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He didn't want his name used. He's a California surgeon and he's scared of repercussions.

"I'd probably be ostracized, I'd be criticized, maybe I'd even lose my license," he said. "People with credibility who put themselves forward in this field could wind up dead, in jail or out of business."

He performed the operations anyway, before witnesses and a video camera. He cut into the big toe of a woman and into the back of a man's hand. Both believed they'd been abducted by aliens. From both, he extracted small foreign objects with some unusual properties.

"No one has the answers," he said. "But we all know something's going on."

The doctor has been active in UFO groups for five years. Through them, he met a Houston UFO researcher who sent the purported abductees here for surgery last August.

The patients didn't know each other. Neither had been aware of the objects he or she carried. Neither bore any nearby scars or punctures. In both cases, the objects came to light in X-rays for minor, unrelated injuries.

In decades of practice, the doctor said he'd never seen anything quite like what he fished out.

The objects were encased in a thick, dark membrane. These weren't cysts, he said. They were so tough, his scalpel couldn't cut them.

The object in the man was the size of a cantaloupe seed; one of the woman's two was T-shaped. Both patients jerked back when the doctor touched the objects - an unusual reaction for people calmed by hypnosis and placed on local anesthetics.

Back in Texas, the membranes were dried out and cut open, revealing tiny, highly magnetic pieces of a shiny black metal. Under ultraviolet light, they glowed a brilliant green - same as the "fingerprints" on the thighs and backs of some who claim to have been abducted, the doctor said.

Strange items have been pulled from "abductees" before but many somehow have disappeared before independent scientists could examine them. The skeptics remain skeptical.

"We haven't heard of anything that, without the shadow of a doubt, couldn't have been made here on Earth," said Barry Karr, director of the Center for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. "Let's see the evidence."

Perhaps they will.

The objects are in Houston for electrical, chemical and microscopic analysis. The patients who unwittingly carried them say they feel liberated. The doctor figures he'll be called on to perform more operations before long.