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David Huggins, a 74-year-old deli counter worker in New Jersey, found himself in the arms of a woman five or six months ago who was not altogether unfamiliar. She was, as he calls them, a ‘being,’ an extraterrestrial from a community of aliens who have been visiting him since he was eight years old.

His recent intimate encounter with the woman took place ‘there,’ as he describes the vague and inexplicable ‘other’ realm he has visited with these beings. Before he knew it, he says matter-of-factly, he woke up again in his bed in Hoboken.

Huggins – a divorced father-of-one – calmly and methodically relates the incident to DailyMail.com with the same level of detail and pragmatism that he exhibits in Love and Saucers, a documentary detailing his extraordinary claims. But his experience this year with that being is far from his most significant encounter with the extraterrestrials over the past seven decades; he lost his virginity to one at the age of 17, he claims, and says he fathered hundreds of ‘being’ over the years – babies who have remained ‘there’ and with whom he has no contact.

‘You’re immediately disarmed by how down-to-earth and normal he seems,’ says director Brad Abrahams, who first heard about Huggins in a podcast which mentioned him in a throwaway comment about how fantastical the claims were. ‘He’s from small-town Georgia in the 1950s, and sort of softly spoken, simply spoken, doesn’t really muse on things, just tells you very matter-of-factly the most ridiculous or surreal of claims.

‘And hearing these things come out of the mouth of someone who seems so, so normal and sobering, the way he talks about it is a real dichotomy. Like I said, it disarms you and it leaves you open to actually just listening to him as another human being, not – as one might think – of a quack or a charlatan or someone who’s unbalanced. Because right away you see that he’s not, and you just tend to take him more seriously and the story more seriously.’

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Huggins, who lives in a three-story home in Hoboken filled with more than a hundred paintings he’s done depicting his otherworldly experiences, tells DailyMail.com that he hopes the film sparks a dialogue and encourages viewers to think more openly. He believes hundreds of thousands – or even millions – of people around the world have also had similar encounters, particularly when they were children.

‘I hope people will think seriously about it,’ he tells DailyMail.com. ‘I have never asked anyone to believe a word I say, because I know I can never prove it … I hope that you’ll think about it.’

The film mostly features Huggins at home as he relates the history of his ‘being’ experiences and shows off his paintings. It also interviews everyone from Huggins’ adult son and neighbors to his boss at the Hoboken delicatessen and a religious studies expert.

Similarly to Huggins, Abrahams says he hopes people, after viewing the film, come away ‘listening, not judging … learning something about consciousness or humanity or just … walking away with more enriching experiences on the human condition.

‘I don’t necessarily want people to come away believing in aliens; that wasn’t my intention,’ Abrahams says. ‘It was more to walk away believing David, believing that he had some kind of experience.’

He tells DailyMail.com: ‘I can say unequivocally that I don’t believe David is making anything up, that he believes what happened to him was real – but if it’s something that happened in objective, hard reality, or if a member of the public was there with him, would they see what he saw? That’s something I don’t know the answer to.’

According to Huggins, his first sighting of a ‘being’ happened during his childhood in rural Georgia, where he lived with his parents and two siblings.

‘Nobody in my family seemed to see what I was seeing,’ he says in the documentary. ‘My first encounter was when I was eight years old. I was playing at the base of a tree, and I hear this voice say, “David, behind you.” And I turned around and there’s this little hairy guy with large glowing eyes coming straight towards me. I thought it was the bogey man. I didn’t know what to think of it.

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Huggins grew up on a farm in rural Georgia, where the rest of his family did not see the beings he claimed visited him

‘What’s interesting was that for a split second, I felt as if I was in his eyes looking at me. Then I just freaked and I ran to the barn, and I glance back and the little hairy guy was turning around and going back into the woods. The eyes were just glowing, is the best way to put it.’

The encounters continued from there as Huggins spotted ‘beings’ of different forms; he speaks of an insect-like creature and others he calls ‘little greys,’ which seemed to him to be workers. And then there were the females, whom he draws as slender, with the bodies of human women and narrow faces marked by large, mesmerizing eyes. One of these women, whom he eventually named Crescent, would create a milestone in Huggins’ life when he was 17.

I was walking in the woods, and I see a woman sitting under a tree – and she gets up and she starts coming towards me,’ he explains in the film. ‘I become very aroused sexually; I couldn’t get my pants down fast enough. I fall back on the ground and I’m lying there and she’s looking at me, and I reach my climax, which was quite painful, actually; it was very intense. And then I’m looking in her eyes and I pass out … Virginity lost.’

He continued his relationship with the beings and Crescent, even after his move at 19 to New York City. At times he even visited ‘there,’ the space or realm occupied by the extraterrestrials, he claims.

He says of Crescent: ‘There was something very beautiful, something lovely about her. She had a very nice body. The only thing that was different about her was that she had very long fingernails and she had these very large eyes, and her face was very pale.

‘My relationship with Crescent was warm and friendly and a little strange … she was my girlfriend, really,’ he says, conceding that it was ‘a very unconventional relationship.’

