| 
			  
			  
			  
			  
			  
			V - Anita
 
 Anita’s experiences, while not so intense or frequent as Lisa’s, are 
			probably more akin to what most abductees witness and recall. They 
			include a number of details commonly reported in other cases. But in 
			her situation, typical of these others, conscious memories of events 
			have been less frequent and more moderate in scope. Her attitude 
			similarly reflects this moderate quality, possibly because she’s 
			been able to reflect upon her experiences with quiet equanimity.
 
 Born in 1947, Anita has spent most of her life in Texas. Her 
			ancestry is French, Scotch, and Native American. A wife, mother, and 
			grandmother, she is attractive and intelligent. For a while, she was 
			a trained volunteer emergency medic, and later she owned and 
			operated her own business.
 
			  
			From her home in a large central Texas 
			city, Anita now takes care of her family and also pursues several 
			intellectual interests. In the past several years, for instance, she 
			has been drawn to a study of psychic and alternative methods of 
			healing. Anita has been consciously aware of UFO activity since 
			childhood, and her brothers and sisters have also had recurrent UFO 
			events throughout their lives. So, perhaps, may have some of Anita’s 
			children and grandchildren. 
 Her first conscious encounter with the unknown was at the age of 
			five.
 
				
				“I recall sitting in my front yard one afternoon,” she said, 
			“and sensing someone watching me. I turned around, and back behind 
			me stood a man in a red flight suit. I have no memory of what 
			happened after that.”  
			Like many abductees, what she recalled from childhood was frequently 
			unexplained, but not necessarily related to UFOs. The nature of the 
			events remained ambiguous. 
 Episodes of missing time which have recurred throughout her life 
			began at an early age. She recalled one such episode that happened 
			at the family home, which was in a very rural setting.
 
				
				“I suddenly 
			came out of what I call ‘mind blank’,” Anita explained. “I found 
			myself close to a creek near our house. I did not know how I got 
			there. The strangest thing was that I was coatless and shoeless, and 
			it was miserably cold outside.”  
			While these two events in isolation don’t necessitate a UFO-based 
			explanation, in the context of Anita’s life-long experiences, they 
			prove to be very typical of abduction patterns. And the third 
			consciously remembered event from her childhood did bring UFOs into 
			the picture.  
				
				“When I was twelve,” Anita reported, “my brother shouted one night 
			for me to come look out the window. I did, and just above tree 
			level, about a quarter of a mile from our house, was a large band of 
			beautiful lights moving from west to east. They appeared to be all 
			on one craft. My brother was around ten at the time. He said it was 
			a UFO. There was no sound, and we had our windows open.”  
			Anita and others in her family have continued to have UFO sightings 
			from time to time.  
			 Her older brother, for instance, who is a long-distance truck 
			driver, has reported a 
			number of sightings especially in the southwest part of the country, 
			although 
			elsewhere as well.
 
				
				“He tells of a time he and his wife had stopped on the highway, 
			somewhere up around Nebraska, to get some sleep,” Anita related. 
			‘They were awakened by a very bright light shining down on them. 
			They got out to see what it was but couldn’t because the light 
			blinded them. They said it didn’t make any noise, and that is what 
			frightened them. They jumped back in the truck and headed for 
			Scott’s Bluff. Whatever it was followed them all the way.” 
				 
			For Anita, the strange experiences continued into her adulthood. In 
			the 1970s, she lived in Houston for a while, and it was there that a 
			number of events occurred. The most traumatic and terrifying was in 
			1972, when at age twenty-five, Anita had her second encounter with 
			the man in the red suit.  
			  
			As in the initial meeting, this occurred in 
			the daytime while Anita was conscious, but as in most abductions her 
			state of mind was soon altered as the strangers intruding into her 
			home took control of the situation. She was lying on the living room 
			couch when she became aware of presences there with her, and 
			instantly her mind was clouded. She saw a man who appeared “human 
			looking in every way” bending over her.  
				
				“I have never experienced such terror in my life,” Anita said. “It 
			was like a dream in that I knew the human was raping my body, but I 
			did not feel anything at all.”  
			The rapist had not come alone.  
				
				“I could see maybe three others,” 
			Anita reported, “standing by the table, but it was like seeing them 
			through frosted glass. I could make out their bodies and the red 
			suits but could not really see any details.”  
			She has no idea, 
			therefore, if the other figures were human-looking, like the rapist, 
			or alien. She does remember that after the forced intercourse, the 
			red-suited man spoke to her about something, but the only 
			communication that stayed with her consciously was his statement, 
			I’ll be there to help you. 
 Anita doesn’t remember what may have happened after that, but as 
			soon as she was aware that the men were gone, she reacted in a very 
			conscious state of mind.
 
				
				“I was so terrified,” she said, “that I 
			grabbed my children and got out of the house immediately.” 
				 
			The trauma of the event had disturbing effects on Anita for a very 
			long time. “It is very embarrassing to say this,” she confided,  
				
				“but 
			after that experience I started wearing a tampon twenty-four hours a 
			day so they couldn’t do it again. As if that would stop them.”
				 
			Not long after the assault, Anita experienced a relocation event, 
			presumably with the congruent missing time. At one moment, she was 
			conscious of being in a certain location, and then at the next 
			moment, without any sense of having lost consciousness, Anita found 
			herself returning to awareness and being in a different place.  
				
				“I was on my way to the grocery store,” she recalled, “and came to a 
			stop sign. There were no other cars in sight in any direction. I 
			started to turn the corner. The next thing I remember is snapping 
			out of ‘mind blank’ and being [in a different location] on West 
			Road. 
			I looked in my rearview mirror, and there was a car parked on the 
			road that wasn’t there 
			when I had stopped at the sign moments before.”  
			Although the 
			location was different, she did not notice a time loss. 
 In 1977, while still living north of the Houston area, Anita had a 
			UFO sighting that was witnessed by one of her friends.
 
				
				“I was 
			outside late one night talking with a friend,” she said, “when I 
			glanced up and saw a large orange globe to the north.”  
			Her friend, 
			who was in his car, took off in pursuit of the object and reported 
			on his return that he had eventually lost sight of it near a state 
			highway. 
 It was also during this period that Anita had two other experiences 
			that are frequently reported by abductees. One of these is the 
			presence of small lighted objects in the home, usually near a wall 
			or the ceiling, that seem to function as some sort of remote probe 
			or monitor.
 
 This first event occurred during the middle of the night, when 
			something woke Anita.
 
				
				“Looking around,” she recalled, “I saw a 
			multicolored triangle moving against my bedroom wall.”  
			She could see 
			that the object had a device or design in its center, where pink, 
			orange, and other colors were moving around. 
 Her reaction to this strange sight reflects a maddening yet typical 
			response that abductees report in such situations. Instead of 
			reacting with surprise, curiosity, and even consternation, as would 
			a person whose mind was not being controlled, her response was quite 
			passive.
 
				
				“I thought, A mandala, how pretty,” she said, “then I just went back 
			to sleep.”  
			This is apparently a programmed response that other 
			abductees report, and it has proven usually to precede an encounter. 
			If anything else occurred that night with Anita, however, she had no 
			memory, conscious or dream-like, of further activity. 
 The other experience was much more physical and less directly tied 
			to alien intrusion. It has been reported, however, to occur 
			following abduction events in a number of other people’s situations. 
			Anita developed a rash which seemed to have no mundane cause. It 
			rapidly covered almost her entire body, and the doctor she consulted 
			could not give her an explanation.
 
