T
hus far I have considered UFO close-encounter reports in which (1) unusual flying objects were seen at close range, (2) these objects were said to leave tangible traces of various kinds, and (3) humanoid beings were seen in connection with the objects. The humanoids are a stumbling block for many people, including some who seem to take intelligently maneuvering, unknown objects in stride. Thus J. Allen Hynek said, “It would be helpful . . . if we could demonstrate that Close Encounters of the Third Kind differ systematically from the other five UFO categories. Then we could, with some comfort, dismiss them.”
1
He went on to say, however, that he knew of no criteria by which these cases could be separated from the general body of UFO reports.
The cases discussed in this chapter may seem even more repugnant to our sensibilities than the humanoid reports we have seen thus far. These are cases in which strange-looking beings were said to intervene forcefully in the lives of human subjects. People have reported being captured, taken on board UFOs, and subjected to humiliating physical examinations. These cases are called close encounters of the fourth kind or UFO abductions.
In examining this data, my suggestion is to suspend both belief and disbelief, and simply try to get an overview of the available evidence. All of the cases that I will mention are based on human testimony. As such, they do not provide proof. In this field, we are forced to make use of inductive reasoning in which understanding of a general phenomenon comes from a study of patterns appearing in large numbers of examples. I suggest that the UFO abduction reports will begin to make sense when they are seen in the light of broader categories of recent and ancient reported phenomena that I will introduce in the course of this book.
I should make a comment here on methodology. I will often point out certain features that appear frequently in close-encounter cases. Many of these features are of interest because they also show up in Vedic accounts of encounters with humanlike beings. Others are of interest because they seem to aid in the interpretation of UFO cases, and still others simply strike me as puzzling. In discussing these features, I will often refer to certain well-publicized cases in the UFO literature that exhibit them. These are not the only cases in which these features appear, and other illustrations could also be used. My aim is not to pick out these particular cases as uniquely significant.
I will begin the discussion of UFO abductions by giving a classical example. This case was studied by Walter N. Webb, a longtime UFO investigator and director of the planetarium at the Boston Museum of Science. The following summary of the case is based on a report that he presented in 1988.
2
The encounter was reported to have taken place on August 7, 1968, on Lake Champlain, north of Burlington, Vermont. The two primary witnesses, “Michael” and “Janet,” were working at Buff Ledge Camp, a private summer camp for girls located on the lake shore. Michael, who was 16, was employed to ferry water-skiers from the dock and to maintain the waterfront equipment. Janet, a 19-year-old Smith student from New Hampshire, was a water-skiing instructor. Webb used pseudonyms to protect the identities of all the witnesses in the case.
One of the key features of this case is that Michael and Janet went their separate ways immediately after their UFO experience and did not communicate with each other until the case was investigated by Webb ten years later. When this investigation began, the first person to testify was Michael. Here is a summary of his version of what happened that evening, as remembered without the use of hypnosis:
Michael and Janet were relaxing on the end of the dock after an afternoon of sunbathing. A bright, starlike light suddenly swooped down in an arc and became visible as a cigar-shaped object. Then it emitted three small white “lights” from its body and flew quickly away. The three lights executed zigzags, falling-leaf descents, spirals, and other remarkable maneuvers, and as they came closer, Michael could see
that they were domed discs. After about five minutes, two of the discs flew away, while the third began approaching them across the lake. He could see that the disc had a band of colored, plasmalike light rotating around its edge and that it produced complex tones synchronized with the pulsation of this light. It seemed to be 40–50 feet across and “as big as a small house.”
The UFO then shot straight into the sky, dropped, entered the lake, and then emerged. As it came within 60 feet of the dock, Michael could see two entities seated under its transparent dome. The beings appeared to be very short with large heads, big oval eyes, double nasal openings, and small mouths. They were wearing grayish or silvery skintight uniforms. At this point, Janet seemed to be in a trancelike state. Telepathically, one of the beings assured Michael that he would not be hurt. They were from another planet and had made trips to the Earth in the past. They had returned after the first nuclear explosions.
As the UFO moved directly over their heads, Michael tried unsuccessfully to touch its bottom to confirm its solidity. A bright beam of light then turned on, and Michael next remembered holding onto Janet as he fell down with her onto the dock. He recalled losing consciousness while under the beam but also felt as though he was floating up. He remembered alien voices, machinelike sounds, and “soft lights in a dark place.”
When they became conscious again, the UFO was hovering over them, and it was now completely dark out. He could hear the sounds of other campers returning from a swim meet. “Susan” and “Barbara,” two camp girls, came running toward the bluff overlooking the lake, and at that point the UFO departed. The two girls then conducted Janet to her cabin. After the incident, both witnesses experienced a time/ memory lapse and extreme fatigue, and quickly went to sleep. However, before falling asleep, Michael went to the male staff quarters, where he met 20-year-old “Patrick,” who, he said, had apparently observed part of the close encounter. Patrick encouraged Michael to call the nearby Plattsburgh Air Force Base. He recalled the Air Force spokesperson saying that the base had received several reports of UFOs that evening but that military aircraft were not responsible for them.
Michael woke up once that evening (about one hour after falling asleep), at which time he made his only attempt to contact Janet about their experience. However, she was sound asleep, and her cabin was off limits to males. Later, Michael quickly became disillusioned by the
disbelief shown to his story by family and friends, and he maintained that he did not try to discuss it further with Janet while they were attending the camp. He and Janet went their separate ways after the camp closed a few weeks later.
Ten years later, in October of 1978, Michael became inspired to understand more about what actually happened that night, and he was advised by UFO researchers at CUFOS to contact Walter Webb. Webb agreed to investigate the case, and he initially located Janet, who was now married and living in the Southeast. She remembered being on the dock with Michael and seeing the moving lights in the sky, followed by the close approach of a “big light.” She said that she and her companion got down on the dock when it seemed that the object would hit them, but after that her mind was blank. She remembered wanting very badly to speak with Michael about something the day after the experience, but she was at a loss to think of what she wanted to talk about, and the conversation never did take place.
Webb ascertained that Michael and Janet had not met since leaving the camp ten years before. He arranged to have them separately hypnotized by two professional clinical hypnotists, Harold Edelstein and Claire Hayward, in an effort to recover their lost memories of the incident. Between September 1979 and April 1980, Michael underwent five hypnotic interviews totaling five hours, and between February and December of 1980, Janet underwent three interviews totaling six hours.
The use of two hypnotists is significant. Webb’s strategy was to obtain two independent accounts of the witnesses’ experiences. This was rendered possible by the fortunate circumstance that Michael and Janet had apparently not communicated since the UFO incident, and thus they had not had any opportunity to influence one another’s memory of what took place. By having them separately hypnotized by different hypnotists, the chances that the story of one witness could directly or indirectly influence the story of the other were minimized.
Here is a summary of what emerged in Michael’s memory during the hypnosis sessions: While in the beam of light, he heard a whining noise and felt as though “filled with light.” He seemed to be floating upwards. He saw streams of colored lights and seemed to be flying through space. Next, he remembered standing next to one of the alien beings on an upper deck inside the UFO. As he looked out through the transparent dome, he saw the earth, the stars, the moon, and a huge
cigar-shaped vessel. Below him, Janet was lying on a table and being examined by two other aliens. On one of the walls, a console filled with various screens seemed to display data from the examination. The beings had large, oval heads, greenish skintight clothing, long, thin limbs, and webbed, three-fingered hands. Their eyes were large and oval with large black pupils, their mouths seemed to consist of a small slit, and their noses seemed to consist simply of two holes. Their skin was greenish-blue.
One being acted as Michael’s telepathic interpreter during the abduction. He was surprised at how alert Michael had been throughout the experience and warned him that this would make things difficult for him afterwards. Michael remembered feeling close to this being.
On the lower deck, he watched as examiners scraped skin from Janet’s body, drew blood from her arm with a syringe, and “sucked” fluids from her body through two openings, using a machine that retracted into the ceiling. When Michael questioned his guide about the latter procedure, he was told that they were “spawning consciousness.” When it was his turn to be examined, the beings moved him toward a table near Janet’s, at which time he went unconscious. Just before this, though, he saw that their ship was approaching the big cigar-shaped vessel outside.
Upon awakening, Michael had the impression that their ship was now inside the big ship. He and his guide floated through the bottom of the craft into a tube of light and were pulled through a hangarlike room in the larger ship by this light beam. They passed
through
the far wall of this room, went up an elevatorlike device, and eventually ended up in a room with many other similar-looking entities. Here a helmetlike device was placed on Michael’s head, and the entities applauded and emitted audible sounds to each other as they looked up at a bubble-shaped screen. Then he was taken to another room, where he saw a strange scene with a purple sky, grass, trees, fountains, and ordinary but dazed-looking humans. Janet was crying in fright near him. Then, he fell asleep.
His next memory was of falling through space toward a globe faceted with TV-like screens. The picture on the screens was one of Michael and Janet on the floor of the dock with the UFO hovering above. After passing through one screen, he became conscious on the dock. At this point, Michael received a telepathic message from his guide, saying that they cared for him, that there would be much he wouldn’t understand about the encounter, and that Janet wouldn’t remember
anything. Another voice assured him that Janet was okay, and he finally heard a voice say, “Goodbye Michael.”
Before undergoing hypnosis, Janet could remember very little of the experience consciously, but under hypnosis she recalled events that corroborated Michael’s account. Webb emphasized that during the period of her hypnotic sessions she had no knowledge of Michael’s abduction story.
The following is a summary of her experience that night, as recalled under hypnosis. She remembered the original light dropping down from the sky. From it, she thought, other lights may have emerged. After displaying various aerial movements in the sky, one of the lights passed in front of them and then disappeared. The object was oval-shaped, encircled by lights, and made a high-pitched sound. It was “larger than a car or house,” and it looked “like a spaceship.” She also saw in the object alien figures that looked out at them. These had unusual heads and wore one-piece uniforms.
She recalled that the object stopped and hovered over them at the exact spot mentioned by Michael and that a bright beam of light came from underneath it. Next, she remembered lying on a table under a transparent dome, surrounded by “people.” She, like Michael, could not recall how the transfer into the UFO was made. She recalled that a being was in charge of her, assuring her in her mind that she was going to be all right, and at this time she felt very relaxed and calm.
She recalled that she was examined by various beings and was told not to look or move while they performed their tests. On taking a peek at them, she was horrified by what she saw, and she recalled that her guide was scolded by the other beings for allowing this to happen. With great reluctance, she described the appearance of the beings. Her description was similar to Michael’s, but she thought that their skin was a whitish, unhealthy-looking color and that they wore smocklike garments. Her recollection of the procedures used in her examination differed somewhat from Michael’s, but she agreed with him in describing the instrumented monitoring panel. She sensed Michael’s presence on another table at some point and remembered seeing him twice on other occasions within the UFO.
Then, she remembered waking up on the dock next to Michael, who appeared scared and fascinated. She recalled not understanding why he was so enthralled over “a few lights.” But while in trance she remembered seeing a dark disc hovering above them and vaguely recalled
observing it go away. She recalled climbing the steps up the bluff with Michael and seeing Susan and Barbara at the top. At this point she felt very tired and lightheaded, and immediately went to bed in the staff cabin.
Webb said that Janet verified 70 percent of Michael’s descriptions of what occurred outside on the dock and 68 percent of his claimed onboard descriptions. Questioning of other people present at Buff Ledge in the summer of 1968 led Webb to locate Barbara and Susan. Independently, both women vaguely remembered seeing a dark, silent, circular object with lights around its edge swiftly leaving the waterfront. However, neither of them could recall seeing Michael or Janet in the area at the time.
Webb also contacted Michael’s friend Patrick, who did not confirm Michael’s claim that he had watched part of the close encounter. Patrick could only recall that Michael claimed to see a UFO that summer. Patrick said that after this he and others on the beach observed strange lights maneuvering in the sky at long range, and they later saw several Air Force jets flying across the lake. In response to this, Michael denied that any jets were involved and contended that his friend’s memory was confused. Webb also noted that Patrick’s testimony was questionable, since he had been undergoing psychiatric treatment for many years.
