FIGURE 5. Cover of Whitley Strieber, Communion (paperback; Avon Books, 1987).
The Lure of the Unremembered
DR. RIMA LAIBOW didn’t know what to make of it. In 1988, the psychiatrist recalled a few years afterward, a patient had come to her “in a state of anxiety and panic” triggered by a book she’d glimpsed out of the corner of her eye. The patient, a forty-three-year-old cardiologist, had never read the book, yet the eerie face that gazed from its cover seemed to her something already known. She herself, she told Laibow, had encountered creatures like the one portrayed. She’d forgotten but now, seeing that cover, she remembered—and was terrified.
“Such notions had always struck me as psychotic,” Laibow said, “but this patient taught me otherwise.”
The book was Whitley Strieber’s Communion: A True Story, published in January 1987 to stellar sales and no critical acclaim whatsoever. A work of purported nonfiction by a man who’d made his name as a novelist, it told of Strieber’s unwilled, traumatic encounters with uncanny beings who might but need not have been UFO aliens. The face on the cover was painted at Strieber’s direction by a master artist named Ted Jacobs. Even those who’ve never seen the book know that face: its light-bulb shape, its huge slanted eyes of impenetrable black, its cryptic, not quite Mona Lisa–like smile. That face is so much a part of our culture that it’s hard to conceive that before 1987 it was unknown. At least to our conscious minds.
The reaction of Laibow’s patient—“I’ve seen it! I’d forgotten but now I remember”—was far from unique. To pathologize it, to dismiss it as weird or abnormal, would bend the meaning of normalcy out of all usefulness. In the months and years that followed Communion’s appearance, Strieber was flooded with letters telling him, “Yes, I’ve lived it too.” By 1997 he’d received nearly two hundred thousand such letters.
“Sitting right there on the kitchen stove,” one man wrote to Strieber, describing something he remembered from 1958 when he was four years old,
in front of God and all my family and relatives, was this creature that I had never seen before. I remember pointing to the creature on the stove, and by now I had everyone’s attention. Obviously I was the only one who could see it, which only added to the terror. . . . I never again saw that face staring at me, that is, until I was browsing in a bookstore a few years ago and saw the book Communion, and right there on the cover was that all too familiar face almost laughing at me.
” Staring at me . . . laughing at me.” Others, who never contacted Strieber, had also felt that stare. One man recalled (in 1992) a close-range sighting he’d experienced at age nineteen of a face in the UFO “looking down at me.” When he saw the cover of Communion many years afterward, he was shocked, for here was the same face that “I imagined was looking down at me.”
By all odds the strangest story, chilling yet bizarrely comical, was told by biochemist Kary Mullis—the same Kary Mullis who won a Nobel Prize in 1993 for his discovery of the polymerase chain reaction, which made possible the forensic use of DNA testing that we now take for granted. In 1985, not yet a Nobelist, Mullis was spending the weekend at his cabin on a tract of wooded mountain country in Mendocino County, California. Shortly after midnight, en route to the outhouse, Mullis spotted something glowing alongside the path. He pointed his flashlight at it. It was a raccoon.
The raccoon said: “Good evening, doctor.”
The next thing Mullis knew, it was early morning and he was walking on a road uphill from his cabin. His clothes, which if he’d slept outdoors should have been wet with the night dew, were dry and clean. The lights in his cabin were still on, as he’d left them. He tried to go into his woods but, overwhelmed by a panic he didn’t understand, he turned and fled.
A year and a half or two years later Mullis, browsing in a bookstore in La Jolla, came upon Strieber’s Communion. “On the cover was a drawing that captured my attention. An oval-shaped head with large inky eyes staring straight ahead.” There was something vaguely, unsettlingly familiar about that face. Mullis bought the book, took it home, and immediately began reading. The phone rang. It was his adult daughter calling from Oregon.
Later she would tell him her own story of the mountain cabin. She’d gone there with her fiancé to spend the night, then vanished not long after they arrived. For three hours her fiancé, at his wit’s end, hunted for her and called her name. Afterward she had no notion where she’d been. The first words she spoke when Mullis picked up the phone: “Dad, there’s a book I want you to read. It’s called Communion.”
It’s an odd sort of book. More than once I’ve had the disconcerting experience of picking up my paperback copy, finding it filled with marginal notes in what has to be my handwriting, yet realizing I have little or no recollection of what the book contains. I’ve explained to myself why I’ve found it so unmemorable: plowing through the long string of bizarre, inexplicable events that Strieber claims to have befallen him, my mind scrabbles for some interpretative key, some pattern of meaning. Finding none, it retreats in frustration.
Yet in a sense this forgettability is not a flaw, but the essence of what Communion is about: the unremembered.
Easy to make fun of this book. Incoherencies and absurdities abound; Strieber’s experiences can be chalked up to temporal lobe epilepsy or brushed off with a wave of the hand and “Aah, he’s nuts!” But the monumental fact about Communion remains unshakable and undeniable: the extraordinary recognition response it’s evoked, not in a few people but in many tens of thousands.
To call them its “readers” would not be quite accurate. They didn’t have to read the book to recognize that, in some way beyond their comprehending, it was part of their own experience. Just seeing the cover—unlike the contents, impossible to forget—might summon that awareness from inside them.
If the abduction myth was born in 1964, with the hypnotic regressions of Barney and Betty Hill, the appearance of Communion in 1987 marks its watershed moment—the date when a compelling image, etched permanently (as far as we can tell thirty years later) into the public imagination, came to represent it. The year 1964 was the start of the myth’s history, with Barney Hill’s recovery and reenactment of his ancestral trauma. The year 1987 opened a window into its prehistory, carrying us back, as we’ll see in this and the next chapter, through antiquity into truly prehistoric times. Each is an aspect of the myth. It can’t be understood without calling on both.
Let’s start with Strieber’s book.
THE ENTITY AND THE OWL
At Communion’s heart is something that happened, or allegedly happened, to Whitley Strieber on the night of December 26, 1985. His bedroom in his cabin in upstate New York was invaded by a small being, or possibly more than one. Naked, paralyzed, his arms and legs extended, he felt himself carried out to “a small sort of depression in the woods,” which transformed itself into a “small, circular chamber” that seemed to rise above the treetops. There he was subjected to a range of weird, unsettling experiences, including an anal rape performed by a narrow “gray and scaly” object. He also seems to have encountered the female entity, uncanny and inhuman in her appearance, whom he would describe thirty years afterward as “the most essentially and powerfully feminine presence I have ever known.” It was her portrait that appeared on Communion’s cover.
