Abducted
The book that proves the truth is out there.
Jason Andrews looks like an ordinary 14 year old. His bright blue eyes, fringed with dark eyelashes, are set in a round intelligent face. He is average at school but gets bad marks for forgetting to do homework.
He's cheeky when he can get away with it, terrific on the computer, hangs out with his friends and thinks money grows on trees. A normal boy -- except that those blue eyes hide a terrible secret.
For Jason has been abducted by aliens.
Today, The Sun reveals his gripping story -- the most extraordinary tale of alien abduction ever.
In the past, such stories have often been dismissed as the fantasies of cranks. But the mind blowing events you will read about, happened to this very ordinary family from Kent.
They are not weirdos. They are not fantasists. Jason's Mum Ann and Dad Paul, both 41, run a 10-arce smallholding next to Ministry of Defence training site near the village of Crouch. In the evenings Paul drives a taxi to make ends meet.
Ann felt compelled to draw this image of an alien, right [typical greys head], after her family's experiences. And now they have told their incredible tale in a new book, Abducted. This week The Sun's Mike Ridley adapts their story. Read it...then make up your mind.
The astonishing story of alien abduction in rural Britain.
Jason Andrews fell into a deep sleep on the sofa after his first proper birthday party.
He was four years old, stuffed full of birthday cake and shattered after running around the house with his friends.
Jason's Mum Ann, relieved everything had gone well, settled down for a quiet cup of coffee with her husband Paul and her Mother Vi.
A loud banging at the door of their cottage in Slade Green, Kent, interrupted their chat.
It was 10 o'clock at night, too late for casual callers. The noise was urgent and insistent.
Louder than a fist, it was more like a heavy boot being thrust against the door with huge force. Paul flung the heavy oak door wide. The banging stopped the moment he touched the door. There was no one there. He peered up and down the lane that led to the cottage. It was empty.
As Paul stepped back into the living room there was a loud crack of thunder. The storm woke seven year old Daniel, the older son, who had been asleep in the bedroom. He climbed onto his Grandmothers lap. Jason slept on.
Suddenly, there was a flash of lightening, so fierce that even Paul, a big, unflappable man, jumped. Jason sat bolt upright. His eyes open, staring, but oblivious to the room and the people around him.
He started to talk, pouring out an incredible stream of numbers, as if he'd hit the jackpot on some weird, mental fruit machine.
Fantastic numbers, huge numbers, strange algebraic configurations, mathematical terms like 'pi' and 'binary codes', all spewed out of the mouth of a boy -- not yet at school -- who normally struggled to count to ten in his picture books. The loud banging at the door began again. It seemed to come from the windows and the doors at the same time.
The whole cottage seemed to shake. Paul grabbed the phone to dial 999 [UK emergency services]. Nothing happened. He had a dialling tone but the numbers did not register.
Jason stopped talking. At exactly the same moment, the banging ceased.
Then Jason slid from the settee and, still in a trance, started to walk towards the door. Paul put his hands on his small son's shoulders, gently restraining him. The child looked up at his Father and replied in a strange emotionless voice: "They're waiting for me, I have to go." As he spoke the knocking began again.
This time his Father grasped him firmly. Jason struggled and Paul, in desperation, shook him violently to snap him out of it.
Jason fought harder. Then the banging receded, dying out completely as Jason looked at Paul and asked innocently if he could watch TV.
Paul picked up the phone again and this time was able to get through to the Police.
When two officers arrived he went through what had happened, without mentioning Jason's part in it.
They went outside but could find no signs of damage.
All four members of the Andrews family claim to have had X Files experiences.
Strange things have surrounded Jason from the moment he was born. Ann would put him into a cot in his bedroom and find him later lying under the cot. Twice she found him under a chair.
One terrifying night she could not find him at all. Her screams brought an answering wail from behind the door, where Jason was lying on the floor.
She thought Daniel, then four, was the culprit.
But Daniel, now 18, remembers that, as a youngster, aliens visited his bedroom too.
When he was four they turned to Jason. He says he is paralysed in bed on the nights Jason is abducted.
Ann has witnessed aliens on the family's smallholding. She says she too has been abducted but, unlike Jason, does not remember everything that happens.
And Paul, the most skeptical of the lot, once witnesses a bright orange circular object darting upwards towards the sky at enormous speed.
After Jason's fourth birthday, electrical equipment in the house developed a life of it's own -- the TV or hi-fi would come on in the middle of the day or night.
One night Ann was drifting off to sleep when the house was bathed in a bright blue light. The lane and farm buildings were lit, brighter than daylight.
A terrified scream came from Jason's room. "They're back, they're back!" he shouted in hysterics.
The screams subsided to sobs and the intense light went off suddenly. Paul refused to admit a connection between Jason's screams and the light. But over the next weeks Jason changed. Bedtimes were a battleground.
He was only really settled if he slept on the floor next to his Mother's side of the bed.
He became anxious and fractious. He would not even go to the toilet alone.
As Jason grew older he still suffered disturbed nights. Ann would wake him for school and sometimes he would get up with muddy streaks down his legs and arms, yet she knew he had bathed the night before.
Sometimes his pyjamas would be caked with mud and his feet and hands scratched.
At first the couple tried to dismiss it as sleep walking. But early one morning Paul poked his head into Jason's bedroom. He had disappeared. Panic stricken, they checked the shed in the back garden. Ann strained at the heavy bolts. The door opened and they found him sound asleep. If Jason had been sleepwalking he would have needed all his strength to open the bolts. Even if he had, how could he close them again?
