Part 3 :Into The Fringe...September 1988 - March 1989

Into The Fringe

By Karla Turner

A NOTE TO THE READER

All of the people in this account are real. Because of the nature of the events they experienced, however, several people involved have chosen to be identified by pseudonym or by first name only .Whenever a pseudonym is used, it will be noted at that name's first appearance in the story

CHAPTER 5 

James and I weren't the only ones having "dream" experiences that Sunday night, September 12. On the following Tuesday James phoned to tell me what he'd just learned from his younger brother Lucas, who'd been at the farm on the twelfth. Lucas spent quite a lot of time with James and David and other friends at the farm, often staying up late to play video games. On Sunday night, however, he had a very different experience. 

He told James that "something like a dream" had happened while he was at his parents' home. "He said he dreamed he was sitting in the living room of the farm," James repeated to me, "when this stream of people began coming in the front door, maybe twenty or thirty. They just, moved through the living room and kitchen into my bedroom, then out my back door and back into the living room. 

"Lucas called them 'people' at first," James continued, "but then he thought they weren't real, so he started calling them 'things'." 

"What else happened?" I asked. 

"Well," James went on, "he watched them for a little while and then he got mad. He said he wanted to stop them from bothering me, so he threatened them. Lucas said when he hit one of them, it just screamed but didn't fight back, even when he knocked it down. They  started running, and he chased after them. He caught one and jerked it around face-to-face. But the thing attacked him, with its mind. Lucas attacked back, pummeling the thing in the face, until the creature began to scream. 

“Then Lucas chased after a second being and attacked it in the same way, but when he went back into the farm, he saw a huge creature, much bigger than the other two. He caught it and demanded to know what was going on," James continued. "The creature didn't answer, so Lucas said he was going to beat them all senseless if they didn't leave me alone. That was when they all left." 

When James paused, I asked if he'd ever said anything to Lucas about his own experiences. 

"Not at all, never," he assured me. "I haven't told him anything. That's why I'm so blown away by the whole thing." 

"Did you ever ask Lucas what these beings looked like?" I wondered. 

"Yeah," he replied. "Lucas said they acted like they were trying to appear human, but they weren't doing a very good job of it. They were wearing ragged clothes and stuff, like hillbillies in old overalls and hats." 

Lucas laughed nervously at the strange description, but I immediately remembered something we'd heard from a member of the study group in the city. This man was at our first meeting with the group, and he'd recounted his own first experience with alien beings. They "astrally" moved him in the middle of the night to a nearby golf course green, where a small craft appeared. Several humanoid beings descended from the craft, the man told us, and he remarked how surprised he was to see that the first one was dressed in a tattered shirt and overalls, with a straw hat and a piece of grass between his teeth as he smiled. "He was dressed just like a hillbilly," the man said. 

And now Lucas's dream had shown hillbilly creatures at the farm. What kind of insanity were we caught up in, we wondered, for it seemed that almost daily some new strange experience occurred to one of us. James, however, had more than his share. After so many years of living with his bizarre secrets of alien encounters, James long had suffered the added strain of fearing that his experiences were merely the product of a diseased mind, not a reality. Now at last he had people he could talk to, who understood because they had strange experiences of their own. And after his trip to St. Louis and the outward confirmation of this alien reality, he no longer doubted his sanity. 

Instead, James wanted to know more about his situation, and it may have been that desire for knowledge which led him to try astral projection. A few years earlier, James had discussed astral travel with a small group of his friends one day when I happened to be present. He said he'd been able to “get out'' of his body in that manner for several years, since he was a young teenager, without going into any detail, but I dismissed the whole subject in disbelief. The only other person I knew who ever talked about astral travel was my brother, years ago, who claimed to be able to do it, and even then I thought he must have been quite imaginative to come up with such stories. 

James told us that on September 14 he had tried to astrally project himself earlier that day, just to see if he could still do it. The last time he tried it, James said he had a lot of trouble getting back into his body and so had frightened himself out trying it again. 

"This time," James said, "I was just beginning to feel like I was about to get free of my body, but something happened. Something just sort of jerked me out. And the next thing I knew," he continued, "I was in this dark room, sitting at a table. There were some black blocks or cubes and rectangles, and I was supposed to move them around." 

"Why?" I asked. "Who was making you manipulate the cubes?" 

"I don't know," James said. "There were some others there with me, but I didn't really see them. The room was dark, and the only light was coming down on the table from behind me. All I ever saw was their arms, when they'd reach over my shoulder to adjust a block or something. The arms looked pretty dark, but I couldn't really tell." 

"How long did all this go on?" I wanted to know, but James just shook his head. 

"I don't know," he admitted, "it was real strange. The phone kept ringing." 

"You mean the phone in the house?" I asked. 

"Yeah. I'd be trying to concentrate on the blocks, on doing it correctly, and then the phone would ring. It kept distracting me, like I was in both places at once." After a short while his concentration on the task was completely broken, and he was put back into his body. He told us that the experience was very unsettling and he didn't think he would try astral projection again, since the beings were able to manipulate him in that state. 

The next day, Thursday, James once again went through a strange and frightening occurrence. David and Megan had both already left the farm for the night, and James was sitting in the living room, finishing a cigarette before going to his parents' home to sleep. Outside, the two cats suddenly  started acting strange, and then the dogs "went wild" barking in their front yard pen. Immediately, James felt the entire farmhouse start to shake, so he raced out the back door and into his car. As he was driving away, he said he could see the house still shaking. 

The whole week had been so full of bizarre incidents like this that we were all perhaps a little apprehensive about the coming weekend. Fred was planning to come out on Friday, to watch a television program on UFO abductions and also to meet James. From hearing their stories, Casey and I knew that they had both seen human-looking beings during some of their experiences, and both of them had been told that new bodies were somehow being made or prepared for us. We wondered what else they might discover they had in common. 

That Friday afternoon, I was alone at home, reading Our Haunted Planet, a book by John A. Keel, that described Joseph Smith's initial contacts with the angels who led him to the golden plates, the Book of Mormon. It reminded me very much of something James had experienced. In St. Louis, out on the hill with the woman, he'd been told he would have to locate something, a box of some sort, at a future date. Joseph Smith was also told of a box he'd have to find within six years, whereas James had been told that his tasks, including finding the box, would come within five years. 

As I was thinking of these similarities, there was a sudden bright flash of light in my living room, a blinding white light, as if lightning had struck indoors. I looked up, startled, waiting for the sound of thunder to follow, but there was none. I ran outside and looked up at the sky, which was clear and bright, so I came back in, bewildered. That was the first silent lightning I experienced, but it occurred several  times in the following months, and I never found an explanation for it. 

That evening we gathered early for a chance to talk before the TV program. Fred and James arrived around 7 P.M., then David and Megan came over, and finally Bonnie stopped by for a brief visit. After she left, we went to the farm to watch the program, a segment of the now-defunct "Late Show." The entire program was devoted to various UFO subjects, with Whitley Strieber, William Moore, and an ex-astronaut, Brian O'Leary, among the guests. Also, in the audience were over fifty abductees, and the host interviewed several of them. 

Each story was different, yet they all shared a basic sameness with the experiences we had had, and it was very eerie to listen to strangers on television and feel so close to their stories. When one of the abductees mentioned finding a triangle mark on his body, Fred laughingly said he wished he'd find one, too, as if it would somehow make the whole thing seem more real. Yet we all felt that it was very real right now, and that it seemed even more ominous now that the media were making these situations known to the general public. 

We wondered why, after so much secrecy and the imposition of amnesia on the victims of abductions, everyone was suddenly being told. And many more people seemed to be waking up to the fact of alien abductions going on in their previously normal lives. I had sometimes taken comfort in the knowledge that people had been abducted for years without there being any perceptible impact on society as a whole, but now I could see that a qualitative change was taking place. From Barbara's research, we knew of over two hundred cases in the Tulsa area, where ordinary people were going through extraordinary experiences in the New York- New England area. There were over fifty ordinary people in the audience of the television program who claimed to have been abducted, and there were four of us in the living room watching the show! I remembered what Casey had been told back in December, that it was "time to remember." How many other people, I wondered, were also being ordered to remember? And why? 

