ALIEN HITCHHIKER

By Joy Barish

I have a pen friend I'll call O.B. for more than 10 years in North Carolina, a very honest down-to-earth, decent man, fairly religious. He takes the Bible literally but also allows for metaphysical concepts - very open minded which I find refreshing and unusual. Perhaps one reason he does so is that he has had so many experiences culminating in this alien hitchhiker episode that it would be hard even if he weren't as open minded as he is - to just brush them under the rug.

Years ago he told me of a sighting that I would call a brownie or a satyr (called URISK and there are many other names for this 5 foot tall goat-like creature) around Goshen, Indiana 20 or 30 years ago.

He had been walking between a railroad embankment and a stream called Yellow Creek when he heard a high pitched tinkling laughter to quote him exactly. He had just begun to take a few steps when he noted a man like face staring at him with short stubby horns high on the forehead and each one seemed to be above the outer corner of each eye. The eyes had a very intelligent look, he said, "they" suddenly narrowed (squinted) when the thing stuck out its tongue at him and emitted a strange sound which sounded something like a bleat (perfect for a man goat I guess) and something like a human voice -- very difficult to describe. Nose was long, broad and somewhat flat on top and he had a thick wavy beard which came to a point. Not the Devil or a demon (as some people might think) but again what in Scotland they call a Urisk, a kind of rough Brownie, half human, half goat. Very lucky to have about the house...who herded cattle and did farm work -- according to Scottish legend. Typically haunts lonely pools but sometimes craves company and thus follows terrified travelers... They lived as solitary fairies but met together at staged times. (The Encyclopedia of Fairies, Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bagies and Other supernatural Creatures by Katharine Briggs).

The site that my pen friend mentions certainly was lonely and isolated. I don't know if there is any correlation here but she ends this little item (re. the Urisk) with something from "Picturesque Sketches of Perthshire by someone named "Grahm" who says that a corrie near Loch Katrine in Scotland was "their" favorite meeting place.." So instead of a "loch" we have the Yellow Creek. Interesting?

OB continued to me that when the THING emitted that sound he said something and the creatures face took on an expression of shocked surprise, as perhaps he didn't think he could be seen or maybe he thought I couldn't talk. Then it bolted away through the thicket towards the Lions baseball field. He returned to that area later but this time he didn't hear the "tinkling laughter" as he had heard before he saw the Satyr. I also see from his letter that he heard a splashing sound as could be made by muskrats.

He figures now the head was as "large as any human head" and he estimates it was about "5 feet tall and the face as a beige color perhaps." Hair on the head and face were pure white but the goat like body appeared to be grey. He does not know ir it had four legs or not. I've thought for years he mentioned "hooves" but can find no mention of any now. Satyrs are usually hoofed. I would bet a $1,000 the creature was hoofed. When he saw the entire creature he was pretty sure it had a goat-like tail but the eyes were totally human though quite slanted. He calls the tinkling laughter feminine now which makes me suspect fairies were in the company of this creature. He feels maybe if he had ignored the creature he might have found the source of the tinkling laughter. How many times have you read of tinkling elfin voices, re UFO entities. I'm just citing this as the most dramatic encounter this pen friend had leading up to the hitchhiker episode which occurred a few years ago outside of Salisbury, Virginia where he has some relatives and where he himself lived at one time.

This same pen friend once told me of being ill in North Carolina (bedridden) and suddenly finding himself on the other side of his bedroom door in the kitchen. We keep fining these strange events in our contactees lives and though I have had three UFO experiences myself, I have not as many. But this Satyr one occurred 20 or 30 years before the "alien" but let us continue..

He once told me of some entities a nephew had at age 4 or 5 - but I can't find the letter now - he is nearly a professional cartoonist though he is not in that profession, but he does some excellent drawing and in this particular letter he drew a picture of the nephew's entities he saw under a house. The child gave them a name and the drawing OB did was of little faces dark in color edged in white. The child began behaving better after being with these creatures. He was a troubled child in school and at home. Again, one can equate that after UFO encounters behaviors change and lives change.

