part0015

I n this survey of the reported UFO phenomena, there are three additional topics that we will need to discuss: contactees, channeling, and UFO-related communications and doctrines. These have been part of the UFO scene since at least the late nineteen forties, and so it is difficult to disregard them. Yet they also involve a great deal of material that sounds highly implausible, and a natural response is to dismiss it out of hand.

However, there are good reasons for giving this material a careful appraisal. Some of it is clearly fraudulent, and we should be aware of this. Some of it may also be genuine, and it may shed important light on the nature of the UFO phenomenon. The unifying theme of the three topics in this chapter is that of detailed communication between human beings and ostensible nonhuman beings. There is great opportunity for fraud here because the idea of such communication appeals deeply to the human mind and therefore allows for many forms of exploitation and self-delusion. At the same time, detailed communications, when genuine, can reveal a great deal of useful information about the communicators.

I will begin with the topic of UFO contactees. In recent years, the study of UFO abductions has become respectable for many ufologists, even though it is largely ignored or rejected by the scientific community. However, there is another kind of reported close-encounter case that tends to be rejected even by established UFO researchers. This is the so-called contactee case, in which a person known as a contactee meets with beings from other worlds on a friendly basis. Contactees may claim to have been selected by these beings to carry their message to humankind, and sometimes they claim to have been taken on visits to other planets in spaceships.

The bad reputation of the contactees became established in the early 1950s, when a number of people began to publicly promote extraordinary extraterrestrial contact stories that were backed up by very little evidence. UFO researcher Richard Hall sarcastically characterized the typical early contactee as “a technician tinkerer, typically male, 40 to 60 years old, from a troubled or disrupted childhood, poorly educated and needing a ghost writer for his book.” 1

Typically, these men presented themselves as specially chosen prophets, and in some cases they tried to impress the public by falsely adopting grandiose titles and academic degrees. They could easily be dismissed as alienated incompetents who took to dishonest means to earn some money, make a name for themselves, or overcome some psychological imbalance.

1. “Professor” George Adamski was an amateur philosopher and hamburger stand grill cook who claimed to have met Orthon, a man from Venus, on November 20, 1952, near Desert Center, California. He took pictures of Venusian spaceships that are widely regarded as hoaxes. 2

2. Truman Bethurum claimed to have met a space woman named Aura Rhanes from the planet Clarion, which is on the other side of the sun. He was widely denounced as a charlatan, and Dr. Edward U. Condon went to the trouble of proving in his Condon Report that Clarion could not exist. 3

3. Daniel Fry wrote that he was “recognized by many as the best-informed scientist in the world on the subject of space and space travel.” He claimed to have met Space People who were descendants of the ancient civilization of Lemuria. 4

4. Howard Menger served in the U.S. Army and subsequently ran an advertising and sign-painting business. He claimed to have had many contacts with Space People from Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, starting at the age of ten. He said that he had lived on Venus in a previous life. 5

5. George Van Tassel hosted the Giant Rock Space Conventions, which were highly popular between 1954 and 1970. He claimed to be in contact with the “Council of Seven Lights,” which rules this solar system. 6

6. Orfeo Angelucci was an uneducated but intelligent Italian-American who had UFO experiences of a highly mystical, religious nature His experiences were interpreted by the psychologist Carl Jung as sincerely reported products of subconscious mental processes. 7

Jung, by the way, is known for his interpretation of UFO experiences as psychological projections. However, it is not so well known that he thought some UFOs were real objects. He wrote: “So far as I know it remains an established fact, supported by numerous observations, that Ufos have not only been seen visually but have also been picked up on the radar screen and have left traces on the photographic plate. . . . It boils down to nothing less than this: that either psychic projections throw back a radar echo, or else the appearance of real objects affords an opportunity for mythological projections.” 8

Although Jung treated Angelucci in a sympathetic fashion, most authors who write about the contactees simply dismiss them with contempt and ridicule. I suspect that such blanket dismissals may be naive and unjust in some cases, since real-life stories often turn out to be more complex than one might expect. Nonetheless, many of these men probably were trying to gain money or followers by promoting false claims. Such promotional activity is unfortunately still going on today, and so-called contactees are running mail-order businesses advertising such items as:

3. A videotape by a 36,000-year-old Space Commander that explains “the brutal, inter-universal war that has been going on between the Universa Federation and the Negitarian Confederation for thousands of years” ($19.95).

I have not investigated these particular ads, and thus I cannot insist that they are phony. But the overall impression conveyed by this material—and there is a vast flood of it—is that much of it consists of “con games” intended to separate fools from their money. This does not enhance the credibility of persons who claim to make contact with unknown beings. However, the fact that some people promote bogus stories does not imply that all claims of otherworldly contact are false. Each unusual claim has to be evaluated on its own merits.

Some contact stories may be deliberate hoaxes created from the beginning for commercial motives. In other cases, a person may try to exploit a genuine experience and later make dishonest additions to his story to enhance its commercial value. Or he may sincerely believe his story, become emotionally committed to it, and then try to embroider it to make it more convincing. In such cases we would expect to see evidence for a real experience overlaid by evidence reflecting increasing dishonesty and self-delusion.