Strieber remembered nothing of this when he awoke in the morning. He had only an implausible but compelling recollection of a barn owl staring at him through his bedroom window sometime during the night. The details of his experience came back to him about a week later, spontaneously, without the aid of hypnotic regression.
Hypnosis would come later. By 1985 it was practically de rigueur in cases of abduction or suspected abduction. These had crystallized into more or less recognizable, more or less predictable dramas that called for the participation of a therapist/hypnotist, as important a figure in the story as the abductee himself or herself. Benjamin Simon’s work with the Hills had provided the template. But Simon was a trained psychiatrist with special expertise in therapeutic hypnosis and no interest in UFOs; it was accident that assigned him his pivotal role in the birth of the tradition. Amateurs, eager UFOlogists, tended more and more to step into the role of therapist/hypnotist as time went on. They brought with them their own agendas, investigative rather than therapeutic.
Dr. Donald F. Klein, at any rate, was no amateur. He was professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, medical director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute. He was also a friend of Budd Hopkins—a New York City artist and UFO researcher, just beginning to emerge as the nation’s foremost authority on alien abductions, to whom Strieber turned for guidance. Klein hypnotized Strieber on at least four occasions in the spring of 1986, with Hopkins present and occasionally chiming in with his own questions. Later Klein would author a statement, printed as Appendix I in Communion, attesting that Strieber wasn’t psychotic, hallucinating, or afflicted with “an anxiety state, mood disorder, or personality disorder.”
The goal of the regressions was the usual one in cases of alien abduction: to elicit details, presumed to have been experienced but afterward repressed, that would put into an intelligible context the strange dreams, baffling memory fragments, or peculiar symptoms or aversions (to a particular stretch of highway, for example) that the abduction had left behind. The transcripts of the Klein-Strieber-Hopkins sessions, quoted in Communion, are cryptic and perplexing. If clarity was their aim, they failed in their purpose. But their jumbled quality creates a sense of emotional authenticity, and one thing at least is perfectly clear. Gross sexual abuse practically cries out to the reader from the printed page.
Strieber speaks of being sodomized by a “big, gray thing” with “a little cage” at its end, wielded by an unspecified “they.” Meanwhile the “woman” (or the “bug”—Strieber isn’t sure) demands, “Can you be harder?” which he remembers as referring to his penis. At the same time he’s told, “You are our chosen one.” “That was a long time ago,” he says. Klein asks how old he was. “Twelve,” he answers; and it’s hard to avoid thinking that he must have endured horrific abuse at human hands, quite possibly when he was twelve years old. The memories, emotionally overwhelming but distorted almost beyond recognition, took hallucinatory form. They came to him disguised as something contemporary—he was forty years old at the end of 1985—and with the perpetrators metamorphosed into fantastic beings of his imagination.20
As imaginations go, Strieber’s was extraordinarily powerful. Prior to the events that catapulted him to fame, he’d been a moderately successful writer of horror fiction: The Wolfen (1978), The Hunger (1981). The weird, grotesque, and ghastly had a pull on him, and on more than one occasion he could not tell what he remembered from what he imagined. Had he really been on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, for example, on the dreadful day (August 1, 1966) when Charles Whitman began shooting from the university tower, killing sixteen people? He had a clear memory of being there. He also knew that the memory made no sense, and he could never decide whether it was true or not.
In the days after December 26, after his experience but before he could remember anything about it except the owl’s face at the window, Strieber wrote a short story called “Pain.” The narrator, a middle-aged writer named Alex who’s doing research for a novel, hooks up with a pretty and deceptively wholesome-looking young prostitute named Janet O’Reilly. “I do pain,” she tells Alex, and “pain” for her isn’t just sadomasochism but something close to a philosophy of life, which she enacts on those who seek her out. Alex finds himself in her basement lair, locked in a telephone booth–like box, tortured by her with a blowtorch. “I was now at the threshold: she had taught me what is essentially needed to be well prepared for death.”
In the end Alex is released. After his ordeal, he finds sex with his wife better than it ever was. So is his career. (“My reviews are excellent, there’s talk of awards.”) Yet somewhere out in the cold, Janet waits. “One day, she will come for me . . . she will tear my heart from my chest like the priests once did to their anointed victims on the altars of the Aztecs.” Of course we know who she is: death incarnate. We can guess that for her author and creator, she and the “powerfully feminine presence” who engineered his torment on the night of December 26—and whose likeness on Communion’s cover propelled the book’s sales into the stratosphere—were one and the same.
Strieber never said that his “visitors,” as he called them, were extraterrestrials. That was a lazy assumption often made by his critics, usually in a context of disparagement. He preferred to look inward, comparing his obsidian-eyed female to the Jungian “anima,”21 to “someone I saw staring back at me from the depths of my unconscious.” Like the anima, like the unconscious—yet not the same. Strieber’s visitors, for all their internal presence, were something other than Strieber himself. They were a force, he wrote at the end of his preface, that “seeks the very depth of the soul; it seeks communion.”
Nor did Strieber claim ever to have seen a UFO. The “small circular chamber” that lifted itself above the trees was as close as he came to that.22 Yet the “visitors” plainly belong with the humanoid beings that have been part of UFO lore ever since there has been UFO lore. If we’re to understand them as something more than extensions of Strieber’s individual psyche—reenactments of his childhood traumas, perhaps—we need to fix them within the tradition of UFO occupants as these were envisioned or encountered during the forty preceding years.
No “little green men” among them. These belong to a dimension of the phenomenon that’s purely folkloric, untethered to the reported experiencing of it; no UFO witness has ever described seeing “little green men.” The occupants of the flying saucers said to have crashed in 1948 in the Southwestern deserts were indeed “little men,” ranging in height from three to three and a half feet. They weren’t green, however. Apart from their diminutive size, they looked just like us.
Frank Scully told the story in his 1950 bestseller Behind the Flying Saucers. Scientists had examined the craft and the corpses, according to Scully, and suspected that they came from the planet Venus. Two years later it came out that the “crash” was a hoax. Scully had been duped by a pair of con men laying the groundwork for an oil-detection scam. His tale slid into oblivion, only to return at the end of the 1970s in the vastly more powerful and authentic form that we know as “Roswell.”
