Alien Nation: Have Humans Been Abducted by Extraterrestrials?
If youre abducted by alien beings, are you physically absent?
This happens to be an important issue for the media-shy people gathered one afternoon last July on the porch of Anne Ramsey Cuveliers blue Victorian inn on Narragansett Bay, in Rhode Island, once called the most elegantly finished house ever built in Newport. Co-designed in 1869 by a cousin of Ralph Waldo Emersons, it has been in Cuveliers family since 1895, when her great-grandfather bought it as a summer getaway from his winter home blocks away, just as the Gilded Age cottages of the Vanderbilts and Astors began springing up across the island, redefining palatial extravagance. Still imposing with its butternut woodwork, ebony trimmings, and four-story paneled atrium frescoed in the Pompeian style, the harborside mansion turned B&B seemed a fittingly baroque setting for the group of reluctant guests Cuvelier describes as not a club anyone wants to belong to.
She had gathered them to compare experiences as, well, experiencers, a term they prefer to abductees, and to socialize free of stigma among peers. Cuvelier, an elegant and garrulous woman in her 70s, isnt one of them. But she remembers as a teen in the 1940s hearing her father, Rear Admiral Donald James Ramsey, a World War II hero, muttering about strange flying craft that hovered and streaked off at unimaginable speed, and shes been an avid ufologist ever since. I want to get information out so these people dont have to suffer, she says. Nobody believes you. You go through these frightening experiences, and then you go through the ridicule.
So, for a week each summer for almost two decades, shes been turning away paying guests at her familys Sanford-Covell Villa Marina, on the cobblestoned waterfront in Newport, to host these intimate gatherings of seemingly ordinary folk with extraordinary stories, along with the occasional sympathetic medical professional and scientist and other brave or foolhardy souls not afraid to be labeled nuts for indulging a fascination with the mystery. I had been invited as a journalist with a special interest who has been talking to some of them for several years.