Original subtitles

NARRATOR: All over the world, there are people

who claim they have been abducted by aliens.

SELMA SYREK: I heard a thump from my bed,

and at the edge of the bed

were two gray individuals.

ERIK NANSTIEL: It felt like a needle had been inserted

into my femur bone.

WHITLEY STRIEBER: As soon as I realized I had

an implant, my immediate response was,

"My God, they're tracking me.

I want this out of my head."

NARRATOR: Since the 1970s,

a growing number of researchers

have dedicated their lives to uncovering what is behind

this disturbing phenomenon.

Are humans really being taken off Earth

by extraterrestrial entities?

And if so, what is their agenda?

GIORGIO TSOUKALOS: The fact of the matter is, as far as abductions are concerned,

they're not a modern-day phenomenon.

It has been happening

for thousands of years.

Weekly news and culture newspaper The Village Voice

publishes a sensational article

titled "Sane Citizen Sees UFO in New Jersey."

The author is New York resident Budd Hopkins.

WILLIAM HENRY: Bud Hopkins was not a ufologist, he was an artist.

His fascination with UFOs began when a neighbor,

a local businessman named George O'Barski,

told him about a strange sighting that he had

where a craft descended from the sky

and landed in a nearby field.

Hopkins writes about this in The Village Voice,

and at the end of the article, he invites people

to share any similar experiences they might have had.

And he's inundated with hundreds of responses

and is deeply impacted by that response.

NARRATOR: The public response to The Village Voice article

was beyond anything Budd Hopkins could have imagined.

As hundreds of UFO witnesses

shared their stories over the following weeks,

Hopkins was compelled to dedicate much more

of his time to researching the subject,

and what he began to find is that many experiencers

not only saw strange objects in the sky,

but also claimed to have been abducted by aliens.

KATHLEEN MARDEN: Budd Hopkins started to collect evidence,

and he started to have meetings of experiencers

in his apartment in New York

where they could gather together

to speak with one another.

He was outstanding

as an investigator, as a researcher.

GRACE HOPKINS: My father liked bringing people together.

He liked the idea of people helping each other,

'cause that's what, in his mind, this was all about,

was just trying to get to the bottom of the truth

and help people

and figure out what it was that happened to them.

LINDA MOULTON HOWE: Budd had the courage, had the guts

to take on what was happening to people who said

they knew that these strange lights in the sky

were connected

to when something entered their bedroom at night.

NARRATOR: Peter Robbins, a fellow New York artist,

was one of the experiencers who reached out to Hopkins.

PETER ROBBINS: I cold called him. I told him that I had

had a sighting when I was a kid

and my sister had an experience.

Budd invited me over for coffee.

We talked about UFOs, and the time

when my sister and I had our sighting.

NARRATOR: Peter's encounter occurred in 1961,

when he was just 14 years old.

ROBBINS: One afternoon

my sister and I

were in the front of the house that we grew up in, playing,

and I caught something out of my right peripheral vision

and called her attention to it immediately.

Six silvery-white disc-shaped objects

stopped over the neighbor's house.

I don't know how long it lasted.

It could have been several minutes.

And at a certain point,

bang, I'm out.

NARRATOR: Peter woke up on the ground

after losing consciousness,

and the disc-shaped objects were gone.

But many years later, he learned that his sister

Helen's experience went much further.

At the time, Helen was 12 years old,

and she not only saw the same disc-shaped objects

that Peter witnessed, but she also remembered

being taken aboard one of the craft.

ROBBINS: She said, "I saw a blue light

"shoot out of the bottom of one of these things.

"And I rose off the ground.

"Then my memory is, I'm inside,

"and I'm being walked through

"a curved metal hallway by a number of small beings,

"and one large one who talked to me in my head.

"The big one.

"And the next thing I know,

"I'm on a metal table.

"I have no clothes on. I'm surrounded by

"half a dozen or so of these beings, and the big one.

