MULTIPLE-WITNESS
CASES
Are UFO alien encounters real events? While the
evidence suggests the experience takes place in an altered state of
consciousness, we need to know: is it a kind of hallucination or is it real in
any objective sense?
The test for objective reality is whether others
see it or not. If I see a ghost or a goblin, I have no way of knowing whether it
is real if I alone see it. If others see it too, I know that it has a degree of
reality independent of my own psyche. It may not be real in the sense that
chairs and desks are real – it obviously is not – but it must nevertheless have
a kind of objective reality.
I decided to find out by looking at
multiple-witness cases. I soon realised however that I had a problem with the
paucity of data. Multiple-witness close encounter / alien abduction cases
involving single witness run into hundreds if not thousands while those
involving more than one witness comprise a disappointingly small category. Ask any ufologist to name those he is
familiar with and he should be able to reel off a handful, maybe a dozen or so,
but after that he will be struggling.
From an already small category, after weeding out
a few cases to which I assigned ‘low credibility’ through a failure to meet
basic criteria for authenticity, I
selected only those that provide primary source information: that is to say
first-hand accounts - not necessarily from all witnesses but at least from two
of them. Only first-hand accounts
will do. Not only will accounts by
the witness’s brother’s best friend’s barber not do but neither will
third-person accounts by the investigating ufologist. When
this last criterion is applied, very few cases remain.
In fact, all that I was left with were: the Betty
and Barney Hill case, the A70 case, the Allagash incident, the Pascagoula case
and Reed family experiences. No
more than a handful of cases but it’s the best we’ve got.
You may want to take issue
with me on this and would have added such-and-such a case but I doubt whether
you would be able to come up with any for which the primary source data is
markedly better than the above.
You may be able to point to this or that case which contains amazing
first-hand accounts by all of the many credible witnesses but is not in the
public domain. It is either
unavailable for public scrutiny to protect the witness or (purportedly) hidden
away in some ufologist’s files.
That is no use to researchers like myself.
If is not in the public domain it can’t be used as data.
Send me the data or put it up on the Net for all to see and I’ll include
it in this analysis.
I will start with the Betty and Barney Hill case
because it illustrates the point about working only with primary source data:
that given in first-hand accounts.
Most UFO enthusiasts have heard
the famous Betty and Barney Hill story many times over.
They know that the couple were abducted by alien grey-like beings. They know it because that’s how
their abductors have been depicted in UFO documentaries and described and illustrated in the UFO literature.
However, as we can see from this interview with Betty Hill, it’s far from
the truth:
INT:
‘Let’s just go back to those type of entities.
They were your classic alien grey-shape, cat-like
eyes…’
BETTY: ‘No, no,
no.’
INT:
‘They weren’t, OK.’
BETTY:
‘Thank you, they were a form of human
being.’
Which
only goes to show, once again, that
anything other than primary source information is pretty much
worthless.
Later in the interview Betty
says ‘…I never told them aliens’.
She brings out a sculpted head, human, slightly Asian-looking possibly,
and tells us that they all looked like that: ‘There was as much difference between
them as among any group of people.’
She also dismisses all the stories about ova being extracted from her;
she says: ‘[There was] absolutely nothing sexual’.
So what did Barney
recall? Did Barney also recall
ordinary humans? Well, yes he did
– but they were different kinds of humans to Betty’s.
Barney recalls Nazi-type humans and a red-haired Irish-type of
human. This is when looking up at
the craft with binoculars and seeing the occupants staring back at him. So did Barney not see any aliens
either? Yes, Barney recalled a
humanoid creature with‘wrap-around eyes’.
We have a sketch by his own hand depicting
this.
So what Betty recalls is
different in many respects from what Barney recalls though the fundamental
experience of being given a physical examination on a flat surface inside a
structure or building of some kind is the same. Indeed, some of the details are the
same too. They both recall being
led up a ramp – by humans in both cases - and both recall a kind of
corridor. And
the early stage of their experience – up until encountering the figures on the
road – hardly differs at all, leastways not in any significant way..
It is curious that even though
Betty’s abductors were human, their most distinguishing feature for Betty were
the eyes. They are strikingly
large and slightly what she refers to as ‘mongoloid’. In
fact Betty was so taken with the eyes that she actually highlighted that part of
the sculpted face in yellow – not that they were actually yellow in reality, she
is at pains to explain. Barney too
is obsessed with the ‘wrap-around’ eyes of his humanoid.
There is then, in the Betty
and Barney Hill case, a shared experience up until the time they were ‘taken’ –
literally taken out of the car. In
fact, their experience up to this point seems as real as any other everyday
experience – real but bizarre.
After this point, their experiences are not the same.
Each undergoes a ‘typical’ abduction experience but Betty’s account of
what she experienced has little more in common with Barney’s experience than
with that of any other abduction experience taken at random from the archives of
ufology. Perhaps that is a slight
exaggeration but it is not very far from the truth.
They are both given medical examinations but it is not only a different
kind of examinations but by different kinds of entities.
[This
is puzzling. If the two witnesses
recalled the same experience throughout it would not be puzzling.
We should simply say the experience was real, albeit taking place in an
altered state of consciousness. If
the two experiences had nothing in common that too would not be puzzling. We should merely assume the two had
undergone some kind of hallucinatory experience. It is the fact that it is ‘the same but
different’ that is puzzling. This presents a problem for those who
hold the experience is objectively real.
However, it is just as much a problem for those who hold that it is
hallucinatory. Whether you think
that supports or refutes your pet theory depends on whether you’re an optimist
or a pessimist.]
Let’s see how the next case
compares in this respect. This is
the A70 case investigated by Malcolm Robinson.
On the evening of 18th August 1992, Malcolm
tells us, two Edinburgh men, Gary Woods and Colin Wright were driving along a
lonely road toward the small town of Tarbrax to deliver a TV satellite system to
someone there. They
were just passing a reservoir on the left when Colin, who was in the passenger
seat, drew Gary’s attention to something ahead of them. Malcolm described
to Chris Everard on Enigma TV what happened next:
‘[It
was] a black disk-shaped object hovering
about 20-30 feet above the road, motionless, tremendous black,
shiny sheen on it, and they’re looking at this and they know that this was not a
conventional helicopter and they decided not to stop the car and do a 3-pt turn.
They decided that the best course of action would be to put their foot down hard
on the accelerator and drive quickly underneath this object and as the car was
directly underneath this hovering object emitted like a heavy silver snowflakes
that just fluttered down and hit the car and both men were enveloped in total
inky blackness. They couldn’t see their hands in front of their face, they
couldn’t see the dashboard of the car, they couldn’t see each other...
Thus far, Malcolm’s account, even though it is a
third-person (second-hand) account, would appear to be a fairly accurate
depiction of what happened to the men up to this point as reflected in the
actual (first-hand) accounts by the two men which were given separately, then
audio-recorded and transcribed.
Both Colin and Gary
remember what happened to them up to this point very clearly and there are no
discrepancies between their stories. This is to be expected as there are no
indication that either of the two men were at that stage of events in any
non-ordinary or altered state of consciousness. What happened next, though, is hazy and
confused. In fact, neither man had
any clear recollection at all of the period between driving toward the disk and
coming out from under it. Indeed
they would have had every reason to suppose that nothing at all had happened
were it not for the strange fact that when they arrived in Tarbrax they
discovered that the journey had taken much longer than it should have – about an
hour and a half longer.
Following typical procedure, they were persuaded
to have hypnotic regression to find out what transpired during this period of
‘missing time’. However, even
under hypnosis, typically, only fragments of a surreal, nightmarish experience
were recalled. This is what Colin
Wright recalls. Note that this is
not Colin speaking under hypnosis but his account of what he afterwards recalls
recalling (if you will) during the hypnotic regression session:
‘...blackness...going up...creatures...in a
bright room, they’re trying to undress me...no clothes on...[sitting on] a metal chair, it’s smooth and
cold...[feel] cold...something in
my right eye...uncomfortable, like a red hot poker in the centre of my
eye...something clamped on it...
[our] car is in a big, bright
metallic room...[interviewer asks how it got there]...it
was lifted...I’m in that chair again..something looking at me in the
corridor...it’s ugly...lurking...it seems ancient to me...I think it’s trying
to manipulate me...I can hear a noise behind me...I’m staring at a wee
creature, it’s not very happy with me, I don’t think I was supposed to look
behind my chair for some reason...black eyes...I’ll not give in...it’s trying
to outstare me... I’m looking at something..it looks like a sort of surgical
tool...I think that was what went into my eye... Two of them have got me by the
feet and are dragging me toward a small archway [He then describes how the
entities put clothes back on him.]
Now let’s compare this with Gary Woods’
account. Gary is being interviewed
by UFO researcher Brian Allan and is telling Brian what he recalled under
hypnosis: I have extracted only
the relevant material from a transcript of the interview:
‘[I’m]
underground.
I saw a big craft in a big,
huge open space under the ground...
tunnels, dark tunnels...the creature I saw...right in my face. It said to me,‘I got a life, a life
like yours but different, things happen to us, but what’s got to be done’s got
to be done.’ I was crying, I said,
I can’t help you, I’ve got a wife and children...and what it said was, it wanted
sanctuary. [It said]
you’re not living like you should... It said we were more advanced than
them. In what way. I don’t
know. I was lying down ...they
turned me round, moved me, they were interested in my left leg. It sounds daft
but these things were happy to see me, that’s what it seemed like... There was a
circular hole in the floor and...a gel-like substance and one of the creatures
climbed out of the gel...it was connected with healing.
[There was] a red mist...these things swimming in it [sketch
shows sperm-like creatures] These things are looking into my life and
I don’t know who they are.... I remember rocks, somewhere they took us...these
things were standing behind the rocks, like they were waiting for us coming
there...’
The two accounts have some similarities. Both men tell of being taken somewhere
by strange entities and submitted, against their will, to some kind of physical
examination. Beyond that, there
are enormous differences. Gary
recalls the car being‘lifted’, Colin has nothing to say about this (neither men
recall being taken from the car).
