"When I was seven or eight years old," Beth related, "my father gave us permission, my sister and me, to go outside and play with the other children, who were playing hide-and-seek. It was close to six in the evening. I remember that I went to hide between some bushes, and then I heard a sound, somebody else. And as I turned, I saw what I thought at that moment was one of the other kids.
"The next thing I know," she continued, "it was dark, and I was very surprised. When I got home, my father was very mad at me and my mother was very upset. My father told me that they had been calling me and looking for me for hours. But I couldn't understand it," she said. "The place where I was hiding was less than a hundred feet from the front of the house. I was hiding there, and it was daylight, and then the next thing I know it was dark-and I was scared.
"Recently I had another memory about that," she added. "That kid I thought was there, he was an alien, one of the Grays. He took me to a ship, but I don't remember what happened after that."
As I listened to Beth's account of her childhood missing-time episode, I was reminded of a similar event in my husband's past. At age twelve, not much
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older than Beth had been, Casey and his best friend were playing in a field one day, when several strange children approached them and asked if they wanted to "come see the UFO" that had landed on the other side of the hill. Casey's next conscious memory was of coming back home and complaining to his mother that his nose was very sore and he had a headache.
As did Beth, Casey had a daytime missing-time episode initiated after contact with unknown "children." Beth has never explored this memory hypnotically, but when Casey used regressive hypnosis to delve into the missing time, he retrieved memories of an onboard abduction involving a nasal implant.
This was not the only similarity between Beth's experiences and Casey's. A divorced mother with grown children, Beth had first contacted us, in fact, because another of her encounter memories, involving apparently military personnel, contained very striking and disturbing parallels to an incident described in INTO THE FRINGE.
A mutual acquaintance helped arrange a phone conversation for us, and we got acquainted. Beth was born in 1942 in Puerto Rico and has lived there most of her life, although her heritage also includes ancestors from Spain and Vermont. Beth was a teacher before starting her family, but in recent years she had vision problems which have kept her from working. Currently, she divides her time between Puerto Rico and Florida.
Beth and I discussed her memories of the military encounter at length. But I was also interested to hear about other her other experiences, especially since she lived in Puerto Rico. A great deal of UFO and alien
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activity has been reported in the past several years, much of it in the area where Beth lived but all over the island as well. In fact, of all the U. S. territory, there may well have been more recent UFO activity in Puerto Rico than anywhere else.
To judge from Beth's account, it has probably been going on for quite a while. In addition to the early missing-time event, she has conscious memories of many other strange experiences from childhood, well back into the 1950s. Her first UFO sighting, for example, occurred only a year or two after the hide-and-seek episode. Beth was walking to the store in the late afternoon, when she looked up and saw a "huge ball of fire" tearing downward through the sky. It disappeared behind a nearby mountain, and Beth assumed that she'd just witnessed a plane crash, although she heard no sound.
She screamed and ran back across the road into the house where excitedly she told her father what she had seen. Since he worked for the U. S. Navy at that time, her father told her he would inquire around the military base and find out what exactly had happened. But a few days later, when Beth brought up the subject again, her father told her that she must never tell anyone about what she had seen or even mention it again. No explanation was given, only a warning, and that made Beth believe some sort of mystery must have been involved.
She was used to mysterious things, even at that young age. "Even before that," she said, "as far back as I can remember, I was aware-and so was my family-that strange things were happening to me, most of them at night. It made me afraid to go to sleep, afraid that someone was going to come for me."
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Unexplained noises often broke the silence of the night. Once, for example, Beth was startled awake by a "buzz or whooshing sound" in the room where she was sleeping alone. Frightened, she ran into her sister's room. "They're looking for me," was all she remembered saying, because at that moment her sister suddenly fell into a deep sleep and Beth's body became paralyzed. Then she, too, lost consciousness.
Another anomalous event took place when she ten years old. Beth had been outside for a while and had stopped to eat a piece of fruit. She consciously remembered standing still, taking a bite, and then looking down at a large, bleeding gash in her leg. "I didn't know what to think," Beth said. "How could my leg be cut and bleeding? I had not even moved from that spot." Heedless of the time as children often are, she had no idea if any was missing.
