Well educated and well spoken, Turner was widely respected within the UFO community for her abduction research. In 1988, she endured a series of experiences along with her husband and son which forced them to believe they had been taken by extraterrestrials. Karla eventually dropped her university career to turn her full attention to abduction research. Her first book, Into the Fringe (1992), recounted their experiences and her second book, Taken – Inside the Alien-Human Abduction Agenda (1994) profiled the abduction stories of eight different women. Her final book, Masquerade of Angels (1994), was co-written with psychic Ted Rice and recounted Ted’s lifelong encounters with strange entities. Karla was working on a fourth book, but became ill in early 1995. She died of cancer in January, 1996.

Turner’s perceived deceit and cruelty by her abductors made her into an activist who insisted abductees must stand up for themselves and seize their souls from a rapacious, non-human species. Turner also speculated the entities had developed parallel to us on Earth, then become transdimensional. “To accept a spiritual explanation for the abduction process and the abducting entities,” she told an interviewer for Contact Forum in June 1995, “is foolhardy and potentially dangerous to our souls.” To another interviewer she reiterated that if we do not rouse ourselves, “we may come to the point where we cede the sovereignty of our souls. We should stand up for our souls. I think there is a possibility of finding out how to change the situation.”

Until shortly before her death, Turner regularly issued veritable calls to arms from the podiums of UFO conferences across the country and abroad. The aliens, she said time and again, used their powers to control our perceptions and practice disinformation in order to break down our resistance and deceive us into believing they were interested in our well-being when they were not. All the evidence, she said, suggested their purposes were entirely self-serving and without regard for the needs of homo sapiens. Now was the time, she insisted, “to work at getting back control.”

Turner contended the best defense against alien intrusions was not “abduction therapy” but abduction research itself. ahe listed what she considered to be the only “facts” which might be construed about the alien invaders:

• We do not know with any certainty what they are.
• At least some of the aliens lie.
• During encounters, they control our perceptions.
• They can implant false memories.
• What we report about them is what they want us to report.
• The alien agenda has physical aims and procedures that have nothing to do with reproduction.
• From childhood, they manipulate us physically, spiritually, and sexually.
• They create virtual reality scenarios that are absolutely real to the abductees.
• They show an extraordinary interest in human souls and in our thoughts.
• There is some element of human involvement in UFO phenomenon.

Turner also insisted the aliens were engaged in a propaganda war to convince us their intentions were more benevolent than they were. They could be creating virtual reality scenarios of cross-breeding to suggest we share commonalities and that they need us. But, she said, there are just as many accounts of brain operations as there are of fetal transplants. In a propaganda campaign which included demonstrating their superiority, proprietary relationship to us, and consistently painting a benevolent picture of themselves they were primarily attempting to “debase and lower our self-view and to break down our resistances.”

“If the terrors of the abduction experience made us grow stronger,” concluded Turner, “it was not because the aliens wanted us to have this strength, but because we willed it ourselves.” Similarly, she insisted, we should take into our own hands this appalling violation of our rights as human beings and fight it with all the resources which we could muster out of the richness of human creativity and experience.