The place where they are taken is different.
The kind of examination they were given is different.
Colin recalls being undressed, Gary not. The aliens who administered it are
different. The template is the
same – taken by strange entities and submitted to physical examination – but the
details are different.
Malcolm’s account, on Enigma TV, of what the two
men had undergone during the missing time period does not reflect
this:
They
were forcibly taken out of the car by these small grey creatures and were taken
independently to this object, stripped naked and Gary found himself place on a
flat, raised table and he was subjected to some form of medical or clinical
examination...
The facts are that while each saw entities they
were different entities, different kinds of Further, neither of the men saw
predominantly greys. In fact,
neither of the men seem to have seen anything grey at all. The
‘grey’connetion is though Gary’s wife who at home, days after the incident on
the A70, saw ‘grey figures’ in her bedroom – not alien greys, note, just grey
figures. Nor
do either recall being actually taken out of the car by the creatures. One does remembers the car being lifted
up but that’s all.
So, you see, we need to be
constantly wary of third-person accounts.
What happens in nearly every case is that the original account by the
witness undergoes a transformation.
One of the abductees may tell the investigator that he was aware of a
grey figure in the background and the investigator will record that ‘there was a
grey entity aboard the craft’ – as if both abductees had seen the figure. It only then needs a researcher to come
along and consult the investigator for one experiencer’s description of a ‘grey
figure’ to become ‘they were taken aboard the craft by alien greys’. In no time at all what may have been an
indistinct greyish presence becomes alien greys abducting both
experiencers. That is before the
author who has his own belief-system and half an eye on book sales comes on the
scene and interviews the researcher.
Of course, the writer in question may be a man of the utmost integrity
(like Malcolm) with no conscious intention to embellish the facts but he still
cannot help but view what he has been told through the lens of his own
belief-system. The end
result is as often as not a poor reflection of the experience related first-hand
by‘witness’ or ‘abductee’.
What Malcolm told the TV man seems to have been a
sort of composite. Now composite
accounts are predicated on an unquestioned presumption about the reality status
of the experience: that if one of
the abductees saw a particular creature or feature of the craft, then it was
objectively there even if the other abductees didn’t see it.
That may be so or it may not but it is something we cannot just
presume.
To return to this particular case, there are few
similarities in the two men’s experiences. One is the feeling (more typical of
faerie encounters of old) of having been gone a long, long time, certainly
longer than the missing hour and a half.
Gary says that they both have the odd feeling‘like
we were away for ten years, and we came back and our family had all changed and
everything like that. I know this sounds a bit…daft, but that’s kind of like the
way that he thought and I thought’.
Gary is equally at pains to point out, however, that, it was ‘the only thing we had in common’.
In spite of all, there is an objective element to
the A70 incident that cannot be dismissed. There were definite physical
effects. In the interview with
Brian Allan, Gary says:‘After this my
car [an almost new Vauxhall Astra] started growing a white‘foost’, [a vernacular expression for fungus or
dust] all over it.
I was always at the car removing this growth...I couldn’t understand it.
I know cars, it’s my job, I’m an
ambulance mechanic.” Both also
say they found scars on their body that were previously not there.
Other members of Gary’s family too seem to have
been drawn into something that was not just psychological but undeniably
physical. Gary
recalls:
Kim
[Gary’s wife] took a seizure and I had to take the boys
to her mothers. I was working and I couldn’t look after them, so I took them to
her mums. It was half six at night I was heading back with the boys and I was
worried, I was in deep despair, really worried and I was panicking and crying to
myself. Then there was this huge
big, like thing, like a flash over the car, everything in the car, the
whiteness, like magnesium white started to come in all over the car. It poured
in all round us and the boys were screaming and…ahhh, I remember at the side of
the road, stopped at the side of the road and I asked Garry (his oldest son)
what he thought and he said “It was like being in heaven”. The youngest lad, he
was being sick, but Garry, that’s what Garry actually said… “It was like being
in heaven… like being in heaven’
Here we have something that seems drawn toward
Gary but manifests itself to others, not unlike a poltergeist. It
may be significant that the experience occurred when Gary was in a state of
emotional intensity, which is also what happens in poltergeist activity. It also manifested itself to Gary’s
wife, who seems to have been quite sceptical of the UFO close encounter
incident, at first. We don’t have
a first-hand account by Gary’s wife, Kim, but Malcolm relates how one day he got
a phone call from Gary’s wife to say that the previous night in bed something
had pulled her by the ankes and looking up she saw for a few moments ‘grey
figures’(though not, have we any reason to presume, alien greys).
I have made several attempts to acquire more
information on this case than is in the public domain.
I was told by investigator Malcolm Robinson, however, that Colin and Gary
and indeed Malcolm himself are under some kind of obligation or contract not to
speak to the public until a forthcoming film about the incident has been
released. I now learn that plans
have fallen through and there will be no film. I am still nonetheless no more
optimistic about more primary source information being released than any film
being released (though I shall keep trying). Whether it would have provided any more
evidence for a ‘shared experience’ is a matter for speculation.
Quite probably it would not.
Any evidence for the physical reality of a case is generally not hidden
away but on the contrary usually seized upon and held up to the gaze of all
within the UFO community – before being simplified, exaggerated and embellished
and appearing in tabloid newspapers.
In the A70 case, most of the material we have to
work with comes from Gary Wood. It
is Gary who was the most affected by the incident, Gary who has been dogged with
subsequent poltergeist activity, Gary who has given is the most detailed account
of his experience. It is also
Gary, but not Colin, who has taken and passed a lie-detector (polygraph)
test. Colin just wants to forget
the whole thing. This is
typical. And it’s so frustrating
for researchers. You’re tempted to
forget the whole thing yourself – except for the tantalising glimpse of a nugget
of gold hidden inside the dung heap of
second, third and umpteenth-hand accounts of somebody else’s
experience.
Most of the primary-source data of
multiple-witness close encounter cases derives from primarily from a single
witness, this cannot be said to be so in the Allagash abduction case, in which
all four experiencers were equal providers of
source-material.
This incident began in the summer of 1976 when
four men - Chuck Rak, Charlie
Foltz and twins Jack and Jim Weiner, all former art students - went on a camping
trip in a wilderness area near Allagash, Maine. One night they decided to do a spot of
fishing in a stretch of water known as Smith Pond.
Before they set off in their canoe they built a big fire as a beacon to
guide their way back, as there was no moon.
Chuck Rak:
I remember being in the back of
the canoe, paddling leisurely, the twins were in the middle, Charlie was in the
front and I remember they were having a conversation.
I was focussing on the night, the lake and the water and I began to feel
observed.’
Jack Weiner: ‘...and
then all of a sudden, Chuck Rat, who was at the back of the canoe said, ‘Holy
Mackeral, what the ... is that?’, and I turned around and looked and there was
this huge white light that was coming out of the trees...it wasn’t making any
sound.’
Chuck Rak:
‘I was very, very fascinated...I
was in a state of extreme euphoria. I remember just feeling, wow, this is
fantastic.’
Charlie Foltz: ‘It
was just alive...and when it was nearest us, about a hundred yards away, it
paused and when it paused I said to the fellas, I said, ‘Shine the flashlight
and see what it does.’
Jim Weiner: ‘The
instant we flashed this flashlight this thing sent this beam of light out to
us. We were in a sixteen foot
aluminum canoe which in the pitch black of night lit up like a roman
candle. We must have looked like
this object just waiting to be approached on this
lake.’
Chuck:
‘All I can tell you was what was
going on in my mind was just exhilarating expectation...this is fantastic, this
is something we can communicate
with.’
Jim:
I was completely shocked and
especially shocked that it reacted as quickly as it did, which told us there was
some kind of intelligence about it and as soon as this light came out this thing
started moving and so we thought, this is real, this is really happening..this
is not a figment of our imagination, we’ve got to deal with this situation now
because within a few seconds this thing is going to be right on
us.’
Charlie: ‘I wasn’t even interested in this thing
anymore except that I didn’t want to be as close to it as I
was.’
Jim:
‘I remember paddling as fast as I
could, and Jack saying it’s getting closer, it’s getting
closer’.
And then, and then....
nothing. A fog of
forgetfulness descends in customary fashion and blanks out everything. None of the men are able to say even how
they got back to the shore. The
last one to recall anything seems to have been Chuck who, watching the light
disappearing into the night sky, was filled with regret: ‘...and
I thought that was that, we’ve lost our chances, we’ve let it slip through our
fingers and I observed it leaving and it just gradually faded out.’
And that was how it seemed for
years. They could recall
everything up until the time of the approaching light and then nothing until
they found themselves back on the shore.
Even that doesn’t seem to have been a clear moment.
It wasn’t like recovering from unconsciousness or waking from a
dream. It was more the gradual
discovery that they were unable to recall a period of time that they should have
been able to recall. Even when
they discovered that their fire had burned down to near-embers, it never
occurred to anyone that there was any ‘missing time’ as such.
It was just that (from what they did recall) no one wanted to sit round
what was left of fire and discuss what had just happened to them.
Nobody
seems to wanted to talk much about anything, in fact.
All four recall this as odd but
again this is typical of this kind of experience.
Had Jim not developed temporal epilepsy after a car accident and started
to have ‘flashbacks’ there would be no Allagash abduction case.
Jim describes the images that surfaced, mainly in
dreams:
‘All I
remember was seeing vague figures, anthropomorphic in shape but they did not
seem human to me...around me and they were either doing things with my genitals
or they were prodding me with some kind of instruments..there was an extreme
feeling of malevolence and I was always absolutely felt terrified.’
When he told his twin brother Jack about this, he
was surprised to learn that Jack too had been having the same nightmares. This led to all four men undergoing
hypnotic regression to retrieve hidden
memories:
The following is from what they recall of the
hypnosis (again, not what they actually said during the session but what they
recalled of the incident after having had hypnotic
regression).
