The Andreasson Affair (28 page)

Betty:
Yes.

When we tried to bring her back to relive what appeared to have been a pre-1967 UFO abduction experience, Betty became literally terrified. Harold strongly suggested that we should not inquire further because it upset Betty too much.

A prior UFO experience would solve several puzzling aspects in this case. First, in an earlier session, Betty inadvertently gave us information that could not have been obtained during the 1967 abduction. It hinted of an earlier incident.

Ray:
Betty, you indicate that the ship was sectioned off and had different levels. Somehow the lower section whirled, and the top section remained stationary. At times the top also moved—especially when there was to be a change in direction. What confuses me is, at what point during your experience did you actually see something like this? As far as I can remember, you have never seen the object in flight or at a distance.

Betty:
I really don't know, Ray, when I saw it. But I know it.

Moreover, psychic phenomena have played a part in the lives of many who have had a Close Encounter UFO experience. And the Andreasson family was no exception. Several months after her harrowing UFO experience of January 1967, Betty stood at the sink doing dishes. Abruptly and without warning, something took control of her mind.

Betty:
It was as if the infinite opened up to me. And it scared me to death, because I was seeing inventions so far advanced—thousands of years advanced—and yet it seemed just a pinpoint or scratch in the infinite. I was afraid ‘cause it wasn't me controlling it. It was something else. As soon as I became fearful, it shut off.

For several years after the incident, Betty received similar flashes of insight, some of which may have been connected with her UFO experience. One of these involved a being of light in her home: “I was lying
there, and I turned my head toward my husband, who was asleep. And then, I heard noises like somebody opening and closing drawers. I turned my head to the direction and I saw this ‘light-being.' This was a bright, illuminated being about four to five feet tall. It wasn't fat or slim. It was just right. The hands were there, the arms, the legs, and the head, but it had no features. It was just all light. It leaped down the stairs.”

One night in 1975, Becky had an experience of her own. As Betty tells it: “The upstairs kitchen of our house was not as yet finished. Only the bedrooms were finished which we were using. We were cooking and eating in the cellar kitchen until the new one was ready. Becky had been awakened by her new baby in the early morning hours and had gone to the cellar apartment to heat the baby's bottle on the gas stove. Before going down to the cellar, she flicked on all the lights. Suddenly all the lights went out and huge glowing eyes peered at her from the cellar window. She screamed and ran upstairs, leaving the gas burning. There was a power failure that night
only
in our area. We learned the next day that the lights had come on by themselves, and the power company did not know what had caused the failure just in our area.”

Hallucination? Imagination? Paranormal phenomena? Who can tell for sure? Prior to the UFO encounter recalled under hypnosis, the Andreasson family had considered these odd but still isolated events. Now they took on a new meaning, as did the several strange events that occurred when Betty lived at Westminster, Massachusetts, way
before
the 1967 UFO encounter.

One evening in the mid-1950s, when Betty was very young, she was lying in bed. Suddenly she had a feeling that someone was staring at her through a second-story window. She was so fearful that she couldn't force herself to look at the window. On the following morning, she noticed that small trees near the window were bent over.

On an evening during the early 1960s, Betty had another strange experience. She was reading her Bible on the sofa when again she had the same strong feeling of being watched. Looking up slowly, she was startled to see a face staring at her through the window. The figure had red hair, red eyebrows, and black, piercing eyes. His gaze was fixed and appeared
malevolent. She forced her eyes away from his hypnotic expression and looked back down at her Bible. Then she slowly got up and left the room before running to the front door and shouting to her father for help. (Her parents lived next door.) When her father arrived, the Peeping Tom had vanished. Betty said he looked like a normal person except for the penetrating black eyes.

