Nightmares or real? Some out-of-this-world stories of alien
abductions
04/04/93
THE BALTIMORE SUN

The nightmares wouldn't stop -- the sudden, bizarre, unsettling
nightmares. They were always the same; they seemed almost real:
Lea was sitting in a booth in a small, empty room with gray
walls. A monotonic voice behind her said: "Don't move, or you might
be hurt."
She felt paralyzed. She heard clicking noises, like an X-ray
machine. Suddenly she was lying on a table. A bright light shone in
her eyes. She sensed people moving around, examining her.
Then she was sitting up, facing a short creature so hideous
she could not look at its face. From a box the strange being
removed a shiny needle. At the tip was a silver marble. The
creature moved closer toward Lea.
At that point Lea would jerk awake in her bed, terrified and
drenched with sweat. Her screams would awaken her parents. But her
mother, Lea recalls, would always admonish her: "It's just a
nightmare. Everybody has them. You shouldn't watch all that scary
stuff on TV."
Lea now believes it wasn't just a nightmare. She believes it
was real. She is one of the people whose stories you might expect
to see in a supermarket tabloid under the heading "Humans Who
Believe They've Been Abducted by Aliens."
Lea is 25, lives in Prince George's County, works at a bank
and is engaged to be married. She is thin and has blue eyes. She
is, in her words, average-looking and average in every way. Knowing
that most people react with scorn and ridicule at the mention of
UFOs and extraterrestrial life, she asked that her last name not
appear in this story.
"I used to think I belonged in a mental institution, to be
honest with you," she says. "But I don't think anymore that I'm
crazy. I go to school. I work full time. I pay my bills like
anybody else. . . . I think other people think I'm crazy."
The subject of abductions by space aliens is so far-out, so
utterly fantastic that most people, even with their wildest
imaginations, cannot begin to fathom it. Many will not take it
seriously. It is unbelievable, unthinkable.
The subject is also deeply disturbing. These are not pleasant
stories of people out raking leaves suddenly beamed into a UFO,
subjected to a little cosmos comedy and sent back to their yards
chuckling.
These are chilling accounts of people who say they've been
kidnapped, confined in spaceship examination rooms, probed, prodded
and examined by aliens who seem primarily interested in sexually
related activities. Their stories more resemble reports of rape
than they do a heartwarming visit by "E.T."
Around these alien abduction stories, an industry has been
launched. It soars far beyond the tabloids. There are best-selling
books, popular films and prime-time television shows. Mental-health professionals gathered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
last summer for a conference on abductions. In Maryland and across
the country have blossomed support groups, where people who believe
they've been abducted can share their stories -- away from the ears
of those who might mock, exploit or be titillated by their anguish.
And, of course, there are the scientists -- from the
internationally known astronomer Carl Sagan to a Navy physicist
from Maryland -- and a plethora of researchers, lining up on either
side of the highly charged issue.
What's really happening? No one knows for sure. But one thing
is clear: Something has shattered Lea's and others' calm, secure
existence on planet Earth. Whether the rest of us accept or reject
their stories is irrelevant. We cannot assuage their fear: It is
palpable. The torment is real.
Lea's began while she was in the fourth grade. She remembers
clearly:
She was outside her apartment in Prince George's County
playing with her sister and other children. It was dusk. They heard
a hum, or a buzz, like a swarm of bees. They saw a disklike object
-- wingless, silver-gray, a row of lights along the edge -- creep
at treetop level over the apartment complex. It hovered above a
parking lot between buildings, and then drifted away.
Lea and her sister ran inside to tell their parents. The girls
even drew pictures.
"My father wanted to call somebody," Lea says. "But my mother
said no, we'd made it up. But all of us saw it. We talked about it
for days at school."
Shortly after that, Lea says, the recurring nightmare began.
She dreamed it on and off for a decade, from when she was 10 until
about 20.
Dreams are only part of her story. When she was 12 or 13, she
and her sister, who is two years younger, were staying at their
grandparents' house in St. Mary's County. They were in separate
beds in the same room when a ball of lightning, as Lea describes
it, passed through a window and curtain into the room.
About the size of a tennis ball, it glided between the beds,
bounced off a door and vanished. A couple of seconds later another
lightning ball did the same thing, and then another. Lea says there
might have been 20 in all.
She and her sister screamed. Five other people were in the
house, but no one heard them. Lea finally escaped into the hallway.
Her next memory is of waking up in bed the next morning.
None of this made sense. She says her sister remembers the
balls of light, as well as the UFO over their apartment building
years before. But her sister, Lea says, won't talk about it with
strangers.
For a long time afterward, Lea feared she was losing her mind.
But then, five years ago, she and a friend were at a mall outside a
bookstore. Lea spotted a display of books, the covers of which
featured a drawing of a grotesque creature with big, black,
almond-shaped eyes.
The book was "Communion," the writer Whitley Strieber's
account of his abductions by aliens. Lea pointed at the drawing and
screamed: "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! That's them! That's them!"
They were the creatures in her nightmare.
"That's when it registered," Lea says. "That's when I said:
`Wait a minute. Something's going on here.' "
It was the first she had heard of abductions by space
creatures. She read the book, and then a couple of others on the
subject. She became convinced that the terrifying events -- the
nightmares, the night of the lights, perhaps other unexplained
events as well -- had been abductions.
Lea's not alone.
Some researchers estimate that thousands -- if not millions --
of humans have been abducted and studied by aliens. They base that
estimate on a 1991 survey of 5,947 Americans by the Roper polling
organization. The survey was commissioned by believers in the
abduction phenomenon.
The survey asked 11 questions, including: Have you ever woke
up paralyzed and sensing a strange presence in the room? Have you
ever "lost" an hour or more you can't account for? Have you ever
felt as if you were flying? Have you ever seen balls of light in
your room? Have you ever found scars on your body you could not
explain?
Two percent of the respondents answered yes to at least four
of those questions. From these results, the poll sponsors concluded
that 2 percent of adult Americans may have been abducted by aliens.
David M. Jacobs was a sponsor of the poll. The author of "The
UFO Controversy in America," published in 1975, is an associate
professor of history at Temple University. In recent years he
interviewed 60 people who believe they've been abducted, and last
year his book about them, "Secret Life," was published. From his
office in Philadelphia, Mr. Jacobs says:
"This subject is as far-out as it gets. It just seems too
crazy, too out of the question. The skeptics say: `This could not
be happening; therefore it is not happening.' But you have to go
where the evidence takes you, even though kicking and screaming
while en route."
Evidence? Budd Hopkins, another of the poll sponsors, says he
has interviewed witnesses and has found physical evidence, such as
unexplained body scars and mysterious burn marks on lawns where
spaceships may have landed. But primarily, he and other researchers
rely on the abduction stories -- stories told by people of
different races, all ages, both sexes; police officers,
psychiatrists, scientists, lawyers, entertainers, nurses,
journalists, farmers, an Army colonel, a golf pro.
Mr. Hopkins, who is a painter and sculptor in New York City,
became interested in aliens after seeing a UFO in 1964. Eleven
years later, a 72-year-old friend told him of watching a spaceship
land in a New York park, and of watching about 10 alien passengers
take soil samples. Mr. Hopkins found others willing to tell their
stories, and since the mid-1970s he has been at the forefront of
abduction research. He has studied more than 400 cases and written
two popular books, "Missing Time" and "Intruders," from his
interviews with people who claim, sometimes while under hypnosis,
to have been abducted.
"The overall patterns in these cases are so remarkably
consistent, often down to tiny details, and people reporting these
experiences are often so inherently credible that the phenomenon
simply cannot be dismissed," he wrote in "Intruders."
Most abductees report being taken first as children, when a
small implant, which could be remembered as a marble at the tip of
a needle, is placed deep into the ear or nose, the researchers say.
The implant's function is unknown, but these researchers say it
might serve as a locater so the person can be abducted again later.
The aliens described in the stories are small, no more than 4
feet tall, and extremely thin. They are light-colored, often gray.
Their heads are oversized, yet their mouths and noses are tiny;
they have no ears or hair. Their eyes are large and black.
Nearly all the stories involve spaceships parked on the ground
or floating in the air. The victims are examined in a room
resembling a hospital operating room. The methodical creatures use
a variety of devices to examine humans from head to toe,
occasionally leaving scars. But the aliens, it seems, reserve
special interest for the human sexual organs.
Here is where the story, if it hasn't already, "will almost
certainly strain your credulity to the breaking point," Mr. Hopkins
wrote in "Intruders."
Through interviews with people who report abduction stories,
Mr. Hopkins and Mr. Jacobs came to believe that these aliens are --
and have been for several decades -- conducting some sort of
breeding experiment with human beings.
This involves the taking of sperm and egg samples; the
implanting of a genetically altered embryo into women; the
extraction of the fetus; and, finally, the external incubation of
the fetus. Women have sometimes reported they were presented hybrid
babies and expected to nurture, even breast-feed, them.
"It's very hard to think of this as some wonderful, new
adventure," Mr. Hopkins says.
Maybe an extraterrestrial species is introducing a desirable
human characteristic into its own evolutionary cycle, say the
researchers. Maybe it is reducing the difference between its
species and ours. Maybe it is seeding another planet, or maybe it
has a plan completely beyond the comprehension and imagination of
the human brain.
Yeah, right, say the skeptics.
The astronomer Carl Sagan says that he is open-minded to the
prospect of intelligent beings living in space, but he doesn't
believe they're sneaking into bedrooms and tormenting Earthlings.
"Tell me," he says, "which is more plausible: We're victims of
a massive invasion of alien sexual abusers, or people are seeing
things that just aren't there?"
Although abduction claims began surfacing nearly half a
century ago, not one shred of indisputable physical evidence has
surfaced, says Mr. Sagan, who recently wrote an article for Parade
magazine debunking those claims.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," he
says. "Somebody telling a story is not evidence, even many people
telling the same story isn't good enough. They're people, that's
the point, and people intrinsically have certain fallibilities."
Abduction accounts may say something about how the brain
works, or how people can be deluded, or even how religions begin,
he says from his office at Cornell University. But they say
nothing, he says, about skinny, large-eyed aliens kidnapping humans.
"There's a better chance of your getting hit on the head by
one of Santa's reindeer than of you being abducted," says Philip J.
Klass, a retired senior editor and now contributing editor at
Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine. "I will say, slightly tongue-in-cheek, there is better evidence of the existence of
mermaids and Irish leprechauns."
Mr. Klass, who lives in Washington, says he has tried to
verify UFO cases for nearly 30 years and has not found a credible
one. In his 1989 book, "UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game," Mr.
Klass contended that people who believe they've been abducted by
aliens need treatment by qualified psychotherapists, not UFO "cult
gurus."
Robert A. Baker, a retired professor of psychology at the
University of Kentucky, has written derisively about abduction
stories. He says some are simply fabrications or the recounting of
stories gleaned from books or movies, while others are products of psychological disorders.
The stories may be repressed memories of childhood sexual or
physical abuse surfacing in disguised form, he says. Or they may be
the type of vivid, realistic dreams occurring as a person falls
asleep or wakes up -- hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations.
And, he says, some people who believe they've been abducted may be fantasy-prone or psychologically disturbed.
"Anyway," Dr. Baker says, "if this phenomena were as common as
Hopkins and Jacobs would have us believe, the sky would be filled
with spacecraft abducting people back and forth. UFOs would be
stacked up like aircraft coming in at O'Hare."
The believers and skeptics counter each other point by point.
Both sides publish newsletters buttressing their claims. And both
produce mental-health specialists who pronounce judgment on the
sanity of the victims.
But in the end, what are we left with? The stories.
Lea started out thinking she was dreaming or hallucinating.
After coming to believe she had been abducted, she contacted a
representative of the Mutual UFO Network, an international group
interested in UFOs. She was referred to Bob Oechsler, a former
National Aeronautics and Space Administration mission specialist
who lives in Edgewater in Anne Arundel County.
Mr. Oechsler, who became interested in UFOs as a boy, is
intrigued with the technology of crafts from outer space: How do
they get here from there? For the past two years he has researched
UFO sightings full time. On his front door is a brass plaque that
reads: UFOs are real!!!
He invited Lea to his home. After a couple of meetings he
suggested she undergo hypnosis. Some abductees remember only
snippets of their experience, but find they can recall more during
hypnosis. A psychologist hypnotized Lea at Mr. Oechsler's home, but
Lea says few hidden memories emerged.
Mr. Oechsler is starting a support group for abductees, one of
dozens forming across the country, he says. About 30 people,
including Lea, have signed up.
Bruce S. Maccabee, a research physicist for the Navy, will
also attend. The Frederick County resident has researched UFOs on
his own for years, and is a longtime leader in UFO research groups,
one of which, the Fund for UFO Research, in Mount Rainier, Md.,
sponsored the abduction conference at MIT.
At the organizational meeting of Mr. Oechsler's support group,
Dr. Maccabee told the participants:
"This subject is so weird, so misunderstood. All we can do is
hold your hand and make you realize you're not alone."
That would be a relief to Lea.
Strange things continue to happen to her. Not long ago, she
says, while visiting friends in the West Virginia mountains, she
was floated out of the house, taken aboard a spaceship and handed a
baby.
It was a boy, with leathery skin, a thin neck and an oversized
head with patches of red hair. It had huge eyes, she says, but they
weren't coal black like those of the adult aliens. They were blue.
"I don't know why, and I know this sounds strange," Lea says
in a voice trembling with emotion, "but as soon as I held him in my
arms, I knew he was mine. I felt like I was his mother."
She rocked him and talked quietly to him, she says, as several
aliens watched. Lea hesitates and says, almost apologetically: "I
know this doesn't make any sense."
Even though she has trouble sleeping and often feels as if
she's being watched, she says she has "kind of gotten used to the
idea" of being abducted.
"I don't like it, but there's nothing I can do about it, as
far as I can see," she says. "If they were going to hurt me, I
think they would have done it a long time ago."
She knows what the skeptics say. But, she says, they don't
give people enough credit for knowing the difference between what's
actually happened to them and what they might have imagined. Lea
says she was never abused as a child. She says she has no reason to
make up a story so crazy and bizarre.
Why does she think the aliens chose her?
"I have no idea," she says. "I don't know who they are, where
they come from, what they're doing, nothing.
"I just want people to understand that this is real, this is
happening. It's out there, and you're going to have to accept it
sooner or later."
Is she absolutely sure that her torment has been caused by
aliens?
"There's no doubt in my mind," she says. "And I know they'll
be back."


