The article below was published in the daily newspaper Seattle Times, Seattle, Washington, USA, May 15, 1991.
EUGENE, Ore. - The UFO Contact Center International provides a haven from the hostility and ridicule that follows the terror of being abducted by aliens, members say.
"I tried to talk to a close friend, and now we haven't talked since. I get that from a lot of people," said Clay Kruger, a member of the center's board.
"But (at the center) I wasn't laughed at, I wasn't ridiculed. I could talk to people who had real good track records, real pillars of society."
Several members shared their unearthly stories with a small audience over the weekend at the University of Oregon.
Kruger, 30, said his first contact with UFOs occurred in July 1989 at his home in Kent. He awakened one night to see a cylindrical object outside, about 6-by-8-feet. It radiated a purple glow around the back yard and went to the front of the house.
Suddenly, he said, he found himself against a wall with nothing beneath him.
Kruger recounted two more nocturnal episodes of alien contact - one featuring a monkey-like creature in his living room.
Aileen Bringle, director of the UFO Center, said the trauma of her first encounter 38 years ago led her to organize the center in 1978. Today, there are 60 regional groups in North America.
Bringle, of Federal Way, described her 1953 encounter.
It was midnight. She was asleep in the car next to her husband, driving west near Pendleton. She awakened to his screams and looked out the window to see the entire landscape fully illuminated - in green.
"When something unknown is happening, there's no way to rationalize it," she said.
Eventually the sky darkened and they went on their way.
Since then, Bringle said, she has seen a UFO over Wyoming; been told by her ex-husband that five aliens entered his bedroom and stomped on a pair of shoes; and earlier this year awakened to find fingerprints on the insides of her thighs.
"That really disturbed me," she said. "I live alone."
Bringle said the debate about UFO contact intensified in 1987 when author Whitley Strieber published "Communion," an account of being abducted from his secluded New York cabin.
"Scoffing at (abductees) is as ugly as laughing at rape victims," he wrote.
In 1988's "UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game," Philip J. Klass included a "Post Script for Potential Abductees."
Klass wrote that if a person worries about a teenage daughter being impregnated by an alien, "shift your worries to more prosaic causes of pregnancy." Bringle calls Klass a "paid debunker."
Francesco Pagliaro, 38, of Eugene, set up the meeting after reading a letter Bringle had written in Omni magazine.
"I know these people are sincere," Pagliaro said. "You can see it in their faces."