There were physical problems, too. He complained frequently of stomach pains but Doctors found nothing. When Jason was ten he had tests in Maidstone hospital. On the final day, doctors asked Ann why Jason had a six-inch scar on his right side. She had never seen the scar before and had no idea.
A week later Jason was suddenly struck with acute stomach pains. He was readmitted to hospital. There was no scar on his right side, but there were several red fresh-looking scars on his stomach.
It was another two years before Paul and Ann discovered a possible cause. At first it was an explanation they could not accept. It was so far-fetched, so incredible.
In 1995 the family were watching a TV show about hypnosis, when a man in his 40s explained how he had been driving his normal route home from work one evening.
A journey that normally took 35 minutes lasted over three hours. He could not explain what had happened in the extra two and three quarter hours. But since the mysterious time loss he had suffered mood swings, depression and an irrational fear of the dark.
Without warning, Jason leapt to his feet, picked up a china dog and hurled it at the TV.
The boy turned to face his parents and, tears coursing down his cheeks, he sobbed: "That man there is stupid. He should be glad he can't remember. He should leave it like that.
"Because I remember. I remember everything. I'm scared. They won't leave me alone. Why can't they leave me alone?".
He fled the room. Ann and Paul looked at each other in shocked silence.
Daniel, by then aged 16, spoke first: "Do you still not understand? This guy on telly was abducted by aliens. Don't you both get it yet?"
Ann's mind was racing. The behaviour the man on TV had described was just like Jason's.
Ann had seen stories in newspapers about people who claimed to be in contact with aliens, but she scarcely bothered to read them.
As for Paul -- if Paul couldn't touch it, it didn't exist.
Daniel told his parents: "I get weird stuff happening, too. Last night I was woken by a bright light, and when I sat up I felt I had been hit by something all over. Almost like something had entered me.
"I felt something hot running through me, but I was paralysed. The next second I was asleep, and I didn't remember anything till this morning.
"I know the aliens wont hurt Jason, but he needs help Mum. He can't cope with it. It's really screwing him up." Jason was in the kitchen, his face buried in his arms. Gulping back sobs, he told his parents: "It's always the light that comes first.
"It wakes me up. Then I see the tall one rise at the foot of the bed. Suddenly there's lots of little ones everywhere.
"They're fuzzy and indistinct, and they move very fast.
"I can't move or speak, but I'm awake and I can see and hear and feel. I want to scream run, but the sound doesn't come and my body can't move.
"Sometimes I am screaming but it never wakes you, you never come to help me. I hate them. I hate them. I hate you for not coming when I need you."
Jason sat up and stared accusingly at his parents: "Why do you let them take me?
"I have to go to hospital with them. They take me to an operating theatre. It's all white. Sometimes it's a circular room with a metal floor.
"It's always cold. I want to go home, I hate it. They're there. The big one touches me but I don't feel it, as if I've had an anaesthetic. I hate it, I hate it.
"But you don't believe me. You think I'm a stupid kid making it all up."
Ann said: "I believe you. I'll help you sort it out."
Did she believe him?
Ann knew instinctively Jason was telling the truth as he saw it. She felt there must be another explanation, but she knew Jason was not pretending. The events were real to him.
Paul was even more reluctant to believe what Jason had told them. But he accepted it was their duty as parents to help. What they learned took the family on a journey in the realms of science fiction.
The Ministry of Defence says there have been no secret operations at the Mereworth MoD site, which backs on to the Andrews smallholding. They say it is used for training part time Territorial Army soldiers.
But the Andrews are convinced their son IS still being abducted by aliens. They would love to be proved wrong. But so far no one has been able to.
1998 Ann Andrews and Jean Ritchie. Extracted from Abducted, The true story of Alien Abduction in Rural England by Ann Andrews and Jean Ritchie. Published by Headline in hardback at 16 pounds and 99 pence and available in all bookshops.
Cynic to believer
Journalist Jean Ritchie, who tells the Andrews family's story in Abducted, was converted from total cynic to believer as she started to investigate their story.
Jean, a journalist for more than 30 years, says: "I became convinced they were telling the truth.
"They are not fantasists. I quickly realised that Ann was not lying, exaggerating or being manipulated.
"I set out to disprove their story -- I couldn't. There are so many unexplainable things that have happened to them.
"When I went to see Jason, I expected to meet a withdrawn, nervous, loner of a child -- a nerd even. He's not.
"Jason is like any likable, 14-year old. He's outgoing and likes talking about Arsenal and the Spice Girls.
"I started as so many outsiders do, desperately looking for material proof -- I wanted to touch an alien, take a photograph. Such proof is elusive, but perhaps this kind of evidence contradicts the nature of abduction.
"If we are dealing with higher levels of intelligence than our own, why should they leave fingerprints and clumsy evidence of an event they choose to shroud in mystery.
"Abductions almost always happen under cover of darkness with all potential witnesses rendered unconscious.
"What the Andrews family provide is a different kind of proof -- a proof that cannot be dissected under laboratory conditions but is no less valid.
"Similar stories can be traced back to the beginning of civilisation, crossing all cultural, social and racial backgrounds. It is a sheer volume of evidence that cannot be ignored or dismissed."
[PART TWO, The Sun newspaper (UK), Tuesday, 17 March, 1998]
Ann saw a face staring in the window...but it wasn't human.
