THE ABDUCTION OF SAMMY DESMOND

To protect his privacy, I shall call the witness Sammy Desmond. Desmond is a 33-year old, single male of Hispanic extraction. His education ended with his high-school graduation and he has lived his entire life in Los Angeles, predominantly in a large suburban outskirts of the city called the San Fernando Valley.

He has worked in a variety of occupations and is currently employed as a wallpaper remover. His background includes considerable recreational drug use, but nothing that could have contributed to his experiences -- i.e., chronic use of hallucinogenic substances or other drugs capable of causing transient psychotic episodes. Desmond also enjoys an unusually active sexual life, a fact that may bear on the specific nature of the abduction.

The location of the purported abduction took place in the Reseda district of the San Fernando Valley. (Because the Valley is so large, each district was given its own name when it was developed into a residential community after World War II.) Reseda is what is commonly called a bedroom community, since it is composed primarily of middle-class tract housing. The entire Valley originally consisted of farmland and orange groves, and to this day pockets of more rustic districts remain completely surrounded by tracts. These are usually large lots still zoned for farm animals, and some Valley residents board horses there.

The Desmond family lived on such property in 1984 when Sammy's primary experiences took place. During that time Sammy was living with his mother and father (who was slowly succumbing to cancer) and with his two younger sisters.

The actual abduction was not an isolated event in Desmond's life but seemed to culminate from a series of weakly related paranormal events. Some of these occurrences date back to his childhood, thereby provisionally supporting Budd Hopkins' theory that UFO abductions could be the result of life-long contact with extraterrestrials (Hopkins, 1981). This possibility has also been raised by Raymond Fowler (1982).

Even though I have known Desmond casually for five years, I first learned of his possible UFO experience in January 1987, when he called me for some information regarding hypnosis. The following story emerged during subsequent conversations.

When Sammy Desmond was approximately six years old, he recalls being frightened by the presence of a "being" by his bed. This apparition, which did not speak, seemed to be composed of fog and moved by floating rather than walking. There was no specific relationship between this being and any UFO sighting, but the incident is consistent with similar reports taken from other "future" abductees. Encountering such bedside entities sometimes serves as a precursor to abduction experiences (i.e., Rogo, 1980a).

Some years later, Desmond (whose family had moved to a different residence) would often wake up feeling that he was being poked by a finger. He usually saw a brown cloud in his room during these unpleasant episodes, which occurred sporadically over a period of several years.

The next phase in Desmond's unusual life occurred during the 1960s. He was working for his father's construction company when metal objects suddenly began inexplicably breaking in his hands. Keys were usually the focal objects of these incidents. When the house or car keys were placed in their locks, Desmond claims, they often snapped in half -- much to his annoyance.

Even stranger incidents occurred while the young man was working at his father's construction sites. Desmond often had to bend thick metal support beams used to reinforce block walls, and the beams frequently snapped in two instead of bending. This phenomenon allegedly was witnessed by several of his coworkers, who expressed astonishment when it occurred. Much to his dismay, though, Desmond could never specifically demonstrate the affect for his father, since the incident only occurred spontaneously.

The events directly leading to Desmond's desire to confide in me occurred during the winter of 1984. The Desmonds were living in Reseda where they boarded horses on their property. Sammy Desmond was sleeping in the living room since the house's living quarters were cramped. His father often paced the house during the night because of the pain caused by his cancer and this activity usually kept Sammy from sleeping.

During these weeks Sammy often saw odd lights in the house. These lights, which usually focused their attention on him, typically consisted of a football-sized glowing and spinning object surrounded by similar but slightly smaller objects. Desmond reported the lights to the other family members, who tended to dismiss the sightings, even though his youngest sister reported seeing them in her room. The lights returned approximately a month later consecutively for three days, and during the last incident descended and paralyzed Desmond. He tried calling his father, who was in the kitchen nearby, but could not speak. He felt himself passing out, fought the urge, jumped up from his sleeping bag and woke the rest of the family with his screams.
The actual or purported abduction took place the following night, when the same lights entered the residence. It was approximately 2:30 a.m. but the lights kept their distance from their future subject and left the house. Desmond then left his sleeping bag, opened the back door of the residence and "invoked" the lights to return. (During our talks Desmond continually emphasized that he felt that he was in a "weird mood" when he carried out these bizarre actions.) When he returned to his sleeping bag, the lights appeared by an outside window and then spontaneously reappeared inside the house.

When they descended upon him this time, Desmond elected not to resist the force and soon passed out. Only a brief moment seemed to pass when he heard three incredibly loud metallic bangs. He looked around the room to see a light suddenly fly from the house, out the back door, and into the sky. Desmond was surprised to see that it was daylight. Unaccountably, some six hours had passed.

More mysteries surfaced moments later when he decided to take a shower. He suddenly realized that he was naked, even though he had been wearing underwear the night before. When he stepped into the shower, he found dirt peppered on his feet and felt an unusual pain in his navel and he soon discovered a large syringelike mark directly in his navel, which was oozing a thick liquid.

Desmond was so puzzled by the mark and the liquid that when he finished showering he showed the mark to his younger sister and later on to a few friends. The oozing continued for three days, then suddenly stopped. The mark vanished, too, despite its size and evident depth.
Desmond did not explore the nature of his time lapse in 1984 but he did confide in me that he experienced an even weirder episode after the prior incident. Several weeks later he was again sleeping in the living room of his parent's house. It was late night or early morning and his youngest sister had just returned home from a date. She was preparing for bed when Desmond heard the horses in the backyard corral whinnying restlessly. The dogs on the property were also barking loudly so Desmond peered through the back door.

Way to the back of the property he saw several sparkling lights. When the lights approached a fence which separated the corral from the formal backyard, he saw that they were actual humanoid beings. They were approximately four feet tall, their heads resembled helmets and they wore what he described to me as "space suits." They were black but their bodies twinkled, except for their faces which were guarded by visors. The creatures seemed to be stumbling trying to climb the fence, which gave Desmond time to call his sister. She, however, was frightened by her brother's claim that there were odd creatures by the house and refused to join him or look through her bedroom window.

One of the beings finally managed to climb the fence and raced to the side of the house. Desmond slammed the back door shut and woke the rest of the family, but by the time he got everyone up the creatures had disappeared and the episode came to an end.

To be continued tomorrow.