Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (41 page)

He told friends at work, but was laughed at.
Then snatches of memory began to return—memory of small creatures and some kind of UFO.
He contacted the sheriff’s department, and an investigator there put him in touch with a hypnotist.

Under hypnosis he recalled that the experience had started when he saw a small man, about four feet tall, wearing a ‘sparkly blue metallic suit’.
This being stepped into a kind of transparent egg with a device like a helicopter blade on top.
Another similar creature came out of the woods, and both of them flew above the trees in these one-man helicopters.
A large UFO then descended at such speed that he thought it was going to crash; in fact, it hung suspended above the trees, causing a kind of whirlwind.
He then became aware of ‘specks’ in the air like the ‘snow’ on an old black-and-white TV set; these suddenly came together into a shape like a wolf, which moved swiftly towards him; as it reached him he received an electric shock.
He was aware that the wolf was some kind of illusion.
The same thing happened several times.
Then he saw a Sasquatch being lowered from the craft on a cable—presumably to intimidate him.
(The evidence of hundreds of sightings make it clear that the UFO denizens are nervous of humans.)

After that, he remembered—dimly—being taken aboard the craft, and being paralysed by a kind of mild electric current.
He could recall a radio, from which there came the sound of voices speaking many languages, including English and Russian.
Then he recalled a man with a shaved head who removed Steve’s eyeball to examine it.
His next clear memory was of being back on the ground, and seeing the Sasquatch walk out of the trees—apparently all other memories had been blotted out.

The sheriff’s office had told Steve Bismarck that they had appointed an investigator because so many people were reporting strange lights and unusual animal deaths.
Linda Howe quotes a man named Dwain Wright, a UCLA graduate, who describes how, in 1980, he and a friend were in Sand Springs, Oregon, a place where, in the previous year, Wright had found a dead cow lodged in the upper limbs of a huge Ponderosa pine.
They met a cowboy who asked, ‘Do you believe in flying saucers?’
When Wright said he did, the cowboy told him, ‘Well, they come across the desert here at night.
I want to show you something’.
He then took them to a dead bull that had dented the ground as if it had fallen from a great height; it had been castrated, and various other organs were missing.
The cowboy told them that coyotes would not touch these mutilated animals, and even flies failed to congregate around them.
The cowboy had seen cattle floated up off the ground, into glowing discs.

High Strangeness
is certainly one of the most extraordinary books ever written on the subject of UFOs.
Some of its bewildering suggestions are presaged in the opening chapter, ‘Military Voices’, containing interviews with military personnel who claim to have had encounters with aliens, and had often been debriefed by military intelligence.
One of them is a staff sergeant who was at the Bentwaters Air Force Base in Rendelsham Forest, in Sussex, UK, when a famous ‘close encounter’ took place during Christmas 1980.
That a UFO was seen at close quarters was acknowledged publicly by the deputy base commander, Lt.
Col.
Charles Halt.

Staff Sergeant James Penniston claims not only to have seen the UFO at close quarters, but to have touched raised symbols on its surface, from which he received some kind of information.
This seems to have been received telepathically.
Penniston recalled under hypnosis that the UFO entities were engaged in research.
Asked, ‘To help them with what?’
Penniston replied, ‘Themselves.
They are time travellers.
They are us .
.
.
From the future’.
The entities, Penniston said, are here to take chromosomes, mainly from the head and stomach.
Asked why, he replied, ‘They are in trouble’.

This notion that the UFO entities are time travellers from the future occurs a number of times in
High Strangeness.
Penniston explains later that the entities can travel only backward in time, because it is impossible to travel into the future.
But a moment later he makes it clear that he means the future of the entities, not
our
future.
And this raises obvious contradictions.
Why should they be able to travel backward and forward in
our
time, but not into their own future?

In fact, the whole notion of time travel will strike most people as self-evidently absurd.
If I reverse a film showing a child falling down, I can make him stand up again.
But life is not a film; it seems to be ‘for real’.
Besides, if I could travel back to yesterday, I could speak to the ‘me’ of yesterday, and perhaps even persuade him to come back with me into tomorrow—in fact, I could accumulate billions of ‘me’s’, one for every instant of my life.
(This notion, as we shall see in the last chapter, is known as the ‘many-worlds’ interpretation of quantum theory.)

But no sooner have we dismissed time travel than we recall cases of precognition, and of time slips into the past, which seem to leave no doubt that time is rather more strange and complex than our commonsense view suggests.
If the two women at Versailles can go back into the past, then perhaps the UFO entities can do the same .
.
.

Linda Porter, a Californian woman who contacted Linda Howe in 1991, told her, ‘They can manipulate time.
They can take a person out of our time frame, and keep him, or her, as long as they please.
Then reinsert them back into time so the person wouldn’t even know he’s been gone .
.
.’

