"Strange Encounters with Another World" 
 
Testimony of Kathy Land by Andy Butcher 
  
for Charisma Magazine,  
 
April 2001  

The pieces started to fit together the night they dropped her. For years Cathy Land had been by the sense that something wasn't quite right. There were periods of unaccounted missing time, mornings when she felt heavy and lethargic despite a full night's sleep, an unsettling sense of somehow having been visited.

Then she woke up with an alien's face inches from hers.

"He had dropped me. I could feel his breath on my face. It startled him that I woke up. He had this confused- 'That's not supposed to happen'- look on his face. The second one still had hold of my legs. I rolled over into a fetal position and went right back to sleep."

In the morning she told her son what had happened. Usually the family dismissed her recollections as a joke. This time he told her: "Those were not aliens; those were demons."

"It finally made sense," she recalls.

Her son's comment propelled her to the Internet, where she found some Christians who didn't dismiss her experiences as nonsense. Her faith was enriched and deepened by as she discovered that God's power could free her from her years of torment.

"I stopped being so scared, and I got mad," she says. "I finally understood. These things were trying to get the world's attention away from God, and how better to do that than make people think they are being invaded from outer space?  These are not benevolent little E.T.'s come to clean up the environment, fix the hole in the ozone layer. They are not from a distant galaxy. They are raping women, they are murdering animals, they are terrifying children."

An office manager for a medical supply company, and one-time stock-car racer and singer-musician, Land began to read all she could to learn more about what she had trouble learning for so long. She had been fascinated by UFOs since early childhood, one time reporting a seashore sighting to the police.

"Many times I would have a strange feeling just before going to bed," she says, by adding that precise memories were hazy when she awoke. "I would feel like something had happened during the night- but nothing I could put my finger on."

One time her son told her of a frightening encounter he'd had with "a tall man." She admits that his account had scared her.

But she continued to devour books and TV shows on alien phenomena. She told family members about her experiences and talked about UFOs with friends, though most laughed her off.

"Sometimes it made me feel like I was losing my mind. Maybe I did dream this all up. But there were too many things over and over and over again," she says.

As she read all the Christian material she could find on the subject after her spiritual awakening, she began to see how she had been so deceived  for so long. "Everything started to make sense," she says, "I realized that everything I had read had probably  been happening to me all along, and it scared me. Then it made me mad. How dare they mess with me and my children?!"

Land's anger over the years her life was "held" spurred her to tell her story to other's caught in the UFO mesh.

"This is war. It's the most ingenious hoax there is. It's a plan to get the world's attention away from the gospel of Christ, and it's working."

She says many exploring the UFO world are, as she was, "searching for love."

"That's what they are looking for, really, in their beliefs about aliens. But there's only one place they will find unconditional love, and they're looking in the wrong place."

An active part of her local Baptist church in Jacksonville, Florida, Land says that she now has a peace she never knew before. "I didn't know it for years," she says. "It was a miserable existence from day to day. Nobody should be victimized like that. If I can save only one person from being harmed, then I have to do this for God. It's my offering to Him.

"It's not the mission field I would choose for myself, she adds. "I would rather be feeding hungry people in India because people wouldn't laugh at me. [But] who else is going to go and tell them, 'You all are being deceived?'"