Roswell, UFOs and the Unusual

The Hill Abduction — 1961

I am going to assume here that the readers have a solid knowledge of the Barney and Betty Hill abduction case and not go over that material again. Many others have provided what they believe to be the corroboration of the case and laid that out in detail in various works including a couple of books. I will look at it from a skeptical position (though some will say a “Debunker” position) and provide the contrary evidence. While I believe that the Hill case can be resolved in terrestrial terms, this does not mean that every case of alien abduction can be resolved in this fashion nor that we can easily explain all those cases in the same way.

First, we learn that the Hills arrived home much later than they believed they should have. They had calculated the time it would be necessary for them to get home and found that time was missing. This is probably a result of their repeated stops to observe what they believed to be a UFO and driving at less than the posted speed as they watched the UFO and as they discussed the sighting.

I freely admit that this is an assumption on my part and is of little real importance in the case. It does explain the period of missing time in mundane terms, however. It gives us a sense of what might have happened that night.

More important to the case, and something that is viewed as a corroboration of the tale, is the star map that Betty Hill was shown by the leader of the alien group. This piece of circumstantial evidence has impressed many people. It is a piece of evidence that was borne of the Betty Hill abduction and which points to a home world of at least some of the alien creatures who many believe are abducting people. If it is accurate, then it provides some solid evidence about the abduction. Let's look at this evidence and see if it is as persuasive as it seems.

Betty, during one of the hypnotic regression sessions with Dr. Simon, claimed she had seen a star map while on board the alien craft. According to John Fuller, author of The Interrupted Journey, Betty kept precise notes of her dreams, writing them down while the details were fresh in her mind. It was during one of the dreams that she remembered the star map and wrote down what she remembered. These notes, according to Fuller, are very similar to the hypnotically regressed testimony recovered by Dr. Simon.

According to the notes, as published by Fuller and later by Jerry [Jerome] Clark in volume one of his The UFO Encyclopedia, Betty"…asked where he [the leader of the alien crew] was from, and he asked if I knew anything about the universe. I said no, but I would like to learn. He went over to the wall and pulled down a map, strange to me. Now I would believe this to be a sky map. It was a map of the heavens, with numerous sized stars and planets, some large, some only pinpoints. Between many of these, lines were drawn, some broken lines, some light solid lines, some heavy black lines. They were not straight, but curved. Some went from one planet to another, to another, in a series of lines. Others had no lines, and he said the lines were expeditions. He asked me where the earth was on this map, and I admitted that I had no idea. He became slightly sarcastic and said that if I did not know where the earth was, it was impossible to show me where he was from; he snapped the map back into place."

Simon had suggested that Betty draw the star map when she first mentioned it to him but she was reluctant to do so, afraid that her poor artistic skills would not allow a proper duplicate. Simon then suggested that she should draw the map when she felt ready to do so. Not long after the session, she produced a map with twelve points on it showing the connections among the stars. The solid lines were for trade routes and the broken, or dotted lines, were expeditionary routes. Fuller published the map in The Interrupted Journey.

In April 1965, The New York Timesprinted a map of the constellation Pegasus because Russian astronomers had found what they believed to be an artificial radio source near it. Betty Hill, seeing the map, was surprised by how closely it resembled the star map she had seen. She even applied the star names from the Times map to her sketch suggesting that the alien creatures home star was either Homan or Baham. This map, of course, did not show our sun on it.

Marjorie Fish, a third grade teacher and amateur astronomer from Ohio and later a research assistant at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, became intrigued with the Hill star map (I mention these things only to provide a little background for Fish, not to suggest that her work was not an impressive bit of scientific study). Fish believed that she could figure out the map and learn which star was the home to the aliens.

There were few clues for her other than what Betty Hill told her during her interviews with Hill. She assumed one of the stars that was connected to the others with lines belonged to our sun. She assumed that the map represented our section of the galaxy, that they would be interested in stars of the same types as our sun, the travel patterns should make some sense and the travel patterns would avoid the largest stars and those that are not on the main sequence (that is, stars that are basically stable for long periods of time and like our sun).

Fish built a number of three dimensional representations of the our section of the galaxy and then viewed them from different angles, searching for the Betty Hill pattern. Eventually she found one with the stars, Zeti 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli as the base (which, apropos of nothing at all, is the system where those on the Nostromo found the creature in Alien). They are separated by "light weeks" rather than light years, but are far enough apart that planetary orbits would be stable and life could evolve on those planets. There are suggestions that the triple star system centered around Alpha Centauri could have planets orbiting these stars because of the distances among them.

But others were also searching for the pattern. Charles W. Atterberg found a pattern that had Epsilon Eridani and Epsilon Indi as the base stars. It too fits with the Betty Hill map, and two of the stars on it Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani were targets by Project Ozma, one of the first of the SETI searches. In other words, astronomers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence believed that two of the stars in the Atterberg interpretation were likely candidates for planetary systems and intelligent life. Tau Ceti was also one of the candidates on the Fish map.

Suddenly we have three published interpretations of the Betty Hill's star map, all of which made sense to many. But Marjorie Fish disagreed. Of the Atterberg interpretation, she noted that he had included some red dwarfs as stars visited by the aliens. She said that she had ruled out red dwarfs because there are so many of them and if she used red dwarfs in a logical construction, then all the lines were used before she reached Earth. She had assumed that the sun would be one of the stars connected to the others on the map although the "leader" of the alien crew had provided no indication that this was true.

She also assumed that if they, the aliens, were interested in red dwarfs, that is, that they visited some, then there should have been lines connecting other red dwarfs but there were not. Her assumption was that one red dwarf would be as interesting to a space faring race as the next. But it could be that some red dwarfs were more interesting because of things we cannot see. Because we can detect no difference between one red dwarf and another doesn't mean that there aren't differences.

She makes other, similar assumptions, in her rejection of Atterberg's model. She notes that a number of relatively close double stars such as 61 Cygni, Struve 2398, Groombridge 34 and Kruger 60 are part of Atterberg's pattern but that there is no line to Alpha Centauri. Once again, she assumes that the alien race would be visiting Alpha Centauri if there were visiting the other double star systems and once again we can point out that there might be something of great interest in the systems visited but not in the one that is by-passed. It should also be noted that according to some astronomy texts, Alpha Centauri is a triple star system and that might be the reason for exclusion by the aliens. It is unlikely that a triple star would have any planetary systems but certainly not impossible. All this is, of course, guess work.

National Geographic, not all that long ago published an article on the search for life on other worlds. I was struck by a paragraph in the magazine that suggested that the search for extra solar planets was now targeting M class dwarf stars, which, of course, include those known as red dwarfs. It mentioned that seven of the ten closet stars to Earth were dwarfs.

To be fair to Fish, she made her assumptions thirty or forty years ago but they are now invalid. The article in National Geographicsuggested that these M Class stars have long periods of stability, longer than those postulated for stars like our sun. While the dwarf stars are smaller, dimmer and cooler than the sun, they do have zones of in which the conditions ideal for life as we know it exist and given the discovery of planets around some of these stars, including planets known as “Super— Earths,” it is possible that life, including intelligent life, would be found on those planets.

There was also a recent announcement of a Super Earth that has oceans. This planet, thought to be about two and a half times the size of Earth, with a mean temperature higher than that on Earth, suggests that some dwarf stars might hold a great deal of interest for any space faring race. And while all stars that have planets where life is possible might not have life, some of them might and that would certainly make them interesting to space travelers.

And there are new problems with the Fish model. Although she used the latest star catalogs available in the construction of her models, some of the distances to the stars in her interpretation of the star map were in error. Astronomers have recalculated the distances to these stars and put them outside the limitations imposed by Fish. In other words, those stars would have been excluded had the distances been accurate when Fish created her three dimensional models.

These two facts seem to suggest that the Fish interpretation is in error, and that we can no longer say, with any degree of certainty, that some of the alien abductors come from Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli. And this overlooks the other interpretations that are equally as valid as the one created by Fish.

What is interesting, is that the UFO community has embraced the Fish interpretation of the Hill star map and rejected the others, including the one found by Betty Hill herself. The acceptance of the Zeti Reticuli interpretation is based on an earth-bound logic that pre-supposes an understand of the workings of an alien mind. It pre-supposes that we can apply our logic to a star map without having the necessary information to make that logic valid.

There is another point to be made here. This star map was "discovered" during one of the hypnotic regression sessions, at least according to some of those interested in it. It came from Betty Hill's memory during one of those sessions but was based, according to Hill herself, on a dream sequence. Although Frank Salisbury of the University of Utah did say that the fact the story and map came to light under hypnosis and that is good evidence that it actually took place, we know that such claims are in error. As we have seen repeatedly in other UFO investigations, hypnosis is a poor investigative tool that is more likely to create false memories than actually access real ones. The hypnotically retrieved memories are less reliable than those accessed in other ways.

Of course, according to Fuller, Betty Hill had "dreamed" the star map long before she had said anything to Simon under hypnosis. To some that has suggested a conscious memory of the event prior to the hypnosis, but that isn't actually the case. The memories returned to her in dreams and she carefully logged them. There is no scientific evidence to suggest that "memories" that surface in dreams, especially those not remembered in a conscious or waking state, are any more reliable than those retrieved with hypnosis.

So where are we on this? One prominent UFO researcher has suggested that we know some of the "grays" come from the Zeti Reticuli system. But we don't know that. What we have is a bit of evidence, retrieved under hypnosis, that has, at least three good interpretations for it. There is no logical reason to accept one interpretation over the other. All fit the pattern created by Betty Hill.

In fact, over the years, these other interpretations have slipped from the UFO literature. Clark, in his UFO encyclopedia, made no mention of either Betty Hill's interpretation or that by Atterberg. Instead, he focused solely on the Fish model.

What we really know is that Betty Hill's star map was created during her dreams and reinforced by hypnotic regression. No evidence has been presented to suggest that the map is valid. It is, in essence, twelve dots connected by various lines. It is not a very good clue as to the home world of the aliens, it is not solid evidence that the event took place, and it has mislead millions who believe that here is evidence of alien visitation and alien abduction.

We can argue the statistical significance of the Fish interpretation of the Hill model, we can argue that Fish's criterion for selection of the stars in the map is solid, and we can argue that hypnotically regressed testimony is important and valuable, but when all is said and done we are once again left with no solid evidence. What we have is an interesting aberration in the abduction phenomenon which does nothing to advance our understanding but certainly clouds the issue with seeming corroborative data. In the end we are left where we began, with nothing in the way of hard evidence. Instead we are left with the nightmares of a kind, sincere woman who believed she was abducted by aliens but the idea that some of the aliens come from Zeta 1 or Zeta 2 Reticuli is no longer corroboration of the tale.

There are other points that are often lost on those studying the Hill case. It has been suggested that neither Barney nor Betty Hill watched the various science fiction programs that were broadcast in the early 1960s. This becomes important because Dr. Simon had Barney draw a representation of the alien creature he saw during the abduction. To some it looked like the alien from The Bellaro Shield, an episode of The Outer Limits.

But asked about this later, Betty Hill said that she had never heard of the show and that she and Barney never watched anything like that on television. I believe that the statement might refer only to The Outer Limits. There is evidence that they did watch The Twilight Zone, or more precisely, were aware of the program and the nature of its stories.

On page 144 of The Interrupted Journey, Betty Hill is describing the events and the craft while under hypnotic regression. She said, “…It was long, and there weren’t any wings. And it was going sideways. You know, like a cigar. It was going from the left to the right. It was just like holding up a cigar in front of the moon, with all these lights flashing around it. So then Barney looked at it, and I too the binoculars and looked again and gave them back to him. And then I went over and put Delsey in the car and got in the car myself and shut the door. And then barney came over and got in the car, and he said, ‘They’;ve seen us, and they’re coming this way.’ And I laughed and asked if he had watched Twilight Zone recently on TV. And he didn’t say anything.”

Now to be fair, Simon asked her, “Had there been anything like that on Twilight Zone.”

Betty responded, saying, “I don’t know. I never see Twilight Zone. But I had heard people talk about this program and I was always under the impression that it was a way-out type thing.”

The problem is that The Twilight Zonedid have a story about alien abduction on it, first broadcast on April 13, 1962. The story is of a man, Andy Devine, who claimed to his friends, family, and all who would listen that he was a genus who has been at the top of various fields of research. Aliens, believing all that he has said, abducted him and wouldn’t listen when he attempted to tell the truth. When he played his harmonica, the aliens reacted in pain, Frisby (Devine’s character in the show) punched one of them and his plastic, human mask fell away.

Which means, of course there was a fictional precedence for a story of alien abduction that was widely broadcast. In fact, as we look at the science fiction movies from the 1950s, we find that as a reoccurring theme. Big eyed aliens grabbing people who do not remember what happened to them, who have scars on their bodies that they did not know how they were acquired, and who have periods of missing time.

None of this means that the inspiration for the Hill tale came either from those 1950s science fiction films or the alien descriptions came from either The Outer Limitsor The Twilight Zone. It is merely to suggest that the Hill abduction case did not spring from a vacuum as has been suggested by some researchers.

There is one other disturbing aspect to this case. On page 298 of Fuller’s book, Betty Hill describes the aliens she saw. She reported, “I note their [the aliens] physical appearance. Most of the men are my height, although I can’t remember the height of the heels on my shoes. None is as tall as Barney, so I would judge them to be 5' to 5'4". Their chests are larger than ours; their noses were larger (longer) than average size although I have seen people with noses like theirs — like Jimmy Durante’s. [emphasis added]”

The look of the alien creatures, then, has evolved over the years. They turn from big-nosed aliens into creatures that have nostrils, but no noses. Is this a significant variation? Has it been influence by other reports and by science fiction? I don’t know. I just know that originally they had big noses and now they don’t.

Some might believe this is of no real importance and they could be correct. It fits in with another aspect of the case which might be important, though I suspect it is not. In his book, Fuller quotes the letter that Betty Hill sent to Donald Keyhoe on September 26, 1961.