Al,
telnet://ricksbbs.synchro.net:23
---
þ Synchronet þ Rick's BBS telnet://ricksbbs.synchro.net:23

The Globe and Mail - Canada's National Newspaper.
Toronto.
Friday, August 13th, 1993.
Page A22


Social Studies - A Daily Miscellany of Information
by Michael Kesterton.


Yesterday, the U.S. space shuttle did not go up and few
Persieds were seen to come down. Nonetheless, many
people believe there is something travelling regularly
between heaven and Earth.

Recently, when the magazine USA Weekend asked "Do you
believe space aliens have visited Earth, now or in the
Past?" 91 percent of Americans said "yes".

Some would go even further:

In 1991, after a UFOolgist-sponsored Roper Poll of 6,000
Americans, some researchers concluded that one out of 50
Americans has had "an abduction experience with an
unidentified flying object".

Most abductees report being taken first as children, when
small implants were placed deep in their ears or noses.
Aliens are generally described as small and grey, with a
special interest in the human sexual organs - which leads
some authorities to think these stories may be repressed
memories of childhood abuse. (Abductees, reports one
authority, can always identify the sex of an alien,
despite a lack of external evidence).

The first clue to the condition is a phenomenon called
"missing time", says David Gotlib, a Toronto physician
and hypnotherapist. The patient loses several hours
and cannot remember what happened, but is very disturbed.
Other symptoms: nightmares, post-traumatic stress
disorder and, sometimes, long straight cuts on the body.
(Doctor Gotlib, who launched the Bulletin of Anomalous
Experience to discuss the disorder, says a doctor must
rule out other conditions such as schizophrenia,
multiple-personality disorders and partial epilepsy.)

John Mack, a Harvard psychiatrist, is convinced abductees
are not lying and says he has non idea what their
experience means. He notes abductees tell remarkably
consistent stories and many have children who become
abductees as well. He has established a support group
for the condition.

David Jacobs, a historian at Temple University in
Philadelphia, teaches a credit course on UFOs in American
Society. He thinks millions of Americans may have been
abducted by aliens, but says "I want to be wrong".

Abduction tales are not new, says astrononmer Carl Sagan,
citing ancient stories about fairies and people having
sex with demons. In 1894, he adds, 'The International
Census of Waking Hallucinations' reported that 10 to 25
percent of ordinary people had had at least one vivid
hallucination.

Waking dreams - delusions while falling asleep or waking
up - are mentioned by some authorities as an explanation,
because most abduction stories begin with the victim in
bed, being roused by aliens. There is also "sleep
paralysis" in which people are awake but their muscles
are still immobilized for sleep. "Almost 90 percent of
the time, sleep paralysis is accompanied by a certainty
that there is something threatening in the room with you,"
writes David Hufford, in 'The Terror That Comes in the
Night'.

Other sources: 'The Medical Post', 'The Wall Street
Journal', news services.

Ends.


Any typos are the result of inept copy-keying by Errol Bruce-Knapp.

Al,
telnet://ricksbbs.synchro.net:23
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þ Synchronet þ Rick's BBS telnet://ricksbbs.synchro.net:23

Psychiatrists and psychologists
with advanced degrees are investigating the mysterious
realm of kundalini, UFOs and ghosts.

Tell us about it. Terrorized by little gray creatures with large black
eyes who whisk you away from your bedroom at night? Plagued by
poltergeists rattling the bookshelf and hurling pictures from the wall?
Haunted by the ghost of a loved one, say, or precognitive dreams that
turn suddenly real? Whatever the nature of your encounter with the
unknown, you may have been left physically drained or emotionally
scarred. Chances are, you've confided in no one, fearful friends and
relatives would consider you insane. So where do you turn?

Actually, you have some options. You might, for instance, place your
trust in someone who makes a business out of the unknown. you saw the
movie; you know the tune. Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters! If it's
psychic troubles you've had, you call a parapsychologist. And when it
comes to possessions and visions and such, there's always the minister,
rabbi, or parish priest. On the plus side, you can be fairly confident
these people will believe you. On the other hand, if your trouble is
even partially psychological, how much help would they be?

That's where mainstream psychologists and psychiatrists come in. If
you're hallucinating, they might have a treatment or cure. But don't
expect them to believe you. They'll dismiss your story as a raving
fantasy, and if you can't shake the episode, you may end up diagnosed
with schizophrenia and on antipsychotic drugs.

Not what you had in mind? Then consider your third option: the new
breed of mental-health professional now contending that such other
worldly experiences are legitimate and commonplace among the sane.
That's not to say they accept the reality of alien abductors or
precognition or ghosts - though much to the horror of their colleagues,
a few of them have. But what many of these therapists have come to
believe over the past five years is that such experiences - regardless
of their cause - are common among normal, healthy people, and that those
who find themselves traumatized by such episodes are just as deserving
of psychological ministrations as those who suffer anxiety, depression,
or the trauma that follows a plane crash or a rape.

