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Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Yeah, well, nobody ever seemed to hear me scream right here on Earth either. And believe me, I've done a lot of screaming.

Everything about my life has made me want to scream. Every. Single. Thing.

I decided to tell my story in the hopes of finding others like me. I know there are others out there. In fact, I'm fairly confident there are 1110 others.

I'm the youngest of 4 children and was raised in a typical middle-class household in Boulder, Colorado. There was mom, dad, Genvieve, Kevin, Gretchen and me, Kat, short for Katrina.

My parents were kind, but simple people who valued work and family above all. Mom was a housewife and dad worked at Harper's Fine Furnishings as a salesman.

But from the time I was a little kid, I never fit in. Not at home, not anywhere else. It was like I was dropped into the wrong family on the wrong planet.

Everyone in my family is tall, with pin-straight hair and round blue eyes. I'm short, just over 5 feet, with thick curly hair and almond-shaped green eyes.

My parents were, and my siblings are, so very average. I don't say that in a bad way. I mean it as a descriptor more than a pejorative. Average looks, average, or in the case of Kevin, just below average, grades. They had typical interests, sports, television, gossip and socializing.

Then there was me. In very fundamental ways, I was different, better. Not just than my family, but my peers as well. I was, I still am, sort of like a Human 2.0. Yes, I know how awful and downright conceited that makes me sound. I cringe even writing it, but it's true.

The first time I noticed I was different was when I was about 3. I could already read, but that wasn't it.

We were all out somewhere. The mall, I think. People kept approaching us and looking at me, patting my head and just saying over and over how beautiful I was. And while they were saying all this, my brother and sisters were just kind of there, invisible. From that day forward it's been like that.

At school, everything came easy for me. Crazy easy! It didn't matter what the subject was, if it could be taught in a book or a classroom, I absorbed it like a sponge.

Then there were sports. I did track and field and gymnastics and again, it just came so easy. From the very first competition, I was racking up the gold medals and blue ribbons. I even beat my nemesis, Brian Gillespie, the best athlete in our 6th-grade class in every single category in the Junior Olympics. If he ran, I ran faster. If he jumped, I jumped further or higher.

On top of all that, I never got sick. I mean never. My siblings would get the usual colds and flus that went around school. So would my parents. But not me. I can't ever remember being home sick from school.

And those traits have followed me to this day. At 38, I haven't fallen prey to the weight gain and myriad of physical limitations and aliments my brother and sisters seem to have started developing. I look oddly young for my age and I'm still never sick.

It probably sounds great, being the pretty one, the smart one, the winner of everything. You'd probably guess I had loads of friends and was loved by everyone. You'd be wrong on both counts.

Unlike my parents, my siblings or other kids at school, I had very few friends. As a child, I couldn't relate to other children. I'd watch them playing and want to join in, but I could never figure out how to do it. I was never invited to sleepovers or birthday parties. And I never had any.

I was more of an observer, studying others from my seat on the outside, trying to interpret the rituals and customs that came so easy to them, but were so very foreign to me.

I was strange. That was the general consensus. And I guess I was. Strange and a loner.

I still am. I'm approaching middle age, give or take, and I'm no more comfortable with the social machinations of people than I was when I was 7.

I don't understand why people want to have tons of friends. I don't understand why people squeal loudly and hug each other when they meet. I don't see the value in hanging out at a bar or restaurant or club or anywhere else for that matter. I don't see the point in inviting a bunch of people to my house.

When I'm finished with work for the day, I don't want to get drinks or stand around and chat. I don't want to attend countless work-sponsored social events designed to "build the team." I don't want to attend any events. I just want to go home, take off my bra, eat something, get a glass of wine and read till bed with my cat, Mulder on my lap.

Anything else just feels unnecessary and pointless to me. It makes me very uncomfortable. That makes me strange. I get it, it's the stark contrast between my being such a high achiever in so many areas of my life and hovering just shy of non-functional in this one.

That contrast has haunted me for ages and recently I decided to search for the reasons behind it. I tried counselling. That wasn't much help. They told me I was socially anxious and offered me pills. Well, duh, I knew I was socially anxious, but I didn't say I wanted to change anything about my life, just find out the why behind it.

I went to one of those public speaking/networking seminars that are supposed to help a person get comfortable with, well public speaking and networking. I left after an hour.

And finally, I decided that I must be adopted. Perhaps I'm just genetically predisposed to being more introverted. I had visions of my biological parents, they'd be just like me, but in different ways.

I imagined that I'd inherited my mother's beauty and slender frame as well as her love for music and literature. And that I'd gotten my father's raw intellect and athletic prowess.

My siblings laughed at my theory. Apparently, they all remember mom going to the hospital and coming back a few days later with me. But, just to humour me, my sister Genvieve agreed to take one of those at-home DNA tests with me.

