The Sandy Larson Abduction on I-94, North Dakota

Tuesday, August 26, 1975. Sandy Larson of Fargo, North Dakota, got up early. She had a real estate licensing test to take in Bismarck. With her were her daughter Jackie, 15, and a boyfriend named Terry. Accounts disagree on whose boyfriend he was, and on who sat where.

About 4:00 a.m. they were heading west on Interstate 94, some 45 miles out of Fargo. First came a flash. Then a rumbling sound, like distant thunder. In the southern sky, heading east, there were lights.

Eight to ten glowing objects with smoke around them. Orange orbs, in some tellings. One was larger than the rest, and the witnesses had the impression that the others had come out of it. The orbs descended ahead of the car and began to approach. The rumble grew louder as the lights grew brighter. The large one came within 20 yards.

All three felt frozen. Stuck, as if frozen in ice. Jackie remembered being outside the car in a state of paralysis. Of the eight or ten spheres, three took off. Five remained floating in mid-air.

When they could move again, they were sitting in different places, with no idea how. At a service station they worked it out. About an hour of missing time.

Larson was later hypnotized by R. Leo Sprinkle, a psychology professor and counsellor at the University of Wyoming. Sources date the sessions anywhere from late 1975 to a year after the event. She said she had been floated into the UFO. Inside was a being about six feet tall. Its head was wrapped like a mummy, with large, bulging eyes. Its arms were jointed strips of metal like a Meccano set.

She described probing, a clear liquid rubbed on her skin, and a metal instrument scraping painfully inside her nostril. In her words: "even our heads were opened and all parts of our brains looked at … we were dissected like frogs." Later sessions added passing through walls, a transparent cube and a desert realm with square buildings.

Shortly after October 20, 1975, Larson called a local UFO investigator. The case went to APRO, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, and Coral and Jim Lorenzen told it in their 1977 book Abducted!. John Coleman of WLS-TV in Chicago drew sketches from her description for a television documentary. No government inquiry followed. Project Blue Book had closed in 1969. Terry confirmed the incident but declined further involvement. Jackie never made her version known.

That October date is the heart of the skeptical case. On October 20, 1975, NBC aired The UFO Incident, a prime-time film about Betty and Barney Hill. Martin Kottmeyer wrote in 1995 that Larson sought an investigation after watching it, and traced her "space mummy" to imagery passed from Peru through ufologists' hands. The Iron Skeptic argued that this is one witness saying three people were abducted, not three people saying so. Over time her credibility diminished, as critics suggested hoax, hallucination or psychological instability.

It is sometimes called the Bismarck Alien Mummy incident. It unfolded in the same season as the Travis Walton case, and it still returns in North Dakota radio, newspapers and podcasts. One of the state's best known encounters. To its critics, one of the least believable.