According to Fuller’s version, Betty wrote, “At this time we are searching for any clue that might be helpful to my husband, in recalling whatever it was he saw that caused him to panic. His mind has completely blacked out at this point. Every attempt to recall leaves him very frightened. This flying object was at least as large as a four — motor plane, its flight noiseless and the lighting of the interior did not reflect on the ground…”

However, in the letter, the original in the files at CUFOS, Betty actually wrote, “At this time we are searching for any clue that might be helpful to my husband, in recalling whatever it was he saw that caused him to panic. His mind has completely blacked out at this point. Every attempt to recall leaves him very frightened. We are considering the possibility of a compentent[sic] psychiatrist who uses hypnotism[emphasis added].

“This flying object was at least as large as a four — motor plane, its flight noiseless and the lighting of the interior did not reflect on the ground…”

The real point here is that it was Betty Hill who introduced the idea of hypnosis long before any UFO researcher had thought of it. Mark Rodeghier, the scientific director of CUFOS, thought that Betty’s background as a social worker might have put the idea of hypnosis to recover memories into her thinking.

In the final analysis here, all we really learn is that the one piece of important corroborative evidence, that is the star map, isn’t as important was we thought. There are other interpretations for what the points mean, what stars they represent, and what the lines among the stars signify. Marjorie Fish’s work, while impressive, has been superceded by new star catalogs and new evidence about the importance of dwarf stars.

We can no longer say with the certainty that some have used, that some of the alien creatures come from the Zeti Reticuli star systems. Fish’s work has been trumped, not by the skeptics and debunkers, but by astronomers and physicists who have reworked the distances, who had found, literally, hundreds of planets outside the solar system, and who have shown that some dwarf stars could be of vast importance to a star trotting race.

We have also seen the evolution of the aliens described by Barney and Betty Hill and found the possible source of inspiration for them. We have learned that the case did not spring into existence without cultural elements in it. We have found the possible source material.

In the end, we are left where we began, with a tale told by a couple who sincerely believed that they had been abducted by alien creatures. We are left with a story that makes a kind of logical sense because the aliens acted as we would expect a scientific expedition to act or as we would act if the circumstances were reversed. We are left with one set of descriptions of the aliens, only to see it evolve into something that matches, more closely the alien abductors of today than it did forty years ago.

The problem is that there is no independent or forensic evidence to take us to the extraterrestrial. There is no evidence that alien creatures abducted the Hills, though there is no evidence that they invented the tale either in some deluded attempt for attention or because some bizarre psychological problems.

While I believe there is a terrestrial explanation for what happened to the Hills, there is always the possibility that the real answer lies in the stars. That is why we continue to search, to learn the truth, even if that search sometimes takes us where we do not wish to go.

At some point we might find the answers to our questions, but I suspect the answers are not going to come from this case. It is interesting, both Barney and Betty Hill were believable, but they had no independent corroboration for their experience. Until we can move abduction research from the case study to the next level, we will always have these questions. If nothing else, the Hill case gives us a thrilling ride.

The Schirmer Abduction — 1967

It was in the 1960s that the Air Force decided to hire a university to make an impartial study of UFOs to determine if there was a reason for the Air Force to continue to investigate them. The so-called Condon Committee, at the University of Colorado, was formed and began their work in the 1967. I won’t bother here with the details about why I think this was a set up and neither the Air Force nor Condon planned to make a true objective analysis. All this is important because, on December 3, 1967, during the investigative phase of the research project, a police officer in the tiny community of Ashland, Nebraska, reported that he had seen a UFO close to the ground, hovering no more than six or eight feet above the highway. When he turned on his bright lights for a better look, the saucer-shaped object brightened, tilted upward, and then with a siren-like noise, lifted and vanished.

Sergeant Herb Schirmer (seen here) opened his car door to watch as the craft rose, spouting a flame-colored material from under it. He would later say that he saw a row of seven portholes, oval shaped and about two feet across. He said he saw a catwalk around the object, below the portholes and that the surface of the object was polished aluminum that glowed brightly in reflected light.

The first part of the Condon Committee investigation of the sighting took place on December 11 and 12, 1967, and that date becomes important a little later. In the summary of the this section of the report, the Condon Committee investigator wrote, “Mr. Schirmer felt perhapshe had not been conscious during a period of approximately 20 minutes[emphasis added] while he was observing the UFO. He had a feeling of paralysis at the time, and felt funny, weak, sick, and nervous when he returned to the police station.”

In another part of the investigation that would become important later, the Ashland police chief Bill Wlaschin, said that he checked the area the next morning but found nothing of great importance there. He did find a single piece of metallic-like material that he did not recognize. It looked to be a chip of aluminum paint but I found no analysis attached to that report or to the various other reports I have. In the published version of the Condon Committee, called the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects(Bantam, 1969), the material was described as iron and silicon and since there was no real connection between the sighting and the material, no further analysis was done.

They searched the site where Schirmer, after hypnosis, would say the UFO had actually landed. They tested for radioactivity but found nothing.

A polygraph for Schirmer was arranged using an experienced official agency that Chief Wlaschin refused to identify. According to the chief, the test showed no indications that Schirmer was deceptive. In other words, he passed.

John Ahrens, of the Condon Committee returned to Ashland about a week later, on December 19, to give a psychological test to Schmirer. Schmirer agreed to take the tests.

On February 13, 1968, after the time discrepancy between Schmirer’s log and the time he returned from the UFO sighting became a concern, another interview was held. Remember, though, Schmirer said there was a short period in which he believed he had been unconscious, so the first real suggestion of missing time is probably attributable to Schmirer himself.

Some suggest that one of the scientists with the Condon Committee, probably Dr. Leo Sprinkle, suggested the missing time might be significant. However it happened, or who noticed it is not all that important, unless it was Schmirer who called attention to it first. Then we have him planting the seeds that would lead to his claimed abduction.

After further investigation, which included hypnotic regression, Sprinkle, worried about a perceived bias on his part, wrote:

The writer [Sprinkle] believes that there is sufficient empirical evidence to support the views that the following phenomena exist: hypnotic processes or varying levels of awareness; extra sensory perception and psychokenetic (sic) processes (ESP or psi processes); and spacecraft (“flying saucers”) from extra terrestrial sources which are controlled by intelligent beings who seem to be conducting an intensive survey of the earth.

Because these views are different from those of many persons in contemporary society, the writer [Sprinkle] offers his impressions with the recognition that other observers may have obtained different, and even conflicting, impressions of the interview with Sgt. Schmirer.

Under the hypnotic regression, first with Sprinkle, and later regressions coordinated by Warren Smith (seen here), an Iowa writer whose work dealt with the paranormal, the unusual and the extraterrestrial, Schirmer told a story that was fairly consistent, though he added detail under the persuasion of hypnosis and the close questioning of the investigators. And there were his log entries that backed up, to a degree, the story he told.

In was early in the morning of December 3, that Schirmer began to suspect something was wrong. He told the original investigators that a bull in a corral at the edge of town was acting strangely and he was afraid that it might break out. At 2:30 a.m., according to what he wrote in his log, he was near the intersection of Highway 63 and Highway 6, when he saw an object hovering over the road. He didn’t believe, at that time, that it landed and only gave a description of it in the air. It eventually climbed out and disappeared. Schirmer then drove back to the police station to report in.

That was really all he had to say about the sighting. Later he would tell investigators that the craft hadn’t been hovering above the highway but was sitting in a field near it. Sprinkle wrote, “He [Schmirer] stated that a bright light had shone from the object upon the car and that he saw a ‘white blurred object’ which came toward the car. He said he felt he was in communication with someone in the object, and that he also felt the communication was in effect during the interview [meaning that while Sprinkle had him in a hypnotic state, Schmirer thought he was mentally in contact with the aliens].”

Schmirer told Sprinkle that he, Schmirer thought it would be wrong to say anything else about the sighting until they were in the proper place at the proper time. Schmirer resisted the attempts by Sprinkle to learn the proper time and place, so Sprinkle ended the session.

They did learn that a bright light came from the object, a white, blurred object approached the car and then seemed to fade, the craft them moved upward, a weird sound came from it and a bright red-orange glow came from under it. The UFO then shot straight up and out of sight.

After the session ended, Schmirer said that he thought the “white, blurred object” was something alive. He mentioned that he believed he had been in direct mental communication with someone on the craft. Schmirer believed that the craft used electrical or magnetic force which controlled gravity and allowed them to travel through space and that they were taking electricity from some nearby power lines. He said that the beings on the ship were based on Venus or Saturn but were from another galaxy and that they were friendly. They were here to keep the people of Earth from destroying the planet.

Schmirer agreed to take a number of psychological tests. Let’s just say that the results tended toward the negative. His I.Q., for example, was on the low side for conceptual thinking, but on the high side for dealing with concrete intellectual tasks such as puzzle solving.

The problem for the scientists at the Condon Committee were that, “His [Schmirer’s] performance on the word association test causes one to doubt his honesty in the UFO sighting, or at least seems to indicate that he himself disbelieves the credibility of the sighting.”

But this doesn’t really tell us much. It could be that Schmirer was lying, but it could also be that he found the experience to be unbelievable. Given what he would later say, that he found the experience unbelievable isn’t much of a stretch.

The scientists also noted that “He is also preoccupied with seeing UFO objects.” But they also noted that he was given the tests after reporting a UFO and that might account for his obsession at the time.

So now we move into a new arena. Warren Smith, a sometimes writer living in Clinton, Iowa, wrote in Gods, Demons and UFOs, that Schmirer contacted him. Schmirer, dissatisfied with the results of the Condon Committee investigation, wanted to push for answers.

Smith and paranormal expert and writer Brad Steiger (seen here) met with Smith on several occasions. Under hypnosis conducted by Loring G. Williams, Schmirer added a great deal of detail. He said that the object was metallic and shaped like a football. It had flashing lights underneath it. He thought he heard a whooshing sound. Finally he saw legs coming from the bottom and it settled to the ground.

He originally hinted to the Condon Committee members that he had been prevented from using his pistol or his radio. Now he clarified that, telling Smith, Steiger and Williams that there was something in his mind that prevented him from acting.

Creatures, aliens, beings, something came from the craft and one of them stood in front of his car holding something. A greenish gas came out surrounding the car. Then the creature in front of the car pulled something out of a holster and there was a bright flash. Schmirer said that he was now paralyzed and passed out.

Schmirer was then walked to the craft. Under it, a hatch opened and a ladder came out. Schmirer noticed that the interior of the craft and the ladder were cold. He spent about 15 minutes on the craft and was “briefed” by the leader.

The creatures were about four and a half to five feet tall, wore close fitting uniforms with both boots and gloves. Their suits came up around their heads much like the hood on a skin diver’s outfit. On the left side was a small headphone with a small antenna sticking up from it. There was a winged serpent on the chest.

He said that the skin was a grey-white, that the heads were thin and longer than a human head, the mouth was a slit and the eyes had an Asian slant but did not blink.

The leader told him many things. He said they have bases in the United States and off the coast of Florida. They have a base in the polar region and there are other bases off the coast of Argentina. Radar can knock their ships out of the air, but the mother ship destroys them before they can crash.

After the briefing, Schmirer was taken back to the hatch. The two crewmen who remained outside climbed back in. Schmirer walked back to his police car. He returned to Ashland and arrived at the police station about three. In his log he wrote, “Saw a flying saucer at the junction of highways 6 and 63. Believe it or not.”

Warren Smith reported that he had found the landing site, an unplowed sloping field. Smith claimed to have seen landing gear markings and patches of grass that had been swirled and twisted. He wrote, “Some very impressive evidence has been embedded in an unplowed, sloping field just above the highway. Three-pointed tripod marks were sunk deep into the earth. Patches of grass in the field are swirled into an unusual pattern, as if the vegetation was whirled by some powerful centrifugal force. The patches of grass are darker in color; it grows higher and faster than surrounding vegetation.”

He was there weeks after the investigators for the Condon Committee who reported nothing of the sort. Smith, who suggested that he was something of a photographer failed to take pictures of the evidence, or to even make notes and illustrations of it or later review.

You might say, at this point, that these are the facts and they are not in dispute… except that some of this isn’t factual and there are areas for dispute. Let’s take a look at this with a dispassionate eye.

We know that Schmirer reported seeing a flying saucer and that in his initial report it was in the air. We know that he logged the sighting and we have a record of that log. We know that there is a discrepancy between the times in his log and his return to the police station and that discrepancy is only about twenty minutes. Not very much time for him to be captured, taken into the craft and given both the tour and briefing that he later, under hypnosis, reported.

Here are a couple of things we don’t know. We don’t know who originally discovered the discrepancy in the times. Some suggest that it was one of the police officers, or possibly Schmirer himself that noticed the timing problems. Others suggest that it was Sprinkle.

I don’t know who did, but I do know, according to the notes made about the interviews with the Condon Committee members held in February, that there was a morning that was an “orientation session — Leo Sprinkle probed the witness and laid certain groundwork for the afternoon session.” This was after the initial investigation completed in December.

What I don’t know is exactly what was talked about during that morning session. I had watched Dr. James Harder, in his preliminaries before hypnotic regression in another abduction case discuss details of other UFO sightings with the witness. Harder was looking for validation of the Barney and Betty Hill abduction and it is clear from his questioning of the witnesses under hypnosis and his discussions with them before and between sessions what he wanted.

I have been unable to learn the contents of the morning session held with Schmirer, but I would suspect a similar discussion. Sprinkle noted that “Sgt. Schmirer seemed to be faced with conflicting wishes: th desire to be seen as a competent observer and courageous policeman versus the desire to be considered ‘his own man’ rather than a puppet which could be controlled through suggestion and hypnosis.”

This might be important because Schmirer, during that first hypnotic regression, refused to provide much information. Instead they used yes and no questions to get more information and I have a copy of those questions.

They hint at something more substantial, but offered little to suggest that he had entered the craft. Instead, he seemed to believe that he had been in “communication” telepathically with one of the aliens.

Now, in an aspect of the case that hasn’t been discussed much, but one that I find quite disturbing, Sprinkle wrote about a break in the questioning, “Sgt. Schmirer described some of his reactions to the sighting: he said that he drank two cups of hot, steaming coffee ‘like it was water,’ he claimed that he often experienced a ‘ringing,’ ‘numbness,’ ‘buzzing’ in his ears before going to sleep (around 1:30 a.m. or 2:00 a.m.): he believed he had experienced precognitive dreams… he said he felt concern and ‘hurt’ since the UFO sighting; he described disturbances in his sleep, including incidents in which he awoke and found that he was ‘choking’ his wife and ‘handcuffing his wife’s ankle and wrist; he said that his wife sometimes woke up during the night and placed his gun elsewhere so that it was not in his boots beside his bed where he had been keeping it.”

