Files From the Edge (10 page)

Abducted by Government Agents

On August 23, 2005, at about seven in the evening, Kate received a phone call by someone who identified herself as “Brenda,” a close friend of hers. There was a great deal of static on the phone and the voice was very low and hard to make out. Kate said that it didn’t sound like her friend and there was so much static on the line that she really could not tell for sure. “Brenda” said that her car had broken down in a town near the Chandler Fashion Center in Chandler, Arizona, in an underground parking lot, and she needed help because she had no money to pay for a tow truck. Kate quickly jumped in her car and got there in about twenty minutes since the mall was only about 14 miles from her home. As she drove around the underground parking lot, Kate was surprised that there were so few cars for that time of the evening. She did not see her friend’s car, so Kate decided to park, get out, and look around. As she stepped out the door, a white van and a black car came screeching towards her and stopped. Out of the van, four men dressed in black with ski masks on their heads grabbed Kate, and one put something over her nose that made her almost pass out. Kate was still awake but was unable to move her arms and legs and when she tried to look around and call for help, everything began swirling.

She was terrified, but there was nothing she could do. Kate was placed in the back of the van in a sitting position with two of the men on each side and one almost face to face with her. At no time did any of them talk. As she went in and out of consciousness, Kate thought she heard a female voice on a radio transmission say “approaching home base with target 8V2.” Then the van stopped and the back door opened quickly. A man in a white coat came in and gave her some type of an injection. She was then taken out of the van by the men and felt herself slipping away. She noticed that the men brought her into a building and one of them took out a card and swiped it through a magnetic lock and then entered a code on a key pad. The door opened, but she was so drugged that she could not make out any faces or what the place looked like—the lights in the room were very bright. The last thing Kate remembers is being strapped on a table where someone moved a device that could have been an ultrasound over her chest and face. She then heard the person who was doing the procedure say, “There. We found it.” Kate then blacked out and when she regained consciousness, she was in her bed at home—it was one in the morning. She got up and besides a slight headache, she felt all right. The next day she called Brenda and asked about her car. Brenda said her car was fine, but she had been trying to call Kate since nine yesterday evening and only got her machine. Kate didn’t tell Brenda about the experience, but after she said goodbye she checked her machine and found two messages from her, one at 9:10 and the other at 9:55 pm.

Kate tried to convince herself it was just a dream, but could not. She thought that the abduction was somehow connected to her contact with Leenal. There is no doubt in her mind that both were very real, and she thinks Leenal put something in her the government wanted so badly that they sent agents to kidnap her. When I asked Kate if she went to the police to report the incident she laughed saying, “Yeah, then I would have to tell them the whole story and most likely lose my job. I am responsible for the lives of people in the cardiac intensive care; how would my patients react if they knew the person giving them medication through their IV had contact with a being from another dimension?” I kept in contact with Kate well into late 2008, and although Leenal and the “government agents” never paid her another visit, she continued to see the shadow people in her home almost every night moving quickly through the house.
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She told me that on a number of occasions at night, she would wake up and see one standing by the bed and it would quickly disappear as if it didn’t want to be seen. As of the writing of this book, Kate came into a very large inheritance and quit her job and moved out of Scottsdale. Kate informed me that despite relocating halfway across the country, she is still seeing the shadow people in her home.

High Strangeness Case Number Five: The Creatures from the Swamp

There are sixty-two cases in my files involving some type of contact with terrifying animal-like creatures. The case I now present involved a grandmother, mother, and her young daughter taken out of their normal reality, brushing against a world they thought existed only in nightmares.

On April 22, 2002, I received a call from a woman named Margaret, a single mother who lives with her daughter and mother in a small Connecticut town. Margaret told me she saw a strange light and a number of unusual creatures in a swamp very close to her home. She said her mother and thirteen- year-old daughter, Jessica, had also seen the “things” and found them terrifying. Margaret also mentioned the creatures took their dog, a six-year-old dog named Thunder. Margaret had heard me on a radio show talking about the paranormal and decided to call me. She had called the police but could tell that despite their politeness when taking her story, they did not believe her. When we spoke, she sounded sincere and like she had a solid case so I made plans to see her.

Margaret’s home was located in an isolated section of Connecticut backcountry, down a long driveway impossible to see from the street. This was before I had GPS, so it took me quite a long time to find the house. It was a good thing I left home very early in the morning since I arrived at Margaret’s home almost two hours late. After ringing the doorbell and going through introductions, I was asked to come into the living room, the side of the house that faced the swamp. I looked around the room and was surprised to see the windows were boarded up. I asked Margaret about it and she replied, “I boarded up the windows to make sure that if the creatures ever came back, they could not get into the house.” In the room was her mother and daughter, Jessica. All three ladies were still quite excited about the experience and tried to tell their story at the same time. The interview ended up being more than two hours long; the important parts of their story are presented below.

An Evening of Terror

On the evening of April 19, 2002, just after a late dinner, Margaret and her daughter decided to have a quiet evening listening to music in the living room. Margaret’s mother was upstairs in her room listening to the radio and things seemed quite normal. Their dog, Thunder, was lying on the floor next to the television, fast asleep after a large meal. At about eight, Thunder jumped to his feet and began growling and barking as if someone was on or approaching the property. At the same time, the CD player began to make strange sounds as the music started skipping and an electrical-like noise played through the speakers. The noise was so bizarre that both Margaret and Jessica indicated that at times it sounded like the howling or growling of some type of animal. In other words, it wasn’t your normal sound coming from a player having trouble. At that point, the grandmother (Margaret’s mother) came downstairs and said that the radio upstairs had all static on it and she couldn’t hear the music. Margaret then turned on the television set and it seemed to be working fine. Jessica tried the CD player again and the noise was still there so she changed CDs—the strange noise seemed to get worse. Margaret then said that it no longer sounded like static; it actually sounded like the groaning and howling of a monster. The dog began barking louder and then started crying as if very frightened of something that could not be seen. Margaret’s mother indicated that she heard almost the same sounds coming out of the radio upstairs after the music faded away.

