"They have those funny hands like Bonnie said but they're orange."
"Orange color? Did they seem to have fingers?"
"Didn't look like fingers."
"Did they move their hands ever?"
"Yeah."
"Did they open their hands ever?"
"Yes. They opened… it was almost like a clasp."
"Like there were two fingers, or three?"
"I wouldn't call them fingers, they were big…"
Harder worked to reinforce the hypnosis, saying, "That's all right. You can remember it… I can understand that you didn't like them. Did they seem to have feet that looked like ours. You really didn't have a chance to see them?"
Harder continued for a few minutes more, asking about the appearance of the creatures and trying to learn what he could about how they were dressed. He asked specific questions about the belts the aliens wore and if their clothing was the same color above the belt as it was below.
Roach mentioned that the aliens had wiped her with something but she hadn’t understood the purpose. Harder speculated, "It probably didn't hurt you. They probably were just taking a little skin sample or something superficial. Cells or something."
"I don't know."
"You can really remember, you just don't want to remember."
"I don't want to."
Harder, trying to convince Roach to remember, said, "I can imagine, you were worried about your children. You children may remember what happened and then afterwards you may want to. You will want to remember what happened to the children so that you can reassure them, probably. So it would be a good idea if you remembered what happened to you, if you can possibly do that without its bothering you too much."
"After I left that room, I wasn't with the children."
"I see," said Harder. "But they may be worried a little bit about what happened to them and you'll want to make sure it isn't too frightening. You don't want to upset them unnecessarily."
"No."
"I want to ask you one question, and you don't have to answer it. Did they put a needle in your stomach or anything like that? You can just answer with your fingers, you don't have to say."
"I'd rather say, I don't remember anything like that."
"You don't remember any blood samples that they took?"
"Nothing. They hooked me up to a machine. Checked everything, examined me from top to bottom. They put needles in me in places."
"Do you remember what places?"
"No."
"Perhaps in your arms or legs?"
"They put needles everywhere it seemed like."
"Was it Chinese acupuncture do you suppose?" asked Harder.
"I don't know."
Harder couldn't learn anymore about the needles or the probing. He wanted to know if she had watched them work or if she had kept her eyes closed. He asked her about leaving the craft. He said, "Did they carry you?"
"Yes, more or less. I don't know how it was. I wasn't really walking."
Harder said, "It would be very helpful for me to know as a scientist, what kinds of things that they are looking for. That would be very helpful if you could remember that… if it wouldn't be too much trouble."
"They wanted to know how our minds work."
"That's very interesting," said Harder.
"They want… to give them certain information that they don't understand yet."
"What kind of information?"
"How we think, how we feel, our emotions. They don't know about us."
"That's very interesting," said Harder.
"No… I don't like what they want."
"You thought you were being intruded upon."
"Yes. They didn't care, because they don't have an understanding of emotions like ours. Maybe they're trying to understand our emotions. I may be wrong…"
"You know, Pat," said Harder, "you're one of the more intelligent people that have been in touch with this thing."
That ended the first session. Roach had awakened at that point. Harder would conduct two more regression sessions, but all were contaminated by the first. Harder made no suggestion that Roach would be unable to recall what had been discussed. He believed that she should be aware of everything that had transpired. This was his investigative technique, believing that the following sessions would build on the first.
In fact, after the end of that session, Harder asked additional questions. She remember a few more details about what had happened. She now believed that Kent, her youngest son, had been on the craft. That was a detail she hadn't known before the regression.
The problem here, as I see it now, is that Harder spent some of the time asking very leading questions. He didn’t take a neutral approach, but was searching for specific information. That does create problems about the credibility of the report. It isn’t always that Roach remembered something on her own, but was led to some of those ideas by the way the questions were being asked and the reinforcing techniques that Harder used.
And some of the things that Roach said were obviously derived from the Llanca abduction. Her discussion of the technology she saw seems to mirror that from the UFO Report article she had read. Rather than being a confirming detail here, it is another evidence of contamination.
That same afternoon, July 8, Harder interviewed the oldest daughter, Bonnie, to learn if she would corroborate what her mother had told us. In the letter to me,Roach had made it clear that her children had more memories of the situation than she did. If true, this would be a key factor.
The session with Bonnie was a disaster. She seemed apprehensive about hypnosis but Harder did manage to apparently induce a light trance. The distractions proved to be too great and no progress was made. Bonnie woke quickly without revealing anything to us.
A second attempt met with the same results. Although Harder could induce the hypnotic state, it wouldn't hold as the probing moved to the abduction. The first question destroyed the mood, and Bonnie would sit up, blinking.
On the morning of July 9, Roach was ready to try again. She was sure that she could remember more, especially after she had a good night's sleep. Harder had no difficulty putting her into a hypnotic state. Roach was a good hypnotic subject.
After describing, again, how she was moved from the house to the ship, Roach said, "They put me on a table and they hooked me up on one leg and one arm. I didn't like their examination."
"Was it like a G-Y-N exam?" asked Harder.
"That's part of it," she said. "I don't like what they do with my head."
"What are they doing?"
"Taking my thoughts…" Then angrily, she said, "They don't have the right to take them."
She and Harder discussed exactly what she meant by taking her thoughts. The aliens were making her relive past events as if building a catalog of human emotion. Roach said, once again, that they didn't understand human emotions.
Roach leaped over a span of time and said, "I'm getting dressed. They don't know."
Harder asked, "Don't know what?"
"They don't know how we humans are. I called them stupid." Roach laughed about that.
"What did they say to that?"
"They weren't angry. They just do what they want to. The man was a regular man."
Harder wasn’t ready for that revelation. He asked, "What? What was that? You thought there was a regular human being with them?"
"Yes."