Alien Nation: Have humans been abducted by extraterrestrials?

S.O.T.T: If you're abducted by alien beings, are you physically absent? This happens to be an important issue for the media-shy people gathered one afternoon last July on the porch of Anne Ramsey Cuvelier's blue Victorian inn on Narragansett Bay, in Rhode Island, once called "the most elegantly finished house ever built in Newport." Co-designed in 1869 by a cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson's, it has been in Cuvelier's family since 1895, when her great-grandfather bought it as a summer getaway from his winter home blocks away, just as the Gilded Age cottages of the Vanderbilts and Astors began springing up across the island, redefining palatial extravagance. Still imposing with its butternut woodwork, ebony trimmings, and four-story paneled atrium frescoed in the Pompeian style, the harborside mansion turned B&B seemed a fittingly baroque setting for the group of reluctant guests Cuvelier describes as "not a club anyone wants to belong to."  She had gathered them to compare experiences as, well, "experiencers," a term they prefer to "abductees," and to socialize free of stigma among peers. Cuvelier, an elegant and garrulous woman in her 70s, isn't one of them. But she remembers as a teen in the 1940s hearing her father, Rear Admiral Donald James Ramsey, a World War II hero, muttering about strange flying craft that hovered and streaked off at unimaginable speed, and she's been an avid ufologist ever since. "I want to get information out so these people don't have to suffer," she says. "Nobody believes you. You go through these frightening experiences, and then you go through the ridicule."...read more>>>...