We talked about such things for a while after the program, and then the group broke up. Fred went back to his apartment in the city, David and Megan went to the air conditioned comfort of her apartment near campus, James left for his parents' house, and Casey and I went home to bed. We slept late the next morning, so we'd only been up for a little while when James phoned, asking if he could come talk to us. 

He arrived looking terrible, with dark circles under his bloodshot eyes, and he was exhausted. 

"What's wrong?" we asked immediately. 

"Something happened last night," he began shakily. "I went to my folks' house and sat up watching TV until 3:00 or 3:30. Then I went to bed in my sister's old room. My parents were asleep already, and so was Lucas. 

"So I finally went to bed," he continued, "and the next thing, I'm standing by my bed, thinking I'm so tired, all I want to do is get some sleep." 

"Weren't you confused?" I asked. "You didn't wonder what you were doing out of bed?" 

"Well, yeah," he replied, "but I was exhausted. I just wanted to lie down again, so I did. And then it happened again." 

"What?" I wanted to know, beginning to feel confused myself. 

"I was up again," he explained, "standing by my bed. And this time I was really upset. But I was too tired to do  anything about it. It kept happening over and over, seems like." 

"And that's all that happened?" I asked. 

"I don't know," he admitted. "One of the times when I woke up, I was already lying down, but I don't think I was in my real bed. Everything seemed very strange, but then I thought that at least I was horizontal this time, so maybe they'd let me sleep. That's how tired I was." 

This phase apparently passed after a while, and then James said he woke up in his bed with a strange female alien being beside him. 

"She was trying to get me worked up," he said, shaking his head. "She got on top of me and tried to make me respond, you know, sexually. But I kept refusing, I pushed her away and begged her to leave me alone. I told her there was no way I could do anything like that, I just wanted to get some rest." 

"So what happened then?" Casey asked. 

"Finally she gave up, I guess," James answered. "She left me and went out in the hall. That's when I saw that there were some other beings out there, too. I could hear them all talking to her, but at first I couldn't understand what they were saying. And then, suddenly it all clicked and I understood them." 

"What were they talking about?" I asked. 

"They were asking her, the female, what had happened, and she told them I wouldn't cooperate," he replied. 

"How long did that go on?" Casey questioned. 

"I don't know," James told us. "I was just completely exhausted, and I guess I fell asleep, because that's all I remember." 

"What did the female look like?" I asked. "Was she like any of the other beings you've seen?" 

"No," he shook his head. "She was different, taller. But  the room was dark, and I couldn't really see much detail. She was naked, though, and she felt really cold when she touched me." 

"And this type, this group, wasn't familiar to you?" I persisted. 

"Not really," he told us. "These were different ones, I've never seen them before. And you know what amazes me? There were a whole lot of them in the hall, right in my parents' house! Like they didn't worry about anyone waking up and seeing them." 

We all sat back in bewilderment. Like James, we wondered how such a scene could occur without any of the others in the house being disturbed. Perhaps we could have dismissed it as a nightmare, except that James was so obviously upset and physically exhausted. 

"There's one more thing," James said then, standing up. He turned around, showing us the back of his calf. "I found these marks this morning," he pointed, "and I don't know where they came from." 

There were three large puncture marks on the skin, arranged in an equilateral triangle. James had never told us of having any marks or scars on his body before, and it was easy to see how deeply the triangle upset him. The arrival of a new group of alien beings and the appearance of the three punctures seemed to be more than coincidental. Until now, I was the only one in the group who'd been marked with a triangle, yet we'd learned that this was an insignia left by at least one of the alien groups. 

There was nothing we could do for James but commiserate, and he soon left. Casey and I immediately checked our own bodies, to see if anything might have happened to us. On my right hip I found a single puncture; there was a dried, smeared drop of blood on my ankle; and I had a small scratch, also smeared with blood, just below and to the left  of my breastbone. I looked at the bedsheets and found a single thin streak of blood on my side of the bed, corresponding to the scratch on my chest. And Casey had a red scratch, a bit larger than mine, below his right breast. Yet neither of us remembered anything unusual during the night. If we hadn't looked, we wouldn't have known the marks were on us until later when we showered because, like all the unexplained scratches and punctures, they caused absolutely no pain. 

Our next thought was of Fred, so we called and asked him if he'd noticed any unusual marks on his own body. 

"I don't know," he said. "I haven't looked to see, but I will." He left the phone for a few moments, and when he picked it up to speak again, I could hear excitement and anxiety in his voice. 

"They're there, all right," he told me. "There's a puncture, three or four of them, on my arm and leg. Some of them are by themselves, but three of them form a triangle." 

Triangles aren't random, and what was happening to us seemed deliberately meant to show a pattern or a connection between us, but we still had no idea what the connection really meant. It seemed like a puzzle to be solved, yet the clues were so ephemeral, only punctures, bruises, scratches that seemed to come from nowhere, caused no discomfort, and healed with remarkable speed. The phenomenon was so obscure that we were like mere children, blindfolded, playing hide-and-seek with invisible prey. 

Casey and I were driven to understand the situation, so much so that it became hard for him to concentrate on his business and for me to concentrate on anything. I read more books, kept a scrupulous journal of the events going on in everyone's lives, and I thought about all the things I'd learned in the past few months. There were the classic cases  of ufology, available in any number of books, with which we were soon familiar: Mantell, the Hills, Pascagoula, Moody, Coyne, Travis Walton. And there were the standard skeptical explanations that had been put forward for years, which under any scrutiny prove very often to be impossible solutions. 

There were the peripheral issues, cattle mutilations and Bigfoot sightings, that were rumored to be closely associated with UFO activity. We knew nothing about these things from our own knowledge, so they were relegated to the "rumors" file. By now this mass of material included stories of secret U.S.-Russian bases on the moon and Mars; blond-haired space brethren from the Pleiades, a star cluster in the constellation Taurus, made famous by the story of Swiss farmer Billy Meier to whom they allegedly imparted cosmic knowledge of their work to assist our spiritual evolution; channeled pronouncements by various extraterrestrials of the Galactic Federation about the shifting of the global axis; and secret U.S.-alien underground bases throughout the country, the products of our government's illegal treaties and arrangements with the leaders of some alien nation whose ultimate goal is total control of our world. These were things we heard about and read about, all at rather a far remove from our own mysterious experiences. 

But there was one rumor, at least, which was more available for us to check out, and our findings were disturbing. Part of the U.S.-alien alliance story says that there has been a falling out between us and them. As a result, and faced with the imminent mass confrontation between aliens and humanity, the government is now working feverishly in two directions. On the one hand, an immense effort is under way to develop super weaponry capable of defending us against alien technology. The aliens  had promised early on to give us their technical expertise, but they had reneged. 

And the second effort is the rapid education of the public, through the media, about the coming alien presence. Apparently, the rumor says, the aliens who are here now are just the forerunners for a much larger group, and that group's arrival is expected within the next four years. The government hopes to avoid worldwide panic by preparing us through advertising and the entertainment media for our encounter with alien beings. 

Thinking back over the past two years, we began to see that there had indeed been an upsurge in UFO-related interests. The Gulf Breeze sightings got wide television coverage; Strieber's book was a best-seller, as were Hopkins's two accounts of abduction experiences. Abduction researchers and victims had been interviewed on all the talk shows and on a few prime-time programs: Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue, Gary Collins, even Morton Downey, Jr. presented Budd Hopkins, Whitley Strieber, Bruce Maccabbee, Stanton Friedman, and many other researchers to the public. "Unsolved Mysteries" devoted over half a show to the abduction phenomenon, and Ross Shaffer's "Late Show" gave it the entire hour. There had even been a one-hour pilot movie in July,”Why On Earth,'' which, strangely enough, had as its premise a joint U.S.- alien secret base from which an idealistic young alien agent would make forays into the bewilderingly irrational world of humans. 

