by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”
In 1973, the claims of Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker that they’d been abducted by elephant-skinned, robot-like creatures in Pascagoula, Mississippi, opened researchers up to what have become known as “high-strangeness” reports. The term comes from J. Allen Hynek’s efforts at creating a system of strangeness ratings in Chapter Four of his 1975 book, The UFO Experience. Hickson and Parker were taken seriously because they seemed genuinely traumatized by their experience while just the two of them were waiting in a room at the police station where they first reported their encounter. They just been interviewed, and unbeknownst to them, a tape recorder in the room was left running, which captured the bewildered men talking to each other about their experience. Their story was reported in newspapers and UFO publications worldwide. After that, abduction reports began to increasingly appear. In the midst of this new openness to high-strangeness reports, in 1979, there was a story told by a trucker that was highly unique, and highly strange, and yet was still given serious consideration by the local newspapers and investigators who examined it.
Harry Joe TurnerThe case was looked into by Mutual UFO Network Investigator Fred Whiting, who wrote about it in the March 1980 MUFON Journal. The story also appears on the front page of the December 1979 APRO Bulletin and on page 12 of the summer 1981 UFO Update! The UFO Update! version seems to come straight out of an article (page 9 of pdf) by Bill McKelway headlined “Trucker Says Journey Covered Light-Years” in the September 23, 1979, Richmond, Virginia, Times Dispatch. According to McKelway, he spent three hours with Winchester, Virginia, resident Harry Joe Turner and listened to him as he chain-smoked and told his story.
Turner, a long-haul-trucker, said he was headed for Fredericksburg, Virginia, on the night of August 28, in his 1974 Kenworth, hauling ketchup and mustard. This was his first time making this trip. He said it was 10:52 p.m. when he looked at his watch during a stop at a Winchester gas station. He said “There was a little lightning and stuff, but the strangest thing was there was hardly no cars on the road. Everything seemed just deserted.”
When he was seventeen miles into the trip, heading south on U.S. 17 after just crossing Paris Mountain, he saw the lights of an oncoming truck. The driver called over his CB radio, “Hey, southbound 18-wheeler! Where you headed to, Buddy?” Turner said, “From that moment on, it was like I walked through that door right there into another world.”
It was then that the lights of his truck blinked off and on, and his CB radio started screeching. He turned off the radio but there was still, in McKelway’s words, “a grating sound.” He then saw a bright light in his rear-view mirror. In McKelway’s words, “A beam of palpably thick white light settled over the truck,” and it seemed to Turner that he was no longer in control of the truck. According to Turner, “It was like the whole truck was just floating, like it was being vacuumed up by the thing.”
Turner said a creature then opened the door and there was another one on the roof. The creature grabbed his shoulder with “a grip like steel” that caused him great pain.” He grabbed his .32 caliber pistol and pushed it to his left until he felt it hit something. He then fired eight hollow points. He said, “I went blam, blam, blam… eight times, but the gun just seemed to move right through the thing.” At this point he started to fade out. He said he shouted, “My God, I can’t kill the thing. What the… And that was it.”
Turner said his next memory was waking up in the warehouse parking lot in Fredericksburg with no idea of how he got there. He was in the passenger seat, and the seat belt on the driver’s side was buckled. He looked at his watch, and it read 11:17 p.m., but a warehouse clock showed the actual time of 3:00 a.m. There were two mileage indicators on the truck, and both showed that it had only travelled 17 miles. In spite of the low mileage indicated, by the time Turner got back to Winchester, 114 gallons of fuel had been consumed. This was, according to McKelway, enough to make the 160-mile round trip more than three times.
According to McKelway, Turner struggled for hours trying to “recall landmarks,” and the words “Alpha Centauri” came to him. This is a star 4.24 light years away from our solar system, and according to Turner, he’d never heard of it before.
Turner said he was taken to a city-like place 2.3 light years beyond Alpha Centauri that looked like it had been through a holocaust. He added that, along the way, they stopped at the Moon, and he looked at Neil Armstrong’s footprints.
Turner described his captors as looking like us. He said they were dressed in what looked like surgical clothes and wore white caps that, when lifted up, revealed numbers written on the creature’s foreheads.
Turner said that the creatures showed him the destroyed city as part of their mission to help us here on Earth, “but they say things have gone pretty far here and that the end is coming soon.”
Turner said the creatures spoke a language he believed was called Alpho Lazooloo that sounded like a tape recording played backwards. He said they slowed down their speech to communicate with him.
According to Turner, he was visited later by invisible aliens and managed to knock five of them down. McKelway adds that Turner left the house on one occasion, “for no apparent reason,” and returned soaking wet, and he was chased from his house by aliens on another occasion.
An unusual detail reported by McKelway, even for a high-strangeness UFO case, is that on September 3, Turner led as many as ten police officers on a high-speed car chase. A Berryville police officer said he was going 110 miles per hour and “couldn’t hold a candle” to Turner. Turner claimed he was out for a drive when an alien appeared in the car and that he was “spurred on” by the creature. According to McKelway, the quoted officer was the one who’d managed to pull Turner over. Turner was charged “with two counts of reckless driving and two counts of failure to heed a siren and flashing lights.” His hearing was scheduled for November 14, and McKelway offers this speculation: “His defense undoubtedly will be the most unusual in the history of the Clarke County General District Court.”
Turner seemed to have been in a bad way during the interview. He said he had thoughts of suicide, ringing in his ears, and crying spells. He said he got warning messages from the creatures and that animals sometimes reacted strangely around him. He said there had been crank calls but that his friends made efforts to help him and understand what he was going through.
McKelway describes Turner’s life in the aftermath of his reported encounter this way: “So, he sits at home, mulling it over and over again, smoking, and taking pills to calm his nerves.” The APRO Bulletin article by Iris Maack headlined “Trucker, Rig, Abducted (?)” ends this way: “The question is what trauma created his condition? All stories, regardless of their bizarre nature, should be closely examined. We owe it to the percipients and to ourselves.” It seems the ground was being laid for the serious consideration of the abduction reports that would become common in the 1980s.