CONTENT WARNING: This story contains discussions of domestic violence and child abuse.
Pain. Pain was what woke Gary from sleep that night, and he winced as he opened his eyes to find himself caught in blinding lights on the ceiling above him. The surface under his back was cold, hard and unforgiving. Save for the ceiling lights, most of the setting was shrouded by darkness. He was on an operating table. As a regular biker, his mind immediately went to thoughts of a horrific accident. Had he been out on the road? Was he in hospital? He began to panic.
The pain was getting worse, it was throbbing in his head. His eyes focused and adjusted to the dark, and his heart dropped as he looked upwards. There was someone - something - in the room with him, and it wasn't a doctor. It was tall and had grey skin. Gary tried to move, tried to escape, but found he was paralysed. Shouting at the creature now, he demanded to know why it was doing this.
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"What are you doing? You're going to fucking kill me! You're going to fucking kill me! Leave me alone!"
The creature gave Gary no compassion or acknowledgement as the needle was pushed further into his skull. The searing agony finally overwhelmed his threadbare senses, and he blacked out.
Gary soon found himself back in his bedroom, and the room was spinning in a disorientated haze. It was 1988, and he was roughly 19 years old. His head hurt terribly and he needed the bathroom. Staggering to his feet before looking in the bathroom mirror, it must've felt like the ground was swept out from underneath him. There was an angry red mark on his left temple. It wasn't a dream. What had happened to him?
The Night Side of Childhood
Gary Rowe (pseudonym) was born in Cumbria in 1969. Despite the beauty of the Lake District and rolling mountains around him, his family home was a tangled nest of vipers and thorns. Susan, his mother, had resented him since before he was born. She would tell him bedtime stories about the times she had tried to miscarry or abort him. She was convinced that he only made it into the world through terrible luck. He doesn't remember anything about his father, except seeing him sat in a van, screaming verbal abuse at Susan before leaving both of their lives forever.
This abandonment prompted Gary and his mother to move into his grandparents' house. Unfortunately, he was subjected to further abuse at the hands of his grandparents. It seemed as if his mother had simply carried an intergenerational trend forward into her own behaviour. He was kicked and beaten by his grandfather, and these awful moments constituted some of his earliest memories.
In spite of it all, Gary fought to express the humanity that his elders had lost. He was a chatty and curious child, spending his free time with the animals at the local zoo and developing a strong distaste for greed and other social ills.
In hindsight, Gary remembers that his first UFO encounter came when he was about five or six. He had been in his bedroom in his grandparents' house when he saw something strange outside his window. There was a "large, white object" hovering in the sky nearby. Hollering for his grandmother to come take a look, she joined him by the window and could also see the anomaly. As they both watched, it started to move away from them before disappearing.
"What was that?" he asked, breathlessly.
"Probably the moon" she curtly replied.
Gary knew this wasn't right, even at the time. Nevertheless, he forced himself to dismiss it, knowing that he was surrounded by people who would be unwilling to entertain his myriad questions.
Soon, a strange lump appeared on the roof of Gary's mouth. It didn't move when he felt it with his tongue, and appeared to be below the tissue. It was months until his next dentist appointment, and the object somehow vanished in that time, disappearing as suddenly as it had appeared. When he told his dentist about it, he was intrigued and examined his mouth thoroughly, but was unable to find anything.
Susan began dating a man named David, who would eventually reveal himself as a drunken gambling addict. Understandably, Gary and David didn't get on very well.
A tense drive ensued when Susan decided that the family should all go on a holiday to the other side of the country. They were still trapped in the car together by late evening, and this was when Gary's next meeting with the anomalous currents running beneath the surface of his life would take place.
Perhaps on the brink of sleep, Gary didn't notice anything was amiss until his mother loudly cried out, "Oh my God! It's following us! What are we going to do?"
Something luminous was keeping pace with the car. It was floating along above the hedgerow on the left side of the road. David told both Susan and Gary to ignore it - "Don't look, just ignore it and go to sleep" - but Gary was unable to. He quietly watched it move along beside them for about an hour, before it turned and disappeared into the long night.
Once the family had returned from this fated vacation, Gary can recall that he began experiencing intense dread around bedtime. Eventually, this unattributed apprehension morphed into memories of full-fledged visitations by "little creatures" who would enter his bedroom at night. He cannot remember them ever interacting with him directly, but he still felt extreme fear around them, running out of his room every time he saw one. Susan and David reacted to their son's night terrors with amusement.
Even regardless of the nighttime visitations, Gary never needed to sleep that much. He would usually sleep for a few hours per night, before just lying in his bed and daydreaming.