				
				“It looked like I had snake 
			skin,” she described. “It took six weeks to go away.”  
			The pattern of activity in Anita’s life thus far had shown 
			occasional intrusions and sightings, but in the late 1980s the 
			activity noticeably began to increase. The timing may not be 
			accidental, as many abductees “woke up” to the fact of their 
			encounters in 1986-88.  
			 Although at the time Anita wasn’t aware of the implications, this 
			new phase of her involvement may have been marked by a possible 
			missing-fetus episode in 1985. When she began experiencing some 
			suspicious physical symptoms, she consulted her doctor and was very 
			surprised to discover she was pregnant. Having already raised a 
			family of three children, and considering her age, she decided to 
			terminate it.
 
			  
			 But the results of the operation proved to be as 
			surprising as the unexpected pregnancy itself.  
				
				“I went to have an abortion,” she said, “after my Ob-Gyn assured me 
			that I was
			pregnant. He performed the procedure and said that he could not find 
			any fetal tissue 
			at all. He was as puzzled as I was.”  
			Whether this was one of the by-now familiar procedures of aliens 
			implanting a fetus and then returning to retrieve it from the host 
			mother, Anita has not been able to determine. But since that episode 
			and up until the present, there have been a number of experiences in 
			which the aliens are clearly involved. She has seen them in 
			conscious glimpses and flashbacks, and remembered events in dreams. 
			She has engaged in telepathic communications with some group of 
			entities, at times generated by them and at times by her. And, as 
			usual, there have been peripheral and confirming external evidence 
			in some instances. 
 Among the types of non-human entities Anita has encountered are the 
			ubiquitous Grays, another group she calls the "Tans,” a blue 
			creature, and an off-white creature whose skin she described as “dry 
			and leathery,” in addition to the humanoids in the red suits.
 
 Although she is conscious of a single event involving the Grays, 
			Anita came away from the experience with a definite idea about the 
			creature’s attitude toward her.
 
				
				“As far as the Grays go,” she said, 
			“I have only one memory of an encounter, and it was not pleasant.”
				 
			In the sketchy recollection, Anita was inside what appeared to be a 
			typical craft. She was being escorted through a corridor, without 
			any sense of the destination or of any preceding scenario.  
				
				“There 
			was the feeling of dislike on the part of the one [a Gray] who was 
			leading me down the corridor,” she recalled. “I mean, he didn’t like 
			me or just didn’t like humans. It was as if he had a somewhat 
			distasteful function to perform. By the way,” she added, “this dude 
			had a short, squatty-looking blue creature with him. I nicknamed him 
			Grimace.”  
			Like so many others in these situations, with no accurate, 
			authoritative explanations or sources to help them understand the 
			aliens and their activities, Anita has had to invent her own terms 
			and phrases. The nickname above is one such example, as is the name 
			“Tan” which she uses for a particular group of entities. Describing 
			these same entities, other abductees have used any number of 
			different names because no one name has yet been established as the 
			proper one. 
 Anita has recalled several encounters with the Tan group in the past 
			few years. She said that they are very similar in appearance to the 
			creature in the drawing on Whitley Strieber’s
			
			COMMUNION, which, 
			according to other abductees, is more like what they would call a 
			Gray. But Anita clearly distinguishes between the gray creature that 
			was leading her down the corridor in one encounter, and the Tans, 
			with whom she is more familiar.
 
				
				“When I first saw their picture on 
			the book cover/’ she said, “I immediately thought, Hello, little 
			friend. I know that for some reason I feel protective of them.”
				 
			Her relationship with the Tans, unlike her one impersonal encounter 
			with the Gray, involves a different degree of intimacy, apparently 
			as part of their deliberate programming of the abductee.  
				
				“I have 
			never sensed the dislike that I did with the Gray,” Anita reported. 
			“[The Tans] seem to be very concerned with making us feel love for 
			them.”  
			But Anita has proven to be quite aware of this psychological 
			manipulation on the aliens’ part and has thus been able to see 
			through some of their intentions or motivations.  
				
				“I recall one [Tan] looking into my eyes,” she described from an 
			encounter, “and making me feel extreme love from him. I put my hands 
			on his face and said, Too bad it isn’t real, meaning the feeling of 
			love that he was projecting into my soul.”  
			Indeed, in spite of the aliens’ intentions to convey such a caring 
			relationship, Anita has continued to suffer much of the same anxiety 
			that other abductees report.  
				
				“When I said I felt protective towards 
			the little critters,” she cautioned, “please believe that it is [a 
			feeling] induced by them. The rest of the time, all I feel is 
			apprehension during the day and dread of going to bed at night.”
				 
			This anxiety very often causes disruptions of the abductee’s sleep 
			patterns, usually occurring nightly at approximately the same time, 
			as happens with Anita.  
				
				“I do still get scared sometimes,” she 
			confessed, “and I still wake up at 3:00 to 3:34 a.m. and huddle 
			under the covers frightened and lie there with my eyes glued to the 
			bedroom door.”  
			This stress response, according to mental health professionals who 
			have studies such situations, shows up in cases where an actual 
			traumatic event has occurred. It may be that abductees continue to 
			wake up at a certain time each night because a traumatic event had 
			occurred previously at that time, as if a preventative warning, a 
			wake-up-and-protect-yourself alarm, is sounding subconsciously. 
 The ongoing feelings of fear and intrusion are fostered not only by 
			the consciously recalled encounters but also by situations in which 
			external evidence points to unremembered events. For instance, 
			without any conscious memories of a disturbance or problem 
			associated with the area, Anita has a phobia about driving alone 
			along a certain stretch of US Highway 287. There is, however, a 
			possible connection with her alien involvement.
 
				
				“This [stretch of 
			highway] is where my older brother called us to look out the window 
			one night,” she said, “to see a UFO going over at treetop level.” 
				 
			And although she remembered nothing further about that night, her 
			phobia about the area is suspicious. 
 So are the various marks and injuries she has discovered on her 
			body.
 
				
				“Lots of mornings,” Anita said, “I have gotten up feeling like 
			someone beat me up in my sleep.” This is another common abductee 
			report, waking up with sore, damaged-feeling muscles and joints. “I 
			have waked up with bruises on my arms, shoulders, and legs,” she 
			continued, “with no idea where they came from. I have found 
			scratches that I could not remember having gotten the day before.”
				 
			The evidence for vigorous physical activity during the night, 
			although unremembered, 
			comes from more than just Anita’s sore or scarred body, however. In 
			one incident, she 
			woke up in the morning and felt an unfamiliar pain in her right 
			hand.  
				
				“I sat up in bed,”
			she explained, “and found that sometime during the night my ring had 
			been squashed 
			on my finger.”  
			She managed with effort to remove the ring, but 
			neither her husband nor
			a jeweler could completely restore its original shape. 
 On another occasion, Anita got out of bed one morning and found the 
			crucifix from her necklace lying on the floor. “It had been on my 
			neck the night before,” she said, “and the chain was still on [me]. 
			But the only way to remove the crucifix is to remove the necklace 
			and take it off the chain.”
 
 She has also awakened several mornings to discover that something 
			had happened to her clothing, a report frequently echoed by other 
			abductees. In one instance, she woke up with her nightie on 
			backward, although she was certain she had not taken it off, turned 
			it around, and put it back on. And on a different occasion she found 
			that the nightie was not only backward but had also been turned 
			inside-out. In the night during one of these events, she had an 
			altered-state experience in which she recalled a group of Tan aliens 
			observing her as she was “free-falling,” an event which did not feel 
			unduly upsetting for some reason.
 