To signal the birth of this new discipline, some dedicated
professionals have even formed a group known as TREAT, for clinicians
and physical and behavioral scientists interested in the Treatment and
Research of Experienced Anomalous Trauma. TREAT, which holds a
conference each spring, deals with everything from reports of UFO
abduction and precognition to near-death episodes, satanic possession,
and alleged contact with the dead. Another favorite TREAT area is
kundalini - often perceived as a burning. vibrating, or electrifying
sensation associated with meditation or any other heavy duty spiritual
chore.

By all indicators, TREAT is a movement whose time has come. Indeed,
every national poll on the paranormal confirms just how widespread such experiences are. A 1992 survey by the Roper Organization, for instance, suggests that 2 percent of the population, or 1 of every 50 adult
Americans, exhibits the symptoms that sometimes mask a UFO abduction experience. A 1987 study conducted by Andrew Greeley and colleagues at
the University of Chicago showed that 42 percent of American adults
reported contact with the dead, 67 percent claimed ESP experiences, and
31 percent reported clairvoyance. And a 1981 Gallup poll showed that an extraordinary 15 percent of all people revived from the cusp of death
reported the spectacle of the near-death experience in which they
glimpsed such generic signposts as beckoning loved ones or a tunnel of
light.

One must not, of course, mistake these experiences for proof of their reality. "Truth should not be defined by what people believe," warns
Harold Goldstein, a psychologist in the division of epidemiology and
services research branch of the National Institutes of Mental Health.
"Facts are facts. Now it may turn out that there are aliens and such
things, but there needs to be evidence for it, and belief is not
evidence."

Then again, say the professionals on the frontier of the new
psychology, beliefs should not be dismissed. "Paranormal experiences
are so common in the general population," psychiatrists Colin Ross of
Dallas and Shaun Joshi of Winnipeg, Canada, said in a recent issue of
the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, "that no theory of normal
psychology or psychopathology which does not take them into account can
be comprehensive." Such experiences, they say, could be studied
scientifically, "in the same way as anxiety. depression, or any other
set of experiences" without making "any decision as to whether some,
all, or none of them are objectively real."

That may sound good in theory, but some observers wonder whether it's
really possible in practice. Therapists, it turns out, are no more
immune to the potent lure of the unknown than any one else. Unwary
specialists of the human mind may, in fact, be particularly prone to
accepting the reality of their patient's fascinating tales. And
enchantment can lead to obsession. The psychoanalyst Robert Lindner
admitted as much in 1955 after coming under the spell of a patient who
provided detailed accounts of visits into the future reality of another
planet. To help the patient, Lindner studied the mass of written
records Kirk had prepared, noted the inconsistencies, and confronted him
with the errors. That effort forced cracks in the fantasy and led,
eventually, to Kirk's recovery. But Lindner, meanwhile, become so
absorbed in the story that he had difficulty extricating himself from
its grip. In his classic book, The Fifty-Minute Hour, he admits to
skirting "the edges of the abyss." Now, some 35 years later, the latest mental-health professionals to flirt with UFO abduction, the near-death experience, and psychic phenomena face this danger as well.

One mental-health worker to dive headlong into the dark pit of the
unknown in recent years is psychiatrist Rima Laibow. Her sprawling
office in the upscale Westchester County town of Hastings-on-Hudson, New
York, is ringed with the big fluffy pillows she uses in holding therapy, originally designed to repair early attachment deficits in autistic
children but now used with other serious chikdhood and adult problems as
well. Dressed in blue slacks and a blouse, her frizzy hair tossed to
one side, Laibow recalls her first professional journey through the
looking glass. "lt was 1988," she explains, "and a patient whom I had
known for many years came to me in a state of anxiety and panic because,
out of the corner of her eye, she had caught sight of the cover of
Communion."

The patient, a 43-year-old cardiologist, had never read this 1987
best-seller by horror novelist Whitley Strieber, didn't know that it
concerned alleged encounters with UFO entities, and had never been
interested in the subject of alien abduction at all. Despite all this,
after glimpsing the cover of Communion, she claimed terrifying memory
fragments of encounters with creatures like those on the book's cover.

"Such notions had always struck me as psychotic," Laibow explains,
"but this patient taught me otherwise." Convinced that her patient
showed no sign of major psychopathology, in fact, Laibow came up with a different diagnosis for the sudden breakdown the cardiologist
experienced following recall of an alleged alien encounter:
posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

According to the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders, PTSD is a stress reaction triggered by various
external events "outside the range of usual human experience."
Triggering events, the American Psychiatric Association's manual goes on
to say, include such atrocities as rape, war, and natural disasters like earthquakes or floods, which are "usually experienced with intense fear, terror, and helplessness." In fact, Laibow's patient met all the
criteria for PTSD but one. "There had been no known trauma," recalls
Laibow, "so I thought, how could she have PTSD when we all know there
couldn't possibly be an external event like an alien abduction could
there?"

Over the weeks that followed, Laibow worked to quell her patient's
anxiety and panic. But the doctor herself remained genuinely puzzled.
In search of answers, she read all the literature she could find on
reported alien abductions and spoke to the primary investigators in the
field: New York artist Budd Hopkins, who had written two books on the
topic, and Temple University historian David Jacobs, who, like Hopkins,
had become a kind of folk guru and de-facto therapist for UFO abduction victims.

"What I found," Laibow states, "left me both impressed and appalled."
She was impressed, she says, because "there's a substantial body of data suggesting that under some circumstances, at some times, for some
reason, there are things in the atmosphere we call UFOs that appear to
have external physical reality." But she was appalled because from her
"sad and shocking experience, UFOlogy as it exists today is little more
than a collection of belief systems vying for dominance. The field is
plagued by the notion that just collecting neat stuff is the same as
doing research. If I were the National Science Foundation, I wouldn't
fund this research, either."

Hoping to change all that, Laibow began by giving UFO abduction and
the whole gamut of experience with unexplained phenomena a new, more respectable name. "Experienced anomalous trauma," she called it, so
that "professionals, who would otherwise stop listening because you've mentioned UFOs, parapsychology, and other weird things would now stop
and process those three words in relation to each other and ask, 'Like
what?' "

The strategy worked. In fact, with the name experienced anomalous
trauma as a draw, Laibow found dozens of psychiatrists and Ph.D.
psychologists intrigued by her ideas. To take advantage of the
momentum, she formed an umbrella organization for the Treatment and
Research of Experienced Anomalous Trauma, or TREAT, and held the group's
first meeting in May 1989.

TREAT quickly attracted some big guns in the mental-health community.
One was John Wilson. A professor of psychology at Cleveland State
University, Wilson is one of the pioneers in the field of posttraumatic
stress disorder. He helped both to coin the term and to formulate a
definition of the disorder as far back as 1980. In the past two
decades, Wilson has listened patiently to more than 10,000 people
traumatized by somc major life event and has conducted major studies of
PTSD in Vietnam combat veterans and victims of toxic exposure.

Wilson's own curiosity with the unknown dates back to childhood, when
a neighbor of his worked for Project Blue Book, the notorious Air Force
effort responsible for investigating UFOs. When the abduction
phenomenon emerged, he began to wonder what symptoms the alleged victims
would report. "The most obvious answer," he says, "is that they would
have PTSD."

According to Wilson, in fact, those who report memories of UFO
abduction find themselves in the same sort of psychologically stressful
dilemma as those who have been exposed to invisible toxic contaminants
such as hydrogen sulfide. "They aren't sure about it," he explains,
"not sure anybody is going to believe them, don't know how to stop it,
and don't know how long it has gone on. But the big difference is that
those claiming a UFO abduction don't even know if it occurred for sure.
If you've been exposed to a toxic chemical, you can usually have a
toxicologist come and study your house, and they'll say, yeah, it's
there, or it's not. But someone who's had a UFO abduction experience
can't point to the flying saucer or the little gray guy with the
almond-shaped eyes. That puts them in a really psychologically
ensnaring position." In fact, Wilson places UFO abductions and exposure
to invisible toxic contaminants in the same general category of
traumatic experiences as childhood sexual abuse and psychological
torture, calling them examples of "hidden events" that may lead to PTSD
but which often can't be proven real.

Wilson isn't surprised by his colleagues' slow reception to anomalous
trauma. "Fifty years ago, mental-health professionals didn't believe in childhood abuse," Wilson notes. "When kids or adults would report
incest experiences, sexual molestation, or rape and went to see a
mental-health professional, they were told, 'That's a fantasy; that
doesn't happen; it can't be real.' It wasn't until the Sixties that the American College of Pediatrics even did a study to find out what was
going on. And then, voila, it was out of the closet, and today we have
hard data on childhood sexual abuse. There is a parallel here to
anomalous experience; whether it's UFO abduction or demon possession,
our culture says no."

But as far as Wilson is concerned, the cultural disbelief system will
change as anomalous trauma becomes a diagnostic subcategory of PTSD.
"American culture is on the leading edge of this material," he says,
"and my prediction is that within five to ten years, the idea of
experienced anomalous trauma will get the serious consideration it
deserves."

Indeed, with Wilson's stamp of approval and Laibow's promotional
drive, other psychiatrists and psychologists have begun to come around.
One already going that route is kundalini expert Bonnie Greenwell, a California-based psychotherapist and author of Energies of
Transformation. This "energy phenomenon," as Greenwell calls it, has
been described by Hindu mystics and practitioners of Yoga as an
"awakening" of spiritual energy that supposedly "sleeps" at the base of
the spine. But kundalini awakenings, considered the beginning of the
process of enlightment by masters of the technique, can result in
serious psychological disturbance as well.

And that's where Creenwell comes in. Even those seeking the kundalini experience can find it painful, she explains, and for those not
expecting it, the experience can be a nightmare. Indeed, those
undergoing the kundalini experience don't seem to know what hit them
because they are unaware that it might be triggered by anything from a
physical trauma or emotional shock to a long-term spiritual practice or
dose of LSD. What's more, says Greenwell, the experience may be
accompanied by visions and trances, the sensation of leaving the body,
and alternating periods of ecstasy and despair, symptoms that could lead
to pathological diagnoses by conventional shrinks.