And then there were the alien movies in the works, not to mention the classic ET stories of the past decades, when, rumor tells us, the government felt more kindly disposed toward their alien allies and wanted us to view them with affection. When the rift took place—a shoot-out of sorts at an underground base, in which the humans got the worst of  it all—the government attitude changed, and we were presented malevolent reptilian aliens in the miniseries "V." And now we had a new series,”War of the Worlds,'' which we watched anxiously each week. In every episode, we saw some fact or detail which we recognized from actual cases, mixed in with the more creative aspects of the show, and as we watched we did feel as if a deliberate effort were being made to acquaint the public with at least part of the truth. 

We read about current movie projects with alien subjects, such as Alien Nation and They Live, and more immediate was talk of an upcoming TV special, "UFO Cover-Up Live," about which little detail was known. I couldn't remember a similar time frame in which so much UFO interest had been evident, and like the rest of the group, I began to wonder if there truly was an effort going on, real preparations for a coming invasion. It seemed unthinkable, yet we had another reason to wonder about this rumor. James, we remembered, had been told by the interdimensional woman that his big task would come within five years and that we would all be involved in it. And he'd been told that we had every reason to fear the gray aliens, who had no concern for our welfare or wishes. 

Strange marks continued to appear on our bodies, and we wondered who or what was causing them. Neither Casey nor I was aware of anything going on in the night, yet we checked our bodies upon going to bed and upon getting up, and new marks were frequently found. Stress and anxiety ran high quite a lot of the time, and I thought it would be good to have a trained therapist on hand. If things really were happening to us which we had no memory of, then hypnotic regression could help us discover it. Yet none of us was in need of traditional therapy—we were adequately coping with the demands of our lives so far—and we did not want or need the feeling of being a patient. So I contacted  several counselors listed in the phone book and at last found one who agreed to see me. 

We met in his office, and I was impressed with the man, an interning counselor just finishing up his work at the local university. As calmly as I could, I explained to him about the abduction phenomenon and about the need for a volunteer hypnotist who could work in complete confidentiality with abductees. His response seemed to show an open mind, and although he admitted his lack of familiarity with UFOs, he did say he would be happy and intrigued to work with abductees. But, at the time, no one in our group was having any overt situations to deal with. 

In fact, aside from a bruise or puncture mark every few days, the only unusual event had been a conversation between Megan and the ROTC sergeant on campus. As a freshman, Megan had joined the Air Force officers' program and reported to a local detachment. Although she was planning to resign from the program (as she has since done, on medical grounds), the sergeant insisted that Megan make plans for the duty she wanted after graduation. Since Megan's major was physics, the sergeant assumed that she would want to work in Research and Development. But instead, Megan signed up for Meteorology, hoping that such an assignment would, should she have to stay in the service, keep her near to home. 

When the sergeant saw the Meteorology listing, she tried to change Megan's mind. "You don't want to work in Meteorology,'' she told Megan.”Don't you want to get into R & D? That way, you'll get to find out the truth about UFOs and aliens. You might even get to do tests and research on them." 

Stunned by the remarks, Megan was unable to answer. She had told no one, outside our small group, about any of the UFO activity we'd been experiencing, and it frightened her to be confronted with it by a military official, in such an open way. It could have been a pure coincidence, we tried to assure her, but we didn't think so. The official Air Force reply to UFO inquiries is that they aren't in the business of dealing with the subject. Why, then, would the sergeant talk about Air Force research into UFOs and aliens? Was it a test of Megan, we wondered, or was it a warning that they knew all about us? Our phones had acted very funny on several occasions, and after having been followed twice during the summer, we wondered just exactly who was interested in us, and why. 

Toward the end of September a few other strange things happened. I had two different spells of sudden exhaustion, which seemed to have nothing to do with my health, and one morning I woke up with a very painful left wrist, arm, and shoulder, as if I'd been wrestling all night, but the soreness was gone by the evening. On the twenty-ninth, Casey woke up with a long, bloody scraped gash down his right shin. It was obvious that getting such an injury would be noticeable—and painful—but Casey hadn't injured himself the previous day, nor did the gash hurt when he found it. We checked the bedsheets for blood and didn't find any there, so we were left with one more unexplained injury. 

And none of these things was severe enough to require a doctor's attention. Besides, what could we say if we had gone to the doctor? "Look at this scratch, Doc—or this scabbed puncture—can you tell me where it came from?" Without pain or infection, without serious trauma to our bodies, what could we expect a doctor to do for us? 

👽 October 1988 👽

Two mornings later, on the first of October, Casey woke up with a small triangular scar above the scraped shin area. It  looked as if a triangle patch of skin had neatly been cut away, and already the wound was healing over. Checking our bodies became a daily ritual, but so far, except for Fred's and James's triangular wounds, Casey and I were the only ones with marks. That changed, however, on October 3, when David came over to show me a puncture he'd just found. It was a single mark, in the vein of his right arm, and it looked just like he'd given blood. 

All the fears and paranoia I'd felt changed at that moment, and I became outraged. I wanted to protect my son, I wanted to protect us all from whatever was invading our lives, using our bodies without our permission or knowledge, and I felt helpless and angry. There was no one to go to and demand relief, or even answers. I knew from the few people I'd talked with that the subject of UFOs and aliens was not well received. Even my own parents didn't want us to talk about it, and they certainly didn't believe anything was actually happening to us. 

And what could we tell people? That we'd seen a UFO, that we wake up with strange marks on our bodies, that impossible things go on in our homes? It was still easier, as it had been in the beginning, to avoid our friends than to tell them about our situation. The only people we could trust to believe us were the others who were being abducted, too. Our emotional stability depended upon mutual support, but all we could give each other was sympathy.

CHAPTER 6 

Scratches and bruises and needle-like puncture marks are infuriating. As evidence of alien contact, they are useless if there is no memory of an event to go with them. We were the only ones who could truly know that a bruise or scratch had not been on our body the night before, that it wasn't the result of accidental, self-inflicted clumsiness during the day. We checked our bodies regularly and made mental note of any bump or scratch from known sources. Still, marks appeared on random mornings, after nights of apparently undisturbed sleep. 

More than once we wondered if there were any way we could be doing these things to ourselves, in our sleep, but the evidence didn't fit. At times we'd find injuries on our bodies but no blood on the bed, and at other times there was plenty of blood on the sheets, although we could find no new cut or scratch. And once, after falling asleep only a couple of hours while staying up late studying, David awoke with blood drying in his ear. When he cleaned it out, fresh blood was also found. Yet there was no sign of a scratch or  other lesion, and he remembered nothing out of the ordinary. 

For James, things got even stranger at the farm. He was often alone there at night, and throughout the autumn the house was alive with bizarre activity. The couch had shaken, the entire house once shook violently, the lights didn't always behave. 

"I was in the living room the other night," James told us, "and when I got up to get a drink in the kitchen, I saw that there was a light on in my bedroom. I went back there, and all the lamps were on, so I turned them off. A little bit later I was back in the kitchen and noticed the bedroom lights were on again. So I turned them off again, but it just kept happening. Four times!" 

“Nobody else was home?'' I asked. 

"Nope," he insisted. "And the last time when I was going back to the kitchen after turning off the bedroom lights, I heard a noise outside, by the driveway. I flicked on the back porch light and looked out, but I didn't see anything. And I swear, I turned off the porch light and walked away. But I turned around, and the porch light was shining! 

"And then," he continued, "when I went to the bathroom later to take a leak, I was standing there, and I heard a metallic sort of jingling sound. I looked around, and the hood-and-eye latch was moving! It lifted up and dropped into the lock, all by itself!" 

