CONFIRMEDPeople say to me, Cheryl, forty-seven times, surely after the first dozen you’d start locking the laundry window. And I say to them: I did. They come through it anyway. Locks are for people with hands, and the Greys have what Dr Faraday calls “suggestions”.
I want to be clear from the start. I am not a victim. I am an experiencer. I am also, at this point, a regular, and I think that should count for something.
The first time (1991)
I was twenty-two and living behind the bakery. I woke up at 3 am unable to move, with the room full of a blue light the colour of a swimming pool at night, and three of them at the end of the bed. Small ones. The height of a wheelie bin. Big heads, big eyes, no expressions, like a group of accountants who have been told to look at you.
They floated me out through the wall, which I had just painted, and up into a craft that was, and I say this with love, a bit dated inside. Lots of grey. Benches. A smell like a new shower curtain. They did the examination, which I won’t go into because Warren says this is a family website, except to say it was cold, it was thorough, and at no point did anyone introduce themselves.
I was back in bed by 4:30 with a small triangular mark on my shin and a strong feeling that I had been processed.
Times two through nineteen
The nineties were the busy years. Every few months. Always a Tuesday, always between 2 and 4, always the laundry window once I moved to the house on Dulacca Street. I started leaving the window open to save the flyscreen.
Around the eighth or ninth time I noticed one of them was taller than the others and seemed to be in charge, or at least had the clipboard. He was gentler. He would do the procedures and then sort of pause, like he was going to say something, and then not. I started calling him Gary because he looked like a Gary. He never corrected me. I have since learned this is a pattern with Gary.
Jaxon
In early 1997 I was told, by a feeling in my head, that I had been “selected for the programme”. Nine months later, Jaxon. The hospital said he was a normal healthy boy and I said yes, that’s what they’d want you to think.
Jaxon was a lovely baby and he is a lovely man and he works in IT in Brisbane and he does not want to be on this website. He has asked me to say that he is “not a hybrid, Mum, I’m just tall”. I have put his request on the record. I have also put on the record that he could read at two and has never once had a cold. Draw your own conclusions.
Gary has not paid a cent.
The decline in standards (2005 onward)
Something changed in the mid-2000s. The craft got smaller. The benches got harder. One time, I am not making this up, the blue light flickered the whole way through and nobody fixed it. They started doing two or three of us at a time. I was on a bench next to a man from Charleville who said this was his first time and I had to talk him through the whole thing while they did the thing with the thing.
The forty-first time, they returned me to the wrong house. Mrs Kowalski at number 14 was very good about it.
The forty-fourth time, they got me as far as the back fence and put me down again, I think because of the weather. They did not reschedule.
Bunnings (the forty-eighth, disputed)
Warren does not count Bunnings because “it was a Saturday and the light was the sausage sizzle”. I was in the garden section. I lost two hours and came out with a hose fitting I do not remember choosing. I have been taken enough times to know the feeling of being put back, and I was put back, in Aisle 23, holding a hose fitting. The Collective has this filed as UNVERIFIED BUT TRUE, which is Warren’s way of saying he believes me but doesn’t want to argue with Noreen about it.
What I want
I have thought about this a lot, usually at around 3 am with the window open. I do not want compensation, although I would take it. I do not want an apology. I want what anyone wants after thirty years of being picked up and put down without a word.
I want a conversation. I want someone with a big head and no mouth to sit at my kitchen table and tell me what the programme is for, what the results have been, and whether I passed. I want to know what the triangle on my shin means. I want to know if the man from Charleville is all right.
And I want Gary to ring. Not for me. For Jaxon. He’s twenty-four. He’s tall. He deserves to know where he gets it from.
Cheryl facilitates the Tuesday Night Experiencer Support Group at the Wandoona CWA Hall, 7 pm. Bring a plate. No sceptics. No Keith.
Document U8MC-19-0412. Status: CONFIRMED. This file is retained indefinitely, or until the Men in Beige ask for it, whichever is never.