But Western medicine is not alone in its ignorance of kundalini,
according to Greenwell. Many spiritual teachers don't have a clue what
to do with it, either. "Some teachers will tell them it can't be
kundalini or it would feel good," she says. "Others tell these people
they're having a breakdown. There are even cases in Buddhist retreats
where people have been taken to psychiatric hospitals when they had a
kundalini opening. Many people who teach yoga or meditation are not
developed to the extent that they have gone through this process
themselves. It's very unfortunate, and it's one of the major reasons I
started doing what I do."

Greenwell's craft includes helping those troubled by kundalini tap the positive aspects of the phenomenon while discarding the negative as
quickly as they can. "Once they understand the process as essentially
positive in the long run," Greenwell says, "they are no longer afraid of
it and can often work it out quite effectively on their own."

One person Greenwell saw over come the problems of kundalini was
Sarah, born after her father's death in 1918. During childhood, Sarah
spent numerous hours communing with her deceased father and as an adult
used that same impulse to meditate. Listening to high-frequency sound
and visualizing the inside of her body, Sarah began feeling waves of
kundalini along with terrifying visions: In one, she was cut up piece
by piece, and in another, her body was invaded by swords. In the end,
Sarah managed to control her terrors by expressing the creative energy
of kundalini in the form of dreams, dance, movement, and art.

Other clients, Greenwell adds, have been far more distressed by
kundalini energy than Sarah. In these severe cases, she notes, "the
person struggles to get control of a body which involuntarily forces
them into motions or freezes them in action, locks pain into the back
and shoulders or into the site of any preexisting injury, and flushes
them with intense heat and cold. Such subjects occasionally fall into
trance or report that they are leaving their body. They may be blinded
by lights upon entering a dark room or feel they're being electrocuted
in bed."

Depending upon who these people consult, says Greenwell, they may be diagnosed with any number of disturbances from schizophrenia to grand
mal epilepsy. That's just what happened to Cathy, who experienced
periods of intense, trancelike states, extreme sensations of cold, and
"unusual energy flows" moving upward from her feet to her hands. Given medication for everything from psychosis to seizures, Cathy finally
decided to abandon all conventional treatment and accept her symptoms as "spiritual" in nature, coming from energies beyond. It was this
acceptance, Greenwell claims, that resulted in an immediate improvement
in Cathy's health and enabled her to give up antiseizure drugs and
integrate her experiences in a positive way into her life.

Greenwell probably sees more patients with kundalini problems than
therapists on the East coast, perhaps because kundalini is largely a
California phenomenon. The high percentage of meditators out West, she concedes, means "you have a lot of people primed for the experiences."

Those who suffer from spiritual traumas, kundalini or otherwise, can
also access another West Coast resource the Soquel, California-based
Spiritual Emergence Network, or SEN, a telephone referral service (408-464-8261) founded by Christina Grof, who with her husband,
Stanislav, pioneered research on the altered state. "We get about 150
calls a month" says Deane Brown, a therapist and the Network's program director. "People call us when something is happening that they don't understand. The volunteers who answer the phone come from a variety of backgrounds and many of them have experienced some critical or
frightening period of spiritual emergence of their own. So they can
truthfully say to the caller, 'I know what you're going through; I've
been there.' What we do, essentially, is listen. That's the greatest
gift that we can give to a caller. We don't judge the content of what
they say. We respond to the feeling rather than the content. We never diagnose."

After talking to the caller for a while, SEN volunteers provide the
name and number of one of the 500 people in the SEN database. These
people range from psychiatrists and psychologists who are familiar with
the SEN philosophy of "spiritual emergence" to shamans, psychics,
healers, or clergy in the troubled caller's area.

"The types of calls seem to go in cycles," notes Brown. "We will
often get a lot of the same calls at about the same time from all over.
For a while we may get a lot of kundalini calls. Then we may get a lot
of psychic opening, including out-of-body experiences, telepathy, and
uncanny coincidences. Other callers report possession, psychic attack
by demons, and the like."

Despite the common goals of workers like Greenwell and Laibow,
however, the TREAT movement has run into some trouble of its own. The
reason: Laibow's strong resistance to the pioneering group of workers
without professional credentials who aided the spiritually traumatized
in the first place, years before it became fashionable for those with
degrees. The biggest rift was caused by her refusal to accept artist
Budd Hopkins, author of the classic volumes Missing Time and Intruders,
and the individual who brought the plight of UFO abductees to the
attention of physicians and the general public when everyone else was
ignoring them or calling them insane. Laibow's beef: Hopkins and others
had been hypnotizing the alleged abductees to elicit their tales, and
they had no business doing so "since their formal training amounted to
just about nil." Such "wannabe clinicians," she believes, can be very dangerous, indeed.

Says Laibow, "There's a huge difference in being able to induce a
hypnotic trance and being a clinician who knows what to do when you've
got a trance, who knows how to not contaminate the material, and who
knows how to facilitate recovery rather than cause retraumatization
because people can be retraumatized by the unconscious repetition of
their material. And what do you do if a UFO investigator does you
clinical harm by taking on clinical responsibilities? Where is his
malpractice liability, and how are you going to be protected? People
who are not willing to take the time and the effort to become clinicians
should not be stomping around in the unconscious."

Though many professionals agreed with Laibow's argument, others felt
it was unjust to throw out those who had brought the phenomenon to their attention in the first place. As Hopkins himself said, "Where have all
the mental-health professionals been all these years while these people
were clamoring for help." In fact, the dispute has done little to
diminish Hopkins' influence, who continues to bring mental-health
professionals into the fold.

One of Hopkins' recruits is Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John
Mack, author of the 1977 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Lawrence of Arabia. Though he is the most prominent and respected member of the mental-health profession to take an interest in anomalous experiences in
recent years, Mack is not a pretentious man. The photo from a Boston
Globe profile shows him standing in a field wearing corduroy slacks and
a plaid shirt, his soft gray-green eyes staring calmly at the camera.
Unlike most therapists who take an interest in these matters, Mack makes
no attempt to hide the fact that he is "open to what these people are
telling us."

Mack met Budd Hopkins in January 1990, and was impressed both by the
man and the case histories of alleged UFO abductions he had collected
over the years. "The stories didn't sound at all like dreams or
fantasies to me," says Mack, his voice resonant with authority. "It
sounded like something real was happening. And I thought, well, if this
is real, what is it? Then Budd asked if I wanted to see some of these
people, and I realized I was crossing some kind of line, but I said
yes."

Since then, Mack has heard abduction stories from people of all walks
of life. "Forty years of psychiatry," he says, "has given me no way to
explain what I'm encountering in my interviews and hypnosis sessions of
these individuals. Something is going on; something is happening to
these people. I'm convinced of it."

In fact, Mack has done as much as TREAT to bring anomalous trauma to
center stage in the professional domain. He has spoken freely with the
media about his interest and has given talks and participated in private conferences on the subject. Colleagues who hear him speak often raise
the issue of whether UFO abduction stories might not be covers for
episodes of sexual abuse and incest in childhood. But according to
Mack, the reverse has been the case. "There is not a single known case
of the thousands that have been investigated where exploring or looking
into the abduction story revealed behind it an incest or sexual-abuse
history," he says, "but therapists looking for incest stories have come
up with UFO abduction memories instead."

Mack understands his colleagues' reluctance to delve into the subject.
"It's so shocking to the paradigm of psychology and psychiatry, which
tend to look for the source of the experience in the psyches of the
people who are affected rather than to acknowledge that something
mysterious is happening to these people. The phenomenon is not simply a product of their mental condition but has some kind of objective
reality. Whether you call it extraterrestrial or other-dimensional,
what it really means is that we may live in a rather different universe
from the one Western science has told us we live in.

Mack speaks of vast philosophical implications for this phenomenon and
human identity in the cosmos. "There's really a great fear of opening
up our world beyond what we know," he says. "But we need to get out of
the box we're in and see ourselves in relationship to the universe, and
I think this phenomenon could be very important in expanding our sense
of ourselves."

Mack's daring views are not shared by all therapists involved in the
dark side of the unknown. "If aliens are coming and invading us and
abusing us in a very literal sense," argues Toronto psychotherapist
David Gotlib, "then it's difficult for me to understand how a
significant portion of those who are taken could find it curious or enlightening. If you compare it to the Holocaust or the Vietnam War or
any kind of traumatic event, then sure you can learn to grow through it,
but only after a lot of pain and soul searching, and not right away. So
it discourages me from subscribing to a literal explanation. It also
suggests to me that the phenomenon may be dependent on who's
experiencing it as well as on what's happening.

Gotlib has thought a lot about UFOs since 1988 when he began treating
a woman who had been turned down by other therapists because she claimed
her anxiety was due to an alien abduction. He has now seen 40 such
patients and publishes the Bulletin of Anomalous Experience so that his
150 subscribers in the mental-health professions can network and
exchange ideas on UFO abduction reports and related phenomena. "I don't
expect to solve the puzzle or have the puzzle solved in my lifetime,"
notes Gotlib. "These kinds of things have been going on for hundreds of
years. I think if we start trying to solve the question definitively,
then we're chasing our tail. What I'm most concerned about is, how can
we help these people?"

Gotlib sees his next patient and 50 minutes later calls back to answer
his own questions. "Basically, what we have to do is listen to them
without judgement. You let them know that there are a lot of other
people who have had these kinds of experiences, that they are not crazy,
they are not psychotic, they are not mentally ill, they aren't losing
their minds, and this has the effect of empowering them. You talk about
the different ways that people understand this experience, and you
explore it with them. One patient left saying that his fear had been transformed into curiosity. If I can do that, then I think I've met my therapeutic objective."

