Original subtitles

[♪ mysterious music playing]

-My name is Debbie Jordan Kauble.

The night of June 30th, 1983,

I was in my 20s; a single mom with

two little boys, living with my parents.

That night I was in the kitchen,

and I noticed the pedestrian door to the garage was open.

I went out and looked around in the backyard.

And I went into the garage.

And I felt weird.

And I remember thinking

“Oh my god I gotta get out of here.”

And I ran towards the open pedestrian door,

and the minute I hit that door,

something hit me.

And it was a bright white light that burnt my eyes.

I couldn’t move,

and I felt like my skin was on fire.

I started to shake and I started to...

the shaking turned into a vibrating.

That’s when I saw what I thought were children walking

around my mom's backyard.

But they were gray with no hair and big black eyes.

And then I heard a voice say it was unfortunate that

I felt pain.

This stuff is real.

This stuff is happening whether you want

to believe it or not.

-He was dressed in black and he had big eyes.

-There was this giant light and it covered the whole lake.

I can remember being levitated out of the car.

-I was right about here,

and all of the sudden my hands just jerked back.

And I was on the UFO, just like that.

-I think people who had the experiences and

seen things like I’ve seen,

I think they’re an integral part of this entire phenomenon.

[♪ theme music playing]

-We get reports every night.

-I don't know what the hell it is.

-Rotating right around it.

[♪ theme music playing]

-A lot of people claim to have anomalous experiences or

encounters with anomalous phenomena,

experiences of encountering beings and

being taken aboard ships,

and a whole range of very strange,

let’s call them abduction experiences.

And this has always been kind of in the background

in terms of what's considered to be respectable

in studying UAP.

The experiencer element of it is not something that's

part of the mainstream dialogue.

It's not part of what the military talks about or what

the government talks about or the scientific community.

They're focused on the physicality of these objects.

-The people that say they’ve been abducted by

aliens and taken up on a spaceship or something, uh,

should bring a piece back.

-The question has been,

for a lot of people who do care about that element of it,

is how to integrate that into the dialogue without

scaring people away who might be skeptical.

-This is suburban Indianapolis.

Not exactly the kind of place you’d expect an

alien spacecraft to land.

But researchers believe that one did land,

not far from here.

And what resulted is one of the most well-documented and

incredible UFO cases ever.

-I had absolutely no idea how long I was in the yard and

I don’t know how I got there.

I remember thinking, “Oh my God, I'm dead.”

And those kids kind of just glided in front of me

towards this thing to my left.

I called it a craft for the last 40 years because I don’t

know what else to call it.

It was egg-shaped and it probably wasn’t 10 feet tall.

The next thing I remember is I heard my name.

[voice] Debbie, Debbie...

-And it was my mom.

She's like, is everything okay?

And I said, “Everything's cool.”

I went in the house and went to bed.

And the next morning, when I woke up,

my eyes were swelled shut and I was in incredible pain.

None of this made sense.

-I call the UFO phenomenon "The Impossible."

And what I mean by that is, it's actually not impossible,

but it's impossible according to our own rules and

our own assumptions.

And so I'm interested in things that are happening and

don't fit in.

My name is Jeff Kripal.

I'm a historian of religions at Rice University.

I'm an academic, I'm a nerdy professor.

And I’m interested in UFOs because I don’t understand them.

And I don’t think anybody else does either.

The experience of a UFO puts into question marks everything

I believe about the world.

And that’s what the archives are about.

The Archives of the Impossible is a professional archive run

by Rice University that collects human experiences that

are considered to be impossible but, but

happen all the time.

We have well over a million documents of

files and papers, all on anomalous phenomena.

If you talk to experiencers,

their story's gonna get really weird,

really fast.

-The doctor was an alien?

-Right, yeah...

-You feel you were impregnated by them?

-Yes. -And who visited?

-They just randomly picked me,

and I woke up while they were doing it,

I’m going, "What the (bleep) is going on,"

my room was white,

I mean it was like I couldn’t see anything.

-I remember a light hitting me in the forehead,

aliens in my room,

being lifted up into a spaceship...

-You understand how crazy it sounds to us?

-Often, something is done to the person,

sometimes in a violent way,

but sometimes the person experiences this in

very positive and transformative ways.

