A British backpacker was rescued by police in Australia after reporting she had been kidnapped by a man who believed he was an alien.
Mary Kate Heys said she feared for her safety after getting into a car with a Swedish man whom she had recently met when they were both staying in a Sunshine Coast hostel. She was rescued Monday after texting her father in the U.K.
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“He said, ‘do you want to go on the adventure of your lifetime?'” Heys recalls the man asking her. “I was a bit concerned. As his friend I wanted to figure what’s wrong and help him and stuff because he’s obviously come to me when he needed help.”
“I knew it wasn’t just going to be like a nice trip to Brisbane.”
Heys said the man told her they were driving to Brisbane but then turned northward toward Cairns.
“I started really panicking and I said, ‘I don’t want to go there’, and he said, ‘well, this is where we’re going, this is what we’re going to do,'” Heys said. “So, I just sat there and I tried to evaluate what to do and I realized by this point that he’d kind of lost it.”
“I was so terrified of this man.”
Heys, 20, said the 22-year-old man appeared to be in a manic state.
“His eyes were really wide and he was like, when you see people in photos with like psychotic eyes, he was literally like that, like he’s lost it, and I thought something might have happened he’s not telling me about,” she said.
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That’s when he revealed he believed he was an alien.
“I actually kind of believed him, that’s how passionately he was talking about it,” she said. “I said, ‘why have you brought me with you?’ and he said, ‘you’re the same as me and you’re the one … that I’ve been looking for.'”
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Heys says the encounter got even stranger when the man asked her to hold his hand.
“I grabbed his hand … and he said, ‘can you feel it?’ And I was like, ‘no’ and he said, ‘you’ll feel the warmth, soon you’ll feel the switch coming on inside of you and you’ll be exactly the same as me,'” Heys said.
“I was like, ‘right, I’m in a bit of trouble here.'”
She said she became concerned and contacted her father secretly via text messages, urging him to call police for help, after pretending she was using her phone for directions.
“I quickly sent my dad my location and said, ‘dad, I’m in trouble, I need you to call the Australian police and need you to send them my location and get them to pull this car over because this man has taken me and he’s not letting me go,'” Heys said.
Police intercepted the car in the town of Gympie early Monday morning.
Heys said the man was taken to hospital. She declined to press charges against him.
“I didn’t want him to go to jail,” she said. “I thought it was a bad place for him.”