"What did you do?" I asked, thinking how I might feel if such a thing had happened to me. 

"I just stood there," he said. "I mean, I couldn't move, I was scared to death. I thought, there's something else in here with me, and I couldn't even move. And then I thought, 'I better get out of here,' so I forced myself to unlock the  door. And I got out of there right away, drove over to my folks' house for the night." 

"Are you still staying there?" I asked. 

"Not anymore, but I stayed for a few days," he replied. “And it was real strange when I finally went back to the farm. Two or three times in the next days, or nights, rather, I kept hearing this voice. It said that 'they' were glad I'd come back, so they could help me." 

"Did they ever show up, then?" I wanted to know. 

"No," he admitted, "but once I heard this girl's voice, crying like she was in trouble. I went outside to see what was going on, but I couldn't find anyone out there." 

James had been going through repeated, frequent intrusions for months, so it isn't surprising that by October his nerves were thin. He still found it difficult to discuss his experiences, although he usually came and told us when anything happened. There were many parts of the events which he couldn't remember, and he admitted he hadn't told us all the details of any of the experiences. He was twenty-three years old by then, entitled to whatever privacy he desired, but we thought he should at least let his parents in on the situation. They knew something was wrong, and they wanted very much to be able to help their son, no matter what the problem. 

James was adamant, however, that we keep his secret. And we hoped that having us to talk to was enough for him, so we respected his wishes and tried to keep in close contact. Later in October we planned to go to a MUFON meeting to hear newswoman and author Linda M. Howe speak on the topic of cattle mutilations, and James planned to go with us. Primarily we hoped to see the woman again, the one who looked like the interdimensional female who'd been visiting the farm uninvited. When we arrived at the meeting, however, James wasn't there. After the speech, I  phoned to check on him, and he sounded very shaken, so we went directly to the farm when we reached town late that night. 

James was exhausted and seemed more visibly afraid than he usually did after an experience. He told us, in a quick, jerky manner, that he'd changed his mind about going to Oklahoma to work with Barbara, that he just wasn't ready. He'd been having horrible dreams and flashes of memories the past two nights, and what he saw frightened him. The worst was a memory of himself as a young child, pinned helpless against a wall and watching as alien beings dissected a human man on a table. The man screamed in agony as they cut parts of him away, and then the action stopped momentarily. The tortured man raised up his head, looked at James, and then he spoke. 

"Don't worry about me," he said, "I'm going to die now, there's nothing to be done about that. But you're not going to die yet." Instead, he said, James would someday have to battle against these beings, but that was all James would tell us. 

And he was shown images of the two farmhouse cats, mutilated in the yard, and a warning, reminding him of what the woman in St. Louis had told him: the Grays are coming down to earth, trying to hold back our evolution and keep us down; they regard us as little more than insects; their home planet had been destroyed at a past crisis point, and they don't want us to survive the current crisis in our own world. He remembered the woman's claim that her group hoped to precipitate the crisis in such a way as to help us survive. Whatever the case, a crisis seemed unavoidable, and James clearly felt frightened and depressed. 

We worried about his mental health and finally persuaded him to let us tell his parents a little about the situation by restricting our discussion to our own experiences. With the ground broken, we hoped James would have enough courage to go to them with his story. So we invited his parents to visit and little by little revealed what we'd been going through. To our relief and surprise, they seemed open minded and inclined to believe rather than doubt our honesty. In fact, while talking about unusual experiences, James's mother, Sandy (pseudonym), recounted an early childhood memory with all the traits of a screened abduction episode. 

Before the evening was over, however, Sandy began asking questions that led to James, via David's experiences, and all I could tell her was that she should discuss any questions she had with James. Despite the very late hour, James's parents went to the farm and offered him their support, urging him to talk more with them the next day. He was surprised by their responses, but once the barrier had been broken, he admitted that his life became much easier. 

The end of October came, and we prepared for trick-or-treaters on Halloween, with bowls of candy and spooky decorations at the door. Once or twice we joked about the real spooks in our lives, but the evening was uneventful. The night, however, must have been much more active, both in our home and at the farm. When we got up the next morning, I found three new punctures in my neck, still bright red. They formed a small triangle and were positioned over my jugular vein. But as usual I remembered nothing during the night. 

November 1988 

Later in the day, November first, David came by with a strange tale from the previous night, too. He and Megan had been alone at the farm when they went to bed around 10:30, and then a little before 2 A.M. he awoke with a headache.

 "So I got up," he said, "and went through the house. I got a glass of water in the kitchen, then I went to the bathroom for aspirin. James was in bed by then, asleep. That's why I couldn't understand why all the lights were on." 

"What do you mean?" I interrupted. "James still had his light on?" 

"No," David explained, "every light in the whole house was on, except for the one in my bedroom. And the radio was playing in the living room." 

"Has James ever left everything turned on like that before?" I asked. 

"No, he's real good about turning off stuff," David answered. "I thought he must have been really wasted to be that careless. But the next morning, James said he had turned out everything as usual. He swore he didn't leave the radio and lights on." 

After getting back in bed, David woke again a while later, feeling, he said, as if he were oscillating violently, as if his body were about to explode or disintegrate into its atomic particles. 

“It felt really scary,'' he said,”like if that sensation went on much longer, I was literally going to come apart. I was just getting ready to scream, I was so scared, and then the sensation suddenly stopped. 

"I think I turned over and said something to Megan," he continued. "I said, 'It's okay, it's stopped'." 

"Was she awake?" I asked. "Did she know what was going on?'' 

"I don't think she even moved," he replied. "After that, I just fell right back to sleep. At least I think I was asleep some of the time." 

He thought he woke again, though he didn't open his eyes or even seem to be aware of his surroundings, and lay there Into the  thinking about the sensation he'd felt earlier. Then, without any volition, he started seeing, or recalling seeing, a scene in which two separate images were superimposed on each other, like two different slides being projected at the same time. 

“One scene was of a desert place, in the middle of a huge sandstorm," he described. "The whole world was a desert, tan, and the only way I could tell the sky from the ground was that the sky was a lighter shade of tan. 

"The second scene," he went on, "was in an outside area at night, pitch-black. But I could see something in front of me. It looked like a fifteen-foot-tall tree trunk or irregular column, and it was covered with thick, dark brown fur." 

"What was it?" I asked. 

"I don't know," he said. "I could see some sort of appendage near the top of the column, but I have no idea what it was." 

Throughout the strange night, David felt as if he never really got back to sleep after waking up the second time, yet he couldn't recall doing or even seeing anything around him all that time. When morning came, he woke up feeling that the night had been very exhausting, and Megan also felt that she didn't get much rest. They were both extremely tired that day. When we discussed the incident, David said that the only time he's felt anything similar was in the summer, recalling the night his head had been filled with a pressure explosive sensation. At the time he said he was afraid he was about to be taken, in some way, out of his body. A strange correlation to David's experience turned up well over a year later, and, since the similarity was so astounding, I think it worth mentioning here. After two successful nonfiction works dealing with his own alien experiences, Whitley Strieber published a novel in 1989, Majestic, which he described as “a work of fiction that is  based on fact." While reading this book, I was shocked to find a scene almost identical to the two scenes David recalled seeing. Chapter Twenty-Six of Majestic describes an experience in a desert setting, matching David's description right down to the "brown sky." Moving through this scene, the fictional character then tells of finding himself in a nighttime setting, and as I read those words, a sense of sickening uneasiness overcame me: 

"There seemed to be a forest of thin trees all around me,'' the character says. "It took me time to understand that I was looking at tall, black legs, many of them. 

"It took every ounce of my composure not to scream. I was under what appeared to be a gigantic insect of some kind, perhaps a spider. The rattling noise started again. I could see sharp mouth parts working. 

"Jumping, twisting, turning to avoid the legs I made a dash to get away from the thing." 

