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(NOTE: This is a story about one of my UFO investigations when I was a member of MUFON. All names have been changed to prevent ridicule. It is one of my short stories in the Amazon e-book, Divine Curses. More information about this book is available on the eight pages of Website - paranormalwarnings.com )
Embarrassing! It is one word but it applies so succinctly to my reaction to a complete inability to assist one family which had observed multiple UFOs near Fort Lee, Virginia in February of 1999. After experiencing an enormous number of run-ins with UFOs and other unknowns, I decided to join a prestigious organization dedicated to studying the UFO phenomenon. This organization just happened to be MUFON, the Mutual Unidentified Flying Object(s) Network. Accolades abound concerning its no nonsense approach to investigating UFO sightings and potential abductions. Nancy and I joined this organization to learn what UFO sightings were being reported in Virginia. Being a member was a real eye opener. My assistance in talking to four members of one Hopewell family brought on a sense of embarrassment about something I thought I had acquired some knowledge about – my constant contact with the unknown.
In a big way, I was wrong. No one can relive someone else’s experiences because everyone reacts differently to life’s bumps, bruises, and bashes. What often frightens most individuals will thrill and excite a few brave souls. When I was asked to be a regional director for Central Virginia’s MUFON, I accepted. Nancy and I together attended state meetings of MUFON and one International MUFON Conference held in 1998 outside downtown Washington D.C., in a hotel across the street from the Reagan International Airport. At the International Conference, we heard dozens of stories about alien encounters and other strange accounts divulged by ordinary people and victims of abductions who had come from all over the world. I believed all of my personal UFO encounters in total, including countless run-ins with paranormal unknowns, and hearing countless stories through contacts in the MUFON grapevine had provided me with the necessary tools and in-depth understanding to assist other individuals in fitting together the pieces of their shocking encounters. However, I was not prepared to deal with the consequences of emotional turmoil and inescapable mental anguish incurred by individuals unable to deal with the aftermath of their UFO encounters. To my dismay, MUFON did not have a plan of action to help these individuals who had their normal lives twisted and ruptured by facing the unknown. In one case dealing with a “newly twisted and ruptured” family living in Hopewell, Virginia, I recognized my weaknesses and was abhorred to discover MUFON’s reaction by its investigators was no better than what could be expected from cold heartless bureaucrats assigned to a government agency.
I was approached by Rick, the State Director for MUFON, who asked if I would join him and Westy, the western regional director, to interview members of a Hopewell family which had a recent encounter involving multiple UFOs. At the outset of this investigation, I was ecstatic with anticipation of meeting other “Hopewellians” who had seen aliens or alien ships. I was going back to my hometown where most of my childhood encounters had occurred, and I would be talking to other people who might have had experiences similar to what I endured as a youngster. Complications developed quickly when I realized I was not invited to the initial interviews with each family member and that this was the family’s second (gentle) interrogation. I surmised that the MUFON team had missed something during the first interviews. The team most likely thought by having an ex-Hopewell native with them during a second meeting with the family might expose something new - maybe an unusual angle they had missed previously. They were right.
(For the sake of the family’s privacy, I have changed names and excluded names whenever possible.) When Rick, Westy, and I arrived at the home of this family, everything seemed normal at first. Mrs. Oaker welcomed us in at the front door and Mr. Oaker stayed his distance. He remained in the kitchen while we interviewed each family member separately in their living room. Three children and their mother were the individuals involved in the encounter with multiple alien ships. Mrs. Oaker was friendly and explained that one of her sons did not wish to participate in the interviewing process. According to her, he had been affected negatively by the encounter which she thought had caused him to argue frequently and aggressively with his brother and sister. I asked her to tell him I knew what he was going through because I had similar encounters during the entire time I lived in Hopewell. Mrs. Oaker went to his bedroom and I heard an almost audible conversation. For a while, he refused to show himself.
