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From: Stig Agermose <stig.agermose@privat.dk> Date: Sat, 29 Jun 2002 05:56:53 +0200 Fwd Date: Sat, 29 Jun 2002 16:17:06 -0400 Subject: 'The Scotsman' On Abduction Source: The Scotsman http://news.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=3D698882002 Stig *** Sat 29 Jun 2002 ** Taken in Jonathan Ledgard * I am Aerial Tellurian (not my real name, the one given me by Outlander). I am 45, single, and I reside in the Panhandle of Florida. Since the age of ten, I have been visited by an alien called Outlander from Regulus - which is 67.0 light years away from our solar system." According to believers, Aerial is just one of two million Americans who have been abducted by aliens. Most of them report having been raped or otherwise interfered with aboard orbiting spaceships. Few abductees report these violations to federal law-enforcement agencies; they believe the government is in on the alien actions. Why else, they ask, do unmarked black helicopters flit about America, keeping track of their movements? Aerial, alas, has not been spared the abuse, as she reports in a diary she posts on the internet. Here is her entry for 28 February this year: "This is my last entry for February, a whole month of keeping this online journal. I reread it and determined a pattern of doubt, followed closely by trusting Outlander again. Perhaps his very nearness, and the implant I must have, creates this trust. But I know of no way to stay suspicious unless I could get away from him entirely and that's not possible while I'm pregnant. I need the pre-natal care the aliens are giving me aboard the mothership. My pregnancy will only be three months, instead of the normal nine months of a human pregnancy. That means our hybrid baby will be born some time in mid- May, a wonderful springtime birth!" Lately, Aerial's entries have become more muddled: "Something horrible has happened during the past month. My baby was born aboard the mothership - and taken from me! I was returned home and kept captive for two weeks until I managed to escape. I'm on the run now, and using cybercaf=E9s and public libraries to update this journal. I can only do this because I move on rapidly afterward, fearful for my life and that Outlander will find me." It is 55 years since a UFO crash-landed in the desert scrub outside Roswell, New Mexico, and kick-started the alien abduction movement. Most abductees see the Roswell incident as tangible proof of the presence of aliens among us. But no evidence has been uncovered and the American military categorically denies the accounts of observers, such as Roswell air-base intelligence officer Frank J. Kaufmann, who claim to have seen the crash site. The craft was of unknown origin, Kaufmann's account has it, shaped like a stingray, perhaps 28 feet long and 18 feet wide, pewter coloured, underlaid with hexagonal cells pulsing orange, and with five small passengers, pallid, not quite human, all of them dead. Intriguing, certainly, but hardly conclusive enough to build an entirely new world view on. Fast-forward to 2002, a few hours' drive south of Roswell in a desolate sweep of west Texas. I can just make out the mountains in the south, a moon-yellowed jawbone marking the Mexican border. The firmament above is breathtakingly clear, the constellations like pieces of silver stitched into a billowing cobalt sheet. A satellite (or is it?) grazes the stratosphere. The mysterious Marfa lights, a few miles outside the small ranching town of Marfa, bounce up and down a mile or so away, like incandescent tennis balls. They break into two and three separate lights, sometimes hovering above the desert floor, sometimes racing about wildly. People come to this remote spot from around the world to see this unexplained spookiness. Scientists reckon there has to be a simple explanation for the lights: static electricity, a quirk of geology, headlights of distant cars refracted through the desert thermals. There are plenty of unusual explanations too. In the 19th century, locals believed the lights to be the spirit of Alsate, a local Apache war chief. Then came talk of devils, and cowboy ghosts, and military experiments. Nowadays, most people who come here believe the lights manifest some alien connection. This is fitting. Aliens have long since overtaken ghosts and demons in the Western popular imagination. We are no longer haunted. We are abducted. Back in Marfa I slouch into a local bar. After a couple of hours an offhand question about UFOs elicits a surprising response. The demeanour of the taciturn cowboys I am shooting pool with instantly changes. A couple of them speak of having seen spaceships on their remote spreads (out here, ranches are 20 miles across and 30 miles from town). Two of them think they may have been abducted. It could be a joke at my expense, but if so these boys are fine actors. For where they have been gruff and no-nonsense, they now appear withdrawn and vulnerable. They speak