The Woman who Time Forgot
The blizzard of 2017 dumped more than three feet of snow in parts of Maine between February 12 and 13. While it is safe to say that most Mainers got through the storm just fine, it was a surprise to many how much snow we got in such a short amount of time. During the height of the storm, the blowing snow created near whiteout conditions and visibility was so poor that the Maine Department of Transportation had to halt plowing operations in the Mid-Coast, Down East, and Bangor areas. That’s bad. I was there, shoveling it out of my driveway in Bangor. My girlfriend and I spent a total of five hours manually removing the hellish white punishment. It got to a point where we had no place to put it, as the banks in our driveway were already above our waists! We ended up having to haul the snow out to the street and let the city plows get rid of it for us.
Fast-forward a few days, to reports that a new storm was headed our way for midweek that could bring us an additional twelve inches of snow! Thankfully it did not hit as hard as meteorologists had originally thought, and we came away unscathed with a mere two to three more inches of the white stuff.
February 12 held another point of significance for me: I was looking forward to meeting Sue, a UFO witness from Stratton, but the storm forced us to cancel our meeting. We rescheduled for the following Sunday, February 19. I had first heard of Sue’s story from an issue of the Portland Phoenix from February 2012; oddly enough, this was almost four years to the day from when the article was published. Synchronistic, yeah?
My colleague Erik Cooley and I met Sue for coffee at an inn located in Stratton. The two-hour drive from Bangor led us through the aftermath of the blizzard, allowing us a glimpse at the snowfall that had been survived by folks in Palmyra, Skowhegan, Anson, Kingfield, Rangeley, Stratton, and all the other small towns we drove through. The snowbanks in these areas easily surpassed Bangor’s, and the people from there reminded me of people I knew when my family lived in Fort Kent. No matter how remote they were or how much weather they got, they survived and smiled through it. Just like the smile Sue gave us upon our arrival at the restaurant.
A petite, older woman, Sue greeted us warmly and asked how our drive had been. She was a spunky, friendly woman. We exchanged pleasantries and quickly got to the reason for our meeting. She told us, “When this whole thing started, ’91–’92, I would have the weirdest dreams, and this Pink Floyd song would be playing in the background. After so many years of this, I got into the band because I had to know what song it was. Turns out it was ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and you know what, it was the strangest thing this morning. I got in the car to drive over here to meet you, and that damn song was playing when I turned on the radio!” The synchronicity was not lost on her, and we were riveted.
Psychoanalyst Carl Jung developed the synchronicity concept, which holds that some events in one’s life tend to be “meaningful coincidences.” In an interview I’d had with Skowhegan psychic Shalel Way, I’d learned about synchronicities. Shalel discussed the impact of it on one’s life, and even had a synchronistic moment with me that involved my birth date as it related to a UFO sighting she’d had in the ’70s.
Sue went on to say that dreams played a sincerely odd role in her life. “I’ve never dreamed as myself except for those Pink Floyd dreams.” I asked her what she meant and she said that her interest in dreams started with a car accident. “When I was fifteen I got my license. You know the bridge in Anson? It’s a newer bridge and they got it because of me. I went off that bridge, forty-two feet down to the water in my father’s station wagon. We should have never lived through it. I’d picked up two people and we were headed to the dance. The way the car landed, there was a seven-foot wall on each side, and I landed right in the middle of it with two inches to spare each side. They said two inches this way, or two inches that way, would have broken the car right in half. We walked away from it.”
After being released from the hospital that same night, she got home and learned about a woman named Ruth Montgomery from the nightly news. Montgomery had just published a book called Strangers Among Us, in which she explored the “walk-in” concept. Montgomery wrote that walk-ins “are high-minded entities permitted to take over the bodies of human beings who wish to depart this life.”
This concept fascinated Sue, and after surviving such an event, it made her pause and analyze her dreams. She thought that she may be dreaming someone else’s memories. She explained, “After that car accident, I can’t remember some things from my past. Even to this day, I have trouble remembering aspects of my past. It seemed really strange that some of the memories that I do have belong to someone else.” She wondered if she might be a walk-in.
The strangeness continued with a UFO sighting in 1991. While living in Clinton, Sue and her then-husband were getting ready to lie in bed and watch a movie. Her kids were downstairs just about to watch a movie of their own. It was a little before 9:00 p.m. when Sue noticed a light outside her bedroom window. “It was bright! Beaming bright! Right above the tree line,” she said. “I watched it for about five minutes and then showed it to my husband.” Sue’s husband expressed confusion about the odd light and both decided to go outside for a better look. As they walked through the living room, the kids inquired why they were going outside. “I told them there was a weird light, and sure enough they filed in line behind us.” Each family member stepped outside slowly, watching the light as they moved. Gathered together on the porch, they stood in silence, unsure of what they were witnessing.
