The Weird Alien Encounters of Barbara Hudson

Throughout the field of the UFO phenomena there are those that study it, and those who seem to have actually become a part of it. In some cases we have the tales of what have come to be called “contactees,” or those people who have met or even been abducted by these otherwordly entities. They almost always have rather strange stories to tell, and one of these is certainly the tale of a woman who seems to have been targeted by aliens from an early age and would become a mainstay on the UFO convention circuit along with her entourage of two of the most famous UFO researchers in the field at the time.

Barbara Hudson was initiated fairly early into the world of UFO weirdness. When she was just 15 years old she claims that she had been awoken one night by a tall man standing near her bed, his features indistinct in the shadows. Barbara thought at first it was a human intruder, but as she was about to scream out to her parents, the stranger released beams from his eyes that supposedly paralyzed her and held her in place, completely frozen. She also felt her mind become foggy, entering a sort of daze or trance, and when the man held his hand out and asked her to follow him she found that she was unable to resist. A grey mist then appeared, and within this mist was what looked like an elevator, which she was ushered into and then brought to a large room with screens on the wall showing the planet earth, as well as “many instruments and colored lights” and more of those strange tall beings. These figures gave her some fruit to eat, before taking her back into the elevator and into her room, leaving her there to lose consciousness.

For years Barbara would try to put this strange incident out of her mind and get on with her life. She would eventually move to New York City, marry and have a child, although she divorced, renting out an apartment in Manhattan where she lived with her parents. Life had seemed to have gotten somewhat back to normal, but just when she thought that she had seen the last of those tall strangers, her life would get weird again. One cold afternoon in February of 1960, Barbara was changing her baby’s diapers when the doorbell rang. It was a bit odd because she hadn’t been expecting anyone, but she didn’t think much of it at first and went to the door to see who it was. She opened the door on its chain just a crack, and there standing in the hall was a man she had never met and who had a demeanor of utter strangeness.

This stranger was described as standing around a bit over 6 feet in height and with a very slender, almost skeletal build, wearing an ill-fitting navy blue suit with a dark tie and a white shirt that all hung awkwardly off of his bony frame. His skin was dark, his eyes deeply set within his face beneath a mop of brown, wavy hair. For a moment he just stood there staring at her with a neutral look that was impossible to read, and just as Barbara was about to close the door in his face he spoke, telling her that he was the exterminator who had been sent by the management of the apartment to spray her apartment for bugs. Looking at his hands, she could see that he was indeed carrying an insect sprayer, as well as a black briefcase, but it was weird because no one had told her anything about an exterminator coming over. As odd as the situation was, Barbara nevertheless showed the man in, where he went to the kitchen and began spraying.

At some point, the man stopped and turned to Barbara, told her not to be afraid and that he meant her no harm, and then marched across the room to pick up a book on the bookshelf, specifically one called Flying Saucers Have Landed, by another alien contactee by the name of George Adamski. Oddly, the man had gone straight to the book and knew exactly where it was, and when he picked it up was described as fondling it lovingly with both hands. He then asked Barbara what she thought of the book, and whether she believed anything within its pages, to which she responded that she did. The man then asked her where she thought aliens came from, and she answered that they were probably from Mars or Venus. This elicited a smile from the stranger as he gently put the book back down and leaned forward to kiss Barbara on the cheek before heading towards the door.

Despite the sheer bizarreness of the situation, not only was Barbara completely calm throughout all of this, but she even went ahead to open the door for the stranger. The man quietly walked out and went down the stairs to the first floor, where he turned to face her again. This time the man spoke again, telling her that she was wrong and that he was in fact an alien but that he was not from Mars or Venus, but rather he was from Saturn, before telling her he would see her again and hurrying off. When he was gone, whatever spell he had placed on her wore off, and Barbara was hit with a sudden wave of fear and panic. She quickly closed the door and locked it, before hurrying to the window to look outside, but the man seems to have never come back out of the apartment as far as she could see, leaving her sitting there with a cold, wet feeling of dread. Unfortunately for her, this would not be the end of such strange incidents.

Later that same year, three tall, thin men in dark suits and with gaunt faces very similar to that of the “exterminator” she had met came to her apartment and once again she felt as if they had put her into a sort of hypnotic trance. The men told her they wanted her to join a secret organization they called simply “the group,” and that they had something to show her that concerned UFOs. They invited her to come out for a drive with them and she felt oddly compelled to do as they said, following them out to the street to a waiting dark sedan. They drove her out to a remote locale at Long Island, remaining silent the entire way, and when the car stopped they were at some sort of compound populated by both humans and aliens alike. The men with her explained that this was “the group,” and that they had been recruited from both Earth and around the galaxy for the purpose of letting the world know about aliens and UFOs. They then instructed her that she was to go to seminars being held by the author and UFO researcher James Willett Moseley at the series of Giant Rock Flying Saucer Conventions going on at the time so that she could “keep an eye on things.” Thus would begin the next strange chapter of her weird story.