Meanwhile other small humanoids, weirder in physiognomy and nastier in character, were making their appearances. On the night of August 21, 1955, small luminous beings, apparently from a flying saucer, swarmed around and over a Kentucky farmhouse. The creatures were three and a half feet tall and had large floppy ears, talons at the end of their fingers, and “large eyes, glowing yellow . . . set between the front and the side of the head.” The people in the farmhouse shot at the invaders, and when the bullets knocked them over but couldn’t kill or stop them, the people fled to the nearby town of Hopkinsville “in a state of near-hysteria.”
Another hoax? It seems not. Whatever the people experienced or thought they experienced, it scared them badly. They came back with the police, who found nothing but sensed “a weird feeling” pervading the area. “It was partly uneasiness, but not entirely,” the police chief later recalled. “Everyone had it. There were men there that I’d call brave men, men I’ve been in dangerous situations with. They felt it, too.”
Not all the small-humanoid reports of the 1950s were from the United States. They figured prominently in the French UFO wave of the autumn of 1954. A few particularly disturbing reports filtered in from Venezuela near the end of that year. Witnesses claimed to have been attacked, sometimes mauled, by hairy, repellent dwarflike creatures who seemed to have emerged from landed UFOs. On one occasion a young boy, out rabbit hunting with a friend, was set upon by four of these beings and dragged toward their flying saucer. His friend rescued him by smashing a shotgun on the small monster’s head.
The first successful kidnap was reported by a young Brazilian farmer named Antonio Villas-Boas. The date was October 16, 1957. Villas-Boas told of being taken forcibly aboard a landed UFO, then released more or less unharmed a few hours later. In the interval he was stripped naked and kept in a small room aboard the craft to await the arrival of a female alien as naked as himself. She was much shorter than Villas-Boas and slim, with “high and well-separated” breasts, large thighs, and “big blue eyes, rather longer than round, for they slanted outward, like those pencil-drawn girls made to look like Arabian princesses, that look as if they were slit.” (Also freckled arms—a touching, unexpected detail.) Disconcertingly, her pubic hair was “bright red, nearly the color of blood,” perhaps hinting at grisly mutilations enacted there.23
She had her way with Villas-Boas twice, making animal-like growls during the sex act but not otherwise speaking. She wouldn’t kiss him but she did bite him once, softly, on the chin. Before letting him go, she smiled at him and pointed to her belly and then to the sky, which he took as a promise she’d come back for him. To his relief—or possibly regret or possibly both—she never did.
As a real event transpiring in the physical world, the episode makes no sense. (If attractive, raunchy space females are at the UFOs’ controls, why do other occupant reports never mention them?) It makes excellent sense as the fantasy of a lonely farm boy. Yet everyone to whom Villas-Boas told his tale was impressed by the sincerity with which he appeared to believe it. In his later years he left the farm and opened a law practice, married, and had four children. He never recanted his story. Neither did he ever try to make any money from it.
Then the abductions began. In retrospect, the Villas-Boas case appears as a prelude to the phenomenon, a transitional stage from the old-fashioned “close encounters of the third kind”—as reports of UFO occupants were coming to be called24—to the new genre that emerged in the wake of Betty and Barney Hill. This was a “fourth kind” of close encounter, characterized by memories repressed and later retrieved, usually with a therapist/hypnotist on hand to aid in their recovery. It suited a culture in which the therapist’s office, once viewed with some derision (classically parodied by Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip, with her PSYCHIATRIC HELP—5¢ lemonade stand) was coming to be seen as a healing space where “ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”25
In his monumental two-volume UFO Abductions: The Measure of a Mystery, published in 1987 by the Fund for UFO Research, folklorist Thomas E. Bullard collected and analyzed 270 abduction reports involving 312 distinct incidents from the beginning of the phenomenon to the middle of 1985. He found that abducting aliens come in different shapes and sizes. They include giants and dwarfs, “humanoids” who couldn’t walk down a city street without creating a sensation as well as beings who look entirely human, with a few stranger, more grotesque entities mixed in. Amid the variety, there were patterns. The humanoids accounted for two-thirds of the abductors and tended toward the small end of the height scale, commonly measuring between four and five feet. Their heads were often disproportionately large, with a shape described as being like a “light bulb” or a “pear.”
“The large, compelling eyes of humanoids capture attention like no other bodily feature,” Bullard wrote—we know we’re in Communion territory. (The close-encounter reports of preabduction times laid no particular stress on the beings’ eyes, even when they were unusually large, as at the Kentucky farmhouse.) They’re “elongated,” “slanted,” “almond or walnut shaped,” or to use the term introduced in connection with the Hill case, “wraparound,” meaning that they extend from the face around to the sides of the head. There were exceptions. In the much-publicized abduction at Pascagoula, Mississippi, in October 1973, the UFO entities were wrinkled gray beings like mummies wrapped up in bandages, with no visible eyes at all. As if in compensation, a huge disembodied eye like a football floated around the two abductees, examining them.
Bullard’s data didn’t allow him to compare the number of cases in which the eyes had an iris and pupil, like those of terrestrial creatures, with those in which, as on the Communion cover, they were solid black. The most he could say was that “the supposition that the eyes are usually dark and uniform in coloration, or possessed of extensive pupils filling most or all of the eye, is reinforced by the poverty of alternatives.” He cited several reports that speak of them as unblinking. This point is important because it drives a wedge between the aliens of the abduction reports and those in Steven Spielberg’s box-office smash Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), sometimes proposed as a model that the abductees unwittingly followed.
Yes, the Close Encounters extraterrestrials have small spindly bodies topped by large oval heads. Yes, their eyes are larger than human eyes in proportion to their faces, though not by much. But they have an iris and a pupil, and they blink. So frequently and demonstratively do they blink that it’s hard to believe Spielberg wasn’t making a point with their blinking: See, however odd these beings may look, they aren’t so alien after all. Their eyes are windows to a soul much like yours.26
The eyes on the Communion cover, by contrast, are windows to nothing. Smooth and featureless, impenetrable as the masklike face in which they’re embedded, they stare but allow the object of their stare no clue to what’s behind them. “Wells of darkness,” Strieber calls them; “limitless” and “eternal,” “the huge staring eyes of the old gods.” They have no visible eyelids. How could they blink, much less close?
