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The Threat Revealing the Secret Alien Agenda By David M. Jacobs Contents 1 Recognizing the Signal 2 "I Know This Sounds Crazy, But..." 3 Shadows of the Mind 4 What They Do 5 What They Are 6 Why They Are Secret 7 Infiltration 8 The Hybrid Species—Children 9 The Hybrid Species—Adolescents and Adults 10 Independent Hybrid Activity 11 The Nature of Alien Intentions 12 Life As We Know It?
13 Accepting the Unacceptable Acknowledgments Notes 1. Recognizing the Signal In the 1996 blockbuster motion picture Independence Day, hostile aliens come to Earth hell-bent on death and destruction. Resourceful humans band together, defeat the common enemy, and save Earth. This Hollywood scenario is not new—it has dominated screen versions of alien contact since 1951 with the release of The Thing, in which a single alien wreaks havoc on a group of humans.
A more peaceful version of alien contact has also become a cultural staple. From 1951 and The Day the Earth Stood Still to 1977 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, benign aliens have come to Earth to help humans. In this scenario, the aliens offer world leaders, scientists, and media representatives their assistance and cooperation. There is mutual respect: The humans expect to learn from the aliens' technological advancement, and the aliens expect to help the humans live in peace and cooperatively build a better world.
Still another vision of alien intervention in human life is the idea that they are coming to save specially chosen individuals from a rapidly approaching cataclysm. Cult groups who believe this have existed since the early 1950s.1 Members of the Heaven's Gate cult in 1997 were so convinced that a UFO would save them from the apocalypse and carry them to a higher physical and spiritual realm that thirty-nine members committed suicide to facilitate their rescue and transportation.
A careful examination of the UFO abduction phenomenon shows us that contact has, in fact, occurred—but it bears no relationship to these scenarios. There has been no public meeting, no involvement of leadership, no press coverage. There has, as yet, been no assistance, no cooperation, no war, no death, and no apocalypse. The contact has been on the aliens' terms—and in secret.
I never imagined such a scenario in 1966 when I first started to study the UFO phenomenon. Nor did I imagine that I would spend so many years of my adult life involved with the subject. I never imagined that I would have to tell my children not to talk about my research at their school because they could be unmercifully teased. I never dreamed that my wife would learn not to mention my interests at her workplace because her employer might think she was married to a madman, and that could hurt her career.
When I talk about the subject to my colleagues in the academic community, I know they think that my intellectual abilities are seriously impaired. I find myself intertwined with a subject that I have learned to dislike and even to fear.
I am first and foremost a professor of history specializing in twentieth-century America. I think, read, and teach about the past, but the study of the UFO phenomenon has thrust me into speculation about the future. The study of history proves that predicting events is an extremely unreliable and usually futile task. Yet, ironically, I now find myself in the uncomfortable position of trying to divine the future.
My research began in one of the leading bastions of historical inquiry—the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin, where I was a graduate student. My major professor was the legendary Merle Curti, who founded the field of intellectual history.
When Curti retired, I studied under Paul Conkin, who applied stringent analytical procedures and evidentiary criteria to every research topic. I immersed myself in the study of UFOs and received my Ph.D. under Conkin's direction. My doctoral dissertation focused on the controversy over unidentified flying objects in America from the perspective of intellectual, social, and military history. In researching this topic, I spent weeks at Maxwell Air Force Base and the Library of Congress, reading government documents about UFOs. I traveled the country to interview some of the most important civilian and military UFO researchers. In 1975, Indiana University Press published an expanded version of my dissertation as The UFO Controversy in America.2 My early research concentrated on sightings of UFOs. My working hypothesis was that if careful analysis of the sightings showed that UFOs were extraterrestrial, it would be the most important scientific discovery of all time. On the other hand, if analysis concluded that the objects were simply misidentification of conventional phenomena and the products of overwrought human imagination, the phenomenon would be relegated to the history of popular culture. It was one or the other. To conceive of UFOs as representing a potential alien takeover was to be either impossibly prescient or foolish. I was neither.
Thus, I joined the other researchers whose objective it was to determine if witnesses were sighting anomalous, artificially constructed, and intelligently controlled vehicles. We scrutinized photos, motion picture footage, radar traces, soil samples, and other residue purportedly generated by UFOs. Collectively we amassed hundreds of thousands of sighting reports from around the world. We worked out a methodology to determine if witnesses were credible. I became a field investigator for the now defunct Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, interviewing puzzled witnesses, knocking on doors searching for others, and publishing the results of my investigations in UFO journals.
By the early 1970s, the UFO research community had collected so many sighting reports that we found ourselves with an uncomfortably huge database. We knew the time of a UFO sighting, its duration, movements, color changes, and number of witnesses, as well as the object's effects upon the environment, automobiles, electrical equipment, animals, and humans. Each of these reports were carefully investigated and documented; in many cases, there were multiple witnesses to lend credence to the evidence. The leading UFO researcher of his time, J. Allen Hynek, called this enormous body of information and reports an "embarrassment of riches." Of course, there were internal debates over specific cases and fierce arguments with debunkers, but these could not discredit the legitimacy of the phenomenon. By the late 1970s, the evidence for UFOs as a truly anomalous phenomenon was so massive that I, along with most UFO researchers, could no longer deny that witnesses were seeing something extraordinary and probably not from Earth.
As part of our research, we of course thought about the ramifications of contact between humans and alien species. We theorized about how such contact might affect religion, government institutions, and the place of humans in the universe, but we devoted little thought to whether direct contact was already taking place, or whether the UFO occupants had hostile intentions. There seemed to be little reason to think along those lines. The UFOs behaved as if they wanted to keep their distance from us. They avoided contact on a formal level. They were not making mass landings. They would fly about for a few seconds or minutes and then vanish. Their apparent "shyness" suggested neutrality, or at least nonhostility, toward humans.
Nevertheless, curiosity and questions about the motivation of the aliens remained just beneath the surface of UFO research. But because there was so little information, most researchers did not spend a lot of time in useless speculation. And the more we learned about the occupants of UFOs, the more difficult it was to understand their motivation.
The UFO and occupant reports that began to increase in number in the 1960s and 1970s were truly bizarre. The objects chased cars, disappeared in midair, and left marks on people; they operated in secret for no apparent reason. Witnesses sometimes said that they saw UFO "occupants" outside the UFOs. Occasionally they reported coming across humanoids (the word "alien" being too dramatic and fringy) near a landed UFO who would paralyze the hapless humans and then inspect them. The humanoids were also seen "repairing" a UFO or digging in the ground; sometimes they appeared to be looking over the terrain, or collecting plants. Some of the occupants' activity was consistent with the hypothesis that they were curious about earthly flora and fauna. At other times they engaged in more baffling behavior. For example, they would pay no attention to a witness, or they would suddenly appear holding a small box in front of a witness and then disappear.
The accounts of these activities were a challenge to researchers who tried to make sense of them. Our mindset was not, however, that the humanoids had any hostile intentions— in fact, they appeared to be examining, surveying, and gaining knowledge.
When abductions were first reported, as in 1961 with the Barney and Betty Hill case, they seemed to fit into the hypothesis that the aliens were primarily curious. Yet, although Barney and Betty Hill were not typical of the notorious 1950s "contactee" charlatans who tried to make money off their tall tales, one could never be sure whether they had invented their story.
As other abduction reports surfaced, UFO researchers were suspicious about the possibility of fabrication. It was easy for me to be skeptical. Most abductees had little to present in the way of evidence for the reality of their experiences. Unlike some UFO sighters, they had no photos, no radar traces, no movies, and usually no other witnesses.
Their accounts were hypnotically retrieved, which was an obvious impediment to believability.
Because of the extreme nature of the abductees' claims, I stood on the sidelines while our knowledge about the phenomenon began to mount. The Barney and Betty Hill case was typical. They encountered the now "standard" gray aliens who communicated telepathi- cally, gave the Hills an "examination," and seemed interested in human reproduction.
Afterward, the Hills experienced a form of amnesia, and their memories of the incident had to be recovered with the use of hypnosis. The Hill case was serialized in a major weekly magazine, was the subject of a best-selling book, and became the best-known abduction case in history.3 There was an even earlier abduction, which happened to Antonio Villas Boas in Brazil in 1957. Villas Boas, who was home for vacation from college, was abducted while riding a tractor on his father's ranch. He was made to have sexual intercourse with a strange but almost-human-looking female. This case was too embarrassing and bizarre for researchers to take seriously, and it was not published until 1966, the same year the public learned about the Hills.
Only a few other cases came to light during the mid-1960s and early 1970s. One was the Pascagoula case of 1973, in which two men said they were abducted as they fished on the banks of the Pascagoula River in Mississippi. During the abduction, aliens "floated" them into an object and a football-shaped machine was passed over their bodies as if it were examining them. The two men seemed traumatized by the event, and one did not talk about it in public for many years.
Another case occurred in 1975. Travis Walton was abducted and physically missing from his normal environment for five days. Moments before his abduction, six witnesses had seen Walton knocked over by a ball of light emanating from a UFO. The witnesses fled in panic, and when they returned a short time later, Walton was gone.
I read about these abductions and was not impressed. Debunkers had stated (incorrectly) that Walton had wanted to be abducted, making the entire event suspicious. Furthermore, the Pascagoula aliens did not match the descriptions given by other abductees. In 1976, I confidently, and erroneously, told J. Allen Hynek that I thought the highly publicized Pascagoula and Travis Walton cases were most probably hoaxes because they did not seem to fit our knowledge of the phenomenon. Besides, they just did not feel right. I thought the chances that these cases were hoaxes far outweighed the chances that the claimants were actually kidnapped by aliens from another planet.
In 1976, I interviewed Betty Hill, who told me something that had been kept out of public accounts—the beings had taken a sperm sample from Barney. I found this fascinating. It not only reinforced the rising number of accounts of alien interest in reproduction, but if the Hills' story had been psychologically generated, why concoct something with the express intention of not telling it to anyone? In my mind, the abduction mystery was deepening and becoming more complex. However, I still concentrated on the sightings paradigm in which I had become fairly expert. Sightings, although still considered illegitimate by the general public, were safe and comfortable. The growing number of credible witnesses, radar contacts, photos, films, and physical effects gave us a solid evidentiary base on which to rely. Abductions, in spite of my interest, still lacked the evidence that I required for believability.
I was skeptical of veteran UFO researcher Ray Fowler's 1979 study of abductee Betty Andreasson. The case demonstrated that the aliens could mentally control people from a distance: They "switched off"—rendered unconscious or immobile—people who were in Andreasson's house while they abducted her and her daughter. This case also illustrated a physical manipulation of matter that, according to other reports, the aliens routinely performed. They came directly through the wall of the house to accomplish the abduction. And, during the abduction, Betty Andreasson saw puzzling and inexplicable images of strange places and bizarre animals. But I remained doubtful and believed that the images she saw, and perhaps the entire abduction, were generated from her mind.4 By 1980, most of the abduction accounts were beginning to display patterns of similarity: paralysis, physical examinations, telepathy, amnesia, and little gray beings with large black eyes. Many of these reports told of a continued alien interest in human reproduction. I had read some of the abduction literature, but I was not persuaded to give up my focus on sightings. The abductees could be lying, or they could have serious psychological problems.
Then, in 1981 Budd Hopkins published Missing Time, a study in which he examined seven abductees and found that a person could be taken many times during the course of his or her life and might have "screen memories" that masked other abduction events.
Hopkins discovered telltale scars on abductees, which they incurred during the abduction, and his work confirmed the beings' interest in reproduction. His book gave UFO researchers the first systematic comparison of abductee experiences and showed that the phenomenon could be studied on a society-wide basis.5 A year later, in 1982,TraceyTorme, a mutual friend of Budd Hop-kins's and mine, brought the two of us together. I visited Hopkins at his vacation home on Cape Cod and learned more about what he was doing. I noted how cautious and conservative he was. He had been developing patterns in his research that were hard to ignore. The abductees he worked with were serious, sober people genuinely concerned about what had happened to them. I became intrigued.
After my meetings with Hopkins, I called Hynek and told him that I thought Hopkins was on to something important. Hynek warned me to stay away from the abduction cases because they were eccentric and led us off the main path of sighting analysis. I disagreed and told him that I thought Hopkins's research seemed solid. Hynek reiterated his warning, trying to steer me back to the "correct" course of research. Abduction reports were too bizarre for him; he could not subject them to the kind of scientific analysis that he could use for sighting reports.
Although I had adopted a stance similar to Hynek's for over fifteen years, this time I had to follow the evidence. I had begun to understand that if abductions were actually happening, they could be the key to the UFO mystery because they allowed us to enter inside the UFOs. They gave us knowledge that examining the out-sides of the objects had never provided. I decided that I would begin to study these cases myself so that I could carefully weigh the evidence. To do this research, I would have to learn hypnosis.
I conducted my first hypnotic regression in August 1986. By 1992 I had conducted more than three hundred hypnotic regressions and had discovered that analyzing abductee accounts was not easy. Asking the right questions and separating reality from fantasy was difficult and even treacherous; false memories and confabulation could lead researchers and abductees into a never-never land of wishful thinking and fantasy.
In 1992, I published the first segment of my research results as Secret Life: Firsthand Accounts of UFO Abductions. In it I delineated the structure of a typical abduction and the variety of mental procedures performed on abductees. I also described a multiplicity of hitherto unknown physical and reproductive procedures and was able to re-create minute-by-minute a typical abduction experience from beginning to end.6 From my research, I could add to Hopkins's findings on the aliens' reproductive procedures of ova harvesting and fetal extraction. We both found that the aliens required abductees to interact physically with odd-looking babies and toddlers, whom the abductees generally said resembled a combination of human and alien—hybrids. By uncovering these elements of the abduction phenomenon, Hopkins discovered one of the central aspects of why the beings are here.7 Having analyzed my own research on the aliens' reproductive procedures, I knew when they were taking eggs or sperm. I could identify when a fetus was extracted or implanted in an abductee. To all appearances, the aliens were engaged in some sort of breeding program. But the ultimate reasons for their physical and reproductive procedures remained a mystery.
The mental procedures were even more baffling. Aliens almost always stared into an abductee's eyes at a distance of a few inches or less and seemed thereby to elicit love, fear, and anger. Some of these "Mindscan" procedures could provoke intense sexual arousal in both men and women. By staring into people's eyes, the beings could cause them to see prearranged scenarios and "movies" in their minds. At that time I had no idea how and why this took place. Now I think I understand why.
I was also puzzled about why abductees were subjected to strange staging and testing procedures in which they acted out a scenario with aliens or found that they could operate complex devices or perform tasks they do not remember having learned. These procedures seemed unrelated to the breeding program.
The aliens themselves were enigmatic. I did not know'whether they ate or slept, or had any kind of life outside the abduction context. The same was true of the hybrid babies, toddlers, adolescents, and adults; their lives were a mystery. One thing was certain—the aliens were engaging in a tremendous number of abductions. A national poll by the Roper Organization in 1991 revealed the possibility of an abduction program far more extensive than we had ever imagined.
Our continuing UFO research raised many other questions. For example, abduction researcher Karla Turner reported in 1993 that some abductees claimed the American military was abducting them in cooperation with the aliens.8 In 1994 Harvard professor John Mack discussed what was apparently an alien interest in the earth's environment.9 Abductees increasingly claimed that hybrid adults were involved with their abductions.
Budd Hopkins found that aliens were pairing young abductees for long-term relationships.10 To complicate matters, although the abduction phenomenon was traumatic for most abductees, many found spiritual enlightenment and an expansion of their consciousness.
As if these issues were not complex enough, until recently I did not have even provisional answers to the most important questions: What is the purpose of the breeding program?
What constitutes alien authority and society? Why are they operating in secrecy? What is the magnitude of the abduction program? What is the purpose of hybridization? For the first twenty years of my research, I thought that we would never have the answers to the fundamental questions of alien motivation and intentions. All that has changed now. In the past ten years, I have gathered information that I feel certain answers these questions satisfactorily.
In my most recent research, I have uncovered information that allows UFO researchers to solve the UFO mystery—at least the questions that will have the greatest impact upon us.
I have put many pieces of the puzzle together. I have focused the picture, and I do not like what I see. For the first time in over thirty years of researching the UFO phenomenon, I am frightened of it. Understanding has not led to a feeling of contribution or accomplishment. Rather, it has led to profound apprehension for the future. The abduction phenomenon is far more ominous than I had thought. Optimism is not the appropriate response to the evidence, all of which strongly suggests that the alien agenda is primarily beneficial for them and not for us. I know why the aliens are here—and what the human consequences will be if their mission is successful.
2. "I Know This Sounds Crazy, But..." It is the abductees themselves who have the answers to questions about alien intentions.
But it is not easy for them to speak about their abduction experiences. They have learned to remain silent. As a child, for example, an abductee may have told her mother and father about the little "people" in her room who came through the closed windows and took her away. Her parents probably reassured her that this was only a dream, and the child's insistence that it was real—"I was awake!"—did no good. Eventually the abductee stopped telling her parents.
In school, she may have confided in a friend and talked about seeing ghosts, perhaps aliens, in her bedroom. The friend may have held the secret for a short time, but it was not long before all the other children knew and the teasing grew mean and merciless. The abductee learned to tell no one else.
As an adult, she probably kept quiet about her experiences. If she told anyone, it was within a protective, humorous context that allowed her to have a good-natured laugh— usually accompanied by the vocalized "woo-WOO-woo" of 1950s science fiction theremin music. But she secretly wished someone would say, "You know, that happened to me, too!" When she married, she did not tell her husband about her experiences and continued to keep them secret. She did not want him to think she was crazy, and she knew he would not accept the reality of the story and be supportive. Thus, most abductees learn over the course of their lives that the best method of protecting themselves against ridicule and further victimization is to tell no one. They live their lives harboring their secrets and hiding their fears.
Contacting an abduction researcher like me is an act of bravery. People who suspect that something unusual is happening to them begin their letters with plaintive phrases: "I know this sounds crazy, but..." or "I know you'll laugh when you read this," or "I've written this letter a hundred times in my mind." They desperately want someone to believe them, but they know they are telling an inherently unbelievable story and opening themselves up to more ridicule. Most abductees come to me with the basic question, "What has been happening to me?" Some have a specific triggering incident that has propelled them to contact me: "In 1979 my boyfriend and I saw a UFO close up and it swooped down low toward us. All I remember was running, and then we found ourselves in our car and it was six hours later. I have thought about this incident every day of my life since then." During the subsequent hypnotic sessions with me, the abductees recall events that can be profoundly disturbing, bizarre, and frightening. When asked if they would undergo hypnosis and relive their experiences if they had a choice to do so all over again, they are often ambivalent. While most say yes and some are uncertain, a few say no—they would rather not know what has been happening to them. They all realize that they have traded one set of problems for another. They have been freed from constantly wondering about what has been happening to them, but now that they know, they are scared. Most acknowledge that becoming aware of their plight transforms them psychologically. They feel more integrated, less confused about their situation, and emotionally stronger. They also feel frightened and powerless in the face of unwelcome sudden physical intrusions into their lives.
I approach abductees individually in search of some new and perhaps revealing information about the phenomenon, although nearly all contribute confirmatory information. For example, in over 700 abduction investigations I have conducted using hypnosis, I have been told of egg-taking procedures almost 150 times, physical examinations about 400 times, Mindscan (staring) procedures about 375 times, and baby and toddler contact 180 times. Some experiences I have heard only occasionally. If I hear anything only once, and I am not yet certain of the thoroughness and veracity of the person who is telling it to me, I withhold a conclusion pending confirmation from other abductees.
Virtually everything I will describe in later chapters has been confirmed many times over.
I have interviewed abductees from North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. I have used transcripts of the hypnotic sessions I have conducted with over thirty of the 110 individuals in my population. They come from all walks of life, cutting across ethnic, racial, educational, cultural, economic, political, and geographical boundaries. Brief descriptions of a few of these brave people indicate the broad human dimension of the abduction phenomenon.
Allison Reed was twenty-eight when she called me in June of 1993. She and her husband operated a successful home-based business. She reached me while my family and I were on vacation on Long Beach Island, New Jersey. She was worried about odd things that had been happening to her throughout her life. She had learned to cope with them silently, but now her eight-year-old son and five-year-old daughter had been telling her of strange and frightening things happening to them, too. She grew increasingly alarmed as her children's descriptions of their experiences seemed to be confirmed by physical marks on their bodies.
When her children independently drew pictures of what was happening to them, Allison decided to act. First she came across amateur UFO buffs who were convinced that the government was covering up a UFO crash on the East Coast. Eventually she found me. I do not work with children because we do not understand the effect that knowledge of an abduction experience might have on their psychological development. But I agreed to look into Allison's strange experiences. When Allison found that she, too, was involved with abductions, she became fiercely determined to find out as much as possible in order to do something to stop this threat to her self and her family. The accounts she gave in her regression sessions were as precise as any I have ever heard. We uncovered abductions that ranged from neutral and procedural to traumatic and even physically harmful. It was not until we had had sixteen sessions together that she told me about an event that had happened to her, her husband, and her ten-month-old baby in 1986. The event took place over a five-day period. Together we examined it in meticulous detail over the next eight sessions.
Allison has become resigned to being involved in the abduction phenomenon. She has tried to prevent the abductions by using a video camera, which is trained on her all night, but with only limited success. She, like all abductees, has sought to find a psychological accommodation with the abductions so that she can get on with her life without having to think continually about what is happening to her and her family.
I first saw Christine Kennedy in 1992. A woman of twenty-nine with three children, she had had a lifetime of unusual experiences, "dreams," and episodes. As a young girl, she had used alcohol to block out her "night terrors." She had been in recovery and sober for a number of years before she saw me, and she continued to go to recovery meetings.
Christine often woke up with bruises on her body. When she was six years old, she woke up and "knew" about sexual intercourse. She had seen UFOs; she had seen beings in her room. When she was pregnant with her first child, she remembered arguing with someone that the baby was "hers" and not "theirs." She had read an article about me in OMNI magazine and sought me out.
Like Allison, Christine resisted her abductors. She never surrendered to what was happening to her and tried to fight back as best she could whenever she could. She eventually used video and magnetic equipment in her room to try to detect the presence of aliens and to try (vainly) to deter them from taking her and her children. She hates the beings and has tried but failed to protect herself from them.1 Pam Martin has led an even more unusual life. She was born in 1944 and lived for a few years in an orphanage. She grew up in New Jersey living a marginal and nonconformist existence for many years. An eighth-grade dropout, she was basically self-taught with talent in both writing and art. As a young woman, she worked as a "taxi dancer," a waitress, a truck driver, and later a home healthcare worker.
As a result of her UFO experiences, Pam had come to believe over the years that she was leading a "charmed" life with "guardian angels" helping her overcome life's difficulties.
She became a devoted member of a "New Age" ministry. After one particularly vivid abduction experience, she decided that aliens were actually wonderful beings visiting her from the Pleiades constellation. She felt certain that she had been given "powers" that enabled her to manipulate time and reality to her benefit. For example, when she drove somewhere, she would sometimes arrive there much earlier than she should have.
I have had over thirty sessions with Pam, and during that time she has come to have a less romantic idea about what has been happening to her. She was initially disappointed that what she remembered under hypnosis were not the pleasant experiences she had imagined, but she now accepts the reality of what has been happening to her. She realizes that neither guardian angels nor the Pleiades have anything to do with her experiences, and that she cannot manipulate time and reality. Now she wants to be able to confront the beings without fear and force them to answer questions about their activities. Her husband has been supportive and feels that he also might be an abductee, although he does not want to look into his experiences.
Claudia Negron was born in Puerto Rico in 1941 and came to the mainland when she was six years old. She raised two children as a single mother after her divorce in the mid- 1970s. At the age of thirty-two, she began college. She has graduated and now works as an executive secretary. Fascinated by the UFO phenomenon as an adult, she joined a local UFO group. She has had a lifetime filled with abductions and has become sensitized to their occurrence. When the particulars of her abductions were revealed under hypnosis, she wanted to learn as much as possible about them. Yet she is ambivalent. As much as she feels intensely curious about the phenomenon, she wants it to stop.
Susan Steiner was born in New York in 1950, graduated college, and began her career as a photography technician at a New York studio. She married in 1987 and has since begun her own marketing consulting business. At first, Susan was extremely skeptical about what was happening to her. Like many abductees, she had developed alternative explanations for her lifelong experiences, but she had a major triggering event in 1985 that eventually propelled her to seek me out. She and a friend were on a camping trip and saw a UFO close up. A period of fear and confusion followed, and when it was over she could not account for several hours of missing time. She thought about that incident continually for years before finally coming to me for hypnosis. She has decided that her husband would not be supportive if she told him she is an abductee.
Terry Matthews wrote to me about her unusual experiences in October 1994. She was born in a small town in Pennsylvania and grew up in an upper-middle-class family with an abusive father. She assumed that her lifetime of unusual dreams and experiences was in some way related to her father's actions. This was seemingly confirmed by a therapist who, during hypnosis, uncovered "repressed memories" of abuse, both emotional and sexual. She became convinced that she had been sexually abused and underwent years of therapy for it. Always emotionally "grounded," she angrily broke off with one therapist when he began to introduce ideas about her "past lives." Even though she is a very religious person, it was difficult for Terry to associate her unusual experiences that seemed unconnected to her father with religious visitations. She found an outlet for her inner turmoil in creative writing, and when I met her she was seeking a publisher for her novels.
As the daughter of a clergyman, Michelle Peters thought that some of her experiences were religious in nature. Like Terry, she copes with her memories by writing about them and is the author of an unpublished novel. Possessed of a charming, self-deprecating sense of humor, she never felt victimized by the phenomenon. Like Pam Martin, she had a strong sense that she was being visited by a "guardian angel." She thought that the visitations had stopped when she married at age twenty in 1982. But when she was thirty- two, she woke up in the middle of the night to see bright blue lights coming into her house from the outside. She tried to wake her husband but could not. She walked into the living room and looked out the window, but the light was too bright to make out details.
The next thing she knew, she was awake the next morning feeling sick; her nightgown was off, and her robe was on backward. This frightening event compelled her to find the origin of her experiences.
Reshma Kamal was born in India and moved with her family to Minneapolis when she was a young girl. She eventually married a man from India and proudly maintains a traditional Indian household. When she realized as a teenager that bizarre things were happening to her, she embarked on a quest to discover their origin. Her mother took her back to India, thinking that traditional healers might rid her of these experiences, but Reshma found their attitude infuriatingly naive. The village doctor and other friends of the family decided that she was fabricating these experiences to attract attention to herself because she wanted to get married. Years later, Reshma's desire to understand her experiences grew stronger as she realized that they were also happening to her five children. She consciously remembered many details and, through the years, kept a detailed journal. Her husband is extremely supportive of her and their children's plight but, as with other abductees, the family has felt powerless to stop it.
I met Kathleen Morrison when she sat in on my "UFOs and American Society" course at Temple University. She had returned to college after a long absence to receive her doctorate. As the course material turned toward the abduction phenomenon, she became uncomfortable and could no longer attend my class. She told me that a few years earlier she gone to a play that contained a scene in which an actor seemed to be floating in air.
The scene triggered vague memories that caused her to panic, and she became so frightened that she had to escape to the lobby. There she hung on to a banister to steady herself while hyperventilating with raw fear. We eventually had twenty-six sessions together, during which she learned the reason for her fear response as she became aware of the many alien intrusions into her life. Despite her marriage of twenty years, she has not told her husband, fearing that the sexual aspects of the abductions would be too difficult for him to handle.
Jack Thernstrom was a graduate student studying for his Ph.D. in physics at an Ivy League university. He came to me to examine puzzling events in his life, some of which he had at first interpreted to be of a religious nature. He also had confusing and disturbing memories of being in the basement and seeing a small being "coming out of a radio," of "snakes" following him, and of being "molested" in the woods. His hypnotic sessions were difficult. He would clench his teeth, tighten his muscles, and literally shake violently with anxiety during each session. After ten sessions he suddenly felt strongly that he should not be telling me about his experiences because it was a violation of some sort. He discontinued hypnosis, although he still comes to my support group meetings.
Both Budd Hopkins and I have worked with Kay Summers. She is thirty-one, lives in the Midwest, and has had perhaps more hypnosis sessions than anyone else. She has experienced the full range of abduction procedures, but hers have been more violent than most. Although she has often suffered a series of physical injuries in her abductions, including, upon two occasions, broken bones, her resolve in the face of adversity is extraordinary. She insists on leading a normal life and refuses to give in to the depression that she often feels. Her parents are hostile to the reality of the phenomenon and give her no support, and she has not told the man with whom she lives for fear of alienating him.
Because of her predicament, Kay leads an emotionally isolated existence—except for talking to Hopkins and me. She is totally resigned to her lot, and in her more depressed moments she tells me that she wishes the beings would kill her so that she can be free of them once and for all. I do all I can to lift her spirits and channel her depression into more productive areas of resistance. I must admit, however, that depression is a frequent and predictable response to the phenomenon.
All the abductees in this study are united by the desire to understand what has been happening to them. They share the common bond of being involved with a phenomenon that at first they could not understand, then could not believe, and now cannot control.
They are all determined to gain intellectual and emotional mastery over their experiences.
As they have recounted their abductions, they have often described neutral or sometimes even enjoyable experiences. By far, however, the most prevalent type is disturbing and traumatic. I can only listen and encourage them to cope. My responsibility is to be as honest and knowledgeable as possible; amateur—and misleading —speculation can be found anywhere. I help them understand both what has been happening to them and how they can get on with their lives in the face of it. This is all 1 can do. I know that the only way to help them permanently would be to stop the abductions, and this I cannot do.
During the process of remembering their experiences, many ab-ductees realize their special situation. They are on the front lines of investigating this monumentally important phenomenon. They are the "scouts" who come back and report what they have seen and experienced. As "participant/observers," they have the most important role of all. They bring researchers like me the pieces of the puzzle so that we can put them together. They are not just the victims of abductions, they are also the heroes, without whose accounts we would have no meaningful insight whatsoever into the UFO phenomenon.2 3. Shadows of the Mind I have received thousands of calls and letters from people who have memories of unusual experiences that have been greatly disturbing to them. They have searched for years in vain to discover the origin of these memories. They think that I might be able to help them. Of course, a person's experiencing unusual events does not necessarily mean he or she is an abductee. I have designed a screening process to eliminate those people who are not serious about their quest (they might merely be on a lark), those who are not emotionally prepared to look into their experiences, and those who have not had, in my estimation, experiences suggesting that they are ab-ductees.
First, I purposely put them through a series of tasks. I require them to fill out a questionnaire about the experiences that propelled them to come forward, and about others that they might not have realized could be part of the abduction phenomenon (for example, "Have you ever seen a ghost?"). I ask them to send the completed questionnaire to me and then to call back. I analyze the questionnaire and decide if their experiences are significant enough to warrant further investigation with hypnosis. When I talk with them again, I try to persuade them not to look into what could be a Pandora's Box. I give them a strong and frank warning about the dangers of going forward with hypnosis and uncovering an abduction event: They might become depressed, they might have sleep disturbances, they might feel emotionally isolated, and so forth. In effect, they could easily be trading one set of problems for another. I urge them to talk over their decision with their loved ones and call me back later. I then send them a pamphlet that reiterates my warnings so that they can make as informed a decision as possible.
About 30 percent of the people who contact me decide not to undergo hypnosis at this point. This is the right decision for them no matter what their reasons. If they do decide to go forward with the process, I give them another verbal warning about the potential dangers and, if they are still willing, we make an appointment for a session. By the time they arrive for their first hypnosis regression, I have typically already spent several hours talking to them, and they , are aware of the problems that might result from their regressions. They are also aware that what they remember, if anything, may not necessarily be accurate or even true.
When they finally arrive at my home, we climb the stairs to my third-floor office and talk for an hour or two before we begin hypnosis. We agree about which event in their lives we want to investigate during this session. It might be, for example, a period of missing time, or an incident in which they awoke and found little men standing around their bed.
They then lie down on my day-couch and close their eyes, and I begin a simple relaxation induction that allows them to concentrate and focus. At their first session, they are often puzzled because they are not in some "dreamland" or because they feel quite normal.
They find that they can argue with me, get up and go to the bathroom, and be completely in control.
I never know what is going to come out of a hypnosis session. If the subject recalls an abduction event—and there are "false alarms," when it seems that an abduction might have taken place but it did not—I begin a series of cautious questions, usually in a conversational style, that organically spring from what they are saying. Some abductees recount their experiences with detachment, as though they were looking back at the past from a present-day standpoint, others relive their memories as if they were the age at which the event took place. Some are calm about what is happening to them, others are so frightened it becomes difficult for them to continue, although I gently help them through the experience. Some remember the events haltingly, as the memories come in spurts and starts. Others have trouble describing their experiences because the memories rush back in a flood. Nearly all abductees recall their experiences with a combination of astonishment, surprise, and familiarity. When they are finished, they remember what happened to them, and we talk about their account for an hour or so. When the abductee leaves my office about five hours have passed.1 Even with all my warnings and the preliminary discussions before the first session, about 25 percent stop at this point—usually they are too frightened to go on. For those who continue with me, I conduct as many hypnosis sessions with them as I can. They desperately want to understand what has happened to them and how it has influenced their lives. I have conducted as many as thirty-three sessions with one individual, although the average for all the 110 abductees with whom I have worked is six. I usually do not go over the same event twice.
My style of questioning is not interrogatory. I engage in a give-and-take with the abductee after I am sure that they cannot and will not be led, even inadvertently. I force them to think carefully about the events. I try to give them perspective and the ability to analyze as they remember. Above all, I try to "normalize" them so they can extricate themselves from the unconscious emotional grip the phenomenon often has had them in throughout their lives. I try to give them the strength to untangle themselves from the abductions' psychological effects so that they can get on with their lives without having to constantly think about their situation. I like to get them to the point where they no longer feel the necessity to seek out a hypnotist to understand what has been happening to them.
Hypnosis is easy. As long as a person wants to be hypnotized, anybody can do it. Asking the right questions in the right way, at the right time, and interpreting the answers is where the trouble comes in. The correct dynamic between hypnotist and abductee depends on the amount of knowledge the hypnotist has acquired about the abduction phenomenon, the experience he or she has with hypnosis, and the preconceptions the hypnotist brings to the session. In addition, the hypnotist must help the abductee cope with the sometimes traumatic memories by intervening therapeutically during the session to provide context and reassurance. Thus, a competent hypnotist/researcher must have a professional knowledge of hypnosis, a thorough knowledge of the abduction phenomenon, a familiarity with confabulation and false memories, and skill in therapy.
Unfortunately, there are few individuals with those qualifications.
All competent researchers quickly learn that memory is unreliable. It is not unusual for a person to remember details of a "normal" traumatic event inaccurately. Researchers have shown that they can make people remember something that never happened. A casual, but calculated, discussion of an event with a person can instill "memories" in him that have no basis in reality. Through the passage of time, memory also degrades, events blend into one another, and fantasy intrudes upon reality.
I was extremely fortunate to have encountered unreliable memory the very first time I conducted a hypnotic regression session. Melissa Bucknell, a twenty-seven-year-old real estate management employee, and I agreed before the session to investigate an incident that had occurred when she was six years old. She began by describing playing in a field with a friend of hers. She bent over to look at a butterfly, froze in that position, and then found herself being lifted into a hovering UFO. Strange-looking beings removed her clothes and placed her on a table. They conducted a physical examination and, to her embarrassment, did a gynecological procedure as well.
After the examination, a more human-looking alien, whom she called Sanda, led her into a hallway where she met a small alien. Melissa was required to touch the small alien's head and immediately felt love, warmth, and affection emanating from him. Sanda then took her into another room in which a council of several aliens sat around a table. The aliens discussed how bright, strong, and good Melissa was and said she would have the same traits as an adult. After that she was led down a hallway, her clothes were put back on, and she was taken to the field where she had been before.
Later that evening, I listened to the audio tape that I had made of the session. To my horror, I discovered that Melissa had spoken too softly to be picked up by my tape recorder's condenser microphone. The tape had almost nothing on it. I continued to work with Melissa, and three months after our first session, I suggested that we revisit our initial abduction regression, explaining that I had had a problem with the tape recorder.
This time Melissa was less sure about what had happened. She described floating up into the UFO. She remembered the gynecological portion of her examination, which she once again was embarrassed to relate. She talked about how the beings lifted her up off the table, redressed her, and took her back to the field. But to my surprise, she did not relate the hallway encounter with the small gray alien, during which she was required to touch his head and feel his love. The meeting in which the aliens sat around a table and discussed her development was also absent from her new account.
I was perplexed. The first time Melissa had told me about the small alien with great conviction and emotion. Now when I asked her about the encounter, she was not sure that it had ever happened. I then questioned her about the council meeting with the aliens.
Melissa thought for a second and said that perhaps this had happened to another abductee with whom she had been friends. She was pretty sure that it had not happened to her.
This experience taught me an invaluable lesson because I realized that, in all sincerity and honesty, abductees might sometimes remember things that were not true. I resolved to work out a strict methodology to ensure vigilance about false memories. As my research progressed and an abductee reported something I had never heard before, I would wait for confirmation by another abductee unaware of the testimony. I carefully questioned every inconsistency, gap, or logical leap. I worked for a complete chronology and tried to obtain a second-by-second recounting of each abduction event, with no skips, no gaps, and no omissions.
I never received, nor did I ever hear of, another report of an abductee who had been required to touch an alien's head and receive loving emotions. I have heard a few reports of aliens sitting behind a "desk" and talking to the abductee, but the circumstances were quite different from Melissa's account. Also, Melissa would never, in our more than thirty abduction sessions, recall a similar event. All this suggested that she might have unconsciously absorbed a memory fragment from her abductee friend and been confused about other details.
Melissa had done me a tremendous favor. She had taught me the dangers of hypnotically recalled testimony. It was a lesson I was grateful to learn, and one that all abduction hypnotists and researchers have to learn.
Normal Event Memory Normal memory is not well understood. Neurologists know that the human brain registers events and gives them a "priority" code. For example, remembering a crime you witnessed receives a higher priority than remembering who passed you on the street. The brain then organizes the material according to its sensory impact. It first places the visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile component parts in short-term memory and then, if these are important enough, it stores them in the myriad neurological sites that constitute long- term memory.
The brain has a retrieval system to recall memory in a variety of ways: by thinking about the event; by allowing another event to trigger recall; or by allowing a sight, sound, smell, or touch to facilitate recall. Memory may also reside in one's consciousness without a triggering mechanism, such as difficult — to — forget traumatic events.
Memory is not stored linearly. It is stored in a "relational" database, where various bits of memory are placed in various neurological "slots." The date and time of an event are stored in one slot, location in another, sounds associated with the event in another, color and smells in yet other slots, feelings in another, and so on. Each of these memory fragments can be forgotten. Each can decay and become distorted. Sometimes a person recalls a memory fragment that only makes sense if the person unconsciously creates a scenario, even if it is a fictional scenario, to incorporate it.2 Given the complexities of memory, it is to be expected that many critics of the abduction phenomenon argue that abductions are only tricks that the mind plays on people. They point to false memory syndrome, to screen memories, and to media "contamination" to explain abduction accounts. They also attack the use of hypnosis in recalling events on the grounds that it, too, can elicit false memories. Are their objections valid?
False Memory Syndrome Critics of the abduction phenomenon charge that abductees, often with the encouragement of researchers, unknowingly concoct abduction fantasies. That people can have false memories is beyond doubt. Given certain circumstances, they can, for example, invent complex accounts of sexual and physical abuse. The False Memory Syndrome Foundation in Philadelphia is filled with members who have been unfairly accused of sexual abuse.
False memories of abuse occur when people remember events, usually as children, that did not happen. Nevertheless, the details the victims relate can be extraordinary. They relive their experiences with the emotional impact of real events. Some remember Satanic cults that terrorized them and even killed babies in human sacrifice rituals. When the "victims" are confronted with facts (investigators have not found dead babies; no babies were reported missing at the time and place of the ritual abuse cases), they angrily provide explanations—such as that the mothers themselves were Satanists who gave up their babies for sacrificial purposes and did not report them missing. People can convey false memories with such conviction and sincerity that they have fooled many investigators. Uncovering false memories of sexual abuse can also lead to major emotional upheavals in people's lives. Families are torn apart, siblings are estranged, lawsuits are instituted, innocent people are unjustly accused and even jailed.
Uncovering false memories is usually facilitated by a therapist who is convinced that a client has been sexually abused (or whatever abuse the false memory recounts), even though the client has no memory of it. Through insistent persuasion, the therapist inculcates the idea into his client that all his emotional problems stem from the repression of the memory of some earlier trauma. The therapist might tell the client that if he thinks hard enough, he will remember the traumatic event. Healing can only begin, the therapist says, after the memories begin to flow. Not remembering the trauma means that the victim is in denial, and denial becomes further "proof" of the abuse. Caught in this loop, the victim of an earnest but misguided therapist finds it difficult to break out. Eventually, as in the widely publicized case of Paul Ingram and his daughters, the subject "remembers" the abuse.3 There are expert investigators of false memory syndrome, who have had extensive experience with allegations of sexual abuse and are able to detect false memories.
However, they have begun to extend their expertise to areas in which, unfortunately, they are not expert. The abduction phenomenon has become an irresistible target.
For example, psychologist and hypnosis specialist Michael Yapko writes, in Suggestions of Abuse, that the abduction phenomenon is simply a matter of "the phenomenon of human suggestibility," which causes him "irritation and disbelief."4 Psychologist and memory expert Elizabeth Loftus, in her book The Myth of Repressed Memory, treats abductions as a form of irrationality engaged in by otherwise "sane and intelligent" people.5 She cites psychologist Michael Nash's assertions that he "successfully treated" a man who claimed that he had a sperm sample taken from him during an abduction. Using hypnosis and other therapeutic techniques, Nash calmed the man and helped him return to his normal routine, but, Nash laments, "He walked out of my office as utterly convinced that he had been abducted as when he had walked in." Loftus agrees with Nash that the power of this man's false memories enabled him to continue to believe his ridiculous story.6 Loftus and Nash, along with other critics, are incorrect. Neither they nor any other critics have ever presented evidence that abduction accounts are the products of false memory syndrome (or, for that matter, of any causative factor other than what the abductees have experienced). The reason they have not presented this evidence is that they do not understand the abduction phenomenon. If they did, they would realize that abduction accounts differ from false memory syndrome in five significant areas.
1. In contrast to victims of false memory syndrome, abductees do not recount only childhood experiences. They do, of course, recall abduction events during childhood, because the abduction phenomenon begins in childhood, but they also recall abduction events as adults. In fact, many abduction accounts, unlike false memory accounts, are of very recent events. Of the last 450 abductions that I have investigated, nearly 30 percent happened within the previous thirty days and over 50 percent had occurred within the past year. I have also investigated abduction events that were reported to me only a few hours, or even a few minutes, after they took place.7 In 1991, for example, Jason Howard, a schoolteacher, was on his way to my house for an abductee support group meeting. He put on his shoes, which he keeps by the front door. It is the last thing he always does before he leaves his house. Suddenly it was four hours later and Jason was on his bed in his bedroom upstairs. He called me immediately, explaining that he vaguely remembered putting on his shoes and then lying on the couch. When I conducted a hypnotic session on this event, Jason remembered putting on one shoe and then feeling an irresistible urge to lie on the couch. He recalled that small beings appeared in his living room and floated him directly up through the ceiling into a waiting UFO. A series of procedures followed, including sperm sampling and mental envisioning sequences. The aliens returned him to his house, but instead of putting him on the couch, where he was at the beginning of the abduction, they put him on his bed in his upstairs bedroom. When he came to consciousness, he realized that something had happened, and he called me. The immediate reporting of this event does not fit the description of false memory syndrome.
2. In contrast to victims of false memory syndrome, abductees have indirect corroboration of events. For example, I was on the phone with Kay Summers, whose abduction experiences began while we were talking. She described a roaring noise sometimes associated with the beginning of an abduction, and I could hear this noise over the phone. Hypnosis later revealed that soon after she hung up the phone, she was abducted. False memories do not take shape simultaneously with the occurrence of actual events during which a researcher is an indirect corroborator.
3. In contrast to victims of false memory syndrome, abductees often remember events without the aid of a therapist. They can remember events that happened to them at .specific times in their lives. They have always known that the event happened, and they do not need a therapist to reinforce their memories.
4. In contrast to victims of false memory syndrome, abductees are physically missing during the event. The abductee is not where he is supposed to be; people who search for him cannot find him. The abductee is usually aware that there is a gap of two or three hours that neither he nor anyone else can account for. Such physical corrobo-ration does not exist in false memory.
5. In contrast to victims of false memory syndrome, abductees can provide independent confirmation of the abduction. Approximately 20 percent of abductions include two or more people who see each other during the abduction event. They sometimes independently report this to the investigator.
In addition, it is important to note that unlike victims of false memory syndrome, abductees do not usually experience disintegration of their personal lives after they become aware of their situation. In fact, in many ways the opposite takes place. When abductees undergo competent hypnosis and understand the nature of their memories, they often begin to take intellectual and emotional control over these memories. They feel more confident as they realize that their supposedly inappropriate thoughts and fears over the years (for example, fear of going into the bedroom at night, thoughts about lying on a table in a strange room surrounded by creatures, being unduly frightened of physicians) were appropriate reactions to a powerful, but unknown, stimulus. By remembering the events, abductees seize control of the fears that have plagued them for years and get their lives back in order, even though they know that the abduction phenomenon will not cease. Knowledge of the abduction phenomenon helps them to lead more "integrated" lives, rather than having the powerfully disintegrating effects so common with victims of false memory syndrome.
Screen Memories of Sexual Abuse Before false memory syndrome came to prominence, therapists assumed that abduction accounts were due to repressed memories of sexual abuse in childhood. They postulated that because the abuse was so traumatic, the victim unconsciously transposed the abuse into an abduction account. To cope with the terror, the person lived with the more "acceptable" trauma of being kidnapped by aliens.
There is no evidence for this explanation. There are no instances on record of an abduction account being a "screen memory" of sexual abuse. In fact, the opposite is true.
There is a great deal of evidence that people "remember" being sexually abused when in reality they were victimized by the abduction phenomenon.
Jack Thernstrom remembers walking with his sister in a wooded area behind their house when he was twelve. On the walk Jack met a man wearing "dark glasses" who sexually abused him. He was unclear about the details, but he remembered having his clothes taken off and his genitals exposed. He was unclear about what happened to his sister, but he thought that perhaps she had run away. He never told anybody about the event, and he lived for the next eighteen years with the traumatic memory that he had been subjected to sexual abuse by a stranger. When Jack recounted the episode during hypnotic regression, the man with dark glasses turned out to be an alien, and the incident was a routine abduction event in which Jack underwent a physical examination. He had not been sexually abused. Jack had formed a "memory" of bits and pieces of the event so that, horrible as it might have been, an account of sexual abuse made sense to him.8 In another case, "Julie" recalled an event that occurred when she was ten years old. She was at home in the basement bar with her father and three neighbors. She remembered her father holding her hands above her head while the neighbors sexually assaulted her.
In hypnotic regression the woman revealed that this had been an abduction event, which began when she was in the basement bar with her father and his friends. The father and two of the neighbors were placed in an immobile and semiconscious state ("switched off") during the event. The aliens took her and one neighbor, Mr. Sylvester, out of the basement and into a UFO. During the abduction event, she was made to visualize scenes of sexual contact between a man and a woman (she thought that perhaps the man was Mr.
Sylvester). When the episode was over, the aliens returned her and the neighbor to the bar. She had not been sexually violated on that occasion. Mr. Sylvester, whom she despised for years after, turned out to be as much a victim as she was.9 Obviously, not all sexual abuse cases are abduction events. An abductee remembered that she had been sexually assaulted when she was thirteen. She did not remember how she got downstairs into her teenage assailant's basement bedroom, and she was confused about other details. Suspecting that this could be a screen memory for an abduction, we reviewed it under hypnosis. She remembered the boy, how she got downstairs, what happened in the basement, and what happened afterward. She had no memories of seeing aliens, being transported out of the house, or being on board a UFO. She had been sexually assaulted and not abducted.
Media Contamination Star Trek has, in essence, become part of American consciousness. Millions of people have seen these fictional accounts of humans and aliens, just as many people have seen reports of abductions on television or have read books about them. Society has been so imbued with stories about alien abductions that it is difficult for most people to escape them. A "pure" abduction account is increasingly difficult to obtain.
The problem of media influence on UFO and abduction reports has long plagued UFO researchers. Over the years, investigators have learned to judge each UFO sighting on its own merits, and they have developed a methodology to "separate the signal from the noise." The credibility of the witness, the quality of the information, and the corroborating accounts of other witnesses have all become criteria in evaluating the validity of the report. Researchers now apply this process to abduction reports.
Does media contamination present a significant problem for abduction research? No.
Although it does occur from time to time, in fact, most abductees are extremely sensitive to the dangers of cultural influences. When they examine their memories with me, they are acutely conscious of the possibility that they might have "picked up" an incident and incorporated it into their own account. In the first few sessions of hypnosis, self- censorship is so heavy that it becomes a problem. People do not want to say things that make them seem crazy, and they do not want to parrot something back to the researcher that they picked up in society. They will tell me during hypnosis when they think they might have mixed in something from the culture. They are so worried about this contamination that very often I have to tell them to verbalize their memories and not censor themselves.
When abductees tell me what they remember, their accounts usually have a richness of detail that could not have come from media contamination. The mass media disseminate very little solid information about abductions. That abductees remember and describe specific aspects of procedures—details that scores of abductees have described but that have never been published—is extraordinary and strongly militates against cultural influences.
A good example of the lack of media contamination is Whitley Strieber's highly controversial book Communion, published in 1987. It was on The New York Times best- seller list for thirty-two weeks and in the number-one position for almost five months.
Strieber recounts details of his experiences that do not match what most abductees say.
He tells about being transported to a dirty anteroom where he sat on a bench amid the clutter. This highly evocative passage in his book was both dramatic and frightening. If media contamination were a problem, I would expect some abductees with whom I have worked and who have read Communion to describe a similar situation. That has not occurred. Not one of them has ever said that he sat in a room that was dirty or littered with clothes. Similarly, Strieber's movie, Communion, watched by millions of people, had a scene of dancing, fat, blue aliens. Neither I nor my colleagues have ever had a similar report. Despite the apparent paucity of any evidence of media contamination, all researchers must nevertheless be vigilant about it. We may not recognize contamination if the person incorporates it smoothly into his account and it becomes part of his "memories." Consciously Recalled Events If abduction accounts are not part of an overall syndrome of subtle and insidious influences on the person's brain, the critics of the phenomenon say that abductees should be able to consciously remember their experiences and to provide investigators with accurate information. In fact, abductees do consciously remember abductions— sometimes fragments, sometimes long sequences, and on some occasions even entire events. Often these accounts are accurate and detailed and closely match those recovered under hypnosis. However, just as often the consciously recalled memories are grossly inaccurate, with distorted details of actual events and "concrete" memories of events that did not take place. Consciously recalled memories can be an amalgam of fragments of an abduction re-created into a logical sequence that does not reflect reality.
An excellent example is the case of Marian Maguire, a woman in her sixties with two grown daughters, who woke up one morning in 1992 and consciously recalled an instance in which she was with her daughter during an abduction years before. She remembered holding hands with her daughter and, along with other people, being "plugged into" a special apparatus on a wall. This is all she consciously recalled, but she was certain that this event happened exactly as she remembered.
I had not heard about abductees being plugged into a wall before. A few weeks later Marian and I explored this event with hypnosis. During the hypnotic regression, Marian found it difficult to remember walking up to the wall, being plugged into it, and becoming unplugged. The more I probed, the less sure she became about what had happened. She realized that the wall contained small black squares. And as she looked at them, I asked her to tell me what she saw beneath them. I expected her to say the wall or the floor. Instead, she said, "Funny hands." The hands were attached to wrists, the wrists to arms, and so on. She then realized that she was staring into an alien's black eyes. She had not been plugged into a wall. She was standing in a room with her daughters and a being came up to her and stared into her eyes. Over time, the black eyes in her mind had transmuted into an "encasing" on a "wall," and her inability to avoid them transformed into being "attached" to them. During hypnosis, the encasing transmuted to "squares." Although there was a real basis for Marian's memory, the details that she consciously recalled had not happened.
Another example is that of Janet Morgan, a single mother with two children, who consciously remembered a bizarre abduction experience. As she was lying on a table, she saw small beings struggling to bring a live alligator into the room. They put the animal on the floor next to her table, turned the reptile on its back, and then took a knife and slit its underside from top to bottom. The unfortunate alligator groaned and looked at Janet in shock. This traumatic memory threw her into a deep and long-lasting depression. At first she did not want to recall the event hypnotically because she was afraid it would bring back details that would deepen her depression. After being continually despondent over this incident for almost a year, Janet bravely decided to confront the memory and try to gain emotional control over it.
In hypnosis, Janet's memory turned out to be part of a complex abduction event in which aliens performed many different procedures upon her. They conducted an examination, took an egg from her, forced her to immerse herself in a pool of liquid, and conducted a Mindscan that elicited profound fear. Then Janet found herself alone in a room, lying on a table, filled with fear and trepidation. The aliens entered from a doorway on Janet's left, pulling the heavy alligator with them, which they placed on the floor next to Janet's table.
Staring at it, she began to realize that the animal did not actually look like an alligator; she did not see an alligator's head or legs. In fact, it was a man in a green sleeping bag.
When the aliens unzipped the sleeping bag from top to bottom, the man looked up at Janet and groaned. There had been no alligator. The aliens had not slit its belly.10 Some of the most common consciously recalled memories are of the first or last few seconds of an abduction when the person is still in a normal environment. Abductees often remember waking up and seeing figures standing by their beds. But instead of remembering aliens, they recall deceased relatives and friends or religious figures. For example, Lily Martinson, a real estate agent, recalled the following incident when she was vacationing with her mother in the Virgin Islands in 1987. Asleep in the hotel room, she woke up to see her deceased brother standing at the foot of her bed; she clearly remembered what he looked like and found this memory comforting and reassuring.
When we examined this memory under hypnosis, however, Lily's description of her brother was of a person without clothes, small, thin, no hair, and large eyes. It was not her brother. Although she was disappointed that she had not seen her brother, she was satisfied that she now knew the truth.11 Indeed, the aliens have created, perhaps unwittingly, a unique obstacle to learning the truth about abduction events. It is the problem of "instilled memories"—images aliens purposely place in the ab-ductee's mind. During visualization procedures, the aliens might show an abductee a multitude of images: atomic explosions, meteorites striking Earth, the world cracking in half, environmental degradation, ecological disaster, dead people bathed in blood strewn about the landscape, and survivors begging the abductee for help. Or the aliens might show abductees images of Jesus, Mary, or other religious figures. These images have the effect of being so vivid that abductees think the events "really happened" or they "really saw" the religious figure. This can be a problem, especially when the investigator is not familiar with visualization procedures and fails to identify instilled memories. Thus, Betty Andreasson in Ray Fowler's pioneering book, The Andreasson Affair, relates a situation in which she "saw" a phoenixlike bird rising from the ashes. It was "real" to her and she reported it as an actual occurrence.12 I have had people remember figures that looked like Abraham Lincoln wearing a stovepipe hat, men wearing fedoras, angels, devils, and so forth.
Memories Recalled During Hypnosis The reliability of memory recalled during hypnosis rests not with the subject but with the hypnotist. Improperly used, hypnosis can lead to confusion, confabulation, channeling, and false memories. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of improper use of hypnosis in abduction research. And when abduction events are recovered by a researcher who has little experience or training in proper hypnotic techniques, both the subject and the hypnotist can easily be led to believe that things that did not occur during the abduction actually happened.13 Leading the Witness Skeptics of the abduction phenomenon often accuse researchers who use hypnosis of "leading" people into believing that they have been abducted. Critics say that cultural or psychological factors impel the person to seek out a hypnotist who has an emotional or intellectual stake in that person's actually being an abductee. The subject comes to the hypnotist and a dynamic is set up to talk about abductions. And through subtle cues and direct questioning, the hypnotist pressures the subject into "remembering" an entirely invented abduction account.
"Leading" is a serious problem in abduction research, but not in the way critics contend.
When inexperienced or naive hypnotists listen to an abductee's story, they often do not recognize dissociative fantasies, confabulation and false memories, or alien-instilled memories.14 The result is that the subject leads the naive hypnotist into believing an abduction scenario that did not, in fact, occur.
This type of reverse leading is best exemplified by a hypothetical situation. Suppose an abductee comes to me to talk about his alleged abduction experiences, and under hypnosis he tells me that while on board a UFO, he sat on the floor with the aliens and played a board game that was almost exactly like Monopoly, but the street names were really strange. If I then ask him about the street names, I am in danger of reverse leading.
In my more than eleven years of investigating abductions, I have never heard of anyone playing board games and I must be sure that the event happened as described before I delve into it.
Because I know that people will sometimes confabulate, especially in the first few hypnotic sessions, I would immediately suspect in this case that confabulation was at work—although I must always remember that it is possible that the aliens did play Monopoly with the abductee. I would probe further to determine whether this event happened. I would look for contradictions or inconsistencies by going over the incident from different temporal perspectives, asking questions that move the abductee forward in time and then back again. I would ask the abductee to describe the sequence of events on a second-by-second basis, searching for slight disjunctures in the account. I would ask whether the aliens were standing or sitting, precisely where they were looking, and exactly what they were looking at. In other words, I would search for the alien visualization procedures that might have instilled this image in the abductee's mind, making him think he had played this game when he had not. If the abductee were inconsistent in his answers, I would regard the incident with skepticism. If he held to his story, at the very least, I would put it in the "pending" file, waiting for another abductee to confirm the same experience independently.
In contrast to the methodology I have just outlined, the naive hypnotist, unaware that he is being led, listens to the Monopoly story and asks, "What were some of the street names?" This question subtly conveys acceptance by the hypnotist, which serves to reinforce the confabulated material as "real" for the abductee. Adding such validation impels the abductee to further confabulation. An unconscious and mild form of dissociation takes place, and the abductee begins to "remember" more events that he is just imagining. (This mental state is akin to "channeling," whereby a person in a self- altered state of consciousness believes that he is receiving communication from an unseen spirit or entity who answers questions or imparts wisdom.) The abductee has unconsciously led the hypnotist and the hypnotist has reciprocated by unwittingly validating the abductee. The two join in mutual confirmation, manufacturing an account that might have a grain of truth but is more fantasy than not.
Mutual Confirmational Fantasies Doing abduction research is exceptionally difficult—not only because of the nature of the material and how it is recovered, but because the rewards for this work are usually nonexistent. Instead, ridicule and scorn supply the main "honors." I believe that anyone who puts his or her reputation on the line and ventures into this treacherous area deserves the plaudits of all who value the search for the truth. In spite of this, even the most prominent researchers sometimes fall into investigatory traps such as mutual confirma- tional fantasies.
John Mack, professor of psychiatry at Harvard University and an abduction researcher, provides a good example of mutual confirmational fantasies. A nationally known social critic and Pulitzer Prize winner, Mack became fascinated with the abduction phenomenon in 1990 when he attended a lecture by Budd Hopkins. Mack quickly recognized that the abduction phenomenon was not mentally generated and therefore had an external reality.
He bravely undertook a full-scale examination of the phenomenon, to the detriment of his career at Harvard and to the scorn of his colleagues.
In Mack's 1994 book, Abduction, he relates a hypnosis session he conducted with "Catherine," in which aliens allegedly showed her images on a screen of a deer, moss, deserts, and other "nature things." Then she saw Egyptian tomb paintings and felt certain that she was watching herself in a former life.
Then they showed her a picture of tomb paintings with paint flaking off. "But then it switched to me painting it." But in that incarnation she was a man and as she watched this scene [she said] "This makes sense to me ... this is not a trick. This is useful information.
This is not them, pulling a bunch of shit like everything else." Catherine now felt that her insistence upon a more reciprocal exchange of information had been affirmed.
I then asked Catherine to tell me more about this image of herself as a painter in the tomb of an Egyptian pyramid. In response to my question she provided a great deal of information ... about the man and his methods and his environment. What was striking was the fact that... she was not having a fantasy about the painter. Instead, she was [him] and could "see things from totally his point of view instead of from one watching it."15 Catherine went on to "remember" many details of Egyptian painting and life. And, later in the session, she told Mack that an alien had asked her if she understood the meaning of the Egyptian scene. She then realized that '"everything's connected,' canyons, deserts, and forests. 'One cannot exist without the other and they were showing me in a former life to show that I was connected with that, and I was connected to all these other things.'" Catherine also appreciated that she was connected to the aliens. Resisting them only meant that she was struggling against herself, and therefore there was no reason to fight.
Mack not only accepts the validity of this "dialogue" but embraces Catherine's interpretations of it as well. Rather than treating the entire episode with extreme caution and skepticism, he does not question her acceptance of a previous life, her sense of connectedness, her sense that a previous request for reciprocal information was answered affirmatively, and her decision not to resist.
Catherine also told Mack that "they were trying to get me over fear, and that's why they were trying to scare me so badly, because I would eventually get sick of it and get over it and go on to more important things." Once again Mack accepts the conversation at face value and asks her "to explain further how scaring her so badly would get her beyond fear." This is a question that calls for information that is not within the scope of her testimony. Catherine duly told Mack details of how this worked.16 Catherine's narrative contained a past life, "dialogue," alien attempts to help the abductee, an environmental message, and personal growth. For the skilled abduction hypnotist, every aspect of this narrative should be suspect. Catherine could have easily slipped into a dissociative state in which she regarded internal fantasies as external events happening to her.
If the Egyptian past life imagery happened at all, it might have taken place during an imaging sequence and that automatically means that an instilled mental procedure was in process. Sometimes abductees combine imaging procedures, dreams, and fantasies for memories of external reality. Their interpretation of these "memories" is often more dependent upon their personal belief system than on the actual occurrences. Unless properly versed in the problems that these mental procedures can create, the hypnotist can easily fall into the trap of accepting fantasies and confused thinking as reality. Mack displays no skepticism about this story. He admires her "straightforward articulation" of the narrative.
There are other abduction hypnotists who, like John Mack, fall prey to methodological errors. As part of a series of thirteen hypnotic regressions with abductees, clinical psychologist Edith Fiore presents a lengthy transcript of an extraterrestrial event in her 1989 book, Encounters. Fiore believes that the act of relating the information—real or imaginary—has therapeutic value, and she is therefore more interested in what the abductees think has happened to them than in what actually occurred.
She describes the hypnotic regression of Dan, who "remembered" being a member of an alien military attack force and destroying enemies on other planets, visiting the planets "Deneb" and "Markel," having drinks with the captain, and other details of a remarkably Earthlike daily life. One day Dan found himself standing in the Cascade Mountains gazing at the trees. It was peaceful and beautiful. It seems that he had taken over the body of a small human child.
Dr. Fiore: And where's your ship?
Dan: I'm a little kid, no ship, no responsibility. Just a nice summer day. Nothing to do. AH day to do it. Just exploring.
Dr. Fiore: Now we see you as this little child. I'm going to ask you to make the connection of how you became this child.
Dan: Two different people.The child has all the memories. It's like retirement.
You get a chance to do nothing if you live longer. Be at a nice pretty place.
Dr. Fiore: How did you get to be this child, [sic] ... Dan: I joined him on that road.
Replaced, really.
Dr. Fiore: Now let's go back to when you joined him, and let's Me how you got to be on that road.
Dan: Drunk. Horribly, horribly drunk. Good party. Next morning ... tour the bridge. Say goodbyes.
Dr. Fiore: Then what happens?
Dan: Just me today. One at a time. Pick your planet. Pick an easy one.
Everybody's laughing.
Dr. Fiore: You say you were drunk?
Dan: The night before, terrible hangover.
Dr. Fiore: Where did you get drunk, [sic] Dan: On the ship, officer's mess.... Confusion, drinking.
Dr. Fiore: What kind of ship is this?
Dan: Class M. Large. Battlecruiser; fourteen drop ships; 3500 people. Armed to the teeth.17 This questioning validated what the subject was saying and subtly acted to confirm its authenticity. Fiore says later that Dan's recollection gave him an "improvement in his self-confidence and a wonderful inner peace of mind." And she believes that each of the experiences her subjects remembered "actually happened very much as they were remembered."18 Clearly, this scenario in no way fits the abduction scenario as we know it, although there are a few similarities (adult hybrids sometimes wear quasimilitary uniforms). Rather than focusing on one incident and gathering data carefully and critically, Fiore skips to nine different "encounters" in her first hypnotic regression with Dan—which, in the hands of an inexperienced abduction hypnotist, can lead to a confused and superficial accounting. Furthermore, Dan knows the answer to virtually every factual question that Fiore asks about life on board the military vessel. This omniscient factual assurance is usually a strong indicator of confabulation.
Dr. Fiore: Is there any homosexuality?
Dan: Some.
Dr. Fiore: And how is that seen?
Dan: Tolerated. Not favorably, but tolerated.
Dr. Fiore: Is there any problem with contraception?
Dan: No.
Dr. Fiore: Why is that?
Dan: Medicines, injections.
Dr. Fiore: How often is it given?
Dan: Every tour.19 The chances that this is dissociative fantasy are extremely high. In 1989 when Dr. Fiore investigated the case, she might have been better served by instituting a criteria of belief in which she accepted only material that was confirmed by others unaware of previous testimony. But Fiore and Mack were trained as therapists and not as investigators. Their approach to abduction accounts is very different from that of researchers who are more empirically oriented.
It is important to understand that in spite of their methodological problems, Mack and Fiore, like other hypnotists, uncover much of the standard physical and reproductive procedures that make up the core of the abduction experience. However, because of their training, they are not particularly interested in what has happened to the abductee. For Mack, as for many other therapists, investigation into the actual circumstances of a client's experiences is not a primary concern. Finding out exactly what happened to the abductee is less important than what the client thinks has happened to him—the account's accuracy or truthfulness is of little concern. As Mack said, "The question of whether hypnosis (or any other non-ordinary modality that can help us access realities outside of or beyond the physical world) discloses accurately what literally or factually 'happened' may be inappropriate. A more useful question would be whether the investigative method can yield information that is consistent among experiencers, carries emotional conviction, and appears to enlarge our knowledge of phenomena that are significant for the lives of the experiencers and the larger culture" [italics his].20 Thus, when Mack conducts hypnosis, he first explains to his clients that he is "more interested in their integration of their recalled experiences as we go along than in 'getting the story.' The story . .. will take care of itself in due time."21 The truth or falsity of a person's experiences—the chronology, the procedural logic, and the accurate perceptions of the events—play a secondary role in Mack's methodology. But he states that his "criterion for including or crediting an observation by an abductee is simply whether what has been reported was felt to be real by the experiencer and was communicated sincerely and authentically to me."22 Facts have a limited role to play in Mack's confrontation with an abduction event.
Fiore has a similar agenda. She states, "Because my main concern is to help people, it is not important to me if the patients/subjects report correctly the color of the aliens' skin, for example. What is important is that the negative effects of encounters be released through regressions."23 Mack's and Fiore's dedication to helping abductees is unquestionably appropriate. They deserve praise for their selfless dedication to helping people come to terms with the abduction phenomenon. Therapy should be the first priority for all researchers. But their (and other hypnotists') reluctance to separate fact from fantasy leads to a naive acceptance of accounts that should be treated suspiciously. This shapes their research techniques and leads to validational questioning and mutual confirmational fantasies.
This mutual fantasy—a subtle form of leading—is a far more significant problem for abduction research than just asking leading questions. For example, psychologist Michael Yapko polled a group of therapists to learn how they think memory works. He found that a large number of clinicians are unaware of the problems of memory and believe that hypnosis always reveals the truth.24 Many researchers have succumbed to the mutual fantasy trap by taking at face value virtually everything an abductee says. Researchers who have New Age agendas perpetuate the problem by uncritically accepting a wide range of "paranormal" accounts. Past lives, future lives, astral travel, spirit appearances, religious visitations—all assume legitimacy even before the believing hypnotist begins abduction research. When the abductee relates stories with false memories, the believing hypnotist is unable to recognize them and is therefore more than willing to take them seriously.
It is easy for inexperienced and naive hypnotists to "believe" because the majority do not have a fact-based knowledge of the abduction phenomenon. Some hypnotists even pride themselves on their lack of knowledge about abductions. They argue that their ignorance gives them a "clean slate" so that their questioning is not encumbered by what they "bring to the table." However, what they bring is their inability to separate fact from fiction. By uncritically accepting (and not challenging), by naively assuming that what is sincerely told is correct, and by defending this as "reality," inexperienced and naive researchers muddy the waters for competent investigators, allow people to think that events have happened to them that have not, and add to the incredulity of the general public.
Abduction Confabulation Abduction confabulation is a frequent problem, especially in the first few hypnotic sessions. The initial hypnotic session is always the most difficult because it can be very frightening. Many people erroneously think they will blurt out intimate details of their personal lives, or be at the mercy of the "evil" hypnotist. Once the first few sessions are completed, however, the abductee feels more comfortable with the hypnotist and with hypnosis. As a result, his memories become easier to collect and more accurate as well.
Confabulation typically occurs in three characteristic areas.
1. Physical Appearance of the Aliens. The most prevalent area of distortion is the description of the physical appearance of the aliens. Many abductees at first maintain that they can see every part of the aliens' bodies except their faces. Some abductees think that the aliens are purposely distorting or limiting the field of view to help prevent the shock of seeing their faces. The evidence does not support this. Because the abduction phenomenon begins in infancy, most abductees have seen the faces of the aliens many times. Once an abductee becomes accustomed to remembering events and less frightened about what he encounters, he usually sees the aliens' faces clearly.
Also, at first abductees tend to describe the aliens as much taller than they are, not realizing that they are gazing up at the aliens because they are lying on a table.
They also describe the aliens as being different colors and having different features. In fact, the majority of aliens are small, gray, and almost featureless except for their large eyes. During competent hypnotic investigation, the abductees recognize their mistakes and correct themselves without the hypnotist's aid or prompting.
2. Conversation. Another prevalent area of confabulation is alien dialogue.
Although alien conversation has given us our most important insights into the abduction phenomenon's methods and goals, researchers must be extremely cautious.
Abductees report that all communication with the aliens is telepathic, as is communication among the aliens. When asked what "telepathic" means, the abductees usually say they receive an impression that they automatically translate into words. We know that an abductee can receive an impression from his own thoughts, translate it into his words, and think that the words are coming from aliens. Naive researchers often accept alien dialogue at face value, not realizing that all or portions of it could be generated from the abductee's mind. Abductees sometimes slip into a "channeling" mode—in which the abductee "hears" messages from his own mind and thinks they are coming from outside sources— and the researcher fails to catch it. Some researchers have based much of their knowledge on suspect dialogue. Only experienced researchers can separate characteristic alien conversational patterns from confabulated dialogue.
3. Alien Intentions. The third area of confabulation is interpreting alien intentions and goals. For example, when asked about the purpose of a specific mechanical device during an abduction, most abductees answer "I don't know." Some, however, supply an answer because it seems reasonable: "This machine takes pictures of my muscles, sort of like an X-ray machine." Unless the investigator firmly and reliably establishes that the aliens told this to the abductee—and that the abductee did not invent the dialogue—the correct assumption is that the abductee does not know what the machine is for and is simply filling in.
The investigator must also be extremely careful with abductee accounts of what the aliens are doing. The aliens rarely describe the reasons for specific procedures, but some abductees routinely supply the reasons. Again, naive therapists and investigators tend to take these accounts at face value.
Some researchers reinvestigate the same material repeatedly in different hypnotic sessions, not realizing that if the account contains unrecognized confabulation and distortion, it can enter into normal memory as "fact." Repeated hypnosis on an event tends to confirm the "fact," and it often becomes impossible to tell what is real and what is not. On the other hand, the more sessions on different events an abductee has with a competent investigator, the greater the likelihood that confabulation will be uncovered and the accurate account will be told.
Competent Hypnosis An experienced and competent hypnotist tests the suggestibility of people who recall abduction accounts. By asking purposefully misleading questions, he can easily tell whether the subject can be led. For example, in the first hypnotic session, I often ask if a subject can see the "flat, broad" chins of the aliens. I ask if a subject can see the corners of the ceiling; I ask if the aliens are fat. The answer to these questions should be "no" according to all the evidence we have obtained. If the answer is "yes," I allow for the suggestibility of the subject when I evaluate the truthfulness and accuracy of the account.
Researcher John Carpenter of Springfield, Missouri, has fashioned this line of questioning into something of a science. He has developed a list of misleading questions—some obvious and some subtle—that are calculated to place wrong images into abductees' minds. In the first hypnotic session, he poses these questions to the new subject, who almost never answers "yes"; most abductees refuse to be led and nearly always answer misleading questions negatively, directly contradicting or correcting the hypnotist.
The first abduction incident that received widespread publicity, the Barney and Betty Hill case, published in magazine and book form in 1966, is an excellent example of the lack of suggestibility among abductees. Using hypnosis, psychiatrist Benjamin Simon tried to trap the Hills in contradictions and to suggest to them that they had invented the account.
He could never get the two to agree with him.
Simon: Was that operating room in the hospital blue?
Barney: No, it was bright lights.
Simon: Did you feel that you were going to be operated on?
Barney: No.
Simon: Did you feel that you were being attacked in any way?
Barney: No.25 During another session Simon tried again to trip up Barney.
Simon: Just a minute. Didn't Betty tell this to you while you were asleep?
Barney: No. Betty never told me this....
Simon: Yes, but didn't she tell you that you were taken inside?
Barney: Yes, she did.
Simon: Then she told you everything that was seen inside and about being stopped by these men?
Barney: No. She did not tell me about being stopped by the men. She did not have this in her dreams.26 At another point, Simon suggested to Barney that the incident could have been a hallucination. Barney disagreed.
The accuracy of abduction accounts depends, to a large degree, upon the skill and competence of the hypnotist. Memory is fallible and there are many influences that prevent its precision. Hypnosis, properly conducted and cautiously used, can be a useful and accurate tool for uncovering abduction memories. Competent hypnosis can illuminate the origin of false memories and can untangle the web of confusing memories.
What emerges are accurate, consistent, richly detailed, corroborated accounts of abductions that unlock their secrets and add to our knowledge of them.
Are Abductions Believable?
With the problems of memory retrieval and memory interpretation, is it possible that the abduction phenomenon is a psychologically generated fantasy? The answer is no, due, in part, to the fact that the evidence for the abduction phenomenon is not based solely on memory and hypnotic recounting. There is also physical evidence. When abducted, people are physically missing from their normal environments—police are called, people search for the abductees, parents are distraught.
An indirect example of being physically missing during an abduction occurred when abductee Janet Morgan's younger sister, Beth, came to babysit for her niece, six-year-old Kim, while Janet went out on a date. Both Janet, a single mother working as a legal secretary, and her daughter had had a lifetime of abduction experiences. Beth, who had also experienced suspicious, but uninvestigated events, had babysat for Kim before and was familiar with her routine.
This night Kim was sitting on the couch in the living room watching television, and Beth decided to take a bath, since the child was occupied. She ran the water, got into the tub with a novel, and began to read. A "mental haze" came over her and she sat in the tub with her eyes trained on the same page in the book for over an hour. Suddenly, she snapped out of it, jumped up, and thought, "Kim!" She threw on her clothes and raced downstairs to see if the little girl was all right.
Kim was not on the couch. Beth went into every room of the row house and called for her. She ran back into the living room, looked behind the couch and in the closet. Then she searched through the rooms a second time. Panicking, she ran outside and looked up and down the street, shouting for Kim. The next-door neighbor was outside and asked what the problem was. Beth told him that Kim was missing. The neighbor ran into the house to search for himself and found Kim sleeping on the couch in plain view. Kim had been abducted, Beth had been "switched off," and when she came to consciousness a little too soon, Kim had not yet been returned from the event. Kim was physically gone from the house, and her absence was conspicuous.
Many abductions occur with more than one person, and as further proof, people who have never heard of the abduction phenomenon have been abducted. A worried Allison Reed called to tell me that her panic-stricken children were remembering abduction events without knowing anything about the subject. She and her husband have a history of unusual personal experiences that suggest abduction activity. At the time of Allison's call in June 1993, her son, Brian, was seven years old and her daughter, Heather, was four.
Both had drawn pictures of aliens and described how they floated out of their rooms and through the window into a waiting UFO. The children reported details of incidents that are known only to veteran abduction researchers and that they could not have absorbed through the media. For example, Heather told her mother about a conversation between herself and a female alien: "She tried to make me think that she was my mommy, but I knew she was trying to trick me." Heather said this to reassure her mother that she was on to their tricks and knew who her real mother was.
The fact that two people might be abducted together and can verify each other's presence during the abduction is additional proof of the phenomenon. Janet Morgan and her older sister, Karen, have been abducted together many times along with other members of their families. Each can independently remember the abduction and can describe in detail what happened to the other without having spoken about the event.
In spite of all the difficulties in studying the abduction phenomenon, it is finally yielding its secrets. The procedures that the aliens employ are lending themselves to study and analysis. And the reasons for the procedures are both bizarre and terrifying.
4. What They Do Virtually everything that aliens do is in service to their abduction program. Every seemingly incomprehensible or absurd alien activity has, upon examination, a logical basis. One by one, these actions have begun to lose their mystery and reveal their true purposes.
When researchers first learned about the abduction phenomenon, they generally assumed that, if it was real, its objective was to investigate humans. That was why aliens abducted humans, examined them, and then released them. Because this scenario occurred repeatedly, researchers concluded that the aliens were conducting a long-term study and benignly collecting data. That belief gave the public a comfortable feeling because it suggested a scientific, and therefore nonhostile, intent.
We now know that the abduction phenomenon as a whole is not for the purpose of research. The evidence suggests that all the alien procedures serve a reproductive agenda.
And at the heart of the reproductive agenda is the Breeding Program, in which the aliens collect human sperm and eggs, incubate fetuses in human hosts to produce alien-human hybrids, and cause humans to mentally and physically interact with these hybrids for the purposes of their development.
Extrauterine Gestational Units A significant component of the Breeding Program is the creation and nurturing of extrauterine gestational units. It was only after years of research and hundreds of abduction reports that I understood this procedure and the reasons for it.
For years women have been telling researchers about mysterious gynecological procedures that were performed upon them during their abductions. Some women described "pressure," as if the aliens were filling the area around their reproductive organs with air, and their lower abdomens distended giving them a bloated and uncomfortable feeling. The women often said that their organs were being "moved around" or displaced in some way, and they got a sense that the aliens were "enlarging" or creating more space within the uterine cavity or elsewhere in the pelvic area.
Various abductees have described these gynecological procedures in similar ways.
Abductee Barbara Archer, in 1988, reported: And I started to feel pressure. It was like all this pressure.
Is this a diffuse pressure, or a specific pressure?
Inside.
But not [specifically] on the left side, or right, or middle?
Middle, inside. Just getting blown up or something, I was feeling really big. I felt really big.1 This type of procedure occurred many times to Lucy Sanders: It's on my right [pelvic] side. It's making me burn! It's making my insides burn!
They're blowing me up! He's pulling it out now, he's patting my leg and saying it's all right, that I should calm down now. Holy Lord!
What do you think they're doing there, or do they say? I don't know. It hurt, burned. I feel like I'm blown up. How do you mean? Blown up. Like a balloon?
Mm-hmm. Now the feeling is going away, but I feel puffy. He's pushing on my stomach area, pushing it in and moving his fingers, like this.2 Laura Mills described a similar procedure: What do you think he's doing down there? I really don't know what the heck he's doing.
Okay. If you had to make a wild guess, what do you think he's up to?
I know it sounds silly, but they're trying to figure out how much space I have inside or something.
So they might be measuring, or whatever? Inside. Like the uterus or something.
I'm not sure.3 Belinda Simpson experienced the same procedure «VW1 though she had undergone a hysterectomy some years before: It just feels like somebody's rolling something inside me.... Tell me what you ...
sense that they're doing.
I feel like I'm being blown up.... My side's being swollen up. It feels like a balloon. This is weird. I feel like somebody's blowing up my side, this is stupid....
It's real warm, and my side's blowing up.... Something hurts. I feel like I'm pregnant. Something is real hard in my stomach, on the side.4 Some abductees have suggested that the introduction of air into their bodies is similar to a laparoscopy, a technique physicians employ for the treatment of endometriosis and other gynecological problems. I suspected that perhaps the bloating meant the aliens were introducing air as part of the procedure for taking eggs. But I decided to put these puzzling cases on the "back burner" and wait for more information to reveal the purpose of the procedures.
It is noteworthy that hysterectomies are common among abductees. During my ten years of abduction research, I have worked with a number of women abductees who have had hysterectomies or suffered from gynecological problems resulting from their abductions.
Several women told me that the surgeons who had performed their hysterectomies have commented on the position of their ovaries, which seemed "pushed" to one side or "pressed" toward their fallopian tubes. Some women reported anomalous ovarian scarring, which is consistent with the theory that the aliens sometimes take eggs directly from the ovaries. Other women have reported vaginal scarring for which neither they nor their gynecologists could account. Others have complained of aching, swelling, and general gynecological pain.
Gynecological pain played an important part in an incident with the first abductee I placed under hypnosis. Melissa Bucknell was twenty-seven years old and intermittently sexually active. In hypnotic regressions she had talked about having "implants" placed in her during her abductions. One morning in March 1987, she awoke with gynecological pain so severe that she was having trouble sitting and she told me that she was now certain the aliens had put an "implant" in her. (My own research had shown that implants were usually placed in the nose or an ear.) I immediately took her to a gynecologist, Dr.
Daniel Treller, who graciously agreed to see her on an emergency basis.
Trailer's examination confirmed that Melissa's pelvic area was very tender and he ordered an ultrasound. The ultrasound team quickly found an anomaly. At the right side of her right ovary, but not touching it, was a mass of some sort. It was small, but looked "organic," and it was not supposed to be there. The bewildered ultrasound team summoned Treller, who was equally baffled. None of them had ever seen anything quite like this before. Suspecting an unusual ectopic pregnancy, Treller ordered a blood test to determine if Melissa was, in fact, pregnant. It was negative.
Melissa, meanwhile, insisted that this mass was an alien "implant" and she did not want to remove it or disturb it in any way. She was extremely stubborn on this point. She did not want to have it touched and she immediately objected to any suggestions to the contrary. Finally, much to Melissa's relief, Treller suggested that she come back in a week to see if the mass had changed or "grown." When we left the hospital, she said that she never wanted to come back, and she did not want the implant disturbed, despite the pain it was causing.
For the next several weeks I tried to persuade Melissa to return for another ultrasound, but she refused. Finally, a month after the initial visit, I successfully prevailed upon her.
She underwent another examination and the ultrasound screen showed the space where the mass had been, but the mass was gone. Dr. Treller was puzzled and noted that the problem appeared to be "resolving itself." Melissa was enormously relieved that she would not have to face having the mass removed. Her case remained a puzzle for years. I would have to analyze several seemingly disparate cases to finally develop a logical theory about what had happened to her.
In March 1992, Lydia Goldman told me about an extraordinary episode. I had conducted seven sessions with this charming and capable sixty-year-old woman since 1989, and she had come to realize that she had been involved with the abduction phenomenon throughout her life.
In early 1992, Lydia awoke one morning with the distinct feeling that she was pregnant.
That was impossible, not only because of her age and because she had not engaged in sexual relations, but because she had undergone a total hysterectomy many years before.
Nevertheless, her breasts began to swell, she retained water, and she had something akin to morning sickness. She recognized the symptoms as those she felt when she had been pregnant with her children. After a few weeks, the right side of her lower abdomen became slightly distended. Then, to her horror, she began to feel something moving around inside as if it were a fetus.
Was she going crazy or was something even less acceptable at work? Lydia was reluctant to go to her gynecologist because he might think she was "losing it." But the physical feeling persisted and she made an appointment with him. A few days before her appointment, she woke up and "knew" that everything was all right; her stomach was no longer distended, nothing was moving around in it, and all the symptoms had disappeared. She canceled her appointment.
When Lydia told me about this episode, I was mystified. At the time, abduction researchers knew that aliens take human eggs and human sperm, fertilize them in vitro, add alien genetic material, and then replace the altered hybrid embryo in utero.
Presumably the subject had to have a uterus in which to implant the embryo. But I had regressed many women who were abducted when they were postmenopausal, or had undergone tubal ligations, or had had their uteri and ovaries removed. I had always assumed that the aliens administered different reproductive procedures to them than to women who were still fertile.
Lydia and I decided to do a hypnotic regression on the events that occurred the night before she woke up feeling pregnant. She remembered that she was asleep at her daughter's home in Florida when the abduction took place. After describing the first segment of a typical abduction event, Lydia turned to the internal examination.
What do you think they're doing internally now? Or can you tell that at all?
They're holding something like you would hold a baby, with two hands, but it's not a baby. It's like a, I don't know.... I can't even imagine.
[Gently] Does it look like a baby, or not?
It looks like a lobster. I can't imagine. I can't even imagine. My legs are up, and they are in this position in front of me. You know, almost as though they were inserting a sack.
They were inserting something, then?
I don't know.... It looks round and light colored, and I would say about the size of a grapefruit.
So it's big.
And they're holding it.... I get the impression like you would hold a baby, like something very precious.... They're bringing it to me. ... This is a terribly repulsive idea. I find this to be extremely repulsive, dirty, unclean. It's got me very upset.
That they are bringing this to you?
And making it part of my body.... I get the sense, and I have a terrible soreness in here—hot and sore. And I find this to be extremely repulsive. This is a solid unit, it is totally contained. There's something in it. I get the sense like it's a sack, and they have inserted that. And my whole feeling about it is that I don't want that in me.
Where do you think they would have inserted this, then?
Vaginally.
But would this have been in the area where the uterus used to be?
Maybe. Maybe. I don't know.
Do you feel that this is sort of the area they're working on, or in?
As a matter of fact, my bladder felt like there was a lot of pressure, as though my bladder was dropping. And for the last six or eight months I felt that way.... I thought well, I'm just getting older, and my muscles are not as strong as they used to be.... I always felt that if I stood too long I would feel like I had to lie down for a while and let it go back into position. That kind of thing, like something was pressing on it or it was dropping. But I never felt that feeling that I have right now. Right now I feel such a soreness throughout this lower abdominal area—and hot. It feels so hot. My back hurts.
Do they say anything to you? Do they explain what they're doing, or are they just silent about this? ...
I found it to be extremely repulsive.... And I did not want that. And I'm in charge now. This is something I've got to take care of.
That's the impression you get?
It's not that I was saying no. I wouldn't say no.... I won't say no to them. I have a feeling that I'm here to serve.... I have that feeling though. I have a commitment to serve, but I don't like it. I'm kind of telling them I find this very repulsive. This is not what I want to do. But they didn't ask me if I want to do this. I don't like this at all, and I'm very upset.
I hope that you told that to them. They don't have a right to do this, Lydia, this is something that's not their right. So it's perfectly okay for you to be upset.
[Crying] I think this is about the worst thing that's ever happened to me.... You know what this is making me do? I have to change to conform to this.... The way my body operates is being disturbed now, and I have to conform to be compatible, to create an atmosphere conducive for this thing....It's throwing my body all off.5 As I was listening to Lydia, I remembered a postmenopausal abductee who had told me about feeling pregnant and feeling something "kicking" in her lower abdomen. At the time I did not know how to interpret the report. Now I knew. I realized that it was possible that the aliens are making women carry babies even if the woman does not have a uterus. Instead of implanting the embryo in a uterus, the aliens could be inserting an extrauterine gestational unit—a sac capable of incubating a fetus without having to be attached to the uterine lining. The aliens place the unit in an area near the uterus, or perhaps even in the space that the womb originally occupied, or behind the bladder, or near an ovary.
This led me to reconsider the situation with Melissa. The "implant" that she had worried about was probably not a technological device, as I had assumed, but an extrauterine fetal implantation near the ovary. In this light, Melissa's adamancy about not removing it became understandable—she unconsciously knew that she must not disturb the fetus.
Now, other puzzling cases also began to make sense. The introduction of air, accompanied by a bloating feeling and the sense that organs were being "moved around," was most likely a preparation of the space into which the aliens placed the extrauterine gestational unit; they literally hollowed out an area for its placement.
The implications of these cases were unsettling. Whatever the reproductive stage or abilities of female abductees, they can help produce babies.They can "house" the standard uterine fetal implants as well as extrauterine gestational units. In addition, these gestational units might help to "camouflage" the phenomenon. They do not trigger the human gonadotropin hormone reaction normally registered on a pregnancy test.
The extensive use of women as hosts for hybrid babies brings into sharp relief the importance of the Breeding Program. Its scope is enormous. In theory, the aliens have produced hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of offspring.
Protecting Pregnancies When an abductee becomes pregnant, what prevents her from aborting the fetus? Or what prevents her from visiting a gynecologist to detect an extrauterine gestational unit and have it removed? It has become clear during the years of my research that the aliens prevent these actions by removing the critical "evidence" before the abductee can act. On many occasions, abductees have reported scheduling an abortion only to find an empty uterus during the actual procedure. By the time the abductee undergoes the procedure, the aliens have already removed the fetus.
Claudia Negron, a woman who had raised two children before going back to college and earning her bachelor's degree, described the removal process that had occurred during one of her abductions. First she saw a long instrument that the aliens inserted into her.
Strange object. I don't know if it's metal or clear or.... They use it for making babies.
They put these things together in a laboratory, in a lab. And then they insert them in the womb so that it will grow there and develop into a baby. At a certain age—they monitor it, they know it's progressing—at a certain time they come back, they take you aboard and they remove the fetus, which by that time is not a fully developed fetus but big enough to be recognizable. They remove it, taking them to this place. I've seen it before.
Kind of fluid, they keep them in this fluid, a warm fluid. It's like a tank and that has a lot of fluid, has a lot of what is essential, I don't know, something to keep them growing, keep them living.6 Logically, the aliens must be monitoring the abductee's thoughts to protect the pregnancy.
But do they monitor and record everything a person thinks twenty-four hours a day, or do they monitor selectively? If they monitor continually, then everything an abductee thinks would have to be received, recorded, evaluated, and possibly acted upon. There is evidence to suggest that this level of monitoring does not take place. For example, the aliens are attracted to anything new on an abductee's body: an appendectomy scar, a bruise, a hair color change, a tattoo, and so on. They closely inspect the changed area and ask the person what it signifies and how it happened. If they were continually monitoring, they would probably know the answers.
Therefore, the aliens must monitor selectively. And they probably target thoughts related to specific subjects. If an abductee thinks about pancakes or shopping, it does not trigger a reaction. But if an abductee thinks about abortion, pregnancy, babies, and implants, these thoughts result in action if there is adequate time. When I rushed Melissa to the gynecologist for an ultrasound examination, the aliens did not have enough time to remove the "mass" they had implanted in her body. It all happened within one hour.
How do the aliens monitor thoughts? They most probably do it through implants. Most abductees have alien implants, which they have been describing for years, and which are high up in the nasal passage, possibly as deep as the optic nerve or the pituitary gland, in the ear, or in a sinus cavity. Abductees with implants suffer from lifelong nasal problems, bloody noses, sinus congestion, diminished hearing, tinnitus, and ear bleeding. Physicians have noted anomalous scar tissue and holes in abductees' nasal passages.
Implants have also been placed in abductees' legs, arms, and necks. Some abductees have reported implants inside their brains. Claudia Negron described receiving this type of implant during an incident in 1983.
He has some kind of instrument in his hand. It looks like, it looks like a needle, a hypodermic needle, but it's not. fit's] long. It has a long tip to it and he puts that in my ear, all the way inside. And it like just goes right through to the brain, it makes my whole brain just go, I don't know, it does something to my whole head. He said it's important. He communicates, he says, "This is important," that he has to do this.
Does he say why it's important, or is he just sort of vague?
He tells me it's important for me, but actually I have a feeling it's more important to him than it is to me. I think they're inserting something inside my head. It's really tiny, very tiny, small, whatever it is. And he said nobody will ever know it's there.
Do you respond to that?
I'm not saying anything. I just feel the pain. It's like I'm immobilized by this pain.
He says it's not going to hurt.
But it is hurting.
But it is. He said it's not going to last long. He says I won't feel anything afterwards, I won't even know it's there. I heard something pop in my ear. Oh!
Oh! ... I asked him what this is for, why are they doing this. He says—he does not talk, he just sends his thought. It's like he projects his thoughts to me and he says that they have to know, they have to know how I see the world, how I see things, how I interpret things as they occur and this is their way of monitoring that. This tells them so they know where I am at all times. They know how I react to every situation at every moment. He said that this is important to them. He says it's important for their research. They have to know this ... because they want to know how the little children will be. They want to know what to expect as they grow older. It's all for the children.7 The exact functions of the implants are unclear, but we can make some informed speculations. They are probably complex multifunctional devices, which might monitor or affect hormonal levels for lactation, menstruation, ovulation, or pregnancy. They probably also serve as a means to locate abductees. Implants in the ear, sinus cavity, and nasal passages might all serve a variety of purposes.
What is clear is that the aliens will go to any extreme to protect a pregnancy. If an abductee has any thought of abortion, they intervene. Often the aliens strongly admonish the abductee not to disturb the pregnancy, but this technique has had limited success.
Although many abductees say that they do not want to interfere in the pregnancy, most women who are aware of their pregnancies exhibit shock and horror and quickly overcome any qualms they might have about termination.
Kathleen Morrison's case is a good example. Although she was not sexually active and had undergone a hysterectomy some years before, she suspected that she was carrying an extrauterine pregnancy and she made an appointment with Dr. Treller. A few days before the appointment, she was abducted and subjected to a gynecological examination while an alien communicated with her during a concurrent staring (Mindscan) procedure.
What do you think he is doing when he does the staring procedure?
Well, I think that he's taking a reading on my body and he did a quick pass on the mind but—okay he's going deeper. He's going to give me a word and I should respond to it. He gives me the word "Treller," and I respond that I'm going to see the doctor. He asks if I don't feel well, and I said that I was having some problems. And I get the feeling that I—my mind also said something to the effect of—and I want to find out what's going on. They want to know what I mean by that. My response is, "Well, you know...." When you say, "You know," how does he respond to that?
The word that comes to mind is ICE. The demeanor changes. I get the feeling that prior to this they were ... a little more gentle, and the face has been lifted.... I feel some kind of heat in the vagina area. It's getting weirder when I say that I don't know if it's heat or extreme cold.... My question is, "What do you want?" and the thing is, "We need to make sure everything is okay." "But it's not okay, and that's why I'm going to the doctor." "You should have let us know." I get the feeling I should have let them know, but I don't know how to do that. Not that I would.
What do you think they are doing down there? Harvesting.... Eggs.
They are on your right side? ...
Yeah. There's one over at my right side. He's putting pictures in my head.
What are you seeing?
Nursery full of children. Not ours, here, up there. It's also attempts at family structure as we know it.
How do you mean?
They're not quite right. They'll be two—what seems older beings—with a group of small children.
Two gray beings, or hybrid?
Sometimes a mixture [one gray and one hybrid, Kathleen added later].
Two older beings would be a mixture, or something?
Right. It's like their concept of family life here. I almost want to say it's like a reconstructed scenario of a picnic....
When you see the family unit together, what are they doing?
It's like a reconstruction of a picnic. But they don't have the picnic bench or anything like that. It's like they are in a park type of environment. Groupings, walking, sitting.... [They're] talking. They are trying to engage in activities with the younger beings, the little ones, but it's form, no substance. It's form, no substance. It's a park type situation but there aren't any trees or brooks and grass and stuff like that but it gives you the feeling that that is like a simulation type— an acting exercise…Then they ask me a question.
What do they ask you?
"How could you do that to them?" It's relating to the picture. I don't understand ...
do what to them?
I know what they're talking about. All right, when they were asking before about, you know, why you have to go to the doctor and all that, I said because I didn't feel well. I wanted to know what was going on. And I know that I had a picture in my mind that if something was there, it wouldn't be there any longer, and that's what they're asking. How could I do that, how could I have something taken out that was them.
But you're not having anything taken out.
Well. I'm not, but... that was something that I was trying to deal with—a "What if," and they picked up on it. Damn it! Your thoughts aren't even your own.
Right. So you were thinking that if anything was there you would have had it taken out?
That's right. It would have to go.
They're saying how could you have anything taken out that was from them?
How could I do that to these little beings—these little children? How could I do that to them? That I would have something removed. That wouldn't be able to get to their like kind—where they are supposed to be. DAMN IT!
So you were seeing a picture of the little children as an example of what is wonderful and good and you're about to mess it all up?
That's right. The guilt trip.... I feel like I screwed up—big time.8 Sexual Intercourse For years abductees have reported being forced to engage in sexual intercourse with another abductee on board a UFO. These reports have been especially puzzling. Since aliens take sperm and eggs and then impregnate a woman with an embryo, there seems to be no reason why they should force humans to have intercourse. A popular theory is that the aliens are interested in the emotional aspects of sex. I have found what could be a simpler reason for this practice.
Intercourse usually takes place after an alien performs Mindscan, arousing intense sexual feelings in both the man and the woman. At this point, the aliens put the man and the woman together and the couple engages in intercourse. Then, just before ejaculation, they pull the two apart and the man ejaculates into a receptacle.
During hypnotic regression, abductees have described a variety of emotional states during intercourse. Some are neutral. Some enjoy it, as they are made to envision a loved one with them. Many feel guilt and humiliation. Sometimes the man experiences remorse at having done this to a woman. Lucy Simpson reported a man who communicated "I'm so sorry" as the aliens pulled them apart. But the aliens seem to pay no attention to these emotional reactions. They focus only on eliciting a normal physiological reaction so that the man will ejaculate.
Although the aliens routinely collect sperm by attaching a collection device to the man's penis, apparently this technique is not foolproof. The evidence suggests that there are times when this procedure and even some masturbatory techniques either fail or cannot be performed.
Joel Samuelson, an easygoing forty-year-old man who owns his own business in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, related an extremely puzzling event in which the aliens attached a device to his penis for sperm collection. Then, just a few minutes later, they led him into another room, compelled him to have intercourse with a woman, and collected his sperm. As I listened to this account, it occurred to me that although it is possible to ejaculate twice in quick succession, the time between the two ejaculations was so short that the chances are that Joel would not have been able to generate very much more sperm. In addition, he had the impression that the initial mechanical attempt had failed.9 It seems likely, then, that most sexual intercourse between humans on board a UFO is for the purpose of sperm collection and not necessarily for eliciting sexual expression. Abductees are often enlisted to obtain sperm when the mechanical means do not work or have failed. Terry Matthews helped to manually masturbate four men in turn as they lay on tables. Each time the aliens collected the sperm. Another example comes from Carla Enders, who had to help the aliens collect sperm from an older man who was "impotent." They can't get him to respond the way they want. So they ask me if I would help.
I'm like, "I don't understand." They're kind of saying, "It's not like you haven't done it before." They're asking me to do something, and I don't really know what they're asking me to do. "You've never asked me these questions before, why are you asking me these questions?" ... I'm standing in the middle of them, and they're all around me. They've formed a circle around me. I'm feeling like I just want to throw a tantrum and scream and yell... They're telling me it won't be that bad, just do it, and it will be over with....
Do you fully understand what they're asking you?
Not really. Except they want to get some sperm from this man and they can't get it. And they've tried what they normally would do, and it didn't work. And for some reason they have this impression that he would really like that.... But I still don't realize until I go in there what they're asking me to do. They're just saying, "It's going to be different, but don't worry about it," or something.
So what happens next, then?
I'm just feeling kind of puzzled as we're walking over there.
You walk back into the hallway, you mean?
Yes, and there's like two in front of me, and two behind me. And we keep going further down the hall, not very far.... And I go into this room to the right. There's other ones in there.... I'm getting flashes of it being an older man.... He's just sitting down on the end of the table, just sitting there. He's not moving. He's older ... probably at least midfifties. You can tell he's older, he's not fat, but his muscle tone is different. It's not like a young person.... It seems like he wants to get up and leave too. Seems like he can't move....
You can tap into his thoughts a little?
Yeah, and then it seems like they start, like they're doing something so he will feel sexually, some kind of sexual desire or something. It seems like he changes----- It's like he's not thinking about leaving anymore. He's not realizing that they're all around him anymore. It's like he's fantasizing or something.... It seems like they're asking me to touch his genitals. And I'm not cooperating, but they make my hands do it anyway.... I'm starting to get images that I somehow really like this person. I don't understand it.
That maybe I'm really in love with this person.
Does this guy look familiar at all?
No. I'm thinking, why am I feeling that? Then it just becomes that I don't really notice any other thoughts. I'm not even noticing that they're there anymore. I don't really remember how I started having, doing oral sex, I just remember there was a flash and I was thinking, "I don't want to be doing this," and my head is going up and down and I can't stop it. It felt... like their hands were on the side of my head, kind of pushing my head up and down, but not, like, in a way it felt forcibly, but in a way it didn't. In a way it felt like my head was just going up and down anyway. But then I felt like I wanted to stop, and I couldn't stop.... It seems like finally I can pull my head away. And I'm just really feeling sick.
What do they do with him when you pull your head away?
It's like I'm thinking they're hoping that he will ejaculate because it seems like that's what they were trying to get him to do. I don't really know. It's like they're all coming around him. ... It seems like they're getting what they wanted to. It seems like they're satisfied with the results because, it seems like they've got what they wanted.
So the procedure was successful for them.
Yes. It seems like I don't stay in there very long. They're telling me I'll just forget.
Because I'm really angry. I'm thinking, "How did that happen?" and we're just walking down the hall.10 Sperm collection is so important that the aliens do not adhere to the accepted "rules" about sex between relatives. "Carole" was traveling in Arizona with two friends and a first cousin when they were all abducted. After her physical examination, Carole was sexually aroused and led into another room. The aliens then brought her cousin to her and the two had intercourse—much to Carole's intense shame and guilt. The aliens pulled them apart when her cousin began to ejaculate and collected his sperm. So again, the purpose of forcing sexual intercourse between human seems to be to collect sperm.
An unintended consequence of intercourse for sperm collection might provide a reason for another puzzling aspect of the abduction phenomenon. Women abductees have reported that they became pregnant under impossible conditions; they'd not engaged in sexual intercourse with anyone and yet they were pregnant. They carried the baby to term and they had a normal, healthy child. One woman remembered seeing a bright light while she was driving, then there was a period of missing time. She became pregnant, and after her child's birth, she referred to him as a "star child." Hearing the story of his birth, the now-twelve-year-old son was convinced that he had traveled to his mother's uterus "on a beam of light." At least some of these "immaculate conceptions" are probably a result of bad timing, and because the aliens are living, sentient beings, they make mistakes. If, during an abduction, the male begins to ejaculate a fewseconds before the aliens pull him off the woman, she could easily become pregnant.
While sexual intercourse between two humans is primarily for sperm collection, there is another sexual scenario. Abductees have reported establishing close relationships with other humans, which the aliens arrange during their abductions. A male and a female child meet while on board a UFO, continue to see each other during abductions, and establish a friendship. When they become adolescents, they enter into an onboard sexual relationship. Sometimes they know each other's names, and sometimes they make up names for each other. Terry Matthews knew a boy named Ben Anderson, with whom she had a deep relationship as a young girl and teenager during her abductions. On one occasion she expected to meet him again, but the aliens abruptly told her that he was dead and that "we have somebody else for you to meet." When she became upset, they told her that it was not their fault and that he had died in an automobile accident.11 Occasionally two abductees will meet in a nonabduction context where they get a strong sense of familiarity and feel a powerful attraction toward each other. For example, Dena and Ray both knew immediately that they belonged together when they met. They had no idea how or why they felt that way, but the feeling was strong enough for them to divorce their spouses and marry. Hypnosis revealed that they have a long-term adolescent sexual relationship that took place exclusively during abductions.
Budd Hopkins, who first identified this phenomenon, has suggested that the mating of two abductees indicates that the aliens are conducting a study of the abductees' relationships, both social and sexual.12 This may indeed be the case. It is also possible that the two abductees possess certain genetic properties that the aliens want passed on to their children.
Controlling the Human Subjects A puzzling aspect of the abduction phenomenon has been the use of Mindscan to sexually arouse women. In Mindscan, which usually comes during or immediately after the initial physical examination, a tall alien places his face very close to that of the abductee and stares intensely at her. The alien can elicit a variety of feelings and he can make the abductee envision specific scenarios of his own choosing. One of the most common procedures is when the alien uses Mindscan to elicit sexual feelings that escalate unabated until the female abductee reaches a high sexual plateau or orgasm.
The question is: Why are sexual feelings stimulated during Mind-scan? To answer this, one must pay attention to what the tall alien, who usually performs Mindscan, does at the onset of the abductee's orgasm. He immediately breaks off his staring procedure and goes between the abductee's legs to begin the gynecological procedures. The most frequent procedure that abductees report during orgasm is egg harvesting. Inducing orgasm does not appear to be linked to any interest in or testing of sexual response. Instead, the evidence suggests that the aliens need the physiological effects of orgasm— tumescence, expansion, lubrication, and perhaps ovulation—to facilitate the gynecological procedures in which they are engaged. Although the role of orgasm in ovulation is controversial, physician (and abductee) Gloria Kane felt certain that during Mindscan the alien was provoking the release of an egg from her ovary.
When I was ... sixteen they said that they were altering the way I worked inside, just after I got my period, that they were altering the way that I worked so that I would be like a rabbit. I would be sexually excited and then produce, or release an ovum. ... They wanted me to get excited enough to ovulate that way.13 Ovulation must take place on cue for the Breeding Program. Hybrids have instructed other hybrids in the intricacies of providing for ova release. Christine Kennedy recounted an event in which one hybrid discussed inducing ovulation with three other hybrids.
He's saying something to the other ones.
When he says something, does he face them, or is he feeing away from them, or ...
?
They're facing him. He's pushing around my ovaries.
What's your position on the table? Straight down, legs straight out and together?
No, they have my feet in these things—the stirrup things.
I see. So then am 1 assuming that your knees are up and legs apart and all that?
Mm-hmm [Yes]. I can't move my feet. He's pressing on your ovary. Mm-hmm.
Now, when he says something to these other guys, can you pick up just a little what he said, a thought here, a thought there?
They're going to make me ovulate. And that's what he says?
Mm-hmm. He says something about an egg, but I don't know if it's, "Take an egg." I don't think so. I can't see my arms ... moving around.
You arms are moving? How do you mean? I was able to move my arms around.
Are you flailing away? I wanted to smack the son of a bitch. Good. So, you have some movement.
I can't do anything with them. I put them down. He hooks my right arm down and the other two, they're on the other side of the table. They followed suit.
So he's no longer pressing down on your ovary when he does that?
Mm-mm [No]. I feel like I'm being patronized. He's saying something. Something about why do I want to do that, or something....
Do you tell him off, or do you respond at all?
No, because ... he's calming me down, he's corning real dose to my face.
How close does he get to you?
Really close. I feel him touching my forehead.
What's happening?
If he makes me reach an orgasm ... son of a bitch!
When that happens—he's just sort of standing next to you, touching your forehead?
With his head. He was staring. He's doing the same shit that they always do.14 The aliens' ability to stare into an abductees' eyes and effect a wide variety of changes in brain function is extraordinary. At first it seems almost supernatural or mystical, as if Svengali were peering into Trilby's eyes, mesmerizing her to do anything he wanted. But the mystical and supernatural are not part of the abduction phenomenon. The aliens use their advanced knowledge of human physiology to control humans and, ultimately, to make sure that humans comply with the Breeding Program and all other parts of the alien agenda.
The aliens' ability to control humans comes through the manipulation of the human brain.
For example, when the alien moves close to the abductee's eyes to begin the staring procedure, almost immediately the abductee feels emotional and physical effects. One way to explain this is that the alien uses the optic nerve to gain entrance to the brain's neural pathways. By exciting impulses in the optic nerve, the alien is able to "travel" along the optic neural pathway, through the optic chiasma, into the lateral geniculate body, and then into the primary visual cortex in the back of the brain. From there he can travel into the secondary visual cortex in the occipital lobes and continue into sites in the parietal and temporal lobes and the hypothalamus. Through that route, the alien can stimulate neural pathways, travel to many neural sites, and cause the "firing" of neurons at whatever sites he wants.
Brain stimulation allows the alien to produce a range of effects. If the alien can connect into the neural pathways, he can reconstitute an abductee's memories. He can inject new images directly into the visual cortex, bypassing normal retinal observations, and cause people to "see" things that become part of their abduction "memories." He can activate sites within the limbic system and cause strong emotions, such as fear, anger, and affection. He can create feelings of sexual arousal that build relentlessly to a peak. And he can institute a form of amnesia that helps to preserve secrecy.
By using the optic nerve, the alien can, in effect, travel down the brain stem, into the autonomic nervous system in the spine, and then branch into the parasympathetic nervous system, giving him contact with virtually any organ. Abductees often talk about feeling physical sensations in their genitals, bladder, or other areas when an alien performs Mindscan procedures. The physiological responses necessary for erection and ejaculation in men, and tumescence, expansion, and lubrication in women can be artificially generated in this manner.
How the aliens engage the optic nerve is, of course, unclear, but there are some clues.
When Mindscan or any staring procedure begins, the abductee cannot avert or close his eyes; they must remain fixed and open. The abductee is, in effect, forced to peer into the alien's eyes. Most abductees report that his eyes are dark brown or black, and opaque.
Others describe what might be liquid inside the alien's eyes. Others frequently see a moving or wiggling structure in the back of the eyes that generates a "light." It is possible that the light-emanating mechanism engages the optic nerve to begin the alien's journey through neural pathways.
Some abductees can feel the engagement when it happens. Allison Reed often sensed the alien's physical attachment to her brain during Mindscan.
What's he doing when he's inside there?
I feel a little tired. There's that thing again. I can't see it but I can feel it, it's ... and it goes all around. I don't know, it goes all around, it's like a blue light. It's between my skull and my brain, of course I can't see it, I just feel it. I don't feel much of anything right now. I feel good, I feel relaxed.. . .
The blue light, is that from his own eyes, do you guess, or from an instrument?
No, I don't like to call it a light because it's not a light like you see, it's more like an energy. I can't see it, usually in these places you see certain things but you feel more than you see. Your major senses are no longer sight and smell and touch, it's your sixth sense when you're here. It's from him, it's not an instrument, it's an energy. Somehow he can make this energy go in my head.15 Similarly, Courtney Walsh, a young woman pursuing a career in the biological sciences, "felt" her neural pathways being stimulated.
No, it feels like, it's hard to describe, like something is worming around in there.
You can feel the different nerve pathways.... It actually feels nice, though. I can feel actual—it feels like something is—little currents of energy running around in my head.16 Jack Thernstrom, a graduate student in the physical sciences, had a similar reaction and sensed that the alien was physically going through his mind: Now he's looking in my face again, and this time it's that feeling of a knife prying into my mind.
This is a feeling of... a physiological situation that's going on there?
It's like pure mental pain.
What do you think he's doing now?
I have this impression of, as if he's probing his way through a lot of—it's almost a physical sensation, as if thin strings or cables are all closely intertwined, almost hairlike, but under tension. It seems I've seen something like this ... he's kind of groping in there, and finding paths between them to get at a certain point. It's this feeling of a knife probing through, and forcing its way between things.. .. It's somewhere between active and passive ... it's not like opening it up and looking at it, it's as if one had a mass of wires and one were pulling and separating them to see what's connected to what.17 Some abductees visualize random thoughts and images as the alien traverses the neural pathways, as if the "travel" enervates the pathways as a by-product of the procedure. One woman saw a frame house, a mule-drawn carriage, a "Gibson-Girl's" hair, someone washing the hair on a mannequin's head (no body) in a basin, an iceberg in a fjord, the top of an old house in winter, two children, and a nineteenth-century print of two politicians. Another abductee envisioned a comb, teeth, numbers, letters, parts of a face, a man falling out of a building, a bird in flight, knife edges, a leg, a mouse hole, a pocket watch, and potatoes.
Once joined with the abductee's neural pathways, the alien essentially has free rein to do what he wants. The abductee is no longer in control of his own thoughts. The aliens can exercise absolute power over the minds and bodies of the abductees. They can make the abductees think, feel, visualize, or do anything the aliens want.
The aliens' ability to attach to the abductee's neural pathways is not automatic. They turn and twist their heads to get the best vantage point to hook into the optic nerve. They hold the abductee's head so that she will not make any movements that might disrupt engagement. Kathleen Morrison had an unusual Mindscan in which the first alien could not make an adequate attachment. After the first alien tried without success for several minutes, another alien took over and she could quickly feel the effects of the familiar Mindscan procedure.
But another abductee successfully resisted mental engagement. During a recent abduction, Reshma Kamal found that she had more muscle control than usual and she used it to prevent a neural connection. She shifted her eyes back and forth rapidly while reciting an Arabic religious phrase. The first alien tried to lock into her eyes but could not. He diverted her attention by causing a pain in her head, and he threatened not to take her home, but she refused to give in. Another alien took over and increased the threats.
Still she refused to stop, although she was getting dizzy moving her eyes back and forth.
A third alien tried, and then a fourth. They could not stop her from shifting her eyes.
Eventually they gave up and said that they would continue the procedure at the next abduction.18 Abductees have said that in some way they know the mental procedures are related to the hybrids. The abductees suggest that aliens record information from them and then transfer it into hybrids' minds so that they can learn how humans live and feel. There are also procedures in which hybrids directly transfer information from human minds into their minds. An alien attached Allison Reed to an adult female hybrid with wires, and as the two sat facing each other, Allison could feel her thoughts and memories flowing out of her and into the hybrid. The hybrid "absorbed" Allison's thoughts and experiences and apparently derived some benefit from this procedure.19 The mental procedures must be viewed in relation to the aliens' reproductive agenda.
Without the ability to manipulate the human brain, the aliens would be unable to control the abductees physically or mentally and the Breeding Program would not be feasible in its present form. Abductees often feel even more violated by the mental procedures than by the reproductive ones. They know that their private thoughts are not their own and that they can be "tapped into" and manipulated. Although I often try to reassure them that in spite of what happens their thoughts are free, they know that this may not be entirely true.
Who are these powerful beings who can control humans? What kind of society do they live in? How do they live? Through abduction accounts, we have been able to piece together facts that provide some answers to these all-important questions.
5. What They Are Abductees have painted a clear picture of how the aliens behave. They present themselves to the abductees very professionally—a cooperative society operating like an efficient factory. But the aliens have been very private about their "personal" lives and the society in which they live. Still, over the years they have "leaked" bits and pieces of information, and a picture of their life and society is slowly emerging.
Where Do They Come From?
Do aliens come from outer space, another dimension, or a parallel universe? At first, researchers believed that outer space was the most logical explanation: that the aliens flew here from Mars or Venus or elsewhere in our solar system. But as scientists learned more about our solar system, it seemed certain that Earth was the only planet bearing intelligent life. Therefore, researchers concluded that the aliens would have to come from another solar system. But even the nearest one is light years away, and flying here would be a daunting task, even at the speed of light. The problem of how UFOs can travel to Earth has been an intellectual "stopper" for many, and scientists have developed various theories over the years to overcome this hurdle. Astronomer and UFO researcher J. Allen Hynek posited that UFOs come from somewhere else via the "astral plane." They in some way "will" themselves here, as if traveling on thought patterns. UFO researcher Jacques Vallee and others have suggested that UFOs come from an alternative reality that mankind somehow calls into consciousness; this alternative reality presumably exists alongside our own. Other researchers have hypothesized that the aliens "pop" out of a parallel universe that might be made of antimatter or some other substance.
This intellectual dilemma—how to reconcile space travel with current scientific knowledge—has been a key issue that has prevented the astronomical community from exploring the UFO phenomenon on any serious level. Yet this intellectual dilemma is a spurious problem. Instead of asking where the aliens are from and how they get here, it is more appropriate to ask: Are people really seeing the anomalous, artificially constructed, and intelligently controlled objects they are reporting? Are people really having the abduction experiences they describe? The question is not how aliens get here but whether they are here. The "how" is ultimately a technological detail.
Abductees have, of course, asked the aliens where they come from. And the answers indicate that they are indeed from another planet somewhere in the known universe.
Since there are billions of stars and therefore billions of possible planets, this explanation seems reasonable and abductee testimony seems to bear it out.
When abductees have asked the aliens about their "home," they sometimes point to an area of the sky; they do not talk about parallel universes, time travel, dimensions, or other exotic "locations." In one instance, Michelle Peters, a woman with two children living in New Jersey, had a conversation with an adult hybrid: I asked him where he's from and he said the North. I sat up and looked at him.... He pointed up at the stars, and he said, "... It's about right there, but you can't see it. You can see stars around it if you had a telescope; three little stars and a planet, then there's a cluster, and then there's that. It's like a helix." First there's a few little stars, then the planet, then the cluster. And then their planet. It's real far away.1 Kathleen Morrison found herself with an adult hybrid staring out a window into space.
The hybrid explained to her that travel through the stars was accomplished in stages.
He's pointing out constellations and stuff. Not just constellations like we know them but points out farther things. It seems that there's a link between certain of the systems that stretch out into space. I don't know. All I think of it is if you're crossing a river and you have stones and you jump from one stone to the next stone to the next stone, that's the best analogy that I can think of. But he points that kind of stuff out, stepping stones.2 Other abductees have described being in space and looking down at Earth. Their UFO did enter another universe.
Many abductees have reported being in desertlike terrain. Although the meaning of these settings is unclear, there are indications that such terrain may be a home environment for the aliens. Susan Steiner remembered an incident when she was in one of these environments walking on sand.
The sky is like reddish. There's like cloud formations that are sort of hanging in the air very low, like very, they're not like cumulus clouds. They're more feathery type clouds.
And they're like all different colors. Like multicolored and they're hanging in the air, almost like cotton candy or angel's hair. It looks sort of like angel's hair hanging there in the air. It's just like all over the place. There's like three, looks like there's three suns in the sky. One of them has like little, like smaller things sort of like ... I don't know what you would call them but like rotating around one of the suns. The other two don't have that, the other two are just plain. We start walking out into this stuff and then....
You were walking on the sand?
Right. But it's like hard sand. It's not like beach sand, it's like harder than that. But it's definitely sand, just not like a beach. And then we're like walking and he's grabbing my hand, he takes my hand and it seems like we're walking up steps but there's no steps.
We're just floating and we float up toward this building, these big glass doors.
She floated into the building where two tall robed beings met her. She then underwent the standard alien procedures.3 We do not yet know where the aliens come from or how they get here, but a picture is emerging, again from abductees' accounts, of what their lives are like aboard the vehicles that appear to have transported them.
The Organization Chart The aliens seem to have a recognizable chain of command and clearly defined roles aboard their spacecraft. In my book Secret Life, I pointed out that the shorter gray aliens act as assistants to the taller grays. The shorter aliens bring abductees to the UFO, take their clothes off, escort them to the "examination" rooms, and even do some nonspecialized procedures. Shorter aliens rarely engage in extended conversation, and what they do communicate is usually limited to palliatives and reassurances for the frightened abductee. Researchers now know that the taller alien, whom abductees sometimes call the "doctor" or the "specialist" to differentiate him from the others, often joins the abduction after the shorter aliens have performed an examination of the abductee. The taller being conducts the more complicated procedures. He takes sperm and harvests eggs. He implants embryos into female abductees and a few months later he extracts the fetuses. He conducts staring procedures in which he can extract memories or information from the abductee and in which he can also elicit sexual arousal and orgasm.
He engages in visualization procedures, during which he can make the abductee see and even relive life events, or he can create entirely new "events" for the abductee to experience.
The taller aliens appear to have more of a personality than the shorter ones. They will engage in a dialogue with the abductee but remain coy about the objectives of the abduction and about the specific procedures.
There are suggestions of further differentiation of task—according to sex. I have received no reports of female smaller beings; all the females seem to be the taller variety. Female aliens perform the specialized tasks, including gynecological and urological procedures and visualizations; occasionally, they engage in Mindscan and staring procedures. The main distinction is that the female aliens attend to the hybrid offspring. They bring the babies for the important physical interaction that they must have with the abductees. They also watch over and direct the activities of the hybrid toddlers and young children.
This differentiation of task could be an artifact of the abductees' cultural perceptions, but the descriptions of the female alien militate against this. The females have no physical attributes of their sex as we would expect if human cultural perceptions informed these descriptions. They have no breasts or any secondary sexual characteristics that are noticeable to the abductee. Instead, the abductees say that the female aliens seem "kinder," "gentler," or more "graceful" or "feminine" in some ill-defined way. Regardless of the vagaries of their descriptions, the abductees are all absolutely certain that these aliens are female.
In my earlier research, I focused on the gray beings because they are the most predominant life forms that abductees see. But it is now important to note that abductees have also reported other subgroups. Sometimes they report shorter beings with different skin color—tan or white are the most frequent. They also describe varying facial characteristics in both taller and shorter beings. By far, the most prominent differentiation is in overall appearance. There are the standard grays, but there are also "Nordics," "reptilians," "insectoids," and robed, or hooded, tall beings.
Because most aliens are small and gray, for years I thought the Nordics were examples of confabulation and wishful thinking, which transformed the ugly aliens into handsome, blond, blue-eyed humans. After listening to many accounts of these more human-looking aliens, I concluded that the evidence clearly suggests that the Nordics are most probably adult hybrids, the products of human/alien mating. They hybrids are critically important and I will describe their crucial roles later.
The reports of "reptilians" or "insectoids" may simply be a matter of word choice, and some abductees apply these descriptive terms to aliens whom other abductees might describe as "standard" grays. Assuming, however, that reptilian and insectlike beings are actually different types, it is noteworthy that abductees almost always see them with the gray aliens, not alone, and that the tasks they perform are all within the standard alien matrix. They generally perform the taller being's more specialized functions. Abductees often express dislike or fear of these aliens, sometimes characterizing them as "mean" or "evil," although they have no evidence for these assertions.
Although we have not yet delineated the "reptilian" beings' roles, the "insectoid" beings are coming into sharper relief. Abductees have reported an alien who seems to have a higher "rank" and supervisory status than even the taller beings. He is very tall and is usually wearing a cape or long robe with a high collar. He often is described as an insectlike being who looks somewhat like a praying mantis or a giant ant. He examines abductees only infrequently and most often engages in staring procedures. When he communicates telepathically with humans, his talk is often more substantive and he is sometimes more forthcoming in the information he imparts. But generally he stands back, observes the abduction proceedings, and may issue directions to the taller beings.
The existence of task-specific beings suggests a hierarchical "society" and the probability of a "governmental body," with a downward-flowing chain of command from the insectlike beings to the shorter gray aliens. Other aliens appear to act somewhat subservient to the insectlike beings. If this is the case, then we can hypothesize that they might possess the highest authority for the entire Breeding Program, and therefore might be the group that initiated it.
Abductees frequently comment that the aliens display a "hive" mentality. The shorter aliens especially look alike, dress alike, and act alike, and on board the UFO, they do nothing that suggests unique personality traits. All individual activity is directed toward the abduction goal in a clinical and dispassionate way. The taller gray aliens appear to have more individuality and the robed insect-like ones even more.
Although the aliens might have disagreements and annoyances among themselves, they generally present a united and positive front to the abductees.They constantly tell the abductees about how important the program is and how thankful they are for the abductees' "help." Communications Skills The aliens communicate telepathically with humans and with each other. When abductees describe the communication process, they say they receive an impression in their minds that they automatically convert into their own words for comprehension. Most of the time abductees seem to understand alien messages extremely well. Yet the subtle and wide range of expression that humans can use— cynicism, irony, sarcasm, drama—seems to be limited for the aliens, and the range of communicative expression that comes from subtle facial movements is almost nonexistent.
Quite often abductees can "tap" into conversations between aliens, which usually relate to the procedures in the abduction. "Hearing" aliens talk among themselves seems to depend on proximity. Abductees report that they do not "hear" a cacophony of sound in the UFO; they only "hear" in the right proximity.
The aliens, however, seem to "hear" and understand both human communication and human thought. Accounts from abductees strongly suggest that the aliens seem to know what abductees are thinking privately. For example, take the situation of a woman ab- ductee who is given a hybrid baby to hold. She resists this order and communicates to the aliens that she will throw it on the floor, but the abductee reports that the aliens "know" she will not do it.
Emotional Demeanor Most abductees describe the aliens as having a narrow and "controlled" emotional demeanor. They are usually calm and collected. When they do become more emotional, they act satisfied, pleased, and gratified, but not joyous; they act irritated, annoyed, and perturbed, but not angry. Extremes of emotion do not seem to be part of their mental makeup.
Their restricted emotional range may help explain why the aliens force abductees to interact physically with hybrid babies and toddlers. The abductees report that this interaction makes usually passive babies become more active, as if the abductees have in some way "charged" the babies or given them more energy.
It is clear from abduction accounts that the aliens cannot provide what the babies need.
They have stated as much themselves. The case of Reshma Kamal is a good example.
During an abduction, a female alien asked Reshma to hold a baby, but she resisted and questioned the need for the procedure: She's going to show me how. She's picking up the baby. She's trying to put it against her, but it's like she doesn't know how. Now she's asking me to do it and I said no. She puts it down again. And I'm asking what do they do with these babies, where do they come from. She's telling me I don't need to worry about that, that the babies need to be held, otherwise they can't grow right. Whatever that means. I'm telling her that she doesn't have to worry about them growing right because they're already not right. She doesn't seem to like the way I feel....
She's explaining something to me.
What is she saying?
She thinks if she can make me understand something, I'll behave better.... I know she's trying for me to cooperate. I'm thinking the more I bother her, the more she will give me information. Now she's telling me that they need these babies. What we need to teach them is emotions, feelings, that they cannot do. She's explaining to me that they can feed and clothe the babies, they can grow physically, but they cannot give these babies emotional development, that they need me to help them to do that. I don't understand that.... She's saying there's a very big need for these babies. She's saying something about these babies are not exactly like them, or not exactly like us. But they need to have emotion.... She seems a little frustrated with me because I'm not cooperating. I'm just standing there with my hands folded, and I tell her I'm not doing anything.
Trying to make Reshma cooperate, the female alien took her to an incubatorium—a room that contained hundreds of containers of fetuses.
She's waiting to see my reaction. I'm asking her why are they doing this, and how do the babies survive like that, and how I wish that we had something like that so I didn't have to go through the birth pain. She's saying to me that if we did that, these babies would have no emotions, just like their babies, and that's where they need our help. These babies can grow physically... but emotionally they're dead...
They need us to do that—nurture the babies. And I'm asking her why do they have to do all this.
Good question. What is her answer, then?
She's not saying anything. It's like she can't believe I still want to know more....
She's saying that these babies cannot function exactly like they do in their society, neither can they function if they were in our society exactly like us. ... So she's saying that we have to work together so these babies are not wasted. They cannot work on the babies alone because the way they function, the baby cannot function like that. And they cannot let us have them because they're not like us. But they need something from them and from us. ... She seems real frustrated with me.
She's not saying anything. She's just saying we need to do that. ...
She says in time I will know. I'm suspicious of her, so I ask her do you want my kids? And she says not the way I think, to adopt them or something. There's no use for them here. That's all she says. I'm angry, and I'm saying to her that if they keep those babies in the wall like that, of course they're not going to have any emotions. She's saying to me if they kept these babies in our stomachs for nine months, that there would be too much confusion. So it's better to take these babies out when they're very small so we don't know, and they keep bringing us back to help them out. They have to take them out so we don't know what they're doing.
I'm looking at all the boxes in the wall. She's asking if I'll help them. I said no.4 Eventually, although Reshma did not want to, she relented and held a baby. It is rare that an abductee can resist what is being requested of her.
Basic Alien Biology All life on Earth requires fuel to exist. Plants obtain fuel from the sun and the soil, animals from plant and animal material. We might assume that aliens would function in a similar way. Abductee reports suggest, however, that they have no mouth, teeth, esophagus, digestive tract, abdomen, or orifices for the elimination of waste products. No abductee has ever reported aliens eating or being in an area that could be reasonably deduced to be a human-style eating room. When the abductee Lynne Miller directly asked the aliens whether they eat, after a pause one answered: "We need no human consumption of the matter that you eat." Until now, how aliens obtain fuel has been a mystery. My earlier research showed that alien biology was different from human biology, but with no obvious sign of ingesting food, one could easily surmise that these beings were robotlike, stamped out by a die with an internal power source. One of Allison Reed's abduction experiences gave me the key to the puzzle. During a four-and-one-half-day abduction, a hybrid took Allison to rejoin her escort, who had been with her since the beginning of the abduction. The hybrid mistakenly took Allison into a room that apparently was "off limits." It was large, circular, and had a vaulted ceiling. Allison saw approximately forty tanks filled with liquid in a horseshoe arrangement around the circular wall. She heard a humming sound and saw a yellow light streaming to the center of the room from the ceiling.
So, what happens next then? You walk in there. You absorb this scene— The light in the center, it withdraws. I'm standing there for a while.... Eventually, the light in the center it kind of sucks itself up. It goes into the ceiling.... Now these things [tanks], they're, like, tilted back just ever so slightly but randomly they'll "sit front" and then the water, I say water, the liquid just goes. It just goes. I don't know where it goes. It just goes. It may be sucked into-I don't know.
Do you hear a gurgling sound or anything?
I hear "wissssshhh." They are sitting back at an angle and every time one is moved ever so much forward, it goes "wisssshhh," like that, then it's forward and the liquid is dissipated. It's gone. I don't see, like, a hose coming out of the top.
Now this happens when the light withdraws?
Right. The light withdraws first, the yellow round thing in the center but then it's, like, intermittently—they don't all sit up together at once and everybody comes piling out—it's more, like, randomly one will pop up here, there, you know, from this side, that side. Some are in longer and some come out....
And what happens then?
Well, some of them they start to come out. They come out.
How do they come out? They walk right through it.
They walk through it? They don't open the door or anything? Hm-mm [No].
They walk right through the glass, in other words?
Right. Just like they do at my house.
Are they surprised to see you or do they just go about their business or—? What do they do when they come out?
They just walk past me. They walk past me. And I'm waiting there. Isn't this stupid? I'm waiting there for this gray guy. I'm so stupid! Why do I do that? I'm remembering this and I'd like to beat myself over the head. I'm such a jerk! Any other time I'm bitching that I want to run away from them and here I stand waiting for him!
When Allison's escort walked up to her, he was shocked to see her there. For him, the shock was compounded because she was wearing hybrid clothes. He quickly told Allison that they would have to go back to the shower room and return the clothes.
After I get that understanding that I could have caused problems for myself, I say to him, "What were you doing? What were you doing in there?" I think it, you know.... He just puts it off like, "Eating and sleeping," like it's so simple. It sounds too simple to be right but that's what I understand.5 If this is true, it suggests that aliens obtain their fuel by absorption through their skin rather than by ingestion. The absorption theory is supported by reports of fetuses floating in tanks in "incubatoriums." Many fetuses do not have umbilical cords, suggesting that they do not receive nourishment from a placenta. An alien told Diane Henderson from southern Illinois that the fetuses were in the liquid for "feeding," and that it was "nutritious."6 They gave Pam Martin the same explanation. An alien took her into an incubatorium and explained the function of the liquid environment in which the fetuses were floating. He told her that they "get everything" from the liquid.7 Susan Steiner went into a nursery where an alien presented her with a baby. First the aliens directed her to have skin-on-skin contact with the baby by rubbing its head and abdomen. Then they wanted her to feed the baby, but she refused. When they could not force her to feed it, they brought out a bowl of brown liquid with a "paintbrush" and told her to paint it on the baby. She asked them what the point of this was. They told her it was for "nourishment."8 Thus, whatever the specific and still unknown biological processes, we now know that aliens obtain fuel differently from humans, that their skin has a unique function, and that they convert "food" to energy very differently. But these are mere glimpses into alien life and biology, and the reason we do not know more is that the aliens do not want us to know. They have implemented a policy of secrecy that has effectively prevented us from understanding them or their intentions. Secrecy is the cornerstone upon which the abduction phenomenon rests. The success of the alien agenda depends upon it.
6. Why They Are Secret Why don't the UFOs land on the White House lawn? Why don't the alien occupants step out and say "Take me to your leader"? Why don't they make formal contact? These obvious questions, which people have posed for years, deserve thoughtful consideration.
Yet the questions themselves are problematic because they are based on the assumption that the aliens want to make themselves known, establish contact with humans, and speak to our leaders. This assumption is incorrect. The evidence surrounding the UFO and abduction phenomenon strongly points, not to revelation, but to concealment as the goal.
Why should the aliens want to keep the UFO and abduction phenomenon a secret?
Secrecy benefits the aliens and befuddles the humans. It hides the facts and fuels endless speculations. It is responsible for prolonged and rancorous debate between proponents and debunkers over the phenomenon's legitimacy. Secrecy also has a powerful and negative influence on abductees. It causes them and the public to question their sanity.
Without secrecy there would be no UFO and abduction controversy.
Yet millions of people around the world have observed UFOs. Numerous photographs, motion pictures, and videos of UFOs have stood the test of scientific analysis. Radar traces have been part of the hard evidence for many years. How can we reconcile all the overt evidence with a policy of secrecy?
Ultimately, UFO sightings do not compromise secrecy. It is impossible to base an analysis of aliens' motivations and goals on the sightings of UFOs and, occasionally, their occupants. We must conclude, then, that the aliens actively dictate the terms upon which we can study them. They have chosen not to land on the White House lawn. They have chosen not to make overt "contact." In the 1960s, the great French UFO researcher Aime Michel succinctly labeled this "The Problem of Noncontact." The Early Hypotheses: 1940s to 1960s A sighting—any sighting—would seem to be inconsistent with a policy of secrecy. If the technologically superior aliens wish to keep their secret, one could argue, they would prevent witnesses from seeing them. But beginning in the late 1940s, researchers struggled with the puzzle of why UFOs did not make formal contact. They offered several hypotheses about noncontact. The first theories focused on human hostility, ethical noninterference, reconnaissance, and various combinations of these three.
The "hostile humans" hypothesis suggested that UFOs were clandestine because they feared human aggression. Instances of jet fighter pilots encountering UFOs in the air and either wanting to fire upon them or actually shooting at them gave credence to the idea that aliens believed we were a hostile species who posed a threat to their spacecraft.
The "hostile humans" hypothesis was particularly in vogue when America was involved with the military mindset of World War II, the Korean conflict, and the Cold War, and was influenced by then-current anthropological ideas that man was an innately aggressive, warlike animal. Humankind's first reaction to extraterrestrial visitation, at least on an institutional level, would be to use military force to control or destroy the UFOs. By maintaining its distance, an advanced, and presumably peaceful, alien species would avoid conflict. As Air Force analyst James Lipp said in 1949: "It is hard to believe that any technologically accomplished race would come here, flaunt its ability in mysterious ways and then simply go away." Lipp suggested that "the lack of purpose apparent in the various episodes is also puzzling. Only one motive can be assigned; that the spacemen are 'feeling out' our defenses without wanting to be belligerent."1 This theory first received popular expression in the 1951 motion picture The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which a UFO lands near the White House and the U.S. military, armed with guns and tanks, immediately surrounds it. A trigger-happy soldier shoots and wounds an extraterrestrial after he emerges from the flying saucer. When the alien escapes, he completes his mission on Earth only by living incognito with humans.
Avoiding overt contact was seen as a preventive reaction to our inherent hostility.
Early researchers also put forward the "reconnaissance" explanation for alien secrecy.
Pioneer UFO researcher Donald Keyhoe, in his 1950 Flying Saucers Are Real, advanced the idea that "the earth has been under periodic observation from another planet, or other planets for at least two centuries." These inspections are "part of a long-range survey and will continue indefinitely. No immediate attempt to contact the earth seems evident.
There may be some unknown block to making contact, but it is more probable that the spacemen's plans are not complete."2 According to Keyhoe, if we were exploring another planet, we would not make contact until our observations were complete: "If we were to find that the other species was hostile or belligerent, then we would go on to the next planet."3 Building upon Keyhoe's theory, Canadian UFO investigator Wilbert Smith speculated in 1953 that when UFO occupants discover that we are a warlike people, they will depart because we are "too primitive by their standards." For Smith and other researchers, UFO occupants were anthropologists practicing a policy of noninterference when they encountered a previously undiscovered tribal society. According to this theory, aliens had a moral responsibility to protect humanity from the problems that interspecies contact could bring. However, Smith suggested to Keyhoe that the aliens would directly intervene if humans became too aggressive: Suppose, for instance, our pilots discovered a lost civilization down in the Amazon country. We'd investigate from the air to see how advanced they were before risking direct contact. If they were a century or two behind us with sectional wars going on, we'd possibly leave them alone—unless they had something we wanted badly. But they might be only a decade or two behind us. In that event we'd at least keep a close eye on them in the future. ... But if for any reason they were a danger to the rest of the world, we'd have to bring them under control, by reason—or threat of force.4 Aime Michel combined the "hostile humans" and noninterference hypotheses in 1956 when he suggested that UFO occupants did not contact us because it might be physically dangerous for them. Michel said that humans are a violent people and, "considering our bloody past, would they not be justified in thinking that their best protection is an 'iron curtain'?" But, explained Michel, the aliens also had a selfish reason for noncontact: "Contact would be a bad bargain for them. It would teach us far more than it would teach them and in every way reduce their margin of superiority over us. And supposing we found out the secret of their machines? Would we use the knowledge as prudently as they have done?" Still, Michel thought that contact might happen "when contact does more good than harm."5 He noted with approval that they had "respect for others" because they had "never once attempted to interfere in our affairs."6 Aime Michel later suggested that the aliens had deliberately avoided overt contact because of the havoc it would wreak upon human institutions and life—and aliens would supplant us in a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest model.7 Contact could, however, take place without our knowledge, said Michel, because the aliens are so superior and clandestine that "we will be as incapable of detecting their activity or of analyzing their motives as a mouse is of reading a book."8 In the 1950s, a very divisive element entered the debate over the meaning of noncontact—the infamous contactees. These people claimed that they were having continuing interactions with friendly "Space Brothers." They met with aliens at various places, including restaurants, bus terminals, and isolated areas. This was contact. And although most serious UFO researchers quickly exposed the con-tactees as frauds, legions of people believed their yarns and concluded that aliens had already made contact and therefore the debate over the secret nature of the UFO phenomenon was moot.9 The contactees lost their popularity by the 1960s, but ever since, debunkers and skeptics have pointed to them as examples of how UFO proponents can be gullible.
In the 1960s, the "hostile humans" hypothesis declined, but the reconnaissance hypothesis remained strong. Writing in 1962, Coral Lorenzen, codirector of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, made the reconnaissance hypothesis part of the satellite program. She said that UFOs were subjecting Earth to "a geographical, ecological, and biological survey accompanied by a military reconnaissance of the whole world's terrestrial defenses." According to Lorenzen this activity had increased since the first Earth-orbiting satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, and "succeeding space probes launched by men seem to have generated a closer scrutiny of earth by our 'visitors,' if indeed they are real."10 Researchers Richard Hall, Ted Bloecher, and Isabel Davis of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena suggested in 1969 that there was no formal contact because the aliens did not understand our civilization. "Even in the simple matter of physical approach to human beings, the behavior of UFOs is above all contradictory; they seem to display a mixture of caution and curiosity." UFOs did not contact humans because "the extraterrestrials ... may still be as baffled about our behavior and motives as we continue to be about theirs."11 However, a real contradiction existed between the hypotheses and the daily events.
Thousands of people were sighting UFOs; investigators were collecting thousands of reports of high-level sightings, low-level sightings, and even landed UFOs; and there was an increase in the number of "occupant" reports, in which witnesses said they saw aliens in or near a UFO. The Barney and Betty Hill case, in the early 1960s, also helped bolster the argument that UFOs were making covert contact.
Did this activity mean that UFOs were displaying themselves on purpose? What was the purpose?
The Later Hypotheses: 1970s to 1990s By the 1970s, some researchers began to theorize that UFOs were revealing themselves slowly so that humans could get accustomed to the idea of alien visitation. Presumably, sudden revelation would be enormously upsetting to all human institutions. Fear, depression, and despair would follow. Suicides would probably rise. Widespread panic, institutional disintegration, governmental crisis, and other forms of catastrophe could follow, leading to societal chaos and anarchy. Gradual revelation would "cushion the blow" of contact and reduce disruption; the aliens did not want to shock humans by showing themselves too abruptly.
Therefore, the aliens allowed humans to sight UFOs as a societal "shock absorber." Researchers hypothesized that sightings allowed us to achieve a higher form of awareness about aliens in a constantly controlled manner, much like a thermostat controlling temperature. Part of the alien design was to allow the idea of UFOs as extraterrestrial objects to creep into popular culture. Thus, researchers theorized, the aliens played us like a fiddle for our own good while they carefully monitored society's knowledge of their presence.
UFO researcher Jacques Vallee expounded a version of this theory in The Invisible College (1975). The random appearance and disappearances of single UFOs and waves of sightings held special significance for Vallee. These UFO manifestations were part of a control system designed by the aliens to "stimulate the relationship between man's consciousness needs and the evolving complexities of the world which he must understand." This would lead to what Vallee called "a new cosmic behavior."12 For Vallee, the UFO phenomenon resided somewhere between the physical and psychic worlds. It was linked to man's consciousness and was called forth to condition humanity to a shift in world view, presumably about the universe and man's place within it.13 UFO appearances and disappearances were part of a human conditioning regimen, although Vallee was vague about the purpose of the conditioning.
Similar theories developed. One popular idea among Jungian UFO researchers was that UFOs were manifestations of an alternative reality that existed between the psychic and the objective. Individual people psychically called these forms into being from an "imaginal" realm. While they were here they were "real" and objective, but they vanished into the other realm.14 The growing number of "occupant" sightings in the late 1970s and early 1980s added support to the "psychic realm" hypotheses. The occupants seemed to behave in incomprehensible ways. They avoided contact, failed to communicate, seemed to inspect people who stood paralyzed, and then disappeared into their UFOs and flew off.
Witnesses reported UFOs swooping down upon their cars and pacing or "chasing" them.
Other reports described objects simply materializing in front of witnesses and then disappearing without the observer seeing them fly away.
The celebrated UFO researcher and astronomer J. Allen Hynek wrestled with the problems of noncontact and the seemingly absurd manner in which UFOs behaved. When the UFOs initiated what appeared to be a form of contact—being seen from time to time, buzzing cars and airplanes, scaring people, not giving humans a "gesture of good will"— it made no sense. Why would UFOs and their occupants exhibit such bizarre behavior?
Hynek speculated that UFOs dwelled in a parallel universe or another dimension and "popped" through to Earth. Perhaps they came on the "astral plane" in which they could "will" themselves to be on Earth. Whatever the case, the ease with which they came to Earth suggested that UFOs could do what they wanted without having to make formal contact.15 Biologist and UFO researcher Frank Salisbury summed up these attitudes in 1974 by saying "The extraterrestrials might simply have their reasons for not wanting to make formal contact, and ... we, in this stage of our development, simply cannot fathom those reasons."16 Although theories have abounded—Earth as a refueling station for UFOS traveling to other places, Earth as a tourist spot for aliens to gaze upon—by the late 1980s most researchers had given up speculating about noncontact. Not enough evidence existed upon which to base a viable hypothesis.
Then in the early 1990s, John Mack revived the debate by postulating that the purpose of noncontact was "to invite, to remind, to permeate our culture from the bottom up as well as the top down, and to open our consciousness in a way that avoids a conclusion that is different from the ways we traditionally require." Humans must look for proof of the existence of aliens in ways other than the purely rational. "It is for us to embrace the reality of the phenomenon and to take a step forward appreciating that we live in a universe different from the one in which we have been taught to believe."17 I believe these prior hypotheses to be inadequate to explain the UFO phenomenon. As with most speculation about the phenomenon, researchers have based their hypotheses about noncontact on the most circumstantial evidence. Furthermore, most theories have placed noncontact within a human-centered context: Aliens either fear humans or want to help them. Like Ptolemy, who assumed that Earth was the center of the solar system, most researchers have assumed that aliens have come to Earth because they realize the uniqueness and importance of humans. This is what the Judeo-Christian tradition teaches.18 Indeed, most traditional theories of formal contact have been rooted in Judeo-Christian anthropomorphism. These theories have generally assumed that an alien species would have a strong interest in the complex thought processes, civilization, and technology of humans. Aliens would respect us and share their scientific and technological knowledge with us; humans would join with aliens into a community of planets. These assumptions have been based not on evidence but on the ideas and thought processes derived from the society and culture in which its adherents live.
Current Hypotheses and Abductions The abduction phenomenon has always been more secretive than the UFO-sighting phenomenon. Researchers investigated UFO sightings for fourteen years before they came upon an abduction case. Another twenty-five years elapsed before they understood that abductions were enormously widespread and the central focus of the UFO phenomenon.
When researchers first began to investigate abductions, they assumed that an abduction was a one-time, adult-onset event. Abductions suggested curiosity rather than manipulation on the part of the aliens. As abductees recalled fragments of events, researchers decided that aliens were "studying" or "experimenting" on people. The secretive aliens were finished with their examination of Earth's flora and fauna and had turned their attention to studying humans.
As the number of abduction reports grew, many researchers adopted the ethical noninterference argument and assumed that aliens conducted their study in secret in order not to disrupt the subject's life. Memories of an abduction could be so traumatic that they would negatively interfere with the abductee's psychological well-being. In addition, researchers assumed the aliens gave abductees posthypnotic suggestions not to remember an event so that it would be buried in the subject's unconscious.
Other researchers hypothesized that an abductee would not remember an abduction because the natural defenses of the human brain repressed the traumatic event. The human mind could not cope with the impossibility and terror of an alien abduction; rather than confronting the horrendous events, the mind buried the memories deep within it and only allowed tiny pieces to "bleed" through. Investigators had to use hypnosis to recover these repressed memories.
The argument that aliens operate in secrecy in order not to disrupt abductees' lives might have merit were it not for the fact that the disruption in their lives is enormous even without conscious recollection of their abduction experiences. If the aliens were indeed concerned about not causing personal disruption, they would not abduct people in the first place, or, at the very least, not so often over the course of their lives.
The hypotheses that abductees repress memories to cope with the trauma of an abduction also have evidential problems. The mechanisms of traumatic memory repression are highly debatable, and even if the hypothesis is true, the frequency of abductions militates against repression in every case. There are many abduction events that are not traumatic and they, too, are not remembered. Furthermore, researchers have uncovered no reports of posthypnotic procedures that aliens might use to "bury" the abduction event. If these procedures existed, researchers would be seeing them during every abduction.
Although the exact neurology is not known, it is most likely that the aliens store the abduction events directly in the abductee's long-term memory system, bypassing short- term memory and preventing the triggering mechanism that allows for its reconstitution.
Hypnosis restores the trigger that allows the memories to come forth. Reshma Kamal was told that the reason the aliens do not "erase" the memories altogether is that there are aspects of them that must be retained by abductees for future reference. Thus, the memories are intact, but inaccessible through normal recall.19 For years, the abduction phenomenon has lain hidden under layers of direct and indirect protection—societal beliefs, scientific hostility, incomplete conscious recall, confabulation in hypnotically recalled testimony, and alien-induced memory manipulation. Unlike sightings of UFOs, there are no radar traces, photographs, films, or videotapes. The evidence is primarily anecdotal, with an occasional artifact. Only one thing is certain: Whatever the reason for it, the alien secrecy strategy has been enormously successful. Most people who have had a lifetime of abduction experiences remain unaware of what has happened to them. They would deny as lunacy any suggestion that they were involved with the abduction phenomenon, even if they had been abducted just hours before.
Methods of Protecting Secrecy Hie starting point of secrecy is to prevent the abductee from remembering what happened, a strategy that is more comprehensive than just inculcating amnesia. First, all those near the abduction event must not be aware of what is happening. Therefore, the aliens routinely immobilize, render unconscious, or perceptually alter potential witnesses to the abduction. In effect, they "switch off" proximate people so that they cannot interfere in the event. Husbands, wives, friends, and bystanders—all are made unaware of the abduction.
Second, the abductee is separated from a group. For example, if he is at a picnic, he will "take a walk" and not return for an hour and a half; when he returns, he explains vaguely that he "lost track of time," and his friends ignore the incident. Thus, the aliens maintain secrecy while abducting someone from a large group of people.
Third, to render memory recall more difficult, the aliens cloud what memory the abductee has by injecting confusing and "false" memories into his mind. For example, if the person is abducted from bed, he might remember an unusually vivid and realistic "dream." Other abductions might produce "screen" memories of animals staring at the abductee—owls, deer, monkeys, racoons. An abductee might think he saw an "angel," a "devil," or a deceased relative standing by his bed. Society provides a menu of explanations, and the abductees pick and choose depending on their background and culture.
Secrecy extends to the physical aspect of the abduction, and "cloaking" the removal of an abductee is an integral part of it. When a person is abducted from his normal environment, he reports that he floated directly out of a closed window, or through the wall, or through the ceiling and roof and up into a waiting UFO. Yet people on the outside rarely see this because the aliens somehow render themselves, the abductees, and the UFO "unseeable" during this time.
Abductions often take place from automobiles, and the aliens institute secrecy in this situation as well. When a person is driving, the aliens cause the car to stop so that the abductee can walk to a UFO waiting by the side of the road (sometimes the abductee floats directly through the windshield). Typically, the aliens wait until there are no other cars on the road, or they compel the abductee to drive down a deserted road and wait for the abduction. Often, the aliens take the car with the abductee, resolving the problem of having an abandoned vehicle on the side of the road.
Threats to Secrecy Yet the secrecy policy has not been implemented perfectly. The aliens apparently cannot maintain total secrecy. Witnesses see UFOs. Traces of their existence have been left behind in the form of marks on the ground and physical effects upon the environment.
Many ab-ductees have conscious memories of their experiences. Abductees are aware of "missing time." They have unexplainable scars and other physical "clues." In addition to these symptoms of abduction activity, the secrecy policy has many other vulnerabilities.
The first vulnerable point is the mechanical device implanted in many abductees.
Walking around with an implant can be risky. The monitoring system that alerts aliens to attempts to remove the implant only works in a nonemergency situation. To my knowledge, on at least twenty occasions abductees who are unaware of their abduction experiences have either sneezed out an implant or discharged it in another way.
Potentially, the discharge can compromise secrecy. The aliens have been "lucky" that this has not been the case; the puzzled and unaware abductees have assumed that they accidentally acquired the object ("The wind must have blown it into my nose"). Or an abductee might feel compelled to discard the object. For example, a young woman discharged a two-inch yellow plasticlike object vaginally, which, of course shocked and frightened her. She "knew" that she had to get rid of the object immediately. She flushed it down the toilet, and then she flushed the toilet three more times to make sure that it had disappeared. Then she felt better.
Not being taped on video equipment or photographed is essential to maintain the aliens' secrecy. They are extremely careful to make sure that the abductee turns off photographic detection equipment before an abduction. If necessary, they can cause a power failure in the house or neighborhood to prevent the detection equipment from working. They do not want to be seen.
Protecting the Fetus The aliens' single most significant area of vulnerability—the one that has, by far, the greatest impact on maintaining secrecy—is the implantation of a gestating fetus. Because producing offspring is a primary goal of abductions, successful fetal implantation and extraction are critical. Virtually all female abductees have had embryos implanted, and after a period of weeks or months the fetus has been removed. Without the fetal implantation-extraction phase of the program, the entire abduction phenomenon would be crippled, if not rendered inoperative. It is absolutely essential that the fetus is protected from abortion during this phase.
Fetal implantation is precisely where security is most likely to be compromised. Once a woman has been impregnated, she continues with her normal life but she is carrying the fetus. Although few female abductees are aware of the fetus, they—and not the aliens— are in control of it and the pregnancy. For the aliens, this crucial shift in control comes at a perilous time. If the woman realizes she is carrying a fetus inserted into her by the aliens, she can elect to terminate the pregnancy. Indeed, many female abductees have sought abortions. Alien monitoring generally reveals a planned abortion so that the fetus can be removed beforehand, but other protective methods must also be implemented.
Deceiving the woman by implanting an extrauterine gestational unit is another way to secure protection for the fetus. The unit does not change the shape, size, or color of the uterus and often does not provoke a characteristic hormonal reaction. Therefore, the abductee has little indication that she is pregnant and takes no action to end the pregnancy.
Another subterfuge is to allow the sexually active woman to think she is pregnant. There is always the real possibility that the pregnancy is a normal outcome of sexual relations even though the couple might have used contraception. If the woman elects to terminate the pregnancy, usually there is enough time between the decision and the necessary testing for the aliens to remove the fetus. In most cases, by the time the woman arrives for the abortion, the fetus is gone. Generally, the physician's diagnosis is pseudocyesis, spontaneous abortion, absorption, or secondary amenorrhea. The woman makes no overt connection between the "disappearance" of the fetus and the abduction phenomenon.
Reasons for Secrecy The critical question still remains: Why are the aliens so secretive? The answer can be found in the motives and purposes of the Breeding Program. Because the fetus must be protected, the most effective method to prevent the abductee from knowing about the pregnancy is to keep it secret from her. In response to Lucy Sanders's questions one alien was uncharacteristically forthcoming. He told her: We have our own interest because we are removing your ova and using it for our own genetic purposes. We know this will be very disturbing to the human female because she is a reproductive organ between the two of the species, she is the host for reproduction, and we only remove those that we need.
When Lucy asked him what that meant, he replied: We sometimes use the female human as a host for genetic reproductive purposes.
We feel that if the female of the species knows that her body is being used as a host, she may wish to remove what she feels isn't hers. So we put a very strong blank [block] on her memory process so that she has no idea that the implant has been put there. We will do the same for you when we, as we have in the past, implant you.
We feel that it is better for the female if we do not leave the implant in. We are able to bring the fetus to term using our own females, but the first, within the first trimester it must be removed so that the female human does not realize she is host to an implant.
We find psychologically, within the first trimester, if the female host is unaware of the implant, she goes about her normal routine, and it does not have a debilitating effect on the fetus. Upon removal, we put another blank on the female human host so that in the future we can do this same procedure and she will be accustomed to it.20 Beyond protecting the fetus, there are other reasons for secrecy. If abductions are, as all the evidence clearly indicates, an intergenera-tional phenomenon in which the children of abductees are themselves abductees, then one of the aliens' goals is the generation of more abductees.
Are all children of abductees incorporated into the phenomenon? The evidence suggests that the answer is "yes." If an abductee has children with a nonabductee, the chances are that all their descendants will be abductees. This means that through normal population increase, divorce, remarriage, and so on, the abductee population will increase quickly throughout the generations. When those children grow and marry and have children of their own, all of their children, whether they marry an abductee or nonabductee, will be abductees.
To protect the intergenerational nature of the Breeding Program, it must be kept secret from the abductees so they will continue to have children. If the abductees knew that the program was inter-generational, they might elect not to have children. This would bring a critical part of the program to a halt, which the aliens cannot allow.
The final reason for secrecy is to expand the Breeding Program. To integrate laterally in society, the aliens must make sure that abductees mate with nonabductees and produce abductee children. If abductees were aware of the program, they might decide not to have children at all or to mate only with other abductees. Thus, the number of childbearing unions between abductees and nonab-ductees would decline, endangering the progress of the Breeding Program.
The Breeding Program must be kept secret, not only from women, but also from men and society as a whole. When Claudia Negron was six years old, a young hybrid girl explained at least part of the program to her.
I ask her why they're doing this. She says it's for the good of everybody and that they have to do this. It's very important and that I'm not the only one. There are many... . And one day I will know what it's all about, but not just yet. Because if they tell people what it's all about, then their project is ruined. So they have to keep it a secret for now. I ask her what kind of a project is it. She says to make a better world, to make a better place.21 It could be argued that since we have evidence of the Breeding Program, secrecy has effectively been compromised. But this is not the case. The aliens' wall of secrecy will only be penetrated when many people within our society, perhaps the majority, fully realize what has been happening to them and understand the implications for them and their descendants. After fifty years of public awareness of UFO sightings and abductions, the debate continues about whether the phenomenon is "real," and the scientific community refuses to study it.
Thus, at this point in time, the aliens' policy of secrecy has been and continues to be enormously successful, despite the millions of UFO sightings and abduction reports. The vast majority of abductees have the memories of their experiences locked in their minds, entwined within a labyrinth of dreams, confabulation, false memories, and induced images—exactly where the aliens want them to be. And if abductees recover these experiences, they endure societal strictures, ridicule, disbelief, and condescension.
Secrecy is not necessary to protect society from the "shock" of revelation of "contact." Nor is it necessary to protect the individual's life from disruption. Secrecy is necessary to protect the alien Breeding Program. It is a defensive measure, not against the hostility of violent and frightened humans, but against the hostility of a host population who would object to being the victims of a widespread program of physiological exploitation.
Now we can understand why the aliens will not land on the White House lawn. If they were to do so, the reasons they have come to Earth might be discovered, and they might not be able to continue with their Breeding Program. Most of the past secrecy theories have assumed the aliens concealed themselves to hide their existence. It is now clear that the primary reason for secrecy is to keep their activities hidden and therefore they must keep their existence a secret.
Because it is covert, the abduction phenomenon that is essential to the Breeding Program has grown to enormous proportions. And both its purpose and its magnitude have profoundly disturbing implications for the future.
7. Infiltration For many years, UFO researchers thought abductions were rare events that befell unfortunate adults who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Barney and Betty Hill case seemed to be a good example of the "There's-One-Get-Him!" theory.
In recent years, however, researchers have realized that the abduction phenomenon is lifelong and pervasive.
We now know that abductions begin in infancy. Mothers have described being abducted with their babies. Some abductees have even reported aliens visiting them in their hospital beds shortly before or after giving birth. We also now know that the abduction phenomenon continues into old age. Most important, we now know that abductees experience a lifetime of abductions. Every abductee whom my colleagues and I have investigated has had many abduction events throughout his or her life.
So, how many people have been abducted? This question is virtually impossible to answer, mainly because people do not remember their abductions. But in spite of this difficulty, we know that the abduction phenomenon is enormously widespread. My colleague Budd Hopkins and I have received thousands of letters and phone calls from abductees relating their experiences. Other researchers throughout our society have dealt with or heard from tens of thousands more. Still, the number of people contacting researchers is not an accurate representation of how many people might be abductees because, again, most abductees are unaware of their experiences.
Unaware Abductees Although unaware abductees are a silent population who confound accurate statistics, they provide an excellent "reality check" for the abduction phenomenon. We can compare reports abductees made before they became aware of their abductions to those they made after hypnosis with a competent therapist. As a group, the unaware abductees consistently report a similar pattern of experiences before becoming aware of abductions.
When unaware, they explain their strange experiences in ways acceptable to society. For example, an unaware abductee will explain his nighttime odd and half-remembered visitations as "guardian angels" calling on him. An unaware abductee might explain a visitation as a deceased relative or friend reassuring him that "Everything is all right." An unaware abductee may think that he has seen "ghosts" and that his house is "haunted." One woman told me she and her family had moved many times to get away from ghosts, but every house she ever lived in was haunted.
Unaware abductees also frequently report seeing religious figures or the Devil. They report having had intense and profound communication with an animal. They describe having unexpected or unwanted "out-of-body experiences" that take place apart from trauma or meditation. They travel on the "astral plane," from which they can look down and see rooftops in their neighborhood.
The case of one graduate student is typical. She told me of seeing ghosts, UFOs, and bizarre occurrences throughout her life. In one spectacular event, when she was a young girl, she looked out of her bedroom window and saw a UFO landing in her backyard.
Suddenly her distraught mother came running into her bedroom, yelling that the aliens were going to get them and that they had to hide. The student remembered nothing else in the incident. I asked her what she thought about these unusual events. She answered that her mother had told her this was just part of life, that life has its mysterious side, and that what she experienced was just a part of growing up. She was able to categorize a lifetime of extraordinary events as "normal." Informal Estimates of Magnitude Budd Hopkins designed a questionnaire for OMNI magazine in 1987 to try to collect incidence data on abductions. Readers of OMNI returned over 4,000 questionnaires.
Physicist Bruce Mac-cabee and UFO researchers Don Berliner and Rob Swiatek of the Fund for UFO Research analyzed 450 of them and concluded that about 4 percent of the male respondents and 11 percent of the female respondents might be abductees.1 In 1987 I also began to collect incidence data on abductees. I developed a simple survey, based on the OMNI questionnaire, for a university student population. Over the years, I refined the survey and continued to give it to students. By 1991 I had collected over twelve hundred responses, mainly from college students aged eighteen to twenty-three.
These fell into three categories: possible ab-ductee, questionable, or not an abductee. I based the categories on my knowledge of the unusual experiences that abductees had told me about before they knew they were involved with the phenomenon. The results of my analysis suggested that 5.5 percent of the respondents were "possible" abductees, and that 15.5 percent were "questionable." These numbers were shockingly high.
And there are many other informal estimates. For example, the evidence strongly suggests that the majority, if not all, of "close encounter" UFO sightings are the beginnings or endings of abduction events. Even high-level sightings may be indicative of abductions. Statistics from Gallup Polls on UFO sightings have varied from 9 percent to 14 percent since the 1950s. If a percentage of these sightings mask abductions, then the number of abduction events is high.
The Roper Poll In 1991, Robert Bigelow, a philanthropist and supporter of UFO research, and another interested researcher proposed to Budd Hopkins and me that we conduct formal survey research to estimate the number of people in America who may be abductees. We agreed.
We knew the challenges. We had to construct the survey so that it would elicit a wide range of information and overcome the problems of lack of conscious memories of abductions. Then we had to find a polling organization that would be willing to take on the task. After interviewing the major polling organizations, we chose the Roper Organization because the people there were enthusiastic about the project. Finally, we had to be very cautious and conservative in analyzing the results.
In the summer of 1991, Roper conducted an omnibus survey of a randomly selected group of adults across the United States. It was an in-home survey, in which an interviewer went to a person's home, asked the questions, and recorded the answers on his questionnaire. The abduction questions were part of other questions about people's personal experiences and politics. There were no questions about product preferences.2 One question was specifically designed to identify people who felt compelled to answer positively regardless of the facts. Hopkins invented the word "trondant" and we asked if this word had special significance or meaning for the respondent. If a large percentage of people answered the trondant question positively, we would know that the answers to the questionnaire should all be suspect.
Survey research usually covers a population of about sixteen hundred people, which is considered large enough to provide accurate results for most national polls. However, given the controversial nature of abduction research, we wanted to use a much larger population to maximize accuracy. The final number of respondents was 5,947 people, which yielded an error range of a mere 1.4 percent. The Roper Poll thus became the largest and most accurate poll of this type ever taken. It is important to note that it was not an opinion poll, but a poll asking about people's personal experiences, which made it different from nearly all other polls of this nature.
In the initial results, the number of potential abductees was very high—embarrassingly high: • 18 percent had wakened paralyzed with a strange figure in the room.
• 15 percent had seen a terrifying figure.
• 14 percent had left their body.
• 13 percent had missing time.
• 11 percent had seen a ghost.
• 10 percent had flown through the air.
• 8 percent had seen unusual lights in the room.
• 8 percent had puzzling scars.
• 7 percent had seen a UFO.
• 5 percent had dreams of UFOs.
• 1 percent said the word "trondant" had special significance for them.
The small number of positive responses to the trondant question meant that the poll was not weighted toward those who had the urge to answer positively. The Roper Organization eliminated from the final statistics all questionnaires with a positive answer to the trondant question.
The results of the Roper Poll indicated that millions of Americans might be abductees.
Hopkins and I knew that the abduction phenomenon was widespread, but these numbers were breathtaking. For that reason, we took the most conservative approach to the data.
We isolated the five questions that had been found in previous research to be reliable indicators of abduction activity. And we included in the final sample only those people who answered at least four of the five questions positively.
The final analysis indicates that 2 percent of the American people—five million Americans—have experienced events consistent with those that abductees experienced before they knew they were abductees. Even if this number is as much as 75 percent higher than actual occurrence, there would still be over one million people who might be abductees. One thing is clear: The Roper Poll confirmed the less formal and anecdotal evidence that there are a tremendous number of people who have had abduction experiences. And we can conclude, therefore, that the abduction phenomenon is widespread and touches almost all groups in society.
In addition to the overall findings, the Roper Poll reported the results by age, sex, race, geography, and social status, and provided data on these subgroups. One important subanalysis focused on age, and a second focused on the group of respondents whom the Roper Organization called Social/Political Actives. These people, whatever their political persuasion, are aware of social problems and seek to effect change. For example, they write letters of protest to their local school boards, seek political office, or otherwise have some semblance of social responsibility. They have more education and a greater median income ($38,700 compared to $28,300) than the general population.
The results of the two subanalyses are shown in the following tables. The first summarizes the responses by age group, showing that the eighteen to twenty-nine age group answered more positively to the five abduction indicators than any other age group.
This seems to go against logic because older people have had a greater opportunity over their lifetime to have more abduction experiences.
Relationship Between Five Indicator Experiences and Age (Total Sample) AGE Overall 18-29 30-44 45-59 60+ Waking up paralyzed with sense of strange figure 18% 22% 21% 17% 10% Missing time 13% 14% 13% 13% 10% Feeling of actually flying 10% 11% 13% 10% 8% Balls of light in room 8% 11% 9% 7% 5% Puzzling scars 8% 14% 7% 6% 5% The second subanalysis concerns the Social/Political Actives. This group would not be expected to have experienced bizarre events; they are people who place themselves in the public eye. However, they not only scored higher on all questions, but they scored significantly higher.
Relationship Between Five Indicator Experiences and Social Political Activism (Total Sample) Overall Soc./Pbl. Actives Waking up paralyzed with sense of strange figure 18% 28% Missing time 13% 17% Feeling of actually flying 10% 18% Balls of light in room 8% 11% Puzzling scars 8% 9% Frequency Estimates The Roper Poll provides incidence data on the abduction phenomenon, but it does not provide frequency data. We know that abductions occur throughout most of an abductee's life. However, estimating frequency is very difficult. The first and most important problem is that abductees do not remember the vast majority of their abduction events.
To collect frequency data, I asked several abductees to chart their abductions. These abductees had a sufficient number of hypnotic sessions with me to be sensitive to the "markers" that strongly indicate abduction activity. Six abductees carefully recorded the events that happened to them. We have confirmed some of these events through hypnotic regression, and we will investigate other events as time goes on.
Frequency of Abductions Abductee Period Events No. Investigated Karen Morgan Jan. 25, 1988-Jan. 22, 1989 1 year 9 7 Kathleen Morrison calendar year 1994 1 year 13 7 Christine Kennedy Oct. 1992-Feb. 19, 1993 31 months 8 5 Allison Reed July 20, 1993-July 22, 1994 1 year 33 14 Gloria Kane July 4, 1988-Feb. 28, 1989 8 months 54 11 Kay Summers Nov. 13,1993-Dec. 14,1993 1 month 14 1 The charting effort uncovers some provocative data. Christine Kennedy, for example, correlated her menstrual cycle with her charted abduction events; when there was no abduction event, her period had a twenty-eight-day cycle; but when there was an abduction event, her cycle shortened to as little as twenty-four days. Allison Reed correlated her abduction experiences with her blood sugar level (having diabetes, she took her blood sugar reading every morning); her blood sugar level was often elevated after an abduction, rising to three or four times its normal level. Gloria Kane found that her experience increased in frequency at ovulation and decreased in frequency at menstruation (although ovulation and menstruation were not the sole determinates of her abductions).
The woman who represents the extreme of the abduction phenomenon is Kay Summers, who lives in the Midwest and works in retail sales. Constant telephone contact has allowed me to record the many events that have befallen her. She had as many as 100 abductions during a one-year period, or an average one every three days.The effect on Kay has been devastating and she lives in despair. She receives minimal support from her friends and family, who either refuse to believe her or, if they do believe her, refuse to believe the amazing frequency.
Often tired and depressed because of sleep loss and abduction trauma, Kay has learned to dissociate psychologically from the experience while it is happening, much as a child might during repeated physical or sexual abuse. Still, she is on an emotional roller- coaster. When the abductions ease off, she begins to regain her sunny disposition, but then they begin again and her despondency mounts. As of 1997, her abductions continue.
Budd Hopkins and I have investigated many of her experiences, including over fifty of the recent events.
Although the frequency with which Kay is abducted is extreme, it is not as unusual as we originally thought. In the last few years, many abductees have reported dramatic accelerations in the frequency of their abductions. The general trend has been toward a greater number of events for each abductee.
Suppose that these data are wrong—that frequency is much lower. The smallest number of abductions per year reported to me is nine. If the rate is only five per year, and if the phenomenon begins in childhood and continues through old age, the numbers still add up quickly. If the person is forty years old, then he may already have had as many as two hundred abductions, with many more to come. This is borne out by many abductees who have charted their unusual experiences over a period of several years. Charles Petrie, who works as a printer, kept a journal of his experiences over the course of his life and has consciously remembered over two hundred events up to age thirty-eight. His life has been a quest to discover what has been happening to him.
The conclusion from the Roper Poll and from our own research is that, without a doubt, an enormous number of people are experiencing an enormous number of abductions. The aliens have invested and continue to invest a tremendous amount of time and energy in the abduction program. Many people think that abductions are a "study" or "experiment," or that the aliens are "learning" about us. The numbers suggest otherwise. The learning and experimenting, if ever the case, are mainly over. Hence, the evidence clearly indicates that the aliens are conducting a widespread, systematic program of physiological exploitation of human beings.
8. The Hybrid Species-Children The production of a hybrid species appears to be the means to the aliens' goal. So far, researchers have been unable to uncover any other purpose for the UFO and abduction phenomena, and the Breeding Program. Why are aliens producing hybrids? This has long been one of the fundamental mysteries of UFO and abduction research. Until now, we have had precious little information upon which to formulate a theory. But to answer this question, it is first necessary to understand both the idea of hybridization and the nature of hybrid life.
Producing Hybrids For years researchers have posited that the aliens are a dying race and must pass on their genes to hybrids to maintain their "life." This theory assumes that the aliens either cannot reproduce or cannot reproduce in enough numbers to sustain their species' viability.
Although dismissed as science fiction by many UFO researchers, the evidence suggests that there may be merit to this theory.
The Allison Reed case sheds light on this issue. In her four-and-a-half-day abduction event, an alien escort took her to a "museum" room in which she saw artifacts on shelves along with strange life-sized "holograms" of several beings. Her alien escort explained what these figures represented and why the hybridization was undertaken.
Each of the hologram figures had a "flaw" of some sort. The first had alien features with distinctive black eyes and a thin body; it also had a distended stomach with boil-like protuberances on it. The next hologram looked more human. He had blond hair and humanlike eyes, but he had no genitals, and his skin was extremely pale, like that of a "borderline albino." The final hologram was a grouping of smaller beings, about five feet tall. They were very white and Allison received the impression that they were "mentally weak or something." Allison's escort told her that the most important fact about these beings was that none of them could reproduce. They appeared to have been failures at previous attempts at hybridization. "The human race is not the first that they have found, or that they have attempted to work with," she said. "We are just the ones found to be the most compatible and the ones that it can work with because they can't sustain themselves for an awful lot longer because they [the aliens] are a result of a genetic mix, alteration, manipulation, whatever the word is." The small one you're looking at can't reproduce?
No. Not any of them. They can't reproduce—any of them. So, besides the parts that were failures, like the white one's mental abilities ... somehow they just weren't able to get it. But, apart from that, the three that I have told you about, they can't sustain life for themselves. My understanding is that's what's happened to the gray ones. Throughout the creation of the gray ones until through their evolution, we'll say, they've gotten to the point that reproduction of themselves is a problem. Almost like the horse and the donkey syndrome in that you come up with a sexless mule. And that's kind of what went wrong. I don't feel like it happened right away. Somehow they were able to reproduce but, because they are a result of a genetic altering, through the years and through the generations it lessened. I guess it would be almost like if men just became sterile year after year after year until, whatever....
Does he tell you what they were like before genetic alteration?
No. He doesn't specify that.... He just claims that he and his gray people are the result of genetic manipulation that some higher species, I guess, played God and mixed and matched and whatever. That's what he tells me.... He and his people were created through a genetic alteration through a higher intelligence.... I don't know what they were created for. But my understanding is that they were created for a purpose and, through the years, they weren't able to reproduce themselves anymore. From what he told me ... they didn't start this. They were a result, just like the hybrids are, from something else. From a higher intelligence. That's what I get from him. I guess. That's just what I hear.1 This explanation suggests that the aliens had attempted a program of reproduction before they came to Earth, and that they have had periods of trial and error. The idea that the gray beings were themselves products of hybridization experiments was also given credence during one of Reshma Kamal's abductions.The insectlike aliens told her that the gray aliens were products of early attempts at hybridization with humans but the program was flawed and it left the gray aliens without the ability to reproduce. Then the insectlike aliens began a new program of human hybridization with different techniques that has taken more time but has been fruitful.2 Whatever the case, humans have been successful for them. We can reproduce, and they can reproduce through us.
Creating Homo Alienus In 1992,1 began a series of hypnotic regression sessions with a woman who apparently had a sexual relationship with a human-looking hybrid. During one conversation "Emily" and the hybrid had discussed his parents. I asked her if he had discussed the differences between him and us. She told me, "He's a hybrid. His mother was like me, and his father was like him. So he's ... a degree closer." I was intrigued by what she had said. If true, the implications of her information were extraordinary.
As I thought about Emily's statement, I began to put other information in context. For years abductees have been reporting a variety of hybrid types. Some hybrids look very much like aliens, some look like combinations of human and alien, and some look extremely human. Although the exact hybridization process is not known, a theory can now be put forward that explains the disparate types of hybrids and their activities.
Hybridization appears to progress in stages. It is clear from abduction reports that it starts in vitro with the joining of human sperm, eggs, and alien genetic material. The result of this union, which is "grown" partially in a human female host and partially in a gestation device, is a hybrid being who is a cross between alien and human (hybrid.1). Many of these hybrids look almost alien. They have large black eyes with no whites; small, thin bodies; thin arms; thin legs; thin, nonexistent, or sparse hair; a tiny mouth; nonexistent or tiny ears; and pointed chins. They have no genitals. Some look so much like aliens that abductees often mistake them for "pure" aliens.
The next (perhaps second) stage in the hybridization process occurs when the aliens join a human egg and sperm and assimilate genetic material from the first-stage hybrid (hybrid.l) into the zygote. This too begins as an in vitro procedure and then requires both a human female host and a gestation device to mature the fetus to "birth." The resulting offspring is a cross between hybrid.l and human. These beings (hybrid.2) still look quite alien. They have an oddly shaped head with a pointed chin, high cheekbones, and only a small amount of white in their eyes; their hair is still quite sparse but there is more of it; their bodies are thin but larger. There is no evidence that hybrids.2 can reproduce. When mature, these early-stage hybrids often help aliens with the abduction procedures and are an integral part of the alien workforce. Abductees see them taking care of hybrid babies and toddlers and executing other important tasks.
The next (perhaps third) stage of hybridization involves taking a human egg and sperm and adding genetic material from hybrid.2. Like the previous stages, the middle-stage hybridization process begins in vitro, progresses to in utero and then to a gestation device. The resulting hybrids (hybrid.3) look very human. If properly attired and wearing dark glasses, they could "pass," although they might be "off" in their appearance.
Abductees say that hybrids.3 can have too much black in their pupils or lack eyebrows or eyelashes. Like the previous-stage hybrids, these middle-stage hybrids help the aliens, and some are responsible for more complex jobs— even performing complete abductions without alien supervision.
Hybridization reaches a critical point in a later-stage generation— possibly the fourth or fifth. Once again, the aliens use the standard hybridization process, splicing a human egg and sperm with genetic material from a hybrid.3. The resulting late-stage hybrids are so close to human that they could easily "pass" without notice.
Most of the late-stage hybrids have normal-looking eyes (perhaps only a slightly enlarged pupil). Their skin color is humanlike but sometimes a bit too even. They often have short- cropped hair, but some have curly or long hair. Some do not have eyebrows or eyelashes, and most do not have body hair or pubic hair. Their frames are sometimes thin, sometimes muscular, but never overweight. They are often blond and have blue eyes, although abductees have noted a range of hair and eye coloration. The females have human secondary sexual characteristics and have longer hair than the men. Most males have normal genitals but some penises might be too narrow. The males are not circumcised. It is these late-stage hybrids whom abductees often call the "Nordics." Late-stage hybrids possess the aliens' extraordinary mental abilities. They can engage in staring procedures, Mindscan, visualizations, envisioning, and so on. They have nearly complete command over the abductees, who report having a little more physical and mental control during hybrid abduction activity—not enough, however, to effectively resist abductions.
Late-stage hybrids have a singularly important attribute: They can reproduce with humans. They have intercourse with humans in the "normal" manner, bypassing the standard egg and sperm harvesting phase of abductions. These resulting hybrids are barely distinguishable from "normal" human beings.
Although it is unknown precisely how many stages of hybrid development exist, the evidence points inexorably to the development of an increasingly human-looking and human-behaving hybrid armed with the aliens' ability to manipulate humans. Whether male late-stage hybrids can reproduce with female late-stage hybrids is unknown.
Abductees have reported that female late-stage hybrids have had difficulty bringing babies to term.
Once the hybrids are born, the aliens funnel them into specific types of service. For example, Kathleen Morrison was told that some hybrids are for acquiring knowledge, some are for "assisting," and some are for both. She also understood that the later hybrid "models" have greater "power" than the earlier ones.3 Clearly, hybrids are not all alike in ability and behavior.
Researchers know little about the hybrids' daily lives. Nevertheless, abduction accounts have provided enough information to at least outline many hybrid activities from fetus to adult.
Fetuses When fetuses are removed from the abductees, they are kept in tanks filled with liquid nutrients. Abductees have reported rooms, some small and some almost cavernous, containing hundreds, and even thousands, of tanks with gestating fetuses—their large, open black eyes dominating their tiny bodies. The tanks are often arrayed in gestational stages of development, from youngest to oldest. A gray alien told Allison that late-stage fetuses are kept longer in utero because they cannot be sustained in incubators for a long time. Early-stage hybrids, he said, can be kept in the incubators for more sustained periods.4 Babies When the "newborns" are removed from the tanks, they are usually phlegmatic, especially the early-stage hybrids. They seem, by human standards, passive and even "sickly." They do not cry, they do not grasp with their hands, and their bodies do not have the same muscular tension as human babies. Abductees often remark that these babies seem "wise" or "mature" for their age; some abductees have said that the babies communicate with the abductee through their eyes, as if they were absorbing information from the abductee through neural coupling. Whether this is true is uncertain, but many abductees have said that the babies, even at an age of less than two, have unusual mental capacities. Susan Steiner once held a baby that impressed her as having capabilities beyond his age: It seems like maybe it's about three or four months old but it seems more alert than a three- or four-month-old baby.... It's not like really physical, but I could see it like looking around. It has almost a curious look in its face instead of the typical blank expression that most three- or four-month-olds have. I get the feeling that this baby's like older than three or four months. It seems older somehow and it seems knowledgeable.
When I look at its eyes, I get almost the same feeling that I get from that tall being like when I'm on the operating table. And so I try to avoid looking at its eyes because that makes me a little uncomfortable. It's almost like the eyes can control you so I don't want to look at its eyes too much.5 Abductees have fed babies by breast and with bottles and have painted nutrients onto their skin. The early-stage hybrid infants seem to eat by absorbing liquid, the middle- stage hybrids eat by a combination of absorption and ingestion, and the late-stage hybrids ingest through their mouths.
Toddlers and Young Children Abductees often report having contact with hybrid toddlers (two to six years old) in group situations. The toddler group usually consists of mixed-stage hybrids, and the aliens bring the abductee to the toddlers to have physical contact, play with them, or teach them. If abductee children are present, they are required to take the lead in play activity, directing the hybrids in how to perform. For example, the human child might suggest that they play ring-around-the-rosy, and then she will show the hybrids how to hold hands and go around in a circle.
Hybrid toddlers sometimes play with human toys (trucks, teddy bears, dolls, airplanes, and balls) and sometimes with alien toys (a ball that has swirling colors in it and dances about in midair by itself, or other high-technology playthings). Hybrid toddlers have alien abilities and can execute Mindscan and other optic nerve engagement procedures.
Abductees report that the toddlers use staring procedures to gather information from humans.
Unlike the aliens, the hybrid children display definite personality differences. For example, Diane Henderson went into a room containing six or seven toddlers. They all had blue eyes with no whites, fuzzy hair, and small noses and wore white garments. She kneeled and hugged each one. The room had some blocks built into the floor but there was nothing for the children to play with.
They just look at me. Like look into my eyes. . .. They all seem to like me for some reason.... There's one little girl that's more shy than the other ones. Some of them seem to be kind of hearty in a way. They're not as slow. They're a little quicker. Not a lot. They just seem to be very peaceful, but I don't think I see any whites of eyes.6 Very often the aliens seem concerned about giving the toddlers some sensory stimulation.
They sometimes build a nature "setting" in which the hybrid children can play. Sarah Stevenson, a real estate agent from Delaware, entered a "glass-bubble" room where she saw Cindy, an abductee friend of hers, playing with a group of about fifteen three- and four-year-olds in a barren, outside setting, They were all kneeling on the ground with a few adults around them.
Yeah, it feels like if you were at the zoo, and you were looking at a habitat. It's very brown, like sandy, light, you know, a lot of light. There's not a lot of grass or—more like rock and sand, a lot of brown. The kids are sitting on the ground on their knees. It looks like they're all wearing the same thing ... a little tunic or something. You don't see any shoes or anything. That's all they have on.
Do they have any toys?
Mm-hmm. It looks like nothing complicated. It looks like some kind of blocks. It seems like maybe there's some adults there too, more human looking. They're kind of playing with them.
Regular humans or kind of humanlike?
They look like regular humans. It's hard for me to see. I think that Cindy is there.
Okay, how is she doing?
... She's sitting on the ground with them. She seems to be showing them how to build things with the blocks. I don't know why it seems like there's caves there or something. I don't know why. Like they're playing on the ground, and behind them is ... something rocky. It feels like the zoo.7 The aliens seem aware of the varying needs of the hybrid children depending on their stage of hybridization. An alien took Roxanne Zeigler, a nurse living in New York State, to see a group of toddlers who were playing together. Then an adult hybrid took Roxanne to visit a late-stage toddler who was in a different playroom with climbing equipment; this toddler was dressed in human clothes. The escort said that the child was born in 1990 and it was Roxanne's.
Well, right now he's taking me to this other room that is, there's like another doorway that goes to this other room, and there's a jungle gym type of thing in there. And it's a colorful one, I mean it looks like it's made out of metal. And there's like a ladder and there's all these rods going and connecting like making open boxes that are kind of scrambled in this thing, but they're the rods. One section is painted. It has one color and these are more brightly colored. One step is red, and one bar is red, and the next bar is yellow, and the next bar is like blue, and the next bar green-—that type of thing. Okay. And . .. there's a little boy who's climbing around on this.
Is he the same age as the others, or a little bit younger, or—?
I think he's a little older. And, he's, he's a little darker, and his hair is darker. I mean he, just like, like the difference between ... a Scandinavian-looking, with the blond and light-skinned, to a more of a umm ... I don't know, Mediterranean, maybe. You know, more bronzy, like, tanner.... They're asking him to come, they're asking him to come to me, and he's coming. They had this little boy dressed differently from the other children that were playing in that other room.
He's not wearing that white smock?
No. He's got on a, a multistriped t-shirt.This is, you know, the stripes going around him. And some, like little blue shorts.
Okay. Did he have shoes on at all or ... ?
Yeah. He had like little brown shoes on. And, yeah he's coming to me. And he's just standing there, and he's looking at the being and he's looking at me. I kneel down and I hold on to him, and you know, I tell him I want to give him a hug, and I put my arms around him ... [he] put his arms around me too. And, then I pick him up and stand up with him, and the being seems to be very pleased. This being said that I held him when he was a baby. But I can't take him home with me. He has to stay there because they said he won't survive outside the environment they've provided for him. But they made arrangements for us to be together that day. It seems like what they're trying to do is they're trying to get him accustomed to our race, somewhat, because at some point, they want to try to wean him so that he can survive in this society, somehow. But he's different, you know, he'd still be linked with them. He can, this little boy, he can kind of will something to come to him. There was something up on a shelf, and he couldn't reach it, and he wanted to give it to me, and to show me this.
How far away was the shelf?
Well... the shelf is across the room, and I probably could reach it, but he wanted to bring this to me. And ... it's a rocket ship, it's not a spaceship, it's a rocket ship, a little silver one. And the way he's getting it, he's just willing it to him, and it floats to him. And he can hand it to me. And it's a little silver rocket ship. And it's one of those, like pencil-type things, you know, that kind of a shape and silver with the wings pointed back that are close to the body of it.
Yeah, like an old-fashioned rocket ship. Yeah.
Does this look like an, an American style toy, or is it a little different, or—?
Well, it's metal.
Does it have marks on it, like you know, a toy will have an American flag on it and things like that? You know, stickers you put on it.
There's, there's like a white ... triangle, you know, that has a short base and a long straight side ... and inverted on the other side of that is a blue, blue equivalent, on top of the wing.
Okay. So this thing floats over toward you?
Yeah, it floated right to his hand, and he shows it to me, and he's kind of excited about that.
Does he communicate with you or ... just show it to you?
Yeah. His eyes kind of shine, and he's smiling, and he's pointing to this thing.
He's cute....
So you're holding him this whole time then?
Yeah, I'm just standing with him, and I'm holding him in my arms, and he's showing me this thing and.... He wants to get down, but apparently he's not telling me he wants to get down. He just kind of floated out of my arms to the floor and let himself down.8 Later the little boy showed Roxanne a special room he lived in, with a human- style bed that came out of the wall. He seemed proud of his possessions.
Hybrid children sometimes want to play with human-style toys, but often they do not know how and need instruction. Aliens bring human children on board to teach the hybrid children how to play. When Claudia Negron was five years old, a female alien took her into a room with five or six hybrids her age. They played together and she taught them how to use a yo-yo.
They want to show me something. They want me to teach them my games....
That's funny. They have a yo-yo. It's weird.
A regular kind of yo-yo? Something like it. Is it colored? No. It's like white.
You know, most yo-yos have the company name on the side, Duncan, or whatever....
No, this doesn't have anything. I can tell it's a yo-yo—I knew what they look like, but it doesn't have any markings on it.... They want me to show them how to use it.... They have these little round balls that look like marbles.
Uh-huh. Where do you see these balls? Do they have them just on the floor you mean, or just in their hands, or in a container of some sort?
One of the children had it and showed it to me.
Do they say anything when they showed it to you? Do they say look at this, or what do you think of this, or something like that?
Nobody's talking. They just show it [the yo-yo] to me and I get the impression that they want me to use it because I know how to use it.
Did they seem pleased or happy?
Oh, yeah. They got happy when I showed them.
Did you show them how to use the yo-yo first, or—?
I showed them. I took it in my hand and I showed them how to play with it. And that sort of broke the ice.
I see. Well, playing with a yo-yo for a five-year-old, that's kind of hard to do.
I had played with it before....
So they had these marblelike balls, how did you play with those?
They're little—they're strange balk... they spin. You mean by themselves?
By themselves. There's something inside them that makes them do that.
Well, do you kind of play with them, or do you show them what you're doing, or what kind of interaction do you have with them?
They show me.... It's like they spin around and they levitate and keep spinning.
You mean they're up in the air a little bit?
Yeah, they keep spinning. And they go down. I'm tired of this game, I want to go home.9 The hybrid adults who attend to the children are usually not forthcoming about the children's origin or family life. Susan Steiner had a short exchange about this with an adult hybrid when she was taken into a room filled with apparently same-stage hybrid toddlers. The children were playing with a combination of small toys and playroom equipment.
They had sophisticated-looking toys, like maybe they got them out of Edmund's Scientific or something. They didn't look like the typical—except for maybe a ball or something like that. Most of the toys looked more complicated than regular toys.
See any of them working the toys?
Yeah, they were playing with them. Sort of like one kid was playing with what looked like a puzzle toy. And some of the kids were playing with the ball. And some of the kids were playing with this stuff that looked sort of like wet silver sand or something.... They were sort of molding it with their hands and stuff, just playing with it. There was no television in there or anything.... There was something that looked sort of like a gym that you could play on. Things that they could crawl through and crawl on—you know, like a play gym. So I asked him, "Well, who do these kids belong to?" And he didn't give me an answer, he didn't say anything. Like I said, "Where are their parents?" because they looked like humans. Then I asked him if he was one of the parents and he just sort of looked at me like, you know, "I'd like to give you the information, but I can't." I see. So he also is not being forthcoming about what this is all about here. What are these kids wearing?
Well, they're wearing little miniature outfits, sort of what he has on. But they're not all black, some of them have a white-beige one, a silvery-colored one, and some of them have black. Like a miniature version of what he's wearing. But they don't all look like him, they're not all blond and blue-eyed like he is.
So they're all sort of wearing these one-piece tight outfits.
Right. But they have different colors of hair and stuff. Some have brown eyes, some have blue eyes, some have hazel eyes.... They all seem to move in unison. I don't know if necessarily they move in unison, but they all seem to know when the other's going to move. Then they all sort of looked like they were cloned or something, at least the blond ones.10 Youth As with the toddlers, abductee adults and children are required to play with and at times instruct the six- to twelve-year-old mixed-stage (from early to late) hybrids. Abductees have taught hybrid youths a variety of games, including kickball, hand-clapping games, and other play activities. The hybrid youths' toys are very technologically sophisticated.
The youths also apparently have more learning sessions conducted by abductees. When they interact with abductees, they appear to be more curious about humans in general, and about the emotional differences between the two species.
Kathleen Morrison was seven years old when she was abducted with her friends Heidi and Barbara. She played with hybrid toys and engaged in a discussion about emotions with her hybrid friend. Kathleen recalled this event from a child's perspective: Their toys are different than our toys. How so?
Their toys feel. When you play with them, you feel things. Our toys don't do that.
You mean, they feel rough, or—?
No, they make you feel.
What kind of toys were there, then?
They're different colors and they're shapes, mostly. And you get to hold them.
Is there like a ball or block or something?
No, it's more like, it's more like blue glass. But they don't like it when you throw them.
Do they want you to touch one?
Yeah.
How many toys are there?
Maybe three or four. But Barbara's there [her friend who, along with Heidi, was abducted with her], and there's whole bunches of other kids. There's a bunch of us [human children]....
So when you come into the room, what's everybody doing?
My kids are giggling and having a good time. And there are two girls on the side and they're sitting near each other and one girl's talking to the other one.
These are normal kids?
The one is and the other one's not all that... no. One of them'i like them. And this other girl's sitting there talking to her.
Can you see what they're talking about?
Well, the girl who's talking is braiding her hair, her own hair? And it's something about her hair.
So what do you do then?
I walked in and I got near Heidi and Barbara. I needed to be near them. But they don't like us to stick all with our own kind. But we all have to play together. I really do like their toys though, because they make you feel.
Well, do you get to pick up a toy? Yeah.... I pick up the blue glass one. What kind of shape is it?
Mmm ... triangle? But it's like it melted? And it's a triangle that melted. You know wax lips? And you put it down on a radiator and it melts all over it? Well, this toy was wax, it kind of melted over something that was round. And it's like shiny from the inside.
How does it make you feel when you pick it op? Very happy. Makes me feel very happy. Do you have to do anything to it or do you just hold it?
You just hold it in your hands. And I took it to Barbara and I had her hold it.
Did she like it?
Yes, she did. She thought it was fun. She said she ought to give it to her parents sometimes. We tried something different, because most of them were just being held by one person and we wanted to see what it would be like for two people to hold on to one. So we did and I think I felt happier than she did. I don't know. She didn't smile. Made me feel real good.. ..
Before that, did you get to talk with any of the other different kids, or not?
After I put down the blue glass thing? I didn't go over to her but I still talked to her. We didn't talk through our mouths though. [She] wanted to know why I was laughing. "Because I felt good." Did I always laugh like that when I felt good?
"No. Sometimes I just feel good." I don't know, they don't look like they have a very happy house.
Did she say anything else to you?
"Is happy good?" I think I said, "Yes." That's a silly question though, really—"Is happy good?" So I don't think they have a real happy house. You know, nobody laughs up there. I think I want to go home. I want to go home now. I want to go home. She doesn't understand why I'm getting so upset. I want to go home. I want to be with my family. I want to go home.11 Not only do abductees teach the children how to play with human toys and learn human games, they also begin to teach about Earth and human society. Doris Reilly, a small-business owner from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was ten years old when she taught a group of hybrid youths about the circus. Talking from an uncooperative ten-year-old's perspective, she recalled how adult hybrids observed the proceedings as she interacted with a large group of hybrid children.
The children were so happy to have me there, they were so excited. ... There's something wrong with these kids. Are they retarded?
How can you tell?
I must be smarter than them because I sure look a lot better. But they're all talking to me as fast as I can talk, and they're talking to me in my language. Their bodies are weaker than I am. They're slower than I am. I would be the ringleader if I stayed. They are so happy to have me there. I seem so wonderful to them....
Are there a lot of kids in there?
I'm going to play with them. I'm enjoying it because they're going to let me be the showoff. There's at least five or more that are really paying attention to me.
There's other activities going on way back in other parts of this big giant room.
Those kids are busy doing other things. It's not real noisy. They're asking me about the circus. She's telling them what to ask me about.
Which one is this?
It's a female, bigger one, older. She's the one that's supervising their activities.
She's telling them what to ask me. The one little boy asks me about the circus, what it's like. They want to talk about the animals, and I want to tell them about the clowns. I keep telling them, "You have to know about the clowns. They're so funny." They don't know what funny is, so I'm trying to show them. I'm trying to explain a playground and what it's like. They don't know what swings are. I feel so sad for them. I want to cry for them. They don't know what it's like to play like I can play. I really don't care about the boys, I feel sad for the girls. I tell them that I'd build them a swing set for them if they'd give me some logs and hammers, but the lady is telling them it's impossible and to stop talking about it.
She's telling you, or—?
She's telling them what to talk about, and she's discouraging them from the playground. I don't pay attention to her because she's talking to them. I tell them what it's like to be in a sandbox.
What are their ages?
They're the same age as me. She's saying to stop talking about the swing set. I hear her telling them that, they wanted to keep talking to me about it, though. So I don't have to listen to her, I don't have to obey her. I'm going to tell you all about big sandboxes. We all sit Indian-style ... and I explain what a tin bucket and shovel is like. I'm showing them what it's like to shovel out the sand. They're imitating me, they look so stupid, they don't know what it is. She doesn't like that I think they look stupid trying it.
She doesn't like your feelings?
She doesn't like me feeling superior because I know this stuff.... I'm telling them stuff they don't know about. They want to go where I am. A couple of them want to see what that's like to play with the other children. She's discouraging them, telling them their life is happier where they are. If they can't come with me, I'll just stay with them. Maybe they'll let me build swing sets, and maybe they'll let me build a sandbox for them. Maybe they can give me metal and I can teach them how to make a big giant sliding board.... She's going, "Our children don't do that." But they want to. They want me to stay. She doesn't want me to stay.... They're having so much fun with me. They really like me; I'm so different and so strong, and I know so much about having fun, and they don't know anything about that.
They want to know more about it, and that's why they like me. I'm telling them, if they can come back with me they can probably look like I do. "Come back into my bedroom, I'm sure God will make you look like me so you can stay and play with me." She's telling them to stop talking like that, to stop it.... I feel like she has some compassion for them, but she has to stick by her rules. She's making sure that there's peace and order kept among all of us. There's one little girl I really like, and I'm naming her Maria. She's smaller than I am.
Does she have a name of her own?
I don't care. I'm telling her I'm naming her Maria, and I want her to be my friend.
How does she respond?
She says she'd like that too. She knows my name is Doris. She will have me back to play with her again. They don't want me to leave, I don't want to leave.
Are you still sitting there?
No, the lady is making me go. I don't want to go. There's so much more we can play ... she's telling me we have to go now. The children seem so happy that I was there, but I'm leaving. There were adult ones observing all this from somewhere.... They were in windows along the sides of us, particularly to the right. They were observing us like we were lab rats. I look over and they're in there, observing us.... She's going to take me out of the room. My heart is beating very fast all of a sudden.... I don't want to go. I promised the children I'd be back, and they tell me to try my hardest to come back. Maria looks so sad. I'm telling Maria that I will be back to play with her, I promise.12 At times, abductees see large groups of hybrid children in special playrooms. Interaction between the humans and the hybrids is controlled so that the hybrids get the maximum amount of play enjoyment. Unlike human children, the hybrids appear to have no disputes or disagreements. In 1965, ten-year-old Carla Enders was at a girls' camp in Texas. In the middle of the night, she and approximately twenty-five other young campers were abducted. They were brought into a large room filled with mixed-stage hybrid children and highly sophisticated play equipment. The children immediately began "laughing and running around" in a state of artificially induced hilarity.
It just seems like there's a bunch of things in there for kids to play with.
Is this a large room, or a small room, or ... can you get a sense of that?
It's really pretty big. It's really big. I can't tell what everybody's doing, but it seems like they're all laughing and running around. It seems like there's girls and boys ... running around like they're playing on these swings and jungle gyms and stuff like that, but different.
How do you mean?
... Like there was just, like a big amusement park where all these different things are there. Like a Disneyland, all compact. I don't know how to explain it. But it seemed fun.
You're talking basically about heavy equipment, things to climb on and all?
It seems like they were just suspended, there was nothing it had to be attached to or anything. Just things, you wondered how they were there, how they were working. I just felt like really amazed. Then I didn't think about a whole lot, I was just running around with the other kids.
Do they tell you anything, or do you just go off by yourself, or ... ?
They just say, "This is what we wanted to show you." They let go, and I go check it out. I can just remember it seemed like a lot of fun. Like really just different than I've ever seen.
Do you hear any sounds? Are the kids yelling and screaming and laughing, that sort of stuff?
Yes. They're having the greatest time I ever had before. You can hear them through your ears?
Yeah, they're all laughing and screaming and running around. And they're all getting along. Nobody's pushing or shoving or hitting or wanting to be first.
Everybody's pretty much getting to do what they want.
Do you see the girls from camp there?
Yes. I don't remember what they look like. But there's girls there about my age and a little younger and maybe a few years older.
Are they all wearing their nightgowns and pajamas?
They seem like they all kind of have on the same thing. Just like really plain, just something, even the boys. Nobody was really concerned about what they were wearing. They didn't care. They weren't even aware of it.... But they're funny, when I think of it now, they're wearing these gowns or something. Like a hospital gown with sleeves, almost like a dress. We didn't really think anything of it.
When you say "We," do you mean the girls from camp?
All of us, the girls and the boys.... It seems like they're just laughing. I don't know why they just keep laughing. I keep laughing too, but we don't really ever talk to each other, we're just laughing. It's almost like they gave us some kind of drug that makes us laugh. ...
So now when you're laughing, are you just standing there?
We're all just running around. Then we stop and then we're standing there all just laughing. We're just having so much fun we can't quit laughing. I think they're thinking that this is all just too much fun so we can't quit laughing. We're kind of laughing at each other too, in a way. It's almost like we don't ever want to leave there. So we're just running around on these things, hanging from the ... they seem like they're hanging in midair. And then there's things that you can get on and they zip you around. Like a roller-coaster or something but they don't have any track.
What are they on?
I don't know, they're just zipping around through the air, up and down and all around, really fast.
Do you get on one of these, or do you just sort of observe it? Yeah, I ride them too. This is up above things?
Yeah, you can't see the ceiling. It's like just this big space and you can't see the ceiling.
When you're up in this ride, do you kind of look down and survey this situation?
It just seems like a big amusement park and there's kids running all over and on these rides. You can't really tell where it begins and where it ends except when you go in that door where you come in. That's all I can see. It doesn't seem like the rides are really high up, but high enough, people are running around underneath and nobody gets hurt. It seems like we were there for a little while and then it was time to go.13 When the children are older, the abductees sometimes are required to teach them about life on Earth. In a classroomlike setting, the youths ask questions about a preselected subject. An alien took Susan Steiner to a room with twenty youths who were apparently waiting for her arrival. They were sitting on molded benches. The alien told Susan that she was to teach a class and indicated to her that she should use the screenlike chart on the wall for her teaching. The lesson consisted of Susan answering questions from the curious hybrid children as barnyard and domestic animals appeared on the screen.
There's a regular school-type chart?
Well, it looks like a blackboard but it's not. It looks like some sort of screen. It looks like an Etch-a-Sketch screen, except it's filled with all sorts of stuff. It's sort of silvery and like a dog is on the screen and she tells me that I'm supposed to explain the dog to them, what the dog is.
Was this a picture of a dog?
It's like a picture of a dog appean on the screen, like a real dog.
Color? Black and white?
Color.
What kind of dog is it?
It's like a chow. A big, furry chow chow, the ones with the purple tongue. And she tells me I'm supposed to explain to them what the dog is. So I tell them what a dog is, you know, that humans like them and they keep them as pets. That they used to live in the wild and humans domesticated them and they became very friendly and loyal. So, then I asked them if they have any questions after I explain what the dog is and the kids ask me, "Why is the dog loyal?" And I tell them I don't know, they'd have to ask the dog. I don't know why a dog's loyal. And they said, "Why does it like humans?" and I tell them I don't know. And they ask me questions like, "What does it eat?" and I tell them what they eat.
Well, are they raising their hands or are they just. . . ?
They're just sort of speaking in turn, one will speak up and when he finishes up, someone else will ask a question and when she finishes. ...
So they say, "What does a dog eat?" And I say that a dog should eat meat. And they ask me why the dog should eat meat and I said because its intestine is shorter than mine. So they ask me if I eat meat, and they ask me if I have a dog.
Do you tell them that you do or do not eat meat?
Yeah, I tell them that I don't.... And they ask me if I have a dog, and I said, "I do. I have a dog." And they ask me what I use him for and I tell them that I use him for companionship. And they seem satisfied with that, like they're finished with the dog and then a goat goes on the screen and they ask me about the goat. I tell them that I really don't know that much about goats, but that some people use them to get milk from and I told them where I come from they don't eat goats but in some countries, they do.
They eat goats. They ask me why some people eat the goats. And I said because they don't know any better. They ask me what else you could use a goat for. And I said some people use them to work, like pull carts and stuff and sometimes you can get wool from certain goats and some people use them to make cheese from their milk. They get milk and they make goat cheese and stuff and people eat the cheese. Then a chicken goes on the screen and they ask me what a chicken is and I explain the chicken. And other animals go on the screen and we go through a similar process—I tell them what it is, like it's a cow and a horse goes on the screen. They seem to be interested in the horse and they ask me what we use the horse for. And I say, well, we use it mostly for work, like it does things, like it pulls things and maybe we ride it to take us from place to place—not so much anymore, I tell them, because we have cars now but we used to ride horses. And they ask me if we eat horses and I tell them that we don't, not where I come from, but some countries eat them. And they ask me why. And I tell them I don't know.
Then it seems like the screen just shuts off and the kids come up to me and they sort of like touch me, everybody touching me, like curious.
You mean they're touching you?
Like my arms and my hands and stuff. They even pick up my hands and they're looking at my hands and, for some reason, even though I don't have my clothes on, I'm not embarrassed. It's like weird, I think that normally I would be. They don't seem to notice that.
Are they wearing anything?
Yeah, they have like little skin-tight outfits on, similar to the one that the teenager was wearing. Some of the girls have little flimsy little dresses on, looks like a nightgown almost, but some of the girls have the skin-tight outfit on too.
But they're girls?
Yeah, there's girls and boys. How can you tell? Because they look like normal people. They look like you or me.
When they speak to you, when you were hearing the questions, were they speaking through their mouths?
No.
They have normal noses and normal lips and all that?
Well, their eyes are like very, very pretty eyes. Their eyes are very big and slightly almond-shaped, not Oriental, but they seem to have big irises but there is white in their eyes, though. And they have cute little noses and their mouths look normal. They look maybe thinner than normal, but they still look normal and their ' skin is, well some of them have light skin and some of them have-skin that looks very normal....
When they come up and touch you, do you touch them?
Yeah. I pat them on the head and I like rub their back and I put my arms around one of the kid's shoulders. They seem to like that. After a little bit of that, the woman tells me that we have to leave. And we go out of the room.14 Late-stage hybrid youths sometimes display an awareness of their genetic situation. Some abductees have related conversations that suggest these hybrids are emotionally caught between two worlds. When Carla Enders was eleven years old, she came across a particularly sad situation with a girl whom she had met during previous abductions. The girl was intensely curious about human family life and sensed that she had missed something by growing up where she did. The meeting took place in a large room with a group of adult hybrids observing.
Then we stop in this room.... And she's walking toward me, and she looks older now. And I'm really glad to see her.
How old does she look? Can you make a guess? She's kind of my age. Eleven or so?
Yeah. It was a year either way, she was my age. We're about the same height. Her head's bigger than mine. But she seems really happy to see me. She can't really smile, but it just feels like she's smiling. I really like her. I guess I kind of love her too. Like she's my sister. Like a sister. Like you would love a sister.... Seems like I give her a hug, and she kind of doesn't know how to respond, but almost like she lifts her arms a little bit, and puts her arms around me a little bit, but not like I do around her. She doesn't get hugs very often. She doesn't know, really, what to think of it. But she knows that it means love. It's just kind of sad. I'm sort of sad for her. She wants to be normal like us. She wants to be, it's like she can't get free, like she's trapped or something. She can't have the same experiences. It's sad....
You said you're standing there looking at her.
She's like, she can become part of me or something.
Here comes these odd questions, Carla. Where is she looking?
She's just staring at my eyes.
And where are you looking?
I'm just looking at her eyes.
How close does she get to you?
Half of an arm's length.... Is she touching you?
No. It's like we're trading thoughts. Like she can experience things through me.
It's just like she wants to know everything about me—what I've been doing, and what's happened since she last saw me, and how I've changed, and what I'm like now. She seems like she doesn't really have anything to do. She gets to see people now and then. That's the most exciting thing that she has to do. And be with other kids, and when she had fun with us, that was everything to her. Like she gets lonely, but not as bad as when she was younger. She's not usually very happy. She doesn't think that she'll ever be happy....
Does she specifically communicate with you?
Yes, she says "Hi" to me, and it seems like she says my name, and how happy she is that we are together again, and she really wishes that we could be together more. She doesn't have much of a life. It's like she tells me there's nothing to do.
She doesn't have anything to do except what they do around there, and it's really boring. And she would like to be able to do things like we do, just to be like a kid.
She doesn't really get to be like a kid unless she's with us. Nobody around there is like us.
So I get the sense that she really wants your company.
Yes. And then I hold her hand. And I don't know what we do. It seems like we just walked over somewhere and we were sitting down and we started looking at some things together, like books or something. I don't know where they got these books.
Regular books, with pages?
They seem like books. And she's saying, "I've got these things to remind me of you and the other kids. They remind me of you when you're not here with me.
They have pictures of people in them." There's English writing in them?
They're like, it seems like they're kids' books.
But it's recognizable letters and all that?
I don't know if she reads them. I think she just looks at those pictures. They got them from us somehow.
The pictures are normal pictures?
Of kids, and older people, and animals, and just, they're probably geared for kids our age, like maybe eight- to twelve-year-olds or something. They have pretty big writing, and there's half the page, some would be writing, and pictures. And she really likes to just look at the pictures. She wants to be in the picture. She just wishes she could be in the picture. I told her it's really not that great in the picture.
I don't know why I tell her that. I say it's better probably than what you have, but sometimes it's really not that great in the picture.... There are a lot of things that go on that are not very pleasant. In a lot of ways I know she has it much worse, but then in some ways I think she has it better because she doesn't have to experience a lot of the negative things about the way we live. But she still thinks she wants to experience it. She thinks it would be better than what she experienced.
Did she say what she's experienced, or is she just talking in general?
... She feels like she's capable of feeling things more than the others are. They can't understand her. She feels like we can understand her. And it's really lonely for her that way because she just wants to feel what it's like to really feel loved and she doesn't feel that she can really know what it's like to feel loved. We're the only ones that can give her that.
I see. Is she leafing through the pages in the book?
She just turns the pages really slow, and she's showing me the pictures that she likes the most, which seem to be the ones with kids and parents in the park or something, and there's a dog running around. And she's amazed, like, "What is that really like to do that?" And I'm thinking, "Well, I guess that is pretty neat, if you don't get to ever do it." She doesn't think she'll ever get to do it, so she's really, she gets excited about looking at the pictures, but at the same time it makes her sad. I don't know how to make it better for her except to tell her they're just pictures and it's not always like that. Animals are fun, and it's nice to have trees around, and there's a lot of nice things about nature but there's a lot of scary things that happen. And people aren't always that nice to each other, and there's a lot of things that happen. People starve, and people are killed, and I just tell her there's bad things too.
So you're trying to make her feel better by having her appreciate her own situation a little more.
I guess it's like she doesn't understand what it's really like, and I just want to explain to her that it's really not all good. There's a lot of good things that I wish she could see. But I'd like her to know that.... I think there are some good things from her. ...
How many books does she have there?
There's lots of books, all different books for different kids, different ages....
Stacked in piles.... It seemed like she would just like to go with me for a while.
I'm wondering if she goes with me sometimes. Maybe she can read my mind so much that she can, she doesn't have to go there, she can see it in my mind, and she's there, kind of. And it doesn't seem like quite enough. She would still like to be able to go with me, not having to be in my thoughts.
Right. What happens next, then?
It seemed like we just were standing up, and I was holding her hand, and we just walked around the room a little bit together. And just so we could be together a little longer. We just walked around the room. And I told her that she was a very good friend, I really liked her as a friend, and I would always be her friend. And then it just seemed really sad because we had to say goodbye.
How do you know?
She just stands there, looks at me really sad. Like when she first saw me she was so happy and now she's standing there looking like she doesn't have anything to be happy about. Then I say well, I'll see her again. I'll probably get to see her again, but I don't know for sure. It seems like I tell her that I'll try to send her thoughts.... I don't know. It just makes me really sad.
So you say goodbye?
Yeah. She has to go, so she turns and walks, one of them walks off with her, out the other side of the room from where I came in. And then somebody walks with me out the other way.15 The evidence suggests that the toddlers and youths are involved with a dual instruction process: gaining knowledge about their own lives and duties, and learning about Earth and life on it. But rather than dealing with Earth's political, economic, and social institutions, their lessons appear to focus on the ordinary events in the day-today lives of humans. Much of what is taught involves getting along with humans and acting human—evidently in preparation for the time when the hybrids will be able to live among us.
9. The Hybrid Species-Adolescents and Adults By the time young hybrids have reached adolescence, the aliens have given them new tasks and responsibilities within the abduction program. Although they still learn from the humans, they now begin to interact with abductees more on a sexual and social level.
The aliens' use of the adult hybrids demonstrates the scope of their Breeding Program.
Adult hybrids assume complex duties within the abduction program which, like those of the adolescents, sometimes involve sexual relationships with abductees. But the adults have interactions with humans that go far beyond that.
Adolescents When hybrids reach adolescence, the aliens begin to give them tasks to perform. They sometimes help retrieve the abductee from his normal environment, they help with some procedures, they escort the abductee from room to room. Their work ranges from menial jobs to helping the grays with specialized duties. In effect, they become "apprentices" to the smaller gray aliens.
Although the adolescents "work," they are young and, unlike the aliens, amuse themselves. Susan Steiner recounted her experiences with an adolescent hybrid who had some sort of "game." The fifteen-year-old boy escorted her to different rooms, but at one point sat down with her to play with a machine.
He just smiles at me and he runs his hand down my arm and takes my wrist. And I kind of like him because I'm kind of happy to see him.... And he has this thing sort of tucked under his arm, the little machine, and he gives it to me.... It's like some kind of wonderful thing and I should be glad that he gave me this thing. ...
And then I kind of like take the thing and I sink down on the floor, you know. I'm sort of like playing with it, because I can tell he wants me to play with it. And I'm thinking, "Oh, well. I'll play with it even though I don't know what it is, and I don't understand what I'm doing." I just sort of start pressing buttons on it... I get the feeling from him that I'm supposed to know what it is, that I might have seen it before.
You said that there was some sort of a green kind of glow coming from part of it?
Light-emitting diode kind of thing. LED? It was like maybe pencil-thin and it was in the center of the metal piece.... He gives it to me and I, well, first I sort of turn it over and look at it. I'm looking at it and I'm trying to think, "What is this? Is this the stereo? Did he take the stereo?" Then I realize that it's not the stereo. Then I start hitting all the different buttons. I'm sitting cross-legged—and I put it down on my knees and start hitting all the buttons, trying to get something different to happen other than just the lines moving in the LED display.
... Can you get something different to happen?
No, nothing's happening. Then he takes it from me and he presses a button, gives it back to me and I'm supposed to press the same button. I press the button and he takes it back. Then he presses a button and I'm supposed to press the button. This goes on for a while and then he gives it to me and I press a button and there's this flash.
You mean the flash comes from the box itself?
Yeah.... It seems the whole box just flashes ... and I drop it because I'm afraid of it. I think it's electrical.
You mean, you dropped it on the floor?
Yeah.... He seems amused ... that I dropped it because I was afraid. He thinks it's very humorous. ... He thinks it's funny— almost like he thinks it's funny.
Does he smile? Or do you just get a sense that he thinks it's funny?
I do see a smile and I get a sense, but he doesn't laugh like we do. I get the feeling that he's like laughing, but he doesn't laugh like a regular child would laugh. His mouth does curve into a smile. Then I think those three other beings come into the room. And they look more serious than the others, like I'm a little afraid of them.
They look very stern and they look different than the ones in the operating room.... And they're watching us interact.... And they look at me like really stern, really stare at me. And I'm a little afraid but then the little boy touches my shoulder and I'm not afraid any more.... He tries to bring my attention back to the toy, that thing, whatever it is. And then I'm sort of not paying attention to them anymore, I'm playing with that metal box again.
You mean you were starting to push the buttons again? Um-hum.
Did you push them in a sequence with him? You push, he pushes, you push, he pushes, or are you doing it by yourself?
Yeah, we're doing that. He's pushing a button and giving it back to me. I'm pushing a button and he's pushing a button, I'm pushing a button, he's watching.
But nothing else happens. No flash like that.
It doesn't lead to another flash?
No. I'm getting kind of frustrated. The little kid just thinks it's funny, that I'm frustrated.
So he thinks that's amusing too?
... Yeah, he just seems amused that I can't figure out what it is. And I get this, like, I don't know, some kind of feeling from this kid, but I can't figure out what it is though—almost like he can understand why I can't figure it out, like he knows why I can't figure it out or something. I don't know.
You get a sense that he knows why you're confused?
Um-hum. Like it's not a feeling of superiority, but it's a feeling of like, "Well, I wouldn't expect you to understand." That type of thing.1 The late-stage hybrids who display a strong sexual drive often begin their sexual activity in adolescence. When Kathleen Morrison was eight years old, a sixteen- year-old hybrid, whom she would know through out her life, engaged in what was clearly masturba-tory activity with her. First he put her on his lap and began rubbing his body on hers while he generated sexual feelings in her through a staring procedure. Kathleen recalled the episode from an eight-year-old's point of view.
He's done this before?
... It's when we've been quiet together. It's usually when I'm sitting on his lap. I'm sitting on his lap, and I straddle his body, and I face him. He gives me wonderful big hugs. And then sometimes he looks at me and makes me feel different.... He Says he likes me to sit on his lap and be very close to him.
... How old are you ... ?
Maybe eight or nine. We don't do this all the time though. Just sometimes. When we're quiet and alone. He does like to rub on my body though.
Does he usually wear some kind of outfit when you see him? Not always.
Sometimes he doesn't have a lot on.
When he doesn't have a lot on, you mean he's sort of naked mid all that?
Sometimes.
When you sit on his lap, what does he do then when he's not wearing clothes?
He just bends his knees up and I just sit on his lap and sit back up against his legs.
And his legs are like this and I sit right here but I can lean on his legs and he holds me, and he breathes pretty heavy sometimes. But he always makes me leave.
He makes you leave?
I always have to get off his lap.... I just kind of sit off on the side, and kind of go into a "comatose" thing. When he's breathing kind of heavily he tells me to get off his lap.2 Hybrid adolescents are encouraged to have sexual relations with abductees. Christine Kennedy recounted an incident when, after Mindscan, she had to get on top of an adolescent hybrid who was reclining on a pad on the floor. The young hybrid, who appeared to be fifteen years old, engaged in intercourse with her. She was extremely angry and thought that she was being used simply to satisfy his needs.
I feel like I was a "treat" that was tossed to this little fucker....
What are his reactions like? I mean, what does he do with his arms? Are they just laying at his side, or does he—?
No. They're wrapped tight around me. I can't... move. My head is laying like over at his shoulder. I'm looking away, and it's just... I'm totally gone. I'm not even a part of my body.
... Do you think they're doing this for reproductive purposes or for other purposes? What's your best guess on that?
I wouldn't say for reproductive—not when it comes to me, because I have my tubes tied.3 Some abductees feel that intercourse with an adolescent is almost like a hybrid "training" session for the future. On some occasions, an adult hybrid actively directs the adolescent on how to have intercourse with an abductee.The adolescent hybrid learns from these experiences and then engages in more active sexual behavior as an adult.
Adult Hybrid Life Once the hybrids become adults, their responsibilities increase and, according to abductee reports, they are more involved in the abduction routine. Although still in an "assistant" or subordinate capacity, some adult hybrids conduct the full range of physical, mental, and reproductive procedures. They work alongside the gray aliens—and become partners working toward a common goal. In recent years, abductees have reported events in which hybrids perform complete abductions without any grays in evidence. Some abductees prefer being with the hybrids rather than with the grays. For them, hybrids offer the comfort of human familiarity. Other abductees find the late-stage hybrids frightening and prefer the more predictable gray aliens. The grays act according to a well-defined system, and over time many abductees have grown comfortable with them. For the most part, the hybrids act like the grays: task-oriented, efficient, and clinical. But their presence injects a note of emotionality and unpredictability. Their very humanness almost makes them party to a crime involving the kidnaping of men and women. Many women feel more emotionally vulnerable around late-stage hybrids. Allison Reed put it best when she said: It sounds crazy but I feel more comfortable with the little gray guys than being left alone with these people-looking [hybrids]. . .. They don't have that compassion, I don't feel it. I don't know if they're anything like human beings.
Maybe that's why I'm scared, because human beings can be so cruel. Whereas the gray guys, they do their job and they don't want to hurt you but they don't want to, you know, give you kisses and love you either. They're just kind of neutral in a way. But human beings can be so cruel.4 Little is known of the private life of hybrids, but some of the most suggestive testimony comes from Allison's four-and-a-half-day abduction, which provided a rare opportunity to glimpse aspects of daily hybrid life. Her experiences reveal that the hybrids have a cleaning routine; they communally groom themselves and check one another for health problems. At one point, an alien escort took Allison to a cleaning and grooming room.
Many naked male and female hybrids between the ages of eighteen and thirty were in the room. Allison, accompanied by an eighteen-year-old female hybrid, and the other hybrids walked in a line to a "shower" area. They stood in front of jets in the wall that sprayed a fine mist that dried on contact. The jets were about chest high. Allison turned around slowly so that the spray would spread evenly around her body. She thought that the mist not only cleaned but protected the skin in some way.
After the shower, she and the others went to a central area in the middle of the room. The hybrids paired off and began to groom and inspect each other. The adolescent hybrid inspected her and then showed Allison how to check her—Allison had to look at the hybrid's hair, the back of her neck, and her eyes; she was required to pull the adolescent's lower eyelids down and look for spots of red in the bottom of each eye. The adolescent told her that the hybrids are prone to rashes under the armpits and Allison had to check her there, too. The adolescent hybrid had "soft" hair, pinkish color in her eyelids (with no red spots), no eyelashes, and taut skin. Her body was long and thin with no hips. It reminded Allison of the animated character Gumby. After the inspection, the other hybrids cut each other's toenails. Allison did not have to perform this task because her adolescent had no fingernails or toenails. Finally, she and the hybrid brushed each other's hair with a tool resembling a normal hairbrush.
The hybrid went to another area to get her clothes—a white shift. She got it from a slot in the bottom of a floor-to-ceiling cylindrical dispenser, and Allison helped her put it on. A short time later Allison's alien escort took her to a huge sleep room. The hybrids were sleeping in tiers, suspended in the air, hooked up to cables attached to the ceiling. The scene was reminiscent of the motion picture Coma.5 Susan Steiner also saw a hybrid sleep room. It had bunk beds arranged in tiers of three.
It could be just as large [as an airplane hangar]. I can't see the whole thing because it's divided. There's areas that are divided and there's like bunk beds all over the place and there's people on the bunk beds.... They're sort of like molded into the wall, and it looks like they're three on top of each other. And the room is sort of like divided so I can see, like areas. And on each side of the wall there's bunk beds. So there's a lot of them.
They're in tiers of three, you mean?
Right, in tiers of three. And maybe ... they're partitioned off and there are some on the opposite sides of the wall and there must be others. I can't see what's on the other side of the partitions but I have the feeling that there are others. Because it all looks the same, it's a very homogeneous environment.6 The adult hybrids appear to have a life that resembles the life humans lead, although the indications are that they lead that life more communally, and less privately, than humans do in modern industrialized society. They bathe, sleep, dress, and work together. Like humans, they have health problems. On an emotional level, however, their lives bridge the area between human and alien.
According to abductee reports, the hybrids have no memories of parents, siblings, family life, nurturing, or other emotionally important events that bond humans to each other. In a long conversation, one late-stage hybrid told Reshma Kamal that his memories were quite different from hers.
And then I'm asking him does he have parents like I do or kids and things like that. He kind of looks sad. I don't know, he looks down and then he looks at me and he's saying no. He says, "We just belong here." ... I almost feel sorry for him.
And I'm asking him like I have a mom and dad, does he have it? He looks down again, then he looks up at me and he goes, "I know where I'm from but I don't have bonding like you do." I said, "What do you mean, bonding?" And he's saying, "files." ... I ask him again "What do you mean by files?" . .. And he's saying like, he's kind of explaining to me like when we look at our ancestors, we have memories and histories. He's saying when he looks at his background, he only has to look at files. There's no bonding and no memories....
He says, "When you remember your mother or your sister, you're remembering memories of being there, of seeing them." He's saying, "When I want to do those things, I have to see files. I don't have that bonding or memories." So I'm saying, "Haven't you seen your parents?" He said, "I have seen them but I don't have the same bonding." He said, "We are just told who they were or what and they're on files." I don't know what he means by that. He's saying to me something like, I don't know, he's explaining to me like when he was a little boy or something. It's like he's really, really, really sad and he's saying that when he was a little boy and when he questioned them [because he looked different than them]—I think he means "them" by aliens because he looks up there [to aliens in the room] ... he was always shown a file.... And I said, "A file? You mean like pictures and things of your belongings?" He's saying, "More in a medical way." ... He's going into like medical stuff, the genealogy of the medical stuff of his parents and things but not in photographs or.... He says, "Not like picnics you might have or parties but in a medical way. Do you understand?" I just kind of shrug my shoulders like I do, but I don't. . .. I'm saying to him that can't he come, you know? And he goes, he's asking me, "Come where? You mean to your home?" And I said, "But that's your home, isn't it?" He's saying, "I have no home. Not in the same sense you do." He's saying, "I don't belong anywhere." I'm asking him like where does he live and he looks at the aliens and he's saying like them. And I said, "What do you mean you live with them? Don't you have a home like I do?" He seems to be saying that he has a home but not the same meaning that I have attached with a home.
He's asking me a question, "Do you know what a robot means?" I said yeah. He's asking me like what. And I'm saying, "Well, a robot is something that you create and it does what you want it to do and nothing else." When I give him that answer, he goes, "Now you know how I feel." And I'm saying, "You're a robot?" He seems a little annoyed with me. He says no, but the meaning is the same. That that robot has no bonding. It just does what it's programmed to do. And he said, "Do you see that I'm doing the same thing?" And I said ... "I understand that, but don't you have emotions of your own?" And he's saying to me, "Even if I had those emotions, what good are they because nothing will happen?" And I'm asking him, "What do you mean by that?" He doesn't answer me but he looks really sad. And I'm asking him like is he happy? He's asking me like what do I think or what do I perceive looking at him. Like I don't answer him because I don't want to hurt him, but he looks like he has really practically no life. He's just alive and breathing. He said, "We're just here to do work." And then he looks at them, the aliens again. He's saying, "We have to do everything they say." I said, "Do you have a bond with them like I do with my family?" And he's saying, "Not the same bond that you have." Like we have relationships and we feel love, hate, sorrow, and all that. He said not in that manner, he doesn't have a relationship with them. It's just like they're in total control of everything. That he's just their creation, whatever they did, and he's to do whatever they say. Then he looks at me and he said ... "If you want to understand me, just think like robots. That's all there is," he says.7 We do not know the effects of the lack of familial ties or memories. Whatever the consequences are, the hybrids' emotional development in that regard would be devoid of a commonality that most humans share and their emotional lives would have to be very different from ours.
Hybrid-Human Information Transference As they do for the younger hybrids, the abductees are often required to instruct the adult hybrids. Instruction takes two forms: directed, and involuntary thought transference.
Allison Reed's case provides a good example. She was directed to instruct four female adult hybrids on how to bond with a child; the hybrids told her that they wanted to raise the children in a nonsterile environment more like "normal" humans and less like their own childhood experience with the gray aliens.8 Like the older children, the adult hybrids show interest in earthly activities. For example, Claudia Negron awoke one evening to see two hybrids in her room—a male and female in their early twenties. They wanted to know why she was hanging her clothes around the room instead of in her closet; she explained that she was remodeling the closet. They asked her other questions about her room and then left.
Sometimes an abductee is required to transfer his memories to a hybrid, almost as if the transfer were a "data dump." Kathleen Morrison cupped her hands around a multifaceted orb that glowed red while a hybrid gazed at her and cupped his hands around hers. He "downloaded" information from her brain—what school papers she had been writing and how she went about doing it. He also mentally examined an argument that she had with her sister.9 Data transference to hybrids also includes emotional responses. Allison found herself "wired" to a female hybrid who sat opposite her and performed Mindscan upon her.
Allison saw sad and painful things in her life, such as her grandfather dying, and she also saw things that had made her angry. After the procedure was completed, the hybrid said she felt fortunate because Allison had such a wide range of emotions.10 Hybrid-Human Reproduction The most problematic aspect of abductee interaction with late-stage hybrids is the frequency of sexual activity. The hybrids want sex, not only because it is critical for the Breeding Program, but also apparently because it satisfies them. Hybrids have total control over the sexual encounter, and the male hybrids require female abductees to have a full range of sexual response. To ensure this response, the hybrids perform a separate procedure in which they physically stimulate a woman almost to orgasm, while an alien stares into her eyes in what amounts to "fine tuning" the precise neural response in the brain. "Beverly"11 had this experience while she was lying on a table, hooked up to a headgear device: There's a monitoring type procedure done. There's ... like something put on my head that I feel... monitors brain activity, brain waves ... something to do with brain. It's something to do with brain and monitoring brain waves, brain action, whatever it does. This gray one, he's here on my left.
Is this the escort, you mean?
Yeah, same guy.... There's a hybrid man on my right, I'm a lot more nervous than before and ...
The anxiety has gone up?
A lot. A lot. Especially because of this ... I want to say "man" but I don't want to humanize it. The gray guy ... he doesn't come really close to my face but he, using telepathy, he can pass on to me calming energies but they don't want me zonked out because then my brain responses won't be legitimate. If they mess with my brain and probe in there or whatever and do something to make me calm down and be vegetablelike, then it will mess up their ...
So, they're allowing you to be nervous?
Yeah.... The hybrid is talking about being calm and stuff but I don't trust him.
He's being nice but I don't like being in these situations. I just do not like this at all. And, again, I don't think either one of these guys means any harm and I don't think any harm is going to come to me but.. . they're doing their job, whatever that is, and I just don't like the things that they do. This guy here's not being mean, like, some can be mean. He's not being mean. He's just being there and what happens is, he touches me everywhere. Touches me everywhere and in different ways. He just touches me and my feeling is that my responses are being monitored to different touches in different places.... It's just, you know, monitoring ... for sexual zones, sexual stimuli. You know, some people are sexually stimulated when touched here, some sexually stimulated when touched ...
of course, there's the obvious, you know, that we all have in common. But other people have different areas that raise more of an excitement than, maybe, someone else....
Well, how do you know he's doing that?
... There's no dialogue. This is a just "knowing" one—one of those things I'm sorry I can't tell you how I know. I just know.
Are you reacting when he's doing this? Are you saying to yourself, "Yes, this is nice," or, "No, that's not," or whatever?
I'm ... in a layer of denial. That nothing you do is going to be pleasurable to me.
And that's where I am, but the other layer is registering, regardless, on whatever mechanism they're using to register it.... It's a violation. I don't like it.12 Similarly, "Paula" was visited by hybrids in her bedroom. They hooked up an "electrical" device to her genitals and she had intercourse with a hybrid. At the climactic moment, the hybrid abruptly removed himself. Her orgasm was so unnaturally intense, it was almost painful. While this was happening, one of the hybrids stared at what appeared to be a "readout" on the machine and told her that it measured "electrical impulses." The device was removed and Paula felt excruciating physical pain followed by nausea. It created a lesion on her clitoris that caused her to seek the help of a gynecologist, who was mystified about how she had received such a wound.13 During intercourse with abductees, some late-stage hybrid males have "normal" sexual response and physical movement. Others, however, do not engage in the normal thrusting movements. Abductees describe more of a "pulse" or a quick penetration and ejaculation.
The hybrids also routinely generate orgasm in women with the help of Mindscan. Thus, it is possible that female orgasm during hybrid intercourse produces ovulation or the facilitation of conception.
The hybrids often note the pregnancy to the abductees. For Stan Garcia, a rehabilitation counselor, this was a fact he wished he had not heard.
She's right directly in front of me, standing and looking at me.... I felt disgusted.
Because she was a female, or because of what she was doing? What she was doing.
What is she doing?
When I say what she was doing, it's like she was chosen, or she was the one for me. And I felt disgusted, because I didn't have a say. I'm just disgusted by the whole thing—that I had no say about it.
When you say she was the one for you, how do you mean that? She's going to have my kids... . I'm not thrilled at all.14 Physical Problems Some hybrids are born disfigured or with other abnormal characteristics. For example, the aliens showed Kathleen Morrison five malformed hybrid babies. Their legs and arms had either improperly developed or not developed at all. Terry Matthews saw an older hybrid with a distorted chin, giving him a vaguely "Popeye" appearance. At another time, Terry saw an adolescent hybrid whose deformed head was too wide and had "bumps" on it.15 The hybrids have other physical problems. Allison Reed observed young hybrids with red blotchy marks on their skin. During a 1994 abduction she was told that her "sister" was "sick" and needed her help; the aliens inserted a needle into Allison's neck and drew blood from her jugular vein. In a similar scenario, hybrids brought Susan Steiner to a sick adolescent hybrid boy. They drew blood from her (they said they wanted "hemoglobin") and extracted a small section of her liver. The aliens explained that they needed these things if the boy was to survive.16 Female hybrids have reproductive problems. Abductees have reported that the females seem to have difficulties with stillbirths. There is also an indication that female hybrids have more problems reproducing with human males than male hybrids have reproducing with human females.17 Reshma Kamal once asked an adult hybrid why there were no females around.
I'm asking him how come I didn't see any females. And he looks up at me and I'm saying like, "Females, like I am. I'm a female, you're a male. Like in your group or race"—I don't know what he is—"aren't there any females?" He goes, he's asking me if I mean him or the aliens and I'm saying him. Where are the females?
And he seems to be telling me that they're used for some other task. I'm asking him what task and I'm asking him are they the same as me. He said, "Not all of them are like you." He's pointing toward his stomach and he's going like this with it. He goes, "They can't." He's making a rounded gesture with his stomach as if they were pregnant or something?
Exactly. He said, "They can't." And I'm saying to him, "What do you mean, they can't?" He goes, "Like the parts that you have, theirs doesn't function like that." And I'm saying, "How come? Aren't they humans?" And he's saying, "Not like you. They don't have the same functions. They cannot be used for that." He says some of them can but not quite. It's not the same. So I'm asking him what does he mean by that and he's saying to me that of course they have tried to impregnate them and all that, and he said that it didn't work. The fetus or whatever—the baby didn't develop all the way for a normal survival.18 Allison Reed saw a hybrid female giving birth to a stillborn fetus. The aliens led Allison to conclude that "the fetus was able to sustain its life in [the hybrid female] for some time and that in itself is quite a step."19 Emotional Reactions Most hybrids who assist the aliens on board a UFO go about their duties dispassionately.
At times, however, abductees can elicit emotions from the hybrids. Take the report of abductee Doris Reilly. When she was five years old, two adolescent female hybrids escorted her to a procedural room, where they placed her on a table.
She kicked her feet and flailed her arms, and they had to hold her down to subdue her.
She reached up and grabbed a hybrid's hair, giving it a strong yank. The hybrid uttered a surprised "Uh!" and Doris could see tears welling up in her eyes.20 In other cases, ab- ductees have reported that the hybrids laugh, seem sad, angry, happy, and so forth—all emotions within the accepted human range.
There is, however, an emotional component of some hybrids that is unacceptable—and out of control. It is as if some hybrids have been improperly socialized and are running loose, doing whatever they please. They have strong sexual drives, but they are not controlled by social constraints. One alien told Allison that the aliens must learn everything, that genetics play almost no role in their personality makeup. He said that although the behavior of the hybrids is, to a large extent, also learned, their human genes affect their emotional reactions and make them less predictable. This unpredictability has been a source of concern to him.
Hybrid emotional problems show up most sharply when they have personal projects— especially selected abductees—assigned to them, and when they act independently of aliens.
Personal-Project Hybrids Some late-stage hybrids have responsibilities that go beyond the normal procedures of the standard abduction scenario. They have personal projects, long-term relationships with a human abductee for reproductive purposes. The relationship between the abductee and her personal-project hybrid begins early, when the abductee is a young child, and continues throughout childhood. The abductee is subjected to the normal abduction procedures and then either has private interaction with the hybrid or is escorted by the hybrid during the abduction. They talk and play together and build a friendship.
When the abductee reaches puberty, usually between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, sexual intercourse begins. While other hybrids may have intercourse with the abductee during her abduction lifetime, her personal-project hybrid remains her steadiest reproductive partner. When "Emily" turned fifteen, she began to have intercourse with her personal-project hybrid, and this activity continued once a month for the next six months.21 "Sally" began sexual activity with her personal-project hybrid at age thirteen.
She was puzzled about why he would want to do such a thing. She knew it might lead to pregnancy but her knowledge about sexual matters was extremely limited, and besides, he said it would be all right—nobody would know and he would take care of any pregnancy.22 Although sexual activity is primarily for depositing sperm, the late-stage hybrids appear to enjoy it. They often display the human emotions of affection and love toward their selected personal project. During intercourse, they engage in foreplay: They caress, kiss, and so forth. They sometimes talk romantically, professing their love. Abductees often share in the emotional attachment—sometimes profoundly. The "couple" laughs, jokes, and makes small talk. After intercourse, some hybrids even linger for a short time before putting on their clothes and going on to another task. Many ab-ductees experience deep love for their personal-project hybrids during abductions. For some, this can spill over into their "normal" lives and interfere with their social and emotional development.
Both men and women have reported personal-project hybrids. "Rob's" personal hybrid is Janice, with whom he has had several children. The aliens bring him to Janice after the standard procedures are completed and then he interacts with his "family." He usually has intercourse with Janice, although he has been forced to have intercourse with other hybrids as well. He has formed an emotional attachment to the hybrid family that is intensely revived when he sees them.
Indications are that the gray aliens assign the hybrids to specific humans when the abductees and hybrids are young. When they are older, it is a joint decision by the hybrids and the aliens. When Emily was eight years old, her personal-project hybrid gave her a glimpse of how the decisions were made and what they would be doing together in the future. She was on a table having procedures administered to her by a "doctor" (possibly an early-stage hybrid) while having this conversation. She recounted it as if she were an eight-year-old child.
[He] wants me to be his one day. He wants this project. There's something he wants to do. It's a commitment he has to make to his government, and he's telling me he really, really does find me interesting. He really does care.. . . He's going to make me do something else so that I won't be afraid anymore. He said it would be all right. I don't know what they are going to do to me.... I don't want some bad thing! He said we don't have to do it for a long time.