At the convention, Barbara would meet Moseley, as well as the UFO author Gray Barker, who was perhaps most well-known for introducing the world to the notion of the Men in Black with his 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. The two researchers were fascinated by Barbara’s story, and from there her, Barker and Beckley seem to have become an inseparable trio, with them even inviting her along when they did an investigation into the Mothman sightings at Point Pleasant, West Virginia, with some of these activities being covered in Gray Barker’s The Silver Bridge (1970). Barbara became very involved with the UFO conference scene, often appearing with Moseley and Barker, and she started work on a book about her experiences, an excerpt of which would appear in Beckley’s UFO newsletter Saucer News, in an article entitled A Visitor From Saturn? Rather strangely, Barbara would allegedly send a rough draft of some of her writings to the writer George H. Smith, who was famous for adult-themed schlock with titles like Orgy Buyer and The Sex and Savagery of the Hells Angels, who used Hudson’s name as a pseudonym and whipped up her outline into a lurid, sex-soaked work of fiction called Those Sexy Saucer People (1967). As for Barbara’s own book, it never would be fully finished and would forever remain a work in progress.

As for Moseley and Barker, they would claim that they fully believed Barbara’s story and found her to be very reliable, enthusiastically endorsing her weird story. They also gave other strange anecdotes about their time with her, telling of a time at Point Pleasant where she had met possibly one of her friends from Saturn in the form of a tall gaunt man she had seen weeping and whistling the theme of Gone With the Wind in the dark in the abandoned power-plant. On another occasion, Barker claimed to have seen Barbara’s doppelganger while at a separate convention across the country. Unfortunately, most of the information we have on Barbara Hudson and her experiences were related by Barker himself, and here is where we get into some problems.

Although he was a prolific author on UFOs and the paranormal and his books advocated the existence of UFOs and extraterrestrials, Barker himself was known to be privately a pretty hardcore skeptic. He mostly churned out his various UFO writings for money, but didn’t really believe in most of what he wrote, even telling friends and family that the subject matter was a joke and calling his own books “kookie books.” He was also known to intentionally greatly embellish facts in his books and omit certain things or play up certain angles in order to make the cases he covered seem more outlandish and mysterious. This personal disdain for the UFO field and for the true believers out there fueled a series of elaborate hoaxes he concocted to fool UFO enthusiasts, and he is known for having relentlessly pranked John Keel during his investigation into the Mothman phenomenon.

His partner in crime, Moseley, was no better. Also a private skeptic, Moseley went through great lengths to orchestrate elaborate hoaxes to discredit UFO believers. He did not do this necessarily out of spite or for kicks, but rather because he believed the UFO field was full of fakers, hoaxes and nonsense that muddied the waters because people were too quick to accept it as real. He believed that some of the UFO phenomena truly was unexplainable and mysterious, but that it was hard to get at the real truth, and that only after weeding out the hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and misidentifications could one truly get close to the truth. To him, his hoaxes were simply to prove that many in the UFO community were too quick to accept something as real and were a gullible lot.

Together, Moseley and Barker came up with some doozies. In one hoax, they faked a letter from the United States government and sent it to self-proclaimed alien contactee George Adamski. The letter stated that the United States Department of State was pleased with Adamski’s research into UFOs, that the government knew that Adamski had actually spoken to extraterrestrials in a California desert in 1952, and that they had their own evidence bearing out his extraordinary claims. The letter was even printed on official State Department stationary and letterhead complete with white-seal, blue-embossed paper, the American eagle watermark and the Seal of State impressed upon it, and it was signed by a R.E. Straith. Barker would use the hoax in his 1967 book on Adamski, calling the letter “one of the great unsolved mysteries of the UFO field.” Adamski would swallow the bait hook, line, and sinker, widely publicizing the letter and using it as evidence to back his various bizarre claims on UFO contacts, exactly proving Moseley’s point. The letter would be debated within the UFO community for years as possibly real, and even when Moseley publicly admitted that it was all a hoax there have been those right up to the present day who still suspect it might be the real deal.

Another one of Barker and Moseley’s more infamous hoaxes was the so-called Lost Creek saucer video. In 1966, the two had the idea to create footage of a flying saucer they planned to present as real and see how far or how blindly people would believe it. To this end, they had an assistant hold a fake saucer on a fishing pole in front of a car as Moseley drove and Barker filmed. The resulting footage was presented as the real deal and made big waves at the time, inspiring a lot of discussion and with many in the UFO community hailing it as an amazing piece of genuine footage. Barker himself would carry it around to his lectures at UFO conventions before eventually admitting it was fake and explaining how he had done it.

Considering this ruthless trolling of the UFO community by Barker and Moseley, it is hard to know just what to make of the fact that they were such champions of Barbara Hudson’s story and made such a point of traveling around to conventions with her. It seems very likely that, while she likely believed what she was saying, Barker and Moseley almost certainly did not, and that she was just another one of their trolling runs. How much of what she said of her experiences was actually true and how much of it was fed to her, played up, or even fabricated by Barker and Moseley? They were such unrepentant hoaxers that it is really hard to say for sure, and we are left to wonder. Was Barbara Moseley the real deal? Was she just a delusional woman? Was she perhaps the victim of two of the most notorious hoaxers in the UFO field? Whatever the case may be, it sure is a strange tale of one of the weirder UFO contactees out there.