Setting the book down, I could read no farther. My son had been shown a tan world, with a tan sky, and then he found himself looking up at those tall, dark, fur-covered columns that had no reference to the reality he'd always known. Was it mere coincidence that Strieber had included such scenes in his novel? Had he invented the material, I wondered, or had it come from someone's actual recollections? And what, in the name of God, did it mean for my son? 

It was an ominous beginning for November, and I began to despair that the phenomenon would ever stop. The following evening after we went to bed, the phone rang precisely at midnight. I answered it and said, "Hello," waiting for a reply. At first there was nothing but very distant-sounding static, and then a bizarre voice said, "Hal-loo." Surprised by the voice, I merely repeated, "Hello?" 

There was another pause, and then I heard "Hal-loo" once again. The voice frightened me in its strangeness, and I sat silently listening, but nothing further was said. I hung up and lay back uneasily, wondering who had been on the other end of the line. The voice kept repeating itself in my mind, but I couldn't recognize the accent, and I couldn't reproduce the sound of that "Hal-loo" when I tried to tell Casey about the call. The next day, November third, the phone rang again just before noon, and when I picked it up there was nobody on the line. In fact, there was no sound at all, no background static, just absolute blank silence. Fearful that I might hear the strange voice from the night before, however, I wouldn't listen, yet I couldn't bring myself to hang up. Putting the receiver down on the cabinet, I walked away, wondering what I should do. A minute or so later when I went back to hang up, I heard a recorded voice repeating, "Please hang up and dial again. We are unable to complete your call as dialed." But of course, I wasn't the one who had dialed the phone in the first place.

Later that same day, I heard about a disturbing rumor that was making its way through the UFO community with all the speed of a highly contagious virus. Such rumors abounded in the ufological community. This one held that a recent public speaker had supposedly confided to a MUFON member that the Air Force was greatly concerned about a large unidentified object in space, apparently heading for earth. When others had tried to track down the source of this rumor, the trail finally led back to some unnamed and retired Air Force officer who kept in contact with his friends still in the service. 

They had told him that the large object was emitting a lot of radiation and was following an unusual trajectory which seemed to show intelligent control. The military, so the rumor went, was concerned that the object was an artificial base of some sort and that it might be connected with the current upsurge in ET activity—the same kind of activity which was intruding into my family. There was even speculation that whoever was controlling the object might be involved in some sort of conflict, that the object was a battle station, and that they could be preparing to use the earth as a staging ground in the conflict. 

It's no wonder we often felt as if we were unwitting characters thrust into a science-fiction movie. Casey's revelations of his past experiences had been shocking enough, and then there were the horrific stories of John Lear—the government's deal with aliens, the underground installations with vats of human body parts and prenatal nurseries for stolen fetuses. And now rumors of alien battle stations heading for earth? A year ago I would have laughed at anyone foolish enough to consider such things seriously, but now I was listening. And I wondered how we could ever hope to sort out the rumors from the facts. 

Fighting off the feelings of anger and fear and disorientation that now accompanied every new twist in this phenomenon, I told myself, "Humans can lie, and so can aliens." My own research showed that different abductees had been told different things by their captors, and not all the information could be true. There were too many contradictions. 

"Yes, some humans lie, but not all," another part of my mind responded, "so does that mean that perhaps some aliens are telling the truth?" It was important to know which humans—and which aliens—to believe, yet it was impossible. 

I relegated the battle-station report to the "rumor" file somewhere in the back of my mind, but it must have disturbed me more deeply than I realized. That night, or  rather in the early hours of the morning, I awoke from a frightening dream that the "Night of Lights" had finally come. That was what we called the rumored event of the aliens' mass arrival on earth, taking the title from another abductee's account of what she was told by a golden colored, humanoid alien. 

I saw thousands of small spacecraft descending to earth in my dream, and all I could remember upon waking was the mass confusion as my family and I tried to prepare a way to survive. The dream left me shaken and fearful, and for the next two days I was preoccupied with the need to communicate with the aliens. No matter how frightening a conscious confrontation with them might be, I was desperate for more information, and so mentally I kept calling out for them to come. 

On the night of November 5, Casey and I went to bed rather late, sometime after midnight, and quickly fell asleep. There was a noise in the room, three series of loud metallic clicks, that startled me awake, and I turned on the bedside lamp, looking around anxiously and feeling the adrenaline rush through my body. 

“Did you hear that?'' I asked Casey as he sat up in the bed, eyes wide open, and he nodded. I glanced at the clock and saw that it was 3:03 A.M. 

"It sounded like clicking," he said. "Did you see anything?" 

"No," I replied, "but we can't just go back to sleep as if nothing happened! Something made that noise, and I want to know what it was." 

Casey got up and searched the room thoroughly, but he found nothing out of the ordinary. The sound had come from my side of the room, about a foot from my head, yet I insisted he search the entire house. Then he turned on the outside lights and peered through all the windows, but everything inside and out seemed normal. 

"Maybe if we turn off the light and lie back down," I said when he returned to the bedroom, “we might hear the noise again and could catch whatever's doing it." 

Casey agreed, and we got back into bed, lying face up under the covers. And since the noise had come from my side of the room, Casey and I switched places so that he could be nearest to the sound if it happened again. He turned out the light, and I noticed that it was now 3:09. 

Casey took my hand and held it tightly as we lay there. My heart was still pounding hard, and our eyes were open as we watched the room, anxiously searching for any movement or sound. At first there was nothing, and then after a minute or so we heard a low, deep rumbling noise in the distance. The railroad track runs a few blocks from our house, and Casey mentioned that it must be a train coming through town. We listened for the familiar whistle at the crossing, but it never came, even though the rumble continued. 

After no more than four or five minutes, I turned to Casey and said, "This isn't getting us anywhere. The sound hasn't come back, so maybe we should just try to go to sleep again. What else can we do?'' 

"All right," he agreed, letting go of my hand for the first time. I rolled over on my side to relax, but then I suddenly sat up with a shock. 

"What's wrong?" Casey asked anxiously. "Look at the clock!" I pointed. "It says it's 3:43, but it can't be!" 

He glanced over at the clock and shook his head. "That's not right,'' he said.”It can't be! We've only been lying here a few minutes."

I turned the light on, and Casey got up to check his wrist watch on the bureau, but it also said 3:43. Yet we knew it shouldn't have been any later than 3:13 or 3:14. Half an hour had passed, apparently, without our being aware of it, and that didn't make sense. We had both been awake, our eyes had been open, and both our hearts were still pounding from the initial rush of fear we'd felt when the clicking noise woke us. 

Eventually we fell back asleep, in spite of the strange time loss, and when we searched our bodies for new marks the next morning, we didn't find any. But both Casey and I were utterly exhausted throughout the day, and we were very concerned to know what had happened to us during the night. We felt certain that something had occurred, but if it was blocked in our memory, our only hope of finding out would be through hypnotic regression. I wished that Barbara didn't live so far away, and we began planning a visit to her as soon as possible. The loss of time was the most consciously jarring, most "immediate" episode we'd been through, wrecking our sense of reality, and leaving us in greater need than ever of answers. 

A few days later, David called in the middle of the morning to tell me there were new marks on his body, and I asked him to come by for us to examine them. When he arrived and showed us the numerous long scratches and welts that covered his right thigh, I was shocked. All any of us had previously experienced were a few punctures and single scratches, but David's leg looked mauled. Several of the scratches formed inverted V-shaped patterns on the front of his thigh, and along the outside there were almost a dozen red welts running from the top of the thigh down to just above his knee. A bloody, curving scratch stretched along the hip, with a deep puncture between it and the welts below. 

"Do you have any idea where you might have gotten these scratches?" I asked David. He shook his head and then shrugged. 

“Maybe there was a sticker in the bed," he said doubtfully, "I don't know. I didn't find a sticker when I looked this morning, but who knows? And the scratches weren't there when I went to bed, so it must have been a sticker or something." 