The case of George Adamski may be an example of this. There is a sympathetic discussion of Adamski written by Lou Zinsstag, a niece of the psychologist Carl Jung. Zinsstag argued that some of Adamski’s early contact experiences were genuine but that later on he somehow became misled and falsely claimed such things as having made a trip to Saturn to attend “the Twelve Counsellors’ Meeting of our Sun System.” 9 She also pointed out that he had a mail-order scheme in which people would send him a photo, their birthdate, and $5.00, and he would give them a reading telling them which planet they came from. 10

Interestingly enough, Zinsstag said she had personally seen evidence indicating that Adamski possessed unusual psychic powers, and she noted that he had resorted to trance mediumship to contact space beings. 11 She speculated that in later years he may have been led astray by disinformation, implanted either by inimical psychic communicators or by inimical humans with expertise in hypnotism. 12

Adamski’s own developing egotism may also have played a role. Although Zinsstag was a leading member of Adamski’s group in Europe, she later rejected him, saying, “he now wants co-workers who implicitly believe in him like in God. This is something I can’t do.” 13

A similar appraisal of Adamski was made by the UFO researcher Ray Stanford. William Mendez, who investigated the famous Pascagoula case, was told by Stanford that he had known Adamski. Stanford said that “Adamski made up all that Venus stuff (and more) but at one time he really did have a flying saucer experience and that, in Adamski’s mind, justified making up stories about them.” 14

If abduction and contactee stories could be cleanly separated into two distinct categories, then one could simplify things by leaving aside the contactee stories. Unfortunately, however, this is not possible. Practically any feature that is found in contactee stories can also be found in some abduction accounts, and there seems to be a continuum of scenarios ranging from typical abductions at one end to contactee cases at the other.

For example, Betty Andreasson reported an encounter in which she was taken on board a UFO by “Gray” aliens in 1967 and subjected to a harrowing physical examination. She also recalled having striking religious experiences during this encounter, and she reported being told by the aliens that they had chosen her to “show the world.” 15 Many features of her story are typical of UFO abductions, but the feature of being chosen as a messenger or prophet is reminiscent of contactee accounts.

The story of William Herrmann also shares features typical of both abduction and contactee cases. This case was studied by the UFO researcher Wendelle Stevens, and I will present information taken from his written account and from a videotape he produced featuring interviews with Herrmann. 16

Unlike contactees who extensively exploit their stories, Herrmann seemed to regard his UFO experiences simply as impediments to his normal life. He is a fundamentalist Christian, and his involvement with UFOs has apparently created serious difficulties for him with his fellow church members. In discussions of his experiences, he has mainly expressed bewilderment and a desire to understand what happened to him. He has also insisted that he did not believe in UFOs or have any interest in them prior to his UFO experiences.

Herrmann reported that he was abducted on March 18, 1978, near Charleston, South Carolina, by beings identifying themselves as Reticulans. He described these beings as short, hairless, and large-headed, with slitlike mouths and small noses, and he said that they brought him on board their craft by hitting him with a blue beam of light. He then became bewildered, and his next clear memory was of lying on a table in the presence of three of the beings. After being given a tour of the ship and seeing all kinds of incomprehensible machinery, he was returned to the earth in a state of terror fifteen miles from his starting point. 17 At that point, he lost all memory of his experiences on board the UFO, and he recovered these memories later with the aid of hypnosis.

Thus far Herrmann’s story followed the standard abduction scenario. He testified, however, that the Reticulans later began to transmit complex messages to him through automatic writing, and they also completely unblocked his memory of the abduction. 18 Subsequently, he entered into a friendly relation with these beings, and he was taken on board their craft voluntarily. 19 He recalled without hypnosis that they took him on a ride down to the Rio Salado in Argentina, and then back north to Florida, where they showed him the Manned Space Complex. This part of his story is typical of contactee cases.

The reception of messages through automatic writing is an example of a process, popularly known as channeling, in which a person writes or speaks material that he does not recognize as coming from his own mind. Such material is often thought to emanate from some other being, who is acting as an information transmitter, but it may actually originate in the mind of the channeler.

Channeled communications have frequently taken place in contactee cases, and thus the automatic writing produced by Herrmann is a link between his case and cases of this kind. I will discuss the content of some of the messages he produced later in this chapter (see pages 180–85 ).

Another report combining features of abduction and contactee cases involved Filiberto Cardenas, a Cuban immigrant living in Hialeah, Florida. This case was investigated by a lawyer and UFO investigator named Virgilio Sanchez-Ocejo, and my information on the case comes from his account. 20

In Cuba, Cardenas had studied physical therapy and had become an electrocardiac technician. He joined the Cuban Army, found himself on the wrong side of Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution, and wound up spending nine years in prison. On being freed from prison, he emigrated to the United States, where he worked at various jobs and ran a gift shop and later a gas station.

On the evening of January 3, 1979, Cardenas, his friend Fernando Marti, and Marti’s wife and 13-year-old daughter were driving around on the outskirts of Hialeah, looking for a pig they could buy for a roast. They were unsuccessful, and on the way home their car engine quit.

The two men testified that the lights and starter wouldn’t work, and so they got out and began to look under the hood. At this point, they suddenly saw red and violet alternating lights reflecting off the engine and heard a sound “like many bees.” The car began to shake, the light turned to a brilliant white, and Fernando began to crawl further under the hood for protection. Meanwhile, Filiberto felt paralyzed, and he began to rise into the air, shouting, “Don’t take me. Don’t take me.” Fernando saw him rising up, and by the time he got out from under the hood, all he could see was a “bulky object that ascended and then moved away.” 21

The next thing Filiberto remembered was being nearly run over by a car on the Tamiami Trail about 16 kilometers from where he had been lifted up. The police were sufficiently puzzled by the story that they listed the Type of Offense as “close encounter of the third kind” in their official report. 22

Under hypnosis, Filiberto initially refused to say what happened during the abduction because “they told me not to say anything.” 23 Later he recounted a strange and elaborate story that began when he awoke to find himself sitting, paralyzed, in the presence of a robotlike being and two small men in tight-fitting suits.

