North York writer Wes Roberts opens up about being an abductee

North York writer and professor Wes Roberts has kept a secret from his family for more than six decades. 

In fairness, it wasn’t until this century — nay this decade — that he fully confirmed he had been the victim of multiple alien abductions.

“It is abduction for a while, but not forever,” he offered, seated in a recliner in his North York, Ont. apartment one July afternoon. 

It’s comfortable in the room, as a small air conditioner rattles in the window, while his partner A.B. Neilly, seated in an adjacent chair, listened to the conversation.

Roberts has also had a handful of bizarre experiences as a teen, but during the late Aughts, he began to grow wary of one particular episode he had as an adult during the 1980s. 

“In the early 2000s I was a mess,” he said. “I was becoming unstable. I was getting paranoid (but) I was still maintaining a teaching job. I wasn’t going over the edge.”

The baby boomer had been to Porto, Portugal to visit a correspondent of his. The two discussed a bizarre experience he had in the 1980s, and on her suggestion, he set out to find a hypnotherapist. 

“She said, ‘If it were me, I would want to find out,’” he recalled. “I couldn’t write it off. 

“It was not a lucid dream. It was not an out-of-body experience. It was not an illusion or a flight of fancy. I finally came to the conclusion that it has got to be this thing.”

That experience was an alien abduction. After connecting with hypnotherapist Lesley Mitchell-Clarke, through research he had done, Roberts discovered he had been visited by a brown-skinned extraterrestrial species several times, starting in childhood.

Mitchell-Clarke works with experiencers that are referred to her by either MUFON’s Experiencer Research Program, helmed by Kathleen Marden, as well as the Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Encounters and The Experiencer Support Association.

Before Roberts steered the narrative into his discovery of being an experiencer, he dove into his past, opening up about the roots of his fascination with all things paranormal, including his own latent psi abilities that he suspected made him more observable. 

Discovery at a young age

The roots of his interest in the supernatural can be traced back to his budding teen years. Roberts admitted he had a noticeable amount of psi-ability that he wanted to learn more about.

He had experimented with his abilities with his then-girlfriend, guessing where she was when she called him or what she was wearing.

“So, a young teenager, trying to figure out what he’s going to do in life, really immature,” he recalled. “I was attracted to this by reading up about seances. That was the start, reading about psychic mediums. 

“I thought, ‘What is this?’ It was the discovery of my young life.”

At 16, and on Halloween, he heard about the Toronto Society for Psychical Research. 

“I thought that was for me,” Roberts said. “I had already had some unusual experiences, (witnessed) apparitions, and I had already dipped my toe in the seance waters.

“I got in touch with them and they said that I was too young.”

He would not let up his pursuit to find an explanation for his extrasensory abilities. He’d have to wait a few more years before joining the team, but at 19 he became the TSPR’s youngest member. 

From there they would perform experiments with telepathy, investigate allegedly haunted houses, shot Kirlian photography, and even attempted to contact the afterlife with a planchette.

During the time Roberts was a member, TSPR was also conducting their famous Philip experiment, where the team created a fictional ghost and attempt to contact it. Alan Robert George Owen led a team of eight people from its membership who did not have any acute psychic gifts. 

Although Roberts was not part of the Philip experiment, they did perform table tipping experiments, following the J.B. Rhine methodology. 

“I was probably the only non-mathematical person there,” he admitted. “There were mathematicians, statisticians, engineers. All sorts of heavyweights.”

Indeed, mathematician Owen was a mathematician who founded the TSPR with his wife Iris Owen, a registered nurse, and Canadian writer Allen Spraggett, a paranormal provocateur. 

Where Roberts fit in the society was the aforementioned experiments, and one, in particular, was long-distance telepathy. The experiment took place in Montreal and Toronto, where members of the control group would call in and provide their perceptions of an item on a table, which is also referred to as remote viewing. 

“I just sat down with a pen on the hour,” he recalled. “I phoned in my results and they responded extremely neutral.

“I thought I was toast and I was in the wrong business,” Roberts added. “I did not blow it.”

The findings were published and Roberts has “a little validation” his psi ability is functioning.

‘The memory of it is haunting’

When it was finally revealed to him through a hypnotherapy session with Mitchell-Clarke in late 2009 that he was first abducted by extraterrestrials as a child, he discovered his experiences throughout his life had more context.

“I had some curious experiences when I was a teen, but I didn’t attribute them to this,” Roberts said.

Roberts eased into his most vivid experience, like it was another session, and admits only a handful were negative.

During the 1980s, one such event left him wondering what had happened. He had come to learn that alien abductions are staged, or “set up in phases of experiences”.

“They never get it right because they are drawing from your subconscious,” he said, adding that on this particular occasion he went to sleep and had been dreaming. “Often the abduction transitions from the dream. In a dream state, you’re very susceptible.”

Upon transition, he found himself at Pearson International Airport on the border of Toronto and Mississauga. It was early in the morning and the airport was closed. This would be Phase 1 for Roberts.

“I’m standing at the departure gate, and there is something beside me,” he recalled. “I’m just looking up and planes are taking off. I never questioned it. I watched the plane take off and it exploded.”

Naturally, he was shocked by what had just happened and he turned to face what he thought was beside him, but he never saw a face. 