He made me see things. I saw a big, big garden, and there's flowers, and there's no bugs and stuff to scare me. There's swans. And I'm older and he's older too. And I have on a pretty dress, a long pretty dress. And he says one day we'll be together when I'm all grown up. "You'll be so pretty, I'll be so proud of you. We'll have such pretty babies. You'll be such a good mother. And you won't have to be afraid. I don't want you to have any stress— nothing for you to worry about." And then they were through. And I looked at him, and the doctor was not happy. He didn't talk, but I knew what they said. It was, "He doesn't choose his own assignments." And he told the doctor that he should tend to medical care and he would worry about the projects. He didn't say anything, they looked it.23 For women abductees, a critical criterion for inclusion in the personal-project hybrid program is that she must have normal reproductive function. "Donna" was borderline.
When she was fourteen, the aliens found a gynecological dysfunction that threatened her status in the program. Her personal-project hybrid intervened. The hybrids and two gray beings argued about her inclusion as a personal project. The dramatic scene that followed reveals the importance of the personal-project relationship and the interplay between the hybrids and the aliens. Although the aliens are in charge, the hybrids can sometimes assert their will: He wants me to be reconsidered because I should be in this with him. That we've been together for a very long time, that we have established a working [relationship] and there has been a lot of energy put in here, and that I should be part of this. Their reaction is that there is something that is wrong. And he doesn't agree with them.... He wants a reconsideration.
What is it a reconsideration of?
I don't really know. He says that I have to be reconsidered to be working with him and that I need to be with him in this project. And they said that there is a problem. And I really don't know what they're talking about. And then I feel like he starts talking about me as if I was "stock." He starts talking about physical attributes, and that I am in good shape, and muscles are good. I'm physically fit. I fit, this is not the word, I fit the "criteria." ... And their rebuttal is there could be problems. It's not the exterior, it's the interior. And they agreed that I need to do an examination. He pushes the issue and tells them they have to tell him more, and they may be wrong, and he's arguing. He's being very argumentative. It's a little embarrassing.
How's that?
I've never had anybody stand there and argue at somebody else about me-----But I know I don't want him to go away, that's important.
Do they argue back or does he ... ?
He's physically displaying his annoyance by stomping every once in a while and moving around. And they're just standing there very reserved responding to his outbursts. At one point he actually makes an audible sound-----It's like, "AUGHHHHH!" You know, that frustration. He does that though when he looks at me.... This is going to sound funny but it's like he's communicating with them in one way and he's communicating with me in my way. The two of them walk back toward where one of those little mobile tables are—mobile cart things—and he turns me around and holds my shoulders again and looks right at me. Right up in my face.
Does he communicate to you then?
He says that they need to do an exam and that he's not going to leave me. He's going to stay. That he's going to be with me during the exam and that it's going to be all right. And that I just need to relax. It's going to be okay. And that through going through the exam I'll be able to stay with him. So then he walks me over to where that table is. And he helps me sit on it, on the end of it, on the narrow end, because he's a lot bigger than I am. He's taller. And I'm sitting there, my legs are dangling over the end. He says, "No matter what happens, remember I'm still with you." Then I lie down on the table.
Is it sort of a standard exam or is it—?
It's straight gynecological.
They don't do any anything else?
No. Well, he does. He moves my hair and he strokes the side of my face a couple of times. He's got a hold of my other hand. I ask him why are they doing this? He said, "Remember, I'm here." ...
What are they doing down there?
I don't think that they are just in the vagina either. I think they're probably up in the uterus too. They're checking some sort of a monitor. I'm going to say that this is like a probe that is going in. And it has something to do with the walls of the uterus. It's like they are trying to show him something, and he's not agreeing with their diagnosis—that it's not all that odd.
... When they try to show him something how do they do that?
There is some sort of monitor that they are looking at, and as they are talking it's showing something on it.
Can you kind of get into their conversation a little bit?
It has something to do with, I don't function normally. That they see this every once in a while and that I don't function as normally or with the ease that they prefer. And there is something about, of course, that with the abnormal functioning it becomes too risky.... Detection could occur. I don't know.
So it's detection that's the bottom line?
Yeah. It's too risky. The end agreement is that they would have to monitor the situation. It's like a probation period. And if it ever became too risky, you know, that's it.
Meaning that?
... I wouldn't be in the project anymore. But they're going to look at it, and monitor it, and see how it works. He keeps on saying things like, "There have been worse that have done," and he's arguing back to them. That he's seen worse and it's not that bad. And this is a good candidate-----This is a "go." This is possible. I get the feeling that they don't really want to do this, but they're going to.
You mean to satisfy him?
Yes. They are giving him the benefit of the doubt. My feeling is, he always takes care of me. And that it shouldn't be too long before we start....
Where is your friend?
Sitting on my right. He's sitting right next to me. Yep, I know what he's doing.
What is he doing?
He's [sexually] exciting me....
He's staring in your eyes? Yes. It's like he's demonstrating. It's interesting.
So he's doing this sexual arousal business while you are lying there.
Right. As far as I can tell they got what they wanted. They were looking for something. But he didn't let it go all the way to orgasm, at all.. .. And he gets up and walks to the end of the table. ... They are talking at the end of the table.
They're still debating this?
They're having a good discussion, and the two grays keep on saying it will be monitored. And he finally gives up and agrees to that. It will be monitored.
So he didn't want it monitored?
No, he didn't want it monitored. But he doesn't seem to be winning on that point and is willing to let it go. They're not budging.
So this is where they draw the line?
Right. And the two of them leave. They go out through the door. ... There I lie and there he is, still being upset.
He's still upset even now although they've left and he's basically won his argument.
Yeah. But he had to give in on some of it.24 When "Emily" was fifteen, her personal-project hybrid also had a discussion with her about how the aliens had selected her for the program. Several hybrids abducted her from a wooded area behind her home. Her conscious memory was that she had talked to a deer.
Her clothes were removed, she was placed on a table, and the hybrid told her that he would not harm her.
He keeps telling me he's not and that he'll always take care of me. He's been tracking me for a long time. He already knew where I was, he said that I've been evaluated over the years and he's been studying me and that now that I'm ready to breed, he's decided he wants to be the one to breed with me.
I see. Does he use the word, "breed"?
Mm-hmm. Somebody told him that it wasn't prudent, and he said it's already decided, and the medical tests were favorable. If it looked like I was fertile, that he would bond with me. And people did that sometimes, he said, where he's from, and it's permanent. But the people he's working with think he's making a mistake— that I'm "a resource, not a resort." He made the decision himself.25 Once a personal-project hybrid has been assigned to an abductee, he becomes a significant part of her unconscious mind because of the emotional, and human, quality of the experiences. The effects upon the abductee's social and sexual development can be substantial. And most of these effects depend upon the emotional and physical quality of a particular independent abduction experience.
It is their personal relationships with human abductees that allow hybrids to have a semi- independent life beyond the confines of the UFO. Independent hybrid activity constitutes an extremely important part of the abduction phenomenon. Indeed, it is at the very heart of the alien agenda.
10. Independent Hybrid Activity Independent hybrid activity is a logical outcome of the abduction phenomenon and the Breeding Program, and it has profound implications for the future of human-alien interaction. It involves hybrids who can, for short periods of time, "pass" unnoticed in human society, acting independently and free from the presence and control of the grays.
When I first encountered independent hybrid activity in a regression with Emily, I was highly dubious. The episode involved romantic sexual relations with a handsome human.
I had never heard anything like this before and human-looking men making love to women in their bedrooms verged on fantasy fulfillment rather than abduction procedures.
I then had little knowledge of adult hybrid behavior and I did not know Emily well enough to trust the possible reality of her narrative.
I have been fooled in the past and I was not anxious to repeat that experience. I told Emily that memories are sometimes not what they seem. I spoke about the pitfalls of false memories, and I tried gently to instill the idea that it was possible that what she had told me was fantasy. Emily was receptive to keeping an open mind about this possibility.
Then I talked to the people at the Fund for UFO Research, the organization that had urged her to see me, and told them to be extremely careful with her testimony. I reminded them that confabulation was a common problem, and her entire story could be a rich example of that.
The following year, however, I began to hear other accounts of independent hybrid activity. Eventually, as with other parts of the UFO abduction phenomenon, this evidence became too great to ignore, and I had to concede that independent hybrid activity was a legitimate part of the phenomenon.
How does it happen? Late-stage personal-project hybrids conduct most independent hybrid activity (IHA). Reports suggest that they can exist in human society for about twelve hours. And we find that most IHA takes place between male hybrids and female abductees. (However, this finding may change as researchers uncover more information about IHA.) It appears that most IHA is related exclusively to abductions but usually takes place in a location apart from the normal UFO setting. IHA events occur in a person's home and occasionally in a workplace. Sometimes these abductions take place outdoors, either at night or during the day, in an area where bystanders cannot see the hybrids.
The case of "Deborah," a thirty-one-year-old single woman, provides a good example of independent hybrid activity. She received a phone call from a stranger who told her to come to a "job interview." She arrived at the office, which was sparsely furnished with a few chairs and a desk. And when she sat down, the hybrid activity began immediately and consisted of a strange-looking "interviewer" asking bizarre questions. When the interview was over, she felt strongly that he might have had sexual contact with her. She went home with the knowledge that she had had an "interview" but could not remember details. Days later, she was able to find the building, but it was empty.
The frequency of IHA for most abductees is unknown. It is the exception rather than the "rule," but as investigators uncover more abduction events, more personal-project hybrids and IHA become evident. It is crucial to note that there is little evidence of hybrids being engaged in "normal" human activity—working at a job, living in an apartment, and so forth. When hybrids appear at an abductee's place of work, or even at places like a restaurant or bar, they have come to fulfill the functions of the abduction program. They have not appeared because they are interested in human work and leisure.
When in Public Late-stage hybrids strive to "pass" for human, but within limits. On board UFOs, one of the reasons that male hybrids are easy to recognize is that they wear nondescript beige or white garments. In public, however, they dress like humans, blend into the general population, and go unnoticed. They usually wear average casual clothes: The males wear jeans or khakis, t-shirts or long-sleeve shirts. Abductees have so far not reported them wearing more formal attire, such as suits, or more casual clothes, such as shorts.
Late-stage hybrids may also dress in military-like clothes such as one-piece jumpsuits that resemble flight suits. Because they look so human, it is easy to mistake them for American military personnel, and many abductees have linked military personnel to their abductions. Over the years, abductees have reported that soldiers are involved with the abductions or that uniformed males, sometimes in military-type surroundings, are present during abduction events.
Hybrids will sometimes abduct people and bring them to abandoned military bases, or even to unused areas of active military bases. Abductees will occasionally see actual armed service personnel in the process of being abducted, still wearing their uniforms.
All this, in conjunction with the long-standing and widespread suspicion of a "coverup" by the American government, has led many abductees and researchers to conclude that the government is secretly conspiring with the aliens. Some abductees have even petitioned the Secretary of Health and Human Services to investigate the military's abduction activities.
In fact, there is no evidence that the American government, or any foreign military, is involved with abducting people. Abductees are most likely remembering fragments of IHA during which they were taken to military-like settings. They cannot understand these experiences and place them in proper context because they have not had competent hypnosis or information about IHA was not available to the hypnotist.
It is imperative to gather much more data on IHA. We need to find out why, for example, in public they often travel in unmarked vans or even in helicopters. Sometimes the helicopters are "real"; sometimes the abductee thinks she is seeing a helicopter but is not.
Abductees have also described unmarked black helicopters circling their houses. Clearly, most of these are real helicopters. Their proximity to an abductee's house is coincidental and they have nothing to do with abductions.1 However, some of these helicopters are a part of IHA. To complicate matters, analyses of some helicopter reports reveal that the "helicopters" have no tail assemblies and no rotors, are more circular than tubular, and make no noise. This is a "screen memory" for a UFO.
We need to obtain information on how hybrids react to human society. Occasionally a hybrid will express passing interest in what he sees in public. In one of Susan Steiner's childhood IHA events with her personal-project hybrid, the two of them walked around her neighborhood before going into a UFO. During the walk, he asked her which car belonged to her father, why people had plants in their windows, and what somebody lighting a cigarette was doing. When Susan explained about the cigarette, he laughed and said it was "silly."2 Affectionate Hybrid Activity Some abductees have relationships with independent hybrids that include love, affection, and kindness. Their considerate quality often results in deep bonds with the abductee.
"Emily" Emily recalls having a romantic and loving relationship with her personal-project hybrid, who talked with her about their life together, the babies they were producing, and sometimes about the abduction program. A close examination of Emily's case reveals that the conversation was usually one-way—on the hybrid's terms. When she asked questions, sometimes he answered and sometimes not. He was the one in charge. He gave the orders and she took them. He rarely asked questions about her family life or work, or about human society and culture.
The main reason for his contact with Emily was reproduction. They had intercourse on most occasions, usually a minimum of two times per event. He would make small talk and say he loved her; he told her he would be back and she would be sad when he left.
But to assume that he was insincere would be a mistake. Because he is a late-stage hybrid, there is every reason to believe that he had strong emotional involvement in the relationship, which lasted for years. There are also indications that independent hybrids are not monogamous and have several "projects" simultaneously.
Most of Emily's IHA encounters took place in areas especially chosen by the hybrids. For example, one evening when Emily and her friend Kelly Peterson drove out of a parking structure, they noticed a van tailgating them. After driving a few blocks, Kelly became so annoyed that she jumped out of her car at a red light to reprimand the tailgating driver.
When she came back to the car, she was calm. She told Emily that everything was all right and that they were now going to follow another car that had pulled in front of them.
The three automobiles then went to an abandoned airfield that had a VOR (VHP Omnidirectional Range) building. Emily and Kelly got out of the car and familiar personal-project hybrids arrived at the scene. They talked for a short time with two hybrids and then Kelly and Emily went with them into a building for sexual activity.
When intercourse began with Kelly and her personal-project hybrid, Emily's hybrid took her into the basement of the VOR building where they talked and had intercourse. The hybrids walked with the women back to their car. Kelly and Emily said goodbye and drove away. They remembered nothing about their experience, but they were two hours late arriving at their homes.
Emily related this event under hypnosis. She said nothing about her memories to her friend Kelly, who also had experienced a life-time of unusual events.Then, two and one half months after my session with Emily, Kelly decided to look into her unusual experiences. At our first session, I asked her about the tailgating van. She was surprised because she had come to the session with a list of odd things that had happened to her, and this incident was not high on the list. She vaguely remembered being tailgated and wondering why she had gotten home two hours later than planned, but she remembered nothing else. In her hypnotic session, however, she confirmed all the details of the event—from being given instructions by the van's driver to her sexual liaison with a hybrid (she was unaware of Emily's sexual contact in the other building). Kelly also recalled that she had experienced a relationship with her personal-project hybrid over the course of her life.
The two women's accounts diverged only when the hybrids separated them for sexual activity. They also differed on what type of vehicle the personal-project hybrids had arrived in: Emily thought it was a helicopter, and Kelly thought it was an airplane, although it was too dark outside to see the details.
After hypnosis, Emily and Kelly discussed the event and physically retraced their journey. They found the location where the abduction activity had occurred—it was a NASA installation no longer in use. The road into the facility was closed and they could not investigate more closely.
"Donna" Donna's experiences with IHA began when she was a young child, and by the time she was twenty, she was meeting with her hybrid in public. One such encounter took place in the summer of 1969, while Donna and some friends were on a jetty enjoying the ocean in Maine. When Donna separated from her friends, the hybrid suddenly turned up. He was wearing blue jeans, a jacket, and a t-shirt. His hair came down past his ears. He and Donna hid underneath the jetty and he told her he had seen her in a summer stock play the previous evening.
He said, "I saw you." I asked him what he meant. He said, "I've been watching you. I came to see you." How did he know where I was? He had come, not that week, but earlier to see me perform, and he sat upstairs.
He was in the audience?
Yes. "Why didn't you come see me?" "I couldn't at that time, or the time wasn't right." Some sort of time problem. He's there right now and oh, it feels good. I asked him what about my friends, couldn't I introduce? He says, "No. Don't worry about them." Do you protest or do you just not worry?
Not worry about it. He's there and that's all I care about. I can't get enough of him.
It's like every pore in my body wants to open up and take him.
So you're not thinking how did he get here?
No more. He's here, hey. Oh, I'm lucky to have him here. Can he come stay with me? "I'm sure I could find a way to do it. I don't know how, but I'm sure I could find a way. It's not possible at this time, but we shouldn't think about things like that right now. We should just enjoy being with each other." You're just sort of crouched down?
. .. No, we're underneath the jetty. We're sitting down leaning back into the nook of the jetty. ... It's slightly secluded down there. "Where have you been?" "I've been very busy." ... He has projects. Sometimes they have to do with people and sometimes they have to do with other things. There is something he has to monitor, to try to keep them at acceptable levels. He said that he wants to be with me more than he's often able to. He had been monitoring this area for a while.
So he says that you should enjoy each other while you are together?
Right. I told him that we always enjoy each other when we are together. And he's been a very good friend for a long time. I wish we could be together more often.
Then he kisses me one of the those kisses—gosh—Oh. I'm getting real embarrassed, because he knows that I really like it and boy ... I could turn into a red-hot poker.... You know what? He takes pleasure in seeing just how far he can push things. He's really enjoying this. It's almost kind of fun. I start to laugh a little bit. And I tell him, "You're really having a good time aren't you?" "Uh-huh." "I know exactly what you're doing." "Uh-huh." "Well, yeah, Donna. Don't think I don't know you...." He knows that I enjoy it just as much as he does.... I don't like it where we are. I think he senses my discomfort. "What are you doing?" "We're going to go elsewhere." ... He sits me up real quickly, grabs my hand and says, "Come on." ... He climbs back up the jetty but he runs around to the side of the car that's in the street and squats down, sits down by the tire.... And I'm giggling and laughing. He's just being silly. And he's smiling and having a good time doing this. It's like he's playing commando-war.... And I'm just giggling and laughing and sitting in the street by the tire. And he's says, "Come on, you ready?" "Ready?
Where are we going?" "Just run with me." We run across the street and into this little park thing that's over on the other side of the street. We're there. ... I trip as I go past a bush. I trip and I go flying to the ground. He says, "Some dancer you are, can't keep your feet under you." And I'm laughing on the ground. He takes his hand and he shushes me up and he rolls on the ground too. And we're both kind of laughing and giggling and he's trying to get me to hush up. And when he does that, the more I'm laughing. The grass is wet. And he stops laughing. And he asked me how I've been keeping my body. I said, "It's the same as it always had been. Just there." He says he has to check. I want to know what he's going to check for. He's going to check to make sure I've been keeping it up the right way.
I asked him, why now, would he be interested in my body. What did he think he did, own it? Now he's the one who's laughing. He said, "In a way." Now I'm going to show him so I'm going to try to get up. He doesn't let me up. I'm pushing. I'm trying to get up. "This is my body, it's not yours." And he said, "Yes, but you let me visit every once in a while." Then he gives me one of those long looks. I can feel myself melting.
He looks into your— Into my eyes... . Yeah, he's straddled over my stomach when I tried to get up and he came very close and looked at me. Then he came even closer and gave me one of those long kisses. You feel your brain exploding and your toes tingling and everything in between absolutely—firecrackers! Oh. It goes into every little nook and cranny in your body.... My stomach starts to tighten up. All the muscles in my stomach, my back starts to arch up, my head starts to throw back. And it's just, it just builds on that stare and that look. It just—Ahh. He slides off to my side and is sitting on his hip. And says, "Well I thought you were going somewhere." I just kind of yawn a little bit. Stretch. "No, think I'll stay here." "Did you like that?" "Yes." "Would you like for me to do that again?" "Yes." "Should I do it again?" "Yes." I feel like it comes back over my body. The feeling is like that of almost being crushed. Extreme pressure.... It's like he's pushing down as hard as he can.
And his hand has come inside my shirt, on my back. He kisses me and then he leans back over to the side. His hand is fondling my body. But he didn't stop kissing me. He asked me if I want to be closer. Should he leave something with me? If he wants to. I feel like I'm floating. ... I had on pants and I had on a t-shirt and a light jacket. I put on the pants because it started to get chilly at that time. I can feel his hand against my stomach. ...
His hand is on your stomach and his body would have to be raised?
And my pants are open.... But he's wearing jeans?
Uh-huh. Yeah. You can get around that.... [I feel] kind of swept away, kind of floaty and goofy and all of a sudden—"cutchewme!" All of sudden, what was that?
Oh. Translate "cutchewme." All of a sudden you are wrapped up in the whole act and you're so floaty. It's almost like you were inebriated, but not inebriated.
You're not in total contact with your body but with the stimulation inside. The difference between this and normal sex is that a lot of normal sex is external stimulation and this is housed completely from the core and radiates out.
Everything is on "absolute"—such a heightened awareness from internal stimulation, but yet you're kind of floating in it. The welling of it is just, it's not even in just waves, it's in a crescendo. It's almost an oscillating crescendo. I can feel it all the way down to the bottoms of my feet and the palms of my hands.
Even that is almost electrified. ... When he turns it on, it's not just the mental stimulation, there is something with this kiss that goes on even beyond that.... It feels like I'm going to pass out at any moment if he takes it too far. I'm just gone.... And you know when it really got turned on, even higher? When he said about leaving something with me. Then it went from a high level to an explosion.
This is totally and absolutely, this is the apex of a kinesthetic experience.... He "does his thing" and he stays there for a little bit. He pushes my hair back. I've got very long hair. He pushes my hair back and then he holds my head in his hands, and he looks at me and I get very sleepy. When I, kind of, come to, everything is back on.
Your pants are back on, your shirt is tucked in?
It's pulled over.. .. And when I wake up he's behind me and holding me. He's holding me close.
Is your head on the grass or is it on his lap or—?
It's on his arm. And his leg is up around my body, he's cradling, kind of.
Does he have a normal sexual response? Does he do everything the way you want, you would expect?
No, he's much cooler. He's much more in control. He's very deliberate, and conserves energy. Very targeted. Very focused. It's almost like his interior is highly concentrating on—it's more than the act, but it's like a goal; that he has something that he's aspiring to. Maybe that's a better way to put it.... I guess, very biasedly, I'd like to say that he is enjoying it. But it almost becomes, after a certain point, it becomes businesslike....
Does he say anything to you then?
Mostly I'm just making sounds like "hmm." With each sound I make he tends to contract just a little bit around me. It's like a hug and a hold and an embrace. He'll try to be back soon. He has a better chance of being back soon now.
... He can come and see you more often now?
I say, "Don't you need to go?" And he said, "No, don't. Just lie here with me for awhile." I say, "I like to hold you. I like to feel you near me." I just get this real feeling of empathy for him, and I just kind of slide around and down on my back and um, say, "Let me hold you." Does he want that?
He does. He does it, whether he wants it or not, I don't know, but I think that he is enjoying it. I get the feeling that this is the type of thing that he misses.... It's a hard question. "If you could come with me would you?" He asks you that?
He asks, but I also ask him, "If you could stay, would you?" I know it can't be.
[He says] something to the effect of, "You must carry me with you, or carry me with you, or have me with you." ... I tell him that he's like a moonbeam in my life, and that I remember how he feels. He says I should hold that feeling all that time and that he's always with me, [that] I don't always know when he's watching me; he watches me more than I know, and I need to look at the stars, that when he's like this he doesn't want to go back, but he must.... "You're part of my purpose but not my work." ... At that point we sit up. "It will be soon. Keep me in your spirit, in your being. Enjoy where you are, what you're doing." I guess he knows that I am enjoying what I'm doing that summer.... And we go and stand pretty much near where I was. He stands behind me and puts his arms around me. He said, "Let's look at the moon together." Then his hands go up to my shoulders. And I turn around and look at him one more time. And he gives me a very gentle kiss, not the other ones. A very gentle kiss. Then he just takes a couple of steps backward. And there's a half-smile on his face. The next thing I know I'm turning around facing the moon.
Do you see him go away?
I guess so. I see him disappear. That way. Up and away.3 Years later, Donna became pregnant, and when she was in the hospital after what appeared to be a miscarriage, her hybrid visited her. The miscarriage had occurred under mysterious circumstances. There was no blood or expulsion of fetal remains, and the hybrid indicated to her that it might not have been a miscarriage. He came into her room wearing hospital whites. "Don't worry. Everything is as it should be," he told her. Donna objected, saying that a miscarriage is not the way it should be. He put his hand on her head and she had an overwhelming sense of relief. He then stared into her eyes to see if she was well. He told her that she was "important" and necessary for the fulfillment of his task. He was glad they could continue to work together. She was irritated and asked "Why?" He said it had such extensive ramifications that she could not comprehend completely. And, besides, it gave them an opportunity to be together. They were given a "special existence" together; it was a gift that he can see her so often. He told her that he has a link to her that is not activated with other coexisting projects.4 Donna was always happy to see her hybrid, and he said he was always happy to see her.
When they were together, they talked about how they were happy to be together, and how they would be together in the future. Donna's sexual relationship with the hybrid slowed after she had a hysterectomy, but he still visits her occasionally. They hug and kiss, and even some sexual activity takes place, but this is now rare.
Abusive Hybrid Activity The women who have had pleasurable contacts with hybrids are the lucky ones. Other women have experienced ominous and difficult relationships with them. Even the romantic hybrids can suddenly display anger and malice. Intentional cruelty is an important component of hybrid interaction with abductees—especially in sexual situations.
"Emily" When Emily's marriage was in trouble, she flirted with another man and thought about entering into a sexual relationship with her new admirer. This brought strong and stern warnings from her hybrid, who was usually the romantic type. In reaction to Emily's new love interest, her hybrid was angry and vengeful. During an abduction, he threatened to turn her over to the gray aliens whom she hated, and he even punished her by including her would-be paramour in a staging incident. The hybrid "placed" Emily's friend in the hallway near her. When she saw him, she broke away from the hybrid and rushed to her friend, begging him to help her and to try to get her out of there. As she clutched him, she realized it was not her friend, but one of the gray alien "doctors" whom she despised and feared so much. Emily was horrified, but the hybrid laughed.
He said he could do anything he wanted to her and this was just another warning to stay away from her friend.
One could explain this episode as the anguish of a jealous lover, and it might be that.
However, it is critical to know that Emily's husband had had a vasectomy and could not deposit sperm. Therefore, a more probable reason for the hybrid's reaction is that he could not allow another man's sperm to intrude upon his private reproductive preserve.
During the next several abductions, he forcefully reiterated that Emily should have nothing to do with her friend. Eventually she broke off with her friend and divorced her husband. She has since remarried and moved to another state. It is not known what her relationship with her personal-project hybrid has been since then.
"Deborah" Other abductees have had experiences with personal-project hybrids that go far beyond anger. Some hybrids demonstrate such cruelty that their "projects" live in fear of being subjected to it again. Deborah's case is a good example of an abusive relationship in which the hybrid rules through fear, intimidation, and punishment. During one abduction, she found herself on the kitchen floor with a familiar hybrid standing near her. She responded as she always did, by adopting the attitude that anything he did to her did not matter.
And he starts dancing around my living room and kitchen. He's twirling around, dancing. The way he's twirling reminds me of what I see at [Grateful] Dead concerts. He looks like he's high on something. ...
Does he say anything?
He's laughing. And he comes over real close to me and he says, "Look! Look! I'm here. I can come here whenever I want to. You're never, ever going to be safe." ...
He looks at me and he says, "Look what I can do," and I look over to where he's looking. There's like a fire burning in my kitchen. I tell him I don't believe there's a fire there. He says, "Oh, but there is. You feel the heat against your face." ... He does a sweep with his hands around the kitchen and says, "This is all mine. You think you own this but you don't." He says I can take any of this at a minute's notice. He comes over to me and he says, "I can also fuck you at a minute's notice, and you'll do exactly as I say." And he's right. I feel this fear starting inside of me. Nothing really matters anyway. I tell him he can do whatever he wants because I really don't care.... But I should care, I should not want it. But I just don't care. He comes over and he spreads my legs apart on the floor. He's on his hands and knees in front of me. And he says to me, "I'll remember that you don't care I'm coming." He lifts my shirt and says, "Nice tits." Puts it down.. ..
And leans on me and licks my face. And then he pulls me in to the living room. ...
He tells me to look around. He says, "I can destroy your life any time I want, just look at this." He goes and starts dancing on my table. I hear his laughter. He keeps saying, "Remember me!" I put my hands over my ears, like it really matters. And he says, "I can even walk out your front door and no one will know the difference.
I'm going to do that right now—I'm walking out your front door." He comes over to me and he says, "I'm one of you. I'm coming back." He starts laughing again.
He says, "I'm off. Remember me." Then he laughed, and said, "Maybe I'll go across the street and buy something. They'll never know the difference." That's when I start crying.
What else does he do?
That's all. Then he leaves....
How is he dressed?
Jeans, coat, tennis shoes. His coat is royal blue.
Does he have on an undershirt?
His coat is zipped up. But he actually has blue jeans on. I've never seen them with blue jeans on.
Do you know what kind they are?
I just don't notice it. I feel like I'm not safe in the apartment He can come any time he wants.... I start sobbing....
And where is he?
He went out toward my front door, I'm assuming he did what he said.
Did you hear the door open and close? No.5 Guilt, intimidation, and death are common themes in Deborah's IHA events. The hybrids continually threatened her with death. They pointed weapons at her and held a knife to her throat. She would come back from these events with wounds and bruises on her body, such as a broken collarbone, trauma to her face, a torn Achilles tendon, and a sprained wrist.
Deborah's personal-project hybrid first had intercourse with her when she was seven years old, and the sexual contact continued over the years with him and with other hybrids. He usually did not batter her (other hybrids did that), but in one instance he tried to get her to react emotionally to his activities. She refused, placing herself in a neutral, dissociated state, so that she would not have to contend with the fear and terror of the event. She was sitting on the floor in her home with the angry personal-project hybrid standing next to her.
He slaps me. He hits me. He's never done that before. He pushes me against the wall... . I'm feeling empty inside. I don't struggle. He has his hand under my chin.
He tells me he can break my neck if he wants to. When I don't respond, he says, "So that doesn't seem to bother you," and he pulls my hair. And he says, "So you like this type of treatment, huh?" And he tells me that nothing is holding me back.
I don't struggle. I am not afraid. I tell him I don't care. And he says, "Oh, so you like this huh? Do you want me to do this?" He says, "Just say 'No,' and I'll stop it." I don't say anything. "Just say 'No,' and I'll stop this." I just start imagining that I'm not there. I keep on hearing him yelling. He pushes me to the floor. He's standing over me and I'm lying down. He says, "I'm in total control." And he tells me that I can scoot away if I want and I have full capabilities. So he says, "What do you want?" I tell him I don't care.... He says I'm in total control, meaning me.
That the grays aren't in control, but he is. So he says, "What do you want?" I tell him I don't care. He still has his clothes on, he's wearing his t-shirt and he squats down on my legs and, and he says, "How come you aren't struggling? I know you don't want this, why aren't you struggling?" He says, "I know you're affected." And I told him it doesn't matter what I want. He gets so angry, he hits me.... He hits me with his fist.. . . He hits me full force on my jaw. And he says, "So you like that, huh? After all I've done for you, this is how you treat me? I'm feeling pretty angry. I'll show you what I mean." He stands up, and he starts undressing.
He takes off his shirt and it's like I don't try to get away. "You're allowed to go.
I'm not stopping you." I just lie there. I'm able to move, so it's not that I am unable to move.
But you're not playing his game.
I don't care. He kneels over me. He says, "You little bitch, you like this type of treatment, huh?" I'm just looking up. Not looking at him; imagining a lot of other things.
What is he doing?
He's on top of me. He's hurting me. He keeps on yelling at me. "You selfish bitch, all you think about is yourself." While he's doing it.... It hurts!... Everything inside hurts.... My jaw still hurts from when he hit me.... I imagine that I'm not there, that I'm back at home. I don't struggle. In a while he's done with me. He just sort of stops. He seems really disgusted with me. He says, "You really liked that, didn't you? Do you want me to do it again?" I don't respond. It seems like I heard him but he wasn't there. And he's squeezing my shoulders. He yells at me, "Didn't you hear me, bitch? Do you want me to do it again?" And he stands up and he tells me to get off the floor, that he wasn't going to satisfy me by doing it.
... So he stands up, says he's not going to do it again ... what does he do next? Puts on his clothes.6 "Laura" Five hybrids of different stages accosted Laura in her room one night. They did not like the fact that she was using electronic instruments to detect their presence—at least that was the excuse they used. She remembered that they had acted this way in the past, even before she was aware of her abductions.
She was lying next to her husband when the independent hybrid activity began.
There's like five of them coming in from the foot of my bedroom.... And they're coming in fast. They're not gray ones. There's one that looks, it looks like it's more gray. But it's still a hybrid that's white. The one looks really close to being human.... He's got long hair almost like [my husband] Ed's.... I think they came in a clump. I was like on my side. The foot of the bed is down there—I was looking down. I must've turned my head and been looking down, because there's ... I don't think there's five of them. They came in a cluster, but the one is coming up ahead.
He doesn't look happy. He looks mean.... God, he's on top of me.
Ed is lying right next to you? Mm-hmm. There's nothing I can do. Well, was this guy wearing anything originally?
... He's got nothing on him.... I'm looking over toward my bedroom door, 'cause three of them are going in, they're going into the kids' room. My kids are going to see this shit.
How do you know?
'Cause they're standing near the door.
The kids are standing in the doorway looking at you?
Yeah.
While he's on top of you?
Yeah.... I'm being told this is going to happen to my kids. If I keep this up, it's going to happen to my kids.
If you keep ... keep this up? Keep what up? The [detector] and fighting back.
Well, he's on top of you. Is this a full-fledged business, in other words, is this just a demonstration, or does he just—?
I don't know, it's everything. I'm wishing I was dead. I see ... he gets off of me and there's another one coming over. I can see that first one going over to [my daughter] Janey. Oh, God.
The first one who just got up from you? • ' Mm-hmm.
What's he doing with Janey?
He's telling me he's going to make her do things if I don't stop.
Oh, damn!
Does Janey react to this or... just stand there and absorb it? She's just real confused.... And what's [the other one] up to?
I can't tell you. I can't. Oh, shit! Oh, God. I'm down alongside my bed on my knees. I'm doing oral sex on this son of a bitch!... Now, this is what they're gonna make Janey do if I don't stop this. And probably the other ones. I feel such shame.
... Now the other three kids are watching this also?
Mm-hmm.
Does this proceed all the way as well, or is it just a demonstration?
No, no, it proceeds. God!
Does this guy say anything, or is it just the main guy who's talking, the first guy?
He's not saying anything, but I can sense his anger. He can be so mean.
What happens when he's finished?
I'm standing up. They're shuffling all the kids back into their room. The first one is right in my face. He's really angry. I'm not going to do anything. I don't want to do anything to make them angry again.
How does he express his anger to you?
It's inside my head—I just know. He said they're going to hurt my kids.7 "Beverly" Beverly's experiences were similar. On one occasion, three hybrids, whom she had encountered before, came into her room, took her out of bed, and began a night of sexual intimidation and terror.
First they made Beverly remember a conversation with a trusted confidante during her adolescence. The confidante had told her not to give her body away unless she was sure, because except for her heart, it was her most precious possession. Then the hybrids told Beverly that they could take her body whenever they wanted and that she was always vulnerable and never safe. One hybrid raped her, and she was forced to perform fellatio upon another. They pinched her, twisted her skin, and hurt her without leaving marks.
They pushed an unlit candle into her vagina. They then told her she had caused her children to be abducted.8 In a different abduction event, the hybrids put images in Beverly's mind of themselves as her close friends. They then raped her and forced her to perform fellatio with two other hybrids. They hit her, bit her, pinched her, and pulled her hair.9 On another occasion hybrids made her envision her six-year-old daughter walking into a room ringed with naked hybrids who had erections; she was led to believe that her daughter would be raped by all of them.
During yet another event, the hybrids sat Beverly in a chair, stood around her, and filled her mind with horrendous images. She saw a graveyard with the bodies of people she loves, including her children, who had been hacked to death and were covered with blood. She saw a car almost hitting her child, who was saved at the last moment by an invisible hybrid. Beverly understood that unless she was more cooperative (there was no evidence that she had ever been uncooperative), the hybrid would not save her son. She saw a crucifixion scene with loved ones, including her children, hanging on crosses. Then the hybrids put images of religious figures in her mind and assaulted her.
They do things like, you know, pinch your skin and turn it, just enough that drives the shit out of you but it doesn't bruise. And pull your arms back and neck back or legs, you know, just one on one side and one on the other side and pull your legs apart until you think your muscles are going to tear. Things like that, that hurt and are cruel. And pulling hair and yanking your head back, you know? Things that hurt and nobody can see it.10 Hybrid Dysfunction What are the reasons for this sadistic IHA behavior? It seems possible that some women are selected for abusive relationships. It is also possible that the malevolent behavior of hybrids toward ab-ductees is necessary. Perhaps they need to generate fear, intimidation, guilt, shame, and humiliation to fulfill the objectives of their agenda. An alien seemed to reinforce the hypothesis that sexually violent behavior was part of their program after a particularly violent assault upon Beverly on board a UFO. When it was all over, she asked the alien why he allowed the hybrids to do that to her. He replied, "The expression is necessary." This could mean either that it was a necessary part of the program for all hybrids or that some hybrids must express their sexually aggressive tendencies in this way because they are unable to express them in the controlled society in which they live.11 But if the aggressive actions are not necessary procedures, then it is possible that the human genes in the hybrids might be responsible. Because the late-state hybrids are mainly human, they have strong sexual drives but little conscience. It is as if they have human attributes but lack human controls. Even if they do have a conscience, they know that the human victim will immediately forget what has happened to her. The hybrid might assume that there is no lasting effect upon the human and he therefore can do and say anything he pleases with impunity. In addition, abduction reports suggest that the aliens do not have the expertise to "humanize" the hybrids. Without effective controls, the late-stage hybrids are "free" to express their aggressive tendencies.
If hybrids are continually gaining human genes, and thus becoming more human, and if they can exist in human society unnoticed for short periods, then it is possible that in the future they will be able to do so for longer periods of time—or even indefinitely. The implications of this for the future are, at the very least, disturbing. And the mystery deepens. Now we must ask not only what the aliens hope to achieve by their hybridization program, but also whether their intentions are benevolent or hostile.
11. The Nature of Alien Intentions Despite the numerous examples of aggressive and humiliating hybrid behavior, the existence of "benign" independent hybrid activity and the "peaceful" and even polite demeanor of the gray aliens have led some abductees and researchers to conclude that the abduction phenomenon is a positive force. This growing group has launched a crusade to convince the public that the entire alien agenda is benevolent, helpful, and spiritually uplifting. "I see the ET visitors—the so-termed 'alien humanoids'—as friendly and with positive motivations and beneficial effects." So writes Dr. John Hunter Gray (formerly John Salter), professor of Indian Studies at the University of North Dakota, committed social activist, winner of the Martin Luther King award for civil rights work, and an ab- ductee.1 Hunter Gray consciously remembered being abducted with his son in 1988. From the fragments he recalled of the event, he knew that kindly extraterrestrials were visiting Earth and that he was personally enhanced by their abduction of him. His view is typical of those of researchers and abductees who believe that aliens are benevolent beings who have come to Earth to help humans on both a personal and a societal level. Since the early 1980s the Positives have espoused the belief that humanity is fortunate to have been chosen for this beneficence.
Influential Proponents In addition to John Hunter Gray, there are several other Positive proponents who have shaped a segment of public opinion about the meaning of abductions and the aliens' ultimate intentions. One of the first to champion the idea that aliens are on Earth for our benefit was University of Wyoming professor of Guidance and Counseling Leo Sprinkle.
An early pioneer in abduction research, beginning hypnosis in the mid-1960s, Sprinkle concluded that the simple explanation that beings come to Earth for their own purposes was insufficient.
Eventually Sprinkle developed the rationale that "there are two themes to the ET [extraterrestrial] purpose; 1, ETs are here to rejuvenate planet earth and 2, ETs are here to assist humankind in another stage of evolution." The ETs' method of showing mankind that they are here to help us, he explained, is "through a metamorphosis of human consciousness."2 The metamorphosis takes place, in part, through the lessons that wise aliens teach humans about cosmic matters. The aliens often communicate these lesson through channeling. In the course of his research, Sprinkle came to realize that he himself is an abductee.
In 1980, Sprinkle held the first of his annual conferences in Laramie, Wyoming, which has become a central meeting place for followers of the Positive point of view. At the conferences, Sprinkle often takes questions from concerned individuals about abductions or sightings and "channels" the meaning of the person's event, directly asking the aliens questions and relating the answers. This total acceptance of the spirituality of the abduction phenomenon has made him popular with many abductees and researchers influenced by New Age thought.
Another proponent of Positive themes is Richard Boylan, a former private practice psychologist in Sacramento, California, and also an abductee. Like Hunter Gray and Sprinkle, Boylan interprets his abduction experiences as profoundly benevolent and beneficial for him. His aliens are environmentally minded creatures who want to raise people's consciousness about Earth's problems and humanity's place in the cosmos.
According to Boylan, the "mission" of the aliens "is to communicate to humans the concerns the ETs share—concerns about our violence toward each other and our government's violence toward them; about the ecological destruction and degradation we are visiting upon our earth; about our failure to properly care for and educate each child; about our possession of, and intended use of, nuclear weapons as a way to resolve disputes; and about our becoming more conscious of our heritage and our destiny (which both involve the ETs)."3 Boylan believes that the aliens will reveal themselves eventually, and at that time a "conditioned" humanity will not be afraid. When the great event comes, we will welcome the friendly aliens with open arms as we join with them in universal fellowship.
We look forward as some of the implications of ET-human relationships develop when we finally get to CEIV [Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind—that is, abductions], the open, official, mutually welcomed, meeting of our earth's representatives with the representatives of these other star civilizations, and then we finally have a truly multi- racial world, racial in its true sense of races from other planets since we are only one human race with different colors and bone structures and so forth.... If we get rid of our nuclear weapons and our gun-slinging attitude towards solving problems by outdrawing the other guy, then we will be ready for admission into the intergalactic UN, if you will.
We can look forward to cultural exchanges or representatives from earth and other civilizations because they have other things to learn from us just as we have other things to learn from them and this may involve the actual exchange of people going to other planets to observe their society and their representatives here walking among us.4 To Boylan, the aliens are even more acceptable because they believe in a form of Supreme Being and therefore confirm Judeo-Christian monotheism: "The ETs, too, realize that there's a Supreme Being or a supreme source of everything. They're not kidded that they are the top of the pile either. They acknowledge a supreme source out there—the fountainhead of all life."5 A significant influence on the Positives' belief system has been Massachusetts researcher Joseph Nyman, who began hypnotic regressions of abductees in the late 1980s and added "past lives" to the Positives' vision. When he regressed them to early childhood to recover the first abduction memories, he found he could take some of his subjects back to when they were infants, then back to the womb, and then to a "past life." A few of them "remembered" that they had lived their past lives as aliens. Nyman hypothesized that abductees were taken from the time they were babies because they already had existed as aliens in past lives.
Not only does Nyman find that many abductees think they were aliens in a past life, but he also suggests that some abductees possess an alien's "consciousness," which imbues their present human form. For Nyman, the evidence is "overwhelming" that the aliens impose these dual feelings—human and alien—on the abductees. "It implies the taking up of residence in the human form at birth (or before) of a fully developed intelligence which for a while is aware ' of both its human and non-human nature and of the pre- arranged monitoring to be conducted throughout life." Abductees and aliens have "melded" together in some way and in a sense abductees and aliens are the same.
Abductees live their present lives with a "dual reference," human and alien.6This allows the abductee to feel a positive connectiveness to the aliens with a resultant loss of "fear, anxiety, and self-doubt."7 Perhaps the most significant spokesperson for the Positive viewpoint is John Mack of Harvard University. As Mack examined the established structure of abductions, he concluded that the aliens' goal was more than administering clinical procedures.
Although Mack says the abduction phenomenon is "mixed" and not entirely positive, he believes abductions bring an opportunity for spiritual transformation and heightened consciousness.
Mack has been influenced by psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, who postulated that the human mind could connect with the "collective unconscious," the universe, and all things animate and inanimate, present and past. Similarly, Mack believes that the abduction phenomenon has the potential, like Eastern metaphysical philosophies, to "depict the universe and all its realities as a vast play of consciousness with physical manifestations." The effect of abductions can be "personal growth," which results in "an intense concern for the planet's survival and a powerful ecological consciousness."8 In addition, Mack thinks that Western society has cut itself off from "awareness of any higher form of intelligence" in the universe. In his view, the aliens have predicted the destruction of Earth by the encroachment of "technodestructive and fear-driven acquisitiveness," and he suggests that the aliens may be using the hybridization program and visualizations of our self-destruction to bring about the healing of Earth and "the further evolution of consciousness."" Within this framework, Mack began hypnotic regression of abductees in 1990, hoping to "push past" their trauma and unveil the essential goodness of the alien higher consciousness. And like Nyman, he found that a number of abductees whom he hypnotized had lived past lives, sometimes as aliens. Mack concluded that even though most other abduction researchers have not found the past-life-as-alien account, Nyman's "dual reference" was a "fundamental dimension of the consciousness expansion or opening that is an intrinsic aspect of the abduction phenomenon itself."10 As a credentialed Harvard faculty member with entree into mainstream intellectual life, Mack became an intellectually courageous and powerful advocate for the abduction phenomenon. Where he deviates from the mainstream is in his belief that the phenomenon transcends conventional ideas about the nature of reality. For Mack, understanding reality requires consciousness expansion that goes beyond traditional science. And such consciousness expansion can only be good for humanity.
A growing number of abductees who are not abduction researchers have also found their experiences spiritually uplifting and transforming. At an abduction conference held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, abductee "Susan" explained that the "communication" she receives from "the alien 'guardians' of our planet offers insight and wisdom to a world in need of it. It contains a message of love and support to a planet in need of healing." She also found personal benefit in the experience: "Since my experience, I rejoice in being who I am, with no expectations of how I should be, and complete acceptance of who I am. The changes in me are staggering. My life works as if by magic... . Although at one time I thought 'Why me?' now I say "Thank you for choosing me.'"11 Abductee Leah Haley, who related her experiences in her book Lost Was the Key, believes that members of the American military— somehow in conjunction with the aliens—abducted her on many occasions and held her in a barrackslike building. Yet despite these clearly negative experiences, her view of the aliens is positive. In her children's book, Ceto's New Friends, Haley tells the story of the gray alien Ceto who comes to Earth and meets little Annie and Seth. The three play together, and Ceto invites them on board his UFO. They are happy to go, float up into the object, play various "games," and then are floated back. On the final page, the two happy but weary children look longingly toward the UFO, and the story concludes with Haley writing that "the Spaceship flew away, but Ceto will come back soon to visit his new friends on Earth."12 Although most abductees have not gone as far as this in "humanizing" and sentimentalizing the aliens, Haley's viewpoint is a logical extension of the desire— perhaps the need—for the aliens to be friendly and helpful.
Taken as a group, the Positives' message is that humans have conducted their affairs in a way that will lead to the degradation of the planet and the end of the human species.
Humans have caused poverty, ignorance, and overpopulation, and they risk environmental catastrophe and atomic annihilation. The concerned aliens are "educating" abductees to warn us of what is to come if we do not change our behavior.
The Positives argue that aliens are more fully evolved spiritually than humans, and that they have a heightened awareness of the mysteries of the universe. The aliens recognize the specialness of human life and are also aware of how humankind has erred. They respect the sanctity of human life even more than we do. They care about us and love us.
The aliens are the teachers and we are the students. They are the parents and we are the children. They must teach us how to behave. Because they are a benevolent species, they have come to help us find solutions to our problems.
Moreover, the Positives believe that alien guidance is not meant only for society in general. The aliens can help the individual ab-ductee to raise himself spiritually by giving him knowledge of higher realms of existence and the connectedness of all things. They can also aid individual abductees physically by curing various problems that they may have. John Hunter Gray was a recipient of alien largess. His body hair increased, his face and neck narrowed, many wrinkles and blemishes disappeared from his face, and his circulation and blood-clotting improved. He has not been ill since the abduction, and after forty years of smoking, he gave it up with no signs of nicotine withdrawal. He also has had expanded psychic abilities.13 Hunter Gray is convinced that the aliens treat all people with the same kindness and respect that he received.
A key aspect of the Positive strategy to mold public opinion is to change the vocabulary used to describe aliens and abductions. They have denied the legitimacy of the word abductee in favor of the more positively charged experiencer. An abductee is a person kidnaped against his will. An experiencer is specially chosen for a very important task.
An abductee has unwanted and traumatic medical procedures administered to him. An experiencer is a willing participant in a grand and wonderful plan. An abductee endures reproductive and sexual procedures that are sometimes tantamount to rape. An experiencer helps the aliens create new people for the betterment of aliens and humans alike. Abductees are laboratory animals, but experiencers are united with the aliens to build a better world. To reinforce the phenomenon's harmlessness, the Positives use only neutral or friendly terms to describe abduction events: visitors come here for encounters with the experiencers; the visitors are ETs, not aliens. Using these terms humanizes the aliens and makes them seem friendly and benign. The abduction phenomenon as a whole is "Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind." Moreover, some Positives aggressively try to discredit researchers who are not in their camp. John Hunter Gray has called abduction researchers who adopt a skeptical or even a neutral stance "gloom and doomers," and he treats them scornfully. He accuses the "gloom and doom" researchers of being either "downright paranoid, motivated by commercial considerations, or ideologically endeavoring to resurrect a new version of the Red Scare."14 Similarly, Positive Richard Boylan has suggested that mainstream abduction researchers are working together with a "self-serving government elite" and CIA operatives to prevent the "real truth" about alien intentions from coming out. The "gloom and doomers" have made the aliens' plans all the more difficult to carry out, because they play on people's fears.15 Both Boylan and Mack de-emphasize the effects of the standard abduction procedures.
Boylan believes that gynecological and uro-logical procedures take place only with a very small number of ab-ductees and he rarely focuses on them.16 And although Mack has found nearly the full range of alien physical, mental, and reproductive procedures, he only mentions them in passing while emphasizing what he finds to be the spiritually uplifting elements. Joe Nyman believes that investigators who find that abductees were victimized have been influenced by the popular media, which have publicized abductees who have been victimized. For Nyman, these investigators have "prejudged" the phenomenon and their abduction work is "superficial," and "incomplete."17 The benevolent "spin" that the Positives (both abductees and researchers) put on the abduction phenomenon is puzzling, given the way most people describe their abductions: being unwillingly taken; being subjected to painful physical procedures (sometimes leaving permanent scars); enduring humiliating and abusive sexual episodes, including unwanted sexual intercourse; living with the fear and anxiety of wondering when they will be abducted again.
The Positives acknowledge that some abduction procedures might be painful or traumatic, but they liken the experiences to going to a dentist, where one endures short- term pain for long-term health. They look past fear because the frightened or traumatized abductees fail to understand the aliens' hidden benevolent motivations. Once the "experiencers" grasp the big picture, they will understand that temporary fear and pain are an insignificant price to pay for the enormous rewards they will reap in the future.
Echoes of the Contactees The Positives, although more sophisticated and complex, echo the "contactee" thought of the 1950s. The contactees were a group of people who spun tales of having continuing contact with benevolent "space brothers" who had come to Earth to prevent humans from blowing up the planet with atomic bombs and upsetting other planets in the process.
Contactees were careful to suggest that the aliens believed in a Judeo-Christian god, and some even claimed that Jesus was also a religious figure for them. The contactees followed alien-directed missions to spread the word to stop atomic wars, live together in fellowship, and stamp out communism. Contactee Howard Menger summed it up: "They are friendly people and are by far more advanced spiritually and physically than the people of this planet. At the present time they are observing us. They wish to help us to help ourselves to attain a higher understanding of life and its meaning.... They are only here to help you and worship the same Infinite Creator that we do."18 At first potentially reasonable, before long the contactee stories become increasingly fanciful. The space brothers gave them short rides in flying saucers—one went from Los Angeles to Kansas City. Howard Menger went to the moon. Eventually, the contactees were flying to Mars, Venus, and the outer planets. Led by "Professor" George Adamski, Daniel Fry, Orfeo Angelucci, Howard Menger, Truman Bethurum, Buck Nelson, and others, the contactees proved to be a terrible embarrassment to legitimate UFO researchers of the period, who had to spend great amounts of time and money combatting them and explain to a confused public that they were charlatans who did not represent legitimate UFO witnesses.19 Of the many influences on contactee thought, perhaps the most significant was the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. The movie portrays humans as warlike and the peaceful alien, Klaatu, as possessing an advanced technology that can end disease for humans. Klaatu has a proto-ecological message: If Earth continues on its aggressive, warlike path, its atomic technology will endanger the community of planets; therefore, the Earthlings must renounce war or the alien will use his robot, Gort, to blow up Earth and end the threat to the planetary confederation's peace.
Although the contactees lost popularity in the 1960s, their legacy is still with us. Devoted followers of the teachings of George Adamski and other contactees still exist in the United States. The modern Swiss contactee Billy Meier has published volumes of philosophical ruminations supposedly derived from aliens who come from the Pleiades constellation. Meier has attracted a large worldwide following and supplies photos, films, and tapes of UFOs, all of dubious origin, in support of his contentions. Dr. Steven Greer has formed an organization that will take a member to a secluded place and signal aliens to come to Earth for private sightings. Greer's claims suggest a special relationship with the extraterrestrials so that they will do his bidding.
The Positive Leo Sprinkle uses the word "contactee" to describe his and other people's experiences. He feels that meditation can cause a UFO sighting, either in the present life or in one or more past lives. He claims direct communication with aliens and can get them to answer his questions virtually on demand.
Using the New Age to Cope It is extremely difficult for unaware abductees who have not undergone competent hypnosis, or who have had none at all, to come to terms emotionally with their abductions. As a result, they develop coping mechanisms to deal with the continual psychological and physical assault from their experiences. To mitigate their victimization, they transform their lifetime of fear and anxiety into a more psychologically bearable scenario.
These abductees seek reassurance and find organizations and people who share their belief that the aliens are benevolent. Often they become involved with New Age groups that focus on the existence of alternative realities. The abductees learn there is more to life than one can know on a conscious, objective level. When they come in contact with the channeling of aliens or spirit-aliens, they "discover" an explanation for their experiences. In channeling, the entity answers all questions, no matter how grand, esoteric, or trivial. And the channeled messages directly address the rationale behind the abduction experiences: The abductees have been chosen to undertake a mission to help humanity, Earth, the aliens, and the universe. Abductees are not victims—they are important players in a majestic alien plan for the betterment of humanity. Enduring a little fear and pain is a small price to pay for taking part in such an important task.
To circumvent the problems of being taken against their will, living in fear, and being unable to say "no," the New Age abductees believe they have given the aliens "permission" to abduct them, either in a past life or when they were small children. They entered into a verbal contract and, therefore, it is proper, and even legal, for the aliens to abduct them. For New Age Positives, the aliens are humanity's friends. Godlike, they have come from the heavens to help us find our way. Not only do they have superior technology, but their moral sense, desire for peace, spirituality, and ability to love are all far more advanced than ours. Being a part of their cosmic vision is a privilege and an honor.
Often the New Age Positives band together into almost cultlike groups to defend themselves from their detractors—researchers and abductees who have come to different conclusions about the abduction phenomenon. The Positives reinforce one another's feelings and insulate themselves from the terror of their lives; they become angry when "less enlightened" abduction researchers question their interpretation.
For years critics of the UFO phenomenon spuriously claimed that UFO witnesses were forming a "new religion" based on gods from space. This was never true of UFO witnesses who came forward to report their sightings and then went on with their lives.
However, abductees and researchers who have accepted New Age teachings share a quasi-religious sentiment in their interpretation of alien intentions. They ascribe benevolent powers to the aliens and have an almost religious fervor in protecting the aliens from wrong-thinking individuals who would treat them more as scientific objects than as miraculous messengers. The Positives simultaneously anthropomorphize and deify the aliens. While the benevolent alien-gods were all-powerful, they have a moral structure not unlike our own. They can destroy us but choose to work for our betterment.
In return, they will eventually receive our gratitude and will know that they preserved Earth and the precious life on it, which is intrinsically rewarding to them.
The belief system of the New Age Positives is exceptionally strong because they know the alien-gods exist. After all, they have actually contacted the individual "experiencer," which adds "proof" to their religious belief and drives the "experiencer" to missionary zeal. Each abduction confirms the reality of the phenomenon and strengthens the New Age beliefs. For New Age Positives, the alien-gods are not just a matter of faith—they are a matter of stark fact.
Of course, some New Age abductees have 'sought assistance from a competent hypnotist, one who is well-versed in the abduction phenomenon. As a result, they remember events that do not seem so positive. Often, the contradiction between belief system and reality is overwhelming, and the abductee breaks off hypnosis, retreating into his protective New Age cocoon.
Rejecting the Importance of Competent Hypnosis A primary reason for the Positive attitude is that most of these abductees have not undergone competent hypnosis to help them understand what has happened to them.
They have only conscious recollections, which are often tainted with screen memories, false memories, fragmented memories, the remnants of imaging and envisioning procedures, and wishful thinking.
In abduction research, memories derived hypnotically under the guidance of a competent hypnotist are more reliable than conscious memories. This is clearly demonstrated by analyzing the abduction "frame"—the first few seconds and the last few seconds of the abduction—which usually takes place in the person's normal environment. Unaware abductees (those who have not undergone expert hypnosis) often extrapolate from memory fragments of these periods. For example, an unaware abductee might remember that an alien came close to him or her in bed to "greet" him, when under hypnosis this is revealed to be a staring procedure to subdue the ab-ductee. An unaware abductee will say that he watched aliens in his room, told them that he did not want to be abducted that night, and watched the obliging aliens depart. But under hypnosis, the unaware abductee reveals that the scenario he consciously remembered consists of only the first few seconds of the abduction, when the aliens first appear, and the last few seconds of the abduction, when they leave two hours later. It does not include the actual abduction. The aliens in both cases had originally and falsely appeared to be more reasonable and "human," exhibiting concern for the abductee and honoring his wishes.
Experience with unaware abductees clearly leads to the conclusion that the most serious barrier to competent abduction research is incompetent hypnosis. This problem is compounded by lack of agreed-upon standards for conducting hypnosis on abductees, and by the continuing debate over the meaning of UFO abductions. Without standardized methodology, a hypnotist can use any induction or questioning technique—no matter how experimental, untried, or dubious—to explore abduction accounts. Questionable technique coupled with the hypnotist's lack of knowledge of the abduction phenomenon results in false memories, inserted memories, confabulation, dissociative states, and error.
A second barrier to competent abduction research is the mindset of the hypnotist. Many hypnotists and therapists who work with abductees adhere to New Age philosophies and actively search for confirmational material. During hypnosis, the hypnotist emphasizes material that reinforces his own world view. If both the subject and the hypnotist are involved with New Age beliefs, the material that results from the hypnotic sessions must be viewed skeptically, because their mindset can seriously compromise their ability to discern the facts.
Competent abduction hypnosis is difficult. Each question must be intrinsic to the abductee's narrative and should grow organically from it, without introducing extraneous material. The investigator should critically evaluate each answer in light of the established knowledge of the abduction phenomenon, the abductee's suggestibility and ability to filter out erroneous memories, the internal integrity of the account, and that ineffable but supremely important element—common sense.
When unskilled hypnotists regress an abductee, they fail to situate him in the event's minute-by-minute chronology. Without links to a temporal sequence, the abductee can interpret the events without the facts necessary to guide his thoughts, which leads to confabulation and other memory problems. The inadequate hypnotist and the abductee engage in a mutual confirmational fantasy: the abductee reports the fantasy; the hypnotist assumes that the abductee's narrative is objective reality. And then by asking questions about the details of the pseudo-event, the hypnotist validates its reality.
Research over the years has shown that the aliens are rational. Virtually everything that happens during abductions is, given adequate information, comprehensible and logical. A systematic, rigorous, and skeptical approach to this phenomenon has successfully uncovered its secrets; there is no reason to abandon competent analysis in favor of religious or philosophical belief systems.
Furthermore, mainstream abduction researchers have been unable to uncover anything paranormal, spiritual, religious, or metaphysical about the phenomenon.There is no evidence to support New Age hypnotherapists' contention that once the abductee "pushes past the trauma" of his abduction, he will encounter "spirit guides" or "guardian angels" who will steer him safely through abduction events, protect him in ordinary life, and guide him toward enlightenment. Usually "pushing past the trauma" comes at the expense of rooting the abductee in the reality of what is happening. Thus, the naive hypnotherapist has unwittingly pushed the abductees into unrecognized dissociative states.
Spiritual Assumptions and Validational Questioning John Mack is a good example of a hypnotist who has relied more on New Age thinking than on an objective approach to hypnosis. Mack's personal study of consciousness transformation and spiritual enlightenment informs and shapes his assumptions and questions during hypnotic regressions. From the beginning of his interest in abductions, he thought the accepted interpretations of the abduction phenomenon—that the beings had their own agenda of physiological exploitation of humans—were inadequate. He also suspected that mainstream abduction researchers were finding the accepted abduction structure because they "pull out of the experiencers what they want to see."20 Ignoring the well-documented research about repression, recovered memory, confabulation, false memories, and mistakes that abductees commonly make about visualization procedures, Mack began to delve into the phenomenon from an unconventional perspective. For his hypnotic sessions, he used a combination of traditional hypnosis and modified Grof "breath" work (holotropic breathing), in which the subject regulates the intake and exhaust of oxygen and carbon dioxide. In full-fledged holotropic breathing, people can feel they are experiencing their birth, some can hallucinate quite strongly, and many have powerful emotional reactions. The effect of even modified breath work on hypnosis and on memory formation and retrieval is unknown, but information derived with it must be treated with caution.21 In spite of his New Age viewpoint and methodology, Mack found much of the same material that other researchers have uncovered: "These individuals reported being taken against their wills by alien beings, sometimes through the walls of their houses, and subjected to elaborate intrusive procedures which appeared to have a reproductive purpose."22 But Mack also began to hear more "spiritual" and transformational accounts from abductees who either related conversations with aliens or just "knew." Rather than proceeding with extreme skepticism, he assumed the abductee's veracity and incorporated the information into an idiosyncratic abduction scenario.
Mack is sensitive to charges of "leading" the subject within the hypnotic session. He sincerely says he does "not lead clients in any particular direction so that if information that is relevant to the spiritual or consciousness expanding aspects of the abduction phenomenon emerges during our sessions, it will do so freely and spontaneously and not as a result of specific inquiries of mine."23 Yet he also sincerely believes that the construction of an abduction scenario depends on the "intermingling or flowing together of the consciousness of the two (or more) people in the room." They "co-creatively" build an experience that they share for the benefit of both.24 While Mack does not "lead the witness" in the classic meaning of the phrase, he embraces the "positive" therapeutic technique that leads to mutual confirmational fantasies and easily steers the ab-ductee into dissociative channeled pathways. This technique may be temporarily useful, but it represents the antithesis of the goal of scientific research—to uncover the facts.
Apparently unconcerned with the problems of dissociation and channeling, John Mack accepts "recollections" at face value. For example, one of Mack's subjects, Ed, "remembered" a female being who told the young man that he possessed special gifts and powers and recommended an environmental course of action for him.
"Listen to the earth, Ed," [the being said]. "You can hear the earth. You can hear the anguish of the spirits. You can hear the wailing cries of the imbalances. It will save you.
It will save you. .. . Things are going to happen," she said, but he must "listen to the spirits," even if he is taunted and not feel overwhelmed. "She gave me a flash . .. she opened up that channel and turned up the volume. Some of [the spirits] are crying; some of them are mirthful. She just ran me through the whole thing in a couple of seconds, 'All this you can see, hear, and feel. Other people may think you are crazy.'" The earth itself, the being told him, is enraged at our stupidity, and "the earth's skin is going to swat some bugs off" that do not know how to "work in symbiotic harmony" with it.
Instead of treating this "dialogue" with extreme skepticism, Mack asks the validational question that confirms the fantasy and calls for more information: "I asked Ed how this swatting off was going to happen."25 By posing this question, he unknowingly joins with the subject in a mutual confirmational fantasy that assumes the authenticity of the information and adds import to it.
There are many examples of validational questioning in Mack's published research, which make the information upon which he bases his theories exceptionally suspect. But despite his methodology, Mack's Positive stance is appealing to many people, and his methodology is typical of the researchers who have found abductions to be positive. The Positive outlook, however, does not only emanate from methodological inadequacies.
There are procedures that aliens perform within the abduction phenomenon that also generate Positive feelings—but in unexpected ways.
Alien Affirmation of the Positive Viewpoint Some abductees think that aliens are benevolent as a direct result of abduction procedures. The aliens can be civil, caring, and even kindly. They can ensure that the abductees will not feel pain during invasive procedures. They can sometimes cure ailments. They can be appreciative. They do reaffirm that the abductee is a "special" person. For women, the Mindscan procedure, with its elicitation of romantic and sexual feelings, can encourage them to feel love and affection for the aliens. When these women think of aliens, they do so with a vague yearning, a sense of emotional emptiness, as if recalling a haunting memory of a long-lost lover.
Abductees have spent their lives entangled in the abduction phenomenon, and the aliens sometimes use this fact for their own purposes. They often tell abductees that they are part of the alien "family," and they frequently tell children that the aliens are their "parents." Abductees often feel a sense of loss when their hybrid offspring are taken away, reinforcing the idea that they have an emotional interest elsewhere, not on Earth.
For these abductees, the aliens must be benevolent. The two species are working together to create a better world. The Positive interpretation is a natural outcome of these close links and active collaboration.
Are the Positives Correct?
It is premature to assume that the Positives are completely wrong about alien intentions.
It is possible that the aliens will, in the end, help humankind and the world. Their intervention in the rush of human events might be a positive step toward solving the problems of disease, the environment, and war. However, at this time the evidence of benevolent intentions is, at best, ambiguous. One thing is certain: Most abductees say the phenomenon has had a devastating effect on their personal lives. Many have phobias, scars, bruises, and physical problems, especially gynecological and urological dysfunction. Many live in fear that it will happen again and feel guilty that they cannot protect their children.
The debate over alien intentions again brings up the question of what is believable in abduction research. Hypnosis, consciously recalled memories, false memories—is there a way of separating the "signal from the noise"? Uncovering the reality of abduction events is difficult but feasible. Methodological rigor has developed a core of solid information, confirmed by hundreds of abductees, and it has enabled investigators to understand the abduction phenomenon. Alien intentions, an area that could not be addressed from an evidentiary standpoint in the past, depends on the aliens' ultimate goals. Their intentions are linked to the end of their program and can be narrowed down to three possibilities: Their actions are mutually beneficial to both the aliens and humans; they are beneficial to the aliens and intentionally harmful to humans; or they are beneficial to the aliens who simply do not care what human consequences their actions might have.
Is there any way to discern what the outcome will be? Our present state of knowledge has finally allowed us to understand what most probably will happen in the future when the aliens' goals and intentions will be made evident. We do not yet have all the pieces to the puzzle but the outlines are well-defined and the picture is clearly recognizable. It is not a picture that I enjoy looking at.
12. Life As We Know It?
The aliens continually refer to the future. They say it will be better for humans and aliens.
When they impregnate women, they say the women are "carrying the future." They refer to the "children of the future." They talk about a "change" coming—a difficult change but an inevitable one. What we are seeing in the abduction phenomenon is apparently a process. Everything that has happened to the ab-ductees and all the aliens' activities are part of a process leading to a predetermined goal for the future. That process has been continuing for the entire twentieth century, and at some point in the near future it will end and the goal will be achieved.
Contrary to the optimistic predictions of the Positives, I do not like what I see for the future. And the more information I gather about the abduction phenomenon, the more ominous the picture looks. When the end comes—and it will come—what will happen to humanity?
I have had an aversion to addressing this question, preferring to ignore it. In a sense, it is easier and more comforting to listen to people's abduction accounts, try to make sense of what is happening, and not confront the implications for the future of what they are saying. The accounts are so extraordinary that it is easy to get lost in the minutiae of alien procedures and avoid taking a "step back" to gain perspective on where all this is leading.
But in spite of my reluctance, it must be done.
The aliens have brought to Earth a highly efficient program of human physiological exploitation. The breeding and hybridization programs have intruded upon our world and taken control of abductees' lives. The aliens have explained to the abductees that these programs are needed to "salvage" the future. They have focused their communication with the abductees on the need to save the environment, on the need to prevent or at least cope with mass destruction, and on the benefits of The Change, which is the way some of them refer to the culminating event in their plans for the future. But just who will benefit from The Change?
Saving the Environment A puzzling aspect of the abduction phenomenon is the environmental concern that aliens and hybrids display. They say that pollution and other problems are destroying the environment and that humans have been doing Earth a disservice. If they are concerned with Earth's environment, there must be a reason. The Positives believe the aliens' environmental message. However, the conclusion that an environmental "cleanup" is uppermost in the aliens' minds is subject to question.
It is significant that the aliens almost never say or do anything to help the environment; they only lament its desecration. For example, they showed Pam Martin scenes of devastation to cities and wildlife, which made her aware of human responsibility for the problem.
I get the feeling that there's communication going on now. What's he saying to you?
I don't know if it's something about getting past it. Like avoiding it. I don't know why they're showing it to me. I can get this off the five o'clock news. I already know this.... He says that this, had to avoid this, or this could be avoided, or this has to be avoided, or something like that.... I don't know, I just get the feeling like they think we're really stupid. Like there's something wrong with us. I get the feeling like, when he conveys that to me, that he's looking at all of us like a group.... It's like they're not blaming us, but like, they're holding us responsible.... I keep getting the feeling like we're supposed to fix this as a group. He doesn't seem to understand how it works around here.1 Lucy Sanders also received a strong message suggesting Earth was in danger and humans were the problem.
Now they have a screen in front of me. They're telling me something about the future.
"What must be known for the future." I see a bomb going off. I see a crack in the world.
There's lava coming out. I'm looking at it from above the world, and a big crack in the world. The world is turned and a crack came in it. And black clouds everywhere and bad wind. And people on the ground dead. I see dead bodies everywhere. "This cannot happen. This will not happen. This shall not happen. This must not happen. Only you can do something about it. Only you can do something about it.... You must stop it. It is coming. We are coming. You must stop it. You must stop the destruction. Your good is our good."2 Kathleen Morrison's personal-project hybrid told her humans did not understand that their actions had effects beyond themselves. Although humans were a "hindrance" to the planet, he did not suggest corrective action. During this exchange, Kathleen was looking at the stars from a UFO's window while her hybrid embraced her.
It is gorgeous up here. Reinforces how tiny we are, how tiny our concept is. In less than a blink of an eye, we are born and die. We have many opportunities to screw things up in that time though [laughs].... I'm in the full throttles of an embrace and this is wonderful. I love feeling his arms around me. This might sound funny but he almost talks like he has a love affair with the Earth.
How do you mean?
That it's one of the most beautiful places he's seen. That it has such an opportunity for peace and tranquility. And that man is very short-sighted into his own personal needs. It is kind of like he [the human] doesn't have the big picture. And in fact, we don't realize it but we don't only affect ourselves. And even when he's saying things like that.... It's almost as if he's massaging my brain with every word. I think maybe that can be also a part of his love of things.... It's like the human population is at a crucial stage of, we're becoming a hindrance to the planet rather than helping the planet. There's an importance of enlightenment. And I interject someplace in here, "We're not all like that. We're not all that way." My question is, "If I was that way, would I be here?" And he asks like, "What do you think? Do you think we would invest our time with someone who would not make a difference?" And that kind of takes me back. It's a left-handed compliment because he used the plural "we invest" rather than "he invests in me." I realize it's meant as a compliment but... and he can tell there's a change in me, in my energy. I don't know, I guess I stiffen a little bit.3 If the aliens are genuinely concerned with the fate of our planet, then it must be because they have some stake in it. Telling selected abductees that the environment is threatened is useless. The majority of them will not even remember the conversation, and most abductees are neither environmental nor political activists. Moreover, concern for the environment appears to be relatively new on the aliens' agenda. Researchers can date the abduction phenomenon directly to the late 1920s, and family stories suggest its origin in the 1890s. Were the aliens concerned about the environment when they began their Breeding Program at the turn of the century? If so, we have found no evidence suggesting this. It is most likely that the stratagem of environmental concern developed well after the Breeding Program was in place.
Seen in this context, researchers must treat statements about the aliens' environmental concerns with utmost skepticism. It is entirely possible that they are using these pronouncements to justify the Breeding Program. They may also be using them to lend morality to their activities. If they can instill in abductees the idea that the human race will destroy itself and they are here to prevent that, then it becomes easier for them to defend their actions and to solicit help from the abductees. Almost as important, the environmental message paints the aliens as benevolent, which fits in nicely with what many humans so desperately want them to be.
Is it not possible that the aliens are concerned about the environment because they want a clean Earth for themselves? The fact that humans live on a sullied planet does not seem important to them, but that they might have to live on a despoiled planet may be intolerable.
Preventing Destruction Images of mass destruction are extremely common during abductions—much more so than environmental images. Virtually every abductee has had to watch scenes of destruction. Tidal waves, floods, earthquakes, atomic bombs, and wars and their aftermaths abound. Devastated cities lie in rubble. Dead people are everywhere. Injured and dying men, women, and children cry out for help to the surviving abductee.
Abductees are led to believe that this is going to happen, that it need not happen, and that humans have caused it.
The aliens sometimes suggest a way to avoid destruction—themselves. They are working to avert this unhappy scenario. Their Breeding Program is the hope of the future and will lead to peace and contentment. They can bring about a happy ending to the horror. Patti Layne had this experience: And they said, that they needed some parts, some things from me and that it would help everyone on the planet. They said that there are going to be some bad things that are going to happen.... They gave me some pretty vivid images.... And I sat on the chair and they put this scope on my head.... They said that there are going to be some bad things that are going to happen. They told me terrible things would happen to the earth and that it would just blow up, and cities would crumble and mountains would fall and the sun would be black. And they said that it's bad because people can't stop being greedy and that they were doing something to help us, and I don't know how. I couldn't make the connection how putting something into my stomach would help us.4 For Terry Matthews, the catastrophic scene ended with happy hybrids strolling in a peaceful setting. First the aliens directed her attention to a screen on which she saw a large explosion: It looks like a mushroom cloud from the top. That's what it looked like.
Is it earth, or some other planet?
I don't know, I could just see the bomb. Just the explosion.... It was real brilliant and puffs of white cloud and I know it wasn't in my head. It was up on the screen.
What else do you see up there as you sit there?
For a minute I thought I saw armies and crashed planes. Armies, like foot soldiers marching forward and I saw a crashed plane and then I saw a field with nothing growing in it, not even weeds, just bare. Just saw a little girl with puffy cheeks ...
standing next to a wall. She looks very poor. Looking very angry and lonely. It was just a flash image though, it was very fast. These images aren't very long.
Do you hear any sound with them?
I don't think so. Although with the explosion at the beginning, I almost felt the vibration of it even though it was just an image. It startled me though so it might have been just my adrenaline. I don't know, but I don't hear any sound. I feel like I hear a gray talking in his ... you know, not talking. Thinking. Kind of like voiceover.
What is the gray sort of thinking, or can you get a sense of that?
Yeah, but it sounds hokey. Like, "This is going to happen." That's not the words.
"Inevitable," that's the word I hear. That's the way it translates. And I feel like I'm watching propaganda.... I feel like it's, like when you're a kid and they threaten, "You better be good or Santa Claus won't bring you anything," you know? That's the feel of it. But I don't know what they want from me. I don't know why they want me to see this.
What's the next image you see up there?
It was real fast. The first one was like as far as the eye could see, it was barren and dead, you know? Not dead people, just dead earth, I guess. Dead soil. No trees, no buildings and then all of a sudden I started to see pretty fields, flowers and ... hybrids.
What are the hybrids doing?
[The scene] looks happy.
The hybrids are happy?
Well, contented or ... I feel a nice day.
... What are they doing?
Walking, everybody's moving kind of slowly and peacefully, even the children.
Looks like an [laughs] alien greeting card. That's what it looks like. It's propaganda, I know it is.... Just like it's a garden of some kind.... It reminds me of... the way they're walking in pairs very slowly ... like they're having a leisurely Sunday afternoon, you know? Like it's perfect or something. ... It's like a very huge garden that goes on and on and on.5 During Allison Reed's five-day abduction, she witnessed many scenes of devastation. The aliens told her that during a future period of human strife, they will intercede and save us from ourselves.6 Roxanne's Zeigler's experience ended with optimism. She saw army people in uniforms and then there was an explosion.
And then [I see] a bomb going off. It's like a mushroom. It's kind of, like everything's like turning black and white. And the color is > all gone. It's like sheer desolation. And a raging fire—trees burned, and . .. animals running. People with like black, blistered skin . . . kind of nothingness, just smoldering. And everything's all quiet and still black and white. The sun is coming out, and a vague whiteness is like covering the land. There's like . .. something I've heard before.
What's that?
It's like, "All's well that ends well." It's like there's this voice coming out of the sky, and this brightness envelops the earth. And the darkness is going away, and the desolation is going away. And the grass is growing. And there's some butterflies that are coming out. And the flowers are growing. And, it's like luminous beings. It's almost like angelic figures around and all in light. And the people are moving around and doing all kinds of things. And people are smiling again. Everybody looks healthy and strong. And children are playing games outside. The animals look content. And the forest is green. There are ships, lots of ships. And all these people are coming out of the ships. It's like people are greeting each other, and they're kind of like, okay, back to business, so to speak, you know. There are a lot of ships arriving, and people are coming out from the ships, almost as if some of them had been here before. It's like they've been away a while, but it's like they're coming home.
When they come out of the ships, how do they look? Do they look just like normal people?
They're not wearing the same clothes that we wear. They're coming out with like this luminous cloth.... But, they're all different colors, like all different races.
They're taking these beings to, and it's like they're showing them around.... It's like there's no fear of them or anything. I get the feeling, though, that these—the ones that are still, still look alien—they still can't live here. I guess they can stay for short periods of time, then they have to at least go to their ships or something.
But, there are parts of them that are with us because they have all these other people that are a mixture. Things won't go back the way they were—things will be better. There will be a lot different technology, and people can utilize their gifts. People will learn to get along better, at least these people have. There is more respect for the earth and all that's living. And, there is more love and acceptance ... more opportunity to realize good potential. The screen is fading....
This person who [is] standing beside me seems to be saying that, you know, "Don't worry, it won't be so bad as it looks. We just had to test your emotions." There will be changes, and it won't be so bad. They are not causing the changes to take place on the earth, but something's coming. He says that we need them. They have to make people like them that can survive in our society. We need what they have to offer. In other words, we might have an awful time trying to recover, and their being here will make things easier for us—not to be afraid.
Now, he says something is coming. Does he say what's coming, or not?
... He says it'll be made clear as times goes by. He says what they are doing is necessary. It has to be done, and they're not trying to hurt us in any way. But, some of the things may hurt—they try to take away the pain. They try to make the memories go ... because the memories give us trouble here with the people, and it's not time yet. But eventually all will be all right. It'll all become clear.7 The Change and the Role of Abductees If these accounts of salvation are true, then the aliens' message is clear: After the catastrophe, whatever it is, takes place, the late-stage hybrids and perhaps the aliens themselves will engage in a general integration into human society. As one hybrid told Claudia Negron, "Soon all life will be changed. People will be different."8 Presumably, we will all live in peace and harmony. The environment will be healthy and there will be no more war or conflict.
Like the environmental message, the salvation message may have a subliminal purpose— a reassuring communication to be used before or during The Change. This suggests that abductees—the aliens rarely mention nonabductees—might have a more active role in the future program of integration. These plans are revealed in a variety of ways.
Calming One of the abductees' responsibilities in the future will be to calm people. They seem to be in training for this role. The aliens often have them calm other abductees during an abduction. For example, while Kay Summers was waiting with a group of abductees for a UFO, the hybrids made her calm the victims and try to keep them from crying.9 The aliens told Susan Steiner to get off her table and calm her friend Linda, who was lying on a table next to her.10 Pam Martin calmed her neighbor on board the UFO while he was lying on a table. She put her hands on his shoulder and forehead and tried to keep him from being so scared.11 The aliens led Kathleen Morrison to believe that when the time was right, she would act as a calming agent between people. She would, in her recollection: make people feel good ... communicating knowledge ... bridging communications between people .. . creating a sense of community and wholeness, oneness. And this is going to sound strange because I don't only think it's people, I think it's also supposed to be ideas too. It's supposed to be to communicate how similar things are that look dissimilar.12 It is important to remember that the aliens are adept at calming people, and do so during every abduction. Teaching abductees how to calm people seems pointless if the aliens are present. That suggests that they might want the abductees to do it in the future without their presence.
Helping The aliens sometimes require the abductees to help them with tasks. Carla Enders helped persuade a recalcitrant woman to breastfeed a hybrid baby.13 The aliens directed Kay Summers to put a machine underneath the midsection of a woman lying on a table; when she accomplished her task, they were pleased with her performance.14 Terry Matthews helped obtain sperm from four men lying on tables. She held her hands in a certain position on their genitals while an alien stared into the men's eyes.15 Pam Martin also helped obtain sperm. With an alien at her side, she floated through a window into a neighbor's home, and at the alien's direction, masturbated a sleeping man (also an abductee) who had been "switched off."16 During some of these helping procedures, the abductee wears special clothes—often a skin-tight blue uniform. Wearing the garb and helping the aliens can lead the abductees to have intense feelings of guilt and shame. But that is clearly not the aliens' intent. Rather, it would appear, again, that they are grooming the abductees for some future role.
Rescuing The aliens seem interested in rescue. From time to time, they will evoke the desire in an abductee to rescue someone. For example, Christine Kennedy observed a "town" inhabited by hybrids that was threatened by a flood. She knew the hybrid babies there would die if they were not rescued, and she felt sorrow at the prospect and guilt that she could not save them.17 Charles Petrie received the idea through a visualization that a colony of aliens was living at the bottom of the sea and that their cable lifeline was not functioning properly. He envisioned himself diving with others to fix the cable and rescue the aliens.18 In Allison Reed's envisioned scene of devastation, she rescued a baby amid the explosions, smoke, rubble, charred bodies, and wounded survivors reaching out to her.
Unknown people chased her as she ran with the baby down a path to a white light and was finally safe. After that vision, she felt safe with the aliens and glad that she was part of their program. The aliens told her, "It's in the future."19 Facilitating Some abductees indicate that they themselves will smooth the way for The Change. They do not know specifically what they will do, but they think they will know when the time comes. The aliens told Pam Martin that when the world changes, they will call upon her to help people adapt to the new reality.
They're telling me things of the future.... What are they telling you?
I can't tell if they're putting me on or what. This sounds really nuts. It's like they're explaining things to me, preparing me for a time when I'll have a lot of responsibility. But I don't have to worry about anything, it's like they'll be there to guide me, to tell me what to do.
What context? How do they mean that? ...
Well, it has something to do with teaching other people things....
They tell me people will be listening to me. I think I'm thinking with two minds because I'm thinking then and I'm thinking now. At the time I was listening to them, going along with it. Right now I'm thinking this is really nuts.
What else did they say you're going to wind up doing?
... Just that they're preparing me. But they don't say preparing me for what....
So ... you're teaching people things and they're going to listen and all that?
Yeah.
What will you be teaching people?
About the new life, after the world changes. Helping people adapt. And right now they're preparing me to accept the unacceptable.
Okay. What do they mean by "after the world changes"? Do they explain what kind of change? Do they give you a sense of that?
Well, the world won't be like we're accustomed to it. They'll be here.20 Other abductees feel that they will have specific roles to perform to facilitate the onset of The Change when the time comes. During a Mindscan procedure with an insectlike alien, Reshma Kamal was told that she was "one of them." When she protested and said she was not one of them, the insectlike alien told her "a plan is going to take place and I would be in it that way." She was shown images in which she acted as a traffic director to help move panicked and distraught crowds of people through the streets to a central location. Those who were nonabductees would be confused and frightened, the alien explained, but she would not be. She was "part of the plan."2 Facilitating The Change may explain why abductees feel infused with mysterious knowledge. For years many of them have been saying that the aliens have given them knowledge but that they cannot bring it to mind. Hypnosis rarely works to recover this knowledge. The aliens tell the abductees that the memories will be recovered when "it is time." In typical fashion they told Steve Thompson, an apartment house maintenance supervisor, something he knew was important but would not be able to remember because "it is not yet time to know."22 Patti Layne's knowledge was linked to a possible implant. She was told she would learn later what it was about: He started saying something to me, but I can't tell you what it is. You can't remember, you mean?
I can't remember it. It's like it's a secret, but I can't remember what it is.
Something to do with what he put in me. He said it would be there, something about in time this will serve a purpose. It will tell you what to do when it's time ...
Do you know what this means?
It seemed to make sense at the moment, but it doesn't now. It kind of left me with the feeling that it was extremely important, some grand plan.23 Carla Enders was eight years old when an alien told her something was impossible for her to bring to mind. Recalling the experience as an eight-year-old, she had trouble verbalizing the mechanism of telepathy and what an alien was telling her: Like it's just not real. Like how can it [the alien] be talking to me in my head?
And I can't really understand what it's saying to me in my head. Like another language or something. Like maybe, it's putting things in my head, and later I'll hear it. I don't know, like a recording or something. But that I can't understand it right now.
It's like it's storing something in my head, whatever it's saying to me. Like it's almost saying to me, that I won't understand what it's saying to me. Like it's telling me I won't understand it. It's not time for me to understand it. But someday I'll understand it. But it's still in my head. Whatever it is. Whatever he said, is in my head.
It's in your head at the time when you're eight years old? Yes.
She then visualized images of aliens dying. They were on the ground outside and lying on the floor in various rooms. She thought that other abductees in the room with her were seeing the same thing.24 Allison Reed was told that there would be many changes in the future and she would know what to do.
He's talking about the future. There's going to be a lot of changes. And there's going to be a lot of unsettling and turmoil.... I'm to understand that it's my cooperation with them is—I'm going to know what to do. I have a safety valve. I don't get it, I don't know what's going to happen, and he's not being specific.
There's just something, my sense is on a global scale. In the future, I don't know how far. It may not even be, something, he's just letting me know that there's going to be something, and it's going to be horrible, but that I'll know what to do.
And that I'll just know, they've been teaching me. He doesn't use the word programming, but that's how I can describe it. They've been programming me— whatever it is, something's going to happen and I needn't worry because I have the information though I don't know I have the information and I'm going to know what to do and that all of what they do to me has something to do with preparing me, as well as themselves, for whatever this is that's going to happen....
Something is going to happen; it's going to be catastrophic. It's in the future, whatever that means, and I'm going to know what to do and that information's coming to me from my experiences.25 The unsettling conclusion is, of course, that abductees are "trained" and "prepared" for later events and it is in this context that the puzzling primary experiences of staging and testing can be understood. Some of these procedures may be part of the training program that abductees begin as small children. In the staging procedure, abductees are required to participate in a "theatrical" production which is a combination of envisioning and playacting. Susan Steiner witnessed another woman abductee scream and run around the room out of control. Suddenly the panicked woman ran into a wall and was accidentally stabbed by a sharp instrument protruding from it. She fell to the floor bleeding. Susan was told to go to her and try to help. Distraught, Susan went to the unfortunate woman and when she bent down she realized that the woman was actually a gray alien. The entire affair had been staged.
In testing procedures, abductees are required to operate special devices that indicate that they have received specialized knowledge in operating the equipment, or they are required to perform seemingly impossible mental tasks like viewing something through the eyes of an alien. The aliens must have a reason for inculcating these specialized skills and that reason could very well be for future tasks.
Alterations of Abductees Feeling infused with knowledge may be related to the common belief among abductees that the aliens have physiologically altered them and their children. Beginning with the "first generation" of abductees, the aliens have continued to abduct their progeny, which indicates that the descendant abductees have certain desirable qualities.
Abductees feel something was done to them that facilitates the abduction process, and this "something" will be "switched on" in the future when the aliens need it. Many abductees think their implants keep them in the abduction "pipeline," and that they may govern their behavior in the future. Abductees also feel that the aliens have effected some sort of neural manipulation that makes them different. For example, it is common for abductees to feel increased "psychic" abilities—they "know" what people are thinking.
These alleged abilities peak a short time after an abduction event and then dissipate.
Sometimes the increased abilities are so intense that they frighten the abductees.
It is not unusual for abductee parents to say that their children have been "altered." Children sometimes say that even though they were born from their mother's womb, they "know" they do not belong in their family. Some abductees can point to so many significant differences between them and their siblings, parents, and other relatives that one can easily see how they would question their genetic link.
The evidence for physiological alteration of abductees is purely anecdotal, and we have been unable to identify those procedures that result unequivocally in permanent changes.
The aliens are characteristically silent on this issue, although they have told abductees that their hybrid babies are more intelligent than normal children and have a somewhat accelerated growth. On some occasions the aliens tell the pregnant woman that her normal human fetus has been "changed." Pam Martin's human fetus was removed and then replaced in her uterus. The aliens explained to her that "he'll know things that he won't be able to explain to other people."26 Is this true of all children who have been abducted?
Perhaps the Roper Poll provides a clue. The Social/Political Actives, a group the Roper organization included in the survey, answered positively in far greater numbers than other groups to all questions on the poll, indicating that there might be a larger number of abductees in this group. According to the Roper Organization, these people are "influential Americans." They are the "trend setters rather than the trend followers" [italics theirs].27 They are wealthier and better educated than most Americans, and presumably above average in intelligence. If indeed there are more abductees in this group than in other groups in society, then there may be a subtle alteration taking place, which does not necessarily show up in individual abductees but is manifested in statistics for large groups. That could suggest that the aliens are somehow altering humans to facilitate their agenda. But at this point there is not enough information to confirm that frightening thought.
After the Change The aliens sometimes describe the future after The Change. Courtney Walsh saw what she called a "propaganda film" on a screen about the route to happiness in the future. It began with the removal of a fetus from an abductee.
It seems like a screen, but I don't know if it really is. And there's a picture of an embryo, and it's implanted, it's growing, and then it's getting harvested out again.
It feels like a propaganda film, like, "Isn't this good." I get the feeling there's some beings there that want me to watch it. But I'm not really watching it, I have my head in my hands. I'm not really watching it that closely. It's like I hear them saying, "Do you think she watched it?" "Yes, she watched it." "Well, she wasn't really paying attention." "No, it doesn't matter, it already took." When you look at this film, and you see them removing the fetus, what do they do with it then?
Put it in a little jar. And they move it to a bigger jar, and then they move it to an incubator that's as big as a baby. And it has tubes going into it. And we're watching it, and there are beings taking care of them. But it's like all so rosy and cheery, and the female beings are stroking the babies, and talking to the babies, it's just really happy. And there's a picture of a toddler—baby toddler girl—and you just get the feeling like, "Aren't these fine children? Aren't these good, strong, fine children?" Do they show them older than that?
It's just so stupid. It almost seems like they show a couple of these toddlers, and they're smiling, and in behind them files [walks] like several aliens, and it's just so stupid. Their hands are on the kids, or each other, and behind them are older adult humans, and they have their hands on each other and everybody's happy. It's really stupid, I know. It's just really dumb. And everybody's smiling and they're all dressed in white and they're standing there and you feel like, "Together we're going to achieve" something. Something about "completion, or happiness." I don't even know if this is real. It's just so stupid. It's obviously fake. Even to me at the time. This is trash.28 Kathleen Morrison also observed a harmonious scene with humans, aliens, and hybrids together in an outdoor setting in the future.
He's showing me some real wonderful pictures. I think this is the way things are supposed to be with us together.
With you and the big guy, or aliens and humans?
It's a mixture of aliens and humans. It's all different types of aliens though, all different colors of humans. It's on a craggy landscape with rocks. It's smooth underfoot. It elicits a feeling of euphoria.
What is everybody doing?
Talking. Walking between groups of people and talking. It seems an odd place to have a gathering.
What else is he showing you, if anything? Embracing between hybrids and humans. Interspecies. Interspecies?
Embracing. It's almost like the grays looking at this as their, the feeling I'm getting is like of a wedding, everybody's so happy. [Kathleen added later that the women's abdomens seem to be very full, rounded.] And that this is good and enjoyable. I don't see any little hybrids or little children. It's not territorial. There's not a jealousy. There's the biblical statement that's coming to mind.... It sounds like, "And they looked upon their work and it was good." ... The grays are having like a matriarchal/patriarchal way of feeling toward what's occurring.
There are grays in this scene?
There are no little grays, there's only the hierarchy [taller] grays.... They're intermingled in there and they are fostering this and everybody's happy with this.29 Claudia Negron was taken into a room rilled with containers of gestating fetuses, and an alien told her that some of the fetuses were hers.
Oh, my God! Do I have some of these babies in here? Maybe some of them are mine.
Is that what he sort of indicates to you? Uh-huh, that's what he's indicating. How do you feel about that?
It feels so strange. I feel good. They are not from this world, bat they are going to be in this world.
Is that sort of what he says?
That's what he is saying. The two species are merging and becoming better. To build a better world. That seems to be what they are really concerned with. Other things too. They have something else in mind; that's what they are telling me....
These are going to be special people. They are here for a special reason. But he won't tell me what the reason is. I want to know too much, I want to know a lot.. ..
When the time comes, they will show me. The time is not now. He says that sometimes they let us keep the children and sometimes they don't. It's all on how they want things to be.30 Allison Reed saw a similar media presentation of what life might be like with the hybrids.
She and other abductees were brought into a room with a large screenlike device, and she observed a beautiful park scene with people having picnics and playing ball. Her extraordinary recollection is a profoundly disturbing description of the aliens' plans for a perfect future.
I see on this screen, sunshine, happy, good things. Good things. Things are good.
Everything about this is good. Everything about it is good.
What kind of an image are you looking at?
It varies. There's flowers, there's gardens, there's families, there's families interacting. I don't know. I can't tell. I can't tell.
Can't tell what?
They want us to see this and tell the "thems" from the "us's" and you can't tell.
You can't pull out in these family settings like, we have a park and there's a couple families, you know? And there's ball-playing and they're doing some like sparklers and games. I can't tell if there's a family of "thems" or if there's "thems" intertwined within the established families. If they're the same, I cannot, I cannot [tell the difference].
Is this the point of it? That you can't tell?
It's like a challenge. "Find for me our creations. Rnd for me, pull, them out of this picture." And I can't.
You mean that's what the point of the picture is?
There are hybrids there, there are people—I can't even call them hybrids anymore—there are people there that were not brought about through a normal human evolution and here we are. They were brought about in the process of many years of experimentation. "Find where they are. You can't tell the difference." / can't tell the difference....
When you say playing ball, in the ball-playing scene are they just throwing the ball around? Are they playing baseball or something?
It's like a beach ball.
Oh, I see.... Do they give you any clues or-hints as to who's who or what's what?
I kind of feel like that's the point. That's the point, you can't tell.... This is like a mental test and everybody get your pencils out, number one, you know? Where are the hybrids? You have thirty seconds to answer this question. I don't know.
Number two, you know? ... Do you see a hybrid family? No. They don't use that word, far from it—our "creation," almost like they want me to find their created million-dollar family. And I can't. That's the way it comes across.
You lost me there for a second. It's like within the family you can't tell, and between families you can't tell.
Exactly. They try to. narrow it down a little bit. Can you find a single family that has one and there'll be an overall picture.... There's some over there and they're playing like with the ball, and there's some over here playing games. I almost see like blankets squared off and families....
Is there any sound in this film, or media display, whatever it is?
It's like a background sound of—like some laughter, like laughter but it's very dull. It's like almost off-in-a-distance-type sound. They're all white. Everybody's Caucasian, there's no Spanish, Black, Oriental.
How are they dressed? Are they dressed for winter, for summer?
Spring. Everyone's dressed. Men have pants on. Some have shorts. You know, springy. It's very pleasant, very nice. I don't know what the point is here but I can't pick out what they're asking me to.... It's very, it's kind of scary. I find it scary. But I don't even know if this is real. I mean, they could all be them or could all be us and I could be looking for nothing. But I feel it's important enough for my opinion that in this scene there are hybrids and I think the point of it is, I think they've achieved their goal. They've mastered the splicing and dicing, test-tubing, and they can fit in now. You can't tell them apart. They're proud of that....
Do you get a sense of for what purpose this might be—that this is being achieved?
No, not right now. What happens now is that the film kind of stops and it's all in color. And what I'm looking at is, like I said, there's like a blanket here and families and kids. There's a whole bunch of blankets, it's all scattered, and families doing things. I think each blanket represents an individual family, that's their picnic area. Like everything kind of stops. Now there's down here maybe it's about one, two, three, well, between a third and fourth blanket area I'll say, there's a man standing there. Everything's in color, it stops. And he's originally facing this way. He turns his head and looks at me and he's like black and white and that's one. And then it starts over there, down a little bit. There's this little girl in a little pink dress. She's got hair about down to here, dark hair. And the same thing happens to her. The whole picture's still but you can see her head turn, look at me and stop and it's black and white. Now she's in black and white. And they do this with a couple people and they're the ones that I missed and couldn't tell the difference.
Do they look any different when you see them? Can you suddenly realize, "Oh yeah, that's one," or you still wouldn't know?
There's only one way to tell and that is that energy field, that energy field around them but unless you can see it, you'll never know.
An energy field around them.
But you know, the man, the woman, the family he's with—they didn't turn black and white. And his kids didn't turn black and white. Only him. My feeling is she, of course, is not of them.
You mean, the wife?
Right. But I don't know if the two kids are just not considered one of them because . .. they don't consider the offspring of this hybrid and this woman to be worthy of the black and white. They're us.... Maybe because she wasn't a hybrid, I don't know. But the children, his offspring, are not considered hybrid though they come from hybrid stock. So anyway, everything just goes. The black and white color disappears and everything just goes to everybody playing. That's when I hear the thing about the energy field.
That it's the energy field that distinguishes them?
But I can't see it. I can't see it on anybody. But there's going to be a few people that can see it and will know. This is crazy. The ones that can see it or can distinguish ... those who can see the energy field and can know the difference and would have an uprising about it, then would be subsequently terminated. So there's a power thing. I don't feel experiment. I kind of feel this is not only going genetically and for that purpose, I feel there's a political power or motivation as well in the underlying scheme of things.. .. They all look so happy. They're healthier. You know, this is almost like a running commercial or a program, as though I'm an investor and they have this program and they want me to invest in it and they're showing me the beginning to the projected end. It's what I feel like.
A prospectus or something.
Um-hum. They're healthier. They don't know everything in this. They don't say it that way but there's things to be worked on. They just put it that way. That these people are healthier, the black and white ones. That they've not mastered everything, they're close to it. It's kind of like an all-around superior model.31 Allison then saw her own family standing in the park. She, her husband, and her two children were about seven to nine years older. They blended into the scene with the other families and everything was perfect.
A late-stage hybrid was exceptionally blunt with Reshma Kamal during a long conversation about what the aliens were planning to do. He provided another chilling glimpse into the future.
And he's saying to me that, "You know how you have memories?" And I'm saying like, "What do you mean, memories?" He's saying, "You know how you remember your father, your mother, your sister, the birthday parties?" I think he's giving me an example and I'm saying yes. And he goes, "Someday people who are like you will not have those memories either. They'll be like me." Like him meaning. And I'm saying, "What do you mean by that?" He's saying, "Don't you understand that?" I said no, or rather, I don't say no, I just shake my head. And then again he tells me to listen. He says, "There will only be one purpose for you.
You won't have memories like you do now." I'm asking him like, "You mean me?" He goes, "No. The people who will come after you." I don't know what he means by that. He's asking me, "Are you understanding?" I'm shaking my head like I don't. I'm asking him, "They're not going to take me away, are they?" And he's saying, "They don't need to take you away. They will come." I don't know what he means by this. Again I ask him what are they doing.... He looks down and he looks up at me again and he lifts his arm up. He saying like, "Do you see this?" And I say, "What? Your arm?" He goes, "Never mind." I said, "No, tell me. Tell me. What are [the aliens] doing?" And he's saying all they're interested in, that no matter what happens at all, is that they control.32 The Alien Agenda All the evidence seems to suggest that integration into human society is the aliens' ultimate goal. And all their efforts and activities appear to be geared toward complete control of the humans on Earth. Indeed, the abductees are already living with the burden of alien visitation and manipulation.
It is now possible to discern at least four specific programs that the aliens have put into effect to achieve their goal: 1. The Abduction Program. The aliens initially selected human victims around the world and instituted procedures to take these humans and their progeny from their environments without detection.
2. The Breeding Program. The aliens collect human sperm and eggs, genetically alter the fertilized embryo, incubate fetuses in human hosts, and make humans mentally and physically interact with the offspring for proper hybrid development.
3. The Hybridization Program. The aliens refine the hybrids by continual alteration and breeding with humans over the generations to become more human while retaining crucial alien characteristics. Perhaps humans are also altered over time and acquire alien characteristics.
4. The Integration Program. The aliens prepare the abductees for future events.
Eventually, the hybrids or the aliens themselves integrate into human society and assume control.
The aliens have suggested that the time is not far off when their programs will end and they will have achieved their goal. Many abductees feel that "something is going to happen" soon and that the aliens have their goal within sight. Claudia Negron was told that time is short: One of them is talking to me. What is he saying?
He's saying that I am helping them and that I should feel proud of that. They're happy with me, and that I'm helping them a lot. They say they need to do this, they have to do this, and that I should be happy I'm a part of this. They can't tell exactly what it is right now, but they will later. At another time they'll tell me.
They'll tell you what it is?
They'll tell me what it is, and they'll show me. They'll take me there and show me, but right now they can't. It's almost complete but not yet. There is more they have to do....
So he says that it's almost complete, but not quite, and they still have some things to do? ...
Well, I understand that he's talking about the future and that he's talking about them—their race. They have to be so secret about it. It has to be that way, otherwise it would never work.33 Pam Martin was led to believe that the alien agenda had three stages—gradual, accelerated, and sudden. The aliens indicated to her that they are now in the accelerated stage and she felt that "all this is going to 'go down' sooner than what people think."34 An alien told Jason Howard that it would happen around 1999.35 The aliens are generally vague about dates, but most imply that The Change will come, as they told Claudia Negron in 1997 when she directly asked, "Soon. Very soon."36The indications are that this could mean from within the next five years to within the next two generations.
It is disturbing that the aliens and hybrids seem primarily concerned with the Earth, not with human beings; they do not comment on the preservation of life or the value of humanity or human institutions. They say they want to make a better world, but they never talk about partnership with humans, peaceful coexistence, equality. Reshma Kamal was told that after The Change, there will be only one form of government: The insectlike aliens will be in complete control. There will be no necessity to continue national governments. There will be "one system" and "one goal." As if to reaffirm their plan, when aliens talk about the future, they do not say what most abductees and researchers want them to say: "Soon we will be gone. Our program is at an end. Thank you for your help. Once we leave no one will be sure we were ever here." This is never stated. The future for the aliens and hybrids is always a future on Earth where they will be integrated with humans. They offer no other possibility.
There is yet another very disturbing aspect to the aliens' view of the future. When they refer to the "humans," they are talking about abductees. The future of, and with, nonabductees is rarely the subject of much conversation. They told Reshma Kamal that nonabductees will be kept as a small breeding population in case the hybridization program has unforeseen problems. Allison Reed was led to believe that nonabductees are expendable. The evidence seems to suggest that the future will be played out primarily with aliens, hybrids, and abductees. The nonabductees will have an inferior role, if any at all. The new order will be insectlike aliens in control, followed by other aliens, hybrids, abductees, and, finally, nonabductees.
What Can Be Done?
The secrecy surrounding the abduction phenomenon shows that the aliens have instituted an elaborate effort to prevent their detection. Detection, therefore, may be where they are the most vulnerable. If so, then perhaps we still have the opportunity to intervene. Yet so far, all our attempts at intervention and prevention have been ineffective. Experiments to interfere in abductions by using video cameras and other electronic equipment have, by and large, failed to stop them, although they have sometimes decreased their recurrence.
Moreover, in recent years abductees have reported a marked increase in the frequency of their abductions. Perhaps this is an artifact of society's increasing awareness of the phenomena. Whatever the case, curtailing abductions—and their consequences—does not seem feasible at present. The program's longevity, the aliens' comments about its being close to completion, and society's disbelief in its existence—all suggest that its denouement will come before the public understands the gravity of the situation.
I have no illusions about making the standard plea to the scientific community to take a serious look at this phenomenon. UFO researchers have been asking for this assistance since the late 1940s to no avail. It is clear that unless there is a dramatic, irrefutable, public event, the scientific community is probably not going to research the UFO phenomenon—regardless of how important this subject is. And even if scientists now decide to conduct serious research, it may very well be too late.
13. Accepting the Unacceptable I have spent nearly all of my life in an academic setting, and I have always believed in the primacy of reason and logic. Studying the abduction phenomenon has made me seem, to my colleagues and many lifelong friends, illogical and out of touch with "reality." Now I am in the extremely uncomfortable position of reinforcing their opinion, not only because I have found the abduction phenomenon to be "real," but also because I have become somewhat apocalyptic in view of its purpose. I have come to the conclusion that human civilization may be in for a rapid, and perhaps disastrous, change not of our design and I am all the more uncomfortable because the reason for this change is the least acceptable to society—alien integration.
My conclusion that alien integration will soon bring about dramatic social change bears no relationship to other more familiar apocalyptic visions. It has no religious underpinning like the Second Coming, no technological basis like nuclear holocaust or environmental tampering. Any of these rationales would give it at least a minimal standard of credibility. I am aware of my conclusion's superficial similarities to cultural constructs like science fiction or millennialism, but the evidence does not warrant this link. I have not derived my conclusion from human thought or endeavor in any way, save through the conduit of memory. My conclusion is based on my knowledge of activities beyond our control, conveyed through narratives told by victims of its advance guard— accounts that society sees as irrefutable evidence of mental derangement.
There are those in society who might "admit of the possibility" that the abduction phenomenon exists, but most are not in a position to influence scientific or public opinion. In the vacuum of an acceptable scientific paradigm, the media have picked up the subject as a guaranteed way to generate revenue, and although at times treated fairly, it has become just another tabloid topic, competing with other bizarre and extraordinary events that seize the public's attention.
Our encounters with the abduction phenomenon have often come through the haze of confabulation, channeling, and unreliable memories reported by inexperienced or incompetent researchers. When competent research reveals the phenomenon, the revelation is so fantastic that it is intellectually and emotionally impossible to embrace. It smacks so much of cultural fantasy and psychogenesis that the barriers to acceptance of its reality seem unsurmountable.
Yet, I am persuaded that the abduction phenomenon is real. And as a result, the intellectual safety net with which I operated for so many years is now gone. I am as vulnerable as the abductees themselves. 1 should "know better," but I embrace as real a scenario that is both embarrassing and difficult to defend. In spite of that, I must go where the evidence leads me. I have come to view the alien abduction phenomenon and its purpose as an asteroid hurtling toward Earth—discovered too late for intervention. We can track its progress and yet be utterly incapable of preventing the collision.
As much as I want to be optimistic, I find little to fuel hope for the future. In a way, I wish I could be like the Positive researchers, existing in a naive but happy dreamland, awaiting the coming of the Benevolent Ones who will engulf us all in love and protection. The Positives' beliefs, shrouded in their own form of spirituality, must be guided by a Utopian vision that is lacking in mine.
The challenge of understanding UFO sightings that occupied so much of my time and attention when I first began my research is now a distant memory. Then I treated the phenomenon as a giant puzzle, not realizing that the completed picture would be far more distressing than the optimism and excitement I felt in the act of putting it together. As the pieces fell into place, an unease began to take hold of me. I realized early on that the UFO phenomenon was the only physical occurrence that we have ever encountered that actively dictates the terms upon which it could be studied. I did not understand that our inability to study the phenomenon was part of a calculated program to hide its activities and purpose.
The flood of information coming from the abduction phenomenon caused me to have epiphanic shock, much like the abductees go through when they realize what has been happening to them. Now I have insight into alien actions and motivations. The mysteries of UFOs "chasing" cars, disappearing, leaving marks on people's bodies, and so forth— all are routine elements of abduction activity. What researchers were hearing from those who had these experiences or even sighted low-level UFOs were merely fragments of memories, often distorted and always incomplete. With competent hypnosis, what I have heard from countless people who have been abducted and taken aboard UFOs were complex, matching, detailed accounts all leading to unavoidably distressing conclusions.
When I first heard of certain alien procedures, they sounded irrational and illogical, but as I learned about alien goals, they have proven to be the opposite. Everything the aliens do is logical, rational, and goal-oriented. With the use of superior technology, both physical and biological, they are engaging in the systematic and clandestine physiological exploitation, and perhaps alteration, of human beings for the purposes of passing on their genetic capabilities to progeny who will integrate into the human society and, without doubt, control it. Their agenda is self-centered, not human-centered, as would be expected from a program that stresses reproduction. In the end it is possible that it will be of some benefit to us, but if we survive as a species, the price for this charity will be re- linquishment of the freedom to dictate our own destiny and, most likely, our personal freedom as well.
Through competent research, many of the abduction phenomenon's challenges have been met, many of its mysteries solved. And one of its aspects has emerged with crystal clarity. The aliens have fooled us. They lulled us into an attitude of disbelief, and hence complacency, at the very beginning of our awareness of their presence. Thus, we were unable to understand the dimensions of the threat they pose and act to intervene. Now it may be too late. My own complacency is long gone, replaced by a sense of profound apprehension and even dread. We know what their behavior means, and now it is imperative to ask what the consequences of that behavior will be for future generations of human society. Perhaps, the answer to that question will not be found until they have completed their agenda, but I do not think that we will have to wait very long. It has taken us more than fifty years, but we have finally learned why the UFOs are here. We now know the alarming dimensions of the alien agenda and its goals. I could never have imagined it would turn out this way. I desperately wish it not to be true. I do not think about the future with much hope. When I was a child, I had a future with much hope.
When I was a child, I had a future to look forward to. Now I fear for the future of my own children.
If you think that you may have been involved with the abduction phenomenon, I would like to hear about your experiences. Please write to: Dr. David M. Jacobs Department of History Temple University Philadelphia, PA 19122 Or: Djacobs@VM.Temple.edu All communication will be confidential. Time permitting, all correspondence will be answered.
Acknowledgments Writing this book has been both an individual and a collaborative effort. My editor at Simon & Schuster, Fred Hills, demonstrated his courage by encouraging me to write this book originally. He and his colleague Burton Beals were continually supportive and extraordinarily helpful in editing and putting the manuscript into its final form. Once the reader understands how strange the material is, one can understand how open-minded and intellectually honest Hills and Beals are. They embody the true meaning of professionalism. Assistant editor Hilary Black also graciously provided editorial help.
My agent, Meredith Bernstein, provided faith and understanding in the travails that inevitably overtook me. I am very fortunate to have her as an advocate on my behalf.
John and Nancy Dodge not only transcribed most of the abductee tapes for my research but helped immeasurably by creating a database of abduction activity. Carolyn Longo and Wendy Henson helped with transcribing tapes and answering my mail. Wendy Roda not only transcribed tapes but provided critical analyses for the manuscript. Dr. K. D.
Manning, Dr. Roy Steinhouse, Corkie Joyen, Katherine Beauchemin, Jerome Clark, Dr.
Michael Swords, and Carol Rainey supplied valuable comments in the book's early stages.
Budd Hopkins, my friend and "partner in crime," provided his usual insight, wise counsel, and invaluable support for my efforts in this book. He has helped me maintain my equilibrium in a world of fact, fantasy, and frustration.
Since the mid-1960s, my wife, Irene, has relinquished part of her life for my research.
Not only did she provide the most meticulous editing of the book, but she did it several times as the manuscript developed. This, in addition to coping with my embarrassing obsession for all these years, is duty above and beyond. Mere appreciation is not enough.
Finally, without the abductees this book could not have been written. Their bravery, perseverance, and humanity in the face of the overwhelming nature of the phenomenon fills me with admiration and awe. I hope this book does justice to their lives.
Notes Chapter 1: Recognizing the Signal 1. For a discussion of an early apocalyptic group, see Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964). See also James R. Lewis, ed.( The Gods Have Landed: New Religions from Other Worlds (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
2. David M. Jacobs, The UFO Controversy in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975).
3. John Fuller, The Interrupted Journey (New York: Dial Press, 1966).
4. Ray Fowler, The Andreasson Affair (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979).
5. Budd Hopkins, Missing Time (New York: Marek, 1981).
6. David M. Jacobs, Secret Life: Firsthand Accounts of UFO Abductions (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
7. Budd Hopkins, Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods (New York: Random House, 1987).
8. Karla Turner, "Alien Abductions in the Gingerbread House," UFO Universe, Spring 1993. See also Leah Haley, Lost Was the Key (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: Greenleaf Publications, 1993).
262 9. John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (New York: Scribners, 1994).
10. Budd Hopkins, Witnessed: The True Story of the Brooklyn Bridge UFO Abductions (New York: Pocket Books, 1996). See also Thomas J. Bullard's excellent analysis of themes in published abduction accounts to 1987, UFO Abductions: The Measure of a Mystery (Mount Rainier, Md.:The Fund for UFO Research, 1987).
Chapter 2: "I Know This Sounds Crazy, But..." 1. Training a video camera and recorder on an abductee every night has produced limited results. Some abductees report a dramatic decrease in abductions. Most report that the frequency of abductions tends to decrease only a bit. So far, no abductions have been videotaped. Rather, tapes reveal people getting up and inexplicably turning off the VCR, or unusual power outages during which the camera turns off, or the camera simply goes off mysteriously. See Jacobs, Secret Life, pp. 258-60.
2. The names of the abductees have been changed. In sexual experiences, they were assigned additional pseudonyms.
Chapter 3: Shadows of the Mind 1. For a short discussion of some of my hypnosis techniques, see David M. Jacobs and Budd Hopkins, "Suggested Techniques for Hypnosis and Therapy of Abductees," Journal of UFO Studies, New Series, vol. 4, 1992, pp. 138-51. A revised version of this article is available to qualified therapists and researchers. For an excellent survey of abduction critiques, see Stuart Appelle, "The Abduction Experienced Critical Evaluation of Theory and Evidence," Journal of UFO Studies, vol. 6, 1995/1996, pp. 29-79.
2. For an overview of memory, see Daniel L. Schacter, Searching for Memory (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
3. Lawrence Wright, Remembering Satan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). Ingram was falsely accused by his daughters of sexually abusing them. He knew that his daughters did not lie, so he felt that he must be guilty and that he must have repressed the memories himself. With that conviction, he "remembered" his abusive actions and eventually confessed. When he remembered a sexual abuse event that had been concocted by a psychol- 263 ogist, he realized too late that his memories of criminal activity were false, along with those of his daughter.
4. Michael D. Yapko, Suggestions of Abuse (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 93.
5. Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Graham, The Myth of Repressed Memory (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), p. 66.
6. Loftus and Graham, p. 165.
7. 1 investigated forty-nine of these abductions within seven days of occurrence.
8. Jack Thernstrom, session 7, October 10,1990. Incident: 1968, age twelve.
9. "Julie." Incident in 1959.
10. Janet Morgan, session 12, March 16, 1989. Incident: May 19, 1988, age thirty-three.
11. Lily Martinson, session 1, December 8, 1989. Incident: 1970, age twenty.
12. Raymond Fowler, The Andreasson Affair (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979).
13. For further information about hypnosis and abductions, see Thomas E. Bullard, The Sympathetic Ear: Investigators as Variables in UFO Reports (Mount Rainier, Md.: The Fund for UFO Research, 1995), and Thomas E. Bullard, "Hypnosis and UFO Abductions: A Troubled Relationship," Journal of UFO Studies, vol. 1, 1989, pp. 1-58.
14. Dissociative fantasies take place when the rnind mistakes its own internally generated thoughts as coming from outside sources.
15. John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (New York: Scribners, 1994), p. 171.
16. Mack, p. 173.
17. Edith Fiore, Encounters: A Psychologist Reveals Case Studies of Abductions by Extraterrestrials (New York: Doubleday, 1989), pp. 235-36.
18. Fiore, p. 333.
19. Fiore, p. 260.
20. Mack, p. 382.
21. Mack, p. 23.
22. Mack, p. 31.
23. Fiore, pp. 333-34.
24. Yapko, pp. 42-61.
25. John Fuller, The Interrupted Journey (New York: The Dial Press, 1966), pp. 122-23.
26. Fuller, p. 198.
264 Chapter 4: What They Do 1. Barbara Archer, session 6, June 27, 1988. Incident: March 1988, age twenty-one.
2. Lucy Sanders, session 6, February 12,1992. Incident: 1987, age thirty.
3. Laura Mills, session 2, June 7,1991. Incident: 1981, age thirty-three.
4. Belinda Simpson, session 2, April 25, 1989. Incident: January 1989, age thirty-seven.
5. Lydia Goldman, session 9, July 6, 1992. Incident: March-April, 1992, age sixty.
6. Claudia Negron, session 7, December 8, 1995. Incident: spring 1983, age forty-one.
7. Claudia Negron, session 7, December 8, 1995: Incident: spring 1983, age forty-one.
8. Kathleen Morrison, session 15, May 4, 1995. Incident: April 20,1985, age forty-five.
9. Joel Samuelson, session 2, June 2,1993. Incident: 1992, age thirty-five.
10. Carla Enders, session 5, July 28, 1993. Incident: May 1993, age thirty-eight.
11. Terry Matthews, session 22, November 8, 1996. Incident: 1974, age twenty-four.
12. Budd Hopkins, "Invisibility and the UFO Abduction Phenomenon" (1993 MUFON Symposium Proceedings, Seguin, Tex.: Mutual UFO Network, 1993), pp. 182-201.
13. Gloria Kane, session 1, July 15,1988. Incident: 1960, age seventeen.
14. Christine Kennedy, session 23, March 29, 1993. Incident: March 2, 1993, age thirty- one.
15. Allison Reed, session 4, August 30, 1993. Incident: August 19, 1993, age twenty- nine.
16. Courtney Walsh, session 2, May 23, 1993. Incident: summer 1992, age twenty-two.
17. Jack Thernstrom, session 4, March 9, 1990. Incident: 1969 or 1970, age thirteen or fourteen.
18. Reshma Kamal, session 5, March 18,1996. Incident: February 27,1996.
19. Allison Reed, session 13, January 11,1994. Incident: December 22,1993, age thirty.
265 Chapter 5: What They Are 1. Michelle Peters, session 8, June 30, 1993. Incident: June 23, 1993, age thirty-one.
2. Kathleen Morrison, session 21, October 23, 1995. Incident: summer 1971, age twenty- one.
3. Susan Steiner, session 9, January 10,1996. Incident: September 1995, age forty-three.
4. Reshma Kamal, session 2, August 8, 1995. Incident: October 1993, age thirty-three.
5. Allison Reed, session 25, July 6,1994. Incident: October 1986, age twenty-two. Of the 700 episodes that I have investigated, seven have occurred when the person was either drunk or had taken cocaine, marijuana, or LSD. Allison's five-day case was one of these.
She and her husband, Jerry, were living in a small house in Florida with their ten-month- old baby, Brian. It was a Sunday evening and the baby was asleep. They decided to have some cocaine together. She and her husband went out onto the deck where she noticed a light in the sky that was getting brighter. The next thing the two consciously remembered was watching television together the following Friday. They thought that their cocaine had been bad and they had been in a mental "fog" from Sunday to Friday. But they noticed that the baby was fine, with a clean, dry diaper. None of them was hungry or thirsty. They did not have to urinate or relieve their bowels. Everything was as it had been Sunday evening. None of the food in the house had been eaten. Under hypnosis her testimony took eight three-hour sessions of recollections from episode to episode during the abduction.
6. Diane Henderson, session 4, July 14,1994. Incident: summer 1974, age fifteen.
7. Pam Martin, session 4, October 28,1994. Incident: 1962, age eighteen.
8. Susan Steiner, session 5, October 9, 1995. Incident: September 30, 1995, age forty- three.
Chapter 6: Why They Are Secret 1. James Lipp, in United States Air Force, "Unidentified Aerial Objects: Project'Sign,'" February 1949, pp. 32-35.
266 2. Donald E. Keyhoe, The Ffying Saucers Are Real (New York: Gold Medal Books, 1950), p. 174.
3. Keyhoe, p. 128.
4. Quoted in Donald E. Keyhoe, Ffying Saucers From Outer Space (New York: Henry Holt, 1953), p. 217.
5. Aime Michel, The Truth About Ffying Saucers (New York: Criterion Books, 1956), p.
225.
6. Michel, p. 224.
7. Aim6 Michel, Ffying Saucers and the Straight Line Mystery (New York: Criterion Books, 1958), p. 230. See also Aim6 Michel, "The Problem of Non-Contact," Ffying Saucer Review, Special Issue, October-November 1966, pp. 67-70.
8. Michel, pp. 224-226.
9. See, for example, Trevor James, "The Case for Contact," Ffying Saucer Review, vol. 7, no. 6, November-December 1961, pp. 6-8.
10. Dr. Olavo Fontes, cited in Jim and Coral Lorenzen, Ffying Saucers Startling Evidence of Invasion from Outer Space (New York: Signet, 1966 [1962]), p. 198. See also Jim and Coral Lorenzen, Ffying Saucer Occupants (New York: Signet, 1967), p. 207.
11. Richard Hall, Ted Bloecher, and Isabel Davis, UFOs: A New Look (Washington: National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, 1969), p. 5.
12. Jacques Vallee, The Invisible College (New York: Dutton, 1975), p. 208.
13. Vallee, pp. 2,194-202.
14. See, for example, Ann Druffel and D. Scott Rogo, The Tujunga Canyon Contacts (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1980).
15. J.Allen Hynek, "The Case Against E.T.," MUFON 1983 UFO Symposium Proceedings (Seguin.Tex.: Mutual UFO Network, 1983), pp. 118-26.
16. Frank B. Salisbury, The Utah UFO Display: A Biologist's Report (Old Greenwich, Conn.: Devin Adair, 1974), pp. 194-95.
17. John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (New York: Knopf, 1994), p. 421.
18. This notion contradicts the astronomical community's familiar lament that Earth is only an insignificant planet, circulating around a nondescript sun, in an average galaxy.
19. Reshma Kamal, session 9, January 24,1997. Incident: November 19,1996, age thirty- six.
267 20. Lucy Sanders, session 6, February 12,1992. Incident: 1987, age thirty.
21. Claudia Negr6n, session 6, September 12,1995. Incident: 1949, age eight.
Chapter 7: Infiltration 1. "Hidden Memories: Are You an Abductee?" OMNI December 1987, p. 55. Pamela Weintraub, "True Confessions," OMNI, February 1989, pp. 18,127. Don Berliner, Dr.
Bruce Maccabee, and Rob Swiatek, The OMNI Abduction Questionnaires: Final Results (Washington: The Fund For UFO Research, 1989).
2. The Roper Poll results were published in Unusual Personal Experiences: An Analysis of the Data from Three Major Surveys Conducted by the Roper Organization (Las Vegas: Bigelow Holding Corporation, 1992).
Chapter 8: The Hybrid Species—Children 1. Allison Reed, session 23, June 7, 1994. Incident: October 1986, age twenty-two.
2. Reshma Kamal, session 7, October 14, 1996. Incident: October 28, 1996, age thirty- five. If the gray aliens are products of early hybridization experiments with humans, it would explain their apparently nonfunctional and perhaps vestigial nose ridges, mouth slits, and earholes.
3. Kathleen Morrison, session 14, April 17, 1995. Incident: December 29, 1994, age forty-six.
4. Allison Reed, session 14, February 2,1994. Incident: January 29,1994, age thirty.
5. Susan Steiner, session 6, October 23, 1995. Incident: 1985, age thirty-two.
6. Diane Henderson, session 4, July 14,1994. Incident: summer 1974, age fifteen.
7. Sarah Stevenson, session 4, October 17, 1974. Incident: 1987, age thirty-seven.
8. Roxanne Zeigler, session 4, July 25, 1994. Incident: June 28, 1994, age forty-nine.
9. Claudia Negr6n, session 2, April 3,1995. Incident: 1946, age five.
10. Susan Steiner, session 4, September 18,1995. Incident: October 1977, age twenty- five.
I 268 11. Kathleen Morrison, session 12, February 23, 1995. Incident: April 195% age seven.
12. Doris Reilly, session 3, January 17,1994. Incident: 1965, age ten.
13. Carla Enders, session 2, July 20,1993. Incident: 1965, age ten.
14. Susan Steiner, session 5, October 9, 1995. Incident: September 30, 1995, age forty- three.
15. Carla Enders, session 3, July 21,1993. Incident: 1966, age eleven.
Chapter 9: The Hybrid Species—Adolescents and Adults 1. Susan Steiner, session 3, September 1, 1995. Incident: May 1995, age forty-six.
2. Kathleen Morrison, session 19, July 26,1995. Incident: 1957, age eight.
3. Christine Kennedy, session 23, May 13, 1994. Incident: April 1994, age thirty-one.
4. Allison Reed, session 10, November 29, 1993. Incident: November 22, 1993, age twenty-nine.
5. Allison Reed, session 25, May 6, 1994. Incident: October 1986, age twenty-three.
6. Susan Steiner, session 4, September 18,1995. Incident: October 1977, age twenty-five.
7. Reshma Kamal, session 5, March 18, 1996. Incident: February 27, 1996, age thirty- five.
8. Allison Reed, session 30, January 11,1995. Incident: December 1994, age thirty-one.
9. Kathleen Morrison, session 11, February 6, 1995. Incident: January 4, 1995, age forty- five.
10. Allison Reed, session 13, January 11,1994. Incident: December 22,1994, age thirty.
11. I have changed the abductees' pseudonyms for certain sexual episodes so that they will be protected.
12. "Beverly." Incident: 1994.
13. "Paula," session July 27, 1996. Incident: June 18, 1996. The lesion was biopsied and the laboratory report read, in part, "The blood clot is partially covered by squamous lining and seems to represent a thrombus occurring in a vein or hemangioma." 269 14. Stan Garcia, session 2, May 31, 1989. Incident: December 31, 1987, age thirty.
15. Terry Matthews, session 4, January 9,1995. Incident: August 24,1994, age forty-six.
Kathleen Morrison, session 7, June 9,1994. Incident: April 1994, age forty-four. Terry Matthews, session 12, October 20, 1995. Incident: September 1995, age forty-seven.
16. Susan Steiner, session 10, February 23,1996. Incident: February 17,1996, age forty- three. Allison Reed, session 10, November 29, 1993. Incident: November 22,1993, age twenty-nine. Allison Reed, session 14, February 2, 1994. Incident: January 29,1994, age thirty.
17. Allison Reed, session 20, April 29, 1994. Incident: October 1986, age twenty-three.
18. Reshma Kamal, session 5, March 18, 1996. Incident: February 27, 1996, age thirty- five.
19. Allison Reed, session 23, April 29, 1994. Incident: October 1986, age twenty-three.
20. Doris Reilly, session 4, February 21,1994. Incident: fall 1960, age five.
21. "Emily," session, August 3,1993. Incidents: February 1977; March 1977.
22. "Sally," session, January 10,1996. Incident: 1965.
23. "Emily," session, May 11,1993. Incident: June 1970.
24. "Donna," session, July 26,1995. Incident: 1963.
25. "Emily," session, April 2,1993. Incident: September 1977.
Chapter 10: Independent Hybrid Activity 1. One woman videotaped some unmarked helicopters flying around her house and eventually followed them. They landed at a nearby air base, even though the base commander had initially told her that there were none there. He later admitted the existence of helicopters at the base. That same woman also had independent hybrid activity during which the hybrids arrived in helicopters.
2. Susan Steiner, session 9, January 10,1996. Incident: June 1965, age thirteen.
3. "Donna," session, June 1995. Incident: August 1969.
4. "Donna," session, December 1995. Incident: February 12,1982.
5. "Deborah," session, February 1994. Incident: February 6,1994.
6. "Deborah," session, July 1995. Incident: July 20,1995.
270 7. "Laura," session, May 1994. Incident: February 1993.
8. "Beverly," session, February 1994. Incident: February 16,1994.
9. "Beverly," session, May 1994. Incident: May 3,1994.
10. "Beverly," session, July 1994. Incident: July 22,1994.
11. "Beverly," session, July 1996, Incident: June 1996.
Chapter 11: The Nature of Alien Intentions 1. John Salter (John Hunter Gray), "No Intelligent Life Is Alien to Me," Internet Web Site: UFO Directory and Forum, 1995, p. 1.
2. Leo Sprinkle, Lecture, Project Awareness UFO Conference, Gulf Breeze, Fla., May 1994.
3. Richard Boylan, Close Extraterrestrial Encounters: Positive Experiences with Mysterious Visitors (Tlgard, Ore.: Wildflower Press, 1994), p. 156.
4. Richard Boylan, Lecture, Project Awareness UFO Conference, Gulf Breeze, Fla., May 1994.
5. Ibid.
6. Joseph Nyman, "The Familiar Entity and Dual Reference in the Latent Encounter," MUFON Journal, March 1989, pp. 10-12. See also Joseph Nyman, "The Latent Encounter Experience—A Composite Model," MUFON UFO Journal, June 1988, pp. 10- 12.
7. Joe Nyman, "Forward [sic] to 'Abductees Anonymous,'" Internet Web Site: Abductees Anonymous, 1996, p. 4. Nyman has been ambivalent about whether his abductees actually were aliens in another life, although he believes that their accounts are not confabulated. See Joseph Nyman, "Dual Reference in the UFO Encounter," in Andrea Pritchard, David E. Pritchard, John E. Mack, Pam Kasey, and Claudia Yapp, eds., Alien Discussions: Proceedings of the Abduction Study Conference Held at MIT (Cambridge, Mass.: North Cambridge Press, 1994), pp. 142^*8.
8. John Mack, "Foreword," in David M. Jacobs, Secret Life: Firsthand Accounts of UFO Abductions (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 12.
9. Mack, "Foreword," pp. 12-13.
10. Pritchard et al., eds., p. 146.
11. "Ecology Awareness—Susan," in Pritchard et al., eds., p. 152.
12. Leah Haley, Ceto's New Friends (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: Greenleaf Publications, 1994).
13. John Salter (John Hunter Gray), "An Account of the Salter UFO Encoun- 271 ters of March, 1988: Their Background, Development, and Ramifications," privately published, 1992, pp. 14-15.
14. Salter, "Account," p. 21.
15. Richard Boyland, Lecture, Gulf Breeze, 1994. See also Richard Boylan, Close Extraterrestrial Encounters, p. 18.
16. Richard Boyland, Lecture, Gulf Breeze, 1994.
17. Nyman, "Forward" [sic], p. 2.
18. Howard Menger, narrative for the record album The Song From Saturn, ca. 1961.
19. See David M. Jacobs, The UFO Controversy in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975).
20. Interview with John Mack, in C. D. B. Bryan, Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: Alien Abductions, UFOs, and the Conference at M. I. T. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p. 271.
21. John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994), p. 390. See also John Mack, "Helping Ab-ductees," International UFO Reporter, July/August 1992, pp. 10-15, 20.
22. Mack, Abduction, p. 19.
23. Mack, Abduction, p. 46.
24. Mack, Abduction, p. 391. Experienced researchers have found that an interactive dynamic will always exist between abductee and researcher, but it is of the utmost importance that the researcher separate his own viewpoint from the abductee's testimony.
Any analysis of the testimony must take into account the analyst's and the subject's preconceptions. For Mack, this is not a major concern. The interactive dynamic is an important therapeutic tool. The intertwining of the two personalities—abductee and investigator—often creates a fictional account that Mack finds desirable and ther- apeutically meaningful.
25. Mack, Abduction, p. 61.
Chapter 12: Life as We Know It?
1. Pam Martin, session 2, September 26,1994. Incident: July 1984, age fifty.
2. Lucy Sanders, session 12, January 23, 1995. Incident: January 1995, age thirty-eight.
3. Kathleen Morrison, session 21, October 23, 1995. Incident: summer 1971, age twenty- one.
272 4. Patti Layne, session 3, August 5,1987. Incident: September 1979, age sixteen.
5. Terry Matthews, session 8, March 24, 1995. Incident: November 4, 1988, age forty.
6. Allison Reed, session 23, June 7, 1994. Incident: October 1986, age twenty.
7. Roxanne Zeigler, session 4, July 25, 1984. Incident: June 24, 1995, age forty-nine.
8. Claudia Negron, session 9, March 1,1996. Incident: February 26,1996, age fifty-four.
9. Kay Summers, session 7, December 13,1993. Incident: December 5,1993, age twenty- nine.
10. Susan Steiner, session 5, October 9, 1995. Incident: September 30, 1995, age forty- three.
11. Pam Martin, session 3, October 12, 1994. Incident: August 2, 1994, age fifty.
12. Kathleen Morrison, session 13, April 3, 1995. Incident: spring 1992, age forty-two.
13. Carla Enders, session 4, July 27, 1993. Incident: early 1993, age thirty-eight.
14. Kay Summers, session 1, August 3,1993. Incident: July 1993, age twenty-eight.
15. Terry Matthews, session 13, November 17,1995. Incident: August 5,1995, age forty- six.
16. Pam Martin, session 11, May 2, 1995. Incident: December 23, 1994, age fifty-one.
17. Christine Kennedy, session 8, July 8, 1992. Incident: March 1991, age thirty.
18. Charles Petrie, session 12, February 26, 1991. Incident: 1986, age thirty-four.
19. Allison Reed, session 5, September 20,1993. Incident: September 3,1993, age twenty- nine.
20. Pam Martin, session 15, September 26, 1995. Incident: 1975, age thirty-one.
21. Reshma Kamal, session 7, October 28, 1996. Incident: October 14, 1996, age thirty- six.
22. Steve Thompson, session 2, October 8,1989. Incident: 1969, age nineteen.
273 23. Patti Layne, session 19, January 16,1989. Incident: summer 1979, age sixteen.
24. Carla Enders, session 6, July 28,1993. Incident: October-November 1963, age eight.
25. Allison Reed, session 5, September 20,1993. Incident: September 9,1993, age twenty- nine.
26. Pam Martin, session 25, December 13, 1996. Incident: January 1970, age twenty-six.
27. Brad Hopkins, David M. Jacobs, and Ron Westrum, Unusual Personal Experiences: An Analysis of the Data from Three National Surveys Conducted by the Roper Organization (Las Vegas: Bigelow Holding Corporation, 1992), p. 24.
28. Courtney Walsh, session 5, June 17, 1993. Incident: June 12, 1993, age twenty-two.
29. Kathleen Morrison, session 20, August 9, 1995. Incident: August 1, 1995, age forty- five.
30. Claudia Negron, session 3, April 27, 1995. Incident: early summer 1994, age fifty- two.
31. Allison Reed, session 16, March 4, 1994. Incident: February 21, 1994, age thirty.
32. Reshma Kamal, session 5, March 18, 1996. Incident: February 27, 1996, age thirty- five.
33. Claudia Negron, session 3, April 7,1995. Incident: early summer 1994; age fifty-two.
34. Pam Martin, session 3, October 12, 1994. Incident: August 7, 1994; age fifty.
35. Jason Howard, session 6, April 20, 1988. Incident: 1976, age seventeen.
36. Claudia Negr6n, session 17, February 7, 1997. Incident: January 28,1997, age fifty- five.
About the Author David M. Jacobs lives with his wife, Irene, and two children, Evan and Alexander, in a suburb of Philadelphia. He is associate professor of history at Temple University in Philadelphia. He has been a UFO researcher since the mid-1960s and is the author of numerous articles, papers, and presentations on the UFO and abduction phenomena. His previous books include The UFO Controversy in America (Indiana University Press, 1975) and Secret Life: Firsthand Accounts of UFO Abductions (Simon & Schuster, 1992). He is considered the world's foremost academic scholar on the UFO and abduction phenomenon, and he teaches the only regular curriculum course on the subject in the United States.
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Page 1 Contents Foreword by John E. Mack, M. D.
A Note to the Reader PART I. THE BEGINNINGS Chapter 1. A New Discipline Chapter 2. Sightings and Abductions PART II. THE ABDUCTION EXPERIENCE Chapter 3. Getting There Chapter 4. Physical Probing, Alien Bonding, and the Breeding Program Chapter 5. Machine Examinations, Mental Testing, and Hybrid Children Chapter 6. Sexual Activity and Other Irregular Procedures Chapter 7. Going Home Chapter 8. The Abductors PART III. LIVING WITH THE SECRET Chapter 9. Exploring the Evidence Chapter 10. The Struggle for Control PART IV. THE SEARCH FOR MEANING Chapter 11. Answers Chapter 12. Questions Afterword: Final Thoughts Appendix A: A Few Words about Methodology Appendix B: The Abductees Appendix C: Diagraming the Abduction Notes Acknowledgments Page 2 Foreword The idea that men, women, and children can be taken against their wills from their homes, cars, and schoolyards by strange humanoid beings, lifted onto spacecraft, and subjected to intrusive and threatening procedures is so terrifying, and yet so shattering to our notions of what is possible in our universe, that the actuality of the phenomenon has been largely rejected out of hand or bizarrely distorted in most media accounts. This is altogether understandable, given the disturbing nature of UFO abductions and our prevailing notions of reality. The fact remains, however, that for thirty years, and possibly longer, thousands of individuals who appear to be sincere and of sound mind and who are seeking no personal benefit from their stories have been providing to those who will listen consistent reports of precisely such events. Population surveys suggest that hundreds of thousands and possibly more than a million persons in the United States alone may be abductees or “experiencers,” as they are sometimes called. The abduction phenomenon is, therefore, of great clinical importance if for no other reason than the fact that abductees are often deeply traumatized by their experiences. At the same time the subject is of obvious scientific interest, however much it may challenge our notions of reality and truth.
The relevant professional communities in mental health, medicine, biology, physics, electronics, and other disciplines are understandably skeptical of a phenomenon as strange as UFO abduction, which defies our accepted notions of reality. The effort to enable these communities to take abduction reports seriously will be best served through scrupulously conducted research by investigators who bring a scholarly and dispassionate yet appropriately caring attitude to their work.
In this way patterns and meanings may be discovered that can lead to fuller and deeper knowledge and, eventually, to the development of convincing theoretical understanding.
In this book Temple University historian David Jacobs has provided us with work of just this kind.
In a field that lends itself to sensationalistic treatment, we have already come to expect of Jacobs a special standard of rigorous scholarship and careful observation. His 1975 book, The UFO Controversy in America, remains a classic history of the early years of UFO-related events. In the present work Dr. Jacobs presents his findings from the investigation of more than sixty abductees over a four-year period, using interviews and hypnosis to overcome their amnesia. His study uncovered more than 300 abduction experiences.
Dr. Jacobs’s findings will, I believe, impress those who are open at least to the possibility that something important is happening in the lives of these individuals and countless others that cannot readily be explained by the theories and categories currently available to modern science. In Jacobs’s cases, as in the work of other investigators, hypnosis has proven to be an essential tool in overcoming the amnesia of his subjects. Lest this lead skeptical readers to question the validity of Jacobs’s findings, it must be pointed out that we have no evidence from this or any other study that under hypnosis abductees have invented or distorted significantly their memories of the abduction experience. On the contrary, memories brought forth in hypnotic regressions have been repeatedly shown to be consistent with what these and other abductees are able to recall consciously.
Hypnosis appears to complete or add greatly to the process of remembering and has proved in this field to be a valuable therapeutic and investigative tool.
Dr. Jacobs’s work covers a broad range of phenomena associated with UFO encounters. His focus, however, is upon the structure of the abduction experience itself. In case after case he demonstrates a pattern that is consistent—even in minute details and specific elements that are not available in the mass media—among individuals who have had no opportunity to communicate their experiences to one another. This pattern consists of what Jacobs calls “primary” experiences (physical examination, staring, and urological and gynecological procedures); “secondary” experiences (machine examination, visualization, and child presentation); and “ancillary” experiences consisting of various other physical phenomena, mental displays, and sexually related activities. At the heart of the abduction process there appears to be some sort of complex reproductive enterprise involving the conception, gestation, or incubation of human or alien-human hybrid babies. In Jacobs’s words, “the focus of the abduction is the production of children.” Another investigator might place greater emphasis upon phenomena that Dr. Jacobs regards as less central, such as the visualizations of planetary destruction and their impact upon the consciousness of abductees. But whatever the emphasis or interpretation of these data, Jacobs’s work has given us a solid foundation of carefully documented experience upon which investigators can now build as we add to our knowledge and explore further the meaning of this puzzling and disturbing matter.
Through his meticulous documentation of the structure and content of the UFO abduction phenomenon, Dr. Jacobs has deepened the mystery that lies before us while at the same time bringing us closer to some form of understanding. He has made clear that we are dealing with a phenomenon that has a hard edge, a huge, strange interspecies or interbeing breeding program that has invaded our physical reality and is affecting the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people and perhaps in some way the consciousness of the entire planet. Jacobs has given us no explanation, but he has set forth explicitly the phenomena for which any theory must account.
Among ufologists and abduction researchers, explanations have generally fallen into psychosocial (or cultural) and extraterrestrial categories. Psychosocial hypotheses, at least in the Western materialist sense, are difficult to take seriously. For unless we are willing to extend our notions of the powers of the psyche to include the creation of cuts, scars, hemorrhages, and bruises, the simultaneous production of highly elaborate and traumatic experiences similar to one another in minute detail among individuals who have not communicated with one another, and all of the physical phenomena associated with the UFOs themselves, such explanations appear quite Page 3 p y p , p pp q inadequate. At the same time a literalist extraterrestrial hypothesis must account for the relative paucity of solid physical information—the lack of photographs of the beings, for example—and the virtually insurmountable problems related to accounting for the location, origins, and lives of the aliens themselves within the framework of the physical laws of our space/time universe. This last frustration has led some ufologists to posit a “multiverse” and the intrusion into our familiar reality of other dimensions or forces outside of the known physical universe. Others have turned to alternative notions of the nature of the cosmos, more familiar to Eastern religions and philosophy, that depict the universe and all its realities as a vast play of consciousness with physical manifestations.
My own work with abductees has impressed me with the powerful dimension of personal growth that accompanies the traumatic experiences that David Jacobs so accurately describes, especially when these people receive appropriate help in exploring their abduction histories. An intense concern for the planet’s survival and a powerful ecological consciousness seem to develop for many abductees. Whether this is a specific element, or even purpose, of the abduction enterprise or an inadvertent by-product of integrating a self-destroying traumatic narrative remains to be explored.
For me and other investigators, abduction research has had a shattering impact on our views of the nature of the cosmos. This has led me to offer at least a parable, if not a theory, to illuminate what is going on. Virtually all peoples throughout history, with the exception of the Western culture of the Newtonian/Cartesian era, have experienced the universe as possessing some sort of intelligence or consciousness in which human beings participate with other animate beings and inanimate things in an enterprise that has meaning, purpose, and direction, however unfathomable these may be. In the West, we seem, for reasons perhaps as mysterious as the abduction phenomenon itself, to have cut ourselves off almost totally from awareness of any form of higher intelligence. But let us suppose that such an intelligence did exist, and, what is more, that it was not indifferent to the fate of the Earth, regarding its life forms and transcendent beauty as one of its better or more advanced creations. And let us imagine that the imbalance created by the overgrowth of certain human faculties, a kind of technodestructive and fear-driven acquisitiveness, were “diagnosed” (perceived? fathomed? felt?—we really do not know how the divinity might experience itself and its creation) as the basic problem. What could be done as a corrective?
The two natural approaches of which we can conceive would be the genetic and the environmental. Is it possible that through a vast hybridization program affecting countless numbers of people, and a simultaneous invasion of our consciousness with transforming images of our self- destruction, an effort is being made to place the planet under a kind of receivership? This would not necessarily be for “our” good if this planet, on which humankind has broken the harmony of being, does not exist just for our pleasure, but in order to arrest the destruction of life and to make possible the further evolution of consciousness or whatever the anima mundi has in store. I do not say that this is true or offer it as a theory. I would merely suggest that if we could allow ourselves to reintroduce the possibility of a higher intelligence into the universe, and experience the numinous mystery of creation, this scenario is consistent with the facts of the abduction phenomenon.
David Jacobs has written in this book, “No significant body of thought has come about that presents strong evidence that anything else is happening other than what the abductees have stated.” He has made his case well and has greatly enriched our knowledge of what the abductees have to tell of their experiences. We must now go on from here.
John E. Mack, M.D.
Professor of Psychiatry Harvard Medical School Page 4 A Note to the Reader This book is based on the testimony of some sixty individuals with whom I have explored more than 300 abduction experiences, and it includes transcripts or accounts of my interviews with more than twenty of them. A complete explanation of the techniques I used, including hypnotic regression, is included in Appendix A; Appendix B is a list of all abductees with whom I have investigated two or more abductions. In deference to the abductees’ wishes, I have changed all their names, but I have included their active occupations and ages.
All the major accounts of abduction in the book share common characteristics and thus provide a confirmation of one another. I have not included one-of-a-kind accounts—no matter how dramatic —because no reliable inferences can be drawn from them without confirming testimony from other abductees.
Because the majority of abductees in this study are women, and because women seem to have a larger number of more complex experiences, I have adopted the stylistic device of using the pronoun “she” throughout the abduction event, except, of course, when discussing specific male experiences.
The transcripts have been edited for brevity and clarity, but the information and the meaning have not been altered. At the end of each transcript I have included the abductee’s pseudonym, age at the time of the abduction, and year in which the abduction took place. Unless otherwise stated, I have personally investigated all of the abductions described in this book.
David M. Jacobs Temple University Page 5 PART I THE BEGINNINGS Page 6 Chapter 1 A New Discipline On an August day in 1986, I sat at my desk waiting for Melissa Bucknell to arrive at my house.
Melissa was a twenty-six-year-old woman working in real estate management. She had experienced dreamlike recollections about strange little Beings examining her, and she suspected that she might have been involved in a UFO abduction. She was coming to me to learn if anything lurked behind these suspicions, and I was about to find out firsthand what such abductions were all about.
As I waited, I reflected on how I, a trained and seemingly rational historian specializing in twentieth-century America, had gotten involved in investigating anything as outrageous as UFOs and alien abductions. I am a tenured professor at an established university, where the majority of my teaching centers on political and cultural history. I have never seen a UFO.
Like many people, I didn’t pay much attention to the subject of unidentified flying objects when I was growing up. Even though I was a child of the space age, Sputnik, and the program to put a man on the moon, I was never attracted to science fiction. But when I was an undergraduate university student, the UFO phenomenon captured my imagination. During my spare time I casually began reading articles about UFOs in newspapers and magazines. This seemed a harmless diversion, but it also had the tantalizing, although farfetched, prospect of being the “real thing.” Then in 1966, when I as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, the diversion became more serious for me.
The April issue of Life magazine contained a large spread on an ongoing national wave of UFO sightings. I picked up a copy and stared at the published pictures amazed: something had been captured in the photographs. What were these objects?
Now I was more intrigued than ever. I read a few well-researched books in which credible witnesses consistently described apparently artificially constructed objects that seemed to be flying under intelligent control. I studied several debunking books as well, but it was obvious that these authors had their own particular axes to grind. In fact, except for perhaps a dozen or so books that presented solid, authenticated data based on responsible investigations, nearly all that had been written about UFOs, pro and con, was loosely researched and poorly documented; it was, quite simply, worthless. Still, enough was there for me to believe that UFOs were potentially an extremely important phenomenon that precious few people knew anything about.
In 1966 I read John Fuller’s Interrupted Journey, the now-familiar story of Barney and Betty Hill, who claimed that aliens removed them from their automobile, gave them physical examinations (including a “pregnancy” test for Betty), and then released them. I thought this was a fascinating but highly improbable tale. The psychiatrist who had used hypnosis with the Hills to bring out the mainly forgotten story thought the case was an example of a shared dream, and I was inclined to agree, even though the aliens the Hills described looked very much like the UFO occupants that witnesses had claimed to have seen near landed UFOs.
In 1970 I joined several national UFO organizations and read their publications. I subscribed to the British journal Flying Saucer Review, which presented lively scientific debates and translations of the best articles from foreign periodicals. Even articles from skeptics, like Harvard astronomer Donald Menzel, appeared in its pages. The more I learned about the subject, the more adept I became at separating the wheat from the chaff. I began to understand the difference between good investigating and poor investigating, good research and poor research. I even began to do my own field investigations of UFO sighting reports.
Since my graduate training was in history, I began searching for historical patterns in the UFO phenomenon. I wanted to learn how society had “handled” UFOs since witnesses first reported them in the 1940s. I wanted to understand the role that the Air Force played in the UFO controversy. I wanted to look closely at the aura of ridicule that has surrounded the subject. I wanted to know why only a tiny percentage of the population had any solid information about UFOs despite the fact that sightings had been reported for so many years. I decided to write my doctoral dissertation on the history of the UFO controversy, even though only one dissertation had ever been written on a UFO- related subject, and that was in journalism. It certainly is not a common history subject. Professor Paul Conkin, who directed my studies and who was considered one of the most rigorous and systematic thinkers in the historical profession, was dubious when I first brought it up to him. He thought that UFOs were more related to social hysteria and fads than to anything else, but he allowed me to go ahead with the project. I finished my dissertation in 1973 and published a revised version of it in 1975.
After I received my Ph.D., I began teaching at the University of Nebraska and then in 1975 at Temple University in Philadelphia. At the same time I kept up my research on UFOs, published articles, and gave papers on the subject. As I continued to work in the area, I became aware of a major problem with the direction of that research. The study of UFO sightings was progressing well, but some of the most fundamental questions about the phenomenon were nowhere near being answered. Why, for instance, were these objects here? Why, if they were extraterrestrial, did they prefer to fly about and not make contact with humans? The answers to these and other questions could not be obtained from studying the outside shells of the objects. We needed to know more about what happened inside the UFOs.
The only UFO reports that described the interiors of the objects and what happened in them were the abduction cases. But the few cases investigators had collected in the 1970s were so different from one another that it was almost impossible to tell what, if anything, had actually happened. Two men said they were abducted by elephant-skinned creatures with long, sharp noses and claw hands. Another claimed to have been abducted for five days straight and to have seen not Page 7 only small aliens but a “human” one as well. A woman said that little Beings came right through her wall and transported her to another planet. Some of the “abduction” stories involved benevolent Beings who had come to bring peace on earth and personal growth to the happy recipients of the contact. Still others told of prophecies of atomic destruction. Even though similarities existed between these cases—for example, all the abductees reported that they had been given physical examinations—it was easy to relegate this melange into the hoax and mind-game category.
Furthermore, there was the memory problem. Virtually all abductees suffered from a form of amnesia that prevented them from remembering exactly what had happened during the abduction.
The preferred technique for retrieving these lost memories was hypnosis, but it was common knowledge that memories collected in this manner were not reliable. Indeed, some of the transcripts of the hypnotic testimony that I read revealed obviously leading questions and incompetent follow-up on answers. The lack of well-researched solid events did not inspire confidence.
In 1982 a friend introduced me to Budd Hopkins, an internationally celebrated artist who has been interested in the UFO mystery ever since his own sighting in 1964. Since the late 1970s Hopkins had specialized in examining abduction cases, and his first book, Missing Time, was published in 1981. In this pioneering work, he investigated a small group of people who he thought might have had abduction experiences. I was immediately impressed with his skillful research.
Using a psychologist to administer hypnosis, Hopkins had collected data much more systematically than anyone had before. He meticulously uncovered important information about abductees having puzzling sustained lapses in time, mysterious scars, bizarre physical examinations, and screen memories (false memories masking what may have been abductions), and he even theorized a possible generational link between parents who were abductees and their children.
Hopkins’s work was excellent, but I found that the overall situation was still confusing. After all, people have always claimed that many sorts of strange events have happened to them. They have lived past lives. They have been in communication with denizens of the spirit world and even Space Brothers. They have seen ghosts, danced with fairies, and had near-death experiences with religious implications. To my way of thinking, all of this might be a demonstration of the mind’s mysterious workings. Perhaps these paranormal phenomena arose from the human tendency to create folklore. Or they might emanate from a collective unconscious. In any case, psychology rather than objective reality would explain these stories.
The same might be true of abductions. The problem was that when I read abduction accounts I could get no real sense of the progression of events during an abduction from beginning to end.
Most of the reports consisted of snippets of stories, beginning in some logical order but then either ending abruptly or swerving off into wild, fantastic flights of fancy. As a historian, I required a chronological narrative. Before I could accept a psychological answer to all this, I needed a clear idea of exactly what the abduction accounts consisted of. I wanted to learn the details on a careful, rigorous, second-by-second basis, beginning with an abductee’s first feeling that something extraordinary was happening to him and ending when the event was finally deemed to be over. I needed to be sure of my evidence.
I knew that if I were to make sense of what was happening, I would have to do abduction research myself. This meant that I would have to learn hypnosis. I had never hypnotized anybody, and it was a frightening prospect, but I was determined to learn. By 1985 Hopkins was doing his own hypnotic regressions, and he invited me to sit in on his sessions. I discussed hypnosis techniques with him and other researchers. I read books about hypnosis. I attended a hypnosis conference. I learned about the dangers and pitfalls of hypnosis.
Now Melissa Bucknell was on her way to my house, wondering if I could unravel whatever had been troubling her. She had written to Hopkins describing some of her unusual events and suspicions; because she lived in Philadelphia, he had referred her to me. I tried to exude confidence when she arrived, but underneath I was anxious. I had no idea what was going to happen, whether I could successfully hypnotize anyone or whether I could enable her to remember events in her past.
Luckily, Melissa had been hypnotized before, so when I began the induction, she slipped quickly into a trance state. It was easy. The difficult part was asking the right questions, in the right manner.
In the first regression session, Melissa described being a six-year-old child playing in a field in back of her house with a friend. Before she knew it she was being transported into a UFO by aliens.
Her clothes were removed and a physical examination was performed on her. Her genitals were probed with a needlelike instrument. She felt that some sort of implant was inserted near her left ovary.
I was amazed. On the first regression, Melissa had spontaneously “remembered” being taken on board a UFO, being given an examination, and having her genitals probed. What was I to make of this? I had no way of being sure of the truthfulness of what I had heard, although the material she recalled was very similar to what Hopkins had been finding. I did not know what to do with this testimony other than to just note it.
Melissa continued to come for sessions on a regular basis, and soon other people were coming as well: Ken Rogers, a professional bicyclist; Barbara Archer, a university student and reporter; George Kenniston, an attorney; Karen Morgan, a public relations specialist, to name a few. I decided that the best way to go about gathering systematic information was to conduct as many hypnosis sessions on as many “suggestive” events in an individual’s past as was possible. Over the next five years I had more than 325 hypnosis sessions with more than sixty abductees. The abductees were, by and large, average citizens who did not desire publicity, who were not trying to commit a hoax, and who, with one exception, were not mentally disturbed. They were Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, white, black, male, female, younger, older, professional, nonprofessional, married, single, divorced, employed, unemployed, articulate, and inarticulate. The people who came to me fit the random quality among abductees that Hopkins had also found.
I discovered that, in general, it made little difference where the abductions occurred. The people I interviewed described being abducted from every region of the country (and around the world as well), from cities and rural areas, highways and isolated roads, single homes and apartment Page 8 complexes. Although in the main they did not know each other, they all told the same stories: They were abducted by strange-looking Beings, subjected to a variety of physical and mental “procedures,” and then put back where they had been taken. They were powerless to control the event, and, when it was over, they promptly forgot nearly all of it. Most were left with the feeling that something had happened to them, but they were not sure exactly what it was. I also found that some of the abductees remembered events without the aid of hypnosis; their stories were the same as those whose memories were recovered with hypnosis.
The events that the abductees related were completely implausible. Time and again they would describe physically impossible situations, such as floating through a closed window or communicating telepathically, that made no scientific sense whatsoever. But the abductees were not asking me to believe them. For the most part they were just as puzzled as I was about the meaning of what had happened to them. Often they would describe abduction events that I had heard perhaps a hundred times and then look and me and ask, “Has anybody ever said anything like that to you before?” Most of them were grateful for having the opportunity to recall what had been locked up inside them, sometimes for many years, and for having somebody who would listen to them without ridicule.
Whether or not their experiences were real, they were all people who had experienced great pain. They seemed to be suffering from a form of trauma related to a combination of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the terror that comes from being raped. Nearly all of them felt as if they had been victimized.
As I listened to them, I found myself sharing in their emotionally wrenching experiences. I heard people sob with fear and anguish, and seethe with hatred of their tormentors. They had endured enormous psychological (and sometimes physical) pain and suffering. I was profoundly touched by the depth of emotion that they showed during the regressions. I did my best to reassure and to help them, but I felt almost as powerless as they did.
Dealing with my own emotions was also a difficult task. During the first year of my research into abductee narratives, my impulse was to deny everything I heard. I reasoned that I had probably been glimpsing an unknown form of psychological fantasy that was causing the abductee tremendous fear and pain. Anything seemed better than the possibility that what people were describing had actually happened to them. Yet I could not ignore the convergence of minute detail, the lack of personal content, the physical evidence of unusual scars and other marks on their bodies immediately following an abduction, the missing time lapses during the supposed abduction, the multiple abductions, and other witnesses. There must be explanations, but no one seemed to be coming forward with a psychological theory that fit the evidence.
As I continued the hypnotic regressions, it became apparent that, as incredible as it seemed, it was possible that these accounts might be true. The stories I was told seemed to take on an air of greater reality as I became more competent in my hypnosis techniques. My questioning became so close and so careful that I began to uncover information no one else had ever heard. For example, Lynn Miller came to me because of missing time episodes that she had experienced over the past few years. I took a history of her background, and, among other events, she remembered that when she was twelve years old she had “flown with the angels.” When we conducted a session about this event, it turned out to be another abduction episode.
She said that during the experience one of the procedures performed on her had involved a tall Being giving her a piece of “paper” with “boys’ names” on it. She was told that she had to remember the names, and that the Being would come back to her later and retrieve the names. She stood there looking at the paper. “What could this be?” I thought to myself. Why would they want the names? Why did she have to remember them? Why couldn’t they remember the names themselves? I had absolutely no idea what was happening in this account. As I tried different lines of inquiry, I at last hit upon the right question. The answer opened up a world of completely unknown testimony about supposed procedures. Question: “What is he doing while you are doing this?” Answer: “He seems to be staring at me.” I was surprised by this answer. When I asked the question I had thought that perhaps the Being was doing something in the room while leaving Lynn to her task. But as soon as she said that he was staring at her, I began to be suspicious. Perhaps the point of this event had very little to do with memorization. I asked other abductees what the Beings were doing when they said that they were required to observe or concentrate on something. In virtually every case the answer was that the Being was staring at them, very closely, and usually at their eyes. I began to realize that this event might be part of a complex series of mental procedures that were administered to abductees.
No one had ever heard these procedural accounts before. It seemed unlikely that so many people would independently come up with the idea that they were being stared at closely. What kind of a psychological mechanism was this? It became evident to me that this and many other details that were described to me would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to attribute to internally generated psychological fantasies.
I wanted to discuss the research I was doing with my fellow UFO researchers. Although sympathetic to my work, most of them were still involved with investigating the sightings of UFOs and knew very little about abductions. They also felt, as I once had, that abductions were probably psychologically induced. When I broached the subject with my colleagues at the university, I was met, with few exceptions, with instant ridicule. Jokes about my sanity followed as they tried to humor me. And who could blame them? The material seemed so outrageous and ridiculous that expressing interest in it was obviously a waste of time. Some criticized me for veering from my normal history research. A few pointed out that my academic career could be effectively halted by this research.
I knew I was on shaky ground in terms of both my own analysis and science. I was using primarily anecdotal evidence as the basis of my research. Stories that people tell are a weak form of evidence for most scientists. Stories of space aliens abducting people and performing strange biological procedures on them were not going be considered evidence for anything other than Page 9 mental aberration. In the discipline of history, one spends years learning how to analyze documents and other forms of evidence, put them together into a coherent, logical whole, write serious historical works, and make knowledgeable contributions to the field. In order to do this the historian has agreed-upon events to guide him and a chronology to structure the evidence. Discovering previously unknown historical facts adds dimension and insight into a larger body of known material.
This was not the case in abduction research. I had no ground rules or signposts except Hopkins’s work to help me make sense of these abductions. In the beginning of my investigations, I floundered with my data. When I started doing regressions it was immediately apparent that significant parts of the stories were impossible to understand, and some of these were pretty “wild.” The more I learned, the more I understood that some of what was being told to me was the product of confabulation (the unconscious invention and filling in of memories), false memories, and dream material. I had to learn to distinguish the unreliable material from what appeared to be legitimate memories. After much trial and error, I finally became confident in my ability to perceive what was happening in various abduction accounts and to make connections. I now was ready to put the material into some sort of theoretical framework.
I noticed that the abduction accounts were forming themselves into distinct patterns of activity.
Practically all the abductees said that they were experiencing similar physical, mental, and reproductive procedures. Each abductee contributed a piece of the puzzle, but no single abductee related the entire structure of the abduction. The more data I gathered, the more I began to realize just how structured this phenomenon was. Certain physical procedures were almost always followed by other procedures. Certain reproductive procedures led to other reproductive procedures. The same was true of the mental procedures. I devised a matrix consisting of three tiers: Primary experiences, which involve procedures that the aliens perform the greatest number of times on the greatest number of people and that set the structure for all other procedures to come.
Secondary experiences, which occur less frequently. All abductees have some secondary experiences, but not during every episode, and some procedures might never be performed on individual abductees.
Ancillary experiences, which involve specialized sexual and other irregular procedures.
These happen infrequently to the abductee population as a whole, but may recur many times to an individual abductee.
I arranged these experiences into the physical, reproductive, and mental categories that abductees described. I worked on this matrix for two and a half years—revising, adding, subtracting, and rearranging the data and the categories as I gained more information and as my understanding of events became more sophisticated. The structure of the abduction was bizarre, fantastic, and alien. Yet it had fit neatly into a pattern. All the procedures appeared to be linked in some way. Even the smallest details of the events were confirmed many times over. There was a chronology, structure, logic—the events made sense. Like any scientific or historical inquiry, my investigations had lent themselves to systematic study, and they displayed an extraordinary internal integrity. I found areas that were difficult to understand because the abductees described apparently superior technology and biotechnology, not because the events were nonsensical.
The more I learned about these abduction stories, the more I felt that I was peeking into a hidden world. If these stories had any semblance of reality to them, many people had been leading secret lives, unbeknownst even to them. They were being abducted and subjected to strange procedures.
As a result, humans were being employed to produce another form of life—a secret life. And all this was being carried out by an alien form of life that existed secretly in our environment.
In writing of these abduction experiences, I am not out to convince the reader they are really happening. The material is inherently unbelievable, and I assume that many readers will be skeptical of it. It is entirely possible that a psychological explanation for the abduction accounts will be devised that fully explains the origin of these accounts. Rather than build a case for their reality, what I have done is to put the accounts that I have collected into a coherent whole, so that we can see what they add up to. It is up to the reader to make up his or her mind about the reality of the accounts.
If, however, the abductions are occurring as the abductees describe, then this book can serve not only as a guide for future abduction research but also as a warning to everyone about something incredible and ominous that is, in fact, happening—something that can have a profound effect on us all.
I now invite the reader to take an extraordinary trip with me, a trip to what might be the farthest reaches of believability. First, we must understand the history of the UFO phenomenon in order to place the abductions in a historical context. Then we proceed on a step-by-step journey through common, or typical, abduction experiences from the first few seconds of an abduction to the last few. Next, I draw a composite picture of the appearance and behavior of the aliens. I then discuss some of the serious consequences that abductions have had on victims’ lives and examine methods of resistance and intervention to the abductions. I also examine alternative explanations for what abductees are describing and, finally, explain some of the implications and meanings of the abduction experience.
This trip may be shocking to some, especially the descriptions of sexual procedures, but it is a journey that has to be made. If not, we may be playing ostrich in relation to an event of such fundamental importance that our failure to recognize it will be the subject of amazement for future generations.
Page 10 Chapter 2 Sightings and Abductions The modern UFO phenomenon emerged full-blown in the summer of 1947 when witnesses described a wide variety of geometrically shaped objects in the sky. These objects were not the earthly rocketships or space travel contraptions commonly found in science fiction literature. Nor were they technological variations of the new jet planes that had captured the public’s imagination in the mid-1940s. They were something completely new and were unrelated to popular culture in general. The UFOs seemed to come out of nowhere.
Although a puzzling “mystery airship” wave had taken place in 1896 and 1897, it had long since been forgotten. Strange aerial objects known as “foo-fighters” and “ghost rockets” had been in the news occasionally from 1944 to 1946, but the public had taken little notice of them. In fact, there hadn’t been any science fiction radio programs with extraterrestrial invasion themes (with the exception of the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast, which did not include UFOs). The first Hollywood motion pictures with plots of alien visitation were not produced until 1949. Many films had been made about earthlings traveling to other planets (Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, for example), but no major films had aliens from outer space invading earth. UFO sightings did not spring from one of the important shapers of popular attitudes—mass media science fiction.1 At the time, not enough information was available to establish just what people were seeing, but the prevailing assumption was that the objects were real and could probably be explained as secret weapons or other “conventional” phenomena. Nonetheless their mysterious nature was enough to rattle the nerves of the United States government. In 1948 the government assigned the Air Force the task of investigating the UFO reports to determine whether or not these objects posed a threat to the national security. Government interest in UFOs also spilled over into the Army, Navy, and CIA, which mounted small-scale investigations of sightings. Even J. Edgar Hoover, sensing Communist hanky-panky, had the FBI investigate UFO witnesses for their possible “subversive” capabilities.2 In these early days of UFOs, the Air Force and the public fell prey to several outlandish hoaxes and rumors. A citizen in Maryland reported that a flying saucer had crashed in his backyard and that he had recovered it. The Air Force sent men to investigate; the three-foot-wide toy of aluminum foil made headlines across the country before the Air Force decided that it had been victimized. Other hoaxes proved all too easy to perpetrate before investigators were able to distinguish them from legitimate UFO reports, and rumors of crashed flying saucers abounded almost from the beginning.
From 1948 to 1953, the Air Force and its scientific consultant for UFOs, astronomer J. Allen Hynek, actively investigated the UFO phenomenon. After the Air Force satisfied itself that the objects were not secret weapons from this or any other country, and having found no “hard” evidence for the existence of UFOs, it reasoned that the witnesses were simply mistaken, no matter how detailed the report or how credible the observer. Project Grudge, the Air Force’s official UFO investigation unit, came to the convenient conclusion that any UFO that defied conventional explanation could be accounted for in psychological terms—specifically, that they were attributable to misperception of conventional phenomena, abnormal psychological or physiological states, “societal stress,” and hoaxes. Whatever reports remained were categorized as “unknown.” In the end the “unknown” category became the solution to the mystery—the objects were unknown, case closed. Project Grudge made no attempt to analyze the character of the unknowns, to look for the common properties in the narratives, or to compare the witnesses’ backgrounds.
Project Grudge quite easily assigned psychological answers to this physical puzzle. Although there was no evidence that UFO witnesses had serious psychological problems, it seemed “right” to suggest that this might be the case. Therefore this scientific judgment, based on no evidence whatsoever, was issued to the public as fact. The scientific community, assuming a perceptual and psychological answer, did not question this evaluation. Scientists preferred to accept this explanation because it conveniently seemed to solve the mystery. The same was true of the “societal stress” argument. No scientist ever attempted to verify the theory that stressful events in the society cause people to look into the sky, see strange objects, and then report these observations as a way of alleviating their personal stress.
From the very beginning, the scientific community, instead of testing the assumptions about conventional explanations of UFOs, gave the military a free hand in UFO analysis and never seriously attempted to confirm its results or investigate the UFO phenomenon independently. A pattern was set: the scientific community assumed that the phenomenon was “illegitimate” and allowed the Air Force to investigate it without questioning either the Air Force’s assumptions and methodology or its own assumptions.
Once the Air Force “explained” UFOs and found no threat to the national security, it attempted to distance itself from the subject, first by proclaiming that UFOs were misidentifications of conventional phenomena, and then in 1950 by dissolving Project Grudge in the hope that the entire fad, now free from government validation, would soon disappear. But by 1951 it was obvious that the Air Force had not solved the UFO problem. UFOs were still being sighted, and even high- ranking Air Force officers were seeing them. The Air Force decided to reopen Project Grudge.
Unknowingly, the Air Force’s actions validated one of the critical findings of UFO research: The UFO phenomenon has no relation to societal events. No matter how the Air Force tried to manipulate public opinion or to suggest that UFOs had no objective reality, sightings continued, unaffected by these activities and pronouncements. Even a 1952 Air Force study of publicity surrounding UFOs and its effect on the number of sightings reported failed to show any cause and effect relation between publicity and UFO sightings.
Eager to put the issue to rest, the Air Force appointed Capt. Edward Ruppelt as the head of Page 11 g p , pp p pp Project Grudge, later renamed Project Blue Book. Ruppelt made an enthusiastic attempt to study UFOs in the spring and summer of 1952. His efforts would constitute the high point of Air Force involvement in UFO analysis. He developed plans to equip a special diffraction lens on a camera to analyze the spectrum of the light emitted by a UFO; he was going to photograph radar screens and measure radiation from UFO fly-overs; and he enlisted electronics and weather experts to help him.
But in 1952 the Air Force and Ruppelt were caught off guard. The Air Force found itself swamped with reports. During one month, more reports came in than the total for the previous five years. A series of spectacular sightings over the White House and Capitol Building created sensational publicity and convinced the Air Force that too many people were reporting what it still believed to be bogus sightings, in spite of Ruppelt’s ongoing investigation. The UFO problem was getting out of hand, and something had to be done before it presented itself as a threat to the national security.
The Central Intelligence Agency then entered into the picture. It put together a panel of scientists to study the situation. The CIA convened the Robertson Panel in January 1953 and changed the course of government involvement in UFOs for the next sixteen years. (Ruppelt and others were invited to give a briefing before the panel, but Project Blue Book did not formally participate.) After only twelve hours of briefings and study, the panel concluded that UFOs were not a threat to the national security. It did find, however, that the UFO reports were a threat because the Soviet Union could use “UFO hysteria” and public criticisms of the Air Force’s UFO investigations as a psychological warfare weapon against the United States. The Robertson Panel endowed the Air Force with a new mission: to mount a public relations effort to convince people that all UFO phenomena were explainable. Once educated to the great variety of things seen in the sky, the people would forget about UFOs, and the entire ridiculous affair would soon disappear. Solving the UFO mystery was no longer the objective. Public relations became the focus.
With this, the Air Force’s (and the government’s) efforts to study the phenomenon ended. All of Ruppelt’s plans to study UFOs systematically were scrapped. Never again would the government scientifically investigate the UFO mystery. Never again would it consider the UFO problem as anything more than a public relations headache. After 1953 it acted as a “soothing agent,” trying to calm fears and persuade the public that it had everything under control, hoping that eventually the fad would end and the reports would cease. No one within the scientific community critically examined the government’s actions.
The Air Force was unwittingly aided in its attempt to prove that UFOs were nonsense by the “contactees.” These colorful individuals began telling their stories in the early 1950s and fundamentally altered people’s perceptions of the UFO phenomenon. Led by “Professor” George Adamski, “Doctor” Daniel Fry, Truman Bethurum, Orfeo Angelucci, and Howard Menger, the contactees claimed in ever-escalating sensational accounts that they had not only seen flying saucers but that they had met the occupants of them, engaged in long conversations with them about the differences in their respective planets, and took trips in flying saucers to visit distant worlds. They claimed that the benevolent beings they called Space Brothers had given them a mission to perform on earth, which usually involved giving a message to mankind to stop atomic wars, stop atomic testing, live together in peace, and so forth.
The contactees gained adherents and in the process attracted widespread press attention with their spectacular (and often demonstrably untrue) claims. Many unsuspecting people interested in UFOs were drawn into the web of charlatanism. To complicate matters, a small but growing number of reputable witnesses were reporting small Beings seen in or near UFOs. These reports were all but disregarded in the confusion as the contactees’ media splash resulted in increased public ridicule for all UFO witnesses. The new UFO organizations were horrified at the contactees and spent large amounts of time and energy trying to dissociate themselves from them.
UFOs continued to be an “illegitimate” area of study for scientists, both because of the Air Force’s debunking policies and the ridicule that stemmed from the lack of tangible evidence of their existence and the negative publicity the contactees generated. In 1952 the Air Force’s UFO consultant, J. Allen Hynek, conducted a survey of forty-five astronomers and found them very frightened of ridicule and afraid of jeopardizing their careers if they showed any interest in UFOs.
Since the scientific community and the Air Force had dismissed the validity of the sightings out of hand, it was left to “lay” people to investigate the persistent UFO mystery and to deal with the contactees. In their efforts to distance themselves from the contactees, most researchers reacted negatively to all UFO “occupant” sightings, and a wave of conservatism swept the UFO research community. A split developed. Some organizations accepted the occupant reports, while others rejected them summarily, fearing that they smacked of “contacteeism.” The quality of investigating, analyzing, and reporting was wildly inconsistent. Some of the work was excellent, but much of it was worthless. Debunkers exploited the weaknesses of these amateur investigators and suggested that the phenomenon itself was illegitimate because most of the people who studied it were not scientifically trained. This reinforced the notion within the scientific community that UFOs were truly an illegitimate field of study. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The longer the scientific community rejected the subject, the more amateurs filled the void. The amateurish quality of the work, along with the contactees’ gibberish, indicated to scientists that the entire affair was a “silly season” fad unworthy of scientific analysis.
But some UFO organizations in the mid-1950s tried to impress upon the public that the UFO phenomenon was legitimate and that the Air Force investigation was inadequate. Organizations such as Jim and Coral Lorenzen’s Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), the New York-based Civilian Saucer Intelligence, and the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), under the leadership of retired Marine Corps Major Donald Keyhoe, became more convinced than ever that UFOs were most likely extraterrestrial and that the government was covering up this fact. They mounted intense efforts to make the Air Force reveal its findings and investigate UFOs openly and fairly.
By 1958 it was clear that the Air Force’s continued attempts to eradicate reports were failing.
Page 12 UFO sightings appeared to be unaffected by Air Force policy, contactee yarns, scientific attitudes, and public ridicule. They had continued at a steady pace from 1952 until 1957, when there was another enormous wave of sightings.
The 1957 wave prompted much public criticism of the Air Force’s handling of the problem. When the 1957 wave hit, much of the press began to realize that Air Force statements about UFOs—that they did not represent a threat to the national security and did not display technology in advance of our own—seemed disingenuous. The press put increased pressure on the Air Force to “come clean” and tell what it knew about the UFO mystery. By 1958 the Air Force, frustrated with trying to eliminate reports, and tired of increasing public hostility, was also trying to rid itself of the UFO program entirely.
The Air Force’s policy of secrecy, however, and its attempts to identify the UFOs at all costs (to implement the recommendations of the Robertson Panel) were firmly entrenched. Only J. Allen Hynek had civilian access to the Air Force data, and he still believed that the UFO phenomenon was the product of conventional sources, although he was beginning to have his doubts.
The Air Force felt that it was under siege. Its efforts to relieve itself of the burden of UFOs intensified. But no matter where it tried to have the UFO project transferred—to NASA, the Brookings Institution, or a scientific area within the armed services—the Air Force could not get rid of it. No one else would assume the public relations headache that went with it.
By 1966, the Air Force was ready to try anything to rid itself of Project Blue Book. The opportunity presented itself in March, when a few sightings in Michigan seized the public’s attention.
Eighty-six college students at Hillsdale College had seen a football-shaped object hovering over a field. The object ducked behind some trees when automobiles approached and then hovered again when the cars left. In Dexter, Michigan, a farmer and his son, along with many other witnesses, saw a large red object come flying out of a wooded and marshy area.
The Air Force dispatched J. Allen Hynek to investigate the reports. Hynek had been the Air Force consultant on UFOs on and off for eighteen years. He had begun as a debunker and had been severely castigated by UFO buffs as an Air Force stooge. But over the years, and especially in the early 1960s, Hynek had agonizingly rethought his opinions and had come to the conclusion that UFOs were probably extraterrestrial. In his role as Air Force UFO specialist, however, his job was to go to Michigan and explain the sightings. After a perfunctory look into the cases, he issued a press statement saying that the sightings might be caused by a spontaneously igniting release of methane gas caused by rotting vegetation, sometimes known as swamp gas.
A howl of ridicule went up in the press. Hynek’s investigation had produced exactly the opposite effect the Air Force had intended. Instead of quieting the public’s interest in UFOs, the swamp gas explanation seemed to give credence to the people who were charging that the Air Force was engaged in a cover-up. Life magazine published a feature article on the sightings with dramatic UFO photographs from around the world.
Pressure on the Air Force mounted as Congressmen Gerald Ford and Weston Vivian, sensing Air Force ineptitude, called for hearings on the Air Force’s handling of the UFO problem. The first of those investigations was held in April 1966. A House committee strongly urged that the Air Force allow universities to look into the UFO matter. As a result, the Air Force contracted with the University of Colorado to conduct a study of the UFO phenomenon and issue findings on whether the objects represented a threat to national security. If UFOs were not a threat, then the Air Force could gracefully retreat from the UFO battleground and close Project Blue Book. Noted physicist Edward U. Condon led a committee of about a dozen scholars that was to take a fresh look at the UFO evidence and recommend whether further study was warranted.
But Condon’s flip attitude toward the subject, his controversial managerial style, and internal disagreements over procedures and evidence severely hampered the committee’s investigation. In spite of the committee’s serious split, Condon recommended in the 1968 final report that the Air Force give up UFO investigations because “further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced,” and UFOs do not “pose a defense problem.”3 For Condon, the entire UFO affair was an enormous waste of time filled with hoaxes, bogus contactees, and weak-thinking UFO enthusiasts awash in the “will to believe.” Based on these recommendations, the Air Force closed Project Blue Book in December 1969, and its public investigation of UFO reports came to an end. It had never mounted a serious full-scale investigation of the phenomenon. It had never systematically analyzed reports. After 1952, the main thrust of the Air Force’s UFO policy was to treat it as a public fad.
In fact, the Condon Report left an unsolved mystery. Even though it had come to strongly negative conclusions, the report still presented a strong case for UFOs as anomalies. The committee could not identify more than 30 percent of the cases it had investigated. Many of the reports were simply labeled as unidentified. In one case a UFO was called an “extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disk-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial.”4 Buried within the report was a solid body of evidence that this was a phenomenon requiring at the very least more study and attention.
The Condon Report, however, did its damage. Scientists who had not bothered to read the entire report concluded that Condon’s recommendations were the final word on the subject and that the UFO mystery had been laid to rest once and for all. UFO “buffs” dropped their membership in UFO organizations, assuming that there was no further reason to support research into the subject.
The media played up the “case closed” angle. Although the Condon Report hurt UFO research, it had absolutely no influence on the UFO phenomenon itself, which continued to be reported, unaffected by societal events.
In 1973 another massive wave of sightings took place, but for the first time since 1947 the Air Force stayed out of it. The wave occurred in exactly the same way the other waves had—without reference to societal events and displaying the full range of UFO activity: high-level sightings, low- level sightings, “trace cases” where the object left evidence of its existence in the form of an affected environment, reports in which witnesses claimed to see UFO occupants, and even a few oddly Page 13 puzzling abduction cases.
But in the absence of government interpretations of these objects in the sky, the American people could at last indulge in unrestrained interest in the phenomenon. Hynek, now fully committed to the extraterrestrial origin of UFO sightings, took the opportunity during the 1973 wave to announce the opening of the Center for UFO Studies, which was to be the first scientific organization devoted to studying the mystery. In addition, the new Midwest (later Mutual) UFO Network came to the fore as a leading UFO investigative organization, and the two groups worked together to collect and analyze reports.
By the end of the 1970s, the study of UFOs had become much more sophisticated than ever, and a great amount of knowledge had been acquired about UFO patterns, effects, appearances, and residues. But UFO researchers felt frustrated by the seeming decline in public interest, and they had great difficulty in piercing the armor of mystery around UFO behavior. And even though Hynek and others strenuously tried to convince the scientific community of the importance of the subject, ridicule still remained a critical negative factor for its study. The scientific standing of UFOs was still very much where it had been from the beginning: intriguing but “illegitimate.” Yet even though the Air Force was ostensibly out of the UFO business, documents released in the mid-1970s showed that it was still doing investigations of UFO reports made by military personnel or on military installations.
Some documents spurred concerned UFO researchers to continue searching for evidence of even more extensive clandestine government activities.
Underneath the surface of these public events were some remarkable cases strongly suggesting that the UFOs were involved in the abduction of humans. January 1965 brought the first publication of an abduction case. The event had occurred in 1957 in Brazil. Antonio Villas-Boas was the son of a rancher. He was working on his father’s farm at night when he saw a UFO land near him. Four large-headed, small Beings quickly came out of the object and forced Villas-Boas inside. They took off his clothes and spread a clear, odorless liquid over his body. They then cut his chin and collected some blood into a cup. Villas-Boas claimed that a small, naked female Being then entered the room. She had thin blond hair, large slanted eyes, high cheekbones, an ordinary nose, a small, thin- lipped mouth, and a sharply pointed chin. Her body looked human, her feet were small, and her hands were long and pointed. She was about four and a half feet tall. She began to hug and caress him. He became uncontrollably sexually excited. They had intercourse twice. Then the female Being abruptly broke off their intimacy and left Villas-Boas with the feeling that he was being treated like “a good stallion to improve their… stock.” He was then let off the object.5 To UFO researchers at the time, this report seemed ridiculous and lurid; it reeked of pulp science fiction. Having spent the better part of the 1950s battling the contactees, they did not need another outlandish case to complicate their job of winning scientific legitimacy for the phenomenon.
But Villas-Boas’s story and actions did not match those of the contactees. He received no messages to relay to mankind. He had no mission given to him. He made no money from the story.
He simply told his story and then retreated to the normal activities of his daily life. (He eventually went to law school and became a respected attorney. He maintained the truthfulness of his account until he died.) While this case stood out for the next few years as an embarrassing anomaly, another case came along that was more difficult to dismiss: The Barney and Betty Hill case not only became a source of great debate, but it also ranks as perhaps the most important and well-known case in the history of the UFO phenomenon. It was the subject of a two-part story in Look magazine in 1966, a popular book in the same year, and a 1975 NBC television movie.6 The Hills said that while driving from Montreal to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, small Beings with large heads and eyes abducted them from their car into a landed UFO. The Beings separated them into different rooms and subjected them to physical examinations. They inserted a needle into Betty’s abdomen and told her that they were giving her a “pregnancy” test. They obtained scrapings of the Hills’ skin and performed other physiological tests. A larger Being, whom Betty thought was the “leader,” communicated with her telepathically. After the “medical” procedures were completed, and after some other events happened, the Hills were allowed to exit from the object and watch its departure. They immediately forgot what had happened to them, resumed their trip, and arrived home about two hours later than they should have. All they remembered was that they had observed a UFO close up. They recalled nothing of the abduction. Over the next few months they were bothered by strange dreams of being on board an alien craft; when they suffered continual anxiety related to their UFO sighting, they sought help through psychological counseling. They were referred to Benjamin Simon, a well-known psychiatrist proficient in hypnosis. Through the use of hypnotic regressions, they recovered the memories of what had transpired that evening.
Although John Fuller’s 1966 book about the episode, Interrupted Journey, described the “pregnancy test” performed on Betty, he decided not to include the fact that the Beings had extracted a sperm sample from Barney. This was too embarrassing for the Hills and for Fuller in the mid-1960s, and he did not mention it lest it detract from the veracity of the account.
The Hills’ story broke like a thunderbolt in the UFO research community. They were an interracial couple whose credibility was above reproach. Barney Hill was a member of the NAACP and the New Hampshire Civil Rights Commission, and Betty Hill was a social worker. They were respected, churchgoing members of their community. This was not the type of couple who liked to attract “lunatic fringe” attention to themselves. But did the events as the Hills described them actually happen? Researchers had no way of knowing.
The Hill case split the UFO research community. Many UFO researchers agreed with University of Arizona atmospheric physicist James E. McDonald when he complained that because of the relationship to the contactee stories, the Hill case put UFO research back twenty years. But, like the Villas-Boas case, the Hills’ account seemed to be unrelated to the 1950s-style contactee claims.
The Hills were not concerned with making money from the tale (although they received money from the publication of the book), nor did they embellish and change the story as time went on. They did not receive a “mission” from the Space Brothers. They did not say that they were chosen for any Page 14 particular reason. They were not members of a flying saucer cult. In fact, until his initial sighting Barney had been hostile to the idea that UFOs existed.
A crucial aspect of the Hill case was that their information was retrieved through the use of hypnosis. Benjamin Simon, the psychiatrist who administered the hypnosis, was never convinced that an abduction had actually occurred. He preferred to think that the two had experienced a “shared fantasy” or a condition known as folie à deux, even though the details of their “fantasies” were quite different because they had been put in separate rooms and had different experiences.
The transcripts of the hypnosis showed that Simon spent a considerable amount of time unsuccessfully trying to get the Hills to admit that the events had never really happened, or to catch them in contradictions.
After the Hill case, other reports of abductions slowly began to surface, but the number was still so small that they caused very little comment among UFO researchers. They represented an anomaly outside the more conventional sighting reports that dominated the field. Yet the abduction claims persisted. In October 1973, two residents of Pascagoula, Mississippi, said that strange- looking aliens floated them into a UFO and physically examined them. In 1975 forest worker Travis Walton claimed that he was taken aboard a UFO and, while he thought he was gone for a few hours, he appeared to be missing for five days. Inside the object he remembered lying on a table and seeing small Beings with large heads and eyes. That same year an Army sergeant saw a UFO headed for him while he sat on the hood of his car. A numbness spread over his body before the object left. He noticed that he was inexplicably missing about one and one half hours of time. The next few days brought a sore and inflamed back and a rash from his chest to his knees. He later remembered small Beings with large heads and eyes performing a medical examination on him while he lay on a table.7 In January 1976 three women in Kentucky observed a bright-red object hovering some distance from their car. The next thing they knew, they were eight miles down the road and it was an hour and a half later. They continued home and experienced burning sensations on their faces when water touched them. They then noticed that they had similar red marks on the backs of their necks.
Hypnosis was administered by Leo Sprinkle, a professor of counseling psychology at the University of Wyoming and an early investigator of abductions. The three women remembered being physically examined by small, gray, humanoid figures while they lay on tables. One woman felt that they were conducting an experiment on her to learn about her emotional and intellectual processes. Another woman could see a human she didn’t know lying on a table next to hers.8 In 1977 a ten-year-old report came to light in Massachusetts. Betty Andreasson claimed that she and her family were put in a state of “suspended animation” when five small Beings entered their home by walking through a wall. She was taken to a bizarre location where, among other things, she was examined, saw strange animals on another planet, and saw a giant phoenix-like bird rising from ashes. She also reported various events that she interpreted as profoundly religious. UFO investigator Ray Fowler wrote three books on her experiences, but the events were so bizarre that UFO researchers were at a loss to separate reality from fantasy.9 By the late 1970s and early 1980s, abduction accounts began to be reported in ever-increasing numbers. Some researchers were beginning to theorize about an apparent reproductive link that recurred in these accounts. As early as 1972 researcher Marjorie Fish hypothesized that a needle inserted in Betty Hill’s navel might have been for experimentation with human eggs, and in 1977 psychiatrist Berthold E. Schwarz discussed the idea of a laparoscopy (a method of examining internal organs by using a viewing scope) being performed on Betty. Based on cases that she investigated, in 1980 researcher Ann Druffel suggested that aliens might be interested in human sexual life-styles.10 Most UFO researchers, however, still considered abduction reports to be exotic and bewildering anomalies—perhaps true and perhaps not. Although patterns were slowly emerging from the abduction stories and the people involved seemed to be credible, the specter of the contactees still intimidated most UFO researchers. In fact, some 1950s-style contactees were still around, claiming trips to the planets and gab sessions with friendly aliens. To complicate matters, some abductees who seemed to be sincere individuals and who did not fit the contactee model were reporting contactee-like abduction experiences. They claimed that they were given prophecies of death and destruction for our society, or that they had experienced Christian religious experiences. Others were enamored with kindly, handsome, space people who were here on a benevolent mission of some sort. How these reports could fit into the scheme of “legitimate” abductions was impossible to comprehend.
To make matters worse, there was the increasing popularity of “channeling,” a process in which, by placing oneself in the proper mental state, a person could contact benevolent aliens at will. Prior to the 1950s, channelers, whose activities are related to automatic writing, speaking in tongues, and a number of other “psychic” phenomena, had mainly communicated with spirits. Now aliens, a phenomenon that had been known in UFO cult groups for more than thirty-five years, became the contacts of choice. In channeled messages, the Space Brothers, frequently said to be from the Pleiades or Zeta Reticuli star systems, freely discussed their reasons for visiting Earth, the propulsion systems of their vehicles, and life on the idyllic planets where they resided, and their philosophy of life. They took Earth people to task for befouling the environment, causing wars, and so forth. They expressed love for Earth and Earthlings, and gave advice on how we should be more loving to each other. Much of the channeled information was taken up with trivial matters along the lines of “pop” psychology and self-help advice—urging vegetarianism and other health measures, providing metaphysical and spiritual messages, and discussing the place of Earth and its people in the universe. Ultimately they wished to lead us through a spiritual passage into a New Age. For some UFO researchers, channeling confused the issue and made the abduction phenomenon seem all the more improbable.
In 1981 UFO research was fundamentally altered by the publication of Budd Hopkins’s Missing Time. Unlike most UFO researchers, who treated abduction cases as simply another “sighting” Page 15 , p y g g category, Hopkins investigated seven abduction cases for patterns, similarities, and convergences.11 He found that the question of inexplicable oneto two-hour gaps of time was more pervasive than had been realized in the past. Among other things, he discovered the significance of an unaccountable bodily scar that often accompanied abduction reports. He demonstrated that a person could be an abductee without having a UFO sighting and that abduction accounts could be hidden beneath the surface of strange “screen memories.” Hopkins’s research confirmed the prevalence of the examination that seemed to take place with nearly every abductee. He showed how the people who had experienced these events were normal people who had not manifested serious mental disorders. He also demonstrated that many of the abductees had family members who were also abductees and that the phenomenon might be intergenerational.
In Missing Time Hopkins invited readers who felt that they might have been abducted to write to him. He received hundreds of letters as a result of the book and more after his subsequent radio and television appearances. UFO researchers began to realize that the scope of the phenomenon was far larger than anyone had imagined.
Yet the question remained: why were there so many abduction accounts now and not after the Hill case? The answer may be that when John Fuller published Interrupted Journey in 1966, he did not embark on a television and radio tour for the book and make the idea of abduction accessible via the media to millions of people. Nor did Fuller include a note in his book asking people who might have had these experiences to write to him. Therefore, abductees did not have an easily reached outlet for their stories. Furthermore, as researchers looked back at older cases, it became evident that some abductees did try to report their experiences as they remembered them, often with fragments and screen memories, but UFO researchers could not understand the import of what they were hearing. For instance, people would report that they had had a close view of the underside of a UFO; or that they had the strange feeling that they had floated out the window upon seeing a UFO; or that they had seen a UFO from their car, had the urge to stop the car, and become confused over what happened next; or that, although they had seen a UFO hovering 100 feet from them, they had the idea that they could tell what was inside. The UFO investigators would record the details of the case, but there would be no back-up or in-depth investigation other than of the sighting itself.
If the UFO investigators had suspected that there was more to the case than a simple sighting, they had no idea how to investigate it. Since most investigators lacked expertise in hypnosis, the majority of cases went uninvestigated. Even when competent hypnotists were called in on cases, they were not well versed enough in abduction research to ask the proper questions. They could not tell if the subject was “filling in” with false information, if the witness had slipped into channeling, or if they were hearing dream material or “screen” memories. And because the investigators did not know exactly what happened during an abduction, they could not identify false memories purposely placed in victims’ minds.
Furthermore, most abductees did not report their experiences because they simply did not remember them. If they did remember something, they often linked the event to a psychic or religious experience and thus had no reason to call a UFO organization.
Even with the investigating problems, by the mid-1980s there were so many of these reports that researchers could not keep up with them. The amount of data from each abduction experience was so extensive and rich in detail that even the most cursory look indicated that something extraordinary was occurring. In 1987 Dr. Thomas E. Bullard published a massive study of 270 published abduction cases. Although most of the cases were not investigated as carefully as they should have been, and many contained untrustworthy material, Bullard’s careful analysis was still able to show numerous structural similarities.12 Most researchers still did not understand the implications of the new data. They had been schooled in the older sighting-analysis techniques and were ill-equipped to study abduction cases with new “internal” methodology. Most of the analytic procedures that had been developed for deciphering what a person observed no longer applied as UFO research moved into the delicate area of recovering memories locked away in the mind. But once a few researchers, like Budd Hopkins and Dr. Richard Haines (who developed a more planned method of questioning abductees) slowly began to develop proper techniques of investigating abductions and to unravel the tangled web of data that the abductees related, the victims’ stories began to take on a coherence and a structure, with extraordinary detail that had never before been revealed.
In 1987 Hopkins published Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods, which for the first time revealed the extent of the UFO phenomenon’s intrusion into peoples’ personal lives.
Hopkins found that, in addition to examinations, victims described aliens performing genetic experiments on them that included the taking of ova and sperm. He uncovered the idea that aliens were having abductees physically interact with odd-looking babies presumably grown at least in part from the abductees’ eggs and sperm. He also began to realize the extent of victimization that had occurred among abductees as a result of their experiences. The people he investigated were traumatized individuals whose lives had been profoundly affected by their abductions.13 By the late 1980s the phenomenon had begun to yield some of its secrets. The abductions, once considered the fringy “stepchild” of the UFO phenomenon, were irrevocably changing UFO studies.
Researchers had begun to realize that the abduction phenomenon yielded far more information about UFOs than sightings had revealed. At last we had literally and figuratively entered inside the UFOs.
Page 16 PART II THE ABDUCTION EXPERIENCE Page 17 Chapter 3 Getting There “THIS IS NOT A DREAM.” Going from a normal environment into a UFO can be a shattering experience. People are engaged in normal activities when suddenly they are removed from their surroundings against their will and taken into the fringes of reality. The abductors seem to make a conscious effort to take people when they will not be missed or when their lives will not be overly disrupted. That still allows a wide range of opportunities for an abduction.
TRANSPORT An unsuspecting woman is in her room preparing to go to bed. She gets into bed, reads a while, turns off the light, and drifts off into a peaceful night’s sleep. In the middle of the night she turns over and lies on her back. She is awakened by a light that seems to be glowing in her room. The light moves toward her bed and takes the shape of a small “man” with a bald head and huge black eyes.
She is terrified. She wants to run but she cannot move. She wants to scream but she cannot speak.
The “man” moves toward her and looks deeply into her eyes. Suddenly she is calmer, and she “knows” that the “man” is not going to hurt her.
This is a typical beginning of an abduction. Virtually all abductees have experienced this. From the first few seconds of an abduction, nothing is within the realm of normal human experience. It is an instant descent into the fantastic and bizarre. Technology and biotechnology that seem like magic are immediately apparent. Once the event begins, humans are powerless to stop it. When it is over, most victims cannot remember it.
Often the abductee forms “screen” memories that mask the beginning of an abduction event. For example, one abductee said she saw a wolf in her bedroom one night. The wolf was standing squarely on her bed looking her in the eyes. She clearly remembered its fur, fangs, and eyes. Other abductees have claimed to have seen monkeys, owls, deer, and other animals. Some say that they have seen an “angel” or a “devil.” Through the use of hypnosis to recover the details of these events, each of these cases turned out to be the beginning of an abduction sequence. It is common for abductees to refer to out-of-body experiences that they had or, more commonly, that they succeeded in “preventing” at what was the beginning of an abduction. They sometimes remember that they felt themselves floating out of bed but then “fought it” and were able to lower themselves back onto the bed and abort the experience. When these memories have been examined, they have turned out to be a combination of the first few seconds and the last few seconds of an abduction.
Secrecy appears to be critically important to the aliens in determining the opportunities for abductions. They commonly take place when the abductee is in an automobile, alone in the daytime, or with a small group of people. Victims have reported aliens doing procedures on them in their homes without being abducted. The majority of abductions, however, begin at night when the victim is alone, either awake or asleep. No abductions have surfaced that took place in the middle of a very large group of people, in full view at a public event.
The greater the victim’s seclusion and the less others will miss her, the longer the experience tends to last. If a person is alone and is not likely to be missed for hours, she will experience more events during the abduction. Similarly, an abduction of a person walking alone in a secluded place will last longer than an abduction originating in a small group of people. Most abductions last from one to three hours.
Nighttime and Sleep Nighttime presents an ideal time for an abduction. During the night, the abductee’s disappearance has a greater chance of going unnoticed and the aliens can maintain maximum “cover.” Also, if the abductee is asleep, the event can become concealed as part of a dream.
Although the “dream” may be much more vivid and have a different quality than usual, it is still within the acceptable cognitive realm.
At the beginning of the nighttime abduction, the Beings enter into the room through a light source coming from the window. How the use of light can transform and transport matter is unknown. The frightened victim is calmed when the Beings come close to her and stare into her eyes. A Small Being then touches her shoulder or arm. She finds herself floating up and out of bed. She is drawn to the light and enveloped in it. She floats toward the light. Small Beings are with her. Then, without hesitation, she and her escorts go directly through the closed window to the outside. She has no particular physical sensation when passing through the window.
Although abductees frequently report going directly through walls and ceilings, the Beings appear to seek out a window. Sometimes the aliens will take abductees out of their bedrooms and into another room and then out through a window there. Windows that are blocked, for example with boxes after a move, are avoided in favor of unblocked windows. One woman was visiting friends with her son. They slept in two different rooms in the basement. An abduction sequence began, and the aliens took her out of her bed and walked her into her son’s room. Then they took her son and walked both of them into the bathroom. She wondered why they were crowding into the bathroom Page 18 and then she realized that the bathroom was the only room in the basement with a window. Soon a bright light entered and they flew out the window.
In spite of hundreds of accounts of people flying through closed windows, it is exceedingly rare to find an outside witness who has observed it. Therefore, although it sounds impossible, the physical mechanism that allows people to pass through solid objects probably renders them invisible, at least for this part of the abduction experience.
Floating can be extremely unpleasant. Many abductees experience nausea and dizziness, compounded by their fear and confusion. As the abductee travels up, rooftops and treetops recede, and then stars come into view. During the transition upward she is only vaguely aware of her body; she may not even be able to see it. As she continues her journey, she approaches the source of the light and is floated into a UFO.
When I met Barbara Archer in 1987, she was a petite, twenty-one-year-old university student who was studying to be a journalist. She was overwhelmed with fear and anxiety when she remembered snippets of bizarre events that had dominated her life. During the course of her six hypnosis sessions with me she was able to recall vividly her extraordinary experiences. One night when she was sixteen years old, she was getting ready to go to bed when she noticed a light coming in through the window. When she closed the shade, the light continued to illuminate the entire room. She looked outside but could not see the source of the light. During a hypnosis session, she remembered what had happened in the beginning of the event. I asked her how she felt when she saw the light.
Well, I think when I first realized that the light was in my room it made me feel scared, but like I couldn’t figure it out.
So you’re puzzled?
Yeah. I should look out the other window, because I could see more of the sky. But I just didn’t…. There’s all this light still. I start to feel like, I sit there for a while and I look out the window, and then I turn around because I think that there might be somebody there. I first thought that it might be the dog. After a while I just stop looking out the window because there’s nothing there to see.
Do you sort of look back in, though, can you get the sense that… ?
Well, the light seems to be going away. It’s not filling the whole room as much anymore.
When I turn around there’s somebody standing over by the closet.
Is this a big person, or a medium person, little person?
He’s smaller than me. I’m not all that shocked to see him standing there…. I think he came toward me when I was standing there by the window…. I think he touches my arm. He sort of touches me around my wrist area, between my elbow and my wrist sort of. It feels better then, I mean, I’m not scared or anything now.
When he touches your wrist, what happens next?
Well, I turn around toward the window again, the side window that I had been looking out of. I just sort of go up.
Okay. Is this through the shade?
Yes. I think I left the shade down. I don’t remember putting it up, anyway. And we just go out.
Oh, I feel so dizzy…. It feels terrible.
Do you get a sense that you’re going horizontally?
No, up.
Is it straight up like an elevator, or… ?
Yes. It’s up straight.
Can you get a sense of movement, or do you just feel that you’re going up?
Page 19 I feel sort of like I’m on an elevator except there’s no walls or anything around it, it’s just up fast….
Can you see anything outside?
When we went out the window we went straight in between the two row houses, my house and my next-door neighbor’s. The houses go back a little bit and there’s like a room in there between my bedroom and the bedroom across from me, it sort of goes back, like a little cove sort of thing. And I go straight up from in between there. So I can see everything. I can see all the row houses on my street, in the driveway. I feel really nauseous…. I hope I don’t get sick.
[I assured Barbara that the feeling would subside and she would not be sick.] Can you get a sense of if you’re headed toward a specific point?
We’re going straight up. I looked down and I saw the trees and everything on my street, and it makes me feel kind of scared because I don’t really like heights. Not scared, but it just makes this nauseous feeling a little bit worse, I think. But then after that we’re just going straight up. I know that we’re going to some place.
Do you get a sense of weather? Can you feel breezes? Is it cold? Do you get a sense of being outside?
It doesn’t feel cold or anything. Just kind of feels like body temperature.
Do you get a sense that you might be enclosed in something? Is something protecting you from the weather?
Not that I can tell. I can’t feel anything, or touch anything.
So you still continue to go up.
Yes.
Can you see yourself approaching something?
Yes. When I look up I can see the bottom of, kind of a big, I think it’s roundish, but longer, though. It’s like an oval maybe. I can see the bottom, sort of gray, dark gray.
Is it big, or small, or are you a little too far away to get that sense?
Well, it’s big, but it’s not huge. I can remember from before, and it’s not that big.
Do you sort of get closer to it then?
Mm-hmm. It feels like there’s sort of light around me, that we’re following up. And we’re getting closer to the point of where that’s coming from, inside that big thing.
Are you heading toward the center of it, or off to the side?
Yes, the center, underneath. We just go right in through the bottom.
Is this other person still with you?
Yes. I think he’s still there. When we get there, there’s somebody else waiting for us at the inside.
(Barbara Archer, 16, 1982) Other abductees report floating horizontally across buildings and fields, and then coming down in a field or secluded area. The UFO is in a clearing and the abductee and aliens walk to it, Page 20 sometimes a considerable distance. Why this happens is not known.
When the abductee is near other people, they are usually rendered unconscious or immobile while the abduction is going on. Typically they sleep through the abduction; if they are awakened at the beginning of it they are made to go back to sleep immediately. This “switching off” procedure presumably allows for secrecy to be kept and for minimal disruption in the life of the nonabductee.
When the abduction is over, the nonabductee will be switched on once again and resume normal activities.
In spite of the aliens’ ability to control human behavior, from time to time an abductee will see another person being abducted. “Tom,” for example, told me an intriguing story. He was making love to his wife “Nancy” (the couple asked that their names be changed) when she complained that she felt an “electric jolt” go through her hips. He said that he did not feel anything. He looked at the clock and was surprised to find that he had been engaged in lovemaking for about forty-five minutes. This seemed odd because he felt that he had not been doing it for more than a few minutes and there were no “gaps” that he was aware of. When I questioned him during hypnosis, Tom remembered seeing two Small Beings come into the room. He was switched off and the Beings moved him off his wife.
She turns her head for a moment, and it’s like she drew a quick breath…. But it’s like, there’s something pulling us apart, but it’s like we look like a couple of rag dolls, it’s like we’re completely poleaxed, whatever you call it, shot with a tranquilizer dart, like a couple of grizzlies or something. It’s like we’re just completely limp, but I’m just facedown on the bed. I don’t know where she is.
Do you sort of feel yourself going limp just before you realize you are like a couple of rag dolls?
Yeah, I just felt clammy, like I was losing energy. It was like I felt like I had been at it for a couple of hours or so, which isn’t usual….
Now, you say that you sort of go limp like rag dolls, so that means that you must be lying on her.
Yes, I’m lying on her. They pull me off, and I’m on my side, but my eyes aren’t moving. I can only see what’s in the field of vision, and I’m on my side. I can see, it’s like everything’s sideways because I can’t turn my head up, and they’re there, and they’ve got her, and there’s a flash, it’s dark.
Is she standing?
No, she’s gone!
Oh, you say they’ve got her. Do they stand her up? Do they get her out of bed that way? Does she walk?
It was like they rolled her off. As they were rolling her off the edge of the bed, she just faded out with them, just like a flash. And yet I’m thinking she’ll be back…. It’s like I’m shutting down.
I’m just there, that’s all. It’s like my eyes, I’m trying, I can’t move my eyes.
Are you still on your side?
No. Well, my head’s turned to the left enough so my left eye still has slight field of vision to the edge of the bed, but there’s nothing there to see, and the other eye is just staring into the blanket. I can’t move my eye. I can’t move from left to right.
But your eyes are open?
Yeah, they’re open, but it’s like nothing’s happening.
While you’re lying there, and she’s gone, do you get a sense that anybody touches you?
I don’t think so. I’m just lying there, I might as well be asleep, except I don’t know why I’m not.
I’d like to move, but I can’t move, so I just don’t…. I’ve got a headache, I know that, and my left arm’s cramping.
Page 21 Can you move your left arm?
No, I can’t move it, but it’s cramping. And the right, my right leg, the tendons from the knee down to the ankle, they’re trying to cramp up, but I can’t do anything about it.
You can’t flex your foot or anything?
No, all I can feel is a tingle, like the muscles are trying to pull but they won’t pull. I can’t do anything about it, but I have a hell of a headache.
Now, you’re looking over somewhere?
Yeah.
When you look there before, Nancy was in your field of vision as they rolled her off the bed.
Yeah.
Can you see her coming back now, or at least coming into view?
It’s like, I can’t see them, but I can see her. It’s like she’s—it’s eerie—it’s like she was down on the side of the bed the whole time, and it’s like if you could imagine the bed like a conveyor belt, if I’m not moving, and it is, it’s almost as if she was down on the side of the bed and she just nonchalantly rolled back up onto the bed, not under her power, but just under a conveyance.
She was suddenly there, but I didn’t see anyone around her…. She comes into view.
From your… ?
From below my field of vision, below the bed, up onto the bed. Then I can sense myself, I’m getting poked and pushed around, I’m being pulled back and we’re being moved, manipulated around. And yet I can move again, and it’s just like we never missed a beat….
So suddenly your wife is back in bed.
Yes.
Is she alert, or is she out of it?
No, she’s awake.
This is before you get back on top.
No, oh, before that, she’s limp, completely, totally limp.
Are her eyes open or closed?
Closed.
Do you see yourself getting back into the position that you were in before?
I’m being put into position. That’s odd. That’s real odd.
I’m going to ask you another horribly embarrassing question.
That’s all right.
How did you get an erection? Is it just there?
Page 22 I still had one.
You mean the whole time that you were… Yeah, that I know.
So that… It’s got to be a record.
So the blood never essentially drained… No, everything is as it was… So then you finish?
Yeah. She says, “Ouch!” She said she felt an electric shock. I said, “Where?” She said, “Right there,” and pointed to her hip. And I remember looking at the clock and I’m thinking it’s around, I know it’s midnight, I’m thinking 12:05.
(“Tom,” 1988) I asked Tom not to discuss the incident with his wife, who had been thinking of coming to see me to investigate some unusual events that had happened to her. When she came I asked if we could hypnotically investigate the incident of her feeling an electric shock going through her hips. She was surprised when I mentioned it because she had not thought about it since it happened, and it did not seem to be related to abductions. After the hypnosis session began, she started to describe the lovemaking episode and then she saw a blue light in her room pointed at her.
It’s aiming right at me.
From in front of you, or on top of you, or… ?
I think it’s behind me.
What is behind your bed, there?
At the time, a window and the heater.
There was a window there, you say?
Yeah.
So the blue light is sort of aiming at you from behind.
Uh-huh.
As you notice this blue light, what is Tom doing?
Nothing.
Has he stopped?
No, it’s like he’s not there. It’s like he’s in a trance, he’s just lying there.
He’s lying there on your side?
Page 23 He’s sort of next to me. He’s not moving.
But he was on top of you just before?
Yes, he was.
Now, as you see Tom lying there, there’s this blue light, do you get the sense that you and Tom are alone in the room?
Not anymore.
What’s going on in there? What do you see?
When I saw the light it’s like the window disappeared. It’s like something came through it.
You mean, sort of from over your head?
Yeah, because I was lying down [their heads were at the foot of the bed].
When you say something came through, what kind of a sense do you get of that? What do you think it might have been?
… I kept telling them to leave me alone, to stop using me because I told Tom I want another baby and I can’t get pregnant if they keep bugging me, if they’re messing my cycle up.
Are you saying this in your bedroom right then and there?
I feel like I’m still in the bedroom. I don’t feel like I’ve left.
When you say “them,” are you talking about more than….
I think there were two of them there.
Are they big, medium, small?
They were shorter than I am.
Where are they in relation to you?
They’re standing up against the bed.
Do they come up to you? Of course, if they’re next to the bed they’re fairly close, I would assume.
Mm-hmm….
Well, let’s sort this out then. You’re lying in bed, you see a blue light, you see these little guys in the room. Tom is off to the side now.
Uh-huh.
He’s sort of in a trance. Are his eyes open, or are they closed?
I can’t see, he’s not facing me. They’ve got him moved from the way he was.
And these guys sort of come up to the side of the bed?
Page 24 Right, they were standing up next to me.
Do you sit up, for instance?
I try, but they kept telling me it was all right, just to lie down. And I couldn’t move, I felt like I was just frozen in that position….
Nancy went on to describe an abduction event filled with physical and mental procedures that happened while her husband “waited” for her. The Beings then returned her to her original position in the bed.
What happens next? Do you just continue to lie there, or… I don’t think they were there that long, I don’t remember how long it was, but they left and, I think, the next thing I remember is, Tom was on top of me again, and that’s when I felt the shock.
(“Nancy,” 1988) Automobile An abduction from a car usually begins with a UFO sighting. The abductee may be driving alone when suddenly she sees a strange object flying through the air or even hovering off the side of the road. The victim pulls over and gets out, ostensibly to take a better look at it. Then for no apparent reason she walks toward the object now on the ground. As she gets closer she notices that the Small Beings are apparently waiting for her near it. She is not necessarily frightened, but she is uneasy, yet she cannot stop walking toward them. She comes up to them and they escort her into the object.
If she is driving and spots an object that appears to land out of view, she might stop the car and walk to an area off the road, with trees or heavy foliage, where she thinks the object has landed. She comes to a clearing where a Small Being joins her; they walk for a short distance toward a UFO resting on the ground and enter it.
If the person is in the car with other people, the aliens switch off the nontargeted individuals. For example: Several people are riding at night and the abductee is one of the passengers. Suddenly they spot a strange light in the sky that gives off an eerie glow and begins to move closer to them.
Inexplicably, the driver pulls the car over to the side of the road and stops. The UFO shines a light directly on them. The abductee is excited and frightened; she yells at the driver to keep going, but it is too late. The driver and the other two people have “vacant” looks on their faces, and their heads are leaning against the window or the seat. The victim realizes in horror that her friends are “unconscious.” Their perceptions and information processing have been disrupted, and they no longer are in control of their senses, memories, or wills.
Then the light beam that was shining on the car takes on a different character. It has a physically compelling or pulling effect on the abductee. Her consciousness is altered, and it is difficult for her to understand what is happening. Before she realizes it, she floats up off her seat and heads directly through the windshield and up. She ascends as if she were on an invisible elevator until she reaches the UFO.
Will Parker, a computer programmer, was driving with his first wife, Ginny, through Virginia late one night in 1974. He inexplicably pulled into a closed gas station in a small town, turned off the motor and the lights, and waited in the darkness. A hypnosis session with me fourteen years later revealed why he had performed this seemingly inexplicable act.
So we’re sitting there. I keep thinking. I don’t know why we keep waiting. Nothing’s come by.
There’s nothing out there.
Are you talking with each other while you’re waiting?
Yes, we’re just talking. We’re both kind of jumpy….
You sit there talking.
Yes. She’s telling me to be quiet, she thought she heard something.
Okay.
I don’t see anything, I’m looking around. I don’t know. I didn’t hear anything, but she said she did.
Page 25 Does she hear a noise that’s coming from the front, the back, the side?
She didn’t say, she just said she thought she heard something. She didn’t say what kind of noise, she said she was sure she saw a light.
While you’re sitting there, or before?
Before. She said that there’s someone out there. Oh, shit.
What is it?
Yeah, I see them. Ginny, she’s shocked. She’s praying.
What do you see?
Little guy, he’s outside the car, and he’s not human. He’s, he ought to be cold because he hasn’t got a coat on. I’ve seen this before, but I didn’t remember it until now. Now Ginny is quiet.
I’m turning to her, but she’s just, she’s asleep is what she is.
Are her eyes closed?
No, they’re not, but she looks like she’s drifting off. They got me out of the car.
Do you open the car door, or do they…?
I don’t remember, I don’t think I opened it. I’m out of the car now, and she’s sitting in the car. I keep thinking I want to lock it up, but I can’t get to the car. I don’t want anyone to get in to her, because she’s by herself.
Does she get out of the car also?
No, she’s asleep.
They don’t take her out of the car?
No. I keep thinking I don’t want them to take me away from the car, but I’m afraid she’s going to be scared when she wakes up and I’m not there for her. We’re going around the building. It’s dark. There are a bunch of them.
How many do you think there are?
Four, maybe five. It’s weird. I’m saying, “Where are the rest?” But they don’t say anything to me.
When you talk to them, are you verbalizing?
I’m not sure. I think so, but it’s like they’re not talking back to me, but… they told me that they’ll bring me back. They’re not going to hurt me. I’m not scared. I’m surprised, but I’m not scared.
I’m scared for Ginny because I don’t know how she’s going to, she’s not going to remember… They told me she’s not going to remember.
The Beings took Will around to the back of the service station where they all stood around in a tight group.
We’re just in the back of the building. It’s dark.
You’re behind the building?
Page 26 We’re behind the building. We’re just standing there, like in a group….
Do they say what they’re waiting for, or what’s happening?
I know what they’re waiting for, they’re waiting to be picked up, but they… it’s here. It’s not very big. It’s bigger than the building, but it’s not huge. We’re going underneath it. We’re just, it’s like it’s opening up, but I don’t see any door. It’s just like it’s open. We’re going up inside.
How do you go up inside?
I’m not sure. It’s like we’re on an elevator, but it’s open. I’m not sure. We were on the ground a moment ago, now we’re inside. It’s like we were lifted up, but nothing grabbed hold of me. I can still see the ground and earth underneath, but it’s closing off. I can’t see it that well. It’s not all that bright inside either, it’s kind of dark.
(Will Parker, 19, 1974) Sometimes the abductee will inexplicably get into her car and drive to a specific location where the abduction will take place. The abductee does not think about why she is doing this, or she invents a reason so that her behavior conforms to logic and reality. For example, the abductee tells herself that she “wanted to take a ride” or that she was “going to visit friends.” When asked where she went, she is at a loss to remember or makes up another excuse that she later realizes is not true.
The critical point is that the abductee’s activity can be altered somewhat to conform to the dictates of the intelligence that is directing the behavior. Barney and Betty Hill raced down the highway trying to get away from a UFO when suddenly and for no particular reason Barney made a left turn onto a little-used dirt road leading nowhere. He made it with such confidence that Betty thought he knew exactly what he was doing and did not question it.
Patti Layne, a high school teacher with an ivory complexion and dark hair, indicated to me that she had a few memories that had upset her, but she did not know what had prompted them.
Subsequent hypnotic regressions with me uncovered a series of abductions throughout her lifetime.
In one that took place on her twentieth birthday, Patti decided to get into the car and go for a drive in the mountains. At the time she was attending college in a small town in Pennsylvania.
I was living in the apartment complex on campus, right in front of the health center, and I had my own car, and I just wanted to get out. I had to get out.
Why?
I don’t know, I wanted to get out, and I knew I had to go by myself.
Do you think it’s because you were excited about your birthday, or… ?
No, depressed, but nothing I couldn’t handle. I just had to… find this place in the mountains and I would feel better. I wouldn’t feel depressed.
So you got into the car and drove off toward the mountains?
Mm-hmm.
I want you to sort of see yourself driving there. Do you kind of know where you’re going?
Kind of. I went out the campus, to the left, down English Street, make a left on Queen Road, go out to Mountain Street…. I stayed on Queen Road until I got to Pine Road, and went right, and I just stayed on that for a long time. I made a right on Bluff Road… I got up to the mountains, to the foot of the mountains, and there were some dirt roads, and I don’t know where those dirt roads were. I don’t know what direction off of Bluff Road they were.
Did you turn off Bluff Road onto one of the dirt roads, though?
Hmm, I think I made a left on Aviation Road after Bluff Road, and I think I went out that, and there were some dirt roads up near there off of Aviation Road, and I could see the roads better.
I didn’t know where, I forgot where Bluff Road went until just now, and it goes to Aviation, and I made a left on Aviation and then I kind of draw my blank, but I know there were dirt roads, and I followed one up to the mountains. There are some real ramshackle houses.
Page 27 p What are you thinking while you’re doing this?
Why am I doing this? I have a night class tonight, I should be studying for it. Why am I out here by myself?
You drive out past these ramshackle houses. Do you remember stopping the car, or the car stopping?
The car stopped. It just stopped on this road, and there weren’t any houses nearby. And I started to try to start it up, and I wanted it in reverse to get out of there, and I rode backward. I think it started again, I went backward.
Now before it started again, when the car stopped, did the car just die?
Maybe I stopped it. I think I put it in park and sat there and waited for something.
And as you’re sitting there for a while, can you tell me what’s happening as you’re sitting there waiting?
I wanted to get out of there. I put the car in reverse, and I turned around, and I found another dirt road and it went to a dead end.
(Patti Layne, 20, 1982) This time Patti waited for a while and then the car door opened. She was taken out and the abduction began.
In spite of the aliens’ ability to make nontargeted people unconscious during an abduction, entire cars—abductees and other passengers as well—have been lifted up off the road and taken on board a UFO. In 1979, Tracy Knapp was driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas with two girlfriends when they spotted a strange light swooping down toward them.
So you see it approaching the car a little bit closer, then?
Mm-hmm, but fast, not slow…. It seemed like it dropped down by the window too, like whizzed by.
So it whizzes by, what happens next, then? [Tracy suddenly became upset.] Are you okay?
How are you doing, Tracy? What are you thinking?
That the car’s spinning around.
Do you get a sense of movement?
Like I’m in a teacup, like I’m spinning, like the car’s turning, and I’m grabbing onto the seat and we’re screaming.
The three of you?
Mm-hmm.
[Tracy was crying now and I calmed and reassured her. After a short time she was able to continue.] So you get the feeling that you’re spinning around; therefore I would assume that you’re not on the ground, or you are on the ground.
That we’re not on the ground.
Do you get the sense of motion up, or sideways, or diagonal, or can you tell that?
Like we’re being spun up, like we’re moving forward and getting spun, and I’m holding on to the car.
Page 28 How do you feel physically? Do you feel dizzy, or anything like that?
A force, a pressure. Heavy. Like I’m weak, weighted.
Do you say anything to your friends, or is everybody too alarmed, or… ?
I can’t talk. Nothing’s being said at that point.
What are your friends doing in the front seat? Are they looking at each other? Are they animated or not, or can you tell?
They were not. They’re going limp.
Are you going limp also, or just sort of observing them going limp?
I’m not going limp. I don’t feel like I’m going limp. I see or feel myself have one hand on the door and one hand on the car seat, and I’m looking out the window watching this whole thing and wondering what’s going on….
What happens next, then? [Again Tracy became too upset to continue and I calmed her.] They just leave them alone. It’s me, and they’re just taking me out of the car…. It seems like the window’s open, and they put their hand through the window and they touched me, and then at that point I’m back now.
You’re back against the seat?
Yeah. I’m laid back now. And I’m getting limp then. And then I see a hand coming through the window, and they were touching me and I’m feeling limp now, and they open the door and I feel like I’m being picked up out of there.
(Tracy Knapp, 21, 1978) The Beings took Tracy out of the car; she lost sight of her girlfriends until the three of them were back on the ground in the car.
Small Groups Sometimes the abduction will begin in the midst of a group of people who are engaged in some outdoor activity. Generally they are in small groups of not more than ten. The abductors control the environment by switching off the nontargeted people or causing them to develop an all- encompassing fascination with some object on the ground or in front of them. The object may be a worm, a leaf, something imaginary, etc. They are compelled to look at it and not at what is happening around them. The abductee is, in effect, separated from the herd.
The abductee may then feel an urge to walk toward a secluded area, which may be on the other side of a hill or a stand of trees. The walk may be a long one, going over one hill after another through underbrush, between trees, and so forth until she approaches a clearing where a UFO has landed. On these journeys, either an alien appears near the small group of people and accompanies the abductee all the way to the UFO or an alien waits for the abductee about halfway to the UFO and goes with her from there. When the abductee returns, her friends have been switched on again, but they do not notice that she was missing. Sometimes one youngster in a group of children feels compelled to wander away; the other children are not switched off and continue their play as before without noticing that the abductee is gone.
Janet Demerest is an attractive woman with strawberry blond hair. She and her sister Karen were subjected to a prolonged series of abduction experiences. When Janet was nine years old she was playing with some of her friends a short distance from her house. (She thinks her friends were part of her Brownie troop.) Suddenly they all gathered around something on the ground and stared at it.
I just want you to remember the one part about the little girls playing there. Can you tell me how they’re playing, and what they’re doing?
They’re kneeling and sitting on the ground.
Page 29 Is this a wooded area, or in a playground, or is this somebody’s backyard, or can you tell at all?
I can’t tell. I can see the grass, it’s green.
What kind of game are they playing, or are they playing a game?
I think they’re looking at something….
And where are you observing this from: Are you standing up there, or sitting down also, or a member of this group?
I was sitting down and I got up….
Now you sort of get up and what do you do now?
I’m watching them.
You’re standing now?
Mm-hmm.
And do they just continue to do whatever they’re doing there?
Yeah, they’re all looking at something. I think it’s a bug or something.
Now when you stand up are you still in that little group of kids, or do you stand away from them a little?
I’m a little bit away, a couple of steps.
Now can you tell me what happens next?
There’s a man there.
Is this a man you recognize?
No, I… he doesn’t look like a person.
Is he tall, or is he medium, or is he short? In other words when you look at him, do you look straight at him, or do you look up at him, or do you look down at him? Just about straight at him.
How did you first notice him?
He was standing outside the circle.
Does anyone else notice him?
No, they’re all looking in the circle.
But you notice that he’s there?
Yes, and I got up and went over to where he was.
And why do you do that?
Page 30 Because I was supposed to.
Okay, and what happens next?
We walk away.
Now when you walk away is he sort of next to you, or is he in front of you, or behind you, or is he leading you, or are you leading him, or does that apply?
He knows where we’re going but I think we’re walking next to each other.
Is he the only one there, or is there someone else also?
He’s the only one.
Can you sort of see where you’re walking?
Into the trees, into the woods.
And what happens next then?
I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense, why would I just go?
Well, that’s okay, just sort of go with the flow. You’re walking along, and he’s on the side of you. You walk into the woods, you keep walking, I assume.
I think he’s holding my hand.
When he holds your hand, how does that make you feel? Do you have feelings about that, when he touches you?
I’m happy to be going with him. I want to….
What do his hands feel like?
It’s not bigger than mine. I feel safe.
Does he communicate with you?
No. I don’t think so.
Now you continue to walk, do you walk a long distance or not?
Not very far. We walk down a path, to a place where there aren’t any trees, to a clearing. And I see something, but I don’t have any idea of what it is….
(Janet Demerest, 9, 1964) Janet could see a landed UFO in the clearing. The Small Being who was with her led her up a ramp and into it.
When Patti Layne was in college she and some of her friends went to a secluded mountainside picnic area to drink some wine and to have fun. She had to relieve herself; so she walked into the woods and the abduction event began.
So, do you set the blankets out?
Mm-hmm, right at the car. And we pass around a bottle of wine, and we tell stories, silly Page 31 stories. Talking about how we teased Margie earlier this year at lunch. We told stories about her, and we finished about half of the bottle of wine, just passed it around. I had to go to the bathroom, so I took a little walk down. It wasn’t really a trail, I just kind of blazed my own back into the woods. I walked down to the left; actually, we were to the left of the car, I was wrong. I walked kind of left into the woods, further away from the road, but also up to the left. And I’m kneeling down, and a light shines on me.
Where is the light coming from? Can you get a sense of that?
It’s kind of coming from the right, deeper in the woods, from the right. And I thought that darned Freddy is bugging me again. If he’s not kicking the bathroom doors in at the apartments, he has to shine a light. I think he’s obsessed with this, disturbed. I get kind of mad and I laugh, and I yell “Cut it out,” but I don’t hear anything.
You don’t hear yourself yelling?
No, I don’t hear them talking. They were laughing a while ago. so I got scared, and I started to walk back. There was a whole lot of them [aliens] standing there with my friends.
How do you mean?
There’s just about six of them standing there with them. They got James by the arm, and he’s standing there, leaned over.
He’s standing, leaning over?
Like he’s going to throw up. The rest of them are sitting there, real still, but they got James.
What are the Beings doing with the other ones?
Looking at them, touching them with something, real fast.
You mean, with an instrument of some sort?
Yeah, with a stick. And they’re all quiet.
What are you doing? Are you continuing to walk toward them?
I’m frozen in my path.
About how far away are you from them?
About five feet now.
Oh, so you walked all the way back, essentially?
Mm-hmm.
You’re five feet back, away from James and June?
James is closest to the road, and they’ve got him by the arms. And he looks sick, he looks really sick.
Does he see you?
No, he doesn’t know what’s going on.
Are they walking with him, or… ?
Page 32 … it’s not moving, I don’t know what they’re doing, it’s just everything’s standing still, including me. And he just looks like he’s going to vomit….
Is he sort of doubled over?
Mm-hmm, he’s doubled over, and one of them comes over to me and takes me very gently by the arm, the one I’ve seen before. I think he has a scarf on.
A scarf?
Yes, like a winter scarf. The dumbest-looking thing.
Around his neck?
Mm-hmm. But I don’t know if he’s got much of a neck anyway, but he’s got a scarf around his head.
Does it have a color to it?
It’s red, a red scarf. But he doesn’t have anything else on.
Does he look the same as the other ones?
Mm-hmm, but they don’t have a scarf on. They look more military. They have an insignia.
An insignia?
Mm-hmm.
Can you sort of see what this insignia looks like?
Birdlike. But he doesn’t have anything on. He doesn’t have any genitals either. Just kind of like a Barbie Doll.
Just kind of smooth, there’s no bulge or anything?
No. It’s like nothing. But anyway, he looks friendly, and he comes over very warmly, and he like grabs my arm like an escort would, and he walks me toward where they have James, and one got on one side of James and the other got on the other side of him, and they both kind of linked arms with him, kind of marshaled him along.
Does James stand up at this time, or is he still doubled over?
He’s kind of being dragged.
I see.
They must be strong because, well, James is not real big, but he’s bigger than they are.
There are six of them. One has me, two have James, and I don’t know what happened to the other three. I think there were six of them. Maybe they were staying with my friends.
What are your friends doing at this time?
They’re frozen. Freddy has the bottle in his hand, kind of resting in the gravel. Freddy has his mouth open. Kathy is looking down at the ground. June is looking at her car. Where’s Barry? I don’t know where Barry is.
Page 33 You don’t see Barry sitting there?
No. I don’t know what happened to him. I don’t see him at all. But, anyway, we walk down the road. James was in front with the other two, and I was in back, walking along. We walk kind of down the road a little bit, and off into the woods again, to the left. We kind of walk deep back into the woods.
And they’re still sort of carrying James?
They’re just dragging him along. He just really looks bad, and I’m really worried about him.
They’re dragging him… ?
He’ll get a foot down, and then his knee will sag, and then he’ll put another foot down, and his knee sags again. It sounds like he’s making retching noises.
I see. So they’re not dragging him and his heels are scraping along, it’s more the tops of his shoes, or something?
Mm-hmm. He’s kind of moaning….
Do they seem to have much trouble with James? I mean, is it easy for them to… ?
No, it looks like it’s a pain for them. I don’t know why they don’t float us, but they’re not. They took us deep back into those woods; it’s pretty creepy back there. And there was a craft, it’s kind of like a bubble with a hatch, and it’s really not terribly big. It’s not a saucer anyway, it’s a bubble. It’s kind of black.
Is there any light emanating from it? In other words, I guess what I’m asking is how you can see it if you’re outside and it’s black.
There’s some light inside. There’s like windows, a whole little row of windows around the top, and we walked in the little… It wasn’t much of a ramp, just like a little walkway inside it.
Is James still there?
They got him in first. They took me into the first room on the right, and he went along down further. It’s like next door in another room.
(Patti Layne, 21, 1984) Although it is uncommon, individuals who happen to be near an abductee will also be taken in an “opportunistic abduction.” When Patti was fifteen years old, she and about eight other students were on an overnight camping trip as part of a high school club. At night they decided to go “skinny dipping” in a nearby reservoir. As they approached the reservoir, they saw a strange light in the sky.
Suddenly the light was shining on them and all of the students were lifted off the ground and taken on board a UFO.
Alone in the Daytime Abductions can occur when a person is alone in the middle of the day. For instance, nine-year- old Jill Pinzarro was returning home after checking out several books from the library. They were in the basket of her bicycle and she was reading one of them on the handlebars as she walked alongside her bike. She cut through a park to go to her house about a mile away.
Do you decide to go through the park that day?
Yeah, I always go through the park. I don’t know another way to go. It’s overcast. It’s about, it must be about four o’clock because I think I have to be home about five o’clock for dinner.
And you go into the park, and you start walking, and what happens then?
Page 34 It’s troublesome to walk and read, and push the bike. So I stop at a bench near the statues….
I put the books on the bench because the bike won’t stand up with the books in the basket. I guess I don’t want to go home because then I’d have to stop reading to do stuff, get ready for dinner, I don’t know. I don’t really know why, maybe I just want to read the book. It might be a Lucky Star book.
Are you still on the bench?
Yes.
Do you continue to read then?
Yes.
What happens next?
I go to the trees. I don’t know why. But it’s, I’m just there at the trees. I don’t know where the books or the bike is.
Is the stand of trees dense, or is it just a few trees?
It’s a lot of trees, not a forest. But I’m at the edge of the trees. Something is, there’s something there in the trees. I’m being brought to the trees.
You’re being led to the trees, or carried to the trees, or walked to the trees?
I feel as if I’m walking, but I feel as if I’m standing there and looking and there’s someone at my elbow. And I don’t want to —it’s not that I’m apprehensive. I don’t feel as if I can resist… I think that there’s something that’s making me come, not that anybody is there. It feels like there’s somebody right behind me, or beside me, but I don’t think there is. It’s just as if I were being brought there.
[Then Jill remembered what was there.] There’s something that’s lit up, or glowing. And that’s what I don’t like about it. There shouldn’t be… Is this the outside of something, or the inside of something, or… ?
It’s the outside. It’s not a bright light, it’s glowing. But there shouldn’t be a glow in there.
There’s something over, I’ve walked up to something. I’m under something. All right, I climb up something metal, ladder-type thing…. Now it’s dark, when I come close to it, it got dark.
(Jill Pinzarro, 9, 1958) Jill climbed up the ladder and entered into the object.
ENTRANCE The actual entrance into the craft may be difficult to remember. The abductee may be extremely frightened; often she is confused, dazed, and nauseated, and her vision is impaired. It is difficult for her to orient herself. Furthermore, her entrance procedures may vary according to the size of the craft that she is brought into. Abductees describe UFOs that range in size from thirty-five to hundreds of feet in diameter. In smaller and medium-sized craft the abductee usually enters directly into an examining room, but, for reasons that are unclear, in larger craft she is almost always brought into an entrance room. There she either lies on a table or stands up. In neither case is she able to move, but she reports feeling “tingly” and that something “physical” is happening to her.
Sometimes there are machines around the wall, and she might find herself surrounded by a gray “mist” or “fog.” The Beings who have accompanied her during transport stand around and watch her.
After a short while, a Being comes over to her. He helps her take off her clothes and leaves them Page 35 there. He puts his hand on her elbow or her wrist and guides her down a hall toward the examination room.
On rare occasions, the abductee might also have to stay in a waiting room until a table in the main examining room becomes free for her to lie on. In these cases, she is brought from the entrance room into a narrow, curved waiting area with benches in arched indentations in the wall.
This happened to Karen Morgan in 1981. Karen is the sister of Janet Demerest and a businesswoman who owns her own public relations firm. When she was thirty-eight years old, she wrote to me saying that she “had an experience” that might be related to my research. I interviewed her and eventually we had more than twenty hypnosis sessions together. The strength of Karen’s personality allowed her to resist whatever happened to her during her abductions, and she was extraordinarily articulate in describing her experiences. In one abduction episode, she was strapped into a bench in a curved area while she waited. She saw other people sitting in alcoves near her, including a red-haired woman.
Are these alcoves sort of real close together, or are they spread apart?
Well, they’re apart. What I see is here’s me, and here’s someone else, and here’s someone else, and here’s someone else. [Gestures with her hand.] So they’re across from you?
Uh-huh, but I can’t see them. I can just see their bodies. I can’t see their faces.
Are these men or women?
There’s a man across from me. I don’t know about the other two. He’s wearing heavy work jeans and boots, and I think a flannel checkered shirt. It’s not flannel, it’s a cotton checkered shirt. It looks like what you think flannel shirts look like. He’s “out of it,” I think….
I see.
I’m just sitting there, thinking, trying to get my thoughts, trying to get ahold of my thoughts.
You can sit, though, as opposed to falling forward?
I think they strap you in. I don’t know why I think that, but I do. They do, I’m pretty sure they do.
So is your back up against something, or… ?
A smooth surface.
Are you sitting on wood, or metal, or plastic?
The closest it is, is plastic. It’s some synthetic, I think. It’s not wood. It’s very smooth. I’m not very conscious of everything, though, because there’s no… but it looks smooth. I’m trying so hard to get ahold of my thoughts. I’m telling myself not to panic. I’m thinking, “Don’t panic. Don’t panic because you’ve been through this before. This isn’t a dream, this is really happening.
Look around, look around. Figure out what’s going on.” So I do.
Are you able to look around now?
I’m trying to stay calm…. And then I see he has very thick, brown wavy hair. He’s young, in his twenties. He’s slumped, like that.
Are his eyes closed?
No, it’s horrifying. They’re wide open.
Is he looking around, or… ?
He’s staring, he’s gone. Okay, then next to him, it’s hard to see. Somebody with short hair, I Page 36 think it’s a woman. Short red hair, much redder than mine. A very petite woman wearing pajamas.
Is she young, or… ?
Early thirties. I can’t see to the immediate right of me because of the way the alcove is. I can only see the legs of the person. I’m trying to think, I’m confused now. I think this person is wearing sandals and has nothing on, a woman, her legs. So there’s three women [including me], and one man… Do you make eye contact with [one of the women]?
Yes, I do. Oh, she’s so frightened. Her eyes are just pleading. She’s scared.… She’s terrified, she’s just terrified. Oh, that’s so sad. It’s awful to see someone that scared…. Maybe I look that scared too, though…. But I’m not as scared as she is.
While she sat waiting to be taken into the examination room, two aliens came and took off her clothes. Now it was time to go into the main room.
You know what, they don’t come for us one by one this time. They take us all together. It’s just like Auschwitz, just like Auschwitz.
How many Beings come in?
I can’t believe this. There’s eight, two for each person. I can’t believe this. I’m so mad. I’m so mad. It is just like being in a concentration camp. They come in and they just take you.
Do they unstrap you?
Yes. There are straps here, and here. They might even have them on your legs. I think they do.
Is that to sort of prevent you from falling over?
From getting up and running away, and smacking them, and fighting with them… Now, does everybody sort of stand up when they [take off the straps]?
Well, the guy’s “gone.” He’s just sort of falling over.
Do they support him?
He’s big, and I don’t think that they can move him very well. He’s big. They use something to poke you with. Maybe it’s their arms, but maybe it’s not. I can’t see him now because they’ve got him around the corner. I don’t think they had an easy time with him. And then one puts his hand on my elbow, and I pull it and it feels like I want to pull it so hard, but it just comes out like I’m under water or something….
Do they sort of get you all real close together, or are you separated from each person?
This part is so hard to see. There’s like a measured distance. Six feet, eight feet.
Can you see the red-haired woman?
She’s going around that way. She’s very petite. I feel very sorry for her….
Are you first in line, or second, or third?
Last.
