Missing Time

One of the most universal aspects of the abduction phenomenon is that of "missing time." This occurs when an abductee runs out to do an errand and comes back two or more hours later than he or she should, with no memory of what occurred in the missing hours, or (usually) even any idea that hours are missing.

Sometimes missing time episodes are difficult to document. Most of us do not activate a stop watch whenever we leave the house. Certainly I had developed a reputation for tardiness among my friends prior to 1990, but on at least some of those locations I knew I was running late. I therefore developed an expectation that I would be late and didn't watch myself very closely.

Yet, when teaching class, I was always on time.

At the beginning of 1991 I lived with my wife and four kids in Melbourne, Florida. The contract I had with Harris Corporation came to an end and the next job I found was in Manchester, New Hampshire. Not knowing how long it would last (most contracts start out on a three-month trial basis), we decided I would move there with a co-worker who had gotten a contract with the same company, and Mary and the kids would remain in Melbourne, at least until the end of the school year.

So in February, 1991, my friend Manny and I left the apartment complex parking lot in our packed Ryder moving truck just after 6 PM. My son and Mary could later verify the time, because after they said goodbye to us they went in to watch a specific TV show that began at 6, and it had just started as they got inside.

Manny drove; I sat in the passenger seat. Melbourne is near an Air Force base and, of course, Cape Kennedy is not far away; so we were used to seeing interesting lights in the sky. But my attention was drawn to a red, aerial light which seemed to be falling down from a blue light. The blue light, which was about ten degrees over the horizon, looked normal enough, like some kind of plane; but I wondered what it had dropped, or if the red light was another, unrelated object. But then, as the blue light came closer, it definitely emitted another red light which also began falling towards the ground.

At this time Manny said, "What is that?" I thought he meant the blue light.

I said, "I don't know…it probably is not a UFO, but I don't know what it is, or what it's dropping." Manny said he had not noticed anything dropping from it, so I didn't know why it caught his attention.

By now it was much closer, about thirty degrees above the horizon, and the single blue light diverged into two lights, which I assumed were on the ends of opposite wings. Another red light dropped from between them. Manny pulled into the emergency lane and began slowing to a halt, as I rolled down my window and leaned out, facing skywards. The two blue lights were now quite far apart, and I thought if it was a plane, it was a hell of a big one. Then, for a brief moment, as the object passed overhead, it caught the reflection of the lights of Melbourne on its underside, and I saw its true shape. I yelled to Manny, who was still braking the truck, "Holy shit—it's a disk!" The blue lights were on opposite sides of the disk. There were no lights in front or back.

(I should mention, it wasn't truly a disk—the bottom surface was convex. But it was big, and round. And the bottom was a convex mirror.)

Having researched all those missing time accounts, I tried to make a mental note which song was playing on the radio. Manny finally got the truck stopped. I nearly killed myself trying to get out the window, get the door opened, and jump out. When my feet hit the ground I immediately looked upward to locate the blue lights, but they were gone. I scanned the whole sky but nothing was moving.

I listened again to the radio and believed it was playing the same song; but for some reason by the time we got to Manchester I could not remember what song that was. This is odd for me; I remember what street I was on when I first heard "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" and the Carpenters' version of "Ticket to Ride" (Tampa, in both cases) in 1969. I am very musically oriented and the aspect of this event which actually bothered me most was not being able to remember what song was playing.

It wasn't until several weeks after we'd gotten to Manchester and moved into an apartment, that we compared notes, recalling the lights against the night sky…and suddenly realized that it shouldn't have been dark. The sun is still up in Central Florida at 6 PM in February (it sets shortly after 6, in Tampa). A phone call to Mary verified that we'd pulled out of the parking lot in daylight. We'd seen the mysterious lights just 18 miles north of Melbourne—yet, when we saw them, it was full-on night and the clock in the truck had said 8:20 pm (though that didn't seem strange to us at the time).

In the abduction literature, it isn't uncommon for a person to see a UFO at the conclusion of a missing time episode.

There's one other element of strangeness associated with this experience.

When we got to Manchester and unpacked we did not notice anything unusual. But over the next two or three weeks, each morning when Manny or I opened the silverware drawer, we would find another spoon or fork had become twisted or bent. We had a hodgepodge of flatware and this happened only to pieces from a particular set, of a kind you can pick up at K-Mart. The pieces are stainless steel with a blue plastic grip. The bends, as they appeared, were not up and down (the easy way) but, rather, sideways; and the plastic where the bend occurs was not marked or stretched in any way. When I discovered the first piece, I tried to bend it back manually but couldn't.

Manny refused to believe the spoons were being bent by magic or aliens, and tried bending other, unbent, spoons the same way. He tried bending them sideways cold, and heated. He's a strong guy and was able to bend them—but always, when he did, the plastic handle would become crinkled and discolored at the point of bend. The "magically" bent spoons did not show this effect.

As I later learned in the Support Group, abductees often "find" each other, seeming by coincidence, and then share a missing time episode. I had originally met Manny in Florida when we both had contracts with Nielson (the people who know you are not watching TV right now). When that contract was completed, we both crossed the state to Harris. By that time we'd become good enough pals to consider rooming together in New Hampshire for a few months.

After that time, however, Manny continued to have missing time episodes of his own, one of which ended with him in his apartment complex parking lot at two in the morning, clad in just his underwear. At his wedding a few months later he showed me a mark that appeared on his neck after another episode.

My missing time episodes had also just begun. But probably the scariest, and certainly most dramatic, occurred in summer of 1996.

By this time my divorce was final and I had a friend, Ray, who I had dated and who lived in New Jersey. Since his house was on my route home from a class I was teaching in Virginia, we made a date for me to drop by for dinner. Ray is a terrific cook and we had a pleasant visit before I got into my car to complete the journey home.

Ray knew about my abduction stories and was polite about them, though he didn't really believe me. "It's eight o'clock," he called as I pulled out of his driveway. "Don't get abducted on the way home!" He and I had previously driven from his house to mine together, and we knew the trip took exactly four hours. I assured him I'd be fine and went on my way.

Somewhere in Massachusetts, I became aware that something was poking or pulling at my upper right arm whenever I moved it. For some reason I got the idea that I'd left one of those little nylon fasteners in my T-shirt when I bought it, though the shirt was years old. (One of the signs of missing time/abduction is making nonsense explanations for strangeness and then not questioning it till later, if ever.)

Steering with my right hand, I felt in my right sleeve with my left hand, trying to find whatever was irritating my arm. To my surprise, my sleeve was stuck to my arm. When I pulled it away from the skin, my fingers came back wet.

I turned on the dome light and, now steering with my left hand, held my arm up so I could see the affected area in the rear-view mirror.

There was an incision, maybe four inches long, running laterally across the back of my arm. There were no sign of stitches, but the skin was pursed as if it had been glued together. One end of the suture had come loose and was bleeding. The blood had probably dried on my shirt, causing it to stick like a bandage until I loosened it and started it bleeding again.

Instead of freaking out, I started laughing. "They got me!" I thought. I had no memory of stopping the car, pulling over, or even slowing down. There was nothing I could do; no one I could tell except the Support Group when I got home. It was like losing a turn at chess.

When I got home, I looked at the big clock I had in the living room and saw that it said four o'clock. "Well," I thought, "at least I didn't lose any time."

It was three days before I realized that I should have been home at midnight…and even then, someone from the Support Group had to point that out.