More of the Most Outlandish Alien Abductions

Alien abductions are inherently odd. The very notion that these alien intelligences are whisking people away for reasons unknown is to a lot of people absurd. Yet some accounts are even weirder than others. Recently, I covered some of these bizarre abductions, but there are so many of them I decided to bring some more to the table, so sit back, get your tinfoil hats on, and enjoy. 

A very strange series of events began to unfold on one January morning in 1954. On this dark early morning, at around 2 AM, a man by the name of Armando Zurbaran was in his car along dim winding roads on his way from Mexico City to Acapulco, in Mexico, in order to meet up with a business partner the following morning. At the time, this was a somewhat perilous journey, with rugged roads twisting and meandering through switchbacks and winding mountain passes, and Armando needed to give his full attention to the treacherous road ahead. He was completely on alert, watching that remote lane flash out of the night to pass him in the beams of his headlights, but despite his completely awake state, he claims that he was suddenly overcome by an intense tiredness, a “hypnotic state of lethargy,” as he would call it. And so would begin one of the odder, yet mostly forgotten, alien abduction reports on record.

Realizing that this was a dangerous state to be driving on while trying to navigate the harrowing terrain, Armando pulled his vehicle over to the side of the road in order to relax for a minute, and this is when he noticed a strange sight ahead. There, hovering right over the middle of this remote mountain road before him was what looked to be a luminous, brightly lit metallic disk of some sort, and as he tried to peer into the nearly blinding light, he could notice that he was no longer alone out on that road. Standing there on each side of the strange object were two very tall figures, who seemed to be dressed in some sort of one-piece suit cinched with very wide belts in the middle. They appeared to have long, flowing hair, and for a moment, they just lurked there, mostly obscured in the glare of that disk. As he sat there trying to figure out what to do, he claims that he suddenly felt himself compelled to get out of his car and begin walking towards these strangers, as if he wasn’t in control of his limbs, and things would only get weirder from there.

He could see as he drew closer that the figures appeared to be male, although they were rather androgynous in appearance, and that they were very human and Nordic-looking, with blonde hair and blue eyes. These two beings were quick to approach Armando to help him steady himself, and then they escorted him closer to what was now clear to be their craft, all as a buzzing sensation filled the man’s skull. When Armando was aboard the glowing ship, he looked around and asked why he had been brought there, to which one of these strange blonde entities replied in fluent Spanish:

"You are neither the first nor last earthman to be chosen for testing. Our task, slow though it may seem, is designed to persuade. We choose the likeliest, most malleable persons for contact, so that they might better transmit our messages."

Armando was not sure what to make of this cryptic statement, but before he was even able to begin processing it all, the two entities began showing him a series of images from his own life, like a dream being played out over the wall of the ship. Some of the scenes he saw playing out before him were from his most intimate moments and half-forgotten corners of his memories, and he began to get the feeling that these creatures could either read his mind or had been watching him for a very long time. The images then stopped, and Armando was shown around the ship, which he was informed was no longer on the ground and not even on Earth, but rather far out into the solar system. This was startling, as the man had not felt any sense of movement or acceleration, and when he asked about this, he was allegedly told that they used a “gravity repulsion system,” without further elaboration. They also said that they were able to neutralize any debris in their path, and let Armando look out a portal, although he was unable to see anything other than a grey mist and a sea of darkness.

Armando then asked whether they were going to the aliens’ home planet, and they responded in the negative, then they proceeded to just sort of cruise about over several days. During this time, he became acclimated to the way their ship worked and spent much time with his mysterious captors. He would claim to have been perplexed by some of the technology aboard their ship, and he was especially intrigued by the bathroom facilities, of which he would say:

“I shall never be able to forget it. That bathroom was a new and unimaginable experience for me. Standing upright, facing an angle of the wall filled with tiny holes, I was covered in warm air, and as it grew stronger, it became transformed into damp air, impregnating my skin like a warm, wet breeze. When I was completely drenched, I was offered a sort of liquid soap, which I rubbed all over myself, from head to toe. Standing once more before the warm air sprinklers, I felt the soap begin to evaporate and my skin become completely clean. The air then ceased to be damp, turning dry and warm instead of becoming colder until agreeably cool.”

