Dr. Karla (also known as `Kandy') Turner was a professional academic (an English PhD) and educator who lived in Arizona and died of cancer on 10 January 1996 at the tragically young age of 48. For several years before her death, she worked to publicise the reality of the alien abduction phenomenon to academia and to a wider public audience. She was a popular and respected public speaker on the subject - you can find videos of her lectures on the web - and between 1992 and 1996 published three books about how this intrusive phenomenon had affected her family.
`Into the Fringe', published in 1992, was her first book and chronicles the process whereby she and her family became aware that abduction by alien entities was the likely origin of all the strange events which had been happening to them. These included multiple close-proximity sightings of UFOs, episodes of missing time (some of several hours' duration), night-time visitations, odd and often dramatic patterns of body scarring and various poltergeist-type activity experienced by different members of the family, especially by her husband Casey and son David. It's essentially a narrative written in the first person about the journey from puzzlement and ignorance to some understanding of what might be happening and their eventual reluctant acknowledgement that the abduction phenomenon, reported in such consistent detail by so many other people, was the only explanation to fit the data and that in their case the fit was an exact one.
ITF details how Turner sought help from Barbara Bartholic, Oklahoma-based long-time UFO investigator and colleague of Jacques Vallee, to help understand the phenomenon in more depth. Bartholic used some hypnosis to aid memory recovery and both Karla and Casey had several such sessions with her.
One of Karla Turner`s most controversial claims was that the US Government, or elements within the Government, were actively interested in the phenomenon and occasionally abducted known alien-abductees in order to glean information from them, using drugs to control them and wipe their memories. She provides some detail, in the final chapters, of how they became convinced that these so-called `MIL-ABS' are, or rather were in the 1990s, a reality. The book also describes interactions with some human-looking entities (`hybrids?) and how abductees have recognised each other in the `everyday' world. The author did not believe these alien intrusions to be in any way benign, and was definitely not any kind of `New-Ager.'
ITF's 13 untitled chapters run to 239 pages including a short epilogue. There is a brief bibliography but no index. All three of Karla Turner's books are in great demand on the second-hand book market and almost impossible to find except with high price tags. If you find even a `fair' paperback copy of ITF for less than US$30 you'll be lucky, and a `fine' or `like new' copy will set you back close to US$200 - if you can find one at all.