UFO ENCOUNTER?
By R. W. Anderson

     It was a week night in September of 1976. My daughter, Michelle, had just started kindergarten. I was married to Bob. We were living in a little house on Seminary Drive just behind the Hamline Athletic Field in St. Paul, Minnesota. We had gone to bed about 9:30 as we usually did on week nights.
     It was probably several hours later when I woke with a start to find Bob was not in bed with me. This would not have been unusual but for the fact he had to work the next morning. I got up and walked through the house, stopping to check on Michelle who was also missing from her bed. While Bob stepping out late on a week night was not tremendous cause for concern, he would never, on the longest day of his life, have take a five-year-old with him.
     I began to panic. I ran to the back door with the intention of looking to see if our van or car were gone. When I opened it, there was a green haze or fog which was quite thick. Sabbath, my German Shepherd, ran out into the murky blur. I screamed for him to come back. He calmly and obediently complied with my alarmed request then, despite all the strange goings on, went straight to his bed and promptly fell asleep.
     My panic turning to terror, I picked up the phone but quickly put it back down. Who would I call and what would I tell them? I went to the kitchen sink and splashed my face with cold water in a vane attempt to regain some composure. I took a glass out of the cupboard, filled it with the cool liquid running from the spigot, drank it, then put it down on the counter to my right. At this point, I was snot nosed and sniveling. I began to pace the length of our small home repeatedly, stopping at each pass to look in my daughter's room.
     Was I having some sort of bizarre psychotic episode or was this just a terrible nightmare? Yes, the Granddaddy of all nightmares. With this in mind, I went back to bed where I lay in a sweat with eyes tightly shut saying to myself, between heaving sobs, "Please, God, let this be just a bad dream."
     At some point (although I didn't recall turning them on), I noticed that the lights were shining brightly in the bedroom. I looked down toward the end of the bed and, to my horror, saw what appeared to be an oval shaped object wrapped or swaddled in a goldish-colored metallic material. I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing except a wheezing whimper would pass my lips. Truly frozen with fear. I was pumping adrenaline at a rate I thought might kill me. My heart wasn't beating, it was buzzing. Some time passed before I was able to move one of my feet, very slowly, out of the fetal position to attempt pushing this object further from me.
     I don't remember a thing after that moment until daylight when I woke to find that Bob was in bed beside me. I ran to Michelle's room where she lay sleeping peacefully. As I walked back to the bedroom, I glanced at the sink. There was my glass on the right side. The light in the bedroom was off.
     The skin on my face felt taut and sore. I looked in a mirror and noticed it appeared sun burned. At breakfast, I could see that Michelle and Bob looked sun burned too. I recall thinking to myself that it had been cloudy and cold all week. I pushed this incident to the back of my mind in a category all its own labeled "nightmare like no other" and went on with my life.
     A few years later as I sat in a dentist's waiting room (in San Diego, CA) paging through a magazine, I noticed an article that quite nearly described my ordeal. Intrigued, I stopped at a book store on my way home. As I perused books on UFO's and the like, I came across some drawings of odd looking supposed human/alien infants. One was of a red haired baby in an oval shaped goldish-colored blanket.
     "Strange encounters" continued to occur in my life for ten years following the one above (none nearly as vivid in my memory as the one I write of here), but ceased abruptly following my total hysterectomy in 1986. My daughter and grandson are, to this day, occasionally bothered by unexplained phenomenon.

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