Cincinnati Researcher & Support Group Meetings (Spring- Autumn 1992)

Though I kept a written diary very faithfully during my teens, after I moved to Ohio, I wasn’t as devoted to journaling for a few years. I still wrote down significant events and some personal ruminations, but I sometime wrote about things weeks later and some details got lost. One reason I advocate writing down ALL unusual encounters and events as soon as possible is because of my own slacker period. There are many smaller things that I would remember to mention these days that I didn’t write down back then…

So I’m left with a few hinted at experiences in pieces of writing and general impressions in some cases.

For example, I remember and read back that some strange things were beginning up again in a ‘flap’ type situation by late spring of 1992. I can’t remember details in all cases, but there were a lot of very vivid and unusual dreams that were very suspicious for abductions, as well as a temporary increase in very psychic dreams of the future (which I often get during active abduction periods). These things bothered both myself and my then-boyfriend Gerick enough that we longed to have more information and emotional support for dealing with it.

We had each other, and I must confess we bonded very powerfully just sharing our memories and understanding of an expanded reality that most people either didn’t believe in or didn’t take seriously. There was a strong mutual desire to dig down and get some answers.

Gerick had already met with Budd Hopkins and both his New York City and Cape Cod area support groups. I had spoken on the phone to Budd and several abductees he worked with, but had yet to meet others like myself in person beyond Gerick. We decided to look around Ohio for researchers and found a very Type 5 nerdy investigator in the Cincinnati area who also helped run a support group.

I can’t recall the actual months we met with them, it was at least twice, but I think three times. We never got hypnosis or anything, just had many phone conversations and then made the drive every couple of months for a while to talk to other abductees. It was a pretty small group, less than 15 people, and included 2 families of older fathers and their teenage daughters who were being abducted. One such father and daughter pair was VERY familiar to me, and we recognized each other instantly.

For alien abductees who ever go to conferences, conventions, or support groups, there is this widespread phenomenon where certain individuals will recognize each other– right down to voice, mannerisms, and attitude– though few will actually recall where and when they’ve met. For some, there is a familiarity that is so powerful its like you’ve grown up together, or are family, or romantic soulmates. It happens again and again and again. Not everyone is familiar, but certain individuals will just be known to you as if the imposed amnesia breaks down just a little when you meet someone you’ve seen during abductions. I knew Gerick from an abduction that occurred when I was in my teens and was lucky enough to remember part of the specific abduction when we actually met for the first time, as did he.

The Cincinnati group was the second time I ran into people I knew that I knew before… and this teenage girl and her father were very familiar. She knew me as well, and my long hair helps to give me away quickly! (Maybe its one reason I keep it that way– even naked I have an easy way to identify myself, even from a distance in a crowd.) Neither of us could remember where, just that we had. Her father was very outspoken on alien abductions and had a very ‘loud’ personality. He was outraged that citizens were being treated as crazy by the media, and not taken seriously, even though he knew that part of the U.S. military knew ‘They’ were real!

The meetings were intense, but covered areas that today are fairly well-known about alien abductions. The researcher was a quiet, intellectual man whose curiosity and gentle spirit were comforting to be around. He once brought in giant magnets at the end of a meeting to scan over abductees’ heads to see if we’d feel anything or react in any way, and over a third of the group declined. Interestingly, all of that group included MY alien group of people who recognized each other, including Gerick, myself, this teen girl and her dad, and someone else who didn’t speak much at the meetings. Later, I read about his study including this, and he meticulously noted that several of us declined to participate. I had a bad feeling I might mess something up, and it wasn’t quite fear, but a very strong feeling that caution was more prudent.

