medium.com/on-the-trail-of-the-saucers/a-personal-note-about-alien-abduction-108ba39e3a31A Personal Note About Alien AbductionMaking sense of your life means accepting you are not crazy. Something real did happen, starting when I was seven years old. I have the scars to prove it.by Mark Hammons /
medium.com/@markhammons_633611-3-2022
AS I MOVE INTO WHAT IS most likely the last decade of my life, I am almost as close in years to my death as I was from my birth when I discovered not everyone gets the same ride. This bit of wisdom came to me not because I was old enough to understand racism, social privilege, or economic disadvantage. Rather, for years grayish beings only slightly bigger than me would walk through the wall of my bedroom in a blue glow and do stuff to my body.
Go ahead and snicker, if that makes you feel better. Everyone I tried to tell did. No one believed me. Everybody accused me of having an overactive imagination, at best. Because I told my parents the same thing over and over every time it happened, I was condemned as a liar. I went to those who were supposed to be protecting me and they punished me for telling them the truth of my experience. My value as a human being was diminished for being open with people. Lesson acknowledged.
On the upside, I also came to understand that while adults pretend otherwise as a lifestyle, they don’t know about everything that actually occurs. That valuable insight has continued to mature over the decades. As you can well imagine, I have since recognized a great deal more pretentious igannance at work in the world than I have enlightened awareness. And, oh yes, bonus point: people can plumb great depths of ridicule, rudeness, and rejection if you threaten their self-content with something that doesn’t fit into the existing system of conceptual pigeon holes.
Nobody wants to be afraid.
Finding The Scary Place
Let me get the basics out of the way.
When I was seven years old my family moved into a new house and I got my own bedroom. There was a large backyard completely enclosed by an eight foot high cinder block fence. My room at the rear of the house had a window into the yard, but the sill was higher than I was tall at the time. I couldn’t look out of it even on my tiptoes. Laying on my twin sized bed placed on the opposite side of the room by the door, I could only see the night sky. The drift of the stars and the moon was beautiful to enjoy in the days before light pollution. I loved my room. I felt safe and happy there. At first.
We had lived at the new place for about a year before it started. I recall with joy that first Christmas season. There was a big, well ornamented tree in the formal living room where I was not allowed to go, so naturally I did whenever no one else was around. Hey, some of those presents had my name on them! I liked my home. I could catch plentiful horned toads, now an endangered species, in the back yard. I kept them in shoe boxes but they always managed to escape. Or, maybe, my parents let them go.
In retrospect, my existence was comfortably ordinary for the late 1950s. I had plenty of Lincoln Logs (which I learned later had been designed by one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s sons, John Lloyd Wright) and playing with them constantly jump started a life long love of architecture. I didn’t get to watch a lot of television, but did regularly see shows like I Love Lucy (my favorite), Adam and Eve, and Hennessey. My parents’ taste in movies tended toward Gone With the Wind and Gigi. There was no The Day The Earth Stood Still, no creature from the Black Lagoon, no Mummy or Frankenstein. We did go to a radical Protestant church every Sunday, but that was a whole other scary business.
In short, there were no environmental cues to spark the imagination of a child into believing non-human creatures might walk through a brick wall in a blue beam of light during the middle of the night to do unpleasant things to me.
Yet they did.
We’re Going To Get You
I’m not sure I can remember the first time they came for me.
Instead, all I have in my memory about the beginning of what would go on for years is the arrival of dread of being in my bedroom at night. Always this was focused on the wall opposite my bed, and particularly on the window. The closet or underneath the bed didn’t scare me. But something else did, and over the years I have come to think that I didn’t consciously notice what was happening until it had already begun.
Then one night I became aware of what, exactly, it was that had brought me to fear being alone in my room when everyone else was asleep. I saw the faces in the window. There was a small whitish head the color of moonlight with big black eyes, or sometimes several heads, looking right at me. Those eyes were frightening, like I was being swallowed. I wanted to cry out, to scream for help. I could not speak, not make a squeak or grunt of any kind no matter how hard I tried. I could not move. I was wholly paralyzed. I could only be aware that I was very much conscious whatever was happening shouldn’t be. It was wrong.
Then they came through the wall in a surge of light and stood next to my bed. They were short, standing only a little higher than me. I was always logical as a child, so I asked myself how could they have looked in through a window I couldn’t see out of? Were they standing on something? No, I realized, they were floating. They sort of bobbed up and down, a little side to side, when they looked in, but when they were inside they seemed to walk normally on the floor.
Usually, they started touching me right away. There was sometimes pain, though when I felt whatever they were doing to my body it was as if I was outside myself. I simply recognized, in an oddly adult sort of way now that I consider the memory, that something hurt but at a distance.
