The David Stephens and Glen Gray Encounter, Oxford, Maine (1975)

Monday, October 27, 1975. Around 2:30 in the morning. David Stephens, 22, was driving a quiet country road just outside Oxford, Maine, near Thompson Lake. Beside Stephens sat Glen Gray, the younger of the two.

A brightly lit UFO rose up out of a field. The two men said it was as big as a football field. It flew just above their car for half a mile or so. Then it shot a blinding beam of light at them. The car skidded sideways fifteen feet. Both men blacked out. The windows had been up. The doors had been locked. When they came to, stopped by the roadside, the windows were down and the doors unlocked.

The night was not over. At Tripp Pond, overlooking a dark lane, they saw a large craft no more than 300 feet from the roof of the car. Two smaller craft emerged from the water. Again and again they dove into the pond and rose from it. Then all three shot into the air and disappeared. The sighting lasted about 20 minutes.

They reached home around 7 a.m. It was hours later than they thought. Within hours their hands and feet swelled. They sweated and felt intensely cold at once. For several days they struggled to walk, see straight and talk. "I couldn't keep them warm enough," Stephens's mother said.

Oxford County deputy sheriff Eldon Bartlett heard their account that afternoon. The next day investigator Brent Raynes, tied by one account to the Center for UFO Studies, interviewed both men and drove them to both sites. Neither would get out of the car. Shirley Fickett of the International UFO Bureau arranged hypnosis with Dr. Herbert Hopkins, a physician from Old Orchard Beach. Glen Gray attended the first session, then withdrew.

Under hypnotic regression, Stephens described looking down on the car from a window in a strange circular room. Four beings about 4½ feet tall. Extremely pale. Bald, mushroom-shaped heads. Large white slanted eyes that never blinked. No mouth. Three webbed fingers and a thumb. A message not to be afraid sounded inside Stephens's head. Stephens resisted and struck one of them. A large device moved overhead, clicking. Blood was taken. Hair and fingernail clippings went into strange-looking tubes. Then Stephens was back in the driver's seat beside Glen.

Psychiatrist Dr. Berthold Schwarz questioned Stephens and eight family members for about 8½ hours. "David is telling the truth. It is a weird story, and it hangs together." Hopkins called Stephens "frank, straightforward, and I believe, honest." Raynes, Fickett and Schwarz all wrote up the case in Flying Saucer Review in July 1976.

September 11, 1976. A caller claiming to represent a New Jersey UFO research organisation arrived at the Hopkins home almost at once. Hairless. Dead-white skin. Bright red lips. A black suit and hat. Hopkins watched a coin go out of focus and vanish. The visitor said Barney Hill's heart "was taken just like the coin because he knew too much" and demanded the tapes be destroyed. Hopkins burned them and quit the case. Stephens had already received a warning from a man in a dark blue suit: "Better keep your mouth shut if you know what's good for you."

No hoax finding has ever been made against Stephens or Gray. In 2008, Howard Lance Hopkins, the doctor's nephew, called his uncle "a fantasy-prone individual" and the visit "a simple lie." Other family members defended the doctor's sincerity. Critics point to auto-suggestion under hypnosis, confabulation and the growing 1970s abduction story. The tapes no longer exist. Betty Hill, of the famous Betty and Barney Hill case, took part in the investigation and recorded Hopkins's account. The case endures as both an abduction story and one of the classic men in black encounters.