Armando also claimed that he ate with the beings, describing their food as being very much like what one would eat on Earth, including meat, vegetables, cheese, and even butter, although none of it anything he had seen on his own planet, and usually accompanied by a milky liquid that he was told was made from materials from their home world and was a chief form of sustenance. They claimed that they also utilized some vegetables and fruits grown on Earth, such as mangoes, which featured heavily in their diet and which they couldn’t seem to get enough of. The food, they claimed, was sort of beamed aboard the ship from an outside source via “telepathy” whenever they needed it. During his discussions with the entities, he would also learn that their average lifespan was 250 years, that they had a society in which everyone was treated completely equally, and that their whole way of life was heavily based on a sort of religion. They believed that a being known as “The Master” or also “The Beloved Number Nine,” had governed them for thousands of years, and kept harmony in their society.

After their time together was over, the aliens then whisked the man back to Earth, where he was dropped off right at the car, which was sitting there as he had left it. Armando bid them farewell and continued on his journey towards Acapulco, and he soon realized that only 90 minutes had passed since he had left his vehicle, despite his assertion that he had been on that ship for a few days traveling who knows where. Indeed, he wouldn’t even miss his meeting with his business associate. Making it all even odder still was that 15 years later, in 1969, Armando would be driving outside of Mexico City and stop to pick up a hitchhiker who was a tall, thin man with blonde hair and blue eyes. This hitchhiker would then admit that he was one of the crew members of that spacecraft all of those years before, but as to his purpose or what they talked about after this, Armando would never say.

Throughout the 1950s, there would be numerous other reports of what have come to be called the “Nordic” aliens, which, like in Armando’s report, appear as tall, blonde, angelic-looking beings, and it is hard not to wonder whether they were all connected somehow. This report would be written about by such esteemed UFO researchers as Albert Rosales, Scott Corrales, Ed Komarek, and Marcus Lowth, and it has remained an obscure yet intriguing report ever since. What were these entities that he encountered along that lonely road? Where did they come from, and why were they so human in appearance? Were they aliens, interdimensional beings, or even, as some have suggested, literal angels? Or is this just a tall tale and the ramblings of a delusional individual, perhaps fueled by the tiredness brought about by the road and his stress to make it on time for his appointment, and if so, how did this simple rural farmer come up with all of this fantastical technology? There are no answers to any of these questions, and it is a case that we can only add to the pile of truly outlandish alien abduction reports.

Moving along, one of the weirdest alien abduction accounts there is began in the early morning hours of April 6, 1974, in the remote farming town of Kitami, in Hokkaido, Japan. On this dark morning, a farmer by the name of Yoshihiro Fujiwara was sound asleep in his bed when he was pulled from his dreams by the sudden pounding of someone at his door and his dog barking and howling outside. Considering his was a fairly isolated farmstead in the middle of nowhere, it was odd indeed to get visitors at 3 in the morning, and the rather annoyed Fujiwara at first thought it was merely some kids messing around. There would have been no reason in this safe little hamlet to think it was anything else, and he trudged to the door to fling it open to a sight that would change him forevermore. And so would begin one of the most flat-out bizarre and controversial alien encounter reports that Japan has ever seen.

There standing in the chilly early morning darkness was a diminutive, 3-foot-tall being dressed in a clear one-piece suit that seemed to be made of transparent vinyl, and the thing itself was only passingly humanoid, resembling what the witness would later call a combination of “starfish and human,” with four tentacle-like appendages, a bulbous head reminiscent of an octopus clad in a blue helmet, slanted eyes, and a strange V-shaped set of nostrils, the whole of it covered with mottled brown and slimy, bumpy toad-like skin and rested on two of its stalk-like limbs and rounded nubs for feet. It was completely silent and motionless, except that its weird conical helmet had an antenna jutting from it, which generated a visible electrical humming charge that ominously rippled through the air.