These are actual encounters with something

in the environment,

but clearly the human imagination is kicking in

to translate what is there from whatever cultural or

folklore or mythological or religious material it has.

So, for example,

when a 16th-century English woman reports an

abduction by fairies, that's her cultural framework.

When a 21st-century American reports an abduction,

they’re likely gonna talk about aliens.

That person will see what his or her culture tells

them to see.

The big question is,

why do human beings have these experiences?

-In the 60s, we first started to hear about

incidences of people saying that they had

encountered alien beings.

And people being taken against their will by these

beings that they described with big eyes.

-The first really famous abduction story was the story

of a New Hampshire couple.

Betty and Barney Hill were coming back from a vacation

driving through the White Mountains.

[Barny Hill] And surprisingly, what I thought

was a star or a satellite, began coming in my direction,

at a very rapid rate of speed.

-Through Betty's dreams and through hypnosis,

this whole narrative emerged about encountering a set of

essentially humanoid-like aliens that are in this ship.

[Betty Hill] They don’t look like what I expected

them to look.

They look like people but they’re sort of grotesque.

And this frightened me.

I became very frightened.

[Barny Hill] And I thought this can't be real.

I thought, "Oh God, it's there!"

"What is this thing?"

-Barney and Betty Hill really do seem genuinely

traumatized by whatever the thing is that has

happened to them.

And they become the first of hundreds of people who come

forward with stories of and reports of alien abductions.

But the most obvious criticism of the experiencers

is just the lack of evidence.

It could be a dream, it could be a hallucination.

-UFO Enthusiasts think the Hill case is a classic example

of a close encounter.

Why?

-There’s no corroborating evidence.

For all I know, we may be visited by a different

extraterrestrial civilization every second Tuesday.

But there’s no support for this appealing idea.

-After my experience, the next day the yard had

this eight-foot diameter circle where the UFO landed.

And there was this long streak that shot off

one edge of it, about two feet wide,

like a jet blast burn or something.

The soil in this area was rock hard.

-Definitely, it had some type of radioactivity to it.

So, there was some kind of activity we

couldn’t identify that had taken place here.

-And then in the winter when the snow starts to come,

the snow is melting off of this place.

It’s not melting off the other grass in the yard.

What does that?

For months after that night,

I couldn’t really remember much about what happened.

There was about an hour and a half of “missing time”

in this incident.

And I did wonder if I was crazy sometimes!

I tried to make sense of it in my own brain so

that it would fit in my world,

but the panic attacks got really bad.

And I think I pretty much had a nervous breakdown.

Eventually, I started remembering more things.

It was like somebody slapped me in the face and woke me up.

I had picked this book up in the library and it

was called "Missing Time,"

and it was written by a guy named Budd Hopkins.

-People who have reported these experiences,

have their memories clouded of what happened.

And they can't explain, certainly not initially,

what it was that accounted for the lapse of time.

So Budd Hopkins put a name on this,

“Missing Time.”

And what he did was very unusual.

He put his actual address in the back of the book.

It drew people to him, sending him letters.

[Deb Kauble] I wrote this 14 page letter to Budd Hopkins.

I told him about how crazy I felt,

and I was just hoping that he could help me

make sense of it.

[phone ringing]

Budd called the house.

As soon as I heard his voice, I felt better.

[Deb Kauble] Hello?

[Budd Hopkins] Uh Debbie?

[Deb Kauble] Yeah.

[Budd Hopkins] This is Budd Hopkins calling.

[Deb Kauble] Oh hi.

[Budd Hopkins] Very interesting letter you wrote.

And I you know gonna just have a few questions

to follow up on.

[Deb Kauble] Well I appreciate you taking the...

I was frankly very surprised that...

I didn't think I'd ever hear from anybody.

I don't even know why I done it.

-Budd Hopkins is a very important figure in the whole

history of UFOs and alien abduction phenomenon.

He was a very fine artist and sculptor who had works

in the Museum of Modern Art and other important museums.

But he also got very interested in the issue of

people who report these encounters with alien presences.

-I got involved in this whole strange subject by the

fact of having a UFO sighting myself,

in the daytime, with a couple of friends in 1964.

