Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (39 page)

Sagan did not agree.
Three months later, Hickson and Parker appeared on the Dick Cavett show on television with Allen Hynek, Carl Sagan and Larry Coyne, a helicopter pilot who, together with his crew, had almost experienced a midair collision with a cigar-shaped object that scanned them with a cone of green light.
Says one writer who saw the interview:

Sagan went last, giving one of his standard, suave, debunking performances.
He took dramatic pauses to emphasise the scientific unlikelihood of interstellar visitation, chuckled dismissively in response to Hickson’s story .
.
.
and did everything but call Coyne a liar (responding to Hynek’s observation that ‘altimeters don’t hallucinate’, he rejoined instantly with, ‘I don’t mean to attack Captain Coyne, but people who
read
altimeters hallucinate’.)
[1]

By this time, the UFO phenomenon was displaying a new and terrifying aspect: animal mutilation.
On 9 September 1967, a three-year-old horse named Lady was found lying on her side on a ranch in the San Luis Valley of Colorado, her head and neck completely stripped of flesh.
Her hoof tracks stopped a hundred yards from the place she was found.
Strange lights had been seen in the sky in the past few days, and newspaper reports of the mystery mentioned UFOs.

By the 1970s, there was a wave of animal mutilations all over America.
Inner organs had been neatly and bloodlessly removed; so, often, had the genitals.
Newspapers spoke of ‘Satanic rituals’, but few Satanists were likely to be found out on the open ranges.

The cuts looked as if they had been done with some kind of laser, which seemed to explain the lack of blood.
(Surgical lasers were not in use in 1967.) An investigator who went to look at the site of Lady’s death months later noted that nothing would grow on the place where the carcass had lain.

At about the time of the Pascagoula abduction, a former air force security officer named Jim decided to retire to a ranch in Colorado, together with a business executive named John; his wife, Barbara; and their teenage sons.
In the investigation carried out by APRO (Jim and Coral Lorenzen’s Aerial Phenomena Research Organisation) and by Dr.
Leo Sprinkle (a researcher of impeccable reputation, who had regressed Patrolman Herb Schirmer), the three asked for their anonymity to be preserved.

They soon found that the ranch they had selected in Colorado was virtually haunted by strange phenomena.
There were electrical failures, sounds of someone walking outside the farmhouse, and sightings of ‘Bigfoot’-type creatures in the woods.

On 16 October 1975, the cattle were braying with alarm, and the guard dog was trying to get into the house.
John went out with a rifle, and saw a large lighted object hovering in the air.
He decided to go back home.
Jim had decided to go ‘hunting’ for cattle mutilators—for which a large reward had been offered—with a twelve-bore shotgun, but found himself unable to get up from the couch.
‘It was like paralysis, like I was drugged’.

At the same moment, Barbara experienced a sudden increase in her heartbeat, a sense of panic, and a flood of memories.
She screamed, and Jim managed to get up from the couch.
But he was unable to speak.
When Barbara tried to tell her husband about it, she could only stutter.

Sometime later, when it was snowing, they discovered a mutilated cow near the house.
Huge eighteen-inch footprints were found in the snow, and even in the barn.

The cow’s udders had been removed with surgical precision, and an eye and an ear were missing; there was no blood.

The incident was reported to a law officer in the nearest town; he promised to investigate, but never came.
When a second mutilation occurred two weeks later—a bull—Jim asked the officer why he hadn’t kept his promise.
The answer was that there was no point.
The mutilation was being done by extraterrestrials, and there had been about four hundred so far.
Jim, understandably, thought this was an excuse for laziness, and told the policeman what he thought of him.

A few days later, he was not so sure.
Visiting friends went to investigate a noise coming from a cistern, and fled in terror as a huge, dark shape came through the barbed wire fence.
Jim collected long strands of hair, and a Denver biogeneticist said they matched no known species.

Still Jim was inclined to believe that some real-estate man was trying to drive them out so he could sell the place to someone else; he began to sleep near the door with a shotgun.
One day, awakened by a humming sound, he rushed out to see a disc-shaped object flying past.
Another night he fired at a hairy creature and saw it flinch, but there was no blood.

One night, after more disturbances, Jim lost his temper, and swore, ‘If we can’t have this place, you won’t either—I’ll blow it up’.
And, when he later went out of the house, a voice speaking from nowhere said clearly, ‘Dr.
Jim, we accept’.

Jim asked the local lawman if he thought the boys ought to be moved away; the lawman said that, as far as he knew, no human beings had ever been harmed.
But Jim was inclined to doubt this.
He allowed two pilots to start putting an airstrip on the land, but, a week later, one was killed in a crash.
He heard of other people who had died once they enquired too closely into the mutilations, including a magazine editor.
After two Air National Guard interceptors crashed, the air above the farm was buzzing with aircraft.
(The land overlooked an air force installation.)

One evening, no fewer than nine discs landed within sight of the house.
Jim walked towards them.
And, as Barbara watched out of the window, she was struck on the forehead, and knocked unconscious.
While the others gathered round her, the discs vanished.
Jim reflected later that it could have been a practical method of getting him back inside and stopping people looking out of the windows.

