Most of the following account was forwarded to me in the mid-1990s. I'm not sure how much of it has been printed elsewhere, though I do know that alien abduction researchers Budd Hopkins & David Jacobs were aware of this case at some point. I found the transcript among some old notes recently:
The nightmares wouldn't stop...the sudden, bizarre, unsettling nightmares. They were always the same; they seemed almost real.
Lea was sitting in a booth in a small, empty room with gray walls. A monotonic voice behind her said: "Don't move, or you might be hurt."
She felt paralyzed. She heard clicking noises, like an X-ray machine. Suddenly she was lying on a table. A bright light shone in her eyes. She sensed people moving around, examining her.
Then she was sitting up, facing a short creature so hideous she could not look at its face. From a box the strange being removed a shiny needle. At the tip was a silver marble. The creature moved closer toward Lea.
At that point Lea would jerk awake in her bed, terrified and drenched with sweat. Her screams would awaken her parents. But her mother, Lea recalls, would always admonish her: "It's just a nightmare. Everybody has them. You shouldn't watch all that scary stuff on TV."
Lea now believes it wasn't just a nightmare. She believes it was real. She is one of the people whose stories you might expect to see in a supermarket tabloid under the heading "Humans Who Believe They've Been Abducted by Aliens."
When she recounted her story in 1993, Lea lived in Prince George's County, MD, worked at a bank and was engaged to be married. She was thin with blue eyes. She was, in her words, average-looking and average in every way. Knowing that most people react with scorn and ridicule at the mention of UFOs and extraterrestrial life, she asked that her last name not appear with her story.
"I used to think I belonged in a mental institution, to be honest with you," she says. "But I don't think anymore that I'm crazy. I go to school. I work full time. I pay my bills like anybody else...I think other people think I'm crazy."
The subject of abductions by otherworldly beings is so far-out, so utterly fantastic that most people, even today, cannot begin to fathom it. Many will not take it seriously. It is unbelievable, unthinkable. Imagine how Lea felt in 1993.
What's really happening? No one knows for sure. But one thing is clear: Something has shattered Lea's and others' calm, secure existence on planet Earth. Whether the rest of us accept or reject their stories is irrelevant. We cannot assuage their fear: It is palpable. The torment is real.
Lea's began while she was in the fourth grade. She remembers clearly:
She was outside her apartment in Prince George's County playing with her sister and other children. It was dusk. They heard a hum, or a buzz, like a swarm of bees. They saw a disklike object...wingless, silver-gray, a row of lights along the edge, creep at treetop level over the apartment complex. It hovered above a parking lot between buildings, and then drifted away.
Lea and her sister ran inside to tell their parents. The girls even drew pictures.
"My father wanted to call somebody," Lea says. "But my mother said no, we'd made it up. But all of us saw it. We talked about it for days at school."
Shortly after that, Lea says, the recurring nightmare began. She dreamed it on and off for a decade, from when she was 10 until about 20.
Dreams are only part of her story. When she was 12 or 13, she and her sister, who is two years younger, were staying at their grandparents' house in St. Mary's County. They were in separate beds in the same room when a ball of lightning, as Lea describes it, passed through a window and curtain into the room.
About the size of a tennis ball, it glided between the beds, bounced off a door and vanished. A couple of seconds later another lightning ball did the same thing, and then another. Lea says there might have been 20 in all.
For a long time afterward, Lea feared she was losing her mind. But then, five years ago, she and a friend were at a mall outside a bookstore. Lea spotted a display of books, the covers of which featured a drawing of a grotesque creature with big, black, almond-shaped eyes.
The book was Communion: A True Storythe writer Whitley Strieber's account of his abductions by aliens. Lea pointed at the drawing and screamed, "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! That's them! That's them!"
They were the creatures in her nightmare.
"That's when it registered," Lea says. "That's when I said: 'Wait a minute. Something's going on here."
It was the first she had heard of abductions by space creatures. She read the book, and then a couple of others on the subject. She became convinced that the terrifying events...the nightmares, the night of the lights, perhaps other unexplained events as well...had been abductions.
As we are aware...Lea was not alone. Over the past few decades, hundreds of credible abductees have come forward and detailed their ordeals. The phenomena occurs in various forms and intervals, as Lea was about to find out:
Strange things continued to happen to her. While visiting friends in the West Virginia mountains, she was floated out of the house, taken aboard a spaceship and handed a baby.
It was a boy, with leathery skin, a thin neck and an oversized head with patches of red hair. It had huge eyes, she says, but they weren't coal black like those of the adult aliens. They were blue.
"I don't know why, and I know this sounds strange," Lea says in a voice trembling with emotion, "but as soon as I held him in my arms, I knew he was mine. I felt like I was his mother."
She rocked him and talked quietly to him, she says, as several aliens watched. Lea hesitates and says, almost apologetically: "I know this doesn't make any sense."
Even though she had trouble sleeping and often felt as if she was being watched, she says she "kind of gotten used to the idea" of being abducted.
"I don't like it, but there's nothing I can do about it, as far as I can see," she says. "If they were going to hurt me, I think they would have done it a long time ago."
She knows what the skeptics say. But, she says, they don't give people enough credit for knowing the difference between what's actually happened to them and what they might have imagined. Lea says she was never abused as a child. She says she has no reason to make up a story so crazy and bizarre.
Why does she think the aliens chose her?
"I have no idea," she says. "I don't know who they are, where they come from, what they're doing, nothing."
"I just want people to understand that this is real, this is happening. It's out there, and you're going to have to accept it sooner or later."
Lea's ordeal continues.
The Custodians: Beyond Abduction
Keepers of the Garden
Earth: An Alien Enterprise: The Shocking Truth Behind the Greatest Cover-Up in Human History
The Andreasson Affair: The True Story of a Close Encounter of the Fourth Kind