Yet on one occasion they did close. Strieber was sitting with Ted Jacobs, whom he and the ever-helpful Budd Hopkins had selected as the artist to render an image of his “visitor.” “I was sitting with my eyes closed, describing this face as carefully as I could. I could see it in amazing detail”—and it moved as he observed it. Like Morton Schatzman’s Ruth,27 though perhaps in lesser degree, he had a gift for creating apparitions.
Ted asked me many questions about the eyes. When he asked me how they looked closed, I got another shock: The image closed its eyes. I saw the huge, glassy structures recede and loosen, becoming wrinkled, and the lids come down and up at the same time, to close just below the middle of the eyeball.
If these closed eyes are tilted fully to the vertical, they’ll suggest another part of the anatomy: the vulva, “displaced upward” as the Freudians would have it. We’ve already noticed how Strieber’s encounters with the “visitors” are drenched in sex, and not very pleasurable sex. Now we find him describing eyes that sound like something more than eyes. We’ll see that he wasn’t the only one.
It’s a matter for debate whether Communion’s commercial success was the cause of what came afterward or a symptom of a process that would have unfolded even if there’d been no Communion. What’s not debatable is that the ten or twelve years that followed were the heyday of UFO abductions. A story circulated that a pair of huge-eyed aliens had been seen poring over Communion in a Lexington Avenue bookstore in Manhattan, and although the tale may have started out as an advertising gimmick, what it conveyed was real and true. With the appearance of the book and its cover, something new—or perhaps ancient and unremembered—had established its presence in American life.
The number of abductions multiplied fantastically. For the period up to the middle of 1985, Bullard had needed to comb through the literature of more than two decades to find 270 cases. By the early 1990s that number had leaped into the thousands, and more were being uncovered every day. There was reason, though not very good reason, to suspect the true figure might be in the millions.
Not that all those millions of people reported or even remembered having been abducted. Failure of memory, whether caused by the aliens in pursuit of their agenda or the mind protecting itself against reliving the trauma, was becoming a recognized part of the phenomenon.28 But a Roper poll of doubtful methodology, conducted in 1991 under the direction of three leading abduction researchers, found that 2 percent of the sample—which, extrapolated, came to 3.7 million Americans—had experienced a combination of odd events such as “missing time” or seeing a strange figure in the bedroom. Any of these, taken by itself, might be given a mundane explanation. Taken together, they pointed (allegedly) toward abduction.
The dark, oppressive sexuality that had always been part of the abduction tradition now proclaimed itself, lurid and unabashed. Both men and women—now about equally represented in the abductee population29—remembered forced sex with the aliens or with other abductees. They experienced strange, pleasureless orgasms. Men were compelled on the “examination” tables to yield their sperm to bizarre machines; women, their ova. The women might be impregnated, then the babies mysteriously taken from their wombs weeks or months afterward. They or other abductees would report seeing what must have been the vanished children aboard some spaceship: rows upon rows of fetuses floating in tanks of liquid, or wan, sickly boys and girls craving human touch.
The “large, compelling” alien eyes became more prominent than ever, their sexual overtones sometimes very blatant. One woman recalled having been abducted as a fifteen-year-old girl and made to have intercourse with an older man while an alien came and stared into her eyes. “He’s in my eyes. He’s flooding my eyes. He’s completely penetrating me, every bit of me is in my eyes.” Others remembered falling into the alien eyes, sometimes having orgasm as they did so. A male abductee spoke of connecting with the aliens by “going in” their eyes. He had a vision of himself seeing inside a “giant vaginal hairball” which “clarified into the hair of a goddess being born . . . flowing from the vaginal lips”; and the two images were linked by his childhood nightmare of a witch forcing him to look into her “huge eyes,” at which point “I was all hers and she would whisk me away.”
“Screen memories,” a century-old Freudian concept given a new twist by the abduction theorists, found their way into the discussion. For Freud, a screen memory was a memory of some fragmentary scene from childhood, accurate in its detail but meaningless or trivial. It was remembered not for itself, but for its association with something vitally important that had been repressed. For the UFOlogists, the screen memory was a mask for something other than itself, a hint allowed into consciousness of an experience too unearthly, too frightening to be remembered for what it really was. Often the abducting aliens would be disguised in memory as animals, behaving in ways no animal ought: the owl at Whitley Strieber’s window, the raccoon that said “Good evening, doctor” to Kary Mullis. It’s no accident that both owl and raccoon are creatures with prominent, staring eyes; no wonder that Mullis, looking into the “large inky eyes” that gazed from the cover of Communion, had the sense that he’d seen this before.
Seen it before: that might be the watchword of the abductions. Abductees often recalled under hypnosis that their abductors had been familiar to them since childhood. No matter how far back they were regressed, there would always be something before that—if not a full-dress abduction, then some encounter with alien beings or strange animals, which only took on meaning in the light of the adult abduction experience.
THE EXPOSITORS
A phenomenon so elusive and complex, yet so rich with possibility for penetrating to the heart of the UFO mystery, called for a new class of specialists—ones who were expert in UFOlogy, trained or self-taught in hypnotic technique. Three men emerged in the 1990s as leaders in the field.
Foremost among the three was Budd Hopkins, Whitley Strieber’s one-time friend and mentor. (The friendship soured after Communion ate into the sales of Hopkins’s latest book on abductions, which came out the same year.) Then there was David Jacobs, professor of history at Temple University in Philadelphia—no relation to Ted Jacobs, as far as I know. Jacobs had appeared on the UFO scene in 1975 with his scholarly and dispassionate The UFO Controversy in America, which had the distinction of being the first book on UFOs to be published by a university press. But he was not only a historian of the UFO idea but a believer in it, and in time his interest shifted to abductions. Not only were they real in his opinion, not only were they widespread, but they were portents of grave danger to the human race.
Hopkins held a dim view of the character and intentions of the abducting aliens; Jacobs went far beyond him into the grim and foreboding. Behind the abductions, Jacobs thought, lay a scheme of mass hybridization, its goal the takeover of the Earth and the replacement of humanity by a half-human, half-alien species. “We now know the alarming dimensions of the alien agenda and its goals,” he wrote at the end of his 1998 book, The Threat. “I could never have imagined it would turn out this way. I desperately wish it not to be true.”