It's not a surprise, of course, that Mack, Laibow, and other
mental-health professionals championing the anomalous have faced a
growing barrage of criticism both from colleagues and outsiders. Are
these therapists, critics wonder, clinging to the myth of their own
mental impregnability and being drawn into the abyss by the magnetic
pull of their patients' experiences?

"One needs to monitor one's own reaction to what it is that goes on," cautions NIMH psychologist Harold Goldstein. "You can be sympathetic,
you can be empathic, you can be understanding, but your goal as a
therapist is not to leap into the same pit as the patient, but to be
there to help pull someone out. I think that when physicians or
psychologists endorse these things, or appear to endorse them, we do
real damage to issues of rationality and realistic evidence. When we
reach a point that what's true is what people believe, then we've sunk
to a very dangerous situation. "

Bill Ellis, a researcher in contemporary legends at Pennsylvania State University in Hazleton applauds mental-health professionals for coming
to grips with anomalous experiences, but, like Goldstein, thinks a
little more objectivity is in order. "I think we forget therapists can communicate through body language what they want from their patients,"
he says. "It's the clever Hans phenomenon. It's like the horse that
could come up with the square root of 360, but what it had really
learned to do was keep pawing the ground until its trainer relaxed. The trainer was not doing it deliberately. The trainer was convinced that
the horse could add and subtract and do square roots. But eventually,
somebody who was smart enough to figure out what was going on stopped
watching the horse and started watching the trainer. I think we should
have more people watching the therapists."

Doing just that is Robert Baker, a retired professor of psychology who
taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University
of Kentucky. And Baker doesn't like what he sees. "I hope we can do
something about this nonsense, because it's getting to the point where
it's almost a national panic disorder," he says. "We have to do
something about therapists who really don't know what they're doing. The therapists who commit themselves to this nonsense are not aware of major
areas of human behavior and just do not understand the way the human
nervous system works."

One thing that fools therapists, says Baker, is cryptoamnesia, a
series of false memories that form a fantasy with a few minor elements
of truth thrown in. "The fact is, we do not remember things exactly,"
he explains. "We change, arrange, and distort the memories we have
stored to better serve our needs and desires. We fill the gaps in
memory with events that never happened or with events that did not
happen the way we imagine, and the results can be bizarre."

The other major cause of the wild stories people tell, according to
Baker, is sleep paralysis, a sleep disorder accompanied by
hallucinations that affects about 5 percent of the population. In sleep paralysis, Baker explains, "people wake up in the middle of the night
and can't move. They feel like they're wide awake, but they continue
dreaming and in the dreams often see such things as demons, aliens, or
ghosts. Since they're partly awake, however, they may think the dream
really happened when, in fact, it didn't. It's no wonder that people
find this terrifying, and that's what's responsible for the
posttraumatic stress disorder that therapists are talking about."

But Baker has no explanation for the wild stories told by the
therapists themselves, unless, he notes, they're "simply seeking
attention." Laibow, for instance, claims to have personally experienced anomalous "healing," an event she says cannot be explained by
conventional medical science. As Laibow recalls, it was a muggy day in
August 1991 when she "trucked on down to Brooklyn to an unairconditioned high-school auditorium filled with lots of Polish and Russian emigres.
"She sat for three hours, she says, watching Kiev-based psychiatrist and self-proclaimed healer Anatoly Kashperovsky dance to New Age Gypsy music
and thought, "What's a nice girl like me doing in a place like this?"

Anyway, there was Laibow, watching Kashperovsky's performance,
impatient and skeptical and thinking, "This wouldn't work well at the
AMA," when suddenly," she says, "this Caesarean scar that I had, which
was thick and ropey and very prominent because I'd gotten an infection immediately after the delivery of my son, began to tingle." As soon as
she could decorously take a peek, she hiked up her skirt and found to
her surprise that the scar was gone.

She immediately made an appointment with her gynecologist, "the head
of reproductive medicine at a major university," who, Laibow claims, was shocked when all he could find was a very fine hairline scar. The gynecologist, whom she will not name, was excited by her story. "Imagine
if we could do that," Laibow says he exclaimed. Laibow adds that the gynecologist may be interested in collaborating on a future study of
healing. One possible subject: a Japanese healer who Laibow says "seems
to have some very substantial powers."

As founder of TREAT and raconteur of stories both marvelous and
strange, Laibow is controversial to say the least. But are the doctor
and her colleagues merely misguided, marrying their fortunes to the
winds of culture, much like those who touted fairies and dragons in eras
past? Or are they onto something new? Will their quest lead more
people to come forward with anomalous experiences and encounters,
providing the data necessary for proper scrutiny - perhaps even
authentication - by the scientific and medical communities at large? In
short, are these mental-health professionals fooling themselves, or are
they forging extraordinary paths through the byways of consciousness and
the murky outback of the unknown? To answer these questions, of course,
is to know the nature of the unknown, and that is something we humans
have ceaselessly attempted for thousands of years - so far, with out
much success.


Al,
telnet://ricksbbs.synchro.net:23
---
þ Synchronet þ Rick's BBS telnet://ricksbbs.synchro.net:23

WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON? by Carl Sagan,
published in PARADE MAGAZINE, 3/7/93
--------------------------------------

It's still dark out. You're lying in bed, fully awake - but, you discover, you're utterly paralyzed. You sense someone in the room. You try to cry
out. But you cannot. Several small gray beings less than 4 feet tall are standing at the foot of your bed. Their heads are pear-shaped and bald,
and large for their bodies. Their eyes are enormous, their faces
expressionless and identical. They wear tunics and boots. You hope this is
only a dream, but as nearly as you can tell it's really happening. They
lift you up, and, eerily, they and you slip through the wall of your
bedroom and float out into the air, rising high toward a metallic, saucer-shaped aircraft. There, you are escorted into a medical examining
room. A larger but similar being - evidently some sort of physician -
takes over. What follows is even more terrifying.

Your body is probed with special machines, especially your sexual parts.
If you're a man, they may take sperm samples; if you're a woman, they may implant semen or remove ova or fetuses. They may force you to have sex. Afterward, you may be ushered into a different room where hybrid babies,
partly human, and partly these creatures, stare back at you. You may be
given an admonition about human misbehavior, especially in despoiling the environment; scenes of future devastation are displayed. Finally, these cheerless gray emissaries usher you out of the spacecraft and ooze you
back through the walls into your bed. By the time you're able to move and
talk, they're gone.

You may not remember the incident right away; you might find some period
of time unaccountably missing. Because all of this seems so bizarre,
you're concerned about your sanity; naturally, you're reluctant to talk to anyone about it. At the same time, the experience is so disturbing that
it's hard to keep bottled up forever. It all pours out when you hear
similar accounts, or when you're under hypnosis with a sympathetic
therapist, or even when you see a picture of an "alien" in one of the many popular magazines and books on UFOs.

In a recent Roper poll of nearly 6,000 American adults, specially
commissioned by those who accept the alien abduction story at face value,
18% reported sometimes waking up paralyzed, aware of one or more strange
beings in the room. Something like 13% reported odd episodes of missing
time, and 10% claimed to have flown through the air without mechanical assistance. From these results, the poll's sponsors concluded that 2% of
all Americans have been abducted, many repeatedly, by beings from other
worlds. If aliens are not partial to Americans, the number for the whole
planet would be more than 100 million people. This means an abduction
every several seconds. It's surprising that more of the neighbors haven't noticed.

What's going on here? Could all these people be mistaken, or lying, or hallucinating the same or a very similar story? When you talk with them,
most seem very sincere, although in the grip of powerful emotions. A few psychiatrists who have examined them find no more evidence of
psychopathology than in the rest of us. But could there really be a
massive alien invasion, repugnant medical procedures performed on millions
of innocent men, women and children, and humans apparently used as
breeding stock over many decades - and all this not generally known and
dealt with by responsible media and the governments sworn to protect the
lives and well-being of their citizens?

Why should beings so advanced in physics and engineering - crossing vast interstellar distances, walking like ghosts through walls - be so backward
when it comes to biology? Why go to all the trouble of repeated sexual encounters between aliens and humans? Why not steal a few egg and sperm
cells, read the full genetic code and then manufacture as many genetic variations as you like? Even we humans - who cannot quickly cross
interstellar space or slither through walls - are able to clone cells. The preoccupation with reproduction in these accounts raises a warning flag - especially considering the uneasy balance between sexual freedom and
repression that has always characterized the human condition, and the fact
that we live in a time fraught with numerous ghastly accounts, both true
and false, of childhood sexual abuse.

The pollsters never actually asked whether their subjects had been
abducted by aliens; they ___DEDUCED___ it: Those who've ever awakened
sensing strange presences around them, ever unaccountably seemed to fly
through the air, and so on, have THEREFORE been abducted by aliens. The conclusion - that millions of American have been abducted - seems
extremely doubtful. Still, at least hundreds of people, believing they
have been abducted, have sought out sympathetic therapists or joined
abductee support groups.

So which is more likely - that we're undergoing a massive but generally overlooked invasion by alien sexual abusers, or that people are
experiencing some internal mental state they do not understand?
Admittedly, we're very ignorant about both extraterrestrial beings, if
any, and about human psychology. But if these really were the only two alternatives, which would you pick?

It's curious that emotions can run so high on a matter in which we know so little. After all, either hypothesis - extraterrestrial invasion or an
epidemic of hallucinations - teaches us something we certainly ought to
know about. Maybe the reason for such strong feelings is that both
alternatives have extremely unpleasant implications.