The final incident in Westminster—the only one recalled when something akin to a UFO was involved—occurred when Becky was about 8 years old, which would place it around 1964. One night Becky woke up to see a glowing yellow-orange ball hovering outside her bedroom window. The object had directed a narrow beam of light at her. Becky's screams of terror caused Betty to rush upstairs to her aid, but by the time she arrived, the strange phenomenon had disappeared. Shortly after this, Becky developed the uncanny ability to automatically write page after page of strange symbols. The strange script was found to be very similar to the so-called spirit writing practiced by the Shakers, an early American religious sect.

Strange incidents also occurred after the family moved to South Ashburnham. Whether or not they were connected with an
earlier
UFO abduction must remain in the realm of speculation. But the fact remains that a pre-1967 abduction would explain why the entities registered surprise at Betty's having “parts missing,” the result of the 1965 hysterectomy. It would also explain the presence of the tiny object in Betty's head. It is interesting to note that the entities made a puzzling statement just prior to its removal: They told Betty that they were
awakening
something. Perhaps this bristled object was a highly sophisticated monitoring device emplaced within her during an earlier abduction!

This theory brings to mind some experiments that man is conducting with lower life forms here on earth. We go to great lengths to study habits, environment, and idiosyncracies. Consider the following analogy:

A black bear is out rummaging for food in a heavily wooded area that he shares with a goodly number of other wild creatures. Sniffing the air cautiously, he cuts across a large field on the way to a river to fish for salmon. Suddenly, a foreign noise coming from above causes him to look up. Terrified, he sees a strange, noisy, whirring, birdlike thing hovering
directly above him. He starts to run back to the woods with the huge “bird” in hot pursuit. Suddenly, a sharp, brief pain stabs into his side. He continues to run, but an inexplicable feeling of drowsiness overwhelms him. The bear slumps to the ground in a sound sleep.

The “bird” lands. It is a helicopter, and out of it step several scientists. One still holds the rifle that has just fired a tranquilizer-filled dart into the fleeing bear. Carefully, a wildlife biologist tags the bear and places a radio transmitter collar and temperature probe about the sleeping bear's neck. The scientists then board the helicopter and depart.

Later, the bear stirs. Perhaps vague images of the frightening chase still linger in his mind. Most likely they are dismissed as a bad dream brought on by eating decayed rabbit meat earlier that morning. He is hungry. So he lumbers off to the river, where there are fat, migrating salmon just waiting to be caught.

Seven hundred miles above him, a highly sophisticated satellite dubbed
Nimbus
wheels around the planet in a predetermined course. It signals the radio transmitter attached to the bear. It, in turn, begins to transmit data gathered by special sensors.
Nimbus
then re-transmits the signals to a ground radio station in Fairbanks, Alaska.
²
Then the data is sent to Goddard Space Flight Center at Maryland, where it emerges as a computer readout.

Meanwhile, the bear continues to fish, hunt, sleep, and hibernate. He remains completely oblivious to the fact that his bodily functions and exact whereabouts are being monitored by a super-intelligent species—man. How could a bear even begin to comprehend such a thing? Similarly, how could a human even begin to understand how a super-intelligent race might similarly monitor man's doings? Could it be that the little BB-shaped object that the entities were “awakening” was a monitoring device?

The entities knew where to find Betty at Ashburnham. They knew her name and told her that they had known all of the trouble she had been going through. This could be ascribed to the “mind reading” aspect of telepathy, except that the entities seemed
surprised
to find “parts missing”—evidently the result of Betty's hysterectomy, which would, of course, have taken place
after
Betty's first abduction.

This also brings to mind a statement made by an alien to Betty Hill, another abductee, back in 1961. In the book
The Interrupted Journey
, Betty Hill is quoted in a conversation with her alien captor:

But there are other people in this country who…would be most happy to talk with him, and they could answer all his questions. And, maybe if he could come back, all his questions would have answers. But if I did, I wouldn't know where to meet him. And he [the alien] said, “Don't worry. If we decide to come back, we will be able to find you, all right. We always find those we want to.”
³

Perhaps even now, individuals like Betty Hill and Betty Andreasson are being monitored by instruments far out in space. In any case, succeeding events were to prove that the entities
were
keeping a most unsettlingly close check on Betty's activities.