Unexpectedly, the light instantly ascended. Audible gasps were heard from the family. “What is that, mom?” asked the older of the two children. “They weren’t scared, they just didn’t know what it was,” she explained. None of them did. So they continued to watch as it hovered at the higher altitude. Again, without warning, the light moved and hovered directly in front of their home. This time it was closer and lower, as if it were watching them. She said, “You didn’t see it move. It was just there. It was so weird. We didn’t see it move!”
I anxiously sipped my coffee and asked, “What time do you think you went outside?” Sue again explained that they went outside just before 9:00 p.m. and that the entire sighting lasted about five or six minutes, and then it vanished. “It was just gone. It blinked out, so we went in the house. We walked through the door and the kids exclaimed that the movie was over.” I looked at Sue, confused. “I know, I told the kids, no, it’s just beginning. They said no it’s not, it’s over, what time is it?” Sue went to check the time and found that it was almost 11:00 p.m. “We didn’t really discuss it. Everyone was aware of it. I didn’t want to discuss it, my husband didn’t. So, no one did.”
No other oddities were reported that night or in the coming weeks. The missing time was weird enough, but then the dreams started.
It was after her sighting in 1991 that Sue began experiencing the odd dreams with the Pink Floyd song. In the dream, “all of a sudden, we’re on a spaceship and everything is white. We’re on this damn spaceship, my husband and I, and everything is white!” I asked her what she meant by “everything is white.” She said, “Everything, I mean everything. The walls, our clothes. It was weird. And then every time my husband would open his mouth to talk, the Pink Floyd song would play.” Erik and I shared a confused look. She continued, “We then made our way to an elevator. There were windows everywhere, too. When we got out of the elevator, the doors opened to something like a Walmart. It was clothes and they were all white! Everything was either my size or my husband’s size and white! And that damn song kept playing, it was blasting. I had that dream for years.”
Enthralled, Erik asked, “Anyone else in the dream other than you and your husband?” “Nope, just me and him,” she said. “And that song playing every time he would try to talk. Big windows everywhere, and we could see the stars.” Erik added, “Anyone else have weird dreams?” Sue did not recall anyone else mention odd dreams.
Sarah (pseudonym), the owner of the inn, walked in during this point in our conversation and looked the three of us over. “We’re discussing the lights,” Sue said to her. She smiled and shook our hands. Sue gestured to me and said, “Yeah, he’s writing a book about UFOs and such.”
The Portland Phoenix reported an encounter that Sarah and some of her patrons had had on Christmas Eve a few years back: “One Christmas Eve, one guy goes out to smoke a cigarette, and he says to me, come on out here and look at this light.” Sarah and others joined the gentleman, and all observed a bright light in the sky. She explained that it would dart left to right, and after a little while it would move elsewhere. Sarah and the bunch watched the light for over an hour.
Then a waitress stopped by the table and said, “You guys heard what Jeff saw, right? On 16.” She looked at Sarah and Sue for recognition and received it. Jeff (pseudonym), a friend of Sue and Sarah’s, was traveling home on Route 16 one evening in 2005 and witnessed a bell-shaped object in the sky. The Portland Phoenix quoted his description: “It was four stories high and floating by somebody’s house.” This sighting recalled the Kecksburg case out of Pennsylvania in 1965. In that incident, an object was observed screeching through the sky like a meteor, but it began making turns and slowing down. Eventually it hit the ground in the woods of Kecksburg. Area residents who saw the object had likewise described it as bell-shaped. But it was not nearly as big as the object Jeff witnessed.
You can watch a documentary about the Kecksburg UFO right now on YouTube by searching for “Kecksburg UFO Incident.” Also, the documentary production company Small Town Monsters produced a film entitled Invasion on Chestnut Ridge, directed by Seth Breedlove.
