The following account is 100% true. No embellishments. I still have no explanations.  I saw "something".. It touched me.  It scared me more than anything I have ever seen. When trying to make sense of the event, all my mind comes up with is that it was death incarnate coming for me.  If not for ..I don't know... divine intervention... I honestly believe I would not be here writing this story.. living my life. A few more seconds and .... ?? I have always figured that on the day of my eventual demise.. he may return.. just as I remember him all those years ago.. ageless... timeless.. faceless...To finish his business.

The Event:

In 1971 I was in a horrendous motorcycle accident that put me in the hospital for 6 months. I was broken up pretty badly. One doctor later told me I had cheated death. Many claimed it was a miracle that I lived through it. After all those months recuperating in a hospital in Nashville, I came out in a full body cast from mid-chest to just above BOTH my knees. I was to stay in this cast for 3 months.. ie..bed-ridden with almost around the clock care required. Basically, someone.. my parents, friends, family took turns staying in the house with me in case I needed anything. I wasn't in any pain.. I was just stuck in bed on my back with no mobility other than my 2 arms and one leg from the knee down. It was a dark period in my life.

My 10x12 room was in the middle of the small house just off the kitchen. It had real wood paneling on all the walls, an off-white ceiling, and one window facing behind the house overlooking some tall walnut trees. There were two doors.. One on each side of the room. My mother had my bed turned around so that my feet were at the window so I could spend my days looking out over the trees.  I fondly remember watching a family of squirrels every morning.. Leaping ..playing.. seemingly flying from branch to branch each day before breakfast. For entertainment I was a voracious reader.. Mostly sci-fi... I also had a hi-end stereo system at my fingertips with reel-to-reel tape and turntable (with 200 albums) all within reach. That stereo helped me keep my sanity although I'm sure it helped ruin my hearing. A minor trade-off.

I always asked to have BOTH doors closed at all times for both my privacy and to keep the sound sequestered around me. On the wall to my right  I had (as I recall) posters of Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, and the Beatles. To my  left, a posters from Casablanca and the Marx Brother's Animal Crackers and between them a large round white-faced clock to remind me of how much of my life I was missing. It was the type that you could hear ticking and see the second hand sweeping in jerky increments..This was long before digital clocks.

At 12-noon (sharp) each day, my mother would bring me some sort of lunch, but on this day my mother had to run errands and had asked our neighbor, Polly Boston to come in to feed and check on me. At noon she was nowhere to be seen. I remember clearly being peeved. While I waited, I was listening to FM radio when suddenly the room went silent as if the power had went out.  I looked up at my ever vigilant wall clock and it was still noisily ticking away, but seconds later while my eyes were on it ... it stopped.  It was  precisely 12:12. There was no other sound in the house until....

I heard the door knob over to my left starting to turn.. I said.."Mrs Boston? Is that you?" No response... the knob twisted and turned a couple of times as if someone was trying to open the door but for whatever reason couldn't. Slowly the door opened. Something stood there. It was shaped like a man.. At least 6ft.. it was almost translucent. I could see it's internal organs, veins, heart, muscles, lungs. I could see it's heart beating. It had no discernable face. No eyes.. no mouth.. no ears, nor nose.  It took one step in. It slowly looked around the room then fixed it's attention on me laying just 4 feet away. It slowly walked over to me and stood there looking down at me. I was incapable of uttering a sound such was my fear. I wanted to scream but no words.. no sound could escape my lips. My heart felt like it was about to beat out of my chest. I remember thinking I hope I don't have a heart attack. I could hear my own heart beating. In my mind, this was no less than death incarnate here to take me.

The entity put one of it's hands on top of the other.. both  palms down (as one might do when performing CPR).. bent down, placed them right over my heart and pressed down. His hands seemingly went right through my cast and body directly onto my heart. At that point it felt like the bottom of my bed had dropped out.  I was free-falling into oblivion.. I remember trying to catch my breath put I couldn't.. I thought.. No.. I knew this being was trying to kill me and it would succeed. I would pass out any second. Today I would die.