Webb tried to confirm that Plattsburgh Air Force Base had received calls about UFOs that evening. However, all telephone logs had been destroyed after a year, and all UFO sighting reports (kept at SAC Headquarters) were destroyed after 6 months.
Webb also got in touch with “Elaine,” who was 25 years old and directing a play at the camp early in August of 1968. She recalled that someone came to the playhouse shouting something about lights in the sky. All the kids went running out toward a clearing in the bluff, and she recalled seeing a silvery glow moving over the trees as she followed at a slower pace. This may have occurred at the time of Michael’s and Janet’s encounter, but the date could not be accurately pinned down.
Various psychological tests were administered to both Michael and Janet, including the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) and the PSE (Psychological Stress Evaluator). Both subjects proved to be normal, although Michael’s tests indicated some intellectual rebellion toward traditional ideas and parental/societal rules. On
the basis of these tests and background character checks, Webb firmly believes that both witnesses were credible, honest people who did not create a hoax and did not share some type of hallucination. Michael graduated in 1978 with a B.A. in religion and went on to pursue a modeling and acting career in New York. Janet graduated in 1971 with honors in psychology, worked as an administrator at an Ivy League school, and then married a physician and became a mother of two children.
Over the last 30 years, so-called UFO abduction experiences such as the one at Buff Ledge have been repeatedly reported. Although abduction cases have been uncovered that date back to the 1940s, UFO abductions of the modern pattern have become widely recognized only in recent years.
The earliest of these experiences to be well-publicized was the case of Betty and Barney Hill, who reported having a close encounter with a UFO on September 19, 1961, while driving home from a vacation trip along a lonely New Hampshire road. The Hills initially recalled seeing a strange craft maneuvering in the night sky with abrupt changes of direction. As it closed in on their car, they looked at it with binoculars, and Barney saw humanoid figures in the lighted windows of the craft. At this point the Hills drove off quickly. Apart from hearing some strange beeping sounds, they recalled no further incidents as they returned to their home.
After the encounter, Betty Hill was troubled by weird dreams of being taken aboard the UFO by aliens, and Barney began to suffer from ulcers and other symptoms of stress. Between December 14, 1963, and June 27, 1964, they underwent hypnotherapy with psychiatrist Benjamin Simon, and there emerged a detailed story of alien abduction similar to that of Michael and Janet. This case was also investigated by Walter Webb, and it was written up in the book
The Interrupted Journey,
by John Fuller.
3
Under hypnosis, Barney Hill described his captors in terms that would later become almost hackneyed. They had grayish, almost metallic-looking skin, no hair, large, slanted eyes that seemed to wrap around the sides of the head, two slits for nostrils, and a mouth that was a horizontal line. He said that they would speak to one another by making a “mumumumming sound,” whereas their leader communicated
with him mentally.
4
He also said that the leader exerted long-range mental control over him: “It was as if I knew the leader was elsewhere, but his effectiveness was there with me.”
5
In the years since 1964, many UFO abduction accounts have come to light. To get an idea of how often these experiences occur, I note that the British UFO researcher Jenny Randles knew of 32 continental European abduction accounts in 1988.
6
In 1981, Budd Hopkins, an American researcher who has become well known for his studies of UFO abductions, said he had personally investigated 19 abduction cases since beginning his UFO research in 1976.
7
Hopkins went on to say that a total of about 500 abduction cases had been studied as of 1981. He based this estimate on 300 cases from HUMCAT, a catalogue of humanoid reports compiled by Ted Bloecher and David Webb, plus cases investigated by Dr. James Harder, an engineer, and Dr. Leo Sprinkle, a psychologist.
8
Jacques Vallee gave a comparable figure in 1990, saying, “At this writing over 600 abductees have been interrogated by UFO researchers, sometimes assisted by clinical psychologists.”
9
Although the story of Michael and Janet seems quite strange, it has a number of features that come up again and again. Here is a list of some of these features, more or less in order as they appear in the story:
1.
The UFO is often (but not always) described as a domed disc with various flashing or pulsating lights.
2.
Unusual high-pitched sounds are often heard, especially in the beginning of the experience.
3.
Witnesses sometimes see alien beings looking out of windows in their craft. The beings often seem to be exerting some kind of hypnotic influence on the people watching them.
4.
These beings are often small, with big heads and eyes, and vestigial-looking mouths, noses, and ears. The term “Grays” is often applied to this racial type. Sometimes, however, UFO entities are said to have handsome human features, and in some cases humans and “Gray” entities seem to be working together in UFOs.
5.
The entities often communicate with human witnesses telepathically. However, they are often said to communicate with one another by incomprehensible sounds.
6.
They often say that they have visited this earth in the distant past and have returned because of our atomic testing.
7.
They generally assure the witnesses that they will not be harmed.
8.
There is typically a loss of memory of parts of the experience and a consequent time gap. This has become well known as the phenomenon of “missing time.”
9.
The entry of the witness into the UFO often involves a beam of light, but the precise mode of entry is not remembered.
10.
Sometimes the witnesses report seeing the earth or other planets from outer space while on board the UFO.
11.
Sometimes the UFO is taken into a larger “mothership.”
12.
These experiences often involve great fear. In this case, Janet experienced some fear, but it was not as extreme as in many cases.
13.
The witnesses generally say that at a certain point they felt very calm, due to feelings of reassurance emanating from their captors.
14.
The witness is typically subjected to a “medical” examination while lying on a table. This examination involves elaborate machines, and the witness’s body is often probed, poked, scraped, and injected with fluids.
15.
As we saw in this case, with the reference to “spawning consciousness,” the examination often has something to do with reproduction, and ova or sperm samples may be taken.
16.
The witnesses often see panels with many TV-like screens.
17.
After the examination, there is often a sort of tour of the ship. The witness is taken to various rooms and sees various incomprehensible things.
18.
Witnesses often are floated through the air on beams of light, and they sometimes report floating
through
walls.
19.
Sometimes convocations of alien entities in large rooms are described.
20.
Sometimes the witnesses are shown strange, surreal landscapes.
21.
There are often experiences that seem hallucinatory or visionary. In this case Michael’s fall into the globe faceted with TV screens is an example. At the same time, many aspects of these experiences seem to involve normal sense perception in strange circumstances.
22.
The witnesses often report extreme exhaustion after the experience.
In addition to these features, there are many small details that come up repeatedly in abduction accounts. For example, although witnesses frequently don’t remember how they entered a UFO (point 9), there are cases where the witness remembered entering through a door, and there are many references to doors within UFOs. Almost invariably, the witnesses say that these doors vanish seamlessly when they are closed.
An example would be the abduction story recounted in
The Andreasson Affair,
by Raymond Fowler. In this story, a New England housewife named Betty Andreasson was visited in her home in 1967 by beings of the “Gray” type, floated by them
through
the closed door of her house (point 18), and then taken into a UFO parked in her yard. She entered the UFO and went from room to room within it by passing through doors in the normal way, and she commented that these doors could not be seen when they were closed.
10
Another example is the story of the Brazilian farmer Villas Boas, who reported seeing seamless doorways in a UFO in 1957 (see
page 138
).
In 1950, Frank Scully published a highly controversial book,
Behind the Flying Saucers,
about the recovery of a crashed flying disc near Aztec, New Mexico, in the late 1940s. In the book he mentioned that the door leading into the disc could not be seen when it was closed.
11
Many UFO researchers have rejected Scully’s story as a hoax, but it has been vigorously defended by William Steinman.
12
Without taking sides on this issue, I note that Steinman introduced some additional testimony regarding seamless doorways. He maintained that Baron Nicholas von Poppen, an expatriate Estonian and expert photographer, was called by military authorities to the Aztec crash site to photograph the downed UFO. Von Poppen is said to have described what he saw to George C. Tyler in 1949. In his description, he said, “The door was so finely machined that when closed it left no indication that it was there.”
13
What is happening here? Did someone make up the seamless door story in 1949, or perhaps borrow it from some science fiction story? Did Betty Andreasson, a fundamentalist Christian housewife, obtain the idea from UFO literature and weave it into her own tale, perhaps unconsciously? Was this also done by the many other witnesses who mention seamless doorways, including the supposedly ignorant Brazilian farmer, Villas Boas? Or were independent witnesses actually observing seamless doors in UFOs?
Here is another example involving Scully’s book. The Scully crashed disc supposedly had an outer ring of metal that revolved around a nonrotating, central cabin. As Scully put it in an article in
Variety
in 1949, “Its center remained at rest, but it had an outer edge that revolved at terrific speed.”
14
This idea also came up in the testimony of Betty Hill regarding her UFO encounter. Under hypnosis, she said, “But there was this kind of rim that went around the craft. And I don’t know why, but I had the idea that this rim was movable, that it would spin around the perimeter, maybe. Like a huge gyroscope of some kind.”
15
Some students of the UFO phenomenon have argued that the content of UFO close encounter experiences has been taken from various forms of fiction, including science fiction movies. According to this idea, fiction writers first invented certain themes. These themes were spread widely by the media, and they later emerged in UFO abduction stories told by people who are psychologically susceptible to accept fantasy as reality. These arguments were recently reviewed by the psychologist Kenneth Ring, who concluded that fiction has unquestionably influenced UFO abduction narratives. Ring, however, felt that “There is more to abduction stories than their science fiction parentage,”
16
and he suggested that these stories may involve an objectively real “imaginal realm” which is somehow the cumulative product of imaginative thought.
17
The repeated appearance of certain details in UFO narratives could be attributed to fictional ideas transmitted from one person to another by ordinary means of communication. However, in many cases these details are so obscure that it is hard to see how the UFO experiencer could have known of them. A striking example is the illustration in
The Andreasson Affair
showing an apparatus that Betty Andreasson supposedly saw on the underside of a parked UFO during one of her abduction experiences.
18
This apparatus consists of three glass
balls held from above by supports reminiscent of the legs of an old-fashioned piano stool.
Researcher William Moore noted that in “Scully’s Scrapbook” in
Variety
magazine of November 23, 1949, Scully described the landing gear of flying saucers as consisting of three “wheels like the glass balls once common to the legs of piano stools.”
19
The piano stool theme is certainly very obscure, and it is hard to see how Betty Andreasson could have come across it unless she was researching the writings of Frank Scully prior to reporting her abduction memories. Ring’s imaginal realm idea can be seen as a way in which the transmission from Scully to Andreasson could take place by nonordinary means of communication. The same could be said of the hypothesis that actual alien beings make use of human cultural materials when staging UFO encounters.
The 1955 movie
This Island Earth
gives another example of possible fictional antecedents for a UFO incident. In the movie, a classical disk-shaped UFO is seen lifting a small airplane by means of a green beam of light that emerges from a hole in the bottom of the UFO. There are shots of the hero and heroine in the cockpit of the airplane staring with astonishment as the cockpit is bathed in green light and the plane is lifted up. This movie scene is strongly reminiscent of the Mansfield helicopter incident in 1973, in which a UFO reportedly bathed the cockpit of an Army Reserve helicopter with a beam of green light and lifted the helicopter 1,800 feet, even though its controls were set for a dive (see
pages 354–55
).
20
One could suppose that the UFO encounter of 1973 was simply a story inspired by the 1955 movie and perhaps triggered in the crewmen’s minds by some natural phenomenon such as a meteor. But the four crew members consciously remembered the incident and their story was confirmed by seven ground witnesses.
21
It does seem strange that a scene from an old movie could exert such a strong irrational effect on the minds of so many people. Is an imaginal realm involved here? Another possible explanation is that the 1955 movie may have incorporated material based on real UFO incidents. This, of course, would put the lifting of objects by UFO light beams back to 1955 or earlier.
In many cases, symptoms of physical injury or disease are connected with UFO encounters, including abductions. For example, Barney Hill
apparently developed ulcers as a result of anxiety caused by his experience. He also developed warts around his groin that were perhaps caused by an instrument he remembered being placed over his genitals while on board the UFO.
22
This experience and a “pregnancy test” administered to his wife, Betty, by the UFO entities are also illustrations of point 15.
According to another report, in November 1975, a young man experienced a bizarre encounter in the Catskill Forest Preserve involving an oval, semiluminous craft, an attack by robotlike figures, and a period of missing time. About a week after this event, he began to develop a series of straight raised welts running from his navel toward his groin in a converging pattern.
