PART 1




CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE CHILLING KIND. By Tom Keyser. The
Baltimore Sun, SUN Magazine; April 4, 1993.

The nightmares wouldn't stop -- the sudden, bizarre, unsettling nightmares. They were always the same; they seemed almost real: Lea
was sitting in a booth in a small, empty room with gray walls. A
monotonic voice behind her said: "Don't move, or you might be hurt."
She felt paralyzed. She heard clicking noises, like an X- ray
machine. Suddenly she was lying on a table. A bright light shone in
her eyes. She sensed people moving around, examining her.
Then she was sitting up, facing a short creature so hideous she
could not look at its face. From a box the strange being removed a
shiny needle. At the tip was a silver marble. The creature moved
closer to Lea.
At that point Lea would jerk awake in her bed, terrified and
drenched with sweat. Her screams would awaken her parents. But her
mother, Lea recalls, would always admonish her: "It's just a nightmare. Everybody has them. You shouldn't watch all that scary stuff on TV."
Lea now believes it wasn't just a nightmare. She believes it was
real. She is one of the people whose stories you might expect to see in
a supermarket tabloid under the heading "Humans Who Believe They've Been Abducted by Aliens."
Lea is 25, lives in Prince George's County, works at a bank and is
engaged to be married. She is thin and has blue eyes. She is, in her
words, average-looking and average in every way. Knowing that most
people react with scorn and ridicule at the mention of UFOs and extraterrestrial life, she asked that her last name not appear in this
story.
"I used to think I belonged in a mental institution, to be honest
with you," she says. "But I don't think anymore that I'm crazy. I go
to school. I work full-time. I pay my bills like anybody else... I
think other people think I'm crazy."
The subject of abductions by space aliens is so far-out, so utterly fantastic that most people, even with their wildest imaginations, cannot
begin to fathom it. Many will not take it seriously. It is
unbelievable, unthinkable. The subject is also deeply disturbing.
These are not pleasant stories of people out raking leaves suddenly
beamed into a UFO, subjected to a little cosmos comedy and sent back to
their yards chuckling.
These are chilling accounts of people who say they've been
kidnapped, confined in spaceship examination rooms, probed, prodded and examined by aliens who seem primarily interested in sexually related activities. Their stories more resemble reports of rape than they do a heartwarming visit by "E.T."
Around these alien abduction stories, an industry has been
launched. It soars far beyond the tabloids. There are best-selling
books, popular films and prime-time television shows. Mental health professionals gathered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last
summer for a conference on abductions. In Maryland and across the
country have blossomed support groups, where people who believe they've
been abducted can share their stories -- away from the ears of those who
might mock, exploit or be titillated by their anguish.
And, of course, there are the scientists -- from the
internationally known astronomer Carl Sagan to a Navy physicist from
Maryland -- and a plethora of researchers, lining up on either side of
the highly charged issue.
What's really happening? No one knows for sure. But one thing is
clear: Something has shattered Lea's and others' calm, secure existence
on planet Earth. Whether the rest of us accept or reject their stories
is irrelevant. We cannot assuage their fear: It is palpable. The
torment is real.
Lea's began while she was in the fourth grade. She remembers
clearly: She was outside her apartment in Prince George's County
playing with her sister and other children. It was dusk. They heard a
hum, or a buzz, like a swarm of bees. They saw a disk-like object --
wingless, silver-gray, a row of lights along the edge -- creep at
treetop level over the apartment complex. It hovered above a parking
lot between buildings, and then drifted away.
Lea and her sister ran inside to tell their parents. The girls
even drew pictures.
"My father wanted to call somebody," Lea says. "But my mother said
no, we'd made it up. But all of us saw it. We talked about it for days
at school."
Shortly after that, Lea says, the recurring nightmare began. She
dreamed it on and off for a decade, from when she was 10 until about 20.
Dreams are only part of her story. When she was 12 or 13, she and
her sister, who is two years younger, were staying at their
grandparents' house in St. Mary's County. They were in separate beds in
the same room when a ball of lighting, as Lea describes it, passed
through a window and curtain into the room.
About the size of a tennis ball, it glided between the beds,
bounced off a door and vanished. A couple of seconds later another
lightning ball did the same thing, and then another. Lea says there
might have been 20 in all.
She and her sister screamed. Five other people were in the house,
but no one heard them. Lea finally escaped into the hallway. Her next
memory is of waking up in bed the next morning.
End of part 1



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