ALSACAT:

The Virginia Horton Case

A few days after the final NBC "News" segment on the UFO phenomenon, Aphrodite Clamar phoned to tell me about an interesting call she had received from a woman we shall refer to as Virginia Horton. They had been introduced through a mutual friend who had just described the television segment filmed in Dr. Clamar's office; it piqued Virginia's curiosity. Though she knew very little about UFO's, she had had a strange experience as a child which seemed to involve a time lapse, and she was interested in pursuing the matter through hypnosis. Dr. Clamar suggested she get in touch with me first for a preliminary interview, and on February 21 she called.

Virginia spoke quickly and directly, in a firm, young-sounding voice. She told me that her friend had recounted the filmed hypnotic session and mentioned the theory we had presented that many, many people may have had UFO abduction experiences without any conscious recall. "I told her I thought that was really unbelievable," she said. "I can't think of a single person who... and then it had dawned on her. As the words came out, something connected in her mind, she said, something that had happened to her as a child. And later, she had remembered a second incident that also "fit the pattern," in that both incidents seemed to involve memory loss. She had been holding the first event in the back of her mind all these years - ever since she was six years old- thinking, "There's something odd about this and when I grow up I'm going to understand it."

Before giving me any details, she asked me about the UFO phenomenon, and about my role as an investigator. Clearly, she was concerned about protecting her anonymity. She is a lawyer with a major corporation whose management might not understand or tolerate her curiosity about such an exotic subject. She told her husband about her desire to explore this childhood mystery through hypnosis, and he was very supportive, but she insisted we not reveal her identity.

The incident that had remained so vividly in her mind had happened in the summer of 1950, a few months before Virginia's seventh birthday.. She was living on her grandfather's farm in southern Manitoba near Lake Superior. She had been outside playing, and had then gone into the barn to gather eggs; there were only a few chickens, and this was one farm chore she enjoyed very much. Then, she said, "All of a sudden, I was in the yard and I didn't remember going from the barn into the yard towards the house. I had an itch on my leg, and I reached down to scratch it. I pulled up my blue jeans and when I scratched my leg I realized it was wet. I was covered with blood, from a cut on the back of my calf. It was a large and clean cut... no dirt or anything. It must have been at least a half-inch deep and an inch long. It was bleeding, but there was no pain."

Virginia explained that her reaction was odd because she and her family are all notoriously pain-sensitive; this cut didn't hurt despite all the blood pouring out. It was doubly strange because she had no idea whatsoever how she had cut herself, nor how she arrived in the yard. One second, she had been in the barn gathering eggs and, the next second, she was standing in the yard with a bleeding leg. On top of everything, as she was about to discover, there was no rip or tear in her blue jeans, despite the fact that the cut was far up her leg, near the place of her calf's maximum thickness. Every young girl probably manages sometime to cut the front of her leg - barked shins being a badge of childhood, like skinned knees - but a half-inch deep slit on the back of one's calf is a little harder to achieve.

"I went in the house," she continued, "and I showed my mother. 'Look at this cut I have. I have no idea where it came from.' My mother and my grandfather - I remember my father wasn't there - were alarmed, and my mother bandaged it very carefully. The funny thing was, even at that age I realized there was something very weird about the cut, and later I ripped the bandage off, thinking 'I want to remember this.' It left a very nice, straight scar... the only scar I have on my body.

"There were things in the barn that could have cut me, so we all went out and looked around, but they couldn't find anything. The only natural way I could have gotten cut required that I somehow catch myself on the jeans hard enough so that they would be pulled up, and then get cut on something different, or else my jeans would have been cut, too. Even at age six, I was clever enough to figure that out. The only sharp thing we could find was a roll of tin plate about six feet off the barn floor. There just didn't seem to be any explanation.

"We went back in and they told me not to worry about it. But, as I said, it never once hurt. It was clean. There wasn't any dirt in it. It wasn't ragged, and the kinds of things you can cut yourself on on a farm are ragged and dirty. And so I ripped the bandage off and I said to myself, 'I want to see this wound. There's something fascinating, completely fascinating about it.' Normally I didn't like to look at blood or anything like that and I always cried and carried on when I hurt myself."

I asked Virginia if she had read much about UFOs, which she assured me she hadn't, and then asked her about any prior interest in anything that might be related to the phenomenon.

"I've always wanted to fly in outer space; in fact, even as a teenager I wanted to be an astronaut."

I mentioned Allen Hynek to her and his name seemed vaguely familiar, but she really knew almost nothing about the UFO case material; her interest, instead, seemed focused on NASA and the American space program, which she knew in detail. This entire childhood business had come up only because of the television program her friend had described to her.

"I called Dr. Clamar and told her that I wanted to be hypnotized. It was possible that this was somehow a figment of my imagination, but I really wanted to try to find out what actually happened. I called my mother to ask her what she remembered about it, but she didn't remember anything much, and thought the whole thing was a little weird.

"Then she said, 'But there was that time later on when we were at the picnic, remember, and you showed up out of the woods covered with blood.' I had forgotten all about it till she mentioned it. It happened when we were on a family picnic, and my father was taking movies of all the kids, and my brother and I came rushing out of the woods. I had been separated from my brother and I didn't remember where I had been, and I was talking when somebody said, 'You have blood on your blouse.' I was horrified and I started feeling the tip of my nose, if I had a bloody nose or something. There was nothing, no wound, but I had blood on my blouse from somewhere, as though I had been splattered.

"I said the only thing I could remember is that I saw a beautiful deer in the woods. It was almost like a mystical deer... it was very strange. It's all on film... me with blood on my blouse and feeling all horrified and kind of yucky. I've always hated that film because it looks so awful. But my mother just reminded me about it, because she said that was a time when I was missing and no one knew where I was. The first time, when I was six, I had been out all afternoon playing, so my mother had no idea if there was any kind of a missing time situation then. I just went on and on about that deer, though, this beautiful deer that I had seen."

I asked a few questions about the circumstances. Virginia had been sixteen at the time, and the picnic took place in Germany, near the Rhine valley, about thirty or forty miles from Frankfurt. My next question has become a regular one in cases which may have a time lapse or other clue which suggest a possible abduction. I asked Virginia if she had ever had any dreams which might bear on the subject. She had.

"I remember, when I was about thirteen, dreaming about traveling in outer space and going far, far away and meeting people that I knew like they were old friends, and I talked to them about things and they explained things to me and showed me things. I wanted to stay there, but they said no, I had to go back. They said I could share what I knew with my friends, but I couldn't stay."

I asked if she remembered how she traveled, if there was some kind of vehicle involved, and she answered that she couldn't remember a vehicle, though she frequently dreams of flying. Our conversation ended after I told her a bit more about the way we go about investigating a UFO sighting. I added that, so far as I knew, there was nothing in the UFO literature that served as a precedent for her accounts, and that it was highly possible that there was, in fact, no UFO involvement. I strongly cautioned her against reading anything about UFOs prior to her hypnotic sessions, and we made arrangements to get in touch with Dr. Clamar for the first appointment, I must admit that I was curious about Virginia's strange story, even though it seemed basically unrelated to the UFO phenomenon. First of all, Virginia herself was an interesting and highly intelligent woman, apparently successful in all the important ways. She held, as I was to find out later, a very responsible position, and was considered by her colleagues to be quite brilliant. She was happily married and maintained a strong, continuing relationship with her parents.

In recounting her story to me, she was specific in her recall of details, and truly puzzled as to what had actually happened. A special tone came through in the telling, a tone which we have learned to respect when we hear it: people who have had encounters, and those who, through hypnosis, have recalled abduction experiences, have a particular objectivity which rarely contains what one might call "moral coloration." Despite the fact that part of this encounter, particularly the beginning, might have been quite terrifying, it is neither "The devils seized me," nor "1 was singled out by God." Instead, as we have seen, the quality of the experience is more that of the laboratory, a nearly neutral situation in which the captors investigate and seemingly run tests in which the captive is immobilized and made to feel, so far as is possible under the circumstances, comfortable. A number of psychologists who have interviewed witnesses and read the hypnotic transcripts have told me that they detected neither paranoia nor delusions of grandeur. The witness's frame of mind is better described as perplexed, often fearful, yet apparently objective and curious as to what happened to them and why.

