Argonaut-GreyWolf's avatar Secret School at Shade's Crest on Shade's Mountain

In 1993, I encountered a small community in three or four nearby and very thickly wooded neighborhoods whose children and even adults in a variety of ages were drawn to wander through frigid winter weather out their side garage doors and back door balconies to this spot in a heavily wooded cemetery adjacent to an old Masonic Lodge, all of which were surrounded within a triangle at the intersection of three mountaintop roads. Noted sci-fi, horror and UFO book author Whitley Strieber and his wife Anne Strieber had written a book about this phenomena, especially down around the rural out-communities of San Antonio, Texas. Whitley had alerted me to this sort of UFO abduction phenomena or contact type. I visited this community every winter in Hoover, Alabama for three successive years.

Hoover is the suburban city south of Birmingham which is where the last, heavily laden with iron, foothills and the last three ridgetops of the southernmost Appalachian Mountains hook south-to-west. This forest-in-the-mountains bedroom community is hardly rural and is certainly not "Hicksville." The population swarms with professionals who are college professors and medical researchers working with the University of Alabama at Birmingham, NASA research and development people, doctors, lawyers, clergy and tradespeople--all of whom exude and sweat highest standards of "Education"--reside in the area's "Turkish Sauna"-like humidity. True, they all like their guns, but interestingly, there is never a gun near the hands when a UFO abduction crew comes in the night to grab a "Specimen."

My sources were and even now in 2021 continue to be an assortment of abductees and "Contactees" calling themselves "Experiencers;" along with numerous police, fire, and Alabama National Guard witness interviews conducted around Hoover, Alabama, the greater Birmingham area, the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the Shades Mountain residential communities between 1994 and 1995.

"You little lab rat you . . . You're so cute!"