One of the men tried to speak to Filiberto in German, English, and finally Spanish, and he rotated a button on the side of his chest each time he switched languages. Filiberto was given an examination that he said left 108 marks on his body, and then he was taken into the presence of an individual who was seated on a high throne and who wore a cape and a chain from which hung a triangular stone. This personage spoke to him at length, both telepathically and in perfect Spanish, and showed him many remarkable scenes displayed on the walls. 24

Filiberto said that the alien beings looked quite human. They had elongated eyes with eyelashes, small flattened noses, long lipless mouths, and light beards. They also wore a symbol on the right of their chest, consisting of a serpent on a lazy X. 25

The story becomes even more extraordinary: The beings proceeded to take Filiberto to an undersea base, traveling beneath the sea at high speed through a tunnel of “firmed water” that seemed to open in front of the craft so that water did not touch it. At the base, he met a human who was working with the aliens, and he was led through what seemed like a city. He was again paralyzed and examined, and a semen sample was taken. Afterwards, another caped, enthroned figure gave him instructions illustrated with images on banks of TVs. After many similar experiences that seemed to go on for many days, he was dropped off near the Tamiami Trail after a lapse of about two hours in local earth time. 26

This could be called a story of not enough missing time. The story is certainly difficult to believe, but there is no need to suppose that it must be completely true or completely false. It is possible, for example, that Filiberto Cardenas was actually carried off into the sky as Marti testified. But the experiences he related under hypnosis may have been partially generated by his own mind. Or they may have been projected into his mind by the agency that carried him off.

As in the Herrmann case, there was a second meeting with the aliens. On this occasion, Filiberto and his wife Iris voluntarily walked up a ramp into the alien ship and had a friendly conversation with its nearly human occupants. They were subsequently able to directly remember this experience, with no need for hypnosis. 27 This kind of voluntary meeting on an alien ship is typical of contactee stories, but for two witnesses to participate in such a meeting is unusual.

Although the Cardenas case has many features typical of contactee cases, it also has many standard features of UFO abduction reports. These include stories of implants that could not be detected medically, stories of crosses between aliens and humans, and stories of psychic phenomena that followed the abduction. 28 Of course, it also includes the dramatic abduction itself, which was confirmed by three eyewitnesses.

I will refer to information people have reported receiving from UFO entities as “UFO communications.” As we saw in the Cardenas case, this information may be presented during an abduction in the form verbal statements by the entities and elaborate visual imagery. After an abduction, information may also be transmitted through automatic writing or unusually vivid, forced dreams that are attributed to the entities. If we make a survey of UFO communications, we find that they tend to contain a large proportion of misleading or completely false information, mixed with material that may be true. This tendency towards falsehood is consistent with a hypothesis of alien deception, and in this section I will illustrate it with a number of examples.

One example involves a story related to UFO investigator Jacques Vallee by a woman he called Helen. 29 Helen was traveling with three friends from Lompoc, California, to Los Angeles in the summer of 1968. While driving in a flat, open area at about 3:00 a.m., all four persons saw a white light in the sky that moved in an erratic fashion and approached their car. As it approached, they saw that it was a white, glowing object with a width of about six freeway lanes. It swooped over the car and projected four funnel-shaped lights over the bodies of the four witnesses. This caused them to separate from their bodies and float out of the car, which apparently continued down the road. Vallee said that he got in touch with two of the other witnesses, and they independently confirmed this part of the story.

Under hypnosis, Helen recalled being taken on board the UFO and meeting a man dressed in white who showed her an amazing motor. She became determined to build this motor. In fact, this became the central concern of her life, and she initially approached Vallee in order to enlist his help in building it. But Vallee pointed out that the motor, as the woman described it, is completely unworkable.

A similar story involves the UFO witness named Sara Shaw, whose case was investigated by Ann Druffel and the parapsychologist D. Scott Rogo. 30 The story began with a frightening experience involving missing time in a lonely cabin in Tujunga Canyon near Los Angeles. After this experience, Sara became interested in medical knowledge and took a job in a hospital. While working there, she saw a method of curing cancer in a sudden revelation, which seemed to her to come from some source outside herself. As in the case of Helen and the motor, Sara became determined to reveal this cure to the world.

When her experience in Tujunga Canyon was investigated using hypnosis, a classical UFO abduction scenario emerged. In addition, Sara reported that she was told about the cancer cure while on the UFO. Unfortunately, the cancer cure, which involves injecting vinegar into cancerous tumors, is an old folk remedy for cancer that doesn’t work.

Now one might argue that the cancer cure really came to Sara through partially forgotten knowledge of the folk remedy and that the UFO story was simply a creation of her subconscious mind under hypnosis. However, this does not explain her preoccupation with this cure and the fact that her fascination with medical knowledge began immediately after her Tujunga Canyon experience.

It is also curious that Sara’s story involved seeking out a physician to tell about the cure. At a certain point, she realized intuitively that a certain Dr. Allini was the right physician. When she approached him with the cure, it turned out that he was indeed receptive to studying it. In fact, he said he had already heard about it from a local man who claimed to have received it from UFO entities. 31 So we seem to have two independent stories in which the same ineffective cancer cure was allegedly promoted by beings from UFOs.

Now why should beings flying about in high-tech vehicles cause people to develop overriding interests in impossible motors and ineffective cures? Whatever the reason, there is evidence suggesting that such beings sometimes give quite elaborate presentations of nonsensical information. An example of this is the abduction case of William Herrmann (see pages 175–76 ).

Herrmann claimed that in 1979 the beings contacting him identified their point of origin as the stars Zeta1 and Zeta2 Reticuli. 32 Apparently, they did this by transmitting information to Herrmann through the medium of automatic writing.