And then, I'm on the ground."

NARRATOR: The story Peter told of his sister Helen's encounter

was one of the first abduction accounts

Budd Hopkins ever documented.

Sharing a fascination with this strange phenomenon,

the two men began to work together,

cataloging the hundreds of other alien abduction accounts

Hopkins was receiving.

The first couple of years, there really was no area

of UFO abduction research.

He was creating it, in great part,

along with a very small handful of other people,

approaching the subject as scientifically as he could.

He's a real intellectual. He was extremely well read.

Insatiably curious.

I think there are many backgrounds

that are great for being a ufologist,

and we think, technically, first,

scientist, psychologist, whatever.

Being an artist is valuable.

It lets you think out of the box.

NICK POPE: Budd Hopkins made a number of observations

about alien abductions which are, I think,

key to understanding the wider phenomenon.

RICHARD DOLAN: Budd Hopkins particularly started noticing

that a lot of abductees would have these bizarre marks

on their body as if

a piece of skin was taken out for examination and so forth.

POPE: Also, he noticed, for example, that

very often, these were not isolated accounts.

People had had a lifetime of experiences,

starting in childhood.

He also discovered that it ran in the family.

NARRATOR: Hopkins was surprised by how many

alleged alien abductees reported that

other members of their family had also been taken.

And perhaps the most intriguing example

of generational abductions began with the famous case

of Betty and Barney Hill.

POPE: The Betty and Barney Hill case from September 1961

is really the best-known early account we have.

Betty and Barney Hill, from New Hampshire,

are travelling in their car

late at night. They see a UFO.

They become distressed,

and then they get home and they find that their journey

has taken longer than they expected by several hours.

Subsequently, they recalled being taken on board a ship

and encountering extraterrestrials.

Years later, Betty's sister Janet

and Janet's daughter Kathleen

had their own abduction experience.

It occurred when they were at a relative's house

and a strange craft was witnessed landing in the yard.

There were two witnesses to the craft that night.

And my mother and I recalled

finding ourselves

in a strange environment,

confused. I was lying on a table.

There were tests being done on me,

and I had physiological changes in my body

the following day.

Pain that was abnormal.

I did have other abduction experiences

periodically throughout my lifetime,

and they stopped about ten years ago.

NARRATOR: Multiple abductions occurring within families,

experiences continuing throughout a person's lifetime,

and strange physical marks appearing after abduction events

are just a few of the many commonalities

Budd Hopkins discovered during his research.

But perhaps most importantly,

he found evidence that there

could be millions of people who are completely unaware

that they have been abducted by aliens.

NARRATOR: Budd Hopkins publishes his first book

on alien abductions.

The title, Missing Time,

is based on a phenomenon experienced by nearly

every alleged alien abductee.

POPE: Often, these alien abduction accounts

are associated with a UFO sighting,

but part of the experience

will be wiped from the memory.

So, they have a period of so-called "missing time."

Then they get dreams

or flashbacks that something happened.

There are a number of theories about this.

Maybe some sort of mind control technique,

maybe some sort of hypnotic, implanted suggestion.

Often, abductees only have vague recollections

that something unusual and disturbing took place.

These entities might want to induce amnesia

to protect the human from the traumatic experience.

Or it might be for their own purposes, as well.

NARRATOR: One person who claims

to have experienced missing time

is retired Navajo Nations Ranger Jon Dover.

Through my 31-year career in law enforcement

up on the Navajo Nation,

I've had a lot of travel time on the roads.

And I started having incidences

where I'd lose half hour increments of time

over several years.

In one case,

I blinked,

and when I opened my eyes,

I was 15 miles further down the road.

NARRATOR: Is it possible

that Jon Dover's missing time experiences

are connected to alien abductions?

While he has no recollection of what happened

during these periods of missing time,

curiously,

Jon has also had recurring dreams

involving a giant, disc-shaped craft.

