It is a divisive subject - those who believe in alien visitors to our planet, and those who do not. But there are many people on this planet who earnestly claim they have been visited by aliens, and have been abducted and taken off this planet, even to alien homeworlds.
While their accounts may vary, the one thing they share is a conviction in what they saw, what they experienced, and the impact it had on their lives.
New York photographer Steven Hirsch, 63,has interviewed and photographed many abductees. He said: 'I don't want my audience to have any preconceptions about these people before they see my images and read their words. 'My interviews barely break the surface of what is going on in their lives ... or in their minds. I'm not an analyst, my questions are not intended to find answers but to allow people to tell us their stories. 'We've become desensitized to the TV sound-bite. With these projects we can stare at the picture. Stare into their eyes. Feel their angst. It's a very simple approach. There's no distractions.'
Here, the 'abductees' tell the stories, in their own words:
CYNTHIA:'I've got to meet numerous types of beings'
When I was in my thirties I found out from my father the truth about a government experiment that I was part of in which they were using other alien DNA to create me. I also have been on the ships most of my life off and on. I've had lots of contacts. Most of my contacts began when I was a teenager although I had it when I was younger. I was being taken. I've been taken on ships quite a bit.
I've also been on various ships. Mother ships and transporter ships. I've got to meet numerous types of beings. I've met Salamander beings and I've met Greys, various different types of Greys. I've also met the Blue Arcturians which are incredible. They all have their own personalities and their own purposes. So I've met Blue Arcturians. I've met Andromedans, the Assyrian Warriors of Light. I've met the Sirius Nephrons. I've also met the Cat People that are from Sirius. I've met many. I've actually seen people that can shape shift from human looking to Reptilians.
As far as the abductions. I've had numerous of them where they've shown me around various ships. They've also explained to me about the Hybrids and about the Starseeds that are here on planet Earth, why they're here and how they're here to help humanity. My job primarily is to awaken the Starseeds to remember why they're here on planet Earth.
'I have communication with beings of all different races. I've had communication with Reptilians as well as those that look like werewolves. They look like werewolves on steroids. I've also had communication with the human looking ones, with Ashtar, with Sananda, with Archangel Michael. I've also been able to help others go to the ships. Part of my mission is to help people get to the ships that need to be on the ships.
'There's a lot of what you would consider updating when it comes to with what's happening to planet Earth and when strategies have to change then many of the Starseeds that are here on special missions are taken to the ships where they are then informed of the changes in the strategies and so forth of what is going to be happening in the future. I've never yet ever met a being that was malevolent. I've always meet the benevolent ones. I've never experienced unconditional love till I've met them face to face and had conscious contact with them. They have taught me the importance of living with unconditional love and working with the light of source. This is the power that rules the universe.'
JEFFERY: 'They took my memory away'
It happen eleven years ago in St. Louis, Missouri at an exotic dancing bar in North County and I went in there to just have a few drinks and look at some strip you know girls dance around the pole and this guy comes in out of nowhere and he was uh black in color but he had a very strange voice.
And he knew things about me that no one in the bar knew. Like how many trips I took.
He knew things I was doing. He knew when my parents were gonna die and what they were gonna die of. Then he tells me he's here to abduct me. Replace forty nine chips. And Dr. Lewinsky one of those hybrids, Grey hybrids was gonna do the operation.
And they were gonna take me aboard a flying saucer. Um, I thought I escaped this guy. I did a physic reading yesterday with a lady, she told me I was abducted, I was swept up for like three hours and they did exactly what they said they were gonna do to me and then took me back to the bar and woke me up and I lost like three hours in time. That's all I remember. They took my memory away from this abduction.
It was a human hybrid. He looks like a black man but he had a strange voice that wasn't like black in origin. He sounded like a white man.
About my life? I remember my father told me he was abducted by aliens in the 1950's. And now he's dead. He died of cancer just like the aliens said he would. He died in 2001 after September 11th. The aliens said my mother was gonna die in 2011 and she did.
She said I do but I don't know where they are.
JILL: 'Zeta Reticulians'
These beings that call themselves pure light beings and they were a collective of beings that were here to assist humanity.
And they came through with this message that had about shifting conscious for human kind at this time. I sensed the wholeness of them that there were many and they came through with information every time.
And I also felt other beings that were present. The little kind of classical beings but kind of silvery light. They would be doing things to my aura or to my energy and I could feel them.
I could see visual images of them activating something in my conscious. That's how I perceived it, they basically said that into my mind that they were activating things. So they could communicate better with me.
There's beings from everywhere out there. And it's fascinating. Some of them were also the Zeta Reticulians. The messages from the Zetas are basically that they're helping us in our evolutionary process and all of these events that are happening, that people are experiencing such as abductions are to help us evolve. Help us evolve as a species. Into a more luminous being, a lighter being.