Page 37 So even when you’re at the end you could be the first, closest to the big room. They turn you the other way so you wind up being last? I’m assuming that the redheaded woman was first?
Second, the man was first…. And they push me along. And I just tense my arms hard, to push them, to try to resist them. It just makes them go faster, they push more. I’m not going to look like all those people just going in order like that, though. I want to shake their arms off me, their hands off me.
(Karen Morgan, 32, 1981) If the abductee has waited in an entrance room, it is now time to take her into the main examining room. The transport and entrance phases of the abduction experience are over.
These stories are characteristic of all the other aspects of abduction accounts, which are remarkably detailed and remarkably similar. The accounts display a predictable routine common to most abductions. The Beings have an agenda to carry out and, once the event begins, nothing can stop it.
Page 38 Chapter 4 Physical Probing, Alien Bonding, and the Breeding Program “YOU KNOW WHAT WE ARE DOING.” Once the abductee has been transported to and entered the alien craft, the primary experiences begin. These involve those procedures that the aliens perform the greatest number of times on the greatest number of people, including physical and mental examinations, and reproductive procedures that are ultimately directed to the production of offspring. The primary experiences usually occur close to the beginning of the abduction episode, and the dazed abductee has little time to accustom herself to the event, even if she has had a number of previous abductions.
Although the primary experiences that I describe are typical, one must bear in mind that they are a composite of many. All the procedures may not happen during one abduction, but all do happen during the primary phase.
During the entire abduction experience, communication between aliens and abductees is telepathic. The abductee either “hears” the communication or receives an impression in her mind.
She knows she is being addressed and what the Beings want from her. The alien’s communication to her is almost always reassuring. For instance, she may ask, “Why are you doing this?” and the answer might be, “We are not going to hurt you” or “You will be all right.” The Beings deflect the subject’s questions with palliatives and do not give substantive answers. Usually the abductee receives only an “impression” of what the Beings are communicating and has difficulty repeating specific words and sentences, although some people “hear” sentences in their minds and can recall not only the sense of the communication but the words as well. So far no cases have emerged whereby Beings and abductees communicate mainly through sound waves.
The aliens bring the abductee into the main examining room. Although disoriented, she can still observe what is happening to her. She sees frightening-looking Beings who are busily going about their tasks, seemingly paying no attention to her. But other aliens are waiting for her. They are small —about three and one-half to four feet tall. These Small Beings are usually gray, tan, pale white (not Caucasian), or “colorless.” They have bald, bulbous craniums. Their immense eyes are dark, with no pupils or corneas. They either have no nose or it is so slight that it is unnoticeable, and their small, slitlike mouth does not move. They have no ears. Their bodies are very thin. They either wear nothing or what appears to be form-fitting clothing.
The examining room is small and circular. It might contain a ledge or “walkway” around the perimeter that appears to be part of the wall itself. Sometimes apparatuses or machines are in the room, often attached to the walls and ceiling. The room lighting is diffuse. It can range from bright to dim, but the origin of the lighting cannot be seen. The entire room closely resembles a hospital operating room. It is serviceable and functional; it is neat and clean. The dominant colors of the “metallic” walls and floor are white and gray.
The central feature of the room is the table. It is made of a “metallic” or plasticlike material supported by a pedestal. Stationed around the table are carts that contain instruments and other machinelike devices. There might be from one to four tables in a small room and up to two hundred in a large room.
When the aliens escort the abductee into a very large room, she silently passes other tables containing naked humans lying in rows in various stages of examination. It is eerily quiet. She hears only the clanging of instruments, the shuffling of feet, and an occasional moan from the victims.
The Small Beings lead the abductee to the table and, if she still has her clothes on, assist her in removing them. They allow the clothes to fall to the floor and remain there for the duration of the experience. She then gets up on the table and lies down. Karen Morgan was escorted to a table in a typical way in 1981.
They take me around the corner. I hate this room. There’s tables. I only see four tables, but I think that there’s more… . This room seems more like an operating room than any of the others.
How so?
Mainly because I’m trying so hard to pay attention. I’m able to see more shelves, the shelf that runs around the room, and instruments and stuff. This room is much more in focus. I think they’re going to do that physical examination again. Oh, they take off my clothes. They’re all moving in unison.
You mean everybody’s having their clothes taken off at the same time, or… ?
I mean exactly at the same time. Allowing for the fact that some people have more buttons, or whatever, than others…. I am wearing a red shirt. I really did like the shirt. And they take it off. I won’t put my arms over my head.
How did they get it off?
Page 39 They pull my arms up. I always have the impression they’re saying, “Come on, come on, come on,” like that. I remember they unfasten my blouse. I remember everything.
Do they untie your shoes?
They pulled them off my feet. I don’t think they untied them.
Are you standing, or are you sitting?
Sitting on the table.
How do they get your jeans off?
They turn me around, and lay me down. They pull off my jeans, my underpants. They strap me onto the table.
(Karen Morgan, 32, 1981) Lynn Miller was told to get her clothes off herself.
Does anybody say anything to you?
I’m told to undress. I don’t want to.
Do they help you get undressed then?
They’re sort of pulling my clothes.
What are you wearing?
A nightgown.
And what happens next?
They force me to take my clothes off, and they make me get on the table.
(Lynn Miller, 31, 1986) Sometimes the Beings place Velcro-like (and often metallic) restraints around the abductee’s upper arms and her legs. From the position on her back she gets a good look at the ceiling, which might be smoothly domed or have “ribs” or “latticework” on it. In the center is a circular area that is “buttonlike” or shiny. Sometimes she can see windows around the dome of the ceiling.
Her mental state is altered. She has no concern for what she was doing before the abduction. If she is abducted with her son or daughter and they are no longer in sight, she may quickly forget about their plight. Brothers and sisters may forget about each other. Although the victim may have had many abductions before, she has only a limited sense of familiarity with the situation she finds herself in. Almost everything that is happening to her during the abduction is forgotten as her attention is continually fixed on the present. Some abductees have more of a continuity of memory, but it is severely restricted at best. Janet Demerest explained it: “When I’m there it’s like one thing happens, then the next thing happens. I completely forget about the first thing that happens. I have no sense of who I am.” While she is in this state and trying to get her bearings, the Small Beings begin the physical examination.
THE PHYSICAL EXAMINATION Between two and four Small Beings surround the abductee while she is on the table. She is powerless to move or to speak. But, although she may be confused and terrified, she still has her wits about her. Her eyes are open, and she is able to observe and record what is happening.
The entire examination may not last much longer than ten to twenty minutes. The Small Beings work fast. They are dedicated to performing their tasks. They are quick, efficient, and focused. They Page 40 target specific anatomical sites for a poking, feeling, “touch procedure” type of palpation. Their fingers move rapidly. One abductee said it was like they were operating a typewriter on his body.
The standard pattern is to begin at the feet. The aliens carefully observe and touch the soles of the abductee’s feet. Sometimes they take a sharp instrument and scrape it down her soles, causing her feet to curl in an apparent reflex test. They quickly touch her ankles and twist her foot from side to side. They push and press against her calf muscles. Sometimes they squeeze hard and painfully between the bone and calf muscle. They look closely at her knee and bend her leg a few times as if they are observing the action of the joints.
During the examination of the legs and knees, the Small Beings might make a painless incision in the calf, thigh, back of the knee, or arm. The incision may be in the form of a scoop, or a long, thin cut, or a wide, messy cut. The abductee usually reports no blood and no prolonged healing process.
A scar forms almost instantly. The subject may be vaguely aware of what the aliens are doing at the time, but after the abduction she does not remember how she got the mysterious scar.
The Small Beings palpate the abductee’s thighs and separate women’s legs. They conduct a quick gynecological examination of women. A Small Being might “scrape” the vaginal or uterine wall and extract the material with an instrument in a manner similar to a Pap test procedure. He uses instruments that sometimes resemble butter knives. Sometimes he only palpates and observes.
Men’s and boys’ genitals are palpated, lifted, and carefully observed.
After the genital exam, the Small Beings closely look at the subject’s ribs and rib cage.
Sometimes the aliens make a small incision on the abductee’s left side. They then raise the subject’s arms over her head while they examine and palpate her underarms and possibly her lymph nodes. When they are finished they return her arms to her side.
For women a breast examination is next. Sometimes the abductee feels a powerful and painful squeezing around the nipple as if the Beings were trying to express fluid. If the woman is not pregnant and some fluid is expressed, the aliens collect the fluid onto an instrument and either put it into a container on the table or take it out of the room. Sometimes women feel “heat,” “heaviness,” or swelling in their breasts during and immediately after the palpation. The Small Beings also express milk from pregnant women; even women who are not pregnant have reported that they inexplicably begin to lactate.
The Small Beings now concentrate on the subject’s head. One of them places his hands on either side of the abductee’s temples and carefully rolls her head from side to side. Next they examine the ears with an instrument similar to an otoscope, and look into each eye, usually with a light-emitting device like a physician’s ophthalmoscope. The Small Beings then open the abductee’s mouth and look in. Frequently they insert something into her mouth and scrape the back of her throat. They may jam a large wad of material into the subject’s throat and then withdraw it, causing her to gag and cough. They then examine the abductee’s teeth and gums. They feel inside with their fingers. They might excise a piece of gum for examination.
The Small Beings next palpate the neck and carefully feel around it, giving the thyroid glands special attention. The abductee might gag a little when this happens. Sometimes it is unnerving because the victim thinks she is being choked. Usually the Beings do it gently, causing little discomfort.
After the abductee’s head examination is completed, the Small Beings lift her up, as several abductees have stated, “like a rag doll,” to a sitting position. Her muscle tone is still almost nonexistent. Her legs are out in front of her, and the Beings balance her so that she does not fall to one side. Once she is in this position, the Beings carefully examine her back and vertebrae. They might take a tissue sample from her back, but more often they continue the palpation that is a constant feature of the entire physical examination. They methodically touch and press each individual vertebrae from the neck to the coccyx; they may repeat this process several times. The Small Beings pay very careful attention to the coccyx, and several of them may palpate it in turn.
They take a long time with the vertebrae as their fingers manipulate each bone structure.
After they have examined the vertebrae and back, the aliens roll the abductee onto her left side.
From this position the Small Beings may once again examine and feel the vertebrae. After this, they conduct a rectal examination. They use a variety of instruments, one of which resembles a small wire whisk. They insert the instrument and withdraw it. When the rectal exam is over, the Beings roll the woman completely on her stomach. They once again examine the back of her legs. They may take tissue samples, especially in the area behind the knee. Frequently the abductee reports that she thinks the Beings are “measuring” her from her hip to her heel or up her side. Finally the Beings turn the abductee on her back again.
Essentially this ends the examination. But many variations exist. The Beings may start at the head and work down and then back up again. They may begin with the gynecological aspect of the exam. They may begin with the examination of the vertebrae. Wherever they begin, they work systematically around the body until the exam is completed.
If the subject has been abducted before, any significant change in her physical status since the last examination immediately draws attention. For instance, Melissa Bucknell had part of her black hair dyed blond, and this instantly aroused the Beings’ concern; after much feeling and examining, they decided that she had been ill and needed treatment. In her late thirties, Karen Morgan was fitted for braces on her teeth; during a subsequent abduction experience, the Beings immediately focused their attention on her braces and asked her what they were for. When she refused to tell them, they cut out a small triangular-shaped wedge of tissue from her gum for analysis.
I see them with the instrument. Cutting it out… It doesn’t hurt. I can’t believe this. This is absolutely unbelievable. There is actually a discussion going on about my braces….
What are they saying?
Page 41 Honest to God, I thought… I can’t believe this! They’re saying, “What are these?” They’re looking at them. And I think, “You jerks, I’m not going to tell you what they are. You figure it out!” How do they respond to that?
They don’t pay attention to me. They say… it’s almost like somebody’s saying, “You shouldn’t be afraid by now!” or, “You shouldn’t be afraid.” Of course, they always tell me that. And I say, “I know you guys do this to me all the time, but if I don’t remember it I won’t care.” Because I haven’t remembered it ever, really.
Are you standing up?
Oh no, I’m lying down…. They’re cutting out a piece of my gum. I’m terrified, just terrified. I’m absolutely terrified. And yet I know… I can’t describe all the emotions I’m feeling by now. I feel absolutely terrified. I feel like this is psychological torture, but I’m not afraid for my life. And I’m furious. There are no words to describe how mad I am because I feel like they’re just torturing me. And I’m saying, “This has got to stop.”… Did they tell you why they were taking this sample of your gum?
I say, “Don’t you guys have enough of me by now? What do you want?” I said, “How long does it take you to study somebody?” And what do they say?
They say it can go on for years.
(Karen Morgan, 38, 1987) Scabs, infections, or other body marks and changes attract their curiosity. For instance, a woman who had given birth by cesarean section had new scars that drew the attention of the alien who told her this was not the way they did it. In another instance, Jill Pinzarro had fallen off her bike when she was eleven years old and was later abducted: They’re looking at my knee, and the reason is, I think is, I fell off my bike, and there’s a bad scab there. They seem to know about it because it’s the first thing looked at, they’re just looking at it.
Is this your right knee or your left knee?
Left. Got all sorts of dirt and gravel in it. They’re just looking at it, look at it, touch the edges of the scar where it’s a little infected probably. It’s kind of pus-y, it’s a bad scrape. But they cover it up [with a “sheet”].
(Jill Pinzarro, 11, 1960) Such changes often elicit discussion among the Small Beings as they try to discover the origin of the change on the abductee’s body.
Implants Toward the end of the examination, the aliens either implant a small, round, seemingly metallic object in the abductee’s ear, nose, or sinus cavity, or remove such an object. The object is as small as or smaller than a BB, and it usually is smooth, or has small spikes sticking out of it, or has holes in it. The function of this device is unknown: It might be a locator so that the targeted individual can be found and abducted; it might serve as a monitor of hormonal changes; it might facilitate the molecular changes needed for transport and entrance; it might facilitate communication.
The ear is a commonly described place for the implant. The abductees report that Small Beings will insert the object with a long, thin instrument far into the ear canal, sometimes rupturing the ear drum, and leave it very near the brain. When asked during hypnosis what the aliens are doing, abductees frequently reply that they “know” the aliens are placing an implant there. How they know this is not apparent, but sometimes an abductee describes a small object shaped like a ball bearing on the end of the instrument that is inserted; when the instrument is withdrawn, the ball is gone.
The nose is another place for tiny implants to be left. Abductees say that the aliens insert an instrument way up in their nasal passages between their eyes. Sometimes nosebleeds occur after this procedure. Both child and adult abductees have seen physicians for nosebleed problems, and Page 42 have discovered odd holes inside their noses. Several abductees have reported that a ball-shaped object either dropped out of their nose or was expelled when they blew their nose. All of these expulsions happened before they knew they had been abducted; in each case they thought that they had inexplicably inhaled something and discarded the object or lost it.
The third most common place for an implant is in the sinus cavity underneath the eye. The Small Beings sometimes insert a sharp, thin needle downward into the tear duct and then into the sinus cavity below the eye and above the cheek. Like the other procedures, it is not painful, although it can cause swelling and sometimes black-and-blue marks. Once again people report that they “know” the aliens left an implant behind.
Abductees tell of other areas of implant placement, such as near the ovaries and in the lower abdomen in women, and even in the penile shaft in men, but the preferred places appear to be in the head.
STARING PROCEDURES Throughout the abduction, both as a way of communicating with the abductee and, presumably, of examining and altering her mental and emotional state, the Beings stare deeply into the abductee’s eyes. For instance, during the first moments of an abduction, often before the abductee has been transported to the UFO, an alien inexplicably stares deeply into an abductee’s eyes. When the abductee is very excited or frightened during the abduction, an alien stares into her eyes, calming her. Staring can also alleviate an abductee’s pain. However, the most profoundly affecting of the staring procedures is Mindscan.
Mindscan After the Small Beings complete the physical examination and implant the device, they stand back from the abductee. Then a Taller Being walks into the room. The Taller Being closely resembles the Small Being except that he is slightly taller, he might have subtly different facial features, he sometimes wears noticeable clothes, and he has an air of authority about him. He gives orders and the Small Beings obey. People often have strong and divided feelings about the Taller Being. Some hate him because he is clinical and brusque, and because he does “bad” things to them. Others feel he has more of a range of emotion and they can relate to him better than they can to the Small Beings. Abductees sometimes call him the doctor because of his demeanor and his task. He is usually very businesslike, with a detached, matter-of-fact attitude.
When the abductee attempts to communicate with the Taller Being, he usually responds with reassuring phrases, much as the Small Being does. But when “pushed” he will not respond directly to the questions asked. When an abductee asks, “What are you doing?” he may answer with a cryptic, “You know what we are doing.” When an abductee asks if they will ever stop doing this to her, the Taller Being might respond with, “You are very special to us” or, “This is very important and you are helping us.” At times the Taller Being will perform the physical exam himself, but Mindscan is the focus of his attention. Mindscan entails deep, penetrating staring into the abductee’s eyes. Abductees commonly feel that data of some sort is being extracted from their minds. We do not know what the information is, how it is extracted, or what the Beings do with it. One abductee thinks that they transfer it to other Beings’ minds.
During Mindscan, the abductee lies on the table and the Taller Being stands next to her. He bends over and comes very close to the abductee, who may feel extremely frightened and threatened. He may even be close enough to touch foreheads with her. When asked how close the Taller Being is to them during Mindscan, Will Parker, Patti Layne, James Austino, and Lydia Goldman gave typical answers: He’s right up in my face. Not quite touching my nose with his face, but he is almost that close.
(Will Parker, 33, 1988) If he had a nose, it doesn’t seem that he does, not much of one anyway, it’s just pressed down as close to my nose as he can get without specifically touching.
(Patti Layne, 23, 1985) How close is his forehead to you?
He is touching it. He is leaning right over and touching it…. My nose touches his face.
(James Austino, 21, 1987) Page 43 I just see what I am looking at and I see this thing moving and it looks like a monkey.
How close is this face to you?
I would say inches….
(Lydia Goldman, 4, 1936) The Taller Being then gazes deeply into the abductee’s eyes. His black eyes, which lack pupils, occupy a huge amount of space on his face. They are spellbinding, riveting. He locks eyes with the abductee. Even though she tries, she cannot close her eyes or take her eyes off his. Most abductees feel overwhelmed by the procedure. They feel as if they are “falling into them [the eyes]” and achieving some sort of connection with the Taller Being. He may order her to “look at me!” to ensure proper contact.
I’m looking into those eyes. I can’t believe that I’m looking into eyes that big…. Once you look into those eyes, you’re gone. You’re just gone.
How do you mean that?
I can’t think of anything but those eyes. It’s like the eyes overwhelm me. How do they do that?
It goes inside you, their eyes go inside you. You just are held. You can’t stop looking. If you wanted to, you couldn’t look away. You are drawn into them, and they sort of come into you….
Are your eyes open or closed?
My eyes are open, but my mind is sort of gone. I have no will. I have no will. I am absorbed and I’m not fighting it.
(Karen Morgan, 9, 1958) Some people say that they feel that the Taller Being is “stealing their memories.” Others say that the effect is calming and soothing, and they are not as frightened as they were before. Both men and women report feeling vulnerable and violated. They are powerless to prevent this procedure from happening. If the abductee tries to close her eyes, the Taller Being tells her she must open them, and she does. Often the Taller Being’s hand is on the abductee’s head or shoulder while he completes his procedure.
Bonding During Mindscan, the Taller Being can elicit specific emotions in the abductee, such as fear and terror. Often he will create an instant rush of pleasurable emotions in the abductee that “bonds” her to him. As he stares deeply into her eyes, she may feel that the Taller Being is really a “good” individual. She wants to help him. She wants to be with him. She wants to give herself to the Beings’ “program,” to help in any way she can. She does not want to leave. Sometimes there is a romantic and even sexual quality to these thoughts. Some women say that they “love” the Taller Being. They want to give themselves to him fully and completely. Men have similar feelings, especially if they perceive the alien to be “female.” Bonding can be a totally overwhelming experience.
Very young children undergo the same experience. But instead of strong romantic or sexual feelings, they usually consider the Taller Being to be “nice” and a “friend.” During abductions they are comforted that their “friend” is present to protect them. With children over age ten, however, the Taller Being might induce mature bonding feelings.
Lynn Miller was a Mennonite woman who had experienced a series of inexplicable events in her life. In one hypnotic regression, she remembered being abducted from her car near Tuckahoe, New Jersey. During the event, the Taller Being stared into her eyes intently and began the bonding procedure.
Can you tell if the person that’s looking in your eyes is the same one that was in the room when you first came in, or is he different?
Different.
How is he different?
Page 44 Bigger.
So when he looks in your eyes, does he just do sort of a cursory examination, or does he go from one eye to the other eye, or is he just kind of staring into your eyes?
He’s staring into my eyes….
Is he touching you?
Yes.
Where is he touching you?
My head.
Now, as you look at him, what kind of feelings go through your mind?
Love.
By love, do you mean directed toward him, or just sort of amorphous?
It’s for everything.
Are you looking into his eyes also?
He makes me.
So he looks into your eyes and you get this sort of rush of pleasurable feelings again?
Yes.
When you have this rush of pleasurable feelings, is there sort of a sexual component to this as well?
Yes.
Is it because of the situation of the vulnerability of it all, or… ?
I think from what he’s projecting… .
So he looks into your eyes for a while, and then what does he do? Then he goes down and does a gynecological exam….
(Lynn Miller, 31, 1987) When Barbara Archer was twelve years old, she found herself in a room with forty or fifty tables.
After her examination the Taller Being came over and performed Mindscan on her. I asked her if he was looking at her.
Yes.
Was he just kind of looking at random, or… ?
He looked into my eyes, and I really like him.
You looked in his eyes too?
Mm-hmm, but I just felt happy and I just lay down.
Page 45 , j ppy j y Did he kind of look in your eyes for just a short instant, or for a little bit longer?
No, for a little while. But I don’t feel sick anymore, I just feel a little chilly.
Now when you look into his eyes, what kind of feelings do you have?
He makes me feel happy. I think that he likes me.
Do you feel positive toward him?
Mm-hmm, he doesn’t scare me when I see him. The smaller guy scares me, but he’s okay because I feel like I know him, but not like this….
[The Taller Being then left Barbara for a short time and when he came back to her he resumed his bonding procedure.] Then the tall guys comes back, and he asks me how am I doing, and I say I’m fine. And he looks at me again, looks at me for longer.
What kind of a feeling do you get when he looks at you?
I feel wonderful. I think that he’s wonderful.
Now when you’re looking at him, does this sort of have an almost romantic type of feeling to it?
A little bit, yes. He just makes me feel okay, makes me feel good.
[I asked her delicately if there was a sexual component attached to these feelings.] Yes, I think that there is.
…you look at him and he looks at you, and you get this rush of positive feelings. Is that the way to describe it best?
Yes, I just feel like I fall into it.
Does he say anything, communicate anything while this is going on?
No, just a general happy feeling.
What do you think he’s doing?
I don’t know, I think he… I don’t know. I think he can read what’s in my mind, he knows what’s in my mind…. He makes me feel grown-up, sort of. When he says things to me he talks to me like I’m really young, but I feel womanly or something, I guess because I think that he thinks I’m attractive or something.
(Barbara Archer, 12, 1979) Twenty-three-year-old Patti underwent a bonding procedure that attracted her to the Being. She struggled to explain what it was like.
So now he comes over and he sort of stares into your eyes. Do you have those same feelings of liking him?
Yeah, kind of liking him. Not being really threatened by him. Kind of sympathizing with his purposes, whatever they would be.
Page 46 Patti, do any of these emotions seem sort of bordering on romantic feelings or anything approaching that?
Well, I don’t think he means it to be that way, but I may interpret it to be that way. Like he’s just so curious, and he’s looking at me with such questioning eyes, and maybe I interpret it that way.
But he gives me a feeling, just kind of a head rush. A real head rush, just all different emotions.
He’s trying to tap into me, maybe he’s just evoking things from me, it’s because he’s curious as to what they are… . A real powerful feeling, but it’s really, you can’t really describe it adequately.
Romantic is just too shallow…. I think you become one with this thing. You’re happy. It’s just like a symbiotic relationship. It’s like you exist together with him, there, while your eyes are locked and you just kind of feed on each other, charge each other. It’s really a very hard thing to describe.
Do you have a feeling you have a certain vulnerability in this?
Yeah, I really do. Because he’s definitely the dominating one.
Do you feel that you’ve sort of given yourself over to him?
Um-hmm. Like possession in a way.
Does this have a sort of sexual component to it?
Yeah. In a way. It’s not unpleasant, though. It’s like you are meant to do this.
(Patti Layne, 23, 1985) At times a female Being will perform Mindscan and bonding, especially with abductees who are children. (Somehow the abductees know that the alien is a female even though they see no anatomical differences.) The female Being is kind and sympathetic. She explains that they are not going to hurt the abductee. She considers the abductee to be a “very special” person who is helping them. She is grateful for this help. The alien might state that the abductee may even be “one of us.” She is very gentle and empathetic. The abductee cannot help but be fond of, or even love, this female Being.
When Jill Pinzarro was ten years old in 1959, she received a strong “friendship” impulse during the bonding procedure. A Taller Being stared at her, and she began to feel positive emotions.
It’s quite reassuring for some reason. I don’t know why it’s reassuring. It’s not love or care or anything like that, but there is a sense of connection to this Being, and it’s not false…. I guess there’s a sense of not even guardianship, but of being personally important in some way to this Being…. And the sense of protection too. I know I won’t come to harm, I know the Being cares about me to the extent that it cares, and that… it’s not cold, it’s limited but it’s not cold. In fact, in some ways it’s more than human beings give because even though it’s not as intense, it’s unconditional.
While he’s looking down at you and you’re getting this sort of feeling, does he touch your forehead or anything?
I can’t think of this as a he.
Do you think it’s female, or does that apply?
It’s more like a she than a he, more like a nonsex than either. But sort of leaning toward the she?
Yeah, just because of the nonmasculine quality of its personality. Maybe it’s the unconditional warmth or something. I don’t know. I don’t think men are so unconditional, maybe that’s why I’m picking this up.
Does this Being put his or her hand on your forehead while you’re thinking about all this?
As a matter of fact, yeah. I almost think that it wants me to look into its eyes, then it links up with me in that caring way, and then it touches my forehead and I feel quite calm and at peace. I Page 47 think this one is a little different from the others in some way. I don’t mean physically…. I do feel such a strong emotional… emotional isn’t really the right word, but bond. I trust. I, to a degree, love, I think, because I so much need what is being given.
Does this feeling, as you’re lying there, have a slight sexual component to it as well, not necessarily directed toward them, but more amorphous?
Wait a minute, let me get ahold of this. There is, yeah, if you want to say that willing surrender is sexual, it’s there.
Is this a little bit confusing to a ten-year-old girl?
It’s not a child’s emotion. But who analyzes like that? It’s just something new.
Is it embarrassing?
It doesn’t have… no. I don’t think it’s embarrassing. I don’t have words. It’s desirable, good, beautiful, and shocking and traumatic, without having as much intensity as those words imply because I can’t analyze it, it’s just there.
Now this feeling that’s being created in you, does this feeling last very long? Do you feel it sort of ebbing away as you’re lying there, or does this maintain a high level of intensity for a long period?
It ebbs away slowly. It does have a slightly sexual component which I don’t recognize at the time. But in another way it can never leave. It’s there, as a perfect experience, and you always try to recapture those, don’t you?… I don’t think I’d want to give it up.
(Jill Pinzarro, 10, 1959) From time to time the aliens will induce rapid, intense, sexual arousal and even orgasm in a woman as part of their Mindscan procedures. A few abductees report that arousal occurs through manual genital manipulation during Mindscan. Others think that it is a combination of physical and Mindscan procedures that quite suddenly creates sexual feelings. Most women, however, know that the feelings are being elicited from them almost as if the aliens were pushing a mental button. In spite of their attempts to fight it, sexual arousal builds to a peak in a few minutes and then subsides.
As often as not, orgasm will take place. The orgasm is not a pleasurable event—it is usually something to be endured until it is over. Some women, knowing what is happening, become very angry and humiliated when this procedure begins, but control is not theirs.
When Mindscan is completed, or when the sexual arousal procedures are at their peak, the Taller Being immediately begins a set of gynecological and urological procedures.
REPRODUCTIVE PROCEDURES Reproductive procedures are a constant feature of the abduction experience and are ultimately directed to the production of offspring. Women endure a complex series of gynecological procedures designed to collect and implant eggs and to extract fetuses. For men, the urological procedures are focused on taking sperm.
Egg Harvesting The Taller Being breaks off from performing Mindscan and begins what is reported to be ova harvesting. With one hand he presses on the woman’s abdomen in the region above the ovaries, and with the other he inserts a variety of instruments into her vagina. The first is a speculumlike instrument that creates an opening large enough to work with. Then he inserts a long, thin, flexible tube that women report goes in very far. One woman described it as being as thin as a “daffodil stem.” The women then realize that the tube is going to an ovary. Most women in some way know that he is taking an egg. As this procedure goes on, the women may feel ill, they may feel a “twinge” of pain, cramping (a little like menstrual cramps), or pressure. Some women perspire, feel dizzy, nauseated, and weak.
In another common procedure, also presumably for egg harvesting, the aliens insert into the woman’s navel a thin needle attached to a “syringe” apparatus. When they did this to Betty Hill, the Beings evasively told her that they were performing a “pregnancy test.” Other women have reported that the Beings told them they were taking eggs. Still other abductees have felt that the procedure was related to both but not specifically to either. One woman stated that the needle in the navel was used to take an egg from the ovary when she was menstruating. On some occasions a slightly larger Page 48 tube is placed in the navel and a liquid is injected. Abductees feel cramping when this procedure is performed. Sometimes the insertion of the needle is painful, but most of the time the aliens succeed in blocking any discomfort.
Now they come up and they’re poking at my bellybutton….
When they poke at your bellybutton, do they use their hands or do they use an instrument?
An instrument.
Can you describe what this one is like?
It’s long and pointy. It’s like a needle…. It pinches.
Do they insert it into your bellybutton?
Yeah.
Does it hurt?
Yeah.
Do they stop the pain, or… ?
They put their hand on my head.
Does that stop it?
It seems to take it away.
(Lynn Miller, 30, 1985) After the egg has been harvested, the Taller Being puts it into a container and places it on a cart or gives the egg container to a Small Being who quickly takes it out of the room. After he is finished with the egg-harvesting procedure, the Taller Being goes over to the woman’s head and stares into her eyes again. Some women “black out” or go to sleep when he does this as a wave of irresistible calmness overtakes them. Then the Taller Being turns around and walks out of the room.
Embryo Implantation Implanting a fertilized egg into the abductee is another critical procedure of the primary experiences. Usually the woman knows that something is being inserted into her and left there. She receives the impression that she is now pregnant. She does not want to be pregnant, and she certainly does not want to be pregnant under those circumstances. The Beings ignore her objections. Karen, for one, was furious at the gynecological procedures performed on her during an incident.
And now… I’m wondering what he’s doing, and I say in my mind, “You son of a bitch, I’d better be all right,” and he says, he’s down at the other end of the table, he says, “But you are all right,” or that he’s just making sure. And then he comes back up…. I think he takes an instrument, and I think he’s taking… it always reminds me of a Pap smear, but I think that’s what he does next…. I remember it feels like a long, rounded instrument.
Thin, or… ?
Thin. I can feel it. A long… I don’t know what he’s doing. This part is mystifying to me. I can’t see and I don’t know. It’s a long, rounded instrument.
You mean, sort of tubelike, or… ?
That’s what it feels like. I must have seen it at some time, too, because I have a better image… Is it something that would just sort of take a smear, or is it something that has an Page 49 apparatus on the end of it?
It definitely has an apparatus on the end of it, and it definitely has a hole somewhere on it, or an impression. I can see it. It’s sort of like a bullet. It’s something, it’s got a bullet in it. I don’t know how I know this. I don’t think this is for removing an egg, I think this is for inserting one.
For inserting an egg?
Okay. That’s why he gave me that exam. That’s why they were worried. He’s implanting an embryo in me, I’m positive of it. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind.
How do you know?
I have no idea, I just know it. I have the impression of something being shot into me, or put into me, but I can see this instrument and I don’t know why. Stapled into me is a better way. I don’t know how I know this. But I know it, even while it’s going on. He must have told me, or I could see it in his mind. Because I’m saying, “This is repulsive! You’re not going to get away with this. I will not let you do this!” And he said, “Yes, you will let us do it. It’s very important.” They never say, “There’s not a damned thing you can do about it,” they always give you some reason. And I say, “I’ll remember this and I’ll have an abortion.” And he said, “You won’t remember this.” That’s a suggestion he’s giving me. He’s saying, “You will not remember it.” It’s hypnotic. And I’m saying, “I will, I will.” But then I’m thinking really fast in my mind, I can never get an abortion. How can I go into someone and say, ‘I’m one day pregnant’? And then I think, there’s got to be a way to get it out, because I know when they put it in they’ve got to take it out, and that means I’ve got to go back. And then he says, “You know there’s nothing to worry about.
We’ve done this before.” And I think I know they’ve done it before, and it always makes me feel sick. I can’t believe it, they really are doing this. They really are doing this. And there’s nothing I can do.
Does this take a while, or is this a very short procedure?
Not as short as some of the others. But it’s not long and drawn out. They’re very careful. The other times they rush around, they give you a real fast exam. They usually focus on one part more than another, depending on what interests them. This time they’re focusing on this and they’re really careful, not because of you but because of the disgusting old hybrid embryos that they’re sticking into you. I feel like a cow. I’m so mad, but I’m also so exhausted. And I now there really isn’t anything I can do.
What does he do when he finishes with this?
The instrument stays in a while, and then he pulls it out. I have the impression there’s a lot of goo involved, but I never remember feeling it…. And he pulls this thing out and he… I don’t know if he hands it to someone or puts it down. He might hand it to someone. And then he pats my stomach or touches my stomach and says, “There we go.” I say, “You’re disgusting, get your hand off me! Take your hand off me! Take your hand off me!” And he does.
Where was his hand, on your stomach still?
He took his hand off my stomach, and he sort of shakes his head as if he’s puzzled. Shaking is too violent a term, he moves his head as if he’s puzzled, as if to say, “I don’t know what’s the matter with this one.” (Karen Morgan, 28, 1977) Karen woke up in the morning with a sticky, gelatinous substance between her legs. She was puzzled about how she got it and washed it off in her morning shower.
Lynn Miller was with her son when they were driving to Cape May, New Jersey. They saw a huge object hovering by the side of the road, and Lynn felt compelled to pull the car over and stop. In the ensuing abduction, the aliens separated Lynn from her son, inserted a needle into her bellybutton, and then implanted something in her.
He puts something inside.
Do you feel whether this is going in just a little way, or a long way, or… ?
Page 50 It’s all the way in.
Left side or right side?
I don’t know. I can’t tell.
Can you describe what this feels like? Does this give you any pain, or pressure, or cramping?
It hurts.
Now, is this after they do the bellybutton procedure, or before?
After.
And what happens next?
It feels like there’s something still in there, but they’re done.
Do you think that they put something in, or they took something out?
It feels like they put something in.
Okay. And what happens then?
Then they make me get off the table.
Just before that, now, this taller one, does he come over to you, say something to you?
They tell me they’re implanting me.
Does he say with what?
No. He said I was implanted.
Do they mean internally?
I don’t know.
What do you say when they say that?
I don’t remember saying anything.
(Lynn Miller, 30, 1985) Janet Demerest has also had events in which she felt that something had been left inside her. As it was for Lynn, it was difficult for her to tell what was happening during one of them.
At some point the guy is there with this long metal thing, like a needle. But I don’t know what context [it is in]…. I think he stuck that thing inside me, and I thought it was going to hurt.
Now when you say stuck inside of you, do you mean through your stomach or… ?
Vaginally.
What do you think he’s doing there? What is your impression?
Page 51 My impression is that he is putting something inside of me….
Do you feel any pain?
No, but I’m scared.
Do you say anything to him?
No, I’m afraid to move….
I asked Janet what the thing looked like that had been left in her. She said that it was “a little round thing.” When the procedure was completed, a female Being helped her off the table.
Somebody helps me sit up, pushing me from the back. I think it’s a woman, I don’t know.
Okay. You sit up on the table?
And all I can think is that I want to have a baby.
And what happens next?
Well, I think I kind of tell that to the woman, that I want to have a baby.
Does she respond?
No. She has no expression on her face at all…. I feel like I’m going to have a baby, and that I want to have a baby.
Do you think that might be related to seeing that thing put inside you?
I don’t know. I don’t know why all of a sudden I would want to have a baby.
(Janet Demerest, 33, 1987) The procedures for implanting an embryo seem similar to harvesting an egg, and often the abductee cannot tell the difference. Similarly, it is often difficult to tell when the aliens extract an embryo or fetus from the abductee.
Embryo and Fetal Extraction The extraction of the implanted embryo is the third critical gynecological procedure in the primary experiences. The abductee with the implanted fertilized egg may not realize that she is pregnant even though she stops menstruating. The abductee may have been extremely careful in her use of birth control, or she may not have had sexual relations of any sort for many months, and therefore there would be little or no reason to believe that she was pregnant. Nevertheless, her breasts swell and retain water, she may have morning sickness, and she may have a “pregnant feeling.” She may take a home pregnancy test that shows positive, and then she may go to a physician for a blood test that confirms her suspicions—she is pregnant.
But about six to twelve weeks later her period begins again. She is inexplicably not pregnant.
She has no miscarriage, no expulsion of fetal material, no indication that something was “wrong.” She goes to her physician, who confirms that the fetus has suddenly disappeared.
Sometimes the pregnant woman decides to have an abortion. When the abortion takes place the physician is puzzled and mystified: There is no fetus. It has mysteriously disappeared.
We cannot be sure of the exact number of times a woman has undergone the implantation and extraction procedures unless we know the number of pregnancies that are terminated in the first trimester. Even then, the pregnancy may be terminated after a very short time, and the subject may assume that she simply missed a period or two and never know she was pregnant. We also have indications that some extractions are completed just before the first menstrual period is missed so that the woman has virtually no overt signs of pregnancy.
Lynn Miller described being painfully poked in the side by the Taller Being and told, “It’s time to take it.” The Taller Being began by using a speculum-type instrument followed by a long, black instrument with a “cup” on the end of it.
Can you tell me what this looks like?
Page 52 It’s long and it’s black. It’s got sort of a cup on the end or something.
Okay, you can go on.
With a suction or something.
Is this instrument attached to anything, or… ?
To a machine.
Is the machine on?
There’s buttons lit up.
Do you hear any noise from it?
No, it’s silent.
So he inserts this suction-cup device, and what happens next?
It feels like he’s tearing something inside at first…. They’re not too gentle. I keep on telling them it hurts.
Do they respond to that?
No.
Does he try to make it stop hurting?
No.
Does he say anything to you while this is going on?
No.
Okay, you can go on.
He seems to pull something out, and he puts it right in something else.
What does he put it in?
Sort of a container with water or something in it.
Is this container near the table, or does somebody give it to him?
He gives it to him.
I mean, when he first got it does somebody bring it to him to put whatever… ?
Yeah, one of the little guys. He wants me to see it. I don’t want to see it.
Does he show it to you anyway?
Yes.
Page 53 What are you looking at, then?
I’m looking at a fetus.
Is this a live little fetus?
Yes, it’s in the bag.
Why does he want you to see this?
He says, “This is your child and we’re going to raise it.” Does this look like a normal fetus?
Yes. I told him it was part of me and they didn’t have any right. He says, “It’s our right.” That’s all he says, “It’s our right”?
Yeah.
Now, what does he do with this container?
He puts it in the machine.
Is there a door or a drawer for it, or an opening?
There’s an opening on the top; he lifts it up and puts it in.
Does it disappear into the machine, then?
I can still see it. It must be glass.
Do you ask him why he’s doing this?
No. I just tell him it’s mine.
Does he volunteer any information as to why he’s doing this?
No, he just said it’s all right.
What happens next?
He told me I’m done, get dressed.
(Lynn Miller, 31, 1986) Although the majority of fetal extraction procedures are performed when the abductee lies on a table, Anita Davis had a fetal extraction while sitting in a special chair.
It’s almost like a birthing chair, it’s at an incline this way, and he’s adjusting straps, or stirrups, or something. I don’t get the feeling it’s to tie me down or anything. I know that I’m going to somehow sit on this thing.
… So this looks more like a chairlike device.
Like a chair that you’d squat in, like something that if you were to give birth in, it would be a good thing. It would go along with the force of gravity, and it would have you in the squatting position with one foot on each thing. I want to go back to the table. I don’t like this.
But you don’t actually see a table in the room?
Page 54 y y No, I don’t think so. I tried to.
Okay.
It’s very obvious that what they put in now has to come out. It’s almost time to give birth to it, but yet, they’re not doing one of those birth numbers, but yet… It has, it’s time to take it out so they can have it. There’s a sense of relief with that.
Is it more than one of them who are adjusting this?
He’s adjusting this. He’s doing it all. The little guys are just standing there, almost hands behind their backs, at ease.
So what are you doing?
We’re talking back and forth. I see.
It’s almost like the obstetrician. I don’t have any sense of dread or anything; it’s like “Yeah, this is part of the procedure.” He gets it ready, I get into it, sort of, there’s no pain or anything….
He straps my feet in. It feels just like going to the obstetrician, though. There’s no sense of “Oh, what are you doing to me?” I know what’s happening….
So you get into this contraption. And they kind of… Strap my feet in.
Where are your arms?
There’s like handles on the sides….
So now you’re… sitting upright?
Mm-hmm.
Your legs are… Kind of bent, like a frog.
What are your feet on?
On little foot platform things, kind of… .
What are the little ones doing?
Just standing there.
And the taller one?
He positions himself underneath… with maybe something made of glass… something to catch it in. And he has me bear down once. There’s no pain, it’s not like I’m simulating birth or anything. And for some reason it just comes right out. There’s a sense of relief. He gives almost a little Pyrex thing to one of the little guys, and he takes it out.
Can you see that little Pyrex thing?
Yeah, if you want to know what it looks like, it looks like what you’d expect a very early Page 55 miscarriage to look like. (Anita Davis, 33, 1991) Twenty-year-old Tracy Knapp found herself the subject of a fetal extraction procedure that provoked intense feelings of sadness and depression in her.
There’s one man here and one man on this side, and there’s one man here and they’re pressing. My legs are up, and I’m getting snipped, but internally. Something’s snipping….
Something burned, burned. A fluid burns me, burns. There’s a fluid put on me and it burns me.
It’s put inside of me. It burns me. [She cries. ] Does anybody say anything to you at this time?
No. [She cries.] [I comfort her,] They’re pressing and there’s snipping.
They’re using instruments for this, I guess, then?
Very tiny, tiny, long, very long, little, bitty scissors things but very, very tiny.
What do you think they’re snipping at? Can you get a physiological sense of that?
Yeah, it feels like… snipping on both sides. Somehow they like, I just feel like an uneasiness.
I don’t know where they’re coming into… I don’t like it. I don’t like it. They’re not taking eggs out of me. They’re just snipping, it’s like they’re snipping. They’re releasing, they’re snipping. It’s like they’re cutting threads or something. They’re cutting something, I don’t know, I don’t know.
Do you get the sense that they’re… ?
Removing something.
Is this a long procedure or a short procedure, or… ?
Pretty long…. I can’t fucking believe this!
Do you kind of see them finishing up?
Yeah.
Do they remove their instruments?
Yeah, they removed something out of me. They removed like a, like a little baby or something. And they removed the sac or something. They removed the… but it’s tiny, it’s real tiny. It’s not a baby.
An embryo you mean?
Yeah, it’s like… What do they do with it when they remove it?
There’s a cylinder or something. It seems like it’s being placed .n this cylinder, like a silver cylinder, I don’t know, tube—silver, probably three inches wide by [gestures with her hand].
Is the cylinder portable? In other words, are they holding it, or… ?
They’re holding it.
Page 56 What do they do with the cylinder then?
Well, you know how, they got other… God! It’s like they’ve got other babies there. They’re in like drawers in the walls; it’s like little drawers that pull out, and there’s babies, like little, little somethings in these drawers that pull out like in a lab or something.
(Tracy Knapp, 20, 1977) Tracy described drawers on the wall containing many fetuses. This is where they put the fetus they took from her. She thought that the drawers were acting as incubators for the fetuses.
Sperm Collection For men, the expression of sperm is a central aspect of the abduction experience. All males after puberty experience the sperm-collection process. The aliens initiate sperm-sampling procedures either directly after or during Mindscan. They place a tubelike apparatus or a funnel with a tube attached on the end of the penis, and they attach the other end to a machine. They then somehow extract the sperm. Sometimes they place a metallic, cuplike machine over the penis to extract the sperm (this is what happened to Barney Hill, among others). The apparatus acts as a pumping machine. An erection sometimes takes place but is not needed. There is ejaculation but not necessarily orgasm.
Often the subject is so distracted with an ongoing Mindscan that he is only vaguely aware of the sperm-collection procedure. At other times it can be quite painful, and it can be extremely embarrassing, particularly for adolescents. Very often a “female” alien will perform a bonding procedure during the extraction of sperm or immediately before it. With a combination of bonding and envisioning (see next chapter), the alien will make the abductee think that he is engaging in sexual relations with a human woman. This facilitates the sperm-collection procedures. At other times a male Taller Being will perform the sperm extraction.
Some men have said that while the sperm is being extracted, the aliens press or “knead” the right side of their lower abdomen. Ken Rogers had his side massaged during a sperm extraction procedure and was at a loss to understand why.
Does he communicate anything to you while this is going on?
Not that I recall. I don’t know what he says at all. I don’t think he says anything. I just feel kind of like a baby, a little. Very safe, calm. I get the feeling these guys are guys who were busy doing something down there.
What do you mean?
I think they’re hooking up a machine. They hook up a machine on a tube, with a suction cup end. So now they put it on my penis. I don’t remember this or feel it, but I can see it happening now. That’s where sexual feeling comes.
This is happening while he’s staring at you?
Yeah, then he’ll break away, and I think he touches me somehow. That’s when I ejaculate. At least that’s the way I see it. And I think while one little guy hooks up the machine the other one pumps my stomach for some reason. That seems to be the procedure. When he looks into my eyes, I get this bonding feeling. When the machine’s all hooked up and ready, he strokes me or something. It feels pleasurable. And I ejaculate into the machine. That’s the way I see it all the time.
So you think this is the same as before, then?
Yeah, it seems to be the same thing. Then they take it away. They wheel this thing away. And then he either bends down, or waits a little, and looks back into my eyes. I think he looks back into my eyes for a short time. Then I get this feeling of “Till we meet again” or something. A real close, ongoing relationship that will continue. Then he gets up and leaves, and I lie there for a while.
(Ken Rogers, 28, 1988) Will Parker experienced the same method of sperm extraction, but his was even more mechanical than Ken’s. One time he felt that there was a “self-contained” unit attached to his penis; at other times he described a hoselike appendage attached to his penis and then to a machine.
Page 57 Are there just these two who are doing this?
There are others. They’ve got this comb-shaped gimmick over my crotch, and it’s a buzzing, vibration type of sensation. It’s a very functional kind of thing.
What do you think is happening?
Well, they’re taking a sperm sample, obviously, because it’s not piss they’re pulling out of there.
Do you feel something flowing out?
Definitely; there’s an erection and there’s no sense of release or anything orgasmic; it’s just like a literal drawing out.
… Can you get a sense of what it [the apparatus] looks like?
The only glimpse I could get of it, and I remember seeing something like it before, a long time before, but it’s like a, it looks like polished stainless steel, aluminum, chromium I guess you’d call it. It fits over the penis and it’s got a rounded lower section that fits up over the testicles.
And it’s like you’re enclosed in this thing. It looks like a piece of machinery that no good mistress of domination would be without, something rather kinky, in a different environment of course. But it looks, it’s completely metallic.
Some people report that there’s like a tubelike thing that goes to a machine on the side of them.
I don’t see any tube or anything. This looks like it’s self-contained.
I see.
Of course, I can’t see if there’s anything coming out of the lower section of it, or maybe where I can’t see, but from where I can see it doesn’t look like there’s anything attached to it, it’s attached to me and that’s it.
(Will Parker, 33, 1988) James Austino was a student at Temple University when he realized that certain puzzling and frightening events in his life might be due to the abduction phenomenon. We had several sessions together; in the course of one, he recalled having sperm extracted by a device similar to Will Parker’s. The Beings began the procedure by pulling an apparatus that resembled a “dentist’s light” close to him from its attachment underneath the table.
Oh, this is the “dentist’s light”?
Yeah, he grabs it and moves it down toward my waist.
How does he get… if it’s down that low…?
He can just reach up and touch it and move it. He pulls it down pretty close to my waist, like maybe two feet above my waist. This part gets embarrassing.
Is this the genital business?
Yeah. The tall guy fumbles around down there, and I’m looking up, and I keep getting the feeling “It’s okay.” So they’re reassuring you?
Yeah. Don’t worry about it, it’s not going to hurt. I still get the feeling that he’s instructing, like the other guy… he’s kind of showing him, because he presses right here [above pubic hair line] Page 58 … and he’s still looking at the other guy, and he looks down and moves it around a little bit. He goes underneath and lifts it up a little bit and starts touching down there and stuff like that. I’m a little uncomfortable.
Absolutely…. So, he’s sort of showing this other guy your genitals, and sort of manipulating the whole thing?
Yes. I feel like a lab animal, just sort of lying there and taking it, like a cat at the vet…. One of the arms has tubes running from it, and they’re bringing it down to my genital area. I say out loud, “What’s that for?” You mean, through your mouth?
Yeah, and the big guy quickly glances over at me, and he moves toward my face. He puts his left hand on my forehead, and he comes down pretty close to my face.
How close is he?
About two inches away from my face right now. It’s almost like I’m locked with him.
While you’re locked with him, what’s going through your mind? Is he generating any feelings?
No, but he’s giving me a picture of Monique [his friend who was switched off during the abduction] with no clothes on. That’s just the image I get.
So suddenly you get this image of Monique?
Yeah.
When you get this image, what setting is she in, or is it just disembodied?
It’s just disembodied… In other words, you don’t get an image of Monique, let’s just say, in another room next door?
No, it’s just an image, like a flash in my mind.
Right.
Then he pulls away, and they’re moving the arm away.
What was going on down there while he was staring into your eyes?
I felt like they were attaching it.
Mm-hmm.
But I didn’t feel anything.
Do you get the sense that you have an erection, or not?
Yeah, one’s going away now. As soon as they pull the machine off, and he moves away.
Okay. Some guys say yes and some guys say no, it doesn’t seem to matter much, for their purposes anyway.
I’m like, “What happened?” Page 59 The part that attaches over your genital area, can you get a sense of what that looks like?
Yeah, I can. It’s like a little ball with the end cut out of it, and it goes over the tip. It doesn’t go all the way down…. This table is pretty useful, multipurpose. It’s like everything’s kind of attached to it on the sides.
So they move this thing away, then?
And I lift my head up a little bit and look down. I’m a little bit embarrassed.
(James Austino, 14, 1980) From time to time a woman will be abducted with a male companion. When that happens, she can sometimes describe the procedures being done to her friend. Their descriptions may vary on the details of what the extraction devices look like, but they are all describing the same event. One woman was abducted with a boyfriend when she was seventeen years old. During the event she noticed that the aliens were attaching something shaped like a “distributor cap” over his penis.
Similarly, Melissa Bucknell also had an abduction with a boyfriend during their lovemaking. She was placed on a table next to him, and she watched the aliens attach a hoselike apparatus with a cap on the end to his penis. The hose went to a machine on the ceiling.
Another woman watched in horror as her teenaged son was placed on a table near her. She could see a female Being perform Mindscan, sperm sampling, and presumably bonding on him.
This was obviously an emotionally wrenching scene for her.
Do they start on Richard now?
I can’t even watch it… Is Richard still asleep while this is going on?
Yes, he’s asleep. But I can’t watch it. I know that he puts his hand on Richard’s head.
The tall one, you mean?
They’re really not very big, but they seem big compared to the other ones.
Is he looking at Richard when he does that?
It gets Richard to open his eyes. I can’t really get into the telepathic conversation they’re having, but I know what they’re saying to him because of what they say to me. And I’m frantic, I’m just frantic. I can’t even watch it. And they’re giving me this exam, and they’re hitting my back, and they’re doing this stupid stuff to me, and I’m trying to get rid of them. I’m saying, “Get out of here! Leave me alone!” And I’m thinking, “Don’t do that to him.” And I’m thinking, “I wonder if I can get my mind into what he’s saying. If I could just concentrate, if they’d leave me alone.” They’re just all over me and I can’t even think…. I’m so mad, and I’m so helpless. And it looks at me. It must hear me.
The one who’s next to Richard?
Yeah, the creature looks over at me—it must hear me. That’s good though. That’s good because that distracts him. And I think, “Keep your hands off him! Get away from him!” I know that they’re taking a sperm sample from Richard. I don’t know how I know it, but I know. I must have seen it. I think it… of course it would hear me. It knows that I’m saying something…. It either leaves Richard or it comes over to me next.
The same one, you think?
I have the impression it’s the same one. The same… either it says it from over there or coming over to me. It says, “Why do you interfere? Why do you want to interfere?” And I say, “You have got to be kidding! You filthy, disgusting creature. You can’t possibly be asking me that question.” It doesn’t understand all that; it just says, “Why do you interfere?” I say, “Leave him alone! Leave his mind alone!” And then it says that he belongs to them. And I say, “No he doesn’t! He belongs to me.” And then all it does is look at me. And it’s saying that I belong to it Page 60 too. And I say, “No, that’s bullshit! I don’t buy that. I don’t care what you had to do with him when he was conceived. I don’t care what you’ve done to him, he’s not yours and I’m not yours. I’ll never be yours.”… I want it to leave Richard alone. It tells me that they’ve only begun with him.
Why should I worry? No harm will come to him. I’ve got to get Richard out of this. Every time I have one of the encounters with one of those creatures, it just depresses the hell out of me.
Does he still stand there with you?
I don’t think, no. He does for a while but then he leaves. I don’t think they’re capable of altering what they’re going to do, so I’m sure he didn’t interrupt himself with Richard. On the other hand, I think he did know that I was trying to interfere. I don’t have the impression that they took eggs or anything this time, but I wasn’t paying any attention to that at all. It’s so hard to focus on anything to begin with, and when I saw that thing put its hand on Richard’s forehead, you know, I’m sure it was the same one who came over to me. But there may have been… there’s more than one running around. It seems there’s another one over with Richard now, sort of a smaller version of the bigger one.
Is it bigger than the little guys?
Yeah…. It’s something to do with sperm samples…. It seems like this one has to do with one of the female creatures.
What do you mean?
I have the impression that there’s a female creature that’s involved. And God knows what she’s doing to him, or telling him.
Is she standing next to him?
Yes. And even though she’s repulsive and horrible, there’s something seductive about the whole thing. I have the impression that she’s opening his eyes.
And is he still lying there?
And she’s opening his eyes. They’re too big. They’re too big. He’s frightened. I just want to scream at the top of my lungs and get her away from him. I’m moving my head from side to side because I’m so upset. I have to make a commotion. I have to make trouble. I have to do something. I’m screaming in my mind. I have the feeling… that she’s doing something to his mind. Like they do with mine. There’s something about it, like the other one was doing with him, but this is more intense or something. How does anyone survive this? They’re putting something in his nose. I know this happened before me. I saw this. They put something in his nose.
They inserted something?
Or they took something out. And I think, “I always knew there was something there, he used to get nosebleeds.” I think that. I’m so furious at this whole thing.
(Name omitted by request) The taking of sperm or the ending of the gynecological procedures usually signals the conclusion of the primary experiences. The Taller Being has left the room and only one or two of the Small Beings remain. The abductee continues to lie on the table for a few minutes. Then the Small Beings get her up, help her to her feet, and guide her out of the room. But the ordeal is not over.
Page 61 Chapter 5 Machine Examinations, Mental Testing, and Hybrid Children “ISN’T THIS A BEAUTIFUL BABY?” By the time the abductee has finished the primary experiences, most of her dizziness, nausea, and confusion has passed, although her consciousness and visual perception are still altered. Her emotions are a mixture of fear, anger, and calmness. The intense alien bonding feelings have ebbed, but she may still feel emotionally attached to the Taller Being. She is now ready for the secondary experiences.
Like primary experiences, the secondary experiences involve physical, mental, and reproductive procedures. The sequence of secondary events is variable, and as always there are significant variations in each procedure.
MACHINE EXAMINATIONS Either the abductee remains on the same table or the aliens lead her into a different room and help her up onto another table. This table is similar to the one that she has just left, except that it may have mechanical contraptions around or on it. She lies down, and the aliens quickly bring one of the machines over to her. They may pull it down from the wall or the ceiling, or “wheel” it over from a side area. It may be attached to the table, or the table may be rolled to it. They turn the machine on, and the abductee can hear a whirring or humming sound. She sees lights on the machine. It may remind her of a “dentist’s light.” The machine is trained on her. The lights are intense. They may be blue or white or yellow.
Sometimes the machine comes down from the ceiling and gets closer and closer to the abductee. It is aimed at her head, her chest, or, more commonly for women, her lower abdomen.
The lights become more intense as the device gets closer. If she feels any sensation at all, it might be a “tingling” where the machine is aimed. If the machine is pointed at the abductee’s head, she might see vivid colors. She is unable to move. The machine may be stationary, or it might slowly circle her body from top to bottom and back again. It is not uncommon for the light to focus on her lower abdomen and genitals. The entire table may revolve with the axis at the feet while her body moves from one apparatus to another.
The variety of machine examinations is great, although the exact purpose of the machines is unknown. Most abductees think they are recording devices, much like X-ray equipment. Somehow people know that the machines are scanning them, “taking pictures,” or making neurological measurements. When Marva Roberts was eight years old, the aliens used a machine on her that was beyond her ability to understand. During most of the hypnosis session she talked from an eight- year-old’s point of view.
Yeah, I know that they’re not going to hurt me…. But it’s okay. It’s okay. They’re not going to hurt me. But they just… What are you going to do, guys?
What are they doing now?
They’re just staring and that little noise they make… I hate this.… I don’t want to be here.
There’s this thing.… Something here that they put over on top of me.… [She gestured to show me where it was. ] Is this machine over your chest?
It’s kind of like over my whole middle; maybe it goes down to my knees. I don’t think I’m supposed to know all this. But it’s a black machine and it’s got like these lights coming out of it.
And there’s lights up there that are, like, I guess it’s almost like that little machine they used on me, and somehow they found something else in there. And it’s like a big one. And it’s… vibrating in my tummy again. It doesn’t hurt. It tickles a little bit, but I guess maybe they’re looking inside me. But when you tickle I touch it… Did you touch the machine?
No, I touched the tummy because it tickled. And they put my thing back down again. But it’s okay, they’re not mad at me. But they’re just touching buttons up there, and… blinking something… I thought maybe they were going to move it up over my head or something. They kind of talked a little or something, and then they decided not to… Page 62 Do you hear any sounds from the machine?
Yes. It’s kind of like… the thing I can hear is like a tiny, tiny, I don’t know what it sounds like, it’s kind of like a hum. But it’s not a hum. It’s a real soft, tiny, tiny noise. It’s sort of like a buzzing… it’s just a tiny, tiny noise.… I’m tired. I want to go home.
Are you in the same room as you were before?
Yes.
Do they communicate anything to you while this is going on?
No. They won’t tell me anything, just like the grown-ups. But they come and mumble back and forth… shake their head or something, but they don’t tell me anything.… Does the machine finally stop?
No, but they’re still kind of talking now… they’re pointing to the lights up on top of the machine, and they’re kind of talking. “Come on! I don’t like this!” They’re moving it away now.
“Can I go home?” This is starting to bug me a whole lot. I don’t like this. Now they’re over there talking again or something. Uh-oh, what’s that they’re poking into me? It looks like it’s kind of shiny. It’s kind of, it looks like metal but it doesn’t feel like it… it’s not cold. It looks like one of Mommy’s Tupperwares…. Something shiny—really orangy-fiery shiny…it looks like a piece of metal, and it’s got a whole lot of little dents in it.
Where is this?
It’s over my head. It’s just glowing… and it’s warm on my face. Whew, it’s bright!
Can you see colors, or can you see just light, or… ?
Well, that thing in the center is orange, and it’s a silver thing and it’s like warm on my face, and then it’s like white. It’s so bright!
Is it over your face, or over your head?
Well, it’s kind of like over my whole head. They want me to stay still. I’m not supposed to… and they didn’t say it, but they said they wouldn’t hurt me. I guess they wouldn’t hurt me. I guess I can do that. I guess I’m stuck here. I don’t want to be here. I want to go home. It’s really warm on my face! It’s really warm on my eyes. It’s dark up there still. I wish I could see something… they just put this thing on my head. This holds my head down.
Is this like a clamp, or is it like a helmet, or something that’s lying on top of it?
It’s kind of lying across my forehead. It looks like [whisper] because they… all three of them up there at my head. I can’t see anything because the machine’s on my head. Maybe they’re looking inside my head! Maybe that’s what they were doing! They don’t tell me, but I can’t understand the words, but they let me know that… special… just a kid… but they said that I can understand them and that’s what makes me special.
(Marva Roberts, 8, 1963) The machine examinations may be quite elaborate, involving the abductee’s entire body. One woman was placed on a table, and a group of identical cylindrical machines were arranged around her table. They all went on at the same time and she felt an intense “pressure” inside of her. She bore it for a few minutes until she could not stand it any longer. When she reached that point, the Beings turned the machines off.
While most machine procedures involve the abductee lying down, many also require her to get into a cylindrical device that envelopes her. Abductees have also described procedures in which apparatuses are placed on top of or around their heads. Some of these head devices appear to make major muscle groupings move in the abductee’s arms and legs. Others make the abductee see bright colors and geometric shapes, and still others have no noticeable effect on the abductee.
Sometimes headgear is even used in gynecological and urological procedures.
Page 63 VISUALIZATION Secondary mental procedures consist of having an abductee visualize scenes and objects that evoke an emotional or intellectual response. This allows the aliens to examine human emotions, abilities, thought processes, memory, and perhaps even intelligence. During these procedures, as in Mindscan, an alien stares deeply into the abductee’s eyes.
Imaging In imaging the Beings bring the abductee into a separate room, where she either lies on a table or sits on a chair. A Taller Being comes over to the abductee and stands next to her. She is shown a screenlike apparatus and images begin to appear on it. The scene is often abhorrent and disturbing —death and destruction, calamity and war, atomic explosions, the end of the world, and so forth.
She may see familiar people in it, such as her family suffering from the effects of nuclear war. It is extremely frightening and unsettling to the abductee, and she experiences great anxiety as the scene unfolds in front of her.
Conversely, the scene might be sexually charged. It can contain a romantic fantasy with a boyfriend or girlfriend or simply a person to whom the abductee is attracted, and it might contain a sexual encounter. This agreeable scene creates loving and pleasant feelings in the abductee. At other times the images are mundane and commonplace, such as a scene of a pretty garden with a fountain, or a display of routine and normal family life. These scenes generally evoke a neutral response in the abductee.
Frequently, an abductee is required to gaze at an inanimate object. For example, an alien might hold a box of some sort, perhaps eight inches square with a small red light on it. The abductee develops an instant fascination with the box and stares at it steadily. She cannot move her gaze from the box. The box appears to have no intrinsic or apparent function other than to provide something for the abductee to look at.
All the imaging events have one fundamental factor in common: A Taller Being stands to the side of the abductee and stares deeply into her eyes while the procedure is in progress. Once again, he might be only inches away. She observes and he observes. It is this interactive staring that provides the key to these mental procedures. The aliens seem to want to analyze the emotional effects of viewing the images. The scenes themselves do not appear to have any prescient or prophetic value.
Imaging can be profoundly influential on the psychological wellbeing of abductees, who can have a difficult time dealing with these sometimes anxiety-provoking scenes in their daily lives. Lynn Miller was thirteen years old when she had a profoundly influential imaging experience. A Taller Being took her into a room and picked up a paper lying on a table. The paper contained a list of male names. The alien told her to memorize the list because “There’s war and I’ll need to know these names.” At first this episode seemed incomprehensible until a staring procedure was revealed.
They take me in the chart room.
What’s the very first thing you see when you get inside? Is it light, dark?
It’s light. I see the table.
And then what happens?
He picks up the chart and tells me to memorize the names.
Do you memorize the names?
I look at them. He told me I’m going to help them.
How are you going to do this, do you know?
I don’t know. He says I’ll know when the time comes.
What are you thinking as you’re looking at these charts?… “Why are they doing this? Why are they picking me?”… Why do they need help?
Page 64 I don’t know.
Does he seem to be very insistent about this, or is he casual about it, or is there some sort of demeanor about him?
He said he would make me remember it.
How long do you look at these names?
A couple of minutes.
Do you try to memorize them, or do you look at them?
I look at them.
Are you actively trying to commit them to memory?
No.
What is he doing while you’re doing this?
He seems to be staring at me.
Now as he stares at you, do you have any unusual feelings about it? Is he creating an emotion in you in some way?
He seems to be doing something….
Does he move close to you?
He’s close.
While he’s holding the chart thing?
Yes.
Does he ever take his eyes off you while you’re looking at the names?
No.
Now as you look at this chart he stands there, and he sort of looks you over. Is that right?
He’s staring….
Now, how does he know when you’re finished?
He takes it away….
And can you tell me what he says again?
That there’s war and I’ll need to know these names. And then he tells me to memorize them.
Does he say anything about how you’ll remember them later or something like that?
No.
Page 65 (Lynn Miller, 13, 1967) Although Lynn remembered nothing about the experience after it was over, she became convinced that a war was about to take place. When her parents bought canned goods she would take some of them down to the basement and hoard them in preparation for the impending war.
After a while she developed an intense interest in World War II and became a “buff,” studying the battles and leaders. This interest lasted throughout high school. Her preoccupation with war was quite unusual for any teenage girl, but it was all the more inexplicable because Lynn had grown up as a Mennonite and was very religious. Mennonites are not known for their interest in war.
Jason Howard was working as an insurance salesman when we first began to explore his experiences. He later went back to college to get his Ph.D. in English literature. During one abduction episode, he was taken into a room and viewed a screen displaying an atomic explosion on earth.
Can you get a sense of what the purpose of showing you this picture is?
That something happens on the picture.
Okay. So it changes while you’re watching it?… A white fog that comes out from the upper left side of the earth.
What does that mean?
Something’s wrong.
Does this fog envelop the earth, or just stay off to the side?
It grows big fast, but only around maybe a fifth of the diameter.
… How does it make you feel when you see this? In other words, does it invoke an emotional reaction?
Not a strong one. I guess it’s sad.
… Does this Being explain any of this to you?
Well, I understand what it is, and he understands that I understand….
What do you understand?
That something blew.
Something exploded, you mean?… What happens next?
We decide to talk about that.
Okay. Does he begin the discussion?
I do…. I say that that’s what happened in Japan in World War II.
Are you talking about an atomic explosion?
Yes.
And what does he say?
I think he’s surprised that I know that because I wasn’t born then, and he says that it’s not like what happened then because it’s much, much more.
Page 66 I’m sorry, I don’t quite understand what you just said.
He said it’s not like what happened in Japan.
Oh, the explosion that you saw was greater?
Yes….
What else does he say?
Well, he says when that is.
When this big cloud is?
Yes.
Is it now, or in the past?
No, it’s ahead of time.
In the future?
Yes.
Does he give you a date?
No. He doesn’t give me years. It’s measured by my life span…. So when he said when the first one was, he said that it was a certain amount of moments before I was born, and the second one he says is when I’m a month away from when I would be forty. But he doesn’t use years. It’s just a measurable amount of time that I would have lived.
Then how do you know that it’s a month away from when you would be forty?
Because that’s the span of time that we understand.
Okay. Is this going to be a cataclysmic event?
Yes.
How do you feel when he tells you this?
I guess relieved that it will be that long.
Now, when you’re talking with him, is he close to you?
Yes.
Where is he looking when you’re discussing this?
At my face.
Where are you looking?
At his eyes.
Page 67 Now during this entire discussion, does he ever look away from your face?
I don’t think so, no.
Does he move at all?
I think he kind of inches forward a little.
A little bit closer?
Yes.
About how close does he get, then?
Pretty close…. A couple of inches.
So he’s right there?
Yes.
(Jason Howard, 17, 1976) Envisioning Instead of viewing scenes on a screen, or gazing at objects, the abductee is frequently made to envision them in her mind. She may be still lying on the table in the examination room when she begins to “see” the scenes. Often the scene is so realistic that the abductee does not know until careful investigation that it is being played out in her mind. Sometimes the envisioned scene involves seeing a friend or relative. The abductee feels certain that the friend is “up there” with her.
But the “friend” is really a Small Being made to appear like the friend in the abductee’s mind.
When Karen Morgan was thirty years old, two aliens lifted her up from the table and held her at an angle so that the envisioning could begin.
I don’t know why they’re holding me up because usually I’m lying down for this. But they lift me up, and he puts his hand on my head, and he’s telling me to look at the picture. And it’s not just like I’m looking at the picture, it’s like I’m in the picture. I can project myself into the picture.
What is this a picture of?
When my mother died. This time, instead of being where I was, which was at the bed, I’m looking at the picture from, like, a corner of the room, and I’m watching the whole thing again.
It’s such a vivid picture, even now, all these years later I can see. I forgot what my mother was wearing but now I can see it.
Is this a bedroom, or hospital room, or… ?
No, she had cancer and she died at my uncle’s house.
Are you there alone, or… ?
No… there are a lot of [relatives] in the room. And everybody’s standing around the bed, and she wanted us to say the rosary like when her mother died. And I’m watching the whole thing.
Why do they want me to watch this? He says I have to look at it. And I say, “No, I don’t want to look at it.” But he’s telling me to see something…. He’s telling me that I have to feel the way I did then. He’s telling me that I have to feel that again. Feel that. And I say, “Why should I feel it?
I’ve already felt… why should I feel it for you?” But it’s hard not to, because when he puts me in the picture it’s hard not to feel all that again. And I’m really pissed off at him. It’s not horrible, it’s emotional. It’s very emotional, and he’s making me watch it. I’m trying not to pay attention to the picture, but somehow they’ve got me in the room. It’s like it’s just all happening again.
Page 68 What does he do while you’re envisioning this?
Watching me….
Is he causing you to feel a sadness or an emotion?
He’s telling me I have to feel it, but I’m fighting it. I’m fighting it because I’m angry. He’s telling me not to fight it, and just to feel. But I’m getting so angry that I’m not feeling it, because I can’t get as completely involved in it as I would have to be… I’m aware that it’s a trick and I don’t like it. They’re telling me that this is happening now, but I know that it’s not, even though I feel like I’m in the room again. In my mind, I say, “Did they make a film of this so that they could play it for me?” That’s what it feels like. It feels like they were in the room and they made a film of it. But if they pulled it out of my mind, how did they do it… ?
Now, is this a static scene, or does it move?
You know what, they tell me that it’s a scene of my mother dying, but I don’t think it’s moved.
It’s not really moved. It’s not going anywhere. It’s like it’s frozen. I don’t see anybody moving. But isn’t that odd? I can remember all the clothes that the people were wearing and stuff.
Are you able to see things close up in this scene, or is this sort of a long shot, or… ?
It’s as if I’m in the corner of a large bedroom and that’s how close up the people are.
You see yourself standing there from the back, I assume?
Mm-hmm, from the side. But I’m the one that I can’t see very clearly. I can see the other people. I can see the people who are on the left-hand side of the bed the best, because that’s the corner I’m looking down off. They want me to look at my mother, but I won’t look. And they want me to see her suffering. They’re horrible. Horrible.
Do you ask him why he wants you to do this?
No, I’m angry. I might say why, but mostly I say no. “I won’t. I won’t. I refuse to do it. I won’t.” They’re trying to tell me that somehow or other I’ll feel better if I see it. You know, that it’s somehow good for me. But I know that’s not true.
Now, if he’s got his hand on your forehead, and two of the Beings are supporting you, would he be standing next to one of the Beings, in other words… ?
No. They’re behind me.
Oh, they’re behind you, I see.
And he’s in front of me.
But is he dead center in front of you, or is he off to the side?
He’s directly in front of me.
So then you must be down by the… Right. My legs are hanging. That’s why I thought my knees were up at first, because they were. But they were moving me. I’m sitting on the edge of the table.
(Karen Morgan, 30, 1979) Patti Layne was sixteen years old when she had a profound envisioning experience. It took place after a needle had been inserted into her navel and after she had undergone Mindscan and bonding.
Page 69 And they said that they needed some parts, some things from me and that it would help everyone on the planet. They said that there are going to be some bad things that are going to happen.
Do they say what’s going to happen?
Well, they gave me some pretty vivid images…. But they didn’t do it in that room, they put me in a little room with a chair. Just one chair in the middle. But it was like across the hall. It was real little. There were two of them in there, two or three. That was a little later. And I sat on the chair and they put this scope on my head. It looked something like what they looked at me in.
And it’s real bright now. It seems like a bright room, and they told me terrible things would happen to the Earth and that it would just blow up, and cities would crumble and mountains would fall and the sun would be black. And they said that it’s bad because people can’t stop being greedy and that they were doing something to help us, and I don’t know how. I couldn’t make the connection how putting something into my stomach would help us. But they were horrible images, the images I still see in nightmares. I have recurring nuclear war dreams.
Why do you think they’re telling you this?
I don’t know, because I think it’s going to happen.
So you’re just sitting in a chair and you’re getting these images, is that right?
Yeah. They’re really bad images.
Now as you’re sitting in the chair what are you looking at?
What’s on the other wall or whatever?
There’s like a, it’s weird, it’s like outer space, stars and… Are you looking at a window?
Well, it’s kind of a window, but I don’t see the treetops or anything—they’re not there. There are like stars and lines, images, geometric things.
Geometric images?
I guess. They’re like lines and dots, things like that.
And [the Beings] are sort of putting these images in your mind?
Yeah, they keep putting images in my mind, about the destruction of the planet, and time when people will be starving, and there won’t be energy because we’re using up the resources, and they keep telling me these things. And I see pictures of my family struggling to survive and being reduced to beggars.
Are you in this room alone, or is there anybody in there?
They’re with me, two or three of them.
What are they doing while you’re receiving these images?
Well, one was holding the thing on me, on my forehead. That’s where they keep putting stuff is on my forehead.
What does this look like?
Like a telescope, a kiddy telescope, or kaleidoscope, with glass on one side. It looks a lot like the thing they had on my stomach. And they, two of them are looking up, behind me. That’s Page 70 kind of what they were doing, looking up in the air.
Now, this one that’s holding this sort of instrument to your forehead, what’s he looking at?
My eyes. My eyes are open. He’s bent down looking over at me.
What are you looking at?
Him.
And what is he doing?
Looking, at images in my mind. He looks kind, he really does. He doesn’t look mean. Kind of like a father or a friend, not a friend, but a wise kind of person you dream about. You just want to take away all your problems. That’s what it’s like.
As he looks into your eyes, do you think he’s just looking into your eyes, or deeper?
I think he’s looking into my soul. Looking into what makes me feel and think and believe things….
Does this go on for a while, while he looks into your eyes and holds this thing to your forehead?
Mm-hmm. Longer than that other thing. That other part, he kept me there for a while. And then he was done and told me to forget about this, and that I was going to have a dream about a nuclear war, and I’d be shaken up the next day, and I was going to think about it most of the day.
And I did, I remember that. At school I was disturbed, and I was so afraid that we would blow ourselves up.
(Patti Layne, 16, 1979) Patti had recurring dreams about nuclear war for many years after this episode.
Staging Staging is a combination of abductee envisioning and alien “playacting.” A “drama” may be played out in an abductee’s mind while she visually sees “characters” standing in a staged manner.
The abductee must interact in a prescribed way with the aliens who are participating in the staged situation. As with the other mental procedures, the purpose appears to be intended to elicit information about the abductee’s mental reactions.
For example, Karen Morgan was led into an area that contained a couch, a table with a flower pot on it, and a rug. She sat on the couch and noticed that several human “guards” were standing around wearing beige uniforms. Shortly a person to whom she was very attracted was brought into the room, and she was amazed to realize that he was part of the abduction also. He came over to her and was about to kiss her. She distinctly had the feeling that they were going to make love, something that she desired. As she looked around, however, it slowly became clear to her that the “guards” were aliens standing around. Somebody else was setting on the couch staring into her eyes all the while. Her attractive friend began to dissolve into the alien that he was. As soon as she realized what was happening, the staging was over. The aliens abruptly got her up and took her away from the scene. She had to step down from a platform where the staged scene was being played out. But she remembered that the couch and the table with the flower pot were solid objects.
Patti Layne found herself in an “office” in which her husband’s “boss” was sitting behind a “desk.” In some way she knew that the boss had unfairly chastised her husband, and Patti became angry about it. She heatedly began to yell at the boss for mistreating her husband. As her anger vented, she began to notice that something was very wrong with this scene. She suddenly perceived that the scene was of several Small Beings standing around a special area of the room that was used for this purpose. She then realized that she had more muscle control than usual, and she turned and ran into another room.
Another time Patti was taken into a room where she watched a frightening devillike face on a screen directly in front of her. Before she knew it, three “soldiers” were shooting “machine guns” at the screen. She was terrified. She could “feel” the glass splinters fall on her upper body. One of the “soldiers” rushed forward to “protect” her. She was then led way and a Taller Being stared into her eyes. He said they were interested in the concept of “rescue.” In one extraordinary staging event that took place seconds before a physical abduction, Charles Petrie, a printer living in Florida, was returning home late at night from the local convenience store, Page 71 when a child ran out in front of his car. Charles could not avoid hitting him and the injured child scampered into some bushes. Extremely distraught, Charles slammed on the brakes and jumped out the car to help the child. When he looked in the bushes, he found himself staring at an alien. He was immediately floated into a UFO, where a Taller Being performed extended Mindscans on him because, as Charles said, “he’s interested in my guilt.” Testing Testing is an extraordinary event in which the abductee is given a task to perform and carefully watched while she does it. For example, one abductee described an event in which she was required to pick out a single alien whom she had seen before from a group of other aliens, all of whom looked alike. Others have been shown an intricate “control board,” or some such apparatus, and told to operate it. The abductee complains that she does not know how to do it, but the aliens insist that she do it anyway. She then goes to “operate” the board and finds that she can in some way do what they want.
Attorney George Kenniston was shown such an apparatus when he was sixteen years old. He felt sure that he had learned to be some sort of a navigator. He carried out the instructions given to him but had no idea about how he knew what to do.
The role I play is navigator.
In other words, is he communicating about himself, or about you?
No, no, I’m saying this is the feeling I get from him. It’s in my mind: I’m a navigator. I can get to the place, whatever it is.
Okay.
I am a navigator. [I] can get there. It’s a testing….
[George described a staring procedure that was also administered to him. I asked him if the alien stopped this procedure.] No, but it’s like I’m turned over to someone to be tested, and another one leads me over to the panel. Let me see if I can described it. I look at the panel. It’s built in the wall, obliquely down at the end it’s four inches thick, and it’s probably maybe thirty-six inches across, maybe thirty inches high. It is covered with bright lights, and in that sense there are some buttons that are backlit. To my left there’s some level of screen There is some sort of visual line display, I don’t see it clearly.…. Some sort of a ball built into the tabletop, or the panel, that I don’t understand, but it can roll. To my right there’s a series of controlling buttons in columns coming down. There are some sort of readouts, because I don’t see them clearly, in the panel on the right-hand side.
I see two columns, but I get the feeling of extensive definition both in the readouts and in the panel controls. There’s a lot of finite control ability here. They’re… supposed to be able to manipulate the entire panel.
How do you know that?
Because I know. I’m supposed to be able to do this. Your left hand does one thing and your right hand does another thing, and you look at the panel with the readout to your left at one, and you’re watching the panel to your right, guiding something over a long haul. We’re talking hitting an object far in the distance and keeping on track. This would be like driving a highway 200 miles long the dead straight, and just keep it between the lines—that level of competence in steering.
As you’re standing at the panel, where is this other person?
To my right, watching me.
Is he far away from you, or…?
He is just off my right shoulder maybe two feet. Staring Eyes [his name for the Taller Being] is against the wall at the end of the panel table, looking at my face, watching me do this, and I’m very intent doing what I’ve got to do. My hands are moving, I’m watching the screen, I’m keeping it between the parameters… oh, God, don’t let me fuck this up.
Page 72 (George Kenniston, 16, 1965) The aliens usually follow testing with staring procedures just as they do in the other visualization events.
Many of the inconsistencies in abduction reports might be the result of the visualization procedures. These mental examinations can strongly affect the abductee’s initial recollection of the experiences because she feels sure that the images she saw in imaging and envisioning procedures were “real.” It is likely that abductees who have reported disturbing prophecies of destruction and doom, religious visions, or any number of other seemingly incomprehensible images were, in fact, subjected to these visualization procedures. The procedures may also account for the variety of aliens that abductees, without skilled investigation, have described in the past.
CHILD PRESENTATION Secondary reproductive procedures do not involve reproduction itself, but rather the interaction between abductees and what appears to be the product of the alien breeding program. In these strange encounters, the aliens carefully watch as women, men, and children are required either to observe or physically interact with bizarre-looking “offspring.” The Incubatorium After the primary experiences, the abductee is walked into a special room that I call the incubatorium. Here she sees scores of what appear to be fetuses in the process of incubation. They may be upright in containers floating in a liquid solution, or they may be lying down in either dry or liquid environments. Abductees report as many as fifty to one hundred fetuses gestating in this room. The containers are often attached to an apparatus that is either in the center of the room or off to the side; this apparatus appears to be responsible for the life-support systems. The abductee can hear a whirring or humming sound coming from the apparatus.
James Austino was taken into an incubatorium when he was fourteen years old. As is usual in these situations, the Beings offered no explanation for why they were showing it to him.
Can you get a glimpse into any of them?
There’s like all these tubes running straight up to the wall, liquid or something in them.
Is there anything in the tubes, other than the liquid?
Yeah, I think so. It’s like a machine with twenty or thirty tubes. The whole room is like round with them.
Are these just all in a clump, or are they lining the walls, or… ?
There’s like the machine, and they’re all sitting up on the machine, going straight up. And they line the wall. It’s like a big fish tank or something, each one of them’s a little fish tank…. It’s like blue liquid. There’s lights underneath each tube, shining up straight into it.
Is this guy still with you when you go into this room?
Yes.
Where is he standing?
Next to me. He looks at me. His hand’s on my back.
What happens next?
There’s little things in each of these tubes.
What do these little things look like?
Hamsters.
Page 73 You mean, they’re animate?
Bald hamsters, just kind of lying in there with wires and stuff attached to it. Looks like hamsters.
Do you stand to watch this, or does he have you sit down?
He just walks me in the middle, tells me to look around, don’t touch anything.
Are all these hamster things the same size?
Yeah, about. But they don’t look like hamsters. They’ve got little black eyes, like curled up, floating in there.
Now you’re saying you’re looking at little black eyes.
Mm-hmm.
Are you looking at babies?
It looks like little ones.
Fetuses?
Yeah, just floating in these things. The light shines up on them from underneath.
Is it one fetus per tube, or are the tubes filled with them?
One per. But the whole wall’s lined up.
How many would you estimate are in there?
Sixty, seventy, maybe more. The room has a blue glow to it from the water.
Do you hear gurgling and bubbling?
Yeah, it sounds like a fish tank.
… Are these fetuses resting on anything?
They’re just floating in it.
Is there anything attached to them?
Little wires. They’re about hand-sized, each of them.
How close are you to them?
I walk up to one and I look in to get a better look.
What do you see in there?
A little thing; it’s curled up.
Does it look like a human fetus?
Page 74 A little. It’s just the eyes are different.
What color are they?
They look blue from the inside, but that could be from the water…. They’re veiny, though.
You can see veins in them?
Yeah, all over the place.
Are they red veins?
I can’t tell, it’s blue. They look blue….
Are these tubes made of glass, do you think?
It looks like glass, because I could see my reflection.
Okay, all the tubes are attached to a central machine, you say?
Yeah, like a monitoring unit, like life support or something.
What happens then?
Then he comes up behind me and grabs my shoulders and moves me toward the door.
(James Austino, 14, 1980) I asked Karen Morgan about an incubatorium that was behind a “glass” panel.
It’s like a big bulging pane of glass. The room is like a big womb up there. There seem to be a lot of new babies in it.
Are the babies lying down?
They’re lying in… yeah, they’re lying in cradles or something—boxes, boxes.
Can you tell me how many there are in it?
God, it looks like there are fifty maybe, or a hundred, a lot. I mean, well maybe not a hundred.
I don’t know—a lot. It’s really sad, they all look like they’re dead.
Do you see any movement coming from the babies?
I don’t see any. But I know they’re alive.
As you look do you see any… is this a room just with these boxes, or is there any other kind of… ?
I think there’s some kind of feeding device, but I’m not sure. There’s something very strange about the room, but I don’t know what it is. By this time I’m just absolutely exhausted, anyway.
I’m too tired to even argue. I just want to lie down.
… Do you see any babies that are completely enclosed in something? In closed containers of sorts. Or are they all just open-air boxes?
They seem like they might be in water or something. Possibly.
Page 75 Are they lying horizontally, or are they… ?
No, they’re curled up. You know, I think they’re little embryos, or big embryos, or fetuses, or whatever. The impression that I have is when I was in biology in college, and they used to have all the babies at every stage, in little jars, it was horrible. That’s what’s going on here.
Now, when you take a look at these jars or whatever, is that what… ?
No, they’re in boxes. It’s like the Museum of Natural History. I am reminded, I keep thinking of fish, fish, I keep thinking of fish. And I’m thinking of babies, and the way they have gills, and… I’m just so confused and tired, and I don’t care.
So, when you look at this nursery, are you seeing a sort of variety of babies, in different stages of development, or are they all sort of the same?
I think that it’s graded, sort of. That as you go into different areas there’s different stages, past certain areas. Oh, now I see why I didn’t want to remember this, too. When you see the kids it’s pretty weird. When you see the babies it’s weird, but when you see the little fetuses, there’s no doubt about what they’re doing.
And what do you think they’re doing here?
They’re breeding us. I mean, but there’s no doubt. I mean, as weird as the other stuff might, I mean, as much of the other stuff might seem not to leave any doubt either, this is absolutely clear. These are embryos they’re taking from human women, probably, and they’ve stuck them in there…. Some of them may be human babies, as far as I know.
(Karen Morgan, 32, 1981) Anita Davis had the opportunity to see the Beings placing an em bryo that they had just extracted from her into a tank in an incubatorium. A Being had told her that other babies she had created were on board. She wanted to see them, and the Being obliged.
We just go out straight into this big area…. It seems to get brightly lit and very large and almost square, like a room, a big room. I think he says it would be impossible to see all of them that I had ever had a part in creating, because I started creating them when I was eleven. That’s too many. They’re not all there. They’re someplace else.
What’s in this room? Is this a big empty room?
There’s one row of, the whole wall is tanks, the whole wall of tanks, almost like fish tanks.
Rectangular. We know what’s in them.
There’s liquid in them, you mean?
Mm-hmm, and little hybrid whatever-they-ares.
Mm-hmm.
I seem to have approached them with a positive attitude borne of familiarity, that they’re not hideous or horrible, because I’ve been there so much. Just like he [the Taller Being] is not hideous or horrible, it’s familiar…. I just walk almost up and down the rows looking at all different phases of development, and he points out, “This one’s yours.” I want to see which ones are mine.
He can tell that?
He can tell me, yeah—unless he’s doing it to humor me. It seems he’s very adept at pointing out, “This one is from a month ago.” There are five or six that are mine, right on that wall.
How are these babies in there? Are they suspended? Are they lying on the top?
Page 76 I would say suspended and attached to the side, or almost attached by something, but it is not an organic something, like a cord…. It is something that sticks out, and they had plugged a little fetus thing onto it, and that’s what it’s growing on. That’s what provides food, and whatever.
Is the fetuslike thing in a little sort of sack?
Mm-mmm [No], just there. Almost inanimate. You can see bubbles, though. I don’t know if there’s a breathing process, but it’s like fish tanks. They’re sort of “starey,” almost dead- looking. But they’re growing.
How many are there?
I would say a hundred.
Do you hear any noises, or not?
I get the impression that I hear a bubbling kind of, maybe the liquid inside moving somewhat, maybe a machine running the whole contraption. It does seem like real sound.
Okay.
It’s not water in there. It’s waterlike. It’s not solid, and it’s more solid than liquid.
It’s got a different consistency than water?
Yes. It’s like Jell-O before it’s set…. You could say it’s solid, but it isn’t. Or the stuff that you make from cornstarch and water that has three different consistencies.
Where is he? Is he standing with you while you’re observing this?
Mm-hmm.
When you walk into this room, are these tanks covering 360 degrees of the room?
It looks like just one wall, one side. That’s it. I don’t think they are anywhere else in the room.
Just this one wall.
You say you basically see them in different stages of development?
Mm-hmm.
So I’m assuming they go from smaller… Not in any order.
I see….
The little guy comes in another door while they’re standing here looking… [and] he walks over to a tank. It’s right about at his level. And I’m bending over watching this process. It’s like almost a spatula kind of thing.
Hmm… How can he get into the tank? That’s what I don’t understand, because they’re all piled up. He reaches into the top, and has this thing in his fingers. He doesn’t have as many fingers.
What about the spatula?
Page 77 It was to lift it [the embryo] up out of this dish, and to put it like this on two fingers…. And he attaches it to something around the middle of the tank. Like a little hose that comes out or something. I don’t know how he attaches it. There’s a sense of “There, there’s another one. I’m done with this job.” Then he goes away, the little guy.
Uh-huh.
There’s some excitement. It’s like I’ve never been allowed to see this before….
So if he puts it into a tank, are there other empty tanks there?
I think a few, not a whole lot. There’s some near the top that look just about fully formed, they’re bigger. So maybe there’s a big turnaround, I don’t know.
So when he puts it in, what does he do then?
He turns around and leaves.
(Anita Davis, 32, 1991) The Nursery In another child-presentation procedure, the aliens take the abductee into a room either singly or with a group of other abductees and show her a nurserylike area containing as many as a hundred babies. Abductees nearly always say that aliens attending the babies are females. The babies may be lying on a “bed” or on some sort of a holder. There might be many rows of them, with each row containing perhaps ten babies. More often than not, they are lying in hard, transparent boxes.
Obviously not fetuses, these babies are old enough to live on their own. However, the babies appear phlegmatic and sickly.
Karen Morgan has seen nurseries on a number of occasions. The aliens usually show them to her with groups of other people. Typically, she is told that some of the babies are hers. She resists this idea and refuses to have her emotions swayed by it.
Then they took you through a hallway and brought you into this other room….
I’m in the nursery this time…. There’s lots of babies there.
Now, Karen, as you look at these babies can you tell me what they look like in terms of how they’re being held?… … There’s attendants in the room, those creatures. I think they’re women creatures. I think of them as nurses. I know why, because I’ve seen them before. I think they’re the nurses.
You’ve seen them before in this nursery area, or somewhere else?
No, I’ve seen them in the nursery…. I see attendants in a room, and I don’t know how many— four, five, I don’t know. Sort of like, see, this is confused with our own nurseries because it’s not maybe that different. They’re kind of bending over them, you know… but mostly they’re just sort of standing there, like they’re standing guard. They’re standing. They’re just standing.
Now, as you look at the babies, are the babies horizontal, or are they vertical, or… ?
Horizontal. But they don’t make baby noises like crying and stuff. I mean, it’s not like they’re crying. They should be crying, that many babies.
How many babies do you think there are there?
Twenty, thirty, I don’t know, a lot. Twenty?… Are the babies… are their feet toward you, or are their heads toward you?
Page 78 I wish I could see it better. The room’s here, I have this impression that, okay, I’m standing here and it’s like they’re, what’s the word, they’re lying like this, here’s their head and here’s their feet.
So they’re sort of horizontal to you.
Perpendicular to me. I think they might go in like a semicircle. I can’t see this very well. I don’t know why. It’s kind of frustrating, because I know I’m there but I can’t really see it.
Can you see what’s in back of you?
I’m very disoriented. I don’t… What I’m giving are impressions, they’re not really even… That’s okay. Why are you observing this?
I don’t know! See, they don’t give me any reasons…. I think the two little things are still with me, but maybe the other one has come too, the thing I thought was a woman. And I say, “It’s a big incubator. It’s a giant incubator! My God!” She doesn’t say anything. I say that, “Why are you showing me this?” She says I have to see it. But why? “Why do I have to see it?” “Because you’re involved with it.” “No I’m not. Oh no I’m not!” And she says, “Oh yes you are.” And I don’t like the way she says that. And I stand there and I’m staring at them, and I say, “Sorry, but you picked the wrong person. I don’t care about babies. I don’t even like babies.” I mean I’m giving it more coherence than I thought, you know, but I gave her that impression. She says, “That’s all right, you’re still involved. You’re still involved.” And right then I’m determined that I’m not going to let them use those babies to get to me, because I didn’t have anything to do with them. And there’s like a curtain that comes over me, and I just won’t let them use it.
Does she say anything about the state of the babies?
Yes. They need mothers. They need something. They need their mothers, they need their mothers. They have to have their mothers. I say you should have thought about that before you started them, because I’m not going to get involved. She says, “Don’t you care about them.
Don’t you care?” And I say, “Don’t you care. Don’t you care?” And now it seems like there’s almost something approaching anger in her, it’s something approaching anger. And it’s like a darkness in her or something, it’s like a… something I feel from her. And she says either “They’re yours,” or “It’s yours,” or, “Some of them are yours,” but there’s some of those babies in that room that are mine. Probably just one, because they’re all the same age. And I say, “So what. I don’t care. I don’t care.” And now it’s like she shrugs and says, “It doesn’t matter if you care or not, it doesn’t matter. They need their mothers, they have to have their mothers.” (Karen Morgan, 30, 1979) While on vacation in Ireland in 1988, Barbara Archer was abducted and taken into a nursery where she also observed babies in holders.
They lead me to the end of the third row, and then down the side, back out to the doorway.
And then we’re in that hallway that’s darker again. And then we go out onto the main corridor.
And then we turn right again. I think we continue down that hallway. We walked by a few rooms, subrooms on the side. And after we passed three or four of them, we come to one that they lead me into. And it’s still pretty big, but it’s not as big as the other room. And instead of tables… [I see] something like a bassinet, but that’s not what it is. It’s small, and it’s not deep, but you can fit something into it….
How many of these tables are there?
I think there were probably about twenty. And there’s like a nurse in there taking care of all these babies that are there. I feel a little scared when I see these babies at first.
Are these older babies, or younger, or…?
I think that there are a lot of baby babies, but then they get older. There are some that look like they are several months old.
From your vantage point, when you look at this, can you see them all, or are some too far away for you to see?
Page 79 There are two rows of ten, and I’m sort of standing in the middle of the rows.
I see. Do the babies have diapers on or something?
They have sort of like a diaper thing, but it’s not like Pampers or something. Some of the older babies have like a little dress thing, but not a dress, it’s just kind of a, it’s not real fancy or anything, it’s just kind of, maybe like a nightgown is the best description I can come up with.
Like a smock?
Yes.
Does it have arms?
I don’t think it does. They’re not long-sleeved if it does. I can’t really tell from where I am where the older babies are.
Do you get a sense of whether they’re boy babies or girl babies?
I guess there’s probably both.
But it’s not readily apparent, I guess?
You kind of, it sounds strange, but I think that I kind of know the difference.
So you sort of stand there between the two rows of babies. Do the babies look a little bit different, or… ?
They scared me when I first looked at them because they looked odd. They look kind of old.
They don’t have much hair. They have some hair, but not much. They kind of scare me a little bit when I first look at their faces.
What’s their skin like? Is it normal-looking skin, or… ?
It’s a little bit more, it’s like grayish, or it’s like lighter than ours. It’s not, but it’s not the same as theirs either.
Are these babies squirming around, moving?
Some of them are, a lot. Some of them are just more quiet, I guess. They strike me as being very fragile. I feel like maybe they’re what I would think of as premature babies, or babies with, they’re fragile, they’re not, I feel like they’re not real strong.
You’re saying they don’t look healthy and robust?
Well, they don’t look healthy to me. They’re kind of scrawny or something. But some of the older babies are longer.
Are they also thin?
They’re a little bit more, but none of them are by any means chubby. They seem to have longer arms, but not a lot of fat or muscle or anything. They’re kind of pretty in a strange way.
Is this just an empty room with the little tables, or…?
I think that there’s machines. There’s some machines in the back. And there’s something like a cabinet or something. It’s the best way I can describe it. It looks like it probably contains Page 80 things. Up like along one wall. There’s not a lot of stuff, other than the babies.
Does anyone say anything to you?
Well, they asked me something like, “Do you like the babies?” or “These are the babies,” or something like that about the babies. And I said that I felt that they scared me a little bit, that they didn’t look right or something.
(Barbara Archer, 21, 1988) Usually the aliens’ communication about the nursery is vague and emotionless, but often they will try to convey the idea that the abductees are viewing a wondrous and triumphant thing. The aliens are often proud and excited. It seems that they want to share their excitement with the abductee.
One of the reasons for this might be to make the abductee feel that she has been a part of the grand scheme and should feel proud of herself. She may be told that some of the babies “are hers” and therefore she is made to believe that she has been helpful in their plan. But this might also be to make her more psychologically bonded to the babies so that her state of mind will be optimally in tune with the babies for closer contact.
Touching and Holding Child presentations involve more than viewing. Abductees are also required to touch, hold, or hug these offspring. Although abductees will see more babies than any other age group of Being, they are also often presented with young children and even adolescents. Apparently it is absolutely essential for the child to have human contact. Although the aliens prefer that the humans give nurturing, loving contact, any physical contact seems to suffice.
Typically, the aliens bring the abductee into the child-presentation room. It might be the nursery or a different room with bright lights. Beings are already in it. The abductee stands or sits down on a bench or chair. The Beings who brought her in are behind her. Then a “female” Being approaches her. She is holding a baby. The woman senses the communication: “Isn’t this a nice baby? Isn’t this a beautiful baby? Wouldn’t you like to hold the baby? Hold the baby!” The female Being extends her arms with the baby in it toward the woman, and the abductee takes it. She holds the baby to her chest with the baby’s head resting on her arm or shoulder. If the abductee resists, she may be given a “reason” to force her to hold the baby. One woman was told that the baby would get sick if she did not hold it, and that it would develop a rash or some other sickness if she held the baby away from her body. Therefore she had to hold the baby against her skin for as long as possible. The baby may be naked, or it may be wrapped in a “blanket.” It is usually very small, but it can be an older and larger baby as well. Women describe the small baby as being very light in weight but with a heavy head. The woman sits with the baby, or she may get up and walk around with it. The aliens stare intently at her and the baby.
The woman hears another directive: “Nurse the baby.” “Put the baby to your breast and feed the baby.” The woman says, “But I do not have any milk.” The response is, “Put the baby to your breast and nurse the baby!” Saying “No” is futile. If she resists, the aliens will put the baby to her breast anyway. It cups its mouth on her nipple. It has a very weak sucking reflex. In many instances, the woman may be surprised to find that she is lactating and that her breasts are engorged. When that happens the baby will partially drain the breast. Often, however, nursing the baby is futile but seems to satisfy the watchful aliens nonetheless.
Unlike many women, Jill Pinzarro found the baby-holding experience pleasant, and she did not look closely at the baby’s physical features.
I see someone coming toward me with a baby.
And do they say something to you then?
No, they just give it to me.
And what do you want to do with it?
I don’t… just to hold it.
Is this a big baby, or…?
It’s a little baby, about two and a half months old. Yeah, about that. Maybe a little bit older, younger.
Is this baby wearing anything?
Page 81 It is when they come toward me. It’s wrapped in something.
Do you like this baby, is it a nice baby? What is your feeling toward it?
I like this baby.
Is the baby an active baby, or not active?
It’s a quiet baby.
Is it asleep, or is it awake?
It’s, hmm… it’s awake. It’s just not very, it’s kind of dopey. Not dopey, not dumb, but just passive.
Is it responsive to you, or not?
I get the feeling that it kind of likes being held.
Does this look like a healthy baby, or…?
Yeah, it seems like a reasonable baby.
Can you tell me what color hair it has?
Light, not much. Brown, but not dark. Fuzzy. Not much hair.
Can you tell me about its skin?
I’m not experiencing it so much in terms of visual things, because I feel the need to hold it, so I’m not really pulling it away and looking at it, I’m thinking about it. So I’m having a hard time with a visual impression.
Can you get a visual impression as it’s just handed to you?
Well, then it’s kind of covered so it’s hard. It’s… I think it’s a male, Caucasian.
Does it have light skin, or dark skin, within the Caucasian range?
Fair. Quite fair. I think it’s very fair, as a matter of fact. Almost like no ultraviolet light for this guy. But I’m having a very hard time seeing it.
Now, do you hold this baby for a while?
Um-hum.
Does it just lie there? Does it put its arms around you?
It’s too little for arms-around stuff….
Do you know sort of what the baby is thinking, or do you feel a bond with the baby in a mental way, in other words?
I feel as if it’s very important to the baby that it has this contact, and I’m very happy to do it for it. I feel that it really needs that. If you want to call that… it’s like it’s soaking up the experience of being held. That’s what I think.
Page 82 Do you sit there with the baby the whole time, or do you stand up with it also?
Hmm… I carry it around, yes. I feel as if it needs the rhythm.
Is there anybody else in the room with you now?
A couple of little people. There might be somebody else that’s not a little person. Not the tall guy either, but maybe, more like the tall guy than the little people. And not a guy, in a way. Has a different aura. I can’t see, though. Just a feeling. I’d say it was the nursemaid.
Is this the one who handed you the baby?
Yeah, that’s right, and it is a taller person. It’s an “it” that approaches a “she,” as the tall guy is an “it” that approaches a “he.” How can you tell that?
I don’t know. I have a… there’s some indication of responsible concern. It has… it’s a nanny, only not… but it has that slightly protecting feeling. Not maternal, but that’s why I get the impression of femaleness. It has a sort of hovering. Sort of an anxious, hovering quality, slightly.
Not like worry, just monitoring carefully….
Can you hear any communication from her?
Hmm… I don’t know if it’s from this person or from the little people.
What are you hearing, or receiving?
“Baby needs to be nurtured.” It’s very important, and they can’t do it. It needs it from me. They can’t give it what it needs completely. It’s sort of a species-specific need, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t know why I know this. I don’t feel like somebody’s standing up there and saying it, I just understand that….
Okay, you hold the baby for a while, you walk around with the baby, and what happens then?
The nursemaid takes the baby, the nanny. I can tell the baby really [liked it]…. I don’t know why, I don’t see what difference it would make, but it was good….
So they take the baby away, and what happens next?
I feel a loss, in a way, which is funny because I’m not really a baby person and I only wanted one child, but I feel a connection. I guess it needs so much, I don’t know. And I could satisfy its needs. I guess I feel a little bonded in a way because I have bonded to a baby. Not anything like the bonding that I had with my daughter, but that baby got under my skin a little….
(Jill Pinzarro, 32, 1980) For many abductees, seeing the features of the baby can be traumatic and frightening. Many women do not want to see the baby. They may claim at first that they only saw the top of the baby’s head. Others say they held the baby so close to them that they did not get a good look at it. But in fact they do see the baby. It has a very large head for its body. It has large eyes with some white showing. Even for a baby it has small ears, a small nose, a small mouth with thin lips, and a pointed chin. Its body is long and thin. Its hands and fingers are long and thin. Its pale-white or grayish skin is almost translucent. Its hair may be within the normal spectrum of hair colors, but very often it is “white” and is usually described as sparse and thin. The baby is not chubby with baby fat. It does not look like a baby alien, nor does it look like a baby human.
Abductees universally state that the baby does not have the normal human reactions of a human infant. It is almost always listless. It does not respond to touch as a normal baby would. It does not squirm; it does not have a grasping reflex with its hands. It is lifeless, yet it is not dead. Most women think that there is something terribly wrong with the baby. They feel that they must hold the baby to help it survive. After holding the baby for a while, women report that the baby seems “better.” It appears to have a bit more energy or to be thriving slightly.
The baby does not communicate with the woman as a normal baby would. She may speak to the baby as a mother would to her child, but the baby does not respond by vocalization or by movement.
Page 83 Yet the baby’s eyes may have a hypnotic quality to them. Some women say that they are unable to stop gazing into the baby’s eyes, which hold a fascination for abductees far more than an ordinary infant’s eyes. Some women say that the baby appears to be a “wise baby,” that it has some sort of “knowledge”—that it can “communicate” on an almost mystical level.
It is so important to the aliens for the woman to touch the baby— and to want to touch the baby— that they will do anything to instill a bond between the woman and the baby to facilitate that touch.
But child-bonding is difficult. The woman does not have a familiar connection to the baby. The woman does not feel like its mother—she has not carried it for nine months and “given birth” in the conventional sense. Furthermore, the baby does not look fully human, and it might just as easily repel a woman as attract her to it.
The aliens try to facilitate child-bonding in four ways. First, they try to instill in the woman the idea that the baby is a “nice” baby, a “beautiful” baby, a “good” baby. It is as if the very act of saying it can make the woman believe it. In fact, many women, because of the extraordinary qualities of the situation, feel that they want to hold the baby. The communication serves to reinforce what they already feel. When they do not want to hold the baby, the message makes them less hesitant.
The second manner in which the aliens encourage women to hold babies is related to envisioning procedures, making the women visually aware that the baby looks “normal.” Women report that they were told the baby was beautiful and when they looked at the baby, it was beautiful— at least that is what they were then seeing. They know, however, that the baby is at the very least “different-looking” and perhaps frightening. The fear is bypassed in favor of the aesthetically pleasing and less-frightening image placed in their minds. Sometimes the abductee will be horrified at how the baby looks and will watch it change into another visage before her eyes.
The third way that the aliens bond the woman to the baby is to tell her that the baby is her baby— and there is reason to believe that this may very well be true. Women report that they feel a genuine bond between them and the baby. The baby’s hair might be the same color as theirs—red, for instance—or they might instantly recognize in some other way that the baby is theirs. This might be another sort of mind manipulation, but enough evidence exists to suggest that women are being shown babies that are the products of their eggs. Knowing this increases their desire to hold the baby. They want to love it and nurture it. They can become extremely depressed and anxious when the baby is taken away. They want the baby to stay with them, and taking it away can cause severe stress.
The last and even more bizarre method of ensuring the bonding between mother and child is also the rarest: the dummy birth. There have been reports, for example, of aliens arranging a “delivery.” The aliens take the abductee into a room and place her on a table. The aliens communicate to her that she is about to have a baby, and she realizes that she has been placed in a “birthing” position. Suddenly she can “see” herself giving birth in a movielike image in her mind.
Sometimes she “views” another woman giving birth. She can see the head and shoulders of a baby coming out. It is a neat, uncomplicated, painless, and generally bloodless birth. While she is “seeing” these images, she is puzzled about what is going on. She was not pregnant before and she knows that she is not giving birth now. After the image of the birth stops, the aliens suddenly produce a baby from between her legs. Usually the baby that is “delivered” is not a newborn. The Beings are happy. They say, “Isn’t this a beautiful baby? Isn’t this a beautiful baby? Here is your baby. Hold your baby.” They place the baby in her arms. The woman holds the baby, but she is puzzled about what has just happened. It is as if the aliens think that the form of the act of birth has as powerful a bonding effect on the woman as does an actual birth. (This procedure should not be confused with the primary fetal extraction procedures, wherein abductees report that a fetus has actually been removed. It is also possible that this might be an envisioning procedure.) The fact that baby presentations do not occur during each abduction suggests that it is not crucial for the offspring to have ongoing contact with their mothers. Any human contact may be sufficient. When Melissa Bucknell refused to hold the baby, instead of forcibly holding her arms up to cradle the baby, the aliens simply gave it to her brother, who had been abducted with her, and he held the baby.
In 1988 Barbara Archer found herself in a baby-presentation situation in which the aliens compelled her to feed the child.
And then they told me that I could hold one. And they sort of pointed me toward this one baby.
And I think that it was a girl baby.
Was this one of the more active ones, or less active?
She seemed fairly alert, and she wasn’t terribly active. She wasn’t kicking or anything. So they asked me if I wanted to pick her up. I felt kind of scared to pick her up at first, but the nurse woman handed her to me. I kind of liked holding her, but I was so afraid, she was so fragile- looking.
Was she heavy?
No, she wasn’t very heavy at all.
Do they want you to hold her in a certain way, or just hold her?
Page 84 Well, at first they let me hold her the way I want to, and just sort of… she had big eyes, but they weren’t like theirs, they weren’t really ugly.
Could you see whites in the eyes?
I think so. I don’t really remember, but I think so. I think there are, if any, though, just a little bit.
They were sort of shaped like theirs, but not as big and ugly.
Are her eyes open, I guess?
Yes.
Does she just sort of look around?
Yes. She’s just kind of hanging out, or whatever.
I guess what I’m asking is whether the baby looks at your eyes also, or…?
Well, she sort of looks at me, I mean, she doesn’t… She doesn’t focus… No.
So you hold the baby the way you want to?
Yes, just holding her. I felt like I should hold her close to me. This may sound strange, but I felt like I needed to protect her. I felt very, I wanted to take care of her. I was kind of afraid for her.
Maternal?
A little bit. I mean, I didn’t really, I sort of felt… I can’t really explain it, I mean, I felt that way toward her. I don’t know if I just felt that way toward her, or if I felt that way toward all these little babies. But I felt worried because she felt so delicate.
I guess you’re saying concerned and protective?
Yes, I felt really protective. Then I felt kind of silly because everyone was kind of standing around there watching me with this baby.
You mean the two who brought you in, and…?
The nurse. One of the other two told me to feed her, and I told them that I can’t do that. And I think that they encouraged me to try, or something. I remember this happening from before too.
It’s still as stupid as it was then for me to be doing this…. But I just tried for a few seconds. They didn’t force me to or anything.
Did the baby have a sucking mechanism?
I think it did. I mean, I think it tried to.
Some babies, normal, healthy babies, have a very strong sucking mechanism, there’s no mistaking it.
Right. I felt that this baby knew what it was supposed to do, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t as strong an instinct… You didn’t sense the baby was used to this?
Page 85 No. No, I didn’t. I felt like I didn’t want to give her to them.
Did you put the baby up to one breast, or both breasts, or… Just one. Just my left.
You sort of don’t want to give the baby up?
No. I’m sort of worried for her a little bit.
Sure.
But then they took her. They said I had to give her to the nurse. I think that I asked them if I could see her again.
What do they say?
I don’t think that they gave me an answer at all.
You mean they just took the baby and put it back and that was the end of it?
I think so, yeah. And then I said something like, “I want to see her again,” and I don’t think they answered me. I feel like maybe I will, but I don’t know if they’ll let me. I mean, they didn’t say yes or no, they didn’t say anything. I think that they said “It’s time to go.” Do you see them put the baby back…?
Yeah. I feel really bad leaving her there….
(Barbara Archer, 21, 1988) Karen Morgan’s experiences with babies have been quite complex. For example, she was asked to play with a baby. This play period might be in a large room where Karen will see several other naked women engaging in the same activity. The women hold the babies up in the air, tickle them, and make baby sounds to amuse them. The babies do not respond. They do not laugh or smile, and they do not make sounds in return. Sometimes Karen and the other women might be told to “wash” the baby. A baby lies in its holder, and the woman must take a “sponge” and wipe the baby with it. Once again, the object might be to touch the baby as opposed to actually cleaning it.
Frequently the offspring that the aliens tell the woman to hold is a child who appears to be between two and ten years old, or even older. Like the babies, the child is light in weight and listless.
He has a larger than usual head, large eyes with small whites, a small nose, a small mouth with thin lips, small ears, and thin hair. His body is unusually long and skinny. He is semiresponsive and appears to be sickly by human standards. His eyes might have a hypnotic quality to them. These offspring are usually dressed in white “smocks” or loose-fitting gowns, but some wear a black, skin- tight garb. They are silent and not very active, although they are sometimes curious about the human.
Sometimes the aliens will bring out one small child for the abductee to see. At first, the child hides behind the alien as if it were shy. Sometimes the child is preoccupied with something. One woman observed a toddler dressed in skin-tight black garb intently manipulating a large toy block.
After a short time the offspring interacts with the abductee. The child will sometimes touch the human and quite often stare into her eyes. Both men and women report that when they see the small child they have an instant rapport with it; they “know” that in some way the child is profoundly connected to them.
On other occasions, the abductee will be required to physically interact with six or seven offspring as each child waits its turn to come up to her and be hugged. Or the abductee will play with the children, which entails much touching and holding. The Beings observe the abductee closely while she is holding or hugging the children.
When Janet Demerest was nine years old, she had an experience with a child that included staring procedures and touching. An alien led her through what she perceived to be a large warehouselike room over to where a woman abductee and a young, odd-looking girl were waiting on a “cot.” And then the man told me to play with the little girl.
Page 86 Now can you describe the little girl?… She doesn’t look real, she looks like the man who brought me there.
Does she have small eyes, or medium eyes, or big eyes?
I don’t know.
What color is her skin?
She looks like a shadow, like the man, sort of grayish black…. She’s thin, but you can’t see her bones.
Does she have long arms, or short arms, or medium arms?
They look like they’re thin, and that makes them look long.
Can you describe her hands and fingers?
Her fingers are long and thin.
Are they tapered at the end—or something else?
They look the same size all the way, just thin.
… Can you see normal-looking genitals?
No.
Can you see anything down there?
No.
Now she’s sitting there next to this woman.
I can’t see any bones in her.
You mean you don’t see a big bone structure?
Right.
Does she have knees? Can you see her knees?
No.
How about feet, toes?
Yeah, I can see her feet.
Does she have ankles, you know that little bone that sticks out at your ankle there?
No, everything’s straight.
What about toes, does she have toes on her feet?
Page 87 Yes, they’re long.
How old do you think she might be, if you were to make a guess?
Eight.
Now, as you sort of look back up toward her head, can you tell if she has a nose?
A little nose.
And a mouth?
Yes.
How about lips?
No.
Can you describe her chin?
I don’t think she has one.
Now, when you look at the girl’s hair, is the girl’s hair just sort of groomed, or is it styled in any way?
I don’t think she has any.
Now, how do you know she’s a girl?
The man told me.
Now, the man wants you to play with her, and so what’s the first thing that you do then?
We take a couple of steps and then we sit down… on the floor.… I sat down cross-legged. I think she did too. We were sitting. And then the man and the woman were watching us. But I don’t think we did anything, we just sat there.
Do you communicate with her?
I think I asked her what she wanted to play.
And what does she say?
I don’t think she wanted to play.
Does she reply to you?
She might have said, “I don’t know.”… I started to say that I would think of a game. I think she said to “just sit there.” Now what is she doing while you’re sitting there?
She’s just sitting there…. She’s looking right at me.
Is she looking at your body, or at your head and face, or eyes?
Page 88 At first she’s looking at my eyes, and I can’t take my eyes off of her. She can move her eyes around and look at different things.
But your eyes are sort of riveted on her?
Right.
So basically you sit there and you face each other.
Right. I think that she’s looking at me because she has to. But that’s because I’m looking at her because I have to.
Why do you think that might be the case?
I don’t know, but it seems very important, and I can’t move my eyes away… . She doesn’t have any ears….
So now you’re sitting there with her, cross-legged, and what happens then, after you are through sort of observing each other?
I think we hug each other and I leave.
Do you stand up to do that or are you still sitting down?
We stand up.
Does she say something to you then? Communicate with you?
“It’s time to go.” I think she said, “It’s time to go now. Say ‘goodbye.’” Do you hug each other then?
Mm-hmm.
Now when you put your arms around her, can you feel her bone structure when you do that?
She’s solid. I put my arms around her shoulders, and she puts her arms around my back.
Does she sort of hold you, you sort of hold her for a while, or is this a very quick thing?
It’s quick….
And what does she do when she pulls away?
Nothing. She stands back, and I walk toward the man….
(Janet Demerest, 9, 1964) Andrew Garcia, who was an alcohol rehabilitation counselor, was referred to me by another abductee. We examined an abduction incident that happened to him just a few months before our hypnotic regression. After several Mindscan preparations in which he was told that he was about to be shown something, he was presented with a five-year-old girl.
There’s some little girl… she looks like, I call her Maria.
Have you seen her before, do you think, or is Maria somebody you know?
It’s not her, it’s not Maria.
Page 89 Who is Maria then?
I thought it was my niece, but her eyes were different, so she wasn’t Maria, but I called her Maria.
Does she respond?
I look into her eyes and they are so peaceful, so unspoiled.
When you look into her eyes where is she?
She’s like right next to me, coming right up to me….
How close does she get to you?
Close, very close, and she looks right into my eyes and I’m calling her name and I’m so happy to see her. I’m really happy to see her.
Does she communicate with you at all?
No. I don’t get the sense that she is, but I get the sense that she is receiving everything that I’m saying in my head.
The communication is one-way then?
Uh-huh. As if all these emotions and thoughts are coming through.
What kind of emotions?
Excitement, anticipation, and love. I want to hold her. She comes closer. Her eyes are so watery.
Do you see any whites in her eyes?
No, they just seem watery, black as marble.
Does she have any hair?
She appeared to have some when I first saw her, she had this black hair, but when she came closer I was transfixed on her eyes.
Okay.
I can’t seem to focus on other things.
Is she still coming closer?
Yes. She’s like at my face.
I see.
I’m drawn into her….
Does she touch you at all?
Page 90 Yes, she does.
How does that happen?
Very lightly, very careful, not like someone walking up and touching you.
Where does she touch you?
On my cheek, like a little poke. Did you ever watch a kid that wants to touch something and just pokes it?
Right.
There’s a sense of joining, yeah, and it’s not long.
What’s happening now?
She’s like pulling back. I’m like screaming in my head.
Screaming for her?
Not to leave. I’m like upset, I’m calling her. I’m very upset.
Does she respond to that?
They don’t understand why I’m upset. No sense of compassion, or no real understanding of the separation. I’m very upset, crying. The one [Taller Being] comes up to me, the one at my side, he stares at me.
Does he communicate to you at that time?
Yes. I have a sense of calming down. “This is how it has to be.” I asked him if she will be back. He says, “Yes, another time.” (Andrew Garcia, 34, 1989) Once in a while an older child is brought out. This Being appears to be an adolescent. Here again the central purpose of this encounter is for the abductee to hug the child. The aliens once asked Karen Morgan to embrace an adolescent female. When she refused, the aliens put the girl next to her, placed Karen’s arms around her, and the adolescent embraced Karen. When Karen attempted to put her arms down, the aliens immediately wrapped her arms around the teenager again, and held them there with their hands. The girl offspring remained motionless, hugging Karen, for a long time. Then when she was finished, Karen’s arms were let go and the adolescent, now a little more active than before, turned to Karen and silently said, “Thank you.” Abductees almost never encounter adult offspring in a controlled physical contact situation as with the younger ones, but some abductees have reported that they have seen what might be adolescent and adult offspring helping the aliens in their procedures, especially sperm collection.
But the purpose of the production of offspring remains one of the great mysteries of abduction research.
Page 91 Chapter 6 Sexual Activity and Other Irregular Procedures “YOU MUST NOW BREED.” Some of the more sensational material in abduction accounts, including a variety of specifically sexual activities, comes out of the abductee’s ancillary experiences. These specialized procedures performed by aliens may recur many times to an individual abductee although other abductees may never experience them. The reasons for their existence remain obscure. Yet their compatibility with the overall structure of abductions strongly suggests that they are an integral part of the abduction experience and not just anomalies.
The ancillary experiences usually come after the primary experiences, but it is not necessary for secondary experiences to have taken place beforehand.
The Breathing Pool In one common ancillary procedure, the aliens bring the abductee into a room with a large tank or even a small “swimming pool” in it. The aliens tell her to get into the tank. The liquid is clear and at first glance looks like water, but it is not water. The abductee is told to submerge herself in the liquid and stay there. She may be scared that she will drown, but the aliens reassure her that she will be all right. She gets in over her head and then is told to breathe. She finds that she is able to breathe normally even though her head is under “water.” After a short time she is told to get out. Sometimes the aliens dry her off, but most of the time they do not. The purpose of the pool procedure is unknown.
James Austino had a breathing pool procedure in 1988. During his hypnotic regression he described seeing an adolescent offspring wearing a white smock and helping the aliens. James found himself looking at a large, oval pool of water, and the adolescent urged him to get into it.
It’s like, “We’ve got to go in the water.” I’m like, “No, no, no….” She says, “It’s not so bad,” that’s the impression I get. And then she gets in. The water’s green.
Green?
Yeah, it’s almost like it’s luminescent. When I look at her, you can see the silhouette of her body. She’s just standing in it.
In the water?
And she says, “Come on, it’s not so bad.” Okay. Does she just jump in herself first?
She just kind of eases herself in.
When she says, “We have to go into the water,” does she use specifically that word?
No, but that’s the impression I’m getting.
So now you see her in there, is her hair getting wet?
No, she’s standing in it. That’s why she’s not sinking.
Oh, I see. How far into the water is she?
About up to her chest.
Is her dress straight down, or is it sort of floating out?
It’s kind of floating a little bit, but not straight out. And I just jump in.
And then you just go straight down past her?
Mm-mmm.
Page 92 Oh, you don’t.
I’m in and I look at her, like, “Okay, I’m in.” And I look back, and the five or so things look pleased.
Okay.
And then she comes over to me and says, “Just lay back, and just relax.” That’s when I sit back down. That’s when I feel like I’m going down.
But you’re not being supported by anything, then?
Mm-mmm. I just sink down to the bottom, and I start to breathe.
How far is it down to the bottom?
About four, five feet.
So it’s not a very deep tank, then?
No, it’s about four feet. And I start to breathe, that’s the neat thing.
Now, when you look at the sides of this thing, can you see the walls? Is it transparent?
It’s just walls. It’s pretty big, though. I see her getting out, because I see her legs leaving.
How does she get out? Does she go over to the side and pull herself out?
She pulls herself out. That’s when I start to feel blacking out and stuff.
Did you taste the stuff?
No. It makes you numb, though. It feels body-temperature, too.
Okay. So you go down, you’re about four or five feet down.
Mm-hmm.
You feel numb, and then you’re sort of blacking out a little bit.
But I’m breathing, which is really strange.
Yes, it sounds strange. What happens next, then?
I hear sounds under water, like mechanical sounds.
You mean, like something is going on while you’re in there?
Mm-hmm.
Can you look around and see what’s up?
Yeah, they’re just sounds. It’s light in here, but there are no lights. I’m just kind of floating, though.
Page 93 Are you actually touching the bottom, though?
A little bit. I’m moving around, though.
Can you look up? Are they up there looking down at you?
Yeah, a couple of them are.
Do you see the girl up there?
Mm-mmm.
Okay, what happens next, then?
I feel like it’s time to come out. So I push myself up.
Can you kind of swim up in some way?
Mm-hmm. I paddle myself up a little bit, and I get up along the walls and I stand up. There’s like two of them kneeling down.
On the edge of the pools, you mean?
Mm-hmm.
Why are they kneeling down?
To grab my arms.
Is it hard to get out of there?
The water feels slimy almost, now. When I come out it’s still on my body, it doesn’t run off like water. You have to take your hands and slop it off.
So it doesn’t have the same… Consistency.
It sounds like you’re saying it’s almost viscous.
Yeah. I get out of the water. And they just kind of walk me into another room.
(James Austino, 23, 1988) Cures and Specialized Internal Procedures In extremely rare cases, the aliens will undertake a cure of some ailment troubling the abductee.
This is not in any way related to the contactee Space Brother concepts of benevolent aliens coming to Earth to cure cancer. Rather, in special circumstances it appears that the aliens feel obliged to preserve the specimen for their own purposes. As one abductee said, “It’s equipment maintenance.” At least two abductees have reported that their cases of pneumonia were cured during their abductions. Lynn Miller feels certain that the aliens were responsible for curing her diphtheria.
Lynn’s Mennonite background precluded her from getting vaccinations, and when she was six years old she became desperately ill. Even though the physician had told her mother that the disease could be fatal, her religious beliefs did not allow Lynn to be taken to the hospital. She steadily deteriorated over a two-week period, and the doctor came daily to do what he could. Finally the Page 94 physician told her mother he did not expect Lynn to live through the night.
That night Lynn experienced an abduction, during which the aliens told her that they were going to cure her. They passed a portable, rodlike device around her body and then made her stand in a vertical cylindrical machine that had a small window. The aliens sat in chairs and watched as a blue light slowly came down toward her from the top of the machine. When the light was about eight inches from her it began to go back up. It reached its highest point and shut off. The Beings then told her to get out. They informed her in a matter-of-fact manner that she was now cured and “cleansed.” They then performed other procedures on her and took her back home.
The next morning her mother was astounded to find Lynn playing on the floor. She cheerily told her mother that she felt fine. Her mother ordered her into bed at once and called the doctor. Her temperature was normal. The astonished and puzzled physician told Lynn to stay in bed for another week, but she wanted to get up that day and play more. Her diphtheria seemed to be completely gone.
Sometimes an abductee reports that the aliens appear to be doing surgery on her, either at the base of her rib cage, near her gall bladder, or behind her eye. This is often a fairly long procedure involving several Beings. The abductee feels no pain during the operation; when it is over, no scar is evident. It is not clear what the aliens are trying to accomplish with this procedure.
In another procedure a tube is inserted into the abductee’s mouth and then down her throat and at the same time a catheter is introduced into her urethra, as if the aliens were flushing out her digestive system. After a while the aliens remove the two tubes at the same time. Sometimes the aliens force the abductee to drink a liquid or pour it down her throat, which might result in vomiting.
At other times the aliens wait a while after the ingestion of the liquid and then take a urine sample.
One woman woke up at night and felt a powerful urge to eat something, even though she was not hungry. An abduction followed in which the aliens examined her intestines and required her to regurgitate her food. With other abductees, the aliens inject a needle into the person’s head to remove either fluid or tissue; one abductee was told that they were removing “just a few” brain cells.
The reasons for all these procedures are unclear.
Pain Threshold Some of the most distressing of the ancillary experiences are those that elicit physical pain.
Creating pain might enable the aliens to examine the neural pathways in a human that allow for the transmission and perception of pain. One man has been the victim of numerous pain experiments ever since he was a child. The aliens touch various parts of his body with a special tool that causes excruciating and unremitting localized pain. Sometimes they place a metallic plate around sections of his body. When energized, the plate creates agonizing pain wherever it touches his body. The pain grows in intensity until the man mentally screams for them to stop—but to no avail. During the pain procedures, an alien stares deeply into his eyes. In one of Steve Thompson—s abductions, the aliens placed a machine on his head that caused such unbearable pain that he lost consciousness.
After the procedure, a Being told him, “It had to be done.” Proto-Beings I have received extremely bizarre accounts from two abductees who describe “Proto-Beings” in the process of manufacture. One abductee was fitted on several different occasions with “suits” that covered different parts of her body, as if molds were being made. Then on other occasions she saw obviously manufactured Beings who looked like rough imprints of humans—tall, with featureless faces. The aliens were in control of these “robots.” The figures had wires attached to their “proto” backs and heads that seemed instrumental in making them walk and move like humans. Until more is known about this, these reports remain as tantalizing hints about possible other aspects of the abduction scenario.
Media Displays Media displays are different from other mental-visual procedures because they do not involve staring by the aliens. They can be presented in a large room with “screens,” or played out as an objective reality in the abductee’s mind, as in the envisioning procedures. The purpose of these displays is unknown, but one abductee had the feeling that they might have something to do with making her more psychologically receptive to the aliens’ reproductive procedures.
For Karen Morgan, media presentations began when she was nine years old. She was made to observe a screen from a table she was lying on just after the examination. Later, when she was grown, she was taken into a special media room with other people. The room is large and circular, with Small Beings standing at regularly spaced intervals watching the abductees. Groups of five to ten naked humans are made to stand in roped-off areas within the room. They are compelled to look up, and a series of “screens” appear toward the top of the wall around the room. The lights darken and the show begins.
The actual pictures are always puzzling and sometimes very difficult to remember. Usually they are moving pictures of beautiful and idyllic landscapes. A majestic mountain might appear in one scene, while another might show a flowing river, a hawklike bird, fields of grain, and so forth. The Page 95 scenes are always sunny, cloudless, devoid of rain, snow, or any other inclement weather.
Abductees do not report seeing any cities or evidence of civilization or of artificiality. No humans or aliens are depicted in the media displays.
The entire scene has a slightly unreal quality to it. The colors are a little “off,” not quite natural. A voice then enters the abductee’s mind. Karen describes this as a “telepathic public address system,” assuming that the rest of the humans in the room are hearing the same thing as she is. The voice starts out by saying “Behold!” or something like that.
Although Karen finds it difficult to recall, she gets the impression that the scenes being shown to her are of a wonderful new world that the aliens are, in some way, developing. This is a beautiful place that will some day become very important for all people. She also has the distinct impression that this place is connected with the babies. Sometimes she thinks that the place is another planet, and sometimes she thinks that the planet is Earth, after alien intervention—and this scares her.
On three occasions between April and June 1987, Karen was taken to a display room where she was forced to observe idyllic scenes. In April she also felt certain that the room that she was being led into with the other humans had something to do with babies.
They’re going to show us something…. It’s, I saw a light, and it’s, the light’s going to show us something. They’re going to show us an image or something but I’m so bored and pissed off that I just want to get this over with…. They’re showing us a place. I don’t know if it’s on a projector or what.
You mean a geographic location?
Yes.
Is this inside, or outside?
Okay, let me describe it…. I think it’s meant to look like it’s outside. And it’s a place, it’s a place. I can’t see the place.
This is an outside scene?
Yeah. I think the impression we’re meant to have is, “This is where we’re taking the babies.” I think this is the impression they’re trying to give us. But what is the light? I can’t see it. Why can’t I see it? I can’t… Is this a city scene?
No, it looks more parklike.
Is there grass.
… It’s green and brown and blue, maybe there’s a stream in it, maybe not. It’s meant to look very idyllic, but still symmetrical.… I think the deal is that we’re supposed to believe that that’s where they’re taking the kids, or that’s what we’re helping them prepare the kids for… Are you just observing this in your mind’s eye, or are you actually looking at this through your eyes?
No one’s touched me. I think we’re all seeing this, kind of. I think. I could be wrong.
Does it have an Earthly quality to it, as opposed to an alien quality?
Definitely Earthlike….
Now, as you look at this scene, is this a static scene, or is this a changing scene?
No, it’s a panorama. It holds on one thing, then it kind of goes around, I don’t like this because they know that this is what I think is beautiful. Maybe everybody is seeing something different. And I know that they never show you anything unless they’re trying to manipulate you, so I’m trying to stay detached from it. It’s… I can see it better. There’s fir trees. There’s a river.
We’ve moved from sort of where the trees were and the grass. Now there’s a river, there’s a canyon, it’s like the Colorado River. It’s cut into the ground. It’s moving fast, but not so fast that it’s scary. I mean, you could still raft on it. And there’s a beautiful fir tree standing next to it. It’s Page 96 not exactly like our aerial photos. This is different. I don’t want to look at it, because I know if I look at it then they’ll be able to do something to me. So I’m trying not to look at it.
Are you trying not to look at it by averting your eyes, or by… ?
I can’t avert my eyes. I don’t know why. No, I’m looking at it with my eyes open, but I’m thinking, “I will not be involved in this.” One month later Karen once again was shown the display room during an abduction. This time she was more apprehensive about the message that was imparted to her.
Your attention is directed upward, you can’t help but look up, and then there’s a message that comes through the PA system.… And I think, “They’re showing us something about the world,” and the message, even at the time, is… see, I’m as awake as I’ve ever been in this room, and the message even at the time isn’t clear. There are words being broadcast like, “Look at this, here’s a picture of…” and then you can’t put your finger on what they’re saying. It’s a female voice doing the narration. But, David, the message is that this is the way, all of these beautiful things that they keep showing us, this is the way the world will be. It’s just like Big Brother.
There’s no difference.
This is the way our world will be?
Yes. This is the way the world will be…. I’m really depressed by this. It’s one thing to have eggs taken out of you and feel like a lab rat; it’s another thing to think that they might be really up to something that involves the world.
(Karen Morgan, 38, 1987) Information Transfer After an abduction, an abductee may have the distinct and frustrating feeling that the aliens have injected some sort of special “knowledge” into her. She usually cannot recognize or recover the knowledge, but she thinks she could if she knew how. To date no specialized information has been recovered from an abductee, but a few have displayed isolated factual knowledge about scientific topics that they have never studied, and others have shown inexplicable interest in physics or astronomy. This might be related to alien testing procedures or to the fact that for most of her life, before undergoing hypnotic regression sessions, the abductee unconsciously “knew” that she was being abducted.
A corollary to this comes in a puzzling situation when an abductee reports that some sort of headgear is placed on her while an alien wearing headgear stands nearby. A wire is run from her headgear to the alien’s headgear. She is then required either to remember something or emotionally feel something. Envisioning might be used in this endeavor. The abductee feels that the mental processes going on in her mind are being transferred to the alien. In some cases, the abductee will be attached to several other Beings either at once or one after the other.
Sexual Activity Sexual episodes, despite how lurid and unbelievable they might appear, seem to be an important, albeit confusing, part of the abduction experience. Alien involvement in human sexual activity represents one of the few direct interventions into a person’s life. There are indications that the aliens think sexual intercourse and orgasm promote conception. Evidence also exists that the aliens can intervene in normal sexual activity.
From time to time an abductee will report a sexual experience with someone that seemed in some way related to her abductions. She might be making love to her partner and realize that they are being watched by aliens in the room, yet be unable to stop. In other situations, abductees might feel compelled to masturbate seconds before an abduction takes place. They are certain that their actions are directly related to the impending abduction.
Far more commonly reported is alien control of sexual activity between two humans aboard their craft. The aliens bring the abductee into a room, and there on a table is another human of the opposite sex. Abductees report that the other person seems “out of it.” The aliens make it clear that they want the abductee to have intercourse with the other person, so the abductee either duly climbs up on top of the other person and intercourse ensues or she lies on the table and intercourse is performed on her. If an orgasm is created, the Beings often stare into the abductee’s eyes during it.
It must be emphasized that this is not a sexual fantasy situation, and most men and women feel that it is an uncontrollable and traumatic, event. One man tearfully said that he felt like he was raping a woman when he was forced into having intercourse with her.
In July 1988 a young woman was brought over to a man in his thirties who was lying on a table Page 97 near her. The man’s eyes were closed, and he appeared to be unconscious. The aliens wanted her to get on top of him and in some way become sexually excited. She resisted this but could do little about it. The woman recalled the incident without the aid of hypnosis.
It seems like I climb up [on him].
Does he move or anything? Does he respond?
He doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t seem like… Does he respond genitally?
He doesn’t seem to, really. He doesn’t. I don’t do anything, after I get there. Then it’s like they don’t even know what’s going on, what to tell me to do or something.
So you’re lying there.
Well, I sit up. I kind of straddle him….
What happens next?
It seems like the one on the left side comes around, comes near me, like around to the front.
And then, I don’t know if he tells me to kiss him or something. It seems strange, I didn’t think they would know that word, or whatever. I don’t really want to.… Then I think I could fool them because they don’t really know what they’re talking about.
Do you kiss him… ?
I try to trick them…. I just thought that maybe I could trick him by some way, by doing another thing and saying I was kissing him. I put my hand on his chest one time, and I said, “There, that’s it.” How did they respond to that?
Well, they didn’t seem to mind.
You mean they accepted it?
Yeah, because I acted like it was a big deal. But I wasn’t sure…. But they didn’t seem to want to force me to do things…. It wasn’t like before when they were forcing me to look at him. It seemed like they told me they wanted me to touch his penis, but I didn’t want to…. Like I was supposed to scoot down below, you know? Down low on the table. I didn’t want to, but it didn’t seem like I had to.
So you could resist it more?
Yes. And I was saying, well, that’s not what we would do. We don’t do that.
You tried to deflect it?
Yes.
How did they respond to that?
They didn’t seem as bad as before, they wouldn’t force me. They weren’t controlling my body so much, so I didn’t have to go down to the bottom of the table or anything like that…. I just said that I didn’t like him, that nothing could happen because I didn’t like him. I didn’t like this guy….
Do they argue with you? Do they try to urge you to?
Page 98 They don’t argue back, but I was trying to come up with all sorts of excuses to them. I said, “He’s just lying there.” I was just coming up with stupid things… if they’re just lying there, and there’s people watching you, I don’t know, it just seemed really… sad.
It is sad, of course it is.
It was just really bad. And I was just getting exhausted again, too. I just remember being tired during it, and I just kind of was hanging my head down.
So you don’t scoot down there?
Mm-mmm.
What happens next, then?… Maybe he gets an erection, but he doesn’t have any other signs, and I’m just sitting on top of the guy, I don’t even know how he could breathe, I’m just sitting on his stomach. But he’s not really excited…. It seems like I know that he does have an erection at some point…. There’s no other part of his body that responds, so it’s not even like an erection, do you know what I mean?
Now, after he does have an erection, what happens then?
Now they want me to have intercourse with him. It’s really bad. I tell them I don’t want to. It’s just starting to seem like something really terrible that they’re doing. It just seems really immoral.
I just think it’s really bad…. I just feel like it’s really bad….
Do you find yourself doing this?
Yes. It’s totally mechanical, it’s really bad. I don’t think I have feelings or anything.
Does he have a normal ejaculation… ?
Yes, I guess he does.
After he ejaculates, what happens directly after that, within a few seconds?
I have the black feeling [Mindscan?]. It seems like I get kind of stimulated for the first time…. I wasn’t before, but then I feel, I don’t know. It’s not like he just kind of winds down. I don’t remember much.
You mean, he just stays erect?
It’s so weird because it’s not like any normal pattern that I’ve ever been through. It’s like they’re lying there. I get a little worried because I think, “God, I could get pregnant by this guy.” I remember thinking that.
Where are you in your cycle… ?
Right in the middle.
(1988) A fifteen-year-old girl had the traumatic experience of being forced into intercourse with an older man. The aliens attached headgear to her and began Mindscan procedures.
Two things happen next. One is they bring somebody over to look at me.
You mean, another one of them?
Page 99 First. And then they do things to me.
Who is it that comes over first?
It’s another one of them, but he’s bigger.
He’s bigger?
He’s bigger. He’s dark, and he’s bigger. He’s much more powerful than they are. He’s much more powerful. The word that comes into my mind… is that he’s much more advanced than they are. It’s like he’s the senior one…. I was extremely frightened…. He’s looking in my eyes and I can’t see. I can’t see. I can’t see anything because he’s in my eyes. How can he be in my eyes?
He’s in my eyes. This is making me crazy. I can’t stand this. How can he be in my eyes?
You mean, he’s staring into your eyes?
He’s in my eyes. He’s flooding my eyes. He’s completely penetrating me, every bit of me is in my eyes. He’s in my eyes… I can’t do anything about it…. He’s spreading into my brain. He’s spreading into my brain… totally, he is invading me. He’s in my brain. Oh, God. He’s in my mind. He’s everywhere. He’s absolutely everywhere. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it.
Does this go on for a long time, or for a short time?
It feels like a horribly long time.
How does he withdraw? Does he do it gradually, or does he just break away?
He finds a place that he wants to be for a while and then it’s not so complete. It’s not so black. I can see a little bit. I can see sort of a shadowy gray. And he’s making me feel things.
He’s making me feel things. He’s making me feel things in my body that I don’t feel. He’s making me feel feelings, sexual feelings. He’s making me feel things. It must be that he’s making me feel them because I don’t feel them. And he’s in my brain. I wouldn’t feel them. He’s making me feel them. He’s making me feel things…. And he’s there. He’s everywhere. He’s in my brain, and he’s everywhere in my body too somehow. That’s very confusing. But it’s not so black. But my body is changing. My body is getting tense in a different way. He’s making my body do things and then they take the thing off my head. Somebody takes the thing off my head.
That’s good, because it was uncomfortable and heavy. I didn’t like that. And I can see more now. And he’s still there, but it’s not everywhere. But my body is, I have funny feelings. I’m not used to these feelings. I don’t understand, between my legs. I don’t understand why this is feeling this way. And he tells me, oh no. Oh no.
What is it?
Oh no. Oh no. Oh God, no, no, no, no. No… oh God, no.
What’s happening?
There’s, he’s standing there looking in my eyes, and the others are standing around, and there’s a man standing at the foot of the table.
A regular man?
Yes. There’s a man standing at the foot of the table, and his eyes are sort of cloudy, and he’s erect, and he’s just standing there, and I’m afraid.
Is this an older guy, or a younger guy?
It’s an older man. It’s a grown-up man, and I’m afraid. I’m so afraid. I’m afraid of what’s going to happen. I’m so afraid.
Page 100 [I comforted her and reminded her that this happened many years ago, that she was frightened at the time, but need not be frightened now.] Was this guy small, thin… ?
He’s sort of a big guy. He’s got a little bit of a paunch.
Does he have a full head of hair, is he bald?
Middle-aged guy. He’s got receding hair. He’s dark, and… Is he sort of out of it, or is he… ?
He’s absolutely out of it. His mouth is hanging slack, and his hands are loose at his side, kind of like an ape. And his eyes are glazed over, cloudy, unfocused.
So he doesn’t make eye contact with you?
He doesn’t make eye contact with anybody.
Okay.
And the guy who’s looking in my eyes is still looking at me, but he kind of moves aside so I can see this guy. And then he comes back, and he’s making my body respond sexually. I mean, I didn’t know what it was at that time, what a sexual response was. I knew it was very strange. It had pleasurable parts to it, but it wasn’t a pleasurable situation, obviously.
Of course not.
And the guy… the inevitable followed.
Do they say anything to you while this is going on?
No.
Do they explain to you what’s about to happen?
I have the idea that I’ve just ovulated, or I’m about to ovulate or something. And that’s connected. I don’t want this to happen. But it does….
Now, does this guy just stand at the end of the table and do his business, or does he climb on top of you?
Climbs on top of me. Oh, before he moves away, the guy who was looking in my eyes sort of zaps me. There’s a sort of jolt of power or something, and all of a sudden I’m really sexually excited. Overwhelmingly sexually excited. And this guy climbs on top of me, and he’s moving and it… doesn’t make any sense, but it feels like he starts to climax and doesn’t finish, or he gets to the point of coming, but what’s the point of that? What’s the point of that?… They just pull him off, and they stick something up where he was, a metal thing it feels like. And then they’re moving very fast. Oh, I know from other times what’s about to happen.
(1959) She described how the Beings apparently took an egg from her at this point and they then walked the man away.
Sometimes the aliens display a great interest in promoting human sexual activity, especially for young girls. From time to time a woman will report that when she was going through puberty, the aliens examined her and said something to the effect of, “You are now ‘ripe.’ You must now breed.
Go and breed!” When one woman was thirteen, the aliens told her this, and then, as if to show her how it is done, they brought in a teenage boy who seemed to be “out of it” and put him on top of her so that intercourse could be accomplished. Afterward, she felt pain and noticed blood on her legs.
Page 101 Her hymen had been ruptured. This was done at least one other time to her when she was a teenager. Both times the aliens couched the event in terms advising “breeding.” Obviously, these embarrassing and distressing moments can have a disastrous effect on the abductee’s sexual development and subsequent social life.
A final variation on sexual activity is an alleged sexual encounter between an abductee and an alien or a hybrid. Sexual imagery is often an important part of this event. In an envisioning procedure, the abductee is made to believe that either her husband or loved one is with her.
Abductees sometimes say that the face of the husband, for instance, tends to “phase” in and out of the face of the alien. Intercourse takes place without much preliminary stimulation. The insertion of the “penis” is quick, and the penis does not feel normal; it is usually very thin and very short. The normal thrusting movement does not take place, but the woman feels a sudden “pulse.” Then it is all over. We have no clear evidence that the aliens have genitals, but hybrids sometimes do. Therefore, actual intercourse may not be taking place with an alien. Three possibilities come to mind. Either the abductee is having intercourse with an offspring who does have genitals, or the aliens are inserting something inside the woman to make her think that intercourse is taking place, or the entire affair is a part of envisioning and no physical event is occurring.
Women who report early sexual contact during an abduction experience also invariably report that their hymens were not intact at their first normal intercourse. Women also report that they feel there was some sort of “strange” and disturbing “intervention” during it. Some have the distinct feeling that they were not in the room alone with their partners. Others become uncharacteristically confused when they try to recall what happened during that initial sexual experience, as if something were blocking their ability to remember.
The ancillary experiences are still a mystery to abduction researchers. We do not know why they take place. The surgical and physical procedures seem related to the aliens’ desire for more information about the body. But how the mental and sexual experiences relate to mental examinations or the breeding program is not clear. What is clear is that the ancillary experiences can be the most traumatic and the most negatively influential on people’s lives. During hypnosis, abductees have screamed in agony as they relived pain procedures. They have tearfully reexperienced the profound trauma and humiliation of being forced to have sexual intercourse with a stranger or a hybrid. And through it all the Beings seem clinically detached—either because they can do nothing about it, they do not understand, or they do not care.
Page 102 Chapter 7 Going Home “IT WAS A REALLY NICE EXPERIENCE.” When the abductee’s time on board the craft is over, the aliens unceremoniously tell her, “It is time to go now.” If the event took place in a larger object, Small Beings quickly take her out of the main room and hustle her down the hall to where her clothes are. If she is walking too slowly for them, they might impatiently say, “Hurry up! Hurry up!” as they push and pull her along. If they are on a smaller object, the aliens get the abductee off the table and either help her dress or watch while she puts her clothes on. Once she is dressed, she begins the trip back home.
The abductee is still very much under alien control during the return and cannot physically affect her situation with any degree of forcefulness. The exit from the object is often difficult for her to remember. Some abductees step on a specific round plate in the floor and the next thing they know they are either floating down or are already on the ground. Others enter a small room where an alien makes them lose consciousness. When an abductee awakes she may find herself in transit. If she is coming from an object in the sky, she feels herself “floating” down, much as she did in the original transit and entrance.
If the abduction took place from her home, the abductee usually goes directly through the window (wall or ceiling, in some cases) and “rematerializes” in her room. If at night, an alien accompanies her to her bedroom and watches carefully as she gets into bed. He might even put the covers over her and tell her to go to sleep, and then he leaves. If the abductee is in an object on the ground, she may float back to an area near her house or apartment and then walk in the darkness to the door, an alien accompanying her. She then floats up and into the window, or she might simply walk into the house through the back or front door. Once in a while an abductee meets a member of the family while coming back into the house. Inexplicably the family member seems not in the least disturbed or puzzled at seeing the abductee come in wearing her nightclothes and says nothing about it at the time or even later. The abductee walks to her bedroom, gets into bed, and goes to sleep.
Patti was still exhibiting strong bonding feelings for the Taller Being when she was told it was time to go home.
And he said, “That’s it for now. That’s it for now.” He helps me off the table, and those other ones, they picked up my clothes from the floor, and they helped me put them on, and he stood watching, staring.
Do you have your nightgown there?
They helped me put my nightgown on.
And your underpants?
Uh-huh. They helped me put them on. I think they put that nightgown on backward. Not backward, inside out. I think that’s what they did, because I remember the next morning thinking that I was stupid, I must have been awfully tired because I put my nightgown on inside out. I think that’s what they did.
Did they put your underpants on in the correct way?
Um-hmm. They did that all right. The nightgown was on inside out, like it was taken off. And he waited patiently, watching, and I think I didn’t want to leave because I knew it was time to go.
He held out his hand, and I was happy to take it.
As they’re putting your clothes on, do you get a chance to look around the room?
Not really. I’m still looking at him because I keep getting this image of looking down at him. I thought, “Isn’t this runny. I’m looking down at him, but yet I feel like he’s really in control of everything,” but I didn’t mind it. I don’t really want to go back. I liked him. It was a really nice experience. I’m interested in this kind of thing, but I wasn’t asking him any questions, it’s like I just understood everything. You know, I didn’t feel like there was a need to be curious about his ship and what he was really doing.
Well, while you are out there, though, do you happen to notice if there are other tables in the room?
No, there was just one, and I didn’t go in any other rooms. [Out back] there’s this little tiny Page 103 hallway, I don’t know, corridor or something. And he held my hand and he walked down the steps with me. We walked out into the woods and into the field. You know, I think we walked pretty far, just slowly. And I don’t think we said anything, but I was really enjoying the feelings, like I was taking a midnight stroll with a lover.
Do you feel the ground underneath?
Um-hmm. I had socks on.
You took the socks off, though, or… ?
I can’t remember that, but I know I had socks on, I always had socks. But I could feel the ground, the trees, the nuts all over, rotting nuts on the ground. And I know I walked down the road with him now, it was real vivid. We walked down the right side of the road. And I think I was telling him about how my grandmother and I would walk along here just for a walk, and she would get paranoid that I would get into the poison ivy, and he wanted to know what that was, and there wasn’t any to show him, but I said it grows on trees right around here, this creek here, that the road goes by. And it makes you itch. And he seemed to know what that meant. And we walked across the bridge, this little bridge, went over the creek, and we walked up the road a little ways and up the step… And I remember standing at the top of the steps and walking up the sidewalk, and there was some green ivy, but there wasn’t many leaves growing up the side of the house, and I said, “Ivy grows up there but it’s not poison.” And there were roots and little things attached to the bricks. And that’s the last thing I remember because then I just kind of felt like I floated up through the window and back into my room, and in bed with Roy [her husband].
And I woke up and I felt like I had to go to the bathroom. And I shook Roy and I did wake him up, and I said… “I just had a nightmare,” or, “I just had a really weird dream.” He just mumbled something and turned over and went back to sleep.
Was Roy in the same position as when… ?
No, he was taking up the whole bed. I lay there for a minute and I got up and went to the bathroom, and I came back in. I had to fight with him to get him to lie so I could get back in. And he wrapped himself around me and said, “Where did you go?” And I said, “I was in the bathroom.” So when you got up, though, you noticed that your nightgown was on inside out?
Inside out, yeah. And the little strings weren’t tied around the neck. They were open, and I usually tie them because I am afraid they’ll get wrapped around my neck in the middle of the night, and they weren’t tied. And I kept thinking, “Boy, I must have had a restless night.” (Patti Layne, 23, 1985) Like many other abductees, George Kenniston floated down from the object and then walked directly in the back door of his house.
I’m moving from the field over the trees over the back alley of Green Street, and the houses, now I see myself, I’m going over the street, and I’m going over the other houses… then the convent, then I’m coming over Third Street, and I’m kind of spiraling down and I land on the hill.
It’s a little higher on the alley side of the houses behind Third, and you go down the hill, and that’s where I come down. I come down the hill and I climb up. And I go over, we had a kind of a wicker-weave fence, and I go right up over it and I’m down, I’m in my backyard, I go in the back kitchen door, I put myself to bed.
Is anybody up when you come in?
No.
They’re asleep?
… I see my father at the door in a tee-shirt and baggy shorts, and that’s how he used to sleep. Did he say anything? He might have said something, but it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. And I made some excuse like I went and got a glass of water or something. And I went back to bed.
Page 104 (George Kenniston, 15, 1964) Janet Demerest remembered, without the aid of hypnosis, an incident in which she was lying in bed with her six-year-old daughter when an abduction began. She saw something that looked like a “laundry basket” come seemingly from nowhere and hover over her and her child. At the same time a gray Small Being appeared on the side of her bed. She was paralyzed and could not scream.
Suddenly the basket and her daughter disappeared and then the empty basket reappeared. Now she felt nauseated and confused, but she had the feeling that she was in some way inside the basket and moving. After the abduction was over, she returned first in the basket to an empty bed and lay on her back, and then she could see the basket disappear and reappear and her daughter was again lying beside her.
If the abductee was taken from a car, she walks back to the car, gets in, closes the door, and starts driving. If there were others in the car who were “switched off” during her abduction, they suddenly become animated. The driver starts the car and they resume the trip. None of the people in the car are aware of what just happened, nor are they yet aware of a time lapse. They might remember that they saw a “flying saucer” and they might even talk excitedly about it, but that memory soon fades as well. The next day the abductee might have the sense that something strange transpired, but the others are completely unaware of anything unusual.
If the abduction occurs during the day, the abductee may simply walk out of the ship and back to the area from which she was taken. If it is a child who is abducted from within a group, the remaining children, after being “switched on,” usually do not make an issue of the abductee’s absence. When Janet was nine years old, she left the wooded area where she was playing with her friends to walk over a hill. She was abducted and gone for over an hour. When she returned, her friends asked her where she had been. She told them that she had gone exploring, and that answer appeared to satisfy them.
Very often with daytime abductions, however, the period of time in which the abductee is missing is noticed by someone. When nine-year-old Jill Pinzarro returned from her experience (which began while she was reading a book in the park in Rochester, Minnesota), her parents were frantic with worry.
What was the next thing that you can remember?
Sitting on the bench… And I’m scared because it’s dark.
Do you have a book in your hand?
Yes, but it doesn’t feel like I’ve been reading it. It’s just sitting there on my lap. But it’s like I’ve suddenly awakened.
And what do you do?
I’m really upset and frightened. It’s so late. And I don’t know how I could have lost track of the time. When they put me to sleep it was just like ether. There’s a moment when you realize that something’s happening, and then you’re just gone. You just feel yourself getting smaller, no consciousness.
And yet when you’re on the park bench your clothes are on?
Oh, yeah. It’s just like nothing’s happened.
Do you go home quickly then?
Oh, yeah, I throw my books on the bike, and I hurry because the park gets dark too, and that’s scary. I’m scared of the dark, being that I have to go through the edge of the woods and over a little bridge, up a hill, and all the houses are lit and I can smell the dinners. All up the block you could smell that food’s been there, but it’s late. It’s dark. And I get to the corner two blocks away, and a car turns. That’s my parent… They’re driving the car. They take my bike in the car.
They see you from the car.
Yeah, they found me. They were out looking for me.
And what do you say to them? What do they say to you?
“Jill, is that you, Jill?” And they’re so relieved they’re not even mad. And I say, I tell them that I didn’t know it was so late, I didn’t know how it got to be so late. I was just reading in the park.
Page 105 And they say, “We’ve got the police out looking for you. We’ve been worried sick.” And they take me in the car. But they’re not really mad, they’re just so glad. And it sort of amuses them in a way, not immediately, it amuses them that I would get so lost in a book as to lose track of the time.
(Jill Pinzarro, 9, 1957) Nine-year-old Karen Morgan was abducted with her brother Robby when they wandered off from a group of friends. The time was dusk, and when they missed dinner her parents were concerned.
I can remember floating down. I came from very far away. We were very high up in the sky, it seemed to me. And when I was put down they put me down gently.
You were with somebody?
I think it was the little ones. I wish I could remember how I got back down. I wish I could remember how they did that… It seems like… it seems like you’re in a room, and the floor… I feel like I’m right on the open sky, you know? Like, on a stretcher.
Are you lying, or are you standing in this situation?
I’m lying down. I don’t know how they keep you so that you’re not cold. It’s a beautiful, beautiful starry night. And before I go I think, “Where’s Robby? Where’s Robby? Where is he?
Where is he? What if they keep him? Where is he?” But then as I’m lowered down I forget it. I have this feeling of being rocked to sleep, and of being… and then they gently put me down.
Here’s the trick, I guess—they put me down not where I remember having been, they put me in the wrong place, sort of. I mean, at the other end. But when they put me down, there was a period when they left, I guess. And then I really was asleep for a minute. Because when I woke up I was staring up at the stars, thinking, “Wow! That’s what it’s like to be unconscious!” Not remembering all this stuff, but just staring at the stars and not being able to take my eyes off them.
Do you stand up then?
No. I didn’t. It’s funny the way you remember something, but it didn’t really happen that way. At first I would have said yes, I stood up, but when I think about it I didn’t stand up. I just lay there staring at the stars. I couldn’t take my eyes off them, really. It was very cold. And then I did a very funny thing. I started feeling my body to see if I was paralyzed. And then I thought, “That’s ridiculous. You fell down and hit your head,” Did you go home then?
I went right home.
And what happened when you walked in the door.
I was confused. I was confused.
Did your mother say something to you?
She said, “Where have you been? You missed dinner.” I said, “No, no, no, no. I was playing at the Murphys’ and then I hit my head, Mom, and I was unconscious. I never was unconscious before.” I said, “I really saw stars!” And she said, “Oh, that’s ridiculous. I’ve been calling and calling you. How could you have been unconscious?” I said, “But I was. I was!” I had a terrible temper as a kid. I was getting very agitated. My father came out. He said, “Where have you been? Was Robby with you?” I said, “Robby wasn’t even playing with us.” I said, “I fell and hit my head and I became unconscious. I never was unconscious before. Don’t you care? Isn’t that interesting?” I was all excited. And my father said, “When did that happen?” And then my mother took her finger and she went like that in front of my eyes to see if I could follow it [she gestures]. Because with all the kids everyone was always hitting their heads. And she said, “You don’t seem to have a concussion.” And my father said, “Do you have a bump on your head?” And I said, “No, it doesn’t even hurt. I think I slipped on the ice.” And he said, “No, I don’t think so, Karen. You don’t just fall down and hit your head and get unconscious and jump up usually, especially if you’ve been lying outside.” I said, “But Dad, I was!” He said, “Well, if you left the Murphys’, what time did you leave the Murphys’? They’ve been in for hours!” And I said, “At dinner time, around five-thirty, five o’clock.” He said, “Well, you couldn’t have been out this Page 106 long. It wouldn’t have been possible.” He said. “We’ve been so worried about you and Robby.
Where is he? Where has he been?” I said, “I don’t know. He wasn’t with me—I was all alone.” I said, “Well, I really was unconscious.” That’s all I remember.
(Karen Morgan, 9, 1958) Aside from being missed by people, there are sometimes odd inaccuracies about the return trip that alert the abductee to the idea that something might have happened to her, although she has no idea what that might be. From time to time the abductee does not return to exactly the same place. It may be a matter of a few feet or some miles. When Patti Layne was floated back to her college dorm, she landed in her roommate’s bed. The startled roomie woke up with a jump, and a confused Patti made up a story on the spur of the moment, saying that she had received a crank call against her life and she was scared. After a later abduction in the same dorm room, she woke up on the bathroom floor. All her toiletry articles were scattered around the floor. What had happened was a mystery to her.
Others have come to consciousness driving their cars miles away from where they should have been—not just down the road but on a completely different highway. Steve Thompson had a far more frightening return with a friend of his while on a trip across Texas. They were sleeping in a car on a small street near a main highway outside of Dallas when they were both abducted. The next thing they knew, Steve, who had been in the back seat, was driving on the wrong side of the highway with oncoming traffic. His friend yelled, “What the hell are you doing?” and Steve, suddenly aware of where he was, quickly got back over to the right side of the road.
Lynn Miller came to consciousness many miles away from where her car had been stopped. She was outside of her car on a strange road in an area of New Jersey that she had never been to before. She got back in the car, started it up, and drove down the road for a few miles, not knowing where she was. When she approached a small town, she instinctively made a left turn at a flashing yellow light. That road got her back to a main highway, and she was able to eventually get home two hours later than she should have.
Many abductees have returned to find oddities about their clothes and bodies. It is not unusual for people to notice that their pajamas or nightgowns are on inside out when they felt certain that they had put them on the correct way the night before. Others have woken up to find their underpants folded on the foot of their bed after they had gone to bed wearing them. Some abductees have reported that their clothes were draped around a chair when they woke up in the morning.
Lynn was abducted from a tent outside of Los Angeles in 1988. The aliens took her right through the screen window inside the tent. When she returned she walked through the underbrush to get to the tent and then floated back through the screen window. She got into her sleeping bag and then took off her socks because they had picked up ground material from the walk. When she awoke in the morning, she was puzzled and surprised to find her socks outside of the sleeping bag and leaves and twigs inside it.
Karen had to wear a bite plate on the palate of her mouth for her teeth each night. She put it in with pressure, creating a vacuum on the roof of her mouth, then attached it to rubber bands hooked to her braces to keep it in place. One night she had an abduction experience and the focus of the abduction was the bite plate. The aliens took it out without too much difficulty, but when it came time for Karen to go, they were not able to put it back into her mouth. They tried and tried but could not achieve the suction necessary to hold it in place. Eventually they gave up. When Karen woke up in the morning, her bite plate was on her stomach. It was puzzling because she had never had it come out of her mouth before or since; one would expect that if it were to come out, it would fall onto her tongue, or into her throat, most probably waking her up, or it simply would fall on the pillow. But finding it resting on her stomach was disconcerting.
Sometimes abductees wake up in odd positions. They might come to consciousness sitting up in bed or slumped forward over their knees. They might regain full consciousness standing next to their bed and wonder how they got there. They might find themselves on top of the covers when they never sleep outside the covers.
Often abductees notice strange marks on their bodies the morning after an abduction. They find bruises, black-and-blue marks, and rashes, and they have no idea how they got there. One woman woke up in the morning after an event with fourteen black-and-blue marks on her legs. Nosebleeds in the middle of the night are another common occurrence after returning. With no discernible trauma, the abductee wakes up in the morning and the bed and pillows are covered with blood. This happens to both children and adults.
Sometimes women wake up with a sticky, clear substance running from their genitals down their legs. They are at a loss to explain this; the substance quickly dries. Other men and women have discovered unusual stains on their bedclothes. They were absolutely certain that the stains were not there when they went to bed the previous night. Almost all abductees wake up feeling tired, restless, agitated. They feel that they have not had a good night’s sleep and that they have been “through the mill.” When the episode is over, amnesia sets in. Abductees might remember something for a few seconds or, in some cases, for a few hours, and, of course, some experiences are fully remembered, but generally the memory is blocked immediately afterward. We do not know how this is accomplished. It might be a function of the alteration in consciousness that all abductees experience as part of the abduction itself. There is little evidence to suggest that the aliens specifically tell the abductee not to remember something as if with a posthypnotic suggestion. Yet when abductees first begin to relate their stories to an investigator, it is often with a sense of guilt and betrayal. They feel that they should not be telling anyone about these experiences. This sense of guilt can occasionally be so deep that it effectively prevents an abductee from talking about his or her experiences.
Page 107 The return is the end of the physical abduction itself. But the abduction experience does not end there. Whether the abductees remember the abduction or not, their lives can be profoundly affected.
Page 108 Chapter 8 The Abductors Ever since the beginning of the UFO phenomenon, witnesses have claimed to have seen alien beings near UFOs. The majority described small aliens with large heads and eyes, although a variety of sizes and shapes of Beings were reported. It was nearly impossible for researchers to learn anything about the Beings simply on the basis of these sightings. Writing in 1969, a UFO research team could say only that the aliens appeared to be curious and cautious. Very little was known about the details of their appearance and still less about their behavior.1 However, the vast accumulation of abduction reports has now provided a wealth of detailed information about these aliens. At last we know enough about their activities and appearance to paint a preliminary portrait of these enigmatic Beings.
Aliens do things that seem like magic to us. They make humans and their clothes go through solid matter like windows, walls, and ceilings. They cause themselves, humans, and other matter to be invisible when they are outside the confines of the UFO. By using light beams, they transport victims and even their automobiles to their destination. They seem to have a monitoring ability that enables them not only to find their victims but also to determine the biologically appropriate time for an abduction.
Some of their greatest abilities come in the area of human mind manipulation. They alter consciousness and affect people’s anticipatory powers. They modify visual perceptions so that people have difficulty seeing objects close to them or discerning spatial relationships well. They interfere with people’s volition and force them to do things against their will—and they can do this from afar. They mitigate fear and stop physical pain. They institute selective amnesia, communicate telepathically, and create complex images and scenarios in people’s minds. They generate at will sexual arousal and emotions such as love, fear, and anxiety. They produce orgasm with mind manipulation. They make people love them. The ability of humans to control the situation and force their own wills upon their abductors is severely limited. In many ways the aliens seem all-powerful.
Yet they display an awareness of limitations. It appears that the aliens cannot proceed with their breeding program without the involvement of human beings. For whatever reasons, they are fearful of being detected—hence they use clandestine methods of abduction. They seem to be afraid of human power. They treat humans gingerly, as if they were zookeepers handling sleeping gorillas, fearful that they might wake and become uncontrollable. They often assign two or more Small Beings to handle an individual human, and they are very cautious. They keep careful mental and physical control. They sometimes put restraints on their victims’ arms and legs.
The aliens are highly routinized. They seldom change their pattern of activity to suit the abductee.
They are focused on their tasks, regardless of momentary circumstances. Some abductees have speculated that the general behavior of the aliens suggests they have difficulty doing several things at once.
Who—or what—are these aliens? No solid evidence exists to indicate whether they are living beings, manufactured beings that act as sentient physical beings, a combination of the two, or something entirely different. But they do have a physical being.
ANATOMY OF AN ALIEN By far the most common types of aliens reported are the Small and Taller Beings. The Small Beings are from two to four and one-half feet tall, thin, slight, and even “delicate” in appearance.
They have a head, a body, two arms, two hands, fingers, two legs, two feet. They stand and walk like humans. The Small Beings are light in weight. Taller Beings stand from two to six inches above the Small Beings and have most of the same gross physical characteristics.
Abductees are often vague about what the aliens wear. In many cases it is difficult to detect whether or not they are actually wearing clothes. Sometimes the color of their skin and the color of their clothes are reported to be exactly the same. Many abductees cannot see where the clothes end and the skin begins. They feel quite certain that the aliens are wearing something, but it is difficult to describe the “fabric” that the clothes are made of. Other abductees have described alien “garments” that fit so tightly that they look “spray painted.” They are able to describe the end of the “fabric,” the beginning of the skin on the hand and the neck, and so forth. On occasion the Small Beings are wearing robes or garments that are loose-fitting. Sometimes abductees report a belt around the aliens’ midsections, but this is unusual.
Abductees rarely describe bodily adornment. The Beings’ clothing has no personal touches, no expressions of individuality. Some Beings might have an insignia on their clothes that seems to resemble “serpents” or some sort of elongated shape. Sometimes it is simply a jagged line. In general, however, abductees see little or no diversity in the garments the aliens wear.
Descriptions of the aliens’ skin color vary from dark gray to gray to light gray to tan to tannish- gray to white (not Caucasian) to pale white. If an abductee reports another color (like yellow, green, or blue), it is almost always in conjunction with gray. The skin color is uniform, without darker and lighter spots or areas (often the lighting in the room will change the way the aliens’ color appears).
By and large, most witnesses report the Small Beings’ skin as just “gray.” There is no visual evidence of a vascular system that might add streaks of other colors.
When abductees touch alien skin or are touched by the aliens (usually when being escorted Page 109 down a hallway or into a room), they report it to range from a rough, leathery feel (for the Taller Being) to a soft rubbery or plastic quality (for Small Beings). The skin is extremely smooth, without the pores, hair, freckles, bumps, ridges, discolorations, warts, moles, scratches, wrinkles, and other common elements found on human skin.
It is difficult to tell whether aliens grow older. The abductees are unable to discern the slightest change over time in alien facial features or physical demeanor. When abductees have had experiences for thirty or forty years with presumably the same group of aliens, they report that the aliens look the same during the last experience as they did during the first.
The Small Beings all look basically the same. Their faces do not betray a readily detectable uniqueness that might distinguish one from another. Nor do they seem to have any sort of emotional characteristics that can be seen on their faces. For instance, one does not look “happy” while another looks “sad.” Although abductees cannot tell one Small Being from another, they commonly report that they in some way “know” that they are dealing with the same Taller Being during all their abductions.
The physical frames of both the Taller Beings and the Small Beings do not reveal any boniness.
Most of the contours on their bodies are smooth and rounded, with no hard angles. Witnesses do not report bones, such as the clavicle or sternum, apparent under their skin. They do not see evidence of ribs or wrist bones or the like. Nor do they see any form of apparent musculature.
The heads of the aliens are, in human terms, disproportionately large for their bodies. Their craniums are bulbous, especially above the eyes. There is no indication of cranial, facial, or neck hair, or hair anywhere else on the body. The neck and face are smooth with no wrinkles. The Small Beings’ heads are also smooth, with no indication whatever of any external markings.
The aliens’ faces somewhat resemble humans’. They have eyes approximately halfway down the face, an area where a nose might be, a small mouthlike slit, an area where one might envision “cheeks” (although none can be seen), and a chin. Using humans or higher primates as a model, all of the features are in the correct position. But the resemblance is merely in the general effect, and each organ and feature differs markedly from that of humans.
The huge eyes are the single most striking feature of the aliens. They span the entire width of the broad forehead. They are largest in the center and taper off to a tip on the side of the head. They contain no pupils, irises, or corneas. When people look into their eyes during Mindscan or other staring procedures, they see black, usually opaque organs. The eyes have no gradation in color, and they do not move from side to side as would a human’s. At times abductees see some hint of liquidy “movement” inside the eyes. A few witnesses have reported a “sparkle” or “light” inside the eyes. Some aliens’ eves can “move”: They can squint and turn on their axes so that the outside tip can be raised or lowered. This is done mainly in Mindscan procedures. Other aliens have eyes that are more rounded and not as almond-shaped as the others. A few abductees have thought that the external eye might be a covering for an eye inside.
Witnesses generally do not report eyelids. Although some abductees have said that they have seen the Beings blink in unison, this may be confabulation; blinking is usually not reported. The aliens do not have eyebrows, although it is commonly reported that they have a ridge that might be caused by a “bone” around their eyes.
A few abductees report noses on the Small Beings, but the overwhelming majority of the reports indicate that the Small Beings have a slight raised bump but no nostrils or openings that might be interpreted as nasal passages.
The aliens’ slitlike mouth does not have lips. Witnesses are ambivalent about an opening for the mouth. Most do not see one, but some have mentioned seeing a “membrane” over an opening. (A small number of abductees report that the mouth is perfectly round, forming an “O”.) Abductees do not see teeth, a tongue, or saliva. The aliens do not use their mouths for communication.
A small and pointed chin lies below their mouths. Sometimes the mouth is so low that there is the appearance of no chin at all. The aliens do not appear to have a jaw or jaw hinge below where the ears would be. They seem to have no muscles attached from anywhere on the face to the top of the head for mastication. The overall look of the face, then, is that of a large forehead leading down to a tiny pointed chin. When they look at the face, some witnesses are reminded of a light bulb, a skeleton head, or a parking meter.
Aliens sometimes may have a small raised feature where human ears would be, but without an opening. Abductees can find no evidence of a device for collecting sound waves on alien heads.
Aliens do not have a thick neck with the head fitting on it in a human fashion. Instead, the head is attached to an extremely narrow, tubelike neck that seems too thin to support the head’s weight. The head does not fit into the neck as human heads would. The neck is short and sticks into the bottom of the head much like, as one abductee put it, “a pumpkin on a stick.” Witnesses see no throat movement denoting a tongue or a swallowing mechanism. The aliens do not appear to have an epiglottis. When Ken Rogers was twelve years old, he was able to reach up during the Mindscan procedure and grab a Taller Being by the throat. He reported that the neck seemed solid, as if it contained material inside, but it did not have the feel of moving muscles. No Adam’s apple is evident in their throats, and there is no indication of vocal cords since communication is telepathic and abductees usually do not hear sounds coming from the aliens.
The alien’s chest is small and narrow, with no noticeable bony structure in it. No sternum or clavicle is discernible. Abductees report no ribs protruding from under the skin. Nor is the chest bifurcated like a human’s chest. Witnesses see no breasts or nipples. The normal human triangular configuration of the shoulders leading down to the waist is not present. The overall outline of the upper and lower body is one of rectangular straightness down to the legs, with no waist. The aliens do not appear to have a pelvis or prominent hip bones.
The area where the stomach would be is flat. The aliens have no rounded paunch or line of demarcation for a food-processing mechanism like upper and lower intestines. Witnesses do not see a navel. Nor do they see genitals. If the “male” Being is wearing tight-fitting clothes, no bulge is evident where human male genitals would be. If he is not wearing clothes, then abductees Page 110 specifically state that he does not have genitals. Similarly, in the “female” alien, abductees can see no hint of a pubic arch, which is consistent with a lack of pelvis. There is no apparent method for the elimination of liquid waste.
The aliens’ backs are consistent with what witnesses describe on the front of the Beings. There is no triangular shape to the back. It is smooth, with no discernible “bumps” of vertebrae. Most abductees do not see shoulder blades. If witnesses see the buttocks area, it is not fleshy and padded as on humans. While abductees do not see individual buttocks per se, they often describe a horizontal oblong ridge at the base of the alien’s back that does not protrude.
Aliens’ arms are long and very thin, with no apparent musculature. They bend at the “elbows” and can be used the way humans use their arms, with a free range of motion. Their arms and elbows do not display any boniness and are apparently the same diameter from the shoulder to where the hands join. They have no wrists.
Their hands and fingers also resemble humans’ although they are thin and long. Their fingers are most often said to have rounded “pads” at the ends, although sometimes they are described as being tapered at the end. They have no fingernails. Frequently abductees see only three fingers.
They have an opposable “thumb” or at least an appendage that acts as a thumb. Occasionally abductees report that the thumb is in a lower position on the hand than humans have. They have no small, curved ridges or swirls on their hands or fingertips that might denote fingerprints.
Their two legs are short and thin, and they bend at the “knees.” The limbs have no evident muscle development. Their legs go straight down, with no sense of a thigh, calf, or ankle. The legs are the same diameter from the top of the thigh to the bottom of the calf, and flow smoothly into the feet. Little is known about the feet and toes. Abductees describe the feet as being either rounded or elongated, and toes are not usually noticed.
When a female alien is described, it is generally in vague terms. The abductee knows that the alien is female, but the physical description is not unique enough to suggest significant anatomical differences. The female is often the same size as the Taller Being. She has no mammary glands and no hair, cranial, facial, or pubic. When asked to describe the differences between the male and female, the abductees say that the female alien is thinner, more “graceful,” more “sensitive,” and “kinder.” Even with these vague descriptions, the abductees are quite clear about whether they are being tended by a male or female.
The aliens’ small motor dexterity is excellent. They are able to conduct physical examinations with great speed—touching, poking, prodding, lifting, and feeling. They can maneuver instruments with precision, for example in performing tissue-sampling procedures. They generally do not drop instruments or have accidents where things spill or are knocked over. They remove abductees’ clothes without much fumbling or clumsiness.2 Abductees have the impression that the aliens are weak and frail, and they are often surprised at the strength the Beings can display. The aliens can maneuver humans through hallways and rooms and onto tables. They can push and pull abductees. Working together, two or three of them can carry an abductee to a table and then lift the abductee up onto it. They can grip abductees’ arms and legs with strong hand pressure. In spite of the aliens’ abilities, abductees usually think that the Beings can be swept aside, pushed over, or hurt, if only the abductees had the muscle control to do it.
The Taller Being is very similar to the Small Beings. He can be a few inches to a head taller. His skin is often more leathery and striated. Because of the nature of his tasks—egg and sperm harvesting, Mindscan, etc.—the abductees usually have stronger reactions to him than to the Small Beings. The abductees who hate and fear him tend to describe him as being “uglier.” Others, especially those who are more “bonded” to him, think that he is friendly and kind and tend to describe him as not being any uglier than the Small Beings. Both groups, however, describe his specific features in similar ways. He has enormous, liquid, black eyes. He usually does not have a nose although sometimes abductees do report seeing a nose. His head is not as smoothly rounded as the Small Beings’; it is more angular. He seems to have more “character” in his face. Abductees sometimes report striations and indentations in the Taller Being’s forehead or on top and in back of the head. He also has no hair anywhere on his head. He frequently wears distinguishable covering, such as a white, gray, or black “lab coat,” smock, or robe. Sometimes abductees report that is he wearing something on his head like a hat or a surgeon’s cap.
Although we know little about the physiology of the aliens, speculation often leads to interesting hypotheses. For instance, if we ask, “Do aliens breathe?” the speculative answer can lead in surprising directions. To answer this question we must put together bits of information. In virtually all abduction accounts, the communication between the aliens and the abductees is done through “telepathy,” and not aurally through their ears. Words are not sent through the air in the form of aspirated sound waves formed by lungs expelling air through a set of vibrating vocal cords. The same phenomenon is reported when aliens talk among themselves: Abductees report that they can also nonaurally understand what the aliens are saying to each other. Also, open mouths are rarely reported, and neither are mouths assuming various shapes as if in word formation. In fact, mouth animation does not appear to be a function.
Humans use the nose, in part, to inhale and perhaps to heat air for breathing, to sense gases, and to trap particulates floating in the atmosphere for odor registration. The lack of a nose on an alien suggests no need for these functions and is therefore consistent with the speculation that they do not use the atmosphere as we do. The same is true for their lack of eyelids. They apparently have no need to keep the outside of their eyes free from dust and other particulates.
In addition, abductees do not report seeing an expansion and contraction of the chest as if the aliens were inhaling and exhaling air. Nor do they feel the rush of air on their faces from exhalation during the extremely close Mindscan procedures. All this leads to the possibility that the Beings do not breathe air, at least not in the manner that we are aware of, and do not interact with the atmosphere as we do.
“Do aliens eat or drink?” The evidence seems to suggest that they do not. Abductees never see aliens eat. The aliens do not appear to have a moveable mouth, teeth, saliva, or tongue. The throat Page 111 is a narrow tube with no indication that it contains a complex apparatus for swallowing or ingestion.
The lack of a jaw further supports the notion that if the aliens eat, it is not accomplished through mastication. Lack of a nose suggests that the sense of smell is not involved with the important (human) function of taste. If that is the case, the ingestion of “food” might be very different, if it exists at all.
There is no evidence of a stomach. Also, all the Beings appear to have the same bodily frame, with no evidence in weight differentiation as if one were eating more or less than the other. There are no discernible buttocks or solid and liquid waste elimination apparatuses. In fact, abductees do not report water as part of the experience. They see no water basins, no spouts or faucets, no cups or glasses for drinking water. The aliens never offer food or drink to the victims other than a liquid for some specific physical procedure. They never wash their hands, at least within sight of the abductees.
A cursory examination of alien morphology, then, leads to the conclusion that these Beings are very different from humans. They do not appear to breathe or to ingest food and water, which means that at least two major human physiological systems are missing or are organized completely differently.
ALIEN BEHAVIOR AND COMMUNICATION The technology and science that the aliens possess suggest that they have logical thought processes with a great capacity to learn and understand. The achievements they have demonstrated depend on cooperation among the aliens, and this would probably entail a hierarchy of work and divisions of labor; the differentiation of tasks that abductees report suggests this as well. Furthermore, the Taller Being’s behavior lends evidence to a hierarchical structure not only of work but of command and knowledge.
The Taller Being appears to be in control of the abduction. He usually makes his appearance after the abductee has been examined. He directs the operations of the Small Beings. He conducts what might be considered the more specialized procedures—Mindscan, gynecological procedures, and sperm collection—rather than the more general ones, such as the physical examination.
In addition to executing the Taller Being’s orders, the Small Beings have their own specific tasks to perform. They retrieve abductees, oversee clothes removal, situate the abductee on the table, and help perform the physical examination. They often maneuver machinery and take the abductee to various stations. Yet they are not simply “robots” with no independence. Most of the time they act in concert to carry out their assignments. On occasion they will discuss a problem and agree upon a solution. For example, one time when Karen Morgan was taken on board the UFO, she felt extremely “out of it” as she lay on a table in an entrance room. The Small Beings apparently saw this, and Karen could “hear” them communicating about the fact that she was not ready for the examination. They decided that the best course of action was to wait. So they waited until Karen began to feel a little less groggy. Then they took her into the room for the examination.
The “female” Being usually looks more like the Taller Being and performs many of his duties along with other tasks. She interacts with both men and women, but she more often reassures males, performs Mindscan and bonding, and extracts sperm. The “female” Beings attend to the babies and nurseries. They bring the children out to be held, hugged, and nursed, and then take them back after the abductees are finished with them.
The aliens are generally cooperative with one another, and abductees report no instances of conflict among them, although there may be differences of opinion about how to proceed when something unusual occurs. The Taller Being may be irritated when the Small Beings have not done something to his liking, such as not taking an abductee’s clothes off fast enough.
He told me that I had to get undressed. He seemed kind of annoyed that I wasn’t already.
You mean, annoyed with you?
Well, annoyed at them. I felt like he was mad at them. He said something to them; he just was unhappy.
Did he turn around and say something?
Yes, sort of off to the side.
Did you happen to pick up a little particle of that discussion?
For some reason I think he said something like, “This isn’t the way this is supposed to be done.” And then he said something about me supposed to be undressed already, or why wasn’t I undressed already, or something like that.
What happens then?
Page 112 He turned back to me, and he looked at me again, and I knew that he’d be back, and he went out of the room again…. I guess they just took my clothes off when I was lying there…. He came back after a few minutes…. He looked at me again, and he said, “This will be over in a minute.” I started to feel scared again, too.
(Barbara Archer, 21, 1988) The aliens’ demeanor is businesslike. They do not waste time; all their actions are deliberate and economical. Abductees get the impression that they are part of an assembly-line process. They are received, processed, and returned as fast as possible so that the aliens can move on to the next victim.
The aliens seem to respond to human needs with a certain amount of compassion. The reassuring nature of their conversation suggests that they appear to understand human fear and aversion to pain (although they sometimes conduct pain procedures). They comfort the abductees by telling them that they will not be hurt, that there will be no pain, that they should not be frightened, that it will not last long. They may have evolved this line of communication because human fear is a constant factor in nearly all abductions.
On the other hand, telling newly pubescent young girls that they should “breed” or “mate,” as if they were animals in a biological experiment, suggests that the aliens are either unaware of or indifferent to human emotions and psychological responses. The aliens act as if the process of making babies involves only the physical uniting of sperm and egg.
They do not seem to understand why humans resist them. The Taller Beings often seem puzzled when someone tries to resist. When an abductee attempts a modicum of physical resistance, the aliens simply enforce their wishes. When the abductee does not mentally cooperate or when she silently cries out against the aliens, they disregard it. They ignore accusations that they are hurting the abductee or ruining her life. If she pleads with them to stop, they answer, “We can’t stop.” If she threatens them with finding a way to put a stop to it, they answer, “You can’t stop us. We won’t stop,” or something similar. Patti Layne reported a very short but typical exchange with the Taller Being.
He looks in my eyes and says, “How do you feel?” And I say, “Not good, why did you bother me?” And he didn’t answer. He just stared at me too. “I’m going to get rid of you guys somehow.” And he said, “Okay, you do that.” But that’s all I remember.
(Patti Layne, 17, 1980) When resistance occurs, the aliens do not seem to become angry. In fact, anger does not emerge as a significant feature of their psychological makeup. They may seem perturbed, exasperated, stern, or annoyed, but they do not manifest anger, even when pushed. They have no outbursts, and they display no uncontrollable behavior. Similarly, abductees report no violent or aggressive physical behavior.
In their efforts to try to get abductees to do what they want, the aliens display a curious substitution of form for content. During child presentations, for example, the aliens sometimes insist that the baby is “beautiful” even though the woman might be repelled by the sight of it. They insist that a woman hold a baby to her breast even though she might not be lactating.
In general, the aliens are evasive in their communications. When asked direct questions not relating to the experience at the moment, they often ignore the question. In fact, most abductions take place with little or no communication whatsoever between alien and abductee. If a telepathic dialogue does take place, it is usually with the Taller Being and it has limits. The Taller Being will ask a question of the abductee related to her physical state, especially if he has found something about her that he has not seen before. She replies and then he might ask a few more questions. Or the Taller Being may sometimes ask a casual question, such as “How are you?” Instead of answering, often the abductee will ask the Taller Being why he is doing something. His answer is evasive. If the abductee persists, the Taller Being will remark about how the victim is asking too many questions and tell her to relax.
The Taller Being and the Small Beings silently communicate among themselves. Usually the Taller Being initiates the conversation and the Small Beings respond. Once in a while abductees report a situation in which the Taller Being explains something about human physiology to the Small Beings, as if he were a teacher and they were students. He will point his finger at various areas of the abductee’s body, the Small Beings will look at the areas, and the Taller Being will communicate with them about it. Abductees often report that they are able to “tap” into communications between Small and Taller Beings. Invariably they are discussing something about the abductee’s body or the procedure they are about to perform on it. Sometimes the Small Beings stand around and communicate with one another, but idle conversations between aliens and abductees are rarely reported. At times the Beings seem pleased or almost happy, especially when the victims have cooperated fully with them in all their procedures.
Abductees rarely describe humor or lightheartedness in any of the aliens, although we do have one reported episode. The Beings had just cut off a lock of a young girl’s hair. The Taller Being then put the hair up to his head and showed it to the other Beings. This apparently was amusing. In the main, however, abductees say that the Beings do not express a sense of fun.
Virtually all conversation revolves around the experiences that are taking place. There is no discussion about the lives of the abductees or of the aliens apart from the abduction scenario. (It must be remembered that the telepathic and nonsyntactical quality of most conversations means that abductees must interpret the correct meaning from the impressions that they receive.) The Beings express absolutely no interest in anything about the abductee’s daily life apart from physiology. They express no interest in her personal, social, or family relationships, except as they Page 113 bear upon the breeding program. They express no interest in politics, culture, economics, or the rich and extraordinarily complex tapestry that makes up human relationships and societies. They do not ask even idle questions about this. They do, however, express interest in birth control, smoking, and health problems that might directly relate to childbearing for women.
For example, when Barbara Archer was sixteen, she suffered from anorexia and had lost a considerable amount of weight. This greatly concerned the aliens.
I feel nervous now because he’s angry with me for something.
At this time, were you in the middle of your anorexia problem, or at the end of it, or just beginning?
Toward the end.
So you were sort of at a lower weight, then?
Yeah. But I don’t think that that’s the problem. I don’t know. I feel that he’s concerned about the weight, but he’s more concerned about other stuff, too.
What do you think he might be concerned about?
Well, I think that’s he’s concerned about what losing the weight has done. He’s concerned about the problem, but I think that it’s not really the fact that I’m real skinny, it’s just that I think that he knows that my period stopped.
Did your period stop for a long time, or… ?
I guess it was about eight months. Maybe a little bit more than that. Not fully a year, I don’t think, but kind of a long time…. And [the Taller Being and the Small Beings) sort of talk or something. They sort of are in the corner of the room, and I know they’re talking about me.
Can you sort of get a sense of what they’re saying… ?
Well, I think that they’re saying, this is the feeling that I got, I feel that they know that I stopped menstruating, and they think that… I’m also so skinny they think that I’m sick or something. The taller guy seems annoyed again because I’ve lost weight. They keep saying I’ve lost weight.
They don’t know why because they can’t see anything wrong. I’m not sick as far as… I don’t have any sickness, you know. They don’t understand why I lost all this weight. But all they do know is that I lost all this weight and it stopped my period…. They kind of left, I think, and it was just the taller guy.
What does he do?
Well, he comes over to me, and he wants me to, he wants to know why I lost all this weight.
And I just said, “Because I want to be thin.” How does he respond to that?
He says something like, “But you made yourself sick” or, “Now you’re sick,” or something like that. And I said that I just wanted to be thin, that’s all. I didn’t want to do anything else. But I feel like he’s kind of annoyed with me. And he tells me that I have to start eating because my body doesn’t function right if I don’t.
Okay, does he tell you this in a nice manner, or… ?
Sort of, but not really nice.
Is there an edge to it?
Yes. I feel like I’m messing things up. I feel like he’s not going to be nice to me the way he usually is unless I do…. He comes over, and he looks at me again. I feel so upset. I mean, I’m sorry that things are messed up but I can’t eat more. I don’t want to eat more…. I think that he’s Page 114 sort of annoyed with me now. I get the feeling that I’ve ruined… things can’t be done now or something. But after he says that, he just starts looking at me again. And everything is pretty okay. I get those same feelings again, and I get the feeling he’s not really mad at me.
(Barbara Archer, 16, 1982) We have no direct knowledge about the aliens’ lives—either on board the craft or elsewhere.
Abductees have not only never seen food or water, but they have also never seen beds, or other “creature comforts.” They see no magazines or apparent entertainment devices like radios and televisions. Abductees do not report seeing aliens at rest. Witnesses see no art on the walls, and the rooms have no furniture, benches, tables, or chairs, other than those used for the abduction procedures. The rooms lack decoration. The wall colors are metallic gray, black, and white.
Basically abductees cannot find any apparent indication of alien life or society outside of the confines of the craft on which the abduction is taking place.
When abductees have the presence of mind to ask direct questions about the workings of alien society, the aliens evade the questions. When abductees ask the aliens where they are from, the aliens usually either do not answer or say that this information is not for the abductee to know. Karen Morgan had a discussion with a Taller Being just as he was about to begin Mindscan.
And then I say, “Are you taking me with you? Where are we going? Where are you from?” And he says, it says, “We’re from…” I can’t remember—something like “very far away,” or “you wouldn’t understand,” or “it doesn’t matter,” but he’s not giving me a straight answer, and I’m really mad because I want to know.
(Karen Morgan, 30, 1979) In 1983 a frightened and confused Patti Layne asked them if she were in hell: I just go into this room, and I was just sitting there in this chair, more like a bench, sitting on this bench in this room and there’s this guy in there, he had these same eyes. And he said, “I have something to show you.” And I said, “Am I in hell?” Because that’s what I thought was happening, that I was dying in my sleep, and he said, “What’s that?” “That’s a lot of fire and stuff like that.” He didn’t say anything and just went away. I was just sitting there.
(Patti Layne, 20, 1983) The composite picture that emerges from the many abductee accounts is of rational, logical, goal-oriented aliens who perform a variety of clearly outlined tasks with maximum efficiency in a detached, clinical manner. There is a hierarchical structure and a differentiation of labor. They are focused on human physiology, neurology, and reproduction. The aliens display very little sense of individuality. Their outward appearance is almost always the same, given the range of clothing types found. They volunteer no information about themselves. Although once in a while more complicated dialogue takes place, the consistency of their communication behavior suggests that they are carrying out a systematic policy of noninformation.
Finally, we should address the question of whether the aliens have more intelligence than we do.
Although they have an extremely advanced technology, we have no indication that aliens have a higher or greater capacity than humans to learn or to solve problems. Nor have we yet uncovered evidence of creative, intuitive, or aesthetic abilities. Given the right amount of information, human beings appear to be capable of understanding everything that the aliens are doing. Alien activities that at first seemed incomprehensible have become logical and rational as we have accumulated more information from abductees. We have not found a situation where our ability to understand and to learn is clearly on a lower level than theirs as if we were a lower form of animal.
But one thing is clear—the Beings are not human. Their mental abilities and their physiology are very different from ours. They are, in the profoundest sense of the word, “alien.” Page 115 PART III LIVING WITH THE SECRET Page 116 Chapter 9 Exploring the Evidence Many abductees have adjusted well to the abduction phenomenon and are able to lead their lives free from the disruption that these experiences can cause. A few abductees feel that in some way they have been enlightened and even prepared for some future benevolent purpose. Some, who have not investigated their experiences, have successfully integrated the barely remembered events into their daily belief structure whether it is religious, New Age, or pragmatic (“Don’t strange things happen to all people?”), and the experiences become little more than a psychological irritant.
For other abductees, however, the effects of abductions can be terribly traumatic and destructive. Once these victims bring the memories to consciousness through hypnosis or unaided recall, and once they understand what has happened to them, they find little positive in the events.
The experience does not improve their lives, give them mystical powers, or put them in touch with Universal Truth. They wish their abductions had never happened and are fearful that they will occur again. Their problems are compounded because few people will believe them when they confide their stories to them. They can produce no hard evidence to prove their contentions.
So far, the strongest evidence presented is the myriad of abduction reports that have surfaced, with the congruence of narrative and the richness of exact detail. “Hard” evidence has been slow in coming, but it is increasing. Now that we know what to look for, the eventual discovery of evidence constituting irrefutable proof might be much closer than ever. In the long run, the hard evidence may be the most important supportive evidence, but currently it is the physiological and psychological effects of abductions that provide many of our strongest clues to the abduction mystery.
RESIDUE FROM THE OBJECT Physical evidence for abductions is difficult to come by. Returning home with an artifact from the UFO is virtually impossible. It would mean having the physical ability and mental acumen to take something surreptitiously, hiding it while naked, keeping the theft a secret from the aliens, and then remembering where the artifact came from after the abduction. In spite of this predicament, UFO researchers have found some physical signs to support abduction claims. For example, from time to time people will say that they were abducted into an object resting in their backyard. When the area is investigated, a flattened or burned circle can be seen where the UFO rested. Budd Hopkins reported in Intruders that he found a circular ring and a forty-foot streak in the backyard in which the soil had been altered to such a degree that for several years nothing grew there.
Even stranger, someone might expel a tiny metallic ball from their nasal passage, although this has not happened to the abductees I have worked with. In all but a few of the cases the artifact has been lost or discarded. In the cases where they have been recovered, analyses have so far been inconclusive about their origin, or the analysis has not yet been completed. CAT scans, MRIs, and X-rays have been employed to detect supposed implants. In a few of these, a small, unusual mass has been detected in the upper nasal passages where abductees have indicated that an implant might be lodged. To date, no operations have been performed to remove the suspicious masses because the risks and problems inherent in surgery outweigh recovery considerations, or the object mysteriously disappears.
Stains In early 1987 Melissa Bucknell called to say she thought something may have happened the night before because she found marks on her back and “blood” on her nightshirt. But, when examined, the stain on her nightshirt did not appear to be blood: It was not encrusted or oxidized, and it did not have the familiar dark-brown color; rather, it was a dark orange. Its location on her garment did not correspond to the area of her body that she said had been touched. The marks on her shoulder were not puncture or scratch marks, and there was no scab or apparent blood on her skin. Soon afterward Karen Morgan also came forward with a nightshirt that had a puzzling dark- orange stain on it. The stain had not come out in the wash, and she had even gone to the trouble of smearing makeup, coffee, and other substances near the stain to try to duplicate it, but with no success.
Sometimes the stains are not on a garment. For instance, Janet Demerest sleeps in the same bed with her six-year-old daughter, Hillary. One night when they woke up after an apparent abduction experience, the little girl complained about pains in her arm and elsewhere. When Janet examined her daughter, she was horrified to find that Hillary’s genitals were red, swollen, and leaking a clear fluid. She had a brown substance painted between her thighs. Janet went into a panic and frantically began to wipe the substance off. As she did, she noticed that the substance simply dried up, turned white, and then “evaporated” until none was left. She found some flakes and a possible stain on the sheet. She stored the flakes in an airtight jar in the freezer, but within a few days they also had evaporated.
A month later the same thing happened again to Hillary. Once again she woke up with the brown liquid painted between her legs. This time Janet peeled off all the material that she could and put it in the freezer. Then she took some toilet paper and wiped the rest of it off. Once again, however, the Page 117 substance simply evaporated within a few days, but some of it adhered to the toilet paper and is presently in storage.
Another woman had an abduction one night while she was taking a nap clutching a favorite teddy bear. She remembered without hypnosis that when she was about to return from the abduction, she was lying on a table and an alien came up to her with the teddy bear. He placed it on her chest, but it fell on the floor. He picked it up and “dabbed” at it a little bit as if he was cleaning it. After the abduction, when the woman remembered what had happened, she looked at the little shirt that the teddy bear was wearing and found orange brown stains on it.
Karen offered a glimpse into the function of the stain substance. She reported that during an event the aliens made her lie on a table and then a small alien came along with a “brush” of some sort and painted the brown liquid in wide swaths on her body. Next, they placed electrodelike devices on her elbows and thighs, and she was required to move her arms and legs one at a time while the aliens either observed or measured something. When I asked her if the aliens wiped the fluid off her when the procedure was completed, she reported that they did not.
We do not know what the stain substance is made of. It either sublimes or evaporates extremely quickly. We do not have enough of the stain substance to mount a viable chemical analysis. Crippen Laboratories of Wilmington, Delaware, attempted a Fourier Transfer Infrared analysis on three of the stains. For two, the analyses showed that they were not common substances such as iodine or caffeine. No analysis was possible for the third stain (from Janet’s sheet) because it had evaporated from the surface.
In 1988 the American Standards Testing Bureau of New York City attempted an analysis. It used a fresh stain from a shirt that Janet had been wearing during an abduction. A small team was assembled to attack the problem. The chief chemist decided that the best way to go about a more in-depth analysis would be through the use of High Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC). The laboratory obtained an HPLC apparatus especially for the analysis, but the team members immediately began to encounter problems. The solvent needed to remove the substance from the garment had to be exactly right so that it would not dissolve the stain completely or alter it chemically. After employing different solvents, they decided that water, after all, would be safest, but the minute traces that they were able to obtain were not enough for anything approaching a complete analysis, even with HPLC. After eight months of sporadic trying, they gave up, unable to go further. Soon after that, a chemist at a Pennsylvania university attempted to analyze an abduction-related stain, with help from his graduate students. After trying for six months they, too, gave up. And there the matter stands. Until a complete analysis is possible, all we have is tantalizing but incomplete evidence. In the meantime the number of stain samples has increased.
PHYSICAL AFTEREFFECTS The abductees suffer a variety of physical problems caused by abductions whether or not they have recovered the memories of their experiences.
Scars and Bruises Many abductees notice mysterious scars on their bodies that they later realize are associated with abduction experiences. The scar may appear at any age, young or old. Abductees report no pain associated with such scars, nor do they describe blood, bandages, or a healing period. The scars range in shape from small “scoop” marks to elongated, thin scars. These scars are permanent records of abduction experiences and can be anxiety-provoking reminders for the victim.
Scarring is found not only on the body’s surface. It may occur internally as well. Abductees have reported anomalous scar tissue in their vaginas, bladders, gall bladders, nasal passages, and sinuses. None of the scar tissue found in these areas has been associated with conscious trauma.
A less harmful but disconcerting physical effect is the anomalous bruise. It is common for abductees to wake up with black-and-blue marks on their bodies. Men discover large bruises around their genitals. Both sexes find numerous black-and-blue marks on their arms and legs right after an abduction.
Vision Problems Eye problems are also typical. Abductees often report red, stinging eyes, blurred vision, or swollen eyes after an abduction event. These difficulties can last for a few hours or linger for as long as three months and even, if there is nerve damage, be permanent. As part of a machine examination, Lynn was forced to look for an extended period of time into an apparatus that contained an extremely bright blue light. She could not blink her eyes, and they quickly became quite painful. When the abduction was over, her eyes were red and tearing, and the next day they were swollen. She had difficulty seeing printed material, and it became impossible for her to concentrate on reading. This condition was acute for about three months, and it then slowly subsided.
Abduction victims report other neurological problems associated with sight. Seeing brightly lit colors, “lights,” or even “figures” at inappropriate times is a disturbing consequence of abductions.
The visions may be large and disruptive to the normal course of the day’s activities, but more often than not they are seen through the corner of one’s eyes and are a constant annoyance. We have not discovered the stimulus for this condition within the abduction scenario. Melissa Bucknell went to an ophthalmologist for this problem and was told that it was a common and somewhat normal Page 118 neurological condition for an elderly person—but she was twenty-six years old at the time.
Muscle Pain Temporary muscle aches throughout the body are often associated with events done during an abduction. The pain might be severe and last for a few days. In one instance, Janet was on a table while two Beings had their hands on her shoulders; her head was bent back at a sharp angle as if she was trying to look directly behind her. The Beings stared intently at her as she lay in this position with her body rigid, and one Being performed a gynecological procedure at the same time. The next day she had severe cramps in her neck and shoulders, and the pain persisted for twenty-four hours.
Nosebleeds and Earaches Nosebleeds, “holes” in the nasal passages, and ruptures in the eardrums are also common ailments associated with abductions. The nosebleeds occur in both children and adults. People wake up with their pillows soaked with blood. Physicians have examined the holes but have found no readily explainable causative factor. Abductees frequently complain of blocked nasal passages that make breathing difficult. Similarly, people with ear punctures find blood on the pillow in the morning, and some abductees endure a form of tinnitus, an irregular ringing in the ear.
Discharges and Vaginal Problems Unusual discharges sometimes occur following an abduction. A woman might notice a brownish substance coming from her vagina or her navel. A frightened fifteen-year-old Patti Layne went to the school nurse the day after having an abduction experience because a brown liquid was coming out of her bellybutton. The nurse was unable to identify the substance or explain why it was leaking from her navel.
Abductees’ unusual vaginal problems can indicate recent abduction experiences. After being abducted, one woman woke to find that the interior wall of her vagina was hemorrhaging. She was unaccountably fearful of going to her gynecologist, and she soaked through twenty tampons in one day before the bleeding finally stopped. After another abduction she discovered perforations in her vagina.
It is not unusual for a woman to have her hymen ruptured during an experience. One abductee reported that at her first regular intercourse her hymen was not intact, and she experienced no pain or blood associated with the sexual activity. During hypnosis she remembered that her hymen had been torn during an abduction when she was seven years old.
Then he looked between my legs. And I said, “That’s not nice; you shouldn’t do that.” He said, “I’m not going to hurt you, I just want to look inside.” So this light came on somewhere….
There’s this big light between my legs. And I could just see this big light kind of burn my eyes.
The light was not focused on your eyes, though, is that correct?
The light was focused between my legs. Then he stuck something in it, and it really hurt. It just really hurt, and I couldn’t move.
Was this an instrument of some sort, do you think?
Mm-hmm.
Can you get a sense of the shape of it?
Whatever it was it fit, but it hurt. It just ripped right through in there. It just ripped me right, it felt like I was ripping. I know there was some blood there. It felt kind of dripping and wet.
(Name omitted upon request, 1970) Later she stated that she felt they had torn her hymen.
Pregnancy The problem of unplanned or inexplicable pregnancy is one of the most frequent physical aftereffects of abduction experiences. Usually the woman feels pregnant and has all the outward signs of being pregnant. She is puzzled and disturbed because she has either not engaged in sex or has been very careful with proper birth control. She has blood tests and the gynecologist Page 119 y p p gy g positively verifies the pregnancy. Typically, between the discovery of the pregnancy and the end of the first trimester, the woman suddenly finds herself not pregnant. She has no miscarriage, no extra- heavy bleeding or discharge. The fetus is simply gone, with no evidence of the rare phenomenon of non-twin “absorption,” in which physicians theorize that a nonviable fetus can be absorbed into the woman’s body.
During the first trimester the woman may decide to terminate the pregnancy. At the appointment, the physician begins the procedure and is stunned to find that there is no fetus in the uterus. In Janet Demerest’s case, the physician was so surprised to find the fetus gone that he became angry at the attending nurse for in some way causing the mix-up. The nurse had to gesture to him to be quiet lest Janet hear his anger and confusion. The “Missing Fetus Syndrome” has happened to abductees enough times that it is now considered one of the more common effects of the abduction experience.
PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA: POST-ABDUCTION SYNDROME Many abductees, whether they are aware or unaware of their abductions, suffer from what Dr.
Ronald Westrum first identified in 1986 as Post-Abduction Syndrome (PAS).1 PAS involves a multiplicity of psychological symptoms that are caused by abduction experiences and has its greatest effect on unaware abductees. While similar to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, it differs in that the external forces compel the abductee to repress the memories of traumatic events, even though the abductee may want to remember them. Furthermore, the abduction episodes are repressed even though many do not have the classic violent traumatic content of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Finally, PAS is generated not only by past experiences, but by ongoing events as well.
The severity of PAS varies greatly from person to person, ranging from mild to debilitating. Many unaware abductees act or think in ways that are inexplicable to them; they wonder about the origins of their unusual thoughts and behavior, but they are unable to discover them. Some PAS victims operate normally in society; others are so anxiety-ridden that they have great difficulties functioning in everyday life.
It is very important to note that many symptoms similar to those of PAS also occur in people who have not had abductions. Having one or a number of the symptoms does not necessarily mean that the person has been abducted.
Sleep Disturbances The most common of all PAS problems are sleep disturbances. For the average adult, sleep can be something to look forward to for relief from the anxieties and tensions of the day. Abductees often view sleep very differently. It can be a time of terror and distress. They desperately need sleep, but an irrational fear makes them afraid to close their eyes. They may be scared that “someone” will come into their room, or that “something” will happen to them while they sleep. To reduce the fear, these abductees often sleep with lights, the radio, or the television on. Some sleep with all three on.
Their spouses have to check the house to make sure that no intruders are around. The doors to the bedroom and to the closet have to be closed. Even after this ritual, abductees still have terrible bouts of insomnia. When they close their eyes, their minds become flooded with terrifying images of hideous Beings staring at them with large horrible eyes. These images are so frightening that many abductees will stay awake as long as possible rather than chance seeing them.
When they do fall asleep, frightened abductees often have difficulty staying asleep and wake up many times during the night. Their dreams can be vivid and disturbing. They have visions of lying on a table, of being surrounded by small, large-eyed creatures, of “operations” being performed on them, of seeing strange-looking babies; and there may be a horrifying sexual component to these dreams.
Both ongoing and past abductions can be half-remembered as very frightening, lifelike dreams.
When the victims wake up in the morning after having an abduction experience that is now relegated to a “dream,” they are shaky and nervous—a feeling that might last for a few days. They feel exhausted, even though they presumably got their normal amount of sleep. Then, inexplicably, they may be seized with the desire to rearrange the furniture in their bedroom in the unconscious belief that their fears will disappear if their room is different from before.
Abductees may develop strong fears of their bedroom and sleep in another room from then on, all the while telling themselves that they are foolish or stupid to act this way. They sometimes find that they can go to another person’s house and sleep soundly, but when they return to their own room the sleep disturbances begin again. Often boys and girls and even young men and women living at home prefer to sleep on the floor next to their parents’ bed, even though they may be embarrassed to do so, but being in the room with their parents gives them a feeling of safety that they cannot get in their own bedrooms.
Fears, Anxieties, Depression Fears, anxieties, and sometimes serious depression are frequent symptoms of PAS.
Sometimes the fears are minor annoyances that do not have any great effect on the abductee’s life; at other times they may be serious, life-changing problems that the abductee wrestles with. The fears that grip adults and children alike seemingly have no basis in reality. The abductees cannot Page 120 point to a specific traumatic event in their childhood that might have provoked the phobia. They understand that their fears are completely inappropriate, but they are unable to control their illogical and perplexing feelings.
Abductees may be extremely afraid of being alone. They find that they must be with someone at all times and particularly at night. This is not because of loneliness, but because they are scared that “something will happen” if they are alone, although they are not overly frightened of burglars.
Some abductees suddenly develop seemingly irrational fears of stretches of road or of fields.
They may have traveled the same route for years without giving it a thought, but one day they become inordinately afraid of it. They stop traveling on that stretch of road, and go miles out of their way to avoid it. Child abductees who have played in a nearby park every day suddenly are afraid to go there and never want to play there again. They may have suffered strange missing-time episodes at these places, and they will agonize over what happened to them for many years. Other abductees develop strong fears of their basement, their bedroom, or their backyard. Riding on escalators or elevators can provoke anxiety.
Visiting physicians can be extremely stressful. Although most women find a routine visit to the gynecologist an uncomfortable but necessary event, many abductees are seized with panic when they must go. Some women abductees never visit gynecologists. They dread the thought of a doctor performing an internal examination on them, and even though they tell themselves that their fears are silly, they become hysterical when the procedure is begun. As a result they forgo yearly checkups, which can endanger their health. One twenty-seven-year-old abductee had gone to a gynecologist only three times in her life, and the last time she cried uncontrollably throughout the examination.
When anxiety becomes acute, panic can plague the victim. Abductees may be seized with a panic attack at any time with no recognizable stimulus. As fear overcomes them, their hearts “race,” they breathe rapidly, they become flushed, and they may hyperventilate. A life-threatening fear overwhelms them. These attacks may become so severe and debilitating that they can prompt agoraphobia: Abductees become so consumed with worry about suffering a panic attack that they are unable to leave their homes to carry out their daily routine. One abductee sometimes suffered attacks while she was teaching her high school class. They became so frequent that she was afraid to go to the market because she once experienced an attack there and had to abandon her cart and run home. This type of panic can interfere with work, and with social and family relationships. Panic attack victims find that they cannot drive alone or even be alone at home at night. When the attack starts, even being with someone does not diminish the fears.
Abductees commonly suffer from moderate to severe depression. They may break out in tears for no apparent reason, or have episodes of withdrawal. They may even contemplate suicide to alleviate the pain. If they are unaware of the origin of their malady, the depression is usually not amenable to normal psychological treatment.
Unaware abductees can have inexplicably exaggerated emotional reactions to normal activities.
For instance, they might wake up in the morning with intense feelings of euphoria. They ride the crest of an emotional high that seems to have no cause and that may last for several days. One young woman woke up feeling extremely euphoric. When she rode her bicycle into town she had the inexplicable feeling that she was falling in love with every man who looked into her eyes. Conversely, abductees might feel an almost overpowering rage at someone for simply staring at them, while this might not have ever bothered them in the past. Animals with large eyes might provoke great anxiety in abductees, who sometimes inexplicably develop aversions to deer, rabbits, monkeys, cows, and even inanimate objects. Ken Rogers was a small child when his mother brought him a souvenir “tiki god” from a trip she had taken; the face and eyes of the souvenir so frightened him that he threw it out after having it for one day. One unaware abductee had several abductions from his car. After the last one, he sold his car and gave up driving for several years but did not know the reason why.
Obsessions and phobias relating to “borderland science” are also a common symptom of PAS.
For example, after an abduction, some unaware abductees suddenly become obsessed with unidentified flying objects. They buy every book they can get on the subject, compulsively talk about it, and seem unable to concentrate on much else. Yet a few days or weeks before, they had little or no interest in UFOs. Others go to the opposite extreme and are inordinately repelled by the subject of UFOs. They refuse to entertain the notion that there “might be something to it.” They dislike talking or even thinking about it. They become extremely angry when the topic is raised and may leave the room so that they do not have to participate in a discussion. Their attitude is so negative that it assumes the dimensions of a phobia.
Some abductees experience extreme emotional reactions when they see illustrations of aliens in a book about UFOs. The pictures rivet the abductee as she stares at them in stunned horror, unable to take her eyes off them, all the while wondering why she is reacting in this manner. Others will pick up a book on abductees and have a powerful yet puzzling reaction to it, becoming extraordinarily emotionally involved with its contents. They might break into tears and sob for no apparent reason.
Still others become inordinately frightened by such books and are unable to read them through to the end.
Memories or dreams can become an obsession as the unaware abductee desperately tries to understand their meaning. It is common for abductees to feel that in some way they left their bodies, usually during the night. When they floated out of bed they were often accompanied by someone they believe to be a deceased relative or an angel.
A few unaware abductees claim not only that they have had out-of-body experiences but that they have also experienced what they call astral travel. They know that they have in some mysterious way experienced a strange displacement in location. One minute they were in one spot and then seemingly the next instant they found themselves in another place. They might be aware of this occurring several times during their lives. The only way that they can reconcile what has happened to them is through the only available cultural explanation—astral travel—no matter how ill-defined that might be.
Other PAS anxieties are related to babies. Some women develop “avoidance” postures toward Page 121 babies. Even though they may have already had children, they find that they do not like babies very much or claim to be “not a baby person.” Sometimes babies generate not only anxiety in them but even fear or dread. Others react in a completely opposite fashion and become convinced that they once had a baby that has since been taken from them. They have the inexplicable feeling that they were once pregnant and actually gave birth. Some women can become so obsessed with the “missing baby” that they may even substitute a doll for it to assuage their baffling feelings of desire and guilt.
Missing Time Missing-time episodes are common in abductees’ lives. They are unable to account for a “lost” period of time, which might be as short as an hour or two or as long as a day—and sometimes even longer. Trying to understand the origin of the missing time can torture the victims. It makes no sense.
They have no explanation, and yet they know it happened.
Psychosexual Dysfunction The basic reproductive procedures that occur during an abduction experience can fundamentally influence the psychosexual development of the individual. This is especially true for young abductees, who are most vulnerable and impressionable.
Consider this scenario. A young girl is taken on board a UFO occupied by strange-looking creatures. She is stripped naked and cannot physically resist. Every inch of her body is examined and touched. Her genitals are probed and manipulated. By the time she has reached sixteen years old, she might already have had a number of traumatic internal examinations that have been stored in her unconscious mind. As a boy, the events surrounding the taking of sperm can be just as traumatic and humiliating.
To complicate matters, while the aliens are performing their procedures, young boys and girls sometimes see naked adults being examined and probed on other tables. Children watch as the aliens perform procedures on sometimes-erect male genitals. They see naked women enduring internal gynecological procedures. Children see their parents being subjected to gynecological and urological examinations. These events can induce a profound sense of shame and guilt in children, both for having seen them and for thinking that perhaps they caused these events to occur to their family members. Furthermore, the children learn that adults have no control over the situation and their roles as protectors cannot be fulfilled. Adults are powerless. Only the aliens have power, and the children are wholly and totally dependent upon them. This can lead to a deep sense of distrust and suspicion in young people.
The problems are made incalculably worse by the bonding and sexual-arousal procedures performed on all abductees. When the alien performs bonding on a young child who is lying naked on a table, the rush of pleasurable emotions in her is irresistible. She is completely defenseless.
This is even more injurious when the Taller Being (“male” or “female”) elicits intense sexual arousal feelings, and even orgasm. Then, while bonding and/or sexual feelings are at a peak, the Being begins the gynecological or urological procedures and physically intrudes into her genitals or mechanically extracts his sperm.
These procedures can have devastating effects on the child’s psychosexual development. The sexually bizarre nature of the event is retained deep within the unconscious mind. Abductees are forced to have sexual feelings while they are focused on a nonhuman creature in a strange setting, and then they are made to forget these feelings so that they are unable to come to terms with them.
When the alien is finished with a young girl, he coldly turns around and walks out of the room while she is lying there with the residue of sexual feelings. In other less-frequent scenarios, the aliens might urge the teenage girl to “breed”: They might conjure up mental pictures in her mind of humans having sexual intercourse, or they might flood her mind with clinical images of the physical details of intercourse to instruct her; they might bring in a man or boy to have intercourse with her for demonstration purposes. The psychological ramifications of all this can be profound—leading to guilt, shame, distrust, and other psychosexual development disturbances, as well as resulting sexual dysfunction.
These abduction events can influence sexual attraction and behavior. Some women abductees report that they prefer men who are small and dark, or they like powerful, dominant men who make love to them and then “just walk away.” Sexual fantasies for women may include odd science fiction themes. Some men and women who are psychologically accustomed to frequent violation, pain mixed with “pleasure,” and the inability to move on a table report fantasies involving masochism and bondage.
As a result of these procedures, some abductees lose interest in sexual relations completely.
They might go for years without a sexual relationship. Any sexual contact is unconsciously viewed as another assault; therefore it is to be avoided. In one extreme case, an abductee’s avoidance behavior was so profound that not only was it impossible for her to have normal sexual function, but she was unable even to talk about her reproductive organs, refusing to admit that she knew their clinical names.
For men, impotence and difficulties with ejaculation are common. Some become obsessed with control. They try to control every aspect of their bodies, including ejaculation. Some men masturbate excessively, unconsciously trying to keep the aliens from having their sperm. Others have a feeling of shame and guilt when they are sexually active, unknowingly rekindling feelings that they may have had during the abduction experience.
The problems engendered by PAS lead both men and women to question their own mental stability. They are often extremely introspective, having continually ruminated about their odd Page 122 behavior—both sexual and otherwise—for most of their lives. These problems can be so severe that thoughts of, and even attempts at, suicide are not rare for adults and even young children.
SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS Many abductees engage in a lifelong search for answers to questions they cannot fully formulate.
For some, the New Age movement (wherein spiritual and humanistic values are achieved through alternative pathways to conventional learning) provides an answer. In some way they know they are in contact with a “higher” or “cosmic” consciousness. They feel sure that they can communicate with other people by mental telepathy. They know that they have been in touch with another realm of existence.
Some unaware abductees become attracted to channeling and might even become channelers themselves. The personal, benevolent, channeled messages they receive from “alien spirits” give them a secure feeling that the ill-defined events they have been undergoing are benign, and they feel enriched and emotionally rewarded by the messages.
It is not unusual for a person to seek answers to the disturbing qualities of their lives through organized religion—usually evangelical Christian groups. When the abductee tells the minister that strange things have been happening to him, the minister frequently invokes “demons” or demonic possession. It is the devil’s work. Prayer and faith will vanquish the demons and allow the victim to lead a life free from harassment. For some abductees this explanation and prescription are satisfying because they give meaning to the experiences and dictate a course of action to control them. But for many others the demonic analysis does not quite ring true. When prayer fails, they look elsewhere for answers.
It must be emphasized that unaware abductees are trying to deal with the phenomenon as best they can. The internal pressure to discover the origin of their experiences can be tremendous. In New Age and psychic societies they find kinship with others who claim to have had the same type of experiences. They discover meaning in their half-memories that satisfies the “cosmic” implications for which they were searching. In religion they find solace and seek to master the events through faith and prayer. Often their quest is primarily to reinforce their hope that they are not mentally ill.
They anxiously want to prove to themselves that their feelings and bleed-through memories are “legitimate,” and that they are not just fantasizing. They desperately want to exert intellectual and emotional control over fundamentally uncontrollable events in their lives.
Rather than joining New Age groups or religious sects, many abductees turn to mental health professionals for help. They know that there must be something “wrong.” A few abductees have even checked themselves into hospitals because they think that mental problems are causing them to imagine the bizarre events in their lives. Others seek conventional psychological or psychiatric help.
The vast majority of professional therapists are not trained to help abductees. “Standard” therapy not grounded in the knowledge of what actually happened to the abductee rarely dissipates anxieties, and the problems continue unabated. Well-meaning therapists try to convince abductees that their problems stem from familial relationships in childhood, or that their vivid dreams originate in repressed sexuality or in childhood sexual abuse. When the abductee says that her problems might have something to do with seeing a strange object in the sky, a “monster” in her bedroom, or an unexplainable lapse in time, the psychologist or psychiatrist tries to convince her that these are just fantasies and the problems are psychological. Some less conventional therapists who have attempted to deal with the residual effects of the problems regardless of their cause have had the best success. A few have referred abductees to competent abduction researchers.
Hypnotic regression—and special counseling by an individual familiar with hypnosis, psychological techniques, and the abduction phenomenon—affords the best opportunity for the abductee to come to terms successfully with the predicament that she finds herself in. Few people are trained for this work.
Recognition that a PAS symptom is related to UFOs often starts with a memory that suddenly wells up. Casual reading about abductions might trigger a memory. Glancing at a book with a representation of an alien in it might cause the terror and anxiety of forgotten incidents to come rushing back. The same anxiety might be triggered by viewing a television show on abductions or even just engaging in idle conversation about the topic with a friend. Or one day an abductee simply remembers a piece of an incident with no obvious activating mechanism.
For some abductees, knowledge of the abductions finally gives them the answers they were seeking, and they let go of previously held belief structures that were never fully satisfactory. But, for many others, awareness of their involvement in the abduction phenomenon brings about a new set of problems.
The first problem is emotional isolation. Although the abductee desperately wants to discuss the phenomenon with friends and relatives, she finds it very difficult to tell anyone about her experiences. The person that the abductee confides in may think she is “having a breakdown” or is mentally unstable. She may be ridiculed outright. It is not uncommon for an abductee’s spouse (particularly a husband) to disbelieve her. The same is true for parents of children-abductees; these parents tend to think that it is a phase the child will outgrow. (Yet most abductees manage to find at least one friend or relative to believe them or to take them seriously.) If an abductee is not married, then she wonders if she can ever get married. Will she put her spouse in danger? Can she lead a normal married life? Does she have a responsibility to her future spouse to warn him of the danger?
Knowledge can also bring a new round of nighttime fears. The abductee becomes extremely anxious when she goes to bed. Any unusual sound in her house or apartment sends her into extreme fear. Driving at night can be frightening, especially in isolated areas. She is constantly aware that an abduction can take place at any time.
Page 123 Abductee parents are concerned for the safety of their children. They fear that they can do nothing to protect them. They may even have seen their children during an abduction, and they suffer intense guilt feelings because they were powerless to help them.
For some abductees, the idea of being taken against one’s will by nonhumans and undergoing a variety of physical and mental procedures is overwhelming. They prefer to think of their experiences as fantasies or dreams. They want the phenomenon to be benevolent and insist, against all evidence, that it is. This is why many abductees, after discovering what is happening to them, continue to embrace channeling. The thought that they might be victims of abductions rather than “chosen people” who are looked after by Space Brothers is difficult to cope with. They willingly retreat into the comfortable scenario of channeled information from kindly and benevolent aliens, in which, instead of being victims, they are cooperative participants who have some measure of control over their destinies. Other abductees face the facts squarely. They know what has happened, and after wrestling with the fear and the terror and coming to terms with their predicament, they want to get on with their lives.
It must be emphasized, finally, that PAS does not occur in all abductees. In fact, most people find a way to cope with these incredible experiences. Whether they know what has happened to them or not, they find a way to lead normal lives with only minor repercussions from the events that have occurred to them. The fact that a person has had abduction experiences does not automatically mean that she is suffering from the most psychologically destructive aspects of them.
No matter how they handle the experience, all abductees have one thing in common: They are victims. Just as surely as women who are raped are victims of sexual abuse or soldiers can be victims of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, abductees are victims who require sensitivity and, if needed, help in understanding what has happened to them and the possible consequences that abductions have had for their lives.
Page 124 Chapter 10 The Struggle for Control Abductees desperately want the abduction experience to stop. They have tried by pleading with the aliens, threatening them, and being willfully uncooperative. They have moved to another house, to another city, to another state, trying to get away from them. They sleep with a knife or a gun. They stay up all night—fearfully waiting, hoping that they can defend themselves. But the abductions continue.
Even biology has no effect. Physiological changes in a woman’s reproductive cycle do not prevent abductions. Women who have had tubal ligations and hysterectomies and who have had their ovaries removed continue to be the victims of abductions, although they are spared the typical gynecological procedures. We have not had enough experience with men who have a low sperm count or who have had vasectomies to know whether these conditions forestall abductions.
PREVENTION AND INTERVENTION Little headway has been made in preventing abductions, although we have had some success with the use of a video camera. The camera makes it impossible for the aliens to maintain secrecy during an abduction, and in some cases it is able to effectively forestall the experience. For example, Melissa Bucknell began to have abduction experiences almost on a daily basis. We decided to use a video camera to try to “catch” the aliens in the act. We set up a camera and a VCR on a dresser top pointed at her bed. Melissa had been abducted the night before we set up the equipment. But after we installed it, days went by with no activity. We viewed all the tapes and she was sleeping at all times. Then one day she reported that she thought “something might have happened” to her that morning. She had gone to sleep very late the night before and had slept until noon. The tape had run out at 6:00 A.M. Investigation revealed that the abduction took place sometime between 6:00 and 12:00. I thought this was a near miss and the taping continued. Weeks later she had another abduction episode. This time she had slept on the living room couch to get away from the noise of her neighbors arguing upstairs—once again it was impossible for the camera to record the abduction.
A few months later Karen Morgan agreed to use a video camera and a similar pattern began to emerge. As long as the camera was trained on her, no abductions took place. But when Karen was away from the camera her problems began. When she went out of town to visit friends or relatives, she would be abducted. When she went to Michigan for a wedding and to Virginia to spend a night on a friend’s yacht and to New York to visit relatives, she had abduction experiences. When she “forgot” to set up the camera or VCR for the night, there was a good possibility that she would be abducted.
More abductees wanted to use the camera, and, as we gained experience with it, we began to notice that the video equipment would sometimes mysteriously malfunction or be turned off—and an abduction would follow. Unusual power outages that affected only the immediate surroundings (sometimes not even other rooms) would cause the VCR to go off and an abduction would take place. After one abduction Karen noticed that the camera wires had been pulled from the back of her VCR. Another time she noticed in the morning after an abduction that the video camera was off when she had specifically remembered turning it on and seeing the red light indicating that it was in the “record” mode.
The problem that the camera was generating for the abduction was overcome in other ways as well. For example, an abductee felt the urge at 5:30 A.M. (her camera put a time stamp on the tape) to get out of bed, walk over to the VCR, and turn it off—all of which was duly recorded on tape. She later remembered seeing Small Beings who were standing just outside of camera range directing her to do it. In another case, a young woman abductee felt very nervous one night and had the irresistible urge to get out of bed (and out of the camera’s field of view) and sleep in her parents’ room. As soon as she was away from the camera, she was abducted. One woman had the urge to go to bed three hours before she normally did. An abduction took place before the VCR was programmed to go on.
Six people have used a video camera and all have had similar experiences. The video camera does not stop abductions from happening; it only forestalls them. Nevertheless, the video camera is the only mechanism known that brings relief to the abductee at night. It helps to alleviate feelings of helplessness and gives the abductee a sense of fighting back and a slight measure of control over her life. It is a form of intervention that forces the Beings to contend with a detection device— something that they do not want to do.
A video camera has its drawbacks, however. It quickly becomes a crutch, and abductees feel that they cannot sleep without it. If they go on a trip and do not have the video camera with them, they can become beset by fears that an abduction will occur. Furthermore, sleeping for long periods of time under a video camera is something that no one looks forward to.
There are other methods of intervention that can be employed during the abduction itself. These appear to be able to affect the course of the procedure, and to switch control of the situation, if only for a moment, to the abductee. For example, several abductees have planned in advance to ask the aliens a question. It does not matter what the question is; the act of asking is most important. During the actual episode, the question is often extremely difficult to remember because of the changes in Page 125 the abductees’ consciousness, but some abductees have managed to do it. The aliens’ answers have been vague and singularly lacking in information, but the important thing is that they seem to be caught off guard. This has given the abductee a sense of control, no matter how small. For a few minutes the abductee calls the shots and might even slightly change the course of the abduction.
During one abduction Karen Morgan was able to ask her question as the Taller Being was beginning Mindscan. As usual, the situation is more revealing for the way in which the alien dealt with the question than for the information imparted to Karen.
And then I ask it the question, “How long have you been doing this?” And it says, “That knowledge isn’t given to you.” And I say, “Jesus Christ, will you answer a question for the love of God? How long have you been doing this, and stop with those stupid answers.” I’m so pissed off at it. And it sort of just smiles and doesn’t answer. And I say, “Have you been doing this forever?” I don’t think it understands forever. And then I ask what it’s doing. “What are you doing?” It wants me to give it my mind, and then it will show me what it’s doing. I say, “No dice, I don’t care that much. No thanks, I’m not that interested.” It says, “Why are you afraid? Why are you worried? Don’t be afraid.” All the same bullshit that it always wants to give you.
(Karen Morgan, 38, 1987) Ken Rogers had intended to ask a predetermined question in several abductions but found it was too difficult to remember. Based on the idea that the aliens appear to be attracted to anything unusual on a person’s body, he decided to put dots on his chest with a washable marker. He hoped that the aliens would be drawn to the marks on his chest, and that their interest would in turn prompt his memory, and he would ask the question. The question he was to ask was similar to Karen’s: “How long are you going to continue to do this?” Nothing happened for a period of weeks. Then he was abducted. As predicted, the aliens immediately focused their attention on the dots. After the examination, they sat him up on the edge of the table and, while the Small Beings watched, the Taller Being pointed to the dots and asked him what the marks were. Instead of asking the question, however, Ken became a little bit frightened and simply stated, “They are dots.” The aliens tapped his chest and looked a little more. When he was leaving, several more Taller Beings approached and he had to lift up his shirt while they carefully surveyed the dots.
Determined to gain enough control to ask the question, Ken decided to try again with a new query, “Do you sleep?” Once again he had an abduction experience, and once again the aliens were drawn to the marks on his chest. This time he asked the question. The answer was evasive.
“We are always sleeping.” After this event, however, Ken was led into a special room off to the side of a large examining room where several Taller Beings carefully examined his chest and performed Mindscan procedures on him. Ken was convinced that the mental activity was related to the marks.
Other abductees have attached various objects to their bodies in the hope of causing the aliens to depart from their routine and contend with the new object. One abductee wrapped a piece of masking tape around her arm and went to bed. That night she woke up and had the strong urge to take the tape off, which she did. An abduction event followed. At another time she wore a special bracelet that a friend had made for her that had battery-powered flashing lights on it. When the abduction event began, she could see the aliens carefully detaching the bracelet from her arm before they took her. Later she had an extremely “penetrating” Mindscan that she felt was directly related to finding out what the bracelet was for.
Will Parker decided to write a letter to the aliens telling them, in essence, to leave him alone. He folded the letter up; on the outside he drew a picture of a smiling alien’s head and wrote, “Have a nice day.” He taped the letter to his lower leg on and off for several months, but he had no abduction events. Then one day he woke up and the letter was gone from his leg. He frantically searched the room and his apartment for more than two hours for the missing letter but could not find it. Two days later, he awoke and was stunned to find that the letter was taped to his leg again in exactly the same place as before.
We conducted a regression session about these two episodes. The first abduction event was odd. Instead of the characteristic sense of rising up out of bed, Will distinctly felt as if he was sinking down. He found himself lying on a table, with a Taller Being looking into his eyes, but this Taller Being did not have the sense of familiarity to him that was usual. He could see two others doing something to his legs. Suddenly one of the Beings abruptly and painfully pulled the letter off his leg.
Another Taller Being put the letter right up to his face and stared at the picture of the smiling alien as if he were doing Mindscan on it. The aliens said nothing and asked him nothing about it, but, according to Will, the Mindscan procedure was particularly “deep.” The second abduction was with the familiar aliens, ones with whom Will had been involved for some time. In this episode, the Taller Being communicated something to the effect that a mistake had been made and that “everything was going to be put right, the way it was before.” Then when Will woke up he was dumbfounded to find the letter taped to his leg again. The letter appeared not to have been opened and the seal was intact.
Some adventurous people have used more direct methods of intervention. Risking the possibility of injury, Janet Demerest tied herself to the lamp one night; the only thing that happened was that she succeeded in turning around in her sleep and knocking the lamp off the table and breaking it. Ken Rogers tied his ankle loosely with a bathrobe cord to his bedpost, and although we are not sure if any abduction occurred, he received the distinct impression that for a while the aliens were annoyed at what he had done and then simply slipped the cord off his ankle and continued with the abduction.
Resistance Page 126 Resistance to the aliens’ procedures occurs infrequently because most abductees are so closely controlled, both physically and mentally, but when it does happen it offers us an unusual opportunity to observe the aliens when all is not going according to plan. The most common type of resistance is simply to try to get away. Although all abductees sometimes think that they should run, few have the opportunity to do so. Nevertheless, once in a while an abductee bolts. Generally, the Small Beings run after the abductee and retrieve her. Evelyn Livingston was being taken on board the UFO when she managed to run down a hall a little way before she was stopped.
I get up, and I look, and I start to try to run, I think. Down there’s a hall or something, there’s a passageway, and I start to run away. I’m trying to get away, and I thought I’d see something they wouldn’t want me to see, and then I’d be able to do something. They would take me out, they would let me get out if I did something that I wasn’t supposed to do. I could get away. So I was running.
So you have enough muscle control to do that?
Yes. I get a little way.
Is this off to your right, or… ?
It’s like on the right.
Is this a passageway… ?
Kind of something like that.
This is directly off the room, then, or the area that you kind of came in on your knees?
It’s right in the middle of that part. And it was like we were in a passage.
How far do you get?
I don’t get that far. I get a little ways.… I’m trying to run, and I can’t…. Then I’m up against the wall, because I can’t move. I’m pressing against something. They say, “Don’t be afraid.” And then… Do they run after you?
Just the one is walking toward me, but he doesn’t even look at me; he says, “Don’t be afraid,” but there’s not any expression on his face. He just is walking toward me….
How many steps did you get, do you think?
Maybe twelve, fifteen.
So you got quite a ways, actually.
I got a little ways down the hall. It felt really good to get away….
What happens next?
He’s walking beside me, in front of me a little bit, and I try the other thing, to go backward, instead of running forward to resist it backward, but it’s even harder to do that. And I push, kind of kick backward. And kicking against it, I can’t do that either. Just with my right foot, I tried to kick.
Kick the… ?
Kick the force, or whatever it is. It’s like I’m on a… moving along, and I can’t even control it.
(Evelyn Livingston, 19, 1980) Page 127 Patti Layne was in the process of being examined when she discovered that she could resist physically more than usual. She used the opportunity to jump off the table and run. Before the regression she had wondered about where she had gotten several “burn” marks on her back and arm.
It seems to me that at some point I got a second wind, then I got up, and I don’t think they wanted me to do that.
While they’re doing the examination?
Mm-hmm, like it took every ounce of will that I had. I got up off the table. I just kind of pushed past them. They’re not physically strong, but there’s some other kind of control they have to use, and I think I was really fighting it.
What was he doing when you got up?
I think he was preparing to look up inside of me, but I think I decided I had had just about enough of it.
Do you see yourself actually getting up off the table?
Mm-hmm. I had to push past a couple of little ones.
Do you swing your legs around and stand up?
Mm-hmm. It was kind of wobbly, but I just had to put forth all of my energy and my will to move.
You pushed past them, then?
Mm-hmm.
Are they heavy?
No, they’re very light. If you punched one you could probably send it flying.
When you push past them, do they fall off balance, or do they just move aside?
They don’t really attack you that much. They just kind of backed off a little. They tried to stand in my way, then they backed off.
… So how far do you go?
Not very far, I start walking across the room. I think I walked out the door and into another area.
Alone?
Well, they were close on my heels, but I was trying to move fast.
You were calling the shots, though?
Pretty much. And I was in another area, another control kind of area where they had the window and the machinery. And there was something in the middle of the room. It was like a big round thing sticking up that was luminous, it was lit up. And there was a little bar that went around it, but I found myself being cornered into it. A couple of ones had left their areas in this room, and they started cornering me, like you corner a cat or a rabbit.… But I got my back against it…. And I just got my shoulders pinned up against it.
You say it had a rail around it.
Page 128 Yeah, but that wasn’t far away from it, and that pressed into the small of my back, kind of like it was drawing me toward it, pulling me back. Maybe it’s magnetic or something, but I guess there wasn’t any metal on me. But I pulled away from it, I felt like it shocked me or burnt me or something. I kept inching around the rail, but they kept moving in…. I kept inching around and around this rail because they were coming at me initially from one side, but then they just surrounded the thing. They came up, and somehow I felt like something just came over me and I was sitting down on the ground by it. I wasn’t touching it, but my head was where the rail was.
And there was one of them doing something to my head again.
How do you mean?
I don’t know, I felt like he was sticking something into my head, like up in here.
And he was touching your head with something?
Yes, he was poking something into it. It didn’t really hurt. It wasn’t like somebody was trying to drill something into your head, but you could feel something sticking in and the initial sting.
This is over up above your ear, or… ?
Up in here [she points to a spot above her left ear]. Come to think of it, I had a bump up here too that I didn’t know where I got it. It was sore for a couple of days.
How does that make you feel, or does it at all?
It felt like there was a flash of light in my head, but then I started to feel kind of soothed and tingling all over, like I had just been drugged. I couldn’t really tighten any of my muscles.… Then they put their hands over me and I just started floating again. They floated me up, and back into the examining room. I couldn’t move really, I felt like Jell-O….
What happens next?
I couldn’t move then, and they were busy putting my feet up in stirrups, little raised areas. And he [the Taller Being] starting doing a very intense pelvic procedure.
(Patti Layne, 26, 1988) Similarly, Will, during an abduction with his wife, also found him self with more muscle control than usual. He was able to run down a hallway with his wife in tow.
I just grabbed Nancy, turned, and went out the door.
Does Nancy say anything to you?
No, she’s not saying anything to me. She’s not talking to me. But I say, “Come on,” and I’m pulling her and she’s going with me.… I turn to my right, I pull her behind me, and we go out the door opening.… There’s a wall on the right, and then that wall bends back and we’re in the big room now. But I keep bending right, like I’m going along the wall there. And there’s another opening, we go in there. That’s where it’s like another room like the first one but there’s no bed in it, no counter.… Are you holding on to Nancy?
I’ve got her by the wrist.
She’s cooperating?
Yes, she’s coming with me. I mean, if I pull, she comes. But she’s still not saying anything, it’s like she’s in a trance still.… I keep having the sense that all of this is staged. It’s like they want me to think I’m getting away. Like it’s, it’s like I’m thinking I want to get out of here, and so they’re going to let me think that I can get loose.
Page 129 Okay.
I don’t know why I’m thinking that, because I keep thinking I’m going to get into this damned room. I don’t even know how the hell to get out of here. They’re going to get me anyway, but it’s like you’ve got to do something. I’ve got to get the hell out of here.… You go through the big room into… Well, I go along the edge of the big room, alongside the wall, and I go into the first door 1 find.
What’s in that room?