Although Sprinkle had suggested that Schmirer was of “average or above average intelligence… He presented himself as a conscientious policeman who has a sixth sense or intuition about crime detection; he also seemed to gain satisfaction from the occasional need for violence in his work, although he spoke favorably about the use of MACE.”

As noted earlier, Sprinkle mentioned his personal belief in a number of paranormal phenomena, which suggested he would be less likely to question Schmirer closely about portions of his report, the above seems to mitigate all that. This assessment, which is not nearly as bold as that of other scientists involved in the case, is, nonetheless quite troubling. It suggests a young man who has a number of possible psychological problems which could manifest themselves in the UFO report. Couple that to the Condon Report suggestion that “His performance on the word association test causes one to doubt his honesty in the UFO sighting, or at least seems to indicate that he himself disbelieves the credibility of the sighting,” and the evidence for a UFO landing is not quite as persuasive.

On this one issue, which, frankly, can be reduced to whichever set of scientists you want to believe, the Schmirer case fails. Sprinkle reported on psychological troubles but not in the same, bold language used by others.

We can say, then, that the only real investigation was that reported by Warren Smith. Smith, contacted by Schmirer, arranged more hypnosis and the details of the abduction came out. The problem here is that we know that Schmirer had been exposed to the other abduction cases being reported. He had been lead there by Sprinkle and the Condon Committee.

But that isn’t the real problem. Warren Smith, who is quoted in some of the UFO books about abduction simply isn’t reliable. He made things up to pad a story. This is no speculation but fact. He told me this himself. He told the same thing to other researchers and writers, so everything that we have, attributed to him, must be carefully reviewed.

Is there evidence for Smith’s invention of details on this case? Certainly. Remember the landing traces he found that escaped the attention of others who searched the area first. He never offered any evidence, and if he had photographed the area, we might have then been able to show that the Condon Committee had been a little loose with the data.

Smith, in fact, goes after the Condon Committee turning each little difference into a mistake by the committee and then into something more than it was. Smith wrote, for example, “He [Schmirer] was identified as a Marine veteran instead of a Navy man.”

But in their final report, the committee members wrote, “The trooper said that he had served with the U.S. Marines.” It’s not really the same thing when you remember that the Navy supplies corpsmen to the Marines. So, he could have been in the Navy and served with the Marines. Not really much of a problem in the greater scheme of things.

Smith placed his own liberal interpretation on the transcript. He reported, “Did you attempt to draw your gun?” Schmirer, according to Smith answered, “I am prevented.”

But the technique used by Sprinkle was a little more subtle. The question was phrased, “Did I take the gun out?” Schmirer indicated a “No.” He was then asked, “Was I prevented from taking the gun out?” and Schmirer said, “Yes.”

All this really means is that Smith was at odds with the Condon Committee. He offered evidence that the committee might have had information that was not released to the public. When Schmirer complained about a rash, or welt on his neck that appeared shortly after his sighting, and which faded in a couple of days, Smith thought something more about that. He wrote that Schmirer said, “One of those guys with the Condon Committee later told me that a welt at that spot is a sign of people who had a memory loss after they meet up with a UFO. It means that something more than a regular sighting occurred.”

According to Smith, “Another member of Condon’s staff informed Schmirer that a contactee was being held at an undesignated government facility. ‘He said this was a Federal Hospital or something like that.’” This is stunning information. It implies that not only were committee members hiding information about UFOs, they had a great deal of inside knowledge. And they knew that UFO witnesses were being illegally held by the government. Yet, in all the time since the committee ended its work, and with all the controversy around its work, including staff members who resigned because of the bias of the committee, these allegations have never resurfaced. And, they have never been corroborated.

Note here that Smith assigns the information to Schmirer and reports it in quotes. But he provides no information to back it up, and provides nothing that would make it possible for us to check the veracity of the information.

There was another man in the room during this session and that was Brad Steiger. He told me, “I was present for the one and only time that Williams regressed Herb. Warren really was unfamiliar with the process and pretty much let Schmirer talk. I really can’t recall that Warren asked any particularly leading questions during the session, which was pretty straightforward.”

So far so good. But then Steiger told me, “I think it is fair to suggest that Smith may have elaborated considerably when he wrote the article for SAGA… It is also fair to suggest that Herb’s interview ‘grew’ and additional details came to both his and Warren’s fertile minds. I guess I never felt terribly convinced by the Schmirer case.”

In the end we are left with two somewhat divergent accounts, one of which is rich in detail. But again, Smith gives us nothing solid. We must rely on Smith’s reputation for that, and Smith fails here.

When MJ-12 first broke, Smith called me with an amazing revelation. Back in the early 1950s, as he traveled around installing the latest printing equipment in newspapers, he made friends with a man from Texas. The man’s wife was on a dude ranch in the southern part of the state and she wrote about a UFO crash that had taken place. She mentioned names, locations, and it is clear that she, through Smith, was describing the Del Rio UFO crash as reported in one of the MJ-12 papers. Smith knew the man, and said the letters existed. If true, then documentation that was created in the early 1950s, that had a provenance, would corroborate some of the MJ-12 information.

But Smith was never able to produce the documents and letters and he soon lost interest. Later, he would suggest that he had the diaries of Ted Bundy… or rather, he wanted help to create them because they would sell for big money. This was a plan that he never put into action.

If there were two ways to do something, an easier, legal and ethical way, and a more difficult con, Smith would opt for the con every time. Ease of a task had nothing to do with his thought process. He wanted to score with the con and part of that was to invent information for his work.

He excused it, sometimes, by suggesting that he needed an item or two to flesh out a story. He told me that while working on a magazine article about Bigfoot, he needed another eyewitness account, so he invented two college girls in Missouri who had seen something strange. It was a minor part of the article, but the point is, he invented the tale.

Finally there is the drawing that Schmirer made of what the aliens (top illustration) looked like. Here is a point where the contamination might be seen. The alien leader, with the diver’s hood and the single earphone resembles the aliens in Mars Needs Women(bottom illustration), which, coincidentally, had played in theaters only a few months before the sighting and regression. It is an image that has not been repeated in the UFO literature with any regularity.

It does suggest, however, that some of the details that appear in the UFO literate have their foundations in science fiction, both the movies and the magazines. So, when UFO researchers tell us that there is no influence by science fiction, they are mistaken.

Where does all this leave us? With a UFO sighting that is uncorroborated, details of an abduction that are out of science fiction movies, and rumors about abductees who are in federal mental hospitals and a committee of scientists who sold out, but let some of the hidden information out anyway.

Most important, however, is that this case is now forty years old and the best we can say is that Schmirer might have seen a UFO. Everything else is the product of contamination, a desire to validate the Hill abduction and invention by a writer who had the reputation for creating details to flesh out a story.

Given what we have learned in the last forty years, it is more likely that this abduction came from a disturbed young man who was aided by a writer who needed a story. He might have originally seen something, but the other details, added long after the fact, are more likely confabulation than alien intervention. This is a case that should be footnoted in the abduction research and then ignored. It teaches us nothing.

The Roach Abduction — 1973

Typical of the abduction reports as they have become known was that of Pat Roach, a divorcee living with her children in a small Utah town in the fall of 1973. Early on the morning of October 17, she called the Lehi, Utah Police to report a prowler, either in the house, or just outside it. By the time the police arrived, the prowler was long gone, and a search of the neighborhood failed to find anyone who might have been prowling the area. Police noted the report in their log, noted the negative results, and thought nothing more about it because there was, quite frankly, nothing more for them to do.

Two years later Roach wrote a letter to one of the old men’s magazines, Sagaexplaining that she now believed that alien creatures had invaded her home. She believed that she, along with three of her six children had been taken from the house, had been aboard an alien spaceship, and then returned to the house. She said that she had awakened to chaos as the children cried and the cat howled. She wanted to know exactly what had happened to her and thought that the reporters of Sagaand their companion magazine, UFO Reportmight be able to answer a few of her questions.

In this time frame, about thirty-five years ago, few people had reported such interaction with the alien creatures. Contactees, men such as George Adamski and George Van Tassel, claimed they had flown to various planets inside the Solar System on alien ships at the invitation of the flight crews, had seen the wonders of science on these other worlds, but always returned without the proof needed to convince most that the experiences were real. Few people outside a small circle of friends believed the tales.

Then, in 1961, Barney and Betty Hill, a couple from New Hampshire suggested they had seen a UFO that paced their car for miles in the White Mountains, one dark night. Eventually, they arrived home but were hours later than expected, and under hypnosis, recalled the terrifying events of an alien abduction. Betty Hill remembered a modified gynecological exam, remembered small, humanoid creatures who seemed surprised by Barney’s false teeth, and remembered conversations with the ship’s captain. Returned to their car after the examination on the alien ship, they had been ordered to forget all that had happened, and remembered nothing consciously until Betty began having vivid dreams about some sort of UFO experience several days later.

But, one tale of alien abduction, told by a single couple, did not prove much of anything. There were those inside the UFO community who believed the tale was invented by Betty Hill, confabulated really, whose nightmares about the UFO sighting in the weeks to follow were the result of an overactive imagination rather than an actual experience. The story was too wild to be true.

But then, other, similar stories began to emerge. An Ashland, Nebraska, police officer Herbert Schirmer reported that he had seen a UFO while on patrol late one night in December, 1967. His sighting was investigated by the University of Colorado UFO study, sponsored by the Air Force, and chaired by Dr. Edward U. Condon. Scientists with what became known as the Condon Committee noted a discrepancy in the times written in Schirmer’s log book, and the times as outlined by him for the investigators. There were, according to the scientists, specifically Dr. Leo Sprinkle, twenty minutes missing. Sprinkle wanted to use hypnotic regression to learn if anything related to the UFO sighting had happened.

Under the prodding of the scientists including Sprinkle, Schirmer described a brief encounter with the alien creatures. He suggested that his patrol car had been “pulled” to the side of the road and then up a hill to where, consciously, he remembered seeing an alien ship. Now, under hypnosis, he claimed that his car was stopped by the alien creatures and that one had reached inside, touching him on the neck. As the creature stepped back, out of the way, Schirmer “came right up out of the car [and] was standing right in front of him.”

This creature asked Schirmer, “Are you the Watchman of this town?”

Schirmer replied, “Yes, I am.”

They then headed for the ship and entered it. Schirmer was given a tour, and provided with limited information about it. On the second level, which, according to Schirmer, they floated up to, was “…like a red light… and this big cone spinning, and there was all kinds of panels and computers and stuff like this; and there was a map on the wall, and there was this large screen, like a vision screen… and he walked up and he pressed some buttons, and he pointed toward the stars and said, ‘That’s were we’re from… it was a map of a sun and six planets… he never said exactly where they were from or anything…”

The alien told Schirmer that they were there to “get electricity” and that the “extracted electricity from one of the power poles there…”

When the short tour ended, the alien leader said, “Watchman, come with me.”

They climbed back down, out of the craft and walked over to the police car. As they approached, the alien said, “Watchman, what you have seen and what you have heard, you will not remember. The only thing that you will remember is that you’ve seen something land and something take off…”

The logic of this seems inverted. Why provide a tour, why show Schirmer a “map” of the aliens’ home system, and then tell him he will not remember it? Why let him remember anything at all? Had it not been for Schirmer’s memory of the alien craft, Sprinkle would not have found the twenty minute discrepancy in the log and not used hypnotic regression to undercover the abduction experience.

The Hill and Schirmer abductions, as well as others that would be reported in the 1960s and 1970s, were considered “targets of opportunity.” The victims were out in isolated areas, normally late at night, and there were no other witnesses available to corroborate the story. The victims were taken simply because they were there, to be had, and the chance that the aliens would be seen by anyone else was remote.

Following that pattern, and of critical importance in understanding the phenomenon of alien abduction, is the report from Dionisio Llanca in Argentina. Although now almost universally accepted as a hoax, Llanca’s adventure was reported first in the APRO Bulletin, the official publication of the private Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, and later in Saga’s UFO Report.

Like the others, Llanca claimed he was driving late at night when a flat tire forced him to the side of the road. As he worked, a bright light caught his attention, and he spotted three people, two men and one woman, who were not really human. He was taken onto their ship, examined, given some sort of important message for the human race, and returned to Earth.

Pat Roach, the Utah mother, read that article in UFO Report, and she believed that she too had been abducted by alien creatures. It was that tale that inspired her to write to me, care of the editors of the magazine, explaining, "I think I know how entire families can disappear." She then wrote, "We had a visit from someone about 11:00 at night in the middle of October 1973."

She wrote that there had been stories of a prowler in the neighborhood but that he seemed quite harmless. It seemed that he would unlock doors or gates and leave them unlocked. He took only food, and the few witnesses who saw him said that he was "dressed, 'like for Holloween.'"

Roach then explained what had happened that night."…I lay on my living room couch and my four-year-old son lay beside me dragging a blanket along. I fell asleep and when I awoke the entire house was in commotion. The cat was screaming. My son was across the length of the living room staring at the space between the bookcase and drapes hysterical saying, 'Skeleton, skeleton’.”

After she quieted her son, she heard a noise outside that sounded as if someone was dragging the branches of a tree across the side of the house. Something shook the windows. Although Roach wrote that she wasn't terribly frightened, she couldn't bring herself to look outside for the prowler.

The next morning, when she inspected the fence around the empty field next to the house, she discovered the middle strand of barb wire had been broken. Standing there, near the fence, she told her oldest daughter, "They must have made us forget."

Debbie, the youngest daughter, according to Roach's letter, said that two men had walked her out of her room the same way they had walked her sister out. "She thought she floated out rather than walked… She did say that she was afraid they wouldn't bring her back. She said there was a man in the corner of the living room and he smiled at her."

Apparently Debbie and the man had a conversation. "She said there were no lips on his mouth and he didn't talk with his mouth but with his 'head.'…She said in the spaceship they told her she wouldn't be sick anymore. She said the spacemen looked like Indians but with shorter hair. There was an 'Indian' girl with a long dress in the spaceship seated at some controls."