 Anita had quite a severe reaction to another similar event, however, 
			venting much more emotion than the situation seemed to call for. It 
			was in the winter, during the Christmas holidays one night, and she 
			had worn socks to bed for extra warmth. When she woke up the next 
			day and found that one of her socks was missing, Anita became 
			extremely upset and angry at her family. She said she was “very 
			belligerent” toward them, even accused them of playing a practical 
			joke on her, one which didn’t strike her as humorous.
 
 Anita was also physically upset that morning, suffering from a 
			violent headache and nausea which caused her to vomit, yet there was 
			no illness to account for the symptoms. Still, she might not have 
			been overly concerned about the vanished sock and her physical 
			problems, if her young granddaughter hadn’t made a disturbing 
			comment.
 
			 The seven-year-old child told her grandmother that some “mean men” 
			had come in and taken her away during the night. When Anita asked 
			her to describe the “mean men,” the little girl called them “the 
			mushroom men.”
 
 “What are the mushroom men?” Anita asked, and her granddaughter then 
			found the book 
			
			MISSING TIME by Budd Hopkins and pointed to the 
			drawing on the cover.
 
 Anita asked the girl to make a drawing of her own. It showed a 
			long-necked humanoid being with a head shaped like an inverted light 
			bulb. The eyes were black, large, and slanted, the nose had two 
			nostril holes, the mouth was a straight thin line, and the chin was 
			more rounded than in the drawing on the cover of MISSING TIME. The 
			girl said the creatures were about a foot tall, gray-skinned and had 
			four fingers rather than five-a detail not apparent in the cover 
			picture. There were quite a few of these entities present, she said.
 
 Anita remembered nothing strange that night herself, but the 
			physical symptoms, the 
			missing sock, and her granddaughter’s story were indicative enough 
			of an intrusive 
			incident to be of great concern. She not only wanted to know what 
			had gone on during 
			the night, but she wanted to know more in general about these beings 
			who had been a 
			part of her life for so long, so she decided to try meditating and 
			sending out messages to 
			the aliens.
 
				
				“I would ask a question telepathically,” Anita explained, “and then 
			lie down on the sofa to drift into twilight sleep, which is really 
			just a deep state of relaxation. I was not asleep or awake. Then the answers to my questions would 
			come.” 
 She remembers, for instance, asking, “Why are you taking human 
			women?”
 
 To insure quality breeding, the answer came back.
   
				“What about when a woman is menstruating?” she inquired, thinking 
			about how she had used a tampon to try to fend off any further rapes 
			in the past. 
 We know the difference, she was told.
 
 “When are you going to show yourselves?” she questioned further, but 
			the reply was less than specific.
 
 The time is almost right, was all she received.
 
			Anita has used this meditative method for communication several 
			other times.  
				
				“When I decide to telepath to them,” she commented, “I 
			spend a good part of the time berating them for not being honest 
			with the human race. They’ve always been here. If they had shown 
			themselves all along, no one would fear them. It’s the unknown that 
			causes fear. Now they’ve made it impossible just to be accepted. I 
			know who I’m yelling at,” she added, “but I have no idea who, which 
			group, is sending back answers.”  
			And some of those answers have been impossible to understand. In 
			addition to the communications which made some sort of sense -it only 
			works when the year arrives and transmogrify, for example- Anita has 
			also gotten messages containing unknown words and meaningless 
			phrases, including one puzzling reference to star-planet fill. 
 Some of these messages look like nonsense, but one of the other odd 
			communications, IRU URI, is very similar to a message given to Lisa, 
			in which she was told by the aliens, referring to some ape-type 
			creatures, They are you and you are them. If the capital letters in 
			Anita’s communication are written out as words, it would read, “I 
			are you, you are I.” And the import of the phrases is clearly 
			similar. Even the grammar is incorrect in both cases.
 
 As with most abductees, Anita cannot explain even to herself just 
			what the aliens are doing with her. And she certainly doesn’t accept 
			all the communications and encounters as objectively real.
 
				
				“I suspect that a lot of these encounters are alien-induced dreams,” 
			she commented, 
			“for the purpose of making you feel comfortable with them. As for 
			the controlled free-falling, I think they were creating an enjoyable flying experience 
			for me because I have a 
			horror of flying and it may be necessary in the future to ‘fly’ with 
			them when the planet 
			tilts in order to save my life.”  
			Her reference to the planet tilting comes from a scenario she has 
			been shown involving future global catastrophe. Such scenarios are 
			so common among abductees that this type of information may well be 
			part of the widespread programming included in the alien agenda, 
			designed to serve some purpose which is not yet clear. And most of 
			the abductees who are told about a coming destruction also report, 
			as does Anita, feeling that they will have a job or task to perform 
			in conjunction with this catastrophe.  
				
				“It is like I have always known that these things [UFOs, aliens, and 
			the predicted destruction] are coming,” Anita told me, “and that I 
			must try to convince people, and also learn things that would help 
			not only with my own survival afterwards but I must also be able to 
			help other survivors. For instance, I was told as a child, The 
			children must be protected.”  
			Anita, then, admits that at least part of the alien programming has 
			had an effect on her, but she doesn’t let herself accept everything 
			they tell her or show her.  
				
				“I’m always amazed when I get any information from them at all,” she 
			said. “I really don’t know if someone who would abduct a person 
			could be trusted to give a truthful answer to any question.” 
				 
			She is aware of their possible deceptions, just as she realizes that 
			the aliens are capable of creating unreal scenarios for humans 
			during encounters. This awareness has served Anita well, for it has 
			allowed her to push the alien activity away from her a little, as it 
			were, in order to analyze and assess the events to which she has 
			been subjected. And it also has kept her from jumping to conclusions 
			about some of the things she has remembered. 
 One recent possible event, for instance, Anita describes as a 
			regular dream, in spite of the presence of UFOs in the scenario.
 
				
				“I dreamed last night that I was standing in my back yard and 
			looking up into the night sky,” she told me. “I saw a rectangular 
			UFO sitting poised about five hundred feet above the house. It had 
			rockets on the side and started firing at a line of trees fairly 
			close to the house. I ran inside, and my doorbell rang.” 
				 
			She said the next segment of the dream involved a scene in which she 
			and I were together, discussing the book project, but after that a 
			very different episode occurred.  
				
				“Next,” she said, “I was visited by some military sorts who were 
			trying to get me to tell them about the UFOs, and I refused. I kept 
			saying, ‘I know nothing, I know nothing’.”  
			Anita dismissed this scenario as a mundane dream, which it may well 
			have been, 
			probably in part because of my presence in one of the segments. What 
			she didn’t know, 
			however, was that I in fact had seen a rectangular UFO at very close 
			range in the winter of 
			1992, so my own curiosity was aroused by her description. Even more 
			interesting was 
			the fact that several other people in this book project-Lisa, Angie, 
			and a member of my 
			family-have reported very similar situations to the military 
			interrogation. And in these other cases, there was reason to believe 
			they were not normal dreams at all. 
 For Anita, however, the evidence of the dream’s reality was not very 
			strong, which is indicative of her tendency not to overreact to 
			possible or actual alien encounters. As a result, she has managed to 
			keep a good sense of mental balance, neither overly exalting the 
			creatures in her mind, making gods of them, nor being overwhelmed by 
			terror as if they were demons. “Not all of the aliens are bad,” she 
			believes, which is a reasonable point of view given the cumulative 
			experiences she has had.
 