Well, when people write to me about the possibility of

an abduction experience,

many letters begin with

"I may be wasting your time. I hope not.

There may be nothing to this, but."

What you have to do is contact that person because

it's a very interesting possibility.

-We communicated, Budd and I.

And at some point, he's like, I would like for you to come out

here to New York.

I sold my washer and dryer that I had in storage

to get enough money for a bus ticket.

I was desperately trying to find reasonable explanations

for all this stuff.

I could find a lot of people who could tell

me what it wasn't,

but I couldn't find anybody who could tell me

what it was.

[Deb Kauble] I remember getting off the bus in New York,

and Budd Hopkins stood, cup of coffee in hand.

First place he took me to was the psychiatrist's office.

I had the EEG on my brain to make sure

I didn't have epilepsy.

I had the CAT scan and then there was

the psychological testing.

At the end of the day, the psychiatrist told Budd,

“Now I can't guarantee you that she saw a UFO

or anything else,

but I can guarantee you that she believed she did.”

And that was the beginning of a two or three-year-long

investigation you know that he conducted.

[Deb Kauble] I’m walking down the street and

I’m really confused.

[Budd Hopkins] What do you see as you walk

down the street, Debbie?

-Hypnosis was mentioned during our conversations prior

to me coming.

And if I wanted to,

I could be hypnotized and see if I could remember more.

All my sessions with him are recorded.

[Deb Kauble] He had those weird eyes.

[Budd Hopkins] Can you describe the eyes?

[Deb Kauble] They were really...

they were big.

And they were black.

And they were, like, fluid.

They like, shimmered.

-When you're sitting with an experiencer,

it's a different feeling that there has been something

that traumatic that has happened,

but it doesn't feel like it can be explained

away through a fantasy, through a dream,

from an early childhood trauma.

It feels like they've had an encounter with something

very, very unusual.

My name is Simon Bresler and

I do psychotherapy with experiencers.

I've had a lifelong interest in non-ordinary experiences or

anomalous experiences of consciousness.

I did a lot of traveling when I was younger and

met people in Argentina, Mexico,

different states in United States that had

had anomalous experiences.

And I was compelled by what they shared.

They had shared interesting experiences that I didn't know

where to put,

and yet their earnestness was intriguing to me.

The brain is still one of the most mysterious organs

of the body.

We still don't understand how and why subjective

experience is created.

Taking into account what experiencers are saying and,

and feeling, I think, is essential to understand the

breadth of this phenomenon

-Occasionally Budd had these support group meetings

in his apartment in New York,

and I was fortunate enough to be able to attend

a couple of them.

-Something otherworldly had happened to me,

I mean, it was, I was 5 years old and

I was lying in bed...

-It was truly amazing,

to me, to be with a group where you could

be yourself and speak freely about the things you

remembered without being ridiculed.

Budd saw the people like me that were wrecked by

it and couldn't function.

Our stories were different,

but the emotions were very much the same,

you know, the fear and the anxiety.

[Budd Hopkins] It’s okay. Lie down. You’re okay, John.

Lie down. Close your eyes. Close your eyes.

I’ve had police officers, military personnel,

I was dealing with an army officer of very high-security

clearance recently, who was an abductee.

Doctors, nurses, scientists,

they are very frightened by what's happened to them.

[Jeffrey Kripal] Something I see in a lot of abductions

is trauma.

I mean that in the sense that people are

physically traumatized,

or they’re sexually traumatized,

or they’re emotionally traumatized.

-They have stuck needles up my nose,

they have stuck needles in my eyes.

-You said they did things to you that hurt, such as...

-Taking semen. At their own will.

Not at my will.

-Some individuals put forth that this could be

a traumatic memory from an operating room procedure.

But with abduction experiences,

often they don’t occur after an operation.

-What just happened?

-Something came in the room.

I can’t move.

There’s something in my nose and I can’t move.

[Leslie Kean] Budd Hopkins being an artist made it very easy for

people to say he doesn’t know what he is doing,

he’s just an artist.

There were concerns about the fact that he was using

hypnosis with people,

but Budd had studied for almost 7 years with

a licensed psychologist and trained hypnotherapist.