No, I didn’t get taken onboard a flying saucer. No, I didn’t get wafted up out of my bed and through the wall. No, I didn’t get the Space Brothers travelogue. No, I didn’t find myself with others of my own kind having the same abduction experience, forming a select crowd to save the world. I just laid there unable to move or speak, knowing they were doing things to my body.
I was utterly terrified, but completely alert. Until I wasn’t. Almost always I would lose consciousness before they left and wake up scared in the morning. Sometimes I had wet the bed when they were there. A few times, I saw them leave the way they came, in a bluish glow right through the wall. The paralysis would cease. Slowly I would come back to being able to move, to croak with a little sound out of my throat. I remember several times running into my parents bedroom, in the middle of the night, trying to wake them up with a mostly still frozen voice begging for help. You can imagine how well that went over.
Just A Little Pin Prick
So, what did they do to me?
Mostly, I remember two things. There are other vague and uneasy recollections, but I don’t have the certainty with them that I do about the two main events.
First, one time they put something on my left hand that bit into my flesh. It was sort of like what you would call an alligator clip, but it was more than that even if I don’t know what. It inserted into my skin with two deep long punctures. I saw what was happening and feared it would hurt, but I don’t recollect any pain. They left it there for what seemed like a long time. My flesh didn’t bleed when they took it off.
I have had the parallel matching scars at the base of my middle finger ever since.
Second, they would sometimes poke something up my nose. I tended to lose consciousness at this point. Yet, I would wake up with a nosebleed. In fact, I started having nosebleeds a lot for the years in question here. I was taken to the emergency room several times for Vitamin K injections because the flow just wouldn’t stop. I was asked what I was sticking up my nose to cause this injury. Don’t lie to the doctor! Well, fine, except by this point I had realized no one at all was going to believe me, and I just said I didn’t do anything to myself. They still didn’t believe me.
So, I was identified as a problem child. More and more often, my parents just assumed everything I said was not credible. When they were proven wrong, as much to their inconvenience they constantly were, there was no acknowledgment or apology. I would get sent to my room for pointing out I had been right. Not a good move, apparently, to prove my integrity. I learned to be introverted and not discuss what was happening to me at all. But the unwanted visitations were still going on.
Then they stopped because of something unexpected.
One afternoon, while I was reading on my bed, I sneezed with a great violent shaking. I felt something move out of somewhere deep in my head and splat out into my hand, which I had raised to cover my face. What I saw was a fat juicy clot of bloody flesh that had a small hard black chip of what I took to be metal in the center. I touched it, turned it over, looked carefully. It was small and perfectly oval, thin and flat in form. I can still see it very clearly in my memory, more than six decades later. This chip of whatever was purposely shaped, not some adventitious fleck. I felt instinctively it was a made thing.
Finally, I had proof I wasn’t lying. I hadn’t been sticking things up my nose, those creatures that came through the wall had. I hollered for my mother, who came into my room. I showed her what was in my hand. This just came out of my nose, I said. She looked at it for about five seconds with an unhappy scowl and wiped it off with a tissue, not listening to a word I said. I can hear her voice even now, Stay in your room. She shut the door on her way out, in more ways than one.
After that blob came out of my nose, I didn’t have any more nosebleeds requiring a trip to the hospital.
No More AirTag
Better yet, I never saw the faces in the window again.
No one entered my room through the wall at night anymore. After a while I came to feel safe again in my bed. I arrived at the idea that whatever the lump was that blew out of my head, they couldn’t find me anymore without it. That part was not necessarily for sure, but the simple fact is that these creepy beings didn’t ever come back. At least not that I can remember, and I don’t like even thinking that.
Surprisingly, I did not obsess over this experience. Indeed, for many years I could ignore what had happened due to other, more pressing matters like adolescence, parental divorce, all the usual things. Not suppression, just over and done with, no further relevance to my life. It was too illogical to think about anyway. My own TV show would have been called I Love Logic. Maybe I did imagine the whole thing since everyone around me told me that I had.
Phone cameras are what they are. The perfect symmetry of the scars is more distinctly visible to the eyeball.
Yet then I look at the everlasting marks at the base of my finger. As I have gotten (much) older those two lines have not faded at all, only turned whiter. Now it all comes back more easily. The awful pale faces, the uncertain bluish glow, the opaque haziness of something passing unnaturally through the wall. Coming for me.
There is something unsettling here I have yet to understand.
More Hearsay
Deep fear is the clearest flavor of my memories from those long ago nights.
No doubt, you can tell I have become pretty skeptical about the virtue of the human race. That was an acquisition of my childhood that matured, like a costly red wine, as it rested in the cellar of my mind. But there was one man, my new step-father, who much later overcame that attitude one time by telling me about his encounter with a flying saucer. And I believed him because he believed me.