Our actual DNA is being shifted so our physical bodies are actually becoming lighter in frequency and they're helping us to do this. And to activate abilities that we have inherently but that have been basically been shut off. Not activated.
So we have this extra DNA that we're not using. Or another level to our DNA that we're not using. And we're supposed to be as a species moving in evolutionarily speaking into a lighter dimension actually. They also say it's an awareness. A new level of awareness. So all of the being Zetas are on one level or another from different perspectives. And the Zeta beings that often are experienced as abduction, experiences are here specifically, they were asked to help with this process because they're actually experts in genetic, I'd say manipulation, but it's really not what they would call it.
They have the ability or they've developed the ability to work with genetic structures. It's beyond what we think of as genetic because there's an energetic level, that I'm not a scientist so I don't know what to really call it but there always comes that message that there's an energetic component to this.
JOCELYN: 'It was a mantis being'
We were taken to an underground base near the Sedona area. At the underground base, my friend and I were separated from the rest of the group that had been abducted. Which was my two daughters, my husband and another woman that was staying next door.
My friend and I were seated in kind of these egg shaped seats. Some kind of apparatus was put around our head. And there was this long cylinder kind of device that had a blue, looked like a blue flame that was coming out of it and they put this up around my head, around this other golden device and a alien came in.
It was a mantis being. And they said, there was this little teardrop, kind of looked sort of like a pendulum upside down. What they wanted me to do was move it with telekinesis through this hoop and literally jump through this hoop and I couldn't do it so the mantis helped me put it. Then they did this blue flashing thing and then they said now you try it and I was able to move it through the hoop. I was told at that time they were upgrading my pineal gland for intuition so i have more physic ability.
SEBASTIAN: 'I saw this ET'
It was like three years ago. I saw this ET. It woke me up in the middle of the night, while I was mediating. They exist. If some could go like this and open your eyelids while you're mediating, while you're in deep man there's something out there. It looked like a little kid except it had big eyes, it looked just like a little kid except it had big eyes, small nose and a little mouth. Big eyes, small nose and a little mouth.
I'm thinking that because, Einstein was right about something. Albert EInstein was right about something. How there's different dimensions and different realities and stuff. I'm thinking they went through time if you will you know. If their out there if they know all this and they have all this technology and all this stuff, what are the odds of them coming back you know?
They didn't probe me, they didn't do nothing. They just opened up my eyes. It was kinda crazy because before that I just asked for something like that to happen just for proof and I just got it you know? It was there. It happened. I was a little bit scared at the moment. It was something crazy.
How did it leave? Just like that it disappeared. You think what you want but that's what happened to me.
JEANIE: 'They're gonna knock me out with that white light again'
Anyway this particular night this was around the time of the full moon and the Hale-Bopp Comet was very prominent in the sky and I had just come home from a fire walking ceremony so that was an intense evening and I kind of awakened in the middle of the night with feeling this weird heat down around my sexual area and I was waking up going, 'What in the world' and then all of a sudden I could feel these long skinny bony fingers drawing circles on my right ovary and I felt the paralysis and I thought, 'Oh shoot they really are here, oh my God.'
I'm not sure how I saw them. If it was you know tuning in and seeing them on what level. My room looks dark and I always sleep with my light on. I've done that since I was a child.
So when I'm realizing they're with me the energy feels different. It was totally unnerving to me to recognize that they really were visiting with me and I could see there was a smaller Grey on my right hand side and a slightly taller one on my left and I remember telepathing to the Grey, 'Please stop doing that, I don't want you to touch me.' I asked him three times.
It didn't stop so I'm not sure if it was my astral arm that came out and I reached over and I grasped his long skinny bony fingers with my left hand and said, 'I asked you not to touch me, please do not touch me.'
And then I noticed the Greys on each side of my bed looked at each other and I thought, 'Ah shoot, they're gonna knock me out with that white light again.'
I have seen myself on ships. Either driving them with somebody who is a well known abductee or I was in a huge mother ship one time where I was being taken by, guided by a taller Grey that had on a bright red robe. He's more or less like my teacher.
Then I went into this conference room and there was all these different beings from wherever and then there was a seat that I knew was just for me. So then I sat next to this being that had a body that looks similar to, I wanna say like a beef jerky stick, beef stick. It had that shape and then he had just a round head and three tubular extensions.
And when he looked and little tiny skinny arms and legs and he looked at me and I heard this energy, I could see it go 'wit were wit.' And I laughed because I knew he was saying hello to me, 'How have you been? I haven't seen you in a long time.'
SASHA: 'They were all humanoid'
I was lying breathing deep and fast to the powerful evocative music and there I was. My consciousness was in the middle of this huge dome like structure.
