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53 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. 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 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, | 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.