Debbie said that she had seen "a lot of children from our neighborhood in the ship. There seemed to be a few from each family on the block. She said one child was lying on the examining machine and another was standing in a small room off the large entrance room. She said they told her to tell no one but her family about the incident."

Roach, in her letter to me, wrote, "When I tried to think if I could remember anything about the night it was very hazy. All I could remember was a bright light coming into the living room. I remember walking up steps like that of an airplane with a solid grey steel wall to the side."

In the text of the letter, Roach also reported that family members had been moved. Of Bonnie and Debbie, her daughters, she wrote, "She [Bonnie] woke in bed and Debbie, the six-year-old, was gone. She awoke again and their places were switched in the bed."

Reporting what her daughter had said, Roach wrote, "She also said Kent [her four-year-old son] was across the room covered by a blanket and I was on the couch. He would never voluntarily leave my side so someone had moved and covered him."

Next to the Roach house was an empty field. Although partially hidden from the rest of the neighborhood by trees, the side next to the street was open and would allow those living across the street to see anything in the field. Roach wrote, "She [Debbie] said there was a spaceship parked in the field. It was saucer shaped with port holes on the sides. She said as she walked up the steps entering the ship she heard a "beep beep and didn't remember anything [sic] except pressure on the top of her left arm. She said she returned through the fence and as she did cut her chin on the wire. She did have a cut in the morning that hadn't been there the night before. As they took her through the dining room she noticed the clock said 1:00 A.M."

She finished the letter, writing, "It was hard to believe although I knew 'something' had happened that night so I placed Bonnie and Debra in separate rooms and told them to draw a picture of the 'spacemen'. The drawings were just alike except the triangle at the top of the suit was reversed in Debbie's drawing."

Here was what would eventually be seen as a classic abduction case that demanded investigation. It held everything that the researcher could want, from the multiple witness point of view, the suggestion of independent, neighborhood corroboration, and even the possibility of police documentation. Most importantly, this was the first time it had been reported that the aliens had entered the house to take the people out to the ship.

It was Roach who suggested hypnosis and the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) Headquarters had the solution. Coral Lorenzen, one of the organization’s founders, suggested Dr. James Harder, APRO's Director of Research, as the scientist to use hypnotic regression. Harder was not a psychologist but a civil engineer who had been trained in the use of hypnosis and who had investigated other abduction reports.

On July 8, 1975, Harder and I visited Roach at her home in Utah. Harder and I discussed the case with her for a short time, he told her about hypnosis and what it was, and then suggested a session to put her at ease. He wouldn't ask any questions about the abduction during that first session. He would just put her under so that she would experience hypnosis with no pressure.

Two hours later, with Roach relaxed, the first of the three hypnotic regression sessions began. Harder put her under and then told her, "Get the feeling of concentration, going back in time, get that feeling that you had that day, that you were going to bed… tell me, tell men that… you've got the feeling of being on air… What was the feeling you had."

"I'm surprised by… It was a bright light…"

"Did you go to the window?"

"No. I was in the living room and I was on the couch… I sleep there occasionally… You know two figures were standing over me. I was lying down, you know, and they're bright. They're skinny. Whatever they were, they're skinny and they look like they've dressed up in all white. People that would be in the service or something?

"What gave you that idea?" asked Harder.

"Their uniforms."

"Did they talk to you at that time?"

"No."

Harder continued to probe trying to determine who was present in the room. Once he had established that some of Roach's children, but not all of them, were with her in the living room, he wanted to know what happened next.

But Roach claimed she couldn't remember anything else. She mentioned that one of the men was in the corner. "He's standing by us… I don't remember what happened."

Harder told her that she could remember, pressing her on this point and she finally said, "They have a machine that they carry. They're very businesslike, and they hurt my arms because I don't want to go anywhere… They seemed to grasp me on my upper arms… I don't remember going out the door… I see bright room, big bright room… They're standing around."

Harder had her describe what she could see around her. She was in a big, round room and she could see stars. "It looked like a lot of technology. It's all machines and buttons and on the wall." Finally she said, "That's all I want to remember… I don't remember being examined but I know I was and that's what bothers me."

"You think you have been physically examined?"

"Yes."

"Probed?" asked Harder. "Somebody touched you?" "Yes."

Harder pressed on. "Did you get the impression that you were up on a table?"

"Yes."

"Were your clothes on? Did they take your clothes off?" "I don't remember."

"It might be hard for you to remember," said Harder. "Did they tell you that you wouldn't remember this? Did you get that impression that you wouldn't remember?"

Roach responded, saying, "They really didn't talk to me."

Harder asked her more about the creatures surrounding her, trying to learn what he could about their attempts, or the lack of attempts to communicate with Roach. She told him that she didn't like their attitudes. She found them to be cold-hearted and cold-blooded. According to Roach, they were interested in gathering their data but cared nothing for her emotional state or her feelings.

Harder then tried to get a description of the beings. He asked her, "Can you remember what the face looks like?"

"I remember the big eyes."

"And do you remember a pupil in the eyes, a round pupil, or was it a slitted pupil like a cat?"

"It doesn't matter… let me think. Cause they looked at me closer in my face."

"Did they?" asked Harder. "How big would you say their eyes were? The size of a quarter?"

"They were big."

"A fifty cent piece?"

"No. Quarter."

"Was it round?"

"No… Oval. It had a big pupil. It was a round pupil."

"Was it black?"

"Yes."

"What about the nose? Do you remember anything about the nose?"

"Don't remember a nose."

"What about a mouth?"

"A fish."

"It looked like a fish?" said Harder. "Does that mean it didn't have any lips?"

"Yes."

Harder then wanted to know how tall the beings were, suggesting three feet and then four feet. He wanted to know how their arms related, proportionally, to the bodies. He then said, "Remember their hands. What they looked like."

"They have those funny hands like Bonnie said but they're orange."

"Orange color? Did they seem to have fingers?"

"Didn't look like fingers."

"Did they move their hands ever?"

"Yeah."

"Did they open their hands ever?"

"Yes. They opened… it was almost like a clasp."

"Like there were two fingers, or three?"

"I wouldn't call them fingers, they were big…"

Harder worked to reinforce the hypnosis, saying, "That's all right. You can remember it… I can understand that you didn't like them. Did they seem to have feet that looked like ours. You really didn't have a chance to see them?"

Harder continued for a few minutes more, asking about the appearance of the creatures and trying to learn what he could about how they were dressed. He asked specific questions about the belts the aliens wore and if their clothing was the same color above the belt as it was below.

Roach mentioned that the aliens had wiped her with something but she hadn’t understood the purpose. Harder speculated, "It probably didn't hurt you. They probably were just taking a little skin sample or something superficial. Cells or something."

"I don't know."

"You can really remember, you just don't want to remember."

"I don't want to."

Harder, trying to convince Roach to remember, said, "I can imagine, you were worried about your children. You children may remember what happened and then afterwards you may want to. You will want to remember what happened to the children so that you can reassure them, probably. So it would be a good idea if you remembered what happened to you, if you can possibly do that without its bothering you too much."

"After I left that room, I wasn't with the children."

"I see," said Harder. "But they may be worried a little bit about what happened to them and you'll want to make sure it isn't too frightening. You don't want to upset them unnecessarily."

"No."

"I want to ask you one question, and you don't have to answer it. Did they put a needle in your stomach or anything like that? You can just answer with your fingers, you don't have to say."

"I'd rather say, I don't remember anything like that."

"You don't remember any blood samples that they took?"

"Nothing. They hooked me up to a machine. Checked everything, examined me from top to bottom. They put needles in me in places."

"Do you remember what places?"

"No."

"Perhaps in your arms or legs?"

"They put needles everywhere it seemed like."

"Was it Chinese acupuncture do you suppose?" asked Harder.

"I don't know."

Harder couldn't learn anymore about the needles or the probing. He wanted to know if she had watched them work or if she had kept her eyes closed. He asked her about leaving the craft. He said, "Did they carry you?"

"Yes, more or less. I don't know how it was. I wasn't really walking."

Harder said, "It would be very helpful for me to know as a scientist, what kinds of things that they are looking for. That would be very helpful if you could remember that… if it wouldn't be too much trouble."

"They wanted to know how our minds work."

"That's very interesting," said Harder.

"They want… to give them certain information that they don't understand yet."

"What kind of information?"

"How we think, how we feel, our emotions. They don't know about us."

"That's very interesting," said Harder.

"No… I don't like what they want."

"You thought you were being intruded upon."

"Yes. They didn't care, because they don't have an understanding of emotions like ours. Maybe they're trying to understand our emotions. I may be wrong…"

"You know, Pat," said Harder, "you're one of the more intelligent people that have been in touch with this thing."

That ended the first session. Roach had awakened at that point. Harder would conduct two more regression sessions, but all were contaminated by the first. Harder made no suggestion that Roach would be unable to recall what had been discussed. He believed that she should be aware of everything that had transpired. This was his investigative technique, believing that the following sessions would build on the first.

In fact, after the end of that session, Harder asked additional questions. She remember a few more details about what had happened. She now believed that Kent, her youngest son, had been on the craft. That was a detail she hadn't known before the regression.

The problem here, as I see it now, is that Harder spent some of the time asking very leading questions. He didn’t take a neutral approach, but was searching for specific information. That does create problems about the credibility of the report. It isn’t always that Roach remembered something on her own, but was led to some of those ideas by the way the questions were being asked and the reinforcing techniques that Harder used.

And some of the things that Roach said were obviously derived from the Llanca abduction. Her discussion of the technology she saw seems to mirror that from the UFO Report article she had read. Rather than being a confirming detail here, it is another evidence of contamination.

That same afternoon, July 8, Harder interviewed the oldest daughter, Bonnie, to learn if she would corroborate what her mother had told us. In the letter to me,Roach had made it clear that her children had more memories of the situation than she did. If true, this would be a key factor.

The session with Bonnie was a disaster. She seemed apprehensive about hypnosis but Harder did manage to apparently induce a light trance. The distractions proved to be too great and no progress was made. Bonnie woke quickly without revealing anything to us.

A second attempt met with the same results. Although Harder could induce the hypnotic state, it wouldn't hold as the probing moved to the abduction. The first question destroyed the mood, and Bonnie would sit up, blinking.

On the morning of July 9, Roach was ready to try again. She was sure that she could remember more, especially after she had a good night's sleep. Harder had no difficulty putting her into a hypnotic state. Roach was a good hypnotic subject.

After describing, again, how she was moved from the house to the ship, Roach said, "They put me on a table and they hooked me up on one leg and one arm. I didn't like their examination."

"Was it like a G-Y-N exam?" asked Harder.

"That's part of it," she said. "I don't like what they do with my head."

"What are they doing?"

"Taking my thoughts…" Then angrily, she said, "They don't have the right to take them."

She and Harder discussed exactly what she meant by taking her thoughts. The aliens were making her relive past events as if building a catalog of human emotion. Roach said, once again, that they didn't understand human emotions.

Roach leaped over a span of time and said, "I'm getting dressed. They don't know."

Harder asked, "Don't know what?"

"They don't know how we humans are. I called them stupid." Roach laughed about that.

"What did they say to that?"

"They weren't angry. They just do what they want to. The man was a regular man."

Harder wasn’t ready for that revelation. He asked, "What? What was that? You thought there was a regular human being with them?"

"Yes."

"Was he taller? Bigger?"

"Yes. He was bald."

"Was he the one who did the examining?"

"He helped."

Harder questioned her closely about the human being. She was sure there was a human with them. He was different from the aliens. He had regular eyes and human features.

Roach began describing other features of the abduction and finally said, "They need us… I don't know why they need us. They're very intent. They need information quickly."

Roach began to talk about her children and started to cry. In seconds she was awake again. She sat for a moment, as if thinking about what she had just seen, and then wanted to talk about the experience. She said that the human was about 55, had a fringe of gray hair, wore glasses, dressed in black and wore one glove.

Harder had been worried because Roach had failed to show any emotions during the first session. For Harder, Roach's emotions during the second session had added a dimension of realism to the story. He was now convinced that Roach had been abducted by the crew of a flying saucer.

This idea, that emotional response is somehow related to the validity of the experience, has been disproved. In research conducted with Vietnam Veterans, it was seen in some cases that those who told horrific tales of combat with the proper display of emotion were later found to have not experienced the combat, had not been in Vietnam, and in one shocking case, the man had never served in the military. What this demonstrated was that the emotional content of the tale had no relation to the validity of the experience.

During the afternoon, Harder thought that everyone should get away from the house for a while. He wanted to move to neutral ground where everyone would have an opportunity to relax. Sitting in an ice cream parlor, Harder discussed some of the other abduction cases that had been reported over the last decade, including the Hill case. He went into some detail about what Betty Hill had reported. Harder told Roach about Betty Hill's belief that a needle had been pushed into her stomach and eggs removed. She had said, more than once, that she believed there were lots of little Betty Hills running around in space.

The final session was held was held on the evening of July 9. Of Roach's children, only Bonnie seemed to slip into a hypnotic state. In interviews conducted with the other children everything they had to say had been uncovered. Their tales were no where near as robust as that told by their mother. They told fragmented stories that provided a measure of corroboration if it was forgotten that they all lived together for two years before Roach wrote to me. From Roach’s letter, it was clear that they had discussed the events of October 17 many times and in great detail. Further attempts with hypnosis would be of no value and failed.

Using a room at a local hotel, both Roach and her daughter would put under. While Bonnie was left alone to concentrate on her experiences, Roach was given a pen and paper and asked to draw one of the aliens. She sat for a moment, as if looking at something, and then sketched, quickly, the one of the creatures.

With that accomplished, Harder again questioned Roach, asking for more details about what she had seen on the ship. She described the interior of the craft, mentioned a "clock" with lots of hands, and told of the human who worked with the aliens.

Again, after she had been floated back to the house, Roach began to worry about her children. She began to cry, and slipped out of the hypnotic state. Now she remembered the needle and thought that it had been pushed into her stomach. Remember, this was after Harder had asked the specific question in an earlier session, and had related, in detail, the experiences of Betty Hill to Roach.