DOVER: When I was young,

I had a reoccurring dream

that me and my sister left the house.

Across the street is a little park.

And in my dream, we go up there,

and there's a disc sitting there.

And that's where my dream ends.

Years later, my older sister tells me

that she had the same dream, and we started comparing notes.

She says there was a hatch.

And I remember the hatch.

And she says, "You ran right into that thing."

And I... For the life of me, I don't remember.

I've had people tell me

that what I experienced was an abduction event.

I am still skeptical,

and I don't have a good explanation,

other than it was something really weird.

NARRATOR: Might the fact

that people commonly experience missing time

but have no recollection of what happened to them

indicate that there could be many alien abductees

who never realize they have been taken?

Budd Hopkins considered this a very real possibility,

and went in search of a way

to help unlock the missing memories of abductees.

At the end of 20th century,

regression hypnosis became a popular tool

used by psychiatrists and psychologists

for helping people retrieve traumatic memories.

Budd Hopkins starts to use hypnosis as a tool

for retrieving missing time experiences

and retrieving memories en masse.

HOPKINS: A lot of times, Dad thought of it as,

it's a trauma situation, and so you chose to forget it.

And that's, I think, why he got involved in the hypnosis,

because it was kind of going past

that trauma to try to find out what actually happened.

HENRY: Now, hypnosis has its critics and its controversy.

The hypnotist can be implanting false memories

and leading subjects into areas that,

simply, they'd never experienced.

DOLAN: You got to be careful about this.

But Hopkins often did publish a lot of the transcripts

of the sessions that they did,

so you can actually read along what they were doing and,

you can say, "This looks legitimate.

"I'm not seeing anything

"in what this person is doing to elicit false positives.

"I'm therefore going to provisionally say,

"'This looks like it could be happening.'"

NARRATOR: One of the most significant abduction events

Hopkins helped to uncover through hypnotic regression

was that of author Whitley Strieber.

Strieber had established himself as a horror writer

with books like The Wolfen and The Hunger.

But one night at his cabin in upstate New York,

he had a terrifying encounter

that, as far as he was concerned,

was very real.

I had an experience in December of 1985

where I woke up in a room full of these,

what appeared to me to be large insects.

And I was immobilized,

and they invaded my body in various ways.

And I ended up back home,

in a state of complete confusion.

NARRATOR: Unable to comprehend what had happened to him,

Strieber searched for ways to explain his traumatic encounter.

Before long,

he came across the research being done by Budd Hopkins.

I looked him up, and he lived a few blocks from us.

So my wife Anne and I went to see him.

And he proceeded to get me

to one of the world's leading forensic hypnotists,

Dr. Donald Klein,

and he wanted to hypnotize me,

because he said hypnosis would help me concentrate

on my memories.

And it was just absolutely terrifying.

NARRATOR: Under hypnosis,

Strieber revealed details of numerous harrowing experiences

with what he believed to be otherworldly visitors.

After piecing together what happened to him

as best he could,

Strieber wrote about his encounters

in his best-selling book, Communion.

STRIEBER: When I published Communion,

Budd and I thought there were maybe 50 or 100

or 200 people in the world who had had this experience.

To my astonishment, after the book came out,

we began to get letters.

We got a few letters, a few more letters.

Then one morning, two postmen came,

and poured boxes of letters onto our living room floor, in heaps.

NARRATOR: Strieber's accounts of his alien abductions

resonated with millions of people across the world.

And as more experiencers came forward to tell their stories,

new revelations would begin to emerge

about the phenomenon and a potential...

alien agenda.

NARRATOR: It's nearly dawn,

and five-year-old Selma Syrek is asleep in her bed,

when suddenly,

she is awoken by an event

that will have a profound impact on the rest of her life.

SYREK: I heard a thump, and I see

this small individual that I thought was maybe a child.

I was five years old, and of average height.

And this person was smaller than me.

