Some Utahns Claim their Encounters with Extraterrestrials are Too Close for Comfort
They first came for Don Anderson’s son in 1984.It was 11:00 p.m. on a June evening in Mapleton, UT, when 25 year old Anderson shut off the TV in the bedroom of his mother’s basement where he was staying. He glanced down at his 4 year old son who sat on the edge of a mattress on the floor playing with a truck.
He noticed a gray alien floating in the middle of the room.
We looked at each other. He pointed to my son, as if he were asking to take him, Anderson recalls.
He returned the alien’s gaze and telepathically communicated, OK let me go with him. If I go with him, he won’t be afraid.
He says a ray of blue iridescent light shot through the room. He took his son by the hand. They jumped into the light ray and followed the gray alien across the basement, through the wall and upward through the ground to the grass outside.
Interview 1: Ron Johnson
Anderson says they moved toward a huge, saucer shaped spacecraft across the street that hovered 60' in the air. It was 30' across with red and blue lights that strobed through the neighborhood, flashing off houses in the area, he recalls.
He wondered why no one in the neighborhood was waking up to notice the ship. It was deadly quiet. There were no dogs barking or crickets chirping, Anderson says. All I could hear was the hum of the ship.
Don says that as he, his son and the gray alien traveled upward to the bottom of the ship, they felt a tingling sensation as they passed through telephone wires. He then remembers walking around the polished interior of the ship.
Everything was metal and really shiny, like it was made from stainless steel. I was walking on a cushy black catwalk.
Anderson and a tall blonde woman who seemed somehow familiar to him walked and telepathically communicated with each other. After he asked her if she could heal a serious stomach disorder he was currently experiencing, he heard her laugh.
The moment her eyes caught mine, it was like she said:
Don’t worry, you will be OK.
Anderson then saw his son and another boy through an arched doorway. They stood beneath a metal column, holding what looked like a hand held shower massager.
My son grabbed it from the kid he just met and put it above his own head. Blue volts of what looked like electricity shot over his body. He cracked up and thought that was really funny. I watched them each use that about 3 times. I think the aliens took me there so that my son would know I was around and not be frightened, and I would know he was safe.
Before long, Anderson was back in the front room of his mother’s house. The screen door was open, and I could look through and see the ship hovering and whirring outside. He says the room was also filled with elderly strangers he had never seen before. They stood motionless, like they were in a coma. We were all sitting there watching and listening to the sound of this flying saucer across the street.
He looked at the clock, and it was 6:00 a.m. I sprang out of bed and thought, Whoa.
Ron Johnson was 14 years old in 1968 when he spent a month helping his aunt and uncle on their California horse ranch. One night, he woke about midnight. I remember seeing the clock on the wall, Ron recalls. All of the blankets were on the floor at the foot of the bed. There was a very scary feeling, and I knew someone was there.
Leaning his head back, he caught sight of a tall, thin alien bathed in a greenish glow. He almost reminded me of an anorexic person with hollow cheeks, a pointed chin, and long bony arms and hands. He didn’t say anything, just stood there and looked at me.
Terrified, Johnson, now 55, remembers closing his eyes and wishing the entity would leave. Though it was gone 10 minutes later, he kept his eyes closed and lay awake in fear until morning. Then he went to the living room and lay on the couch. Whenever he stayed at his relative’s house after that, he slept in the car.
In 1993, at sunset in mid June in Oklahoma, Glenys Moore glanced across the treeless acres outside her home where cattle usually grazed among the sage and cedar. Coming from the North, Moore saw a light close to the ground shining outward. She noticed tall creatures that she first thought were cows walking toward and away from this light.
There were at least a dozen of them. They looked like ants, coming and going from their anthill. They were examining something. One would bend down, pick something up, show it to another creature, and seemingly discuss it.
Glenys noticed the time was 6:30 p.m. She realized that 2 large dogs who usually barked at everything, were completely silent.
One of the creatures turned to look straight at her. She says the alien appeared to be slender, with a large head, huge oval eyes and long, thin extremities. I first felt fear, thinking:
I hope they don’t see me.
The entity walked toward her, into her back yard and near the bathroom window where she stood watching.
I felt like running but could not. I seemed to be locked in its gaze. Then, as it drew nearer, my world disappeared.
The next thing she knew, it was pitch dark.
I remember physically shaking myself back to reality. I walked in the bedroom and screamed when I saw that the clock read 10:30 p.m.
Moore still wonders where the four hours went.
Elaine Douglass, says that the above 3 stories are far from rare and fit a typical pattern of alien abduction.
These UFOs are not being reported out of nowhere. On the NUFORC website, there are hundreds and hundreds of reports of UFO sightings, from every state in the union since the 1930s. They are always flying around. What are they doing? They are picking people up, says Douglass.
MarLee Spendlove has heard stories like those of Anderson, Johnson and Moore again and again. A former employee for a high risk maternal clinic for the Utah Department of Health, Spendlove pursued hypnotherapy training after a decades long interest in UFO related topics.