With her mother awake, Bonnie too, slipped out of the hypnosis. Now she remembered being on the craft. She was standing near a wall and could see her mother on a table that floated, surrounded by alien creatures. She said that she didn't watch too closely because her mother had no clothes and she was frightened.

Then, Bonnie said one thing that excited Harder. She said, "I can see a human with them." She went on to say, "He was taller and he had an ear like a regular ear."

Bonnie then took the paper and sketched the scene as she remembered it. The drawing agreed with Roach had said earlier. The numbers of beings and the positions of them were all correct, just shown from a different angle.

According to Harder, the descriptions provided by Roach matched several other reports, some of which hadn't received any wide circulation. Only someone who had studied the phenomenon would be aware of the reports. There certainly was no way for Roach and her children to be aware of many of those cases.

Of course, the problem was that Harder was well aware of the descriptions and his questions sometimes lead to the description he wanted. At the time, I didn’t realize that the phrasing of a question, the tone of the hypnotist’s voice, and the gentle probing until he found the clue he wanted, dragged the report in the direction he wanted. It was quite subtle, and I’m not sure that Harder realized what he was doing as he questioned Roach. I certainly didn’t notice it until studying the case years later.

Harder was impressed by a couple of details. Because the majority of the story was reported while in a hypnotic state, Harder believed it added a note of authenticity. Harder was aware that a subject can confabulate under hypnosis, but he was impressed by her emotions. Her emotions, and her repeated worries about the children, suggested to Harder that the abduction was real. Of course, Harder had reinforced that idea several times telling her that she must be worried about her children. (And yes, that would be a natural assumption, but Harder erred in saying it to her on many occasions while she was in a state of hypnosis.)

There are a number of other very disturbing aspects in this case, however. First, and foremost, is the way the case reached the hands of researchers. Roach, after having read the story of an abduction in Saga's UFO Reportwrote to me in care of the magazine. Although Roach said she had read no books about UFOs and abductions, it is clear from her first letter that she had read magazine articles about them.

There are a number of parallels between what was reported in that article Roach read and what Roach said. For example, both report a domed disc, male and female beings involved, long hair, and elongated eyes. There are other similarities as well.

The problem for researchers is that there is a known source of contamination. It can't be suggested because there are similar items in both stories they both must be true. What can be said is that Roach could have picked up that information through her reading of the Llanca abduction tale.

The other point that must be made is that the family had discussed this among themselves for nearly two years. Almost from the very beginning, the family was talking about alien intruders. The story of Hickson and Parker was being reported nationally at that time Roach thought she was abducted. Hickson and Parker claimed an abduction on October 11, and according to various records, news of the case was reported, nationally, the following morning.

According to The A.P.R.O Bulletin, September-October 1973, it was at 9 a.m. on October 12, that APRO Headquarters received the first call about the Hickson-Parker abduction. After learning the details, Coral Lorenzen tried to find a psychologist to go to Pascagoula to interview Hickson and Parker, but none of the consultants could get away fast enough. The job fell to James Harder, just as it did two years later.

Harder interviewed both men and used hypnosis to attempt to learn more. After the sessions, he told APRO Headquarters that it would be nearly impossible for the men to simulate the feelings of terror while under hypnosis without some kind of outside stimulus. According to Harder, the terror both men displayed seemed to be quite real.

This was almost the same thing that Harder would say about the Roach case two years later. In fact, during the first session, Harder was concerned by a lack of any real emotion. Roach related the material and answered the questions in a flat, cold voice, as if reporting on a TV program she had seen.

But throughout the first session, Harder told Roach, "It may be a little bit frightening." Later he asked, "Is there something that you think would be frightening to remember?" Not long after that he said, "…It might have been a very frightening experience at the time."

In the first session, Harder told Roach it was frightening, though she had suggested no such thing herself. In later sessions the fright and the fear is evident. It is clear that Harder, through his technique and questioning, told Roach that she was to be frightened and that she picked up on the suggestion.

Harder was guilty of providing other information to Roach and leading her in other directions. For example, Roach mentioned there were machines and buttons. Harder then asked, "What kind of machines? Did they look like typewriters, computers?"

When she responded, "They looked like computers," Harder asked, "What made you think they looked like computers?" Although Roach said, "Because they had wavy lines going through them," a better answer might have been, "Because you just mentioned it."

That's a little point, however. Implanting the idea that there were computers on an alien spacecraft isn't of much importance. Much more important is that during the interview, Roach said, "I don't remember being examined but I know I was."

This contamination can be traced directly to the Llanca article published by Saga's UFO Report. Llanca mentioned some of the things that Roach had described during her session. The examination by the aliens is an obvious one. The elongated eyes, which Roach mentioned several times was also mentioned by Llanca. He mentioned the eyes several times as if they were of overwhelming importance.

There is one other interesting parallel between the Llanca story and Roach's report. Llanca said, "There are many viewing devices, many… two viewing screens. In one, stars can be seen."

Roach, in her first session said, "It's very bright [in the room]… Door's on my right hand side and a look out, you can see out at the stars, not the top but the side, toward the ship."

Harder asked, "You can see stars? Is it clear?"

"No, I can see stars. It's as if you could see the stars. It looked like a lot of technology."

Later, as Harder and Roach, discussed what she was talking about, she said that she could see the stars on a screen. She wasn't looking outside the ship, but at a screen near the top of the room in which she stood. In other words, she is describing a scene straight out of the article about Llanca.

But when the Llanca case failed to provide a lead, Harder was there with a leading question. After Roach mentioned that she knew that she had been examined, Harder said, "You think you might have been physically examined?" Roach had said nothing about a physical exam and to that point had been talking about a mental examination.

Later, he asked, "Did you get the impression that you were up on a table?" He also told her "They probably were just taking a little skin sample or something superficial, cells or something?" There had been nothing in the interview, to that point, to suggest that the aliens were collecting any kind of tissue samples, but Harder implanted the idea.

Worse still, during the interview, Harder asked, "Did they put a needle into your stomach or anything like that?" Roach said that she remembered nothing like that during the first session. She did say, after Harder's leading question, "They put needles in me in places." But she said nothing about needles until Harder asked his question.

Later, as mentioned, Harder told Roach about Betty Hill's experience with needles into the stomach. After she awoke from the final hypnotic session, she told Harder that a needle had been pressed into her stomach. Clearly this was a detail implanted by the sloppy work of the hypnotist.

It is equally clear that Harder was looking for something specific. He wanted to be told that Roach had a needle pressed into her. He was trying to draw a parallel between the Hill abduction and the Roach case.

The one area that Harder believed to be an important area of corroboration probably demonstrates the suggestibility of abductees. When Bonnie mentioned a human with the aliens, Harder thought it important. However, looking at the transcripts and notes carefully, it is clear that Bonnie was present during one session when her mother described the event.

Remember, both Roach and her daughter were in the room for the final session. Harder put both under, telling Bonnie to concentrate on what she could see. He then interviewed her mother, who provided a description of lying on the table, of the human with the aliens, and the scene as she remembered it. Later Bonnie told the same story with the same details. It's no mystery how she learned of it if she hadn't witnessed during an abduction. She had just heard her mother tell Harder all about it.

Harder, throughout the sessions, was telling Roach exactly what he wanted. At one point, he said to her, "That's a very intelligent thing for you to recognize." Later, he told her, "It would be very helpful for me to know, as a scientist, what kinds of things that they are looking for…" He also told her that he found some things interesting or very interesting.

The later sessions demonstrate the influence that Harder exerted. He mentioned something, either in the first session, or in private conversations held between the sessions, and those things appear later. Studying the transcripts now, it is very easy to see what ideas were implanted by Harder and what ideas were contamination by the Llanca article she read.

The Roach abduction is a clear case of contamination. The event that precipitated it was the prowler in October 1973. But with the country talking about UFO abduction, and headlines from various newspapers telling readers that the scientists (Harder and Dr. J. Allen Hynek of Northwestern University) believed the tale, it is not a stretch for Roach to leap from a prowler to alien intrusion.

The prowler, however, might never have existed outside of Roach’s mind as the police suggested to me. Science now recognizes a phenomenon know as sleep paralysis. According to various published figures, somewhere between a quarter and half the population have experienced an episode of sleep paralysis. In about eighty percent of the cases, the people have reported some sort of entity or creature in the room with them.

Sleep paralysis occurs either just upon falling asleep or just after waking. It is a paralysis that prevents any movement, and often gives the victim the impression that something heavy is on the chest making respiration difficult. The paralysis lasts a short time and the victim usually falls back to sleep. The next morning, he or she remembers the event, remembers the fear, and remembers the vague creature that lurked in the shadows.

Pat Roach, it seems, suffered a classic manifestation of sleep paralysis right down to the little man in the corner and the two creatures standing over her. And then, suddenly, the little men were gone and the house erupted into confusion. Roach had no idea what had happened to her and began to search for an answer.

Although she claimed that the object had landed in a nearly empty field next to her house, there was no evidence recovered from that field. No one along the street, which had dozens of trees that would have made a landing difficult, had seen anything that night. Reports of other neighbors and their children on the craft went unverified, though I talked to many of them. No one seemed to have any memory of any event that would suggest they had been part of an alien abduction. Remember here that Roach had some conscious memory, but no one else reported any unusual happenings on that same night.

Roach’s search for an answer led her into the world of alien abduction. The theory explained the little men, the invasion of the house, and the other details. The problem was that no evidence, other than the somewhat fragmented testimonies of her children were ever offered, and they had been under her influence for nearly two years before investigators arrived.

There seems to be little evidence that anything extraterrestrial happened to Roach and her family. The tale came out of a desire to believe, the contamination of the news media and, more importantly, to the scientist who conducted the hypnotic regression sessions. It is obvious that he wanted a report that would underscore and validate the Hill abduction and he unconsciously provided the details for Roach to do that.

While it might be that the circumstances around the Roach case were unique, and now that it seems logical that Roach had suffered an episode of sleep paralysis, it wouldn’t have happened without the unconscious and sometimes unsubtle coaching of Dr. Harder. To fully understand alien abduction, it would be necessary to learn just how pervasive such coaching might be.

What is important to learn from this case is that sleep paralysis can be the explanation for some, but certainly not all cases of alien abduction. As some researchers have pointed out, and rightly so, some witnesses, such as the Hills, were abducted while wide awake. If there is a terrestrial explanation for the Hills, it does not lie in the direction of sleep paralysis.

Secondly, it must be noted that Harder did, unfortunately and probably unconsciously, lead Roach into the details that she hadn’t gotten from the magazine article. His desire to validate the Hill case with another, similar case becomes obvious when the transcripts are read.

Third, it much be noted that the stories offered by the children were not as complete or as detailed as that told by their mother. A logical conclusion to be drawn is the children, in talking with their mother picked up those details from their mother, but hadn’t observed anything themselves.

In the end, this case doesn’t involve an abduction. The answer is terrestrial and it seems that there will be no new evidence in the case. And even though we can draw this conclusion about this case, it is not an explanation that can be applied to all reports of abduction. The search for answers must be continued in those other cases but the Roach abduction report can be removed from the unidentified category.

Alien Abduction in Pop Culture

(Special Note: Since there has been some discussion of the elements contained in this partial chapter from The Abduction Enigma, I thought I would reprint it here. It addresses the issue of the cultural elements that have found their way into abduction reports and it mentions some of the early work done by some others. Christopher Allen wanted to address Martin Kottmeyer’s essays on pop cultural influences, suggesting, I guess, that the theory was somehow original to Kottmeyer and none of the rest of us had realized it until he thought of it. As you’ll see, these arguments pre-date some of Kottmeyer’s work ((the witness whose abduction matched Killers from Spaceso closely was regressed in 1976, for example and I realized the moment I heard it where it originated)), and you’ll see that reference is made to Kottmeyer’s articles. The bibliography for The Abduction Enigma contains five articles and papers published by Kottmeyer.)

David Jacobs (seen here) has argued that the UFO phenomenon sprang into existence in 1947. Thomas Bullard suggested that the Barney and Betty Hill abduction of 1961 had no cultural sources from which to draw. And Budd Hopkins has claimed that the beings reported by abductees are like no "traditional sci-fi gods and devils." In other words, each is arguing that UFOs and abductions must be real because there are no cultural sources from which the witnesses could draw the material. Without those sources of material, the witnesses must be relating real events rather than some sort of folklore history even though the airship scare of the late nineteenth century demonstrates that the fundamental assumptions by each are inaccurate and the rich history of cultural elements argues against them.

It seems ridiculous to suggest that a phenomenon that has no substantial evidence of its existence other than witness testimony must be real because there is nothing in the past that relates to it. Because there are no past traditions, how did each of these witnesses, who have never communicated, relate similar events if not reporting, accurately, something they have witnessed? This is the question posed by many UFO investigators and abduction researchers.

The answer is, of course, that the cultural precedents demanded by Hopkins, Jacobs and Bullard (seen here) do exist. Pop culture from the beginning of the twentieth century is filled with examples of alien beings and alien spacecraft that match, to an astonishing degree, the beings and craft being reported today by the abductees.

To completely understand the cultural influences we must examine the pop cultural world. At the turn of the last century information moved at a slower pace, but it still had the impact it does today.

For example, there were no radio stations that played the latest music. Instead, sheet music was sold. To sell it, without radio to play the songs, music stores hired piano players and singers. The music circulated through the culture much more slowly, but no less completely. A hit, on sheet music, might take weeks or months to move from one coast to the other, but the point is, it could and frequently did.

Think about that. Music would move from coast to coast. Musicians would hear it in one city and play it in the next. Vaudeville performers used the same popular music in their acts. Player pianos played it to audiences in all sorts of environments. Before long everyone in the country was singing the song, or playing it at home, all without records, radio, national broadcasts or MTV and before Ipods and YouTube.

This demonstrates just how information can be passed from person to person without the modern technology. It also suggest that arguments claiming that one person could not have heard a specific story because it had no national forum is wrong. The information, whether it is music at the turn of the century or information about abductions, can enter into a "collective consciousness." Simply, it moves from person to person until all have been exposed to it.