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It was at roughly this time that Susan married David, and David began to beat Gary just as all the rest of the adults in his life had. His mind was set on slot machines and alcohol, and he regarded the presence of a child in his life as an unwanted burden. The verbal abuse was constant and physical violence was frequent as well.
Beyond the Bounds
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Gary was a struggling student. He enjoyed the process of learning, but he didn't feel any sort of attachment to academia. Once he'd finished school, the suffocating life that had been built up around him started to fall away rapidly.
His mother and stepfather kicked him out of the house the moment he was of legal age - but this would ultimately serve him well. He was able to successfully secure a place to live, and managed to find a fulfilling job and a lively group of friends. I can imagine that joy became a more frequent part of his life.
Just a couple of years later, it was 1988. One night, Gary woke to find himself lying on a cold operating table with an inhuman spectre staring down at him. The being drove a needle into his head, causing him to lose consciousness shortly after he'd woken up in the otherworldly setting. Much to his horror, he discovered a red welt on his left temple the next morning, exactly where the needle had been inserted. Despite its incongruity with the rest of his life, it had indeed taken place.
Knowing that he would not be believed - barely believing it himself - he pushed this experience out of his head and submerged himself in his ever-expanding life in the human world.
Soon afterwards, he found a woman named Grace and she found him. They were bound together in romance, and shortly thereafter got married. They decided in together in the little town of Distington, Cumbria. This place had only slightly over 2,000 inhabitants. It was the perfect place to raise a child. Nine months later, Grace gave birth to a baby boy. Gary would give his son the childhood he was deprived of, and was a loving and compassionate father.
Many years passed, the new family sharing trials and joys and sorrows. Gary felt anchored and happy in his world. His son had grown into a bubbly little toddler, and everything seemed as if it had finally reached a place of calm. Gary was now 24 years old, and it was 1993.
Most nights, he would be woken up by the need to urinate - unable to sleep through it due to an unspecified injury he'd received as a teenager. The bathroom was on the far side of the house, and so Gary would need to navigate down the stairs to the first floor and make it across the living room and through the kitchen each time. One night in particular stands out.
It was close to dawn, and although Gary had woken up needing the bathroom, he briefly tried to wait it out. He proved unable to, and had to get out of bed and walk down to the living room. As he stepped into the room and shut the door behind him, his blood ran cold. There was a short humanoid stood in the middle of the room. Its flesh was dark grey, and it had its head bowed and its arms together in front of it, "like it was a scolded schoolboy". Gary recoiled in horrified confusion, before abruptly losing consciousness. When he next woke up, he found himself back in bed.
He remembered this fully the next morning, but once again decided to keep it a secret. Although the uninvited guests had left years in between their previous visits, they started to pick up the pace after this incident. The next bizarre happening took place a few weeks later.
Gary and Grace turned out the light after talking in bed for roughly 30 minutes, and laid down with their backs facing each other. Gary curled into a ball to sleep in his usual position, and waited ten minutes before realising that he couldn't sleep. Sticking his head out from the blanket, he was terrified to see a woman's face just "six or eight inches" from his face.
It took a moment for the reality of the situation to set in. Was it Grace? No, she was still asleep in bed. There had been a total stranger staring at him through his bed covers. She was wearing a grey-coloured suit which looked clean and new, and she had blonde hair. He lept to his feet, yelling, and the woman did the same. Without wasting a moment, she floated upwards and disappeared through the ceiling, which seemed to blur and swirl as she passed through it.
Grace was now awake, and pleaded with Gary to know what was going on. He gestured to the ceiling and told her that he thought he had seen a ghost. The swirling effect on the ceiling was no longer visible by the time Grace was looking upwards. The couple made tea to calm themselves down, and Grace agreed that the strange woman might've been a ghost.
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Choking out words, Gary asked, "Hello, what's your name?"
The woman jumped backwards and shoved Gary powerfully away from her. His screaming woke Grace up - but the woman had already vanished before she could see her.
Could she have been a ghost? Her shoulder felt solid, and she had physically pushed him with great force. A while later, Gary and Grace were briefly exposed to information about alien abductions involving "Pamela Anderson lookalikes". Gary wondered whether the woman he had seen could've been from another world.
Big Questions
"What do you want to do with your life?"
This was the question that Gary found himself confronted with when he woke on the operating table, in the company of a tall grey humanoid. He was sat upright on the edge of the table, with his legs dangling off it. One or two years had passed since the encounters with the woman in grey. For a reason he couldn't explain, he felt "calm, relaxed, and at home" with the grey alien. It was as if he was with his doctor. When the entity asked him the question, he was nonetheless caught off guard.
