On October 12 2004 my daughter was abducted by aliens. It didn't happen like in the movies. There were no UFOs, no beam of light. I had tucked her into bed one night, and the next morning she was gone. I only knew aliens had done it because the doors and windows were still locked. She doesn't have a set of keys.

The weird thing is that she's always been obsessed with them. Her room is full of E.T. paraphernalia: there's a procession of little green figurines lining the headboard of her bed, and a pile of sparkly-grey "alien slime" folded neatly on a stack of books about UFO sightings. I had never given her obsession much thought; I figured all kids had their morbid pastimes. This wasn't even unusual since we lived in Villanueva, New Mexico, about an hour away from Rosewell, where the most famous UFO crash occured. Beside that, there's not much else around here to entertain a kid's imagination. Anyway, my point is that it's almost like she wanted to be abducted by aliens.