At that time, these stars were quite famous in UFO circles as a result of the celebrated star map reported by Betty Hill. The Hill abduction occurred on September 19, 1961, and Betty Hill recalled dreaming of a star map on a wall in the UFO. This map supposedly included the aliens’ home star. Betty Hill first drew this star map in 1964 while under hypnosis. In 1966, Marjorie Fish, an intellectually brilliant grade-school teacher, began an effort to model the star patterns in the vicinity of the earth and identify the pattern represented by Betty Hill’s map. In the early autumn of 1972, she concluded that the home base on the map must be Zeta1 or Zeta2 Reticuli. This finding was written up in the July 1973 issue of Saga and the January 1974 issue of Pursuit . 33 It was discussed in Astronomy magazine in the issue of December 1974. 34

How did Herrmann come to mention Zeta Reticuli? He was a born-again Christian and an auto mechanic, and he swore that he had no interest in UFOs before his close-encounter experiences. If this is true, it is unlikely that he had heard of Betty Hill’s star map. However, it is possible that he may have heard of the star map in conversations with UFO investigators after his abduction in March of 1978. One can then hypothesize that the information could have emerged from his unconscious mind during his automatic writing.

However, Herrmann’s messages from the Reticulans do have a number of strange features that are hard to account for by the hypothesis that they are entirely produced by his mind. Here is an extract from one of the messages:

A combination of gravity equilibrium manipulation by electromagnetic energy-mass conversion within a unified field of positive and negative particle beam fusions . . . using kinetic energy and harnessed static electricity a conversion takes place that increases the energy flow into the electromagnetic wave cohesive force chamber . . . thus resulting in action/reaction basis of fluctuation. The manipulation effect is maintained by continual increase and decrease of the electromagnetic wave MPS (manipulation per sequence). 35

Wendelle Stevens observed that this kind of statement is completely out of character for Herrmann, and it is not to be expected from a person of his educational background. Possibly it involves more than Herrmann’s own unconscious mind.

At the same time, the message does not look like a genuine communication of technical information. If one wanted to transmit technical knowledge using this kind of vocabulary, the only rational way to do it would be to make step-by-step definitions of terms that would be intelligible to the intended audience, and that is not what we see here. The message is reminiscent of Helen’s impossible motor or Sara’s unworkable cancer cure. It would appear that, for some reason, gibberish was being transmitted to Herrmann. One can also postulate that a meaningful message was being garbled in the process of being transmitted through Herrmann’s mind. But intelligent beings responsible for the transmission would be expected to know about such distortion and be able to correct for it.

Some of this gibberish makes use of technical knowledge of the kind one could look up in various reference books. For example, in one communication there are complicated mathematical formulas and a reference to “ORBITAL ECCENTRICITY: 0.0167.” 36 In fact, according to astronomy textbooks, the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit is 0.0167. 37

Unless Herrmann studied astronomy, it seems unlikely that he would have run across this datum. In his writing and in videotaped interviews, he comes across as a sincere person who would be unlikely to consult textbooks to fabricate a phony story. At the same time, it seems doubtful that alien space travelers would use this particular three-significant-digit eccentricity figure in their calculations. We are thus left with the alternatives of fraud on Herrmann’s part or fraud on the part of beings communicating with him.

Some of the technical points in the messages clearly were not taken from current textbooks. For example, in the mid 1970s, astronomers maintained that Zeta1 and Zeta2 Reticuli are 36.6 light-years from the earth. 38 In contrast, the communications to Herrmann repeatedly mention a distance of 32 light-years.

Another curious point is that Herrmann’s communications from the Reticulans refer repeatedly to an organization they call “the Network.” Now, the word reticulum means “network” in Latin. It would seem that whoever created Herrmann’s Reticulan story may have been indulging in bilingual puns. This seems a bit strange either for a South Carolina auto mechanic or for aliens from another planet.

There is a curious story behind the phrase “MPS (manipulation per sequence)” in the Reticulan message quoted above. This phrase showed up in notes dated 9/10/85 on a telephone interview between the UFO investigator James McCampbell and the physicist Paul Bennewitz. 39 Bennewitz was investigating UFO activities in the Albuquerque, New Mexico, area, and some have said that he was driven off the deep end by UFO disinformation spread by government agents (see pages 110–15 ).

In the notes presented by McCampbell, Bennewitz referred to the term MPS, saying that for alien craft “the MPS (manipulations per sequence/second) changes its frequency on a periodic basis.” 40 Compare this to Herrmann’s reference to “continual increase and decrease of the electromagnetic wave MPS (manipulation per sequence).”

There are other apparent coincidences between the statements of Bennewitz and Herrmann. Herrmann said he observed the Reticulan vehicles moving in triangular patterns, and he said that the Reticulans explained to him during his abduction that they did this to avoid harmful effects from U.S. military radar. 41 Bennewitz maintained that he had photographed UFOs as they flew in triangular or square patterns, making acute-angled turns in a 20th of a second. He also said that high-powered radar can interfere with these UFOs. 42 He said that some of the aliens might come from Zeta Reticuli, and he mentioned that they came from distances “up to and larger than 32 light-years away.” 43 Like Herrmann, he also said that they have a federation called “The Network.” 44

This information seems to solidly link Herrmann with the material ascribed to Bennewitz. Some possible explanations of this are: (1) Bennewitz or some disinformer in contact with him copied from Herrmann (whose statements preceded Bennewitz’s), (2) Bennewitz and Herrmann were both victims of the same group of disinformers, or (3) there is some connection between Herrmann’s abductors and the aliens discussed by Bennewitz. It is difficult to say which alternative is correct.

Throughout this chapter, one hypothesis that has always been in the background is that material in ostensible communications from UFO entities is really being transmitted through human society by ordinary means. Let us look more closely at the idea of radar-induced UFO crashes from this point of view.

The history and possible genesis of the radar-induced-crash story is a bit difficult to unravel. An article in the Kansas City newspaper The Wyandotte Echo of January 6, 1950, gave a version of the radar interference explanation of saucer crashes. The article said that “since they seem to invariably crash near radar installations, it is surmised that they are attracted by radar, or possibly radar waves interfere with their control systems.” 45 According to William Moore, 46 the story in The Wyandotte Echo can be traced to friends of Silas Newton, who was the source of information for Frank Scully’s controversial book Behind the Flying Saucers . This book came out in 1950 and discussed a UFO crash that supposedly took place in 1948.