 Still, when they physically intrude into her normal reality, Anita 
			is not happy about it, as her description of two typical episodes 
			show.
 
				
				“When I went to bed,” she said, “I started feeling apprehensive. I 
			couldn’t go to sleep. It got worse as the hours passed. Finally, I 
			turned on the bedside lamp to read. I had not been reading long when 
			I saw a flash of light in the den. I started thinking, Oh, geez, no. 
			I told myself that maybe it was the light in one of my aquariums and 
			tried to read some more. 
 “I started hearing a clicking noise,” she continued, “and tried to 
			figure out what it was. Then I saw, in my peripheral vision, a flash 
			of brown go past my door toward the bathroom.” The “flash of brown” 
			was recognizable to Anita, and she realized that at least one of the 
			aliens was in the house. She fought to stay alert, hoping to fend 
			off another abduction, but she couldn’t do it.
 
 “Finally,” she concluded, “in sheer fatigue I gave up and fell 
			asleep. They really are patient little critters.” If anything 
			occurred after that, Anita couldn’t recall it. But she awoke with a 
			possible sign that she had indeed been paid a visit. “On Saturday 
			morning,” she said, “my knees and legs were in terrible pain. I have 
			been checked for arthritis and don’t have it.”
 
			Four months later, in December 1993, a similar incident occurred, as 
			fleeting and consciously elusive as the first one.  
				
				“I woke up around 
			3:30 a.m.,” she told me, “and turned on the television set in the 
			bedroom. This is usually the time I wake up and scan the bedroom for 
			whatever. I turned on Channel Four because they are on all night. I 
			wanted to catch a weather report because we were expecting sleet. 
			Everything was normal until an insurance commercial came on. I was 
			lying on my side and just happened to glance up at the TV. 
 “At that moment, a black object moved in front of the screen, left 
			to right, and then moved back off, right to left. It had a face, 
			after a fashion, but appeared to be one-dimensional. It was almost 
			as though you could stick your hand through it, but you could not 
			see the TV screen through the blackness. It must have had 
			intelligence, because as soon as I thought, What the hell is that? 
			it moved back off the screen. I was fighting to stay awake, as if it 
			wouldn’t bother me if I were awake. Shortly thereafter, I felt the 
			old familiar ‘zap’ through my body, and I was out of it.
 
 “Since that time I have had a sore spot on my spine eight to twelve 
			inches up from my 
			coccyx. I’ve had everyone check my spine, and they tell me there 
			isn’t even a red spot there. However, it [remained] very sore for 
			the past three weeks.”
 
			A conscious sight of a strange creature, an 
			unexplained physical effect, and nothing in her memory to connect 
			the two: such events have punctuated her life as they have countless 
			others with alien contact. The alien abductions are something she 
			lives with very quietly, rarely discussing them with others, coping 
			with her fears and uncertainties as best she can on her own. The 
			experiences have changed her views, her habits, and her desires and 
			fears. 
			 
			  
			The whole texture of her life is interwoven with the pattern 
			of an unknown agenda. 
 Back to Contents
 
 
 
 
 VI - Beth
 
				
				“When I was seven or eight years old,” Beth related, “my father gave 
			us permission, my sister and me, to go outside and play with the 
			other children, who were playing hide-and-seek. It was close to six 
			in the evening. I remember that I went to hide between some bushes, 
			and then I heard a sound, somebody else. And as I turned, I saw what 
			I thought at that moment was one of the other kids. 
 “The next thing I know,” she continued, “it was dark, and I was very 
			surprised. When I got home, my father was very mad at me and my 
			mother was very upset. My father told me that they had been calling 
			me and looking for me for hours. But I couldn’t understand it,” she 
			said. “The place where I was hiding was less than a hundred feet 
			from the front of the house. I was hiding there, and it was 
			daylight, and then the next thing I know it was dark-and I was 
			scared.
 
 “Recently I had another memory about that,” she added. “That kid I 
			thought was there, he was an alien, one of the Grays. He took me to 
			a ship, but I don’t remember what happened after that.”
 
			As I listened to Beth’s account of her childhood missing-time 
			episode, I was reminded of a similar event in my husband’s past. At 
			age twelve, not much older than Beth had been, Casey and his best 
			friend were playing in a field one day, when several strange 
			children approached them and asked if they wanted to “come see the 
			UFO” that had landed on the other side of the hill. Casey’s next 
			conscious memory was of coming back home and complaining to his 
			mother that his nose was very sore and he had a headache. 
 As did Beth, Casey had a daytime missing-time episode initiated 
			after contact with unknown “children.” Beth has never explored this 
			memory hypnotically, but when Casey used regressive hypnosis to 
			delve into the missing time, he retrieved memories of an onboard 
			abduction involving a nasal implant.
 
 This was not the only similarity between Beth’s experiences and 
			Casey’s. A divorced mother with grown children, Beth had first 
			contacted us, in fact, because another of her encounter memories, 
			involving apparently military personnel, contained very striking and 
			disturbing parallels to an incident described in INTO THE FRINGE.
 
 A mutual acquaintance helped arrange a phone conversation for us, 
			and we got acquainted. Beth was born in 1942 in Puerto Rico and has 
			lived there most of her life, although her heritage also includes 
			ancestors from Spain and Vermont. Beth was a teacher before starting 
			her family, but in recent years she had vision problems which have 
			kept her from working. Currently, she divides her time between 
			Puerto Rico and Florida.
 
 Beth and I discussed her memories of the military encounter at 
			length. But I was also 
			interested to hear about other her other experiences, especially 
			since she lived in Puerto 
			Rico. A great deal of UFO and alien activity has been reported in 
			the past several 
			years, much of it in the area where Beth lived but all over the 
			island as well. In fact, of 
			all the U. S. territory, there may well have been more recent UFO 
			activity in Puerto Rico than anywhere else.
 
 To judge from Beth’s account, it has probably been going on for 
			quite a while. In addition to the early missing-time event, she has 
			conscious memories of many other strange experiences from childhood, 
			well back into the 1950s. Her first UFO sighting, for example, 
			occurred only a year or two after the hide-and-seek episode. Beth 
			was walking to the store in the late afternoon, when she looked up 
			and saw a “huge ball of fire” tearing downward through the sky. It 
			disappeared behind a nearby mountain, and Beth assumed that she’d 
			just witnessed a plane crash, although she heard no sound.
 
 She screamed and ran back across the road into the house where 
			excitedly she told her father what she had seen. Since he worked for 
			the U. S. Navy at that time, her father told her he would inquire 
			around the military base and find out what exactly had happened. But 
			a few days later, when Beth brought up the subject again, her father 
			told her that she must never tell anyone about what she had seen or 
			even mention it again. No explanation was given, only a warning, and 
			that made Beth believe some sort of mystery must have been involved.
 
 She was used to mysterious things, even at that young age.
 
				
				“Even 
			before that,” she said, “as far back as I can remember, I was aware 
			- and so was my family - that strange things were happening to me, 
			most of them at night. It made me afraid to go to sleep, afraid that 
			someone was going to come for me.”  
			Unexplained noises often broke 
			the silence of the night. Once, for example, Beth was startled awake 
			by a “buzz or whooshing sound” in the room where she was sleeping 
			alone. Frightened, she ran into her sister’s room. “They’re looking 
			for me,” was all she remembered saying, because at that moment her 
			sister suddenly fell into a deep sleep and Beth’s body became 
			paralyzed. Then she, too, lost consciousness. 
 Another anomalous event took place when she ten years old. Beth had 
			been outside for a while and had stopped to eat a piece of fruit. 
			She consciously remembered standing still, taking a bite, and then 
			looking down at a large, bleeding gash in her leg.
 
