Woman Recalls Frightening Encounter With “Tall White Beings”

Location of Sighting: Cherry Valley, New York
Date of Sighting: Early 1970’s

Description: My experience occurred in Cherry Valley, upstate New York on some land owned by my uncle. I believe I was seven or eight, so it was the early 70s. My brother is about five and half years older than me. I was sleeping in a tent. (What hour it was I really don’t know.) I heard my brother’s footsteps and thought “that’s (brother’s name) and it’s time to go.” We walked a short distance through the woods, which seemed for about five or 10 minutes, until I felt him freeze. I remember looking slowly at the side of his arm to his face and seeing he was transfixed. I was terrified because I knew he was completely terrified. When I looked at what he was seeing I was only momentarily frightened, then felt completely calm. I would say about 40 to 50 feet away were five very tall, very thin silhouetted beings. They seemed to be facing us with their arms at their sides. They were of varying heights. (Their height was difficult to estimate, but I would say somewhere between eight and 12 feet.) It’s hard to say as we were young people so they may have seemed taller than they actually were. They were heavily backlit by a light, which I always assumed was the rising sun, but now I wonder. I thought of them as warm, kind beings. They didn’t speak, but they said into our minds “do not come any further, we will not hurt you.” After what seems like just a few moments my brother and I turned around and began to leave. As I was turning I remember thinking: “I have to tell mom this.” By the time I completely turned around I remember thinking “tell her what?” I then remember standing at the foot of her bed at the farmhouse and feeling like I had something to tell her, but I couldn’t remember what it was. I had completely forgotten the incident.

What was likely four or five years later I had a PTSD like experience. I was at my grandmother’s home on some land in Virginia and was returning to her home so that her house was a certain distance and set diagonally from me. I had an extreme panic reaction that I could not understand, and had never had in my life. I stored that experience in the back of my head because it was so unusual.

One evening, I believe it was my 21st birthday, my brother and I and some others were in the backyard of my parents home on Long Island when my brother said to me suddenly: “Do you remember the Giants at the top of the hill in Cherry Valley?” I had no idea what he meant for a moment and then everything in front of me went black. I had the sensation of what I felt like a bug running through my brain, which I believe was the process of memory retrieval. Moments later the entire incident was back in my conscious mind and I immediately thought about the panicked reaction I had a few years after the initial event which I think was prompted by the proximity of my grandmother’s house on her land, which had reminded me of the landscape when we saw the beings, with a neighbor’s house in sight. My brother and I have no recollection of any abduction if there was one. I have had tiny fragments of memory, such as remembering drowsily waking up in our home on Long Island thinking the “short smart people are here again” and falling back to sleep, but I don’t know if that is just an idea that I held in my mind to try to make sense of the initial experience.

The night my brother reminded me of the incident, we talked for hours. We both seemed to settle on them perhaps having been ghosts maybe Farmer Brothers who we had interrupted tilling the land in their ghost world. It didn’t occur to me that they might be aliens, until I saw a scene in the movie “Communion” where the Whitley Schreiber character is with these tall beings on their craft. That is what the beings my brother and I saw looked like in height and shape. Although I remember the heads being more blocky.

I would add that there may be some intergenerational visits on our mother’s side of the family. When my brother and I discussed it with her, she did say that when she was very young 9maybe three or four years old0. She remembers very small beings standing by her bedside and even on her chest. She did not think they were a dream. Her brother also revealed that he had an experience of driving alone. (I believe it was in California where he sawg a bright light ahead and then experienced several hours of missing time. We are not squirrley people. My brother is an attorney, my uncle was a highly placed social worker for the state of California and my mother was a perfectly sane housewife. I am a clinical social worker specializing in mental health.

For many years there seemed to be some kind of physical difficulty or pressure on my chest whenever I tried to talk about it. It was something telling me not to. In the last three years I have had the opposite feeling, that I should talk and talk and talk about this. I have talked about it certainly to non-receptive people, and I just don’t care how they react.

Well, there you have it. Thanks for filing this away.

Note: In the early 1970’s many close encounters with alien beings were reported. A couple of well known cases was the Travis Walton abduction in Arizona and Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker encounter in Mississippi. Also airman Charles Hall had repeated encounters with tall white beings while stationed as a weather observer at the Nellis AFB bombing range in Nevada in the mid 1960’s. Charles Hall wrote several books about these encounters.

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