Jack: ‘The last thing I can remember is having
both hands on the side of the canoe looking out at the water to see if Chuck was
in the water and then not seeing him and thinking, ‘Oh my God, what happened to
Chuck and then looking up and then the next think I remember is ...this intense
feeling of...almost like I was coming apart or something...and the next thing I
remembered was being on my back in this hazy
environment.’
Charlie:
‘I’m lying on my back and I’m
disorientated...I’m not sure where I am.
As I’m struggling to get up, a face appears and looks straight down at
me.’
Jack:
‘It’s reminding me of
insects...bugs, large eyes like ants have...could have been goggles for all I
know...their hands were not like hands at all and this one had me by the wrist
and it was holding its arm up and it had something in its hand ...I didn’t like
the looks of it and I remember thinking, Oh boy, here we go, this is it, I’ve
got five seconds, they’re going to cut me open, dissect me,
whatever...’.
Chuck:
‘Under regressive hypnosis I
remembered the aliens trying to put me into the canoe.
There was one of them standing in the canoe trying to adjust my position
in the back of the canoe and another sort of waist-deep in the water right next
to me and then they tried to position Jim Weiner in front of me but he’s heavier
and they were having a hard time with him..and then the other two were beamed
right on land and Jim got out to join
them.’
The juxtaposition of these fragments of
(first-hand) description are taken from a documentary and is misleading. It suggests they are all complementing
each others’ accounts and recalling the same thing.
They are not. For example,
Jack’s description of ‘large eyes like ants’ is not complementary to Charlie’s
description of ‘a face’. The viewer is intended to think it is
but it is not. We must be wary of
this sort of thing.
In fact there are enormous differences in the
accounts of the four men as recalled under hypnosis.
There is a similarity, yes.
All recall being physically examined against their will by otherworldly
entities. The detail of the
recalled experience, however, differs from one individual to the next. For example, Jim Weiner recalls the
entities doing things with his genitals, though the others didn’t.
And they’re all different entities –different types
of entity. It as if, following
Alice down the rabbit hole, you were to meet Oberon and Titania instead of the
White Queen and the March Hare. It
is interesting, though, that the ‘abductees’ still seem to be aware of one
another even after this core part of the experience has begun.
Perhaps we can refer to this ‘core’ part of the
encounter as Phase II since there are, as with all close encounter / abduction
experiences, two distinct phases.
The first phase can be said to begin with the Chuck Rat’s feeling that
something is watching them and end with the men fleeing from a UFO that is in
pursuit of them. All of them recall
this part clearly without any gaps in their memory and all agree upon it what
was encountered. Of the second part
of the experience they recall nothing but needed hypnotic regression to do
so. Even then what is recalled are
only fragments.
There is also a third phase,
depending upon how you want to ‘cut up’ the total experience.
This is a period of confusion when everyone seems to be socially isolated
from one another, enveloped in their own private world, wrapped in their own
cocoon. It begins in this
particular abduction experience with men finding themselves back on the shore.
Were
they simply stunned into silence by what had happened?
Were they still in a state of shocked? Or had they not quite ‘come down’
yet from their altered state of consciousness? It is not clear whether we should view
this third stage as an extension or tail-end of the second.
Either way, it is the nature of the the second
phase of the experience, the middle part, the ‘core’ experience, that we know so
little about. We are still unable
to say to what extent and in what sense it is a shared experience.
Perhaps too much should not be made of this but
it is interesting that in all the cases we have looked at so far the encounter
was initiated by the witnesses / experiencers. In the Allagash incident, it is
precisely and only when one of the men flashes his torch at the UFO that it –
apparently in response - sends out a beam of light to the canoe, initiating the
abduction. Betty too recalls:“I’m trying to attract the attention of this
craft, I’m telling it, ‘come on in, hi!’.
I’ve got the window down and I’m yelling to it, ‘Hi, hi, hoo-ee’ and at
that point it left the topof the mountain and stopped mid-air directly in front
of us about fifty feet in the sky.’
Betty goes so far as to explicitly state,
‘I think I brought it on myself, I’m waving to them and yelling to them.”
In the A70 case the two men see the UFO ahead hovering above the
road. They have to make a decision
whether to drive under it or not.
If they had to decided to turn back instead of drive under it, would they
have been ‘taken’? That we shall
never know. It’s certainly not
true of all cases but it’s true of the final case.
Four out of five of cases might not amount to much but is intriguing when
they are the best cases on record.
First, though, let’s look at the Pascagoula case.
This was an incident which occurred on
11th October 1973 and
began with two ship yard workers, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, fishing off
a pier on the Pascagoula river. It
had already been dark for little while.
This is Hickson’s account which I’ve transcribed
from an audio-recording of an interview he gave with Dr James
Harder:
“I
heard some kind of zipping-like sound, like air escaping from a pipe and as I
turned around I saw two blue flashing lights or pulsating lights I’m not
sure. It seemed like it was some
kind of craft. It seemed like it
was almost down to the ground. In
fact it seemed to be a couple of feet, you know, above the ground and it just
hovered there. So Calvin had
turned by this time and he was looking at it too and I didn’t know what to
do. I was just spellbound there for
a few minutes and then almost immediately some kind of opening appeared in
the...what I assumed would be the front and the light that had come outside it
was real bright light and three things appeared in the doorway of the craft and
they seemed to just glide out of the craft, they never touched the ground. They seemed to just glide across
twenty-five or thirty feet from us or maybe a little further than that. And they came to us, just glided over
to us, and then two of them took me by the arms from the side and one took hold
of Calvin and I seen Calvin go limp and I didn’t know it then but he had
fainted. So they carried me inside
the craft and the light was almost burning inside.
In fact for almost three or four days I had something like a bad
[inaudible] flashing in my
eyes. I can’t recall, I can’t
remember just what was in the inside simply because the light was so bright.
I couldn’t make out what it
was. I didn’t see any tables or
chairs and the room seemed to be round. Of course that could have been because
the light seemed to be going from the wall and overhead in the ceiling. They[inaudible]
middle of the room and we just seemed to be suspended there. I couldn’t move, I
didn’t have any feelings, no sensation of [inaudible]
and it seemed something like a big eye – I keep referring to it as an eye
because it was about the size of a small baseball and the end of it was focussed
toward me. It was a different
colour or a different light and it seemed to come directly off the wall. It came
within six to eight inches of my face and it remained there for a few minutes
and then it went over my entire body.
I’m assuming it did because it went down and the next time I seen it it’s
coming back over this way. I assumed it went over my entire body. But it came
back in front of my face and it stayed there for a few more minutes and then it
seemed to go back into the wall. These things they...the way they was holding me
I was elevated because they weren’t as tall as me and they were upright and I
was elevated like this and I could see.
I could move my eyes, it was the only thing I could move and I could see
that they had released me and I don’t know where they went, whether they went
outside the craft or another room or compartment but they didn’t come in front
of me. And they left me that way
for a few minutes. I don’t know
how long. And then after a while I
seen them come back to the side of me and took hold of me again and they carried
me back outside the craft and they were [inaudible]
I wasn’t to touch anything. And
they seemed to glide back out of where they had taken me, put me back down on
the ground. When they did I fell
because my legs grew weak and gave way on me and it was this time that I seen
Calvin again. He was standing there.
He was standing facing the river with his arms outstretched and he was
almost in shock. He seemed to
appear to me at the time that something was wrong with him.
So I was trying to make my way toward him and I was crawling.
I couldn’t get my legs to work but before I got to him the strength came
back to my legs and I was getting up off my feet and I heard the same sound I
heard before, zipping sound and I glanced around and I saw the blue flashing
lights and the craft, it was just gone, disappeared,
almost instantly. And I
made it to Calvin and I shook him and I was calling to him and it took several
minutes to get to him before I could even talk to him [inaudible]
any sense. He was in shock. And these things that came out of the
craft, they were about 5 or 5 ft 4 inches tall and they didn’t have a neck. The head seemed to come directly to the
shoulders. It had something that resembled a nose on a face and where the ears
should be something that was similar to a nose. There was something like a slit
or a mouth and it was very wrinkled and it seemed to me to be something like an
elephant skin. I don’t know whether it was a man or what it was but it seemed
very wrinkled and the wrinkles horizontal. And where the eyes should
have been it was so wrinked that I’m not even sure they was
eyes.”
Hickson subsequently underwent and passed a
lie-detector test. The assessment
of Scott Glasgow, the polygraph specialist who tested him, was this:“It is my
opinion that he told the truth when he stated that he believes he saw a
spaceship, that he was taken into the spaceship and that he saw three
creatures.’
It
would be wonderful if we had a similar assessment of the other witness, Calvin
Parker. Unfortunately we don’t -
as is so often the case. Parker
did not wish to undergo a polygraph test.
In fact he did not want to tell the public much about his experience at
all. Consequently we have very
little in the way of primary source information from Parker.
It is mostly from Charles Hickson. We
have interviews
with Parker’s family, with the medic, with Julius Bosco, with the Pascagoula
physician who examined them both, but very little by way of first-hand recall
from Calvin Parker himself. In
each ‘rare interview’ with Parker we learn about the stress he suffered, the
alienation from those around him and the difficulty of getting his life back
together in the aftermath of such an experience. What we are not given is the
kind of information we want.
What we do have, however, is a secret audio
recording of the two in conversation in the sheriff’s office where they reported
their experience. The
sheriff had been called away for a short while during the interview and had
unintentionally (we are told) left the tape recorder
running:
CALVIN: I got to get home and get to bed or get
some nerve pills or see the doctor or something. I can't stand it. I'm about to
go half crazy.
CHARLIE: I tell you, when we're through, I'll get
you something to settle you down so you can get some damn sleep.
CALVIN: I can't sleep yet like it is. I'm just
damn near crazy.
CHARLIE: Well, Calvin, when they brought you
out...when they brought me out of that thing...goddamn it, I like to never in
hell got you straightened out.
CALVIN (voice rising):
My damn arms, my arms, I remember they just froze up and I couldn't move.
Just like I stepped on a damn
rattlesnake.
CHARLIE:
They didn't do me that way.
CALVIN: I passed out. I expect I never passed out
in my whole life.