The first alien abduction story in the modern era began with Betty and
Barney Hill, a New Hampshire couple - she a social worker and he a Post
Office employee. During a late night drive in 1961 through the White
mountains of New Hampshire, Betty spotted a bright starlike UFO that
seemed to follow them. Because Barney feared it might harm them, they left
the main highway for narrow mountain roads. They arrived home two hours
later than they had expected. The experience prompted Betty to read a book claiming that UFOs were spaceships from other worlds. Soon after, she had
a repetitive nightmare in which she and Barney were abducted and taken
aboard the UFO. Barney overheard her describing this dream to friends and volunteer UFO investigators.

Several years later, Barney's psychiatrist referred him to a Boston hypnotherapist, Benjamin Simon, M.D. Betty came to be hypnotized as well. Under hypnosis they separately described a memory of their trip home - of seeing a UFO, watching it land on the highway and being taken partly immobilized into the UFO, where little humanoid creatures subjected them
to unconventional medical examinations.

I was glad to have an opportunity to spend several hours with Mr. and Mrs. Hill, and with Dr. Simon. There was no mistaking the earnestness and
sincerity of Betty and Barney, and their mixed feelings about becoming
public figures under such bizarre circumstances. With the Hills'
permission, Dr. Simon played for me some of the audiotape of their
sessions under hypnosis. By far my most striking impression was the
absolute terror in Barney's voice as he described - relived would be a
better word - the encounter. Simon rejected the notion that they were
lying. So what's left? The Hills, said the psychiatrist, had experienced a species of "dream."

In 1894 THE INTERNATIONAL CENSUS OF WAKING HALLUCINATIONS was published in London. From that time to this, repeated surveys have shown that 10% to
25% of ordinary, functioning people have experienced at least once a vivid hallucination - hearing a voice, usually, or seeing a form when there's no
one there. In some cases there are profound religious experiences.
(Probably a dozen times since their deaths I've heard my mother or father,
in an ordinary, conversational tone of voice, calling my name. They had
called my name often during my life with them. I still miss them so much
that it doesn't seem strange to me that my brain will occasionally
retrieve a kind of lucid recollection of their voices.)

Such hallucinations may occur to perfectly normal people. But there are circumstances in which they can be elicited by a campfire at night, or
under great stress, or by prolonged fasting or sleeplessness, or sensory deprivation, or through hallucinogens such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, hashish or alcohol. These hallucinations have a vivid and palpable
reality.

Hallucinations are common. If you have one, it doesn't mean you're crazy. Indeed, they are sought out in many cultures. We would surely be missing something important about our own nature if we refused to face up to the
fact that hallucinations are part of being human. But none of this makes hallucinations real.

Most of us remember being frightened at the age of 3 or so by real-seeming
but wholly imaginary "monsters." If we're capable of conjuring up monsters
in childhood, why shouldn't some of us, at least on occasion, be able to imagine similar things as adults?

There's a common, although insufficiently well known, psychological
syndrome very much like alien abduction: Many people have experienced
sleep paralysis. On falling asleep or when waking up - just for a few
seconds, or maybe for longer periods - you seem to be paralyzed and
acutely anxious. You may feel a weight on your chest, your heartbeat is
quick, your breathing labored. You may experience auditory or visual hallucinations - of people, demons, ghosts, animals or birds. In the right setting the experience can have "the full force and impact of reality," according to Dr. Robert Baker, a psychologist at the University of
Kentucky. Sometimes there's a marked sexual component to the
hallucination.

Baker has forcefully argued that these common sleep disturbances are
behind many if not most of the alien abduction accounts. (He and others
suggest that some abduction claims are also made by fantasy-prone
individuals or hoaxers seeking fame and fortune.) Even if no known hallucinations were to fit the alien abduction pattern, it's certain that humans commonly hallucinate. There's considerable doubt about whether extraterrestrials exist and frequently visit our planet. We may argue
about details, but the one category of explanation seems much better
supported than the other. The main reservation you might then have is: Why
do so many people report _THIS PARTICULAR_ set of hallucinations? Why
little gray beings and flying saucers and sexual molestation?

Demons, the early Church Fathers taught, come down from heaven and have unlawful sexual congress with women. St. Augustine believed witches were
the offspring of these forbidden unions. In his famous Bull of 1484, Pope Innocent VIII declared: "It has come to Our ears that members of both
sexes do not avoid to have intercourse with evil angels, incubi, and
succubi, and that by their sorceries, and by their incantations, charms,
and conjurations, they suffocate, extinguish, and cause to perish the
births of women," as well as cause sundry other calamities. With this
Bull, Innocent initiated the systematic accusation, torture, and execution
of countless "witches" all over Europe.

Two inquisitors appointed by Innocent declared: "Devils...busy themselves
by interfering with the normal process of normal copulation and
conception, by obtaining human semen, and themselves transferring it.
The offspring of these demonic unions are also, when they grow up,
visited by devils - although not all witches are created this way. And
witches were well known to fly through the air. There is no spaceship, but
most of the essential elements of the alien abduction story are here.

In 1645, a Cornish teenager, Anne Jeffries, was found groggy and crumpled
on the floor. much later, she recalled being attacked by little men,
carried paralyzed to a castle in the air, seduced and returned home. she
called the little men fairies. They returned to torment her. The next year
she was arrested for witchcraft. Fairies traditionally have magical powers
and can cause paralysis by the merest touch. The ordinary passage of time
is slowed in fairyland. Fairies have sex with humans and carry off babies
from their cradles. If Anne Jeffries had known about aliens rather than fairies, and UFOs rather than castles in the air, would her story have
been distinguishable from the one "abductees" tell?

Is it possible that people in all times and places occasionally experience vivid, realistic hallucinations, often with sexual content - with the
details filled in by the prevailing cultural idioms, sucked out of the Zeitgeist? When everyone knows that gods regularly come down to Earth, we hallucinate gods; when everyone knows about demons, it's incubi and
succubi; when fairies are widely believed, we see fairies; when the old
myths fade and we begin thinking that aliens are plausible, then that's
where our hypnogogic imagery tends. Snatches of songs or foreign
languages, images and stories we witnessed in our childhood can be
accurately recalled decades later without any conscious memory of the
source. In our everyday life, we effortlessly incorporate cultural motifs
and norms and make them seem our own.

Today, aliens are the subject of innumerable science-fiction stories and novels. UFOs are a regular feature of weekly newspapers dedicated to falsification and mystification. One of the highest-grossing motion
pictures of all time is about aliens very much like those described by abductees. Alien abduction stories were comparatively rare until 1987,
when a purported firsthand account with a haunting cover painting of an
"alien" became a best-seller. It is striking how similar many of the
abduction accounts are now, and how little we hear about incubi and
fairies. But it might not be altogether surprising that, in our time and society, short, gray aliens with breeding programs on their minds are what
we mainly reach for when we must describe these hallucinations.

No one would be happier than I would if we had real evidence of extraterrestrial life. But the issue comes down to the quality of the
evidence. Proponents of alien abductions do not ask us to believe on
faith, but rather on the strength of their evidence. Surely it is our duty
to examine the purported evidence closely and skeptically. _NO_ anecdotal
claim - no matter how sincere, no matter how deeply felt, no matter how exemplary the lives of the attesting citizens - carries much weight on so important a question. As with the older UFO cases, anecdotal accounts are subject to irreducible error. This is not a criticism of those who claim abductions or of those who investigate them. It is merely a statement of
human fallibility.

Where is the physical evidence? Some abductees allege that aliens stole
fetuses from their wombs. This is something that would surely cause a stir among gynecologists, midwives, obstetrical nurses, especially in an age of heightened feminist awareness. But not a SINGLE MEDICAL RECORD has been produced substantiating such claims.

Some abductees say that tiny metallic implants were inserted into their
bodies - high up in their nostrils, for example. But no such implants have
been confirmed by physicists or chemists as being of unearthly
manufacture. No abductee has filched a page from the captain's logbook or
a strange examining instrument, or taken an authentic photograph of the interior of the ship or come back with detailed scientific information not hithero known on Earth. These failures tell us something.

If indeed the bulk of the alien abduction accounts are really about hallucinations, don't we have before us a matter of supreme importance - touching on our limitations, the ease with which we may be misled, the fashioning of our beliefs and perhaps even the origins of our religions?
There is genuine scientific paydirt in UFOs and alien abductions - but it
is, I think, of distinctly terrestrial origin.

---------------------------------

Carl Sagan of Cornell University has played a leading role in the search
for extraterrestrial life with spacecraft and radio telescopes. He was a
member of the U.S. Air Force committee that evaluated the government's investigation of UFOs. In 1966, Dr. Sagan resigned from the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board in protest against the Vietnam War. He is the
author (with Ann Druyan) of "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors."


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Gannet News Service
Dec. 11, 1993
-+-----

ABDUCTED BY ALIENS?

Two Women Say They Were

Catlett, Va.

Clare Holcomb and Diana Graves say the aliens grab them without
warning, usually at dusk or out of deep sleep.

Sometimes a spaceship -- the saucer-shaped vessel of B movies --
touches down silently in a corner paddock of this Virginia horse
farm 50 miles west of Washington, D.C.

Sometimes, "the beings" materialize out of thin air.

The "experiences" that follow are always terrifying to them, even
though they've happened hundreds of times. Holcomb and Graves
report pokes and prods by aliens deaf to their cries and pleas,
skin excisions and forced feedings that leave the women feeling
wretched for days.

"Every day or two you deny the whole thing, 'It's all going to
stop because I don't believe it anymore,'" says Holcomb, explaining
how she copes with her belief that space aliens regularly abduct her
and her best friend. "It's a self-defense mechanism. It protects
your sanity."

Holcomb and Graves sometimes question their sanity.

But people who report abductions or UFO sightings are not
necessarily psychotic, fantasy-prone or more imaginative than anyone
else, says research reported in the November issue of the Journal of
Abnormal Psychology.