				
				“I didn’t know 
			what to think,” Beth said. “How could my leg be cut and bleeding? I 
			had not even moved from that spot.”  
			Heedless of the time as children 
			often are, she had no idea if any was missing. 
 She also didn’t know what to think of the shadowy figures that 
			sometimes appeared in the house, although she tended to believe they 
			might be ghosts. On one occasion, though, the figure seemed very 
			real. Beth woke up during the night and found a humanoid figure 
			sitting on her bed. He was wearing a tight white outfit, and he 
			proceeded to talk to her. She couldn’t remember, however, any of the 
			things he said, and she couldn’t remember his face. Beth told her 
			mother about some of these strange occurrences, and her mother 
			replied that she had sometimes heard Beth in her room at night, 
			apparently talking to someone. But when she tried to get up and 
			check on the girl, her mother said, she was paralyzed.
 
 A little later, at age fourteen, Beth had a second UFO sighting. As 
			she sat studying on 
			the stairs by a window, she glanced out and saw an object through 
			the trees. It stopped 
			for a moment and hovered before shooting off vertically out of 
			sight. Beth learned later that one of their neighbors had also 
			spotted the object.
 
 Even when she moved away from that house, staying for a while after 
			her father’s death in a boardinghouse, the unexplained occurrences 
			followed her. One of her roommates there woke her up once, 
			screaming, saying that she’d just seen a weird creature standing 
			beside Beth’s bed. The being apparently noticed the roommate looking 
			at it, because it started moving toward her, and that was when she 
			screamed. Her description of the creature matches today’s well-known 
			Gray entity.
 
 The odd events seemed to subside as Beth grew to adulthood. She went 
			to college and then began working as a teacher. Nothing notable 
			happened until she was married and pregnant with her second child.
 
				
				“I remember that I was so afraid that I wasn’t pregnant,” Beth said, 
			“that it was a tumor, because it [the fetus] was not moving. I told 
			my doctor frequently that it couldn’t be a child, that he was 
			mistaken, but it was a big joke to him. 
 “When I was almost six months into the pregnancy, I was very worried 
			because the baby wasn’t moving. One night I remember that I suddenly 
			felt so sleepy that I got in bed, and I had a dream. I saw myself on 
			a doctor’s table. A strange doctor put a needle into my navel. When 
			he did this, I felt something like an electric shock, and the baby 
			started moving. I also felt that something was put up my nose. And 
			then I woke up,” she concluded. “And when I awoke, I was having a 
			very heavy nosebleed and the baby was moving.”
 
			Beth carried the baby to term and it was born healthy. But a 
			subsequent pregnancy a few years later didn’t survive. Beth 
			apparently miscarried one night and isn’t sure if she saw any fetal 
			tissue. This occurred, it should be noted, on a night when one of 
			the neighbors reported seeing an unexplained light over Beth’s home.
			
 Whatever she may have thought about these numerous, often nebulous 
			events through the years, whoever she might have thought was behind 
			them, in the summer of 1978 an event occurred that left no doubt of 
			its source. On the night of July 17, Beth went to bed around 9 p.m., 
			where she read for an hour and then turned off the bedside lamp 
			planning to go to sleep. In the dark, a light caught her attention 
			through the window, where she saw a glowing object.
 
			  
			Concerned, Beth 
			woke up her husband and had him check the area. He came back to bed 
			having found nothing unusual, and they turned out the lamp again to 
			sleep. But the light returned to the yard and shone in through the 
			window. Beth looked up at the light, and the next moment she was 
			aware of being somewhere very different. She was in an unfamiliar 
			round room, and she wasn’t alone.  
			 Her husband lay near her, apparently asleep, as was her youngest 
			child nestled in her lap. In a panic, she suddenly thought, Where 
			are my other children? A voice from an unseen source then replied, 
			Don’t be afraid, they are here.
 
 Three other people whom Beth didn’t know were also unconscious in 
			the room. She saw a young man and woman, probably in their twenties, 
			and an older man who looked to Beth like an “ex-military” sort.
 
			
			The whole situation was so unexpected that Beth was too bewildered 
			to react logically, perhaps. Or perhaps, as in other reports, her 
			responses were “directed” for some purpose. At any rate, when she 
			noticed the older man coming to consciousness just as she was 
			regaining her own awareness, Beth inexplicably asked, “What time is 
			it?”
 Given the total strangeness of their situation, such a question 
			appears ludicrous, but instead of reacting with surprise or panic, 
			the man simply checked his watch and replied, ‘Ten after twelve.”
 
 Almost two hours had passed since she saw the light for the second 
			time, although to her it seemed as if it had only been a few 
			moments. Looking around, she saw strange, computer-like equipment in 
			the room. And then she noticed some other beings, clearly not human, 
			there with her. The two entities were gray and very skinny, dressed 
			in metallic silver suits.
 
 Beth saw that her husband was starting to come around then. But her 
			attention was caught by a startling change in the metal wall in 
			front of her, as it seemed to transform into glass, like a window. 
			Looking out, she recognized the location as a rural area near some 
			property she owned.
 
 A door opened just then, and a very tall man walked in. He was pale, 
			with dark, short hair that formed a widow’s peak in the center of 
			his forehead. His eyes were larger than usual, and his jaw was very 
			square. The man wore the same tight silver outfit as the Grays, but 
			he also had on gloves and a wide belt. In his hands was a small orb 
			that looked to be made of glass, within which many lights were 
			brightly blinking. As the tall man stared at Beth and her family, 
			she got the impression that he was perhaps a scientist, and she felt 
			he was the one “in command.”
 
			  
			
			His gaze made her feel like a specimen 
			or a “guinea pig.”  
				
				“My husband was starting to wake up,” Beth said, “and this man put 
			him back to sleep, by holding the glass ball over his head. He did 
			it to me, too, and then I was paralyzed.”  
			Beth was next aware of being back in her bed, with a terrible 
			headache, and then she fell quickly to sleep. Upon waking, she 
			discovered that the night’s events had left her in a bad physical 
			state. Besides the pounding headache, she also suffered aches 
			throughout her body, especially in her back, and she was dizzy. Beth 
			was also very nauseated, vomiting repeatedly, as well as plagued 
			with diarrhea. She had difficulty seeing because her eyes were badly 
			swollen and irritated, a condition that bothered her for a long time 
			after this, so much so that she had to wear sunglasses. 
 A terrible rash persisted for two months, and her hair began to fall 
			out in excessive quantities. Most disturbing of all, however, were 
			the cataracts that began forming in her eyes. Nine months after the 
			abduction, Beth had to undergo cataract-removal surgery, and it was 
			during preparatory exams that the doctor found physical scarring 
			from what he insisted was previous eye surgery. But Beth had never 
			had an operation, at least not by human hands.
 
 Clearly there had been some thing or some activity in that strange 
			environment that 
			caused her numerous afflictions, but Beth could only recall the 
			brief scenario in the round room. She wasn’t sure about the tall, 
			dark-haired man, but she was certain that the gray beings were not 
			human.
 
 Not long after this, Beth once again saw one of the strange 
			creatures. She had been asleep, but the sound of someone calling her 
			name woke her up. She got up and looked out the window, where one of 
			the little beings was looking back at her. Beth remembered that he 
			was holding a metal stick of some sort, but the next instant she 
			found herself back in bed, and the little creature was nowhere to be 
			seen.
 