CHARLIE: I've never seen nothin' like that before
in my life. You can't make people believe-
CALVIN: I don't want to keep sittin' here. I want
to see a doctor-
CHARLIE: They better wake up and start
believin'... they better start believin'.
CALVIN: You see how that damn door come right up?
CHARLIE: I don't know how it opened, son. I don't
know.
CALVIN: It just laid up and just like that those
son' bitches-just like that they come out.
CHARLIE: I know. You can't believe it. You can't
make people believe it-
CALVIN: I paralyzed right then. I couldn't move-
CHARLIE: They won't believe it. They gonna
believe it one of these days. Might be too late. I knew all along they was
people from other worlds up there. I knew all along. I never thought it would
happen to me.
CALVIN: You know yourself I don't drink
CHARLIE: I know that, son. When I get to the
house I'm gonna get me another drink, make me sleep. Look, what we sittin'
around for. I gotta go tell Blanche... what we waitin' for?
CALVIN (panicky): I gotta go to the house. I'm
gettin' sick. I gotta get out of here. Then Charlie got up and left the room,
and Calvin was alone.
CALVIN: It's hard to believe . . . Oh God, it's
awful... I know there's a God up there...
There is little here to indicate either way
whether the experience was a shared one.
Calvin describes how his arms were paralysed as if by a rattlesnake. Charles says, ‘They didn’t do me that
way.’ That’s just a physical or
physiological effect. There is
just one allusion to the actual event and that concerns the door of the
craft. Calvin is awed with the
way the door opened. He asks
Charles if he saw how ‘that damn door come right up’.
Charles cannot recall anything special about how the door opened.
It appears that both men underwent hypnotic
regression. Unfortunately there do
not appear to be any audio-recordings or transcripts of the sessions in the
public domain.
All that we can say about the Pascagoula incident
is that the information that exists does not support the contention that they
two had the same core experience.
In fact, even non-primary sources do not support it.
These tell of Parker being taken aboard and given a physical examination
by a petite female being. This
doesn’t match up with Hickson’s elephant-skinned men.
Intriguingly though, once again, what both experiencers did report, under
hypnosis, is a physical
examination by alien or otherworldly entities.
You might object that if there is so little
primary-source material from one of the witnesses, why use this case at
all. Quite frankly, I’m using it
because I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel. When there are no really good cases,
one is reduced to using the best there is.
The final case we’ll look at
here is the Reed family abductions.
There is a documentary currently available on
Youtube which gives not only first-hand accounts (or significant fragments
thereof) by the two brothers but reports by MUFON investigators on physical
traces as well as an assessment by a polygraph expert of a ‘lie-detector’ test
he administered to one of the witnesses and so on.
To get to the bare bones of what actually happened, however, you’ve got
to disregard all the tedious conjecture about extraterrestrials, which has
nothing to do with the facts of the case, and bear in mind, as always, that
simulations and narratives can be misleading. Nevertheless
what is left is at least worth something in terms of primary source data.
Matthew Reed’s 2009 encounter is especially
well-documented. There’s
no questioning the fact that something physically real was involved which left
the car highly magnetised and radioactive. He says: ‘From my perspective [the light] would
have been about the size of a basketball.’ It’s not entirely clear whether he
means that its actual size was that of a basketball or that its apparent
size was that of a basketball held at arm’s length or at some other unspecified
distance. In either case, what he
saw was a pure light form.
Typically, there is no indication of the witness slipping into an ASC at
this early stage of the encounter.
Proponents of Persinger will no doubt offer the suggestion that
the car was damaged by a UAP, an Unidentified Atmospheric Phenomenon: a rare but natural plasma-type light
form on the fringe of scientific understanding. Persinger has postulated that
electromagnetic and other radiation emitted from such light forms might also be
capable of inducing hallucinations by electromagnetically stimulating the
temporal lobe of the brain. However
Matthew Reed’s many other experiences, including another car-stoppage and
abduction incident in 1969 – involving multiple witnesses on that occasion – do
not support such a hypothesis. It
is just too much of a coincidence.
Naturally occurring light forms don’t target specific individuals –
unless they’re much stranger than we thought.
The 2009 incident provides no evidence of a shared alien
abduction experience, however, since it is a single-witness experience. We have to look to the 1969 incident
for data relevant to that kind of study.
The latter was a car-stoppage alien abduction case involving four members
of the family. We have
first-hand accounts by both brothers.
I’ve done the usual transcripts of the audio-recordings and compared
them. In the early stage of the
encounter, separate accounts by the two brothers by do not significantly
differ. However with regard to the
actual abduction experience there is far less similarity between the two
accounts than the narrative leads us to believe. It’s significant that both describe the
spacecraft as vast and empty.
Matthew: ‘The craft was
just giant, I felt like I was in a warehouse.’
Thomas: ‘The size of it
was like four football fields...like an empty room, like an empty
warehouse.’
Both brothers reported
undergoing a physical examination at the hands of alien entities.
However, there is little in brother Thomas’s account that matches
Matthew’s threadbare description.
Once again, they were not even the same kind of entities.
This
is puzzling. It is as if two
people involved in a road accident were to report the incident afterwards,
one
saying they swerved to avoid a cyclist and crashed into a tree, the other
maintaining that they swerved to avoid a truck and rolled down a bank. It is puzzling because something
happened to them, something that involved being given physical examinations by
otherworldly entities – but that’s all they can agree upon.
Wherever it may take
place in the world, the alien abduction experience almost always involves a
physical examination by alien entities. Often these entities show a special
interest in the reproductive parts of our bodies.
Less commonly they extract sperm or ova – or have an experience which
makes us believe they have. In
some experiences the entities show their captors apocalyptic visions of the
earth. No abduction experience is
exactly like another but there is a kind of family resemblance among them: certain features are common to a fair
percentage of the abduction experiences taken as a whole.
Each
experiencer seems to dip into a common pool of ‘alien abduction’ material and
come out with a typical and recognisable alien abduction experience.
The
question to be decided, in multiple-witness abduction cases, is whether the
experience of witness A is more like that of witness B than either is to any
other abduction experience taken at random. The analyses of these five cases
do not support the theory that they do– not significantly.
Tantalisingly, there are a few minor – seemingly insignificant
– details that peculiarly seem be
shared: the sensation of vast
emptiness of the space vehicles in the Reed case, the feeling of having been
gone for aeons in the A70 case, the weirdness of the eyes in the Betty and
Barney Hill case (even though they were weird in different ways and belonged to
different types of being), for instance – just as, in the analogy, both
co-passengers agreed that they swerved, even if to avoid different
vehicles. This may be simply due
to coincidence – but it may not.
If it is not it is a challenge to those who hold that abduction
experiences are all alike only because the human brain is ‘wired’ in a certain
way. It is equally a challenge to
those who view the abduction experience as real in some ‘other dimension’. The
findings do not support the view that the entities and craft exist in another
dimension, at least not in the usual way we think of this.
The witnesses aren’t being elevated to some other plane of existence
where they simultaneously perceive something the rest of us can’t.
A better parallel perhaps
can be drawn with the near-death experience (NDE).
If soldiers dying on the battle field have NDEs, they may all experience
a tunnel of light. This is
because the NDE experience is much the same the world over.
However, one may see the Lord Jesus, another a dead relative, another may
hear a choir of angels...and so on.
Their experiences are similar but they cannot be said to be having shared
experiences. It is more like
a dipping into a pool of archetypal material in both cases:
of NDE material in the one type of experience and ‘alien abduction’
material in the other. That is not
to imply any ‘choosing’ of the content of the experience, either conscious or
otherwise. The experiencer is
barely active at all. He is the
one who is done to.
In the alien abduction
experience, the experiencer is the one who is abducted against his will,
captured as by demonic beings, taken as by the
faeries.
All
this points to
a reality that does not belong to the individual psyche but to an archetypal
reality that may be filtered and processed by the individual psyche, but
ultimately lies beyond it.
It pointsto it – that is
all. All that can be said of this
small analysis is that it does not support the claim that multiple abductees are
sharing the same experience.
There is simply insufficient data to tell us any more.
I have done my best with what there is.
So little primary source data is there in the
public domain that I’ve been tempted to use data from secondary sources. However this would be like looking
at the phenomenon through mythologically-tinted spectacles.
Inevitably, there will be those who will say I
haven’t looked hard enough.
Therefore, I issue a challenge. Can you present me with primary
source information for any multiple-witness case where there core experience is
shared. It has to be
primary-source. It has to come from the witnesses themselves.
It’s no use showing me an account written up by one of the
investigators. I want first-hand
accounts – and by both witnesses so they can be compared.
If any ufologists want to dispute this then the onus is on them to
provide primary source information to show they are similar.
If you find a multiple-abductee case with
plentiful primary source material then let me know and I will be more than happy
to include it in this analysis.
But remember it must be from more than one of the
abductees.
It can be argued with at
least some plausibility that NDEs are similar because all our brains are wired
the same way. I do not think the
alien abduction experience is susceptible to the same kind of argument but
nevertheless it is a hypothesis that merits testing.
I have trawled the Net for all the primary source
material relating to multiple-experiencer abduction cases.
I have transcribed all the first-hand accounts, fragments of first-hand
accounts and interviews with the experiencers, if they have not been transcribed
already. I have also looked at
what written material I could get my hands on: books, papers and so on. I shall continue to look.
It could be argued that the
similarity is more with alien abduction experiences generally than with each
other, since it is the eyes that feature most prominently in accounts of UFO
occupants, while Barney’shumanoid
have ‘wrap-around’ eyes.
The paucity of data must itself tell us
something.
REFERENCES
Charlie Hickson lecturing at the first Ozark UFO
Symposium in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, in 1988, co-sponsored by MUFON. (Image
credit: Antonio Huneeus)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascagoula_Abduction transcript of conversation
when tape left running in the sherrif’s
office.
Polygraph http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/cienciareal/mothman_prophecies/mothman14.htm this is by John
Keel
Rare interview with Parker about stress http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/cienciareal/mothman_prophecies/mothman14.htm 1.08 mins into it.