The radar story also appeared in a memo supposedly sent to the director of the FBI from Guy Hottel on March 22, 1950. This memo gave a somewhat artificial sounding description of three 50-foot-diameter flying saucers, each containing three humanoid bodies, that had been recovered by the Air Force in New Mexico. It went on to say:

According to Mr. . . . informant, the saucers were found in New Mexico due to the fact that the government has a very high-powered radar setup in that area and it is believed that the radar interferes with the controlling mechanism of the saucers.

Moore also claimed that this memo can be traced back to The Wyandotte Echo, although this seems doubtful since the newspaper article speaks of two flying saucers with two bodies apiece. 48 In any event, it seems that the radar-induced-crash story goes back as far as 1950.

During Herrmann’s first UFO abduction in 1979, his captors reportedly told him that some of their space ships were sensitive to radar. Apparently, some of their ships went out of control and crashed because radar interference damaged their on-board computers. The entities told Herrmann that this had last happened about 30 years previous to the date of his abduction. 49 Since the abduction occurred in 1979, this means that the last crash was in 1949. This ties in Herrmann’s radar story with the stories relating to UFO crashes in about 1948.

Did Herrmann’s story come to him from these earlier stories by ordinary means of communication? The story is definitely obscure, and we would have to suppose that Herrmann heard it from some irresponsible UFO investigator (or some such person) and then falsely incorporated it into his own account. Or we would have to suppose that, contrary to his testimony, Herrmann really had done considerable reading of UFO literature.

The radar-induced-crash idea came up in another close-encounter story. On December 3, 1967, a police officer named Herb Schirmer saw a strange, lighted object on the road ahead of him at 2:30 a.m. When he flashed his high beams at it, it took off, and Schirmer reported seeing a flying saucer. This came to the attention of the Condon committee, and arrangements were made to hypnotize Schirmer. Hypnosis revealed a complex experience in which Schirmer was met in his car by beings who took him aboard the UFO. There the beings told him many bizarre-sounding things, including that their craft operated by reverse electromagnetism, that they drew power from water reservoirs, and that their ships had been knocked out of the air by radar. 50 Jacques Vallee, interestingly enough, regards this as disinformation by the UFO beings.

To make things worse, Schirmer said that the beings were wearing coveralls with an emblem of a winged serpent. 51 Likewise, William Herrmann reported that the beings he saw had a metallic figure worked into the fabric on the left breast of their one-piece jumpsuits. It was an image of a winged serpent. 52 Filiberto Cardenas and his wife reported seeing an emblem of a serpent on a lazy X on the right breast of the jump suits worn by their captors. 53 Also, the psychologist John Carpenter mentioned the case of a 29-year-old abductee who had not read any UFO books but who recalled captors of the “Gray” type wearing “a tight-fitting uniform with an emblem on the chest depicting a winged serpent.” 54

Are serpent emblem stories also circulating and being incorporated into the UFO tales of supposedly honest witnesses? Why would anyone want to adopt these pointless stories and lie about them? It could be argued that people hear them, forget them, and then bring them forth from their subconscious minds. But why do such arbitrary stories have such an effect on the subconscious mind that they can override people’s power of discrimination between imagination and reality?

Another radar story comes up in the case of Staff Sgt. Charles L. Moody of the U.S. Air Force, who had a UFO close encounter on August 13, 1975, near Alamogordo, New Mexico ( page 220 ). Over a period of two months, Moody gradually remembered a typical abduction by beings of the classical “Gray” type. Among other things, he reported being told by these beings that radar interferes with their navigational devices. 55

It is impossible to know for sure how these stories are being transmitted. Some of them may be literally true, but those that are false are not necessarily due to manmade lies and delusions. Vallee’s option is also a possibility. For example, it is conceivable that a manmade radar story from 1950 might have been transmitted to Herrmann, Schirmer, and Moody by actual nonhuman beings, perhaps as part of their own disinformation plan. This would be consistent with the use of constants from astronomy textbooks in communications to Herrmann.

One might ask why humanoid beings would want to spread disinformation about themselves. One possible answer is that the function of disinformation is to make a subject unbelievable. If “they” want to conceal their activities, then the spreading of ridiculous stories about themselves is a very practical way to achieve this.

To sum up this subsection, one can always dismiss Herrmann as a fraud or a suggestible victim of human manipulators. But there is also the possibility that he was telling a genuine story of his experiences. Perhaps Herrmann did have an encounter with strange beings riding UFOs. If so, it appears that these beings may have presented him with nonsensical communications using material—some of it very obscure—that was borrowed from earthly culture.

The material I have just discussed gives us some idea of the quality and level of truthfulness of UFO communications. In this section and the next, I would like to discuss some of the particular themes that come up repeatedly in this material. I will begin by considering the story that extraterrestrials created modern humans by mating with existing primitive people on the earth. The theory that humankind was created by some kind of extraterrestrial genetic manipulation comes up repeatedly in UFO-related communications, and it is related to stories of present-day genetic manipulation of humans by UFO entities.

According to some scholars, the genetic intervention theory can be found in ancient Hebrew and Sumerian texts. For example, the geologist Christian O’Brien argued that these texts describe a race of beings called Shining Ones—his translation of the Hebrew word Elohim. 56 These beings created modern humans from earlier human forms by genetic manipulation. Some of these beings, called Watchers, mated with humans, and this was considered a crime by the leaders of the Shining Ones. O’Brien argued that the Shining Ones were superior but mortal beings of unknown origin.