She also didn't know what to think of the shadowy figures that sometimes appeared in the house, although she tended to believe they might be ghosts. On one occasion, though, the figure seemed very real. Beth woke up during the night and found a humanoid figure sitting on her bed. He was wearing a tight white outfit, and he proceeded to talk to her. She couldn't remember, however, any of the things he said, and she couldn't remember his face. Beth told her mother about some of these strange occurrences, and her mother replied that she had sometimes heard Beth in her room at night, apparently talking to someone. But when she tried to get up and check on the girl, her mother said, she was paralyzed.
A little later, at age fourteen, Beth had a second UFO sighting. As she sat studying on the stairs by a window, she glanced out and saw an object through
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the trees. It stopped for a moment and hovered before shooting off vertically out of sight. Beth learned later that one of their neighbors had also spotted the object.
Even when she moved away from that house, staying for a while after her father's death in a boardinghouse, the unexplained occurrences followed her. One of her roommates there woke her up once, screaming, saying that she'd just seen a weird creature standing beside Beth's bed. The being apparently noticed the roommate looking at it, because it started moving toward her, and that was when she screamed. Her description of the creature matches today's well-known Gray entity.
The odd events seemed to subside as Beth grew to adulthood. She went to college and then began working as a teacher. Nothing notable happened until she was married and pregnant with her second child.
"I remember that I was so afraid that I wasn't pregnant," Beth said, "that it was a tumor, because it [the fetus] was not moving. I told my doctor frequently that it couldn't be a child, that he was mistaken, but it was a big joke to him.
"When I was almost six months into the pregnancy, I was very worried because the baby wasn't moving. One night I remember that I suddenly felt so sleepy that I got in bed, and I had a dream. I saw myself on a doctor's table. A strange doctor put a needle into my navel. When he did this, I felt something like an electric shock, and the baby started moving. I also felt that something was put up my nose. And then I woke up," she concluded. "And when I awoke, I was having a very heavy nosebleed and the baby was moving."
Beth carried the baby to term and it was born
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healthy. But a subsequent pregnancy a few years later didn't survive. Beth apparently miscarried one night and isn't sure if she saw any fetal tissue. This occurred, it should be noted, on a night when one of the neighbors reported seeing an unexplained light over Beth's home.
Whatever she may have thought about these numerous, often nebulous events through the years, whoever she might have thought was behind them, in the summer of 1978 an event occurred that left no doubt of its source. On the night of July 17, Beth went to bed around 9 p.m., where she read for an hour and then turned off the bedside lamp planning to go to sleep. In the dark, a light caught her attention through the window, where she saw a glowing object. Concerned, Beth woke up her husband and had him check the area. He came back to bed having found nothing unusual, and they turned out the lamp again to sleep. But the light returned to the yard and shone in through the window. Beth looked up at the light, and the next moment she was aware of being somewhere very different. She was in an unfamiliar round room, and she wasn't alone.
Her husband lay near her, apparently asleep, as was her youngest child nestled in her lap. In a panic, she suddenly thought, Where are my other children? A voice from an unseen source then replied, Don't be afraid, they are here.
Three other people whom Beth didn't know were also unconscious in the room. She saw a young man and woman, probably in their twenties, and an older man who looked to Beth like an "ex-military" sort.
The whole situation was so unexpected that Beth was too bewildered to react logically, perhaps. Or
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perhaps, as in other reports, her responses were "directed" for some purpose. At any rate, when she noticed the older man coming to consciousness just as she was regaining her own awareness, Beth inexplicably asked, "What time is it?"
Given the total strangeness of their situation, such a question appears ludicrous, but instead of reacting with surprise or panic, the man simply checked his watch and replied, 'Ten after twelve."
Almost two hours had passed since she saw the light for the second time, although to her it seemed as if it had only been a few moments. Looking around, she saw strange, computer-like equipment in the room. And then she noticed some other beings, clearly not human, there with her. The two entities were gray and very skinny, dressed in metallic silver suits.
Beth saw that her husband was starting to come around then. But her attention was caught by a startling change in the metal wall in front of her, as it seemed to transform into glass, like a window. Looking out, she recognized the location as a rural area near some property she owned.