The second detail that linked Virginia's story to an aspect of the UFO phenomenon was the factor of a time lapse. Both times, on the farm as a child and on the picnic in France as a sixteen year-old, Virginia herself was aware of time she could not account for. She told me later that, when she came out of the woods just before she discovered the blood on her blouse, her parents had asked her where she had been, and she told them she had been with her brother up until the last minute when she had seen the deer. Her brother insisted he had been searching for her and calling for at least a half hour. The discrepancy was immediately swept aside when Virginia's mother spotted the blood on her shirt, and their concern shifted to this new problem.

One of the arguments against mere psychological aberration as an adequate explanation for cases like Virginia's is that the witnesses are apparently normal people who have gone through, say, thirty-five years of life (Virginia's age) with no obvious signs of aberrant behavior- no hallucinations, no instances of amnesia, no paranoid behavior or whatever - yet one afternoon, at, say, age sixteen, something happened for a short time that the witness cannot recall. In the incident in the French woods, of course, we have as evidence for something strange, real, and non-hallucinatory, the film of Virginia discovering the blood on her blouse and the testimony of her family that she had been missing (and in retrospect, from various accounts, the missing time period seems to be somewhere from a half-hour to one hour long). The vast majority of encounters or abduction accounts are neither hallucinations nor hoaxes; indeed, in my investigations, I have never run into either. (This is not to deny that such things may have happened from time to time; they are simply very rare and usually obvious from the start.)

Inquiries into Virginia's case moved slowly since the investigating team in normal circumstances consisted of a nine-to-five computer expert, an overworked psychotherapist, and a professional painter- Bloecher, Dr. Glamar, and myself. I spent eight days as visiting artist at the University of Texas in Austin shortly after Virginia had first called me. Ultimately, several weeks elapsed between that call and her first hypnotic regression session with Dr. Clamar, a not untypical delay. In the meantime, we had spoken again by phone, and again I was struck by her obvious intelligence. This second conversation was more wide-ranging, involving as it did an extended discussion of hypnosis and its reliability as a method for uncovering the truth. Virginia grasped the issues instantly, choosing from an extensive, even technical vocabulary with speed and precision. It was as if her well-stocked verbal closets were always in perfect order; in a split second, she is able to lay her hand on whatever phrase she needs while the rest of us grope about on untidy shelves.

Her physical appearance is equally striking, and one feels she is the sort of woman who is inevitably noticed wherever she may be. She came, accompanied by her husband, Mark, for her first hypnotic session. I had arrived a few minutes before and was chatting with Dr. Clamar when the doorbell buzzed, and I answered it. Virginia stepped in, a tall, handsome woman wearing a tailored suit and carrying, as I recall, a thin attache case. An instant half-memory flashed through my mind, a long forgotten image from a Fifties movie of Alexis Smith in a business suit hurrying through a revolving door, every inch the attractive, efficient career woman. Virginia's gaze, when she fixes it upon you, conveys a combination of feminine vulnerability and enormously clear-headed analytical skill. She is above average in height, perhaps five-feet-eight-inches or so, and has the kind of athletic proportions that suggest abundant physical health. One of the touching aspects of the subsequent hypnotic regressions was seeing Virginia relaxed upon the couch in a deep trance, a solid and fully mature businesswoman, speaking slowly with locutions proper to the little first-grader she was at that moment revivifying.

Mark, her husband, was rather quiet. This was Virginia's afternoon, and one can only guess what he was thinking about a subject so bizarre, which his wife was intent upon exploring. In any case, he seemed supportive of her desires in the matter, and, since the idea of hypnosis strikes fear into even well-educated hearts, perhaps his presence was necessary to steady both of them.

We entered Dr. Clamar's little office and took our usual positions: the subject reclining on the leather couch, the doctor about three feet away, sitting on her straight-backed wooden chair, and I on the floor near the head of the couch with my recorder and hand-held microphone at the ready. An extra chair had been brought into the room and Mark placed it at the other end of the couch. Occasionally, during the hour-long session, he would reach over to gently stroke Virginia's feet and ankles in a nice, calming gesture of physical support.

Dr. Clamar first induced a hypnotic trance in Virginia simply to let her experience the feeling of such deep relaxation for a few minutes before bringing her out of it. This is the "dry run" that prepares the subject for the next step, which is to introduce a deeper trance state, and then to move into regression. Aphrodite takes her time bringing the subject slowly down, down into a very deeply relaxed state. Then she sets the scene, describing the time, the place, and the circumstances to trigger specific recall.

The verbatim transcript of a hypnotic session is, in its cold, flat neutrality, quite misleading. Virginia was a very apt hypnotic subject and her memories developed with great ease, but the way in which words, phrases, and even sentences were inflected is crucial. Short of writing what would look like stage directions, there seems to be no satisfactory way to indicate these subtle shifts of emphasis.

One can detect at least three distinct levels of discourse. The simplest is when Virginia relives her long-ago experience in the present tense: "I walk up the hill, I say to my mother," and so on. In these cases, the language and phrasing is often quite childlike- what one would expect of a precocious six-year-old- and the sense of immediacy can be startlingly vivid.

The second level is when Virginia comments on her experiences, speaking more or less to Dr. Clamar about what she had just re-experienced. "I remember I always liked eggs, even when I was littler," etc., and often this kind of past-tense discourse flows quite directly out of the other. Usually the vocabulary in this mode is that which one would expect of Virginia at her current age.

A third level is more complex. Dr. Clamar would occasionally ask a question which would bring up a subject slightly outside what was being actively recalled. At these times, Virginia would slip into her six-year-old persona and try to remember, while analyzing the evidence with her present adult faculties. So several modes underlay the narrative, often sliding one into the other, and producing a rich psychological mix.

Dr. Clamar induces the trance, a process lasting about fifteen minutes. Virginia is provided with a safe "cloud" from which she can witness and re-experience a childhood event with complete freedom. She is taken back to a warm, sunny afternoon on her grandfather's farm in Manitoba... "You are playing outside in the yard..." When she begins to speak, Virginia's speech is slightly slurred because of her very relaxed state. The sentences follow each other logically, but slowly, and she speaks in a somewhat childish idiom.

VH: I sit on the grass... the grass is very thick and green. I blow the dandelions. I always like them because they are so fluffy. I sit under a big oak tree that has a big swing in it, and I like to swing, and I like to look at all the plants and flowers, and I have my own little garden with things growing up although I was disappointed that they didn't come out as neat as Mama's garden did. It's sort of all mixed up and I can't actually tell exactly which were the weeds and which were the flowers... but I expect the weeds to turn into flowers. 1 didn't pull out anything. That's my garden. It's supposed to grow... and I walk around the yard, pick up the dirt- the dirt's moist. I look at the pigs... I like to look at the little piglets, and I walk up the hill. I look for some interesting stones and sometimes I see lizards all around. They're scary, but I kind of like them. They're like little rocks, but I don't like to pick them up. I look for interesting rocks and I look at the big piles of cow manure... they're really huge... and I like the barn. We used to have more animals. Now I think we just have a few chickens. There is one horse or maybe two horses. I go in to get the eggs. I remember the feeling of those nice, warm tummies and putting my hand under each tummy. They don't always have eggs under them... and so I have to feel around... they have fat tummies, so you sort of have to poke around... and sometimes there are two eggs. 1 don't think the eggs were gathered every day. So I gather them, I think there are eight or nine of them and they were brown.

I remember I always liked eggs, even when I was littler. My grandmother had a porcelain egg for darning and I was very attached to it and I got one for my birthday. I like it. I always like eggs. They had such a nice feeling.