And he turns around,

like, suddenly, and I stop in my track.

His eyes are large, but actually quite beautiful in some way.

They kind of, like, look like they're wet and luminous.

And not frightening.

But of course, you know,

I've never seen an individual like this,

with the dent in the top of the head,

and a pointy chin.

So, having a sort of an insect-like face,

but still child-like.

And it turned out

there were two individuals.

They were performing an exam

right through the blanket.

Mostly what I remember-- my arms and my legs.

They were just looking and holding them.

They had a conversation of some kind between the two of them.

NARRATOR: The encounters continued

sporadically throughout Selma's childhood.

But as she entered her twenties,

her experiences took on a new dimension.

According to Selma,

the beings began taking her to a place

she calls, simply, "the classroom."

SYREK: I have experienced many episodes

of being put in a classroom.

And I don't know if the classrooms are holographic,

or if they're inside a craft, but it feels real.

The teaching was done via a screen.

And it could be anything from cosmology,

archeology,

ancient documents that apply to science today.

And they would show you how

early groups of humans had this knowledge.

And they would show how humanity evolved with assistance.

We have been completely assisted.

They had an agenda, they were performing it.

And I think it's for mankind, for humanity's benefit.

NARRATOR: Selma Syrek's extraordinary account

resonates strongly, not only with abduction researchers,

but also with ancient astronaut theorists.

A key tenet of the ancient astronaut theory

is that humans are the creation of extraterrestrial visitors.

The ancient astronaut theory proposes

that humans are the result of a genetic modification

that extraterrestrials performed on Homo sapiens

thousands of years ago.

And these visitors then conveyed important information

to our ancestors

to help accelerate the advancement of civilization.

And sometimes they even took certain people off Earth

to give them this special knowledge.

So, what's really interesting

about these modern-day abductions

is the fact that we have similar stories in ancient times.

HENRY: This abduction phenomena

goes all the way back to the bible.

There's the story of Elijah, who ascends into the heavens.

The story of Enoch, who's taken up into Heaven

by the archangel Michael.

TSOUKALOS: Enoch was said to have been taken up

into the heavens,

and there he received knowledge by the so-called angels.

For example, that angel showed him out the window,

and said, "The moon that you can see is full of light,

but the moon receives the light from the sun."

So, you know, this has been happening

for thousands of years.

NARRATOR: Could it be that extraterrestrials

are abducting humans in order to relay information,

just as ancient astronaut theorists believe happened

thousands of years ago?

Numerous experiencers have claimed to receive information

from an otherworldly source in a variety of ways.

While Selma Syrek describes being taught

in a classroom-type setting,

author Whitley Strieber claims

that advanced knowledge is communicated to him

by means of an alien implant.

He believes the device was implanted in his ear

during an encounter that occurred

four years after the publication

of his autobiographical novel Communion.

STRIEBER: It was about 11:00.

I somehow ended up lying on my right side,

and there is something pushing my head down

into the pillow in waves.

There were these dark figures standing around.

A few minutes later, there was a flash of light...

...and they were gone.

A few days after, it became clear

that there was something in my ear

because you could feel it.

And it hadn't been there before.

My immediate response was,

"My God, they're tracking me. I want this out of my head."

NARRATOR: For years, Whitley had no idea

what the purpose of the implant might be.

But then, one day, it suddenly activated.

The ear gets warm. You can feel it.

There's just this little slit that opens up in my eye.

And I can see words racing past in it.

And the result is that I can write the most detailed things

about genetics and so forth.

I wouldn't have been able to do that without the implant.

NARRATOR: Could Whitley Strieber really have an alien implant

that is feeding him information?

Incredibly, dozens of alien abductees

have had strange metallic objects

surgically removed from their bodies.

DOLAN: The most interesting physical evidence of abductions

might very well be the implants that were removed

through the auspices of Dr. Roger Leir.

And he collected close to a dozen of them.