-The problem of hypnosis is that you can inadvertently

foster material that surfaces that then are taken

to be memories when in fact they're not.

Especially if there are leading questions.

The way the questions are posed when someone's under

hypnotic trance can sort of shape the sorts

of material that will surface during the

hypnotic session.

[Deb Kauble] I don't feel that there was ever a time while

I was under hypnosis that I was led in

questioning or anything unduly was planted in my subconscious.

I had started remembering things but it just sharpened

details of something that was already there.

-There's a handful of studies that have shown with

a trained clinician,

that hypnosis can be very effective to

recovering memories.

-Three almost awake, two, one fully awake.

[Simon Bresler] In this relaxed state of being they

have access to parts of their mind that they

don't typically have access to.

-After working with Deb for a number of years,

Budd Hopkins wrote the book Intruders

about Deb Kauble’s case,

because he thought it was one of the most

outstanding cases ever.

It's very rare that you'll have a craft that lands and

leaves this huge mark on someone's lawn.

And it wasn't just what happened to Deb.

There was also a neighbor who witnessed

a large flash of light around the time of the event.

And her mother had seen this large orb of light around

the same time as well.

-Budd approached the entire family and said,

“I think your case is important and I would like to

write a book about it so that I can share

it with the world.”

-Budd Hopkins,

an accomplished artist and sculptor,

has turned into a UFO investigator.

He has written two books on the subject,

the latest called Intruders.

-Good morning, everybody.

Welcome to AM Chicago. We have a lively group.

-Look at that eighties hair.

-When was the very first time you saw a quote UFO?

-People have expressed their skepticism of

my case in particular, and it kind of broke my heart.

I did work hard to try to find rational explanations for

things that happened.

And at the end of the day,

if people don't want to believe me,

I don't care.

That's okay, you don’t have to.

I share my story because I know there are millions,

literally millions of people out there

who have seen weird things that they can’t explain,

and they’ve doubted themselves, doubted their sanity.

And I have come to learn, in my old age and my wisdom,

that life is not what you think it is.

[Ralph Blumenthal] Every book that Budd wrote after Intruders,

drew more people to him, more letters.

People sought him out,

and they would have these stories to tell him.

-He says, “Let me say when I say there was a UFO

over the house I’m not talking about something that

could be mistaken for something else.

I’m talking about something the size of at least

two large cars put together maybe 100 feet up.”

[Ralph Blumenthal] Eventually, Budd Hopkins shares this

information with a

renowned Harvard psychiatrist named John Mack.

-I first got into this field really without knowing

I was getting into it.

I had a psychologist colleague who asked me,

did I want to meet Budd Hopkins.

And I said, “Who’s he?”

My reaction was that he must be quite mad if

he believes such stories.

-Budd said to Mack,

“Listen, you’re the psychiatrist.

I mean, you can evaluate this better than me.

I talk to these people, but you can see if they're

crazy or not.”

[Budd Hopkins] I gave him a box of 20 letters, and I said,

”Here, John. You take this box and you

read these letters and let me know what you think

about what these people are saying.”

[Ralph Blumenthal] Mack, still very skeptical,

took the letters with him,

and after he looked at them, said,

“This is absolutely phenomenally strange.”

-Then John was, as they say, down the rabbit hole.

-Tonight, a look at aliens. -Are they really visiting Earth?

Or are they just the product of some earthlings'

overexcited imaginations?

[Jeffrey Kripal] The topic of alien abductions has gone

through stages or decades of popularity.

In the 90s, the man who really probably did more

than anyone was John Mack.

[Oprah Winfrey] Dr. John Mack.

[host] In the crossfire, Dr. John Mack.

[reporter] Dr. John Mack is professor of psychiatry

at the Harvard Medical School.

[Jeffrey Kripal] John Mack was probably the most

famous researcher of abduction experiences in...

certainly in the US.

-That’s what I’ve been trying to do is get people

at least look at it.

Think about it.

-I’m Karin Austin.

I’m the Executive Director of the John E. Mack Institute.

John Mack was sort of amongst the elite in terms of

his credentials as a clinician,

as a psychiatrist, and as a writer.

[Ralph Blumenthal] When Mack got involved,

anyone who propounded these stories were viewed

very skeptically, if not as totally mentally ill.