The inside of the structure was white and then there were coves in it that were big enough for people to sit in meditation and they were sitting cross legged. Some of them wore white robes. Some of them had long hair. They were all humanoid.
There were some I couldn't quite tell what they were. But I got the feeling they were a type of human. Some of them were huge. Some of them were small and they were all in their coves and it was all part of this huge dome and the atmosphere in this place was absolutely beautiful. It was golden light and the background was white, like it was whitewashed and it was a place of meditating on peace and love.
LISA: 'I had a hole in the back of my head'
There was a knock at the door and there was a Grey being standing there.And this being handed me this small baby. I looked up to him and he handed me a second one that shouldn't have been there. I woke up screaming and so angry. Come back with bruising or woken up I guess with bruising that shouldn't have been there. I had a hole in the back of my head that under black light glowed with a triangle around it. I like to tell myself that they were dreams but somewhere inside myself I know it was more than that.
NANCY: 'The car was totally immobilized'
In the summer of 1961 when I was twelve years old, I was at my girlfriends house and we were playing and her father yelled for us to come outside, he wanted us to see something. When we walked outside we immediately saw a giant silver craft. It was silently hovering above a tree. It had red, green and white lights that I thought at the time were rotating but I realize they were pulsating.
Someone called the police. Two Novi police came. Her father actually brought a telescope out and he asked me to look through the telescope, I said, 'Why? It's right there.'
I didn't even understand why I would even look through a telescope. It was so close. And then there was a car coming down the road. There was a tree here and a craft here and a car coming down the road and as it got right underneath the craft, a beam of light came out of the bottom and it went right to the roof of the car and as soon as it touched the car the car was totally immobilized.
I just remember screaming and being excited and jumping up and down. I remember tugging on one of the police officers arms and saying, 'Do something. Do something.' After that I remember being home and Mom and Dad telling me to not talk about it, forget about it, hoping that I would forget about it and it would go away. So for fifty years I never shared it with anyone, not with family or friends or anyone.
Six months ago I met Dr. Harry Wellness and I told him my story because he was a Ufologist and I knew he would believe me and not think I was crazy. He found a regression therapist for me. I had no idea I just wanted to remember the incident more clearly. And at the end of the first regression I remember seeing that my body was rumbling, was a word I never used. My body was rumbling and waving to the low hum of the craft and that was the end of the first regression.
In the second regression, I actually remember being aboard and a procedure that was performed on me. There were three Greys. They performed a laparoscopy on me. In 1961 in the medical field there were no laparoscopy.
They explained to me that they wanted to see inside. They described themselves as teachers. They promised they would get me home safely. I remember in that regression that as the craft was leaving they let me see them leaving and they wanted me to see them leaving. The reason being that they promised and they telepathically told me, 'See we told you we would get you back safely.' That was important to them to relay that message to me.
In the third regression I remember communication that I had with, I called him Mr., because that's how we refer to adults, Mr. and Mrs. back then. And I remember my conversation with him as I was leaving the craft. And he corrected me that it was called a ship and the reason it was called a ship was that it goes in the water as well as in the air.
And I watched how the doors shut. They shut like this. They wrapped around. All the instruments that they use on me when they did the laparoscopy were retractable. They all came out of the wall. It was all neat and clean. There was nothing in there. It was just silver, white floor, a silver table that I was on.
Three Grey beings. The pilot looked like a normal anybody's dad. I said Mr. why did you let them hurt me. And he said, 'Your pain was perceived.' And I got really mad at that remark. I realize that my pain. I realize now that my pain was perceived. They didn't hurt me. They didn't want to hurt me. But I was watching the needle and seeing the needle. My pain was perceived.
I remember the first night that I got home after I was taken, staring out my bedroom window forever. And wishing for them to comeback. 'Please come back, please comeback.' I'm here. Come get me.
CAMILLE: 'They had big white heads'
I had a sighting with my boyfriend. We were walking the dog and the dog was barking at this squirrel that had run up a tree and we were looking up. We were looking at the squirrel.
This was in Silver Lake section of Los Angeles. And we saw this thing in the air that was black and it wasn't moving. It was a bright blue sky day and I remember looking at him and saying, 'It's a UFO'.
A blue light had come through my ceiling. It was this very particular turquoisey kind of blue. And it was very solid like a column with like a bottom but it didn't flare out, it was like a solid beam. And it came into my room and when it touched me I was frozen and I curled into a ball and I went through the ceiling.
And the next thing I know I'm in this white misty room on a table. I saw this row of beings to my left that were tall. They had white robes on with high collars. They had some kind of emblem here. I wanna say it was like a triangle inside a circle. They had big white heads and big black wrap around eyes. They all looked the same. I was terrified.