His response to it was apparently so embarrassing and humiliating that he refused to tell Preston Dennett (with whom he spoke about his experiences) what it was. It was through this experience that he began to reconcile with the fact that he was an alien abductee. It also seemed that the aliens had no sense of humour, based on the being's emotionless response to his absurd answer.
He got the impression that his family was somehow involved with the abductions, and shortly afterwards this would be confirmed.
The next time he woke somewhere he had not gone to sleep, he was with his wife. He felt groggy and disorientated, struggling to come back to full consciousness. He and Grace were both completely naked, huddled together "like two trapped animals in the corner of a cage." They were floating in a clear, breatheable liquid in some kind of giant tank.
They could both see grey humanoids above and to the right of them, observing from an elevated walkway. Three of these beings were tall, and two of them were shorter. One of the tall greys was the same one who had painfully inserted a needle into his skull many years previously. He understood that the tall entities were the masterminds, and that the smaller ones did grunt work.
Behind the greys stood two human-looking figures in dark suits and boots. They held what were either tablets or clipboards, and seemed to be taking notes on their observations.
Grace was terrified, screaming at Gary and pleading with him to tell him what was happening and what they should do. Despite not feeling certainty, and knowing that they were powerless in the situation, Gary tried his best to reassure her that the beings were not going to hurt them.
Gary's memories of that night abruptly end there, and he discovered that Grace did not recall that night's events when he gently questioned her about it the morning after. He decided against telling her.
In late 1994, Gary was looking out of his window in the late evening when he caught sight of the most striking UFO he had ever seen. It was slowly, silently moving over the house. It seemed to be solid, shaped like a cigar, and was big enough to have completely "blotted out the winter sky". Gary said it was "the biggest moveable object I have ever seen in my life".
This was the last alien-related experience he would have for many years. Gary got a satisfying job at a nearby warehouse and attempted to move on with his life. All the while, he continued to have intense out-of-body experiences in which he had the ability to travel to other celestial bodies, and even to other dimensions, which he lacked the language to really describe. He believed these experiences were related to his abductions.
Both Gary and Grace developed precognitive abilities. Grace's were more pronounced, regularly giving her foreknowledge of events in her daily life. Gary experienced many dramatic visions of tragic events of both personal and global scales.
"I Think We're Property"
It was now 2016, and the intrusive beings had been absent from Gary's life for over twenty years. A few years earlier, the Rowe family had moved from Distington to a little village outside the city of Carlisle - a city with a strong military presence. It took a long time to unpack their whole lives into this new dwelling-place, and by the time they had started to feel properly settled, they were due to receive some unexpected visitors.
Gary was lying awake in bed at night when he suddenly felt the covers being tugged back away from him. He snapped out of his nocturnal reverie, uncertain whether he had imagined what had just happened. Just as he tried to relax again, the same thing happened. The third time it happened, whatever it was successfully pulled the covers fully off his body.
"My heart was pounding like a steam train".
Panic struck him like a rock impacting glass as he felt his body begin to float off the bed and into the air. Unable to resist, he levitated out of his bedroom window and upwards into the night.
Beyond that point, he was unable to remember anything else of that night. When he woke up the next morning, he checked himself for any visible marks but could find nothing.
The same thing would happen to him repeatedly over the next few months. They could take him whenever they wanted, and there was nothing he could do about it.
After repeated violations, he noticed something crucial that would eventually help him defend himself from his otherworldly tormentors. There was a peculiar heaviness that would come over his body when they were about to make their presence known. He could now anticipate their interventions, provided he was awake at the time.
One evening, Gary drifted off to sleep how he usually did - and found himself jolted awake. He was lying on an unfamiliar surface and there was a figure straddling him. It was a young woman, and she was having sex with him. The moment she realised he was awake, she immediately got off him and sat down beside him. Gary presumably scrambled backwards with horror and bewilderment.
"Shush! It's okay. Keep calm. You're okay", whispered the woman in a forceful, urgent tone.
She had dark hair and was lithely built, and appeared maybe only twenty years old. For reasons he couldn't explain, Gary found himself feeling reassured by the woman despite the bizarre situation. He was sat on the floor of a strange room, facing the wall. He could see an arched doorway nearby, that led down a narrow, curved corridor with dim lighting.
Where was he? He made a move to turn around to look at the rest of the setting, and the woman reacted dramatically. Her voice rose in panic, and she begged him to remain facing towards her.
