Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (34 page)

One of Beth’s most crucial experiences happened in September, when she took a four-day holiday in the West Virginia National Park.
On her first day there, a huge golden bee appeared, which she dubbed Goldie, and which followed her around like a pet bird.

That evening she saw a fog bank up above her cabin, and felt uneasy.
Then she woke up and found herself in her bed; fully dressed.
It was the next day, and she felt sick.
When she removed her jeans, she was puzzled to find she was wearing no panties, which she had certainly been wearing the previous day.

Her car keys were missing, and the car proved to be in the middle of the roadway.
As she was about to climb into it, she suddenly remembered what had happened the day before.

The fog bank had ‘walked’ down the slope; then three grey figures had emerged from it, and the fog had vanished.
The small grey creatures seemed oddly familiar.

She grabbed her car keys and rushed for the car.
The three ‘greys’ stopped in front of it, and one pointed his finger at the bonnet.
The gear stick felt loose.
Then a thought came into her head: ‘Come with us.’

She agreed, but said, ‘I want to remember this one’.

They climbed to the ridge where she had seen the fog bank, then she was engulfed in a blue-white light.

She found herself in a room, and a taller ‘grey’ approached her—over five feet; it had a huge head perched on a thin neck, and black almond-shaped eyes.
He took her to another room, where there were three more like him; then she recalled that she had known him before, and that he was the ‘doc’.

Liquid was injected into her hand below the thumb.
When she cried out, she was told, ‘There is no pain’, and the pain went.
Then she was undressed, and a needle driven into her navel.
When she asked why this was being done, she was told, ‘It is part of the change’.
Later she was shown horses on a tiny screen, and told that they had also been ‘changed’.
So had cows.
Then the ‘doc’ told her, ‘You must eat only cow things’.

The creatures dressed her, forgetting her panties, and finally let her finish dressing herself.
Once dressed, she took a step towards the ‘greys’, and was immediately paralysed; she realised they were afraid of her.

Then she woke up in bed, fully dressed .
.
.
The ‘greys’ had allowed her to remember.

Her car refused to start, and a mechanic told her that the wires were all burnt out, and would be very expensive to repair.
Anna arrived the next day, and the rest of their stay passed without incident.

The story sounds, of course, as bizarre and incredible as any of John Mack’s cases, and even has touches of John Keel.
(The women began to receive mysterious phone calls, one of them in a language that sounded like gibberish, although each word was carefully pronounced; the speaker became increasingly angry at his inability to make himself understood.) And, when Budd Hopkins—who entered the case as a result of meeting them at MIT—hypnotised both women, he uncovered memories of abductions dating back to childhood.
What was even more incredible, some memories indicated that Beth and Anna had been abducted
together
since childhood, which seemed to suggest that their whole lives had been manipulated by aliens.
Hopkins was confirmed in the view he had formed as a result of years of study of such cases: that the ‘greys’ were engaged in some kind of biological experiment with human beings which involved implanting foetuses in the womb, and removing them when they were a few months—or weeks—old.

Anna had always been convinced that she had been raped by her father when she was twelve, when they were on a fishing trip.
She could not recall how her pants had been removed, but thought that something had been inserted into her, and that, when she cried out, the assault stopped.
Under hypnosis, she recalled this as her first abduction experience, during which her father was paralysed, and that it had resulted in the loss of her virginity.

If Beth Collings is to be believed, her family had been subjected to abductions for decades—at least since the late 1920s.

One of the most intelligent and perceptive of English ufologists, John Spencer, is inclined to doubt whether hypnosis is of any value whatever in abduction cases, on the grounds that it is too easy for the hypnotist to create false memories.
But, while this is obviously true, it is hard to see how this should influence our view of the case of Beth and Anna.
It would be easy to accuse them of a kind of
folie a deux,
and of simply being too imaginative.
Certainly, if a book like
Connections
is taken in isolation, it would be easy for a sceptic to dismiss it as fantasy—lights going on and off on motorways, voices on the phone speaking gibberish, grey figures in the bedroom.
Yet as soon as we turn from this to John Mack’s
Abduction,
or Budd Hopkins’s
Missing Time
and
Intruders,
or David Jacobs’s
Secret Life,
or the vast transcript of the MIT conference,
Alien Discussions,
it is obvious that
Connections
fits neatly into a far larger pattern, and that, if we are going to dismiss the experiences of Beth and Anna, then we must dismiss everything else.

It is often stated that the 1961 abduction of Barney and Betty Hill is the first abduction case on record, and that little else happened until Budd Hopkins began to uncover cases of ‘missing time’ in the 1970s.
In fact, one of the earliest recorded cases dates back as far as 1953.
Two women who preferred to shelter under the pseudonyms of Sara Shaw and Jan Whitley were awakened at 2:00 a.m.
by a bright light at their cabin in Tujunga Canyon, near Los Angeles; Sara knelt on the bed to look—and suddenly realised it was 4:20 in the morning, and she felt giddy and confused.
Years later, under hypnosis, she described how she and Jan were floated up to a UFO and medically examined by aliens, then floated back.

The well-known psychic investigator Scott Rogo decided that the story was pure fantasy based on Sara’s dissatisfaction with the lesbian relationship, but there is no evidence that this is true.