Also interesting to me was that one woman, who I viewed as a ‘wannabe abductee’ given her New Age warm fuzzy enthusiasm, eagerly not only participated, but announced all kinds of psychic feelings as a result of the magnet. The room of real abductees politely smiled and nodded at her and then looked silently at one another behind her back and rolled our eyes. We were all annoyed that the researcher allowed her into the group, but then I realized later she was his control for fakirs. He compared what someone like her would do and how she’s answer to others of us who had scars and witnesses and recognition of fellow abductees that helped to verify the truth of what we reported. He never told me that outright, but it became pretty obvious after a couple of meetings. That woman left the group when she realized she wasn’t the star of the show and that the rest of us weren’t interested in her self-aggrandizing tall tales!

It was a long drive from Lancaster, Ohio to Cincinnati and back for a 2-hour meeting, so we couldn’t go very often, but we learned a lot every time we managed to make the trip. The second meeting was especially memorable because it led to military harassment…

At that meeting, in either May or June I think, the father-daughter family that we recognized included another family member– the older son/brother. He had had his own experiences, but his dad and sister were more the focus of the abductions. It finally came out towards the end of the meeting, when the father announced again that he knew some branch of the U.S. military knew about aliens and abductions and were monitoring the situation actively. He knew because his son, who was right there– was in that branch!

There was stunned reactions from the abductees. Many had faced some form of governmental harassment (including me at the age of 8 and then again at 14) and were exceedingly displeased to find the researcher had not informed them that their safety/comfort might be compromised by this guy’s presence (he was YOUNG, like 20 maybe.) Gerick was pissed and almost walked out right there. I was very concerned, but not alarmed, since I was just as curious about this new information. On the West Coast, there was less quasi-military harassment, so perhaps I wasn’t as prudent as I should have been. Not that it mattered; by the time we found out– it was too late. This was one reason we stopped going to the meetings in Cincinnati, but not until after it became clear that our being at that meeting in particular did indeed get us placed on a surveillance list!

Why did the father expose the son so dramatically? Well… I kind of poked a sore point.

One of the topics that came up during the meeting that was very interesting was ‘future dreams.’ Those are where you seem to dream of past events as if they are memories, when they clearly come from the future. I was having a lot of them around that time and asked if anyone else did– and then several future dreams were shared and there were several fascinating commonalities. Few seemed to have written down as many as I did, though, so I had more to share. The researcher was fascinated and leaned forward when I mentioned the dreams of the U.S. military turning against abductees, and what details of that I saw.

My dreams were about a future AFTER the reality of aliens was acknowledged openly, and there seemed to be a kind of war between aliens and humans, with abductees stuck in the middle– but working more for the aliens and to help each other. Several dreams showed the round up of abductees (how could they tell us apart? I’m still wondering on that point!) and there were military personnel everywhere.

The researcher wasn’t the only one listening intently. The father and son were very keen on my tales as well. The researcher then asked me what were the military personnel wearing as head gear? I thought that was a very oddly detailed question, but I truthfully answered, “Not helmets or anything. They were all wearing berets.” Instant reactions!!

The father couldn’t hold it in anymore, “What COLOR were they?! Because I know what color they should be already!“

That was when the stuff all came out about the son, who claimed to be in a UFO retrieval and alien abduction reaction team and he could go show me the beret right now if I wanted! He seemed to be practically bragging about it, but was badly acting overly casual at the same time.

No pressure–!

But for several minutes everyone was reacting to the discovery of this son who was in this secret branch of the military and there was a lot of chaos and contention. Finally, the researcher calmed everyone down, and you could hear a pin drop as he asked me if I remembered the colors of the berets.

Of course I could! I had those dreams over and over again. I said, “I saw 2 colors of berets. Most of the military men and women were wearing black berets, and they seemed to be regular army. The ones in charge of the alien stuff were wearing blue.”

They looked very intrigued. I was told that they didn’t know any ‘black berets’ — though of course now in the future it’s clear that the regular army does indeed wear black berets. That didn’t start until after 2000 I think– but they wore nothing like that in the ’80s and early ’90s when I had those dreams.

