Pamela Stonebrooke is reviewing a portrait of a former lover painted by a friend. But there's something not quite right about the nose.

"It should be more alligatorish," she says.

The skin ought to be more sensual and snakelike, but when it comes to the lower part of the body -- well, that's where Stonebrooke's powers of objectivity fade into amorous distraction.

"Tail? I don't know about a tail," she chuckles. "Honey, I was in another place!"

Details aside, any half-serious scholar of UFO mythology can identify these scaly humanoids as belonging to the race of extraterrestrials known as Reptilians. Some might call Stonebrooke an abductee, but she thinks that word makes her sound like some kind of victim. She prefers "experiencer." Experiencer serves as the title of a self-distributed CD/cassette of her own songs, and figures into Experiencer: A Jazz Singer's True Account of Extraterrestrial Contact, the paranormal tell-all she's been writing for the last two years.

Her imposing height, bleached blonde hair, and smoky, worldly voice all convey the air of confidence you'd need to go public about an erotic tryst with an alien. Shortly after meeting me for an interview she is good-naturedly lifting the cuff of her slacks to reveal two curious scars on her shin, which she says "just showed up" when she was eight or nine. She identifies them as "scoop marks" left from extraterrestrial tissue sampling.

A few years after serving as an unwitting tissue donor, Stonebrooke became a musician, fronting a rock band during her teen years. Since then, she's honed her skills in nightclubs from New York to Tokyo, providing backing vocals for everyone from country western artist Hoyt Axton to the quirky new-wavers of Sparks. Today she performs mainly on the Los Angeles jazz circuit, in clubs and private gigs like birthday parties for Gene Roddenberry and the wedding of Larry Flynt. Her voice can also be found winding its way through the first CD released by the New Age group Agartha and on the German compilation, Wave Music, which features her song "Alien." This composition, she says, contains a verbatim message of galactic unity from an ET by the name of Bashar.

Not to be confused with the Reptilian Casanova, Bashar is a "Grey" (the species gracing countless baseball caps and skateboards) from Zeta Reticula, an outer space metaphysician who regularly addressed workshops at the Encino Women's Center during the 1980s -- via human channel Daryl Anka. Stonebrooke's recording of the message (rendered cosmically androgynous by digital magic) was kind of a "goof on Daryl," she says. Though enthusiastic about Anka's teachings, she was at the time somewhat dubious about their extraterrestrial origin.

All that changed when an extraterrestrial started calling her Mommy.

In 1993, Stonebrooke awoke one night to find herself in what she believes was a spaceship. "On this short metallic table were these four little girls," she says. "They were very frail like the Greys, but they had wispy hair, almost like chemotherapy hair. They ran over to me and grabbed my arms and started calling me Mommy. I lost it."

A few years after the song was composed, the Reptilian came calling. In the first of three encounters, Stonebrooke remembers waking during the night surprised to find herself "making love to this gorgeous blond man. I had no idea who it was since I don't bring people home like that. But the sex was incredible, and I felt safe enough to just put my head back, close my eyes, and enjoy it. All of a sudden the energy felt totally different. It felt aggressive, and the entity felt bigger -- bigger than the person who was inside me."

In the throes of passion she opened her eyes to witness the blond dreamboy morph into a reptile. She was frightened only briefly. "The telepathic communication was so intense and sensual and emotional," she explained. "It was everything you would want to feel to be able to surrender in a sexual experience." And the reptile had great technique. "It was almost like every cell in your body was having an orgasm. It had a kind of playful, kind of bad-boy attitude," she recalled. "It was kind of a sly, slick… It's really hard to explain, but he was definitely in control!"

Her openness to this experience has bothered many, including more paranoid factions of the UFO subculture who regard her as a "New Age Positive" mind-controlled by ETs. Even more empathetic moderates in the community sometimes object, she says, because "Reptilians are not PC." These critics believe that the idea of lizard-men from outer space damages credibility of the UFO believers as a whole, thanks to the creatures' uncomfortable resemblance to the rubber-suited monsters of atomic age sci-fi.

Popular late-night radio paranormalist Art Bell, however, has provided Stonebrooke more than once with a sympathetic coast-to-coast platform, and these broadcasts, she says, brought in untold letters and e-mails detailing the same experiences. "I've heard from women whose families are trying to put them into institutions, and women in the Bible Belt whose ministers think they are possessed by demons." It's the chance to help these people that makes it all worthwhile for Stonebrooke.

"I'm not the only one who's had this happen, she said. "I'm just the only one who would talk about it."

To share news of similar encounters or to obtain tapes or CDs, contact Pamela Stonebrook at galactic_diva@mail.telis.org or P.O. Box 1552, Hollywood CA 90078-1552.

Al Ridenour's taste for the bizarre is evident in his upcoming book from Santa Monica Press, Offbeat Food. When not constructively engaged in writing, he falls prey to his alter ego, Reverend Al, "Grand Instigator" of the Los Angeles Cacophony Society, an organization dedicated to pranks and acts of public buffoonery.