It was the summer before my senior year of college when it happened.
Up until then, I wouldn't say I was one of those disbelievers; I was merely one of those people under the impression that the idea was so crazy it couldn't possibly happen to me.
Aliens zapping unsuspecting humans away to some far-off spacecraft or world for experimentation only happened in stories or movies. To me it was merely a notion of traditional modern day societal entertainment with a dash of intrigue.
But if it was just left as an alien abduction and nothing more, that actually would have been passable to come to terms with. I mean, how many people in history have already claimed to have taken some kind of unmerited intergalactic trip in the dead of night?
Even if I had come to terms with a sense of acceptance, how profound would it truly be compared to all the others? It would be white noise. Nothing special. We are so dumbed down by what Hollywood has depicted as every race, shape, size and intention of extraterrestrial visitors imaginable that no one would simply care if I came forward publicly with it.
No, it was what happened DURING the abduction which made it a truly unique—and life changing—experience.
I lived at home with my mother. My father left the picture seven years earlier. I see him a couple times a year, but our relationship is nothing short of casual and passive, which is what made my connection with my mother much better and stronger. She was like my best friend, yet we still had that appropriate barrier up to limit more personal and private things that BFFs would otherwise have revealed long ago.
By all means I have never been a "mama's boy". She was just simply cool, and still being in her mid-forties she was young enough to realistically relate to someone my age without being too far down the line of elderly proportions (I mean, come on, don't all of us under the age of twenty-five still view forty and up like it's eighty?).
I had plenty of close friends, but my mom and I spent a good amount of time together when I wasn't in class or studying, and being summer vacation, we were able to get out and do things we couldn't enjoy otherwise during the wintered limitations of our northern small town locale.
One of those was hiking. I've always loved to explore and usually kept it simple to day trips, but there was a mountain range I had always wanted to tackle and she had always wanted to relish in the breathtaking sights of, so we decided to pack a small tent and stay the night, and hike back to the car by afternoon the next day.
The small portable heater was keeping us just comfortable enough inside the tent where our electric lantern had been turned off, shrouding us in darkness with the exception of the natural moon glow. The buzzing of insects and crickets outside aided us on a journey to an easy and calm sleep after a long day of working our calf muscles and feet, miles away from any other bothersome living human soul.
I was the first to wake in the dead of night. I wasn't sure what did it. It wasn't a noise.
It was just an eerie, peculiar feeling, like emerging from the depths of an ominous nightmare, only I could not recall having one.
I was ready to ignore it and fall back asleep when my mom groggily stirred to life as well. "What's wrong?" she asked, brushing her brunette hair away from her eyes before rubbing them.
"Nothing. Sorry if I woke you," I said.
"You didn't. I don't know why I woke up. I just got this strange feeling."
"Yeah, me, too," I agreed. "It's like I don't even feel tired anymore of all the sudden when I should still be feeling dead after our hike."
That's when the light hit us out of nowhere, coming from everywhere. Our tent was lit was a bright blue and white hue. It was almost like pure daylight.
"Was is that?" my mom asked with sudden, sharp concern as she sat up and twisted her head all around. "Is it morning already?"
"No way," I assured her, craning my neck. "It's only two in the morning."
"It can't be the moon. It's way too bright."
"Gotta be big truck headlights or floodlights or something, from a forest ranger maybe," I suggested. "I'm gonna check it out."
I grabbed the tent door to unzip it, but the tent started to shake and rattle as if we were party to some kind of spontaneous earthquake. A loud humming noise like some kind of machinery revving to life reverberated in circles around us.
My mom kicked her blankets off and tumbled back against me in her panties and thin long-sleeved shirt. "What the hell is that?!" she yelled in fear, grabbing hold of my arm.
All I could do was dart my wide eyes around and spin my head in confusion until the light got so brightly white it was practically blinding. I heard my mom scream, shielding her eyes into my shoulder as the rumbling wildly overtook our tent.
And just like that, it was over.
I managed to slowly pry my tightly closed eyes back open to see that the tent was gone.
No, it wasn't the tent that had gone away... it was us. We were no longer inside its comfortable confines but sitting on the bed of a moderately illuminated room of some sort.
"What the...?" was all I could manage to mumble as I started to graze my eyes around.
At that point, my mom had reopened hers and loosened her terrified grip on my arm, slightly parting as she wondrously examined the new situation.
"Where are we? How did we get here?" she murmured.
I stood up, my socked feet shuffling across the bare floor. There didn't seem to be any doors or windows, and the bed, covered by a generic sheet and equipped with two simple pillows, was the only thing other than us in there. I felt around the smooth, metal-like doors.
"Where the hell are we?!" my mom huffed in an almost demanding tone.
"I don't remember us being brought anywhere. Maybe it was an earthquake or some kind of natural disaster, and the lights we saw were some kind of emergency rescue team that brought us here," I hypothesized. I banged my hands against the wall. "Hello?! Anybody?!" I called out.
"Silence!" a voice bellowed, jolting our awareness even more sharply. I couldn't tell where it was coming from. It almost sounded like a loudspeaker without the static and crackle of one, only there were none that I could see, and I didn't think it had originated from another room. It was almost as if it was coming from inside my own mind, clear and audibly crisp.
"Who are you? What are we doing here? What happened?" I directed to the ceiling.
"We are a species not from your world," the voice flatly responded. "You are aboard one of our vessels for an experimentation exercise."
I scoffed. "What?! Is this some kind of joke?"
