Abductions occur all through an abductee's life, but there is one seminal moment when the horrifying reality is forced upon the abductee. Ready or not, here they come! The abductee may or may not have suspected these contacts were going on. He or she may or may not even believe in "aliens." I have received permission from several other abductees to print here their descriptions of the first time they realized they were, in fact, abductees.

Sandra's case was a common one, in which she spontaneously recalled an earlier, forgotten experience:

While driving in rural Wyoming late at night in 1955, in either late October or November, my father, step-mother and myself saw something unusual. At first we thought it was the moon. It was not until the late '60s or early '70s that I recalled this "something strange" and that was when I happened to pick up a magazine and read of the Betty and Barney Hill experience with a UFO. While reading the story, a memory was triggered of that time in Wyoming and I began to think about that night.

For many years I thought about this experience and, a few years ago I decided to find out the truth. I went to a [hypnotic] regressionist and discovered that not only had I seen a UFO that night in 1955, I was taken aboard a craft and examined. After reliving this experience, I felt a sense of freedom, knowing that I was not crazy. I also realized that there were many strange things that had occurred in my life that I never thought of as UFO or abduction-related until I was awakened to the knowledge.

While some abductees find themselves fascinated by UFO literature, others actively avoid it. Holly was one of those:

I had always avoided the subjects of UFOs and abductions; they made me very uncomfortable inside and I wrote the believers off as "weirdoes" to make it easier for me to ignore them. Then came the day when I was walking through a bookstore and saw the paperback edition of Whitley Strieber's Communion. The alien face on the cover took my breath away. I [suddenly] remembered being five years old and talking to a tall, thin, grey alien lady who told me to call her "The Grandmother". I remembered all of the psychic things she taught me, and everything she told me about what was going to happen in the future. I remembered the day when she told me I must forget everything she told me, but that she would see me again, someday, when I was ready. I remembered all of the years after that of fear and being captured and being used and never being able to say it out loud or even know about it when I was awake. I cried and bought the book, and never stopped crying till I was through reading it.

Holly became a friend and I can vouch for her integrity, as well as the accuracy of her psychic "things".

Aitan is a young man who lives in Canada, having moved there from England. Odd experiences in his life had led him to become involved in various New Age/metaphysic-type stuff, and that gave him a vocabulary to describe his initial awakening. It also may have helped prepare him for the experience; for, as you'll see, it wasn't as much a shock for him as it was for many others:

[One] Friday night I came home late from a party, and went straight to bed. I was feeling ill and shouldn't really have gone out that night. I had a slight ringing in my ears, my throat was hurting to the extent that I couldn't even swallow, my nose was blocked, and it felt like if I breathed, that my lungs would have collapsed. I lay awake and restless in bed from 2:30 AM until around 4:30, getting more and more impatient at my inability to sleep, and the fact that I felt so crappy. The ringing remained in my ears.

Around the 4:30 mark, I made a concerted effort to note the time, I suddenly dozed off, and before me standing on a grassy bank at night, with a medieval stone wall behind, were standing a little girl, very short, with very long black hair and a retrospectively featureless face, and a tall old skinny man with long white hair, both in white robes. From the little girl I heard a soothing exclamation of peace, "Please do not be scared, we are not going to hurt you."

As abruptly as the scene came on, I was awakened by a click, which I recognised as the sound of the deadbolt on the front door opening, a sound which is pretty distinct. The rest of the house was silent. At the time, my dog was still new to our family, and he used to sleep behind a baby gate near the front door. I lay still in my bed, listening for the slightest sound, when I heard my dog crying, not in pain but in fright. I plucked up the courage to get up and see whether there was an intruder or not, but when I tried to get up, I could only move my head. I was able to wriggle my fingers and toes as a reality check, but I could not even twitch any of my major muscles.