Rick began the interviews and I followed them up with spontaneous questioning based on what I had heard, and more importantly, on what I had not heard. We talked with the mother first followed by the daughter and one son. As always each gave a different story, but this was exactly what I expected. Mrs. Oaker stated they were riding down reformatory road near the Petersburg Federal Reformatory on their way to buy clothes from a Peebles department store in Colonial Heights. She indicated as they approached a sharp curve on the road, a gigantic craft, possibly a saucer shaped floating vehicle, seemed to rise from the horizon. It moved parallel to the road at a slow pace just above the tree tops. To get a better view, Mrs. Oaker drove a couple hundred yards and turned right onto a road which led to a government housing complex where guards and their families lived. The giant ship floated above the trees and some of the houses. Mrs. Oaker exclaimed her amazement that quite a few people were in the yards and on the porches, but they did not indicate in anyway, by pointing, jumping up and down, or screaming they had seen the huge UFO floating above them. Mrs. Oaker and her two children agreed to everything up to this point. Their stories almost sounded like separate encounters after the point in their stories where Mrs. Oaker firmly testified she had parked her car.
Mrs. Oaker claimed no one left the car but she thought someone had rolled down a window. Both son and daughter disagreed with her saying all four had opened the car doors and proceeded to leave the car behind them as they approached the gigantic craft. Mrs. Oaker showed some surprise when she realized differences existed between her story and those of her children. When I asked how many UFO vessels they were able to see and their approximate size, the mother affirmed that there was one huge craft which was hundreds of feet across. Floating near it was one small white cylinder somewhere between 20 to 30 feet in length. Her children disagreed with their mother and with each other on whether there were three or four smaller white UFOs hovering near the larger UFO. All three agreed however that the dark UFO was hundreds of feet across.
At this stage of the interviews, I realized I had to ask a critical question. I really hated to ask it because disagreement already prospered in the Oaker household and tension had risen between mother and children. So, I took a back door approach.
I asked, “Were you able to get your shopping done at Peebles?”
Mrs. Oaker’s face became pale as she answered, “No, by the time we got there, they were starting to close.”
I asked, “Did you leave with plenty of time for shopping?”
Mrs. Oaker eyebrows raised and she replied, “It was Sunday and the store closed earlier than normal, but we left home with about 2 ½ hours left before the store closed.”
Mrs. Oaker began to become fidgety and I could almost see a calculator in her mind working to make the numbers fit. I already knew her rational thinking was in a quandary. What did surprise me was that the two investigators who had performed the initial interviews with members of the Oaker family totally missed seeing at least one huge semi-veiled elephant in the room. And this particular elephant is always a part of the perennial puzzle where UFOs and aliens are involved.
Careful maneuvers had to be made to unveil this behemoth piece of the jigsaw puzzle. My next question was carefully thought out before being asked and I realized it had to be simple and to the point. Looking into Mrs. Oaker’s eyes I asked, “How long does it take you to drive from Broadway (a major avenue) in Hopewell to the Peebles store in Colonial Heights?”
She hesitated and then gave an answer, “… about 15 to 20 minutes!”
She continued, “Something’s wrong, we only stayed at the reformatory for 10 minutes…”
Mrs. Oaker’s change in her facial expressions exposed an expected state of confusion.
I finally reached the point where I could ask Mrs. Oaker what I wanted to ask her at the beginning of the interview, “So, how much time are you missing?”
Mrs. Oaker might have been confused but she was mentally sharp. She confidently stated, “Over an hour and a half…close to two hours!”
Mrs. Oaker’s face was now flush but I had to ask her one more critical question. Again the “MUFON guys” had missed seeing a second bigger elephant, covered with a little thicker veil than the first, sitting next to the first one during their previous meeting with the Oakers.
I swallowed and asked, “Have you or anyone else living in this house ever seen a UFO or flying saucer sometime in the past?”
My question caused Mrs. Oaker to react as if she had been insulted or slapped across her face. My stress level was raised somewhat due to her reaction and I feared she might have thought our interview was turning into an inappropriate and indiscrete interrogation.
Sitting a little straighter than a second earlier, she unleashed a shrill retort, “No, Never!”
Right then I felt I had been intentionally lied to, a psychological feeling of being hit with a sucker punch at the beginning of a mental fistfight. I had seen a pattern develop with many people who believed they had encounters with strange phenomenon, mostly UFOs. All had parents or grandparents who also had encounters with the paranormal years and decades earlier. The pattern always seemed to repeat itself. In the Oaker family encounter this pattern was missing. At least that is what I heard Mrs. Oaker telling me.