Just when I feel like I'm gonna black out, out of the depths .. I hear a sound... The door to our kitchen had opened. It was Polly Boston with my lunch. At the same moment I heard the sound, so did the entity. It quickly turned it's head towards the sound. It quickly stood up. It looked down at me and then back at the sound. It turned to exit the room through the door in which it came. It looked back at me once then slowly and silently closed the door just as Polly opened the opposite door. Polly walked in, casually setting my lunch tray down, turned to me and said.. "My God.. you're as white as a ghost!".. I still couldn't speak although I was trying. I wanted to warn her. Would it come back and kill us both? She walked over to me and was feeling my head to see if I had a temperature when the music suddenly  came back on (all by itself) and scared the shit out of both of us.. I looked up and it was still 12:12 and I swear it was a few beats before the second hand started moving again...

1970.. One year before the preceding story, this 14 year old boy woke up at around 3am on a warm, Nashville mid-summer night due to a humming sound and bluish light coming through my bedroom window. I remember thinking.. "that's odd." There's nothing, but a dense wooded area behind my house and past that, a deep gully behind the trees about 150 feet away. No roads. No houses.

I slid off my bed and peered out my window across our lawn and through the thick wall of trees to what would be the first of two UFOs I'd see in my life.. I could only see glimpses of the craft, but as best I could tell it was round and about 30ft across. The bright blue light filtering through the foliage was blinding as the craft slowly moved (at 2-4mph) down the gully. It was directly beside my house when I saw it. Thinking back, it seems like a lighting effect Steven Spielberg would use. According to the USAF, I experienced the quintessential "Close Encounter of the 1st Kind." A sighting with no contact.

What sticks in my mind now is that I felt almost paralyzed by the deep penetrating hum and blinding light. I wanted to run out and into the woods and follow it to see what it was, but I could not leave my window as if I was drugged.. I wasn't scared.. Just unable to move. The close encounter only lasted maybe 60 seconds, but I've never forgotten it and until this very week at the age of 68, I had never for a second thought that seeing this UFO could be connected to my story.. The Entity. Now, I think they are.

2024-Present Day- A few nights ago I was channel hopping on cable. Virtually always an exercise in futility. I landed on the science channel on a show about alien abductions. Ordinarily that's not my cup o tea, but it was just coming on and it was featuring the world's most prominent alien abduction expert who had been interviewing "victims" around the world for over 50 years.. He was as old as I am so I assumed he'd accumulated some knowledge along the way and wasn't just doing this to see how many Facebook likes he could get...

He said that in many, if not most cases, the lucky abducted individual was either asleep or laying down when the close encounter occurred. Immediately the victims were aware that they could not move although they were fully conscious. His term was "sleep paralysis." and he explained it as a temporary inability to move or speak that occurs directly after waking up. Essentially paralyzed, unable to raise an arm or make a sound. Your ears ring, a weight presses down on your chest, and you struggle for breath. Some of the encounters were with the same small aliens with big heads we see in many movies. Others, he said, were in almost human form, translucent, and without faces. After reading my story... sound familiar?

As soon as he said this, something in my subconscious clicked as if a missing piece of the puzzle had been revealed. Facts came into focus and lined up perfectly. An epiphany! The sighting in 1970 right outside my house.. followed by a close encounter of the fourth kind.. ie contact with an alien being within 150ft of the first sighting... Two instances of "sleep paralysis." The faceless, translucent being. I don't believe in coincidences.

I now believe that the being I had contact with was no demon or death incarnate after all. The empirical evidence proves (at least to me) that my encounter was with an alien seeking contact of some sort.. Benevolent? Malicious? Indifferent? I have no idea, but I had the distinct feeling it didn't want to be friends, eat Reese's Pieces, or "call home."

Of course I have questions.. Was the first visit in 1970 a reconnaissance mission? And why would it come back in broad daylight unless it was unconcerned about detection? How did it enter and then exit my house? And what was it's intentions? I wonder if the timely appearance of my neighbor, Mrs Boston, saved me from an abduction? In some ways I'm actually relieved. For over 50 years I've been certain that the entity I saw in 1971 was a demon or death incarnate coming for me. One of my greatest fears has been that it would reappear on the day of my death. Instead, it seems clear to me that my encounter, while terrifying, was not uncommon. A thought that's not comforting.