Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (37 page)

Although it is true that
Witnessed
seems to demand a suspension of disbelief that is well beyond the average reader, this is largely due to the fact that ‘its implications exploded almost exponentially’, as Stacy puts it.
What looks like a highly convincing case of a well-witnessed abduction begins to look more and more incredible when we learn that the witnesses were also abducted, and that one of them had known Linda—in some spacecraft—since she was four years old, and later impregnated her.

But then, we have already encountered something of the sort in the case of Beth Collings and Anna Jamerson, who met by chance as children, and came to believe that they had been abducted together in childhood.
And, in this case, we are being asked to believe that the abductions took place over several generations, and are still going on.

The ‘aliens’ told Patrolman Herb Schirmer as long ago as 1967 that they were conducting biological experiments with human beings, and six years earlier they had taken a sperm sample from Barney Hill, and, four years before that, taken sperm from Antonio Villas-Boas.
So it seems fairly clear that—assuming we accept the reality of aliens—the UFO beings are interested in human reproduction.

It also seems clear, from the number of abductees who have been shown scenarios of the end of the world, that the aliens are interested in warning us about the dangers of destroying ourselves.
In a hypnosis session of October 1993, Anna Jamerson foretold a ‘holocaust’, and said that it had already started.
It would get ‘really bad’ in 1997.
I am writing this in August 1997, and have not noticed any holocaust that began in 1993 and has got worse recently.
So it seems possible that, where these prophecies of doom are concerned, the aliens are, as Jacques Vallee suggests, ‘messengers of deception’.
On the other hand, pollution of the sea and atmosphere means that there
is
deep and immediate cause for concern, and adds plausibility to the notion that aliens may be warning us to take thought before it is too late.

Hopkins, oddly enough, rejects this notion:

Everything I have learned in twenty years of research into the UFO abduction phenomenon leads me to conclude that the aliens’ central purpose is not to teach us about taking better care of the environment.
Instead, all of the evidence points to their being here to carry out a complex breeding experiment in which they seem to be working to create a hybrid species, a mix of human and alien characteristics.
A careful reading of the various witnesses’ accounts suggests that here, as in many earlier cases, reproductive issues appear far more frequently than alien ecological concerns.
Indeed, apart from the suspicious Lady of the Sands scenario, references to the environment are virtually nonexistent in the Linda Cortile case.
But the possibility Richard raised—that the aliens may need a safer environment on Earth in order to carry out their own central agenda—is not to be dismissed.
Crudely put, one wants the hotel one stays in to be clean.

(
Intruders
, 1987)

John Spencer, on the other hand, has written:

The somewhat reductionist and simplistic view that alien astronauts are capturing literally thousands of people all over the world, over long periods of time, and performing genetic and sexual acts on them, as part of a programme of genetic engineering, seems to be the product of the science-fiction culture that gave us flying saucers in the first place.
It is my view .
.
.
that this scenario is created by the mostly accidental misuse of hypnosis .
.
.
[1]

Yet such a view—which amounts to dismissing the whole abduction phenomenon as some kind of mass hysteria—is hardly consistent with the facts: such facts as women finding themselves pregnant, having their pregnancy confirmed by a doctor, then suddenly being no longer pregnant; or such facts as a whole family waking up at the same time with a nosebleed from the right nostril.

In any case, many abductees recall their experience without hypnosis.
This wholesale attempt to make the abduction phenomenon go away has much in common with the attempt in the 1950s and 1960s to make the UFO phenomenon go away by talking about temperature inversions and weather balloons.
We have already seen what happened to that attitude in the 1960s, with the Condon Committee, Hynek’s ‘conversion’, and the seminal books of Jacques Vallee.
The explanation, whatever it turns out to be, is certainly not that everybody was suffering from delusions.
In fact, John Spencer undermines his own case in the long section on ‘The Abduction Phenomenon’ in his important book
Perspectives.
After a long and critical account of Budd Hopkins’s
Intruders,
he goes on to describe his own investigation of a case in Vallentuna, Sweden.

On Saturday, 23 March 1974, a man Spencer calls Anders left a political celebration and decided to walk home, about five kilometres (three miles) away.
He had drunk a few glasses, but was still sober.
It was a starry, moonlit night, and he decided to take a short cut that led over a hill.
As he was climbing, a bright light came from behind, and, thinking it was a fast car, he moved off the road on to the grass and flung himself down—and realised that it was not a car: the light was right over him.

Then he found himself outside his home at a place called Lindholmen, and his wife opened the door to his frantic ringing.
He was bleeding from a wound in the forehead, and his cheek was burnt.

The next day he called the National Defence and was advised to contact a man called Hardy Brostrom, of the Home Guard, who was later to impress Spencer as a sober and thorough investigator.
A UFO investigator called Stan Lindgren advised Anders to try hypnotic regression.

Under hypnosis, Anders remembered that he did not actually hit the ground.
Some force lifted him into the air.
He was then sucked into a vehicle by four ‘semi-transparent entities’ looking a little like Indians, but with no nose or ears.
(He thought they could have been wearing hoods.) They were surrounded by a hazy glow.
They approached him with some kind of ‘instrument’, which Anders would not describe, and he gathered that they intended to pierce him, and fought hard.
In spite of that, the instrument was placed against his forehead, and caused a burning pain.
After that, the aliens delivered him to his home.

There was no ‘missing time’: the walk would have taken him three-quarters of an hour, so the lift home meant that he arrived there about when he intended to.

Anders objected to the hypnotic sessions.
But Brostrom found a way of overcoming his increasing unwillingness to help the investigation by introducing him to a man called Bertil Kuhlemann, who was on the staff of a scientific institution (and who later introduced Spencer to the case).
And Bertil unearthed other witnesses.

