Are there little-green men on Mercury? One UFO expert is convinced NASA photos show a city on the red-hot planet’s surface. Courtesy: Scott Waring

HILARY Porter knows most people won’t believe what she says and some will dismiss her as a nutter, even though she seems entirely normal and her many responsible jobs include work for the Ministry of Defence.

“I’m a sane, together person,” she says.

It’s only when 67-year-old Hilary talks about aliens that people start to doubt her. Specifically, when she says she has been abducted by creatures from other worlds more times than she can count.

“I have been an alien abductee all my life,” she says with a sigh as she shows me into a living room where two ornamental spaceships sit on the mantelpiece.

“I didn’t choose this life. I didn’t ask for any of this, but it has been happening for as long as I can remember.”

Hilary will be among more than 100 people at a national conference this month organised by the Anomalous Mind Management, Abductee, Contactee, Helpline Project (Ammach for short). She will share stories and compare notes with others who claim similar experiences.

The first close encounter she recalls came when she was five and playing in the long grass in a field behind her home.

She says: “Suddenly there was a reptilian alien in front of me. It had scaly skin, black holes on the nose and a little mouth.

“It wasn’t tall — maybe 5ft, but very strong. It grabbed my arms and pulled me towards a disc in a depression in the field. It dragged me underneath into a lift and the door slid closed. The next thing I knew I was in a room with consoles and coloured lights and little figures moving around.

“I was stripped and thrown on to some sort of bed. They took a really horrible, sharp instrument and they were pressing it right the way up my body while I was screaming. I can’t remember anything after that.”

She believes this was not the first time because when she was two she kept disappearing from a secure back garden and her frantic mother would find her half a mile away.

Hilary has no memory of those disappearances, but rattles off one close encounter after another from her adult life.

She is sure she was abducted while driving near Cardiff in the 1970s and again by a hexagonal spacecraft while hanging out bunting at a charity event. She tells me an alien broke into a top-secret research laboratory at a local Marconi plant while she worked there in 1974.

She remembers two orbs of light flying past her kitchen window near the M3 in Farnborough, Hants, and when she went to work next day sections of the building were cordoned off and a security guard who had witnessed something was taken away for treatment and never seen again.

Her experiences have common threads.

Afterwards she suffers migraines and feels very ill. Sometimes she wakes up with fresh scars or bruises. Or there are bloody marks or stains on her clothes or bedsheets.

“I’ve got a metal implant in my ear too,” she says. “The doctor said it was wax but I can feel it. My partner Ken has a monitor that detects bugging devices. He puts it near my ear and it goes ding-ding-ding.”

Hilary will tell the full Marconi story for the first time at the Ammach gathering.

“Of course there are sceptics, people who laugh at us, but that doesn’t bother us,” she tells me. “Just because they haven’t seen it with their own eyes doesn’t mean it isn’t true. We’ve had people from right across the spectrum tell us about their experiences, from university graduates to businessmen. They can’t all be just stupid.”

Hilary used to work as draftsman and artist for the MoD and decided to record her encounters by drawing them. One of her pictures shows her as a little girl being dragged towards the spaceship. Another sketched in 1980 shows a shadowy figure standing just outside her window.

She recalls: “I had just put my daughter Sally to bed and came downstairs. Then I spotted a huge figure by the window. I froze. After a few moments he raised his hand and I did the same.

“After that I wasn’t quite so frightened. I thought he wasn’t going to hurt me.

“Then he glided to the back of the garden. He moved so fast. Whoosh. Then he shot sideways, paused for several seconds, and was gone.”

For years she suffered alone until a “crisis abduction” in 1994 when she says she was shown flashbacks of previous encounters. Pushed to the brink, she started looking for other people with similar stories.

That’s when she met partner Ken, who runs the British Earth and Aerial Mysteries Society (BEAMS). She met more abductees and as someone who can recall many experiences, she began counselling them.

“Finding someone else who understood me was so important,” she says. “You know you’re not off your trolley.”

So who are these aliens? Ken says: “There are greys, the ones everyone recognises, but they are just servants. The reptilians are higher beings, then there is a humanoid type. But there is something above them, cowled figures. You can’t look at them. Their eyes shine and when they look at you they blast a message into your mind.

“They tend to take females more for their eggs and genetic material for breeding purposes. We believe they are making a cross between aliens and humans.”

Hilary says her abductions have grown less frequent, but strange phenomena still plague the area around her home, which has spectacular views over the Hampshire skyline. She says she’s seen hovering triangular shapes and bright lights flying in formation which she has photographed.

She dismisses the idea that it could be military planes from Farnborough air base, insisting they look and sound different.

Hilary is now planning to work with Ammach founder Joanne Summerscales on a self-help manual for abductees.

Since founding her group in 2011 Joanne has been contacted by 1,500 people who believe they have been abducted. Several claim to have implants like Hilary.

“I keep hearing the same things time and again but these people have never met,” says Joanne. “I think there are definitely aliens on our planet.”