I mocked my dad’s claim he was abducted by aliens. Now I’m not so sure

More than four decades ago, Patrick McGuire became the laughingstock of his small Wyoming town when he appeared on national TV to claim he’d been abducted by aliens. 

After being placed under hypnosis live on the air, McGuire claimed he had been visited by ‘Star People’ from outer space who mutilated his cattle, then warned him of an incoming apocalypse. 

McGuire’s claims became the subject of mockery, with his son, Daniel Riedel, writing in HuffPost this week that the farmer spiraled into alcoholism and despair after becoming obsessed by ideas of aliens and ‘deep state’ cover-ups. 

But now, following months of blockbuster Pentagon hearings about alien visitors and renewed interest in UFO lore, Riedel admitted he ‘never should have laughed’ at his dad.

McGuire’s TV appearance came in 1981 on NBC’s prime-time show ‘That’s Incredible’, where he was placed under hypnosis by famed psychiatrist Dr. R. Leo Sprinkle.

While under a trance, the farmer recounted in harrowing detail how he came face-to-face with ‘Star People’ – aliens – who he claims made threats on his life. 

He claimed the saga began after finding a mutilated cow on his farm, which had ‘the nose off, tongues out and sex organs gone’. When a ‘spaceship’ landed on his Bosler, Wyoming ranch, several other cows from his herd were also beamed to the sky. 

The year before, in an interview with ABC News, he also claimed to have been visited by aliens ‘somewhere around 25, 30 times’. Riedel writes that a witness to some of the landings was quoted as seeing ‘two or three (spacecrafts) land at separate times’. 

‘We stayed and watched the sun come up and we saw two of them, in daylight, hovering in two separate places,’ they added.  

The televised claims made him a pariah in his Wyoming town, but Riedel said his father’s hypnotic confessions were far from attention-seeking. 

‘From the earliest points in my childhood, I was told that UFOs were nothing to make light of,’ he recalled.

He says his father would warn him and his brothers that the ‘Star People’ could take them at any moment, a source of nightmares for the youngsters for years.

This was coupled with harrowing descriptions of ‘5ft hairless beings with eyes like colorless pools hovering by my bedside’, details that Riedel admits are similar to the stereotypical alien look as seen in film and TV. 

Within just a few years of his fateful 15-minutes of fame, McGuire was destitute. He was a confused, sad homeless man who had, by his own son’s admission, become the town outcast.

In one incident recounted by Riedel, McGuire’s decline saw him caught rifling through a classmate’s garbage. When the classmate revealed the embarrassing moment the next day, the school erupted with laughter – including from Riedel himself. 

He said despite his newfound respect for his father’s UFO inclinations, he and his brothers used to frequently mock McGuire when he would warn them about alien encounters. 

‘My brothers and I laughed when our father talked about the implants and their accompanying pain,’ he wrote.

‘We laughed when he claimed he could barely walk after what the Star People did to him. We laughed when he said that he was suing the government for the land they took from him, for destroying his life, for destroying our lives. 

‘We laughed. The world laughed.’

Patrick McGuire passed away on May 14, 2009 at the age of 67 from cancer. Writing 44 years after his father’s TV appearance, Riedel said the world’s renewed fascination with UFOs has left him full of regret. 

‘I’m the one who feels ashamed,’ he wrote. ‘How should we address our past mockery and ridicule if it turns out that, hidden in a desert base somewhere, there are indeed crafts, cadavers and photographs of strange visitors?’

With even Barack Obama claiming he has viewed UFO footage that he ‘can’t explain’, many could argue McGuire didn’t deserve to be so publicly ridiculed. 

Greater numbers of whistleblowers are coming forward with eerily similar tales of non-human made aircrafts entering airspaces and leaving their witnesses as baffled as McGuire once was. 

Earlier this month, a top attorney involved in bringing UFO whistleblowers to Congress revealed to DailyMail.com that the US military had recovered a craft that could defy the laws of nature. 

Daniel Sheehan says he was told the mind-boggling tale by a whistleblower who allegedly took part in an illegally-undisclosed program retrieving crashed non-human spacecraft.

They claimed the retrieved spacecraft ‘distorted space time’ and was ‘bigger on the inside’ than it appeared from the outside.