A door opened just then, and a very tall man walked in. He was pale, with dark, short hair that formed a widow's peak in the center of his forehead. His eyes were larger than usual, and his jaw was very square. The man wore the same tight silver outfit as the Grays, but he also had on gloves and a wide belt. In his hands was a small orb that looked to be made of glass, within which many lights were brightly blinking. As the tall man stared at Beth and her family, she got the impression that he was perhaps a scientist, and she felt he was the one "in command."
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His gaze made her feel like a specimen or a "guinea
Pig-"
"My husband was starting to wake up," Beth said,
"and this man put him back to sleep, by holding the glass ball over his head. He did it to me, too, and then I was paralyzed."
Beth was next aware of being back in her bed, with a terrible headache, and then she fell quickly to sleep. Upon waking, she discovered that the night's events had left her in a bad physical state. Besides the pounding headache, she also suffered aches throughout her body, especially in her back, and she was dizzy. Beth was also very nauseated, vomiting repeatedly, as well as plagued with diarrhea. She had difficulty seeing because her eyes were badly swollen and irritated, a condition that bothered her for a long time after this, so much so that she had to wear sunglasses.
A terrible rash persisted for two months, and her hair began to fall out in excessive quantities. Most disturbing of all, however, were the cataracts that began forming in her eyes. Nine months after the abduction, Beth had to undergo cataract-removal surgery, and it was during preparatory exams that the doctor found physical scarring from what he insisted was previous eye surgery. But Beth had never had an operation, at least not by human hands.
Clearly there had been some thing or some activity in that strange environment that caused her numerous afflictions, but Beth could only recall the brief scenario in the round room. She wasn't sure about the tall, dark-haired man, but she was certain that the gray beings were not human.
Not long after this, Beth once again saw one of the
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strange creatures. She had been asleep, but the sound of someone calling her name woke her up. She got up and looked out the window, where one of the little beings was looking back at her. Beth remembered that he was holding a metal stick of some sort, but the next instant she found herself back in bed, and the little creature was nowhere to be seen.
UFOs also continued to appear. On Father's Day in 1980, the entire family witnessed one of these events. Out in the yard, two of the children saw it first and called to the others to come look. They arrived in time to see a cloudy-looking object hovering silently about ten feet from the ground with what seemed to be "bubbles" inside, before it disappeared.
Less than a year later, Beth once again had a bedroom visitation by unknown beings. As she prepared to go to bed, she began to feel as if someone were watching her. Turning around, she saw a tall, slender man standing by her bed, and she became very frightened. Beth tried to scream, but no sound came out, so she began to pray silently for help. And then she found that she was moving, going forward toward the man's outstretched hand. Unable to stop, she floated after him toward the window and knew she was about to be taken through it. This panicked her even more, and she feared she would be "ground up like hamburger" by the process.
The actual moment of passing through the window, however, left no impression on her when it happened, and she was next aware of being in a dark place, lying down, surrounded by "a feeling of great speed." Blackness overtook her, and the next apparent moment she was back in bed in the guest room, still unable to move. She could scream,
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however, which she did, bringing her husband running. But the strange man, of course, had disappeared.
Beth wasn't the only one in her family to witness the alien beings. In 1986, she and her son saw a small white entity. Beth was in bed when she was surprised to hear the sound of water running somewhere. As she got up to check for the source, her son called for her to come outside with him.
"Mommy, look there!" he shouted, and Beth looked, but without her glasses all she could see was an indistinct white object out in the yard. Her son, however, had better vision, and he described seeing a small being by the garage, holding a garden hose through which water was running. As the son watched, he told her, the little being stopped and "floated away."
Later, in 1987, Beth's daughter said that three of the Grays had come during the night and taken her out to an area near the house, into a UFO. She said they talked together in a friendly manner and that one of the aliens even laughed. She also reported the presence of a strange man, who told her he was going to "fix" her heart as he inserted a large needle into her chest. Beth said this occurred at a time when her daughter was awaiting heart surgery.
It was also at this time that Beth recalled having a brief but vivid dream that greatly disturbed her. In this dream, she was on a table, location unknown, with three men standing around her. The terrifying part of the scenario was the single sentence she heard spoken by one of the men: "She is expendable, and we can always use a terminator."
The experience was so unlike the previous
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encounters she had remembered that Beth insisted it was just a dream, but the idea and the threat of a "terminator," whatever it might be, haunted her. So did the identity of the men.
