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It turned out that this would not be the last time that something would occur where my girlfriend would witness one of my events. A year later, I had just moved in with my girlfriend. She owned a very beautiful corner condo suite on the topmost floor of a unique condominium in the Frazer Valley about an hour's drive east of Vancouver.  It has an interesting design for a condo. From the outside, it looks like any other standard four-story condo building. However, when you get inside, you realize that the hallways are an open-air atrium style building with no roof over the hallway, but instead a long narrow open-air courtyard. This is of particular importance because it is here that I had another period of missing time. Imagine in the middle of winter when it was cold, dark, and raining. I went missing and returned without any signs of exposure to the elements.  There is no way in this unique condo design that one could simply leave the condo suite without going outside, and yet in the middle of the night, I simply disappeared. This is how it began.

After a very long day at work, we arrived home at about 8 o’clock at night. After eating we prepared for bed and went through our typical routines. There was nothing out of the ordinary to indicate that this would be a very strange night. We were both so tired that we were quick to fall asleep. Suddenly waking with a start, I found myself extremely wide awake, breathing rapidly. It felt like there was an imminent threat, it was an adrenaline driven acute hyper awareness. Yet all around me, the silence was deafening. I knew something or someone was nearby, for I had felt this fear before. I felt it many times. I knew what was coming. I have known since childhood. This has happened before… (For readers who do not know, abduction researchers have found that many experiencers report finding themselves acutely awake to the point of hypervigilant awareness just before an abduction occurs. There is no indication of what causes this abrupt hyper alert wakefulness). I found myself laying there listening for any noise or sounds of movement around me, hoping that I was not right. Trying to convince myself nothing was wrong, I still felt like I was being watched. I tried to logically work through, why I was awake and why I was feeling this way. Yet, I continued to feel the energy of someone watching me, though I could not find the source. My partner was fast asleep and then it happened…

Laying there in bed feeling fearful, I know that I did not have sleep paralysis. Then suddenly I had the urge, almost compulsion, to get up and walk into the living room. I even had to force myself to stay in bed. As this feeling of being coerced intensified, I repeated to myself, “No, I am not going to get up! No, I am not going to walk into the living room! I am staying here. This is not happening!”  

Suddenly I felt an immense sense of relief because I realized that I had to go to the washroom. This was a typical nighttime occurrence.  I laughed at myself, thinking I was overreacting. I must have had a night terror. I then got up and instead of walking into the ensuite bathroom right beside the bed, I decided I did not want to disturb my partner and I thought it would be quieter to go out to the other bathroom in the hallway. I then proceeded to walk through the living room and around the corner.  I remember walking towards the other washroom and minutes later, I returned to the bedroom unaware of anything being amiss. I was grateful of now being able to go back to sleep. 

As I walked back towards the bedroom, I noticed that the bedroom light was now on. Had I woken up my partner after all? I was only gone a minute. 

I walked through the door and there to my surprise was my partner sitting up in bed, with a mixed look of extreme worry and extreme anger on her face. The second she saw me she screamed, “Where have you been?! You have been gone for an hour and a half!”

I responded with, “What are you talking about? I just went to the bathroom. I’ve only been gone a couple of minutes at most!”

She responded with, “No you've been gone from the condo for an hour and a half! I went looking for you, I couldn’t find you anywhere! Where have you been?” 

I repeated, “No. I just went to the washroom. What are you talking about? I've only been gone for a maybe a minute.  Honestly, I’m in my briefs, look at me, do I look I have been 

outside? It’s raining and freezing cold.”  

My partner was still visibly angry, as she said “You woke me up when you yelled in the living room. It sounded like you hurt yourself. I went out there and you weren’t there. I checked the bathroom. I went through this entire condo, twice through. I know you weren’t here. I even looked outside. Where were you?” 

Still in disbelief I said, “I honestly got up, went to the washroom in the hallway, and did my best to not wake you up and came straight back. I could not have been gone an hour and a half.” 

“Chad, I have been up an hour and a half, looking for you and waiting for you. You were not anywhere here. I have been calling you. You simply disappeared. You explain it then?!”

It was clear that we had a difference of opinion.  In silence, I thought back to my initial fright when I first awoke. Had something happened?  Was she right? Is an hour and a half missing? Did time simply skip again? I didn’t want to make any excuses, but I had no explanation for it. Time skips in my life.

It was then that my partner said, with a look of shock and realization crossing her face, “You don't think you've been abducted - do you?!”

All I could think of in response was, “For me, I was only gone for a couple of minutes. If you're saying that I have been gone from the condo for over an hour, then an abduction is the only thing I can think of, that would explain this. As I have shared with you, this has happened to me before.”

I had no idea that I had been missing, yet my partner very much noticed that I was not in either the condo or the building. All my clothes were there. My keys were there. My shoes were there, and my jackets were there. This was winter. I could not have wandered outside into the cold, sleepwalking without being woken up by the bitter cold, nor would I have gotten very far without drawing attention from neighbours. My skin was not cool to touch and there was no sign that I had been out in inclement weather. 