So I get all the eggs that I can and I go to the house and I remember that my leg itched- itched, you know, like it itches when you - if you accidentally sprinkled water.... It's the sensation of having fluid on the surface... that kind of an itch- and I reached down to scratch and it still itches, so I pull up my jeans and- I wasn't looking at my leg, just reached my hand down and my hand feels all wet, so then I look down and my hand is all covered with blood and 1 see blood on my leg and I'm really surprised because I'm afraid of blood and being cut and how could I be covered with blood and I thought, well, I wonder if it's something from a chicken or something. I didn't think it was my blood at first. Then I see that I have a cut and the cut's deep; it's bleeding and dripping down my leg into my sock... I have very dark blood and I'm kind of alarmed about it. But it's not even as though it's my blood. It's somebody else's blood; somebody else's cut... and so I go running into the house with the eggs. I'm careful not to drop them, and I say, 'Mom, look. I cut myself.' She said, 'What did you cut yourself on?' and I said, 'I don't know. I just have a cut.' She looked at it. She sees a lot of blood and she stops whatever she's doing and she looks at it. She says, 'Well, you must have felt it'... and I say, 'I don't know. All of a sudden there was blood. I don't know what it was from.'

(Virginia uses a slightly different tone of voice when she repeats her mother's words.)

Mother: Well, where were you?

VH: I just got the eggs out of the barn.

Mother: Well, didn't you feel it?'

VH: No, I didn't feel it. I don't know what I cut it on.

VH: And then my mother said something to my grandfather.

Mother: There's something sharp in the barn?

VH: Gramps said, 'Not that I know of. Why?'

Mother: 'Virginia cut herself.'

VH: And Gramp looked at it and he said, 'What did you cut it on?' and I said, 'I don't know. I just... suddenly it was bleeding. I don't know what I cut it on.'

Gramp: 'Does it hurt?'

VH: 'No, it doesn't hurt.'

Gramp: 'It's a deep cut.'

VH: And they wiped it off with a wet cloth and I'm just staring at it and I'm wondering why it doesn't hurt and Mom put a bandage on it. It takes her awhile. It doesn't stop bleeding, though. It's still bleeding, though not as much. It's itchy. It feels almost as though... it itches from the blood touching my skin but the wound itself doesn't have any feeling at all. Like it isn't even part of me. Like I'm looking at somebody else's leg.

AC: Ask your mind to help you recall how you got the cut.

VH: How do I ask it?

AC: Let yourself go into yourself.

(Further instructions from Dr. Clamar.)

VH: Well, I'm kind of afraid to watch myself get cut. That will bother me.

(There follows a five-minute period in which VH discusses pain, her fear of it, and her fear of remembering this incident. It is clear to Dr. Clamar and to me that there is a definite resistance to further recall. After a pause, Virginia speaks again.)

VH: I think my leg was cut with a scalpel. It was just really sharp and clean... as if somebody made a nice, clean quick incision... and I don't think that it hurt, but 1 think I expected it to hurt.

(And again, Virginia hesitates to recall more details, and gives further examples of her fear of pain. But then she resumes her narrative.)

VH: They took a little cut. They didn't mean to hurt me.

AC; Where were you when this... was taking place?

VH: I was just lying on the couch, a little couch like this. It was comfortable, you know, like a bed or almost like a medical thing, but it is... it does not have the quality of a doctor's office. It's not chromey and white and the light's bright, There's plenty of light but I think maybe - it might be pale gray or a real soft gray. It's pearly. Those kinds of colors.... There was a luxuriant feeling to it. Elegant and simple and rich. I'm trying to think if it had some smell. Clean. Really an ozone smell. That was the smell. Kind of a clean smell, but nothing very specific.

AC: How were you feeling?

VH: I was really relaxed and almost at home. Comfortable.

Curious. Like you feel when you're a guest of somebody and you're glad to be there. I... ah... it seems that I was told about the cut, that it wouldn't hurt and that there was a reason for it, but I don't think the reason was one that was too clear to me... whatever the explanation, I didn't really understand,

AC: Who told you about the cut?

VH: Hmm. I'm trying to think. Who told me about the cut? I don't know. I just could say it was direct communication with my mind, but I wouldn't necessarily claim it was telepathic... but it seemed the trouble I had understanding was not the words so much as just the idea was one that I didn't understand.

AC: You don't understand it conceptually?

VH: Yeah, the conceptual part I didn't understand, but I didn't have any trouble in communicating. Whatever I was told, the communication process wasn't a difficult one, whether it was direct mental communication or words or English... it was just that at that age... the communication was straightforward and I didn't even think about how it worked... and who it was. It was sort of like how my grandfather explained things to me- just explaining, a friendly person who was explaining things; explaining that we need a little, bitty piece of you for understanding... and it was as though they had a puzzle that they were working on and it was very important to them. And they asked my permission. I guess it was a they... it was as though somebody was doing the explaining and someone else was the one who did it (the cutting). I don't have a strong sense of how many somebodies. I don't have a visual image. I have a visual image of soft colors, pearl-grays with some blue or mauve... but a kind of a textured feel, like leather and velvet, you know those kinds of nice, smooth comfortable textures, but I don't have... it could be that somebody was in a different room and talking to me and I knew there was somebody talking to me but, um - it was as though I was in a room by myself and yet I knew I wasn't. It's as though they said, 'You can't see us because you wouldn't understand how we look. It would scare you.'

No. They didn't say scare. It was as though you wouldn't understand, so it was easier to just talk. You know, I think it could be that I didn't see anybody at all. It could be that it was just all handled by automatic equipment, except that they explained to me what the equipment would do, you know, and how and why and did it in such a way that it was like an extension of somebody that I was communicating with . , . not a face, not a hand, but there was a gentleness about it. It wasn't anything abrupt. Whoever it is, it's someone I'm very comfortable with. It's either somebody that I've known, except that I think it just reminds me of somebody I've known, like my grandfather... somebody who's older and whom I'm very comfortable around, like a very explaining type of person.

It's as though there are more people than one but I think I only talked to one. And I'm more curious about where I am and more curious about the room and the immediate environment I'm in than where they come from and what they mean or what they're about. The room doesn't have an alien feeling; it's just different than I've seen - fancy, modern - and it seems pretty big. It seems like the room is either spherical- no, the room is like a round room or half of a round room. I don't see behind me, but what I'm looking at is round, I think, and it's like the walls are round, too. Round. It has a quality like the TWA terminal at JFK- round, curved walls.

There are lots of things to catch my eyes: things that shine, they're sparkly, like crystals or like instrumentation or... but they're so pretty that they don't distinguish in my eyes between whether they are things, or art. Just pretty. Like pearls and like crystals and like metal... mostly silver. It doesn't seem to be goldcolored. It seems to be silver-colored. And it's big - it seems it's big- it seems, it seems- um- bigger than your (Dr. Clamar's] living room, it seems maybe bigger than my living room, but not quite as big as my whole apartment. It's a big space. But, of course, I was littler. And the light doesn't come from any one place and it isn't all the same color. It changed a little bit and there are colors in different places, but only soft.

AC: How did you get from the chicken coop to here?

VH: Hmm... you know, it could be that I went to the chicken coop afterwards... the chicken coop... I don't know. I don't know (puzzled hesitation). Let me see. How did I get there? I'm so overwhelmed by being in the place that I am that I don't even remember getting there. How did I get there? Gently. It wasn't rough.

AC: It wasn't rough?

VH: No, it was gentle. It was like I was playing and I was just doing something and then all of a sudden I'm somewhere else. Nothing rough about it. Not rough at all. I think, however, it is just that I get there or something, but I don't understand. Just, "here I am." Then I think it's all right. Quiet, too. There's not much sound... maybe a soft, soft, soft subdued hum or noise like a humidifier makes, but there's not a lot of noise. It's nothing like flashy or bright or noisy, or abrupt, like maybe I'm just in the yard and then I'm somewhere else gently, nothing noisy or flashy or abrupt about it. It's almost like it's a dream. (Long pause.) In fact, maybe I thought it was a dream except, except I'd never had a dream like that! (Emphatic.) Also there's a strong sense of person to the person I'm talking to. A very grandfather ly quality about him, a quality that reminds me of my grandfather, who is very loving and very patient... likes to explain and share things with me and he's fun.... The place is like a dream, except the person's not like a dream. The communication is very real.

