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UFO Encounter – Hawkes Bay, 1975A Personal Account of a Close Encounter With a UFO, By Suzanne HansenCopyright © S. Hansen 2007 At some stage in our lives, each and every one of us is bound to experience something that is a mystery to us. At the very least, this may be something as simple as misplacing an object that is subsequently never found - an experience that has minimal impact on our day-to-day lives. However, at the other end of the scale, we may have an experience that is so mysterious and unexpected, so inexplicable and confusing, that its effect on our life is on-going and traumatic. We may be afraid to reveal our experience to anyone for fear of being ridiculed, or in fact, we may even attempt to deny the experience to ourselves if it is beyond all that we have ever known. But all the while, beneath whatever ‘surface’ we have created around the incident, we know for sure that the experience was real, that it did happen, and – most nerve-wracking of all - that it might happen again at any time. Southern Hawkes Bay, North Island, New Zealand, 1975 Such an experience happened to me when I was 20 years old, living and working in the city of Hastings. It would definitely register at the ‘traumatic and life-changing’ end of the scale. Family friends owned a sheep station south of Hastings and I enjoyed staying at the farm on the odd weekend. Pete, one of my flatmates, also had friends on a sheep station in the same area and one weekend, we decided to visit our respective friends for a day. We left early in the morning and travelled south on State Highway 2. Pete dropped me at my friends’ farm, arranging to pick me up again at around 4.30 pm. I had a great day on the farm and at around 4.30, I was sitting up on a gatepost waiting for Pete to arrive. It had been a fine, golden Hawkes Bay day; the air was cooling off quickly now and there was snow on the tips of the Ruahine Ranges. As I sat looking out over the countryside, I suddenly experienced a strange feeling of premonition – a feeling that something was about to happen, without knowing any obvious cause. I tried to put the feeling to one side, but it hung around in the back of my mind regardless. Pete arrived to pick me up and I soon felt cheerful again. He had a terrific sense of humour and we had talked and laughed all the way on the trip down from Hastings, so I was anticipating a repeat performance on the way home. However, when Pete announced that he intended to take a ‘back road’ highway home to Hastings for a change instead of the main State Highway 2, I felt that strange psychic feeling again – like being ‘wired up’. Have you ever had that kind of intense feeling about something, without really knowing why? Anyway, we set off and I began to relax again as we swapped stories about how we had spent the day. We had planned to be home at our flat in time for dinner and the 6.30 news (as it was in those days). State Highway 50 was a fairly lonely road passing through endless farmland and crossing some wide, shallow rivers. Visible farmhouses were few and far between in those days, and there were no townships or settlements to pass through, as there were on the main highway further east. That feeling of apprehension was still nagging away inside me every now and again. We had been travelling in silence for some time, watching the sky changing; light and full of pastel colours, with the trees in the distance becoming dark silhouettes. We wound our way up to the top of a low hill and below us we could see a very long straight where the road ran parallel to a line of hills for a couple of kilometres or more. We proceeded down towards the straight. At that point we both noticed two extremely bright, white lights in the sky ahead of us and off to the left, up over the line of hills. By now we were just descending onto the straight itself. That anxious feeling came back as we both watched the lights. I looked briefly at Pete and saw a curious mix of interest and uncertainty on his face, which I attributed to him wanting to be right about it being a helicopter rather than a topdressing plane, but at the same time it gave me a momentary uneasy feeling. I turned to look at the lights again. Suddenly, before our very eyes, the lights just ‘switched off’ and reappeared instantaneously above the hills, closer to and parallel with our car. For a split second there was a disbelieving silence between us, and then the panic started. “God! What’s that?” I said. “It’s not a helicopter. What is it?” “Don’t be stupid – it’s a helicopter!” “Helicopters can’t do that!” “I don’t know! It’s a bloody helicopter.” But Pete had instinctively eased off on the accelerator and changed down into second gear. The two lights hung motionless and exceedingly bright in the sky – uncomfortably close over the hills. Only a few seconds had elapsed since we first saw them, and for a few more – nothing else untoward happened. I felt a momentary flood of relief, that perhaps it was a fast-moving helicopter after all! Pete’s emphatic words, “It’s a bloody helicopter”, had a reassuring ring about them. In those few suspended seconds