Nothing. It’s like the room that they had the bed counter in, but there’s no bed in it. It’s just empty. But there’s the same rectangles on the wall and everything. It’s the same thing except for no bed in it.
Is there anybody in this room?
No, I don’t see anybody. But there’s an opening there. I keep thinking it’s like a cellar, it’s all dark inside. It’s real dark. I remember turning to Nancy and saying, “ That’s not a very good idea. I don’t think we can get out of there.” Does Nancy respond?
No, she doesn’t. She’s not saying anything.… Do you walk into the room, or do you just look into the room?
I ran into the room.
[Will said he had the sense that aliens were following them. Then two Taller Beings caught up with them in this room and immediately began to exercise control over Will.] Yeah, there are two tall ones, just two tall ones, that’s all.
Okay. Do they come over to you?
Yeah. They, it’s like I feel myself getting limp, like I’m losing mobility. It feels like, it just feels shitty. I’m losing the ability to move out of there. I have the sense that they’re not amused.
Do they communicate with you?
I have the sense that they were telling me that I could have caused serious problems if I had gone the wrong way. I’m thinking, “What do you mean? This is serious enough.” But they’re saying it was very serious if I had not stopped.
Okay.
They said, “Highly serious.” They said, “You would be no more if you had not stopped.” And they are not happy at all. They are definitely not very happy about it.
What happens next?
They’re up in each of our faces, both of them. And I can’t fight it. They might as well do what they’re going to do….
Do you get a sense of what happens next? Do you just sort of stay there near the edge of this Page 130 big room?
I don’t really remember that. I just remember kind of drifting off. They told me, “You’re going to sleep.” It’s like they put emphasis on “You’re going to sleep. You’re going.” I’m thinking, “Yeah, but where?” They said, “To sleep.” Now I feel real drained. I feel like I’m a battery that’s been completely discharged, extremely weak. I feel like I’m shutting down.
(Will Parker, 33, 1988) Another common form of resistance is for the abductee to try to get up from the table when she is lying on it. Barbara Archer tried it, and the aliens handled it by calling over the Taller Being.
I sat up. I don’t want to be there anymore. They kind of looked upset when I did that.
When you sat up?
Yes. And the other one came in.
How do you know they were upset?
Well, they sort of rushed over, and then in a few minutes I guess they told the other one or something, because he was there. I just have this feeling like I wasn’t supposed to sit up.
Do you continue to sit up, though?
I sat up until the other one came in…. The other one came in, and I felt a little bit better. He came over. He touched me.
Where does he touch you?
Well, at first he touched my hand, but then he moved his hand to my head.
Are you still sitting up, then?
Well, when he came over and touched my hand, I lay back down again.
(Barbara Archer, 22, 1988) One of the most bizarre episodes of resistance during an abduction occurred when Jason Howard was drunk. He had gone to bed having had too much to drink, and then was abducted. The aliens were performing procedures on him when he simply decided to get up off the table. They tried to calm him down and asked him questions such as “How do you feel,” but he would have none of it.
He laughed, swung his arms around wildly in mock karate chops, and managed to stand in the middle of the room. The Small Beings immediately backed up against the wall. The Taller Being tried to reason with him, but to no avail. Then the Taller Being came up to him, stared in his eyes, and the next thing he knew he was standing in his underpants on the grass of his college campus about a mile from where he had been abducted.
Jason’s experience was typical of how the Beings act when the abductee gets out of control: The Small Beings immediately back off and allow the Taller Beings to deal with the situation; they do not try to intervene, nor do they try countermeasures; it is up to the Taller Being to remedy the situation.
Unquestionably the greatest opportunity for resistance comes when the Beings force the abductee to hold a baby. Many women and men want nothing to do with the baby. The baby looks strange, and they may be reacting negatively to the suggestion that it is their baby. In any case, many women simply refuse to hold the baby. When Lynn refused, they put the baby in her arms; one Being pushed the baby toward her chest, while another Being stood behind her with his arms in her back preventing her from backing up.
Melissa wanted nothing to do with the baby, but this time the Beings did nothing.
It’s a baby. Little baby. It’s ugly…. It’s not mine.
Is it a little baby or a big baby?
I don’t want this thing. I don’t want anything to do with this species.
Page 131 Is this baby a human baby?
Gross baby.
Does it have normal eyes?
No. It’s… an ugly one like the little creatures. I don’t want anything to do with this species, nothing at all. I’ll kill it. I swear to God I’ll kill it if you bring it near me. I hate you. I hate it. I hate this. It’s so fucking unnatural. Fucking stupid. Disgusting thing. I’ll kill it if you bring it near me, I swear. Move it away. They just stand there with it. I’m not looking at it. I’m not going to look at it.
I hate it….
Do they take it away?
They try to put it in my arms. I push it away. I’m getting really pissed off. If they keep doing this I swear I’ll smash it. I hate it already. I get really angry. I hate you when you do this. Don’t you ever listen to me? Don’t you ever listen to me? Don’t you ever listen to what I’m saying to you?
Do they respond?
No.
(Melissa Bucknell, 27, 1987) Karen Morgan has been perhaps the most resistant to the aliens. She rarely misses an opportunity to exert her own individuality by refusing to do what they want. She has, at various times, walked too slowly down the hall, with the Small Beings frantically urging her to move faster while they pushed and pulled her. Once when two small aliens walked her down the hallway, she stopped suddenly and the alien behind her bumped into her. She dropped to the ground, forcing them to carry her to the table. In one remarkable event, as two small aliens were leading her into a large examining room, she hooked her left arm into a panel on the doorway, and she could not be easily dislodged.
I came in from the little anteroom, maybe it’s a big anteroom, but there’s a room where they undress you…. I’m really putting up as much of a fight as you can under the circumstances, and I’m refusing to do anything at all because I have more muscle tone than I usually do…. I remember coming in through a door and grabbing onto the panel, and they can’t get me away from it. And I’ve got my arms sort of locked around the panel. I just want to see how far I can push them.
What do you mean by panel?
There’s a panel, a door, except I don’t see the door, and I think they open it somehow, but I don’t see that part either. It’s just not like a normal door. And you walk into this big examination room from this area, and usually they lead you right through the middle of it, but this time there’s one on my side, leading me, and [one is pulling me by my arm].
One is leading you, and one is pulling your arm?
Right, and the one who’s on my side has my arm like this, and there’s one sort of in front of me…. The one gets ahead of me…. I have enough muscle tone to pull my arm away from him and lock my arm like this into the panel. So I put my arm like that and it’s surprised. It sort of turns around like, “What just happened?” And so I have my arm like that, and I sort of look at it [the Being]. And the other one is pulling my other arm, but I won’t let go and I’m stronger than they are. They must be very weak.… I’ve got my arm hooked in such a way that I’ve got more leverage than they do, and so there’s creatures in the room….
Do they say anything to you?
They’re impatient. They say, “Come on! Come on!” sort of. I’m not really sure those are the words. And I say, “No, I’m not going anywhere.” Then there’s these other Beings in the room that are doing the… examinations, and they sort of look up like, “What is going on?” And I just look at them and smile. And they look at the two little ones and say, “What’s happening here?” And now it’s not so funny anymore because it looks like the little ones are getting scared, and I wonder what they’re going to do if they’re scared. But then I say, “So what? Who cares? Let’s Page 132 find out.” I just won’t let go of the door. So they come back to me, and one is still pulling on my arm, and the other comes around behind me and pulls my arm like that, which explains, I think, why I have such a sore shoulder for a couple of days after. He pulls my arm away like that. But they got scared for a minute, they got frightened. I think they thought that they really messed up.
And then they bring me into the room, and there’s two other creatures, the ones that have the big eyes, and they’re sort of looking at each other like, “What was this disturbance?” And then they put me up on the table, and they tie me down real fast.
You mean, your whole body or your arms… ?
My arms and my legs, real fast. They do everything so fast that I can’t respond.… Ever since the door thing it was like… right into the table. And they tie me down, and I don’t know how I know this but I think they drug me more…. I’m getting woozier and woozier, and I think they drugged me. I think that they just hadn’t given me enough. That’s why I was able to do that.
Maybe not, but most of the time you don’t get to do those kinds of things because you don’t have that kind of muscle tone….
So they get you down on the table, and you feel yourself getting a little bit woozy. Do they then begin the examination, or do they wait a while?
I lie there for a while, then the creature comes over and he puts his hand on my chest, and he says through my mind, “Well, that was quite a little scene,” or something like that. But… he says it in such a condescending voice, like he’s talking to a three-year-old. And I say, “I’d like to kill you guys, every one of you.” He says, “I know, you don’t like us,” or something like that, “but just relax, but just relax.” And I say, “I don’t want to relax. I don’t want to be relaxed when I’m here.” And he says, “It’s much easier if you relax, it’s much easier.” And I say, “It’s much easier for you, but it’s not easier for me.” And he says, “Now, now, you know there’s nothing to be afraid of.” And I say, “There’s a lot to be afraid of, and you had better stop doing this to me.” And he says, “Don’t resist, there’s no point in resisting.” And I say, “Yes there is, there’s every point in resisting. I don’t believe you, I don’t trust you, I know that nothing you say is true.” And then I say something I’ve forgotten. All those years I’ve forgotten about it. And I say, “You’re a shapeshifter.” And he looks puzzled. And I say, “You’re a shapeshifter. You can take any shape that you want, and you can make us think you’re anything that we want to believe that you are, but I know what you are.” And then he sort of shrugs and takes his hand away. He’s indifferent really. But when I said he was a shapeshifter he looked puzzled, and then when I sort of explained what it was, there was just sort of a flash of recognition…. For all these years in literature people have been writing about the shapeshifters. Maybe that’s where they got it from.
And somehow I feel better knowing what he is. Being able to put a name on it. And now I think he puts his hand on my head, they’re always doing this. And he looks into my eyes, and because they drugged me they think they can do this now, and he tries to suck me, pull me into his eyes. And he says, “Look at me, look at me.” And I say, “No, you can’t give me enough drugs to make me go along with this, you’ll have to kill me.” And he says, “We don’t want to hurt you. This can feel very good, this can feel good.” And I say, “No it won’t because I won’t let it happen. It won’t work with me.” And then I say, because they always say to me, “Why do you resist,” I say, “Why do you keep doing this? You know it’s not going to work,” in the same way that he always does it to me. And then he looks at me like he’s wondering something, and somewhere in the back of my mind I think, “Maybe I really have him thinking for once,” and then I think, “No, they’re not capable of that.” But that’s good because now I’m really not in any danger of having him be able to pull me into his mind. But he keeps his hand on my forehead and the pressure gets more and more intense. Starts to hurt.
(Karen Morgan, 38, 1987) Karen has consistently balked at holding a baby. She invariably does hold it, but not without a mental struggle. Her thoughts and actions have pushed the aliens further than most. In one episode, the Beings took her into an incubatorium and then wanted her to hold a baby.
And that’s when we go to that place with the bench. And she’s fighting with me about taking this baby. I say, “I don’t want the baby.” And sometime during the discussion, which really isn’t a discussion because she’s going to win, but sometime during this she’s trying to make an illusion, she’s trying to create an illusion in my mind. She’s trying to make me feel something that I’m not going to feel. And I say, “No, sorry. But we’re not all alike, and you’re not going to get to me through a baby because I don’t care.” And I’m so angry, and I hate them so much, that I think for a minute that I’ll take the baby and I’ll throw it down on the floor. And then what are they going to do to me? But she knows I’m thinking that. You can’t think anything because they know it.
Does she do something now?
Mm-hmm. She says, “You won’t hurt the baby. You won’t do that.” And I wouldn’t. She’s right, I wouldn’t. But I never feel anything for it.
Page 133 (Karen Morgan, 30, 1979) Karen has continually upset the aliens by her constant refusal to hold the babies. They become exasperated. But no matter how irritated they become, their exasperation does not escalate into more than that. Abductees do not report aliens using violence or threats of violence to get their way, and they usually get their way. On one occasion when Karen refused to hold the baby, they forced her hand onto the baby’s lower abdomen.
And she says, “All right now, touch, rub the baby. Touch the baby.” And I say, “Oh, come on, will you? This is ridiculous.” And she picks up my hand and she puts it on the baby’s skin. Ugh!
It’s creepy.
Does it feel like skin?
Ugh! No! Ugh! I can’t stand to touch it. I pull my hand away. I probably don’t move it that fast because I’m drugged, but ugh! It was on my lap but I don’t remember feeling it that way… ugh.
How did it feel?
Soft. I mean, it has no tone.
It wasn’t firm like a baby’s tone is firm?
No. No. They’re so thin, their skin is like paper. I don’t like it. She says, “Oh, you mustn’t do that,” or something like that, some stupid thing. “Oh, no, no, no, no,” and she puts my hand back and I don’t like the way the baby feels at all.
Does the baby respond at all when you touch it?
A little bit. It does. It sort of, I can feel it respond. I can feel it respond…. I don’t really like what they’re doing to me. I don’t care about this baby. I don’t like what they’re doing to me. They’re putting my hand on it. She’s putting my hand on it. She’s forcing me to touch it. Their hands are very strong when they want them to be…. And this one holds my hand down and I can’t move my hand…. I’m really mad now. I’m really pissed off because she won’t let go of my hand. And I say, “Let go. How dare you touch my hand?” And she says, “You have to touch the baby.” She’s very stern. “The baby needs you, you have to touch it.” I say, “No I don’t. You can make me touch it, but I don’t have to touch it.” She says, “You’ve got to touch the baby.” And then I say, “If you keep pressing like that you’re going to kill the baby.” And she says, “It won’t hurt the baby.” And I think, “These people, things, don’t know what they’re doing. She’s got my hand pressed into the kid’s stomach.” But maybe they do, I don’t know. And I say, “Fine, go ahead. Keep pressing it.” But you know what, maybe she really does know what she’s doing. If you pressed a human baby this hard it would scream. It would scream. But what she’s doing is, I’ve got it now. I’ve figured it out. She’s pressing my hand into its stomach… because they wanted to get energy from us. So she’s pressing my hand really hard into its stomach. Real low on its stomach, almost by its genitals. She’s pressing my hand there really hard so that it will get energy…. But at the time I thought, “Boy, she’s sure pressing hard. A human kid would cry.” And I’m really mad that she’s pressing that hard. Then she takes her hand away and she says, “There, there. The baby needs you.” (Karen Morgan, 38, 1987) In all, the abductees’ ability to resist during the abduction episode is limited. The aliens meet resistance with either patience or exasperation. Because they can physically and mentally control humans, they treat resistance as a nuisance. If the abductee gets out of control, the Small Beings usually back off and let the Taller Being deal with the situation, and the proper procedures for regaining control are instituted. Yet some abductees have learned the areas where defiance and self-assertion are possible. When they do resist or at least throw the aliens off their routine, they briefly enjoy a sense of control and mastery of the situation that allows them to feel they are fighting back and are therefore less victimized.
Page 134 PART IV THE SEARCH FOR MEANING Page 135 Chapter 11 Answers Suppose that all of the abduction accounts have their origin in the minds of the people relating the stories and not in objective reality. They must, therefore, be explainable in conventional terms. In fact, a great variety of explanations have been proposed, all of which attribute the abduction phenomenon to subjective rather than objective causes. An analysis of these conventional explanations for abductions—psychological, psychiatric, cultural, and exotic—might be helpful in evaluating whether or not any of them can truly solve the mystery.
PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS Psychological explanations suggest that abductions are generated in people’s minds for a variety of emotional reasons. These explanations do not come from people who suffer from organic brain problems or mental illness.
Fabrication Fabrication is, of course, the first explanation that must be addressed. Debunkers have routinely said that people who claim to be abductees lead “humdrum lives,” and their fabricated abduction stories generate publicity, excitement, and maybe even money. The contactees in the 1950s set the precedent for this theory, with their tall tales of ongoing contact with benevolent, cancer-curing, war- stopping Space Brothers.1 Contactees provide the model for what is not legitimate, but their claims serve as a convenient touchstone for deciding which abduction reports are probably bogus and which may not be. Major differences exist between the contactees and the abductees. Contactee claims were deeply rooted in the popular science fiction of the period, and their tales were bounded by their knowledge of science. However, abductee claims contain events that include exact and minute details of procedures known only to a few UFO researchers. It is virtually impossible that nearly all abductees would chance upon these details at random and lie en masse to make their claims seem valid.
Whereas most major contactees knew and supported each other’s claims, most abductees do not know each other, do not know much about UFOs, and are not familiar with abduction literature.
Furthermore, while contactees talked of utopian worlds and compassionate Space Brothers, abductees describe aliens who use them as specimens. They feel violated and victimized. They fear the abduction phenomenon, they do not want it to happen again, and they wish that they could lead their lives free from it.
Contactees actively sought money and publicity, and devoted a tremendous amount of energy to getting both. Most abductees have sought neither. Rather, they are extremely concerned that their identities might be revealed and that they might lose their standing in the community and in their work. Only a few of the abductees that Budd Hopkins and I have worked with over the years have gone to the media to tell what has happened to them, and this was at our request and only after they engaged in considerable soul-searching. To the best of my knowledge, none has profited monetarily from these media appearances.
There have been instances in which a person has fabricated an abduction event. One woman who wanted to write an article about her experiences went to an abduction researcher for hypnosis.
From the beginning, her story was unlike other abduction accounts. The aliens were tall monsters, all of the primary, secondary, and ancillary experiences were missing, and nothing else resembled known abduction reports. The investigator found her out very quickly. In another case, a person who was fabricating an account went to an abduction researcher who accepts all accounts as valid regardless of whether they are channeled information, dreams, abductions, and so forth. This well- meaning but unsystematic researcher simply accepted the woman’s story as true even though it also did not match any of the known abduction events. Thus, lying can fool an inexperienced researcher, but not one who is familiar with the abduction experience that has been confirmed so many times over.
Repression of Abuse One of the most popular explanations for abductions in recent years has been that the accounts are “screen” memories masking the repression of sexual and/or physical abuse. This theory postulates that the victims are so traumatized by abuse they suffered as children that they forced the incidents out of their conscious memory; now, years later, the painful memories have resurfaced in disguised form.
Therapists have seized upon this explanation more than any other to get at the root of the abduction memories for two reasons. First, memories of abuse will suddenly be triggered in adulthood in much the same way as abduction memories. Second, abuse victims suffer many of the symptoms found in Post-Abduction Syndrome.
But there are serious problems with this explanation. Most abductees do not claim to have been Page 136 sexually or physically abused as children (at least not by humans). If indeed they have repressed the abuse from their conscious memory, one would assume that they might spontaneously remember it at some point during hypnosis. However, this does not appear to be the case. No abduction screen memories have ever been stripped away to reveal a past history of abuse.
Those abductees who have been victims of sexual and physical abuse clearly remember the instances of abuse and have either come to terms with them or are working with a therapist to that end. They explicitly differentiate between the abuse that they suffered and the abduction memories.
They have no psychological need for screen memories to convert their abuse into fantasy situations.
Furthermore, because the abduction phenomenon is ongoing, the memories are of events that happened in the very recent past, not screen memories of childhood when the abuse would have taken place. I have talked with abductees who have experienced abductions from a few days to only a short while before our meetings. They do not remember what happened to them, but they know something occurred. For example, one woman abductee took a nap on her couch in the afternoon and “woke up” standing in her backyard. She groggily walked into the kitchen and called me about eight minutes later. Jason Howard was in the process of getting ready to come to my house for a support group meeting. He was putting on his shoes by the front door a few seconds prior to going out, when he had the irresistible urge to lie down on his couch and go to sleep. When he woke up two and a half hours later, he knew something had happened. His shoes were off and he was lying on his bed upstairs. Within three minutes he called to tell me about it. A subsequent hypnosis session confirmed his suspicions and he related a complex abduction.
Although I have purposely not conducted hypnosis with children—not enough is known about how their knowledge of being abducted would affect their personal development—from time to time worried parents will either tell me about what is happening to their children or bring them to talk to me. I find this to be the most heartrending and frustrating aspect of the abduction phenomenon.
Although the parents usually do not discuss abductions in front of them, children as young as two years old will talk about “egg-men” coming in through their windows at night and taking them places.
“Bad doctors” come into their rooms and “hurt” them. When given a series of drawings of popular children’s storybook and television characters, the children readily point to a picture of an alien as the culprit.
Older children will sometimes consciously tell their alarmed parents about being abducted. The parents of one ten-year-old girl who had consciously described typical abduction events in detail took her to a gynecologist because she complained of pain. The physician found no evidence of sexual or physical abuse, nor did the child claim to have been abused. Although it is possible that parents would encourage their children to talk to a stranger about unusual events happening to them at night while in fact those parents were in the process of abusing them, it is highly improbable. To date, neither researchers nor therapists have found a single abduction case that is unequivocally generated from sexual or physical abuse.
Hysterical Contagion Hysterical contagion, whereby people will believe that something has happened to them because they are aware that it has happened to others, is a real phenomenon that deserves discussion as a possible cause of abduction reports.2 Although this phenomenon is rare, well- known incidences of it have appeared in the psychological literature.
For example, in 1954 residents of Seattle, Washington, reported that a mysterious force was pitting their automobile windshields. Investigators found no such force. People had become sensitized to the problem through publicity, and when they examined their windshields, they found the pits, which had remained unnoticed until the concerned citizen carefully looked for them.3 In another example, in 1962 employees at a small clothing plant in Georgia reported being bitten by a mysterious “insect” that attacked their arms and faces, but no one could catch one of these bugs or even see them. Investigators found that no mysterious insects existed and that the employees were describing something that had no basis in objective reality.4 These classic examples of hysterical contagion contain several elements that must be considered in analyzing abduction cases and UFOs in general. In the Georgia incident, the workers were confined to one building where they could have daily mutual reinforcement about the reality of the “bugs.” The workers, however, could neither describe nor catch any of the bugs. The only thing they perceived was the effect of the bugs. In a few days the hysteria had passed. It had been limited in time and space and relied heavily on the workers’ mutual reinforcement within that space.
In the Seattle case, the “witnesses” actually saw nothing occur, but they had the pits as “evidence.” Newspaper publicity suggested to them that the pits were caused by something extraordinary. When people found normal road-wear pits on their windshields, they assumed it was the mysterious force that had caused the damage and hence the phenomenon spread. In a few weeks the idea that the pits were being caused by a single force (e.g., radioactivity from recent H- bomb tests in the Pacific) was discredited, and the entire affair dissipated. Although much more widespread than the Georgia incident, the Seattle case was still limited geographically and involved media reinforcement of commonly held beliefs. Also the subjects had the pits as “proof.” The phenomenon was short-lived with no recurrence.
Abduction claims do not fit the model of mass hysteria events. Although some claimants know each other, most do not. They are usually not in close proximity to one another; they do not engage in mutual reinforcement; prior to 1987 they were not subject to ongoing publicity about others with similar claims; and the phenomenon is not restricted in time or in geographic area. Furthermore, this is not collective behavior. Often the abductee claimant believes that he or she is the only person who has had an abduction experience. What we are dealing with is isolated individual behavior; only when taken together does it becomes collective.
Furthermore, the character of the abduction stories is quite different from that of hysterical Page 137 , q y contagion stories. The abduction claims sometimes involve more than one witness, and the narratives that are related are greatly detailed. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Recounting the episode often takes several hours. They do not involve only a single event, like the classic mass-hysteria cases. They contain a wealth of detailed information consistent with other abduction cases.
Unlike the people in hysterical contagion stories, abductees appear to have little in common.
They usually do not know each other, and they often know little or nothing about abductions in general (although some may know about UFOs). While some abductees may have limited knowledge of the Barney and Betty Hill case, they also describe many common and critical parts of their experiences that are not in the Hill case. And some unpublicized parts of the Hill case routinely show up in the abduction accounts.
Finally, when first investigating their memories, the majority of abductees may suspect that something has happened to them, but most of the time they do not know what it is. This eliminates any overt conscious “hysteria” that they may be subject to. They are not reacting to events that they read about in the newspapers.
Prewaking and Presleeping States Another psychological explanation involves hypnogogic and hypnopompic states—the periods between wakefulness and sleep, and between sleep and wakefulness during which the subject may feel paralyzed for a very short time. She might have vivid “dreams” in those moments that take on the shape of reality. Some people have great difficulty in telling the difference. Since many abductions take place when the victim is sleeping or about to sleep, hypnogogic and hypnopompic states are reasoned to be responsible.
But this explanation fails to account for those abductions that take place when the victim is awake, not tired, not in bed, and not even inside a room. A large percentage of abductions take place in broad daylight when the victim is pursuing normal activity or driving a car. Furthermore, hypnogogic and hypnopompic states have idiosyn cratic, dreamlike content that does not match that of the abduction accounts.
The Will to Believe Some critics say that the abduction phenomenon is a prime example of “the will to believe.” In other words, people want to be abductees and therefore they allow themselves to believe that they are. This claim lumps abductees together with New Agers and occult practitioners who actively demonstrate the will to believe. But abductees differ in that they are unable to summon forth an experience at will. Furthermore, for the most part, their recollected stories are not dreamlike or surrealistic; they proceed in a consistent, step-wise fashion, and they are extremely disturbing to the abductee. Abductees universally wish the abduction had never happened, and they are often desperately frightened that it might happen again. For most, the trauma is so great that they refuse to confront it, fearful of bringing it into memory because of the terrifying feelings it might unleash.
Some have even contemplated suicide as an escape from the buried horror’s pressure. It seems absurd to suggest that the abductees would will themselves to believe in something so terrifying or destructive.
Channeling Critics like to point to the popularity of channeling—wherein a subject goes into a trancelike state and contacts benevolent space alien spirits—and suggest that the abduction accounts are simply channeled variants that have the same point of origin: the mind. But channeled information is very different from abduction accounts. It is devoid of any physical aftereffects or other evidence. It is almost always personally directed toward the channeler, and the space spirits relay messages with much the same content as those given to the contactees. In short, these tales have virtually no points of congruence with the abduction information. For channelers, the spirits are benevolent, informative, advice-giving folks who have the best interests of the channelers and the human race at heart. They tell the channelers where they are from, how they got here, and what they are doing.
Except in some broad areas, most of the channeled information is inconsistent with itself.
Furthermore, channelers do not claim abduction events as the normal course of obtaining information.
Hallucinations Some critics have suggested that people who claim to have been abducted are simply hallucinating, and that all humans have hallucinations at one time or another. Hallucinations are, according to Professor Ronald Siegel of the University of California at Los Angeles, “previously stored memories or fantasy images woven together or projected onto the mind’s eye” that are “usually accompanied by simple geometric patterns.”5 But the abduction phenomenon has no strong element of personal fantasy. There is nothing in our society or in people’s backgrounds that would call forth such concepts as imaging, Mindscan, staging, and hybrid touching. Most abductees’ lives contain nothing that would have such a strong effect upon them that they would hallucinate a full-scale, copiously detailed abduction event that they Page 138 desperately do not want to have.
Abductions are profoundly alien. They contain few reference points upon which to hang personal content. Abductees do not know what is happening to them; they find nothing in the accounts that would allow them to lead better lives; and they find very little about the effect that relates to their lives.
Fantasy-Prone Personalities Another theory is that people who generate abduction accounts have fantasy-prone personalities —in other words, that they spend an inordinate amount of time fantasizing about themselves as willing participants in erotic or dramatic adventures.
In order for the fantasy-prone individual to spin abduction yarns, she would have to be so inordinately affected by her daydreams that she would be unable to distinguish them from reality.
Like hallucinations, the fantasies of fantasy-prone individuals are almost never completely divorced from idiosyncratic personal content, and simply dreaming up a complex abduction event is just as unlikely for them as it is for non-fantasy-prone individuals. Furthermore, the abduction accounts are not pleasant experiences designed to bolster or shield the ego of the abductee.
Of course, some people do spin fantasy-abduction tales. But their idiosyncratic stories do not match the accounts given by other abductees. They have not usually undergone competent hypnosis. They act more like a combination of channelers and contactees seeking publicity and perhaps money and yet still not fabricating a conscious hoax.
The Influence of Hypnosis A popular theory suggests that it is the use of hypnosis itself in the hands of an incompetent practitioner that calls forth abduction stories. People can be suggestible while undergoing hypnotic regressions, and it is possible that the abductees might be responding to leading questions asked by the hypnotist. If so, their accounts might represent material that was confabulated, or invented from the unconscious mind, either to please the investigator or to “fill in” when the answer is not truly known.6 Yet experience has shown that most abductees refuse to be led. When asked intentionally leading questions by the hypnotist, they will nearly always reject the suggestion and reply in the negative (“No, it wasn’t like that”). For example, while investigating the Barney and Betty Hill case, Dr. Benjamin Simon was intent on getting the Hills to admit that their incident had no objective reality. For months he deliberately tried to instill the idea while they were under hypnosis that events did not happen the way they described. He looked for contradictions and tried to get them to agree that it was just a dream. Still he was unable to get them to admit that any part of their stories did not occur as they had described.
Throughout the history of the abduction phenomenon, it has been the abductees who have taught the researchers. The abductees have outlined the major events of the experience and set its parameters. The investigators, hypnotists, and researchers have learned about abductions not by imposing some sort of purposeful structure on abductee accounts but by patiently listening to what the abductees say. Furthermore, a significant percentage of abduction accounts are related by the abductee without the aid of hypnosis. Their stories are essentially the same as those related while under hypnosis.
A comprehensive study of abduction accounts written by Dr. Thomas E. Bullard demonstrated that the “same key traits” (examination, table, etc.) showed up in accounts regardless of how the information was retrieved. He found no significant differences between material collected by experienced hypnotists, inexperienced hypnotists, and by hypnotists who believed in abductions and hypnotists who did not. His findings indicated that “hypnosis makes far less difference than critics have claimed.”7 In 1978, Alvin Lawson, a professor of English at California State University at Long Beach, conducted an interesting study using eight volunteers to see if the abduction phenomenon was psychologically built into the unconscious minds of individuals. He screened each subject to filter out those who knew something about the UFO phenomenon (although he did not screen for abductions, a serious error because one of his subjects may have been an abductee) and had a physician hypnotize them; then he told them that they were to relate a UFO abduction event. They then proceeded to describe their “abduction.” The stories they told were all different from each other. The details within the stories were also different from each other. The aliens all looked different from each other. One looked like a lizard, one was cone-shaped with no head, one had an asymmetrical head with no eyes, one looked like a wise man with a beard. The subjects reported no egg or sperm sampling. They had no secondary or ancillary experiences. Except for one, the subjects felt no emotional content in their stories. They described no natural progression of events during the course of the “abduction.” For example, they were told that they would be taken aboard a UFO and were encouraged to describe how they got on board. They then described the interior and the aliens.
Lawson specifically had to tell them that they were going to have a physical examination. Although a few details resembled those found in real accounts (e.g., they lay on a table, a machine was used to X-ray one, and a few said they could not move), the majority of them were not related to abductions and did not match what is known. Lawson showed that imaginary abductees were just that— imaginary.8 Hypnosis has been used to explore claims of “past lives.” Under hypnosis, subjects deliver accounts of living lives in the past, complete with details about geography, society, and significant areas of personal life. Thus the case can be made that abductions are akin to past-life regressions in which subjects remember long, sometimes complicated scenarios about their former status. But Page 139 past-life accounts are all different, more akin to “channeling.” They lack the great mass of confirmatory detail that abductees report. They are personally idiosyncratic. Critics who claim that past-life stories and abduction accounts are related fail to take into consideration multiple abductions, the physicality of the event, psychological trauma, and the remarkable similarity of detail.
In truth, there are sincere people who are not channelers who make extravagant claims about being abducted that fit only loosely into the scenario that researchers have developed. These people might indeed be abductees but have not had the opportunity to undergo competent hypnosis. Therefore they carry mental images of atomic destruction, pollution problems, and kindly Space Brothers more typical of contactee accounts. Only competent hypnosis can reveal the origin of these images and feelings. When the hypnotist does not have an adequate knowledge of the subject, the true nature of the abduction may never be revealed.
Stigmata Finally, it has been posited that the physical effects associated with abductions—scars, internal injuries, blood loss, and gynecological and urological sequelae—are a form of “stigmata” very much like the stigmata that can result in rare cases when a person is so extraordinarily obsessed with the crucifixion of Christ that he develops the wounds from it.
If abduction sequelae are stigmata, however, then stigmata or other psychosomatic physical symptoms can achieve a life of their own apart from the conscious thoughts and activities of the victims. For example, the abductee may have only a passing and vague concern with abductions, but she may develop marks on her body associated with them even though she is not in any way obsessed with the subject or aware that she might be an abductee. Far from being obsessed with it to the point of incorporating some functions of the abductions into the physical structure of her body, the aware abductee usually desperately wants the abductions to end. Moreover, scars are often found by accident: a friend will notice it behind the abductee’s knee, or the abductee will feel something “funny” on her body and then notice the mark. Thus the physical aftereffects of an abduction do not conform to our knowledge about stigmata.
PSYCHIATRIC EXPLANATIONS Psychiatric explanations of abduction accounts suggest that they originate either from organic brain problems or from serious mental disorders.
Psychosis It is possible that abductee claimants are mentally disturbed people whose fallacious stories are an integral part of their illness. Psychiatrists believe that mental illness affects, in one degree or another, a significant percentage of the population of the United States and probably the world. To some debunkers the mere fact of claiming an abduction is prima facie evidence of mental illness.
Even the eminent physicist Philip Morrison has said, “Go into a state hospital and every tenth person will tell you the same [abduction] story.9 It is true that mentally ill people will sometimes claim contact with Beings from other planets. But their claims are usually part of their psychoses and are consistent with a whole range of bizarre and confused thought patterns and behavior that characterize their lives. Their stories are inconsistent and incoherent. The details in their stories do not match the details in any other people’s stories.
Sometimes broad patterns of psychotic thought disturbances are similar (“The FBI is plotting against me,” “Voices are speaking to me”), but even within this context the details are confused and jumbled.
Legitimate abductee claimants do not mistake fantasy for reality in the normal course of their daily existence. Most are productive members of society and are not mentally ill.10 They claim events have happened to them that are inconsistent with anything else in their lives. For most of them, the abductions are unprecedented events that do not fit a pattern of other bizarre or unaccountable experiences.
And even though some of the abductees might seek psychological help, no evidence exists to show that they are schizophrenics, manic-depressives, or have delusionary personalities (although people with these traits may also be abductees). “Blind” psychological testing of nine abductees, including the administration of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, has shown that they exhibited characteristics of people who had been “violated,” e.g., raped, and were more “wary” than usual. All the abductees were well within the psychologically “normal” range and exhibited no pathology.11 Multiple Personality Disorder In spite of the lack of evidence for mental disease, some critics have said that the serious illness of disassociated personalities, or “multiple personalities,” may have a bearing on the abduction phenomenon. The people who suffer from this unusual disorder may have one or more personalities separate from their dominant one, and they may or may not know about the others. The alternate personalities may engage in antisocial, immoral, or just different behavior from the other Page 140 personalities.
In no case has an abduction researcher uncovered an individual who exhibited traits of multiple personality disorder. No abductee has spontaneously shifted into another personality during a hypnosis session, as if the abduction were happening to someone else. Nor has an abductee displayed other personalities independent of the regression session. When an abductee remembers the abduction, it is fully integrated into the structure of her life without resistance; it would not be if it were another person’s problem.
Generally, people with multiple personality disorder come from backgrounds filled with severe and prolonged sexual abuse. Their disassociated personalities can be understood as a psychological attempt to escape from the traumas of their “real” existence. Although some abductees have been sexually abused, we have no evidence to suggest that the frequency of abuse is any higher among abductees than among the general population. Moreover, the abductees’ accounts of abductions do not occur in response to the abuse and are exactly the same as those made by people with no known history of sexual abuse. Thus multiple personality disorder does not seem to be a likely candidate as the causative factor in the reports of abductions.
Psychogenic Fugue State Psychogenic fugue state is a condition that has parallels with multiple personality disorder and with the missing time episode. In a fugue state, the individual will inexplicably travel to another geographic location, assume a new identity, and conduct her affairs with no recollections of what has happened in the past. A fugue state takes place when the individual is under a severe amount of pressure and stress. Usually a major conflict has just ensued with another person and the fugue victim lapses into this state. The act of going into a fugue state is an attempt to replace intolerable affairs with ones that are more psychologically manageable. Each experience is unique to that individual. The details of one person’s life in a fugue state differ from the details of another person’s life in a fugue state.
As with a fugue state, an abduction often takes place without the victim remembering the events.
But the similarity ends there. People do not change their identities during an abduction, nor do they travel to another geographic location where other people see them. They consider themselves helpless victims of the abduction rather than new personalities forging new experiences. Their accounts contain no personal elements and are remarkably consistent with the accounts of other abductees. Finally, their memories are often filled with fear and terror. They wish to escape from the memories of the abduction rather than from any precipitating causative event.
Temporal Lobe Dysfunction Dr. Michael Persinger, a professor of neurobiology at Laurentian University in Canada, has theorized that abduction accounts might stem from dysfunctions in the brain’s temporal lobe. He says that the temporal lobe could be stimulated by electrically charged particles in the atmosphere unleashed as a result of the earth’s geologic tectonic plate stress (sections of the earth’s crust rubbing against each other). These electrical discharges might stimulate temporal lobe instability that could lead people to hallucinate. Or, says Persinger, abduction accounts might also be triggered by temporal lobe epilepsy. When the temporal lobe is electrically stimulated in a laboratory, he says, the subject will have a series of perceptual experiences that closely parallel abductions. For instance, they might have a sense of a “presence” around them; they might feel that they are having a mystical experience; they might interpret unusual events “as being meaningful or as special, personal messages,” and they might have feelings such as a sense of unreality, internal vibrations, rising sensations, erotic thoughts, and anxiety. Persinger has even claimed that, with medication to control temporal lobe dysfunction, he has been able to “cure” an “abductee” of her “abduction” experiences.
Persinger’s theory is based on precarious ground. The electrical effects of tectonic plate stress are extremely controversial and not yet accepted by the geologic community. The effect that the electrically charged particles might have on people’s brains is highly conjectural and not accepted by the psychiatric community. Persinger presents no direct evidence to the contrary. Furthermore, the tiny population sample that Persinger worked with to obtain his abduction material was, by and large, not composed of abductees. Rather, it consisted of channelers, followers of mystically oriented Eastern religions and philosophies, and people with a few highly dubious “visitor” accounts that have never been fully investigated. And finally, their narratives, which he says contain “substantial fantasy,” do not match the narratives of the abductees.12 CULTURAL EXPLANATIONS Cultural explanations maintain that abduction accounts originate from the influence that prevailing culture and society have upon the individual.
Desire for a Baby Some critics have stated that the abduction phenomenon is related to the societal awareness of new fertilization methods, such as in vitro fertilization, artificial insemination, and surrogate Page 141 motherhood. Women, and presumably men, who desperately want children might unconsciously internalize these ideas and bring them forth in obsessive fantasies based on their desire to have children.
But the abduction phenomenon was known long before the new fertilization techniques were developed. And if abductions represent the unconscious longings of women for a child, then their reports of not wanting to hold or touch babies during the abduction would not make much sense.
Also, teenage boys and men are shown babies and have sperm taken with no evidence that these men so want to have children that they are inventing fantasies around the event. Furthermore, the new fertilization techniques almost exclusively focus on women. Of the fifteen women in this study who were shown babies, ten already had children and had no plans for more, one was planning on having a child in the near future, and four had no desire to have a child at that time. Finally, young children are often shown babies and their concern with the new fertilization techniques must be assumed to be negligible.
The Influence of Science Fiction Other critics claim that people pick up their ideas about abductions from science fiction motion pictures. While it is true that science fiction movies are popular, none has been released with themes or events similar to abduction accounts. No science fiction movies have been made that portray invading aliens as being uncommunicative and refusing to give information about their origin, mission, or methods. Nor have any shown aliens collecting eggs and sperm from their human victims with the intent of producing hybrid offspring.
Science fiction movies have recognizable and even formulaic plots: Aliens come here to wreak destruction; aliens come here to take over the planet; aliens come here to help mankind, etc. The three most widely seen science fiction movies of all time, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E, T., and Star Wars, were not at all similar to the abduction accounts (although Close Encounters did have an off-camera abduction suggestion). Even Star Trek, which has been seen probably by more Americans than any other science fiction television show, had no plots that resembled the abduction scenario. Moreover, many abductees are not science fiction fans. They do not see science fiction movies or television shows. They do not read science fiction literature. They are not involved with the world of science fiction at any level. Thus to dismiss their abduction accounts as coming from science fiction is unwarranted.
Folklore Some researchers have suggested that so-called abduction stories have occurred all through recorded history and that they are found in myth, legend, and folklore. However, these skeptics generally lump together all folklore accounts of “little people,” gnomes, trolls, dwarfs, and so forth, no matter what the context, into the abduction phenomenon simply because these characters are small or because they are said to have supernatural powers. The adherents of this theory disconnect such folktales from their original social and cultural context and then present them as fact in a completely different milieu as if they have a life of their own. The only difference, they claim, is that abduction stories are now more technologically advanced. But they present only vague and general similarities to show that the abduction phenomenon is related to myth, legend, and folklore such as superficial stories about “changelings,” little people, or gods who live in the heavens. For adherents of the folklore hypothesis, facile resemblances become complex modern duplicates.
The folktales also become evidence that the UFO abduction phenomenon has been going on for centuries. Of course, hundreds of folktales have been collected about little people, giants, gods, flying machines, people being kidnapped by trolls, and other material that the uninformed might decide were like the UFO and abduction phenomena, but the actual content of myths, legends, and folktales has almost nothing in common with abduction accounts. Typically, folktales, myths, and legends have been orally transmitted. They have been changed and altered over the years depending on the “spin” that the teller puts on the tale. That alteration is determined by the personality of the storyteller and the culture in which he lives. Folklore is a dynamic process that is constantly changing. Getting at the kernel of truth that may lie behind the tale is often quite impossible.13 The victims of abductions are not telling stories that they had previously heard from other people. They are relating accounts of sometimes ongoing events that they believe happened to them.
EXOTIC THEORIES Let us suppose that abductee claimants have no discernible psychological or psychiatric dysfunction and that they are not internalizing cultural events but are still relating episodes that have no basis in objective reality. Given this presumption, how can we explain these claims? Critics have often dipped into the exotic and bizarre to explain these accounts, as they try to replace one strange set of circumstances with another.
The Collective Unconscious Some researchers have suggested that the abduction accounts embody certain archetypal Page 142 memories that are inherent in all human minds, and that, when taken together, form part of what psychoanalysts call the “collective unconscious.” The concept of the collective unconscious is a staple of Jungian and psychoanalytic dream interpretation. Freud and Jung found certain images in dreams that they thought had universal applications. When a person dreams certain images, they are symbolic of other more deep-seated desires and fears. The collective unconscious suggests that people can share the same thoughts across cultural and technological barriers.
Jung addressed the problem of UFO sightings from this point of view in his 1958 book Flying Saucers. His position was that if witnesses were not actually seeing objectively “real” objects, they might be seeing archetypal images, similar to those found in dreams. Like dreams, abduction accounts could be grand metaphorical stories masking or symbolizing more profound mental events.14 The collective unconscious challenges the theory that humans are born with a “clean slate,” suggesting instead that we have preprogrammed, richly detailed, and complex memories that can easily generate abduction stories. To date, however, the psychological community has made no discoveries to indicate that common, detailed thought patterns exist, lodged deep in the psychic lives of all people. Of course, the healthy survival instinct makes all people think about food, reproduction, and the prevention of death. But, beyond such considerations, generalizations about what goes on in people’s unconscious minds are open to question.
If abduction events are part of the collective unconscious, then the theory would have to be expanded to take into account any of the abduction’s unique characteristics: multiple abductions, physical effects, disappearances, and so forth. Furthermore, it would have to consider the puzzling fact that the abduction syndrome is a recent phenomenon confined to the twentieth century. It would have to prove that the collective unconscious is dynamic and can come into being and change around the world at any given time regardless of the culture.
If the collective-unconscious theory turns out to be valid, it is revolutionary in the extreme. It fundamentally changes the way in which human beings think and react to their environment. It removes much of the control that people have over their own thoughts and lives and places it within the genetic makeup of the species. The implications for humanity are enormous. If the theory is true, a new psychology of human experience based, to a large extent, on hypnosis would have to be devised because it is through the use of this tool that the collective unconscious would be brought forth.
We must also bear in mind that Jung himself, writing in 1958 when only minimal knowledge of the nature of the UFO phenomenon was available, understood the dangers of trying to place UFOs within the collective unconscious. He pointed out that although UFO sightings might have a psychic component, “we are dealing with an ostensibly physical phenomenon distinguished on the one hand by its frequent appearance and on the other by its strange, unknown, and indeed contradictory nature.”15 Birth Trauma Professor Alvin Lawson, who mounted the study of imaginary abductees, has also championed the birth trauma theory to explain abduction accounts. He states that the profound mental effects of being born are remarkably similar to abductee stories of going through a dark passage and then seeing little fetuslike people with large heads in bright rooms while lying on a table. The traumatic memories of being born are lodged deep within people’s psyches, and abduction reports are transmuted manifestations of these memories.16 However, advocates of the birth trauma theory fail to explain how a baby would see other fetuses. They fail to explain why people born in a cesarean procedure have related accounts similar to those of people born vaginally. They fail to demonstrate how the rest of the abduction material would fit into the birth trauma scenario.
If true, however, birth trauma, like the collective unconscious, would suggest that current theories about the development of fetal brains are wildly erroneous, and that all newborn minds are extraordinarily more sophisticated than the evidence indicates. The minds of newborn abductees would have to contain countless bits of specific identical information relating to their birth environment, regardless of whether their eyes were closed, whether they were born in a dark area, whether other people were present, and so forth. Presumably, all babies would retain the endless details of many other “traumatic” events as well.
Alternative Realities Finally, some theorists—agonizing over the inability to explain abduction evidence—have resorted to suggesting that the human mind can in some way create a physical reality through mental processes. In other words, abductees “think up” a real, alternative universe that has aliens in it who can cause scars, disappearances, and the other physical phenomena of abductions. If abductees can do this, it would neatly answer all the problems created by their accounts.
This theory substitutes one bizarre series of events for another. If it was possible, then human beings would be creating many alternative realities and would have been doing so for all time. But the creation of an alternative reality that would terrorize its creator, cause her to experience physical damage, and then make her live in fear that it will happen again seems unreasonable when people might instead create physical realities wherein their deepest pleasurable fantasies could be played out. No evidence whatsoever has been presented to suggest that this theory has any viability.17 • • • All of these explanations—psychological, psychiatric, cultural, and exotic—fail to account for critically important aspects of the abduction event. They ignore the richness and abundance of Page 143 similar, frequently exact detail and the extraordinary convergence of the abductee narratives across all cultural boundaries. For example, Mindscan, visualization, and many other abduction procedures have never been publicized or written about even in the most esoteric UFO literature, yet virtually all abductees describe them. Abductees tell essentially the same story regardless of their age, race, religion, upbringing, occupation, economic status, educational level, intelligence, life-style, or ethnic or cultural background. This would not be so if the accounts were internally generated.
None of these theories explain the lack of strong personal content in the abduction accounts. For instance, the narratives contain little about the abductee’s past life, personal life, or fantasy life.
Abduction accounts contain almost no material related to a person’s social, cultural, familial, or occupational activities. Events happen to them. They are unwilling participants.
None of the explanations account for the fact that when victims claim to have been abducted, they are physically missing from the place where they are supposed to be. Never has an abductee claimed to be abducted and later been physically accounted for during that exact time.
None of the explanations explain the unusual physical effects apparently derived from the abduction event, such as scars, bruises, cuts, hemorrhages, and bloody noses, to name a few.
None account for the phenomenon of one person seeing another being abducted while the witness herself is not abducted. None explain the “switching off” phenomenon. And even if a theory can be made to account for one of two abductions, it still fails to deal with the great number of them.
To take the argument that abductions are internally generated one step further, we would logically expect certain things to take place. For example: We would expect reports of a great variety of sizes and shapes of aliens, as in the Lawson study. In fact, the opposite is true. Although abductees do see a limited variety, the vast majority of the accounts describe small beings with large heads, distinctive eyes, and so forth.
We would expect that people would describe a vast array of procedures and events that happened to them during an abduction. As with the contactees, they might take trips to the moon, they might engage in leisure activities, they might eat lunch and dinner. In fact, the events that happen to abductees are narrowly focused, and virtually all abductee accounts fall within these narrow parameters.
We would expect a significant number of abductees to say that the communication that takes place between them and the aliens is aural. In reality, virtually all abductees describe communication as telepathic.
We would expect abductees to claim that communication that takes place with aliens is widespread and deeply searching. As with the contactee reports or channeled information, we would know about where the aliens came from, what their planets were like, why they were here, how many wives or husbands they have, what their children are like, whether they have death, taxes, divorce, and so forth. In fact, abduction accounts contain no such information.
We know nothing about the aliens’ home environment. We do not even know if they have a home environment. We have no knowledge about the aliens’ lives outside the UFO.
We would expect at least some of the abductees to conjure up aliens who show some interest in human affairs. But, in fact, according to the abduction accounts, the aliens virtually never express any overt interest in what people are doing, in human society, culture, politics, and economics.
We would expect abductees to describe a wide range of intentions that the aliens would have.
The aliens would want to take over the world, force world peace, benevolently cure disease, use humans for food, etc. In fact, we find a singular lack of information about the aliens’ ultimate intentions except the tantalizing bits and pieces of information about what is going to happen to the babies.
We would expect abductees to report that the aliens opened and closed the window to transport them out of the room. But virtually all the abductees who say they floated through a window or screen describe it as being closed.
We would expect that the abduction events would have a strong personal content reflecting fears and other aspects of the abductee’s life. In fact, we get the same accounts over and over again, regardless of the background and upbringing of the person who is relating them. The accounts do not draw on personal lives for their contents.
We would expect that the baby and child presentations during abductions would be not only loving and happy but directly related to the person’s inner desires for children. In fact, many of the instances of baby and child holding are described in horrific tones. Babies appear to be so oddly formed that the women often recoil when being told to touch them. Some women have to be physically forced to hold the babies. This unpleasant experience suggests the opposite of a deeply desired wish fulfillment.
We would expect that the totality of the events would remain permanently random, without the congruence and richness of detail that characterize abduction accounts. In fact, we find many accounts to be so precisely similar that, in order to match other random, internally generated accounts, the abductees would have to be not only extremely well versed in published abduction literature, they would also have to know the minutiae of events that have never been published in the literature and, indeed, that even most abduction researchers are unaware of.
We are left with a puzzle. No viable alternative theory has emerged that takes into account the totality of the data in the abduction experience. Some theories address specific parts of abductions, but none even comes close to explaining the mechanism of the internal generation of these stories.
No significant body of thought exists that presents strong evidence that anything else is happening other than what the abductees have stated.
If the abductees are relating events that do, in fact, have an objective reality, then we are presented with what might be one of the most important events ever to befall mankind. If, on the other hand, the events do not have an objective reality and the abductees are imagining abductions, Page 144 then we have discovered something of immense importance. We have found a fascinating and inexplicable new psychological and sociocultural phenomenon unlike anything ever discovered in the human psyche before. It is obviously worthy of intense scientific attention. No matter what the origin of the abductions, whether subjective or objective, this phenomenon cannot be ignored.
Page 145 Chapter 12 Questions Suppose that everything the abductees report is essentially true. Suppose that we are dealing with extraterrestrial Beings and activities. From this admittedly precarious perspective, let us try to generalize about the meaning of these events.
When UFO research dealt merely with sightings, we could not answer any questions about the activities inside the objects or their purpose for being here. Speculation was rife and culture-bound; They are reconnoitering our atomic sites in preparation for takeover. They are surveying our geography for a scientific mapping expedition. They are here to prevent Earthlings from destroying themselves in a nuclear war. They are here because humans need help (for whatever reason) from benevolent, superior races. They are here to raise our consciousness about the multiplicity of life elsewhere. All of this speculation was based on little or no knowledge.
Today, if the abduction reports can be believed, we have gained knowledge. For the first time we can pose the correct questions and even supply some tentative answers based on new evidence.
Why are UFOs here? One of the purposes for which UFOs travel to Earth is to abduct humans to help aliens produce other Beings. It is not a program of reproduction, but one of production. They are not here to help us. They have their own agenda, and we are not allowed to know its full parameters.
Why are UFOs sighted at all? If people can be rendered invisible and float through solid matter to similarly invisible objects, and if secrecy is a priority of the abduction phenomenon, then the reason for UFO sightings is unclear. There have been, of course, many sightings by people who were not abducted. But it is possible that many, if not most, low-level sightings may be related to abductions. This may be true of a significant number of high-level sightings as well. Abductees might have only a few conscious sightings during their lives. If this is the case, then abductions might greatly outnumber sightings.
What is the magnitude of the abduction phenomenon? At first it appeared to be an isolated phenomenon that had occurred to just a few people around the country. That was wrong.
We have evidence of thousands of abductions, and that is perhaps only a small fraction of the total number.
An unpublished survey that I conducted of more than 1,200 students at Temple University who answered a written questionnaire suggests that as many as 5.5 percent of them have potentially had abduction experiences. Similarly, a study done of 275 respondents to a magazine’s survey searching for potential abductees came up with 6 percent. Projecting that number to the population as a whole yields as many as 15 million people in the United States who might have had abduction experiences. Let us assume that this number is ridiculously high, and that abductions are only happening to one half of one percent of the population. If that is true, we are dealing with over a million possible abductions in the United States.
Furthermore, abductions are not confined to the United States. British UFO researcher Jenny Randles has catalogued many abductions in the United Kingdom, and we have evidence that the geographic scope of the phenomenon might extend around the world. As researchers learn how to investigate these types of cases, the data are mounting not only that abductions are apparently taking place everywhere, but that the same material is beginning to come out of the accounts— namely, that the focus of the abduction is the production of children.1 If abductions have occurred for more than half a century, why have we not learned about them before? Abductees have been coming forth with accounts for many years, but in the past UFO researchers have not been well versed enough in the phenomenon to recognize them. For example, in 1977 I listened to an account about a UFO hovering above a group of stores in a shopping center in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. It was about 9:00 P.M. and an employee was going home from work. One of the last people out, she walked into an almost deserted parking lot. She was about to open her car door when she saw a UFO, which was quite close to her. She could see details of the craft, including the “windows.” When I asked her if she could see inside the windows, she said that she could see white walls, the ceiling, and other details, although from where she was standing it would have been almost impossible to see these things. It did not occur to me then that she might well have been describing the interior of the object from inside.
In another case I investigated in 1972, an elderly couple was traveling at night near Madison, Wisconsin. They saw a UFO in front of the car and stopped to get a better look at it. They then felt the overpowering urge to go to sleep, which they did. When they woke up the UFO was gone and they resumed their journey. I listened to their story, but I was unable to recognize that something else might have happened to them.
Many other abductions have been couched in personal and cultural terms—visits from deceased relatives, encounters with angels, devils, and other religious figures, mystical meetings with animals, out-of-body experiences, and so on. We are now learning how to sift through these stories to see which ones indicate abduction activity. For the first time UFO researchers are recognizing potential abduction accounts, and they are actively seeking out possible abductees. The climate of opinion has made it “safer” for them to come forward.
Who is selected to be an abductee? The selection criteria are largely unknown. But the generational aspect of abductions is extremely important. There is a good chance that one or both of the abductees’ parents may have had these experiences, and our research indicates that if a man or woman is abducted, the chances that his or her children will also be abducted may increase.
The spouse, however, may not be an abductee and might be “switched off” during each abduction Page 146 sequence. Evidence suggests that people who have been abducted only once are targeted as a matter of expediency and are in close proximity to an abductee during an abduction.
When do abductions begin? The evidence indicates that, with the exception of opportunistic abductions, all abductees have their first experience in childhood. The youngest case I have found was that of an abductee who reported her eight-month-old child being taken, although most abductees remember their first episode occurring when they were between the ages of four and seven. The aliens then in some way “tag” the person and mentally and physically “mine” him or her for a good part of their lives. I have no record of a series of abductions that begin when the abductee is an adult.
Abductions sometimes take place in “clusters.” They may increase as the child approaches and goes through puberty, continue through the teens, and then abruptly stop. Long periods of time may pass without an abduction and then they begin again—intensely. Sometimes the abductee can have as many as one experience every few nights for a week or two. For some women, frequency is linked to their menstrual cycle. Abductions increase during ovulation and decrease during menstruation. The frequency of abductions for men has not yet been adequately researched, but it appears to be less predictable than for women.
Does location matter for an abduction? We used to think that UFOs were sighted more often in secluded areas than in densely populated locations. This may still be true for the sightings, but it makes no difference for abductions. With certain exceptions, abductions can occur anywhere and location is no determinate.
An abductee cannot hide from the abductions. They occur in the middle of Manhattan or in a farmhouse in Kansas. They occur within an apartment complex or in a single dwelling in the suburbs.
If an abductee travels to other states or countries, he or she is often abducted there. However, the specific locale might make a difference. For example, being in a room full of sleeping people at night makes no difference, but being in a crowd of people at a sporting event, in a market, or in a workplace seems to give some protection against an abduction at that time. Methods have been found that, in some cases, might postpone abductions, but no one has been able to find a way to stop them permanently.
What do the aliens want? The reports indicate that they want to use the ability humans have to recreate themselves. They want human sperm and eggs. They want human physical involvement with the offspring. They want complete knowledge of the reproductive areas of human life. They also want knowledge of our mental and nonreproductive physiological processes. With Mindscan and other mental procedures they might also want knowledge of how humans function within society.
What do the aliens not want? They appear not to want human advice or consultation. They do not want to disclose information about their origins and purposes. Neither do they impart much information about the technicalities of what they are doing during the various procedures they conduct on humans. They do not want to be discovered. They do not want to be stopped.
How long have the aliens been doing this? It is possible that aliens have been abducting humans for hundreds of years, but we have found no evidence for it. It is very difficult to say exactly when the phenomenon began, but there are indications that it might have begun in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. We have collected some reports suggestive of abductions in the 1900s, and we have investigated abductions that occurred in the early 1930s. The main bulk of the abductions seems to have begun in the mid-twentieth century, perhaps coinciding with the first UFO sighting waves in the 1940s. Our knowledge is limited by the age of the people who explore their experiences; most abductees who have come forth in the last five years are under sixty years old.
If we are dealing with a generationally based abduction program, then it could have started on a relatively small scale one hundred years ago; it may have grown exponentially as the children of the original abductees were themselves abducted, then their children in turn became abductees, and so on. The amount of time and effort that the aliens put into the breeding program would have grown as the abductee population increased. Such a scenario would account for the widespread abduction phenomenon of today.
How long will aliens continue abductions? The abduction program appears to be vast.
Abductees routinely report rooms with as many as two hundred tables holding humans in various stages of examination. The aliens hustle them out as soon as possible after the procedures are completed, presumably so that more humans can be brought in. The evidence suggests that this goes on twenty-four hours a day, month after month, year after year. The amount of time and energy invested in the breeding program is enormous. This might indicate that the aliens will be here for a long period of time—possibly forever. It is also possible that the aliens could cease their operations tomorrow and never bother us again.
Are aliens malevolent or benevolent? The aliens appear to be neither malevolent nor benevolent. They do not seem to be here to help us or to harm us. They are here for themselves.
They are doing what they want to do, without consideration for our wishes. They appear to have no concern with the central issues and problems of human survival. They do not share technology, impart knowledge, give advice, warn us about our course for the future, or tell us how to cure disease.
Modern anthropologists employ a policy of ethnical noninterference when they encounter a newly found tribal society so that it can survive without the disruptive shock of modern cultural and technological intervention. It is possible that the aliens are acting in the same way, although little evidence exists for this. However, it is also possible that they have instituted the practice of nonintervention so that they can continue to execute their program without threat of human attempts to prevent it.
Does the breeding program involve genetic interbreeding? Dr. Michael Swords, a professor of natural sciences at Western Michigan University, has argued that it would be biologically impossible for aliens to join their DNA with ours—assuming that they have DNA—just as it is impossible for humans to interbreed across animal species. Moreover, the lack of genitals on Page 147 the aliens (some sexual reports notwithstanding) makes it clear that they are not interbreeding with us in the most usual sense.
It seems more likely that genetic alteration is taking place instead of interbreeding. The evidence seems to indicate the following sequence: (1) eggs and sperm are taken; (2) they are fertilized in vitro; (3) the fertilized egg is genetically altered; (4) the fertilized egg is implanted in utero; (5) after a short period of from two to ten weeks of gestation, the fetus is removed; and (6) the fetus is incubated externally. However the effect is achieved, the babies look like crosses between humans and aliens.2 Why do aliens need humans to touch offspring? Budd Hopkins has posited that the point of holding the offspring is for nurturance—to give them human love, just as humans do with their own children. However, touch seems to be more important than love. Experiments with premature human babies have shown that without touching the babies develop at a slower rate than premature infants who have been regularly massaged. Touching can stimulate hormones essential for physical and psychological well-being. For all human babies, the absence of touching can cause physiological deficiencies that lead to the serious condition of psychosocial dwarfism. If this is the reason the alien offspring need touching, then why the aliens cannot supply it is a mystery, as is why the offspring would need human touch so infrequently.
Are the offspring sick? Although abductees commonly report that the offspring look sickly or even close to death, we cannot substantiate the fact that they are ill. In fact, most abductees only see “sickly” babies and few, if any, see “healthy” babies. Thus, we must assume that either all the babies the abductees see are sick, or, more probably, that the babies’ appearance of “wasting” is normal for them.
Why do aliens repeatedly abduct the same people? We do not know the answer to this. The abductee obviously fits some sort of criteria for use. It has been speculated that if the abductees’ offspring cannot themselves reproduce in sufficient numbers to maintain the population, then repeated mining of abductees for reproductive material might account for the recurring nature of the abductions.
Do abductees take trips in the UFOs? Over the years researchers have reported cases of abductees traveling in UFOs. I have not uncovered an abduction-related trip to another planet in my research. I have had abductees say that they had the definite feeling of movement in the object as if it were traveling. Others have said that they could see the planet Earth outside a window. Some have seen stars against a black background outside a window. The travel that I have investigated has seemed incidental to the abduction, and I have found no procedures related to it. Further investigation may reveal deliberate travel experiences, but, based on what we know, it seems likely that some reports of travel might be due to envisioning or staging procedures.
Are aliens ultimately going to take over the planet? Based on everything we know, the aliens could have taken over many years ago if they had wanted to. The program they have instituted does not seem to be one of conquest, at least not in the common meaning of the word.
The apparent lack of systematic interest in our culture and society probably precludes any type of program to “colonize.” However, the aliens’ meticulous attention to human thought processes and physiology suggests a far more serious interest in humans than just the mechanical production of babies. The clandestine character of the abduction event suggests that they do not want us to know what they are doing. This might mean that in the future they could make a sudden, widespread public appearance when they are ready. Of course, it could also mean that eventually they will complete their program and disappear.
What happens to the babies? This is the central question of abduction research. If the abduction phenomenon has been going on for at least fifty years, then the first of the offspring must be around fifty years old by now. But where are they? There is no evidence that the offspring are on Earth. We can surmise that the offspring are being taken somewhere else.
Some abductees have suggested that the babies are being taken elsewhere to populate another planet. Others have suggested that the babies are being used as workers somewhere. In one regression, Karen Morgan recalled a child-presentation procedure in which a voice came over the “telepathic P.A. system” summoning her to “behold the children of the future.” She was shown ten children standing together. The voice told her they were playing.
And I think, “They’re not playing. This is all manipulated. [Something bizarre is] happening here.” But they’re saying, “The children are playing.” Or, “Observe the children at play. These are our children, and they’re your children. They’re the children of the future. Together we have done… built something.” I’m looking at the children, saying, “I don’t like this.”“ Observe the children of the future.” It’s like a speech. Everything’s like a speech, you know? And the children are under a soft, yellow light, like a spotlight on them.
Can you kind of [remember] anything else?
Yes, I do remember. It said, “We’re on the verge of a new horizon” or “beginning,” or something. “We’re on the verge of new ‘something.’”… What else do they say?
Nothing that I’m aware of. They just walk out of the room.
These babies have something to do with the future, then?
Page 148 They definitely do. They said they’re the children of the future. Whose future? I don’t know.
(Karen Morgan, 38, 1987) In another episode, Karen was once again in the media room when she heard more information about the possible purposes of the aliens.
Do they say anything about babies?
Children. There’s some bullshit, David, I hear like, “Children of the future” or something.
Children of the future, children of the world, children of the… it’s like, these are impressions now, but it’s something like, “This will be brought into being or inherited by children of the future.” And something like, “the future that you help create,” or “the future that you are part of,” or “the future that…” I’d like to think that this was just wishful thinking on their part, but I’m not sure it is.
Now, are you sure that they’re talking about Earth, or are they talking about another planet?
It looks a lot like Earth to me…. I have the feeling that it’s not another planet, but it’s a highly idealized version and a too-pretty picture of this planet.
(Karen Morgan, 38, 1987) In one of Lynn Miller’s abduction experiences, a Taller Being told her that the babies were being produced to be workers. She received the impression that he wanted her to have babies.
Why do you think he might want that? He needs babies….
When he says that he wants you to have babies, can you get a sense of why he needs babies?
No.
Can you get a sense of what he’s going to do with the babies?
They need them for work.
For work?
Yes.
You mean they’re growing babies to be workers?
Yes.
How can you get a sense of that?
I just get a sense of it.
Do you get a sense of what kind of work they’ll be doing?
No.
Do you get a sense of where they’ll be doing the work?
Not on Earth….
So you suggest, then, that the babies will be in another place.
Yes.
Page 149 By another place, does he mean another planet?
Another solar system.
So not in our own solar system?
No.
(Lynn Miller, 32, 1988) A depressed Lynn said she felt as if she was being used as a babymaking machine for their purposes.
If the aliens’ focus is on producing babies, then what do all the physical and mental procedures mean? Unfortunately, we do not have enough information about the purposes of these procedures to understand exactly how they fit into the larger context of abductions. The mental procedures suggest that the aliens are far more interested in human mental and emotional lives than the production of babies would warrant. It is possible that some Mindscan procedures might utilize human memories to learn about human culture and society. The aliens’ meticulous physical examination of men and women also suggests greater curiosity than what might be assumed is necessary for physiological reproduction. The nonreproductive mental and physical procedures represent one of the more important, and perhaps ominous, mysteries in the abduction phenomenon.
Is it risky to investigate abductions? No investigator has ever been abducted as a result of his research. Yet, since we do not know the consequences of investigating abductions, it is necessary to proceed cautiously. For instance, the clandestine nature of abductions has been in effect since the beginning. But if abductions become commonly known through the work of investigators and are therefore no longer clandestine, we do not know what response the aliens might have to that situation.
What does the abduction phenomenon mean? We have been invaded. It is not an occupation, but it is an invasion. At present we can do little or nothing to stop it. The aliens have powers and technology greatly in advance of ours, and that puts us at a tremendous disadvantage in our ability to affect the phenomenon or gain some control over it. We do not know what is going to happen in the future, just as we do not know what the aliens’ ultimate purposes are. We do know that the effect on abductees’ lives can be devastating. The net effect of the abduction phenomenon on our society and culture at large could very well be the same over a long period of time.
Contact between the races is not taking place in a scenario that has been commonly envisioned by scientists and science fiction writers: two independent worlds making careful overtures for equal and mutual benefit. Rather, it is completely one-sided. Instead of equal benefit, we see a disturbing program of apparent exploitation of one species by another. How it began is unknown. How it will end is unknown. But we must face the abduction phenomenon squarely and begin to think rationally about what to do about it.
Page 150 Afterword Final Thoughts When I first became involved with abduction research, it was easy to keep it at arm’s length and treat it as an intellectual puzzle. But the more I learned about the abduction phenomenon, the more frightening it became, both personally and in the larger context of its potential effects on society.
This book is, in one sense, a warning. We must realize that the abduction phenomenon is too important to dismiss as the ravings of prevaricators or psychologically disturbed people. I hope the extraordinary lack of scientific concern to date does not in the long run prove to be a mistake with undreamed-of consequences.
We are just at the beginning of a systematic study of abductions. Amateur investigators and professional therapists are also beginning to do abduction research. Extreme caution is necessary. The researcher must protect the abductee from further harm. Abductees can be emotionally fragile, and incompetent memory recovery techniques can cause them psychological damage. The risk of the further victimizing of the abductees by well-meaning but unqualified individuals is high. Special training is required.
Investigating the abduction phenomenon has demonstrated to me how brave and resilient people can be. I am continually astonished to see people who come back from these terrifying experiences and retain their sense of humor and their optimism. I admire their fierce determination to gain control over their lives and the abduction experiences. It is the triumph of the human spirit that is most remarkable in dealing with the abduction experience. And in the end, I believe, the human spirit will prevail.
I am often asked how I would react if the entire abduction phenomenon should prove to be the internally generated product of people’s imaginations—if there are in reality no abductions and no aliens, and never have been. If that were true, I would weep with joy. I want to be wrong.
If you think you may have been involved with the abduction phenomenon, I would like to learn about your experience. Please write to: Dr. David M. Jacobs Department of History Temple University Philadelphia, PA 19122 All communications will be confidential.
Page 151 Appendix A A Few Words about Methodology Anecdotal Data For the most part, the material in this book is based on anecdotal evidence—stories that people relate. The quality of evidence of this nature has been a point of contention ever since the public began to make UFO sightings. But we must do the best with what we have. Wishing for better evidence does not advance knowledge; dealing with the evidence at hand does. No single book, no matter how much or what quality of evidence it marshals, is going to convince the majority of people that alien abductions are happening as described. Most probably, it will be the accumulation of evidence over a long period of time that ultimately will persuade people of the importance of the abduction phenomenon.
Recruiting Subjects People who have had abduction experiences have come to me in a variety of ways. Some were referred by Budd Hopkins and other UFO researchers, others heard me discussing the subject on radio or television or saw newspaper articles about my work, and still others heard of my abduction work through word of mouth. I have also had abductees referred to me by mental health professionals who had them as clients.
When a person first contacts me and tells me that she thinks something might have happened to her, I first ask a set of twenty-five questions that enable me to discern whether her memories might be related to the abduction phenomenon. I try to get a “feel” for the person and gauge whether she is motivated by a sincere desire to find out what has happened or is simply inquiring on a lark. If the person demonstrates genuine concern, if she does not have serious mental problems, and if she has had unusual experiences that might be related to the abduction phenomenon, I give her a strong verbal warning about the psychological consequences of finding out that something might have happened to her, and I then send her an abduction information pamphlet that outlines the pros and cons of memory collection. The pamphlet emphasizes the problems that can be engendered from memory recovery and stresses that for some people it might not be the right time to explore these events. If the person still wants to go forward, I give her a second verbal warning detailing more of the problems that she might face. If she still wants to participate, then the memory recovery process begins.
Recall Abductees have a wide range of conscious recall about any given abduction event. If I am investigating a series of abductions that have taken place over the course of the abductee’s life, the subject may be able consciously to remember bits and pieces of some abductions, virtually nothing of other abductions, and virtually everything about still other abductions. The process seems dependent on the degree of consciousness alteration that occurs during the abduction. When abductees remember entire episodes consciously, hypnosis on that same abduction event often reveals that some of the details might be different and that entire parts are sometimes left out of the conscious recall. The consciously recalled elements of the abduction are often accurate, sometimes even to minute details. Just as often, however, they are untrustworthy because of the problems of screen memories, confabulation, dream material, and the visualization procedures.
The Use of Hypnosis When I first begin the memory recovery process with a subject, I obtain a case history of the abductee, outlining many of the “suspicious” occurrences in that person’s life that might be indicative of an abduction. I do not discuss anything about the specific content of abductions with the subject. Then, with the abductee’s accord, I select a memory to be probed. The abductee then consciously relates all that she remembers about the incident, sometimes in surprising detail. We discuss this and then we begin a hypnosis session to ascertain the origin of the occurrences.
Hypnosis is an indispensable tool in unlocking the memories of an abduction. Ever since 1963, when Dr. Benjamin Simon first used it on Betty and Barney Hill, UFO researchers have employed it to learn about abductions. It is the best method available to gain detailed access to people’s hidden abduction memories. Hypnosis, however, is not foolproof. Some abductees simply do not remember; when they do remember, especially details, it may be an incorrect memory that they are Page 152 “filling in.” This can be particularly true when the subject is asked to supply details of an event from childhood.
It is easy for a hypnotist to ask (consciously or inadvertently) leading questions that steer the abductee into an answer that may not reflect reality. This can be a problem for suggestible subjects.
Confabulation, or the unconscious invention and filling in of memories, can become an easy way of providing information to the eager hypnotist-investigator. In hypnosis, even asking questions about a specific event can put pressure on the subject to invent details of that event to provide the answers to those questions. This problem is compounded by the fact that in abduction research, questions about details are routinely asked in order to gather as much information as possible.
Even the milieu of the investigation might present problems. Certain expectations are inherent in this situation. The hypnotized person might unconsciously invent information about an abduction because that is what is expected. Even the investigator’s beliefs might subtly influence the subject to tell him “abduction” material. Intentional fabrication can be another problem. Even in deep hypnosis, the subject can consciously fabricate stories.
Yet, despite these potential problems, hypnosis is a valuable instrument of data collection. The abduction accounts are recalled in a surprising manner. For many abductees, once the event is tapped into, the memories seem to pour out without much questioning. When the memories are finally out and discussed, they then are contained in “normal” memory and the abductees tend to forget them as they would any other more or less traumatic memory (thus, often these abductees find it difficult to recall details of the events later on without hypnosis). Other abductees, however, have a very difficult time remembering details of the abduction during the regression. Much of this depends on the specific abduction that they are trying to recall.
The hypnosis I employ consists of light relaxation induction. Basically, I tell the subject to relax in several different ways, use a small amount of visual imagery to “deepen” the trance, and then begin to ask questions. My inductions are usually about fifteen minutes long. The hypnotized subjects have complete control and are free to challenge questions, refuse answers, or get up and go to the bathroom.
I use a calm, informal style of inquiry, especially with those abductees who have had many sessions with me and with whom I have spent enough time to know their reactions to the questioning. When a person comes for her first session, my questioning technique is necessarily cautious and not pressing. With a new subject, I intentionally ask leading questions to ascertain whether she is “leadable” to any degree. The vast majority of the time she is not, demonstrating this by answering a definite “no” to my leading questions.
During a regression session, I try to be as rigorously systematic as I can. I go through the abduction one step at a time, from just before the incident began until the very end. This requires expending a great amount of time on each abduction account. I have developed a technique through which I can move the abductee backward and forward through the event, slowly expanding memories. Sometimes I will go through the event twice, asking questions in a slightly different manner based on what has already been said. If a person cannot remember something, I do not press for recall. Each session lasts between three and five hours, with the hypnosis itself lasting between one and three hours.
I use as nonconfrontational and supportive a manner as I can, often purposely not finishing questions so that abductees can “ease” into the line of questioning that I am developing or interpret the question for themselves. For the most part, I speak in low, conversational tones so that I do not in any way set up an environment that is hostile or suspicious. If I find what appear to be contradictions, I point these out and question them about it (e.g., “If you are lying on your back, how could you feel someone touching your back?”). If they say something that I have never heard before, I again question them very closely to make sure that it is not imaginary. It might appear in some of the transcript excerpts used in this study that a question is leading. In each case I have found that the abductee was not leadable; often the questions asked are from material that had already been discussed previously in the session.
During a regression, all abductees are quite aware of what is happening on two fundamental levels: (1) the information that they are remembering, and (2) the questions and answers that they are required to deal with while they remember. If possible, the abductees learn to observe and analyze the events from a dispassionate and systematic point of view. When they have had a number of sessions, they become adept in questioning themselves and their remembrances, and they can distance themselves to a greater degree from the event. They become “participant- observers” rather than just helpless victims. This has proved to be invaluable for my own research and for the way that the abductees learn to cope with the problems engendered by the abductions.
After I have had a number of sessions with them and am sure that they cannot be led while undergoing hypnosis, I can be more blunt in my questions and they can evaluate their memories for themselves. After I bring them out of the hypnotic state, we engage in a thirty-minute to one-hour “talk down” period when other details may be recalled.
Occasionally I use a method I call “assisted recall,” in which close and careful questioning techniques enable the abductee to remember most of the abduction without the use of hypnosis.
Questioning Techniques Disentangling “legitimate” information from unreliable memories involves techniques calculated to produce an understanding of the structure of the abduction and a recognition of anomalies within it. But this is not easy. The most systematic method is patient and thorough questioning, minutely examining every detail and going over every minor contradiction and gap in the account, no matter how irrelevant it might seem, in a second-by-second chronological order. But the problem of confused memory is complicated by the fact that not only is the abductee usually in a hypnotic trance Page 153 while recalling her memories, but she was also in an altered state of consciousness during the abduction itself. Furthermore, complex mental procedures might have been executed on her that further clouded her perceptions and placed pseudo-images and “memories” in her mind.
Experience in investigating these problems makes it possible to unweave an abduction account and have a reasonable assurance that false recall has been eliminated. Through patient and extremely cautious questioning, the researcher and the abductee can recognize that the events abductees sometimes describe might either not have happened at all or have happened in a different way than they first thought. For instance, one man talked about a beautiful young woman who was coming over to him for what he thought would be a sexual liaison. He described her as having “black hair.” Through meticulous questioning about the minute details of her actions and her appearance (“If her head is on your upper chest, can you see the top of her head?”), the false memories fell away and the abductee independently realized that it was her black eyes that he had been describing and not her hair. In fact, she had no hair at all. He also realized that the sexual encounter that he thought he was having was not, in fact, taking place, and that he had been involved with sexual imagery before a sperm sample was taken.
Uncovering abduction memories and helping people come to terms with them is not an easy task. My investigative techniques have evolved and become more sophisticated during the five years that I have been involved in this endeavor. As I learned more about the content of abductions and their effects on the victims, my questioning changed to incorporate my new knowledge. Thus, I conducted my first investigations somewhat differently from later ones. This is bound to happen in a dynamic field where the influx of information is rapid and overwhelming, and where there is no large body of precedent to guide the investigator.
Multiple Sessions The process of systematic and careful delving into abduction accounts can yield much previously unknown information. When abductees decide to do a series of hypnotic regressions on many different experiences in their lives, each session can generate both material previously known and new material never before encountered. Thus, abductees can have myriad experiences that might not be discovered with only one or two sessions. The investigation of abduction material over the course of a subject’s lifetime can provide important information about whether the abductions have changed over time and demonstrates the full scope of activity that happens to each individual.
Furthermore, multiple sessions allow for the establishment of the mutual trust that makes it easier for an abductee to reveal sensitive and sometimes embarrassing material, often sexual in nature, that might be difficult to discuss after only a few sessions.
Developing the Scenario When I started this research, some events had been known for years and were easier to understand. For instance, since 1966 researchers have known about the physical examination. In the 1980s, Budd Hopkins’s pioneering work uncovered reproductive procedures, such as egg removal, sperm collection, and baby holding.
Yet there were still many elements of abduction accounts that seemingly defied comprehension.
Systematic questioning techniques and analysis have now revealed the origin of many of those incomprehensible events. Thus, some reports of extremely tall aliens might be the result of an abductee’s lying down and looking up at them, which gives them the appearance of height. Images of atomic explosions are due to visualization procedures. Scenes of alien landscapes might also have their origin in mental procedures. Published accounts of alien “councils” during which aliens discuss abductees probably reflect the abductee’s seeing aliens standing around the examining table. Even though the abductees may not understand the import of the information they are relating, I have found it to be amenable to rational explanation given enough data collected through correct questioning techniques.
The Transcripts I have tape-recorded each abduction account I researched and then had it transcribed. These written documents, based on oral accounts, help in comparing and analyzing the reports. The transcripts are then analyzed, divided into constituent parts based on the type of event described, and stored in a computer for more detailed analysis.
Reading the transcripts can present a problem. My questioning might sound harsh or abrupt in places, which is unavoidable when the spoken word is written down verbatim. Inflection, nuance, timing, pauses, and the like are lost in a transcript. Therefore, much of the impact of what the abductees are saying is unavoidably omitted. Rather than extensively annotating each transcript, however, I allow the abductees to speak for themselves as much as possible without editorial comment that might interject too much of myself into the accounts.
Support Systems Page 154 Abductees are victims who, having gone through incredible and traumatic events without the ability to deal with them consciously, sometimes need help in overcoming the stress from the abduction events. I provide as much support as I can based on my experience, and I hold support- group sessions to allow abductees to discuss their ideas and meet others who have had the same experiences.
Some abductees find it very difficult to cope with their abductions. The tears and emotions that have emerged in many regression sessions from these often terrorized victims is a testament to the trauma they consciously confront for the first time. If a person is suffering emotionally from the effects of abductions and needs more help than I can give, it is important for them to have professional counseling from a sympathetic psychologist or psychiatrist. Dr. Stephen Greenstein in Merion, Pennsylvania, has proved to be invaluable in giving the support and therapy that some of the abductees require.
The proper methods of abduction research are still in the formative stage. Methodological and ethical protocols are being established. While this is happening, the possibility of abuse exists both from well-meaning but incompetent abduction investigators and from mental health professionals. It is extremely important for anyone seeking to examine potential abduction experiences to be certain that the person she or he consults for help in recalling the memories is well qualified for that task.
Page 155 Appendix B The Abductees Below is a list of thirty-nine abductees with whom I investigated two or more abductions, and whose testimony appears in this book. In addition, twenty-two other individuals explored only one abduction experience with me.
Name, year born Occupation Number of hypnotic regression sessions Barbara Archer, 1967 Newspaper reporter 6 James Austino, 1966 University student 5 Melissa Bucknell, 1960 Real estate management 30 Rick Caulfield, 1951 Bartender 4 Elaine Corrello, 1955 Dance instructor 2 Anita Davis, 1958 Transcriber 4 Janet Demerest, 1954 (Karen Morgan’s sister) secretary 13 Alan Edwards, 1950 Commercial artist 4 John Franklin, 1966 University student 4 Andrew Garcia, 1955 Alcohol rehabilitation counselor 4 Cindy Goldman, 1957 (Lydia Goldman’s daughter) Registered nurse 4 Lydia Goldman, 1932 Secretary 8 Ruth Grossinger, 1943 Interior decorator, 4 former nurse Richard Heyward, 1956 Clerk typist 3 Jason Howard, 1959 Corporate insurance consultant 8 Marvin Josephson, 1966 Accountant 2 Gloria Kane, 1943 Cardiologist 14 George Kenniston, 1949 Attorney 2 Tracy Knapp, 1957 Musician 2 Patti Layne, 1962 High school teacher 24 Evelyn Livingston, 1962 Graduate student in English 5 Michelle Mason, 1942 Apartment maintenance 2 Lynn Miller, 1955 Waitress 11 Laura Moore, 1948 Secretary 2 Karen Morgan, 1949 (Janet Demerest’s sister) Owner of public relations firm 26 Linda Nichols, 1957 University student 10 Will Parker, 1955 Radio announcer 9 Lucile Perino, 1940 Homemaker 5 Charles Petrie, 1951 Printer 13 Jill Pinzarro, 1948 Minister 7 Marva Roberts, 1954 Systems engineer 2 Ken Rogers, 1961 Professional bicyclist 16 Jason Sandburg, 1956 Graduate student in physics 10 Grant Sawyer, 1932 High school teacher, 3 former army colonel Belinda Schiffrin, 1951 Music teacher 2 Helene Thomas, 1950 Real estate sales 4 Steve Thompson, 1950 Apartment maintenance 8 Rodney Walker, 1959 Graduate student in urban planning 8 Victor Young, 1949 Computer programmer 2 Page 156 Appendix C Diagraming the Abduction After studying abductions for several years I began to realize that the procedures I was uncovering fit together into a graphic form. This matrix represents the results of my investigations into diagraming the structure of the common abduction. All of the physical, mental, and reproductive experiences are linked together through the primary, secondary and ancillary experiences. By examining this matrix, we can get a visual sense of the continuity of these remarkable events. What is extraordinary is that there is a structure, and a fairly tight one at that. The existence of this complex structure suggests a greater sense of the purposefulness in the alien abduction program, and lends support to the theory that reports of abductions have a nonpsychological origin. Although most of the abductions that I investigate verify what is already in the matrix, I expect that as researchers learn more about the abduction phenomenon, the categories will be filled in and expanded upon.
I also expect that new categories will be added that shed further light upon alien activities. We are continually learning and continually being astonished.
COMMON ABDUCTION SCENARIO MATRIX Primary Secondary Ancillary Examination Machine Miscellaneous Tissue Samples Enveloping Surgery Physical Implants Scanning Pool Light Cures Miscellaneous Pain [Proto-People] Staring Visualization Miscellaneous Mental Mindscan Imaging Media Display Mental Onset Envisioning Knowledge Calmative Staging Information Transfer End-Pain Testing Sexual Arousal Urological- Gynecological Child Presentation Sexual Activity Egg-Sperm Collection Incubatorium Involuntary-Compulsive Reproductive Nursery Embryo Implanting Baby Humans Fetal Extraction Toddler, Youth Hybrids Adolescent Page 157 Notes Chapter 2: Sightings and Abductions 1 Cf. Armando Simon, “The Zeitgeist of the UFO Phenomenon,” in Richard Haines, ed., UFO Phenomena and the Behavioral Scientist (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1979), pp. 43-59.
2 For a more complete analysis, see David M. Jacobs, The UFO Controversy in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975); Edward Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (Garden City: Doubleday, 1956); Paris Flammonde, UFO Exist! (New York: Putnam, 1976).
For current government activity see also Lawrence Fawcett and Barry Greenwood, Clear Intent (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1984). See also Timothy Good, Above Top Secret (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1987).
3 Edward U. Condon, in Daniel S. Gillmor, ed., Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (New York: Bantam, 1969), pp. 1, 5.
4 William Hartmann, in Daniel S. Gillmor, ed., Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), p. 407.
5 Coral and Jim Lorenzen, Flying Saucer Occupants (New York: Signet, 1967), p. 54.
6 John Fuller, The Interrupted Journey (New York: Dial Press, 1966).
7 Travis Walton, The Walton experience (New York: Berkeley Books, 1978).
8 Leonard Stringfield, “The Stanford, Kentucky Abduction,” The MUFON UFO Journal, January 1976, pp. 5-15.
9 Ray Fowler, The Andreasson Affair (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1979); The Andreasson Affair, Phase Two (Englewood Clifis: Prentice-Hall, 1982); The Watchers (New York: Bantam, 1990).
10 Berthold E. Schwarz, “Talks with Betty Hill: I—Aftermath of Encounter,” Flying Saucer Review, vol. 23, no. 2, 1977, p. 19n; Ann Druffel, The Tujunga Canyon Contacts (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1980).
11 Budd Hopkins, Missing Time ( New York: Marek, 1981).
12 Thomas E. Bullard, UFO Abductions: The Measure of a Mystery (Mount Ranier, MD: Fund for UFO Research, 1987).
13 Budd Hopkins, Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods (New York: Random House, 1987).
Chapter 8: The Abductors 1 Richard Hall, Ted Bloecher, and Isabel Davis, UFOs: A New Look (Washington, DC: National Investigations on Aerial Phenomena, 1969), p. 5.
2 Once in a while an abductee will report that the aliens appear to be much clumsier than others report. They claim that the aliens have trouble unbuttoning and removing their clothes.
Chapter 9: Exploring the Evidence 1 Ron Westrum, “Post Abduction Syndrome,” MUFON UFO Journal, December 1986, pp. 5-6.
Chapter 11: Answers 1 See David M. Jacobs, The UFO Controversy in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), chapter 5, for a discussion of the contactees and their effect on UFO research.
Several of the contactees either confessed that their stories were untrue or were exposed by investigators.
2 For a discussion of hysterical contagion, see Neil J. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior (New York: The Free Press, 1962); Ralph L. Rosnow and Gary Alan Fine, Rumor and Gossip: The Social Psychology of Hearsay (New York. Elsevier, 1976).
3 Nahum Z. Medalia and Otto N. Larsen, “Diffusion and Belief in a Collective Delusion: The Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic,” American Sociological Review, vol. 23, 1958, pp. 180-186.
4 Alan C. Kerckhoff and Kurt W. Back, The June Bug: A Study in Hysterical Contagion (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968); Alan C. Kerckhoff and Kurt W. Back, “Sociometric Patterns in Hysteric Contagion,” Sodometry, March 1965, pp. 2-15.
5 Ronald Seigel, “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” Omni, December 1988, p. 88.
6 Philip J. Klass, UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game (Buffalo: Prometheus Press, 1989).
Page 158 7 Thomas E. Bullard, “Hypnosis and UFO Abductions: A Troubled Relationship,” Journal of UFO Studies, n.s. 1, 1989, pp. 3-40.
8 Alvin H. Lawson, “Hypnosis of Imaginary Abductees,” in Curtis Fuller, ed., Proceedings of the First International UFO Congress (New York: War ner Books, 1980), pp. 195-238. One woman related some details about the examination and the aliens that were closer to abduction accounts. It is possible that she was an abductee and that neither she nor Lawson realized it.
9 Michael Capuzzo, “Exploring the Claims of UFO Abductions,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 8, 1987, p. 8-L.
10 One must be clear, however, that mentally disturbed people can also have abduction experiences. The ability of these people to describe and analyze what has happened to them is limited. Competent investigators usually refuse to work with them and refer such people to mental health professionals. One young woman with whom I worked in the course of writing this study fell prey to mental illness and was hospitalized. The factors leading to the breakdown were not related to the abduction phenomenon, and at no time did the abductions become involved with her thought disturbances.
11 Ted Bloecher, Aphrodite Clamar, and Budd Hopkins, “Summary Report on the Psychological Testing of Nine Individuals Reporting UFO Abduction Experiences” (Washington, DC: The Fund for UFO Research, 1984).
12 Michael Persinger, “Contribution of Temporal Lobe Factors to Visitor and Paranormal Experiences,” paper, Society for Scientific Exploration, Cornell University, June 1988. Persinger has also suggested that geophysical events can precipitate temporal lobe instability.
I have worked with an abductee who had temporal lobe epilepsy. She took medication to stop her seizures. Once she was given medication that had been recalled by the manufacturer; instead of preventing seizures, it caused them. Within five days, she had 125 seizures before her epilepsy was brought under control. During that time, she did not have an abduction, imagine abductions, or think about abductions. Three months later, she forgot to take her medication and had a seizure while recounting an abduction event to me under hypnosis. She felt the onset of the seizure, asked to be brought out of the trance, and then had the seizure. At that time she did not confabulate, imagine other abduction events, or have vivid memories of the abduction event she had been describing.
She experienced no sensory stimulation of any sort, nor did she think about the abduction event. In fact, the seizure prevented her from recalling the event and it added nothing whatsoever to her account. None of the other abductces with whom I have worked have had any type of epilepsy.
13 Jacques Vallee, Passport to Magonia (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969); Jacques Vallee, Dimensions (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1988); Robert Bartholomew, UFOlore (Stone Mountain, GA: Arcturus Book Service, 1989); Thomas E. Bullard, “Why Abduction Reports Are Not Urban Legends,” International UFO Reporter, July/August 1991, pp. 15-20, 24. See also Edoardo Russo and Paolo Grassino, “Ufology in Europe; or, What Is America Coming To?” International UFO Reporter, March/April 1989, pp. 4-7; Jerome Clark, “Two Cheers for American Ufology,” International UFO Reporter, March/April 1989, pp. 8-12; Jerome Clark, “The Fall and Rise of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis,” MUFON 1988 International UFO Symposium Proceedings (Seguin, Texas: MUFON, 1988), pp. 58-71; Thomas E. Bullard, “The American Way; Truth, Justice, and Abduction,” Magonia, October 1989, pp. 3-7.
14 Carl G. Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky (New York: New American Library, 1959).
15 Ibid., p. 17.
16 Alvin H. Lawson, “A Touchstone for Fallacious Abductions: Birth Trauma Imagery in CE III Narratives,” in Mimi Hynek, ed., The Spectrum of UFO Research (Chicago: The J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, 1988), pp. 71-98.
17 Ann Druffel and D. Scott Rogo, The Tujunga Canyon Contacts (New York: New American Library, 1988) (updated version). Rogo later felt that the mass of abduction evidence had weakened this theory.
Chapter 12: Questions 1 Jenny Randles, Abduction: Over 200 Documented UFO Kidnappings (London: Robert Hale, 1988).
2 Michael Swords, “Extraterrestrial Hybridization Unlikely,” MUFON UFO Journal, November 1988, pp. 6-10; David M.Jacobs, “Hybrid Thoughts,” MUFON UFO Journal, February 1989, pp. 10- 11.
Page 159 Acknowledgments This book could not have been written without the help and encouragement of those who have been subjected to abductions. They were supportive and gave freely of their time and energy. Not only did I learn about the abduction phenomenon from them, but I also learned lessons about the human spirit in the face of adversity that have made me proud to have had our lives intertwine.
No study of this nature can be done in a vacuum. Dr. Thomas E. Bullard, folklorist and abduction researcher; Jerome Clark of the Center for UFO Studies; writer Michael Fare; Dr. Stephen Greenstein, psychologist; Dr. Charles W. Hieatt, Anglia College, Cambridge; Dr. Roger Keeran, Empire State College; art historian April Kingsley; Dr. Michael Swords, Western Michigan University; and Dr. Ronald Westrum, Eastern Michigan University, gave much of their time and offered invaluable comments on the manuscript.
Fred Hills and Daphne Bien of Simon & Schuster were extraordinarily helpful in shaping the final outcome of this book. They expended much time and energy editing the manuscript, and their work has enhanced the quality of this book immeasurably. I am in their debt.
Without Budd Hopkins this project would never have begun. His encouragement, advice, and critique of my work has helped me to clarify my thoughts and to work steadily toward my goal. Our countless hours of discussion provided me with an outlet for my thoughts, and he patiently suffered through the earliest days of this study when my ideas were just beginning to take shape.
My wife, Irene, has put up with the enormous disruption and turmoil that the research for and writing of this study have caused in our lives and the lives of our children. In spite of this, her sage comments, her clarity of vision, and her steadiness have kept me on the intellectual straight and narrow in the face of tremendous obstacles. Her thoughtful editing of the initial drafts of the manuscript strengthened it tremendously.
Page 160 |
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THE BATTLE OVER UFOS .
• • • 7896-97: Airship sightings throughout the country-the work of an unknown American inventor, or the product of an alien tech nology?
World War II: The "foo-fighters" spotted dur· ing air battles-were they static electricity, enemy secret weapons, or extraterrestrial observers?
J950s: The age of the contactees-sane, re· sponsible sky watchers, or irrational people suffering from the delusion that they have been chosen by the "space brothers"?
J 960s: The Condon Report vs. the UFO or ganizations-who's telling the truth?
J970s: The scientists join the fray-but which ones have the right theory?
Unidentified Flying Objects have been with us a long time. Scientists have developed their own pet theories about UFOs. Many people have seen or claimed to see them. And even the Air Force and Congress have investigated the phenomena. Now Professor Jacobs puts all the facts together in one book, revealing the gov ernment cover-ups, the work of leading sci entists, the activities of the national UFO organizations, and actual cases of UFO sight ings, contactee reports, and trace evidence found. Here is the complete truth about THE UFO CONTROVERSY IN AMERICA "A publishing landmark • . . a book which you should own and which should be in every library in the land."-Fate Magazine To the Memory of My Mother NAL BOOKS ARB ALSO AVAll.ABLB AT DISCOUNTS IN BULK QUANTITY FOR INDUSTRIAL OR SALES-PROMOTIONAL USB, FOR DETAILS, WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, NEW AMERICAN LffiRARY, INC., 1301 AVENUE OF THE AMER• ICAS, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 1001!).
CoPYRIGIIT © 1975 BY INDIANA UNIVERSTIY PREss All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. For information address Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana 47401.
Library of Congress Catalos Card Number: 74-11886 This is an authorized reprint of a hardcover edition published by the Indiana University Press. The hardcover edition was pub lished simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Don Mils, Ontario.
(/) I!IIGNET TBA.DEMABK BEG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND I'OBElGN OOUNTKill BEGISTBRED TRADEMARK-MAROA BEGIBTBADA !UDOBO EN OHIOAGO, U.S.A.
SIGNET, SIGNET CLASSICS, MENTOR, PLUME AND MERIDIAN BOOKS are published by The New American Library, Inc., 1301 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New Yorą 10019 FIRST SIGNET PRINTING, SEPTEMBER, 1976 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Contents Foreword vii Acknowledgments XV Some Words of Explanation 1 1.
The Mystery Airship: Preliminaries to the Controversy 3 2.
The Modern Era Begins: Attempts to Reduce the Mystery 30 3.
The 1952 Wave: Efforts to Meet the Crisis 55 4.
The Robertson Panel and Its Effects on Air Force UFO Policy 78 5.
Contactees, Clubs, and Confusion 95 6.
1954 to 1958: Continued Skirmishes and the Rise of NICAP 117 7.
The Battle for Congressional Hearings 140 8.
1965: The Turning Point in the Controversy 171 9.
The Condon Committee and Its Aftermath 200 10.
1973: Echoes of the Past 235 Air Force UFO Statistics 270 Notes 271 A Note on Sources 307 Selected Bibliography 309 Index 321 L Foreword Scientific controversy has a rich history. And in modern times no controversy in science has had the global extent, the awareness by the public, the display of scientific argument and prejudice, the involvement of the media, and the scientific dilu tion of, and gross distraction from, the main issues by religious ' fanatics, visionaries, and charlatans, as has the phenomenon of , the Unidentified Flying Object (UFO).
The UFO controversy has a relatively long history, but until now this has been only partially and not coherently docu mented from about the turn of this century to the present.
There is only sporadic documentation in earlier centuries.
Indeed, in earlier times there could hardly be said to have been a controversy, although the phenomenon apparently was present.
The need of a sober non-partisan compilation and docu mentation of the controversy itself arises precisely because the UFO phenomenon has elicited as strong an emotional and partisan response as any scientific controversy in history.
Certainly it has involved far more people, and on a global basis, than the classic scientific controversies on, say, meteor ites, continental drift, mechanical nature of heat, relativity, and even biological evolution and natural selection. The latter, however, is perhaps the only controversy in which basic emo- • tiona! responses, buttressed by deep-seated religious and per sonal prejudice, played so major a role.
L Indeed, there is an interesting anti-parallelism between controversy surrounding the theory of biological evolution and that surounding the UFO phenomenon. In the gradual rise of the concept of biological evolution, there was first the slow acceptance at the top echelons of biological science before these concepts filtered down to the popular levels. It was at these lower levels, however, where the greatest emotional and surcharged prejudicial responses were generated. Human dignity, it seemed to the man on the street, was at stake, as was religious orthodoxy, and the new concepts were stubborn ly resisted and openly combated by the "grass roots" very vi viii Foreword much more than by the scientific establishment. One has to recall the famous Tennessee "monkey trial" in which the Dar winian concepts were ably but unavailingly defended by Clarence Darrow and vehemently opposed by William Jen nings Bryan to gauge the extent of rampant emotionalism surrounding the whole subject.
With the UFO phenomenon there is a parallel, but one with the opposite sign. Here the phenomenon arose and was re ported at the grass roots levels (as in the case of meteorites, as a matter of fact) and it was, in contrast, the highest scientific echelons that generated the emotional storm against allowing unprejudiced examination of the claimed observations of thou sands upon thousands of persons judged sane by conventional standards.
One may expect unbridled emotional responses in scientific matter from the untutored public; one is aghast to find it among one's scientific colleagues. One should expect that they, above al, would be conversant with the history of science, which has furnished so many, many examples of violent opposition to new ideas and concepts, opposition which was forced to give way to acceptance in the face of overwhelming evidence. Above al, the ideals of science call for calm and unprejudiced examination of the evidence, duly and properly presented.
And therein lies the rub! The UFO evidence has not been properly presented at the Court of Science. The parallel of meteorites comes at once to mind. For centuries there had been stories of stories having falen from the sky. Peasants reported finding such stones as later they plowed their fields.
Why should the French Academy of Science take seriously the untutored peasants' incredible stories of stones having fallen from the skies? Clearly impossible! And by the same token, why should science take seriously incredible stories about strange craft in the sky? Stones don't fall from the sky, and strange craft, exhibiting behaviors totally unknown and not encompassed in modem science, can't exist.
One glaring difference: many of the observers of the UFO phenomenon have by no means been "untutored peasants." Professors, scientists, air-traffic controllers, engineers, pilots, persons holding elective office as well as truck drivers, farmers, and school children have reported much the same things. And_ Foreword ix as in the case of meteorites, the reports have come from al around the world.
But the data on the UFO phenomenon have had to run an insidious gauntlet that the meteorites were spared. Discoveries of meteorite falls did not become the fabric of cultists, pseudo religious aberrants; meteorites were not regarded as sent by other-world intelligence bent on helping and reforming the benighted people of the earth. Nobody concocted a story about riding a meteorite to Venus and there meeting glorious "per fected humans" who imparted "platitudes in stained glass attitudes." But let it be clearly understood: such UFO associated stories have been relatively few and certainly were not generated by pilots, policemen, air-trafic controllers, and persons holding public office and other highly responsible positions. These were quite clearly generated by persons for whom the concept of ''flying saucers" satisfied some psychological fantasies and peculiar iner needs. Unfortunately, though few in number, such persons were generally uninhibitedly vocal and insensitive to ridicule; they were given ample press and often generated a cultist following. Meteorites were not so encumbered. Nor was final acceptance of meteorites and of other concepts obstructed by stories generated by misidentification and misperceptions.
The untutored in what can be seen in the sky, and those un aware of the vagaries of perceptions, are legion. Stimulated by accounts of truly strange sights in the sky or near the ground, and anxious to partake in the excitement, this legion ino cently but devastatingly heaped large piles of UFO stories onto the market. Although these were soon revealed for what they were-"unidenti:fied" only to themselves and certainly not to others who could easily identify the source of the mis identifications-this all served to muddle the primary issues.
It was in this atmosphere of confusion and misinformation that the Condon Committee, the Air Force sponsored group at the University of Colorado headed by the late Dr. Edward Condon, was conceived. It labored long to produce a scientific mouse, and a deformed mouse at that, one with two dissimilar heads; one, the summary of the investigation by Dr. Condon, which summarily dismisses the entire subject as unworthy of scientific attention, and the other, a series of attempts, often agonizing-and unsuccessful in four times out of five-to de- X Foreword vise a natural explanation for the UFO report selected for study. Clearly, the right hand head did not know what the left hand head was doing.
It was nonetheless quickly accepted, and with an audible sigh of relief in scientific circles, that Dr. Condon had suc ceeded in giving the subject a half-milion dollar burial, with unctuous gestures befitting an interment ceremony. But it turns out that the corpse had not even attended the funeral. As am· ply detailed in the last chapter of this book, the UFO phe nomenon presented itself to full view in the Fall of 1973, especially in the United States and in France, despite the over whelming opinion that the subject had been put to rest by science itself. Once again, it was merely history repeating.
How many times before had overcaution and established sci ence seemingly buried a disturbing concept!
It is interesting to contemplate, had the Condon Committee had the benefit of Dr. Jacobs's comprehensive study of the UFO controversy, how diferent the final report might have been.
But we have Dr. Jacobs's work now at hand. It is not my aim here to summarize it-the reader should have the pleasure of having the entire story unfold as he reads-but it is, I be· lieve, both my privilege and duty to say a word about the UFO phenomenon itself, the subject of the controversy. Since it is impossible to treat the controversy without introducing to some extent the subject itself, as Dr. Jacobs has of necessity done, I will limit myself to an overview, based primarily on my long acquaintance with the subject. My involvement with UFOs began in 1948 when I became astronomical consultant on ".flying saucers" to the Air Force. In the ensuing years I observed at firsthand both the phenomenon of continued UFO reports and the manner in which it was being treated (mis treated would be the better word) by science, the public, and by the Air Force.
Just exactly, then, what was and is the UFO phenomenon about which so many words have been spent?
First off, a quarter of a century has clearly shown, to al who are wiling to look, that after the dross is removed-i.e., accounts from the untutored, the pranksters, and the relatively few but vocal lunatic fringe-there remains a profoundly im pressive body of data which can truly be said to constitute a L Foreword xi new empirical set of observations. The only possible way to gainsay this is to accuse a veritable host of persons-from all walks of life, from all parts of the world, and adjudged sane and responsible from their personal records--of being crazy or of lying. These are persons whose testimony in a court of law would be unquestioned.
Now it is quite true that these remaining accounts are un believable by ordinary standards. That is precisely why they constitute new empirical evidence, in the same way that me teorites once did--or radioactivity, atomic fission, anomalous motion of the perihelion of Mercury, which the new Theory of Relativity finally explained. They do represent something new. And that is precisely why they are important. They may signal a whole domain of nature (for intelligence is part of nature) as yet unexplained.
Specifically what is new? The reported sporadic and unpre dictable appearance of "craft" by day, and lights (freque_ntly briliant) and "craft" by night, whose non-random behavior (and thus presumably guided or programed by intelligence) is totally unexplainable by our present scientific technology.
What sort of behavior? The reported ability to execute tra jectories, often but not always silently, that no known man made craft could generate or follow; the ability to hover, and then to accelerate to high speeds in periods of the order of seconds (and generally without a sonic boom); on occasion to change shape, and to produce durable physical effects on both animate and inanimate matter; to be, on occasion, unmistak ably detected on radar, yet to be peculiarly localized and preferential in their manifestation (that is, their appearance at times and places when and where they would be least likely to be detected, and their avoidance of level flight which would of necessity open them to observation by people along the way). The pattern in the "close encounter" cases is almost universal : a rapid descent to a landing or near landing, a stay of the order of only minutes, and the ascent, at usuaiiy a high angle, and disappearance either through distance or by some other means (it is often reported that at a height of a few hun dred feet the bright luminosity vanishes). The choice of locale is statistically significant. The close encounter cases simply do not occur on the White House lawn or between halves at the Rose Bowl game, but in desolate spots, generally xi Foreword some distance from habitation and where detection would be least expected. In a small percent of the close encounter cases, robot-like or human-like "creatures" are reported.
A growing number of my colleagues and I have been driven, albeit reluctantly, into the bold step of accepting the more than-amply reported UFO phenomenon as something that really is new, something not yet encompassed by our present science. There will indeed be a twenty-first century science, and a thirtieth century science, . to which the UFO phenom enon may be as natural as television, atomic energy, and DNA are to twentieth century science, as these were quite foreign to eighteenth and nineteenth century science.
In any event, the UFO phenomenon presents us with a fantastic challenge. Off-the-shelf explanations just won't do.
We've tried these for more than a quarter of a century, and they just don't wash. Accepance of the UFO as a new empiri cal phenomenon worthy of very serious study is growing not only among scientists, engineers, and technically aware per sons, but by educators and the socially aware and the polit icaly astute. There is a growing recognition that here is indeed something new.
ఊ And anything new almost surely creates controversy. The controversy about UFOs has been, however, no ordinary one.
It has brought into play a veritable host of human concerns: science and scientific prejudice, human emotions, bureaucratic authority, the press and other media, charlatans, religious fanatics-the list could be extended.
Dr. Jacobs's most admirable work has put the UFO contro versy into scholarly perspective. It is indispensable reading for any who seek an informed view of the tortuous history of the UFO phenomenon. And now that the controversy has been ably and fairly presented by Dr. Jacobs, where does that leave the actual subject matter-the UFO phenomenon itself?
Where can we logically go from here? Can the controversy be resolved? And more precisely, can it be resolved by science, or are we in a realm beyond the legitimate concerns of science?
One can certainly hold-and I for one do-that nothing that intrigues the mind of man is automatically ineligible for scientific approach. As logic is the basis of all scientific en deavor, even the most bizarre subjects can be approached in a Foreword xiii logical maimer. The methodology may differ from one subject area to another, but not the local substrate. In determining causal relationships, logic demands that we isolate variables and hold as many as possible constant-aU but one ideally while the effects of running one variable through its total feasi ble range are noted. This has "paid off" in the classical physi cal sciences. If the variables are too numerous, as they fre quently are in the behavioral sciences, statistical methods prove fruitful.
Unfortunately, little has been done in this direction, the Condon Committee notwithstanding. Any school child learns that in science one tests hypotheses. What he generally does not learn is that the hypotheses to be tested must logically follow from, and be suggested by, the data. As Dr. Jacobs indicates, many of the members of the Condon Committee did not apply this stricture. Without once asking what the overall, observed nature of the UFO phenomenon was-which could easily have been learned from a serious survey of a statistically significant number of well documented and truly puzling cases-they set out to test the hypothesis that UFO's ··were visitors from outer space! And the relatively few cases they examined were studied individually, as though that one case-and only that one-existed. No attempt was made to find patterns, relations between the thousands of cases from al over the world (which were available in copious literature), and then to consider various testable hypotheses. This would be like asking, in times past, whether the Northern Lights represented interstellar communications, and concluding that since the data did not support this hypothesis, the Northern Lights were hallucinations, hoaxes, or sheer imagination.
This is clearly not the place to criticize the Condon Report.
It is proper, however, to enter a plea for the proper scientific study of the UFO phenomenon and to profit from our mis takes.
One must first determine, if the controversy is ever to be resolved, whether a legitimate body of data really exists-that is, whether UFO reports, at least in part, represent truly new empirical observations. I am convinced, from my long acquain tance with the subject, that they most certainly do. But the majority of scientists still tend to reject this, often on emo tional grounds, and in al cases because they forget another xiv Foreword cardinal rule: A scientific opinion demands of the opiner that he be "acquainted with the literature." When the nature of the UFO controversy is understood and thiS book is dedicated to that end-and when the inter disciplinary nature of the phenomenon is grasped (no one knows to what discipline the subject belongs simply because not enough yet is known of the subject), a meaningful start can be made on a truly scientific study of the subject, which can then be approached as scientific subjects should be approached-without prejudice or emotional bias.
CENTER FOR UFO STUDIES EVANSTON, ILLINOIS J. ALLEN HYNEK CHAIRMAN,· DEPT. AsTRONOMY NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY Acknowledgments I have incurred many debts in the past years as part of this project. I thank William L. O'Neil for originally encouraging me to go forward with this study. I owe my greatest academic debt to Paul K. Conkin, who patiently oversaw the manu script, diligently corrected its errors, and good-naturedly kept my thoughts on an even keel throughout the writing. His rigor ous thinking and sound advice were invaluable in helping me gain a perspective on the UFO controversy.
While I was conducting the research, James and Coral Lorenzen and Richard Greenwell at the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (Tucson, Arizona) and Stuart Nixon of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenom ena (Kensington, Maryland) gave encouragement and im measurable help by allowing me complete use of their organi zations' files. I am particularly grateful to Richard Greenwell for his cogent criticism of the manuscript, and to Betsy McDonald for giving me access to her late husband's files.
J. Alen Hynek also allowed me to research his files, and my discussions with him at Northwestern University filled many gaps in my knowledge of his and the Air Force's roles in the UFO controversy. Judy Endicott and the staff at the Albert F.
Simpson Historical Archives at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, were especialy helpful to me in my research there.
I thank Roger Keeran for listening to countless rehashings of my theories and helping me over many rough spots in my writing and ideas. Lynn and Charles W. Hieatt deserve grati tude for the friendship and support they gave me during the trying days of writing.
The debt I owe to Irene D. Jacobs for listening to my ideas, reading and editing my writing, and giving moral support over the past three years is so large that mere acknowledgment becomes absurd in the face of it.
XV Some Words of Explanation Unidentified flying objects (UFOs) have been a source of continuing controversy. Steeped in ridicule and existing on the fringes of scholarly pursuit, the subject of unidentified flying objects has a history of its own. This involves the Air Force's , efforts for over twenty years to cope with the UFO phenome non, the growth of national organizations dedicated to investi gating it, and the scientific community's fear or reluctance to study the subject because of the ridicule attached to it. It also involves press coverage of the subject, motion pictures and television shows about it, and the small group of people who have made a living capitalizing on the fantasy aspects of UFOs. The debate over unidentified flying objects in America has been surrounded by emotion, ignorance, misinformation, and, above all, loose thinking. I do not attempt to solve the problem of the origin of the phenomenon. Rather, I try to explain some of the reasons why so many people expended such large amounts of time and energy on it. My focus is on describing and, in part, analyzing societal and individual responses to the appearance of a mysterious phenomenon.
There are semantic dificulties inherent in a discussion of unidentified flying objects. No words exist to describe a per son who studies the UFO phenomenon, one who believes UFOs do or do not represent an anomalous phenomenon, one who believes UFOs are products of extraterrestrial intelli gence, or one who reputably claims to have an experience with a UFO. The lack of precise language prompts people to use the terms flying saucer and unidentified flying object synonymously. They are different. The term flying saucer conveys the idea of objects intelligently controlled and ex traterrestrial in origin. The term unidentified flying object denotes just that, an unidentified flying object regardless of speculations about its origin. I have tried to use the two terms in the way that the participants used them. There also is a difference between a UFO sighting and a UFO report. The first is an event that happens to a person, and the second is 1 2 The UFO Controversy in America the description that the person gives of the event. Moreover, there are two types of UFO reports: those that investigators can explain given sufficient information, and those that inves tigators and analysts cannot explain even with sufficient in formation. Unhappily, these two types of reports do not have different labels, and the context in this study will have to make the meaning clear. Semantic rigor was not a character istic of the debate over UFOs.
Finally, a word about the time span of this study. The UFO sighting waves dictated my chronology. The first major : sightings took place in 1896 and 1897. I had to leap to 1947 : {with a short interlude around World War II) because there 1 were no known large-scale sighting waves in America be- ' tween 1897 and 1947. The sighting waves prompted public reaction. Therefore, the history of the debate coincides with the times when people reported unidentified flying objects in American skies.
1 THE MYSTERY AIRSHIP: PRELIMINARIES TO THE CONTROVERSY Thousands of people in the United States in 1896 and 1897 said they saw airships in the skies over Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Ken tucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, and Wiscon sin. The sightings started in California in November 1896 and continued until May 1897, with a break from January to the middle of March.
1 The airships appeared most often as dirigible-type ma i chines, cylindrical or cigar shaped and driven by a motor • attached to an air screw or propeller.! When witnesses said they saw an airship, they implicitly differentiated between it · and a glider or a heavier-than-air "flying machine." Also, most people distinguished between an airship and a balloon, 1 which was definitely round and had a basket attached to it.
They expressed a popular belief that the solution to aerial navigation would be through an airship rather than heavier than-air flying machines, which had not yet assumed the im portance in the popular imagination that they would after the Wright brothers' experiments in 1903. Consequently, many of the early designs for the "machine that would conquer the air" looked like dirigibles with a passenger car on the bot tom.
Descriptions of the objects varied greatly, either because the witnesses were inaccurate or because they viewed dif ferent airships. In Omaha, Nebraska, an airship sighting interrupted a Knights of Ak-Sar-Ben initiation ceremony.
According to the excited witnesses, the object was "at least eighteen inches in diameter, the reflection from which passed 3 4 The UFO Controversy in A merica I along what appeared to be a steel body, the length of which 1 could only be estimated at from twelve to thirty feet." In; Chicago, on April 10, 1897, the Chicago Tribune reported· that people observed a slender object, seventy feet long with approximately twenty-foot wide structures resembling wings or sails just above the body. In Mount Carroll, lllinois, witnesses described an airship eight to ten feet long and two or three feet high. "A dim outline of it could be seen, which appeared to be shaped like an egg," in Wausau, Wisconsin.
An airship over Dallas, Texas, was "in a luminous, hazy cloud" and had "sails or wings outstretched on both sides of its cigar-shaped body"; "on both ends," the report said, "there were large rotating fans projecting from the sails at an angle ·.
of about 45 degrees, the one in front being elevated, while · the one at the rear was depressed, somewhat resembling the body of a bird." Witnesses estimated its length to be about two hundred feet. In Fort Worth, Texas, an airship looked, like a sixty-foot long "passenger coach," pointed at the ends .
and with batlike wings.2 Witnesses repeatedly reported lights on the object, usually the first indication of an approaching airship. Colored or bright white lights plus an intense red or white searchlight were the most common features of the airship descriptions. In Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, "the white light • • .
ahead and a red light at the rear made the affair look like a machine ' about fifty feet long and flying about 500 feet above the earth." The Benton Harbor, Michigan, airship had blue, red, and green lights. Occasionally the searchlight on the airship was so brilliant that, for example, when it appeared in Everest, Kansas, at 9:05 P.M., the "full power of the wonder ful lamps were turned on, and the city was flooded with light." Often the unusual color of the white searchlight made it seem ' phosphorescent. Sometimes the lights came from the side of · the ship and moved independently of it. As thousands of gaping spectators watched in Milwaukee, ''the machine, or whatever it was," hovered directly over the city hall and the lights on it moved backward and forwardŔ "as if signalling to the earth." In Guthrie, Oklahoma, "its outlines were indis tinct, but a light was thrown out from the front and at times there were flashes of light from the sides." Frank Dickson, editor of the Edna (Texas) Progress, saw two airships "400 feet apart communicating with each other by means of red 1 and green lights. "3 The airships movements ranged from erratic to smooth. In The Mystery A irship 5 Guthrie, Oklahoma, the object "sank almost to the ground just north of the city, and then rose straight into the air at great speed and disappeared in the darkness of the night." Often the airships "bounced" or "undulated" due, people speculated, to the flapping of "wings." For late nineteenth- · . century American, an airship's ability to maneuver against · the wind proved that it was under control. A dispatch from Nashville, lllinois, pointed out that "the fact that the object traveled from the northwest while the wind was from the southwest goes to prove it was not a balloon."• Like all other aspects of the airships, reported speeds varied greatly, from as slow as 5 miles per hour to as fast as 200 miles per hour. Occasionally witnesses made more accu rate measurements of an airship's speed. A railroad engineer from Burlington, Iowa, estimated an airship's speed at 150 miles per hour by comparing it to his train's speed. But most people could not make such estimates and simply reported that an airship traveled slowly or "at a terrific rate of speed."5 Sometimes people heard noises emanating from a sighted object.
In Burlington, Iowa, witnesses heard a "hissing 1 sound," in Decatur, Michigan, a "sharp, crackling sound," and in Cameron, Texas, a "humming" noise. In general, though, either the objects made no sounds or no one heard them.s All the reports indicate that more than one object was being sighted, both because of simultaneous or almost simul- . taneous ̨ightings and because of the differences in perceived details. Nevertheless, people found it difficult to accept the idea of many airships. The Chicago Times-Herald reported, for example, that "the 'air ship' has been seen again-that is, . in this vicinity. To be sure, it was also seen in Kankakee, Mount Carroll and other places at the same time, but the . people in these cities must have been mistaken-or else there is a whole flock of air ships cavorting about through the heavens. The real 'air ship' [is] the one that was seen here." Another reporter, trying to explain how witnesses could re- , port an airship in two different places in a short period of time, theorized that it was "speedy" and "covers vast areas of ground." Once in a while either an airship would return to the area or another airship would appear there: a sensation ensued in Middleville, Michigan, when citizens sighted an air ship flying north at 9:00 P.M. and another one flying east at 10:30 P.M.7 6 The UFO Controversy in A merica Often witnesses reported hearing sounds as an airship passed over them at low altitude. Citizens in Sacramento heard voices coming from an airship; others claimed to have heard music, and one man said he heard someone on board say "go up higher, or collide with the church steeples, etc." In Farmerville, Texas, and Galesburg, Michigan, witnesses heard voices but could not understand them. "Sweet strains of music could be heard" in Fontanelle, Iowa, as well as "the workings of its machinery." Observers in Belton, Texas, heard the "passengers' " voices but could not understand them "on account of the velocity" of the craft.s From time to time people said that items, usually letters, dropped from the airships. The Milwaukee Sentinel reported that several letters, fastened to iron rods that were rusted from the rain, purportedly dropped from an airship as it passed overhead: "The suspicion that the letters were 'planted' was not apparently well founded, for no hardware dealers in this vicinity have sold any such rods as the letters were wired to." The letter supposedly stated that the airship Pegasus, traveling from Tennessee to South Dakota, used steam for propulsion and could carry as much as a thousand pounds; the airship, the note maintained, would "revolution ize al present methods of locomotion." The letter did not dis close the inventor's identity but asked the "finder" to keep the note until a member of the Masonic fraternity called for it.
Citizens in Newport, Kentucky, also found a letter describing an airship's traveling speed (forty miles per hour) and other details; "Captain Pegasus" had signed the note. In Dupont and Lorain, Ohio, people supposedly found similar notes.9 Occasionaly witnesses reported seeing occupants on board or near an airship on the ground. In Lovelady, Texas, one ' witness saw an object resembling a moving man in the air ship's lower part. Several people in Girard, lllinois, who ar rived at a landing spot after they had seen an airship rise and "disappear," found footprints which did not lead anywhere.
"It was evident that they were made by someone who had jumped out of the ship to repair some of the machinery on the outside." In Belle Plaine, Iowa, on April 15, 1897, airship witnesses reported seeing "two queer looking persons on board, who made desperate efforts to conceal themselves"; the witnesses said the occupants "had the longest whiskers they ever saw in their lives." Some people in Belton, TeJras, "distinctly" saw ten passengers on board an object. Witnesses in Sacramento reported seeing a cigar-shaped machine "op- The Mystery A irship 7 erated by four men who sat aside the cigar and moved as though they were working their passage on a bicycle." In Cle burne, Texas, a man who claimed that "he had not touched a drop of anything except water during the evening" saw an airship speed by "just above the tops of the houses" with a passenger in it. "The passenger gave him the go-ahead sign that brakemen give on the railroad." Once in a while 1 witnesses saw animals as well. The city marshal of Farmer ', vile, Texas, said that when the object passed over him at about two hundred feet he could "see two men in the ship and something resembling a large Newfoundland dog." He also reported hearing the occupants talk, although he could not understand the language, which sounded like Spanish.10 , Clearly the strangest occurrence in these 1896-97 sightings , was the reported contacts between witnesses and airship occu pants. These frequent reports substantially influenced the thought of the period about what the airships were and who was responsible for them. Sometimes the contact reports were so sketchy that it is difficult to ascertain exactly what hap pened, if anything did indeed happen. For example, a report from Downs Township, illinois, simply said that "while [the 1 witness] was at work in a field, an airship alighted near him and • • • six people disembarked therefrom, remained a few minutes and conversed with him, and then jumped aboard, : ascended and sailed away." The Harrisburg (Arkansas) Mod ern News reported that ex-senator Harris (of that state) en countered an airship and occupant who said he had a special "Hotchkiss" gun on board and was thinking of going to Cuba to "kil Spaniards"; he offered Senator Harris a ride which 1 the senator refused. One of the earliest claims of a detailed contact occurred in California in 1896. The witness told the San Francisco Call that, while searching in the woods for a deer, he had come across six men working on an almost com pleted airship who swore him to secrecy; but now that he was I sure this was the airship people had seen, the witness said, he 1 would give a detailed description of the encounter.n : In 1897 witnesses reported a whole series of contacts with : people making repairs on their airships. Several "presumably i truthful" citizens of Chattanooga, Tennessee, said they "came upon the vessel resting on a spur of a mountain near this city. Two men were at work on it and explained that they had been compelled to return to earth because the machinery was out of order. One of the men said his name was 'Prof.
1 Charles Davidson.' He is alleged to have said that the vessel J j 8 The UFO Controversy in America left Sacramento a month ago and had been sailing all over the country. "12 John M. Barclay in Rockland, Texas, saw something that "made his eyes bulge out." Hearing a whining noise on his farm and the dogs "barking furiously," he grabbed his rifle and went outside to investigate; he immediately noticed an airship circling his farm and then saw it land in a pasture next to his house. When he was about 150 feet from the ship, "an ordinary mortal" met him and told him to lay his gun aside because no harm was intended; the occupants wanted lubricating oil, chisels, and a bluestone, for which they paid him. When Barclay tried to inspect the airship, one occupant prevented him from going near it but told him that someday they would return and take him for a ride. The airship, Bar- ' clay said, took off "like a shot out of a gun."lS In Stephenville, Texas, some of the most prominent men in the community-including a judge, a state senator, and a dis trict attorney-saw an airship which the occupants were re pairing. One witness spoke to two of the airship passengers, who gave their names as S. E. Tilman and A. E. Dolbear; they refused to allow the witness to come near the airship but explained that New York "capitalists" were financing them and that air navigation shortly would be an established fact.
Then they boarded the ship and, "bidding adieu to the aston ished crowd assembled," sailed away.lf Some people who claimed to see occupants with the air- I ships reported coming across them in secluded places. Judge Love and his friend, Mr. Beatty, were fishing near Waxachie, Texas, when Beatty (while going upstream for a better fishing spot) discovered a "queer looking machine" in the woods and a group of "five peculiarly dressed men" near it. One of the men, who spoke "fairly good English," explained this was 1 one of the famous airships and invited the witnesses to exam- r ine it. The man told them the airship came from "regions in the north pole" since, "contrary to popular belief, there is a large body of land beyond the polar seas." He explained that his people descended from the ten lost tribes of Israel and had been living in this inhabitable land for centuries; the people spoke English because Sir Hugh Willoughby's 1553 North Pole Expedition party (which supposedly was lost) and United States raiding parties had been stranded there and taught them the language. They were forced to build airships, the leader said, because they did not have timber for locomo tives or sea ships. Now twenty airships were sailing around The Mystery A irship 9 , the United States and Europe, he explained, and all would meet on June 1 8 and 1 9 at the Tennessee Centennial Exposi tion where anyone could inspect them. Judge Love said good-bye to the occupants, -and "We then shook hands with the crew and they stepped into their ship, rose in the air and started toward Waco. The description of the ship I have given you is a very meager one, but you can all go to the Nashville Exposition June 1 8 and 1 9 and see for yourselves."15 Similarly, when C. G. Williams walked across a field in Greenville, Texas, a light suddenly "frightened [him] almost out of his senses." An airship had landed near him and three men came out of it, two of whom started to work on the "rigging" of the ship. As Williams began to write down what was happening, the third man interceded : "See here, young man, don't give this thing away. We are experimenting with this vessel.
• • • We expect to revolutionize travel and transportation." The visitor explained that he had been ex perimenting with flight in a little town in New York State.
He and the other two men had intended originally to take a short trip, but the flight went so well that they decided to keep going and soon found themselves over Indiana; they were returning home in a few days to make some improve: ments on the ship. They used electricity to get the airship off the ground and wind power (to tum the large wheel in front of the airship) once in the air, the visitor said. He predicted that in a short while people would hear from him and there would be a "full description of the modem wonder, the airship." The visitor said that if Williams would mail some letters for him, without copying the addresses, in return the visitors would come back and take him on a ride to South America.lo Perhaps the most bafiing of all contact stories concerned a man named Wilson. The first incident occurred in Beaumont, Texas, on April 19, 1 897. J. B. Ligon (local agent for the Magnolia Brewery) and his son Charles noticed lights in the Johnson pasture a few hundred yards away and went to in vestigate. They came upon four men standing beside a large, dark object; one man asked Ligon for two buckets of water.
Ligon consented and then questioned one of the men, who said his name was Wilson. The man explained that he and his companions were traveling in a flying machine; they had taken a trip "out on the gulf' and were returning to a "quiet Iowa town" where the airship and four others like it had been 10 The UFO Controversy in America made. Wilson explained that electricity powered the propel lers and wings.U The next day, April 20, Sheriff H. W. Baylor of Uvalde, Texas, went to investigate a strange light and voices in back of his house and encountered an airship and three men. One of the men gave his name as Wilson from Goshen, New York. Wilson inquired about C. C. Akers, former sheriff of Zavalia County, whom Wilson said he had met in Fort Worth in 1 877 and wanted to see again. The surprised Sherif Baylor replied that Captain Akers was now at Eagle Pass in the cus toms service and that he often visited him. Wilson, somewhat disappointed, "asked to be remembered to the captain on the occasion of his next visit." The men from the airship wanted water and requested their visit be kept secret from the towns people. Then they boarded the airship, and ''its great wings and fans were set in motion and it sped away northward in the direction of San Angelo." The county clerk also saw it as it left the area. One week later (on April 27) the Galveston Daily News printed a letter from C. C. Akers, who said he had indeed known a man in Fort Worth named Wilson, who was from New York, educated, and about twenty-four years old. Akers said Wilson "was of a mechanical tum of mind and was then working on aerial navigation and something that would astonish the world"; Wilson, Akers theorized, seemed to have enough money to work on his inventions, and "having succeeded in constructing a practical airship, would probably hunt me up to show me that he was not so wild in his claims as I then supposed." Akers concluded by saying: "I have known Sheriff Baylor many years and know that any statement he may make can be relied on as exactly correct." The next reported incident with a man named Wilson oc curred in Kountze, Texas, on April 23. An April 25 article in the Houston Post said that two "responsible men" observed an airship which had descended for repairs ; the occupants on board gave their names as Wilson and Jackson.ts The Houston Post published an account of an incident that purportedly occurred in Josserand, Texas, on April 22, and that was similar to the Wilson incidents, although the name was not mentioned specifically. A whirring sound awakened Frank Nichols, a prominent farmer, who looked out his win dow to find "brilliant lights streaming from a ponderous vessel of strange proportions" in his cornfield. "With al the bravery of Priam at the siege of Troy," Nichols went outside to investigate. Before he could get to the object, two men ac- The Mystery A irship 1 1 costed him and asked for some water from his well: "Think ing he might be entertaining heavenly visitants instead of earthly mortals permission was readily granted." The men in vited Nichols to visit the ship, where he talked freely with the crew of six or eight individuals. Although "in his short inter view he could gain no knowledge of its [the airship's] work ing," crew members told him that the ship's motive power was "highly condensed electricity." This airship was one of five that they had built in a small town in Iowa with the backing of an immense stock company. The Houston Post ar ticle concluded by saying : "Mr. Nichols lives at Josserand, Trinity County, Texas, and wil convince any credulous [sic] one by showing the place where the ship rested."19 The last reported sighting that might involve a man named Wilson-because ot ' its similarities with the other Wilson sto ries-occurred in Deadwood, Texas. In its April 30 edition, the Houston Post published a letter describing the event. At about 8 : 30 P.M., H. C. Lagrone heard his horses, which were "old gentle stock, .
• .
snorting, running and bucking around like a drove of bronchos on a regular stampede." Going out to see what was happening, he saw a bright white light cir cling around the fields nearby and illuminating the entire area; eventually the light descended and landed in a field. La grone thought this might be the much publicized airship and went to the landing spot. He found a crew of five men, three of whom entertained him while two others went for water with rubber bags. The men informed him that this ship was one of five that had been flying around the country recently 1 and was the same one that had landed in Beaumont a few days before; these ships were "put up" in an interior town in lllinois. But the men were reluctant to say anything about the iner workings of the ship because "they had not yet secured anything by patent." They did say they expected to set up a factory in St. Louis and "at once enter into active competi tion with the railroads for passenger traffic." The crew, La grone noted, "was careful not to forget earthly things even though traveling in the heavens. They were well supplied with edibles of all sorts-likewise drinkables; had a good supply of beer and champagne, also had a full supply of musical in struments." Lagrone also reported a curious ·sidelight to this sighting: the airship passed close to a religious camp meeting and some of the participants who saw the craft "went into paroxysms of alarm" while others thought it was a messenger from God.2o 1 2 The UFO Controversy in A merica Perhaps the most famous occupant incident during the 1 896-97 wave of sightings took place in Leroy, Kansas, on or about April 1 9, 1 897. Alexander Hamilton, his son Wall, and his tenant Gid awoke to cattle noises. Going outside they dis covered-to Hamilton's "utter amazement"-"an airship slowly descending over my cow lot about forty rods from the house." The cigar-shaped object was three hundred feet long with a carriage made of "panels of glass or other transparent substance alternating with a narrow strip of some other material"; a large searchlight and smaller red and green lights were attached to it. As it desceaded to thirty feet above ground and the witnesses came to within fifty yards of it, Hamil ton could see "six of the strangest beings I ever saw" inside.
The occupants were "jabbering" but Hamilton could not un derstand anything. Then the witnesses noticed that a heifer was attached to a ted "cable" emanating from the airship and also was caught in a fence. Unable to free the heifer, the witnesses cut the fence and "stood in amazement to see ship, cow and all rise slowly and sail off." The next day a neighbor recovered the calf's hide, legs, and head a few miles away.21 Hamilton was deeply affected and complained that when he tried to sleep he "would see the cursed thing with its big lights and hideous people." Distressed by the incident, Hamil ton later said, "I don't know whether they are devils or angels or what but we all saw them and my whole family saw the ship and I don't want any more to do with them." The news paper that carried Hamilton's account also printed an affi davit from eleven prominent community members, such as the postmaster, sheriff, justice of the peace, banker; it said they had known Hamilton "from 15 to 30 years" and "be lieve his statement to be true and correct." Eight days later a similar afidavit appeared in the Burlington (Kansas) Daily ' News.22 All these varied reports of occupants agreed on one detail: each described them as ordinary human beings and not as creatures from another world. These descriptions played a major role in molding contemporary thought about the air ship. The public seemed convinced that if an airship existed, a secret inventor, perhaps named Wilson, must have made it.
This is how the public thought an airship would probably be developed.
The rbove reports, from seemingly reliable witnesses, C?Il• trast sl;tarply with several apparent hoaxes perpetrated dunng the period, generally to demonstrate that the entire airship The Mystery A irship 13 wave was a lot of nonsense. Excited witnesses usually ex posed these hoaxes immediately.
First recorded was the April 5, 1 897, hoax in Omaha, Ne- ' braska. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, two men sent up a balloon with a basket of burning shavings attached to it, and the wind carried the balloon over the center of the city-hence the solution to the airship mystery. Five days later the Des Moines Leader reported a hoax in Burlington, Iowa: the hoaxers sent a tissue paper balloon up over the city and, as the Leader said, people called the local newspaper of fice swearing they had seen the airship complete with red and green lights; one reputable citizen swore he heard voices. This convinced the newspaper that "the Nebraska-Iowa-Tilinois air ship is a pure fake." A more elaborate hoax took place in ' Waterloo, Iowa, where several men secretly constructed a thirty-six-foot canvas and wood airship, complete with "com pressors and generators." They guarded it, allowing no one "to inspect the machinery, and any attempt to cross the rope - fence . . . was met with an order to stay out." The airship "operators" told the five thousand visitors about. how they had come from San Francisco and how they had landed.
When the "crew" said that "one man had fallen overboard just before landing," some of the distraught citizens organized a party to search the river for him; they they "discovered that the entire affair was a joke." Hoaxes also occurred in Chi cago, in Fond du Lac and Portage, Wisconsin, in Muncie, In diana, and in Des Moines, Iowa. Of course, none of the hoaxes-being hoaxes-flew.2a Enterprising reporters perpetrated many journalistic hoaxes. These generally are easy to identify because of their tongue-in-cheek tone, with an accent on the sensational. Yet because so many of the legitimate stories were fantastic, some of the journalistic hoaxes appear equally convincing. The Dallas Morning News printed a story that may have been a hoax. It supposedly took place in Aurora, Texas, on April 17, 1 897. "Early risers of Aurora," the writer said, "were aston ished" at seeing an airship "traveling due north, and much nearer the earth than ever before." It seemed that the "machinery was out of order" because it was traveling slowly and descending. "It sailed directly over the public square," the article said, and then "collided with the tower of Judge Proctor's windmill and went to pieces with a terrific ex plosion, scattering debris over several acres of ground, wreck ing the windmil and water tank and destroying the judge's il 14 The UFO Controversy in America {!
flower garden." Although the body of the one occupant was "badly disfigured, enough • • .
has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world"; in fact, a United I States signal service officer, an astronomy expert, said "he • was a native of the planet Mars." Moreover, some papers the occupant had "are written in some unknown hieroglyphics, and can not be deciphered." Since the ship was wrecked, the writer explained, it was not possible "to form any conclusion as to its construction or motive power. It was built of an un- Ť known metal, resembling somewhat a mixture of aluminum and silver, and it must have weighed several tons." The last sentence in the article was : "The pilot's funeral wil take place at noon tomorrow."24 This report contains many elements found in other sight ings of the period : a ship flying over a town, evidence point ing to Mars as the home of the occupant, the opinion of an "expert," unknown metal. And although the collision itself seems somewhat strange, especially the reference to the flower garden, some of the sincere sightings were just as strange. Nevertheless, a 1966 follow-up investigation seemed to substantiate the hoax theory. There was a Judge Proctor living in the Aurora area, but "that is the only part of the story that anyone recognized. Two life-long residents of the Aurora area-Miss Mag Morris and Mrs. Lou Inman (88 and 93 respectively) -scoffed at the story."21i In 1 973 UFO researchers resurrected this story and claimed to have circum stantial evidence that the event took place. However, they failed to establish its authenticity. In contrast to this story, other literary hoaxes were much less subtle, the author pur posely giving himself away by saying-in the last line-that he was writing from an insane asylum (or something to that ff ',' e ect ) .
1 Concurrent with these hoaxes, numerous people around the 1 country claimed to be the airship's secret inventor. The first 1 identified himself during the Sacramento-San Francisco 1 896 sightings. The Sacramento Daily Record-Union reported that Mr. Collins, a prominent attorney, claimed that the air ship's inventor was one of his clients whom he could not name because of a pledge of secrecy. The client was a wealthy man who, after studying flying machines for fifteen years, came to California from Maine to get away from the prying eyes of other inventors, and had spent at least $ 100,000 on his inven tion, for which he had applied for a patent. He kept his iden tity secret because he feared that someone might steal his The Mystery Airship 15 patent if people knew his machine worked. According to the newspaper, the attorney claimed to have seen the machine on the ground and in flight. The next day the Sacramento Daily Record-Union printed a retraction of Attorney Collins's state ment, explaining that the San Francisco Bulletin had tracked ' down Collins's client, the alleged inventor of the airship, who was only a wealthy dentist. The article reported that Collins denied making any statement about knowing the airship's in ventor but did admit that a man had come to him with a patent for an airship and wanted the attorney to represent him in this matter. Collins's client seems to have had nothing to do with an airship other than making arrangements for patent plans.26 Five months later, on April 1 2, 1 897, the Chicago Tribune reported that "A. C.· Clinton" bad written to the directors of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition (to be held in Omaha, Ne braska) claiming to be the inventor of the airship. Clinton said he would prove it in Omaha if the exposition directors would give him 870,000 square feet of space. "I truly believe I have the greatest invention and discovery ever made," he proclaimed. A few days later Clinton A. Case wrote a similar letter to the Omaha newspaper. It soon became obvious that A. C. Clinton and Clinton A. Case were the same person.
Case, a violin maker in Omaha, claimed to have discovered the secret of aerial navigation and declared be was the man who had been sailing about the sky recently. Aerial pioneer Henry Maxim saw Case's plan and said it represented noth ing new in the field. Case had tried to get capital for his invention before 1 896 but no one would invest. There is no evidence that Clinton A. Case ever built an airship and he was not granted the land he requested at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition. 27 On April 19, 1 897, the Louisville Courier-Journal reported that Hary Tibbs claimed to be the inventor of the mysterious airship, which needed only a bit more work before it was ready for flight. Tibbs supposedly was a studious man inter ested in engineering and had been conducting research on an airship for some time. A while after this report, a friend of Tibbs purportedly received a letter from him saying that the airship was a success: he had made a voyage in it from Cin cinnati to Erie, Pennsylvania, and "it works like a charm." Tibbs's description of the ship was similar to those many witnesses had made. Tibbs explained that he was keeping his 1 6 The UFO Controversy in A merica invention a secret because he was afraid someone would copy his idea and beat him to Washington.2s Sometimes an enterprising reporter, in an effort to solve the airship mystery, would "find" the inventor. An article in I the Detroit Free Press called John 0. Pries of Omaha the secret inventor, although Pries vigorously denied the story.
The reporter's proof was that witnesses had seen an airship hover over Pries's house on two diferent occasions and that · Pries had made small models and drawings of airships as a hobby.29 In addition to the mystery inventor claims, some people de clared that they had taken photographs of an airship. Walter McCann took a widely publicized photograph in Rogers Park ( Chicago ) while three other men witnessed the event and nu merous people said they saw an airship in the vicinity. The Chicago Times-Herald printed a pen and ink etching of the photograph and an etcher's "expert" analysis. The etcher, who apparently knew something about photographic analysis, conducted chemical tests to see if anyone had tampered with the print. His results showed the photograph to be a good print, "genuine in every particular," and "a mighty fine piece of photographic work at that." But on that same day the Chi cago Tribune announced that the supposed photograph of an airship was a fake. An "expert photographer" examined the photograph and said it had a "perspective impossibility'' be cause "no camera could have caught so much within the 1 scope of its lenses." Moreover, the Chicago Tribune noted 1 that a man appeared in the picture who seemed to have his arms outstretched and a camera in them, as if he was taking 1 the picture of the airship.
"This suggests," the Chicago Tribune said, "the thought that perhaps this wonderful Kodak takes pictures of itself and its manipulator as well as of air ships." Yet the picture published in the Chicago Times-Her ald did not show a camera in the man's hands. so There were other reports of photographs, but no one veri fied their authenticity. The Cincinnati Commercial-Tribune, hostile to the idea of an airship, took a fake picture of one to demonstrate that people could be misled and to suggest that everybody who thought he saw the object was fooled.31 The debate over the authenticity of the Rogers Park photo graph demonstrates the intense public interest in airship sightings, especially among people who had already seen an airship and those who wanted to see one. Indeed, excitement was so great that reporter after reporter saw fit to describe it.
The Mystery A irship 1 7 , A reporter for the Detroit Free Press said "the section of Iowa where the ship has been seen is fairly crazy with excite ment. People throng the streets of all the towns and villages in hopes of catching a glimpse of it, and the telegraph wires 1 are hot with messages about it." In Dallas, St. Louis, and Chicago the airship was "the sole topic of conversation," as it was in many other cities and towns where it supposedly had ' been; in fact, some people stayed up all night hoping to get a glimpse of the aerial wonder. After an airship had passed over Kansas City, Missouri, "hundreds of people [were] still on the streets watching intently for a return of the airship." "Expectation ran high" among people in Milwaukee who gathered in the streets when they heard an airship was com ing toward their city; any flash of light, such as from trolley poles of street cars, drew exclamations of wonder from the knots of citizens clustered in the streets. A St. Louis Post Dispatch reporter interviewed people arriving by train in Mil waukee from· the north and northwest areas of the state and found that "the airship was the one topic of conversation in the region through which they passed." In Chicago the tradi tional greeting of hello was replaced with "Have you seen the airship?"32 For people who saw an airship at close range or who had encounters with one, their exictement was mixed with fear and terror. A man in Richmond, Texas, who saw an airship ran terrified into his house. An airship's appearance in : Springfield, Tennessee, caused the witnesses to be "non ! plussed," and some people in the area were "overcome with I abject terror. Many of them shouted and prayed as if they i thought the millennium was at hand." In Paris, Texas, one 1 man fell down on his knees upon seeing an airship and prayed for his and his family's safety; he said the airship was actually "the return of Noah's ark with wing-like attachments on its way toward the Mississippi bottoms, its mission being to save [his people] from the perils of the overflow in that section." In Hilsboro, Texas, a lawyer was driving his horse and buggy when he saw a brilliant flash of white light directly over his buggy; the light "frightened [him] to death." His horse also was frightened and "snorted, reared, and plunged madly, trembling meantime like a leaf."33 Colonel Peoples of Cameron, Texas, was out in the field with his forty convict-workers, a newspaper article reported, when a "very low" aerial "monster" suddenly appeared over the field. The object seemed to be in trouble; there was "great 18 The UFO Controversy in America commotion" on board the ship and "many apparent signals were given with strange-colored banners or flags. Strange streamers or streaks of peculiar, dazling white lights seemed to shoot up to the sky from aboard this strange craft." Even tually the object took off and the convicts thought that "evil days had drawn nigh" and their "day of deliverance had come." The article said this strange story ''was given in good faith to the [Dallas Morning] News reporter and is vouched for by al the men on Col. Peoples' plantation."34 Airship witnesses were so certain of the reality of their ex perience that many were vociferous in opposing the pre vailing scientific skepticism about the phenomenon. An article in the Chicago Times-Herald said people who had seen the airship ''were ready to debate the matter without fear of being ridiculed, and their opinions were coolly arrived at." In reaction to the theory that the supposed airship was a star, R.
W. Allen, a pharmacist, sitid he was ''willing to take the con sequences of expressing the opinion" that the star theory was wrong. He claimed that he and six other men bad observed the object's movements carefully and "no star ever acted in the manner displayed by the lights we saw." The object undu lated with the regularity of a "pulse beat"; it had red, green, and white lights on it and flew rapidly toward the northwest.
An airship witness in Milwaukee charged that "anyone who claims that the thing I saw floating over the city hall is a star.
simply don't know what he is talking about."BII On the other hand, other witnesses feared public ridicule so much that reporters began to stress the witnesses' reliability and truthfulness : in Belle Plaine, Iowa, a ''reputable physi cian" saw the spectacle; in Fort. Atkinson, Wisconsin, "repu table citizens" watched the object; in Mount Carroll, Tilinois, "persons whose honest and truthfulness are beyond dispute" observed an airship; in Denton, Texas, two "credible" witnesses" saw the object and one witness was a woman ''whose reputation for truthfulness can not be assailed." A man who reported sighting an airship over Evanston, Tilinois, said he ''was afraid of being laughed at and declined to give his name." A Chicago Tribune article about this sighting said "many reliable people" claimed to have seen the mysterious ' airship. Witnesses who saw an airship in Omaha were careful 1 to give their full names to the newspapers to emphasize their reliability. In Brenham, Texas, the newspaper took an offen- 1 sive stance when it published Mr. John R. Pennington's re port. The article said people could tell airship stories al day The Mystery A irship 19 and "the public would scarcely pause to hear them, much less to give the story more than a passing thought, but Mr. John Pennington is a man of unquestionable integrity and not in the habit of talking to hear himself talk."36 It was indeed necessary for the public and especially witnesses to be concerned about their reputations in light of what many scientists and other professional people said about the sightings. In 1 896 the famed aviation pioneer Octave Chanute, who was working on an airship of his own, said he 'did not have the patience to read the full account of the Cali : fomia airship because of its "absurdities." He was certain , about the eventual mastery of air travel but did not expect "one fortunate achievement" to solve the complex problem.
He was confident that the airship reports would not fool the public. Unknown to · Chanute, Attorney Max. L. Hosmar, secretary of the Chicago Aeronautical Association, seemed to have the complete explanation for an airship sighted in Chi cago: he announced that Chanute invented it and had gone to California to oversee a test flight from San Francisco to Chicago. The Aeronautical Association planned to give Chanute and his crew a reception when they arrived, but the airship came sooner than expected because "conditions" must I have been "extremely favorable." The next day Hosmar had second thoughts about his initial solution because it seemed impossible for Chanute to arrive so soon, "scarcely three , weeks since the journey was begun." Hosmar revised his statement, saying Chanute's airship was someplace between . San Francisco and the Rocky Mountains. 87 Chanute's airship did not arrive in Chicago; in fact, it never left the ground in San Francisco.
Scientific opinion about the cause of the mysterious objects in the sky was divided. Professor Rigge, an astronomer of Creighton College, thought the first airship seen· in Omaha ( was the planet Venus; it was impossible that an undetected 1 "fellow in the back woods" could invent an airship when air I researchers had been trying unsuccessfully for years. Profes sor G. W. Hough of the Dearborn Observatory (in Evanston, lllinois) watched an airship-like object with a telescope and I declared it was the star Alpha Orionis, which people could : see with the naked eye usually around 8 :00 P.M. The star, at its brightest, "resembles a ball of fire," and the atmosphere 1 made the star's rays change from white to red to green. The next day the Chicago Tribune criticized Professor Hough's theory: it "is open to the suspicion of professional jealousy ., 20 The UFO Controversy in America I On the part 0ă a man WhO does not like Other people tO see ' I things in his realm that he does not see." Hough immediately 1 1 issued another statement explaining that the star Alpha : !
Orionis has been "roaming through its regular course in the : firmament 10,000,000 years, and why it should have been : i settled upon in the last three weeks and pointed out as the 1 headlight of a mysterious aerial vessel is hard to explain. "38 Astronomer Arthur C. Lun of Lawrence University, who claimed to have observed the phenomenon personally, ex- 1 plained that it was not an airship but the star Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion; he told how atmospheric conditions contributed to the illusion that the object changed colors and I bobbed up and down. Professor G. C. Comstock of the Uni- I versity of Wisconsin's Washburn Observatory generally .
agreed; the brightest stars in the sky were Jupiter, Venus, and Sirius, he said, any of which could be mistaken for an air- 6 ship.a9 Professor Henry S. Pritchett of Washington University (in · St. Louis) took a more cautious approach. At first he placed;, I little stock in the airship stories, he said; but due to corrobo rative evidence, he now was inclined to treat the matter seri- 11 ously and believed "something unusual has been seen in the heavens." He joined the Chicago Tribune in criticizing i Hough's star theory: Venus was the bright star, not Alpha Orionis, and witnesses had seen the object on cloudy nights.
However, Pritchett could not identify the object. He first thought it was a baloon but changed his mind because the 1 object did not have the characteristics of a balloon. He did I think it was possible that a secret inventor had developed an airship and he said that scientists at Washington University · were going to try to solve the problem. 40 Professor M. S. Koenig, identified only as an electrician from New York, stated that he knew a former workman in 1 one of Edison's laboratories who had discovered a way to overcome the laws of gravity. At last report this person was living in San Francisco and working on an airship. "Of course this sounds remarkable," Koenig said, "but if there is ' an airship prowling above the clouds, I firmly believe it is en gineered in some such manner." Apparently someone used Koenig's statement to fashion a hoax. Citizens of Astoria, illi nois, discovered some letters supposedly dropped from an air· ship. One letter was addressed to "Edison" and was signed ''C. L. Harris, electrician airship No. 3." Edison took this op portunity to comment publicly on the airship sightings. He The Mystery A irship 21 declared the letter a "pure fake" and said be had never heard of C. L Harris. Scientists would probably construct airships in the near future, Edison thought, but it was absurd to imag ine that someone could do so secretly at that time. He sug gested that the whole affair was a hoax and the objects were colorful gas-inflated balloons. 41 Most newspapers agreed with Edison that the airship was a hoax and printed editorials to this effect. The Sacramento Daily Record-Union attributed the sightings to balloons. Any- , one who thought the airships were real was mistaken: "No one went flying through the air on Tuesday night on a machine with a powerful electric light." The editorial did ad mit, however, that people had seen a light. On the next day the paper carried another editorial that articulated the most common thought about airship witnesses-they were drunk-and placed the airship in the hoax tradition of the sea serpent: "The sea serpent never appeared off the Atlantic coast when there was any dearth of whiskey"; the same was true of the airship, which "cannot be verified properly without a liberal use of stimulants." Similarly, the Birmingham (Ala bama) News thought "if the airship business continues, the Prohibitionist party will be driven into calling an extra session to formulate plans for an emergency campaign." An editorial in the Chicago Tribune equated the airship sightings with the sightings of a sea serpent every year in Lake Michi gan. The Kansas City (Missouri) Star declared simply that the airship was Venus and people who thought otherwise had "more imagination than astronomy." The paper charged that San Francisco newspapers had initiated the airship hoax and placed the airship in a long tradition of elaborate hoaxes, including the Kansas meteor and the Prince of Wales's trip to America to see the Fitzsimmons-Corbett fight.42 Taking an ironic stance, the Chicago Tribune said the "vessel is purely a celestial body which has taken on a few ' terrestrial attributes in order to accommodate inself to the limitations of human imagination." Some people, the editorial I pointed out, even agreed with the "preposterous supposition" that the light was the planet Venus. This could not be true because "a man who knew the facts" said that "Venus does not dodge around, fly swiftly across the horizon, swoop rap idly toward, then soar away until lost in the southern awry [sic]." Ironically, many newspapers used this last statement to support the belief that the airship was not Venus.43 Agreeing with the hoax theory, the Des Moines Leader 22 The UFO Controversy in A merica said airship stories were one of the "most successful fakes in an era of such successes" and a plot that telegraph operators had devised. Operators had kept the airship hoax alive by constantly reporting it in their vicinities, but "when the rest of the public began to take a hand, the airships got too nu merous; the reports would conflict, and it was evident that ei ther there was a whole family of the ships or else somebody was manufacturing storues [sic]." The editorial concluded J that similar overworked imaginations had deceived the rest of \ the country. Madison's Wisconsin State Journal attributed the airship to drunks, apparitions, optical illusions, wishful think- : ing, overzealous newspapermen, and stars. It stated :flatly that I "there is no airship." To prove the airship a hoax, the Cincin nati Commercial-Tribune had a photographer take a fake photograph of an airship to show how such evidence could be II the product of trickery. The Baltimore News said dryly: "Last summer is was free silver, now it is airships; what next, no- body knows. "44 1 In contrast to the above editorials, the Memphis Commer- I cial Appeal simply stated that "the airship seems to be an accomplished fact." The Dallas Morning News, reluctant to admit that someone had invented an airship, remarked that "nobody need be at all astonished if the airship of fancy should in due course of experiment and invention become an airship in fact." In an article entitled "The Airship Serial," the Galveston Daily News expressed confidence in the future of ' aerial navigation and in technology's ability to overcome eventualy the problems of the air. In a more practical ap proach, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch believed the airship would influence frontier taxation and smuggling: "Customs houses would be useless, and the army of officers that now collects customs on imports would have to seek other employ ment." Also, "Mr. Dingley and his tarif protection would be 'knocked out.' "411 As soon as airship stories appeared, imaginative ways of dealing with them emerged as well in the press. Would-be poets spun verses to describe the phenomenon, like the one that appeared in the Sacramento Daily Record-Union: I see'd it! I see'd it!
Away up in the air, And the gooses and the duckses Stopped in their flight to stare At the aerphone, or balloon-phone, The Mystery A irship A sailin' round up there.
I see'd it! I see'd it!
'Twas a funny-lookin sight, A sailin' round the stars With its incandescent light Sashaying first with Jupiter, Then dancin' round the moon, An' bowing to Andromedear Was the electrified balloon.
I see'd it! I see'd it!
And a friend of mine will swear That he too see'd the new masheen A tlyin' round up there.
He's way up in astronomy, An' never tells a lie, An' knows the name of all them things A shinin' in the sky.
23 Several other newspapers printed similar poems, some of them combining political satire with the airship mystery. One such effort in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch concluded: That agent of Prosperity That travels in Advance.
I says it "was", for now, alas!
'Tis fallen in the dust; The bag above it filled with gas, By some mischance did bust; And Hanna and McKinley dig Each other on the sly, And grin while thinking of the big Explosion in the sky.
With its poem, the Dallas Morning News printed a cartoon that pictured an airship, labeled "The Advance-Agent of Prosperity," floating over crowds of farmers; the title of the cartoon was "The Secret of the Airship Disclosed. "46 There were other cartoons on the subject as well. They ranged from serious attempts to illustrate an airship, to politi cal commentaries, to humorous statements. A cartoon in the Chicago Times-Herald depicted various Chicago nominees running riot in a car suspended beneath two balloons filled with the hot air of campaign oratory. The St. Louis Post Dispatch carried two cartoons, one of a drunk person stand- "l 24 The UFO Controversy in America I ing near a light pole seeing two cigar-shaped airships in the ' sky-<me marked "Domestic" and the other "Havana"-and the second showing people looking at the object through vari ous types of appliances, including a whiskey bottle, a wine bottle, and a glass,47 Although many newspapers and scientists ascribed the air ship to hoaxes, hallucinations, alcohol, and the like, some people thought it existed and tried to account for its presence and seemingly inexplicable behavior. The most common the ory was that a secret inventor had developed an airship.
Another theory held that extraterrestrial visitation was pos sibler-the most_ popular source being Mars. Schiaparelli's remarkable discovery in 1 877 of "canals" on the Martian sur face, the appearance of "seasons" on the planet, and science 1 fiction literature of the day all created a general interest in the possibility of life on Mars. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells had helped popularize the idea that airships came from Mars.
Wells's 1897 story ''The Crystal Egg" told about a Martian .
television-monitoring device that people had found on earth"= Moreover, a commonly held belief was that the Martian land scape was habitable, its air breathable, its costumes conven tional, and the inhabitants humanlike.4S The idea of an inhabitable Mars appeared in press and witness accounts too. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch said some thing was in the sky well worth scientific attention: "these may be visitors from Mars, fearful, at the last, of invading the planet they have been seeking." The Post-Dispatch sug gested sending the Martians "a message of peace and good wil as well as a hospitable invitation to alight." After people in Girard, lllinois, saw a machine on the ground, approached it, and watched it rise and fly off, they found footprints in the area; they concluded that "something has happened above the clouds that man has not yet accounted for." People in Texas thought the airship was an exploring party from another planet, and the Washington Times conjectured it was a recon· noitering party from Mars. The Memphis Commercial AP peal, also speculating about extraterrestrial visitation, decided that even if "the inhabitants of Mars or some nearer planet have succeeded in overcoming the force of gravitation, it is impossible that human life could be sustained while making the voyage to the earth. It must be the work of man, and of someone who inhabits this earth."49 Although these extrater restrial speculations were limited because of the more seem ingly plausible secret inventor theory, they nevertheless form The Mystery A irship 25 a link between the 1 89 6-97 airship mystery and the modern UFO controversy.
Another popular idea was that the airship was an elaborate advertising scheme. A reporter in Omaha hypothesized that the airship might be an advertisement for cigarettes, and other people in that city thought, if not for cigarettes, it was a gimmick for another product. Citizens of Madison, Wiscon sin, were convinced that the circus in nearby Baraboo was using the airship as a clever advertising scheme, especially since people in cities on the circus route reported seeing an airship. One company did, in fact, capitalize on the airship's publicity: Beck's Stove and Range Company published a hu morouS drawing of an airship and confessed that the whole affair was a publicity stunt. In a semi-serious statement, the company described' how it had made the airship and gave a short history of the ship's flights. In conclusion, the advertise ment cautioned: "Don't you believe that any air-ship is genu ine unless it bears out Trademark."50 A related theory, which an Omaha newspaper developed, was that the airship was the second part of a confidence scheme. Several years before, a man in Omaha had charged gulible people twenty-five cents to sit in a stadium and see an airship fly. Of course the flight never materialized, but now the hoaxers, the newspapers theorized, had obtained a real airship and had come back to give people their money's worth. The airship crew was afraid to land because the bilked people "have always been convinced that it was a confidence scheme, and notwithstanding McKinley's election, confidence has not yet been restored to these people."51 Other theories approached similar levels of absurdity. A man in Hempstead, Texas, thought the airship was actually fireflies or "lightning bugs" which could give off very bright lights and seemed to have characteristics in common with the airship : "On dark nights they fly high and are very rapid in their movements, throwing flashlights every few seconds, of ten at longer intervals." A Washington State man, in a letter to the Sacramento Daily Record-Union, said the solution to the airship mystery was a pelican; he had captured one, tied a Japanese lantern around one of its legs, and turned it loose-hence, the airship sightings. A theory put forth in At lanta, Texas, suggested the airship "is the property of a gang of cracksmen [burglars], who by the aid of the searchlight and X-rays, under the management of scientific experts, sail over the towns and look through the wals of the houses and 26 The UFO Controversy in America bank vaults and locate the booty; that they return on a later date and secure it, and then disappear by the aid of their air ship."52 Despite al the observations of the airship phenomenon and both serious and humorous speculation about its nature and origin, the question of what it was remains. Not all of the hundreds of consistent and detailed sightings can be dismissed as hoaxes, ilusions, or hallucinations. The most logical and reasonable explanation, in the context of American society of 1 896-97, was the secret inventor theory-that perhaps a powered, controlled flight of an airship actually occurred be fore present records indicate. Is it possible that not one but many airships, intelligently powered and controlled, flew through American skies during this period?
European inventors were far ahead of their American counterparts in developing an airship.
Henri Giffard of France built the first navigable (but not practical) one in 1 852; it traveled seventeen miles at a speed of five and one half miles per hour. But it was underpowered and Giffard could not circle or return to the place from which be had started. Frenchmen Albert and Tissandier applied an electric motor to an airship in 1 883 and 1 884 and enjoyed a slight amount of success in navigating it; yet this machine, too, was underpowered and could not maintain itself against the wind current. In 1 884 Charles Renard and A. C. Krebs made a more successful flight in France. Their nonrigid dirigible with an electric motor could travel about thirteen miles per hour and return to the point from which it left. The experiment proved that an airship could be practical. However, the power source was still inadequate and the airship could travel only a short distance and carry very little weight.113 David Schwartz built the first completely rigid dirigible in Germany in 1 897.
Although the trial flight failed, the machine was an important development in that it used a gasoline-powered engine. Two other Germans, Wolfert and Baumgarten, built the first dirigible with an internal-combus tion engine but the ship exploded before its trial flight. De velopment of the modern dirigible began in France in 1 898 with Alberto Santos-Dumont's first airship. Its nonrigid body with two internal-combustion engines was controllable. In 1 90 1 Santos-Dumont thrilled France by traveling seven miles in thirty minutes, spectacularly rounding the Eiffel Tower to return to his starting point. 54 American airship builders during the 1 880s and 1890s ex- The Mystery Airship 27 perimented as well, but few ever completed a machine. In 1 884 Arthur DeBausset, a Chicago physician, designed an electrically powered vacuum tube that was supposed to carry people over great distances at high speeds. He organized a stock company and began soliciting money, but he failed to obtain the funds and could not build his airship.M Six years later Edward J. Pennington of Racine, Wisconsin, organized the Aeronautical Company and built a twenty-four-foot model of a projected airship. Pennington's model remarkably resembled the "mystery airship" sighted in 1896 and 1 897: it had a cigar-shaped gas bag with wings attached on the sides, a large railroad-like car hanging from the bottom of the bag, and storage batteries to light the car. But Pennington, like DeBausset, could not raise the necessary funds to actually build the ship. His exaggerated claim that the ship could travel ųt two hundred miles per hour prompted press ridicule, especially from the Chicago Tribune, which dampened his fund-raising efforts. 56 In the 1 890s American air pioneers Chanute, Lilienthal, Langley, and Pilcher were conducting heavier-than-air experi ments. However, these contrivances had no similarities with witnesses' descriptions of the airship and, as far as historians know, no motor-powered airships flew in America in 1 896 or 1897. (A bicycle-powered airship did fly for short distances at the Tennessee Centennial Exposition in May 1 897.57) In 1900 A. Leo Stevens built the first motor-driven navigable airship flown in the United States. After this, others experi mented with limited success, and in 1904 Thomas Baldwin's four years of experimenting resulted in the flight of the first practical dirigible in this country-the California Arrow in Oakland, Califomia.5s In the late 1890s many people in the United States obtained patents for proposed airships. Most people believed someone would soon invent a flying machine, and many wanted to capi talize on the fame and fortune that certainly would come to the first person to launch an American into the skies. As soon as someone had a glimer of an airship design, he immedi ately applied for a patent. These would-be inventors constantly worried over possible theft or plagiarism of their airship designs, for even a patent could not insure that someone might not steal or copy part of a design. As a consequence, most people keep their patents secret. Given this atmosphere and numerous European and American experiments with flight, it is not surprising that secret inventor stories so captured the 28 The UFO Controversy in America public imagination and seemed such a logical explanation for the mystery airship. To some Americans the possibility did exist that "Wilson" of Texas airship fame was the inventor and pilot of the mystery airship. And, in fact, independent inven tors did invent a heavier-than-air flying machine.
Nonetheless, al evidence indicates that scientific knowledge about powered flight in 1 896 and 1 897 could not have led to the invention of airships with the characteristics witnesses described. 59 And even if an independent inventor had been able to design and fly a successful airship, the problem of secrecy would have been almost insurmountable. An inventor would have found it nearly impossible to spend time and money designing an experimental craft and test flying it with out someone discovering his activities . Moreover, in light of the number of different airships reported in many states dur ing . 1 896 and 1 897, a mysterious inventor would have had enormous dificulties concealing himself.
The airship phenomenon of 1 896-97 constitutes the first major wave of documented unidentified flying object sightings in America (although not the first sightings per se) . Occur ring at a time when technology could not duplicate the char acteristics witnesses described, the sightings created a national controversy. Although most people expected an airship in the near future, the immediate reaction of those who had not seen the object was hostile; they simply would not believe it was there. Neither the numerous newspaper accounts stressing the reliability and honesty of the witnesses, the descriptions of object characteristics completely unlike any natural phe nomena, nor the knowledge that nothing else was in the sky could convince most people to believe an airship existed. In contrast, for the people who had sighted an object, no amount of persuasion or reason could dissuade them from be lieving they had seen an actual airship.
To explain the enigma, the public then, as did the public later, looked first for rational explanations-those that would make sense in terms of the scientific and the experiential knowledge of the time. When these were not completely satis factory, the public turned to more irational theories. An air ship seemed so far out of the realm of current technological knowledge that a gap resulted in people's idea of what should be and what was. Since airships, given the technology of the times, could not have existed, then witnesses who claimed to have seen one obviously had not seen one. Most arguments against the airship idea came from individuals who assumed The Mystery A irship 29 that the witnesses did not see what they claimed to see. This attitude is the crucial link between the 1 896-97 phenome non and the modem unidentified flying object phenomenon beginning in 1947. It also was central to the debate over whether unidentified flying objects constituted a unique phe nomenon. Lying low for the first half of the twentieth cen tury, while air technology mushroomed, the phenomenon of strange objects in the sky and the furor over it appeared again in 1 947 and became a private and public battlefield.
2 THE MODERN ERA BEGINS: ATTEMPTS TO REDUCE THE MYSTERY The modem debate over the existence and ongm of unidentified flying objects centered on the Air Force's investi gation of the phenomenon. Begining in 1947, the Air Force started to collect and evaluate reports. When it had acquired what it considered to be adequate information, it determined that UFOs represented nothing unusual in the atmosphere.
The methodology the Air Force used in arriving at this con clusion became a focal point of the controversy. But even be fore 1 947, when the modem controversy began, the United States twice had been involved with large-scale sightings of unidentified flying objects, first in World War II and then in postwar Sweden.
The first sightings occurred when Allied bomber pilots re ported that strange balls of light and disc-shaped objects fol lowed them as they f1ew over Germany and Japan. The American pilots dubbed these UFOs foo-fighters, after a pun on the French word for fire (feu) appeared in the popular comic strip Smokey Stover: "Where there's foo, there's fire." The foo-fighters danced off the bombers' wingtips or paced the planes in front and back. Naval personnel at sea also saw the objects maneuvering in the sky. At first the Allies thought the objects were static electricity charges; then rumor had it that they were either German or Japanese secret weapons designed to foul the ignition systems of the bombers. Later many servicemen decided that the absence of overt foo fighter hostility meant the objects must be psychological war fare weapons sent aloft to confuse and unnerve American '11 pilots. Ironically, after the war the American public learned that the Germans and Japanese had encountered the same 30 'I ·ɥ The Modern Era Begins 3 1 strange phenomenon and bad explained it as Allied secret weapons. The United States Eighth Army made a cursory in vestigation of the foo-fighters and concluded that they were the product of "mass ballucination."1 No one was overly concerned with them at the time because they did not appear to be hostile. Their explanation or source, however, remains a mystery.
The second wave of sigbtings occurred in Western Europe and Scandinavia, where from 1946 to 1 948 many people re ported seeing strange, cigar-shaped objects. Witnesses in Sweden and Finland sighted the objects close to the Soviet border, making American intelligence agents curious. They feared that these ghost rockets, as they were called, might be secret weapons the Russians developed with the help of Ger man scientists and captured designs from the Peenemlinde, Germany, secret proving ground. Army intelligence dis patched General James A. Doolittle to investigate the reports in cooperation with the Swedish government. The investiga tors explained 80 percent of the objects as misidentifica tion of natural phenomena but made no conclusion about the other 20 percent. The Swedish government tried to use the ghost rocket sigbtings as a rationale to buy new and sophisti cated radar equipment from the United States. It hoped that the new radar would be able to track and recover one of the rockets. But the United States Army, having determined that there was only a small possibility the ghost rockets were secret weapons, refused to sell the radar to Sweden.2 While Sweden was experiencing its wave of UFO sightings, the modem era of sightings in the United States began. On June 24, 1 947, Boise businessman Kenneth Arnold, an ex perienced mountain and licensed air rescue pilot, was flying his private plane from Chehalis to Yakima, Washington, when he decided to look for a downed plane missing for some days. While searching, Arnold saw nine disc-shaped ob jects flying in loose formation and making an undulating mo tion, like, he said, "a saucer skipping over water." Arnold times the speed of the objects as they passed between two points and calculated them to be traveling over 1 ,700 miles per hour-an unprecedented speed for 1 947. He told his story to the ground crew in Yakima. When he flew on to Pendleton, Washington, his story had preceded him and skep tical newsmen awaited him. But because Arnold was such a reputable citizen (pilot, businessman, deputy sherif) , skepti- 32 The UFO Controversy in America cism changed to wonder and the joumalists reported the in cident as a serious news item. a The Arnold sighting was vital for modem UFO history in the United States. As a result of his description of the ob jects, the newspaper headline writers coined the term flying saucer,'*' which rapidly spread around the world as the most popular phrase to describe UFOs. The phrase allowed people to place seemingly inexplicable observations in a new cate gory. Witnesses scanning the sky could now report that they saw something identifiable : a flying saucer. Moreover, the term subtly connoted an artificially constructed piece of hard ware; a saucer is not a natural object. Consequently, when a witness said at that time that he saw a flying saucer, he im plied by the use of the term itself that he had seen something strange and even otherworldly. The term also · set a tone of ridicule for the phenomenon. The idea of saucers flying on their own volition was absurd. The term allowed people to laugh at the very notion of an unusual object in the sky with out having to confront the circumstances behind the event.
Saucers do not fly. It was ludicrous for a witness, using the only phrase available to him, to say that he saw one. There fore, he obviously did not see one. The term itself made the actual event seem invalid.
Perhaps the greatest importance of the Arnold story is that it encouraged people all over the country to come forth with their own reports about strange objects in the sky. Many of these sightings occurred before Arnold's. In this sense the Ar nold sighting acted as a dam-breaker and a torrent of reports poured out. Newspapers printed hundreds of these accounts.
Independent UFO investigator Ted Bloecher studied the 1947 wave of sightings and found that, with 850 reports, it was one of the largest sighting years on record. Some reports went back to January, but the peak did not come until July, one month after the Arnold story broke. II The press went through stages in its attitude toward the 1947 sightings. At first it reported the stories fairly and im partially. But as some of the stories became more fantastic and as newsmen vainly searched for proof, they added ridi cule to their reports-a ridicule stimulated by the fact that no one had found a flying saucer or could offer concrete evi dence that such things even existed. Many previously skepti cal newsmen began to feel that nothing unusual or anomalous bad existed in the sky in the first place. By the end of July newspaper reporters automatically placed any witness who The Modern Era Begins 33 claimed to see something strange in the sky in the crackpot category. Kenneth Arnold became victim to this belated ridi cule and stated: "If I saw a ten-story building flying through the air I would never say a word about it." An Air Force in vestigator privately noted in mid-July that Arnold was "prac tically a moron in the eyes of the majority of the population of the United States."6 News reporters had some evidence on which to base their skepticism. Along with the authentic 1 947 sightings came nu merous hoaxes that, as in the 1 896-97 period, added to the confusion. The most important hoax of the time took place at Maury Island near Tacoma, Washington. This hoax would not have been so sensational were it not for a tragedy that occurred in the course of its investigation. Harold Dahl and Fred Crisman claimed to have encountered a flying saucer at close range while boating off Maury Island. They said the fly ing saucer had dropped fragments of slaglike metal on them during the incident and they had picked up some of this material. Kenneth Arnold, who had been keenly following UFO reports since his sighting, heard about the two men and phoned army intelligence officers in California to tell them about the sighting. The army immediately dispatched two of ficers to interview Crisman and Dahl. But the interview never took place because the two army men were killed in a plane crash en route to Hamilton AFB. Later under Air Force in terrogation Crisman and Dahl confessed they had created the entire episode in hopes of selling the story to a magazine.T Numerous minor hoaxes occurred as well. Vernon Baird, a pilot, reported seeing a bunch of "yo-yo's" while flying over Montana. A Los Angeles newspaper printed the story on July 6, 1 947, and other newspapers around the country quickly picked it up. Baird later said it was al a joke he had cooked up while shooting the breeze with the boys around the hangar. Other people thought it would be good fun to make saucer-shaped objects and leave them in people's yards so that they could discover a crashed saucer. One midwestern newspaper offered $3,000 to anyone who could prove that flying saucers existed, and this prompted many individuals to perpetrate hoaxes to collect the reward. As in 1 896-97, some people tried to capitalize on the saucer craze. A public ity agent sent his clients pie plates inscribed with their names.
Another press agent advertised a radio show featuring the "Flying Saucer Blues."B Some people, of course, viewed the situation seriously. The 34 The UFO Controversy in America Washington Air National Guard equipped all its pilots with cameras in hopes of getting a picture of a flying saucer.
When the pilots were unsuccessful, this added to the suspi cion that nothing unusual had been in the sky to begin with.
But lack of photographic evidence was not the only thing making people suspicious. A constant stream of explanations for the reports helped as well. This urge to explain, as it may be called, became an integral part of the UFO controversy.
Although this behavior was evident to a lesser degree in the 1 896-97 sighting wave, it came to full fruition in the twenti eth-century sighting waves. Prompted perhaps by the tremen dous increase in scientific knowledge of the world and the universe, scientists seemed to put limits on the expansion and direction of that knowledge. Instead of attempting to discover if any of the reported UFO observations represented an om a- .
lous phenomena, scientists, academics, and other professional people simply categorically denied that the observations were of anomalous phenomena, and many denied that the witnesses had seen anything at all. Because these explanations came from "experts," people accepted them more readily.
The urge to explain became a severely limiting factor in the study of unidentified flying objects.
The San Francisco Chronicle published a group of ex planations for the Arnold sighting. One United Air Lines pi lot thought Arnold had seen the reflection of his instrument panel off his cockpit window. A meteorologist suggested Ar- nold had seen strange objects because he had become slightly snowblind. A University of Oregon astronomer said Arnold was the vistim of persistent vision, the result of staring at the sun for long periods of time. 9 Some scientists began to notice the UFO interest and to issue explanations for it. At a meeting of the American Associ ation for the Advancement of Science in Chicago on Decem ber 26, 1 947, Dr. C. C. Wylie, an astronomer at the Univer sity of Iowa, suggested that the UFOs were an example of national mass hysteria. He blamed the sightings on "the present failure of scientific men to explain promptly and accurately flaming objects seen over several states, flying sau cers and other celestial phenomena which arouse national in terest." This failure, he explained, caused the public to lose confidence in the "intellectual ability of scholars." Gordon A.
Atwater an astronomer at the Hayden Planetarium, told the New Ydrk Times that the first sighting reports were authentic but that most subsequent reports were the result of a "mild The Modern Era Begins 35 case of meteorological jitters" combined with "mass hypno sis." Dr. Jan Schilt, Rutherford Professor of Astronomy at Columbia, explained that a speeding plane had churned up the atmosphere, thereby causing distorted light rays that were responsible for the sightings. Dr. Newborn Smith of the United States Bureau of Standards laughed the whole thing off as another Loch Ness monster story.1o The New York Times also interviewed Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko and air pioneer Orville Wright. In a light hearted manner Gromyko suggested that the UFOs were discs from Soviet discus throwers practicing for the Olympic Games. Orville Wright believed that no scientific basis for the objects existed and darkly hinted at a more sinister explana tion: "It is more propaganda for war to stir up the people and to •excite them to believe a foreign power has designs on this nation." In the same article, the Times quoted Leo Cre spi, Princeton psychologist, as saying the real problem was whether a flying saucer was an illusion with objective refer ence or whether it was "delusionary in nature."ll Not all the explanations were serious. The New York Times began a long antipathy to the subject of UFOs by printing a tongue-in-cheek editorial suggesting that the objects were "atoms escaping from an overwrought bomb," Air Force antiradar devices, visitors from another planet, or af terimages of light on the human eye. Yet another suggestion was that the objects, all being silver, were coins that "high riding government officials" scattered to reduce the country's overhead. The New York Times consistently took this humor ous stance during the first five years of the controversy. Life magazine followed suit, printing a suggestion from Harvard anthropologist Ernest A. Hooton that saucers were "mis placed halos searching for al the people who were killed over the Fourth of July." The Life article compared the UFO sightings to those of the Loch Ness monster.12 As had hap pened in 1896-97, many magazine writers with flashes of humorous "insight" insisted on equating flying saucers with the Loch Ness monster or sea serpents.
These early attempts to explain the phenomenon contain nearly all the assumptions the public and the Air Force made throughout the controversy. Almost everyone assumed the objects were real but easily explained-that witnesses had sim ply misidentified conventional phenomena. An August 1947 Gallup Poll projected that 90 percent of the adult population had heard of flying saucers and that most people thought the 3 6 The UFO Controversy in A merica objects were illusions, hoaxes, secret weapons, or other ex plainable phenomena. According to the poll, very few people thought the objects came from space.1s This poll raised a cru cial question : Were people able to distinguish between atmo spheric and man-made phenomena?
The agency best able to make this differentiation at the time was the Air Force. It took on the task, sending all re ports to the Technical Intelligence Division of the Air Materiel Command, at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. This division quietly received reports throughout 1 947. Because national defense was its primary responsibility, it initially was interested in whether the objects might be secret weapons. In- ' telligence personnel thought it was possible that either the Soviets had developed a fantastic secret weapon, the same one the Germans supposedly were working on at the Peenemiinde proving ground, or that another branch of the United States military had developed a secret weapon unknown to the Air Materiel Command. The investigators at first did not connect flying saucers with the foe-fighters, ghost rockets, or the 1 896-97 airships.
Although privately interested in the phenomenon, the Air Force's public position was that the saucers were probably misidentifications. On July 4, 1 947, an Army-Air Force spokesman said the military had not developed a new secret weapon that might be responsible for the sightings and a pre liminary study of UFOs had "not produced enough fact to , warrant further investigation." He dismissed the Arnold sight ings as not realistic enough to deserve more study. In the same announcement, however, the Air Materiel Command said it was, in fact, investigating the matter further (particu larly sightings in Texas and the Pacific Northwest) to deter mine whether the objects were meteorological phenomena. It thought perhaps they were solar reflections on low-hanging clouds, or "large hailstones which might have flattened out and glided a bit. "14 Because sources for the early years of the Air Force's UFO investigation are scarce, one necessarily has to rely on Ed ward Ruppelt's The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects for much of the information. As head of the Air Force UFO in vestigation group from 1 9 5 1 to 1 953, Ruppelt had access to files now no longer available. In his book he explained that the Air Materiel Command (AMC) in 1 947- had no formal structure within which to investigate sighting reports and that the staff hesitated to do so on its own-without specific or- The Modern Era Begins 37 ders. To the people at AMC, no orders meant the Air Force was not officially interested in the subject. Nonetheless, the staff did collect reports in a haphazard manner, filing news paper accounts and reports made to other military bases.
Finally, AMC received classified orders to investigate al re- ' ports it collected.15 Because the order was classified, and the objects might be Soviet weapons, the Air Force insisted that the investigation be secret and tightened security.
Ruppelt said that the Air Force "top brass" wanted to solve the problem quickly. This created a certain amount of pressure and the staff began making frantic attempts to find answers. According to Ruppelt, two main schools of thought resulted. Some Air Force investigators thought the objects were terrestrial-either Russian secret weapons, atmospheric phenomena, or a secret navy circular plane called the XF-5- U-1 or the Flying Flapjack. The navy had scrapped the circu lar plane project in 1942, but the Air Force investigators did not eliminate the possibility that perhaps it had started the project again without the Air Force's knowledge. Other Air Force intelligence personnel thought the objects might be ex traterrestrial-spaceships or space animals. Eventually both groups merged to investigate what seemed to be most likely and immediate : the Soviet secret weapon theory.16 In the meantime public speculation and interest were growing. Many people thought the atomic bomb might in some way have caused the sightings. This prompted David Lilienthal, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, to state publicly that the UFOs were not a result of the testing program.t7 At the end of 1947, after having officially received 1 56 re- I ports, the Air Force decided that the problem required a more complete investigation than the one in progress at AMC. On September 23, 1947, Lieutenant General Nathan F. Twining, commander of the Air Materiel Command, wrote to the commanding general of the Army-Air Forces saying that "the phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious"; the objects appeared to be disc shaped, as large as aircraft, and controlled "either manually, automatically, or remotely." Twining said it most likely was possible to build an aircraft with similar flight characteristics, but "any developments in this country along the lines indi cated would be extremely expensive, time-consuming and at the considerable expense of curent projects." Twining thought the military must still consider the possibilities that 38 The UFO ControvϘrsy in America the objects were of domestic origin, that one might crash and provide positive physical evidence of its existence, and that they might be of foreign origin and "possibly nuclear." But because the military could only speculate about the objects, Twining recommended that "Headquarters, Army-Air Forces , issue a directive assigning a priority, security classification and Code Name for a detailed study of this matter." In the meantime, AMC would continue to collect the data as they came in.1B Major General L. C. Craigie accepted this recommendation and issued an order, on December 30, 1947, to establish an Air Force project to study the phenomenon of unidentified flying objects. The project, code name Sign, would be at Wright Field (now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) under the auspices of the Technical Intelligence Division of AMC and would carry a 2A restricted classification ( lA was the highest) . Its function was to "collect, collate, evaluate and distribute to interested government agencies and contractors al information concerning sightings and phenomena in the atmosphere which can be construed to be of concern to the national security." The main purpose was to determine whether UFOs were a threat to the national security. Project Sign, known publicly as Project Saucer, began work on Janu ary 22, 1 948.19 Two weeks before Project Sign's establishment, a famous sighting occurred that occupied much of the project staff's time and attention for the next year. On January 7, 1948, witnesses in the Louisvile, Kentucky, area saw a cone- 'I shaped, silvery object, tipped with red, about 250 to 300 feet in diameter, moving in a southerly direction. They reported the sighting to the state police, who called Godman Air Force Base to ask if anyone there had seen it. The flight controllers went outside and quickly saw the object as it floated over head. After deciding it was not a plane or weather balloon, the flight controllers radioed four Air National Guard F-5 1 planes,. which were coming into base, to take a look. One plane was low on fuel and landed, but the other three, with Captain Thomas Mantell in the lead, went up to observe. As Mantell climbed to reach the object, it sped away from him and climbed higher; he had no oxygen equipment in his plane and could not follow. But being obviously excited about the object and reporting it was metallic and "tremendous in size," he decided to climb to 20,000 feet to try to overtake it. As he The Modern Era Begins 39 did this he lost consciousness, his plane went into a dive and crashed, and Mantell died.2o The Mantell incident resulted in more sensational press coverage. The fact that a person had dramatically died in an encounter with an alleged flying saucer increased public concern about the phenomenon. Now a dramatic new pros pect entered thought about UFOs : they might be not only ex traterrestrial but potentially hostile as well. And as if this were not enough to increase public curiosity, the people at Project Sign explained that Mantell had died while trying to reach the planet Venus, which he had apparently mistaken for a flying saucer. The press and the public were incredu lous. This official explanation began an enduring theme in the , UFO controversy: that the Air Force conspired to keep im portant information from the public. (Three years later, the navy disclosed that a secret, high altitude, photographic reconnaissance Skyhook balloon was in the area and Mantell probably died trying to reach it.21 Ultimately the Air Force concluded that Mantell had died chasing the Skyhook, but it , could never definitely establish the presence of that balloon. ) After the Mantell incident the people at AMC began to work earnestly on the problem. They assumed that conscien tious observers had sighted real objects and that UFOs were not products of misidentification. According to Ruppelt, Pro ject Sign staff thoroughly investigated every possibility that the objects could be Soviet secret weapons of German design.
AMC even contacted those German designers in America to see if it were possible for the Soviets to have used the designs to develop flying saucers. In every case the answer was nega tive.22 Furthermore, AMC reasoned that the outside metal would not hold up under the tremendous heat at the reported speeds, and if the objects were actually Russian secret weapons, the Soviets would be foolish to fly them over hostile territory where they might crash and the Americans could recover them.
The Project Sign staff was left with some unsettling impli cations. If the objects were real but not Soviet or American, and if their flight characteristics did not match the state of technology at the time, then perhaps they were not ordinary; perhaps they came from another planet. One group at Project Sign began to explore this possibility seriously. Ruppelt found a memorandum in the project files stating that thinking of the objects in human terms was unproductive; thinking of them in nonhuman terms might help explain their maneuvering 40 The UFO Controversy in A merica characteristics.23 Nevertheless, another group at Sign was not convinced and maintained that the objects were not extraordi nary but rather manifestations of psychological quirks, or man-made, or natural atmospheric phenomena mislabeled.
But at this time the group favoring the extraordinary hy pothesis won the day and the Sign investigators focused on the possibility of extraterrestrial origin.
By the time Project Sign began its investigation in 1948, press ridicule of UFO witnesses was intense, and newspapers, losing much of their initial enthusiasm for the subject, printed fewer articles about sightings. This enabled Sign personnel to work with maximum privacy and minimum disturbance from February to the begining of August. But on July 24, 1948, another famous and controversial sighting catapulted the UFO controversy into the headlines again. Captains Clarence S. Chiles and John B. Whitted, flying an Eastern Air Lines DC-3, saw a large light, traveling at a tremendous speed, fly toward them. As the light-object approached, the startled pi lots noticed it was cigar shaped, had two rows of windows around it with light coming from them, and had a red orange flame coming out of one end. Chiles and Whitted became alarmed as the object streaked past the DC-3 at about seven hundred miles per hour, made a sharp angular tum, climbed into the clear sky, and then seemed simply to vanish. The one passenger awake at the time said he saw a bright flash of light go by his window but could not provide any details. A pilot flying another plane in the vicinity reported seeing a · bright object in the sky at about the same time. Later, people on the ground also reported witnessing a similar object at about the same time as the DC-3-object encounter.M For the first time two obviously competent witnesses and a passenger had seen a UFO at close range. The sightings, classified unknown, had a great impact at Sign. The people at AMC now felt it was time to present their :findings. They wrote an unofficial "Estimate of the Situation," classified top secret. The Estimate traced the history of UFO sightings, in cluding the ghost rockets and American sightings before 1947; it concluded that the evidence indicated the UFOs were of extraterrestrial origin. The Project Sign staf sent their report through channels, all the way to Chief of Staff General Hoyt S. Vandenberg. The general decided the report , lacked proof and sent it back to Sign where it died quietly. A ], few months later the Air Force declassified and burned the ' report.21i The Modern Era Begins 41 According to Ruppelt, the failure of the "Estimate of the Situation" to receive official blessing. resulted in a policy change at Project Sign. The people who had suggested that the objects were extraordinary and perhaps extraterestrial suddenly lost influence and the people who believed the objects were ordinary gained prestige. A subtle change in climate ensued and the proponents of the extraterrestrial hypothesis found themselves championing an unpopular the ory. The prevailing opinion at AMC was that UFOs could be explained in conventional terms.26 On the whole, Sign's UFO investigations were fairly good.
Its main problem was that the staff was too inexperienced to discriminate between which sightings to investigate thor oughly. Because of unfamiliarity with the phenomenon, the staff spent inordinate amounts of time on sightings that were obviously aircraft, meteors, or hoaxes. The staff also spent much time looking into the private lives of witnesses to see if they were reliable. Sign checked routinely with FBI field of fices and criminal and subversive files of police departments, and the staff interviewed the witnesses' fellow employees, friends, and acquaintances. The Sign staf, however, did a creditable job considering that these early sightings usually contained too little information on which to base any kind of judgment and that the Air Force had no standardized method of reporting sightings.
In February 1 949, Project Sign issued a report reflecting the philosophies of the group that thought the objects were extraordinary and of the group that thought they were ordi nary. The report concluded that the staf had not found enough evidence to either prove or disprove an objective exis tence to flying saucers. On the one hand, positive proof of the existence of UFOs could come only from hard data, i.e., the remains of a downed saucer. On the other hand, "proof of non-existence is equaly impossible to obtain unless a reason able and convincing explanation is determined for each in cident," and the staff acknowledged it had not been able to do this for 20 percent of the sightings.2T Furthermore, the staf said it did not have enough evidence to conclude that the objects did not represent a security threat to the United States, even though it had no evidence to suggest the objects were Russian weapons. Since the staff ar rived at "simple and understandable" causes for some of the objects, "there is the possibility that enough incidents can be solved to eliminate or greatly reduce the mystery associated 42 The UFO Controversy in America with these occurrences." However, the Project Sign staff be lieved that evaluating UFO reports was a necessary activity for military intelligence agencies : the sightings were "inevita ble," and during war "rapid and convincing solutions of such occurrences are necessary to maintain morale of military and civilian personnel." For this reason alone the staff thought the Air Force should train competent people to handle the problem. The report recommended that the Air Force expend only a minimum effort to collect and evaluate the data on flying saucers : "When and if a sufficient number of incidents are solved to indicate that these sightings do not represent a threat to the security of the nation, the assignment of special project status to the activity could be terminated." The Air Force should handle subsequent investigations of the phenomenon routinely, "like any other intelligence work." The report also recommended improving procedures for obtaining accurate measurements by using photography and radar and by relying more on simultaneous ground and air sightings.28 The Project Sign report included an interesting appendix by James E. Lipp, of the Rand Corporation, on the feasibility of the objects being extraterrestrial. Lipp's reasoning was as follows : because earth is the only evolutionary life-producing planet in our solar system (he had eliminated all others in his study) , the objects do not come from another planet in our solar system; assuming that probably one planet in each solar system has an environment conducive to producing evolution ary, intelligent life, and assuming that earth is "average in ad vancement and development," then a fifty-fifty chance exists that such forms of life are advanced enough to engage in space travel; therefore, the objects are more likely to come from planets in other solar systems; but, Lipp explained, even if life on other planets had developed space travel, the dis tance between earth and those planets and the time necessary to reach earth probably would prohibit other life from com ing here. Besides, Lipp argued, if the extraterrestrials were here they would have contacted us by now. Lipp concluded that it was possible extraterrestrials were visiting earth but that it was highly improbable. In addition, the "actions attrib uted to the 'flying objects' reported during 1 947 and 1948 seem inconsistent with space travel''-as he had formulated it.29 Project Sign's recommendations set the tone for the contro versy over unidentified flying objects for the next twenty The Modern Era Begins 43 years. In 1 949 the cold war was becoming heated and it was natural for Sign to recommend continued military intelligence control over the investigation of sighting reports. Sign never envisioned a nonmilitary, systematic study of the phenome non. The staff believed that even if the alleged objects were nonhostile, and therefore not properly within the jurisdiction of the military, the military should still be involved with the subject because of the potential morale problem during war time. As a further result of this reasoning, and apart from the growing ridicule attached to the subject, the military's control of the UFO investigation may have inhibited the scientific community from conducting its own study of UFOs; al "good" data were in Project Sign's classified files. Therefore, military inquiry- may have prevented nonmilitary, systematic inquiry--even in the unlikely case that scientists would have found an interest in the phenomenon.
After the Project Sign staff issued its report, the project took on a new look based on the ascendancy of the group th,at believed UFOs did not represent any type of extraordi nary object.
According to Ruppelt, Air Force officials abruptly terminated the plan to expand Project Sign's investi gation by placing UFO teams at every Air Force base. New staff people replaced many of the old personnel who had leaned toward the extraterrestrial hypothesis. In the future, Sign personnel would assume that all UFO reports were misidentifications, hoaxes, or hallucinations. J. Allen Hynek, later scientific consultant for the Air Force's UFO project, said that after the Sign report came out the atmosphere at the UFO office was markedly chillier than before. so The new look meant a new name as well. On December 1 6, 1 948, the Air Force director of research and development ordered Project Sign's name changed to Project Grudge, which, under the United States Joint Services Code Word In dex, referred to "Detailed Study of Flying Discs." Its purpose was the continued collection and evaluation of UFO data.
Grudge retained the 2A security classification and its UFO files were closed to the public. The Project Grudge staff tried to implement Project Sign's recommendations, both by ex plaining every UFO report received and by assuring the pub lic that the Air Force was investigating the UFO phenome non thoroughly and had found no extraordinary objects in the atmosphere. Instead of seeking the origin of a possibly unique phenomenon, as Sign had done, Grudge usually de nied the objective reality of that phenomenon. In this way 44 The UFO Controversy in America Grudge shifted the focus of its investigation from the phe nomenon to the people who reported it. Grudge also made a concerted effort to alleviate possible public anxiety over UFOs by embarking on a public relations campaign designed to convince the public that UFOs constituted nothing unusual or extraordinary.sl As part of this new public relations focus, the Air Force made its first major public statement on UFOs by giving its "whole-hearted co-operation" to writer Sidney Shallett's two part article about UFOs for the Saturday Evening Post. The article appeared on April 30 and May 7, 1 949. Shallett be lieved most UFO sightings were balloons, atmospheric phe nomena, and ordinary objects. He dismisssed pilots' reports as being "strange tricks" that "the sun, stars, and senses can play upon you in the wild blue." Shallett conceded that a few UFO sightings remained unidentified, but most of these were probably the products of "vertigo and self-hypnosis brought about by staring too long at a fixed light." Shallett discussed hoaxes in detail and gave many examples of easily identifi able sightings, some of which army and Air Force generals had made. He quoted Air Force General Carl Spaatz: "If the American people are capable of getting so excited over something which doesn't exist • • • God help us if anyone ever plasters us with a real atomic bomb." Shallett also suggested a psychological explanation. Americans, living in a "jittery age," induced in part by an "atomic psychosis" and the possi bilities of space travel and planned earth-orbiting satellites, easily saw Martians and saucers.s2 The first installment of Shallett's article concluded: "if there is a scrap of bona fide evidence to support the notion that our inventive geniuses or any potential enemy, on this or any other planet, is spewing saucers over America, the Air Force has been unable to locate it." The second part ended with a quotation from Dr. Irving Langmuir, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, a consultant for Project Sign, and, as Shallett admitted, the most outspoken foe of the existence of flying saucers in the United States. Langmuir's final advice to the Air Force on the UFO issue was "Forget it!"33 According to Ruppelt, the Air Force had hoped the article would stem the tide of reports flowing into AMC. But ap parently the article failed; a few days after the second part appeared, UFO sightings hit an al-time high. The Air Force, thinking the article caused the sightings, tried to counter this reaction by issuing a lengthy press release saying that UFOs The Modern Era Begins 45 were nothing but products of mass hysteria and the misiden tification of natural phenomena. Ruppelt explained the public reaction to the article in two ways. He said, first, that several people at Project Grudge thought the sightings continued be cause Shallett had admitted that a few UFOs remained uni dentified. According to some of the Grudge staff, this made Shallett prosaucer. Second, Ruppelt said, the article was too biased; instead of alleviating the public's doubts, it planted a seed of doubt in the public mind about the Air Force's inves tigating method. Some people started studying the subject on their own because they could not reconcile Air Force concern six months back with the subsequent lack of concern.34 Throughout 1949 the Air Force worked on gathering evi dence to prove that UFOs as a unique phenomenon did not exist. For this the· Air Force had the help of the project's new scientific consultant, J. Alen Hynek, a professor of astron omy at nearby Ohio State University and head of the McMil lan Observatory. Hynek had read about the UFO sightings in the newspapers. He thought the whole business was a joke and that no scientist could possibly take it seriously. But when the Air Force asked him to become its scientific consultant on the subject, he accepted the contract because, as he later said, he enjoyed a sporting challenge. Hynek's job was to sift astro nomical phenomena from the UFO reports, as part of the Air Force's efforts to explore every conceivable possibility that witnesses who thought they saw something extraordinary were mistaken. These findings were, of course, classified. Six months after Project Grudge began this official investigation, it was ready to issue its. final report in August 1949. (The Air Force released a summary of the report to the press on December 27, 1949.) Project Grudge reported on 244 cases it had investigated.
As the Project Sign staff had recommended, Grudge made an effort to explain every sighting even though many of the ex planations seemed forced or highly speculative. The case of a T-6 training plane pilot illustrates these tactics. The pilot no ticed a light near him as he was beginning to land and tried to get closer to see what it was, but the light seemed to take "evasive action." The pilot blinked his navigation lights but got no answer. He flew even closer to the light but it went up and over his plane. He tried to get closer again, and again the light turned. He attempted to get between the light and the moon, but the light tur:i:ted so tightly that he could not do it.
This scene went on for ten minutes. Finaly the pilot made a 46 The UFO Controversy in A merica pass at the light and turned on his landing lights. He could see that it was a "dark gray and oval-shaped" object, which fi nally made a "tight tum and headed for the coast." Four Air Force witnesses who had been watching from the ground completely corroborated the pilot's story. The Air Weather Service, which specializes in weather baloons, investigated and said the object was "definitely not a balloon." Hynek also investigated and said that there was no astronomical explana tion. The object was neither another airplane nor an haluci nation. Project Grudge, though, explained that the object was a weather baloon but did not reveal how it had arived at this conclusion. as Grudge's final report also included the results of Hynek's investigation of the Mantell case. His conclusions were am biguous, but Hynek speculated that Mantell had chased Venus. Yet because Venus is only a pinpoint in the daylight sky, even at its brightest, Hynek further speculated that if Mantell did not chase Venus he probably chased a balloon or maybe two balloons. Later in a press conference an Air Force major said Mantell had definitely chased Venus. (Hy nek changed his interpertation in 1952, saying the UFO was not Venus. ) At the time, Hynek and the Air Force had no knowledge of the navy's secret Skyhook balloon. as Even though the Grudge staf (working primarily with Hy nek) did everything it could to explain all the sightings, 23 percent remained unidentified. For these, Grudge looked to psychology. The final report stated : ''There are suficient psy chological explanations for the reports of unidentified flying objects to provide plausible explanations for reports not oth erwise explainable." The Rand Corporation, which had a con tract with the Air Force to study reports of sizes and shapes of UFOs, found nothing in the reports ''which would seri ously controvert simple rational explanations of the various phenomena in terms of balloons, conventional aircraft, planets, meteors, bits of paper, optical illusions, practical jokers, psychopathological reporters and the like!' Project Grudge concluded that "there is no evidence that objects re ported upon are the result of an advanced scientific foreign development; and therefore, they constitute no direct threat to the national security." It also concluded that "al evidence and analysis indicated that UFOs were the result of the mis interpretation of various conventional objects," or "a mild form of mas hysteria and war nerves," or hoaxes that public ity seekers and "psychopathological persons" perpetrated.
The Modern Era Begins 47 Grudge recommended, therefore, that the investigation and study of UFO reports should be down-graded and AMC should collect only those reports "in which realistic technical applications are clearly indicated." A note attached said that "further study along present lines would only confirm the find ings presented herein."37 Project Grudge, stil unsure of public reaction, brought up a phase of the phenomenon that was to occupy much of the Air Force's time and attention: the reported sightings could be dangerous. ''There are indications that the planned release of sufficient unusual aerial objects coupled with the release of related psychological propaganda would cause a form of mild hysteria," the report said. "Employment of these methods by or against an enemy would yield similar results." Therefore, "governmental agencies interested in psychological warfare should be informed of the results of this study." Moreover, Grudge recommended that its conclusions be made public in an official press release to dispel "public apprehension."38 The importance of public relations in the UFO controversy · is evident in the staff's recommendation that the project be reduced in scope. The Grudge staff thought that the very ex istence of an organized Air Force investigatory body might encourage people to believe that something strange was flying in the skies. With this in mind, the Air Force issued a press release on December 27, 1 949, announcing the termination of Project Grudge. The Air Force decided that now was the time to disengage itself from the public side of the contro versy. It transferred Project Grudge personnel elsewhere and stored all its records. While this was going on, however, the Air Force intelligence director, in a directive to the Project Grudge staf, announced that the project had not really dis banded and that the order to do so was premature. The direc tor explained that the Air Force would continue to collect UFO reports but would handle them through normal intelli gence channels rather than by a special project. 39 In fact, the Air Force immediately launched a classified study of a strange phenomenon-green fireballs-that compe tent and reliable observers had reported between 1947 and 1949. These objects closely resembled meteors except for their bright green color, fiat trajectories, slow speeds, and sighting location ( only northern New Mexico at the time) .
The Air Force's Cambridge Research Laboratory coordinated the study, called Project Twinkle, which was part of Project Grudge. The Air Force decided it would set up observation 48 The UFO Controversy in America posts in areas of high fireball activity. The men in these posts would be armed with cameras, telescopes, theodolites, and any other equipment that would help them in their observa tions. The Air Force set up the first posts at Vaughn, New Mexico, where citizens had frequently reported seeing green fireballs. When the posts went into operation, however, green fireball sightings stopped completely. The men scanned the skies for six months with no luck. Meanwhile a rash of UFO sightings occurred at Hollomon Air Force Base 1 50 miles to the south. So the Air Force packed up and moved its obser vation posts to Hollomon. But virtually the same thing hap pened. Although some pilots and civilians made a few UFO reports around the area, the observation posts could report nothing tangible after six months of watching. Some scientists in the Air Force thought it might be significant that the sight ings had stopped as soon as the Air Force started observing, but the Air Force concluded that sinking more funds into the program was a waste and dropped the project:Ɗo From the begining of 1950 until the middle of 1951 Pro ject Grudge remained in a state of suspended animation.
Once again, as with the Project Sign report, Grudge's recom mendations discouraged independent civilian investigation.
Grudge, in spite of its conclusion that UFOs were not hostile, continued its collection and classification policy and hence the near military monopoly over sighting reports. Even though the Air Force was no longer officially interested in the problem, Grudge refused to declassify its data or recommend that a nonmilitary group study the problem further. Even in late 1951 Grudge refused to declassify the Project Twinkle report because it feared that undue public speculation would stir up interest in UFOs.
Project Grudge personnel had anticipated a large amount of publicity about the Grudge final report. But press reaction was subdued and mainly limited to noticing that the Air Force had issued the report. Why the expected publicity did not materialize is a matter of conjecture. Ruppelt's specula tion was that the report, being so ambiguous and such an ob- 1 : vious attempt to explain every sighting, served to hinder news reporters from believing it or writing about it as the final ex planation for the sightings. Whatever the reason, the Project Grudge final report received slight publicity, whereas articles about the UFO phenomenon steadily increased in number. I Although most people, according to a 1950 Gallup Poll, be- f lieved UFOs represented secret weapons, hoaxes, misidentifi- The Modern Era Begins 49 cations, and the like, a growing number thought UFOs might be "something from another planet."41 This interest, continued widespread reports of sightings, and the possibility that money could be made in the UFO business all helped to in crease the number of newspaper and magazine articles.
True Magazine, in late 1949, commissioned Donald E. Key hoe, a retired Marine Corps major, to write an independently researched article on flying saucers. Born in 1 897, Keyhoe was an energetic and peppery man who had been a pilot and an aviation writer. As chief of information for the Department of Commerce in 1927, he had accompanied Charles Lindbergh on his triumphant United States tour after his trans-Atlantic flight. Then in 1928 Keyhoe wrote a well-received book about the tour called Flying With Lindbergh. In 1 940 Keyhoe wrote M-Day, which described what the United States government planned to do economically and industrially in the event of war. He had also written many magazine articles about avia tion in the 1930s and the 1 940s. In 1949 he turned his atten tion to solving the flying saucer mystery. Keyhoe still had many friends in the upper echelons of the military and went to them for information. He received none, perhaps because Grudge wanted to play down the entire UFO affiar and put a stop to reports. In fact, he alleged that every military person he contacted gave him the "silent treatment."42 Keyhoe sensed a big story. He interpreted the silence to mean official tight security which, in tum, meant that the Air Force was hiding something important. To Keyhoe only one thing could be this important: the flying saucers came from outer space.
Keyhoe's article, entitled "The Flying Saucers Are Real," appeared in the January 1950 issue of True. He concluded: "living, intelligent observers from another planet" had been scrutinizing earth for 175 years; the intensity of the visits had increased during the past two years; there were three basic types of spaceships; and the manner in which the extraterres trials observed earth was similar to American plans for space exploration expected to come into being within the next fifty years. Keyhoe reviewed various sightings, including the Man tell and Chiles and Whitted cases, and discussed the opinions of several "unnamed authorities" on the origin of the saucers.
He refrained from attacking the Air Force because he did not know the reasons for the "cover-up." But he speculated that the Air Force was covering-up to prevent a panic (as in the Orson Welles's 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast) and to prepare the public for the startling disclosure that the saucers 50 The UFO Controversy in A merica were from another planet. Keyhoe used his imagination liber ally in the article. When be could not see a clear reason for Air Force policy or actions, he surmised the reason and stated it as fact. Scholarship and reliable information were not strong points of the article. It was, nevertheless, a sensa tion and Keyhoe became the leading private UFO "authority" in the country. This issue of True was the most widely sold and read in the magazine's history. Indeed, it was one of the most widely read and discussed articles in publishing history.
In the face of this massive publicity, Air Force efforts to as sure the public that the article did not reflect the facts accu rately were futile. 43 True followed Keyhoe's article with another sensational fly ing-saucers-are-real story in March. Navy Commander R. B.
McLaughlin, a member of a team of scientists at the White Sands (New Mexico) secret guided missile development grounds, explained "How Scientists Tracked the Flying Sau- I cers." The navy cleared McLaughlin's article even though he •.
.
contradicted Project Grudge's findings. He discussed how, in the process of launching and tracking a Skyhook balloon, scientists (whose specialties he did not name) caught sight of a strange silvery object near the balloon. One scientist bad a theodolite (a surveyor's instrument for measuring horizontal and vertical angles) , another a stopwatch, and the third a clipboard. They began to record as much information as they I 4 , could as soon as they saw the object. Before it sped away from view, they were able to ascertain that it was 40 feet long, 100 feet wide, and traveling at an altitude of approx imately 56 miles and a speed of 25,200 miles per hour.
1 McLaughlin was convinced that the object "was a flying sau- . I cer, and further, that these discs are spaceships from another Õ · planet."« The Keyhoe and McLaughlin articles were the first I in a national magazine to present a case for extraterrestrial explanations for UFOs and to contradict official Air Force findings. The articles set the stage for a battle that was to rage for the next twenty years.
111 Still one more element was to enter that battle arena Frank Scully's book Behind the Flying Saucers, published in 1 950. Scully was a former Variety columnist who had previ ously written Fun in Bed, More Fun in Bed, and Junior Fun in Bed for bedridden people. With this background, Scully presented his book on UFOs as a serious work. In it be related the content of a lecture he had heard at the Univer sity of Denver. The lecturer was Silas Newton, described as The Modern Era Begins 5 1 being a millionaire Texas oil man. I n the lecture Newton recounted the experiences of his friend and scientist, "Dr.
Gee." The doctor had told Newton that the Air Force cap tured three landed saucers and found sixteen, four-foot-tall, dead occupants in them. The Air Force took the occupants for examination to "scientists," one of whom was Dr. Gee.
Scully described the occupants and the material composition of the craft. He explained that the water the spacemen drank was "twice as heavy" as earthly water, that the men had no cavities in their teeth, and that the spaceship's metal was much harder than anything known on earth. Neither Newton nor Dr. Gee knew why the Air Force kept this a secret, but Newton theorized that it was to avoid panic.45 In the remainder of the book, Scully discussed some of the famous sightings, Einstein's special theory of relativity, and newspaper articles on UFOs. The Dr. Gee Story, of course, was a hoax. However, Newton had given the lecture at the University of Denver and it seemed that Scully actually be lieved the story. The police arrested Newton and Mr. Ge Bauer (the mysterious Dr. Gee) two years later on a charge of fraud. They had bought a worthless piece of war surplus equipment for $4.50 and were trying to sell it as a surefire device for detecting potential oil wells. The price? A mere $800,000.46 In spite of the book's content, it still had a large impact and became a best seller. It was the first American book on UFOs, and Time, Saturday Review, Science Digest, and many other magazines carried reviews of it. 47 But perhaps it was most important as a forerunner of the special breed of saucer disciples-the contactees-who were to emerge a few years later. Scully's book also added to the already great pub lic confusion. The Air Force had discounted all extraterres trial theories and had tried to find natural explanations. Key hoe had contended that UFOs came from outer space and that the Air Force knew about them. Then Scully had said that the Air Force not only knew about them but had actu ally captured some. The public immediately linked Scully to Keyhoe. This basic confusion between legitimate UFO theory (that the objects might be extraterrestrial ) and the Scully brand of hoax was to plague UFO investigators from this time on.
Keyhoe, meantime, was busily expanding his article for a book with the same title, The Flying Saucers Are Real ( 1950) . In addition to the information in the article, the 52 The UFO Controversy in A merica book contained some new ideas on the reasons for Air Force secrecy. Keyhoe's book, like his article, was based on conjec ture, personal opinions from unnamed scientists, some factual information, and a large amount of loose thinking. Because the Project Grudge files were secret, Keyhoe had no way of knowing what was really happening and was forced to rely on people's opinions, official press releases, and the little in formation he could get out of his friends in the military. For example, Keyhoe used the following conversation as a legiti mate method of gaining information: "Charley, there's a rumor that airline pilots have been ordered not to talk," I told Planck. "You know anything about it?" "You mean ordered by the Air Force or the compa nies?" "The Air Force and the C.A.A." "If the C.A.A.'s in on it, it's a top level deal," said Charley.48 Keyhoe's "facts" seemed similar to Scully's "facts," and many critics failed to see any difference at all.
Because Keyhoe tried to get information but could not, he became more concerned with the secrecy aspect than with ex planations for UFOs. Keyhoe concluded that the Air Force was "badly worried" when witnesses first reported UFOs in 1947. The Air Force knew "the truth" about Mantell's death, he said, and had established its investigatory agencies to conceal the truth about UFOs from the public. The Air Force changed this policy in the spring of 1 949 and "decided to let facts gradually leak out, to prepare the American pub lic." This, explained Keyhoe, was why the Project Sign report included a section on the feasibility of extraterrestrial visita tions and why the Air Force had accepted his True article as part of its "public education program." But the Air Force misinterpreted the unexpected public reaction to the article as evidence of hysteria and began to deny the existence of sau cers.4D Keyhoe's Air Force secrecy angle later provided him with the basis for three more books and the impetus for es tablishing a large national UFO organization.
By 1 950 other people also were speculating about the origin of the flying saucers, and the parade of explanations continued. David Lawrence's U.S. News and World Report featured an article that purported to solve the flying saucer .I , · I bcI I The Modern Era Begins 53 mystery once and for all. The article said flying saucers were real and "top Air Force officials know where the saucers originate and are not concerned about them." The reason for this lack of concern was that the saucers were actually navy secret weapons, the old Flying Flapjack XF-5-U-1 that Proj ect Sign had investigated and found abandoned in 1 942. This article appeared at the same time that commentator Henry J.
Taylor made a similar statement on a national radio broad cast. Although the Air Force denied the story, the old secret weapon theory revived for a short time. Newsweek printed this story under the heading "Delusions." Despite these ex planations for UFOs, by May 1 950 reports hit an all-time peak and came into AMC at the rate of about seventeen a month.50 The Air Force still tried to downplay the entire UFO phe nomenon. Newsmen even asked President Truman about UFOs, and he seriously denied ever having seen one. White House Press Secretary Charles G. Ross, in April 1 950, said the Air Force's final report on the subject "was so conclusive" that the project closed down. When the New York Times asked Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson about the flying saucers, the question, as the reporter put it, "brought grins from the man who ought to know." Later a Department of Defense press officer said the Air Force had no intention of reopening Project Saucer. 51 In January 1 95 1 the Air Force for the second time cooper ated with someone writing an article of UFOs. Columnist Bob Considine, in Cosmopolitan magazine, made the most vicious attack to date on "believers." Project Grudge person nel allowed Considine to see certain classified documents in the Pentagon and at AMC and to interview Air Force of ficers. In ''The Disgraceful Flying Saucer Hoax," Considine characterized people who saw flying saucers as "true believ ers," "gagsters," "screwballs," members of the "lunatic fringe," and victims of "dementia," "cold war jitters," "mass hypnotism," "hallucinations," and "mirages." The whole UFO issue was "purely idiotic," and saucers "wholly nonexistent." Considine interviewed Air Force Director of Intelligence Colonel Harold E. Watson, who said that the entire sad affair was simple "nonsense." Not only that, added Considine, but it cost "the taxpayers a tremendous amount of money-for nothing."52 (One of the private citizens mentioned in the ar ticle sued Considine for libel. In 1954 a judge ruled in favor of Considine. Although the judge admitted that the article 54 The UFO Controversy in America wa.S libelous, he believed that the part directly related to the plaintif could not be construed as such.li3) One month after the Considine article, Time magazine an nounced that all UFOs were actually Skyhook balloons, a theory widely accepted for a time. But Dr. Anthony Marachi, an Air Force chemist, argued that the Skyhook theory led people to a false sense of security because, in actuality, a for eign power launched the saucers. Marachi recommended that the United States identify the foreign power before Ameri cans experienced another Pearl Harbor.ll4 By the summer of 1951 Project Grudge had so drastically reduced its staff that only one person, a lieutenant, served as investigator. The large number of sightings in 1950 gave way to a substantial decrease. in 195 1 . In April, May, and June of 1 1951, only seventeen sightings were reported to AMC.65 It ap peared that the Air Force, after eighteen months of effort, · had finally succeeded in its campaign to eliminate UFO reports and reduce the mystery surounding the phenomenon.
r\ I 3 THE 1952 WAVE: EFFORTS TO MEET THE CRISIS In 1952, after a dormant period of nearly two years, the Air Force again found itself plagued with the unidentified fly ing object mystery. The Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) , formerly the Intelligence Division of the Air Materiel Command, received the most sighting reports ever recorded-1501 for the year. Many were concurrent radar and visual reports from Air Force pilots and radar personnel.
In an attempt to meet the challenge, ATIC authorized the re organization of Project Grudge, and eventually the Air Force gave it a more prestigious position in the official hierarchy.
Under the leadership of Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, the proj ect staff designed and instituted plans to systematically study the UFO phenomenon. It sought the assistance of engineers, physicists, and astronomers, among others, implemented new and more efficient reporting procedures, contracted for a com puter-based study of reported UFO characteristics, made plans to study UFO maneuver patterns, and developed special radar and photographic detection methods. This up surge in activity resulted in renewed press and public interest in the phenomenon and a concomitant change in Air Force press policy. The year 1952 marked the high point of the Air Force's UFO investigation and the beginning of styles of thought that dominated the Air Force's attitude toward UFOs until 1969.
A dramatic sighting on September 10, 1951, stimulated the Air Force to revitalize and bolster the dormant project. A T-33 pilot and his passenger, an Air Force major, saw what appeared to be an unidentified flying object over the Fort Mon mouth, New Jersey, area. The witnesses described an object 55 56 The UFO Controversy in America thirty to fifty feet in diameter, round, silver, nonreflecting, and flat, which hovered below the plane. The pilot dived in an attempt to intercept it but failed. The object hovered for a short time, flew south, made a 120-degree tum, and contin ued on its way out to sea. At this same time a radar operator at the Army Signal Corps radar center (Fort Monmouth) was demonstrating radar equipment to a group of visiting Air Force officers. He picked up a fast moving object above the center and tracked it at speeds from 400 to 700 miles per hour; but the object was so erratic and fast that the operator lost it. The next day Fort Monmouth radar once again picked up unidentified flying objects with the same maneuver pat terns. This time, however, the objects disappeared and re turned several times and moved so fast that the radar opera tors could not track them automatically.1 According to Ruppelt, the sightings caused a sensation at Fort Monmouth. An Air Force major and a group of officers had witnessed either the objects or their radar returns. The astonished radar operators wrote to ATIC, Ruppelt said, re questing an investigation. The director of Air Force intelli gence, Major General C. B. Cabell, saw a copy of the letter and requested more information about the Air Force's UFO program. He dispatched Lieutenant Jerry Cummings (head of Project Grudge) and his superior, Lieutenant Colonel N. R.
Rosengarten (chief of the aircraft and missiles branch of ATIC) to Fort Monmouth to investigate.
Cummings and Rosengarten completed the investigation, tentatively classifying the objects as balloons and anomalous propagation (freak radar returns caused by unusual atmo spheric conditions) , and then they briefed General Cabell and his staff on the general status of the UFO project. Cum mings related the history of the Air Force program, its short comings, and its current status; he explained that reputable persons reported UFO sightings to Project Grudge at a steady rate. Apparently convinced of the legitimacy of the problem, and with no publicity or fanfare, General Cabell ordered ATIC to launch a new UFO project.2 Since the Air Force had just released Cummings from active duty, Rosengarten appointed Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, a decorated World War ll bombardier, to hearl the project.
Ruppelt, who had a reputation as a good organizer, had just been reactivated from the reserves because of the Korean conflict and was assigned to ATIC as an intelligence officer.
He had a layman's interest in the subject and had familiar- The 1 952 Wave 57 ized himself with Grudge before his appointment. In late Sep tember 195 1 he set to work. First he read all the old Grudge and Sign records. Then he filed and cross-indexed every Sign and Grudge UFO report accOJ;ding to an object's color, size, location, and time of sighting. The cross-indexing helped his staff to determine general characteristics of the reports and to compile statistical data. Although the Air Force gave Ruppelt some clerical aid, the process was slow.a Being familiar with the factionalism that had permeated previous UFO projects, Ruppelt resolved to avoid such con flicts if possible. He made clear that open speculation or ar gument about the origins of unidentified flying objects or the legitimacy of the reports was taboo and even ousted several staff members who advocated one theory or another. Ruppelt was determined to reserve judgment until his staff processed all available information. As part of his reorganization, Rup pelt arranged for his staff to write a classified report each month on current specific investigations and on the overall status of the project.4 He appointed Dr. J. Allen Hynek, al ready an Air Force consultant in astronomy, as chief scien tific consultant to Project Grudge and placed him on Air Force contract. Sensing the need for increased scientific help on UFOs, Ruppelt actively sought the cooperation of other interested scientists in return for briefings on the UFO situa tion.
One of Ruppelt's first problems was obtaining fresh UFO reports, because the Air Force had no routine way of quickly gathering them. Even reports from Air Force servicemen came in haphazardly and sometimes after a delay of up to two months. Consequently, the investigators found it difficult to obtain information that was fresh in the minds of witnesses. In addition to delays, the Project Grudge staff also encountered a serious ridicule problem. In an informal survey of Air Force pilots, Grudge found them reluctant to report UFO sightings because of possible ridicule from the press and from their fellow pilots and officers. One pilot summed up the attitude well : "If a space ship flew wing-tip to wing-tip formation with me, I would not report it." The Project Grudge staff worried that if an unconventional vehicle with extraordinary performance and characteristics appeared, "its detection would be hampered by the reluctance to report sightings."5 To overcome delay and ridicule, Ruppelt sought a com . pulsory method of reporting UFOs quickly and routinely.
58 The UFO Controversy in America First, to speed up the reporting process, he requested a revi sion of the existing Air Force directive. Then he and his staff intensively briefed Air Force officers to acquaint them with the UFO situation and to show that the Air Force now treated UFO reports seriously. Ruppelt also recognized the need for a standardized questionnaire for UFO reports, hoping it would alleviate the imprecision and random quality that had characterized previous reports; the Air Force agreed to contract with Ohio State University to develop such a form.
In addition, finding that newspapers carried many sighting reports not sent to ATIC, Ruppelt subscribed to a clipping service.s One of Ruppelt's most ambitious projects in late 1951 was to obtain a statistical study of reported UFO characteristics.
Although he did not expect such an analysis to reveal the origin of the UFO phenomenon, he did believe it would yield valuable data. Accordingly, the Air Force contracted the study to the Battelle Memorial Institute, a private research organization. Ruppelt's final project in 195 1 was based on a suggestion from General Cabell. He thought electronic means of UFO detection might be valuable and suggested that radar used in conjunction with photographic equipment could help detect UFOs. Project Grudge immediately sought to imple ment this idea. 7 Although Project Grudge made progress and seemed to en joy Air Force favor, it lacked sufficient funds to do its work well. The Air Force gave Ruppelt a few people to help with investigations and some clerical staff for the office, but thor ough investigation of more than a few monthly reports was still impossible. Even when a staff member, usually Ruppelt, conducted a field investigation, lack of money frequently pre vented him from following up all leads. Investigators often had to pay for their own transportation to and from an inves tigation site when military transportation was unavailable.
Similarly, the Air Force would not give Ruppelt funds for a related materials library; to help out, Hynek volunteered to buy the books with money from his own Air Force contract.
The monetary difficulties indicated Grudge's continuing low priority in spite of its buildup. a Six months after Ruppelt began his reorganization of Grudge, the Air Force decided that the project deserved more support. Ruppelt's aggressive briefing policy, his basic or ganizing procedures, and an increase in the number of sight ings during the first three months of 1952 prompted the Air The 1 952 Wave 59 Force to promote Grudge from a project within a group to a separate organization. The Air Force changed the code name to Project Blue Book and gave it the formal title of the Aerial Phenomena Group.9 Normally a change of this nature would mean a change in leadership as well ; an officer with the rank of colonel or higher usually headed a group. Rup pelt, however, bad been so effective that the Blue Book divi sion chief, Colonel Donald Bower, decided to retain him as project director.
Ruppelt also received new help : ATIC's electronics group, analysis group, radar section, and investigating group now worked directly under Project Blue Book; and because of the contractual arrangements for the statistical study and the questionnaire, the scientists at Battelle Memorial Institute and Ohio State University could also help Ruppelt directly.
Around this time, Joseph Kaplan, a University of California at Los Angeles physicist and a member of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, visited the new project at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. He bad come up with a good idea. Realizing that accurate measurements of any UFO were essential but difficult to obtain, Kaplan sug gested an analysis of the color spectrum of an object by use of a special diffraction grid placed over the lens of a camera.
When an unidentified flying object came into view, the camera photograph would put the spectrum on film and the staff could compare the object's spectrum with those of known objects (such as meteors and stars) to determine whether the object was unknown. ATIC and Blue Book were enthusiastic about this plan, and for the remainder of 1952 Kaplan and Air Force scientists tested possible diffraction grids and cameras for suitability under all conditions.1o With Kaplan's plan in the development stage, Ruppelt de cided to act on General Cabell's radarscope suggestion. He contacted the Air Defense Command, which had about thirty radarscope cameras around the country, and specially briefed its top officers as well as the Joint Air Force Defense Board; they agreed to work out plans for Blue Book to use the cameras. Ruppelt also briefed the scientists at the Cambridge Research Laboratory (the Beacon Hill Group ) who were Air Force technical advisers. They suggested that special sound equipment, left unattended in areas of high UFO activity, might be a useful and inexpensive detecting device. Also, the Pentagon, wanting to be informed of Blue Book's activities, assigned Major Dewey Fournet as Pentagon liaison man.
60 The UFO Controversy in America Fournet was a party to all major developments, investiga tions, projects, and theories that came out of Blue Book dur ing 1 952, and he acted as the Pentagon's chief source of information from the project.n As well as giving Ruppelt and Project Blue Book more au thority, the Air Force implemented Ruppelt's proposed change in UFO reporting methods. On April 5 it issued Air ' Force Letter 200-5 (published on April 29) directing the in telligence officer on every Air Force base in the world to tele gram preliminary sighting reports to A TIC and all major Air Ô Force commands immediately and then to write a more de- · tailed report and mail it to ATIC. A copy of these reports also went to the Air Force director of intelligence in Wash ington. Furthermore, the new directive allowed the Blue Book staff to communicate directly with any Air Force base or unit without going through the normal chain of command.12 This new reporting method resulted in ATIC receiving reports quickly and gave Blue Book more control than it ever had before : the intelligence officers had to report all sightings, and Blue Book staff members could decide, on the basis of preliminary information, which reports to investigate immedi ately.
Two days before issuing Air Force Letter 200-5, the Air Force publicly announced that it was still studying UFOs and would continue as long as some sighting reports remained unexplained. It also alerted all Air Force field commands to report UFOs. The press release warned, however, that the public should not interpret this action as meaning the Air Force had come to any conclusion about the subject.13 ATIC and the Pentagon also decided to cooperate with the press, replacing their "no comment" with the policy of explaining as much as possible to the public.
Even before Project Grudge became Project Blue Book, the press had shown a renewed interest because of the num ber of sightings reported. The press's first test of the official cooperation policy came in the early part of March 1952.
Robert Gina, a writer for Life magazine, visited A TIC to gather material for a feature article on UFOs, which he was writing with H. B. Darrach. They had already been to the Pentagon, where they received as much help as they needed.
The Blue Book officers were especially cooperative, declassi fying sighting reports at Ginna's request. Blue Book wanted to arange for copies of all the UFO reports Life received from its reporters around the world to be sent to the project.H The 1 952 Wave 6 1 Life published the Ginna and Darrach article in its April 7 issue. "Have We Visitors from Space?" was one of the most influential articles ever printed on UFOs, rivaling even the original Keyhoe True article. Ginna and Darrach explained that the Air Force used radar, jet interceptors, and photo graphic equipment in its study, and that it had no reason to believe flying saucers were hostile or a foreign power's weapons. Blue Book, they said, actively solicited sighting re ports from scientists, pilots, weather observers, and private citizens. The authors noted that discs, cylinders, and similar objects of geometrical form, luminous quality, and solid nature had been and might then be present in the earth's at mosphere. "These objects," the authors stated, "cannot be ex plained by present science as natural phenomena-but solely as artificial devices ·created and operated by a high intelli gence." No power on earth, they argued, could technologi cally duplicate the performance of the objects.l5 The article aired in some detail ten reports never before published, some of which ATIC declassified for the authors.
Ginna and Darrach concluded that psychological aberrations, secret weapons, Russian weapons, Skyhook balloons, or atomic test results did not explain adequately these ten sight ings. To support their conclusions, they went to Dr. Walther 1 Reidel, former chief designer and research director of rockets and missiles at Peenemiinde, Germany, who now worked for an aircraft company in California. Reidel said that earth material would bum up from the friction that the reported objects' maneuvers created and that human pilots could not withstand the centrifugal force. He interpreted the lack of jets or jet trails to mean that the UFOs used an unknown power source. "I am completely convinced," he said, "that they have an out-of-world basis."16 Ginna and Darrach also included remarks from Dr. Mau rice A. Boit, a prominent aerodynamicist and mathematical physicist. Bait believed the circular design, while being im practical for earth's atmosphere, had significant advantages for space flight. "The least improbable explanation is that these things are artificial and controlled . . . . My opinion for some time has been that they have an extraterrestrial origin." Ginna and Darrach concluded by posing several questions : Where do they come from? Why are they here? What are their intentions? Are they benign? "Before these awesome questions, science-and mankind-can yet only halt in wonder. An- 62 The UFO Controversy in America swers may come in a generation--or tomorrow. Somewhere in the dark skies there may be those who know."n For the first time a national magazine of Life's stature had come close to advocating the extraterrestrial hypothesis, and reaction to the article was widespread. From April 3 to April 6 over 350 newspapers across the country mentioned the ar ticle. ATIC recieved 1 10 letters concerning the article, most of them about UFOs sighted over the past two years and the ories on the objects' origin, propulsion, and the like. Life it- ·!
self received over 700 letters. When the press questioned the validity of the Life article, the Air Force did not, as in the past, issue a blanket denial. Instead, it stated that "the article is factual, but Life's conclusions are their own."lS The New York Times, maintaining its consistently hostile attitude toward the extraterrestrial hypothesis, printed a re buttal to the Life article. New York Times science writer Walter Kaempffert complained that Gina and Darrach were "uncritical." He attacked the validity of some of the reports by citing inconsistencies and argued that most of the sighted objects were balloons, since they dated from the time of the old Skyhook balloon project. Using information from the Grudge report, Kaempffert said the Air Force had accounted for 99 percent of all sightings and lacked suficient informa tion on the other 1 percent. For Kaempffert, UFOs had as much reality as the Loch Ness monster. In a similar vein, a New York Times editorial suggested that the Grudge report should have put an end to all this nonsense once and for all.
But "the idea was too fantastic to die. After all, the sea ser pent was with us for decades and it took several years before the Loch Ness monster was buried."19 Blue Book braced itself for a flood of reports as a result of , the Life article, assuming that its sensational nature would prompt people to see things in the sky. The day after the magazine appeared, ATIC received nine reports; the next day the reports dropped off.20 Yet the number of monthly reports did increase considerably, from the normal ten to twenty re ports in previous months to ninety-nine in April and then to seventy-nine in May,21 although Ruppelt could not attribute the increase to the Life article.
One consequence of this increase and of the Life article was a surge of press inquiries to Blue Book, so much so that Ruppelt and his staff felt the inquiries interfered with their regular duties. To help out, the Air Force appointed a civil ian, Albert M. Chop, to handle al press relations through the The 1952 Wave 63 Air Force Office of Public Information in the Pentagon.
' Chop received his information from Ruppelt directly and from the Pentagon liaison officer, Major Dewey Fournet. A second result of rising activity in Blue Book was that Thomas K. Finletter, secretary of the Air Force, personally requested • a briefing on UFOs. Afterward Finletter issued a press state ment saying that although there was no concrete evidence to prove or disprove the existence of the so-called flying saucers, a number of sightings remained that Air Force investigators could not explain. As long as this was true, Finletter stated, the Air Fqrce would continue to study UFO reports.22 By June 1952 Project Blue Book was a dynamic, ongoing organization. Ruppelt's briefing policy had made the UFO problem visible to many Air Force and military groups. The difraction grid plan-, the radarscope plan, the new reporting directive, the Battelle Institute study, the Ohio State question naire project, and the monthly status reports al enhanced the prestige of Blue Book and indicated that the Air Force was working intensely and seriously on the UFO mystery.
In June ATIC officially received 149 reports-more than in any previous month in history. The reports came from 1 nearly every section of the country. The Blue Book staff had all it could do to simply screen, classify, and ille them; Rup pelt had to discontinue the monthly status reports so that his staff could deal with al the sightings, and the Air Force tried to meet the growing number of reports by increasing Rup pelt's staf to four officers, two airmen, and two secretaries.
But the staf stil was able to investigate only a fraction of the cases and, in deciding whether a case warranted field investigation, had to rely more and more on the judgment of the base officer who sent in the reports.23 Air Force intelligence officers in the Pentagon became con cerned about the increase in reports and sumoned Ruppelt to Washington to give a special briefing to Director of Intelli gence General Samford, members of his staf, intelligence of ficers from the navy, and people Ruppelt claimed he could not name (possibly CIA members) . At the briefing some in telligence officers told Ruppelt that they were seriously con sidering the possibility that the UFOs were extraterrestrial.
They directed him to obtain more positive information of scientific value.24 Ruppelt hoped that the difraction camera plan would fil this need and continued work on it with a new sense of urgency.
With the upsurge in sighting reports: Harvard astronomer 64 The UFO Controversy in America Donald H. Menzel outlined the solution to the UFO mystery in Look and Time. The key to the UFO problem, he said, was in mirages, reflections, ice crystals floating in clouds, re fraction, and temperature inversion (the condition whereby a layer of cold air is sandwiched between layers of warm air) ; in fact, Menzel argued, temperature inversion could account for nearly all nighttime visual and radar sightings. To prove his point, Menzel conducted an experiment. He half filled a glass cylinder with benzene and floated a layer of acetone on the top; the benzene acted as a layer of cold air and the ace tone as a layer of warm air; the fluids simulated temperature inversion. He then shot a beam of light through the cylinder, and the light curved down as the layers of solution bent it; he agitated the cylinder and the light seemed to move. Thus he accounted for the source of a saucer and its · movements. The temperature inversion theory was most appropriate, he said, for desert sightings where. "saucer reports are more frequent" and to explain radar returns of UFOs. Menzel concluded : "I believe that these saucers will eventually vanish-most appro priately, into thin air, the region that gave birth to them." He felt sad because saucers were a "frightening diversion in a jit- 1 tery world." Menzel thought he was bravely acting as the re alistic, scientific debunker, and described himself as the man "who shot Santa Claus."211 In July Look followed its Menzel article with one by J.
Robert Moskin who, like Darrach and Ginna, had been to A TIC and had received full cooperation from the Blue Book staff.26 Moskin quoted Air Force Chief of Staff General Hoyt Vandenberg as saying the Air Force would continue to study the phenomenon as long as unexplained sightings existed; Vandenberg warned that "with the present world unrest, we cannot afford to be complacent." Moskin described Blue Book's radar and diffraction grid plans, the sound equipment idea, and alluded to the Battelle study. Although personnel at key atomic installations around the country had sighted UFOs, he noted, there was no evidence that the saucers were spying on or threatening the atomic programs. "But," he hinted darkly, "this fear still lies deeply in some responsible minds."27 Moskin made an important point in his article.
He described how intelligence men had attempted to correlate sightings with societal events, such as war tensions, atomic tests, and publicity about flying saucers. "They offer no pat tern," he concluded, "no explanation that satisfied the ex- The 1952 Wave 65 perts. And long ago the Air Force gave up the easy idea that al the excitement is just the result of mass hysteria." Moskin stated that the Air Force felt sure the solution to the problem was either misinterpretation of conventional objects, optical phenomena (as Menzel described) , man-made objects, or ex traterrestrial objects. Even though Ruppelt said there was no direct indication that the objects were a threat to national se curity, Moskin concluded, "that doesn't mean they are not a potential threat."28 In July ATIC received 536 reports, more than three times the number received in June. They came in steadily from all over the country and peaked on July 28, when ATIC re ceived nearly fifty reports on that one day. The situation as sumed near panic proportions. The Blue Book staff thought the country was in. the midst of a full-scale flying saucer scare, mainly as a result of the Time, Life, and Look articles.
However, the staff could find no evidence to substantiate this idea; in fact, it found that. except for the increase a few days after the Life article, the number of reported sightings was about the same immediately before the articles appeared as immediately afterward, on a daily basis. To help meet the challenge of the mass of reports, ATIC received the cooper ation of the Air Weather Service to try quickly to learn if a sighted object was a weather balloon or a temperature inver sion. Project Blue Book stopped issuing monthly reports and the entire staff worked on screening and filing the reports, some staff members working a sixteen-hour day. The Pen tagon liaison officer, Major Dewey Fournet, began working full-time to keep the Pentagon informed about all the re ports.29 During these hectic summer months a series of sensational and important sightings occurred over Washington, D.C. On July 10 the crew of a National Airlines plane saw a strange, bright light just south of Washington in Quantico, Virginia.
On July 1 3 another air crew spotted an unusual object about sixty miles south of the capital; the object came directly up to the plane from below, hovered for a few minutes, and then flew straight up at a tremendous speed. On July 14 a Pan American Airlines crew reported seeing eight UFOs near Newport News, Virginia. The next day observers on the ground reported a UFO in the same area. so On July 19 and 20, between 1 1 :40 P.M. and 3 : 00 A.M., a group of unidentified flying objects appeared on two radar scopes at the Air Route Traffic Control Center at Washington ' 66 The UFO Controversy in America ' National Airport.81 The objects moved slowly at first, about Ă.
100 to 130 miles per hour, and then shot away at "fantastic · speeds." During this same time, several airliner crews reported ' l seeing mysterious lights moving erratically up, down, and · sideways; the objects slowed down, speeded up, and hovered.
The visual sightings corresponded with the radar returns.
Early that morning Chief Radar Controller Harry Barnes , recommended an intercept. At 3 : 00 A.M. the Air Defense Command scrambled two F-94 jet fighters. The squadron charged with protecting the capital from attack by air was usually stationed at Bolling Air Force Base just across the Po tomac, about two miles from the Capitol building. Earlier that day, however, the Air Force had secretly moved the squadron a hundred miles away to New Castle County Air port in Wilmington, Delaware, because of runway repairs at · · Bolling. It took the jets about half an hour to get from New Castle to the Washington National Airport area. When the jets finally arrived, the Air Route Traffic Control _Center vee- ·1: tored them to the targets' positions, but the objects disap- ; · peared as the jets neared, and the pilots were unable to make visual conʮact.82 At the same time, people on the ground re ported seeing strange lights making erratic maneuvers. (There are indications that other airline pilots saw the objects but were reluctant to file reports for fear of ridicule. ) Some of the objects had appeared over the restricted air corridors above the White House and the Capitol.
