Whereas the accounts from Polly and Pat contain several elements that may not be familiar to most students of the abduction phenomenon, Lisa's experiences are much more "typical," in one sense, comprising many recurrent details-although, as these accounts are meant to show, the accepted definition of the "typical" abduction is woefully inadequate.
A thirty-five-year-old wife and mother of two children, Lisa and her husband Neal have lived in southern Alabama for the past fifteen years. Her medium build and thick brown hair reflect her ancestry of Italian and Scotch-Irish. To all outward appearances, Lisa's life seems quite normal. While her husband works at a good job in heavy industry, Lisa takes care of her home and children, involved in the usual activities of a family with teenagers, and she enjoys gardening as well as more strenuous outdoor activity.
I met Lisa and Neal while I was in Florida to give a presentation on abduction research. Several of the local UFO group's members invited me to one of their homes for a more informal and intimate discussion, and when I described a few of the less well-known events some abductees have reported, Lisa suddenly became very interested. We spoke privately, and she told me that some of the things I had just discussed
61
were familiar to her, from her own experiences. Lisa had some conscious memories of encounters with the typical Grays, as well as missing-time episodes, multiple-witnessed UFO sightings, unexplained body marks, telepathic communications from unseen sources, and many dream-memories of ambiguous reality-except in those instances where other evidence pointed to an actual event.
While the details of Lisa's life-long involvement are certainly very typical, the alien intrusions are clearly more intense and frequent than in many such cases. Equally intense are her emotional reactions to these encounters and her need for help in coping with them.
"Meeting other abductees has helped me feel not so isolated," she wrote me shortly after that first meeting, "but my depression is still severe. I can't believe I have them [alien interactions] so frequently. If they're trying to wear me down, they've about succeeded. The flashbacks just don't yet make sense, or maybe they have no intentions to. I'm starting to have military flashbacks, and my phone clicks and goes crazy. The 'Morse code' and humming in my ear has literally driven me up the wall.... I don't want to be used for experiments or reproductions, but how do I stop them? I pray until sometimes I'm prayed out. Why won't God help? By the way, I don't feel special or chosen like they said."
I began my investigation with Lisa by asking about any unusual childhood events. Her responses showed a pattern of activity going back as far as she can remember. "The sounds of things walking through the house," she said, "have been going on since I was small. The shadows [dimly discernible
62
figures] happened more in my later life, from twenty years old on. Like I said, they do it [appear] right in front of me." She also recalled episodes of missing time in childhood. "I would go to the woods-we owned twenty-five acres when I was a child-and come back, and it would be dark."
And the missing-time experiences still occur. "Now, I'll look at the clock and roll over and look at it again, and sometimes it will be an hour later and other times four hours," she explained, "and I could swear it hadn't been but a few minutes. It makes me disoriented after I realize there's been some missing time. It's hard to go on when something robs you of your life, and you have no memory of it.
"The Grays appeared about three or four years ago," she continued. "Before that, I didn't know what was causing these things, but the shadows I've seen forever, seems like."
In 1980, however, Lisa did see something very different from the shadows, in a terrifying event. "A being appeared to me," she recalled, "when I was a couple of weeks pregnant. We had just got into bed and Neal already seemed 'out of it,' and the being appeared on the end of the bed, squatting, telling me mentally the child I was carrying was special and it would be a boy. I almost had a fainting spell. I threw the covers over my head as the being was leaping toward me, I believe, and said, 'In Jesus' name, take it away!' It disappeared, and I fell quickly asleep. It was about three feet tall, dark-skinned, leathery looking. I don't remember anything else." The child, incidentally, did turn out to be a boy. Now in his teens, he has proven to be extraordinarily intelligent, with an IQ that tested above 140 when he was seven.
63
After going through Lisa's early memories, I asked her to fill out a preliminary questionnaire which focused on a number of events most often reported by abductees. A comprehensive comparative chart of the responses to this questionnaire by all eight women is presented on p. 231. Because Lisa's experiences are so very typical, however, many of her responses will be discussed here in some detail, as representative of reports from numerous abductees.
