The One That Got Away

Night Fishing

Are abductees chosen at random, or do aliens select their victims using precise criteria? The experiences of an English pensioner one night in 1983 suggest that not everyone is of equal interest to alien intruders. Nevertheless, we should beware of taking anomalous encounters at face value. The true motives of otherworldly beings may differ radically from our simplistic interpretations of them.

77-year-old Alfred Burtoo was fishing the Basingstoke Canal in the early hours of August 12 1983 when a brilliant light descended from the sky and settled on the towpath. Thinking it was a helicopter from the nearby MOD base, he ignored it and poured himself some tea from his Thermos flask. But then his dog, Tiny, began whining furiously at two small figures who had suddenly emerged from the darkness.

Burtoo's sketch of the craft.

"They were about four foot high, dressed in pale green coveralls from head to foot," Burtoo told reporters. "And they had helmets of the same colour with a visor that was blacked out."

The strangers gestured to Burtoo to join them. Calmly setting down his cup of tea, the intrepid pensioner followed them along the towpath towards a disc-shaped craft. "I was 77 and didn't have much to lose," he later explained.

Inside the Saucer

Burtoo climbed up a set of steps into the craft. He found himself inside a black metallic octagonal chamber, which smelt slightly of decaying meat. The ceiling was so low that he had to stoop.

"I did not see any signs of nuts or bolts, nor did I see any seams where the object had been put together," he stated. "What did interest me most of all was a shaft that rose up from the floor to the ceiling. The shaft was about four feet in circumference, and on the right-hand side stood two forms similar to those that walked along the towpath with me."

One of the beings told the old man to stand beneath an amber beam of light, which appeared to "scan" him like a x-ray machine.

"Is the Earth their laboratory?"

"What is your age?" asked the alien, in a "sing-song" voice that sounded like "a mixture of Chinese and Russian". When he replied that he was 77, it told him, "You can go. You are too old and infirm for our purposes."

Bemused, Burtoo exited the saucer and returned to his fishing spot.

"The first thing I did... was to pick up my cold cup of tea and drink it," he recalled. "And then I heard this whining noise, just as if an electric generator was starting up, and this thing lifted up then took off at a very high speed."

Apparently unfazed by the bizarre events, Burtoo returned to the task at hand. "I got into what I had come out for - the fishing!"

Despite his rather curt reception, he later declared that his nocturnal close encounter had been "the greatest experience of my life".

Fishers of Men

Alfred Burtoo is not alone in having apparently failed an alien medical exam. American abductee Carl Higdon claimed that he had been rejected as a candidate for a hybrid breeding programme once his captors discovered he had had a vasectomy.

Likewise, Luis Oswald - an elderly Brazilian abducted by beings from "a small galaxy near Neptune" - endured a lengthy examination only to be told she was "of no use".

Similar Cases

The Albino Spacemen
63-yr-old Tom Dawson is examined by humanoids.

Sources

Jenny Randles: Alien Contact: The First 50 Years, p102.
Peter Brookesmith: UFO: The Complete Sightings Catalogue, pp127-128.
Timothy Good: Beyond Top Secret, pp87-93.