The most extraordinary, fascinating, and tragic of the trio was John Mack, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the author of a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”). Handsome and charismatic, Mack had been raised in a secular Jewish household where the only reality was the material, and religious faith was antiquated mumbo-jumbo. He spent his life in quest of the spirituality of which he’d been starved. On the meaning and purpose of the abduction phenomenon, he differed sharply from Hopkins and Jacobs. His vision was optimistic. The abductors, severe and heartless as their methods might occasionally seem, were heralds of a new spiritual dawn that would rescue humanity from the blind science-worship that was hustling us to our doom.
The thread running through Mack’s endeavors was what Jung called the “uniting of opposites,” represented in the archetype of the mandala wheel. The opposition that most resonated for him was Jews versus Arabs. Of the “experiencers” profiled in his 1994 book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, his hands-down favorite was an Israeli woman who, under hypnosis, remembered a former life as a thirteenth-century Arab merchant renowned for his justice and benevolence.30 In Beirut in 1980, Mack had been one of the first of a string of American Jewish intellectuals to make peace overtures to the Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat, contacts that helped pave the way for the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians. Mack’s hero T. E. Lawrence was the godfather of Arab national liberation. He was also a pro-Zionist who poured his energy into bringing Zionist and Arab leaders together, dreaming of a Jewish-Arab confederation that would arise in the Middle East to “become a formidable element of world power.” No wonder Mack was captivated by him.
In 1990, when Hopkins led Mack into the ranks of the abduction researchers, Lawrence’s dream was long dead, bombed and machine-gunned into extinction. Mack would live just long enough to see the Oslo peace process toward which he’d labored disintegrate into blood and terror. But in the sky were the UFO mandalas, bearers of the magic that—in Schiller’s words, which Beethoven put to music in his Ninth Symphony—could “bind together/That which custom has strictly divided.”
Mack’s faith in that magic proved his undoing on at least one occasion. A would-be writer named Donna Bassett, for motives that remain unclear, came to him pretending to be an abductee. In hypnotic trance, or what Mack thought was hypnotic trance, she told him how during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 she’d been aboard the flying saucer to which President Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had also been abducted. Khrushchev was crying, and Bassett sat on his lap, put her arms around his neck, and told him everything would be OK. She’d zeroed in on Mack’s vulnerability; he swallowed the ridiculous story. It got him so excited “he leaned on the bed too heavily”—the sessions, according to Bassett, were held in a darkened bedroom in Mack’s home—“and it collapsed.”
Bassett proclaimed her coup, first to Time magazine, then at the 1994 conference of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) to which she and Mack were invited speakers. Conveniently, the CSICOP organizers had neglected to notify Mack that he and Bassett would be sharing a platform. “I faked it,” she crowed to her appreciative audience while Mack sat nearby, blindsided and humiliated. “Women,” she added, “have been doing it for centuries.”
THE OPPONENTS
For skeptics in the CSICOP mold, Mack’s folly was emblematic of the whole alien-abduction nonsense. All the rapidly accumulating data, as far as they were concerned, was a great pile of nothing. The consistencies among the abduction narratives, which advocates pointed to as evidence of their reality, had a simple if distressing explanation. They were creations of the so-called researchers, who’d brought their preconceived scenarios with them into the hypnotic sessions. Using leading questions, they coaxed out of their subjects the tales they expected to hear, convincing them in the process that those tales must be real. As for the abductees, they were troubled men and women who needed treatment by bona fide therapists, not exploitation by shamanic witch doctors with an eye on the next book contract.
How was it, Philip Klass wondered rhetorically, that the people hypnotized by Leo Sprinkle31 remembered being abducted by aliens who were gentle and kindly like Sprinkle himself, while those hypnotized by Hopkins seemed to have fallen into the clutches of a harsher, crueler sort of ET? Wasn’t it obvious that their “memories” were shaped by whoever had them on his couch? In the process, they were being done perhaps irreversible psychological harm. Klass dedicated his book UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game (1989) to “those who will needlessly bear mental scars for the rest of their lives because of the foolish fantasies of a few.”
The skeptics had a point. Even with the best of intentions, the hypnotists couldn’t have avoided conveying hints of the answers they were looking for; the people they’d put into trance would do their best to comply. The techniques of leading might be extremely subtle, and presumably unconscious. Hopkins, for example, seems to have been in the habit of using the words “I bet” to introduce suggestions to which he wanted a negative response. His abductees were thus cued to create a response opposite to the one proposed, and Hopkins could point to their apparent resistance as proof they were immune to his influence.
But the skeptics went too far. They underestimated the desire of the hypnotizers to learn from their “experiencers,” which put a brake on any impulse to control or influence them. They likewise underestimated the genuine resistance of the hypnotized, their ability to insist on what they thought they remembered even if it didn’t make sense within the abduction scenario.
“Underground!” one of Hopkins’ subjects cried out in her trance, as described by a more or less unbiased observer (the writer C. D. B. Bryan) whom Hopkins had invited to be present. “We’re underground! Oh, I don’t like being down here! This is terrible! . . . It’s cold as hell down here!”
“How’d you get there, underground?” Hopkins asked, evidently puzzled. If you’re abducted into a UFO, surely you ought to be going in the other direction.
“I don’t know! I don’t know. We’re down underground,” was the only answer the woman could give.
The friend who’d shared this woman’s experience spoke similarly, also in a Hopkins-induced trance, of tumbling down into the UFO—not being caught up into it, as we might expect. The descent seems to be part of a pattern, larger than the conventional scenario and perhaps transcending it in time. Whitley Strieber, we recall, was conveyed by his captors into a “small sort of depression in the woods.” And in the early centuries of the Common Era, Jewish mystics called yordei merkavah, “descenders to the chariot,” struggled to reexperience the chariot vision of Ezekiel chapter 1 by going down to it and not up. More on these ancient mystics in the next chapter.
For now, my point is that some genuine experience seems to have asserted itself in the hypnotic regressions in the teeth of, rather than in obedience to, Hopkins’s expectations. He and his fellow researchers were bringing a real phenomenon to light, and if it wasn’t what they thought it was, that didn’t make it any less real. The psychiatrist James S. Gordon, a sympathetic skeptic who’d taken the trouble to get to know several abductees and attend their hypnotic sessions, came away with precisely that impression: that “clearly something had happened to these people, something powerful, strange, and transformative.”
