It was late summer in 1979 when a friend, whom I will call Paul Lowen, the Environmental Officer for the town I lived in, stopped by to see my brother Wes and I in our printing business to tell us he had seen a flying saucer, or at least a UFO.

Paul was a scientist, of that I can assure, and one of the early pioneers in environmental science, those years just after the moon landing gave us a real view of the planet Earth and burgeoning consciousness of our frailty. Not out of college too long, Paul landed one of the newly created jobs as an Environmental Officer in a large town at the Jersey Shore.

He was responsible for stopping wanton disrespect for bog land and he was proud of that.

Paul was a plain fellow, of moderately stocky build with sandy blond hair and childlike blue eyes that sparkled when he spoke about the land and the sea. I once asked Paul if he could tell me a good place to go swimming. I was thinking that he would know where there might be an unpolluted beach or cove nearby.

He actually put his hand to his brow and moved his head from side to side thinking about what I had asked him. Slowly, Paul lifted those blue eyes and spoke in that direct childlike way to me saying " Yes, I know a small inlet that is absolutely the cleanest spot anywhere and it is on the east end of the Grand Cayman Island."

Paul meant it.

You may or may not recall that until we saw the Earth from outer space we were all a might provincial. We really were not as sophisticated as we may think back then in those severe seventies. A large oversize newsprint book came out in the last year of the 60’s called the Whole Earth Catalog. Everyone suddenly became very earthy.

It was in 1970 my friend Abby called me at my Greenwich Village apartment and asked if I wanted to join her for a thing they were calling Earth Day and it was being held in Washington Square Park. On the tables that were set up were varied booklets containing some of the early warning signs which would soon be pollution frenzy that would soon become the stuff of the Environmental Protection Agency and all the organizations that are now the foundations of the ecology movement in America.

Paul comes out of this movement. He was in cahoots with Pete Seeger and the Clearwater project. In fact in 1978 Paul organized the Atlantic Ocean Alliance Concert at Convention Hall in Asbury Park, New Jersey. I attended to see Allan Ginsberg and say hello to him after not seeing him for many years.

In the early 1960’s I would go listen to Allan read poetry and play instruments and sing at St. Mark’s in the Bowery, the old Dutch church on 2^nd Avenue between East 10^th and East 11^th streets. He appeared there regularly with the other beat poet and always with his longtime partner Peter Orlovsky. It was when I took over a store front on St. Mark’s Place in May of 1968. One night Allan was on his way home from the Café Metro on 2^nd avenue and passed my stoop, where I was sitting.

He stopped a minute and spent a few on the stoop with me. We became friendly and saw each other often in the east village and west and always remained more than cordial. Allan was an inspiration for many young artists in those years.

I was also thrilled to hear the famous 60’s songstress Melanie sing "I got a brand new pair of Roller Skates" and to hear all the wonderful things people were saying as though they really had it in their hands to save the world from Global Warming.

Paul Lowen was a down to earth scientist, a ‘no fooling guy’ with real concerns and no frivolity yet Paul had a wonderful, wry sense of humor. He also had a sister Marty, a very pretty girl, kindergarten teacher by trade. She was smart, chic, quick and usually seemed somewhat embarrassed by her brother’s boyishness.

That fateful autumn afternoon in 1979 my brother and I were working away in our small strip mall print shop when Paul came through the sunny front door. We had not seen him in a while and were glad to see him. If nothing else, Paul was an intelligent friend. But, today he looked odd; his face all red like he’d been under a sun lamp. That and the expression on his face gave us reason for concern.

Printing presses stood in the middle of the large shop. My drawing table was up against the left wall. Other than the light coming through the large storefront window, we had overhead fluorescents that cast a slightly pale blue light over all.

"Something very strange has happened. We saw something." Paul said.

My brother asked him to explain, he being older than Paul and I who were about the same age, he took charge. I respected my brother. He had served in the Army for four years and been on some dangerous missions. He took after the Viking side of our family, blond and ruddy faced. He did not scare easily, and he was not at all naïve.

Not that I was a rube having grown up in Hudson County and lived in the Village over ten years, but I was a longhair with more of the Scottish looks of our Grandmother..

Paul told us how he, his sister, mother and father were driving home late one night just before the opening day of his sister Marty’s school. The family drove in one of those 1970’s AMC Hornet cars, with the large over sized front windshield that revealed the passengers from head to knees. Paul’s elderly father drove and Paul sat up front. His mother and sister shared the back seat.

They lived off what was then a long wooded country road. Trees lined the sides of the road and soon they reached the corner they would turn off on. On their right stood a cleared treeless field, lit by a full moon in the autumn sky.