The Israeli scholar Zecharia Sitchin used ancient Sumerian and Babylonian texts to argue that modern human beings were created by space travelers called the Nefilim, who then mated with them and quarreled over what to do with them. According to Sitchin, the Nefilim created humans by genetically modifying Homo erectus. 57

O’Brien and Sitchin based their ideas on ancient Near Eastern texts, but in 1950 Pope Pius XII arrived at a very similar idea in what appeared to be an attempt to reconcile evolution with the Bible. He decreed that it is acceptable to Catholics that the human body evolved from other living matter already in existence. But he held that Catholics must believe that present humans are descended from Adam and Eve, since otherwise there could be no doctrine of original sin. This implies that Adam and Eve resulted from divine intervention, but that all other organisms, including ape-men, evolved in the Darwinian fashion. 58

The genetic intervention theory has shown up in the stories circulating about UFOs and the U.S. Government. The American UFO researcher Linda Howe claimed that a version of this theory was part of a “presidential briefing paper” shown to her by AFOSI agent Richard Doty. (AFOSI stands for Air Force Office of Special Investigations.) According to this paper, the extraterrestrials in contact with the U.S. Government have come to the Earth at various times to manipulate DNA in existing terrestrial primates. Supposedly, this was done 25,000, 15,000, 5,000, and 2,500 years ago. In addition, two thousand years ago extraterrestrials created a being that was “placed on this earth to teach mankind about love and non-violence.” 59

Doty has publicly denied showing such a document to Linda Howe, and the genetic manipulation story belongs to the realm of rumors and disinformation. 60 But where did the story originate?

The genetic intervention theory also surfaces through a variety of UFO-related channeled communications. This might indicate that the idea has a strong grip on people’s minds and therefore tends to emerge from the subconscious. Or it may be that it is actually being communicated to channelers from a source external to themselves. A combination of these possibilities could also be true.

Here is an example in which the theory emerges from a channeled communication. The medium Carla Rueckert produced elaborate trance communications that purportedly came from the Ra entity, a “social memory complex” that had visited the earth in spaceships in the days of ancient Egypt. Ra’s story of human origins can be summed up as follows:

War on Mars caused that planet to become inhospitable and its human population died. The “Yahweh” group produced humans of modern type on the earth 75,000 years ago by cloning genetic material from the dead Martians. The first modern humans on earth appeared at this time; half were from the Martians, half developed from barely erect native bipeds, and a quarter came from other planets. 61

The Ra communications stated that the Yahweh group was a task force of advanced extraterrestrials. The genetic intervention theory presented here is similar to others we have seen, but there are differences, such as the reference to Martians. This is typical of UFO and channeled communications. Certain themes come up again and again, but the stories all tend to differ in detail.

The genetic intervention theory dates back at least to the early 1950s. At that time Ralph M. Holland, an engineer living in Cayahoga Falls, Ohio, said he was in touch with humanlike space travelers that he called Etherians. These beings claimed to live on an etheric plane of existence. According to Holland, they told him that they had created the human race in the following manner:

When these groups first came to the physical plane of your planet, they found that their physical bodies were not entirely suited to the environment. In an effort to improve the situation, they began, by selective breeding and cross-breeding, to develop a better adapted physical body. The final choice was the ancestor race of the present Adamic races, which was a cross between the Elder Races themselves and a certain manlike animal native to your planet. 62

Linda Howe has presented an abduction case in which the alien intervention theory shows up. This case involved a New Jersey woman named A. Allen, who is black and American Indian. She remembered under hypnosis having an encounter with a 7-foot-tall male being who had eyes with vertical slit pupils. 63 Howe stated that this woman “believes that Homo sapiens were originally created to be someone else’s work force on Earth to mine minerals and do physical labor for a tall race of beings who have been harvesting this planet for eons.” 64

When I asked her where the woman may have gotten these ideas, Howe said that they emerged during the hypnosis sessions probing her abduction. She said that the woman was not well educated, and she was not a reader of many books. However, the idea that humans were created as miners appears in Zecharia Sitchin’s book The 12th Planet . 65 The miner detail may link Allen’s story with Sitchin’s book.

My last example of the genetic intervention theory is found in Raymond Fowler’s book The Watchers. In that book, Fowler asked, “Was Cro-Magnon Man placed on earth intact or was he the result of a genetic transformation of Neanderthal Man by alien beings?” 66 He based this speculative idea on the evidence he has gathered for a genetic element in UFO abduction reports, combined with the well-known idea that Cro-Magnon Man abruptly replaced the Neanderthals. Fowler also noted the Biblical passages about the “Sons of God” who found the daughters of man to be fair and who mated with them, producing “mighty men, men of renown.”

Fowler called the extraterrestrials the “Watchers” and speculated that they have been concerned with the human race from its very beginning. He got this term from the contactee Betty Andreasson, who was extensively studied by Fowler, and who said that her abductors referred to themselves as “Watchers.” 67 The genetic manipulation of humans is a prominent theme in Andreasson’s abduction accounts.

All of these versions of the genetic intervention theory share common elements that are found in human cultural traditions—in this case traditions recorded in Biblical apocrypha and Sumerian mythology. It is puzzling that this theory keeps coming up in alien contact stories, but here are some possible reasons for this: (1) This happens because the genetic intervention theory has a strange psychological attraction that induces people to imagine being told about it by alien beings. (2) It happens because a cabal of sinister disinformers is spreading the theory. (3) It happens because UFO entities are taking the genetic intervention theory from human culture and using it for their own program of conditioning human society. (4) The theory is a true picture of our origins, and the entities are presenting it to us as such.

There is some support for option (1). The genetic intervention theory is a neat compromise solution to the conflict between Darwinian evolution theory and Biblical creationism. For this reason it could have intellectual appeal to many people. But this still doesn’t explain why people should say they experience hearing about it from alien beings.

Option (2) also doesn’t explain why people should report such experiences. However, this is explained by options (3) and (4). Option (4) cannot be strictly true, since there are many differing versions of the genetic intervention theory, and they cannot all be correct. This leaves us with (3).