He said the scratches didn't hurt, which was very unusual considering how many there were and how deeply some of them had broken the skin. Yet he did his best to dismiss the strangeness of the experience, since there was no obvious explanation. I decided, however, that if the chance ever came for him to work with Barbara, I would encourage him to do it. I hated the fact that he was involved in this phenomenon, but I knew that ignoring it wouldn't make it go away. The numerous scratches, however, healed quickly and without infection, as did all of our unexplained body marks. 

The following week, Casey had a nighttime experience that upset him enough to tell me about it in great detail. He tried to call it a dream, but he admitted that the memory seemed much more real than that. He remembered standing outside in the dark, watching a very large, boiling black cloud rolling in quickly above him. 

"I heard something that sounded like a helicopter," he told me, “and I thought it was coming from the cloud. And just as the cloud got almost directly over me, I looked up to watch what I thought would be a helicopter come out of the cloud. But instead of a helicopter, a late model white pickup came flying out of a 'portal' which opened up in the cloud. The truck flew downward steadily, still sounding like a 'copter. I don't remember it landing." 

"The next thing I remember was seeing copies of myself trailing off into the distance, like I was seeing myself move  through time, with images being left in place instead of dissipating." It was an unnerving memory, but one for which he could find no rational explanation. And the final part of the dream was just as puzzling. Casey felt himself falling down a narrow tunnel into a vast underground area, and then he was in a saloon, reminiscent of old western settings from movies and television. All he recalled here was sitting at a table in the saloon with David and a close male friend and wondering if they were going to play poker. It seemed to have nothing to do with the first parts of the dream, yet somehow they were all related. 

The only portion of Casey's dream that we thought might have been triggered by our experiences was the helicopter. After living in the same location for five years with no noticeable helicopter activity, we had begun to see numerous craft flying over our house. They were of every variety—sleek blue and silver models, dark military types, even huge transport craft—and they came in groups or singly at any hour of the day. Once near midnight a helicopter flew so low over the house that all the windows shook with great force. During 1988, the number of helicopters at any one time was never more than three, but later that number increased. Once I counted nine flying over, in three groups of three different models, about an hour to two hours apart. 

Sandy, James's mother, also began to have helicopters over their house frequently, and when I watched one fly directly above us and then circle around for a second sweep, I tried to find out where they were coming from. Contacting the local airport, I was told that there was no record of these craft in the area, and that the only military helicopter flights were twice a year when the National Guard carried out exercises far to the north of us. 

It would have been wonderful to have some intelligent,  insightful, open-minded and uninvolved person with whom to discuss our situation, but there was no one. On impulse, however, and also from a sense of desperation, I phoned Dr. Riley, my former therapist, again and asked if he would meet me informally, over a cup of coffee. He was the one I'd called back in May, when Casey first remembered the face of the Old One and the huge spacecraft, and his response had been immediately negative. "Whatever it is," he'd told me, "it isn't flying saucers and little green men," and I was in too much shock to question his declaration. 

But now, armed with much more information and more personal experience, I wanted a chance to find out exactly why he was so sure there was nothing extraterrestrial about the phenomenon. There was a remote chance, I told myself, that the therapist knew of some syndrome, mental aberration or condition, that produced hallucinations of alien beings. Yet I had read two different articles that reported, upon checking with mental health institutes, no relationship between mental imbalance and abduction scenarios. Still, if the therapist had any new information, it was worth my while to find out. 

We met a few days later, and I wasted no time in questioning him about that negative response. Why, I asked, was he so sure? "Do you remember when I called you about my husband?" I asked, and he nodded. "Why did you tell me that you were certain Casey's memories weren't real? How could you be so sure? You didn't even talk to him. Have you read studies on this subject, or anything? What do you know that makes you certain?" 

"Oh, I don't have any evidence," he admitted, smiling. "It's just my own personal bias. I don't believe in flying saucers." I was shocked that he would have offered mere  opinion and then try to pass it off as fact without any logical basis. I mentioned the strange marks that we had found on our bodies, and Dr. Riley reached across the table to take my hand momentarily. 

"A piece of advice," he said, shaking his head. "Don't go around telling people that you have marks on your body." 

"Why?" I asked. "The marks are there, and we don't know where they come from." 

"I wouldn't mention them, though," he replied. "If you do, people will know that you've been abusing yourselves." 

And then he went on to explain that the only reason Casey thought he'd been abducted was obviously because he'd been abused as a child! When I told him that Casey had certainly not been abused, Dr. Riley said that there are many forms of abuse. "He might have fallen down one time and hurt his knee, and then when he went running to his parents for comfort, they might have ignored it. That would be enough to traumatize a child," the therapist said, but I couldn't see the logic in such a statement. If all children experience such abuse, as the therapist implied, then why didn't everyone feel as if they'd been abducted? 

"So you think these memories stem from some mental problem?" I asked, remembering what I'd read about the lack of such symptoms among the mentally ill, “Do people in institutions also have these experiences?" 

The therapist admitted that there was no clinical evidence to connect the two things, but he still thought the real answer could be explained in purely psychological terms. So I challenged him to investigate the reports of abductions, as a mental health professional, but he refused.  

"No serious professional would touch this subject," he said. "They'd be afraid of the ridicule." 

So I was left with a psychologist—and, apparently, the entire field of psychology—who would have nothing to do with what was declared to be a psychological situation. It seemed they began with the assumption that reported abduction experiences were simply not real. It didn't matter that they couldn't find anything psychologically wrong with us. Once again I realized that all we really had were each other. 

(An interesting note: when I was preparing this story for publication, I contacted the therapist again and asked for permission to use his real name in my account. Reviewing what he had told me in both of our conversations, the therapist refused to let me name him. "It's awfully embarrassing, professionally embarrassing, for anyone to know I said those things," he told me. "I wouldn't have responded to you that way now, believe me. So please don't use my real name. Just refer to me as 'the stupid therapist' or give me a pseudonym.") 

CHAPTER 7 

December 1988 

The approaching Christmas holidays and the end of 1988 kept us all busy, and, as if respecting our need for diversion, the strange episodes temporarily left us alone. We still found punctures and other unexplained marks on our bodies, though. But without any remembered event connected to them, we were able to put the phenomenon out of our minds and enjoy visits with our family and friends. 

In mid-December I received a phone call from my sister in-law, Tanya (pseudonym), which brought us right back to dealing with ET intrusions. My brother, Paul (pseudonym), and his family had been in California for over ten years, and during that time we had little contact with them at all. In fact, it had been over two years since I'd spoken with any of them, so when I picked up the phone and heard Tanya on the other end, I was extremely surprised. And what she had to say was even more surprising. She had overheard a phone conversation between Paul and my father in which Dad had mentioned our claims of UFO sightings and alien abductions. 

Tanya wanted to tell me that she and Paul were involved in the very same situation, that they had been abducted more than once in the past years, and that the ETs were active in their lives again now. It was because of the strange events they had experienced that they had decided to stay away from the rest of the family, since they feared their stories wouldn't be believed. I could hear the relief in her voice as we talked, and for once I felt that something positive was coming from these events. My family is important to me, and I was grateful that we were once again in touch with each other, no matter what the motivation. 

January 1989 

After the holidays passed without any overt activity, Casey and I hoped that the phenomenon was diminishing, at least in our lives, although we knew from other friends that there was still quite a lot of strangeness continuing with many of them. We also still wanted to meet with Barbara again and go through more hypnotic regression, hopeful of discovering what had happened to us in the past few months and the source of the many scratches and punctures we'd received. But as there was no immediate opportunity for us to visit with her, we decided once again to attempt a regression ourselves, for the first time since last May. We were both much more familiar with the process now and trusted ourselves to carry it through competently. 