in time, my rational mind was already telling me that everything was okay. It was as if my mind was trying to fit a strange occurrence into a ‘familiar’ box, to appease my senses and emotions. It must be a helicopter. However, this was not to be. To our astonishment and alarm, the lights again ‘switched off’, and reappeared instantaneously back along the line of hills ahead of us near where we had first sighted them. Now fear and panic really gripped us both. We were barely crawling in second gear, eyes fastened on the lights. My mouth had gone dry. Pete was murmuring, “What is that? Shit! What is it?” “Well it’s not a helicopter! What if it’s a UFO? It’s playing with us! I’m scared.” “Shut up! Shut up!” The lights suddenly pulsed several times in quick succession, and then grew larger and brighter, seeming to merge into one. Pete halted the car completely. In retrospect, that seems like a strange thing for him to have done at that point. Most people would have rammed their foot to the floor and got out of there as fast as they could. I wouldn’t even go so far as to say that our curiosity had got the better of us. We were both very scared and completely unsettled, but it was almost as if we were transfixed by this glowing ball. The light(s) suddenly ‘switched’ off again. We half expected them to come on again somewhere else, but they didn’t. We frantically swivelled our heads around, scanning the sky. I wound my window right down to get a good look. Nothing. My stomach was churning. Everything seemed strangely still. “I can’t see it. Can you see it Pete? I think it’s gone. What do you think it was?” “How the hell would I know! Let’s get out of here. Shit this is weird.” Pete accelerated off. In his haste to get away now, he graunched the gears and swore loudly. It was almost soothing to hear it! I noticed that my arms and legs were shaking. Very cold air was rushing in the open window, but it felt good - strangely mind-clearing. Pete changed into third gear. We had only travelled a very short distance but at least we were moving. We were silent – lost in our own thoughts and feeling ‘safe’ again. But then Pete’s voice broke the silence and spoilt that feeling. “Oh God!” he said quietly. “What? What’s the matter?” He was looking in the rear vision mirror. All the colour seemed to have drained from his face and his mouth was a thin line. “Whatever it is, it’s just swooped down the hill and it’s coming up behind us.” I stuck my head out the open window, looking back behind us.
Pete was absolutely shouting now, “Quick, shut the window! Hell what’s happening? Hey! What’s happening!” The car’s motor had stalled. The brightest imaginable light was radiating everywhere around us now, as if we had been swallowed up, and we could barely see each other illuminated within it – nothing else was visible outside. Instantly, the car began shaking and vibrating violently, followed by a feeling of compression and then smoothness, as if the car had actually left the road and become airborne. My ears were hurting as if a huge suction was being applied to the ear canals. I felt as if I had been hit by a mild electric shock and could hear myself screaming and Pete shouting and swearing. There was an intense buzzing noise - like a rasping electronic sound that seemed to reverberate through my entire body. In the midst of this hell and confusion, my brain somehow registered the fact that Pete had suddenly gone quiet and it seemed to take ages to turn my head in his direction. Pete was staring straight ahead, motionless, as if he was in a trance - his blond hair looking silver in the light. Using every last bit of energy, I tried to shut the window. One of the last things I remember doing is looking down at my hand and watching it moving towards the window handle as if in slow motion. I was fighting to keep my eyes slightly open in a narrow slit as the intensity of the light was now too great and extremely painful. The buzzing noise had intensified and risen in pitch and speed of vibration until unbearable. Everything surrounding me became so blindingly white that I must have somehow ‘shut down’. My peripheral vision closed in to blackness and I must have lost consciousness. Bang! “What the …..! What the hell’s going on! Shit!” It was pitch black outside and we were heading straight for a bridge. Beyond that in the headlights, the road wound off up a hill. We were at the far end of the straight! How did we get here? Pete was swearing, braking and thrashing gears and I gripped the edges of my seat. There was a terrible roaring, ringing noise in my ears and I was unbearably thirsty. The memory of some lights in the sky sprang up somewhere in my mind, along with confusion and fear of something – what? “The light, Pete. Where’s the light? What’s happened?” “What light?” “The light. You know – we saw some lights in the sky.” I began frantically scanning the night sky for them as vague memories began to filter back. “Shut the bloody window – it’s freezing.” “Hey! It’s dark! Oh my God – something’s happened! Remember the lights?” “What lights? It was a helicopter.” “No, we saw some lights a minute ago.” Pete started shouting at