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
80
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 1 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
81
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
82
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
83
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-
84
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
85
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
86
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
87
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.
88
"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. "\ 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
89
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
90
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.
91
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
92
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 fUFOs, 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
93
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. "1 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
94
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
95
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."
96
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.
97