The startled farmer and this anomalous being stood there for several moments merely staring at each other, perhaps each as surprised as the other, before that strange frozen moment in time was shattered by a sudden movement from the creature as it flicked one of its tendrils to point up towards the sky. This was followed by a ray of blinding light that washed over everything, generating a profound heat that sent the frightened farmer reeling back into his house to slam the door shut. A quick look outside showed that the brilliant orange colored light was emanating from an illuminated disc-like craft that measured around 26 feet across and was shooting off beams of orange light.

If Fujiwara thought he was safe merely gawking from his window at this outlandish sight, he was wrong, as he suddenly felt his feet being pulled forward by some inexplicable force. At first, he was merely dragged across the floor, much to his amazement, but then he allegedly began to hover, before finally being levitated fully off the ground to go flying out of the window and towards the inscrutable floating disc with its scintillating beams of light. He was drawn faster and faster towards the object, seemingly on a collision course, but rather than smack against its metallic side, he found himself being drawn through its walls to be dumped upon the floor of the craft.

The interior of the craft was described as being bright blue, with some sort of writing on the walls that the farmer could not fathom, and the whole of it all overlaid with a repulsive stink that made him feel lightheaded. It was then that two creatures identical to the one who had freaked him out at his doorstep approached him to tell him telepathically, “No danger. We promise to release you at your home.” As peaceful as this sounded, the two entities nevertheless made to grab him and forcefully hold him down, upon which Fujiwara felt the fear left him and his survival instinct take over, tearing away and dashing through an open hatchway to go careening through air to the ground below, which luckily for him was only around 10 feet down.

Fujiwara vaguely recognized that he was around 2 miles from where he had left, and went running wildly towards the house of a person he knew in the area, who let him in. It was at their house that he would realize that a full hour had passed, even though to him it seemed that it had been mere moments since he had been taken aboard the strange craft by its odd octopoid inhabitants. Although the experience had been baffling and not a little terrifying, Fujiwara was at least relieved that it was over, and he quietly went back to his home to try and find some way to get over what had just occurred. Little did he know at the time that it was not quite over just yet.

The very next evening, Fujiwara was sitting alone in his house, his thoughts no doubt wandering back to those strange tentacled dwarves and their otherworldly craft, when he was suddenly overcome with a sharp pain worming its way through his ears and fingertips. He felt himself slipping into a daze, and for some reason, his hands took on a life of their own and began to scrawl strange letters onto a piece of paper of their own volition. This was all followed by a voice that reverberated through his skull, which commanded him, “When the disc lands on the mountain, you will come and board by yourself,” which was accompanied by a potent vision of the area they wished him to come to, left blazing into his mind. After that, the pain abruptly left, leaving Fujiwara there shaken and with bizarre hieroglyphics etched onto paper by his hand, but the meanings of which he did not know.

The farmer took the voice’s command as being the nearby Nikoro Mountain, and although he was still frightened by his ordeal, he felt a compulsion to go there to see what would happen. To this end, he gathered up some supplies and two companions to join him, and they set out, unsure of what awaited them up on that lonely peak. Fujiwara then made his way alone to the area he had seen in his vision, where there awaited that same luminous disc-shaped craft, and he boarded it without a fight. Once aboard, the aliens then supposedly took him on a flight into space, flying around the moon and around the earth twice, all within about the space of an hour. When they returned from their dizzying journey, the farmer then lost consciousness, after which he was apparently just left lying there on the mountainside for his friends to find.

This wasn’t even the end of it all, as Fujiwara would claim that the last trip had left him with strange telekinetic powers that allowed him to move objects and bend spoons, and he was telepathically invited on yet another excursion on April 13, 1974. This time, the bizarre beings took him on a journey that went around the planet Jupiter, as well as the moon of Saturn, Titan, where one of the creatures would allegedly go out to retrieve a rock from the surface as a souvenir for him to keep.