She had already mentioned a couple of these things-the odd phone disturbances, the beeping and humming sounds in her ear-and there were other details, internal and external, which are often part of the alien abduction phenomenon.
For instance, there were sightings of unexplained lights, within the house as well as in the sky. Lisa described "large whitish-yellow lights in the sky that blink out like a light switch and fast-moving streaks of light." She has also witnessed "large and small balls of red or white light bouncing in the house" and blue, orange, and white lights flooding in through the windows from craft outside. A couple of passages from her journal show some of these typical events:
"August 10,1993. When I got ready to go to sleep at 11:30 or so, my cat noticed it, then I did-a small ball of light bouncing through the room. It was just zipping around. I probably saw it for fifteen seconds, then it went out of the room. In the morning my eyes were burning and irritated."
"August 24, 1993. Woke at 1 a.m., felt something was happening, looked around the room, fell back asleep. Woke up at 4:25 a.m. with white lights turning, like strobe lights, outside of my bedroom window. Before I could race to the window, it was
64
gone. My eyelids were very swollen in the morning, and also my back hurts."
"March 27, 1993. Felt uneasy, like having a nightmare, struggling and thrashing about, and then feeling sort of paralyzed. I felt the need to scream and resist, and I yelled, 'No!' two or three times. Trying to wake Neal up, I grabbed onto him. I was being lifted off the bed by a force, but I struggled and somehow broke out of it. When I looked around the room, a reddish-orange light flashed in the house and then went to the side and it seemed white. This was about 1:00 to 1:20 a.m."
Another common report involves bizarre, unexplained behavior of electrical equipment in the abductee's environment, and, as an excerpt from Lisa's journal shows, this has also frequently occurred with her and Neal.
"At about 3 a.m. my husband and I were waked up by the radio going crazy, the front porch light blinking, and the touch-light lamp in the living room on bright." Even the phone began to act oddly, ringing and crackling incessantly with no one on the other end of the line. "Finally we just had to unplug the phone," her journal noted. "I was scared."
This was not an isolated event, as other entries in her journal show: "May 10, 1993. About midnight or so, the kids' radio came on and the lamp in the living room came on twice. Neal and I had disturbed sleep."
Unexplained activity of helicopters over the home, following, as it does so often after UFO activity, shows up in Lisa's case. For her, it began in early 1993, as her journal notes.
"March 15, 1993. About 12:20 or 12:30 a.m. I saw some beautiful blue lights coming down the hallway
65
[through a window from a craft near the house], then somewhere around that time I heard a helicopter over our house by my bedroom window. It stayed for a while, then left. It appeared on the scene moments after the craft was leaving. Couldn't sleep rest of the night."
"May 29, 1993. At 3:30 p.m. my son and I saw a dark helicopter pass over our house."
"September 22, 1993. Helicopters were still flying at 11 p.m. The humming and 'Morse code' were almost deafening again."
"September 23, 1993. Went to bed about 11:30. I 'dreamed' about the Grays telling me how easy it was to get me. Then it changed to a room where there were autopsies going on. Somebody human-sounding was talking, and a woman was lying on a table who had been 'done.' They said some people had a Y-incision and some a straight incision. She was a white woman, probably in her forties. Also, sometime during the night a helicopter was flying close to our house, but I couldn't get up and fell back asleep. So tired in the morning."
Lisa has many of the symptoms typically reported by other abductees, including stress, sleep disruption, depression, a sense of having a job or task to perform, disturbing dreams of massive UFO landings and of widespread disasters.
"I feel they have said they love me and that I was special (yeah, sure), and they say that I will be used for some purpose," Lisa commented. "Probably to tell others about them. I've had dreams telling me to go to isolated places and store food. Can't remember more. I have had small glimpses of catastrophes, just a flash of severe starvation, not enough to remember."