[Finally] I gave up the struggle and flopped my head back on the pillow. As the ringing was growing, I began to see an electric blue emanating from the walls, where there were cables running behind to the sockets and light on the ceiling. All my windows and doors were closed at the time, and a thin stream of light passed across my room through the tiny string holes and space around the Venetian blinds. The humming grew to a deafening shrill and I let out a very audible roar of terror at the top of my lungs, "Somebody!!!!!" as I felt what seemed to be something slicing open my chest from the base of my neck to my navel, and I could feel my very essence pouring forth, like a very wide chakra opening. I could feel that someone was delving into my very soul, but my only terror was from the noise, which was so painful that I was confused. I saw something like an aura of pure energy pouring from my body. My head flopped to the right, where I found a face staring right into mine. I was shocked, but felt a kind of calm. The [alien] face we all know so well, but a glowing orange in colour. I turned back away and it was over.

I just went from noise in my ears and open chest to normal. I did however take a deep breath. To my amazement, I could breathe through my nose, my chest felt the best it has in years, my throat was fine, and there wasn't even a peep of sound ringing in my ears. The sense of peace was overwhelming. I looked at my clock and it was 5:15 am. I didn't even move. I'm not sure I would have been able to either, but I just lay there, trying to think what the hell I just went through. After about a minute, I started shaking violently. I lay there convulsing for nearly an hour, when I just got a grip and controlled the shaking until it went away. I lay there until six o'clock.

I went downstairs and my dog was lying in a corner, curled up into a ball, and he raised his sad face as I came to him. I climbed over the baby gate and sat down in a corner. He got up and curled up practically on top of me. He was quiet, and he looked up at me and gave a huge sigh. I could feel him shaking as I held him tight. "Thanks for trying to warn me." The front door was locked, but I knew the dog was as scared as I was.

Ready or Not, Here They Come!

So you're a regular kind of guy. Yeah, you sometimes have prophetic dreams but you don't like to think about it much because you know the other guys in your softball team would rib you unmercifully. You go to work in the morning, love your wife and four kids, and pretty much ignore any anomalous experiences in your life. (There've been a few, but you stopped talking about them once you realized they set you apart from other people.)

And then, one night, you are awakened from a sound sleep. You might have had trouble falling asleep, because you've been irritable for the last day or so. But now you know—someone's in the room, someone who doesn't belong there. You're frozen. The security alarm you installed last October hasn't gone off for some reason, but you open your eyes and see a crowd of odd-looking shapes moving about the room. You are terrified and definitely awake—but suddenly you are asleep again and then it's morning. The intruders are gone…but the terror remains. Maybe there's even another little reminder: a scar or bruise where you didn't have one before.

Your experience may vary, but not by much. And it's repeated. So now you become more sensitive to your own physical defects. Every morning you look for a new scar or bruise, and sometimes you find one or two. That's even worse, because now you don't know if you just overlooked it before, or if you really had another, unrecalled, encounter the previous night. You find yourself blaming everything on aliens! Or trying not to, which is almost worse. You constantly second-guess yourself. And every noise the house makes, even the flowing of blood through your own ears, makes you jump clear to the ceiling.

Preparing For The Moment

If you have a nagging feeling that something's been happening at night and you just can't remember what it is, reading the previous accounts may tell you that this could happen to you—someday. If it does, how can you prepare? Is there any way to avoid the experience, or lessen its impact?

(At the other end of the spectrum is the inevitable person who can't wait for such an experience, and would buy tickets for it if any were available. Sadly for him or her, such a person is probably not an abductee.)

The first time you are pulled off your bed from a sound sleep, you are quite naturally startled. Moreover, no matter how much you may think you believe in aliens, let's face it: that belief is only mind deep. Until you are exposed to the reality first hand, it doesn't hit you in the gut. So, even if you half-suspect yourself to be an abductee (as I did), and even if you've done your homework and know what the aliens look like and what to expect—that moment when you really realize it's all true is like a kick from a horse.

It's called a paradigm shift—a major change in the way you view the Universe and its workings. Toffler warned of it in his book, Future Shock. Whenever you discover that you've been wrong about something in a fundamental way, it hurts, physically. It also hurts mentally. Compare it to the shock the nation felt when Kennedy was assassinated, and we lost our collective, childhood innocence. Compare it to the shock of the World Trade Center attack on 9/11, when what remained of that innocence was further shattered. In fact, it seems to be innocence that suffers most in any paradigm shift. Basically, innocence is just a way of looking at things that may not be false, but is incomplete.

