The Betty & Barney Hill Abduction (1961)

It was September 19, 1961, a night that still feels like a dream and a nightmare. Barney and I were driving back from a quick getaway to Canada, cruising down Route 3 through the White Mountains of New Hampshire. It was just after 10pm and the road was quiet, nothing but the hum of the car and the stars hanging heavy in the night sky.

Do you see that? I asked, pointing at a bright light hovering above the trees. At first it seemed like a star, but it was moving, darting in strange patterns, unlike anything I'd ever seen before.

Barney was silent for a moment, watching the light his brow furrowed. It's probably just a plane, he said, but I could hear the doubt in his voice. It wasn't a plane.

Things don't move like that, I said. The light kept following us. I could feel my pulse quickening, a cold dread settling in my chest.

We pulled over to get a better look, and that's when the light got closer, larger, until I could see the outline of something metallic, an actual craft hovering silently in the sky. Barney was terrified, muttering under his breath. It's following us.

Barney pulled over the car on the side of the empty road and grabbed his binoculars, and as he peered through them, I could see the colour drain from his face. The craft suddenly appeared in the middle of the road in front of us, and we were frozen, and then, nothing. Just blank.

I don't remember how we got home. We should have been home by 2am, but we didn't walk through the door until after 5. Others were missing, gone from our lives like someone had hit pause and fast forwarded through time.

We were dazed, confused, as if we'd slipped into another place or time and only half remembered our way back. For days we tried to ignore it, pretend it was just a strange sighting, but deep down I knew. Something had happened that night.

Eventually, I started telling people, close friends, family. Others didn't believe me, but I knew what we saw. We had been taken.

There's no other explanation. Under the hypnosis of a professional hypnotherapist, the memories came back in pieces for my husband Barney and I, being aboard a sleek ship, strange, short grey beings examining us, probing us like we were animals under a microscope. They communicated, but not through words.

They did not have human movements or emotions. The aliens weren't like the men in jumpsuits from the science fiction movies. They were short, grey skin, large heads and dark, unblinking eyes, cold and calculating, yet oddly curious, like scientists studying a new species.

And they were studying us, probing us, not just physically, but mentally, emotionally. I remember lying there, unable to move, feeling their presence in my mind. It was terrifying, and yet, there was something almost clinical about it, like they didn't mean us harm, but we were just another part of their research, another species to analyse.

Barney was more reluctant to accept it, he didn't want to talk about it, didn't want to believe that we'd been abducted by extra-terrestrial beings. I kept thinking about those early stories from the 1940s, the UFO sightings after Kenneth Arnold's report of flying discs near Mount Rainier, and then George Adamski, meeting that man from Venus in the desert, warning us about nuclear weapons. There was a pattern, a reason they were contacting us.

They were concerned about what we were doing to ourselves. For the longest time, I wondered why us, why Barney and I? Was it because we were an interracial couple, living in a world where we didn't quite fit in?

Was it our blood? Did that make us stand out to them like an anomaly on their radar? Or was it just random?

Either way, we were chosen, and our lives were never the same.