I decided to be more direct. “Can you confirm that the US government knows for certain there’s alien life out there?”
“Even if I knew, Ben, I couldn’t tell you.” He continued looking at me.
I went a little further. “What about any new government black programs, like the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program? I read that the former program manager, Luis Elizondo, said he believed there was very compelling evidence we may not be alone.”
The Congressman was dismissive. “That’s just one man’s opinion. He no longer works for the government. People say all kinds of crazy things when they retire from security positions.”
“He’s part of the To The Stars Foundation, isn’t he? They have some kind of contract with the government related to anti-gravity, don’t they?”
The Congressman rubbed his chin. “I admit I’m not in on this stuff, but I’ll look into this for you and let you know what I find out. How does that sound?”
I was surprised. What did he want in return? “That would be great, sir,” I said, scraping the plate to the last dregs of Esmeralda’s pie.
At the door, he shook my hand again and said, “Good luck with the story, Ben. Don’t hesitate to call my office if you need any more information. I look forward to seeing your article.”
Walking down the driveway to my car, I was thinking it was no coincidence that the Congressman was interested in UFOs, and yet he said he didn’t seem to have much information on black government programs investigating them—SAPs, the government calls them—Special Access Programs. Wouldn’t he have known more? Or did he actually know and pretend he didn’t know? With all of that staring and smiling, I suspected he did.
In the car I shot Jennifer a quick text to let her know I was on my way. The map on my smartphone told me there was an accident at Snoqualmie Pass. I’d have to take Interstate 12 south of Mount Rainier to get home before midnight.
About an hour into the drive, Steve Miller Band’s “Fly Like an Eagle” came up on my phone play list. The sun had set and the sky was dark, no moon, just like it was during the first sighting event. My phone lit up. I glanced over: the Proxima Foundation’s iM4ET app had launched. How, and why, did the app start by itself? I force closed it.
In less than a minute, a large white light was in my rearview mirror to my right, above and behind my car. It had to be an Army helicopter spotlight, maybe on maneuvers from the Army National Guard base near Yakima or Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma. If it was, it must be on whisper mode. It seemed to be trailing me, then the light was gone. Had it changed course or gone behind a ridge?
A moment later, a blinding green-white light enveloped my car. I slammed on the brakes, my mind scrambling for an explanation. Then my engine cut out. The Jetta had completely died. I felt a vibration, a high-frequency buzzing as if it was coming from inside my body and resonating in my skull, then a tingling sensation. All the hair on my body rose up, responding to the static electricity. Leaves and dust swirled around my car in a vortex of wind and pale green light.
Out of instinct, I grabbed my phone and fumbled to turn on the video app. A ringing tone began in my ears and grew louder until it felt like my ears were popping from low air pressure. I remember the panic, then I lost consciousness.
I came to in a room unknown to me. Except for a bright pin-point of light emanating from the ceiling, it was dark. The air was thick, very thick, and smelled sour and stale, like a refrigerator after no power for a week. I was having difficulty breathing and realized I couldn’t move my arms and legs. In fact, I couldn’t see or feel them. Was I in an ambulance? the hospital? was I dead?
Peripherally, I caught movement to my left. Two humanoid beings were on the other side of what appeared to be a glass wall. They had large hairless heads and two small completely black eyes. Like the Congressman, they were staring at me. I stared back, terrified. Their arms and torsos were thin and spindly in grey body suits of some kind. What were they planning to do to me? I tried to get up and get away. It was useless. I must be strapped down. Their stares seemed to be connected to slowing my thoughts, perhaps due to my state of panic. My jaw felt weighed down from the inside, but I managed to shout, “What are you doing? What do you want?”
I scanned the room for other possible threats. When I looked back, the two figures were standing over me, their pale skin as textured as fine cloth with long ridges from their foreheads down to two small nostrils and no nose. I could smell them—spicy and cinnamon-like.
The beings backed away and exited. That’s when I noticed a narrow, metallic robotic arm above me with something rectangular at the end of it, transiting my face. Something was positioned over my eyes, covering them completely. Suddenly, I felt a horrendous pain in my groin. Something, some kind of instrument had been shoved up the urethra of my penis, but how? Feeling as though I was going to pass out, I began seeing images, symbols, some sort of star map. Then I heard a garbled voice say in English, “You are special to us. We will be coming for you again, Ben.” Then a bright flash, a loud noise, and a booming coming from within my head.
I was sitting on the edge of a road, facing a large drop-off, hundreds of feet above a valley. It was still dark. A white light was approaching just above the ground, shining into my face.
“What are you doing there?” asked a masculine voice.
The man was wearing a hat, a light blue uniform, and I saw a badge. Washington State Patrol Trooper. What the hell happened? Where am I? Was everything that I’d just experienced a bad dream? I realized then that I was naked and shivering from the cold. A few cars and a tractor-trailer truck crept by us, rubbernecking the scene.
“What are you doing up here?” the trooper repeated, towering over me, holding a blanket.
“Up here?” I looked around. I was in the mountains, a hundred feet above a valley. Was it still Snoqualmie Pass?