66
A journal entry from December 1992 records one of the dreams of massive UFO presence which is very commonly reported. "In this dream ," Lisa notes, "I was in the dark with someone, looking at the night sky, and the spaceships were coming in landing. I told someone, 'They're finally coming'."
Among the events of actual abduction scenarios-whether recalled consciously, in flashbacks, or in memories surfacing in dreams-Lisa's experiences include almost every type of reported event. Most women, for instance, have undergone physical, specifically gynecological, examinations while in the hands of the aliens. Lisa's account echoes the usual scenario, beginning with the memory of being "on their spaceship on a small examination table all scrunched up.
"My legs were put as close to my bottom as possible. They had something holding me open while they inserted [something] or did their exam. The table seemed to be at their height. Seems like there were two of them. I remember looking up between my legs and the alien looking back at me. It seemed to be very uncomfortable. I can't remember more after looking at the Gray."
On another occasion, Lisa remembers being less cooperative during an exam, "giving them a hard time about being examined. I remember asking them, 'How would you like me to do this to you?' I don't know what they said...I'm sure they sedated me." The following morning, she suffered from a sore chin and a bruise on the top of her right wrist.
A journal entry from July 1993 shows how disturbed she has felt during some of these examinations. "Had a 'dream' of being on their
67
spaceship in a huge room on a table with the Old One examining me," she noted. "I was fine until he showed me an instrument (I can't remember it now) he was going to use on me. Then I got upset. He placed his hands on my head, and I don't remember anything else."
Lisa also recalls, more than once, being shown alien or "hybrid" babies. An entry from October 1993 states, "I gave birth to a fair-looking baby and called it a star baby. It had real light blue eyes with unusual pupils."
One of the most commonly reported events is that of an alien's face up very close to the abductee's face. Some researchers, taking their cue from abductees' descriptions of this event, call it a "mind-scan," and whatever else this activity does, it certainly seems to control the abductee mentally. Lisa remembers this occurring on several occasions. 'The ETs like to put their noses almost on my nose," she explained, "and when they do this I just stare into their eyes. Sometimes that's all I ever see, their eyes, and nothing else that's happening."
Besides being told by the aliens that she is "special" and "chosen," as often happens with others, Lisa has also recalled scenarios of training or instruction. In a November 1993 dream, for example, she was in a brightly lit room talking with some people whose identity she can't recall. They were telling Lisa how she should go about discussing the aliens with other people. "I was being told I needed to learn better how to speak about them," she said.
And she has been given information about the aliens' interest in human genetics, another common communication. Two entries from her journal typify
68
this event.
"August 16, 1993. In one 'dream' Neal and I were raising weird creatures, and another [part] was where they [aliens] were telling me how they have been genetically altering us gradually. I felt like we were their pet project or something."
"August 20, 1993. Woke at 2 a.m. and at 4:53 a.m., got up and went to kitchen for something to eat. Had a 'dream' of an ape or gorilla, whatever you want to call them, sitting on my bed holding my hands, and someone was saying, They are you and you are them. Very nauseated in the morning and had sweated very badly last night."
Other, more specific, physical effects have also been reported in Lisa's experiences. In addition to the nausea and eye irritations that she suffered after certain abductions or abduction 'dreams,' Lisa has also found patterns of bruises, and puncture marks that couldn't be accounted for in any mundane way.
She has the well-known scoop marks, for example, one on her lower right leg and another on the upper part of her right arm, which are permanent. Temporary marks, however, are much more commonly reported. In Lisa's case, these have included a triangle of circular bruises on her hip-the triangle pattern shows up more frequently than any other design-scattered bruises on other body parts, such as the bridge of the nose; the bottom, top, and heel of the foot; the wrist; inside the arm very close to the armpit; all around the knee; and on top of the hand.