As the car came into the intersection, around the bend, Paul and his family saw in the field to their right what he described as a huge circular structure the size of a football field. It appeared to be a big flat disc, surfaced with large lighted panels that seemed to be lit from within. Each panel rose from the ground a full thirty feet.

The front seat of the little car was emblazoned with light. We all saw this kind of scene in 1977 in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but Paul probably had not seen that, he was an egghead and avoided popular pictures..

Wes and I were taken aback, to say the least. This was not the kind of story we had ever heard from anyone of our less educated or serious friends. There were some whoppers for sure but no one would set themselves up to be thought nuts with this kind of far out story. Certainly we were having a tough time getting close to this story and held Paul at arm’s length to hear more.

Paul continued that as he and his father leaned into the windshield to watch the huge craft the lighted panels that formed its outer skin began to flash and grow brighter. Before their eyes the massive disc began to turn like a great wheel, perpendicular to the earth and when it gained high velocity it lifted from the ground silently and made a short rise then a meteoric shot into infinity in less time than they imagined possible. Paul had never seen anything like this and he was frightened. He was as scientist and knew he had seen something decidedly Para-normal.

Wes and I were naturally at a loss for words, and greatly relieved when Paul’s sister came in to urge him to drive her home. I turned to her and asked, "Is he telling us the truth about what happened to you?" Marty barely engaged my eyes and said, in a clipped tone, "I do not want to discuss it!"

With that she demanded Paul be quick and left the store, to go sit in their car and wait for him.

Her demeanor was so out of character. I had really hoped she would have denounced Paul as a clown and fraud for trying to deceive us, but all she did was strengthen his claims, also uncharacteristic of Marty Lowen. Paul followed her out the door with his eyes and apologized, at which we confusedly shrugged our shoulders.

He revealed that his father and he were heavily sunburned from leaning forward in the front seat of the AMC Hornet. Their bodies were still red from the head to the knees; their clothing did not protect them from the light emanating from the alien spaceship.

Paul’s family physician said the burns looked like those experienced when people are exposed to large doses of mild radiation. They looked sunburned in September.

Then Paul turned to me and asked if I could draw a picture of the craft he had seen if he described it carefully, and of course I agreed I could and indeed, right there on the spot I did make that drawing. Paul intended to take the drawing to the United States Air Force in Washington the very next day, and we wished him the best, not really knowing what that would be.

It was over two weeks before we heard from Paul Lowen again. He dropped by, without his sister to tell us that the United States Air Force dismissed him as a crank. His being a scientist, a working scientist, Paul was dismayed that his experience, shared by his entire family of highly educated people, was being treated like raving of a bunch of lunatics.

Seemingly he had resigned himself to be one of the many considered demented because of this sighting. It was tragic actually. Imagine having any experience that you attempt to share and find that you are disbelieved by the very people you reach out for to help you. So many women face this dilemma when they attempt to report abuse or worse a violent rape. Paul Lowen and his sister, mother and dad were nor hysterics, nor were the Lowens publicity seekers.

Wes and I could sympathize but even we had not seen the craft. We too were those who had to evaluate and decide how we would process this in relation to the person we both

knew to be level headed and not self deceptive, who we knew to be honest, forthcoming and otherwise un-deluded. The best we could do was to wish him luck pursuing the matter. The Air Force people kept my drawing of Paul’s spaceship. I never made a copy of that drawing. There were no inexpensive copy machines then. Few ways existed to make copies then in fact, except costly photo-static repros.

Over the next few years Paul resigned his job for the township and built what was the first water testing laboratory in this county. In fact, by that time our little firm had moved up into advertising, and Paul came to me for his start up graphics. We were hired to create a brochure for his new lab and to gather data for it I went to the new lab.

Paul’s Environmental Testing was housed in a brand new building two stories high in the heart of his hometown. Remember that this all takes place in the later part of the 20^th century. In the early 1980’s there were no laptops, or cell phones, and few computers small enough to benefit small businesses. Paul’s lab was closer to the command center of the Star Trek flagship, Enterprise than any other place I had yet seen.

There were three or four employees strutting about in lab coats and Paul also wore one when he approached me. We shook hands and I noticed that the wry smile was gone and Paul was now all too serious. I brought my then partner and lifelong friend Jack to meet Paul. My scholarly and bearded friend Jack and Paul got along, both highly educated. Paul did not mention his encounter to Jack. He waited until Jack excused himself to make a phone call.