About ten years before Jeff’s sighting, Sue had had another strange incident. It was 1995; she was recently divorced and moved to Cape Cod. She developed some back pain and was concerned, so on a friend’s recommendation, Sue paid a visit to a doctor who ran a chiropractic business in Orleans, Massachusetts, and he took her on as a patient. Sue said weakly, “I’m starting to shake, because this is where it gets weird. My doctor said that he needed to take some X-rays.” Once the X-rays came back, the doctor called Sue and asked her to come in. She explained how their conversation went: “I walked in and he says, ‘When were you shot?’” “What?!” answered Sue. “Seriously though, when were you abducted by aliens?” Sue’s face went serious, but she laughed it off and asked, “What are you talking about?” The doctor motioned for her to come look at the X-rays. The one he had showing was of her left hip. He pointed to an area and asked, “What the hell are those?” Sue explained that the X-ray showed three metal spheres in the shape of a triangle, and he’d written on it, “Unknown Metal Objects in Pelvic Area.” “A shotgun bullet would not do that,” she said excitedly. “Besides, I’ve never been shot. There’s no marks there. No scars or anything!” Sue and the doctor discussed the strangeness of the objects, though he did not recommend their removal as they were not harming her in any way. Sue provided me with her doctor’s name. I called his practice in Massachusetts to get his take on this anomaly, but my messages went unanswered.
Months later, Sue met a gentleman by the name of Rod C. Davis. He is a paranormal researcher and author who spent time in the Stratton area as a youth and young adult. They discussed Sue’s metal spheres, and he recommended that she have them surgically removed and get them tested to see what they were. Sue declined this option, as she did not want to have surgery. However, she did give it some consideration.
A little more than a year later, Sue came down with pneumonia. She contacted her doctors and during her visit, they advised that X-rays were needed. She boldly asked them to also take an X-ray of her hip. Her doctor was confused, but Sue insisted and, surprisingly, her doctor obliged. After seeing the new X-ray of her hip, she called Rod Davis. Before she could get the words out he said, “They’re gone, aren’t they?” “How did you know that?” she asked. Rod explained that the mere mention of the metal spheres brings attention to them, and “they” do not like that. He added, “You were being tracked, you talked about them too much.” Sue then called her chiropractor from Orleans and exclaimed, “They’re gone!” He was confused and asked Sue what she meant. “The metal balls are gone!” She said that her doctor couldn’t believe it and went to check his files and found that Sue’s original X-rays were now inexplicably missing. This confused him, as he kept meticulous records.
Our waitress at the restaurant handed Sue her order of toast. In between bites, she told us of another story that happened a little while later, after she moved to the Stratton area from Massachusetts with her boyfriend. “We decided one day to go up to Kennebago. My boyfriend makes furniture out of moose antlers and we went up to the woods to look for some.” They arrived at a clearing near the woods at 8:00 a.m. After a brief discussion, her boyfriend was to take one route, and Sue and her dog another, and they would meet in an hour. After walking for a while, she found that she was lost. She did have a walkie-talkie with her, so she turned it on to radio her boyfriend. “I knew I was lost. Kennebago Mountain is a big area. I was walking and walking but I was lost. We just put fresh batteries in the walkie-talkies so I turned it on to admit to him that I was lost.” We shared a smile at her comment. She continued, “All of a sudden this screech came on and then nothing. It was dead!
You gotta be kidding me, I don’t know where in the hell I am, and I’ve got no battery? So, I walked.”
Eventually, Sue found Saddleback Mountain and knew she had to walk in the opposite direction. Finally, after about an hour and a half, she heard a vehicle honking. As she approached the direction of the noise, she saw her boyfriend’s truck; he was honking to help her find her way. “He knew I was lost. But he was not happy. He asked where I had been. I told him I got lost and I tried the walkies but the battery died.” The boyfriend looked at her, confused. “Sue,” he says to me, “you know how long you’ve been gone? You’ve been gone for four hours. It’s noon!” Sue couldn’t believe it. She thought she had only been gone for about an hour and a half. I asked her if she had any odd moments that she could not explain while on her walk, but she said no. It was just her and her dog trying to find their way. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary other than being lost. “I lost that time. And the walkies, it didn’t make sense to us.”
She has not had any other experiences that she can remember. “I still wonder,” she said, and I asked her if she had or would be interested in utilizing hypnotic regression. She said she would be interested so I did put her in contact with a source, though no sessions have been completed yet.
As the stories unfolded before us, Erik and I couldn’t help but ask ourselves if there was something about the area that attracted all the strangeness. Could it be the nondescript military presence (the Navy has a SERE school in the region), or perhaps imaginations have a knack of running a bit wild here. Sue said, “The more you dig into the questions of this area, the more questions you find.” Regardless of one’s opinion of the area and the stories told, the perception of the population is one of high strangeness. We also discussed how the people in this area might be more attuned to their surroundings because there are not as many distractions in their rural environment, and this could lend itself to odd sights and sounds being more easily observed.
As Erik and I were wrapping up our conversation, Sue looked at us with lost, honest eyes and made a somber inquiry. She asked, “I’ve got nothing to gain by it. I just want to know, why me?” We looked at each other, wishing that we had an answer or some sort of explanation, but we didn’t.