The Taking Explores What it’s Like to Confront the Unknown

When people gazed at the sky at night in Pangea,  New Hampshire, they could see the galaxy from their backyards. The dark nights of sparse streetlights brought the universe to life and accentuated the starlight on the woods. Sometimes, unexplained orbs were also seen hovering in the patch of sky above the town. An unnatural silence and a feeling that you are all alone in the world. There have always been stories about encounters with strange beings from other planets. In these stories, human beings are singled out by the strange creatures, who change the humans’ lives forever. At least this is true according to the unsettling legends of unidentified flying objects and alien abductions, stories which have influenced the suspenseful new novel, The Taking by Dona Masi. On one level, The Taking is a story about out-of-the-world beings that visit Earth to look for us. On another level, The Taking is a coming-of-age-story about love, courage, and learning difficult truths. The heart of the story is the relationship between a father and daughter amid strange events that occur in a small New England town. Masi has been fascinated with UFO stories for most of her life. She lives in New Hampshire, which is a known hotspot for UFO events, including one of the most famous and credible reports of an alien abduction – the Betty and Barney Hill UFO encounter. “I feel like it was natural for me to write The Taking, and at one point, I was just ready to begin it.” Both Masi and her mother were interested in UFOs. She thinks some of her mom’s enthusiasm rubbed off on her. “We talked about them together, and sometimes, we imagined chasing a UFO in our car for the adventure of it.” In The Taking, Masi wanted to show off the beauty of the rural landscape of New Hampshire. She made it an important part of the story. The deep woods outside the fictional town of Pangea are peaceful, but other times, they seem to be hiding something. Masi found pleasure in writing about the natural environment and tying it to the ideas in the novel. “The characters in The Taking are inspired by nature, but sometimes nature seems lonely and frightening to them. The natural world, the woods for example, elicits their deepest emotions.” Some people might be curious to know if Masi has ever seen a UFO. She says that The Taking isn’t based on her life or experiences, but on reports, news stories, documentaries, and her conversations.      However, there is a memory that has stuck with her of seeing something in the sky that looked like an airplane without wings. She was very young, but whatever it was made a lasting impression on her. “I looked up and I saw a very shiny metallic object that was shaped like a cylinder, and it was just standing still above me in the sky. It was weird, and I was scared.” The experience felt like it lasted for no more than a few seconds, but it also felt like there was a gap in time in her conscious memory. It was as if she had amnesia between when she first saw the object and looked back up at it again. “Ufologists call that sensation ‘missing time.’ I don’t know if that’s what I experienced.” She wonders about the object that she remembers seeing, and if it was a brush with a UFO, a dream, or a fantasy. “It was a long time ago, and I’ll never know what actually happened.” Her feelings about UFOs are that some of them are probably extraterrestrial in origin, and alien abductions could be a part of what they’re doing. She thinks about what that implies for the people who are affected and for the rest of humanity. This was on her mind when she wrote The Taking. A few years before she began writing The Taking, Masi took an anthropology course for which she was asked to write an ethnography about a culture other than her own. Her professor was skeptical when she told him she wanted to write about UFO folklore. “He didn’t think the UFO-curious world fit the criteria for a culture, but the UFO community was the only topic I wanted to write about.” Later, though she found many groups who were knowledgeable about UFOs in general, she discovered that it was difficult to find a community of alien abductees, or a community of people who believed in UFOs who would allow her to talk with them. “I was disappointed when the groups I wanted to talk to said no, but I understood because of the stigma attached to belief in UFOs. People are afraid that no one will believe them or they’ll mock them.” Attitudes like that appear to be changing, and people in the United States are more openminded about the idea of aliens from other worlds visiting us, since the government released its reports several years ago about UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomenon. It’s also a time of historic scientific discoveries about space and other planets. The idea that we are not alone in the universe feels less and less like science fiction. Masi interviewed people who were associated with the UFO mystery. Her sources included witnesses, researchers, and investigators. Some of the things they told her were incredible. “I think those conversations sparked my imagination, and I started to subconsciously think about writing The Taking.”   Then, she read Abductions: Human Encounters with Aliens by the prominent Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, which gave her new ideas. In the 1980s and ‘90s, Dr. Mack’s patients included more than ninety people with symptoms of fear and anxiety that many of them attributed to some kind of paranormal event. All of their stories had similar eerie details. After several years of treating their disorders, Mack went from being an openminded skeptic to a full-throated believer in UFOs and alien abductions. Mack’s book influenced the story that Masi wrote. The themes in The Taking derive from Mack’s book.   Imagine being a victim of an abduction. How would being an abductee affect a person emotionally and psychologically. How would having a child who was abducted affect the people who loved her?   The Taking intentionally raises more questions than it answers. In writing The Taking, Masi always wanted to “depict the unknown, because no one knows for sure whether there really are UFOs, or alien abductions.” Masi has mixed emotions about the prospect of discovering that UFOs and alien abductions are real. To have proof and to know with certainty, would be incredible and petrifying. Petrified was how she felt in the memory she has of the object she may have seen that one day.     Masi thinks her mom would’ve liked to have known the truth, though. “My mom would’ve been braver than me. If they were friendly, she would’ve wanted them to take her for a ride.”   https://donamasi.com