Frightening Things with Angry Eyes
The following includes an update to my story “A Case for David Stephens,” originally featured in UFOs Over Maine: Close Encounters from the Pine Tree State.
The Recap
Just days before Halloween, on the evening of October 27, 1975, David Stephens and Glen Gray were hanging out at their home in Norway, Maine. At approximately three o’clock in the morning, the pair heard a loud explosion from outside. I wrote previously, “The two men ran to see what had disturbed the stillness of a late fall night, but found nothing out of the ordinary. On a whim, it is told, David and Glen got into their vehicle and decided to drive toward the Lake Thompson area in Oxford. Following Route 26 for less than a mile, the men claimed that some sort of force field enveloped their car.”
Once they reached the lake, they saw a bright light in an adjacent field. The light slowly rose into the air and the full extent of the light source was seen. A massive, cylinder-shaped object hovered overhead and moved toward their car. The men sped out of the area. What was to follow over the subsequent months became one of the oddest and most well-documented cases of alien abduction/men in black visitations that Maine has ever seen. It rivals the Allagash Abductions and the Loring Air Force Base incident, and was the catalyst for the Herbert Hopkins “men in black” story, since David Stephens was the patient on whom Dr. Hopkins had conducted hypnotic regression therapy.
The Update
On the evening of October 28, 1975, UFO investigator Brent Raynes received a phone call from fellow investigator Shirley Fickett about the incident in Oxford. Two hours later he was on-site and interviewed David and Glen. Brent found the men believable, but the story was intense, highly detailed, and, quite frankly, inexplicable. Brent, like myself, never shies away from a fantastic story dismissively. He listened intently and wrote down everything he could. We corresponded in June of 2017 about the incident and he said, “Word of David’s experience in a small town spread like wildfire. People started looking up and seeing things, too. Some of it stars and planets, but then other incidents, who knows. A lot of people seemed to believe there was something odd going on back then.”
In addition to the multi-UFO sightings occurring the night before, David and Glen also complained of odd paranormal activity in and outside of their home. During the daylight hours of the 28th, before Brent’s arrival, the two men went back to the area of the abduction and observed ash falling like snow, and they could see black cubes and silver spheres flying about. Inside their home, they witnessed small black cubes floating through walls, golden wires appearing and disappearing above the television set, and an ashtray float up into the air and drop back down. David complained of unexplained knocks at the front door as well as footsteps on the roof of his home, and of a voice that said, “UFO.” Afterwards, David fell into a deep sleep. Raynes said of the activity, “I had heard of similar odd elements in such cases, as well as the paranormal aspects (i.e., the ashtray episode, the voice that said UFO, etc.) and I later found a woman experiencer in Dover-Foxcroft who had ‘visions’ that were somewhat similar that began for her around the same time as the Oxford incident began.”
Sixteen days later, Shirley Fickett visited David and Glen to conduct more interviews. After hearing about their missing time and their thoughts on possibly being abducted, Shirley recommended hypnosis “to pull together the missing facts.” She was introduced to Dr. Herbert Hopkins and he agreed to conduct the hypnotic regression sessions for free, to further his studies on the subject. The first session began on December 2, 1975, and continued through March 23, 1976, totaling eight hypnotic regression sessions. Through these sessions, David revealed having been aboard a UFO and seeing his captors. In her article for Flying Saucer Review about the event, Shirtley wrote that “it was soon established that a non-human being came in to join David. Although it was not human, we learned from David that it was a living being, but not of this world.”
After the first session, Glen withdrew from further analysis and eventually moved out of state. David felt for his friend, realizing that the ordeal had deeply shaken him. Despite this, David kept up with the sessions. He described the beings to Shirley and Dr. Hopkins. Shirley drew a picture of one, based on his description, and David drew one as well. Shirley stated, “We learned that the skin was white, the head was shaped like a mushroom, and that it had two eyes (slanted, large, white and unblinking). The nose was small and rounded; no mouth could be observed.” David pointed out that they wore long black gowns and had three fingers—webbed. They’re frightening things with angry eyes. He also conveyed, while hypnotized, that samples were taken from him, which included blood, hair, and nails. He was thoroughly examined head to toe for approximately forty-five minutes.
In January of 1976, Brent Raynes contacted longtime collaborator and psychiatrist Berthold Eric Schwarz, MD, for his take on the abduction and hypnotic sessions completed to date. Raynes recounted that “Dr. Schwarz, who was a psychiatrist, came up from Montclair, New Jersey, to investigate the Oxford case. I had called him in on the case. Dr. Hopkins was a medical doctor, but to my knowledge not a psychiatrist.” Schwarz interviewed David and his family and found them to be of sound mind and body. His report stated, “There was no evidence from David’s past history, or from interviews with his father and stepmother, for dishonesty, lying, falsification of or loss of memory, previous sociopathic or dissociative behavior, or of excessive interest in flying saucers, and no detailed knowledge of the Betty and Barney Hill abduction case … ”
It is interesting to note that Dr. Schwarz mentioned the Betty and Barney Hill case. One week before David and Glen’s encounter, the movie version of the Betty and Barney Hill story, called The UFO Incident (which can be viewed in full on YouTube), was televised. Robert Cahill, author of New England’s Visitors from Outer Space, stated that David and Glen “gained national attention from many UFO investigators … but conservative UFO investigators concluded that it was more than coincidence that their adventures came only one week after a full-length movie about Betty Hill’s experience was aired on national television.”
For you, dear reader, this is one of those moments where you should not simply dismiss the David Stephens case just because it would be easy to. Instead, peruse the literature that has been written about the incident and consider the information I provided previously about Dr. Herbert Hopkins. You can find David’s story in Borderlands by Mike Dash and in my first book, as well as in the fascinating related articles in Flying Saucer Review written by Raynes, Fickett, and Schwarz.