Roger Leir wrote and talked about these implants

at great length, and they had been studied,

by himself and by chemists and electrical engineers.

Leir actually said they gave off a radio frequency.

They were incredibly sophisticated.

NARRATOR: In 2014,

Dr. Roger Leir died of a heart attack,

and his collection of alleged alien implants

mysteriously disappeared.

DOLAN: Roger Leir is no longer with us,

but what I would like to know is where the heck

those implants are today.

It was a fascinating, fascinating,

piece of potential evidence

that I think should be followed up on.

NARRATOR: Do accounts like Selma Syrek's and Whitley Stieber's

along with mysterious implants extracted from alleged abductees

reveal that alien abductions

are about the transfer of information?

Researchers suggest there is more to the story,

and point to the many abduction accounts

that involve the harvesting of DNA.

NARRATOR: Through a mutual friend,

famous alien abduction researcher Budd Hopkins

is introduced to Harvard professor Dr. John Mack.

POPE: John Mack was professor of psychiatry

at Harvard Medical School.

He was an establishment figure.

Budd Hopkins approached John Mack and said, "Look,

I'm getting all these cases. What do you think?"

John Mack, his initial,

almost jocular response was, "Well, I think they're crazy,

and I think you're probably crazy, too, for believing them."

But John Mack looked at

some of Budd Hopkins' case files.

Then he started to meet with some of the abductees.

MARDEN: John Mack wondered

if this was some kind of new mental illness.

Was this public hysteria?

Why were, suddenly,

all of these people coming forward

saying that they had had these experiences with nonhumans?

He opened a center at Harvard University.

He conducted a study of 200 individuals.

He did psychological testing.

He did interviews on camera.

DOLAN: By and large, John Mack found

exactly what every other researcher into this found,

which is that most of these people are very stable.

They've all had these very consistent

types of experiences.

HOPKINS: It's not anything anybody wants to have happen,

And that's what I always sort of went back to

when I met these people: they have nothing to gain,

everything to lose,

and they're all in pain, and it's the same pain.

CAROLINE CORY: John Mack had to take it seriously,

because his patients were truly suffering.

They displayed trauma telling the story.

They were experiencing very strong PTSD symptoms.

They were literally reliving these stories,

and shaking, crying,

having all sorts of anxiety come up.

As a trained psychiatrist,

he could tell what is truth and what isn't.

POPE: Slowly but surely,

John Mack became convinced that this was a real phenomenon.

And so, here you have this intellectual,

academic heavyweight

saying alien abductions are real.

What is extraordinary about it

is the consistency of the stories

amongst people who are of sound mind,

who come forth very reluctantly,

who doubt their own stories,

who describe what they've gone through with great emotion.

So, something is occurring that is entering our world.

NARRATOR: In 1994,

Dr. Mack published his research in his best-selling book

Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens.

While the book was highly controversial

among his colleagues and drew sharp criticism

from the board at Harvard University,

it also led to the alien abduction phenomenon

being taken more seriously than ever before.

And as Dr. Mack met with more and more patients,

he found that one particularly unsettling experience

came up frequently.

HOWE: It was very clear to Dr. Mack

that we were dealing with nonhumans

extracting tissue, blood,

sperm from the males and eggs from the females.

What this taking of eggs, taking of sperm from the men

What the aliens will tell us

is that it has something to do with evolution,

that we're moving to another level of creation.

NARRATOR: Are the incredible revelations

that emerged during Dr. Mack's research

evidence of an alien agenda for humanity?

Perhaps further clues can be found

by examining the account of a man who claims

to have had genetic material extracted from his body

on multiple occasions.

Graphic artist Erik Nanstiel

begins to experience strange occurrences

in his bedroom late at night.

It started with things being disturbed in my bedroom

that I noticed were changed

between when I'd go to bed at night

and then when I'd wake up in the morning.

I did not know if I was being taken,

I just had an intuition

that there were intruders in my bedroom,

and after two weeks, something happened.

