Sgt. Charles L. Moody Abduction, Alamogordo

Charles L. Moody was a US Air Force sergeant stationed at Holloman Air Force Base, near Alamogordo, New Mexico. On the night of August 13, 1975, he drove into the desert alone to watch the Perseid meteor shower. One account has him sitting on the bumper of his car, having a smoke.

About 1:15 a.m. One of the meteors seemed odd. A silver glowing object separated itself from the flashes far above and fell toward the ground about 300 feet away. It was a metallic disc, described in one retelling as about 50 feet long and between 18-20 feet wide. At fifteen to twenty feet up, it wobbled on its own axis. Then it moved slowly and steadily toward Moody. It stopped about seventy feet away.

He heard a high-pitched hum. Through a rectangular window he saw shadows resembling human forms. His car would not start. A numbness came over him. Then the craft rose into the sky and disappeared into the distance.

Moody got home at 3:00 a.m. with about one and one-half hours of missing time. The next day his lower back hurt. Within days, a rash broke out over his lower body.

A physician suggested self-hypnosis. Over a couple of weeks, the memories returned in fragments. Two beings came up to his car. After a brief scuffle, he was knocked unconscious. He woke on a slab inside the craft, paralysed.

His two captors were about six feet tall, in skin tight black clothing. Their leader stood about five feet, in a silvery-white suit, with a large hairless head, a protruding brow, roundish eyes, small ears and nose, and very thin lips. His skin was whitish-gray. Their lips did not move. They spoke in his mind.

The leader asked if he would behave peacefully. Moody agreed. A rodlike device was placed against his back, and the paralysis lifted. He was shown a drive unit, a large rod surrounded by three glass-canopied holes holding crystal-like objects. He was told of a mother ship 400 miles above Earth, of several alien races watching, and of the danger of nuclear weapons. Closer contact would not be attempted for another twenty years. Then his memory was blocked.

No Air Force inquiry is known. Project Blue Book had closed in 1969. The case went to Jim and Coral Lorenzen of APRO, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, who told it in their 1977 book *Abducted! Confrontations with Beings from Outer Space*. Charles McQuiston, co-inventor of the Psychological Stress Evaluator, analysed Moody's claims and said they appeared to be true.

The first doubts came from Jim Lorenzen himself. He found contradictions in Moody's accounts. The mother ship was 400 miles away in one telling and 6,000 miles in another. The captors were robust six-foot-tall creatures, yet also frail. The Iron Skeptic later published a rebuttal, "Charles Moody's Lonely Hearts Club Band." Others note that the sighting began during a meteor shower, that the details surfaced weeks later through self-hypnosis, and that voice-stress analysis is disputed. No hoax has been documented.

The story belongs to the same year as the Travis Walton case in Arizona. It follows the car and missing time pattern set by Betty and Barney Hill in 1961. New Mexico MUFON says it holds the original case file, including pictures his wife took at the site shortly after his abduction. They do not appear to be online. Podcasts still return to that night in the desert.