Ann and Paul Andrews are an ordinary couple with two sons, Daniel and Jason.
They run a 10-acre smallholding, called Hawksnest Farm, near the village of Crouch in Kent. Their home lies next to a Ministry of Defence training site. Paranormal activity has surrounded the family since Jason, 14, was born. But it took 12 years for the couple, both 41, to discover the cause: Jason is regularly abducted by aliens. Neither Paul or Ann wanted to believe it and fought hard to find more logical explanations.
Now Ann has told their story in a gripping new book, Abducted, which you can read here first.
Today, Mike Ridley reveals Ann's diary of unexplained events.
Many weird things have happened to Jason Andrews, but among the most inexplicable are the strange marks that appear on his body.
Jason and his parents are convinced the wounds and scratches are caused when he is abducted by aliens in the night.
Here is part of his Mother Ann's diary for 1995:
Sept 20: Jason complained of a pain in his side this morning. Showed me a red triangular-shaped mark on his rib cage. Later there was no sign of it.
Sept 23: Jason limped slightly. Showed me a mark at the top of his leg, as if the flesh had been scooped out. But there was no cut. Later I tried to show Paul, but it had gone.
October 1: Jason has the dice mark on his left knee. (The dice mark was a square of dots, a quarter of an inch in diameter.)
On another occasion, Jason gashed his hand at a school fete. A St Johns ambulance first-aider placed five "butterfly" stitches on the wound and warned Jason he might have to go to hospital.
The next morning when Paul went to wake Jason, the bandage and dressing were on a bedside table.
His parents examined his hand. There was no sign of a cut or a scar.
Just after Christmas 1996, Jason woke up when the weather was below freezing outside. His skin was red, like he had been sunbathing. By the end of the day he had returned to his normal winter pallor. In June that year, Jason was seen by the family GP [Doctor], Dr Karen Parks. In a letter, she said: "Jason has shown me marks on his left side, stating this is where the 'creatures' cut into him.
"I do not know what to make of them. I haven't seen anything like this before."
Jason was examined by school psychologist Dr Pauline Stevenson who was satisfied that the youngster was not mentally ill.
FACE IN THE WINDOW: In November 1996, Jason had become so depressed Ann took him and three pals on holiday to a mobile home at Allhallows in Kent.
Ann was relieved to see Jason smiling again. But on the Wednesday night she was woken by his screaming. She rushed to the room he shared with his best friend Mark. Jason was standing by the bed.
The screaming stopped as Jason realised that she was there. He said: "Don't touch me, you mustn't touch me," In tears, Ann turned to leave the room. Jason spoke softly: "Mum, they're making me feel and see what they feel and see. I'll be all right."
Later Jason behaved as though nothing had happened.
Early next morning, sounds in the living room woke Ann at 3am.
She wondered nervously into the living room. Things had been moved.
Suddenly a chill swept over her. There on the glass window pane was an image of what appeared to be a face. The features were well defined.
It was a face -- but not a human one. Ann copied the image as accurately as possible. The picture she drew is above [printed in the newspaper]. Later Jason said: "I didn't think they'd find me here. Not here on holiday.
WATCHERS IN THE WOODS: Since Tuesday, September 12, 1995, Ann and Paul have been convinced they have been under surveillance.
Their smallholding backs on to thick overgrown woods, owned by an Arab consortium. Behind that is a Ministry of Defence base.
On May 8 last year Ann had a terrifying experience.
She was walking across a field when she saw a "head" peep out from behind a tree and disappear again. It reappeared and ducked back. It was only four feet off the ground. The head was white and with such indistinct features that Ann could not make them out.
She called Paul but, as he approached, a figure fled from behind the tree and crashed noisily into the thick, bramble undergrowth.
Paul put it down to vandals, but their escape route did not make sense -- their skin would be ripped to shreds. Ann knows what she saw was NOT human.
She says: The face was so pale, almost luminous. The head seemed hairless and too big for a human.
"The movement was really odd, a gliding motion that was smooth. It was as if it was hovering just inches above the ground."
CATTLE: In 1989 every one of Paul's herd of 22 calves and seven sheep died from a rare strain of salmonella which baffled their vet.
The Ministry of Agriculture told Paul to dispose of the bodies by incinerating them.
Later he received a call from a man claiming to be a Ministry official who told Paul to keep the carcasses.
Soon after a black transit van pulled up and a tall thin man dressed in a white coverall suit, complete with hood, leapt out. He told Paul: "We're from the Ministry."
He and five more "spacemen" in white suits loaded the carcasses into another lorry which lumbered into the yard. The two vehicles drove off along the dirt track. At that moment Jason and his brother Daniel returned from school. They had been dropped at the bottom of the lane -- but had seen no van.
Five years later Paul was told the Ministry of Agriculture did not have a flying task force of vans and men.
The normal procedure after a salmonella outbreak is still to burn the carcasses on the farm.
HORSES: Paul discovered his horse, Shannon, had had a large flap cut in his shoulder. There was only a small amount of blood.
The vet said it was a deliberate incision and that layers of tissue below the skin had been removed.
Strangely, Shannon stood still and showed no sign of pain while the vet stitched the wound.
It seemed to Ann that the horse had already been anaesthetised.
At the time, the family knew nothing of a strange spate of animal mutilations which appear to have some connection with alien activity.