We took them and sent them off. Her results came back in about 6 weeks. It gave a breakdown of her ethnic make-up and a list of people that were related to her. It was pretty cool and I learned quite a bit. For example, I had no idea we were part Jewish and part Norweigan.

I was anxious to get my results. They never came. Instead, I got an email saying they couldn't process my sample. They gave a list of reasons. It could have been contaminated. Maybe I didn't follow the instructions, stuff like that. They gave me another test kit so I could provide another sample.

I tried again. I followed the directions to the letter. I made sure I had nothing to eat or drink for a full 2 hours before providing the sample. I made sure I spit all the way to the line on the vial, added the preservative stuff and sealed everything up just right and sent it off.

Then I waited. And waited. And waited.

About 10 weeks later, another email came that said the same thing, they couldn't process it, contamination, failure to follow instructions, blah, blah, blah.

I was livid! I was no closer to an answer than I'd ever been. But I wasn't deterred. I convinced my sister to take a private DNA test with me at the local clinic. She agreed, as long as I paid, which I did.

This time it only took about 2 weeks to get the results. We matched on the matrilineal side, meaning we definitely had the same mother.

But there was, yet again, a problem with my sample. My patrilineal DNA came back as unrecognizable/unknown.

I asked what that meant and didn't really get much of an answer. I asked for a second opinion and was referred to the university's School of Genetic Research where I met with a Dr Rolando Cummings.

He took on my case and after months of careful study called me into his office.

He looked over his thick, dark-rimmed glasses at me, his face chalk-white, as if he'd seen a ghost. He started mumbling about "not believing it if he hadn't seen it with his own eyes."

He was making me nervous.

Then he leaned over and dropped a bomb that changed my life, "your patrilineal DNA is not consistent with human DNA and is of undetermined origin."

My head swam, his words twirling around inside it. Not consistent with human DNA? What does that mean? Am I not human? Am I half not human? What exactly am I? Is his equipment broken? Was the sample compromised? I started firing questions at him furiously, desperate for him to say something that would make some sort of sense.

He pushed a manila envelope, containing the results of his research toward me. He took off his glasses and wiped the beads of sweat that had formed from his brow and asked, "Tell me, did your parents ever go to the Wilkenson Fertility Clinic?"

I nodded, astonished, "Yes."

I remembered mom telling me when she was still alive that when Gretchen started kindergarten, she and dad decided to have one more baby. It wasn't as easy for them as it had been with the other 3 and I was the result of intrauterine insemination, or what they call commonly artificial insemination.

I still remember going to visit his office as a child and into my teens. There was no particular reason for these visits. My parents took me out of courtesy, to show him how I was getting on, how I was growing up.

He'd always take a picture of me and put me on "the big wall," a giant wall in his waiting room covered in photos of babies, children and teenagers, all that he was responsible for bringing into the world.

I relayed the story to Dr Cummings.

He nodded, scratched his head and adjusted his glasses, pushing them to the tip of his nose, "Do you remember anything about the Big Wall? About the pictures?" His tone had a strange urgency.

I didn't. It was just a wall of kids, all smiling, looking happy and healthy.

He sighed as if my failure to recall anything specific about the photos was a personal disappointment.

He looked at his watch and stood up slowly, "Ms McAvie..."

"Kat, please," I interjected.

"Kat," he continued, "I have to run, I have a class to teach. We'll speak again, but in the meantime, I would suggest you do some research. Google the Wilkenson Clinic and Dr Curtis Wilkenson."

As if he had to tell me that! I already had my hand on my phone, itching to punch Dr Wilkenson's name into a search.

I don't know how long I sat in my car, in the parking lot, but it was long enough to find more questions than answers.

The first item to pop up in Google on Dr Curtus Wilkenson was a link to a story in the now-defunct Boulder Truth-Observer dated June 26, 1991. The headline read Prominent Fertility Expert Loses Medical Licence, Clinic Closed.

The second was a report of a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of various parents alleging certain women, over 1000 of them, were inseminated with sperm other than their husbands' without their knowledge or consent. I wondered if my mother had been one of those women, or if she even considered such a possibility.

Pages and pages of stories about the rogue doctor and his demise. I scrolled through 6, maybe 7 and was about to give up. I wasn't finding anything new.

But I went to page 8. I'm not sure why. In for a penny, in for a pound, I guess. And at the bottom of the page, another headline, "Local Doc Recounts Alien Encounter: It's Not The First Time, He Says."

Yeah, this Doctor Curtis Wilkenson apparently claimed to have been routinely abducted by aliens and somehow had it in his head that he'd become friendy with them.

So, the guy who was responsible for my existence, I learned, was a crook and a nutcase. He inseminated women with the wrong sperm and he thought he was pals with extraterrestrials.

I felt both sick and driven to learn more. It all gave me the heebeejeebees but in that train wreck kind of way. It's horrific. It's disturbing. You want to look away. You have to look away. But you can't. You just can't. And I didn't.