Bill Herrmann abduction, Summerville / North Charleston, South Carolina

Bill Herrmann was 26 or 27, a diesel mechanic and church custodian living in a mobile home off Dorchester Road in North Charleston, South Carolina. He had never believed in UFOs. "I'd never been interested in science fiction," he later told the Associated Press. "I thought that was all hogwash. Garbage."

That changed in late 1977. A glowing disc began appearing over Charleston. On January 22, 1978, he took nine photographs of it.

March 18, 1978. About 9:25 p.m. A UFO was flying low over his home, above a marshy area. Herrmann went out to a field with binoculars to get a better look. The disc zoomed toward him and projected a blinding beam of aquamarine light.

"It dropped, and I was scared," he said. "A green light came up around me. I was disoriented. At my feet there was an orange circle of light."

He tried to run. His legs would not move. He could not yell. "I thought Oh God, I'm going to die."

He described a metal disk, 60 feet in diameter, and said he was engulfed in light and pulled upward toward the ship.

Then he was somewhere else. A wooded clearing near Bacons Bridge Road near Summerville, about 15 miles from home. Several hours had gone missing. He ran hysterically toward a distant road where he could see cars, and watched the UFO depart. At approximately 1:15 a.m., Deputy Pike Limehouse of the Dorchester Sheriff's Office met a man in a very excited and distressed state.

James A. Harder of APRO hypnotized him, and the missing time filled in: a curving hallway, a control room filled with computers, a red-lit, hospital-like room with an examination table only 2 feet above the floor, and three frail beings about 4½ feet tall. "Their skin was the color of a marshmallow. Their eyes were long and dark with a brown iris." They spoke English without moving their lips and called him a "subject." They came, they said, from Zeta Reticuli, "32 light years from here," and they feared humanity's tendency toward war.

On April 21, 1979, a metal bar stamped "M A N" appeared in a globe of blue-green light in his bedroom. Automatic writing followed, then a voluntary flight over Florida and the Kennedy space center. A man calling himself "Tom Olsen" polygraphed him in a hotel room. The real Thomas M. Olsen later denied ever visiting. Retired Air Force colonel Wendelle Stevens spent 11 days on the case, called it "a classic," and in 1981 published UFO... Contact from Reticulum with Herrmann.

Voice stress analyst Charles R. McQuiston found nothing wrong with his story: "That's what he believes, and that's as far as I can go." Hypnotherapist Dr. Bernard Stern found him honest, then added: "He is fantasizing but doesn't know it." MIT found the bar was a cast alloy of lead and 6 percent antimony, like lead pipe or a car battery grid. When Herrmann photographed a disc near Charleston Air Force Base in 1980, an officer took one photo and he was told it showed a Phantom aircraft. Most ufologists dismissed the book, and researcher Patrick Gross rates the case a contactee tall tale.

In 1983 Stevens was convicted. Herrmann broke with him in print, accusing him of exploiting UFO case histories, his own included. That same year he called the phenomenon "satanic in nature, demonic in origin." The field near Bacons Bridge Road still keeps its secret.