I woke up in my garage

and I was suspended off the floor

and I was looking down at a small Grey.

NARRATOR: After the encounter in his garage,

Erik began to have reoccurring and often violent experiences

with the same Grey beings.

According to his account,

they would use some kind of medical equipment

to extract blood and fluids from his body.

NANSTIEL: Typically, what they would do

is they would collect semen.

But there were times where I suspected

they were taking bone marrow.

I believe they took some from my left arm.

My left arm was killing me.

I could only move it a few degrees of movement,

and it was swollen for an entire month.

I suspect that they took bone marrow from my hip.

It felt like a needle had been inserted into my femur bone.

They're determined to take genetic material from me

one way or another,

and I absolutely felt like a lab rat.

NARRATOR: Could extraterrestrials be harvesting

genetic material from humans,

as John Mack and many abductees have claimed?

Ancient astronaut theorists say yes,

and suggest that otherworldly visitors

could be creating alien-human hybrids.

NARRATOR: Over the course of five decades

that have passed since Budd Hopkins

first started investigating alien abductions,

researchers have found that one of the most common experiences

reported by abductees

is the extraction of genetic material

such as blood, semen and ova.

And Erik Nanstiel believes he was shown what happens

with that material.

There was an abduction where they took me into a room...

...where I was faced with a pewter-grey, featureless wall.

And suddenly, it turned into some kind of an image screen

and I was shown

three rows of rectangular portraits of faces.

They told me that "These are your offspring,

these are your children."

And the children that I saw

were of varying ages, so they've been coming for me

and making hybrids for some time.

NARRATOR: According to Erik, during one surreal experience,

his abductors brought him into some kind of examination room

where he encountered one of his alleged children.

I did actually meet one of the offspring.

He was on a metal table and I got a glimpse of him

and I could see he was a boy.

And the very tall Grey that was there with me--

he was, like, seven feet tall-- he said, "He's yours,

"but he has a genetic problem,

"and we have you here to provide samples

so we can correct his problem."

NARRATOR: The children that Erik says he was shown

did not appear abnormal in any way.

But he believes they are part

of an extraterrestrial experiment

and are not entirely human.

I believe they're hybrids.

I believe they're part human,

part who knows how many other species.

NARRATOR: After being shown images of the children,

Erik shared his experiences with his immediate family.

NANSTIEL: I've told both my brothers about it,

My eldest brother, he's very supportive.

He has his own religious interpretation

of what these things are.

I do not take a religious interpretation.

These are flesh-and-blood beings,

they're from somewhere else, they have the technology

to come here from somewhere else,

and I think they maintain bases here

and I think they're running a breeding program.

My only question at this point is,

what do they plan to do with these offspring?

NARRATOR: Could Erik Nanstiel's incredible account be true?

Did extraterrestrials not only abduct him

but also use him to create hybrid offspring?

As sensational as it may sound,

alien abduction researchers today

have heard dozens of similar stories.

Alien abductees often report

a similar set of very consistent details

regarding being in a medical-type facility,

a sanitized room,

whereupon medical procedures soon follow.

If it's a male abductee,

they often report extraction of semen,

often by very uncomfortable and even painful means.

If it's a female, they report artificial insemination.

Later, they report being introduced

to alien-human hybrid children,

with an inference that these are in fact their own children.

POPE: Very often, one hears accounts of a hybridization program.

This is thought to involve, sometimes, crossbreeding

humans with extraterrestrials, perhaps to save their race.

Talk about a dying race needing an input

of fresh DNA, fresh material.

Or to create a new race...

...merging them and us to create new life.

NARRATOR: Is it possible that extraterrestrials

are abducting humans as part of a breeding program?

And if so, why?

Researchers believe that some alien abductees

may already be hybrids themselves.

We do hear about stories, even since biblical times,

where, for example, someone is being abducted,

and when they come back, their babies

have been replaced with another baby.

