KIRKUS REVIEW

Lacy, a civil servant, musician, artist, and poet, (Heroes and Villains Down the Halls of Time, 2013) details a life as a recurring subject of so-called alien abduction phenomenon.

Born in Texas, the young Byron was not expected to survive a childhood case of sarcoma cancer. Yet he did, miraculously. In 1961, he witnessed a flying submarinelike thing at close range over his entire elementary school class as they exercised in the yard (he now surmises that the apathetic substitute teacher, the only adult supervisor, was a human-alien hybrid). Other uncanny events include repeated narrow escapes from deadly car accidents. Only in 2009 (after seeing a couple of “stargates” materialize in the sky) was Lacy convinced by his conspiracy-occult buff friends that he—and most likely his family—had been alien plagued and abducted for generations, and the imaginary playmate “pirates” Byron saw as a little boy were the enigmatic intruders, messing with human perception. Byron believes he and fellow “abductees” endured many strange experiences: missing time, bodily implants and mysterious scarring, and “little gray” humanoids. Genre superstar Whitley Strieber makes guest appearances at conventions, and while Byron’s solid, plainspoken prose contrasts with Streiber’s wild emotionalism in the cult-classic contactee memoirCommunion, one does somewhat miss Strieber’s (at least initial) frantic quest for alternative explanations to the incredible. For Byron, it’s obvious; skeptics be damned, aliens are everywhere, countless folks are being abducted, and some extraterrestrials are giant insects, some are reptiles. He also contends that the U.S. government covered up that spacemen fought with troops at Dulce, New Mexico, and our moon is filled with machinery feeding on human torment. “Some weird stuff if you ask me,” Byron writes, a sublime understatement. 

A far-out, disconcertingly readable memoir that flatly declares everything about aliens you read online or see dramatized on TV is true.