The foremost mystery we were intent on investigating was that of the missing thirty minutes on November 5. So in the first week of January I put Casey into a hypnotic trance and moved him back to that date for a look at the events of that night. The session was not so successful as before, however, and Casey had a very hard time relaxing and going deeply into trance. What he did recall was unsettling, enough to let us know that an intrusion had indeed occurred, but not enough to give us any thorough explanation. 

The first thing he remembered was seeing a bright light shining through a diagonal vent or slash in the dark room, as if a rip had been made through the air itself. He also saw that he was lying face up on the bed, because he could see his feet pushing up the covers. The next specific thing he recalled was a light near the foot of the bed and a clawed, webbed hand reaching out to grab his ankle. At that point, Casey's courage weakened, and I was unable to help him continue looking at the event. His last memory was very unclear: a glimpse of some coppery metallic surface whose form he was unable to perceive. Neither of us felt that the regression had been very successful, for obviously much was still missing from his recall, and we decided that a trip to visit Barbara would be our first priority. 

After more than a month without overt activity, we were both lulled into a sense of security and relief, but it didn't last long. On the morning of Friday, January 13, Casey woke up covered with long scratches on his back, very similar to the marks David had found back in November. There was also a large triangular patch of bright red rash covering Casey's left side, and as usual he had no memory of anything occurring during the night. 

On Saturday, when David and Megan stopped by, I asked if they had experienced any strangeness in the past couple of days. David just grinned in confusion and glanced over quickly at Megan. 

"Yeah!" she exclaimed, staring back at him. "David's been acting really strange. For the past two nights, he's gotten out of bed and gone out of the room, and he won't tell me where he went." 

Knowing how frightened Megan had been at the farm  since all the ET activity had begun, I asked her why she didn't follow after him. 

"I couldn't move,'' she said."I tried to ask him where he was going, but I was too tired. I couldn't even talk, or move." 

"How long was he gone, then?" I asked. 

"I don't really know," she told me. "I just fell back asleep when he left." 

This in itself was unusual, because Megan's uneasiness at being alone in the spooky old farmhouse had gotten worse with the advent of the strange experiences, and she never let David out of her sight. It was also hard to believe that he could have spent any time out of bed without his clothes on at that time of year. The farmhouse was frigid in the winter, with no insulation and only small gas heaters that warmed a very limited area. 

"So, what were you doing?" I asked, turning to David. "Where on earth were you going in the middle of the night?" 

"I don't know," he told me. "I don't remember getting up at all." And he playfully accused Megan of making up the whole thing, which she vehemently denied. So we were left with two new mysteries: David's disappearances and the scratches on Casey's back. 

When I told Roger, the local researcher, about these events, he suggested that we might try to get some evidence of nocturnal visits by setting up a sound-activated recorder in our bedroom. I doubted that whatever or whoever had been bothering us would let such evidence be acquired, but we had nothing to lose by trying it. So we began putting a small recorder on the bureau opposite our bed and turning it on when we retired each night. 

For the first two nights, the tape recorded only the usual sounds we could expect: creaks in the house as it settled, an  occasional cough, and the small noises I made when I'd get up to go to the bathroom. But on the third night, something much more noisy was recorded. When I played it back the next morning, I couldn't imagine what the sounds were. After the noises of our coughing, turning out the lights, and saying good night, there was a series of eighty-five almost identical sounds, the likes of which I had never heard before. The best description I can give is the noise a six foot-tall can of hair spray might make: short, breathy aspirations that were more mechanical-sounding than organic. 

For the next week, we recorded every conceivable sound in our house, trying to duplicate the eighty-five noises, but to no avail. We recorded the central heating unit turning on, our own coughs, even Casey's occasional snores, but nothing reproduced the original sounds. Finally, we hired a sound-studio technician to analyze the tape and see if he could identify the noises, but after more than an hour of working with the tape, he was as mystified as we were. And although we kept the recorder going nightly for a while longer, the sounds never came back. 

The rest of January was uneventful, but in the first week of February we found yet more scratches and punctures. By mid-month we made plans to visit Barbara for a weekend, and while we were in Tulsa, Casey and I both went through another regression. Barbara always recorded these sessions, but the machine didn't work properly during Casey's regression, so there is no transcript of the entire session. Barbara and Casey remembered most of what transpired, however, when she took him back to the night of January 12 and the scratches on his back. 

Casey recalled being wakened as several aliens were trying to turn him over, facedown, in our bed. When he saw them, he tried to resist their manipulations, but they proceeded to turn him over, pulling hard at his side and back in the process. The result was the pattern of claw marks we'd found the next morning, for these aliens, unlike the small Grays, were the reptilian type, with webbed, clawed hands and vertically slit eyes. 

He also remembered that they examined his back with an instrument that left no marks. He described it as a small bar with two "light-pen" points on the curved end, and he said the alien held it to the base of his spine. Casey's impression was that the instrument in some way was able to check on his entire biological system, although he had no real way of knowing exactly what was being done to him. 

This was all he recalled, and it made a sketchy story at best. But that was typical of most people's experiences under regression, we knew, finding gaps in the chain of events that even hypnosis couldn't fill. Casey admitted later that the session was a difficult one for him this time. He wanted to know what had happened, of course, but at the same time he was afraid to look at it too closely. 

In my regression, I had the same mixed feelings when Barbara took me back to Halloween night, in hopes of discovering the cause of the three punctures in my jugular vein. Once I was finally relaxed enough to let myself focus in the trance state, however, the memories began to return, and I saw myself in bed. 

"I'm feeling heavy, my head, neck, real heavy," I said. "Feel strange across my face, like gravity is pushing on it. I feel real tingly, my hands, my arms, and my ears ring. Feels like my arm's hurting, a little, in my vein, had a real sharp pain, left arm. It's still hurting a little bit. My eyes close. I'm tingling all over now." 

"Describe your surroundings," Barbara instructed. 

"The bed's flat open and there's not any cover, and I can  see me. I don't want . . . it's making my heart beat. It's like I'm the only thing on the bed." 

"Look around," Barbara said. "Are you alone in the room? Is anyone else there?" 

"There's, umm, I think"—I hesitated—"it looks like people around the bed. There's heads around the bed: one, two, three, four, maybe four. There's one by my head, there's one at the side of the foot of the bed. There's one at the other corner, one behind me on the other side. I just see little round heads, and it's dark." 

“What is happening, Karla?'' Barbara asked, moving me forward. 

"It's like they have got all the covers off me," I replied. "I'm still on my side. Barbara, I don't even know if I want to see this. It makes me shake. I'm really not moving. My legs and body are uncovered. There's one about six inches from my head, and there's another one. I don't see them moving. Nothing is moving right now, but I feel like it's looking at me. My eyes are closed, my arm's not hurting now." 

"Where is Casey?" Barbara asked. "Isn't he there with you?" 

"Casey isn't here," I told her. "I'm in bed by myself." 

"How is your body positioned on the bed?" 

"My legs are straightened out now. I'm on my back. I don't know how I got there, I didn't see me move. I'm afraid they are going to touch me. The one on the left is holding my left arm. He's touching, I'm not moving, I'm not even awake. I just see his arm, and the top of his head, and his arm's out touching mine. 

“My arms and legs are a little apart now, I can't open my eyes. I don't know what the bottom ones are doing, but my legs are spread apart about a foot and a half. My arms are spread out. I think I'm afraid to see. 

"There's a light flash, overhead, above my body on the bed. Maybe they have rolled me over. I'm real limp, they have to move me. I can start to see the other one by my head, and my arm hurts. I don't see him doing anything to it. Now it's like afterwards, while before it was burning, a little burning spot. Now it's just sort of tender." 

"Move forward to the next thing you can recall," Barbara said. 

"Oh, Barbara," I replied, uneasy, "I feel like they are standing up right there. I'm in the bed, in the center, and they are moving, but they don't make any noise. I'm on my back, and I feel them moving right here." My eyes grew wet. "I don't know if this is all real, but it's making me cry. I'm trying not to, but it does make me cry. I'm afraid they are going to touch me again." 