23
In the Villas Boas case, the witness was exhausted, nauseated, and unable to eat or sleep normally after his abduction experience. Subsequently, he developed an unusual chronic skin disease.
24
He also experienced severe headaches and burning and watering of the eyes.
Irritation of the eyes is apparently common in UFO close-encounter cases, since UFOs often employ dazzling beams of light. A number of examples of CE3 cases with eye injuries are cited in an article, “The Medical Evidence in UFO Cases,” by John Schuessler.
25
According to Budd Hopkins, abduction witnesses frequently report eye irritation caused by brilliant lights seen within UFOs.
26
At the same time, there are reports of remarkable healings connected with UFO close encounters. Some of these appear to be of a mystical nature (see
pages 164–65
). Others are attributed to medical interventions that seem to make use of recognizable high technology.
An example of the latter is a case reported by the psychologist Edith Fiore. One of her patients said that he was born with a malformed blood vessel in his brain that was likely to burst. Physicians had told his mother that he could only be expected to live for a few years and that he would be retarded. However, he is now in his late 40s and is normal. It turns out that under hypnosis by Fiore, he remembered “ETs doing a treatment on him which he saw on a screen, in which he saw some blood vessels which appeared to be on the outside of his brain.”
27
Fiore said that she has run across some 200 CE4 reports in the course of hypnotic regressions performed for purposes of psychotherapy. Of these, some fifty percent involved cures of life-threatening illnesses, such as cancers, or painful conditions, such as migraines.
28
Of course, one can suggest that people imagine these ET cures because
they need to explain natural cures occurring for unknown reasons. But Western culture provides familiar mystical explanations of unusual cures (such as the grace of Jesus). So why should someone try to explain mysterious cures by invoking even more mysterious ETs?
The evidence that many UFO encounters tend to be accompanied by physical effects—injurious or beneficial—gives support to the hypothesis that these encounters are physically real. This is especially true in cases where the physical effect can be connected with recollections of specific events occurring within a UFO.
At the same time, however, it is known that states of mind can produce remarkable effects on the body. A well-known example would be the stigmata that have appeared on the bodies of certain Catholic monks and nuns who were meditating on the crucifixion of Christ. Some stigmata have been said to closely resemble actual nail wounds, but whether their cause was “natural” or “supernatural,” they were clearly not produced by nailing. Could it be that UFO abductions take place on a mental level and involve unusual effects of mind over matter?
The issue of whether or not UFO abductions are physically real turns out to be very complex. Comparisons with Vedic material can help shed light on this issue, and I will discuss it further in
Chapter 10
after some of this material has been introduced. For the moment, I would suggest that some UFO close encounters seem to involve gross physical phenomena and others seem to involve the action of subtle energies connected with the mind.
The UFO literature suggests that the humanoid beings involved in abductions are, with some notable exceptions, remarkably uniform in appearance and behavior. For example, the British researcher Jenny Randles pointed out that, on the basis of her data, two basic types of abducting entities can be identified.
Her first group, which she calls the “small, ugly beings,” correspond to the “Gray” type that I have already mentioned. According to her, “These are between 3½ and five feet tall, have large, pear-shaped heads, big, round eyes and slit noses and mouths; they are usually hairless and often wear greenish uniforms; skin is sometimes said to be gray or wrinkled.”
29
She pointed out that there is a staggering lack of variety in the descriptions of these beings.
Her second category is “the tall, thin ones.” These are typically six feet tall or more, and they are often said to have Scandinavian features, including pale skin and blond hair. Their eyes are generally said to be oriental or catlike and are often blue or pink. They are often said to be strangely beautiful, and their appearance is more humanlike than that of the “Gray” beings.
The division between short and tall humanoids also shows up statistically in the table of 164 humanoid reports published by the UFO investigators Coral and Jim Lorenzen in 1976.
30
As I pointed out in
Chapter 2
(
page 69
), the Lorenzens mentioned small and large humanoids, and (oddly enough) the size of the reported humanoids seems to correlate with the size of the accompanying UFO.
The Lorenzens also mentioned four other types of entities, which they spoke of as large and small robots and large and small monsters (recall the Cisco Grove robot story,
pages 93–94
). In their table, the large and small humanoids predominate, as we can see by counting the number of reports featuring entities in the different categories. (In their table there is only one case featuring two different entity types, but such cases are fairly common in the UFO literature.)
| Type |
Number |
| Large humanoid |
60 |
| Small humanoid |
81 |
| Large monster |
3 |
| Small monster |
4 |
| Large robot |
1 |
| Small robot |
3 |
The Lorenzens also listed various bodily features of the humanoids. It turns out that among large humanoids, eight had notably large eyes, and ten were said to have normal eyes, a roughly equal division. But among small humanoids, eighteen were reported to have large eyes, and two were said to have small eyes. This is consistent with the standard description of the “Gray” entities as having large eyes.
In recent years a number of nonhumanoid physical types have been reported. One is the so-called Reptilians, who are described as erect, lizard-like creatures with catlike eyes.
31
These beings are typically said to sexually attack their human victims, and they are described as
grotesque and repulsive. Another, even stranger, type is said to resemble an insect such as a grasshopper or preying mantis and is sometimes said to play a supervisory role in some abduction experiences. Reports of these beings seem to be significantly rarer than humanoid reports, although this may be an artifact of biased reporting.
Do the consistent anatomical patterns in the humanoid beings reflect the bodily structure of actual living organisms, or do they reflect the anatomy of some kind of hallucination? Although there may be other possible explanations for the humanoids, let us consider these two for the moment.
One could develop the hallucination idea as follows: For some reason, abduction stories featuring certain types of beings were first created by human imagination. These beings are humanlike because it is natural for people to imagine human forms. The stories are spread by normal means of communication. When people report vivid and shocking encounters with these beings, this may be due to a psychological process that incorporates the stories they have heard into a seemingly real experience. This could be called the folklore theory.
Randles cites a study of 200 abduction cases by a student of folklore named Thomas E. Bullard.
32
Bullard argued that if UFO stories spread as a kind of folklore, then they should show features expected of folklore. For example, the stories should show a degree of variation typical of products of human imagination. They should vary from one geographical region to another, and they should show the influence of highly publicized cases.
Randles summed up Bullard’s conclusions as follows: Although American cases show markedly fewer instances of the tall beings than non-American cases, abduction cases from different parts of the world nonetheless tend to be highly uniform. Well-publicized cases seem to have no detectable impact on abduction reports. Also, abduction stories are highly stereotyped, and they show a much smaller range of variation than is found, for example, in science fiction. It seems that abduction stories don’t follow the patterns expected of folklore.
33
It might be argued, however, that abduction experiences tend to be highly uniform because of a psychological process that picks out certain ideas and intensifies them. However, abduction reports have become prominent since the early 1960s. Why have these particular stories become invested with psychological potency in recent years and not before?
Another drawback of this idea is that many of the uniform features that show up repeatedly in abduction accounts do not seem to be psychologically significant. For example, what would be the psychological significance of seamless doors in UFOs, or slitlike mouths in short humanoids? Why should people speak of bright lights inside the UFOs, and why should they imagine that entities would communicate telepathically? A good psychological theory of these features would relate them convincingly to known psychological principles.
One can still argue that certain key features of abduction reports are psychologically determined. The others are arbitrary creations of the imagination that are, so to speak, carried along for the ride by the psychologically compelling story elements. But if these elements carry no great significance for people, then why don’t they vary greatly from one account to another on the basis of individual whimsy?
If the reported humanoids are not products of psychology and folklore, perhaps they are real living beings. If this is so, then the commonly reported features in abduction stories might be due to the fact that these beings have certain physical and cultural traits. Some of them might really have slit-mouths, and seamless doors might be part of their technology.
This hypothesis is not proven by the close-encounter reports, but as far as I am aware, it remains a definite possibility. However, it immediately gives rise to the question of where and how the humanoids originate.
For the moment, let us restrict ourselves to the idea that the humanoids have physical bodies that arose by processes of neo-Darwinian evolution. Some scientists, such as Carl Sagan, have argued that intelligent life may have evolved on other planets within our galaxy. Others have argued that if the dinosaurs hadn’t died out, evolution might have generated a large-brained, bipedal dinosaur that would look similar to a human being and have comparable intelligence. On the basis of these considerations, it has been suggested that humanoids might have evolved on another planet.
34
However, the prominent evolutionist Theodosius Dobzhansky rejected this idea, and he explained why by discussing a thought experiment. He said, “Suppose that by some utterly unlikely chance there
is another planet somewhere on which there arose animals and vertebrates and mammals like those which lived on earth during the Eocene period. Must manlike creatures develop also on this imaginary planet?”
35
Dobzhansky estimated that changes in some 50,000 genes would be required for the development of modern humans from Eocene ancestors of some 55 million years ago.
36
These changes include mutations and other kinds of genetic alterations. Since each of these changes is simply one out of a large number of alternatives, the probability would be virtually zero that the changes would occur and be selected in the same sequence as they were in human evolutionary history. Small deviations in the sequence of changes could throw the evolution of prehuman creatures off the track to humankind. Deviations in the evolution of other plants and animals in the prehuman environment could also derail human evolution, and so could deviations of the planet’s climate from the climatic history of the earth.
Dobzhansky therefore felt that the chances were vanishingly small that anything humanlike would evolve on his hypothetical planet. To get something that we would regard as similar to humanity, evolution would have to keep on an earthlike track for most of the 55 million years since the Eocene. Otherwise, the tree-climbing Eocene prehumans probably would have either gone extinct or evolved into some unfamiliar mammalian form.
The famous evolutionist George Gaylord Simpson came to similar conclusions. He defined a humanoid in very broad terms as “a natural, living organism with intelligence comparable to man’s in quantity and quality, hence with the possibility of rational communication with us.”
37
He argued that the evolution of such a being is contingent on a vast number of special circumstances and that it is extremely unlikely for equivalent circumstances to arise on another planet. These circumstances include the chemical conditions required for the production of living cells, the environmental conditions prevailing during millions of years of evolution on earth, and the many mutations required to produce complex organisms. He concluded, “I therefore think it extremely unlikely that anything enough like us for real communication of thought exists anywhere in our accessible universe.”
38
If this understanding of evolution is correct, then the existence of UFO humanoids as real, humanlike beings poses a challenge to current evolutionary theory. We can argue that evolution was bound to
produce something, and humankind happens to be one of the things it produced on the earth. Thus the existence of humans on the earth presents no problem. But for evolution to produce something close to humankind independently on two different planets in this galaxy is highly unlikely.
Of course, one could argue that UFO humanoids only superficially appear to resemble humans. One hypothesis is that the humanoids people see are simply simulations of the human form that are being manipulated by an unknown agency. The agency is perhaps using these simulations to communicate with us. Or perhaps the motives of the agency are completely incomprehensible to us. The drawback of this simulation theory is that it can be applied to any data whatsoever, and it simply leaves us with a mystery. I suggest that it should be left as a last resort.
Another hypothesis is that UFO humanoids actually have certain humanlike features, but on a fundamental level they are totally different from us. This may well be partly true, but some of the extremely humanlike traits that these beings are reported to have make me doubtful that it is wholly true.
For example, the humanoids are often reported to wear clothing.
39
They are frequently said to exhibit human emotions such as friendliness, anger, humor, and fear. They communicate verbally with human beings by telepathy, and they are sometimes said to communicate with one another using what seems to be a spoken language.
40
With the exception of some of the reported Reptilians and Insectoids, the physical form of UFO entities is remarkably humanlike. This can be contrasted with the many weird alien forms portrayed in science fiction movies.
Are the humanoids just crude simulations of humans, or are they fundamentally similar to humans? The latter alternative is certainly a possible hypothesis. This hypothesis has the virtue of simplicity, and it makes a strong, specific statement. But it also asserts the existence of the sort of being that Simpson thought would not evolve anywhere within the accessible universe.
Let me sum up my observations in this section and the preceding one. The folklore-plus-psychology hypothesis can explain why UFO entities should seem very humanlike in many ways (we naturally imagine humans), but it cannot readily explain the consistently appearing strange features of these entities. The extraterrestrial-evolution hypothesis can explain these strange features as the physical and technological
traits of an alien race (or races). However, this theory is not compatible with the many highly humanlike features of the reported entities.
