Travel by UFO
I wrote this story for the Montreal Gazette two decades ago, before the effects of climate change had become so obvious and catastrophic. Were these “aliens” “abducting” Madame M showing her their dried, waterless planet as a warning? We are all going there ourselves, I’m afraid.
It’s been many summers since I’ve visited the southern Indiana of my teen years, but on these potent August nights sizzling with crickets, I think about how I’d sit out on the old farmhouse porch under zillions of stars and scour the big glittering sky for flying saucers.
Travel by UFO—the ultimate adventure travel. Must be something about it in the air these days. I thought it would make a cockamamie travel story, and began looking for an abductee who had travelled with aliens. “How were the in-flight movies? Interesting scenery? Bring back any souvenirs?” I’d ask the abductee, in the spirit of an inquisitive travel journalist. But is it politically correct to call beings from foreign spheres aliens ? Should we not refer to them as intergalactic visitors or extra-terrestrial tourists?
I was abducted once. It wasn’t on a summer’s night on a farm in Indiana, but on a winter’s dawn, in front of my apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City, a few blocks from Jimmy Rigberg’s Flying Saucer News Bookstore. I knew it was a dream because there’s no place to land in midtown Manhattan, and they never abduct you in the dead of winter.
My abduction nightmare was a sort of spiritual chastisement for an extended bout of misanthropy. The alien spacecraft landed near the bus stop in the middle of Tenth Avenue right in front of Sonny’s Delicatessen. When I got inside the big white ship, I felt an unspeakable sadness at the thought of never, ever seeing a fellow human being again—no matter what kind! The dream’s effect has stuck to this day, and flashes back whenever I’m feeling ornery and belligerent.
The search begins…
To begin my search for a suitable abductee, I dug out the six-page handwritten letter dated June 4, 1989, that I received after the Montreal Gazette published a story I’d written on Quebec’s Lac Mégantic Observatory. The letter writer, a former British Royal Air Force medic and UFO buff for 48 years, implied that Quebec astronomers knew more about UFO’s than they would admit.
Five years after I received the letter, I answered it. I called up Ronald W. J. Anstee, who was still at the same address, and he invited me to watch some UFO videos. Maybe he could help me find an abductee, he said. On a stormy night in June, I drove to his home in Rosemont to meet with him. Driving east on Rue Sherbrooke in the lashing rain and lightning, Montreal’s arched Olympic Tower glowed like a thing landed from the Pleides 500 light years away…
The evening at Anstee’s was as casual as a bowl of potato chips. We all sat around munching—Anstee, his son and me and the whole family of in-laws and visiting grandchildren, while UFOs: The Secret Evidence and what was said to be censored NATO Cosmic Top-Secret footage rolled across the screen. Stuff like UFO’s filmed by astronauts orbiting the moon, testimonies of Puerto Rican abductees, and a UFO crash in Durango, Colorado in 1978 in which five extra-terrestrial tourists were rescued and supposedly kept alive in a special Atomic Energy Commission “alien habitat.”
National Enquirer meets B movie Sci-fi and the X-Files. Hangars housing UFO’s being test-flown by U.S. Air Force pilots, anti-gravity research, alien autopsies, and UFO’s hovering over the Place Ville-Marie in downtown Montreal. Some of the stuff seemed pretty extraordinary, but some of it seemed too goofy to be true.
Hoaxes!
After all, most UFO photos turn out to be hoaxes. (A friend of mine faked a good UFO picture while lying on a beach, by throwing a soda cap bottle into the air snapping it with a camera). One of the most famous and funniest pictures that inadvertently became a hoax, was that of the elfin-faced alien in a silver suit photographed in Montreal in 1967 at Terre des Hommes (Man and His World). Christian R. Page, Montreal journalist specializing in the paranormal, had taken the photo of the plastic model ET as a personal souvenir of the exhibition. But it fell into the hands of a British UFOlogist who actually peddled it as authentic to sensationalist newspapers around the world.
To set things straight, at Montreal’s first UFO Conference sponsored by SOS OVNI/Québec, Page, its president, offered dramatic proof that the “alien face” he’d photographed in 1967, which had circled the globe, was indeed a fake. The conference ended with a screening of the controversial footage supposedly made in 1947 of a medical autopsy of an alien crashed at Roswell, New Mexico on July 2, 1947. Before the black and white movie started rolling—reel by gory reel—dry ice smoked over the stage and a “doctor” in a surgical mask wheeled out an operating table with an alien just waiting to be disemboweled—the very same silver-suited ET tourist from Terre des Hommes—miraculously retrieved from an auction!
As my evening with Ronald Anstee continued, he loaded me down with books, including D. Scott Rogo’s Alien Abductions and Timothy Good’s Alien Liaison. Then he showed me an odd metallic fragment found 30 miles north of Montreal on a farm in Saint-Alexis-de-Montcalm. He also sketched the strange face with button eyes he’d seen on the #64 bus a few days later. Then he gave me the phone number of a French Count who might “know someone.”
