The Lehi Abduction

A spaceman came into the house and took them aboard a spaceship. That is what two of Pat Roach's daughters said after the night of 16 October 1973, and they said that on board they saw a line of people waiting to board. Roach was a single mother living with her five children in an isolated house on the outskirts of Lehi in Utah. The family woke in fear of an intruder the children described as a spaceman or a skeleton. Police were called at ten past midnight and found nothing amiss and no sign of a break-in.

What is on the record

The archive's telling says the mother and all five children were taken from the house while they slept, at some point between eight in the evening and midnight. Two years later Roach underwent hypnotic regression with Dr James Harder. Under hypnosis she recalled the interior of a craft, a scanning device like an eye and an examination by a tall ordinary-looking man with a needle.

The case was investigated by APRO and published by Coral and Jim Lorenzen. It appears in Jerome Clark's encyclopedia and in several sighting catalogues. The main counter-reading comes from Kevin Randle, who has argued that the night was sleep paralysis and that Harder's hypnosis shaped the memories through leading questions.

The archive's source placed the house in the Orem area. The published record puts it outside Lehi.

Pat Roach and one of her daughters are the two claimants on file. The daughter was a child at the time and is not named here, and neither are her siblings.

Why it sits where it does

The Roach case grades L3 on two members of one family, both from the same video. What was recorded at the time is a frightened household and a police call that found nothing. The abduction itself was recovered under hypnosis two years later, and that method is the focus of the case's main criticism. What happened in the Roach house that night is not resolved here.