Barbara paused to reassure me that everything was all right, that I had survived the experience and could look at it now without fear. 

"There's a hand right here," I continued. "I don't want to look at them. I don't want to see their faces. I see they have big, round heads. I don't want to look. These things touch me, but I'm not going to feel it. I don't feel it, it doesn't hurt. I can see something reach out to me on this side," I pointed left, "by my head. There's a sensation on my neck, but it doesn't hurt. It feels like a cold burn, something so cold it feels like it's burning. It's like it's frozen, like feeling skin that's asleep." "How is this happening?" 

Barbara pressed. "Tell me exactly what you see." 

"Something is touching it real lightly," I explained. "I don't know if it's a thing or a hand. It's very still, and the one on the left has something in his hand that's reaching out. It's a stiff arm straight out, not bent like ours, and there's a point touching my neck. It's just resting there very lightly.

"Can you describe the thing itself?" 

"I can see it's in his hand, almost covered by the hand," I said. "It may be round. It's smaller than a saucer, the hand's not real big, and just a little bit is showing on either side of the palm. It's held stiff over that spot. The others aren't moving." 

"How long does this take?" Barbara wondered. 

"I can't tell how long it's there. I did feel a frozen burn, but I'm not feeling anything now. I'm just looking at the bed, and I see all the covers are down at the foot of the bed. Now I'm no longer in the middle of the bed, I'm closer to the right side, because the one on the left has to reach across. They all look bald. 

“I feel pressure on my neck, and it does hurt a little bit. And I don't feel afraid, and I keep my eyes closed. And it feels real tingling still and real tired. I just don't want to look at them. I can't move myself, so it's just like I surrender. I've just given it up, and now I'm ready to go to sleep. It's okay, it doesn't hurt, he took it all away." 

"Did anything else happen?" Barbara asked. "Was anything else done?" 

“There may have been something running over the top of my body without touching it," I remembered, "over both legs, over my belly. It's like something goes above this leg and goes above that leg and up over my belly, but I don't feel it going any higher. Checking, or scanning. They're still holding still while this thing moves over me. They seem like robots, they seem so stiff I hardly see any movement, and I don't hear any sound. That may be because I'm so out of it." 

"What do these beings look like?" Barbara probed. "Describe them to me." 

"They look just the same as each other," I answered. "My bed is tall, and the heads of them about a foot taller,  and they are real close to me, maybe four feet tall. They look a darkish gray in this light. The arms sticking out seem a light color, probably wearing something on them. They might be wearing a covering. They look like ghosts, they look so hollow, they don't have any real feelings. That's why they are so scary, they just look dead, but they're not. They don't even look mean. They're really hardly there. I don't know where they came from. I don't even feel surprised, I don't even feel curious. I don't feel anything like that. I just feel real sedated." 

So sedated, in fact, that I found it too hard to continue and asked Barbara to end the session. I wasn't satisfied that I had recalled everything that had happened on Halloween night, but what I had seen was more than enough to deal with. This was the first time I had remembered being face to face with such beings, and the fear I experienced under hypnosis was heavy and real. It had been one thing to see flashing colored lights on a UFO up in the sky, but it was much more disturbing to recall how the gray alien beside my bed reached out his stiff arm and touched my neck. 

At least, however, this time both Casey and I remembered the instruments used by the aliens, which we hadn't seen in previous regressions. Up to this time we just had no idea what sort of devices were being used on our bodies, except for the teardrop-shaped metallic instrument Casey had recalled from his 1947 abduction. 

The regression sessions were very draining, on Barbara as well as us, so we left off further attempts until our next visit and returned home. Before we left, however, plans were made for Barbara to visit us in March, to attend a talk given by Budd Hopkins in Dallas. At that time we planned to undergo more hypnosis, and both Casey and I felt that we were really beginning to discover at least part of what was  happening to us. We were also anxious for Barbara to work with David and Megan, and we even hoped that James would agree to hypnosis, although he found it difficult to deal with his frightening experiences. 

March 1989 

In the week before Barbara's arrival, there was one more unsettling incident. One Monday morning while changing the bedclothes, I found several splotches and smears of blood. A smallish smear was on my pillowcase, and there was blood on my right thigh, although I couldn't find a puncture or cut. But most of the blood was on Casey's side of the bed. There the spots ranged from tiny flicks of blood, some smeared and some not, to large areas about the size of a fingerprint. We looked all over Casey's body, trying to find an injury to account for the blood, but we found nothing. 

And then, a few days before Barbara was scheduled to come, James and David came over, telling us about a series of nightmares James had been having. They started on Saturday night and recurred on Sunday. During both nights, James said he woke repeatedly, sometimes after only half an hour's sleep, frightened by the same nightmare. He saw himself spread out on a table with tubes coming out of his arms and body. A large screen like mirror was above him, and in it he could see what looked like a thick plastic blue washer in the middle of his forehead, with a hole in the center of it. Although he felt no pain and saw no beings in the dreams, they left him terrified and afraid to sleep. It was clear that he couldn't simply dismiss them as normal dreams, or he wouldn't have been so affected. 

On the third night, Monday, the nightmares were different. This time he awoke again and again, from recurrent dreams of some member of his family or of his friends, including David, dying a violent death. One dream showed his father dying of a heart attack, another showed his mother and sister falling from a tall building, and he saw David crushed in a car wreck. These dreams, James said, were much more frightening than the first two nights, and he begged us not to tell his parents. 

We agreed reluctantly, not liking to keep secrets from such good friends. It would be especially difficult, we thought, since James's parents were planning to attend the Hopkins talk with us. They were anxious to learn anything they could about these experiences since their son was being so often affected, and a second motive was to look for the woman we'd seen the previous summer, the one who looked like the interdimensional woman who'd visited James repeatedly at the farm. James hadn't had any visits from her since September, but we still hoped to find the woman and question her about any connection she had to James. 

By the time Barbara arrived, we had planned several sessions of hypnosis with David, Megan, James, and Fred, besides hoping to work with her again ourselves. On the way home from the airport, we caught up with the latest findings from her work with people in the Tulsa area, including new abduction cases and several reports of people being taken to some sort of underground facility. Over and over, Barbara said, she was getting reports of huge vats in these underground areas, vats filled with parts of human bodies, and there were also repeated experiences where people found themselves taken by aliens into bathroom or stall areas and experiencing exams and manipulations of their sexual organs. Such accounts sounded familiar now, after having heard John Lear's talk about the government-alien underground bases, but word of his revelations was by no means readily available to the general  public. Yet somehow, without any knowledge of Lear's tales, many people were telling the same, or similar, stories. 

But what it all meant, we really had no idea. The only thing Barbara could be sure of was that more and more people were undergoing or remembering abductions, and that many of their reports confirmed each other. She had been dealing with cases in which children as young as two years old were reporting strange beings in their bedrooms, as well as older men and women, most of whom had previously had no interest at all in UFOs or "little green men." Listening to Barbara's accounts, we felt very sympathetic, because we too had been entirely uninterested in UFOs before our own experiences forced us into this fringe reality. 

And it made us feel worse, somehow, knowing that so many people were involved. So long as we thought the phenomenon was a limited one, we could still tell ourselves that it might all be some sort of hallucination or psychosis, involving only a few people. The idea that such experiences were widespread, and apparently on the increase, sank our spirits. What on earth, we wondered, was really happening? From my own research, I had learned of hundreds of abductions, but the numbers were now well into the thousands. Barbara was in contact with researchers on the East and West coasts, and they too were finding more and more cases turning up, begging for help in trying to understand their strange and frightening experiences. All we could do for the time being, however, was to concentrate on the events involving our immediate family and circle of friends, and so, less than two hours after Barbara's arrival in our home, she was conducting her first regression. 

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David was the first to undergo regression. He had been through several disturbing episodes that puzzled him.....72s

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