Dr. Nicholas P. Spanos, professor of psychology at Carleton
University in Ottawa, compared the intelligence, imagination and
hypnotic suggestibility of abductees and UFO sighters with the
general population. The only difference he found was that UFO
sighters believed that extraterrestrial life existed before they
experienced aliens up-close and personal.

The researcher's findings are old news and cold comfort to
Holcomb and Graves.

"I'd be happy with (being) crazy," says Holcomb, a tall, thin
woman with a wedge of curly blonde hair. "You can see a
professional. There's medication to help you. I can't call 911
when I'm abducted."

Whether you believe in extraterrestrial life, Clare Holcomb, 47,
and Diana Graves, 44, are very real. And so are at least 1,000
other people in the United Satates who claim to have been contacted
by space aliens.

These people -- 250 more each year -- live in constant states of
anxiety and depression, afraid they're crazy, afraid they're not.

Catlett, Va., seems a cliche setting for a close encounter.

This 2,000-population town is dotted with corn farms and apple
orchards. Country roads lined with old oaks and hickories wend
through acres of hard clay and winter wheat.

Holcomb says her first abduction took place on such a deserted
road six miles from the Moonraker Equestrian Academy, the farm where
she lives and teaches horseback riding.

On Dec. 15, 1991, at 7:30 p.m., Holcomb was returning from nearby
Winchester, Va., when a pair of low-flying bright lights demanded
her attention.

What seemed like a moment later, Holcomb was driving five miles
further down the road and feeling nauseated. She arrived home more
than an hour later than usual, her ear lobes were inflamed and
bleeding, and her pierced earrings had been inserted backwards.

"I assumed I had had a nervous breakdown," she says.

The memory, which Holcomb retrieved about a year ago, sparked
flashbacks of regular abductions -- sometimes weekly -- dating back
to childhood.

The flashbacks, which Holcomb illustrates in ink drawings, feature
short, pale beings with hollow eyes and long fingers without
joints. Many scenes are set in high-tech modules. And many
memories feature Graves.

Even though the women grew up far apart -- Holcomb in Virginia,
Graves in England and Rhode Island -- they believe they were
abducted together as children and are certain they were fated by
alien forces to meet again as adults.

Eight years ago, Graves, who owns Moonraker, placed a newspaper ad
for a farmhand, Holcomb answered.

"We could never have met under normal circumstances," says
Holcomb, who is divorced and has a grown son. "We have countless
memories of childhood instances in `their' presence."

Six months after Holcomb began remembering her abductions, Graves
began having flashbacks, too. These days, the women say they are
frequently abducted together.

"They've threatened that someday they'll take us and we're not
coming back," says Graves, a policy analyst for the U.S. Forest
Service.

Until now, neither woman has spoken publicly about the abductions:
They fear ridicule from disbelievers and retribution from the
aliens.

But both feel now is the time to talk, though they can't
articulate why.

How do these women live fearing they"ll be snatched at any moment?

Both have sought professional help.

A year ago, Holcomb consulted David Ruxer, a Fairfax, Va.,
clinical psychologist who has treated a dozen UFO abductees.

Ruxer says abductees often display anxiety, depression and
flashbacks, symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress.

"It's not really a post-traumatic stress because it is an on-going
stress," he says. "The difference is this person is telling you it
happened last night, it's going to happen tomorrow. You struggle
for another model."

Ruxer says abductees come to him for hypnosis to recover
suppressed memories, or for a safe place to talk about their
experience.

Al,
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PART 6



From the Dallas Morning News
Wednesday, March 2, 1994
Today - Section C

ABDUCTED BY ALIENS? LIST GROWS

By Nicole Brodeur (Orange County Register)

This is a hard story for C.C. Peters to tell.
She drains her coffee cup a third time, lights a cigarette.
The smoke comes first, then the words.
"When I was 7 years old, I had this dream..." Ms. Peters stops
and levels a look across the kitchen table. "That's what I was told; that
it was a dream," she says. "That's what I believed at the time."
Now, 26 years later, the housewife believes something else: She
was abducted by aliens.
They came to her home in New Jersey, she says. Three of them,
each just over 3 feet tall, appeared at the base of her bed and asked- telepathically-to play with her toys.
She remembers feeling woozy, then hearing a crunching sound, "like
someone taking a bite out of an apple," and feeling a sharp pain in her
nose.
She remembers floating: out of her bedroom window, over trees in her
front yard and into a round room, where she saw her mother lying on a
floating table, being examined by aliens.
She remembers an alien - a scientist of some sort - taking her into
another room, where "hybrid babies" sat like shoes in boxes in three rows against the wall.
Finally, she was taken into a room filled with blinding white
light, where she encountered a feminine entity who exuded overwhelming
wisdom.
The next morning, Ms. Peters says, she awoke with leaves and twigs
in her bed. To this day, she believes she ripped them from the treetops as
she passed over them - evidence of her journey.
It's an incredible tale, but a familiar one to the people in the
abductee community, as active and organized as any PTA and growing all the time.
"Definitely growing," says Debbie Kenna, a Fullerton, California, hypnotherapist with 75 clients who believe they were abducted. "As more
comes out, people are beginning to educate themselves and become aware
of the possibility of abduction.
"Before, they may have thought they were going crazy."
At monthly support groups, people meet to talk about their
abductions. They also attend conferences and workshops to gather information on the phenomenon. And the Psynetics Foundation in Anaheim, California,
hosts regular "abductee night," when stories are shared and discussed.
Abductees are all kinds of people. Professional and poor. Vocal
and silent. Believers and debunkers, and those who will wonder all their lives.
"Abductees always seem to be simple, innocent people who have had
no prior interest in the subject," Ms. Kenna says. "Abduction is like an awakening; a massive consciousness shift."
For Ms. Peters (not her real name), though, the abduction has meant upheavals in an otherwise normal life: The daughter of well-to-do, loving parents, she attended private schools and spent her summers in Europe. Now
33, she lives witrh her husband and young son in a sprawling home overlooking Marbella Country Club in San Juan Capistrano, California.
"I know all this sounds crazy," Ms. Peters says again. "I know
it. And I keep wondering, `Why me? I'm just a housewife!'"
Most psychiatrists - as well as noted scientist Carl Sagan - believe alleged abductions are simple hallucinations, bouts of fitful slumber when
a person is thrashing about in bed, half awake but still dreaming of lights
and almond-eyed beings.
"People can be absolutely convinced that aliens are kidnapping
them," says Dr. Robert Baker, professor emeritus of psychology of the University of Kentucky. "It's an old science-fiction theme."
But Harvard University psychologist Dr. John Mack disagrees. Dr.
Mack, founder of the psychiatry department at Cambridge (Mass.) Hospital and winner of a 1977 Pulitzer Prize for his psychoanalytic biography of T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), has investigated almost 70 alleged abductions and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews and treatment.
"When memories come back like that, I never have any question that
people are describing something that has authentically happened to them,"
he told the Boston Globe in 1992. "No one has been able to come up with a counterformulation that explains what's going on."
The number of people who think they've been abducted is hard to
gauge.
However, a 1992 Roper poll of nearly 6,000 U.S. adults showed that
lots of people believe they've had alien encouters. The poll was funded by
Las Vegas developer Robert Bigelow and comissioned by a group of people who believe in alien abduction, including author Budd Hopkins and Temple University professor Dr. David Jacobs.
The questionnaire contained queries as benign as "Have you
experienced self-esteem problems?" and as off-the-wall as "Has someone in
your life claimed to have witnessed a ship or alien near you or witnessed
you being gone?"
The conclusion: Two percent of all Americans believe they have
been abducted, many repeatedly, by beings from another world.
Impossible, says Dr. William Cone, a Newport Beach, California, psychologist who specializes in treating alleged abduction cases.
"There is no data. But I really, honestly think it's very few
people."
A former marriage and family couselor, Dr. Cone developed an
interest in alien abductions after reading Whitley Strieber's "Communion,"
a 1987 best seller that brought the idea of alien abduction into the mainstream.
"This wasn't my game plan, to spend my career on the fringe," Dr.
Cone says with a smile. "But if you think you've been abducted, you come
to me."

HORRIBLE EXPERIENCES

Abductees compare their experiences to that of rape victims: taken
against their will, undressed and examined by strangers, then returned to
their lives shaken, scared and dysfunctional. Many suffer post-traumatic stress, sleep and sexual problems, and have trouble maintaining jobs or relationships.
"There's no self-help book for abductees," Dr. Cone says. "I just
try to make the experience a piece of their life, rather than their whole
life. I de-stress them, give them coping skills and help them to function
as humans again."
Some clients are children, as young as age 4, who tell Dr. Cone of
their trips aboard spacecraft with "snowmen," "doctors," and "little
friends" hovering around them.
"The parents are completely freaked out," Dr. Cone says.
Does he believe their stories?
"I don't disbelieve anything. I'm interested in paranormal
experiences, but I have no way of verifying their stories."
The abductees' stories are intriguing in their similarity.
The most common symptom is missing time - one to several hours
when they cannot account for their whereabouts.
Abductees also suffer from sleep paralysis, a condition in which
they remember being awake in bed but unable to move. Some feel heavy weight
on their chests, as if something is sitting on them.
Once paralyzed, abductees see aliens - about 3 feet tall, with almond-shaped eyes and gray bodies - before them.
The aliens take the abductees from their homes or cars and lead
them aboard a spacecraft, put them on a table in a round room and subject
them to what appear to be medical procedures.
"At times, these `examinations' are very painful," Dr. Cone says.
"Some people have also reported other humans involved in their abductions, some in military uniforms."
Russ Estes - a San Diego-based producer who, with Dr. Cone, has
interviewed at least 100 abductees for a documentary on the phenomenon - says the similarities of the stories were "absolutely astounding."
"Granted, the media has brought a heck of a lot of information to
the public, but even the smallest details are highly similar," Mr. Estes
says.
Does he believe them?
"Tough question," Mr. Estes says. "I don't disbelieve them. Most
people have no reason to lie. And why would they subject themselves to ridicule?"