“Unacceptable” was my internal response. If Mrs. Oaker, her husband, or their parents had ever expressed experiencing a paranormal event, they must have forgotten about it or refused to admit it. Having no ` connections to anyone having previous paranormal experiences was incredibly illogical to my way of thinking. My solution to finding out if my logic were on track was to challenge the Oaker family’s encounter by verbally attacking Mrs. Oaker’s ability to remember. It was a gamble and I hated doing it. If I were wrong, I knew she would be asking us to leave. (I have always been a risk taker, but with the paranormal, I never failed to dive head first into a controversy.)
I began with, “I am sitting here in your living room and you’re telling me no one in your family has ever seen a UFO or anything in the past. Ever! I can’t believe it. They don’t work that way!”
Mrs. Oaker’s facial expression changed dramatically and I knew she was going to unload a verbal barrage in my direction. I waited for her words to begin to flow. Finally and to my surprise, she exclaimed she had experienced an encounter when she was a youngster living in the mountains of West Virginia. I exhaled slowly and deeply and realized my words had jolted her memory. She added she had moved to Hopewell many years later, but she had seen a small silver flying saucer with some of her friends on the playgrounds surrounding their elementary school.
When I asked how small or large she thought the saucer appeared, she began to relay a monolog which only required a few simple questions to set free her memories from long ago. Mrs. Oaker smiled as she began to relate her pastimes on the playground of her youth. One day, she and her friends looked up to see a silver saucer gliding in the air over their playground. It moved from the playground area and up to one hilly ridge to another. According to Mrs. Oaker, the silver saucer seemed to jump from ridge to ridge.
For some reason unknown to her, she had forgotten about the silver saucer encounter. Over a decade later, when she attended a class reunion in the West Virginia town where she graduated, she ran into the friends who had witnessed the saucer with her. One had become a medical doctor and one was a federal judge. Mrs. Oaker revealed that one of her old friends brought up the subject of the silver saucer and asked her two classmates if they remembered seeing it. Both did. One commented he often wondered what the sighting was all about. The other friend conveyed an attitude of oblivion and offhandedly mentioned she had not thought about the incident very much since she had left their cozy little town.
About the time Mrs. Oaker was finishing her West Virginia saucer story, Mark walked into the living room. He was the son who initially refused to be interviewed for a second time. Actually, I did not blame him for having a foreboding attitude concerning the interviews and the encounter. Mark never smiled and his depression was evident from his demeanor and delivery of his answers. Some of his responses and remarks were so distressing they caused me to instantaneously empathize with him. When it came to the encounter near the federal reformatory, he remembered a huge dark craft but indicated that it was not saucer shaped. Mark suggested its shape was so unusual he could not possibly describe it. He saw smaller white saucer-like crafts floating around the larger craft and some of them flew in and out of the larger UFO. He remembered some lights on the UFOs but did not remember the colors. Like all answers obtained from individuals exposed to UFOs, Mark supplied our interview process with unconventional explanations of an unconventional encounter.
Mark was calm but the quavering in his voice unveiled a fear which needed to be dealt with promptly. His story became alarming when he remarked that he had dreams every night where little gray people came into his bedroom and talked with him. He was not sure what they talked about upon waking from his dreams; however, he did not want any information about his family’s UFO encounter to reach the public. Mark was attending high school and was afraid he and his family would become the butt of jokes and a source for ridicule should the encounter become public knowledge. Mark walked slowly back to his bedroom displaying an appearance much like a puppy which had been scolded. He seemed to be walking in the same shoes I had walked in when I was a kid. My stomach began to turn after my conversation with this fragile victim of the UFO phenomenon.
Rick asked Mrs. Oaker to invite her husband into their living room for a brief review with us concerning his family’s extraordinary encounter. We were barely able to hear their conversation, but we heard a definite answer.
He answered his wife with a terse, “No!”
When Mr. Oaker seemed to be out of ear-shot, I asked Mrs. Oaker about Mr. Oaker’s potential problem of dealing with his family’s UFO encounter. She shook her head affirming the answer to my question.
Next, she acknowledged barely aloud, “Everyone is having problems with it. It has flustered everyone and the kids won’t stop arguing. I’m going nuts dealing with it.”
My feelings were 100 percent sympathetic for Mrs. Oaker. She explained, that up until the time she and her children had seen the UFOs, her family was basically at peace and arguments were nonexistent. I looked at my fellow MUFON team members and the expressions on their faces were blank. I thought – looks like no help coming from the peanut gallery. After their first interview of the Oaker family by this MUFON team, these guys should have had some recommendations ready for the Oaker family during a second meeting. They had none!
