Alien Abductions

     09-May-88 09:07 EDT

Sb: APn  05/06 2057  Alien Abductions

 Copyright, 1988. The Associated Press. All rights reserved. 

By BRIAN MURPHY Associated Press Writer 

   BOSTON (AP) -- Joann Berte swears she was paralyzed by three-fingered aliens

and taken aboard their spaceship. Marianne Shenefield, who claims to have twice

encountered extraterrestrials, said people who have seen them have an aura. 

   Their stories are likely to be heard in dozens of variations this weekend at

a conference in Waltham expected to draw more than 250 UFO experts and people

who claim to have been abducted by extraterrestrials. 

   "I was immobilized. I couldn't move and I didn't think to speak. I just

watched," said Berte of a warm night on Dec. 10, 1979, when she says she was

awakened on a friend's porch in Rhode Island and carried in a paralyzed state

aboard an alien spacecraft. 

   Berte tells of observing a small, three-fingered alien in an incubator and

being brought to a glass-enclosed platform overlooking a table where her friend

lay with a tube extending from her navel. 

   "It makes you very angry," said Berte. "They don't ask your permission. They

just take you away." 

   Arthur Myers, a conference coordinator and member of a church group

interested in the paranormal, said the gathering is one of the first public

meetings of people claiming to have had close encounters of the third kind. 

   "It reminds me a lot of alcholism or homosexuals coming out of the closet,"

said Myers. "There's a stigma attached to the abductees. But once someone comes

forward with their story, others are willing to speak." 

   Marianne Shenefield of Agawam is one of those yearning to let people know

about her two experiences. Thirty-five years ago, she was an 11-year-old girl

building a tree house in Agawam on a July afternoon. 

   "Then I turned around and there was what I thought was a little boy in a

scuba outfit," said Shenefield. "Then I felt this floating sensation and the

next thing I knew I was in this round craft." 

   Shenefield said the aliens put her under an X-ray device and she was

observed by several aliens, who tried to communicate with her by a sound-making

unit. 

   In 1972, Shenefield said, a female-like alien captured her outside her home

and brought her into a small compartment. Shenefield said she was released

hours later, dazed but unharmed. 

   A degenerative eye disorder has reduced her sight to dim shadows and bold

streaks of light. But the ailment enables her to see auras, she said. 

   "I can immediately detect someone who has been abducted," she said. "They

are surrounded by an indescribable color. Believe me, I can tell." 

   Author Ray Fowler said about 80 percent of all UFO sightings can be

explained. 

   "But there are those instances that defy any explanation," said the former

Air Force intelligence officer, a keynote speaker at the conference Saturday. 

   "It's imperative that we study these things with an open mind, not gullibly

accept them or reject them out of hand. There are too many people who come

forward with nothing to gain and everything to lose." 

   Fowler, whose book "The Andreasson Affair" describes a family's encounter

with aliens, said he became interested in UFOs after seeing flying discs in

1947. 

   He is director of the Mutual UFO Network, an international group that

documents UFO sightings.