CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

We journey into the twilight zone with three people who recall, under hypnosis, their astonishing experiences of alien abduction - and bizarre experiments.

You may find some of the facts far-fetched. Others you may feel are simply figments of people's imaginations - but they will all make you think twice about UFOs.

We take a look at three close encounters, accounts by people whom UFO experts believe have been abducted by extra-terrestrials, and talk to an Adelaide farmer who believes his property was used as a landing site.

Roy Lake, 53 chairman of UFO Studies, an international organisation with its head office in London, has been studying UFOs for 33 years. He formed his group two years ago with three people, and now has 18 investigators. "The subject goes a lot further than the public's perception of little green men," Roy says.

"When you mention abductions and flying saucers, people ridicule it. But you can't dispute the evidence that is materialising to the contrary. And unfortunately, a lot of prople are too scared to talk about it."

Tony Dodd, 57, is the director of investigation and research for UFO Magazine, and he had his first encounter with a UFO in 1978. "I'm very involved with investigating abduction cases and I'm usually present at the regression hypnosis sessions," Tony says. "The similarities of the stories related by the people under hypnosis are so strong that even sceptics would change their minds.

"We believe the aliens are involved in genetic engineering, but it's not new - it's been going on for centuries." Harry Harris, 50, a lawyer who has spent 12 years investigation accounts of sightings, adds: "My conclusions are that these people experience amnesia, and hypnosis is the only way they can recall the time they've lost."

UFO RESEARCHERS BELIEVE

* Aliens are visiting so often that a spaceship is spotted somewhere in the world every 15 seconds.

* Aliens are abducting women up to three months pregnant and snatching their unborn babies.

* Male abductees are being used for bizarre experiments before being return- ed to earth unharmed.

* If you have seen a UFO, it is likely you have unknowingly been abducted.

* Governments are covering up sightings to prevent mass civilian panic.

* US security services are withholding 50,000 documents about UFO sightings.

* UFOs have been recorded on radar sys- tems, travelling at 25,000 km/h.

CLOSE ENCOUNTER NUMBER ONE.

Housewife Linda Jones, 49, considers herself to be an ordinary person. She is married to Trevor, who works as a heating engineer, and they have two children. One August evening 13 years ago, she was out walking with her daughter and son, aged 15 and five, collecting wild flowers along the banks of a local river. She was bending down looking at a plant when her son suddenly said, "Look Mum, the moon's coming towards us."

Linda saw an orange and pink ball of light heading towards them. "We all ducked really low in the grass," she recalls. "There was no noise, and at the last moment the object shot off to the right. It went over two hills and then appeared to drop vertically onto a field. I thought it was a plane on fire, so we started to run towards it. We got to within 30 metres and we could see this massive white light with an under-structure like a bridge, made of what looked like a mesh material," Linda says.

"It was hovering about a metre off the ground and appeared to have no windows or doors. It seemed to be as light as a feather, even though it was about 18 metres across. "Normally, I'd run away from any danger, but I felt myself being drawn towards it. My daughter was terrified and kept shouting, "Come away, Mum!" But my son was quite calm.

"As we were watching, the object kept appearing and disappearing - it was really weird. Eventually, we turned around and ran off. But as we ran, the grass blew over in front of us and the thing just followed us.

"The object then disappeared, but shortly afterwards we spotted it trailing a plane that was about to land at the nearby airport." When she got home, Linda found the skin under her eyes was burned and scaly. She and her daughter also had violet scars on their left legs.

Eighteen months later, Harry Harris, the lawyer who works with Roy Lake, contacted Linda and persuaded her and her daughter to be hypnotised. They gave their consent and, while under hypnosis, were videotaped. Both related the same chain of events. "I was running downhill and bumped into a tall human figure, then everthing blurred," Linda says on one of the videotapes.

"I then experienced a sensation of floating. Next I was on a table being examined and I had a feeling of ice being put on my legs. There were six very tall people who looked like clones. They wore dark overalls up to their necks, their hair was dark and their eyes were black and almond-shaped."

Linda still cannot consciously recall this event. We have not named her children because her son is terrified of reliving the sighting and, although now a teenager, he sleeps with the light on. Linda's daughter is now married and refuses even to discuss the subject because she is afraid that people will mock her.

After the incident, Linda's periods stopped (she was 36 years old), and she has since had problems with a lump in her neck that keeps appearing a disappearing. "I even went into hospital to have the lump removed. When the surgeon came for a last check, he found it had disappeared, so the operation was cancelled. At the moment, it's back. I feel like an idiot because I know all this is not normal," Linda says.