The case of Betty Andreasson provides another example of a UFO-related experience that is consistent with option (3). When hypnosis was used to probe her 1967 abduction, Betty recalled being taken in a UFO to a tunnel bored through solid rock. This tunnel led to a strange landscape with a view of an ocean, a distant city, and a pyramid surmounted by an “Egyptian head.” She was conducted by two entities along an elevated track to a place where she saw a vivid enactment of the Egyptian myth of the Phoenix, a giant bird that consumes itself with fire and is then resurrected from the ashes. 68

This experience had strong religious overtones, and Betty Andreasson is a fundamentalist Christian. However, the Phoenix story is not used by modern fundamentalists, even though it was used by early Christians. Thus the Phoenix motif may have been chosen by visiting entities, rather than by Andreasson’s conscious or unconscious mind. In support of this idea, Fowler pointed out that the enactment of the Phoenix story recalled by Andreasson involved small details that are part of the original Egyptian myth but are not widely known (such as the fact that a worm emerged from the ashes, rather than a young bird).

A common theme in UFO communications is that human beings are in danger of some terrible disaster caused either by nature or by their own actions. This theme tends to be intertwined with the theme of genetic manipulation. In this section, I will discuss these themes with the aim of gaining some more insight into the motives behind UFO communications and their possible sources.

Disasters involving the earth’s atmosphere are mentioned repeatedly in UFO communications. For example, Whitley Strieber said he was shown “graphic depictions of the death of the atmosphere, not to mention the entire planet simply exploding.” 69 William Herrmann said that his Reticulan contacts informed him that the earth’s magnetic field was decaying and that radiation from space would soon wreak havoc on living organisms. 70

The Ra communicator, in a more philosophical vein, spoke of a coming transition of the earth in which it would no longer be inhabitable by grossly embodied beings of the “third density.” This involves a crisis attended by ruptures in the earth’s “outer garment”—which presumably is the atmosphere. 71 In 1953, a medium named Mark Probert made the following statement in a trance communication on UFOs and their occupants: “Your present danger, mitigated for a time by the Guardians, lies in the progressive breakdown of the upper ethers, i.e., of the ionosphere.” 72

As we see in other UFO communications, these statements about the atmosphere have a surreal quality. They seem to be expressed more in dream symbolism than in objective scientific language. Probert’s statement sounds the most realistic, although the ozone layer, which is now thought to be breaking down, lies below the ionosphere. The statement was made in 1953, well before the time of the controversies about the ozone layer in the early 1970s. The other statements about the atmosphere were, of course, made during or after this period.

Some feel that channeled communications such as Probert’s are dubious and shouldn’t be mentioned. Nonetheless, they may have an important bearing on communications received during UFO encounters because (1) they are often similar in content and (2) channeling takes place in some UFO contact cases. It is perhaps significant that many of the things mentioned in current UFO communications were also being mentioned in channeled communications in the early 1950s. Two other examples of this are the genetic intervention theory and the idea that radar can cause UFOs to crash.

The dangers of manmade pollution and nuclear testing are frequently mentioned in UFO communications. For example, these topics came up in a close-encounter case that took place in May 1973 near Houston, Texas. The witness, Judy Doraty, was driving along with four family members. All five people remembered seeing a very bright light in the sky that paced their car. The family members remembered Judy pulling off the road and walking to the back of the car, then returning, getting back in, and complaining of thirst and nausea. She drove home with the light still following, and upon arriving they all watched it perform strange antics in the sky. They found that they had lost about an hour and fifteen minutes.

This time gap was filled in through hypnosis administered on March 3, 1980, by Dr. Leo Sprinkle, then Director of the Division of Counseling and Testing at the University of Wyoming. Sprinkle also tested the woman psychologically and said that she turned out to be completely normal. Under hypnosis, Judy Doraty related information communicated to her by entities on a UFO that she visited through an out-of-body experience. The entities were cutting up a calf, and they explained that they were doing this to monitor progressive pollution of the environment. The entities said that humans are going to destroy themselves through pollution, and they said that nuclear testing, including testing in outer space, is having very harmful effects on the earth.

Close-encounter witnesses often say they were warned about the dangers of manmade pollution, including pollution caused by nuclear tests. Of course, we all know that these dangers exist, and one explanation of Judy Doraty’s testimony is that worries about pollution and nuclear testing were simply surfacing within her mind, perhaps as a result of being under hypnosis. However, there are curious features in this testimony that are corroborated by other UFO accounts. For example, the beings said that humanity’s dangerous activities affect other unspecified beings:

Doraty: It’s like if we continue like we are now, it’s going to involve not only us but possibly other . . . and they’re trying to stop something that could cause a chain reaction. And maybe involving them. I don’t know.

This point also came up in a case studied by Dr. James Harder, a professor of civil engineering at UC Berkeley and a longtime UFO researcher. Pat Price, the main witness in the case, recalled sitting in front of a desk on board a UFO and conversing telepathically with the “leader.” Here is part of the conversation, as recalled under hypnosis:

If our activities affect “them,” one possible reason is that some of them might live here on the earth. This idea came up in the Doraty transcript, and it was mentioned explicitly in the testimony of Betty Andreasson. Here is a quotation from a hypnosis session in which alien entities seemed to be speaking through Betty Andreasson’s voice, using her as a kind of channel or spirit medium. She spoke of many races of visiting beings that work cooperatively together and pointed out that some of these races live on this earth:

The Andreasson testimony also presented the idea that pollution is going to cause serious harm to the human race. In one experience recalled under hypnosis, Betty had seen two fetuses taken from a woman abductee in a UFO. With horror she saw the aliens put long needles into the head and ears of one fetus and place it in a tank of liquid connected to a strange apparatus. The aliens gave her the following explanation for this:

