Group Helps Those Abducted by UFOs Feel Less Alienated

What do you do if you are abducted in your sleep by a group of scrawny gray aliens with enormous heads, beamed up to a spacecraft, placed upon an examination table, probed with enormous needles and lasers, and then returned to your bed?

If you live in Southern California, you form a support group and share the experience. But the thorny questions posed at these sessions are far more complex than those discussed at your run-of-the-mill self-help groups.

How do you determine, one man asked at a recent meeting in La Crescenta, whether you have been abducted by aliens, abducted by the CIA or were merely dreaming? When the aliens implant a tracking device in your body, how do you get it out? After you’ve been abducted, what do you tell your employer when you show up late for work?

If you are concerned about something such as abduction security, you cannot simply approach your neighborhood watch captain for advice. And your family doctor might be reluctant to explore the “scoop marks” left by aliens seeking tissue samples. So abductees from throughout Southern California meet on the last Sunday of every month and discuss these common problems, buck each other up and relate abduction adventures.

During a break in the meeting, Kim Carlson rushes over to the coffeepot for a caffeine jolt before she will answer any questions. She is exhausted, she confides, because she has been staying up late every night to outwit the aliens who have been abducting her in her sleep. Carlson now will not go to bed until 4:30 a.m.--the time that she has determined is the alien abduction deadline.

Carlson delivers the same spiel as any ther support-group devotee. She used to feel alone, keeping her feelings bottled up inside. But now that she has met others like herself, she is open and forthcoming about her abduction experiences. Although this has done wonders for her emotional health, it has been tough on her social life. Her boyfriend of five years recently dumped her, telling Carlson: “ ‘When you get through this UFO business, give me a call.’ ” She shakes her head, raises her palms skyward and says: “Like I really have a choice.”

Carlson is a still photographer for the film industry. Like most of the others at the meeting, Carlson relates even the most outlandish tales with a heartfelt sincerity.

Many of her abductions, she says, follow a similar pattern. She is transported by little gray men to their spacecraft and placed on a table, where the aliens surround her and study her emotions, her sexuality, her DNA makeup and her hand-eye coordination. She is returned home after about two hours, she says.

Carlson has become something of an abduction activist. Wherever she goes, she asks strangers if they have been abducted or had UFO experiences. Just last week, she says earnestly, while shopping at Circuit City, she discovered a salesman and a warehouseman who both had had intimate experiences with UFOs.

Carlson does not know why she and the others at the meeting are the chosen people--for abduction--but she has a hunch why the aliens are studying the human race. The little gray men, she surmises, are attempting to create a new, hybrid race.

During the session, abductees discuss a variety of esoteric subjects. Snatches of testimony and random comments create a bizarre conversational mosaic:

“Did your alien have a sense of humor?”

“At first I thought I was in an elevator, but then I realized I was in a small craft detaching to a larger craft.”

“I know it wasn’t a dream because when I returned, my dog was very hyper and panting and he usually is very calm.”

“There is some sort of work going on between the CIA and an alien faction to develop a propulsion technology.”

Although some of these random comments might seem as if they come from the lunatic fringe, those who attended the meeting did not seem all that peculiar. Many of them had the mien of typical suburbanites who struggle with their mortgages, attend PTA meetings and complain about freeway traffic. But ask them about UFOs, aliens or extraterrestrial abductions, and they launch into lengthy monologues that some might consider more appropriately delivered from a psychiatrist’s couch.

The support group meets at the home of Yvonne Smith, a hypnotherapist who sees many of the abductees as clients. Through hypnosis, she directs their “regression therapy,” where they can re-experience and ultimately come to terms with the abduction.

She frequently is asked if the abduction experience is “just a California thing,” because residents seem more open to the unorthodox. But abductions and UFO experiences, she says, are occurring all over the United States and the world.

The difference is that Californians are the only ones who eagerly, enthusiastically and publicly talk about it.