"I just wish more people who have had similar experiences would come forward, because it would help me feel easier about the whole thing."

CLOSE ENCOUNTER NUMBER TWO.

It was 5:15 am and policeman Alan Godfrey, 34, was thinking about going home after a night on patrol. Suddenly, he saw what he thought was a bus. But later, in a taped interview, he said, "I realised it wasn't a bus. It was about six metres wide and four metres high, hovering just over a metre above the ground. The bottom half was spinning and there was a row of darkened windows and a dome on top."

When he tried to report back to his headquarters, neither his car radio nor his pocket walkie-talkie would work. He started sketching the UFO, but it suddenly vanished. At first, he did not want to report the incident because he was afraid of sounding foolish. When he discovered that five other policemen had reported a UFO at much the same time, he decided to come clean.

What mystifies Alan is that the reports were never investigated. "I wish now I'd slapped a parking ticket on it, because then at least some bureaucrat would have wanted to know why the fine hadn't been paid," Alan jokes. Another odd thing was that when UFO researchers visited Alan, they discovered that at least 15 minutes of that night were missing from his detailed log entry of the event.

A year later, Alan was persuaded to undergo a technique called regression hypnosis - which is used by police enforcement bodies throughout the world. Hypnosis enables witnesses of crimes to remember in great detail facts that their concious minds either disregard of suppress.

In all, Alan has been hypnotised five times and each time his story is the same. On each occasion, he was videotaped. The following is a small extract from one videotape;

"I'm in a room now ... there's a table." (Horror on his face.) "There's him. Don't know who the 'him' is. About 180cm, like a man. He's got a sort of black and white sheet on. He has a beard and something like a skull cap." (Alan's face distorts with fear.) "They're horrible. He's touching me. He's feeling at the cloth ... at my clothes. They have hands and heads like a lamp. They're making noises."

He stretches his lips and makes a high-pitched warbling noise, imitating the sound. "Joseph. I know he's Joseph. He told me not to be scared. These are robots. They're not humans. There's a dog. I think it's a dog. It's horrible. Joseph is leading me to a table. It's a bed. It looks like black leather. He wants me to get on it - not likely!

"Now I'm getting on to the bed. I don't know why. There's a light ..." The stress was so great at this point that the psychiatrist, taking a reading from the heart monitor to which Alan was wired, stopped the test.

At a later session, Alan relates in some detail an examination that Joseph performed on him. The last thing he recalls is the aliens removing his boots and looking at his toes. Alan later says that after seeing the craft hovering, and blanking out, he found himself back in the police car, with one boot split and a circular burn on his left instep.

So what was his reaction when he was shown the videotapes of his hypnosis sessions? "I was absolutely shocked. I still can't conciously recall any of it." Another baffling fact is that several years before Alan's encounter, doctors said he was unable to father children after being beaten up on duty.

But a few years after his encounter, his son John was born. Alan has since had a vasectomy. He says of his experience: "I wish it hadn't happened. I'm just an ordinary bloke just trying to do my job." CLOSE ENCOUNTER NUMBER THREE.

Until now, Maria, 34, has been reluctant to talk publicly about her close encounters with UFOs because she does not want to be ridiculed. But she now believes the subject deserves to be treated more seriously, so has decided - with reservations - to break her silence.

Maria still does not want her full name revealed. Her experiences are fascinating becuase, unlike Linda and Alan, Maria has never been subjected to hypnosis. It was Novenber 1990, when Maria, an agricultural research assistant, experienced a UFO sighting that was to trigger apparent past memories of the alien kind.

"My husband was away when I was abducted from my bedroom," she says. "I was left with physical injuries - a patch of hair missing from the back of my head, a circular patch of seven pinpricks on my little finger. Twice I had pregnancies confirmed by my doctor, then in the third month I was mysteriously not pregnant."

Maria describes the encounter: "I was fast asleep when suddenly I felt as though unseen hands were shaking me. I sat up and looked at the clock. It was 3:40am. I felt compelled to look out the window, so I got out of bed. At first I remember thinking, with a smile on my face, 'Oh, look, it's Father Christmas'.

"There were lights shimmering, then this wheel of light just came cartwheeling down into the garden. I panicked and ran into the hall where I saw a light. I was then told - not by a voice but by thought transference - to look at this light and that it wouldn't hurt me. As much as I tried not to look, I couldn't stop myself.

"Next thing it was 90 minutes later and I was sitting in bed. My feet were dirty. There was blood on my pillow. I couldn't recall what had happened. "Over the past few years I have had flashbacks to that night. I have not been hypnotised, but I have spontaneously remembered things.