In another letter he told me of seeing as a child what some might designate as a gigantic frog sitting close to his house in Indiana. He thought it was a "green rock" until he got closer to the thing which had an open mouth with human like teeth with a gap between the mid upper ones. That is how detailed this man is with descriptions. This is another reason I have believe all these things. This creature terrified him he says, and he ran all the way to the other side of the house to tell his Dad about it.

In another letter he tells me that when he was very young he had what he terms a dream vision and he describes "voices" coming from his front yard. He went into the kitchen and through the window he saw young ladies in what he describes as tiered dresses seated on the lawn along with an equal number of young men attired in vests with silvery cravats and strange looking trousers with very high waists, the legs of which terminated in a sort of lowered point in the rear. He ends this description with "they looked like characters from a Charles Dickens novel though he was not acquainted with Dickens at the time - he was so young." They seemed to be having a picnic, he says, for he saw a white linen cloth spread with what appeared to be bottle cups and bowls of varying sizes. He ran to his father and coaxed him to come see but naturally it was gone when the father got thee. Again we see very extreme sensitive psychic sensitivity.

All these experiences again, lead up to the climax with the alien hitchhiker. I don't mean to frustrate you, re UFOs and UFO entities but I want you to see a typical psychic background which many contactees do have. This subject my friend (OB) told me a few months ago of a car stalling a few years ago but no UFO was seen. A UFO may have been involved. This occurred though, after his confrontation with the hitchhiker, who by the way, he saw again last November 82 with his wife this time but this time he wisely (?) whizzed right by.

In a recent letter he mentioned some eerie cuts. I apparently in an earlier letter had discussed the queer cuts some abductee contactees (percipients) had discussed with him in "Missing Time" by Budd Hopkins. He says that recently he was leaving the men's smoker at the mill he works in in North Carolina when a fellow employee asked him why there was a thin line of dried blood running from his wrist bone on his right hand (3 inches long he says) towards his little finger. Blood had accumulated between it and his ring finger but he has no idea what caused the wound; he was near no machinery. I know in an earlier letter he mentioned a brother walking with him (as a child) and his brother was barefoot in some rural area - and suddenly he had gash like cuts in his foot - and they retraced the path and there was nothing on it to cause such wounds - as if made by an ax!" He said "was the brother abducted? I'll have to check on events around this "walk" in the near future."

In a recent letter OB told me that he had a desire recently for small scissors to trim his eyebrows when at the factory he works for... and he verbalized this wish to himself and as he entered the hallway after leaving the factory rest room towards an EXIT door (no windows there he says) he inexplicably found just the type of small scissors he desired lying on the "suggestion box!" He says many weave room workers carry such scissors but not that small and these certainly were not "weaving sheets" for they are blunted on the tips for safety. He says the summer before he had purchased similar scissors at a local drugstore and then they had vanished shortly after from his medicine cabinet at home. Did he find these apported to the factory? Who knows. Anyone who can go through doors, see a picnic from the 1800s, receive a mysterious cut, encounter a giant frog, see a Satyr, who knows - the Sky is the limit. He mentions a pole lamp that used to relight during the late evening or early morning hours and he would sometimes have to go turn the thing off in the middle of the night.

On checking an old letter, I see the incident with his brother was in Meadowview, Virgina. He had noticed his brother was leaving bloody tracks as he walked... his brother lost a large quantity of blood and required 14 stitches.

In the cases in "Missing Time" one wound was treated at home and in most of them including this one, no pain is experienced though all the cuts become scars and are still visible 20 - 30 years later.

OB has definitely experienced many disappearing objects in his lifetime. A year or so ago he mentioned putting down his reading glasses he had bought in a near by town several years before -- then he got up and noticed how cloudy it was out so he got up to close the doors/windows and when he came back his glasses were gone. He searched every logical and illogical places but they were gone. He finally had to buy another pair. They have never appeared since.

One thinks now of that couple in Argentina in the 60s who drove their car, a Peugeot, into some kind of mist and suddenly found themselves near Mexico City. The lady (of the couple) died of Leukemia or some cancer like disease a few months later and the husband never got his Peugeot back from the government who confiscated it when it was shipped back from Mexico.

(To be continued)