At a quarter past eight, there was a total loss of power in the house; the lights went out. The women brought out the flashlights and lit candles when Jessica noticed a light in the swamp. All three of them looked out the large living room window and wondered what it could be. At first they thought it was a car that ran off the road and got ditched in the mud, maybe after hitting a telephone pole, causing the power outage. Margaret picked up the phone to call the police, but it was dead—no dial tone, not even static. She told her mother and daughter to wait inside as she went out the back door to the deck to get a better look at the light. As Margaret left the house, Thunder ran past her and into the swamp barking and growling. She tried to call him back, but he disappeared into the darkness.

As Thunder got farther away, his barking started to fade and eventually just stopped. Once again, Margaret tried to call him, but there was no response . . . the dog seemed to have vanished. From the deck, the light seemed to be about a hundred feet away. Now walking closer, Margaret realized it wasn’t the headlights of a car but a large sphere that was yellow in color with some type of swirling in the middle. When I asked her to estimate the size of the light, she indicated that it was at least 6 feet in diameter.

As she continued to watch, the light started to change color from yellow to red and appeared to be pulsating. Then, a dark human-sized figure jumped out of the light. Two others followed. Since the light was so bright, she could not see them clearly and they appeared only as silhouettes. Margaret noticed they seemed to walk on two legs, but they swayed back and forth and were crouching. As she stood and watched, her daughter yelled from the window that they saw them also. The creatures seemed to hear Jessica’s voice and started moving toward the house at a much quicker rate. Margaret said as they got closer she heard growling, as if these creatures were animals of some sort. When I asked if she could compare the noise to some common animal, she said it was very much like a dog’s growl.

Jessica and her grandmother yelled for Margaret to come back to the house because the creatures were coming closer. Margaret told me with a shaking voice, “As they got closer I could make out their form: they seemed to have hair all over their bodies with long arms that almost reached to the ground. I was so scared that I couldn’t move; the feeling was of pure terror. I stood transfixed—the hair on the back of my neck stood up. Finally, I heard my daughter scream. [I] turned around, ran into the house, locked the door, and yelled to my mother to close the shades.”

All three women stood close together in the living room, trembling in fear when suddenly, they heard a loud pounding on the back door, outer walls, and living room window that faced the swamp. The pounding on the window was so hard, they were afraid the glass would shatter. The noise stopped, then after a minute or two, Margaret slowly lifted the shade. One of the creatures
was standing by the window
! The apparition was so scary that the women all screamed. Margaret quickly pulled down the shade and moved backward from the window. The three women described the creature as being as tall as a man but with hair all over its body. It had long, skinny arms with claws on its hands, circular eyes, and long ears that went to a point. The most terrifying part, they said, was its mouth—full of long, sharp fangs.

Terrified, the three women didn’t know what to do. Young Jessica was screaming so loud her mother tried to calm her by saying, “If we are quiet, perhaps they will go away.” After ten minutes of standing in the middle of the room in the dark, Margaret cautiously went to the window and pulled back the shade. She told me, “I saw three of them standing together in the middle of the yard, they were pulling something apart and placing it in their mouths like they were eating. I had a horrible thought that they may have killed Thunder and ate him. Then the creatures ran back into the woods toward the light and I lost sight of them. A short time afterward, the lights in the house blinked several times and then the power came back on.”

Margaret picked up the phone; to her relief she heard a dial tone and called the police. When the officers arrived, they could find nothing on the property and there was no sign of the dog. Interestingly, they refused to go into the swamp and said that a patrol car and a detective would come by in the morning to do a more complete investigation. Despite the next day’s extensive police efforts, the dog was not found. The police report said there were no footprints or any other signs that someone or something had been on the property.

My Investigation

I looked around the grounds and walked into the swamp where the light was seen and found nothing. The marsh was still thawing from the winter and smelled slightly of methane. The local electric company reported no outages in the area that could account for Margaret’s home losing power. As of the writing of this book, Thunder was never found and it was the opinion of the police and the animal control officer that the dog must have just run away. This explanation didn’t make any sense to Margaret; the dog was treated very well and was quite loyal.

Margaret knows a local nature expert who offered the possibility that the light she had seen was nothing more than swamp gas, also called a will-o’-the-wisp or
ignis fatuus
. Swamp gas has been reported as a ghostly light appearing over a bog at night or twilight. Science has explained the phenomenon as methane gas being released from rotting vegetation after a spring thaw. The methane rises into the air and ignites when coming into contact with oxygen. Much folklore surrounds the lights and many still believe they represent fairies or the souls of the dammed trying to escape from hell.

When I heard these tales, I almost laughed out loud—back in the sixties, Dr. J. Allen Hynek suggested that a rash of UFO sightings in Michigan was the result of swamp gas igniting and glowing. Dr. Hynek never lived down his swamp gas statement—many UFO skeptics later used “swamp gas” to jokingly explain away sightings they did not want to address. Throughout his eighteen-year position as a scientific consultant with Project Blue Book, Dr. Hynek was told to explain away all sightings at any cost.
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I have seen swamp gas on two occasions: it appeared to be a bluish glowing flame, rising up from the ground and then exploding with a “pop!” Although there have been reports of the phenomenon lasting several minutes, the two I witnessed were no more than three seconds in duration.