The introduction of movies, radio, and other mass media, however, have made it even easier to spread data, and provides more opportunities for all of us to be exposed to it. An abductee might claim no interest in science fiction, but that doesn't mean that he or she has not been exposed to the elements of science fiction.

One of the first movies made was the 1902 version of Jules Verne's First Men in the Moon. Walt Disney used parts of it on his old Sunday night show and while science fiction might not have been the theme that night, millions saw it. Since that time, Verne's work has been translated into dozens of films in dozens of versions. They have been broadcast on television for more than fifty years.

H.G. Wells was responsible for more than just adding science fiction to pop culture. His War of the Worlds, first published before the turn of the last century was responsible for one of the great "hoaxes" in American history. In 1938, Orson Welles, in a radio program broadcast nationally, reported on an alien invasion launched by beings from the planet Mars. The panic that developed during that broadcast has been studied for years afterwards.

Even those who hadn't heard the original radio broadcast learned about the after effects. Sociological studies have been done on the mob psychology that produced the panic. But more importantly, it brought the concept of alien invasion into the homes of average American before the 1940s. They might not be reading science fiction, but they were seeing the results of science fiction spread across the front pages of their newspapers.

Science fiction has been an important part of pop culture since Hugo Grensback introduced it to American society in the 1920s. Grensback's idea was to sugarcoat science so that the young would be interested in it. He envisioned it as a way of teaching science to those who weren't interested in learning science. He wanted it to bubble through society, through our collective conscious.

In the 1930s and 1940s there were many science fiction magazines. The covers of them featured full color art designed to catch the eye. Scientists, looking like all-American heroes, monsters of all kinds, and women in scanty clothes and in peril, were the themes on many. At the time, these were the pulp magazines, filled with action stories and exciting tales. Each month the newsstands had new covers, all crying out for attention to convince us to buy the magazine.

One particular cover, from Astounding Stories, published in June 1935, is particularly important. It shows two alien beings with no hair, no nose, a slit-like mouth and large eyes. Through a door, one of the strange creatures is looking at a woman on an examination table. Her eyes are closed and she is covered by a sheet (a convention of the time), but it is clear that she is naked under the cloth. In the foreground another creature is restraining a man trying to break through to the woman.

This cover predicts many elements of the abduction phenomenon of forty years later. Although, the alien beings have pupils in large whites of the eyes, the similarities to the modern abductions is striking. To suggest that abductees of today could not have seen the cover of a science fiction magazine published decades years earlier is to miss the point. It demonstrates that the idea of alien abduction is not something that developed in a vacuum recently, as aliens began abducting humans, but in fact, had been announced in public long before anyone had heard of flying saucers and alien abduction.

The idea that the aliens are from a dying planet have been played out in everything from Not of this Earthfirst released in 1956 to many of the most recent science fiction movies, including a 1994 remake of Not of This Earth. Interestingly, the alien is collecting blood in an aluminum briefcase and he always wears dark glasses to hide his eyes. Although not collecting genetic material in the way sometimes suggested by abductees, he is required to send humans to his home world as they attempt to end the plague destroying them. The obvious purpose is to gather human genetic material.

But that very problem is discussed in The Night Callermade in 1965. In that movie the alien is sent to Earth to provide women for "genetic experiments" on his home world. The women are, of course, abducted by that alien.

Films, such as This Island Earthcontain alien scientists eventually abducting Earth scientists to help them defeat their enemies on their home world. The 27th Day, features potential alien invaders who provide several people with the power to destroy all human life on Earth so that the aliens can inherit it.

And each of these films suggest human abduction somewhere in the storyline.The 27th Day, begins with five people abducted onto an alien ship where time slows almost to a standstill. The abductees are returned quickly, after being given their mission, and the weapons to wipe out the human race. Peter Graves, a scientist working on atomic energy, is abducted from his jet as it crashes in Killers from Space. He returns to the base, confused, with a period of missing time and a huge scar on his chest. The one thing that stands out in the film is the huge eyes of the aliens. Although not the jet black orbs of the modern abduction tales, these eyes haunt Graves as he tries to remember exactly what has happened to him. And Graves remembers nothing of the encounter until he undergoes a chemical regression aided by sodium amytal.

To take the Killers from Spacetheme even a step further, in 1975 I attended a UFO conference in Fort Smith, Arkansas. A man there claimed to have been abducted while waiting in his car at a railroad crossing. Under hypnosis, arranged by the conference organizer Bill Pitts, he told a story of being subjected to a medical examination of some kind. He said that while lying on the table, surrounded by aliens, he could see a huge screen near him. It was a display of his internal organs including his beating heart. And it is a scene right out of Killers from Space. I recognized the scene as soon as I heard it.

The implants claimed by some as proof that abductions are real have also been featured in science fiction movies. Tiny probes, pushed into the back of the neck to monitor the victims, are found in 1953's Invader's from Mars. In fact, there are several scenes in the movie that mirror the stories told by modern abductees.

And for those who find these examples interesting, but not persuasive there is Mars Needs Women. Overlooking the obvious which is, of course, the abduction of women for reproductive purposes, there are the costumes worn by the Martians. These include a tight fitting helmet, not unlike those worn by skindivers. Over the ear was a small, round radio with a short antenna sticking up. This exact costume was reproduced by Herbert Schirmer after his abduction was reported to the Condon Committee in 1968. The contamination by the movie is unmistakable.

What we find, by searching the science fiction movies of the 1950s and 1960s, are dozens of examples of aliens invading from a dying planet, abducting people for reproductive purposes, and implanting small devices into them for a variety of reasons. To suggest, as Budd Hopkins has, that there is no similarity to the "traditional sci-fi gods and devils," is ridiculous. The similarity to many of the alien beings and abduction situations in science fiction is overwhelming.

What we have demonstrated here is that all the elements of the abduction phenomenon have been used in dozens of science fiction stories. These films might have been poorly attended when first released to the theaters, but have been replayed time and again on late night television and are available in mass collections of science fiction movies. Even those who claim no interest in science fiction movies have had the opportunity to see them on the late shows. It cannot be suggested that these films have had no influence on the abduction phenomenon for even if a specific witness could prove he or she had never seen any of these movies, there are dozens of others who have. There is no denying that this aspect of pop culture has had an influence of our view of the aliens and their motivations, and therefore on the reporting of stories of alien abduction.

And even if the witness could somehow prove that he or she had not watched the films on late night television, there would be other arenas for exposure. Again, we slip into a look at pop culture in the 1950s and 1960s. While a specific abductee might have avoided films with flying saucers and aliens in them, he or she would have attended movies. We all did, whether it was the Friday night date, or the kid's matinee on Saturday afternoon. One of the many features of the theater presentation was the trailers, or the previews of coming attractions. So even if the abductee didn't go to the science fiction movies of the era, he or she would have seen the previews for them. The abductee might have avoided seeing the whole film, but would have seen pieces of it while at another movie.

Or, to take it a step further. How many families made it an outing to attend the drive-in theater on a Friday or Saturday night? It didn't matter so much which films were showing, but that the family was going out together. Many of the drive-in movies were the "B" films, those made to support the main attraction. These were black and white science fiction films made cheaply. Many of them were of alien invasions, monsters from outer space, and as we have noted, included many of the elements of the abduction phenomenon of today.

And often, at those Friday night movies, or Saturday matinees, a chapter of a serial was shown. These films featured everything from Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers to Superman and tales of the Lost Continent of Atlantis. Robots, spaceships and evil aliens were the norm. Trips through the Solar System and to planets far away were taken. Many times the main film program was what people attended to see, but the "boring" shorts were shown first, including a serial.

In today's environment, the influence is even more obvious. NBC broadcast the story of Barney and Betty Hill to a national audience in October, 1975. If nothing else, it focused the alien abduction in the minds of so many of the viewers. After that, millions knew that the aliens were smaller than humans and they had big eyes.

Bullard opens his massive study of the abduction phenomenon by reporting on the Hill case. Prior to the release in 1966 of The Interrupted Journey, John Fuller's book about the Hills, there had been no discussion, in this country, of alien abduction. The Antonio Villas-Boas case, known to few even inside the UFO community, would not be known to Betty Hill. Yet, without that prompting, Betty Hill tells a tale of alien abduction that is similar to that related by Villas-Boas. The question that plagues the researchers, including Bullard, is, where did she get the idea?

Bullard believes that the Hills didn't possess the knowledge to construct the nightmare of alien abduction. And, he might be right. We have, however, just been provided with a clue about how the idea originated. The question is, are there other facts that add to this? Barney Hill's hysterical reaction certainly isn't enough to add the details of small alien creatures. The answer to this can be found in Keyhoe's The Flying Saucer Conspiracy.

At the time of the Hill abduction, there were few public reports of alien creatures. It was not a topic discussed much in UFO circles. Keyhoe cites a dozen of so of these cases, ignoring the majority of them. He does, however, treat the case of pilot in Hawaii who claimed, "I actually saw him," meaning the creature from the craft, with respect. Keyhoe seems to be suggesting that the story, while wildly extreme, at that time, has an undercurrent of authenticity.

More importantly, however, Keyhoe writes of UFO reports from Venezuela that seem to have contributed to Betty Hill's nightmare. In his book, Keyhoe reports on two men who sight a bright light on a nearby road. Hovering over the ground is a round craft with a brilliant glow on the underside. According to Keyhoe, four little men came from it and tried to drag Jesus Gomez to it. An apparent abduction that failed.

Betty wrote to Keyhoe, "At this time we are searching for any clue that might be helpful to my husband, in recalling whatever it was he saw that caused him to panic. His mind has completely blacked out at this point. Every attempt to recall, leaves him very frightened."

All of this, from Keyhoe's writings about nasty, hairy dwarfs who are attempting to kidnap humans, to the idea that the aliens are conducting some kind of experimentation, were introduced prior to 1961. The elements for the abduction scenario as outlined by the Hills were abundant throughout the media. If Bullard wonders where Betty Hill got the idea, a study of the case will provide an answer for it. There is no denying that pop culture could have supplied the various elements. Betty Hill may have pulled them together into a single, neat package. Please note here that I said, “May have…”

Martin S. Kottmeyer, writing in Magonia, presents a good argument for the introduction of elements from pop culture. For example, Barney Hill talked of "wraparound eyes" when he described the aliens to his psychiatrist, an element of extreme rarity in science fiction films. But Kottmeyer found the exception. He wrote, "They appeared on the alien episode of an old TV series, 'The Outer Limits' entitled the 'The Bellero Shield.' A person familiar with Barney's sketch in The Interrupted Journey(top two drawings are Barney’s sketches, bottom photo from The Twilight Zone) and the sketch done in collaboration with the artist David Bakerwill find a 'frisson' of 'dejavu' creeping up his spine when seeing this episode. The resemblance is much abetted by an absence of ears, hair, and nose on both aliens. Could it be by chance? Consider this: Barney first described and drew the wraparound eyes during the hypnosis session dated 22 February 1964. 'The Bellero Shield' was first broadcast 10 February 1964. Only twelve days separated the two instances. If the identification is admitted, the commonness of wrap around eyes in the abduction literature falls to cultural forces."

Betty Hill was eventually asked about this by UFO researchers. She claimed that neither she nor Barney ever watched the Outer Limits. It seems ridiculous to believe that she would be able to recall if her husband watched a television show some thirty years earlier. It could simply have been the only time that he ever watched it. The coincidence between the airing of The Bellero Shieldand Barney's description some twelve days later is interesting. (See also my discussion of the Twilight Zone episode about an alien abduction called “Hocus Pocus and Frisby” that is included in this package of blog columns.)

The situation of April 1961 is slightly different than we have been lead to believe. The Hill abduction didn't spring into existence in a cultural vacuum, but in a society where information was shared nationally on television and by the movies, not to mention magazines and books. Betty's interest in UFOs predated her experience because of her sister's UFO sighting, and Barney's fear of capture while driving on a lonely stretch of highway in New Hampshire, created the scenario. As the days passed, Betty Hill dreamed of the incident, writing about them in her diary. When interviewed by interested UFO researchers, she always told about her dreams, with Barney sitting in the room with her. The rest of it came together almost naturally.

It is important to note that the Hills' psychiatrist, Dr. Benjamin Simon, never believed the story told under hypnosis. He didn't accept the abduction as real. He believed it to be a confabulation, a fact often forgotten by UFO researchers.

What we have then, is a well ingrained theory, that is, that aliens are abducting humans, fueled by speculation from science fiction movies and the popular press. All the ideas have been discussed, in the movies, on the radio, on television and in dozens of science fiction books. All elements of the abduction phenomenon have been well publicized long before the first of the abductions was reported. Contrary to what the UFO researchers might want to believe, we can find all the elements of abduction in pop culture. We may have to search several sources, but there is no denying that the elements were all present before Betty Hill made her astonishing report. If alien abductions are real, and even if we find precedents in pop culture and in folklore traditions, the abduction experience itself should be unique. We should find nothing similar to it in our society. It turns out that such is not the case. Alien abduction is not unique. There is another phenomenon that has grown out of pop culture, whose traditions and traits mimic UFO abduction almost step for step. It is a phenomenon reported, essentially by the same kinds of people, investigated by the same kinds of people, and it provides us with clues about the reality of claims of alien abduction.

The Abduction Engima and UFO Research

(Note: Russ Estes, Bill Cone and I published a book called The Abduction Enigmaabout a decade ago. We saw it as a way of changing abduction research for the better by pointing out the weaknesses in the field. Of course we were attacked for our heresies and our suggestions were ignored. Instead other researchers asked for our demographics and wanted to know our methodologies. The following, originally published in The Anomalist, provided that specific information.)

In July, 1996, at the MUFON Symposium held in Greensboro, North Carolina, Budd Hopkins was disturbed by my paper about pop cultural influences on the imagery of alien abduction. He approached me and said, “You’re not an abduction researcher.” I reminded him that he used information about an abduction I had investigated in his first book on the topic. I have been investigating alien abductions since the mid-1970s and apparently before Hopkins started.

Four years later, that same comment was made, even after having published a number of articles on the topic, and having written two books about abduction. The second of those books, The Abduction Enigma, written with Russ Estes and Dr. William P. Cone, has created something of a fire storm, with many attacking without attempting to understand the reason the book exists.