 UFOs also continued to appear. On Father’s Day in 1980, the entire 
			family witnessed one of these events. Out in the yard, two of the 
			children saw it first and called to the others to come look. They 
			arrived in time to see a cloudy-looking object hovering silently 
			about ten feet from the ground with what seemed to be “bubbles” 
			inside, before it disappeared.
 
 Less than a year later, Beth once again had a bedroom visitation by 
			unknown beings.
 
			 As she prepared to go to bed, she began to feel as if someone were 
			watching her. Turning around, she saw a tall, slender man standing 
			by her bed, and she became very frightened. Beth tried to scream, 
			but no sound came out, so she began to pray silently for help. And 
			then she found that she was moving, going forward toward the man’s 
			outstretched hand. Unable to stop, she floated after him toward the 
			window and knew she was about to be taken through it. This panicked 
			her even more, and she feared she would be “ground up like 
			hamburger” by the process.
 
 The actual moment of passing through the window, however, left no 
			impression on her when it happened, and she was next aware of being 
			in a dark place, lying down, surrounded by “a feeling of great 
			speed.” Blackness overtook her, and the next apparent moment she was 
			back in bed in the guest room, still unable to move. She could 
			scream, however, which she did, bringing her husband running. But 
			the strange man, of course, had disappeared.
 
 Beth wasn’t the only one in her family to witness the alien beings. 
			In 1986, she and her son saw a small white entity. Beth was in bed 
			when she was surprised to hear the sound of water running somewhere. 
			As she got up to check for the source, her son called for her to 
			come outside with him.
 
			  
			“Mommy, look there!” he shouted, and Beth looked, but without her 
			glasses all she could see was an indistinct white object out in the 
			yard. Her son, however, had better vision, and he described seeing a 
			small being by the garage, holding a garden hose through which water 
			was running. As the son watched, he told her, the little being 
			stopped and “floated away.” 
 Later, in 1987, Beth’s daughter said that three of the Grays had 
			come during the night and taken her out to an area near the house, 
			into a UFO. She said they talked together in a friendly manner and 
			that one of the aliens even laughed. She also reported the presence 
			of a strange man, who told her he was going to “fix” her heart as he 
			inserted a large needle into her chest. Beth said this occurred at a 
			time when her daughter was awaiting heart surgery.
 
 It was also at this time that Beth recalled having a brief but vivid 
			dream that greatly disturbed her. In this dream, she was on a table, 
			location unknown, with three men standing around her. The terrifying 
			part of the scenario was the single sentence she heard spoken by one 
			of the men:
 
				
				“She is expendable, and we can always use a terminator.”
				 
			The experience was so unlike the previous encounters she had 
			remembered that Beth insisted it was just a dream, but the idea and 
			the threat of a “terminator,” whatever it might be, haunted her. So 
			did the identity of the men. 
 Another situation arose during this time that caused her a great 
			deal of concern, even though it seemed to have nothing to do with 
			UFOs or aliens. Several different mornings, when Beth woke up and 
			went into the kitchen for coffee, she found the water jug, normally 
			kept in the refrigerator, and four glasses containing water sitting 
			out on the counter.
 
 The first time this occurred, Beth was annoyed by the inconsiderate 
			act, and she questioned her son and daughter about it. Both of them 
			denied leaving out the water jug or even being in the kitchen after 
			bedtime. The next time she found the dirty glasses and the jug, Beth 
			became angry and found it hard to believe her children’s 
			protestations of innocence in the matter.
 
 What were they doing, she wondered, getting up in the middle of the 
			night and inviting in people, visiting with them in secret? Why was 
			it done in secret? Why were they denying doing it? The questions 
			bothered her greatly, yet the children were adamant that they had 
			nothing to do with the intermittent discoveries of the jug and 
			glasses left on the counter by undiscovered persons during the 
			night.
 
 Finally Beth came to believe them, but that made her even more 
			afraid, for it pointed to a scenario of four strangers with free 
			access to her home and family. Yet no one in the family saw any 
			strangers there, and none of the household goods had been stolen. 
			But the scenario of strangers breaking in merely for a sip of water 
			just didn’t make any sense. And Beth couldn’t believe the visitors 
			were aliens, not if all they seemed to do was pour themselves a 
			drink, leave a mess on the kitchen counter, and then disappear.
 
 Beth worried about this mysterious situation for a long time, even 
			after the visits stopped. And she never caught anyone in the act of 
			entertaining guests or getting out the water jug, which would have 
			explained the whole affair. Much later, however, Beth did have a 
			flashback memory concerning this situation. In a very upsetting 
			scenario, she saw herself opening the door and letting a group of 
			people into the house. She even saw herself pouring the water.
 
			  
			Beth 
			didn’t recognize any of the people, and the flashback memory didn’t 
			show her why she let them in or what they did there after she poured 
			their drinks. She didn’t know if the flashback reflected a real 
			event or if it came from her imagination. It certainly felt real, 
			but it seemed so unlikely that Beth just couldn’t accept it. 
 In September 1987, however, an indisputably real event occurred. 
			Another UFO appeared and was witnessed by three members of the 
			family.
 
				
				“Mommy, there’s a UFO up there!” 
				 
			Beth heard her daughter shout on 
			night around 11 p.m. She got up and looked out to see a “huge, 
			beautiful UFO” about half a mile from the house. Her son also saw it 
			briefly. 
 This sighting seemed no different than previous ones, but it was 
			followed the next day by the onset of activity that would continue 
			for years: overflights of unidentified helicopters. On that first 
			day, an AW AC also flew over, in addition to the black copters, and 
			the craft operated at such low altitudes that sometimes the windows 
			and the entire house were shaken by their force. They returned a 
			week later, and this time Beth even witnessed a craft that looked 
			like a helicopter but flew noiselessly.
 
 She continued to have frightening nocturnal experiences, usually 
			involving fragmented scenarios and time loss. Once after midnight, 
			for example, Beth went through an event of which she only 
			consciously retained three “snapshot-type” memories. The first part 
			began when she was still quite conscious, as she looked out the 
			window at some red and white lights she’d just noticed in the yard. 
			The second scene is of her out in the yard, watching a craft fly 
			away and crying, “Don’t leave me.” This was followed instantly by 
			her being conscious again and aware that she was back in her bed.
 
 During these years of fairly active alien involvement in her life, 
			Beth had a number of dreams relating to UFOs, the Grays, and other 
			sorts of entities. Some people may think that it is foolish to look 
			for information in dreams, but a close familiarity with the 
			multi-phenomenal context of the abduction situation shows that this 
			is not so.
 
 In abduction research it is generally acknowledged that many times 
			the memories of an alien encounter, suppressed at the time of the 
			event, will surface in any number of ways. It may happen as a sudden 
			flashback during regular consciousness, or it may emerge during the 
			dream state.
 
			  
			It also may be that what the person recalled as a dream 
			was not a memory of some past event but instead reflected an event 
			of that particular night, so lightly suppressed that it remained in 
			the consciousness as an altered-state awareness. At any rate, it is 
			wise to pay attention to the dreams of a person with current alien 
			activity. Certain details, often identical, turn up from case to 
			case that differ from the typical archetypal entities and situations 
			found in normal dreams. 
 This was certainly true for Beth’s dreams. In one, for example, she 
			was with an unfamiliar alien being in an environment where the sky 
			was pink, and she recalled seeing an animal similar to a cow. All of 
			these details have been reported by other abductees, sometimes in 
			dreams and sometimes in actual experiences. So has the scenario she 
			recalled from another dream: being given a liquid to drink by the 
			Grays. In a different dream, Beth was made to immerse in “a heavy 
			liquid” and was surprised to find that she could breathe in it. This 
			scenario is so familiar now that it is often included in the list of 
			most frequently reported abduction events.
 
