Going Public with your Close Encounter

Interview with Rosalind Reynolds

By Philip Mantle

In the 1990’s I was fortunate enough to become involved in the research and investigation of a number of close encounter cases better known as cases of ‘alien abduction.’ The bulk of my research was published in the book I co-authored with journalist Carl Nagaitis entitled Without Consent. I traveled the length and breadth of the UK interview witnesses to both well known events and many cases that were totally unknown. There were a number of witnesses that stood out for me and one such was Rosalind Reynolds. Rosalind was one of a few brave enough at the time to go public with her account which I will relate here in brief. I caught up with Rosalind in September 2013 to ask what it was like and what happened to her once she went public. But first her story:

It was September of 1982 and CB radio fan Rosalind Reynolds and Philip, her boyfriend at the time were on a late summers drive through East Anglia when an encounter with a UFO changed her life forever. The couple had set off from Clacton in Essex and they were en-route to Corby in Northamptonshire to meet up with relatives. The approximate journey time was two and a half hours and they were both looking forward to it. They had stopped for some food after leaving Clacton and were heading towards Sudbury. It was a nice warm evening and the car windows were down the radio was playing. On the outskirts of Sudbury they drove under a string of electricity pylons which spread out across the hillside.

Suddenly they were confronted by a strange configuration of lights as they emerged from underneath the power lines. A horseshoe-shaped set of lights was approaching them at high speed. The multi-coloured, mostly orange and red object swooped low over their car. It was at this point that Rosalind noticed the silence and stillness that seemed to surround them. As the UFO moved across the sky a flash of blue electric light illuminated everything around her. “It made everything look like a photo-negative,” recalled Rosalind. A peculiar, foul smell, almost like rotten eggs seemed to be coming from the object. The odour became stronger the closer it got.

Bemused by the whole event the couple drove on through Sudbury and at Long Milford joined the A604 to Haverhill. As Philip concentrated on the driving Rosalind took in the surrounding countryside. It was at this point that her eyes glimpsed something in the distance. “Look another one!” she shouted, pointing to an oval-shaped object that seemed to be heading towards them. Philip thought it might be a plane but Rosalind was adamant that it was heading in their direction. “Why would a plane draw level with us?” she asked as she looked across to see a ball of light pacing their car. Philip was having none of it and continued to drive on.

Rosalind tried to ignore the thing that was following them but it was no good, she knew it was there. Philip simply refused to acknowledge it no matter what. They drove on and suddenly they were plunged into darkness. The car’s engine and electrics cut out and the disabled car rolled to a stop. “Philip was glued to the steering wheel, looking straight ahead as if he had blinkers on” remembered Rosalind. She assumed that, like she, he was shocked and scared by the presence of the UFO. The thing was now so close they could not avoid looking at it. Big, bright and round sitting just sixty feet away from them. “It was like a big ball of light with lots of little lights around it,” Rosalind told investigators later.

The couple reluctantly climbed out of the car and lifted the bonnet to see if they could find out what had caused it to stop. The way the car had stopped seemed as if its battery had just suddenly been drained. As they stood looking at the cars engine its headlights came back on. The couple looked at each other and Philip jumped back in the driver’s seat and tried the ignition. It started first time. Rosalind climbed in and they drove off leaving the UFO behind them. After putting some distance between themselves and the UFO the couple finally began to relax. Then a few miles further away Rosalind saw what she thought was the same object again shooting straight up into the sky with a pencil-thin blue light streaming out behind it.

Glad to be on their way again they seemed to make good progress but when they got to Corby their host was not answering their knock on the door. After a while, a bedroom window opened and someone asked: “What time do you call this? It’s half past one in the morning.” Their two and a half hour journey had taken five and a half hours. Rosalind and Philip were stunned by the events of that night, and by their missing hours. But the after effects of that encounter would be equally astonishing. Within months the couple broke up after six years together.” He was a different person, not the Philip I knew,” said Rosalind.

Rosalind had changed too. She dramatically lost weight, despite developing a craving for sweets, especially chocolate, and went down to just six stones. She gave up drinking and smoking and suddenly became creative, speedily writing complicated scientific papers on such topics as: “How The Universe Was Formed” and “What Religion Really Is.” But Rosalind was desperate to discover why she had lost three hours from her life. What had happened on that summer’s evening?

Rosalind saw the chance to discover why she had three hours of missing time when she spotted an article in her local newspaper about a UFO group in East Anglia. Rosalind made contact with the group and eventually they arranged a session of regressive hypnosis. The hypnosis took place at Rosalind’s home but it went disastrously wrong. “A Bright beam of light came into the room, the video recording was wiped out and all the clocks stopped,” said Rosalind. After the abandoned hypnosis session Rosalind was advised to see a psychic and was introduced to the man she would eventually marry. Mark Reynolds-Parnham was that man.

Mark arranged a second hypnosis session in which Rosalind was taken back to her 1983 encounter. She recalled being approached by four or five small beings after their car had stopped. The aliens, for that is what she assumed they were, forced her into their craft. They took her to an examination room where she was undressed and laid on a clear perspex-like table for observation. Rosalind became agitated, embarrassed and frightened during the hypnosis session. She described how the aliens undressed her and laid her on the table but then she became quiet. Suddenly Rosalind sat bolt upright in her chair and screamed: “No. I don’t want any babies,” So concerned were the hypnosis team by Rosalind’s distress in trance, they decided to end the session. Rosalind is convinced that she underwent some kind of gynecological procedure but still prefers not to speak about her hypnosis session.

Since that night she has suffered irregular menstruation which she feels has cost her the chance of having children. Medical tests failed to find a cause for the problem. Rosalind also reports an unexplained scar in her groin area, which she assumed is linked to her abduction experience. Additionally, she developed a buzzing in her head which troubles her to this day.

Rosalind says the after effects of that encounter were truly devastating to her. The initial weight loss left her friends and family worried that she might be anorexic and she worried about her missing periods. “I could not talk to anybody about these things because I thought they would think I was a freak,” said Rosalind. “I just bottled it up. I became a recluse for a while worrying about what had happened.”

Rosalind’s husband Mark has helped her come to terms with her experience, but she now believes she may well have had UFO encounters in the past; there are other events of missing time that she finds hard to ignore.

Continue Reading Part II: Interview with Rosalind Reynolds

 

This article is published with the expressed written permission of Philip Mantle for publication on alienjigsaw.com

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