But he gathered his own group and started

his own investigation.

[Karin Austin] Once his research began in earnest,

people started coming to him directly.

And he interviewed one individual,

after another, after another.

There was testing that was done.

-He was very wary of using hypnosis.

He preferred relaxation techniques.

[reporter] In this tape made two years ago by

Canada’s CBC Television,

Peter hears one of his own regression sessions

for the first time.

[Peter] They’re taking me.

[interviewer] Where are you?

[Peter] Laying on a table.

[interviewer] How old are you?

[Simon Bresler] John Mack was interviewing these doctors,

lawyers, social workers, blue-collar workers,

everybody from all walks of life.

-I mean you put me through psychological testing

to rule out delusions,

to rule out sexual abuse or child abuse or any

psychosis or neurosis that the normal psychiatric

community would say were the reasons for these memories.

-Yes, actually you came out healthier than

the average of the population,

I want you to know.

[Karin Austin] People who were perfect strangers to

each other at the time,

telling the same stories over and over and over

and over again.

-They describe experiences in great detail,

that are so similar one to another, which,

and the only thing I know that acts like that

is real experience.

[Karin Austin] He knew what psychopathology looked like

and that this was not that.

-None of them have shown any consistent personality pattern,

none has shown consistent psychopathology.

-They didn’t suffer from delusions, hallucinations,

schizophrenia, proneness to fantasy.

John Mack started to deeply question,

what if some percentage of people are having encounters

with non-human intelligence that aren't fully benign and

challenge our sense of reality incredibly deeply?

-It sounds as if what you’re saying is you’re

inclined to take these reports at face value?

-“Face value,” I wouldn’t say.

I take them seriously.

It’s often said that I'm a believer,

and sort of have gone and lost my objectivity.

I really object to that.

I didn’t believe anything when I started,

I don’t really believe anything now.

I‘ve come to where I’ve come to, clinically.

In other words,

I worked with people over hundreds and hundreds of hours

to consider alternative explanations.

And none have come forward.

-We’re back now talking about UFOs and

alien abductions and we welcome Dr. John Mack,

a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School.

And Budd Hopkins who's worked to help over 400 people

remember their abduction experiences.

[Leslie Kean] Budd Hopkins was very happy when John Mack came

on the scene because being a Harvard psychiatrist,

he could lend a lot of credibility to the

study of this.

And they were willing to go out on daytime shows

to impress people with the mystery of

what was going on here.

-Because it is the most important event in all

of human history if it’s true

and I have no doubt whatsoever that it is true.

[host] All right, Dr. John Mack and...

-And then, other people started to come forward who

had had similar experiences.

-In December of 1985,

I woke up in the middle of the night in this little room

with these people in it that had these big black eyes.

It took me six to eight weeks before I came to understand

that it might have been a real and very bizarre experience

of some sort.

My brother had given me a book and in the

back of the book,

there was a description of an event like mine that

had been researched by a man named Budd Hopkins.

So I went to see him.

I was very strung out at the time, I was suicidal.

I was really struggling.

And Budd saved my life by letting me

know that I was not alone,

that other people had had this experience.

-The New York Times list of bestselling books

is often cited as a barometer of America's

current preoccupations.

And topping the list this week,

this is nonfiction, is a book about one man's

encounter with beings from outer space.

[Leslie Kean] Intruders by Budd Hopkins and

Communion by Whitley Streiber came out

within a few months of each other,

but it wasn't planned that way.

They were brand new blasting out into the media world,

and they set a new tone in the culture with regard

to the abduction aspect of the UFO phenomenon.

[Jeffrey Kripal] 1987.

Communion created an avalanche of hundreds of thousands of

letters to Whitley from people who recognized the being

on the cover.

-My interest was in the eyes and in the mouth and

the look on that face.

The eyes were brain -bendingly intense.

It was like there was somebody there looking at you totally.

-People who saw that cover, found themselves shocked.

Transported into seeing a figure that they thought might

have only come up in their dreams.

[Leslie Kean] The Communion cover has such power and detail.

Alien imagery was already in the culture,

thanks to sci-fi movies like Close Encounters,

but I don’t think there was anything as compelling as the

Communion cover in terms of its impact on experiencers.