What else did he tell me? I... think he explained things. Well, you know, it's almost as though it was somebody I knew. You know, like 'How are you? How are things here and how have you been?' It isn't necessarily somebody I specifically knew but it does have a quality to it. Like somebody I know. 'Hello, how are you? How are things?' 'They're fine. They're fine. This is such a nice place.'

And- umm- (long pause) I guess we did talk about the stars. It's like he says, 'You know, you look up at the sky. You see all those stars.' 'Yes, I have done that.' 'And each one of those stars is a place like the sun that has its own places, like your place. And all of those stars have their places. There are a lot of things there, a lot of different homes, and we're from a long way away, from one of those places,' and it seems that he spent some time explaining to me that there are different kinds of places, you know, some that are like where I live and some that are very different and some that are very nice and some that aren't and some that are modern and some that aren't. And so it's a very big, exciting place to explore. You would like to go and see a lot of different places, what they're like.... Some of those people know each other and some of them don't, and he knows quite a lot of them. It's all sort of matter of fact. I mean... it's just like somebody would describe visiting Europe to you, you know, that there are different countries and they do different things in different countries, and you can travel between them like, pretty much like explaining to a child about foreign places. And also that the people that live there are all very different and some of them know things and can do things that are a lot different, mostly friendly, but not all. Kind of a long description of the variousness of life, places that people live and the adventures of visiting different places and learning more about it. And I guess he explains why I am there (in the craft)... that I am part of that adventure of discovering a new place and that it (Earth) seems like a nice place, and I say, 'Yes, it is. It is a nice place.' And I guess I ask him what his place is like, too, and, umm, what did he say? He says his place is different, that it would look strange to me, but not super-strange, and, umm, he was very happy. He was very happy about meeting me and about visiting, about talking to me. It's like the whole thing is a big happiness for him, as though he... you know, I have that sense that... it's a big deal, happy thing for them just to be talking to me and he's trying to share their excitement with me.

And I'm not so excited as I am just kind of happy about it and- let's see- he's sort of... he doesn't tell me too much about himself; it's like- umm- be has hands, says he has hands, it's like his fingers are longer. Well, I mean, maybe not longer, but it's like they're skinnier. He calls to mind... I don't know whether he calls to mind or his description calls to mind... maybe like tree frogs have, you know,... and I don't remember if he says how many (fingers). However, how ever many there are it isn't like they're a lot different .. . maybe four, maybe there's six. It isn't a lot different. And, umm, I think he says that they're a little grayer than we are in color and he says that it would take me quite a while to get used to how he looks.

I don't feel any overwhelming compulsive curiosity specifically about it. It's as if he's right there, just in the process of communicating. Umm, when I was a little kid, I always had a very easy rapport with older people, my grandparents and other people... he's just like another one of them. You know, like discovering another old friend. I have always had older people, friends, who explain things to me, and I accept it as just that kind of a thing.

And what else?... They have eyes. The eyes are different than ours. I don't remember exactly how. They might not have eyelids... and they might not have two eyes; they might have three or they might have two. I'm not sure about that, but they have eyes, and I think they stand; I think they have a body that stands up like ours does. Tall. Slim-type body. They can walk around... and the eyes are at the top. Let's see. Sort of going through the parts of him that are like the parts of us. Let's see if he says anything that's different. Ah... the skin's different. Bones are different. I guess he says his insides are arranged different, and I think he says something about the brain is a percentage of their total body... it's a bigger part of them. Hmm. Now what else did he say is different? 1 think hair. I don't remember whether they don't have any hair or whether the hair is different or whatever their surface is, it's somewhat different. Smoother, I think. Maybe like soft, pearly leather. It seems like their bones are different.

I don't think he said whether he was a man or a woman, but it seems like whatever it is it reminds me of a masculine thing, grand fatherly. Grandfatherly. He's old. Yes, he's definitely old and he doesn't tell me how old he is. He's just old. And that reminds me of my grandfather, too, who used to lie about his age, and he would say he was one hundred and three, which he wasn't, but he would just say it because he was telling me that he was old, and this person told me that he was very old, too, but he wouldn't tell me how old.

I think I just talked to one person. It seems like a long time. It seems like a whole afternoon, you know, a long, relaxed afternoon.

AC: (Inaudible question about the incision.)

VH: It's almost as though the couch has a thing on it which does that by itself, and I didn't see the person who does it. It's as though it's done remotely. You know, have you seen those things where you put your hands in when they handle radioactive material? Your hands go in and you handle instruments and then, at a remote location, something happens. It's like that. I don't think they have any direct contact with me, physically. It's as though wherever I am lying they're on that side of me behind the wall, or perhaps that's just where the sound comes from. It's as though I am talking to them over there in the next room. I guess it's because they tell me that, you know, I breathe my kind of air. I guess they breathe different air. I'm not sure about that, but it's as though, well, whatever it is it's for my comfort. All this, it's just like you find it so natural. Matter of fact.

(Break is continuity where the tape was changed. VH discusses wanting to see them again, but how can they find her?)

VH: It's an easy thing. It's almost as though he can identify me by... it's just like I stick out who I am, you know, like he can tell where lam.

AC: How can he tell who you are?

VH: Umm, like he can recognize a voice. It's like, he says, I can recognize your voice. It's sort of like recognizing brain waves, or something... it's like everybody has their own pattern, own trademark, so that he doesn't have any problem about that. When I think of it, I didn't... (explain?). It seems that I just accepted that. He said, 'It's like recognizing your voice.'

AC: Does the wound have any function in their ability to 'recognize you'?

VH: I'm thinking (pause)... umm. They didn't talk about blood. They just said, 'Take a little, teeny piece of you home.' It's as though, the way they described it to me, it's like a combination of a souvenir.... Yeah, I guess it does... a combination of a souvenir and a way of getting to know me better. And they asked my permission and they said it's very important and it won't hurt. And I say, 'Fine.' So I don't watch. It's as though there's kind of chromey stuff over there, you know. And so I don't watch. I don't think- I don't think it feels anything more than when you rub your fingernail on your skin or... (pause) maybe, I don't know whether maybe it hurt, and they told me it wouldn't hurt. Since I decided to do this (undergo hypnosis) and I've been thinking about it- it's like I could feel feeling in my leg. It's as though maybe there was pain there, but I was told it wouldn't (hurt) and then I didn't feel it. It was like the pain was inside and the pain wanted to come out - um - but I don't think it hurt at the time, and I think I asked 'Aren't you going to put a Band-Aid on it?' and they said, 'No, we'll just stop it from bleeding.' So whatever they do, they do it, you know, like this, and then it just closes itself and stops bleeding, like that's all part of what they touch me with, you know, just like (pop)... but there's no Band-Aid. O.K., so that's fine. Yeah, I guess they leave it attached to me. I mean next to me as though it's just holding it against me, and uh- yeah, it's against my leg. Soft, like that, and (pause) he has to explain to me that in a while that I can't remember him... yeah... and 'You won't be able to remember unless you see me again.' I have a hard time understanding why not. He says, you know, people will be upset, and I say, 'Why?' He says because it's different than what they do. It's one of those things... kids - you know- why? Why? Why?' This is just nice, you know. My mother won't be upset. I'm certain! They say, 'Well, that may be, but other people will be and you don't want them to treat you like you're weird just because you visited me.'

'No. Why would they do that?'

'Because people just do.'

'Now, I don't think so, I just don't think so.'

'Yes, they do.'

It's sort of like I don't believe him, but he tells me that that is the way it is... because 1 don't have a sense of weirdness about it, so I can't imagine why anybody else would.

