Here’s Mitchell’s account of her encounter: “I was putting the washing out on the line, putting my underwear out to dry, which should only take five minutes, right? I remember looking at my watch, because I took it off before I put my hand in the washing machine to take the wet clothes out. When I came back in, people said, ‘Where have you been?’ I didn’t understand what was going on till I saw the time. It was 45 minutes later. That’s a long time to be hanging out underwear.
“I tried to remember what had happened and gradually it came back to me. I had seen two lights in the sky, and then each light split into three, and then went like that and like that and like that.” Mitchell draws fast, jerky, triangular movements in the air. This seems like the end of the anecdote, but Mitchell is looking at McDonald with a “Should I? Shouldn’t I?” expression. “Angus doesn’t want me to talk about the rest because he thinks it makes me sound like a crackpot,” she says. “No, no, I like you talking about it,” McDonald disagrees. “I think it’s fascinating.” So, Mitchell continues, outlining more details of her lost 45 minutes, the highlight being the fact that an alien implanted schematics in her brain showing how to build an android, saying that he would return to give her more information, but that she should get started.
And has she? “No, it’s too hard,” says Mitchell, going into no little detail about what’s involved; and as the conversation continues and Mitchell starts discussing how to source titanium, it becomes obvious that she has at least done some research.
“I was given a job to do,” she laughs.
"There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil." ~ A.N. Whitehead