Another situation arose during this time that caused her a great deal of concern, even though it seemed to have nothing to do with UFOs or aliens. Several different mornings, when Beth woke up and went into the kitchen for coffee, she found the water jug, normally kept in the refrigerator, and four glasses containing water sitting out on the counter.
The first time this occurred, Beth was annoyed by the inconsiderate act, and she questioned her son and daughter about it. Both of them denied leaving out the water jug or even being in the kitchen after bedtime. The next time she found the dirty glasses and the jug, Beth became angry and found it hard to believe her children's protestations of innocence in the matter.
What were they doing, she wondered, getting up in the middle of the night and inviting in people, visiting with them in secret? Why was it done in secret? Why were they denying doing it? The questions bothered her greatly, yet the children were adamant that they had nothing to do with the intermittent discoveries of the jug and glasses left on the counter by undiscovered persons during the night.
Finally Beth came to believe them, but that made her even more afraid, for it pointed to a scenario of four strangers with free access to her home and family. Yet no one in the family saw any strangers there, and none of the household goods had been stolen. But the scenario of strangers breaking in
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merely for a sip of water just didn't make any sense. And Beth couldn't believe the visitors were aliens, not if all they seemed to do was pour themselves a drink, leave a mess on the kitchen counter, and then disappear.
Beth worried about this mysterious situation for a long time, even after the visits stopped. And she never caught anyone in the act of entertaining guests or getting out the water jug, which would have explained the whole affair. Much later, however, Beth did have a flashback memory concerning this situation. In a very upsetting scenario, she saw herself opening the door and letting a group of people into the house. She even saw herself pouring the water. Beth didn't recognize any of the people, and the flashback memory didn't show her why she let them in or what they did there after she poured their drinks. She didn't know if the flashback reflected a real event or if it came from her imagination. It certainly felt real, but it seemed so unlikely that Beth just couldn't accept it.
In September 1987, however, an indisputably real event occurred. Another UFO appeared and was witnessed by three members of the family.
"Mommy, there's a UFO up there!" Beth heard her daughter shout on night around 11 p.m. She got up and looked out to see a "huge, beautiful UFO" about half a mile from the house. Her son also saw it briefly.
This sighting seemed no different than previous ones, but it was followed the next day by the onset of activity that would continue for years: overflights of unidentified helicopters. On that first day, an AW AC also flew over, in addition to the black copters, and the craft operated at such low altitudes that
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sometimes the windows and the entire house were shaken by their force. They returned a week later, and this time Beth even witnessed a craft that looked like a helicopter but flew noiselessly.
She continued to have frightening nocturnal experiences, usually involving fragmented scenarios and time loss. Once after midnight, for example, Beth went through an event of which she only consciously retained three "snapshot-type" memories. The first part began when she was still quite conscious, as she looked out the window at some red and white lights she'd just noticed in the yard. The second scene is of her out in the yard, watching a craft fly away and crying, "Don't leave me." This was followed instantly by her being conscious again and aware that she was back in her bed.
During these years of fairly active alien involvement in her life, Beth had a number of dreams relating to UFOs, the Grays, and other sorts of entities. Some people may think that it is foolish to look for information in dreams, but a close familiarity with the multi-phenomenal context of the abduction situation shows that this is not so.
In abduction research it is generally acknowledged that many times the memories of an alien encounter, suppressed at the time of the event, will surface in any number of ways. It may happen as a sudden flashback during regular consciousness, or it may emerge during the dream state. It also may be that what the person recalled as a dream was not a memory of some past event but instead reflected an event of that particular night, so lightly suppressed that it remained in the consciousness as an altered-state awareness.
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At any rate, it is wise to pay attention to the dreams of a person with current alien activity. Certain details, often identical, turn up from case to case that differ from the typical archetypal entities and situations found in normal dreams.
This was certainly true for Beth's dreams. In one, for example, she was with an unfamiliar alien being in an environment where the sky was pink, and she recalled seeing an animal similar to a cow. All of these details have been reported by other abductees, sometimes in dreams and sometimes in actual experiences. So has the scenario she recalled from another dream: being given a liquid to drink by the Grays. In a different dream, Beth was made to immerse in "a heavy liquid" and was surprised to find that she could breathe in it. This scenario is so familiar now that it is often included in the list of most frequently reported abduction events.