Ann noted in her diary for February 14 that all six horses, including the foal, were limping on the nearside back leg. Every animal had an identical bloodless wound in the same place on the rear leg. The wounds healed quickly.
COWS: In spring 1996 Paul bought four pregnant cows -- three Charolais heifers and an older Jersey cow.
The farmer who sold them said all four would calve around September. During the summer Ann and Paul watched the cows swell and felt their carves kicking. But September came and went without any births. In fact, all four looked thinner.
In November, when Ann arrived at the smallholding she found deep cow hoofprints in the mud OUTSIDE the gate as if the cattle had been moving around in a circle. But there were no prints leading to or from the place, even though mud was everywhere.
Then Ann pointed to a boot print. There was only one -- Paul estimated it to be a size 15. They raced to the barn. The cattle were there, but clearly disturbed.
The vet latter announced that only two of the cows were pregnant but the calves would not be born until the following spring -- six months overdue.
ANIMAL DEATHS: In 1995, the farm cat was found dead in the barn. There was a neat hole in her head but no blood. Paul and Ann blamed vandals. But Ann felt uneasy. To her the cat looked as if it had been stretched out on a medical slab. The precision of the bore hole did not have the mark of vandalism.
A few months later they found a fox with the same strange injury.
On Friday, August 26th 1996, Jason went to the farm with his parents -- and recoiled in horror.
Four dead mice were laid out in a line near the gate. Each one had a small hole, not much bigger than a pin prick in the forehead, the left eye missing, and the rectum cut out.
One had lost part of its stomach, another had its jawbone exposed and one had its left paw cut off.
PREMONITIONS: Jason began to have premonitions. One incident has been confirmed by all involved.
Paul was grazing two pregnant mares on land belonging to neighbours Billy and Sue Rutland.
On May 1, 1996, one of the mares, Honey, gave birth to a foal. The mare was in perfect health.
But at 3.30 am, the family was woken by Jason screaming. He sobbed he knew Honey was dead, repeating: "They didn't know she was ours."
Paul believed Jason had had a nightmare. But at 7am the Rutlands daughter Laura phoned. She mumbled: "Honey's dead. Please come."
The mare's stomach appeared to have exploded. An investigation concluded that the animal's stomach was in such a mess it was impossible to give a cause of death.
1998 Ann Andrews and Jean Ritchie. Extracted from Abducted, The true story of Alien Abduction in Rural England by Ann Andrews and Jean Ritchie. Published by Headline in hardback at 16 pounds and 99 pence and available in all bookshops.
[PART THREE, The Sun newspaper (UK), Wednesday, 18 March, 1998]
The aliens are sharing my body...and my mind
Ann Andrews felt ridiculous as she explained to a stranger over the phone that she thought her 12 year old son was being abducted by aliens.
She expected a derisory laugh or perhaps a suggestion she should see a psychiatrist.
Instead the well spoken man on the other end of the line was calm and reassuring.
He did not ridicule her, or humour her.
Astonishingly, he reacted as if everything she said was perfectly familiar.
Ex-cop and UFO investigator Tony Dodd was to become the person who believed in them. He has helped the family cope since they realised son Jason, now 14, was being regularly abducted.
Strange and apparently inexplicable things have surrounded the boy almost since birth. He has vanished in the night, only to reappear covered in mud and wounds which vanish within hours.
Ann, in her book Abducted, tells of seeing "aliens" around the families ten-acre smallholding, which backs on to a Ministry of Defence site near Crouch in Kent.
Their animals have been surgically mutilated and many died in mysterious circumstances. Ann, and her husband Paul, both 41 -- who have another son Daniel, now 18 -- promised Jason they would search out the truth.
She met Tony after phoning Quest, a British based UFO investigative organisation.
The hard bitten former police sergeant had, with two colleagues, once witnessed a UFO over the North Yorkshire Moors.
He has researched UFOs for the last 20 years and is one of the world's leading authorities.
Tony Dodd does not care whether you believe him. He knows what happened to him and what has happened to thousands of others.
The majority of calls he receives will have a perfectly logical explanation. Only around two cases in every 100 contain enough unexplained evidence for him to investigate. The call from Ann Andrews fell into this category. He quizzed her gently and sympathetically.
Tony says: "Ann's answers rang true. I'm very suspicious of people who state they, or someone in their family, are being abducted.
"Ann put it forward as a possibility. She wanted help.
"I got a strong feeling, as I do in genuine cases, that she sincerely wished it would all go away."
Jason spent hours on the phone talking to Tony Dodd, recalling his early memories of aliens haunting the house where the family then lived in Slade Green, Kent.
He told Tony: "The first memory I have is hands. I was crying for some reason and I can see long fingers -- twice as long as Mum's with large knuckles -- reaching into the cot and picking me up."
As he gets older the memories of being taken in the night by a 5ft 4in alien and half a dozen smaller creatures became clearer. Jason gets a tingling feeling in his head when he is about to be abducted.
He says: "It always happens at 3am. I see the creatures in my bedroom. I never remember what happens immediately next.
"Sometimes I wake up and I'm lying on something smooth and cold. I can't move or speak. I can see the big alien. Its head is large with big black eyes on a slant and a small nose and mouth.
"I can see it touching me, but I never feel it. I'm always terrified."
Jason remembers another night when he found himself at his parent's smallholding, Hawksnest Farm, three miles from his present home in Borough Green, Kent.
The next thing he knew he was being chased by a big brown animal. He ran for a hole in the hedge which he knew was there.