haltingly, embarrassed, self-doubting, and when they mention the word abduction, it as though they are talking of childhood abuse. "This is what I remember," they say, pulling on a beer, "but it ain't true." Whatever the veracity of their particular stories, something is clearly going on. People around the world - a disproportionate number of them in the United States - say they have been abducted. Some of them are seeking out psychiatrists and support groups. An abductee movement is forming which challenges our most basic understanding of the world. But abductees have not brought forth a shred of physical evidence to support their claims. Many are manifestly cranks or mentally ill; their stories are moonshine. But other sincere and perfectly normal folk risk their careers, their marriages, everything that is valuable to them, to assert that they too have been abducted. Why? The unexplained is potent. It doesn't take much - a strange light in the woods, the whispering of air in a still room - to trigger the imagination. There have been sightings of otherworldly beings through-out human history. Some believe Elijah was swept up not by a fiery chariot but by a luminous spaceship. Others state that the ancient monuments were erected under the instruction of alien foremen. In 1758, a Swedish scientist and religious figure, Emanuel Swedenborg, published a "true account" of his travels to Mars. Swedenborg noted the appearance of the aliens who abducted him (Danish) and their mode of living (utopian). But it wasn't until the industrial revolution filled the ether with electrical currents and radio signals that the notion of aliens began to supplant angels and ghosts. In 1898, H.G. Wells laid the ground rules of science fiction with War of the Worlds. There was nothing subtle about his view of aliens: they were monsters. UFOs fully entered the public consciousness after Hiroshima. The aliens doing the abducting were very different from H.G. Wells's insectoid, amoral creatures intent only on mindless destruction. The taxonomy of aliens of the atomic age was more complex: reptilian, amphibian, robotic and spectral, but far more often Nordic - like those who gave the first well-known abductee, George Adamski, a tour of the solar system in 1952 - or so- called "greys" with the hairless aspect of rhino skin, and swollen skulls inset with large, almond- shaped eyes. Ask a child to draw an alien and you are bound to get a grey, or at least a small weedy thing with a bulbous head somewhat resembling Steven Spielberg's ET. Greys started abducting Americans not long after artists developed them - or styrofoam puppets which looked very much like them - for a 1975 made-for- television film called The UFO Incident. Some abductees accept this connection but turn it back on itself. The artists, they say, were merely recovering something that was already in their subconscious: all of us have a faint memory of greys because we were genetically engineered by them. If they were simply drawing on American popular culture, believers point out, wouldn't British abductees find themselves in a Tardis discussing cricket with Dr Who? And how to explain sightings of three-foot aliens with large black eyes, not unlike greys, in America in 1896, or in England in 1901, Australia in 1925, and Spain in 1944? In America, UFOs have become a new-age religion. Affable gurus breezily predict aliens will soon be guiding mankind into "the greater community of intelligent life". Aliens still hector us on our follies; they fret about pollution and point a grey jelly finger at the hole in the ozone layer. Some abductee groups even blend science fiction with religious dogma: spaceships shall obliterate the unclean while a chosen few will be swept up to salvation. Thirty-nine members of the Heaven's Gate cult infamously discarded their vehicles (that is, their bodies) in the belief that their souls would be taken up to a spaceship surfing the backwash of the Hale Bopp comet. Other groups peddle conspiracy theories. They hold democratic governments to be a front; real power rests with a secret world order which does the bidding of aliens under pain of annihilation. Those disposed to such theories cling to anything that supports their case, like this odd aside from Lord Louis Mountbatten, of all people: "The fact that [aliens] can hover and accelerate away from the earth's gravity... shows they are far ahead of us. If they come over in a big way, that may settle the capitalist-communist war. If the human race wishes to survive, it may have to band together." For those abductees who are not UFO fanatics, abduction is an involuntary and, by all accounts, painful experience. Dr John Mack, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, argues abduction is not a matter of belief but a clinical reality which abductees usually try to deny and suppress. "Abductees do not say it is possible," Mack told me, "they say it is true." His investigations are thought-provoking, not least for the Harvard establishment which