Light Worker

In 1950 a tornado tore across a farm in northwest Alabama. Ted Rice's uncle, clinging to a fence post, saw lights of different colours turning inside the funnel. Ted was eight, and nobody could find him. He came running out of the middle of the field as the storm shoved the house off its foundation, and for weeks afterward he told his family his insides were burning up. Forty-two years later, under hypnosis, he remembered the rest: a light over the field, floating up into it, two small grey beings speaking inside his head, and a huge spiked craft out in the black.

He grew up to be a gifted psychic medium in Atlanta: a bank officer by day, with spirit guides who spoke through him, readings that came true, and a calling the spirits named for him themselves: Light Worker. Then one of his teachers came through his bedroom wall. Seven feet tall, with a lizard's skin and a fish's mouth full of teeth, it walked him through solid plaster. His mentor's guides called it "completely harmless, and of great help."

Then the spirits went silent, and he walked out of the bank and onto a psychiatric ward. Voices in his dreams moved him from city to city, and a silver craft came down in the field behind his trailer while his neighbours floated toward it. In 1992, on a hypnotist's couch, he went back forty years to the night his grandmother stood between him and the thing that had been teaching him, and he saw its face. What she said to him at breakfast is the part the film saves for last.