Beth was concerned and curious about these dreams, as she was about the experiences she recalled consciously. So when the opportunity arose for her to work with a well-known UFO investigator and to undergo regressive hypnosis, Beth decided to do it.
In early 1988 she underwent four separate sessions of hypnosis, all focusing on a single event: the encounter in 1978 when she remembered being in a circular room with her husband, one child, and three strangers. The following account is a composite of the information from those sessions, comprising all the bits and pieces that emerged during the regressions.
Beth recalled that when the light shone in through the window that night, she saw that several aliens were in the room. She was terrified, but one of them calmed her and seemed to be in charge as they led her
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outside to a craft. The next part of her memory is patchy, for she was in a small room in which the atmosphere seemed "foggy," and she couldn't see much more than several strange instruments on a table. One of them looked somewhat like a hair dryer.
Next, two of the aliens took her down a curved hall through a door, into a different area. It looked to Beth like "a surgery room," and she became afraid they were going to kill her there. She cried out in fear when they placed her on a "floating" table. Overhead she saw a screen upon which her insides were displayed. A third alien in this room engaged in some communication with the two escorts. Beth sensed that he seemed more compassionate than the others. This third entity, holding a black box, then moved to a position behind Beth. She could not see what he did, but she felt as if her head was being "opened" and her brain removed, all without any sensation of pain.
After she felt as if she were "all put back together again," a cold liquid was poured over her head. When this procedure was finished, the aliens stood in front of her, and Beth realized that mentally she was different. Her thoughts and reactions to everything were changed, it seemed, and she was filled with new ideas about God and the unity of all life within that supreme source.
This very spiritual moment was followed by a quite physical exam, as the aliens took samples from her skin and hair. A man with a widow's-peak hairline, similar to the one she'd seen before, entered and made a full examination of her body, including a gynecological procedure.
This was the most upsetting part of the experience for Beth, and she was especially frightened when he
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produced two long, thin needles and explained that he had to make some "corrections" involving her kidney and ovary. He inserted the needles in the areas of those organs, and Beth felt a warm vibration. The man said this "alignment" was necessary to put her glands in better condition for what they wanted her to do, "in service to humanity." He talked at length about changing the human "vibration."
Next, a young woman, similar in looks to the man, came into the room and proceeded to clean Beth's body with a sponge and liquid. She escorted Beth back to the first room, where the man continued to explain about certain things. For one, he told her that she and other humans were "chosen" to carry out "jobs" in the future. He also described a coming disaster in the world, and he explained to her about working "as a spiritual being" for the good of humanity. The alien said that his group was here to study, collect genetic material, and avert a destructive process which humans had started.
She then recalled nothing more than being back in the round room with her husband. Beth was very shaken by the recovered memories, and she said she had no idea why she was "chosen," as they had told her.
After the regressions, Beth's subconscious became more accessible, because she started having conscious flashbacks of previously unremembered events. In the summer of 1988, while chatting with a friend, Beth suddenly experienced one of these flashbacks. It began with her in a small flying disc, entering a well-lit underground city. The craft flew on through a tunnel passage into an enormous cavern that contained several buildings. Beth also saw some
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UFOs parked in various locations and aliens working side by side with human military personnel.
The next scenario is of Beth flying somehow through a body of water, into a tunnel, and then emerging from a lake. She also remembered trying to run away, but a big man grabbed her and said, "We brought you here because we want you to see this" as a huge craft rose out of the water. Beth then got back into the little craft and flew up to the huge one. The entire memory was strange and disturbing, and Beth had no idea when such an event might have occurred.
Shortly after the regressions, in August 1988, Beth received a mysterious phone call from a voice that sounded as if it were coming from a vacuum. An unknown man said, "Elizabeth."
"Yes," Beth replied. "Who are you?"
"We know about your experience," the voice said, "and we know about all the problems and doubts you have, but we can give you proof."
"Who are you?" Beth persisted. "Why are you telling me this?"
"Don't be afraid," the strange voice continued. "We can give you proof. We want to talk to you, so next Thursday go to the botanical garden. Be there at ten. We know you. Don't worry about looking for us. Don't tell anybody, and go there alone."
