Audrey Hewins saw him across the club, running the sound board for her brother’s band, and knew.

She walked over, sat on his lap and asked, “You remember, right?”

The man gave a stunned, “Yeah.”

“We had been introduced to each other 10 years before during an abduction, on a craft,” Hewins said.

As her brother’s band played an original track called “My UFO’s up on blocks,” they reintroduced themselves that night in Massachusetts about 15 years ago. 

“We didn’t know he had that song,” Hewins said. “The synchronicity and high strangeness around this is amazing. You can’t make this up.”

Hewins is 40, friendly and matter-of-fact, with long red, blond and brown hair. She and her twin sister say they have been visited and abducted by alien beings almost as far back as they can remember.

After moving to Maine in 2006, Hewins got a visitation that inspired her to create a national online group, Starborn Support, for people with similar encounters.

For a long time, it mostly consisted of a hot line (nearly 2,000 calls and counting.) Today it has 12 chapters on the East Coast, in Latin America and Columbia.

On Saturday night, Starborn Support will hold its first Maine in-person support-group meeting.

Hewins’ still-active hot line rings a lot at 3:33 a.m., a popular time for people to be returned post-abduction, she said.

They call panicked and they call wanting someone to believe them.

She does.

ETs, visions

Hewins said she and her twin sister, Debbie, of Mechanic Falls, can remember being visited regularly by “the bald man” when they were 4 years old. Before being removed from their room, she said they would hear voices, then a hum like a swarm of bees, then see a blinding blue/white light.

They decided to reach out for help in their 20s, connecting with MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network.

“We weren’t capable of handling it; the drama started to set in,” Hewins said.

Debbie sat for a hypnotherapy session first, which, in hindsight, might have been a mistake.

“It opens up a lot of things; I remember a lot,” Debbie Hewins said.

As she started coming to, everyone in the room screamed: Her skin had turned an eerie shade of gray. “They all freaked out,” she said.

It freaked her out.

“The memories we did (recover) were, ‘Uh, OK, we don’t want to do this again,'” Audrey Hewins said. “Some memories are meant to be forgotten — the human mind is so fragile.”

There’s a language to the work they do now. For example, Audrey Hewins, who lives in Oxford, said aliens prefer to be called extraterrestrials or ETs.

Instead of abductions or abductees, she calls people who have had encounters “experiencers.” People can be either taken, sent mental pictures or hear voices, she said.

Some experiencers are dormant, some “activated” (they remember what happened).

As she’s gotten older, she said she’s had more visions than abductions. One vision told her to pull together the first Experiencers Speak conference last year. About 200 people attended the second annual event in Gorham in September, and the third is in the works.

At the 2012 conference, that Massachusetts sound man, Matt Moniz, now a Harvard-graduated scientist, stood and outed himself, Hewins said, telling the crowd, “I have to tell everyone for the first time: I, too, am an experiencer.”

“He’s now our scientist on the team,” she said. “It feels like we were introduced for a reason.”

‘Not an accident’

The good news may be that Earth, she said, is not being softened up for an invasion. But it hasn’t caught the ETs’ attention for entirely good reasons, either.

“The planet is very, very sick and people have lost touch with it,” Hewins said. She talks about pollution, pulling oil and gas from the ground, losing animals to extinction. “The planet being destroyed would have a domino effect throughout the universe and that’s not going to be allowed.”

Hewins called the next three months “critical.” Signs from way away could include earthquakes, volcanoes and flooding, maybe even martial law.

“The comet that’s coming (named ISON) is significant somehow,” she said. “The government shutdown is not an accident. There’s something with this comet.”

Despite such premonitions, Hewins said she’s had very few people be skeptical to her face, and when they are, “I won’t feed that negativity.”

“The programming all our lives — ‘They don’t exist; they’re not real.’ — it’s intended, it’s part of the cover-up,” she said.

After a bad experience with the ABC show “Prime Time: The Outsiders” in 2009, Hewins said she and her sister have been cautious with media requests.

“They ended up tying into it skeptics, sleep paralysis, swamp gas — what they’ve been doing to us forever,” she said.

Hewins was in the pilot episode of “Alien Encounters” on the Biography Channel last April and on National Geographic’s “The Secret History of UFOs.” She’ll appear in an episode of “Monsters and Mysteries in America” in December on Destination America.

She’s filming something later this month but can’t yet tell what it is. She also appears in the new book, “Alien Abduction Files.”

The new monthly support group meets from 6 to 8 p.m. Saturday at Leapin’ Lizards in Portland. A Massachusetts support group started 18 months ago with 15 members. Now, 45 to 50 regularly attend.

“People don’t realize how many experiencers there are in the world,” Hewins said.

Weird, Wicked Weird is a monthly feature on the strange, unexplained and intriguing in Maine. Send ideas, photos and visions to kskelton@sunjournal.com.

More coverage: ‘Experiencers’ share abduction stories