* Part 6 of a series of columns examining UFO encounters in Kansas and Missouri.

Mr. H has described being taken aboard a disc-shaped aircraft, and then deposited in unfamiliar surroundings at night...

H huddles under a rocky outcropping, worried the craft might return for him. Before long it occurs to him that they're not coming back, and he doesn't know where he is.

He scrambles up the side of the ravine and stands on the dark flat plain, searching in vain for farm lights or cars. He can make out the silhouette of a high horseshoe-shaped hill from which the ravine issues, so he trudges up the hill to get a better look at the territory.

Then he glances up, and is transfixed. He observes a cluster of 10 or 12 stars, the largest and brightest he's ever seen. Abruptly he is seized by a profound feeling of destiny fulfilled, like every trivial event in his life only had one real purpose -- to ensure that he would be right here, right now.

(During this session I asked him to draw the star cluster, numbering the individual stars in order of size and brightness. I quickly pocketed the drawing and said nothing more about it. But at the next session, I asked him to draw it again, and he duplicated the seemingly random configuration and brightness scale perfectly.)

After a time, he sees the disk again, below him. It has returned to the area he just left, and describes a slow zigzag above the plain until it pauses; suddenly it swoops up over him again, and draws him up and inside.

Finally he has seen the top of the craft. It tapers up smoothly to a central peak, upon which a single red light glows.

The slender critter that first picked him up is not present now; instead, his host, while still fairly short, is more stocky. Its face is deeply lined, "like Charles Bronson." No helmet this time. Its suit is black with three horizontal white bars stacked along each side of its chest.

It escorts him to an opening in an inner wall, where another host wearing a white smock brings him into the adjacent room. He is assisted to lie down on a narrow cot or table.

The examiner opens H's mouth, which just stays open while a flexible tan tube is inserted. The host stares at a console while feeding an attached tube down H's throat. H doesn't cough or gag. Then the host returns its attention to H, and quickly pulls out the tube.

There's a metallic tray at the head of the cot, and the host selects an instrument from it -- a 6-inch silver cylinder with lateral projections at each end, and a long thin probe or needle extending from one end. The host seems to insert the probe painlessly into each of H's elbows. (Recall the sore elbows he mentioned during my initial clinical exam.)

Next the host affixes a dime-sized flat disc to each of H's shoulders in turn; it removes the discs, and stows them somewhere. (Remember those strange circles on H's shoulders?)

Finally, a mirror-like rectangle descends from the ceiling and stops over H's torso. Then it retracts upward, and H is assisted to his feet. He moves toward the door to the primary chamber, and notes that he is actually walking. It occurs to him that previously when he moved about the craft, he was not walking, but somehow gliding. Walking with difficulty, he feels clumsy, uncoordinated.

After a bit longer, a door again opens in the outside wall of the craft, and H descends to the ground -- right beside his pickup. The disk flashes away into the night sky, and is gone. Mr. H enters his pickup, sits awhile in confusion, then drives home.

The sessions continued for 20 weeks. I've recounted, in abbreviated form, the narrative we assembled. Eventually, no new material was emerging, and we decided to bring the inquiry to a close.

There is a postscript. The University of Missouri at Kansas City hosts an annual dinner presentation, and that year the speaker they'd invited was J. Allen Hynek, chairman of the Astronomy Department at Northwestern, and former Project Blue Book investigator for the Air Force. He also established the Center for UFO Studies in Evanston. If you saw the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," Hynek served as technical adviser, and made a brief cameo as the dapper gent who steps forward from the crowd near the end, pipe in hand.

After delivering his dinner address, Hynek pled fatigue and asked to return to his hotel. He ascended the first flight of stairs before ducking out a side door, where we had a car waiting. Ted Phillips, a "trace case" expert, came along.

For three hours in the middle of the night, we reviewed the case with Hynek and Phillips, tape recorders running. H was there, as was Rick, and Jim, the guy who referred H to me initially. Hynek said this was one of the nation's top three cases currently under study.

We agreed to keep details unpublished. If similar elements surfaced in other cases, we'd know witnesses weren't merely copying H's tale. (An abduction case in France was preceded by a sighting of incandescent flying blue basketballs ...)

In two weeks: What on earth is going on?

Jon Hauxwell, MD, is a retired family physician who grew up in Stockton and now lives outside Hays.

hauxwell@ruraltel.net