During the night radarscopes continued to track targets in the Washington, D.C., area. At one time al three radar in stallations at Washington National Airport, and also those at 11 Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, picked up the same 1 targets three miles north of the city. Early in the morning the Air Route Traffic Control Center at Washington National 1 Airport called Andrews Air Force Base to report it had a tar get that appeared to be directly over the Andrews' radio tower. The radio operators rushed out and saw "a huge fiery orange sphere" hovering directly above them. The press swamped AI Chop, the Pentagon public information officer, with inquiries; he said he could not comment until the Air Force had studied the situation. The Air Force refused to ad- : I mit that it had scrambled a jet interceptor.ss Events calmed down until the following weekend. On July 1 1 26, at 10:30 P.M., Air Route Trafic Control Center radar .) 1 once again picked up unidentified flying objects. Tracking be- 11 I gan immediately. A half hour later the Air Force command The 1 952 Wave 67 post in Highlands, New Jersey, scrambled jets still at New Castle Airport to intercept the objects. As on the previous weekend, the objects disappeared from the radar screens when the fighters arrived; the pilots saw nothing and returned to the base. As soon as the targets disappeared from the ra dar screens, people in Newport News, Virginia, began to re port unidentified flying objects-bright lights rotating and emitting alternating colors. A few minutes later Langley Air Force Base in Virginia saw a str,ange light and ordered an other jet scramble. It vectored the jet to the object. The pilot spotted the light but, as before, it disappeared "like somebody turning off a light bulb" when he attempted to approach it.
The jet did manage to obtain a radar lock-on to the invisible target for a few minutes.s4 When the jet returned to Langley Field, the targets reap peared over Washington. Once again officers at the traffic control center at Washington National Airport ordered jets to investigate. This time, however, the returns stayed on the rad arscopes even after the jets entered the area. A game of tag ensued. Each time the jets were able to get close enough to the targets for close-range observation, the objects sped away.
At one point in the chase a pilot noticed the lights were sur rounding his plane and nervously asked the ground control lers what to do. Before they could answer, the lights moved away from the plane and left the area. After twenty minutes of fruitless chasing, the jets ran low on fuel and returned to base. The pilots bad seen only lights in the sky. AI Chop and Dewey Fournet watched the radarscopes during the entire chase sequence. During this same time the radar operators noticed weather targets, the results of a mild one-degree tem perature inversion surrounding the Washington area. The operators claimed that they could easily tell the diference between the actual targets and the returns from this week temperature inversion.s5 These Washington sightings were the most sensational to occur since the Mantell incident in 1948. They made bead lines around the country, even replacing front-page news of the Democratic National Convention in many newspapers. At 1 0 : 00 A.M. on the morning after the sightings, presidential aide Brigadier General Landry, at the request of President Truman, called intelligence authorities in Dayton, Ohio, to find out what was happening in the skies over Washington.
Ruppelt took the call and personally briefed Landry on the phenomenon. Later Ruppelt learned that Truman had been .,I 68 The UFO Controversy in America ;1.
listening in on the conversation.ss The next day an uniden- J tified Pentagon spokesman (probably Chop) told the Wash- .no · ington Post that the Air Force was "fairly well convinced" I : the objects were not a menace to the country. While the Air Force could not discount the extraterrestrial hypothesis, it leaned toward the theory that the objects represented a new kind of physical phenomenon about which it knew very little. "One thing I would like to do," the spokesman said, "is dispel 1 the belief of some that we are holding something back. We 1 are not."87 The Pentagon and Blue Book were swamped with press and congressional inquiries about the UFO situation. So many calls came into the Pentagon alone that its telephone circuits were completely tied up with UFO inquiries for the .
next few days. The Air Force was keenly aware of the dan- - gers involved in jamming communications in the military's .
nerve center. As A1 Chop said later, the Air Force "had to do 1: something to keep the people quiet."38 It decided to hold a press conference to allay fears ·and rumors. On July 29, 1952, .
the Air Force held the longest and largest press conference ·: since World War II. The spokesman at the conference were Major General John A. Samford (director of Air Force intel ligence) , Major General Roger A. Ramey (chief of the Air Defense Command) , Colonel Donald L. Bowers (ATIC's chief of the Technical Analysis Division) , Ruppelt, several civilian electronics experts, and radar expert Captain Roy L.
11 James, who knew about the Washington sightings only from newspaper reports.
Samford headed the conference. He said the Air Force was .
reasonably well convinced that the radarscope sightings on J1: the past two weekends were the result of temperature inver- · sions (one of Menzel's solutions) ; the radar equipment had 1 picked up ground lights reflecting off a layer of cold air be- 11 tween two layers of warm air. Captain James supported this :, by providing technical details on temperature inversions. " Samford then explained that the Air Force was planning to call in outside scientists to examine the Washington sightings more closely (there is no evidence it ever did this) . He said 1 the diffraction grid scheme, still in the planning stage, had \ top priority and would help in gaining accurate scientific J measurements of the objects. The Air Force could not ac- .
count for the fact, Samford admitted, that some of the airline j pilots had actually seen the objects. No astronomer had ever 1 seen a flying saucer, he claimed, but the Air Force had re- ' I ' The 1 952 Wave 69 ceived a certain number of reports of unknown objects from "credible observers of relatively incredible things"; these un knowns constituted about 20 percent of the total reports. Fi nally Samford explained that none of the UFOs seemed to be a threat to the national security. Although all the participants at the conference seemed to agree, Ruppelt later said that Dewey Fournet and a navy radar expert, who were both in the radar room during the July 26 sightings, were not invited to attend the conference because they did not subscribe to the temperature inversion theory.a9 The news conference had a soothing effect on the nation's press. Most reporters and editors fully accepted the Air Force's version of the events on July 19 and 26. The sightings also prompted another round of the urge to explain. The New York Times volunteered the information that the Air Force press statements in the Samford news conference were the result of its analysis of "the thousands of plausible reports of apparitions that have poured in during the last six years." Radar detected the objects over Washington, the New York Times explained, because it could not distinguish between birds, ribbons of tinsel, cellophane, and rain. The newspaper suggested that the Air Force should continue studying UFOs only because it could gain knowledge about meteorological conditions. Bil Lawrence, writing in the New York Times, asserted that the explanation for the UFOs should be sought in the realm of mass psychology rather than in scientific legit imacy. Taking a similar stance, the Christian Science Monitor chalked up the sightings to inadequately understood natural phenomena and "the vagaries of the human mind." The American people had problems enough, the paper said, with out worrying about either "heterogeneous oddities which so far display no menace or outbreaks of fancy without credible foundation." Herbert B. Nichols, a special correspondent for the Monitor, explained that the public remained interested in , flying saucers because it loved a mystery and "why spoil it?"40 The Baltimore Sun compared flying saucers with the Loch Ness monster and the British "silly season." The reason Americans saw more flying saucers was that America was a larger country and had a longer silly season. The Milwaukee Journal explained that it took very little imagination to see a flying saucer, and if imagination were not enough, "a little al coholic stimulation will help." Writer Elliot Lawrence, in an article in Coronet magazine, interviewed a man who had once witnessed a secret demonstration of a saucerlike craft; 70 The UFO Controversy in A merica the inventor had blueprints for a spaceship that could "skip ' through the air like a fiat stone." The witness did not know where the inventor was at present but thought he had gone to the Soviet Union before the war and was still there. There fore, the saucers were probably Russian secret weapons.41 Some of the press was not so enthusiastic about the confer ence. The Washington Post, which had been in on the inner workings of the Washington sightings, decided upon a wait and-see attitude. It criticized Menzel's theories : radar had "detected twelve different objects" and the radar sightings were the most impressive to date. "The best advice at this point," the Washington Post said, "would be to keep your mind open and your fingers crossed.'' The Denver Rocky Mountain News found the Air Force's inability to identify the origin of UFOs "incredible" and "terrifying.'' The News suggested that the Air Force tell the public if these were mili tary secret weapons; if the Air Force was unable to identify the objects, then "it should not boast about its scientific and military advances until it comes up with the right answer.''42 C. B. Allen, columnist for the New York Tribune, expressed a minority viewpoint : the Samford news confer ence "had gone far toward its obvious purpose of debunking the whole snow-balling phenomenon of 'Flying Saucers.' " Drew Pearson believed the news conference was important because the Air Force had admitted for the first time that personnel had recorded radar and observational data at the same time, and he implied that the objects could be from an other planet. Life magazine also noted that the Air Force had admitted concurrent radar, ground, and observational sight ings. A Life reporter had asked the Air Force about the jet interceptors that it had originally denied dispatching; after a confrontation, the Air Force admitted to the jet action but made no other comment. The Life reporter posited that per haps the Air Force had "known more about the blips than it admitted. "43 The Washington sightings also prompted a full expression · of the urge to explain among scientists. Physician Edgar l Mauer, writing in Science, believed it was time to examine the problem of the existence of saucers in physiological spheres "other than the psyche," since scientists had not been able to come up with a plausible explanation. Mauer's analy sis : "flying disks are motes in the eyes of a dyspeptic micro cosm or perhaps some abnormal cortical discharges in the migrainous.'' Professor C. C. Wylie, head of the astronomy The 1 952 Wave 7 1 department at the University of Iowa, said "the object" over Washington was the planet Jupiter. Unless the Air Force gave the complete answer to the sightings in clear astronomical terms, Wylie argued, "belief in visitors from outer space will be strengthened in those who cannot distinguish between speculation and scientific reasoning." The distinguished Dr.
Gerard Kuiper, head of the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, said the objects were weather balloons.44 Dr. Jessie Sprowls, professor of abnormal psychology at the University of Maryland, told the country in a radio inter view that the reports were the product of hallucination. His advise was "Just sort of forget about it." Dr. Horace Byers, chairman of the meteorology department at the University of Chicago, attributed the sightings to "junk" in the skies, such as balloons, meteors; reflections, clouds, and the like. "I know of no reputable scientist who places any credence in reports that so-called flying saucers come from a mysterious or unex plained source," he said. Dr. Otto Struve, University of Cali fornia astronomer, explained that the evidence for the reality of flying saucers "appears to be completely negative to an as tronomer." Dr. I. M. Levitt, director of the Pels Planetarium in Philadelphia, agreed with the inversion theory and said the sightings were due to mirages and temperature inversions. Dr.
Donald Menzel asserted again that the sightings would disap pear "when the present hot spell is over." Even Einstein had an opinion about the flying saucers. When a Los Angeles evangelist asked him to comment, Einstein replied : "These people have seen something. What it is I do not know and I am not curious to know."45 While the major wave of sightings was in progress, in the summer of 1952, Dr. J. Allen Hynek discreetly polled for the Air Force forty-four astronomers around the country on their views about UFOs. He found that 5 percent claimed to have seen a UFO. This, Hynek explained, was understandable be cause they spent more time watching the skies than most people; however, astronomers also could discriminate between what was unusual and what was not. In probing their atti tudes toward the subject, Hynek found that 1 6 percent were completely indiferent, 27 percent mildly indifferent, 40 per cent mildly interested, and 1 7 percent very interested. Most of them believed that UFO reports could be explained as misidentifications of conventional objects. But when Hynek took the time to explain the exact nature of the phenomenon and to describe some of the more puzzling cases, "their inter- 72 The UFO Controversy in A merica est was almost immediately aroused, indicating that their gen- , eral lethargy is due to lack of information." Hynek also ; found an "overwhelming fear of publicity . " A newspaper headline to the effect of "Astronomer Sees A Flying Saucer" would be "enough to brand the astronomer as questionable among his colleagues." Hynek concluded that most astrono mers were not ·actually hostile to the subject but did not want to become involved because of publicity and the tenuous and unreliable nature of the data.46 The Washington sightings marked the high-water point of the 1952 wave. ATIC received 326 reports in August, down 2 1 0 from the July total. The Blue Book staff concentrated on filing and screening. The monthly status reports remained sus pended but work on the questionnaire, the statistics project, and the diffraction grid continued.
The UFO sightings had had an ominous effect on the mili tary. Not only was the Pentagon swamped with UFO in quiries and Blue Book immersed in a huge backlog of re ports, but air bases and installations around the country were 1 feeling the effects as well. On August 1 , 1952, the New York 1 Times reported that the Air Force had been getting so many flying saucer inquiries that "regular intelligence work had been affected." An Air Force spokesman (probably Fournet ) re ported that one full-time man was already working on the press inquiries and still other people in other departments had to answer some of the questions. The Christian Science Monitor said that Captain F. R. Shafer, commanding officer of the Air Force Filter Center in South Bend, Indiana, was receiv ing so many UFO reports that he was forced to spend a few hours every day studying them. The same was true, the report said, for Captain Everett A. Turner of the Chicago Filter Center; his weekends had been hectic, devoted to screening and sending in his reports to Washington and ATIC. General ' Ramey appeared on the nationally televised CBS show "Man of the Week" a few days after the Washington news confer ence to answer questions about UFO reports. Essentially say ing the same things that Samford had said at the conference, Ramey also noted that the Air Force was trying to come up , with "fast answers" in order to avert hysteria.47 Perhaps Air Force Chief of Staff General Hoyt Vanden berg best summed up the rising feelings of many Air Force , officials in an interview with the Seattle Post-lntelligencer.
After reiterating that UFOs were neither extraterrestrial, pro ducts of foreign technology, nor secret weapons, he bluntly a t' The 1 952 Wave 73 i stated that he did not like the "continued, long-range occur renee of what might be called mass hysteria about flying sau r, cers." He went on to say that "The Air Force has had teams 1Ó of experts investigating all reports for several years, since the āĀ end of World War II, and they have never found anything to 5 substantiate the existence of such things as flying saucers."48 'I Donald Menzel reflected this growing. Air Force attitude as well. Look quoted him on September 9 as saying once again l ' that the UFOs in Washington, D.C., were mirages. Menzel · had examined the case and decided that the reason both the · pilots and radar saw the same objects was that both were 1 "operating under the same meteorological conditions." Fur thermore, Menzel reasoned, it was highly unlikely that the objects were extraterrestrial : if they have spaceships, then they probably have radio, and if they have radio, they would have contacted us. "If inter-planetary travelers came here they wouldn't hang around like ghosts; they'd get off their ships and have a look at us. Wouldn't you on Venus?" Men zel remarked that the flying saucer scare could be dangerous "in the sense that if an enemy were to attack us tomorrow, it ' might take 24 hours for the people in the target area to make up their minds whether it really was a terrestrial enemy or · somebody from Venus."49 Although the 1952 wave of sightings generated growing i anxiety, it also created more genuine interest. The increasing number of articles about UFOs seemed to have contributed to the interest; Ruppelt found that in a six-month period 148 newspapers carried 1 6,000 items about UFOs. Many previ ously skeptical people now wanted to know more about the phenomenon. As a result, some professional people initiated projects to study the flying saucer reports. In Wisconsin a group of electronics engineers and technicians from a reserve unit of the Army Signal Corps set up Project Vortex, the pur pose of which was to receive information about UFOs and to conduct research. The Wichita ( Kansas) Beacon organized thirty part-time reporters to be on "camera alert" for UFOs.
Ohio Northern University initiated an independent UFO in vestigation that scientists at the university would conduct. In spite of the increased public interest in the phenomenon dur ing the summer months, the university stated, "little bas been done to adequately screen information and to aid in present ing a scientific appraisal of this phenomenon to the general public." Moreover, there was a need for a private organiza tion to collect the data objectively and distribute the results 74 The UFO Controversy in America of a careful study to the public. Ohio Northern hoped that its proposed study would "lead to a more logical appraisal of phenomena observed in all walks of life." With this an nouncement Ohio Northern began soliciting reports and worked on the data for the next year. 5o During 1952 two private research groups came into being.
The first was Civilian Saucer Investigation of Los Angeles, founded by Ed Sullivan, a technical writer for North Ameri can Aviation Corporation. The organization included scien tists from the Los Angeles area with Dr. Walther Reidel its most prominent member. The second was the Aerial Phenom ena Research Organization ( APRO) , formed by Coral Lorenzen, a private UFO researcher in Sturgeon Bay, Wis consin. Basically a collecting organization, APRO attempted to work independently of the Air Force and come to its own conclusion based on what evidence the group could amass.
The organization published a bimonthly newsletter, The A.P.R.O. Bulletin.lil With small membership, these two or ganizations were the first major independent groups es tablished for the specific purpose of looking into the UFO mystery.
Professional organizations now began to take an interest in the subject. In October 1952 the American Optical Society sponsored a symposium on UFOs and invited Drs. Hynek, Menzel, and Liddel (of the Bendix Aviation Corporation and a member of the Atomic Energy Commission) to give papers before the society. In his paper, Menzel reiterated his familiar theories of mirage, reflection, refraction, temperature inver sion, and the like. For Menzel these theories could explain all sighting reports that the Air Force now listed as unknown. 52 Urner Liddel took a similar stance in his paper, "Phantas magoria or Unusual Observations in the Atmosphere." Frankly stating that he prepared the paper because "the na tion was in the throes of a flying saucer scare," he thought it worthwhile "to take any action which might alleviate the hys teria." Liddel's analysis was that "hucksters of science" caused much of the flying saucer scare. These people were mainly newspaper reporters who fed on the scare because it provided a "lucrative business." Liddel then attempted to ex plain some sightings, concluding that all reports basically stemmed from reflections, mirages, and psychological inade quacies. Furthermore, he argued, conditioned fear of atomic weapons and the secrecy surrounding them as well as the UFO sightings around atomic installations had contributed to r I The 1952 Wave 75 .
i the current "mass hysteria." "Thus, just as ghosts are seldom I seen outside [away from] ceÿeteries or haunted houses, .
s?, flying saucers are seen at pomts of greatest fear psychosts.
J Liddel concluded that he knew of "NO" evidence leading to I the extraterrestrial hypothesis and that all unexplained reports were due to insufficient scientific data.os Hynek took a different approach. He directly attacked ' Menzel's and Liddel's theories and for the first time departed ' publicly from his hostility to the idea that UFOs were not or- dinary objects. The events of 1 952 had affected him. Instead of believing, as did many Air Force people, that all UFO re ports were the result of hysterical public reactions to illusions, Hynek slowly began to rethink this position in light of the quality and puzzling aspects of the reports. In his paper he gave several examples of particularly puzzling unexplained . cases. He reasoned that if the reports were not of natural phenomena, then an obligation existed to "demonstrate explic itly how . . . specific reports can be explained in terms of balloons, mirages, or conventional aircraft."o4 Hynek became the first scientist in the country to note the destructive effect of ridicule, and he emphasized that ridicule of witnesses and the phenomenon itself acted against scien tific interest in the subject: "nothing constructive is accom plished for the public at large-and for science in the long run-by mere ridicule and the implication that sightings are the products of 'birdbrains' and 'intellectual flyweights.' .
• , Ridicule is not part of the scientific method and people should not be taught that it is.'' Taking a more practical stance, he concluded that the UFO problem was one of "science-public-relations" in that the "chance has consistently been missed to demonstrate on a national basis how scientists can go about analyzing a problem." After the symposium Hy nek filed a report with Project Blue Book saying that the Lid del and Menzel papers were worthless; the two men had not studied the evidence or the literature and were not qualified to speak on the subject. Hynek felt his trip to the society was unproductive. 55 Some people in the Air Force were beginning to think Hy nek was right, that perhaps UFO reports did represent some thing unknown or even extraterrestrial. The Air Force's inves tigation of the Fort Monmouth incident-the September 1951 sightings which were a major influence in th e decision t o re organize Project Grudge-concluded that one of the four ma jor radar and visual reports, the one from the. T-33 pilot, re- 76 The UFO Controversy in America mained unexplained.56 Moreover, the official explanation for the Washington sightings, in spite of Samford's temperature · inversion statements, listed them as unknown. Project Blue Book consulted with scientists working on the Battelle statisti cal plan about Menzel's theories and they agreed that "none of the theories so far proposed would account for more than a very small percentage of the reports, if any."57 Pentagon liaison officer Fournet wanted to look into the . .
situation more closely. Mter meeting with Ruppelt and two . .
Pentagon officers ( Colonels W . A . Adams and Weldon Smith ) , Fournet an!il the other three men decided to study the maneuvers and reported motions of the objects to deter mine whether they were under intelligent control. This idea had been around for some time, and the mass of data col lected in the summer now made such a study feasible. If the study showed that the objects moved in a definite .
pattern (rather than randomly) , then the Air Force would 1 have to consider the extraterrestrial hypothesis a serious alter- ( native. Ruppelt and the Pentagon officers assigned the prob- · lem to Fournet, who began work on it immediately. 58 By the end of 1952 the sighting wave subsided. The frantic days of the past summer gave way to the routine of receiving an average of fifty reports each month for the last three ., months of the year. The Air Force had taken in a record I number of 1,501 reports for the year-nearly twice the total j number of reports received during the previous five years. ' And yet despite this number, Ruppelt estimated that the Air :j Force received reports of only about 10 percent of the total I sightings in the country. 59 j With the number of reports declining, Project Blue Book .
resumed its prewave activities. It started issuing its status re-1· ports again. It sent the Ohio State University questionnaire!· (completed in October) to everyone who filed a report; this · greatly improved the quality of received reports. The Battelle Institute's statistical study also was progressing. The scientists · , decided to stop collecting data at the end of 1952, because l they assumed that additional reports would yield similar data. , and they hoped to complete their study some time in 1953.
The diffraction camera plan was in the final stages of de velopment. ATIC and Dr. Kaplan had hit upon the idea of : using special two-lens Videon cameras, which could take ster-; i eoscopic pictures; ATIC planned to put a diffraction grid over one lens and leave the other free to take a normal pic ture of a suspected UFO. The cameras were accurate, inex- I , The 1952 Wave 77 pensive, and fairly simple to operate. ATIC began to negoti ate in December with Air Defense Command headquarters to place the cameras in air bases around the country and also to mount the grids on the lenses of F-86 gun cameras to take pictures from the air.6o The groups cooperating with Blue Book also made progress. The Air Defense Command had nearly completed its radarscope plan and directed personnel to place all radar scope cameras on a twenty-four-hour alert. In addition, ADC made the Ground Observers Corps (a group of civilians who watched the skies for enemy planes that might have broken through the radar network) available to Blue Book and told the members to report any UFOs to ADC, which would then forward the reports to ATIC.61 The navy directed all naval units to report UFOs directly to Air Force headquarters, ATIC, or the Air Defense Command. The Air Weather Ser vice began to give full cooperation to Blue Book, supplying the project with data about weather conditions, balloons, inver sions, and the like.
The year had been exceptionally hectic, and the Air Force breathed a collective sigh of relief at the end of 1 952. The great mass of UFO reports had created a climate in which Fournet, Hynek, and others had begun to consider seriously the extraterrestrial hypothesis as one of many explanations for the sightings. But for others in intelligence circles the 1 952 sightings had the opposite effect. They firmly believed the reports signified only psychological manifestations . of a so ciety caught in the grips of a potentially dangerous scare. By 1953 a growing number of people in the Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency began to think that-for reasons of national security-the number of UFO reports had better be reduced drastically, if not eliminated altogether.
4 THE ROBERTSON PANEL AND ITS EFFECTS ON AIR FORCE UFO POLICY I ·• I" Official policy on UFOs switched dramatically in 1 953. M-=ୣ ter building its investigatory capacity in 1 952, Project Blu!
Book by the end of 1953 could no longer adequately investi gate or analyze UFO reports and functioned mainly as a pub lic relations and collecting office.
This change was due · · primarily to th e recommendations o f a group o f scientists who 11 formed the Robertson panel. The convening of this CIA sponsored panel was a pivotal event in UFO history. AI though much of the information concerning the impetus for the panel remains in CIA and Pentagon files and is therefore unavailable, sufficient information is accessible to reconstruct most of the events leading to the Air Force's policy reversal.
.
The CIA became interested in the UFO phenomenon dur- '· ing the 1 952 wave of sightings.t The CIA and some high-1 ranking Air Force officers, including Generals Vandenberg and Samford, thought the mass of UFO reports might consti tute a threat to the national security. It was possible for the Soviet Union, or any other "enemy," to use UFOs as a decoy in preparation for an attack on the United States. It was pos- ' sible that a deliberately confused American public might think attacking enemy bombers were UFOs. At the least, a foreign power could exploit the flying saucer craze to make the public doubt official Air Force statements about UFOs and thereby undermine public confidence in the military • .
Moreover, the volume of sighting reports in 1 952 bad clogged normal military intelligence channels and this certainly would pose a danger during an enemy attack.2 I With the information from the Battelle Memori.U Insti- 78 Jl' I.
The Robertson Panel and its Effects 79 tttute's statistical study, it would be possible to assess the 1 ·dangers UFOs might represent. But a snag developed in the 1 1plans. The Battelle Memorial Institute was not ready to Я.present its findings. At a preliminary meeting in early Decem fl;ber 1 952, Battelle repreаentatives strongly reбommended that ·. iithe proposed CIA meetmg be postponed until Battelle could 11.make the results of its study available to A TIC. Battelle's 0 problem was that the data it was working with were unreli- lable, and it could not document what it felt should be sup ported by facts from the analysis. Sometimes critical informa tion was missing from a report, and even in a well-documented report an element of doubt always existed about the data because of its anecdotal nature. This made positive identifica . tion of the reported objects difficult.
J Since the need for .precise data was important for identifi cation, Battelle suggested that the Air force set up controlled experiments in areas of high UFO activity. These areas could be stocked with skywatch equipment (radar, cameras, meas uring equipment, etc. ) . Al conventional objects crossing the area would be known in advance. Therefore, any uniden tified flying objects could be recognized at once by a simple process of elimination. Once Battelle had data from these controlled experiments, it would apply the information to past unidentified sightings and would lay the flying saucer controversy to rest once and for all. Furthermore, the Air Force would benefit from this experiment because it would then know just bow much attention to pay to a massive wave of sightings like the one just passed. The Air Force could make positive statements reassuring the public that the mili tary bad everything under control.
But against Battelle's objections and mindful of the poten tial threat to national security, the CIA decided to go forward. It convened a distinguished panel of nonmilitary sci entists to analyze the Blue Book data. Five outstanding scien tists in the physical sciences, two associate panel members, and various Air Force and CIA representatives met from Wednesday, January 14, to Saturday, January 17, 1953, in Washington, D.c.a Dr. H. P. Robertson, formerly at Princeton and the Cali fornia Institute of Technology and an expert in mathematics, cosmology, and relativity, chaired the panel. At that time he was director of the Weapons System Evaluation Group in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and a CIA classified em ployee. Panel member Samuel A. Goudsmit, an associate of 80 The UFO Controversy in America Einstein, discovered electron spin in 1 925 in Holland, helped found a school of theoretical physics, and headed a mission at the end of World War II to investigate the Germans' progress in developing the atomic bomb. In 1 953 he was on the physics staff of the Brookhaven National Laboratories.
Luis Alvarez, a high-energy physicist, contributed to a mi crowave radar system and the atomic bomb and received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1 968. Thornton Page, former pro fessor of astronomy at the University of Chicago, was a physicist at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory during World War II and in 1 953 was deputy director of the Johns Hopkins' Operations Research Office. Lloyd Berkner, the final panel member, had accompanied Admiral Byrd on the 1 928-30 Antarctic expedition, had been a physicist with the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, had headed the radar section of the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, and had served as executive secretary of the De partment of Defense's Research and Development Board in World War II. Later he became special assistant to the secre tary of state and at the time of the panel was one of the I directors of the Brookhaven National Laboratories.-i Two associate panel members were J. Allen Hynek and Frederic C. Durant. Hynek was only invited to selected meet ings. Durant, an army ordance test station director, past president of the American Rocket Society, and president of the International Astronautical Federation, wrote the sumв mary of the proceedings. Also present were Ruppelt, Dewey Fournet, ATIC chief General W. M. Garland, Navy Photo Interpretation Laboratory representatives Lieutenant R. S.
Neasham and Harry Woo, and CIA personnel : Dr. H. Mar shall Chadwell, Ralph L. Clark, and Philip G. Strong.5 The panel convened on Wednesday without Lloyd Berkner, who did not arrive until Friday afternoon. It began to re viewing the CIA's interest in UFOs. Dr. Robertson requested that panel members investigate the reports according to their specialties. For example, astronomer Thornton Page should focus on nocturnal lights and green fireballs and physicist Al varez on radar cases. Then the panel watched two color films,, both taken in daylight and showing maneuvering light sources in the sky. Nicholas Mariana had taken one movie in Great Falls, Montana, and navy Commander Delbert C. Newhouse the other in Tremonton, Utah. The Marian!!- film showed two, objects flying behind a building and a water tower. The Newhouse film, which the Air Force had kept classified, I The Robm,on Panel and '" EfJecu 8 1 4 showed twelve objects flying in loose formation through the sky. The Project Blue Book staff believed the films were among the best evidence it had to give credence to the ex traterrestrial intelligence hypothesis. 6 Ruppelt briefed the panel on Blue Book's method's of tracking down UFO reports. Hynek described the Battelle Memorial Institute study, which was still in progress. The panel discussed a few case histories and saw a special movie of sea gulls in flight that tried to duplicate the Newhouse ' firm. It then heard a report on Project Twinkle, the Air Force's attempt to decipher the green fireball mystery. Gen eral Garland spoke, explaining that more intelligence efforts coupled with better briefings should be used to sort and col lect UFO reports. He recommended declassifying reports · completely on a continuing basis and increasing A TIC's UFO analysis section. Later, Hynek outlined a skywatch program which might be an inexpensive adjunct to current astro nomical programs. Trained astronomers could photograph a UFO while doing other work through a program of this kind.
Hynek suggested ten different observatories where Blue Book could implement this plan. 7 On Friday morning Dewey Fournet read a paper on re ported UFO movements, concluding that the extraterrestrial hypothesis might be the key to the mystery. Although impressed that Fournet had been with the UFO project for fifteen months and was an aeronautical engineer, the panel members could not accept his interpretation of what they per ceived as "raw, unevaluated reports." During the three days of examining Blue Book data, the panel reviewed eight cases in detail, fifteen in general, and saw two movies. It discussed tentative conclusions and recommendations on Friday after noon and commissioned Robertson to draft the final report.
The members spent the next day correcting and altering the draft. The panel had spent a total of twelve hours studying the UFO phenomenon. The panel adjourned Saturday after noon, January 1 7, ending the most influential government sponsored, nonmilitary UFO investigation of the 1950s.s Probably because of time limitations and the small number of reports the panel members examined, they disregarded ap parent anoinalistic evidence in certain UFO reports. For ex ample, the Navy Photograph Interpretation Laboratory spent 1 ,000 hours analyzing the Newhouse film and concluded that the objects in the firm were neither birds, balloons, aircraft, nor reflections; rather, they were "self-luminous." The labora- 82 The UFO Controversy in A merica tory based its analysis on the assumption that Newhouse's dis tance estimates were accurate. Rejecting this analysis, the panel members reasoned that Newhouse probably was mis taken in his distance estimates. As S. A. Goudsmit said, "by assuming that the distance was less, the results could be ex plained as due to a formation of ducks or other birds, reflect ing the strong desert sunlight but being just too far and too luminous to see their shape. This assumption yielded reason able speeds and acceleration!' The panel concured in the bird explanation. The panel used similar reasoning to inter pret the Mariana firm. Mariana saw two jet planes about to land at a nearby air base just before his sighting. He testified, however, that he knew the diference between -the planes and the objects. But because the jets and the two objects had ap- · peared near the same place at about the same time, the panel !
decided Mariana was mistaken and had taken a film of the · jets.9 After reviewing the data, the panel found no evidence that t UFOs represented a direct threat to the national security. The ; I Air Force's concern over UFOs ''was probably caused by · public pressure," due to the number of articles and books on the subject. Nevertheless, the panel warned that "having a military source foster public concern in 'nocturnal meander- .
ing lights' " was "possibly dangerous." The implication was · that military interest in the objects might encourage people tÒj believe the objects were a potential threat to national se· · curity. The panel also concluded that the reports represented;· little, if any, valuable scientific data; the material was "quite .
irelevant to hostile objects that might some day appear." As- : suming that visitors would probably come from our solar sys- : tern, Thornton Page noted that astronomical knowledge of !
the solar system made the existence of extraterrestrial intelli- !
gent beings extremely unlikely. Page also incorrectly assumed · that UFO reports occurred only in the United States, and the idea that extraterrestrial objects would visit only one country seemed "preposterous. "10 Even though the panel did not believe UFOs were a direct 1 threat to the national security, it did find a potentially dan gerous threat in the reports. The panel commented that "the continued emphasis on the reporting of these phenomena I does, in these parlous times, result in a threat to the orderly I functioning of the protective organs of the body politic." The reports clogged military intelligence channels, might precipi- .
tate mass hysteria, and might make defense personnel ' I I The Robertson Panel and its Effects 83 misidentify or ignore "actual enemy artifacts." In language reminiscent of Project Grudge's recommendations, the panel found that the reports could make the public vulnerable to "possible enemy psychological warfare" by cultivating a "morbid national psychology in which skillful hostile propa ganda could induce hysterical behavior and harmful distrust of duly constituted authority."ll At last the military had found the threat to national security-the UFO reports, not , the UFOs. The solution of the UFO problem now assumed another dimension. The real enemy had finally been iden tified. The battle was joined.
Based on its conclusions, the panel made four recommen dations. The first concerned Blue Book's diffraction camera, radarscope, and skywatch plans. It suggested using the dif fraction cameras not to collect UFO data but to allay public anxiety, especially because the plan was the result of public pressure. Similarly, it recommended implementation of the radarscope plan because it could help explain natural inter ference in the radar screens. But it rejected Dr. Hynek's ex panded skywatch plan. "A program of this type," the panel argued, "might have the adverse effect of overemphasizing 'flying saucer' stories in the public mind." In a second pro posal, the panel suggested that the two major private UFO research organizations, the Aerial Phenomena Research Or ganization and the Civilian Saucer Intelligence, "be watched because of their potentially great influence on mass thinking if widespread sightings should occur. The apparent irresponsi bility and the possible use of such groups for subversive pur poses should be kept in mind." Third, the members recom mended that national security agencies take steps immediately to strip the UFO phenomenon of its special status and elimi nate the aura of mystery it had acquired. This could be done by initiating a public education campaign so that people could recognize and react promptly to true indications of hos tile intent.12 Finally, in its fourth proposal, the Robertson panel out lined a detailed program of public education with two pur poses : "training and 'debunking.' " Training would help ' people identify known objects so that there would be "a 1 marked reduction in reports caused by misidentification and resultant confusion." Debunking would reduce public interest in UFOs and therefore decrease or eliminate UFO reports.
The education program, by using the mass media, would concentrate on "actual case histories which had been puzzling 84 The UFO Controversy in America at first but later explained. As with conjuring tricks, there is much less stimulation if the 'secret' is known." Such a pro gram would reduce "the current gullibility of the public and consequently their susceptibility to clever hostile propaganda." The panel suggested that the government hire psychologists familiar with mass psychology as consultants; it named a few, including Hadley Cantril who had written a book on the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast. The panel also recommended that the Air Force use any army training firm company, Walt Disney Productions, and personalities such as Arthur Godfrey in this massive educational drive. In a key discussion before making recommendations, the panel members decided that a limited expansion of Blue Book's in· vestigatory capacity was needed to increase the percentage of explained reports; -this also was necessary to reinforce the proposed educational program.ts A few panel members may have prejudged the UFO issue.
At the meetings, Page refused to take the subject seriously and Robertson had to chastize him for joking about the UFO rĜ· ports. Writing in 1965 to a person interested in UFOs, S. A.
Goudsmit said he had not changed his mind about the UFO phenomenon since the meetings; he still believed the subject: was "a complete waste of time and should be investigated by psychiatrists rather than physicists." Furthermore, the extra terrestrial theory was "almost as dangerous to the general wel fare of our unstable society as drug addiction and some other mental disorders." Hynek was aware of these attitudes, and although the panel members did not ask him to sign the final report, he later stated he would not have signed it even if they ' had asked. He argued that the panel made a judgment about UFOs in less than four days whereas he had spent more than, four years studying the problem and was unable to arrive at · any conclusions.14 When asked why he did not speak out against the panel, Hynek replied that he was only "small po-1 tatoes" then; not only would the Air Force have ignored him, but he would have jeopardized his standings with the Air· Force and with the astronomical community.tll The Robertson panel conclusions were roughly similar to I those of the 1 949 Projects Sign and Grudge reports. Sign also wanted the Air Force to "eliminate or greatly reduce the mystery'' associated with UFOs. Grudge found that enemies could use UFOs to create a "mild form of hysteria" in the public and recommended publicity to dispel "public appre hension."16 Both Sign and Grudge found that UFOs The Robertson Panel and its Effects 85 represented no direct threat to national security. Also, the Robertson report, like the Sign and Grudge reports, set the tone of future Air Force UFO policy. The panel did not recommend declassification of the sighting reports and did not exercise its apparent opportunity to move the study from the military to the academic community. Rather, because of the UFO reports' threat, the panel implied that the Air Force should tighten security , continuing the situation whereby non military personnel could not obtain the technical and anec dotal information the Air Force had amassed over the last four years, and also increasing public suspicions derived from secrecy. The panel believed the dissemination of information would lead to increased public awareness of UFOs and this would eventually mean an increase in reports. It assumed that keeping quiet would make UFOs disappear.
The Robertson report also had critically _important public relations ramifications. It enabled the Air Force to state for the next fifteen years that an impartial scientific body had ex amined the data thoroughly and found no evidence of any thing unusual in the atmosphere. More importantly, the panel gave the Air Force's UFO program the necessary military raison d'etre it needed to continue : it had to mount a ma jor effort against UFO reports because they were a threat to the national security. The Air Force could now sidestep the substantive issues of the nature and origin of the objects and concentrate on the public relations problems involved in elim inating UFO reports. Blue Book was therefore relieved of its main investigating burden. Yet since the Air Force's overall mission was to monitor everything in the skies, Blue Book would still investigate and analyze UFO reports, but on a greatly reduced scale.
The panel submitted its formal conclusions and recommen dations to the CIA and, as far as can be ascertained, to the Pentagon and higher echelons of the Air Force. Robertson showed the final report to General Cabell (former director of intelligence) , who expressed satisfaction with it. The CIA did not give a copy of the report to Ruppelt or his staff in 1953, although it did release a summary to Blue Book a few years ; later. But shortly after the panel adjourned, the CIA sum- 1 moned Ruppelt and Garland to its headquarters to tell them about the recommendations. As Ruppelt reported it, the offi cials explained that the Robertson panel had recommended expanding Blue Book's staff, using instruments for more accu rate measurements, and terminating all secrecy in the project 86 The UFO Controversy in America by reclassifying sighting reports,17 If Ruppelt understood and reported correctly, it remains a mystery why the CIA gave out this false information. The panel members had recom mended continued use of some plans in their discussions but had not made this the focus of their formal recommenda- tions.
.
Armed with these CIA "recommendations" and orders from his superiors to follow them, Ruppelt began implemen tation. He tried to have the Newhouse film declassified and shown to a press conference. This was to be a major event because in 1 952 the press had heard rumors of the film and Fournet had fought hard with the Air Force Office of In formation to release it. But just before the showing was to take place, Air Force officials stopped it and the press confer ence. According to Ruppelt, the military believed the sea gull theory was weak. Moreover, the new publicity policy was to keep silent.18 Other events happened at Project Blue Book that Ruppelt could not account for. Toward the end of 1 952 the Air Force began to work out a nationwide plan to set up cameras in connection with radar units (this plan was different from the plan to take photographs of radarscopes) . The cameras would photograph any UFO that radar picked up and would provide accurate measurements of the objects. The Air Force hoped this plan would either take the place of the diffraction grid camera plan or supplement it. Suddenly, and seemingly , without reason, the Air Force abandoned it, saying the dif fraction cameras would suffice. Even the radarscope plan, which the panel had suggested, was not producing valuable information. Thus, the diffraction camera scheme, which was ready for implementation, assumed even more importance.
The Air Force placed about a hundred Videon cameras equipped with diffraction grids in air bases around the coun- I, try and tested them. After a few weeks o f testing, however, it found that because of chemical decomposition the grids were slowly disintegrating and losing their light-separating ability.
It decided to tr.y to repair or substitute the grids but never did, finally abandoning the entire idea. After one full year of work, the Air Force allowed the diffraction camera plan to die, although the Videon cameras without grids remained in operation at the bases.t9 In the face of growing Pentagon opposition to mounting a full-scale UFO investigation, Ruppelt conceived an idea to supplement his diminishing Blue Book staff. During wartime The Robertson Panel and its Effects 87 the 4602d Air Intelligence Service Squadron, a unit within the Air Defense Command, gathered intelligence from cap , tured enemy pilots. But during peacetime the unit only simu lated this activity and bad no other duties. In a February 1953 briefing to high-ranking ADC officers, Ruppelt suggested that the 4602d take over Project Blue Book's field investi gation. The men of the 4602d would get on-the-spot investi gation experience and also expand Blue Book's field work.
General Garland liked the idea and, with General Burgess, worked out the transfer plan, which became operative in De cember 1 953. It was the last major expansion of Blue Book's activities. 20 Ruppelt temporarily left Blue Book in February 1 953 for a several-month assignment in Denver. Since his replacement never came, this left a staff lieutenant in charge. When Rup pelt returned he found that the Air Force had reassigned several members of his staff and had sent no replacements.
Eventually the Blue Book staff dwindled to Ruppelt and two assistants. This was not in keeping with the panel's recom mendation, as Ruppelt understood it, to expand Blue Book.
According to Ruppelt, his superior officers gave him orders to build up Blue Book; yet every time he tried to add personnel or expa'nd in any way, the Air Force refused to concur. Rup pelt left Blue Book permanently in August 1953. As a reserve he had been reactivated for the Korean War; now that it had ended he accepted a position in private industry. No replace ment came for him and he turned over his command to Air- ' man First Class Max Futch.21 The fact that an airman com manded the project demonstrates the priority the Air Force , placed on it.
Dewey Fournet left the Pentagon in the same year. These i two departures meant that the last effective military support for the continued study of UFOs based on the premise that they could be extraterrestrial vehicles had vanished. Hynek still supported such study, but he was a civilian and could only submit suggestions. Moreover, although he believed the Air Force should study the subject systematically, he feared "dicule from the academic community if he came out strongly 1 for a continued systematic investigation. Hynek simply kept quiet and continued in his role as consultant.22 During the first half of 1953, even as the Air Force de l ided to downplay publicity about UFOs, popular UFO ' peculation boomed. Donald Keyhoe headed the field when excerpt of his book Flying Saucers From Outer Space ap- 88 The UFO Controversy in A merica peared in an October issue of Look magazine. Keyhoe began the book in the summer of 1952, acting on Blue Book's new liberal attitude toward the press.
Having heard General Samford say at the July 1 952 press conference that the Air Force had no reason to classify sighting reports, Keyhoe asked AI Chop, Pentagon UFO information officer, for nu merous classified reports. The Office of Information routinely denied Keyhoe's request. But Chop, who was leaning toward the extraterrestrial hypothesis, asked Dewey Fournet to help.
Fournet, who also tended toward the extraterrestrial theory, went to Ruppert and had al the sightings that Keyhoe re quested declassified and turned over to him. With these sight ings, Key hoe had enough information for his new book. 23 The Air Force feared that the excerpt of Keyhoe's book in Look would result in another rash of sighting reports. To combat this it pressured Look into including an Air Force disclaimer in the article. The disclaimer stated that the in formation contained in the article was unofficial and that the Air Force had found nothing unusual about the objects. In addition, Look allowed the Air Force to insert parenthetical remarks disputing certain points throughout the article.24 As well as trying to neutralize the expected impact of the Look article, Air Force officials charged that Keyhoe had ob tained his sighting reports fraudulently and that the Air Force had no record of releasing them. Keyhoe went directly to AI Chop to counter this claim. (Chop had resigned his press in formation post in March 1 9 5 3 . ) He willingly signed an affi davit stating that he had released the sighting reports, which were from official Air Force files, to Keyhoe. Eventually the Air Force admitted this was the case. The entire affair deepened Keyhoe's conviction that a massive cover-up was taking place within the Air Force to keep vital information from the public. He believed high-ranking Air Force officials knew UFOs represented extraterrestrial intelligence, and be cause they had not informed the public of this, Keyhoe felt certain it meant only one thing : a conspiracy of- silence. Key hoe's book, Flying Saucers From Outer Space, came out in ·' October 1953 and was one of the most widely read books of the decade, selling over half a million copies.25 Through its sales, Keyhoe kept his position in the forefront of private UFO investigators.
Although Keyhoe believed more than ever in an Air Force cover-up, he admitted in his book that he might have been wrong about the Air Force trying to cover up information in The Robertson Panel and its Effects 89 the early days of the controversy. But, he said, "they knew a lot more than they were telling now." He contended that the Air Force kept facts from the American public to prevent possible panic and hysteria. Keyhoe had heard the argument that an enemy possibly could use the flying saucer scare to its advantage. But he turned the argument on its head. By 1954, Keyhoe wrote, the Russians would have, according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the ability to stage a massive atomic at tack. Keyhoe reasoned that the Russians, just before the at tack, could claim the saucers were actually secret weapons.
"By starting false rumors of Russian saucer attacks, they might cause stampedes from cities, block defense highways, and paralyze cpmmunications just before an A-bomb raid." Therefore, a "grave danger" existed if the Air Force refused to correctly identify· the saucers as extraterrestrial vehicles.26 Keyhoe had learned many of the basic facts. He had ob tained the sighting reports from Blue Book files; he had heard rumors of the Robertson panel meetings and recommenda tions, although he could not verify them; he accurately iden tified the people within the Air Force sympathetic to his rea soning by establishing a direct line to the Air Force through Fournet and Chop. The problem was his interpretation of these facts. He had no way of knowing all the Air Force and CIA reasons for their actions. But because he lacked access to all the information, his interpretation-that the Air Force blocked ful release of information about UFOs to avoid pub lic panic and hysteria-seemed to be the only answer to the Air Force's puzzling behavior. For Keyhoe all outward indi cations of the Air Force's actions led to the conspiracy thesis.
Because Keyhoe's facts were basically correct, the Air Force could not invalidate or refute his interpretation unless it dis closed fully the rationale for its activities. Therefore, the Air Force's main counterattack in 1 953 was to issue press re leases denying Keyhoe's claims and to ward off additional publicity. This only reinforced Keyhoe's contentions and the effect was circular: the more the Air Force denied Keyhoe's conspiracy charge, the more it seemed to be covering up.
At about the same time that Keyhoe released his book, Don ald Menzel published his long-awaited book on the subject as well. Menzel was the first American scientist to write a book on UFOs, and Harvard University Press published it.
He had not changed his mind about the phenomenon. As in previous articles, he explained again in Flying Saucers that the objects were mainly uncommon atmospheric occurences: / 90 The UFO Controversy in America temperature inversions, reflections, lenticular clouds, sun dogs, mock suns, ice crystals floating in the clouds, optical il lusions, and, especially, mirages. The very idea that UFOs represented extraterrestrial intelligence was ludicrous. People who accepted this idea were lunatics, cultists, religious fan atics, or at best frightened and confused.27 Menzel, thinking that a direct attack on specific sighting reports was the best way to explode the "saucer myth," at tempted to solve each major sighting that had achieved noto riety. The faa-fighters of World War II were the sun's reflec tions shining off imperfections of a bomber wing tip ; Captain Mantell had chased a mock sun; the "windows" and struc tures that Chiles and Whitted had described were products of overexicted imaginations, although Menzel could not explain what it was they saw. To show how self-seekers had taken ad vantage of the gullible public, Menzel dwelled on the famous hoaxes of a few years before. He erroneously claimed there were more hoaxes than legitimate reports in the begining of the phenom,enon, and he spent an entire chapter describing Frank Scully's 1950 semihoax, Behind the Flying Saucers, and the events surrounding it.2S Menzel also dealt with the 1896-97 airships and thereby moved these sightings into the UFO debate. Menzel believed the airships were either twinkling stars that appeared to move because of atmospheric refraction, cigar-shaped lenticular clouds, or mirages. The entire airship affair was a product of mass illusion; people wanted to see an airship and therefore did. To back up his argument, Menzel quoted Edison's state ment that airship sightings were ridiculous. This, Menzel said, effectively burst the airship bubble and the sightings stopped after newspapers around the country published Edison's state ment If a person sighted an airship after the publication of Edison's remarks, Menzel reasoned the sighter obviously had not read the article.29 To reinforce his arguments Menzel once again stressed the potential dangers of UFOs in psychological warfare. Ameri cans were suffering from a case of "international jitters," Menzel said, and had been conditioned to report anything un usual because they were anxious about an atomic war. Also, science fiction writers had conditioned the American public to believe in other intelligent life in the universe; therefore, the public interpreted anything unusual in the sky as being evidence for this. Menzel saw no difference between the 1952-53 flying saucer scare and the hysterical reaction to The Robertson Panel and its Effects 91 the Orson Welles 1938 invasion from Mars broadcast. Men zel, as did the Robertson panel, believed the sightings represented a possible danger to the national security. "The public is afraid of saucers-and we need only a match to set I off a nation-wide panic that could far exceed that of the Inva- 11 sion from Mars. In fact, if a foreign power were to pull off a I surprise attack on the United States, millions of Americans would conclude that the flying saucers from Mars or Venus were finally landing!"Bo I, Menzel's book was successful. Published at the same time as the Keyhoe book, many libraries had to decide which book ! to purchase. They more often bought Menzel's book because ' he was an established scientist. Sometimes libraries bought both and put the Menzel book in the science section and the Ñ Keyhoe book in the ·science fiction section. One librarian was I ' so hostile to Keyhoe's book that he decided "no amount of rationalizing about 'future historical importance,' 'balanced collections,' and 'public demand,' can justify their expenditure of tax dollars for books such as Keyhoe's-books whose pur pose seems to us to satisfy a jaded taste for the bizarre and the sensational."31 In addition, Keyhoe's popularity and looseness in thinking helped legitimize Menzel's views. Men zel wrote his book in an acceptable scientific manner. This, coupled with the subject's inherent illegitimacy, enabled Men zel's views to achieve substantial influence in the scientific community.
While the Keyhoe-Menzel debate raged, the Air Force, mindful of the previous year's hectic summer, moved to regu larize and simplify its UFO investigating and reporting methods. First it issued Air Force Regulation 200-2 in Au gust 1953, which superseded Air Force Letter 200-5. The regulation required an air base UFO officer to make a prelimi nary report of a sighting, and it spelled out exactly all the questions he was to ask of the UFO witnesses. The air base officer decided what priority to assign a report according to his determination of the report's intelligence value. The fol lowing year the Air Force amended APR 200-2, stipulating that only the 4602d would make investigations. If a unit was not in the vicinity of a sighting, an air base officer was re quired to make a preliminary report and send it to the 4602d unit nearest him, which would determine if a field investiga tion was warranted. APR 200-2 also took a firm public rela tions stance: it prohibited the release of any information about a sighting to the public except when the sighting was 92 The UFO Controversy in America positively identified. In addition, while Air Force Letter 200-5 had stated that sightings should not be classified higher than restricted, the new regulation (200-2) said all sightings should be classified restricted at the very least. Finally, the regulation directed ATIC to continue analyzing UFO data as they came in from the 4602d units.a2 The new regulation gave the Air Force strong control over the sighting reports it received, and it hoped this control would mean increased identification of the objects. The prohi bition against riving out sighting information reflected the Air Force's attempts to institute the Robertson panel's desire to end public speculation about UFOs with the concomitant threat of increased reports. For the first time the Air Force had institutionalized secrecy at the air base level. To fur ther ward off publicity leaks, the Joint Chiefs of Staff fol lowed up 200-2 with Joint-Army-Navy-Air Force-Publication (JANAP) 146 in December 1953. Under the subheading of "Canadian-United States Communications Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings," the Joint Chiefs of Staff made releasing any information to the public about a UFO report a crime under the Espionage Act, punishable by a one-to-ten-year prison term or a $10,000 fine. JANAP 146 applied to anyone who knew it existed, including commercial airline pilots.as This action effectively stopped the flow of in formation to the public. Only if Blue Book could positively identify a sighting as a hoax or misidentification would the Air Force release information to the public. The policy was in effect until December 1969, when the Air Force termi nated its involvement with UFOs.
The Blue Book status reports subtly reflected the Air Force's new attitude toward sightings. Instead of issuing monthly reports as before, Blue Book issued only four more status reports, all during 1953 and the first two in January and February. The reports displayed a certain defensiveness and concern for public relations. For instance, Blue Book mentioned in all four reports that the decline in sighting re ports was due to a decline in newspaper publicity. There was a "direct relation" between newspaper publicity and UFO re ports : one "highly publicized sighting would again trigger off another 'saucer' scare with resulting pressure on the Air Force and ATIC." Because of possible public hysteria, Proj ect Blue Book was preparing a fact sheet for the public in formation officer in Washington to release. "Thus the Air Force cannot be accused of withholding information." I The Robertson Panel and its Effects 93 J ATIC's concern with public relations was further demon- 1 trated in its new policy of channeling all .
its releases and in formation through the Secretary of the Air Force's Office of 1 Public Information.34 Blue Book's last major ongoing project in 1 953 was the ' Battelle Memorial Institute's statistical study of UFO charac teristics. The institute had finally completed the study. It con- • eluded that the objects did not appear to represent anything unknown or outside the capabilities of human technology, even though earlier in the year the institute acknowledged that the data were highly unreliable. Instead of immediately issu- i ing the report to the press, evidence suggests that the Air I. Force decided to delay the study's release until the most op portune time.s5 , Thus the Air Force's involvement with the UFO con ,1 troversy changed character rather completely during 1953. A year earlier, Blue Book, under Captain Ruppelt, had tried to . set up procedures whereby it could systematically study the i UFO phenomenon, at least within the bounds set by its lim :} ited funds and resources. But by the end of 1 953 the oppor- 1 tunity for such an investigation was gone. Project Blue Book ÏÐ had only three staff members, its investigating capabilities had j gone to another command, and most of its projects had died for lack of funds. Ruppelt, Fournet, and Chop were no longer involved and General Garland never again raised his voice in defense of a UFO investigation.
The CIA-sponsored Robertson panel changed Blue Book's role from seeking the causes of sightings to keeping the sighting reports at a mini mum or, preferably, stopping them completely. Although Project Blue Book continued its work, it would never again be able to conduct a program of thorough investigations.
From 1953 to 1969 Project Blue Book's main thrust was pub lic relations.
In the private sector, Ohio Northern University's study of UFOs also ended fruitlessly in 1 953. Although the research ers had found that about 20 percent of the reports seemed to be of genuinely unusual phenomena, they could not make an adequate scientific study because they had received only 54 reports from the public out of the 200 they estimated they needed for scientific analysis. sa The CIA recommendations became critical for future Air Force action. It would claim for years afterward that it had conducted an adequate scientific investigation, complete with instruments (radarscope camera and Videon diffraction grid) 94 The UFO Controversy in A merica to measure UFO characteristics. Moreover, the Air Force would use the Robertson panel as proof that it had sought the most able scientific evaluation. Meanwhile, the Air Force had unexpected help in its public relations efforts. A growing number of flying saucer "believers," who subscribed to the views of a new group of people called contactees, emerged in 1953 to confuse the controversy even more. But that is an other story.
CONT ACTEES, CLUBS, AND CONFUSION As public interest in unidentified flying objects grew, the UFO phenomenon entered popular culture. Because of its nature, the phenomenon easily lent itself to science fiction, fantasy, sensationalism, and hoax. In the early and middle 1 950s two groups in American society exploited the sensa tional aspects of the phenomenon. As would be expected, the Hollywood movie industry entered the scene early, capitaliz ing on the growing audience for stories associated with UFOs. But the group that captured public attention most was the contactees-people who claimed personal contact, com- ! munication, and interaction with beings from another planet.
Rising to popularity at the same time as the Air Force was ' trying to reduce the number of UFO reports, the contactees 1 increased publicity on the subject and counteracted many of these Air Force efforts. Similarly, the contactees hindered the attempts of people concerned about the UFO phenomenon to 1 convince the public and the Air Force to treat the phenome non seriously. Ironically, the contactees also aided the Air Force by making seemingly ridiculous claims and inviting widespread ridicule of al UFO witnesses. The contactees did not participate directly in the debate over the origin of UFOs, but they embodied many of its elements and became, above all, a divisive force in the controversy.
Since the 1 950s there have been many instances when rep- , utable individuals claimed to have close encounters with UFOs. Occasionally, people with no discernible reason to lie, who were respected members of a community-teachers, ministers, policemen-claimed to have seen occupants or beings in or near a UFO. Puzzled and frightened, these witnesses usually reported their experiences to the police or Air Force because they wanted a reasonable explanation for such a fantastic experience. They often asked for anonymity 95 96 The UFO Controversy in America and were not interested in gaining publicity or money. Their UFO experience seemed to be an aberration from the normal flow of their daily lives. Nothing in their backgrounds sug gested that they hallucinated or perpetrated a hoax (although a serious investigator could not ignore these possibilities) .
Sometimes these witnesses presented evidence of their experi ence in the form of corroborating witnesses, flattened and scorched grass, broken tree limbs, and deep depressions in the ground. Often they claimed that these encounters produced strange side effects, such as electrical failures, automobile en- .
gine failure, and radio interference.l This group was completely different from the psychologi cally aberrant individuals who, apparently because of mental problems, had delusions of communicating with extraterres trial beings. These peple often claimed to receive signals from outer space or to have mystical encounters with spacemen.
Their experiences did not constitute deviations from their daily lives, and their stories usually were incoherent, inconsist ent, or part of a pattern of psychical or occult experiences.
Like the first group, these people generally did not seek pub licity or fabricate hoaxes intentionally.2 The contactees represented an entirely diferent type of UFO witness. They exhibited behavior consistent with the asertion that they fabricated hoaxes. They did not report their "expe riences" to a reputable investigatory agency. Instead, they publicized them by writing books and articles, presenting lec tures, and appearing on radio and television shows. Indeed, the contactees had no fear of ridicule and eagerly sought publicity.
They often organized special flying saucer clubs based on their experiences and used the clubs to help publicize their stories.
Also, their "experiences" often differed markedly from al other UFO observers, in that some contactees claimed to have taken a ride in a &ying saucer and described the ride and the planets they visited in great detail. Moreover, most contactees reported that space people had charged them with a mission, which, they said, was why they had to seek publicity.
The five major contactees who rose to national stardom in the 1 950s were George Adamski, Truman Bethurum, Daniel Fry, Orfeo Angelucci, and Howard Menger. Each attracted a large following. The five men also knew each other and rein forced each other's claims.
George Adamski was the most famous contactee of the 1 950s. He worked as a handyman in a four-stool cafe near Mount Palomar, California. Previous to his encounters with 1 Contactees, Clubs, and Confusion 97 the spacemen, he had billed himself as "professor" and had written a tract about a body of thought he devised and called the "Royal Order of Tibet."8 Failing to gain recognition as a mystic, he turned to science fiction to capitalize on his inter- , · est in astronomy and photography. His main endeavor in this ,( genre was a novel he wrote in 1946 about an imaginary trip ' ୢ to the stars.Lj 1 i When UFO sightings began, Adamski conceived of a way 1 ; to take advantage of the current interest. The product of this 'I idea was Flying Saucers Have Landed, which he coauthored l with British writer Desmond Leslie in 1953. In the book Adamski related his contactee experiences. They began in 1946 when he "actually saw with [his] own naked eyes a gigantic space craft." The next year Adamski saw 184 sau cers one night passing over him one after the other "as if in review." Unfortunately he took no pictures of this extraordi nary procession. From then on, he said, he observed the sau- ' cers regularly. G I Adamski's first "contact" came on November 20, 1952, 'I when he and six friends saw a spaceship land about one mile •f off the road in Desert Center, California. He told his friends I to wait at the car and rushed to the landing spot. taking pic J tures all the way (he had two cameras with him) . When he neared the craft, a man with long blond hair confronted him.
The man was from Venus. Adamski and the Venusian con versed telepathically and by sign language; the Venusian told Adamski that he had come to Earth to stop atomic testing be- , cause the radiation from fallout was damaging the other planets in the solar system. The Venusian did not want his , picture taken because then he would no longer be able to roam incognito among the earthlings.
The Venusian expressed an interest in a roll of Adamski's film and asked to borrow it, promising to return it soon. Adamski consented and the Venusian then allowed him to look inside the space craft before it took off and left the area. Adamski was able to take the pictures that day; but, as luck would have it, one camera was out of focus and the other was not working properly. The result was one blurry photograph. Mter the Venusian took off in his spacecraft. Adamski looked in the desert sand and discovered the Venusian's footprints, which had strange hieroglyphics in the middle of the soles. Adamski just happened to have some plaster of paris with him and made casts of the footprints. He and several friends attempted in vain to decipher hieroglyphics.o 98 The UFO Controversy in America Adamski's major work, Inside the Space Ships, appeared in 1955. He told bow he met incognito space people in Los An geles bars and cafes. At various times they invited him aboard Martian, Venusian, Satumian, and Jupiterian spaceships. On board these ships Adamski met beautiful Mar tian and Venusian spacewomen and the elder philosopher of the space people--the Master. While the women served re freshments, Adamski and the Master engaged in long and deep conversations about the state of the universe and Earth's posi tion in it. The Master described other planets' social and po litical systems and made it clear that Earth was primitive.
The space people were benevolent beings who had come to save mankind from eventual atomic destruction and, as the Master explained, to stop the Earth's atomic radiation from harming the other planets. The space people had a dual mis sion: to save the earthlings from themselves and to save the universe from the earthlings. They told Adaniski that they had selected individuals to carry their message to the people.
Jesus had been one of these messengers; Adamski was an other. He had to carry their message to the Earth people and 1 bear the ridicule of those who would not believe him. 7 Truman Bethurum followed Adamski's lead in 1 954 with Aboard a Flying Saucer. Bethurum was then a mechanic lay ing asphalt in the California desert. One night eight to ten little men awakened him as he slept near his rig, and he no ticed a flying saucer near them on the ground. The little men took the curious Bethurum aboard the scow, as they called it, and introduced him to the captain, a gorgeous woman named Aura Rhanes. She was similar to Earth women except for her extraordinary beauty. Aura explained that she and her crew came from a planet called Clarion, which was in the same so lar system as Earth. Astronomers could not see Clarion be cause its orbit always placed it directly behind the sun. The Clarionites had been coming to Earth for many years and were able to walk around unnoticed. They were "very reli gious, understanding, kind, friendly and . . . trusting." They had come to Earth, Aura explained, to reaffirm the values of marriage, family, and fidelity, because a "dreadful Paganism" was at work and the Clarionites did not want to see Earth people destroy themselves. Aura feared atomic war and wanted to prevent Earth from blowing itself up, an event that would cause "considerable confusion" in space. In the course of their lengthy discussions, Aura explained to Bethurum in detail the idyllic quality of life on Clarion, a life that Earth Contactees, Clubs, and Confusion 99 people could enjoy if they thought and behaved correctly.s Before the Clarionites departed for home, Betburum met 1 with them eleven times. Sometimes be saw them in cafes, but there they ignored him because they did not want to reveal , ୡ their identities. When they finally left and Betburum told his 1· story, no one believed him except George Adamski, who en· 1 . couraged him to publicize his experiences. Betburum thought r Adamski was a great man and an authority on space travel.9 In the same year ( 1 954) "Dr." Daniel Fry's White Sands l Incident came out. One night, when Fry was working in an 1 unspecified capacity at the White Sands Proving Ground in 11 New Mexico, be saw a flying saucer land near him. He ' · walked up to it and beard a voice say: "Better not touch the bull, pal, it's still bot!" This frightened him but the voice was reassuring: "Take it easy, pal, you're among friends."10 The voice, which later identified itself as "A-lan," invited Fly into the saucer and explained the details of the saucer's power.
Fly remembered the conversation and carefully recorded the technical data: When certain elements such as platinum are properly prepared and treated with a saturation exposure to a beam of very high energy photons, the binding energy particle will be generated outside the nucleus. Since these particles tend to repel each other as well as all matter they, like the electron, tend to migrate to the sur face of the metal where they manifest as a repellent force.n Alan, as Fry called the voice, whisked him to New York City and back in about thirty minutes. During the flight Alan told Fry to write a book about this experience to prevent the world from falling into the "terrible abyss" that nuclear weapons brought about. The spacemen, Alan explained, were forced to contact Fry because they would upset the "ego balance" of the Earth's civilization if they showed themselves. Alan said the key to peace and happiness for Earth was "understand ing'': if al the nations on Earth would just understand each other, then there would be no more war.t2 Orfeo Angelucci, a mechanic at an aircraft corporation, continued the contactee tradition in 1 955 with his mystically oriented Secret of the Saucers. Angelucci's experiences began when be saw a flying saucer land in a Los Angeles field; he 100 The UFO Controversy in America l inspected the craft and heard a voice, which identified itself as a "space brother," explain that he was visiting Earth to , record the "spiritual evolution of man." He was concerned 1 that Earth's "material advancement" was endangering life's evolution. A few weeks later Angelucci saw another flying saucer in the same location and entered it on impulse. Inside a voice revealed the secrets of the saucer's power. He took a ride in the saucer and was so impressed that, during the flight, he underwent a mystical-religious experience that demonstrated his kinship with the space people. After the flight he met a spaceman named Neptune who instructed him about the universe and life in space.1s Angelucci then began to meet the spacemen in mundane places. For instance, one contact took place in a Greyhound bus terminal. Unable to keep these experiences a secret, he gave weekly talks, published a newspaper and attended flying saucer conventions, where he met Adamski, Bethurum, and other contactees whom he admired greatly. One day he real ized he had had amnesia for a week and eventually discov ered that he had been spiritually transported to another planet. There he met the beautiful Lyra and her friend Orion, who explanied that Angelucci had been a spacemen also named Neptune in another life. They exposed Angelucci to all the wonders of their beautiful planet and told him that Earth had better change its course-by mankind working to gether benevolently--or a calamity would ensue in 1986. An- , gelucci returned to Earth knowing that in his first life he was a spaceman with his spiritual heritage in the heavens. In a later contact, Angelucci met Jesus, who told him the space people were on Earth to help mankind and were traveling in cognito everywhere. ''This is the beginning of the New Age," Jesus said. At his last meeting with Lyra, Angelucci drank from the crystal goblet and finally understood that, even though he must return to the mundane world, he, Lyra, .
Orion, and the other Neptune were joined together forever in love.14 Howard Menger, a self-employed sign painter, was the fifth of the major contactees. He told about his experiences in From Outer Space to You ( 1959 ) . Menger had his first con tact as a child. He was playing in the woods when he chanced upon a beautiful woman who told him that the space people were watching over him. He did not have another contact until he was an adult but sensed during all those years that thɏ space people were helpinɐ him. He felt they Contactees, Clubs, and Confusion 101 1! had helped save his life in World War II when he Ȱas in 1 • hand-to-hand combat with the Japanese. When the space 1 people finally contacted Menger again, they revealed that they came from Mars and Venus. They took him to the 1 moon and gave him a guided tour of the wonderful buildings and sights there. Menger explained that the moon's atmo sphere was similar to the Earth's and that he could breathe the air easily. Eventually Menger learned that he was a re- - ୠ incarnated Jupiterian put o n Earth to perform good deeds for ! the benefit of mankind. At one of his lectures about his ex r periences, he met a beautiful woman, Marla, whom he imme i diately recognized as being a spacewoman, even though she 1ఉ did not know this herself. Menger divorced his wife and mar ÍÎ ried Marla; they made a "natural couple," destined for each !' other because of their common heritage. During this lecture 1 tour, Menger met contactee George Van Tassel, who accom- 1 panied him on the tour. Later Menger met George Adamski and said he was a "great soul."15 " The Adamski, Bethurum, Fry, Angelucci, and Menger sto- l ries all contained similar concepts. They defined the contactee literature genre and illustrated the contactees' anthropomorph ic style of thinking. These concepts possibly reflected the 1 contactees' anxieties about post-World War II American so- ! ciety and, more specifically, the prospect of atomic war, the 1 role of religion in a technological society, the yearning for • peace and harmony in the cold-war political climate, and the • possibility of extraterrestrial visitation. An analysis of these i themes is at least essential for understanding why the contac ୟ tees became so popular.
\ According to the contactees, space people came from uto ! pian planets free from war, poverty, unhappiness, or want.
i Everyone on Clarion was employed and poverty was un- 1 known. No Earth-like problems existed, although some ex- 1 traterrestrials did mention enemies. Moreover, the space I people, if not immortal, lived thousands of years and usually I could be reincarnated in another life. The planet Angelucci i visited had "eternal youth, eternal spring and eternal day." The contactees portrayed the space people as rational, tech nologically advanced, perfected "humans" who understood the disastrous implications of Earth's technology. Angelucci's space people told him that "man's material knowledge has far outstripped the growth of brotherly love and spiritual under standing in his heart."t6 Operating within a common fear of the 1950s-the inevita- 102 The UFO Controversy in America bility of atomic war-the contactees invested the space people with missions that promised society a release from cold-war tensions. The space people came to help Earth people avoid war, stop atomic testing, and help mankind work together for a benevolent society. But they were not completely altruistic and were working for their own interests as well as those of Earth. They wanted to stop atomic testing because the leaking radiation afected their planets; they wanted to stop an atomic war because it would upset the so lar system's delicate balance. The contactees avoided poten tialy troublesome political issues in the 1950s by having the nonideological space people expound these beliefs and by tak ing an anticommunist stance in their literature.
In keeping with the aliens' humanity and benevolence, they came from planets where civilization was based on a god-fig ure, such as the "Infinite Father" or "Infinite Creator." The space people lived within a religious ethos that supported their moral reasons for coming to Earth. They placed Jesus in I a secondary position and did not worship him because he died on Earth for Earth people. The contactees said that ei ther the space people or God had sent Jesus to Earth to fulfil a mission. Jesus, the Master told Adamski, "was sent to be re incarnated on your world to help your people, as had others before him." His death taught the space people to carry on their mission "in a way less perilous to those concerned than actual birth on your planet." For Angelucci's aliens, Jesus was an "infinite entity of the sun" and "not of earth's evolu tion."11 In this sense, the contactees transformed Jesus into a spaceman and allied God, Jesus, and the space people into a unified system. Moreover, because both Jesus and the con tactees were space messengers, the contactees compared them selves to Jesus and thereby strengthened the impact of the re ligious implications of their experiences. Although the con tactees never claimed to be on a religious par with Jesus, the parallel was stil clear.
Apart from religious and ideological implications, the con tactees dealt with a host of more mundane problems. In ex plaining why aliens did not land publicly, they juxtaposed the space people's benevolence with the Earth people's hostility and psychological frailty. It was these Earth qualities that prevented the aliens from landing publicly. As Adamski said : humans would have a "tremendous amount of fear" of the space people and probably would "tear [them] to pieces." Daniel Fry's Alan explained that most Earth people would r Contactm, Club,, and Confu,ion 103 !consider the space people "potential tyrants" and would try Ito destroy them. Menger's space friends feared that a landing !would result in hysteria and panic and, Menger reasoned, "there would be endless investigations and controversy, and the work and message the space people have come to deliver 1would be snowed under by red tape." But contacting selected , ;Earth people was not a problem for the space people. Re- gardless of where the aliens were from, be it Mars, Venus, : !Jupiter, or Clarion, they looked like human beings, except that the women were fantastically beautiful. Thus, the space Jpeople were able to mingle incognito with humans.ts .
If the space people looked just like Earth people, why did 1 •they not carry out their own mission instead of having a hu- 1 man do it? The contactees did not answer this question. They 1 sidestepped it with self-conscious explanations of why the 'space people chose them in particular. They chose Adamski because, in photographing saucers for many years, his thoughts "inevitably" reached them and demonstrated his "sincerity." They chose Bethurum simply because he "hap pened to be close" when the scow landed. They selected Fry because he had one of those rare brains that could receive as ell as send telepathic signals. And, the "buffetings of fate" 'gave Fry an "unusual depth and breadth of perception and understanding" which made him an ideal contact. The aliens ontacted Angelucci because he was simple, humble, publicly nknown, and possessed a "higher vibrational pattern" than , ther men. Aliens singled out Menger because he was one of 1 them, a "rebirth" from another planet. Presumably these haracteristics made it easier for the contactee to carry out · · his prescribed mission.19 ]J Along with these personal qualities, all the contactees had he experience of entering and/ or flying in a saucer. This ex . erience seemed to undergo an evolution in the contactee 1 Ìiterature. Adamski, who wrote first, observed the saucer !close up but could not enter it. Bethurum, the second con r 1tactee of 1 953, entered the saucer but it did not leave the ound. The next year Fry claimed that he went from New Mexico to New York City. In Adamski's second book ( 1955 ) , , e claimed to have flown to the moon; he did not actually and but saw all its wonders-inhabitants, cities, plants hrough a special viewing apparatus. He saw Venus the same ay. Angelucci went further. In addition to riding in a saucer, e was mysticaly transported to the planet Lucifer, previously j 1 piece of a larger planet that had existed in another time zone 104 The UFO Controversy in America I and had been destroyed in an ancient war before the aliens were benevolent. In Menger's 1959 account, his flying saucer landed on the moon, where the inhabitants gave him a sight seeing tour. Menger was the only one of the five major con tactees who claimed to have landed on a celestial body after a flight in a flying saucer.
Similarly, each claimed to have had the earliest contact, Menger's pre-World War II claim topping the list. The escala tion of contactee claims appeared to be a function of trying to outdo one another in their efforts to be the most important contactee. Yet most contactees seemed reluctant to become too sensational. They preferred not to overextend themselves scientifically. Menger, who constantly escalated his claims over the years, eventually f-ound himself in completely inde fensible scientific positions, and subsequent astronomical dis coveries forced him to recant on many of his positions.
The heart of contactee literature was in the mission the space people gave the contactee. This mission provided the central rationale for the contactee's publicity-oriented behav ior. Adamski had to impart the Master's knowledge to Earth people so that they could avert the disaster of an atomic war.
Bethurum's task was to make sure the Earth people under stood Aura Rhanes's message : unless Earth changed its ways, "the water in your deserts will mostly be tears." Fry obeyed Alan's order to spread the word about universal "understand ing" to prevent the Earth's nations from engaging in an atomic holocaust. Alan passionately directed Fry to "tell the story through your newspapers, your. radio and television sta tions. If necessary, shout it from the house-tops, but let the people know." The space people warned Angelucci of a terri ble war of extreme devastation and charged him with a Christ-like mission: "For the present you are our emissary, Orfeo, and you must act! Even though the people of Earth laugh derisively and mock you as a lunatic, tell them about us!" Later he emphasized, "As you love your brothers of Earth, Orfeo, fight to your dying breath to help them toward a world of love, light and unity." Menger's friends did not specifically forecast a catastrophe but did tell him that wars, torture, and destruction would result from people's "misun derstanding"; Menger had to inform others of his experiences in the hope of promoting better understanding.2o The contactees had to make the Earth people believe them but had difficulty obtaining reasonable evidence to support their claimed experiences. Because Adamski's space people 1 !
Contactees, Clubs, and Confusion 105 did not want him to take their pictures, be bad to rely on the Venusian's footprints and a few blurry photographs. The Air Force analyzed Adamski's photos and decided they were probably hoaxes. Betburum's evidence was a note written in French that Aura Rbanes bad supposedly translated into En glish and Chinese. Angelucci and Fry offered no evidence, preferring to have their stories stand on their own merits.
Menger was the only major contactee to offer tangible evi dence. One day be chanced upon a cabin in the woods with a Satumian inside who was playing the piano; the Satumian told Menger that be too could play this enchanting music, even though he did not know bow to play the piano. Menger ar rived home to find that be could play the music be had beard, and be immediately made a commercial record album.
On another occasion, one of Menger's space friends gave him "a space potato," which supposedly bad five times the protein of an Earth potato. Menger also built a small "free energy motor" from the space people's telepathic instructions; it did nothing in particular, but Menger considered it good evi dence of alien visitation.21 Not having any reasonable evidence of their own, the con tactees often used the Air Force's role in the controversy to prove that flying saucers existed. Adamski and Betburum said the Air Force's secrecy in investigating UFOs constituted proof that flying saucers existed. Angelucci implied that the Air Force was a party to the space people's plans : the Air Force was handling the issue of extraterrestrial visitation "precisely as those visitors have anticipated and desired them to do." If the Air Force were to release all it knew about fly ing saucers, "It would be the beginning of national panic that no amount of sane reasoning could quell." Al this, of course, proved the existence of flying saucers.22 A composite contactee formula was as follows. People from a utopian planet accidentally or by design contacted an unsuspecting human. The extraterrestrials gave the contactee a ride in their spacecraft, explained the workings of the craft, told about their own planet's civilization, and predicted dire events to take place on Earth that also would affect the other planets. They endowed the contactee with a mission that, if ɑuccessful, would avert the calamity, allowing Earth to exist 1D peace and harmony. The contactee, having little or no proof, embarked on a publicity campaign to get his message to the people.
Adamski, Betburum, Fry, Angelucci, and Menger were the 106 The UFO Controversy in America most prolific and publicized contactees but not the only ones.
Minor figures existed as well, al of whom used the above for mula and al of whom had their local followings. Buck Nel son flew to Mars, Venus, and the moon; as proof, he offered to sell packets of hair from a 385-pound Venusian St. Ber nard dog. The space people took George Van Tassel on a fly ing saucer ride and explained the "true history" of the begin nings of life on Earth. George Hunt Wiliamson, one of the alleged witnesses to Adamski's first contact, claimed he could communicate with men from Mars by using a ham radio set and Ouija board. It seemed that the Martians had heard other earthlings communicate by radio and had "managed to dope out the language." Lauro Mundo claimed to communicate telepathicaly with the space people. Dana Howard went to Venus, married a Venusian, and raised a family-all while she was napping on her living room couch.2s Some contactees not only publicized their experiences but used them to appeal directly for money. George Van Tassel said the space people had dictated designs for a rejuvenation machine that would guarantee everlasting youth; all he needed was $42,000 to develop the plans. Otis T. Carr claimed to have plans for a genuine flying saucer and succeeded in raising many thousands of dollars to build it.
Although most contactees seemed to be in the flying saucer business primarily for money, at least one, Gabriel Green.
saw the political potential as well. His California-based or ganization, The Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of Amer ica, published Thy Ki11gdom Come, a semireligious magazine.
Using the organization and magazine as a political base, Green ran for the presidency of the United States in 1960 on a space and peace platform but dropped out of the race be fore the election. Then he ran for the Senate in 1962, garner ing over 1 7 1 ,000 votes.24 The contactees' chief problem was gaining publicity for their messages and themselves. They did this by writing books, pamphlets, and tracts, presenting lectures, and attend ing flying saucer conventions where they could sell their literature and deliver their lectures. George Van Tassel's an nual Giant Rock Convention in Yucca Valley, California, be came the largest and mostly highly publicized of such events.
In 1954, its first year, the convention attracted over five thou sand people. Here the contactees gathered to lecture about their experiences. Spectators could buy books, pamphlets, I Ë; Contactees, Clubs, and Confusion 107 photographs, records, and other souvenirs from the con tactees' booths on the grounds.
The conventioneers generally assumed that the space people looked favorably upon the meeting and a participant was sure to spot a flying saucer near the area. If this did not happen, Van Tassel would sometimes send up a balloon with flares attached to it to create some excitement and contro versy. At times the space people would make their presence known in mysterious ways. Gray Barker, a popular con tactee-oriented author and publisher, once found some blood near his book stall. He and others immediately were con vinced that it was "space blood" from an extraterrestrial. Be cause the blood did not clot as they had expected, this, Barker claimed, substantiated his theory that space people walked among them. The faithful rallied to Barker's side and attacked the skeptics who wanted an analysis of the blood be fore they would judge its origin. The skeptics won the debate later when the analysis proved the blood's menstrual origin.25 Numerous flying saucer clubs held their own conventions and invited a contactee to lecture. Green's club sponsored some tremendously successful conventions in Los Angeles in the late 1 950s; thousands of people attended and one conven tion agenda included over forty-five speakers for a two-day event. These conventions became part of the contactees' lec ture circuit. If business was slow, contactees sometimes would sponsor their own conventions, as Howard Menger did on his front lawn where excitement ran high when people spotted several blue lights rising from the back of Menger's bam.
Buck Nelson, who claimed to have eaten dinner with the rulers of nearly all the planets in the solar system, held a con vention at his home in Missouri and was left with over nine thousand hot dogs when only three hundred people attended. 26 The contactees were media events, and radio and television shows helped them gain publicity. The sensationalism of the contactees' claims always provided good entertainment. In New York, Long John Nebel furnished the most consistent outlet for contactee stories on his late-night radio talk show; Menger's fame was chiefly due to his appearances on the Long John show. Steve Allen's nationally televised "Tonight" show featured many contact,ees, as did the NBC "Betty White Show" on which Truman Betburum appeared several times.
In addition to the national shows, many locally broadcast shows helped feed the growing public feeling that the con- 108 The UFO Controversy in A merica tactee and the contactee-oriented groups made up the essence of the UFO phenomenon. The public found it difficult to dis tinguish between contactee experiences and those of reputable witnesses. For example, a television producer would invite Keyhoe to appear on a show with a contactee, not under standing the difference between these two people. Keyhoe usually refused these invitations because he did not want to be associated in any way with the contactees.27 The growth of flying saucer clubs in the mid-fifties clearly indicated the contactees' success in gaining publicity and their subsequent domination of the UFO scene. These clubs were of two types : contactee clubs and contactee-oriented clubs.
Many contactees organized their followers into local and na tional clubs designed to propagate their message. Daniel Fry, using Alan's message about the importance of understanding in world politics, formed "understanding'' units. With fifteen in California alone and more around the country, Fry had a ready market for his publication Understanding. George Van Tassel established the College of Universal Wisdom, the en trance requirement being a subscription to Van Tassel's jour nal, Proceedings.
George Adamski formed the Adamski Foundation, and Truman Bethurum the Sanctuary of Thought.2s The majority of flying saucer clubs were contactee-orient ed. They were not centered around an individual contactee, but the members believed contactee stories or, as least kept an open mind. Most of these people did not discriminate be tween Keyhoe's brand of serious UFO investigation and con tactee claims. In 1954 the anticontactee Saucers magazine il lustrated this confusion when it polled its readers about whom they considered to be the best authors on UFOs. Key hoe came in first, followed by Adamski, Scully (Behind the Flying Saucers) , and Fry. Similarly, the Space Observers League of Spokane, Washington, fully supported Keyhoe and his theories and unhesitatingly accepted Daniel Fry's claims.
Over 1 50 contactee-oriented clubs existed in the mid-1950s.
Invariably, they held conventions and sponsored contactee lectures. Also, the contactee clubs blended into occult areas, such as astrology and mysticism, and were able to assimilate many of the previously existing occult and psychic clubs which originally were not a part of the flying saucer world.
For example, an editorial in The Spacecrafter, the newsletter of the Phoenix, Arizona, Spacecraft Research Association, said the club's objective was to "acquaint ourselves with as I Ê Contactees, Clubs, and Confusion 109 many facts as possible concerning UFO's, Metaphysics, Mys ticism, and other related subjects."29 Some contactee-oriented clubs subscribed to one of the more outlandish flying saucer theories. It held that if a person learned too much about flying saucers, or if he discovered the "secret" of their origin, then he might expect a visit from the mysterious and frightening Men In Black (MIB ) . The MIBs were aliens from an unknown planet who would silence any unfortunate individual by threats, harassment, or worse. The MIB theory was remarkably resilient and provided a constant source of anxiety for some individuals who delved deeply into the saucer mystery.ao The contactees and their publicity posed a serious threat to legitimate UFO investigation and research groups. These groups thought the contactees were confusing the public about whose activities were legitimate and whose were not. In addition, non-contactee-oriented UFO investigation groups were not nearly as popular as the flying saucer clubs and did not have as much support. The investigation and research groups tried to solve the UFO problem and refused to accept contactee claims, even though the members read about them in periodicals. As the contactees gained popularity, the inves tigation groups took on the difficult task of exposing them but were not often successful, for the contactee controversy created factions within their ranks. Orbit, a publication of one research group and one of the best periodicals in the early 1950s, folded partially because its readers shifted to contactee-oriented journals. Similarly, the Grand Rapids Fly ing Saucer Club, which published UFORUM, died when members became split over contactee claims. Most noncon tactee groups published articles determinedly hostile to con tactee claims. James Moseley's Nexus and Saucer News, Max Miller's Saucers, Lex Mebane's Civilian Saucer Investigation Newsletter, The UFO Newsletter, and other periodicals fea tured extensive exposes of Menger, Adamski, Van Tassel, and others.Bl To Keyhoe and Coral Lorenzen (the latter of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization) , the contactees were dangerous enemies. From 1953 to the early 1960s, Keyhoe and Lorenzen spent much time trying to correct the damage to the legitimacy of UFO research. Keyhoe complained to Lorenzen in 1954 that he spent a lot of time "cleaning up" after the contactees or "getting the record straight" about their claims. Lorenzen wanted to expose Adamski by proving 1 10 The UFO Controversy in America his photographs were fakes but, as Keyhoe pointed out, "Knowing it and proving it are, unfortunately, not the same thing."32 Eventually some of the exposes began to have an effect on the contactees' claims. Adamski's "witnesses" recanted many of their statements and considerably weakened his case, al though he maintained his claims until his death in 1965.
When evidence mounted in 1959 that Howard Menger's ex periences were fallacious, he tried to salvage his veracity by claiming his story was "allegorical" and his book "fact/fiǩ tion." A New York lawyer, Jules B. St. Germain, deveioped a scheme to prove George Van Tassel's experiences a hoax. He mailed Van Tassel some fake flying saucer and occupant pho tographs that he had taken in his home; Van Tassel insisted immediately that the photographs were "conclusive proof" and used them to bolster his own contactee claims. When Van Tassel appeared on the Long John Nebel show, St. Ger main also appeared unannounced and asked Van Tassel about the photographs. Van Tassel insisted on Ǫeir authentic ity and St. Germain took the opportunity to expose the hoax, thereby putting Van Tassel in an embarrassing and indefensi ble position. Daniel Fry, stung by charges that he had fabri cated his story, offered to take a lie detector test. He failed it.
He later claimed that the test was rigged against him. Eventu ally many minor figures dropped out of flying saucer world and some were imprisoned for fraud. Space ride claimant Rheinholdt Schmidt and saucer builder Otis T. Carr received prison sentences when convicted of bilking people out of thousands of dollars to develop a flying saucer or to mine for "free energy crystals. "33 In spite of the exposes, Angelucci, Adamski, Fry, and Be thurum steadfastly refused to recant no matter what evidence their critics used against them. The contactee clubs thrived during the 1 950s, even though their numbers decreased by the late 1950s and early 1960s and the minor figures faded.
The contactees' influence on the public and press hampered serious UFO researchers' efforts to legitimize the subject. The UFO phenomenon had always encountered ridicule, such that many reputable individuals were afraid to report sightings and scientists refused to view the subject seriously. Indeed, ridicule was probably the most decisive factor that prevented professional people and the public from treating the subject seriously. The contactees' emergence and their popularity and publicity succeeded in entrenching even deeper the ridicul Contactees, Clubs, and Confusion 1 1 1 factor in the public imagination. From the mid- 1950s to 1 972 people with little knowledge of the phenomenon constantly confused the "lunatic fringe" with serious UFO investigators and researchers. Civilian Saucer Intelligence of New York in its newsletter bemoaned the fact that contactees received so much publicity in the news media. This massive publicity, the article stated, "conspires to help the audacious 'contactee' on his path to fame and fortune-and in the process, to help wreck the reputation of flying saucers, which are more and more indissolubly linked, in the public mind, with the fan tasies of these well-publicized tale-spinners."34 The contactees scared off many people who were genuinely interested in the subject. Even Ruppelt purportedly felt the effects of the contactees. He revised his 1 956 book in 1959 and totally reversed his open-minded position; he stated posi tively that UFOs as a unique phenomenon did not exist and attempted to erase his identification with the phenomenon.
Although no one can know for sure his reasons for this rever sal (he died of a heart attack in 1960 ) , his wife stated years later that the constant agitation of the contactees and their followers, along with lack of proof for the extraterrestrial hy pothesis, contributed to Ruppelt's reversal. The Air Force was pleased with the reversal, and Project Blue Book chief Robert Friend fed Ruppelt information through the Office of In formation to help him write the new chapters.s:; Serious UFO researchers dismissed the people who believed the contactee stories ( contactee followers) as psychologically disturbed inocents with a will to believe or, simply, "the lunatic fringe." The situation was more complex than this. It involved a logical belief system that evolved in contactee fol lower thinking and acted as a buffer to outside attacks on them. As such, it is necessary to separate the contactees from their followers.
Contactee followers believed, as did legitimate UFO in vestigators and researchers, that flying saucers (UFOs) exist ed. The difference between the two groups was the reasoning that followed the belief. Most serious UFO investigators ei ther refused to speculate on the origin of the objects or be lieved the extraterrestrial hypothesis best explained the evi dence. They were split over whether to accept reputable witness claims of occupants sightings as part of the evidence, and many were hostile to any claims of communication.
When a contactee claimed direct social intercourse with an alien and had no reasonable evidence to back up even the 1 1 2 The UFO Controversy in America fact that he had sighted a UFO, most serious UFO investiga- ·) tors denied the claim as a fabrication.
'• The contactee followers, on the other hand, were not so concerned with the evidence. Believing the saucer existed and, from available reports, were products of an extraterres trial intelligence with a highly advanced technology, the con tactee followers accepted contactee claims based on the con tactees' sincerity. They did not ask for evidence. Moreover, already assuming that the aliens could routinely explore space, the contactee followers logically accepted the notion that the aliens must have overcome the problems of advanced technology (pollution, waste, and destructive weapons) . And if their technological capabilities had not destroyed them through war, it was probably because they desired to preserve life and were able to do so. Hence, the aliens had a moral sense. Therefore, when a contactee sincerely said he met a moral, benevolent, technologically-advanced space person from a utopian world who wanted to help save Earth, the contactee followers' logic dictated that the contactee was tell ing the truth. The key here is the sincerity of the contactees; all the major ones seemed to have had more than the re quired amount. Serious investigators were always struck by the contactees' sincerity and how people seemed to want to believe them.
The contactee followers, then, based their belief on their own logical system. They did not ask What are they? or Are they here? but Why are they here? They went past the ac cepted thought of serious UFO investigators and directly dealt with the implications of extraterrestrial intervention in human affairs. John Godwin, in Occult America, equated the contactee followers with the New Guinea Cargo Cultists. This was perhaps unfair. The contactees did not regard the space people as deities. They were always careful to say that the space people had advanced to their high level only with God's help. The aliens' religion was compatible with Christi anity. Believers did not have to respect and admire atheists.
The contactees characterized themselves as messengers and did not insist that they were deities (although they came close to this position by equating their mission with Jesus' mis sion) .s6 Robert Ellwood, a religion scholar, suggested that the role of messenger placed the contactee in the shaman tradition.
This argument has merit. The shaman is a man in special communication with the spirit world, fighting evil spirits for Contactees, Clubs, and Confusion 1 13 the good of the community. He acquires his role either through heredity or a sudden, unexpected vision, trance, or seizure. If the contactees did have a shaman role, then the contactee groups could be sects. Most groups possessed a body of writings or teachings and a dogma to guide the mem bers' thought and behavior.37 Other scholars have not been so generous in their appraisal of the contactee followers. Because of the religious and sensa tional aspects of contactee thought, some academicians have characterized the contactee followers as insane or as lunatics.
H. Taylor Buckner, a Berkeley sociologist, observed that the typical contactee club members were poorly educated, elderly, widowed or single women with physical and mental infirmities, older infirm men, and younger "schizophrenics." Although such people most probably belonged to these clubs, they were not the only members. People of all ages, classes, and, to a lesser degree, educational backgrounds, belonged.
For instance, Leon Festinger's small, Minnesota-based, con tactee-oriented group, discussed in When Prophecy Fails, consisted mainly of young and educated people. Basically, though, contactee followers were gullible people who, through lack of adequate factual information about the UFO phe nomenon, formulated a belief system that easily incorporated the contactees' claims as fact.ss Like the contactees, the Hollywood motion picture industry moved in early to capitalize on public interest in UFOs. The first films with flying saucer themes predated contactee litera ture by two years, perhaps because the industry was quicker to realize the market potential of the flying saucer theme.
The subject of flying saucers was ideally suited for the movies. Using spectacular special effects, a film maker could exploit the sensational implications of the extraterrestrial hy pothesis. Both the movies and the contactees dwelled on the fantasy aspects of UFOs, but whereas the contactees pictured the extraterrestrials as basically beneficient but with a poten tial for hostility, Hollywood portrayed the space people as both beneficient and hostile, with an emphasis on the latter.
For most motion pictures about flying saucers, the destructive potential of hostile beings from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization was a standard theme.a9 The first and perhaps best film with a flying saucer motif was Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still.40 Released in 1951, it contained most elements of later contactee litera ture. A handsome benevolent being from a utopian planet 1 14 .
The UFO Controversy in America landed his saucer near the White House and brought the message that atomic testing was harming other planets. The alien was semi-immortal; his life span, which only God could end, could be hundreds of years long. The Earth people reacted with hostility and attempted to destroy him, but he escaped, mingled with the populace, and succeeded in deliver ing his message to Earth's major scientists. The film brought together the themes of the alien as beneficient, the Earth people as hostile, the dangers of the atomic bomb, the alien's ability to walk on Earth incognito, and immortality. But the film left out the messenger-the contactee.
Because the themes in the film were so much like later contactee litera ture, it is possible that some contactees may have drawn upon the film as a source for their ideas.
The 1951 Howard Hawks film The Thing was the first to present the extraterrestrials-as-hostile theme. In it an alien crashed in a flying saucer and brought havoc to a group of scientists who tried to capture him. The movie portrayed the alien as intelligent but bent on purposeless, irrational destruc tion. The alien strongly resembled Frankenstein's monster. In the end, Earth people destroyed the alien and the movie avoided the problem of the alien's origin and his purpose on Earth. Some of the other characters in the movie reflected popular thought about the Air Force's UFO investigation in 1 95 1 by poking fun at the Project Grudge report, which stated that al UFO sightings were mistakes. After Earth people confirmed the existence of the downed flying saucer, they read portions of the Grudge report aloud amidst general hilarity and ridicule.
The Red Planet Mars ( 1952) did not picture a flying sau cer but did portray Martians who could communicate with Earth through radio signals, a Ia George Hunt Williamson. In It Came From Outer Space ( 1 953 ) extraterrestrials acciden tally crashed on Earth and tried to repair their craft when hostile Earth people confronted them. The extraterrestrials · managed to escape before they were hurt. Only one Earth person in the town tried to keep the townspeople from destroying the aliens. Although not a contactee, this man-hero interceded on the aliens' behalf to give them time to repair their craft. The War of the Worlds ( 1 953 ) featured hostile extraterrestrials who attempted to destroy Earth but met de feat at the hands of bacteria in Earth's atmosphere. The idea that a small group of extraterrestrials wanted to colonize Earth was the central theme in This Island Earth ( 1955 ) . A Contactees, Clubs, and Confusion 1 15 benevolent alien with a moral sense believed that the colo nization plan was wrong and saved Earth by disobeying his fel low aliens and then committing suicide. Invasion of the Saucer Men ( 1 957 ) parodied other saucer films. It featured a feebly humorous account of extraterrestrials who overtook people by injecting alcohol into their veins and making them drunk.
The aliens melted when lights were shined on them.
Even Keyhoe's book, Flying Saucers From Outer Space, underwent the Hollywood treatment and became a standard science fiction film, Earth Versus the Flying Saucers ( 1 956 ) .
I t did accurately portray UFO shapes and maneuvers based on actual witness reports. But the aliens in it were hostile and addicted to blowing up Earth rockets as they were sent aloft.
The aliens wanted to subjugate Earth and went on a destruc tive rampage against the earthlings and their cities. The hero-scientist invented a special antimagnetic weapon with which he finally destroyed the aliens. The film's producers persuaded Keyhoe to sell them the rights to his book by tell ing him that they were making a documentary on UFOs.
When the feature came out, Keyhoe was angry; he refused to make personal appearances for the film and tried unsuccess fully to have his name removed from the credits.41 The rise of the contactees and of flying saucer movies came at the same time as the Air Force's increased secreey coupled with contactee publicity fed the UFO controversy.
The public was confused. On the one hand, it heard about the alleged Air Force cover-up and, on the other hand, it read about UFO sightings in the press and either heard about or read Keyhoe's books. In the resulting confusion it tended to equate Keyhoe with the contactees, which hindered Key hoe's determined fight to bring respectability to a systematic study of the UFO phenomenon.
Moreover, the contactees, their followers, and Hollywood movies in the mid- 1 950s hardened the aura of illegitimacy surrounding the UFO phenomenon. While the contactees and the movie industry gave the UFO phenomenon publicity the Air Force wanted to avoid, they also-by focusing on the sen sational and fantastic-lent credence to the Air Force position that reports of unique aerial objects of possible extraterres trial origin were groundless. At the least, the movies and the contactees created a misleading impression about the nature of the phenomenon.
Correcting this impression occupied much of Keyhoe's and other serious investigators' energies during the 1 950s. Keyhoe's attempts to disassociate legitimate 1 1 6 The UFO Controversy in America UFO investigators from contactees and their followers com plicated h is continuing fight with the Air Force. The skir mishes continued in the 1 950s, with both sides using new resources and reinforcements to try to win the battle.
6 1954 TO 195 8: CONTINUED SKIRM ISHES AND THE RISE OF NICAP After the contactee and civilian UFO organizations entered the UFO controversy, they engaged in a series of skirmishes with the Air Force over its UFO program. During this period from 1 954 to 1958, the civilian UFO groups found a leader in the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenome na (NICAP) . The Air Force reorganized its investigative and public relations . systems, and both parties formulated their positions on the issues of Air Force secrecy, congressional in vestigations, and publicity about UFOs.
The skirmishes centered around the Air Force's position as keeper of the knowledge. It was the only official agency that continually collected, investigated, and analyzed sighting re ports. The Air Force had the most comprehensive data avail able tucked away in its classified files. The civilian UFO or ganizations, following Keyhoe's lead, criticized it for what they thought was a conspiracy of silence to prevent panic among the people. They demanded that the Air Force make the files public. But the Air Force refused, because of the Robertson panel's report and because the files did contain some classified intelligence information. By continually react ing to Air Force pronouncements, regulations, and policies, the civilian groups made the Air Force the prime mover in the controversy and thereby relinquished some of their own autonomy. Yet the Air Force stimulated this reaction by de nying the potential significance of the UFO phenomenon and by suspecting the civilian groups' intentions.
Air Force secrecy policies made UFO proponents some what paranoid. Civilian UFO investigators James Moseley and Leon Davidson thought UFOs were actually American 1 17 1 1 8 .
The UFO Controversy in America secret weapons. Moseley said the Air Force used them to "absorb excess radioactivity" in the atmosphere. Davidson, while originally thinking they were secret weapons, later de veloped the theory that UFOs were nothing but a CIA "front"; the CIA, Davidson explained, had maneuvered or created all UFO club activity, contactees, books, and so on to confound the Soviets about our technological capabilities.!
The clearest example of extrapolating sinister ideas from non information was Keyhoe's theory that the top levels of gov ernment perpetrated the flying saucer "conspiracy" : "Actu ally, the Air Force is not the only agency involved; the CIA, National Security Council, FBI, Civil Defense, all are tied in at top levels. The White House, of course, will have the final word as to what people are to be told, and when." Keyhoe also believed the Air Force conspired -against him personally.
He wrote Coral Lorenzen, head of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, in August and September of 1 954, that it might try to "muzzle" him by recalling him to active Marine Corps duty and putting him under military restric tions. He thought the Air Force might try to silence Coral Lorenzen as well and devised a written signal for her to use in case this happened.2 In this atmosphere of suspicion and near paranoia, the Air Force moved to counter the criticism by reorganizing its UFO program to minimize public interest and to implement the Robertson panel recommendations. In March 1 954 it ap pointed as head of Project Blue Book Captain Charles Hardin. And because Hardin's two-man staff could not inves tigate the large number of UFO reports coming into A TIC, the task fell on the 4602d Air Intelligence Service Squadron (AISS ) , a division of the Air Defense Command. Actually Ruppelt began this transfer during his last months as head of Blue Book, but his purpose was to supplement and expand Blue Book's investigative capabilities, not abolish them.s The transfer meant that Blue Book would analyze and evaluate the data, only making special field investigations when ATIC felt they were important enough.
The first activity in the reorganization was to teach the 4602d personnel, who were trained only to identify planes, how to investigate and evaluate UFO reports. Hardin, Hynek, and members of the 4602d devised a "UFOB Guide" for this purpose. The manual described the characteristics of bal loons, aircraft, meteors, and so on, and also explained some of the problems field investigators were likely to encounter. It Continued Skirmishes and the Rise of NICAP 1 1 9 became the standard guide for all Air Force field investiga tions.4 In late 1 954 the 4602d started its program of making preliminary investigations and screening out reports too fragmentary for evaluation or easily explainable by known activities or phenomena. The 4602d then sent the rest of the reports to ATIC for analysis and evaluation, and ATIC in formed the 4602d if a follow-up investigation was warranted.
Almost immediately, however, the 4602d found itself doing A TIC's job of analyzing the data in an effort to find solutions to the sighting reports. The Air Force did not consider this a violation of AFR 200-2. Instead, it saw that the field investi gators could save A TIC much trouble by their on-the-spot identifications and moved to regularize this aspect of the 4602d's function by declaring that the squadron should con duct follow-up investigations when the evidence suggested that a positive identification could be made.5 At first the 4602d classified a large number of reports as unknown. This was unacceptable. In February 1 955 an ATIC officer told the commander of AISS that investigators should strive to solve as many cases as possible to reduce unknowns to a minimum. To help with this task, because the very nature of UFO reports militated against positive identifica tions, the Air Force devised a new classification system.
Whereas previously investigators placed reports in either the identified, insufficient data, unreliable, or unknown categories, the Air Force now broadened the identified category to in clude probable and possible. These vague subcategories al lowed the investigators to identify a report based on their es timate of the probability or possibility that the sighting was a known phenomenon. If investigators could not definitely iden tify a sighting, they could solve the problem, and the case, by placing it in one of these two broadly defined categories. In press releases and final Blue Book evaluation statistics, the probable and possible subcategories disappeared and Blue Book listed the sightings simply as identified. a In March 1 955 the Air Force issued a revision of the "UFOB Guide" to the 4602d. In it the Air Force differenti ated between unsolved and solved cases. Unsolved cases bad contradictory and conflicting data. All others the investigators could solve, the guide explained, in a truly "scientific" man ner by looking at the direction in which the preponderance of data leaned and then placing the report into one of the cate gories of identification as outlined in the guide. The "UFOB 120 The UFO Controversy in America Guide" called upon investigators to use "common sense" which, presumably, would rule out the possibility that the witness had observed anything truly extraordinary.7 The new methods of investigating and identifying UFO re ports worked marvelously. The percentage of unknowns fell from 60 percent in August 1 954 to 5.9 percent in 1955 and then to 0.4 percent in 1 956. Of the 335 reports the 4602d investigated in the last half of 1 956, it forwarded only two to ATIC as unsolved. By the end of 1 957 the 4602d had virtu ally taken over A TIC's job of analyzing UFO reports. a The modus operandi of the 4602d was that the UFO prob lem was a public relations problem and no one could ever have seen anything truly extraordinary in the sky. The Air Force assumed that UFO sightings resulted from the "Buck Rogers trauma"-a mixture of technological advance, cold war fears, and the influence of science fiction. The only justi fication for investigating UFO reports, therefore, was that en emy guided missiles might resemble UFOs and the Air Force had to investigate these reports for national defense reasons.9 The 4602d envisioned its job as that of allaying public hys teria by systematically squelching rumors that UFOs represented an invasion from outer space. But the 4602d real ized it would have only partial success in stopping reports, since "emotionally unstable" people still reported UFOs, and in great numbers. Indeed, the number of reports coming in disturbed the 4602d, and it looked to public relations for part of the answer: perhaps the very knowledge that the 4602d in vestigated UFO reports created public hysteria which, in tum, created more UFO reports. Whatever the reason, though, the 4602d was never able to affect the number of reports sent to it.
The 4602d's methodology allowed the Air Force to broaden its public relations campaign. With strategically placed personnel making immediate identifications, the Air Force claimed that its investigating capabilities were more "scientific"; the more accurate information coming into ATIC was reducing substantially the number of unknowns. Using the data gathered through the new procedures, the Air Force stepped up its campaign to emphasize that its UFO program was not secret and that UFOs were not unusual. The Air Force explained that the 20 percent to 30 percent unknown rate for the previous 1 947 to 1 952 period resulted from inad equate data and poor reporting and cited the current less Continued Skirmishes and the Rise of NICAP 121 than 1 0 percent unknown rate as evidence for this explana tion.10 But no matter what statistics the Air Force gave, it could not convince UFO proponents to accept at face value state ments about its objectivity and openness. The Air Force re fused to declassify its sighting reports and thus found itself in ' a dilemma : the same policies it defended handicapped its public relations efforts. By refuting the secrecy charges while at the same time refusing to declassify the sighting reports, the Air Force incurred even greater criticism and appeared to be covering up as the critics charged. Furthermore, in its zeal to dispel the notion that it had at one time considered the ex traterrestrial hypothesis seriously, the Air Force denied that certain essential documents existed and that pivotal events had taken place. Spokesmen denied the existence of General Twining's 1947 letter, which stated that the objects were "real," and which was the impetus for UFO program. They denied that the 1948 "Estimate of the Situation" had ever existed. They denied that Dewey Fournet had conducted a UFO maneuvers study in 1952. And they denied that the Robertson panel ever had met. Privately the Air Force con tended that declassification of its UFO files could lead to an other saucer scare; publicly it claimed that its classification policies were necessary to protect witnesses' names and the capabilities of classified electronic equipment that might have been involved in investigating a sighting.u Mass Media coverage in 1954 about UFOs boosted the Air Force's public relations campaign. Once again the urge to ex plain came to the fore. Charlotte Knight, in Collier's, ex plained that Air Force high altitude balloons accounted for virtually all UFO sightings. Siegfried Mandel, confused about the contactees, lumped Adamski and Keyhoe together when he reviewed several books on UFOs for the Saturday Review.
Mandel said that these two writers exploited the anxieties of the times "to create infantile illusions, fears, and hopes rang ing from facile solutions to world conflicts to the saucers will-get-you bugaboo." He hoped readers "with a normal degree of objectivity" realized UFOs were "auto-suggestive myths." When extraterestrial visitors arrived, Mandel stated positively, they would approach "reliable" people and present unmistakable credentials of their galactic origin." He recom mended Menzel's book as a "potent antidote" to the other writers. Wartime head of the German V-2 rocket develop ment, Dr. Walter Dornberger, told a Newsweek reporter that 1 22 The UFO Controversy in America I UFOs were only violent eddies of air that spun so fast their atoms became unstable and emitted light; this accounted for 98 to 99 percent of all sightings and the rest were natural phenomena. "No one is going to convince me of visitors from space," Dornberger said, "until they bring in one of those little guys and sit him on my desk."12 Menzel reiterated his feelings at the International Astro nomical Union in Dublin, Ireland ; when some of the astrono mers began to discuss UFOs, Menzel exclaimed that "such fantastic nonsense has no part in business dealt with on such a high scientific level as at these meetings." Even President Eisenhower seemed to help the Air Force's public relations endeavors. He stated at a news conference that a trusted Air Force official had told him the notion that UFOs came "from any outside planet or any other place" was "completely inac curate." A New York Times reporter interviewed an Air Force spokesman after Eisenhower's comment and said that "If the Air Force were not tactful it might scoff at the whole business publicly." Later, after asking Air Force headquarters about UFOs, the same reporter explained that "talk about fly ing saucers is one of those delusions that from time to time sweep the popular mind, especially in time of stress."13 Meanwhile, the Air Force made more direct debunking ef forts to prevent a saucer scare. An article in the March 1954 issue of American A viation said that the Pentagon "definitely attributes" the latest wave of UFO sightings to Keyhoe's Fly ing Saucers From Outer Space, which, the article explained, gained notoriety by affecting an official air with the help of an Air Force "underling" (AI Chop ) who was no longer with the service.u Keyhoe continued his counterattack against the Air Force in his third book, The Flying Saucer Conspiracy, published in 1955. In it he again put forth his conspiracy-of-silence the ory, but this time he had new facts to back it up : the issuance of Air Force Regulation 200-2, part of which prohibited the release of UFO reports to the public, and of Joint-Army Navy-Air Force-Publication (JANAP ) 146, which made pub lic disclosure of a UFO sighting described in the JANAP form a criminal offense ; the Air Force's insistence on includ ing disclaimers in Keyhoe's Look article and the efforts to discredit him. He concluded once again that high-ranking Air Force officials knew more than they were telling and that a small group of Pentagon conspirators were directing the Air Force policy to the country's detriment. This "Silence Group" Continued Skirmishes and the Rise of NICAP 123 within the Pentagon, Keyhoe said, used censorship to prevent hysteria. He realized that such action might be due to a high motive but warned that censorship endangered democratic in stitutions and that the "Air Force's insistence that it has no answer only heightens the possibility of hysteria." To bolster this theory, he listed over a hundred puzzling UFO cases and weak or ridiculous Air Force explanations for them.l5 Believing that his new book would boost his cause, Keyhoe did not know that the Air Force still had an important card to play, a card it had been holding since 1953. It was Project Blue Book Special Report Number 14, the updated results of the Battelle Memorial Institute's statistical study of UFOs , which Ruppelt had initiated in 1 952. Although it is unclear why the Air Force decided to release Special Report Number 14 at the same time that The Flying' Saucer Conspiracy came out, Keyhoe's assertion that the Air Force did it to counteract his book seems consistent with the Air Force's policy of op posing any publicity that might lead to another saucer scare.16 Special Report Number 1 4 was puzzling. The purpose of the study was to determine, through statistical techniques, whether anything flying in the air "represented technological developments not known to this country." A secondary pur pose was to develop a model of a flying saucer and to find common patterns and trends in the movements of the report ed objects. But the researchers could neither devise any "veri fied" model of flying saucers (apparently assuming UFOs should come in one shape) nor find any physical evidence for them. Similarly, the researchers could find no patterns or trends in sightings, although, the report said, "the inac curacies inherent in this type of data, in addition to the in completeness of a large proportion of the reports, may have obscured any patterns or trends that otherwise would have been evident."17 The researchers did find that the more complete the data and the better the report, the more likely it was that the re port would remain unknown. Nevertheless-even after saying they could not identify the unknowns-the researchers found that "the probability that any of the UNKNOWNS considered in this study are 'flying saucers' is concluded to be extremely small, since the most complete and reliable reports from the present data, when isolated and studied, conclusively failed to reveal even a rough model, and since the data as a whole failed to reveal any marked patterns or trends." Yet the researchers concluded that as a result of incomplete data and !ll 124 The UFO Controversy in America j.
inadequate scientific measurements, "it cannot be absolutely I proven that 'flying saucers' do not exist." But they also con- , 1 eluded that "on the basis of this evaluation of the informa- 1 .
tion, it is considered to b e highly improbable that any of the ·1 • reports of unidentified aerial objects examined in this study represent observations of technological developments outside the range of present-day scientific k.nowledge."lS W'hen Secretary of the Air Force Donald Quarles released Special Report 14 on October 25, 1955, he made several statements to the press about the entire UFO issue. He said that no one had reason to believe flying saucers had flown over the United States and that the 3 percent unknowns dur ing 1954 would be identifiable if more information were available (the latter being contrary to what the Battelle Insti tute found) . Also, he explained that the Air Force had re cently tested a new, circular, vertical-take-off jet and had con tracted with a Canadian firm, the A. V. Roe Company, to buy a circular flying craft. These two planes, Quarles stated, would probably cause UFO sightings in the future. Keyhoe's reaction to this last statement was that it was calculated to deceive the public,19 The Air Force hoped the timely release of Special Report 14 would quiet the UFO controversy once and for all, es pecially because the report was a scientific study that found no evidence for UFOs being interplanetary objects. But in stead of laying the controversy to rest, Special Report 14 created a new battlefront. Keyhoe and other civilian UFO proponents charged that the Battelle Institute had not an alyzed the best cases for its study and had avoided using many important cases that the Air Force listed as unidentified in its files. Keyhoe asserted that the "cream of the crop" re ports on which the Battelle Institute based its model of a fly ing saucer were in reality weak cases, and that the Institute deliberately used them to convey the impression that all witnesses saw different phenomena. Keyhoe criticized the In stitute for being biased in favor of explaining the reports and for studying only a few foreign sightings and none before 1947, which intimated that the phenomenon began in 1947.
Finally, Keyhoe faulted the Institute for using the statistics on unknowns to imply that only 9 percent of all sightings and 3 percent of the recent sightings were unknown; in fact, Key hoe said, 20 to 30 percent of all sightings were unknown and the 3 percent was for the first three months of 1955 only.2o Ruppelt criticized Special Report 14 as well. In a widely Continued Skirmishes and the Rise of NICAP 125 quoted letter (February 1 956) to UFO researcher Max Mil ler, Ruppelt said the most astounding thing about the report was that it said all but a few UFOs were explainable. This shocked him because he had initiated the project and knew that the study's purpose was not to solve the overall UFO problem, as the Air Force made it out to be, but to find un known technological developments. Moreover, Ruppelt said, "after spending a considerable amount of money, statistical methods were no good for a study like this. They didn't prove a thing. The results were such that by interpreting them in different ways you could prove anything you wanted to. This is not a good study." Ruppelt could not understand why the Air Force had held on to the report for two years and re leased a 1953 study·in 1 955 as the "latest hot dope."21 Special Report 14 also created another mystery and endless speculation about its significance. Project Blue Book had previously issued twelve status reports, the last one in September 1 953. Civilians interested in the UFO controversy wanted to know what happened to report number 1 3 , and what secret and perhaps sensational information it contained.
UFO researchers spent much time over the years trying to find the phantom report, but to no avail. The Air Force claimed in 1 973 that material intended for report number 1 3 was subsequently included in Special Report 14, but this did not stop the speculation.22 At first Special Report 14 seemed to have the desired ef fect. Time magazine science editor Jonathan N. Leonard added to the paper's ongoing hostility toward proponents of the theory that UFOs had an extraterrestrial origin by using Special Report 14 as a basis for a scathing review of Key hoe's The Flying Saucer Conspiracy, ·popular writer Harold T. Wilkens' Flying Saucers Uncensored, and Ruppelt's The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Leonard characterized all UFO proponents as cultists and said one subcult included those who believe in "heretical conspiracy in the depths of the Pentagon." Keyhoe, the chief cultist, wanted to become a martyr to the cause. Ruppelt's book was the "longest and dul lest" of the three and, while more sensible, still well within the cultist range. But, explained Leonard, while these books were in preparation, "the Air Force released the results of a massive, intelligent, painstaking and detailed analysis of all flying saucer reports," employing "excellent scientists" with "elaborate apparatus." Leonard favorably outlined Special Report 14's conclusions and called it a "cruel blockbuster" for 1 26 · The UFO Controversy in A merica Ruppelt and other "cultists." Captain Hardin, commenting happily on the review, reported that "It would appear from this review that the downgrading and subsequent release of Special Report 14 is serving well the purpose for which it was intended. "23 In spite of Hardin's optimism, though, the criticism of - Special Report 14 was so intense that the Air Force and Blue Book became more sensitive than ever, and the contro versy did not subside. Instead, the Air Force became em broiled in a protracted fight about making the report avail able to the public. Perhaps uneasy about the criticisms and inadequacies, the Air Force had printed only a hundred cop- ies for in-house distribution, particularly for every major pub- lic information officer in the country. But pressure from UFO researchers persuaded California Representative John E.
Moss of the House Subcommittee on Government Informa tion to force the Air Force to print and distribute more cop ies.24 Despite its controversial nature, by 1 956 Special Report 14 had becoi:ne the cornerstone of the Air Force's position on UFOs. This position, that the Air Force had "scientifi cally" studied UFOs and found no evidence for their exis tence as a unique phenomenon, was not limited to public pro nouncements and press releases; it prevailed within the Air Force staff as well. Although Keyhoe charged that the Air Force stifled interest in UFOs, no information exists to indi cate that any member of Project Blue Book or ATIC ever thought UFOs constituted anything other than an explainable phenomenon.
Captain George T. Gregory, who became head of Blue Book when Captain Hardin transferred in April 1956, best il lustrated this attitude when he briefed members of the Air In telligence Training School. Gregory, a zealous UFO debunker, told the staff that the 1 952 sightings definitely resulted from publicity about the subject and that the growing number of UFO clubs, books, and articles criticizing the Air Force were contributing to a new surge of reports. According to Gregory, in 1952 the Air Force managed to rise above the hysteria of the times to investigate UFO reports "quietly, solemnly and seriously." He freely used Hynek's name to demonstrate the caliber of scientists who worked on the problem and found nothing unique in the atmosphere. Gregory enumerated all the latest techniques the Air Force used to study the phenom enon, such as the Videon diffraction grid and the radarscope Continued Skirmishes and the Rise of NICAP 1 27 camera. But he neglected to explain that the Air Force had installed the Videon diffraction grids even though they had failed and that the radarscope plan had been unsatisfactory.
At the end of the briefing, Gregory distributed . copies of Special Report 14, explaining that it contained the results from "a large panel of distinguished scientists" who had in tensively studied and analyzed the phenomenon. Special Re port 14 proved, said Gregory, that there was a "total lack of evidence" to demonstrate that the objects were hostile inter planetary spaceships, that they represented technological development not known in this country, or that they threaten ed the United States.25 By 1 956 almost all former ATIC and Blue Book personnel had left the project. Gregory and the new officers may not have been aware of the UFO program's previous history. It is clear that from 1 956 to 1 969 no one within ATIC seriously questioned the Air Force's UFO investigative or analytical methods. Even Hynek, with his vague misgivings, willingly participated in the Air Force's plan to rid itself of the UFO problem. Hynek described the characteristic style of thinking in the Air Force around 1 956 as : "It can't be, therefore it isn't."26 Given this philosophy, Gregory and the other staff people had little or no concern with verifying the facts or val idating their methods and findings; UFOs were nonsense, and any reputable scientific study would most certainly conclude the same thing.
Gregory's method of analyzing reports reflected his opinion that the phenomenon did not merit serious attention. During his tenure he made the most strenuous efforts of any Blue Book project leader to identify UFO reports regardless of the information they contained. Under Gregory, Blue Book staff routinely classified all reports from youths age ten to seven teen as figments of their imaginations and placed the reports in the unreliable category. The staff automatically put most sightings reported through the "Canadian-United States Com munications Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings" channels in the insufficient data category without soliciting more information. Blue Book extended the probable category to include sightings that presented no data to indi cate the object could not have been an aircraft, balloon, and so forth. If a witness in his efforts to describe a UFO used words like jet-like, balloon-like, or meteor-like, Blue Book staff identified the object as a jet, balloon, or meteor. The staff did this even when the witness used the words to 128 The UFO Controversy in A merica l describe what the object did not look like. It also routinely placed some of the most interesting low-level or close encoun- \ !
ter reports in the insufficient data category. Occasionally in- ' vestigators mistakenly sent obvious meteor reports to Blue 1 Book, and the staff diligently put them in the solved category.
H Hynek or an investigator listed a sighting as possible, Blue Book put it in the probable category; if originally called probable, the project labeled it definite.27 Blue Book also continued in its efforts to eliminate reports because the Air Force still felt anxious about the steady stream of UFO publicity emanating from private souces. Per haps the most serious threat to the Air Force in 1 956 was the release of Clarence Greene's semidocumentary motion pic ture, U.F.O. Greene had received the technical assistance of Chop, Fournet, and Ruppelt on the film and also had ob tained copies of the recently declassified Great Falls (Mon tana) and Tremonton (Utah) UFO films of supposed UFOs in flight. Greene's movie featured Los Angeles journalist Tom Towers in the starring role as AI Chop; other actors por trayed Ruppelt, Fournet, and General Garland. Greene in cluded interviews with Nicholas Mariana and Delbert C.
Newhouse (the two men who had taken the UFO films ) , a portion of the Samford news conference, and dramatic reen actments of the Mantell incident and the Washington, D.C., sightnings. 28 Such publicity posed a severe threat to Captain Gregory and the Air Force, which mobilized its resources to coun teract the film. Gregory kept a file on all the movie's re views, notifications, and advertisements, carefully underlining every statement that might cause problems for the Air Force or generate interest in UFOs. From Richard Dyer McCann's review in the Christian Science Monitor, Gregory singled out the statement, "It will almost certainly stir up a storm of pub lic controversy," and added the marginal note, "This is some thing that neither PIO [Office of Public Information] or ATIC would like to undergo again!" Gregory summed up the Air Force's attitude toward the film by using the phrase from the review: "This film may stir up a storm of public contro versy similar to that which USAF was subjected to in 1952 with regard to UFOs as a result of the unwarranted sensa tionalism generated by so-called 'UFO experts,' writers, and publishers." In addition to keeping files, ATIC asked Hynek and Air Force officers to review the film before its release, and asked photo experts to compare copies of the Mariana Continued Skirmishes and the Rise of NICAP 1 29 and Newhouse films with the excerpts · shown in the movie.
ATIC Chief Scientist A. Francis Arcier met with agency offi cials to discuss the preparation of a case file giving the official Air Force explanation for every sighting portrayed in the film. And, finally, ATIC devised a standard response to all in quiries about the movie in which it referred the person to Special Report 14.29 When the film was released in May 1956, the "storm of controversy" the Air Force so feared turned out to be little more than a light mist. U.F.O. was successful, but it did not cause flying saucer hysteria, criticism of the Air Force, or more UFO reports. Nonetheless, the Air Force still had rea son to believe its UFO debunking campaign was inadequate, for the number of sighting reports began to rise again. In the peak sighting year, 1952, ATIC received 1,501 reports. In the following three years, 1 953, 1 954, 1 955, it received 509, 487, and 545 reports, respectively. Then in 1956 it received 670 reports.ao Public interest in the subject increased with the re ports, and the discrepancies between the sightings, Air Force pronouncements, Keyhoe's theories, and the public percep tions of the problem came to a head in 1956 with the forma tion of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phe nomena (NICAP) .
A group of private citizens interested in UFOs and dissatis fied with Air Force policies met in October 1 956 to organize the Flying Saucer Discussion Group. They proposed to inves tigate UFOs and the possibility of space flight. Club member and space propulsion researcher T. Townshend Brown, the club's first director, wanted scientists and other influential cit izens to back the club. With the help of Keyhoe, Brown ap pointed to the board of governors a retired army brigadier general, two physicists, two ministers, and two businessmen, among others. The most prestigious man on the board was missile pioneer and former head of the navy's guided missile program, retired Rear Admiral Delmer S. Fahrney. Brown changed the club's name to the more professional sounding National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena and had the organization incorporated on October 24, 1 956. A major problem confronting the new organization was to keep the "crack pots" out and to become "respectable" enough to draw professional people. Keyhoe purposely stayed in the background, not wanting reporters to "jump on it [NICAP] and picture it as a Keyhoe-inspired deal."31 From the beginning Brown ran into trouble. He had esti- 1 3 0 The UFO Controversy in A merica mated that $85,000 a year would cover salaries and expenses and set the membership fees at from $ 1 5.00 for regular mem bers to $ 1 ,000 for founders. Expenses mounted but the ex pected funds did not materialize. By the end of 1 956, when only two months old, the fledging organization hovered on the brink of bankruptcy. Tensions between Keyhoe and Brown over Brown's financial policies peaked in January 1 957 at a climactic membership meeting. Keyhoe attended and seemed content with watching and listening only. But when Brown decided to place his own name in nomination for chairman of the board of governors, a position he wanted in addition to being director, Keyhoe could not contain him self. He stood up and accused Brown of mismanaging the funds and steering the organization on too radical a course (he referred to Brown's dubious antigravity propulsion theo ries ) . A shouting match ensued and Keyhoe issued an ultima tum to the board and to Brown : either Brown resigned from NICAP or Keyboe would personally advise Admiral Fahrney and other board members to resign. Faced with this ultima tum, the board capitulated; the next day it forced Brown to resign, elected Admiral Fahrney chairman, and appointed Keyhoe to replace Brown as the new director of NICAP.32 Keyhoe finally had an organizational tool for challenging the Air Force on a national scale. He bad been formulating plans since 1954, when be told Coral Lorenzen that a "wide public demand" for Air Force declassification or con gressional hearings on UFOs was needed to combat the top level conspiracy. "If enough intelligent believers could get to gether and use all possible influence, through their congress men, senators, and any other means at hand, it might force a quick policy change in Washington."aa Keyboe's strategy to solve the UFO problem to his satisfaction and uncover the conspiracy was either to force or to wait for a "big break through," which could take several forms : a flying saucer could land on the White House lawn, thereby putting an im mediate end to the UFO controversy; a series of spectacular sightings could occur, which would create enough public pressure to force the Air Force to reveal all its findings; or rational argument could swing the public to Keyboe's posi tion, giving him the leverage to compel the Air Force to dis close its "hidden" findings publicly. The latter method was, of course, the only way Keyhoe could control the breakthrough.
All UFO organizations drew a degree of ridicule, but NI CAP tried to keep its share to a minimum. Keyhoe's position Continued Skirmishes and the Rise of NICAP 1 3 1 as director plus the people on the board o f governors gave NICAP dignity, and it attracted many individuals who would usually not have joined a UFO organization. Within a few months after Keyhoe's appointment, the board of governors consisted of Fahrney, Vice-Admiral R. H. Hillenkoetter (the first director of the CIA) , Dewey Fournet, J. B. Hartranft (president of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association) , retired Rear Admiral H. B. Knowles, Army Reserve Colonel Robert B. Emerson, retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General P. A. delValle, Dr. Marcus Bach (professor of religion at Iowa State University) , Dr. Charles A. Maney (professor of physics at Defiance College in Ohio) , Reverend Leon LeVan, , Reverend Albert Baller, columnist Earl Douglass, and radio ' TV commentator Frank Edwards. These men gave NICAP the prestige and national outlook that no other UFO organi zation had. Furthermore, NICAP bad a distinguished group of special advisers : AI Chop, Captain C. S. Chiles (of the 1948 Chiles and Whitted sighting fame) , Captain R. B.
McLaughlin ( author of the True Magazine article on track ing a UFO ) , Warrant Officer Delbert C. Newhouse (who took the famous Tremonton, Utah, motion picture) , and Wil bert B. Smith (former head of the Canadian government's UFO project) .34 Fahrney inaugurated NICAP's public role with a press conference, which the Associated Press carried nationally. He stated that neither the Soviet Union nor the Unied States could duplicate the UFOs' observed speeds and accelerations and that the flying objects seemed to be intelligently controlled because of "the way they change position in formations and override each other." With over five hundred newspaper arti cles about the press conference, the new organization began with a burst of publicity. ali Meanwhile, Keyboe's reorganizing plans advanced rapidly.
He cut the membership fee to $7.50, arranged to publish a monthly bulletin, slashed the organization's overhead, and put it on a bare bones financial policy by, among other things, moving to offices with lower rent and dismissing salaried em ployees. Most important, be changed the organization's em phasis. Unlike Brown, Keyhoe wanted to use NICAP as a pressure group to force congressional hearings on the Air Force's UFO program; Congress could require the Air Force to release its UFO data to the public and also prompt a fair and impartial scientific investigation. More conservative than other UFO organizations, NICAP at first avoided any claim 132.
The UFO Controversy in A merica that UFOs were extraterrestrial. By assuming that Air Force records and sighting reports would prove the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs, NICAP in effect gave the Air Force this re sponsibility. Through this stance, NICAP placed the Air Force in the position of being the expert in the field and re linquished some of its ability to act independently of the Air Force. For nearly all of NICAP's existence, it was inextric ably connected with Air Force policies and whims.ss Keyhoe's main vehicle for his lobbying efforts was the or ganization's publication, the UFO Investigator. The first issue created much public comment because it contained a previ ously undisclosed radar-visual sighting that Civil Aeronautics Administration control tower operators had made.s7 Each suc ceeding issue presented information designed to counteract Air Force claims of UFO "solutions." Before long the newsletter and Keyhoe's aggressive reorganization policies led to a considerable membership, numbering approximately 5,- 000 by 1958. But regardless of the large numbers of people joining and paying $7.50, NICAP existed in a constant state of financial crisis. Keyhoe had to finance the newsletter after the first few issues and, in large part, the entire organization with his personal funds. With careful nurturing, however, NICAP quickly assumed leadership over the scores of smaller UFO organizations spread around the country.
NICAP's only potential rival organization was the Aerial , Phenomena Research Organization (APRO ) , which James and Coral Lorenzen had founded in 1952. But the Lorenzens were pleased to see NICAP's formation and did all they could to help the new organization. They did not agree com pletely with Keyhoe's conspiracy thesis but, at least in 1957, did not argue with it. APRO was, from its inception, a small organization, content to report UFO sightings and events. It had neither the resources nor the inclination to take on the Air Force or Congress ; it had avoided severe monetary prob lems and preferred to remain within its financial limits.
The Air Force looked upon the establishment of NICAP , with Keyhoe at its head as an ominous development. The in fluential people on the board of governors did nothing to ease the Air Force's anxiety. It was distressed especially over Key hoe's efforts to obtain congressional hearings, fearing that the publicity from such hearings would touch off another saucer scare. Moreover, hearings would imply that the Air Force was not doing its job properly. In the face of increased criticism from UFO proponents and the newly formed NICAP, the I , Continued Skirmishes and the Rise of NICAP 1 3 3 Air Force expanded its rationale for keeping UFO data clas sified. In 1 957 Major Robert Spence, deputy chief of the op erations branch of the Public Information Service, told pri vate researcher Max Miller that the Air Force could not give him its photographic files "without making them available to all." This was undesirable because the "man hours and cost would be exorbitant" and, more importantly, it would inter fere with the Air Force's normal missions and operations.
Similarly, General Joe Kelly assured Keyhoe in 1 957 that the Air Force would not turn over its UFO files to NICAP be cause it would then have to do the same for the other organi zations. The Air Force classified UFO reports, Kelly said, to "safeguard the National Security" because often a case in volved a specific radar or classified weapons system.38 Concurrent with major public relations problems from NI CAP, the Air Force went through another reorganization of its UFO project. In July of 1 957 the Air Defense Command disbanded the 4602d and reassigned UFO investigating duties to the 1 006th Air Intelligence Service Squadron (AISS) . The Air Force took this opportunity to divide public relations re sponsibilities between the Office of Legislative Liaison for Congress and the Office of Public Information for the public, thereby allowing Air Force intelligence to be "completely di vorced" from the public relations aspect of the controversy.a9 The Air Force revised AFR 200-2 in February 1 958 to formalize the new procedures. Also, the revised regulations recreated the system of air base commanders conducting ini tial investigations of all UFO sightings in their areas and con tinued ATIC's formal UFO responsibility for analysis and evaluation. If ATIC believed more extensive study was re quired, revised AFR 200-2 stated, it should submit a request to have 1006th personnel conduct the investigation. At the same time, the Air Force added the order to AFR 200-2 that "Air Force activities must reduce the percentage of uniden tifieds to the minimum." The Air Force continued its firmly held belief that reducing the number of unidentifieds would cut down on the number of new sighting reports. It hoped people would begin to understand that a strange something in the sky was not necessarily a spaceship and, therefore, would not report such sightings to the Air Force. In revising the reg ulations, the Air Force tried to eliminate "any and all por tions of [AFR 200-2] which might provoke suspicion or mis interpretation by the public." (Keyhoe, in The Flying Saucer Conspiracy, had criticized the Air Force for its secrecy poli- 134 The UFO Controversy in America l cies as outlined in AFR 200-2. ) The new procedures also !
countered the contactees' publicity efforts; the Air Force gave : the FBI names of individuals who were "illegally or de- I ceptively bringing the subject to public attention." These ' · changes, the Air Force hoped, "should d o much toward the relief of [Air Force intelligence] in the UFO program."40 The change to the 1006th encountered problems immedi ately. Within a few months of the transfer, the Air Force reduced the funds for the 1 006th, making curtailment of its investigating functions necessary. The Air Force limited the 1006th's duties to conducting investigations only upon request of the ATIC commander or the director of intelligence in Washington, D.C. The 1 006th remained with the UFO pro gram until its reassignment in July 1 959, at which time the Air Force used the 1 127th Field Activities Group stationed at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. This group made few investigations.41 The Air Force's organizational and regulation changes had no effect on the number of sighting reports coming into ATIC. Despite the campaign to downplay the subject, 1 957 represented another peak year in UFO reports. Whereas ATIC recorded 670 sighting reports in 1 956, it received over 1,000 in 1957. The average held steady at from 27 to 39 sightings per month for the first six months of 1957; then the reports increased in July and August to about 70 a month, decreased slightly to 60 in September, increased to over 1 00 in October, and finally climbed to over 500 for Novem ber and December together.42 The country was experiencing another major wave of saucer sightings, approaching the scale of the 1952 "scare." November, the month with the most reports, began with a spectacular group of sightings in Levelland, Texas. These cases were important not only for the public impact but for illustrating the Air Force's investigatory methods. The sight ings began at 1 1 : 00 P.M. on the night of November 2 and ended at 2 : 00 A.M. on the morning of November 3. Two witnesses, driving just north of Levelland, saw a glowing, yel low and white, torpedo-shaped object flying towEtrd them. As the object flew over the automobile, the car's motor and lights failed. The two witnesses left their car to view the ob ject, and it came so close to them that they experienced "quite some heat," which forced them to "hit the ground." As the object left the area, the driver could start the car again and turn the lights on. The witnesses reported the incident to the police.4S Continued Skirmishes and the Rise of NlCAP 135 One hour later, at midnight, a witness driving four miles east of Levelland came upon a brilliantly glowing, egg-shaped 1 object resting in the middle of the road. As the witness ap proached the object, which he thought was about 200 feet long, the car's engine and lights failed. A few seconds later the object rose to a height of about 200 feet and disappeared.
The amazed witness could then start his car and the lights worked properly. Five minutes later another person, driving eleven miles north of Levelland, reported to police that he had come upon a 200-foot-long glowing object sitting in the road; as he approached it, he said, his car engine failed and the lights went out; when the object rose and left the area, the engine and lights functioned normally again.44 At 12 : 05 A.M., a nineteen-year-old college freshman was driving nine miles east of Levelland when the engine and lights in his car failed suddenly; as he got out of his car to look under the hood, he saw an egg-shaped object sitting on the ground in front of him. The object, he said, was 75 to 1 00 feet long, glowed white with a greenish tint, and seemed made of aluminum. Frightened, he jumped back into his car and watched the object for about five minutes. Then the ob ject "disappeared" and the witness could start his car. He did not tell anyone about the incident "for fear of public ridi cule." (The next day, however, .his parents convinced him to call the police. ) Fifteen minutes after this last incident, an- I other car stalled as it approached an object sitting on a dirt road nine miles north of Levelland. The object was glowing, but when it rose to an elevation of about 300 feet, it disap peared from sight. And once again the witness was then able to start the automobile. 45 All of these reports came in to Patrolman A. J. Fowler of Levelland, who was on duty that night. He sent two deputies out to investigate; they reported seeing bright lights in the sky but had no engine problems. Several minutes after the dep uties' report, a man driving just west of Levelland saw a huge orange ball of fire coming toward him ; it settled on the high way about a quarter of a mile in front of him, covering the paved portion of the road. When the witness approached the object, his car engine and lights failed. As the object rose a few minutes later, the witness was able to start his car again.
One-half hour later, a truck driver called Patrolman Fowler to report that, as he was driving northeast of Levelland, his truck engine and headlights failed when he came within 200 feet of a 200-foot-long, egg-shaped object on the ground. He 136 The UFO Controversy in A merica said it glowed "like a neon sign." As he got out of the truck to investigate, the object shot straight up with a roar and flew away. His truck engine and headlights worked perfectly after the encounter.46 During this time other sheriff's deputies, aware of the UFO reports in the area, searched for objects. Sherifi Clem and Deputy McCulloch, while driving four or five miles outside the city, saw a streak of light with a reddish glow about 300 to 400 yards ahead of them on the highway; it lit up the en tire area in front of them. Patrolmen Hargrove and Gavin were only a few miles behind the sherif's car on the same road when they saw "a strange looking flash" which "ap peared to be close to the ground" about a mile in front of them. Constable Lloyd Ballen reported the last sighting of the evening. He saw an object that, he said, traveled so fast it looked like a flash of light moving from east to west. n In all, twelve people claimed to have seen an object and three more to have seen an unusual flash of light during a three-hour period. Al of the witnesses reported a light rain or heavy mist in the area but no storms or lightning.4.8 The national news wire services picked up the sightings, which made headlines around the. country. Public pressure on Blue Book to investigate these incidents was severe. An Air Force spokesman told a New York Times reporter that "a preliminary investigation had been ordered." When the re porter asked the significance of this, the spokesman replied, "We don't investigate all of them, after all." According to Hynek, the Blue Book investigation consisted of one man from the 1 006th who arrived a few days after the sightings, took two automobile trips to question witnesses, and then told the sheriff that he had completed the investigation. The of ficer failed to interview nine of the fifteen witnesses and also erroneously stated that lightning had been in the area at the time of the sightings. 49 Public pressure for an explanation was so intense that the assistant secretary of defense requested ATIC to immediately submit a preliminary analysis to the press. Although Captain Gregory called this request "a most difficult requirement in view of the limited data," officers at ATIC analyzed the in formation on hand and released a press statement a few days later. The ATIC officers said that contrary to the popular idea that many witnesses were involved in the sighting, only three people "could be located" who had seen the "big light." The object was visible for "only a few seconds, not sustained Continued Skirmishes and the Rise of NICAP 137 visibility as had been implied." Furthermore, the officers said, the key to the sightings lay in the presence of lightning and storm conditions in the area. The Air Force's final evaluation gave the cause of the Levelland sightings as "weather phe nomenon of electrical nature, generally classified as 'Ball Lightning' or 'St. Elmo's Fire,' caused by stormy conditions in the area, including mist, rain, thunderstorms and light ning." The Air Force attributed the car engine and light fail ures to "wet electrical circuits." Privately Blue Book officers believed the Levelland sightings were "obviously another UFO example of 'mass suggestion.' "50 What concerned the Air Force most about the Levelland sightings was the amount of publicity they generated. Captain Gregory, operating within the accepted Air Force theorem that one sensationally publicized sighting would cause others, reported that the Levelland case bad provoked a flood of other reports and "within three weeks this Division [ATIC] had received approximately 500 UFO reports as a result.'51 To counteract the latest wave of reports, the Office of Pub lic Information in the Pentagon released a fact sheet, which stated that "after ten years of investigation and analysis," with the help of a "selected scientific group," the Air Force was unable to discover any evidence for the existence of "Flying Saucers." Using Hynek's name and credentials, the fact sheet explained that "the selected qualified scientists, en gineers, and other personnel involved in these analysis are completely objective and open-minded on the subject of fly ing saucers.'' These scientists "apply scientific methods of ex amination to all cases in reaching their conclusions.'' More over, "no report is considered unsuitable for study and cate gorization and no lack of valid evidence of physical matter in the case studies is assumed to be 'prima facie' evidence that so-called 'flying saucers' or interplanetary vehicles do not ex ist.'' To reinforce the fact sheet, an Air Force spokesman told the New York Times a few days later that the Air Force gave all reports the " 'most thorough' " analysis involving the services of top-level scientists in many fields to be sure that the findings were fair and impartial and " 'above all, in formed.' "52 Donald Menzel, while attending a meeting in Stockholm, once again supported the Air Force's conclusions and added some of his own ideas about the wave of sightings. As many flying saucers existed now, Menzel said, as did in 1947 and 1948 when the scare first started; this was not surprising be- 138 The UFO Controversy in America cause they were all due to mirages and other natural phe nomena. And Menzel gave another reason for UFO sightings, a reason that the Air Force would use later in its official ex planations of the 1 957 wave of sightings : "The current rash of flying saucers is tied in with the sensitization of people to the Sputniks." Doubtless Soviet satellites did create some UFO sighting reports; the larger wave of UFO sightings in November of 1957 coincided with the launching of the sec ond Sputnik, but the sightings decreased to 1 3 6 in December and to 6 1 in January of 1958. The 1 958 rate, 627 for the year, was a little less than the 1956 rate. 53 The Air Force campaign to stop UFO publicity seemed to be working. After the 1 957 wave newspaper publicity about the subject subsided considerably, and articles about UFOs became rare because, as the Air Force reported, "the press is completely satisfied with the periodic UFO 'fact sheets' made available to them and the Air Force responses to specific UFO sightings."M Public interest seemed to be waning by 1958 and the passions that the UFO phenomenon aroused appeared much less intense, although the UFO· groups were stil strong.
Keyhoe's appearance in February 1958 on the Armstrong Circle Theater's television show, "UFOs : Enigma of the Skies," added new fuel to the controversy. Departing from the script he had hesitantly agreed to use, Keyhoe said on na tional television that the Air Force had three secret documents of which the public was unaware : the original let ter from General Nathan Twining in 1 947 establishing the Air Force's UFO project on the premise that UFOs were "real"; the 1948 "Estimate of the Situation" that favored the ex traterrestrial hypothesis; and the Robertson panel report. But before he could complete even one sentence, the producers turned down the audio so that the home audience heard prac tically nothing. The producers explained that they had cen sored Keyhoe because they feared a libel suit against the net work. 55 In this case the Air Force seemed to take Keyhoe's side. It was unfortunate, it said, that the producers had cut off the audio, for "they enhanced rather than detracted from Major Keyhoe's position concerning his sensational and unsupported claims." Major Tacker, then Pentagon public information of Écer for UFOs, wrote that people tended to remember sensa tiOnal accusations better than "the responsible statements of such qualified scientists who disclaimed such charges on the I I I Continued Skirmishes and the Rise of NICAP 139 same program." The show prompted many letters to Keyhoe and to congressmen. But the Air Force received only six let ters, and these, the Air Force said, were all from "cranks." This apparent lack of public criticism pleased the Air Force, and an ATIC officer wrote that "reaction from the CBS TV program has been beyond expectation." The show, he said, actually helped the Air Force because Keyhoe had "alienated himself with the press" by going beyond the script in his ef fort to criticize the Air Force. 56 The skirmishes between civilian UFO proponents and the Air Force did not end. In fact, 1954 to 1958 was a transi tional period, filled with minor debates, reorganizations, and policymaking. Of course, no period has a neat beginning and ending, and these minor battles continued into the 1960s. By about mid-1957, Keyhoe and NICAP were just beginning their full-scale battle with the Air Force. Although publicity about UFOs bad greatly decreased, Keyhoe always bad one great ally to rely on in his war with the Air Force-the UFO sightings. Continued sighting reports in addition to constant pressure from NICAP and other civilian groups created an even greater problem for the Air Force-the threat of con gressional hearings on UFOs.
7 THE BATTLE FOR CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS Congressional hearings presented a serious threat to the Air Force. They might imply that the UFO phenomenon was vi tally significant and that the government was very interested in it. This might lead to another "flying saucer scare," threatening to the national interest. Hearings might force the Air Force to declassify its IDes, contradicting Air Force claims that its IDes were open already. Hearings might prompt criticism of the Air Force's UFO investigation, criti cism that would harm its public relations program. Therefore, preventing or limiting congressional hearings became a major objective for the Air Force from 1957 to 1 964.
Handling the hearings problem and congressional inquiries about the UFO program fell to the Secretary of the Air Force Office of Legislative Liaison (SAFLL) . It continually assured congressmen that the Air Force's UFO program was adequate to the task. Relying heavily on Special Report Number 14 for its information, SAFLL told New Jersey Con gressman Frelinghuysen that there was . a "total" lack of evi dence to suggest that anything unusual was in the skies or that the objects were interplanetary vehicles. Writing to Rep resentative Lee Metcalf (of Montana) in early 1957, Major General Joe Kelly of SAFLL defended the way in which the Air Force dealt with UFOs : its interceptors pursued UFOs "as a matter of security to this country and to determine as pects involved" and it kept the public informed and released summaries of evaluated UFO reports. "For those objects which are not explainable," Kelly said in support of the clas sification policies, "only the fact that the reports are being an alyzed is considered releasable due to the many unknowns in volved."!
Despite these assurances, some congressmen still considered holding public hearings on the subject. Under pressure from 140 1 ' The Battle for Congressional Hearings 141 Keyhoe and NICAP, in January 1 958 the Senate Subcommit tee on Government Operations (Senator John McClellan, chairman) asked to meet with representatives from SAFLL to discuss the possibility of holding open hearings on the Air Force's UFO program. At the meeting William Weitzen, dep uty of the Air Force research and development operations, said the Air Force saw no reason for bearings but would co operate if the McClellan subcommittee thought them neces sary. The participants discussed the UFO program, the benefi cial aspects of the bearings, and the potentially harmful ef fects of bearings. Whereas hearings might show that the Air Force was doing its job, the participants said, the "uncon trolled publicity" that might result could be dangerous.2 The outcome of the discussion was that Richard Homer (assistant secretary of the Air Force for research and de velopment) told subcommittee chief counsel Donald O'Don nell that hearings were "not in the best interest of the Air Force." O'Donnell, impressed with the Air Force's UFO pro gram after bearing about its work, said he would advise the subcommittee to drop the issue. In an unsigned February memorandum, an Air Force officer said it seemed as if "there is no longer any basis for congressional, press, or public criti cism of Air Force UFO activities." Because inquiries about UFOs drastically dropped after the launching of the second Sputnik and with better public understanding of American space efforts, he hoped that "public thinking wil be more re alistically conditioned, transcending from fantasy to fact." Several weeks later, on February 28, Major General Arno H.
Luehman, director of information services, asked the McClel lan subcommittee to certify that its "preliminary investiga tion" had "proved" the Air Force was conducting its UFO in vestigation properly and was not withholding information from the public. The subcommittee refused to cooperate; the members did not want a previous press release to "shackle" them in case the situation changed. a The Air Force prevented congressional hearings, but only for the moment. In June 1958, Ohio Representative John E.
Henderson, after reading Ruppelt's book, sent a list of ques tions about UFOs to the Air Force. Still very sensitive about congressional opinion, Project Blue Book decided to respond with a special, comprehensive briefing for Henderson and other interested congressmen. According to an Air Force memorandum, congressmen complained that constituents con stantly besieged them for information about UFOs and that, 142 The UFO Controversy in A merica because the congressmen knew nothing about the subject, they experienced some "professional embarrassment." Mter the briefing the congressmen expressed confidence in the Air Force's UFO program and said they understood the problems in administering it. Rather than leaving responsibility to the Air Force, the congressmen agreed that they should advise their constituents on UFO m atters and also that publicity would be "unwise . . . particularly in an open or closed formal Congressional bearing." The Air Force persuaded con gressmen that private organizations and authors gave "undue impetus to the existence of 'flying saucers' " and stimulated ''unfavorable public hysteria." To bolster its argument, the Air Force distributed to the congressmen classified portions of the Robertson panel report.4 Again the Air Force bad only temporarily forestalled the threat of bearings. In August, John McCormack's House Sub committee on Atmospheric Phenomena (part of the House Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration) re quested a briefing on UFOs. McCormack wanted a week-long bearing in "closed secret session, unrecorded, names of witnesses to be held in confidence," and decided to call as of ficial witnesses Francis Arcier (the Air Force's chief scientific adviser) , Captain Gregory, Majors Best and Byrne of Air Force intelligence, and Majors Brower and Tacker of the Of fice of Public Information. McCormack requested that Men zel, Keyboe, and Ruppelt serve as outside witnesses. Air Force intelligence thought that if there must bʞ hearings, the Air Force might benefit from them.5 McCormack opened the session by explaining it was not really a hearing; the subcommittee, according to an Air Force memorandum, merely sought "additional information on up per space that would be helpful to the appropriate executive_ agency." Gregory outlined major events in the history of the UFO program, from Project Grudge and its reorganization to Special Report 14.
He correctly explained that Project , Grudge concluded UFO reports were misidentifications of utural phenomena, war nerves, and the like, but he incor rectly stated that press publicity was the only reason for reor ganizing Grudge and establishing Project Blue Book. Without mentioning any UFO sighting reports, Gregory said that the publicity about UFOs brought about the 1 952 "hysteria." This publicity, according to Gregory, led people to question the Air Force's handling of the UFO menace. As a result, Gregory recounted, General Samford requested the CIA to The Battle for Congressional Hearings 143 review the Air Force's UFO program; it did so by forming the Robertson panel which, he incorrectly reported, had six· ' teen members (it had five) .o Gregory then outlined the panel's conclusions and recom· mendations and described the current Air Force UFO pra.
gram. Without mentioning Project Blue Book's habit of lumping the probable and possible categories under the title of identified or the Air Force's policy of urging untrained air base officers to identify UFO reports at the base level, Gre· gory said Blue Book's improved investigating methods had reduced the unknowns from 30 percent to 10 percent. With· out explaining that the difraction camera plan never worked properly, Gregory declared that the plan, while "not wholly successful" because of "lack of operating personnel," pro duced no results to indicate the objects were not conven· tiona!. Gregory said Special Report 14 found a "total lack of evidence" for extraterrestrial visitors but did not tell the subcommittee that the report called the evidence ambiguous.
He used Hynek as an example of the caliber of scientists who had carefully examined the UFO phenomenon and found nothing unusual about it but did not say Hynek thought UFOs deserved increased systematic study.7 Gregory concluded by noting the rise of private UFO or ganizations, books, and clubs, and by chastising the organiza tions for continually trying to embarrass the Air Force. These self-appointed UFO groups, he said, constantly misinterpret ed, exaggerated, or misquoted Air Force publications "all to the detriment of the Air Force." Gregory added that the Air Force "would be more impressed by all this were it not so profitable." Contrary to these private groups' claims, the Air Force neither did nor would suppress any evidence indicating that UFOs were a threat to the security of the United States.
This briefing apparently relieved the subcommittee members, who "highly commended" Gregory and the other Air Force officers for their efforts. According to Air Force records, the members were "definitely pleased" with its approach to the problem and "apparently satisfied" with the results. The sub committee was so satisfied, in fact, that one of its staff told Air Force representatives that it would call no more witnesses and "take no further interest in this matter."B Once again the Air Force had defused an inquiry into the UFO program. But other congressmen, under continuous constituent pressure for public hearings, requested informa tion from the Air Force on previous hearings, briefings, and 144 The UFO Controversy in America the like. In response, SAFLL in 1959 devised a policy line for answering such inquiries. Not mentioning the Henderson, McClellan, or McCormack briefings, SAFLL said the Per· manent Subcommittee on Investigations (part of the Senate Government Operations Committee) periodically requested information, which the Air Force furnished, and after prelim· inary investigation the subcommittee indicated that it did not intend to hold hearings. The Air Force, the policy statement continued, believed hearings ''would merely give dignity to the subject out of all proportion to which it is entitled." Moreover, "the sensation seekers and the publishers of scien tific fiction would profit most from such hearings, and in the long run we would not accomplish our objective of taking the aura of mystery out of UFO's." Not wishing to appear in transigent, the policy statement assured the reader that if "overriding considerations" should prompt a congressional committee to hold public hearings, "the Air Force stands ready to give its wholehearted coperation" to such an en· deavor. SAFLL also included in the policy paper some state ments defending the Air Force's public information policies.9 Yet Air Force pronouncements explaining its classification policies often seemed contradictory. Richard Homer, assistant secretary of the Air Force for research and development, told Barry Goldwater in a January 1958 letter that allegations about the Air Force withholding information about UFOs were "entirely in error." But Homer also explained that many people who reported UFOs did not want details of the sight ings made public and the Air Force respected their wishes.
Writing to Senator Harry F. Byrd in January 1959, Major General W. P. Fisher (who replaced Joe Kelly as director of SAFLL) said the charge that the Air Force was withholding information "has no merit whatsoever." But, Fisher went on to explain, sometimes the Air Force did withhold information from the public to protect witnesses from "the idle curiosity of the sensation seekers" or to keep from "compromising our investigative processes. "10 Congressional inquiries, threats of public hearings, and public pressure prompted two Air Force actions in late 1958 : it issued another fact sheet in October and it undertook a staff study in December to evaluate its UFO program. The October fact sheet said "refinements" in Air Force investiga tory processes had led to a decline in the number of unknown UFO reports. These refinements essentially meant integrating the probable and possible categories with the identified cate· Tire Bat:le for Congressio r!al Hearings 1ఇ5 gory. so that when the Air Force released its offici:.l statistics on L rO reports. it could claim that the unkno\0-ns, which were 9 percent in 1953 and 1954 and at 3 percent in 1955, \O""ere only 1.8 percent in the first si.,;: mon"s of 1958. The fact sheet explained that Air Defense Commanc person:1el conducted the investigations and then sect the data to ATIC for analvses and evaluation "t-v scientific me3.l:1S"' : the l'FO project often used the senices of Dr. Hynek and other scien tists to investigate indhidual cases or to conduct .. detailed studies,. of lJFO"s in generaJ.ll As m example of the scientific" aspect of Air Force pro cedures, the fact sheet mentioned, for the fi.-st time publicly, tbe 1 953 Robertson panel. It explained that the Air Force convened the panel to conduct an '·over-al examination of investigative procedures and findings on specific reports.,_ and summarized the panel's conclusions and recommendations without mentioning the educational program pl:!.ns. Fin:ily, the fact sheet explained that the Air Force clasified repcrts "only in a few instances" to protect '"elements in our Air De fense S)"Stem" and did not comply with indi•idual reques'"..s for information because '·individuais who have asisted Air Force investigators·• (the witnesses 1 might be embarassed.12 Although the fact sheet's purpose was te> relieve press and public pressure on the Air Force, it had limited effect on pri vate urO groups. and intelligence officers remained dissatis fied with the Air Force's abilitY to counter the inroads these groups had made in its credibiity. Therefcre. intelligence of ficers ordered a staf study to enmine the public relations problems and to revaluate its "CFO program. The staf re ported that civilian UFO groups frequently inYestigated a sighting from a biased \iewpoint and then publicized it.
pointing to inadequacies in the Air Fcrce·s h:mdling of the case. Because the Air Force only investigated officiily report ed sightings. these groups could study and publicize sensa tional sightings never reported to the Air Force. These or ganizations knew the Air Force's deficiencies and used them to put it -"in a defensiYe position.·· :Moreover. the staff stated incorrectly, •·cఈptain Ruppelt .
.
.
is now afJi:J.ted lOith :t'ol: CAP," which meant that Ruppelt and "political adventurist" Keyhoe '"represent a formidable team from which plenty of trouble can be expected"'; both were in the .. business·• for the money. Comparable situ::ttions existed in forty-nine other or ganizations, the staf explained. which .. for various reasons" felt the need to do e;-erything they could to discredit the Air 146 The UFO Controversy in A merica È Force. Often these groups reached witnesses before the Air !
Force did and primed them on what to say; the club mem bers even remained in the room when the Air Force investi gator asked his questions.13 The Air Force, the staff concluded, needed to increase its credibility. One problem was that the Air Force did not in vestigate all sightings and sometimes took a long time on those it did investigate. The time delay was crucial because it allowed UFO groups to complete their investigation quickly and put the Air Force on the spot. To complicate matters, the staff said, many Air Force investigators did not have the experience to handle complex situations; all they could do was ask questions as outlined in AFR 200-2. The staff recom mended, first, that the Air Force assign eighteen to twenty .
men to temporary investigating duties and arm them with a UFO kit containing a standard operating procedure manual and other tools necessary for an adequate investigation; the ' men should be available at a moment's notice. Second, the Air Force should automatically investigate sightings reported ' to press people but not to it. Third, two members of the ATIC UFO group should be on alert each week for critical investigating duty. Implementing these recpmmendations, the staff felt, would help alleviate the problem of civilian UFO group criticism and also decrease the percentage of reports in the unknown and insuficient data categories (as of Novem ber 1958, 20 percent of al official reports were in these two categories) ,14 The ATIC commander tentatively approved the plan. But later Air Force headquarters dropped it, apparently deciding not to spend more money on a phenomenon that was no threat to the national security and that seemingly had no scientific value.lli In October 1958, one month before the staff undertook the above study, Major Robert J. Friend assumed Captain Gregory's duties as head of Project Blue Book. Friend was, according to Hynek, the only Blue Book chief who earned his respect. Having studied physics in graduate school, he had more extensive scientific training than other Blue Book chiefs, and he was a "total and practical realist" who under stood Blue Book's limitations. No sycophant or bureaucrat, Friend was the fairest chief of Project Blue Book since Ruppelt. Although not an advocate of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, and to a certain extent a willing participant in The Battle for Congressional Hearings 141 the Great Keyhoe War, he nevertheless brought a new per· spective to the project.16 When Friend took over the reins from Gregory, he imme· diately began to systematize the chaotic situation in Blue Book's office. He ordered an electric filer for reports, which Blue Book staff in the past had filed haphazardly or not at all. In his tenure he tried to institute a microfilming project to save the reports for posterity because he feared many had been pilfered. The Air Force decided the project was too ex· pensive and never carried it out. Friend began cataloging the sightings according to color, size, geographic location, and the like, but the job was so enormous that the lack of additional help forced him to abandon the work. Friend also realized , Hynek's value and supplied him daily with current UFO re· ports. More importantly, under Friend's direction and for the first time since the implementation of the Robertson panel recommendations in 1953, Blue Book began to reassess its role in studying the UFO phenomenon.H The first indication of a new outlook for Blue Book came in February 1 959 when Hynek called a meeting of key ATIC and Blue Book personnel to review public relations policies on UFOs, and also ostensibly because he was smarting from personal attacks. From 1 957 to 1 960 Hynek was codirector ' of the Smithsonian Institution's satellite tracking program and : played a limited role in analyzing UFO reports. Hynek made clear at the beginning of the meeting that the Air Force "had done a good job of handling a very difficult program with the limited resources available" but that the Air Force could im· prove these resources and other facets of the program. Trying to smooth out some of the public relations and scientific problems, the participants suggested five changes.lB The first suggestion was to change the ambiguous appella· tion unidentified flying objects, although this was not the proper time to do so because such a change would supply "the UFO fanatics with ammunition for a new attack." But the participants did recommend changing the name of the statistical category unknown to unidentified; this they thought, was less suggestive of mystery. Second, the partici· pants thought the Air Force should take advantage of favor able publicity: "Pictures and descriptions of the phenomena or objects determined as being probably responsible for a sighting should accompany a news release."19 Saying that the overall Air Force approach was not scien tific enough, the participants' third recommendation was that 148 The UFO Controversy in America I the Air Force call in a panel of scientists once a month to discuss the UFO problem. Fourth, the participants thought Project Blue Book should review old, sensational, unknown · cases-those that private UFO organizations were reopening "to the further embarrassment of the Air Force"-so that, given the "greater scientific knowledge" of the day, they "may be removed from the 'unknown' category and reclassi fied as a 'probable.' " Concerned about private UFO organi zation claims that people "held in high esteem by the public" sympathized with the organizations' views, the participants' I fifth suggestion was for the Air Force Information Service to ,, ask these individuals "for corroboration or denial and for fur ther detail if in the affirmative." To relieve public pressure on Hynek, the participants decided to discontinue using his name in official press releases (which had begun to anger Hynek) ' and to have the Air Force Information Service answer in quiries addressed to him.2o Of the five suggestions, the Air Force implemented two : it changed the name of the unknown category to unidentified and, although it did not create an official scientific panel, it allowed Hynek to meet informally with some ATIC person nel each month. The purpose of the meetings was to review "troublesome cases," discern trends, and make suggestions for the future. The unofficial scientific advisory group, which Blue Book recruited, basically consisted of six men in addi tion to Hynek. They were astronomer L. V. Robinson, public relations specialist Theodore J. Hieatt, chaplain Captain R.
Pritz, physicist V. J. Handmacher, psychologist Leroy D.
Pigg, and Friend. The group met for the first time on May S, 1959, and continued to convene about once a month until the end of 1 960.21 The group recommended that the Air Force stop evalu ating UFO reports on the basis of their potential hostility and, instead, step up its scientific evaluation of the phenome non using the mass of available data rather than individual cases. The advisory group supplied a military reason for con tinued Air Force study of sighting reports : if Air Force per sonnel did not learn to discriminate between UFOs and space-probe equipment, in the future they might mistake UFOs for sophisticated enemy missiles. Air Force officials chose to ignore these recommendations, and by the end of 1960, the group, as Hynek said, "just petered out." Its effect was nil.22 The unofficial group of advisers had no impact primarily The Battle for Congressional Hearings 149 because ATIC, while the group met in 1 959, conducted its own reassessment of the UFO project and arrived at diferent conclusions. Friend's outlook, continued private UFO group ctiticism, and increased expense for public relations all made the Blue Book staff think about getting rid of the UFO prob lem entirely. Friend realized that the Air Force's interest in UFOs only extended to determining whether they were threats to the national security or had intelligence value. He also realized that if the UFOs did not fall into one of these two categories, they were then a scientific problem and, as such, did not come within the purview of what the Air Force called the intelligence community. Because of Friend's atti tude, ATIC ordered a second staff study to determine how to economize on the UFO program and how to devise a differ ent policy toward it. This staff study became the most impor tant of the UFO program to date.
The staff reported that the ATIC UFO program consisted of four essential tasks : investigating sightings for possible in telligence and/ or scientific value; eliminating the "defensive attitude" of the program's public relations philosophy, such as "trying to prove that each object sighted is not a space ship"; informing the public that the UFO program, which evaluated each sighting, "is not essential to natioual security"; and using a public education program to "strip the shrouds of mystery'' from the project because "many innocent people are duped by those who are using the UFO for personal gain."23 After twelve years of investigating and analyzing UFO re ports-over 6,000 in total-A TIC had no evidence to suggest that UFOs were either space vehicles, a threat to national se curity, or of scientific value, the staff explained. The UFO program was a costly and "unproductive burden" on the Air Force, resulting only in "unfavorable publicity." The pro gram, which strayed from its original intent, was 80 percent public relations efforts, primarily because members of more than fifty private UFO organizations "exploit unidentified fly ing objects for financial gain, religious or other more devious reasons at the expense of the Air Force." When dissatisfied with the Air Force's investigation, the staff said, these people convinced witnesses to complain to their congressmen, causing congressional hearings, unfavorable publicity, and more work for ATIC. Project Blue Book's staff, which in cluded three full-time personnel, many part-time people, and the field investigators, "who must meet this problem on a 1 50 .
The UFO Controversy in A merica day-to-day basis," could be more constructive on other pro grams.24 Given this situation, the staff considered four possible solu tions. The "immediate elimination of the program" could cer tainly solve all problems but would destroy every advantage the Air Force had gained in the last twelve years, especially in public relations, and would undermine the average citizen's belief in the Air Force and give "UFOites" and "propa gandists" more weapons.
Complete disbandment was the eventual goal, the staff said, but "the public must first be con ditioned in order that they be receptive of the idea." Thus, the Air Force should still receive and "give proper attention" to reports that might prove hostile or have scientific and intel ligence value.25 A second solution was first to remove the program from the intelligence community, ''where it is extremely dangerous to prestige," and then disband it completely. The Air Force could transfer the program to a more suitable branch of the service, such as the Office of Information Services; this would eliminate an intelligence program that was "open to public inspection" and lent itself to exaggerated importance. Then the Air Force would have to embark on a long-range educa tional program-using the press, radio, television, and motion pictures-to assure the public that it continued to monitor ev erything in the sky. One disadvantage was the likely "loss of prestige" in taking the program from intelligence and placing it in a public relations division. Another disadvantage would be the expense of a public education program, which would require new coordinative and liaison systems. But, the staff said, "The expense incurred in the public education program wil more than pay for itself if this eventually reads to deac tivation of the program. "26 A third solution was to reassign the program from intelli gence to an Air Force division with scientific and technical capability, such as the Air Research and Development Com mand (ARDC) . This reassignment would provide the pro gram with a fresh approach and greater scientific stature and would not result in loss of prestige. Such a transfer had a disadvantage in that the Air Force would have to establish new directives and lines of communication and train new per sonnel. The fourth and last alternative was to do nothing, to maintain the program in its special project status at ATIC.
Yet the public tended to exaggerate the importance of a pro gram connected with intelligence and such a wide-open pro- The Battle for Congressional Hearings 1 5 1 gram "has a tendency to reduce the prestige" of the entire in telligence community. The staff concluded that the best move was to transfer the UFO program to an Air Force division with scientific capability, which could implement an active public relations campaign with the goal of "the eventual elim ination of the program as a special project." None of these possible solutions meant that the Air Force would stop receiv ing sighting reports, for it had to monitor all aerial objects.
The Air Force wanted to eliminate the UFO program, not eliminate its watch over objects in the sky.27 After reaching the decision, A TIC attempted to interest the Air Research and Development Command in the program.
Colonel Richard R. Shoop of ATIC explained to ARDC's commander, Lt. General Bernard Schriever, that the UFO program had potential scientific value in the areas of meteors, fireballs, space vehicles " (general) ," missiles, radar, static electricity, meteorology, and upper-air physics. The UFO pro gram's value to the Air Force, Shoop believed, lay not in in telligence but in exploring these areas for scientific purposes.
ARDC was not convinced. Major General James Ferguson, ARDC vice commander, replied that more than half of the UFO program related to "nonscientific phenomena" and that the other portion, "while possibly associated with scientific processes, does not include qualitative data and is therefore of limited scientific value." Aerial phenomena observations, Fer guson said, would not "enhance" ARDC's research programs and, therefore, the proposed transfer was not "in the best in terest of the Air Force." A letter from Hynek to ARDC strongly recommending the transfer failed to move Fergu son.2S ATIC next tried to transfer the UFO program to an Air Force public relations agency, such as the Secretary of the Air Force's Office of Information (SAFOI) . In March 1960, ATIC deputy for science and components, Colonel Philip G.
Evans, wrote to the ATIC commander, Major General Dougher, suggesting this transfer; A. Francis Arcier, ATIC chief scientist, concurred; be added that the prestige the UFO program might lose from a transfer to SAFOI was actually an advantage, because less prestige meant less importance. He recommended that Hynek remain the scientific adviser if ATIC transferred the program. ATIC made strenuous efforts to sell SAFOI on the idea of accepting the program, but SAFOI, like ARDC, wanted no part of it, for it also thought it would be inheriting a major public relations headacbe.29 1 52 The UFO Controversy in A merica While ATIC tried to transfer the program, two more books on UFOs came out and added yet more fuel to the Air Force-civilian UFO group fires. In Flying Saucers: Top Secret, Keyhoe outlined his activities from 1 956 to 1960: the formation of NICAP, the Armstrong Circle Theater episode, and attempts to obtain hearings. Now more than ever, he said, he believed the Air Force was covering up to avoid panic, not only among the general populace but among its own pilots as well. According to Keyhoe, Air Force pilots beard rumors that UFOs had caused mysterious plane disap pearances; if the Air Force admitted that UFOs existed, Key hoe reasoned, the pilots would panic. so Keyhoe, from his own perspective, was unable to arrive at a logical explanation for why the Air Force classified its IDes, denied the existence of extraterrestrial vehicles, and opposed congressional hearings. On the one hand, Air Force public policy statements about UFOs seemed to him contradictory, confusing, and sometimes erroneous. On the other hand, Key hoe thought there was overwhelming evidence for the exis tence of extraterrestrial vehicles. Given this situation, Keyhoe reasoned that the only explanation to reconcile the two sides was his conspiracy-to-avoid-panic theory, with minor varia tions. Keyhoe tried to deal with an illogical situation in a log ical manner.
In 1 953 the Robertson panel gave the Air Force a reason for secrecy : UFO reports, by clogging intelligence channels, presented a threat to national security; therefore, the Air Force had to decrease the number of reports by downplaying the entire subject. But by 1 9 6.0, the personnel change at Blue Book and, to some extent, at ATIC, the lessening of cold-war fears, the Air Force's confirmed belief that extraterrestrial ve hicles did not exist, and the simple passage of time all ob scured the original reasons for secrecy. In their place was the overriding public relations problem, questions about whether the Air Force was "doing its job," was lying to the people, or was competent to examine aerial phenomena.
Although the Air Force's goal was to eliminate the UFO program as a special project, it did not think it could take the apparent logical course of action-to open its files, announce the project unworthy of further involvement, and disband it.
Instead, the public relations problem had assumed a life of its own. The Air Force, highly sensitive to bad publicity, looked at the conflict with civilian UFO groups as it would a war.
Each attack was a battle; to declassify its IDes, stop its de- l The Battle for Congressional Hearings 153 bunking campaign, or close down operations in the face of attacks was tantamount to surrender. The UFO enigma had only secondary importance, if that; the 1952 "hysteria" and the Robertson panel recommendations definitely had receded into the background. With the original reason for secrecy for gotten or neglected, secrecy to prevent bad press took promi nence. It is doubtful that by 1 960 anyone in the Air Force could remember the original reasons for the policies, and cer tainly not Keyhoe. Consequently, it was easy for him to con clude that the Air Force's action confirmed his theories.
Keyhoe would have had even more reason to believe high echelons of government conspired to keep information from the public had he known of the bizarre case the CIA had be come involved in. The CIA had stayed away from the UFO controversy since it sponsored the 1 953 Robertson panel . But in 1959 the Office of Naval Intelligence heard of a woman in Maine who claimed to be in contact with space people and brought it to the CIA's attention. Normally the government would have ignored this contactee-like case in which the woman, used the common psychic device of automatic writ ing. But the Canadian governp1ent had also heard of this woman, and is sent Wilbert Smith, its UFO expert, to inter view her. In her trance the woman purportedly correctly an swered technical questions about space flight beyond her knowledge. After learning of this, the Navy sent two officers to investigate. The woman persuaded one of the officers to go into a trance himself and try to contact the space people. He tried but failed.
When the two officers returned to Washington, they told CIA officials about their experience. The CIA arranged to have the officer who unsuccessfully tried to make contact try again at CIA headquarters. Six witnesses gathered in the CIA office to watch. The officer went into another trance and ap parently made contact with space people. The other men in the room wanted proof. The officer in a trance said that if they looked out the window, they would see a flying saucer.
Three men rushed to the window and were astonished to see a UFO. Two of these men were CIA employees and the third was with the Office of Naval Intelligence. At the exact same time, the radar center at Washington National Airport report ed that its r¥far returns had been blocked out in the direction of the sighting. The CIA briefed Major Friend on these de velopments, and Friend sat in on a later trance session. He asked to be kept informed if anything else happened, but ap- ::endy no.: u::.
c;:: •:o:;, m`_^e Univenity'• parapsychology laboratories should investigate the officer and the woman. But Project Blue Book never analyzed the sight ing and what the men actually did see remains a mystery.
The CIA did not treat the incident seriously yet took punitive actions against the men involved. It made sure they were transferred to other positions. As far as is known, the govern ment never followed up on the sighting or the radar black out.31 Although no one knew about this sighting, of course, the Air Force public relations policies in 1960 seemed to add support to Keyhoe's conspiracy theories, especially when Ma jor Lawrence Tacker's Flying Saucers and the U.S. Air Force appeared. Tacker was an Air Force public information officer and the UFO project monitor for the press. He was angry that the Air Force "was being set upon by Major Keyhoe, NICAP and other UFO hobby groups who believe in space ships as an act of pure faith." He particularly objected to the "countless harangue[s] that the Air Force is withholding in formation." His book was supposed to set the record straight and end the debate.a2 The short book was basically a compilation of press re leases, fact sheets, and official pronouncements and, as such, was a good review of Air Force thought on UFOs in 1960.
Tacker began with a short history of the UFO phenomenon, a history that iluminated the lack of basic knowledge within the Air Force of the phenomenon and the Air Force's in volvement with it. Tacker maintained that one day in 1 896 an airship sailed from Oakland to Chicago where it disap peared. Astronomers identified it as Alpha Orion, "but public opinion was that the object was an airship." Jumping to the 1947 and 1952 sightings, he claimed that lack of data was the only reason the Air Force did not draw "definite conclu sions" and take the "aura of mystery" out of these sightings.
The Air Force had taken the problem of the UFOs seriously in 1952 and had "put a lot of effort into developing adequate and proper reporting, investigating, analysis, and evaluation procedures." This policy, he said, was still in effect, and "selected qualified scientists, engineers and other technical personnel" at ATIC kept Project Blue Book up to date so that the American public remained informed about UFOs.33 Tacker responded to four of the most common attacks on the Air Force, essentially the same four that Keyhoe made on the Armstrong Circle Theater telecast in 1958. The first was The Battle for Congressional Hearings 155 that the Air Force had a document dated September 23, 1947, which proved that flying saucers existed. This referred to the Twining letter, which stated that the objects were "real" and authorized an Air Force investigation of UFOs, although Tacker did not identify it as such. His response to 1 this charge was technically correct but deceptive: ''There is , no official Air Force report or document which states that .
.
• flying saucers are real." The Twining letter did not contain the term flying saucers. The second charge concerned the 1948 Estimate of the Situation document claiming that UFOs were interplanetary. Ruppelt, Fournet, and Hynek had veri fied its existence, but Tacker replied that ATIC never had an "official" document of this nature.M In response to the third accusation-that a secret Air ' Force intelligence report on UFO maneuvers concluded that the objects were interplanetary (Dewey Fournet's late 1952 study)-Tacker stated bluntly that such a report was "non existent." Finally, Tacker dealt with the charge that a secret panel of scientists in 1953 urged the Air Force to expand Project Blue Book and publicly release all UFO information (the Robertson panel recommendations as Ruppelt explained them). Tacker acknowledged the panel and accurately sum marized its recommendations, but he omitted one: that na tional security agencies should institute a public education program immediately to strip the aura of mystery from UF0s.35 He failed to give the reasons why the panel con vened.
Tacker explained in the book that a team of selected scien tists met each month (the unofficial UFO panel) to make sure the Air Force conducted a "thorough information pro gram • • .
to keep the public informed." In spite of all Air Force efforts, Tacker said. "a small but articulate segment of people" mistakenly believed that the Air Force had not inves tigated the UFO problem scientifically and that it withheld information from the public. These people, according to Tacker, spoke out because the subject was so "novel and fas cinating" that it supported over a hundred organizations, all of which expected the Air Force to release its data to provide "grist" for their publications. These organizations made "senseless and vicious" attacks on the Air Force, which "would be remiss in its duty to the American people if by its assistance it encouraged these clubs in their sensational claims and intentions." Tacker concluded by saying that the Air Force had a tremendous job in defending the country from 1 56 The UFO Controversy in America enemies; if the Air Force diverted more money and personnel to investigate UFOs, it would seriously jeopardize the coun try's security, allow "sensation seekers" to "dictate our de fense policies," and lay itself "open to the charge of gross im- I' pudence. "86 That same year Tacker continued his defense of the Air Force with appearances on radio and television shows around li,· the country. On the radio show "Washington Viewpoint" he ' outlined the "vast scientific resources" the Air Force used to analyze UFO sightings, resources such as the Air Research and Development Command, the Air Materiel Command, 3·1 and scientific consultants from many different colleges and , universities. Furthermore, Tacker said, the Air Force had "in stantaneous communications world-wide," which enabled it to hear about a sighting anywhere in the world "in a matter of ' ninutes." He compared this to a "small group of euphologists [sic] who have a typewriter and read a newspaper account of the thing, and-you see you really can't compare."B7 Tacker's personal campaign had little effect. The civilian UFO groups continued their attacks, congressmen remained interested, and as a result the Air Force had to resist new threats of congressional hearings. In early July 1960, mem bers of the Senate Committee on Preparedness, the House Armed Forces Committee, the House Science and Astronau tics Committe, and the CIA requested Air Force briefings on the UFO program. The public increased pressure on con gressmen, who were concerned particularly over charges that the Air Force gave a preliminary briefing to Stuart French of the Senate Preparedness Committee on July 13. French wanted to know about Air Force solutions to puzzling cases and requested resumes of several well-known sightings, in cluding those in Washington, D.C., and in Levelland, Texas.
He also felt that Project Blue Book should be capable of in vestigating cases that might have scientific significance. ss The French briefing was a warm-up for the major briefing on July 1 5, 1960. Present were Richard Smart from the House Armed Forces Committee, Spencer Bereford, Richard Hines, and Frank Hammit from the House Science and As tronautics Committee, and two men from the CIA (Richard Payne, technical adviser, and John Warner, assistant for legis- ' lative liaison to Allen Dulles) . Air Force representatives in cluded John McLaughlin (administrative assistant to the secretary of the Air Force) , Major General Luehman (direc tor of intelligence) , Brigadier General E. B. LeBailley and The Battle for Congressional Hearings 151 Tacker (Office of Information) , Brigadier General Kingsley and Colonel James C. McKee (Office of Legislative Liaison) , Lt. Colonel Sullivan (intelligence) , Major Boland (legislative liaison) , Major Friend, and Hynek.
The congressmen were not as cooperative as others had been in the past. Bereford of the Science and Astronautics Committee said it had discussed UFOs and they appeared to have "scientic potential." Congressman Smart (of the House Armed Forces Committee) believed the Air Force withheld information from the public as well as from congressional committees. Although the Air Force assured him this was not the case, Smart remained skeptical. He was particularly un happy that the Air Force investigated routine cases but was "limited" when a case required extensive scientific analysis.
He indicated that his committee would be satisfied if it could say the Air Force had the "numbers and the capability'' to in vestigate all cases that appeared to have intelligence, scien tific, or public relations value. Also, he wanted the Air Force to keep his committee advised of all pertinent sightings and warned that future remarks to his constituents would be based on these conditions. Hynek had told Smart about ATIC's inadequate capability to investigate UFO cases with scientific potential, displaying his growing dissatisfaction with the Air Force; of course Hynek agreed with al of Smart's recommendations. S9 For the Air Force, though, Hynek's growing restiveness was unimportant, and the significant aspect of the briefing was that once again the Air Force had successfully prevented open hearings. As General Luehman said to the assistant chief of staff for intelligence, "All personnel attending the briefing were pleased with the results and the general consen sus is that no public hearings wil be held in the near future."40 Nevertheless, congressmen for the first time had expressed dissatisfaction with the UFO program and had suggested steps to remedy the situation. Hoping to put a quick end to congressional dissatisfaction, the Air Force immediately be gan to deal with Smart's recommendations. ATIC decided that to investigate cases with intelligence, scientific, and pub lic relations potential, it would assign another man to Project Blue Book, which had a staff of only one commissioned and one noncommissioned officer. ATIC estimated it had to inves tigate from twelve to fifteen cases per year, at a probable cost of $200 per case, and needed an additional $3,000 to cary 158 The UFO Controversy in A merica out the program ; it also needed money to buy a Polaroid camera and a Geiger counter for the investigators and $ 1 ,00 per year to raise Hynek's salary (he was receiving $3,00 per year as a consultant) . ATIC officially requested the funds from the assistant chief of staff for intelligence (AFCIN) .U While waiting for the extra money to come through. the Of fice of the Secretary of the Air Force authorized travel money in connection with the recommendations. But in Sep tember AFCIN informed ATIC that it would not alocate ad ditional personnel or funds for Project Blue Book. ATIC would be able to institute Smart's recommendations in one way only: Blue Book could have "close telephone moni torship" with air base officers investigating a UFO sighting of "extreme importance."4.2 The Air Force did not relay this information to Smart, who inquired in November about the progress it had made toward implementing his recommendations. The Office of Legislative Liaison explained that the changes "had yet to be accomplished." In early 1961 Major Friend decided on a new course of action. Blue Book requested an increased budget for the fiscal year which allowed it to implement at least a compromise measure to satisfy Smart. Rather than use one officer ful time, it decided to place four officers on an on-cal basis; because UFO sigbtings were "cyclical and erratic," the four officers could handle the reports more expeditiously.
This reponse seemed to satisfy Smart. Blue Book did use these officers from time to time during Friend's stay as bead of the project but not afterward." Publicly the Air Force remained silent about its con gressional briefings and investigatory problems. It continued to castigate its critics and assure the public that top-level scientists with command of al necessary facilities were con ducting a rigorous scientific investigation of UFOs. The Air Force witheld nothing from the American public, it said, ex cept in certain cases when the data required security classifi cation. The July 1960 fact sheet criticized the many "self-ap pointed authorities on UFOs" who considered themselves "unofficial advisors to the United States Air Force Intelli gence community." Because they did not have this authority under the law, the Air Force thought "it would be entirely inappropriate and even dangerous at times to exercise the In telligence system in order to give them, or their organization, any notoriety or publicity." ATIC officials privately placed the blame for the July congressional briefings on Keyboe, NI- 1 The Battle for Congressional Hearings 1 59 CAP, and other civilian UFO organizations. Colonel Evans reflected this when he said that the 500,00-plus members claimed by the civilian groups belonged for "financial gain, religious reasons, pure emotional outlet, ignorance, or pos sibly to use the organization as a 'cold war' tool." NICAP and Keyhoe were of course the principal villains.« Stil, many congressmen continued to inquire about the UFO program. The Air Force replied, as it had done in pre vious years, with statements from the semiannual fact sheets.
Once in a while it changed its official line. For example, writ ing to Senator Oren E. Long in April of 1 960, Colonel Carl M. Nelson (legislative liaison) said the Air Force protected the identity of UFO witnesses "in order to encourage the public to report UFO's." Brigadier General Joseph Kingsley, deputy director of legislative liaison, wrote to John Carstar phen of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics in May 1960 and said that as Mr. Carstarphen could tell from the recent U-2 incident (the abortive mission over the USSR) , the Air Force had a dificult job in defending against "known enemies" and their weapons systems and had com mitted all its resources to this end; one of the greatest prob lems in the UFO area was not to waste resources on false alarms or UFOs that did not constitute a threat to the coun try's security. Kingsley also told Carstarphen that the Air Force's refusal to lend its resources to private UFO groups was based on the 1953 Robertson panel, which found that UFOs constituted a threat to the "orderly function of the protective units of the body politic because an unwarranted mass of irrelevant information could clog vital channels of communication and continued false reports could hide indica tions of a genuine hostile attack." Similarly, Colonel Gordon B. Knight told Estes Kefauver in April 1960 that the Air Force did not honor individual requests for UFO information because it did not have the resources to do so and because most of the replies to the requests ended up in the files of pri vate UFO organizations.•5 These Air Force explanations did not convince everyone.
House Speaker John McCormack, whom the Air Force briefed in 1958, doubted it had disclosed all it knew at that time. In fact, McCormack believed in 1 960 that UFOs were "real" and not familiar objects or delusions. The reputation of many UFO witnesses impressed him and, with Keyhoe's urging, he began to think about holding another congressional investigation. In 1961 he directed Congressman Overton 1 60 The UFO Controversy in America 1 Brooks of the House Science and Astronautics Committee to look into the UFO problem. Brooks was sympathetic, and he appointed Minnesota Congressman Joseph Karth head of a three-man Subcommittee on Space Problems and Life Scien ces and directed Karth to hold hearings on UF0s.48 Keyhoe had written letters to both Brooks and McCormack requesting these congressional hearings and proposing a plan in which both NICAP and the Air Force would present their evidence on the existence of extraterrestrial vehicles at an ex ecutive session of the subcommittee. There Keyhoe said, NICAP would present proof of Air Force incompetency in dealing with UFO reports and proof of Air Force secrecy in making "contradictory, misleading and untrue statements" to congressmen and private citizens. Keyhoe wanted the Air Force representatives to answer all NICAP questions about specific cases and methods. In turn. said Keyhoe, NICAP would answer all Air Force questions. If, after hearing evi dence on both sides, the executive session disproved NICAP's contentions, then Keyhoe would resign as director of NICAP, cease all publications, and dissolve the organization. If, on the other hand, the executive session decided that the Air Force was withholding information, then it should ask the Air Force to end its secrecy policies and NICAP would re quest that the government establish a new agency to "insure the speedy release of all UFO information, with the immedi ate purpose of reducing the grave secrecy-dangers [sic]." If the Air Force refused to participate in this plan, NICAP would urge public hearings. The fui NICAP board of gover nors signed the proposal. 47 In mid- 1961 the Air Force heard about the proposed hear ings for early 1962. To meet this new crisis the Office of Leg islative Liaison began to direct its efforts toward heading off the hearings. But it could not prevent House Science and As tronautics Committee staff member Richard P. Hines from visiting ATIC to gather information for the hearings. When Hines, who had attended the July 1 9 60 briefing, came to ATIC in August, Friend "thoroughly briefed" him on the Air Force method of conducting the UFO program, using "gov ernment-wide facilities .
• • to provide data and/ or assist with the analyses." ATIC officials, including Hynek, took Hines on a tour of the Aeronautical Systems Division facilities which, they said, gave support to the UFO program. Hines told Friend and Hynek that congressional interest in the program was due to pressures from ''undisclosed sources" on John W.
The Battle for Congressional Hearings 161 McCormack. The three men reasoned that Keyhoe was the culprit, especially since he had been behind previous con gressional inquiries, had spoken on radio and television about the need for congressional hearings, and had urged NICAP members to write to congressmen. Hines left ATIC "favor ably impressed" with the Air Force UFO program and en lightened about Keyhoe's intentions.4B A week later Hines wrote to Major Friend, addressing the letter "Dear Bob" and saying he had not talked to Karth yet but Chairman Overton Brooks had decided not to hold UFO hearings then or in the foreseeable future. "For this," Hines remarked, "I am sure both you and I breathe a deep sigh of relief." As a result of this decision, Hines explained, the " 'Plaintiffs' [meaning Keyhoe] have begun their clamor stimulated by notices in the press of our committee's interest in UFOs. "49 The following week Congressman Karth wrote to Keyhoe viciously attacking him for trying to " 'be-little,' 'defame,' 'ridicule' " the Air Force. He accused Keyhoe of "malicious intent toward a great branch of the military." Previously, Karth said, he thought Keyhoe planned to "prove" the exis tence of spaceships but knew now that Keyhoe could not do it (Keyhoe never claimed he could prove this ) . Therefore, Karth concluded, he was not interested in holding hearings or "listening to headline-making accusations (prompted it seems by past gripes ) in open debate between you and the Air Force." Karth became more agitated as the letter progressed.
Answering Keyhoe's request for a face-to-face meeting before • .
the executive session of the subcommittee, Karth said proto col called for the Air Force and NICAP to testify on difer ent days, and Keyhoe obviously wanted the direct confronta tion only to ask the Air Force embarrassing questions and in dulge in "grandstand acts of a rabble rousing nature where accusations may be made THAT COULDN'T BE AN SWERED BY ANYONE-the Air Force or NICAP." Karth was quick to claim, however, that "/ am not a captive of the Air Force, I assure you." A few days later Major Friend quoted to Colonel Wynn what Karth had told a newspaper reporter: "[The reporter] was advised by that worthy gentle man that he would not be part of Major Keyhoe's cheap scheme to discredit the Air Force, and that there would be no hearing."50 Keyhoe weathered this attack and even managed to soften Karth's views. In answer to Karth's charges, Keyhoe replied 162 The UFO Controversy in America that he wanted the confrontation with the Air Force to occur in closed session only and that NICAP did not have "evi dence" that "UFOs were superior objects under intelligent control" and extraterrestrial. Moreover, the NICAP board of governors gave Karth "proof of NICAP's serious and patri otic purpose and its continued offer to cooperate with the Air Force." In place of its original plan, Keyhoe said, NICAP would offer its "massive UFO evidence". in accordance with congressional protocol. During the month of this exchange, Chairman Overton Brooks died. The new chairman, Con gressman George P. Miller of California, expressed neither an interest in UFOs nor a desire for hearings. On September 19, 1961, Karth wrote to Keyhoe : "Now that we better under stand each other, I would hope we could properly proceed with a new hearing early next year-providing that the new chairman authorizes hearings." Of course, the new chairman did not. Once more Keyhoe had watched the bait dangle in front of him only to see it withdrawn at what he thought was the critical moment. lit Events on the UFO home front in 1961 and 1962 did not go well for NICAP and Keyhoe. When the organization first started in 1958, Keyhoe maintained close and cordial contact with the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) in Alamogordo, New Mexico (before it moved to Tucson, Arizona ) . Although never convinced of the grand conspiracy theme, Coral Lorenzen (director of APRO ) supported NI CAP by giving lip service to the idea. From 1959 to 1961, however, she grew steadily away from this position. She had worked for the Air Force in a civilian capacity at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico and had found no evidence for a conspiracy there, and she had the growing suspicion that the Air Force UFO program amounted to no more than public relations. Mrs. Lorenzen began to feel that NICAP's attacks on the Air Force were misguided. Moreover, APRO was more willing than NICAP to consider reports of UFO occupants. Although both groups strongly disavowed any con nection with the infamous contactees, APRO would accept reports of occupant sightings if the evidence warranted it whereas NICAP steadfastly refused to accept such reports be cause they seemed too similar to the contactees' bogus claims.
NICAP scrupulously avoided even the vaguest hint of hoax. 52 The issues came to a head in 1961 and 1962 when both or ganizations felt a financial squeeze. Lack of a major sighting wave had caused a decrease in press publicity about UFOs I ,, The Battle for Congressional Hearings 1 63 and public interest began to wane and membership to dwindle. Many people interested in UFOs belonged to both APRO and NICAP; the 1962 "recession" prompted some people to give up their dual membership. In an effort to re tain APRO's membership, Coral Lorenzen wrote an editorial in the newsletter stating that NICAP was basically a lobby group and members should remain in APRO because it was more active in research than in uselessly attacking the Air Force. This editorial represented an open break in the sim mering feud with NICAP, and the two organizations were never able to cooperate again. 58 Other UFO club members had been sniping at Keyhoe as well. James Moseley of the Saucer and Unexplained Celestial Events Research Society (SAUCERS) thought the Air Force used Keyhoe to divert public attention from UFOs, and oth ers believed Lorenzen was right and Keyhoe's energies would be best spent in matters other than lobbying. The ever present contacts were another problem that plagued Keyhoe con stantly. He spent much time telling the press and NICAP members that he forbade contactees to join NICAP. But the contactees were a pesky lot.
In 1958 George Adamski claimed on television and radio shows that he was a member of NICAP. Keyhoe found to his horror that his secretary, second in command at NICAP, secretly had issued Adamski and other contactees membership cards because she was con vinced of their truthfulness. To Keyhoe this was treason in his own general staff and he accepted her resignation. On top of this, NICAP was in a continual state of financial crisis.
Time and again Keyhoe sent out emergency pleas for dona tions to keep the organization solvent; the membership always contributed the necessary funds. 54 Through the rival UFO proponent attacks, contactee trou bles, and financial problems, Keyhoe steered a steady course aimed at Congress and the Air Force. Undoubtedly Keyhoe's most important activity in 1962 was to compile with Richard Hall (who had replaced Keyhoe's secretary) a document con taining the best NICAP evidence to support the extraterres trial intelligence theory. The document contained numerous detailed sighting reports from reputable individuals, scientists' .
statements, congressmen's statements, and the like. NICAP is- 1 · sued this compendium to all congressmen who expressed an interest in UFOs and in the Air Force's handling of the mat ter. Most often, however, NICAP pushed for congressional investigations simply by showing congressmen key UFO re- 164 The UFO Controversy in A merica ] ports and examples of Air Force secrecy and by its letter Ç writing campaign.115 The Air Force's public relations problems remained--even though the Office of Information, the Office of Legislative Li aison, and the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intel ligence tried to avert congressional hearings, discredit NICAP and Keyhoe, and transfer the UFO project. And the sighting reports continued to come into A TIC at a steady rate of be tween 500 and 600 a year. ATIC received 474 reports in 1962, and this was far from the desired goal of no reports at j al. Consequently, in 1962 ATIC made one final effort to ·, transfer the UFO program. lis , l Edward R. Trapnell, assistant for public relations to the secretary of the Air Force, had become interested in the UFO program and requested a briefing from Lieutenant I Coionel Friend (recently promoted from major) . At the ·j' briefing, Friend and Hynek told Trapnell · about the Robert- son panel's recommendations and the Air Force's attempts to educate the public by stripping the UFO program of its "aura of mystery" and putting it in "its proper perspective." Trap- nell "was amazed to learn" that UFO reports were, as Friend and Hynek had told him, three times higher in 1962 than the yearly totals in the 1947 to 1951 period, and he observed that "this could grow into a lifetime job unless headed off in some manner."57 Afterward, Trapnell met with the Secretary of the Air Force Zuckert, Dr. Brockway McMillan (head of Air Force re search and development) , and Dr. Robert Calkins (president of the Brookings Institution) ; they suggested several transfer plans. The Air Force could transfer the UFO program to an agency such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation, or the Smithsonian Institution. Or the Air Force could contract it out to a private group, such as the Brookings Institution, which would operate the program under the auspices of an Air Force scientific complex such as, for example, the Office of Aerospace Research. Or, third, the Air Force could con tract the project to a private organization and not keep it un der Air Force auspices. The organization could "make posi tive statements regarding the program. and the Air Force's handling of it in the past and make recommendations re garding its future, i.e., disban[d] the program completely" or transfer it to NASA or the like. liS The Battle for Congressional Hearings 1 6.:> Lieutenant Colonel Friend took a dim view of the transfer, which past experience had taught him was all but impossible because no one wanted the public relations problem that went with it. Friend believed the only two alternatives left were ei ther to disband the program or to contract it to a private or ganization under the Air Force's monitorship. Colonel Ed ward Wynn, who had taken over Colonel Evans's position as deputy for science and components, concurred with Friend but was even more pessimistic about any transfer possibility.
Transferring it to NASA or the National Science Foundation "would only serve to convince a larger segment of the public that sightings are due to visits to earth by interplanetary space vehicles." Contracting the project out to another agency would be expensive, the public would think that the Air Force was secretly directing the private agency to make cer tain statements, and the Air Force still would have to investi gate sightings even though the private group would analyze them. Thus, Colonel Wynn and the Foreign Technology Divi sion (in 1961 ATIC became part of the Foreign Technology Division [FTD] of the Air Force Systems Command} thought the Air Force should embark on a public education program and eventually either disband the special project en tirely while still investigating UFO reports at the air base level or, failing this, continue the UFO program in one of its scientific branches. 59 Despite these arguments, the Air Force tried once again to get rid of the UFO program. But again its attempts to get NASA or the National Science Foundation to handle the pro gram proved futile. In 1 962 the Air Force finally gave up the entire idea. The program remained at FTD as a special proj ect and without expanded resources. 60 The irony of the situa tion was that Keyhoe, through his persistent campaign against Air Force secrecy, unwittingly prevented the Air Force from approaching the problem more systematically. By keeping the UFO program and fighting public relations battles with Key hoe, the Air Force found it had a burden that no other agency-private or public-wished to assume. In a sense NI CAP's fight to have the public recognize the seriousness of the UFO problem had, because of the Air Force's counter ef forts, moved the UFO problem away from scientific scrutiny and closer toward Air Force control.
After all transfer plans dissolved, Lieutenant Colonel Friend retired as head of Project Blue Book in 1 963 and Ma jor Hector Quintanilla replaced him. Friend had realized that 166 The UFO Controversy in A merica the UFO program did not belong in the intelligence commu nity and had tried to transfer it to a more suitable branch of the service; when this failed, he had pushed for disbandment Quintanilla, on the other hand, made no efforts whatsoever to improve Blue Book's capabilities or to transfer the project He basically believed Blue Book was doing the best job it could and there was no reason to rock the boat by improving Blue Book's status. He looked on Blue Book as a collection and public relations agency, not as an investigatory or analy sis operation. He maintained complete belief in the Air Force's ability to cope with the UFO problem and its public component, envisioning his role as that of caretaker. s1 While Blue Book's outlook was changing, congressional in terest declined and by mid-1963 reached a low point Ac cording to available evidence, Georgia Congressman Carl Vinson made the last congressional inquiry into UFOs until 1966.62 In spite of a decrease in press and congressional interest and in the number of UFOs reported to ATIC, NICAP con tinued its constant pressure on Congress. In 1964 NICAP put together another compendium of facts surrounding the UFO enigma (basicaly a revised version of the previous compen dium) . Published privately as The UFO Evidence, the 200- page report contained the best evidence for extraterrestrial visitation NICAP could gather. It covered nearly every aspect of the UFO phenomenon, from details of over 700 sightings (at least 50 percent made by "trained or experienced ob servers") to congressional and scientific attitudes toward the subject Complete with charts, graphs, photostatic documents, Air Force statements, and NICAP rebuttals, the book placed the UFO controversy in historical context based on NICAP's perceptions of events. NICAP mailed a copy to every mem ber of Congress. Probably as a result of The UFO Evidence and incessant NICAP pressure on Congress, Blue Book began to package its reports more attractively. Instead of issuing semiannual fact sheets, it began in 1964 to print an annual booklet discussing in detail all the sightings and their statisti cal breakdowns, the Air Force's methodology, and the UFO program's history. It also included short articles and reprints on the improbabilities of extraterrestrial visitation. sa At this time Donald Menzel came out with his second book on UFOs, The World of Flying Saucers: A Scientific Examination of a Major Myth of the Space Age. Written with the help of science writer Lyle Boyd, the book basically The Battle for Congressional Hearings 167 rehashed Menzel's 1953 work. Although slightly more moder ate in his remarks about "flying saucer enthusiasts," Menzel refused to criticize the Air Force investigation or to temper his statements about the absurdity of the extraterrestrial visi tation theory. Branching out into the history of the UFO phe nomenon, he attributed the saucer sightings in the late 1940s to the efforts of publisher Ray Palmer, who printed Kenneth Arnold's story ("I Did See the Flying Disks") in the first is sue of Fate magazine. Menzel said the "panic" of 1952 was a result of Ginna and Darrach's Life magazine article, the Look article on "Hunt for the Flying Saucers," and the issu ance of APR 200-2. These, plus the summer heat wave, mete ors, and the 195 1 motion picture The Day the Earth Stood Still, all acted on people's imaginations and they started seeing flying saucers. 64 Menzel went on to explain that the Robertson panel spent "five long days . . . analyzing every available act of evidence" relating to possible theories about UFOs and found no sup port for the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Menzel admitted that the Air Force should have declassified the panel's conclusions immediately because this would have ended the saucer scare at once. But, instead, "the UFO hysteria continued, and is still dying a slow and lingering death." The Air Force, of course, was enthusiastic about Menzel's book and called it "the most significant literary effort to date" on the UFO phe nomenon.65 Hynek (now at Northwestern University) , in the mean time, continued to change his attitude about UFOs and to call for increased scientific study. The 1 964 Lonnie Zamora case in Socorro, New Mexico, further changed Hynek's mind.
While chasing a speeder at about 4 : 45 P.M., Socorro Dep uty Marshal Lonnie Zamora heard a sound like a roar and saw flames off to his right in hilly desert terrain. He thought the dynamite shack there had exploded and abandoned the chase to investigate. He turned onto a dirt road leading to the dynamite shack. As he proceeded to the site, he saw a shiny, aluminum-like object, which he thought was an overturned car. He noticed two people in white coveralls standing next to the object. The person seemed surprised and quickly jumped.
Zamora began to hurry toward them, thinking they needed help. He radioed to the sheriff's office that he was in the process of investigating an accident. 66 Zamora approached to within a hundred feet of the object and got out of his car. He then heard a loud roar that 168 The UFO Controversy in America changed in frequency from soft to loud to very loud. At the same time he spotted a strange blue and orange flame that appeared to be coming from the underside of the object.
Zamora panicked. He turned and ran, bumping his leg 1; against the car which made his glasses fall off. He glanced ଡ଼ back a few times and noticed that the roaring object was egg shaped and had a red "insignia." He also noticed that the ob- ject had lifted off the ground to a height of about twenty to twenty-five feet. The continued roar frightened Zamora, and he ducked down and covered his head with his arms. At that point the roar stopped and a high-pitched whine emanated from the object; then complete silence. Zamora lifted his head and saw the object heading away from him against the wind. He jumped up, ran back to his car, and immediately radioed the sheriff's station and asked the radio dispatcher to look out the window and try to see the object. The radio of ficer failed to see it. 67 Zamora then went to where the object had been and dis covered burning brush in several places and depressed marks in the ground. Three minutes later a sheriff who had been lis tening to the radio conversation arrived on the scene. Zamora was shaken, sweating, and pale. The sheriff looked around the area and also found the burning brush and indentations.
Later a gas station attendant reported that a customer had mentioned seeing an unusual oval-shaped object heading in the direction of Zamora's sighting just before it happened. 68 This unusual case had important ramifications. The press heard about it and widely publicized it. Once again the public put pressure on the Air Force, congressmen, and the White House. Quintanilla dispatched Hynek to investigate the case personally. Hynek confirmed the burned areas and the de pressions, and he sent soil samples to the Air Force for analy sis. The analysis uncovered nothing unusual. Hynek inter viewed Zamora at length. Zamora was by this time weary of interviews because he had already related his story countless times to police officers, the FBI, newsmen, and civilian UFO groups, including APRO and NICAP. Zamora impressed Hy nek, who found the deputy marshal to be highly credible and reliable. Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, who had worked on old Project Twinkle, knew Zamora and testified to his honesty. Zamora was telling the truth, Hynek concluded. Hynek's report stated that this was one of the "major UFO sightings in the history of the Air Force's consideration of the subject." To the press he declared that the sighting was "one of the soundest, best The Battle for Congressional Hearings 1 69 substantiated reports." Privately Hynek cautioned Quintanilla that the UFO organizations would probably make a large commotion over this sighting. 69 Quintanilla immediately began to work on the case with the assumption that Zamora had seen something. Quintanilla reasoned that the landing mechanisms of an experimental lunar landing module could have made the depressions in the ground. He discreetly contacted NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and fifteen industrial firms to see if they were conducting any experiments with lunar landing modules in the area. In each case the answer was no. Quintanilla also es tablished that no helicopters or aircraft were in the area at the time of the sighting and that the direction of the winds ruled out the possibility that the object was a balloon. Quin tanilla had no alternative. He listed the case as unidentified.
This is the only combination landing, trace, and occupant case listed as unidentified in Blue Book files.
The case had an impact on NICAP. Prior to this, NICAP had scrupulously avoided any occupant cases because they smacked of contacteeism. But because of Zamora's reliability and credibility, and because the Air Force listed this case as unidentified, NICAP began slowly to reevaluate its position.
As a result, NICAP moved closer to APRO's stance re garding occupant cases and the sighting served to "liberalize" the organization. 70 Perhaps the case affected Hynek the most : he now came to virtually the opposite position to that which he had held when he started as an Air Force consultant in 1 948. He was ready to accept privately some sensational cases as being a legiti mate part of the UFO controversy.
By the end of 1 964 the UFO controversy had reached a type of stalemate. On the one side were Keyhoe, NICAP, and, to some extent, APRO. Keyhoe had some support in Congress and NICAP still had prestigious people on its board of gover nors. Also on this side were the sightings, an ever present source of embarrassment and concern for the Air Force, which had forced itself into the position of categorizing virtu ally every UFO witness as credulous, gullible, or easily de ceived. NICAP's policies, popular pressure, and the sightings creatc;:d congressional interest and the threat of hearings.
On the other side was the Air Force with its three-pronged counterattack : ATIC to evaluate the sighting reports, SAFOI to deal with public inquiries, and SAFLL to counter con gressional hearings.
The tool they used was elaborate 170 The UFO Controversy in America briefings. While not containing complete fabrications, the briefings, except during Robert Friend's tenure, were certainly deceptive and designed to place the Air Force in the best pos sible light and its critics in the worst. Helping the Air Force in its public relations were the mass media and most scien tists. The latter, believing Air Force press releases and with out extensive research experience in the UFO phenomenon, derided the legitimacy of the subject and castigated the people who considered it important. Donald Menzel stood out of this group as the Air Force's leading scientist-ally, as the self-professed UFO debunker, and, as he characterized himself, "the man who shot Santa Claus." In the middle of the warring factions stood Hynek. The amount of time he took to change his attitude, the better part of nine years, was a testament to his caution and his concern over other scientists' criticism of him for taking the subject of UFOs seriously.
By 1964, though, it was questionable whether he was the Air Force's ally.
The opposing forces faced each other in a standoff. The Air Force public relations policies had to some extent de creased public concern over UFOs, but NICAP and APRO continued to bring the subject to public attention. Congress , I l.
had not held hearings on the subject, as Keyhoe and NICAP [ wanted, but the Air Force had averted them only barely.
Congress had pushed for expansion of the scientific aspect of 1 the program, but the Air Force managed to avert this also.
And within the Air Force itself, ATIC wanted to transfer the program but other divisions refused to take it. The two vari ables that NICAP and the Air Force could not predict were Hynek and the number of sighting reports. At the beginning of 1 965, these two unknowns assumed paramount importance and opened another front in the continuing battle.
8 1965: THE TURNING POINT IN THE CONTROVERSY For seventeen years, 1 947 to 1 964, the UFO controversy raged within the confines of special interest groups-the Air Force on one hand and the private UFO organizations on the other. The press, public, and Congress became involved sporadically, but for them the subject of UFOs and the con troversy over the phenomenon had only fleeting interest, de pending on the frequency of the reports. The Air Force and private group charges and countercharges remained unimpor tant for most people. The one group that might have given the subject dramatic interest and popular importance-the scientists-remained silent. But the period from 1965 to 1967 marked a turning point in the controversy. Those who had been on the periphery of the controversy became actively en gaged in it. The press, public, Congress, and the scientific community all entered the debate over UFOs. As a result, the Air Force finally gave up its near monopoly of the UFO study and asked a university to examine the phenomenon.
The impetus for this turning point was the one unknown variable, and the crux of all the controversy-UFO sightings.
Although ATIC recorded sighting reports at an average rate of 30 to 50 per month for the first six months of 1 965, it re ceived 1 35 reports in July and 262 in August. This began a wave that continued until the middle of 1967. The increase in reports prompted widespread press and public criticism of the Air Force UFO program and an outpouring of popular arti cles and books on UFOs.
A long drought of press publicity on UFOs ended in 1965.
Since 1957 the press had accepted the Air Force viewpoint and had refrained from criticizing it. Many newspapers even 171 172 The UFO Controversy in America refused to carry sighting reports because editors decided the reports were only illusions, fabrications, or misidentifications of natural phenomena. Because no significant wave of sight ings had occurred since 1957, newspaper editors thought the UFO fascination had ended. But in August 1965, following a series of spectacular UFO sightings in Texas, press interest revived.l The new attitude seemed to be a product of frustra tion over the Air Force's inability to explain UFOs. Since Air Force pronouncements had not affected the number of sight ing reports, more newspaper editors and reporters became suspicious of the Air Force's role. Some newspapers even seemed to agree with NICAP's conspiracy theories.
The Charleston (South Carolina) Evening Post reported in 1965 that "something is going on 'up there' and we rather suspect the Air Force knows it." When the Air Force re ceived a UFO report, the Evening Post stated, it "immedi ately begins to crank out of the wild blue yonder the same pre-recorded announcement it has been playing for 20 years: scratch, scratch, the Air Force has no evidence.
• . . If our courts shared the Air Force's professed suspicion of credit able witnesses our jails would be empty." The Orlando (Florida) Sentinel printed a compilation of newspaper edito rials in early September 1965 and noted that many editorial writers had changed focus "from outright scepticism to at least tentative belief'' in extraterrestrial visitation. If these edi torial writers joined with congressmen interested in the UFO problem, the Orlando Sentinel predicted, then "perhaps some thing wil happen," and the Air Force would be forced to open its classified UFO files. "Whether UFOs or not, the pub lic deserves to know. "2 The Fort Worth Star Telegram said "[the Air Force] can stop kidding us now about there being no such things as fly ing saucers . . . . It's going to take more than a statistical re port on how many reported saucers turned out to be jets and weather balloons to convince us otherwise." The editor of the Richmond (Virginia) News Leader wrote that only im prudent people would deny the possibility that UFOs were real: "Attempts to dismiss the reported sightings .
• • serve only to heighten the suspicion that there's something out there. The Air Force doesn't want us to know." For the Ala meda (California) Times-Star the time was "long overdue" for governmental disclosure of all it knew about UFOs. "It would surprise no one today to learn that some UFOs are spacecraft from elsewhere in the solar system or beyond. In The Turning Point in the Controversy 173 fact, it would even be more surprising to learn that they were not."8 The Christian Science Monitor remarked that recent sight ings over Texas gave "the clearest evidence of all that some thing strange was actually in the sky." The Monitor called for a "thorough look at the saucer mystery." A week later Moni tor natural science editor Robert C. Cowen said that although the Air Force has tried to brush off puzzling reports with handy explanations, "something is definitely going on that cannot yet be explained" and "the long standing saucer mys tery begs for thorough scientific study." As if to soften a hastily taken stand, a few weeks later he wrote that additional data could clear up the puzzling reports and that he did not really believe in extraterrestrial visitation.4 By the end of 1965 ATIC had received 887 reports for the year. This large wave created great public interest in UFOs and the Air Force's investigation of them. As usual, the sight ing wave also prompted a host of explanations. Astronomer Robert L. Brown of Southern Connecticut State College of fered one of the most ingenious : saucer sightings were actu ally lunar dust; when the retrorockets on the Russian moon satellite (Lunik V) fired, a dust cloud rose up and the earth's gravitational field pulled it in; the dust could hover, become luminous, or move erratically; therefore, the saucer mystery could be "resolved in rather simple terms devoid of any refer ence to visitors from outer space." A spokesman for the Fed eral Aviation Agency gave reporters a more standard ex planation when he said the sightings were due to the "long, hot summer," which "expedites the imagination."5 Some scientists expressed reservations about the Air Force's pat explanations for UFOs, and the Wall Street Jour nal printed some of these opinions. I. M. Levitt, director of the Fels Planetarium, who made national news in 1952 by calling the famous Washington, D.C., sightings mirages and temperature inversions, now urged the Air Force to admit that "there are natural phenomena taking place under our noses of which we know nothing . . . . The Air Force is trying to explain something that isn't susceptible to explanation." Robert Risser, director of the Oklahoma Science and Art Foundation Planetarium, criticized the Air Force explanation of the August sightings as stars. Those stars, Risser said, were not visible at that time of year and "the Air Force must have had its star-finder upside down during August." Dr. Frank Salisbury, a plant physiologist at Utah State University who 174 The UFO Controversy in A merica was rapidly becoming a proponent of the extraterrestrial hy pothesis as a rΆsult of studying UFO reports, said that people had to consider the tentative possibility that UFOs were "spaceships. "6 Columnist John Fuller, in an article for the Saturday Re view, greatly stimulated public interest in the subject. Fuller, a self-professed skeptic about UFOs, decided to investigate thoroughly "at least one specific case of UFO-chasing"; he contacted NICAP, which brought a case in Exeter, New Hampshire, to his attention. Upon investigation Fuller found two policemen and a nineteen-year-old college student who had observed at close range a large, metallic-like object that hovered silently over them. At one poitit the object swooped down and came so dose to the amazed witnesses that they had to drop to the ground; the policemen went for their guns but did not draw. Fuller's article caught the attention of the G. P. Putnam publishing firm, which commissioned him to write a book on the Exeter sightings. He spent over a month in Exeter interviewing UFO witnesses and uncovered over seventy-five additional sightings. This experience convinced him that there was "overwhelming evidence" that UFOs were extraterrestrial. Before Putnam published Fuller's book, Look magazine printed excerpts from it and insured a wide reader ship.' In the meantime, the subject of UFOs became a staple of Fuller's Saturday Review column. By January 1966, a month before the Look article appeared, Fuller believed that "the truth" about UFOs would not remain hidden forever. "In fact," he said, "many are wondering if it isn't time for the government either to explain whatever it knows, or to order a research project to investigate the phenomenon and reveal the facts." When the Air Force interpreted what the two police men and the college student saw as a mirage caused by a tem perature inversion, Fuller began to consider seriously the idea of an Air Force cover-up about UFOs. These statements plus the Look article made Fuller a nationally known authority on UFOs. With the phenomenon so much in vogue, he added to UFO publicity by becoming a frequent visitor to television interview shows. s Fuller was not the only UFO proponent to capitalize on media interest. During the last months of 1965 and the first months of 1966, Keyhoe and NICAP staff members appeared on the "Today'' show, the ''Tonight" show, NBC's panel show "Open Mind," "The Mike Douglas Show," and many radio The Turning Point in the Controversy 115 shows, and accepted numerous speaking engagements. This visibility helped NICAP's continuing campaign to publicize the UFO phenomenon. From 1957 to 1 966, Keyhoe, NICAP board members, and NICAP general members had appeared on over nine hundred television and radio shows and conduct ed over five hundred public discussions; Keyhoe himself was responsible for four hundred broadcasts and a hundred public talks.o The renewed interest in UFOs during 1965 to 1 967 started a fad in television shows. Just as sighting reports in the early 1 950s had stimulated motion pictures with flying saucer themes, the revived interest in the middle 1960s stimu lated several television shows with either flying saucer or in terplanetary travel themes. Among these were "Star Trek," which used a version of 1948 Captain Mantell incident for one of its episodes, "Lost in Space," and "The Invaders," which continued the old motion picture extraterrestrial-as hostile theme.
With the increased interest and publicity in 1 965, the Air Force became worried. Hynek took advantage of this concern and wrote to Colonel Spaulding about the need for a scien tific investigation of the UFO phenomenon. Hynek proposed that a panel of civilian scientists carefully review the UFO situation "to see whether a major problem really exists" and to make recommendations about the program's future status within the Air Force. The Air Force, now looking in earnest · for a solution to its problem, took Hynek's suggestions under advisement and turned the UFO program's future over to the Public Information Office. On September 28, 1965, Director of Information General E. B. LeBailly wrote to the military director of the Air Force's scientific advisory board and said that the assistant deputy chief of staff for plans and oper ations (General Arthur C. Agan) had found Project Blue Book to be a worthwhile program deserving more support and that the Air Force should continue to investigate UFOs "to assure that such objects do not present a threat to our na tional security"; the project would remain at FTD.1o LeBailly also noted that reputable individuals, "whose in tegrity cannot be doubted," made many reports and that, in addition, reports sent to the Air Force represented only a small portion of the "spectacular reports which are publicized by many private UFO organizations." Using Hynek's sugges tion, LeBailly requested "that a working scientific panel com posed of both physical and social scientists be organized to review Project Blue Book-its resources, methods, and find- 176 The UFO Controversy in America ings-and to advise the Air Force as to any improvements that should be made in the program to carry out the Air Force's assigned responsibility."ll The panel resulting from the LeBailly letter turned out to be the impetus for a new approach to the problem and for taking the investigation out of military hands. Called the Ad Hoc Committee to Review Project Blue Book, it featured Dr.
Brian O'Brien as chairman and five other scientists as partici pants : Drs. Carl Sagan, Jesse Orlansky, Launor Carter, Wilis A. Ware, and Richard Porter. Al the scientists but Sagan were members of the Air Force's scientific advisory board.
The committee met for one day in February 1966, at which time it reviewed the Robertson report of 1 953 and heard a briefing from Quintanilla and the FTD staff.12 The committee members were satisfied that UFOs did not threaten the national security, that the Air Force program was "well organized" albeit "quite limited," and that no UFO case represented technological or scientific advances outside of a terrestrial framework. Although the committee found that most unidentified reports lacked sufficient data, it also discovered some questionable identified reports that also lacked sufficient data and did not belong in the identified cate gory. Assuming that it was always possible for a sighting to have scientific value, the committee recommended that the UFO program "be strengthened to provide opportunity for scientific investigation of selected sigbtings in more detail and depth than bas been possible to date." To accomplish this, the committee suggested that the Air Force negotiate contracts "with a few selected universities to provide selected teams to investigate promptly and in depth certain selected sigbtings of UFOs";. a single university should coordinate the teams, which together should study a hundred sigbtings per year, de voting an average of ten man-days to each investigation and the resulting report. The committee recommended that each team have at least one psychologist, "preferably one inter ested in clinical psychology," a physical scientist, and an as tronomer or astrophysicist, and that air base UFO officers should work with the teams. The committee hoped these new investigations would "provide a far better basis than we have today for a decision on a long term UFO program. "13 In addition, the committee, being aware of the Air Force's public relations difficulties, recommended disseminating Proj ect Blue Book reports among "prominent members of the The Turning Point in the Controversy 177 .
Congress and other public persons" to give evidence that the Air Force took a scientific approach.t4 The O'Brien committee represented both a break in and a continuation of Air Force UFO policy. It broke with policy in recommending that a university conduct a systematic, de tailed study of UFO reports. It continued policy in recom mending, in different language, that the Air Force resolve its UFO problem by getting rid of the program. Contracting out the investigation to a university was another means of trans ferring the program. The Air Force moved cautiously and it held back on implementing the recommendations. It waited to see if the new "flying saucer scare" would die down. It did not.
The sighting wave that began in July 1965 continued through 1967. In fact, more sightings came into Blue Book in 1966 and 1967 than in 1965, making this the first time sight ing reports remained at very high levels for three consecutive years. Public interest grew enormously : a May 1 9q6 Gallup Poll indicated that 96 percent of the people polled had heard or read about flying saucers; of these, 46 percent thought them to be "real," and 29 percent, "imaginary" ; moreover, 5 percent of the people who had heard of flying saucers thought they had seen one personally-projected to the gen eral population, this represented approximately nine million people.15 Once again the flying saucer "hysteria" gripped the country, with one dramatic sighting after another filling news paper and magazine articles. The Gallup Poll findings may have been due to one of the most widely publicized events in the history of the UFO controversy : the furor over the ex planation of the Dexter and Hillsdale, Michigan, sightings in March 1 966.
On March 20, 1 966, eighty-seven women students and a civil defense director at Hillsdale College saw a football shaped, glowing object hovering over a swampy area a few hundred yards from the women's dormitory. The witnesses claimed the object flew directly at the dormitory but then stopped suddenly and retreated back to the swamp. The ob ject "dodged an airport beacon light," appeared to dim when automobiles approached the area, and then "brightened when the cars left." The witnesses watched the object for four hours. The next day five people-including two police of ficers-in Dexter saw a large, glowing object rise from a swampy area on a farm, hover for a few minutes at about 1,000 feet, and then leave the area. Over one hundred 178 The UFO Controversy in America witnesses saw objects on these two nights in two Michigan cities sixty-three miles apart. The story of these somewhat routine sightings caught fire. Within a few days virtualy ev ery newspaper in the country and al national news shows carried the report. Reporters put intense pressure on the Air Force to investigate the incidents and arrive at a solution im- mediately.te _ Quintanilla sent Hynek to the scene. When he arrived, he encountered a situation "so charged with emotion that it was impossible for [him] to do any really serious investigation." He had to fight his way through reporters to interview . the witnesses, and the entire region "was gripped with near-hys teria." Police, he said, madly chased stars they thought to be flying saucers and people believed spaceships swarmed in the area. After his investigation, Hynek held a press conference to explain what happened. He claimed that the Air Force or dered him to hold the press conference; Quintanilla, on the other hand, claimed that Hynek informed him that he had the solution and therefore gave Hynek permission to hold the conference.lT Whatever the impetus, the press conference became a singularly important event in the history of the UFO contro versy. It was the largest press conference in tlie Detroit Press Club's history. Hynek described it as a "circus," with a melange of television cameramen, newspapermen, photogra phers, and others all "clamoring for a single, spectacular ex planation of the sightings." Hynek explained that the faint lights people had observed could have been the result of de caying vegetation that spontaneously ignited and created a faint glow-this phenomenon is known as marsh gas. As soon as he handed out the written press statement, Hynek recalled, he "watched with horror as one reporter scanned the page, found the phrase 'swamp gas,' underlined it, and rushed for a telephone." Journalism Professor Herbert Strentz, in his study of newspaper attitudes toward UFOs, pointed out that "press and public reactions to the 'swamp gas' theory were prompt, wide-ranging and generally hostile"; not one of the hundred witnesses involved in the sightings accepted the explanation.ts The swamp gas solution became an object of ridicule and humor throughout the nation. Cartoons lampooning the solu tion appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines, and press coverage of UFOs increased steadily during March and April 1966. Life magazine ran an eight-page feature on the Hilsdale sightings and UFOs, including ful-page color pho- The Turning Point in the Controversy 179 tographs of various UFOs. Entitled "Well-Witnessed Invasion by Something: Australia to Michigan," Life's story hit hard at the swamp gas explanation through interviewing witnesses and showing photographs of the area. An article in The New Yorker magazine stated acidly: "We read the official explana tions with sheer delight, marveling at their stupendous inade quacy. Marsh gas, indeed! Marsh gas is more appropriate an image of that special tediousness one glimpses in even the best scientific minds." On the other hand, Time continued its ridicule of the idea that UFOs might be extraterrestrial and agreed with the swamp gas explanation; it called the current wave of sightings "primaveral deliriusion" and said the sight ings exemplified an "American mythology." The Wisconsin State Journal (Madison) featured Hynek's explanation in red, front-page, banner headlines, and an editorial bluntly stated that the swamp gas theory "smells."19 The New York Times printed a witness's drawing of the Dexter UFO and compared it to a drawing of one of George Adamski's sightings; the New York Times lumped Adamski and the witnesses from Dexter in the same category. In the same issue, reporter Evert Clark wrote that Congress held back from investigating UFO sightings because it would "en courage the idea that there is more to the unidentified flying objects than mistaken sightings of natural and manmade ob jects"; an investigation "might frighten much of the pub lic .
• .
by seeming to indicate concern in Congress." In an other editorial, the New York Times continued to oppose the idea that the UFO phenomenon was unique: "people who are conditioned by television, comic strips and books to believe in flying saucers find it easy to see them in [man-made} phenome na," and the Michigan sightings typified people's "strange propensity for seeing what they want to see." But the Chris tian Science Monitor said the recent sightings and investiga tion in Michigan had "deepened the mystery" of UFOs, and "it is time for the scientific community to conduct a thorough and objective study of the 'unexplainable.' " Syndicated columnist Roscoe Drummond decided that the swamp gas ex planation had signaled the time "for Congress to take charge" in an investigation and "a more thorough and objective search for the facts is in order."20 In early April 1 966, probably in reaction to the Michigan sightings, CBS news began to investigate the UFO problem.
The result was a nationally televised news show, "UFOs: Friend, Foe or Fantasy?," narrated by Walter Cronkite. In 1 80 The UFO Controversy in America it, Donald Menzel · reiterated his theory that UFOs were misidentifications of unusual atmospheric conditions. Secre tary of the Air Fotce Harold Brown assured the viewers that the Air Force was not withholding information from the pub lic. Ex-SAFOI officer Lawrence Tacker called attacks on the Air Force "senseless and vicious." Radar experts claimed that they bad never picked up UFOs on their radarscopes. Several astronomers said that no one involved in tracking satellites or meteors had taken pictures of UFOs. Carl Sagan, a member of the O'Brien panel, talked of "flying saucer cultists." The theme of the show came across clearly : UFOs were misiden tifications, delusions, hoaxes, and products of the wil to be lieve and of societal stress.
To reinforce the "experts," CBS devoted long sections of the. show to the contactees. The network sent a camera crew to the Giant Rock Convention, where the CBS staff inter viewed George Van Tassel and other contactees. The show also included sections of a filmed interview with George Adamski, who bad died a year before.
For "balance," CBS spoke with Keyhoe, who accused the Air Force of withholding information, with Hynek, who made a noncommittal statement, and with Charles Gibbs Smith, an aviation historian, who strongly advocated the ex traterrestrial hypothesis. Gibbs-Smith showed the CBS staff a film clip of what he said was a spaceship. The staff proved, beyond a doubt, that the film clip showed only a refraction of part of an airplane, thus successfully destroying Gibbs Smith's credibility.
At the end of the hour-long show, Cronkite tried to sum up the various viewpoints. People should keep an open mind, be said, because "yesterday's fantasy is tomorrow's reality." Yet the viewers must remember, Cronkite intoned, that "while fantasy improves science fiction, science is more often served by fact. The show was televised in May, too late to have any effect on the fast-moving events of March and April.
The uproar over the latest wave of sightings in general and the Dexter-Hillsdale ones in particular was so great that Wes ton E. Vivian (Democratic congressman from Michigan ) and Gerald R. Ford (then House Republican minority leader) re sponded to their constituents' concern and formally called for congressional hearings. In a letter to the House Armed Ser vices Committee requesting the hearings, Ford enclosed several newspaper articles criticizing the Air Force investigation of the events in Michigan and the New Hampshire sigbtings.
The Turning Point in the Controversy 181 Referring to these and other public statements questioning the Air Force, Ford said "the American public deserves a better explanation than that thus far given by the Air Force"; to "establish credulity" about UFOs, he strongly recommended a committee investigation of the subject. Keyhoe, of course, quickly praised Ford's suggestion, telling the Associated Press that the Pentagon had a "top level policy of discounting all UFO reports" and that the Air Force for years had used ridi cule to debunk sightings.21 The House Armed Services Committee acted on Ford's suggestion. On April 5, 1966-for the first time in the history of the controversy over unidentified flying objects-Congress held an open hearing on the subject. The committee, under the chairmanship . of L. Mendel Rivers, invited only three people to testify; Secretary of the Air Force Harold D.
Brown, Project Blue Book Chief Hector Quintanilla, and Hy nek-all associated with the Air Force. The committee did not invite a NICAP representative, but a NICAP member submitted material for the record, hoping this would balance the Air Force testimony.22 · Secretary Brown began the formal testimony by reading a statement outlining the Air Force views as made public in its press releases, fact sheets, and Blue Book reports; he included the LeBailly letter and the report of the Ad Hoc Committee to Review Project Blue Book (the O'Brien committee) .
Brown's main argument relied on the familiar refrain that no evidence existed to prove that UFOs threatened the national security or came from extraterrestrial origins.23 Hynek spoke next.
Reacting to press criticism of his swamp gas explanation and rankling over charges that he was a puppet of the Air Force, Hynek said he would read a "dar ing" statement "which has certainly not been dictated by the Air Force." He made his now frequent point that UFOs deserved the scientific community's attention. He warned that complete adherence to the policy that all UFO reports had conventional explanations "may tum out to be a roadblock in the pursuit Qf research endeavors." The Air Force had claimed time and again that it could either identify an object or prove the sighting invalid if it investigated the case long enough; this, Hynek said, was an example of a "poverty of hypotheses" and investigators were apt to miss "matters of great scientific value" if the phenomena did not fit the "ac cepted scientific outlook of the time." He called for a civilian panel of scientists to examine the UFO program critically 1 82 The UFO Controversy in America and to determine if a major problem actually existed. Quin tanilla made no formal statement.24 During the questioning following the formal testimony, Secretary Brown mentioned that he was considering the O'Brien committee's recommendation for a private study.
The congressional committee seized on this and said several times how pleased it was to hear this. Hynek then pointed out that foreign governments looked to the United States Air Force for guidance in UFO matters but the Air Force had opened no official lines of inquiry or scientific exchange with any other government. Brown countered Hynek by saying the Air Force had no scientific information to exchange, and the thrust of the program had been to give the public a certain kind of evidence so that the UFO phenomenon did not "get more out of hand." Following the questioning there was a general discussion about public pressure and press publicity, especially the Life magazine article which had appeared the previous week. The hearings closed amidst much tongue-in cheek humor, a few questions to Quintanila, and an ex pression of satisfaction that the Air Force would implement the O'Brien recommendations.2s The committee had presented a fait accompli to Brown.
Although he had only been considering the O'Brien recom mendations, that afternoon-as soon as the hearing con cluded-he directed the Air Force chief of staf to accept the O'Brien committee recommendations and to make arrange ments for a scientific team to investigate selected UFO sight ings. By deciding to contract out the UFO study to a univer sity, the Air Force tacitly acknowledged that its nineteen years of investigation and analysis had been inadequate.
The UFO program had constantly embarrassed the Air Force : private groups continually attacked the Air Force, cit izens who thought something must be up there distrusted the Air Force, congressmen threatened it with hearings, and, above all, the sighting reports continued. Since 1947 the Air Force had been in the unenviable position of having to pass judgment on every report of an unusual occurrence in the sky. And because these judgments were not always convinc ing, for years the Air Force tried to placate the public and Congress with fact sheets and special briefings. Even high ranking government officials tried to help until the very end.
In a sesion of the House Foreign Afairs Committee, just five days before the UFO hearings, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Joint Chiefs of Stat! Chairman General Earle The Turning Point in ti:e Controversy 183 '\'heeler both stated for th record that UFOs did not represent a unique phenomenon and that the Air Force's in vestigation was adequate. But none of these efforts :stopped the mounting discontent and, in April 1966, the Air Force fi naly moved to extricate itself from the lJFO dilemm3.. The open congressional hearings did not directly force the Air Force to support a scientific investigation of UFOs but cer tainly did insure that it would take place. 2tS The Air Force formed a panel of si't Çople to help cary out the O"Brien committee recommendations. The panel con sisted of O'Brien and another member of the ori:f.nal ad hcc committee, two military personnel from the Air Force Scien tific Advisory Board, a representative from the Air Force Of fice of Public Information, and Lieutenଢ଼t Colonel Robert Hippler of the Ofice of Scientific Research, 'WIilo was respon sible for obtaining university participation in the project.
General James Ferguson (deputy chief of staf for research and development) assumed the duty of administering al t:J.e panel's decisions. 27 The panel first decided to find a "lead university" th:!t could best coordinate a set of investigation teams, and with assistance from the National Academy of Sciences, the pa.:.el prepared a list of twenty-five prospective universities. Because the UFO problem was "an emotional phenomenon." Dr.
O'Brien said, he thought his friend Dr. Horton G. Stever, president of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, should write letters to university presidents to get a feel for their atti tudes toward the project. Recognizing that the t 'FO program '\-as "99% " public relations, the panel recommended th:1t the proposed investigating teams have the necessary skils "to give good Air Force public relations." The panel W:llted both Hy nek and Menzel to be on the investigating teams, but then re versed this decision because both men had made public t.'lei-r feelings on the subject. The results of the proposed investiga tion hopefuly would allow the Air Force finally to know whether to continue the UFO program in its present capacity.
to increase efforts, or, as the panel put it, to ""discontinue the effort and get the Air Force out of the business.'Æ:> It was not until May 9, 1966, that the Air Force disclosed publicly its plan to contract with scientists for a UFO investi gation. But by the time the prospects looked dim. According to Colorado psychologist and future project member DaYid R. Saunders, none of the universities Colonel Hippler tried to interest in the UFO project would h:1 ve it, presumably t--=- 1 84 The UFO Controversy in A merica cause of the public relations problem and the topic's "illegiti macy." Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of North Carolina, the University of Califor nia, and others had turned down the project. During the search the Air Force abandoned its plan to have several uni versities coordinate investigating teams and looked for only one university to conduct the entire study. When Colonel Hippler failed, Dr. William T. Price (Air Force Officer of Scientific Research ) tried; he too was unsuccessful. Finally, Dr. J. Thomas Ratchford (Office of Scientific Research) joined in the hunt for a "buyer." He first tried to interest the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado-to no avail. The center's director, Dr. Walter Orr Roberts, sug gested the University of Colorado. When Ratchford asked Colorado in August 1 966 to take the project, he assured the administration and faculty chairmen that the National Center for Atmospheric Research had been the Air Force's first choice and Colorado its second. The University of Colorado was interested.29 The decision to accept the Air Force's proposal rested in large part on the composition of tt>e Department of Psychol ogy faculty.
Because the Air Force Office of Scientific Research required at least one clinical psychologist to be at tached to the project and other psychologists in the fields of perception, cognition, and data gathering to help if possible, the Department of Psychology had to be sure it could recruit people with these qualifications. It did not see this as a prob lem and was receptive to the idea of taking the study. Fur thermore, the Air Force offered an appealing incentive : it would forgo congressional cost-sharing regulations for federal grants so that tre t•niversity would have to pay only one dol lar to receive $300,000. David Saunders thought that as a result of legislative budget cuts for the university, the $300,- 000 government offer may have looked especially good to Colorado and may have been a factor in the decision. Also, in its zeal to induce the University of Colorado to take the project, the Air Force turned the prant into a contract; this meant that the government added $ 1 3,000 to the $300,000 to cover the university's cost of operating the program. (Eventu ally an extension brought the total sum to over $500,000. ) 30 Ratchford and Price tried to interest internationally known physicist and former head of the National Bureau of Stan dards, Dr. Edward U. Condon, in being the project director.
But Condon was not anxious to accept the job. He was revis- , r The Turning Point in the Controversy 1 85 ing his book on atomic spectra and running for public elec tion to the University of Colorado's Board of Regents. Ratch ford told him that the job was "a dirty chore" but somebody had to do it. If Condon did, people would believe him more than "just some ordinary guy." Condon later said : "I fell for this. Flattery got him somewhere."St Condon's credentials made him the ideal person for the Air Force, which wanted the project leader to be a prestigious scientist and to have the proper political outlook. Condon fit the job description in every way. He had coauthored the first textbook on quantum mechanics in this country, and he had written the standard work in the field of atomic spectra. He was a world renowned physicist. He was also politically ac ceptable. The Air Force did not want someone so far left or right of center that his credibility would be impaired. When Condon headed the National Bureau of Standards, he ran afoul of Richard Nixon and the House Committee on Un American Activities. The committee, spearheaded by Nixon, thought Condon was a security risk because Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace, whom the committee thought to be a Communist, had appointed Condon to his post. Also, Condon's wife was Czechoslovakian, and he had fraternized with various liberals and foreigners. Hauled before the com mittee, Condon refused to knuckle under, and after a long and hard fight between him and the committee and various loyalty review boards, Condon was completely exonerated.
He came out of the fight with his scientific and political cre dentials intact, and he appeared to be a fighter against the es tablishment. Now as he took on the UFO project, he em barked on one of the most dificult and troublesome tasks of his career.32 On October 7, 1 966, the Air Force publicly announced that the University of Colorado had accepted the UFO study project and that Edward U. Condon would be in charge.
With the announcement Condon named three other men to work on the project: Assistant Dean of the Graduate School Robert Low as project coordinator, and psychologists Franklin Roach and Stuart Cook as principal investigators.
The use of psychologists fulfilled the Air Force's requirement.
The program, the Denver Post reported, was "designed to quiet public fears of the aerial objects."33 Reactions to the announcement varied. The Denver Post favored the decision, which it called "wise" because the Air Force had not been able to satisfy the American people. AI- I ]:.b John T20O:·1:-:::::m=.w. penonaly j thought UFOs had something to do with "dying comets," be 1 felt that the Condon committee would have a "fairer chance of clearing the air" of the bitterness that had developed over the UFO argument in recent years. Two Colorado congress men were delighted over the Air Force's selection of the uni versity; they thought this proved that the University of Colo- i" rado "has the academic climate to satisfy and stimulate the , · scientific community" and that therefore the Atomic Energy Commission would be more prone to place the National Ac celerator Laboratory in Colorado. S4 Hynek and Keyhoe, of course, were positive. Writing in 1 the Saturday Evening Post, Hynek said the establishment of 1 the Condon committee gave him a feeling of "personal tri- . ·!· umph and vindication." He was especially pleased that the committee would have enough time to review the phenome non thoroughly, for he could not consider anyone an author- ity on the subject unless that person had read "at least a few I thousand original (not summary) reports" and studied the phenomenon's global nature. Keyhoe called the establishment I of the committee "the most significant development in the history of UFO investigation." The study of UFOs, he said, is j now in the hands of civilian scientists "where it belongs." NI- ' CAP also felt vindicated in its policies of pushing for con gressional hearings and trying to end Air Force secrecy. Key hoe said NICAP would refrain from criticizing the Air Force unless it "releases counter-to-fact explanations" of sightings or "false information," and NICAP would help by giving the committee all "significant evidence. "35 Not everyone was satisfied, however. Columnist Don Mac lean charged, in a New Jersey newspaper, that the govern ment was spending money to "check up" on another branch of the government-making the Condon committee "the most insulting thing that has happened to one of our armed serv ices in some time." Hollywood columnist Austin Connor sug gested that the government was cheating the taxpayers : the Air Force, for legitimate reasons, would not give the commit tee all its classified files, and therefore nothing would come of the UFO study. An editorial in the Nation, which publicly had backed Condon's unsuccessful campaign for regent, said if Condon did not come up with anything other than "little green men," the UFO enthusiasts would crucify him; yet it hoped the study could provide some useful results, such as in sight about why people "must look to beings from beyond the The Turning Point in the Controversy 1 87 earth as the only hope for escape from the tensions, dangers and boredom of modem life."B6 Robert Low, the project coordinator, also had reservations.