While she also addresses matters such as smoking cessation, she prefers to help clients who wish to explore their extraterrestrial experiences.
Both Anderson and Johnson had conscious memories of extraterrestrial encounters. But after undergoing hypnotherapy sessions with Spendlove, they each retrieved numerous previously unconscious memories of extraterrestrial encounters.
Johnson believes that hypnotherapy took him back to a time when he was a year old in a room with small gray aliens. There were clear cubicles that looked like incubators with girls and boys in them, all naked. The grays grabbed me, and I was screaming at them. They slammed me down face first under this table and told me not to move.
I started screaming:
It hurts, it hurts.
He recalls Spendlove saying:
We’re not going back there at this time.
Before undergoing hypnotherapy, Spendlove’s patients usually have a partial memory of an extraterrestrial experience. It’s almost like an unread book that they are opening pages to explore, she says. Often, it takes a lot of courage for people to get here because of the trauma involved. They are finally ready to open a door that has been closed, locked and boarded up.
Hypnosis expands their information and is almost like a view into a drama they didn’t know they were part of.
Spendlove says that extraterrestrials are able to block portions of memories, so that the human who interacts with them carries screened memories where the actual alien encounter is replaced with elements that are more typical of everyday human life.
After his initial experience, Anderson says that memories of other experiences made more sense to him. When I was a kid, the 9' man in the back yard was one of those beings coming to get me. On other times, they would send these little 3' black troll looking guys to get me, and I called them my gorillas. Thinking back, it made sense, because I had a little black stuffed animal that was a gorilla.
Eager to validate his first extraterrestrial experience, Don Anderson hoped his young son would corroborate it. I thought, My son has got to prove to me that this really happened. When he arrived home from work the day after his first alien encounter, he met his son, who told Anderson he’d had a dream about being attacked by wild bears that were in the house. Anderson had recently read that in screened memories, aliens mask themselves as animals, because people are comfortable with that.
When you are an abductee, they are coming for you many times, and they will keep coming for you. If you could say:
I’d like for this to stop.
Their response would be:
It’s not going to stop.
They aren’t going to encounter you in your normal state of mind. They capture you and subdue you, and you can’t resist. Then they take your memory away.
She says such experiences start in childhood and keep going.
They are just using you for some purpose and you don’t have a choice about that. This extraterrestrial life is intent on doing things here on its own terms and doesn’t care if we would want to sit down and speak rationally with it.
Ron Johnson remembers little of an experience in 1971, when he was driving North on Wyoming 89, 12 miles North of Evanston, at 11:00 p.m.
After buying gas and a microwave burrito, he drove along the road as it veered back into Utah. I was driving along when, there was a big massive light, so bright I couldn’t even see where I was going and could hardly see inside the truck. After the light flash, Johnson’s next memory is of sitting inside his truck while it was parked at the side of the road. Another hypnotherapy session with Spendlove brought back a memory of seeing a spacecraft during the incident.
Glenys Moore, now living in Ogden, shares a similar experience from a year ago when she initially thought she saw 2 stars in the sky that she hadn’t seen before.
Then, a vibrant, silvery blue light soared toward the rear of my truck. A big ball of bluish light swooped down over my truck with breakneck speed. It was so bright that it lit up the inside of my truck and the surrounding area. She says the light proceeded down the highway to where the 2 stars were.
It came into that light and then they all shot off in the blink of an eye. Moore says her legs turned to rubber bands, and she had to let her friend drive afterward.
Spendlove says that people who have extraterrestrial experiences often come back with a broader understanding of the universe. It profoundly affects their views in that they are more spiritual and less into organized religions, says Spendlove.
Anderson says that an extraterrestrial or interdimensional encounter gives you a whole new outlook on everything you thought you knew and believed. You are questioning everything. Nothing is as real as it seems on this planet. The things going on interdimensionally with humans have other implications.
He says that following an extraterrestrial experience, some people feel like they are walking between 2 worlds. In a way, it’s like being James Bond. You know the extraterrestrial experiences are real, but then you have to put that aside and go to work and live your everyday life.
Some abductees also return physically changed. Like the crescent mark on Anderson’s son’s leg, Spendlove adds that scoop marks, bruises or 2 snake bite marks on ankles have been observed. Sometimes abductees are put back in bed with someone else’s nightclothes on, she explains. She has heard of one account where many people in a single neighborhood were taken at night, and another where 2 boys were taken and returned to each other’s homes.
She adds that it is common for abductees to have more than one extraterrestrial experience. Some have a family history where multiple generations of people have had extraterrestrial experiences. Why would aliens choose to take more than one member of the same family?
There are lots of things you could learn by studying a family, she says. In some families, people don’t mind discussing it because they have lived with it for so long.