So long ago and still my initial investigation into the abduction experience of Betty Andreasson in 1967 remains fresh in my mind. At that time in 1977, I was 42 years of age. Now, at the age of 80, I find myself writing an epilogue to yet another edition of
The Andreasson Affair
. So where do I begin? The best place would be where the book left off with Betty's 1967 experience with the Phoenix. At that time she was told in no uncertain terms that she had been chosen to tell the world about the alien entities that had abducted her. How has this come to pass since that terrifying encounter? Let us see.

Her experiences were first revealed in the original publication of
The Andreasson Affair
by Prentice-Hall in 1979, which made the
New York Times
Best-Seller List. Soon after that the book was reprinted by Bantam in 1980 and again in 1988. Bantam sponsored a two-week nation-wide book tour during which Betty and I appeared on radio and TV throughout the United States.
The Andreasson Affair
was reprinted in several foreign countries and movie rights were purchased by Universal Studios, which still holds the rights.

This certainly was a good start to informing the public about her experiences, but it did not end there. The information obtained from the original investigation documented in this book was just the tip of the proverbial
iceberg of Betty's startling experiences revealed during my follow-on 17-year investigation into the UFO and paranormal experiences of Betty and her family. These were documented in my four follow-on books that were published between 1982 and 1995. Now here we are again with yet another reprint of
The Andreasson Affair
and also the beginning of negotiations with Universal Studios to obtain the rights for a movie. So much, so far, for Betty's experiences being made known to the world. The rest of this epilogue is a summary of what Betty and her family have gone through since her 1967 experience. It will be divided into four sections that encompass the four phases of my overall investigation of Betty's and Bob Luca's families.

After Betty's divorce, she temporarily moved to Pompano Beach, Florida, in the fall of 1977, where she purchased a small house at Pompano Beach and took a job at the Clock restaurant as a waitress. Betty's abrupt decision to go to Florida ended my Phase I investigation and I decided to write a book about Betty's experiences, which culminated in
The Andreasson Affair
.

Betty met Bob Luca while working at the Clock restaurant. Their meeting was highly synchronistic. Bob, like Betty, had a UFO experience in 1967 with a period of missing time. Betty told him about our investigation and he decided to undergo an investigation to probe his missing time experience. During the investigation, Betty married Bob in 1978 and moved into a house in Meriden, Connecticut.

In the meantime I spent most of 1978 writing
The Andreasson Affair
, keeping track of Betty by occasional letters and phone calls. Betty temporarily moved back to Ashburnham, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1978 to sell her house. During that time she told me about a number of strange things that happened in the house: poltergeist phenomena, unexplained noises and voices, and small floating balls of light. I was curious about how a small object had been removed from Betty's nose during her 1967 abduction and about her mentioning a “big door” by the aliens. Also, I was most interested in looking into Bob's UFO/missing time experience. A team of
investigators was again put together and the new Phase II investigation was launched. Both Betty and Bob underwent 13 audio-taped hypnosis sessions.

We started with Bob first on March 17 and 24, 1980. When asked under hypnosis to describe his first UFO experience, we expected to hear about his missing time experience. Instead Bob described in a childlike manner, a UFO experience as a 5-year-old in 1944. At that time he was living with his grandmother in Meriden, Connecticut. While playing on a swing placed in a field behind the house, a disk-shaped object suddenly appeared. Two small, gray entities could be seen in a clear dome on top. A beam of light from the object hit and paralyzed Bob. A message was given to him telepathically. A brief excerpt follows:

They're telling me things. Telling something, be good when I am older.… I can't say that yet.… They visit other people, and, ah, they're going to visit other people too.… Prepare us something good. Going to be for mankind.… In time
people
in the
light
will be back and the people that have seen them before will not be afraid when they come back.