Peter Khoury and the "Hair of the Alien", Sydney, 1992

Peter Khoury was born in Lebanon in 1964 and moved to Australia in 1973. He married Vivian in 1990. By his own account, the strangeness started early. In 1971, on a rooftop in Chekka, Lebanon, he said a silent egg-shaped craft hovered over a group of children frozen like statues. On 12 July 1988, in Sydney, he reported paralysis, tall beings with "big black eyes" and "a long needle-like flexible crystal tube" pushed into the side of his head. Between 1 and 2 hours seemed to vanish. Missing time, in the language of the field.

July 23, 1992. About 7 am. Khoury had driven Vivian to a train station and come home alone. He felt unwell and lay down to sleep.

He awoke with a start. Something was alighting on the bed. Two naked women knelt at its end. One appeared Nordic, the other Asian. The Nordic woman had a very elongated face, a sharply pointed chin and blue eyes 2 to 3 times larger than normal. Her fine blonde hair was "curled something like Farrah Fawcett, but to an extreme," Khoury said. Her companion had straight black hair and eyes that were almost completely black. Neither spoke.

The Nordic woman, over 6 feet tall and apparently very strong, pulled his head to her breast. He resisted. She did it 3 times. "And I bit," he said. A small piece of tissue came away and he swallowed it without meaning to. He saw no sign of pain and no blood, only a look that seemed to say "this isn't the way." Moments later, both women had vanished.

Later, urinating was painful. Khoury found fine blonde hair wrapped tightly under his foreskin. "I knew that there was no way, no way at all, that a hair that size and wrapped around the way it was should have been there," he said. He sealed it in a plastic sachet. In April 1993 he founded the UFO Experience Support Association in Sydney.

In early 1998 the Anomaly Physical Evidence Group, self-funded biochemists led by Dr Horace Drew, agreed to test the hair. Bill Chalker, the case's main investigator, reported the results in "Strange Evidence" in the International UFO Reporter of the Center for UFO Studies in 1999. The hair was human. Its mitochondrial DNA carried "five distinctive DNA markers characteristic of a rare sub-group of the Chinese Mongoloid racial type." The team concluded that the most probable donor was, as Khoury claimed, "a tall blonde female." A later test of the root, reported in Chalker's 2005 book Hair of the Alien, gave "a novel Basque/Gaelic type mitochondrial DNA." Chalker asked whether these were "'humans' from elsewhere," but he did not claim the results proved an alien hybrid programme.

John O'Neill of Australian Skeptics pointed to sleep paralysis, hallucination and simply falling asleep, while accepting that the experience was real to Khoury. Others raised contamination and the limits of 1990s DNA methods. Spanish researcher Luis R. González wrote a long critical report in 2017. On 1 September 2010, for the SBS documentary My Mum Talks to Aliens, Khoury sat a polygraph. "Peter passed the test," said examiner Gavin Wilson. Sceptics reply that polygraphs themselves are doubted.

No official body ever investigated. No photographs of the beings were ever found. Every retelling leads back to Chalker. Even so, the case keeps drawing comparisons with Antonio Villas Boas in Brazil, 1957, for one reason. It offers something from the encounter that can be put in a test tube.