JUST DAYDREAMS

Dr. Baker, of the University of Kentucky's department of psychology, believes abduction stories are "a false belief or delusion."
"These are hoaxes!" he bellows in a recent telephone interview.
"Every one of these things that (abductees) take as evidence of something strange going on, of aliens abducting 3 to 4 million people annually...every one of the things they argue can easily be explained with a simple understanding of human psychology.
"We all daydream," he says. "We read a page when we are tired and
can't remember a thing we have read."
Sleep paralysis is common too. "When you're half awake and half
asleep and see, for example, balls of light coming at you from the walls.
These people aren't crazy, because the paralysis is real," Dr. Baker says.
What about scars and scoop marks abductees bear as proof of their experience?
"Those can be done at night by fingernails and toenails," he says.
"We do that to ourselves all the time. In no way do we have any physical evidence that it can be established and agreed upon by competent scientists that we have ever had any visitations by extraterrestials," he says.
All of which means nothing to the members of the Out There Group,
a gathering of 24 alleged abductees ages 10 to 56. They meet every month
in the Mission Viejo, California, home of hypnotherapist Jane Lake.
Some abductees enjoy the experience, Ms. Lake says.
"They feel they are doing something for humanity, contracting with
the extraterrestrials to help us all."

[DISTRIBUTED BY KNIGHT-RIDDER TRIBUNE NEWS WIRE]

--End Of File--

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PART 8



Abducted By UFOs!
Sooners Report Close Encounters
01/23/94
THE SUNDAY OKLAHOMAN

Richard Seifried was sound asleep on the lonely Black Mesa in the
Panhandle.
Suddenly he awoke to find himself floating out the end of his tent and
up into a spaceship, where he was given a physical exam by short, hairless, gray-colored beings with fragile necks, long arms and black eyes the size
of grapefruit.
"I went right through the mosquito netting" without tearing it, he said.
Now for the strange part. Seifried's been snatched like this at least
five other times.
Sometimes the beings beamed him off a mountain while he worked for the Forest Service. Sometimes they grabbed him from home.
Sometimes they scooped skin samples or poked him with tiny needles in a pattern.
Seifried's not alone. As director of investigations for the Oklahoma
chapter of the Mutual UFO Network, Seifried has come across many Oklahomans who've had uncomfortably close encounters with strange entities from who
knows where.
Well, that's what they say.
Some who believe in UFOs - in the sense that unidentified flying objects
are advanced aliens from some unknown part of the cosmos - estimate up to millions of people have been so "abducted."
In Oklahoma, Seifried and his wife, Jean Waller, longtime state director
of the network, know of at least 30 or 40 such people who believe they're victims.
UFOs - in the sense of things in the sky that did not make sense to the observer - have been around forever, or at least as long as people have had eyes and a brain big enough to wonder, "What the ...?"
Seifried has written a book, "Native Encounters," about the history of
UFO things in Oklahoma, one of several unpublished manuscripts by the
retired school teacher.
Interest in UFOs seems to run in cycles, but it's been pretty hot since
the early 1950s, when humanoids began building rockets in earnest. Recently,
a congressman succeeded in launching a government investigation into what believers say was the crash of a flying saucer in New Mexico in 1947 that
was covered up by the same government.
UFO conventions and meetings have boomed in the past decade.
"I'm interested in anything that's unexplained," James Rea, 18, of El
Reno said, explaining why he showed up at a recent network meeting in
Norman. "I don't really know if I believe them (UFOs) or not. I believe anything's possible."
Oklahoma has its share of UFO stuff, network people say. Like animal carcasses with eyes or sexual organs removed or like circles on rural land
that cows mysteriously avoid, all of which some people attribute to
celestial interlopers for lack of other explanations.
Philip Klass blames it on a kind of extra-terrestrial baloney
sandwich beamed directly into people's brains by tabloids, talk
shows, books and movies. Despite the huge numbers of people who
have seen UFOs or their creators, not one lug nut from an
interplanetary craft has been recovered.
Klass, publisher of the Skeptics UFO Newsletter, said the
National Enquirer offered $1 million and a British liquor magnate
offered about $2.8 million for any hard evidence. Zilch.
Klass is a former senior avionics editor for Aviation Week &
Space Technology magazine and still writes for the magazine. If one
alien visit to Earth could be proven, "It would have been the
biggest story I had ever written. In 28 years I have yet to find
that story."
Aside from the elderly woman who died from exposure while
waiting for a spaceship, belief in UFOs had been relatively
harmless, he said. He said most UFO investigators are
well-intentioned people, albeit many with a tendency to avoid
obvious, earthbound explanations.
But this abduction thing, which popped up about 1987, leaves
mild curiosity in the dust.
"It's a UFO abduction cult," says Klass. "This is New Age
witchcraft."

"Pretty Crazy" Images

Whatever it is, belief in UFO abduction is seriously disturbing or
moving to those who think they have been chosen or picked on by aliens.
Like Joel and Carilee Delano. For the Choctaw couple and their two young daughters, it all began on a clear fall night on a South Dakota highway in
1992 on a trip to Montana.
That's where, the parents say, a mysterious craft that had followed them
for miles made its close encounter and "interacted" with the family. On
their living room wall, framed in oak, hang a half dozen enlarged glossy
photos of what they say is the craft, or at least light from it.
What's obvious is only a chunk of roadway, with three dots or
squiggles of light in the darkness.
Joel's brother called MUFON about it. MUFON suggested hypnosis.
And, like many others, the Delanos discovered under this altered
state that they too had been abducted.
Those abducted often have difficulties with their marriages, as
spouses assume they're Lost in Space without a shuttle. It helped
lead to Seifried's divorce from a former wife.
"I thought this is how you felt before you went into the nut
house," Carilee Delano recalls of her first reaction to her
husband's abduction "memory." After accepting it, the Mary Kay
cosmetics representative began viewing the incident "like it was a
rape."
"This is getting into the Looney Toons area," Joel said,
worrying about what all this sounds like.
During four sessions of hypnosis, at $35 apiece, Joel recalled: "I felt
a levitation up. I felt I was in a room, foggy, my legs paralyzed."
The construction worker saw beings with large heads, thin necks and
"large black eyes staring at me. Images, images, images," he says, gazing
at the wall as he searches for words.
"In my mind it really happened," he said.
Now the Delanos feel the beings were "obviously corresponding
with us." Although they had no specific message, Joel says since
then he's had a lot of thoughts about evolution and creation. The
Delanos are convinced the aliens have been back. Several times.
"I feel we've had visitations here at the house," Joel said.
Strange things like nightmares and flashes in the sky around
their rural acreage provide clues, they say. That plus hypnosis
that revealed "a being sitting beside my bed," Joel said.
Joel, 43, also figures "I was medically altered" because dizzy
spells and a nagging cough he used to have disappeared.
They fear their daughters are involved in this pattern of
experiments and visits, since they have bad dreams too. "You're
helpless," Carilee, 33, said."Our children probably are genetically
altered."
Chana Sue, 9, lacing up sneakers for a basketball game, said she
didn't know what the family saw that night in South Dakota. Her
mother shows a crude drawing Chana Sue did of a pear-shaped craft
with a row of windows on it.
Carilee said that's the craft she saw in a dream. Joel said he
saw that shape while under hypnosis.
Asked how the figure came to her, Chana Sue explained, "That's
always been what I thought they (UFOs) looked like."
Joel's sister once saw an alien in her room in Tulsa and his
mother in Arkansas saw a UFO too.
Emily (not her real name) is another Oklahoman abducted by
aliens. Or who believes she was.
Married with two kids, the 36-year-old maternity nurse recalled
being awakened by a strange red light and noises when she was 7.
She was living in New Hampshire.
Under hypnosis, she further remembered "floating up in a light
with my cousin beside me." She was paralyzed, as beings in the fuzzy
memory "apply pressure to the back of my head" and work with a long
instrument with a ball on the end of it.
During another hypnosis session, she remembered at age 11 waking
to "a dark hand over my face in the middle of the night." She
closed her eyes and prayed, shaking until it was gone. She counts a
total of four alien abductions.
"It's pretty crazy," she says.

Memories or Metaphors

Many have stirred these images with the help of Jean E. Byrne, a
Norman nurse who works in home health care most of the time. Byrne
also is trained in massage and hypnotherapy, studying at the American
Institute of Hypnotherapy and at the Association of Research and
Enlightenment.
She said the "scariest part" of hypnotherapy on UFO cases is
"when we work with children. They're just terrified." Kids who
apparently have been abducted by aliens have been known to refer to
them as "Big Boy" or "the one who comes ... at night and takes her
to the ball in the sky."
Dr. Vernon Enlow, Oklahoma City psychologist who uses hynposis,
said there is a raging controversy over "created memories," ideas
subtly planted in subjects' minds by hypnotists.
Byrne said she is aware subjects are very receptive to suggestion. And
these days, "there's so much of what we call contamination," that is
reading, hearing or seeing films about aliens then thinking it happened to them. "You don't know how much of that is real memory," she said.
Enlow said stories elicited under hypnosis aren't necessarily true, even though subjects believe them and the therapist doesn't suggest them. They
can be "a metaphor" for something else.
"Hypnosis is not a truth serum," he said. "Hypnotism can sometimes
release a lot of creativity." Any therapist who encounters numerous people believing UFO abductions would cause him to wonder. Wonder is about all
most people do with UFOs.
Tom Renbarger, 42, graphic artist for the state Department of Transportation, said his interest in UFO stuff is more "a social
phenomenon."
"I think it sort of fills a need for some people to have something supernatural or something to believe in," he said.



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