We hear about hybrid children.

We do hear these stories since the beginning of time.

When John Mack started working with abductees...

...he begins to find some of his cases involve people

who recall almost having, literally, a dual identity

as extraterrestrial and human.

So, perhaps this program, this breeding program,

this hybridization program, has been going for longer than

maybe we figured,

and John Mack is getting some of these people

who were produced as a result of this program.

Yeah, the whole hybridization idea is a fascinating one.

So, then that leads to the question of

is there evidence of alien DNA in the population?

Are these people actually in human society or not?

There's a lot of unanswered questions here.

NARRATOR: As more people come forward

to openly discuss their abductions,

researchers are finding

that the harvesting of genetic material

and the passing on of information

are two of the most widely reported experiences.

And as far as ancient astronaut theorists are concerned,

the accumulated data is beginning to point

to an undeniable connection

to humankind's very beginnings.

NARRATOR: Today, UFO phenomena

has become an important part of our modern society.

NARRATOR: UFOs are openly investigated by the government,

reported by both civilians and military personnel

and captured on video.

NARRATOR: But alien abductions still remain

mostly a fringe topic.

We don't hear as much

about abductions nowadays as we used to.

I think part of that is just the fact that we've had

the New York Times article about AATIP,

we've had the U.S. Navy videos

and everything that led to in terms of whistleblowers,

in terms of congressional inquiries,

in terms of the government setting up a program again.

Abductions have taken a bit of a back seat.

They've not gone away.

We know that UFOs are still underreported.

And it's doubly, triply,

orders of magnitude more the case with abductions.

And so, we can really only guess at the numbers involved.

I mean, I know, just from my own government work,

that there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands,

if not more, cases out there.

NARRATOR: While the U.S. government is focused

on investigating UFOs,

there is a growing number of civilian researchers

that are now dedicating their time

to the alien abduction phenomenon.

POPE: It's been left to private research groups.

So, we have, for example, ICAR,

the International Community for Alien Research.

MUFON, as well, the Mutual UFO Network,

have put a lot of resources into this.

They actually have their ERT,

which is "experiencer resource team."

And they will run, effectively,

a sort of network support group for these people.

And that's needed.

There's really not much out there for these people.

NARRATOR: While there are now many groups

studying the alien abduction phenomenon

and speaking with experiencers,

there is still no consensus as to why abductions are happening.

But one rather surprising revelation

has emerged from the statistical data.

MARDEN: 71% of our survey takers

said that if they could end their experiences today,

they would not.

Among the group identified as abductees,

74% said that they would not end their experience

if they were given a choice.

After an individual has worked through their initial trauma,

they gain an understanding of what is occurring.

Then, they can lose that fear and work cooperatively

with these nonhumans.

NANSTIEL: Generally, I would say I wish it'd never happened.

But I have to admit,

I'm very fascinated by all of this.

I don't believe that they're here

to invade the Earth

and impose their way of life.

I believe that they want to upgrade humanity

so we will be a gentler, wiser species.

They want to make us into

responsible stewards of our planet.

STRIEBER: At first, I was scared to death,

but I was also so damn curious.

My curiosity overcame my fear,

and eventually, we built a relationship.

What's it like now?

It's the center of my life.

I was changed for the better.

There's no question in my mind about that.

SYREK: My life has been greatly enhanced by these encounters.

Knowing that we are not alone in the universe,

knowing that we are cared for and taught?

There's a, just, tremendous hope

and joy in a future that they see for us.

NARRATOR: Is the alien abduction phenomenon

part of an extraterrestrial project

that dates to the very beginnings of humankind?

Could it be that we are, in fact,

being directed and upgraded

by the very beings who created us?

And if so, might the ultimate agenda be for us

to become like them?

Perhaps one day soon,

the true purpose behind these abductions

will be revealed

when we are reunited with our alien ancestors.

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