I can’t offer you any explanation of why this happens, but it I do know that I hear lot of stories just like yours from people that sound very sane and credible. I’m not convinced that this phenomenon is necessarily caused by “alien abduction”, but I’m hesitant to just write it off as a matter of zoning out or dozing off on your feet. I honestly don’t feel that this was what happened to me.

Thanks for telling us about this.

This particular experience was not a time loss but rather a time GAIN.

I was about 19 years old at the time, in college at University of Tennessee-Knoxville campus, and had been invited by a boy I had met to visit him at Fort Knox, Ky over New Year’s. My roommate and I debated the trip and decided at the last minute to go. It was very cold, snowing and the roads (this was in ’67) over the mountains between the two places were an icy mishmash of secondary and short stretches of interstate roads under construction, far different from the smooth interstates we travel on now. It took us about 8 (hair-raising) hours to make the trip in our little Volkswagen bug. When we got there, the whole experience of seeing the boy again was a disappointment, so we simply decided to get back in the car and go home even though it was in the wee hours of the morning. I took what I thought was going to be the first leg of driving and found myself slowly creeping over more an and more treacherous icy roads. To my dismay, my roommate had immediately fallen into a deep sleep. After couple of hours I tried to wake her so she could drive for a bit, but no amount of yelling, shaking or cold air with the windows down would wake her. I didn’t think too much about it as she was an early to bed person and a very sound sleeper, so I drove on, thinking sooner or later she would wake up…but no. I continued driving, rolling down the window, playing music and trying periodically to wake her..to no avail. There were no convenient rest stops or eating places back then. No well-lighted roads, and businesses were few and far between, and didn’t stay open all night back then either. I resigned myself to driving the rest of the way with no help, the roads getting worse and worse.
I seemed to sense myself “fading out” ..like going on “auto pilot” and THEN… I found myself pulling into the parking lot of our apartment complex. at about 7 am–at which time my roommate woke up and asked groggily, “Where are we now?” I told her “Home”. She looked at her watch and said, “That’s impossible.” We had apparently traveled the entire way in less than 5 hours.
Even weirder, though we both realized how bizarre the experience was, we never discussed it again. It was almost as if it was a taboo subject.

I just don’t know how to respond any longer to these accounts of missing time incidents. I’ve really been getting a lot of them — emails as well as comments on the blog. I wish I knew what to the heck they were all about. Some seem to have a strong UFO connection, as yours seems to, and others defy categorization. I find it both comforting and disturbing that so many people from different areas and walks of life have gone through this. I have to say, it’s starting to sound almost commonplace.

The two aspects of your story that I found the most intriguing were the fact that your daughter claims to have had these alien “dreams”. If you’ve read any of Budd Hopkins’s books, like Missing Time and Intruders, he talks about the abduction phenomena often occuring among families and over several generations. The other part that caught my attention was that you had a haunting experience and ghostly encounters. I know the UFO folks don’t like to mingle with the Ghost enthusiasts, but there’s been plenty of anectodal evidence that these supposedly different phenomena are often linked. This just further cements my feeling that a lot — probably all — of these different phenomena are all, at the most basic level, part of the same thing. Probably why I thought Hunt for the Skinwalkers was such an important book. The people at that ranch also experienced hauntings and poltergeist-like activity, as well as UFO sightings and encounters with bizarre creatures. Wow, ghosts, UFOs, and cryptids all in one place? But one has nothing to do with other, right? I’ve really come to believe that this is wrong thinking.

Thanks so much for sharing that with everyone. Best of luck to you and your family.

John

Background information: My daughter, then 6, had just undergone brain surgery for a tumor, (craniopharyngioma), and was still very unstable physically. I had to quit my job and stay in my parents country home near Burney while she convalesced. My son who was 5 was with us too. I was recently divorced so my life was a nightmare, needless to say. I also must metion, (sorry as I digress), that this remote property was haunted. We heard sounds of people around, (footsteps, bangs, doors slamming, knocks on wall), but no one was there. One night I awakened terrified of something coming down the hallway and I got up to turn on the bathroom light. The elecricity cut off and, in the pitch darkness, something sat on the bed next to me. The mattress moved, causing me to lean toward the thing that made it go down. I was quite awake when this occurred. Then the lights came back on. As soon as they did, I threw on some clothes, grabbed my kids and drove to town to find lodging but nothing was available – (also very freaky as this was a nothing town). I ended up having to go back to the house.

Now, to get back to the missing time part: My good friend and her children came up to keep us company for a few days- (it was around the 4th of July), and she had taken the Express bus from San Jose CA to Redding. The day she had to travel home was very hot and I was concerned because I had an older car that overheated frequently. We were also on a tight time schedule and she and I both were very aware of the time we left, how long it took to get to Redding, and when we’d be there in relationship to the bus’ departure. We were happy to be making good time and she was going to be at the station early, (if the good road conditions continued). Suddenly, we had this awareness that it was MUCH LATER. The day looked different: the shadows were longer, the daylight different. I looked at the clock and my watch, and it confirmed time loss of around 2 hours, (maybe more). We were very chagrined and kept wondering how this could have happened. Worse, she missed the one express bus and now we’d have to figure something else out. We decided it made more sense to continue into Redding, go to the bus station so she could buy a ticket and get the next days’ schedule. (the bus only ran once a day). She would have to get a motel room for the night too. When we got to the station and she was buying a ticket, the agent told her the bus had had some malfunction but they had just repaired it! It was going to leave after all, albeit late. To this day she and I scratch our heads in wonder as to what happened to us and our 4 children, (her two and my two). I do have dreams of flying and going very fast. I also have dreams of being in an “elevator” that goes sideways, up and down and tremendous speed. My daughter, now 16, was born around 9 years after this experience. She has always been afraid of aliens and described one to me as a little child. She said it was looking in her window. I chalked it up to a child’s imagination at the time. She also told me about her nightmare of being around aliens and us, (humans), mutating into aliens. She was the only one who was pure human. She said one other person was human, she thought, but then she saw his hand was an alien one. Well, there’s more but my knuckles are tired. I just pray to God that they leave me alone because I like my reality of being on terra firma!! The notion of being abducted does not sit well with me at all. PS Two years ago my brother, at the same country property, (whose location shall remain secret), saw a UFO hovering in the night sky. He said he did not see a craft but saw bright lights signaling another light in the distance, near Mt. Shasta. They were doing some sort of code. Then, a powerful beam of light swept from over the land, illuminating trees, river and fields, and abruptly went dark. There was no noise. Thank you for letting me share.