 Beth was concerned and curious about these dreams, as she was about 
			the experiences she recalled consciously. So when the opportunity 
			arose for her to work with a well-known UFO investigator and to 
			undergo regressive hypnosis, Beth decided to do it.
 
 In early 1988 she underwent four separate sessions of hypnosis, all 
			focusing on a single event: the encounter in 1978 when she 
			remembered being in a circular room with her husband, one child, and 
			three strangers. The following account is a composite of the 
			information from those sessions, comprising all the bits and pieces 
			that emerged during the regressions.
 
 Beth recalled that when the light shone in through the window that 
			night, she saw that several aliens were in the room. She was 
			terrified, but one of them calmed her and seemed to be in charge as 
			they led her outside to a craft. The next part of her memory is 
			patchy, for she was in a small room in which the atmosphere seemed 
			“foggy,” and she couldn’t see much more than several strange 
			instruments on a table. One of them looked somewhat like a hair 
			dryer.
 
 Next, two of the aliens took her down a curved hall through a door, 
			into a different area. It looked to Beth like “a surgery room,” and 
			she became afraid they were going to kill her there. She cried out 
			in fear when they placed her on a “floating” table. Overhead she saw 
			a screen upon which her insides were displayed. A third alien in 
			this room engaged in some communication with the two escorts. Beth 
			sensed that he seemed more compassionate than the others. This third 
			entity, holding a black box, then moved to a position behind Beth. 
			She could not see what he did, but she felt as if her head was being 
			“opened” and her brain removed, all without any sensation of pain.
 
 After she felt as if she were “all put back together again,” a cold 
			liquid was poured over her head. When this procedure was finished, 
			the aliens stood in front of her, and Beth realized that mentally 
			she was different. Her thoughts and reactions to everything were 
			changed, it seemed, and she was filled with new ideas about God and 
			the unity of all life within that supreme source.
 
 This very spiritual moment was followed by a quite physical exam, as 
			the aliens took samples from her skin and hair. A man with a 
			widow’s-peak hairline, similar to the one she’d seen before, entered 
			and made a full examination of her body, including a gynecological 
			procedure.
 
 This was the most upsetting part of the experience for Beth, and she 
			was especially frightened when he produced two long, thin needles 
			and explained that he had to make some “corrections” involving her 
			kidney and ovary. He inserted the needles in the areas of those 
			organs, and Beth felt a warm vibration. The man said this 
			“alignment” was necessary to put her glands in better condition for 
			what they wanted her to do, “in service to humanity.” He talked at 
			length about changing the human “vibration.”
 
 Next, a young woman, similar in looks to the man, came into the room 
			and proceeded to clean Beth’s body with a sponge and liquid. She 
			escorted Beth back to the first room, where the man continued to 
			explain about certain things. For one, he told her that she and 
			other humans were “chosen” to carry out “jobs” in the future. He 
			also described a coming disaster in the world, and he explained to 
			her about working “as a spiritual being” for the good of humanity. 
			The alien said that his group was here to study, collect genetic 
			material, and avert a destructive process which humans had started.
 
 She then recalled nothing more than being back in the round room 
			with her husband. Beth was very shaken by the recovered memories, 
			and she said she had no idea why she was “chosen,” as they had told 
			her.
 
 After the regressions, Beth’s subconscious became more accessible, 
			because she started having conscious flashbacks of previously 
			unremembered events. In the summer of 1988, while chatting with a 
			friend, Beth suddenly experienced one of these flashbacks. It began 
			with her in a small flying disc, entering a well-lit underground 
			city. The craft flew on through a tunnel passage into an enormous 
			cavern that contained several buildings. Beth also saw some UFOs 
			parked in various locations and aliens working side by side with 
			human military personnel.
 
 The next scenario is of Beth flying somehow through a body of water, 
			into a tunnel, and then emerging from a lake. She also remembered 
			trying to run away, but a big man grabbed her and said, “We brought 
			you here because we want you to see this” as a huge craft rose out 
			of the water. Beth then got back into the little craft and flew up 
			to the huge one. The entire memory was strange and disturbing, and 
			Beth had no idea when such an event might have occurred.
 
 Shortly after the regressions, in August 1988, Beth received a 
			mysterious phone call from a voice that sounded as if it were coming 
			from a vacuum. An unknown man said,
 
				
				“Elizabeth.” 
 “Yes,” Beth replied. “Who are you?”
 
 “We know about your experience,” the voice said, “and we know about 
			all the problems and doubts you have, but we can give you proof.”
 
 “Who are you?” Beth persisted. “Why are you telling me this?”
 
 “Don’t be afraid,” the strange voice continued. “We can give you 
			proof. We want to talk to you, so next Thursday go to the botanical 
			garden. Be there at ten. We know you. Don’t worry about looking for 
			us. Don’t tell anybody, and go there alone.”
 
			Everything about the call was suspicious - the use of a disguised 
			voice, the disturbing references to Beth’s “experiences,” the 
			insistence that she come by herself to the meeting - and she felt the 
			call implied a threat. She told the investigator with whom she was 
			working, but she didn’t want to go to the garden.  
			  
			Later, however, 
			Beth changed her mind, so she picked up the investigator and went on 
			to the appointed place. Although neither of them saw any suspicious 
			humans or any alien presences, Beth said a communication about love, 
			faith, friendship, and service was put into her mind there in the 
			garden. 
 On the drive back home, Beth felt dizzy and ill. Her body didn’t 
			seem to “work right,” 
			and her sense of time was very disoriented. According to the clock, 
			she even gained 
			time on the return trip, and for a while thereafter, day and night 
			seemed to come and 
			go very quickly. Even more disconcerting was the clear sensation of 
			her hand passing 
			through solid objects as she reached for them. But the bizarre 
			perceptions eventually 
			passed, and there were no further phone calls.
 
			 In 1990, two years after the flashback of the underground facility 
			with humans and aliens working together, more of Beth’s memories of 
			this event surface in a dream. She saw herself stepping out of an 
			aircraft with two “military men.” They were in a desert-like area, 
			reminiscent of the American southwest, with buildings that “matched” 
			the desert environment. A dark, grassy pool of water was near a 
			large metal building that looked like a warehouse inside.
 
			  
			An 
			old-fashioned wooden door opened to reveal a very high-tech metal 
			door, through which Beth was taken into a large room. There she saw 
			four big tables and a number of people. Some of them looked to be 
			military, some were clad like scientists, and others appeared to be 
			“regular” people. A uniformed, red-headed man, one of the two who 
			had brought her to the facility, seemed to be “in charge” of her.
			
 Two more men entered the room, wearing outfits Beth described as 
			similar to astronaut’s gear. They talked with Beth and the other 
			people, although she didn’t remember what was said, and then someone 
			shouted and the group started running toward the back of the large 
			room. The red-haired man grabbed her, and then the flashback ended, 
			but the next morning Beth found bruises in the exact spot where the 
			man had gripped her arm.
 
 The memory felt real, but she had no idea when such a fantastic 
			event might have occurred. Of course, mysterious things had been 
			happening all along and continued to occur-sightings of UFOs and 
			strange lights, episodes of unexplained time gaps, occasional 
			appearances of patterned bruises and punctures on her body-and for 
			most of these events Beth had no explanation or memory, either. It 
			was clear that her conscious recollections about these things were 
			merely the tip of the iceberg, and whatever lay beneath the surface 
			had been deeply suppressed.
 