What we are left with at this point is that the humanoids might be beings similar to ourselves but with a nonevolutionary origin. Or they might be illusions or outward manifestations of something incomprehensible. However, we are just beginning at this point. There are other considerations that may help shed light on the nature of the humanoids, and I will introduce these gradually in the course of this book. The final hypothesis that I shall present depends on these considerations.
Having said this, I now turn to one of the most disturbing aspects of the UFO abduction phenomenon. In case after case, there are reports of sexual interactions between human abductees and UFO entities. These seem to fall into two categories: (1) experiments with human reproduction involving medical manipulations and (2) direct sexual relationships between abductees and their captors. I will begin by briefly reviewing what has been written about these matters, and then make some observations.
The earliest known example falling in category (2) is the abduction story of the Brazilian farmer Antonio Villas Boas. This incident was investigated by Dr. Olavo T. Fontes, M.D., a few weeks after it occurred in October of 1957, and an English translation of Fontes’s write-up was later published by a British UFO researcher, Gordon Creighton.
41
I will give a brief summary based on Creighton’s publication.
When the reported incidents occurred, Villas Boas was 23 years old and lived with his family on a farm near the town of Francisco de Sales, in the state of Minas Gerais. He was intelligent but poorly educated and was engaged in work on the family farm.
On the 5th and 14th of October, Villas Boas observed strange lights that maneuvered around the farm at night and at one point mysteriously vanished. The main episode, however, occurred on the night of the 15th. He was alone in the fields, plowing with his tractor at 1 a.m. to avoid the blazing heat of the sun. He saw a red star that came rapidly toward him, growing in size until it appeared as a luminous egg-shaped object. The object halted about 50 meters above his tractor and illuminated the area as though it were broad daylight. It paused for a couple
of minutes, then slowly landed. It was rounded in shape with small purplish lights and a large red headlight. It had three supporting legs and a glowing, rotating cupola on the top.
Villas Boas tried to escape in the tractor, but the engine died and the lights went out. He tried to run, but a short individual in strange clothing grabbed him by the arm. He pushed the attacker down but was grabbed by three others and dragged, struggling, toward the machine.
After he was dragged into the machine, the outer door closed, and its outline became invisible. His five captors conversed with sounds resembling the barking of dogs. They stripped him naked, washed him with some kind of liquid, and took him into another room. Again, when the door closed, it was no longer visible, even in outline. An apparatus was used to take two blood samples, and he was left alone in the room. Then nauseating smoke was blown into the room through tubes, and he vomited.
The men wore tight-fitting gray garments that appeared to be uniforms, and helmets that hid their facial features. Above their eyes, which seemed light in color, the helmets were twice the size of a normal head. The trousers were form-fitting and were joined without a break to the shoes, which were bulky and curved up in the front.
After some time, a naked, good-looking woman came into the room and seduced him. She seemed to be a normal human being in every respect, although her face was somewhat unusual, with nearly white blonde hair, large slanted eyes, very high cheekbones, thin lips, and a narrow pointed chin. After the woman left, his clothes were returned. After dressing and waiting for some time (and trying unsuccessfully to snatch an object as a proof of his experience), he was given a short tour around the outside of the craft and then dismissed.
At this point, the whirling cupola began to spin faster and change from greenish to red; the craft lifted into the air, and then shot off, like a bullet, to the south. Villas Boas estimated that he was in the craft for 4 hours and 15 minutes. In response to questioning, he said that he had not been under any telepathic influence during the experience.
As I mentioned in the previous section, Villas Boas suffered from a number of ailments after this episode. These were noted by Dr. Fontes, who also observed that Boas had two marks on the chin corresponding to the places where he said blood samples were extracted. Fontes also observed that Boas seemed psychologically normal, with good intelligence, and with no tendency toward mysticism.
Since Fontes thought the story obviously couldn’t be true, he believed that Boas must be a liar of great imagination, with the ability to remember an imaginary story in great detail and recount it without slipping up. Fontes suppressed the story until sending it to Gordon Creighton in April of 1966. The story had first been published in English by
Flying Saucer Review
in January 1965, on the basis of an interview with Boas by Dr. Walter Buhler of Rio de Janeiro in 1962.
In this story, there are many details that come up repeatedly in UFO close-encounter cases. These include (1) lights of unknown source that move around and then abruptly vanish, (2) brilliant beams of light projected by a glowing UFO, (3) the stopping of the tractor engine, (4) doors that are invisible when closed, (5) helmeted form-fitting uniforms with shoes attached to the pant legs, and (6) heads with large slanted eyes, thin lips, and pointed chins. It would seem that if Villas Boas made up the story, then he was not merely imaginative but also well-versed in UFO lore.
The Villas Boas story is a bit unusual in that Boas was not paralyzed or mentally controlled during the experience. However, there have been cases in which men have reported being forced, while in a state of paralysis, to engage in sexual relations with strange-looking alien women. These experiences were particularly distressing and revolting to the men forced to undergo them, and the women involved resembled crosses between humans and the “Gray” beings. Three cases of this type are described in detail in Budd Hopkins’s 1987 book,
Intruders
.
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It is curious that the being described by Villas Boas back in 1957 also seemed to share human and “Gray” features.
Budd Hopkins is also well known for his discussion of cases in which a woman is somehow impregnated and the embryo is then removed by UFO entities. These cases sometimes involve “presentation” scenes, in which the woman is later shown a half-human, half-alien child that seems to be her offspring. An example would be Hopkins’s case of “Kathie Davis.”
43
It has been argued that these stories are created by Hopkins in the minds of his subjects through the process of hypnosis. For example, Ann Strieber, the wife of abductee Whitley Strieber, pointed out that some 2,500 people wrote letters in response to Strieber’s book
Communion,
describing their own UFO experiences. About these letters, she said:
We have literally no letters that mention the Budd Hopkins’s taking-the-fetus scenario. None of them, except for the ones that have been either heavily influenced by his book,
Intruders,
or—in most cases— hypnotized by him. There are only a few [of these] letters, but it just struck me that the ones who have been hypnotized by him—and it’s only a few [of the] people who wrote—followed the scenario exactly. It’s like they’re religious converts.
44
Curiously, Whitley Strieber himself accepted the taking-the-fetus scenario. He said to the journalist Ed Conroy, “I think that the visitors literally are us, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these beings that I’ve seen that look like half-visitor and half-human aren’t the progeny—they are what happens when one of the pure neonates is somehow crossed with a fully mature human being, and the fetus is then removed. . . .”
45
Strieber’s abduction experience, as reported in
Communion,
also involved strange sexual interactions with his “visitors.”
One should certainly be cautious about accepting testimony obtained through hypnosis (see
pages 147–53
). However, it should also be recognized that the taking-the-fetus scenario has been described by investigators other than Hopkins. David Jacobs, an associate professor of history at Temple University, has written a book presenting several abduction cases in which this scenario appears.
46
The scenario also emerges in testimony given under hypnosis by Betty Andreasson and reported in Raymond Fowler’s book
Watchers
.
47
Likewise, Jenny Randles in England spoke of a “young woman who claims repeated and at least partially conscious memories of being taken into a room by small beings who have then impregnated her. Later the foetus has been removed.”
48
In this case, hypnosis was not employed.
Randles cited about seven additional cases with strong sexual or gynecological features. In one, a “Mrs. Verona” recalled without hypnosis being raped in a 1973 UFO encounter in England. In this case the “entities” looked human, but they were equipped with a domed, disc-shaped craft and a metallic, robotlike “retrieval device,” which they used to capture their victim.
49
In another case, witnesses in Venezuela in 1965 were told by seven-foot-tall, blond-haired, large-eyed beings that they were “studying the possibility of interbreeding with you to create a new species.”
50
In a case in 1978, a Brazilian man described under hypnosis a seduction episode very similar to that of Villas Boas.
51
In another Brazilian case,
in 1979, the well-known concert pianist Luli Oswald was given a complete gynecological examination by “Gray” beings who said they came from “a small galaxy near Neptune.”
52
And in a case investigated by Dr. Hans Holzer in New York State in 1968, small hairless entities used a long needle to take ova samples from a woman and told her she had been chosen to give them a baby.
53
It would seem that many UFO abductions do have a strong sexual component. This feature is consistent with the hypothesis that the abduction experiences are expressions of human psychology. However, the question remains why people should choose UFO stories, with their many strange but recurring details, as a medium for sexual fantasy.
Ostensibly, the medical examinations in UFO abductions look like scientific studies of humans conducted by visitors from another planet. Indeed, it is often reported that UFO entities tell people this. For example, William Herrmann of South Carolina reported being abducted in 1978 by humanoids who said they came from the constellation Reticulum and have been abducting humans for research purposes.
54
But messages from UFO entities tend to be untrustworthy or self-contradictory, as we can see from the story of beings coming from a “small galaxy near Neptune.”
Jacques Vallee has argued that physical examinations performed in UFOs could not be strictly scientific in nature, since the human body can be examined and tissue samples can be taken without resorting to the traumatic methods experienced by abductees.
55
This can be done by human doctors, and it certainly should be child’s play for high-tech ufonauts. The sexual component of UFO abductions also suggests that they involve something other than objective scientific research. Genetic experiments could be carried out using sperm and ova collected without any awareness on the part of the individual, and direct sexual activity with abductees is certainly not required.
If UFO humanoids are actual beings that evolved on another planet, the reasoning of Dobzhansky and Simpson indicates that it is highly unlikely that they would be genetically compatible with humans or any other earthly life forms. One reason for this is that the earthly genetic code table could be set up in many ways, and if life were to arise independently somewhere else, then it is highly improbable that it would make use of the same code table. Even if the beings outwardly resembled us, their molecular machinery would surely be completely different from ours.
One could argue that high-tech ufonauts could easily overcome these difficulties and produce bodies genetically compatible with humans. But in that case, why produce semihuman forms and try to get them to mate with humans? Why not just create perfect human bodies using high-tech methods? One can say that the motives of the entities are incomprehensible. This may be true, but I suggest that we can always turn to the hypothesis of unknown agencies with incomprehensible motives as a last resort. A better strategy would be to seek comprehensibility first and see how far we can get.
One comprehensible hypothesis is that the humanoids are real beings endowed with a sexual psychology similar to our own. According to this hypothesis, sexual manipulation of humans by these beings is at least partly due to their own sexual motives. This hypothesis can be kept general, and it allows for various interpretations of the controversial cases in which women were apparently shown their half-alien offspring. For example, they may literally have had such offspring, or this may be an illusion created in the abductees’ minds by the entities.
This hypothesis suggests that the humanoids have not evolved independently from humans in the Darwinian fashion. This is certainly implied if they are close enough to humans genetically to make crossbreeding attempts worthwhile. It is also indicated if the humanoids lack genetic compatibility with humans but nonetheless have a recognizable sexual psychology.
The key term here is psychology. On a hypothetical planet where technological capacity evolves, would recognizable, humanlike psychology also be likely to evolve? I suspect that Dobzhansky would say no. Independent evolution of humans and the humanoids is unlikely, and coevolution of both forms on the earth is ruled out by current evolutionary scenarios. If the humanoids are real beings, then it would seem that something non-Darwinian must be involved in their origins or in our own.
One commonly reported feature of UFO abductions is intense fear. This fear typically arises from the helplessness an abductee feels when put into a state of temporary paralysis by the UFO operators. A striking illustration of this is found in the experience of 16-year-old “David Oldham,” as related by Budd Hopkins. In September of 1966 David
was in a car with teenage friends, who were driving around aimlessly, looking for something to do. At one point the driver stopped the car on a side road, and the boys saw a large orange light hovering over nearby trees. David recalled wishing that he could talk to the others about the light but feeling that his mind was somehow blocked. His next conscious memory was of driving to a nightclub and going inside with his friends.
Under hypnosis, David recalled that on seeing the light, he got out of the car and began to walk toward it. Then he felt paralyzed and encountered beings who took him into the UFO. He responded to this with extreme terror:
WHAT IS IT? WHAT . . . WHAT IS IT? (Very agitated breathing) What is it? Why . . . why . . . getting numb . . . all over . . . getting numb. . . . Oh! Oh! Oh! Can’t move . . . can’t move. Oh! Oh! What’s going on? Can’t move. Oh! What . . . what do you . . . want?