He handed me the blanket. “Have you been drinking? Taking drugs?”
I draped the blanket over my body. I couldn’t get any words to come out of my mouth. I shook my head, indicating no to his drug use question.
“What’s your name?’ he said.
I struggled to get the word out. “Ben,” I said.
“Okay, Ben, let’s get you up and somewhere safe, what do you say?”
I was shivering uncontrollably and my head was pounding with the worst headache I’ve ever experienced. I stood up and almost instantly the trooper spun me around and had handcuffs on me. He secured the blanket over me and then made a call on his radio. “10-73 in custody.” He then told me that the restraints on my wrists were for my and his safety.
He walked me back to a patrol car and had me sit in the back, then he shut the door. I watched him do a quick walk up and down the side of the road, presumably scanning for anything that would serve as a clue to who I was and what was going on. He picked up what appeared to be my smartwatch.
“This yours?” He held it up when he got back to the car and I grunted a yes, still in migraine pain.
“I’ll keep it for now,” he said.
He took me to the State Police station in Morton where I was booked, fingerprinted, given an orange jump suit, and placed in a holding cell. Three days had passed since I had left Yakima. They gave me a medical exam and told me that there were no obvious signs of a head injury. There was nothing wrong with my man parts, either. They located my car, 10 miles away from where they had found me.
Later, a young woman who introduced herself as a mental health counselor questioned me.
“Any idea what you were doing up there on the Pass, Ben?”
“I don’t know. I remember seeing lights, I don’t know what happened.” I thought I’d be better off not mentioning the details of what I’d experienced for fear of them thinking I was a psych case.
“Lights? You mean headlights?”
I remained silent.
“Have you been having thoughts about suicide?”
“Suicide? No. Like I said, I w
as driving home and I saw some lights. I don’t remember. Did you find my car? I must have been in an accident.”
“Your car shows no signs of an accident.”
“I just want to go home,” I said, exhausted.
“Is there anyone that you want us to call?”
“Yes, my fiancée, Jennifer.”
They made me take a shower. I stripped down and noticed a red spot in the center of my chest—six raised holes in a circle, as if I’d been pricked or embossed. I leaned against the wall of the shower stall, letting the water cascade over my body, images of the black-eyed beings flooding my mind, their eyes looking through me, their strange cinnamon scent, and that voice in my head, You are special to us. We will be coming for you again, Ben.
I began to cry, my mind racing. What was happening to me? Am I crazy? What is this mark on my chest? Was I now a UFO abductee? Why did they pick me? What did they want from me?
Jennifer arrived in the morning. I changed into the clothes she brought, and the booking officer gave me back my smartwatch I’d completely forgotten about. I sat in the waiting area, watching Jennifer on the other side of the glass, talking with an officer. Once I was buzzed through, Jennifer looked me over but didn’t say a word. She was saving it for the ride back to Seattle.
At last in her car, she sat and looked at me. “What the fuck, Ben? Where in the hell were you? What happened? Were you drinking?”
“No, I wasn’t drinking! Can we go, please?”
“Then what in the hell were you doing on the side of road with your clothes off? Were you going to jump or something?”
I put my hands on my head. The bright sunlight was triggering another migraine. I felt like someone was sticking a knife in my right eye and out through my left.
She looked at me. “Are you okay?”
“No. I’m not, let’s just go home.”
She started the car. “You’d better call your parents, they’re worried.”
I knew I should, but I didn’t want to talk to anyone.
Once on the road, Jennifer started her interrogation again. “Are you on meth or something?”
“No!” I was staring out the window, suddenly very tired of her endless suspicions, wanting her to just leave me alone.
“What then? Are you into some kinky shit or something I should know about?”
“Goddammit, Jennifer, no!”
“Then what’s going on?”
I was growing angrier by the second. “I don’t know. Something happened to me! I just need to get home and sleep.”
“What happened?” She glanced over at me, newly concerned.
“I think I was abducted, okay?”
A look of terror and disgust went across her face. “Abducted? You mean like aliens?”
“Yeah, like aliens.”
She rolled her eyes and sighed. “Here we go again with the aliens. What are you talking about, Ben?”
I remained silent. I felt like kicking out the windshield. After a minute, she put on the radio, and I turned it off, making it clear that I wanted quiet.
“Why won’t you talk to me?” she said.
I kicked the dash. “Just drive! Please, Jennifer! Just get me home!”
“Okay, okay, take it easy!”
I leaned against the glass of the passenger door and within minutes, I was asleep.
9: High Strangeness
The ringing in my ears sounded like cicadas on crack. The sound ebbed and flowed over long cycles, with its most intense peaks coinciding with pounding migraines. My sleep was terrible. I was having dreams of being on a highway at night only to lose control of the car after being blasted by bright lights from above. My restlessness in bed was driving Jennifer crazy.
