Social media post by Roberta Hoffman, August 9th, 2006
!!! PLEASE DON’T SCROLL PAST THIS !!!
My husband, Mark, is missing, and I am very worried about him. I’m attaching a picture to this post of what he looks like, please spread this around as far as you can! I last saw him leaving for the subway on July 7th, he was walking to the Fifth Avenue-59th street station. If anyone has seen him, please contact me at xxx-762-1431 or via email at rhoffman@xxxxxx.net.
Diary entry of Roberta Hoffman, August 11th, 2006
Mark came back today. There’s something wrong with him.
I’d been sitting by my computer and frantically checking my notifications, hoping against hope for a message or an email, when I heard a knocking at the door. I checked through the peephole and there he was. He was smiling, but it didn’t reach to his eyes at all. His eyes seemed cold. Dead.
I let him in of course, hugging him and crying and asking where he’d been, but he was just completely silent, completely still, just smiling and staring forward. If it weren’t for the fact I could hear him breathing and feel his heart beat, I would have worried he was dead, just propped up in front of the door to scare me. He smelled strange, a little bit like hospital antiseptic.
Eventually I pulled back from the hug, and he didn’t even look at me. He just walked straight inside and moved over to the refrigerator. He pulled out a carton of eggs, and starting eating them, raw, one by one, just popping them in his mouth, chewing on the shells. I was dumbstruck, I didn’t know what to do. He ate the entire carton while I just stood there, quaking with fear. The whole time he didn’t stop smiling.
After he finished the eggs, he moved into the bedroom, where he started packing some clothes into a briefcase, haphazardly. It didn’t look like he knew what he was doing. The mix of clothes he chose was very odd, a completely haphazard assortment of random items with no rhyme or reason to them. I swear he even took some of my panties and packed them up as well. I asked him what he was doing, and without even glancing up at me, still smiling as he stuffed the clothes into the overfull briefcase, he said “I am leaving you and moving away.”
He said it with such a lack of emotion, as if he were a text to speech program reading out a script. There wasn’t a flicker of recognition behind his eyes. There was no sadness, no sense of vengeance, no catharsis, nothing. It was as if he were a robot.
While I was trying to process what was happening, too shocked to even know what sort of emotions I should be feeling, he reached under the bed and pulled out a small metal lockbox, the one I knew he kept full of cash in case of emergencies. He packed it up in the briefcase as well, before finally closing it with a click and moving to leave the house.
I stopped him, my shock having faded just enough to feel angry. I shouted at him that he couldn’t just leave, that we’d been married for 5 years, that if there was something wrong he could tell me, all sorts of things. I kept screaming at him and sobbing until eventually I couldn’t say anything anymore and my throat hurt from the effort. The whole time he just stared blankly, grinning like an idiot.
I’m not proud of it, but I did slap him across the face, just to see if he’d react. He didn’t even flinch.
After that I wasn’t angry anymore. I was afraid.
“Please move out of the way” he said, completely neutrally, either ignorant or uncaring of the red mark on his face where I had hit him. His smile hadn’t faded. I did as he said. He walked out the door and I watched him continue calmly in the direction of the subway station.
I don’t know what to do. I called the police of course, but they just seem to think I’m overreacting over my husband leaving me. It just doesn’t make sense. I don’t know what made him act this way. I’m not even sure it was Mark. He looked like Mark, his voice sounded like Mark, but there was nothing behind his eyes, there was no soul. It was like someone had peeled off his skin and was wearing it like a suit.
Letter written by the late Dr. Elsa Humboldt to her daughter Hannah Humboldt, September 13th, 2007. The letter was taken as evidence by the police following Hannah Humboldt’s disappearance on October 2nd, 2007.
Dear Hannah,
I fear that my appointment with the reaper is fast approaching, and while I’ve done my best to tie up all the loose ends and settle the last of my worldly affairs, there is one final thing I must do before I feel truly comfortable passing on my way to the other side. There is something I’ve never told anyone else, something I’ve had to keep secret for over a decade now, and it just wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t tell anyone.
You see your fair share of strange things as a mortician, and I’ve told you about many of the things I’ve seen in the profession which struck me as a little odd, but nothing comes close to the bodies they sent me from subways and underground parking lots.
The first one I ever saw showed up in 1989 I think, some time during the winter. I’m afraid I can’t quite recall the exact date, you’ll have to forgive the memory of an old woman. In any event, it was a John Doe, recovered from a lowest level of a parking garage downtown. There were no signs of violence or anything like that, but the thing that made them send the body to me to perform an autopsy was its face. It was smiling, an intense grin that seemed like something other than the rictus smiles that sometimes happen due to rigor mortis. They wanted me to see if there was any sign of poison or the like.