56
Fear and other emotional reactions are sometimes mixed up in very complex ways in abduction cases. For example, overwhelming fear is one of the main themes of the books
Communion
and
Transformation,
in which the popular author Whitley Strieber described his encounters with humanoid beings he calls “visitors.” Although he seemed preoccupied with fear, Strieber also stressed the idea of developing a positive relationship with these beings. Apparently, a similar attitude was expressed by many people who wrote to him about their experiences with UFO entities. His wife Anne said, “you get a lot of letters where people say ‘They [the aliens] felt like family,’ or ‘I’ve always felt I didn’t belong on this Earth; when I was little I would look up in the sky and I would tell my mother I came on a spaceship.’”
57
Budd Hopkins, who takes a more uniformly negative view of alien entities, made some remarks on Strieber’s possible motives for taking a positive view of his visitors:
Strieber called me up early on, saying the aliens had told him to change the title of his book from “Body Terror” to “Communion,” from a title that suggested they were scary to one suggesting that they had to be much nicer. Then he called me up a month later, very upset, saying it was extremely important that I change the title of my book from “Intruders” to something more palatable—or things might go
against me. He was saying this not from the point of view of the publishing world, but that “they” didn’t like it, he said.
58
In many cases, people experiencing UFO abductions tend to find their captors uncaring and devoid of compassion, and they often say they felt as though they were being treated like experimental animals. Some people have seen ironic justice in this, in view of our own well-known cruelty toward defenseless humans and animals. Interestingly enough, the UFO entities themselves have been frequently said to deliver scathing comments about human motives and behavior.
However, not all abduction witnesses describe their experiences in negative or fearful terms. In some cases, people have reported meeting UFO entities initially during a fearful abduction scene and then developing a friendly relationship in the course of subsequent meetings. Two examples of this are the stories of William Herrmann
59
and Filiberto Cardenas.
60
These accounts represent a cross between UFO abductions and the so-called contactee cases, in which a person claims to have entered into a voluntary, friendly relationship with alien beings. The stories of Herrmann and Cardenas will be discussed along with the contactee phenomenon in
Chapter 5
.
Another example of a positive response to a UFO abduction was provided by John Salter.
61
Salter is a professor of sociology at the University of North Dakota and a social justice activist who was heavily involved in the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the 1960s. He said that on March 20, 1988, he was traveling with his son John III from North Dakota to Mississippi, where he was due to deliver a paper on civil rights. At that time, he had no interest in UFOs and had read virtually nothing on the subject.
He pointed out that for some reason he had chosen a route through Wisconsin that went far out of his way on small country roads. At a certain point along this route, both he and his son experienced amnesia for a considerable section of the trip, extending from late afternoon to about 7:45 p.m., with a short stretch of clear memory at about 6:30 p.m. After the point where their memory resumed, they drove on for some time, stayed overnight, and then resumed driving in the morning. At about 10:14 a.m., they saw a shimmering, silvery saucerlike form that swooped overhead and vanished at high speed. Both father and son felt that this had something to do with their experiences of the previous day.
In late June of 1988, the elder Salter began to spontaneously remember what had happened during his period of amnesia, and he pointed out that his son had similar recollections beginning in November of 1988. Salter said that he deliberately refrained from telling his son the content of his own recollections until his son’s memories of the encounter surfaced.
He recalled that he had pulled off onto a narrow and rough road that went into a wooded area. On parking, he and his son were met by two or three small humanoid figures and one taller humanoid. The smaller figures were four to four and a half feet tall, with large heads and conspicuously large, slanted eyes. The taller one looked “more human.” These beings led them to a parked UFO, where they were given medical examinations. The elder Salter said that they inserted some kind of implant up his right nostril and also gave him several injections. Then he and his son were returned to their vehicle.
Although this is a typical UFO abduction account, both Salter and his son felt strongly that their encounter was positive and beneficial. Salter also noted that his physical health had markedly improved after the encounter, and he attributed this to the treatments administered by the humanoids. That this reaction is not limited to Salter alone is indicated by a letter written to him by the folklorist Thomas Bullard:
In my earlier studies a pattern of unfriendliness, coldness and exploitation came to the fore and persuaded me that these beings were up to no good. Since then I have received several letters from people who regarded their experience in the same positive light as you do. Some people certainly come away with negative feelings. That is understandable, even reasonable when taking the experience of kidnap at face value. Yet the more I learn, the more I realize that the experience has a less obvious positive side. Some abductees feel a deep and abiding affection for their captors, and sense a reciprocity of those feelings.
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The Salter case displayed the common feature of “missing time,” in which people find a mysterious gap in their memory of UFO-related experiences. The Buff Ledge case is another example of this. In these two cases, we see that people responded differently to this period of
amnesia. Thus Michael and Janet in the Buff Ledge case were not able to recall their experiences on the UFO without the aid of hypnosis, and even then, Janet’s recall was less complete than Michael’s. The Salters were able to recall their meeting with the humanoids spontaneously, but the elder Salter’s recall began several months before his son’s. This suggests that UFO-induced memory loss may, like other forms of amnesia, be partly due to psychological mechanisms within the individual.
Another possibility is that memory loss may be deliberately induced by UFO entities to hide their operations. In some cases, the entities are said to give the witness threatening posthypnotic suggestions to the effect that “you will die if you remember these events.” Hopkins has given several examples suggesting this, including the stories of “Steven Kilburn,”
63
“Dr. Geis,”
64
and “Kathie Davis.”
65
Barney Hill likewise remembered being told by his captors that “you have to forget it, you will forget it, and it can only cause great harm that can be meted out to you if you do
not
forget.”
66
In other cases, the entities are said to simply tell the witness that he or she will not remember. In one encounter occurring north of Los Angeles in 1956, they even seem to have convinced one of the witnesses, a woman named Emily, that she should not talk because nobody would really care to know about her experience.
67
Although Emily seemed to remember, she would not talk, and she appeared to side with the UFO entities against the people who were interrogating her.
There are cases where the witness notes missing time in connection with a UFO sighting, even though no abduction is known to have taken place. Here is an example dating back to September 1963, in England. Paul, aged 21, was driving toward the village of Little Houghton at 2 a.m. Suddenly he found himself on foot and soaking wet just outside Bedford at 7 a.m. His last conscious memory was of seeing a brilliant white light in the sky heading toward his windshield. A friend drove him back along highway A428 to search for his car, and they found it locked up in the middle of a rain-soaked field with no tracks showing how it got there. Paul had the keys in his pocket.
68
In this case, hypnosis was not used. In the absence of further information, one might suspect that Paul suffered from petit mal epilepsy or some kind of psychological fugue state. However, the story of the car in the field, if true, adds a mysterious element to the story. How did it get into the field without leaving tracks unless, perhaps,
it was lifted there through the air?
In another British case, in January of 1974, Jeff and Jane, aged 20, were out driving at 9:30 p.m. They experienced being followed by a green light in the sky. At a certain point, this seemed to have gone away, but when they stopped the car and got out, green and blue beams shone down from a black oval above. They drove off in panic but suddenly found themselves in another town at 1:30 a.m., with no memory of how they got there. Then after a few more minutes of driving they found themselves in another town 20 miles away with another memory gap. It was now 3:30 a.m.
69
Here again, hypnosis was not used.
Here is an example of a similar missing time case in which an abduction story did turn up when hypnosis was used to probe for possible lost memories. On June 11, 1976, in Romans, France, Helene Giuliana, a maid in the house of the mayor of Hostun, saw a big orange glow in the sky while returning home from a movie. At this point, her Renault stopped functioning. The light suddenly vanished, and she drove home—with about four hours of missing time. Under hypnosis, she reported being carried into a room by “small figures with big eyes and ugly faces, clamped on a table and examined, particularly around her abdomen.”
70
Thus far, many of the abduction accounts I have presented have emerged under hypnosis. These cases might suggest that the process of hypnosis somehow conjures up abduction fantasies from the minds of UFO witnesses. There is certainly a great deal of support for this viewpoint. For example, after reviewing the scientific literature on hypnosis, the Council on Scientific Affairs (CSA) of the American Medical Association concluded that “recollections obtained during hypnosis can involve confabulations and pseudomemories and not only fail to be more accurate, but actually appear to be less reliable than nonhypnotic recall.”
71
This condemnation of hypnosis as a means of recovering lost memories must certainly be taken seriously. At the same time, there appears to be evidence indicating that hypnosis can enable people to genuinely recover lost memories, including memories of UFO abductions. What is going on here?
One important point is that most scientific studies of memory under hypnosis deal with items such as nonsense syllables or passages of poetry that carry little emotional significance for the experimental subject. This can be contrasted with memories of UFO abductions which deal with highly traumatic experiences. Thus the CSA report stated that “With respect to cases where there is a preexisting psychopathology and/or extreme emotional trauma, the current experimental literature is not definitive.”
72
Of course, this is not surprising. It would be unethical to carry out experiments in which people are subjected to extreme emotional trauma.
Another point is that UFO abductees often recall being told by the abducting entities not to remember their abduction. In some cases they are told that they will experience great harm if they remember. This suggests that the role of hypnotic regression in UFO abduction cases may be to counteract the effects of both trauma and previous hypnotic commands to forget. It might be possible to scientifically investigate the effectiveness of hypnosis in reversing amnesia induced by previous hypnosis. However, to be truly relevant, such investigations would have to duplicate the traumatic character of UFO abductions.
According to the CSA report, hypnosis often “results in more information being reported, but these recollections contain both accurate and inaccurate details.”
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If this is so, does it also apply to UFO abduction accounts? Or do recovered memories of UFO abductions contain only inaccurate details?
In the Buff Ledge case, Webb reported that under hypnosis Janet verified 70 percent of Michael’s descriptions of what occurred on the dock and 68 percent of his on-board descriptions (
page 123
). This means that she failed to verify some 30 percent of his descriptions. One could argue that this 30 percent consists of false memories and the 70 percent consists of accurate memories.
In the Buff Ledge case, the presence of two witnesses who never had a chance to discuss their experiences makes it possible to distinguish between false memories and memories that are quite likely to be genuine. In cases with only one witness, it is not possible to do this. Unfortunately, multiple witness cases with lack of communication between the witnesses are rare.
It is difficult to estimate what percentage of testimony retrieved under hypnosis is accurate and what percentage is inaccurate. This
presumably varies from case to case and depends on such factors as the psychology of the witnesses and the methods used by the hypnotist. However, if a substantial portion of the details remembered in some UFO abduction cases are accurate, then we must conclude that UFO abductions are not mere fantasies. At the same time, we have to be cautious about assigning great weight to the details of particular cases.
In
The Allagash Abductions,
Raymond Fowler reported on a UFO abduction case in which four sane, responsible witnesses testified under hypnosis about a single UFO abduction.
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This case is similar to the Buff Ledge case in that (1) the witnesses did not consciously remember the abduction before their hypnosis sessions, (2) they did consciously remember a UFO close encounter (of type CE-III) connected with the abduction, and (3) they were strongly encouraged not to communicate with one another about the results of their hypnosis sessions until the sessions were completed for all four witnesses.
The four Allagash abduction accounts broadly agree with one another, even though they differ in some details. Thus this case seems to add further support to the idea that UFO abduction memories recovered under hypnosis can contain both accurate and inaccurate material. The common features of the four abduction accounts suggest that the witnesses did undergo an extraordinary experience.
The psychologist John Carpenter has reported a case in which consistent information was obtained separately from two respectable, middle-aged women who reported a close encounter of type CEIII that involved missing time.
75
The women were given the MMPI test and found to be free of psychopathology or psychological problems. They were also found to have a low to moderate level of fantasy proneness. They testified that they had no interest in UFOs before their experience and they had not read any books on UFOs. In separate hypnosis sessions they produced abduction accounts that agreed in some 40 points, although there were also some disagreements. This also seems to be a case in which genuine memories were recovered under hypnosis.
One explanation for consistent narratives produced by two witnesses is that these may be due to
folie a deux.
This is a disorder in which a dominant, psychotic person induces another person to share his or her delusions.