me, “Shut up about the bloody lights. Shut up! I don’t want to hear about it. Do you hear me?” For several minutes we continued in this way – me trying to jog Pete’s memory as more of my own memories flooded in, and Pete becoming more and more angry and distressed by the minute. Why was he doing this? It didn’t make any sense at all. Why was he denying what we had seen? Pete was driving way too fast and I decided it was better to drop the subject and leave him to settle down. We lapsed into a strained silence for the rest of the journey home. But my mind chattered on in that silence. I could remember the sunset and seeing lights in the sky that had behaved in a strange way. We watched them and then drove off. We must have hit a possum on the road or something, because there was a loud thump and Pete was swearing and seemed to be wrestling to get the car under control. Something had happened anyway. I can’t have been watching – but it gave me a fright though. There must be something wrong with his car headlights because they switched off and then on again. How did it get dark so quickly? How did we get to the end of the straight? “You’re late!’ said our flatmate Lyn. It should have been around 6.30! Pete and I glanced at each other in confusion and disbelief and I looked at the TV. The news should have been on, but some other programme was blaring away instead. I threw a barrage of questions at Pete again and he began yelling and denying having seen anything, and I noticed that his hands were shaking. Of course the flatmates picked up on the bits about lights and possible UFOs and began hurling ridiculous comments at us. However this was all brought to an abrupt halt when Pete yelled hysterically at us all to shut up and stormed out of the room choking back tears. There was a shocked silence. This was not the Pete we all knew. There were a few mumbled apologies and the subject was dropped. Pete had disappeared to his room and did not come out again that evening. I felt totally exhausted and disappeared into mine. Lyn came in to talk to me, wanting to know why we were late, why we didn’t seem to know that we were late, and why Pete was so upset and distressed. The shocking reality hit home to me that I couldn’t answer her questions. I could only tell her some vague story about lights in the sky and a terrifying incident that made no rational sense at all. I lay awake trying to replay the journey in my mind. Try as I may, I couldn’t fill in the gaps at all. I reeled the stages of the trip through my head like a roll of film and each stage seemed to move seamlessly into the next up until the time that we saw the lights. From then on the flow of events made absolutely no sense at all. For many years to come, I would play that ‘film’ over and over, trying to find an answer, trying to fill the gaps. I could be sitting on the couch having a coffee, in the shower, driving the car – the result was always the same – sheer frustration and anxiety that I could not piece an invisible puzzle together. Then one day, quite unexpectedly, I experienced what is described as a ‘flash-back’ and I recalled the car being surrounded by light and the feeling of being lifted off the ground. As to whether the thought that we had hit a possum was a result of my mind trying to rationalize the experience, or whether it was what is known in abduction terminology as a ‘screen memory’, I do not know. Eventually at some stage it occurred to me that the mere memory of this strange experience would illicit equally strange physical symptoms in my body. My palms would sweat; my armpits would prickle; my heart would race. I would feel jittery and anxious, and eventually tired and angry. Many years later, I would learn about the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress which can be caused by a life-threatening or extremely traumatic experience. It was a perfect match. An unexpected and tragic change took place in Pete. Over the weeks following our experience he became increasingly angry and morose. Our hilariously funny flatmate changed into a sometimes argumentative and other times reclusive shadow of his former self. He continued to refuse to discuss the incident with me and eventually left the flat. In retrospect, I can imagine that his ‘nuts and bolts’ scientifically-based belief systems were shattered and his logical mind was seriously challenged by impossible questions and answers he would rather not know about. For me, the incident became a wake-up call. I began to piece together other UFO related incidents that had occurred throughout my life since early childhood, and those that occurred in the years following this incident – in particular, during the time of the much publicized “Gisborne UFO flap’ of the late 70s and early 80s, when I was living north of Gisborne on the East Coast. I began to view these incidents differently and the initial fear I had felt began to melt away and gave way to serious research. In later years I would read about the characteristics and circumstances of alien abduction experiences and close encounters with UFOs and their occupants. Another perfect match, adding to the pieces of the puzzle. |