Interview with medic 0.55
CASES
Are UFO alien encounters real events? While the
evidence suggests the experience takes place in an altered state of
consciousness, we need to know: is it a kind of hallucination or is it real in
any objective sense?
The test for objective reality is whether others
see it or not. If I see a ghost or a goblin, I have no way of knowing whether it
is real if I alone see it. If others see it too, I know that it has a degree of
reality independent of my own psyche. It may not be real in the sense that
chairs and desks are real – it obviously is not – but it must nevertheless have
a kind of objective reality.
I decided to find out by looking at
multiple-witness cases. I soon realised however that I had a problem with the
paucity of data. Multiple-witness close encounter / alien abduction cases
involving single witness run into hundreds if not thousands while those
involving more than one witness comprise a disappointingly small category. Ask any ufologist to name those he is
familiar with and he should be able to reel off a handful, maybe a dozen or so,
but after that he will be struggling.
From an already small category, after weeding out
a few cases to which I assigned ‘low credibility’ through a failure to meet
basic criteria for authenticity, I
selected only those that provide primary source information: that is to say
first-hand accounts - not necessarily from all witnesses but at least from two
of them. Only first-hand accounts
will do. Not only will accounts by
the witness’s brother’s best friend’s barber not do but neither will
third-person accounts by the investigating ufologist. When
this last criterion is applied, very few cases remain.
In fact, all that I was left with were: the Betty
and Barney Hill case, the A70 case, the Allagash incident, the Pascagoula case
and Reed family experiences. No
more than a handful of cases but it’s the best we’ve got.
You may want to take issue
with me on this and would have added such-and-such a case but I doubt whether
you would be able to come up with any for which the primary source data is
markedly better than the above.
You may be able to point to this or that case which contains amazing
first-hand accounts by all of the many credible witnesses but is not in the
public domain. It is either
unavailable for public scrutiny to protect the witness or (purportedly) hidden
away in some ufologist’s files.
That is no use to researchers like myself.
If is not in the public domain it can’t be used as data.
Send me the data or put it up on the Net for all to see and I’ll include
it in this analysis.
I will start with the Betty and Barney Hill case
because it illustrates the point about working only with primary source data:
that given in first-hand accounts.
Most UFO enthusiasts have heard
the famous Betty and Barney Hill story many times over.
They know that the couple were abducted by alien grey-like beings. They know it because that’s how
their abductors have been depicted in UFO documentaries and described and illustrated in the UFO literature.
However, as we can see from this interview with Betty Hill, it’s far from
the truth:
INT:
‘Let’s just go back to those type of entities.
They were your classic alien grey-shape, cat-like
eyes…’
BETTY: ‘No, no,
no.’
INT:
‘They weren’t, OK.’
BETTY:
‘Thank you, they were a form of human
being.’
Which
only goes to show, once again, that
anything other than primary source information is pretty much
worthless.
Later in the interview Betty
says ‘…I never told them aliens’.
She brings out a sculpted head, human, slightly Asian-looking possibly,
and tells us that they all looked like that: ‘There was as much difference between
them as among any group of people.’
She also dismisses all the stories about ova being extracted from her;
she says: ‘[There was] absolutely nothing sexual’.
So what did Barney
recall? Did Barney also recall
ordinary humans? Well, yes he did
– but they were different kinds of humans to Betty’s.
Barney recalls Nazi-type humans and a red-haired Irish-type of
human. This is when looking up at
the craft with binoculars and seeing the occupants staring back at him. So did Barney not see any aliens
either? Yes, Barney recalled a
humanoid creature with‘wrap-around eyes’.
We have a sketch by his own hand depicting
this.
So what Betty recalls is
different in many respects from what Barney recalls though the fundamental
experience of being given a physical examination on a flat surface inside a
structure or building of some kind is the same. Indeed, some of the details are the
same too. They both recall being
led up a ramp – by humans in both cases - and both recall a kind of
corridor. And
the early stage of their experience – up until encountering the figures on the
road – hardly differs at all, leastways not in any significant way..
It is curious that even though
Betty’s abductors were human, their most distinguishing feature for Betty were
the eyes. They are strikingly
large and slightly what she refers to as ‘mongoloid’. In
fact Betty was so taken with the eyes that she actually highlighted that part of
the sculpted face in yellow – not that they were actually yellow in reality, she
is at pains to explain. Barney too
is obsessed with the ‘wrap-around’ eyes of his humanoid.
There is then, in the Betty
and Barney Hill case, a shared experience up until the time they were ‘taken’ –
literally taken out of the car. In
fact, their experience up to this point seems as real as any other everyday
experience – real but bizarre.
After this point, their experiences are not the same.
Each undergoes a ‘typical’ abduction experience but Betty’s account of
what she experienced has little more in common with Barney’s experience than
with that of any other abduction experience taken at random from the archives of
ufology. Perhaps that is a slight
exaggeration but it is not very far from the truth.
They are both given medical examinations but it is not only a different
kind of examinations but by different kinds of entities.
[This
is puzzling. If the two witnesses
recalled the same experience throughout it would not be puzzling.
We should simply say the experience was real, albeit taking place in an
altered state of consciousness. If
the two experiences had nothing in common that too would not be puzzling. We should merely assume the two had
undergone some kind of hallucinatory experience. It is the fact that it is ‘the same but
different’ that is puzzling. This presents a problem for those who
hold the experience is objectively real.
However, it is just as much a problem for those who hold that it is
hallucinatory. Whether you think
that supports or refutes your pet theory depends on whether you’re an optimist
or a pessimist.]
Let’s see how the next case
compares in this respect. This is
the A70 case investigated by Malcolm Robinson.
On the evening of 18th August 1992, Malcolm
tells us, two Edinburgh men, Gary Woods and Colin Wright were driving along a
lonely road toward the small town of Tarbrax to deliver a TV satellite system to
someone there. They
were just passing a reservoir on the left when Colin, who was in the passenger
seat, drew Gary’s attention to something ahead of them. Malcolm described
to Chris Everard on Enigma TV what happened next:
‘[It
was] a black disk-shaped object hovering
about 20-30 feet above the road, motionless, tremendous black,
shiny sheen on it, and they’re looking at this and they know that this was not a
conventional helicopter and they decided not to stop the car and do a 3-pt turn.
They decided that the best course of action would be to put their foot down hard
on the accelerator and drive quickly underneath this object and as the car was
directly underneath this hovering object emitted like a heavy silver snowflakes
that just fluttered down and hit the car and both men were enveloped in total
inky blackness. They couldn’t see their hands in front of their face, they
couldn’t see the dashboard of the car, they couldn’t see each other...
Thus far, Malcolm’s account, even though it is a
third-person (second-hand) account, would appear to be a fairly accurate
depiction of what happened to the men up to this point as reflected in the
actual (first-hand) accounts by the two men which were given separately, then
audio-recorded and transcribed.
Both Colin and Gary
remember what happened to them up to this point very clearly and there are no
discrepancies between their stories. This is to be expected as there are no
indication that either of the two men were at that stage of events in any
non-ordinary or altered state of consciousness. What happened next, though, is hazy and
confused. In fact, neither man had
any clear recollection at all of the period between driving toward the disk and
coming out from under it. Indeed
they would have had every reason to suppose that nothing at all had happened
were it not for the strange fact that when they arrived in Tarbrax they
discovered that the journey had taken much longer than it should have – about an
hour and a half longer.
Following typical procedure, they were persuaded
to have hypnotic regression to find out what transpired during this period of
‘missing time’. However, even
under hypnosis, typically, only fragments of a surreal, nightmarish experience
were recalled. This is what Colin
Wright recalls. Note that this is
not Colin speaking under hypnosis but his account of what he afterwards recalls
recalling (if you will) during the hypnotic regression session:
‘...blackness...going up...creatures...in a
bright room, they’re trying to undress me...no clothes on...[sitting on] a metal chair, it’s smooth and
cold...[feel] cold...something in
my right eye...uncomfortable, like a red hot poker in the centre of my
eye...something clamped on it...
[our] car is in a big, bright
metallic room...[interviewer asks how it got there]...it
was lifted...I’m in that chair again..something looking at me in the
corridor...it’s ugly...lurking...it seems ancient to me...I think it’s trying
to manipulate me...I can hear a noise behind me...I’m staring at a wee
creature, it’s not very happy with me, I don’t think I was supposed to look
behind my chair for some reason...black eyes...I’ll not give in...it’s trying
to outstare me... I’m looking at something..it looks like a sort of surgical
tool...I think that was what went into my eye... Two of them have got me by the
feet and are dragging me toward a small archway [He then describes how the
entities put clothes back on him.]
Now let’s compare this with Gary Woods’
account. Gary is being interviewed
by UFO researcher Brian Allan and is telling Brian what he recalled under
hypnosis: I have extracted only
the relevant material from a transcript of the interview:
‘[I’m]
underground.
I saw a big craft in a big,
huge open space under the ground...
tunnels, dark tunnels...the creature I saw...right in my face. It said to me,‘I got a life, a life
like yours but different, things happen to us, but what’s got to be done’s got
to be done.’ I was crying, I said,
I can’t help you, I’ve got a wife and children...and what it said was, it wanted
sanctuary. [It said]
you’re not living like you should... It said we were more advanced than
them. In what way. I don’t
know. I was lying down ...they
turned me round, moved me, they were interested in my left leg. It sounds daft
but these things were happy to see me, that’s what it seemed like... There was a
circular hole in the floor and...a gel-like substance and one of the creatures
climbed out of the gel...it was connected with healing.
[There was] a red mist...these things swimming in it [sketch
shows sperm-like creatures] These things are looking into my life and
I don’t know who they are.... I remember rocks, somewhere they took us...these
things were standing behind the rocks, like they were waiting for us coming
there...’
The two accounts have some similarities. Both men tell of being taken somewhere
by strange entities and submitted, against their will, to some kind of physical
examination. Beyond that, there
are enormous differences. Gary
recalls the car being‘lifted’, Colin has nothing to say about this (neither men
recall being taken from the car).