Before moving on, it is necessary to provide some background information on both Estes and Cone. Estes, as a documentarian, has been investigating UFOs, and by default, alien abductions, since the late 1960s, which puts him ahead of most in the field today. He has interviewed and video taped literally hundreds of abductees and was responsible for some of the insights published in The Abduction Enigma.

Dr. Cone is a licensed psychological clinician with more than twenty years experience in the field. He has worked with, again literally, hundreds who believe that they have been abducted. Some of those believed the abduction was at the hands of worshipers of Satan, but dozens of others believed that they had been abducted by alien creatures. When we begin to talk of experience, as a psychologist and an abduction researcher, Cone has credentials that are as impressive as any of those working in the field today. Unlike some who gained their experience in the ivory towers of academia, Cone gained his experience in the field working with real people who had real problems.

Of course none of that means anything to the critics of our book. They simply begin attempting to pick apart some of our basic assumptions. For example, those believing that alien abductions are taking place have asked what is our definition of an abduction. They are attempting, I suppose, to understand the process we used to select the participants in our survey. The flip answer would be that we used the same definition that they used and the same people they used. It allows us to dodge the question without answering it.

The real answer is that our sample was taken from those who had been identified as abductees by others. That means that our sample was made up of those who were accepted as abductees and that we identified no one from the general population who hadn’t been accepted by the “mainstream” of abduction research. It means that the abductees were those identified by Hopkins, John Mack, John Carpenter, Yvonne Smith, Richard Boylan and so on. It means that we did not identify them as abductees but relied on the definition used by those others and the identification of those others. Therefore, as mentioned, abductees in our sample are the same as the abductees used by the other researchers.

The interesting thing here is that there seems to be no universal definition of who is an abductee. Jerry Clark, in the second edition of his The UFO Encyclopediawrote, “Abduction reports concern alien entities who capture humans from their bedrooms, vehicles, or open air, transport their captives inside a UFO, and subject them to a bizarre, sometimes painful physical examination before returning them to the capture site.” That seems to define the abduction event but not who, or what, an abductee actually is.

David Jacobs, in Secret Life provided a description of the typical abduction. He wrote, “An unsuspecting woman is in her room preparing to go to bed. She gets into bed, reads a while, turns off the light, and drifts off into a peaceful night’s sleep. In the middle of the night she turns over and lies on her back. She is awakened by a light that seems to be glowing in her room. The light moves toward her and takes the shape of a small ‘man’ with a bald head and huge black eyes. She is terrified. She wants to run but she cannot move. She wants to scream but she cannot speak… This is the typical beginning of an abduction.” Again, this addresses, more closely, what an abduction is as opposed to who is an abductee.

Raymond E. Fowler, in The Watchers, also tells us what an abduction is and provides a few clues about who the abductee is. He wrote, “…credible witnesses who claim not only to have observed but to have been taken abroad a UFO by alien creatures…the alleged abductee claims to have been examined and operated upon with foreign instruments. Almost always, communication is accomplished by telepathy.” By the way, I have seen no complaints about Fowler’s suggestion that communication is telepathic, and I have seen no one howling for demographic data to prove this bold assertion.

The closest that anyone comes, at least in the literature search I made, was from the “Abduction Code of Conduct” published in the Journal of UFO Studies. The authors wrote, “As there exist a number of possible causes for a reported abduction experience, investigators and MHPs [Mental Health Professionals] may work with individuals whose reported experiences stem from a variety of factors…abduction experiencer… simply indicates someone who reports experiences in their (sic) life which are consistent with, suggestive of, or thought to be associated with being ‘abducted’ (i.e., ‘carried or led away… in secret or by force,’) by apparently nonhuman entities.” What this suggests is that an abductee is anyone who reports that he or she is an abductee. It tends to validate our sample because those we used were those who reported they were abductees.

Unlike most of those other researchers, we did not advertize in the backs of books, or in magazines, or on radio programs, suggesting those with specific types of symptoms to write or call to expand our database. Those used in our survey were those who had been identified by other, the “true” abduction researchers. They were the ones who attended the UFO conferences, the symposiums, and the local, small meetings, and those who had joined one of the many abduction groups whose purpose was to gather to discuss abduction. Many of them were names that would be recognized by the UFO community including those who have appeared on television, those who have written their own books, and those who have been featured in the books of the abduction researchers. We defined our sample by who they were and who had hypnotically regressed them. The flippant answer turns out to be accurate because “our” abductees were the same as those interviewed by Hopkins, Mack, Jacobs, Carpenter and many of the other, lesser known researchers.

I might point out here that, somehow, the selection of abductees has been turned on its head. We used those only identified as abductees, yet the other researchers advertize for their clients. Their abductees are “selfselected.” Their sample is not random, by the strictest definition and that could skew their results.

The size of our sample was 316 individuals. They were selected because they claimed to have been abducted and “true” researchers had validated their claim. Today, for some reason, everyone is screaming for our demographics, though in the past no one really cared about these numbers, random sampling or even the scientific method.

In the last few months I read again that there is no psychopathology in the abduction population because Hopkins tested for it. What is rarely remembered is that Hopkins selected the sample, so it doesn’t seem to be random and it was only nine individuals. Hopkins has said that he has interviewed hundreds and hundreds of abductees since he began his research. This would mean that the data he presented about nine individuals who were not randomly sampled are invalid. The sample size was too small and not properly selected. Somehow those facts get missed most of the time.

In fact, Dr. Thomas E. “Eddie” Bullard pointed out that the Hopkins’ test was of people who had “achieved a high educational level.” He also noted that “In this sense the group is neither adequate in size or suitably representative to indicate what abductees are like… Abductions may still have a psychological explanation, but it belongs in some branch of the field other than abnormal psychology.” Bullard agreed that the sample was too small for the results to have any validity, yet champions of alien abduction continue to cite these data.

Our sample was drawn from all parts of the United States and several foreign countries. Each individual was video taped, and each was asked the same questions in approximately the same order. We, or rather I should say Russ and Bill because they did the lion’s share of the interviewing, asked all questions that seemed relevant. We did not limit ourselves by our preconceived notions, nor did we worry about privacy issues because we do not plan to release the names of those who participated in the interviews. In our sample, all those asked sat down in front of the video camera. Some asked to have their faces in shadow, or to be backlit so that it would be impossible to recognize them. Unlike Hopkins, Mack and the others, everyone agreed to go on camera in some respect. In our sample we had one hundred percent cooperation. Each of those interviewed signed a release, each had the right to refuse to answer any specific question, and each had the right to refuse the interview on camera. This too negates the privacy issue that is now so important to some of these researchers.

Here again there are some interesting twists. Yes, when I first approached Pat Roach (who, by the way was self-selected), she asked that I use a pseudonym for her. I called her Patty Price to protect her identity. Within months, she had agreed to go on a syndicated television program and used her real name. So much for the privacy issue here.

The story of Sherry, as related in The Abduction Enigma, is also illustrative. Sherry wanted her identity protected. She wanted to remain in the shadows and have her facial features obscured, up to point. That point seemed to be Disney and the opportunity to appear on a program that would be aired nationally. On television she told a story that was somewhat different than that she had been telling her abduction researcher and that she had told Estes. Not only that, she dragged her daughter into the tales, telling how she had stood by helpless, paralyzed, as the aliens had medically examined her child. Sherry had appeared in front of the camera to tell her horrifying tale.

Finally, before we leave this area, and in contrast to what other researchers claim, Estes noticed that the abductees were often eager to appear on camera. The reason given was that the abductee seemed to believe that sharing the tale might help others and if that was the outcome, then the exposure to possible ridicule was well worth it. If Hopkins and others are having trouble finding people to appear on television programs to help advertize their latest books, then they simply are asking the wrong people. It has not been difficult for us.

One other point about the our sample is important. The range of ages is from 26 to 47. We all decided not to deal with children because the memories of children are easily manipulated as shown by a number of scientific studies. When you begin to interview children under five, the things you learn from them are colored by their sense of wonder and by “magical” thinking. They don’t understand causal relationships and everything is new and wonderful for them.

As children grow, they learn more about the world around them and their view of the planet changes. They learn that some of the myths of childhood have no validity, but they are still confronted by things that are new to them and information that is often difficult to grasp. An authority figure, whether a parent, a teacher, a police officer, or an abduction researcher, can lead them, often without intension, into arenas that are far from the literal truth. We eliminated this problem by dealing solely with adults.

Now, in what has become the strawman of our research, we found a disproportionately high number of homosexuals in our sample. One hundred and seventy-four of them expressed homosexual tendencies. That can be broken down into those who were bisexual (23 %) and those who had expressed a homosexual preference but who had not engaged in sexual activity for more than five years (29 %). Before anyone claims the percentages do not add up, remember that those who said they were bisexual could also be in the group who abstained. And no, we did not investigate to learn the accuracy of their claims. We accepted, at face value, their reporting of their sexual preferences and activities, just as the other abduction researchers have accepted at face value many of the selfreported facts.

Before we proceed, it might be illustrative to discuss how this discovery was made. It wasn’t a question of sitting down to decide to talk about homosexuality, but an outgrowth of the interview process. Russ Estes had asked about the gender of the alien creatures. He was told, by the females, that most of the abductors were male, but that the leaders seemed to be female. In early discussions, as these distinctions were being made, Estes asked the natural follow-up question which revealed the pattern of gender identity. Once the preliminary observation had been made, the question about sexual orientation, as an outgrowth of an attempt to learn the gender of the alien creatures, was added to the survey.

The statistic became important, not because it deals with homosexuality, but because homosexuals are over represented in our abduction sample. Depending on which psychological or sexual study is cited, the representation of homosexuals in the general population is between 2 and 10 percent. This means their representation in our sample is between six and thirty times what it should be. Given that there is no accurate way to identify a homosexual individual by outward appearances, it would seem that an alien race grabbing people at random would end up with a sample that is statistically within the norms of the general population. This is not the case, based on our findings.

Maybe it should be pointed out here that African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians are vastly under represented in the abduction population. Again, you would expect that all racial and ethnic groups would be represented as they appear in the general population, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. Yes, Hopkins, Mack and Jacob all say that the representation of these groups is normal but the individuals in these subgroups simply do not report their abductions. Of course, if they don’t report them, then we can’t know for certain that they are properly represented but I see no one suggesting that abductions researchers explain this abnormality. No one is asking for proof that these other racial and ethnic groups are properly represented in the abduction populations. Instead the pronouncement that these other groups are properly represented but don’t report their abductions is accepted at face value without questioning the validity of the claim.

All of this leads to a number of other statistical surveys that could be made. By changing the variable from sexual preference to college education, or incident of divorce, or religious choice, or right and left handedness, further statistical abnormalities might be identified, and that might provide clues about the nature of alien abduction. If another population, one which has no outwardly visible signs is overly represented, then we would have learned something about those who report abductions and that might provide clues about abductions in general.

And while we’re attacked for not providing precise demographic data, other abduction researchers are not asked similar questions. Using Budd Hopkins again, he has said that 20 to 30 percent of the abductees have conscious memories of their abductions so that hypnotic regression is not a factor. No one has asked any specific questions about this information. For example, what exactly does Hopkins mean by conscious recall? Does this mean a vague feeling of unease, the memory of awaking paralyzed and the belief that something is in the room with them, or is it just the memory of a vivid dream?

Hopkins reported that “Steve Kilburn” had a conscious recall of a vague feeling of dread about a segment of highway. Under hypnotic regression, this feeling of dread was expanded into an abduction experience. Is Kilburn counted in this 20 to 30 percent?

Does the conscious recall include what is properly termed sleep paralysis? Depending on the study used, as many as half the people in the general population have experienced an episode of sleep paralysis. The symptoms match, exactly, those Jacobs outlined as his typical abduction experience cited earlier. No one has asked if the abduction researchers have taken care to separate the abduction experience from that of sleep paralysis.

In fact, abduction researchers have claimed that sleep paralysis does not explain alien abduction. They cite differences such as those who were allegedly abducted while fully awake. That does not mean that a percentage of those now identified as abductees did not have, as the precipitating event, an episode of sleep paralysis.

I should point out here that we attempted to gain the cooperation of a number of abduction researchers in a general survey of sleep paralysis in their abductee populations. It seemed to us that such a statistical analysis would provide some independent corroboration of some our findings. Of our 316 individuals, nearly half reported an episode that mimicked sleep paralysis and seemed to be the event that caused them to search for additional answers. None of the abduction researchers were courteous enough to even respond with a negative answer. Instead they ignored our requests for assistance and this was long before the book was published.

We can expand our database by searching through the abduction literature. Hopkins’ tale of a man he called Philip Osborne provides us with some clues. Hopkins wrote, "I noticed his interest in the subject [UFOs] had a particular edge to it. It was almost as if he accepted too much, too easily." Hopkins believed "that someone with a hidden traumatic UFO experience might later on be unconsciously drawn to the subject."

Osborne called Hopkins after an NBC UFO documentary and said that he had been struck by Steve Kilburn's remark that anyone could be the victim of abduction. According to Hopkins, Osborne had been searching his memory for anything in his past that would indicate some sort of strange experience. Then, one night after the NBC program, Osborne awoke in the middle the night, paralyzed. He could not move, turn his head or call for help. The experience was over quickly, but it reminded him of another, similar event that happened while he was in college. That earlier event had one other, important addition. He felt a presence in the room with him.

Hopkins, along with others, met Osborne a few days later to explore these events using hypnosis. During the initial hypnotic regression, Osborne gave only a few answers that seemed to direct them toward an abduction experience. According to Hopkins, Osborne told them that he "had more or less refused to describe imagery or events that seemed 'too pat,' too close to what he and we might have expected in a UFO encounter."

During the discussion after the hypnosis, Osborne told Hopkins that "I would see something and I would say to myself in effect, 'Well, that's what I'm supposed to see.'"

And, in a second hypnotic regression session held a few days later, while under hypnosis, Osborne said, "I'm not sure I see it… I think it's my imagination… It's gone now."

Osborne, it seems, had recognized one of the problems with abduction research, had communicated it to Hopkins, and then had it ignored. Osborne was wondering if the "memories" he was seeing under hypnosis were real. Hopkins believed they were so took no notice of Osborne's concern. Hopkins believes in the reliability of hypnosis as a method for uncovering the truth. We, however, see those statements by Osborne as extremely important in attempting to understand the context of alien abduction.

