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- 09-May-88 09:07 EDT
- Sb: APn 05/06 2057 Alien Abductions
- Copyright, 1988. The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
-
- By BRIAN MURPHY Associated Press Writer
- BOSTON (AP) -- Joann Berte swears she was paralyzed by three-fingered aliens
- and taken aboard their spaceship. Marianne Shenefield, who claims to have twice
- encountered extraterrestrials, said people who have seen them have an aura.
- Their stories are likely to be heard in dozens of variations this weekend at
- a conference in Waltham expected to draw more than 250 UFO experts and people
- who claim to have been abducted by extraterrestrials.
- "I was immobilized. I couldn't move and I didn't think to speak. I just
- watched," said Berte of a warm night on Dec. 10, 1979, when she says she was
- awakened on a friend's porch in Rhode Island and carried in a paralyzed state
- aboard an alien spacecraft.
- Berte tells of observing a small, three-fingered alien in an incubator and
- being brought to a glass-enclosed platform overlooking a table where her friend
- lay with a tube extending from her navel.
- "It makes you very angry," said Berte. "They don't ask your permission. They
- just take you away."
- Arthur Myers, a conference coordinator and member of a church group
- interested in the paranormal, said the gathering is one of the first public
- meetings of people claiming to have had close encounters of the third kind.
- "It reminds me a lot of alcholism or homosexuals coming out of the closet,"
- said Myers. "There's a stigma attached to the abductees. But once someone comes
- forward with their story, others are willing to speak."
- Marianne Shenefield of Agawam is one of those yearning to let people know
- about her two experiences. Thirty-five years ago, she was an 11-year-old girl
- building a tree house in Agawam on a July afternoon.
- "Then I turned around and there was what I thought was a little boy in a
- scuba outfit," said Shenefield. "Then I felt this floating sensation and the
- next thing I knew I was in this round craft."
- Shenefield said the aliens put her under an X-ray device and she was
- observed by several aliens, who tried to communicate with her by a sound-making
- unit.
- In 1972, Shenefield said, a female-like alien captured her outside her home
- and brought her into a small compartment. Shenefield said she was released
- hours later, dazed but unharmed.
- A degenerative eye disorder has reduced her sight to dim shadows and bold
- streaks of light. But the ailment enables her to see auras, she said.
- "I can immediately detect someone who has been abducted," she said. "They
- are surrounded by an indescribable color. Believe me, I can tell."
- Author Ray Fowler said about 80 percent of all UFO sightings can be
- explained.
- "But there are those instances that defy any explanation," said the former
- Air Force intelligence officer, a keynote speaker at the conference Saturday.
- "It's imperative that we study these things with an open mind, not gullibly
- accept them or reject them out of hand. There are too many people who come
- forward with nothing to gain and everything to lose."
- Fowler, whose book "The Andreasson Affair" describes a family's encounter
- with aliens, said he became interested in UFOs after seeing flying discs in
- 1947.
- He is director of the Mutual UFO Network, an international group that
- documents UFO sightings.
-