Third Eye Staff Struggles With Missing Time

Johnson: August 6 began last year as any early August workday morning: Staff ambled about their desks, computer screens blinked their impatient cursors, coffee makers gurgled and spat tepid dun-colored liquid, cigarettes smoldered, mingling with the scent of fresh newsprint to perfume the room. At ten AM, the phone rang several times at Shirley Kopaloff's desk before she was able to reach it. That was the last event any of the 14 people in the Third Eye Offices recall with clarity...

     Everything from that point on for the next 66 days---for each and everyone of us in the offices---is shrouded by vague feelings of unease and fear. Now, all are having profound trouble concentrating, eating, and sleeping. A few reporters---who have asked not to be named---have attempted hypno-regression therapy. The results have been quite disturbing and they each have gone on short leaves of absence under medical supervision. We trust they will return soon.

     Meanwhile, Third Eye Over Iowa has begun an intensive investigation on its own into this amazing incident. No where in the recorded annals of this phenomena have so many been affected in an urban environment in daylight. Yet, even more frustrating is the fact that we can find no witnesses to our seeming disappearance!

     Our office hours are those of any respectable, routine business. According to our advertisers, all their calls were received or even returned in some cases. Publisher Hans Abbadon, who has been concentrating most of his recent hours on work at the B.Lavatsky Museum, admitted that he never contacted the office during the period in question for, as he explained, "Rarely is anything amiss." We employ individuals to clean and maintain the office during evenings and weekends, and one might conclude they certainly may have witnessed something. We are unsure if they saw anything. They are from a sheltered workshop program so regrettably in the eyes of the public, a seriously credible account from them is unavailable. To add to our confusion, staff family members also report that every morning their loved one left for work at Third Eye and returned home safe and sound completely as normal...

     But never the less, we feel we were all abducted and brain-washed while temporarily replaced by duplicates---either android copies or short-lived genetic clones---for some purpose as yet unbeknownst to ourselves. Our certainty rests in the simple fact that all fourteen victims nightly experience the same ghastly dream:

     We are in a brightly-lit room with shiny silver-white metal walls. We are strapped naked to a table or gurney that feels as if it is floating in mid-air. A tall, muscular man with blue eyes, square chin, and dressed in a silver tunic appears to record our vital signs with what looks like a fat pen-light, paying excessive attention it seems to our shoes. Another being whose face we cannot see interrupts him to feed him a sandwich, which we come to learn through what would seem to be telepathy is a cheese sandwich on rye with salad dressing that is sometimes a tangy Ranch and other times Russian. When the blond giant finishes, more attention is paid to our footwear---though for what purpose or reason we can not see, and it is this unknown purpose that fills us with fear for no matter how fervently we shout and demand, the two disdainfully ignore us. An instant later, another figure enters the room; he is short, perhaps a dwarf and his face we also cannot make out. He approaches us bearing a large syringe. Paying no attention to what the others are doing to (or---possibly---with) our shoes, he plunges the needle of the syringe deep into our abdomen. Abruptly, he lets go of it with the needle caught firm by our innards. Instead of taking a sample of fluid, he begins flicking the end with a finger, making it rock and wiggle grotesquely about our bellies. Some of us say they scream at the horrible sight, others laugh explaining that it tickles, yet all agree they soon become so angered by this little being they demanded a competent alien to test them.

     We are clearly repressing something...

     This then is why Third Eye has fallen so far behind since September (though the August Issue too was late owing to a mistake at the printers whereby it was accidentally translated and printed as the noted Reykjavik University Philological Review). Despite wresting with this nightmarish and in many cases debilitating problem, we release this Special Triple Edition to disseminate the vitalest information our valued readers need.

     In the meantime, if any of our readers have overcome a similar experience, please feel free to share your solution with us. As always, Third Eye encourages reader input at all times.

     ...it may afterall be your only chance.