I had heard that other abductees kept journals of their experiences and that those journals often became useful later. That seemed like a pretty sensible idea. If strange things were going to keep happening to me, I might as well start taking notes in an encounter journal. So on August 30, 2010, I wrote my first entry:
“August 30, 2010
Woke up last night with sharp pain in upper right chest area.
Saw light fade in and disappear. Thought it was a comet until it faded back in. It did this 3 or 4 more times before disappearing. Just a light — no blinking lights.
Saw another, more faded, like a dim star, do the same at the same time.”
And with that, my encounter journal officially began. It continued for more than twelve years with my last handwritten entry was on February 19, 2023:
“February 19, 2023
Ally saw something last night. She said it had its back turned to her, it was orange, and it first hopped up at foot of bed, went down, hopped up at her side of bed near her feet, then went down, then hopped up nearer to head of bed on her side.
The sleep app recorded no noise, nada, between around 4:15am & 5:10am. It picked up some weird knocking noise at 4:02am.
I had asked if it might have been Tiger, our tubby orange cat. She said no, it was too big. Debra confirmed Tiger slept downstairs in the master bedroom.
Thursday night, the 16th:
I went to sleep at 2am. Had bad feeling a couple hours before.
When I went to sleep, had issues with seeing. Seemed like my eyes wanted to black out. Had this at previous encounters.
Went to sleep at 2. Sleep app recorded nothing until 3am. 1 hour of missing noise, 1 hour of not working.
Debra said Ava saw something, pointing to ceiling.”
A quick explanation about the sleep app, because it became an unexpectedly important part of all this. For a while, I used an app that recorded sounds throughout the night. And it recorded everything things such as the cat meowing, sleep talking, my snoring, random bumps, creaks, coughs, and all the glamorous noises a sleeping family makes. But whenever we believed something unusual had happened, the recording would contain a long stretch of absolutely nothing. Nada.
Later, I installed motion-sensitive cameras in the bedroom. Those cameras normally worked just fine. They caught us rolling over in bed, getting up, and occasionally a cat wandering through like it owned the place. But during suspected encounters, I found the same thing: gaps. No sound recording. No camera footage. Nothing.
Now, obviously, I can’t prove why that happened. But if I were dealing with an intelligence technologically far beyond ours, disabling a phone app and a few home security cameras probably wouldn’t exactly be their Moon landing. So even when I remembered little or nothing from the night before, a gap of an hour or so in the sound and camera recordings would immediately get my attention.
After that final journal entry, I found an easier system. I started emailing myself. Whenever something happened, I could grab my phone the next morning and quickly type out what I remembered before the details had a chance to evaporate.
Almost all of my experiences happened at night. I don’t remember having a clear daytime encounter. And looking back, one of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t begin documenting everything much earlier. I know there were experiences from childhood that I once remembered more clearly but that have since faded. Time has a way of sanding down memories, even strange ones.
Still, some never left me. Those were the ones that stuck and then, in 2010, something unexpected happened. I had hired a massage therapist to come in and give massages to my staff. Their work could be physically demanding, and I thought it would be a nice way to help them relax and relieve some stress. Apparently, I was the one who ended up needing the stress relief.
During one of those massages, old memories suddenly began surfacing. Not vague impressions. these were memories I never forgetting and recalled clearly. I thought for the first time it’s time to write them down. And that’s exactly what I did.
I think that was when I finally decided I needed to start writing everything down. Soon afterward, the encounter journal began.
