Editing Tujunga Canyon Contacts

# This little-known alien abduction case happened in LA’s backyard. Your guide to the ‘UFO hotbed’ in Big Tujunga Canyon | LAist
In March of 1953, two women asleep in a remote area of the Big Tujunga Canyon were awoken by a bright light flooding around their cabin. Inexplicable time loss, an alien abduction account and years of searching for answers were to follow.

This was the first in a string of UFO accounts that one local researcher called “The Tujunga Canyon Contacts,” making this stark landscape just about 30 minutes north of downtown L.A. what she called a hotbed of UFO encounters.

Investigators in the field point to the incident as one of the earliest modern day abduction experiences, but even in the town that gave us _Close Encounters of the Third Kind_, it’s not a story many Angelenos have heard.

Listen: When L.A. was a hotbed of UFO accounts

Why haven't more people heard about these stories?

Slender entities and beams of light
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At an isolated cabin in the Big Tujunga Canyon, two women were terrified by an experience they had beginning around 2 a.m. on March 22, 1953. According to the women, bright lights and a deathly stillness were followed by an alien abduction in which one of them said they were taken on board a UFO by slender entities with elongated, mask-like faces.

  ![An illustration of an alien being with an oblong, mask-like face. ](https://scpr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/19f613e/2147483647/strip/true/crop/2473x2866+0
One of Sara Shaw's drawings from 'The Tujunga Canyon Contacts'


Both women’s accounts — and several others — are described in detail in the book [_The Tujunga Canyon Contacts_](https://anomalistbooks.com/book.cfm?id=53) by Ann Druffel and D. Scott Rogo. To protect them from backlash, the pseudonyms Sara Shaw and Jan Whitley were used in the book, first published in 1980.

Shaw and Whitley would undergo regressive hypnosis sessions in order to try and pull recollections of the incident from their memory. Shaw had her hypnosis session led by Dr. Martin Reiser, [who founded the LAPD’s Behavioral Sciences Services in 1968](https://www.lapdbss.online/who-we-are).

In a second hypnosis session with a different doctor by the name of Bill McCall, Shaw recalled her abduction experience in 1953:

> Shaw: I’m starting to float. I’m starting to float towards it.
> 
> McCall: What do you mean you’re starting to float toward it? Shaw: Well, they’re walking with me, but my feet aren’t on the ground
> 
> McCall: They were on the ground when you came out of the house. How come they’re not on the ground now?
> 
> Shaw: Well, there’s a beam of light. It’s like, it’s almost like a...
> 
> McCall: Now you see a beam of light?
> 
> Shaw: I’m _on_ the beam of light....
> 
> (Excerpt from "[The Tujunga Canyon Contacts," Anomalist Books)](https://anomalistbooks.com/book.cfm?id=53)

Shaw would go on to recall being examined aboard the spaceship by the entities with some type of scanner. She said they even imparted to her a cure for cancer.