ARE THEY REALLY OUT THERE?
By Kevin Gillies - Times Reporter

Local woman says she's been abducted. Wants to meet others at library.

X-Files agent Fox Muldar has nothing on Abbotsford resident Arva Abraham. The 39 year old has been abducted and visited regularly by aliens.

"The truth is out there, that's for sure," says Abraham borrowing a line from the popular television show which explores the phenomenon.

She is bringing other abductees to the Clearbrook branch of the Fraser Valley Library for a May 3 seminar between 1 and 4 pm.

Abraham describes the aliens as grey with large heads, long narrow eyes, and long three fingered hands.

She says four times in the last five years she has awoken from hazy scenarios with vague memories of aliens probing and inspecting her with medical tools and lasers, adding she awakes with burned skin, scars on her forehead, ringing ears  and severe headaches.

"There is no explanation of why I woke up like that," she says.

Dr. Barry Beyerstein is an SFU psychologist who heads the B.C. Skeptics Association. Yes, the truth is out there he says.

"I have a version of it that makes more sense to me."

While not discounting the possibility of life existing elsewhere in the universe, he says alien visit type experiences are products of regular sleep-dream patterns or disorders which people try to interpret.

"In the past,similar experiences were attributed to demons, fairies or witches," says Beyerstein, (who by the way, does not watch the X-Files).

"There's a lot of people out there who fervently believe it."

Astronomer David Dodge of the H.R. McMillan Planetarium says he receives reports constantly.

"Where I can't help them astronomically, I pass it on. "Dodge says he hasn't seen anything, personally, that he couldn't explain.

Graham Conway, president of UFO*BC, says more people are reporting these experiences because the social atmosphere is opening up, in part, because of the TV and movie industry's focus on the phenomenon. "They feel as though they are being watched." He says B.C. has the highest number of UFO in Canada.

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of Absence" Conway says.