[Jeffrey Kripal] Whitley’s wife, Anne,

took it upon herself to read all these letters,

all from individuals who have had such an experience,

and she kept somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 of them.

And those now sit in our Archives of the Impossible.

-My name is Amanda Nedham and I came to Rice

being very interested in the intersection between drawing

and belief systems.

I’d read that 200,000 people wrote to Whitley and

Anne Strieber and I think a lot of the letters

have drawings because it was people’s way of,

like making it more real.

This is a miniature UFO that a woman saw.

It came into her bedroom one night and pressed

itself down on her body.

So this is another one of these 3 beings that came to visit

this person one night.

A lot of people talk about whether it’s psychological,

it’s physical, it’s somewhere in between,

and it’s mediated by our imagination and our mind.

But in the end, it’s, it comes down to this being part

of our human story.

[Jeffrey Kripal] A lot of these experiences are shared.

"A few years ago I saw a UFO.

Several hundred people also witnessed it."

That, that’s one of the falsehoods that people make.

They think UFO landings are somehow always private.

That's just not true.

Sometimes they involve dozens of people.

[Ralph Blumenthal] So many people have experienced these

UFO encounters that it raises the question,

"Well, what is going on?"

[Ralph Blumenthal] John Mack kept hearing about cases

breaking all over,

of people with alien experiences that he was

eager to investigate.

[Simon Bresler] In 1994 in Ruwa Zimbabwe,

maybe sixty-plus schoolchildren claimed to

have experienced one of the largest mass

UFO sightings on record.

These children claimed that in the middle of the day,

a UFO landed, and began to communicate with them.

-They had long, longish hair and big black eyes.

[witness] I saw something silver on the ground,

amongst the trees.

-And a person in black.

-He was dressed in black and he had big eyes.

[Simon Bresler] There was sort of a media buzz about this,

and John Mack flew out to investigate what was going on

and to speak with these children.

-It seemed that he was looking at all of us.

-What was it, what did it feel like when he was

looking at you?

-I felt scared.

[Ralph Blumenthal] Some of the children remembered

receiving telepathic messages from these beings.

No adults saw this, only children.

-I think the two most often cited skeptical alternative

explanations for the Ruwa event are number one:

that the kids somehow made it up.

Number two is that they just somehow embellished something

that was out there.

However, there's never been any explanation provided

for what they saw.

[chanting in Shona]

-The whole quality of the way they talk about it is

the way a person talks about an experience that

happened to them.

-I think they want people to know that we’re actually

making harm on the world.

[Jeffrey Kripal] I think John Mack did have conclusions,

and that is that the secular, materialistic, scientific

worldview that we assume to be true is not fully true.

-I think John Mack's work is invaluable on this subject.

He recognized that whatever is happening in intense

UAP experience seems to work differently.

Time and space are distorted.

It's not clear your body is even operating the same way.

I'm Peter Skafish.

I'm a cultural anthropologist.

With people claiming to have had abduction experiences,

from an academic perspective, it's a really tricky thing

because a lot of it is not distinguishable from what an

anthropologist or another kind of scholar would call a

religious experience.

[Jeffrey Kripal] When people ask me whether abductions

are real, what they really mean is,

“Can you get this in a scientific laboratory and

can you replicate it and measure it,”

and I’m like, “No! You can’t.”

Of course, they’re real.

But they speak to a reality that is not what we assume.

The UFO is a wedge issue into a whole bunch of other questions

that I think are actually much deeper and much more important,

like what is the soul?

What is the mind, what is consciousness?

What these abductions tell people, or teach people,

or force on people,

is the realization that there’s a deeper reality

that has something to do with our place in the cosmos,

and the idea that we are not separate from nature;

we are not separate from the universe;

we are not separate from God;

we are not separate from one another.

-The mythic dimension of the phenomena is also

very interesting because we have a whole series of

cultures across the world that make references

to non-human intelligence.

You have the aboriginal Australians

who talk about the Wandjina,

and you have here in the United States,

both the Cherokee and the Lakota Sioux,

that talk about star people.

-This is why I keep saying something’s actually happening.

But it’s getting fed through whatever the mythological or

cultural lens of the people of the time.

