Measured for Light

January 1967, South Ashburnham, Massachusetts. Betty Andreasson has seven children, a husband in the hospital after a head-on car crash, and her parents staying in the house to get her through the evenings. The kids are watching television. She is finishing the dishes when the lights flicker, hesitate, and die, and a light starts pulsing in the small kitchen window.

Her father goes to the pantry window. Out in the glow, figures are coming across the yard, one after another, leaping, "just like grasshoppers," he would later write, and sign his name to it. The one in front turns its head and looks straight at him.

Then everything stops. The children on the couch. Her mother with the youngest on her lap. Her father at the glass. Every soul in the house frozen where they are. Except Betty.

Four of them come through the kitchen door. Not the doorway. The solid wood. Small, grey, heads like upside-down pears, eyes that wrap around the skull. And Betty Andreasson, alone and awake in a house full of her own frozen family, is not afraid.

She goes with them. On the craft behind the house a silver needle goes up into her skull, and they tell her they are only measuring her for light. They carry her through a red world where things with eyes on stalks climb the walls, past a city of crystal, to a bird of fire fifteen feet tall, so hot she screams that she is burning. Then they bring her home and tell her to forget.

Ten years later, in 1977, it all came back, session by session, on tape. The investigators checked what they could. The power company had a record of a failure in her neighbourhood that night. The weather station logged it as misty. The hospital confirmed her husband's dates. The television station confirmed what the children were watching. Her daughter, questioned on her own, described the same beings.

And on one of those tapes, Betty Andreasson says the one sentence the whole night turns on.