In 1957, there occurred the famous case of Antonio Villas-Boas, the Brazilian farmer who claimed to have been taken on board an egg-shaped craft, and seduced by a naked blonde.
Although it sounds preposterous, his story has been subjected to detailed investigation, and is widely accepted as true.
Villas-Boas later added that, in a second act of intercourse, the alien woman took a sperm sample, a fact that he had originally suppressed because it implied that he was merely being used.
(Barney Hill probably had similar motives when he asked John Fuller not to mention in his book that a sperm sample had been taken from him during the abduction.)

One of the most admirably detailed investigations of a sexual encounter with an alien was recorded by Hans Holzer in a book called
The Ufonauts
in 1976.
As a result of an advertisement in a UFO magazine, Holzer established contact with a pretty blonde woman named Shane Kurz.

She told Holzer how, one evening in April 1968, she and her mother—who lived in Westmoreland, New York—saw a cigar-shaped object overhead.
Later both women woke at 2 a.m.
to find the bedroom flooded with white light, which came from behind the house of a neighbour across the road.
Finally, the light moved up into the sky.
The neighbour verified that he had also seen it.

On 2 May, Shane’s mother realised that her daughter was not in her bed—they slept in the same room.
She assumed Shane had gone to the bathroom.
Later, she woke up to find that her daughter was lying on her bed wearing her robe, and mud-covered slippers.
Muddy footprints led down the stairs to the open front door.
More footprints led across the street to the field where they had seen the flashing light.

She shook Shane awake; the girl felt as dazed as if she had been given a sleeping tablet.
When she showered, she noticed a red triangle on the lower part of her abdomen, and a red line running down from her navel.

For the next few days she felt deeply depressed, and found it hard to sleep.
Her eyes were red and swollen, and, when she went to an oculist, she found that her vision had suddenly deteriorated.
She suffered from headaches, and her periods stopped.
Her hearing became abnormally acute—an effect noted by other abductees, including Beth Collings.

Shane’s periods eventually started up again.
But she then began to dream that she was in the field in her night robe, and that she was frightened of the UFO that hovered above her.
In the dream a spotlight beam comes from the bottom of the ship, and she is floated up through a hole underneath.

Not long before she went to see Holzer, she woke up late, and noticed that her neck and face seemed to be heavily sunburnt.
Again, she felt as though she had been drugged.

Holzer placed her under hypnosis, and Shane was able to recall the night in 1968 when she woke up with a feeling that someone was calling her name.
‘I see this light and I want to get up’.

She sees the saucer, with a revolving rim, hanging above her, and she is ‘floated’ aboard.
Then she is in a white room, and a small man wearing a kind of motorcycle jacket comes in.
He asks her to lie on the table, and she refuses.
He tells her to undress, then explains that he wants her to have a baby.
She feels impelled to lie down.
Then a long needle punctures her stomach.

After that, some kind of jelly is rubbed on her body, and she feels sexually stimulated.
Finally, the naked man lies on top of her and makes love to her.
‘I feel terrible .
.
.
I am enjoying it’.
Shane had been a virgin until then.
Afterwards, she accuses the man of raping her, and he tells her she will forget it.
She is dressed and floated down to the ground again.

What happened to the pregnancy?
Holzer never found out.
Shane had nightmares that made her refuse to submit to further hypnosis, so the case remained incomplete.
But, since her periods came back, the assumption—based on other cases—is that she was abducted again and the foetus removed.

Ten years after Holzer’s hypnosis of Shane Kurz, Budd Hopkins encountered a case that was in many ways similar.

After the publication of
Missing Time
in 1981, Hopkins was contacted by a woman named Kathie Davis (real name Debbie Tomey), who lived in Copley Woods, near Indianapolis.
She sent him colour photographs, in which he immediately recognised typical signs of UFO landing—notably, a burnt circle of grass about eight feet in diameter.
In July 1983, Kathie’s mother had seen a bright light that had moved over the lawn.
The dog hid under the car.
That night, the grass was burnt, and nothing would grow there.

Kathie Davis also spoke of her sister Laura, who had felt a curious compulsion to drive into a car park, where she had seen ‘something silver’ hovering over a telegraph pole.
Then, hours later, she found herself driving home in the dark.

Ten years later, Laura went to a hypnotist to lose weight, and that night found she was deaf and dumb.
Hopkins reasoned that the hypnosis had probably awakened the abduction experience that had taken place in the car park.

Kathie herself had experienced missing time as a teenager, when she and two girlfriends had seen a UFO hovering over their car one night; the next thing she remembered was arriving home at dawn.

Yet some of Kathie’s experiences make us aware that, in abduction experiences, it is often hard to separate reality and unreality.
One night, she drove to an all-night food store to get a drink.
When she returned, she realised that she had still not bought anything to drink.
She turned and drove back, and saw some large, brightly lit object in the sky, which she took to be an advertising balloon.
After this, she went into the store, but the man she saw there was not the assistant who usually served her, and she recognised that the store was not a store, but some kind of spacecraft.
Later that night, Kathie believes she had an abduction experience, and that so did her mother.
It seems clear that the ‘aliens’ have the power to blur the sense of reality and make it dreamlike.