He was troubled because the study did not fulfill the three criteria for acceptable research projects : teaching, research, and public service. But, he added, the University of Colorado was the only institution that the Air Force asked to take the study, and ''when you're asked to do something (as opposed to applying for it) you don't say no-not to the Air Force." Besides, he said, by examining people who reported UFOs, the study could uncover some new knowledge in the be havioral sciences.a7 Soon after the committee's establishment, Condon started making statements- that, at least to Keyhoe and others, seemed inconsistent with Condon's supposed impartiality and open-mindedness. The day after his appointment he informed a reporter for the Denver Rocky Mountain News that there was "just no evidence that there is advanced life on other planets," and he did not think flying saucers had visited the earth: "I haven't seen any convincing evidence. It is possible I suppose-but improbable. I would need a lot of convinc ing." Condon thought the Air Force had been doing a good job of handling UFO reports. as The next day he explained that the committee would do more than conduct field interviews with UFO witnesses; it would experiment with swamp gas and similar phenomena as well, to give the public a "better understanding of ordinary phenomena, which, if recognized at once, would reduce the number of UFO reports." He suggested that this educational program could be accomplished through news media and school science classes. A few days later, Condon wrote to the Denver Post explaining that the UFO project could make "valuable contributions to knowledge of atmospheric effects and of people's behavior observing them under unusual con ditions." Because "well-known natural phenomena" caused the great majority of UFO reports, this "clearly indicates an appalling lack of public understanding of such phenomena [and] this calls for improved teaching about these things."39 On October 30, R. Roger Harkins, reporter for the Boulder Daily Camera, quoted Condon as saying the committee would use social psychologists to study large groups of people and their reactions to "unusual stimuli," which included the field of "rumor phenomena, as exemplified by the hysterical popular reaction to H. G. Welles' [sic] radio program, 'War 188 The UFO Controversy in America of the Worlds,' in the late 1930's." In a mid-November inter view with a reporter from the New York Times, he admitted that he did not expect to find visitors from outer space, "but I'm not against it. . . . After all that would be the discovery of a century-the discovery of many centuries--of the millen nia, I suppose." In a speech before the Coming Section of the American Chemical Society on January 25, 1967, Condon confessed : "It is my inclination right now to recommend that the government get out of this business. My attitude right now is that there's nothing to it." He added that "it would be a worthwhile study for those groups interested in meteorolog ical phenomena." Condon seemed to be headed toward studying only two facets of the UFO problem : misinterpreta tions of natural phenomena, and the psychological bases for UfO reports. 40 Having decided to place the study of UFOs in a university, the Air Force thought this was the right time to proceed with its 1 959 plan to transfer the UFO program out of the intelli gence community. In June 1966 General James Ferguson, now deputy chief of staff for research and development, as sumed primary responsibility for the UFO program. This move put Blue Book in the Air Force's scientific community, under the Foreign Technology Division of the Air Force Sys tems Command. The Air Force changed AFR 200-2 to AFR 80-17 (the 200 series refers to intelligence and the 80 series to miscellaneous) , thereby formalizing the new arrangement and also allowing Blue Book to send UFO cases directly to the Condon committee. 41 At this same time, 1966 to i967, the public debate on UFOs became more serious than it had been before, for it in creasingly involved professional people. John Fuller was par tially responsible for this. His articles in Saturday Review and Look contributed to widespread public interest in UFOs, and his book, Incident at Exeter, was sober, well written, well researched, and nonsensational. Because of Fuller's national reputation and because he was not afiliated with any private UFO organizations, many people who previously had not been involved in the UFO debate expressed a favorable reac tion to the book and its subject matter. For instance, Oscar Handlin, professor of history at Harvard, in a review in the Atlantic Monthly, summed up the growing serious attitude toward UFOs. The answer to the UFO enigma was "not now knowable," he said. Eyewitness testimony, the human eye being fallible, was inconclusive; yet because very little else ex- The Turning Point in the Controversy 189 isted t o corroborate eyewitness testimony, "the confession of ignorance is the safest policy." Handlin attacked the Air Force for its "unwillingness . . . to concede that anything is unknown" and for its "bland public relations assurances,'' which had "heightened popular anxiety." Although scientists disliked admitting the limits of their knowledge, Handlin said, "there is . . . nothing inherently implausible about extraterres trial visitors." Intelligent life probably existed elsewhere in the universe and it might "be much more advanced than that on earth." Therefore, "to dismiss out of hand the evidence for UFOs will not quiet the fears that we may be living through the first stages of exploration from elsewhere."42 John Fuller's work in the UFO field provoked enough in terest at Saturday Review for science editor John Lear to write a series of articles about the Robertson panel and the CIA's involvement with it. The Air Force let Lear look through its UFO files, except for the classified and uncen sored version of the 1 953 Robertson panel report. It gave him an edited version instead, leaving out the participants' names and the key recommendation that national security agencies should embark on a public education program to explain the dangers of reporting UFOs. The fact that the CIA had edited the document disturbed Lear. He compared the edited version with Ruppelt's 1 956 version, and since Lear had no way of knowing what the CIA had deleted, he stated that a doubt would always remain about what the CIA had found as long as the Robertson panel report remained cen sored.
Concern over the exact contents of the Robertson report became more intense when Dr. James E. McDonald, a senior atmospheric physicist at the University of Arizona's Depart ment of Atmospheric Sciences, accidentally saw the classified version of the report at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
McDonald had been interested in the UFO phenomenon pri vately for the last ten years, and the 1965 sighting wave strengthened his growing conviction that the phenomenon had scientific importance and that the extraterrestrial hypothesis might be the answer to the mystery. By 1966 he emerged as one of the nation's leading scientific authorities on UFOs and embarked on a national speaking tour to explain his views.
After seeing the classified version of the Robertson report, McDonald placed the blame for the Air Force's secrecy poli cies on the CIA, and he resolved to make this information public. Speaking before members of the University of Ari- 190 The UFO Controversy in America zona's Department of Meteorology, McDonald claimed that the CIA bad ordered the Air Force to debunk UFOs, as seen in the unedited version of the Robertson report. The national news services picked up this story and publicized it widely on the same day that the Air Force announced the establishment of the Condon committee. 43 Many professional people who became interested in the UFO phenomenon were scientists. Dr. Frank Salisbury, head of the Plant Science Department at Utah State University, Dr. Leo Sprinkle, psychologist at the University of Wyoming, Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist at Westinghouse As tronuclear Laboratories, Jacques Vallee, a computer expert at Northwestern University, and other scientists who had not been involved in the UFO controversy before now aligned themselves with the view that UFOs merited scientific study and that the extraterrestrial hypothesis might be valid. This new scientific interest probably was in part. due to the es tablishment of the Condon committee. Condon's prestige was so great that he helped legitimize the subject and made it easier for scientists to discuss the matter without fearing as much ridicule as they had before 1966 (although ridicule stil persisted) . Condon's stature and Hynek's vigorous public statements about UFOs came together in October 1 966, when Science magazine (the official organ of the American Associ ation for the Advancement of Science) printed a letter Hy nek bad written in August 1966. Science at first had refused to publish the letter but changed its policy and published it in abridged form after Condon agreed to take the UFO project.« Since the Lonnie Zamora sighting in 1964, Hynek bad be come more determined in his request for a "respectable schol arly study of the UFO phenomenon." The swamp gas incident had plaǑd him in a defensive position, and the result in 1966 was a more liberal view toward UFOs. Hynek's letter to Science was his most forthright statement to date. His main purpose was to refute several common misconceptions about the phenomenon, Truly puzzling reports came not from UFO buffs, he said, but from people who had given little or no thought to the subject before a sighting. Although unreliable, unstable, or uneducated people did generate some UFO re ports, Hynek explained, "the most articulate reports come from obviously intelligent people." Moreover, the notion that scientifically trained people did not report UFOs was "un equivocably false," and, in fact, some of the best reports came The Turning Point in the Controversy 1 9 1 from this group. Contrary to popular opinion, Hynek contin ued, people saw UFOs at close range and reported explicitly and in detail. 45 As for the Air Force statement that it had no evidence that UFOs were extraterrestrial or represented advanced technol ogy, Hynek said this was true but it "is widely interpreted to mean that there is evidence against the two hypotheses. As long as there are 'unidentifieds,' the question must obviously remain open." Hynek also countered the commonly held no tion that publicity generated UFO reports : while it was true that widely publicized reports might stimulate other reports, "it is unwarranted to assert that this is the sole cause of high incidence of UFO reports." Finally, in answer to the charge that neither radar nor meteor and satellite tracking cameras had picked up UFOs, Hynek said these instruments had indeed tracked "oddities" that remained unidentified. For these reasons, Hynek said, he could not "dismiss the UFO phenomenon with a shrug." Twentieth-century scientists tended to forget "that there will be a 2 1st-century science, and indeed, a 30th-century science, from which vantage points our knowledge of the universe may appear quite differ ent." He concluded that "we suffer, perhaps, from temporal provincialism, a form of arrogance that has always irritated posterity. "46 Hynek's letter was just one example of scientists speaking out about the phenomenon. Condon reported receiving many letters from scientists volunteering to help the committee and none ridiculing him personally for accepting the project. Nev ertheless, some scientists with an urge to explain persisted in ridiculing UFOs and the people who reported seeing them.
Dr. Edward Teller, on a nationwide broadcast of CBS's "Face the Nation," said UFOs were "miracles," and "the hu man soul needs a miracle"; given a scientific age, "what is more proper than that the miracles should be scientific mira cles?" The celebrated British astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell, on an American speaking tour, explained that people who re ported UFOs were "tremendous emotionalists"; UFOs were nothing but natural phenomena and hoaxes, and the entire subject was "incredible nonsense." Science fiction writer and biochemist Isaac Asimov displayed his lack of knowledge about the subject by confusing what contactees reported and what reputable witnesses reported. He was convinced that "most flying saucer enthusiasts" believed "spaceship-crews are benevolent guardians of our welfare and anxious to keep us 192 The UFO Controversy in America from destroying ourselves in nuclear warfare." According to Asimov, people who believed in the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs were "clinging to a fantasy."47 Other scientists skeptical about the subject at least offered arguments based on some knowledge of UFOs and related fields. Philip Klass, avionics editor of Aviation Week and Space Technology, added a new dimension to the scientific inquiry into the nature of the phenomenon when he proposed that ball lightning or plasmas caused UFOs. He expanded his theories into a book, UFOs-ldentified. Basically Klass be lieved virtually all UFO sightings were due to coronal dis charges-the result of free floating packets of charged air that a lighting bolt had ignited; this phenomenon occurs most often near high-voltage power lines. Klass forqmlated his the ory after reading Incident at Exeter, in which many of the witnesses told of seeing UFOs near high-tension wires. Klass was convinced that he had found the solution to the UFO mystery: plasmas could cause automobile engine failure, ap pear luminous, hover, and create radar echoes.4S Many magazines and newspapers featured articles about the plasma idea. While admitting that plasmas might account for a few UFO reports, most UFO researchers, including Hy nek, McDonald, Richard Hall of NICAP, and some electrical engineers, discounted the Klass theory as a solution because it did not explain the majority of UFO sightings. Because plas mas existed at most for a few seconds only near high-tension lines in a severe thunderstorm with lightning, the researchers said, the theory failed to account for sightings not in the area of high-power lines, that occurred in fair weather, and that lasted longer than a few seconds.49 Marquette University Professor of Physics William Markowitz found his own explanation of the mystery by studying how the objects moved. In a 1967 article of Science, "The Physics and Metaphysics of Unidentified Flying Ob jects," Markowitz discussed the idea that reported UFO maneuvers did not obey the "elemental laws of celestial mechanics and physics." He constructed a theoretical model, based on known laws, of the physics of interstellar space travel, giving special attention to takeoffs and landings. Re ports of UFO takeoffs and landings did not conform with this model, he discovered, and therefore extraterrestrial space ve hicles did not account for the phenomenon. Markowitz con cluded by stating that he had now investigated UFOs, and be cause he had seen no valid reports of occupant sightings and The Turning Point in the Controversy 193 no crashed UFOs had turned up, he doubted extraterrestrial visitation. Furthermore, because the data on extraterrestrial visitation was so meager, people should not waste time study ing it and the Air Force should terminate its investigation ac tivities.
He had mentioned this prospect to Quintanila, Markowitz said, and the major "raised no objections."50 This article provoked a lively response from the readers of Science. Richard J. Rosa, of the Avco Everett Research Lab oratory, agreed with Markowitz's conclusion but found the argument "irrelevant"; although interstellar travel was impos sible for our society now, Rosa wrote, Markowitz's arguments "in no way prove or imply that it is beyond someone else's or . . . what we wil have 100 years from now." William T.
Powers, a friend of Hynek from Northwestern University's Dearborn Observatory, said Markowitz's argument "bears no relationship to the contents of UFO reports"; all his foolish model for space flight proved was that "his own design does not explain reports of takeoffs or landings." Furthermore, Powers stated, "the contrast between the notion of an ad vanced civilization's mode of transport (as one may legitimate ly attempt to imagine it) and Markowitz's sketchy design for a starship is ludicrous." Jacques Vallee, one of Hynek's col leagues at Northwestern and the author of two books on UFOs, charged that Markowitz deliberately selected "border line cases in an effort to cast doubt on the validity of current official and private attempts at data-gathering." Furthermore, Vallee insisted, being concerned with only one idea (the ex traterrestrial hypothesis) , as Markowitz was, meant one had to "abandon entirely the rational process upon which science is based." The argument, Vallee concluded, was "grossly ira tional. "51 Although the scientific debate focused, in large part, on finding answers for or alternatives to the extraterrestrial hy pothesis, some scientists took a middle-of-the-road position.
Dr. Carl Sagan was representative of this view. Sagan was an astronomy professor at Cornell University and also had been a member of the Ad Hoc Committee to Review Project Blue Book (the O'Brien committee) . He believed, on the one hand, in the possibility that extraterrestrial visitors had jour neyed to earth in prehistoric times. Although highly unlikely and seemingly fantastic, this possibility definitely existed, he said, and scientists should examine closely ancient myths and legends for possible extraterrestrial contact. On the other hand, Sagan thought the prospect of extraterrestrial visitation 194 The UFO Controversy in America to contemporary civilization was dim. Scientists had obtained no photographs of UFOs as they had of meteors, he argued, and the majority of sightings were actually common astro nomical objects or atmospheric phenomena. Although "no unambiguous evidence" for even simple forms of extraterres trial life existed, Sagan said, "the situation may change in the coming years." Therefore, Sagan warned scientists who had \ "a tendency to reject out of hand the possibility of extrater- · restrial intelligence as baseless, improbable or unscientific" to avoid this danger.ll2 Hynek, too, publicly placed himself in this camp. He nei ther denied nor supported any theory; rather, he spent much of 1966 and 1967 calling for increased scientific scrutiny of the UFO problem because "no truly scientific investigation of the UFO phenomenon has ever been undertaken." Much of this Hynek did through the media: the letter in Science in October 1966, an article about the Air Force study and his involvement in it in the Saturday Evening Post in December 1966, a full-page interview with Hynek in the Christian Science Monitor in May 1967, and an article in Playboy in December 1967 discussing the inadequacies of the Air Force program. In the latter, Hynek outlined the dangers of the So viets deciphering the UFO mystery before the Americans could and recommended increased study · to avoid a "UFO gap." If the United States could do this, wrote Hynek, "Man kind may be in for the greatest adventure since dawning human intelligence turned outward to contemplate the universe. "53 If Sagan and Hynek spoke for the middle position, Dr.
James McDonald certainly was the advocate for the extrater restrial position. Unafraid of ridicule, McDonald was an ex tremely intense and energetic individual whose research into UFOs had far outstripped all other researchers save Hynek.
In March 1966 McDonald had succeeded in obtaining the National Academy of Science's approval for a discreet, one man study of UFOs. But when McDonald heard of the Air Force plans to contract a UFO study to a university, he de clined to use N.A.S.'s support. McDonald used his own money for UFO investigation, and he meticulously investigated scores of sightings and personally interviewed hundreds of witnesses.
He concluded that "the extraterrestrial hypothesis [was] the only presently plausible explanation for the now-available facts."IS4 Armed with this idea and with the perhaps naive but un- The Turning Point in the Controversy 195 shaken faith that scientists, once alerted to the depth and enormity of the UFO data, would be swayed by logic and reason, McDonald launched a crusade to alert the scientific community to the seriousness of the problem. Over the next few years he wrote thousands of letters about the UFO prob lem to scientists, UFO researchers, military personnel, and private citizens. He stumped the country giving innumerable lectures, speeches, talks, and private discussions. His method of argumentation was to overwhelm listeners with a wealth of exhaustively documented and detailed UFO reports. He per sonally investigated all the reports he used, and he uncovered some of the best substantiated and strongest cases known.
McDonald also did original research on many of the classic cases, such as the Mantell, Chiles and Whitted, Washington, D.C. and Zamora ·sights. He printed his lectures and dis tributed them to anyone interested.
McDonald rushed into the fray with Menzel and Klass.
Since his field was atmospheric physics, he was best equipped to counter Menzel's and Klass's arguments that most UFOs resulted from unusual atmospheric conditions. McDonald worked intensively on Menzel's books and painstakingly showed the implausibility of Menzel's theories. Phil Klass presented easier pickings. After demonstrating the weaknesses of Klass's ideas, McDonald remarked: "Klass dismissed." McDonald's drive, tireless energy, keen intelligence, and re markable productivity made him a major force in the UFO controversy.
McDonald also took on the Air Force. He vigorously at tacked it for its lack of scientific investigation and its pro nouncements designed to soothe the public. He attacked the CIA for its involvement in the Robertson panel report. While not subscribing to Keyhoe's conspiracy ideas, McDonald did believe the Air Force had been involved in a "grand foulup" because of the "limited scientific competence" of the person nel attached to the UFO project. sr; The Air Force feared McDonald. It saw him as a major threat to its public relations efforts. When the American Soci ety of Newspaper Editors asked the Air Force to allow Quin tanilla to join McDonald and others in a symposium on UFOs, the Air Force Office of Information (SAFOI) thought long and hard about subjecting Quintanilla to McDonald's at tacks. SAFOI decided to let Quintanilla appear, but he would have to be "brainwashed thoroughly" beforehand. "Two colonels with 30 years' experience in the information business 196 The UFO Controversy in A merica will be holding his hands. They wil work him over-ask him every leading dirty question he might get. He wil be ready for them." Besides that, Klass would be on the panel, and since he was eager to promote his book and debate with McDonald, Quintanila would be able to sit back and listen.56 McDonald's contacts with the scientific community also worried the Air Force. When McDonald wrote to the Air Force Office of Aerospace Research telling it that he would be in Washington and wanted to discuss the UFO situation with the staff, SAFOI knew that the Ofice of Aerospace Research would not be receptive but that "they dare not turn him down." The Air Force, as SAFOI put it, wanted to "fire proof'' McDonald. liT McDonald's civilian adversaries, particularly Phil Klass, also wanted to fireproof him. Klass, who was rapidly becom ing the new leader of the anti-UFO forces, engaged in a pro tracted battle of attrition with McDonald. He printed and distributed detailed critiques of McDonald's speeches and statements. McDonald charged that Klass had told the Office of Naval Research that McDonald used navy funds on a trip to Australia to study UFOs. This caused a minor scandal and the navy sent an auditor to look at McDonald's contract. The navy found nothing irregular, but the resulting pressure from the university administration caused McDonald some embar rassment. The McDonald-Klass struggle continued until McDonald's death.58 In addition to his fight with Klass, McDonald also had a simering feud with Hynek. It started in early June 1966 when McDonald visited Project Blue Book at Wright-Patter son Air Force Base. Quintanilla allowed him to examine some case reports. McDonald was astonished. The sighting reports he saw confirmed his suspicions. The Air Force was holding an enormous quantity of impressive reports, and Hy nek had said nothing about them to the scientific community.
He went directly from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to Northwestern University and Hynek's office. He pounded on Hynek's desk and asked, "How could you sit on this informa tion for so many years without altering the scientific commu nity?" Hynek later said this incident was "like a breath of fresh air," for here at last was a reputable scientist who was not afraid to say UFOs deserved scientific study.159 But McDonald was not through with Hynek yet. McDon ald believed Hynek had committed an unpardonable scientific sin-he had been scientifically dishonest Hynek had a key The Turning Point in the Controversy 197 and unique role in being the only scientist working on UFOs. Hynek had known of the strong evidence of the possi bility of extraterrestrial visitation but had remained quiet. He had known of the Air Force's inadequate ' investigatory methods but had gone along with them in the crucial early years. McDonald thought Hynek was as bad as, if not worse 1 than, Menzel. In fact, McDonald characterized Hynek as "the original Menzel" and saw Hynek's later open-minded stand toward the UFO mystery as a self-serving way to as suage his guilt. Although in later years Hynek and McDonald were cordial to each other and appeared on forums together, McDonald never trusted Hynek and never forgave him.60 McDonald and Hynek did work together, to a certain ex tent, to interest the scientific community in UFOs. As a result of their urgings, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIA) decided to convene a panel of scientists for an unbiased discussion of the UFO problem. Joachim P.
Kuettner of the Environmental Research Laboratories in Boulder, Colorado, chaired the eleven-member panel, which hoped to reach some conclusions before 1969.61 Clearly, the events from 1965 to 1967 opened wider the door to scientific inquiry than ever before.
The events of 1965 to 1 967 increased not only scientists' interest in UFOs but public interest in the various UFO or ganizations and clubs as well. The private UFO groups en joyed increased memberships. Peter Bail in the New York Times reported that membership in UFO organizations was "soaring" and that "predictably the number of sightings of 'saucers' seemed to be growing apace." He reported that NI CAP had doubled its membership to 1 1,000 and that the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America (the Califor nia-based contactee group) claimed 3,700 members. George Van Tassel's contactee convention at Giant Rock, California, drew crowds of at least 2,000-more than double what it had drawn in previous years. Hector Quintanilla's analysis of this new interest in UFOs was that it was due to an "upsurge in magazine stories and television shows devoted to the topic."62 Although Quintanilla's reason for the increase in UFO re ports might be dubious, it was true that more peoplct were writing more books on the subject. From 1966 to 1 968 over two dozen books on UFOs were published. Frank Edwards, Keyhoe's old friend, led the way in 1966 with his best-selling Flying Saucers-Serious Business, an amalgam of sighting tales, history, and a large dose of speculation. Edwards's 198 The UFO Controversy in America research was shoddy at best, but his book rivaled Keyhoe's books for sheer volume of sales. Edwards followed the next year with Flying Saucers-Here and Now/, which gave the reader more of the same. 63 John Fuller's The Interrupted Journey told the story of the Barney and Betty Hill case, which involved an extremely credible and reliable interracial couple who claimed that ex traterrestrials abducted them, took them aboard a UFO, gave them physical examinations, and then released them. Ordinar ily UFO researchers would shy away from a case like this, but it bore no resemblance to contactee stories and the Hills had circumstantial evidence to bolster the credibility of their claim. Excerpted in Look magazine, the book was an instant success.M . Jim and Coral Lorenzen's 1962 The Great Flying Saucer · Hoax, a comprehensive exposition of the worldwide UFO phenomenon coupled with their ideas on Air Force secrecy, came out in paperback in 1966 under the title Flying Saucers: The Startling Evidence of the Invasion from Outer Space. It too was popular and underwent numerous print ings. They followed that with UFOs Over the Americas, which concentrated on recent sightings in the Western Hemi sphere, Flying Saucer - Occupants, the first book to treat re ports of occupants seriously, and UFOs: The Whole Story, which outlined UFO sightings, the government's secrecy poli cies, and brought the history up to the Condon committee. 65 Jacques Vallee, a mathematician and computer expert from Northwestern University, published two books on UFOs in 1965 and 1966, A natomy of a Phenomenon and Challenge to Science. Both of these well-reasoned and scientifically based books attempted to give a scholarly basis for studying UFO reports. Vallee discussed the reports statistically, analyt ically, and categorically. His scientific training made these books the most solid scientific works on the UFO phenome non during this period. 66 Numerous other books that tried to capitalize on the cur rent high level of interest also appeared in book stores. These works ranged from naked exploitation, like reprinted con tactee books, to the standard potboiler. They all sold well as public interest seemed insatiable in light of the tremendous number of sightings during these years.
The Air Force received nearly three thousand sighting re ports from 1965 through 1967. Public interest in them and massive publicity had finally forced a congressional hearing The Turning Point in the Controversy 199 on UFOs which, in tum, compelled the Air Force to look for outside aid in dealing with the UFO problem. Finding the University of Colorado and especially Edward U. Condon to direct the civilian study allowed the Air Force to get rid of the UFO problem at least for a while. Condon's prestige also made UFOs a more legitimate area of study for some mem bers of the scientific community. The spokesmen for the pri vate UFO groups seemed less vocal; prominent professional people, such as Hynek and McDonald, more vocal; and many previously hostile sectors of the society began to treat the subject seriously.
Although hostility still prevailed, a growing number of scientists took a closer look at the UFO phenomenon during these years and independently concluded that the topic had scientific merit. As the UFO debate moved away from in-group and public relations haggling and toward the scientific com munity, the Condon committee's work became, necessarily, the focal point of attention. Many scientists as well as UFO , proponents adopted a wait-and-see attitude before judging the work of this first university-based scientific investigation of the UFO phenomenon. The Condon committee assumed paramount importance, and, eventually, most concerned cit izens and scientists looked to it to give them the answer to , the problem.
9 THE CONDON COMMITTEE AND ITS AFTERMATH The establishment of the Condon committee was the culmi nation of years of pressure from Keyhoe, Hynek, private UFO groups, Congress, and the news media. Because the committee had a university rather than a military base, be cause its members were trained in the physical and social sciences, and because its purpose was a long-term and in-depth study of the UFO phenomenon, it assumed extraordinary importance for people on all sides of the UFO contro versy. But the committee fell prey to internal division, meth odological disputes, and personality clashes, and it did not resolve or clarify most of the issues surrounding the UFO controversy. In fact, its final report raised more questions than it answered. Although the Condon committee success fully helped the Air Force eliminate its UFO problem, the committee failed to add substantialy to knowledge about the phenomenon.
The Condon committee began its work in October 1966 with optimism on all sides. Even though no one connected with the project had any prior experience in the field, the staff of twelve-inch.iding psychologists David Saunders and Stuart Cook, chemist Roy Craig, astronomer Franklin Roach, and project coordinator Robert Low-formulated workable plans to attack the UFO problem on many fronts. The staf planned to keep a case book of the best available sightings, and Saunders was to study them statistically. The staff com piled a library containing most of the important works on the subject. It planned to create investigation teams to study sightings as soon as they occurred. Psychologist William Scott began work on a standard questionnaire to gather informa- ' tion about sightings and their witnesses. Condon hired outside consultants to write reports about physical phenomena, such as bal lightning and plasmas, associated with UFO sightings.
200 The Condon Committee and Its Aftermath 201 To orient project members about problems in UFO research, the staff brought in Hynek, Jacques Vallee, Quintanila, Key hoe, and NICAP assistant director Richard Hal.l Trouble developed almost as soon as the first rush of op timism faded. David Saunders outlined the problems in a 1968 book about the Condon committee's early problems.
According to Saunders, one of the first disagreements was over Scott's questionnaire : of its twenty-one pages, only one covered items about the sighting itself; the remaining twenty pages asked questions about the psychological reactions of the witnesses. Some staff members objected to this method, a dis pute ensued, and Scott resigned. A second problem centered on project coordinator Robert Low who, Saunders said, seemed insensitive to the project members' work. He preoccu pied himself with adding reports to his case book. Saunders later charged that Low improperly screened and analyzed these cases and they only increased the projected length of the final report. In August 1967 Low went to Europe for a month's stay to represent the committee at the International Astronomical Union in Prague. The staf thought this would be an excellent opportunity for Low to meet with two of Eu rope's leading UFO researchers, Charles Bowen of England and Aime Michel of France. Low, however, decided not to visit Bowen and Michel and went instead to Loeb Ness be cause, be said, although although neither UFOs nor the mon ster existed, it was important to compare the two phenome na.2 A third source of iritation was Condon's attitudes. Early in the project, on January 25, 1967, in his speech before the Corning Section of the American Chemical Society, be said that the government should get out of the UFO "business" and that the UFO phenomenon had nothing to it. Saunders explained that not only did the speech upset and puzzle some project staf members but it almost caused a break with NI CAP. The Condon committee needed APRO's and NICAP's help, both of which bad agreed to supply it with good sight ing reports. The Air Force was inefficient; Blue Book person nel had misfiled and misplaced many reports, and air base officers sent reports slowly and contributed many of poor quality. Saunders, who joined NICAP to keep up with current sightings when the university accepted the UFO project, found that NICAP reports were of a higher quality than those of the Air Force. Many NICAP members thought Con don's speech at Corning proved both his bias and the Air 202 The UFO Controversy in America Force's influence, and they put pressure on Keyhoe to with draw support. Under Saunder's urging and with much reluc tance, Condon wrote to Keyhoe explaining that the press had misquoted what he said and he managed to head off a serious problem with NICAP. s But Condon still had problems concealing his negative atti tude toward UFOs. He showed a distinct partiality to contact ee-like claims-claims that serious UFO investigators viewed as hoaxes. Not only did these stories provide Condon with ex cellent after-dinner anecdotes, but they occupied an unusually large portion of his project efforts as well. Of the four of five cases he personally investigated, all were either hoaxes or had contactee overtones. In addition, he made a special trip to New York City in June 1 967 to appear at a meeting of the contactee-oriented Congress of Scientific Ufologists where Howard Menger was the guest speaker. Condon took a bow in the audience. The project staff was not happy with this be havior:4 A major source of conflict, begining as early as January 1967, surrounded the validity of the extraterrestrial hypothe sis. Saunders rapidly emerged as the champion of the idea that the committee should consider the extraterrestrial hy pothesis equally with other theories. Psychologist Michael Wertheimer and Low took the position that the extraterrestrial hypothesis was not only unprovable but probably absurd as well. A dispute over this point ensued between Saunders and Low and Wertheimer; as a result, Wertheimer lost interest in the project and. participated only minimally. But Low and Saunders continued at odds over the issue, and in March 1967 Low wrote a position paper in which he called the ex traterrestrial hypothesis nonsense.5 He maintained this atti tude until the end of the project.
The disagreement over the extraterrestrial hypothesis indi cated deeper disputes within the committee. One concerned the committee's policy of releasing no information to the press before completing the final report. Condon and Low had instituted this policy, the one exception being any public remarks Condon might make, but Saunders disagreed with it.
The policy seemed to bear directly on the committee's scien tific intent. Saunders hoped and perhaps assumed that the staff would find at least several solid cases to support the recommendation for continued scientific study of UFOs ; he had found some sightings he thought were solid, one being the 1950 Nicholas Mariana film.& The Condon Committee and Its Aftermath 203 For Saunders, recommending continued study implied that UFOs were a unique phenomenon and that the extraterres trial hypothesis might have merit. Therefore, he reasoned, the committee should release selected information to the public to soften the shock of this kind of recommendation. But Con don, also assuming that a "positive" report would mean that the extraterrestrial hypothesis had merit, refused to change the policy; if a positive final report seemed likely, he ex plained, he would not release the information to the press but would take it personally to the president of the United States.
Saunders interpreted this statement to mean that no matter what the staff found the final report would be negative, that the report would not recommend continued study because the idea that UFOs represented an anomalous phenomenon of · possible extraterrestrial origin had no validity.7 While this dispute simmered beneath the surface, a second issue emerged that unquestionably became the project's most dramatic by-product-the release of the so-called Low memorandum. In August 1966, as people at the University of Colorado tried to decide whether to accept the UFO project, Low wrote a memorandum to the university's administrators explaining his views. In it he dealt with the question of what could be the final result of the study. s The memorandum, ambiguously and loosely worded, expressed the basic premise that UFOs were not a unique phenomenon, that they had no physical reality and were not extraterrestrial. But, Low stated, even though the staff would be composed of "nonbelievers," it was practically impossible to prove these negative propositions. Yet the staff could col lect an impressive body of evidence to bolster these common sense negative assumptions. Such bolstering, Low cautioned, might involve a public relations dilemma in which "the trick would be to describe the project so that, to the public, it would appear a totally objective study but, to the scientific community, would present the image of a group of nonbeliev ers trying their best to be objective but having an almost zero expectation of finding a saucer." Low decided that the best way to accomplish this dual objective would be to stress the investigation of "the psychology and sociology of persons and groups who report seeing UFOs." By placing emphasis on the witnesses, Low said, "rather than on examination of the old question of the physical reality of the saucer, I think the scientific community would quickly get the message."9 The Low memorandum found its way to a file marked 204 The UFO Controversy in America "AF Contract and Background," where it sat, as Saunders said, "ticking away like a time bomb" until July 1967, when staff member Roy Craig discovered it. Puzzled over its con tents, Craig showed it to coworker Norman Levine, who showed it to Saunders. Saunders then showed the memoran dum to Keyhoe because he wanted to be open with NICAP.
He wanted Keyhoe to know about Low's apparent bias, but he also wanted Keyhoe's continued cooperation with the proj ect so that Saunders would have data to write a minority re port. Keyhoe, in turn, told James McDonald about the memorandum. Later McDonald received a copy of it. Al this went on without Low's knowledge.1o No one brought up the memorandum until February 1968, when McDonald wrote a seven-page letter to Low criti cizing the project's methodology and expressing concern over 1 the negative conclusion to which the project seemed headed.
In the letter McDonald mentioned the memorandum, quoting the section about "the trick would be .
.
• .
" Low became ex ceptionally upset and showed Condon McDonald's letter.
Condon, who had not known about the memorandum until this time, was outraged. He accused Saunders and Levine of stealing the letter from Low's personal files and releasing it to McDonald; Condon told Saunders he ought to be "profes sionally ruined" for leaking the memorandum. The next day Condon fired Saunders and Levine. Their dismissal brought other staff problems to the fore. Condon's administrative as sistant, Mary Lou Armstrong, resigned, citing "an almost unanimous 'lack of confidence' " in Low's ability to direct the project. She also accused Low of misrepresenting the majority of the senior staff's opinion that the UFO phenomenon deserved further scientific study.n The Low memorandum and Condon's handling of it re flected the philosophical divisions in the project and the con flicts between staff members. Condon was unable to maintain a continuous project staff; out of the original twelve, only Low and two other full-time staff members remained with the project for its duration.12 Much of the personal conflict was based on the philosophical issue of what assumption to make in investigating cases. Neither of the two groups involved saw the primary focus as being to determine whether UFOs con stituted an anomalous phenomenon. Instead, one group, with Saunders as spokesman, thought the committee should con sider the extraterrestrial hypothesis and other theories about the origin of UFOs; this group wanted to look at as much of The Condon Committee and Its Aftermath 205 the data as possible. The other group, with Low as spokes man, thought the extraterrestrial theory was nonsense and be lieved the solution to the UFO mystery was to be found in the psychological makeup of the witnesses. The main conflict was over whether UFOs were an extraterrestrial phenomenon rather than whether they constituted a unique aerial phenom enon.
Perhaps the reason the two groups focused on the efficacy of the extraterrestrial hypothesis as a measure of the objects' reality was that none of the project staff had any experience in investigating UFO reports. Even though Condon asked Hynek, Keyhoe, and Jacques Vallee at the beginning to brief the project staff on problems in UFO research, he did not use these men as consultants for the project's methodology.
Therefore, its methodological problems led the staff members to tangential concerns.
Disclosure of the Low memorandum became the central event in the Condon committee's stormy history. Journalist John Fuller found out about the firings soon after they oc curred and in May 1968 wrote an article, "Flying Saucer Fi asco," for Look magazine. Fuller discussed the divisions in the project, Condon's seeming preoccupation with contactees, the Low memorandum, McDonald's letter to Low, the firing of Saunders and Levine, and Mary Lou Armstrong's subse quent resignation. To Fuller these events meant that "the hope that the establishment of the Colorado study brought with it has dimmed. All that seems to be left is the $500,000 trick." Condon sent a telegram to Look charging that the Fuller article contained "falsehoods, and misrepresentations" but not specifying what they were. The Denver Post quoted Mary Lou Armstrong as saying the article was accurate.1a In addition to the article, Look printed a short piece Key hoe had written to say that NICAP had withdrawn its sup port from the Condon committee. NICAP had been wavering about continuing its support even before the Low disclosure.
Although Saunders encouraged Keyhoe to withhold judg ment, Keyhoe knew about the project's difficulties and be came increasingly wary of its objectivity. The dismissals con vinced him that his fears were justified; he could see the direction the project was taking and wanted no part of it.
(He actually had withdrawn support before the Look article I but made his decision public in the magazine. ) APRO, claim ing that NICAP had tried to influence the committee through • 206 The UFO Controversy in America Saunders, decided to continue to give sighting reports to the committee and not to prejudge the study.t4 Fuller's article had far-reaching effects. Technical and pro fessional journals carried the story and opened a forum for debate. In an interview with Scientific Research, Saunders and Levine said they planned a libel suit against Condon and attacked him for an " 'unscientific' approach" to the study. In reply, Condon said calling him unscientific was grounds for libel, and one factor in dismissing Saunders and Levine was that they gave "outsiders" material from "personal" files. Un til the final report became available to the public in the fall of 1 968, Condon said, "fair-minded people will reserve judg ment." Industrial Research printed excerpts from the "stolen" Low memorandum, as Condon called it, and a statement from Thomas Ratchford of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. He said it would be "inappropriate and premature" for the Air Force to comment on the matter until the Condon committee completed the final report. But, asserted Ratch ford, he believed Condon to be "outstandingly open-minded" and unbiased. According to Air Force Public Information Of ficer David Shea, the Low memorandum caused a stir in the Air Force and Secretary Brown organized a task force "to keep a close eye on the project. "15 Science magazine's news department was working on an article about the project's problems, and Condon, a past president of AAS, agreed to cooperate with the author in hopes that this would be his counterattack to Fuller. But dur ing the preparation of the article, the expected public interest in the committee's problems did not materialize, and Condon, according to Science editor Daniel S. Greenberg, decided it was "inappropriate for Science to touch the matter, withdrew his offer of cooperation, and proceeded to enunciate high sounding principles in support of his new-found belief that Science should not touch the subject until after publication of his report." When Greenberg reminded Condon that he had wanted the article and had offered complete cooperation, "Condon flatly refused to discuss the matter further." Science printed the piece anyway. Condon became so angry that he resigned from AAS.l& One of Condon's friends at the University of Colorado's 1oint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics criticized the mag azine for writing about the controversy : because the public did not understand the workings of scientists, it tended to base its judgments on commentators' reactions to scientific The Condon Committee and Its Aftermath 201 controversies; the "tragedy" of the article was that "Science apparently fails to perceive that public acceptance of the ra tionality of science is at stake." Condon's colleague may have overstated his case. In spite of the debate the Fuller article created, the majority of people interested in UFO controversy seemed to agree with the Denver Post when it said that al though it would have liked Condon to answer Fuller's charges, "everyone [should] wait for the project report be- fore passing judgment."17 · Fuller's article even prompted reaction in Congress. Indi ana Congressman J. Edward Roush delivered a speech on the House floor saying the article raised "grave doubts as to the scientific profundity and objectivity of the project." In an in terview with the . Denver Post, Roush cited the Low memorandum as evidence of the Air Force's influence in the project from the start. Roush, who had a prior interest in UFOs and with McDonald's urgings, recommended a new congressional investigation, took steps immediately to initiate such an investigation, and scheduled it for July 29, 1968.18 Under the auspices of the House Science and Astronautics Committee, this hearing was more encompassing and ambi tious than the one in 1966. Conceived of as a symposium, the participants were Hynek, McDonald, astronomer Carl Sagan, sociologist Robert L. Hall, engineer James A. Harder, and as tronautics engineer Robert M. Baker. Menzel submitted a written statement, saying he was "amazed . . .
that you [Roush] could plan so unbalanced a symposium, weighted by persons known to favor Government support of a continuing expensive and pointless investigation of UFOs without invit ing me, the leading exponent of opposing views and author of two major books on the subject." Psychologists Leo Sprinkle and Roger N. Shepard, nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman, geophysicist Garry C. Henderson, and exobiologist Frank B.
Salisbury also submitted prepared statements. The Science and Astronautics Committee set up symposium ground rules prohibiting any criticism of the Condon project or the Air Force, because the committee said, the House Armed Serv ices Committee was the appropriate place to criticize the Air Force or an Air Force sponsored project.19 Hynek spoke first. He recounted his involvement in the UFO controversy and his change of mind over the years. At first he believed that the subject was "rank nonsense, the product of silly seasons, and a peculiarly American craze that would run its course as all popular crazes do." But as he ex- 208 The UFO Controversy in America amined more of the data over the years, be recounted, be re alized that there might indeed by "scientific paydirt" in the phenomenon. He had not alerted the scientific community to the seriousness of the problem before, he said, because scien tists had to be sure of their facts; be did not want to cry wolf unless he was reasonably sure there was a wolf. Now be was sure.2o Hynek offered two reasons for why scientists had not shown interest in UFOs previously. First, he said, was the lack of bard-core data and a method for obtaining this data; the Air Force failed to uncover such data because it only wanted to determine whether UFOs threatened national se curity. The second reason, Hynek explained, was the contact ees and the sensational treatment of UFOs . in pulp maga zines. Hynek noted that the subject was so illegitimate for scientists that "there appears to be a scientific taboo on even the passive tabulation of UFO reports." It would be fool hardy for a scientist to present a paper on UFOs to the American Physical Society or to the American Astronomical Society-"the paper would be laughed down."21 In contrast, Hynek noted, the recent 1966-67 wave of sightings increased scientific interest, and all for the good.
Scientists' misconceptions about the nature of UFO informa tion have been "so powerful and all-encompassing," he said, "that an amazing lethargy and apathy to investigation has prevailed. This apathy is unbecoming to the ideals of science and undermines public confidence." The new scientific inter est, Hynek explained, gave the impression that "we should ei ther fish or cut bait." He wanted to fish and recommended establishing a "UFO Scientific Board of Inquiry properly funded, for the specific purpose of an investigation in depth of the UFO phenomenon." He also recommended using the United Nations for a free interchange of international sight ing reports and data. Due to continued reports of close en counters with "unexplainable craft" from sane, reputable people, Hynek said, he had to believe that either the reports had scientific value or world society contained people "who are articulate, sane, and reputable in all matters save UFO reports." Either way, the phenomenon deserved study.22 The second speaker was McDonald. He began his testi mony by saying that even though scientists had been lax to investigate UFOs because of the ancedotal evidence involved, the UFO matter was of "extraordinary scientific importance." He outlined his own change in attitude about UFOs: he, too, The Condon Committee and Its Aftermath 209 had placed little credence in UFO reports at first, but his research during the past few years convinced him that the ex traterrestrial hypothesis was capable of explaining the major ity of unexplained UFO reports whereas other hypotheses were not. For example, he had researched independently the 1952 Washington, D.C., sightings and found that the temper ature inversion theory was untenable. UFOs were "entirely real," he said, and "we do not know what they are because we have laughed them out of court." He supported Hynek's suggestion for an ongoing UFO study on a global scale and urged further House hearings to enable scientists to debate the issue.23 Former O'Brien committee member and Cornell Professor of Astronomy Dr. Carl Sagan testified third. Taking a skepti cal attitude toward UFOs being extraterrestrial, he confined his remarks to the possibilities of extraterrestrial life and the problems of space travel. He thought extraterrestrial life probably existed elsewhere in the universe, although intelli gent life was most unlikely in our solar system ; yet interstel lar space travel, while encountering the difficulties of the time over great distances, Sagan said, was not physically impos sible.2• The fourth person to speak was Dr. Robert L. Hall, chair man of the Department of Sociology at the University of Illi nois and the brother of NICAP assistant director Richard Hall. He examined the theory that "hysterical contagion" caused UFO reports and found it "highly improbable," for "hard-core" cases and "the weight of evidence is strongly against it." Hall had discovered strong evidence that physical phenomena underlay a portion of the reports. To alleviate panic over UFOs, Hall said, the government should circulate freely all available information about the phenomenon and scientists should study carefully 100 to 200 cases per year for "recurring patterns, with emphasis on the way they react to their environment, the way they react to light sources, the way they react to presence of humans and so on." Hall "en thusiastically agreed with Hynek's suggestion of a Board of Inquiry."25 Dr. James A. Harder, associate professor of civil engineer ing at the University of California and an APRO consultant, did not mince words : "On the basis of the data and ordinary rules of evidence, as would be applied in civil or criminal courts, the physical reality of UFO's has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt." The objects were "interplanetary" and 210 The UFO Controversy in A merica their propulsion was based on "an application of gravitational fields that we do not understand." As did the previous witness, Harder recommended a continued scientific investiga tion of UF0s.26 The last witness was Dr. Robert M. Baker, senior scientist with the Computer Sciences Corporation in southern Califor nia, editor of the Journal of Astronautical Sciences, and a former UCLA professor of astronomy and engineering. Baker had analyzed the Mariana and Newhouse films and had con cluded that the Mariana film exhibited anomalistic objects and the Newhouse film "most probably anomalistic objects." Addressing himself to why American sky photography proj ects, radar surveillance systems, telescopes, and military de tection equipment had not provided many photographs of unidentified flying objects, he explained that the majority of astronomical equipment was specialized and "would probably not detect the anomalous luminous phenomena reported by the casual observer." Only one American surveillance system had a "slight opportunity" to detect UFOs above the earth's atmosphere, Baker said. He had visited Air Defense Com mand headquarters and confirmed that since this equipment had been operative, "there have been a number of anoma listic alarms. Alarms that, as of this date, have not been ex plained on the basis of natural phenomena interference, equipment malfunction or inadequacy, or manmade space ob jects."27 Baker concluded : "We have not now, nor have we been in the past, able to achieve a complete-or even partially com plete-surveillance of space in the vicinity of the earth, com prehensive enough to betray the presence of or provide quantitative information on anomalistic phenomena." He rec ommended instituting a long-term, properly funded interdisci plinary, mobile scientific task force to study the surveillance problem and develop UFO sensing and tracking equipment.
Baker also suggested a system of "listening posts" for possible extraterrestrial communication and studies to forecast techno logical and behavioral patterns of advanced extraterrestrial life.2s Finally, a House committee staff member placed into the record the papers prepared by Menzel, Stanton Friedman, Frank Salisbury, Leo Sprinkle, Garry Henderson, and Roger Shepard. Menzel's paper included his familiar theories that UFOs were mirages, reflections, temperature inversions, and the like. In his paper, Friedman criticized the positions of The Condon Committee and Its Aftermath 21 1 Menzel, Klass, and Markowitz and concluded that "the earth is being visited by intelligently controlled vehicles whose origin is extraterrestrial." Dr. Frank Salisbury's paper dis cussed the issue of noncontact and the danger of attributing human motivation to nonhuman intelligence : ''To inductively extrapolate from our own current sociological approaches to those of other intelligent entities would be to commit the logi cal sin of extrapolation in a most flagrant manner." In their papers, Dr. Leo Sprinkle (psychologist at the University of Wyoming) , Dr. Garry C. Henderson (senior research scien tist for General Dynamics) , and Dr. Roger N. Shepard (psy chology professor at Stanford) took issue with Menzel's theo ries and criticized him for not giving enough credit to human observations, perceptions, and witnesses' ability to reconstruct accurately what they saw.21 Thus ended the second congressional hearing on UFOs. Al though the House Science and Astronautics Committee pro hibited all participants from criticizing the Colorado project openly, the criticism was apparent nonetheless. Each witness recommended an ongoing systematic investigation of UFO's; none suggested or implied that the Condon project would settle the debate over UFOs or would add significantly to knowledge about the subject. The hearing-symposium made the strongest case to date for continued study of UFOs. It also represented growing academic interest in the subject: a few years before the 1968 hearing Hynek was the only Amer ican scientist capable of discussing the UFO phenomenon knowledgeably and from a research basis, but at the time of the hearing at least twenty specialists in the physical and so cial sciences (apart from the Condon committee) were taking an active interest in the subject, and the number was growing.
The 1965-67 sighting wave helped create this new scholarly interest and the Condon committee's work helped legitimatize the subject. In 1968 many academicians interested in UFOs joined APRO, which, with the help of Assistant Director Richard Greenwell, had launched an active recruitment pro gram to gain these consultants for its work.ao The July 1 968 House hearings came at the end of a peak period of sightings and of public interest in and press cover age of the phenomenon. Membership in the two national or ganizations had dropped as all interested groups waited for the Condon committee's final report, due in the fall of 1968.31 After the firing of Saunders and Levine in February 1968, press coverage of the Condon committee became virtually 2 1 2 The UFO Controversy in America nonexistent; Condon stopped making public speeches and very few people knew what was happening in the project.
The only event to mar the quietude of this period was the publication of Saunders and Harkins's book, UFOs? Yes!, a blow-by-blow account of the early problems in the Colorado project. Saunders, sure that the Condon committee's final re- · port would not recommend further systematic study, attempt ed in his book to prepare the public for this and to raise the issue of the committee's objectivity. Saunders and Levine hoped the book would appear just before the Condon report came out.
In November 1968, before Condon released the final report publicly, he turned it over to the National Academy of Sci ences (NAS) for review and approval. NAS's review panel consisted of eleven scientists, who praised the report's scope, methodology, and concurred with all its conclusions and recommendations. The panel found the study to be a "credit able effort to apply objectively the relevant techniques of science to the solution of the UFO problem." It agreed that systematically studying UFO reports was not a fruitful way to expand knowledge of the . phenomena and concluded that "the least likely explanation of UFOs is the hypothesis of ex traterrestrial visitations by intelligent beings." Frederick Sietz, president of the National Academy of Sciences and one of Condon's ex-students, wrote to Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Alexander Flax in January 1969 to say he hoped NAS's review would "be helpful to you and other responsible officials in determining the nature and scope of any continu ing research .effort in this area." Flax added that the National Academy of Sciences had made its report for the "sole pur pose" of helping the Air Force make this decision.32 The Condon committee final report, 1,485 pages in hard cover and 965 pages in paperback, contained a collection of analysis from various individuals who were either project staff or consultants. It had six sections and extensive appendices.
The New York Times science editor, Walter Sullivan, wrDte the preface to the paperback edition. In it he basically an swered Saunders's charges and hinted of what was to come in the body of the text. Sullivan called proponents of the ex traterrestrial hypothesis "UFO enthusiasts" or "UFO believ ers." People who believed in the extraterrestrial theory did so, said Sullivan, because of "a hope that some sort of superior beings are watching over our world prepared to intervene if things get too bad"; although these UFO enthusiasts tried to I · I The Condon Committee and Its Aftermath 213 discredit the report before i t came out, the National Academy of Sciences gave it "straight As."33 Turning then to the project's critics and internal disputes, Sullivan claimed that Keyhoe, "as author of Flying Saucers A re Real, has a vested interest in the confirmation of his the ories" and therefore tried to discredit the project. Sullivan ex plained that Condon's negative statements about UFOs and his apparent interest in contactee stories were the products of a "garrulous soul who loves to spin · a yarn"; Condon found it hard to resist recounting some of the "sillier episodes" in UFO research. The project's biggest problem, according to Sullivan, was the release of the Low memorandum. Condon did not agree with its contents, Sullivan explained, and had not seen it before the release; the Look article resulted from leaking the memorandum to "disgruntled UFO believers."34 The final report included chapters from thirty-six people.
Condon had contracted with most to write sections on, for example, the history of the UFO phenomenon, and public opinion. The Stanford Research Institute had written sections on plasmas, in which it criticized Klass's theories, radar, me teorological optics, and so on. Condon's staff wrote the remain ing sections. The result was a rather unorganized compilation of independent articles on disparate subjects, a minority of which dealt with UFOs.
The main UFO sections looked at ninety-one cases. Most were neither the cases Low had compiled nor those NICAP had donated. Of the ninety-one cases, the project staff iden tified sixty-one as mispercepti.ons, hoaxes, and the like. The remaining thirty were either possible, probable, inconclusive, or unidentified. Because of the tentative nature of these un solved cases, the committee listed all of them as unexplained.
This finding was significant in view of the project's working definition of a UFO : "The stimulus for a report made by one or more individuals of something seen in the sky (or an ob ject thought to be capable of flight but seen when landed on the earth) which the observer could not identify as having an ordinary natural origin" and which seemed sufficiently puz zling to report to the authorities.35 By using this definition, the project concerned itself not with extensive evaluation of UFO reports that had defied previous analysis but with any UFO report prior to any analysis; this method greatly in creased the project's chances of identifying the cases it studied.
Still, the staff could not identify about one-third of the cases.
The final report divided the cases into five categories : as- 214 The UFO Controversy in America tronaut sightings, optical and radar sightings, old cases, cur rent cases, and photographic evidence. In the astronaut sight ing section, author Franklin Roach said three observations from astronauts McDivitt and Borman were "a challenge to the analyst" and "puzzling." Of the ten cases Roach exam ined that predated the report, he listed only one as identified; two were possible, one probable, one inconclusive, one "part unidentified and part astronomical," and four unidentified.86 Gordon Thayer wrote the section on optical and radar sightings, dividing them into two groups : those with uniden tified visual phenomena but identified radar phenomena, and those with both unidentified visual and radar phenomena. An example of the latter was the Lakenheath, England, case in August 1965, which featured two different ground radar-sta tion, aircraft radar, and visual observations of an object that seemed to act in an intelligently controlled manner as it suc cessfully evaded a jet intercept. Thayer concluded that "this is the most puzzling and unusual case in the radar-visual files.
The apparently rational, intelligent behavior of the UFO sug gests a mechanical device of unknown origin as the most probable explanation of this sighting." Later in the report, the staff discussed this case again and found "the probability that at least one genuine UFO was involved appeared to be fairly high." In another case Thayer said the "sighting defies ex planation by conventional means." Describing a radar-visual report in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Thayer concluded: "This must remain as one of the most puzzling radar cases on record, and no conclusion is possible at this time,"37 In the category of current, nonphotographic cases, the staff analyzed thirty-four reports, but some were multiple sightings and brought the total to fifty-one reports; thirteen of the sightings in these reports remained unidentified. Of the four teen photographic cases (one of which occurred on two days and made a total of fifteen photos) , photoanalyst William K.
Hartmann listed three as positively identified, eleven as either possible, probable, or inconclusive, and one as unidentified.
The latter involved two photographs that a farmer in McMin ville, Oregon, took in 1950; the project staff analyzed the original negatives and interviewed the farmer. Hartmann con cluded : "This is one of the few UFO reports in which all fac tors investigated, geometric, psychological, and physical ap pear to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disk-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew within sight of two The Condon Committee and Its Aftermath 215 witnesses." The number o f reports the committee could not identify-thirty of the ninety-one analyzed-strongly suggest ed that some cases involved "genuine" UFOs. But the final report buried these findings : it devoted most space to the identified objects.as Condon ignored these findings in his recommendations, which he placed at the beginning of the lengthy report. Con don's recommendations reflected more the speeches be gave during the course of the project than the evidence in the final report. His general conclusion was "that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 2 1 years that bas added to scientific knowledge. Careful consideration of the record as it is available to us leads us to conclude that, further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby." Addressing himself to previous lack of scientific interest in the UFO phenomenon, Condon said scientists bad ample opportunity to study the phenomenon and "have individually decided that UFO phe nomena do not offer a fruitful field in which to look for ma jor scientific discoveries." In light of this fact, Condon said, the federal government should not study UFO reports "in the expectation that they are going to contribute to the advance of science," and the Air Force's conclusions that UFOs did not threaten national security was valid. The Department of Defense, Condon suggested, should give UFOs attention "only so much as it deems necessary from a defense point of view'' and could do this "within the framework established for intelligence and surveillance operations without the con tinuance of a special unit such as Project Blue Book." Con don found that, contrary to popular opinion, the subject of UFOs had not been "shrouded in official secrecy. .
• . What had been miscalled secrecy has been no more than an intelli gent policy of delay in releasing data so that the public does not become confused by premature publication of incomplete studies of reports. "39 Condon argued that the staff had found "no direct evi dence whatever of a convincing nature . . . for the claim that any UFOs represent spacecraft visiting Earth from another civilization." Although scientists said intelligent life elsewhere Was "essentially certain," Condon argued, the great distances and time involved in interstellar travel made contact between societies on planets in different solar systems impossible. He concluded : "There is no relation between ILE [intelligent life elsewhere] at other solar systems and the UFO phenomenon 2 1 6 The UFO Controversy in A merica as observed on Earth." By estimating the average life span of planets and civilizations, Condon could theorize that inter planetary travelers would not visit earth for at least 10,000 years. To illustrate that it was a "fantasy" to believe in the extraterrestrial hypothesis, Condon cited, among others, con tactee Truman Bethurum's claim that the planet Clarion was located behind the sun and thus always out of Earth's view.
Condon spent two pages proving that Clarion could not pos sibly exist and, therefore, that people who believed in the ex traterrestrial hypothesis were misguided. 40 Condon also offered his version of the project's conflict with NICAP. Although NICAP maintained friendly relations with the project at the beginning, he explained, "during this period NICAP made several efforts to influence the course of our study. When it became clear that these would fail, NI CAP attacked the Colorado project as 'biased' and therefore without merit. "41 Condon's final remarks in the opening section concerned the problem of "miseducation" in public schools. This arose because teachers allowed children to use their science study time to read books and magazine articles about UFOs. Be cause of errors in the material, children were "educationally harmed" or retarded in the "development of a critical faculty with regard to scientific evidence." To remedy this situation, Condon recommended that teachers withhold credit from students who study UFOs and instead "channel their interests in the direction of serious study of astronomy and meteorolo gy, and in the direction of critical analysis of arguments for fantastic propositions that are being supported by appeals to fallacious reasoning or false data. "42 Reactions to the Condon committee's final report followed expected lines. Keyhoe, McDonald, and Saunders held a news conference on January 1 1, 1969, a few days after the report appeared, and denounced it as a waste of money. McDonald and Saunders charged that Condon was biased against the ex traterrestrial intelligence hypothesis, that the committee had failed to investigate the vast majority of significant UFO re ports, and that Condon's conclusions did not represent the findings in the text. Furthermore, McDonald said, the Na tional Academy of Sciences' review panel was not adequately prepared to assess the report. Keyhoe claimed the Condon committee had examined only about one percent of the "reli able unexplained" UFO sighting reports that NICAP had supplied.43 J I The Condon Committee and Its Aftermath 217 Keyhoe elaborated on his objections in a special January issue of NICAP's UFO Investigator. He accused Condon of not making field investigations himself, of trying to discredit some witnesses by calling them " 'inexpert, inept, or unduly excited'," and of concentrating on "kook cases." He pointed , out those sections of the report that seemed to reaffirm that · UFOs were a unique phenomenon and appealed to NICAP members for money to carry on a "full-scale campaign to ɤ bring the UFO subject out in the open in order to offset the Condon report." Keyhoe directed his main criticism at the inadequacy of the investigation : he accused Condon of ignor ing numerous "top cases" involving highly credible witnesses who fit the project's requirements for witness reliability. Con don used only fifty cases from the 1947 to 1 967 period, Key hoe charged, whereas NICAP had 1 0,000 to 1 5,000 such cases in its files, and the fifty the project used did not represent the main body of solid UFO reports. In the next is sue of the UFO Investigator Keyhoe emphatically denied Condon's charge that NICAP had withdrawn support after failing to influence the committee's direction. NICAP did indeed try to influence the project, Keyhoe said, but only "in the direction of objectivity, thoroughness, and concentration on the really significant reports." NICAP made every effort to cooperate with Condon and withdrew its support only "when it became evident that the project situation was be yond repair and foredoomed to be biased and superficial."44 APRO's reaction to the final report was as negative as NI CAP's. Coral Lorenzen said that just as Condon dismissed many sighting reports because of internal inconsistencies, "we find that the report as a whole fails to pass the same test and should therefore be dismissed and/ or discredited." The Lorenzens criticized the report for its "looseness and shal lowness," citing as examples Condon's unsubstantiated con clusions that there was no evitlence of Air Force secrecy and that school children should not be allowed to study the UFO .
phenomenon. Also, the project did not investigate enough ' cases adequately, the Lorenzens said, and the report tended to choose and emphasize cases with no particular significance.
They attacked the report's methodology by offering case anal yses that directly contradicted those in the report. 45 As expected, other UFO groups and people connected with them also opposed the report. Nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman and electronics engineer Joseph Jenkins, members of a Pittsburgh UFO research group loosely affilated with NI- [ 2 1 8 The UFO Controversy in America \ CAP, criticized Condon for much the same things as Keyhoe Æ and others had. Leonard Stringfield, an old-line UFO pro ponent, claimed that Condon's thinking was "Neanderthal" and "retrogressive" while Apollo flights showed that inter planetary flights were near. Earl J. Neff of the Cleveland Ufology Project said Condon was biased and the Air Force had for years "been on the hot seat." The Air Force would not admit UFOs were extraterrestrial "because there's no known defense against UFO's."46 McDonald, speaking before the DuPont Chapter of the Scientific Research Society of America ( in Wilmington, Dela ware ) , attacked the Condon committee on nine points. He criticized it for analyzing only a small fraction of scientifi cally puzzling UFO reports and for not discussing certain sig nificant cases it did investigate, such as the 1957 Levelland sightings. Many of the reports were trivial and insignificant, McDonald said, and the committee should have ignored them.
McDonald charged that scientifically weak and specious argumentation abounded in the case analyses. While Condon had said that scientists previously interested in the UFO phenomenon were biased, McDonald said the report it self was biased in the opposite direction. For example, the "disturbingly incomplete presentation of relevant evidence" in some cases was so severe that it was "little short of misrepre sentation of case information." In addition, he asserted, the quantity of irrelevant padding was so great that scientists would find studying the report tedious. Moreover, Condon had casually ignored the significant number of cases that re mained unidentified. In sum, McDonald said, the report "dis mally" failed to support Condon's negative recommendations and the National Academy of Sciences' endorsement would eventually be a painful embarrassment to it. He promised to· devote all possible personal effort to air objectively the re port's inadequacies because scientific clarification of the UFO problem would not come until the Condon report's negative influence was neutralized.47 Hynek's critique was perhaps the most cogent. Writing in the April 1 969 issue of the Bulletin of the A tomic Scientists, he praised Condon for his previous contributions to physics but said his effort in the report was analogous to "Mozart producing an uninspired pot-boiler, unworthy of his talents." Hynek pointed out that the number of unexplained sightings in the report was higher than in Air Force files and that the Air Force's concern over unidentifieds wa!l why Condon The Condon Committee and Its Aftermath 219 mounted the investigation in the first place. Hynek thought Condon had "grossly underestimated the scope and nature of the problem he was undertaking," as evidenced in his defini tion of UFOs. The definition, Hynek said, was so broad that the committee tried to study too much with its limited time and funds. Hynek proposed an alternate definition that lim- , ited the purpose : "A UFO is a report . . . the contents of which are puzzling not only to the observer but to others who have the technical training the observer may lack." On the basis of his many years of experience, Hynek said, he would have deleted about two-thirds of the report's cases as scientifi cally profitlessfS Warming to his task, Hynek zeroed in on the report's un derlying assumption. The project staff and the public, Hynek claimed, had confused the UFO problem with the extraterres trial hypothesis. The issue was not the validity of the extrater restrial hypothesis but the existence of a legitimate UFO phenomenon regardless of theories about its origin. Just as , nineteenth-century scientists could not explain the aurora borealis with their physics, UFOs might be as inexplicable in terms of twentieth-century physics. Condon's conclusion that a phenomenon that thousands of people over a long period of , time had reported was still unworthy of further scientific at tention, Hynek said, did not serve science.49 Hynek hit hard at the project's selection of scientists.
Asking an inexperienced group of scientists to take a fresh look at the UFO problem "was akin to asking a group of cul inary novices to take a fresh look at cooking and then open a restaurant. Without seasoned advice, there would be many burned pots, many burned fingers, many dissatisfied cus tomers." Concluding his critique, Hynek found a serious flaw in the report's methodology. "For any given reported UFO case, if taken by itself and without respect and regard to cor relations with other truly puzzling reports in this and other countries," Hynek explained, "a possible natural, even though farfetched, explanation can always be adduced." The Condon committee found well-known causes for most UFOs because it operated solely on the hypothesis that these were the causes. As an example Hynek quoted a passage from the re port: " 'This unusual sighting should therefore be assigned to the category of some almost certainly natural phenomenon which is so rare that it apparently has never been reported before or since.' " The final verdict on the Condon commit tee, Hynek said, "will be handed down by the UFO phenom- 220 The UFO Controversy in A merica enon itself. Past experience suggests that it cannot be readily waved away."liO Except for McDonald and Hynek, most other scientists did not react extensively to the Condon committee's report.
Those who did speak out held opposing opinions. Dr. Robert M. L. Baker, who had testified at the 1 968 House hearing, criticized the report in Scientific Research. He said it did con tain evidence that scientists should continue to study the UFO phenomenon although the provocative and unexplained UFO sightings were hidden in the text among extensive dis cussions of explained cases and often superfluous technical background material. The report mixed the unexplained and explained UFO cases in "an almost contrived manner-and this tactic confuses or diverts all but the most dedicated reader." According to Baker, Condon should have highlighted the unexplained cases and juxtaposed them to the explained cases for comparison purposes. Baker thought the Condon committee should have determined the probability that UFOs were a new phenomenon, and if so, what patterns the sight ings displayed. Then the committee should have formulated hypotheses to account for them. 51 Frederick J. Hooven, who was a consultant to the commit tee and analyzed a case in which a low-flying UFO report edly affected an automobile, also took issue with the final re port. He did not think UFOs were extraterrestrial, but he held that the possibility of a visitor from space was reason able enough to warrant continuing investigation of UFOs. Al though man could not speculate about the state of science 50,000 years from now, Hooven explained, he could conceive of the idea that an extraterrestrial, technologically based civ ilization could be at least this far ahead of our own techno logical capabilities. Science was in its infancy, he said, and what we knew of physics was only a tiny fraction of what we would understand in the future. 52 Yet most scientists seemed to support the Condon commit tee report. For example, Dr. Donald E. Ehlers, president of the Boothe Memorial Astronomical Society, wrote in a letter to the New York Times that the committee was courageous because it "discounted a growing religion." But as a taxpayer Ehlers was annoyed : the government spent "five hundred kilo bucks" to investigate a phenomenon and came to the same conclusion which, "since the beginning of this hysterical witchhunt, has been that of all professional scientists worthy of the title." Dr. Hudson Hoagland, president emeritus of the The Condon Committee and Its Aftermath 221 Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology and on the board of directors of the American Association for the Ad vancement of Science, claimed that the current concern with flying saucers resembled the old obsession with ghosts and seances. Even after investigators exposed seances as frauds, Hoagland said, the devout band of followers never relin quished their belief in them. For Hoagland the Condon study added "massive additional weight to the already overwhelm ing improbability of visits by UFOs guided by intelligent beings." But because science could not prove a negative, some UFOs would remain unexplained due to insufficient in formation ; yet these unexplained cases did not justify contin uing scient1fic investigation. Hong-Yee Chiu of NASA's Insti tute for Space Studies said now "ufology should be regarded as a pseudo-science." But the UFO enthusiasts would "find the truth a bitter pill" and would probably continue their "ufological career" with "greater vigor and bitterness toward scientists." He argued that it was "unthinkable" that extrater restrial visitors would have visited our planet, which is indis tinguishable "from the background noise of the Galaxy."53 A few politicians were annoyed enough to react to the Condon report. Congressman William F. Ryan (New York) attacked it on the House floor : the study did not explain con clusively the UFO phenomenon and its conclusions were not justified; accepting the conclusions might delay solving the UFO puzzle and make "a scientific breakthrough in an un derstanding of the problem" more dificult. Noting that in its July 1968 hearing the House Committee on Science and As tronautics had forbidden discussion of the Condon committee because it fell within the jurisdiction of the House Armed Services Committee, Ryan said Condon's conclusions were scientific judgments and therefore fell within the purview of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics. There fore, Ryan said, the committee had a "duty and responsibil ity" to hold hearings on the Condon report and its implica tiom;. By trying to stop public discussion and governmental action on UFOs, Ryan charged, the report undermined confi dence in its own conclusions and recommendations. "Public interest in UFOs cannot be wished away, and reported sight ings will persist." Ryan recommended continued government involvement in UFOs, suggesting that NASA assume respon sibility for the study. California Congressman Jerry Pettis, who had found the testimony at the July hearing impressive, announced that be too would seek a congressional investiga- 222 The UFO Controversy in America tion of the Condon report in the next session. Neither Ryan's recommendations nor Pettis's promise came to fruition.114 Newspaper reactions were divided. Most applauded the conclusions and recommendations of the Condon committee, saying the report was "reasonable," "thorough," "objective," and "sound" and the "eminent scientists" who served on the committee constituted an "impressive roster of experts." The New York Times ran full-page articles about the report, ex cerpted it, and gave it front-page coverage. Condon and his staff, the New York Times said, had made "a careful and ex tensive investigation" of the phenomenon, and the study would find "wide acceptance" from all except a few "true be lievers" who were "committed" to the extraterrestrial hy pothesis. The rest of society could now worry about "more serious matters." New York Times science editor Walter Sul livan, who wrote the preface to the paperback edition of the report, suggested that the small number of unexplained cases could be identified if the committee had suficient informa tion. Similarly, the Wall Street Journal called Condon's sug gestion that further UFO study would not serve science a "sound conclusion" and "common sense."55 The newspapers that praised the Condon committee's con clusions and recommendations almost always accompanied their remarks with the observation that "true believers," re gardless of how convincing the report was, would not change their views. Frequently newspapers compared true believers to members of the British Flat Earth Society who, despite photographs and astronauts' eye-witness accounts, refused to believe the earth was round. One editorial said NICAP was .akin to the "World is Flat Society" and accused it of trying to coerce one project investigator into making his findings "less positive." Moreover, many newspapers-in a turnabout of general press coverage in 1 965 and 1 966-resorted to ridi culing UFO proponents as "UFO enthusiasts," "diehard wish ful thinkers," "die-hard flying saucer sighters," "nuts," "fanat ics," and "dedicated disciples of the 'little green men from Mars' school." Syndicated science writer William Hines ac cused Keyhoe of being interested in UFOs for the money he received from "the sale of sensational paperbacks, boob-bah magazines articles and the donations of excitable people. "56 Not all newspapers and journalists supported the Condon report. Lucian Warren, writing in the Buffalo Evening News, called the report a "total bust" because it did not explain ade quately the sightings in the Buffalo area. The Knoxville Jour- 1 The Condon Committee and Its Aftermath 223 nal expressed reservations because the report contained some unexplained photographs and sighting interpretations inconsis tent with the facts. Chattanooga, Tennessee, columnist Sally Latham caiied the report a "$500,000 woolly eyeshade." Jour nalist Tom Tiede opposed the Condon report and defended NICAP. Once again "America is laughing at Don Keyhoe," he said, but in the final analysis Keyhoe might have the last laugh.
Mike Culbert, columnist for the Berkeley Daily Gazette, added a political twist by singularly attacking Con don for being a subversive ( because of his past battles with the House Committee on Un-American Activities) and inti mated that Condon was foiiowing Moscow's "new 'line' " in trying to discredit the existence of UFOs.57 Generally, magaшine articles on the Condon committee's fi nal report followed the same patterns as the newspaper re ports. Magazines supporting the report thought it would not end the controversy. Philip Boffey, in Science, called the re port the "most thorough and sophisticated investigation of the nebulous UFO phenomenon ever conducted" but doubted whether "flying saucer fans" or "UFO enthusiasts" would be satisfied : "scientific methods are not always able to resolve problems in fields where emotions run high and data are scarce." Popular Science writer Alden Armagnac thought the believers would not be quieted even though the "chances of ever finding a real saucer look a whole lot more remote, after you read the Condon report, than before." U.S. News and World Report and Newsweek agreed that the controversy would continue. Newsweek observed that saucer believers would continue to believe just as alchemy long resisted chemistry's discoveries and astrology survived in spite of modern psychology_r;s Similarly, the Nation said that although we lived in an age of "ever-increasing rationality," science and the scientific method still inspired "stout resistance, especially when the subject is one of ancient myth and emotional connotation." The Nation theorized that we "yearn for neighbors among the stars" to help relieve our loneliness. For example, the ar ticle pointed out, "hardly any of these true believers have seen, or even thought they saw, anything" but insisted on be lieving witnesses who "on investigation almost invariably turn out to be unreliable or to have a naturalistic explanation." The Nation agreed with Condon's recommendation to keep school children from read ing about UFOs and getting a warped view of science ; th is was a "public service of no small 224 The UFO Controversy in A merica importance." Time, in "Saucers End," explained that the Condon report had destroyed saucer buffs' favorite theories with "rational, simple explanations."59 During the public debate over the report, Condon re mained quiet. But he broke his silence in April 1969 in a speech before the American Philosophical Society in Philadel phia. The topic was "UFOs I Have Loved and Lost." Condon defended his conclusion that continued scientific study of UFOs was unwarranted, despite those who said oth erwise. To reinforce this point, he related how "flying saucer buffs who have been making money from sensational writing and lecturing to gullible audiences, and collecting dues from the membership of their pseudo-science organizations" had bitterly denounced his conclusions. He told several humorous stories about contactees but allowed that some UFO pro ponents were "deeply sincere." He equated the study of UFOs with astrology, spiritualism, psychokinesis, and other pseudosciences, and he again said it was practically criminal for teachers to teach these subjects to young people : "In my view publishers who publish or teachers who teach any of the pseudo-sciences as established truth should, on being found guilty, be publicly horsewhipped, and forever banned from further activity in these usually honorable professions."60 fhroughout the debate over the Condon committee's final Aeport, the Air Force continued its public relations effort but with less sound and fury than before, for the Condon com mittee had taken some of the pressure off. Since 1966 the Air Force quietly had collected reports, submitted articles to mag azines, and issued its usual press statements, fact sheets, and annual Project Blue Book reports. The Blue Book reports in cluded statistical breakdowns of the number of reported sight ings and the number of solved cases, a standard resume on how the Air Force investigated and alalyzed UFO reports, an explanation of the most common misidentifications of known objects, short histories of the Air Force's UFO project, dis cussions of the improbability of UFOs coming from other planets, and a bibliography that usually contained only one book treating the extraterrestrial hypothesis seriously. Using its standard definition of a UFO-"any aerial object or phe nomenon which the observer is unable to identify"-the Air Force claimed in 1 969 that it had identified all but 701 of the 12,6 1 8 reports it had received since 1947. It reported a de cline in reports, from the nearly 3,000 in 1965-67 to 375 in 1 968 and 146 in 1969-the lowest number since 1 947. Only The Condon Committee and Its Aftermath 225 one report in 1 969 remained unidentified. Because of the Air Force's usual method of putting the probable and possible re ports in with the identified category, the statistics overwhelm ingly favored solved cases. at The Air Force purposefully kept a low profile during the Condon committee's study. Fearful of being criticized for negatively influencing the committee, the Air Force was care ful not to interfere with the committee's work and made no public statements about it. But the Air Force did not put aside work on its own UFO program. In 1 966 and 1 967, while the Condon committee was conducting its investigation, some people at the Foreign Technology Division (FTD) asked to strengthen Project Blue Book's scientific capabilities.
This resulted from three factors : intense public interest in UFOs, the concomitant criticism of the Air Force, and the 1 966 Gallup Poll finding that nearly half of the adult popula tion believed flying saucers were real although not necessarily extraterrestrial. Noting this public interest, Colonel Raymond S. Sleeper, FTD's new commander, wanted to build a "new intage for Project Blue Book" based on this "anchored public attitude." Sleeper thought Project Blue Book should begin a "positive program ainted at establishing contact with extrater restrial life." But Air Force Director of Information General W. C. Garland bad no interest in new images in 1 967 and wanted no part of a program to search for extraterrestrial life. Besides, said Garland, "we would really open the flood gates on UFO problems if the public thought that the Con don group was about to involve in extensive research on ex traterrestrial activities." Thus ended Sleeper's plan to energize Project Blue Book.62 Nonetheless, Sleeper was persistent. In September 1 968 he wrote to Hynek asking for suggestions "towards defining those areas of scientific weakness" in Blue Book. Hynek re marked that this request marked the first time in the twenty years of his association with the Air Force that anyone had asked for his advice on Blue Book's scientific methodology.
Hynek responded with a comprehensive critique of Blue Book's methods, attitudes, and conclusions. He attacked the Air Force in its most sensitive and potentially most respon sive area: Blue Book had not fulfilled its twofold obligation, under AFR 80- 1 7, to determine the potential danger of UFOs to the national security and to use the scientific and technical data garnered from the study of UFO reports. The Air Force claimed that UFOs were not dangerous, Hynek 226 The UFO Controversy in America said, only because so far the objects had displayed no hostil ity, but this did not mean that UFOs were not hostile or that something could not happen in the future. Furthermore, Hy nek charged, Blue Book had been inept, inefficient, and un scientific : it had emphasized explanations at any cost and failed to investigate significant cases adequately, spending too much time on obvious and routine cases; the staff was not trained to handle the most rudimentary scientific analyses, yet it routinely used explanations based on sophisiticated scien tific knowledge. os Hynek also criticized the Air Force's policy of eliminating the possible, probable, and insufficient data categories from its year-end reports to make Blue Book seem efficient and most unidentifieds appear as misidentifications. Hynek com plained that time and again his suggestions for improving the quality of Blue Book had gone unheeded, that even he did not have free access to the UFO case files, and that the Air Force did not tell him about significant UFO reports. Blue Book was a closed system where project officers only talked to one another and made no attempts to establish working relationships with Air Force scientists or with Air Force labo ratories. Finally, as in his later critique of the Condon report, Hynek accused the Air Force of treating UFO reports as completely separate occurrences and not attempting to dis cern patterns of reported UFO behavior that could help solve the UFO mystery. By treating reports separately, Hynek ar guedч Project Blue Book personnel could always solve the case by explaining it as a misidentification of a natural phe nomenon, an hallucination, or a hoax.64 Impassioned and critical as Hynek's letter was, it came too late for the Air Force to worry or do anything about, for the Condon report came out a few months later. Hynek's letter was the last major internal criticism of the Air Force. The Condon report recommended closing down Project Blue Book. In March 1 969 a meeting took place at Air Force headquarters in Washington, D.C., with representatives of the Air Defense Command, Air Force Systems Command, Office of Aerospace Research, Office of Scientific Research, and Of fice of Information. "From the moment the meeting opened," Captain David Shea of SAFOI remembered, "there was no doubt that Project Blue Book was finished. Everyone agreed on that." The major question was where to place Blue Book's files to keep people "with a UFO axe to grind" from having easy access to them. For this reason SAFOI rejected Wash- I I ., The Condon Committee and Its Aftermath 227 ington, D.C., as the site for the documents. It also thought the Air Force museum in Dayton, Ohio, was too accessible.
Finally SAFOI decided on the less accessible Air Force Ar chives at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. 65 • · On December 1 7, 1969, Secretary of the Air Force Robert C. Seamans, Jr., officially announced the termination of the Air Force's twenty-two-year study of unidentified flying ob jects. An Air Force news release noted that Seamans, in a memorandum to Air Force Chief of Staff General John D.
Ryan, said Blue Book's continuance " 'cannot be justified ei ther on the ground of national security or in the interest of science.' " Seamans based his recommendation on the Con don study, the National Academy of Sciences's approval of the study, "past UFO studies," and previous UFO investigat ing experience. 66 Most UFO investigators and researchers were not unhappy about the announcement. McDonald called it "no great loss," since Blue Book had been unsuccessful; he feared, though, that its closing might prompt people to believe no real prob lem existed. APRO's James Lorenzen thought terminating Blue Book eliminated a stumbling block that had hindered objective inquiry into the UFO problem. Stuart Nixon, as sistant director at NICAP, said in a press conference that the Air Force's termination opened the way for a fresh look at the UFO problem free from military involvement, and he called for a federal or private agency to open new UFO in vestigations. The New York Times said nearly everyone in the country, except "saucer buffs," would applaud the Air Force's decision, but "no doubt true believers will continue their quest more convinced than ever" of a conspiracy. The paper was puzzled that the Air Force had waited so long to act after Condon had "punctured the U.F.O. bubble.''67 Hy nek, out of a job with Blue Book, remained in his position at Northwestern University and also began work on a book about the UFO phenomenon and the Air Force's and Con don's investigations of it.
The closing down of Blue Book, in addition to the dearth of sightings since 1968 and the Condon report, definitely af fected public interest in the subject. NICAP, claiming 12,000 members in 1967, steadily lost members through 1 968, 1 969, and 1970; by 1971 the membership decreased to 4,000.
APRO had the same problem, its membcQbj,p declining from about 4,000 in 1967 to 2,000 in 197 1 . Newspaper and maga- 228 The UFO Controversy in America zine publicity, with the exception of articles on the Condon committee and the closing of Blue Book, virtually ceased.
Many of the popular UFO magazines stopped publication for lack of readership. The contactees, who had long since faded in popularity, although still somewhat in evidence, were no longer a factor in the UFO controversy. sa Furthermore, younger people were displacing some of the familiar figures. NICAP's chronic financial problems had be come so severe by the end of 1969 that its board of gover nors, which had not held a meeting since 1960, decided to reassert its authority. In a stormy and angry meeting, the board determined that Keyhoe had to go. Keyhoe was furious about this "coup" but be stepped down, although he remained on the board. After twelve tumultuous years as director of NICAP, Keyhoe quietly retired to his home in Luray, Vir ginia, to begin work on his fifth book on UFOs. During his reign NICAP had become a force as a public pressure and education group that no other UFO organization could match. Its power and pressure were a major concern to the Air Force, and it had helped keep the UFO issue alive for the public and in Congress. But in the aftermath of the Con don report, Stuart Nixon, NICAP's new director, had all he could do to keep the organization alive. In 1 968 Richard Greenwell, the young British assistant director of APRO, also tried to avert a financial crisis-the result of the Condon re port and subsequent loss of membership. Interest on a popu lar level did not disappear completely, though. A new club, the Midwest UFO network, appeared in 1969 and its mem bership rapidly climbed, although its numbers only amounted to several hundred by 1970.69 Even though the established private UFO organizations had serious problems at the end of 1969, scientific interest in UFOs still was at a peak.
The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics UFO Subcommittee continued its UFO study with a report promised for 1970, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAS) scheduled a symposium on UFOs for its December 1969 convention.
Thornton Page, who had been a member of the Robertson panel in 1 953, and Carl Sagan had proposed a UFO sym posium for the December 1968 meeting of AAAS in Dallas, but they decided to postpone it for a year when it became clear that the Condon report would not come out until after the symposium and when Condon and some influential . , I I 'I I l i ) .
The Condon Committee and Its Aftermath 229 AAAS members objected. McDonald said the symposium was "frowned upon by elder statesmen. "70 The symposium was on again in 1 9 69, but not without stiff opposition from Condon. He circulated three letters from Hudson Hoagland, National Academy of Sciences member C.
D. Shane, and himself describing their objections. In his own letter be blasted AAAS in highly charged emotional terms: "The UFO buffs are a slippery lot, and do a great deal by 'in sinuendo,' so that it is usually useless to try to find out what they are really contending. Some never had any critical fac ulty, some are suffering severely from progressive degeneration of whatever critical faculty they ever bad." Since reputable scientists had not wasted time on such a worthless subject, Condon said, AAAS would not be able to get well-informed speakers "to criticize the fantasies of the UFO cult." The AAAS symposium would give the "UFO nonsense" a de gree of legitimacy that would mislead the ignorant and "the intelligent will think AAS is crazy." If AAAS gave a plat form to the "UFO charlatans,'' it would aid them in their "deceptive and fradulent [sic] operations." Condon even ap pealed to Vice President Spiro Agnew to stop the symposium, but Agnew did not.71 The AAAS symposium went on as planned in December 1 969 in Boston. The participants fell into three groups.
McDonald, Hynek, Robert L. Hall, and Robert M. L. Baker presented the case for UFOs as anomalous phenomena.
Thornton Page, psychologist Douglass Price-Williams, physi cist Philip Morrison, and astronomer Frank D. Drake took a middle, "agnostic" position. Sagan, Menzel (who was sick but Walter Orr Roberts read his paper) , journalist Walter Sul livan, Condon staff members William K. Hartmann and Franklin Roach, psychiatrists Lester Grinspoon and Alan D.
Persky, and radar expert Kenneth Hardy presented the argu ments for UFOs being explainable as known phenomena. Al though heavily weighted with speakers against the idea that UFOs were anomalous phenomena, the symposium was the best scientific discussion of the subject to date. 72 Even though the AAAS symposium featured only four scientists who thought UFOs were anomalous, many more scientists, less fearful of ridicule because of the legitimacy the Condon committee had given the topic, became increasingly active in the field. Through Richard Greenwell's and the Lorenzens' aggressive recruiting of consultants for APRO, 230 The UFO Controversy in America over twenty-five physical and social scientists joined the APRO consultant roster.
By 1970 the UFO controversy was practically a forgotten episode in the press. NICAP's and AFRO's losses of member ship had depleted their finances and the heads of these or ganizations began to redirect their efforts. They no longer cried for a scientific investigation. Instead, Stuart Nixon of NICAP and the Lorenzens and Richard Greenwell of APRO began projects to computerize and microfilm all their sighting reports so that investigators would have easy access to the raw data. The new theory among UFO investigators was that individual schol.ars would have to study selected aspects of the pbenomenon and come to independent conclusions. The shift was away from asking the "outside" community to con sider the origins of UFOs and toward encouraging the growing number of individual scientists interested in the sub ject to conduct their own internal investigations free from the encumbrances of the "scientific establishment." Reflecting this new attitude, APRO held three symposiums on the UFO phe nomenon, in Baltimore in January 1971, in Santa Ana (Cali fornia) in June 1971, and in Tucson in November 197 1 . The Tucson symposium featured papers by thirteen APRO consul tants in various scientific disciplines. The Midwest (later, Mu tual) UFO Network also established an annual conference on the subject. 73 The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics released its promised UFO subcommittee report in November 1970. The subcommittee consisted of eleven very prominent members of the scientific community including its chairman, Joachim Keuttner. They found no basis for Condon's conclu sion that nothing of scientific value would come from further study of UFOs. In fact, the subcommittee found it "dificult to ignore the small residue of well-documented but unex· plainable cases which form the hard core of the UFO contro versy. " It recommended increased study with an emphasis on data collection and high-quality scientific analysis, and it expressed hope that scientists, engineers, and government agencies would consider "sound proposals in this field without bias or fear of ridicule and repercussion. " Finally, the sub committee announced it would publish examples of "hard core" UFO cases so that AIAA members could form their own opinions . In July and September 1971 the AIAA journal Astronautics and Aeronautics carried two important UFO en· counter cases. Also in 1 97 1 Industrial Research polled its YZ The Condon Committee and Its Aftermath 23 1 readers about the UFO phenomenon. Of the 2, 700 respon dents, 54 percent thought UFOs "probably" or "definitely" existed, 8 percent claimed to have seen a UFO, 32 per cent thought the objects came from "outer space," 32 percent thought they were conventional phenomena, and 35 per cent was undecided about their origin.74 The ridicule attached to the study of UFOs revived in 1970. Science magazine refused to publish electrical engineer William T. Powers's paper on UFOs, explaining to him that "at the present time the overwhelming majority of our read ers are not interested in a further discussion" of the phenom enon. Science also refused to publish a critique of the Con don report by UCLA psychologist Douglass Price-Williams.
Yet the magazine did print social worker Donald Warren's article espousing the theory that most people who reported UFOs suffered from "status inconsistency" : UFO witnesses bad a higher educational level than their employment indi cated.75 To scientists, ridicule certainly loomed as the most fearful aspect of becoming involved on the positive side of the UFO controversy. Hynek, mindful of ridicule's destructive poten tial, bad skillfully maneuvered around its pitfalls to prevent harming his academic and professional credibility. Loss of credibility would have destroyed any influence he may have bad in urging other scientists to take the UFO problem seri ously. His change of attitude toward UFOs had taken so long that be bad not only succeeded in establishing his credentials as a scientist but had also learned methods of avoiding ridi cule in the process. Other researchers were not so fortunate.
McDonald's case is a good example.
During the years of his intense activity in UFO research, McDonald had managed to avoid the ridicule that plagued and hindered so many others. With the exception of Klass's vitriolic attacks on him, McDonald's bold stands on UFOs bad not incurred censure from his colleagues, the press, or others. But in 1 971 he found himself in a position of having ridicule used against him to discredit his professional credibil ity.
The House Committee on Appropriations called McDonald to testify about the supersonic transport (SST) plane because, as part of a National Academy of Sciences panel on weather and climate modification, he had worked arduously for three months on how the SST would affect the atmosphere. McDon ald bad discovered that the SST would reduce the protective 232 The UFO Controversy in A merica layer of ozone in the atmosphere, and this might cause an ad ditional 1 0,000 cases of skin cancer each year in the United States.
During McDonald's testimony, Congressman Silvio Conte of Massachusetts abruptly pointed out that McDonald was an expert on UFOs and believed power failures in New York "were caused by these flying saucers." Conte thought this point was "very, very important." McDonald calmly re plied that he had not come to that conclusion but that he did think enough of a correlation existed between UFO sightings in the areas of power outages and the failures to warrant fur ther investigation. During this exchange spectators and some congressmen openly laughed at McDonald. Conte kept after him, obviously trying to impugn his credibility. Congressman William Minshall of Ohio joined in and mentioned that Congress had held open and closed hearings on the subject and Department of Defense "experts" had "absolutely dis counted any possibility of actual incursion into airspace by people from the outer planets." After a recess, Conte again brought up UFOs, trying to link McDonald's views on skin cancer with his views on UFOs-as if both of them were somewhat deranged. McDonald protested that no relationship existed between the two.7o The next day a general discussion ensued about McDon ald's credentials, and Congressmen Yates of Illinois, McFall of California, and witness Wil Kellogg, director of the Na tional Center for Atmospheric Research, tried to recover some of the damage done to McDonald by stating that he was a "very distinguished atmospheric physicist." They said they deplored the snickering that some congressmen had in dulged in the day before. Yet that afternoon Conte again hit hard at McDonald's credibility. First he read a section of McDonald's testimony before the Roush committee hearing in July 1968 when McDonald said he thought some reports of UFO occupants might be valid. Then Conte said, "A man who comes here and tells me that the SST flying in the strato sphere is going to cause thousands of skin cancers has to back up his theory that there are little men flying around the sky. I think this is very important."77 McDonald's work on the SST was his last project. In June 1971 be committed suicide at the age of fifty-one. He had not had the success with scientists in the area of UFOs that he had hoped for. He had not induced NASA to take on a study of UFOs, something he worked on for years. He had not convince<d the scientific community to accept UFO research The Condon Committee and Its Aftermath 233 as a worthwhile endeavor. And he had not reduced the ridi cule that so hindered systematic investigation of the phenom enon. Even after his death the ridicule of him that came out in the hearings did not stop. The eminent paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson called McDonald's advocacy of the extraterrestrial hypothesis a "monument to gullibility." Con don said bluntly that McDonald was a "kook." In 1972 Vice President Agnew derided Senator Edward Kennedy of Massa chusetts for quoting McDonald's opposition to the SST with out also mentioning that McDonald " 'had declared that the electric power failures in New York City were caused by air craft from outer space, otherwise known as flying saucers.' " Agnew conceded that " 'there is always a remote possiblity that flying saucer people can be right about some things,' " yet he placed McDonald and Kennedy, for their opposition to the SST, in the ranks of English doctors who had opposed smallpox vaccinations because they would make people look like cows. 78 Nevertheless, McDonald's efforts did have an effect on the scientific community. His correspondence, speeches, and dis cussions had brought the UFO problem to the attention of many scientists who had not previously been aware of it. His research and investigation of case histories had uncovered a multitude of strong cases that other UFO researchers could point to as being virtually irrefutable and the crux of the UFO controversy. In the final analysis, perhaps McDonald's greatest contribution was to help legitimize the study of UFOs by lending his prestige to the field and joining Hynek in publicly advocating serious academic attention to the sub ject. Partially as a result of McDonald's and Hynek's efforts, a growing core of scientists became more interested in the UFO mystery. Many were younger men who had not gone through the wars with the Air Force, the contactees, and the scientific community. They formed the nucleus of a group of scientists who quietly studied the UFO phenomenon in the early 1 970s.
The year 1 972 was calm. The national UFO organizations tried to regroup the membership they had lost as a result of the Condon report and the lack of widespread sightings. UFO reports had increased somewhat, but not enough to gain pub licity or renew public interest. Hynek's book, The UFO Ex perience: A Scientific Inquiry, came out in 1972. In it, he criticized the Air Force's handling of UFO reports and the Condon committee's methods and conclusions, and he dispas- 234 The UFO Controversy in America sionately described the UFO phenomenon and issues in UFO research. He set up new procedures whereby scientists could study the problem. His book brought the study of UFOs to a new level of sophistication. With an unemotional and undog matic approach, Hynek helped bring the subject back to re spectability and even obtained a favorable review in the pages of Science.79 Condon, embittered from the criticism he had faced in the previous three years, had only harsh words for his adversaries, who he believed based their scientific judg ments on unsound.evidence. Saunders was a "kook," McDon ald was a "kook," Hynek was "sort of nuts" and the Air Force should have fired him early on. Obviously disgusted with the entire controversy and wanting no more to do with it, Condon claimed to have burned the project's records. so By the end of 1 972 many people, including scientists and news reporters, thought flying saucer crazes were a quaint part of the popular culture of bygone years. The early 1970s' nostalgia fad curiously resurrected UFOs as a part of the ten sions of the 1 950s. For the public, UFOs were yesterday's news.
.
, II 10 1973: ECHOES OF THE PAST Thousands o f people i n the United States i n 1973 and 1 974 said they saw unidentified flying objects in the skies over nearly every state in the Union, including Alabama, Arkansas, California, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.
The sighting wave ranked with those of 1 896-97, 1947, 1952, 1957, and 1965-67 in intensity, making it one of the largest in American history. Sighting reports had slowly in creased since 1970, and a flurry of reports in 1972 preceded the massive wave of the following year.
January began the 1973 wave when private UFO organiza tions received reports from northern Aalbama and Rhode Is land. Sightings continued through March with reports from the Piedmont, Missouri, area and eastern Pennsylvania. From May through July the reports dwindled. The National Investi gations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) , sure that the minor wave had ended, called 1973 the "Year of the 'Miniflap'." But in August people in Georgia started reporting UFOs again. By September the South seemed to be involved in a wave, and by October it was clear that the entire nation was in its grips. Mid-October was the peak period. Reports continued at a high rate in November, dipped in December, increased again in January 1 974, and continued through April 1 974. By June the wave had subsided. UFO researchers were unable to determine the exact number of sightings in the 1 973-74 wave. One researcher catalogued over five hundred reports in Pennsylvania alone. If, as the Air Force estimated in the early 1950s, generally only about 10 percent of the people who had sightings reported them, then the 1 973-74 wave must have produced thousands of sightings.l 235 2 3 6 The UFO Controversy i n America The 1 973-74 wave mirrored previous large waves, although by mid-1 974 not enough time had passed for investigators to scrutinize the reports thoroughly for misidentifications, hoaxes, and the like. Reports fell into a wide range of UFO sighting categories. Among them were high-level and distant sightings, low-level sightings, car-chasing incidents, sightings causing electrical and/ or mechanical effects or interference, sightings affecting animals, sightings affecting people physi cally, sightings causing psychological and mental effects on people, landings with traces left behind, and occupant cases.
High-level and long-distance night sightings constituted, as always, the largest category of reports. Although witnesses of ten could give only vague, general descriptions of the objects, they considered the objects strange enough to notify local po lice and newspapers.
Police officers in Manassas Park, Virginia, watched a glow ing, circular object for over two hours late one night in De cember " 1 973. Through binoculars the officers could see a green light on one side of the object and a red light on the other side. A short distance away another police officer watched two lights hover in the sky. Suddenly one dropped to tree-top level and hovered silently while the other light re mained stationary. After fifteen minutes the first light moved back up, and then both lights disappeared.2 In Waverly, Illi nois, the police chief and three other citizens saw an object with a white light in the middle and red and green flashing lights on each side early in the morning of October 1 7, 1 973.
As the astonished men watched, the object sent out glowing "embers" that burned in the sky as they fell to the ground.
They watched the object with binoculars for an hour and forty-five minutes.a Ohio governor John Gilligan and his wife were driving near Ann Arbor, Michigan, when they saw a "vertical amber colored" object for about half an hour. It ascended, pene trated the cloud cover, ,and then disappeared. Governor Gilli gan told reporters that what he had seen was not a bird or plane.4 · In October a young couple staying in a hotel near Dallas called two bellmen outside to view a strange, blindingly bright, red "ball" hovering over another hotel near the Texas Stadium. As the ball came closer to the witnesses, two smaller red balls came out of the larger object. The smaller balls grew large and flew off to the north and south. 5 Witnesses in Magnolia, Mississippi, saw a round object, [I . I I I , I 1 973: Echoes of the Past 237 "colored like shiny new aluminum," hanging in the sky. As they watched, the object opened up and a rectangular, darkly colored "parachute-like thing" came out of it. The witnesses flagged down a passing motorist, and together they watched as the round object opened up again after a few minutes and the rectangular parachute-like device reentered it. The object then rose higher and disappeared into the clouds. 6 Several high school students in Palmyra, Missouri, reported a strange spectacle similar to the 1 896-97 sightings. An object with flashing lights appeared near the Mississippi River and shone a spotlight on a passing barge, lighting up the entire river bottom. The object then circled the river bottom several times and approached spectators on shore before leaving the area. Four days later Palmyra police and citizens observed an object with red, white, and amber lights on it and two ex tremely powerful "headlights" in front. It silently and slowly circled the town at a low level. When it flew over an elemen tary school police officers shone a spotlight on the object and it immediately moved away. The object made a humming sound similar to an electrical transformer.7 As in previous sighting waves, witnesses in 1 973-74 claimed that beams of light came out of objects. Near Fayette ville, Arkansas, a woman saw a bright light the size of a "No. 3 washtub" with a beam of light radiating from it in a whirlwind motion. People in Felton, Pennsylvania, observed three oval-shaped UFOs revolving with orange coloring around the middle of them. One of the objects had a beam radiating from it. In Washington Township, New Jersey, witnesses described a spinning object that resembled an amusement park "whip" car with red and green lights and a red ray coming down from it. s Many people observed strange objects at a low altitude, usually at night. For instance, an elementary school bus driver in London, Ohio, saw a yellow orange, football-shaped Ą0 the size of a bam hovering above some trees. The ob ject's glow lighted up the trees and the ground around them.
The object rose straight up and flew away. "People will think I've gone off the deep end," the witness declared, "but I know what I saw."9 Citizens summoned Los Angeles police officers to investi gate a strange object on the east side of the city. Arriving at the scene, the police officers saw from their car an object "oblong shaped and very bright and bluish-white, like a mer cury vapor lamp." The object then descended to the ground, 238 The UFO Controversy in America and a sign obscured it from the officers' view. They continued toward it in their squad car, sighted it again, and estimated that it was the size of a half dollar at arm's length. The ob ject rose at a 45 degree angle to a height of between 1 ,000 and 1 ,500 feet and sped off. Mter the sighting about a dozen other people called the police to report seeing a similar object at the same time the police had their sighting.1o A woman in St. Joseph, Missouri, glanced out the window before going to bed and noticed an object with a brilliant red and blue light coming down near the front lawn of the house across the street. The object hovered approximately six feet above the street for about six minutes. The witness said she was too "petrified," surprised, and curious to move. At first the object was still, but then it began to rotate slowly and the witness saw a "ribbed shield" that extended "about 1 0 inches from the side of the circular object up and slanting inward toward the translucent dome." The object had a round bot tom, a high domed top, and blue and red lights glowing from inside it and flickering. It continued to rotate slowly, and af ter five or six minutes it gradually moved back in the direc tion from which it had come and drifted north. The witness looked through a pair of binoculars and found the object in the sky. Shortly another object joined it and "the two seemed to dart back and forth from north to south at very rapid speed for a time, then both shot upward out of sight at tremendous speed. ••n A group of people in Goldsboro, North Carolina, observed a triangular object with lights at each apex of the triangle.
The entire object changed colors, blinking red, then green, and then yellow. At first the object was high in the sky, but then it "shot downward at tremendous speed" and hovered.
The witnesses could hear a whirring sound at this time. The object seemed as big as a house and had three long legs with a "chute" extending from one side of it. The observers watched it for thirty minutes. Then the object slowly turned and rapidly flew across the sky in four to five seconds.12 A Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, couple had what they described as a traumatic experience in December 1973 when they noticed a very bright light in the sky while driving on Route 252. As they approached the light they thought it might be a plane in distress or about to land. One of the witnesses described it as having "two blue lights on the wings, and it kind of looked like a plane, but it was moving very slowly, parallel to the road, like it was observing us. We 1 973: Echoes of the Past 239 weren't alone on the road. There were plenty of other cars around, going in both directions." The noiseless object came to within fifty feet of the couple's car, and they saw that un derneath it seemed triangular with rounded edges and had a flashing red light in the center. The couple was too afraid to stop the car.1a This last case is similar to what UFO researchers have la beled car-chasing incidents. A good example occurred in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where two sisters claimed that a cylindrical UFO, with red, yellow, and green lights, followed them for nearly eighty miles while what appeared to be its identical companion remained stationary in the sky. The next day they summoned the sheriff's office as they once again saw a UFO following them home. The sheriff also observed the object. "I know some people will think I'm crazy," the sister who was driving said, "but I know what I saw. "14 The next night, on October 1 1, 1973, at 8 : 00 P.M., a woman, her daughter, and her thirteen-year-old grandson were driving west of their home in Madisonville, Kentucky, when they spotted an egg-shaped object, which they estimated to be five or six feet long, giving off white, then red, pink, and blue lights that illuminated the road. The object was twenty to twenty-five feet in the air and began to follow them. The daughter, who was driving, was too scared to stop the car and continued to travel at speeds over seventy miles per hour. The silent object paced the car, turned when it did, and always stayed on the left. "I know it's hard to believe, but it's God's fact," said the mother. At the same time on the same night 100 miles west in Cairo, Illinois, four members of a family and a friend also reported a car-chasing incident.
They claimed that a twenty-five-foot circular object, with red and white lights blinking in a circle, followed their car, slow ing down when it did, for five miles before the driver stopped. They all got out of the car and watched as the ob ject performed loops in the air, turned somersaults, stopped, backed up, and generally behaved erratically. The object stayed about one-half mile off the ground, and the witnesses heard no sound from it.15 A month later two Cameron County deputy sheriffs were driving prisoners from Brownsville, Texas, to the state peni tentiary in Huntsville when a strange object appeared over their station wagon early in the morning. The deputies found it difficult to discern the object's shape but said it had a red light on top and a yellow light on the bottom. The object 240 The UFO Controversy in America stayed at from fifty to sixty feet above the station wagon at all times and followed the car for twenty miles. When the driver speeded up, slowed down, or stopped, the object did the same. The sheriffs called police units in Harlingen and San Benito, Texas. These officers converged with the sheriffs near San Benito, and they all watched the object hover in the sky for thirty minutes before it zoomed straight up and disap peared."16 Another frequent feature of UFO sightings was electrical or mechanical effects on or interference with automobiles, ra dios, televisions, and the like. These incidents date back to 1947, the beginning of the modem era of sightings, and 1 973-74 had its share of them. A woman in Osyka. Missis sippi, went outside to bum some trash and noticed an oblong, shiny, aluminum-colored object in the sky. Her radio inside the house stopped working when the object passed overhead and came on again when the object moved out of sight. "It scared me so I'm still shaking," she told reporters. The police chief of Pierce, Nebraska, and other citizens observed a bril liant blue flashing light early one morning. The light was so bright that it turned off several street lights in the area which supposedly shut off automatically only when sufficient day light triggered a photosensitive device. Two deputy sherifs investigating a ringing burglar alarm near Santa Cruz, Califor nia, were surprised to hear the alarm ringing in synchro nization with the blinking lights of an object hovering over the coast. The deputies said the alarm stopped ringing when the object disappeared.11 At times UFO appearances seemed to have a noticeable ef fect on animals, just as they did in the 1 896-97 wave. The majority of animal effect cases involved dogs barking at strange objets or else cowering and behaving uncharacteristi cally. However, witnesses reported that the appearance of a UFO affected other animals as well. For example, a dairy man spotted a strange object at 4 : 30 A.M. about forty miles northeast of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It appeared to be taking off from his pasture and made a high-pitched, shril, whistling sound. The object was silvery and had red or orange flashing lights. The witness saw it take off and land two more times before it shot straight up into the sky and vanished. The ob ject so frightened the dairyman's herd dog that he ran into the house and refused to come out. It also scared the herd of forty-two cows, which scattered around the pasture. Their 1973: Echoes of the Past 241 milk production was 1 00 pounds below normal for the next week,lB Some people reported that strange objects affected them physically during a sighting. Often witnesses said they experi enced a tingling feeling or the sensation of heat or cold.
Sometimes witnesses reported that alleged UFOs caused in juries. In Zeigler, Illinois, near Carbondale, a bright light awoke a woman early in the morning. She thought she had forgotten to tum her hallway light off. When she got out of bed she noticied that the light was coming from outside her house. She then saw an object about 60 feet off the ground and 400 feet away giving off an extremely intense light. She repeatedly tried to look at the light, but it burned her eyes and she bad to tum away each time. After fifteen minutes the object disappeared. The woman's eyes hurt after the sighting and that day she claimed that her vision was reduced. Four days later her eyes still bothered her.19 One of the strangest visionξaffecting cases of the 1 973-74 wave occurred near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in early Octo ber 1 973. The witness, a truck driver, and his wife were driv ing a tractor-trailer about dawn when be noticed, in his rear view mirror, an unusual lighted object about a mile behind them. Its lights glittered red and yellow, and the object trav eled at about four to five feet above the ground. The object rapidly moved up on the witness as he drove at sixty miles per hour. He told his wife about the lights, but she saw notb- 1 ing out of the rearview mirror on her side of the cab. He looked again, and this time be observed that the object was ' turnip shaped, about thirty feet in diameter, and very close behind the truck. It had three sections : the top and bottom sections were spinning and appeared to be made of aluminum ' or chrome; the middle section did not move and had red and yellow lights on it that glittered and seemed to mix together.
The driver faced the windshield as the truck entered a patch of fog. Then he put his bead out the window, looked back again, and saw a spotlight come out of the object at the same time that it began to rise. He also heard for the first time a humming sound coming from the object. The humming rose in pitch as the object rose in altitude. He thrust his head out a little farther and suddenly a bright white flash like a ball of fire struck him in the face. The instant this happened the noise stopped and the object disappeared. The driver pulled his head back in, put his hands over his eyes, and screamed that he could not see. He stopped the truck in the middle of 242 The UFO Controversy in America I the highway. His wife, who had neither seen nor beard any thing, turned the light on in the cab and saw that her hus band's forehead was red and hot, the frames of his glasses were melted and twisted, and one lens had fallen out. An am bulance took the driver to the hospital where he received emergency treatment. His sight returned gradually, but five days later a St. Louis ophthalmologist found that the driver still had only 20 percent vision. Also, be complained of pain deep inside his forehead. Later a physicist examined the glasses and said the frames appeared to have been internally heated.20 Perhaps some of the most puzzling and elusive cases, oc curring in previous sighting waves as well as in 1973-74, were those that seemed to have mental effects on witnesses. Al though subjective and difficult to pinpoint as the results of an object, these effects happened so often that serious UFO re searchers considered them a legitimate part of the UFO phe nomenon. For instance, a man and his family were fishing late at night near Madison, Wisconsin, when they saw three 1 lights in the sky darting about and moving erratically. The man ran to another campsite to get other people's confirma tion of the sighting. As he returned to h is camp, he looked up again and saw another light. This one was bright orange, at a lower level than the other three, and hovered. When he looked at it be immediately received the sensation that beings were inside the object and "they" saw and knew everything.
The witness was terrified and said he felt he would not be able to make it back to his campsite. The feeling went away when the object disappeared.21 In a similar case near Tulsa, Oklahoma, a husband, wife, and their ten-year-old daughter were in .their pickup truck at 12:20 A.M. on October 17 when they saw a gigantic object with an intricate set of lights on it. The object seemed big enough to dwarf a 747 jet. It came within 250 feet of the truck at one time, and the witnesses noticed four "prongs" with red lights on them coming out of the tail end and a white light in the object's center. The witnesses heard low pitched and high-pitched humming sounds.
The driver stopped the truck and the family watched the object. During the sighting they experienced what they called an all-around you feeling, and they said they felt "powerless." The same night in Ohio two Adams County deputy sheriffs on routine patrol in the town of West Union saw an unusual obiect hanging about 200 feet in the sky. The arrangement of pul- 1973: Echoes of the Past 243 sating, brilliant, red, green, blue, and white lights apparently made the object's shape difficult to discern. The amazed men watched as the object zigzagged and made tight circles in the sky. During this time they both felt mesmerized or transfixed as they watched the object.22 The 1 973-74 wave had its share of landing cases. Reported since 1 896, they have represented some of the most unusual and sensational cases. Yet UFO researchers believed these cases were among the best to study because often a UFO would leave "proof' of its existence in the form of markings 1 on the ground. UFO researchers called these trace cases.
In mid-October in Clay County, Mississippi, two witnesses reported independently that they had to swerve their vehicles into a ditch to avoi<l an elliptical object, with blue and orange lights, sitting in the middle of the road on legs about four to six feet in height. The next day one of the witnesses and other people searched the area where the sighting occurred and discovered that the grass on either side of the road was ' "burned and smelled like oil." They also found two padlike marks in the ditch.2a An Ohio National Guardsman reported seeing pulsating, bright lights in the night sky near his borne in Columbus. The lights swooped down in a zigzag pattern and disappeared be hind some trees. Later the man checked the area of the sup posed landing, a field of waist-high weeds, and found a semi oval area about twenty feet wide and thirty feet long of weeds crushed to the ground.24 One of the most interesting trace cases of the 1973-74 wave occurred in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. In the afternoon of September 30, 1 973, a hunter quietly perched in a tree saw a white, fluorescent, perfectly round ball about ten feet in diameter silently glide across a nearby soybean field and pass directly in front of him. The object stopped about four feet above an old roadbed. Three legs unfolded from under the object and formed a tripod. Two legs came down on the roadbed and the third leg rested on the field next to it. A few ' seconds later the bunter heard two loud squawks which sounded like high-pitched crow calls. Although the witness could see no seams, windows, or openings in the object, sud denly a door, about three feet wide and four feet high, ap peared. It swung down to form a ramp. The bunter bad bad a cold and unconsciously sniffed. The object apparently de tected the sound because the door immediately snapped shut, the tripodal legs disappeared into the object, and it shot away 244 The UFO Controversy in A merica at a tremendous speed. The witness then saw a whitish vapor or fog where the object had landed. He climbed down from the tree and went to the landing site. Breathing the fog gave him the sensation that his lungs were about to burst. He ran out of the foggy area and was able to breathe normally in the fresh air. He returned to the spot (presumably after the fog had dissipated) and found three spots of depressed grass where the tripodal legs had rested. The depressions were about eight inches long.25 As fascinating as this case was, some of the 1973-74 occu- 11 pants reports overshadowed it. These reports of alleged occu- j, pants did not follow the contactee tradition. Instead of having 11.
continual communication with space beings who imparted knowledge and a mission to the selected earth people, the witnesses of alleged occupants usually only caught a fleeting glimpse of the "beings." The 1964 Lonnie Zamora sighting, in which the police officer briefly saw two occupants beside an object on the ground, is a classic example of this type of report. Yet on rare occasions reputable witnesses claimed to have interacted with an occupant. So-called legitimate occu pant cases illustrate the more bizarre aspects of the UFO phenomenon. They required the most extensive and meticu lous investigation to eliminate hoaxes. For years occupant cases caused conflict within UFO organizations. Some investi gators wanted to avoid these cases because they smacked of contacteeism. Others wanted to accept and study them as a valid part of the phenomenon. By 1973 most groups, includ- ing the conservative NICAP, regarded well-documented occu pant sighting cases as legitimate part of the UFO mystery.
The following is an example of the most typical type of oc cupant sighting. The witness saw the object and the occupant only briefly and had no interaction with the being. The sight ing began when the witness was driving home from work on a freeway in southern California and noticed a blimplike ob ject hovering over a crest of hills. The object sank below the hills and he lost sight of it. As he approached the top of a rise in the freeway, he looked down into the area where the object had descended. At first he saw nothing unusual, but as he continued driving he noticed what he described as dust ris ing from the canyon below the freeway. Curiosity made him stop his car, back up fifty feet, and get out to look into the canyon. He then observed, at a distance of from eighty to a hundred feet, a grayish pink object that resembled a giant Jaguar XKE car about fifty feet long and thirty feet wide. It I , I 1973: Echoes of the Past 245 hovered about ten feet above the ground. On one side it had what the witness thought was either a series of vents or an in signia in the shape of a large V with progressively smaller Vs inside it. A hose about eight feet long and one foot in diame ter protruded from the bottom of the object but did not touch the ground. The witness saw no doors or windows, but he no ticed a glasslike "bubble" three feet in diameter and swiveling like a ball on top of the object. He also discerned a colored mass inside the bubble.
Suddenly the witness spotted an occupant crawling from the opposite side of the object toward the front. The occu pant appeared to be of normal size and dimensions and was wearing apparel that resembled a silvery or light-colored wet suit. The man did not get a good look at the occupant's face.
The occupant looked at the witness and quickly scrambled to the other side of the object and disappeared. At the same time the witness heard a few clicking sounds coming from the UFO which reminded him of distant automatic weapons fire.
With the occupant out of sight, the bubble rotated and disap peared inside the body of the object. The object made a whir ring or humming sound and a foglike substance, which ex uded a sweet incense-like odor, began to envelop it. Then suddenly the object just disappeared and the fog and scent dissipated quickly. The witness did not see it fly away or leave the area. After the sighting he told the police what he had seen. A week later a woman called the witness to tell him that she had seen a similar object in the same general area a week before.26 The case of a twenty-five-year-old woman in New Hamp shire was atypical and more bizarre because it contained physical and mental effects on the witness and because she claimed to have interacted with the alleged occupant. Driving home from work on Route 1 14A near Manchester, New Hampshire, at 4 : 00 A.M. in early November 1 973, the witness noticed a bright orange light in the sky that seemed to vanish and then reappear. She watched the object for about seven miles. She veered left on Route 1 14 and was amazed to see the object now larger, lower, and closer than before-about 1,600 feet in front of her. It looked like a large ball, honeycombed with a design of hexagons. In its up per left sector she saw what appeared to be an oval window of a paler color. The object had a "peculiar translucent qual ity about it." Red, green, and blue rays emanated from the center of the object. The woman heard a steady, high-pitched 246 The UFO Controversy in America whine that she felt throughout her body as a tingling sensa tion.
The witness panicked when she felt unable to remove her hands from the steering wheel. She felt that the object was drawing her toward it and she was unable to take her eyes off it. As she drove toward it, she claimed to have experienced memory loss during a half mile stretch, and she remembered nothing about it. Then she suddenly became aware of her surroundings and found herself and the car hurtling toward the UFO. She acknowledged after the sighting that she could have unconsciously been pressing on the accelerator because of fright. She approached to within 500 feet of the object whel). the whining noise grew louder. She now saw that the object was about 30 feet above the ground and noticed a fig ure in the window.
The occupant was looking at her. She could see the being only from the waist up because a dark area obscured the lower part of its body. Its head was grayish, round, and dark on top. Its face had large egg-shaped eyes. Underneath the eyes the occupant's skin seemed loose or wrinkled like "ele phant's hide." The occupant's mouth turned down at the cor ners. The witness did not notice a nose or ears. As the witness looked, her attention riveted on the occupant's eyes, she claimed that she received an impression that the occupant was in some way telling her not to be afraid. Overcome by panic, she thought the UFO was about to capture her.
The woman spied a house on the left side of the street at the same time that the object became so bright she covered her face with her arms. She turned the car half blindly into the driveway of the house and stopped across the front lawn.
The witness was only three-fourths of a mile from her own home. She jumped out of the car, leaving the headlights and motor on, and a German shepherd dog charged up to her.
Although usually afraid of strange dogs, the woman smacked the dog across the mouth, ran to the front door, and pounded on it, yelling "Help me! Help me!" She looked over her shoulder and saw that the UFO, still making a whining noise, had moved across from the house. The witness found the whine unbearable. She pounded and yelled for about two minutes until the owner, who had been upstairs asleep with his wife, came to the door. The witness, panic-stricken, hys terical, and crying, grabbed the man, sank to her knees al most in a faint, and sobbed "Help me! I'm not drunk! I'm 1 97 3: Echoes of the Past 247 not on drugs! A UFO just tried to pick me up!" The witness covered her ears with her hands, but the man heard nothing.
By this time the man's wife had awakened and come downstairs. It was 4: 30 A.M. After a few minutes in the cou ple's kitchen, the witness said the sound and tingling sensa tion had stopped but she noticed a spot in her vision similar to staring too long at a bright light. The woman of the house called the police and an officer arrived about ten minutes later. He turned the headlights and motor off in the witness's car. After he arrived the four people went outside and saw a light some distance off moving slightly and changing colors.
The light appeared to go off when the officer shined his spot light on it. When the local newspapers heard about the sight ing, the witness, fearful of ridicule, only mentioned the occu pant phase of the sighting briefly and in vague terms.27 Probably much to the witness's relief, this case received little publicity except in UFO organization literature and related journals. This was not so for the Pascagoula, Missis sippi , incident, which ranks with the 1 947 Kenneth Arnold sighting and the 1 952 Washington , D.C., sightings as one of the most publicized and publicly discussed cases on record.
The incident occurred on October 1 1 , 1 973, at the peak of the 1 973-74 wave. Calvin Parker ( nineteen years old) and Charles Hickson (forty-two years old ) , both from Gautier, Mississippi, were fishing at the mouth of the Pascagoula River in Pascagoula when they became aware of a buzzing sound. The men looked behind them and instantly froze with fright as they saw a large, egg-shaped , glowing object hovering a few feet above the ground and about forty feet from the river bank. The object, about ten feet wide and eight feet high, had blue lights on the front of it and seemed to transmit a buzzing sound, like air escaping from a pressure hose. Paralyzed with fear, the men watched as a door seemed to appear out of nothing and three occupants came toward them. The occupants floated instead of walked and their legs did not move. The occupants were human-like, about five feet tall, with bullet-shaped heads but no necks, pointed conical appendages jutting straight out where noses and ears would be, and a slit for a mouth. The witnesses saw no eyes. They described the occupants' skin as light gray and resembling el ephant 's skin with many wrinkles. The occupants had round feet and hands that looked like crab claws.
Two of the occupants took hold of Hickson and the third grabbed Parker, who, overcome by fear, fainted . Hickson 248 The UFO Controversy in A merica claimed that the occupants lifted him by putting their hands underneath his arms, at which time he felt a numbness in his body, and then "floated" him into the UFO. Inside he found himself in a round and brightly lighted room, but he said he could not see the source of the light. As the two occupants held Hickson, an object resembling an eye and apparently not attached to anything appeared in front of him. The two occu pants moved Hickson in different positions in front of the ob ject, as if it were an examining device, and the apparatus also moved over his body during the "examination." The occu pants at one time seemed to communicate by making hum ming sounds. When the examination ended, the occupants left Hickson suspended in the middle of the air. He could not move except to blink and shift his eyes. Hickson thought the occupants had Parker in another room but was unable to tell for sure.
After about twenty minutes from the time Hickson first saw the UFO, the occupants "floated" him outside and put him down. He was so weak-kneed that he fell overɾ He saw Parker crying and praying near him. Hickson then watched t1ie hissing object fly straight up into the sky and disappear almost instantly. Hickson calmed down his hysterical friend and the two ran from the area.
At first they decided not to tell anyone about their experi ence, assuming that no one would believe them and that they would encounter a lot of ridicule. But then they thought the government might want to know what happened. They called Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi and a sergeant there re ferred them to the sheriff. But afraid that the sheriff would not believe them, they drove to the local newspaper office to see a reporter. A janitor there told them the office was closed and suggested that they go see the sheriff, which they did at 1 0 : 30 that night. The next day the local press heard about the story and publicized it. The wire services picked it up, and within a few days it became sensational news across the country.
The Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) sent one of its consultants, University of California engineer ing professor James Harder, to investigate. J. Allen Hynek also went to Pascagoula, and he and Harder interviewed the witnesses. Harder hyponotized Hickson but had to break off the hypnosis when Hickson found it too painful and frighten ing to go on. The hypnosis, Harder said, was too soon after the traumatic event. On the night of the sighting the local 1 973: Echoes of the Past 249 sherif bad put Hickson and Parker in a room equipped with hidden sound-monitoring equipment and thought they would reveal the hoax when left alone, but the two men passed this "test" to the satisfaction of the authorities. Eventually Charles Hickson took a lie detector test which be passed. Hynek and Harder believed the events bad happened as the wit nesses bad described them. After interviewing the two men, Hynek said be was certain that they had had "a very real, frightening experience." He said this "fantastic" experi ence "should be taken in contexcwitb experiences that others have had elsewhere in this country and in the world. " Later, newspapers and television, which gave Hynek as much pub licity for this sighting as for the 1966 swamp gas episode, quoted him as saying "there was definitely something here that was not terrestrial."28 The 1973-74 wave echoed previous sighting waves, includ ing the airships of 1 896-97, in many respects. The large vari ety of reports, ranging from high-level, nocturnal · meandering lights to occupant encounter cases, and the disparate people who made them, ranging from children to policemen, were common elements in all sighting waves. The 1973-74 wave also had its share of radar reports and photographs of UFOs as well as a few motion pictures of objects. As in the past, people in rural areas made most of the reports, but many cit izens in urban areas also reported seeing strange objects . Per haps the most unifying element was fear. Witnesses through out the UFO controversy, from 1 896 on, reported, first, that their sightings frightened them and , second, that as a result of relating their experiences they feared public ridicule. Thus some witnesses preferred anonymity while others took great care to explain that they were not lunatics, drunk, or on drugs, and that they saw what they said they saw. In the 1973-74 wave, as in previous sighting waves, hoaxes and the media's treatment of them compounded the witness ridicule problem. Hoaxes seemed more widespread than they actualy were because of publicity and thus cast doubt on what repu table people reported and on the legitimacy of the UFO phe nomenon.
Yet in many ways the 1973-74 wave was different from previous waves. For the first time since 1947 the Air Force stayed on the sidelines. In all previous sighting waves, es pecially since the large one in 1952, the Air Force had acted as the official body that made pronouncements and judgments about the reports. It had served as a restraining influence, es- 250 The UFO Controversy in A merica !1I pecially on scientists and members of the press interested in 1 !
the subject. Through its press releases, its system of classify- 1 ing reports, and its assumed authority and expertise on the subject, the Air Force had pushed public opinion toward dis believing and ridiculing UFO witnesses and denying that UFOs were an anomalous phenomenon. In 1969 the Air Force gave up its role as overseer of the phenomenon. From then on it refused to investigate any UFO sightings and usu ally told people who reported them to call their local police departments. It made one exception and cursorily investigated the Pascagoula case, but it did not release conclusions to the press. Thus in 1973-74, without the Air Force's influence, and without an official government body assuring the public that it had found no evidence to suggest that UFOs were ex traterrestrial, or even anomalous or extraordinary, the Ameri can people for the first time in twenty-five years could in dulge in unrestrained interest in the phenomenon.
Not only could the public speculate more freely about UFOs, but it could also take a fresh look. The 1973-74 wave came at a time when many people thought "flying saucer scares" were a quaint, and somewhat ludicrous, part of the 1 950s and, to a lesser extent, the 1960s. The Air Force and the Condon committee had solved the UFO mystery, the pub lic thought, and lack of widespread publicity about UFO sightings seemed to prove this. Therefore the sighting wave in the early 1970s generated a certain amount of surprise and shock in the country. It stimulated people to confront the UFO mystery anew and to take a fresh look at a phenome non that refused to take its place with outmoded fads and crazes. The very persistence of the phenomenon may have contributed to the change in public attitudes toward UFOs.
Also, the 1 973-74 wave was the first since the historic 1969 manned moon landing. Although the impact of the moon landing is unclear, it may have made extraterrestrial hypothe ses more acceptable : if people on earth could visit other heavenly bodies, then possibly others from the skies could visit earth. Moreover, in the early 1 970s scientists increas ingly began to say that the probability for life existing else where in the universe seemed fairly high, and the media widely publicized the efforts of astronomers like Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, both of Cornell University, who were ac tively searching for extraterrestrial life.
Furthermore, the 1973-74 wave came at a time when many scientists had publicly expressed interest in the UFO 1 97 3: Echoes of the Past 25 1 phenomenon. In the middle and late sixties, as a result of dis satisfaction with the Air Force's and the Condon committee's "solutions," many scientists privately began studying the phe nomenon. The Air Force's exit from the UFO battles and its release of its accumulated sighting reports removed a barrier that had long hindered scientific interest and research in the subject. Thus by 1973 many scientists had already researched the phenomenon extensively and began to present new methods of studying UFOs, especially through the use of computers.
The incipient scientific interest in UFOs that had started in 1965 progressed quietly in the early 1970s without fanfare or major publicity. In March 1974 the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics revitalized its UFO subcommit tee, which had laid dormant for several years because its chairman, Joachim Keuttner, was working in England. The subcommittee decided to petition for full committee status so that it could remain permanently active. In addition, many scientists teaching at small colleges around the country inde pendently organized a variety of courses on the UFO phe nomenon.29 One of the most ambitious of the scientific research proj ects on UFOs took place in mid- 1973 under the direction of Harley D. Rutledge, who was chairman of the physics depart ment at Southeast Missouri State College, a former president of the Missouri Academy of Sciences, and skeptical about UFOs. Rutledge, James E. Sage (an electronics professor at Southeast Missouri State College) , and several graduate students achieved a unique feat: they succeeded in photo graphing and taking scientific measurements of high-level uni dentified flying objects over a seven-month period in 1973.
Rutledge and his colleagues had at least seventy sightings, and they measured speed, distance, and altitude for many of them. Rutledge classified twenty-three sightings as strange ob jects that he thought might be aircraft although they did not exhibit aircraft characteristics. Another twenty-seven he cat alogued as sightings of lights that turned on and off in the sky or had "extraordinary" flight characteristics. And he listed twenty-one sightings as lights that behaved so puzzlingly that he called them "incredible or bizarre-miracles of physi cal science." Rutledge said that at his first sighting of lights he knew he was investigating "very mysterious phenomena."30 At the front of the growing corps of scientists actively re searching the UFO phenomenon stood Hynek. After twenty- 252 The UFO Controversy in A merica six years of nearly continual involvement with UFOs, he had become the premiere authority on the subject. His unique position as the only man in the country to have studied firsthand the entire history of the phenomenon since 1 948 made him the one unifying link with the UFO controversy in previous years. Remarkably, he had successfully steered through the treacherous waters of emotionalism, anger, and ridicule during the early years and had emerged practically j,' unscathed. He had gone from initial hostility toward the sub- ' ject to skepticism and misgivings, to cautious calls for more study, to muted criticism of the Air Force, and eventually to open hostility toward the Air Force and complete acceptance of the idea that UFOs represented potentially one of the most serious problems he had confronted. His change was gradual · I and often agonizing. Although others had roundly, · and at times deservedly, attacked him for his actions or inactions during the first ten years of the controversy, he had survived this criticism and emerged as an activist in the fight to gain scientific legitimacy for the UFO phenomenon.
In 1973, at the age of sixty-four, Hynek became more in volved with intensive UFO research than ever before in his career. He established the first UFO study group under the complete direction of scientists, the Center for UFO Studies in Northfield, Illinois. The Center consisted of scientists, en gineers, and other professionals who donated their time to study specific problems arising from UFO reports. The research involved five main areas : analysis of soil and plants that a UFO may have afected, medical examination of people and animals affected, theoretical studies of UFO movements and luminescent properties, psychological studies of witness credibility, and photographic and spectrographic analyses of UFOs. The Center also had a computer data bank for information retrieval and analysis of reports. Hynek arranged with the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) to have its investigators send reports to the Center. In addition, Hy nek sent a toll-free number to every major police department in the country so that they could phone in reports. The Cen ter for UFO Studies functioned in much the same way as the Air Force had claimed to function, and Hynek hoped that, with the cooperation of NICAP and APRO as well as MUFON, it would become a national clearinghouse for sight ing reports. 31 The three established UFO organizations, somewhat lethar gic because of the Condon report's effect, began to revive in 1 97 3: Echoes of the Past 253 the early 1 970s and especially as a result of the 1973-74 wave. NICAP underwent personnel and policy changes dur ing this time. John Acuff, a management and marketing ex pert, became chairman of the NICAP Board of Governors in 1 970. He clashed with Stuart Nixon, director of NICAP, over organization and financial policy, and Nixon left the organiza tion at the end of 1 973. Acuff was determined to pull NI CAP out of its long-standing financial difficulties and did not hire a replacement for Nixon_. Instead he decided to direct the organization himself more along the lines of a small business, and he hired a person to manage the daily affairs and help edit the UFO Investigator. NICAP's financial and organizational problems since Keyhoe's retirement had forced it to concentrate on keeping alive. It received a boost in 197 4 when Senator Barry Goldwater agreed to join the board of governors. Goldwater had been interested in UFOs since the early years of the controversy and had no qualms about ex pressing his belief in the extraterrestrial hypothesis to the press. Many NICAP members hoped that Acuf's new poli cies and Goldwater's activities would help pull the organiza tion out of its seemingly unending financial and organiza tional difficulties.a2 APRO also went through a realignment in its staff in 1973.
Richard Greenwell, the assistant director, resigned early in the year and the Lorenzens reassumed more direct control over the organization. They continued APRO's increasingly successful program of scientific symposiums and added to its scientific consulting staff, which consisted of forty members by mid- 1974. As a result of the 1973-74 wave, APRO's mem bership increased to levels approaching the high point in 1 967, before the Condon report. The A .P.R.O. Bulletin car ried some of the most thoroughly investigated foreign and do mestic sighting reports available in the United States.33 MUFON thrived during 1 973 as scientists, engineers, and other professional people volunteered their time for analysis and investigation of UFO reports. MUFON's annual UFO symposiums enjoyed continuing success, and its magazine,.
Skylook, took on a new professional look reflecting the or ganization's growing influence in UFO research, under Walt Andrus's direction.
Scientific support for Hynek's center and public interest in ' the three national organizations indicated the subtle change in society's attitudes toward the UFO phenomenon in general and the 1973-74 wave in particular. Scientists, the news 254 The UFO Controversy in America media, the general public, and even the Air Force seemed less opinionated about UFOs, less enmeshed in the traditional lirie of reasoning, and more willing to suspend judgment on the phenomenon. The 1973-74 sighting wave lacked the emo tionalism and rancor that had characterized the opposing viewpoints in the waves of the 1 950s and 1960s. In general, society seemed more open than ever to the theory that the UFO phenomenon might be legitimate regardless of the ob jects' origins. The bitter battles of previous years had ended, and only the phenomenon remained. Yet not all the battle scars had healed, and the spectrum of opinion on UFOs was as wide as ever.
The 1 973-74 wave brought out a resurgence of an aspect long a part of the UFO controversy : the urge to explain. This mechanism was mainly at work in the scientific and academic communities, where many people refused to acknowledge that witnesses had observed extraordinary or potentially anomalous objects or that the subject deserved systematic at tention. The academics voiced the familiar refrains that had become a staple in all the sighting waves. Psychologists and psychiatrists most frequently used the hoary societal-stress and-anxiety explanation. "Mass hysteria," "collective halluci nations," "UFO hysteria," public "suggestibility"-these, the psychologists said, explained why people reported UFOs. So cial scientists related UFO reports to societal and political anxieties in 1973, which presumably were higher than in pre vious years.34 Astronomers usually found that people were actually seeing stars, planets, other astronomical bodies, and disintegrating satellites. Several astronomers asserted that people could not possibly be seeing anomalous craft because of the great dis tances between the stars, too great for humans to traverse.
Some astronomers used simple reason to deny the legitimacy of the problem. Why would UFOs visit the insignificant planet Earth, they asked rhetorically, and why would they visit remote places on earth? Some limited their remarks on the subject to paraphrasing the National Academy of Sci ences's review of the Condon report: the extraterrestrial hy pothesis was the least likely explanation for UFO reports.
Other scientists in other fields had their own pet theories. A chemist explained a rash of sightings in Piedmont, Missouri, as being "a combination of stars, airplanes, reflecting sun light, excess moisture, and hot plasma gas." A physician theo- rized that UFOs were "specks of antimatter."311 1, ' 197 3: Echoes of the Past 255 The urge to explain did not confine itself to those new to the UFO controversy. Thornton Page, a member of the 1953 Robertson panel, who also bad helped organize the 1969 American Association for the Advancement of Science Sym posium on UFOs, asserted that the great distances between stars ruled out the possibility that UFOs were extraterrestrial.
Besides, be asked, why would extraterrestrials want to visit earth? Astronomer Carl Sagan also relied on the distance-be tween-stars theory. Isaac Asimov explained that one sighting set off others like a "mania." He said the first sighting in the 1973-74 wave was the Pascagoula incident and the rest multi plied from it. "There is no such thing as a single UFO sight ing," he declared.as Phil Klass, busy at work on a new book that would "solve" the UFO mystery, got in his licks as well. He told United Press International that "there simply is not a shred of physi cal evidence [for UFOs] after more than 25 years of sight ings. Quite literally. Not a shred, in any of the tens of thou sands of UFO sightings that have been reported, that you could take before the National Academy of Sciences and ask : 'Have you ever seen its like on Earth?' " Curiously, Donald Menzel remained quiet on this UFO wave, but Edward U.
Condon, apparently unable to detach himself from the con troversy, gave his views to a Florida newsman. He said that UFO reports were "pretty much fantasy stuff." Ninety per cent of the sightings could be explained, be claimed, and "the other 10% only bad vague details." This was one of the embattled physicist's last statements on the subject. Condon died in March 1974, after a prolonged bout with heart dis ease.37 Although the great majority of scientists who made state ments to the press came out against the idea that UFOs represented an anomalous phenomenon, a small number of scientists advocated impartiality. Most of these stressed the need for an open mind about UFOs because of the probabil ity of extraterrestrial life. They admitted the possibility that people saw extraordinary things and did not just misidentify known phenomena. Some cautioned about the "unscientific" stance of dismissing reports automatically because they seemed ridiculous. Others suggested that scientists pay serious attention to the subject.as Just as the wave elicited scientists' explanations and opin ions, as in the past it also brought out widespread newspaper coverage. Editorial writers adopted a slightly different tone 256 The UFO Controversy in A merica than they had used previously. The frustration evident in so many editorials advocating a thorough study of UFOs during the 1965-67 wave was absent in 1973. Few newspapers called ' for a governmental study and virtually no newspapers called for the Air Force to "do something." Like the scientists, newspaper editorial writers exhibited a wide range of opinion on UFOs. Of the newspapers that con sidered the sighting wave nonsense, most gave the standard reasons that the press had used since 1947. Some editorials likened UFOs to the Loch Ness monster, and some called the wave a product of the "silly season." "Benign hysteria" or the "power of suggestion" supplied easy answers for others.s9 These views were in the minority, however, and the major ity of the press adopted a neutral attitude toward the phe nomenon. Some newspapers considered the wave simply a pleasant and harmless diversion from the world's ills, and a few reflected that the UFO wave had a nostalgic quality to it. For instance, the Washington, D.C. Star-News said the reappearance of UFOs was a "nice reprise from the 1960s, in retrospect a simpler age." Many journalists advocated keeping an open mind because intelligent life probably existed else where in the universe. Most of the newspapers that recog nized the legitimacy of the UFO problem claimed, as did some scientists, that given the probabilities of life in space, one had to assume that some of the sightings were valid and some of the UFOs extraterrestriai.•o Many newspaper columnists also seemed more disposed in 1 973-74 to accept the validity of the phenomenon than they had been in the past. Syndicated columnist and popular radio commentator Paul Harvey wrote seriously about UFOs, dis cussing Harley Rutledge's study and Hynek's views. Lydel Sims, in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, equated people's ready acceptance of polticians' statements on world affairs with people's ready rejection of UFO reports. He called it "gullicism," made up of "equal parts of abject gullibility and uninformed skepticism," and thought the country needed a lot less of both. Roscoe Drummond continued his efforts to give the subject legitimacy by writing two columns in succes sive weeks saying "UFOs are real" and advocating attempts at communication with the extraterrestrials. Others columnists claimed that the evidence suggested "there does seem to be something out there" or urged the public to believe people who reported UFOs. Even Walter Sullivan, science editor of the New York Times, who, in the introduction to the paper- 1 973: Echoes of the Past 257 back edition of the Condon report, had severely criticized those who accepted the legitimacy of the UFO problem, had changed his view somewhat in the early 1970s. He wrote that although hoaxes, misidentifications, and the like accounted for most sightings, a small residue of perplexing cases re mained, and some of these "involved seemingly reliable ob servers and could not be dismissed out of hand."4t Yet several columnists still took hostile and uninformed stands. Nationally syndicated columnist Clayton Fritchey called UFOs a figment of the imagination and people who ac cepted reports of UFOs true believers and gullible. Lawrence Maddry labeled people who reported UFOs "Utterly foolish odd-balls," "mentally infirm," "drunks, deadbeats, hot-gospel goodfellows, goatherders, pool hall perverts, and other glau coma cases with eyeglasses thicker than bulletproof windows." They were "all seeking and getting headlines," he claimed.42 Many people could not help but treat the phenomenon hu morously. Since 1 896-97, political cartoonists had found UFOs an effective vehicle for their statements. The 1973-74 wave, coming at a time of domestic political problems, presented rich material. Some political cartoonists linked the circular UFO to the disputed circular White House tapes in the Watergate scandal. Cartoonist Herblock drew a man looking at an occupant talking to him from a UFO after the man had finished reading a newspaper with articles on Water gate, Nixon's finances, Agnew's resignation, inflation, and fuel shortages. The caption read : "On The Other Hand, Can You Rule Out Anything Anymore?"43 All the humor did not take a political form. A short poem, reminiscent of the 1 896-97 wave, made the point: I never saw a flying saucer, I never hope to see one.
But I can tell you anyhow, I'd rather see than be in one.44 The 1 973-74 wave did not receive the magazine coverage other waves had. Life and Look had folded in the early 1970s before the wave and most other magazines and jour nals virtually ignored the sightings. Only four major articles on UFOs and the 1973-74 wave appeared in popular maga zines. Rolling Stone, the rock music and counterculture mag azine which expanded its scope to articles on politics and cur- 258 The UFO Controwrsy in A mnica rent new·s, featured a long article on the Pascagoula incident.
Writing in the breezy "new journalism" st}ie of the Tom Wolfe school, the author described the town and its leading citizens in an often biting and uncomplimentary manner. He was fair and accurate in his details of the actual sighting but ' concentrated on the incident's impact on the townspeople rather than on the scientific implications of the sighting.45 Newsweek gave the sighting wave a tongue-in-cheek and skeptical treatment. It hinted that the Pascagoula sighting was a hoa."t, having "as much moonshine as stardust in the story." U.S. News and World Reporfs article took the L'FO reports seriously. It posited an explanation for the sightings : they were a "freakish--but very real and naturalƅlectronic phenomenon" that resembled bal lightning. In experiments conducted in a private laboratory, the magazine explained, scientists ignited ammonia with a high-voltage spark and pro duced a one-inch round mas of glov.ing gas that darted about. This experiment, reminiscent of Phil Klass's ball light ning theories and Donald :Menzel's bell jar demonstrations in the early 1950s, accounted for "perhaps al" UFO sight ings-a.cording to an unamed scientist and U.S. News and World Report.-46 Perhaps the best article of the four, in terms of the treat ment of the phenomenon, appeared in Cosmopolitan. This was Cosmopolitan's first article on UFOs since Bob Con sidine, with Air Force sponsorship, attacked the subject and L'FO witneses in 1 95 1 . In a total reversal from the 1951 piece, journalist Ralph Blum wrote an impartial review of the scope of the L'FO phenomenon. including some of the more bizare sightings and incidents, and seriously considered the extraterrestrial hypothesis.47 Donald Keyhoe, now seventy-five years old, released his fifth bok on UFOs in 1973. Caled A liens From Space, the bok traced Keyhoe's trials and tribulations in his b attle v.ith the Air Force and the government when he attempted to end official secrecy about L'FOs and initiate congressional hear ings on the matter. Keyhoe had at last discovered the identity of his old nemesis, the silence group : it was the Central Intel ligence Agency. He told how the CIA had directed the Robertson panel and then had orchestrated the Air Force's program to thwart NICAP's efforts to reveal the truth about UFOs. Keyhoe also descn'bed his dispute v.ith the Condon committee and roundly criticized its report. For Keyhoe the most important pan of the bok was Operation Lure, a plan 1973: Echoes of the Past 259 to induce UFOs down to a prescribed meeting place so that the United States could make official contact with their occu pants. Keyhoe wanted to set aside a large parcel of vacant land, allow no planes to fly over it, and build a large model of a UFO to attract the attention of the aliens. The area would also contain "education buildings" stacked with "a variety of exhibits intended to interest the UFO crews." Hid den television cameras and microphones would record the aliens' reactions. Eventually live contact would take plaç.48 Keyhoe's book indicated a change in his attitude toward occupant reports. Although Keyhoe had in the past refused to accept these reports because of their similarity to the infa mous contactee stories, he now admitted the reality of the Lonnie Zamora sighting and other fleeting sightings of occu pants yet balked at occupant-witness interaction cases.49 Publishers quickly capitalized on renewed interest in the phenomenon in 1973 by reprinting a barrage of books on UFOs. Frank Edwards's and John Fuller's books appeared in bookstores once again as did French UFO investigator Aime Michel's 1956 book, The Truth A bout Flying Saucers. The contactees enjoyed a minor resurrection as well. George Adamski's Flying Saucers Farewell ( 1961 ) , wherein he recounted for the last time philosophical conversations with the space brothers, and Howard Menger's "fact/fiction" From Outer Space resurfaced with new covers and assumed their old role of confusing the public about which UFO re ports were reputable and which were not.̩>o By far the biggest economic bonanza for publishers came not in reprinting old books but in publishing new ones on ex traterrestrial visitation in ancient times. Although UFO re searchers had published books with similar themes for over twenty years, Erich von Dliniken, the Swiss writer, hit the publishing jackpot with his wildly successful Chariots of the Gods? A big seller in Europe before it appeared in American markets, its success in this country was unparalleled. Von Daniken theorized that the "gods" of many ancient cults and religions may have been extraterrestrial visitors. He went fur ther than this, though. He posited the theory that the ex traterrestrials might have landed, lived with the people, and offered basic technological help and skills. Von Dliniken's evi dence consisted of myth, legend, ancient drawings and paintings, and artifacts from ancient societies around the world, particularly those in Latin America. 51 Although von Daniken had a certain amount of evidence 260 The UFO Controversy in A merica to back up his ideas, be failed to discuss a wide range of an thropological theories that may have accounted for the data or to grant to ancient people the intelligence and creativity they deserved. Nevertheless, the book was stimulating enough to provoke widespread discussion.
and eventually von Dli.niken published two more books espousing the same theo- ries. :>2 He also contributed to a television show and movie based on his ideas. Other authors, seeing gold in the "gods," rushed to partake in von Diiniken's success. In little more than a year, over a dozen books came out with the same gen eral theme of extraterrestrial intervention in ancient times.
Moreover, they either bad the word god in their titles or bad the same block lettering style as von Diiniken's book covers.
As a spin-off of the von Diiniken craze, the public became interested in the so-caled Bermuda Triangle, an enormously large area of the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea. Mysteri ous disappearances of planes and ships since 1945 bad caused speculation about their fate. In 1 973 John Wallace Spencer 'Wrote a book claiming that in some way UFOs had either kidnapped the ships and planes and their crews or caused them to disappear. Spencer ·went on a national tour promot ing his bok, and sales and profits swelled . 53 Although the contactees themselves did not make a come back in the 1 970s, the wave of sighting reports thrust a few of them into the press again. Daniel Fry's "Understanding units," still in existence, continued to bold meetings with speakers who claimed to be on intimate terms with space brothers.
Contactee Hal Wilcox, who bad visited other planets, spoke on "Chariots and Other Vehicles" at one meet ing. Dr. Frank Stranges, an evangelist turned contactee sup porter who once 'Wrote a book revealing the hitherto un known facts that space brothers bad infiltrated the Pentagon and even conversed with President Kennedy, made the news as the sponsor of a contactee-oriented space and science na tional convention. :>t The early 1 970s bred a new type of contactee. The new contactees evolved from the popular fascination in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the occult and the psychic. They claimed to possess psychic powers and abilities and either al leged, as did the popular Israeli psychic Uri Geller, that their psychic powers derived from a close encounter with a UFO or that they, through their special talents, communicated with space brothers. Psychic Ray Stanford belonged to this latter group. He claimed in 1974 that be may have had many meet- 1 973: Echoes of the Past 26 1 ings with space people and had taken motion pictures of UFOs on several occasions. One of the motion pictures, he said, was a spectacular film of a UFO that the Air Force had analyzed and classified as unidentified-the only unidentified film in Air Force files. But Air Force records show that it clasified the object in Stanford's film as Venus-positively identified. Like the contactees of the 1 950s, the new contact ees in the early 1 970s added yet another confusing element to the UFO controversy. By linking psychic and ocult phe nomena to UFOs, the new contactees threatened to compli cate the subject even more for the public. 55 Television, however, somewhat prevented this confusion from escalating. Whereas in previous years television had aided the contactees' cause, in 1 973-74 in the main it did not couple either the old or new contactees with UFOs. During the earlier sighting waves, television news had concentrated on giving vent to contactee claims or ridiculing legitimate UFO reports as part of a national "sily season." But in 1 973-74, for the first time television news squarely confronted the UFO problem. CBS, NBC, and ABC gave the UFO sight ings the fairest and most impartial coverage the networks bad ever given the subject. CBS and ABC nightly news shows car ried twcrminute and three-minute news features on the UFO sightings and noticeably refrained from tongue-in-cheek hu mor, "silly season" editorializing, or ridiculing witnesses.
NBC's John Chancellor tok the boldest stand of the network commentators. In his October 1 8, 1 973, newscast, Chancellor sumed up what seemed to be the prevailing opinion among broadcasters : "Many people would like the UFOs to go away. But the UFOs won't go away, and many scientists are taking them very seriously. It's likely that we wil hear more and more about the UFOs." In fact, the only major exception to the new television news stance was CBS newsman Hughes Rudd, who continually resorted to sarcasm and ridicule when he read news accounts of UFO sightings.
The only prime time dramatic show to have a plot capital izing on the interest in UFOs was CBS's March 3 1, 1974, ep isode of "Apple's Way." The leading character spotted a UFO, underwent severe ridicule as he bravely told his story to the public and the press, and then encountered several contactee types and lunatics who confided their experiences with the space brothers to him. No one on the show spoke of reputable UFO witnesses. In the end the hero discovered that he actually saw a secret weather device. The show left the 262 · The UFO Controversy in America viewer with the inference that UFOs were misidentifications of known phenomena and that most UFO witnesses were crazy.
Generally the many syndicated and network talk shows so popular in the late 1 960s and early 1970s gave UFOs the most attention. Of talk show hosts, David Susskind reacted most antagonistically toward the subject. When he featured a show with author John Fuller, UFO researcher Stanton Friedman, Betty Hil (of the 1961 Barney and Betty Hil ab duction case) , and · militant UFO debunker Phil Klass, Susskind indulged in heavy ridicule, taunting comments, and general derision of his guests and the subject during the entire show.
Susskind's attitude, however, was not typical. The hosts of the NBC "Today" show discussed the subject seriously with Friedman, Hynek, and Ralph Blum who, with his wife Judy, wrote a book about his investigation of UFOs during 1973.
The program with the Blums also included Congressman Roush of Indiana, who had chaired the 1968 House hearings on UFOs and was a member of the NICAP board of gover nors, and Air Force general and astronaut James A. McDiv itt, who had sighted a UFO while aboard the Gemini IV mis sion and who believed the subject deserved serious attention.
NBC's late-night ''Tomorrow" show devoted one full pro gram to UFOs. Host Tom Snyder, a Los Angeles newsman, talked with Hynek, James A. Harder, the University of Cali fornia engineering professor who had hypnotized one of the Pascagoula witnesses, and Phil Klass. Most of the discussion consisted of a dispute between the two scientsts and Klass. As the 1973-74 wave continued, the "Tomorrow" show displayed some confusion about the reputable UFO phenomenon by having some minor contactees on. The ''Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson had very little on UFOs per se, but Carson did interview Erich von Daniken and Bermuda Triangle au thority John Wallace Spencer.
Without doubt, "The Dick Cavett Show" (ABC) presented the best discussion of the UFO phenomenon on television.
Cavett opened his November 2nd ninety-minute show with a half hour interview with Charles Hickson, who calmly and articulately described the events of the Pascagoula incident.
Then Hynek, astronomer Carl Sagan, John Wallace Spencer, astronaut James McDivitt, and army helicopter pilot Laurence Coyne talked about the UFO wave. (Several months before the show Coyne a,nd his crew of four had had 1973: Echoes of the Past 263 a close encounter with a UFO in their helicopter. ) Cavett did not engage in ridicule, and the participants discussed the sub ject calmly and seriously.
The 1973-74 wave prompted several ambitious television projects. In May 1 974 NBC, after an abortive start in Octo ber 1 973, began production on a news documentary concen trating on the changing societal reactions to the UFO phe nomenon over the years. Hynek and producer Craig Leake were working on the program, and it promised to be the best news presentation on UFOs to date.li6 Independent film maker and producer Allan Sandler began to produce a highly popularized television and motion picture semi-documentary on UFOs in 1973. Surprisingly, Sandler obtained complete Air Force support for the production. The Air Force appeared to be engaging in a dramatic but low keyed reversal of policy. Instead of telling Sandler to obtain his information from the Air Force Archives at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, it decided to cooperate with him in every way possible. Even though the Air Force knew that the script mildly criticized it and suggested in creased study of UFOs, it assigned a public information of ficer to look after Sandler's needs and to give him virtually everything be wanted for the show. The Air Force approved the appearances on the show of former Project Blue Book directors Hector Quintanilla and Robert Friend as well as other Air Force personnel. Furthermore, rumor had it that the CIA also supported the project. Whatever the reasons the Air Force may have had for cooperating with Sandler, through this open policy the Air Force circumvented poten tial charges of secrecy, collusion, and dishonesty and thereby removed itself as an easy target for criticism. 57 The 1 973-74 sighting wave, as all other sighting waves, had an impact on American public opinion. A November 1973 Gallup Poll indicated that 51 percent of adult Americans be lieved UFOs were "real" and not products of imagination or hallucination. Furthermore, 1 1 percent, a projected fifteen million people, said they had seen a UFO, which was more than double the 5 percent figure in 1 966. The poll showed that UFO sightings were not confined to any particular popu lation group. College-educated people reported seeing UFOs as often as those with less education. But people living in the eastern part of the United States saw fewer UFOs than people living in the north, west, or south. The poll also re vealed the remarkable statistic that 95 percent of the adult 264 The UFO Controversy in A merica population in the United States had read or heard about UFOs. This awarenes was one of the highest in the history of the Galup Polls. ss Here was a phenomenon that virtually the entire adult pop ulation of the United States had heard about. and that mil lions of people claimed to have seen, yet after twenty-seven years no one knew for sure what it vtas. The controversy over unidentified flying objects, from 1 896 on, centered around two isues: identification and credibility. Identification lay at the heart of the opposing positions. Credibility formed the basis for a continuing controversy.
In the 1896-97 mystery airship sightings these two issues had not yet jelled. The public at first had a simple explana tion for the existence of the airships : an unknovm individual had secretly invented a flying machine and had put man into the skies. But when no authentic inventor appeared on the scene, the focal point of the controversy shifted from identifi cation of the strange objects to the credibility of the wit neses, and ridicule entered the debate. Scientists compound ed the ridicule problem when they aserted that witness had sen stars and planets or had contrived hoaƂes. But ridi cule of witnesses in 1 896-97 did not become as severe as it did after 1947. The American public in the late 1 890s could more easily believe witneses because it sensed that the inven tion of flight was near. Also, the 1 896-97 sightings lasted only a few months. The public did not have to confront the phe nomenon on a continuing basis and could view the airship mystery as a minor episode.
Fifty years later when the modem era of sightings began, the United States could not aford to treat reports of strange objects in the sky as a minor mater. Identifying the uniden tified flying objects was for the Air Force, the scientific com munity, and the civilian CFO organizations the most impor tant issue. The problem of identification involved asking the most appropriate question. The history of the controversy demonstrated that these three groups usually failed to pose the basic question: Did UFOs constitute an anomalous phe nomenon? Given the anecdotal and ephemeral nature of the data, the sighting reports, this question was the only remotely answerable one. Al other questions about the origin of UFOs were at best highly theoretical and speculative. The available data provided no way to determine the objects' origins. Yet al three groups focused in vain on the unanswerable question of origin. Because neither the Air Force, most scientists in- 1973: Echoes of the Past 265 volved in the controversy, nor the civilian UFO organizations concentrated on the limited and less sensational issue of anomalousness, each group seriously weakened its position and prolonged the debate.
The task of identifying the unknown flying objects fell first and appropriately to the Air Force-the official group re sponsible for defending the nation against attack from the air.
Public pressure and Air Force concern that UFOs might be secret foreign weapons prompted the study. When Project Sign concluded in 1 948 that the objects were not foreign weapons and did not threaten the national security, some staff members speculated that UFOs therefore had to be extrater restrial. Without first proving that the objects represented an anomalous phenomenon, however, this conclusion remained untenable. Since the Air Force found no proof for the ex traterrestrial hypothesis, it rejected this theory completely af ter 1948 and operated under the unproven assumption that UFOs did not constitute an arfomalous phenomenon.
By concluding that UFOs were not anomalous, the Air Force put itself in the position of denying the credibility of witnesses. People who reported UFOs, the Air Force said, ei ther misidentified natural phenomena, lied, or suffered from delusions. But the public, and especially people who claimed to have seen a UFO, found it difficult to believe many of the , Air Force explanations for the strange observations.
In 1 953 the Robertson panel intensified the Air Force's need to explain all sightings as ordinary occurrences. By recommending that the Air Force reduce UFO reports to a minimum for the sake of national defense, the Robertson panel encased the Air Force in a difficult public relations problem and gave it a rationale for making misleading and deceptive statements to the public and to Congress. The Air Force had to protect the country not against the objects but against the reports. It had to allay public fears by assuring I the people that nothing unusual was in the sky. It had to avert congressional hearings because they might create popu· lar interest in UFOs, which would result in "flying saucer hysteria," which, in turn, would generate more UFO reports and thus threaten the national security.
To do all these things, as well as to safeguard the intelli gence community that presided over the UFO project, the Air Force gave out only limited information and kept its files classified, thus preventing civilians from examining the data.
' More importantly, it tried to eliminate sighting reports. If 266 The UFO Controversy in A merica hoaxes, delusions, and misidentification of known phenomena accounted for the sightings, as the Air Force believed, then the Air Force needed to educate the public and especially Congress about this fact to prevent a recurrence of UFO re porting. Hence the problem of unidentified flying objects for , the Air Force lay primarily in public relations.
These public relations policies created a credibility problem for the Air Force. UFO organizations vociferously criticized Air Force methods of investigating and analyzing sightings and the public doubted its explanations for UFOs. To coun teract these attacks and maintain its credibility, the Air Force engaged in a protracted struggle with the UFO groups. But the Air Force's position was weak. After the Robertson panel's recommendations, the Air Force bad abandoned sys tematic study of UFOs and confined its activities to collecting reports and performing statistical breakdowns of the broad identified category. Systematically studying UFOs wasted time and effort because people did not see uniquely unusual objects.
The Air Force's conviction that scientific investigation would prove worthless deepened even more its public rela tions bind because the public looked to the Air Force for scientific answers to the problem. To placate the public, the Air Force insisted, on the basis of the incomplete and incon clusive Battelle Memorial Institute study and the Robertson panel, that it had thoroughly investigated the phenomenon and had found no evidence for unusual craft in the sky. The Air Force also effectively used this argument to prevent con gressional scrutiny of its UFO program. Consequently, from the early 1950s to the late 1960s, the Air Force was in the unenviable position of playing a conflicting role : it supplied "scientific" answers to a question it had not studied by releas ing incomplete and misrepresentative statistics based on poorly analyzed sighting reports, and it attempted to quiet public criticism of it for not treating the UFO issue scientifi cally by making misleading and often deceptive public rela tions statements.
Almost all scientists involved in the UFO controversy also assumed that UFOs were misidentifications, hoaxes, delu sions, and not anomalous. The ephemeral, nonreproducible, anecdotal, and unpredictable nature of the data made study within established disciplines and the methodologies dificult.
And most raw reports, in fact, did fall in the category of misidentification of known phenomena. But the crux of the 1973: Echoes of the Past 267 controversy rested on the reports that analysts could not iden tify. Few scientists confronted the basic question for these unidentified reports : Did the objects constitute a uniquely un usual phenomenon? If scientists answered this question affir matively, they then could have asked whether the objects were natural or artificial. Only after this could they have dealt with the objects' origins. Instead, they made the same logical leap as the Air Force and tried to explain the origins before asking the other questions. Many scientists used logical fallacies to attack the extraterrestrial hypothesis. They argued that since human technology could not overcome the prob lems of time and distance in space, then neither could ex traterrestrial technology. Even if "aliens" controlled the ob· jects, the argument went, the occupants would surely have made "official" contact with earth people. Because they had not, it followed that the objects were not under intelligent control, not extraterrestrial, and not anomalous.
A central problem in the scientific community's treatment of the subject was that the UFO phenomenon did not fit into the purview of any one scientific discipline. Each scientist as sumed that UFOs fell within an established scientific field usually his own. Most scientists failed to recognize that UFOs might constitute a complex and interdisciplinary field of study with its own precepts and methodology. This was why scien tists never could account for those reports that remained uni dentified after extensive analysis. In fact, most scientists re fused to see the phenomenon as a legitimate field of study: Ridicule played a critical role in perpetuating the idea that the UFO phenomenon was nonsense and undeserving of study. Ridicule touched everyone in the private sector in volved in investigating the phenomenon, especially active members of UFO research organizations. The threat of ridi- ' cule inhibited scientists from studying the phenomenon and reinforced the idea that UFOs were not anomalous. Fear of ridicule deterred people from reporting UFO sightings. Al· though the ridicule problem began to lessen slightly by 1 973, it remained one of the most important barriers to research on UFOs.
The contactees' unsubstantiated claims of trips in flying saucers and ongoing personal communication with aliens in the mid- 1 950s increased the ridicule problem, added more confusion to the subject, and strengthened the scientific con;t· munity's position that UFOs did not merit study. The media and entertainment industry compounded the confusion be- 268 The UFO Controversy in A merica tween contactees and reputable UFO witnesses by giving the contactees widespread publicity and by producing movies with contactee-Iike themes. As a result, the national UFO or ganizations had to expend much energy not only disasociat ing themselves from the contactees but also trying to correct the public confusion they engendered.
The contactees represented only one obstacle for the UFO organizations. Two greater impediments were the Air Force, with its public relations policies, and the scientists, with their attitudes toward the UFO phenomenon. Yet like these two adversaries, the UFO groups became ensnarled in asking inappropriate questions.
The leaders, especially Keyhoe, presumed that UFOs were anomalous and therefore extrater restrial. For Keyhoe this "fact" lay buried in the iner reaches of Air Force and CIA classified files. With this con viction, Keyhoe evolved a complex belief system that as sumed the Air Force was lying to the public and conspiring to keep information from it to prevent panic. In view of the Air Force's classification policies, investigatory techniques, and public statements, Keyhoe's suspicions seemed well found· ed. But through Keyhoe's influence the focus of the contro versy shifted away from the UFO problem and onto the Air Force. This outlook weakened the potential effect of NICAP and , to a lesser extent, other UFO organizations.
The Air Force effectively combated Keyhoe's calls for con· gressional investigations and denied charges of cover-up by referring to its scientific studies which found no evidence for the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Furthermore, the Air Force impeached Keyhoe's credibility by using the Robertson panel report to show that his activities might threaten the national security. With Keyhoe's credibility undermined, and with his assumption that UFOs were extraterrestrial, he never could convince the scientific community to study the phenomenon.
The charges and countercharges of the Air Force, some scientists, and the national UFO organizations in the 1960s planted a seed of doubt in many people's minds about the Air Force's capability to handle the UFO problem. The 1965-66 sighting wave led to widespread press criticism of the Air Force as well. Hynek's 1 966 swamp gas pronouncement stretched credibility to the limit as many people simply re· fused to believe him. Furthermore, the sightings themselves, always present, had a renewing effect on the controversy and on public interest. The UFOs seemed immune to public dis cussion about them, came at quasi-predictable times re- 1973: Echoes of the Past 269 gardles of societal events, and cut acros geographic bound· aries. Also, people who reported sighting:s represented ail strata of American life. The Air Force, after t:r)ing to disen gage itself from investigating LrOs, became frustrated over its helplessness to reduce reports after years of effort. Cnder tremendous public presure and criticism. it tacitly admited defeat in 1966 and established the Condon committe. Stil confident that urOs were a nonsense problem. the Air Force tok a calculated risk in creating the committe and won.
The Condon committee fell into the s.ame trap as the oth ers : it primarily concerned itself with the validity of the ex traterrestrial hypothesis and not with the posible anomalous nature of the phenomenon. Finding no e\idence for the ex traterrestrial origin of LrOs, the committee, and especialy Condon, fell prey to the common mistake of concluding that L'"FOs did not constirute an anomalous phenomenon and therefore did not merit further srudy. The Air Force seized upon these conclusions and used the Condon commitee's recommendations to close Project Blue Book and end its in volvement with the LrO phenomenon in 1969.
The failure of the Air Force. the scientific community, and the urO organizations to ask the one question that offered some possibility of empirical resolution perpetuated the LrO mystery and the confusion surounding it Thus in 1969, al though no official L:rO project existed, many people stil sought a solution to the m)ry. Among them was a growing corps of scientists Ulder the leadership of James :\fcDonald and J. Alen H vnek.
By the time· of the 1973-74 wave, the tone of the contro versy, while for the most part following established lines., be gan to change. The Air Force bad remo..-ed itself from the controversy, -Keyhoe had retired. the fight for congresional hearings had ended, and the Condon committee was history.
Between 1969 and 1974 scientists interested in LrOs quietly and slowly chipped away at the granite wall of disreputability and ilegitimacy so long asociated with the subject of LrOs.
The moon landing and scientists' acceptance of the probabil ity of life elsewhere in the universe helped ease ridicule of UFO witneses and the phenomenon itself. The fC>Cl5 began to shift from credibility back to identification, the heart of the isue.
By mid-1974 many scientists had answered afirmatively the question of urO anomalousnes and were cla.rif)ing some of the basic isues that had muddied the controversy.
270 The UFO Controversy in America New perspectives emerged based on the increased awareness of the global nature of the phenomenon. The excellent British journal, Flying Saucer Review, provided a forum for interna tional exchanges of data and ideas. Hynek's Center for UFO Studies served as a focal point for scientific analysis of the phenomenon. Free from the debates of previous years, re searchers for the first time focused on identification and con fronted head-on the mystery of unidentified flying objects.
Changes in Ai r Force Annual UFO Report Statistics, 1 96()..{,9 Year in Yearly Tolals as Reported by /he Air Force To/a/ Which Public No.
Reported UFO 1960- 1962- Uniden· Sighlings 61 63 1964 1965 196 1967 1968 1969 rifled " 1 947 79 79 79 79 1 22 1 22 122 1 22 12 1948 143 143 143 143 1 S6 1 S6 1 S6 1 S6 7 1949 186 186 186 186 186 186 186 1 86 2 2 1950 1 69 169 169 210 210 210 210 210 27 1951 1 21 1 21 1 21 1 S6 169 1 69 169 1 69 22 1952 1,501 1 ,501 1,501 1,501 1,501 1,501 1,501 1,501 303 1953 425 425 425 425 509 509 509 509 42 1954 429 429 429 487 487 487 487 487 46 1955 404 404 404 543 545 545 545 545 24 19S6 n8 n8 667 670 670 610 670 670 14 1 957 1,178 1 ,1 78 1,004 1,005 1,006 1,006 1,06 1 ,006 1 4 1958 573 590 623 623 627 627 627 627 10 1 959 364 364 386 387 390 390 390 390 1 2 1960 462 514 5S6 5S6 557 557 557 557 14 1 961 48 584 585 591 591 591 591 1 3 1962 469 469 474 474 474 474 1 5 1963 382 393 399 399 399 399 14 1964 532 S62 562 S62 S62 19 1965 886 887 887 887 16 196 1,()60 1 ,1 1 2 1 ,1 1 2 32 1967 937 937 19 1 968 375 3 1969 1 46 TOTAL 1 2,618 701 NOTE: The Air Force failed to explain adequately why changes existed in its annual statistics. It stated in 1968 that some press releases ఆ not included all the sightings and that this was later corrected, but the Air Force never explained why some yearly totals decreased over time.
• The unidentified list does not include sightings in the possible and probable categories.
Notes 1 The Mystery Airship: Preliminaries to the Controversy 1 . See Savante Stubilius, Airship, . Aeroplane, Aircraft (Gote borg, Sweden: Almqvist Wiksell, 1 966 ) , for a complete analysis of nineteenth-century usage of words dealing with aircraft.
2. Omaha Morning World-Herald, 6 April 1 897, p.5; Chicago Tribune, 10 April 1 897, p.2; Dallas Morning News, 17 April 1 897, p.8, and 1 6 April 1897, p.5.
3. Milwaukee Sentinel, 11 April 1897, p.l l ; Detroit Free Press, 14 April 1 897, pp.3, 2; Chicago Tribune 12 April 1 897, p.5; Dal las Morning News, 8 April 1 897, p.3 ; Galveston Daily News, 24 April 1 897, p.3.
4. Dallas Morning News, 8 April 1897, p.3 ; Chicago Times Herald, 6 April 1 897, p.l .
5 . Dallas Morning News, 1 6 April 1897, p.5.
6. Detroit Free Press, 10 April 1 897, p.2; Chicago Tribune, 2 April 1 897, p. 14; Dallas Morning News, 1 9 April 1897, p.5.
7. Chicago Times-Herald, 10 April 1 897, p.1 , and 13 April 1 897, p.2; Detroit Free Press, 6 April 1 897, p.3.
8. Sacramento Daily Record-Union, 1 8 November 1 896, p.4, and 19 November 1 896, p.8; Dallas Morning News, 18 April 1 897, p.4; Chicago Tribune, 2 April 1 897, p.14; Des Moines Leader, 1 3 April 1 897, p.3; Houston Post, 22 April 1 897, p.9.
9. Milwaukee Sentinel, 15 April 1 897, p.10; Cincinnati Com mercial-Tribune, 25 April 1 897, p. 1 0.
10. Galveston Daily News, 22 April 1897, p.4; St. Louis Post Dispatch, 14 April 1897, p.7; Chicago Times-Herald, 16 April 1 897, p. 1 ; Houston Post, 22 April 1 897, p.9; Sacramento Daily Record-Union, 19 November 1896, p.8; Dallas Morning News, 18 April 1 897, p.4.
1 1 . Chicago Times-Herald, 17 April 1 897, p.6; Harrisburg (Arkansas) Modern News, 23 April 1897, p.2; San Francisco Call, cited in Sacramento Daily Record-Union, 24 November 1 896, p.8.
12. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 25 April 1 897, p.9.
13. Houston Post, 25 April 1 897, p.13.
1 4. Dallas Morning News, 19 April 1 897, p.S.
1 5. Ibid.
1 6. Ibid.
1 7. Houston Post, 21 April 1 897, p.2.
1 8. Galveston Daily News, 24 April 1 897, p.3, and 28 April 1 897, p.6; Houston Post, 25 April 1 897, p.S.
19. Houston Post, 26 April 1897, p.2.
20. Houston Post, 30 April 1 897, p.7.
271 272 Notes 21. Yates Center (Kansas) FarmeŅs Advocate, 23 April 1 897, cited in Jerome Clark. "The Strange Case of the 1897 Airship," Flying Saucer Review 12 (July-August 1966) : 10-17, especial ly 13.
22. Ibid.
23. St. Louts Post-Dispatch, 1 1 April 1 897, p.2; Des Moines Leader, 1 1 April 1 897, p.3; Chicago Record, 17 April 1 897, cited in Donald Hanlon, "The Airship in Fact and Fiction," Flying Saucer Review 16 (July-August 1 970) : 20-21 ; Milwaukee Sen tinel, 1 5 April 1 897, p.1 ; Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, 19 April 1 897, p. 1 ; Des Moines Daily News, 12 April 1 897, p.3.
24. Dallas Morning News, 1 9 April 1 897, p.5.
25. Frank Masquellette, "Physical Evidence of Great Airships of 1 897," Houston Post, 13 June 1966, p.8.
26. Sacramento Daily Record-Union, 23 November 1 896, p.4, and 24 November 1 896, p.8.
27. Chicago Tribune, 12 April 1 897, p.6, and 26 April 1 897, p.3.
28. Louisville Courier-Journal, 1 9 April 1 897, p.1.
29. Detroit Free Press, 1 April 1 897, p.9.
3 0. Chicago Times-Herald, 12 April 1 897, p.1; Chicago Tribune, 12 April 1 897, p.5; Des Moines Daily News, 12 April 1 897, p.3.
31. Cinci111lti Commercial-Tribune, 16 April 1 897, p. 1.
3 2. Detroit Free Press, 10 April 1 897, p.2; Dallas Morning News, 1 8 April 1 897, p.4; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 2 April 1 897, p.2; Milwaukee Sentinel, 10 April 1897, p.1 ; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 10 April 1 897, pp. 1, 2; Chicago Times-Herald, 10 April 1 897, p.4.
33. Galveston Daily News, 20 April 1 897, p.2; Louisville Courier-Journal, 1 5 April 1 897, p.5; Dallas Morning News, 17 April 1 897, p.8.
34. Dallas Morning News, 1 9 April 1897, p.S.
35. Chicago Times-Herald, 11.
A_pril 1 897, p.2; Chicago Tribune, 12 April 1 897, p.5.
36. Chicago Times-Herald, 8 April 1 897, p. 1 ; Milwaukee Sen tinel 1 1 April 1 897, p.1 1 ; Chicago Tribune, 10 April 1 897, p.2, Galveston Daily News, 15 April 1 897, p.l ; Chicago Times-Her ald, 4 April 1 897, p. l ; Chicago Tribune, 5 April 1 897, p.4; Omaha Morning World-Herald, 6 April 1 897, p.5; Galveston Daily News, 23 April 1 897, p.3.
37. Sacramento Daily Record-Union, 24 November 1 896, p.1 ; Chicago Tribune, 10 April 1 897, p.l , and 1 1 April 1 897, p.l .
3 8 . Omaha Morning World-Herald, 8 April 1 897, p.S; Chicago Tribune, 10 April 1 897, p.2, and 1 1 Apri1 1 897, pp.32, 1 .
3 9 . Milwaukee Sentinel, 13 Apri1 1 897, p.l.
40. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 10 April 1 897, pp.1 , 2, and 13 Apri1 1897, pp.l, 2.
Notes 273 41. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 13 April 1 897, pp. 1, 2; Chicago Tribune, 20 April 1 897, p.4.
42. Sacramento Daily Record-Union, 20 November 1 896, p.2, and 21 November 1 896, p.4; Birmingham (Alabama) News, cited in Cincinnati Commercial-Tribune, 22 April 1 897, p.4; Chicago Tribune, 1 9 April 1 897, p.6; Kansas City (Missouri) Star, 28 March 1 897, p. 2, and 29 March 1 897, p.8.
43. Chicago Tribune, 4 April 1 897, p.32.
44. Des Moines Leader, 1 1 April 1 897, p.3 ; Wisconsin State Journal (Madison) , 12 April 1897, p.2; Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, 1 6 April 1897, p. l ; Baltimore News, cited in Cincinnati Commercial-Tribune, 22 April 1 897, p.4.
45. Memphis Commerical Appeal, cited in Cincinnati Commer cial-Tribune, 22 April 1 897, p.4; Dallas Morning News, 21 April 1 897, p.6; Galveston Daily News, 2 May 1897, p.20; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1 8 April 1 897, p. 20.
46. Sacramento Daily Record-Union, 24 November 1 896, p.8; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 17 April 1 897, p. 1 ; Dallas Morning News, 18 Apri1 1 897, p.4.
47. Chicago Times-Herald, 12 April 1 897, p.l ; St. Louis Post Dispatch, 12 Apri1 1 897, pp.1, 2, and 1 8 April 1 897, p.l.
48. James 0. Bailey, Pilgrims Through Space and Time (New York: Argus, 1947 ) , p.96.
49. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1 1 April 1 897, p.4, and 14 April 1897, p.7; Houston Post, 22 April 1897, p.9; Washington Times and Memphis Commercial Appeal, cited in Cincinnati Commer i cial-Tribune, 22 April 1 897, p.4.
50. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 13 April 1 897, p. l l ; Milwaukee Sentinel, 13 April 1 897, p. 1 ; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 14 April 1 897, p.5.
5 1 . Omaha Morning World-Herald, 8 April 1 897, p.S.
52. Galveston Daily News, 16 April 1 897, p.2; Sacramento Daily Record-Union, 30 November 1 896, p.3 ; Houston Post, 22 April 1 897, p.9.
53. Basil Clarke, The History of Airships {Lmdon: Herbert Jenkins, 1960) , pp.3 1-44. See also Joseph H. Hood, The Story of Airs/zips (London : Arthur Barker Ltd., 1968 ) ; John Toland, Ships in the Sky (New York: Henry Holt Co., 1957) ; Charles H.
Gibbs-Smith, The Invention of the A eroplane, 1799-1901 (New York: Taplinger, 1966) ; C. Gibbs-Smith, A History of Flying (London : B. T. Batsford, 1953 ) ; C. Gibbs-Smith, Aviation: An Historical Survey (London: Her Majesty's Sationery Office, 1970 ) .
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. "Pennington's Airship," Scientific American, 7. March 1 891 , p. 150; Howard Scamehorn, Balloons to Jets (Chicago : Henry Regnery, 1 957 ) , pp. 14-15.
.
57. For a photograph of Professor Barnard's pedal-powered aJ.l'- 274 Notes ship, see Herman Justi, ed., Official History of the Tennessee Cen tennial Exposition (Nashvile : Brandon Printing Co., 1898), p.404.
58. Scamehom, p. 15.
59. Charles H. Gibbs-Smith, "Historical Note," Flying Saucer Review 12 (July-August 1966) : 17.
2 The Modem Era Begins: Attempts to Reduce tbe Mystery 1 . Gordon L Lore and Harold H. Deneault, Mysteries of the Skies (Englewood Clifs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), pp.l l6, 123- 25; David R. Saunders and R. Roger Harkins, UFOs? Yes! (New York: Signet, 1968), p.S3; Washington Star, 6 July 1947, reprint ed in Donald E. Keyhoe, The Flying Saucers Are Real (New York: Fawcett, 1 950 ) , pp.34-35; New York Times, 2 January 1945, pp.1, 4; Jo Chamberlain, "The Foo Fighter Mystery," American Legion Magazine, December 1945, pp.9, 43-47; Fred eric 0. Sargent, Night Fighters: An Unofficial History of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron (Madison, WIS. : By the Author, 1946) .
2. United States Air Force, "Unidentified Flying Objects : Pro ject 'Grudge'," 1 August 1949, No. 102-AC 491 1 5-1 00, Appendix A (in the Air Force Archives at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, hereafter referred to as MAFB ) ; New York Times, 12 August 1946, p. 1, 13 August 1946, p.4, 14 August 1946, p. l l, 1 1 October 1946, p.3 ; Saunders and Harkins, p.54.
3. Kenneth Arnold's testimony and sighting information are in the sighting files at MAFB.
4. Herbert Strentz, "An Analysis of Press Coverage of Uniden tified Flying Objects, 1947-1966" (Ph.D. dissertation, North western University, 1970), p.2.
5. Ted Bloecher, Report on the UFO Wave of 1947 (By the Author, 1967), pp.l-1, 1-2.
6. Bloecher, p.l-1 1 ; Frank M. Brown, Memorandum for the Officer in Charge, 1 6 July 1947 (MAFB ) .
7 . DeWayne B . Johnson, ''Flying Saucers-Fact or Fiction?" (Master's thesis, University of California at Los Angeles, 1950), pp. 105-15. This thesis contains some little known information about this famous incident.
8. Bloecher, p.I- 1 4; New York Times, 9 July 1947, pp. 1 and 10, 12 July 1947, p. 1 1.
9. Bloecher, p.l-1 1 , and p.I-5.
10. New York Times, 27 December 1947, p.28, 6 July 1947, p.36.
- 1 1. New York Times, 10 July 1947, p.23.
12. "A Rash of Flying Discs Breaks Out Over the U.S.," Life, 2 1 July 1947, pp. 14-1 6.
13. George H.
Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935-1948 (New York: Random House, 1972), p.666.
Notes 275 14. New York Times, 4 July 1 947, p.26.
15. Edward J . Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Ob jects (Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1956 ) , p.23; "Project 'Grudge'," pp.2-3.
1 6. Ruppelt, Report on UFOs, p.22.
17. New York Times, 7 July 1947, p.5.
18. General Nathan F. Twining to Commander, Air Material Command, 23 September 1947, contained in Edward U. Condon, project director, Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (New York: Bantam ed., 1969 ) , pp.894-95, hereafter referred to as Condon Report.
1 9. Major General L. C. Craigie to Commanding General Wright Field, "Flying Discs," 30 December 1 947, contained in Condon Report, pp.896-97. See also Edward J. Ruppelt, "What The Air Force Has Found Out About Flying Saucers," True (May 1 954 ) , reprinted in The TRUE Report on Flying Saucers (reprints of articles · in True Magazine; New York: Fawcett, 1967 ) , pp.36-39, 57-74.
20. Captain Mantell sighting information on file at MAFB. Re- ports that Mantell noticed heat in his cockpit are untrue.
2 1 . Ruppelt, Report on UFOs, pp.33, 37-38.
22. Ruppelt, Report on UFOs, pp.27-28.
23. Ruppelt, Report on UFOs, p.28.
24. Chiles and Whitted sighting information is on file at MAFB. The information contained in Ruppelt, Report on UFOs, -p.40, relating to a "tight left turn" by Chiles and "turbulent air" by the object is incorrect. Chiles and Whitted told James E.
McDonald that the object vanished into thin air (letter from James McDonald to Richard H. Hall, 13 January 1968 ) .
25. Ruppelt, Report o n UFOs, pp.41 , 45. J. Allen Hynek, the Air Force's scientific consultant on UFOs, confirmed the existence of the "Estimate of the Situation" in an interview with the author, February 197 1 .
26. Ruppelt, Report o n UFOs, pp.58-59. Albert M . Chop, Air Force public information officer, confirmed the factionalism at AMC in an interview with the author, 7 January 1974.
27. United States Air Force, "Unidentified Aerial Objects: Projects 'Sign'," February 1949, No. F-TR-2274-IA, pp.vi-vii (MAFB ) .
28. Ibid.
29. Project 'Sign'," pp.32-35.
30. Ruppelt, Report on UFOs, pp.57, 59-60. Interview with J.
Allen Hynek, February 1 97 1 .
3 1 . "Project 'Grudge'," p.2. Ruppelt, Report on UFOs, pp.60- 6 1 .
32. Sidney Shallett, "What You Can Believe About Flying Sau cers (Part II) ," Saturday Evening Post, 7 May 1 949, pp.36, 184- 86.
33. Sidney Shallett, "What You can Believe About Flying Sau- 276 Notes cers· (Part I) ," Saturday Evening Post, 30 April 1 949, p.20; Shal lett, Part IT, p. 1 86.
34. "Project 'Grudge'," p. 1 ; Ruppelt, Report on UFOs, p.63.
35. "Project 'Grudge'," incident No. 207, Appendices B, n.p., I, n.p., C-2, p.4. This incident is discussed in Ruppelt, Report on UFOs, pp.67-68.
36. "Project 'Grudge'," incident No. 33 a-g, Appendix B, n.p.; see also Ruppelt, Report on UFOs, pp.34-35.
37. "Project 'Grudge'," Part V, Appendix G, n.p.; A. M. Wood to lieutenant Colonel A. J. Hemstreet, 29 March 1949, contained in "Project 'Grudge'," Appendix D-I, n.p.; "Project 'Grudge'," p. 10.
38. "Project 'Grudge'," p.10.
39. Department of Defense, News Release No. 629-49, "Air Force Discontinues Flying Saucer Project;'' 27 December 1949, contained in Leon Davidson, ed., Flying Saucers: An Analysis of the Air Force Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14, 4th ed.
(Clarksburg, W. Va. : Saucerian Publications, 1970), p.7; Major Boggs, Memorandum for the Record, 3 1 August 1949 (MAFB) .
40. Project Twinkle final report, 27 November 1951 (MAFB).
Includes letters and memoranda.
41. Ruppelt, Report on UFOs, p.67; George H. Gallup, 2 (1949-1958) , p.9 1 1 .
42. Keyhoe cited in Ruppelt, Report on UFOs, pp.64-65.
43. Donald E. Keyhoe, "The Flying Saucers Are Real, " True (January 1950), reprinted in The TRUE Report on Flying Sau cers, p.93. Keyhoe, True, p.7. Ruppelt, Report on UFOs, pp.64- 65.
44. Robert B. McLaughlin, "How Scientists Tracked a Flying Saucer," True (March 1950 ) , p.28.
45. Frank Scully, Behind the Flying Saucers (New York: Henry Holt, 1950 ) , p.137.
46. Roland Gelatt, "Flying Saucer Hoax," Saturday Review of Literature, 6 December 1952, p.3 1 .
47. Roland Gelatt, "In a Saucer From Venus," Saturday Re view of Literature, 23 September 1 950, pp.20-21, 36; "More About Flying Saucers," Science News Letter, 16 September 1950, p. 1 8 1 ; "Visitors From Venus; Flying Saucer Yarn," Time, 9 Janu ary 1950, p.49.
48. Keyhoe, The Flying Saucers Are Real, p.73.
49. Keyhoe, The Flying Saucers Are Real, p.173.
50. "Flying Saucers-The Real Story : U.S. Built First One in 1943," U.S. News and World Report, 7 April 1950, pp.13 -1 5; "Flying Saucers Again," Newsweek, 1 7 April 1950, p.29; Ruppelt, Report on UFOs, p.82; Condon Report, p.515.
51. New York Times, 5 April 1950, p.24.
52. Bob Considine, ''The Disgraceful Flying Saucer Hoax," Cosmopolitan (January 195 1 ) , pp.33, 1 00-02.
53. Saunders and Harkins, pp.98-99.
Notes 277 54. "Belated Explanation on Flying Saucers," Time, 26 Febru ary 195 1 , p.22; New York Times, 14 February 195 1, p.28, 26 February 1951, p.25.
55. Condon Report, p.514.
3 The 1952 Wave: Efforts to Meet the Crisis 1 . "Project Grudge Special Report No. 1," 28 December 1951, contained in United States Air Force, Projects Grudge and Blue book Reports 1-12 (Washington, D.C. : National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, 1968 ) , pp.23-28. All subse quent references to Project Grudge and Blue Book reports in this chapter are from this volume and are cited by report number and date only. For Edward Ruppelt's discussion of this sighting, see ' his The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1956, pp.9 1-92 .
2. Ruppelt, p.93.
.
3 . Letter from Ruppelt to Max Miller, 1 3 February 1956 (files of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, Kensington, Maryland, which I hereafter refer to as NICAP ) ; Ruppelt, p.94; "Status Report No. 2," 3 1 December 1951, p.33 ; "Status Report No. 3," 3 1 January 1 952, p.58; "Status Report No.
4," 29 February 1952, p.67.
4. Ruppelt. p. l 14; "Status Report No. 1 ," 30 November 1951, p.2; Ruppelt, p.14.
5. "Status Report No. 2," 3 1 December 195 1 , p.33; "Status Re port No . 3, " 3 1 January 1952, p.59.
6. "Status Report No. 1," 30 November 1951, pp.3-4; "Status Report No. 2," 3 1 December 1951, pp.33-34; "Status Report No.
3," 3 1 January 1952, p.59; "Status Report No. 4," 29 February 1952, p.67; "Status Report No. 5," 3 1 March 1952, p.84; "Status Report No. 6," 30 April 1952, p.99; Ruppelt, pp. 1 3 6-37.
7. Letter from Ruppelt to Max Miller, 13 February 1956 (NI CAP ) ; Ruppe It, p.94; "Status Report No. 2," 3 1 December 1951, p.34; "Status Report No. 3," 3 1 January 1952, p.59.
8. "Status Report No. 1 ," 3 0 November 1951, p.4. See also David R. Saunders and R. Roger Harkins, UFOs? Y est (New York: Signet. 1968 ) , p.59.
9. Ruppelt. pp. 1 3 1 , 1 43.
10. "Status Report No. 5," 3 1 March 1952, pp.85-86; "Status Report No. 6," 30 Apri1 1952, pp.98-99.
1 1. Ruppelt. pp. 137, 140, 143.
12. Department of the Air Force, Air Force Letter No. 200-5, 29 April 1952 (from the Air Force Archives at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, which I hereafter refer to as MAFB ) ; Ruppelt, pp. 133-34.
1 3 . Department of Defense, Office of Public Information, "Press Release," 3 April 1952, reproduced in Leon Davidson, ed., Flying Saucers: An Analysis of the Air Force Special Report No.
278 Notes 14, 4th ed. (Clarksburg, W.Va. : Saucerian Publications, 197 1 ) , p.A4.
14. "Status Report No. 5," 3 1 March 1952, pp.84-85.
15. H. Bradford Darrach and Robert Ginna, "Have We Visi- tors from Space?" Life, 7 April 1952, p.80.
1 6. Darrach and Gina, p.86.
17. Ibid.
1 8. "Status Report No. 6," 30 April 1952, p.99.
1 9. New York Times, 12 April 1952, p. 10, and 13 April 1952, Sec. IV, p.9.
20. Ruppelt, p. 1 32. Two months later Life published a follow up: Robert Gina, "Saucer Reactions," 9 June 1952, pp.20-26.
Ginna noted that there had been a "tremendous barrage" of letters and that more were coming every day (p.20) .
2 1 . Ruppelt, pp. 1 3 1 , 138. Accurate statistics o n the number of reports sent to ATIC are difficult to obtain; the Condon commit tee final report, Project Blue Book reports, and Ruppelt al give slightly different figures on monthly sighting report totals but are substantially in agreement about the yearly totals.
22. Ruppelt, p.149; "Status Report No. 7," 3 1 May 1952, p.1 1 5.
23. "Status Report No. 8," 3 1 December 1952, pp.134, 136, passim.
24. Ruppelt, pp. 147-49.
25. Donald H. Menzel, "The Truth About Flying Saucers," Look, 17 June 1952, pp.35-39; "Those Flying Saucers" (an inter view with Donald Menzel) , Time, 9 June 1952, pp.54-56. These articles are essentially similar in expounding Menzel's views.
26. "Status Report No. 6," 30 April 1952, p.99.
27. J. Robert Moskin, "Hunt for the Flying Saucers," Look, 1 July 1952, pp.37, 40.
28. Moskin, p.41.
29. "Status Report No. 8," 31 December 1952, pp.134, 136, 143 ; Ruppelt p.132.
30. Ruppelt, p.1 57.
3 1 . For a more complete description of the Washington D.C., sightings, see: file on Washington, D.C., sightings at MAFB; Rup pelt, pp.1 56-72; Donald E. Keyhoe, Flying Saucers From Outer Space (New York: Holt, 1953 ) , pp.63, 68-69; Richard Hall, ed., The UFO Evidence (Washington, D.C. : NICAP, 1964), pp.35, 77, 1 32, 149, 159; Washington Post, 22, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30 July 1952.
32. Interview with Albert M. Chop, 4 January 1974. See also Washington D.C., file at MAFB.
33. Ruppelt, pp. 1 60, 1 62.
34. Hall, p.l 59; Ruppelt, pp.161, 1 65.
35. Hall, p. 159; Ruppelt, p. 1 66; interview with Albert M.
Chop, 4 January 1974.
36. Ruppelt, p.167; Memorandum for the Record, ''Trip to Washington, D.C.," 26 July 1952 (Personal files ) .
I .
: , , Notes 279 37. Washington Post, 29 July 1952, p.l.
38. Interview with Albert M. Chop, 4 January 1974.
39. Department of Defense, "Minutes of Press Conference held by General John A. Samford," 29 July 1952 (MAFB) ; Keyhoe, p.76. Keyhoe's transcription of the Samford new conference is a fairly accurate and complete account. See also Christian Science Monitor, 3 1 July 1952, p. 1 ; Washington Post, 30 July 1952, p.1; Ruppelt, p. 168.
40. New York Times, 31 July 1952, p.22, 30 July 1952, p,. 10; Christian Science Monitor, 3 1 July 1952, p.12, 30 July 1952, p.l.
4 1 . Baltimore Sun, 1 August 1952, p. 10; Milwaukee Journal, 30 July 1952, p.24; Lawrence Elliot, "Flying Saucers: Myth or Men ace?," Coronet, 19 November 1952, p.50.
42. Washington Post, 25 July 1952, p.1 8 ; Denver Rocky Moun tain News, 28 July 1952, cited in Keyhoe, pp.69-70.
43. Allen cited in San Francisco Chronicle, 4 August 1 952, p.3 (Allen was part of the New York Tribune news service) ; "Wash ington's Blips," Life, 4 August 1 952, p.40.
44. Edgar Mauer, "Of Spots Before Their Eyes," Science, 19 December 1952, p.693 ; New York Times, 29 July 1 952, p.20, 28 July 1952, p.5; Milwaukee Journal, 30 July 1952, p.2.
45. Milwaukee Journal, 4 August 1 952, p.2; Baltimore Sun, 3 August 1952, p. 1 ; "No Visitors From Space," Science News Let ter, 30 August 1952, p.143; San Francisco Chronicle, 30 July 1952, p.2; Washington Post, 30 July 1952, p.1 ; Milwaukee Jour nal, 3 0 July 1952, p.2.
46. J. Allen Hynek, "Special Report on Conferences with As tronomers on Unidentified Flying Objects," 6 August 1 952, p. 1 8 (MAFB ) . See also "Status Report No. 8," 3 1 December 1952, pp.l37-38.
47. New York Times, 1 August 1952, p.19; Christian Science Monitor, 30 July 1 952, p.10; New York Times, 4 August 1952, p.3 ; Baltimore Sun, 4 August 1 952, p.l.
48. Baltimore Sun, 31 July 1952, p. l.
49. Chester Morrison, "Mirage or Not, Radar Sees Those Sau cers Too," Look, 9 September 1952, p.99.
50. Ruppelt, p.1 3 ; Milwaukee Journal, 1 August 1 952, p.1; "Wind is Up in Kansas," Time, 8 September 1952, p.86; Ohio Northern University, "Project A: Investigation of Phenomena," 1 8 March 1953, p.1 (from the files of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, Tucson, Arizona) .
5 1 . Darrach and Ginna, p.86; interview with Coral Lorenzen, head of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, June 1 972.
52. Donald H. Menzel, "Abstract, " Journal of the Optical Soci ety of America 42 (November 1952 ) : 879. Menzel did not submit his paper for publication but the journal published his abstract.
53. Urner Liddel, "Phantasmagoria or Unusual Observations in the Atmosphere," Journal of the Optical Society of America 43 (April 1953 ) : 3 14, 3 15, 3 17.
280 Notes 54. I. Allen Hynek, ''Unusual Aerial Phenomena," Journal of the Optical Society of America 43 (April 1953 ) : 3 1 2.
55. Hynek, "Unusual Aerial Phenomena," p.3 1 3 ; "Status Re port No. 9," 3 1 January 1953, p. 158.
56. "Special Report No. 1 ," 28 December 1951, pp.23-28. See also the complete report on the Fort Monmouth sightings at MAFB.
57. "Status Report No. 8," 3 1 December 1 952, p . 138.
58. Ruppelt, pp. 190-9 1.
59. Ruppelt, p.149.
60. "Status Report No. 8," 31 December 1952, pp. 139, 141.
61. "Status Report No. 8," 3 1 December 1952, p. 1 39.
4 The Robertson Panel and Its Effects on Air Force UFO Policy 1 . Transcript of UFO briefing to Subcommittee on Atmospheric Phenomena, House Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration, 8 August 1958, p.3 (from the Air Force Archives at MllXwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, which I hereafter refer to as MAFB ) .
2. Memorandum, Air Technical Intelligence Command to Air Defense Command, 23 December 1 952 (MAFB ) ; letter from S.
A. Goudsmit to author, 9 February 1972 : "communication chan nels had been nearly saturated during an outbreak of UFO hys teria shortly before our meeting. We considered this a real dan- ger .
.
.
• " 3 . The duration of the meetings is a subject of controversy.
Ruppelt said the meeting started on 1 2 January and went for five days. The Robertson panel minutes puts the date at 1 4-18 January.
According to a copy of the minutes, the date of 14-17 January is correct.
4. Who Was Who in America, no. 4 (New York: Marquis Co., 1968 ) , p.800; Who's Who in America, no. 36 (New York : Mar quis Co., 1971 ) , p.865, and also Edward U. Condon, project director, Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (New York: Bantam ed., 1969 ) , pp.5 1 6-17; Who's Who, p.37; Who's Who, p.1733; Who Was Who, p. 1 051.
5. Edward J. Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Ob jects (Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1 956), p.241.
6 . Frederick C. Durant, "Report of Meetings of Scientific Advi sory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects," 1 4-1 8 January 1953, p.3 (MAFB ) , which I hereafter refer to as Robertson report; also contained in Condon, pp.896-99. Ruppelt, p.2 1 9.
7. Robertson report, pp.3-5, 17.
8. Robertson report, pp.4-6, 17.
9. Robertson report, pp.12-13; letter from S. A. Goudsmit to author, 9 February 1972.
10. Robertson report, pp.9, 1 1-12.
11. Robertson report, Tab A.
!
' l Notes 281 12. Robertson report, pp. 1 8-24, Tab A.
13. Robertson report, pp.21-22.
14. Letter from Thornton Page to Author, 7 February 1 972; letter from S. A. Goudsmit to J. A. Hennessey, 25 February 1965 (in the files of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, Kensington, Maryland, which I hereafter refer to as NICAP ) ; letter from S. A. Goudsmit to J. A. Hennessey, 1 0 March 1965 (NICAP ) ; J . Allen Hynek, "Are Flying Saucers Real?" Saturday Evening Post, 17 December 1966, p.19.
15. Interview with J. Allen Hynek, February 1972.
1 6. See chapter 2, pp.61-62, 66-69.
17. Letter from Edward J. Ruppelt to Leon Davidson, 7 May 1958, contained in Leon Davidson, ed., Flying Saucers: An Anal ysis of the Air Force Special Report No. 14, 4th ed. (Clarksburg, W.Va.: Saucerian Publications, 1970 ) , p.B3. Exactly when the CIA released the summary to Blue Book is not known.
18 Ruppelt, p.228; Donald E. Keyhoe, The Flying Saucer Con spiracy (New York: Holt, 1955 ) , pp.39-40.
19. United States Air Force, "Status Report No. 1 0," 27 Febru ary 1953 , Projects Grudge and Bluebook Reports 1-12 (Washing ton, D.C. : NICAP, 1968 ) , p.180 hereafter I will refer to all status reports by number and date only) ; "Status Report No. 1 1 ," 3 1 May 1 953, p.204. Also see Ruppelt, p.229.
20. Ruppelt, p.23 1 ; letter from Major Robert C. Brown to Commanding General, Air Defense Command, 5 March 1953 (MAFB ) ; Memorandum, "Division of Responsibility ATIC ADC," December 1953 (MAFB ) ; "Status Report No. 10," 27 February 1953, p.179;· Memorandum, "Briefing of ADC Forces and Divisions of Project Blue Book," 12 November 1952 (MAFB ) ; Memorandum, "Project Blue Book Special Briefing for Air Defense Command," March 1953 (MAFB ) .
21. Ruppelt, pp.23 1-32.
22. Interview with J. Allen Hynek, February 1972.
23 . Keyhoe, Conspiracy, p.44.
24. Donald E. Keyhoe, "Flying Saucers From Outer Space," Look, 20 October 1953, pp. 1 14-20.
25. Keyhoe, Look, p.1 14; Keyhoe, Conspiracy, p.55 ; telegrams from Albert M. Chop to Keyhoe, n.d., December and October 1953? (NICAP) ; interview with Keyhoe, April 1972.
26. Donald E. Keyhoe, Flying Saucers From Outer Space (New York: Holt, 1953 ) , pp. 124, 249.
27. Donald H. Menzel, Flying Saucers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953 ) , pasim.
28. Menzel, pp.22, 1 5, 149-66.
29. Menzel, p.80.
30. Menzel, pp.57, 171, 143-44, 148.
3 1 . Norman J. Crum, "Flying Saucers and Book Selection," Li brary Journal 19 (October 1954 ) : 1 7 1 9-25; David Flick, ''Tripe for the Public," Library Journal 80 (February 1955 ) : 202.
282 Notes . 32. Department of the Air Force, "Air Force Regulation 200- 2," 26 August 1953, 2 November 1 953, 12 August 1954 (MAFB) , and also contained in Davidson, pp. 135-38; Department of the Air Force, "Air Force Letter 200-5," 29 April 1952 (MAFB ) . See also "Status Report No. 12," 30 September 1953, p.219.
33. Joint-Army-Navy-Air Force-Publication 146, December 1953, contained in Lawrence Tacker, Flying Saucers and the U.S. Air Force (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1960 ) , pp. 127-35.
34. "Status Report No. 1 1," 31 May 1953, p.200; "Status Re port No. 12," 30 September 1953, p.2 1 6.
35. Special Report No. 14, 5 May 1955, contained in Davidson.
See section in chapter 6 on Special Report No. 14.
3 6. Ohio Northern University, "Project A: Investigation of Phenomena," 18 March 1953 (from the files of the Aerial Phe nomena Research Organization, Tucson, Arizona) .
5 Contadees, Clubs, an d Confusion 1 . For a discussion of occupant reports, see Coral and Jim Lorenzen, Flying Saucer Occupants (New York : Signet, 1967 ) ; J.
Allen Hynek, The · UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry (Chi· cago : Henry Regnery, 1972) ; and Charles Bowen, ed., The Hu manoids (London: Neville Spearman, 1 969 ) .
2 . Jung's psychoanalytic description o f a flying saucer sighting pertains to these individuals. See Carl G. lung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959; Signet, 1969 ) .
3 . Paris Flammonde, The Age of Flying Saucers (New York : Hawthorn, 197 1 ) , p.53. See also Bryant and Helen Reeve, Flying Saucer Pilgrimage (Amherst, Wis. : Amherst Press, 1 957 ) , for a discussion of the contactees' personalities.
4. Flamonde, p.54. The title of Adamski's novel is Pioneer of Space.
5. Desmond Leslie and George Adamski, Flying Saucers Have Landed (London : Werner Laurie, 1953 ) , pp.172-73.
6. Leslie and Adamski, p.205.
7. George Adamski, Inside the Spaceships (New York: Abe lard-Schuman, 1 955 ) ; the paperback edition is Inside the Flying Saucers (New York: Paperback Library, 1967 ) , pp.78, 95, 104-5, 123, 157, 179. All subsequent references are to the paperback edi· tion.
8. Truman Bethurum, Aboard A Flying Saucer (Los Angeles: De Vorss, 1 954 ) , pp. 143, 1 23, 145.
9. Bethurum , pp.25-26.
10. Daniel Fry, The White Sands Incident (Los Angeles: NeW ' Age Publishing Co., 1954 ) , p.19. One year later Fry wrote Alan's Message to Men of Earth (Los Angeles : New Age Publishing Co., 1955) . Both books were combined in The White Sands In· Notes 283 cident (Louisville, Ky. : Best Books, 1966 ) , to which the notes in this chapter refer.
1 1 . Fry, pp.20-2 1 .
1 2 . Fry, pp.67, 70, 90-92.
13. Orfeo M. Angelucci, The Secret of the Saucers (Amherst, , Wis. : Amherst Press, 1955 ) , pp. 1 13, 33-36. For an extensive psy choanalytic study of this book, see Jung, pp. 1 1 9-27.
14. Angelucci, pp.76-78, 121 , 1 3 8-40.
1 5. Howard Menger, From Outer Space to You (Clarksburg, W. Va. : Saucerian Books, 1959 ) . The paperback is From Outer Space (New York: Pyramid, 1 967 ) , pp.34-38, 1 49, 1 19-24, 127.
All notes refer to the paperback edition.
1 6. Bethurum, p.141 Angelucci, pp . 1 06, 3 1 .
17. Adamski, p.78; Angelucci, p. 1 30.
18. Leslie and Adamski, p.202; Fry, p.7 1 ; Menger, p.1 55.
19. Adamski, p.75; Bethurum, p.1 03; Fry, pp.26, 46 : Angelucci, r p.9; Menger, p. 1 58.
20. Adamski, p.73 ; Bethurum, p.75; Fry, p.67; Angelucci, pp.46, 30, 1 10; Menger, pp.23, 41, 63.
21. Edward J. Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Ob jects (Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1956 ) . In 1959 Doubleday published a revision of this bok which included three additional chapters, one of which discussed contactees (p. 263 ) ; however, the revision does not have the word revision on it and carries the 1956 date. Also Bethurum, pp. 1 20-25; Menger, pp. l l3, 1 32, 172- 75. See also Flammonde, pp.94-100.
22. Leslie and Adamski, pp.177, 1 83 ; Bethurum, p. 10; Ange lucci, pp.74, 26.
23. Flammonde, l'P -87-88, 21 1 ; Civilian Saucer Investigations of New York, CSI Newsletter, 1 5 July 1959, p.1 1 . George Van Tassel, I Rode A Flying Saucer (by the Author, 1952 ) ; George Van Tassel, The Council of Seven Lights (Los Angeles : De Vorss, 1 958 ) . George Hunt Williamson and Alfred C. Bailey, The Saucers Speak (Los Angeles : New Age Publishing Co., 1954 ) .
Flammonde, pp. 179-80. Nexus 2 (May 1955 ) : 9 . For additional descriptions of some of these minor figures, see : Flammonde, pas sim; John Nebel, The Way Out World (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall, 196 1 ; New York: Lancer, 1962) ; John Nebel, The Psychic World Around Us (New York: Hawthorn, 1969; New York: Signet, 1 970 ) .
24. CSI Newsletter, 1 5 December 1 956, p.8 CSI Newsletter, 1 5 July 1959, pp.5-8; see also Flamonde, pp. 128-3 1 . Thy Kingdom Come became AFSCA World Report ( 1959-6 1 ) , then UFO Inter national ( 1962-65 ) , and then Flying Saucers International ( 1 966- 72) . John Godwin, Occult America (Garden City, N.Y. : Dou bleday, 1972 ) , p. 147.
25. James Moseley's reports on the Giant Rock conventions are in: Nexus 2 (May 1955 ) : 9; Saucer News 7 (September 1960) : 3-9; Saucer News 8 (December 1961 ) : 1 2-1 3 ; Saucers, Space and 284 Notes Science 60 ( 1 97 1 ) : 7-8. James Moseley, "Non-Scheduled Newslet ter No. 1 1 ," Saucer News ( 1 0 September 1 960) : 1 ; see also Sau cer News 7 ( September 1960 ) : 3-9.
26. "AMFSCA Souvenir Program," Thy Kingdom Come (May-June 1959 ) : 2-3. James Moseley, "Recent News Stories," Saucer News 6 (December-January 1 958 ) : 1 3-14. CSJ Newsletter, 15 July 1959, p . 1 1 .
27. Flammonde, passim; Nebel, The Way Out World, passim. 1 Letter from Keyhoe to Lorenzen, 30 March 1 954 (in the files of · the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, Tucson, Arizona, .' to which I hereafter refer as APRO) .
28. For an index of some of these clubs and their locations, see ) Thy Kingdom Come (April-May 1957 ) : 1 3-1 5 (published by the Los Angeles Interplanetary Study Groups,' later called the Amal gamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America) .
29. Flammonde, p.67; The Flying Saucer Review (official publi- 1 cation of the Space Observers League, Seattle, Washington) , see particularly 1 (October 1 955 ) , 2 (February 1956 ) , 2 (April 1 956) , 2 (June 1956), 2 (August 1 956) ; The Spacecrafter 3 (January-March 1960 ) : 3.
30. Gray Barker, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucer! : (New York : University Books, 1956 ) ; Albert K. Bender, Flying Saucers and the Three Men (New York : Paperback Library, 1968 ) .
3 1 . UFORUM 1 (February-March 1 957 ) : 4-5; CSJ Newsletter, 1 May 1 957, pp.1 -2; Nexus (January 1 955, March 1 955, May 1955 ) ; Saucer News 2 (June-July 1955 ) , 4 (February-March 1957 ) , "Confidential Newsletter No. 4." (October 1957 ) , "Confi dential Newsletter No. 8" (August 1958 ) , 6 (December-January 1 1958-59 ) , 6 (February-March 1959 ) , 7 (September 1 960 ) , "Non- 1 Scheduled Newsletter No. 1 1" ( 10 September 1960 ) , 8 (Decem- 1 ber 1961 ) , 1 1 (March 1964 ) , 13 (March 1966 ) .
32. Letters from Keyhoe to Lorenzen, 2 2 September 1 954, and 2 July 1 954 (APRO) .
3 3 . See "Special Adamski Expose Issue," Saucer News (Octo ber 1957 ) ; James Moseley, "Strange New Ideas from Howard Mcrnger," Saucer News (Non-scheduled Newsletter No. 26 [25 January 1 966] ) : 1 ; an account of the Van Tassel-St. Germain ep isode can be found in CSJ Newsletter, 1 May 1 957, pp.9-10; Ruppelt ( 1959 revision) , p.268 ; Saucer News (December 1961 ) : 15.
34. CSJ Newsletter, 1 November 1 957, p.16.
35. Ruppelt ( 1959 revision ) , pp.270-7 1 ; letter from Keyhoe to .
Lorenzen, 1 7 July 1958 (APRO) ; interview with Mrs. Ruppelt, 4 11 January 1 974; interview with Robert Friend, 4 January 1974.
1 3 6. Godwin, p. 1 44.
i .
37. Robert Ellwood, Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern , .
America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall, 1 973 ) , pp. 132- 1 : 33, 1 1-19.
Notes 285 38. H. Taylor Buckner, "Flying Saucers are For People," Trans-Action 3 (May-June 1966 ) : 10-1 3 ; Buckner, ''The Flying Saucerians : An Open Door Cult," in Marcello Truzzi, ed., Sociol ogy and Everyday Life (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968 ) , pp.223-30; Leon Festinger, When Prophecy Fails (Min neapolis, Minn. : University of Minnesota Press, 19 56 ) , passim.
39. No good analysis of science fiction movies exists. However, three fair attempts are : John Baxter, Science Fiction in the Cinema (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1970) ; Dennis Gifford, Science Fiction Film (London: Dutton, 1969 ) ; Susan Sontag, ''The Imagination of Disaster," Against Interpretation (New York: Dell, Laurel edition, 1969 ) , pp.21 2-28.
40. The Day the Earth Stood Still, It Came From Outer Space, and This Island Earth are at the Library of Congress. The Thing is at the State Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin.
41. Letter from Keyl;1.0e to Lorenzen, 3 October 1956 (APRO) .
1 6 1954 to 1958: Continued Skinishes and the Rise of NICAP ' 1. James Moseley, Saucer News 3 (June-July 1956) : 3. Leon I Davidson, "The Air Force and The Saucers, Part 1," Saucer News 3 (February-March 1956 ) : 1 3-1 6, and "The Air Force ancf The Saucers, Part II," Saucer News 4 (June-July 1957 ) : 9-1 6. Leon Davidson, ed., Flying Saucers: An Analysis of the Air Force Special Report No. 14, 4th ed. ( Clarksburg, W.Va. : Saucerian Pub lications, 1970 ) , pp. 145-54 (all subsequent references to Special Report 14 are to this volume and are listed by report title only) .
2 . Letter from Donald Keyhoe to Coral Lorenzen, 30 March 1 954 (in the files of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organiza : tion, Tucson, Arizona, to which I hereafter refer as APRO ) ; let ters from Keyhoe to Lorenzen, 15 August 1954 and 22 September ' 1954 (APRO) .
3. Department of the Air Force, "Air Force Regulation 200-2," 13 August 1954, contained in Davidson, ed., pp. 135-38, and at the Air Force Archives at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, to which I hereafter refer as MAFB. Edward J. Rup pelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects ( Garden City, N.Y.; Doubleday, 1956 ) , pp.231-32; Major Robert C. Brown to Commanding General Air Defense Command, "Utilization of 4602nd Personnel in Project Blue Book Field Investigations," 5 March 1 953 (MAFB ) .
4 . Colonel John M . White, Jr., to Commander, Air Technical Intelligence Center, "Report of Visit of ATIC Representatives," 23 November 1 954 (MAFB ) ; United States Air Force, "Status · Report No. 1 1 ," 3 1 May 1953, Projects Grudge and Bluebook Re orts 1-12 (Washington, D.C. : National Investigations Commit ee on Aerial Phenomena, 1968 ) , p.203 ; Lt. Mary L. Storm to ommander 4602nd (ADC ) , "Unidentified Flying Object Guide," 4 January 1955 (MAFB) .
286 Notes 5. Interview with J. Allen Hynek, March 1974.
6. Project Blue Book press releases, which are on file at MAFB and at National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena 1 (NICAP) in Kensington, Maryland.
7. Interview with J. Allen Hynek, March 1 974.
8. For complete statistics listed in ATIC and 4602nd reports during these years, see addition to Special Report Number 14, which is a typed insert (MAFB ) ; Department of Defense, News Release No. 1 108-57, 1 5 November 1 957 (APRO & NICAP) .
9. Interview with J . Alen Hynek, March 1 974.
1 0. Department of Defense, "Fact Sheet," n.d. late 1953 and early 1954? (NICAP & APRO) ; Department of Defense, News Release No. 1 053-55, 25 October 1 955, attachment (NICAP & APRO ) . See also New York Times, 2 January 1954, p.5; J. Allen Hynek, "Are Flying Saucers Real?" Saturday Evening Post, 11 December 1 966, pp. 1 7-2 1 .
1 1 . Department o f Defense, "Fact Sheet," n.d. late 1953 and early 1 954? (NICAP & APRO) .
1 2. Charlotte Knight, "Report on Our Flying Saucer Balloons," Collier's, 1 1 June 1 954, pp.50-57; Siegfried Mandel, "The Great Saucer Hunt," Saturday Review, 6 August 1 955, pp.28-29; ''Wait ing for the Little Green Men," Newsweek, 28 March 1 955, p.64.
1 3 . New York Times, 2 September 1 955, p.3, 16 December 1954, pp.24, 1 , 26, and 19 December 1954, Sec. IV, p.8.
1 4. ''The Saucers Again," American Aviation 1 1 (March 1954 ) : 3.
15. Donald E. Keyhoe , The Flying Saucer Conspiracy (New York: Holt, 1955 ) , p.7 and passim.
1 6. Letters from Keyhoe to Lorenzen, 6 November 1 955 and 28 October 1955 (APRO ) .
1 7 . Special Report 14, pp.51, 68.
1 8. Special Report 14, pp.24.
19. Department of Defense, Office of Public Information, News Release No. 1 053-55, 25 October 1 955, contained in Davidson, ed., pp.D5-D6. Letters from Keyhoe to Lorenzen, 1 December 1955 and 29 February 1956 (APRO ) . See also Donald E. Key hoe, Flying Saucers: Top Secret (New York : Putnam, 1 960) , pp. 1 57-60.
20. Letters from Keyhoe to Lorenzen, 1 December 1955 and 29 February 1 956 (APRO) .
See also Keyhoe, Top Secret, pp. l 57-60.
2 1 . Letter from Ruppelt to Max Miller, 1 3 February 1956 (NI- · I CAP).
22. Information supplied by Stanton T. Friedman, nuclear physicist and private UFO researcher.
23. New York Times, 22 January 1 956, Sec. 7, p.25; letter from Charles A. Hardin to General Watson, 7 February 1956 (MAFB ) .
24. Colonel John G. Eriksen, Memorandum for Director of In- Notes 287 telligence, "Proposed Reply by the Secretary of the Air Force to the letter from the Honorable John E. Moss, Chairman, Govern ment Information Subcommittee of the Committee on Govern ment Operations," 25 June 1 956 (MAFB ) ; letter from Donald A.
Quarles to Representative John E. Moss, 5 July 1 956 (MAFB ) ; A. Francis Arcier to George T. Gregory, "Request-Progress on Status of 'Blue Book' Printing and Dissemination," 8 April 1958 (MAFB ) ; letter from John E. Moss to Donald A. Quarles, 17 June 1956 (MAFB ) .
25. Captain George T. Gregory, "Lecture on UFO Program for the ATI School," n.d., pp. 1-l l (MAFB ) .
26. J . Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry (Chicago : Henry Regnery, 1972 ) , p. 1 8 1 .
27. The information in this section was derived from case files at MAFB.
28. This film is in the Library of Congress Film Archives.
29. Christian Science Monitor, 1 May 1 956. Captain Gregory's marginal comments are contained in a special file at MAFB.
George T. Gregory, "Memorandum for AFOIN-4X1," 17 May 1 956 (at MAFB; AFOIN, and later AFCIN, is the Air Force Of fice of Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence) ; Gregory, "Memorandom for The Scientific Advisor," 21 May 1 956 I (MAFB ) ; Gregory, "Memorandum for Office of the Scientific Ad visor," 5 June 1 956 ( MAFB ) ; Colonel John Eriksen, "Memoran ' dum for Director of Intelligence," 1 June 1956 ( MAFB) ; ' Brigadier General Harold E. Watson to A. M. Rochlen, n.d.
(MAFB ) . See also file on motion picture at MAFB.
30. For a convenient compilation of most years of sighting re . ports, see Edward U. Condon, project director, Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (New York: Bantam ed., 1969) , p.5 14. Many of the statistics are not consistent with Blue Book · statistics. For Blue Book's version, see "Project Blue Book, 1964- 1 968" ( MAFB, APRO, NICAP) .
31. UFO Investigator, October 1 97 1 , pp. 1-4; letters from Key hoe to Lorenzen, 3 October 1956 and 21 October 1956 (APRO ) .
32. Letters from Keyhoe to Lorenzen, 22 January 1 957 and 1 February 1957 (APRO ) ; Keyhoe, Top Secret, p.44. See also Mor ris K. Jessup, "A Report on Washington, D.C.'s NICAP," Saucer News 4 (February-March 1957 ) : 5.
33. Letter from Keyhoe to Lorenzen, 30 March 1 954 (APRO).
See also letter from Keyhoe to Lorenzen, 6 November 1 955 (APRO) .
34. Keyhoe, Top Secret, p.20. See also UFO Investigator, July 1957, for short biographies of members of the board of governors.
UFO Investigator, July 1957, pp.28, 30.
3 5. UFO Investigator, October 1971, p.1; letters from Keyhoe to Lorenzen, 1 February 1 957 (APRO ) .
3 6 . Letter from Keyhoe to Lorenzen, 1 0 June 1 957 (APRO); 288 Notes Donald Keyhoe, "Statement by Major Donald E. Keyhoe, Director of NICAP ," 7 March 1957 (NICAP & APRO) .
37. UFO Investigator, July 1957, p.l .
3 8 . Colonel Leonard T. Glaser, Memorandum to Commander, Air TechnicĀ\! Intelligence Center, "UFO Program," 1 7 December 1958 (MAFB ) ; letter from Major Robert F. Spence to Max Mil ler, 1 1 June 1 957 (NICAP ) ; letter from Major General Joe W.
Kelly to Donald Keyhoe, 1 5 November 1957 (NICAP ) .
3 9 . Colonel Frank B. Chappell to Chief, AFOIN-X, "New AFOIN-4 Plan on UFOBs,'' 1 5 May 1957 (MAFB ) ; Colonel Frank B. Chappell to AFOIN-XI Colonel Hurley, "New AFOIN- 4 Plan on UFOBs,'' n.d. (MAFB ) ; Memorandum (unsigned) to Chief, AFCIN-XI, "New AFCIN-4 Plan on UFOBs,'' 13 Febru ary 1958 (MAFB ) ; A. Francis Arcier, Memorandum for Director of Intelligence, "Publication of UFO Special Report No. 1 4,'' 4 January 1957 (MAFB) • 40. Air Force Regulation 200-2, 5 February 1958 (MAFB ) ; Memorandum to Director AFOIN-4, "Publication of UFO Special Report No. 14,'' 10 May 1 957 (MAFB) ; Keyhoe, Conspiracy, pp.24-25.
41 . Colonel John W. Meador, AISS, to the Assistant Chief of Staff/Intelligence, Headquarters, USAF, "Processing of Reports of UFO Sightings," 8 October 1953 (MAFB) ; Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff Harold E. Watson to General Charles B. Dougher, Commander ATIC, "The UFO Program," 21 July 1 959 (MAFB ) ; Air Force Regulation 200-2, 14 September 1959, contained in Lawrence J. Tacker, Flying Saucers and the U.S. Air Force (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1960 ) , pp.9 1-98.
42. Condon , Scientific Study of UFOs, p.5 14.
43. These sightings are more fully discussed in Hynek, The UFO Experience, pp. 123-28; his analysis is based on a NICAP study. The information for the Levelland sightings is contained in "Air Intelligence Information Report,'' No. 141957, 2-8 November 1957 (MAFB) . See also New York Times, 4 November 1957, p.4.
44. Hynek, The UFO Experience, p.124.
45. "Air Intelligence Information Report," No. 141957, 2-8 November 1957, p.5 (MAFB) ; Hynek, The UFO Experience, p.125.
46. Hynek, The UFO Experience, pp.125-26.
47. Hynek, The UFO Experience, pp. 126, 1 0, 126.
48. "Air Intelligence Information Report," No. 141957, 2-8 November 1957, p. 1 6 (MAFB) .
49. New York Times, 5 November 1957, p.22; Hynek, The UFO Experience, p.128.
50. George T. Gregory, Disposition Form, "Request for Air Science Division Review of Levelland Case,'' 4 December 1957 (MAFB ) ; Department of Defense, News Release No. 1 108-57, 15 November 1957 (NICAP & APRO ) .
5 1. George T. Gregory, Disposition Form, "Request for Air Notes 289 Science Division Review of Levelland Case," 4 December 1957 (MAFB ) .
52. Department of Defense, News Release No. 1083-58, 5 November 1957 (NICAP & APRO) ; New York Times, 7 Novem- ber 1957, p.24.
· 53. New York Times, 6 November 1957, p.12; Condon, Scien tific Study of UFOs, p.5 14.
54. Memorandum (unsigned) to Chief, AFCIN-XI, "New AFCIN-4 Plan on UFOBs," 13 February 1958 (MAFB) .
55. Keyhoe, Top Secret, pp.155-65.
56. Letter from Lawrence Tacker to unspecilied person, 12 March 1958 (MAFB ) ; Memorandum (unsigned) to Chief, AFCIN-XI, "New AFCIN-4 Plan on UFOBs," 13 February 1958 (MAFB).
7 The Battle for Congressional Hearings 1. Letter (unsigned) from Air Force Office of Legislative Li aison to Frelinghuysen, 1 2 September 1957 (in the files of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, Ken sington, Maryland, to which I hereafter refer as NICAP) ; letter from Major General Joe W. Kelly, Director of Legislative Liaison to Lee Metcalf, 1 1 January 1957 (NICAP) .
2. Colonel Glen W. Clark, Chief Public Information Division, OIS, Memorandum for Deputy Director of Information Services, SAFS, "Congressional Public Hearings-Unidentified Flying Ob jects," 3 February 1958 (in the files of the Air Force Archives, Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama, to which I hereafter refer as MAFB ) . See also Donald E. Keyhoe, Flying Saucers: Top Secret (New York: Putnam, 1960), pp.81-96.
Memorandum for Chief AFCIN-XI, "New AFCIN-4 Plan on UFOBs,'' 13 February 1958 (MAFB; AFCIN stands for Air Force Office of Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence ) .
3. Memorandum for Chief AFCIN-XI, "New AFCIN-4 Plan on UFOBs,'' 1 3 February 1958 (MAFB) ; Major General Arno H.
Luehman, Memorandum for Director of Legislative Liaison, "McClellan Subcommittee Statement Concerning Air Force Han dling of UFO Reports,'' 28 February 1958 (MAFB ) ; Major Gen eral Joe W. Kelly, Memorandum for Director of Information Services, "McClellan Subcommittee Statement Concerning Air Force Handling of UFO Reports,'' 3 March 1958 (MAFB) .
4 . Letter from John E. Henderson to Secretary of Defense Neil H. McElroy, 8 May 1958 (MAFB) ; Major Byrne, Memorandum for the Record, "Briefing of Representative Henderson and Col leagues on the Air Force Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) Pro gram," 23 June 1958 (MAFB ) .
5. Major General W. P . Fisher, Director of Legislative Liaison, Memorandum for the Under Secretary of the Air Force, "Hear ings on Unidentified Flying Objects,'' n.d.
(MAFB) ; Colonel 290 Notes Bourne Adekson, Deputy Director of Legislative Liaison, Memorandum for the Assistant Chief of Staff/Intelligence, "Hear ings on Unidentified Flying Objects," 6 August 1958 (MAFB) ; Major Byrne, Memorandum for the Record, "Hearings on Uni dentified Flying Objects (UFO ) ," 1 2 August 1 958 (MAFB ) .
6 . Major General W. P. Fisher, Memorandum for the Under Secretary of the Air Force, "Air Force Briefing for the Subcom mittee on Atmospheric Phenomena, House Select Committee on A'Stronautics and Space Exploration, on Unidentified Flying Ob jects," 1 1 August 1958 (MAFB ) ; George T. Gregory, Transcript of UFO Briefing, "UFO Program," 8 August 1958, pp.1-1 1 (MAFB ) .
7. George T. Gregory, Transcript o f UFO Briefing, "UFO Pro gram," 8 August 1958, pp. 1-l l (MAFB) .
8. Ibid.
9. For examples, see: letters from Major General Fisher to Senator Hary F. Byrd, 20 January 1959; Fisher to Senator Mike Momoney, 4 June 1959; Fisher to Senator Barry Goldwater, 29 July 1959 (NICAP) .
1 0. Letter from Richard Homer, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Research and Development, to Senator Barry Gold water, January 1958 (NICAP) ; letter from Major General Fisher to Senator Byrd, 20 January 1959 (NICAP).
1 1. Department of Defense, Air Force Fact Sheet No. 986-58, 6 October 1958 (NICAP).
1 2. Ibid.
13. Colonel Leonard T. Glaser, Memorandum for Commander of Air Technical Intelligence Center, "UFO Program," 17 Decem ber 1958 (MAFB ) ; Major General Charles B. Dougher to As sistant Chief of Staff/Intelligence, Draft, 16 December 1958 (MAFB) ; Draft of proposed message to all Major Commands, n.d. (MAFB ) .
14. Colonel Glaser, "UFO Program," 17 December 1958 (MAFB ) ; Major General Dougher, Draft, 16 December 1958 (MAFB) ; Draft of proposed message to all Major Commands, n.d. (MAFB).
1 5. Colonel William E. Boyd, Disposition Form, "Support of the UFO Program," n.d. (MAFB ) ; William E. Boyd, Disposition Form, to AFCIN-4X4, "UFO Program," n.d. (MAFB ) ; Boyd Disposition Form, to AFCIN-4X5, "Support of UFO Program," n.d. (MAFB ) ; Boyd, Disposition Form, to AFCIN-4X6, "UFO Program," n.d. (MAFB ) ; Charles B. Dougher to Brigadier Gen- eral Howe, "UFO Program," 17 December 1958 (MAFB) ; Leon- f ard T. Glaser, Memorandum for the Record, 1 6 December 1958 (MAFB) .
1 6. J . Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience: A Scientific l111.uiry (Chicago_: Henry Regnery, 1 972 ) , p.1 87.
17. Interview with Robert Friend, 7 January 1974.
18. Robert J. Friend, Memorandum for the Record, "Uniden- Notes 291 tified Flying Object · Conference," n.d.
(20 February 1959?), pp.2-3 (MAFB).
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Colonel H. K. Gilbert to Lt. Colonel Parris, Disposition Form, "Unidentified Flying Objects Advisory Panel," 1 6 March 1959 (MAFB) ; Colonel Vincent C. Rethman to Theodore Hieatt, 29 April 1959 (MAFB ) ; Rethman to Chaplain Graham, 8 May 1959 (MAFB ) ; R. J. Friend, "AFCIN-4E4g Weekly Activity Re port," 8 May 1959 (MAFB ) .
22. Memorandum for the Record, ''Meeting o f UFO Panel," 7 April 1960, 12 April 1960 (MAFB ) ; interview with J. Allen Hy nek, 27 September 1972.
23. USAF UFO Program," unsigned, 28 September 1 959, pp.1-3 (MAFB ) . See also Dougher to AFCIN (General Walsh) , "UFO Program," n.d. (MAFB) .
24. Colonel Richard R. Shoop, "Study by AFCIN-4E4, Uni dentified Flying Objects-Project #5771 (Blue Book) ," 28 Sep tember 1959, pp. 1-2 (MAFB) .
25. Colonel Shoop, "Study by AFCIN-4E4 on UFOs," 2 8 Sep tember 1959, pp. 1, 2, 3 (MAFB) .
26. Ibid.
27. "Study by AFCIN-4E4, Unidentified Flying Objects Pro gram Project #5771 (Blue Book)," unsigned, n.d., p.2 (MAFB) ; this document differs somewhat from the Shoop memorandum above. Colonel Shoop, "Study by AFCIN-4E4 on UFOs," 28 Sep tember 1959, pp.2, 3 (MAFB) . See also Charles B. Dougher to AFCIN (General Walsh) , "UFO Program," 28 September 1959 (MAFB) .
28. Shoop to Lt. General Bernard A. Schriever, "Transfer of USAF Aerial Phenomena Program," 1 December 1959 (MAFB) ; Major General James Ferguson to Headquarters, USAF (AFCIN) , "Transfer of USAF Aerial Phenomena Program," S February 1960 (MAFB ) ; Colonel Aaron J. Boggs, Referral No tice, ''Transfer of USAF Aerial Phenomena Program," 7 March 1960 (MAFB) ; letter from J. Allen Hynek to General Holzman, 17 February 1960 (MAFB ) ; letter from General Holzman to J.
Allen Hynek, 8 March 1960 (MAFB) .
29. Colonel Philip G . Evans to AFCIN-4 (M/Gen. Dougher), "Transfer of USAF Aerial Phenomena Program," 31 March 1960 (MAFB) ; A. Francis Arcier, Memorandum for Major General Dougher, ''Transfer of UFO," 1 April 1960 (MAFB) ; letter (un signed) to AFCIN (Major General Walsh) , "Transfer of USAF Aerial Phenomena Program," n.d.
(MAFB) ; Major General Wa1sh to SAFOI (Major General A. H. Luehman), ''Transfer of USAF Aerial Phenomena Program," nd .. (MAFB) .
30. Keyhoe, Top Secret, p.274, passim.
3 1 . Robert J. Friend, "Memorandum for the Record," n.d.
(MAFB ) ; interview with Robert Friend, 7 January 1974.
292 Notes 32. UFO Investigator 1 (December-January 1960-6 1 ) : 3.
33. Lawrence Tacker, Flying Saucers and the U.S. Air Force (Princeton, N.J. : Van Nostrand, 1960 ) , pp. 1 2, 1 6, 17, 1 8.
34. Tacker, p.83 .
3 5. Tacker, p.84.
36. Tacker, pp. 85, 47, 87. See also letter from Colonel Carl M.
Nelson to Senator Philip A. Hart, 4 April 1960 (NICAP) .
37. Transcript, "Washington Viewpoint," 20 December 1960 (MAFB ) .
3 8 . Robert J . Friend to AFCIN-4E (Colonel Evans ) , "Possible Congressional Hearing," 7 June 1 960 (MAFB ) ; Richard R.
Shoop, "UFO Briefing," 1 1 July 1 960 ( MAFB ) ; Robert J. Friend, Task Activity Report, 1 8 July 1 960 (MAFB ) ; Colonel Philip G.
Evans, "UFO Case Summaries," 28 July 1 960 (MAFB ) .
39. Friend, Task Activity Report, 1 8 July 1960 (MAFB) ; Hy nek, The UFO Experience, pp.267-69.
40. Major General Amo H. Luehman, Director of Information, Memorandum for Assistant Chief of Staff/Intelligence, "Uniden tified Flying Objects," 2 August 1960 (MAFB ) .
4 1 . Task Activity Report, 2 0 July 1960 (MAFB ) ; Richard R.
Shoop to AFCIN-4X6, "ATIC Capability for Investigating Sight ings of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena," 20 July 1960 (MAFB ) ; Philip G. Evans to Lt. Colonel Sullivan, "ATIC Capability for Investigating Sightings of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena." 29 July 1960 (MAFB ) ; Luehman to Assistant Chief of Staff/Intelli gence, 2 August 1960 (MAFB ) ; Colonel Barton S. Pulling, Chief of Staff, ATIC, to AFCIN-P, 17 August 1960 (MAFB ) .
42. Shoop to AFCIN-4X6, "ATIC Capability," 20 July 1960 (MAFB ) ; Friend to AFCIN-R, Joint Messageform, 26 January 1 9 6 1 (MAFB ) .
43 . Philip G . Evans to Lt. Colonel Tacker, "ATIC UFO Inves tigation Capability," 17 March 1961 (MAFB ) .
44. Department of Defense, News Release, "Fact Sheet Air Force UFO Report," No. 81 2-60, 2 1 July 1 960 (NICAP and the files of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, Tucson, Arizona, to which I hereafter refer as APRO ) ; Philip G. Evans to Headquarters USAF, "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena." 27 De- cember 1960 (MAFB) .
· .
45. Letter from Carl M. Nelson to Senator Oren E. Long, 27 ; April 1 960 (NICAP ) ; letter from Joseph Kingsley to John Car- .ɣ starphen, 26 May 1 960 (NICAP ) ; letter from Gordon B. Knight X to Estes Kefauver, 6 April 1 960 (NICAP) .
46. Springfield ( Massachusetts) Union, contained in UFO In vestigator 1 1 (January-February 1962 ) : 3 ; UFO Investigator 1 1 , (July-August 1961 ) : 1 ; UFO Investigator 1 1 (October 1961 ) : 1 .
47. UFO Investigator 1 1 (July-August 1961 ) : 1-4.
48. Colonel Edward H. Wyn to Brigadier General Arthur A.
Pierce, Commander, Air Force Systems Command, "Con gressional Investigation of the UFO Program," 14 July 1961 Notes 293 (MAFB) ; Robert Friend to AFSC (SCGP) , "Congressional Committee Staff Member Visit," 25 August 1961 (MAFB) .
49. Letter from Richard P. Hines to Robert J . Friend, 21 Au gust 1961 (MAFB ) .
50. Letter from Joseph E. Karth to Donald E . Keyhoe, 2 8 Au gust 1961 (NICAP & MAFB) ; Robert J. Friend to Colonel Wynn, "Unidentified Flying Objects," 4 December 1961 (MAFB ) .
51. UFO Investigator 1 1 (October 1961 ) : 2; letter from Joseph E. Karth to Donald Keyhoe, 19 September 1961 , contained in, UFO Investigator 1 1 (October 1961 ) : 1 .
52. Interview with Coral Lorenzen, June 197 1 .
53. The A.P.R.O. Bulletin, July 1962; letter from Richard Hall to Coral Lorenzen, 7 September 1962 (APRO); letter from Coral Lorenzen to Richard Hall, 20 September 1 962 (APRO) .
54. Saucer News 5 (August-September 1958 ) : 1 1-1 3. See also Winston F. Gardlebacher, "Does NICAP Really Exist?,'' Saucer News 15 (Summer 1968) : 9-1 1 ; Frank Strange, "NICAP Has Gone Too Far!,'' Saucer News 15 (Summer 1968 ) : 2-3. Letter from Donald Keyhoe to Zan Overall, 1 9 September 1958 (NI CAP) . See also telegram from Donald Keyhoe to Gabriel Green, 6 July 1 959 (APRO) : "This is to warn you against repeating any claim that the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phe nomena is part of your flying saucer clubs organization." Letter from Donald Keyhoe to NICAP membership, 30 June 1961 (APRO) .
55. See also UFO Investigator, special issue (October 1962) , for basic outline of this compendium.
56. Edward U. Condon, project director, Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (New York: Bantam ed., 1969) , p.
514.
51. Robert J. Friend to Colonel Wynn, "Trip Report (UFO) ,'' 9 April 1 962 (MAFB) ; Edward H. Wynn to Headquarters USAF, "Project Blue Book (Unidentified Flying Objects) ," 20 April 1962 (MAFB) .
58. Friend to Wynn, "Trip Report (UFO) ," 9 April 1962 (MAFB) ; Wynn to Colonel Carlisle, "Unidentified Aerial Phe nomena," n.d. (MAFB) .
59. Friend to Wynn, "Trip Report (UFO) ," 9 April 1 962 (MAFB) ; Wynn to Headquarters USAF, "Project Blue Book (Unidentified Flying Objects) ,'' 20 April 1962 (MAFB ) ; Wynn to Carlisle, "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena," n.d. (MAFB ) .
60. Hynek, The UFO Experience, p.198. See also James E.
McDonald, Unidentified Flying Objects: Greatest Scientific Prob lem of Our Times, address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors (Washington, D.C.: Pittsburgh Subcommittee of NICAP 1 967; published at author's request) .
· ' 6 1 . Interview with Quintanilla, in Herbert Strentz "A Survey of Press Attitudes Toward UFOs, 1 947-1966" (Ph.D.
' dissertation, Northwestern University, 1970), pp.21 6-17.
294 Notes 62. Draft (unsigned) of letter to Carl Vmson, n.d. (MAFB).
See also Commander Arthur I . Pierce to Lt. Colonel Desert, 1 8 July 1963 (MAFB ) ; Colonel Eri c de Jonckheere, Staff Summary Sheet.
"Congressional Correspondence on the U.S. Air Force UFO Program, Congressman Carl Vinson," 1 8 July 1963 (MAFB ) ; Colonel de Jonckheere, Memorandum to Headquarters, USAF, "Unidentified Flying Objects," 22 July 1963 ( MAFB ) .
6 3 . Richard Hall, ed., The UFO Evidence (Washington. D.C. : NICAP, 1964) ; see United States Air Force, "Project Blue Book, 19¶1967" (MAFB, NICAP, APRO ) .
64 . Donald Menzel and Lyle G. Boyd, The World of Flying Saucers (Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1963 ) , pp. 1 5, 133, 134.
65. Menzel and Boyd, pp.142, 143; "Project Blue Book, 19o 67" (MAFB, NICAP, APRO ) .
66. Socorro, New Mexico, sighting information on file at MAFB. Se also Hynek, The UFO Experience, pp.144-45.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid.
69. Socorro, New Mexico, sighting information on file at MAFB. See also Hynek, The UFO Experience, pp.144-45; Chris tian Science Monitor, 1 May 1 9 64, p.3.
70. Socorro, New Mexico, sighting information on file at MAFB.
8 1965: The Turning Point in the Controversy 1. Herbert Strentz, "A Survey of Press Coverage of Uniden tified Flying Objects, 1 947-1966" (Ph.D. dissertation. North western University, 1 970 ) , p.47.
2. Charleston (South Carolina) Evening Post, 16 July 1965; Orlando (Florida) Sentinel, 21 September 1965, p.l3-b.
3. Fort Worth Star Telegram, Richmond (Virginia) New!J Leader, and Alameda (California) Times-Star, cited in Orlando Sentinel, 21 September 1965, p. l 3 -b.
4. Christian Science Monitor, 1 6 August 1965, p.1, 21 August 1965, p.B-1 , 3 September 1965, p.5.
5. Edward U. Condon, project director, Scientific Study of Uni dentified Flying Objects (New York: Bantam ed., 1969 ) , p.514; San FerTUJndo (California) Valley Times, 4 August 1965.
6. Wall Street JourTUJI, 1 3 December 1965, pp. 1, 20.
1. John Fuller, "Tradewinds : Report of an Unidentified Flying Object in Exeter, N.IL," Saturday Review, 2 October 1965, p.10; John Fuller, Incident at Ereter (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1966) , passim; Fuler, "Incident at Exeter," Look, 22 February 1966.