This mysterious rock would go on to prove to be rather controversial, indeed. It was sent to scientists for analysis, but came back as just one of the many common rocks from a Kitami cave, which brought a fair amount of ridicule down on Fujiwara and his astounding tale. In the meantime, the farmer would begin to address himself as the earthly representative of the “Summon Call Space Union,” and he claimed that his telepathic powers increased exponentially, allowing him to levitate objects, predict catastrophes, and even teleport across vast distances, of which he would say:

“I can teleport to a star 250 million light years away in 6 minutes. My role is delaying natural disasters such as earthquakes and eruptions.”

He would also claim that he could actually travel within the Earth to stop volcanic eruptions, and pull together tectonic plates to prevent earthquakes. It is all bizarre to say the least, but one Japanese UFO researcher named Ninichi Arai has offered evidence that there was something to this when he found that several other locals who did not know Fujiwara also reported seeing strange lights in the skies during the same time frame, and there were others who claimed to have been first hand witnesses to the farmer’s mental powers, somewhat corroborating his weird tales. Was this all the doing of entities from another world or merely the tripping of balls? Is there anything to this account, or is Fujiwara a disturbed individual and unreliable witness? It is hard to know for sure, but it is a wild ride all the same, and goes to show that some alien abduction accounts can be truly surreal affairs to be sure.

From the 1970s, we have another outlandish account. 50-year-old school teacher Elsie Oakensen was in most ways unremarkable. She had a contented life in Church Stowe in Northamptonshire in the United Kingdom with her husband, John, and her life was more or less uneventful. However, on the night of November 22, 1978, this was all about to change. On that evening at just a little past 5 p.m., she was driving on her way home from work on her way out of Daventry on the A45 and on to the busy A5 road. It was a mundane routine, a drive she took every day and which only took 15 minutes, so as she stared out at the lane lines flickering by, she would not have expected the strange events that were about to transpire. 

As she approached her home village of Church Stowe, just 2 miles out, she noticed something weird in the sky. She at first could make out what she called “two very bright lights, one red and one green” about 100 to 150 feet over the road, and her first assumption was that it was an extremely low plane, but as she drew closer, she could see that it was no normal aircraft. She could now see that it was a “dumbbell-shaped object” made of what appeared to be a smooth plastic material the “color of old pewter,” and that it was hovering there completely motionless. At this time, she would later say that she had felt a strange sensation, as if time had slowed down or that she was in slow-motion or underwater. Her first reaction was to stop the car, but the road at the time was full of traffic and she could not find a place to easily and safely pull over, so she continued along, driving directly under it and noticing that it was completely silent and had no windows, portals, or any discernible propulsion system.

As she drove along, she could not get her mind off what she had seen, and she wondered if any of the many cars on the road had seen it as well. She could not resist looking back to see if it was still there, and it was, so curiosity got the better of her and she risked an accident to pull the vehicle over on a side road. As she stood there gaping at it, just hanging there like some inscrutable monolith, the green light, which had until then been a solid illumination, began blinking. This snapped her out of her wonderment, and she warily got back into the car to continue her way home, but almost immediately her car started to lose power until the power cut off completely, and it stalled. She tried several times to start it, but it wouldn’t turn over. It was strange because she had just had the car serviced earlier that very same day, but as she puzzled over this new predicament, things would get even odder still. She would say:

“A green light started to flash. I decided to restart the engine but when I turned into the village something strange happened – the car, which had just been serviced that day, completely cut out. Eventually it restarted but I had only travelled about 100 yards when it stopped again. The natural light disappeared and everything was in absolute blackness. Then suddenly a brilliant white circle of light about a yard in diameter shone on the road. The very next moment, as if someone had flicked a switch, natural light returned and I was driving my car normally.”