We laugh about some things. I can't remember what. Some things are funny. Some kind of chuckley things like- oh, it's funny. It seems like we laugh about chickens. I don't know. It's just that we do some laughing about how funny things were. I don't really know what.

Yeah, he just asked me if I would like to visit him at his home, and I said, 'Yes, I would.' And so that's another maybe. I ask him if it's nice, and he says, 'Yes, it is.' You feel a lot like the way it feels right now, and, um, he seems to enjoy how much I enjoy all the sparkly things. It doesn't mean that they have a lot of sparkly things at home.

AC: (Inaudible question about the purpose of his visit.)

VH: We had... it's the adventure of it. You know, it's the fun of it and the adventure of it. He explains about all those wonderful, interesting places to visit. How different life is in different places and... the different kinds of animals and plants and people and different ways of doing things, and that it's so interesting to see and learn about them. So he just explains it like an adventure.

It's funny. When I went to graduate school. I remember that people would ask me what I wanted to do. I said I wanted to be an adventuress, and I was very taken with the idea of adventure, and traveling around and seeing neat things and trying neat things, meeting interesting people. It sounded like a lot of fun, and he said it was a lot of fun, and that was why he had come to see me and that's why he would try to come back another time to see me again if he could.

Yes, he painted a wonderful picture of all there is to see. Beautiful things, unbelievable things... and no end to them. No matter how long you looked or how far you went, you'd never get to the end of them.

AC: Did he tell you how you could get to visit these places?

VH: Yes, he said he could take me there, but that it would take a while and that we didn't have time now. Maybe some other time he would. And, ah, you know, like, 'Your Mom would be upset if we went away for a while, you know.' A while didn't seem to be- didn't seem to be years, you know, it could have been months, but it would take a while, which seemed natural, of course, and, uh, yeah, he couldn't do that without asking my mother's permission. And I said I was sure she wouldn't care. I said I'd ask her. *No, we couldn't do that just now.' He didn't say he would and he didn't say he wouldn't, but it was just something we couldn't do right then, so maybe we would do it another time.

AC: Has he done it for others? Has he taken others to his place?

VH: I don't think I asked him. I don't think- you know the light might have been very bright. It seems like my eyes hurt me. (Virginia was rubbing her eyes.] Maybe the light was very bright. Pretty, but bright. (Returns to the question.) Did he take others? Well when we talked about it, he didn't talk about it as though it was a new idea or something that was an odd question. It was like, you know, you'd ask your grandfather if he would take you to town to go to a movie, and it wasn't that it was a novel idea or anything. It was as if he felt like it, he could or would, and I don't think I asked about anybody else.

It seemed like- it seemed like it was just a special relationship with me, but you see that was true of the way I related to older people, so I don't know whether that was- I mean, I was especially close to my grandparents and especially close to aunts and uncles and it was always a very special relationship to me. They were closer to me- it was just that kind of a thing. We were good buddies and that just seemed very natural to me, but... he talked about the adventure of it as though he wasn't the only person who did it. People did it because it was a neat thing to learn, and a fun thing to look around, and it didn't seem it was unusual for more than one person to do it. The thing is, you know, it wasn't like I was talking to strangers - that's what made it so interesting. You would have thought, you know, when I first got there, I mean it wasn't an uncomfortable place, but you would have thought that, when I started to talk to somebody, it would have seemed like- it's almost like there wasn't much even in the way of introductions.

AC: As if you've known each other from somewhere or other from before?

VH: Either that we had known each other, or about each other, or were just the kind of people who found it easy to get to know one another. It just wasn't - it wasn't like when you meet a stranger.

We had reached a logical stopping place in what had turned out to be a remarkable session. I signaled Dr. Clamar and she nodded agreement. After a minute or so of instruction about how relaxed she would feel, and how easy about what she had learned, Virginia came out of the trance. She yawned, stretched, and smiled and the tension broke; we all realized at that moment how deep our concentration had been, and how intense our psychological involvement in her unfolding adventure.

It was well into the dinner hour, so we departed quickly. I hardly knew what to say after the revelations of the past hour, but I mumbled good-bye and thanked them for their time; then I headed back to my place in Chelsea to mull over what we had learned. So many things coincided with other abduction cases; in fact, all during the hypnotic session, little bells of recall kept sounding in my mind, as detail after familiar detail surfaced. When I had time finally to re-examine some of the case material, I found the specific parallels I was searching for in other accounts, most of which are either completely unknown to the public, or at least extremely obscure.

The general description of the circular walls and the even, sourceless lighting of the examining room naturally fit the pattern. But there was an interesting detail about the color of the light. Virginia had said that it "might be pale gray, or a real soft gray... pearly... those kinds of colors." "Gray" or "pearly" seemed odd words to use to describe bright light, but in the 1976 Casey County, Kentucky, abduction of three women, Ms. Elaine Thomas, under hypnosis, also described the examining room as being lit by a gray light. 1 Barney Hill, under hypnosis in 1964, described the room in which he underwent some kind of physical examination as "being filled with this bluish light... which didn't cast any shadows." 2 David Stephens, abducted with a companion in Maine in 1975, thought the curving walls of the examining room were gray and the floors shiny. 3 So we have a narrow band of colors used to describe the atmosphere - pale, soft gray, pearly, bluish- denoting a cool, specific range far away from either white, which one might expect, or a normal incandescent range.

Virginia described this gray light as being very bright; in fact, she frequently rubbed her eyes during the hypnotic period. In her second session, she even complained that the subdued lighting in Dr. Clamar's office was too bright, and ultimately we had to switch off the lamps and continue almost in the dark. Carl Higdon, 4 who was abducted in Wyoming in 1974, complained later about the lights in the hospital room where he was taken after his ordeal. They were too bright, he said. His eyes were extremely bloodshot and teared constantly. Mona Stafford, another of the women in the Casey County case, 5 suffered a severe burning and tearing of the eyes. Her two companions also had trouble with their eyes, though Mrs. Stafford's problem was so severe that she consulted a doctor. Betty Hill, 6 describing her position on an examining table as she recalled it through hypnosis, said, "... the light is very very bright, so my eyes aren't always open. I'm a little scared, too. I'm not particularly interested in looking at them (the humanoids who are performing the examination)." Young Gerry Armstrong was abducted at the age of twelve from the grounds of the school he was attending in England. When he was found seven hours later, he remembers, there was something wrong with his eyes although he is not sure what the problem was; he feels he might have been told that his eyes were dilated. 7 This abduction of a twelve-year-old in 1953 creates an interesting additional parallel - the very early taking of a child - but through many of these encounters - the Wyoming, Kentucky, New Hampshire and English cases I have cited are only a random sample - eye reactions are extremely common.

Prior to her second hypnotic session- which turned out to be more startling even than her first- Virginia discussed with Dr. Clamar and me some further specific details which she had consciously recalled. Hypnosis is an odd process in that most frequently after the subject comes out of the trance he or she continues to remember things. It is a little like turning off the garden hose; the flow immediately slows, ebbs, and finally trickles to a stop - the turn of the valve does not produce instantaneous results. In a conversation which was, of course, recorded at the time, Virginia said this about the equipment which made the cut on her leg:

"It was something like dental equipment, but much smoother. It didn't look like something abrasive or scary; it was more like, maybe half the size of your torso . , . mostly smooth like a metal box with rectangular contours, but rounded, and with fixtures that might pull out, you know, to do things like dental equipment does. It's retractable but nothing so sharp and crude as that... more like soft contours, more like a tentacle. It was as though the thing that touched me was just like a massager, like those electric massagers, the long ones. Just something simple-looking, almost a tubular thing. It reached out and just laid against my leg. It looked to be all metal. No obvious cutting edges or anything like that. It didn't have any real evidences of fine instrumentation, you know, cutting edges or plucking edges or filing edges." Just a simple, tubular object which came out of a boxlike instrument on the end of a retractable arm. I asked if she noticed any sound.

"A soft vibration, maybe... 1 think I felt it, but I don't think I heard it."