Lucky for me, The Count happened to be in town rather than at his ancestral château in Brittany. Philippe de la Messuzière was a seemingly modest man, a retired electronics engineer with a quirky sense of humor and a passionate interest in UFOlogy. He had some highly-placed friends in the Canadian aerospace industry who were investigating UFO activity around Montreal. Apparently Laval—perhaps because of the Cosmodôme’s Space Science Centre—was a real traffic jam of UFO’s.
I met the Count at his apartment on a quiet street on the Plateau Montreal. . A short, delicate man in his fifties greeted me with a wide-mouthed smile that was dolphin-like, sweet yet engigmatic. Over a calming vervaine tisane he showed me his albums of fabulous news clippings, and filled my ears with stories about local UFO activity—mass abductions in Saint Jovite, strange lights over Laval, and the work of Dr. Jean-Roch Laurence, Professor of Psychology at Concordia University. Dr. Laurence directed the Quebec Institute of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis and published the Institute’s findings in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology and other prestigious medical revues.
One of the Institute’s projects was to study cases of claimed abduction. Professor Laurence was the first to point out that hypnosis does not produce accurate, undistorted recall of an event. Hypnosis may serve to open the doors of memory, but what comes out is from inner, not outer space. Hypnosis was only one of the tools the Concordia team was using to study the experiences of those claiming to be suffering the after-effects of alien abductions. One of the cases that particularly interested the Count was that of a young mother of two who lives in the Laurentians in the ski-resort town of Saint-Jovite…
Jaunt to St. Jovite
On Sunday morning I was off to the Laurentians, not to make the resort Perrier umbrella scene or go boutiquing or canoeing but to Saint-Jovite to meet Lyne M., who, upon arrangement with The Count has agreed to talk about her “trip.”
The suburban bungalow was light and cheery. Lyne welcomed us in to her living room, where she began to tell me about her experience en français in animated detail.
Il ya trois ans… she began. Three years ago, on a Sunday night in late August, she was at her desk doing some bookkeeping for the family business, a restaurant and billiard hall. Her two children and husband were fast asleep, but she was wide awake and deep into her figures. Without warning, Lyne felt groggy, then stuporous. She was used staying up until 1 a.m. and felt annoyed at this sudden urge to fall into bed. She stumbled into the bedroom, and the last thing she saw, the clock read 10:30 p.m…
“Lying on the bed, I was still conscious, when I had the weird sensation of feeling myself shrinking and becoming very tiny, and being sucked up into a long tube. Then I became my normal size again. I was in a long hallway, feeling my way along a concave white wall made of some shiny material which was neither metal nor plastic.”
(In print this looks preposterous, I know. Like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. But let us continue…)
A small grayish humanoid about three feet tall silently beckoned Lyne to follow him into a chamber. There, she said, she underwent a kind of examination to see if she was fit for the voyage. (Voyage to where, she never found out precisely, but it must have been awfully darn far away.)
Lyne described the tall blonde human-like beings—two males and a female—who monitored the machines during the examination as “Wow! Quelle beauté! They were gorgeous! They belong in Hollywood!” She didn’t feel scared, she says, because she was so fascinated with how incredibly beautiful these beings were.
Fit for the trip, Lyne was strapped in and they took off. Lyne compared the G-force of the take-off to the wildest roller coasters at Montreal’s La Ronde amusement park—mais cent fois plus intense—a hundred times more intense.
“The pressure felt awful,” she says. “I don’t know how long it lasted. I kind of blanked out. The next thing I remember, I was on another planet with strange scenery. I was looking out through a giant window onto a strange-colored city with no water, no trees. Just fantastic buildings I can’t describe. But no water anywhere. It was dry and looking at it I felt very felt sad. ”
Climate disaster warning?
Why did they choose to take her, Lyne wondered. And why go all that distance to just turn around and come back? After feeling the G-force pressure on the return trip, Lyne was back in her bed. When she looked at the clock, it was 4:30 a.m.
Alien abduction capsule?
Post climate change apocalypse
Since her experience, Lyne complained of severe sinus problems, neck and back pain, and is sometimes afraid to go to sleep at night. And she says that now she’s obsessed with conserving water and recycling everything in sight. And she’s bugging her family and neighbors in Saint-Jovite to do the same.
Was Madame M. really an Innocent Abroad on the Planet X? She can hardly believe it herself. Unlike The Count, who’d love to meet some ET’s and plans to booby-trap his apartment to kidnap them if they ever do visit, I prefer to be an armchair UFO traveler. Give me a book like The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever by Richard C. Hoagland, and I’m gone.
