The Betty Andreasson Story
South Ashburnham lies in the center of Massachusetts, fifty-eight miles northwest of Boston. In 1967, as today, the village had a Little League team, some small restaurants, and a homogeneous white population. Because a larger town, Ashburnham, lay directly to the north, residents made a point to stress South Ashburnham in casual conversation with outsiders. Residents felt relaxed in this village of tree-lined streets and attractive, white frame houses. They enjoyed quiet lives.
Betty Andreasson was one such resident, but her circumstances changed on January 25, 1967. The time was just after 6:30 p.m. Darkness had fallen, and as Betty stood in the kitchen washing dinner dishes, she listened to the usual living- room chatter from her seven kids, and her mother and father. She gave a small start when the kitchen lights flickered and went out. During the brief interval of darkness, Betty clearly saw a peculiar red glow from the yard. When the glow began to blink, Betty called for her father. He joined her at the kitchen window.
People were out there. Little people. Her father laughed. Just kids in leftover Halloween outfits. Children?
No, not children. As Betty instinctively turned to gather her own kids, her father watched as five humanoids, ranging from three to five feet in height, hopped toward the house. He moved to secure the kitchen door, but reared back when one of the figures walked through the wood and into the kitchen.
For eight years, Betty blanked on what happened next, and it was only through sessions of regressive hypnotism conducted by researcher Dr. J. Allen Hynek that she began to remember. Betty and the other nine people in the house were put into what Betty described as suspended animation. Four of the five visitors established telepathic contact with Betty, who felt tentative rather than alarmed.
Still, the early moments of telepathic discourse were a little rocky: Betty misunderstood a remark or question and began to cook meat, which gave the small visitors a fright. The visitors took Betty outside, where a saucer-shaped ship about twenty feet in diameter sat on the slope of the yard. Her father had seen the hopping, but to Betty the strange visitors seemed to levitate. She fell under the telepathic contact of four of the five creatures.
Betty Andreasson described the aliens in terms later recognized as markers of classic “grays”: the creatures’ heads were dramatically oversized and “pear- shaped,” and dominated by “large, dark, almond-shaped eyes.” When she recalled “very little neck,” Betty meant that the creatures’ necks were unusually thin, and seemed inadequate to support the large heads. Mouths were mere slits; ears and noses were “tiny holes.” Betty noted that the alien hands had three fingers.
The creatures dressed identically in blue coveralls, the sleeves adorned with an avian symbol that Betty ultimately described as an eagle. The aliens’ chests were crossed, uniquely, with quasi-military Sam Browne belts. (In some accounts the belt is characterized as a sash.) All five creatures wore boots.
And then Betty was taken inside the ship. She was instructed to remove her clothing and slip into a plain white gown. She underwent a physical examination. When the examination ended, she was telepathically invited to dress herself again. Despite the intimate nature of the examination—physical violation is common to abduction accounts, and is something nearly always recounted with horror—Betty felt “love” and “comfort” in the aliens’ presence.
Because she is a committed Christian who accepted Christ when she was sixteen, Betty was inclined to regard the aliens positively. “I believed them to be angels,” she said. She identified the group’s leader as Quazgaa.
Betty’s recollections of the ship’s interior were detailed and precise. The saucer was multileveled, with a center section dominated by a crystal wheel revolving around a clear tube filled with gray liquid. The main deck was divided into plain cubicles, and some areas were obscured by walls. Betty recalled strange “red creatures” that crawled along the walls, eyeballing her with orbs mounted on stalks.
The craft gave no physical or audial sense of movement, but Betty nevertheless had an impression of travel to another place—a “sense,” she called it.
Quazgaa told her that she would leave the ship, but not before she was treated with an “amnesia block.” However, the alien suggested that the block would eventually lift.
About three years after the encounter, Betty became mildly intrigued by Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods. But she was not a UFO enthusiast, and her interest in the subject did not take firm hold until she answered J. Allen Hynek’s call for interview subjects in 1975. In the course of fourteen regressive-hypnosis sessions, Betty produced details not just of her 1967 encounter, but of brief abduction encounters dating to 1944, when she was just seven years old.
Betty’s key early experience happened on the family farm in 1950, when the teenage Betty was confronted by a spherical craft that she initially misidentified as the Moon. She was taken aboard the ship, where a tracking device the size of a BB was implanted in her brain. Betty’s calm reaction to the events of 1967 suddenly made sense, because the 1950 event was, for her, a positive one: Betty was taken to “the world of Light” for an audience with “the One.” The implant marked her as a person to be contacted again—which is precisely what happened in 1967. (The aliens retrieved the implant, through Betty’s nose, at that time.)
