Abductions: Post-Abduction Torment
Imagine the distress of Charleston, South Carolina, resident William J. Hermann, who witnessed UFOs five times during 1977–78, and was then taken (via a blue- green beam of light) into a craft on March 18, 1978. Hermann was a sober young man of twenty-eight, a Sunday school teacher and deacon at his Southern Baptist congregation. He frequently considered infinity and other realms, but had no apparent history of fanciful thinking.
Although not harmed aboard the ship, Hermann did endure a physical examination. Afterward, small, pale aliens in red coveralls telepathically answered some of Hermann’s questions. They came from Zeta 1 Reticuli, part of a binary star system nearly thirty-six light years from Earth. (The star map sketched by Betty Hill in 1961suggested the Zeta Reticuli system.) The alien planet described to Hermann is, like Earth, third from its sun, and Earthlike conditions had evolved there. The Reticulans admitted their concern for human welfare, and told Hermann that they had visited Earth numerous times during the past fifty years. One visit, from eighteen years before, involved their abduction and study of an Earth couple. Hermann became convinced that the aliens were referring to Barney and Betty Hill.
After that, Hermann lost track of time and place. When he regained his senses, he was standing in an open field fifteen or twenty miles from Charleston. Retired USAF Lt. Col. Wendelle C. Stevens, an investigator with the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), looked into Hermann’s story.
Stevens arranged for the first of Hermann’s sessions with a hypnotist. That, and hypnotism and psychological tests arranged later by others, suggested that Hermann was not lying. At the least, he believed that space aliens had taken him aboard their craft. (Stevens went on to write a book about the Hermann case, UFO . . . Contact from Reticulum.) Between 1979 and 1982, aliens came to Hermann twice more. During one encounter, aliens (presumably Reticulans) left a glowing ingot, inscribed with the letters M-A-N, in Hermann’s bedroom. Professional examination showed that the ingot was a common lead-based alloy; Hermann explained that the metal, though common on Earth, was valuable to the aliens. After local and national publicity, Hermann suffered a flurry of crank calls and some local derision. Officials from Charleston Air Force Base (now Joint Base Charleston) rudely demanded photographs he had snapped of the UFOs. Hermann wrote an essay titled “Inevitable Destruction,” and was chided for his prediction of nuclear war.
By 1983, Hermann’s experience had become an emotional agony. Insomnia and migraine headaches upset his health and peace of mind, and he lost his job as a diesel mechanic when his employer claimed a general need to make cutbacks. Worse, Hermann was removed as a Sunday school teacher because a few congregants worried he had a connection to Satanism. Perhaps because the charges preyed on him for more than twenty years, he finally claimed his experiences were demonic rather than extraterrestrial.
Hermann’s decision to share his adventure brought negative consequences. He is a sympathetic figure, and it’s easy to feel bad for him. On the other hand, some abduction stories have peculiar or unrealistically specific details, and become difficult to accept as truth or even as jokes. Take the experience of E. Carl Higdon, a Wyoming oil roughneck abducted by a UFO on October 25, 1974, as he hunted deer in snowy Medicine Bow National Forest. When Higdon pulled the trigger on a good-looking elk, the bullet emerged from the rifle barrel in slow motion and dribbled to the ground a few feet away. At that, a bristle- haired alien with cranial antennae, and an arm that ended in a sharpened cone rather than a hand, surprised Higdon. (The creature’s other arm had neither cone nor hand.) The alien stood about six feet tall. It identified itself as Ausso One, and directed Higdon to a man-sized cube that had apparently landed in the woods. The craft—which was considerably larger inside than outside—traveled to a spot 163,000 “light miles” distant, with Higdon the unwilling guest of Ausso and another extraterrestrial—and accompanied by five deer!
Other human beings were in the craft, too: a little girl, three teenagers, and a middle-aged man. Although Higdon observed the people through the craft’s transparent walls, he shared no communication with them. As the ship continued on, Higdon spied a foreign planet that he described as “shaped similar to a basketball”—a clunky way of saying “round.” He looked around the control room and noticed an intriguingly low-tech alien device festooned with loose wires, and observed the ship’s control levers, which Ausso manipulated without touching. (This encourages the question, Why have levers at all?) By now tethered to a chair, Higdon struggled to shield his eyes against brilliant light pulsing from an immense tower on the planet’s surface. Ausso fed him food pills before a bulkhead-mounted device scanned his body for a few minutes. The ship finally returned to Earth, and Higdon’s captors released him soon after.
Time had got away from Higdon, who struggled to his truck and waited there until a sheriff’s search party discovered him. Although bothered after his return by a sore neck and shoulders, Higdon did receive a pleasant surprise: x-rays showed that his lungs, once badly scarred from tuberculosis, were now pristine.
Under multiple sessions of professional hypnosis conducted the month following his abduction, Higdon recalled his journey in more detail. The other humans and even the deer on board the ship, he said, were unwilling participants in a breeding experiment. Higdon could not explain why he hadn’t been selected for the program; perhaps the aliens were put off by his scarred lungs.
Higdon’s local reputation was good. He came in for little teasing, and his wife stood by his account. Encouraged, he insisted on his story’s truthfulness until the end of his life.