Spendlove says that it is the aliens’ choice to abduct a particular individual and that those who want or seek to have this experience strike her as childish. On the other hand, Spendlove says, because of her own longtime interest she wouldn’t mind if an extraterrestrial experience were in her future.
She says interest in extraterrestrial experiences abounds because many people feel that there is more to life than what is on this planet.
After hypnotherapy, Spendlove’s patients feel a sense of relief in learning what happened to them. They are grateful to know that there are beings from other worlds visiting us and that they have had an opportunity to be touched. It’s a spiritual awakening. There is something outside of church that interacts with beings not on the Earth.”
Such experiences, Spendlove says, are life changing because people realize that what they see in their 3D world is a limited view of the world. Extraterrestrial experiences resemble near death experiences in that they carry the message that that life is eternal, people who have had such experiences are not afraid to die.
To people who feel that they are privileged by having such extraterrestrial experiences, Douglass says:
We all want to know about extraterrestrial life, but we don’t want to be captured by it. If you are in the grips of something like this, you might as well make it into a positive thing in your mind. You don’t have a choice, therefore, your mind has got to tell you it is all for the best.
According to Douglass, the group of citizen investigators looks into local UFO sightings and events. Monthly meetings are held in Spendlove’s suburban West Valley City home. With attendees seated around card tables, the mood is one of acceptance. The discussion ranges from Bigfoot to UFOs at Area 51 in Nevada to paranormal investigations in Tooele. No one offers skeptical criticisms, but the questions fly fast and furious. Do Bigfoot creatures sometimes have white fur? Is it possible to drive to Area 51?
In an event Douglass herself investigated, a man was driving in Cisco, UT, on U.S. 50 at 2:00 a.m. He saw an amber disk rotating counterclockwise. It came up from behind the hill and rose 200', and his car stalled.
It came to a stop in the middle of a 2 lane road, says Douglass. The last thing he remembered hearing on the radio was the time, 2:08 a.m., on KSL Radio in Salt Lake City. The man’s next awareness was that he was leaning out the window, watching something move across the sky to the northwest. He tried to start his car, and it died, because the clutch was still engaged. The radio was playing and the announcer said it was 2:44 a.m.
After years of such experiences that have included sightings, dreams and actual abductions, Johnson now feels more comfortable discussing his extraterrestrial experiences than in years past. Years ago, I wouldn’t tell anybody. I’d just clam up, he recalls. But I find that it’s not so traumatic now.
Moore, who holds a master’s degree in counseling psychology, finds it refreshing to discuss her experiences after years of silence. The silence comes from fear that people will say we have lost our minds.
Some would argue that it is the mind that is playing tricks on them. I don’t think that most people who report abduction experiences are dishonest or crazy. Most of them have likely had very real, or at least realistic experiences, says Patrick Orlob, president of Salt Lake City Skeptics. Orlob feels that such people are more likely to have experienced a phenomenon such as sleep paralysis, a hallucinatory, semiconscious state where one’s body is immobilized. In this state, the brain can create visceral hallucinations.
In the Middle Ages, sleep paralysis might have been accompanied by terrifying visions of cloven hoofed demons, vampires or succubi, says Orlob. Today, we see skinny gray aliens because that’s what our brains, in a way, expect to see when in these kinds of conditions.
For Orlob, it’s about plausibility. He asks:
What’s more likely? That someone experienced a visceral, realistic hallucination under a well understood and not uncommon neurological state, or that a race of humanoid beings traveled thousands of light years with technology we can’t imagine, picking up the occasional random person and performing experiments for no apparent reason?
Does he feel that it’s possible that alien abductions actually occur? Sure. But until we have evidence that cannot be reconciled with Earth bound, well understood explanations, it’s not reasonable to conclude that aliens are responsible for these events.
There are those who say that extraterrestrial encounters are impossible. We don’t find any more evidence of alien abduction or extraterrestrial beings than we do supernatural gods or deity, says Joel Layton, president and director of Atheists of Utah. He recalls the Carl Sagan quote:
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
In the case of extraterrestrial encounters, he says, We feel that the evidence just isn’t there.
In 2008, for the first time, Johnson was willing to discuss finding tangible physical evidence of alien encounters following several instances of sexual relations with extraterrestrials that occurred over many years. He describes lying on a table having intimate encounters with scrawny looking, near anorexic aliens with large eyes. For him, it felt like having sex with a mannequin. They had no life to them.
He says he always awoke with a green residue, the color of lime sherbet and texture of Karo syrup, in his underwear. He says he encountered a young man from England at a UFO conference in Laughlin, NV., who had similar experiences.
Recalling his many encounters, Johnson wishes that whatever the aliens want to do with me, I wish they would let me know what it is.
Do aliens ever keep people permanently? We would never know, says Douglass. I don’t know of any abductees who have vanished. But there are a lot of missing people. We don’t know where they go. If abductees are taken and kept, the aliens are perfectly capable of doing it.