But bruises aren't the only marks that show up. Like Polly and others, Lisa has found damaged areas in the bend of her elbow and scratches, which she is
69
certain were not accidentally inflicted, in unusual places. After one particular abduction in October 1993, in which she recalled being in a pool of water with the aliens around her before they took her to an examination room, Lisa found a scratch across her lower left jaw, as well as two bruises on the outside of her left knee. And she has had patterns of bruises which are so commonly reported that we have come to refer to them as "clamp marks" because they appear to have been left by either three- or four-fingered hands grasping the upper arms or the thighs very forcefully.
All of these physical effects are very familiar in abduction reports, as are instances of blood found on the abductee's body or bedclothes after an encounter. Lisa, too, has had this occur, in situations where the blood could not be explained as coming from a bloody nose or some other injury.
It is clear, then, that Lisa's abduction situation has involved most of the "typical" scenarios and events, even including episodes where she has been shown how to operate a craft and has been warned about the physical dangers of touching a craft during certain phases of operation.
But she has also experienced several of the less familiar events-less familiar, that is, in terms of abduction research findings which have been made public. Regrettably, much of what abductees have reported has not been publicized, for a number of reasons. In some cases, as with alien-human sexual activity, this may be because so many abductees are unwilling to talk about such intimate things.
In other cases it is the researchers themselves who are reluctant to expose some aspects of the events,
70
fearing they will push the credibility of their audience, especially their desired audience of professionals and academics, too far. Some parts of this phenomenon, they fear, are simply not "politically" acceptable, no matter what the abductees themselves insist they have experienced. Lisa and several other of the women whose experiences are reported in this book, therefore, are to be commended for their courage in discussing these aspects.
The first highly controversial area is that of sexual activity. It is important to remember, when reading the following journal entries, that the aliens have superb "virtual reality" capabilities and that without external verification it is impossible to know if the memory or dream of an encounter reflects an actual event. This is especially important when assessing reports of sexual activity with the aliens, for in some situations people tell of seeing celebrities, religious figures, and even dead acquaintances.
One of the first sexual situations Lisa remembers happened in late 1989, beginning with her conscious awareness of the aliens' presence. Lying in bed, she woke up and saw a group of aliens, one of which held a wand-like instrument, around the bed. The tallest of the beings was touching Neal's chest. "I looked at them," Lisa explained, "and told them not to touch him and to leave him alone. That's the night I got to see them for a few seconds in an unaltered state. Then they pointed the wand at my forehead, made me feel dizzy, and I was out. I believe that's the night they made me have sex while they watched."
The sexual interaction involved another abductee. Lisa said the man gave her his name, T. M. Reiss, which he spelled for her. "He told me they had been
71
abducting him since he was a child," she said. "He was very sorry."
In a couple of the sexual scenarios, Lisa recalled interacting with creatures of some sort. These types of bizarre reports turn up less frequently in the research, but they are not unheard of. She recalled the first episode as a dream-event, in which she and a gorilla-type creature were sexually engaged. Lisa woke up after having this 'dream' when the sound of a "breathing device" brought her to consciousness. She saw a dim figure in the doorway step out of sight and then, as unlikely as such a response always seems in these situations, she went back to sleep. The action, however, was not yet over. At 3:25 she woke up again, flinging her arms about and trying to rouse Neal, who was completely unresponsive. She saw a lighted object outside the bedroom window, and she could feel an energy controlling her body.
'They had some force on me," she said, "stopping me from getting up. When the craft [outside] started to lift up, it broke the force. I ran outside, but I really can't say for sure if I saw something."
On another occasion, while lying down during the day, Lisa dreamed about a number of sexual situations. Something like a small horse was involved, as well as a "dolphin," some Grays, and "a dark, leathery, scaly creature" whose features she couldn't clearly recall. After waking from this dream, Lisa experienced the "humming and Morse code" noise that occasionally plagued her internal hearing.
After a similar 'dream' in which Lisa was placed with several animals in sexual situations while being observed, she awoke the next morning with a bruise on her lower ankle and a tender area on the back of
72
her head, in spite of no consciously recalled injuries to these areas. And immediately following another dream-like sexual episode with what appeared to be a well-known public figure, Lisa awoke in her bed and saw a nebulous form move quickly across the room and disappear. Startled and frightened, it took her a long time to fall back asleep, and in the morning she felt nauseated.