He say: "It scratched me but I got through the hedge.
"I felt as if the aliens were with me, experiencing what I was feeling. I felt, for the first time, they were protecting me." When he woke up in bed at home, Jason was splattered with mud, deep scratches covered his body.
Tony Dodd is convinced Jason is telling the truth.
He says: "If children are making up stories it is usually very easy to trip them up."
One Sunday, as Jason was riding his favourite horse Patch, he became aware THEY were there.
Unseen, the aliens were with him experiencing the exhilaration of the ride. Jason knows that sometimes they share his feelings.
The ride ended badly. Another horse spooked Patch, who fell. Jason expected to experience immediate pain. There was none.
For weeks afterwards his bruised arm bore a hoof mark where the other horse had trodden on him. It was as though his uninvited guests had absorbed all the agony.
Jason has refused to ride a horse since. He blames the aliens.
He says: "They don't enjoy it and don't want to get hurt again."
Ann was horrified. She called Tony Dodd: "You have got to do something. He's somehow letting them share his own body, his mind. They're experiencing things -- and he's letting them."
Tony calmly explained this was not unusual. He shies away from the word "alien." He calls them extra-terrestrial biological entities. Tony told Ann that, according to research, the EBEs were apparently incapable of feeling emotions but are interested in human experience of them. To do that, they need a human host.
One night Ann and Paul were woken by Jason who told them: "Look out that window, you will see them."
At first they could see nothing. Then Ann spotted a bright light becoming bigger and brighter.
The last thing they remembered was their bedroom being flooded with white light.
The next morning, Jason said in disgust: "You went to sleep, I had to go with them again."
He described being taken into an enormous room with hundreds of other people. On a giant screen was a picture of Earth.
Paul was listening attentively but Ann clutched Jason's arm urgently. She knew exactly what he was going to say. She whispered: "It blew up, didn't it? Then there was a low whistling sound, a desolate sound, like a strange wind."
Jason nodded and smiled with relief. He whispered softly: "I knew you were there. I saw you there."
Paul was in shock. He had resigned himself to his son's strange life...but his wife too?
1998 Ann Andrews and Jean Ritchie. Extracted from Abducted, The true story of Alien Abduction in Rural England by Ann Andrews and Jean Ritchie. Published by Headline in hardback at 16 pounds and 99 pence and available in all bookshops.
Check if you have been abducted
UFO investigator Tony Dodd has compiled a list of occurrences experienced by people who claim to have been abducted by aliens.
1. Noises in the ears.
2. Nose bleeds.
3. Increased psychic abilities.
4. Strange unexplained marks appearing on the body overnight. They usually disappear quickly.
5. Waking to find odd things have happened in the night -- nightclothes removed or inside out and waking in the wrong bed or wrong room. In one case Tony investigated, an abductee woke wearing clothes that he had never seen before.
6. Fear of the dark.
7. Strange lights appearing around the home.
8. Animals behaving strangely, like dogs barking at unseen objects.
[PART FOUR, The Sun newspaper (UK), Thursday, 19 March, 1998]
How do you fight something that can paralyse you, levitate you and then float you out of the house through the walls?
Abducted -- the book that proves the truth is out there
Adaption by Mike Ridley
Ann Andrews woke in the middle of the night as her bedroom filled with a mysterious light.
The next instant, she claims, she was standing in a field on the family's smallholding three miles away, still in her night clothes.
In an exclusive Sun serialisation this week of new book Abduction, Ann has revealed how her 14 year old son Jason is repeatedly snatched by aliens.
In today's final extract, she reveals how she came to realise that she too, was being abducted.
Ann explains: "A second after the light began, without any sensation of moving, I was in a clearing in the woods. There were large spotlights around the edge of the clearing and half a dozen men in navy blue or black overalls were working. One of the men smiled and took me by the hand and led me to the centre of the clearing where a makeshift animal pen had been built.
"Lying in the pen was our stallion, Cardi. I thought he was dead yet I felt strangely emotionless. Then two of the men went inside and knelt down.
"I could not make out what they were doing but Cardi woke up and staggered to his feet. He wobbled as if he was coming round from an anaesthetic.
"I was aware I ought to feel relief he was alive, but again I felt detached.
"One of the men opened the gate and Cardi wandered slowly out and disappeared into the woods."
It might sound like a dream. But the next morning Ann and husband Paul went straight to their smallholding -- Hawknest Farm, near Couch, Kent. As they drove up the lane to the farm they met a girl who works at the local stables leading Cardi. The groom had been riding when she found the stallion wandering in the woods.
Ann drove on while Paul walked the horse home. When Ann reached the farm the animals were clearly disturbed. When Paul returned he said the stallion seemed "half-doped" but there was no sign of injury.
That made Ann realise that, like her son Jason, she was being abducted by aliens. Ann, 41, believes she has been abducted all her life, but it is only now that memories are coming back.
Asked what the future holds, Jason shrugs his shoulders and says he does not see it ever getting better.
Nor does he seen himself ever learning to accept it.
Chillingly, he reveals how he had seriously contemplated suicide, even going as far as to take a rope into the woods.
He talks about it with apparent indifference. Then suddenly the reserve breaks and tears come to his eyes as he shouts angrily at "Them," the strangers who have robbed him of his youth.
It was a sad moment, the sort many UFO sceptics ignore.
They demand proof and use the lack of it to dismiss the whole subject as cranky.
But for Jason, and many thousands of people like him across the world, the quest for proof is not important.