My initial thought, when something like this happens in my life is always, what has happened? I try to figure it out logically. What I can share with you, as I have shared with her that particular night, is that I had no recall. I was not ill. I have never had seizures. I have never been found sleepwalking. In fact, my waking pattern is that I am typically up out of bed awake and alert quite quickly. I have no need for coffee, and do not even drink it; there was also no confusion or disorientation here. It is not easy to come to the realization that time skips. What I do distinctly remember about that night, is that my partner was telling the truth. She had looked for me. I was not laying on the floor, experiencing a seizure. There was no where to hide, that she had not looked. She was so angry, and I believe her. She repeatedly said she checked throughout the apartment.  After she heard me yell, her assumption, was that I was hurt myself and she felt an urgency to find me. I was not in the condo that night; I was truly missing. It is difficult to come to terms with missing time. I can deal with it when it is just me and I can keep it to myself. It becomes far more challenging to deal with, when your partner notices that you are the very thing missing, and you do not have an explanation for it. Put yourself in my shoes, and I do know that it is difficult for people to accept the abductee experience and missing time. Imagine what it would be like with your family members if the same thing happened to you.  Not only is it a struggle to believe my explanation, but to actually realize that it has happened in their presence, for I had disappeared, and they are now part of the missing time experience. It is frightening for me as well as everyone else around me. It can feel like a breach of trust and relationship. It forces family and friends to really decide one way or another, whether they believe it is happening to me or not? It can be polarizing if there is any doubt on the other partner’s behalf.

Over time I was eventually able to recall more details and fragments of memory from that night. When I walked out into the living room, a grey was standing there, around the corner to the left and that is when I let out a gasp of fright.  I never did get to the washroom. Upon my return, I found myself standing in front the hallway bathroom unaware that time had passed. The memories did not come right away, but emerged on their own, unaided, although not without PTSD symptoms. Everything comes with a price. Yes, I have memories, enough to know that I had an encounter that night, but I am still unsure what they did to me. What I do know is that I came back with new and intensified fears-- of pain, medical procedures and being approached from behind.  Though my memories are few, I felt traumatized, for I did not know what to call it, or why I was feeling so terrible. At this point in my life, this mysterious trauma, missing time, and weird experiences were becoming quite normalized. I was always focused on moving forward, promising myself to figure it out later. The one thing I learned, which helped in moving forward, was knowing that my girlfriend had truly accepted my experiences.  

This event is not the only example of partners witnessing experiencer’s periods of missing time. Discovery Channel created a UFO documentary series called Alien Mysteries. During one episode  they interviewed a woman from Aldergrove BC named Corina Saebels.  As it turns out, Aldergrove is less than 20 km, as the crow flies, from Mission BC where the condo was located where I had my missing time experience. Corina described how on July 17, 1991 (three years before I moved to Mission), her and a romantic partner were out sitting on the back patio enjoying a nice warm summer evening. Both suddenly felt a deep vibration that preceded a giant black triangular boomerang shaped ship that blocked out the night sky as it passed silently overhead. Corina described it as being, “about the size of a football field, if not bigger.”  Her friend began to panic and said this is dangerous and urged her to come inside, then took off inside leaving her behind, standing on the patio, frozen in place watching it.  “Then it was there, and then it wasn’t.”

He then came back outside and asked her, “Where have you been? I’ve looked all over for you. You’ve been gone for quite a while.” 

She then said she “[I] didn’t go anywhere. I’ve been outside for just a few minutes.” 

He said, “No, you’ve been gone for over 45 minutes.” 

Her response was “That’s impossible.” 

They proceeded to have an argument over her being missing for nearly an hour.  She had no idea where she had been, nor did she even know she had been gone.  This event caused the end of their relationship. He called her up the next day, apologized and then broke up with her. The following day, she reached out to the Vancouver Planetarium and asked if they received any similar reports. They responded, no, but got here in touch with UFO BC. This is the very same group I reached out to that same year.  

The UFO BC investigator that was being interviewed in the documentary had reported that they had received 15 other reports that very same night.  This shows that the sighting of the triangular craft was not just their imagination. Two things were certain-- they really did see something that night and Corina really did go missing. 

In the book Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind, Alien Abduction, UFOs, and the Conference at M.I.T. by C.D.B. Bryan, the author had interviewed an experiencer named “Carol”. Carol eventually discovered that her father might also be an experiencer and had his own similar missing time event. 

Carol's father's earliest experience had occurred in 1930, when he was twelve years old. He had gone down to the beach with his older brother to skip stones in the surf. They had been playing together for less than an hour when Carol's father bent over to pick up a particularly interesting seashell. When he had straightened up, everything about him was hazy and his brother was gone. Carol's father wandered the beach looking for his older brother for what had seemed to him only a few moments, then turned to look behind him. His older brother was there. He was there and equally frightened and upset, because he, also, had bent down to pick up a shell, and when he had straightened up, Carol's father suddenly seemed to have disappeared, too.

Neither of the boys would have thought much about this incident had it not been for the fact that when they returned home, instead of having been absent a little more than an hour as they had thought, they learned they had been gone three times that long. What's more, when they hadn't gotten back on time, their mother had called the police, who had thoroughly searched the beach the boys had been playing on and reported back they were nowhere to be seen. 

It was reports from families of experiencers like Carol and her father that caused researchers to quickly realize that the abduction experiences were also running in families. It didn’t take them long to realize the greys are doing what scientists call Family Science, also known as a family study…