Need a last-minute gift idea for the Halloween fanatic in your life? Great news – alien abduction insurance policies are on sale.
The UFO Abduction Insurance Company, which has been operating out of Altamont Springs, Florida since 1987, is selling $10 million coverage that pays out in the event a UFO takes you away against your will. And the one-time payment is now just $9.99.
More than 5,000 people have bought the policies, which require proof that the insured has been abducted by an alien.
Mike St. Lawrence, who owns the unusual company, started selling the policies in the late 1980s after watching Whitley Strieber discuss his book, “Communion” – a detailed account of his alleged abduction by aliens – on CNN.
St. Lawrence had already won some press attention with his “reincarnation insurance” product at the time, and his brother suggested he take advantage of the UFO cultural zeitgeist and do something similar for alien abductions.
“I sat down and in fifteen minutes, I wrote a policy, and the rest is history,” St. Lawrence told reporters.
The policy requires that aliens from another planet physically abduct you and remove you from earth before the policy pays out. It also asks that policyholders provide proof of their abduction.
Surprisingly, St. Lawrence has actually written a few checks. In the early 1990s, one of his policyholders claimed he had been taken into a spaceship where he was implanted with a mysterious device before being returned to earth. He had an MIT professor certify that the device was “not made of any earthly substance.”
Satisfied with the proof of abduction, St. Lawrence began to pay out on the claim.
Before anyone gets any ideas about claiming a windfall after an alleged abduction, however, know that St. Lawrence pays out just $1 a year – over a period of 10 million years.
“We don’t want to put a tax burden on anybody,” he said.