The 1967 event generated additional interest because of Betty Andreasson’s skill as an artist. Her ability is at the semi-professional level, with a good grasp of perspective and visual narrative. Her talent has allowed her to draw competent images of alien spacecraft, as well as images of extraterrestrials and even herself, as she appeared during the twenty-year span of encounters. In the late 1970s she worked with Massachusetts UFOlogist-writer Raymond E. Fowler. His book The Andreasson Affair was issued by Prentice-Hall, a major publisher, in 1979. (A follow-up, The Andreasson Affair: Phase Two, appeared in 1982.) Though college-trained in the liberal arts, Fowler is a competent amateur astronomer, and has established himself as a careful and diligent UFO researcher. In 2002, he self-published UFO Testament: Anatomy of an Abductee, his account of his own experiences as a person snatched by extraterrestrials.
Between 1967 and the mid-1970s, while the events of January 25 still simmered in Betty’s unconscious, some odd and tragic things happened. Betty’s ex-husband disappeared, and her father died. After both of her sons were killed in an auto crash, Betty married a local man named Robert Luca, who had had a UFO experience of his own. The Lucases regularly attend UFOlogist events, and Betty is a frequent guest on local and cable-access television, and on Internet radio and podcasts. She is an attractive woman with black hair and calm, wide- set eyes. Her voice is soft and modulated, with just a hint of a New England accent. For longevity in the public eye, and for her appealing demeanor, Andreasson must be regarded as one of the most significant of all UFO abduction participants.
Betty and Robert eventually fell victim to what they felt was government harassment and surveillance. As recently as February 2015, Robert Luca wrote to the local FBI office (Richmond, Virginia) to express displeasure at continuing hacks into his personal computer by computers registered to the Department of Defense network information center, in Vienna, Virginia. Over the years, various residences of Robert and Betty have been surveilled by black helicopters; in 1980, Luca snapped a photo of one that hovered above the Luca home in Cheshire, Connecticut.
Betty’s earliest encounters with aliens suggested to her that grays work in concert with superior beings called the Elders. Humanlike and attired in white robes, and sometimes glimpsed in flaming chariots—in accordance with popular Christian notions about angels and redemption—the Elders guide events so that human beings can advance spiritually. Even illness and death are calculated to bring the sufferers and their survivors to a higher spiritual plane. Life is never-ending; death is simply a path to the next level of existence. As described by Betty, the Elder mindset seems distinctly Christian. Just as the Christian God has involved himself in human affairs, the Elders, too, are keenly aware of our activities and behavior. Raymond Fowler’s 1996 book The Watchers 2 quotes Betty as saying, “We are all constantly being monitored. Nothing that you do in your life escapes them.” Could the black helicopters have been sent by the Elders?
In 2007, Robert Luca’s son, Robert Luca Jr., used his Web site to post an open letter to the UFO community. He insisted that the entire Betty Andreasson abduction case was a lie, a fraud that had been perpetuated for more than thirty years. Robert Jr. claimed that his father built electronic “gadgets” to tap his own phone. Son accused father of alcoholism, and described Betty as delusional and “far gone.” Luca Sr. responded to the claims by saying Robert Jr. had no special insights into the case, or access to any related materials. The younger Luca had been estranged from his father and stepmother since 2005, partly because of what Robert Luca described as his son’s “irrational and untruthful manner” following the death of his grandfather (Robert Sr.’s father), and an implied tussle over the grandfather’s will. Robert Sr. wrote his son out of his own will in 2005. He is convinced that his son challenged Betty’s account out of spite.
Not long after this dustup, Luca Jr. died. He was forty-three.
Betty Andreasson’s oldest child, Becky, has forged a life structured as a sort of coda to her mother’s, establishing an Internet presence as a channeler, psychic, and abduction survivor. She has been trained, she says, since infancy in the interpretation of alien symbols. Her stories, especially those involving a “murky brown” creature she likens to a Chupacabra, are ingenious and detailed. She has spoken and written about her abductors (the human-appearing “Elders”), and grays. There are, however, red flags. Becky Andreasson’s Web site is monetized —a long-distance psychic reading costs fifty-five dollars—and Becky employs the language of a person inclined to believe in conspiracies dedicated to the suppression of private thoughts. In the meanwhile, Becky podcasts on Supernatural Girlz Radio.
Becky Andreasson’s status might confirm a commonly held theory of “lineage abductions,” by which people of successive generations are taken, to ensure an effective transfer of alien genetic information.
For a variety of reasons, not all UFOlogists are on board with Betty Andreasson’s story. Her earliest drawings of the visitors, dating from the mid-1970s, depict eyes that, though enlarged, have distinct whites and pupils. But (as has been pointed out by Internet skeptic Aaron Sakulich and others) drawings Betty did after the 1977 release of the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind show ebony-black eyes, with no discernable pupils. Similarly, the coveralls Betty describes are familiar from pulp covers and science fiction films (aliens in the movies Killers from Space [1954] and This Island Earth [1955] wear the outfits).