Regarding the blue berets, though the father and son were looking at each other like, “BINGO!” the researcher asked me what kind of blue? I said not light blue and not navy blue, but rather a medium bright true blue. Gerick was not happy and wanted to leave, telling me once we were out of the meeting that I should have kept my mouth shut! I could tell by their reactions that the son was in the Blue Berets, which, years later, I found out has been reported as a secret UFO-related military group, so I was dead on. I actually wanted to go see this guy’s blue beret– was it really in his car or was he blowing smoke? Gerick made us leave too soon to find out, but the offer was sincere– the guy wanted to show it off. He wanted to prove he was in on all of this and his own father worried he’d get in trouble.

Someone asked (the meeting was starting to break up at this point) if the Blue Beret guy would be in trouble for admitting all this to a room full of abductees and a researcher? Blue Beret guy scoffed, “Nah. They know I’m here. I joined because of my family’s involvement and anyway, no one believes what any of you say enough to make it a threat.” His father was greatly bothered, though.

One of the last things that was said before we beat a retreat was the father saying that he knew that if he lived long enough, this future I was talking about– which almost every abductee had been warned about!– he and his daughter would be on opposite sides to his son. “That’s not something I look forward to, but that’s the reality.“

A few weeks later the two father-daughter abductee families went on the then brand new and local Jerry Springer show along with the researcher. I’ve looked and looked for that episode, but it was before Jerry Springer went national and became famous for on-air fights and such in the dawn of ‘reality’ television. It was a talk show that thrived on controversy. Springer was a little more talk show and quite a bit less crazy fighting when he first started out. In the 80s and early 90s, when they were still bringing abductees onto talk shows like Oprah and Springer, most would include professional debunker Philip J. Klass, who was this old asshole who insisted that if abductions were real, why didn’t we call the F.B.I.? He was an idiot, but he loved the limelight, and making abductees answer his stupid challenges was how they pretended to be ‘fair’ in presenting both ‘sides’ of the abduction phenomenon back then. The teen girls actually did a great job standing up to ol’ Phil and I wish we still had our copy of that taped show!

The researcher really wanted Gerick and myself to be on that show, but we wisely declined! We had the most interesting encounters and ‘stories’ to tell, but we weren’t about to get nailed like that! No way. Still, I must admit I admired those families for daring to share what was happening to them in such a hostile public venue. It was only the first time I had the opportunity to be famous for my abductions– but there were a couple more, and note!– I said NO every time. The articles I wrote for JAR magazine and the phone interview with Mike Clelland were my only toe tips into exposing myself. That and At Spiral’s End– which feels safer because its under my control.

At the time of the meeting, no one talked about Blue Berets as a thing. Maybe the United Nation peace keepers wore them then, I can’t remember– but they weren’t what I saw. Some other countries had blue berets, but not the United States at that time. Everyone had heard of Red Berets and Green Berets of course, but Blue-? No. By the late 90s though, Blue Berets as UFO/alien reaction teams had become at least a thing in fiction. I think it was in X-files at one point, and other shows it would pop up as well– even in kids’ shows! But at the time I reported my dreams, it wasn’t in the conspiracy paradigm. There was no internet either– that had another couple of years to show up for the public at large, so information wasn’t as easy to leak or look up. I barely even remember those dreams now, but back then they were still very vivid and repeating, and I was wildly curious about what they meant. Were they about a real future? A possible one? A faked scenario by aliens to make a point? I still don’t know.

In 2 weeks, I’ll talk about what started happening after that fateful support group meeting that led me to further believe that the guy who said he was in the Blue Berets was probably telling the truth– or something close to it at least. At Spiral’s End: What’s Left After the Paradigm Shatters is the personal paranormal blog of a woman that follows not only current odd events in her life, but recounts incidents from her past, including lifelong alien abductions, encounters with ghosts and other spiritual beings, and premonitions from either waking visions or dreams. She reacts and speculates about the deeper meaning behind these incidents and wonders– what is the ultimate reality or intelligence behind it all?