The Truly Haunting Story of The Man in Black - Area52 Special

Chris Ramsay (0:00)

October 28th, 1975, almost 51 years to the day. It's 2.3 in the morning, and David Stephens and his friend Glenn Gray are out for a joy ride in Oxford, Maine. They're headed down to a lake called Thompson Lake. When all of a sudden, they describe something commandeering the steering wheel. Like something took control of the car. The dials start going crazy. The car even turns off into a secluded road where all of a sudden, they're face to face with a giant cigar-like object staring right at them. The bright lights are blinding them. There's two spotlights that begin chasing them. They turn around. It hit the gas.

So these lights start following this car. The boys are driving as fast as they can. When they realize, it is immediately over their head and this giant beam of light flashes down on the car. The car skids for about 15 feet and both of them black out.

Next thing they know, the boys are parked in front of a giant pond, much like this one here, except the craft is still overhead. Underneath the craft are two disks flying up and down into the water and back out again. This goes on for about 20 minutes. The car won't start. And then in the blink of an eye, all the crafts shoot up into space. It's now seven in the morning, and the boys are on their way home.

So the boys ended up making a pact not to tell anybody we keep this to ourselves. Except they started getting these random, wild, terrible symptoms, like their hands and feet started swelling. They started slurring their speech. They couldn't walk straight. They had fever chills. The mom was getting quite worried. So they actually contacted the Deputy Sheriff, Eldon Bartlett, who when he showed up, his report said that the boys were definitely terrified of something. Word got around town and eventually this got back to UFO researcher Brent Rains. Now Brent Rains shows up. He talks to the boys, talks to the mother and they agree to take them out for a spin and try to retrace their steps. The problem is the kids wouldn't get out of the car. They were too afraid. So the boys are still scared. They're having flashbacks, poltergeist activities happening in and around the house. Super high strangeness ensues. To top it off, they get a visit from a man in blue, not a man in black this time. This is a guy with a crew cut, probably Navy or Army Intelligence. He shows up, knocks at the door, and tells David Stephens, if you know what's good for you, you better keep your mouth shut. That scares the living daylights out of both of these boys, specifically Glenn Gray, who never ends up talking again. He refuses to be regressed. He refuses to give more information. He just wants this all to fade away. Well, then Shirley Fickett is hot on the trail because this story makes rounds in town specifically, and she's a UFO researcher in Maine, while she shows up and decides, hey, maybe the key here is the missing time.

Let's try to regress these boys, or at least David Stephens, to see if we can glean a little bit more information or find out, you know, what happened. And so they enlist the help of Dr. Herbert Hopkins. This is our main protagonist of this evening's tale. Well, Dr. Hopkins was a physician and he's done, he's got about half a decade of experience doing regressive hypnotherapy, but he's never done it on a UFO subject before. And so this is a first for him. David ends up agreeing to the hypnotherapy, and they end up doing about seven sessions together. And the sessions would go just as any classic gray abduction session goes.

David remembers looking down, out of the window of a craft, seeing his car parked sideways in the middle of the road, when all of a sudden, from behind him, a tiny being emerges.

Classic gray in the brain talk, do not fear, we're not here to harm you, yada yada yada. He parked the car for one second.

So he describes the gray as having this mushroom-shaped head, these large eyes, tiny nostrils, pale white skin wearing what looks like a bedsheet. The gray then asks him to follow him into another room. Now they get to this other room, and David is faced with this, what looks like an operating table, this giant room, this slab in the middle, and four similar-looking beings standing around. Now, they tell him to get undressed, and they start helping him get undressed, and he freaks out and starts throwing punches, and he says he even punched one. Now, here's the interesting part about this whole story. This happens on October 28th, which is exactly in 1975, exactly one week before the abduction of Travis Walton. So I don't know if this is related, but I'd like to somehow think that they picked up two humans and both of these humans were like trying to punch the crap out of these aliens. Whether or not it's related, I just think it's really interesting that it happened right before this other case. And we have a similar type environment. Anyways, I digress. He eventually agrees. He gets on the bed. They perform all sorts of experiments on him, taking fingernail samples, clothing samples, blood samples, hair samples. After which, they tell him to get dressed. He does this by himself. And then the memory fades, and he's back in his car. But you see, the story doesn't stop here, because Dr. Herbert Hopkins, the physician who did the regressive hypnotherapy, about one year later, gets a very strange phone call from what eventually turns out to be The Man in Black.