Gordon was unusual. The skeptics normally preferred to criticize from a distance. Perhaps they intuited that if they allowed themselves to witness any of the hypnotic sessions—hearing the abductees’ voices, watching their gestures and facial expressions and the contortions of their bodies—they might come face to face with something they preferred not to see. They kept themselves away.
For a time it seemed that Carl Sagan, Cornell astrophysicist and media superstar, might be another exception. Encountering Hopkins by accident in a Boston TV station where they’d been interviewed separately, Sagan told him: “Budd, the next really good abduction case you have, let me know, and I’ll look into it with you.” Hopkins was elated. But when Sagan’s chance came the following year, he pulled back.
In the spring of 1988, Hopkins received a letter from a Cornell student who suspected he’d been abducted. Hopkins wrote Sagan: he would fly to Ithaca at Sagan’s convenience so the two of them could investigate the case together. If hypnotic regression seemed warranted, it could be done by Hopkins or by a psychologist of Sagan’s choice. If Sagan wanted to speak with the boy in advance, Hopkins had no objection; if he was worried about possible fallout, Hopkins promised confidentiality. Sagan waited nearly a month before replying. Then he sent a six-line note: the evidence in the case was “anecdotal,” therefore of no interest. And that was that.
DECLINE AND FALL
By the end of the 1990s, abductions were losing steam. A second Roper poll, conducted in 1998, yielded far fewer encouraging results than its 1991 predecessor. The number of those who said yes to having had the peculiar experiences that were supposed to be abduction indicators had fallen by one-third to one-half. It wasn’t that people were no longer being abducted; they plainly were. But if these polls could be trusted, average Americans were no longer as ready as they’d been seven years earlier to ascribe significance to things like a few hours having passed without their having any recollection of them (“missing time”). As a cultural phenomenon, alien abduction was in decline.
Part of the problem was that the research had hit a dead end. Hypnotic regressions had stopped yielding new information on who these beings were, what they wanted from us, why they seemed so endlessly fascinated by our reproductive organs. What we were discovering was what we’d already known, and when all was said and done we didn’t know much more about the UFOs than we’d known before. External confirmation of what the abductees had experienced so intensely remained elusive. The “implants” that their captors had supposedly left in their bodies—the ET equivalents of the tracking devices biologists used with animals, some supposed—turned out, whenever they could be retrieved and examined, to be ordinary substances.
But something deeper was at work. Abduction research was not the era’s only expedition back into the mists of the unremembered. The 1980s and early ’90s were the age of the therapeutic quest to bring repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse into the light.
“Ye shall know the truth” of what befell you, of what you were compelled to endure and then to forget, and that truth shall bring you healing. That could have been Budd Hopkins’s mission statement. It was also the mission of Ellen Bass and Laura Davis’s bestselling self-help book The Courage to Heal (1988): “You may have no conscious memory of being abused. You may have forgotten large chunks of your childhood.” Yet “the knowledge that you were abused starts with a tiny feeling, an intuition. It’s important to trust that inner voice and work from there. . . . If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were.”
I can imagine Hopkins nodding his approval. More important, I can imagine millions of Americans—instructed on the workings of memory by writers like Bass and Davis and the talk shows and newspaper columns parroting them—being prepared to give Hopkins and his colleagues the benefit of the doubt. These UFO tales are fantastic, yes, but also plausible. Don’t we know that people recover long-forgotten memories of childhood abuse? So maybe these too . . . ?
The recovered-memory advocates had an advantage over the abduction researchers. The events they supposed to be lurking in the dark of the unconscious were events that did happen in the everyday world. Even the bitterest of their critics had to concede that sexual abuse of children was a reality, even if it hadn’t taken place in every instance. But this advantage, and the power it gave them, made them targets of attack. In contrast, UFO aliens were beyond the reach of human justice. Rail at their misdeeds all you wanted; no one was harmed. But memories of sexual exploitation, once retrieved or imagined, tore families apart and sent people to prison. There was bound to be a backlash.
The backlash, when it came in the early to mid-1990s, was ferocious, as excessive and undiscriminating as the recovered-memory crusaders had been at their worst. It was also triumphant. Within a very few years the accepted wisdom had shifted 180 degrees. Repressed memories were “junk science”; genuine trauma, far from being forced out of consciousness, was remembered all too well. The substantial evidence that memories of sexual abuse sometimes were repressed, to return many years later with or without therapeutic involvement, was brushed off or ignored.32 Most of this evidence was “anecdotal”; it had to be. Trauma didn’t lend itself to laboratory experiment.
Bessel van der Kolk, professor of psychiatry at the Boston University School of Medicine and past president of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, tells of being interviewed about traumatic memory by a London periodical. He patiently led his interviewer through the research that had been done in England for over a century on traumatic memory loss; he “suggested they look at an article published in The Lancet in 1944, which described the aftermath of the rescue of the entire British army from the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940. More than 10 percent of the soldiers who were studied had suffered from major memory loss after the evacuation.” The result? “The following week the magazine told its readers that there was no evidence whatsoever that people sometimes lose some or all memory for traumatic events.”
For UFO-abduction researchers, the belief in repressed memories of sexual abuse was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it lent respectability to their claims and methods. On the other hand, it suggested a wholly terrestrial alternative to their conclusions. What if the outrages on the abductees’ bodies that the hypnotic regressions were turning up were indeed something real, but perpetrated not by aliens but by trusted adults on helpless children? The UFOlogists’ appeal to “screen memories” could be flipped on its head. The otherworldly spaceship scenario was not what was being “screened” by memory’s disguises, but was itself the “screen”—for events that were mundane, yet too awful to be remembered in their sickening reality.
I’ve already suggested something of the sort with regard to Whitley Strieber. With characteristic self-awareness, Strieber has suggested it with regard to himself. What if something happened to him at age twelve, he mused thirty years after his life-changing 1985 encounter, “part of a pattern so shocking that I cannot face it directly even now and have transferred it into this strange memory in order to protect myself from what my unconscious mind regards as an unbearable truth? . . . A brutal rape by a beloved parent might become a brutal alien abduction, as the mind seizes on the most believable and acceptable alternative in order to avoid facing what it cannot bear to see.”
