Symposium on unidentified flying objects: hearings before the Committee on Science and Astronautics, U.S. House of Representatives, Ninetieth Congress, second session, July 29, 1968.

166
night couldn't have missed
that light.
Although
it
was an
unusual
sight,
it
seemed
very real
to
him and
is
still
very
vivid
in
his
mind.
He
had
never
seen
anything
like
it
before
and
in
fact
had
never
previously
had
the
occassion
to
report anything whatever
to
the
police.
He
says
that
the
only
reason he hadreported
seeing
the light was
a
sense
of
duty,
after he
had read
in
the
morning
paper
that
some one
else had
also
seen
an unusual object
in
the sky on the
samenight.
The
patient
was
the
youngest
male and
third youngest
child
among
seven
siblings
born
in
Boston
into
a
lower class
urban
situation, during
the
Depression.
His father,
Irish
by
heritage,
was
an
occassional bartender
who
was
rarely home,
paid
little
attention
to
his
children, and
is
best
remembered
as
"scarey"
because
of
his
violently
angry outbursts
at the
mother when he
had
been
drinking.
The
patients;
early
memories
include
1)
a.
scene
in
which hisforlorn-looking mother
is
bending
over
a
tub
scrubbing clothes
in an icey
cold
kitchen and
2)
an episode
in
which
his oldest sister
snatched
his
doll away
from
him but
was later
made
by
the
mother
to
return
it.
It
is
that
same sister
whom
he
now
visits
during his
vacations;
she
is
married
but childless and
still
lives in
Boston.
He
would
like to live
permanently with
her, if
her husband
were
better dispositioned.
His
other
sisters
all
have children, and
it
makes
him nervous
to
be around them.
He says
he
always got along
better with his sisters than
his
brothers
and has
not
kept
in
touch with
any
of
the latter.
He
has never
had
many friends;even
as
a
boy,
he
was
a
"loner"
and
a
"homebody"
who was
more than once
called
a
"mammas
boy"
by
his
peers.
He
didn't
involve himself
in school athletics
or
neighborhood games because he seemed
to
be
so
clumsy,
but
did sell newspapers in
another part
of the city
for
several years
for
the
sake
of the family
budget.
His
leisure
hours
were spent reading
and
re
-reading
old comic books, making upstories
about
his adventures
with Ali
(a
make-believe playmete
from
whom he was
inseparable until he was
12),
and helping
his mother in various ways.
It
is still difficult
for
him
to
talk about his dead mother, although
he says he thinks about her
all
the time. Painfully, he
revealed
that
he feels
he
was
never
a
good enough son
to
her, that he
had wanted
to
make
up to her
for
all
her hardships
at the hands
of
his father but that he
had
never
been
able to
fill
a
certain void
for her (despite his long-term devotion
and
protectiveness).
He tends
to
blame himself
in
a
sense for her death and says that it
is
his fault
that she spent her final days so unhappily
far away from all
her
other children; apparently, he had insisted
that
she follow her doctor's advice
and took her West for the
sake
of
her "asthma" condition.
She
had died
on
her
seventieth birthday.
He didn't know the cause.
He
had come home and found her
on the
floor of
their Tucson apartment near the
phone
(which was
off the
hook).
It
had been
7
PM
when he
had
arrived, having stopped
for
a
couple
of
drinks
atthe
neighborhood bar.
He says he still gets sick
to
his stomach when he thinks
about
how he
was
sitting
in that bar while she was
dying and trying
to
reach
him.
He
remained in Boston, unemployed,
for
six months after the funeral,during which time he slept
a
lot, ate little, and hit the bars more often than
usual.
By
the time he
could bring himself
to face Tucson and the apartment
again, he had lost his accounting job.