by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
UFO abduction accounts of grey aliens taking people from their homes and examining them in their spaceships started becoming typical after the publication in 1981 of Budd Hopkins’s book Missing Time. However, there is an early account with these elements in the 1977 book Abducted!: Confrontations With Beings From Outer Space by the founders of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, Coral and Jim Lorenzen. The case was investigated by APRO Field Investigator Kevin Randle and APRO Consultant and Director of Research Dr. James Harder. Years later, Randle presented his thoughts on the case, which provide some insight into how the typical UFO abduction narrative might have evolved.
The person who reported the abduction profiled in the Lorenzens’ book is given the pseudonym “Patty Price,” and she is described as a divorced mother of six children in a “small town in a midwestern state.” According to the account, on October 16, 1973, the family had just moved into the house, and after a “hectic and tiring day”, Patty fell asleep on her couch along with her five-year-old son, Keith. Her other five children are said to have been tucked into their beds. At around midnight, she woke up and was scared, due to the fact that there had been reports of a prowler in the area. She gathered up her children and took them to a friend’s house down the street where she called the police (she had no phone of her own).
The family is described as discussing the events of the previous night on the following morning and speculating about the possibility of a prowler. Patty’s seven-year-old daughter, Dottie, said, “Mama, it wasn’t a prowler; it was a spaceman!” She is said to have been adamant about this in spite of what anyone said.
According to the account, Patty didn’t think about that night again until she picked up a copy of Saga magazine “in the spring of 1975” and read accounts in there of people who had claimed to have had UFO experiences. She wrote the magazine, and they “turned the case over to Kevin Randle, a young field investigator for APRO.” Randle contacted APRO saying he wanted to look into the case and asked them “to recommend the case to one of the consultants proficient in hypnosis,” and Harder is the person they chose.
When Randle talked to the family, he learned that they had initially woken up because Keith was screaming that he saw a skeleton in the corner. Their cat was “yowling” and a neighbor’s dog was “barking furiously,” and Patty decided then to go to her friend’s house. Dottie added to her account of the spaceman and “told a long story about a spaceship and said to her mother, ‘they didn’t make me forget.’” She described the craft, the creatures on it, and creatures that had come into the house, and the oldest of the children, Betty, “agreed with Dottie and her descriptions.”
Randle was convinced that something had happened that night, as there were other reports of “someone moving about the area,” and when he asked about Patty’s character, those he spoke with thought of her as “a reliable person,” so he made arrangements for another meeting with Harder, himself, and the family on July 8, 1975.
That morning, Harder spoke with Patty and “the children who had been involved,” and then put Patty “into a light trance.” Patty described a bright light, two figures standing over her, and said Keith wasn’t with her. She described the creatures as “bright and skinny” and said they were dressed like people “in the service.” The story came out that she, Betty, Dottie, Keith, and another child, Steve, were taken, and she found herself in a large, bright, round room. She said she could see the stars through “the side toward the top.”
She described four or five creatures in uniforms and machines like computers. She said the creatures were “cold blooded” and didn’t want her to know it and that they treated her “like a guinea pig.” She said she didn’t remember being examined but knew that she was. With coaxing from Harder, she described the creatures in more detail saying they were just over four feet tall, very thin, with long arms, clawed hands with small thumbs, large, slanted eyes, and were wearing, in the authors’ words, “fluorescent clothing with Sam Brown belts,” and possibly, gloves. She then described being floated over the ground back to the house and recounted how they had woken up and gone to her friend’s house.
Hypnosis was attempted on Betty later that night at Randle’s hotel room (the house was too noisy), however, when questioned about the creatures, she woke up. This happened on a second attempt as well. Dottie was then questioned without hypnosis, and she described a line of people, that included Betty and two neighbor boys, waiting “to get on the machine.” She said the creatures “thought at me with their heads.” When questioned the next morning at her home, she described two creatures being in the house, one in the corner, and one near the couch, and said the one in the corner told her she wouldn’t be sick anymore. Randle is said to have pointed out in his report to APRO that she “had been very ill prior to the experience” and was in good health afterwards.
Patty was put under again, and she recalled more about the examination and said, “They had lots of machines.” Harder asked, “Were some of those machines attached to you by wires?” and got no response. She then said, “They put me on a table and hooked me up on one leg and one arm.” She said, angrily, “I didn’t like their examination.” Harder asked if it was a gyn exam and she said, “That’s part of it–I don’t like what they do with my head.” She said they were taking her thoughts. Asked how they did that, she said, “They put a needle in and they took my mind, my thoughts.”
Another detail that came out was that there was a human in the room examining her as well who was wearing horn-rimmed glasses and was bald “with a fringe of grey on the sides.” Patty spoke of needles being pushed into her, and being asked about her family, what she loved and hated, and what animals she liked. She said, “They need us.” She also said “they limited time” and when asked what gave her the idea that their time was limited, she explained, “Not amount of time. I don’t–I don’t know what it means.”
That night, both Betty and Patty were put under together for one last session. Patty was given pen and paper and was “asked to draw the alien,” and the resulting picture is said to have matched her description, but to have been more detailed. Betty described seeing her mother nude on a table that floated. She also drew a picture of the same number of aliens described by her mother and included the human, and it is noted that she hadn’t heard her mother mention the human. Patty recalled waking up and finding Keith on the floor on a blanket and finding Dottie and her sister Mary in the bed where they slept together but with their positions reversed.
Kevin Randle presents his thoughts on the case in a blog headlined “Alien Abduction and Leading the Witness” posted March 28, 2005, on his blogspot.com site A Different Perspective. He identifies Patty Price as Pat Roach and says:
It is quite clear to me that Roach was led into her more detailed descriptions by Dr. James Harder who was looking for some validation of the Hill abduction. It is also clear that Roach took cues from the magazine article I had written about another abduction. Her descriptions of the interior of the craft, for example, mirrored those in that article.
He gives details of Harder’s influence:
Between sessions, Harder discussed with Roach other abduction cases. Just before the session in which Roach revealed that she had been “medically” examined on the craft, Harder told her about Betty Hill’s examination on board a craft. Harder’s leading questions took her into other arenas.
His conclusion regarding the accounts given by Roach and her children is this:
The genesis was the adult’s episode of sleep paralysis and then two years of discussing this with her children until some of them believed they had been abducted.