One night, with guests present, a mechanical-sounding voice spoke out of the radio and TV speakers.
‘Attention.
We have allowed you to remain.
We have interfered with your lives very little.
Do not cause us to take action you will regret.
Your friends will be instructed to remain silent about us’.
One of the guests, a computer expert, dismantled the stereo, but could find nothing unusual.
(On the other hand, many radios—or even gramophones—pick up police broadcasts, so what happened is not beyond the reach of normal technology.)

Speaking again with the law officer, Jim learnt of an incredible incident.
On patrol one night, the lawman had seen a box with a blinking light, in a group of trees.
The officer returned to get a colleague—but by the time they returned, not only had the box disappeared
but the trees as well.

One night in January 1977, Jim experienced an odd compulsion to go to the top of a nearby hill where grass refused to grow.
There was a box on the ground with a light inside it, and it was making a noise like ‘a bunch of angry bees’.
Jim was with one of the teenagers, and told him to get back in the car.
By the time he went back, the box had vanished.

Soon after, Jim saw another light, and walked towards it.
He found two fair-haired men in tight-fitting clothes waiting for him, and one of them said, ‘How nice of you to come’.
(It sounds as if he had learnt his English from a phrasebook—‘How nice of you to come’ is laughably inappropriate under the circumstances.) Down the hill was a disc.
The light seemed to be coming from nowhere in particular.
And there was also a Bigfoot present.

The men, sounding perfectly normal, apologised for the inconvenience they were causing, and talked about ‘a more equitable arrangement’.
They told Jim that he had been sensible not to approach the black box, and illustrated their point by ordering the Bigfoot to approach it; as it did so, the humming noise changed tone, and the Bigfoot collapsed.
‘As you see, it is quite lethal’.

Oddly enough, Jim did not ask any of the dozens of questions he had in mind.
Yet he still did not think he was talking to aliens—he thought that perhaps some government agency was responsible.
After five minutes, he felt it was ‘time to go’, and went away, feeling ‘pretty rocked’, and wondered why they had wanted to talk to him.

When speaking to the investigators, whom they impressed as truthful, the three expressed bafflement about the whole bizarre story; Jim even wondered if he had been hallucinating.
This is obviously possible—with the corollary that it looks as if something was deliberately causing them to hallucinate.

The whole story—recounted in Timothy Good’s
Alien Contact
—sounds so fantastic (in the most precise sense) that the easiest way of dealing with it would be to assume that Jim and his friends are liars or madmen.
But the APRO investigators, a psychologist, an anthropologist and a seismologist, had no doubt of their truthfulness, or of that of the witnesses, while the nearby air force base had also had so many sightings of ‘Bigfoot’ that they had instituted an official procedure for recording them.

As in Puharich’s
Uri,
we note the strange phenomena of voices speaking out of the air or out of loudspeakers.
We also note Jim’s ‘compulsion’ to go to the hilltop, as if summoned—an indication that the ‘aliens’ can exercise the same form of mind control as (according to Rivail) disembodied ‘spirits’.

As to the purpose of animal mutilations—Timothy Good quotes one investigator as saying, ‘.
.
.
the mutilations, involving the extraction of enzymes or hormonal secretions—were said to be essential to the aliens’ survival’.

Linda Moulton Howe—whom we have already met in connection with crop-circle analysis—was drawn into the problem of animal mutilation and alien abduction by chance.
She had produced radio and TV programmes on medicine, and moved from Boston to Colorado in 1976.
In 1979, she began researching a programme on animal mutilations.
Oddly enough, the public was hardly aware that they were still going on—the initial publicity had died away almost entirely, and some people had never even heard of them.

She learnt that, only two years earlier, locals in Sterling, Colorado, had become accustomed to the sight of a huge white light in the sky, and smaller lights that were seen leaving and entering it so often that they became known as Big Mama and Baby UFOs.
A local reporter named Bill Jackson had pulled into the side of the road when he saw what appeared to be an enormous aeroplane about to land on the prairie.
What he saw fly over him, in complete silence, was a machine as big as a football field, with hundreds of lights—green, white, orange, and red—that ran in lines along it.
Sheriff Tex Graves tried tracking it down in a plane, but could get no closer than five miles.

Talking to locals about cattle mutilations and UFO sightings, Linda Howe soon began to suspect that they were connected, and subsequent investigation would strengthen this opinion.

When she heard of a Texas woman called Judy Doraty, who had experienced ‘missing time’ after seeing a UFO, she immediately contacted her.
It seemed that, in May 1973, Judy had been driving back from a bingo game in Houston with four other people when they saw a bright light hovering overhead.
She pulled up and found herself outside the car.
Then they all experienced ‘missing time’, although no one recognised it then.
Judy only knew that she got into the car feeling sick and very thirsty.
Back at home, they were surprised by the lateness of the hour.

Five years later, she decided to undergo a hypnotic session to try to bring back what had happened.
She then recalled seeing a calf being drawn up a beam of light into the UFO.

Later, under hypnosis by Dr.
Leo Sprinkle, with Linda Howe present, Judy Doraty described her experience in a way that suggests that it was neither wholly objective nor wholly subjective; it belongs, so to speak, to a third category between the two.
She recalls feeling ‘sick to her stomach’ at the sight of the calf having parts surgically excised while it was still alive, yet she does not seem to be in the UFO at this point.
She seems to be asking why they are doing this, and receiving the information mentally.

The aliens told her, she claims, that they are testing our soil for poison, and that for the same reason they are conducting tests on animal reproductive systems.