They Went Willingly

In 1973 a young woman sitting on a hillside watched a friend point at a star, and the star moved. The next year a craft set down seventy-five feet in front of her: rust-coloured, standing on a tripod, a railing round its middle, writing on its side she could not read. For three years after that, the ships came when she called them.

Years later, in Austin, Texas, another woman went out to them every night, wide awake, by her own choice. She says not one night of it was bad.

Then she stopped going. The first night they came for her against her will, she could not move, her mouth was sealed shut, and a net lay over her while the bed shook. What stopped them is the part the researchers who heard cases like hers asked to keep off the record.

Both women told it in their own words. This is their record, to the end.