They’re telling me they have to do this. And I’m saying, “Why do you have to do such a terrible thing?” And one of them is saying, “We have to because as time goes by, Mankind will become sterile. They will not be able to produce because of the pollutions of the lands and the waters and the air and the bacteria and the terrible things that are on the earth!” 76

This statement ties in the pollution problem mentioned to Judy Doraty with the idea that an alien race is engaged in genetic experimentation with human beings. These two themes also come up in a report presented by Jenny Randles. 77 On February 5, 1978, in Medinaceli, Spain, a 33-year-old veterinarian named Julio was abducted, along with his dog, by tall, Nordic-looking entities. The entities examined Julio, taking samples of blood, gastric juices, and semen. They told him that their world is a dark spoiled place, and they want to study our wonderful life-filled world before we make a mess of things as they did. They also mentioned small, ugly entities who have a strange idea of biologically reprogramming humans.

The entities reported by Betty Andreasson seemingly correspond to these “small, ugly” beings concerned with genetic manipulations. However, she remembered an occasion in which she was taken to their world, and she described it as gray, dark, and hazy all the time. 78 This agrees with the statement of Julio’s Nordic-looking entities, and one wonders if there are two dark worlds. Or perhaps there is a relationship between the two types of entities.

John R. Salter, who had an abduction experience on March 20, 1988 (see pages 144–45 ), also spoke of a dimly lit alien world. On January 9, 1990, he had a vivid dream in which he recalled being told that the beings who abducted him came from the Zeta Reticuli star system. On March 4, 1990, he had another vivid dream, which he perceived not as a recollection but as a direct telepathic communication from one of those beings. In this dream, he was visiting their world, and he noted that the light was very dim and the buildings were all white. 79 This kind of vivid dream is similar to a channeled communication in the sense that the subject receives information that he feels is coming from outside of himself. (Salter told me that he knew about Betty Hill and Zeta Reticuli before the dream of January 9, 1990, but he had only a slight acquaintance with the Hill case and no knowledge of the Zeta Reticuli story before his abduction experience in March of 1988.)

Another idea about the aliens’ world was expressed by “Lucille Forman,” a New York psychotherapist whose abduction experience was studied by Budd Hopkins. According to her testimony, her alien abductors, who were of the “Gray” type, come from a dying society that stresses intellectual development at the expense of emotional growth. Something has gone wrong with them genetically. Their children are dying prematurely, and they are engaged in a desperate struggle to survive. Hopkins tied this in with their interest in human genetics and reproduction. 80 There is also a tie-in with the dark world idea, although here the aliens’ world is dark metaphorically, rather than literally.

Turning to another report cited by Jenny Randles, in Pudasjarvi, Finland, a woman named Aino Ivanoff was driving her car in the early hours of April 2, 1980. Suddenly, the car was surrounded by a mist, and she found herself in a room where she was examined on a table by small entities. These beings told her that war is evil and she should support peace groups. They also said they were unable to beget their own children. 81

This fits in with Betty Andreasson’s statement—on the other side of the Atlantic—that alien females cannot bear children and that human females are used to carry alien fetuses. 82 She gave this as the reason the aliens are concerned that human beings will destroy themselves: “The fetuses become them —like them. They said they’re Watchers . . . and they keep seed from man and woman so the human form will not be lost.” 83

The italics in this quotation were supplied by Raymond Fowler. This is the statement that seems to tie in Andreasson’s story with the old Hebrew story of the angels called Watchers that mated with human beings.

If we put together some of these communications, we get the picture of the “Gray” aliens as a parasitic race that depends on humans for reproduction and is concerned that humans may be on the verge of wiping themselves out. But then there are stories contradicting this. The communications reported by Lucille Forman and those from Julio’s Nordic-looking entities do not exactly agree with this theory. Also inconsistent is the fact that abductions with a gynecological slant have been reported frequently only within recent decades. Why weren’t the aliens’ reproductive activities evident in the nineteenth century if they need humans in order to reproduce? Also, stories indicating that the aliens are from a distant star, such as Zeta Reticuli, are incompatible with the idea that they depend on earth humans for reproduction.

In conclusion, communications reported to come from UFO entities often contain certain standard themes. These range from disturbing statements regarding human genetics and origins to seeming trivia, such as the radar-induced-crash story. The communications often have a surreal quality, and they often contradict one another. Many seem to be a cross between disinformation and sheer nonsense, and many contain material found in human cultural traditions.

Hoaxes and delusions undoubtedly occur, and there is evidence suggesting that highly organized hoaxes have been perpetrated. There is also the possibility that sinister intelligence agents are spreading UFO disinformation. However, this does not mean that UFO contact stories are all products of human lies and delusions. We can always attribute them to these causes, but if we do so, I think we unnecessarily lower our estimate of apparently sane and responsible human witnesses. Ultimately, this lowers our estimate of our own ability to discriminate truth from illusion.

In the real world, we often encounter mixtures of truth and falsehood. It may be difficult to separate the true from the false, but I think it would be a mistake to dismiss a body of material just because it contains false elements. Indeed, we can turn things around and suggest that if a body of human testimony seemed to contain nothing false, then that would be contrary to human nature.

We can also turn around the theory that UFO tales are simply a phenomenon of folklore aided by deceit. It is possible that actual nonhuman beings are responsible for many reported UFO communications. These beings may be trying to condition people’s thought processes by making use of themes taken, in some cases, from the people’s own cultural traditions.

If this is so, then by manipulating traditional themes they add to the traditions. One can ask, To what extent are cultural traditions orchestrated by the intervention of various kinds of intelligent beings? Also, to what extent are cultural traditions true, and to what extent are they “disinformation” introduced—not by conniving priests and imaginative poets—but by transhuman sources? To what extent is this cultural orchestration good, and to what extent might it have bad effects?