Folie a deux
is ruled out in this case because the two witnesses were acquaintances who did not have a close personal
relationship. Also, neither witness was psychotic. This is also true of the Buff Ledge case.
It is sometimes argued that hypnotists produce consistent UFO narratives by asking leading questions. This idea was explored by Alvin Lawson, a professor of English at the California State University at Long Beach, in a paper entitled “What Can We Learn from Hypnosis of Imaginary Abductions?”
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Lawson hypnotized eight subjects and asked questions like, “Imagine you are seeing some entities or beings aboard the UFO. Describe them,” and then, “You are undergoing some kind of physical examination. Describe what is happening to you.” The eight subjects were supposedly unknowledgeable regarding UFOs, yet they produced abduction stories in response to such questions. To explain this, Lawson later published the theory that abduction scenes involving beings with big heads and spindly bodies are based on memories of the trauma of birth and one’s bodily shape as a fetus.
However, Lawson’s work has been widely criticized. Jenny Randles pointed out that he was definitely asking leading questions, and his data base of eight people was too small. In addition, his subjects’ eight imaginary abduction stories featured six types of alien entities, including four types that almost never appear in abduction accounts. On top of this, his fetal memory theory is baseless, since people never see themselves or others as fetuses at the time of birth.
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Although Lawson’s work was flawed, it does show how leading questions can influence a person’s testimony under hypnosis. However, it should not be concluded that hypnotic regression carried out by UFO investigators will automatically invoke UFO abduction accounts. Randles noted that there are British cases in which hypnosis was used in an effort to uncover a UFO abduction but no abduction scenario emerged, and she pointed out that Budd Hopkins has cases in America where the same thing happened. In fact, Hopkins mentioned that out of 79 cases in one study, in 20 an abduction was recalled with the aid of hypnosis, in 11 hypnosis was used but no abduction was recalled, and in five cases an abduction was recalled without the aid of hypnosis. The remaining 43 cases had not been fully evaluated at the time of the report.
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Randles also noted a study by Dr. Thomas Bullard of over 200 abduction cases, in which one-third of the subjects had full conscious memory of the abduction experience. An analysis of these cases showed
that abduction experiences recalled under hypnosis were essentially the same as those recalled without hypnosis. The most notable difference between the two sets of cases was that medical examinations were mentioned twice as often in hypnosis cases as in cases with direct recall.
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Of course, this might be expected if the medical examinations are more likely to be blocked by amnesia than other, less traumatic aspects of abduction experiences.
The findings mentioned by Randles are paralleled by those of David Webb in a study of 300 abduction reports from HUMCAT, a data base of UFO encounters involving humanoids.
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Out of these 300 reports, Webb found that 140 satisfied the following five reliability criteria: (1) an abduction was clearly indicated, (2) the case was reasonably well investigated, (3) there was no evidence of a hoax or of witness psychopathology, (4) there was enough data to assess the general scenario and degree of hypnosis used, and (5) the case did not involve crashed UFOs.
Webb divided these cases into three categories: those in which onboard abduction information was obtained (I) mainly with, (II) partly with, and (III) entirely without the use of hypnosis. The last category was divided into two subcategories, IIIa, in which hypnosis was used but added nothing new, and IIIb, in which no hypnosis was used. At the time of his report, he had reviewed 117 of the 140 cases and obtained the following results:
| Category |
No. of Reports |
% of Total |
| I |
61 |
52 |
| II |
11 |
9 |
| IIIa |
8 |
7 |
| IIIb |
37 |
32 |
Thus it turns out that in 39% of the cases, no on-board abduction information was obtained using hypnosis. Webb pointed out that the reports in categories I and III were remarkably similar in content.
Another point to make about hypnosis as a tool for retrieving lost memories is that there are instances in which information obtained under hypnosis is independently corroborated. An example would be the story of “Steven Kilburn” presented by Budd Hopkins. Underhypnosis, Steven (whose real name is Michael Bershad
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) revealed a typical abduction
scenario, including a physical examination by the standard “Gray” entities. This included what seemed like a neurological examination.
Steven described this examination to a neurosurgeon named Paul Cooper. Here is Dr. Cooper’s reaction, as related by Hopkins:
Steven is a remarkable young man. He’s extremely bright, an excellent observer, and totally believable. . . . Everything he told me about what they did to him and how his body reacted accorded exactly with what should have happened if they stimulated the different nerves he said they touched. I tried to mislead him. . . . And he has no particular knowledge of the nervous system. He’d have to have known a great deal to make it all up, and I’m certain he’s not the type to lie. He’s a very decent guy, and I’m really impressed with him.
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It seems from this that under hypnosis there emerged specialized anatomical information that Steven had never consciously studied. Assuming that he wasn’t lying about his medical education, one could hypothesize that he once read a neuroanatomy textbook, remembered it only on a subconscious level, and incorporated material from it into his abduction story. This sort of thing is actually known to occur, and it is called cryptomnesia. For example, there are cases where an apparent previous life that has been recalled under hypnosis has been traced to a book that the subject read but had forgotten.
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Although cryptomnesia is a possible explanation of Steven’s testimony about his neurological examination, it seems to be an unlikely one. It is one thing to remember information from a medical textbook, and it is quite another to convert that knowledge into an accurate description of how the body would behave during an examination. That might well require practical medical training that would not readily be forgotten. Thus, if Dr. Cooper’s testimony is genuine, it definitely seems to add weight to Steven’s abduction story.
In summary, it appears that typical abduction experiences are sometimes remembered with or without hypnosis. Since the experiences remembered with the aid of hypnosis tend to be much the same as those remembered without it, it would appear that the process of hypnosis itself is not a major cause of abduction accounts. If abductions recalled without hypnosis might be factual, then so might abductions recalled with hypnosis.
I should note, however, that very doubtful stories can emerge under hypnosis. For example, the psychologist Edith Fiore recounted the
story of a man named “Dan” whom she regressed hypnotically, hoping to recover memories of possible close encounters. Dan proceeded to describe a previous life as a cold-blooded soldier on an interstellar spaceship. His job was to make “drops” on designated planets and wipe out target cities with “force beams” without asking questions. The soldier and his compatriots were fully human, living a life reminiscent of “Star Trek.” The soldier was supposedly “retired” by being mentally transferred into the body of a child in Washington State, displacing the child’s original mind. This child then grew up as Dan.
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In this case, it seems doubtful that the story was produced as a result of leading questions, for the hypnotist had no idea that such a story would emerge. But in contrast to UFO abduction accounts, Dan’s story seems very similar to familiar science fiction stories, and it also casts Dan in an ego-building role as a tough, self-reliant soldier. Dan had read a lot of sci-fi,
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and it is possible that he had incorporated science fiction themes into a subconscious fantasy. Hypnosis, it seems, is an imperfect and poorly understood tool that can produce useful results but cannot be fully trusted.
To many people, it is natural to attribute the strange stories of UFO abductees to some kind of mental aberration. To test this idea, a number of psychological studies have been made of abductees, and I will discuss some of them in this section.
It turns out that abductees as a group have proven to be free of overt psychopathology (although there are inevitable exceptions to this rule). Psychologists have reacted to this finding in a variety of ways. Some have tried to remain noncommital, while others have accepted the reality of abduction by aliens. Others have argued that the abduction phenomenon requires far-reaching reformulations of our basic ideas of reality. Still others have tried to preserve those ideas by arguing that although abductees are sane, they are nonetheless prone to accept fantasy as reality.
A pioneering study was undertaken in 1981 by two UFO researchers, Ted Bloecher and Budd Hopkins, and a psychologist, Dr. Aphrodite Clamar.
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They selected five men and four women who had reported UFO abduction experiences involving missing time, encounters with aliens, on-board physical examinations, and so on. A psychologist, Dr.
Elizabeth Slater, was asked to evaluate them in order to determine their comparative psychological strengths and weaknesses. She was not told that the nine people had anything to do with UFOs, and they were instructed not to disclose this to her.
The subjects were a college instructor (photography), an electronics expert, an actor and tennis instructor, a corporation lawyer, a commercial artist, a business executive, the director of a chemistry laboratory, a salesman and audio technician, and a secretary. They were administered the MMPI, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, the TAT (Thematic Apperception Test), the Rorschach test, and the projective drawings test.
Slater concluded that the nine subjects were “quite heterogeneous” in personality, but they tended to share the following traits:
1.
relatively high intelligence with concomitant richness of inner life.
2.
relative weakness in the sense of identity, especially sexual identity.
3.
concomitant vulnerability in the interpersonal realm.
4.
a certain orientation toward alertness which is manifest . . . in a certain perceptual sophistication and awareness or in interpersonal hypervigilance and caution.
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She also found that the nine subjects tended to be anxious, sometimes overwhelmingly so. They tended to suffer from low self-esteem and a feeling of vulnerability to insult and injury. They tended to be wary and cautious, but Slater described this as oversensitivity rather than paranoia.
After learning of the subjects’ UFO histories, Slater was flabbergasted. After reading Hopkins’s book
Missing Time
and meeting with Clamar, Hopkins, and Ted Bloecher, she said in her final report:
The first and most critical question is whether our subjects’ reported experiences could be accounted for strictly on the basis of psychopathology, i.e., mental disorder.
The answer is a firm no.
In broad terms, if the reported abductions were
confabulated fantasy productions,
based on what we know about psychological disorders, they could have only come from
pathological liars, paranoid schizophrenics, and severely disturbed and extraordinarily rare hysteroid characters subject to fugue states and/ or multiple personality shifts
. [Slater’s italics.]
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Thus, the subjects’ abduction experiences could not be explained psychologically. However, Slater observed that their anxiety and insecurity could be readily accounted for by real UFO abductions:
Certainly such an unexpected, random, and literally otherworldly experience as UFO abduction, during which the individual has absolutely no control over the outcome, constitutes a trauma of major proportions. Hypothetically, its psychological impact might be analogous to what one sees in crime victims or victims of natural disasters, as it would constitute an event during which an individual is overwhelmed by external circumstances in an extreme manner.
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Slater pointed out that an analogy can be drawn between UFO abductees and rape victims. She concluded that although the study did not prove the reality of UFO abductions, it showed that the subjects’ psychological problems could be explained in terms of such experiences and not the other way around.
Another psychological study of UFO abductees has been carried out by Rima Laibow, M.D., a psychiatrist in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and a graduate of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. On the basis of personal work with 11 abductees and familiarity with 65 cases, she made observations similar to Slater’s. She expected to find psychosis in people reporting such bizarre experiences, but instead she found only the anxiety that such experiences would be expected to produce.
In the abductees she saw PTSD, or posttraumatic stress disorder, which is normally thought to be produced only by event-level trauma. (This term refers to traumas that actually occur physically, as opposed to fantasies generated within the mind.) She also observed that fantasies should vary widely from individual to individual, whereas UFO abduction stories tend to be very similar.
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Dr. June Parnell, a professional counselor at the University of Wyoming, wrote a 110-page paper entitled “Personality characteristics on the MMPI, 16PF and ACL tests, of persons who claim UFO experiences,” which was published by the university in 1986. She applied these tests to 225 witnesses reporting all types of UFO encounters. She described people reporting exotic contacts and abductions as “. . . having a high level of psychic energy, being self-sufficient, resourceful, and preferring their own decisions . . . [with] above-average intelligence,
assertiveness, a tendency to be experimenting thinkers, a tendency toward a reserved attitude, and a tendency toward defensiveness. There was also a high level of the following traits in these deep-encounter witnesses: “being suspicious or distrustful . . . creative and imaginative . . . .’”
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This description is quite similar to Slater’s, and Parnell concluded that UFO experiencers tend to be mentally healthy.
Kenneth Ring, a psychology professor known for his near death investigations, published an extensive study comparing near death experiencers with people having UFO experiences. Ring observed that while some researchers agree with Parnell’s positive interpretation of her findings, other “psychiatrically oriented commentators” argue that UFO experiencers may be suffering from some form of mental illness.
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Ring’s own conclusion was that UFO experiencers are characterized by a tendency to dissociate which may have been brought about by abuse in childhood.
