Where Did the Time Go?
The notion of “missing time” is a standard abductee complaint. Subjects report, variously, that time seems truncated, compressed, or missing (in chunks) altogether. One normal-life parallel is so-called highway hypnosis, a fugue state caused by fatigue, boredom, daydreaming, or, especially, over-familiarity with one’s route. Commuters often pull into their driveways following long drives and ask themselves, How did I get here? Although no time was really lost, the drivers’ awareness of it was compromised. Physically present, the drivers were nevertheless absent.
The phenomenon is familiar to some epileptics, whose seizures “blank” portions of memory—and thus, of time. Accident victims, particularly those who are concussed, often emerge with little memory of the moments before and after the accident, and no recollection at all of the incident itself. In cases of concussion, memory can return as the brain heals itself.
For UFO abductees, though, memory may never return naturally. Regression hypnosis administered by a competent medical professional (working with a willing subject) may return memory to subjects’ consciousness. Occasionally, however, the missing-time conundrum, and the state of an abductee’s consciousness, can be determined by conventional means, without hypnosis.
Trucker Harry Joe Turner was abducted from a lonely Virginia highway, truck and all, in 1979. Although the experience seemed to Turner to have taken almost no time at all, he realized later that he had been gone for nearly four hours.
Turner’s case is an intriguing combination of missing-time syndrome and a hint of extraterrestrial friendliness that didn’t work out quite as Turner hoped. He described his kidnappers as humanoids whose faces were marked with numbers.
One of the aliens, Alpha La Zoo Loo, offered Turner a trip to a planet located light-years away. Although the journey happened, and Turner and his truck eventually returned to Earth in one piece, his recollection of the event was fuzzy.
Local authorities that took a good look at the truck found it had been tampered with by conventional means, which is to say, with ordinary tools the likes of wrenches and hammers. Turner insisted that the truck (which carried a load of catsup and mustard) returned to Earth covered by a peculiar caul. Investigators found nothing unusual on or inside the vehicle.
Turner later fell into paranoia and tranquilizer dependency, fearful of a second abduction and tormented because the physical evidence did not support his story.
Had he fabricated his account, or had he told the truth? If the latter, did his abductors cover for themselves by tampering with his truck? “The Cosmic Frame,” a 1955 science fiction short story by Paul W. Fairman (cited in chapter nine), unfolds along just those lines, with a man framed by extraterrestrials for an auto-related crime that is not his fault.