I was sitting in my living room, watching Ancient Aliens on the History channel. It was about half-past Midnight when my cell phone rang. Looking at the caller ID on my cell phone, it read "blocked". Nevertheless, for better or for worse, I answered it.
The woman on the other end sounded frantic. I asked her what had happened and she told me, she had just been abducted. She was driving home from somewhere when she rounded a bend. There they were. She recounted to me several other details which sounded a lot like many classic abduction accounts.
It was one of those late night judgement calls. Had this woman just had a frightening abduction experience, or was she a late night prankster giving me BS? This sounded a lot like a number of other calls I've gotten, all in the middle of the night and all from young adults. It was not too dissimilar to the guy who called me when the aliens landed in front of him in the parking lot (see last month's CE4 corner), I didn't know what to think. This time, I suspected she was pulling my leg and I was in no mood to have my leg pulled - it was stretched enough already.
I asked her a few questions, my mind scrambling to find the right things to ask to learn details, provide assistance and remain empathetic, while at the same time, checking the story for consistency. Scramble, scramble, I asked her to continue with her account - she did...
I asked her to back up and tell me again what had happened. She started to recount her story once more, how she had been on the road and there they were. I asked her what happened next. She described how she had been taken aboard and had had salsa, chips and dip (it was Velveeta, but the aliens were OK with that). What was going on here?
I was quite at a loss as to what to ask or say next. I told her that this didn't make sense to me. Clearly this person needed to talk to a local investigator. I said that, not sure what to make of this. She got angry and asked me if I had ever been on board a ship - no I hadn't.
She spouted a few obscenities and said I was a doubter, just like all the others. And at that point, she was right - I was.
Yet what if she was telling me the truth? Was this a mental health issue? Was this a late night prank? I really didn't know. But if she came off to others in the same way she had just done to me, I have no doubt that she had encountered a wall of skepticism. Calling in the middle of the night, then blowing up at the person they are talking to when their account contained a rather bizarre logical inconsistency - yeah, I was skeptical.
I thanked her for her time and hung up the phone, hearing one final obscenity as I hit the disconnect button. Did I do the right thing? I try to give the caller the benefit of the doubt. But this time, my intuition told me that the person was - well, I'm not sure what. Was it the right thing to do? I will never know....