The place where they are taken is different.
The kind of examination they were given is different.
Colin recalls being undressed, Gary not. The aliens who administered it are
different. The template is the
same – taken by strange entities and submitted to physical examination – but the
details are different.
Malcolm’s account, on Enigma TV, of what the two
men had undergone during the missing time period does not reflect
this:
They
were forcibly taken out of the car by these small grey creatures and were taken
independently to this object, stripped naked and Gary found himself place on a
flat, raised table and he was subjected to some form of medical or clinical
examination...
The facts are that while each saw entities they
were different entities, different kinds of Further, neither of the men saw
predominantly greys. In fact,
neither of the men seem to have seen anything grey at all. The
‘grey’connetion is though Gary’s wife who at home, days after the incident on
the A70, saw ‘grey figures’ in her bedroom – not alien greys, note, just grey
figures. Nor
do either recall being actually taken out of the car by the creatures. One does remembers the car being lifted
up but that’s all.
So, you see, we need to be
constantly wary of third-person accounts.
What happens in nearly every case is that the original account by the
witness undergoes a transformation.
One of the abductees may tell the investigator that he was aware of a
grey figure in the background and the investigator will record that ‘there was a
grey entity aboard the craft’ – as if both abductees had seen the figure. It only then needs a researcher to come
along and consult the investigator for one experiencer’s description of a ‘grey
figure’ to become ‘they were taken aboard the craft by alien greys’. In no time at all what may have been an
indistinct greyish presence becomes alien greys abducting both
experiencers. That is before the
author who has his own belief-system and half an eye on book sales comes on the
scene and interviews the researcher.
Of course, the writer in question may be a man of the utmost integrity
(like Malcolm) with no conscious intention to embellish the facts but he still
cannot help but view what he has been told through the lens of his own
belief-system. The end
result is as often as not a poor reflection of the experience related first-hand
by‘witness’ or ‘abductee’.
What Malcolm told the TV man seems to have been a
sort of composite. Now composite
accounts are predicated on an unquestioned presumption about the reality status
of the experience: that if one of
the abductees saw a particular creature or feature of the craft, then it was
objectively there even if the other abductees didn’t see it.
That may be so or it may not but it is something we cannot just
presume.
To return to this particular case, there are few
similarities in the two men’s experiences. One is the feeling (more typical of
faerie encounters of old) of having been gone a long, long time, certainly
longer than the missing hour and a half.
Gary says that they both have the odd feeling‘like
we were away for ten years, and we came back and our family had all changed and
everything like that. I know this sounds a bit…daft, but that’s kind of like the
way that he thought and I thought’.
Gary is equally at pains to point out, however, that, it was ‘the only thing we had in common’.
In spite of all, there is an objective element to
the A70 incident that cannot be dismissed. There were definite physical
effects. In the interview with
Brian Allan, Gary says:‘After this my
car [an almost new Vauxhall Astra] started growing a white‘foost’, [a vernacular expression for fungus or
dust] all over it.
I was always at the car removing this growth...I couldn’t understand it.
I know cars, it’s my job, I’m an
ambulance mechanic.” Both also
say they found scars on their body that were previously not there.
Other members of Gary’s family too seem to have
been drawn into something that was not just psychological but undeniably
physical. Gary
recalls:
Kim
[Gary’s wife] took a seizure and I had to take the boys
to her mothers. I was working and I couldn’t look after them, so I took them to
her mums. It was half six at night I was heading back with the boys and I was
worried, I was in deep despair, really worried and I was panicking and crying to
myself. Then there was this huge
big, like thing, like a flash over the car, everything in the car, the
whiteness, like magnesium white started to come in all over the car. It poured
in all round us and the boys were screaming and…ahhh, I remember at the side of
the road, stopped at the side of the road and I asked Garry (his oldest son)
what he thought and he said “It was like being in heaven”. The youngest lad, he
was being sick, but Garry, that’s what Garry actually said… “It was like being
in heaven… like being in heaven’
Here we have something that seems drawn toward
Gary but manifests itself to others, not unlike a poltergeist. It
may be significant that the experience occurred when Gary was in a state of
emotional intensity, which is also what happens in poltergeist activity. It also manifested itself to Gary’s
wife, who seems to have been quite sceptical of the UFO close encounter
incident, at first. We don’t have
a first-hand account by Gary’s wife, Kim, but Malcolm relates how one day he got
a phone call from Gary’s wife to say that the previous night in bed something
had pulled her by the ankes and looking up she saw for a few moments ‘grey
figures’(though not, have we any reason to presume, alien greys).
I have made several attempts to acquire more
information on this case than is in the public domain.
I was told by investigator Malcolm Robinson, however, that Colin and Gary
and indeed Malcolm himself are under some kind of obligation or contract not to
speak to the public until a forthcoming film about the incident has been
released. I now learn that plans
have fallen through and there will be no film. I am still nonetheless no more
optimistic about more primary source information being released than any film
being released (though I shall keep trying). Whether it would have provided any more
evidence for a ‘shared experience’ is a matter for speculation.
Quite probably it would not.
Any evidence for the physical reality of a case is generally not hidden
away but on the contrary usually seized upon and held up to the gaze of all
within the UFO community – before being simplified, exaggerated and embellished
and appearing in tabloid newspapers.
In the A70 case, most of the material we have to
work with comes from Gary Wood. It
is Gary who was the most affected by the incident, Gary who has been dogged with
subsequent poltergeist activity, Gary who has given is the most detailed account
of his experience. It is also
Gary, but not Colin, who has taken and passed a lie-detector (polygraph)
test. Colin just wants to forget
the whole thing. This is
typical. And it’s so frustrating
for researchers. You’re tempted to
forget the whole thing yourself – except for the tantalising glimpse of a nugget
of gold hidden inside the dung heap of
second, third and umpteenth-hand accounts of somebody else’s
experience.
Most of the primary-source data of
multiple-witness close encounter cases derives from primarily from a single
witness, this cannot be said to be so in the Allagash abduction case, in which
all four experiencers were equal providers of
source-material.
This incident began in the summer of 1976 when
four men - Chuck Rak, Charlie
Foltz and twins Jack and Jim Weiner, all former art students - went on a camping
trip in a wilderness area near Allagash, Maine. One night they decided to do a spot of
fishing in a stretch of water known as Smith Pond.
Before they set off in their canoe they built a big fire as a beacon to
guide their way back, as there was no moon.
Chuck Rak:
I remember being in the back of
the canoe, paddling leisurely, the twins were in the middle, Charlie was in the
front and I remember they were having a conversation.
I was focussing on the night, the lake and the water and I began to feel
observed.’
Jack Weiner: ‘...and
then all of a sudden, Chuck Rat, who was at the back of the canoe said, ‘Holy
Mackeral, what the ... is that?’, and I turned around and looked and there was
this huge white light that was coming out of the trees...it wasn’t making any
sound.’
Chuck Rak:
‘I was very, very fascinated...I
was in a state of extreme euphoria. I remember just feeling, wow, this is
fantastic.’
Charlie Foltz: ‘It
was just alive...and when it was nearest us, about a hundred yards away, it
paused and when it paused I said to the fellas, I said, ‘Shine the flashlight
and see what it does.’
Jim Weiner: ‘The
instant we flashed this flashlight this thing sent this beam of light out to
us. We were in a sixteen foot
aluminum canoe which in the pitch black of night lit up like a roman
candle. We must have looked like
this object just waiting to be approached on this
lake.’
Chuck:
‘All I can tell you was what was
going on in my mind was just exhilarating expectation...this is fantastic, this
is something we can communicate
with.’
Jim:
I was completely shocked and
especially shocked that it reacted as quickly as it did, which told us there was
some kind of intelligence about it and as soon as this light came out this thing
started moving and so we thought, this is real, this is really happening..this
is not a figment of our imagination, we’ve got to deal with this situation now
because within a few seconds this thing is going to be right on
us.’
Charlie: ‘I wasn’t even interested in this thing
anymore except that I didn’t want to be as close to it as I
was.’
Jim:
‘I remember paddling as fast as I
could, and Jack saying it’s getting closer, it’s getting
closer’.
And then, and then....
nothing. A fog of
forgetfulness descends in customary fashion and blanks out everything. None of the men are able to say even how
they got back to the shore. The
last one to recall anything seems to have been Chuck who, watching the light
disappearing into the night sky, was filled with regret: ‘...and
I thought that was that, we’ve lost our chances, we’ve let it slip through our
fingers and I observed it leaving and it just gradually faded out.’
And that was how it seemed for
years. They could recall
everything up until the time of the approaching light and then nothing until
they found themselves back on the shore.
Even that doesn’t seem to have been a clear moment.
It wasn’t like recovering from unconsciousness or waking from a
dream. It was more the gradual
discovery that they were unable to recall a period of time that they should have
been able to recall. Even when
they discovered that their fire had burned down to near-embers, it never
occurred to anyone that there was any ‘missing time’ as such.
It was just that (from what they did recall) no one wanted to sit round
what was left of fire and discuss what had just happened to them.
Nobody
seems to wanted to talk much about anything, in fact.
All four recall this as odd but
again this is typical of this kind of experience.
Had Jim not developed temporal epilepsy after a car accident and started
to have ‘flashbacks’ there would be no Allagash abduction case.
Jim describes the images that surfaced, mainly in
dreams:
‘All I
remember was seeing vague figures, anthropomorphic in shape but they did not
seem human to me...around me and they were either doing things with my genitals
or they were prodding me with some kind of instruments..there was an extreme
feeling of malevolence and I was always absolutely felt terrified.’
When he told his twin brother Jack about this, he
was surprised to learn that Jack too had been having the same nightmares. This led to all four men undergoing
hypnotic regression to retrieve hidden
memories:
The following is from what they recall of the
hypnosis (again, not what they actually said during the session but what they
recalled of the incident after having had hypnotic
regression).
Jack: ‘The last thing I can remember is having
both hands on the side of the canoe looking out at the water to see if Chuck was
in the water and then not seeing him and thinking, ‘Oh my God, what happened to
Chuck and then looking up and then the next think I remember is ...this intense
feeling of...almost like I was coming apart or something...and the next thing I
remembered was being on my back in this hazy
environment.’