93
He stressed, however, that dissociative tendencies can be considered to be mentally normal and must be distinguished from dissociative disorders, which are pathological. Ring’s theory is that both near death experiencers and UFO experiencers are able to enter an altered state of consciousness through dissociation. This enables them to enter an objectively real “imaginal realm” or alternate reality in which their unusual experiences take place.
Ring’s ideas have led him to affirm a third state of consciousness which is distinct from both sanity and insanity as they are customarily defined. Philosophically, he has adopted a position reminiscent of idealism, in which matter and imagination are not considered to be separate categories. To Ring, this allows for remarkable possibilities. He suggests that in the future, “Veils will be lifted from the face of the nonphysical, and we ourselves will become diaphanous beings, with bodies of light—
if
the speculations to be offered are a true reading of our future condition and experiential possibilities.”
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Dr. John Mack, a professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, has also adopted radical new views of reality as a result of a study of UFO abductees. He accepts the experiences of the abductees as being essentially real and concludes that “To acknowledge that the universe (or universes) contains other beings that have been able to enter our world and affect us as powerfully as the alien entities seem able to do would require an expansion of our notions of reality that all
too radically undermines the Western scientific and philosophical ideology.”
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Mack argues that the conceptual expansion caused by abduction experiences often causes abductees to undergo spiritual growth and thus it tends to have a positive effect.
Dr. Richard Boylan, a clinical psychologist, has published a study of abductees which presents UFO abductions as essentially positive experiences brought about by real alien beings. Boylan introduces the controversial idea that “when experiencers are properly debriefed and psychologically treated, they do not exhibit PTSD,
unless
the close encounter has caused a resurfacing of preexisting
human-caused
PTSD-level trauma.”
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For example, memories of childhood sexual abuse could cause a negative reaction to a UFO abduction. Boylan also argues that some traumatic UFO abductions are actually pseudo-abductions perpetrated by human agents (see
page 47
).
A more scientifically conservative approach to UFO experiences was taken by a team of psychologists from Carleton University in Canada led by Nicholas Spanos.
97
Spanos and his colleagues administered a battery of psychological tests to four groups of people: 15 intense UFO experiencers (including abductees), 20 nonintense UFO experiencers, 74 college psychology students, and 53 people from the general community. One of their most important conclusions was that UFO experiencers tend to be mentally healthy:
The most important findings indicate that neither of the UFO groups scored lower on any measures of psychological health than either of the comparison groups. Moreover, both UFO groups attained higher psychological health scores than either one or both of the comparison groups on five of the psychological health variables.
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Spanos and his colleagues also tried to evaluate the idea that even though UFO experiencers tend to be sane, they nonetheless have tendencies towards fantasy and false experience that might account for their strange experiences. Here I use the phrase “false experience” to refer to impressions of unreal events that might arise due to hallucination, suggestibility, brain instability, or irrational (but not pathological) thought processes. Clearly this concept is an attempt to straddle a fine line between sanity and insanity.
The following table sums up some of the test results that address this issue.
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| Psychological Variable |
UFO experiencers |
Control groups |
|
Intense |
Nonintense |
General |
Students |
| Paranormal experience |
42.2 |
34.4 |
40.9 |
40.0 |
| MMPI Schizophrenia |
12.1 |
9.2 |
19.3 |
19.6 |
| Perceptual Aberration |
5.6 |
3.0 |
7.6 |
6.3 |
| Magical Ideation |
9.0 |
8.3 |
10.9 |
8.7 |
| Temporal lobe lability |
32.8 |
34.2 |
37.3 |
38.6 |
| Fantasy Proneness |
22.4 |
21.6 |
25.3 |
23.6 |
The six psychological variables in the table are supposed to assess the tendency of a person to have false experiences or indulge in fantasy. We can see that the intense UFO experiencers tend to score higher than the nonintense UFO experiencers on five out of the six variables. However, both UFO groups tended to score lower on the six variables than the control groups. The authors conclude:
Subjects in the two UFO groups failed to differ from subjects in the comparison groups on any of the imaginal propensity measures, the temporal lobe lability index, the paranormal experiences index, or the hypnotizability measures. These findings clearly contradict the hypothesis that UFO reports—even intense UFO reports characterized by such seemingly bizarre experiences as missing time and communication with aliens—occur primarily in individuals who are highly fantasy prone, given to paranormal beliefs, or unusually suggestible.
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Nonetheless, Spanos and his colleagues could not accept that UFO experiences might be caused by some agency external to the experiencers. Their final conclusion was that “beliefs in alien visitation and flying saucers serve as templates against which people shape ambiguous external information, diffuse physical sensations, and vivid imaginings into alien encounters that are experienced as real events.”
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Of course, this does not account for the fact that many intense UFO experiencers maintain that they had no belief in UFOs before their experiences.
The test data reported by Spanos and his colleagues indicate that the intense UFO experiencers scored higher on the Paranormal Experience scale than the nonintense UFO experiencers or controls. This
scale is supposed to measure belief that one has had paranormal experiences, and it turns out that many UFO abductees do report experiencing unusual psychic phenomena.
Spanos and his colleagues followed conventional scientific wisdom by implicitly treating paranormal experiences as false. Certainly there are many instances in which such experiences turn out to be delusory or fraudulent. However, it is possible that some paranormal experiences may be both genuine and closely connected with the UFO phenomenon. I will therefore discuss the connection between UFO close encounters and psychic phenomena in this section. But before doing this, I should say a few words indicating why reports of psychic phenomena should be taken seriously. I will do this by presenting strong evidence for some extremely controversial psychic phenomena.
The world of spirit mediums is famous for fraud, and one can find extensive accounts of this in books such as
The Psychic Mafia,
by the confessed psychic confidence man M. Lamar Keene.
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However, it might be a mistake to dismiss the phenomena connected with spirit mediums as entirely bogus. Many cases could be cited showing significant evidence for the reality of these phenomena, and here I will briefly summarize one of them. This case is described in greater detail in a book entitled
The Limits of Influence,
by Stephen Braude, a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland.
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In the early part of the twentieth century, there was a spirit medium named Eusapia Palladino, who became known for producing such things as supernormal movements of objects and ectoplasmic emanations. She was studied by a number of distinguished scientists, and she was also caught in fraud. The people investigating her agreed that she would cheat if she got the opportunity, but some argued that strange phenomena had been observed in her presence that she could not have produced by cheating.
In an attempt to resolve this question, the Society for Psychical Research in England put together a “Fraud Squad” consisting of:
1.
The Hon. Everard Feilding, who claimed to be a complete skeptic regarding spiritualistic mediums and who had detected many of them in acts of fraud.
2.
Hereward Carrington, an amateur conjurer who wrote
The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism,
three-fourths of which was devoted to an analysis of fraudulent mediumship.
3.
W. W. Baggally, a skilled conjurer, who “claimed to have investigated almost every medium in Britain since Home without finding one who was genuine.”
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(Daniel D. Home was a famous nineteenth-century medium.)
These investigators rented three adjoining hotel rooms in Naples, Italy, in November of 1908, and séances with Palladino were held in the central room. The room was illuminated by electric ceiling lights. Before each séance, the investigators would carefully examine the room, and they would set up a curtain, called the “cabinet,” across one corner. Behind the curtain there was a small table surrounded by the walls, floor, and ceiling, with no doors or windows (and presumably no trapdoor). The table and curtain were carefully checked for hidden devices.
After these preparations, one investigator would go downstairs and escort Eusapia Palladino up to the room alone. The room would be locked, and Palladino would sit at a table in front of the curtain, accompanied by the investigators. Two of the men would sit on either side of 54-year-old Eusapia, holding onto her arms and legs, and observing her carefully. In front of the séance table was a table occupied by the stenographer Albert Meeson, who was a stranger to Eusapia and who wrote down whatever the investigators spoke to him.
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Feilding explained the strategy of the investigators as follows: “We felt that if, in a reasonable number of experiments, persons specially versed in conjuring tricks and already forewarned concerning, and familiar with, the particular tricks to be expected, were unable to discover them, it would not be presumptuous to claim as a probable consequence that some other agency must be involved.”
106
Here is an excerpt from Feilding’s account of the séances. He began by stressing his skepticism, which was based on many observations of fraud. In the séances with Eusapia, however, he witnessed phenomena that he was unable to explain on the basis of fraud, and his reactions to this are interesting:
The first séance with Eusapia, accordingly, provoked chiefly a feeling of surprise; the second, of irritation—irritation at finding oneself confronted with a foolish but apparently insoluble problem. The third séance, at which a trumpery trick was detected, came as a sort of relief. At the fourth, where the control of the medium was
withdrawn from ourselves [due to the presence of “guest” sitters], my baffled intelligence sought to evade the responsibility of meeting facts by harbouring grotesque doubts as to the competency of the eminent professors, who took our places, to observe things properly; while at the fifth, where this course was no longer possible, as I was constantly controlling the medium myself, the mental gymnastics involved in seriously facing the necessity of concluding in favour of what was manifestly absurd, produced a kind of intellectual fatigue.
After the sixth, for the first time I find that my mind, from which the stream of events had hitherto run off like rain from a macintosh, is at last beginning to be capable of absorbing them. For the first time I have the absolute conviction that our observation is not mistaken. I realize, as an appreciable fact in life, that from an empty cabinet I have seen hands and heads come forth, that from behind the curtain of that empty cabinet I have been seized by living fingers, the existence and position of the very nails of which could be felt. I have seen this extraordinary woman sitting visible outside the curtain, held hand and foot by my colleagues, immobile, except for an occasional straining of a limb, while some entity within the curtain has over and over again pressed my hand in a position clearly beyond her reach. . . .
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A more detailed account of the heads and hands is given by the following passage, in which Feilding contemplated the possibility of producing the strange phenomena by means of an apparatus:
It would be an interesting problem to set before a manufacturer of conjuring machines to devise an apparatus capable of producing alternatively a black flat profile face, a square face on a long neck, and a ‘cello like face on a warty nobbly body two feet long; also, a white hand with moveable fingers having nails, capable of reaching high above the medium’s head, or patting, pinching and pulling hair, and of so vigorously grasping B. by the coat as almost to upset him into the cabinet. Our manufacturer must so construct the apparatus that it can be actuated unseen by a somewhat stout and elderly lady clad in a tight plain gown, who sits outside the curtain held visibly hand and foot, in such a way as to escape the observation of two practical conjurers clinging about her and on the look-out for its operation.
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One way of looking at this testimony is that it constitutes good evidence that some unknown agency actually produced the weird phenomena that Feilding described. But one can also say that we have no proof that Feilding and his colleagues were not lying or that they were not duped by Eusapia Palladino. The status of evidence for the paranormal is similar to that of UFO evidence. In the ultimate issue, incontrovertible proof is impossible. But there are cases of strong testimony for paranormal phenomena, and these tend to become more persuasive as they accumulate and display recurring law-like patterns.
With this background on psychic phenomena, I will now turn to the main topic of this section, beginning with the case of Betty and Barney Hill. The psychiatrist Berthold Schwarz observed that after the Hills’ close encounter on a lonely New Hampshire road, they began to experience poltergeist phenomena in their home. Betty would find her coats unaccountably dumped on the living room floor, even though she had left them in the closet. Clocks would stop and start mysteriously, or their time settings would change. Water faucets would turn on when nobody was there, and electrical appliances would break down and then work perfectly without repair.
109
The German word “poltergeist” literally means “noisy ghost” and is used to refer to disturbances in which objects move or behave strangely without any obvious physical cause. In recent years, parapsychologists wishing to avoid the word “ghost” have coined the term RSPK, or recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, for these disturbances. This change is motivated by their hypothesis that poltergeist effects may be produced by some kind of energetic emanation from a target person. In this case, Betty Hill would be the likely target individual, and one could speculate that her UFO experience changed her energy balance and triggered the poltergeist effects.
Poltergeist phenomena have been known for centuries, and they include the kind of events reported by Betty Hill, as well as spontaneous fires, objects flying through the air, and spontaneously moving furniture. Frequently, the target person in a poltergeist case is emotionally disturbed or chronically ill.
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This doesn’t seem to be the case with Betty Hill, but Schwarz pointed out that she had a past history of paranormal experiences. When she was in high school, she had many accurate precognitive dreams, including two in which she foresaw the deaths of school friends in automobile accidents. Many of her family members were also psychic, including
her maternal grandmother and an adopted daughter. Her sister, Janet, reportedly lived in a house that was haunted by a child ghost named Hannah, whose name was revealed by a psychic and later confirmed by old records.
