The Pat Roach ("Patty Price") Family Abduction, Lehi, Utah

Pat Roach was a divorced mother who worked at Geneva Steel. In October 1973 her family had just moved into a house on the outskirts of Lehi, Utah. On the night of October 16, after a hectic and tiring day, she fell asleep on the couch beside her five-year-old son.

Near midnight she woke to the cat yowling, a child screaming and the neighbour's dog barking furiously. There had been reports of a prowler in the area, and she had no phone, so she bundled up her children and hurried to a friend's house about a block away. In Jerome Clark's version, she also saw a bright light through a window, coming from an open field. The police call was logged at 12:10 A.M.

Officers searched the house and found nothing. The boy who had been sleeping in the living room said he had seen a skeleton standing in the corner. An older daughter was sure of something else. "Mama, it wasn't a prowler; it was a spaceman! I saw him."

About eighteen months later, Roach read abduction stories in a magazine and wrote in. Her letter reached Kevin Randle, a field investigator for APRO. Randle confirmed with the Lehi police that they had answered a midnight call to the house. Then APRO research director Dr. James Harder began hypnotic regression sessions in July 1975.

In a light trance, Roach described two figures standing over her, unlike any being she had ever seen. They were just over four feet tall, very thin, with long arms, clawed hands and huge eyes. They spoke without moving their lips and took her to a nearby craft, into a large, bright, round room with machines like computers. They put her on a table, and she said, "They put a needle in and they took my mind, my thoughts." Among four or five creatures stood a human, a bald man in horn-rimmed glasses.

Every child but one described being taken aboard, then put back in bed. One daughter said the beings "thought at me with their heads" and told her she wouldn't be sick anymore. She had been very ill. Afterwards she was healthy. The mother and her eldest daughter both drew the beings.

Coral and Jim Lorenzen told the story in Abducted! in 1977. They called her "Patty Price" and set the story outside a small Midwestern town. Within months, Randle says, she went on a syndicated television program under her real name. In 1996 the Deseret News recalled that she had attracted national attention when she went public.

In time, Randle became the case's sharpest critic because he believed Harder was looking for some validation of the Hill abduction. Just before the session in which Roach described a medical examination, Harder told her about Betty Hill's. When she said she believed she had been examined, Harder asked if it had been a G-Y-N examination. Randle's conclusion: "The genesis was the adult's episode of sleep paralysis and then two years of discussing this with her children until some of them believed they had been abducted." No one has alleged a hoax, and Randle treats the witness as sincere. And the prowler reports from that night were never resolved.

Pascagoula came five days earlier. It was another case Harder and APRO investigated. The Roach story remains a study in how hypnosis and an investigator's questions can shape an abduction account.