What matters is the search for a way of life.
Ex-cop and UFO investigator Tony Dodd says: "I wish I could promise Jason it will stop but it is unlikely. Having been selected for multiple abductions, I feel the aliens will follow him for many years, probably all of his life."
In learning to live with it, Jason and his family have already taken the first step.
Coping with abduction entirely alone makes victims miserable and some question their own sanity.
Tony pulled no punches, explaining to Jason that there was "no cure."
But by being open about his own experiences, he has helped Jason come to terms with what is happening. He described his own abduction to the boy and admitted: "We are all scared, not just you.
"I travel the world but I'm too afraid to entered a darkened room on my own.
"They still come for me and, although I now accept they mean me no harm, it still scares the hell out of me.
"It's easy to be calm and rational in the cold light of day, but when night comes, so does the fear.
"Having seen their craft and awesome power, I know we can never stop them. How the hell do you fight something that can not only paralyse you, but can also levitate you and float you out of the house through the walls?"
It was a speech that brought great comfort to Jason. If a grown man could admit he was scared, then he had nothing to be ashamed of.
When Jason confided in a school friend about his abduction within days he was being laughed at in the playground and dubbed Spaceboy and E.T.
It was unsettling but Jason is resilient and survived with his "street cred" intact.
At times, when a burst of paranormal activity is at its height, he appears to be electrically charged. Touch him and you get a mild shock.
Ann was burned by him badly enough to leave a scar.
Unfazed, Jason charges 10p a time to give them an electric shock.
Paul and Ann eventually plucked up the courage to tell other members of their family how their son was suffering.
The reaction was mixed. Paul's mother Shirley was unwilling to believe in aliens.
She could not agree to accept everything he said but promised to be understanding and willing to listen to Jason. Ann's two brothers reacted differently. Stephen believes and accepts his nephew's story. David refuses to credit the alien story.
At first Stephen and his wife, Anita, had been unsure about the alien story.
On a holiday in Greece they became friendly with a family from Birmingham and after a few days the father confided they were on holiday to rest and bring normality to their lives.
He told them he was an abductee. It took courage to confess it and at first Stephen reacted by treating it as a joke.
It was only when he heard the full story that he was struck by the similarity to the stories his sister told about Jason.
When he returned home, Stephen rang Ann to apologise for not taking her seriously.
Looking at everything that has happened to him in his short life, Jason says: "Perhaps I have been chosen, perhaps I am special, maybe one day I will understand.
"But now I'd just like it to stop. I want them to leave me alone. I want them to let me be ordinary."
1998 Ann Andrews and Jean Ritchie. Extracted from Abducted, The true story of Alien Abduction in Rural England by Ann Andrews and Jean Ritchie. Published by Headline in hardback at 16 pounds and 99 pence and available in all bookshops.
Victims 'telling truth'
John Mack -- professor of psychiatry at America's highly respected Harvard Medical School -- turned down a request to examine a man who claimed that he was being abducted.
His reaction was that the man, Budd Hopkins, was "crazy."
Later, Mack agreed to see Hopkins because he was confident he would find a psychological cause for people to "imagine" they were being abducted. Mack found nothing wrong with Hopkins.
He went on to study 100 abductees. Their age, sex and family circumstances threw up no common patterns.
He concluded that, apart from the stress caused by the abduction, they are normal, sane people with no psychiatric problem.
He now believes that abductees are telling the truth.
[end]
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MANY QUESTIONS ABOUT ANDREWS CASE REMAIN UNRESOLVED
Daily Mail Journalist Takes Skeptical View After Interviewing Main Witness
[CNI News thanks Dave of the United Kingdom UFO Network for forwarding this additional report on the Andrews abduction case. This article appeared in the Daily Mail on Sunday, March 21, 1998.]
Abducted by aliens
(Or was this young boy carried away by the UFO lobby, a distinguished writer and publishing hype?)
by James Dalrymple
JASON ANDREWS looks you in the eye when he speaks. He is eager to do well, and although he mumbles and shrugs a lot, he tries hard to stick to the basic facts of his story.
On the surface, there seem to be but two possibilities. At Just 14 years old he is either a born liar capable of playing the leading role in an elaborate hoax. Or is he speaking the truth when he tells his extraordinary story of being taken from his bed in the night by creatures from beyond the Earth?
Experts have been throwing questions at Jason for several years. Doctors, social workers, psychiatrists, investigative journalists -- they have all had a crack at him.
His medical and education records could fill a filing cabinet. His family have been examined down to the smallest detail -- and exonerated.
The boy is not psychotic. He has not been the victim of abuse. Nor has he been coerced into a conspiracy. His family may be impoverished, but every expert has concluded that it is a close and loving one.
So how can we explain his complex and eerie tale? His skinny body shows no evidence that it has been sliced open by long, gleaming fingers using strange instruments. Yet his parents say they have seen large scars on his side and his stomach. Scars that disappeared within hours.
And his school record makes it unlikely he could reel off complex mathematical equations, with numbers running into the billions, or speak fluently in strange, crooning languages.
Yet his family say they have seen and heard him doing precisely that, in a trance-like state, in a voice sometimes deep and harsh, sometimes soft and melodic.
These events and many others, we are being asked to believe, have all happened to this ordinary boy from Hawksnest Farm in rural Kent.
In a new book, Jason and his family reveal the story of a long series of visitations by aliens who have targeted him (and sometimes his mother) for their experiments into the minds, hearts and bodies of earthlings.