Why we were talking about strange things we had experienced is lost to my knowledge. What I do know with clarity is that my step-father was a wholly hoannable man, one who took his words seriously and instructed me to do the same. Hey, for a wannabe writer, it was great advice. So when he told me what had happened to him and a coworker out in the middle of the oil fields of West Texas late one night in the early 1960s, I accepted him as telling the truth.
He said that, at about 2 am, him and his colleague had finished delivering a load of pipe to a drilling site. They faced a long drive back to town but had some coffee in a thermos and were wide awake, talking. Then suddenly a classically shaped craft (lenticular with a dome), about 50 feet across he estimated compared to the length of the pipes he had just delivered, flew toward them from down the road.
The UFO came up to within a few feet of the truck windshield at a high rate of speed then stopped instantly, hanging in midair directly in front of their vehicle. The motor died, the radio went off, the lights went out. There was a band of pulsing colors around the middle of the craft and there were windows in which someone, or something, shadowy could be seen looking at them. The whole shebang rotated, then darted off faster than their eyes could follow. He said it looked like a beam of light when leaving. He and his friend stared at each other and pledged to say nothing to anyone because they didn’t want to be tarred as crazy.
But he told me, some twenty five years after the experience, how afraid he was. I could still see it in his eyes.
So I confessed how scared I had been and how angry no one believed me. He understood. The emotion of remembering how I felt in having that conversation with him is pretty intense. He passed away about twenty years ago, but if I could I would thank him now. He shared a frightening, long hidden secret with me that helped me handle my own uncomfortable memories. I was better off for it.
Thanks to the deeply entrenched insecure denials of the United States Government, the American public was already trained to shame people like my step-father should he have reported the event. He knew it and said nothing. How many others did the same? That approach also applied to my experience of beings coming through the wall into my room at night with toothy finger clamps and things to push up into my right maxillary sinus. I’ve just gotten too old to care much anymore about what people think.
Curiously, knowing the truth does set you free, even if it takes a while to realize what that means. But then you have to find the real trick of the thing, which is to be not bothered by what others say in response.
BS Detector On
There should be a road sign that says learning curve ahead.
After my talk with my step-dad, I started to read everything available on UFOs. Books and a few magazines were about all I could get in those ancient days before the Internet, but I’m a good digger when it comes to information. There was a lot of garbage I found, and I knew it for what it was, but there was also enough that had the substance of real experience. I learned about everything from Lonnie Zamora to Roswell to Cash-Landrum to Rendlesham, cattle mutilations to crop circles, and — wait for it — abductions.
Another confession. While I discovered Whitley Strieber and Travis Walton, I wasn’t able to bring myself to finish Communion or sit all the way through Fire in the Sky. Part of me just wasn’t having it. It took me a while to realize that same part of me was the one still resisting the acceptance of my own experience as a reality. It wasn’t logical.
Is there a 12 step program for people who have had an encounter with high strangeness? Hi, my name is Mark. I saw little gray people with big black eyes come through the wall of my bedroom and I peed in my pajamas with fear as they left permanent marks on my hand. Hi, Mark. Thanks, Dad.
The first step is to be honest with myself about the fact that, for me, this happened as an actual experience. Bizarre, true, but at least start with face value. Not some imaginary night terror, not a dream gone half awake, not the fabulous invention of a kid who was sublimating some other anxiety. So, no thanks to a contorted narrative cobbled up by some self-satisfied explainer wanting to convince me, so they are convinced themselves, that I am not firing on all thrusters.
Because then little gray guys just might come through anyone’s bedroom wall, and that’s not a permissible event according to the senior monkeys of Oz.
I’ve still got the scars, so calling BS on pompous explanations that it wasn’t a physical event. But as for what it means? Nada. Maybe I was just a forgettable experiment to those little beings, botched due to a failed implant procedure. Maybe they finished what they were doing and whatever came from my nose shuddered out right on schedule. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all in something like my frame of reference and I need to be aware of another realm of consciousness to find comprehension. I just don’t know, like a great many things that are mysterious in life. As my Aussie mate says, no worries.
Make of it what you will. No matter, I always knew what I experienced but now I allow myself better acceptance. I am aware there are many others who report the same as me, hypnotic regression or not (I didn’t need any). Abduction, or home invasion, or whatever phrase gets used, is as popular among researchers looking for UAP as ranchers finding dead, bloodless, surgically mutilated domestic livestock on their range. From all accounts both happen frequently, but no one cares to look. Eww, nasty. I just want the anti-gravity drive.
Turns out this experience I remark on here forms part of a group with a large membership. Inevitably, I am reminded of the line by Groucho Marx about being uninterested in joining a club that would have me as a member. Trouble is, I have already paid the dues. Just don’t talk to me about well meaning Galactic Federations with councils of ascended masters lifting humanity up from the mire of degenerate violence. That’s not what they did to me.
medium.com/on-the-trail-of-the-saucers/a-personal-note-about-alien-abduction-108ba39e3a31