has investigated and cleared him of the charge of using shoddy scholarship. His first book on abductees, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, remains a standard text on the subject. "I'm not claiming that everyone I work with has been taken into a spacecraft - it could be an astral body; the point is that something powerful has happened to these people. It may or may not have been in this material world. What is certain is their experiences demand a more sophisticated ontology than we have now, one that questions the whole way we think about reality." Mack outlines what most abductees feel happened to them. "They feel themselves being removed from wherever they are. They float through a wall or out of a car, carried up on this beam of light into a craft and there are subjected to a number of now familiar procedures which involve the beings staring at them and probing their body orifices; and a complex process whereby they sense, in the case of men, sperm being removed, in women, eggs being removed; some sort of hybrid offspring is created which they're brought back to see in later abductions." Mack hotly rejects charges that he prompts his subjects to invent abduction stories while under hypnosis. He says he applies strict clinical criteria to his work. Still, for all his undoubted brilliance, Mack's narrow focus can make him sound suspect. "The experiencer," he writes, using the word he prefers for abductees, "may at first call what is happening a dream. But careful questioning will reveal that the experiencer has not fallen asleep at all." Careful questioning or leading questioning? One of the most troubling facts about alien abduction is the number of people who discovered they were taken only after being regressed by hypnotists who accept the reality of alien abduction. Whitley Strieber, the author of Communion, a best- selling account of abduction, falls into this category. But are these abductees imagining spaceships in the way some others imagine sex abuse? Is it really a coincidence that abduction is far more common in countries like Brazil and the USA, where hypnosis is used routinely by psychiatrists? Alvin Lawson, a professor at California State University, has demonstrated the power of suggestion under hypnosis by planting the idea of abduction in his hypnotised subjects. The resulting stories mirrored those of abductees. "The abductee movement is confabulation," says Robert Baker, an expert on hypnosis. "It's making up a good story to satisfy the promptings of the hypnotist." Baker points out that most abductions happen during sleep. He believes abductees are actually suffering identifiable states of sleep disorder. Hypnopompic hallucinations occur just before waking up and hypnogogic hallucinations just after nodding off. Paralysis - a common feature of abductee accounts - is a natural function of sleep, as is the reported feeling of a heavy weight on the chest. Baker also points out that these stories are not new; medieval nuns sometimes reported waking to find a demon or incubus on their chest, having sex with them. Sex is standard fare in abductee accounts. Even Mack's relatively sober case studies read like a series of sexual fantasies: a woman is fondled by a grey with cool, steady hands, a man has great sex with a silvery blonde Nordic alien in a pod. But the pornographic element also helps explain the popularity of the abduction movement on the internet by mixing successfully with two other proven money-spinners: UFOs and therapy. Once inside the abductee subculture, people feed off each other with alarming credulity. This advice appeared recently on one internet chat group: "Yes, Gail, the reptilian aliens do rape. I have been raped by them. If I ever feel they are about to come into or are in my energy field, I put up a protective shield around myself. Unfortunately, there is another type of reptilian we have serious problems with - the reptoids. This group works in conjunction with the human faction who abduct and interrogate. I have not been able to stop this kind of abduction because this group does not follow any Universal Law and can take us and harass us at will." David Hume laid out the most sensible approach for studying a phenomenon like alien abduction. "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle," Hume wrote, "unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish." Which is more likely: that we are abducted and molested by aliens in ever larger numbers, or that the human mind gives birth to aliens as it once gave birth to trolls, demons and fairies? Yet no matter how we try to explain away these 'memories', abductees still fully believe they have been taken up by aliens, perhaps even given birth to a hybrid. Even if the aliens and the abduction are imagined, sceptics say, clinical studies of abductees can help further our understanding of the brain and expand our sense of what it means to be terrestrial. ** =A92002 scotsman.com
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