Since Jason was four, the Andrews claim, they have been subjected to every type of extraterrestrial invasion. Small creatures, tall creatures, kind ones, sinister ones, some with huge round eyes, some in hoods and with dark features, others fair-skinned and ethereal, have all appeared in the various homes they have lived in.
SOMETIMES they appear flooded in brilliant light and merely move about the rooms, sometimes they transport Jason to another place and lay him on a smooth, cold slab and conduct experiments on him.
In the morning Jason often has long scars on his body, but by tea time they have disappeared. His father, Paul, says he has seen one such scar vanishing before his eyes.
The boy says the aliens can communicate to him through thought. He believes they have implanted devices inside him. They can blank out tape recorders and make cameras inoperable. They can induce coma- like sleep on the rest of the family, instantly silence barking dogs and 'freeze' farmyard birds and animals into immobile statues.
They can produce visions of the Earth blowing up on vast TV screens and present these images to Jason and his mother simultaneously.
Mostly, such visitations are benign. But once, claims his mother, Ann, they came to her in the night and painlessly induced a miscarriage, implanting a voice in her mind that told her: 'It's all for the best.'
There is much more in the same vein. Their story, told in a compelling book by a respected and talented British journalist, author of 13 books and an expert in the field of the paranormal, could well be a best- seller.
Such accounts have already made fortunes in America, where alien abductions have become a media sensation and have involved mainstream scientists. Already, TV and film companies are said to be interested.
All of this has been highly profitable. The Andrews family have been mostly broke for years, sometimes living on less than 15 pounds a week. The only asset they have ever owned is the scrubby little ten- acre smallholding, near the village of Borough Green, which they bought nine years ago for 25,000 pounds.
They live in a nearby council house. But every day the family move up to their much-loved scrap of land and tend to their livestock -- a few ponies and a flock of geese.
Now all that has changed. The money will soon be rolling in. They are already guaranteed some 60,000 pounds from the book, including money from The Sun, who serialised it this week. They have their own agent and the celebrity chat show circuit beckons.
'I'd be a hypocrite if I said the money wasn't nice,' said Ann. 'But we never wanted to go public, and I never saw it as an opportunity to make money.
WE THOUGHT long and hard about doing the book, and it was only after big family discussions that we were persuaded it would help others.
The book's author, Jean Ritchie, is also quick to point out that if she had never stumbled on the story in a copy of a magazine about UFOs, the Andrews family would have remained in obscurity.
'I thought it would make a good magazine piece,' she said. 'But when I met Ann and read her diary I saw that it was far more important than that. I began as a total sceptic, but now I have an open mind.
'I feel they are telling the truth. I checked everything they told me, including the medical records. I have the names of all the doctors who were involved and there is no doubt they were mystified by what the boy was telling them.
'There is no doubt Jason was suffering from strange injuries and illnesses at the times when he claims he was abducted. There is clear evidence of scarring and strange marks on his body. And throughout it all Jason was consistent.
'One thing I am sure of: Ann and Paul Andrews are not liars out to make money.'
There are two things to remember with alien abduction stories. One is that they are almost comically derivative. If you have read one you have read them all.
All aliens look the same. They all have saucer eyes, pointed heads and are inherently benign. If they were monsters no one would ever get back to their beds. Nothing new in the literature has appeared in half a century, since the first B- movies of the Forties and Fifties.
Second, the victims of abductions cannot lose. It is impossible to disprove a paranormal invention. All they have to do is get their story right and stick to it. If witnesses say you never left the house that night, you simply devise a scenario when every one else in the house was zapped into frozen immobility for several hours.
Why didn't the video camera and the tape recorder set up to capture the aliens see the bright lights and hear the noises? Because they knock out all electronic equipment. And so on. For each reasonable question there is an unreasonable but complete answer. The aliens have all power.
So are the Andrews just liars and fantasists trying to earn a little media money? The answers to these questions are fascinating and complex.
AND the answers, in turn, pose intriguing questions about so much of the burgeoning UFO industry. There is no doubt Jason was a disturbed little boy. He suffered from bad dreams and he sleep-walked. Both he and his older brother, Daniel, told their mother they had seen things in the night.
Jason's schooling was a disaster. He began to be disruptive and was threatened with expulsion. He was forced to undergo psychiatric counselling.
Up until that point neither of his parents made any claims of alien intervention. Then Paul got some books from the library. And they began to immerse themselves in the cult of alien visitation and abduction.
The possibilities of this childlike rubbish are endless. Every dream, every small family crisis, every strange sound, every odd piece of behaviour by their pets, even a lightbulb blowing, becomes a sign of alien intervention. The Andrews family became instant converts.
'Suddenly, it all made sense,' said Ann. 'We knew we had found the answer.'
What she had found was an elaborate potpourri of pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo, invented by largely harmless obsessives, that has become a flourishing industry in the Western world.
They contacted one of the leading British 'authorities' on this phenomenon, an agency called Quest, and were eagerly welcomed to the fold by Tony Dodd, a retired Yorkshire policeman who styles himself Director of Investigations.
For Dodd the Andrews family were the find of a lifetime. He became their guru and protector. Using the gaudy terminology of the genre, he explained each of Jason's symptoms and instructed them what to look out for.
