Taken - Karla Turner-pages

Page 71 of 148

Page 71 of 148
Taken - Karla Turner-pages

Page Content (OCR)

71 people. Some of them looked to be military, some were clad like scientists, and others appeared to be “regular” people. A uniformed, red-headed man, one of the two who had brought her to the facility, seemed to be “in charge” of her. Two more men entered the room, wearing outfits Beth described as similar to astronaut's gear. They talked with Beth and the other people, although she didn’t remember what was said, and then someone shouted and the group started running toward the back of the large room. The red-haired man grabbed her, and then the flashback ended, but the next morning Beth found bruises in the exact spot where the man had gripped her arm. The memory felt real, but she had no idea when such a fantastic event might have occurred. Of course, mysterious things had been happening all along and continued to occur-sightings of UFOs and strange lights, episodes of unexplained time gaps, occasional appearances of patterned bruises and punctures on her body-and for most of these events Beth had no explanation or memory, either. It was clear that her conscious recollections about these things were merely the tip of the iceberg, and whatever lay beneath the surface had been deeply suppressed. Beth might have been able to tell herself that all these events weren't real, that she had imagined them, until an event occurred which proved that the weirdness wasn’t only in her mind. In 1992 during a visit to Miami, she and a friend were driving from his house to her daughter’s home one night, a trip of thirty to forty-five minutes on the turnpike. They 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