David Stephens, whose 1975 abduction in Maine I have already mentioned, described lying on a table near a machine which "looked square, had lights on the left side of the front, and it had an arm coming out" with something on the end of it, "like some kind of X-ray machine or something." 8 Betty Hill described a device which was like a letter opener in shape which scraped over her arm. 9 One of the Kentucky abductees recalls an elongated bullet-shaped object about an inch-and-one-half in diameter being placed on her chest. 10 It seems to me these witnesses are trying to describe the same equipment through the use of various homely images, with varying degrees of success. Virginia's "elongated massager" image describes an object conventionally about six or seven inches long by about one-and-one-half inches in diameter, which accords nicely with Elaine Thomas's "bullet-shaped"- cylindrical- object "about one-and-one-half inches in diameter"; this silhouette, of course, is not unlike that of a letter opener. And most interesting is the persistent "neutrality" of the description-an object that seems efficient and totally unspectacular in appearance. It constitutes the exact opposite of the complicated Star Wars gadgetry so inescapable in pop culture. Virginia's "machine" gains validity to me by virtue of its plainness and simplicity.

When Ted Bloecher listened to the tape of Virginia's hypnotic session, we were able to discuss at length the new factors which it presented. First of all, as I've mentioned before, the Hill case of 1961, which surfaced only in 1964, was for many years the earliest abduction case which had been satisfactorily investigated and eventually accepted by most UFO investigators. But here we were with a case that preceded it by eleven years! A few other cases earlier than 1961 had come to light in the years following John Fuller's book on Betty and Barney Hill, and a few had been rather summarily studied, though very few had been explored through hypnosis. Here, we had an unfolding case with an eminently intelligent and credible witness, who bore a physical trace- Virginia's very noticeable scar, (see illustration section)

Even more important was our realization at that moment that Virginia, like Steven Kilburn, had no conscious recall of a UFO sighting. When these two cases which we had uncovered were seen in context with the "Patty Price'' case of 1973 11 and the Judy Kendall case, we knew that there was a sub-group within the UFO abduction spectrum: cases in which people are abducted and all memory traces of a UFO sighting are subsequently suppressed. As Steven wondered aloud on NBC's UFO presentation, how many people may have had this experience without knowing it? And how many years has it been going on?

Ted Bloecher, drawing on his mental storage files, pointed out that a significant number of humanoid cases over the last decades involved sightings by children, and many of these took place in rural settings. In dozens of instances, children reported that, while they were outside playing, one or two small men wearing strange silvery or gray costumes approached them and then departed as suddenly as they had appeared. How many of these cases, we wondered, might have involved time lapses that a six-year-old girl or a ten-year-old boy, playing alone in the afternoon, would never have noticed? What were the dimensions of the problem? It was as if our classic type of abduction case- the automobile being stopped at night as a glowing object descends - may represent only a narrow aspect of the phenomenon.

And what were "they" doing with a six-year-old child, and why did they need to take a "little, bitty piece" of her? What was the problem or "puzzle" they were working on? Most of the abduction cases on record involved some kind of sample taking during the examination, if that last term is indeed even remotely accurate; skin samples, blood samples, hair samples, 12 almost everything one could imagine, but this seemed somehow more serious a piece of her flesh, a deep incision across many layers of skin and muscle.

One of the differences between Virginia's encounter and the other abduction reports we have been considering is her apparent lack of any fear. It is important, first of all, to remember that her story begins when she is already inside the examining room of the UFO. The reader will recall that the most consistently frightening time is at the outset of the experience when the abductee is simultaneously paralyzed and approached by the captors. Even after her second hypnotic session (the subject of chapter 8), Virginia still had not remembered in detail that section of her encounter, so one can assume her unconscious mind effectively censored out the "bad part." The six-year-old child who underwent this extraordinary adventure probably handled it differently than many adults - and also might have been treated differently by her captors. Obviously, these two sets of variables exist in each abduction experience.

But gentler, more traditional fairy motifs can be found, even in Hopkins's accounts. Take Virginia Horton, who encounters a deer which may be a fairy in disguise in an enchanted forest, and under hypnosis recalls an imperfectly modernised fairy revel. “In reality” we might suggest that the blood which covered her came from the deer, which was wounded: that she held and comforted a dying deer, that the fairy quality was either a denial of the brute facts of death and blood, or a vision of transcendence - depending on one's own beliefs. Anyway, the story of Virginia and her deer is profoundly moving, and Hopkins's reduction of it to “nothing but” a cover story for medical examination by Greys is a sign of the loss of soul in American ufology.

Pure amensia, with later appreance of a ufo theme

Finally, recently, with Budd Hopkins' investigations, a new syndrome has just appeared, where any reference to the UFO theme is absent. "The plot is approximately as follows: a person finds a hole in his schedule, possibly associated with a "dis-location" or phobia of a specific place (usually an isolated section of road, a field, etc.). Immediately thereafter, the subject discovers a scar or a fresh wound on his body. This experience will remain associated for him with something disturbing and he will not cease until it has been elucidated. This is how he sometimes ends up with a psychiatrist who thinks of using hypnosis, thus making appear the classic abduction scenario.

The young woman who testifies under the pseudonym Virginia Horton is currently a brilliant New York lawyer about forty years old. Her adventure dates back to the summer of 1950, when she was eight years old. Like every year, she spent the summer on her grandparents' farm in Canada, in Manitoba. Suddenly, as she was playing in a barn, she found herself several hundred meters away, in the farmyard, without understanding how she could have arrived at this place. She felt a warm liquid flow along her leg. Rolling up her pants, she found at mid-calf a deep, clean wound that was absolutely painless. A flap of flesh had disappeared. The wound was 2.5 centimeters long, and more than a centimeter deep; she was bleeding profusely. But, curiously, her pants were not torn. The girl arrived in tears at her grandparents' house, who searched in vain for the object likely to cause such a wound. Virginia was so stupefied by this inexplicable wound that she recalls undoing the bandage that very evening to look at the wound.

As a teenager, Virginia experienced a similar mishap. It was in 1966; she was with her parents traveling in France. The family was preparing to picnic at the edge of an Alsatian forest, in a game-filled place. While the table was set, the girl entered the room with the hope of seeing a deer. She seemed to have left for only a few minutes; but on her return, she realized that her parents, maddened by her absence, had been looking for her for three quarters of an hour. She discovered that her apron was stained with blood, but her body bore no wound, not even a scratch. The incident marked the girl all the more because she had not forgotten the precedent. She tried several times to dispel the mystery of this adventure, without ever establishing, at least consciously, a relationship with the UFO context. In 1980, she met the investigator Budd Hopkins who sent her to the New York psychotherapist Aphrodite Clamar. Under hypnosis, Virginia Horton recounted a very classic abduction scenario: lead aboard a UFO, she underwent a surgical examination in which the entities practiced the removal of a portion of flesh on her calf, and implanted something in her nose. Another encounter took place sixteen years later, in Alsace: it was on this occasion that the implant was removed, which explains the presence of blood on the apron.

There were some other interesting aspects of the abduction phenomenon that had begun to surface. For example, the Virginia Horton case: after NBC had run a piece about abductions on its Nightly News show late in 1979, featuring Hopkins and Clamar and Mike Bershad, Horton had telephoned Dr Clamar with her story. She was a corporate lawyer, living on the east coast, with a husband and a family and an ordinary life. She had always been fascinated by the possibility of space travel, but strictly human space travel - NASA and the astronauts, that kind of thing - and had never been very interested in strange phenomena such as UFOs. A friend of hers, who also knew Clamar, had seen the NBC show and had told her about it, and now Virginia remembered that some strange things had happened to her as a child. Once in the summer of 1950, when she was six, she had been at her grandfather's farm in Manitoba, and had gone into a barn to gather eggs from the chickens - and the next thing she knew she was out in the yard again, with an itch on the back of her calf. She pulled up the leg of her jeans, and saw that she was bleeding from a neat surgical-type wound. Her jeans were undamaged, and she couldn't think of any reason for the wound, or remember how she had got back into the yard. After her friend told her about the abduction story on NBC, Virginia called her mother to ask if she remembered the incident. She didn't, but she did remember a time when the family had been on a picnic somewhere in France. Virginia, then sixteen, and her brother had been exploring a nearby forest but had become separated. Her brother had been looking for her for at least half an hour but couldn't find her and when she finally reappeared, her dress mysteriously spattered with blood, she claimed that she had been with her brother until just before she had emerged from the woods; otherwise, all she could remember was that in the woods she had met a beautiful deer.

