Peter Khoury is a Sydney man whose reported anomalous experiences span from infancy in Lebanon to adulthood in Sydney, forming the Peter Khoury alien abduction case documented by Bill Chalker in his 2005 book Hair of the Alien: DNA and Other Forensic Evidence for Alien Abductions. Khoury’s family migrated from Lebanon to Australia,1 settling there in 1973 following his father, who had already moved to the country.2 His father had worked overseas, and Khoury hardly knew him growing up until around the age of seven.3 The Khoury family are Maronite Christian,4 and Khoury currently works at a church.5 He has known Vivian since 1981, when the two first dated at school,6 and reconnected with her around 1988.7
Khoury has said his mother told him that, while breastfeeding him at three o’clock in the morning when he was 22 days old, she saw a being at the window during the 1964 Peter Khoury infancy alien window sighting,8 which she felt was looking at her infant son rather than at her.9 His earliest personally recollected experience, the 1972 Lebanon rooftop egg-shaped craft encounter, he dates to around late 1971 or early 1972,10 in a neighbourhood where children regularly played on flat rooftops11 and families used them for cubby houses, sometimes sleeping there in summer.12 He was among a group of about seven or eight children, including a boy named George Farduis, invited onto a neighbouring roof,13 and as they ran up the stairwell a heavy door that normally slammed shut under its own weight stayed open the entire time.14 On the roof, Khoury said his cousins and friends froze motionless mid-movement,15 while he alone remained able to move and look up.16 He reported seeing an egg-shaped silver craft hovering approximately 30 metres above the group,17 silver in colour with a large, darkly tinted windscreen18 and no visible landing gear, propeller or doors,19 which he likened in size to a neighbour’s Volkswagen Beetle.20 Inside, he described two very thin, tall figures visible only as silhouettes.21 The craft reportedly dropped in altitude twice, by around five metres each time,22 coming to rest at roughly 20 metres above the children after the second drop,23 after which Khoury’s next memory was of the group at the bottom of the stairs with no recollection of getting there.24 The children were reportedly grounded for one to two weeks afterwards.25
By 1988, Khoury had been back living at his parents’ home for about nine months.26 During the 1988 Peter Khoury bedroom hooded entity encounter, he was sitting on his bed with the television on27 when he said something gripped his ankles just before his head touched the pillow,28 followed by pins and needles spreading from his ankles up through his body to his scalp,29 after which he became paralysed.30 He could not move any part of his body except his eyes, which remained open because he had not been asleep,31 and he has maintained that the paralysis began before he fell asleep, which he says rules out a hypnagogic or sleep-related explanation.32 At the foot of the bed he reported a hooded figure approximately 1.2 metres tall,33 which he found horrific and evil-looking, its head appearing enlarged by a robe and hood,34 and said two further, identical hooded beings stood closer to him on the right side of the bed.35 He also described a female being with large, black, almond-shaped eyes,36 wearing a thin mask over her mouth held by a fishing-line-like band, which he said gave him the impression she did not want to catch or transmit something.37 Khoury said he blacked out for about 15 minutes before regaining movement,38 and that the following night he discovered a burn mark on his shin resembling a bullet hole, with three prong marks in a triangular pattern.39 Years later, Khoury recounted that his brother Sam Khoury had described witnessing him floated through the hallway by three beings during the 1988 Peter Khoury brother’s levitation witnessing event,40 an account Khoury said he only learned of when Sam told Chalker directly.41
Khoury reported two further bedroom encounters in the early 1990s. During the 1991-10 Peter Khoury bedroom encounter, he said an Asian-looking woman took his hand to her breast repeatedly before cupping his head to her breast, seemingly wanting him to bite it.42 He said he woke about two hours after that encounter, whereas after the 1992-07-23 Peter Khoury bedroom encounter he telephoned Vivian Khoury at work less than an hour after the incident.43 Of the blond woman he described encountering in July 1992, Khoury said she appeared in her mid-thirties, with hair styled as if blown back by wind, protruding high cheeks, and eyes two to three times the size of human eyes,44 and that her face was longer and narrower than a human’s, with a pointed, witch-like chin.45 He said he bit her nipple during the encounter, swallowing a piece that remained lodged in his throat for three days.46 Khoury and Vivian Khoury have