Mrs. Oaker stressed that her husband drove back to the scene of the encounter a few days later with the entire family in their car. Suddenly, a bright light appeared and Mr. Oaker reacted by stomping the accelerator pedal to the floor and leaving behind any chance for another paranormal encounter. Mr. Oaker had one of his outside work projects geographically located just a short distance from where his family had first spotted the huge dark UFO.
I asked her how she planned to deal with the upheaval in her family. She stated she had already contacted a family counselor. I suggested that she also contact a priest or minister because I felt pretty strongly that something wrong (I meant evil) was involved with their encounter.
When I walked from the Oaker’s house, I was troubled and disappointed with myself because I could not offer anymore assistance than I had. At this point, I also realized MUFON was no more than a data collection agency incapable of really helping anyone having serious problems after facing a paranormal encounter. It seemed to me that investigating UFO encounters for MUFON was no different than an ambulance arriving on the scene of a bad car accident and its EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians) asking everyone how the accident happened; and, after gathering anodyne information, the EMTs jump back into the ambulance and drive away without assisting anyone or taking any of the injured to a hospital. At the moment Mrs. Oaker closed her front door behind her I thought - MUFON assistance is a farce and my assistance is no better. Now, years after the interviews with the Oakers, I believe MUFON management personnel, knowingly or unknowingly, are without a doubt supporting some entity but not the general public. In fact, I quit the organization in disgust shortly after visiting the Oaker family. I knew the top echelon of MUFON could do better. As an education specialist for 12 years for the Department of Army, I performed hundreds of evaluations and program reviews, and I knew the appropriate system for investigating, revealing findings, and making recommendations in formal reports. The most important part of this process was giving the personnel affected by the evaluation a way to correct any discrepancies, and this was done through recommendations. MUFON does not provide recommendations, it just collects data. This is the crux of my distrust or uncertainty concerning MUFON.
By the way, my best guess was that Mark’s dreams about aliens visiting him in his bedroom were probably not dreams at all. However, for the sake of his sanity I hoped Mark was right and only his dreams produced the diminutive creatures. But, because the probability of little gray people visiting the Oaker home existed – if only in my mind, I had to ask Mrs. Oaker to talk to a priest about her family’s problems (She informed me that her family was Catholic.). I informed Rick and Westy about my thoughts about Mark but nothing more was mentioned.
I met many good people who volunteered their free time to MUFON and I believe they have everyone’s best interest at heart. I guess finding the best organization to assist people dealing with UFO encounters is like finding that one special church you are really comfortable with even though hellfire and brimstone are preached there every Sunday.
Footnote: The story about the Oaker family had to be divulged to the public despite its members requesting anonymity. Their actual names remain confidential, but the stress caused by their alarming encounter should be made public domain for erudition purposes, especially for other families and individuals who have had similar experiences. My concern was for the Oakers but also for other families. I wondered how many more “Oaker families” were out there in Hopewell, in Virginia, in the United States, and in the world. Who could these people actually turn to for help? Who would really believe their stories involving strange floating unidentified flying objects and missing time? Can individuals suffering from the effects of an UFO encounter be restored to their previous state of wellbeing? Can this wellbeing be regained when they participate in regressive hypnosis? Are there enough legitimate specialists who, like Bud Hopkins, can lead individuals through a therapeutic hypnotic regimen to regain normalcy?
Ultimately, who should be held accountable for people who are negatively impacted by paranormal experiences involving UFOs and non-human creatures? Eventually, these questions will be answered; hopefully, in time to assist in preventing some cataclysmic event from happening with the capability of wiping out most human life on our planet. I know this sounds melodramatic, but after actually witnessing such weirdness, a feeling attaches itself to your overall beliefs suggesting something awesome is about to happen.
In 2010, it had been over 12 years since the Oaker family faced their UFO encounter. The Oaker children are no longer in their teens but in their mid to late 20’s. No one from the Oaker family has contacted me since the interviews were conducted but their stories frequently bounce into my consciousness while I am reading or watching TV. I often think about the Oaker family, about Mark in particular, which causes me to hope and pray everything turned out positive for each one of them. Due to the intense questioning during the interviews, I felt I had been too intrusive in gaining inside information. My contacting them again seemed to be stepping beyond a line separating privacy from unwanted meddling. The one thing I learned during the interview process which startled me was that all three Oaker children were very young when they were adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Oaker. They were in fact actual brothers and sister of the same parents.