Everything about the call was suspicious-the use of a disguised voice, the disturbing references to Beth's "experiences," the insistence that she come by herself to the meeting-and she felt the call implied a threat. She told the investigator with whom she was working, but she didn't want to go to the garden. Later, however, Beth changed her mind, so she picked up the investigator and went on to the appointed
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place. Although neither of them saw any suspicious humans or any alien presences, Beth said a communication about love, faith, friendship, and service was put into her mind there in the garden.
On the drive back home, Beth felt dizzy and ill. Her body didn't seem to "work right," and her sense of time was very disoriented. According to the clock, she even gained time on the return trip, and for a while thereafter, day and night seemed to come and go very quickly. Even more disconcerting was the clear sensation of her hand passing through solid objects as she reached for them. But the bizarre perceptions eventually passed, and there were no further phone calls.
In 1990, two years after the flashback of the underground facility with humans and aliens working together, more of Beth's memories of this event surface in a dream. She saw herself stepping out of an aircraft with two "military men." They were in a desert-like area, reminiscent of the American southwest, with buildings that "matched" the desert environment. A dark, grassy pool of water was near a large metal building that looked like a warehouse inside. An old-fashioned wooden door opened to reveal a very high-tech metal door, through which Beth was taken into a large room. There she saw four big tables and a number of people. Some of them looked to be military, some were clad like scientists, and others appeared to be "regular" people. A uniformed, red-headed man, one of the two who had brought her to the facility, seemed to be "in charge" of her.
Two more men entered the room, wearing outfits Beth described as similar to astronaut's gear. They
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talked with Beth and the other people, although she didn't remember what was said, and then someone shouted and the group started running toward the back of the large room. The red-haired man grabbed her, and then the flashback ended, but the next morning Beth found bruises in the exact spot where the man had gripped her arm.
The memory felt real, but she had no idea when such a fantastic event might have occurred. Of course, mysterious things had been happening all along and continued to occur-sightings of UFOs and strange lights, episodes of unexplained time gaps, occasional appearances of patterned bruises and punctures on her body-and for most of these events Beth had no explanation or memory, either. It was clear that her conscious recollections about these things were merely the tip of the iceberg, and whatever lay beneath the surface had been deeply suppressed.
Beth might have been able to tell herself that all these events weren't real, that she had imagined them, until an event occurred which proved that the weirdness wasn't only in her mind. In 1992 during a visit to Miami, she and a friend were driving from his house to her daughter's home one night, a trip of thirty to forty-five minutes on the turnpike. They started out at 9:50 p.m. and things proceeded normally at first. But then they both noticed that the others cars, in both directions, had disappeared from view. Beth saw a large, dark, shadowy form looming up ahead of them, which she thought might be a bridge. She reasoned that the bridge's great shadow had somehow blocked their view of the other traffic.
At the very next instant, it seemed, she and her friend felt the car "set back down" on the turnpike.
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The driver lost control of the wheel, fighting to steer the car out of danger, and Beth found herself inexplicably unlocking the seat belt, staring out the window, and shouting, "Where are they? Where are they?"
"How do you feel?" her friend asked.
"Confused," she told him. "My hair is standing up, like static electricity, and there's a bad pressure on my neck and my forehead."
Her friend said he was having the same symptoms, too, and that he didn't know what had just happened. Beth noticed the shadowy shape was gone and the traffic was thick all around them. "The bridge must have blocked our view," she told her friend, explaining about the shadowy form.
But her friend, who drove that turnpike regularly, told her there was no bridge at that location. They continued on the drive, bewildered. When they reached her daughter's home, all the lights were out and the place was silent. Beth looked at her watch and was shocked to see that it read 11:55. She knew they should have arrived no later than 10:45, which meant that over an hour was missing. And this time, she hadn't been alone. The mystery was just as great as ever, though, for neither of them remembered anything other than being in the car.
The pattern was always the same: evidence of an odd event, a fragment of a puzzling scenario, and a blank in the place where the details should have been. Every missing hour was a grievous loss to Beth, a dark emptiness in her life. She had seen aliens, and she had seen humans, some of them military, but she had no clue as to what any of them were really doing. The agenda behind these events has remained
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unknown, and Beth has continued to struggle with her questions and her fears, because the events continue to occur.