Charlie:
‘I’m lying on my back and I’m
disorientated...I’m not sure where I am.
As I’m struggling to get up, a face appears and looks straight down at
me.’
Jack:
‘It’s reminding me of
insects...bugs, large eyes like ants have...could have been goggles for all I
know...their hands were not like hands at all and this one had me by the wrist
and it was holding its arm up and it had something in its hand ...I didn’t like
the looks of it and I remember thinking, Oh boy, here we go, this is it, I’ve
got five seconds, they’re going to cut me open, dissect me,
whatever...’.
Chuck:
‘Under regressive hypnosis I
remembered the aliens trying to put me into the canoe.
There was one of them standing in the canoe trying to adjust my position
in the back of the canoe and another sort of waist-deep in the water right next
to me and then they tried to position Jim Weiner in front of me but he’s heavier
and they were having a hard time with him..and then the other two were beamed
right on land and Jim got out to join
them.’
The juxtaposition of these fragments of
(first-hand) description are taken from a documentary and is misleading. It suggests they are all complementing
each others’ accounts and recalling the same thing.
They are not. For example,
Jack’s description of ‘large eyes like ants’ is not complementary to Charlie’s
description of ‘a face’. The viewer is intended to think it is
but it is not. We must be wary of
this sort of thing.
In fact there are enormous differences in the
accounts of the four men as recalled under hypnosis.
There is a similarity, yes.
All recall being physically examined against their will by otherworldly
entities. The detail of the
recalled experience, however, differs from one individual to the next. For example, Jim Weiner recalls the
entities doing things with his genitals, though the others didn’t.
And they’re all different entities –different types
of entity. It as if, following
Alice down the rabbit hole, you were to meet Oberon and Titania instead of the
White Queen and the March Hare. It
is interesting, though, that the ‘abductees’ still seem to be aware of one
another even after this core part of the experience has begun.
Perhaps we can refer to this ‘core’ part of the
encounter as Phase II since there are, as with all close encounter / abduction
experiences, two distinct phases.
The first phase can be said to begin with the Chuck Rat’s feeling that
something is watching them and end with the men fleeing from a UFO that is in
pursuit of them. All of them recall
this part clearly without any gaps in their memory and all agree upon it what
was encountered. Of the second part
of the experience they recall nothing but needed hypnotic regression to do
so. Even then what is recalled are
only fragments.
There is also a third phase,
depending upon how you want to ‘cut up’ the total experience.
This is a period of confusion when everyone seems to be socially isolated
from one another, enveloped in their own private world, wrapped in their own
cocoon. It begins in this
particular abduction experience with men finding themselves back on the shore.
Were
they simply stunned into silence by what had happened?
Were they still in a state of shocked? Or had they not quite ‘come down’
yet from their altered state of consciousness? It is not clear whether we should view
this third stage as an extension or tail-end of the second.
Either way, it is the nature of the the second
phase of the experience, the middle part, the ‘core’ experience, that we know so
little about. We are still unable
to say to what extent and in what sense it is a shared experience.
Perhaps too much should not be made of this but
it is interesting that in all the cases we have looked at so far the encounter
was initiated by the witnesses / experiencers. In the Allagash incident, it is
precisely and only when one of the men flashes his torch at the UFO that it –
apparently in response - sends out a beam of light to the canoe, initiating the
abduction. Betty too recalls:“I’m trying to attract the attention of this
craft, I’m telling it, ‘come on in, hi!’.
I’ve got the window down and I’m yelling to it, ‘Hi, hi, hoo-ee’ and at
that point it left the topof the mountain and stopped mid-air directly in front
of us about fifty feet in the sky.’
Betty goes so far as to explicitly state,
‘I think I brought it on myself, I’m waving to them and yelling to them.”
In the A70 case the two men see the UFO ahead hovering above the
road. They have to make a decision
whether to drive under it or not.
If they had to decided to turn back instead of drive under it, would they
have been ‘taken’? That we shall
never know. It’s certainly not
true of all cases but it’s true of the final case.
Four out of five of cases might not amount to much but is intriguing when
they are the best cases on record.
First, though, let’s look at the Pascagoula case.
This was an incident which occurred on
11th October 1973 and
began with two ship yard workers, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, fishing off
a pier on the Pascagoula river. It
had already been dark for little while.
This is Hickson’s account which I’ve transcribed
from an audio-recording of an interview he gave with Dr James
Harder:
“I
heard some kind of zipping-like sound, like air escaping from a pipe and as I
turned around I saw two blue flashing lights or pulsating lights I’m not
sure. It seemed like it was some
kind of craft. It seemed like it
was almost down to the ground. In
fact it seemed to be a couple of feet, you know, above the ground and it just
hovered there. So Calvin had
turned by this time and he was looking at it too and I didn’t know what to
do. I was just spellbound there for
a few minutes and then almost immediately some kind of opening appeared in
the...what I assumed would be the front and the light that had come outside it
was real bright light and three things appeared in the doorway of the craft and
they seemed to just glide out of the craft, they never touched the ground. They seemed to just glide across
twenty-five or thirty feet from us or maybe a little further than that. And they came to us, just glided over
to us, and then two of them took me by the arms from the side and one took hold
of Calvin and I seen Calvin go limp and I didn’t know it then but he had
fainted. So they carried me inside
the craft and the light was almost burning inside.
In fact for almost three or four days I had something like a bad
[inaudible] flashing in my
eyes. I can’t recall, I can’t
remember just what was in the inside simply because the light was so bright.
I couldn’t make out what it
was. I didn’t see any tables or
chairs and the room seemed to be round. Of course that could have been because
the light seemed to be going from the wall and overhead in the ceiling. They[inaudible]
middle of the room and we just seemed to be suspended there. I couldn’t move, I
didn’t have any feelings, no sensation of [inaudible]
and it seemed something like a big eye – I keep referring to it as an eye
because it was about the size of a small baseball and the end of it was focussed
toward me. It was a different
colour or a different light and it seemed to come directly off the wall. It came
within six to eight inches of my face and it remained there for a few minutes
and then it went over my entire body.
I’m assuming it did because it went down and the next time I seen it it’s
coming back over this way. I assumed it went over my entire body. But it came
back in front of my face and it stayed there for a few more minutes and then it
seemed to go back into the wall. These things they...the way they was holding me
I was elevated because they weren’t as tall as me and they were upright and I
was elevated like this and I could see.
I could move my eyes, it was the only thing I could move and I could see
that they had released me and I don’t know where they went, whether they went
outside the craft or another room or compartment but they didn’t come in front
of me. And they left me that way
for a few minutes. I don’t know
how long. And then after a while I
seen them come back to the side of me and took hold of me again and they carried
me back outside the craft and they were [inaudible]
I wasn’t to touch anything. And
they seemed to glide back out of where they had taken me, put me back down on
the ground. When they did I fell
because my legs grew weak and gave way on me and it was this time that I seen
Calvin again. He was standing there.
He was standing facing the river with his arms outstretched and he was
almost in shock. He seemed to
appear to me at the time that something was wrong with him.
So I was trying to make my way toward him and I was crawling.
I couldn’t get my legs to work but before I got to him the strength came
back to my legs and I was getting up off my feet and I heard the same sound I
heard before, zipping sound and I glanced around and I saw the blue flashing
lights and the craft, it was just gone, disappeared,
almost instantly. And I
made it to Calvin and I shook him and I was calling to him and it took several
minutes to get to him before I could even talk to him [inaudible]
any sense. He was in shock. And these things that came out of the
craft, they were about 5 or 5 ft 4 inches tall and they didn’t have a neck. The head seemed to come directly to the
shoulders. It had something that resembled a nose on a face and where the ears
should be something that was similar to a nose. There was something like a slit
or a mouth and it was very wrinkled and it seemed to me to be something like an
elephant skin. I don’t know whether it was a man or what it was but it seemed
very wrinkled and the wrinkles horizontal. And where the eyes should
have been it was so wrinked that I’m not even sure they was
eyes.”
Hickson subsequently underwent and passed a
lie-detector test. The assessment
of Scott Glasgow, the polygraph specialist who tested him, was this:“It is my
opinion that he told the truth when he stated that he believes he saw a
spaceship, that he was taken into the spaceship and that he saw three
creatures.’
It
would be wonderful if we had a similar assessment of the other witness, Calvin
Parker. Unfortunately we don’t -
as is so often the case. Parker
did not wish to undergo a polygraph test.
In fact he did not want to tell the public much about his experience at
all. Consequently we have very
little in the way of primary source information from Parker.
It is mostly from Charles Hickson. We
have interviews
with Parker’s family, with the medic, with Julius Bosco, with the Pascagoula
physician who examined them both, but very little by way of first-hand recall
from Calvin Parker himself. In
each ‘rare interview’ with Parker we learn about the stress he suffered, the
alienation from those around him and the difficulty of getting his life back
together in the aftermath of such an experience. What we are not given is the
kind of information we want.
What we do have, however, is a secret audio
recording of the two in conversation in the sheriff’s office where they reported
their experience. The
sheriff had been called away for a short while during the interview and had
unintentionally (we are told) left the tape recorder
running:
CALVIN: I got to get home and get to bed or get
some nerve pills or see the doctor or something. I can't stand it. I'm about to
go half crazy.
CHARLIE: I tell you, when we're through, I'll get
you something to settle you down so you can get some damn sleep.
CALVIN: I can't sleep yet like it is. I'm just
damn near crazy.
CHARLIE: Well, Calvin, when they brought you
out...when they brought me out of that thing...goddamn it, I like to never in
hell got you straightened out.
CALVIN (voice rising):
My damn arms, my arms, I remember they just froze up and I couldn't move.
Just like I stepped on a damn
rattlesnake.
CHARLIE:
They didn't do me that way.
CALVIN: I passed out. I expect I never passed out
in my whole life.