I won’t bore you with the details of what I found out during the autopsy, because frankly it wasn’t much. Almost everything seemed completely normal in every respect, nothing in the blood or anything like that. Everything except for the skull. I had almost finished up the autopsy and was going to call it a night when I noticed it, a faint scar in a ring around the circumference of the head, almost unnoticeable. Of course I had to check it out, so I got out the bone saw and cut open the skull. What I saw shook me to the core.
There was more metal than brain matter, a mess of silicon microchips and wires. I’m a doctor, not an engineer, so I don’t really know exactly what any of it was, but I do know it has no business being on the inside of a man’s skull, dead or alive. And judging by how healed the scars around the head were, he must have been alive for some time after that junk was implanted. Now I know that nowadays some people have those experimental implants to help with certain brain issues and things like that, but keep in mind this was over a decade ago, when such things were firmly in the domain of science fiction.
As soon as I recovered from the initial shock, I immediately called up my boss in his office and explained what I found. When I finished describing the body, he went very quiet for a few seconds. I was worried that the line must have gone dead, and was about to hang up and call again, but then he finally broke the silence and said “Wait right there. I have to make a call”.
So I waited. It turned out I didn’t have to wait particularly long, only about a half hour at most. Without knocking, a group of four men in black suits and sunglasses burst through the door of the autopsy room, moving in brisk lockstep. All of them were smiling.
Three of the strange men made themselves busy packing up the corpse into a body bag, sealing up the already removed organs in plastic bags. The fourth meanwhile came up and spoke directly to me.
“Hello sir or madam. I understand what you believe you may have seen is shocking and upsetting to you. It is in the best interests for your mental health to forget what you think you saw. The body you performed an autopsy on was completely normal in every way. If you ever think you see something like this again, please call this number.” He pressed a business card into my hand, completely blank save for a phone number printed in black ink.
While he spoke, the other three finished sealing up the corpse, and one of them popped out the tape from the tape recorder I used to make autopsy reports and slipped it into his pocket. I felt dazed. Everything was happening so fast. The three men picked up the body bag and began to move towards the door. The remaining man moved to join them.
“Wait!” I cried out, “Who are you people? You can’t just do this, this is evidence!”
The man who had spoken to me earlier turned on his heels to face me once again and said something I will never forget. Without missing a beat, he recited your name, Hannah, along with your address, your phone number, your blood type, and your social security number. The threat of what would happen if I talked about what I’d seen was implicit.
Over the years since then I’ve seen a number of more bodies like that one in 1989. I didn’t have to cut open the skull to make sure, they all had the same grin and the thin white line around their head. They were always recovered from somewhere underground, always in a subway tunnel, or a parking garage, or a basement. One was even found in a cave. Whenever it happened, I’d dutifully call the number and smiling men in black suits would arrive, tell me to forget what I saw, and leave with the body.
The thing that bothers me is that, as time went on, I began to see those bodies with more and more frequency. At first they only showed up once every 2 years or so, but by the time I quit being a mortician in 2003 I was seeing them nearly every 6 months.
I’m telling you this because you’re the only person I can tell. I don’t care what happens to me at this point, the cancer has progressed far enough that I know there isn’t any real danger to me, but I know they can still hurt you. After you read this letter, please burn it. Don’t tell anyone what I’ve told you.
Letter by Michael Mora, sent to the Californian Unidentified Flying Object Society, November 3rd, 2007. It is unlikely that it was ever seriously investigated, as CUFOS formally dissolved on November 15th, 2007.
To whom it may concern,
I’m not really sure if you folks are the sort of people I should be sending this to. I can’t say I have any evidence, not really anyway, and even if I did, what I saw is only tangentially related to UFOs at best. Let me start from the beginning.
I used to work in an office building in downtown Oakland. I worked in the basement, maintaining archives of all the necessary documents that are required for a company of that size to remain operating within the limits of the law. It wasn’t exactly glamorous work, but the pay was decent and I appreciated the solitude.
I used to always take the elevator down to the basement, not really out of any real necessity to be honest, I’m more than capable of walking down the stairs, but I just enjoyed the feeling of motion. I know it sounds silly, but it was just a little way to brighten up my day a bit.
Anyway, around 3 months ago I remember pressing the button to go down to the basement level. I had just punched in to work, so I knew it was 9 o’clock in the morning. The next thing I knew, I was lying on the floor of my basement office, feeling incredibly woozy. I glanced at my watch and found it was nearly 11 o’clock. I had lost almost 2 hours of time.