8. Fuller, "Tradewinds : Exeter People Give Accounts of Obser vations," Saturday Review, 22 January 1 966, p. 14; Fuller, "Trade winds: U.S. Air Force's Reactions to Recent Sightings," Saturday Notes 295 Review, 1 6 April 1 966, p. 1 0 ; UFO Investigator 3 (January-Febru ary 1966 ) : 5.
9. UFO Investigator 3 (January-February 1 966) : 5-6.
10. J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry (Chicago : Henry Regnery, 1972) , p.198; General E. B. LeBailly, Memorandum for Military Director, Scientific Advisory Board, "Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) ," 28 September 1965 (in the files at the Air Force Archives at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, to which I hereafter refer as MAFB) , and also contained in Condon, pp.816-17.
1 1 . LeBailly, Memorandum for Military Director, Scientific Advisory Board, "Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) ," 28 Sep tember 1965 (MAFB) , and also contained in Condon, pp.816-17.
12. "Special Report of the USAF Scientific Advisory Board Ad Hoc Committee to Review Project 'Blue Book'," March 1966, pp.1-9 (MAFB and in Condon, pp.81 1-1 5 ) .
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Gallup Political Index, Report No. 1 1 , April 1966 (Ameri can Institute of Public Opinion) , p.13. See also George H. Gal lup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion I935-1971, vol. 2 (New York: Random House, 1972 ) , p.2004.
1 6. New York Times, 23 March 1966, p.22. For a good sum mary of the Dexter sighting, see "Well-Witnessed Invasion by Something: Australia to Michigan,'' Life, 1 April 1966, pp.24-3 1.
17. J. Allen Hynek, "Are Flying Saucers Real?,'' Saturday Eve ning Post, 1 7 December 1 966, p.20; David R. Saunders and R.
Roger Harkins, UFOs? Yes! (New York: Signet, 1968 ) , p.61.
1 8. Hynek, "Are Flying Saucers Real?," p.20; Strentz, "A Sur vey of Press Coverage of UFOs," p.52. See also Raleigh (North Carolina) News and Observer, 27 March 1966, pp.1 , 3.
19. Life, 1 April 1966, pp.24-3 1 ; "Notes and Comment: Saucer Flap,'' The New Yorker, 9 April 1 966, p.33; "Fatuus Season: An Arbor and Hillsdale Sightings,'' Time, 1 April 1 966, p.25B; Wis consin State Journal (Madison) , 26 March 1966, p,1, and 29 March 1966 (private clipping) .
20. New York Times, 27 March 1966, Pt. 4, p.2 and p.61, 23 March 1966, p.43; Christian Science Monitor, 30 March 1966, p.24, 1 1 April 1966, p.1 6.
21. New York Times, 26 March 1966, p.3 1 ; Gerald Ford to L Mendel Rivers, 28 March 1966, in U.S. House, Committee on Armed Services, Hearings, Unidentified Flying Objects, 89th Cong., 2d sess., 5 April 1966, pp.6046-47 (I hereafter refer to this as Hearings) ; Detroit News, 30 March 1966, p.lO.
22. Hearings, pp.601 1-42.
23. Hearings, pp.599 1-6005.
24. Hearings, pp.6007-8.
25. Hearings, pp.6045, 6069-74.
26. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas J. Hester, "History of the 296 Notes Directorate of Science and Technology Deputy Chief of Staff, Research and Development, 1 January 1966 through 30 June 1966," n.d., pp.27-28 (typescript at MAFB ) ; U. Colonel Harold A. Steiner, Memorandum for the Record, "Implementing SAB Ad Hoc Committe on Project Blue Book Recommendations," 20 April 1966 (MAFB) ; U.S. House, Committe on Foreign Afairs, Hearings, Foreign Assistance Act of 1966, 89th Cong., 2d sess., 30 March 1966, pp.330, 332.
27. Steiner, Memorandum for the Record, "Implementing SAB Ad Hoc Committee on Project Blue Book Recommendations," 20 April 1966, pp.1, 2 (MAFB ) .
28. Steiner, Memorandum for the Record, "Implementing SAB Ad Hoc Committe on Project Blue Book Recommendations," 20 April 1966, pp.1, 2 (MAFB ) ; Lt. Colonel Robert R. Hippler, Memorandum for the Record, "Scientific Panel to Investigate Re ported Sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs)," 22 April 1966 (MAFB) .
29. Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Af fairs), "Air Force to Contract with Scientists for UFO Investiga tions," 9 May 1966 (MAFB). Most of the information for the section on placing the Colorado project was obtained from Saun ders and Harkins. pp.25-29.
30. Saunders and Harkins, pp.29, 28, 29.
31. Nation, 26 September 1966, p.269; Major David J. Shea, "The UFO Phenomenon : A Study in Public Relations" (Master's thesis, University of Denver, 1972), Appendix C, pp. 150-51, 157.
32. Letter from James E. McDonald to T. F. Malone, 20 July 1966 (personal files ) ; Saunders and Harkins, pp.39-41 .
3 3 . Denver Post, 7 October 1966, p.3, and 6 October 1966, _t pp.1, 19; see also New York Times, 14 August 1966, pp.1, 70.
34. Denver Post, 7 October 1966, p.22; John Lear, "Research in America: Dr. Condon's Study Outlined," Saturday Review, 3 December, 1 966, p.87; Denver Post, 7 October 1966, p.3.
35. Hynek, Saturday Evening Post, pp.17-21 ; UFO Investigator 3 (October-November 1966) : 2.
36. Union City (New Jersey) Hudson Dispatch, 21 October 1966 (from the files of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, Kensington, Maryland, to which I hereafter refer as NICAP) ; Hollywood (California) Citizen-News, 27 Oc tober 1966, p.A-2; "Can Dr. Condon See It Through?," Nation, 3 1 October 1966, p.436; see also "Condon for Regent," Nation, 26 September 1966, p. 269.
37. Quoted in Denver Post, 9 October 1966, p.29.
38. Denver Rocky Mountain· News, 8 October 1966; see also Denver Post, 8 October 1966, p.26.
39. Denver Post, 9 October 1966, p.47, and 1 1 October 1966, p.21.
40 . Boulder Daily Camera, 30 October 1966, pp.1, 6; New -i Notes 297 York Times, 1 6 November 1966, p.28; Elmira (New York) Star Gazette, 26 January 1967 (NICAP) .
41. Lt.
Colonel Robert R.
Hippler, Memorandum for the Record, "Scientific Panel to Investigate Reported Sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects," 22 April 1966 (MAFB ) ; Colonel Raymond S. Sleeper, Deputy Chief of Staff for Foreign Technol ogy, to Foreign Technology Division, "Scientific Panel Investiga tion of Unidentified Flying Objects, " 2 June 1 966 (MAFB) ; U.S.
Air Force, "Air Force Regulation 80-17," 19 September 1966, contained in Condon, pp.819-28.
42. See Walter Sullivan's review in the New York Times, 21 August 1 966, p.27; Daniel Cohen, "Review of Incident at Exeter," Science Digest, October 1966, pp.42-44; "Heavenly Bogeys," Time, 2 September 1 966, pp.8 1-82; Oscar Handlin, "Readers' Choice," Atlantic Monthly 21 8 (August 1966 ) : 1 17.
43. John Lear, ''Th,e Disputed CIA Document on UFOs," Sat urday Review, 3 September 1966, pp.45-50; New York Times, 21 October 1966, p. 9; Denver Post, 9 October 1966, p.29.
44. "UFO's for Real?," Newsweek, 10 October 1966, p.70.
45. J. Allen Hynek, "UFOs Merit Scientific Study," Science, 21 October 1966, p.329.
46. Ibid.
47. New York Times, 16 November 1966, p.28, 4 April 1966, p.33 ; Christian Science Monitor, 21 April 1966, p.18; Isaac Asi· mov, "UFOs-What I Think," Science Digest, June 1966, p.47 .
48. Philip J.
Klass, "Plasma Theory May Explain Many UFOs," Aviation Week, 22 August 1966, pp.48-50 + ; Klass, "Many UFOs Are Identified as Plasmas," Aviation Week, 3 October 1966, pp.54-55 + ; Klass, UFOs-Identified (New York: Random House, 1968 ) ; New York Times, 23 August 1966, p.3 6; John ' Lear, "Scientific Explanation for the UFOs?," Saturday Review, 1 October 1966, pp.67-69; "Great Balls of Fire," Newsweek, S Sep tember 1966, p.78; "Management Newsletter," Electrical World, 15 April 1968, pp.57-60; Chicago Tribune, 9 October 1966, pp.1B, 2B; "UFOs or Kugelblitz?," Popular Electronics, Septem ber 1 966, p84.
49. For critiques of Klass's theory, see : James McDonald, Uni dentified Flying Objects: Greatest Scientific Problem of Our Times, address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 1966 (Washington, D.C. : Pittsburgh Subcommittee of NI CAP, 1967; published at the Author's request) ; Chicago Tribune, 9 October 1966, pp.1B, 2B. For electrical engineers' critique, see: "Management Newsletter," Electrical World, 1 5 April 1968, pp.57-60. Also see Richard Hall's letter to the editor, Aviation Week, 10 October 1966, p.130.
50. William Markowitz, "The Physics and Metaphysics of Uni dentified Flying Objects," Science, 15 September 1967, pp.1274- 79.
51. Richard J. Rosa, "Letters," Science, 8 December 1967, 298 Notes p.1265; William T.
Powers, "Letters," Science, 8 December 1967, p. 1265; Jacques Vallee, "Letters," Science, 8 December 1967, p.1266.
52. Carl Sagan and I. S. Shklovskii, Intelligent Life in the Uni verse (San Francisco : Holden-Day, 1966) ; see also John Lear, "What Are the Unidentified Aerial Objects?," Saturday Review, 6 August 1966, pp.41-49. Carl Sagan, "The Saucerian Cult," Satur day Review, 6 August 1966, pp.50-52.
53. Hynek, Science, 21 October 1966, p.329; Hynek, "White Paper on UFOs," Christian Science Monitor, 23 May 1967, p.9; Hynek, ''The UFO Gap," Playboy, December 1967, pp.143-46, 267, 269-7 1 .
54. McDonald, UFOs: Greatest Scientific Problem, pp.6, 17.
55. McDonald, UFOs: Greatest Scientific Problem, p.l l.
56. "Resume o f telephone conversation between Colonel Stan ley (in Col. Jack's office, SAFOI) and Colonel Holum 4 April 1967," n.a. (typescript at MAFB) • . 51. Ibid.
58. Letter from James E. McDonald to Richard Hall, 8 March 1969 (personal files) .
59. Interview with J . Allen Hynek, February 1972.
60. Letter from James McDonald to Richard Hall, 10 February 1971 (personal files ) .
61. See "AIA Committee Loks at UFO Problem," Astronau tics and Aeronautics, December 1968, p.12; "Background," As tronautics and Aeronautics, November 1970, p.5 1 . I wil discuss the AIAA's conclusions and recommendations in chapter 9.
62. New York Times, 16 November 1966, p.28; "Out of This World : COnvention of the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America," Newsweek, 7 November 1966, p.38; New York Times, 16 November 1966, p.28.
63. Frank Edwards, Flying Saucers-Serious Business (New York: Bantam Books, 1966 ) ; Frank Edwards, Flying Saucers Here and Now/ (New York: Bantam Books, 1967).
64. John Fuller, The Interrupted Journey (New York: Dial , Press, 1966).
t 65. Jim and Coral Lorenzen, Flying Saucers: The Startling Ev- ' : idence of the Invasion from Outer Space (New York: Signet 1 Books, 1966) ; Jim and COral Lorenzen, UFOs Over the Americas · (New York: Signet Books, 1 968) ; Lorenzen, Flying Saucer Occu pants (New York: Signet, 1968 ) ; Lorenzen, UFO's: The Whole Story (New York: Signet Books, 1969 ) .
66. Jacques Vallee, Anatomy of a Phenomenon ( Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965 ) ; Jacques and Janine Vallee, Challenge to 1 Science: The UFO Enigma (Chicago : Henry Regnery, 1966).
- c , ' Notes 299 9 The Condon Committee and Its Aftennatb 1. David Saunders and R. Roger Harkins, UFOs? Yes! (New York: Signet, 1968 ) , pp.67-74; I obtained much of the informa tion on the internal methodology and disputes from this book. Ed ward U. Condon, project director, Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (New York: Bantam edition, 1969 ) , p.1 5, to which I will hereafter refer as Condon Report; see also Saunders and Harkins, p.50.
2. Saunders and Harkins, pp.67-69, 135. See also Mary Lou Armstrong's letter of resignation in J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1972), p.245.
3. Saunders and Harkins, pp.1 1 5-17, 1 1 9; letter from Edward U. Condon to Donald E. Keyhoe, 2 February 1 967 (in the files of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, Kensington, Maryland, to which I will hereafter refer as NI CAP) .
4 . 1967 Congress of Scientific Ufologists (New York: privately printed, 1 967 ) , p.l4.
5. Saunders and Harkins, pp.78-80, 132-33.
6. Saunders and Harkins, p. 141.
7. Ibid.
8. Saunders and Harkins, pp.81-108, 1 3 6-37.
9. Memorandum from Robert J. Low to E. James Archer and Thurston E. Manning, "Some Thoughts on the UFO Project," 9 August 1966, typed copy (NICAP, and in the files of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, Tucson, Arizona, to which I hereafter refer as APRO) ; also contained in Saunders and Har kins, pp.242-44.
10. Saunders and Harkins, p.130.
1 1 . Letter from James E. McDonald to Robert J. Low, 3 1 Jan uary 1968, contained in Smmders and Harkins, pp.244-52. Saun ders and Harkins, pp.1 8 8-95; see also Denver Rocky Mountain News, 10 February 1968, p.3 1 . Letter from Mary Lou Armstrong to Edward U. Condon, 24 February 1 968, contained in Hynek, The UFO Experience, pp.243-45, see also Denver Post, 29 Febru ary 1968, p.61.
12. Saunders and Harkins, passim and p.21.
· 13. John Fuller, ''Flying Saucer Fiasco," Look, 14 May, 1968, ! p.63; Denver Post, 30 April 1968, p.15.
.
14. Fuller, "Flying Saucer Fiasco," Look, 14 May 1968, p.63.
· 15. "Libel Suit May Develop from UFO Hassle," Scientific J Research, 13 May 1968, p.l l ; Edward U. Condon, letter to Scien- tific Research, 27 May 1968, p.5; "UFO Study Credibility loud?," Industrial Research, June 1968, p.27; David J. Shea, ''The UFO Phenomenon: A Study in Public Relations" (Master's thesis, University of Denver, 1972) , p.39.
300 Notes 1 6. Daniel S. Greenberg, letter to Science, 25 October 1968, pp.410-1 1 .
17. Lewis M . Branscomb, letter to Science, 27 September 1968, p.1 297. See Also Philip M. Boffey, ''UFO Project: Trouble on the Ground," Science, 26 July 1 968, pp.339-42. Denver Post, 2 May 1968, p.18.
1 8. U.S., Congressional Record, 90th Cong., 2d sess., 30 April 1968, val. 1 14, part 9, p.l l0-43 ; Wall Street Journal, 3 May 1968, p.10; Denver Post, 2 May 1968, p.4.
19. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Science and As tronautics, Hearings, Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, 90th Cong., 2d sess., 29 July 1 968, p.205; I hereafter refer to this as Hearings. The transcript of the hearings is included without material submitted for the record in John Fuller, Aliens In The Skies (New York : Berkeley Medalion, 1969 ) . Hearings, p.2.
20. Hearings, pp.4, 14.
21. Hearings, p.5.
22. Hearings, pp. 14-15.
23. Hearings, pp. 1 8-19, 21, 26, 30.
24. Hearings, pp.8 6-98.
25. Hearings, pp. 1 06, 107.
26. Heairngs, pp. l l 3-21.
27. Hearings, p. 1 3 1 .
28. Hearings, pp. 135, 1 37.
29. Hearings, pp. 1 99-205, 214-24, 238, 208-9.
30. See The A .P.R.O. Bulletin from 1968 to present for list of scientists connected with the organization.
3 1 . New York Times, 17 January 1968, p.14.
32. "Review uf the University of Colorado Report on Uniden tified Flying Objects by a Panel of the National Academy of Sciences" (National Academy of Sciences, 1969) , pp.1-6. (Mime ographed; NICAP and in the Air Force Archives at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, to which I hereafter refer as MAFB) . Letter from Frederick Sietz to Alexander H. Flax. 8 January 1 969 (MAFB & NICAP) .
33. Condon Report, p.viii.
34. Condon Report, pp.x, xi.
35. Condon Report, p.9.
36. Condon Report, pp.245-80.
37. Condon Report, pp. 1 64, 256, 1 43, 1 7 1 .
38. Condon Report, pp.280-3 69, 396-480, 407.
39. Condon Report, pp. 1,5.
40. Condon Report, pp.25, 28, 29, 30-3 1.
4 1 . Condon Report, p.14.
42. Condon Report, pp.6-7.
43 . Philip Boffey, ''UFO Study: Condon Group Finds No Evi dence of Visits from Outer Space," Science, 17 January 1969, pp.260-62 ; New York Times, 1 1 January 1969, p.30.
44. "The Truth About the Condon Report," UFO Investigator Notes 301 (Special Edition), January 1969, pp. l -2; UFO Investigator, Feb· ruary-March 1969, p.2.
45. The A.PR.O. Bulletin, January-February 1969, pp.l, 5.
46. Cincinnati Enquirer, 13 January 1969, p.13 ; Cleveland Press, 10 January 1969, p.B3.
47. UFO Investigator, February-March 1969, p.5. See also Wil mington (Delaware) Morning News, 13 February 1969, p.19; Daily Wildcat (University of Arizona), 3 February 1969, p.6A.
48. J. Allen Hynek, ''The Condon Report and UFOs," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Apri1 1969, pp.39-42.
49. Hynek, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, pp.39-42.
50. Hynek, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, pp.39-42. Se also Condon Report, p.140.
5 1 . Robert M. L. Baker, ''The UFO Report: Condon Study Falls Short," Scientific Research , 14 April 1969, p.41.
52. Frederick J. Hooven, "UFOs and the Evidence," Saturday Review, 29 March 1969, pp.1 6-17, 62.
53. New York Times, 27 January 1969, p.32; Hudson Hoag land, "Beings From Outer Space-Corporeal and Spiritual," Science, 14 February 1969, p.7; Hong-Yee Chiu, Review of Con don committee report, Icarus, November 1969, pp.447-50.
54. U.S., Congressional Record, 91st Cong., 1st sess., 1969, vol. 1 1 5, part 1, pp.373-74; Tucson Daily Citizen, 13 January 1969 (NICAP) .
55. New York Times, 8 January 1969, pp.l and 2, 9 January 1969, p.36, 10 January 1969, pp.32 and 46, 1 1 January 1969, p.30, 12 January 1969, Sec. IV, p.6; New York Times, 10 January 1969, p.46, and 1 2 January 1969, Sec. IV, p.6; Wall Street Jour nal, 16 January 1969, p.18.
56. Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner, 1 0 January 1969, p.6A; Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, 19 January 1969, p.C-2.
57. Buffalo Evening News, 1 1 January 1969 (NICAP) ; Knoxville Journal, 1 1 January 1969 (NICAP) ; Chattanooga Post, 14 January 1969 (NICAP) ; Fort Smith (Arkansas} Times Record, 30 January 1969, p.2-B; Berkeley Daily Gazette, 13 Janu ary 1969 and 14 January 1969 (NICAP) .
58. Boffey, Science, 1 7 January 1969, pp.260-62; Alden Arma gnac, "Condon Report on UFOs: Should You Believe It?," Popular Science, April 1969, pp.72-76; "Flying Saucers, Not Real But-," U.S. News and World Report, 20 January 1969, p.6; "Shooting Down the UFOs: Condon Report," Newsweek, 20 January 1969, p.54.
59.
"Lost Cause: Condon Report," Nation, 27 January 1969, p. IOO; "Saucers End," Time, 17 January 1969, pp.44-45.
60. Edward U. Condon, "UFOs I Have Loved and Lost," address to the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 26 April 1969 (typed transcript at NICAP ) . This address was slightly revised and printed under the same title in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, December 1969, pp.6-8.
302 Notes 6 1 . U.S. Air Force, "Project Blue Book," 1967, p.l (MAFB, NICAP, APRO ) ; "Project Blue Book," 1968 (MAFB, NICAP, APRO) . See also "Project Blue Book," 1966 (MAFB, NICAP, APRO) ; and U.S. Air Force Press Release, ''Total UFO Sightings 1947-1 969," n.d. (MAFB, NICAP, APRO) .
62. William F. Marley Transcript of Briefing to General Wil liam C. Garland, 7 July 1967, pp. 1 8-19 (MAFB ) ; see also Ray mond Sleeper to William Garland, 28 July 1967 (MAFB) . Wil liam C. Garland to Raymond Sleeper, 2 August 1967 (MAFB ) .
6 3 . Letter from Raymond Sleeper to J . Alen Hynek, 4 Septem- ber 1968, contained in Hynek, The UFO Experience, p.1 67.
64. Hynek, The UFO Experience, pp.25 1-70.
65. Shea, p.48.
66. U.S. Air Force, News Release, "Air Force to Terminate Project 'Blue Book," No. 1 077-69, 17 December . 1969 (NICAP & APRO ) .
67. Tucson Daily Star, 19 December 1969, p. 1 2 (NICAP) ; New York Times, 1 8 December 1969, p.41, and 1 9 December 1969, p.54.
68. Interviews with Stuart Nixon, April 1 972 and May 1974.
69. Letter from Stuart Nixon to author, 29 May 1974; inter view with Richard Greenwell, April 1972.
70. Letter from Carl Sagan to James E. Mci:><>nald, 18 Septem ber 1968 (personal files) ; letter from McDonald to Richard Hal, 1 6 October 1968 (personal files ) .
7 1 . Letter from Edward U . Condon to Walter Orr Roberts, 5 September 1969 (personal files) ; letter from Thornton Page to J.
Allen Hynek, 23 September 1969 (from Hynek's files) ; Birming ham Post-Herald, 29 September 1969.
72. See Carl Sagan and Thornton Page, UFOs: A Scientific Debate (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1 973 ) .
73. See The A .P.R.O. Bulletin, November-December 1971 , for information on the Tucson symposium. Also see Coral Lorenzen, ed., Proceedings of the Eastern UFO Symposium, 23 January 1971, Baltimore, Maryland (Tucson, Ariz. : APRO, 1971 ) .
74. "UFO, An Appraisal of the Problem," Astronautics and Aeronautics, November 1970, pp.49-5 1 : "UFO Encounter I," As tronautics and Aeronautics 9 (July 197 1 ) : 66-70; "UFO Encoun ter ll," Astronautics and Aeronautics 9 (September 197 1 ) : 60-64; "UFOs Probably Exist," Industrial Research, April 1971, p.75.
75. J. Allen Hynek, "Commentary on the AAAS Symposium," t Flying Saucer Review 1 6 (March-April 1970 ) : 5; Donald I. War ren, "Status Inconsistency Theory and Flying Saucer Sightings," అ Science, 6 November 1970, pp.599-604.
76. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Appropriations, Hear- m ings, Civil Supersonic Aircraft Development (SST), 92d Cong., 1st sess., 1-4 March 1971, pp.334, 33 6, 340-4 1. See also New York Times, 3 March 1971, p.87.
77. SST Hearings, pp.587, 592.
Notes 303 78. George Gaylord Simpson's remarks in Carl Sagan, ed., Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1973 ) pp.363-64; Shea, Appendix C, p. 1 57; Washington Post, 13 July 1972, p.A35.
79. Bruce C. Murray, "Reopening the Question," Science, 28 August 1972, pp.688-89.
80. Shea, Appendix C, pp. 1 50-51, 1 57.
10 1973: Echoes of the Past 1. For more analyses of the 1 973-74 wave, see : Eileen Buckle, "Major 'Flap' in the United States," Flying Saucer Review (Lon don) 19 (November-December 1973 ) : 2-5; George D. Fawcett, "1973-Big for UFOs," Skylook, February 1 974, pp.10-l l ; Ted Phillips "14 Ring Reports in 1973 Landings," Skylook, March 1974, pp. 16-17; Jacques Vallee, "The UFO Wave of 1973," Flying Saucer Review (London) 1 9 (November-December 1973 ) : 15; UFO Investigator, September 1973; and The A.P.R.O. Bulletin, November-December 1973.
2. Culpeper (Virginia) Star-Exponent, 29 December 1973.
Newspaper citations without page numbers are from clipping serv ices and personal files.
3. Springfield (Illinois) Register, 17 October 1973.
4. Lima (Ohio) News, 1 7 October 1973.
S. Irving (Texas) News, 28 October 1973.
6. Jackson (Mississippi) Clarion-Ledger, 1 8 October 1973.
7. Palmyra (Missouri) Spectator, 10 October 1973.
8. Fayetteville (Arkansas) Northwest Arkansas Times, 18 March 1974; York (Pennsylvania) Recorder, 1 6 October 1973 ; Hackensack (New Jersey) Record, 10 October 1 973.
9. The Madison Press (London, Ohio) , 1 7 October 1973.
10. Los Angeles Times, 14 November 1973.
1 1. St. Joseph (Missouri) Gazette, 9 October 1 973.
12. Goldsboro (North Carolina) News Argus, 28 October 1973.
13. Today's Post (King of Prussia, Pennsylvania), 3 December 1973 .
14. Baton Rouge State Times, 1 2 October 1973.
15. Madisonville (Kentucky) Messenger, 1 7 October 1973; Cairo (llinois) Evening Citizen, 17 October 1973.
16. Wisconsin State Journal (Madison) , 16 November 1973, sec. 2, p.8.
17. McComb (Mississippi) Enterprise Journal, 16 October 1973; Pierce Co. (Nebraska) Leader, 22 November 1 973; Wis .. consin State Journal (Madison) , 8 December 1973, p.6.
i.
1 8. Oklahoma City Times, 1 8 February 1 974.
1 19. So. lllinoisian (Carbondale) , 9 October 1973.
20. Cape Girardeau Southeast Missourian, 4 October 1973. For follow-up reports, see: Cape Girardeau Southeast Missourian, 9 304 Notes October 1973 ; and Wisconsin State Journal (Madison) , 6 October 1973, p.3.
21. Personal files.
22. Tulsa World, 19 October 1973; West Union (Ohio) People's Defender, 1 8 October 1973.
23. West Point (Mississippi) Times-Leader, 17 October 1973.
24. Columbus (Ohio) Evening Dispatch, 14 October 1973.
25. Lawrenceburg (Tennessee) Democrat-Union, 18 October 1973.
26. Simi Valley (California) Enterprise Sun and News, 12 Oc tober 1973. For the complete police report on this sighting, see Skylook, December 1973, p.4.
27. The A.P.R.O. Bulletin, January-February 1974, pp.S-7.
28. The press has covered this sighting innumerable times. Two of the best accounts are : Ralph Blum with Judy Blum, Beyond Earth: Man's Contact with UFOs (New York: Bantam Books, 1974) ; and Joe Eszterhas, "Claw Men From The Outer Space," Rolling Stone, 17 January 1974, pp.27+.
29. Interview with J. Allen Hynek, June 1974.
30. Milwaukee Journal, 28 December 1973, pp.l, 3 of green sheet.
3 1 . Skylook, March 1974, pp.6-7, and April 1974, pp.6-7.
32. Interview with Stuart Nixon, May 1974; UFO Investigator, May 1974, p.1 .
3 3 . Interview with J im and Coral Lorenzen, January 1974.
34. For examples of psychologists', psychiatrists', and social scientists' explanations, see : San Francisco Examiner, 19 October 1973 ; Louisville Times, 1 9 October 1973 ; Buffalo (New York) Courier-Express, 19 October 1973 ; anfil Milwaukee Journal, 21 October 1973 .
3 5. For examples of astronomers' and other scientists' explana tions, see: Wisconsin State Journal (Madison) , 1 8 October 1973, p.9, and 26 April 1973, sec. 5, p.4; Glendale (California) News, 1 8 October 1973 ; Austin (Texas) Statesman, 18 October 1973; Pottstown (Pennsylvania) Mercury, 19 October 1973; and .
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 23 March 1974.
36. Cape Girardeau Southeast Missourian, 8 February 1974; Valley News & Green Sheet (Van Nuys, California) , 24 March 1974; and Trentonian (Trenton, New Jersey), 19 October 1973.
37. Wisconsin State Journal (Madison) , 23 October 1973, p.12; .
Pensacola (Florida) News, 19 October 1973.
38. For examples of scientists impartial to the UFO phenome- · non, se : Wisconsin State Journal (Madison) , 23 October 1973, p.1 2; Bellefontaine (Ohio) Examiner, 19 October 1973 ; New Or leans States-Item, 17 October 1973 ; Philadelphia Daily News, 1 8 ' October 1973 ; Newport Beach (California) Daily Pilot, 18 Octo ber 1 973.
39. For examples of editorials criticizing the validity of the UFO phenomenon, see: Springfield (Massachusetts) Union, 19 Notes 305 October 1973; Pensacola (Florida) Journal, 18 October 1973; Charlotte (North Carolina) Observer, 11 October 1973; Trentonian (Trenton, New Jersey) , 1 9 October 1 973 ; and Lyons (Kansas) Daily News, 18 October 1973.
40. Washington, D.C., Star-News, 19 October 1973. See also New Orleans States-Item, 1 8 October 1 973; and Oregon State Ba rometer (Corvallis) , 1 8 October 1973.
41. Santa Monica (California) Evening Outlook, 25 March 1974; Memphis Commercial Appeal, 16 October 1 973; San Fran cisco Examiner, 28 December 1973, and 4 January 1 974; New York Times, 21 October 1973, p.65.
42. Chicago Tribune, 30 October 1 973, p.12; Norfolk (Vir- ginia) Pilot, 1 8 October 1973.
43. Madison (Wisconsin) Capital Times, 27 October 1973.
44. Trentonian (Trenton, New Jersey ) , 19 October 1973.
45. Joe Eszterhas, "Claw Men From The Outer Space," Rolling Stone, 17 January 19'74, pp.27+.
46. ''UFO : Stardust and Moonshine," Newsweek, 29 October 1973, p.3 1 ; "Are Flying Saucers Real? Latest on an Old Mystery," U.S. News and World Report, 5 November 1973, pp.75-76.
47. Ralph Blum, "UFOs: Those Heavenly Bodies are Alive and Well ," Cosmopolitan, 1 February 1974, pp. 176+.
48. Donald E. Keyhoe, A liens From Space (Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1973 ), passim.
49. Keyhoe, pp.107, 123, 239.
50. Aime Michel, The Truth About Flying Saucers (New York: Pyramid Books, 1974) ; George Adamski, Behind the Fly ing Saucer Mystery (New York: Warner Paperback Library, 1974) ; Howard Menger, From Outer Space (New York: Pyramid Books, 1974).
5 1 . Erich von Daniken, Chariots of the Gods? (New York: Bantam Books, 1971 ) .
52. Erich von Daniken, Gods From Outer Space (New York: Bantam Books, 1 972) ; Erich von Dliniken, The Gold of the Gods (New York: Bantam Books, 1973 ) .
53. John Wallace Spencer, Limbo of the Lost (New York: Bantam Books, 1973 ) .
54. Culver City (California) Evening Star News, 22 March 1974; Glendale (California) News-Press, 25 June 1974, p.8-A.
55. "Interview: Ray Stanford," Psychic, April 1974, pp.6-10, 36-38.
56. Interview with J. Allen Hynek, June 1974.
57. Interviews with Allan Sandler, February, March, April 1974.
58. New York Times, 29 November 1973, p.41.
A Note on Sources There is no central depository for documents and other material relating either to the UFO controversy or to UFO sight ings. Researchers must cull what they can from several public and private agencies. Some individuals, aware of the problem of sources, have begun collecting whatever documents they can find for their own files. I consulted three of the best private collections -those of J. Allen Hynek, Richard Greenwell, and the late James McDonald. McDonald's collection is without a doubt the best, containing reports of his own excellent investigations of sightings, copies of hundreds of Air Force reports, and an enormous amount of correspondence between him and other scientists and UFO re searchers. J. Allen Hynek's collection includes cases, correspon dence, and documents, as well as a large volume of newspaper sighting reports and articles. Richard Greenwell's collection of books, pamphlets, and privately printed material is one of the most complete in the country. For the researcher interested in the controversy, though, the Air Force, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, and the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization are the best places to obtain material.
The Air Force Archives at Maxwell Air Force Base in Mont gomery, Alabama, contain the bulk of Projects Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book documents. The voluminous collection of sighting re ports includes a wealth of information about UFO report investi gation and identification procedures. I found most of the major documents, reports, and studies in the unsystematically arranged project files. In addition, the project files contain many unpub lished letters, memoranda, and other documents about the Air Force's struggle with NICAP, its attempts to avert congressional hearings, and its efforts to transfer the UFO program. While providing much information about the Air Force's UFO program and policies, the project files are still disappointingly incomplete.
Strongest on the 1953-6 1 period, the files have few documents for the years before or after. Moreover, these potentially significant missing documents are not available from any other known source.
In the files of NICAP, which moved from Washington, D.C., !o Kensington, Maryland, in 1973, I found essential supplemental mformation about NICAP's fight for congressional investigations and its struggle with the Air Force. NICAP files contain letters from the Air Force to congressmen and private citizens in addi- 307 308 A Note on Sources tion to the organization's own correspondence. NICAP's collection also includes some of Donald E. Keyhoe's private correspon dence with AI Chop, Edward Ruppelt, and other figures promi nent in the early years of the controversy. Although not all of Keyhoe's correspondence is at NICAP, enough is there to provide invaluable supplementary material.
The organization also has many Air Force documents, reports, press releases, and some of fice files, most of which are duplicates of the material at the Air Force Archives. NICAP's newspaper file includes many articles that it has collected from clipping services since 1957. The or ganization's book collection contains its own holdings as well as that of the defunct Civilian Saucer Intelligence of New York, which makes the book collection one of the most complete on UFOs in the country, with many rare and out-of-print contactee books. Finally, the NICAP's large sighting files do not signifi cantly overlap those of the Air Force and the organization's in vestigations are usually more complete than the Air Force's.
APRO, located in Tucson, Arizona, offered me access to the largest collection of UFO club and contactee periodicals in the country. The Coral Lorenzen-Donald Keyhoe correspondence at APRO is invaluable for an understanding of their early theories and the beginnings of NICAP. APRO also has a collection of Air Force press releases and reports and some Air Force correspon dence with APRO members and private citizens. Most of the Air Force documents are duplicates of material in the Air Force Ar chives. APRO's sighting files supplement those at NICAP and the Air Force Archives and its investigation work is generally very good.
The Library of Congress has a limited but valuable collection of books and periodicals. It has some important contactee and UFO club literature unavilable elsewhere. The library's unspecial ized motion picture collection includes a few movies with flying saucer themes and several interesting television films about UFOs, some dating back to the mid-1950s.
I found the facilities of the Wisconsin State Historical Society in Madison useful for researching newspaper accounts of the 1 896-97 and recent sightings. The most helpful newspapers for the 1 896-97 sightings were the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Times Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dallas Morning News, Houston Post, Detroit Free Press, Sacramento Daily Record-Union, and Cincinnati Commercial-Tribune. For recent sightings and the con troversy over them, I found the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, and other major city newspapers indispensable.
Also, local newspapers in or near a sighting area contained im portant UFO reports. In addition, I found that newspaper clipping .
services often obtained sighting reports that large city newspapers or the wire services did not carry.
Selected Bibliography Personal Interviews and Correspondence Alvarez, Luis. Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, University of Cal· ifornia, Berkeley, California. Letter, 9 February 1972.
Chop, Albert M. Downey, California. Interview, January 1 974.
Friend, Lieutenant Colonel (ret.) Robert. Irvine, California. In terview, January 1974.
Goudsmit, Samuel. Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, Long Island, New York. Letter, 9 February 1972.
Greenwell, Richard. Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, Tucson, Arizona. Continuous correspondence from August 1971 to June 1973 .
· Hynek, J. Allen. Northwestern University, Evanston, Dlinois: In terviews, February 197 1 , February 1972, September 1972, April 1 973, and continuous through July 1974.
Keyhoe, Donald E. Luray, Virginia. Interview, April 1972.
Lorenzen, James and Coral. Aerial Phenomena Research Organi zation, Tucson, Arizona. Interviews, June 1 97 1 , January 1 974.
Nixon, Stuart. National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phe nomena, Kensington, Maryland (formerly in Washington, D.C. ) . Interview and correspondence, April 1973, May 1 974.
Page, Thornton. Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut.
Letter, 7 February 1972.
Ruppelt, Mrs. Edward J. Long Beach, California. Interview, Janu ary 1974.
Shea, Major David J. Dayton, Ohio. Interview, May 1974.
Reports and Public Documents National Academy of Sciences. Panel. "Review of the University of Colorado Report on Unidentified Flying Objects." Washing ton, D.C., 1969. (In the Air Force Archives, Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama. ) U.S. Air Force. Projects Grudge and Bluebook Reports 1-12.
Washington, D.C. : National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, 1 968.
U.S. Air Force. Air Materiel Command. "Unidentified Aerial Ob jects : Project 'Sign'." No. F-TR-2274-IA. February 1949. Mont gomery, Alabama, Maxwell Air Force Base, Air Force Ar chives. (Mimeographed.) --. "Unidenitfied Flying Objects: Project 'Grudge'." No. 102- AC 49/ 1 5-100. August 1949. Montgomery, Alabama, Maxwell Air Force Base, Air Force Archives. (Mimeographed. ) -. "Project Twinkle Final Report." 27 November 1951. Mont- 309 3 1 0 Selected Bibliography gomery, Alabama. Maxwell Air Force Base, Air Force Archives.
(Mimeographed. ) --. Air Technical Intelligence Center. "Special Report No. 14." 1955. Montgomery, Alabama. Maxwell Air Force Base, Air Force Archives. (Mimeographed.) --. Scientific Advisory Board. Ad Hoc [O'Brien] Committee to Review Project Blue Book. "Special Report." Washington, D.C., 1966. (Mimeographed. ) U.S. Congress. House. Representative Roush speaking against the Condon Committee's methods. 90th Cong., 2d sess., 30 April 1 968. Congressional Record, vol. 1 14, p. 1 1043.
-. House. Representative Ryan speaking against the Condon Committee's findings. 9 1 st Cong., 1st sess., 9 January 1969.
Congressional Record, vol. 1 15, pp.373-74.
-. House. Committee on Appropriations. Civil Supersonic Aircraft Development (SST). Hearings before The Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives. 92d . Cong., 1st sess., 1-4 March 197 1 .
-. House, Committe o n Armed Services. Unidentified Flying Objects. Hearings before the House Committee on Armed Ser vices, House of Representatives. 89th Cong., 2d sess., 5 April 1966.
--. House. Committee on Foreign Afairs. Foreign Assistance Act oJ 1966. Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives. 89th Cong., 2d sess., 30 March 1966.
-. Hoose. Comittee on Science and Astronautics. Sympo sium on Unidentified Flying Objects. Hearings before the Com mittee on Science and Astronautics, House of Representatives.
90th Cong., 2d sess., 29 July 1968.
Books Adamski, George. Behind the Flying Saucer Mystery. New York: Paperback Library, 1967. (Original title: Flying Saucers Fare well. New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1961.) --. inside the Flying Saucers. New York: Paperback. Library, 1967. (Original title : Inside the Spaceships. New York: Abe lard-Schuman, 1 955. ) Angelucci, Orfeo M. The Secret of the Saucers. Amherst, Wis.: Amherst Press, 1955.
Bailey, James 0. Pilgrims Through Space and Time. New York: Argos, 1947.
.
Baxter, John. Science Fiction in the Cinema. New York: A.S.
Barnes, 1970.
Bethurum, Truman. Aboard a Flying Saucer. Los Angeles : De Vorss, 1954.
Bloecher, Ted. Report on the UFO Wave of 1947. Washington, D.C. : By the Author, 1967. (Available from California UFO Research Institute, P. 0. Box 941, Lawndale, Calif. 90260) .
Selected Bibliography 3 1 1 Blum, Ralph with Blum, Judy. Beyond Earth: Man's Contact with UFOs. New York: Bantam Books, 1974.
Buckner, H. Taylor. "The Flying Saucerians : An Open Door Cult." Sociology and Everyday Life. Edited by Marcell Truzzi.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall, 1 968.
Clarke, Basil. The History of A irships. London : Herbert Jenkins, 1960.
Condon, Edward U., project director. Scientific Study of Uniden tified Flying Objects. New York: Bantam Books, 1969.
Daniels, George H. Science in American Society. New York: Knopf, 197 1 .
Davidson, Leon, ed. Flying Saucers: An Analysis of the Air Force Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14. Clarksburg, W.Va. : Saucerian Publications, 1 97 1 .
Edwards, Frank. Flying Saucers-Here and Now! New York: Bantam Books, 1967.
--. Flying Saucers-Serious Business. New York: Bantam Books, 1966.
Ellwood, Robert S. Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America. Englewood Clifs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall, 1 973.
Festinger, Leon. When Prophecy Fails. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956.
Flammonde, Paris. The Age of Flying Saucers: Notes on a Pro jected History of Unidentified Flying Objects. New York: Haw thorn, 197 1 .
Fry, Daniel.
The White Sands Incident. Louisville, Ky. : Best Books, 1966.
Fuller, John. A liens in the Skies. New York: Berkeley Medallion, 1969.
--. Incident at Exeter. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1966.
--. The Interrupted Journey. New York: Dial Press, 1966.
Gallup, George H. The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935-1972.
3 vols. New York: Random House, 1 972.
Gibbs-Smith, Charles H. Aviation: An Historical Survey. Lon don : Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1 970.
--. A History of Flying. London: B. T. Batesford, 1953.
--. The Invention of the Aeroplane. New York: Taplinger, 1966.
Gifford, Dennis. Science Fiction Film. London : Dutton, 1969.
Godwin, John. Occult America. Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1972.
Hall, Richard, ed. The UFO Evidence. Washington, D.C. : Na tional Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, 1964.
Hood, Joseph. The Story of Airships. London : Arthur Barker, Ltd., 1968.
Hynek, J. Allen. The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry. Chi cago: Henry Regnery, 1 972.
Johnson, DeWayne B. "Flying Saucers-Fact or Fiction?" Mas ter's thesis, University of California at Los Angeles, 1950.
· 3 1 2 Selected Bibliography Jung, Carl G. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen In the Sky. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1 959; Signet, 1969.
Justi, Herman, ed. Official History of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition. Nashville : Brandon Printing Co., 1 898.
Keyhoe, Donald. Aliens From Space. Garden City, N.Y. : Dou· bleday, 1973.
--. The Flying Saucers Are Real. New York: Fawcett Publica- tions, 1 950.
--. The Flying Saucer Conspiracy. New York: Holt, 1955.
--. Flying Saucers From Outer Space. New York: Holt, 1953.
-. Flying Saucers: Top Secret. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1960.
Klass, Philip J. UFOs-Identified. New York: Random House, 1 968.
Leslie, Desmond, and Adamski, George. Flying Saucers Have Landed. London: Werner Laurie, 1953.
Lore, Gordon, and Deneault, Harold H. Mysteries of the Skies: UFOs in Perspective. Englewood Clifs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1 968.
Lorenzen, Coral, ed. Proceedings of the Eastern UFO Sym posium, 23 January 1971, Baltimore, Maryland. Tucson, Ariz.: Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, 1 97 1 .
Lorenzen, Coral an d Jim. Flying Saucer Occupants. New York: Signet, 1967.
-. Flying Saucers: The Startling Evidence of the Invasion from Outer Space. New York: Signet, 1966.
-. UFOs Over the Americas. New .York: Signet, 1 968.
--. UFOs: The Whole Story. New York: Signet, 1969.
McDonald, James E. Unidentified Flying Objects: Greatest Scien tific Problem of Our Times (address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 1966 ) . Washington, D.C. : Pittsburgh Subcommittee of NICAP [National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena], 1967.
Menger, Howard. From Outer Space to You. Clarksburg, W.Va. : Saucerian Publications, 1959. (Paperback edition title: From Outer Space. New York : Pyramid, 1967. ) Menzel, Donald. Flying Saucers. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni versity Press, 1 953 .
- Menzel, Donald, and Boyd, Lyle G. The World of Flying Saucers.
Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1963.
Nebel, John. The Psychic World Around Us. New York: Haw thorn, 1969; Signet, 1 970.
--. The Way Out World. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice· Hall, 1961; Lancer, 1962.
1967 Congress of · Scientific Ufologists. New York: Privately Printed, 1967. (Available at the Library of Congress.) Reeve, Bryant and Helen. Flying Saucer Pilgrimage. Amherst, Wis. : Amherst Press, 1 957.
Selected Bibliography 3 1 3 Ruppelt, Edward J . The Report o n Unidentified Flying Objects.
Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1956. (In 1 959 Doubleday pub lished a revision of this book which included three additional chapters; however, the revision does not have the word revision on it and carries the 1956 date. ) Sagan, Carl, and Page, Thornton, eds. UFOs: A Scientific De bate. Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1973 .
Sagan, Carl, and Shklovskii, I. S. Intelligent Life in the Universe.
San Francisco : Holden-Day, 1 966.
Saunders, David R., and Harkins, R. Roger. UFOs? Yes!: Where the Condon Committee Went Wrong. New York: Signet, 1968.
Scamehorn, Howard. Balloons to Jets. Chicago : Henry Regnery, 1957.
Scully, Frank. Behind The Flying Saucers. New York: Henry Holt, 1 950.
Shea, David J. "The UFO Phenomenon: A Study in Public Rela tions." Master's thesis, University of Denver, 1 972.
Strentz, Herbert. "A Survey of Press Coverage of Unidentified Flying Objects, 1947-1966." Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1970.
Tacker, Lawrence J. Flying Saucers and the U.S. Air Force.
Princeton, NJ. : Van Nostrand, 1960.
Toland, John. Ships in the Sky. New York: Henry Holt Co., 1957.
Vallee, Jacques. Anatomy of a Phenomenon. Chicago : Henry Regnery, 1 965.
--. Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma. Chicago : Henry Regnery, 1 966.
Van Tassel, George. The Council of Seven Lights. Los Angeles: De Vorss, 1958.
--. I Rode A Flying Saucer. By the Author, 1952. (Not avail able.) , Williamson, George Hunt, and Bailey, Alfred C. The Saucers Speak. Los Angeles : New Age Publishing Co., 1954.
Articles and Periodicals • AFSCA World Report. Edited by Gabriel Green. Los Angeles: ' Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America, 1959-60. (In the files of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, Tucson, Arizona. ) "AIA Committee Looks at the UFO Problem." Astronautics and Aeronautics, December 1 968, p.2.
The A.P.R.O. Bulletin. Edited by Coral Lorenzen. Tucson, Ariz.: · Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, 1 953-74.
"Are 'Flying Saucers' Real? Latest on an Old Mystery." U.S.
News and World Report, 5 November 1 973, pp.75-76.
Armagnac, Alden. "Condon Report on UFOs: Should You Be lieve It?" Popular Science, April 1969, pp.72-76.
314 Selected Bibliography Asiinov, Isaac. "UFO's, What I Think." Science Digest, June 1 966, pp.44-47.
"Background." Astronautics and Aeronautics, November 1970, p.S1.
Baker, Robert M. L. ''The UFO Report: Condon Study Falls Short." Scientific Research, 1 4 April 1 969, p.41.
"Belated Explanation on Flying Saucers (Balloons) ." Time, 26 February 1951 , p.22.
Black, Victor. "Flying Saucer Hoax." American Mercury, October 1952, pp.61-66.
Blum, Ralph. "UFOs: Those Heavenly Bodies are Alive and Well." Cosmopolitan, February 1974, pp. 176-78, 200-201, 221 .
Boffey, Philip M . "UFO Project: Trouble on the Ground." Science, 26 July 1968, pp.339-42.
--. "UFO Study: Condon Group Finds No Evidence of Visits from Outer Space." Science 17 January 1969, pp.260-62.
Branscomb, Lewis M. "Letter". Science, 27 September 1968, · p.1297.
Buckner, H. Taylor. "Flying Saucers are for People." Trans-Ac tion 3 (May-June 1966) : 10-1 3.
"Dz Dr. Condon See It Through?" Nation, 3 1 October 1966, p.43 6.
Carson, Charles. ''Those Little Men From Venus : A Reply to R.
Gelatt." Saturday Review of Literature, 21 October 1 960, p.25.
Catton, William R. "What Kind of People Does a Religious Cult Attract?" Sociology and Everyday Life. Edited by Marcell Truzzi. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall, 1968.
Chiu, Hong-Yee. Review of Condon Committee Report. Icarus, November 1 969, pp.442-47.
Clark, Jerome. ''The Strange Case of the 1897 Airship." Flying Saucer Review (London) 12 (July-August 1966) : 10-17.
Clark, Jerome, and Farish, Lucius. ''The 1 897 Story-1." Flying Saucer Review (London) 14 (September-October 1968 ) : 1 3-16.
-. ''The 1 897 Story-IT." Flying Saucer Review (London) 14 (November-December 1968 ) : 6-8.
--. ''The 1 897 StoryʼnID." Flying Saucer Review {London) 15 (January-February 1 969) : 26-28.
Cohen, Daniel. "Review of Incident at Exeter." Science Digest, October 1966, pp.41-42.
Condon, Edward U. "Letter." Scientific Research, 21 May 1968, p. s.
---. ''UFOs I Have Loved and Lost: Adaptation of an Ad dress-April 1969." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 25 {De- cember 1969 ) : 6-8.
ୗ "Condon For Regent." Nation, 26 September 1966, p.269.
Considine, Bob. ''The Disgraceful Flying Saucer Hoax." Cosmo- G- politan, January 1951, pp.33, 100-102.
t Crum, Norman J. "Flying Saucers and Book Selection." Library ୖ Journal 79 (October 1954 ) : 1719-25.
Selected Bibliography 3 1 5 CSI Newsletter. Edited by Lex Mebane. New York: Civilian Sau cer Intelligence of New York, 1955-59. (In the files of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, Tucson, Arizona.) Darrach, H. Bradford, and Ginna Robert. "Have We Visitors From SpaceT' Life, 7 April 1952, pp.80-82 + .
Draper, Hal. "Mtemoon with the Space People." Harpers Maga zine, September 1960, pp.37-40.
Elliott, Lawrence. "Flying Saucers: Myth or Menace?" Coronet, 19 November 1952, pp.47-54.
Eszterhas, Joe. "Claw Men From The Outer Space." Rolling Stone, 17 January 1974, pp.27+.
"Fatuus Season : Ann Arbor and Hilsdale Sightings." Time, 1 April 1966, p.25B.
Flick, David. "Tripe for the Public." Library Journal 80 (Febru ary 1955 ) : 202.
The Flying Saucer Review. Edited by Roger Gribble. Seattle, Washington: Space Observers League, 1955-56. (At the Library of Congress.) "Flying Saucers Again." Newsweek, 1 7 April 1950, p.29.
"Flying Saucers, Not Real But-." U.S. News and World Report, 20 January 1969, p.6.
"Flying Saucers-The Real Story: U.S. Built First One in 1942." U.S. News and World Report, 7 April 1950, pp. 13-1 5.
"Flying Saucers : The Somethings." Time, 14 July 1947, p. 18.
Fuller, John. "A Communication Concerning UFOs." Saturday Review, 4 February 1967, pp.70-73.
--. ''Flying Saucer Fiasco." Look, 14 May 1968, pp.58-63.
--. "Incident at Exeter." Look, 22 February 1966, pp.3 6 + .
--. ''Tradewinds: Exeter People Give Accounts of Observa- tions." Saturday Review, 22 January 1966, p.14.
--. "Tradewinds: Report of an Unidentified Flying Object in Exeter, N.H." Saturday Review, 2 October 1965, p.10.
--. ''Tradewinds: U.S. Air Force's Reactions to Recent Sight ings." Saturday Review, 1 6 Apri1 1966, pp. 10, 12, 77.
Gelatt, Roland. "Flying Saucer Hoax." Saturday Review of Litera ture, 6 December 1952, p.3 1 .
--. "In A Saucer From Venus." Review of Behind the Flying Saucers, by Frank Scully. Saturday Review of Literature, 23 Sep tember 1950, pp.20-21, 36.
, Gibbs-Smith, Charles H. "Historical Note." Flying Saucer Review (London) 12 (July-August 1966 ) : 17.
Ginna, Robert E. "Saucer Reactions." Life, 9 June 1952, pp.20, 23-24, 26.
"Great Balls of Fire! Philip Klass Theory." Newsweek, 5 Septem- ber 1966, p.78.
Greenberg, Daniel S. "Letter." Science, 25 October 1968, pp.410-ll, Hall, Richard. "Letter." Aviation ,Week, 1 0 October 1966, p.130.
Handlin, Oscar. "Reader's Choice." Review of Incident at Exeter, by John G. Fuller. Atlantic Monthly, August 1966, pp.1 16-17.
316 Selected Bibliography Hanlon, Donald. "The Airship in Fact and Fiction." Flying Saucer Review (London ) 16 (July-August 1970) : 20-21.
"Heavenly Bogeys." Time, September 1966, pp.81-82.
Hoaglund, Hudson. "Beings From Outer Space-Corporeal and Spiritual." Science, 14 February 1969, p.7.
Hooven, Frederick J. "UFOs and the Evidence: Condon Report", Saturday Review, 29 March 1969, pp.16-17, 62.
Hynek, J. Allen. "Are Flying Saucers Real?" Saturday Evening Post, 17 December 1966, pp.17-21 .
-. "Commentary on the AAS Symposium." Flying Saucer Review (London) 1 6 (March-April 1970) : 5.
-. "The Condon Report and UFOs." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 25 (Apri1 1969) : 39-42.
-. "The UFO Gap." Playboy, December 1967, pp.143-46 + .
---. "UFOs Merit Scientific Study." Science, 21 October 1966, p.329.
--. "Unusual Aerial Phenomena." Journal of the Optical Soci ety of America 43 (April 1953 ) : 3 1 1-14.
-. "White Paper on UFOs." Christian Science Monitor, 23 May 1967, p.9.
Keyhoe, Donald E. "Flying Saucers Are Real" True Magazine, January 1950. Reprinted in The TRUE Report on Flying Sau cers. New York: Fawcett, 1967, pp.6-7, 92-94.
-. "Flying Saucers From Outer Space." Look, 20 October 1953, pp.1 14-20.
Klass, Philip J. "Many UFOs Are Identified as Plasmas." Avia tion Week, 3 October 1966, pp.54-55 + .
-. "Plasma Theory May Explain Many UFOs." Aviation Week, 22 August 1966, pp.48-50 + .
Knight, Charlotte. "Report on Our Flying Saucer Balloons." Col lier's, 1 1 June 1 954, pp.50, 52-53, 56-51.
Lear, John. ''The Disputed CIA Document on UFOs." Saturday Review, 3 September 1966, pp.45-50.
-. "Research in America: Dr. Condon's Study Outlined." Saturday Review, 3 December 1966, pp.87-89.
-. "Scientific Explanation for the UFOs?" Saturday Review, 1 October 1966, pp.67-69.
---. "What Are the Unidentified Aerial Objects?" Saturday Re view, 6 August 1 9661 pp.41-42.
--. "UFOs and the Laws of Physics: Concerning Views of J. Allen Hynek and Wiliam Markowitz," Saturday Review, 6 October 1967, p.59.
Ley, Willy. "More About Out There." Review of Is Another World Watching?, by Gerald Heard. Saturday Review of Litera- .
ture, 28 April 195 1, pp.20-21, 30.
"Libel Suit May Develop from UFO Hassle." Scientific Research, 13 May 1968, p. l l .
Liddel, Umer. "Phantasmagoria or Unusual Observations in the 1 ୕ Selected Bibliography 3 1 7 Atmosphere." Journal of the Optical Society of America 43 (April 1953 ) : 3 14-17.
.
"Lost Cause: Condon Report." Nation, 27 January 1969, p. 100.
' McDonald, James E.
Review of Condon Committee Report.
Icarus, November 1 969, pp.447-50.
McLaughlin, Commander R. B. "How Scientists Tracked Flying Saucers." True Magazine, March 1950, pp.25-27, 96-99.
"Management Newsletter." Electrical World, 15 April 1968, pp.57-60.
' Mandel, Siegfried. ''The Great Saucer Hunt." Saturday Review, 6 August 1955, pp.28-29.
Margolis, Howard. "UFO Phenomenon." Bulletin of the A tomic Scientists 23 (June 1967) : 40-42.
1 Markowitz, William. ''The Physics and Metaphysics of Uniden tified Flying Objects." Science, 15 September 1967, pp.1274-79.
Masquellette, Frank. "Physical Evidence of Great Airships of 1897." Houston Post, 13 June 1966, p.8.
Mauer, Edgar F. "Of Spots Before Their Eyes." Science, 19 De cember 1952, p.693.
Menzel, Donald H. "Abstract." Journal of the Optical Society of America 42 (November 1952) : 879.
--. "The Truth About Flying Saucers." Look, 17 June 1952, pp.35-39.
"More About Flying Saucers." Review of Behind the Flying Sau cers, by Frank Scully. Science News Letter, 16 September 1950, p.181.
Morrison, Chester. "Mirage o r Not, Radar Sees Those Saucers Too." Look, 9 September 1952, pp.98-99.
Moseley, James. "Giant Rock." Saucers, Space and Science 60 (197 1 ) : 7-9 (In the files of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, Tucson, Arizona. ) Moslcin, J. Robert. "Hunt for the Flying Saucers." Look, 1 July 1952, pp.37-41.
Murray, Bruce. "Reopening the Question." Review of The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry, by J. Allen Hynek. Science, 28 August 1972, pp.688-89.
Nelson, Buck. ''I Visited Mars, Venus and the Moon!" Search, no.
18 (December 1956) : 6-20. (In the files of the Aerial Phenom ena Research Organization, Tucson, Arizona.) Nexus. Edited by James Moseley. Fort Lee, NJ. : James Moseley, 1955. (In the files of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organi zation, Tucson, Arizona. ) "No Visitors From Space." Science News Letter, 30 August 1952, p.143.
"Notes and Comment: Saucer Flap." The New Yorker, 9 April 1966, pp.32-34.
"Out of the Blue Believers : Civilian Saucer Intelligence of New York." The New Yorker, 1 8 April 1959, pp.36-37.
"Out of This World: Convention of The Amalgamated Flying 3 1 8 Selected Bibliography Saucer Clubs of America." Newsweek, 7 November 1966, pp.38, 40.
"Pennington Airship." Scientific American, 7 March 1891, p.1 50.
Powers, William T. "Letters." Science, 8 December 1 967, p. 1265.
Proceedings. Edited by George Van Tassel. Yucca Valley, Ca.: College of Universal Wisdom, 1 958-59. (In the files of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, Tucson, Arizona. ) "A Rash of Flying Disks Break Out Over the U.S." Life, 2 1 July 1 947, pp. 14-16.
Rogers, Warren. "Flying Saucers : Sightings and Study of UFOs." Look, 21 March 1967, pp.7fH!O.
Rosa, Richard J. "Leters." Science, 8 December 1 967, p. 1265.
Ruppelt, Edward J. "What the Air Force Has Found Out About Flying Saucers." True Magazine, May 1954. Reprinted in The TRUE Report on Flying Saucers. New York: Fawcett, 1967, pp.36-39, 57-7 1 .
Sagan, Carl. ''The Saucerian Cult." Saturday Review, 6 August . 1966, pp.50-52.
Saucer News. Edited by James Moseley. Fort Lee, NJ. : Saucer and Unexplained Celestial Events Research Society, 1 955-68.
(In the files of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, Tucson, Arizona. ) Saucers. Edited by Max B. Miller. Lo s Angeles : Flying Saucers International, 1953-60. (In the files of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, Tucson, Arizona.) "The Saucers Again." American Aviation 11 (March 1 954) : 3.
"Saucers End: Condon Report." Time, 17 January 1 969, pp.44-45.
Shallett, Sidney. ''What You Can Believe About Flying Saucers (Part 1) ." Saturday Evening Post, 30 April 1949, pp.20-2 1, 1 3 6-39.
---. "What You Can Believe About Flying Saucers (Part IT) ." Saturday Evening Post, 7 May 1949, pp.36, 1 84-86.
"Shooting Down the UFOs : Condon Report." Newsweek, 20 Jan• uary 1969, p.54.
Skylook. Edited by Dwight Connelly. Quincy, ID.: Mutual UFO Network, 1969-1 974.
Sontag, Susan. ''The Imagination of Disaster." Against lnterpreta• tion. New York: Dell, Laurel ed., 1969.
The Spacecrafter. Phoenix, Ariz. : Spacecraft Research Associa· tion, 1960 (At the Library of Congress.) Telonic Research Bulletin. Edited by George Hunt Williamson.
Prescott, Ariz. : Telonic Research Center, 1955. (In the files of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, Tucson, Ari zona.) "Things That Go Whiz: Flying Saucers." Time, 9 May 1 949, pp.98-99.
"Those Flying Saucers : An Astronomer's Explanation." Time, 9 June 1 952, pp.54-56.
Thy Kingdom Come. Edited by Gabriel Green. Los Angeles: Selected Bibliography 3 19 Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America, 1957-59. (In the files of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, Tucson, Arizona.) "UFO, An Appraisal of the Problem." Astronautics and Aeronau tics 8 (November 1970 ) : 49-5 1.
"UFO Encounter I." Astronautics and Aeronautics 9 (July 1971 ) : 66-70.
"UFO Encounter II." Astronautics and Aeronautics 9 (September 1971 ) : 60-64.
U.F.O. Investigator. Washington, D.C./Kensington, Md. : Na tional Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, 1 957-74.
(NICAP moved to Kensington in 1973.) UFO Newsletter. Morristown, N.J . : New Jersey UFO Group, 1 957 (In the files of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organiza tion, Tucson, Arizona. ) UFORUM. Edited by Art Gibson, Bob Hillary, and Don Plank.
Grand Rapids, Mich. : Flying Saucer Federation, 1956-57. (In the files of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, Tucson, Arizona.) I "UFO's for Real? J. Allen Hynek Calls for Serious Investigation." Newsweek, 10 October 1966, p.70.
"UFOs Not From Mars." Science News, 3 September 1966, p.165.
"U.F.O.'s or Kugelblitz?" Popular Electronics, September 1966, p.84.
"UFOs Probably Exist." Industrial Research, April 1971, p.75.
"UFO : Stardust and Moonshine." Newsweek, 29 October 1973, p.3 1 .
"UFO Study Credibility Cloud." Industrial Research, June 1968, p.27.
Valee, Jacques. "Letters." Science, 8 December 1 967, p.1266.
--. "UFOs: The Psychic Component." Psychic, January February 1974, pp.1 3-17.
"Visitors From Venus: Flying Saucer Yam." Time, 9 January 1950, p.49.
''Waiting For the Little Green Men." Newsweek, 28 March 1955, p.64.
Warren, Donald I. ''Status Inconsistency Theory and Flying Sau cer Sightings." Science, 6 November 1970, pp.599-604.
"Washington's Blips." Life, 4 August 1952, pp.39-40.
"Well-Witnessed Invasion by Something: Australia to Michigan." Life, 1 April 1966, pp.24-3 1.
"Wind Is Up in Kansas." Time, 8 September 1952, p.86.
I J.
; þ '-' .
",' Index Index Acuff, John, 253 Adamski, George, 96-1 10 pas sim, 1 2 1 , 1 63, 179, 1 80, 259; books by, 96-97, 98, 1 03, 259 Ad Hoc Committee to Review Project Blue Book, 176, 1 80- 83 passim; recommendations and conclusions of, 176-77; as part of Air Force policy, 177 Aerial Phenomena Research Or ganization (APRO), 74, 83, 109, 1 1 8, 1 32, 1 69, 170, 201, 209, 2 1 1, 229-30, 248, 252, 253 ; conflict with NICAP, 162-63; and Condon commit tee, 205-6; and Condon re port, 2 17, 227-28 Agnew, Spiro, 229, 233 Air Defense Command: UFO detection plans, 59, 77, 145, 210, 226. See 4602d and 1 006th AISS Air Force, 30, 33, 35-38, 39-94 passim, 95, 1 05, 1 14, 1 15-39 passim, 147-70 passim, 176- 77, 1 82, 1 83, 1 84, 193, 194, 198-99, 224, 249-5 1 , 265-69; and public relations, 86, 120- 21, 122-23, 133, 1 3 8, 140, 147-58 passim, 1 64, 1 65, 169-70, 176-77, 183, 224, 265-66, 268; and congression al inquiries/briefings, 141-43, 1 56, 161, 1 69, 1 82-83; unoffi cial UFO panel, 148-49; staf studies, 144, 145-46, 149-5 1 ; and UFO program disband ment, 1 50, 151, 1 52, 1 64-65, 166, 200, 2 15, 226-27; and university contract, 176-77, 1 82-86, 187; and conflict with McDonald, 195, 196; and transfer of UFO program, 1 88; fact sheeG, 137-38, 144- 45, 159, 1 8 1, 1 82, 224 Air Force Letter 200-5, 60, 91, 92 Air Force Office of Aerospace Research, 1 64, 1 96, 226 Air Force Office of Scientific Research, 1 83, 1 84, 206, 226 Air Force Regulation 80-17, 188, 225 Air Force Regulation 200-2, 91, 1 1 9, 122, 133, 146, 188 Air Force Systems Command, 1 65, 1 88, 226 Air Materiel Command, 36-55 passim, 156 Air Research and Development Command (ARDC), 150-5 1, 156 323 324 Index Airships, history of, 25-28 Airships, mystery, 1896-97, 28, 33, 34, 35, 90, 154, 235, 237, 240, 243, 249, 257, 264; char acteristics of, 3-12; "Wilson" reports of, 9-1 1 ; hoaxes, 12- 14; photographs of, 16; reac tions to, 17-25, 28-29; expla nations of, 19-21, 24-26, 27- 28 Air Technical Intelligence Cen ter (ATIC) , 55-65 passim, 68, 72, 76-81 passim, 92, 93, 118-49 passim, 154, 151, 165- 73 passim; and transfer of Blue Book, 149-51, 1 64-66; and congressional hearings, 151-58 Alvarez, Luis, 80 American Association for the Advancement of Science (ġS), 190, 206, 221, 228- 29; symposium on UFOs, 229, 255 American Institute of Aeronau tics and Astronautics (AIAA): UFO subcommittee, 197, 228, 230, 251 American Society o f Newspaper Editors: UFO symposium, 195 Andrus, Walt, 253 Angelucci, Orfeo, 99-106 pas- sim, 1 10; book by, 99 .A..P.R.O. Bulletin, The, 14, 253 Arcier, A. Francis, 128-29, 1 5 1 Armstrong, M ary Lou, 204, 205 Armstrong Circle Theater, 138, 152, 154 Arnold, Kenneth: UFO sighting by, 3 1-33, 167, 247 Asimov, Isaac, 191, 2SS Baker, Robert M. L, Jr., 207, 210, 220, 229 Battelle Memorial Institute, 63, 64, 76, 78-79, 81, 93, 123, 124, 266; contract with Air Force, 58, 59. See Special Re port No. 14 Berkner, Lloyd, 80 Bethurum, Truman, 98-1 10 pas sim; book by, 98; in Condon report, 216 Blum, Ralph, 258, 262 Bowen, Charles, 201 Bower, Col. Donald, 59, 68 Brookings Institution, 164 Brooks, Rep. Overton, 159-60, 161, 162 Brown, Harold, 180, 181-82, 206 Brown, T. Townshend, 129-30 Cabell, C. B., 56, 58, 59, 85 Cambridge Research Laborato- ry, 47, 59 CaiT, Otis T., 106, 1 10 Carstarphen, Rep. John, 159 Center for UFO Studies, 252, 253, 270 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 63, 78-80 passim, 93, 118, 142, 195, 258, 263, 268; and national security fears, 78, 79; and the Robertson panel, 79-80; and Ruppelt, 85-86; and 1959 UFO psy chic case, 153-54; briefings 1 requested by, 156; and Rob- 1 ertson report, 189-90 .rl Chanute, Octave, 19, 27 Chiles, Clarence S., and John B.
Whitted UFO sighting, 40, 49, 90, 13 1, 195 Chop, Albert M., 62-63, 66, 67, 68, 88, 89, 93, 122, 128, 131 Craigie, Major General L C.
38 I I Index 325 Christian Science Monitor, 69, 72, 128, 173, 179, 194 Condon, Edward U., 1 84-85, 190, 199, 200, 201 , 202, 203, 206, 207, 2 1 3, 222, 224, 227, 229, 233, 234, 255, 269; atti tude toward UFOs, 1 87-88, 201-2, 205, 2 1 3 ; and Low memorandum, 204, 205; and dismissal of Saunders and Le vine, 204, 205, 206; criticism of, 2 1 6-24 passim; and AAS symposium, 228-29 Condon committee, 190, 191, 198, 199, 2 1 1 , 2 1 2, 224, 225, 228, 233, 250, 25.1, 269; es tablishment of, 1 84-87, 190, 200; problems of, 200, 201-6 Condon report (Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Ob jects ) , 2 1 3-1 5, 226, 227, 228, 254, 257; NAS review, 2 12- 1 3 ; reactions to, 2 1 6-25 Considine, Bob, 53-54, 258 Contactees, 95-1 1 6 passim, 197, 198, 202, 205, 224, 228, 244, 261-62, 267-68; and flying saucer clubs, 108-9; and NI CAP, APRO, 109, 1 17, 163; followers of, 1 1 1-1 3 ; confu sion of with UFO witnesses, 1 1 5-16; new, 260-61 Conte, Rep. Silvio, 232 Cook, Stuart, 1 85, 200 Craig, Roy, 200, 204 Cumings, Lieutenant Jerry, 56 Darrach, H.
B., and Ginna, Robert : article by, 60, 6 1 , 62, 64, 167 Day the Earth Stood Still, The, 1 13, 1 67 Dexter, Michigan, sightings, 177, 180 Diffraction grid camera plan, 59, 63, 64, 76-77, 83, 86, 93- 94, 126-27 Drummond, Roscoe, 179, 256 Earth Versus the Flying Sau cers, 1 15 Edison, Thomas A., 20-21 , 90 Edwards, Frank, 1 3 1, 259; books by, 1 97-98 Einstein, Albert, 71, 80 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 122 Ellwood, Robert, 1 12-13 "Estimate of the Situation," 40, 41, 121 , 1 3 8, 1 55 Evans, Col. Philip G., 151, 158- 59, 165 Exeter, New Hampshire, UFO sighting, 174, 180 Fahrney, Rear Admiral Delmer s., 129, 1 30, 13 1 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI ) , 41, 1 1 8, 133 Ferguson, Gen. James, 151, 1 83, 1 88 Festinger, Leon : When Proph- ecy Fails, 1 1 3 "Flying Flapjack," 37, 53 Flying saucer: origin of term, 32 Flying saucer clubs/conventions, 1 06-7, 108-9, 1 1 0, 197 Flying Saucer Review, 270 Foo-:fighters, 30-3 1 , 3 6 Ford, Gerald R. : letter, 1 80-8 1 Foreign Technology Division (FTD) , 1 65, 1 88, 225 Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, UFO sighting of 1951, 55-56, 75 4602d Air Intelligence Service Squadron : assumes UFO in- 326 Index vestigating duties, 87, 92; investigations systematized, 1 1 8--20; disbands, 133. See 1006th AISS Fournet, Dewey, 59-60, 63, 65, 67, 69, 72, 76-89 passim, 93, 121, 128, 1 3 1 , 155 French, Stuart, 156 Friedman, Stanton, 190, 207, 2 1 0, 217, 262 Friend, Lt. Col. Robert J., 1 1 1, 148, 149, 153, 1 57-58, 170; reorganizes Blue Book, 146- 47; and congressional hear ings, 160-61 ; and Blue Book tran´eµ 164, 165-66 Fry, Daniel, 99-1 10 passim, 260; book by, 99 Fuller, John, 174, 188-89, 205- 7, 259, 262; boks by, 188- 89, 192, 198 Futch, Max, 87 Gallup poll : 1947, 35-36; 1950, 48; 1966, 177, 225, 263 ; 1973, 263-64 Garland, General W. C., 225 Garland, General Wiliam M., 80, 81, 87, 93, 128 Geller, Uri, 260 Ghost rockets in Sweden, 3 1 , 36 Giant Rock Convention, 106, 180, 197 Gilligan, Governor John, 236 Godwin, John: Occult America, 1 12 Goldwater, Senator Barry, 144, 253 Goudsmit, Samuel A., 79-80, 82, 84 Green, Gabriel, 106-7 Greenwell, Richard, 2 1 1 , 228, 229-30, 253 Gregory, Captain George T., 126-28, 136, 1 37, 146, 147; congressional briefings by, 142-43 Hall, Richard, 163; briefs Con don committee, 192, 201, 209; and UFO Evidence, 166 Hall, Robert L, 207, 209, 229 Handlin, Oscar, 1 88-89 Harder, James A., 207, 209-10, 248-49, 262 Hardin, Captain Charles, 1 1 8, 125-26 Harkins, R. Roger, 1 87-88; bok by, 212 Hartman, William K., 214, 229 Henderson, Garry, 207, 2 10, 2 1 1 Henderson, Rep. John E., 141, 144 Hill, Barney and Betty, 198, 262 Hilsdale, Michigan, UFO sight ings, 177, 178 Hines, Richard P., 156, 1 60-61 Hippler, U. Col. Robert, 1 83, 1 84 Hoaglund, Hudson, 220-21, 229 Homer, Richard, 141, 144 Hynek, J. Alen, 45, 46, 57, 71- 72, 74, 75, 77, 83-87 passim, 126, 127, 128, 136, 143, 145, 146, 147, 151, 1 55, 157, 1 58, 1 60, 164, 169, 170, 175, 1 80, 1 83, 1 86, 192, 193, 199, 200, 201, 205, 209, 21 1, 225-34 passim, 248-49, 251-52, 256, 262, 263, 268, 269; astrono mers poll, 71-72; American Optical Society speech, 74, 75, 77; and Robertson panel, 80; and Blue Book methodology meeting, 147-48; and unoffi cial UFO panel, 148; and "swamp gas," 178, 179; in , congressional hearings, 181- 82, 207-08; in Science, 190- 91, 194; in Playboy, 194; in , ' Index 327 Saturday Evening Post, 186, 194; conflict 'with McDonald, 196-97; critique of Condon report, 2 1 8-20; critique of Air Force, 225-26; The UFO Ex perience, 233-34; and Center for UFO Studies, 252, 253, 270 Invasion of the Saucer Men, 1 1 5 It Came From Outer Space, 1 14 JANAP 1 46 (Joint Army-Navy Air Force Publication) , 92, 122 Kaplan, Joseph, 59, 76 Karth, Joseph, 160, 1 61-62 Kelly, General Joe, 133, 140, 144 Kennedy, Senator Edward, 233 Keyhoe, Donald E., 49, 108, 109-1 0, 1 1 5, 121-29 passim, 133, 1 39, 142, 145, 1 52-53, 154, 158-59, 161, 1 63-64, 165, 1 69, 170, 180, 181, 195- 205 passim, 213, 2 1 6, 222, 223, 268, 269; in True, 49-50, 6 1 ; The Flying Saucers Are Real, 5 1-52; on Air Force se crecy, 5 1 , 52, 88-89, 1 17, 1 1 8, 1 32, 133, 152-53, 160, 268; Flying Saucers from Outer Space, 87, 88, 9 1 , 1 1 5, 122; and contactees, 109-10, 1 15, 163; Flying Saucer Conspir acy, 122, 1 25, 1 3 3 ; in forma tion of NICAP, 129-32; on Armstrong Circle Theater, 138; Flying Saucers: Top Se cret, 152; efforts to obtain congressional hearings, 160- 62 ; problems with NICAP, 163; on radio and television, 174-75; and Condon commit tee, 1 86, 201 , 202, 205; reac tion to Condon report, 2 1 6, 217, 2 1 8 ; resigns from NI CAP, 228, 253 ; Aliens from Space, 25S-59 Kingsley, Brig. Gen. Joseph, 156, 1 59 Klass, Philip, 213, 23 1 , 255, 258, 262; book by, 192; plasma theories, 192; conflict with McDonald, 195-96 Knight, Charlotte, 121 Kuettner, Joachim, 197, 230, 251 Lear, John, 186, 1 89 LeBailley, General E. B., 156, 175-76, 1 8 1 Leonard, Jonathan N., 125-26 Levelland, Texas, UFO sight ings, 134-35, 1 3 6-37, 156, 2 1 8 Levine, Norman, 204, 205, 206, 2 1 1 , 212 Levitt, I. M., 7 1 , 173 Liddel, Umer, 74-75 Life magazine, 35, 60-62, 65, 70, 1 67, 178-79, 257 Lilienthal, David, 37 Lipp, James E., 42 Loch Ness monster, 35, 62, 69, 201, 256 Look magazine, 64, 65, 73, 88, 122, 1 67, 174, 1 88, 198, 205- 6, 2 1 3 , 257 Lorenzen, James and Coral, 109-10, 1 1 8, 130, 1 32, 1 62, 1 63, 1 98, 227, 229, 230, 253 ; and formation of APRO, 74; and contactees, 1 09 ; and con flict with NICAP, 1 62-63 ; 328 Index books by, 198; criticism of Condon report, 2 1 7 Low, Robert T., 1 85, 1 87, 200-7 passim, 2 1 3 ; memorandum of, 202-5, 206, 2 1 3 Luebman, Amo H., 141, 156, 157 McClellan, Senator John, 141, 144 McCormack, Rep. John, 142, 144, 159, 1 60 McDivitt, I ames A., 262 McDonald, James E., 189-90, 194-95, 199, 204, 207, 208- 9, 220, 227, 229, 233, 234, 269; conflict with Menzel and Klass, 195-96; conflict with Hynek, 196-97; letter to Low, 204, 205; criticism of Condon report, 2 1 6-1 8 ; at ssr hear ings, 23 1-32; effect on UFO research, 232-33; death of, 232 McLaughlin, Comm. R. B., 50, 1 3 1 McMinnvile, Oregon, UFO case, 214 McNamara, Robert, 1 82 Mantell, Thomas: UFO sight ing, 38-39, 46, 49-67, 90, 128, 1 75, 195 Mariana, Nicholas : UFO film, 80, 82, 128, 202, 2 1 0 Markowitz, William: in Science, 192-93 Maury Island hoax, 33 Menger, Howard, 100-7 passim, 109, 1 10, 202; book by, 100, 104, 259 Men In Black, 109 Menzel, Donald, 63, 68, 70, 71, 73, 75, 76, 121, 1 22, 137, 142, 170, 1 80, 1 83, 197, 2 10, 2 1 1, .
229, 255, 258; American Op- tical Society paper, 74, 75; Flying Saucers, 89-9 1 ; World of Flying Saucers, 1 66-67; conflict with McDonald, 195 Michel, Aime, 201, 259; book by, 259 Miller, Rep. George P., 1 62 Milleľ Max, 109, 124-25, 133 Moseley, James, 109, 1 17-18, 1 63 Moskin, I. Robert: in Look, 64- 65, 1 67 Motion pictures, 1 13-15, 128- 29, 1 50 Mutual (Midwest) UFO Net work (MUFON ), 228, 230, 252, 253 National Academy of Sciences, 183, 194, 2 1 6, 2 1 8, 227, 229, 23 1, 254, 255; reviews of Condon report, 2 1 2-13 'I r t I National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 1 64, i 1 65, 1 69, 22 1, 232 National Center for Atmospher- ic Research, 1 84 I National Investigations Com- Å mittee on Aerial Phenomena 1 (NICAP ) , 1 17, 129-41 pas- ' sim, 145, 1 52, 154, 158-59, 1 63, 1 64, 1 65, 1 66, 1 69-75 passim, 1 8 1 , 1 86, 1 92, 197, 201, 2o4, 205, 209, 213, 2 1 6- I 17, 222, 223, 227, 230, 235, !
244, 252, 268 ; formativn of, 129-32; Board of Governors (1957), 1 30-3 1 ; and congres- 1 sional hearings, 1 60-61, 1 62; ý UFO Evidence, 1 66; effect of l Condon report on, 227-28; ·.J reorganization of, 228, 253 National Science Foundation, 1 64, 1 65 Nebel, "Long" John, 107-1 10 Index 329 Nelson, Buck, 106, 107 Newhouse, Commander Delbert C.: UFO film, 80, 81, 86, 128, 131, 210 News media. See Press New York Times, 35, 53, 62, 69, 72, 122, 136, 137, 179, 188, 197, 212, 222, 227 Nixon, Richard, 185 Nixon, Stuart, 227, 228, 230, 253 , O'Brien, Brian, 176, 183 O'Brien panel.
See Ad Hoc Committe to Review Project Blue Book Ohio Northern University, 73, 74, 93 Ohio State University: UFO questionnaire, 58, 59, 76 1006th Air Intelligence Service Squadron (AISS), 133, 134, 136 Page, Thornton, 80, 82, 84, 228, 229, 255 Pascagoula, Mississippi, UFO case, 247-49, 255, 258, 262 Pennington, Edward J., 27 Plasma theory, 192 Powers, Wiliam T., 193, 231 Press, the, 52-53, 54, 64, 65, 67- 68, 70, 121-22, 205-6, 207; on airship reports, 21-25; on 1947 UFO wave, 32-33, 34, 35; on 1950 UFO wave, 52- 54; on 1952 UFO wave, 69- 70; criticism of Air Force, 171-73, 181; on "swamp gas," 179-80; on Condon com mittee, 185-86, 1 87; on Con don report, 222-24; on 1973- 74 UFO wave, 255-57 Price, Wiliam T., 1 84 Price-Williams, Douglass, 229, 23 1 Project Blue Book, 126, 127, 141, 142, 143, 154, 156, 157, 158, 2 15, 263; formation of, 59; and 1952 UFO wave, 65, 68, 75, 76-77; policy follow ing Robertson report. 86-87, 88, 92, 93; under Gregory, 127-28; under Friend, 146- 47; staf studies, 144, 145-46, 149-50; under Quintanila, 165-66; reviewed by O'Brien panel. 176, 177; transferred, 188; anual reports, 224-25; image of, 225-26; termination of, 227, 228, 269 Project Grudge, 47, 54, 51, 58, 59, 83, 84, 85, 142; formation of, 43-4; under Ruppelt, 56- 58 Project Grudge report, 45-47, 48, 1 14; conclusions and recommendations of, 46-47; public relations aspects of, 47; comparison with Project Sign report, 48; efects of, 48-49 Project Saucer, 38. See Project Sign Project Sign, 38-4, 265; forma tion of, 37-38; extraterrestrial hypothesis in, 39-40, 41 ; "Es timate of the Situation," 40- 41, 121 ; attitude change in, 43 Project Sign report, 40-43; com parison with Grudge report, 48; comparison with Robert son report, 84-85 Project Twinkle, 47-48, 81, 168 Quintanilla, Major Hector, 176, 178, 181, 182, 193, 195-201 passim, 263 ; as head of Blue Book, 165-66 330 Index Ramey, Major General Roger A., 68, 72 Ratchford, Thomas J.
184-85 206 ' • Red Planet Mars, 1 14 Ridicule, 53, 57-58, 62, 15, 130 269; in 1 896-97 wave 1 8-19 , 264; in 1947 wave, 32-3 3 ; u; 1952 wave, 66, 7 1 ; and con tactees, 95, 1 1 0-1 1, 267; and 4602d, 120; and "swamp gas," 178-79; after Condon report, 23 1 ; of McDonald, 23 1, 232- 33 ; and 1973 wave, 247, 249, 250, 256-57; and scientists, 252, 267; and the press 261 262 ' , Rivers, Rep. L. Mendel, 1 8 1 Roach, Franklin, 1 85 200 214 229 ' ' , Roberts, Walter Orr, 1 84, 229 Robertson, H. P., 79 80 8 1 84-85 ' ' , Robertson panel, 78-94 passim, 121, 143, 145, 153, 255, 258 265, 266; formation of, 79.:_ 80; members of, 79-80 Robertson report: conclusions of, 81-83 ; recommendations of, 83-84, 85-86, 1 1 8, 147, 155, 164, 268; effect on Air Force of, 84-85, 93, 152-53, 1 59; and the CIA, 1 89-90; and James McDonald, 189- 90, 195 Rosengarten, Lt. Col. N. R., 56 Roush, Rep. J. Edward, 207 262 ' Ruppelt, Edward J., 36-45 pas sim, 55, 63, 67-69, 76, 86, 87, 93, 1 1 1, 1 1 8, 125, 128, 142, 145, 146, 155; Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, 36, 125 ; on Project Grudge report, 48; problem of obtain ing UFO reports, 55-58; on Fort Monmouth sighting, 56; as head of Project Grudge, 56; and reorganization of Project Grudge, 56-51, 58- 60; and Robertson panel, 80, 8 1 , 85-86, 189; on Special Re port 14, 124-25 Rutledge, Harley D., 251, 256 Ryan, Rep. William F., 221-22 l j Sagan, Cui, 176, ! 80, 19>-94,1 .
207, 209, 228, 229, 250, 255, 262 ,I Salisbury, Frank, 173-74, 190 1 207, 210-1 1 , .j Samford, General John A., 63, j 78, 142-43; press conference by, 68-:-70, 72, 76, 88, 1 28 Saucers magazine, 108, 1 09 Saunders, David R., 183, 1 84, 200-6 passim, 2 1 6; dismissal from Condon committee, 204, 205, 206, 21 1 ; book by, 212 , Science, 70, 206, 207, 23 1, 234· 1 Hynek in, 190-91, 194; Mark: •d owitz in, 192-93; on Condon J report, 223 1 Scientists, 233, 250-5 1, 252 264-70 passim; and mysteÄ airships, 19-2 1 ; and 1947 ,I UFO wave, 34-35; and 1950 ,1 UFO wave, 53-54; and 1952 · UFO wave, 70-71 ; and 1965 , UFO wave, 173-74; and 1966 1 UFO wave, 191-95, 198-99; ' and Condon report, 219-22; : and 1973-74 UFO wave, 1 253-56 l Sculy, Frank: book by, 50-5 1 , .
52, 108 I Secretary of the Air Force · Office of Legislative Liaison · (SAFLL) , 133, 140, 144, 156, 1 157, 169; and Smart's recom- , mendati<>M, !58; efom to I Index 33 1 stop congressional hearings, 1 60, 164 Secretary of the Air Force Office of Public Information (SAF OI) , 63, 93, 1 1 1, 128, 1 32, 133, 137, 142, 151, 156, 1 69, 175, 1 80, 183; Office of Infor mation Services, 148, 150; at titude toward McDonald of, 195, 196; decision to store Blue Book records, 226-27 Shallett, Sidney: in Saturday Evening Post, 44-45 Shea, David, 206, 226 Shepard, Roger N., 207, 210, 2 1 1 Sietz, Frederick, 212 · Sleeper, Colonel Raymond S., 225 Smart, Rep. Richard, 156, 157, 158 Smith, Wilbert B., 131, 153 Socorro, New Mexico, UFO sighting. See Lonnie Zamora Spaulding, Colonel J. F., 175 Special Report No. 14, 123, 1 24, 125, 126, 127, 129, 140, 142, 143. See also Battelle Me morial Institute Spencer, John Walace, 260, 262 Sprinkle, Leo, 190, 207, 210, 2 1 1 Sputnik, 138, 141 Stanford, Ray, 260-61 Stevens, A. Leo, 27 Strentz, Herbert, 178 Sullivan, Walter, 229, 256; and Condon report, 212-13, 222 "Swamp gas," 178-79, 1 87, 190, 268 Tacker, Major Lawrence, 138, 142, 1 55-56, 1 80; book by, 154-56 Television: and contactees, 107- 8; and 1965-67 UFO wave, 174-75, 179-80, 191; CBS news show, 179-80; and 1973-74 UFO wave, 261-63 Thayer, Gordon, 214 The Thing, 1 14 This Island Earth, 1 14 Truman, Harry S, 53, 67-68 ·Twining, Lieutenant General Nathan F., 37-38, 121, 138, 155 U-2 incident, 159 "UFOB Guide," 1 18, 1 19-20 UFO Investigator (NICAP) , 1 32, 217 UFO Newsletter, 109 UFOs, 1 27-29 .
UFO wave of 1947, 3 1-37, 154, 235, 249, 264; scientists' ex planations of, 33-36; pres responses to, 32-33, 34, 35, 256 UFO wave of 1950, 52-53 UFO wave of 1952, 55, 63-77, 153, 154, 235, 249; extrater restrial theory of, 63 ; and news media, 69-70, 73; effect on military of, 72-73; fears for national security in, 77 UFO wave of 1957, 134-37, 138, 235 UFO wave of 1965-67, 171, 173, 174-75, 177, 198, 235, 256; press response to, 171- 73 ; scientists' attitudes about, 173-74; books as result of, 197-98 UFO wave of 1973-74, 235-49, 262, 263 ; long-distance night sightings in, 236-37; low-level sightings in, 237-39; car-chas ing incidents in, 239-40; elec trical-mechanical effects re- 332 Index parted in, 240; effects on ani mals reported in 240-41· physical effects re;x,rted in: 241:42; mental effects report ed m, 242--43 ; landing and trace cases in, 243--4; ocu pant reports in, 244-49; Pas cagoula case, 247--49; distinc tive features of, 249, 254; and the Air Force, 249-51 ; and the urge to explain, 254-55; press responses to, 255-58; effect on television of, 261-63 University of Colorado, 1 84, 185, 187, 199, 203, 206 Unofficial UFO panel, 148--49 155 , Urge to explain, 34, 70, 191, 254-55 U.S. Congress : briefings and in quiries on UFOs, 141--42, 156-60 passim, 166, 169, 1 82-83 U.S. Congress, House: Commit· te on Appropriations, 23 1 - 32; Committee on Armed Services, 156, 157, 180-83, 207, 221 ; Committee on For eign Afairs, 1 82; Committee on Science and Astronautics, 156, 157, 159, 160, 207-1 1, 221 ; Committee on Un-Amer· ican Activities, 1 85, 223; Sub committee on Atmospheric Phenomena, 142--44; Subcom mittee on Government Infor mation, 126 U.S. Congress, Senate: Com mittee on Preparedness, 156; Subcommittee on Govern ment Operations, 141, 144 Vallee, Jacques, 190, 193, 198, 201, 205; books by, 198 Vandenberg, Gen. Hoyt S., 40, 64, 72, 78 Van Tassel, George, 101, 106, .; 107, 108, 109-10, 180, 197 ,, Verne, Jules, 24 Vivian, Weston E., 1 80 Von Diiniken, Erich, 259-60 262 • ·ఄ ' I I) War of the Worlds, The, 1 14 · J Washington, D.C., UFO sight· ః ings, '65-67, 68, 69, 70, 128, 195, 209, 247; effect on press of, 67-69 Watson, General Harold E., 53 Welles, Orson : "War of the Worlds" broadcast, 49, 84, 91, 187-88 Wells, H. G.: ''Th.e Crystal Egg," 24 Wheeler, General Earle, 1 82-83 Wiliamson, George Hunt, 106, 1 14 Wynn, Colonel Edward, 161, 165 I I Zamora, Lonnie : UFO sighting in Socorro, New Mexico, W 1 67-68, 190, 195, 24, 259; effects of, 168-69 J ,, I ..
, , ' ', '- About the Author The UFO Controversy in America is part of Dr.
Jacob's long interest in and study of UFOs. He has written numerous articles, reviews, and papers on them. He has conducted courses on "UFOs in American Society" and was technical consultant for the television program "UFOs : Past, Present, and Future." David Michael Jacobs is currently Assistant Professor at Temple University. His specialty is 20th Cen tury American History. He has a B.A. from U.C.L.A. and an MA. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin.
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Praise for Walking Among Us “Walking Among Us is a chronicle of human experience that contradicts every current theory about the universe that we think we live in. Jacobs' human observers have experienced a concealed reality that is literally next door to some of us, and that he believes is about to interact, secretly and insidiously, with the rest of us. Walking Among Us explains why extraterrestrial UFOs are here, who is aboard them, and what they are doing. To put it mildly, the evidence from the people that Jacobs has interviewed shows that the extraterrestrials are up to no good. You will find Walking Among Us hard to put down. If enough of us read and pay attention to the evidence in this book, we might be able to avoid the disaster that its evidence portends.” —Don C. Donderi, PhD, associate professor (retired) of psychology, McGill University, Montreal, author of UFOs, ETs, and Alien Abductions “David Jacobs has written an extremely important book about UFO abductees and the meaning of their abductions.” —Ron Westrum, PhD, emeritus professor of sociology, Eastern Michigan University “Once we accept the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs and that the beings can act purposefully as rational beings invariably do, it is only a small step from UFO phenomena to the co-residency of the two species.
It is this logical consistency that makes Walking Among Us constantly grip our imagination with such vengeance.” —Young-hae Chi, D Phil, faculty of Oriental studies, University of Oxford “David Jacobs has spent his career as a history professor at a major university, and—what matters most of all—he backs his claims with an impressive mass of evidence. . . . Jacobs treats his subject with ethnographic depth and detail, but without academic ponderousness.” —Thomas E. Bullard, PhD, board member, Center for UFO Studies and Fund for UFO Research and author of UFO Abductions: The Measure of a Mystery Published by Disinformation Books, an imprint of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC with offices at 665 Third Street, Suite 400 San Francisco, CA 94107 www.redwheelweiser.com Copyright © 2015 by David M. Jacobs, PhD. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages.
ISBN: 978-1-938875-14-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data available upon request.
Cover design by Jim Warner Text design by Frame25 Productions Cover photograph © Menna / Shutterstock Printed in Canada MAR 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Disinformation® is a registered trademark of The Disinformation Company Ltd.
www.redwheelweiser.com www.redwheelweiser.com/newsletter To Irene My wife, my best friend, my advisor, and my bastion of common sense.
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: The Back Story 1. Abductees and Their Testimony 2. Abductees, Aliens, and the Program 3. Preparing Hubrid Children 4. Training Adolescent and Young Adult Hubrids 5. Field Training for Hubrid Integration 6. Integrated Hubrids 7. Adjusting to Life on Earth 8. Learning about Relationships 9. Training Abductees for The Change 10. Integration and Speculation Appendix: Evolution of an Abduction Researcher Endnotes Index Acknowledgments A variety of people helped me bring this book to life.
Carolyn Longo has transcribed most of the hypnosis sessions for over twenty years. She says she never grows tired of the accounts.
My wife, Irene, edited an early draft of this book and provided her usual excellent advice. As the book evolved, my older son, Evan S. Jacobs, supplied very cogent critiques and editing of not only my writing but my theories as well. Dr. Laurel Trufant completed the final and exhaustive edit. Her professional work on the manuscript was extraordinary.
My younger son, Alexander W. Jacobs, gave me sage encouragement. Prof. Young-hae Chi provided helpful suggestions, thus making the manuscript stronger. Leslie Kean, Prof. Don Donderi, and Prof.
Ronald Westrum have encouraged me while listening to more detailed expositions of my theories.
My literary agent Lisa Hagan took a chance with me. Greg Brandenburgh, associate publisher at Red Wheel Weiser publications, also took a chance and accepted this unusual book. I am enormously appreciative of their efforts.
I am grateful for the work done by abduction pioneers such as Prof. Leo Sprinkle, Prof. James Harder, Dr. Richard Haines, Ann Druffel, Prof. Karla Turner, and many others who showed that something profoundly unusual was happening and people must take abductions seriously. Prof. John Mack lent intelligence and prestige to the study of this fringe phenomenon. Dr. Roger Leir made important contributions into the physicality of abductions. Hypnotherapists Yvonne Smith, John S. Carpenter, Jed Turnbull, Kathleen Marden, and other colleagues have continued, often in the face of ridicule, to seriously study abductions. All serious abduction researchers are caring people who want to help abductees while researching the phenomenon.
I am profoundly indebted to the abductees with whom I have worked to uncover their experiences.
They are heroic souls who allowed me to enter into their private lives; they have astounding courage and determination. This is especially true of “Betsey” who gave me access into her life for a period of time that went well beyond what most people would endure.
Of course, my dear friend Budd Hopkins made all my abduction research possible.
Introduction: The Back Story During a hypnosis session in 2003, Bernard Davis told me an absurd story. He said he went to a Baltimore Orioles baseball game with his close friend, Eric. Yet Bernard knew nothing about Eric. He did not know his last name, where he came from, where he lived, what he did for work, or how he had met him. However, he and Eric had been close friends for more than seventeen years. Bernard even showed me a 1995 photograph of Eric—an ordinary-looking man in his thirties sitting with Bernard on a fishing boat in Brazil.
Over the years, abductees have told me about having “special friends” like Eric who befriended them in childhood and continued to visit them for decades onboard an unidentified flying object (UFO) or in strict privacy on Earth.1 But Bernard's relationship with Eric was different. Rather than meeting only onboard or in secret, they spent time together in public. They often met at restaurants; they drove to various places; they met in different countries during Bernard's business trips; they went sightseeing.
They also had long talks about how to live in human society. The problem is that Eric is a hybrid—a mixture of alien and human.
Just a few years before, I would have considered Bernard's baseball story pure unconscious fabrication. This type of public human/hybrid interaction did not fit the descriptions I had heard since I began doing abduction research. But soon after Bernard started having sessions with me, other abductees began to give similar accounts of public interactions with hybrids. They were relating something new and alarming. Not only were they engaging in activities with aliens and adult hybrids onboard UFOs; they were also having complex public interactions with late-adolescent and young-adult hybrids who were all focused on one goal—assimilating into human society. Several abductees had their own “Erics.” Bernard's story about attending a baseball game with Eric was consistent with my other findings. My research had uncovered a substantial presence of hybrids living on Earth.
This book tells how I came to this seemingly ridiculous conclusion. It builds upon my previous books and on my fifty years of research in the UFO and abduction field. To have a foundation for processing the information in this book, it may help to have a brief review of my research and other books, which I have given in the appendix. This book will illustrate how hybrid aliens are integrating themselves into human society and their strategies for achieving their goals. The narrative is based on interviews with fourteen abductees—a small fraction of the 1,150 abduction events I have investigated over the years. Their testimony has led me to some surprising conclusions.
My thinking on the subject of alien integration has evolved as my knowledge has widened. I now know enough to theorize about who these beings are and what they are doing. Unfortunately, I still do not know the ultimate reason they are doing it—the “why.” At the end of this book, I provide some possible explanations. But the “why” remains the last great unanswered question in abduction and UFO research.
In this book, I will examine our current and previously unknown knowledge of the abduction phenomenon. Chapter 1 explores the testimony of abductees and how we are able to explore their experiences. Chapter 2 redefines abductions, describes who abductees are, outlines their function within the alien program, discusses alien goals in detail, and begins to delve into the progression of their abduction program. Chapter 3 outlines onboard training and assessment for young hybrids who will eventually integrate into human society. Chapter 4 describes training and assessment for older hybrids.
Chapter 5 details hybrid visits into abductees' homes to become familiar with human living. Chapter 6 shows how abductees are helping hybrids move into their apartments and training them in “real life” situations. Chapter 7 identifies the various problems of hybrid adjustment. Chapter 8 discusses how hybrids learn about the complexities of human relationships. Chapter 9 explains how abductees are trained to do aliens' work and thus gives us a glimpse of the future. Chapter 10 speculates about the alien program's meaning. Historians normally do not use conditional words like could, would, should, may, might, and probably, but I will use them throughout the book.
Ultimately, this book is not about abductions. It is about the aliens' program and the niche that abductees have within it. My research into the program has revealed it in greater detail than ever before.
Though the aliens themselves are mysterious, nothing about their activities is beyond understanding. And with more evidence, we will learn more. I hope that this book will be a step in that direction.
CHAPTER ONE Abductees and Their Testimony “Are they here?” I understand that alien integration into human society sounds ridiculous. The idea that alien/human hybrids are living on Earth is inherently preposterous. During media interviews, my favorite question has been: Do you think aliens are walking among us? I liked this question because it gave me a chance to say, “Absolutely not! There is no evidence whatsoever that aliens are walking among us.” This answer allowed me to feel sane in the world of presumed craziness in which I dwelled. In this book, however, I give evidence for aliens not only walking among us, but living here as well. By doing so, I realize that I am stepping over a line that most abduction researchers—and especially most UFO researchers—will not cross. But as an academic researcher, I must follow the evidence where it leads.
Still, I feel uneasy about relating what I have found. Believing such incredible testimony seems weak- minded and fodder for supposedly tough-minded debunkers. Writing that an abductee took a hybrid to a baseball game embarrasses me and strengthens the debunkers' resolve. But regardless of my personal discomfort, I am confident of the veracity of the information I present here. Nevertheless, readers should be aware that no author is infallible, and that abductees may not have perfect recall.
In this book, I use edited verbatim transcripts more extensively than I have in the past because they provide compelling first-person accounts. I have pared most of the transcripts down to their essentials, removing tangential conversations between the abductee and me as well as other extraneous utterances.
In all cases, I have preserved their exact meaning and context.
In understanding these transcripts' usefulness, it is important to know that when abductees describe their experiences, they often do so at great personal peril. Many abductees are successful, high- functioning individuals with advanced professional degrees who risk their reputations and livelihoods by relating their experiences. Abductees come from all strata of society. Among them are physicians, businesspeople, attorneys, psychologists, psychiatrists, scientists, university professors, graduate students, police officers, librarians, retailers, laborers, retirees, and the unemployed. They all face ridicule and scorn when they claim they were abducted by extraterrestrial beings. One abductee who talked about his experiences in his workplace was fired. Others who told their spouses about their abductions have had the accounts used against them as proof of mental instability in divorce and child- custody proceedings. Very little good can come from relating such experiences to nonabductees. For a person even to have an interest in the subject—without a claim of abduction—can make others question their mental stability. When child abductees talk about their experiences at school, they undergo relentless teasing and learn to keep their memories to themselves. Yet the need for many abductees to understand what has been happening to them outweighs the danger of disclosure. They come to me out of desperation, driven to find a rational explanation for the seemingly irrational activities that have intruded upon their lives.
I selected most of the fourteen abductees whose experiences I use in this book because they best elucidate the end-point phase of the abduction program and demonstrate new and chilling aspects of the alien agenda. All the names given here are pseudonyms to maintain confidentiality. Table 1 presents a list of the abductees' false names, their actual birth years and places, the years when I first began to work with them, and their vocations.
TABLE 1: ABDUCTEE PROFILES I had the most sessions with Betsey. From 1999 to 2007, we examined over 100 abduction events and I had the unprecedented opportunity of having sessions with her on a weekly basis or more for over a year. This access allowed me to delve more deeply into her daily life and discover unknown details of the abduction program. To the best of my knowledge, no other investigator has had such entrée to or opportunity with any abductee. She was an excellent describer of her experiences and I quote her extensively throughout this book.
Hypnosis and Evidence The raw data of abduction research is human memory retrieved through hypnosis, often administered by amateurs. I am acutely aware of the weaknesses of this methodology. But the alien program is clandestine; few abductees consciously recall their abductions. Because of this, abductees have unique problems in retrieving detailed abduction memories, and abduction researchers rarely understand how to elicit accurate descriptions. Unfortunately, there are currently no courses on abduction hypnosis and no reliable books on the subject. Learning comes from trial, error, and experience. Becoming competent with abduction hypnosis requires a thorough knowledge of the abduction phenomenon and an awareness of the pitfalls of retrieved memory. There are precious few people who are able to do this.
Even with competent hypnosis, abduction descriptions are still controversial. Evidence for the abduction phenomenon is anecdotal and often incomplete. And, as is to be expected with incomplete data, accounts often present more questions than answers. Furthermore, abductees may confabulate— fabricate imaginary experiences as compensation for loss of memory—and relate events that either did not happen (although they think they did) or happened differently from what they remember. In spite of these problems, the consistency of detail and narrative over time has generated an authenticity that cannot be matched by idiosyncratic imaginations. When researchers retrieve abductees' memories competently, they can give us a realistic glimpse into the extraordinary world of alien abductions.
Confabulation and Error Abduction accounts remembered without the benefit of competent hypnosis are most often untrustworthy, no matter how much abductees are invested in their memories' truthfulness and accuracy. Even with competent hypnosis, confabulation is common in the first few hypnosis sessions and declines in subsequent attempts. Practitioners must learn how to correct for confabulated memories by using a set of controls to recognize and mitigate them. Unfortunately, inexperienced or highly trusting abduction researchers cannot identify confabulation and even encourage it through improper questioning. The result is false accounts that incompetent researchers think are true.
An example of the perils of confabulation is telepathy. Communication among beings onboard UFOs is consistently said to be telepathic. Abductees describe it as the sensing of thoughts. Thus, little prevents them from sensing their own thoughts and thinking that they are communications from aliens. This occurs most frequently in abductees' conscious memories.
Other errors are the direct fault of abduction researchers. Some harbor agendas that they instill in abductees—either subtly or hamfistedly. Though some researchers are sincere believers in abduction phenomena, they tend to be New Age supporters who are dedicated to the idea that aliens are here to bring us into a higher state of consciousness. Aliens will do everything from spiritually enlightening us, to teaching us to heal each other or the Earth, to ending war, to stopping the despoiling of the environment, eliminating weapons of mass destruction, and preparing us to join a welcoming community of planets.
I sometimes come across accounts in which aliens talk of the environment's ruination. But if these memories are accurate—and I now have serious doubts about that—the aliens' concern about the environment is less about saving it for humans and more about on what kind of planet they themselves want to live. This is the argument I make in my book, The Threat.
Recall and the Emergence of Patterns When I conduct hypnosis with abductees, I use simple relaxation techniques. The subjects are not in a trance. They sometimes tell me that they are not hypnotized, but I often tell them it does not matter.
During a hypnosis session, I ask logical and chronological questions that can hardly be considered leading or suggestive. The abductee dictates what I can ask. For example, if abductees say they are on a table and then go into another room, I ask how they got off the table. After they tell me how, I ask if they are standing and what they can see now that they have a different point of view. If they begin to walk, I ask in what direction. If they are headed for a doorway, I ask about the shape of it. If they leave a room, I ask if they go straight ahead or turn left or right. If they say they are in a hallway, I ask about its size and shape, the lighting there, and other particulars.
It is easy to overdo this type of questioning, so I try to keep it within reason. I often leave my questions open-ended so my own opinions do not influence their answers. For new subjects with whom I have had only three or fewer sessions, I try to ask subtly misleading questions to test their suggestibility.
I find that people rarely can be dissuaded. After several sessions, once I am familiar with the person and no longer worry about confabulation, I become more conversational rather than interrogative. These simple and logical techniques help prevent confabulation and aid in memory recovery.2 Abduction research consists of uncovering patterns. Without those patterns, all memories would be individualistic and therefore almost certainly self-created. Different psychological phenomena would produce wildly varying abduction accounts. In fact, without patterns, there would be no abduction program to investigate.
Typically, I hear the same abduction accounts over and over. I have heard some specific events in the same detail hundreds of times—some so often that I have to force myself to stay awake. But that soporific, repetitive quality is critically important for verifying accounts. Once in a while, I hear something new, something that potentially can advance my knowledge. I am usually skeptical of these accounts and do not elevate that information to evidence until other abductees without knowledge of the previous testimony report the same thing. I wait for a pattern to emerge. In general, multiple descriptions of the same phenomena are the most important aspect of abduction investigation.
Of course, patterns can be elicited through inept questioning as well. Some researchers using flawed methodology have received multiple descriptions of similar events—for example, receiving messages from aliens. They then claim these events as solid evidence. Usually, these accounts are born from leading questions and/or the bizarre practice of asking abductees to question aliens—as if the abduction were taking place at the moment. This directly calls for confabulation, and subjects unwittingly cooperate. Information from this type of questioning is useless and undermines rigorous abduction research. With competent investigation, abductees say what they know and not what they do not know.
Reproduction Procedures A critical pattern that has persisted over years of rigorous, methodical abduction research is that of reproductive procedures. The pattern emerged with the first two abduction cases discovered—the 1957 Antonio Villas Boas case in Brazil and the 1961 case of Barney and Betty Hill in America. Villas Boas reported having sexual relations with a female being who looked human. After the sexual activity, the female pointed to her abdomen and then up, presumably toward the sky. Villas Boas said he thought he was being used as a “stallion to improve their stock.” No hypnosis was used with Villas Boas.
The Hill case was the first to be investigated through hypnosis, but the hypnotist, though talented and experienced, did not know about abduction phenomena and its attendant memory problems. Barney reported that sperm was taken from him; Betty said an alien pierced her navel with a needle, telling her it was a “pregnancy test.” The Villas Boas case was not published until 1966, and neither the 1966 book nor the 1975 television movie about the Hill case discussed Barney's sperm sample. Consequently, the cases had little influence on future abduction accounts of reproductive processes. Nevertheless, since the late 1970s, the reproductive aspects of abductions have grown in importance as researchers began to realize their ubiquity. Indeed, the prevalence of reproductive procedures in abductee accounts has led us to understand what renowned abduction researcher Budd Hopkins first uncovered in 1983—that aliens were using human sperm and ova and adding alien biological material to create a mixture of the two species. He called these partially human/partially alien beings “hybrids.” The gestation of these hybrids begins with an insertion procedure. Female abductees report that aliens inserted a hybrid embryo into the uterus and removed a fetus nine to eleven weeks later. During subsequent abduction events, these abductees saw the offspring (although not necessarily their own) as infants, toddlers, adolescents, young adults, and adults. (Oddly, I have heard no reports of abductees seeing hybrids as elderly adults.) Abductees report a spectrum of hybrid types, from those who look mostly alien to those who look human. Abductees also describe a spectrum of hybrid responsibilities, from escorting abductees into a UFO to conducting full abduction events without the aid of the well-known gray aliens—those with large heads, black eyes, and thin bodies. Many abductees report complex personal relationships with adult hybrids.
Messsages and First Contact Fantasies about aliens and abductions often seep into the popular culture and come out as “truths.” In some instances, certain facets of these fantasies have profoundly affected both the society at large and scientists and academics. For example, the concept of receiving a “message” from aliens was used by the infamous “contactees” of the 1950s who claimed they had met aliens, been taken on trips to Venus and other planets, and been given messages—often about the evils of communism, the atomic bomb, and other current issues of the time. The “message” is still part of flying-saucer lore, but it has never been a legitimate aspect of abduction phenomena. When one learns about abductions, the illogicality of such messages becomes evident.
Similarly, the idea of formal “contact” is squarely based in popular culture. Many people are sure that if aliens ever did “come down,” it would occur in a “take-me-to-your-leader” fashion. Aliens and humans would come together as equals, ideally on the White House lawn, with both sides showing courtesy, consideration, and a desire to teach or inform. Though the idea that aliens would reveal themselves publicly is heavily ingrained in the zeitgeist, it is not found in the abduction phenomenon.
Furthermore, the converse of this—that aliens are here to destroy humans and take over the planet—is also a popular-culture staple. Movie producers use this idea because of its drama, horror, and violence.
Again, though the abduction phenomenon has insidious aspects, there are no reports of a desire to destroy human civilization. Despite the lack of any data, however, these two conceptions of “first contact” have become powerful in a negative way; they are seen as the only options. And because these scenarios have not happened, the majority of people, including academics and scientists, jump to the conclusion that UFO and abduction phenomena are nonsensical.
Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis provides an excellent example of dismissal due to nonconformity to popular expectations. Australian UFO researcher Bill Chalker quotes Mullis: “Any culture that could conquer the barrier of space-time could have easily conquered the far simpler problems of complex biochemistry and would not need us in the manner described in the grey alien-human ‘hybrid’ agenda theories.” This confident statement has no evidentiary basis and suggests that abductions could not occur because they do not follow what he thinks should happen.3 Mullis's statement also suggests that he knows something about life elsewhere. But if we took all the world's scientists and academics who are not UFO and/or alien-abduction researchers or abductees, and combined all their knowledge about extraterrestrial life, the total amount would be zero. As of this writing, this is an irrefutable statement. We must deal with the facts at hand and not say that the aliens would, could, or should behave in a manner we think is proper. Using popular culture or popular scientific speculation to explain abductions must include a chain of evidence demonstrating how cultural information entered into subjects' minds, which then transmuted it into complex personal abduction narratives. Yet competent investigation of abductions fails to reveal any evidentiary chain from popular culture to abduction reports.
Skeptics, Debunkers, and the Facts at Hand One of the critical aspects of the abduction phenomenon is that abductees all say the same thing about what is happening to them, even though they do not share knowledge of each others' experiences. For example, it would be interesting (albeit trivial) to know where aliens come from. If the abduction phenomenon is psychologically based—and therefore, not real—some abductees would simply invent a home base for the aliens, just as they are imagining everything else. We would then have a variety of origin theories. In fact, abductees seldom describe a “home base,” because the aliens they encounter do not choose to give this information. Nor do aliens ever reveal the ultimate reason for why they are here.
If the phenomenon were psychological, we would be given a wealth of reasons.
Knowing how aliens got here matters to scientists. They understand the immense difficulties of our going to other solar systems or galaxies with our technology and conclude that it is unlikely for others to travel here. They assume that we are just an insignificant planet in an ordinary solar system. Therefore, there is no reason for aliens to come here. This line of argument is, of course, nonsense. It does not matter how aliens got here or where they come from. Nor does it matter where the Earth is in the galaxy.
The only important question is: Are they here? If the answer to this question is “Yes,” the next most important question is: Why are they here? The anecdotal evidence strongly indicates that they are here; the question “why” is what I am exploring in this book.
Scientists, debunkers, and skeptics have many reasons to ignore or discount the abduction phenomenon. No one disputes that people claim to have been abducted. Thus, the phenomenon is either psychological or experiential—there are no other options. Because the experiential explanation is, for many, too unlikely to consider, debunkers and skeptics put forth myriad psychological explanations for it.
They cite faulty hypnosis, false-memory syndrome, sleep paralysis, popular-culture osmosis, sexual abuse in childhood, fears of the new millennium, hysterical contagion, self-hypnosis, the will to believe, myth and folklore, and many more explanations.
I have read over thirty-five different—and, for the most part, mutually exclusive—debunking explanations to account for abduction narratives. All the debunkers have a common mind-set. They do not know the accurate evidence for the phenomenon; they ignore the evidence they do know; they distort the evidence to conform to their explanations. I have found no exceptions to this. Most skeptics fail to realize that competent abduction researchers are also familiar with psychological explanations and have thoroughly examined them. No serious researcher wants to mistake psychological accounts for experiential ones. For debunkers, however, any explanation—no matter how divorced from the evidence, no matter how outlandish—is preferable to the idea that abductions are real.
The abduction phenomenon does not lend itself to facile answers. Here are some aspects of reported abductions that must be accounted for in any explanation: When people are abducted, they are physically missing from their normal environment.
People are sometimes abducted in groups and can confirm each others' reports.
Bystanders sometimes see people being abducted.
When returned to their normal environment after an abduction, people often have marks, cuts, bruises, broken bones, and even fully formed scars (a biological impossibility) that were not there before the abduction.
When returned, people sometimes have their clothes on inside out or backward, or they are wearing someone else's clothes. In these cases, they clearly remember dressing themselves correctly beforehand.
Most of what abductees describe has no antecedents in popular culture.
The abduction phenomenon cuts across all social, political, religious, educational, intellectual, economic, racial, ethnic, and geographic lines.
The abduction phenomenon is global. People describe the same things in the same detail worldwide, regardless of cultural differences.
Abductions occur at all times of the day and night, depending on access to the abductees and when they will be least missed. Abductees need not be sleeping.
Abductions begin in childhood and continue with varying frequency into old age.
The abduction phenomenon is intergenerational. The children of abductees often themselves report being abductees, as do their children.
Abductions are unrelated to alcohol or drugs.
Of equal importance is how abductees deal with the phenomenon.
Most abductees fear abductions and want them to stop. They do not revel in them.
High-functioning people who report these experiences testify against their own interests, knowing that public disclosure could ruin their careers.
Many abductees have “screen memories” that recall vivid, irrelevant events that mask abduction activity.
Some abductees accurately remember large parts or all of their abductions without hypnosis.
People remember what happened to them in greater precision, detail, accuracy, and completeness with competent questioning.
Abductions are sometimes investigated a few weeks, days, or hours after they happened, minimizing memory degradation.
Abductees often have long-standing cherished memories of seeing deceased relatives or religious figures. When they investigate their memories, they realize that they are of the abduction phenomenon and not what the abductees had desperately wanted them to be.
There has never been anything like this in human history. In the next chapter, we will explore this unique phenomenon of abductions and how they contribute to the alien program.
CHAPTER TWO Abductees, Aliens, and the Program “Soon.” Over the years, many people have attempted to define the abduction phenomenon. But the phenomenon has yielded itself to analysis only slowly. Most definitions are inaccurate because they fail to incorporate new information accrued over the years. We now know that abductees need not be physically “kidnapped.” They need not necessarily be subjected to examination-type procedures. And they need not be taken onboard a UFO. So perhaps a correct definition of the phenomenon is: An alien-initiated interaction with a human during which the alien controls a human both physically and cognitively in real time and in any location.
This new definition includes activity outside of the UFO and does not require that abductees be physically kidnapped. It does not rely on examination procedures. It also includes neurological control, which is central to the abduction phenomenon. And it is a physical event that takes place within normal temporal bounds. Before describing those who are abducted and the beings who abduct them, however, we need to look at the salient characteristics of each group.
Abductees Abductees are easy to define, but difficult to describe. They are people who, from birth, are subject to being placed under the control of aliens and who forget most or all of their experiences immediately after the event ends. The terminology used to describe them, however, is more troubling than the definition. In fact, I dislike the word “abductee.” It marks the person as “other,” as being in some way different from “normal” people, and as somehow psychologically threatening. Unfortunately, however, I have found no acceptable alternative term. “Abductee” is currently the only word that adequately describes a person's situation, and therefore I use it throughout this book.
Some researchers prefer to use the nondescript word “experiencer,” but this term sidesteps the lifelong psychological trauma and physical events that most abductees endure. “Experiencer” subtly imputes neutrality, passivity, and even pleasantness to the phenomenon. As one abductee said, the word “experiencer” is “all pink and fluffy.” To avoid that connotation, other researchers have used cumbersome phrases like “abduction experiencer” and “abductee-experiencer.” “Contactee” is another term used most often by New Age followers. It recycles the old 1950s label for the long-discredited charlatans who falsely claimed contact with aliens. The word is now often used to suggest that benevolent aliens have singled out someone for special help or education. I have never found this to be the case.
Abductees live normal lives except for their involuntary participation in a lifelong abduction program.
They come from around the world and they have no common overt traits that suggest they are being abducted. Abductees appear to be randomly distributed across all demographics. Interestingly, health is rarely a barrier to abduction. People who suffer from cardiac disease, diabetes, cancer, and other serious medical problems are all abducted. They do not report miracle cures, although there are rare cases of young children being cured of serious illnesses and of adults being cured of colds. The aliens are not “healers.” In fact, the only people who are not candidates for abduction seem to be those with significant physical and neurological infirmities that prevent them from doing their duties as part of the abduction program.4 Abductees are as emotionally and mentally stable as nonabductees. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), along with other mental and personality assessments, has shown that abductees do not have personality characteristics that would account for their fantastic personal narratives.5 Of course, some abductees are mentally unstable, just as many nonabductees are. My policy is not to work with these subjects if their instability is apparent in advance. In a few cases, these behavioral issues have manifested after I started my sessions, but I have not used any accounts from these people in my research, even though they were abductees.
The vast majority of the people I have worked with are capable of separating reality and fantasy.
Some have been referred by professional therapists who did not know how to handle abduction accounts, but who were confident their clients were not delusional. I have also had investigation sessions with abductees who are psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental-health professionals who were clearly capable of differentiating between reality and fantasy.
A common thread among abductees is that one or both of their parents were abductees. Abductions usually begin in infancy (parents are sometimes abducted with their babies) or early childhood; they continue with varying frequency into old age. This fact leads to the question of population size. How many people are or have been abductees? Most people are unaware that they have experienced abduction events. Instead, they may have had many anomalous experiences—missing hours of time, seeing ghosts, traveling on the astral plane, and other odd events—but they do not link them to abduction activity. The best answer we have to the question of numbers is, of course, speculative. But it is clear that, at the very least, millions of people worldwide have been abducted, and their numbers are growing as the world's population increases.
In 1991, Budd Hopkins, sociologist Ron Westrum, and I worked with the Roper Organization to determine how many people have had abduction-like experiences. Roper interviewed 5,986 randomly selected people across the United States. The poll, with an error rate of 1.4 percent, indicated that at minimum 2 percent—6,000,000—Americans have had experiences with abduction-like characteristics.
And that number reflects an exceptionally conservative analysis of the poll.6 Of course, to verify these numbers we would have to investigate each case. However, tens of thousands of people have contacted me and my colleagues detailing their abduction experiences. And each one of them likely represents many more who have not contacted a researcher. Given that the abduction phenomenon is global and people around the world describe similar abduction events, the number of abductees is obviously extremely large.7 Aliens Most of the beings who abduct humans live onboard UFOs. While all are physically similar to Homo sapiens, all have mental abilities that are significantly different and unimaginably powerful. They communicate telepathically. Using “neural engagement” (a term I now prefer to my original and more science fiction-like term, “mindscan”), abductors can elicit emotions ranging from fear to hatred to love to sexual response. Most abductees undergo some form of neural engagement almost every time they are abducted. Just as important, all aliens can control human thoughts and behavior from a limited distance, without neural engagement. By gazing into an abductee's eyes from a few inches away, or even touching foreheads, they can lock into the optic nerve and, using it as a conduit, stimulate various neural sites within the brain, causing that person to “see,” or think, or physically do whatever they want. The aliens' extraordinary neurological and telepathic abilities are the most significant difference between them and humans. Without these capabilities, abductions would be extremely risky for them, if not impossible.
Although aliens and hybrids, whom I will discuss below, share core characteristics, they are not all alike. In my previous books, I described “tall, insect-like beings,” “reptilian-like beings,” and “gray aliens.” As a result of my ongoing research—and at the risk of confusion—I have revised this nomenclature and classification, labeling insect-like beings “insectalins,” reptilian-like beings “reptalins,” and gray aliens simply “grays.” I have also refined the alien/hybrid taxonomy (see Table 2.) All hybrids are still aliens, however, no matter how hybridized they become. Likewise, I previously identified early-stage hybrids (who look very alien-like), middle-stage hybrids (who look half alien and half human), and late-stage hybrids (who look quite human, but with noticeable physical differences).8 To this, I have added different degrees of hybridization based on neurological factors ranging from human-stage, to advance hybrids, to security hybrids, to “hubrids” (hybrids whose function is to assimilate into humanity).9 I hope the new classification places the abduction phenomenon in a more coherent light. Table 2 provides a summary of the physical appearance, characteristics, and functions for the various types of alien beings, although much of what they do is still unknown. A few words of caution: I have separated the aliens into discreet categories. As with all classifications, however, it is certain the hybrids represent a smoother continuum of alien life than can be communicated with this reductive analysis.
I have also rethought the aliens' origins based on their physical appearance and activities. My new hypothesis is that the insectalins are either the “original” aliens, or the least hybridized. Their morphology is the least humanoid and therefore the most alien. I contend, therefore, that they hybridized all the other aliens onboard a UFO, with the possible exception of the reptalins. In the process of hybridization, I include cloning, especially for grays. The evidence for this may be slim, but the inclusion answers questions that have heretofore been inexplicable. With the possible exception of the insectalins and reptalins, all other aliens onboard are hybrids.
TABLE 2: THE ALIEN SPECTRUM Most aliens and hybrids perform tasks for which they have been created and do not appear to think past their own particular functions. Dissatisfaction with their position is highly unlikely. They are willing functionaries in a complex system. The exception may be the hubrids living on Earth. Their full relationship to onboard aliens is unknown.
Aliens do not have individual names; these are apparently unnecessary in their telepathic society.
Thus, abductees give humanoid hybrids names. Because of this, each one may have many names. The absence of a name reflects the aliens' adherence to a group ethic (the collective) and their lack of personal identity and independence within the group.10 Each group of aliens as classified in Table 2 has specific functions for which it was created. The only exception is the insectalins.
Insectalin Leaders Insectalins appear to be the ones in command. They seem superior in intellect and in breadth of understanding. They do not have the well-ordered routine by which grays abide, and therefore they are less structured. They do not perform commonplace tasks, like physically taking humans into a UFO or guiding them through the corridors into rooms. They sometimes conduct preliminary examinations on abductees, although these procedures are generally left to the grays. They employ neural engagement, and abductees report that they perform the most penetrating and strongest neural engagement of all aliens.
They appear to have more knowledge of the program than other aliens.
Abductees report that some insectalins wear robes or cloaks with extremely high collars that rise above where ears would be on humans. Researchers do not understand the role of these robe-wearing insectalins, and abductees almost never describe them as involved with common abduction procedures.
It is possible that they have a higher status than other insectalins, but more research is needed to understand their function.
Insectalins are supremely logical and appear to lack a humanlike emotional life. Abductees' descriptions of their personalities and communication patterns indicate that they care little about human civilization. To them, humans are an inferior species who are almost childlike in their ability to think and whom they can manipulate, not only individually, but societally as well.
Insectalins appear to have no sense of human morality or ethics, although they may have their own characteristic morality. For them, abducting people is a logical means to an end. Thus, their ability to think rationally is similar to that of humans, whose history is replete with grand-scale attempts to exploit other humans who are considered inferior. In the insectalins' minds, we are the inferior ones ripe for exploitation.
Insectalins are often more apt to communicate with humans than are other aliens. When they have a discussion, it is primarily about their program. I have not yet had a case in which an abductee asked questions about insectalins' personal lives, their non-UFO society, or life on their home venue.
Insectalins will sometimes talk about the future, but we cannot be sure that they are telling the full story; they are careful not to divulge too much. Why they talk to people at all is unclear, other than that they may find it diverting to discover a human with the unusual ability to ask questions during an abduction.
Insectalins care little about the people whom they use to create hybrids. They express no guilt or regret about their disruption of human lives. They have little or no sense of humor, pity, or sorrow. They do, however, express a strong entitlement to do whatever they want to humans. They appear not to understand human emotions and therefore they cannot empathize. Whether they have sympathy is unknown, but they and other aliens will stop pain if an abductee is in distress during a physical procedure. However, this may only be to suppress an adrenaline rush that could cause an abductee to become uncontrolled.
Hybridization I contend that the hybridization of aliens with humans—and perhaps other aliens—is the key to understanding the abduction phenomenon. This is a controversial hypothesis within an already controversial subject, but I will present information in this book that will add substance to my contention.
All hybrids are created to perform specific functions. They all work constantly. Most do not sleep as long as humans do, but humanoid hybrids, and perhaps even grays, go into short sleeplike states. They all have the same neurological abilities in varying degrees of strength. They all communicate telepathically.
They all give complete allegiance to insectalins. As hybrids become more human, we can see a progression of human features that the grays do not seem to need.
Grays Grays have had the most exposure in popular culture. They have been used to epitomize the “standard alien” in the advertising and entertainment industries since the 1980s. It is difficult to categorize grays in terms of degree of hybridization. The best way to differentiate them is by height and function (see Table 2).
Small grays are basically helpers. They are the ones who come down to Earth to abduct humans and take them to the UFOs. Onboard, they help abductees remove their clothes and then escort them around the UFO for scheduled procedures. When the abduction is almost over, they give the abductees back their clothes and, depending on their mental condition, help them get dressed. They often accompany abductees back to their normal environment. Small grays all wear extremely tight-fitting, almost skin-like clothes.
Tall grays perform more complex procedures on abductees—egg-and-sperm harvesting, embryo implantation, fetal extraction, and neurological engagement. They are the main agents in abduction processes for most abductees. Both small and tall grays have noses and mouths, although they do not eat or talk through their mouths. They have no teeth and no apparent lungs. They do not breathe.
Abductees describe gender differences among grays—some are described as more “graceful” or “seem feminine,” and are therefore thought to be female. Most, however, are apparently not graceful, nor do they exude femininity. These grays are assumed to be male. Tall gray males can be substantively communicative, but most of the time they engage in minimal communication with abductees.
Reptalins Reptalins are more difficult to categorize and describe than other aliens and are reported only infrequently. Abductees' descriptions of them vary. Some are portrayed as having scaly skin, some as having lizard- or snake-like faces. Many abductees are frightened by reptalins, either because of their appearance or because, in some way, they seem threatening. Why reptalins seem to be more threatening than other aliens is an open question, although some abductees say they are more mentally aggressive.
This, along with their popular association with Earth's reptiles, has made them the object of endless conjecture and biblical ruminations by interested abduction followers. It is possible that my hybridization hypothesis does not apply to reptalins. But their existence has other potential meanings that I will address in the last chapter.
Reptalins communicate telepathically like insectalins and the rest of the work force. Their tasks are the same as the grays', but they do not physically abduct people as do grays and other hybrids. They are, however, an important part of the program.
Humanoids I have been able to identify five differentiable stages of humanoids: early, middle, late, human, and hubrid. Most likely, however, their biological demarcation is more subtle than these simple stages.
Nonetheless, the categories shown in Table 2 provide a convenient way to describe what abductees see.
Early-stage humanoids are still alien-looking, but also appear to have more human genetic material than grays have. Males and females are physically distinct. It is unknown whether they have reproductive organs and, if they do, whether they are capable of reproducing. Their primary activity is to take care of hybrid babies and toddlers. They and small grays are frequently seen in gestation-tank rooms, or incubatoriums. Like the small grays, these hybrids clean up if an abductee urinates or vomits in the UFO.
Middle-stage humanoid hybrids are something of a mystery. They look half alien and half human. As is the case with early-stage humanoid hybrids, their reproductive abilities are unknown. Middle-stage humanoid hybrids take care of hybrid toddlers and older children. They sometimes perform procedures on humans and they often help small grays process abductees and escort them around the craft if they are there for a prolonged period of time. They tend to be more “talkative” than grays or early-stage humanoids. Some have been trained to perform the tall grays' standard procedures on humans.11 Late-stage humanoids are of human stature and can easily pass for human, except that their irises may be too large and they may not have pubic or body hair (although they have normal head hair). In recent years, abductees have described an increasing role for late-stage humanoids in the program. The males sometimes become “personal project hybrids,” attaching themselves to female abductees from an early age. They visit these abductees frequently over decades and have a personal relationship with them.
They use these abductees for both sexual and insemination purposes, thus relieving sexual tension and perhaps bypassing egg-taking procedures and fetal implantation.
Late-stage humanoids have become somewhat socialized into human society. They visit abductees in their homes. They make sure abductees do not violate security by, for example, remembering and consistently describing their abductions to others. The relationships between late-stage humanoids and abductees can be both affectionate and/or aggressively hostile, depending on the humanoid's mindset and whether the abductee is obeying orders. They live onboard.12 Human-stage hybrids are indistinguishable from humans except in their neurological abilities. Little is known about the functions of these hybrids, but they seem to have a single-minded purpose: to ensure that the hubrids who are living on Earth are adjusting smoothly. They operate on Earth, but whether they stay here permanently is unknown. Some act as advance hybrids, coming to Earth to find housing for those who follow. Others act as security hybrids, who are rigidly concerned with protecting the hubrids beginning to live on Earth. They keep abductees quiet if they remember their abductions and make sure they are performing their duties of helping hubrids assimilate into Earth's population.
If abductees are recalcitrant or resist orders, security hybrids do what is necessary to bring them into compliance. If abductees do not respond to orders and tell an abduction investigator about their participation in the program, security hybrids stop this behavior by admonishing them or, if necessary, threatening them and even using physical violence. Security hybrids live alone in apartments near integrating hybrids, although how much time they spend on Earth or on a UFO is unknown.
Hubrids Hubrids represent the end point of the human hybridization program. They are indistinguishable from humans in every way except neurologically; they can speak orally or use telepathy and, most important, they can neurologically control humans. It seems they have one main function—to live on Earth undetected, blending seamlessly into society. This goal is the penultimate event in the abduction program.
Even after being educated about aspects of Earth living, hubrids are still exceptionally naïve about the complexities of human life, and they require an immense amount of help from abductees. But they are quick learners and soon adjust to the social complexities in which they have been immersed.
I have found two types of hubrids: independent hubrids who live alone and group hubrids who share an apartment, usually with one to three other hubrids. Independent hubrids are assigned to one or more abductees who may spend months or years teaching them about the intricacies of human society. They have personal and sexual attachments to abductees of the opposite sex. They are carefully monitored by security hybrids and by personal project hybrids who make sure that abductees will help hubrids blend into their human community.
All hubrids are at first dependent on abductees to help them navigate the intricacies of society and need less help as they become more socialized. I have known about certain hubrids for over a decade, and my sense is that many are now living by themselves with minimal or no help from abductees.
Onboard, it is often difficult for abductees to tell the difference between hubrid and other hybrids when they are in a group. Therefore, I am careful when using the word “hubrid,” understanding that they may actually be late-stage human hybrids.
Alien/Hybrid Society Aliens come from a collective society in which individuality and personal lives are virtually nonexistent. Function and task are paramount. They appear to have no idle or personal time during which they can indulge in any type of rest or recreation. Insectalins and grays have limited and narrow emotional ranges. Moreover, the world of aesthetics that occupies the lives of so many humans is nonexistent in alien society. It is entirely possible that no art forms exist—no painting, drawing, literature, music, drama, or dance. Likewise, there is no evidence of entertainment of any sort, except for hybrid children's toys.
Yet, the clothes hybrids wear onboard had to be designed, as were the robes abductees describe for some insectalins. So there must be some rudimentary form of artistic sensibility. Regardless, aliens and hybrids seem to live in a dull, joyless society focused on work, obedience, and subservience to the group and its goals. If insectalins created all other alien forms for specific functions, it is likely that their society values only work, obedience, and purpose.
The lack of a personal, independent life is reflected in the aliens' telepathic communication. The “language” abductees recount contains no sarcasm, irony, or humor. This is understandable since, in a telepathic society, privacy and individual expression are necessarily either nonexistent or severely truncated. The subtle and wide range of communication that humans enjoy is limited, or even nonexistent, for aliens. The range of expression that comes from facial movements, hand gestures, or “body language” that communicate subtleties and nuance is unnecessary and therefore absent. Of course, it is possible that aliens may have incorporated subtleties into their communication without abductees being able to recognize it. However, the evidence for a native alien language has not been established.
Human emotions are sometimes of concern to aliens. In one abduction event, an alien told the abductee that the emotional needs of humanoid hybrids constituted a serious control problem that the aliens had not fully understood before they embarked upon their reproductive program. If this account is correct, hubrid emotions may be a significant challenge for the aliens.
Rationality and logic are far more important in alien society than emotion and empathy. For aliens, not only do the ends justify the means; the means have no need to be justified. The concepts of right and wrong play virtually no role in the abduction program. Unfortunately, this is not limited to aliens.
Throughout human history, dominant groups have identified other groups as lesser species and have subjugated and even eliminated the “inferior” group. The history of genocide amply displays the consequences of objectifying and demonizing the “other.” Alien abduction and exploitation of humans may be an indication of this mode of thinking. Moreover, in terms of neurological abilities, we may actually be the “lesser” species.
What We Do Not Know Unfortunately, abductees seldom see what happens “behind the scenes” of the abduction scenario.
However, there are areas on UFOs that are not designed for humans, and I know of only a few instances in which abductees were able to see some activities that seemed unrelated to their abductions.
A female hybrid took Paula Richardson into a special area so she could see the hybrids' sleeping quarters. Paula did not know why she was supposed to see this area. While walking down corridors, she and her guide came upon several hybrid women who were quietly folding clothes and putting them into bins. After she saw the dormitory area, Paula was told to go back to where she had started by herself.
She once again came upon the hybrids folding clothes. They were communicating telepathically with each other and seemed not nearly as disciplined as when she had seen them with her escort. When she walked by, they quickly stopped talking, as if they had been doing something wrong.
During a five-day event, Allison Reed was brought to a “shower” room with hybrids who were grooming themselves and checking each other for red spots in their eyes. Allison participated in some of these activities. As recounted in The Threat, her assigned escort did not show up to take her away, so the hybrid she was with in the shower room took her back to the escort. The two entered a room containing a semicircle of about forty tilted-back coffin-like boxes that contained grays immersed in a liquid. As Allison stood there, the boxes tilted forward, the liquid drained from them, and the fronts opened. Grays walked out. Allison's original escort was among them. She asked him what he had been doing and he responded “eating and sleeping.” I am unsure about the “sleeping” part, but getting nutrition through dermal absorption is consistent with other accounts I have heard.13 These tiny glimpses into the backrooms of UFOs suggest that aliens have a full “ecosystem,” complete with components and functions that tend to the needs of both aliens and hybrids. Obviously, humanoid hybrids must be handled differently from grays. They all must get their food and clothes from somewhere. Humanoid hybrids must have areas where they rest or nap for short periods, depending on their degree of hybridization. Unfortunately, our knowledge of “backroom” support areas is exceptionally scant and only rarely revealed.
The Abduction Process Abductions are critically important parts of the alien program and they have their own modus operandi.
Before abductions, aliens neurologically pacify humans from a distance so they cannot resist the events that follow. If bystanders are present, they are “switched off” and do not remember witnessing the abduction. People are usually taken when they will be least missed or not observed—when they are asleep in the middle of the night, when they are driving in secluded areas, or when they are alone.
When an abduction begins, abductees are under total mental control by the aliens. They cannot run, fight, scream, or take evasive action. This control lasts until they are returned to their normal environment, whereupon they immediately forget the experiences they just had.
A light source from a waiting UFO transports passive abductees through closed windows, walls, and ceilings into the UFO. They are rendered invisible during these passages. Sometimes the aliens err and fail to “switch off” bystanders, who then witness the spectacle, although this is the exception to the rule.
Activities onboard the UFO are highly structured, and abductees are handled in assembly-line fashion.
The aliens spend much of the time in typical abductions conducting “table procedures,” in which abductees are subjected to a series of physical, mental, and reproductive procedures while lying on tables. This begins with a physical examination, which I have come to believe—partly due to its similarity to our own neurological examinations—is an inspection of the abductees' nervous systems. In this examination, aliens check the body's functions and especially the central and peripheral nervous systems. For example, in one type of neurological check, they put their thumb and finger on the sides of a vertebra and move them up and down the length of the spine. There is some sort of mechanism that allows them to understand through their fingertips what is happening neurologically beneath the human skin.
During table procedures, aliens place tiny implants into abductees' heads. Most often, they are inserted through the upper nasal area to near the pituitary gland, through a tear duct and into the sinus cavity, or through an eardrum next to or in the brain. In addition, implants are also found in a variety of other places on abductees' bodies. The implants' functions are unknown.14 During table procedures, aliens frequently use apparatuses to investigate abductees' bodies. They attach headgear and sometimes place abductees inside human-sized enclosures. At other times, they pass machines over abductees' bodies. We know nothing about what these devices and machines do.
Because of these physical procedures, for many years it was assumed people were abducted only to be examined, as if aliens were concerned about human well-being or were perhaps learning about them physically. This led to a long-held belief that aliens were experimenting on humans or studying them.
However, this is the only part of an abduction event that can support this contention. The rest, beginning with the reproductive procedures, shows that aliens have an agenda and are conducting a program, and not experimenting or studying.
In the second part of the table procedures, aliens perform neural engagement with abductees. They “look” at what the abductees have been doing since they were last abducted. Abductees occasionally report that a tall gray or insectalin does something physically to their brains. They sometimes feel sensations in their bodies when the aliens go to various neuronal sites. They see flashes of objects or events as the aliens go through their brains. The reasons for these processes are as yet unknown.
In reproductive procedures, the aliens take sperm and ova to be used in the hybridization process. To take ova from women, they often use neural engagement to stimulate orgasm and then immediately harvest the ovum, suggesting that the response in some way facilitates the procedure. Women also report instruments inserted vaginally to access the ovum without neural engagement, as well as long needles inserted into their navels, probably to take follicles from their ovaries or an ovum from their fallopian tubes. Men have sperm taken by special machines and/or with the help of other abductees. Sometimes men and women are brought to abductees of the opposite sex and forced to have intercourse with them.
At the critical moment, the “partner” is removed and the men ejaculate into an alien-held receptacle.
Abductees are often embarrassed to discuss these procedures.
The ova are then fertilized in vitro with the sperm, and the resulting zygote is altered in some way to create a hybrid. The aliens implant the altered embryo during another abduction. Between nine and eleven weeks post-implantation, when the women are about to “show,” the aliens extract the fetus and put it into a gestation tank filled with liquid nutrients. Eventually, they remove the fully developed babies from the tanks. Abductees and hybrids then help raise the hybrid offspring. Abductees are required to interact with the offspring from childhood to adulthood. They hold and feed hybrid babies, play with toddlers, interact with adolescents, and teach the hybrids about life on Earth. The aliens tell these abductees that they are “special” and fortunate to be involved in a program of such importance.
The aliens also engage in purposeful mental procedures, in which abductees see images on screen-like devices and the aliens make them envision complex scenes in their minds as if they were real. They also present special “staging episodes,” during which the abductees look at aliens and think they are humans.15 When the table and mental procedures are finished, abductees are sometimes taken into special rooms to interact with hybrid babies, toddlers, children, and adolescents. They may also have other tasks to fulfill that will be detailed in a later chapter.
After an abduction, abductees are returned to their normal environments with no memory of what has happened to them. Some notice periods of missing time—usually two hours or more—and may experience an odd disjuncture in time and space—for instance, finding themselves driving on the same road in the same location, but noticing to their astonishment that it is two hours later. Because of this memory blockage, researchers see only a tiny percentage of abductees who can link their odd experiences to the abduction program.
The Change During my research for my 1998 book, The Threat, I uncovered disconcerting reports about alien plans for the future and about a “Change” that is coming. This Change would consist of humanlike hybrids intermingling with humans in everyday life. Abductees reported that aliens had told them that soon “everyone would be together.” I had heard this and similar statements often enough to understand that this was part of the aliens' goal. Their activities and communications strongly suggested that they were engaged in a carefully conceived program that was directed toward integrating hybrids into human society.
Since 1998, I have found an evolution in some important abduction events. Many abductees are now being given new, additional duties. For the last decade, abductees have told me that, although the common abduction procedures still take place, implementing “The Change” has now become almost a full-time occupation for many of them. Even abductees I have known for many years have reported this difference, suggesting that The Change is now either in effect or has expanded greatly over those years.
It is clear now that integration into human society is the aliens' primary goal. All aliens are part of a dedicated program to integrate hubrids into humanity. They perform their duties to fulfill the program's purposes and are all interconnected neurologically. All give allegiance to the insectalins. They do not talk about healing the Earth, or healing or enlightening humans, or joining together with humans in a cosmic community, or anything else that might help humans. They talk about sending aliens to Earth to live here undetected and eventually to supplant humans.
Although the alien program is one of integration, exactly how The Change will take place is still a mystery. It is possible that integration into human society may merely be a preparation for The Change. If this is the case, then the program itself may be an ongoing integration into human society that will continue until the global population contains a critical mass of hubrids. In this case, The Change may be a final, as yet unknown, event or series of events that will culminate in the aliens' completion of their program. Whatever the final event is, it will be exclusively for the aliens' benefit.
Abductees and hybrids sometimes have conversations about The Change. Bernard talked about it with his hubrid friend, Eric. Their discussion was typical of other exchanges between them, except that Bernard was allowed to ask some questions, which was unusual. Eric's task was to be Bernard's friend, but he was elusive in answering.
I asked him a hundred different ways when this change will take place and what this change is. At one point, it's always “soon.” And I asked him, “When you say ‘soon’, is ‘soon’ synonymous in your mind with ‘soon’ in mine? Or does it mean the future?” He just smiles. I said to him, “If 70,000 years or 80,000 years, or whatever it was of research, was a shortcut to get an answer, is that ‘soon’?” And he says, “That was long ago. That would not have been soon.” “Well, would 50,000 years be ‘soon’?” And he smiles. . . . I said to him, “Friends don't lie to friends. Is this a story you are telling me so you can make me feel enlightened?” He says, “There are things I cannot tell you, but I would never tell you things that were not fact. And friends do not do that. So I could not do that because we are to be friends.”. . .
I tell him, I said, “From my perspective, the most horrible experiences in the history of humanity have come from a concentration of power in the hands of a few. I've perceived you have more power than anyone in the history of the Earth. The concentration of that power in your hands is frightening because our future rests in your benevolence and good judgment. There had been people on the Earth before that people had looked upon as the savior, and they have done horrendous things.” That seems to kind of shock him: “I would never do terrible things.” I also tell him that secrecy and stealth are red flags to humans. There is the feeling that if these were good things you were doing, you should be proud to say what they are and do them openly. Always the theme, “Does this impact our friendship?” “No. There are things sometimes people cannot discuss openly. The fact that you are candid with this and telling me these things makes me think that you are trying to be a good friend. I am accepting that you will not do bad things. I have no ability to stop you if you would. But as a friend I'm also being honest with you and telling you that you frighten me. You have the ability to control me, and I don't know what you're doing.”16 The conversation ended with Bernard's frustration with Eric's lack of specific information, some of which Eric claimed he did not know, suggesting that he was carrying out his function without full knowledge of its consequences.
Abductees' Roles in The Change Karen Morgan is a woman who has the mental ability to put up some resistance to her abductors, an ability that varies between abductees. She had frustrating talks similar to Eric's and Bernard's.
Nevertheless, the aliens told her she was considered a valuable component in their plans. In April 2006, she was taken into a UFO where part of the time she was made to “inspect” hybrids. Karen recalled that a female hybrid escort was with her.
She's off to the side. Seems like she's saying that she wants me to look at more hybrids, and I'm saying, “I really don't want to do this anymore.” I'm getting a lecture, if you could call it that, on my lack of cooperation with the whole program. And that it's basically, you know, “You better shape up or we have ways of making sure that you do.” And I'm like, “Go ahead and use them because I'm not going to do it. So, let's see what you've got in store here.” But it's ridiculous because this is like a program; she can't go beyond that. See, I guess the thing is that it's just really horrible because what they're saying is that they're going to integrate these hybrids into the society.
They're coming, and we, the abductees—it seems like our whole purpose in being abducted . . . is to create these hybrids and get them into the society. And I'm saying, “Well, that's your plan, not mine. You should check with me first. Just because you think this is a good idea doesn't mean I'm going to do it.” And they're saying that was the whole point of the whole thing all along.
I asked Karen if this came out all at once, or if it was something she had picked up over time. She responded: No, I think we have this discussion quite often. It's like this was the whole point of the whole thing. And of course, whenever I say, “Well, what's the point of integrating them into the society?” they never tell me that. . . . But there's just this general feeling that this was the whole point, and I'm not being a good sport by not going along with the program.17 A few weeks later, during a neurological engagement procedure, Karen was given a glimpse into The Change by a tall gray who stared into her eyes. Just before, she had bitten the thumb of a gray and the aliens were annoyed with her and strapped her to the table. She described it in a conversation with me.
I get the sense that he wants me to accept him and participate in whatever the plans are. . . . But it has something to do—in my mind at least—or, am I getting this vision of this taking-over-the- world thing from them?
Could be.
The picture is that they're going to replace us but we have to help them. I'm thinking as this is happening, “Why would I do that? Are you kidding? No, I'm not going to do that.” How do they portray “replacing”? How do you know it's a replacement situation?
They're going to replace us with people that look like us, but in this staring thing, it's not quite like that. It's more gradual. . . . I can't tell. The staring thing is more to try to get me to cooperate and the gist of it is that I have not been at all helpful and they're not very happy about that and they have to force me to do things. Why do they have to force me? I should be helping them. . . .I have the sense that the hybrids really do need us to cooperate. They can force us but it's not going to have the same effect as if we all just merrily pitch in and help them do whatever it is they want to do, which is learn about the Earth.
Is that what they say? They need to learn about the Earth?
They don't say it. It's the image that you get, you know what I mean? The general gist is that I have a lot of experiences. I have a lot of things I could teach them and I haven't been helpful and sometimes I've even lied to them. The general impression I get is “this better stop, or else.” And I say, “Or else what? What are you going to do? Kill me?” And that question just goes unanswered and even then the feeling I'm getting is that I'm not even being cooperative then and they're trying to bond [neurologically] with me. They're not pleased.18 The Progression from Alien to Hubrid Creating hubrids for The Change is at the heart of the aliens' program. Paula was often shown images of hybrid “evolution.” One evening in 2005, she and other abductees were taken onboard a large craft.
Small grays directed the abductees into a big room. An insectalin stood in front of the group and showed them images on a screen displaying the evolution of hybrids to hubrids. She described it to me like this: We walk into this room and we don't change our clothes. There's a man up there that's going to teach and he's more of a, more of a bug. He looks more like a praying mantis than a hybrid.
So he's more insect-like?
Yeah. And he's very serious. He's not trying to scare us or anything, but this is very important.
And this seems to be part of our project that we work on. And there's a screen or something and what I'm seeing now is it's kind of like a lesson on different stages of these hybrid humans. And he's talking to us about the different things that they have done over a period of time. And they're almost like prototypes. It's kind of like scientifically shown. These are like generations and they all have their value.
So how many stages are you seeing? How many hybrid types are you looking at?
Maybe eight. . . . It's like successive generations. And the ones to the right are where we're going to and the left are where we started. There were big craniums, for one thing. And the outfits that they have them in, interestingly enough, they start [looking] kind of like uniforms and slowly but surely, as you look down it, they're more like our clothes. I mean, they are our clothes. . . .
They have them in more like a dress, like a business outfit. Not like going to a ball game or something. . . . And [the insectalin is] paying particular attention now to the ones that are further along, I mean, that are the farthest along. He's saying, “Pay particular attention to the hands and the build.” He's narrowing it down to just the later few stages.
And it's not just the appearance. It's the behavior too. . . . And he's reminding us that they're mostly us, that they're more us than them. That should make us feel good. And so we're getting up.
I don't know why I feel this way—this is an odd word to say—but somehow it feels sacred. Isn't that odd? [He says] that these are very special guys and they're mostly [human] and they look good. They're not noisy at all; they're just walking around. . . . I think they were showing us how many generations, or how many improvements they have made.
When the insect-like one was explaining this, did he say why they were doing this?
Well, all he said was that they were going to come down and be with us. But he didn't say much more than that; just that they were going to come down and be with us. . . . And he said they're getting . . . a little bit of experience. . . . And it really was so they could live with us. That was from the very beginning so they could be together with us in our world. But they would be—both of us—working for our betterment, for all of our betterment. . . . And it wasn't even like the best traits of both sides, you know. It was more the physical traits with us and the mental with them.
And he said that he wanted us and other people to be comfortable with them. And to do that they had to make them as close as possible to us physically.19 While reporting a 2006 abduction event, Paula provided me with more information about the program's goal. One evening, aliens took her from her backyard into a UFO. They gave her special yellowish hybrid-like two-piece clothes to wear. After she interacted with hybrid toddlers in one of many rooms containing children of all ages, she was taken into another area with over a hundred other abductees. There, an insectalin gave them a glimpse of the future and their position in it.
We're all kind of sitting there in a semicircle. At first I was just looking around me, but now I'm really looking. I recognize people and they recognize me.
People whom you know in normal life or people whom you've. . .?
That I know from up there. The hybrid, the really humanlike hybrid, is talking to us, and I'm not grabbing anything. . . . He's standing in front of us. Whatever he's talking about, it's very technical.
It's like everything with this is divided into little segments. And they all fit, the little segments, but separate, that somehow fit together in a whole. . . . And there are people under us. It's not like we all depend on one another. We're all sufficient on our own, for God knows what. But the design is that we all come together.
What do they mean by “they”? Do they mean that the design is that they all come together, do you mean hybrids and humans, or just all the humans coming together to form this?
Yes. It's all the humans coming together. They're directing us, but we're coming together. This is the most significant thing that's ever happened. . . . We as individual abductees were sort of designed for this. This is also like it's our place in time right now. This is where we fit. This is where we fit. This is our place. We all seem to know it's true—whatever.20 Paula's account reinforces my contention that the aliens' plan can only be carried out by cooperation between abductees, hubrids, hybrids, and insectalins. All must work together to further their interests.
The evidence I have found points in one direction, and that is the integration of hubrids into human society for an eventual takeover. I have found no evidence to refute this.
CHAPTER 3 Preparing Hubrid Children “Someday he's going to eat a pizza.” Meeting the aliens' goal of integrating hubrids into human society requires extensive training that begins when the hybrids and hubrids are children. The program's success depends on abductees, who are the designated trainers and coaches. While not all abductees are required to train hybrids, it is an important function for a significant number of them.
Teaching Young Hybrids Teaching human-stage hybrid children21 to act like humans is difficult. The lives these children lead onboard is almost incomprehensible to us. For example, hybrid babies are withdrawn from tanks, not born. There is no date attached to the event and, therefore, they do not know their own age. They have no identified father, mother, sisters, or brothers. They have no known extended family and no normal familial interactions. They cannot keep childish secrets in a telepathic society. They do not understand music. Because they have never lived on Earth, they know very little about almost everything human.
Acting human requires subtleties of behavior that only humans can teach the hybrids. The volume of information they must learn to live in modern civilization is incalculable—perhaps too much for them to absorb or understand. Humans depend on relationships, friends, family, work, school, recreation, and legal, political, and cultural institutions, as well as a plethora of rules and norms that shape their lives.
We live in a semi-privatized society based on love, family, work, money, recreation, justice, religion, and culture, all of which help to build a sense of self-worth within a framework of modified freedom.
Humans are governed by laws and customs, both public and private, with specific sanctions for violating them. Although they acknowledge some rules, hybrids have almost none of this knowledge and structure.
Everything must be taught to them.
Hubrids grow up onboard in a collective society based on function, work, and duty. Free will is a meaningless concept for them. Independent activity and freedom of choice are severely limited. Love and affection, apart from that given by abductees, is probably not within their experience. Work and rules are everything. For hybrids and hubrids, life onboard is extremely circumscribed.
Hybrids' Learning Styles Human-stage hybrid children are ready and motivated to learn. Because they live in a telepathic society, large amounts of information can be transmitted, or dumped, all at once. They are therefore capable of extremely rapid learning. They are usually attentive and keenly interested in what abductees tell them.
Abductees do not report serious behavioral problems among hybrid or hubrid children. Disputes do not break out among them, nor do tantrums. They do not whine or ask for things. Ridicule, name-calling, pushing and shoving, and all the other normal behaviors of human children living in close proximity are not reported. Hybrid children listen to their hybrid and gray caretakers and obey orders.
Instruction takes various forms. The children are shown pictures of things on Earth and told what they are. They are taught how to do certain tasks and then watched as they perform them; they are given feedback on whether they are doing them correctly.
Reading is apparently not a primary source of knowledge in a telepathic society. Instead, asking questions is critical to hybrid education. They often engage in what I call a “question cascade,” in which they ask a flood of questions in rapid succession. Human-stage hybrids and hubrids remember all the answers to their questions.
In a typical training session, abductee-trainers are taken onboard and subjected to the standard preliminary table procedures. Eventually, they are led, singly and in groups, into a room where five to fifteen children are sitting on the floor or on raised cubes that are part of the floor and serve as chairs.
Hybrid children are almost always with young adult female hybrid caretakers who watch over them.
The training includes subjects like going to school, having a pet, eating with a fork, family relationships, and living in a home. Abductees have taught these skills, as well as other common behaviors, to hybrid children for decades. Although our knowledge of this training is very incomplete, we know enough to paint a striking picture.
Being a “Normal Kid” Betsey has been teaching hybrid and hubrid children since at least the 1980s. In a 1988 abduction event, she first had her table procedures. During these, she realized that, for some reason, she had more mental control than usual. She waited for her chance and then jumped off the table and ran toward a doorway with a gray standing in it. In her panic, she tried to push him aside, but hit the arched doorway wall instead, sustaining a hairline fracture in her wrist. She continued to run down a hallway, but a tall gray got in front of her and brought her under control.
They then took her into a room crowded with other abductees, several early-stage hybrid caretakers, and hybrid children, most of whom were wearing white gowns. A caretaker brought her to a five- or six- year-old boy who was wearing human clothes. With her arm aching, she had a conversation with the young hybrid that focused on food. He was human in his reactions and desires, and he indicated that he had had contact with other abductees. In this particular conversation, pizza and school became the center of attention: This kid almost looks normal. Not quite, his eyes are different but it's pretty close. He's a little bit thin, his head is just maybe a bit too big. Other than that, he's pretty normal. He wants to talk to me. I'm starting to feel very connected to him. I don't know why. He's kind of young, but he seems to know a lot, seems to be smart. He's talking about different foods. He's telling me he wishes he could try different foods we have and [asking] what do they taste like or what's it like.
What kinds of food do you mean?
There's a lot of different things in there, but he's kind of curious about pizza, of all things. He asked about cereal. What the difference is when you put the milk on the cereal. Hamburgers: “Why do you put so much stuff on your hamburgers?” He's very curious; I'm not really answering him, but he's sort of getting the answers from me.
So there's not really a give and take? You're not saying: “Why do you want to know?” or “How come you haven't had any?” or anything like that?
No. It's like he asks the question and I think about it and he just sort of knows. I don't know how to explain it. He's telling me some day he's going to eat a pizza. That's what he really wants to do.
He's telling me he's heard a lot about pizza. It's kind of cute, really. I don't mind him; I kind of like him. He's making me feel very connected to him. He's nice and . . . more animated than the rest of them were. He actually shows like a little excitement at times. Just seems more like a regular kid.
Some of them are just, they're just not—I don't know what the word is. They don't have that range of emotions. It's like they're blunted in some way.
But he's got his heart set on pizza?
Yeah. I asked him, “Why pizza? Why is that the one?” He said, “Everybody I talk to likes pizza.” I said, “Well, how many people do you talk to?” and he said, “I talk to a lot. I have to learn. I have to learn things.” He's asking—well, not really asking—but he talks about something and then I think about it and I think that's how he's learning about it.22 The discussion ended with the boy asking about the things Betsey did when she was his age. They talked about playing, school, and eating.
Seventeen years later, Betsey was still answering questions for young hybrids. In 2005, she was taken into a room with several hybrid children between ages five and ten. Here, she was subjected to a question cascade. The conversation consisted of telepathic communication accompanied by images in Betsey's mind. The rapid questioning was tiring for her.
What kind of questions are the older ones asking?
All kinds of stuff. What are things for, like normal kids use—you know, like a ball. And then we have to clarify which kind of ball. Baseball or regular ball or just a play ball, you know?
Is there a ball around there? Are they referencing some sort of ball?
Not really. I mean, I get images in my head of what they're thinking of, but I don't think it's a tangible item. But they have images; they know what the different ones are because they're showing me in my head. I'm saying, “What kind of ball?” and I'm getting like an image of a baseball and I'm saying, “Well, that's for the game of baseball.” I'm trying to explain that and then I get another [image], which is just a normal kid's ball, play ball, and I'm saying that they would just use it to throw around or bounce; it's not really for a specific game. I'm kind of introducing the game ones—basketball, football—as a way to explain that this one is not something special; it's just a ball.
They're asking me, “What do kids do?” and I'm saying, “Mostly they go to school and they learn things.” Then they're trying to relate it back, “Well, do they learn how to play basketball? Do they learn how to play baseball?” I said, “Sometimes, but mostly school is for other things.” This is all rapid-fire, though. They want to know what kids eat, how they eat, where they sleep.
What do they mean by how do they eat?
Do they eat with their fingers? Do they eat with utensils? What's the process involved? Why is the food on a plate? What's the purpose of the plate? Why are some foods eaten with the fingers and some foods are not? It's like endless questions. “How do you know when to eat with your fingers and when to eat with a utensil? How do you know what kind of plate to use? Why do you use a plate? Can you not use a plate?” I mean it's just endless. It's like they don't know anything.
And then they're saying, “How do these kids learn all this?” and I said, “This is what we do with them since they're babies. They just know.” Then, when I bring up the subject of babies, it's, “Why don't babies eat this food? Why do babies have bottles?” And I'm thinking they should know some of this stuff. This is not mystery stuff here; this is simple. This whole exchange is mentally exhausting.
Because of the rapidity of it, you mean?
Yeah, it's just rapid-fire and this and that and this and that and it's exhausting. Then somebody comes over and takes most of the kids away to like a different area. There's one kid, though, that stays. I've seen him before, I know him. He's about ten or eleven maybe. I've seen him before; I've worked with him before. . . . This kid's a nice kid; I like him. He seems to be happy I'm there. He's telling me he can't wait to actually get to do some of the things that he's learning about. He seems to be real excited about that.
He's telling me he thinks baseball looks too hard, but he thinks he wants to try basketball and he definitely wants to try a lot of different foods. He's excited. . . . I said to him, “What about school?
Do you want to go to school?” and he said there's no need for that. He said, “We learn differently.” I kind of got the feeling they have kind of like a school type thing, but it's not like ours. They learn differently; they can't be taught in the same ways.
He's sort of asking me, “How do kids get to their school?” He's asking me about transportation, how do they get places. I'm saying like, “They take a bus or they can be driven. They could walk.” I'm telling him, “Kids don't drive so they have to have someone drive them.” I'm telling him, “There's like a bus driver or they walk or they have bikes.” He's asking about different kinds of travel, “Why would you travel, go someplace?” and I'm telling him, “There's so many different reasons. We travel to visit, we travel for vacation, we travel because we need to for work, there's no one answer.” Living in Houses Then Betsy tells me that the child “kind of switches gears” and wants to know why human children sleep and where. She explains sleeping arrangements to him: “We have a house and we have beds and bedrooms” and he's aware of that, he just doesn't understand why.
Why they have bedrooms, or why they sleep?
A little of both, but I think more it's a question of why you have separate areas to sleep. I say, “It has to do with having privacy and sometimes you just want to spend a little time alone. This is what we do, but it's not that everybody is so close; it's just that they have their own space.” I'm not sure he understands. He's having a hard time with that one. I'm just trying to say humans just need to be alone and he really doesn't understand that. . . . He's asking me, “Does everybody have to sleep apart? And I said, “No. Whatever the family decides on, but most do.” And he wants to know why the families live together but separate from other families. He's kind of saying like, “You have one house. If everybody slept together you could fit [in] a lot more people.” And I'm saying, “But we don't want to.” Like, it doesn't make logical sense to him. I keep telling him, “The goal is not to fit as many people as you can in a house. A house is for one family or extended family, but it's only those people who choose to live together.” Then he wants to know, “Who decides to live together?” I try to explain to him, “Nobody really decides. You decide for yourself so you might have a good friend you decide to live with, or you might get married and live with someone, or you might have kids and live with them or extended family.
You decide for yourself.” I'm telling him, “Sometimes it changes. One person might move out, somebody might move in; a child might be born. It changes.” He wants to know, “When do the kids decide where they live?” and I said, “Not until they're bigger usually, because they need someone to take care of them. They can't just go out on their own when they're five years old.” I said, “We have certain ways of doing things and that's just how we do it. Some people don't leave until they're much older.” He's having trouble with that one too; he's having trouble with a lot of these concepts. . . . He's saying to me, if he were to be here now, would he have to join a family because he couldn't be on his own? And I said: “Yeah. They wouldn't let you be on your own. That would be a real difference. It would be an oddity, because you're too young.” And he wants to know “How old do you have to be?” And I said, “I don't know.” He doesn't want to wait, but I think he knows he has to. That's kind of it. Then he goes off somewhere else.23 Writing Aliens and hybrids live in a telepathic society where brain-to-brain communication from systematically stored data is most important. In fact, in alien and hybrid society, there is little evidence for a written language of any kind, although some abductees report seeing symbols used and a few have reported seeing books. If those symbols represent a sophisticated language, however, alien writing and reading could be very different from what we know.
In 2007, Betsey was once again taken into a room where human-stage children ages seven or eight were in the company of adult hybrid caretakers. The room contained a bed and night table to teach the hybrid children about human sleeping quarters. Although Betsey did not remember him, the adult hybrid who escorted her into the room told her that he, too, had learned from her when he was living on Earth.
I conducted the following session with Betsey without hypnosis. She had so many sessions with me that she had learned to place herself back into the event and to remember consciously and accurately what had happened to her. This session took place using Instant Messaging. Often, our messages crossed each other in cyberspace. I have corrected the typos and spelling mistakes.
I see several children walking from one room into another. There are more hybrids (adult or nearly so) around as well.
Okay. No other abductees?
No, I don't think so. He is saying something about the space we're in: “This is where we practice” or “This is where we simulate,” something like that. I think he's asking me what I think, or how it looks, or if it's correct—something along those lines. We're walking around that area.
I'm looking into the rooms. He wants to know if I think it's correct. This is very important.
Everything must be correct.
I see. What is in the rooms?
In one room—the first one on the right, I think—there is a small bed and night table. The bed is made up with a blanket and pillow. I'm saying, “There is no lamp. There would be a light source.
There might be a dresser or closet.” The second room on that side has those kids in it. They are sitting at kind of a desk thing, I guess. It's a long bench with a long kind of table part in front—all one piece, though.
Like a picnic table, you mean? The kind [where] the benches are part of the whole?
Yeah, similar idea, only just one bench to sit on. And there aren't legs on it or anything. The bench is right into the floor in a kind of small block thing. I am helping one of the kids. He is trying to hold a pencil-like thing (it's not a pencil, but it reminds me of one). I finally get it into his hand the right way. I'm asking him where his paper is. He's asking what paper is. I'm saying, “What you will write on.” He's taking the pencil thing and marking directly onto the desk. I am saying, “No, don't do that; you only write on paper.” (I'm a mother, through and through.) Then he's showing me he can make it all go away again when he wants to.
He can make the marks go away?
He is showing me this because I'm upset that he ruined the desk. It's kind of like a “No I didn't, look!” thing. He is telling me this is how they practice. Will I help him practice? I'm saying, “Yes, what do you need to write?” He is kind of staring at me. He's asking me my name. He's saying, “Show it to me.” So I'm taking his hand and helping him form the letters. I'm sounding it out mentally as we go. He is asking about the “y.” The ‘e’ makes that sound, “Why is the ‘y’ there?” I'm saying, “The ‘e’ can be silent sometimes, so the ‘y’ tells us it isn't.” I'm telling him that “y” on the end usually sounds like “e.” He is saying, “That is not the correct way to do it. If you want it to sound like ‘e’ it should be an ‘e.’ This is making it too complicated.” I am saying that the written language has lots of odd rules like that. He doesn't like that. He's telling me I should tell my people to change it so it makes more sense. It is difficult to learn all of the rules if they don't make sense. Someone is coming over and telling me it's time to go. This kid is cute. As I'm getting up, he says, “Thank you for your help.” He says it kind of rotely, like he's memorized it, but it's still cute.
Time to leave that room. It's a different guy now [a familiar hubrid] taking me out of there. . . .
He is saying it is important that these young ones learn. It was good of me to help. He's pleased with that. This doesn't make a lot of sense. He is telling me, “They are our future.” Then he's kind of stopping and looking at me and asking me if I understand that. I'm saying no. He repeats it: “They are our future.” This time, he's emphasizing the word “our.” It's important I remember that. I feel like there was some significance in the whole exchange that I completely missed. . . .
We are walking through several rooms and he is telling me this is like their house. This is how they learn to be like us before they come down. He once learned in a place like this. I think he is saying it was not exactly right, though. He had to learn a lot more when he met me and lived there.24 Young hybrids are sometimes fascinated with writing instruments. Pens and pencils that are common in our world may never be encountered by aliens, who have no need to write. Thus, like children on Earth, hybrid children must learn to read and write.
Peggy Friedrich remembered an event in 1964 when she was fourteen, during which she was taken to two ten-year-old human-stage females who wanted to learn how to write. They had taken Peggy's favorite pen during a previous abduction and they were sitting at something that resembled a drafting table. Peggy was given her pen and a plain square piece of paper to write on. She told me about the event in this interview.
How are you teaching them how to write? In other words, do you have the pen or do they have the pen?
I've got the pen; it's my gold pen, too. I'm showing them how you hold it in your fingers and the angle you write at. The boys use the wrist and the elbow, but the girls use just the wrist and they look like they're drinking it all in. . . . They want to learn how humans do things and understand why I have an attachment to this pen, but not other pens.
How do you respond to that?
It's like I don't know how to tell them that. I'm fourteen years old. How do you explain something like that? It's like somebody special gave it to me and I liked it! It had really nice elegant lines; it was aesthetically pleasing. I liked it. It was totally subjective stuff that made me like it.
Do they respond to that?
They don't seem to understand that. It's a pen. It's a thing. You use it to write. What's the difference? It's like somebody gave it to me out of love and that made it special. I don't think they understood how feelings can be attached to an object when the object couldn't give any feelings back, I guess. . . .
Do they want you to work it for them?
It was just, “Show us how to use it.” . . . I flick the top down, show them the nib comes out, you press to the paper and make the symbols, you write. . . . They just watch me. They don't try to take the pen; they just watch me. . . . I offer the pen to one of them and it [she] doesn't take it and then I offer to the other and it [she] just looks at me like, “What are we supposed to do?” Well, write something. Here's how you write an “A”; here's how you write a “C”; here's how you write an “E.” But she's not doing that.
No. It's like [they ask], “Why do you do this?” and it's like [I answer], “Well, to communicate, why else?”25 Learning, Acceptance, and Discipline In 2000, Paula was given the function of teaching children ages ten to early teens. In one event, a late- twenties female hybrid caretaker took her into a room with a group of ten-year-olds. Under the caretaker's watchful eye, they gathered around Paula and began a question cascade about what going to school was like.
Sitting in front of them, Paula first told the children she had been a grade-school teacher. Her students came to school every day and they all lived elsewhere. She talked about classes and how students might go to different rooms for different subjects. She described books, assignments, and having friends. She told them about the lives of boys and girls, learning about history, and about ideas.
The discussion turned to home life. One of them asked, “What are the kids' duties?” Paula said that, at home, children clean up after themselves and put away their clothes. For some reason, the caretaker cautioned her not to talk about taking out garbage, walking the dog, or other seemingly innocuous chores.
Part of Paula's job during this question-and-answer period was to tell the children how to be accepted by others. She said: “You want to look clean. You don't want to stand out. You don't want to be different.
Kids want to belong to a group. That's why good grooming is important. You don't want to stand out and be picked on or pointed out and have no friends.” “Is it the same for the girls?” one female hybrid child asked. “Yes, even worse for girls.” “Why is that?” the girl asked. The caretaker again steered Paula away from talking about puberty, telling her just to say that girls are more judgmental than boys. But Paula said that boys have more friends than girls. The hubrid boys seemed to like this. “Do people touch?” “Yes, they slap each other on the back and poke like with their fingers. But boys don't go arm-in- arm like girls do.” “Do they hold hands?” A boy had seen parents holding hands with young children, but not with older ones. Paula explained that little children had to be looked after and protected.
Paula expanded her talk to sports and games. The caretaker told her the children knew about some of the games and asked, “Is this how it is in schools?” Paula said, “Yes, but some children do not follow rules.” The caretaker said that these hybrid children were better at cooperating than most human children. She said they would be practicing and that Paula would be coming back to see their progress.
When the visit ended, Paula went to the children and touched their hands, saying goodbye. Each child stared into her eyes. The caretaker told her, “This is important, vital work.” Touching their hands was also important. Contact with humans at various stages is essential to them, she told Paula. “They have been hugged before, but they were younger.” The caretaker then told Paula, almost confidentially, that sometimes the children got unruly and the caretakers did not like this. “That's their human side,” Paula said; and the caretaker replied, “Yes, I know.” The caretaker reiterated that this was vital work: “It's important for our futures, all of our futures.” Paula asked, “Do you think they'll have a chance to come down to be with us?” The hybrid was guarded: “I think so. We'll see.” The caretaker then asked Paula about her private life. She said she was an English teacher, but the caretaker was not interested in literature. Paula surmised that it was more of “a human thing” to her. The caretaker was more interested in discipline. She asked, “If they [the students] act up, what do you do?” Paula, using a teaching example, said, “I talk to them, and if it doesn't work out, I call the parents.” Puzzled, the caretaker asked, “What are ‘the parents’?” Paula said, “There are two-parent and one- parent families” and that she preferred to talk to the fathers.
The caretaker asked, “What are your students like?” Paula told her about their houses, their siblings, and how they got to school. She said dressing correctly is important for kids and that clothes tell something about who you are. “Why would it make a difference?” the caretaker asked. Paula tried to explain the meaning of fashion, but the hybrid did not understand and would have none of it. She said they make their clothes onboard and the human system was “foolish.” “How could clothes make someone feel better about themselves?” This was difficult for Paula to explain, and she asked, “Does everybody dress the same here?” “No,” the caretaker said, “but people dress differently according to their jobs. You know [what] someone's position is by their clothes, but students are just students.” Paula asked the caretaker whether children have books to read or homework to do. The caretaker told her that hybrids and grays give them their knowledge. Paula's sense of this was: “Because they don't use books and they all get the same information, they don't get homework the way we get homework, or we give homework. But they do practice . . . how to do physical things.” She got an image in her mind of a special room to which the children go to learn. It's not gauged on how much information they obtain, Paula said, because not all of them are trained for the same thing. They do not have to practice how to learn; the knowledge is there. They are trained for different jobs; they have different futures.
Paula told the caretaker that the children seemed happy. The caretaker corrected her: “They are not sad.” It is not happy or sad for them but, “Some of them just don't work out.” Paula asked why. “Some of them are just not suitable,” but they find other jobs for them to do. “This is the way it is.”26 School Lunch On another occasion, Paula was required to put on a two-piece white outfit. She was led into a small room by a familiar late-stage female hybrid dressed in an outfit similar to hers, except that it was yellow.
A group of about seventeen young hubrid boys around eleven to fourteen years old were in the room.
Paula consciously remembered they were eating “hamburgers.” And we're standing outside of this room and it's almost like there's a glass or something. It's like in the observation room, but there's glass. And she [the caretaker] said they've been working with a young group. And they're having some trouble with them and they want me to teach them, to show them. And I'm asking her what does she want me to do? What do they want me to teach them? She said they're like school age; they're like our school-age children. But they are eating in a new setting; it's a new setting for them. She wants me to watch and see how they're doing. And I'm asking her, “Am I supposed to show them how to eat?” And she said no, I'm supposed to show them how to eat like we eat. She said, “This is a different setting.” . . . She shows me they have the ladies with the food. It's like a counter.
You can see that through the glass there?
Mm-hmm [Yes]. And then there's some little kids. And then there's like a stand that's a little bit raised over to the side and it has more food. And she showed me that the ladies were making something and they were wrapping it in paper. And I said, “Do you usually wrap food in paper?” They said, “No, this is for us, for the way we eat.” Oh, I see. For humans, you mean?
Yeah. They've seen us eat like this. And I said, “What is it supposed to be?” And she said, “They are eating outside of their home.” And so I said, “I have a feeling of a school.” And she said, “Yes, yes, it's school, but also out to eat, out of their home.” And so I said, “Like a restaurant, like going out to eat in a restaurant,” and we talk about that. . . . She didn't know what a restaurant was. I mean, I said, “Kids this age eat in a school. When they go to school, they eat.
They have to eat in the middle of the day and then, when they're free with their friends, they go out to eat.” It's kind of like, how would I do it, how would I do it? And I'm telling her that there has to be some order, that some would go up [one] at a time to get their food, not everybody go up at once.
But, she's lost control. They have to control this. We're going inside now. . . . They're cute little kids; they're really cute. They look very much like us. . . . Looks like there's like four or five tables. . . . And I'm telling them in a school, they go up in a line and they get their food. It's really a lot of disorder and people are talking.
Out loud, you mean?
Yeah, out loud. I mean, I can hear it. So, they're acting like kids. See, some are already eating, and some are eating the dessert. And I'm telling her there has to be some structure here. And some kids are getting very loud. And she just asked me, “Do children act like this?” And I said, “They do unless they're controlled. This would never do in a school; this would not do at all in a school.
They wouldn't put up with it.” So we're going to start over. She's telling them we're going to start over. So they're going to sit down. Sit down at the tables and be quiet, be quiet. And I just went like this, I went, “Shh,” and they're laughing.
They laughed at you?
They laughed at that; they never saw that before. It's kind of cute. Then I'm talking to them, and I'm talking to them out loud, and I'm telling them they need to sit down and leave the food alone and let's talk. And there are a couple of kids over here that are not following the rule. They're still talking and they're giggling and she [the caretaker] said that they're not listening to us. And I'm telling them they're eating their dessert first. They can't have that yet. So I'm walking over there . .
. and telling them to put it down and come on back. And . . . there's one child here and one child here, and I'm kind of ushering them back with my hands on their backs and they're not used to that.
Not used to being touched?
No. I tell them, “It's okay. Let's just sit down and be quiet.” I'm telling them, “Shh,” and they're laughing again. It's funny, . . . but, “You've got to behave. Part of being human is to get along and to do things the way other people do them. So let's start over.” And a couple of boys are still being very loud. And she's very worried about them. . . . She keeps saying, “We can't have this.” And I'm telling her, “Well, you can help by controlling it. You tell them what they have to do when they get there.” They come in and they sit down, and then some go up and get the food and the others wait. And you start with one, then after they eat that, then they can go for that. It seemed to be a simple thing to me to understand. So I'm walking up with some. Just the first table, I'm walking up with them. I tell them to get their hamburger.
Where are you walking up to?
To where those ladies are standing. It's like a counter, kind of. . . . And the ladies have these, this brownish paper wrapping up—they look like hamburgers. And I would expect to see like mustard and ketchup and stuff, but I don't see it there.
Can you see the actual hamburger? Does it have a bun and meat and all that?
No, it looks sort of like bread and something in it. It doesn't look like a McDonald's or anything. But it looks like there's some kind of like a bread. . . . It's more of a squarish. Kind of like a squished in—it's like a top and a bottom and it looks like there's something brown in it.
It's like a sandwich then?
Yeah, more of a sandwich. The women are picking [cups] up and handing them to them. It's like water, they could take it back or the ladies can bring it. And I said the boys should carry it back with them. So it's like a water in some kind of a plastic glass. . .
As sophisticated as they are, this is kind of a rudimentary type of setup. They have some—like paper towels almost, and I tell the boys to get it and bring it with them. . . . I'm just telling them how to do it. There's eating at home and there's eating out. And when you eat out, this is what you do. . . . They are listening. They know it's serious now. I'm telling some of the kids they can break it in half and make it into two pieces like two sides. . . . “And take the napkin. You can put it on your lap, right here. That's right. You take the top off of the cups, and then they just take small bites and you can talk, but you don't yell.” . . .
And I'm going down to that spot where those couple of boys are . . . that were talking and I tell them they're supposed to whisper. . . . And I think I've overdone it, because now they're really very serious. And she [the caretaker] is telling me to talk to them; to tell them what's going on. So I'm telling them, “If you're in a school, this is what you do. You have to eat. And other times you go out into a restaurant. And the restaurant is freer because you don't have the teachers watching you, but you still have to be good; you have to behave.” And I'm telling them the big thing is not to look different than other people. Not to draw attention to them. Because she said, “We just want them to fit in.” . . . They've eaten this food before. It's not like they've never had it. . . .
It's kind of like, “Why is this such a big deal?” because they eat all the time. This is because it's different; it's in a different place with different people. . . . And they're eating still and they know how to use a napkin to wipe off their faces. I told her that having ice cream there is a bad choice of foods, because it's just melting over there. And there's like a chocolate sauce and the boys kind of made a mess of it over there. But they do have something else that the ladies have brought out and it's like little squares. Kind of like a little yellow sponge cake, maybe? And the ladies put them on the tables. I'm telling her that generally they take one. When they get their food, they'll get their dessert. Or, they get it themselves after they eat their food. . . .
But they're being good and they're just talking. . . . I think I hear they're asking what they're going to do next. And it's like she wants me to talk to them and instruct them how to eat. . . . She says when they normally eat, they don't really have to train them. . . . But I'm telling her this is just something that she can build on. That it's just a new behavior and everything has to be taught. I'm telling them to put the cake on the paper. . . . And that when they're done, they can just fold it all up. But, they can't throw away the cups for some reason. . . . So they have like a bin. It's like a cloth kind of, almost what you'd use for clothes. I'm telling them, “Throw the paper in there and then take the cups back.” They do that. They're doing it.27 Paula noticed that there were no utensils and that the students ate everything with their hands. The food was obviously something the hubrids were accustomed to; at least, they do not ask how to eat it or what it is, and they do not express feelings about its taste.
Clothing and Conformity Hubrid children have to dress the same as human children, and abductees help them. In the incident described above, a female hybrid took Paula into a “dressing room.” The room had clothes in piles on the floor and on shelves, bins containing shoes tied together by their laces, an alcove with mirrors, and two young female hybrid helpers. Paula told the female they should have the clothes organized by size and she asked them for a table to put the clothes on. The two helpers brought in a table with legs on it.
They found jeans in the piles and spread them out on the table to see their sizes—she noticed the “Wrangler” label on one of them.
The helpers repeated the process with shirts and underwear. Paula saw about ten sets of boys briefs that were new, still in the package, although she did not notice the labels. The female hybrids took out the shoes—mainly sneakers, but some shoes looked as if they were made out of cloth, like slippers. Paula asked the female hybrid, “What are these [slippers] doing here?” The hybrid said, “This is what we were given.” All the socks were white and folded in plastic wrap. There were no undershirts or belts.
Young hybrid boys then entered and Paula was directed to “dress them with what we have.” She put the clothes next to each child for measuring and they took off their hybrid outfits and put on the human clothes. The clothes did not fit perfectly, but a female hybrid told her not to worry about that. Paula asked where the boys were going, but she was told it was not her place to know that. Her job was to do this.
The females asked, “Don't they look like your children?” Paula replied, “Yes. They look a lot like our children.”28 The female hybrid took Paula into another room to see a group of high-school-aged kids. They were wearing human clothes, sitting at a table, and talking quietly to one another.
You can hear them. Some are whispering, some are just talking, but not, you know, out loud. I'm trying to get a sense of what they're talking about. . . . It's more like projects. I have a sense it seems like they work in like twos and threes. Like they're going to work together. And my sense is —and I don't know how I have this—is when they're down [in human society] with us, they're going to be in groups and they're going to have a project to do. It's like they're going to interact with people, but they're going to stay with their friends, their groups.
And they all have different assignments, is what I'm getting. And they're excited about it, but they're really well prepared, is how I'm picking this up. They know what to do. . . . They're smart.
They're very earnest people. . . . These are the older ones. They've been working with these a long time. These are special ones. They are very proud of these kids. They're like the top and they've been working with them since they were very young. They're handpicked. I get the sense it's kind of like the best of our two worlds. They're very smart; very smart. But they can listen to people and they can try to feel like them. Almost like empathy. . . . They're good with people and people trust them.
So they've already been with people?
They've already been with them, yeah. . . . And she said again they are the best of both worlds.
And I ask her, “Well, are they us?” And she said, “Yes, they are too.” So they're sitting at these tables talking. Is this a food situation also?
No, it's more like a study area or something. Like a meeting area. I have two feelings here. I'm very impressed, because they look so good and they seem so good, but then it's scaring me, because they fit in, you know? It can tie a knot in one's stomach to see this. . . . And I have a feeling that somebody gets up and they put their hand out.
Now, does this mean he wants to touch you or shake your hand?
Shake my hand. I mean, I'm kind of groggy on this, but it seems like he's saying, “Hi” and, “How are you doing today?” So he's being social?
He's being social. And I said, “I'm fine, how are you doing?” And he asked me if I'm an observer. . . . And I said, “Yes I am.” “Well, what do you think?” or “How did they look?” I said, “You look very good.” And we're getting some communication here. It's kind of like rapid. He said, “We're going over some procedures” and, “We've done this many times before.” . . . And the feeling I get is that this is all our future. But then again I have a feeling that they're really going to be molding the future. I mean, they're really organized and, you know, target-driven. But it's okay, because they're part us. . . . And there's like an edge of warmth, but it's more just, “This is the way it is.” This is not how it's going to be; this is it.29 Evaluation In April 2006, Karen was taken into a room with many young girls. Three hybrid children were brought to her. Karen's resistance to the children elicited a threat from the female hybrid who was escorting her.
And now it seems as though we're looking at children. They're girls. Three girls. And they're wearing little smocks.
How old are they, do you think?
I would say they're like seven, five, and three. They're kind of angelic looking. They're very pretty, but they have no affect. And I'm saying, “What are you doing? What is the point of this?” I'm thinking, you know, “You must have millions and millions of eggs and sperm and all that stuff and, you know, how many people, why are we doing this? I've been looking at these kids for twenty-five years.” And the answer is, “We're not going to tell you why we're doing this.” . . . But the sense I have is that I am supposed to help integrate these hybrids into the population.
I see. Now, do they say you're supposed to help them integrate into the population, or is that just a sense that you get? Is there a discussion about that, in other words?
Here's what it's like. It's like they're saying when I'm with the girls, the female one, the two helpers are by my side, and the female is saying, “You know, it's your job to help us get . . . them into society.” And I say, “I'm not doing it. No. Nope. Nope. I'm not doing it.” And that's when she says, or puts in my mind, that “If you don't help us, do you know we can kill you?” And I can't laugh, but I almost did, and I say, “No you're not.” I say, “Go ahead. Go ahead. I've been hanging out with you for all of these years, you know, I don't think that you can do that.” What I say is, “I'm not going to help you integrate them into the society. I'm just not going to do it.” . . .
So, she gets angry in a sense. Or at least . . . stern. They get stern. But, whatever they say to you or whatever you say to them, it never stops the program and I know it. . . . Whatever you're going to do next was going to happen no matter what you say you'd do. It just seems like in this big area there's all these hybrids.
All kids, you mean, or . . .?
All ages. Kids. But they all have this really whacko affect. It's just blank. The girls have very thin hair. Silky. But they don't have any affect. . . . They're standing there for me to inspect them and they're in a row. And I'm supposed to inspect them.
Well, how many kids are there, do you think?
It's a big, cavernous area that seems to have rooms off of it. And it seems like there's all different hybrids and all different people. There's a lot of activity and motion going on. . . . It's like they're looking at me to tell them something and I feel kind of sorry for them. I guess it's not their fault they're hybrids. That's why sometimes, when this happens, I feel bad when I say, “Oh, yeah. They'll be just fine.” Because I feel like—I feel bad for the hybrids, but I'm not going to help the aliens. I'm just not going do it. I'm not going to help them. If I can stop, if I can just make it more difficult for them, I will.30 Abductee accounts of training hubrids inevitably reinforce the idea that they will be living on Earth.
Hubrids have a function to perform and they must be “human” to carry it out.
The same type of training takes place for older children, adolescents, and adult hubrids. Although it seems that a hubrid's age is not a factor, the actual integration program is most problematic for the youngest children. They have to be in a family and attend school. They cannot live by themselves or blend in without help. Thus, most young hubrid children might be learning about life as humans for when they get older, but it is possible that they could be inserted into hubrids' homes or families in which both parents are abductees.
CHAPTER 4 Training Adolescent and Young Adult Hubrids “Is a person bred to do this?” While onboard, aliens require abductees to teach young adult hubrids about integration, just as they train hubrid children to fit in. Contrary to what may seem logical, instruction for these adult hubrids does not address topics like government, law, societal institutions, entertainment, corporations, economics, or other complex aspects of society. Instead, most hybrid training is centered on the ability to communicate and interact correctly with humans—to “blend in.” To this end, instruction for adult hubrids focuses on relationships and the innumerable details of day-to-day behavior and social norms.
The challenges of teaching adolescent and young adult hubrids are similar to those encountered with the children—they must be taught nearly everything. They have had little or limited experience with ordinary daily human life. They do not understand how to eat human foods properly, live in a house, drive a car, watch television, or purchase something in a store. They have rarely encountered art, music, or literature, and likewise have never played sports. Most young adult hubrids have had no experience acting independently, making their own decisions, or giving and receiving affection.
Young Adult Learning Styles Late adolescent and young adult hubrids are highly motivated to learn about human society. Like the children, they absorb information rapidly using telepathy. And, like the children, they also learn from human instruction, practicing human behavior and eliciting abductees' feedback.
Young adult hubrids use question cascades to draw out information and quickly assimilate it.
However, there are times when the content is more difficult to comprehend and the question cascade can go on for long periods. Strangely, hubrids are rarely uniform and homogenous in their level of knowledge; some have learned more about human life than others of the same age. For example, some have already visited Earth and observed humans or seen mock human rooms, while others have not. They have talked to different abductees who gave perhaps different answers to the same questions. Moreover, sometimes abductee information is wrong.
Hubrids have to learn a broad spectrum of information. Their training extends from the mundane—like learning how to eat an orange—to the abstract—like understanding the concept of music, something completely absent in the aliens' emotionally narrow telepathic society.
We do not know why the knowledge that abductees give hybrids is not spread uniformly to all other hybrids. Rather, it appears that each group, from children to young adults, keeps the knowledge to themselves. This may be because the number of humanoid hybrids onboard is limited. Therefore, there is always a fresh group of hybrids who must learn from abductees, as the older hybrid groups have gone on to other tasks or are now living on Earth. It is also possible that the way in which the information is stored neurologically is not conducive to transfer for human-stage hybrids.
At the end of one abduction, when Betsey was about to put her clothes on to leave the UFO, a young adult female who had been escorting her sat next to her and asked a series of questions about learning styles and a bus.
She's asking me, “Why don't they learn in one place?” I'm just saying, “That's what's been set up for them to learn.” And she wants to know what kind of things they learn. And I'm going through some of the things. She asked me something—and I was thinking about the bus, she's asking questions about the bus for a while, “Why would they go on that? Do they use that all the time?
Does everyone use it? How do they fit everyone on it? How big is it?” And I'm just explaining it to her as best I could, you know, that there are different buses, different kids go on different ones.
She was asking how they organize that and I said based on where they have to be picked up and dropped off and what time.31 Dancing and Music Sean Allen recounted an example of training young adults during an extraordinary two-part incident in 2009. In the first part, while on a UFO, he was required to teach a female hubrid how to dance with men.
He estimated that she was between twenty and thirty years old. Sean, whose memories always come haltingly, described the scene to me as taking place inside a human-style room with an oak dining table.
There were food-like items on the table, but no one ate anything. A caretaker hybrid brought the hubrid to Sean.
She is here and she comes up to the top of my chest and no higher . . . She's right in front of me, two feet away from me . . . The guy who's with me [the caretaker] tells me, “Teach her to dance.
She doesn't know how to dance and you're going to teach her.” What is she wearing?
She's wearing a black dress which had long sleeves and it comes up to her neck and from the waist it kind of flares out somewhat and it's knee length, maybe about knee length, and then she's got some kind of shoes on, black shoes. . . . It doesn't look very stylish and it doesn't look like someone who has a sense of fashion. . . .
Does she say anything to you? Do you get a sense of communication from her?
All I can remember is something like, “We have to dance. You have to tell me what to do.” But it's like she's saying the word [“dance”] and she really doesn't understand entirely what it means.
It's something she's been told she has to learn, you know?
When you look at her, does she seem familiar? Have you seen her before?
She does kind of seem familiar. I've known these kind. She looks quite human. . . . She has black hair which comes to about her shoulders and it's parted down the middle and it's a bit tangly and curly and it's absolutely black with no decoration of any kind.
Is she happy to see you? Is she neutral? Or is she frightened?
She seems completely indifferent, I'm afraid to say.
So what happens next?
I put my hand on her waist and I hold her hand in my left hand and then I say something like, “Where's the music?” or “I can't teach the steps without music.” What I get back is something like, “What music?” or “What kind of music?” or “There is no music,” or “How do we do that?” or something like that. It's like it hasn't been considered or thought about. . . . Like, “There is no music” or “Why is music needed?” or “What is music?” or “How does it go? Does it make a sound? What is it like? Where do you get it from? Is there always music when you dance? Can you dance without music?” This kind of flavor. . . . There were questions like, “What does it sound like? Where do you get it from? Why do you need it? Can you do it without music? Do you always have music for this?” . . . And I try to think of it in my head—the sounds—so maybe they'll pick it up from my thoughts, which they can do, but they still haven't got it somehow.
What happens then? Do they supply music?
No, they don't. They can't. But anyway, I say, “Well, you move back and forward” and she looks very impassive and just completely emotionless about it, like it's a task, like when you have to learn to change a tire on a car or you have to learn a piece of machinery. It's a very functional sort of thing and she follows me with some basic competence.
Does she say anything to you like, “Am I doing it right?” or “Do I put my foot here?” She questions [stepping] like this or like that. I say, “No, go back a little farther” and it's very hard, because what do you do in a situation like that? You've got to work very hard to get the steps. . . . I did spend quite a while in this situation, but I don't know that I managed to communicate very much. I think at one point I said what you need to do is show her a film of people dancing—say, salsa—and then you'd understand the way it's supposed to feel and it'll be much easier for you. But that was just not available or an option at the time.
When you're holding her, do you actually get to do some sort of dance steps with her?
Yeah, very slowly, I kind of lead her and she gets the feet wrong. I say, “You need music and then you'd understand about the timing.” Anyway, in the end, I just leave her; I just walk off.
How do you know when it's over?
Good question. Somebody who was with me, somebody says something like, “Okay, it's time to go. It's time to go now,” . . . and off we go. . . . There's one other detail, Dave. We weren't the only couple. There were others, but not that many—five or six other pairs in the room—so I'm assuming that at least one of each pair was an abductee. I don't remember what everybody was wearing.
Were these other couples sort of following your lead?
There was no interaction at all. They were all separate.32 The second part of this encounter came two weeks later when he was abducted again and underwent a question cascade about music and how to make it. Four late-adolescent hybrids wanted him to teach them how to play instruments. Sean was unclear about whether he saw real musical instruments onboard, or if the aliens had put images of musical instruments in his mind. He had played various instruments when he was younger, but trying to explain how music is created was difficult.
I was being asked all these questions about music . . . and I had to visualize in my mind what something looked like. So, I would visualize a keyboard and I would say, “You have white notes and then in between, the black notes are sharps and flat[s]. Octaves go in seven notes and this is how it works and this is music in the harmonic scale.” I could visualize this keyboard and somebody would say, “What's it attached to?” and “Who makes [music]? . . . So I would visualize the little electric piano and then the electric piano would be placed there. . . . I'd say, “You need rhythm. . . . What most people do is use drums or percussion of some kind.” So then I was asked to describe them, how you'd fit the drums together, and what they're made out of, and what they look like, and where would you find them, and would you hit them with your hands? And I'd say, “They use drumsticks, but you can use your hands.” All these questions about different kinds of drums, and eventually I settled on a very small basic drum set, a snare and a big bass drum and a couple tom toms and high hats. And a drum stool.
Sean continued to address the question of why you need music to dance, trying to explain how the dance and the music complement each other; the dance is an extension of music in a way.
“You can't just dance silently; you need some music to dance to; you need to dance with a rhythm.” It's very hard to explain to them, but they kind of get it somehow. But they don't really get it, you know? So then they ask me, “Well, what about this music? How do you make it? How do you create it?” I say it's recorded and you can just play it on a CD and they say, “Where does it come from?” and then I say, “Well, people create it in a little group of humans and they work cooperatively to make this sound.” “How do they do that?” “Well, you've got different instruments that make different kinds of sounds and complement each other.” “What kind of instruments?” “Well, one would be maybe an electric piano or keyboard.” “What's that? What does it look like?” and “How do you play it? Who plays it? Do you have to be chosen to do this? Is that all you do with your life or do you do other things?” . . .
And then there's a guitar and I can kind of visualize holding one myself with the six strings. . . .
Well, okay, “What kind of noise does it make?” So then it's like, “With electronics you can make it do all kinds of different noises and a typical noise would be like this. Then there's a microphone.” What I'm visualizing—or they have this idea of or somehow a combination—is a kind of old- fashioned mike stand, you know, one of those rectangular-type mikes that you'd see in the 1940s or something. That's what gets visualized. So what we have is this little group of instruments—a little keyboard, a little drum kit, a guitar leaning against an amplifier, no bass—and a microphone stand standing there on its own. And I say, “That's typically what you might use for a group of people to make music with and then you could record the music and the music would last forever on this record and then you could reproduce it and millions of people could listen to it in all different locations, because it would be a historic recording.” They kind of get it and then they want to know about who makes the music and, “Is it all you do?” or “Who chooses you to make the music?” or “Who told you to make the music? Is it something you're born to do and do for years and years, or do you have to do another job?” The question “Who chooses you to make the music?” is consistent with the aliens' focus on their rigid social structure. The hybrids' perspective does not allow for someone to decide to make music for themselves; instead the hybrids emphasize, and are perhaps even obsessed with, obeying rules from “above.” Sean continued: The kind of questions I'm being asked is very peculiar. The sense of it is: Is the person bred to do this or is it something, a job, you're given later when they've grown to adulthood? It's like a role or function they have for like a number of years and then they're told to do something else. That's the kind of way they think. . . . Anyway, I'm then supposed to make the music and they say, “Let's go.” And I say, “I can't actually do that because I don't play keyboards. I play piano a little bit. I can play basic chords, but I can't teach you to do it just like that.” So, I've got this situation where they want to be in this little band to make music and the whole situation is pretty ridiculous, because they can't play instruments and I'm not even sure the instruments are really there. Nothing can then happen, nothing can then be done. I realize this sounds insane, because they'd know that then, wouldn't they? Surely they'd realize that.33 Sean explained to the hybrids that it takes time and practice to learn how to create music: there is more to it than simply making sounds with the instruments.
It seems inconceivable that hybrids would not know what music is. It is possible that, when particular hybrids came to abduct people in their homes, they may have heard it. Of course, seeing it played in person would be a much rarer event. This is especially true if a hybrid's functions do not entail abducting humans and spending even a brief time on Earth. Therefore, some hybrids may know what music is, but most may never have seen it played or heard it at all.
Oranges Later in 2009, Sean remembered being taken aboard a UFO and brought to a female hubrid with black hair. She was familiar to him and he was “kind of happy” to see her again. The female seemed happy to see him as well. He sensed that he might have known her for about ten years. They sat together on what Sean thought to be a “couch.” The female kept her hands on her lap and asked questions.
She's asking me about oranges. Isn't that insane? She's asking me about oranges, fruit.
Does she want to know what they are or how to eat them?
“How many do you eat? How do you eat them? Do you take the skin off? Where do you get them from? Do you just eat them as they are or do you do things with them? How often do you eat them?” All these questions about oranges. I just remembered that. I didn't remember that before.
So she's in essence—if I may use my own words, and this may be wrong—asking you about the rules for eating an orange.
Yeah, the rules about oranges, yeah. “Where do they come from? How do you get them? How many do you get at one time? How many do you eat? How do you eat them? How do you get the skin off? Do you share it? Do you eat it on your own in private? Do you eat all of it or do you throw part away? Is there anything else you can do with it? Does everybody eat them? Do only some people eat them?” It's very strange. She doesn't generalize about grapefruit or other fruit, just [talks] about oranges. Why, I don't know, unless it's been made up in my mind. I don't know.
She's full of questions about them, though. . . . You imagine it in your mind. The conversation is about oranges, but there is no physical orange with us in this place.
Later during this same session, Sean pointed out the difficulty of explaining how to peel an orange without having an orange in hand: It's so much easier to explain something to somebody if you have the artifact there and you can explain it and practice in practical terms. But most of these questions I'm getting are just purely mental and it's hard to clarify things that way. I don't know why she doesn't just have the objects there. They ought to be able to get an orange from planet Earth and keep it and show it to you so you can teach them how to peel it.
In this exchange with Sean, a hubrid was once again searching for the rules of how to do something, with no sense of priority or importance; every question appeared to have equal weight. For hubrids, almost everything is new, and abiding by the rules gives their lives structure. In a telepathic society, it may be much harder to circumvent or break a rule. Plotting something in private is difficult, if not impossible, when others can understand your private thoughts. Nonconformity in this society is virtually impossible.
Nail Polish and Reading Books Sean's memory-retrieval session covered a broad range of subject matter, all of which related to following rules. After the conversation about oranges, the female hubrid asked him about nail polish and then about books.
I think she has questions about nail varnish or manicuring. I think she has questions about something like that.
Does she know what it is?
No. She's learned things. She knows some things, but she has questions. I don't remember the details. It's something about nails, manicuring the nails, too long or too short, different lengths. Do you cut them to points, something like that. It's something she needs to get right and it's something I can't really help her with that much.
But she's interested in how she should do her nails, basically?
Yeah. Basically, yeah. What's the right way and what's the wrong way. . . . She's got this kind of attitude about everything. How do you do this, what's the right way, what's the wrong way to do it? . . .
She asked me something about writing and about language and about alphabets and about books as well. I think she knows something about this already, but there's far more that she doesn't know —a whole world of literacy and writing simple things with a pen or a pencil. She's asking me about that too, but it's kind of a big subject. . . . She's interested in literacy and books in a fairly deep and general kind of way. She needs to understand more about that. She understands about storing knowledge and ideas; that much she understands. She understands about paper and symbols and writing. . . . I'm not sure she can read very well. I think she has an idea. You'd think that would be something they could teach the young ones, just like we teach our young ones. They could learn it very rapidly. . . .
She's asking you about books too?
Yeah. . . . What kind of things are in books? What kind of things do they keep in them? Why?
All questions like this. Explain why different sizes, explain why people have so many of them. Is this where you keep all your information? I say you can keep information on computers and on electronic gadgets too. She's definitely asking about writing on paper and recording things that way and about literacy and about books.
When you answer, do you ask her, “Why are you interested? Why are you asking these questions?” Or do you just sort of answer the questions?
It's like I know why she's interested. She doesn't have the understanding of societal norms, so I know she doesn't have that and I try to explain that in a simple way.34 Facial Expressions Instructing hybrids can be very basic and at the same time very detail-oriented—even sometimes including things as elemental as facial expressions. One such incident occurred in 2006, when Allison was taken onboard and walked into a large room containing three half-circle rows of “tables” with seats opposite each other. She estimated that the room contained about thirty tables with about ninety seats.
She sat directly across from an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old late-stage hybrid female in a booth-like enclosure.
Allison often recounted her abductions in cynical and sometimes sarcastic tones, the result of psychological wearying from remembering a lifetime of abductions. She told me about this exchange four days after it happened.
And we sit across from whoever is in our box. I'm sitting across from a girl. She's got really, really long black hair—I'd say at least to the middle of her back. It's very straight. She's very pale.
. . . There's like this partial glass around it, . . . almost like a ticket booth. . . . But it's square and it's in proportion with the square glass. There's a little lip that comes out for your chin, like an eye-doctor thing. . . . I understand that we're to put our chins on these things. . . . This girl inside this thing puts her chin on the support. So, we're face-to-face at about two inches [apart]. I could kiss her.
You're just a couple of inches away from her?
Yes. . . . I feel she's either searching for or taking or viewing something [through my eyes] that .
. . has to do with her smiling. I don't know. She's looking at things. I don't do anything on purpose, but I get the sense the purpose of the thing is an associative thing for her with the physical act of smiling that's associated with the emotional feelings of being happy. That's something at this moment I feel is taught for her, anyway. And I feel like my gray guy is just standing behind me.
Is she an early-stage, middle-stage, or late-stage hybrid?
Late.
Okay. So, she looks pretty human, then.
Yeah, except for—well, she looks very sickly—not because of being skinny or anything.
Actually, her face is pretty rounded and her skin is smooth, but she is very white, like she's never known the sun. This is definitely something for her, because I don't feel anything in return. You know, when our eyes are connected, I don't get anything back. . . . I don't get any sense from her of anything. So, what she's doing is she's probing in me and doing whatever it is she needs to do for her. I'm getting nothing in return.
But you get the sense that she is looking for clues and triggers for smiling as related to emotions?
Yes. I don't know if she really does smile, but I have this image of a really fake, plastic, practiced kind of smile thing. . . . There's a connection between a physiological response to an emotional feeling, and this one was “happy.”35 Clothing and Dressing Allison, like other abductees, was required to teach hybrids how to put on clothes and how to wear them properly. After years of doing this, she was tired of the routine and complained to me: “You have to talk about how you walk, how you sit. If it's a girl and she's in a skirt, you've got to talk about how to sit and those things. But there's still only so much you can do as far as teaching someone how to sit, how to walk, how to dress, about buttons and zippers. I've done all I can there, and it was just frustrating me.” The frustration appeared in many of her other abductions.36 In 2005, Allison was in a room onboard with a male hubrid. She was told to dress him properly. She guessed that he was about twenty-three years old and about five feet, nine inches tall. He wore a sleeveless tank-top undershirt (Allison called it a “wife-beater”), jeans, and white sneakers. She sensed that others had dressed him most of his life. She said he seemed “shy” and “intimidated.” She presumed he was just about ready to enter into human society. On the floor, there were bins full of clothes for him.
She looked through the clothes and found a T-shirt and a pair of pants. The problem was that she did not know his sizes.
So, we have to start with the whole concept of putting on a shirt. That's probably why he has a tank top on, because he didn't have the sleeves and stuff to mess with. I think when I get him all dressed up [I will] calculate what size I think he is, because [I will] have to take him shopping later. Right now, I have these bins with stuff to try on. I mean, I don't want to take him to a mall and try to guess there what size he is. I wish we had the wife-beaters in these bins, because he puts his hands up to get his clothes put on, and I've got to teach him from the very beginning how to put his own shirt on, and with wife-beaters, it's going to be easier than fumbling with sleeves.
And somebody probably already figured that out. That's why they sent him in there the way he was. . . .
There's like T-shirts in different colors. And there's bins over here of jeans, different sizes, different colors [arranged] so that it goes from dark to light, and bigger to smaller. I have to start out with guessing size and stuff. Then I put clothes on him and he can sit in one of these little desk/chair things. He puts his hands up like a little kid and I pull it over. If I don't get the right size the first time, I do it until I can with that and pants. There's no underwear. There's no socks, and there's no shoes. . . .
So, he puts on the shirt, puts on the pants. The pants fit, I assume, or pretty much so?
Yeah. I got one size too big.
So you go get another one then, or . . .?
Mm-hmm [Yes]. And he sits bare-butt on the desk thing. I take the pants over and do this with the legs, put it there and put it there. When he stands up, he pulls his own pants up, but I zipped them, because I didn't want him to hurt himself.
So, you get him dressed. What happens next?
I work with him for a while. I want to make sure I do it all in the right order. Because I see things—I see images, floating images, of putting on socks. Like sitting in a chair and—I have to show you. Sitting in a chair and putting your foot up like this and putting your sock on, as opposed to sitting in the chair and bending way down to do it. I see myself showing him, sitting at his desk to bring his foot up so he can put his sock on and still engage in eye-to-eye conversation. That was a practice. . . . That's why I say it's so complicated. It's not complicated, but it's over weeks and weeks. Months maybe. I don't know.37 Making Friends and Being Safe Paula was in a room with eight or ten late-adolescent male hybrids and an older caretaker. They were learning how to understand casual human interactions. Paula explained that the best way to learn how to act human is to watch humans. Either in her mind or on a screen, Paula envisioned them being in a park together. They all seemed to tap into that image. She instructed them in the proper way to meet people.
They just are trying to get comfortable with people. . . . They kind of stay in groups. When they walk, there might be three together or four together. . . . And I'm telling them they really should spend, if they can, just a lot of time looking like they're talking to one another and just watching people and seeing how they act. . . . And I'm telling the hybrid that they just have to have a lot of watching experience. Maybe go to a mall and just walk through, a couple at a time or three at a time, and just walk and then sit down and watch them.
They seem to think we're kind of unruly. People are kind of doing every little thing instead of following on a mission. Some of them like the girls. They like looking at the girls. . . . And I'm telling the hybrid who was the watcher, or whatever you want to call him, they have to see all these different things that people do for their leisure. Everything's not training, work with what he wants. And I'm being told that they think a lot of what we do is just a waste of time. And I'm telling him, “Well, we do things in spurts. We learn things, we're with our family, we're with our friends, we play, and then we get to business.” They don't seem to have a whole lot of play.
Paula's conversation with them turned to how humans interact physically.
They've kind of selected people that are going to be their friends, and they're people that they know. But they're human. . . . And those people will be understanding, and they will have patience. And I'm telling them it's just really a comfort level, but they'll get to the comfort level.
And I'm telling them about my own experience of moving from school to school and how—what I did. And they're really paying attention here. What I did is, I just sat back and watched people for a few days. And then, you just relax, and you just see that it's just a different way of communicating. . . . And the idea that we're being told is that we want them and they'd like them to go over to two or three [kids], to get to know these kids and for short periods of time maybe visit the kids' house. It's very controlled—very, very, controlled.
Who says this?
The head guy. . . . They're supposed to go outside first, not go into the houses. Meet the kids outside just to get a relationship, just to feel comfortable.
But these would not be children of abductees, though? I mean, this is just average—?
Average. Yeah. Yeah. And the abductees, they're going to know them ahead of time and they know the kids ahead of time. He said they met them. He's saying something like the abductees are much more like them. It's not like they're after any huge friendships or anything. They want a comfort level. That's as deep as it goes.
It's almost like they absolutely don't want friendships. Like alliances almost. He's telling them about the bullies that could be neutralized in a way. It's like the kids could do that themselves.
And I'm saying to him, “What? With their eyes?” And he said, “Yes.” And he's telling them they're not going to be down here alone. There will be people that are visible and invisible that'll be here. . . . But one point I'm telling them is they need to fit in. I feel like a traitor here. But anyway, I'm doing what I have to do. . . .
We're talking a little bit about mothers and fathers. And I'm telling them that a lot of the times, it's a very good thing that the fathers and the mothers teach them what we're trying to teach them.
And the hugging and the touching, that's a bit uncomfortable for them. So, I'm telling them, “Let's practice shaking hands. That's not up close.” . . . You know, they should've known this before. So, we're just, you know, “Not too tight,” and they kind of think it's funny.
Are they practicing with you or with each other?
With each other and with me. And the other guy was just watching. It's kind of like he thinks it's distasteful. But I'm telling them that, in our perspective, it's a good thing. It's kind of like you shake their hand, you look them in the eye, you say something that's connecting, and that's what we want.
And someone's asking me about doing it with the girls. “Not usually, unless it's a business or it's some kind of a meeting.” But I don't see it at their age. Somebody's asking me, “Do you just go up and shake people's hands?” “No. They have to be introduced. There has to be a reason for it. But that's one of the connections. Another [way of connecting] is just to say, ‘Hi. Hi. How are you doing?’” They don't understand, and I'm trying to tell them [it provides] comfort on both sides; not only their sides, but the people's sides. “These are just the little things you have to do.” The hybrid is saying that sometimes things don't work out with the humans. Sometimes, they get rough. Sometimes humans fight. All of a sudden, they start fighting. And I'm telling him that we get indications beforehand—that if I was somewhere and a fight was going to begin, I would see somebody making movement, or talking louder and getting louder, or accusing someone. We just don't attack like wild dogs. There's a reason. I'm telling them you can just step back slowly. Just step back.
The exchange continued with more questions about human interaction and about safety. Paula surmised that, eventually, the aliens intend to change our behavior.
Then I'm being asked like right now, “What should they be aware of if it could be dangerous?” And I'm saying, “The raise in the voice, getting closer, someone standing closer to them, the look in their eye.” He [the adult hybrid] is saying that they can sense it also. I don't know what that means. Telepathically. He's telling them they won't be alone. But there's a real fear of us. He's telling them they're absolutely not going to be alone. There's going to be people around watching them. . . . They must have had some sort of bad experience in the parks.
Paula then described an incident in a park when some human kids came up to the hubrids and asked them if they wanted to play “a game.” The hubrids refused, but the humans would not let it go and asked, “Why not? Why don't you want to play?” This insistence frightened the hubrids, who apparently took it as an aggressive act. They then agreed that, in a park situation, they would not all stare at people at the same time.
But they were telling me some of the good things that happened, too. They sat down in the park, and they saw people going by with the kids and that was interesting. A mother holding a child's hand—that was interesting. It's interesting for them the emotions that we have. It's sad. They never had parents. The deep love, too, really is surprising to them. He [the adult hybrid] doesn't think that [deep love] is necessarily a good thing at all.38 Inspection Not all hubrids move into human society. The late adolescents and young adults are in the final stages of preparation for moving in, but the inspection and assessment process prior to integration is ongoing.
These pre-integration hybrids will only pass muster when they can blend in without the slightest difference that might draw attention. The inspection process is shared with some, but not all, abductees.
Paula, Karen, and Allison occasionally had this task. We do not, however, know how or why the aliens choose certain abductees to perform certain functions.
These chosen abductees have the responsibility, during parts of some abductions onboard a UFO, to inspect hybrids and provide feedback on how well they would fit into human society. Some abductees are so involved with the program that they recommend ways in which the hubrids can learn more about humans. In effect, they serve as both judges of and, given their state of neurological control, unintentional guides for safe integration.
Inspection includes physical and behavioral characteristics: Are they dressed appropriately? Is their hair cut properly? Are they acting in a way that will not draw unwanted attention? These are critical questions and the answers may help determine the hubrids' future.
Hubrid Physical and Behavioral Characteristics The physical and behavioral characteristics sought in hubrids run the gamut from anatomy to dress. One of Paula's primary duties, often in concert with other abductees, was to inspect and critique hubrids' ears, hair, hands, nails, clothes, demeanor, and conversation. In one typical event, Paula was part of a group of thirteen to fifteen abductees who sat in form-fitting chairs and watched as hybrids of various stages of development came in and displayed themselves. First, the abductees were shown an image of a hybrid with big ears and odd hair. They said he would stand out. Then a more human-looking group came in dressed in human clothes. The insectalin in charge telepathically said he was “proud” of this group.
He asked the abductees how they looked. Paula said they all looked good. One abductee, however, noticed a hybrid wearing what appeared to be wingtip shoes and said, “People don't wear those that much anymore.” But, everything else was correct.
Mingling Socialization—the ability to mingle among humans undetected—is an extremely important goal of the aliens. If abductees do their job properly, the hubrids will have a rudimentary understanding of human society and will be able to function within it. Being among humans onboard is an important step in this process. Paula recounted a “discussion” related to socialization—one of many conversations about this goal.
Paula tells of being taken into a room with a group of abductees. Hubrids then came into the room and walked around among them. These hubrids looked human and the same insectalin they had seen before seemed pleased with their appearance. Some of the abductees suggested places where the hubrids could be dropped off to observe and mingle with humans. One suggested street corners, malls, and shops.
He's saying not that he's going to take them, but they [the aliens] should take them. Somehow they should be exposed to it. But not like in a stadium, but like in a park. And he [the insectalin] said that they see, like, “movies” of this. They've been shown this along with their other training.
They're learning how to act. . . . And I'm saying I never go to ball games, but I could help them in a mall, looking in windows and walking through. . . . [The insectalin is] saying that sometimes they take them down a few at a time and they keep them together and they can observe. And then someone [an abductee] thinks that they should let them watch some television programs about teenagers. He [the insectalin] doesn't want them to watch television.
Does he say why?
He did; I just missed it though. I think that it was he just wanted them to see useful things, serious things, you know, not fooling around. He's kind of asking us what we think, and on the whole, we think they look real good. . . . Now [the insectalin is] telling us that this is an important part of the project—our project. And we'll be doing this again. And they are protective of their people. These are very special young people. . . . It's like the best of the two worlds. We have the best of the two worlds here. And we're very lucky to be part of it. There is no individual anything.
This is what we're doing. And then somehow we just all get up and there's little guys [small grays] out there and we just kind of follow them.
Fitting In In their role as trainers and judges, and because they are human, some of the abductees develop feelings for the hybrids, especially for the children. This can cause cognitive dissonance, however. The abductees may be concerned for the safety of the hybrids, who are vulnerable when in human society, and then feel guilty about having these concerns. In the same session as the one just described, Paula felt somewhat bonded to the hubrids and conflicted by her feelings. She walked up to one hybrid and held his hand as if he were a child. He reminded her of her brother. She wanted to keep him safe, but she felt guilty because, “it's like a real betrayal to my own kind.” I see a female [hybrid], a girl, and I'm smiling at her and she's smiling back. I'm making the move over to see her. . . . I say, “Hi, my name is Paula.” She doesn't tell me her name. She said she's nervous. And I'm asking her, “How come there's so few girls?” And she said some groups have more girls. She's asking me what do I do. I'm telling her, “Right now I'm retired, I'm not working, but I'm out a lot.” I tell her that I [volunteer to] visit sick people and that's kind of an odd thing for her. . . . I asked her what she does and she said she studies. She's learning about us.
She's mentioned the word “violence” to me—sometimes there's violence where we are. And [I said] yes there is, but most of the time not. She just wants to go and be with people. She doesn't want to be near the violence. She would like to be in a building watching people, she said, like a school. I'm just saying, “Would you like to be in a hospital?” No, she didn't want to be around that.
. . . And I—this is getting personal, because I told her I have a daughter. And she wants to know what she does. And I'm telling her, “She goes to school, and then she also works during the day.
She's studying people.” And she [the hybrid] says that is what she's doing—and how they [humans] act. I'm explaining to her about my daughter that during the day, she goes and she works with people.
You're saying that your daughter tries to help people who have problems during the day?
Yeah, that is her job and it's like she [the hybrid] is confused that people have problems. “Why do they have these people who have problems?” And I tell her that people, humans, do have problems. And [she asks,] “Is that acceptable?” Well, “Yes, it is acceptable because we do. But we can get help and we talk about them.” Does she know what you're talking about?
She has no clue. And I'm talking to her right now about families and sometimes things happen in families. And [she's] like, “families?” She said she has a lot to learn about us.39 Buses are frequent topics of conversation when young hybrids ask how other children get to school.
The following event with Gillian Williams illustrates the meticulous care that aliens take to make sure hubrids do the most mundane activities correctly.
In a session with me, Gillian couched the following event as a possible dream. Some of her other recollections had included dream material, but, given previous experiences of hers that we had investigated, this seemed to be a typical onboard “envisioning” procedure in which a scenario was played out in her mind. While onboard with hybrids, she envisioned an eighteen- to twenty-year-old hubrid woman with brown hair and no makeup, who was wearing a jacket and a knee-length skirt, with an over-the-shoulder bag. She was walking down a sidewalk and then sat down at a sheltered bus stop.
Another woman was sitting there as well. Soon, a bus pulled up and they both got in. The hubrid female glanced at the bus driver, reached into her purse, and paid her fare. Then she walked down the aisle and sat in a seat. That was the end of the visualization.
Immediately afterward, the hybrids next to Gillian asked, “What is she doing wrong?” They wanted to know the subtleties of the event. Did she look at the driver long enough? Should she have taken her purse off? Gillian said that everything looked all right, but the hubrid's demeanor looked a bit off, as if she seemed perhaps a little too cautious, but nevertheless doing what she was supposed to do. Then, the hybrids asked if the hubrid “fit in.” Gillian said she did.40 Gillian's incident suggests that the aliens monitor even the most mundane of hubrid activities during the training process. That level of watchfulness is important, not only in images placed in an abductee's mind or shown on a screen, but it continues when the hubrids integrate into the society.
CHAPTER 5 Field Training for Hubrid Integration “The towel's not working.” Field training, in actual human society, is essential for integration. Eventually, pre-integration hubrids must come to Earth to learn about humans. For adolescents and young adults, this is the last step. Young hubrid children, in preparing for future integration, also visit abductees. Regardless of age, hybrids and pre-integration hubrids must have firsthand knowledge of human homes.
In an abductee's home, teaching is much more visual and practical. The home is filled with new and unseen wonders for the hubrids. Descriptions and explanations given onboard can go only so far.
Abductees' homes are deemed safe for hubrids, with no outsider to look at them or interact with them.
Moreover, a house or apartment can provide an enormous amount of information and many learning situations. Training covers the absolute basics of human private life, from the beds we sleep in, to the food we eat, to the clothing we wear, to our relationships.
Sleep Cycles Home visits are either nighttime events or, if abductees are home alone, can happen during the day. This can be a problem, however. Abductees sometimes complain of sleep deprivation after a nighttime abduction—although fortunately, most abductions are infrequent enough that abductees are able to recover. But aliens—hybrids and hubrids included—appear to have different sleep patterns from humans. While abductees have seen hubrids “rest” or go into a sleep-like state for several hours, there is no indication that aliens of any kind have six- to eight-hour sleep cycles as humans do. When Allison was abducted for five days, she was allowed to have a normal sleep cycle in a hammock-like bed. Eric —a hubrid—told Bernard that he would “rest” for about three hours, but he indicated that he did not sleep like humans. Consequently, young hybrids may appear in a person's home at 3:00 in the morning.41 The Bathroom Hubrids do not seem to be interested in people's bathrooms. They must have facilities onboard that allow for urination and defecation. That they are familiar with bathrooms, however, was demonstrated once when her personal project hybrid entered Kay Stevens's hotel room late at night. The hybrid went into the bathroom and urinated into the toilet. But he partially missed his mark and splashed urine on the wall and floor behind it. The next morning, Kay recovered the urine by soaking it up in a tissue. She brought this to me and I had it analyzed in a university laboratory. It was deemed to be urine, but, before any other tests could be run, someone in the laboratory accidentally disposed of the tissue.42 As I wrote in The Threat, Allison described facilities onboard that created a spray of some sort that cleaned off naked hybrids as they walked through it. Other abductees have talked about similar “showers,” which dispensed a non-liquid substance that the abductees were required to stand in for a few seconds. Abductees have also described having to get into an onboard pool of liquid that was not water. Water is rarely described onboard, although humanoid hybrids and hubrids require it.
The Kitchen From late 2005 through 2006, home training became one of Betsey's main functions. Week after week, she received visits from hubrids and their caretakers. Of all the rooms in her home, the kitchen seemed to elicit the most hubrid curiosity. During one typical home visit, Betsey took a twenty-year-old female hubrid to the kitchen and explained what the refrigerator was. The hubrid wanted to know what was in the cans of food on the shelves and why they were not in the refrigerator. Betsey said that they did not have to be refrigerated unless they were opened. The hubrid looked inside the refrigerator. Then she looked at the dishwasher and, apparently never having seen one before, asked why cans were not kept in there. Betsey explained that dirty dishes went in there to be cleaned. She wanted to know how. Betsey explained the jets of water and soap, and then other aspects of the sink. Next, the hubrid wanted to know what the stove was for. When Betsey told them about cooking in the oven and on top of the stove, the female hubrid asked, “Why can't you cook in the can itself?” Betsey replied that they were not made for that.43 In another training session, Betsey explained the kitchen to a ten-year-old hubrid boy who was accompanied by a caretaker. The boy was full of questions about the most mundane objects.
I showed [him] how one of the cabinet doors opens and he's opening and closing it a couple times.
Then he goes over to the other side and he wants to know why one side has handles and the other side doesn't. I said the one side is new and we haven't put the handles on yet and he's glad we're going to put them on—he likes the handles better; it's easier.
We're looking in the refrigerator and the freezer—he's putting his hand in the freezer and then into the refrigerator to see the difference. He's looking at the food. He's looking at the ice bin in the freezer and I'm telling him it makes ice—it's frozen water—and we use it for a lot of different things and he's familiar with ice. He wants to hold a piece and I'm telling him, “No. It'll make your hand too cold and it'll hurt it.” He still wants to hold it, so I hand him one. He holds it for a while and then he kind of drops it on the floor and he's taking the palm of his hand where it's real cold and he's putting it next to his face to feel it.
Then he's opening and closing the drawer. He's fascinated with the drawer. He's looking at the sides where the tracks are and the rollers and stuff. He wants to know if everyone has drawers in their kitchen like this and I said I don't know, probably a lot of people do. We go over to the dishwasher and he's looking at that, talking about that a little bit.
The kid is looking at the dishwasher?
Yeah, then the sink. He's turning the water on. It's like a one-handle faucet. He's turning it from side to side, basically from hot to cold, and of course it's not doing anything. He's asking me how to work it and I reached over and pulled up on it to turn it on and I'm telling him our faucet is broken and he wants to know why it's not coming out the regular part. I said, “Ours is broken, it only comes out the sprayer part.” He's asking me why it's broken and I said, “Because these things happen and it's too much money to replace it right now. We'll replace it when we put the new sink in and until then we'll just live with it. It still works, we still get water.” And he wants to know what's wrong with this sink, “Why do you get a new one? Does everyone get a new one? How often do you get a new one?” I said, “You don't get a new one very often, but we're redoing the kitchen and a lot of stuff in it is old and is breaking, so we're getting new stuff. . . . Sometimes you repair it and sometimes you get new.” He wants to know if we're going to get rid of the drawers and the cupboards too, because they're old on this side. I said, “No, they're not broken. They're fine” and he's glad. He doesn't want to get rid of the drawers. . . . He's looking at the stove and I'm telling him, “It gets hot. You can't turn it on; it gets hot.” And he says, “You mean like the ice?” and I said, “No, that's cold.
That's the opposite.” He's putting his hand on it and he's saying, “It's cold” and I said, “That's because it's not on. When you turn it on, it gets very hot” and I told him it would burn him.
I talk a little bit about what a burn is and I tell him it's very painful, you don't want that. Again he's asking me, “Like the ice?” The ice caused him a little pain. I said, “No, not like that. That was a little pain. This would be a lot of pain. This would damage the skin” and he understands that. He understands the difference. He's looking inside the oven and we're talking a little bit about why you need the oven—he's calling the oven a “hot room.” “Why do you need that hot room when you have the stove that gets hot right there above it?” and we're talking about different ways of cooking things.
It's an electric oven?
Yeah. It's a flat-top one. We talked a little bit about that too, because he didn't quite understand these painted-on circles—like the difference between the hot and the cold. He was thinking the paint stopped it from spreading across the whole cook top—you know, they paint on the circles where the burners are. I'm telling him it's something underneath and it only goes that far and they paint it so you know where it is and he understood that. Then over to the microwave and we're talking about how that's different too for cooking, a different way of cooking.44 Daily Routines A week later, Betsey was sitting on the edge of her bed in the morning, deciding whether to get up or go back to sleep, when she saw an adolescent male standing in her bedroom doorway. He told her to follow him and they went into the living room where she sat on the couch. Four hubrid males and one female were there, along with a security hybrid—“The Enforcer,” as Betsey and I called him—whose function was to make sure the hubrids were safe and that Betsey stayed compliant. The female appeared to be in her twenties. They were all sitting on the floor. A hubrid asked Betsey about what constituted a normal day's routine.
And another one is asking me about day-to-day, basically, routines, but he doesn't use that word, you know. “What do you do? How do people know what to do?” You mean during the day?
Just in general. He's aware of certain things. He's aware that people get up and they take a shower, they perform hygiene, and then they work, they go someplace. In essence, he's asking like how do you do things. He knows there are different routines for different people. He asks, “How do you know which set of rules is yours?” and “Which ones do you follow and how do you memorize them all? There seems to be a great many of them.” How do you remember them all?
Yeah. But he's calling them “sets of rules” instead of “routines.” I'm saying, “Well, really what you have to do dictates which rules. If you have to go work at a certain time, then you have to get up at a certain time and most people would shower before they go. But if you don't work, maybe you can shower later or go back to bed as I do. It's a different set.” He's saying, “Even you don't have the same one all the time. How do you determine which one to follow?” I'm saying, “It depends on what I have to get done during the day. There are certain things in life that you have to do. It takes time to do most of them and you have to allow for that timeframe and adjust everything accordingly. It depends on where your responsibilities are.” He's not understanding that and I'm not really able to explain it very well to him. I'm saying—this is that young one—“You're young.
You would probably still be in school. You'd get up in the morning, shower, all the same type things.” Wetness After answering questions from the hubrids, Betsey took them all to see the kitchen. Once again, Betsey's broken kitchen-sink sprayer came up in the tour and an unexpected drama took place.
There are a couple of dirty dishes in there [the sink] and I'm explaining that they have to be washed, things have to stay clean. And the rest of them are kind of behind us watching, but I'm talking to her. And somebody else asks, “Why is there a special room for these things, for like the dishes?” . . .
Meaning the kitchen?
Yeah. I'm saying, “You need special things to cook and wash the dishes so they put everything in one area” and he's saying, “But you don't eat in this area.” I said, “No, there's no room. We eat in the next room.” He wants to know, “Why isn't it the same room, like one big room?” “In some places it is. Some people eat in their kitchens, but there's no room in ours.” He doesn't understand.
He just keeps asking me, “Well, why didn't they make it bigger?” and I'm kind of saying, “We need to have a dining room where we eat. It's right next to it.” That's really going right past him; he doesn't understand it. To him it makes no sense. I'm pointing out like the stove—they're kind of familiar with all this already—I'm just sort of quickly going over it. That's the stove, that's the refrigerator, that's the sink. One of them [the female] wants to know how to turn the sink on and I'm telling her, “You just lift the handle up” and she does that and the water squirts out and it hits her and she gets upset.
The water squirts out on her hand, you mean?
No, it's broken and you know those vegetable “squirter” things? It only comes out there. It's broken and the water only comes out of that thing and it was like pointing up. I have to walk over and turn it off, because she doesn't. She's just [standing] there letting the water hit her; she's not turning it off. I went over and turned it off.
Is it hot water or cold water? I mean, is she getting burned?
No, no, I don't think it's real hot. . . . And she's upset. She's asking me why it did that and I was telling her, “It's broken. It should come out the other part, but it doesn't.” She wants to know if every time you turn the water on do you have to get wet and I said, “No, you generally just point the thing down at the sink.” She is fairly upset about this. She's holding her arms out—she's not really touching anything like we would use to wipe the water off—she's not, she's just holding her arms out in front of her.
Her clothes must have gotten wet too and her face, maybe.
Not so much her face, more her chest and stomach area. She's pretty wet. She's asking me, “What do you do when this happens?” and I say, “Go get a towel and dry it off.” We walked down to the bathroom and got a towel out of the closet and I'm telling her, I'm kind of showing her how you wipe yourself down and dry yourself, at least get some of it. And she keeps holding her arms out, like she's having trouble drying herself because she's holding her arms out at these weird angles. It's almost like she's injured—she's just wet! I'm taking the towel and drying her two arms.
. . . It's a bit difficult to get back out because they're all sort of crowded in by the bathroom door. .
. . Eventually, everybody backs up and we go back into the living room.
Did she put her arms down finally?
Yeah. She's kind of holding the towel to the wet part of her; she's not really actively drying it.
She's like holding it to herself. She's telling me, “It's cold.” I told her, “It's going to be until you get dry again.” And she wants to know how to do that; she said, “The towel's not working.” I said, “You need to change your shirt and put a dry one on.” And she's asking me if the towel will work and I said, “In a way. You take off your wet shirt, you use the towel to dry your skin and you put on a dry shirt” and then she understands. [The Enforcer is] telling me that I won't remember this and I won't talk about it. . . . I think he goes on like that for a while and then, when he kind of breaks off, the others are gone already. It's just him and me and he's telling me I can go back to bed now and I will not remember this. That was basically it.45 Food Betsey was awake early in the morning of April 25, 2006, when a nineteen- or twenty-year-old hubrid male whom she had seen before showed up at her house. He said he was interested in tasting different foods.
I stood up and I followed him out to the kitchen. He wants to try some different foods. So I'm getting some things out and he's trying them and I'm telling him what they are before he tries them so he knows their names.
What are you serving him?
He's just trying little bits of everything. There were some leftovers in the fridge—there was part of an apple pie, there was some leftover pasta. He wants to try the tub of margarine and I said, “No. You put that on other things; you don't eat it plain.” He tries some pudding and I gave him a little bit of milk. He wants to know their names. He wants to know when you eat them. And I'm telling him like that's more of a dinner thing, that's more of a breakfast thing, all that kind of thing, it's a snack. So then he wants to know what the differences are. The pudding is one of those cups of pudding and it has chocolate and vanilla in it and he wants to know what the differences are. I told him the brown parts are chocolate, the white is vanilla and it's a different flavor.
Does he express likes or dislikes, or are they pretty much all the same?
They all seem to be pretty much the same. There's nothing he goes crazy for and wants to eat more of and there's nothing that he spits out—it's all learning about it, trying it, and going on to the next thing. He's looking at some of the cupboards and asking what some things are. I'm telling him most of the stuff is used to make something to eat, but it's not ready to eat now. There's a package of Pop Tarts in there, so he tries one of those and I'm telling him they're generally for breakfast, but they're not good to eat all the time. And he wants to know why and I'm telling him they're just not nutritious. He wants to know what other things there are to drink except milk. I got him water and then I got him a soda.
Did he drink the water or did he just sip it?
He sipped it. I had to open the soda for him. He said that was quite different. He took another sip of that and we talked about the carbonation a little bit. . . . I think he likes that, because he took another sip too. There's a bag of [potato] chips sitting there and he tries a couple of those. . . . He sips the soda again after the chips—he says he's thirsty. We talk a little bit about the salt, how that makes you thirsty.46 Watching Television Betsey's training sessions also included watching television. About two weeks before the water-spraying incident, three ten-year-old hubrids, her usual security hybrid, The Enforcer, and the same hubrid woman who would later claim the towel wasn't working were all in her living room. They had questions about the television and the satellite connection. They also wanted to know the rules for watching TV.
We're going over the cables, like the cables that go from the wall to the cable box of the TV or DVD or VCR and what they do, what their function is, why they're there. He's confused by the power strip and wants to know why, if you need that many [plugs], why there just aren't that many in the wall. Why are there only two in the wall when you need six? . . . I just said that most of the houses just have the two, and if you need more, you add them; but two is standard. It's what most people have. Then . . . he basically wants to know if the power supply is endless—if one can power six, then can each of those six power six more and on and on—is it endless? I said, “No, it would be too much to do that.” And then we go over what happens when it's too much; we go over circuit breakers. I don't know too much about it, but I know some. We're talking about the different [wires]—“Why are the wires different?” Why everything is tied together with these cables and wires and what the purpose of it is.
What the purpose of what is?
The whole system, like the TV and the VCR and the DVD and the cable box—satellite, actually.
Then he's confused about that. . . . He's confused by the satellite. There's a wire going into the box and [he asks,] “Where does the wire go?” And I said, “It goes through the wall and up the wall to the satellite dish.” “Where does that go?” And I said that goes up to the satellite. “If that works without the cable, why can't it work without the cable down to the box?” and I don't really know. .
. . That is confusing to him. It's kind of confusing to me too, because I never thought about it. Then he wants to know about the clock that's just sitting on top of everything—it's not part of anything; it's just sitting there. . . . Then we're talking about the television itself for a little while. . . .
The television is off or on?
It's off. He's asking if you communicate through it. I told him maybe some of them, but not this one, not most. And we do turn it on for a minute so he could see it. And I'm showing them the button to push to turn it on. I'm showing them the volume, up and down, and what that does.
Somebody else asks, “Are all the shows like this?” and I said no and I changed the channel a couple times. It was left on one of the cartoon ones for my kids. A cartoon has come on, so I switched it a couple times until a show with real people came on.
Were they interested in it?
Not really interested in the shows, but more like, “How many channels? Are they all different?
Does each show have a purpose? How many are you permitted to watch?” . . .
I said, “As many as you want to, but with children sometimes we restrict them because they watch too much or they watch the wrong thing. But adults can watch as much as they want to.” Then they wanted to know at what age specifically you're allowed to watch anything and I just told them it depends on the child and the family. They wanted to know if everyone watches the same show. “No.” “Does everyone have to watch?” “No.” . . . Then one asked if you're required to watch. And I said, “Some people want to watch; it's preferences.” Then I put the guide on so they could see all the different things there were to watch. We have like a guide on the screen and the woman wants to know how you choose just one and I'm explaining, “Just choose the one that looks most interesting to you.” She said, “Well, what if there are two or three or four?” and I talked about recording and oftentimes they'll be on again.
Then they want to know, “What's the purpose of having the same one on again?” and “How many times will it be on?” and “What subjects will be covered?” . . . “[Are] there only a few things that these shows are about or are there more?” They really just don't have a clue. And I'm saying, “Whatever you're interested in. There are a million different subjects.” . . . When we're going through what subjects, I'm thinking of all the different things you find on the Learning Channel and Discovery and things like that. . . . And then I'm just flipping through the guide. I'm not really putting every channel on. I don't get a sense they're watching it; they're just interested in the picture and the sound, not the story line per se—just the picture and the sound and how it works.
What else do they want to know about it? I mean, are they asking other questions about it?
They want to know what the numbers all mean. They're looking at the guide, at the channel numbers, and then like the station names—A&E or TLC or whatever. They want to know, “Are you required to memorize what each one means? Are you required to memorize where each one is —what number it is?” The guide itself only shows maybe an hour-and-a-half or two-hour time slot and they want to know how you find out what's on at different hours, does it move. And I said, “Yeah, it moves. It gives you what's on at that current time.” And I'm showing them the clock and I'm showing that you can manually go to a different time.
