“I don’t know much, but I do know for sure that I lost my virginity to an extraterrestrial woman,” says David Huggins. The 70-year-old from Hoboken, New Jersey has been making paintings of his encounters with aliens for many years.
“I believe what he experienced was real to him,” filmmaker Brad Abrahams tells ANIMAL over the phone. You can sense that, deeply, in the teaser for his documentary in progress, Love And Saucers (above). Abrahams tracked Huggins down through his neighbor, after hearing him mentioned in a radio interview with an abduction investigator. Over the few days Abrahams spent in his house, Huggins painted and showed him impressionistic, surreal scenes of beings with glowing eyes, spaceship beams, and interterrestrial babies — spindly, translucent, clutching — babies that he fathered, all across the galaxy.
The visitations began when he was eight. Huggins recalls, “There were the grays, the little hairy guy, an insect being…” None of his experiences were as harrowing as those described by people at the abductee meetings Huggins attended in the ’80s and ’90s. He stopped going. He found it depressing. Abrahams says Huggins called it “a club that no one wants to belong to.” He had a better outlet for the overwhelming stories inside him, things he couldn’t talk about. As he says in the clip, “It was just a relief to get the images on canvas.”
“…and then there was Crescent.” None of his experiences were as precious as Crescent. At 17, on his way through a Georgia forest to a lake, Huggins saw her sitting by a tree. She appeared human, except for her large, black eyes, a pale, pointy face and the wig. She disrobed. He disrobed. He laid down. She got on top. They consummated the start of their long-time and very long-distance romance.
There are explanations, of course. Abrahams recalls a neurotheologist explaining that specific kinds of epileptic seizures and trauma can trigger visualizations and experiences that feel real. There are the 1,000 VHS fantasy, sci-fi and horror tapes in Huggins’ house, but Huggins draws no connection.
There were others, later, but there was always Crescent.
Did he love her?
After a pause, Abrahams says, “He did.”
