Encounter record / 1977
Waimata Valley, near Gisborne, New Zealand, March 1977. Three women lay on a hillside, watching the sky. First came the banging, like tin cans buckling somewhere out in the dark. Then, at about 1 am, nurse Beverlea Parsons woke to find someone standing over her. She touched a metallic boot and turned away. About two hours went missing that night. Under hypnosis, Beverlea described a domed disc, a beam of light and an examination by a human-like man in overalls. Less than a year later, a glowing cigar roared just feet above her car. She would become, in one researcher's words, the first recorded New Zealand abductee to go public.
Gisborne, on New Zealand's East Coast. In the late 1970s the region lived through what the local press called the heaviest spate of UFO sightings recorded in the country. Beverlea Parsons was in her late twenties, an ophthalmology nurse at Gisborne Public Hospital. After shifts, she and friends sometimes drove up the Waimata Valley to watch the sky.