They want to know if this is always available and I said, “Yeah, in this system it is. Some systems don't have it.” Then they want to know how they know what's on them. So we're talking about guides—like a TV guide and newspaper guides—and I'm telling them, “Some people just turn it on and flip through.” They want to know if there are consequences for missing something that's important. Does anyone monitor it—what you've watched—and, if no one monitors it, how do they know which ones to show again. . . . And they're saying, well, “How do they know which ones people missed?” and I'm telling them no one monitors it. I'm telling them, “They just assume that some people missed it,” and they want to know if there's a mathematical formula they use and I say, “I don't know. They would need to ask somebody whose job it is to do that.” Betsey changed the channel to a situation comedy with a laugh track. The hubrids had difficulty understanding why they could not see people laughing, or what a laugh track was for.47 Upholstered Chairs In the late evening of April 14, 2006, Betsey was walking to the kitchen when she noticed a boy, about ten years old, in the living room with a caretaker. Betsey remembered the boy from one or more previous onboard abductions, and that he was talkative. The caretaker told her to sit with him on one of their two couches. The boy, however, was interested in an upholstered chair.
The younger one's looking at the chair there. He's sort of feeling it. There's like a blanket laying over it and he's lifting that up and he's looking underneath and feeling underneath; you know, there's a different fabric on the chair part and he's running his hand over it. It's like corduroy and he's running his hand so it goes different ways a little bit. He's just really looking at the chair. The older one's telling him to sit in it and he's confused because he doesn't know if he should sit with the blanket or without the blanket. He wants to know what the purpose of the blanket is and I told him the blanket's on it because I don't like the color. He does like it. It's got a lot of color and he likes a lot of color. It's bright orange—it's horrible. Picture a pumpkin and that's the chair. Then he wants to know if he can sit without the blanket and I said yes. I take the blanket off. It's a small little blanket and small chair—and he sits down. He's very tentative sitting down. He sits down right at the edge.
He doesn't sit back?
No. He just sort of sits there for a minute and kind of takes his arms on either side of the chair arms and he's kind of lifting himself up and down a little bit on it. It looks like he's concentrating.
It almost looks like this is a very difficult thing, but I can't imagine it is [enough] for that concentration-type look. The older one is telling him to sit like me, he's saying, “Look at her. Sit like her.” Are you leaning against [the couch's] back?
Yeah. He's looking at me and he's sliding back a little bit. He still won't lean against the back, though. I almost want to say his back is ramrod straight. I'm telling him to lean back and he's not sure he wants to. It's a major deal. I'm telling him, “The back is just like the bottom, it's padded so it feels good. It's supposed to make you feel comfortable” and he asks me what “padded” is and I'm trying to explain that it's not hard; it's a cushion. He bounces up and down a little bit again and he says, “That?” and I said, “Yeah. That's padded or cushioned, that's what that means.” He—very slowly, very tentatively—he does lean back and I almost get the feeling he expects the back to give way or something. He finally gets all the way back, though.
He asks me how it supports him when it's soft. I said, “It's soft on this side but it's hard on the other side, the side away from you.” He gets up and he goes around the other side and he's looking at the back of the chair now. He comes back around and he sits down again—a little quicker—and he leans back and he's kind of pushing back, he's testing or something. He's asking me, “Are they all like this?”—he means the other two couches—and I said, “Yeah, that's what we sit on.” He gets up and he sits on the other couch and he leans back against that and he comes over and sits next to me and he leans against that and he tells me he likes the chair better because it's all his; no one else can sit on it, it's too small. It is a small chair. Then he's lifting the blankets on the couch so he can see the colors they are—both couches—and he's telling me he doesn't like either one; there's not enough color in them. They are a lot more sedate than the orange chair.
I do not have reports of upholstered furniture onboard. Seats mainly consist of squares of floor that are raised about two and a half feet. These “cube chairs,” as Betsey calls them, have no backs. There are also ledges around walls made for abductees who are waiting their turn to be processed. They can lean against the wall behind them. Some abductees have described hard form-fitting chairs for physiological processes. Sitting for comfort and support is apparently not an important part of the UFO environment for aliens.
Carpets and Floors After dealing with the chair, the young boy became curious about the carpet.
He likes the carpet too—that's got a lot of color. We go upstairs and he stops me on the bottom step and he wants to know why the carpet changes color there and I told him they brought the upstairs carpet down the stairs, but the downstairs carpet is different. It was like this when we moved in. He tells me he doesn't like that, he thinks it should all be the same. We go up the stairs and go into the kitchen. He's asking me about different things in there. The color changed on the floor again and he really doesn't like that—that's like a whitish color and he doesn't like that at all.
He wants to know if I can put the blue carpet in there and I said, “No, no, you don't put that kind of carpet in the kitchen.” I'm telling him you can have things spill on it and everything, and you wouldn't be able to keep it clean.
Computers Later in the visit, Betsey took the young hubrid boy and his caretaker to her office. She had her computer there and the boy wanted to see it. Again, he asked about rules.
He wants to see the computer? How does he know you have a computer?
I'm remembering a conversation with him and I'm talking about how my kids like to play games on the computer and like to talk to people on the computer. . . . We talked about how you interact with the computer. That confused him at first. He's having trouble understanding that you use a keyboard and a mouse to interact with it and he's asking me how it knows what you want and I'm trying to explain.
I finally understood and I told him it's a machine. It does a lot of things and it does connect you with someone else, but you're not actually interacting with the machine itself; it's not sentient.
There's a list of instructions of what to do—if you click here, if you click there, if you do this, if you do that—and then he understood that. I think because I was talking about talking to other people that he got confused. So now he wants to see it.
Email When Betsy and the hybrids entered her office and began examining the computer, Betsy had her email on screen. This prompted some interesting questions.
We go in and I happen to have email up—actually it's a screen saver at that point, the power-saver mode; it looks like it's off. I move the mouse and it comes back up and he's asking me, “Is that how you turn it on?” I said sort of, it wasn't really off. Then I'm telling him the emails are from other people, they're messages from other people, and he's asking me can he send me one and I said I don't think so. All these other people have a computer on their side and they have things that they can type out the message and send it. [The caretaker is] interested in this too. He's trying to squeeze in there too, and there isn't a whole lot of room.
It's the first time he's shown any interest in anything and he's asking me, “What are the rules for the messages?” “There are no rules; it very much depends on the social interaction. If it's a business person, you probably talk about business. If it's a friend, you might talk about anything— you know, relatives, family.” He's asking me, “Is it a way of socializing?” and I said, “Yeah, a communication method.” The young one wants to know why we have so many communication methods. I don't know. I'm telling him, “Each one has its place and some people like one over another and sometimes you use one over another because it depends on what you're doing.” He's asking, “Why don't you just talk [telepathically]? Why don't you just ask questions?” and I'm telling him, “We can't do like you do” and he's confused. He's saying, “You're doing it right now.” “But I can't do that with other people and I can't do it when you're not around.” I don't think he knew that, because he looks kind of surprised. The other guy breaks in and tells him it's time to go.48 eBay A few months later, Betsey had an exchange with her security hybrid and visiting hubrids about eBay, revealing that they, unaccustomed to human technology, have different expectations of it. The morning after a household visitation, she received email from eBay and PayPal confirming her purchase the night before, but she did not remember buying anything. Betsey contacted me through Instant Messaging and, without hypnosis, we looked at what happened.
She and I had been messaging very early the morning of July 5th; our last message was at 3:24 a.m.
(both Betsey and I are night owls). Immediately upon closing down the IM session with me, Betsey found three hybrids in her room. One was The Enforcer, and two others were female hubrids in their late teens.
The Enforcer had learned that one was communicating with me through email. He had previously warned her not to. A few nights later, Betsey described the interaction: And he comes over and his usual thing is, “Show me the emails!” and I happened to click—I was going to click on the spot on the toolbar down below to bring up email—and I clicked a little off of it, so I happened to pull up the eBay stuff. The browser I had put up a while before and never shut down. And he asked me, “What is this?” and I'm explaining, “It's up on that page with the one [a voice recorder] that was cheap, because I was watching that one, so it's open to that page.” I'm explaining that I'm watching that one to buy and he's saying well, “Buy it. Show me how this works, buy it.” I said, “You can't.” I said, “This one doesn't end for a while yet.” It was like another two hours before it ended and I said, “I can put a bid on it” and he said, “When will you know if you bought it?” “Not until it's over”—two hours, three hours, whatever it was. There's another one which is quicker and I went back to the watching page and there is one I was watching and it's got the “Buy It Now” on there and I'm explaining that to him and he's saying, “Buy it.” So I went through and I bought it.
What are the others doing?
They're watching. They're all crowded in. . . . They're all intent on this. And it comes on; it says, “Do you want to pay now?” . . . One of the other ones is asking, “If you don't pay now, when do you pay?” and I'm explaining you have to pay before you get it. They're not going to send it out until you pay. And so he comes back and says, “Pay for it now,” and so I clicked on it.
I went through and I paid through PayPal and that woman asked, “Where is it? You've paid, where is it?” I said, “It has to be mailed.” “When will it come?” I said, “In a couple of days, maybe a week” and they're very unhappy with that. I think they thought it was just going to appear.
I'm trying to explain and I even went back onto the page to find out where it's coming from and I'm explaining, “It's in New York and they have to put it in a box and put my address on it and then they give it to some mail carrier or package carrier and they transport it to me and that takes time.” He's saying, “Why would you wait? Why would you not go to a store?” Suddenly Betsey heard something that might have meant another abduction was starting. “I just heard a series of thumps upstairs, she said. “Let's close off.”49 The iPod Sean always put his iPod in a speaker dock before going to bed. He woke up March 13 in 2012 to find the iPod missing from the dock. He searched his home for three days. On the morning of the fourth day, he woke up to find the iPod in plain view, lying on the lid of his laptop computer. The iPod's battery was drained.
We did a session about this incident. Sean remembered one female and two male hubrids coming into his house in the middle of the night. They looked around and asked questions about various articles. A male hubrid became interested in the iPod. He asked how it worked and Sean showed him. The hubrid took the iPod, obviously interested in listening to it, and he probably had no knowledge of what a battery was or, if he did, he had no way of charging it.50 Christmas Tree Lights, Extension Cords, and Cats During a home training session with Betsey, a female hubrid saw a Christmas tree in the living room and wanted to know “Why is it there?” Betsey replied, “It's a holiday tradition.” The interaction continued: “Aren't trees supposed to be outside?” the female asked. “Yeah, but this is something we do to celebrate the holiday and this one is not a real one anyway.” “Do you move the tree around?” “No.” “How did the lights get on it?” Betsey told her. The female examined the lights and wires and asked what the extension cord was.
Betsey said that, if people need power from somewhere else, they use one. She asked if people always needed cords to connect things. Betsey said that they were used most of the time, but sometimes things ran on batteries.
The female and Betsey continued to discuss electrical cords. She explained that cords come in various sizes and have various types of prongs. Betsey brought out some cords from a closet to show her. The hubrid stretched them out in hallway to see how long they were. Because the hubrid was still confused about the cords, Betsey took her into a bedroom to show her lamps without extension cords. She looked at the lamp and then the cordless phone, asking how it worked. Then the female saw a cat brush on the nightstand and asked what it was. Betsey explained that she used it on her older cat. The hubrid wanted to know why Betsey had a cat. Betsey said, “A lot of people have pets for companionship or love or whatever.”51 Relationships In the morning of July 5, 2006, Betsey walked into her family room to see her security hybrid and four hubrids, including a boy and their hybrid caretaker. She sat down and they began an intense question cascade about relationships. I asked her what they wanted to talk about.
Various social relationships. Just everything—friendships, love, even business, even in relationships where you hate someone, absolutely everything to do with all of that and everything connected to it. Certain things come out and someone would ask—they don't really ask questions; it's more like they pick up on something and they want to look at it closer, you know? And I don't know who's asking what; I can't decipher between them. Something about work relationships and one of them sort of sees there can be a crossover, a work relationship can turn into a personal friendship or whatever, and they want to pursue that for a minute. What is that all about? And how does that happen? And when does it happen? And why does it happen? Can the reverse happen?
Can a personal friendship turn into a work relationship? That whole crossing over, the boundaries thing, just fascinating for a second there.
And then it's on to other things, social situations and various types of parties and small groups and large groups and family situations, just everything, absolutely everything. One of them wants to know about online relationships and online social situations—how do they cross over. And we look at that for a while. We look at neighbors for a while. What you do with neighbors, different types of neighbors and what's acceptable and what's not, bad relationships with them, good ones with them. Then it's family groups: What's a normal family group look like? What would an unusual one look like? What would draw attention? What would not draw attention? But all this is rapid-fire and they're all coming at me at once; it's all going on at the same time. It's exhausting.
Can you communicate with them on various levels at the same time, or is it just sort of linear for you?
No, it's not linear, but I'm not like they are either. I'm doing it, but I get the feeling like to them I'm slow. They're impatient with me. It's definitely not like our linear conversation. . . . It's like fifty people talking to you at once and you have to be able to hear and understand all of them. He finally stops them. He tells them it's enough.
The kid comes over to me and he's asking a few questions, but his is more linear. . . . He's asking more kind of age-appropriate questions for him; they're really to him, not to everyone. He's asking a bit about school, he's asking about socialization at school and how that occurs and what's expected at school, what's expected from the adults, what's expected from the other children, expected clothing, expected supplies, what his attitude should be. Should he be happy to be there?
Should he be not wanting to be there? How do the other children react to it? How do they prepare for it? Must you know every answer? Will they have different questions? How many questions?
What will they be on? He wants to know everything, every detail, every possible problem that might be there and every solution to every problem. And he asked me an interesting one—he asked me if I thought he looked good enough to fit in. And I said, “Yes, you look like everybody else. No one will know anything different about you.” And then he goes on and he wants to know how he relates to the adults. Does he relate to them as equals? Does he relate to them as his superiors? Does he relate to them as if he is their superior, you know. And then the same question about the students—and older students and the younger students, and what's the hierarchy? He wants to know the rules for riding on a school bus and I told him every bus is different; they'll tell you. What happens if you break one of the rules and has anyone ever broken a rule? The kid of endless questions. I can tell he's both excited and concerned and worried. There's a note of anxiety there, which I haven't noticed in him before. The other guy comes over and tells him it's time to go.52 Before Betsey went to bed that night, her adult hybrid told her that these were important times. She surmised from the circumstances that it meant that more young hubrids were moving in and that she and other abductees would be helping them.
Dressing Appropriately One afternoon, a young adult male hubrid visited Allison in her home. He had apparently dressed himself with clothes he had gotten somewhere and he sought her approval for his accomplishment. She did not approve and found herself caught between a hybrid's burgeoning sense of individuality and her role as a trainer. She was exasperated at his arrival and did not want to be bothered. He stood in her living room showing off the clothes he had picked out for himself, including a leather jacket. She did not know where he had gotten the clothes, but in her estimation, he was greatly overdressed for the summer and his slicked-down hairstyle was wrong. She had worked with him over the past few weeks trying to explain how to dress appropriately so that he would blend in. Now, left to his own devices, he had failed the test.
I'm almost irritated like, “You're trying too hard!” and I mess his hair up with my hand. It's almost like (sighs), Come on! Look at you! You're trying too hard! I mess up his hair. I go like this to it first, and then I fix it with my fingers.
So it looks more natural in a sense, then?
Yeah. . . . I feel like he's, I don't want to say trying to please me, maybe that's not even the point.
Like when I say he's wearing tan or dark tan with the jeans, it's another thing. . . . It's like he's just trying too hard. . . . It's like he's trying to fit in and I'm showing him where he's miserably standing out instead.
Does he ask you questions about the right way to look, for example? In other words, is he interested in what you are doing?
Yeah. He's just taking it in. . . . I tell him the jacket's got to go. It's just got to go. He takes it off.
. . . He picked [the clothes] out himself. . . . I just know that he got them himself and I guess I've counseled him about dressing and appearance and things. I guess that's why I kind of got, . . . like, “Oh, are you ever going to get this?” Because I kind of get the feeling that he's doing this on his own now, and then coming for my approval or whatever. . . .
When he takes his coat off, what sort of shirt is he wearing underneath it there? I mean, is it a pullover, button?
It's like a T-shirt but thicker, no pocket. It's a little more formfitting, but it doesn't have a collar.
It's purplish kind of. I don't know where the hell he got that thing. I don't know. It's almost sweater-like, but it's short-sleeved. It fits him like a T-shirt, but it's kind of like knitted with purple and white balls. . . . It's just ugly, outdated. . . . I'm just feeling, you know, guilty . . .
because he's trying. . . . I guess it's his own creativity and what he thinks. Maybe he's just trying to find himself. And I guess I should just help him, or I should better try to understand at what point is it you want to fit in, and at what is it you want to express yourself? Because you're not able to do both the way you're acting.
Well, is he disappointed that he made the wrong choice?
He's pouty like a baby. Almost like an oh-I-thought-you'd-like-it sense. . . . I believe I just basically was working with him on the basics of . . . just getting by, fitting in, feeling comfortable, and like now I'm like frustrated. . . . I think he wants to assert more of himself as an individual [rather] than just fitting in and looking normal and being comfortable. To what point do I squelch that or encourage it? I don't know. I think he likes how he looks and he wanted me to like how he looked. I'm in a dilemma. . . . And I feel guilty now making him take his jacket off and squishing up his hair, because it's not about fitting in anymore. It's about what makes him happy. . . .
I said, “Take off that jacket. My gosh, that looks so bad.” . . . He took it off and just looked at me. I can't say he looked sad. He was just blank. . . . He says something along the lines of he knows what he needs to do, and he knows what he needs to wear. . . . And he wanted to wear that jacket. And that's when I don't know what to say or how to handle it, because I wasn't instructed beyond this point. Because, if he wants to wear that in the dead of summer, if it makes him happy, then he should wear it. But that goes against my point of having it so he doesn't stand out.
So, what finally happens?
I don't ask him to change or whatever, because I don't care what he wears. At first I did; . . . but then I just felt a more human side of him, a desire to be expressive and just make himself happy.
Then it didn't matter anymore what he wore to me in that moment. But I don't know if I will get in trouble for it later.53 Remote Controls, Cabinets, and Defiance After Karen's husband left very early in the morning for work, three young adult male hubrids appeared in her room and woke her up. They took her downstairs into her living room. Karen was angry they were there and, as usual, she cooperated as little as possible. The hubrids picked up a garage-door remote control and wanted to know what it was for and how to use it. Karen refused to help them with that or anything else. Angered at her obstinacy, they threatened her with the destruction of her house and she saw mental images of her house demolished. This scared her, but did not dissuade her.
One of them goes over and starts fiddling around with the remote control for the TV. . . . He wasn't actually trying to turn it on. He was just looking at it and turning it over in his hand and just being curious about it.
Does he ask any questions about it or anything like that, or...?
No. It seems more like they have a dialogue about it, he and the other two. . . . And they're saying, “Isn't this like the other ones?” It's like they've seen this before. You know, I think, then they hand it to me. . . . I said, “I'm going to shove this down your throat.” And they said, “You can't do that.” So I just let it drop. I just drop it. I was like, “Sorry.” There was like a scramble. You'd think I had dropped the Crown Jewels because they jump down and they're scrambling to pick it up. I think that's kind of funny. . . .
Then they make a motion. They don't actually say, “Show us how to do this.” They make a motion like, “You!” . . . And they obviously want me to work the remote. I just shrug and say, “I don't know how to work this.” . . . Maybe that's the point where they show me the house being trashed. . . . But at some point, they were so furious with me that they showed me this vision. . . .
We go into the room with the computer. And the computer is in sleep mode. They seem to know what that is. . . . They looked in my silver drawer. They actually opened it. You know what? They actually opened all of my cabinets. . . . I have a stereo in my office, a little one. They seem to be interested in that. They weren't asking me a lot about it. They were just looking at it. I don't think they were interested in anything else. . . . But they don't know simple things like how to operate a [remote for a garage] door.54 As the hubrids become more humanized, they gain a desire to choose for themselves. Some abductees “forget” that they are helping hubrids and, like Allison, can have a sense of purpose, as if the hubrids were friends in need of help. Most abductees understand that the hubrids are part of a program that could threaten humanity; but because of their own sense of human decency, most abductees, Karen notwithstanding, usually choose to be kind and display their humanity.
These home training visits are extremely important for the aliens. They use field training as the penultimate educational experience before moving hubrids into human society. Exposing hubrid children to homes is necessary for integration when they are older or perhaps even when they are still young. But late-adolescent and young-adult hubrids are ready to move in and become even more socialized.
CHAPTER 6 Integrated Hubrids “What's ‘the refrigerator’?” When hubrids move into a house or apartment on Earth, abductees are responsible for continuing to teach them about living in human society. Hubrid knowledge of day-to-day human life is insufficient and uneven. This is partly due to their unstandardized training. For example, some hubrids have never seen a fully made bed, while others have seen beds in peoples' homes. Similarly, some hubrids have never written letters or symbols, while others have done so many times. Specially selected abductees are trained for the responsibility of filling hubrids' gaps of knowledge and smoothing the edges of hubrid behavior, with the single goal of undetected assimilation.
Integrated hubrids are usually between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five. Their knowledge about the complexity of human society is still rudimentary. Living arrangements can be puzzling; relationships with friends and neighbors are foreign. Almost everything associated with intellectual or popular culture is unfamiliar to newly arrived hubrids. They do not understand the subtleties of spoken language. They have little, if any, aesthetic sense. Consensual romantic relationships baffle them. Although these hubrids have undergone training both onboard and in abductees' homes, they still have very much to learn.
Adolescent and young-adult hubrids have pleasant personalities. They are generally respectful and dutiful. Because they come from a highly structured telepathic society, they always obey orders. They rarely display anger or hostility. With some exceptions, they are not argumentative or defiant in the face of criticism. They lack the suspicion or wariness most humans their age possess. Often, abductees cannot help feeling fond of the hubrids; they do not sense that their presence represents a threat and perhaps even eventual catastrophe. But the fact that naive hubrids are moving into the society surreptitiously and most likely in huge numbers signifies a covert invasion. Unlike normal immigrants, they are not here because they want to be; they are here only to fulfill the aliens' goals.
As polite, innocent, guileless, and unsuspecting as hubrids can be, their neural abilities differentiate them sharply from us. Hubrids use neural engagement to control human actions when it suits them. They use telepathy to communicate between one another or learn a human's private thoughts. Their overwhelming “humanness” seems to weaken their alien abilities, but even weakened abilities are more than enough to be effective. Conversely, abductees cannot read hubrids' inner thoughts and, consequently, we do not know whether they have the full range of human emotions. How much they will be able to blend into society is an open question. But humans can be very strange. So hubrids have a lot of leeway before anyone might recognize something is wrong.
All hubrids are dedicated to their function. Their loyalty is to the program and not to their human trainers. Hubrids and hybrids may develop relationships with abductees, but they focus only on fulfilling the goals of the integration program. Abductees are a means to an end. As hubrids move into their own homes, the program of assimilation enters a new phase.
The Assimilation Bureaucracy Hubrid societal integration is not a complex process. The insectalins oversee the entire program. They have installed an effective “bureaucracy” consisting of personal project hybrids (PPHs), advance hybrids, security hybrids, and group hubrids to ensure that all goes well in the integration process.
Hybrids within the bureaucracy often have overlapping functions, including, but not limited to, the following: Protecting hubrids Installing hubrids in appropriate living quarters Making sure abductees instruct hubrids how to live within the norms of human society Keeping the program's goals intact Ensuring that abductees are in compliance with alien rules Reporting recalcitrant abductees to insectalins or tall grays Personal project hybrids now have a critical role in the abductees' lives. Before, they were primarily sexual partners or interested bystanders in the abductees lives. Now, with the advent of hubrids being trained in the field and then moving in, the personal project hybrids have the duties of keeping the abductees in line and, if they remember anything, not betraying the program to family, friends, or researchers. They make sure abductees are doing what they are told and instructing the hubrids properly.55 Security hybrids also make sure that the hubrids are safe and that the abductees are obeying orders and not endangering the integration program by talking to others about what they are doing. They are relentless and unyielding in their pursuit of obedience.
Personal project hybrids often accompany abductees around and, in some cases, learn about the world themselves. For example, Betsey's PPH, whom she called “Ken,” met her at a supermarket and asked questions about the foods she put in her shopping cart. He smelled the fruit and asked about whether she cooked eggs, meat, and a loaf of bread. On other occasions, he accompanied her on trips to the ophthalmologist and to her family doctor, sometimes sitting in the room where she was examined. The doctors could see him, but did not seem to care or pay any attention to him.
When the decision is made to begin integrating into a specific geographic area, advance hybrids are the first to arrive. Though we know very little about their activities at this stage, it is logical to suspect that abductees help the advance hybrids become acclimated. Eventually, the advance hybrids, with abductee help, find a location within their assigned geographic area suitable for the hubrids to live in and then obtain living quarters for them. Housing, usually apartments, must be safe and, ideally, near stores that are open twenty-four hours a day so they can satisfy daily needs—Walmart, Target, Walgreen, Kmart, or various supermarkets and convenience stores where they can enter late at night with a minimum amount of human contact.
Once the advance hybrids have secured the accommodations, an independent hubrid moves into the living quarters. Soon, the personal project hybrid introduces his abductee to the independent hubrid, who becomes the abductee's student and, like the PPH, a sexual partner. After the independent and the abductee have had a chance to establish a complex personal and teaching relationship, the independent, the PPH, and a security hubrid take the abductee to see younger group hubrids who are also moving in.
The more hubrids an abductee encounters, the more important safety becomes. Because hubrids are so critically important for the program's outcome, their safety becomes the program's safety. To protect them, the aliens have established a security force.
Like PPHs, security hybrids bring hubrids to abductees' homes for training. But unlike PPHs, security hybrids have no interest in human society. Their mindset is fixated on the program's security and safety; that is all they think about. Abductees are not to talk about the program to anyone. They must do exactly what security hybrids dictate. If the abductees continue to talk in the face of pressure, violence can be used to stop it.
Violence Security also means protecting hubrids from violent humans. When an abductee reported to me that hubrids onboard mentioned concerns about violence, I was at first somewhat puzzled, given how all types of aliens can control humans.
The more I learned, however, the more this concern seemed logical. I was already aware that abductees onboard sometimes regain mental control, get loose, run down hallways, and physically attack aliens. Moreover, considering the vast number of abductees operating within the system, one can imagine all sorts of scenarios where violence may become an issue, whether through loss of control of an onboard abductee, conflicts arising during field training experiences, or resistance from nonabductees when hubrids use their mental abilities to try to control them.
Violence also takes place among PPH and security hybrids. They do not hesitate to use it on chronically disobedient abductees. They routinely instill headaches into those who describe their experiences to researchers. They push women backward to the floor and pick them up by their hair. They press their thumbs into abductees' cheeks, causing pain but leaving no mark. If an abductee is still recalcitrant, they may resort to vivid death threats, and they sometimes force abductees' heads into water until they think they are drowning. Insubordinate women have had cuts made to their genital area. This causes little or no bleeding, and within a day or two the cuts quickly heal. And, of course, the abductees “know” not to go to a hospital.
If abductees are still uncooperative and the hybrids cannot correct them, even with physical punishment, they are ultimately sent to insectalins or tall grays who, through stronger neural engagement, try to persuade them to cooperate.
Although any hubrid can control any one human in a normal situation, it seems that neurally “weaker” hubrids have difficulty controlling several humans at once. Thus, hubrids are especially vulnerable when threatened by a group of humans. Conversely, they have found that they can mitigate their vulnerability by banding together. They can pool their neural resources to control obstreperous humans more completely.
A hubrid told Betsey an illuminating anecdote about an incident that illustrates their pooling of powers as well as the threat of humans. Three young hubrids were in a public park late at night in a high-crime area when a group of humans approached and threatened them. Whether the humans were simply violent criminals or detected something strange about the hubrids is unknown. Working together, the three hubrids managed to control the humans, but only with some effort. The incident made them all the more wary of human tendencies toward violence.
This has been reflected with other abductees. Eric told Bernard that humans' tendency to be violent must be controlled. Paula had the same conversation with her hybrids. Therefore, it is possible that the groupings of hubrids from two to four for integration allow them to have physical protection through strength in numbers.
Furnishings When hubrids move into an apartment, they must set up a household encompassing the basics of human home life. Betsey was involved with young hubrids who were moving into a sprawling three-story apartment complex on the outskirts of a small city. Her job was to make sure that the hubrids settled in properly. The apartments were unfurnished and the hubrids needed to know how to arrange their furniture properly.
On the night of June 15, 2006, Betsey's security hybrid, The Enforcer, and a human-stage hybrid around nineteen years old abducted Betsey from her bedroom. They made her get dressed and a probable advance hybrid drove her SUV while she sat in the back with her eyes closed. Betsey recalled that the two were engaged in a telepathic discussion about how, if they had more time, they would have more “proficiency,” and that something was going to happen in three weeks. She was unable to tap into much more of the conversation, but it was “strictly business” between the two.
Eventually, the two hybrids and Betsey parked at the apartment complex and entered one of the apartments. Four late-adolescent hubrids met them. Betsey recognized them from her previous home training. The Enforcer was their caretaker. They wanted her to explain the functions of each room in their new apartment.
I'm giving them names to the rooms like, “This is the living room. You should have seats in here.
You should have a TV in here. Maybe some pictures on the wall. Curtains on the window.” You mean this is not a furnished...?
It is, but very sparsely. And some of the furniture just is not placed right, you know? There's like a small round table and like four chairs. And that's in the living room. And that shouldn't be there. That should be kind of like where the dining room is. It's all one room, but that is obviously meant to be the dining area, because it's right next to the kitchen. . . . They have everything cramped in the living room.
So this really isn't a furnished apartment. They bought furnishings and put them in?
Yeah and they put them in all wrong. Well, they didn't put them in wrong, I guess, but just whacky. I mean they got the bed in the bedroom, but then they have like a couch, a table, and then this round table with the four chairs all crammed in this living room area and then nothing right next to it in the dining room area. It doesn't make sense. And there's no curtains, there's no pictures, there's no—you wouldn't think anyone was living there because it's sparse.
Is it a one-bedroom place or...?
It's very small. It's like a small kitchen, and sort of like this one big room that's a living room and dining room, and a bedroom and bathroom—that's basically it. . . . And we go to the kitchen and I'm going over, “What's ‘the refrigerator’?” “It keeps things cold. You want to have milk; you want to keep your food in here, drinks.” But the caretaker knows that already, doesn't he?
Yeah, but he's not saying anything. He's just standing there watching me. That's what he always does when I'm with the rest of them. These other ones kind of know that already too, I think. . . .
I'm saying, “You have to cook food. You have to buy the food. The food goes in the refrigerator. It goes in the freezer if it was frozen in the store. Some of it can go in the cupboards. If you cook, you are going to need pots and pans. You will need utensils. You need plates, dishes. You need cups.” I'm walking out and I'm telling them, “Your table goes in this area.” And I told them about the living room, you know.
Do they change it when you tell them. In other words, do they get right on it?
No. They're just following me around and listening. . . . I'm going into the bedroom. They've got a blanket on the bed and I'm asking if there's anything under the blanket. And the younger one, the seventeen- or eighteen-year-old, is going over and he's pulling the blanket back to show me that they've got sheets. And they're on correctly, too. I'm telling them, “That's good. You did that right.” I'm asking where the pillows are. He doesn't know. I'm saying, “You need to get pillows” and “Did the sheets come with pillowcases?” And he goes over to the dresser and gets out the pillowcases and he's telling me he wasn't sure what to do with them. And I'm opening one up and I'm showing him the opening end and I'm saying, “You put the pillow in here to cover the pillow.” He's asking what the pillow is for. “To put your head on when you sleep.” He wants to know what purpose it serves and I'm telling him that we just find it comfortable. He's asking me if it is necessary. And I said, “Well, people will wonder if you have a bed without pillows. You don't have to sleep with it, but you need to put the pillows on the bed if somebody is going to look at it.” And he's okay with that; he understands that.
I'm telling them to get some hangers for the closet and put some clothes in there. It looks strange to have an empty closet. There's no door on the closet, so it looks strange. . . . And I'm telling them they need curtains on the windows again. Maybe some pictures up there on the wall. And we walk across the hall to the bathroom. . . . I'm telling them, “You put towels there.” There are no towels in the bathroom at all, or...?
No. They have a shower curtain. It looks kind of grungy. I'm telling them you can kind of replace that: “You could get a new one.” We're all looking at the hooks. I'm showing them how to replace them—how to take one off and put another one on. . . .
And I'm telling them you need toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, comb, brush, razor, and all those kinds of things go in there. They're opening up the medicine chest and I'm telling them most of this stuff goes here. Toothbrush holder. Some are looking at that and I am showing them that a toothbrush goes through there. One of them asks me, they opened up under the sink, “What goes here?” And I'm telling them cleaning stuff, spare toilet paper, anything big that you want out of the way. I'm telling them that it's small and you are not going to fit a lot under there. . . .
Then we go back out to the living room. And he's kind of looking at the four of them. I'm not sure what he's doing, but he looks at each of them in turn. I think they are communicating something to him, but I do not have any idea of what. I do not hear or have any idea of what. And then he pulls back toward me and says that it's time to go. And I go back out to the car. . . . And he [The Enforcer] tells me I have to look down and close my eyes.56 Detour to Kmart On July 1, 2006, Betsey went to pick up pizza for dinner. She told her family she was leaving. It was daylight when she left her house, between 5:00 and 5:15 p.m., for the twenty-minute round-trip drive to the pizza restaurant. She returned home at 6:45 p.m., an hour later than she expected. She had no idea what had happened; in her mind she had picked up the pizza and returned home as usual. It turns out that her husband called her, but she had missed the call, although her cell phone was on.
In our session, she remembered driving her SUV in a different direction from the pizza restaurant. She “knew” she had to go someplace else. I asked her if she was alone in the car.
No. I don't know when he got in though. I'm supposed to think I'm alone.
Mr. E [The Enforcer]?
Yeah. “Everything's going to be fine [he says]. We're just going to do this and then you can get the pizza.” We go to where the Kmart is and we pull up by the door, but it's past the door. I get out and put all the backseats down and I just start loading things into the car. There's like a table.
There are some boxes—I'm not sure what's in the boxes. It looks like maybe the furniture you put together, those kinds of boxes, but I can't really see what's in them. . . . It's more of them [hubrids] I think. It's like some of the younger ones—seventeen-, eighteen-, nineteen-year-olds. . . . And my guy got out and he's helping. I'm just standing there. . . .
There are bags and stuff too. Everything was like sitting on the curb there, waiting. There are bags of stuff like they went shopping. And then they load everything up and we drive. The three of them don't come with us, just he [The Enforcer] and I get back in. With all the seats down, there's only the front seats. We drive over to the other place. He's driving now. He made me get in the passenger seat. He doesn't want me to pay attention to where we're going. He wants me to look at my feet.
Can you get a sense in your peripheral vision of where you're heading?
I know I'm in that [apartment] complex. . . . There's a guy—I don't know what he is. He doesn't seem to be a part of them, but I don't know.
Where is he?
He's sitting inside. He doesn't seem very with it; he's just sitting staring.
Older guy? Younger guy?
Probably like mid-thirties, somewhere in there, but he's overweight. It's kind of hot and he's sweating. It doesn't look like he's enjoying himself, that's for sure. . . . And he also has that sort of blank look too, and they [hubrids] don't usually [have that]. They gave me some of the bags and I carried two bags in. They had me sit next to this guy [on a couch] while they brought the rest of this stuff in. . . .
What else is in this place?
There's a couch, there's like a chair that matches the couch. There's like a stand with a TV on it, but that looks old. They bring in the table. It's kind of a small table and they put it in I guess what's supposed to be the dining room; it's more part of the living room. . . . They're stacking up a couple of boxes and stuff. The floor is empty, but there are some things on it. There aren't any boxes or anything like somebody is moving in or moving out. . . . Then when they got everything in, he takes me back out and tells me to put the seats back up in the car again and make sure everything looks normal. Then he tells me I can get the pizza now and go home; everything will be fine. And that's what I did.57 When Betsy arrived home, no one said a word about where she had been, or why she was an hour late, or why she did not answer her phone.
Telephones Eight days later, Betsey was taken in the morning. Her husband and children were outside, but she “knew” they would not miss her. She was driven by two late-twenties advance hybrids in their car while she sat in the backseat looking at her feet. The two hybrids talked to each other about getting things done, being on a schedule, and completing other tasks. They went to the same familiar apartment complex, but entered a different apartment than the one she had inspected before. The young adult female from the water-spraying incident was there.
She's sitting in the living room there on the couch and they have a coffee table in front of the couch and it has a phone on it and he tells me to go over and instruct her A phone was on the coffee table?
Yeah, it's just sitting there. It's like a real cheap standardized phone. The handset fits directly into the base; there's no extra on the base or anything. It's the same size as the handset basically.
This isn't a dial phone, is it?
No. . . . But it's like a real, real cheap kind of thing and it's corded; it's not cordless. I sit down next to her and I know I'm supposed to teach her how to use this thing. I pick up the handset—it's a touchtone. You dial from the handset right in the middle between the earpiece and the speaker. I pick it up and I notice it's not lighting up. It should light up when you pick it up and I'm asking her, “Is it plugged in?” She's asking me what that will do. I said it'll make the phone work; it won't work otherwise. And I'm looking at the cords and the cords are just sort of dangling—it's just one cord; it's just a phone cord.
I'm asking her does she have phone service. She wants to know what the purpose of this is, why they would need to get the service. I'm sort of going into everything, you know, what you would need to call about, why people call you. And then I pick up the receiver again and I'm telling her you get a phone number and when you have that number, people who dial that number, it rings to you and you pick it up and you can communicate with them. She's asking what the purpose of this communication is and I'm telling her it could be anything from a friendly call to business, or even emergencies—basically anything.
I'm showing her how to push the buttons to dial a number and I'm explaining that numbers in that area would be just seven digits and numbers further away are ten. And I'm going through what an area code is and what an exchange is. I'm picturing it in my mind, the way the numbers are grouped so she can get a better idea which ones are the exchange, which ones are the area code, which ones are the actual number. I'm having her practice dialing our number. She gets very quick at it. After once or twice, she gets very fast at it. I have her practice a few other numbers.
There's no dial tone there or anything?
It's not plugged in. After we went through all that, we went into the kitchen, because I told her usually there's some sort of phone jack in the kitchen. We went into the kitchen and I found one on the wall and I showed her how the end of the cord fits in.
This one doesn't need an actual plug?
No, it just has the phone cord. In the beginning, when I asked her if it was plugged in, I was thinking it needed like a power plug too and that's why it wasn't lighting up, but it didn't have it; it just had the one cord. And now I'm picking it up and there's no dial tone, but it is lighting up. And I'm explaining what a dial tone is to her. When you get phone service, that tells you it's ready to dial someone else. And the others are in there and they're kind of listening to this.
You mean the two others?
There were those two and I think there were one or two others who were in the apartment and they all sort of went off into the kitchen; so when we went into the kitchen, they were still there.
Then after that, he [an advance hybrid] tells me to sit down on the couch again. She sits next to me. She's still looking at the phone. She's not really asking me anything, she's just sort of studying it.58 TV, Religion, and Spoiled Meat Later, Betsy and I examined an event in which she returned to the original apartment two weeks after going to Kmart. The Enforcer and two apparently advance hybrids drove her in someone else's car while she stared at her feet. Once again, she was made to inspect and critique the hubrids' home.
I think this is the first one again [the apartment she first helped furnish]. I'm not sure, but I think so.
. . . And once I get inside, it sort of looks the same too. When we get inside, that's when he [The Enforcer] lets me stop staring at my feet. There are some others in there. That woman [from the water-spraying incident] is there and I think there's at least three or four of the guys there. They're all just standing there like they were waiting for us. They're taking me around and I just have to tell them if everything looks right by just looking around—not by going into things or anything like that, just does it look standard, average, you know? “Does anything stand out as abnormal?” “Everything seems pretty normal to me.” Have they fixed it up a little bit?
Yeah, definitely. There are curtains now; there's furniture—not a whole lot, but enough.
Did they move the table into the dining room area?
Yeah, it's in the dining room. . . . The one thing I'm noticing, though, is there's no television in the living room and I'm telling them, “You have to have at least a small television. Everyone has a television just about and that would be noticeable.” One of them is asking me, “Well, does everyone watch it? Is there anyone who doesn't watch it?” “Well, there is but that's the minority; that would stand out, that's odd. People would notice that and ask why.” They're asking me what are some of the reasons why someone would not have one and we're going through some of that, just different reasons: they don't like it. There are certain families that don't like it for their kids, and certain religions wouldn't allow it.
They're curious about religion. I'm kind of thinking about different things I know about different religions, different questions like: “Does everyone have to have one?” “If there are so many, how do you choose?” “Which one is best?” Stupid questions. “Will people ask you if you have one?
What are the rules of each one?” And I said, “I don't know the rules of every single religion.” What are the rules of each one? That's an interesting question.
It's almost like they're not getting what it is. It's like a rule book to follow; it's not anything more than that to them. We walked into the kitchen. They've got some things in the wrong places and I'm telling them, “No, you can't do this.” They've got a package of meat that's just sitting out on the counter and it's been there a day or two, you can tell. I'm telling them, “That's trash. Put that in the trash. That's not good.” They're confused. They want to know why. Now one of them is telling me they left it out because if someone came in, they wanted them to know they had food. Oh, God. It's like dealing with five-year-olds! I'm explaining certain things have to go certain places and you can have food sit out, but not that kind. We're going to the refrigerator and the freezer and I'm explaining the difference—why you use one over the other and when and what goes in where.
Cans and boxes can stay out and things you buy in the store in a cold section should stay in a cold section.
Haven't you explained this to them before, or is this a different group?
This is a different group. I think we sort of looked at things, but I don't think we went in-depth and some of these are different too. I mean the woman's the same and the seventeen- or eighteen- year-old is the same, but there are some different faces there too. But this is in-depth, this is kind of going through every food and every food group and every type and they're not shy about asking questions.
They're not sure why you freeze something over the refrigerator—that seems confusing, because I'm saying for meat you could put it in the refrigerator or the freezer. I'm going over how long foods last and various different types—you know, a can will last basically forever, meat not put away won't, that kind of thing. And then they want to know why you do this, what happens if you don't and I start to get into, “If you eat it, you'll get sick.” And then they want to know how you eat certain things and how you prepare them. It's confusing —why with some things you can eat them both as they come and cook them and eat them. They're not sure about that. Some things must be cooked and how you know the difference. As I said, they're not shy about asking questions. We're talking about different ways of preparing things and different typical things you would eat at various meals, like what is a breakfast food, what is more a dinner food. It takes quite a while.
You'd think they would learn this onboard.
Yeah, they're asking age-appropriate questions if they're five! This takes a while. I had to sit down and there's a table and chairs in that kitchen over in the corner and I sat down there and they're kind of just around me.
So it's a little eat-in kitchen?
Yeah, it's real small, like maybe two chairs and a table, but I didn't notice it before. I'm kind of impressed that they would know to put that there. I mean these are the same people who didn't even know to put the dining room table in the dining room, but I don't think I commented on it or anything, because we were in the middle of this other stuff.59 Operating a Television Brian Reed also helped hubrids who were moving in. In one event, he was brought to an apartment where he had to teach a familiar hubrid how to use a television. Beforehand, onboard, Brian said a gray put an image in his mind of him making love to a blond girl. This was Brian's first session with me and he expressed typical confusion over what he was remembering.
I know this room like the back of my hand, and I have no idea how. I can see it so clearly. I can see the room. I can see the way the bed is set up. When I'm looking at the bed, it's neatly made. It's got a bunch of pillows. It looks really comfy. There's not much else in there. There's just a TV. I see it on right now, but there's nothing really on it. I see the dresser. There's nothing in the closet.
There's no curtains. There's nothing out the window. It's just a plain room with a bed, a dresser, and a TV, and the TV is sitting on a stand. . . . The television was on, but it was on to a static channel. You could hear the static going. There has to be something on. So, it was either tuned to a channel which is not a channel, or it's not connected.
It didn't seem like a modern set—think like late eighties, early nineties television. It seemed like that. . . . It's not like a flat screen, or plasma, or anything. It's definitely got an older feel to it, but not like ancient. It's not very big. I would say maybe it's like a twenty-two-inch screen. That would be my best guess. I think it's a Sony.
I think, for some reason, I looked at the TV while I was telling somebody how to change the channels on it. And whenever I'd change the channels, it was just all snow. I'm like, “If you're going to change it, you have to have cable.” And it was like the snow stayed there, but the channels in the upper right hand corner kept changing. So it was because they didn't have a connection. I'm seeing this blonde girl, this blonde female, with me. I feel like I'm talking to her and she's naked. So something's not right here. I can see her naked. I can see her face. I can describe her body to you. But she's naked in this room, and I'm explaining . . .
She looks normally human, basically?
She does. She really does. . . . This is strange, because I'm telling her how to do it, but I'm talking to her. It's not like she's looking into my eyes and asking me things. And I'm telling her, “This is how you do it.” And she's talking back to me and like pointing out and kind of rephrasing what I just said.
Do you have a remote control or are you doing it manually?
No. No. It's right on the TV. It's a Sony TV. I can see it, because I had to look down. I can look at all the buttons on the TV, and the channel buttons are on the far right. I'm pushing the “up” button the whole time. I'm telling her, “This is how you change the channels, but you're not connected.” I'm looking at her, and she's like, “Okay. Okay.” She's naked, though. She's looking at me while I'm explaining—and this is the same girl that gray was having me look like I was sleeping with—in that image in my head.
The female was about the same age as Brian. Then he remembered that they had engaged in sex in that room and it was after that when he explained how the television worked.
I say, “You're not going to be able to get any channels because you don't have cable. You're not connected. You need to get a cable connection.” I actually explain this to her rather elaborately, to be honest. Basically, it's on a tiny, little stand. I'm kind of crouched down like I have my knees bent. She's to my left. I had my right hand pushing the channel button up, and I'm kind of looking over to my top left looking up at her, talking to her. When I'm talking to her, I'm saying things, and she's saying things back. She's pointing to the TV and pointing at the different things. . . . I was really enthusiastic about showing her these things. I really wanted her to learn. I almost feel like I care about her. I almost feel like this is someone who is really close to me, and I'm, you know . . .
Does she have a name?
Anne. I get Anne. It's the first thing in my head. I don't know if that's right, but that's the first impression I get. Anne. I don't know why. Don't hold me to that. I think that might have just been something I named her.
Brian then got the impression that someone else was in the room overseeing what was happening. He also realized that he had known Anne for some time and that he had, in fact, experienced a loving relationship with her. He continued his recollections about the TV, showing her how to push the channel and volume buttons on it. He explained that there were different channels and some were dedicated to one type of programming.60 Traveling Proper furniture placement and room arrangement, operating a television or a phone, and understanding a refrigerator are all small steps in learning to establish a home on Earth. However, hubrids must also deal with the outside world. Sooner or later, they have to learn how to negotiate their way physically through a town or city.
Traveling from one place to another in close proximity to a UFO is not a problem for the aliens. Their technology allows them to transport themselves unseen through the air, through walls, and through windows. We know little about how the beings “travel” from their UFOs to places on Earth, but abductees report that aliens do not move through solid objects without the proximity of UFO technology.
When people are abducted, they are taken up directly into a UFO that is clearly visible to them.61 If the craft is farther away, abductees cannot go through solid objects and they sometimes have to travel some distance to a waiting UFO before they can then be taken up. Onboard abductees see open doorways in every room. No one has reported aliens moving through walls onboard. Whatever facilitates going through solid objects is not operating. The science behind this technology is obviously unknown, but it seems reasonable to assume that movement through physical barriers is generated by a technology that exists only for UFO transport.
On Earth, hybrids and hubrids need help in transporting themselves without the aid of a UFO. Like most humans, they must learn to drive if they hope to travel in private. Moreover, driving maintains secrecy and thus the integrity of the program in a way that assistance from a UFO would not. Advance, security, and independent hybrids cannot simply show up somewhere with no indication of how they arrived or how they will leave. Nonabductees might witness them appearing and disappearing. Security cameras might capture a materialization. Thus, hybrids and hubrids must be able to drive, not only to go where they want, but also to transport abductees surreptitiously so they can help in the program.
When hubrids first move in, they must learn about society, and they press abductees into driving them to places they believe will support their assimilation. Sightseeing and driving to special places with abductees also seems to be part of their training.
Valley Forge Knowing how to get to unknown places requires an abductee's knowledge. Karen recalled a trip in the middle of the night to Pennsylvania's historic Valley Forge National Park. She did not recall how the trip began.
Another time—I don't know why—they had me take them to Valley Forge Park. . . . And I was driving through the park and I was thinking there are park rangers here and stuff, you know? I parked the car and we got out and we walked. They seem to just want to see the park. I don't know. It was very odd.
Do they ask you things like why is this park here or what is a park?
They ask me about [why] the parking lot . . . didn't have any cars in it and I said, “That's because it's at night.” And they said, “Do other cars come here?” And I said, these are stupid questions, but, “Yes, during the day other cars come here.” They seem to be more concerned with little things like where the cars park. . . . Not only am I not inclined to help them, but even if I were, I've often thought even if you wanted to help these guys out, you can't explain things to them, because they don't have the basic understanding of stuff. Where do you begin with people who don't understand the whole concept of a park—people visiting, daytime—you know? Their questions are stupid and boring and do not make me want to teach.
So you pull into the parking lot. Does everybody get out and look around or do they just look through the windows?
We get out and we walk up a little hill. They asked the question about the parking lot when we turned in. There's a little hill and we walk up.
It's at night. Can you see anything?
No. I mean, it's at night. The stars are out. I'm afraid I'm going to break my ankle. They're kind of pushing and pulling me.
Oh, I see. Are you near the Visitors' Center?
No. We're right by the covered bridge. It's called Maxwell's Field. I know it really well, because I used to ride [horses] there. They kind of look around. They walk around a little bit.
They seem a little confused. They seem to be telepathing to me, “What's the point of this?” And I said, “There's not really a point. It's just a park and people come here.” This is so basic. “I don't want to explain it to you. Don't keep asking me these stupid questions. You don't get it. You're really thick.” Somebody must have told them to go to Valley Forge Park. So they just don't seem to understand what the park is or anything. And I said, “Well, you have to come here during the day if you want to see anything, because that's when the people are here.” Then I don't know. I don't know if something's going to happen there or not. Then I said, “Come on, let's go,” and they're just walking around and I think I tripped as we went down the hill and they caught me. I'm always really mad. . . . They walk around a little bit. I have this image of them sort of going in a circle. . . . But then every once in a while, I think a car comes through the park and they ask me about the car and I say it's just cutting through the park on its way somewhere else probably. They're really interested in that. They're really interested in the road that runs through the park. “Where does the road go? Why is there a road through the park?” I mean, it's like so boring and stupid and so beside the point.62 Blue Jays vs. Orioles As I discussed in the first chapter, Bernard's independent hubrid, Eric, traveled by car with him to a baseball game. It seemed that Eric had planned the scenario, as opposed to innocently accompanying Bernard. Baseball is a game with a long American tradition. Going to a game would give Eric more insight into American culture.
Bernard lives in New York, but is a lifelong Baltimore Orioles fan with season tickets for the games.
He almost always takes one of his teenage daughters along, but for one game, he decided to go alone to see the Toronto Blue Jays play the Orioles. Three weeks later, he came to see me. I asked him why he did not take his daughter along. He was not sure. I asked him what he did with the other ticket. He had no idea. I asked him if someone sat next to him in his daughter's seat at the game. He could not remember.
We decided to look into this odd memory lapse.
Bernard started out on his regular route, taking I-95 south to Baltimore. While going through Delaware, he exited onto an unfamiliar street without knowing why. He stopped outside a café and saw Eric waiting for him on the sidewalk. Eric got in and the two continued on to Camden Yards stadium.
At the game, Bernard telepathically explained the rules to Eric, but questions came up. With two innings left, the Blue Jays were nine runs ahead and spectators were streaming out of the ballpark. Eric wanted to know why they were leaving. Bernard explained that the Orioles were far behind in the score and the game was most likely lost. The fans were going home early to avoid the traffic. Eric asked why Bernard did not leave. He answered that he was a superior fan and would stay to the bitter end. After the game was over, instead of going straight back to New York, they made a detour in Maryland to a university dormitory. Eric parked the car and told him to wait. A full forty-five minutes later, Eric came back and they continued going north. Bernard thought Eric was visiting a female “friend” there. He then dropped Eric off at another location and continued home.63 Driving Lessons One morning, Karen and her husband noticed a lengthy tire rut in the grass alongside their long sloping driveway. They were puzzled. Neither she nor her husband had driven out of their garage onto the grass.
During a regression session, she remembered three hybrids coming to her bedroom late the previous night while her husband was asleep. They opened the garage door and Karen and the hybrids got into her car.
It seems like rather than letting me turn around, or rather than my turning around, because we have a place to turn around, they wanted me to back the car down. I was saying, “No, that's not a good idea.” Is it dark out there when you're doing this or . . .?
Completely, totally black. It seems like there were three of them again. Two in the back and one in the front. How did they get me to do this? . . . The one in the front held my hand while I turned on the car to start it.
He held your hand? So it was as if he was turning it on to start it?
Yeah. As if he was turning it on. I don't know if he was doing that to learn how to use it or to make me do it. I was saying, “No. I'm not going to drive. I'm tired. I'm not going to do this.” And they said, “You will. You have to.” I can't imagine they could actually make me do this when I didn't want to. I only remember backing down the driveway. I don't remember where we went.
Well, when you got to the end of the driveway, did you get a sense that you just sort of drove back up, or did you back out into the street?
. . . I think it was more inching down the driveway. You know what it seems like happened when we got to the end of the driveway, the reason it blanks out? I think that one of them, the one in the front, changed places with me. And he took the car back up.
So, he didn't drive it somewhere else, then?
No. I'm pretty sure we didn't go anywhere. Also, it seems like we left out one really important thing. We didn't turn the lights on on the car. I think that was their idea so that no one would see us.
And I was saying, “Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind? You want me to back the car down a pitch-black driveway? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life. I'm not going to do that.” And they said, “Yes, you are. You're going to do it. Now start the car.” And I said, “No. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to start the car.” Then he took my hand. I must have gotten the keys out of my purse. He took my hand, put it up to the thing, and he said, “Don't turn on the lights.
You'll wake your husband.” Well, if your husband was asleep, was the [house] alarm on?
This night was a night—this is really amazing that they put this together. How could they have known this? . . . Three months before we moved, we had the alarm turned off because we had the house on the market.64 Betsey not only drove hybrids and hubrids, she taught hubrids how to drive as well. Around 1:30 a.m.
on March 29, 2006, Betsey put her coat on over her pajamas and drove to an almost deserted part of town. The buildings there were slated to be torn down for a new shopping mall and most of the stores were abandoned. Betsey pulled her SUV into the middle of the parking lot on the corner of an intersection. The two sides not facing the street abutted the side wall of a building and an empty, weed- filled lot. Chain-link fences separated the lot from the streets. It was empty except for two cars parked facing one of the fences.
Betsey saw her nearly lifelong PPH, Ken, waiting with The Enforcer, along with three young hubrids between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. Ken had become her strict overseer when the hubrids began to integrate into society. As a late-stage human hybrid, he was mildly interested in human life, but he lived solely onboard a UFO. He had already learned how to drive, either from Betsey or from another abductee.
She got out of the car and left it running. Ken instructed her to teach the young hubrids how to drive.
One hubrid got into the driver's seat and Betsey sat on the passenger side. She told the hubrid to put his foot carefully on the accelerator and slowly move the car forward. She taught him how to use the brakes.
After a few turns around the parking lot, he seemed to be catching on. Rather than returning to the place where they had started, she told him to park in a marked space next to the cars that were already parked there. The two parked cars were on Betsey's right and the chain link fence was in front of him. The other hubrids were standing nearby, observing.
Does he ask any questions about what's on the dashboard—what's this, what's this?
He doesn't ask questions, but we go over what they are and try reverse, try neutral, see what that does, try park. He doesn't try the lower gears, but we sort of talk a little bit about what they are.
Does he want to know about things like traffic lights?
No, we really don't go over rules of the road. Then I'm pulling in beside one of the parked cars to give him a parking kind of practice. . . . So he pulls in there.
Is he accurate? He's not getting too close to one car or anything like that?
The first time, he's a little too close. I had him back out and pull it back in again and it's much better. It's a little crooked, but it's not bad. . . .
So after he pulls in between the two cars...
He's not between them; they're right next to each other. They're like on my side. He gets out.
So it's just once around, or did he go a couple of times around?
It was once around, but we stopped and did a reverse and stuff like that. Then [another hubrid] guy gets in. . . .
Does he have the same demeanor—that is to say, concentrating? Or does he have a different kind of personality?
He seems to be a little more excited about it—not by much, but a little bit more. He puts it in reverse and he hits the gas a little too hard and kind of goes quickly out of the spot and he's turning the wheel and I thought we were going to hit one of the other cars there. . . . And then I thought we were going to hit the fence, because he kind of did a U-turn around the other two cars and I thought for sure we were going to hit the fence, but we didn't hit either one. But that's what kind of woke me up. I'm suddenly realizing that, you know, I'm in this car and there's some kid beside me driving. I don't think I saw the other guys. They were off to the side and I wasn't paying much attention, but the guy in the car sure was. . . . I just opened the car door and I got out.
You got out of the car?
Yeah, he stopped probably an inch or so before hitting the fence. He put the brakes on pretty hard to stop and I sat there for a few seconds, but at that point it was a stranger and I just wanted to get out of there. . . . I'm kind of walking as fast as I can toward the far side of the parking lot, which isn't that far away.
Betsey had a previous leg injury and could not run. She described how she walked quickly to the side of the empty lot where the brush was.
So I'm kind of walking in knee-deep weeds and stuff. The only thing I'm thinking is, “I've got to get away.” I can hear that there's somebody there—there's somebody else there, maybe more than one person. I hear them in the brush too now. . . . I'm just thinking I don't want them to get to me. I don't want them to reach me. But then somebody's right in front of me, looking at me. I turn around and he's sort of leading me back. Then there's somebody else there too, I think, because they come over to the other side. I think it's Ken and that guy I don't like [The Enforcer]. They're not acting angry or anything; they're just leading me back. I'm calm again now, I know who they are now.
But for those few moments you were out of [their] control. You were in your own control. You snapped out of it.
Yeah, it was that adrenaline rush, I think.
So they lead you back to the car, or back in the parking lot somewhere?
No, back to the car. And I have to put my seat belt on and they both get in the backseat. And they're telling me there's no reason to be upset. It was an accident and everything's under control now, just relax.
Who's behind the wheel?
The younger guy. . . . We go to start again and I have to tell him to put the car in drive. He's had it in reverse with his foot on the brake.
Where's the car facing now?
The back is toward the chain-link fence and the front is sort of toward the open parking lot and the two parked cars would be to my right. We were facing on the other side of the two parked cars and he pulled out, sort of made a U-turn, and backed in on the other side of those two cars—very fast. He did ask me if it was okay, since he didn't hit anything and I said it was better, but it was just luck that he didn't hit anything. I'm telling him we're going to start like the other guy; we're not going to use the gas, we're just going to roll. He puts it in drive and takes his foot off the brake and we're just rolling forward. I'm making him keep it slow. I do a little more with him—practice stopping, starting, reversing, parking. I think at one point I had him do kind of like a K-turn thing. .
. .
So what happens next?
We stop and he gets out. Then that guy I don't like [The Enforcer] gets up to the front and we talk for a while. . . . He tells me what I can do and can't do. He's in control; I'm not. I won't remember this. No one must know the locations I'm in or the people I'm with or what happened, what occurred. He's telling me he knows everything I'm thinking, everything I'm feeling. He doesn't care how I feel about him; it doesn't matter. I can feel any way I want about him, he's not concerned with that. The others are, but he's not. He's not going to make me feel anything toward him, but he is in control and he is going to help me to accept my role in this. He's done this before and he knows how our minds work and he knows how to help me. He's very neutral. . . . I think he drove me home.
He drove you home? So he knew how to drive?
Yeah.65 A week later, Betsey gave one of the same young hubrids a driving lesson in the parking lot of the local Kmart store. She was at Kmart to pick up a prescription for her husband. She parked in the lot and returned to the car with the medicine. When she got there, the seventeen-year-old who had haphazardly pulled out of the parking space was waiting for her. She got into the passenger side and he took the wheel.
Does he say anything to you when you see him out there? Does he communicate with you?
A little—he wants to know what I have in the bag.
Did you tell him what you just got?
Yeah, and show him. He's asking a lot about the medicine.
He's very curious about . . . taking medications for different things, how it works. . . . He's starting the car. I'm kind of watching what he's doing, making sure he's doing everything right. He's pretty good.
Does he pull out of the parking space?
Yeah, I had backed in. That's why he just had to pull straight out.
Is he driving like a new driver or a more confident driver? Or is he still learning?
Sort of in the middle—he's a little bit more confident, but he's still not sure. . . . I'm just watching him and waiting if he does something wrong to tell him. My job is to watch him and help him. . . .
So he pulls out of the parking space. Now is he going to drive around the parking lot?
No, we're heading out toward the road.
Can he get on the road properly? Does he pause at the drive-way—the entrance—so he can look both ways and see if cars are coming and all that?
Well, there's a light there and he stops for it. I tell him he can go right on red if there's no traffic.
You come to a stop first and look for the traffic; if there isn't any, you can go ahead. . . . I tell him he could speed up a little bit—he's kind of slow. He's having more trouble with his speed more than anything else, trying to keep it steady. I'm telling him that will come with practice. Then we turn off the main road to the right. I'm kind of wondering where we're going. He says he's going to practice with me. . . . He's just driving on some little roads around. I'm helping him—he cut one corner a little too close and I'm telling him he's got to swing out a little bit wider.
He's making a right-hand turn you mean?
Yeah. We're talking about different areas you drive in—highway, major road, residential street, and sort of the different things you need to be aware of for each. We're on kind of a residential street and I'm telling him you have to watch, make sure there are no kids or people around, and if there are, you have to be more cautious. On a highway, you wouldn't have that. You'd be going faster. All that kind of thing.
The hybrid talked about the different road signs and what they meant. He knew what “stop” meant and other signs as well. There were a few he was not sure of. He asked why some roads have signs on them and some do not. Betsy told him it depended on the community and if they wanted to put them up. He asked if all roads have names and Betsy said that most do, but perhaps a few might not. He wanted to know why highways had numbers, but smaller streets had names. She did not know the answer to that.
Then he tried parking a couple of times.
You mean parallel parking?
Sort of—I mean, it is parallel parking, parallel to the curb, but there are no other cars around right there. It's like an open area.
Can he judge where the curb is?
. . . It takes him a couple tries and he sort of gets it down. That's it—we're just driving around for a while. . . . Then he pulls over and parks again and I'm telling him that was a good one. He's pretty close to the side of the road, but he didn't go off of it. It's like dirt and stuff. He's looking at me for a little while. . . .
Is he talking with you? Is he communicating with you?
Yeah. He's saying he's glad he's going to be working with me. We're working well together. The usual kind of stuff, you know? . . . Then after a while, he stops and puts the car back in gear and we go back out to the main street. We're not really that far from it—I kind of thought we were, because we were driving around a lot, but when we went back out, it didn't take too long to get there. Then we get into the turn lane to go across the river and he wants to drive across the bridge.
He's never done that before. I'm telling him it's just a road like any other. We made a right onto the main road again and then, down a couple lights, there's a left to the bridge.
It's a relatively new bridge. I mean it's like driving on a road; there's nothing to it, but he wants to drive on the bridge. It's a double turn lane and I'm telling him he's got to stay in his lane as he turns. I'm showing him—it's like a dotted line to guide you—I'm showing him, “You've got to stay on this side of it.” He does really well. We drove on the bridge for a while and I told him, “You have to get over to the other lane, because it closes down to one lane on the other side.” He kind of merges in—there are not that many cars. After he merges into the other lane, he's kind of trying to look at the water and I say, “You can't do that when you're driving; you've got to pay attention; you've got to watch the road.” We get down to the other side and drove up to the main street and made a right, which is going toward home. He pulls over into a parking lot on that street and that's when I got back in the driver's side.
Does he say anything like: “This is it” or “That's all I can do today” or something like that?
No. He tells me just go home, forget about all this. That's pretty much what I did.
You just leave him there standing in a parking lot?
Yeah.66 Driving is obviously an important aspect of hubrid training. That The Enforcer already knew how to drive meant that either Betsey or, more likely, another abductee (or a series of abductees) had taught him.
The same goes for the young hubrid who waited in the Kmart parking lot. He most likely had had another driving instructor. Driving gives the hubrids freedom from a UFO and its transportation technology, and allows them to insinuate themselves more closely into society.
Shopping Like driving, sports, and home décor, shopping is also a vital part of the hubrids' field training. Betsey and other abductees have instructed hubrids about the intricacies of making purchases in stores. As with driving, training hubrids to be consumers can be complicated, but it is necessary for smooth integration into human society. Moreover, to understand shopping, hubrids must have a working knowledge of money, fashion, electronics, and other aspects of modern culture.
More than other day-to-day activities, shopping requires that hubrids encounter, communicate with, and exchange money with humans. Thus, along with more complex personal relationships, hubrids must also understand impersonal relationships. These relationships constitute a true test of the program, allowing hubrids to blend in with nonabductees.
CHAPTER 7 Adjusting to Life on Earth “His task is to live here.” To integrate into human society and live on Earth unnoticed, hubrids must learn how to navigate through normal life outside of a home or car. They have to contend with the subtle complexities of life—from making purchases, to understanding when someone is joking, to knowing what to eat. Hubrids find the everyday world challenging, and they rely on abductees to make sense of it all.
My most detailed examples of adjusting to everyday life come from Betsey's experiences with an independent hubrid whom she named Jamie. In July 2005, Ken introduced Jamie to Betsey onboard and told her, “His task is to live here.” He said with Betsey's help, Jamie would take in as much information as he could. Ken said Betsey must protect Jamie at all times, and that meant she had to like him and want to help him. Jamie had just moved into his apartment and it would be Betsey's task to help him adjust to life on Earth. Although it is not known how long independents generally stay with abductees, Jamie would be with Betsey for at least the next two years.
Training Jamie Ken emphasized how crucial it was to keep all her interactions with Jamie a secret in order to protect him. Ken was Jamie's protector as much as he was Betsey's constant overseer. He told her that Jamie had been waiting for this and had studied and learned about humans; he said that Jamie and Betsey were compatible. Neural engagement with Jamie followed.
[Ken said,] “He's special. You've got to take care of him; you've got to make sure he's okay,” you know? And I do kind of feel that way. I really do. . . . Well, Ken breaks it off after going through the usual crap that he's pleased and everything, and I'm doing everything the right way and I'm cooperating and all that garbage. This is kind of new for him, too; he's never been one to do this either. And then he tells Jamie to go ahead and move in closer and try to connect in with me as well. And I feel very calm and relaxed when he sort of connected in [through neural engagement].
I'm not sure how to describe it, but there's no real words or anything exchanged. It's sort of all feelings. . . . It's feelings of love and protection and very, very, strong feelings toward him. Like at the same time, that sort of calm and relaxed feeling is there as well. There's even a mild sexual component to it. I don't want him to stop. I don't want him to break off. And it slowly subsides.
And then after it subsides to a certain point, he does break off. And that's basically it. They stand up and I stand up. I walk over to the door and there's the little guy [a small gray ] there again.67 Two days after first meeting Jamie, Betsey drove to a specific place on a residential street to meet with him. He was standing on the sidewalk waiting for her and, when she arrived, he got into her car.
I'm getting the feeling that the new piece to this is he's going to be mostly here [on Earth] and visit there [the UFO], versus mostly there and visit here. And that terrifies me; that really terrifies me.
I'm having a hard time accepting the fact that I am helping this.
So he gets in the car. Where are you driving to?
At first, I don't think I'm driving anywhere. We're talking. . . . And he's telling me he's not used to being alone so much. That's hard, too, although he did expect that. He prepared himself for that, but it's still difficult. I'm sort of telling him you have to set up a routine—what you're going to do every day. And I asked him, is he going to work, and he says, “No.” No, his assignment or his task is to live here, not to work here; that's like two separate things. And I'm telling him most people do both, you know? But no, his assignment is to live here. So I'm telling him if he talks to anyone or whatever, tell them that you work from home and that's why you don't leave for like eight hours a day. Otherwise, they'll wonder how you get the money. It will call attention to you.
And he's asking me about what a normal routine would be. I'm saying, “Well, you get up and you take your shower or whatever; you brush your teeth, you get dressed. And most people would go to work or, you know, have something to do. They either clean up the place they live in, or they take care of kids, or whatever. You go about your daily life.” And he had forgotten about brushing his teeth. He wants to go to the store and get a toothbrush. He knew about it; he had just forgotten about it. . . . Then we went down to the store. We both went in and I bought him a toothbrush and toothpaste.68 When Betsey dropped him off at the sidewalk again, she told him that he had to say “Hello” or “Hi” or some salutation whenever he meets with her or another human whom he knows.
A few days later, Betsey was taken onboard a UFO. After the aliens conducted the routine physical procedures on her, a small gray led her into a room where Ken and Jamie were communicating with each other. Ken said that he would oversee Betsey's work with Jamie.
And they sort of break off with each other and Jamie looks over at me and says, “Hi!” It's just so out of place, it doesn't fit at all. But he's like trying to show me that he's understood the lesson. I think I remember almost laughing at it, because it just seemed so out of place; and it's funny, because the same thing here from the same person wouldn't have seemed out of place. It was the context. . . . And he doesn't have it down yet, because it's, I don't know how to explain it, it's just off somehow.
It sounded like it was almost too exuberant?
Yeah, exactly. It almost wasn't a genuine greeting; it was, I-remember-you're-supposed-to-do- this, you know? It was off. You could tell that, you know, more practice is needed on that one. It's not smooth. Some of the things he does and says are very smooth and very natural sounding or looking. . . . Overall, he's much, much smoother and much—I guess, more socialized than Ken? I don't know what the word is, but Ken would stand out big time, where he stands out a little. You know, there's a difference. This is odd to say, I know, but he [Ken] often sort of reminds me of an autistic person. The social aspects are just off. The intelligence is there, but the social part is just not. And that involves all aspects of social—you know, his world, or with him and I, or more than that, or whatever.
Ken then asked Betsy about the meeting that had occurred a couple of days before. He wanted her to go over what had happened with Jamie and her.
What's there to go over?
Just what happened exactly and how I felt Jamie—I almost want to say—“performed.” You know, “Was he natural? Were there areas of problems? In the store, were there any areas of problems?” I'm almost getting the feeling of, you know, he's looking for like glaring areas that need to be worked on. And there really weren't any. But I'm saying now it was a short thing. There were no other people around really, except one in the store, but there was no interaction. You know, it's pretty hard to judge someone on their social skills when they didn't really interact with anyone. Now, Jamie's asking me where he can go to practice his skills [so] that it won't stand out too much. I'm just telling him, “Go back to the grocery store, but go through like the checkout line with somebody there instead of like, the self-serve.” And then you have to interact a little. Go to the post office and buy a book of stamps. Something, you know? He's worried about standing out.
But you're saying that he doesn't stand out?
I don't think so. I mean, maybe a little, but I think most people would put it down to, “Well, he's kind of a little odd,” you know? Nothing major. I haven't seen him interact with anyone else, so I don't know. And that's what I'm telling him. I'm telling him, you know, “Until you do it, you won't know. You have to do it. You have to try it.” Then Ken was telling me that he's going to, or Jamie's going to, go with me places and watch how I interact. . . . [Ken] has taken over a kind of role of like coordinating what's going to happen, which is kind of weird. I've just sort of never had him do stuff like that before.
Yeah, it's like I have so much history with him and all of a sudden like his role totally changed and that's kind of an odd feeling. Jamie is going to go with me and observe, and then after he's observed for a while, then he may try it and I'll observe him. I'll help him. . . . Then Ken comes closer and he's staring at me a little. This is going to sound really paranoid saying this, but I think he's trying to figure out if I've kept my end of the bargain [to tell no one about her task or Jamie's existence]. He's sort of focusing in on that.69 The Supermarket and Exact Change Betsey taught Jamie everything she could about living in human society for the next two years—how to talk to people, how to dress properly, how to buy goods, how to drive, and myriad other behaviors for looking and acting human. Though he was not necessarily grateful to her, she liked him more than other hubrids and hybrids she had worked with, because he had human feelings to which she could relate. His education, however, had to be watched carefully. For example, this incident occurred at a supermarket early in his training.
We walked in and he's asking me what does he need to put in his refrigerator. . . . I'm thinking maybe we should get a cart if it's going to be a lot. He wants to know where the carts are and I said outside. There's a lady walking in with one and she just gives it to him and she sort of goes back outside to get another one. And I said, “That's not right. You shouldn't do that.” How does he respond? Or does he?
He does; he didn't realize that was inappropriate. I said, “If you need a cart, you go get your own. You don't let somebody else give you theirs.” He says, “Okay.” We go in and go to the produce area and I'm showing him how to get a couple different things—a couple of apples, mostly fruit, two apples and an orange and a pear. I'm showing him you have to put them in separate bags. Then we go past a display of soda and he says to me, “This is what you drink?” and I said yeah, so he gets like a 12-pack of that.
Is he pushing the cart or are you pushing it?
I'm pushing it. We go over and we get a small thing of milk and a small container of cheese, just regular American cheese or whatever. He wants some eggs and I said, “You're only one person.
You don't need a big thing. You can buy a small one of six eggs.” So I open it up to look at them and he asked me what I was doing and I said, “I'm making sure none of them are cracked because they crack easily.” He asked me, “Is it okay to open up the package like that in the store?” I think I told him in the past that you can't, you can't open the packages. And I said, “Eggs are different.
They're not sealed or anything; so you can just open them up, take a quick peek, and then close it.” He's asking what to do if you open it up and you see that one is damaged, and I said, “You just get a different package.” And that's basically it. We go over to the lines. . . . We go over to the cash register area. He takes over the cart and he sort of pushes it into the lane and he's taking things out and putting them on the belt. He says hello to the girl and I'm thinking that's really good, he did that just right—not too enthusiastic or anything, but he did it really well. I'm just standing there. I'm not really doing anything, just watching him. She's ringing the stuff up. It's not that much—it's like nine dollars or something—and she gives him his total and he kind of looks quickly at me, and I said, “Give her ten dollars.” He didn't have money with him?
No, he had it, but he wasn't sure because it was nine something and I think he was confused— like should he count out the nine something or what. And I said give her ten, because he pulled it right out of his pocket; he pulled out bills and he pulled out change. I'm telling him, “Put the change away. Just give her a $10 bill.” The girl's kind of looking at me a little funny, I guess because I'm telling him what to do. But she doesn't say anything; she just gives me a funny look.
She gives him his change back and the receipt too. And he's putting the stuff in the cart again and I tell him you have to be careful of the eggs, they're fragile.
The girl put them in a bag?
Yeah, she bagged everything and like put it at the end of the checkout stand. Well, she didn't bag the soda, but everything else. As we're walking out, he's asking me does he need to save the receipt and I said no. He says he always sees me put it in my pocket and I said, “Yeah, I collect a bunch of them and then I throw them all out.” I said, “I just put it in my pocket so I don't throw it on the ground.” We talked about receipts for a little while, talked about how sometimes you might want to save it if you buy something and it's worth a lot of money, and if there's a problem with it and you take it back or whatever. But the little ones from the grocery store, you're not going to take anything back. We go back to the car, put the stuff in the backseat, and go to his apartment.
Does he carry the groceries, or do you carry them?
I carry them. No, he carried the soda, because I couldn't manage it. I carry the bags. . . . [At his apartment] we're sort of going over the trip and I'm telling him I thought his greeting was really good; he did a really good job with that. And I said he'll get used to the money. He said, “Well, why don't you count out the money?” And I said it wasn't a small amount of change; if it had been $9.01 or $9.02, you might give her the two pennies, but it's easier when it's a higher amount just to go up to the next bill. He's asking me what the cutoff is, “Where do you decide which way to go?” I said, “There's no set number. If it's something real low or it's real easy to count out, then you do it; but if it's going to take a little time, then you don't.” I'm telling him you can't do the thing like with the cart that he did when he first walked in and he's not quite sure why you can't do that. I said, “That's not normal behavior. Two humans wouldn't do that. Somebody wouldn't just walk in and know you needed a cart and give you theirs and then go get another one for themselves. You're kind of on your own when you go in there. You get a cart if you need it and, if you forgot, you go back and you get it; you can't force people like that.”70 Betsey's correction of Jamie makes it easy to forget that, even though he is not supposed to force a human being to give him a shopping cart, he is still using Betsey to help him without her consent. For hubrids, controlling humans even in a minor way can be a normal part of their function as superior beings.
Stealing and Morality Having a sense of right and wrong is central for human life, but it may not be so important to integrating hubrids. They are only concerned about morality insofar as they need to understand it to fit in. If being moral means not using mental powers to get what they desire, then hubrids will conceal their abilities.
But if they want to, they can always be immoral with little or no reprimand and no consequences.
Forcing their will upon others is the essence of the abduction phenomenon. Bernard and Eric confronted this problem when Eric rode with Bernard to the baseball game.
As was the case with Betsey and Jamie, Bernard had to teach Eric the difference between right and wrong in a shopping situation. When Bernard picked up Eric on his way to the ball game, he was wearing a jersey representing the opposing team—the Toronto Blue Jays. After Bernard explained that wearing the shirt was not the best clothing choice for the occasion, Eric went into a store at the ballpark and got a Baltimore Orioles jersey. When I asked about how he had gotten the jersey, Bernard told me about a discussion he had with Eric about morality and whether Eric had a sense of right and wrong, or was merely focused on being conspicuous or inconspicuous.
Well, did you ask him—I don't want to put words in your mouth, of course—where he got this jersey? How did he get it?
Yes. . . . He stole it. He went to a store and got it. He didn't sneak it out; he just picked it up and walked out of there and made sure that nobody had any objection to that. “Oh, that guy's taking the shirt. Well, that's all right because it's that guy. I don't know why it's all right because it's that guy, but I know it's all right.” Do you think he's going to go purloin one again?
Yeah, we got one [at a store] when we got there [the stadium]. We went in and he tried on a hat and a jacket, and then just walked out with it. The girl smiled.71 You didn't offer to pay for it?
No, I didn't even think about it. I stood there. He got it, and he said, “Thank you,” and then smiled. “You're welcome,” and there were actually several people in plain view there, but somehow he communicated something to them so that the appropriate thing in their minds for him to do was walk on out with a jacket on. . . . He is just taking mental control of the situation.
This event resulted in a discussion of the morality and repercussions of taking apparel without paying for it.
And now I'm talking to him about the implications of doing that, and he's acknowledging that he will pay for it in the future. But where will the money come from? He'll steal the money. But there's an acknowledgment that he has a need to have certain things in our culture and he will take them. But if he steals the money from a richer source and then pays for the shirt from a merchant, he's taking it from somebody at least who can more afford the loss. . . .
I'm explaining that, unless he earns that shirt, he's hurting someone. And I would consider that wrong and I am acknowledging that his circumstances make a different morality applicable. But as a result of this whole exchange, he's—it's not this well-articulated—he's saying, “In the future, I'll go into a bank and take enough money so I can pay for the shirt, because the bank won't be as badly hurt as this is.” . . . But there's just a thousand considerations at once and he's more or less saying, “Well, I'll do the right thing and since you acknowledge that I have to do these things, I will do it where the harm will be least felt in the future. I'll start paying for food I eat in restaurants,” and he does pay for things sometimes. . . . So there are times, apparently, when he can't just take it because he'd be conspicuous in the eyes of someone watching what he's doing. So when he's paying for things, it's because it's less conspicuous to pay for the thing and leave.
But he does understand money and he understands change and all that sort of stuff?
Yeah, he understands. He has knowledge of the way our culture works. I'm not sure that he attaches a similar meaning to it, but I think he's being totally sincere. . . . But I think he's looking on my values as an effective tool for walking around without causing ripples. It isn't that he has any appreciation for my values in their convenience. . . . I've made it clear that I'm not offended in any way, shape, or form that he's wearing the Toronto jersey. This isn't a mistake and I don't want him to go and get another one, but he also is understanding now that I'm an Orioles fan and we're going to go and sit with Orioles fans. And he's decided, “I can better participate in this whole thing if I'm an Orioles fan too.”72 Free Will For hubrids, adjusting to being more human means understanding the concept of choice. This is an “alien” concept for them, because their lives have been completely controlled. Betsey recalled how Jamie struggled with the idea of choice, but finally understood it. They had a discussion about this after the supermarket-cart incident.
He's asking me, “Don't humans ever get other humans to do things for them?” And I say, “Well, yeah, but it's different. It's not done the way you do it. The other person wants to do something because they have a relationship or they have feelings or whatever for the other one. It's done because they want to.” And he says, “Well, what if they don't want to?” And I said, “Well, they don't do it. That's what it is to be human.” I said, “We can't control people like that” and he's asking me what about if there's danger. “It doesn't matter the circumstances. People have a free will; they can do whatever they want. If they don't want to help you, it doesn't matter if there's danger or not or anything. If they don't want to help, then they don't.” There was another conversation we had—I don't know when it was—but I'm referencing that and I'm saying, “It's like when we talked about the rules. Sometimes, even though there's a rule, you might not follow it. It's the same thing. To be human, you have a choice.” And he's trying to understand. He's asking me, “Do you have a choice on every rule?” And I said, “Yeah, but I mean most humans realize that most rules are there to help and they will follow them. Sometimes it's a matter of circumstances too. There's a rule that you can only go a certain speed on the road; but if people perceive there's no danger or anything, they might go faster; they might break that rule. At another time, there might be cars or humans or kids or whatever, and they might not. You evaluate the situation.” And he said to me, “Would you choose to be here with me if you could choose?” I said, “I don't really know; I wasn't given a choice.” Does he react to that? He's suddenly brought the conversation around to himself.
Yeah, he's kind of thinking for a minute and he asked me, “If I want to live exactly like a human lives, then I have to give everyone every choice?” And I said, yeah. That's a hard concept for him.
He's asking me, “What would the reasons be that you would choose to stay here?” and I'm not sure what he means. He says, “If you had a free will to leave or stay, what would make you stay?” And I said, “Well, probably a relationship or friendship or something like that—if I felt there was something I wanted to do.” He wants to know if that would be the same for everyone, and I said, “Probably. You're not going to get somebody who's a stranger just to walk into your apartment and sit down and stay. There has to be some sort of a relationship there.” . . . He's confused as to what things would make someone want to stay of their own free will.
You mean he doesn't understand friendship?
No. I really get the impression that he's just never given this any thought before. He's asking me, “How do you get people to stay in your house?” [She replied,] “People who come to my house are friends, or they are relatives, but there's something there already and they want to stay. They want to come in the first place and they want to stay and visit, you know?”73 The Convenience Store Karen has also had the experience of teaching hybrids about money and how to make a transaction.
During an abduction event that took place in the middle of the night, a hubrid forced Karen to drive him to an all-night convenience store. As was usual for Karen, she resisted at first; but she was nevertheless forced to do the hubrid's bidding. Karen's description of the incident highlights how dependent on abductees hubrids are. On the initial drive to the convenience store, the two engaged in a verbal sparring match.
He's asking me questions about the store. What kind of store? What's the difference between that and other stores? . . . He wanted to experience being in a store, and he said—it was late, you know; it was like between 2:00 and 4:00 in the morning—and he said, “Where would you go?” And I said, “There's only one place that I know that's open twenty-four hours.” And I thought, “Why am I telling him this?” Then I say, “Forget it.” So he says, “I know. I know there are stores that are open. What I'm asking is, where is there one near here?” And I say, “I don't know.” I say the same thing. I say, “I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.” And he said, “Well, if you pick the nearest one, we'll get this over with faster” or something like that. So I say okay, and I go to the Wawa [a Pennsylvania convenience store] that's right near us because I know there's no way out [of obeying]. We're either going to sit in that car all night or, if I at least get him there, then I can get home. . . .
It seems like we parked on the side [of Wawa]. I got out of the driver's side. . . . I was wearing a coat. . . . So, we get out of the car. I'm woozy. I can't stand very well. Maybe actually he opens the door for me. I remember thinking, “Oh, how chivalrous,” because I thought, isn't this interesting, it takes an alien to get a man to open a door for you these days. As we go in, he's kind of holding my back to hold me up. He's got his hand on my back.
He's not actually pushing you?
No, he's more steadying me. Well, a little pushing me. And I'm like, “What are you doing? Are you crazy?” And he says, “Don't do anything.” I said, “What am I going to do? I can't even move, you moron.” So, we go into the Wawa.
There can't be many people in there, I would assume.
It's deserted. And there's one clerk who looks worse than the alien. . . . And he buys something insignificant like from the counter, like candy or something.
Do you have your purse with you or do you have money with you?
I don't remember. I don't think I have my purse with me because it's really big and bulky. . . . It seems like he turns to me like, “Are you going to pay for this?” And I'm like, “I'm not paying for it.” I look at him like, “You pay for it.” So the clerk is kind of looking at us. I get the suggestion that I should reach into my pocket to see if I have money. Before we got out of the car, he told me to put money in my pocket. We get in the store and I said, “I'm not paying for this.” . . . He actually reached into my pocket and pulled out two crumpled dollars and puts it on the counter.
The clerk probably thinks that we're drunk. And the clerk pushes back one of the dollars and just takes the other one. And the being takes the crumpled-up dollar and holds it in his hand. And I think, “You better give that back to me. It's my dollar.” The clerk gives the change to the guy. The clerk rings this up, and I look, and he holds up the change. . . . It's like he doesn't know what to do.
The clerk is standing there holding this and then says, “Here.” . . . And the alien is actually saying to me, “What should I do?” or “What does he mean?” That's what he's saying. And I'm saying, “Figure it out. Figure it out.” And I think we end up leaving and he doesn't take the change.
He doesn't take the change from the clerk?
I don't think so. I don't think he knows what he was supposed to do, because, on the way out, we get into this argument, if you could call it that. I said, “What if there was somebody in there that I knew? Are you stupid?” And he said, “You didn't help me in there. You didn't play your role. You didn't perform.” And I said, “Wait. I'm not going to perform. Haven't you figured that out yet?” And I thought, gee, we're arguing like a couple, you know? So he kind of throws me into the car.
He pushes me in. . . . I said, “What if I saw somebody I know in there?” And he looked at me and said, “That would not be a problem.” . . .
And now I'm getting this lecture on my overall attitude, which is not up to snuff. And this guy has been around any number of times and knows me well. He's sick of it, he says. He's tired of it.
He's tired of this constant battle. And I say, “Well, welcome to my world. This is the way it is.
This is the way it's going to be.” And they always say the same thing, “There will be consequences.” They always say things like that. “There will be consequences.” And I say, “Hey, give it your best shot. What are you going to do?” . . . So he says, “Now you've got to get us home.” And I said, “What if I don't?” And he's like, “We can't stay here. We have to get home.” I said, “I'm too tired.” He says, “You've got to drive. You've got to get us back.” You know, sometimes even though they seem very limited, there is an air of desperation to them. There really is. I've sensed it when they're up against something that's not in the program, and they don't have any ability to think critically and get out of the box. . . . And I'm amused at his desperation. I think it's pretty funny, because he's saying, “We can't just sit here.” And I kind of say, “Why not? Let's just sit here for a while. I don't feel like driving.” He says, “No. You must.” Then he says, “You've got to get back. What about your husband?” And I think, “Oh, shit. I've got to be back in bed.”74 Karen's constant lack of cooperation slows down the hybrids' training and frustrates them. Yet even after many years of defiance, the aliens still use her as often and extensively as I have seen among abductees.
The Rules of Eating Even with eating, rules are paramount in hybrids' minds. Onboard a UFO, the strict behavioral rules and clear distinctions between one directive and another allow all aliens to exist within familiar boundaries.
On Earth, hubrids and hybrids find it challenging to adjust to the complexity of human rules. We see an example here, in an exchange between Betsey and Jamie about why humans do not follow their own nutritional guidelines.
Is he asking you what people eat?
No, he's asking me about what foods taste like, why he would choose one over another, why I would choose one over another. He's telling me he's tried some foods, but he doesn't know what other ones to try.
Does he say which ones he's tried?
Yeah, he told me he tried one of the eggs that we bought and I'm telling him he has to cook the eggs, you can't just eat them raw. He's asking me why and I said, “Well, they taste better, number one, and, number two, the bacteria in them could make you sick.” He wants to know, “Do you cook everything then?” And I said, “No, some things you do and some things you don't.” He tried the milk. He didn't like the milk. He's asking me, “How much do you eat every day?” And I said, “Well, don't you get hungry? Eat when you get hungry.” I'm not sure I understand his answer, but it's something about he doesn't have to get hungry. I don't know; I don't really understand his answer, but it's like he's trying these foods, but he's getting what he needs from somewhere else. I'm telling him, “We usually get all our bodies need with food; that's how we sustain ourselves.” He knows that and he knows about nutrition, but he says, “People eat so many different things and there's such a variety, how do you know which ones to choose?” He thought it went by nutrition, but he said he's observed that not many people follow that and he's confused.
He sees so many things that wouldn't be in a nutrition guideline sort of thing and he's confused because he sees this so much. I said, “You should follow it, but people usually don't.” And he wants to know, “Why do they have it if no one's going to follow it?” He's really confused on that.
On the nutrition guidelines, you mean?
Yeah. He's feeling if they're there, everyone should follow them; and he's confused why people aren't, why he observes so much that people aren't doing that. It's hard to explain. I'm telling him, “Sometimes it's for the taste. Sometimes it's what's available. There are a lot of different reasons.
Sometimes people eat just to get comfort.” And that one really confuses him. He's asking me, “How can you be comforted by food and which foods are comforting?” And “Are all foods comforting? Are there some that are not?” And “How do you perceive this comfort and, if you're hungry and you've eaten, then you're not hungry anymore?” Is that the comfort that I'm talking about? I'm telling him, “No. Just sometimes you attach emotions to certain things and this is one of them. Not everyone does this, but a lot of people do.”75 In his confusion, Jamie showed that he implicitly trusted the “rules” from above. That the humans determined that nutritional guidelines could be fallible was foreign to him.
Fried Clams Eating outside of the privacy of home can be puzzling to hubrids. What they eat onboard remains a mystery. Hubrids show an interest in trying human food, but they usually only taste it. Because Eric had been with Bernard for decades, Bernard had seen him eat many times. During one event, he was driving with Eric and wanted to eat lunch. They stopped at a restaurant with a drive-thru window. Bernard ordered fried clams.
I told Eric they [fried clams] were the best food on Earth. I said to him, “But if you eat two, your heart will stop.” And then I had to explain to him it was a joke and why. Then after I explained it was a joke and why, he laughed. He ate one and said it was wonderful. “Oh, that [tastes] wonderful, Bernard. These are very good.” “Have another one.” “No, thank you.” And I ate the rest of the fried clams, which wasn't tough.
After lunch, they drove about forty miles on the highway and stopped at a general store.
You know what I got him? I got him grape soda. I asked if he wanted anything, and he asked me if they had grape soda. And they did. They had grape soda. I think I got a six-pack of grape soda, and he drank the grape soda. He loves grape soda.
But he didn't want anything to eat? He just wanted the soda?
The soda and he had the one fried clam. He wanted to know what the tartar sauce was, but he didn't want to put any tartar sauce on his clam.76 Families Adjusting to life on Earth means understanding human families. This can be difficult, because hubrids do not have families. They have no parents or relatives to care for them or to socialize them. They have no family members who can provide different perspectives on life and on how to behave in various everyday situations. Early in their work together, Betsey tried to explain family relationships to Jamie.
He's asking me, “Do we have a relationship—a normal human relationship?” And I said, “No, no.
This is different than normal relationships. There's a relationship, but it's not the same as between two humans.” He's asking me, “How do relationships form?” I said, “There are so many ways.
You meet someone; you talk with them, maybe work with them or go to school with them. Family relationships are your family. You're born to that family. You grow up knowing these people.” And he's asking me, “Is that parents?” And I said, “Yeah, it could be parents; it could be brothers and sisters; it could be cousins, aunts, uncles; there are a lot of different family relationships.” He's asking me do I know every member of my family, and I said, “To a certain point, but sometimes you don't know somebody; they live too far away or whatever.” And he's confused because he thought just the parents raise the kids; and I said, “For the most part, but that doesn't mean other people can't be around the child and have a relationship.” He's asking, “Are these caretakers?” And I'm not sure what he means. He's saying, “Do they look after the child? Do they make sure its needs are met?” And I said again, “Sometimes. Everyone is different.” He's telling me it's very hard for him to understand; that's something that doesn't exist in his world. He's telling me he had caretakers that took care of his needs, but it was different. He wasn't aware before that families could be a lot bigger. He knew, of course, that they were bigger, but he didn't know that the parts that weren't directly involved with the child could form a relationship as well.
You mean cousins or something?
Yeah, aunts and uncles and cousins.
So he didn't know about extended families.
Well, he knew extended families existed; he knew the names for them—like he knew aunt, he knew uncle, he knew that. But he didn't realize that those people could also have a relationship with a child that was not their own and be a part of a child's life. And the only thing he can equate it to is a caretaker and that's not really, that's not the same. He said, “Well, is it like another parent?” And I said, “No, it's different than that usually, too.” I'm kind of thinking about my kids and their one cousin. They get together at special occasions —they get together other times, too—and they play; one may spend the night with the other, but they don't live together. So she's not like a sister to them. It's a relationship, but it's different. I said, “Their aunt might take care of them and their uncle might take care of them for an evening or a day, but that's it; that's not where they live and that's not where they're being raised and that's not who's raising them. It's a relationship, but it's different.”77 The breadth of information that abductees have to impart to hubrids is extraordinary. Asking if his relationship with Betsey was normal illustrates how much hubrids need to learn.
Empathy Jamie's emotional relationship with Betsey did not have the depth that most human relationships naturally have. Areas that called for a “normal” response were nonexistent. One afternoon in September 2005, Jamie showed up at Betsey's home and his attention was immediately drawn to a splint on her arm. The night before, Ken had pushed her backward onto the floor as punishment for talking to me and thereby endangering Jamie. She put her arms back to break her fall and broke her wrist. Since I had known her, this was the second broken bone that resulted from abduction activity. The next day, she went to the doctor, who put a cast on it.
That evening, Jamie visited her. He was not concerned that she was in pain or had been treated violently. He showed no empathy or sympathy. He asked where she had it fixed. She told him she had gone to a doctor who put it in a splint. He was interested in the doctor and why a person would go to one. Betsey explained it to him.
Jamie had a hard time understanding why her arm was going to take six weeks to heal. She said, “It has to heal on its own and that takes a little time.” He responded that it wouldn't happen that way with him. He could just have it fixed. They then discussed getting sick and going to doctors. Jamie wanted to know if going to a doctor was normal and expected. Betsey said, “No, not unless there is something wrong.” “Is it acceptable to say no if someone asks if you have gone to the doctor?” he asked. She replied, “Yes, but not very often.” He wondered if people will ask him questions about it. “No,” Betsey told him. “It's not a big consideration. Nobody will care.”78 Whether Jamie lacked all empathy, or just chose not to show it, are equally worrying for humans who understand the lack of empathy to be pathological. It is conceivable that empathy may not be functional for the task of controlling humans. For hubrids, however, developing empathy may be possible as they “humanize.” Talking with Neighbors Two days after Jamie and Betsey's talk about her broken wrist, he told her that he had a conversation with one of his neighbors who was looking under the hood of his own car. Why someone would need to do this puzzled Jamie.
He's telling me that he greeted someone in the parking lot [of his apartment building] and the other person greeted him back and he was pleased with that—almost the feeling that “it worked,” because the other person responded. Then he wanted to know why the guy he greeted was looking inside the car. He wanted to know why would you do that. And I said, “Well, he might need to fix it.” He had like the hood up. He's asking me why I don't open my hood and look at it, and I said, “Well, I don't know anything about cars. I could look at it, but I couldn't fix anything.” He's asking me all along those lines, you know, “Can you drive without that knowledge? What do you do when the car is broken?” So it's more practical stuff.
Yeah. I have a feeling this guy really made him curious. I told him maybe he should talk to this other guy, maybe he should ask him what he's doing. He'll probably find out more, because I don't know what he was doing. And he's asking me is that acceptable, can he do that—can he just start talking to somebody about that—and how will they react. I said, “They probably won't mind, but don't force them to talk; just sort of be friendly and let them decide what to tell you.” I said, “That's how you get to know people; that's part of fitting in.” He liked that idea. When I said it was part of fitting in, he liked that.79 Idioms Jamie had another talk with the man in the parking lot a few days later. The conversation unveiled a problem that hubrids have with idiomatic language in all its broad and subtle aspects. Understanding the subtleties of language is important to having any kind of normal conversation with a human, even small talk. But for hubrids, jokes, doubles entendres, unspoken implications, and other subtleties are difficult to understand.
This became apparent when Jamie insisted that Betsey take him to Walmart to buy clothes late one night. She had done this several times before, but Jamie had an urgent reason this time; he said he needed new clothes. “So you head over to Walmart?” I asked.
Yeah. Then we get there—there's hardly anybody there. He wants to go see the clothing. So we go over to the men's section. This is weird—he wants to know if light clothing means it's not warm or does it mean the color. I said it could mean either; I don't understand. He said he wants light clothing and I said, “Why, what's the purpose of it?” and maybe I could figure it out. He said he talked to somebody who's told him he needed to “lighten up,” so he wants light clothing. “Oh, God!” I said. “That's not what it means.” And he's saying he talked to . . .?
He didn't say exactly, but I got the feeling it was a neighbor or something, but he didn't really say. I said, “Did they tell a joke or something?” and he said he didn't know. He wants to know, “Why would you tell a joke in everyday life?” And I said, “That happens a lot. If you didn't laugh, they'd think you're too serious.” And I'm thinking that's probably what happened. Then he wants to know, “How do you determine when someone wants you to laugh?” “I don't know,” I said. “If you look at the other person and they're kind of chuckling and laughing then you should.” Whoever it was told him to lighten up and change his clothes once in a while too, because he's always wearing the same thing; so he thought it had something to do with clothes. He's worried because, “Does that mean they know I don't fit in?” And I said, “Well, I don't think it was anything serious. Everyone has their little quirks where they don't exactly fit in; it's not something that's serious here.” Then he wants me to show him what clothes would make him fit in more and how often does he need to switch them so he looks like everybody else. I said, “Most people change every day, but you have to clean them somehow” and he really didn't think that was a problem.
He's more interested in what he should be wearing instead of how to take care of it.
We got a couple pairs of jeans and a couple shirts—I told him he needs a little color, a colored shirt. I got him a kind of regular jacket too, because the jacket he always wears looks like it's out of the sixties or something. I'm telling him he should try the pants on, but he doesn't want to do that.80 The desire to buy new clothes could have been the first time that Jamie had heard “advice” from a nonabductee and he understood it as something he should put into action. He did not first ask Betsey what she thought of the advice. He was apparently confident enough to take it upon himself to do what he thought was the right thing without her input.
If Jamie and other integrating hubrids are safe, then the program is safe. But there is only so much abductees can do to protect them. Hubrids have to learn to protect themselves, and to keep their origin a secret. This is easy through mental manipulation. But they also have to develop acceptable relationships with people around them. Being strange and in opposition to other humans would make them stand out and draw suspicion, at the very least, about their emotional and mental life.
Although hubrids interact with abductees, the point of integrating into society is to be able to have a life among nonabductees. Regardless of what the abductees explain to them about correctly interacting with people, there is a tremendous amount still to learn about how to present themselves in both everyday life and personal relationships.
CHAPTER 8 Learning about Relationships “What's the weather like there?” We know very little about gray aliens' private lives. We do not know if they have non-work relationships with one another. Both the small and tall grays seem to exist within a confined set of functions and responsibilities. They are focused solely on carrying out their specific duties. Their emotions are extremely narrow and limited to their tasks. Less is known about insectalins, but they appear to have a slightly wider emotional range than grays. Depending on their stages, hybrids become more human and their emotional ranges expand. Hubrids may have relatively normal emotions, but the responsibility falls upon abductees to teach them how to use those emotions in a normal manner.
Humans are social animals; relationships are the glue that holds society together. Relatives, friends, casual acquaintances, co-workers, the person behind the counter at a local store, and countless others make up the society in which most people live. Very little of this exists for hybrids. Humanoid hybrids lead extremely confined lives, obeying rules and following orders. Talking to abductees gives them a sense of the differences between humans and themselves, but little else.
Hubrids have wider, but still restricted, interactions with humans and their peers. When they come to live here, they are suddenly connected to a variety of humans, and it is difficult for them to understand the subtlety and complexity of relationships—for example, those between parents and children, husband and wife, boyfriend and girlfriend, teacher and student, boss and worker, friends, relatives, neighbors, passing strangers, and others. Growing up onboard UFOs, hubrids learn little about humans' social lives.
By the time they are ready to settle into human society, they need constant help recognizing and deciphering the subtleties of relationships.
Abductees often say that teaching hubrids is similar to teaching children how to behave. They must teach them to say common words like “goodbye.” They often have to explain why mundane interactions like small talk are necessary. They must instruct them in how to exchange pleasantries with a neighbor.
Without normal relationship reactions, hubrids might be thought of, not only as odd, but as having mental disorders, and this would make them stand out.
Small Talk An example of the scope of relationship instruction comes from an experience that Brian had. While onboard, Brian was required to teach the hubrid Anne, with whom he was very affectionate, about relationships, sex, and even customary small talk. I asked Brian first if Anne was happy to see him again.
She seems to be. I think she talks to me with her mouth a little bit. I think she said, “Hi. How are you?” The way she said it didn't really flow right. It's almost like she was someone from a foreign country trying to learn how to talk English. It was very kind of staccato. It seemed kind of weird. .
. . She didn't seem like she was very comfortable talking or something. . . . And I said, “I'm okay.
How are you?” So, we're having a conversation. Part of me feels like I'm teaching her how to communicate in a way. . . . It almost seemed like she was kind of following a script of how to have a normal conversation. I think she asked me how I was doing, and I said, “I'm doing well.
Thank you.” I think I explained to her what “thank you” meant. She said, “Where are you from?” . .
. I think I said, “Well, I'm from Reading. Where are you from?” . . . She didn't even attempt to answer. She just kind of ignored it. She said, “What's the weather like there?” or something like that. It's really stupid stuff. I said, “Yeah. It's starting to get warmer out.” She said, “Very nice.” I think we just go through a whole series of things like that.
You mean there was more after this?
I think so. I'm trying to think. . . . “How old are you?” I know she said that. I'm not sure what else she said. I think I was mainly just teaching her how to have a conversation. . . . She says, “It was nice to meet you.” She already knows me. It's a very, very elementary way of talking. Very generic. Because, even though those are what you use for small talk, it's not really how people talk. . . . I feel like she gave me a hug at some point. After we were done, at some point, she said, “Thank you” to kind of show what she learned.81 A month later, Brian explained sexual love and passion to Anne. He told her about hugging and kissing in bed. She wanted to know the purposes of kissing and stroking. He said that kissing was a way to make you feel nice. She wanted to know how one did this and he mentally described it to her.82 Fraternizing Betsey had to explain the necessity of using salutations and interacting with people in social situations when Ken and Jamie appeared in her home with two young hubrids. They both sat on a couch with Betsey facing them.
[Jamie's] asking me if “goodbye” is necessary after every conversation and I'm telling him no. . . .
“Sometimes you say it and sometimes you don't. If somebody says it to you, you return it.” We talked about that for a little while and we switch into like, “When you're in groups of people, how do you act?” I'm almost getting the sense of a party, but not really, but like a lot of people around, how do you interact with all of them. I'm almost getting the feeling of a large group and it's almost overwhelming.
You [mean] a large meeting or a rock concert or something?
This feels more like a large group of people and they're-breaking-into-groups-and-talking kind of feeling. I think he's looking at, “Do you interact with everyone?” And I'm saying, “No, you interact on a group level.” I guess four or five people are talking and, “You interact with all of them at the same time.” And he's asking how you do that. “You just follow the conversation and if you have something to say, you wait for your opening and you say it. And everybody else is doing the same thing and you don't have to pay attention to the rest of the conversations going on at that time. You pay attention to the one that you're in.” And he's saying, “But won't you miss the other conversations?” And I said, “Yeah, you will. You can't be having ten conversations at the same time. It's just common courtesy to pay attention to where you're at and then, if you want, you can excuse yourself and go to a different one.” I don't know if he was in this situation or just was told about it or what, but I do get the sense that it's overwhelming for him.
So you tell him that you basically have to pay attention to your group; you can't keep up with every conversation.
Yeah. And he's asking me, “Which group do you choose?” And I say, “Whichever you're closest to. But if that doesn't interest you, politely excuse yourself and maybe wander over to another one.
But you don't try to take in everything at once. Just take it a little at a time. And if someone speaks to you, you speak to them. You're polite. You could watch what the other people are doing and sort of follow what they're doing.” I'm saying, “You know, you look at the others; they're not trying to take in every conversation that's going on at the same time. They're having their own. You need to be relaxed. If you're not relaxed, they're going to know something's wrong.” I get the feeling the people he was around, like they're dressed up a little bit. It's not formal, but most of the men seem to have jackets on. There are no blue jeans or anything like that.
You tell him that he should be relaxed, otherwise people will know something's wrong?
And he's bringing the goodbye thing in again. . . . And he's asking, “When you leave something like that, do you have to say goodbye?” And I tell him, “Sometimes. It depends if you're talking one-on-one with somebody and you want to say goodbye to them; or if you just want to say, “I've got to leave now.” Or if they say it to you, or if you're just quietly slipping out, you don't need to worry about it. It depends.” He's probably getting it. I'm thinking a lot about different situations that I've been in where the rules change depending on what's going on. . . . And I'm trying to explain the rules change. He understands the rules change depending on what's going on, but he's still looking for how they change—like if this happens, then I do this kind of thing. But he's kind of getting it; he's calmer about it now. . . . Whatever this was really overwhelmed him.83 Jealousy, Monogamy, and Sex Betsey remembered instructing a twenty-year-old female hubrid about how to handle a delicate sexual situation. Jamie had brought her to Betsey's home. The female was not one of her hubrids, but Jamie's action gives us a glimpse into his life outside of Betsey and the female's life. It suggests that he believed that the female hubrid needed further instruction and that perhaps Betsey was a better teacher than the abductee who had instructed the hubrid before—at least in this one aspect of human life.
Apparently the female had been in a sexual relationship with two brothers and their friend. None of them knew about her relationships with the others. Betsey thought that the event happened when she was perhaps at a college party and the three boyfriends were there. One recognized her, although he should not have, and he caused an angry jealous ruckus. She had to place the three under control and get them home and into bed. She wanted Betsey to tell her the reason for their anger and whether it would occur again. The conversation displays another hubrid difficulty with smoothly integrating into society. Betsey recalled this incident without hypnosis and described it to me using Instant Messaging.
She senses the sexual aspects were the root of the anger, but this doesn't make sense. They are all part of her tasks; she has told them this. Do I understand why they were angry? This occurred with others around. I'm feeling like she felt as though she really called attention to herself. I'm getting the feeling of just a mixture of people, all about the same age (which is why I'm thinking party). I have an image from her of it and I'm seeing one of the three holding a glass (well, a plastic cup really); so again I'm thinking party with drinks. . . .
She saw each of the three during the day. None of them should remember much. She's telling me the one that's not a brother sometimes remembers. He sometimes knows who she is when he first sees her. . . . One of the brothers looked at her and smiled, called her by a name he uses with her.
The others looked at him oddly. She was confused. She's asking if she should have controlled them the minute something began that was not expected—like at this point, would that have been wise? How would she know?
So the situation seemed innocent enough at first?
She sensed one of the others becoming angry that the one brother knew her—she was his; they had something special (I think she's picking this up from his thoughts). She is trying to calm the situation, but not by calming them (or controlling them, is what she is saying). She doesn't understand the problem, though. She is telling the one who is getting angry (I think this is the non- brother) that she has something special with them all. She thinks this will help, but he then gets very angry. She's asking me, “What happened?” And then why did the other two also get angry when she had said nothing to them?
I think one of them might have said something kind of loudly, because I'm getting from her that “others were interested.” Then she felt that she was in danger. She called attention to herself, but doesn't know why. She quickly controlled the three and they all left together. She made sure each got to their beds and slept the rest of the night; but she does not know what went wrong, so she does not know what to do.
She cannot stop seeing them—this is her task. She must understand it. . . . She doesn't get it.
Why can't she be with all of them? This is her task. I'm sensing they are not the only three, too; but they are the three who had the problem. . . . I am saying that the problem is they found out about one another. She should not have gone to where all of them were without being wary, until she knew they didn't recognize her. Or she should have controlled them to not recognize her. One cannot know about the sexual relationship she has with another and now she is asking me what other things may happen. What other rules about sex should she know?
Betsey had to explain that men expect sexual relationships to be monogamous and the men got upset when they realized she had sexual activities with all three. They felt betrayed by her and the other males.
They each expected exclusivity with her.84 I am explaining that rule number one is most people expect only sex with them, if there is any kind of a relationship feeling (which I knew she had worked on with all of them). . . . I am explaining that each of them, because she fostered that relationship feeling in them, believed her to be only with them. That was the component that caused it. It wasn't just sex; it was a relationship. Most humans will assume that means no one else. . . . So there is anger because they feel she betrayed them and, furthermore, betrayed them with a brother or a friend. She is saying the relationship is necessary, but she has this with all of them. It is needed with all of them. . . . I am telling her that sex in the context of a relationship puts it into a more serious category. Sex implies this is a serious relationship, not just flirting. I have to explain flirting then.
She asks you about flirting?
I said the word, and she didn't understand it. I had to explain it. . . . My sense is these were “her” males [abductees], since she had manipulated all of them . . . and I am getting the feeling that these three are not the end of “her” males—there are more. But the others weren't involved in this little dating disaster.
The conversation turned to sexual relations. Betsey did her best to explain the complexities of sexual activity to a hubrid who already had her own set of rules for it.
She is asking in general about relationships. With the flirting bit, I said there was no sexual contact. She wasn't aware a relationship could exist without a sexual component. I am getting the feeling that the only “relationship” she's ever heard of is the kind she creates. I am telling her about those who hold off on the sex to allow the feelings of love and commitment to grow first.
I'm saying, “Others do not wait at all. It all depends on the people involved and even the situation itself.” She wants to know what the rules are for this. Are the first group (those waiting to have sex) governed by a separate set of rules? How does one know what set of rules applied to them? She is also confused because she is saying the sex encourages the feelings to expand—waiting should not do the same thing. I am explaining that some people agree with her and those are the ones that would probably not wait to have sex. It is personal choice between the two people involved.
Now she wants to know what will happen if one is in the wait group and another is in the not-wait group. Which one will win?
Win?
I'm saying that they might decide to talk it over and come to an agreement. Or, they might not be compatible and end the relationship. Or they may compromise and wait a little while. She is seeing those that wait to have sex as one group and those that don't as another completely separate group. I am trying to explain that it isn't like that. One might decide to change their mind on the subject. Another might want to wait with one person, but then not with another. This is not a situation where you can divide people up into groups with a big line down the center. . . .
And this explanation is confusing her; she is telling me I am describing something that cannot work. How can the system work when rules are broken and groups are not defined? I am saying, “It does work. Our systems don't always have defined groups, but they still function.” She is sort of turning the conversation away from this area now. I get the sense she thinks that I am wrong and the groups must be defined. She is kind of dismissing my “silly notions,” is the feeling.
That is odd. She is assuming that you know less about humans than she does, in a way. Or at least that you are feeding her wrong information.
Well, she wasn't until this point, but I think when I tried to pull apart her vision of the orderly groups beset with a book of rules she couldn't handle that. She is asking me some other things now —uh, this would be the not-so-PGI3 [sexual] part.
Okay. Dive into it. I can take it.
She is asking me why these men engage in different forms of sex (she is seeing each position as a new form). They don't do this with her because she does not permit it, but she understands they do it with others. I may be wrong, but my sense is she knows quite a bit about each one of them— either through questioning or just looking. And what she won't allow is anything other than your kind of he's-on-top standard position. . . .
I am telling her that we (humans) find more pleasure in variety. She is contradicting me. She is telling me that pleasure is not the main reason for sex. Bonding is. I am saying that bonding is part of it for us, but pleasure is just as important to us. She is asking me why. I am saying that, to us, pleasure enhances the experience and permits the bonding to be even stronger. She wants to know how these different kinds (positions) create pleasure. I am saying that a new way is unexpected and therefore excites more, creating the increase in pleasure. She is not seeing this. She is telling me it is the same task; the pleasure would be the same. I am telling her that humans don't feel that way. We find more pleasure in finding a new approach to things.
I am then trying a different approach. I am telling her that the same way over and over decreases pleasure, because it becomes routine. The new way restores the original pleasure. She likes this better. She can understand this. (She says she can. My sense is that she has a very limited idea of what I'm saying.) She is telling me, though, that this will not be an issue with her.
She maintains the same level of pleasure with the men each time. She is very careful to maintain this pleasure level so they will respond correctly. She is indicating to me that she now understands the different ways we use because we cannot sustain the pleasure the way they can. . .
. She is getting up to leave now. Jamie is coming back over. He is talking to me a little bit. He is saying [she] has much to learn yet.85 This is one of the few integrated female hubrids I have information about. The conversation could have meant more than sorting out complex boyfriend relationships. It suggests that the female was not concerned about becoming pregnant, because either birth control was used or she could not become pregnant. Or, conversely, that she wanted to become pregnant.
Bernard and Eric Discuss Sexual Relationships In the summer of 1986, Bernard was at a beach preparing his catamaran for the water. He was waxing the hulls and doing other tasks to make the boat seaworthy. He suddenly noticed Eric standing next to him. As usual, Bernard had no sense of surprise at Eric's appearance. After a question cascade about what Bernard was doing and why, Eric turned his attention to relationships.
Then he asks about my wife. And then he asks a whole bunch of personal questions about my life and my sexual habits and how they changed and how I feel about them. I'm just standing there telling him. I tell him, “That's none of your goddamn business.” . . . He stands there with this beaming smile on his face like he's all-knowing . . . but I don't think he's got a clue about anything.
. . .
It's difficult to explain these things to him. . . . He's asking if I still love my wife, and I say yes.
But then he's sort of asking questions that I'm admitting that things have changed. He wants me to explain why I still think her body parts are as attractive as they were when she was eighteen and I first met her. I'm acknowledging that basically the body parts aren't, but I'm still attracted to my wife, and that your sexual relations change. . . . He seems to really envy me and wants that.
He started to ask me about whether or not I'm going to find my daughters sexually attractive when they get older. And he can tell, before I even answer the question, that that definitely evoked the wrong emotion in me. He's saying that that's the way most people react, but he doesn't understand. He's never had a daughter. The questions he's asking me aren't like socially inappropriate; they're just the kinds of things the crudest of guys, other than to try and be crude, wouldn't be asking other guys about in detail, or anyone in detail. He has the social maturity of an eight-year-old. He looks like he's twenty-five or thirty, handsome, good shape. He's got a lot of [Earth] girlfriends, though.
Then he wants to know if I think my friend's wife is attractive or if I'm attracted to her. I told him yes, and I have to explain to him why. Because I think she is attractive that doesn't mean that I expect to have sex with her. He asks me, “Is that because your friend would be angry with you?” I say, “Well, he would be, but that's not the reason that I'm not going to come on to her. It wouldn't be appropriate.” I think he's kind of, as I'm talking to him, saying like, “Oh, thanks for filling me in.” . . . He told me before how, one day, he hopes he can marry one of his girlfriends or be with her permanently, but he loves all of his girlfriends.86 Friendship Several days later, Eric appeared again. Bernard was fishing off a pier. The two went to a private area to talk about friendship. Friendship was a complicated subject for Eric to understand. They discussed the complexities of choosing a friend. For example, Bernard told Eric that, although some people may have friendly personalities, they can also be dangerous criminals whom you would not want as friends. Being friends means more than just enjoying the other person's company. Bernard explained that the people you become friends with are the ones you feel you can count on, and you want them to know they can count on you as well.
Eric then asked, “Well, what do we do next to be friends?” Bernard told him that that was something that just happened in the normal course of events, but that their relationship was not developing within the normal course of events.
At one point he says, . . . “Should I tell you everything that I can tell you about what you want to know?” I said, “That would be great.” I said, “If you really want to have a real friendship with me, you should allow me to remember all of the exchanges we have between each other.” “Well, I cannot do that,” he replied. “You pointed out that there are techniques that people have for remembering this sort of thing. And that people do find this out. If friendship is that important, what difference would it make if I was one person who knew this? If there is something I'm going to find out about I can go tell about, then why does this have to be secret?” He said . . . if I remembered everything, it is unlikely it would change anything. He says, “But your recollections would be highly accurate and organized. Part of what contributes to the effectiveness of the secrecy of the program is the partial memories that people have.” Bernard asked him why not throw the rules aside and have a regular uncontrolled conversation with no memory restrictions. Eric said this was not going to happen.
When I ask him why, he says, “This cannot be. This will have to be our private relationship.” And I said, “Well, why? What are you doing that you have to do secretly? Why can't you just tell everyone?” He has a big smile on and he says, “It is best for everyone that these things are secret.” This is a very open conversation. He's letting me say, I think, just about everything I want. And I'm saying, “Well, if you let me know the things you cannot tell me because of the rules, I won't persist and pry and try to get you to. But in turn, I want to know everything about why you're here and what you're doing, even if I forget it afterward.” He's affirming that he can do that. And I've told him that I will do my best while we are with each other to be his friend. . . .
And he says, “Well, you said that there is nothing anyone could do for you that would make you appreciate them more than to let you know things that you could not.” I said, “That is true, but there is nothing in my life, practically, that would probably mean anything more to me than if somebody gave me a hundred million dollars. But . . . that wouldn't make that person my friend.
So even though you do this, that doesn't make you my friend.” I told him that this was getting over- complicated. That we needed to talk and do things, and I didn't find it difficult to feel that people are my friends nor I theirs. . . . It was something that just kind of happened.87 In January 2004, Bernard met with Eric a few hours before he was scheduled to have a session with me. Bernard had a doctor's appointment in the morning. When he left the doctor's office, a switch went on in his mind and he “knew” he was going to drive to a Denny's restaurant and see Eric. It was not surprising or puzzling to him. By this time, the two had been meeting and talking together for at least eighteen years.
So you park in the space at Denny's. Do you just sit there and wait, or do you get out of the car, or . . .?
No. I get out of the car and I walk up the side of Denny's. There's like a handrail there and Eric is like leaning on it . . . and he turns and our eyes meet and the switch to the other world goes on.
Now I am totally cognizant of Eric. The second I see Eric's face, I remember everything about what I have done with Eric, what he is, and what happens with me, and I am just aware. . . . He just walks up and extends his hand and shakes it and kind of slaps me on the shoulder and says, “Hi. How are you doing?” or something like that. He spoke out loud and he says, “It's crowded in there. Shall we go talk in the car?” And there are other people there going by. . . . I'm sure he spoke out loud there and for some reason I find the handshake interesting. I think that that is for show. I think if I were meeting Eric privately, we wouldn't do that.
Bernard and Eric walked to a nearby hotel and sat in the lobby and talked.
He's saying that there's going to be a new phase to our friendship. He's telling me what he's gained from this, what they learned, and how now he's going to be able to respond and let me respond on a somewhat different level and he's telling me a lot about this. He's telling me a lot about The Change that's coming and its nature and its significance, and he's also telling me he's very negative about me coming [to your home office for hypnosis].
He is? Huh!
He refers to himself as “the ones like me.” He clearly is telling me . . . he is much more different from the aliens than he is from me, or any human. And when he was given this task, he could not imagine identifying with a surface person—Earthling—because of our hugely limited abilities compared to them. But they are prevented from having personal relationships with each other as we would think of them. And he started to relate to me that this relationship is every bit as important to him as I've always suspected it was. The aliens wanted him to be a friend and develop friendship as a normalization process for when The Change comes that would be expanded to everyone. . . .
As this evolved, the significance of all of this to him started to become apparent. . . . You know what he really wants is to have human relations with people with his capabilities. He sees how wonderful his life could be with real relations with people who are like him. And . . . the kind of meaning that [friends] have to us has been an incredibly exciting thing for him. Not that he is excited about me as a friend, but that he is now realizing what being alive is going to be like.
Did he happen to say why it was that he was not allowed to have personal relationships with others like him?
Yes and no. I asked him that. And for some reason he couldn't answer the part about me. But they don't want them sexually attracted to hybrid women. And they aren't. They're attracted to Earth women only.88 The theme that hubrids seek normal relationships with abductees, even though they might be only one- sided, does not tell the whole story, however. These relationships can be more balanced than they seem.
Some “special” abductees are being purposely trained by hybrids for work in the program's future.
In the summer of 1988, Bernard was on a fishing vacation with friends on the Kennebec River in Maine. He was outside of a boathouse waiting for a friend when Eric walked up behind him. As at other times, they had a conversation about what constituted friendship. Bernard told Eric about the different kinds of friends one might have. He said, “Friends do things for each other. They help each other.” Therefore, Eric was not really a friend, because their relationship was one-sided. For example, Bernard could not ask him questions about his life apart from Bernard. Eric said there were things he could not say, but it was important that Bernard be his friend, because Bernard was “special.” Bernard said, “I've been hearing I'm special from you people since I was a kid. What does that mean? Why do you say that?” He kind of stops me again. He says, “You are special for many reasons, for several reasons.” He says, “All of the people from the surface who come to the ships are special because you are all prepared to participate in the great Change that will come to humanity. In addition, there are some like you who have been given special information and knowledge so that, when The Change comes, you will know what to do and will be able to assist or help.”89 Although teaching and demonstrating normal human life to hubrids is essential for the aliens' program, as Eric said, some abductees have additional and very different roles to play within it. They are subjected to special training situations for possible future responsibilities more directly related to the aliens' goals. They are almost certainly indicative of many thousands more around the world with the same training.
CHAPTER 9 Training Abductees for The Change “I'm going to be able at some point to kind of jump between both worlds.” In typical abduction scenarios, abductees involuntarily contribute to the alien integration program by supplying sperm and eggs, tending to hybrid children, and teaching hybrids how to pose as humans. Some abductees, however, play more significant roles. In The Threat, I described how abductees have been used to calm other onboard abductees. Female abductees are sometimes made to help in the collection of sperm. In some cases, abductees have been required to go with grays when abducting people. Why only some and not all abductees engage in these activities is still an open question, but it is clear the aliens are going to give them special functions and responsibilities in the future.
It took me a while to learn the extent of these functions. In 2003, when Eric told Bernard about The Change and that abductees would have special duties when it happened, I had not learned enough to understand fully what he was saying. I knew many abductees believed they had “information” stored deep within them that might eventually be called into use, but very little else. I had also investigated many situations in which abductees were engaged in “testing” procedures, as I called them in Secret Life. Now I know that they were not testing procedures; they were training procedures.
Training abductees for The Change stands out as a critical component of the integration program.
Selected abductees are being taught abilities only hybrids and aliens have. This training consists of making abductees perform alien tasks, either by themselves or in concert with hybrids. It seems the idea behind the training is to expand the size of the workforce available to implement The Change and to help after it is in effect.
All abductees are lifelong victims of the abduction program and deserve understanding and empathy.
But “special abductees” experience something even worse. They are unwilling workers in an organization they had no choice but to join. They desperately wish they could get out of this captivity, and these “special” duties add to their feeling that they are betraying the human race.
“Special” Abductees After an abduction, some abductees retain telepathic abilities. This disconcerts them. They complain of unwillingly knowing peoples' thoughts. They want it to stop. Usually, the telepathy ebbs and disappears after a week or so. This residual effect presents the possibility of a neurological alteration that enables telepathic ability when required. It may be using existing human neural architecture in a different way, or it may be that something is “hardwired” into an abductee, who will eventually be able to use the ability at will. If the latter is the case, it suggests other brain alterations in abductees and even more capabilities than just telepathy. Moreover, this neural ability may be intergenerational, reinforcing the idea of it becoming a permanent neurological change.
Some abductees have described other alien-like skills they have learned onboard UFOs—finding other abductees, making them do activities against their will, putting images in their minds, and, with the help of hybrids, moving objects with their minds. All of these abilities were thought to be unique to aliens and hybrids. Training to use these skills has emerged as a vital part of the aliens' program. The neurologic manner in which abductees acquire the powers is unknown, but the exercises they go through to practice the skills implies that they will eventually perform them in the real world.
These special abductees are unwilling converts who desperately wish they could get out of their lifelong captivity. Their new duties add to their guilt and their feeling that they are betraying the human race.
Hybrids teach abductees to use their minds to perform a variety of procedures that hybrids and aliens routinely do. Though this training begins onboard UFOs, once the abductees have developed these skills, they continue their training in real-life situations under the evaluation of hybrids. Mentally controlling both objects and people is the first step.
Controlling Objects Training abductees to manipulate objects with their minds begins in childhood. The abductees are taken into a room with late-stage hybrid children of their own age. The room has a collection of special toys.
The hybrid children mentally make ball-like toys fly into the air and then return to their hands. They can mentally make flat featureless toys flash in different colors; they pass around toys that mentally cause them to experience joy.
Once they have demonstrated the toys, the young hybrids tell the human children to do the same thing.
The abductee children protest that they cannot play with the toys in the same way, but the hybrids urge them to try. Of course, the abductees find they can manipulate the toys with their minds, just like the hybrids. This is not telekinesis; rather, it may mean that the toys have the ability to receive whatever “energy” comes out of hybrids' and abductees' minds. This requires a special connectivity between mind and matter that nonabductees may not have.90 When these abductees get older, the objects they are required to manipulate become more complex. In one training session, Paula was onboard a UFO sitting on a semicircular bench with four early-stage hybrids. They were all required to look into an apparatus Paula described as “some kind of a tube—like a computer, but it has depth to it.” The apparatus contained “plates” that had to be moved on top of one another. After much urging and help from the presiding hybrids, she was able to move one “plate” onto another one. The hybrids encouraged her throughout and told her it was one step of many to come.91 The point of this exercise is unknown. What is important is that an abductee and hybrids worked together to achieve a neurological goal.
“Piloting” UFOs Abductees have reported training sessions in which they were taught to “pilot” UFOs. In one such incident, Phil Nelson was placed in front of a console in what he assumed was a training device and watched on a screen as he “flew” the UFO. In another, Clint Samuels practiced maneuvering a UFO. He was placed in what he thought was a flight simulator; he could see a screen with a UFO on it. Either a hybrid or human (Clint was unsure) in his fifties with gray hair and wearing a uniform instructed him.
Clint found it easy to maneuver the UFO with the man's help.92 In yet another training session, Rachel Howard was taken to a console with a screen displaying hostile humans chasing a stranded gray alien through a field. Grays stood by her and told her to use the console to control the UFO and maneuver it over the alien so he could be taken aboard and rescued. The console contained a bewildering array of lights and buttons with symbols on them. Rachel told the aliens next to her that she did not know how to operate the console. The grays insisted that she did know. One showed her how to put her hand over a symbol on the console. After much urging, she remembered that she did indeed know how to operate it; and as she watched the screen she was able to maneuver the UFO over the fleeing alien. The grays told her that she had done a good job.93 Crowd Control Early on, I discovered that some abductees are being trained for controlling crowds of frightened humans. For example, during one onboard training session, Brian was told that it was up to him to keep control of people as they moved in crowds down a certain path. Working in tandem with a hybrid in a specially designed scenario, Brian had to use mental abilities to keep the humans from reaching a river and leaving the city.94 Paula was shown a large wall screen displaying a street map. A hybrid pointed to where she should stand to control people. The hybrid told her that she was to make sure that panicked people moved toward a waiting UFO as they rushed down a street.95 Neural Control over Humans Being trained to move objects with the mind or to urge crowds of people to move in an orderly manner are methods of manipulation that will help the aliens implement their program. But abductee training goes well beyond that. Preparing abductees to exert neural control over humans, just as hybrids do, is the crux of the matter. If abductees are able to exert neural control over humans, then they must be accessing some power similar to what hubrids and hybrids are using.
Pam Martin was the first abductee I worked with who reported learning the alien ability to engage and control neurologically. In the summer of 1986, she and her boyfriend, Angelo, were abducted in New Mexico. During the onboard activities, a hybrid neurologically engaged with Angelo through his optic nerve. Watching this, Pam remembered performing the same procedure on Angelo and other abductees in the past.
Sometimes I look into people's eyes.
What do you do when you look into their eyes?
You go into the black part. It's weird, but not totally weird. It's almost natural, because when you're inside, you feel the same things surrounding you that surrounded them when they had the experience. I did go in his eyes. . . .
You did this with Angelo?
Yeah. Right now, I'm watching him [a gray] do it. . . . I'm standing there close and he took Angelo's head and put his face up to mine and I went into Angelo's eyes. You have to put your eyes real close so your eyes are almost touching; and then the black part, you feel it go around you, and then it's not black anymore.
What is it?
Whatever was in his memory and his mind.
What do you see in there?
I saw his mother, a lady. See that? Now how did I know that was his mother? I hadn't met her yet, but I knew it was his mother. . . . The best part is if I see something really scary, I can just disconnect. He's in my mind, too.
You mean Angelo's in your mind?
Somehow. It's kind of like a room. When I go inside his eyes, he's inside mine. Like we can join, like when they stare in my eyes and I can go into their mind while they're in mine. At first it was scary, but now I'm not afraid. When I remembered back to that first person I did it with, I was afraid. . . . When that one guy held Angelo's head and face toward me, somebody was standing behind me and they held my head like the other guy held Angelo's.96 Training Allison Allison was also trained to use enhanced neurological abilities to control humans onboard. In different abductions, she learned to move objects with her mind, and she practiced staring procedures on an abductee. These activities distressed her even more than the standard abduction procedures.
In one abduction, a male hybrid began by giving Allison the standard talk about how important she was to them. “He's making it sound like I've been working with people; I've been helping them to prepare people, specific people, and that's what he's updating me on.” They then approached a red-haired woman lying on a table and Allison understood that she was to calm her by looking deeply into her eyes.
She's like a zombie. Her eyes are open, so I look into her eyes, but I don't know what I'm looking for or why I'm doing it. . . . He's talking to me about techniques, about calming this woman with my eyes. I look in [her eyes] and she's already very calm, but at the time I just do what he says. He kind of coached me while I look at her. He's coaching me in my mind. He's saying things that don't make sense, like “float with it, easy, float with it.” I don't know if I'm having any effect. I don't feel comfortable talking about this stuff. I want the information because I think it would be interesting, but I don't like playing hybrid.
The hybrid then took her over to a man lying on a table. She was to access his mind, but problems arose.
Two tables up from the short red-haired girl there's kind of a short, squat kind of yucky hairy rounded-belly little guy—older, kind of balding. I'm doing the same thing with the eyes and this [hybrid] guy is telling me that there's a certain space I'm supposed to reach first before I even go up to these humans—a mental space I have to reach and I can't do it myself. He like guides me to this space and then I pick up from there. I'm mentally in tune to his thoughts. He guides me into this clear space in my mind where . . . there's nothing; it's like a slate that's blank and ready to be written on. And then once I get to that place, I guess once I can contain this energy, I can follow it to do, or be, or act how I want it to. . . . Once this hybrid person helps me attain that level of consciousness and my brain is clear [with] energy ready to be funneled into whatever I want it to, then he has me go up to this guy who's lying on the table. That's when it goes wrong.
What happens?
The guy was like the lady with the short red hair. She was just a vegetable. . . . When I get down to this guy, I'm warmed up. I practiced. I've got the feel now. I've got this welling of mental energy and I'm ready to do something with it. And I go up to this guy and something goes wrong.
He gets very strong and he's got his wits about him. I screwed something up, but he [the hybrid] didn't tell me exactly what to do.
I guess instead of messing with the spell, I broke it, because he almost wakes up and then there's kind of panic. He's like extra strong and then I kind of lose the control. It's like my brain's empty and there's this ball of pure clear energy in there and it's just like gone. It's gone and I myself am kind of brought back to reality. I no longer feel the sense of belonging. I feel scared, because this guy's going nuts. He's looking around screaming, sitting up on his arms on this table, screaming. It just startled me, because I was that close to his face. He just woke up.
How close did you get to him?
I was about maybe six inches away. . . . He just kind of goes crazy—I guess like all of us in his position always wanted to do but never could. He's kicking stuff. He doesn't have any clothes on.
He's kicking stuff and screaming. He got up from the table. . . . He's throwing some objects. He's having a fit. . . . He was here [gestures] and I was on this side of the table and I was looking down at him and then he sat up and I backed up.
Now the door[way]'s over here and there's not a cart but like a stand—it reminds me of a washstand—and the stuff he was throwing was on the bottom. I get startled and, like I said, it pulled me out too. My initial reaction was to take off toward the door[way]; so I went quickly toward the door[way] and he came up from behind me and grabbed me. . . . I don't think he wanted to hurt me in particular. I just think he wanted out and he grabbed me like this [gestures]. I don't know if he thought I was going to block the doorway or what.
Does he say anything to you when he grabs you? I mean what's the point of grabbing?
He was just screaming, “I've got to get the fuck out! I've got to get the fuck out! I've got to get the fuck out!” I was headed for the door[way]. It would have been just as easy to push me, but he just kind of grabbed me and went like this to push me down [on the floor] out of his way.
Allison's hybrid escort just stood and watched; he did not try to help. He acted as if this kind of reaction sometimes happens during training sessions and it would be fixed. Allison continued.
He [the abductee] leaves the room. I don't know where he goes or who gets him or what they do with him. . . .
You didn't cause this to happen.
I'm left with the impression that I did, which scares me in a sense, because to say I have the capability or even the power to do what they do with eyes scares me—the whole concept of it, while I'm there. . . . I don't feel they're surprised at what happened. I hear a commotion out in the hall and then dead silence.
They control him, in other words.
Someone did, yeah. I'm just sitting there. I turned my head to look at my friend, my escort, and he's just standing there. I'm like pleading with them almost, “Why? What?” He just looks over and gives me his hand and helps me up. . . .
We go to the screen and it's replaying what happened in there, but the setting doesn't look like it.
The picture doesn't have the other people on the tables and it doesn't have the confines of the room. It's like a computer-generated thing—use a fake background and put the people on it. . . .
This is where the review takes place. Like before, the message is pretty much the same—talking about sharpening my senses. . . . He [the hybrid] just addresses the issue of when something is out of control and he's telling me again about pointers and reminders and things to look for. Again it seems to be another stage in creating my own alertness, whether it's in people's eyes or a console of some sort.
And now he's talking about hearing it, sensing it, before it happens to avoid the situation of what happened to me. I keep getting a sense of, “You're going to need to know this.” It's important that I know this; it's important that I'm able to diffuse a situation before it happens. . . . I feel like I'm a commodity. I'm an investment of theirs and they don't want to lose the investment over something stupid. So I need to fine tune everything so that I'm able to do what I'm supposed to do.
. . . I'm going to be able at some point to kind of jump between both worlds without aid before the transition [The Change]. Hybrid-in-training is the only way I can describe it, but I can be like us and I can be like them.97 Training Betsey Betsey has recounted more of these training sessions than any other person I've worked with because of our frequent contact for several years. In one account, Betsey was taken onboard and became acquainted with two young late-stage hybrids. They were talkative and enthusiastic. She called one of them “Chatty” or, when she used Instant Messaging, just “C.” He had thin hair that made him look like “a very young Ron Howard.” Chatty was going to help her with a hybrid-like task: She was to control a fully conscious abductee from a distance. A hybrid “coach,” as she called him, presided over the event.
Betsey and Chatty walked up to a raised, glass-like booth overlooking a round room in which a fully conscious male human was standing. He was panicked, yelling and screaming. Betsey and the hybrid looked down at him through a glass-like partition. For some reason, she had to put her hands on a metal plate in front of her. Betsey's task was to bring the human under control and make him move around at her will.
Before Betsey started, she did a staring procedure with the hybrid “coach,” who calmed her and helped her prepare for the exercise.
I have to concentrate and look only at him [the coach]. I have to relax and let him help me. We are going to be a group now (but, just him and I, no others). He is going to help me and we will be able to do this together. And I feel myself wanting to do this, wanting to do whatever he tells me to. And he goes back to his seat and we're both looking out the windows. I have to put my hands on the part in front of me again.
Like behind the glass barrier?
Yeah, same idea; only this is up high and only for two. I'm noticing there is a man in the room now. I don't remember seeing him come in. I can feel Chatty is excited. He's telling me this is a human who is not controlled at all. This is a real test for us (his emphasis).
You mean he is not an abductee?
No, I think he is, but he is wide awake. He is looking around. He doesn't know we are there yet.
We are waiting for him to kind of notice us before we begin. I'm not sure what we are supposed to do with him. But he (C) tells me not to concentrate on that, just be ready to begin.
I am staring at this guy. I want to begin, so I am thinking I want him to turn around. C is telling me not to do that when the guy spins around. He's telling me that we are together and even thinking like that will affect things. I need to only think about the training. But this guy knows we're there and he is coming over. He is walking fast, but not running. He looks angry and confused. He is yelling something, but I can't hear anything. I can see him standing below us; his mouth is moving rapidly. He appears angry and it just looks like he's yelling. He's also making hand gestures at us.
But there is no sound.
And C is telling me to begin; first to calm him down. He just looks confused at first, but the yelling and hand gestures have stopped. He's looking right at me and that kind of unnerves me. I'm thinking he knows it's me doing something to him. C is telling me to concentrate. The guy kind of moves his arms up a bit in like some halfhearted gesture and looks like he's trying to say something, but just kind of opens his mouth without anything else. C is kind of pushing me into concentrating again, kind of forcing the issue. And the guy stops moving completely and is just standing there looking at me. Then I/we have him move back out to the center of the room and stand there.
He's completely in control now. And the C guy is telling me now to practice the other task I learned. I'm telling him I need the guy close for that. He's saying no, that I can affect him at a distance too, just not as completely, and he will help me. And I feel him kind of, this is hard to explain, I'm sort of trying to get into the guy's head from the distance, but I also feel C kind of giving me a boost, sort of. And I do feel a connection, but it's not that strong.
With the guy [the abductee] or with C?
With the guy. C is having him raise his head so I can see his eyes. It gets a little bit stronger then. I'm telling C it's not enough and kind of together we're having the guy walk closer again. He comes right up to the spot just below us; he's looking up at us (me) and I'm trying to affect him. I'm having a small effect on him, but not much. I'm saying I'm not close enough. C keeps saying that with him helping I am, but I'm not. He is pushing me to do more, but it's not possible. I'm saying, “I'm not close enough.” How far away are you from him?
Maybe eight feet. C is pushing me really, really hard now and it's giving me a splitting headache. I feel nauseated and then it's almost like I passed out, because things kind of go dark, but I don't think I did. At least, I don't feel like I lost consciousness, just maybe sight for a brief few seconds. And the headache is gone and the nausea is gone. [A] gray is there staring at me.
From below or next to you?
Next to me—actually in front of me. My hands are off that plate thing too. I don't remember removing them. It's the same gray, though. He is staring for a while—no clue what he's doing.
When he moves away, I feel fine again. The one coach guy from earlier is there and C is at the back of the room, not in his chair. The coach guy is showing me something new with the guy down below. I can make him kind of not want to remember he was staring at me. It's not erasing the memory, just making it so he doesn't want to think about it. Then he's telling me I did well on this training and that each one I do well on is helping me get to the level I need to be at. There will be many more, but I am doing well and he is pleased.
No, they are pleased. He's talking for all of them now. They will train me further. He understands I feel it is difficult, but they would not be training me if I was not capable. I am one of them. I have the resources to attain the level they wish. I must remember that. He will see me again and help me to learn new tasks. And he's sort of handing me over to a small gray.98 A week later while onboard, Betsey was given a more difficult task. She had to convince an abductee to jump off a cliff. Chatty was waiting for her. He was happy and excited to be with her again. They went into a room where another male hybrid waited. Soon, a different hybrid brought in a naked human in his thirties with a beard and moustache.
It's a large room. . . . C is telling me not to worry, everything will go fine. We are ready and prepared for this.
Okay. What is the bearded man doing?
Just standing. I'm going over and staring at him. I'm making him think things. . . . I'm putting images in his mind of some kind—a bridge or high place, I think. . . . I'm trying to get him to believe he's actually there. This is not an easy thing to do. He can still see the room around him. I have to convince him not to look at that, only think about this image. It's a little like a tug of war at first. He's seeing the room, I'm pulling him to see my image, he's pulling back to the room, etc. C is helping now, though. He's telling me I need to forget about the room. My thoughts of the room help him to pull back to it.
So he has been monitoring you during this?
Yeah, he knows what I'm doing and thinking. He's telling me the guy is too aware. I need to take him to a deeper level. I'm kind of saying I've never done that. I'm not sure I can. He's telling me to relax, take him to a deeper level, then reintroduce the image.
So he's sort of instructing you, rather than just telling you to do it.
Yeah, he's giving me the steps, kind of, but not the hows. I think I know how, though; the knowledge is just there. This guy is pretty easy to take deeper. I'm getting the impression (not words) that this is why he was chosen to be the target for this. As he goes kind of deeper; I'm sensing a whole different side to his mind . . . hard to explain. It's kind of like I haven't ever had access to this part before. C is saying, “It's easier to do some things here.” And I'm putting the image of that bridge or whatever it is back in his mind. It's sort of a scene of like a long footbridge with no railings. It's made out of metal, almost like a catwalk kind of thing, but not a grate on the bottom. It's over some canyon or something. It's high up. We're supposed to be standing on one side and looking at it stretch out before us.
The room is gone now; it's not even a factor. It's like we're there at this scene, although I still know I'm not really. I don't think [the human] knows that, though. I'm feeling a certain amount of fear from him. He's afraid of the height. C is telling me to now have him walk across the bridge.
The guy is afraid, doesn't want to. I don't want to force him. C is telling me I must. I have to learn this task. I'm pushing the guy to begin walking. I can feel his fear—it's very real. He thinks he's going to slip and fall off, killing himself. I'm forcing him to move his feet one after another slowly.
I'm not supposed to reassure him. He's supposed to be afraid and reluctant and I'm supposed to force [him]. This is awful to remember, but at the time it wasn't really affecting me that much. I have to make sure he's envisioning his feet landing safely on the bridge with every step. I can't let him fall or think he's fallen. This is important.
You force him, while at the same time keeping him safe?
Yeah. There is something about, “If he believes he's fallen, he may damage himself. No damage is to come to him.” I'm getting the idea (this might be wrong) that if he thinks he's fallen, he might throw himself down to the floor and injure himself. Anyway, I get him to the other side okay. I can feel his relief, then I'm having him sit down. He's sitting on a seat (I know this), but he thinks he's sitting looking down into the canyon or whatever it is. I'm waiting. This has to be coordinated and controlled. C is telling me to begin. This is awful.
Betsey coordinated her actions with Chatty, who in turn coordinated with others, although Betsey was not aware of the others until later. Chatty told her that she had to control the situation completely. Any emotions the man had would interfere with her ability to manipulate him. Chatty also told her the previous task had been preparation for this next important one.
This is my task—to see if I can take total control. He's helping me to get into the right mind-set, sort of. It's almost like steeling yourself to do something difficult, but that you must do. And then he's telling me to begin and I'm pushing [the man] to jump off the cliff. This is something he is horribly against. He's terrified, but I can't let up at all. I have to control him completely even through his horror and fear. God, this is just awful.
But before, they said not to let him fall.
But at the time, I'm not really feeling any emotions at all about it. Before was not controlled and coordinated. This is. He won't be hurt, but he doesn't know this. I'm not sure I am completely aware of it either. I am on some level, but I'm also very much “in the moment” as it's going on. I'm mentally pushing this guy and he is resisting me, but I can feel I have the upper hand in it. I've got the control over him. I finally just feel him completely submit to my will and slide off into the cliff.
Almost instantly, I'm in the room again. The bearded guy is on the floor by my feet (I'm on a cube seat). There are three small grays around him. They are helping him up and he's still got a fearful look on his face, but he's “out of it” too. They're walking him out of the room. C is telling me I did very well. He's excited. He's saying this marks a new level in my training. Now we can move forward. He wants me to be aware [of] (feel?) that connection between us. I need to give myself over to him completely so that it will strengthen and be more complete. He's telling me that we will become like one person. What one thinks, the other will know. I cannot learn the tasks in the future until this happens.99 The next day, Betsey was taken into a room where a female abductee in her mid-twenties and some hybrids were waiting. She was required to gaze into the woman's eyes and provoke specific feelings in her. Once again, Chatty directed her.
I need to help him [Chatty] prepare. We will be working together. . . . He wants me to hear what he's saying to me. I'm not hearing him and I need to focus on him. He is being very serious and very intense about it. He is actually being just a bit demanding. I keep hearing him telling me I have to focus on him and what he is saying. . . . Then he backs off and moves over to the right and a little ways away from me. There's a couple of others there. . . . I think he's speaking to them, although I'm not caring too much.
Are these grays, hybrids, or abductees?
Hybrids and one maybe early hybrid? . . . Then I go back to kind of looking around. . . . C comes back over to me and has me get up. We're walking toward the back of the room. There seems to be an area to sit in back there. I'm sitting down and that other guy is coming over too.
He's sitting down in front of me. We're staring at each other, but I'm not sure why. . . .
So you can't quite identify exactly what he was doing?
I feel the word “teaching” when I think about it. . . . He's backing up and he's saying something as he does. I think this is the first (only?) time he's spoken to me.
What is he saying to you?
I did very well and did not resist him at all. I am now prepared to move forward. He sounds like them—very stilted and emotionless. He's walking away and C is now sitting down, although he's not staring at me. He's talking, but looking out over the room.
Chatty told Betsey that this level of training was critical and that he would help her through it. Amid much guilt, Betsey was forced to instill fear and anger in the abductee.
I'm telling C I don't want to do this; it's wrong. I feel wrong doing it. He's telling me it's okay; she [the female abductee] won't remember it; it's just training. She will be fine. I don't need to think about how I feel about it.
What does he want you to do to her?
I am going to train with her. She is the “target” for this. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with her.
Then how do you know it is wrong?
I don't know. There are several things I'm going to do with her. He wants me to control her mind first—that same kind of total control of the night before with the guy and the cliff. I am staring at her until I feel I have the control. As I'm doing that, I'm feeling like I'm sort of falling into an emotionless state myself, or muted emotions anyway. Before I began, I was upset—so no muting there. I'm telling her [with C's help] that this is a dream and she won't remember it at all. I'm sort of saying it, but C is the one kind of forcing her to accept it. I'm saying she is safe; nothing bad can happen to her. She will just relax and go with the dream, knowing it is not real. I can feel her relaxing, although I wasn't really aware she was tense. There's an image I'm supposed to introduce to her. C is backing off on this part. I need to do this part. The image is not random. I'm pulling something from her own thoughts, I think.
A specific image you were looking for, you mean?
I think so—maybe not the specific image, but specific feelings attached to it. In this case, I'm feeling fear. The image frightens her somehow. There is something about being in her house or apartment or whatever, and she is afraid. Someone is trying to get in, or is in—something like that.
I'm letting her see and feel the image. I'm letting the fear in her build up—almost encouraging it.
When it gets to a certain level, I'm taking the image away and trying to calm her.
Then I'm doing the same thing with anger next, but I'm using an image of her fighting with someone. C is telling me not to use that one. It needs to be more general. I'm sort of looking for something. I'm getting something where she was really angry about missing out on something by a short time. [She] fell asleep and missed the chance. . . . And I'm helping her to build it up in her mind again, until she's almost livid over this relatively harmless memory. As long as the basic emotion is there (in this case, anger), I can encourage it and push it to higher levels. And again, at a certain point, I drop the image away and actively encourage her to relax again.
And C is telling me it needs to be faster. If she really was that angry, I would be too slow to calm her, [and] it could mean danger. So he's having me do it again—getting her very angry, then calming her. Actually, I think we went through this three or four times.
Did you finally get to the point where you were fast enough?
I think so. The last one I feel him helping when I'm getting her angry. He's pushing her further than I can. She is almost beyond reason with anger at that point, and then he sort of lets go and leaves me to calm her. I get her under control and calm again. He's telling me I did well. Now we're getting up and taking her somewhere else—to a different room, a smaller one. But it's close by. I'm telling her to lie down [on the table], it's okay.
She's lying there and he's telling me to begin. I'm just looking at him. I'm very reluctant. He's telling me I must end my feelings and perform the task. I am one of them and this is something I must perform. Everyone will be fine. She won't remember. I'm getting the feeling he almost is thinking of my feelings as being silly or childish.
What is it you are supposed to do?
Prepare her for a procedure. I'm telling him I don't like this. I'm actually feeling like we're in a bit of a tug-of-war here. He's pushing me forward and I'm pushing back. I'm telling him that a part of her will remember. That he can't get rid of all of the memory. He is saying that she won't remember. I should know that. I should understand that. I am being noncompliant again. I need to relax and end these feelings.
There is something about that particular bond with him that allows me to have more control. I am not sure what it is, but I feel it. I feel like he is feeling frustrated with me. He is telling me to begin the task. I am saying it is wrong. We sort of stand there for a minute, but then someone is looking at me (not C). I'm almost instantly feeling calmer and more in control of myself. I'm understanding that it must be done and that it's my task to perform. There is nothing to be concerned with about it. There is no arguing with this one. . . . I'm walking over to her and looking at her. I'm looking for another image. I found one and I'm encouraging the feelings again. I don't feel anything about it now.
What kind of feelings are these that you are encouraging?
Sexual. The image is one of her being with someone. I keep encouraging her until I feel I should stop, . . . but I'm keeping that control over her. I'm just kind of holding her at a specific spot and then I feel or someone tells me to continue. And then I move back away, and C takes me out of the room.
You continue, though. How high up do you allow her to go?
After stopping, then I continue all the way to the top.
So you allow her to have an orgasm?
I feel sick about this now. Yes. At the time, I'm just kind of flat and emotionless, but now, knowing I did that shit, I feel like I want a shower or something. [During the event] I popped back to my senses for a moment first. And it just feels wrong to invade someone's private thoughts like that and use them for some other purpose. When I'm with them, it's very obvious to me just where I “fit in,” who is above me, who is below. No one has to tell me, I just know. But oddly, it's the humans who are below me. When I'm there, I am separating myself from the humans. I'm sort of not one of them; I am higher. I don't know what I am, but I'm one step up somehow.100 Training abductees to control humans mentally and force them to stand in the middle of the room or to go to sleep presents the unsettling idea that abductees will be required to do this by themselves on Earth.
But these hybrid-style tasks also can involve physical procedures for specific onboard activities.
Medical Procedure Training In 1999, Alison was selected to perform a medical procedure. As in many abductions, the beings involved were all hybrids; no grays were evident. A female hybrid ushered Allison into a room where a young adult, red-haired female hybrid was lying on a table. As Allison watched, a middle- to late-stage male hybrid took an instrument and prepared to do a procedure on the female.
I kind of feel like I'm a student and he's the teacher. I think it's more like a learning exercise than really participating in doing something. I don't know if this person on the table is a hybrid or a human. I tend to think she's a hybrid only because some of the stuff I see this doctor doing to her is unusual. . . . I'm getting the sense [that] I'm learning something that I'll need to use someday. . . . He takes this knife-like thing and he reaches over her so his hand is coming to my side and cuts her neck. Just slowly takes this scalpel and cuts her neck about four inches; and the wound opens but doesn't bleed, so I don't know if she's dead.
Is this by the artery there or below?
If you go down from the ear and then toward the front maybe three inches. It's not a deep incision, but the skin does tear. It opens some, but it doesn't bleed. He steps to his left—my right —to the counter and picks up this thing. It looks like a little penlight. It's like a little laser light, a very thin red beam. . . . And then he takes her skin and just holds it shut and goes over the incision with this little red beam and this penlight and kind of burns the skin back together. He has to do it really slowly, but it works. And there's some residue left on her neck.
I don't know how this is possible, but my understanding is somehow it burns the damaged cells, the damaged skin. It burns them and removes them and fuses the other good ones near it together so that, when it's done, there's dark burn residue on her neck that he takes off; and after that's off, there's no mark from the incision. . . .
Does she move or does she react in any way?
No. Now that I think about it, I don't see any breathing reflexes. But that doesn't make any sense, because the cells wouldn't be alive.
Does the doctor say anything while this is going on?
I was getting the sense of, “Pay attention.” I don't recall a very clear dialogue, but what I'm understanding is this is something I'll need to know; this is something I'll be doing.
The “doctor” made another incision in the “patient” so that Allison could practice closing up the wound. Initially, she was concerned about causing pain.
He cuts her again, but this time it's across here, the front of the neck. It's a little bit smaller. It's not quite as deep. It doesn't open as far. Then he tells me to do what he did and I just copy him. I hold the skin together with one hand and take this “laser” thing—you have to hold the top down to keep the beam coming out.
You mean like a penlight?
Right. I can't do it smoothly and precisely like he did. I actually am not right on the incision. It's kind of gross. I guess some of the good flesh as opposed to the damaged—when I hit that a little bit, go off the line, so to speak, a little bit. Her skin smokes like it's burned. Somehow in burning the damaged cells to close the incision and merge the healthy ones, I'm just feeling the damaged ones. After the initial cut, the damaged ones don't feel pain, so that burning them away doesn't hurt. I'm thinking, though, when I'm not as precise and hit living good cells that make it smoke, I think it has to hurt . . . but I don't know why there's no blood.
So your closure is not as fine as his closure was?
Right. He tells me I have to back up with the light a little bit; I'm too close. I'm leaning over and I'm holding it shut, almost blocking my own light, because the light source is from up above. So he reminds me to move myself back a little bit and then hold the pen thing a little bit away. I don't close it the whole way and burn some good cells in the flesh. He eventually finishes it up for me. I have to be more precise and have to be quicker.
Allison, when you're doing this procedure, are you thinking to yourself, “I've done this before; I know this one?” Or is this brand new to you and you have no memory of it from before?
A little of both. I'm feeling like I know I have to learn this. . . . I'm feeling like I've resolved myself in my waking days to the fact that there is something going on. And I've been told through the years . . . there are going to be roles to play in the transition, and I have to resolve myself to learning what it is I have to do and play my role.101 Abductee Teamwork Hybrids train individual abductees to work with them, but sometimes they train them to work with other abductees. During one abduction, Betsey and seven or eight other abductees were assembled in a room onboard a UFO and given the task of finding a person in a large geographic area. Their task was a combination of remote viewing and remote control. A “coach” led the group in the mental exercises. At first, the group “saw” an image of the Earth from space. Then the image zoomed into a smaller geographic region. Betsey sensed that she was “trying to find one guy in the whole Midwest.” She had trouble doing this and the coach took her out of the group, told her she was “not proficient,” and said the experiment would only succeed if they worked as a group. After returning to the group, he made her “see” images of North America as if from space, “clouds and all.” She tried several times and finally succeeded in mentally connecting with the other abductees.
I think about joining the group and feel it kind of click into place. Then the image of the globe is there again and I'm just sort of letting go, letting it zoom where it wants to. I'm not trying to control it at all. It's zooming to an area. I'm hearing or sensing somehow Colorado. I'm letting it zoom even more. This is not a real image of the Earth. This is like a map. . . . It's responding to me and to the group, though I can feel it kind of zooming in and narrowing things down. I know on some level I'm affecting it, but it's almost subconscious. It's zooming down to a town level, then to what feels like a house, but I'm feeling it's an apartment. Weird. Oh, wait. It's going to one section of the house, maybe a house turned into apartments, and there is the guy. . . .
Again, I get that sense that this is the target. He's sitting in an easy chair. Someone is close by, one other person. It's important to know that; always note who is around the target. Both of them are staring at something. I can't see it, but I would bet it is a TV. My part is over; now I am just a part of the group lending my energy to the rest of them. I feel like an observer now, although I know I am also helping. . . . We are to have them get tired and go to sleep. . . . I feel others beginning to try to accomplish that. . . . I feel some of them having trouble, as I did as well.
During this time, do you get the idea that this is simply a movie being played out, or that these are indeed real people?
The feeling is that they are real people, but the image is very movie-like, so I'm not sure.
The other abductees also had difficulty locating the targeted person. This was a challenging task for them.
I feel them being pulled out [by the coach] then put back into the group as I was. I can feel different attempts. I think different people might be trying the same task too.
But this is not your individual task?
No, but there is a point I feel like I'm participating as part of the group, or maybe as part of a smaller group. There is a point I feel a bit more active, but not the same feeling as doing it myself earlier. We're working at this for a while. There are mistakes. One of the people [in the house] gets up, but then sits back down. One falls asleep right where she is. That's incorrect. She needs to move to the other room first. The guy is moved to the other room, but not asleep. This is kind of haphazard.
Are you viewing them from a top-down position, or are you viewing them from a standing-in- front-of-them position?
Top-down. In fact, it almost has the feel of looking down over a dollhouse and dolls. We're slowly getting it. Both people are finally in the bedroom. Then finally we have them both sleeping. It takes some time; this working together as a group is very, very difficult. It feels unnatural. We are slowly getting it. He's telling us we will practice a lot more. We are not proficient. And then it ends. . . . Suddenly, there is just no more group; we are just sitting in the room.102 Allison at the Mall So far, our focus has been on taking abductees onboard UFOs to train them to assist with the integration program. But aliens are also training abductees on Earth and assessing how well they apply what they have learned to real-life situations. An example of this comes from Allison, who was taken to a shopping mall to practice her skills.
Allison had helped a hubrid she called “the tan guy,” who had shown up at her home improperly dressed in a tan jacket. She had first met him some months before during a training session at a shopping mall. Her PPH had taken her there and asked her to use her mental abilities on hubrids who were at the mall. First, she described her feelings about the hybrid trainers and their training efforts.
How did you first meet him? How was first he introduced to you?
It was one of these situations when I met him. . . . It was a shopping mall. There's a very gentle guy that kind of instructs me.
Do you [also] meet him onboard a UFO? Or do you meet him in regular life?
No. He's been on ships. He's helped me do learning things sometimes. He's helped me do mental exercises. But he goes back. He teaches me there [onboard] and then he observes me here [on Earth]. Sometimes I feel like I don't know what his purpose is. Is it to use me to make hybrids seem more like people in our environment, or to take me, a person, and make me more hybrid? I don't know where I stand or where I fit. . . . I feel a contradiction, because the same hybrid that's supervising how I help these other hybrids in this arena, at the same time he's been trying to get me to learn things more alien. I guess that's where my conflict is. . . .
How do you get [to the mall]?
He told me we were going to go, and we went together [by car]. . . . [The mental exercise] was a matter of observation. Honing in on my skills to like mentally connect to people, but that's old news. But instead of having headgear and ten people in a room, or sitting in a room with one hybrid eye-to-eye, it's advanced to being in open and vast settings with lots of people, and being able to connect with whomever, for whatever reason, and just being able to do it. . . .
First we go in and . . . I don't know what it is that I'm to do, but I know it's going to be a mental exercise of some sort. Randomly, he'll point to people and—not obviously—but he'll focus in on an individual and ask me questions about them. Some of the questions are opinions. Some of them are like a test. They're relatively simple. As an example, he pointed to this one woman, and he told me to concentrate, to look into her eyes, to clear my head, and flow into the nothingness of her eyes and tell him what she was afraid of, because she was afraid of something. She's slowly walking toward us.
Allison did as she was told and concluded that the woman was troubled about a financial situation.
And I get the impression that I read her right. Again, it's an exercise. To me, it's no big deal, because it just continues what I've already been doing almost forever and telling you about for ten or fifteen years. It's just now, I'm doing it somewhere else. . . . He acknowledges that I answered correctly.
The question is, how do you know he's telling you the truth? I mean, how do you know that he knows?
Because I found out myself. He told me first, “She's afraid of something.” I had to tell him what.
I did feel that there was a fear. He said there was a fear, and when I—it's kind of like a process.
You let go and—oh, God! I swear to God they're turning me into an alien! . . . I saw the tan guy walking in the mall. It was later. I knew right away that he was one of them. . . . He wasn't dressed incorrectly or acting weird or anything. I just knew. I just knew. Without being told that that was the exercise, I accomplished it anyway. . . .
So was the one you were standing with pleased that you were able to do this?
Very, very, very pleased. I think he was as much pleased with himself for accomplishing his mission of teaching me, as opposed to being pleased with me for having done what I did.103 Betsey at Walmart In another applied training situation, Betsey experienced a disquieting event with Jamie at the Walmart they had been to many times. All she remembered consciously was being at the store and, oddly, getting free merchandise. She felt guilty, as if she had done something wrong.
During an Instant Messaging session, she recalled going to Walmart to buy Easter gifts. At first, she thought she was alone in her car, but then she realized she was on the passenger side and Jamie was driving. Instead of going directly to the store, they went to Jamie's apartment, where The Enforcer was waiting for them. Jamie was very serious about what was going to happen that evening. The Enforcer forcefully told Betsey she must not talk to anyone about what was to take place at the store and that she would forget it had happened. The three of them then drove to Walmart. They went in and Betsey got a cart, as if it were a normal shopping trip. I asked her if the two were walking alongside her cart.
One on each side. Jamie is on my left. Jamie is telling me which way to go. There is something we're going to do. We have to go to the back of the store to do it. (I don't know what it is.) . . .
We're going through some doors and Jamie is telling me “It's okay, no one will mind.” Some doors?
Like gray metal doors, two of them, wide—maybe five, six feet wide. There's someone sitting at a table off to the left. I have to speak with him and work with him. . . . He doesn't seem to know we walked in. I'm sitting down in front of him. I think it's like a picnic table kind of thing—not sure if the benches are attached, though. . . . I'm getting the feeling I should not take a long time. I should be quick. I'm staring at him. There's specific information they want me to get from him. I don't know why they couldn't do it, though.
Is this Walmart person older or younger?
Younger. Maybe mid-twenties at the most.
What kind of information do you need from him?
Who he's sharing things with. It's mainly his girlfriend. He's telling her things he knows he shouldn't. I'm telling him he can't do that anymore. He will put her in danger. This is a bad thing to do. And then . . . we're leaving. The other guy [The Enforcer] isn't with us.
After this encounter, Betsey and Jamie returned to the main part of the store. Betsey forgot what had just happened and started to shop. She remembered looking at toys and “kids' stuff.” Then she went to the self-checkout area. While she was in the process of putting her items through the scanner, the man from the back room, whose mind she had previously accessed, came to her checkout station. Without being asked, he swiped his Walmart employee's card in the scanner and said it was okay to pay now. She said that she had not finished scanning her items. He said, “It's okay. Just pay.” She did not know why this happened, but it is possible that Jamie arranged it.104 The Meaning of Training Abductees' training indicates that they may provide services much more important than just teaching hybrids and hubrids. Some are being prepared to do alien work. Their training enables them to use their minds to find and control the movements, thoughts, and emotions of other humans. It is possible that, in the future, abductees may be abducting people with or without the aliens' aid. This disturbing facet of training suggests that abductees will supplement the insectalins in their program of integration and control. They may take a much more active role in the abduction phenomenon itself. Thus, abductees are far more integral to the program than had originally been thought.
Training abductees to be more neutrally proficient is a critical consideration when we think about how hubrids can integrate into the society en masse. I had previously thought that mass integration would be accomplished with insectalins and grays directing the activities. Although this appears to be partially true, the insectalins have also created a society of surrogates to do the work for them on Earth. These hybrids can ensure that hubrids are smoothly and safely integrated. There may, however, not be enough hybrids skilled in human ways to accomplish the task of mass global social integration. The most efficient way to manage the program and to facilitate The Change may therefore be to expand the number of workers by training abductees to do what hybrids do. This will allow the aliens to have an expanded workforce when the time comes. Then some abductees will be more fully involved with the integration plans. Obviously, aliens make abductees do their bidding, and if the abductees had a choice, they would not participate on any level.
With what we have learned from the foregoing accounts, we can now attempt to address the larger question of what all this means. We can speculate in a variety of different contexts about how and why the aliens, hybrids, hubrids, and abductees are working in concert to achieve specific goals. The nature of these goals, other than integration and takeover, still eludes us. But the program's future is becoming clear.
CHAPTER 10 Integration and Speculation “Goodbye, old friend. We'll be seeing each other.” Abduction evidence points to a single goal: global integration resulting in takeover. It does not point to other goals. It is a process happening now. And, if I have discovered hubrids in my corner of eastern Pennsylvania and in a few other places, it means that it is happening everywhere. Obviously, there are many unanswered questions, but I will venture to speculate about the aliens' program and its implications for the galaxy in general.
I fully understand that I am on shaky ground here and that I am describing what is happening in a “reverse-engineering” manner. Nevertheless, I think the evidence leads to some specific conclusions.
The Cocktail Party As hubrids integrate into society and learn more, they engage in ongoing training sessions to make sure they are acting appropriately. Paula consciously remembered an onboard abduction in which she was taken into a large room where a “cocktail party” appeared to be in progress. People were standing around with drinks in their hands and talking with one another in small groups. Everyone wore human clothing. This was unusual for an onboard abduction, in which abductees are usually dressed in special clothes.
Hypnosis revealed a more unsettling situation. She thought the cocktail party was in a UFO “conference room.” Paula counted about fourteen hubrids and four other abductees in the room. She recognized some hubrids whom she had trained when they were younger. She also recognized a few abductees whom she had encountered in other abduction events. It appeared that the hubrids' function was to practice mingling and being at ease in a group social situation. The small talk revealed that some hubrids now had “jobs” and a new-found place in human society.
It's in the daytime. They're dressed, and some people have ties on like they're working. And it's weird. It's not like a happy hour. There's no booze. There's no happy. . . . And guys are coming up to me and they're talking to me, and they're telling me what they've been doing.
All guys?
There's a couple girls there, but it's mostly guys. I don't know why. This one guy's telling me that he has a job where he's a consultant, so he doesn't work for anyone. And it's kind of bizarre.
Like it's not a real business, but he goes in and interacts with people and he's somebody's assistant.
I'm not sure I follow you.
This guy's in a suit. He's got a lot of [dark] hair. And he goes on business calls with somebody.
And he sits there, and he listens.
What kind of business is it?
It's some kind of technical thing. It's like computers or something. Like I'm not getting it, and he thinks it's really fun. It's really enjoyable to see how this stuff works. It's like he's placed somewhere, and he goes in, and he's kind of like a shadow guy to somebody, and he's learning.
And he wanted me to know he's doing real well.
This is weird. It's like they're another stage up, but they're older and they're doing things. . . .
There's the small chatter. And one wanted me to know that he was doing really well and he remembered me. And I told him I was proud of him, which is okay in the context, but I was really proud of the way they were mingling. You'd think it was just a normal gathering. They're drinking water. Not out of a bottle, out of a glass.
Can you see where they got their glasses of water?
It's a table. There's not like somebody walking around, serving them. It's a table. It's part of their training, I bet, just to hold the glasses and then they react. But, to me, it's kind of frightening in that they're getting their tentacles in, like with the businesses, you know? There's a couple ladies. I can hear their giggling. They're wearing skirts and blouses with jackets. One is a grayish, and one is a darker blue. It's business attire. And the guy that had talked to me, he told me they can really talk people into things. Now, that's interesting.
Did he give you an example [of this], or not?
Well, yeah. They can talk people into using their product. Something technical. And it's kind of like a joke. And it's not funny to me that I understand how that goes, which would be that they just overpower them “intellectually,” don't you think?
Maybe. Does anybody else come up to you and talk to you? I mean, other than this one guy, or . . .?
Mm-hmm [Yes]. There's a guy with the whitish hair, and he said, “Hi” and shook my hand. I asked him how is he doing. He said, “Very well, thank you.” I don't know what he's doing. Some kind of an assistant. It looks like he's doing things, but he's not doing much. He's just observing. I get the feeling it has something to do with money that he works with. It's kind of like with money that somehow they're in charge of. But it's watching money. Money being transferred? I don't know. But I get the impression that what he's doing is learning how things work. . . . I have the [mental] picture of him in a room with somebody else, and the guy is on a big computer, and they're watching money being transferred. Whether that means it's a stock thing, or else that's at a bank, I don't know. And he finds it very interesting, whatever it is, and he's happy. He seems happy. I ask him if he's happy, and he is. See, I think happy equates to “it's enjoyable.” But [a hubrid] girl comes up to me, and she shakes my hand and looks me in the eye, and she's gentler than they are. She's asking if I remember her, and I don't. She's working with people, with groups of people. It sounds like it's human resources or something because she places people. Not on her own. And she says, “Thank you for your help.” . . . She tells me that I was right that women have a way of being able to do things that men can't do sometimes. Just to listen and to be calm and kind. Wow! That was a long time ago. . . .
How many people are drinking the water?
Not very many. Not all of them are holding anything. It's just some have it. But it seems to me it's more of an exercise in getting comfortable in a crowded room, because they don't like being crowded. And there's somebody going by I want to talk to, and I reach over and I tap them on the back, and that was kind of an unusual thing in the room just to do that. And they turned. It was somebody I thought I knew.
But, was it?
No, it wasn't. I didn't know them, but they looked like them from the back. . . . Then, I'm getting the idea someone is saying, “Well, thank you very much.” And that's kind of the cue for everybody to know it's over.
As with her other training events, Paula and the other abductees were asked to evaluate the hubrids' behavior and appearance.
And we're asked, “How do you think they did?” And we thought they did real well. And they didn't seem to be uncomfortable standing close to other people, which was a big thing, I thought.
And we're asked about how we thought they looked. We thought they had it right on with the clothes—nothing too flashy. Especially the ladies . . . would fit in. And I was asked, “How was their demeanor?” And I thought it was appropriate. They weren't loud with their voices or anything. It was just very business tone. . . . I thought they did really well. I told them I liked the eye-to-eye contact and that's important.
Then Paula, along with the other abductees, was led into another room, where an insectalin gave them what amounted to a motivational speech.
And it's the same old story, which is that this is so important and we're so lucky to be a part of it.
It's like we have risen above the other humans and we're at the top. And we have the opportunity to work with these guys, and they're going to be the future. And we're going together, them and us, to the future. They spent so much time, and so much energy, and so many resources to get here.
This is the only way it's going to work. And it's not so much they're thanking us; it's almost like we should be thanking them that we have the opportunity to help. This is just so big and so important.105 Paula's group was integrated into society and, using their neurological advantage, they had “jobs.” The jobs were apparently learning situations. For them to do this and not stand out meant that they had learned the skills of human behavior. They had achieved a measure of normality in human society. They had blended in.
Eric and Bernard's Chat Given all the abductee accounts in this book, Bernard taking Eric to a baseball game was an understandable part of the integration program. What was unusual and more meaningful was Bernard's long friendship with Eric. For Eric, it was grounded in learning human interaction. Bernard considered himself the teacher in a one-sided flow of information.
In late 2004, Bernard was at a hotel for a business conference. During a break, he went into the restroom where a man dressed in a suit and tie with a short beard greeted him with, “Hi! How are you doing, Bernard?” Puzzled, he could not understand how he knew this stranger. Suddenly, he realized who it was and said, “Eric?” “That is what you call me,” Eric said. Bernard was astounded. He was completely conscious in every way and not under Eric's mental control. He had never been in that situation before.
Dumbfounded, Bernard wanted to ask him questions, but Eric said he would not answer any questions and he just wanted to meet Bernard on his level and do him a favor. They sat on a couch for a minute or so and orally discussed an article Bernard was writing. Then Eric got up and said, “Goodbye, old friend.
We'll be seeing each other.” Bernard watched Eric walk out of the hotel lobby and into the parking lot.
He was left in amazement.106 Eric was now fully integrated into human society and could function as a normal citizen. He had learned well from Bernard and his additional helpers. Now, as with Paula's group, using his powers allowed Eric to blend smoothly into society along with all the other Erics and Ericas.
Accomplishing Goals Paula and Bernard's experiences demonstrate that the hubrids have already established themselves in human society. Allison's “tan guy,” who appeared in her house with the wrong clothes on, was walking in a shopping mall. Paula's hubrids had “jobs” of sorts, and others—like Eric, and most likely Jamie, and Jamie's female hubrid friend—had human-style lives within society.
The abductees' testimony is straightforward: Aliens are not just planning a global takeover; they are doing it. Hubrids are already living here and more are coming. Eric and Jamie are now “normal.” To understand fully what is occurring, one must look at the takeover phenomenon logically. Above all, the aliens are logical. The program is logical. Thus, we can interpret it with logic.
Planetary Acquisition If the aliens want the Earth, humans are an obstacle. Taking over a planet without intelligent life would be much easier than taking over one with an intelligent, technologically adept population that could have the means to resist the invasion. If a technological civilization exists on a targeted planet—in this case, Earth—the aliens have several major choices. They can destroy the civilization. They can convince humans that takeover is in their best interests and therefore have a smooth transition. Or they can take over the planet and the civilization without the people's knowledge and maintain an intact alien- controlled global society for future purposes. The first option was not chosen. The second option has not been offered. The third option appears to be operative.
To exercise the third option requires mounting a widespread clandestine operation. Earth's civilization allows for this method. Our physical technology is not advanced enough to detect aliens working secretly. When people report UFOs or abductions, scientists summarily dismiss these accounts as visual misperceptions or fantasy. Moreover, human neurological abilities are undeveloped and cannot overcome the aliens' neural manipulation.
This became apparent when aliens first arrived many decades ago. They almost certainly took time to learn about human biology, physiology, and neurology. They found that they could alter human gametes for their own purposes and that human nervous systems were susceptible to the aliens' neural abilities.
Thus humans—who had the physiological and neurological makeup that allowed them to help the aliens in their process of acquisition, but were not sufficiently developed to allow resistance—were perfect candidates for a clandestine takeover.
Abductees describe a program of well-ordered, nonviolent (with individual abductee exceptions), gradual, stealthy takeover. When this integration program succeeds, it will mean the end of humans' control over their own destiny. If successful, it strongly suggests, as I wrote in The Threat, the end of Homo sapiens and the beginning of a new species of human—Homo alienus (hubrids and the offspring of hubrids and humans). Physically, these creatures will be exactly like Homo sapiens; but they will be endowed with different neurological capabilities.
A program with the magnitude of planetary acquisition must be meticulously planned and smoothly administered to gain the desired results. The cornerstone of the program is its ingenious design, whose main concepts are now revealing themselves. The program contains at least nine essential components of advantage and activity that support global acquisition.
1. Advanced Technology and Bioengineering In order to get to Earth from wherever they originate, the aliens must have extremely advanced technology. That technology shows itself in ways other than just travel. They lift people and aliens into their craft using what appears to be a shaft of light. They move humans, aliens, and objects through solid barriers like windows and walls. They can render themselves and their craft invisible to humans.
Sometimes radar registers them or people see them, and UFO investigators have recorded thousands of these cases. But given the aliens' enormous numbers, ubiquity, and the length of time they have been here, radar sightings are relatively uncommon.
Their technical prowess shows itself more subtly in the realm of biotechnology. They can implant small objects with unknown functions into abductees' bodies. They can harvest sperm and eggs, fertilize ova, implant embryos in women, extract fetuses, and perform numerous other procedures—all without abductees' remembering. They can create hybrids with human sperm and ova. They can seemingly alter abductees in such a way as to pass on their abduction-related physical changes to their children, allowing for a new generation to engage in telepathy and neurological training.
Indeed, the UFOs themselves may not be ships to transport an alien crew, but instead may be mobile abduction/integration facilities. Much of the UFOs' internal furnishings appear geared toward performing physiological procedures on humans. Every room abductees have seen serves a purpose in abductions or integration. It appears that the UFOs themselves and everything in them are made for abducting and processing humans, hybridization, and teaching and training abductees. The UFOs were manufactured exclusively for the program.
2. An Advanced Global Workforce The worldwide hybridization and integration program relies on a vast workforce. Rather than initially bringing a huge workforce with them, insectalins seem to be creating workers as they need them. The aliens' bioengineering abilities are extraordinarily sophisticated.
In the aliens' onboard society, everyone has specific tasks that further the program. They work constantly and apparently have little rest or recreation. Abductees have not reported anything that is not directly related to these functions. This single-minded focus is critical for the program's success. Each alien is a cog in a well-oiled machine that keeps moving forward to complete the integration program.
With constant worker creation made possible through the use of abductee sperm and ova and/or cloning, insectalins can continually add new workers. If grays and other hybrids have a human-like lifespan, or if they cannot reproduce, or if something goes wrong with them, they can easily be replaced.
One aspect that the abduction phenomenon must contend with is population increase. Since the industrial revolution, the human population has been growing exponentially. When I was born in 1942, the Earth had about two billion inhabitants. Now it has over seven billion. The aliens must keep up with the indigenous population if they want to continue their program at a consistent level. Therefore, their population must grow exponentially as well.
This is partially accomplished by following abductees' bloodlines. When an abductee marries a nonabductee and has two children, indications are that both children will be abductees. Thus, when the children are adults and marry nonabductees and have babies, those children will also be abductees. In this way, if every couple has two children, one abductee can create six other abductees over two generations. The abductee population (and the workforce) will therefore keep pace with world population growth. Aliens will have access to as many abductees as they can handle. They therefore must create as many grays and hybrids as they need. (It is, of course, possible that, hidden away in the universe, there is a large population of grays who can be enlisted for use in the insectalins' program.) Eventually, as the population increases, more UFOs with insectalins will have to be used.
3. Advanced Neurological Abilities All aliens can control any human's thought processes and actions, robbing them of full use of their mental powers, memory, and agency. They can dull people's ability to think normally or be fully aware during abductions. From a distance, aliens can render humans passive when an abduction first begins, and keep them in that condition for its duration. During an abduction, aliens can alter people's perceptions by manipulating neurological sites in their brains. They can make abductees think predetermined thoughts or “see” specific images. They can provoke a wide gamut of emotions, depending on their objectives. They can make both abductees and bystander nonabductees do their bidding. Although susceptibility to control varies, in the end, humans have little or no ability to resist.
Neurological control and manipulation give aliens an extraordinary advantage over humans.
Insectalins can easily implant specific packets of knowledge into both abductees' and gray workers' minds to allow them to perform tasks without previous training. Thus, neurologically inserted information can resist the normal pattern of memory degradation and be stored intact for future retrieval.
This memory storage may allow current gray workers to be efficient and proficient without much on-the- job training. It also enables abductees to know and carry out unremembered future tasks.
4. Secrecy Most people are not aware of the abduction program. It is clandestine. Although there are many reasons for secrecy, the most irrefutable and basic one is that the aliens do not want humans to know what they are doing. If humans knew about the program, they would try to stop it.
Preservation of secrecy begins with memory blockage. Abductees are neurologically programmed to forget what happened to them immediately upon returning from an abduction. Even though they may not remember it, many sense that something odd has just happened to them and disturbing, disjointed images may come into their consciousness. Others realize that they are missing time—perhaps two or three or more hours—during which neither they nor anyone else can account for where they have been. Yet, abductees usually do not pay attention to these fragments and time oddities; they do not think about their partial memories or try to understand why they are missing time. Deep inside, they know they should not think about these things.
Abduction memories could threaten the program. If women knew that they were suddenly and inexplicably pregnant with a hybrid baby, they might terminate the pregnancy. The aliens cannot allow this, so they remove the fetus at around ten weeks, before the woman begins to show. When these women are examined by a physician, the doctor assumes that the previously confirmed pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage (which the woman denies), or was a product of pseudocyesis (false pregnancy), even though the woman may not want another baby. Some physicians simply say the ten-week fetus has been inexplicably “absorbed.” Thus, our knowledge of the abduction phenomenon does not come from examining hybrid babies and fetuses; it comes from a small minority of abductees. This means that the aliens' baby program, while not perfect, works well enough for their purposes.
Secrecy must also extend to what bystanders may see. Thus, the craft they came in and the abduction itself are made invisible to nonabductees. Perhaps more than 99 percent of abductions are not witnessed by bystanders, although they may take place in crowded city streets in daytime. In spite of our knowledge of abductions, the secrecy program has been extraordinarily successful.107 5. Telepathy Telepathy is part of advanced neurological abilities, but it has a special function within the aliens' program. It may allow the aliens to circumvent the 6,000 or more languages on Earth or to learn them extremely quickly. Communication with abductees is thus assured, no matter where they are from.
Hybrid children say that they learn differently from human children. When these children learn about Earth, no books are involved. They remember what abductees tell them, or simply “download” information from abductees' minds through neural engagement.
Telepathy represents the foundation of a society in which privacy is not important. The aliens may be able to know what others are thinking, but they and humans almost certainly have a filtering system that allows for specific thoughts to be known and others ignored. Aliens cannot know all of an abductee's thoughts; telepathy has its limits.
Aliens may also experience thought limitations. On Earth, telepathy allows for hubrids to control others, to have to have obedience, and to be safe. But abductees have been able to hide some of their thoughts and even promise obedience when they know they will not be. Regardless, telepathy is an extremely effective way to communicate and control.
6. Time The aliens seem to have almost limitless time. By comparison, humans measure their time in extremely short segments. Human lifespans are infinitesimally short in cosmic time. Various plants and animals can live much longer than we do; some fish, reptiles, and mammals can live 200 years or more, and certain trees can live from 2,000 to 5,000 years. Several species exhibit even longer lifespans. In America, the average lifespan for humans is just over seventy-eight years. Scientists are now thinking about ways to allow humans to live over 100 years on average, and eventually that may be considered only middle- aged. If technology continues to advance, it is very likely that human lifespans will increase dramatically.
If insectalins live for hundreds of years—a reasonable conjecture—their lifespan is important for continuity in leadership, stability, and long-term planning. At the very least, aliens act as if they have as much time as they need. They seem to be slow and deliberate in progressing to their goals. They do not refer to target times or dates. It is true, however, that abductees sometimes describe being hurried from procedure to procedure during an abduction, as if the aliens or hubrids were on a schedule and trying to do as many tasks as they can during an allotted timeline.
Of course, even if insectalins have much shorter lifespans, longevity may not be a significant factor in the context of a constant changeover of leaders who, through telepathy, can deposit great amounts of data into one another's brains, ensuring a seamless transition to the new leaders without confusion or error.
Regardless, time does not seem to be a barrier to their goals. And the aliens have accounted for short human lifespans; they do not cure seriously ill humans. Miracle cures might draw unwanted attention to abductees. If an abductee dies, there is a stock of others ready to step in and do whatever tasks are necessary.
7. Planning, Logistics, and Support When insectalins first recognized Earth and its civilizations as a possible planet to acquire, at least two chains of events may have taken place. In the first, they ascertained whether humans were biologically and neurologically suited for them. A period of testing and investigating followed. Next, they mapped out plans for their infiltration and domination of humans. For this purpose, they developed specially equipped spacecraft for the program, with everything onboard geared toward humans—including the size of tables, the instruments used, the machines, the incubator rooms (incubatoriums), and the color of the clothes abductees would be required to wear.
The second alternative is only slightly different from the first, but profound in its implications. Once the decision was made to integrate into human society, aliens may already have had pre-existing spacecraft that contained all the instruments, devices, and machines and interior structure necessary to fulfill their program's goals. They may have taken UFOs previously designed for any humanoid aliens and modified them specifically for human beings. There could be other possibilities, but I suspect that these two chains of events are most likely.
During the program's course, through many years' activity, it is possible that materials might eventually run out and have to be resupplied. If this were to happen, the aliens would need a background support system and a method of communication and transfer of goods, unless those goods were available in other ways. Or, they may have other UFOs that specialize in obtaining whatever is necessary for the abducting ships. It is also possible that all the materials they need are on Earth, ready for the taking.
On a more specific level, almost nothing is known about the onboard behind-the-scenes mechanisms required for aliens to carry out the program. For example, we do not know where or how the onboard aliens or hybrids make and perhaps sanitize clothes and other fabrics, or where the solution is made for alien and fetus nutrition, or where food is prepared for hybrids, or where bathrooms are for hybrids, or where spare instruments are stored, or where fuel is stored, or where a command bridge is located (if there is one). And there is little information about where the actual processes of hybridization and other biological activities take place. Early in his research, Budd Hopkins interviewed a woman who reported seeing an assembly line of grays manipulating material in Petrie-like dishes. She thought this was where sperm and ova were altered to produce hybrids. But this was a single observation and more like it are needed to give it credence.
UFOs come in different sizes—from small, with only one room and a table, to enormously huge, perhaps a half mile or larger in diameter, with many levels and rooms. Depending on a UFO's size, abductees have more or fewer procedures administered to them. In large UFOs, abductees report longer abductions, more table procedures, and more complex hybrid teaching and abductee-training sessions. In smaller craft, the focus is mainly on table procedures.
Perhaps a more accurate way to consider very large UFOs is not only as transportation vehicles, but also as factories. It is on these ships that the multi-level hybridization program is executed. Very large UFOs may contain all the elements that are required for the program, including a system of biomanufacturing. The factory UFOs are probably connected with each other, but each appears to be self-contained, with all the necessities for carrying out their part of the program. It is conceivable that other UFOs are manufactured onboard. But even for the factory UFOs, materials not created onboard might eventually have to be restocked. And that might necessitate a complex network of background support to make the program successful. It is, of course, possible that the aliens obtain all their materials on Earth and in the solar system.
8. Abductees Abductees are a critical part of the workforce. Without them, the takeover program would be difficult, if not impossible. They supply sperm and ova to create more hybrids and, ultimately, hubrids. They have abductee children who, like their parent or parents, have a built-in neurological basis for telepathy and perhaps other alien-like abilities. The number of hubrids the aliens have created from abductees is unknown, but it is obviously massive. Abductees teach them about life on Earth from childhood through young adulthood. The hybrids and hubrids grow in numbers with Earth's expanding population, allowing the aliens to have an enormous number of workers. Moreover, abductees will have more complex, important, and untold functions to fulfill in the future.
9. Hubrids Hubrids are the ultimate weapon in taking over the planet. They are likely building up their numbers in the human population. If hubrids living on Earth mate with humans, they may, like abductees, be producing hubrids who will be absorbed by society and will themselves create more hubrids. It is also possible that their already socialized hubrid parent may allow the hubrid child to live within Earth's societies, while keeping his abilities a secret. It is unknown how many hubrids are necessary to reach a population density at which they can dominate a society, but they are growing unimpeded and on a grand scale.
These features make up most of the abduction program. The program is secret. It is efficient and effective. It is complex yet elegant in its execution and concept. It is self-replicating, using an increasingly expanding workforce that will create beings who will clandestinely infiltrate society until a critical mass is reached and aliens can control human society.
Are Other Aliens Visiting Earth?
If life is as abundant in the galaxy as many scientists believe, then other advanced aliens may be widespread and they may have even more sophisticated technology than those aliens who are already here. It is also possible that other aliens have visited Earth, although so far, I have found no evidence for this. Most abductions that Budd Hopkins and I investigated that took place after 1930 have consisted of the same basic experiences with the familiar gray aliens and procedures. But, could nonabducting aliens be visiting here? It is possible. Presumably, these nonabducting aliens would allow their UFOs to be seen everywhere, because they have nothing to hide. I cannot prove a negative and this could be happening. These visitors may have their own reasons for not landing on the White House lawn. But the question of other aliens is only an interesting distraction. It is the abducting aliens who require our immediate concern.
A New Form of Evolution?
Some people who study the abduction phenomenon believe that it represents a giant step forward in human evolution. This is possible; but whether the step is forward or not is debatable. Although there are many complex and intelligent animals, humans have enjoyed the highest form of neurological development on Earth. It resulted in a brain capable of extremely complex thought and action. We are immensely intellectually superior to all other life forms on Earth and have tremendous capacities to advance technologically, biologically, and physiologically in perhaps unimaginable ways.
Now we are faced with a species that may have an even greater mental capacity and that is certainly more highly advanced—both neurologically (at least in its ability to control humans) and technologically.
In this situation, The Change means that “evolution” for humans will come in a more sudden spurt compared to the pace of natural evolution in which some species evolve over great amounts of time, while others stay relatively unchanged for eons. Rather than natural selection and adaptation, this evolution will be an artificially engineered evolution, imposed upon us for the benefit of another species.
This is “unnatural selection.” It is a case of one species supplanting, or perhaps absorbing, another.
The insectalins have their own agenda of artificial evolutionary imposition. They are not human. They do not have a sense of “humanity” and they are not necessarily humane. Insectalins have created a hierarchical society with advanced neurology at its core. They have what can best be described as a collective, hive, or even military mentality, in which the colony, not the individual, is supreme.
Telepathy, which may itself be a result of engineered evolution, prevents individuality and privacy. It drastically limits personal liberties, independent action, and free will. It is something that most humans would not want.
Do We Need to Know What's Happening?
For abductees, understanding their situation can be psychologically important. Many abductees live in constant anxiety about what is happening to them, even though they may know the particulars of their experiences. Often, understanding the abduction phenomenon provides answers to lifelong questions about their odd experiences and allows them to move on with their lives, free from fear, worry, and obsession about abductions—even though the abductions continue unabated. When abductees come to me to help them remember, I cannot give them physical control over what is happening to them. I try to give them some emotional and intellectual control, but they can do little about stopping the abductions.
There are several possible scenarios that could be realized involving public knowledge of hubrids living in society. The first is that there would be no public knowledge. People would obligingly do the hubrids' bidding and think nothing of it. Hubrids would live here and everything would go on as normal.
That something is off-kilter would simply be disregarded by most people.
If public knowledge were to become widespread, societal disruption could ensue. The idea that some people are actually hubrids could cause fear and panic. It could pit humans against each other. Suspicion and paranoia could run rampant in the early part of The Change, when most people are not yet incorporated into the aliens' structure. The concept of trust would be destroyed, as humans hunt for supposed hubrids to eliminate them. Even abductees might be imperiled. Because most abductees are unknown even to themselves, everyone would fall under suspicion. This is a nightmarish vision, but it might be a realistic one if society were destroyed from within through knowledge that The Change is happening.
Another scenario could mean a smooth and unknown transition for humans into another species. In this scenario, people would not know what is occurring until it is too late—if, indeed, it is not already too late. Eventually, there might be a point at which people begin to realize that others can control their thoughts and actions. By that time, however, The Change would be too advanced to be stopped— assuming it can be stopped. Eventually, most humans might be in a close relationship with a hubrid and thus toe the line for their new masters. When that happens, freedom of thought, privacy, self- determination, and individuality would almost certainly diminish greatly, if not disappear completely.
Knowing what is happening to us would be meaningless.
The possibility also exists that hubrids, although loyal to the insectalins, could be seduced by human lifestyles and perhaps driven by human empathy to protect people. In this scenario, the evolution of the human race could mean the evolution of hubrids into humanity, the hubrids having been tempted into a free-wheeling semi-private existence that they have learned to enjoy. They would be humanized. But the central fact remains that they can control humans and humans cannot control them. That neurological inequality gives them free rein over humanity in every way. Resistance to them would be practically impossible, no matter which scenario ensues.
For researchers, the question of choosing whether to know what is happening has other ramifications.
I have struggled with this problem for many years. It is a close call, but my sense is that it is better to know than not to know. Without knowledge, we are completely at the aliens' mercy. With proper knowledge, we may think of options to delay or impede their program. I think this is worthwhile. And helping abductees struggle with what is happening to them is the human thing to do.
If enough intelligent, knowledgeable people put their minds to the problem, there may be a remote possibility that they can stop the aliens, or at least slow them down.108 But something of that nature will not be realized as long as academics, scientists, and especially neuroscientists—who might be able to decipher the mysteries of memory storage and reclamation—not only disregard the abduction phenomenon, but also think it to be a direct indication of mendacity or mental instability. And, even if we accept the idea of alien infiltration, it may be either technologically impossible or already too late to make a difference. The one thing that gives hope for efforts to disrupt the aliens is that they remain secretive. This implies weakness somewhere in their program that humans can exploit. Taking advantage of that weakness, however, is unlikely unless the scientific community participates—and that is extremely improbable.
The Future Accurately predicting the future is usually a futile task, but I will try to speculate about a few of the more pertinent and obvious ideas. Unfortunately, no matter how I look at them, none have happy endings.
The worst-case future is a sudden physical destruction or removal of the human species as we know it, even though the aliens specifically say this will not happen. It would be accompanied by a repopulation of hybrids, hubrids, and perhaps insectalins. This could be The Change. The evidence for this grandiose and seemingly “science fiction” assertion is slight, but the idea must be considered, no matter how ridiculous it seems.
If hubrid sperm can fertilize a human egg, interbreeding between hubrids and humans could take place over generations, until Earth's population consists only of hubrids. This is a distinct possibility, because abductees have reported that male and female hubrids do not mate with each other, presumably because that would not further the purposes of the program. And there appear to be more male than female hubrids, probably because males can impregnate many female humans. If this impregnation progression occurs, hubrids would eventually take over all jobs and positions in society. Society would, of course, be unimaginably different.
As the insectalins told some abductees, they are devising a slow takeover of humanity, leaving a small “pure” stock of humans for hybrid breeding purposes. This will insure the aliens' survival in the event that they need to restock the world with aliens due to an unknown eventuality. The remaining humans could be workers, used much as abductees are used. And, while the program is ongoing, aliens could keep humans to run civil society under their watchful eye. This is a possibility, because hybrids and aliens seem to have no concern about human social and political institutions. For example, they seem to have little knowledge of what a country or a community is, or anything that humans take for granted as the normal world's political structure and institutions. Indeed, some hybrids do not know the name of the country in which they are living and working. This lack of concern could be because, eventually, they will use their own hierarchical structures to run society. Or they might allow us to keep ours and simply learn about society as they live here. Or there mught be a combination of the two.
The aliens could, as many abductees have told me, activate a mental “switch,” causing chosen trained abductees suddenly to become field workers in the final phase of the program. In this stage, humans might be herded onto UFOs and transported elsewhere, or simply be enclosed in confined areas. Hubrids and aliens would then take over and own the planet. This could be The Change, when all aspects of the program are fulfilled.
Ultimately, The Change will have consequences that do not include human societal growth or development. Only the aliens know what the future holds, and they have said little of substance beyond pursuing integration.
Why?
Perhaps the most important unanswered question in UFO and abduction research is: Why do aliens want to occupy the planet? I do not know. The abductees do not know. There is evidence that even hybrids and hubrids, who only know what their tasks are, do not know.
I will hazard three simple guesses: Survival: Some abductees have theorized that insectalins need to spread their genes via hybridization throughout the galaxy to gain a type of species immortality. Information from their minds can be transferred easily into other aliens' and hybrids' minds, allowing them to exist in different planetary environments. This could be considered genetic and/or neurological self- survival. It also fits with the “dying planet” hypothesis, in which the aliens' home planet is in crisis and they must continue their lives in some way on another planet. Furthermore, Earth's most advanced societies sustain life and order. The aliens could use this as a ready-made opportunity to take over an already complete civilization.
Geo-political strength: The insectalins' program may constitute a geo-political takeover that is based on the circumstances of other competing groups or civilizations and their particular interrelations. By acquiring planets or populations, one group of aliens could obtain influence over other alien groups. Thus it could be an empire-building or power-accruing operation. Earth may be a rare prize in a universe teeming with life, but where intelligent, technological life is less common.
Resources and economics: It is possible that Earth has an abundance of elements or characteristics that are rarely found in great quantity on other planets. To obtain and then exploit the planet with these resources might in some way give aliens status, make them more powerful, enhance their economic well-being, or help their home planet by exploiting Earth's resources. It may also be a combination of any of these ideas.
I assume that all of these speculations may be proven wrong. There is probably a logical reason not yet evident, and I have not worked with enough abductees to find it. Regardless, it is safe to say that the aliens are engaged in planetary acquisition because they want to do it, they can do it, and it benefits them.
Is Earth the First Planet to Be Taken Over?
If hybridization can produce grays, humanoid hybrids, and hubrids, we can now begin to think about it in a different light. It is possible that constructing hybrids is central to taking over specifically appropriate planets. If this is true, it brings up the question of how prevalent this activity is throughout the galaxy.
In 2013, scientists posited that our galaxy could contain over 8.8 billion habitable planets (estimates ranged from one billion to 100 billion). Assuming this conservative estimate is relatively accurate, if only 1 percent of them developed an evolutionary life form that resulted in advanced technology, there would be 88,000,000 advanced civilizations in the Milky Way. If only 1 percent of those civilizations were intent on dominating other planets, then 880,000 other technologically advanced civilizations could potentially be on the prowl looking for the optimum planet to take over. If only 1 percent of those civilizations colonized planets through hybridization, then 8,800 alien civilizations could be in the process of absorbing the inhabitants of other planets or searching for planets to hybridize. These are beings from extremely advanced civilizations who would probably be able to find suitable planets easily. So the chance that Earth is the first planet ever to be taken over by other aliens is probably low.
This is speculation, but there are specific reasons for it—namely the aliens' error rate, the reptalins, and the aliens' preparedness.109 The Error Rate If this were the first time that aliens had attempted the takeover of another planet through hybridization, we would expect a higher rate of error at the beginning of the program than we see now. Common errors have been known for many years. In a clandestine planetary takeover, there would be no reason to see UFOs, but people do occasionally witness them. Sometimes bystanders see people being taken.
Onboard, abductees occasionally get out of control, panic, run, and sometimes physically attack grays; they have kicked, punched, bitten, and even tried to strangle gray aliens. Budd Hopkins investigated a case in which a gray inadvertently held a scalpel-like instrument upside down and, when he pressed it on an abductee's skin, he cut his own thumb. These are all errors. The witnessing of a UFO may actually demonstrate the limits of alien technology, showing that they cannot remain invisible permanently, thereby causing an error when it is seen.
Furthermore, when an abduction ends, people are sometimes returned to the wrong place—if in a car, sometimes to the wrong road, or even miles away from the road they were on. They find themselves locked out of their homes when returned outside instead of inside of them. One woman had to break open a patio door with a piece of wood to get back into her house. Others wake up with their clothes on inside out, or on backward, or not on at all. Sometimes, they return wearing someone else's clothes. These are errors.
There are numerous other examples, but errors occurring outside of a UFO are not numerous enough to attract public attention. I suspect that Murphy's Law—that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong— applies to sentient beings throughout the universe. But that does not mean that it cannot be mitigated. The evidence points to aliens having somewhat diminished the effects of Murphy's Law before they ever arrived here. If aliens were here to conduct their program for the first time, then witnesses might see people who had accidentally dropped out of a UFO and were found dead wearing their pajamas in a place where there was nowhere to fall from. It might mean aliens inadvertently showing themselves in great numbers. Many more people would have witnessed abductions early on. Many more would have consciously remembered their abductions than do now. Inexperience with hybridization would mean many more errors than researchers have catalogued. Yet, overall, the error rate appears to have stayed the same since the program began.110 If the constancy of the error rate suggests that most of the program's problems were resolved before the aliens arrived here, then the aliens already had experience with hybridization and had corrected the major errors that such a widespread and complex program would most probably have. Because aliens are not perfect, minor errors will occur. But major errors that might give widespread dramatic evidence of their activities have not occurred. Therefore, it is most likely that the aliens were proficient with their program before they came here.
Reptalins Reptalins have the same functions as grays. Their presence onboard UFOs and performing procedures means they are contributing to The Change. However, they are not present in great numbers—despite abundant claims on the Internet. They are reported infrequently, and I have so far found no evidence of their doing anything differently than the workers onboard a UFO. In fact, early in my research, I was skeptical of their existence. But consistent and continuing reports of them by abductees convinced me otherwise. I now think their presence implies more of a supportive role in the program's process. It also indicates the possibility that they were brought into the program early on, when creating the workforce first began. Insectalins may have made reptalins the first workers in the program, and they fit smoothly into the insectalins' scheme of things. They do their work like grays and hybrids. They do not appear to be in positions of authority or to have a different agenda of any sort.
But the question is: Why are there reptalins? They might be pure aliens taken from other insectalin- acquired planets. Or, they may be aliens who were hybridized with insectalins. If hybridization with intelligent beings from other planets is ubiquitous, it means the reptalins could have lived in a civilization that fell under the insectalins' control. When the insectalins arrived on Earth, they did not need an enormous workforce with them. However, they required an initial workforce to begin the physical process of abducting humans for planetary acquisition. The insectalins brought the reptalins to perform that function. After the program was under way, grays were created from humans and insectalins to provide very large numbers of workers as the human population grew. (Hybridizing with small- brained reptiles would be illogical and counterproductive to the aliens' program.) Thus, the reptalins are probably the remnants of the program's earliest beginnings.
Preparedness The concept of preparedness is a little more amorphous to define. Insectalins have everything they need and nothing extraneous. They have technology for processing abductees and creating grays and humanoid hybrids. They have stealth and physical technology and planning. The aliens are not only efficient; they act as if this is a normal situation for them. In a strange way, abductee reports suggest that grays seem almost indifferent to their tasks. They are surprised at nothing and they are prepared for every eventuality. They act as if what they are doing is normal. Almost everything is routinized and the aliens know exactly what to do with each abductee. Even for unplanned actions—for instance, an abductee breaking away and running—they have rules in place to regain control and continue. Like error rate, this level of efficiency and routinization is the same now as it was when abductions first began.
The almost flawless alien program suggests that they possess previous knowledge of how to “capture” a planet. Most important, the evidence points to the idea that taking over another planet is standard practice throughout the galaxy and hybridization is at least one method of accomplishing it. If this is true, it suggests that planetary acquisition via hybridization has happened many times before. We can therefore summarize planetary acquisition through hybridization in a few short sentences: It is common. It is routine. It is happening to us.
Some Final Thoughts My favorite interview question is no longer: Are aliens walking among us? They are here, and I know how insane I sound when I answer that question. I know that hubrids are indeed walking and living among us and they are doing so in great numbers. I wish I could answer the question as I used to, but the evidence indicates a different truth and therefore I am forced to change.
Since I began to understand what the alien program is, however, I have not changed my mind about its catastrophic nature. Indeed, my research since The Threat has only confirmed this. Yet, I find myself in a dilemma. There is apparently little that can be done to stop the inexorable takeover. My writings about it do not offer solutions. Nonetheless, I harbor the optimistic sense that, if people know what is happening, good will come from it. Perhaps scientists and academics will begin to research the phenomenon.
Perhaps a method for stopping the program will eventually be found. One can only hope.
Appendix: Evolution of an Abduction Researcher I have been a UFO researcher since the mid-1960s. My first book, The UFO Controversy in America, was published in 1975. In the beginning, I placed little stock in the abduction phenomenon. I found it interesting, but probably psychological in origin. The use of hypnosis, a problematic technique, to uncover abduction events did not lend it legitimacy. Most abduction evidence is the result of human memory, with all its problems, retrieved through hypnosis, with all its problems, administered by amateurs like me. It is difficult to think of a weaker form of evidence, especially for such a potentially important subject.
My views were challenged in 1982 when I met Budd Hopkins, an internationally known abstract expressionist artist. Hopkins was also a pioneer in abduction research. By the late 1970s, he had become a serious abduction researcher. He discovered many of the abduction phenomenon's fundamental facts, such as its intergenerational nature: People became abductees, he observed, because at least one of their biological parents was an abductee—and at least one grandparent and at least one great-grandparent.
Using hypnosis, Hopkins discovered babies and children onboard UFOs who looked like crosses between gray aliens and humans. He called them hybrids. He found, as did other researchers, that abductees could not avoid being abducted no matter how much they tried. Aliens mentally controlled abductees. Hopkins used responsible hypnosis in abduction research and helped many frightened people come to terms with what was happening to them. His books—Missing Time (1981), Intruders (1987), and Witnessed (1996)—are essential for understanding abductions.
Under Hopkins's tutelage, I learned about abductions and how to investigate them. In 1986, I began doing hypnosis with abductees. At first, I made methodological errors; but I realized my mistakes, put controls into effect, and have since used hypnosis to study what people report when they think they have been abducted. Hypnosis evidence is tricky; but it is still evidence, and we have tremendous amounts of it.
My first book on abductions, Secret Life (1992), explored what happens minute-by-minute during typical abductions. I found that abductions were comprised of physical, reproductive, and neurological events. Physical events include aliens examining abductees on odd-looking tables, showing them rooms filled with fetuses floating in incubation containers, implanting objects in their bodies for unknown reasons, and requiring them to interact with, hold, and sometimes breast-feed hybrid babies.
Reproductive events are for the purpose of harvesting abductees' ova and sperm (gametes), usually with instruments and machines (for sperm), and sometimes through forced sexual contact with other humans. I speculated that the gametes were combined and altered—perhaps by adding alien genetic material, which caused the production of a range of hybrids.
Neurological events include manipulating emotions, thoughts, and images into abductees through prolonged staring into their eyes from only a few inches away. These “staring procedures” were baffling at first. It appeared that aliens could access abductees' memories, as well as make them “see” and believe anything they wanted them to. I found that aliens could cause women to have orgasms during staring procedures, and I posited that they were interested in human sexual response. Most alarmingly, even though staring procedures were always conducted from a distance of only inches, aliens could neurologically control people from much greater distances. Before an abduction occurred, abductees were often neurologically “pacified” by an alien, sometimes from hundreds of feet away, to ensure there would be no resistance.
In Secret Life, I also analyzed alien morphology and physiology and found that gray aliens do not eat or speak through their “mouths,” nor do they appear to breathe. While they are biologically different from humans, they have humanoid bodies with a tubular torso, two arms, two legs, a head and neck, two front-facing eyes high on the head, a slit-like mouth, two holes for ears, and two holes for a nose.
At the end of Secret Life, I proposed a matrix of events: primary events that virtually all abductees experience during every abduction onboard a UFO, secondary events that most abductees experience during most abductions, and ancillary events that many abductees experience relatively infrequently. I also addressed the impact of abductions on people's lives and their unintended consequences. My premise throughout the book was that aliens are perhaps studying human physiology, sexuality, and neurological processes.
My second abduction book, The Threat (1998), focused on hybrids and their roles in the abduction phenomenon. I described abductees' relationships with “personal project hybrids”—human-looking hybrids who involve themselves with abductees for years, sometimes for most of the abductees' lives, often visiting them in their homes.
I found that abductees were instructing hybrid children in how people on Earth lived. The children ranged in age from five to seventeen. It seemed that they were being trained, rather than just satisfying their curiosity.
I posited that the aliens' staring procedures used the optic nerve as a conduit to activate precise sites in the brain. Alien knowledge of human anatomy, physiology, and neurology was breathtakingly advanced. As I learned more, I realized they were not specifically interested in the workings of human physiology or sexual response, as I had thought in Secret Life. Their staring procedures seemed to be used primarily to see what abductees had been doing for the previous few weeks, or to force sexual response (which in some way facilitated the taking of ova), or for other reasons. I also realized that aliens were purposefully creating hybrids to look more like humans.111 By 1998, when The Threat was published, I had been hearing about an impending Change in which hybrids would be living on Earth. I did not yet have enough information to know when The Change might occur. I was cautious: It is crucial to note that there is little evidence of hybrids being engaged in “normal” human activity—working at a job, living in an apartment, and so forth. When hybrids appear at an abductee's place of work or even at places like a restaurant or bar, they have come to fulfill the functions of the abduction program. They have not appeared because they are interested in human work and leisure.112 Starting in 2003, I noticed an acceleration of integration activities, which were becoming centered more on the mundane actions of daily life. Bernard Davis was the first to describe a hybrid's “friendship” as part of the alien's normal, daily life on Earth. I began to hear similar reports of such friendships from people who were unaware of Bernard's accounts, and I realized that this could be evidence of The Change. The accounts suggested a now-continual physical integration into society and a slow intellectual integration that was allowing hybrids to master the long and complex learning curve that will enable them to act as normal humans. They use abductees to help them in this endeavor.
In essence, I had discovered what I did not want to find. Rather than finding aliens who were intellectually interested in humans and perhaps human civilization, the evidence suggested that the aliens were engaging in a far different program. All the evidence I could find pointed in the same direction: planetary acquisition.
I began my journey in the mid-1960s being thrilled that the UFO phenomenon might signal contact with another species. It did, but not in the way that I imagined. The abduction evidence has forced me to evolve into a fearful investigator. I have uncovered the alien reality, as much as I dislike it.
Endnotes 1 When I use the term “onboard,” it will always mean onboard a UFO.
2 For detailed information about abduction hypnosis methodology, see David M. Jacobs, The Threat (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), pp. 30–60, 211–224.
3 Bill Chalker, Hair of the Alien (New York: Paraview Pocket Books, 2005), p. 85.
4 See David M. Jacobs, Secret Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992) for children's cures, pp. 195– 196.
5 Budd Hopkins, Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods (New York: Random House, 1987), pp. 22–26.
6 The error rate in this poll was +/-1.4 percent. We were ultra-conservative in assessing the potential abductee population at 2 percent. See Jacobs, The Threat, pp. 122–127.
7 Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs, Ron Westrum, Unusual Personal Experiences: An Analysis of the Data from Three Major Surveys Conducted by the Roper Organization (Las Vegas: Bigelow Holding Corporation, 1992).
8 See Jacobs, The Threat, pp. 128–184.
9 I have purposefully chosen this word to differentiate them from the other hybrids.
10 For a discussion of alien physiology, see Jacobs, Secret Life; for hybrid life, see The Threat.
11 When I refer to discussions or talks onboard UFOs, they are all telepathic.
12 For a more in-depth discussion of personal project hybrids, see Jacobs, The Threat, pp. 177–184.
13 Allison Reed, Session 25. Incident, October 1986. Investigated, July 6, 1994.
14 Dr. Roger Leir and his medical team conducted many surgical removals of possible alien implants.
See his The Aliens and the Scalpel, Revised Second Edition (San Diego: The Book Tree, 2005).
15 For more information about envisioning, imaging, and staging procedures, see Jacobs, Secret Life, pp. 143–149.
16 Bernard Davis, Session 10. Incident, summer 1988. Investigated, November 17, 2003.
17 Karen Morgan, Session 29. Incident, April 15, 2006. Investigated, May 12, 2006.
18 Karen Morgan, Session 31A. Incident, early May 2005. Investigated, May 20, 2011.
19 Paula, Session 22. Incident, April 22, 2005. Investigated, May 18, 2005.
20 Paula, Session 24. Incident, March 11, 2006. Investigated, March 22, 2006.
21 I am calling all children onboard hybrids. They are hubrids when they are selected to live on Earth.
22 Betsey, Session 19. Incident, 1988. Investigated, January 28, 2005.
23 Betsey, Session 23B. Incident, March 11, 2005. Investigated, July 7, 2005. Betsey transcribed this session and included italics.
24 Betsey, Session 97. Incident, April 21, 2007. Spontaneous memory; Instant Messaging. Investigated, April 22, 2007.
25 Peggy, Session 9. Incident, 1964. Investigated, October 22, 1999.
26 Paula, Session 20. Incident, fall 2000. Investigated, December 27, 2005.
27 Paula, Session 21. Incident, March 12, 2005. Investigated, April 12, 2005.
28 Paula, Session 21. Incident, March 11, 2005. Investigated, April 12, 2005.
29 Paula, Session 21. Incident, March 12, 2005. Investigated, April 12, 2005.
30 Karen, Session 29. Incident, April 15, 2006. Investigated, May 12, 2006.
31 Betsey, Session 35B. Incident, January 20, 2006. Investigated, January 25, 2006.
32 Sean, Session 5. Incident, June 25, 2009. Investigated, July 5, 2009.
33 Sean, Session 6B. Incident, July 7, 2009. Investigated, July 18, 2009.
34 Sean, Session 8. Incident, October 10, 2009. Investigated, December 11, 2009.
35 Allison, Session 44B. Incident, January 5, 2006. Investigated, January 9, 2006.
36 Allison, Session 44C. Incident, 2005. Investigated, January 9, 2006.
37 Allison, Session 44C. Incident, 2005. Investigated, January 9, 2006.
38 Paula, Session 25A. Incident, July 30, 2006. Investigated, August 23, 2006.
39 Paula, Session 22. Incident, April 22, 2005. Investigated, May 18, 2005.
40 Gillian, Session 6. Incident, August 28, 2008. Investigated, March 20, 2009.
41 Bernard, Session 17. Incident, May 13, 2004. Investigated, June 25, 2004.
42 Kay, Session 7. Incident, December 5, 1993. Investigated, December 13, 1993.
43 Betsey, Session 31D. Incident, December 6, 2005. Investigated, December 14, 2005.
44 Betsey, Session 44C. Incident, April 14, 2006. Investigated, April 17, 2006.
45 Betsey, Session 47C. Incident, May 5, 2006. Investigated, May 10, 2006.
46 Betsey, Session 45B. Incident, April 25, 2006. Investigated, April 29, 2006.
47 Betsey, Session 45A. Incident, April 24, 2006. Investigated, April 29, 2006.
48 Betsey, Session 44C. Incident, April 14, 2006. Investigated, April 17, 2006.
49 Betsey, Session 57B. Incident, July 4, 2006. Spontaneous memory; Instant Messaging. Investigated, July 6, 2006.
50 Sean, Session 10. Incident, March 13, 2012. Investigated, March 17, 2012.
51 Betsey, Session 32A. Incident, December 6, 2005. Investigated, December 20, 2005.
52 Betsey, Session 56A. Incident, July 5, 2006. Investigated, July 5, 2006.
53 Allison, Session 43. Incident, October 7, 2005. Investigated, October 10, 2005.
54 Karen, Session 30. Incident, July 25, 2006. Investigated, July 27, 2006.
55 For a fuller exposition of PPHs, see Jacobs, The Threat, pp.177–184.
56 Betsey, Session 51. Incident, June 15, 2006. Investigated, June 16, 2006.
57 Betsey, Session 56B. Incident, July 1, 2006. Investigated, July 5, 2006.
58 Betsey, Session 58B. Incident, July 9, 2006. Investigated, July 17, 2006.
59 Betsey, Session 58A. Incident, July 14, 2006. Investigated, July 17, 2006.
60 Brian, Session 1. Incident, March 4, 2007. Investigated, March 31, 2007.
61 For abduction beginnings, see Jacobs, Secret Life, chapter 3.
62 Karen, Session 31B. Incident, May 18, 2011. Investigated, May 20, 2011.
63 Bernard, Session 16–17. Incident, June 4, 2004. Investigated, June 25, 2004.
64 Karen, Session 30. Incident, July 25, 2006. Investigated, July 27, 2006.
65 Betsey, Session 42A. Incident, March 29, 2006. Investigated, April 4, 2006.
66 Betsey, Session 44A. Incident, April 8, 2006. Investigated, April 17, 2008.
67 Betsey, Session 24C. Incident, July 11, 2005. Investigated, August 12, 2005.
68 Betsey, Session 24B. Incident, July 13, 2005. Investigated, August 12, 2005.
69 Betsey, Session 24C. Incident, July 6, 2005. Investigated, August 12, 2005.
70 Betsey, Session 26C. Incident, September 14, 2005. Investigated, September 19, 2005.
71 Bernard, Session 16. Incident, May 13, 2004. Investigated, June 4, 2004. Bernard remembered this incident in two successive sessions. In the first, he talked about chastising Eric for not paying for his jacket and hat. In the second, he remembered watching Eric steal the jacket and hat.
72 Bernard, Session 17. Incident, May 13, 2004. Investigated, June 24, 2004.
73 Betsey, Session 26C. Incident, September 14, 2005. Investigated, September 19, 2005.
74 Karen, Session 30. Incident, winter 2005. Investigated, July 27, 2005.
75 Betsey, Session 27B. Incident, September 28, 2005. Investigated, October 3, 2005.
76 Bernard, Session 10. Incident, September 1988. Investigated, November 17, 2003.
77 Betsey, Session 26. Incident, September 14, 2005. Investigated, September 19, 2005.
78 Betsey, Session 27A. Incident, September 21, 2005. Investigated, October 5, 2005.
79 Betsey, Session 27A. Incident, September 23, 2005. Investigated, October 3, 2005.
80 Betsey, Session 27C. Incident, September 23, 2005. Investigated, October 3, 2005.
81 Brian, Session 3B. Incident, May 12, 2007. Investigated, May 14, 2007.
82 Brian, Session 4. Incident, June 19, 2007. Investigated, June 20, 2007.
83 Betsey, Session 34B. Incident, January 15, 2006. Investigated, January 20, 2006.
84 Betsey, Session 100A. Incident, April 28, 2007. Investigated April 29, 2007.
85 Betsey, Session 100B. Incident, April 28, 2007. Investigated, April 30, 2007.
86 Bernard, Session 6. Incident, September 1986. Investigated, September 12, 2005.
87 Bernard, Session 10. Incident, September 1988. Investigated, November 17, 2003.
88 Bernard, Session 15. Incident, January 8, 2004. Investigated, May 19, 2004.
89 Bernard, Session 10. Incident, September 1988. Investigated, November 17, 2003.
90 David Jacobs, “The Meaning of Hybrid and Abductee Play,” International UFO Reporter, Summer 2004, 8–12, 27. With the help of electrodes connected to their brains, some people with “locked-in” syndrome have learned to manipulate computers with their minds. See Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Sharon Begley, The Mind and the Brain (New York: Reganbooks, 2003), p. 316.
91 Paula, Session 17. Incident, June 5, 2004. Investigated, June 9, 2004.
92 Clint, Session 10. Incident, March 1995. Investigated, October 7, 1995.
93 Rachel, Session 6. Incident, 1998. Investigated, December 10, 1999.
94 Brian, Session 4B. Incident, May 22, 2007. Investigated, June 20, 2007.
95 Paula, Session 12. Incident, May 2003. Investigated, November 3, 2003. See Jacobs, The Threat, for other examples of crowd control.
96 Pam, Session 31. Incident, summer 1986. Investigated, July 15, 1997.
97 Allison, Session 36. Incident, March 8, 1999. Investigated, May 18, 1999.
98 Betsey, Session 69. Incident, February 19, 2007. Spontaneous memory; Instant Messaging.
Investigation, February 19, 2007.
99 Betsey, Session 73. Incident, February 27, 2007, early morning. Investigated, February 27, 2007, late night. Spontaneous memory; Instant Messaging. Saying “almost instantly” suggests that she inadvertently skipped a memory.
100 Betsey, Session 74. Incident, February 28, 2007, early morning. Investigated February 28, 2007, late night. Spontaneous memory; Instant Messaging.
101 Allison, Session 38. Incident, November 9, 1999. Investigation, December 7, 1999.
102 Betsey, Session 69. Incident, February 19, 2007. Investigation, February 19, 2007. Spontaneous memory; Instant Messaging.
103 Allison, Session 43. Incident, October 7, 2005. Investigation, October 10, 2005.
104 Betsey, Session 90. Incident, April 6, 2007. Investigated, April 14, 2007. Spontaneous memory; Instant Messaging.
105 Paula, Session 25B. Incident, July 15, 2006. Investigated, August 23, 2006.
106 Bernard, Phone conversation, September 27, 2004. Incident, August, 2004.
107 See Jacobs, The Threat, pp. 102–118 for information about secrecy and protection of the fetus.
108 See, for example, Michael Menkin's www.stopabductions.com. He reports a high success rate in stopping individual abductions.
109 Eric A. Petigura, Andrew W. Howard, and Geoffrey W. Marcy, “Prevalence of Earth-size planets orbiting Sun-like stars,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2013 110 (48), pp.
19273–19278; published ahead of print, November 4, 2013.
110 One exceptional case is Budd Hopkins's Witnessed: The Brooklyn Bridge Abduction (New York: Pocket Books, 1996). More than twenty people saw the abduction or aspects of it in New York City.
111 Jacobs, The Threat, pp. 161–207.
112 Jacobs, The Threat, pp. 186–187.
Index Note: Abductee names are fictitious and entered by first names.
A abductee profiles. See also individual abductees Bernard, 3 Betsey, 3, 4 Brian, 4 Clint, 4 Gillian, 4 Karen, 3 Kay, 3 Pam, 3 Paula, 4 Peggy 3 Phil, 3 Rachel, 3 Sean, 3 abductees. See also “special” abductees common threads among, 17 mental and emotional stability of, 17 names for, alternative, 16 number of, 17–18 in planetary acquisition, 250–251 profiles of (See abductee profiles) roles in The Change, 41–43 traits of, 16–17 abductees, training for The Change, 203–233 abductee teamwork, 226–228 Allison, at the mall, 228–230 Allison, training, 209–212 Betsey, at Walmart, 230–232 Betsey, training, 213–223 meaning of training, 232–233 medical procedure training, 223–226 neural control over humans, 207–223 overview of, 203–204 “special” abductees, 204–207 abduction accounts confabulation and error in, 5–6 evidence in, 4–6 hypnosis and, 4–6 recall and emergence of patterns in, 6–9 reproduction procedures in, 8–9 abduction hypnosis, 4–5 abduction phenomenon abductees' role in, 232 abductees' understanding of, 253 abduction hypnosis and, 4–5, 6, 8 classifications of aliens and, 19 defining, 15 evidence for, 5 explanations for reported abductions and, 12–13 first contact and, 10 forcing will upon others and, 167 how abductees deal with, 13–14 human evolution and, 252 hybridization and, 28 intergenerational nature of, 13, 265 messages and, 9–11 population increase and, 244 secrecy program and, 246, 255 skeptics of, 11–14, 255 abduction process, 35–39 memory blockage in, 38–39 mental control in, 36 mental procedures in, 38 reproductive procedures in, 37–38 returning abductees to normal environment, 38–39 table procedures, 36–38 table procedures in, 36–38 timing of, 35–36 transport into UFO, 36 abduction research confabulation and error in, 5–6 on how abductees deal with abduction phenomenon, 13–14 hypnosis in, 4–6 on messages and first contacts, 9–11 patterns uncovered in, 7–8 psychological explanations and, 12–13 reproduction procedures in, 8–9 on why aliens want to occupy the planet, 257–258 adolescent and young adult hubrids, training, 73–96 clothing and dressing, 86–88 dancing and music, 75–81 facial expressions, 84–86 inspection, 92 learning styles, 74–75 making friends and being safe, 88–92 nail polish, 83–84 oranges, peeling, 81–82 overview of, 73–74 physical and behavioral characteristics, 92–96 reading books, 83–84 advance hybrids, 19, 24, 25, 31, 127, 128–129, 131, 136, 139 alien/hybrid society, 32–34 clothing in, 33 communication in, 33 emotion in, 33–34 entertainment in, 33 function and task in, 32–33 rationality and logic in, 34 aliens, 18–26 Alien Spectrum, 20–25 hybridization of, 28–32 versus hybrids, 19, 25–26 insectalins and, 26–28 mental abilities of, 18 names of, 26 neurological and telepathic abilities of, 18–19 origins based on physical appearance and activities, 20 Alien Spectrum, 20–25 hubrids, independent and group, 25 humanoid hybrids, early-stage, 23 humanoid hybrids, human-stage: advance and security hybrids, 24–25 humanoid hybrids, late-stage, 24 humanoid hybrids, middle-stage, 23–24 insectalins, 20–21 reptalin hybrids, 22 small grays, 21 tall grays, 21–22 Allison (abductee) clothing and dressing and, 86–88, 120–122, 241 facial expressions and, 84–86 inspection of hybrids by, 92 at the mall, 228–230 241 medical procedure training and, 223–226 profile of, 4 shower room and, 35 sleep cycle and, 98 training, for The Change, 209–212 Angelo (abductee), 208–209 assimilation bureaucracy, 127–129 B bathrooms, 98–99 behavioral characteristics of hubrids fitting in, 94–96 mingling, 93–94 Bernard (abductee) Blue Jays vs. Orioles and, 147–148, 167–169 The Change and, 40–41, 203, 268 Eric and Bernard's chat, 240 on friendship, 197–201 human food and, 176–177 profile of, 3 on sexual relationships, 195–196 sleep cycle and, 98 on stealing and morality, 167–169 violence and, 130 Betsey (abductee) on broken kitchen-sink sprayer, 103–105 on carpets and floors, 112 on Christmas tree lights, extension cords, and cats, 117 on computers, 113–116 on driving lessons, 150–157 on eBay, 114–116 on email, 113–114 personal project hybrid of, 128 profile of, 3, 4 on relationships, 117–120 on tasting different foods, 105–106 on teaching daily routines, 102–103 on teaching hybrid and hubrid children, 49–58 training for The Change training, 213–223 on training in kitchens, 99–101, 103–105 on upholstered chairs, 110–112 at Walmart, 230–232 on watching television, 106–110 on young adult learning styles, 75 bioengineering, advanced, in planetary acquisition, 242–243 books, reading, 83–84 Brian (abductee) on crowd control, 207 profile of, 4 on teaching hubrid about relationships, sex, and small talk, 186–187 on teaching hubrid how to operate TV, 141–144 bureaucracy, 127–129 C cabinets, 122–123 carpets, 112 cats, 117 Chalker, Bill, 10 The Change, 39–46 abductees' roles in, 41–43 conversations about, between abductees and hybrids, 40–41 overview of, 39–40 progression from alien to hubrid in, 44–46 training abductees for, 203–233 Christmas tree lights, 117 Clint (abductee) piloting UFOs and, 206 profile of, 4 clothing. See also dressing of adolescent and young adult hubrids, 86–88 in alien/hybrid society, 33 Allison Reed and, 86–88, 120–122, 241 of hubrid children, 67–69 communication in alien/hybrid society, 33 among beings onboard UFOs, 5–6 computers, 113–116 eBay, 114–116 email, 113–114 iPod, 116 conformity, of hubrid children, 67–69 controlling objects, 205–206 convenience store, 171–174 crowd control, 207 D daily routines, 102–103 dancing, 75–81 debunkers, 11–14 defiance, 122–123 dressing. See also clothing of adolescent and young adult hubrids, 86–88 field training for, 120–122 driving lessons, 148–157 E Earth adjusting to life on (See life on Earth, adjusting to) other aliens visiting, 251–252 Earth, as the first planet to be taken over, 258–262 error rate, 259–260 preparedness, 262 reptalins, 261 Earth, reasons for aliens wanting to occupy, 257–258 economics, 258 geo-political strength, 257–258 resources, 258 survival, 257 eating, rules of, 175–176 eBay, 114–116 economics, 258 email, 113–114 empathy, 179–180 The Enforcer, 102, 106, 115, 131, 134, 135, 138–139, 150, 152, 153, 157, 231–232 error rate, 259–260 evaluation, of hubrid children, 69–71 evidence, hypnosis, 4–6, 266 exact change, 164–167 extension cords, 117 F facial expressions, 84–86 families, 177–179 first contacts, 9–11 fitting in, 94–96 floors, 112 food, 105–106 fraternizing, 187–189 free will, 170–171 freezers, 138–140 fried clams, 176–177 friends, making, 88–92 friendships, Bernard and Eric's discussion on, 197–201 furnishings integrated hubrids, 131–134 UFO, 112, 243 G geo-political strength, 257–258 Gillian (abductee) mundane hubrid activities during training process, 96 profile of, 4 global workforce, advanced, in planetary acquisition, 243–244 grays emotional ranges of, 33 hybridization and, 28–29 small, in Alien Spectrum, 21 tall, in Alien Spectrum, 21–22 group hubrids, 25, 32, 127, 129 H Hill, Barney and Betty, 8 Homo sapiens, similarities of aliens to, 18 Hopkins, Budd, 9, 18, 249, 251, 259, 265–266 houses, hubrid children living in, 53–55 hubrid children, preparing, 47–71 being “normal kids,” 49–53 clothing and conformity, 67–69 evaluation, 69–71 learning, acceptance, and discipline, 59–62 learning style, 48–49 living in houses, 53–55 school lunch, 62–67 teaching young hybrids, 47–48 writing, 55–59 hubrid integration, field training for, 97–124 bathrooms, 98–99 cabinets, 122–123 carpets and floors, 112 cats, 117 Christmas tree lights, 117 computers, 113–116 daily routines, 102–103 defiance, 122–123 dressing appropriately, 120–122 extension cords, 117 food, 105–106 kitchens, 99–101 overview of, 97 relationships, 117–120 remote controls, 122–123 sleep cycles, 98 upholstered chairs, 110–112 watching TV, 106–110 wetness, 103–105 hubrids adolescent and young adult (See adolescent and young adult hubrids, training) group, 25, 32, 127, 129 hybridization and, 31–32 independent and group, in Alien Spectrum, 25 integrated (See integrated hubrids) in planetary acquisition, 251 humanoid hybrids, in Alien Spectrum early-stage, 23 human-stage: advance and security hybrids, 24–25 late-stage, 24 middle-stage, 23–24 humanoids, hybridization and, 30–31 hybridization, 28–32 grays and, 28–29 hubrids and, 31–32 humanoids and, 30–31 reptalins and, 29 hybrids versus aliens, 19, 25–26 learning style of, 48–49 teaching young, 47–48 hypnosis, 4–6. See also abduction accounts becoming competent with, 4–5 evidence, 4–6, 266 relaxation techniques in, 6 I idioms, 181–183 insectalins in Alien Spectrum, 20–21 emotional ranges of, 33 leaders, 26–28 inspection, of adolescent and young adult hubrids, 92 integrated hubrids, 125–158 assimilation bureaucracy and, 127–129 driving lessons, 148–157 furnishings, 131–134 Kmart, detour to, 134–136 overview, 125–127 religion, 138–140 shopping, 157–158 spoiled meat, 138–140 telephones, 136–138 traveling, 144–148 TV, 141–144 violence, 129–131 integration and speculation, 225–251. See also planetary acquisition abduction phenomenon as step forward in human evolution, 252–253 cocktail party, 235–240 Earth as the first planet to be taken over, 258–262 Eric and Bernard's chat, 240 error rate, 259–260 on future, 255–257 goals, accomplishing, 241 importance of understanding abduction phenomenon, 253–255 other aliens visiting Earth, 251–252 preparedness, 262 reasons for aliens wanting to occupy Earth, 257–258 reptalins, 261 Intruders (Hopkins), 266 iPod, 116 J Jamie (hubrid). See Betsey (abductee) jealousy, 189–195 K Karen (abductee) on driving lessons, 148–150 on evaluation of hybrid children, 69–71 on home training visit, 122–124 inspection of hybrids by, 92 on money lessons, 171–174 profile of, 3 on role in The Change, 41–43 on Valley Forge trip, 145–147 Kay (abductee) bathroom incident, 98–99 profile of, 3 Ken (PPH), 128, 150, 152, 159–164, 179, 187–188. See also Betsey (abductee) kitchens, 99–101 Kmart, detour to, 134–136 L learning, preparing hubrid children for, 59–62 learning styles of adolescent and young adult hubrids, 74–75 of hubrid children, 48–49 life on Earth, adjusting to, 159–183 convenience store, 171–174 eating, rules of, 175–176 empathy, 179–180 families, 177–179 free will, 170–171 fried clams, 176–177 idioms, 181–183 neighbors, talking to, 180–181 stealing and morality, 167–169 supermarket and exact change, 164–167 training Jamie, 160–164 logistics, in planetary acquisition, 248–250 M messages, 9–11 mindscan. See neural engagement mingling, 93–94 Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), 17 Missing Time (Hopkins), 266 monogamy, 189–195 morality, 167–169 Mullis, Kary, 10 music, 75–81 N nail polish, 83–84 names, of aliens, 26 neighbors, talking to, 180–181 neural control over humans, 207–223 training Allison, 209–212 training Betsey, 213–223 neural engagement in Alien Spectrum, 20–25 to control human actions, 126 insectalins use of, 26, 130 with Jamie (hubrid), 160 overview of, 18–19 in reproductive procedures, 37 in table procedures, 37 telepathy and, 247 neurological abilities, advanced, in planetary acquisition, 245 O objects, controlling, 205–206 onboard envisioning procedure, 96 oranges, peeling, 81–82 P Pam (abductee) on alien ability to engage and control neurologically, 208–209 profile of, 3 patterns, emergence of, 6–9 Paula (abductee) inspection of hybrids by, 92 profile of, 4 Peggy (abductee) profile of, 3 on teaching hybrids to write, 58–59 personal project hybrids (PPHs), 25, 30, 32, 127, 128–129, 150, 228, 267 Phil (abductee) piloting UFOs and, 206 profile of, 3 physical characteristics of hubrids, 92–96 piloting UFOs, 206–207 planetary acquisition, 241–251 abductees, 250–251 advanced global workforce, 243–244 advanced neurological abilities, 245 advanced technology and bioengineering, 242–243 hubrids, 251 overview of, 241–242 planning, logistics, and support, 248–250 secrecy, 245–246 telepathy, 247 time, 247–248 planning, in planetary acquisition, 248–250 preparedness, 262 R Rachel (abductee) piloting UFOs and, 206–207 profile of, 3 reading books, 83–84 recall, 6–9 relationships, 185–201 Betsey on, 117–120 Brian on, 186–187 field training and, 117–120 fraternizing, 187–189 friends, making, 88–92 friendships, Bernard and Eric's discussion on, 197–201 jealousy, monogamy, and sex, 189–195 overview, 185–186 sexual, Bernard and Eric's discussion on, 195–196 small talk, 186–187 religion, 138–140 remote controls, 122–123 reproduction procedures, 8–9 reptalins in Alien Spectrum, 22 hybridization and, 29 speculation on, 261 telepathy and, 29 resources, 258 Roper Organization, 18 S safety, of adolescent and young adult hubrids, 88–92 school lunch, 62–67 Sean (abductee) on discussing nail polish and reading books with hubrid, 83–84 on discussing oranges with hubrid, 81–82 on iPod incident, 116 profile of, 3 on teaching hubrid how to dance, 75–81 secrecy, in planetary acquisition, 245–246 Secret Life (Jacobs), 204, 266, 267, 268 security hybrids, 19, 24, 25, 31, 32, 102, 106, 114, 117, 127, 128, 129, 131 sex, jealousy, monogamy and, 189–195 sexual relationships, Bernard and Eric's discussion on, 195–196 shopping, 157–158 skeptics, 11–14 sleep cycles, 98 small talk, 186–187 “special” abductees, 204–207 controlling objects, 205–206 crowd control, 207 piloting UFOs, 206–207 speculation. See integration and speculation spoiled meat, 138–140 stealing, 167–169 supermarket and exact change, 164–167 support, in planetary acquisition, 248–250 survival, 257 T table procedures, 36–37 teaching daily routines, 102–103 hybrids to write, 58–59 young hybrids, 47–48 technology, advanced, in planetary acquisition, 242–243 telepathy abductees and, 204 adolescent and young-adult hubrids and, 126 in Alien Spectrum, 20–25 children of abductees and, 243, 250 confabulation and, 5–6 hubrids and, 32, 74, 126 human-stage hybrid children and, 47–48, 49 hybrids and, 28 individuality and privacy limited by, 33, 253 insectalins and, 248, 253 late adolescent and young adult hubrids and, 74 nonconformity and, 82 onboard UFOs, 5–6 overview of, 247 in planetary acquisition, 247 reptalins and, 29 telephones, 136–138 Threat, The (Jacobs), 6, 35, 39, 98, 203, 242, 263, 267, 268 time, in planetary acquisition, 247–248 training. See also individual headings of abductees for The Change, 203–233 of adolescent and young adult hubrids, 73–96 field training for hubrid integration, 97–124 traveling, 144–148 Blue Jays vs. Orioles, 147–148 Valley Forge, 145–147 TV operating, 141–144 watching, 106–110 U UFO researchers, 1, 10–11, 243 UFOs activities onboard, 36 alien-like skills learned onboard, 205 in Alien Spectrum, 20–25 backrooms of, 34, 35 behavioral rules onboard, 175 communication among beings onboard, 5–6 design of, for abduction program, 243, 249 errors occurring outside of, 260 factory, 250 furnishings, 112, 243 grays and, 28 growing up onboard, 186 as home for aliens, 18 insectalins and, 26, 27, 244 light source for transporting abductees into, 36, 242–243 manufacturing, 250 onboard behind-the-scenes mechanisms of, 249 piloting, 206–207 reptalins and, 261 security hybrids and, 31 sightings of, 241–243, 259 sizes of, 250 transportation technology in, 144–145, 242–243 upholstered chairs, 110–112 V Valley Forge National Park, 145–147 Villas Boas, Antonio, 8 W Westrum, Ron, 18 wetness, 103–105 Witnessed (Hopkins), 266 writing, 55–59 About the Author David M. Jacobs is an American historian and recently retired associate professor of history at Temple University specializing in 20th-century American history and culture. Jacobs is also well known in the field of UFOlogy for his research and authoring of books on the subject of alien abductions. Visit him at www.ufoabductions.com.
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