"I recalled being walked down this long corridor by three small beings. They were a bronze colour and smelt terrible - like rotten mushrooms. I was then laid on a metallic table. I can remember certain things being done to me. My head and hair being held and a tremendously sharp pain at the back of my head

- that must have been when my hair disappeared. The most frightening thing, though, was having a glass tube put up my nose. At that point, I thought they were going to kill me. I can remember thinking, 'I don't want to die like this'. The pain was considerable.

"A few days later, I went to my doctor who referred me to a hospital consultant who could find no reason for my injuries. In fact, tests came back saying there was unusual cellular damage as well as a soft tissue injury to my cervix. They could not account for this. I have the signed medical records from my doctor and hospital consultant to prove it.

"It's easy for people to say aliens don't exist, but physical symptoms don't just appear," says Maria.

She says she doesn't like "ET theory", which goes against everything she believes in - "but something's going on. They are very real, but where they come from, I don't know. It's as though some external thing is saying to me, 'Right, today you will remember this'. I've no doubt at all that it's a specific course - a programmed course - and all of us are given just parts of the puzzle.

"I feel aliens are around me a great deal. There have been a lot of UFO sightings in the area where I live - most recently only a few weeks ago. "I don't want to be hypnotised, because conscioulsy I know my mind couldn't cope with the experience. But on the other hand - perhaps I really don't want to know."

Story: John Moore.

ALIENS IN ADELAIDE.

Adelaide Hills grazier Andrew Davidson is frankly baffled. What spooked one of his horses to go into a wild, galloping, whinnying panic for a couple of nights recently? What caused a big, egg-shaped "circle" to appear mysteriously on a remote paddock about the same time?

"It's almost as if you'd brought a huge branding iron down and went whoooosh and pulled it up again," Andrew says, shaking his head. "Like putting a brand on the hide of a cow - but the strange thing is, the grass isn't burned. It's more like it has had the life sucked out of it and been left lying down in flat patterns."

Andrew, who owns a large sheep farm 35km east of Adelaide, points out the odd patterns - one clockwise, the other anti-clockwise. The dead grass patch [ring] is 56cm wide, forming an egg shape 22 metres by 13 metres. "There were no wheel marks - no trucks or tractors or rollers," Andrew says. "My mate can back me on that." (There were definately no signs of tracks when we went to the site 11 days later)

Andrew's friend John Purvis was the first to find the circle as he cut across the paddock to get wood for his fire early on november 16. "The untouched surroundings really puzzled me. I raced home (he lives in a cottage on the property), got my video camera and recorded it.

"It was weird about our horse, too. He was in the same paddock as the circle, and a few nights before I found it, he was galloping and whinnying and carrying on like a mad thing." Andrew Davidson's way of heading off the sceptics who might think he is crazy has been to call in a group of experts to unravel the mystery.

"I got the agronomist from the Department of Agriculture at Mt Barker. I wasn't there when he called, but from what I've heard he was totally perplexed. When I talked to him later he said, 'Look, there's no biological or agricultural explanation - no fungus, no root-rot or weedkillers or anything like that."

Graeme Budgen, a scientist with a consulting engineering company who did soil and radiation tests, found strange readings in the circle. The salt content in the circle was 40% higher than the rest of the paddock (a characteristic of "UFO circles") and radiation was up.

"The moisture content is especially weird," Graeme says. "It's much higher on the circle than away from it, yet the soil on the circle feels and looks dry and crumbly and the rest of the paddock is soaking wet. There's something very strange here and I cannot conclude what has happened. My opinion is that it's no hoax. A hoaxer couldn't duplicate an elaborate thing like this." [There's a couple of very good photos, one showing the egg-shaped 'track' from an elevated position with three men standing inside, and one close up showing the 'dead' grass]

Colin Norris, director of Australian International UFO Research, agrees. "I've looked into thousands of UFO phenomena and I can spot a fake a mile off. This is no hoax. There has been a visit from an extra-terrestrial craft here, for sure. In the eight weeks leading up to this I had a spate of UFO reports around these parts. The Air Force rang me because they were getting so many reports of lights moving and standing still in the Adelaide Hills."

As the evidence piles up, Andrew Davidson admits his lifetime disbelief in UFOs has taken a battering. Crop circles, or "the calling cards of UFOs" as their believers call them, were first reported in 1976 and serious research began in 1980. One of the most controversial sites has been in the Wessex Triangle in England - an area rich in mystical associations and location of Stonehenge. Story: Liz Johnswood.