If the Oaker children had been brought on board the huge UFO floating near the Petersburg Federal Reformatory during their missing time episode, their abduction definitely imposed uncertainty for the creatures controlling the large alien craft. Their involuntary presence and guinea pig type involvement in experimental trials might have caused some confusion among the (gray?) aliens who scratched their heads in disbelief. Within UFO investigatory groups, discussions and theories abound concerning the abduction process whereby aliens obtain blood, sperms, eggs, and other fluids from unwilling hosts for numerous purposes including the tracking of human movement. Should this be true (and it probably is), the aliens eventually learned the children were not the offspring of Mrs. Oaker, and the tracking of a genetic footprint had to jump tracks to an unrelated hereditary lineage. With this being the case, Mrs. Oaker and her children had delivered a genetic bombshell to the aliens. With aliens tracking humans through a system of genetic lineage, the Oaker family made it clear to them that we humans are unpredictable and capable of delivering a slight of hand without intentionally trying. If genetic tracking is not a real fact and part of the alien abduction scenario, most of the Ufologists are being fooled, and the Oaker family was kidnapped for purposes yet explained or beyond imaginable guessing. (A video recording was made of our MUFON team questioning the Oakers. It is doubtful if this recording is available to the public, but after all these years I would love to see and hear it.)
One certain connection exists between me and the Oaker family. Where they encountered the multiple UFOs, the location next to the Petersburg Federal Reformatory, is only a few miles from where I experienced my countless run-ins with UFOs as a boy in my home on Lee Street. The difference was I believed I was being visited by ghosts. The one thing they knew they had experienced was “confusion.”
During this same period of time, members of another family living near Smith Mountain Lake, Virginia, were also going through their hell on earth. Paranormal events had invaded their home and shattered the sanctity of whatever most people consider to be a normal family life. The family lived in a house which bordered a huge tract of farm land. Their normal squabbles and joviality filled everyday life, but things changed for the worst when a neighbor informed a family member that a partially formed crop circle had been found in the field beside their house. After each member of the family had examined the crop circle, they began to see and hear “the unusual” and invisible world which lies just beyond normalcy. Their everyday lives convulsed into an upside down world as they began hearing knocking on the walls in the middle of the night. Pulsating lights indiscriminately flashed through their home’s windows without any evidence of a actual source. These paranormal events became frequent but never tolerable.
“Dysfunctional” mildly described the condition the family degenerated into as the kids, the mother, and father screamed at each other over minor disagreements. When one of the children began telling everyone she was being physically examined and manhandled by short gray humanoid creatures on a nightly basis, the parents decided to contact MUFON. Rick contacted the family and agreed to spend a weekend with the family and with another MUFON investigator. While staying up all night with recording equipment, the MUFON guys were looking for something strange. They found it. As Rick explained to me later, the banging began sometime after 2 AM and seemed to move to different walls from outside the house. Upon inspecting the outside of the house, a small cloud was observed attached to and rolling around the outside walls. After a beam from a flashlight hit the cloud, it began to dissipate and gradually dissolved into nothing. There was no more knocking or banging that night.
The next day the MUFON investigators took photographs of the house and surrounding grounds. After the photos were processed, a bizarre figure emerged in one of them. Rick asked me and other investigators to review this photograph to see whether there was something unusual in it. Within a split second I identified a “Bigfoot” creature in the background of one of the photos. Rick pointed out that it was not there when the camera’s button snapped the picture. I was not a bit surprised with his anomalous assertion. By actually witnessing a Bigfoot creature with Nancy in January 1976, I knew they were real. I had already convinced myself that these big hairy creatures were UFO related prior to the Oaker and Smith Mountain Lake families experiencing their paranormal events.
As with the Oaker family, the Smith Mountain Lake family needed rigorous family counseling. However, the mother and father of the Smith Mountain Lake family separated, and I guess, they eventually divorced. I am still wondering how many families are torn apart because of their loved ones facing a UFO or some other type of unknown paranormal event. Tearing a family apart has to be an evil intent. God is our shield and sword, and families who have been attacked need to turn to Him for the strength to overpower the paranormal entities that prosper in human confusion.
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