On one occasion, he says, he demanded to visit when Crescent unexpectedly appeared and announced that they had a child – an announcement that would turn into an even bigger development.

‘I was doing some painting, and then all at once the wall opens up and there’s Crescent,’ Huggins says in the film. ‘And she’s very stressed out and she says, “David, the baby’s dying.” And I go, “Baby? What baby?” “Your baby, but it’s dying.” And I say, “Show me my baby!” At first she wouldn’t do it, and I had to yell it out three times, really loud: “Show me my baby!”

‘She picks the baby up out of some container and holds it out in front of her, and the baby’s just like dangling. And I say, “No, no, no – don’t hold the baby like that. Cradle the baby in your arms … Listen, I’ve got to come there.”’

Crescent told him he wasn’t allowed ‘there’ – to which he responded: ‘”Watch this.” And I go and I pass out on my bed. The next thing I know I’m “there”. The insect being comes over and he’s rather upset with me. He says, “What are you doing here?” And I say, “My baby’s dying, I want my baby.” And I see Crescent holding the baby; the baby’s not moving – and I reach over to touch it, and just as I touch it, like static electricity jumped from my body and to the baby – and the baby moved.

He adds: ‘The insect being is looking at me, and he says, “Come with me.” And we go into another room filled with babies, and I’m looking at them – and I say, “Oh my god, whose babies are these?” He points to me. I wasn’t so much as creeped out as I was surprised. I could not believe it, but they were my babies and I had to help them so I wound up touching them all.’

Huggins’ home is filled with paintings he began doing in 1987 that depict his encounters; he also paints landscapes and other scenes, but there is a special quality to his extraterrestrial art, Abrahams says – a quality that spurred him further to make a documentary about Huggins’ unusual life and claims.

‘That really was what sort of clinched it for me to want to make the film, after seeing the paintings,’ Abrahams tells DailyMail.com. ‘As a filmmaker, they’re so cinematic. Each one tells a story. He has very little training; there’s a real sense of composition, of lighting … it’s like a narrative in each one. That’s a real gift for a filmmaker. As a storytelling device, there’s something so arresting and off-putting about them – and yes, there’s hundreds of them, and they’re completely consistent.’

Huggins’ son, Michael, says he doesn’t remember an exact revelation about his father’s stories, but he was aware of the artwork.

‘I just remember the paintings, and I just asked who are they, what are they … I guess at some point I was told, but there was never like a moment where we had like a big conversation about it,’ he says in the film. ‘I guess my childhood upbringing was pretty easygoing, pretty normal. The extraterrestrial encounters are unique; the encounters never impacted my childhood. It was just something that was going on. It never like flowed over into my life. I suppose I just accepted it. I never really questioned it or was very concerned about it.’

Huggins’ ex-wife, with whom he still lives in New Jersey, declined to be interviewed for the film – but his boss happily expressed his view.

‘I admire him, that he believes in certain things, and nobody has to judge nobody else,’ Anthony Lisa says in the documentary. When asked whether he believed the claims, he answered: ‘Yes, I do. That’s what he tells me; I just believe it.’

Director Abrahams tells DailyMail.com: ‘His boss is like this real salt-of-the-earth Italian immigrant running a family shop in Hoboken – and he’s like, “No, I believe him.”’

He expresses wonderment and satisfaction at people’s reactions to Huggins, saying: ‘There’s people like David where you can tell that they’re honest and down to earth people that don’t have an agenda, no matter how ridiculous of a story or claim they make.’

Jeffrey Kripal, professor of philosophy and religious thought at Rice University, also weighs in for the documentary. An academic who has specialized in alien abduction literature, he calls Huggins ‘very sincere, very simple.’

‘He just exudes this kind of humane, personable nature, and I heard a man who was just telling us the truth as best he could, without a whole lot of interpretive overlay … kind of a humility,’ he says in the documentary. ‘He’s clearly working through his experiences and his suffering and his joy all at the same time.’

Prof Kribal situates Huggins’ experience within a wider context of extraterrestrial encounters, comparing them to different religious revelations throughout history.

He calls alien abduction literature ‘a modern secular form of mystical literature.’

‘The whole history of religions is essentially about weird beings coming from the sky and doing strange things to human beings,’ he says. ‘Historically, those events or encounters have been framed as angels or demons or gods or goddesses or what have you, but in the modern sort of secular world we live in, they get framed as science fiction.’

He adds: ‘I think David is being sincere. You can’t talk to him without thinking that.’

Abrahams, the director of Love and Saucers – which is currently streaming on platforms such as Amazon and iTunes – also refers to Prof Kripal’s description of mystical or shamanic experiences, theorizing: ‘These are shared experiences that are products of their time.

‘If David, for example, had been living in the 1500s in medieval Europe, maybe he’d be having visions of Jesus or something biblical – but as he grew up in the 50s and 60s, this was a time where science fiction and aliens were so much in the popular culture, that whatever happened to him perhaps was colored by the era that he lived in – but not diminishing that something happened to him.’

He tells DailyMail.com that the reaction to his film has so far been positive and has ‘really opened up a dialogue.

‘That’s important, instead of just shutting these people out.’