By the 1990s, the apparent link between “the prevalence of childhood sexual abuse, and the sexually violating nature of many of the alien abduction stories,” as one psychologist put it, had become hard to overlook. “One possible explanation is that the abduction/contact narratives are screen memories for early childhood trauma such as sexual abuse.” The UFOlogists protested: “neither researchers nor therapists,” David Jacobs wrote in 1992, “have found a single abduction case that is unequivocally generated from sexual or physical abuse.” But what does it take for such a connection to be “unequivocal”?
In November 1992, Hopkins did a hypnotic regression on the woman who, in a subsequent session, would remember tumbling down into a UFO. This woman had long carried a memory of a fishing trip she’d taken with her father when she was twelve, from which she’d returned unwilling to speak to him and with blood in her underpants. She suspected he’d raped her, but couldn’t recall the actual rape. Under hypnosis, however, she remembered it well. It wasn’t her father who’d perpetrated it, but the aliens. Her father had stood by, watching helplessly.
“I feel hatred for him!” the woman cried out, still in trance. Why hadn’t he intervened to protect her? Hopkins stepped in to explain: there was nothing the man could have done; the aliens had “paralyzed” him; instead of hating her father, she should hate the Beings who had abused her so cruelly. By the next morning, however, her doubts had returned. Maybe her father had been the rapist after all.
If this won’t qualify as “unequivocal,” what will?
The new millennium began. The Twin Towers fell. The notion of recovered memories, which had created such a stir at the end of the old century, was remembered mostly with shame, as an occasion for the harassment and prosecution of innocent people; the Salem witch trials were invoked in comparison. In the wake of that idea’s discrediting, alien abductions faded as well. How could they have thrived in an atmosphere turned so hostile to the unremembered?
John Mack, visiting London in 2004 for a conference on his beloved Lawrence, was killed by a drunken driver. (His family pleaded for clemency for the driver, saying, no doubt correctly, that that was what John would have wanted.) Budd Hopkins died in 2011. David Jacobs soldiered on. But his “threat” from outer space seemed nebulous and distant compared to more immediate menaces: medieval religious war freshly reignited, a planet’s climate spinning out of control.
Abductions were still reported and remembered, but as a cultural phenomenon, they’d had their day. From the vantage point of nearly twenty years, we can look back on them and ask, What were they? What did they mean?
COMMUNION AND PREDIONICA
At the end of 2013, I received an email from my old friend Professor Marc Bregman, then teaching at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNC-G). “I have a vague recollection,” he wrote, “of seeing via you a drawing of what someone thought an ‘alien’ face looked like—very big eyes, etc. Did you or I or we mention that this image is remarkably similar to some of the prehistoric (Neolithic) ‘masks’ thought to be of ancient gods?”
The alien face Marc remembered was from the cover of Communion. In March 2011 I’d given a PowerPoint lecture on UFOs at UNC-G, and one of the pictures I’d shown was Ted Jacobs’s rendering of Strieber’s “visitor.” Writing in Communion, Strieber had likened that countenance to the “huge staring eyes of the old gods.” But here was a god not just old but truly prehistoric: the Predionica mask—actually, a sculpted ceramic head wearing a mask, about seven inches high and six inches wide—found in the 1950s at Predionica, near Pristina, now the capital of Kosovo in the Balkans. Marc had come upon a photograph of it in Marija Gimbutas’s The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe. More than two and a half years after seeing the Communion cover projected onto a screen, he experienced a flash of recognition.
One more case of the “recognition response,” this time in reverse. (First Marc saw the face on the cover, then, long afterward, something else that evoked the feeling he’d seen it before.) I could agree: the resemblance was remarkable. True, the nose of the Predionica sculpture was more prominent than on the Communion painting. The being depicted by the mask had hair, represented with lines etched into the clay, and seemingly ears as well; the Communion entity had neither. But as skeptical UFOlogist Martin Kottmeyer put it in an email to me, “The nature of the eyes and face lines generates a strong emotional resonance that overrides one’s awareness of the disparities.”
Marc wasn’t the first to notice the resemblance. Kottmeyer directed me toward Michael Hesemann’s UFOs: The Secret History (1998), which printed a drawing based on the Communion cover side by side with the Predionica mask, with the remark that Strieber’s alien “has a very ancient double.” Hesemann didn’t say what the significance of that “double” might be. But it’s clear enough what he was implying: that aliens like the one Strieber experienced had visited the Kosovo region thousands of years ago.
This is improbable, to put it very mildly. The Predionica mask is securely embedded within the art of the prehistoric Vinča culture of the central Balkans, the culmination of an evolutionary sequence of mask sculptures from pre-Vinča times to the late Vinča period (4500–3500 BCE). It’s not an interloper, as it would be if the sculptor were depicting something he and his people had never seen before.
That leaves three possible explanations:
1. The resemblance is coincidental, without any significance.
2. Ted Jacobs had seen the Predionica mask or a photograph of it sometime before painting the “visitor” at Strieber’s direction and was influenced by it as he translated Strieber’s words into a visual image.
3. Or the face he painted and the face fashioned in clay by a forgotten but stunningly talented artist in prehistoric Kosovo were archetypal, hardwired into the human brain, occurring spontaneously and independently 6,000 years ago and now.
The second option seems the most economical and satisfying. I know of no evidence that Jacobs ever saw the mask, but there’s no reason he couldn’t have. A photo of the mask was published in 1959; the first edition of Gimbutas’s book came out in 1974, the second in 1982. Jacobs was not only an accomplished artist but also a highly regarded teacher, first in New York City and later (from 1987 onward) at his own art school in France. He must have had a rich knowledge of art history and a curiosity that might well set him to poring over books like Gimbutas’s. It’s true that the mask’s light brown color, one of the most striking features linking it with the Communion cover, doesn’t come across in Gimbutas’s photos, black and white in both editions. But perhaps color reproductions, on picture postcards, say, were also available to him?
FIGURE 6. The Predionica mask. From Marija Gimbutas, The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe: 7000 to 3500 BC (University of California Press, 1974).
I wouldn’t rule out the first possibility either. Random coincidences, some of them fantastic, are part of our daily lives. The human imagination, through the generations, must have created thousands of facial images of uncanny and otherworldly beings. If we could comb through them all, we’d surely find at least a few “doubles” among them.33
Marc’s recognition experience, though, makes me hesitate to adopt this explanation. I’ve known him for more than forty years; he’s never shown any interest in UFOs except as a by-product of our friendship. Yet the sight of the Predionica mask triggered a recollection, admittedly “vague,” of a similar face he’d seen once, more than two and a half years earlier. This suggests a genuine and significant link between the two.