111
Apparently, Barney Hill and his family had no past history of psychic phenomena.
112
Karla Turner, a college instructor with a Ph.D. in Old English Studies, began to investigate UFO abductions in an effort to understand abduction experiences involving herself and her family.
113
In a recent lecture, she observed that in a group of 21 UFO abductees, 16 reported heightened psychic abilities, 16 reported unexplained noises in their homes (such as footsteps on the roof), 16 reported unexplained electrical disturbances (such as TVs and lights turning on or off mysteriously), 16 reported the overnight appearance of strange marks on their bodies (such as punctures, bruises, and claw marks), and 12 reported poltergeist phenomena (such as the unexplained appearance or disappearance of household objects). She also pointed out that all 21 abductees reported hearing unexplained voices (often calling their names) and unexplained sounds (such as beeps and whistles).
114
Nearly all of these reported events fall broadly into the category of psychic phenomena.
Phenomena of this kind are often mentioned in published UFO accounts. For example, Ed Walters, a Florida businessman well-known for his UFO photographs, has recently published a book which includes accounts of his own UFO abduction and of poltergeist activities in his home.
115
Likewise, in Raymond Fowler’s Allagash case, four men recalled a common UFO abduction under hypnosis (
page 149
). Two of them, the twin brothers Jim and Jack Weiner, had a history of childhood poltergeist experiences.
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The psychic phenomena reported in connection with UFO accounts tend to fall into the following two categories:
1.
Psychic phenomena not directly connected with UFOs, such as poltergeist activities in the home. These may begin abruptly after a UFO encounter, or it may be that a close-encounter witness has a long history of paranormal experiences. Matters are complicated by the fact that UFO close-encounter witnesses often turn out to have a long history of UFO encounters going back to early childhood.
2.
Psychic phenomena that typically occur during UFO encounters, including telepathic communication, levitation, passing of matter
through matter, and mysterious healing. UFO investigators some times attribute these phenomena to high technology on the part of UFO entities. This may be correct, but it remains a fact that these phenomena have also been studied in the domain of psychical research without reference to UFOs. Of course, one should not rule out the possibility that psychic phenomena not connected with UFOs may also involve some kind of high technology.
We have already seen reports of UFO encounters involving telepathic communication, levitation, and the passing of bodies through walls. An example of mysterious healing is provided by the case of “Dr. X,” a French medical doctor. This case was studied originally by Aime Michel in France and was recounted by Jacques Vallee.
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According to Vallee, an important aspect of the case is that an astrophysicist, a psychiatrist, and a physiologist were able to gain rapid access to Dr. X and were able to monitor ongoing developments.
The doctor testified that on November 1, 1968, he was awakened by calls from his 14-month-old baby shortly before 4:00 a.m. On opening a window, he saw two hovering disc-shaped objects that were silvery-white on top and bright red underneath. After moving closer for some time, the two discs merged into a single disc, which directed a beam of white light at the doctor. The disc then vanished with a sort of explosion, leaving a cloud that dissipated slowly.
The doctor said that he had received a serious leg injury while chopping wood three days before. After the departure of the mysterious object(s), the swelling and pain from this injury suddenly vanished, and during subsequent days he also noticed the disappearance of all the chronic aftereffects of serious injuries he had received in the Algerian war. A few days after the encounter, Dr. X and his child each developed a strange, reddish, triangular mark on the abdomen, and this mark recurred in successive years.
During a two-year period following this incident, there was no recurrence of symptoms associated with either the war injuries or the leg wound. However, strange paranormal phenomena began to take place around the doctor and his family, including poltergeist activity and unexplained disturbances in electrical circuits. According to Jacques Vallee, “Coincidences of a telepathic nature are frequently reported, and the doctor has allegedly, on at least one occasion, experienced levitation without being able to control it.”
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Other developments were even more bizarre. Dr. X recounted that he began to have mysterious meetings with a strange, nameless man he called “Mr. Bied.” The doctor would hear a whistling noise inside his head and would feel guided to walk or drive to a certain location. There he would meet the strange man, who would discuss his UFO experience with him and instruct him on paranormal matters. Mr. Bied caused him “to experience teleportation and time travel, including a distressing episode with alternative landscapes on a road that “does not exist.’” The stranger also once visited Dr. X at his home “accompanied by a three-foot-tall humanoid with mummified skin, who remained motionless while his eyes quickly darted around the room.”
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Vallee remarked that even though UFO cases generally seem quite strange, the reports of such cases are often edited by the suppression of particularly bizarre or incredible aspects. Nonetheless, strange events of the kind reported by Dr. X also turn up frequently in other UFO cases.
For example, Vallee mentioned a case in Lima, Peru, on December 9, 1968, in which a customs officer was hit in the face by a purple beam from a UFO and then discovered that he was cured of myopia and rheumatism.
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In South Carolina on April 21, 1979, UFO abductee William Herrmann reported being visited in his trailer by two alien beings who seemed to materialize in the midst of a blue glow while he was on the phone with a UFO investigator.
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Whitley Strieber has reported many paranormal effects connected with his visitor experiences, as well as visions of surreal landscapes. These include poltergeist phenomena, spontaneous levitation, and out-of-body experiences.
122
The British UFO investigator Jenny Randles has given many examples of persons who reported both UFO encounters and psychic experiences. For example, Joyce Bowles experienced being abducted into an unknown room along with a man named Ted Pratt and having an extended meeting with three tall humanoid beings. Randles commented that Bowles had also suffered a poltergeist attack and “had a track record of psychic experience.”
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Raymond Fowler pointed out that Betty Andreasson and some of her family members reported a number of strange psychic experiences that occurred before her 1967 UFO encounter. For example, her daughter Becky (who was involved in that encounter) described how she woke up in 1964 to see a glowing yellow-orange ball hovering outside her bedroom window and directing a beam of light at her. Shortly after this, Becky began to produce pages filled with strange
symbols by automatic writing.
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Automatic writing is a well-known psychic phenomenon, and it also shows up in the stories of many UFO witnesses (see
Chapter 5
).
Fowler also gave the story of Mrs. Rita Malley, who was driving along Route 34 to Ithaca, New York, in 1967 when her car was stopped by a humming, domed, disc-shaped object. She said that a bright light beamed down from the object. “Then I began to hear voices. They didn’t sound like male or female voices, but were weird, the words broken and jerky . . . like a weird chorus of several voices. . . . The voices named someone I knew and said that at that moment, my friend’s brother was involved in a terrible accident miles away.”
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As the lady found out the next day, this message was correct.
In this case, the UFO experience included a precognitive warning. There is an extensive literature on precognitive warnings in dreams and sudden flashes of intuition, and it is reported that these predictions very often turn out to be true.
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These paranormal warnings and the other psychic phenomena that I have mentioned have been part of human life since time immemorial, even though they do not fit into the mechanistic paradigm of modern science.
In summary, there is evidence that psychic phenomena (or close imitations of them) are often reported in conjunction with UFO close-encounter cases. These phenomena seem to be connected with both the human subjects of these cases and the humanoid entities they meet.
One possible inference from this is that the UFO humanoids are not as alien to us as one might suppose. This is based on the argument that beings with humanlike form, humanlike emotions, and humanlike paranormal powers may well be related to human beings on a fundamental level.
Of course, there are other possibilities, and I will mention two. First, there is the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH), which maintains that UFO entities have evolved on a distant planet. It is difficult to discuss the evolution of psychic abilities, since evolutionists generally deny that such abilities exist. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that psychic abilities have evolved according to standard evolutionary principles. Then the reasoning of Dobzhansky and Simpson must apply and we would not expect them to evolve on another planet. If that is so, it is strange that visiting ETs seem to exhibit psychic phenomena and also seem to awaken psychic abilities in humans.
Statements of the Hypothesis that UFO Manifestations Are Given Physical Reality by the Power of the Human Mind
1. Jacques Vallee: “One could theorize that there exists a remarkable state of psychic functioning that alters the percipient’s vision of physical reality and also generates actual traces and luminous phenomena, visible to other witnesses in their normal state.”
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2. Berthold Schwarz: “Almost all the data associated with UFOs have their analogies in spontaneous psychic phenomena, or have been noted to occur in the séance room.” The reported UFO electromagnetic effects may be an exception, but even they might be produced psychically. He quotes Eisenbud as saying, “There is a small solid core of parapsychological data indicating that both animate and inanimate entities can be created (presumably under mental auspices) not only piecemeal, as a sort of intrusion into a more ordinary reality, but as a completely coexisting reality.”
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3. D. Scott Rogo on UFO abductions: “The abduction is a real physical event, but it reflects concerns or traumas buried within the subject’s unconscious. It might be called an “objectified’ dream— i.e., a system of symbolic imagery which suddenly erupts into the three-dimensional world.”
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4. Lieutenant Colonel (Ret.) Thomas Bearden: “In June 1947 Kenneth Arnold, flying over the state of Washington—the state closest to the Soviet Union at the time— encountered flying saucers, which were simply female mandalas modulated by our science fiction/Buck Rogers national/cultural unconsciousness. . . . Make no mistake, these tulpoids are actual materializations, not hallucinations or fantasies.”
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5. Hilary Evans: “The entity experience has a material basis that can be reasonably conceived of as a physical communication, fabricated by an autonomously operating part of the percipient’s mind, either on its own or in liaison with an external agent; expressed in the same encoded-signal form as any other mental communication; presented to the conscious mind as a substitute for sensory input from the real world; and occasionally being given a temporary external expression utilizing some kind of quasi-material psi-substance.”
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6. Jenny Randles used Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field idea to formulate a theory of UFO abductions: “If something becomes accepted as real, then it gains more and more actual reality. It would not be stretching Sheldrake’s hypothesis too far to regard abductions as becoming real, because of their repeated emphasis within society.”
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However, if we posit beings similar to ourselves with more highly developed, inborn psychic powers, then we can formulate an explanation that accounts for a number of empirical observations. For beings with inborn psychic powers, it would be natural to interact with humans using such powers. Such interactions might stimulate latent psychic abilities in human beings, thus accounting for poltergeist effects that follow UFO encounters. It is also conceivable that humans with “psychic track records” might be especially compatible with the alien entities, thus explaining why people who report UFO encounters often turn out to have such track records.
This brings us to the second hypothesis: UFO entities and all their paraphernalia are psychic projections of the human mind. This idea is related to Kenneth Ring’s concept of an objectively real imaginal realm that is somehow connected with human thought (see
page 156
). Such an imaginal realm would generate both psychic and UFO experiences in sensitive people, and it might also create actual physical effects.
One could hypothesize that the imaginal realm is a product of individual human thoughts. This idea is quite popular and could be called the psychic hypothesis. The table on
page 167
lists six different formulations of this hypothesis by popular UFO writers. (These are not necessarily the only UFO theories advanced by these writers.)
One could also propose that the imaginal realm exists as a collective “mind at large” that is independent of individual minds and may even be the underlying cause of the human mind.
To me, it seems doubtful that ordinary humans have the power to call into being flying objects that can reflect radar, chase jet planes, and interfere with automobiles. If human imagination has so much power, then why don’t typical sci-fi movie monsters materialize in American cities? If an imaginal realm is the cause of UFO phenomena, then it is much more powerful than individual human minds. Since UFO phenomena only partially follow popular culture, such an imaginal realm must also be independent of the contents of our individual minds.
An independently acting imaginal realm that can produce physical effects is the equivalent of a transphysical world that interacts with the world of matter. Such a world might have its own inhabitants which are capable of visiting our world. If that transphysical world is the source of the physical world, then its humanoid inhabitants might be closely related to the human inhabitants of this world. In this way, the concept of
an imaginal realm can be related to the idea that the UFO humanoids may be objectively real beings that have psychic powers and are fundamentally similar to ourselves.
Here I should note that psychic phenomena and UFO phenomena are both reported to violate the known laws of physics. Thus, when I say that the UFO entities may be similar to us, I do not mean to suggest that they are simply molecular machines, made of matter as we ordinarily think of it. Human beings may also be something more than molecular machines
.