by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
Last Week, we wrote about a case that Betty Hill looked into and came upon another case she was involved with that intrigued us to the point that we were moved to explore it in detail. Most significantly, it involves reported encounters with Men in Black, one from a witness/experiencer (actually a Man in Dark Blue), and the other from the doctor who worked with him to recover memories using regressive hypnosis.
The principle investigator was Brent Raynes, who wrote the article headlined “The Twilight side of a UFO Encounter” published in the July 1976 Vol. 22, No. 2 Flying Saucer Investigator. According to Raynes, he arrived at the home of the parents of “W,” one of the witnesses (identified as David Stephens and Glen Gray in other accounts and referred to in Raynes’s article as “W” and “P” respectively), at 9:45 p.m. on October 28, 1975. This is just a day after the reported event, which was said to have taken place between 3:00 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. on October 27th. Raynes says he set up his tape recorder and interviewed Stephens for an hour before they were joined by Gray, who helped fill in the details. The following is the story that came out as described by Raynes.
On October 27, 1975, Stephens, 21, and Gray, 18, were relaxing in their shared trailer at around 3:00 a.m. when they heard a sound like an explosion. They went outside and saw nothing out of the ordinary, and as they were standing there, Stephens mentioned that it might be nice to go for a short car ride and Gray “abruptly” suggested they go to Lake Thompson.
In a 1971 Plymouth Satellite, with Gray driving, they headed south on route 26 and after about a mile, “the car turned onto a back road to Oxford, completely under its own control.” The ride is described as “unusually smooth.” After passing through Oxford and travelling down the east side of Lake Thompson, they saw two lights shining out towards the road from a cornfield on their left. They thought what they were seeing was a truck until it lifted up, making them believe they were seeing a helicopter until they turned off the motor, rolled down their windows, and didn’t hear any sound.
What they then saw is described as being 20-30 feet from the car and having an “elongated cylinder-like” appearance with green, blue, and yellow lights all around it that went out when it got just above a line of trees.
Gray restarted the car and took off. The men “rolled up the windows and locked the doors with the object giving pursuit.” The next thing they were able to remember was finding themselves at a full stop on the right side of the road about a mile south of the cornfield after Stephens saw what he described as the “brightest lights I’ve ever seen.” Their doors were unlocked and their windows were down. They looked at each other and each man noticed that the other’s eyes were orange.
They continued on, driving south, and the object, still seen in the east, was no longer visible after about two miles. They turned around and headed back at Stephen’s suggestion and then, on “an unexplained impulse,” Gray turned onto a gravel road headed south that led to Tripp Pond on the east side of the southern end of Lake Thompson.
At this point, they saw the object, which appeared bright white at this point and hovered 20º-30º above the horizon about 500 feet from the car. The car motor stopped and the radio “faded out.” The object seemed to move up and down and then rose up to about 80º above the horizon and hovered, now 500 yards from the car.
Stuck there unable to restart the car, after about 45 minutes, Stephens and Gray saw two disc-shaped objects with red, green, and blue lights. They described them as being a quarter of the size of “the mother ship,” which they described as being as big as a football field. The discs put on an aerial display which consisted of descending in a falling-leaf motion down to the pond, skimming along it, and then ascending in a stair-step pattern, switching directions as if going up different flights of stairs. The men then noticed a strange fog rising out of the pond described as “dark grey” and “thick-looking.”
Raynes points out that the men perceived their surroundings differently from what they really were. He says that Tripp Pond, which was a half mile from their position, seemed to be 20-50 feet away, with one section being like an ocean with water “as far as they could see” that had an island in it that one of the discs flew over. According to Raynes, there were hills visible behind the pond, and there was no island.
The fog surrounded the car and a loud voice announcing that it was going to be a clear, bright, and sunny day came over the radio. The mother ship was the only craft seen at this point. Gray was able to start the car at 6:30 and they got to the Stephens’s house at 7:00.
While they had planned to keep quiet about their experience, they were overcome by a variety of symptoms that included burning eyes, sore and loose teeth, sore throats, inability to speak coherently, lack of balance and coordination, chills, and difficulty breathing. Mr. Stephens noted that the men had a yellow discoloration around their eyes, and Gray saw in the bathroom mirror that his tongue was cracked and covered with a “scum” that was “brownish white.”
Raynes says that at one point, both men were startled when they got a mental impression informing them “We’re not done with you yet. We’re coming back for you.”
According to Raynes, Stephens and Gray suffered “strange, secondary hallucinations.” Gray is said to have been watching television in the Stephens’s living room and to have seen a black cube tumble through the air that seemed to vanish into a wall and to have seen “golden wires” appear over the TV. Stephens, who was in the room with him, saw none of this, however, he reportedly saw an ashtray lift up about a foot and then drop back down. Upon visiting the pond the next day on the 28th, both men reportedly saw what looked like snowflakes coming down, spheres and black cubes flying towards the pond, and silver spheres flying in all directions. They are also have said to have seen a red outline of something like a face and something shaped like a bird’s beak fly into the pond.
Also on the 28th, something reportedly walked across the roof of their trailer and at around 8:45 p.m., an hour before Rayne’s arrival, three knocks on the front door are said to have been heard. According to Raynes, Stephen’s sister opened the door and no one was there, and Gray, standing eight feet away, was the only one who heard “a male-sounding voice say the letters ‘UFO.’”
Raynes describes other events in the days following his arrival. He says that on the 29th, at 9:00 a.m., a knock on the door was heard and Stephens opened it to find a stocky man with a crewcut wearing dark blue clothing and sunglasses. The man is said to have asked him if he was the one who saw a flying saucer and when Stephens said yes, the man told him “Better keep your mouth shut if you know what’s good for you.” Raynes says the man then “scurried away” around the corner of a nearby building.
Next week: Hypnosis and another visit by a Man in Black.