She didn’t get far before a bright light appeared very near the front of her car, followed by one at the rear and one on each side of her. These lights were almost blinding in their intensity and started to alternately switch on and off in some sort of pattern or sequence. As she tried to process this eerie situation, the lights all suddenly simultaneously blinked out, and Ellie was amazed to find that she had travelled a considerable distance down the road and that 15 minutes had passed that she could not account for. She would tell her husband about what had happened, and the next day she would notice a strange scar on the back of her knee that she had never seen before, and have a series of intense headaches so excruciating that she almost passed out from them. Now realizing that something truly outlandish had happened to her, she decided to report her experience.

When the report of what had happened to Ellie hit the news, it captured the attention of UFO researchers, and the British UFO Research Organization (BUFORA) reached out to her to find out more about what had happened. Ellie herself was a bit taken aback because she would claim she had never really even heard of UFOs before and had no interest in the topic, but she was finally convinced to undergo hypnotic regression to possibly glean some memories of what had happened after those strobing lights had surrounded her car. It would be a rather frightening session, to say the least, and during it Ellie would say to the researchers:

“My car engine has stalled, I feel hot. A band has tightened around my head as it did at lunchtime. I am getting hotter and beginning to sweat. The pressure hurts. It hurts my head. A brilliant white light is shining in my eyes, a pure white light, very bright. Circles of very bright light radiate from it as it comes closer until I can only see the top of the circles. My body gets hotter. The pain in my head is intense. I feel as if I am sitting. I can’t feel my legs. My arms are shaking. I am very frightened. The radiating circles of light seem to change to a small brilliant circle, obviously going away from me. It’s still light, but hazy and through this haze materialize two shapes. The first is a long, thin shape that appears to the left and then disappears. The second is more rectangular and appears to the right – disappears – then both appear together. They shine through the haze, a silver glow outlines both grey-coloured shapes which are smooth and rounded, rather ghostlike. The bright light now shines as a small circle in the distance. I get hotter, my arms shake more, my head hurts dreadfully. I am terrified.”

Ellie then began screaming and having some kind of panic attack or seizure, so the session was cut short. After that, Ellie tried to go about getting her life back to normal, and would write two books on her experience called One Step Beyond (1996) and Into The Unknown (1999). UFO researchers have long wondered just what happened to her and there have been all sorts of ideas tossed around, including that she somehow hallucinated the whole episode or that it was a hoax, but she has been described as a quiet teacher with a career, a reliable witness who would be unlikely to just fabricate a story about aliens and UFOs. Indeed, she and her husband faced much ridicule from the community in the wake of the incident, so why would she risk her career and peaceful life for some made-up event? BUFORA also vouched for her honesty and sincerity, calling her an ideal witness. Another idea is that this really was an alien craft and that it had somehow chosen her, a notion Ellie herself believed. She also entertained the thought that perhaps only she could see the object, and that it was a sign of some sort of psychic power manifesting within her. She would say of it:

“I feel that consideration could be given to the possibility that it may have been my first experience of clairvoyance. I wonder? But perhaps not, because there were physical effects also.”

There are certainly some interesting details to this case. One is that the witness is considered to be so reliable, and another is that during that very same month, there was an intense wave of UFO encounter reports coming in from all over the southwest region of England, where Ellie’s incident happened, and indeed the area has long been considered a UFO hotspot. Also of interest is the fact that there were no corroborating reports of the object she had seen, which is rather odd considering the A5 is a very busy road and by her own admission there had been a lot of traffic, as well as the fact that the object was claimed to be hovering directly over the road. This could be because no one wanted to report it, but it could also be because only Ellie could see it, either through psychic powers, hallucination, or hoax; we’ll probably never know because she has already passed away to take any secrets to the grave with her. We will probably never know what really happened out there, and it remains just another very bizarre tale of inexplicable alien abduction among many others. 

Moving into the 80s, in October of 1989, Steve and Dawn Hess headed out for a weekend of camping and hunting on the Mojave Reserve, in the Mojave Desert of the southwest United States. It was supposed to be a relaxing getaway for the young, happy couple, a chance to get away from their two small children for the weekend and have some time alone together. As they drove out towards the Midhills camping ground, just inside the Nevada border, they did so in very good spirits, having had a bit of luck gambling at a casino earlier in the day and looking forward to their trip. They had been planning it for a long time, and to be out there in the remote, scenic locale was like a dream come true, but the dream was about to become a nightmare, and they were about to become the center of a series of harrowing, otherworldly events that have never been explained.