Now I wasn’t especially familiar with the various traditional “symptoms”, shall we say, of abduction at that time. I wound up going to the hospital, worried that I had suffered some sort of stroke or something, but the doctors gave me a clean bill of health. I couldn’t just let it go though, it was profoundly disturbing to have simply forgotten almost two hours of a day with no explanation of what had happened. I never felt comfortable in the basement anymore, and I would nearly have a panic attack at the mere thought of entering an elevator. None of my coworkers remembered seeing anything odd, but that’s not much of a surprise given I often spent days without interacting with anyone I work with.
Eventually I wound up seeking out a hypnotherapist, to try and uncover what I figured must be some sort of repressed memories. It didn’t take just one session, I had to keep coming back for weeks and weeks, but eventually I did remember what had happened to me. Now I almost wish I didn’t. I really hope that the skeptics are right, that hypnosis simply makes one susceptible to suggestion, and that what I think I remember is merely fantasy. It would make everything so much easier. What follows is, to the best of my remembrance, what happened to me that day.
The elevator didn’t stop going down. Normally it only takes about 30 seconds or so to reach from the ground floor to the basement, but this time it just kept going. I started to panic, hammering on the buttons to try and get the elevator to stop, but nothing worked. I could feel my ears pop from the change in elevation, like when an airplane begins its descent. After about 15 minutes, the elevator stopped with a loud clunk. Then the lights went out.
Shortly after I was plunged into what felt like total blackness, the elevator doors opened, and I found myself being grabbed by people I couldn’t see. I tried to fight back, punching and kicking as best as I could, but to no avail. They just dragged me into the darkness and I was helpless to resist.
It wasn’t pitch blackness as I had originally thought, as my eyes adjusted I realized there was a faint phosphorescence covering the walls of the tunnel I was being dragged through, and I could vaguely make out the shapes of the people who had taken me. They seemed to just be ordinary people, clad in normal street clothes. There seemed to be something vaguely wrong with their faces though, they all looked like they were smiling far too intensely. The tunnel was roughly cut into a rectangular shape, and seemed to be hewn from the living rock.
I had stopped resisting at this point, and when they noticed I wasn’t struggling anymore they let me walk on my own, keeping a grip on my shoulders to make sure I wouldn’t run off. As we proceeded deeper into the dark, we passed into a vast cavern of sorts, it must have been as large as a football field at least. Like the tunnels, it was dimly lit, but I could make out enough to get a general understanding of the size of the place. What made me gasp though was the object I saw in the center of the room; a large, metal disk about the size of a house, sitting atop three metal legs, like landing gear. Crowded around the object were various people with what looked to be welding equipment, and every so often I’d see sparks fly, like it was being repaired. I never saw it in motion, but I can only assume it was some sort of flying saucer. That’s why I’m sending this letter to your organization.
Eventually we’d crossed the large room, which I can only think of now as a hangar, and I was led into a smaller, circular room, where I was strapped down to a cold metal table. That’s when I saw one of them.
I’m sure you’ve read enough letters like this to know what they look like. It was short, like a child, and even considering the gloom I was surrounded by it was difficult to get a good look at it, like it was something my brain wouldn’t allow me to see. It touched me with a cold, clammy hand and I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. I was completely paralyzed, whether by fear or something else I don’t know. It felt wrong, it felt utterly unnatural. When I looked into its vast, black eyes, I felt nothing, no sympathy, no intelligence, not even cruelty, it was just empty. It pressed an odd metal object to my head, and my entire body erupted in horrible, burning pain. It felt like hours, but it must have only been seconds. When it removed the object I saw bright spots before my eyes. The thing gestured towards the exit where I’d come from and the restraints were lifted. The smiling people who had brought me here grabbed me and dragged me back out again. We passed through the hangar and the saucer was gone, as were the people who had been working on it. I was taken back to the elevator through the tunnel. Everything was blurry, and I felt vaguely as though I was drunk.
The elevator doors closed, and the light came back on, the brightness nearly blinded me. When it arrived at the basement, I stumbled into my office and collapsed on the floor, I must have blacked out after that. When I woke up I didn’t remember any of it.
It doesn’t really matter if you write me back or not. I don’t even work at that company anymore, I quit shortly after I recovered my memories. I just needed to be able to tell someone, anyone about this. Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Michael Mora
- - -
While these accounts do not paint as clear of a picture as those of the Stephensville or Plainsfield incidents, they do seem definitely related. Further research is, of course, required, but after a certain point it has been difficult to acquire further information regarding events of this nature. Any documentation of similar encounters after 2007 are vague and difficult to verify, as though any information relating to these topics has been purposefully removed from the public eye.
Whether this is simple coincidence or signs of some sort of cover up remains to be seen.
Regardless, it is, perhaps, in one’s best interest to avoid interactions with unusually smiling strangers, and to keep oneself above ground whenever feasible.