 Beth might have been able to tell herself that all these events 
			weren’t real, that she had imagined them, until an event occurred 
			which proved that the weirdness wasn’t only in her mind. In 1992 
			during a visit to Miami, she and a friend were driving from his 
			house to her daughter’s home one night, a trip of thirty to 
			forty-five minutes on the turnpike. They started out at 9:50 p.m. 
			and things proceeded normally at first.
 
			  
			But then they both noticed 
			that the others cars, in both directions, had disappeared from view. 
			Beth saw a large, dark, shadowy form looming up ahead of them, which 
			she thought might be a bridge. She reasoned that the bridge’s great 
			shadow had somehow blocked their view of the other traffic. 
 At the very next instant, it seemed, she and her friend felt the car 
			“set back down” on the turnpike. The driver lost control of the 
			wheel, fighting to steer the car out of danger, and Beth found 
			herself inexplicably unlocking the seat belt, staring out the 
			window, and shouting,
 
				
				“Where are they? Where are they?”
				
 “How do you feel?” her friend asked.
 
 “Confused,” she told him. “My hair is standing up, like static 
			electricity, and there’s a bad pressure on my neck and my forehead.”
 
			Her friend said he was having the same symptoms, too, and that he 
			didn’t know 
			what had just happened. Beth noticed the shadowy shape was gone and 
			the traffic was thick all around them. “The bridge must have blocked 
			our view,” she told her friend, explaining about the shadowy form.
			
 But her friend, who drove that turnpike regularly, told her there 
			was no bridge at that location. They continued on the drive, 
			bewildered. When they reached her daughter’s home, all the lights 
			were out and the place was silent. Beth looked at her watch and was 
			shocked to see that it read 11:55. She knew they should have arrived 
			no later than 10:45, which meant that over an hour was missing. And 
			this time, she hadn’t been alone. The mystery was just as great as 
			ever, though, for neither of them remembered anything other than 
			being in the car.
 
 The pattern was always the same: evidence of an odd event, a 
			fragment of a puzzling scenario, and a blank in the place where the 
			details should have been. Every missing hour was a grievous loss to 
			Beth, a dark emptiness in her life. She had seen aliens, and she had 
			seen humans, some of them military, but she had no clue as to what 
			any of them were really doing. The agenda behind these events has 
			remained unknown, and Beth has continued to struggle with her 
			questions and her fears, because the events continue to occur.
 
 In January 1993, for instance, when she was staying in a Miami 
			apartment with her son and daughter, Beth experienced another 
			missing-time episode, and this time she discovered artifactual 
			evidence afterward. The event was preceded by a number of odd but 
			minor occurrences involving each member of the family.
 
 On Wednesday, January 27, they had all gone to bed by midnight. Beth 
			awoke at 4:39 a.m. and went to the bathroom. On her way back to bed, 
			she suddenly felt a compulsion or instruction to go into the kitchen 
			and pull up the window. She became afraid and fought against the 
			urge, but still she walked to the window and opened it without 
			looking out, before returning to her bed.
 
 As she lay down, Beth glanced at the window and thought, I don’t 
			want to see. She began to turn over to face the other direction, and 
			at that moment she heard something that sounded like a train, 
			followed by the sound of an electronic door closing. Rolling on 
			over, she glanced at the window again-and saw that it was daylight 
			outside. The bedside clock read 6:45. Two hours had disappeared in 
			the time it took her, consciously, to turn over in the bed.
 
 The realization startled her, and Beth got up in great agitation. 
			She went to the kitchen to make coffee and tried to figure out what 
			had happened, but without success. Then she went to take a shower, 
			and that was when she noticed that both of her knees were coated 
			with a chalky white substance, as if she’d been kneeling in the 
			unknown powder. But she couldn’t imagine where she might have been, 
			for the substance was unlike anything in her house.
 
 In spite of her agitation, the morning’s activities had to go on, so 
			Beth woke up her 
			children to get ready for work. Before he left, her son remarked 
			that something might 
			have happened to him during the night because he’d discovered a 
			puncture on his 
			forearm that he couldn’t explain. When they returned in the evening, 
			Beth told them about the events of the previous night: the strange 
			sounds, the missing time, the white substance, and the apparent fact 
			that she must have been out of the house temporarily.
 
			  
			But her son, 
			who’d slept at the foot of Beth’s bed in a sleeping bag, said he 
			didn’t think that was possible.  
				
				“She was sitting in bed last night,” he told his sister. “She acted 
			afraid, talking to someone. I saw a figure in the doorway,” he 
			added, but at the time, he said, he couldn’t get up and apparently 
			fell back asleep.  
			Everything about the event remained a mystery. 
 In this final account from Beth’s ongoing experiences, an event 
			occurred which had identical details to a bizarre report I had 
			learned about from a close relative. Beth’s parallel story confirmed 
			that it wasn’t the imaginings of a single mind. Either the aliens 
			were actually doing these things, activities that were not familiar 
			from other abduction accounts, or they were creating the same 
			virtual-reality scenario for at least two unrelated abductees.
 
 Beth was in Miami when the experience occurred, staying with a 
			friend and sleeping on his couch. One night, she awoke and watched 
			in amazement as “a rectangle of light, like a very thin page of 
			paper” came in through the window. She could see an area in the 
			center where white, pink, and purple lights were moving about.
 
 The rectangle of light stopped in mid-air, and out of its center 
			emerged a full-grown man, very tall, wearing a tight-fitting suit 
			and a small helmet. The man stood up and leaned over her, bringing 
			his face very close to hers. He was above her, but as she stared 
			into his eyes, she said she felt as if she were falling. That’s 
			where the memory ended, and Beth was aware of nothing more until she 
			awoke in the morning, in a dazed, groggy condition that persisted 
			throughout the day.
 
 Enduring repeated episodes of such activity, she has no clearer 
			understanding of these events now than at first. She does, however, 
			have feelings about it all, and certain beliefs to which she clings.
 
 Although she is never certain of who has abducted her or what they 
			have done, Beth feels that at least one of her experiences, the 1978 
			event, involved a benevolent group of aliens.
 
				
				“They brought me an 
			enormous sense of affinity with God,” she said, “with the universe, 
			and with love.”  
			But she also recognizes that other forces seem to be a part of the 
			overall phenomenon.  
				
				"There’s a battle of good and evil,” she said, explaining her 
			feelings about the situation. “Sometimes they interact in our lives, 
			bring pain and confusion, but I hold onto faith that my good ETs 
			will help us.”  
			She feels very strongly that the future catastrophic events the 
			aliens described will indeed 
			come about, and that she and other abductees will play a vital role 
			at that time. But that 
			doesn’t keep her from feeling fear and depression. Most certainly 
			she fears the 
			possible military or human intrusions, unable to forget the threat 
			that she is 
			“expendable.” 
 To face these fears, she relies on her religious beliefs for 
			strength.
 
				
				“My faith has nurtured me,” Beth said. “I’m a part of 
				God. 
			Faith, love, and truth will pull us through the enormity of things 
			that are going to happen. That is the spiritual part.”  
			The physical part, unfortunately, continues to include anxiety, 
			sleep disorder, sudden and total energy losses, a number of health 
			problems, and marks on her body that indicate the aliens are 
			interested in more than just her spirit.  
			 Back to Contents
 
			  |