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63 “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. As did Beth, Casey had a daytime missing-time episode initiated after contact with unknown “children.” Beth has never explored this memory hypnotically, but when Casey used regressive hypnosis to delve into the missing time, he retrieved memories of an onboard abduction involving a nasal implant. This was not the only similarity between Beth’s experiences and Casey’s. A divorced mother with grown children, Beth had first contacted us, in fact, because another of her encounter memories, involving apparently military personnel, contained very striking and disturbing parallels to an incident described in INTO THE FRINGE. A mutual acquaintance helped arrange a phone conversation for us, and we got acquainted. Beth was born in 1942 in Puerto Rico and has lived there most of her life, although her heritage also includes ancestors from Spain and Vermont. Beth was a teacher before starting her family, but in recent years she had vision problems which have kept her from working. Currently, she divides her time between Puerto Rico and Florida. Beth and | discussed her memories of the military encounter at length. But | was also interested to hear about other her other experiences, especially since she lived in Puerto Rico. A great deal of UFO and alien activity has been reported in the past several years, much of it in the area where Beth lived but all over the island as well. In fact, of all the U. S. territory, there may well have been more recent UFO activity in Puerto Rico than anywhere else. To judge from Beth’s account, it has probably been going on for quite a while. In addition to the early missing-time event, she has conscious memories of many other strange experiences from childhood, well back into the 1950s. Her first UFO sighting, for example, occurred only a year or two after the hide-and-seek episode. Beth was walking to the store in the late afternoon, when she looked up and saw a “huge ball of fire” tearing downward through the sky. It disappeared behind a nearby mountain, and Beth assumed that she’d just witnessed a plane crash, although she heard no sound. She screamed and ran back across the road into the house where excitedly she told her