VIVIAN: 'They're so ugly'
Me and my partner decided we were going to go for a walk up on Bell Rock in Sedona. Bell Rock is known for being a vortex, an energy vortex. I didn't know what that meant. I just thought we would go up there and feel some energy changes or something. My partner doesn't feel anything so we basically we're going for a walk in a nice area and see if we can feel anything. I had no idea there was any connection with alien activity there at all. Zero. Didn't even cross my mind.
We had to walk a distance, maybe three miles to get there. I started to notice out of the corner of my eye there's a figure next to me and the figure, we call them the shirt boxes because if you can imagine a man's shirt box it's that shape except that the thing is about four feet tall and it's got little sticky legs, its got two eyes and something that's a little off center and kinda looks like a turkey gobble for a mouth.
It's made of white plasma material in some kind of square membrane and it's lit up. Anyway it appears to be about four feet tall something like Sponge Bob. So Sponge Bob was walking with me and I'm getting tired. I said, 'I don't think I'm going to make it to Bell Rock today.'
And Sponge Bob says, by the way we communicate telepathically, I've never ever heard a voice, Sponge Bob says, 'Yes you are, you're going'. All right. All right, I'm going. So I walked a little bit farther and I said, 'You know I really am getting tired.'
And Sponge Bob says, 'No you're not, you're going, you're going'. All right, I'm going, I'm going. So I go a little bit farther and I'm really tired now and I turn to Sponge Bob and I say, 'Look it, I don't know who you are but I think I'm done'. 'You're not done' and Sponge Bob starts pushing me, physically pushing me, from the behind.
Oh my God. 'All right, all right I'm going'. And then I notice there's another one of these guys. Now there's two of them and they're walking with me. Wait there's another one. I walk a few more, maybe ten or thirty feet and there's ten of them now.
The whole thing's so bizarre I don't know what to think of it anyway but I'm walking. So I'm walking and there's ten of them now, then there's more and there's more and by the time we get to Bell Rock there are literally thousands of these guys.
And I see other humans walking around and nobody sees them but me. They are laughing and singing and dancing. The happiest most loving little creatures. And I asked them, 'Why me?' and they said, 'You're one of us.' In the back of Bell Rock there's a Stargate. There was a pipe going up. I could see their little bodies were being sucked up in the vortex in the pipe. Sucked up into the heavens.
BRUCE: 'You're on one of the moons of Saturn'
When I was seven years old, i went to sleep one night in Indiana. I was a corn feed farm boy. In the middle of the night I woke up just basically cause my nose was itching and I went to scratch my nose and there was glass over my face and it startled me for a second and I couldn't understand what was happening so I reached up and I was kind of panicking, when someone reached out and took my arms, folded them across my chest and held them down across my chest and said: 'Relax you're perfectly fine, just stay calm' and I said, 'What's happening?'
He said,'If you're ready I'm going to let you loose and show you something.' Well he let me loose and I sat up and I was on some kind of metal stand and I was wearing a space suit and in from of me was a guy wearing a space suit.
And I couldn't see his face cause his shield was gold in color. And I said 'What am I doing here' and he said, 'Well we wanted to show you something that human beings have never seen and we wanted you to see this'.
So I said, 'Really this is cool.' You know this is a little boy having and experience of a lifetime you know, I said 'Great.' So he said, 'Follow me.'
So he goes off and he opens the door, he reaches up on the panel, activates this thing. These doors open. This ramp goes down and I follow this guy out, down this ramp. I was standing on dirt and I was wondering where I was at.
And right in the sky to my left was a huge moon like body and in the immediate background was Saturn. And I could see hundreds and hundreds of rings. And I said, 'Where am I?' and he said, 'You're on one of the moons of Saturn.' I said, 'Why did you bring me here?'
And he said, 'Because these two moons are going opposite directions. They get to a certain point and they revolve around each other and go back the opposite direction. I just wanted you to see that.' Well the thing is after he showed it to me, they took me back in, he knocked me out and when I woke up the next morning I was in my bed.
I looked off in the distance and I saw a light over the mountains. It clearly looked like a UFO to me. So I said out loud, 'If you're coming for me, you outta get your asses over here and get it over with.' And as soon as I said that, this thing leaped at supersonic speeds, it went zoom and just stopped right over my head. It was huge. It was circular, anywhere from fifty to seventy five feet across. And it was surrounded in light.
And this thing was ebbing, this light at a slow ebb. And it had all these colors in the rainbow like pink and teal green and red and orange and yellow. It was just sparkling at this low ebb. But it didn't do anything. It just stayed there. So I'm sitting there looking at this thing and about ten the higher it got the brighter it got then ten minutes came and went and nothing happened. Then suddenly this thing starts ebbing way, way up and the higher it got the brighter it got untill it got almost white hot looking and when it went bright white looking it suddenly disappeared right in from of my eyes. It didn't fly off it didn't shoot off it literally just went, 'sheeeeeesh', disappeared.
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