Under hypnosis it turned out that when she was six in Manitoba she had been taken into a bright room in a spacecraft by grey aliens who had explained that they were from far away, among the stars, and that they only wanted to take a piece of her home, and that it would be best for her not to remember anything afterwards. At one point a big box-like thing, attached to a retractable arm, similar to the thing that Bershad had seen, came down from the ceiling and emitted a tubelike instrument which rubbed the back of her leg at the place where she later found the incision. And when she had been in the woods in France, and had seen the deer - well, the deer turned out to have been a peculiarly grey sort of deer, with peculiarly large black eyes, and inside the spaceship her old friends (for it was the same group) showed her star maps and told her they were from another galaxy and spoke about the importance of biological diversity and the preservation of species, such as the human species ... and she talked them into giving her a short ride a few hundred miles up, and at one point they laid her down gently on a table and inserted a needle-like instrument into her left nostril, giving her a slight nosebleed which explained the blood on her dress.

The idea of aliens sticking things into abductees' nostrils wasn't too new; quite a number of the abduction cases which had been investigated and publicized by other UFO researchers in the seventies had turned out to include this kind of thing. Sometimes the witness remembered seeing something on the end of the needle that wasn't there when the needle came out again, as if some kind of neurological monitor had been implanted in the forebrain. The Horton case merely confirmed that the nasal-implant motif was a common one. But the case also suggested some new and interesting things about the abduction phenomenon. First, there was the matter of the scar on her leg. This kind of thing didn't appear too often in the literature, but it seemed to be happening to a great many of the abductees whom Hopkins looked at. An 'unexplained' scar not only indicated what the aliens might be up to; it also provided missing time, which suggested that a given individual had previously been abducted.

Another new feature of abduction phenomenology was suggested by the fact that Virginia's deer in the woods in France had clearly been a 'screen memory', put there by the aliens or by Virginia's own frightened perception. The screen memory concept suggested that many other cases might also be masked by such prosaic recollections.

Finally, the fact that Virginia had been abducted at least twice suggested that abductions in general might not be isolated, once-in-a-lifetime events for the abductee. Each abduction might represent part of an ongoing, lifelong research programme, involving for example tissue and cell sampling, the ultimate purpose of which only the aliens knew.

The second startling revelation in Missing Time appears in one of the last chapters, which recounts the encounters of a Virginia Horton. Horton, it seemed, claimed two abduction encounters, which indicated that, for some unknown reason, the aliens were following her life. The idea that someone might be abducted twice was an entirely new, and frightening idea that was just starting to be reported. Betty and Barney Hill, Travis Walton and most of the other early abductees, with the exception of Betty Andreasson [hoax], whose encounters more resembled those of the early contactées, each had but one abduction experience. The abductees appeared to be people who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time; aliens had picked them up, conducted some tests, and let them go. The Horton case, however, indicated that aliens might be choosing certain humans for abduction and then monitoring those humans over a period of time.

Horton's first strange memory was as a six-year-old on her grandparent's farm near Lake Superior in the summer of 1950. Horton had entered a barn to gather some eggs, when, all of the sudden, she found herself standing in the yard with a large cut on her leg. Her second experience occurred during a family picnic when she was sixteen. She remembers following a beautiful "almost...mystical" deer into the woods. The next thing she recalled was coming out of the woods with a horrible bloody nose. Based on Horton's memories she under went hypnotic regression with Hopkins. Under hypnosis, Horton told of encountering grey-colored beings who examined her. Hopkins placed much importance on the second incident, with the mystical deer. He believed the deer was a ruse put on by the aliens to lure Virginia away from her family. Once Horton was in the woods, the aliens inserted a "probe" into her left nostril, which caused the bloody nose Horton had remembered.

Budd is fascinated. Some witnesses remember seeing a UFO, others have snatches of memories of their adventure inside a craft, but Bershad did not remember anything: he does not even remember seeing a luminous object! The absence of memory does not prove anything, Hopkins notes. The researcher is not done with the meanders and caprices of memory. A little later, he discovers that his witnesses report, with the best faith in the world, false memories. They remember to have met an animal with big eyes: owl, deer, wolf, fallow deer... The hypnosis will reveal that, behind the memorized appaeaence of this animal, hides... an alien. With Virginia, it will be a deer.

At the age of six, Virginia Horton, who was picking eggs from a barn, suddenly found herself in a farm yard with one leg bleeding profusely. Her parents did not understand how she could have inflicted herself such a deep, clean, clear wound like as done with a sharp instrument. Unbelievable detail, her jeans were not damaged and the girl assured that she had not removed her pants.

Ten years later, Virginia spends her holidays in France. During a picnic, she disappears to reappear, nearly two hours later, saying she had not moved away. Her blouse is stained with blood as if she had bled. In the forest, she saw a beautiful deer who, she was sure, told her telepathically goodbye. As an adult, Virginia (now a lawyer) decides to explore these two hours of which she has kept no memory. Under hypnosis, Dr. Aphrodite Clamar asks her to describe this deer. Virginia is talking about a small humanoid with very large eyes Dr. Clamar returns to the point:

- I ask you to describe to me the animal you saw.

- But yes! It is about the size of a ten-year-old child, he has a big head, very long arms, huge black eyes, but... it's not a deer, it's a little being...

And Virginia engages on a story of abduction during which the aliens have performed on her these multiple examinations and operations they seem so fond of, warning her kindly before taking a little nasal mucosa: "We will bring back to our place a tiny bit of you."

Virginia only remembered the deer, whose image - reassuring and scarcely able to arouse questions - played the role of a screen memory implanted in her mind as if to hide other disturbing events.

This intrusion of the screen memory, in the form of descriptions of animals whose behavior during abduction is not plausible, is noted by most therapists. When the abductee must provide more details, he eventually discovered that they were aliens. Just before being kidnapped, a patient of Dr. David Gotlib saw three horses. The psychiatrist asked him to draw them: the abductee penciled three "Gray" and was troubled when his "error" was reported to him. He claimed to have represented what he had seen and was convinced that it was horses! Under hypnosis, this man confirmed his observation of three "Gray".

UNITED STATES, 1950

This case is told by a brilliant New York lawyer lady. She would have been the victim (like many American "abductees") of a first kidnapping very young, then another much later. Some witnesses tell of being repeatedly kidnapped.

The affair began in 1950. The future victim was 8 years old and played on her grandparents' farm during the summer. Suddenly, she finds herself several hundred meters from her playground. A wound is bleeding on her leg, a flap of skin has disappeared. The little girl is in tears, and cannot explain what happened. Her grandparents will search in vain for an object that could have hurt her.

Sixteen years later, the young woman is living in France with her parents. The group settled on the edge of an Alsatian forest to have a picnic. The young girl who hopes to see animals goes deep into the woods. When she returns, she finds her father and mother completely distraught. She has been missing for three quarters of an hour, when she thinks she was only gone for a few minutes. Blood covers her apron. She has no memory of her stay in the forest.

In 1980, the young woman met the famous American ufologist Budd Hopkins, who persuaded her to try hypnosis. The memory of several kidnappings resurfaces. The first took place during her vacation with her grandparents, where she was taken on board a spaceship in which humanoids took a piece of flesh from her calf. An implant would also have been inserted in her nose and removed during a second kidnapping, sixteen years later, in Alsace, causing the bleeding which stained her clothes.

