The Abduction Case that Spans Generations
By Natalie Myers
The Reed family consists of Mum and Dad (Nancy and Howard Reed) and their two sons Thomas and Matthew. Theirs was a famous case in Sheffield, Massachusetts in the 1960’s.
However the story starts before this in 1954.
Nancy, who was 15 at the time, was at a cabin on Moosehead Lake, Massachusetts. She was there with her Mother, brother and his girlfriend at the time. Nancy and her brother’s girlfriend both woke up to a blinding light in the cabin, illuminating two small “tubby” figures in the corner of the room watching them. Nancy recalls moving but not by herself. It was if someone was moving her legs for her, whilst she remained completely paralysed. Both reported that as time went on and the sun began to come up, the paralysis slowly faded away, but both were left with a terrible feeling of nausea.
Nancy never understood this unexplained incident and didn’t experience any other traumas until over a decade later when her sons began to be visited.
Thomas and Matthew Reed’s experiences began slowly, somewhere between 1966-1969. They would see bright orbs in their room that appeared to watch them. The orbs floated around and then would disappear.
One on particular occasion, the boys recall being stood at the top of their landing when they were lifted up and out of their house into a ship that resembled a ‘turtle’. They remember being escorted by two figures.
Thomas was shown a picture that resembled a willow tree and remembers being told this was of great importance. Both boys were shown pictures of galaxy clusters. Shockingly, they were told that they would be used as part of a study on human genetics and the immune system. They then both awoke in their bedrooms.
Frequent abductions occurred to both boys and the following year, their Mum Nancy found them missing from their rooms. Once she located them she was shocked to hear that a ball of light had taken them, not for the first time and that both recalled watching the beings standing over Nancy and their Grandmother whist they were sleeping in their beds. Nancy found the boys on a trail on their ranch, the boys were about 15 feet from each other, both in a catatonic state and covered in mud.
Next, on 1 September 1969, the boys were in the car with Nancy and their Grandmother driving across a covered bridge in Sheffield, Massachusetts. All four witnessed a bright light rise from the river. Nancy instinctively knew what was about to happen and tried to speed off and outrun the light. The car stalled and then they all remember being inside something that resembled an aircraft hangar.
We encountered something,” Reed said. “It was definitely not of this world. We had a black and white television at time and the imagery that we saw on this thing was unbelievable. There were lights that looked like fluorescent tubing inside this hangar.”
Suddenly they were back in the car, only this time Nancy was sitting in a different seat that when she started the journey. They recall it being dead silent, then after a while, the noise of insects, frogs and birds came back. Two hours had passed but it had seemed like just a few minutes. The peculiar thing about these events were that the Reed family were not the only ones to have experienced strange occurrences.
People had begun to flood the local radio station with calls of a strange “UFO” in the sky and strange light anomalies across the sky. Some 40 plus people had born witness to the events. Speaking many years later of the events, one of the witnesses recalls lying in his back yard stargazing when an enormous craft came overhead that beamed light down towards him. He described the lights on the ship being colours he had never seen before. He told reporters who later interviewed him that his recall of the event is still as vivid now as it was all those years before and that he was 100% convinced what he saw was an alien space craft.
Thomas Reed later took a polygraph test, in which he passed with flying colours, however as with most such cases and polygraph testing, this did little to silence the sceptics. Thomas was also vocal on how much the experiences had traumatised his family and made their lives “pretty miserable”. He stated he was regularly subjected to bullying and ridicule and people would come into his Mothers restaurant just to make fun of her. He stated that his Mother was always assured to tell them that it was important to tell the truth no matter what the consequences may be.
Things go so bad that the family had to board up their own house in order to protect themselves from the abuse of outsiders, and finally ended up having no choice other than to move.
Fast-forwarding to 2009, Matthew Reed recalls driving his car on night after dropping off a friend. He was stationary at a set of traffic lights when, quick as a flash he found he was parked close to a cornfield. Around an hour had passed and he had mud on his boots. He recalls seeing a ship in the sky. MUFON sent a response team to him and discovered strange magnetic anomalies around the car. Compass readings spun and radiation readings spiked. Checking other areas close to the car, the readings were all normal.
The story of the Reed family and of the mass sighting in 1969 have been regularly used within TV shows and documentaries over the years. It even made it into the series The X Files, however the family think that such shows have sensationalised their experiences and the truth has been somehow lost or distorted over the years.
However, so sure were the residents that experienced the events in ’69 that in 2015 the Great Barrington Historical society and museum included the Reed abduction case and the mass sightings into their official archive. This is the first time that a UFO experience has been recorded as an historical fact !
Further controversy followed when in 2015 when Thomas Reed placed a memorial at the sight of the bridge incident with a citation from the Governor that read
“In recognition of the off-world incident on Sept. 1st, 1969, which engaged the Reed Family, which has been established.”
The monument was vandalised and ended up being removed in 2019 due to local complaints and not having apparently been granted the right planning permissions.
The Reed family continue to speak out about their case and claim that the events have been reviewed by Bigelow Airspace. Their story, like that of many remains unchanged after all these years. Surly it would have been too much of a coincidence for some 40 other people to witness UFO’s the night of 1st September? Whatever conclusion you come to, the locals seem to be convinced that they were visited that evening.