Fatima is a perfect example of that.

In 1917, there are three shepherd children,

in Fatima, Portugal.

And they encounter apparitions of the Blessed Virgin.

These visionary experiences promised that there would be

a great miracle on October of 1917.

50,000 to 100,000 people had, had lined up

in this valley, waiting for this miracle.

What happened is the sun began to spin,

and it created this sort of chromatic effect on the ground.

And all these people,

they thought it was the end of the world.

They report heat, they report colors, and light.

There's a lot of aspects of this phenomena

that looked very UFO-like,

but it was framed in a way that Portuguese Catholics

could accept in 1917.

This notion of a glowing woman becomes the Virgin Mary

if you're in a Roman Catholic world,

but it doesn’t become the Virgin Mary if you’re not.

-We want to think that science is one thing and

spirit is another.

And what this phenomenon invites us to

look at is that the split isn't always so neat.

-History starts with stories,

starts with ideas that occurred in the past.

The stories takes us into a certain direction,

and it’s a search for the truth.

September 1st, 1969.

Over 40 or 50 phone calls came into the radio station.

The calls came in one after another.

The phone just didn't stop ringing.

Bright lights, strange occurrences in the sky,

strange personal experiences.

And people who were abducted.

As long as I live,

I will never forget that evening in 1969.

[♪ mysterious music playing]

-I'm Robert Krol.

I'm the executive director here at the

Great Barrington Historical Society.

The first UFO or strange sightings were occurring during

the Massachusetts Bay colony days.

That dates back to our first governor,

Governor Winthrop.

People were going to him citing strange occurrences with lights.

Strange movements of people from one part of a town to

another without knowing what happened.

It’s just another entry into a long line of historical

documentation that said something strange occurred here.

[Leslie Kean] The Great Barrington case

is particularly interesting because there were

so many witnesses to the actual UFO that night.

And secondly, the people who were abducted describe very

similar things, even though they didn't know each other.

-We started collecting people’s reflections of what happened

that particular day.

These documents are affidavits of what people experienced.

It started from one individual who had a

sighting in Sheffield, our neighboring community.

But then it grew from there.

Once the word got out that somebody reported an incident,

people started talking about,

“I experienced something, also.”

At least a dozen people reported some kind of incident

that occurred that day.

And you start thinking,

hmm something did really happen.

-I'm Tom Warner.

I was ten years old when I was abducted.

It was September 1st, 1969.

It was a couple of days before school starts.

Last swim of the summer.

We were swimming all day.

Later we went next door and we watched a little TV,

and then we put on music and all of a sudden I just

got a funny feeling.

I walked towards this window, which was facing the east,

and I heard this telepathic voice saying,

“You have to go home.”

It was a voice I had not heard before.

So I ran out of the house and over this way.

All of a sudden,

all the sounds of crickets and Katydids... gone.

All a sudden I became aware of it.

I was right about here and all of a sudden,

my hands just jerked back.

And my brother's screaming for me to run.

I say, "I can't.

The beam, it's holding me in place."

-It was Labor Day weekend in 1969.

My sister and I had spent the day at the Mahaiwe Theater.

I was 12, she was 14.

We were cleaning the theater.

It was my first job, her first job.

My dad and mom picked my sister and I up.

And we drove to Lake Mansfield.

All of a sudden, there was this light, huge,

huge light coming over, and my dad was like,

“Holy (bleep)!”

And it was this giant light, and it covered the whole lake.

But what was so amazing about it,

was that there were all these other colors

in the middle of it,

and I can’t even describe it because they were so bizarre,

these colors.

-These were colors I'd never seen before.

And the lights were spinning one way and then another part

of the UFO was going to the other,

and then a third was going in an opposite direction.

[Melanie Kirchdorfer] And I remember I put my head down.

And I can remember being levitated out of the car.

You can't move when you're being levitated.

You just can't move.

You can just move your eyes.

That’s when I ended up on whatever it was.

-I describe it like if you're swimming underwater and you

slowly come up out of water.

And all of a sudden you go...

(gasps)

like that when my hands jerk back and

all of a sudden I'm like, I'm on a UFO.

[♪ suspenseful music playing]

Captioned by Cotter Media Group.