Our analysis of the alleged alien hair sample would not have been possible without a remarkable breakthrough conceived by Dr. Kary Mullis, an American biochemist. On a Friday night in April 1983, Mullis was driving up to his Anderson Valley cabin in Mendocino County in northern California. During the drive to his cabin, Mullis made one of the great discoveries of modern chemistry—the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a surprisingly simple method for making unlimited copies of DNA, thereby revolutionizing biochemistry almost overnight. For his discovery, which he described in Scientific American, 34 Kary Mullis was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993.

Oddly enough, this famous and controversial scientist may have had an alien abduction himself. On another Friday night, during the summer of 1985, Kary Mullis drove up to his cabin and arrived at around midnight, after driving for about three hours. Mullis dropped off groceries he had bought on the way, switched on the lights (powered by solar batteries), and headed, with flashlight in hand, to the outside toilet located about fifty feet west of the cabin. On the way, Mullis encountered something extraordinarily weird. Recalling the episode for his 1998 book Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, Mullis wrote, “…at the far end of the path, under a fir tree, there was something glowing. I pointed my flashlight at it anyhow. It only made it whiter where the beam landed. It seemed to be a raccoon. I wasn’t frightened. Later, I wondered if it could have been a hologram, projected from God knows where. “The raccoon spoke. ‘Good evening, doctor,’ it said. I said something back, I don’t remember what, probably, ‘Hello.’ “The next thing I remember, it was early in the morning. I was walking along a road uphill from my house.”

Mullis had no idea how he got there, but he was still dry despite the extensive early morning dew. His flashlight was missing; he has never been able to find it. There were no signs of injury or bruising. The lights of the cabin were still on; the groceries were still on the floor where he had left them. But some six hours had gone by, all unaccounted for. Later in the day he found that an area of his property—“the most beautiful part of my woods”—had inexplicably become a place of dread for him. A year or so later Mullis exorcised this fear John Wayne–style by firing rounds of ammunition into the woods. While the cowboy-style psychotherapy proved successful, it did not help him find out what had happened to him that night in the summer of 1985. His encounter with the talking raccoon resembles other alien abduction accounts where something ordinary appears to be a screen memory for something apparently quite alien.

Mullis is probably the only known Nobel Prize laureate to claim an alien abduction–like experience. Kary Mullis describes himself as “a generalist with a chemical prejudice.” Others have described him as “Hunter Thompson meets Stephen Hawking,” or “the world’s most eccentric and outspoken Nobel Prize–winning scientist.” We cannot dismiss Mullis’s experience as a drug or alcoholic hallucination; Mullis states he was not under the influence of either that night. But he is not the only one to have experienced something strange at the cabin. His daughter, Louise, once disappeared for about three hours, after wandering down the same hill. She also reappeared on the same stretch of road. Her frantic fiancé was about to call the local sheriff.

Mullis had told no one of his own experience until his daughter called to tell her father about her strange experience and advised him to buy a book, Whitley Strieber’s Communion. By coincidence, Mullis had already been drawn to the book and was just then reading Strieber’s report of strange “owls” and little men entering his cabin in Upstate New York. In his book, Mullis concluded, “I wouldn’t try to publish a scientific paper about these things, because I can’t do any experiments. I can’t make glowing raccoons appear. I can’t buy them from a scientific supply house to study. I can’t cause myself to be lost again for several hours. But I don’t deny what happened. It’s what science calls anecdotal, because it only happened in a way that you can’t reproduce. But it happened.”

Kary Mullis confirmed all this and more when I spoke with him in 1999. 35 He told me then that yet another person had encountered a “glowing raccoon” between his cabin and the toilet. This was a friend of Mullis’s, who did not know of the “raccoon” story and was a first-time visitor. The incident occurred during a party at the cabin after the announcement of Mullis’s Nobel Prize in 1993. On the way up the hill toward the house the friend encountered a small glowing man, who then suddenly expanded into a full-sized man who said something like, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” Mullis’s friend, who was not experiencing a drug- or alcohol-induced hallucination, left with a friend without informing anyone. They returned to their hotel at a nearby town. That night the man inexplicably found himself outside in the hotel car park, troubled and terrified by the impression that he had somehow been back at the Mullis cabin.

The following night, he and his friend returned to the Mullis cabin, where the celebration continued. As the man arrived he was shocked to see the “full-sized man” he had seen as an expanding apparition the night before drive up in a car. Panicked, he left immediately, holding Mullis somehow responsible for the previous night’s events. Sometime and sure enough, he had come to the party on the second night, arriving to be seen by the terrified visitor. However, he was certain he was not there on the first night, not in person, anyway, and not lurking as a glowing raccoon or a small glowing man that expanded into a vision of himself!

Given this sort of activity on his property, it perhaps isn’t surprising that Kary Mullis told me he thinks the nature of his experience is even stranger than abducting aliens. He speculates about multidimensional physics (à la Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace ) 36 at a macrocosmic level: it’s “like anything can goddamn happen and the speed of light is not really the limit in terms of interactions with other cultures or whatever. This stuff about grabbing people or subjecting them to all kinds of experiments, it’s just anthropology at a level we don’t understand quite yet.” When I told him about our PCR testing of biological samples from abductee experiences, he replied: “You might imagine that I thought of that myself, as for instance in ‘you can have some of mine, if I can have some of yours.’ ”

He feels that the idea of an alien culture needing our DNA to survive is very unlikely and finds implausible the existence of an alien presence on the scale suggested by some of the bleaker alien abduction tales. Mullis knew of the 1998 book called The Threat by historian and abduction researcher David Jacobs, who argues for an alien secret agenda to create alien-human hybrids, which are in the process of integrating into our planet and supplanting mankind. 37 Kary Mullis thought that any culture that could conquer the barrier of space-time could have easily conquered the far simpler problems of complex biochemistry and would not need us in the manner described in the gray alien–human hybrid theories.

The very strange nature of the experiences that befell Kary Mullis, his daughter Louise, and his friend remind us of the bizarre dimension of this alien abduction controversy. Strangeness and reality unbound are the siren calls of this phenomenon. Discontinuities of memories feature aplenty. Extraordinarily bizarre recalls are often ignited by seemingly innocuous events or by revisiting the scene of the encounter. Sometimes memory is seemingly contorted, manipulated, or just shut down during a person’s engagement with this strange or interacting with some sort of bizarre quantum hyperspatial playground.