Taken By Aliens

It all began innocently enough but the bitter taste in my mouth will never fade and I'm not sure who I can trust anymore. Witness my tale and decide for yourself.

Out of the blue, I received an e-mail from an old friend. His memory had long since faded into the background of my thoughts. But here he was, alive and kicking as they say. We exchanged several e-mails in the ensuing weeks. We talked about what we've been doing for the last 15 years. He gave up acting to become a real estate professional in a rural area of Wyoming. I studied philosophy and have been a Chinese herbalist in Los Angeles for the better part of a decade. We talked about the movies we'd seen, the books we'd read. (I've read far more than he had, though many were herb or health-related.)

We had been good friends since high school, roommates in college, confidants and each other's excuse during a time when students always needed some sort of alibi. Then came graduation and the barges that ferried our lives drifted in different directions. But our e-mails revealed that neither one of us ever felt the other had dropped the friendship. This is just the way life works. People simply grow apart.

It was great to relive some of the high points of our youth and it had been good to catch up. I'm certain that I am not alone in the need for some connection to my past. It rounds out ones' life. Still, as we continued e-mailing back and forth, I came to realize that he was holding something back...something intangible...something he wanted to say but I think, was moved to avoid. Initially, I didn't press him on certain missing details out of a concern that he might unilaterally end the communication. And I was truly enjoying his e-mails. But something was definitely being glossed over on his side of our exchanges.

When I asked him how he came to be in Wyoming, he danced around the question, blathering loosely about aimlessly drifting and ending up in this desolate but beautiful area. He claimed that the breathtaking beauty of the locale saved his very soul. It was all very poetic. And it was all a carefully contrived camouflage. Then he abruptly changed the subject. He was also clearly reluctant to be specific about a certain three year period, instead bending the timeline so that the years around it sort of filled it up, like water pouring in from all sides of a hole in the sand, seeking its own level. From my point of view, it was in fact, a gaping hole in his life. I tried to get him to open up about it, but he was resistant. The more he resisted, the harder I tried to pry it out of him. The harder I tried, the stronger was his resolve to remain tight-lipped, until I finally gave up and decided not to press him for more detail. But I determined to solve the mystery of the three year gap on my own.

I began by Googling him and found that there were lots of references to him, 843,678, if you counted all the other people with his name. As I got better at it, narrowing the search parameters, I found several dozen web-sites that talked about him. And every one of those web sites was concerned in one manner or another, with alien abductions. The other thing that I didn't know until I Googled him, and which he took great pains not to mention to me, is that he had been reported missing by his family, some 12 years ago.

When I contacted them, (being cautious to only inquire as to his whereabouts as an old friend) I learned from his sister that his mother and father had passed on some years back and that she didn't know where he was or even if he was alive. She told me that he had disappeared under a cloud of suspicion about his involvement in an embezzlement scam. In the interim, he had been cleared. She had heard the theories about him being abducted by aliens because of the mysterious circumstances of his disappearance, but she had discounted them. She thought that he had dropped out of sight to avoid prosecution. So now I had all the pieces...and they fit. My friend, wrongly accused, had taken the line of least resistance and simply disappeared to begin a new life in a new state. I decided to e-mail him and tell him that I knew it all. His response floored me.

He said he hadn't run out on the embezzlement case. He actually claimed that he had been kidnapped by aliens, and that he feared that they would be coming back for him if he left Wyoming. So, he decided to stay there. But why Wyoming? His extremely curious answer was that the area, in which he now resided, had been the site of numerous cattle mutilations in the 1980's. The place was crawling with government agents and Ufologists. Because of that, he said, the aliens had shifted their operations elsewhere. Then he told me something that would have frightened me had I believed a word of what I was hearing. He said that he feared for me.

He believed that the aliens had hacked his e-mail and had my e-mail address and could easily find me. He said I could be in danger now that I knew his story. He suggested that I come up to Wyoming where I'd be safe. Stalling for time, I told him I'd think about it. But when I shut down my e-mail that night, I had pretty much decided that my old friend was a wacko. And I decided that I wasn't going to e-mail him anymore. What happened later that night made me change my mind.

I was sound asleep when around midnight, when a sound...a hum, that I can only describe as a low-pitched ringing in my ears, awakened me. It reminded me of the time I was struck in the side of my head with a softball and suffered tinnitus for a week. I sat up in bed, groggy. There was a light glowing in the center of my room. It seemed to have no source, and while it was fairly intense, it didn't hurt my eyes and faded to inky blackness at its edges.

I thought I was having a nightmare, but soon realized that I was wide awake...and further realized that if I was awake, I was also terrified. Mercifully, the glow faded, as did the hum and I seemed none the worse for the experience except I'd peed in my pajamas.
The very next day, I boarded a flight for Wyoming, not knowing what I might be facing. When my flight landed at the South Bighorn County Airport, outside of Greybull, I was greeted at the gate by my old friend and a limo driver named Gabor. We collected my bags and I was ushered to a Town Car with the name "Safe Harbor Realty" printed on a magnetic sign on the door. We headed north, away from the town. As we drove along in silence, I observed that the car's headliner was made of what appeared to be aluminum foil. My friend informed me it blocked the alien mind probes. This was getting crazier and crazier. And yet, I could not get the terrifying hum and light of the previous night, out of my head.


Presently, we arrived at the middle of a desolate nowhere. And there, plunked down on thousands of acres of nothing was a sign that read: "Safe Harbor Estates." We drove past an unattended guard shack and down a black-topped entry street to a small neighborhood of one-story homes with aluminum foil-skinned roofs.

Then came what would have under other circumstances seemed like a high-pressure sales pitch. My friend asserted that for my own safety I had to move here. He told me to pick from any of the fifteen unoccupied units that remained among the twenty or so houses in the neighborhood. I was in such a daze throughout that I went along with everything, no questions asked. My friend handled everything and assured me that he was feeling extremely guilty about getting me involved in the mess to begin with. He removed his commission from the sale and convinced the developer to include upgraded carpets, landscaping, new appliances and tile floors in the purchase price. And he arranged for me to live, rent-free, in the new house until escrow closed. Over the next couple of weeks, with my friend's help, I sold my home and business back in Los Angeles, and closed escrow on the house in Wyoming. If this was L.A., I'd have felt it was all a scam. But here...here my life was being saved.

On the day escrow closed, my friend came to visit me, final papers in hand. It was then, as I sat, initialing the final page in my new kitchen, that I learned the horrible truth. My friend morphed into a hideous and unearthly creature. He was himself, an alien. He then told me that my friend, the real one, had been abducted several years back and his mind had been probed for what he knew. But he had died, regrettably, in the process. This alien and his pals saw this as an opportunity to replace my friend with an otherworldly doppelganger and make some money at the same time.

I had just closed escrow on a worthless piece of dirt in Wyoming that would never appreciate because no one in their right mind would want a tin foil house, 50 miles from civilization.

The alien's laugh still reverberates in my memory as I recall the moment he scooped up the papers and vanished in the same light I had seen in my bedroom all those weeks before. What a fool I had been. My savings were gone. I now lived, a Chinese herbalist, in the absolute middle of cowboy nowhere with no prospects and no recourse. I had been taken...taken by aliens!