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Show 54. "Yes," she seemed to get the point. It took another minute to set up his tape recorder. He'd expected her to be a bit of a chatter-box, but she was clearly waiting for him to begin. Close enough now to see the freckles on her face he also noticed that she was feeling uneasy. She held tight to the chair arms and he was afraid she might forget to breathe. "This won't be as bad as going to the dentist," he grinned. "Are you sure?" He was glad to hear her laugh. "Yup! And if you'd rather I didn't tape this, I'll be happy just to take notes." "No, it won't bother me," she assured him. He remembered an old farmer in western Nebraska throwing them out of the house when they'd set up the recording device without any explanation. "Get on outta here!" the old man shouted. "Ain't nobody goin' to ridicule me!" They'd learned their lesson. Then Mr. Corrigan explained what NICAP was and how their records were kept confidential. Without Stephanie's express permission, no part of their interview could be used or made public. He felt like the cop on TV giving the criminal his "rights" speech. "In fact," he went on, "the first question I'll ask is if you're giving me this information of your own free will, if the answers are unrehearsed and to the best of your knowledge and memory, true." "At any time you like," he went on, "we can interrupt. If you need a rest, a glass of water, a walk around the block, we'll switch it off until you're ready to go on. Okay?" Stephanie nodded and he turned on the tape recorder. They went through the preliminaries, then he handed her a questionnaire and asked if she'd like to discuss the UFO incident in the order of the questions suggested there. At first her voice was tight and high-pitched, but as they started through the list of questions, she seemed to relax. Later on, when her excitement increased, it wasn't the interview jitters, he realized. It was the excitement of actual recall. Stephanie had decidedly feared for her life and her brother's. She got through the descriptions of sound and color and movement. |