CHARLIE: I've never seen nothin' like that before
in my life. You can't make people believe-
CALVIN: I don't want to keep sittin' here. I want
to see a doctor-
CHARLIE: They better wake up and start
believin'... they better start believin'.
CALVIN: You see how that damn door come right up?
CHARLIE: I don't know how it opened, son. I don't
know.
CALVIN: It just laid up and just like that those
son' bitches-just like that they come out.
CHARLIE: I know. You can't believe it. You can't
make people believe it-
CALVIN: I paralyzed right then. I couldn't move-
CHARLIE: They won't believe it. They gonna
believe it one of these days. Might be too late. I knew all along they was
people from other worlds up there. I knew all along. I never thought it would
happen to me.
CALVIN: You know yourself I don't drink
CHARLIE: I know that, son. When I get to the
house I'm gonna get me another drink, make me sleep. Look, what we sittin'
around for. I gotta go tell Blanche... what we waitin' for?
CALVIN (panicky): I gotta go to the house. I'm
gettin' sick. I gotta get out of here. Then Charlie got up and left the room,
and Calvin was alone.
CALVIN: It's hard to believe . . . Oh God, it's
awful... I know there's a God up there...
There is little here to indicate either way
whether the experience was a shared one.
Calvin describes how his arms were paralysed as if by a rattlesnake. Charles says, ‘They didn’t do me that
way.’ That’s just a physical or
physiological effect. There is
just one allusion to the actual event and that concerns the door of the
craft. Calvin is awed with the
way the door opened. He asks
Charles if he saw how ‘that damn door come right up’.
Charles cannot recall anything special about how the door opened.
It appears that both men underwent hypnotic
regression. Unfortunately there do
not appear to be any audio-recordings or transcripts of the sessions in the
public domain.
All that we can say about the Pascagoula incident
is that the information that exists does not support the contention that they
two had the same core experience.
In fact, even non-primary sources do not support it.
These tell of Parker being taken aboard and given a physical examination
by a petite female being. This
doesn’t match up with Hickson’s elephant-skinned men.
Intriguingly though, once again, what both experiencers did report, under
hypnosis, is a physical
examination by alien or otherworldly entities.
You might object that if there is so little
primary-source material from one of the witnesses, why use this case at
all. Quite frankly, I’m using it
because I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel. When there are no really good cases,
one is reduced to using the best there is.
The final case we’ll look at
here is the Reed family abductions.
There is a documentary currently available on
Youtube which gives not only first-hand accounts (or significant fragments
thereof) by the two brothers but reports by MUFON investigators on physical
traces as well as an assessment by a polygraph expert of a ‘lie-detector’ test
he administered to one of the witnesses and so on.
To get to the bare bones of what actually happened, however, you’ve got
to disregard all the tedious conjecture about extraterrestrials, which has
nothing to do with the facts of the case, and bear in mind, as always, that
simulations and narratives can be misleading. Nevertheless
what is left is at least worth something in terms of primary source data.
Matthew Reed’s 2009 encounter is especially
well-documented. There’s
no questioning the fact that something physically real was involved which left
the car highly magnetised and radioactive. He says: ‘From my perspective [the light] would
have been about the size of a basketball.’ It’s not entirely clear whether he
means that its actual size was that of a basketball or that its apparent
size was that of a basketball held at arm’s length or at some other unspecified
distance. In either case, what he
saw was a pure light form.
Typically, there is no indication of the witness slipping into an ASC at
this early stage of the encounter.
Proponents of Persinger will no doubt offer the suggestion that
the car was damaged by a UAP, an Unidentified Atmospheric Phenomenon: a rare but natural plasma-type light
form on the fringe of scientific understanding. Persinger has postulated that
electromagnetic and other radiation emitted from such light forms might also be
capable of inducing hallucinations by electromagnetically stimulating the
temporal lobe of the brain. However
Matthew Reed’s many other experiences, including another car-stoppage and
abduction incident in 1969 – involving multiple witnesses on that occasion – do
not support such a hypothesis. It
is just too much of a coincidence.
Naturally occurring light forms don’t target specific individuals –
unless they’re much stranger than we thought.
The 2009 incident provides no evidence of a shared alien
abduction experience, however, since it is a single-witness experience. We have to look to the 1969 incident
for data relevant to that kind of study.
The latter was a car-stoppage alien abduction case involving four members
of the family. We have
first-hand accounts by both brothers.
I’ve done the usual transcripts of the audio-recordings and compared
them. In the early stage of the
encounter, separate accounts by the two brothers by do not significantly
differ. However with regard to the
actual abduction experience there is far less similarity between the two
accounts than the narrative leads us to believe. It’s significant that both describe the
spacecraft as vast and empty.
Matthew: ‘The craft was
just giant, I felt like I was in a warehouse.’
Thomas: ‘The size of it
was like four football fields...like an empty room, like an empty
warehouse.’
Both brothers reported
undergoing a physical examination at the hands of alien entities.
However, there is little in brother Thomas’s account that matches
Matthew’s threadbare description.
Once again, they were not even the same kind of entities.
This
is puzzling. It is as if two
people involved in a road accident were to report the incident afterwards,
one
saying they swerved to avoid a cyclist and crashed into a tree, the other
maintaining that they swerved to avoid a truck and rolled down a bank. It is puzzling because something
happened to them, something that involved being given physical examinations by
otherworldly entities – but that’s all they can agree upon.
Wherever it may take
place in the world, the alien abduction experience almost always involves a
physical examination by alien entities. Often these entities show a special
interest in the reproductive parts of our bodies.
Less commonly they extract sperm or ova – or have an experience which
makes us believe they have. In
some experiences the entities show their captors apocalyptic visions of the
earth. No abduction experience is
exactly like another but there is a kind of family resemblance among them: certain features are common to a fair
percentage of the abduction experiences taken as a whole.
Each
experiencer seems to dip into a common pool of ‘alien abduction’ material and
come out with a typical and recognisable alien abduction experience.
The
question to be decided, in multiple-witness abduction cases, is whether the
experience of witness A is more like that of witness B than either is to any
other abduction experience taken at random. The analyses of these five cases
do not support the theory that they do– not significantly.
Tantalisingly, there are a few minor – seemingly insignificant
– details that peculiarly seem be
shared: the sensation of vast
emptiness of the space vehicles in the Reed case, the feeling of having been
gone for aeons in the A70 case, the weirdness of the eyes in the Betty and
Barney Hill case (even though they were weird in different ways and belonged to
different types of being), for instance – just as, in the analogy, both
co-passengers agreed that they swerved, even if to avoid different
vehicles. This may be simply due
to coincidence – but it may not.
If it is not it is a challenge to those who hold that abduction
experiences are all alike only because the human brain is ‘wired’ in a certain
way. It is equally a challenge to
those who view the abduction experience as real in some ‘other dimension’. The
findings do not support the view that the entities and craft exist in another
dimension, at least not in the usual way we think of this.
The witnesses aren’t being elevated to some other plane of existence
where they simultaneously perceive something the rest of us can’t.
A better parallel perhaps
can be drawn with the near-death experience (NDE).
If soldiers dying on the battle field have NDEs, they may all experience
a tunnel of light. This is
because the NDE experience is much the same the world over.
However, one may see the Lord Jesus, another a dead relative, another may
hear a choir of angels...and so on.
Their experiences are similar but they cannot be said to be having shared
experiences. It is more like
a dipping into a pool of archetypal material in both cases:
of NDE material in the one type of experience and ‘alien abduction’
material in the other. That is not
to imply any ‘choosing’ of the content of the experience, either conscious or
otherwise. The experiencer is
barely active at all. He is the
one who is done to.
In the alien abduction
experience, the experiencer is the one who is abducted against his will,
captured as by demonic beings, taken as by the
faeries.
All
this points to
a reality that does not belong to the individual psyche but to an archetypal
reality that may be filtered and processed by the individual psyche, but
ultimately lies beyond it.
It pointsto it – that is
all. All that can be said of this
small analysis is that it does not support the claim that multiple abductees are
sharing the same experience.
There is simply insufficient data to tell us any more.
I have done my best with what there is.
So little primary source data is there in the
public domain that I’ve been tempted to use data from secondary sources. However this would be like looking
at the phenomenon through mythologically-tinted spectacles.
Inevitably, there will be those who will say I
haven’t looked hard enough.
Therefore, I issue a challenge. Can you present me with primary
source information for any multiple-witness case where there core experience is
shared. It has to be
primary-source. It has to come from the witnesses themselves.
It’s no use showing me an account written up by one of the
investigators. I want first-hand
accounts – and by both witnesses so they can be compared.
If any ufologists want to dispute this then the onus is on them to
provide primary source information to show they are similar.
If you find a multiple-abductee case with
plentiful primary source material then let me know and I will be more than happy
to include it in this analysis.
But remember it must be from more than one of the
abductees.
It can be argued with at
least some plausibility that NDEs are similar because all our brains are wired
the same way. I do not think the
alien abduction experience is susceptible to the same kind of argument but
nevertheless it is a hypothesis that merits testing.
I have trawled the Net for all the primary source
material relating to multiple-experiencer abduction cases.
I have transcribed all the first-hand accounts, fragments of first-hand
accounts and interviews with the experiencers, if they have not been transcribed
already. I have also looked at
what written material I could get my hands on: books, papers and so on. I shall continue to look.
It could be argued that the
similarity is more with alien abduction experiences generally than with each
other, since it is the eyes that feature most prominently in accounts of UFO
occupants, while Barney’shumanoid
have ‘wrap-around’ eyes.
The paucity of data must itself tell us
something.
REFERENCES
Charlie Hickson lecturing at the first Ozark UFO
Symposium in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, in 1988, co-sponsored by MUFON. (Image
credit: Antonio Huneeus)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascagoula_Abduction transcript of conversation
when tape left running in the sherrif’s
office.
Polygraph http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/cienciareal/mothman_prophecies/mothman14.htm this is by John
Keel
Rare interview with Parker about stress http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/cienciareal/mothman_prophecies/mothman14.htm 1.08 mins into it.
Interview with medic 0.55