The fact that seemed to be overlooked, once again, is that Osborne's initial experiences are classic forms of sleep paralysis. Even the belief that an entity is in the room happens in about eighty percent of the cases of sleep paralysis. While Osborne certainly has some form of conscious recall of an event, it wasn’t until hypnosis was introduced that the memories moved from those that sound suspiciously like sleep paralysis to those that are now a complete and full blown abduction. The key here, with Osborne, as it has been with so many others, is the use of hypnosis and the validation provided by the abduction researcher.

And now we reach the reports that can be classified as vivid dreams. Betty Hill remembered nothing of the abduction until she began to dream about it. On the advice of friends, she began to keep a journal of those dreams and when interviewed by UFO researchers about her sighting, told them of the dreams she was having. That aspect of the case, the abduction told through dreams, was virtually ignored until she, along with husband Barney, were hypnotically regressed. Then, because the memories were accessed through hypnosis, they seem to have been validated. The point, however, is that the conscious memories of the abduction surfaced through dreams.

So, there are a number of reports that represent conscious recall. Unfortunately, that conscious recall isn’t of an abduction itself, but of a dream, or possibly sleep paralysis, or of vague anxieties that emerge under hypnosis.

Yes, we know that Eddie Bullard, in his report for FUFOR noted, “Only a minority of cases include hypnosis in their discovery and investigation. For 212 cases the reports include no mention of hypnotic probes, and undoubtedly in most instances no mention means no hypnosis.” Of course, this is an assumption on the part of Bullard. Since his report was published in 1987, that situation has changed. But the real point is that we have no demographic information about where Hopkins obtained his 20 to 30 percent suggesting no hypnosis necessary for recall of the abduction event.

But all of this, the demands for demographic data and definitions of abduction are red herrings because they mask the real issue. In The Abduction Enigmawe addressed many of these issues, but more of the criticisms focused on either the lack of demographic data or that we had found an anomaly in our statistical sample. That is, the homosexual population was over represented. We thought this strange statistic should be reported simply because none of the other abduction researchers had explored this ground. When questioned about it, they thought nothing of it.

Overlooked, however, are the facts we uncovered about abduction research itself. These facts are mentioned, in passing, by other researchers, but the significance of them is downplayed. Searching the abduction literature, we found, expressed by other researchers, another part of the abduction answer. It was an answer that each of the researchers offered to explain the mistakes of their fellows, but a criticism that did not apply to the researcher making the claim.

Jacobs, in The Threat, wrote, “Many hypnotists and therapists who work with abductees adhere to New Age philosophies and actively search for conformational material. During hypnosis, the hypnotist emphasizes the material that reinforces his own world view. If both the subject and the hypnotist are involved with New Age beliefs, the material that results from the hypnotic sessions must be viewed skeptically, because their mindset can seriously compromise their ability to discern facts.”

John Mack said something similar. He said, “One of the interesting aspects of the phenomenon is that the quality of the experience of the abductee will vary according to who does their regression.”

Mack also told C.D.B. Bryan, “And there’s another interesting dimension to this which Budd Hopkins and Dave Jacobs and I argue about all the time, which is that I’m struck by the fact that there seems to be a kind of matching of the investigator with the experiencer… And the experiencers seem to pick out the investigator who will fit their experience.” This is, of course, a ridiculous explanation offered to explain why the investigations of a specific researcher match the data gathered by that researcher, but not necessarily that of another.

Mack then goes on to explain it. He said, “It seems to me that Jacobs, Hopkins and Nyman may pull out of their experiencers what they want to see.” Mack has just provided an answer about the abduction experience if he could understand what he implied. He has explained why Jacobs finds hybrid invaders, Hopkins finds alien scientists and Mack finds eastern philosophers. They pull from their experiencers what they want to see.

Evidence of this is seen from the earliest investigations into alien abduction. When I arranged for Dr. James Harder, at the time the APRO Director of Research, to use his hypnosis skills on Pat Roach, there weren’t many people claiming to have been abducted. His motivation was a validation of the Hill abduction. If there were additional abductions in widely separated parts of the country, Harder believed that the testimony would be persuasive evidence of alien abduction.

A close reading of the transcripts of Harder’s hypnotic regression sessions with Roach point to his leading her to the place he wanted to reach. For example, when Roach mentioned that she believed she had been examined by the aliens but didn’t really remember it, Harder asked her if it had been a G-Y-N examination. There certainly was no reason for Harder to limit it to that one specific kind of examination, other than his desire to validate the Hill case.

There is another point that is not evident on the tapes or in the transcripts because the intervals between the hypnosis sessions were not taped. These discussions provided some insight into the researcher methods. At one point, before the session in which Roach revealed she had been examined, Harder had told her of Betty Hill’s quasi-medical examination on board the UFO. It was in the very next session that Roach told that she thought she had been examined and Harder asked about the G-Y-N.

In fact, a close examination of the Roach case revealed where most of her inspiration could be found. Harder was inducing it during his questioning under hypnosis and in his discussions with her between those sessions. At the time, to me, it seemed to be a good technique because it assured her that she was not alone in her memories of alien abduction. It was supposedly a relaxing technique that reduced her anxiety. In the end, it was a subtle prompting that took Roach in the direction that Harder wanted her to go. I doubt that Harder realized what he was doing. I certainly didn’t see the harm in 1975 as we interviewed Roach.

I tried to find out how pervasive such coaching might be. Looking at the Herbert Schirmer abduction from Ashland, Nebraska in 1966, I saw that Dr. Leo Sprinkle, working with scientists from the notorious Condon Committee, had met with Schirmer during one morning to explain how they planned to proceed with their investigation. Notes and information about the hypnosis sessions were included in both the official report issued by the Condon Committee and in books written by Coral Lorenzen. Neither of those sources provided the answers that I wanted.

Working with Jerry Clark, we began a long distance investigation. We asked Dr. Michael Swords, who has been through the Condon Committee files, and who is quite familiar with the case, if there were any notes that would tell us what happened before the hypnosis session. Unfortunately, there was nothing available in that source to clear up the questions. Clark, who is friends with Sprinkle, agreed to approach him to see if notes or minutes or some sort of record of those earlier sessions existed. Sprinkle responded quickly to Clark’s request, but only to say that everything he had was published and he gave the same sources that we had already checked.

What I wanted to know, and what is important here, is how Sprinkle had approached Schirmer. What did he say to him about the reasons for wanting to hypnotically regress him? It would seem that if Sprinkle mentioned that he thought there might be more to the original UFO sighting, if Sprinkle mentioned the possibility of an abduction, then the session would be tainted. That is not to suggest that Sprinkle mentioned abduction, or that one of the scientists from the Condon Committee mentioned abduction, but there is no way of knowing this in today’s world.

If we extrapolate from the problems with the Roach investigation, the possibility of implanting memories by discussing hypnosis, and from Mack’s theory, we can see that each of the researchers is finding an abduction where nothing of the sort might exist. All we have to do is return to the initial hypnotic regression sessions, as published by the abduction researchers, and we find, time and again, how, originally, the subjects said there was nothing there. The researchers, however, using various techniques, “strengthen” the state of hypnosis and eventually break through the mental blocks erected by the abductors.

I think we need to note here that it doesn’t matter how skilled the hypnotists are, or how sophisticated the alien abductors might be. Everyone who tries is able to break through the mental blocks to learn all that the aliens try to hide. It would seem that an alien race who has defeated the problems of interstellar flight would understand enough human psychology to hide their actions if they wanted to do so. Yet their attempts fail as the weekend hypnotists, as well as though with extensive training, are able to learn the alleged truth.

Eddie Bullard in his report for FUFOR noted, “At no time in any of the reports on record has an abduction appeared out of nowhere to someone undergoing hypnosis for unrelated reasons.” Bill Cone reinforced that, saying much the same thing. In our survey of 316 individuals, all of them had gone to an abduction researcher. All of the individuals found an abduction experience, even when the reason for beginning the search was little more than a very vivid dream.

In a corollary, it should be pointed out that we know of no case in which someone approached an abduction researcher, was taken on, and failed to produce an abduction experience. Yes, we know that one researcher screens those who write to him, suggesting that he can tell the “nut cases” by the number of times confidential is written on the envelop and how much tape is used. The point is that all those who have been accepted have produced the required tale, with the proper elements that reinforce the specific researcher’s belief structure.

In one of the most important of the revelations in The Abduction Enigma, we found a clue about the nature of the abduction phenomenon and we have discovered why the stories, used as proof that abductions are real, seem to match so well. The researchers are directing the stories as they are being told. This observation was one that was made by Mack and Jacobs. There is no reason to reject it as an explanation. Both have suggested, as noted, that the researcher finds what he or she wants to find.

But, rather than discuss this revelation, rather than suggest that we have misinterpreted what they said by claiming it is inaccurate, they begin to complain about demographic material, source of interviews, and the fact that a disproportional number of gays were found in our abductee sample. These researchers and critics don’t know if our sample was skewed because none of the other researchers asked these basic questions. Instead they suggest that we were asking questions that were none of our business. This from people who are not mental health professionals but are using hypnosis and commenting on psychological principles that they have not studied and about which they know very little.

And if it is true that the researchers are pulling from the abductees what they want to find, and we certainly saw corroboration of it in our research, then hasn’t the case for alien abduction been seriously damaged? Haven’t we reported on a flaw that has been virtually ignored as researchers continue to gather data? If we are correct, then shouldn’t abduction research, as it is now conducted, be reevaluated to eliminate these problems? Remember, we are not the only ones to find this problem but we did suggest it as a major reason that abduction research should be altered. Instead of considering this possibility, the critics and abduction researchers begin to focus on demographics and trivia rather than confronting the issue.

Case study research, which is what the lion’s share of abduction investigation has been for the last twenty to thirty years has yielded all the results we can expect. There are now, literally, thousands of case studies, beginning in this country with Barney and Betty Hill and continuing to Linda Cortile of Witnessedfame. These latest studies provide nothing that is actually new or important but become one more stone to throw onto the pile. But case studies are not going to advance our understanding of alien abduction. Instead, they conceal understanding under a mountain of paper and transcripts.

The real point of The Abduction Enigmawas that abduction research has stagnated. Abduction research is caught in a cycle that allows for no new revelations or understanding. When we suggested that such was the case, when we presented evidence that such was the case, the attitude was to ignore these criticisms and attack demographic information that has little overall importance.

This report provides the sort of demographic information that other abduction researchers have refused to supply. It also points out where abduction research should go if it is going to survive in the future. We understand the case studies, we understand that the abductees are telling all the truth as they understand it, but we must now determine if that truth is of alien visitation or if it conceals something else. That was supposed to be the message in The Abduction Enigmabut too many chose to ignore it or fail to see it. They would prefer that we stay where we are, placing the unsuspecting under hypnotic regression in a thinly veiled attempt to maintain the status quo. Let’s look beyond that and move the research into an arena that can provide some answers and that will actually help those claiming abduction. To do any less would be to ignore the situation.

Sleep Paralysis and Alien Abduction

For those of you who might have missed it, I was at the 40^th MUFON Symposium in Denver (speakers panelists seen here). I had the opportunity to give a talk about using the scientific method to upgrade the evidence that we gather, but that’s not the point here.

During the question and answer period after my talk, someone, naturally, asked me about alien abductions. I pointed out that I believe that there is a terrestrial explanation for most abductions and like it or not, sleep paralysis is a viable answer to many cases. I attempted to make it clear that I don’t believe that all cases of abduction are actually episodes of sleep paralysis, but some are. I suggested that we needed to develop a protocol to separate sleep paralysis from alien abduction and was aware that some work along those lines was being done.

In fact, in a brief discussion with Kathleen Marden (seen here), the niece of Barney and Betty Hill, she told me that you could tell the difference because abduction descriptions were in black and white and sleep paralysis was in color. What she was saying was that because it was normally dark in the room when the abduction took place, the abductee described the events there in black and white. During sleep paralysis, which is often accompanied by the feeling that something is in the room, the descriptions are in color because this is, essentially, a hallucination.

That was an intriguing point and it suggests other ways to develop the protocol to separate sleep paralysis from abduction. But that’s not the point here either. Just a taste of something I learned at the Symposium, which proves the worth of such gatherings, but as I say, I digress…

I went out of my way to explain that while it was clear to me that some cases of sleep paralysis were offered as evidence of abduction, I didn’t believe that this was the end all solution. It was clear to me then, as it is now, that there will be many diverse answers to this problem and sleep paralysis is just one of them…

Or, I suppose I could say, “Get it?” Not all sleep paralysis ends with a belief that the person was abducted and not all abductions are explained by sleep paralysis.

I tried to make that distinction, but, of course, as there is in any large group, there were those who didn’t listen. They heard, “sleep paralysis” and then were so busy forming their response, they lost the rest of the message. They didn’t listen, and, of course, wouldn’t believe that sleep paralysis solved any case even if the witness came forward and said, “I experienced sleep paralysis and not abduction.”

To make that point, all we have to do is look at the knee-jerk reaction to Susan Clancy’s book about abductions and sleep paralysis (called Abduction: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens, if you must know). Of course, she was so busy trying to prove her theory that she didn’t bother to see the flaws in it, but then again, I digress.

The next day, one of those in the audience came by and handed me a short list of statements by John Mack that he thought refuted the idea of sleep paralysis. I told him that not only had I read Mack’s book, but I had a signed copy given to me by Mack. I didn’t even have to pay for it.

For those interested in such things, the inscription says, “To Kevin, with admiration for your pioneering work. All the best wishes. John Mack.”

So, yes, I understand that sleep paralysis won’t explain everything. But I also know that its part in abduction can’t be dismissed with a couple of words of derision. To understand abduction we’re going to have to understand sleep paralysis.

And when we dismiss sleep paralysis with a smart-ass response, then we’re doing exactly what we accuse the debunkers of doing. Not looking at the evidence. Not willing to learn something new. And not bothering with research because our minds are made up. After so many years of this, shouldn’t we be a little more open to solutions and a little less closed minded about the work of others, even if we don’t like where it is going?