“I turned to this thing and said, ‘We have to help those people.’”

Then he found himself on the plane itself, which Roberts referred to as Phase 2. 

He was not seated but found himself in the washroom. Around him, the cabin was filled with the sound of whining turbines. 

“Everything seemed normal, except I am on a plane that is about to crash,” he said. “I intuitively knew it. To me, this is all real. This is it. I die tonight.”

For what seemed to be just a few minutes, he was on the plane and then he was outside of an apartment suite. He walked in. 

“It was a pristine condo. As if no one had been in it,” Roberts said, adding the aliens tend to observe the reactions of their quarry. “I didn’t know I was being observed.”

How Roberts realized he wasn’t dreaming was that nothing changed. There was no disjointed blur of images, but rather a simple apartment in the style of the 1980s. He felt like he was the same person, but he found a photo album with a different guy, who he identified with, and his partner, another family. 

“It didn’t look like me. That’s me. That’s apparently my wife,” he recalled. “I went through another album and saw my sisters. I didn’t know them, but I could identify them. Then I became confused.”

He became more aware of a presence or multiple presences in the apartment.

“These were brown-skinned things and I can’t remember what they looked like,” he said. “Once I became aware, this entity told me that it was time to go.”

He was back at the airport, though this time Roberts was being escorted along the tarmac by two entities. There are hundreds of other people being escorted as well. They made their way through a turnstile and to a one-person elevator. 

“I get in it and suddenly I felt intense light and heat,” he recalled. “I had to shield my eyes from the light from above and below. I felt motion.”

Then he was back inside the airport. His family is there, but they’re not. 

“They’re not zombies but they cannot tell I’m in distress,” he said, adding he awoke in his room to discover a few drops of blood on his pillow. 

“I mentioned to my partner, ‘Did anything happen last night?’ And she said, she could hear me in the other room, but she couldn’t move.”

The 1980s experience was one of many experiences that were revealed over five years and 30 sessions with Lesley Mitchell-Clarke.

‘Is this for real?’

Mitchell-Clarke opened Roberts up to his repressed memories through their hypnotherapy sessions. 

Hypnotherapists are careful not to make suggestions, as far as images and experiences. The process is entirely organic and neutral, Mitchell-Clarke said, in an August phone conversation.

The frontal lobes are not as active during a session, limiting the amount the imagination plays into an experiencer’s story.

“What’s interesting, in the real-time mapping of the brain, they’ve wired up people to various diagnostic machines and allowed a hypnotist to induct an individual,” she said. “It’s not the frontal lobes. It’s not where we have creative processes. It’s in the deep memory centres, the amygdala.”

Although she does admit there is room for error, she tends to work with gut instinct.

“I’m not so egotistical that I couldn’t be fooled by someone very clever,” Mitchell-Clarke admitted. “If someone is resonating with me, I will work with them. If someone is not ready to explore, then I won’t work with them.”

When it comes to Roberts’ experiences and the epiphany that they had been happening since childhood, his reaction was one of incredulity.  

“I woke up with tears in my eyes asking her, ‘Is this shit for real?’ And (Mitchell-Clarke) said, ‘Yes, because we are accessing your memory’,” he said.

It was also during these sessions that he uncovered that he agreed to be taken during his inter life, or the time between lives, a concept pioneered by Georgina Cannon and Michael Newton. 

Mitchell-Clarke, at this point, had worked with enough clients to identify that Roberts was an experiencer.

“I don’t think I would have brought him to that early experience if I didn’t have a strong feeling that he was an experiencer,” she said. “He had stuff going on all the way back. I felt pretty confident that within the scope we were performing, we would discover he was an experiencer.”

In metaphysical hypnosis, there are three modalities: past-life regression, inter-life regression and energy release. The ultimate goal is to remove the idea of being victimized by an experiencer’s circumstances.

“I went through one of (inter-life regressions), and I went through with it to see if these creatures pre-dated my birth,” Roberts recalled. “They were there, among many others.

“That’s part of the reason, ‘Why me?’” he added. “I think that I agreed to do this before I was born.”

Roberts and Mitchell-Clarke, a certified clinical hypnotherapist, had used a handful of transcribed sessions in their new book Intersections. He has written the book under a nom-de-plume. Wes Roberts is a nom-de-plume used to protect his identity. 

“I decide to maintain this distance because I was mainly concerned with my employer,” he said. “I would wonder what the college would think.”

The entire process began a year after Roberts had worked with Mitchell-Clarke, but it was a book that took at least six years to hammer out. There is additional material for a second book, which is set for a 2020 release.

And there is a support system in place for Roberts. Along with Mitchell-Clarke, he’s found solace in the Alien Cosmic Expo, which allows him to share his experiences.

“You can either be honest and open about it, saying come see me and I’ll tell you what I’ve experienced, or run away from it,” Roberts said. “I guess ACE gave me the opportunity to confront it more boldly, directly than any other experiencer.”

Mitchell-Clarke lauded him for his courage in addressing something many people will have a tough time accepting.

Roberts will be a speaker at this year’s MUFON organized Alien Cosmic Expo, being held Sept. 21 to 22 at the Toronto Airport Marriott Hotel. 

Before that, he’ll launch his book at 7:30 pm on Aug. 15 at the Super Wonder Gallery.