It would turn out that the campground was uncommonly full, and so they decided to drive out into the wilds in their camper to go camping off the beaten path in a secluded valley between the Tabletop and Woods Mountains. That evening, the sky was full of a multitude of stars, like millions of tiny diamonds spread out over an expanse of black felt, and they decided to start a fire and have a romantic dinner there under that sprawling vista of twinkling lights. It was as Steve was cooking up a steak that things began to get odd. He noticed a pinpoint of light moving about over the nearby Tabletop Mountain that, for some reason, instilled a great sense of unease in him. He found himself perplexed and mesmerized by the gliding light, which looked like another star moving about in the sea of stars, and it wasn’t until Dawn called out to him that he snapped out of it. He tried to direct her attention to what he had just seen, but the light was gone.

Steve tried to put the weird episode out of his mind, and the two poured some wine, had their romantic dinner there under the dazzling night sky, and then settled down to do a bit of stargazing. As they sat there pointing out star constellations, they noticed a particularly bright star that wasn’t supposed to be there, and they soon realized that it was not a star at all when it started moving. It was then joined by several other lights, around nine in total, after which they created a sort of 'M' formation. Their first impression was that it had to be aircraft from the nearby Nulles Air Base out on nighttime maneuvers, but then, as they looked on, small red lights descended from the larger white ones and began silently gliding towards the desert below, blinking and pulsating as they did so. It was about then that they noticed that the night sounds of the desert had ceased, as if a veil of silence had descended upon them, and through that eerie clinging quiet, the red lights approached them. These bizarre lights then circled above them and configured and reconfigured into different formations as their flashing intensified, to the point that Dawn was beginning to panic. 

These lights began to flash and pulse faster and faster until they suddenly went out together. Shortly after this, there were sounds out in the brush, like something scampering about out there in the wilds, and there seemed to be more than one of whatever it was. The frightened couple hurried into their camper, and Steve grabbed his hunting rifle, thinking they were about to be attacked by wild animals. They could see out in the darkness what looked like glowing red eyes circling them, and at one point, something jumped onto the hood of the camper and scurried across to jump back down on the other side. Steve was about to take a shot at one of the red-eyed shapes, but Dawn stopped him, telling him that she had a very bad feeling that it would not be a good idea to fire on them, which she felt was oddly being projected into her head. As they peered into the murky night, the creatures got bolder and close enough that they could see that these were no wild animals, but rather what they would later describe as “small red-eyed gremlins.” 

The couple at this point were paralyzed with terror, and the entities roaming about outside seemed to sense this, becoming bolder and running right up to the camper to leap onto its roof and bang on the sides, the whole time jabbering with each other in some alien language. As this happened, nine tall, thin, translucent beings with large, deep, featureless black eyes, much different than the “gremlins,” bloomed out of the darkness and surrounded the camper, peering in at the terrified couple. As these beings loomed outside, Steve and Dawn would later claim that their minds had been filled with thoughts and visions that seemed to be telepathically forced into their heads, and as this happened a large, bright object descended nearby, almost right over them, after which their camper began to buck and shake wildly as a fog or mist filled the vehicle. The light got brighter and brighter, and then Steve and Dawn lost consciousness.

When they woke up, they were still in their camper, which was now filled not with the light of that bizarre craft but rather that of the coming morning. There was no sign of the creatures they had encountered the previous evening, and indeed, a look around the area showed no evidence that they had ever been there at all. There were no footprints, no sign of damage to the brush, nothing. The only thing they could find were two red pin pricks in Dawn’s neck that had not been there before. They could not remember anything about what had happened to them after that large light had appeared, they had no idea where the creatures had gone, but they did know that it had not been a dream or a figment of their imagination, and that they had experienced something truly outlandish out there in the desert. They quickly packed up and got out of there as fast as they could, driving home mostly in silence and trying to process what they had been through.