It was too late, and Gary's head spun with what he saw. The room was enormous, like a warehouse. There were human bodies, male and female, lying all over the floor. At least 50 of them, probably closer to 100. Most of them were completely still, while others twisted around with apparent pleasure. Some were coupled together and were having intercourse.
"The feeling I got was, I really, really wasn't supposed to see this."
Looking back towards the woman, he was momentarily confronted by two small greys walking past them at the end of the corridor. They seemed to be talking with one another, and didn't notice him. Nevertheless, he reacted with instinctual panic and the woman grabbed him, telling him to ignore them. She stood up and put out her hand - "Quickly, come with me!"
He followed her through a previously-unnoticed arched doorway and passed into a long, narrow room with a work surface with sinks up on the furthest wall. It was some kind of washroom. The woman leant against the surface, and Gary approached her before lifting her up onto it and kissing her. She reciprocated eagerly, and they both agreed that they were attracted to one another. Gary asked her if she would like to have sex again. It seems likely that she ultimately refused, though the precise events were lost in Gary's hazy memories.
The woman looked entirely human, but Gary somehow knew that she did not live on Earth. She seemed to enjoy spending time with him, giving the impression that human interaction was a scarce thing for her. Making the most of his intimate audience with her, Gary started asking her questions about his circumstances, which made her visibly nervous.
"Why are you doing this? Why are they doing this?"
"I'm not allowed to tell you."
In what seemed like an instant, Gary was suddenly back in his bed. It was morning, and his otherworldly lover was nowhere to be seen. This experience led him to conclude that the interlopers had an agenda involving human reproduction, and that alien abduction may be a much more common experience than most realise.
What if it happens to everyone? What if it's a human universal, like birth and death? What if only some of us are able to remember it?
Pandemonium and Resistance
Gary was laying in bed one evening in 2016 when a different kind of visitor appeared in his bedroom. He opened his eyes to see a tall humanoid shape stood by his television. It was entirely black in colour, but seemed to be three-dimensional. As if realising it was being observed, the entity darted away from him and abruptly passed through a closed curtain and window before disappearing. These shadow people would soon become a permanent fixture of Gary's life, most commonly appearing at night.
The Rowe family household seemed to suddenly become a magnet for all sorts of otherworldly intruders. Grace was terrified to see an entity she described as a woman's ghost, and one morning the couple woke to find that all their stove burners had been switched on overnight. Phantom footsteps and weird noises prowled the corridors at every opportunity.
Gary and Grace both witnessed a "ghost dog" walking through their house, which was certainly not the same animal as their two pet dogs. They would see this creature often enough that they started referring to it as another pet in the household.
Gary also saw a round, spider-like creature “about the size of a grapefruit” scuttling on the floor. A giant lizard-like entity made its presence known to him as he was lying in bed, crawling up his wall and turning its crocodile-like head to hiss at him. He saw it several times over months, and would liken it to a demon. Despite having loved animals his entire life, he could not love this thing.
Later that year, he would have one of his only daytime encounters. He came downstairs in the morning to find a grey alien standing next to the base of the stairs in the living room. Thinking fast this time, he jumped towards it and grabbed it by the throat in a strong chokehold. It spun its spindly arms around in mad panic, and he could hear its voice screaming in his mind.
"Get off me! Get off me now!"
The thing had leathery, firm skin which was cold to the touch. Just as he seemed to have gained the upper hand over his kidnappers, something unseen rushed him from behind and he lost consciousness. Nonetheless, he felt good about having made his tormentors panic for once, instead of the other way around.
His first experience of 2017 was a repeat of his horrifying abduction from 1988 - complete with the agonising penetration of his temple with a large needle wielded by a tall grey. The nighttime kidnappings had also become constant at this point, with the blankets being pulled from him and his body being levitated up out of the window.
Gary woke in the middle of the night on one occasion to see something moving in his bedroom to his left. It felt like there was something in his head, and it was attempting to force him back to sleep. He tried to sit up, knowing that this wasn't right - and was met by an gentle voice telling him to go back to sleep.
When he finally managed to sit himself up, a hand reached out of the darkness and pushed him back down. "It's okay. Just sleep. It's not you we need this time."
He felt a hot surge of anger at the sight of two greys getting Grace out of bed. Unable to help his wife, he mutely fell back to sleep.
Gary found himself standing up when he woke from sleep one night in September of 2018. He squinted as his eyes filled with a blinding light, and had to stop himself from covering his face. He was inside some kind of small craft. It was a circular machine, and was entirely transparent save for the floor. Two small greys sat at a control panel roughly eight feet away from him, apparently piloting the vehicle.
