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44 consciously elusive as the first one. “| woke up around 3:30 a.m.,” she told me, “and turned on the television set in the bedroom. This is usually the time | wake up and scan the bedroom for whatever. | turned on Channel Four because they are on all night. | wanted to catch a weather report because we were expecting sleet. Everything was normal until an insurance commercial came on. | 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 | thought, What the hell is that? it moved back off the screen. | was fighting to stay awake, as if it wouldn't bother me if | were awake. Shortly thereafter, | felt the old familiar ‘zap’ through my body, and | was out of it. “Since that time | have had a sore spot on my spine eight to twelve inches up from my coccyx. l’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.” 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. Back to Contents VI - Beth “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. | remember that | went to hide between some bushes, and then | heard a sound, somebody else. And as | turned, | saw what | thought at that moment was one of the other kids. “The next thing | know,” she continued, “it was dark, and | was very surprised. When | 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 | couldn’t understand it,” she said. “The place where | was hiding was less than a hundred feet from the front of the house. | was hiding there, and it was daylight, and then the next thing | know it was dark- and | was scared. “Recently | had another memory about that,” she added. “That kid | thought was there, he was an alien, one of the Grays. He took me to a ship, but | don’t remember what happened after that.” As | listened to Beth’s account of her childhood missing-time episode, | was reminded of a similar event in my husband's past. At age twelve, not much 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.