Above all, he told them they were special, chosen people. Nobody had ever done that before with the Andrews. It was like the opening of floodgates. Ann, who had never felt any connection to all this, suddenly began to remember childish visions, which eventually led to a whole slew of 'recovered memories', including the miscarriage induced by aliens.
The family attended UFO conferences and soaked up the lore of it all. Ann began to see the faces of the aliens herself, drew pictures of them, and began a diary of invasion. By the time Ritchie stumbled upon the story the entire family were already well- read in every facet of alienism.
They became convinced that Government scientists were removing their dead animals, that the council was conspiring against them and that strange military activity was taking place in a nearby Territorial Army base. They began to produce endless anecdotal evidence that their isolated farm was surrounded by strange forces which had the power to immobilise their animals and geese into living statues. After this came a series of mutilations to their horses.
ONE horse was discovered to have a large flap of skin hanging loose. But there was no blood or damage to the tissue and the animal wasin no discomfort.
'The vet said he had never seen anything like it,' said Paul Andrews. 'And he was able to stitch the flap back without sedating the animal'
At another time they noticed that all their horses had become lame in the same back leg. 'There were little round boles that seemed to have been punched into the flesh,' said Ann. 'Again the horses didn't seem to be suffering.'
The Quest investigators loved all this. Animal mutilation is a major issue for them. It proves, for them, that aliens are testing for toxins in living creatures.
One day the family found four dead mice laid out in a neat row near the gate to the farm, each one with a tiny hole in it's skull. This, ironically is the only hard piece of evidence the family have ever produced. And they are very proud or the snapshot of the dead mice.
Ritchie could find no chink in it -- because there was none. An entire family was by now immersed in what the psychologists call passive group hysteria, and the fact that they could produce not a single tape recording, photograph of the 'visitors', or physical injury was explained away by the common response: the aliens were so far advanced in technology that they could do anything.
Ritchie did try to contact the medical and school authorities, but got nowhere. She talks of Jason's medical records, but she didn't actually see them; she only saw the notes which his mother had made from them.
After months practically living with the family, Ritchie produced her 80,000-word blockbuster. She, too, is now part of their world her next book will be into other aspects of alien intervention.
It may be impossible to expose an illusion-but it is easy enough to see the essential silliness that lies at the heart of it. All you have to do is spend some time with the boy himself sitting in the tiny wooden shed at the farm where some of these strange events happened, I put him through his paces and the whole charade began to collapse.
In two hours of questioning he rarely gave a full answer. Within moments of our interview beginning both his mother and Jean Ritchie were jumping in.
When I quoted specific incidents In the book, in which he talks in great detail, he faltered repeatedly, and each time the two women moved in with answers: 'Don't you remember, Jason, that was the time you saw the one you called the Monk,' says his mum. 'The one with the hood.'
'You saw the Instruments in his hands, didn't you Jason?' suggests Ritchie. Again and again, under prompting, he tried his best. 'Yeah. uh, like I remember seeing the Monk, with a sorts hood thing. I sensed he was wise, you now ... oh could see something in his hand.'
Again and again he missed his cue. Did you feel any pain when you woke with the scars in your body? He looked blank for a moment, then finally decided to ignore the question. We looked at each other in silence. I felt sorry for him.
Eventually he began to run out of answers of any detail at all. From then on his only reply to any of my questions was: 'I, uh, don't remember things too clearly. That's why I always run into my Mum's room and tell her to write it all down. She knows it all.' And he looked at her pleadingly.
Did you hear them speaking? 'You think you hear things. Sometimes I hear some funny voices ... coming from somewhere . like, uh, I'm thinking things in my head .'
Jean Ritchie breaks in, reminding him that they use telepathy. This was allegedly the same boy who, in the book, can give this kind of descriptive detail. 'There is a pattern to the bad nights, the nights when things happen to me .
'I've got a very good alarm clock, a state-of-the-art digital one, and it always stops at 3am. That's the time it happens... I always try to go back to sleep, in the hope that nothing will happen, but then I see something almost out of the corner of my eye.
'It rises up through the floor. It's a big one. There's only ever one a big one. It's about 5ft 4in tall, just a bit shorter than me.
THE head is large, with big black eyes on a slant which go round the side of the head, and a very small nose and mouth
'It's thin, and it has the long, dark fingers that I remember from my baby days . I'm aware of the little ones. I never see where they come from, they're Just there ... They scuttle around. busy, busy, busy, they never stay still.
'Sometimes they bring some other creatures with them. I call them koalas because they are small and furry like bears .'
When he began to look at the floor in silence, I had had enough. Leaving the dilapidated little farm, I was rather glad that the family were coming into their small fortune. They are nice people and they almost certainly believe by now that they are telling the truth.
But I had a bad feeling about Jason. He is now locked forever into his role as Britain's most famous alien abductee. Each day he will have to face derision and hostility at a school where he once suffered pain and rejection. And already, inside his extended family, there is agrowlng anger at the publicity.
Jean Ritchie is central to all, of this. She is a talented writer with the ability to give the stamp of authenticity to any story. Whether she really believes this spider's web of nonsense or not is something that only she knows.
But it is entirely due to her that two things will happen. A hard-up and likeable family will become moderately rich and be feted briefly on the celebrity circuit before being spat out and forgotten.
And a rather lonely young boy, who has shown evidence of emotional and behavioural problems, will become a kind of freak show.
ABDUCTED, by Ann Andrews and Jean Ritchie, is published by Headline Book Publishing Ltd at 16 pounds 99 pence.
[end]
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