Several years ago I watched an episode of "Unsolved Mysteries" about a well-known alien abduction case known as the "Allagash Abduction". In this story a group of men were on a camping trip in the woods of northern Maine in the 1970's when they shared a strange experience, but only remembered it years later. I was intrigued by the particulars of the story and went on a several month long jag of reading about UFOs and the alien abduction phenomenon. I also thought that the creepy Allagash abduction story would make great subject matter for a song. I quickly wrote the music, the verse and chorus melodies, and came up with the basic idea of recasting the story as that of two men on a hunting trip. But I was stumped on the lyrics after working on the song for a couple months, and gave up on it altogether.

Maybe 7 or 8 years later while on a bike ride with my girlfriend, she described for me a dream she had about being abducted by aliens. I told her the Allagash story and thought for the first time in years about the song I had started about it. I thought it might be fun to revisit the idea and see if I could fare better with it this time. As soon as we got home I picked up the guitar and to my surprise I was able to immediately recall all the chord changes and melodies. I was able to write the lyrics in just a few days. I used the Allagash story as a backdrop but tried to work in several of the different recurring motifs from the abduction literature, without ever overtly referring to the events in the song as depicting an alien abduction scenario.

The recording of the song was pretty straight ahead. I brought in Mike Coykendall to lay down a swampy drum track and built from there. I wanted to give the song a cinemagraphic element and had the idea of adding a long noise track to the fade out of the song. The idea of the sound scape was to capture the state of mind of the hunters after they were returned to their campsite at the end of the song, having been drugged, their minds manipulated, not really knowing where they are or have recently been, numb and surrounded by the sounds of the fire and the woods at night. I brought in my friend Daniel Riddle, mastermind of King Black Acid, to put this track together, and he gave the song the subtly weird aspect it needed.