A woman cyclist had seen the light at exactly the time Anders had been abducted.
Two men independently saw a metal object in the field where Anders had his encounter.
A woman and her fiancé, driving towards the spot, saw what they thought was a new water tower with lights shining out of its windows; later they saw that there was no water tower at the spot.
There were numerous other sightings of a bright light the following night, including one of a bright yellow-white object that travelled over the forest and lit up the sky, moving off at a great speed.
Televisions blacked out or showed interference, and telephones misfunctioned.
And there were many more sightings over the next two years.

What is clear is that, in spite of the fact that Anders submitted to hypnotic regression, there was abundant evidence to show that the abduction was genuine.

Anders and investigator Arne Groth were inclined to believe that Anders was somehow under the influence of the ‘aliens’ from the moment he left the political celebration.
This may or may not be so.
What is significant is that Anders felt that the encounter had, according to Spencer, ‘given him a feeling of one-ness, of unity, with the Earth itself’.

The ‘instrument’ used by the aliens had left a scar on Anders’s forehead.
When he placed his left hand over the scar he felt a pricking, stinging sensation inside his head.

Groth had been studying the theories of Baron von Reichenbach, who discovered that certain people—particularly ‘sick sensitives’—were responsive to magnets and crystals; one girl could tell when a magnet was uncapped even through a thick wall.
(Reichenbach thought he had discovered a so-far unknown ‘odic force’.) Groth found that Anders was sensitive to magnets at a distance of eight inches to a foot, and to rock crystal from six or seven feet.
They gave Anders a stinging or sucking sensation in his head.

Anders clearly had some kind of paranormal talent, and felt that it had been heightened by his UFO experience.

A year later, Anders had a dream in which he heard the words, ‘Search in yttrium’.
He thought yttrium was a place, but Groth knew it was a rare metallic element.
Groth obtained some and tried it on Anders; the effects were very powerful, and Anders felt something like an electric current.

Groth discovered ‘lines’ in Anders’s body, similar to acupuncture lines, and that these were also sensitive to yttrium.
Groth believed that his attention had been ‘directed’ to these lines of enquiry by the entities who had abducted Anders, and that their purpose was that Anders should enjoy a better association with the Earth.
(Anders felt that the aliens were not extraterrestrials, but from Earth.)

Anders discovered that he could move a compass needle by passing his hand over it, and that he could cause ‘patterns of force’ to appear in iron filings placed on his stomach.

Anders told John Spencer that he could dowse—not only for water, but for ‘Earth force’.
To demonstrate this, he got Spencer to hold a dowsing rod and placed him over an energy line.
Nothing happened until Anders placed his hand nine inches above the rod, when Spencer felt a surge of energy, and the rod bent down, in spite of his efforts to resist.

Anders had dowsed the abduction site, and found that it was the convergence point of many lines of force (what are in Britain known as ley lines).
There was also an ancient runic stone circle.
Anders was able to see the aura of the Earth, which in places, he said, had diminished from a living blue or violet to a dull brown, a sign of pollution.

In one interesting experiment, Groth and Anders stood in their separate homes, twenty kilometres apart—that is, about twelve and a half miles.
One would touch gold, yttrium or a magnet with his rock crystal, and the other would know which had been touched.
There were witnesses at both homes and the connection was established by telephone.

Spencer takes up the suggestion of Budd Hopkins that the purpose of ‘implants’ (like a ball in the nose) is to enable the aliens to contact the abductees subsequently—in other words, that it is a little like game wardens tagging an animal with a device that gives off a radio signal.
Spencer adds that it ought to be possible to do it with the energy lines of each individual.

Significantly, a study of Anders’s biorhythms revealed that he had been abducted at the exact moment when the three energies—physical, emotional and intellectual—peaked at a triple maximum, which happens only once every forty-six years.
The implication is that Anders had been carefully selected for the abduction, and with some specific purpose involved with increasing certain paranormal abilities—a claim also made by Uri Geller.

Another implication is that the abductors meant no harm: on the contrary, they were trying to increase the powers and sensitivity of one human being.

This seems to be supported by another case Spencer looked into: of a Swedish woman called Kathryn Howard.

Like Anders, Kathryn felt that her experience had changed her, and that she had been ‘born that day’.

In April 1969, she was out in the Swedish countryside with two men, Harvey and Martin.
It happened around midday, and the three have no further memory until they found themselves sitting on a sofa in the home of one of them at 11:00 at night.

All three were highly ‘politically conscious’, and they were sitting in a meadow on a beautiful spring day discussing Vietnam and Biafra.
Kathryn began to cry as she thought about the indifference of the civilised world to the sufferings of the masses.
Then she and Martin looked up and saw an oval-shaped object with ‘legs’ against the sky.
She asked, ‘What’s that?’
A moment later, it vanished.
Then she and Martin seem to have had a kind of vision.
There was no longer blue sky, but ‘a kind of colourless, almost fluidic, grey eternity’, and against this background they saw the moon, as if at close quarters, with all its craters clearly visible.
Martin could see it, but Harvey thought they were playing a joke on him.
Kathryn said, ‘We are sitting in the universe’.
She later said, ‘As I said that, the Earth seemed to be expanding in front of my eyes.
It was enormous and round’.
She began to walk around, and said, ‘I am walking upside down, sideways, every which way.
The only thing that keeps me here is gravity’.
And, as she spoke, she seemed to understand gravity.
The Earth continued to expand, and she seemed to be above it as well as standing on it.
Then she heard a beating sound, like the heart through a stethoscope, except much slower.
She knew this to be the rhythm of the universe.