In January 1993, for instance, when she was staying in a Miami apartment with her son and daughter, Beth experienced another missing-time episode, and this time she discovered artifactual evidence afterward. The event was preceded by a number of odd but minor occurrences involving each member of the family.
On Wednesday, January 27, they had all gone to bed by midnight. Beth awoke at 4:39 a.m. and went to the bathroom. On her way back to bed, she suddenly felt a compulsion or instruction to go into the kitchen and pull up the window. She became afraid and fought against the urge, but still she walked to the window and opened it without looking out, before returning to her bed.
As she lay down, Beth glanced at the window and thought, I don't want to see. She began to turn over to face the other direction, and at that moment she heard something that sounded like a train, followed by the sound of an electronic door closing. Rolling on over, she glanced at the window again-and saw that it was daylight outside. The bedside clock read 6:45. Two hours had disappeared in the time it took her, consciously, to turn over in the bed.
The realization startled her, and Beth got up in great agitation. She went to the kitchen to make coffee and tried to figure out what had happened, but without success. Then she went to take a shower, and that was when she noticed that both of her knees were coated with a chalky white substance, as if she'd been kneeling in the unknown powder. But she
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couldn't imagine where she might have been, for the substance was unlike anything in her house.
In spite of her agitation, the morning's activities had to go on, so Beth woke up her children to get ready for work. Before he left, her son remarked that something might have happened to him during the night because he'd discovered a puncture on his forearm that he couldn't explain. When they returned in the evening, Beth told them about the events of the previous night: the strange sounds, the missing time, the white substance, and the apparent fact that she must have been out of the house temporarily. But her son, who'd slept at the foot of Beth's bed in a sleeping bag, said he didn't think that was possible.
"She was sitting in bed last night," he told his sister. "She acted afraid, talking to someone. I saw a figure in the doorway," he added, but at the time, he said, he couldn't get up and apparently fell back asleep. Everything about the event remained a mystery.
In this final account from Beth's ongoing experiences, an event occurred which had identical details to a bizarre report 1 had learned about from a close relative. Beth's parallel story confirmed that it wasn't the imaginings of a single mind. Either the aliens were actually doing these things, activities that were not familiar from other abduction accounts, or they were creating the same virtual-reality scenario for at least two unrelated abductees.
Beth was in Miami when the experience occurred, staying with a friend and sleeping on his couch. One night, she awoke and watched in amazement as "a rectangle of light, like a very thin page of paper" came in through the window. She could see an area in
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the center where white, pink, and purple lights were moving about.
The rectangle of light stopped in mid-air, and out of its center emerged a full-grown man, very tall, wearing a tight-fitting suit and a small helmet. The man stood up and leaned over her, bringing his face very close to hers. He was above her, but as she stared into his eyes, she said she felt as if she were falling. That's where the memory ended, and Beth was aware of nothing more until she awoke in the morning, in a dazed, groggy condition that persisted throughout the day.
Enduring repeated episodes of such activity, she has no clearer understanding of these events now than at first. She does, however, have feelings about it all, and certain beliefs to which she clings.
Although she is never certain of who has abducted her or what they have done, Beth feels that at least one of her experiences, the 1978 event, involved a benevolent group of aliens. "They brought me an enormous sense of affinity with God," she said, "with the universe, and with love."
But she also recognizes that other forces seem to be a part of the overall phenomenon. 'There's a battle of good and evil," she said, explaining her feelings about the situation. "Sometimes they interact in our lives, bring pain and confusion, but I hold onto faith that my good ETs will help us."
She feels very strongly that the future catastrophic events the aliens described will indeed come about, and that she and other abductees will play a vital role at that time. But that doesn't keep her from feeling fear and depression. Most certainly she fears the possible military or human intrusions, unable to
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forget the threat that she is "expendable."
To face these fears, she relies on her religious beliefs for strength. "My faith has nurtured me," Beth said. "I'm a part of God. Faith, love, and truth will pull us through the enormity of things that are going to happen. That is the spiritual part."
The physical part, unfortunately, continues to include anxiety, sleep disorder, sudden and total energy losses, a number of health problems, and marks on her body that indicate the aliens are interested in more than just her spirit.
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