JOSEPH COOK ABDUCTION CASE

Joseph Cook (a pseudonym), a 59 year old Bellevue man claims he saw a UFO on July 24, 1985 and was taken aboard it. "I was abducted" said Cook. The incident, he said happened while he and a friend, Cassandra Wright were at Crystal Mountain, just east of Mount Rainier.

The two originally had planned to ride two chairlifts to the Summit House and take photographs. But Wright had sprained her ankle and decided to stay at Crystal Mountain Lodge while Cook went on up.

The Miners Basin chairlift, which goes from the base to midway up the mountain, wasn't running. But Cook, wearing slacks, a longsleeve shirt and dress shoes, decided to hike up the mountain and get on the Iceberg Ridge lift, which goes to the top. He and Wright parted. It was 2:30 p.m. on a warm, clear Sunday.

The next thing Cook remembers is lying face down on rocky Powder Pass, 2,000 feet above the point where he'd started to climb and about a quarter-mile east of the Summit House. "I was panting like a steam engine," he said. "I was petrified. I had no recollection of how I'd gotten there."

"Emotionally drained," he vaguely remembers stumbling back down to the lodge, his back and his ribs aching. He arrived at 4:30 p.m. "I don't know how I got there," Cook told Wright, "but I was up there on those rocks."

In the two weeks that followed, Cook was "Incoherent," according to Wright. "He'd jump at every little noise - like the telephone ringing. He's never shed more tears. He didn't leave the apartment for a couple of days. He didn't want to be alone." "It was the first time in my life,' said Cook, "that I didn't have control over an event."

Additing to the mystery were five puncture wounds on Cook's back, wounds which Wright said looked like "needle marks." Though they've faded now, the marks were photographed by Wright.

On August 8, Fred Rantz of Kirkland - whom Cook sought out after a recommendation from a friend - placed Cook under hypnosis. Wright obverved. Rantz, in California couldn't be reached for comment on the matter. But Cook and Wright say the session revealed that Cook had been taken aboard a disc-shaped spaceship.

"It was about 200 to 300 feet in diameter and was blue - the undersurface was," said Cook. "It had no lights on it." It hovered above him, he said, close to the ground.

"I don't remember how I got into the ship; I understand they can levitate you. But anyhow, the next thing I remember - the only other thing I remember - was I was on a white hospital bed and there were about 25 or 30 fiugres around me and they were diffused. You couldn't see their features but they were humanoids. It wasn't like an extraterrestrial. They were blurry."

Cook doesn't remember whether he was in clothes, whether any of the "grayish-green humanoids" bent over him or whether any instruments touched him. But he's convinced he was being examined.

And he's convinced he's seen two disc-shaped UFOs since the incident. On August 11, said Cook, he was hanging up the phone in his downtown Bellevue apartment about 7 p.m. when he saw a blue disc hovering above the Seattle Trust Building. Then, in "two seconds," it shot straight up and disappeared.

On August 21, at about 5:30 p.m. Cook said he was turning on the evening news when a disc shot by his window, heading east, "like a bomb."

Cook, who has an engineering background and is now in sales, says for weeks after the hypnotic session he denied the abduction story. He and Wright ventured back to Crystal Mountain. He double-checked to make sure there wasn't some way he could have gotten up to the rocks on Powder Pass and back to the lodge in two hours. (It's a four-mile trip that would take an avid hiker about 2 1/2 hours, according to a Crystal Mountain spokesman.) Impossible for him, Cook decided, particularly since he was wearing street clothes, hasn't hiked in years and is admittedly in poor physical condition. He said he hadn't been drinking or taking drugs. He denied he fell and hit his head, mistook something else for Powder Pass, is mentally off balance or is plain lying. "There's no doubt," he said, "that this happened."

Many months later we held a special meeting for contactees. Many of them had been having a dream about a cataclysm. Cook was one of them that had seen a vision of such frightening events that he could not tell the story without weeping.

A question has been raised about all of the negative visons, prophesies and events surrounding UFO contact. Why should it be so negative? Some of the events that were foretold have come and gone without happening. In the meantime the contactees suffer tremendously. One contactee surmises they are testing our emotions - or mettle, if you will. They are trying to understand what makes us tick. Is it because they lack emotion and sensitivity?

Before we finish with Cook's story there is another interesting event that happened to him that never made the newspapers. He told us the night of the special meeting. Just another event in the life of a psychic contactee.

When Cook lived in California he was driving on a busy freeway in Los Angeles. All of a sudden he found himself in a fighter plane at the controls. This was as real as the car he had just been driving. He said he recognized the airplane. It belonged to the Israeli Air Force. He was pulling the trigger on a machine gun or some such weapon. All of a sudden the airplane he aimed at was hit by his fire. He felt the g-forces from the plane as he pulled up and away after completing his task. The next moment he is back on the L.A. freeway! That event is almost like Pat McGuire's trading bodies with Ariel Sharon and being in the Tank Corp during the 6 Day War in Israel.