Maria Cuccia woke with a leaping heart.
It was 3 a.m., the family home in eastern Long Island was peaceful, her husband slept soundly beside her and their three young daughters were tucked in around the house.
Her eyes were suddenly drawn to a white light that seemed to radiate from the bedroom ceiling. The 31-year-old piano teacher felt herself being drawn toward it.
What she claims happened next would change her life forever and bring her face to face with the boy she believes is her lost son, Elijah – a half human, half alien child.
Today, Cuccia, now 64, lives in Florida. She is one of many Americans who claim to have been abducted from Earth by alien beings.
Estimates of affected humans vary from several thousand to 3.7 million, according to one controversial study dismissed as false by some psychologists.
Her experience in 1992 was particularly vivid, Cuccia told the Daily Mail.
As she gazed at the white light flooding her room that night, she claims her body became paralyzed. Then, she said, something surreal happened: She felt energy surge through her body, ‘like electricity,’ and claims she was lifted into the sky.
Maria Cuccia has since spoken to other abductees and released albums of music about her experiences (Maria Cuccia/supplied)
The next thing she says she remembers is standing on ‘some kind of spaceship… aircraft… something.’
Cuccia says she was surrounded by tall beings in robes, with a glowing light emanating from their heads – she can’t remember what their faces looked like.
‘All I know is they instructed me to look at a large glass window, at what appeared to be like a spaceship. And I looked out the window and I saw what appeared to be a group of many, many children,’ she told the Daily Mail.
She says that the beings then ‘brought forth’ a young boy, about eight years old, and that she found herself unable to look away from him.
He began to wave at her and their eyes ‘locked.’
She says she asked the beings: ‘Is this my son?’ And claims they replied, ‘This is your son, and we call him Elijah.’
Cuccia claims they told her to look up the meaning of the name when she returned home, and that for now her visit to them was over.
She told her husband that ‘something had happened’ to her in the night. Understandably, he dismissed it as a dream or nightmare.
Yet, she believed it was all far too real to be a dream.
She had never experienced anything like it. And how could she explain that young boy who so clearly recognized her, and she him?
Maria Cuccia has written albums of music about her experiences
Cuccia claims she was lifted rapidly into the sky
When she looked up the name Elijah, she found it means ‘the Lord is our Savior.’
That close encounter with her ‘hybrid’ son spoke to a deep loss that Cuccia had experienced some years before her abduction.
After the birth of her first daughter, she’d become pregnant again. During one of her appointments for an ultrasound scan, she was told she was going to have a healthy boy.
But a day or two later, she was in excruciating pain and bleeding, and her husband had to call an ambulance. Cuccia had a miscarriage.
Some days later, her doctor called to tell her that she had ‘passed a fetal sac, but there was no fetus inside.’ They were worried the fetus was still in her body, Cuccia told the Daily Mail, although that proved not to be the case.
Now, Cuccia believes the fetus was ‘taken’ from her body by the alien beings, and that this happens to other women around the world.
She claimed that she later had a feeling something ‘was inside [her] that did not belong.’
After the miscarriage and feelings of housing something foreign, Cuccia began receiving what she described as ‘messages’ – she claims she would wake in the middle of the night, hearing voices that inspired her to create music.
Cuccia says she was spiritually curious before her abduction and had tried hypnosis therapy to reclaim past lives. She has wondered if those practices ‘opened up a channel’ related to what she claims happened to her.
In the years since that supposed encounter, Cuccia has spoken to many others who also claim to be abductees and contactees.
Maria Cuccia has written albums of music about her experiences
Many of them believe that aliens are secretly reaching out to the human race for various reasons, some think it’s to warn us of impending dangers while others, more sinisterly, think it could be to experiment on us.
Some experts suggest that the claims of alien interventions are simply related to phenomena such as sleep paralysis. Others suggest they are manufactured within affected people as coping mechanisms for trauma, including experiencing a miscarriage.
Nothing will persuade Cuccia that these explanations apply to her.
Her recent move to Florida during the pandemic – which coincided with her mother’s death – felt like a ‘turning point’, she said.
She had spent much of her life working with her now ex-husband and traveling the world for business. Now, she has the time at last to turn her incredible experiences into a book.
‘I brought a big plastic container filled with journals and things from my past… and came out here to reflect during [lockdown], and I started writing a book,’ she said.
For Cuccia, it will be a chance to share a story many may scoff at, but one that, after more than 30 years, remains very real to her.
Reports of encounters with aliens – some ecstatic, some disturbing – began to proliferate with the dawn of the space age, although similar stories from previous centuries, involving demons or mystical beings, are long established in human history.
One of the most highly publicized cases – no doubt because of its salacious nature – involved Brazilian farmer, Antonio Villas Boas, who claimed he had sex with an alien in October 1957.
Boas’ report stated that he was ‘hauled aboard’ a star-like UFO that landed in front of him, before being experimented on and covered in a mysterious gel.
Brazilian farmer Antonio Villas Boas claimed he was abducted by a UFO in 1957 and had intercourse with a female alien
Nigel Watson, who has researched and investigated historical and contemporary reports of UFO sightings, is author of The UFO Files. He told the Daily Mail, ‘This was first case of sexual contact in our “flying saucer” era.
‘Boas claimed he was dragged inside a flying saucer and forced to have sexual intercourse with a beautiful alien woman.
‘When he left, she pointed at her stomach, at him and then at the sky, implying she would have his child somewhere in outer space.’
Though, Watson said it’s important to remember that people have been telling stories about sexual encounters with supernatural beings throughout history.
‘I suspect many are fantasies that the abductees actually believe,’ he said. ‘Such fantasies or stories make [them] feel like special people who are selected to breed a new race of hybrid beings.’
‘Other abductees might use these fantasy experiences as a way of unconsciously disguising and coping with real miscarriages, abortion or rape.’
The controversial 1991 study into alien abductions was conducted by artist Budd Hopkins, associate professor of history at Temple University David Jacobs, and professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University Ron Westrum.
The team surveyed nearly 6,000 adults, asking them how often they experienced five specific scenarios (see box below).
They concluded that many of the participants who claimed to have been abducted reported similar scenarios.
‘They wake up immobilized in a room surrounded by alien creatures (‘small, gray-skinned, hairless figures’ with large eyes) and balls of light,’ the study reported.
‘They [claim they] are levitated to a metallic spacecraft, where they are stripped and subjected to medical examinations (aliens take an unusual interest in the genitals of abductees) that sometimes leave scars. Afterward, they are unable to account for their lost time.’