In the coming days, they mostly didn’t talk about what had happened, but it would seem that their ordeal was not over. They experienced intense, vivid nightmares, physical symptoms such as headaches and nausea, and then there was the really spooky stuff. They experienced seeing lights in the sky that seemed to be following them, intense feelings of being watched, strange sounds inside and outside of the house, and their children began to tell of seeing little “red-eyed monsters” prowling about their bedroom at night. On one particularly terrifying occasion, Steve and Dawn were woken by the panicked screams of their son and rushed to his room to find him suspended in the air, “spinning like a top.” Dawn would even tell of being accosted by unseen hands. 

At their wits’ end, they decided to undergo hypnosis with Dr. William Anixter, who, through a series of sessions, was able to uncover what had happened during their lost time. According to Steve and Dawn, they had been brought aboard a massive craft of some kind and subjected to a battery of medical experiments and tests, many of which were quite painful and one of which had left those red marks on Dawn’s neck. At several points during the hypnosis sessions, Dawn was seen to speak in a voice that was not her own, as if she were channeling an outside force, and on one of these occasions, she allegedly eerily and cryptically said, “I know where the Universe ends. Our Universe ends when its matter stops mattering to us, and starts mattering to them.”

Dawn and Steve Hess would keep mostly quiet about their bizarre experience for years, but author Ron Felber would find out about it and approach the couple about possibly writing a book about it. Interestingly, Felber was known as a true crime author, and had never had any real interest in UFOs or paranormal phenomena, but after talking to the Hess’s, he changed his tune. He would say of this in an interview with Shadows Of Your Mind magazine:

“I met them through a man called Paul Moran, an employee who was working as a sales rep for the company I ran. He lived in Southern California and confided in me that he had a best friend (Steve) who he’d played varsity football with while a student at the University of Redlands. Paul told me that his friend had had an alien experience in the Mojave Desert that had “changed his life forever” and though he’d promised not to tell anyone about Steve’s experience, he thought that as a writer I’d be interested in hearing about it and that telling his story to someone like me would be “cathartic”.

My first impression before meeting the Hess’ was that I wasn’t interested in writing about “alien abductions”. The subject was not one that fell into the genres of writing I’d done before, and I wanted to focus on true crime stories or fiction. However, after meeting them, that all changed. I found Steve and Dawn to be exceptionally stable, upwardly mobile, well-educated, and rational. They were solidly middle class with two children, a mortgage, and hopes of a successful career as a project manager for the construction of shopping malls for Steve, and ardent in her ambitions to raise a stable family for Dawn.

More than intriguing, I found their story to be absolutely mind-blowing. The detail, the emotional manner in which they told the story, and the sweeping nature of their experience told me that this was a one-of-a-kind experience, unlike anything I had ever personally heard or heard about. It was, to me, as if a curtain had been lifted and an entire realm of existence heretofore unknown to humankind suddenly exposed. The authenticity of the Hess’s themselves told me that this was undoubtedly true and that their story needed to be shared with the world. As a writer, I know a heart-stopping true story when I hear one, and this was definitely one. What the Hess’s story did do was convince me that there exists another realm of existence. Humans, albeit rarely, can sometimes catch glimpses of something that is perhaps more real than the existence we live now, or believe we are living.”

Felber would go on to write a book on their experiences called "The Mojave Incident," which is a harrowing and detailed account of the ordeal of that fateful evening and the traumatic series of events that unfolded. He has also kept in touch with Steve and Dawn Hess, who now have six children, and claims that they have continued to experience strange phenomena right up to the present, although it would seem no further abductions. 

We are left to wonder what is going on here. Is this a case of a genuine abduction, and if so, where did these entities come from and what did they want? We will never know for sure, and these all remain rather odd and spooky cases of the alien abduction phenomenon.