Perhaps the problem belongs in a wider context. The massively documented recognition response to the Communion cover after its publication, with which this chapter began, points to something in the human psyche that responds to the Strieber/Jacobs face as a thing already seen, already known. This points us toward the third option, whether we choose to use the Jungian word archetype for it or go in search of some more appropriate terminology.
Indeed, it’s possible that the second and third options combined will yield the best explanation of all. Jacobs’s memory, conscious or unconscious, of the Predionica mask came to him as he listened to Strieber describe the “visitors,” particularly the one who was “the most essentially and powerfully feminine presence” Strieber had ever known. He felt intuitively, without ever having seen that “visitor,” that this was the right model to use in depicting her. Why? Because he knew that when the human mind gazes into darkness, this is the face it’s apt to see staring back.
It’s a female face, both for Strieber and for the nameless genius of ancient Kosovo. (Gimbutas infers the gender from the arrangement of its hair.) It shades into the animal, as do the aliens of the abduction tradition. “Was it the sculptor’s intention to portray on the mask an animal or half-animal, half-human creature?” Gimbutas asks. “Though we cannot know for certain, we feel that the creature is endowed with an awe-inspiring power, the very essence of the significance of the mask.”
Strieber must have felt the same when Jacobs showed him the painting. So did many thousands of bookstore browsers at the beginning of 1987. “That book started to sell the minute it appeared on the bookshelves,” its publisher recalled a year or so later; “no reviews, no appearances, nothing. And we had word from the bookstores that Communion, with this strange picture on the cover, was selling.” The italics are mine; the point is made even without them. It was that “strange,” “awe-inspiring” picture—archaic and numinous, with the “huge staring eyes of the old gods”—that sold the book.
And that will lead us back into the tangled prehistory of alien abduction.
Notes
20. As we’ll see, Strieber himself was keenly aware of this possibility.
21. In Jungian psychology, an “anima” is the female “self” that every man has within him, just as every woman has a male “animus.” To bring the anima (or animus) into conscious awareness, to integrate it with one’s maleness (or femaleness), is a key aim of Jungian psychotherapy.
22. And perhaps his hazy memory, which he dates to age two, of “a terrifying round object hanging in some forgotten babyhood sky, and seeing a crowd of big, gray monkeys coming up across the hillside.”
23. In 1967, Coral and Jim Lorenzen published the first full English translation of Villas-Boas’s testimony in their book Flying Saucer Occupants. Arbitrarily, and without any indication of what they’d done, they shifted the blood-red hair from the alien’s crotch to her armpits—proof that something about this detail made them squeamish. This is an example of what the Freudians call “displacement upward.” We’ll see other examples before long.
24. The nomenclature was devised by J. Allen Hynek, professor of astronomy at Northwestern University and for many years the Air Force’s scientific advisor on UFOs, and set forth in his classic, The UFO Experience (1972). “Close encounters of the first kind” are where the UFO “is seen at close range but there is no interaction with the environment,” while in the “second kind” it does something like cause a car engine to stall or leaves some trace on the ground or vegetation. Hynek’s taxonomy inspired the title and much of the content of the 1977 Steven Spielberg blockbuster Close Encounters of the Third Kind and earned Hynek a six-second cameo at the movie’s climax.
25. A perception powerfully conveyed and reinforced in the popular 1980 film Ordinary People. I remember a Dear Abby column, whose date I can’t recall but which must have appeared sometime in the 1970s, quoting John 8:32 to persuade a reluctant reader to go into therapy.
26. A message conveyed in a similar way in Spielberg’s 1982 E.T., when the boy and the extraterrestrial have flinch reactions to each other at precisely the same moment.
27. See “On Seeing What Isn’t There” in chapter 2.
28. Parodied in a 1992 sequence of the comic strip Guy Stuff: “This TV show made it all clear, Sam—I was kidnapped by space aliens. . . . 9 out of 10 aimless lives are caused by post-alien abduction trauma!! And I’ve got the number one symptom!” “Which is . . . ,” says Sam, who gets the reply: “No memory of being kidnapped by space aliens.”
29. In the pre-1985 cases collected by Bullard, men had outnumbered women by about two to one.
30. In the hypnotic regression of UFO abductees, there normally proves to be “something before that.” When Mack had led his subjects back to earliest childhood and still found something before that, he had no choice but to extend his investigation into their past lives.
31. A psychology professor at the University of Wyoming, one of the first of the UFOlogist/hypnotists to follow in Benjamin Simon’s footsteps.
32. In its November 29, 1993, issue, U.S. News & World Report published a compelling eight-page article by Miriam Horn, entitled “Memories Lost and Found.” It told the story of a Brown University political science professor named Ross Cheit, who in the spring of 1992 sank into a prolonged and inexplicable depression after his sister phoned him with the “happy news” that his nephew was going to sing in a boys’ chorus, just as Cheit had in his early teen years. Cheit felt his marriage to be at risk and went into therapy. On vacation that summer, he awoke “with the baffling sense that a man he had not seen or thought of in 25 years was powerfully present in the room.” It was the administrator of the boys’ chorus summer camp, and over the course of the day, memories returned to Cheit of what the man had done to him: he had sat on Cheit’s bed night after night as he was going to sleep, stroked his chest and stomach while telling him to relax, and “slowly [brought] his hand into my pants.” Over the coming months Cheit tracked down others from the summer camp who had similar stories. He tracked down the administrator, kept him on the phone with a tape recorder while the man admitted what he’d done. He sued the man and won; he sued the boys’ chorus and got an apology. His story does not stand alone. In his blog Recovered Memory Project: Case Archive, Commentary, and Scholarly Resources (blogs.brown.edu/recoveredmemory), Cheit currently maintains an archive of 110 corroborated cases of recovered memories of abuse.
33. A proposition testable in some measure through an update to the Google Arts & Culture app, introduced in December 2017. Users can find their “fine art doppelgänger” by sending in a selfie, which Google will match to its vast collection of paintings and sculpture from the world’s museums. Most of these doppelgängers, to judge from the examples posted to the web, have not looked much like the people they’re supposed to twin.
