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The incidents began slowly. As Jay Carlton’s family got ready for church one Sunday in 1983, music began to pour from 18-year-old Carlton’s stereo, even though it had been off just moments before. As he stared at the device in his Independence, Missouri, home it shut off. No one was near it.

“On the day I was getting baptized as a Mormon, some weird things were going on,” Carlton said.

As the family drove to church, the car’s windshield wipers turned themselves on and off. Then something else happened, although the family didn’t realize it at the time.

“At church everyone asked us what took us so long,” Carlton said. “We were really late.”

And they were, although they didn’t know why they were late, or what had happened.

A year after his baptism, Carlton’s faith in the church faltered, and he found himself alone and upset.

“I had a disagreement with the church,” he said. “I went home at night and took down all the spiritual pictures I had.”

Finished clearing his walls of religious images, he relaxed and sat on his bed, staring out his bedroom window. He saw a light.

“I saw what I thought was the moon and it was full,” Carlton said. “I said, ‘man, the moon looks pretty tonight.’ Then it moved.”

The light grew closer to Carlton’s house; he found he wasn’t alone in the room.

“I was thrown flat on my back by some force,” Carlton said. “I couldn’t move. I couldn’t open my eyes. I felt a presence at my feet.”

As he lay pinned to his bed, struggling against something – some entity he couldn’t see – his religious teachings came back to him.

“I called out to Jesus and it left,” Carlton said. He lay there, panting, now able to move and open his eyes; he wondered what had been in his room.

That wasn’t the last time.

Carlton served in the Army National Guard, worked in law enforcement, and currently works as a security guard. He’s seen a lot of strange things in his work, but nothing like what has followed him throughout his life.

Carlton, once again a Mormon and living in Salt Lake City in 2002, was driving to a church dance near when he lost hours of his life.

“I think the dance started at 7:30, 8 o’clock. I left at 6 something,” he said. “I was lost and was trying to get back to the road the dance was on. I was going toward the mountains west near Utah Lake.”

On a long stretch of road, Carlton noticed the big, full moon.

“It was beautiful,” he said. “It started to move. I thought, ‘here we go again.’”

The light began to “do maneuvers. I thought maybe it was a helicopter.”

He rolled down his window; there was no sound. It wasn’t a helicopter.

“My mindset at the time I wasn’t even going to pay attention,” he said. “I turned south and came upon Utah Lake.”

He drove by a small peninsula framed by a fence. Later, he drove by the same fenced-off peninsula a second time.

“I remember passing again and said, ‘what on earth?’” Carlton said. “I got to the dance and my friends said, ‘where have you been?’ It was 9:30. I had lost time.”

Since then Carlton has experienced more lost time than he cares to count. He moved back to the Independence, Missouri, area, and strangeness continued to stalk him. Carlton has seen metallic craft floating in the mid-day sky, large white lights pacing his car, triangular craft the size of a football field, and a 100-yard-long snake-like metallic craft undulating in the afternoon sky.

He also has experienced physical symptoms typical of alien abductions.

“I find blood drops on my bed down near my navel area,” he said. “No nosebleed, nothing. Marks on my body that would disappear the next morning.”

However, Carlton is convinced his experiences aren’t related to aliens from space.

“Less than a year ago, I saw a being at 3 or 3:30 in the morning,” Carlton said. “It was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Carlton lay on the couch in the basement when a feeling dragged him from sleep. He opened his eyes and saw a red human-like creature about four feet tall with long ears, and dead black eyes.

“It had this funny stare towards me,” Carlton said. “Almost like it wanted to laugh.” But it couldn’t laugh; the entity had almost no mouth, just a small slit.

During about ten seconds of eye contact, Carlton was convinced this entity didn’t mean him harm.

“It was just checking on me,” he said. “How’s he doing today? I can’t say I wasn’t scared. I’m staring at a being I’ve never seen before. Is this an alien? Is this a demon? What the flip is this thing?”

Carlton mustered enough courage to speak and said, “Lord Jesus.” The entity simply disappeared. Carlton is convinced, after a spiritual encounter in 2002 in which he heard the voice of God, that many of what people consider UFOs and extraterrestrials are some type of angel.

“I believe that they are both fallen and good angels,” he said. “They are constantly at battle in the heavens. When they go from universe to universe they use these craft. UFO buffs say they’re beings from another planet, I’m not saying that’s not possible.”

But he knows what he’s encountered is spiritual.

“I’m being taxed for my purpose on earth,” he said. “There’s angels constantly looking over me, and there are bad angels attacking me. It’s spiritual warfare. It’s been that way for a long, long time.”

And the warfare for Carlton continues.

“A few months ago I saw a bluish light shining in my room and felt something touching my feet,” he said. Carlton now lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “I looked at my clock which read 3:33 a.m. The very next morning I noticed small long fingerprints on my desktop computer next to my bed.”