Secret life: firsthand accounts of UFO abductions (3 page)

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 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 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.

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.