1966, Summer

FRANCE, Alsace

(cfr 1950, Summer, Canada, Manitoba) On a trip with her parents, the young woman entered a forest of Alsace, in a game-filled area in the hope of seeing a deer. It seemed to her to have remained there only a few minutes, but her parents had been looking for her for three quarters of an hour. Her apron was stained with blood, yet she had no injuries or even a scratch. (in 1980 under hypnosis she reveals she had been conducted into a UFO, where one operated the ablation of flesh of her ankle and where one implanted something in her nose - in Alsace this implant is said to have been removed). (Bertrand MEHEUST: "En soucoupes volantes" - Imago 1992 - p. 43, 44)

M.-T. DE BROSSES - Virginia...

B. HOPKINS - ...remembered seeing a deer, Virginia Horton; the deer had very beautiful dark eyes, and under hypnosis it turned into a gray extraterrestrial! The only thing that is as misleading as the extraterrestrials is certainly the government and the way it treats this problem! Never believe what a government official tells you on this matter, and never believe what an alien can tell you about what they are here to do! The safest is to be slightly cynical.

Hopkin's first revelation arose from hypnosis sessions in the 1970s with an abductee named Virginia Horton. Horton, it seemed, claimed two abuduction encounters, which indicated that, for some reason, the aliens were following her life. The idea that someone might be abducted twice was entirely new at the time. Betty and Barney Hill, Travis Walton, and most other early abductees each had one abduction experience. Abductees appeared to be people who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Horton case suggested that the "Grays" puprosefully selected certain victims.

Horton's first strange memory was as a six-year-old on her granparents' farm near Lake superior in the Summer of 1950. she had entered a barn to gather some eggs; suddenly, she found herself stamding in the yard with a large cut on her leg. Then, when she was 16, Horton followed a deer in the woods. The next thing she remembered was coming out of those woods with a terrible bloody nose. Under hypnosis, she recovered memories od each incident, which involved examniation by gray-colored beings. during the second incident, the creatures inserted a "probe" into her left nostril that caused Horton's bloody nose.

1950 - The Virginia Horton case

By Tyron29 in Ufo and aliens - The CE4s on January 2nd, 2009 at 10:29

THE LITTLE GIRL THAT SERVED AS GUMIIEA PIG TO THE ALIENS

In 1950, thirty-seven children, all seven years old, were captured by UFO occupants! Studied from every angle, subjected to all sorts of examinations and sampled of organic tissues, then released with a conditioning so that they kept no memory.

In 1959, they were again captured and released under the same conditions, as if the mysterious space travelers had come to see the result of experiments attempted on them nine years before. Such is the amazing revelation made by the American ufologist Budd Hopkins in his book Missing Time that has just come out in the United States. Of the nineteen cases he personally investigated, that of a young woman who wishes to remain anonymous because of her employment as a lawyer in a major corporation, and whom he refers to as Virginia Horton.

Virginia, therefore, since Virginia there is, remembered a slight injury she had made a few days before her seventh birthday, while she was living on her grandfather's farm in the southern part of the country of the Canadian province of Manitoba. She was near a barn when she noticed that there was a stain of fresh blood on the leg of her jeans at the calf. Rolling up her pants, she saw a deep cut about one and a half centimeters by two inches long that did not hurt her. But what surprised him the most, and which surprised his family too, was that her jeans were not torn. This inexplicable adventure puzzled her for some time, then, as time passed, she forgot about it. In 1979, Virgina watched on television a story about a child who had found details about his life, unknown in the conscious state, while he was under hypnosis by a renowned psychologist from New York, Dr. Aphrodite Clamar.

Remembering her adventure and eager to clear the case, Virginia wrote to Dr. Clamar to propose to try on her a hypnotic regression. The practitioner acceded to her desire and, a few weeks later, during a session, she began to make in a monotonous voice, under deep hypnosis, the strange following story: "I lie on a bed... or on something that looks like an operating table... my leg is cut with a scalpel... someone tells me that I will not feel anything... I do not see any faces near me, just pale colors, pearl gray with some bluish... I do not know how I came here... a voice tells me not to panic... then it tells me... or rather it does not tell me anything I understand, but I had the impression that it spoke to me, that it told me that it had come from far away... that it had a body much like ours, but that inside it was not the same... that it wanted to see how I was doing."

And, over the course of the sessions, it was the same type of story, with each time, additional details. Then Virginia told how an adventure had happened to her for sixteen years old. As the sessions progressed, Dr. Clamar was able to reconstruct all her adventure. She had played the role of a guinea pig for humanoids with biological and medical knowledge far superior to ours. By confronting this testimony with others of the same type, Budd Hopkins came to the conclusion that the Earth was really the subject of a careful exploration in the 1950s. Contemporary ufology has recorded many other cases of men and women reliving under hypnosis examinations to which extraterrestrials would have submitted them. Admittedly, there is never formal proof and everything depends on the credibility of the stories in a state of hypnotic regression. This again raises the question of whether emcounters of the third kind can be dangerous, subject to which I have already devoted a file. It appears that disturbances recorded by witnesses of such encounters were involuntarily provoked by the occupants of U.F.O. by ignorance of human physiology.

However, even in the opposite case, could we accuse our visitors of cruelty?

I answer in the negative in all sincerity, although sincerity has nothing to do here.

No, for two reasons: (1) We do not know whether the taking of human samples is carried out with deliberate hostile intent, with the obvious purpose of harming people on this planet; none of the "sampled" came back, until today, to affirm it; 2) We have serious testimonials, concerning facts subsequently checked, that make us think the opposite."

In any case we are far from understanding the intelligence that dominates us...

C/ This is a Franco-Canadian case developed by B. Hopkins in his book (18); it concerns Virginia Horton (pseudonym) to whom sessions of regressive hypnosis carried out in 1979 reactivated forgotten memories, especially about a disturbing encounter during a stay in France, in Alsace, in June 1960, when she was 16 years old. During a family picnic, to play with her brother, she went into the woods and stayed there for 30 minutes to an hour, which worried her family, especially since on her return there was blood on her blouse.

Unable to pinpoint the cause, she only remembered a deer that had weirdly looked at her. By having her personality reinstated 19 years earlier by hypnosis, one realized that the image of the deer was a camouflage for a real UFO contact in which she had met a family of greyish creatures in a flying machine in the forest: "They celebrated something. Blood had been drawn from inside her nose and the ceremony was to celebrate the result of an experiment performed on her 10 years earlier when she had already been abducted by those same beings while, as a child, she was picking up eggs in the barn on her grandfather's farm in Manitoba, Canada. She had, on this occasion, made a trip aboard the UFO and was examined in a medical office. The aliens had long fingers and eyes without eyelids...

Case not really French, the unity of place being hardly respected.

3 / This is a French-Canadian case cited by Budd Hopkins, an American specialist in "abductions". In his book "Extraterrestrial Abductions: Witnesses Speak" (1995) where he reviews seven cases of reminiscence of abudction, one touches on Virginia Horton (pseudonym) whom regressive hypnosis sessions "awoke" her forgotten memories, especially about a disturbing encounter during a stay in France, in Alsace, in June 1960, when she was 16 years old. During a family picnic, to play with her brother, she went into the woods and stayed there for 30 minutes to an hour, which worried her family, especially since on her return she had blood on her back of her blouse.

Unable to pinpoint the cause, she only remembered a deer that had weirdly looked at her. By having her personality reinstated 19 years earlier by hypnosis, one realized that the image of the deer was a camouflage for a real UFO contact in which she had met a family of greyish creatures in a flying machine in the forest: "They celebrated something. Blood had been drawn from inside her nose and the ceremony was to celebrate the result of an experiment performed on her 10 years earlier when she had already been abducted by those same beings while, as a child, she was picking up eggs in the barn on her grandfather's farm in Manitoba, Canada. She had, on this occasion, made a trip aboard the UFO and was examined in a medical office. The aliens had long fingers and eyes without eyelids...