Such things made it hard for her to dismiss all these dream memories as mere figments, yet they were such scant evidence as to give no certainty of the events' reality. Whether they were real or dreams, there is the question of motivation. "I believe sometimes I'm made to dream odd things," Lisa said, "to see my reaction to them." A poignant journal entry reveals how confusing this activity can be, how vulnerable it leaves the abductee. "Dreamed Neal and I made love," she noted. "I hope it was him."
The second controversial area reported by Lisa involves, as with the case of Pat in the previous chapter, the viewing of "new bodies." She told me that her memory of seeing a new body occurred sometime in late 1992. Although she was keeping a journal by that time, which recorded UFO sightings, conscious events, and dreams, both alien-instigated and the normal, self-generated variety, she refused for some reason to include this event in the record.
Lisa recalled lying on a table aboard a craft, with her "new body" beside her. "I got out of my old body," she said, "and stood next to it. I was looking it over, and I even looked at my teeth. The body was perfect, but it had my long hair that I used to have. Somebody said they could make people believe that was me," she continued, "even though it was perfect
73
and with long hair. I wanted so badly to get in it, but I did not. I don't remember who the beings were in the room with me, just being overwhelmed seeing the body. I don't remember how I got back in my old body."
Later, in 1993, Lisa had experienced another dream-event about this situation. "Dreamed of showing my new body to some friends," her journal records, "and reading to them from a special book about humankind. I was reading with some clear instrument like a triangle. Don't remember what I was reading." This scenario of reading a book during an encounter, by the way, is a little-known detail reported in a number of separate cases.
Similar dreams recurred in which she found herself displaying the new body. In one briefly recalled episode she was showing it to her doctor, and in a much more involved dream, Lisa felt as if she had actually died in order to get into the new body, which she then showed to her husband and some other people. There were other details of this dream that suggest it may at the very least have been a screen memory of an actual event. She insisted on keeping her son with her, for example, explaining to her husband that the son "is one of us, like me." Lisa had been told in a past encounter that the aliens were interested only in her and her son, not the entire family.
The encounter in the new body was followed by a more familiar situation, in the exam room. "A doctor and a nurse were giving me an examination," she recalled, "and telling me I had hepatitis. But they were giving me some sort of vaginal exam. I told them to leave me alone, that they weren't my doctors,
74
[but I] don't remember more."
In addition to the sexual encounters and the alleged cloning capabilities of the aliens, a third controversial topic avoided by many researchers focuses on military involvement with aliens and abductees. For Lisa, as is so often the case with abductees, the first memory of a possible encounter with the military surfaced in a dream.
"I was being interrogated by the military," she said, "pushed and made to lie crouched on the ground. In the back were some trucks, and beside them were guys in black uniforms standing watching me. The men asking questions were in regular military clothes. They held me down with the butts of their guns. They told me to give them the knowledge, and they said 'at any cost.' I told them I didn't know what they were talking about, and they just repeated themselves."
Since that dream in August 1993, however, Lisa has had other memories of this particular 'event' come to the surface. The most detailed recollection came as part of a situation which closely fits the definition of the VRS dream discussed earlier. On the night of December 19, 1993, Lisa had several dreams of a very ordinary sort. But in the midst of these regular dreams, she suddenly found herself in a situation and environment that had quite a different 'feel' to it.
"All of a sudden I'm surrounded by military men, some in black clothes and some in green," she noted. "I was being made to walk hurriedly on the grounds of some installation. I don't know how I got there or left. The soldiers were rude to me. I told them to stop pushing on me.
75
"Then we went into an office of some type that seemed plainly decorated. It looked like white walls and no pictures, and the desk and chair were plain. A man was sitting behind the desk. He was a little heavy and looked slightly balding, but his hair was short. He had on green clothes and no medals or name as I could tell. He started asking me questions, about what I felt on the aliens. It seemed like he was wondering about how to get the public prepared.
