The Tujunga Canyon Contacts

Five women. All known only by pseudonyms. All part of the LGBTQ community, and connected through it. "Sara Shaw" and "Jan Whitley" were partners, though the 1980 book presented them as "roommates." For more than twenty years, they said nothing.

March 22, 1953. An isolated cabin in the Big Tujunga Canyon, about 30 minutes north of downtown Los Angeles. At 2:00 a.m. Sara woke to "a deathly stillness" and an "illuminating glow of light." Bright light flooded around the cabin.

Then, "suddenly, inexplicably, it was 4:20." More than two hours of missing time. The women fled. As they ran, they passed "a vaporous something" with "the head and shoulders of a long-haired personage."

August 5, 1975. Sara contacted investigator Ann Druffel after a TV documentary brought back her memories. Under hypnosis in December 1975 and February 1976, she described a "Saturn-shaped" craft hovering over a stream. She stood on a beam of light, "about the same angle as an escalator would be, except it doesn't have ridges or steps." "I'm starting to float," she said. "Well, they're walking with me, but my feet aren't on the ground."

Inside was "like one giant room," with circular balconies above. The beings were slender, dressed in black, with "elongated, mask-like faces." They spoke by telepathy and examined her with some type of scanner. She was marked with the number 4 on her back, "like an invisible tattoo," and controlled "as if I were a sheep." Jan remembered very little. The creatures were invisible to her, and she felt a crunching pain in her head.

1956. Jan and "Emily Cronin" were driving back to Tujunga late at night and stopped at a rest area. They were awakened by a bright light and found themselves paralyzed. Emily recalled two tall, thin entities clad in black coming out of a saucer-shaped craft. She managed to move one finger, and the paralysis broke for both.

Summer 1975. In a Panorama City apartment, "Lori Briggs" and her roommate "Jo Maine" saw a dark dome-shaped object in a vacant field next door. They heard whining noises. The beings stood 3 to 4 ft tall, with large domed heads and only a hole for a mouth. Lori had felt something before, in 1970, at 16, in Redondo Beach: "it was as if some force came in and just dragged me out of sleep."

No government body ever examined the case. There are no photographs and no physical traces. By one account, the first reports went to NICAP. Druffel investigated alone for about five years, then with parapsychologist D. Scott Rogo. She called the region a "window area." Rogo and Druffel themselves considered implanted false memories. They also noted that nobody else in the densely populated Panorama City complex saw the 1975 landing. Critics point to hypnosis, and to The UFO Incident, which aired on October 20, 1975, before Sara's first regression. David Halperin saw Holocaust imagery in the tattooed number, the sheep-like captives and the striped clothing. He read Sara's experience as coming from society's rejection of her lesbian relationship.

The Tujunga Canyon Contacts was published by Prentice-Hall in 1980. It was only the second book about alien abductions. Podcaster Rob Kristoffersen calls it "absolutely a very early case in the pantheon of alien abductions." Sara's date comes before Betty and Barney Hill. Jan died of cancer in 1987. The case remains inconclusive.