"I found out a lot more about myself and that sighting. I actually took myself to a hypnotist," he said, "the trouble was I found out he was using me to help himself write a book, and that did not make me happy. The last thing I need is to be the subject of his book."

I was sympathetic. It was enough to believe you had a close encounter of the third kind without a voyeuristic hypnotist, to boot.

Paul told me that hypnosis revealed he had been gone that night in September for 24 hours. In other words, he and his family thought they simply saw the ship and continued on home. What I had never been told, and what had made Paul’s sister the kindergarten teacher so very uncomfortable with the tale was that the whole family was missing for a full 24 hours that day. School started the next day and Marty never showed up.

It turned out that Paul’s hypnosis revealed that they had been abducted and taken on board the space craft. He described how uncomfortable the examinations they underwent were physically and had another bit of information for me. This was not the first time Paul Lowen had been visited upon by aliens. This was one of many such experiences that he did not remember except under hypnosis. It had begun during his childhood.

There was not much I could say to this man anymore. His life had changed dramatically through no indulgence of his own. Hypnosis revealed much that made him constantly on vigil. He could be the victim of multiple abductions, and unearthly medical examinations, not only in the past but predictably in the future as well. He was never to be the same fellow he was when I first met him, full of piss and vinegar ready to take on the environmental ills of a planet. Paul was now jaded and frightened. The environment was the last thing he cared about.

He was out to make money testing hysterical parents’ water. He needed money to pursue his quest for truth in a world decidedly ready to disbelieve. He was now a man on a mission, to prove he was in danger, and hide from the danger that would always be there for him.

When Jack returned I said my goodbyes to Paul, he had given me the data for the brochure and we left.

"He’s a queer duck,’ Jack offered from the passenger seat in my 1984 Pontiac.

"He used to be the most sober guy I knew, Jack. Him saying he saw little green men is no different friend than if you turned up with that tale yourself!" I meant it I meant it.

I made up the brochure for his lab and delivered it.

Never heard from Paul Lowen again, nor did I ever lay eyes on him or his lovely sister Marty ever again. I always thought of him, of them and wondered if they were safe.

Years later I went for a drive out where his lab had been. The building was there, but empty. No sign of Paul or the industry he had built. I searched for him over the years in the local phone book to no avail.

When the Internet came along I found myself searching for Paul online. Oddly enough I have found many old friends even some going back to the 1960’s on the web, but no sign of Paul Lowen. None.

My brother Wes died of ALS in 1995. Now only I am here to tell you of this strange tale.

My Dad was a retired US Air Force Colonel. Dad passed on in 1991. He was still alive when Paul related his UFO story to my brother and I. Dad flew missions over Tokyo in WWII. I asked him if there were aliens and he said, "Yes there were indeed."

"The government cannot tell you that they exist, Richie," Dad said. " People only support government for the protections it affords them. What do you think people would do if they discovered that aliens could reach down and abduct them and the Government could do nothing to protect them? It would mean outright civil mayhem.

Then one day recently I do a search for Paul and, son of a gun if he doesn’t come up. Google has his picture, looking unchanged from the Paul I knew thirty years ago."

The web has his site, he is the founder of a far out supposed group of scientists who believe there is an innate energy, a renewable one that can be drawn from the earth and the universe in fact. This site says that space travel is possible. Like real space travel between galaxies.

By the way, the first thing Paul related about the Spacecraft sighting was that the huge spaceship seemed to be drawing fuel from the earth through those huge receptors on its surface.

That was Paul’s primary deduction when he first told Wes and I his story. He was convinced the spaceship he saw drained power from the earth itself to fuel its extraordinary flight capabilities he witnessed when it took off. The scientist in Paul forced him to overcome his fear and hypothesize about the fuel the craft used.

Thinking I ought to reach out, I wrote the email contact on the website asking Paul, the site’s organizational founder, to say hello as I was writing about those days and his adventures as he had related them. No answer yet.

For nearly 25 years this story stayed with me. I tried to tell people about it and they listen, but I guess it just sounds like another UFO story on TV.

One difference from other stories I tell is this one leaves people uncomfortable. It makes their skin crawl.

Somehow I am left feeling like Paul; I really heard him tell me his story, I made a drawing of the spacecraft that was in the Government’s hands and yet I do not see that anyone else takes it seriously.

I always feel funky when I tell it, and very lonely. If no one believed Paul, and they find me hard to swallow, what if what Paul said happened to him was the truth? If he was right, and my Father was right, we are all very, very wrong to ignore this.

What do you make of it? Hello? Hello? Are they out there? Are you still out there?

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