I got a new cell phone and called my insurance company. A local tow company had retrieved my car, and its transport to Seattle was covered by my insurance. Luckily, I didn’t need it right away. Marcus agreed to let me work from home as long as I got the cell tower story done. He gave me two weeks. I went to work on it, but couldn’t focus worth a damn. I was spending hours on the Internet, searching and reading everything that I could about alien abductions and what people experience afterwards. I downloaded a bunch of books, including John Mack’s Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens and Budd Hopkin’s Intruders. I watched documentaries on Betty and Barney Hill and Travis Walton. I needed answers, and what I found were similar themes among what ufologists call experiencers. The bright lights from above and being examined by large-headed beings while strapped to a table were common themes. Some of the details were the same too. In the book Communion, Whitley Strieber mentioned the odors of burning cardboard and sometimes cinnamon when his abductors were present. He mentioned the small triangular mark on his son’s body; for me, it was a hexagon on my chest.
One night, I had a particularly terrifying dream. Two dark figures entered our bedroom and stood over me, watching me. I tried to jump out of bed only to find my body paralyzed. I yelled for Jennifer to wake up, but my mouth wouldn’t move. At last, the specters disappeared. I awakened from whatever state I was in to find Jennifer out of bed and staring at me from the far side of the bedroom. She was terrified, her face lit up dimly by the night light in the bathroom.
“What’s going on, Ben? You kicked me really hard.”
“I don’t know, I just saw...” Before I could finish my sentence, I spotted several translucent balls of light about the size of grapefruits floating in the air.
“Right there!” I pointed to the balls of light. “Do you see that?”
“See what?”
“Balls of light!”
Jennifer looked around the room.
“There’s nothing there, Ben.”
As soon as I pointed to them, they faded away.
“I don’t know, I thought I saw lights floating in the air, right over there.” I pointed.
“You were having a nightmare again, Ben. You are hallucinating. I think you should see someone about this.”
I sat up on the side of the bed to think, feeling another migraine coming on. “I need some water. I don’t want to talk about this now.”
Jennifer was still staring at me.
“Maybe you should sleep on the couch.”
“Fine,” I said, not wanting to argue. I went out into the kitchen for the water, popped a couple of Excedrin, and spent the rest of the night in the living room.
A day later I began to notice something going on with the thoughts in my head. Sometimes a thought would come into my mind, and I would find myself putting it into my own words and then acting on it, whether it was to get up and pace the room or get a drink of water. They were benign behaviors, but the thing is I’m sure the original thought was not my own. It would just appear, and I would believe it was true or that I needed to carry it out. Only afterward would I question it.
People with schizophrenia have conversations with phantom voices that sometimes tell them what to do, or tell them they are a worthless piece of shit. What I was experiencing was different. I wasn’t hearing voices; I was having thoughts telling me what I needed to do or believe. But where were they coming from? Why was this happening to me?
In the morning, while I was putting on my smartwatch, an idea came to me. Did the watch capture my heart rate and GPS from the night up on that ridge? Would the data prove my abduction experience? Why hadn’t I thought of checking before?
I synched my watch to my laptop and looked at the data. My heart rate was a normal 74 beats per minute up to about eight-thirty, and then it shot up to 110, which must have been when I spotted the lights in the sky trailing behind me. Then my heartbeat rocketed to 120 for about two minutes before plummeting down to 56 for about a minute, and then—missing data. I checked the GPS map feature. It showed me on the highway, then stopping on the ridge, then missing data until about 7 am, a mile down the road.
I sat back to take it all in. If I had been taken up into a ship, then the data would look just like it did. I had to show Jenn
ifer. I took my laptop into the bedroom. She was still in bed.
“Look,” I said, sitting on the bed next to her with my laptop in hand. “My smartwatch recorded the whole thing. It shows my heart rate increasing, and then the GPS does something crazy. This proves something happened to me up on the ridge. I was taken up into a ship.”
She pulled the covers over her head. “I’m not hearing this,” she said, her voice muffled.
“Why won’t you look?” I said. “This proves something did happen to me up on the ridge. It was an abduction, Jennifer, I’m certain of it.”
She didn’t respond, but her crying told me enough. It must be too much for her—too outside her worldview. She wasn’t ready for this.
I left her and went out to the kitchen to make some coffee and conduct more research online.
The next evening Jennifer requested a sit-down talk.
“I’m really worried about you, Ben, you’re not sleeping, and I’m still not sure what is going on with you. I think it would be helpful if you saw someone. My mom gave me the name of a psychiatrist who’s close by.”
She dropped a piece of paper with a name, number, and address on the coffee table.
“Make an appointment. I think it would be a good thing.”
I picked up the paper, glanced at it, and then tossed it back onto the table. If I saw anyone, it was going to be a neurologist, not a headshrinker. Whitley Strieber went to see a neurologist and got tested for epilepsy. Did I have a tumor pinching up against the occipital lobe? Was this the cause of the orbs of light that I was seeing at night? Could something like this be affecting the thoughts in my head, too?
Perhaps it would be better that I talk to someone who was an expert on alien abduction. When conventional medical explanations failed, Strieber had sought solace by talking to the UFO abduction expert Budd Hopkins. John Mack would be an ideal option, too if only these prolific men weren’t deceased. I wasn’t sure who I should call. I just knew that it needed to be someone I could trust.
The Goldilocks Zone Page 8