When these shifts occur, it's because more information has become available to you in a way that can't be ignored. The things you knew are still true; it's the supposed foundation on which you believed those things to be based that's proven to be false.

For example, the movements of the stars and planets in the heavens was mapped many thousands of years ago. These mappings were factual, predictable, and accurate. But people wanted to know why the stars moved in these ways, and they developed a foundation (the Earth-centered system) that was accepted for millennia. It wasn't until Copernicus and Galileo put their intellects to the task that it became evident that foundation was incorrect, and that we live in a Sun-centered system. The paradigm shift hurt so much that people did anything to avoid it. That's why the ruling Church branded Galileo a heretic and excommunicated him, forcing him to deny on his deathbed what he knew was true in order to be allowed into Heaven. Paradigm shifts take time to complete; the Church didn't reinstate Galileo until 1987, at which time it finally, officially, agreed that the Earth does, indeed, revolve around the Sun.

It's my feeling that you can't avoid the kick in the gut. But you can minimize the worst of it through preparation beforehand and useful exercises afterwards, should the experience actually occur to you.

Obviously the preparation beforehand involves as much study as possible. At one time UFOlogists discouraged study of abduction cases; if someone was abducted who had studied abductions, the debunkers would say the abduction was fabricated out of what the abductee had read. (How long would a policeman stay in business these days if he accused a rape victim of fabricating a reported rape, from rape stories she had read? But our society encourages such debunking of abduction stories, because it helps delay the cultural shock of that paradigm shift.) However, now there are so many cases of untainted abductions that we don't need any more to prove the fact of the phenomenon. We may not know exactly why it's happening, but we know it is happening. So you may as well know what, in fact, is happening.

Which leads me to this book list. It's hardly a complete list of every UFO/abduction book ever published, but it is a required bibliography for those who would deal with the phenomenon in an informed manner. It is also an interesting statement of our culture's attempt to deny these experiences, that so many of these books—most of which were best-sellers when originally released—are now out-of-print. (But you may find them quietly resting beneath a layer of dust in your local public library.)

• Above Top Secret, Timothy Good.
  Timothy Good doesn't care whether UFOs are real or not. Using memos and reports released under the Freedom of Information Act, this book proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the government believes they are.
  
• Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, Edward U. Condon.
  Out-of-print, but you can still buy used copies. The infamous "Condon Report." The forward to this document, as presented to the U.S. Congress, implies that all UFOs are explainable in terms of everyday phenomena, as misinterpreted by well-meaning citizens. However, the contents of the report—unread by most Congressmen—contradicts this premise.
  
• The Interrupted Journey, John Fuller.
  This first documented account of an alien abduction involved New Hampshire couple Barney and Betty Hill. The abduction itself occurred in 1963; other abductions were documented between the time Interrupted Journey was written and when it was actually published, yet described identical aliens, ships, and procedures.
  
• UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game, Philip J. Klass.
  Klass is the country's foremost debunker, and the only one my research showed who had published more than one book. Read this one with Interrupted Journey handy and compare point to point: see how Klass must omit some key points and distort others for his "explanation" to seem other than the poor science it is. I have never read a debunking report of a UFO incident that covered all points in a consistent, rational explanation.
  
• Missing Time, Budd Hopkins.
  Out-of-print, but you can usually find it in a library or second-hand book store. Hopkins was the first writer to realize the abduction phenomenon was a wide-spread, rather than chance, occurrence.
  
• Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods, Budd Hopkins.
  Hopkins again "scooped" the UFO community with this well-documented revelation of what the aliens were doing when they abducted humans.
  
• Dimensions, Jacques Vallee.
  This book details historical events which show the alien presence is not a new phenomenon. Although I disagree with his conclusion regarding the origin of the aliens, his historical research is thorough and impeccable.
  
• Secret Life, David M. Jacobs, Ph.D.
  By analyzing the reports of some 760 abductees, Jacobs discovered there is a consistent pattern to all abductions—and describes it. In one of the closing chapters, he also explains why each of the conventional "explanations" for the abduction phenomenon does not explain all the facts. Read this when you start worrying you might just be crazy!