Standing there, motionless, Gary took in the view as it rushed past him. They were flying through a scrubland environment, resembling the quintessential North American desert. Although they were only several feet off the ground, the craft was continually picking up speed. It felt like he was seeing something that he wasn't meant to. He wasn't meant to be awake.
A few minutes passed before he decided to make his presence known. He wasn't sure what to say, still feeling groggy and disorientated from sleep. "Alright, lads!"
The entities in the bubble-like vehicle seemed terrified, more scared than he had ever seen them. The one sat at the right leapt up and started running from one end of the craft to the other, seemingly trying to find a way out of the situation. Gary got the impression that it was young, or otherwise inexperienced. The other one was frozen at the controls in complete silence.
"It's okay! I'm not going to hurt you!" Gary repeated, until the seated grey finally broke its silence and told him to remain standing where he was. He agreed, and the younger one seemed to calm down slightly. It went back to its seat and looked at him. The ship stopped moving and both entities approached him, initiating a telepathic conversation.
He felt that this was the first time a human had woken up while they were being returned to their home after an abduction. Just like he had asked the woman, Gary asked the pair why they did this to people. They seemed sad to tell him that they were not allowed to say. They did not say why this was the case.
"Can you let me remember being taken?" Gary pleaded.
"No, we're not allowed" the greys responded regretfully.
"Who am I going to tell? Who'd believe me anyway?"
He received no answer, and soon woke up back in bed. At first, he didn't recall the incident - but his memory suddenly came rushing back to him later in the day. He felt as if the beings had allowed him to remember what had happened as a 'thank you' for remaining calm when he had woken up onboard the ship.
Three days later, he remembered that the small craft had actually left a mountain or mound in the desert via an opening. This implied that he had been taken to an underground facility, and that the "shuttle craft" had been ferrying people back and forth from it. Perhaps he had not been being taken to an off-world mothership all this time, but rather somewhere closer to home?
A few months later, it was December of 2018 and Gary was lying in bed when he felt the familiar heavy feeling that announced the greys' impending arrival. This time, he was prepared for what was coming. The entity pulled the covers all the way off him when he lunged forward and punched it in the face.
It was as if a mask slipped. The grey's face changed immediately - its slit-like mouth suddenly widened to display jagged teeth in a gaping maw. The monstrous thing approached him and Gary pulled his fist back in preparation to punch it again, realising that he was fighting for his life. He blacked out.
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Nonetheless, this experience changed something in him. He had now seen the true face of the greys. They had tried to come across as frail and innocent, but were really vicious predators underneath. He was ready to fight back even harder when they next appeared.
Just a few months passed before the heaviness once again filled his bedroom. The visitors were here. Gary thought to himself that he would have to kick them this time instead of punching them, to gather more power and hopefully do more damage. As soon as this thought crossed his mind, he lost consciousness.
Conclusion
The greys would not appear to him again. They had learned that he was prepared to violently resist, and so adopted more indirect means of kidnapping him. His next experience took place in early 2019, when he was relieving himself late at night. A group of approximately twenty small orbs appeared in the bathroom, swirling around next to his head at high speed. Confused, he retreated from the bathroom.
In Spring of 2019, Gary had just gotten into bed when a dazzling white light filled his bedroom from the curtained window. He stared at it, transfixed, until a grapefruit-sized orange ball floated through the curtains and into his room. It hovered silently as he watched it, perplexed at this new phenomenon. A dizzying flash caught him off guard, and he lapsed into unconsciousness again.
One cold December morning of that year, Gary woke up and went to look out of his bedroom window. Thick mist covered his garden and field. The gust of wind suddenly blew, pushing the mist around the outline of a large UFO that had previously been invisible. It was some 50ft above the ground, and was a clear oval shape. As the mist gradually cleared, the object did not depart - but was no longer visible. Was he being watched?
Eventually, Gary realised that he could not do anything to stop the abductions altogether. He often woke with memories of being floated out of his bedroom window, but nothing much else. Eventually, he decided to break his silence and tell Grace about what had been happening. He had to get a little bit drunk to do it. "It would be easier confessing to being a serial killer, I think."
Grace was shocked but supportive, and Gary felt safe enough to also tell his closest friend. His friend also supported him. "Now that the weight has been lifted, I want people to know."
After many decades of abductions, Gary's perspective on his visitors remains negative at the present. He suspects that the human species is essentially livestock to the beings, but has resolved to make the greys' job harder for them by talking openly about his experiences.
"I've spent most of my life trying to block this all out. I think that's what they want you to do... but now, I've gotten through that mental block. The genie is out of the bottle."
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