Bulletin:  A Housewife In Scranton, Pennsylvania

A housewife in Scranton, Pennsylvania, has reported to local police that she was abducted in broad daylight last month by four-foot, gray-skinned humanoids from outer space.

After taking her onboard their spacecraft, the aliens communicated with the woman telepathically, she claims, explaining to her the following. 

1. On their planet, an epidemic is causing all the children to die before they reach puberty.  
2. The epidemic has been caused by a random genetic mutation beyond the ability of their scientists to control.
3. Their race is dying out. 
4. The aliens therefore decided they should secretly visit the planet Earth to breed with its women.
5. They chose to visit Earth because of the beauty, fertility, and lovingkindness of its women—in each category of which, Earth-women surpass all other females in this sector of the universe. 
6. By reproducing with Earth-women, they hope to create a new hybrid race—more intelligent, rational, and calm than the human; bigger, stronger, and healthier than the alien. 

At that moment in the conversation, according to her, two of the creatures approached the woman and held her by one arm each.  She remembers that they peered at her through enormous, glossy, jet-black eyes, which seemed “to look right through [her],” and that their touch felt dry, soft, and spongy, like that of a mushroom.

Despite the aliens’ repeated attempts to calm the woman by telepathy, she was frightened so badly that she fainted.  When she woke, she was sitting upright in the driver’s seat of her Ford Escort automobile, which was parked in her driveway at home.  She found this particular fact strange because, as she states, the aliens had originally taken her from her kitchen, where she had been standing over the sink, peeling a potato.

There are no witnesses to the abduction.

The woman has undergone psychological testing and has been pronounced sane, though under some stress from a troubled marriage.  (Her husband is a mathematics teacher and assistant football coach at the local high school.)  

The woman has also undergone a gynecological examination and is not pregnant.  However, an unexplainable fresh incision scar, approximately two inches long, was found on her abdomen, to the right of and somewhat below her navel.  

The woman stated that “the only way I have to prove what happened to me is real, is the scar I have on my stomach.  But even that is starting to go away.  Every week it gets whiter and looks fainter.  I can barely see it any more.”

The woman reports that she often dreams about the incident and sometimes awakens in a cold sweat, unable to get back to sleep for hours.  “I don’t know why,” she stated, “but I think they’re coming back to get me.  Something about my menstrual cycle—but I’m not sure what.  And I’m not sure why I think this.”

She believes she is not the only woman who has been approached by the aliens, and in desperation, she urges all Earth-women to quit wearing any make-up, perfume, or eye-catching provocative outfits.  Perhaps then, she argues, the aliens will go elsewhere to mate.  Referring to the Islamic custom of covering women head to toe except the eyes, she said, “Maybe the Arabs have the right idea, after all.”

The woman’s name has been withheld at her request.

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Michael Edwards teaches English at Santa Fe College, in Florida.  His most recent publication is a story titled “The Mountain Pathway,” in The Dillydoun Review.  

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