"I told him that a lot of the public was already aware, and some would never accept it. I asked him how he could expect that, since we don't all agree on other things. We talked, I believe, a little about religion and politics. I believe there were other people in the room. I probably wasn't allowed to look.
'Then I think they brought me something to drink. I don't remember more. I just know this man looked bewildered and concerned. I believe the alien issue has gotten out of control in his opinion. I expressed to him that I was tired of the game-playing."
For Lisa, then, the abduction phenomenon's parameters include witnessed UFO sightings; conscious perceptions of lights, probes, and aliens in the house; conscious telepathic communications; bizarre external physical reactions from inanimate objects in her environment; conscious perception of missing-time episodes; unexplained physical marks on her body; and a number of virtual-reality/dream scenarios involving both human and alien beings.
In a nutshell, this is an accurate general definition of the phenomenon as reported by numerous abductees. But as the eight representative accounts here demonstrate, the details of that scenario are highly bizarre, variable to an absurd degree from case
76
to case, invariably intrusive, sometimes physically painful, spiritually ambiguous, ingeniously deceptive, and, at every level, deeply disturbing.
Three experiences Lisa has recently reported will make this point very clearly.
The first, which she recalled in a dream state, began inside an unknown facility. "I was on a table," Lisa said, "and it looked like I was being pushed down a hall with bright lights. They [her attendants] were quickly strapping my feet down with straps that looked like velcro. I don't know what these beings that abducted me looked like. Then something was inserted in my left ear, I think. I told them they were killing or hurting my brain, then I blacked out."
In the next remembered scene, something very different was going on, this time involving other humans. "I believe the FBI came to arrest me," Lisa said, "and they called me by my maiden name. One man was really mean to me." Lisa remembered nothing more, but she wondered the next morning if the soreness in her left ear and her throat had anything to do with the memory of the ear probe.
The second experience, which she recorded as a dream, also involved some physical procedure aboard a craft, but it began on a rather exalted level. "I dreamed I was given a heavenly audience," Lisa reported. "I believe it meant that they [aliens] invited me to speak with them, but I don't remember about what." A physical exam followed. "I saw myself on a table in a spaceship and alien beings standing at the end of my feet, telling me or each other that I was an excellent breeder," she recalled. "A reptile-looking creature was getting on top of me, I guess to rape me." After this, she remembered nothing more.
77
The final experience had a much more conscious element to it than the 'dreams/ in spite of its more 'fantastic' nature. Lisa had gone to bed early on this night and awoke at 1:10 a.m. Preparing to fall asleep again, but still awake, she began to feel a growing sense of some "pressure" which became very intense.
"I looked up at the ceiling over me," Lisa said, "and saw images that looked like vultures or the phoenix bird. There seemed to be two of them...trying to chase each other off. Their eyes glowed green, I believe. Then there appeared a spirit form. It seemed to have white hair and a beard. I started yelling frantically, 'Oh, God, oh, Heavenly Father!' over and over and trying to get myself free from the force. I felt my eyes roll back in my head.
"Then I felt a great pulling, and I'm not sure if I was in spirit form or my body, but very quickly I was in the clouds and sky. I looked down and saw the lights of a town and vapors of the clouds. The spirit took me to a wall or some sort of tunnel, and I was going to be taken in. I don't remember more of what I saw. The next thing I know, I was back in bed and looking at the same birds disappearing. I came out of the odd state I was in and went to the kitchen, I was trembling so bad. The clock said 3:40."
"God help me," Lisa concluded, "whatever I was seeing." The vulture and the phoenix, after all, are very different creatures who embody quite different concepts.
A time loss of two and a half hours occurred that night. And so did a serious injury to Lisa's back. The "great pulling" that took her upwards jerked her with such force that the next day she could hardly walk. The pain continued getting worse, and when she
78
consulted her doctor, she was told that the spinal damage could prove permanent. In this one instance, at least, the event was more than virtual reality.
79