I'll be a little disappointed in this thread and the follow-up, if some folks, including my many proponent friends, some of whom have already spoken up here :) (and it's cool we come at this with different perspectives, it goes to show the forum doesn't get dull if there's no from-the-ground-up "skeptical" involvement), don't end up engaging in a discussion of the actual abduction hypothesis material.
:)
I don't discuss this much, but I have some very old childhood experiences that are consistent with these UFO stories. That said, to my knowledge, I have no conscious memories of anything like what you read about in these abduction/UFO books. What got me thinking about this was my first UFO book, which happened to be Communion, by Whitley Strieber. He was writing about "lost memories", when I suddenly realized I had something like that in my background.
In 1979, my family moved from Las Vegas to Santa Barbara. We left some of our things with my grandfather in Kingman, Arizona that we had to retrieve later. On the trip back from Kingman, my mom drove at night to avoid the desert heat. Some time after passing through Las Vegas, several hours later, we saw a bright glow on the other side of some hills. It looked similar to the glow made by the lights of Las Vegas at night when approaching from the Hoover Dam. I asked my mom if we were headed into another big city like Vegas, but she said we weren't. We were in the middle of the desert, with no towns of any size within a hundred miles.
As we got closer over the next twenty minutes or so, the light remained strong. It was clearly a local light source on or near the ground, but I took a look in the sky to find the moon, against the possibility it was a late moonrise that we were mistaking for an artificial lightsource. But the moon was where it was supposed to be, high in the sky. I asked my mom the time, and she responded that it was 2 am. I asked against the possibility it was a sunrise, with the moon still visible in the sky. At 2am, there was no chance of that.
Eventually we cleared the rise and saw below us a very tiny town. It had about two streets with maybe twenty to thirty decrepit buildings, and that was it. By the time we got there, we saw that we were now below the light. This was evident both from the illumination falloff and the shadows it cast. An interesting feature of this is that the streetlights on the two little roads were turned on, but the little pools of light they cast were almost totally washed out by the brighter light above us.
My mom pulled over so we could look at this phenomenon more closely. We parked on the side of the highway, about twenty feet from a hurricane fence. The little town was about thirty feet below us, with the one intersection in town about a quarter mile away. It was now about 2:15 am, but we were no closer to determining what this light source was, though we were now directly under it. Looking up, I couldn't see anything that could have lit up the desert like this, but did see that the light was coming from above. It had to be local, because the surrounding desert was dark.
After what seemed like fifteen minutes of pondering this, the light was gone, the sun was up, and my mom decided to continue on our drive. The farm report on the radio gave the time as 9:00 am.
This is how I had always remembered it, 15 minutes of sitting there talking, then leaving after the light was gone. Stopped at 2am, left at 9am. I never thought of doing the math. When I read the Streiber book, I suddenly realized there was seven hours missing time in there. I wanted to see how my mom and sister would remember it, so I called them both. I was very careful not to ask leading questions. To my surprise, they both remembered it exactly the same way, including the part where they hadn't bothered to notice the missing seven hours. We all thought we had been continuously conscious for this period, with no rest, yet somehow we'd missed the sunrise and disappearance of the light. It was this quality that surprised me more than anything else.
My earliest memory is a dream of "monsters" abducting me and other humans, bringing us to a laboratory, and performing medical experiments (or simple surgeries). This was in 1969, long before I had heard of alien abductions. In 1970, I thought I saw one of these creatures in my room, was very frightened and called for my mom. When she ran in, I saw it run to another part of my room where she couldn't see it. As for scars, I do have one of those too. One morning in 1987 or so, I woke up to discover a fully healed scar on my abdomen that hadn't been there the day before. When I showed it to a doctor, he said it looked like a healed biopsy. I told him I'd never had a biopsy, which left him stumped. Because of its size, about the size of a nickel, he said I would have known of a biopsy or injury in that spot. With no other alternatives, he said he had no idea, but it looked like a biopsy. I've shown it to other doctors, who gave the same answer.
I don't know what to make of these things in my life. I think the material I started reading on the subject in about 1989 is interesting, even compelling, particularly because it describes things that are consistent with the couple items I've mentioned here, all of which happened before I was introduced to them in the literature. I am not willing to claim these as anything more than odd events that aren't inconsistent with abduction reports, but they could well be something else. However, that group experience with my mother and sister is tough to wave away. Both of them were just as shocked as I was when I pointed out the time discrepancy. Neither had thought of that before. For three people to have responded in the same odd way to an event like that is pretty compelling. That said, none of us saw a UFO.
AP