said they are certain the episode occurred after his severe 1992-05-13 Peter Khoury job site head injury, at a time when he was still suffering nausea, headaches and vomiting and unable to work.47 Khoury has also said that a needle-like device inserted something into his head during the 1988 encounter, leaving a puncture mark;48 he said that, nearly four years later, the site still bore a doughnut-shaped lump that intermittently grew before shrinking, though it never fully disappeared,49 and that in May 1992 he felt something pop from the site and saw a dark brown, match-head-sized object fall into the carpet, an episode recorded as Peter Khoury’s implant puncture mark episode.50 In Peter Khoury’s diary, he recorded an entry on 26 August 1992 noting a “lack of help from committee”,51 and the following day wrote “do not discuss experience”, reflecting his frustration at the lack of positive feedback.52
Chalker did not learn of Khoury’s hair sample until 1996, initially focusing on more conventional lines of investigation.53 He later brought the case to a group of specialists referred to as an “invisible college”,54 who undertook a forensic investigation of the hair from late 1998 to early 1999,55 in what is catalogued as the mitochondrial Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) hypervariable region I analysis of Peter Khoury’s alien hair sample (Phase One, hair shaft, 1998-1999). Investigators used polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification and sequencing on the hair,56 alongside control samples cut from Khoury’s and Vivian Khoury’s own hair in Chalker’s presence.57 The three samples were easily distinguishable both to the naked eye and under a microscope,58 Khoury’s hair being thick and black and Vivian’s of normal thickness and brown.59 The resulting mitochondrial DNA profile from the blond hair showed five substitutions, three considered common among human racial types and two rare;60 although the hair was blond, which would ordinarily suggest Scandinavian racial types, the DNA indicated otherwise.61 Further controlled testing used blood samples from Khoury, Vivian Khoury and a Chinese biochemical analyst,62 who had had no prior contact with either of them or the original hair sample.63 This finding underlies the Chinese Mongoloid mitochondrial Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) substitution found in Peter Khoury’s alien hair shaft: according to Hair of the Alien, the biochemist who analysed the sample considered it not impossible that Khoury had had contact with a fair-skinned, nearly albino woman from the Sydney area, but concluded the DNA evidence ruled this out, fitting instead only a Chinese Mongoloid donor,64 and judged the most probable donor to remain, as Khoury described, a tall, blond woman who did not require much colour in her hair or skin as protection against the sun.65
Khoury’s engagement with the organised UFO research community began in November 1991, when he joined UFO Research New South Wales, then about to hold its inaugural meeting, seeking to understand his 1988 experience.66 He became the group’s de facto abduction coordinator, developing an abductee support subgroup within it.67 After Budd Hopkins delivered a lecture in October 1992, the organisation sought to take over the support group Khoury had nurtured;68 Khoury resigned at the end of March 1993,69 and together with Jamie Leonarder and others formed the UFO Experience Support Association, formalised on 14 April 1993.70 John Mack regressed Khoury under hypnosis during a 1996 visit, seeking to clarify the 1988 encounter beyond the point at which his memory went blank after the needle was inserted into his head;71 under that regression, Khoury described being taken into a brightly lit, white-walled room and placed on a table, with an entity standing over him speaking in a sound like the chirping of birds.72 Khoury has said he was not fully satisfied with the results and felt more comfortable relying on his consciously recollected details.73 Chalker wrote to Moira McGhee and Bryan Dickeson, with Khoury’s written support, requesting a copy of an earlier taped interview with him;74 after listening to the resulting 1992 McGhee/Dickeson taped interview with Peter Khoury, Chalker told Khoury that in it he clearly referred to the two strange women but did not mention the hair sample.75 This prompted 2003 hypnosis session with Peter Khoury Robb Tilley’s November 6, monitored by a psychologist friend and videotaped;76 in it, Khoury recalled driving Vivian Khoury to the station while feeling very sick,77 pulling the car over to vomit before reaching the station,78 and being told by her that he might need to see a doctor.79 Chalker, who has known Khoury since 1993, has described him as a friendly and reliable person,80 who remains open to whatever his experiences may turn out to be but insists on serious and ethical research and support for abductees.81