The story of Linda Porter is one of the oddest in
High Strangeness.
Troubled by recurrent images of huge ‘grasshoppers’ and moving inside a light beam, she was referred to a hypnotist, but found the memories that began to return so frightening that she refused to continue.
But memories then began to return spontaneously—for example, of being inside the grey corridor of some kind of craft, and seeing a mantis-type being about eight feet tall.
She was then about fifteen.
On another occasion, she recalled being taken to some kind of undersea base off the coast near Santa Barbara where, above bright-coloured doors, there was writing that looked like Arabic or hieroglyphics.
(This recurs in case after case.) At the age of seventeen, she woke to find a hole in the middle of her bedroom floor, and grey, shadowy beings climbing out of it.
She also recalled being lowered down a shaft of light at such a speed she was terrified that she would die as she hit the ground; but she slowed suddenly when about four feet above the ground.

But her strangest story is of how she ‘changed bodies’.
When she was twelve, she almost died of a badly infected throat, and had an out-of-the-body experience.
Her parents did not believe in doctors, so she was left to recover without medical help.

Later, on board a craft, she saw a middle-aged man who was close to death, and watched as his soul lifted out of his body and moved to another identical body, which then came to life; she was told that the old body would be scrapped, since old bodies are no more than ‘empty beer cans’—that the ETs are amused by the human obsession with funerals.
Then Linda Porter went through the same process—her soul was lifted out and placed in another body, since the infection had damaged the old one beyond repair.

She was afterwards shown her former body, and an alien scientist held her heart in his hand.
The instrument he used to cut out the heart was a small silver-coloured tube with a blue light on the end, which used vibrations to cut the flesh without causing damage to the cells.

Linda Porter received the impression that the ETs who performed this operation were ‘trying to hide all this from some “higher” form of life—whatever the “authority” is that prohibits this soul transfer also prohibits them from interfering on this planet’.
This authority is much more highly evolved than the ETs are, ‘and wields a great power over many, many other realms of existence’.

Like so many other abductees, Linda Porter was told that Earth is in immediate danger because of pollution and destruction of the environment: .
.
.
there is a chemical poison spreading in our land .
.
.
the result of some kind of secret testing done by our government in outer space.
A dangerous by-product of that testing was created, and is now falling back into our atmosphere’.
It would eventually lead to a deadly chain reaction culminating in ‘ignition’ or ‘sky fire’.
(Linda Howe points out that Judy Doraty had told her something very similar in 1980.)

The language of the ETs, according to Linda Porter, is much more precise and compact than ours, and consists of ‘symbols that create emotions’.
These appear as three-dimensional holographic sculptures.
The universe itself is ‘built on sound patterns, which is why so many different worlds/dimensions can exist in the same space.
Each is on a different frequency .
.
.
There are countless different worlds/dimensions occupying the same space without being aware of one another, because of having their own individual octaves’.
(These ideas seem to echo those of Gurdjieff, or those of the Cambridge archaeologist T.
C.
Lethbridge.)

Like so many abductees and contactees, Linda Porter did not wholly trust the aliens and the account they gave of their purpose.
‘I still feel there’s something fishy going on, something they don’t want us to know’.

She also told Linda Howe that she had a ‘gut feeling’ that crop circles were a subliminal message.

One of the purposes of the abductions, she thought, was to bring the abductees to emotional maturity through fear.
‘When the person becomes thoroughly saturated with this emotion, it causes them to move beyond it’.
The people who had passed this test would be prepared for the time when ‘the great changes begin’.
But she also seemed to feel that abductees are themselves ‘aliens’.
‘We are like exchange students in that we were created to come here, and live an earthly life within the limited human experience’.
This seems to fit in with the notions that John Mack suggests at the end of his own book
Abduction.

Another abductee, Wanna Lawson, described how she and her family were travelling near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in two cars when they saw lights in the sky, and she seemed to hallucinate lights and figures, ‘swinging what appeared to be lanterns’.
Then, although the car was still travelling fast, her daughter Netta slumped over the steering wheel without causing the car to swerve.
Both cars pulled into a rest area and they found themselves on the New Jersey Turnpike, a hundred miles or so from Harrisburg—yet both cars still had full petrol tanks.

The rest of the family wanted to forget the whole thing, but Wanna and her daughter had vague memories of being examined by humanoids.
They submitted to hypnosis, and Wanna remembered a large room of humanoid bodies in glass containers.
Linda Porter had described the same thing.
Somehow, Wanna Lawson was transferred from her own body into that of a tall humanoid female—although she also recognised this new body, says Linda Howe, as ‘her own’.
In her new body she had sex with a male humanoid whom she recognised as a long-time companion.
Linda Howe comments, ‘The implication is that humanoid bodies were put on and taken off at will for a specific goal’.

This goal seems to involve ‘seeding’ the human race with a higher species, for which purpose certain beings like Wanna, who are actually aliens, return to Earth again and again in a kind of reincarnation.
The aim of what she calls ‘the watchers of man, the creators of man’ is to ‘take a sub-creature and evolve it to (their) level’.
One problem they have encountered is that ‘some humans are so evil that it just about cripples us [aliens] to be around them’.

At a UFO conference, soon after she met Wanna Lawson, Linda Howe gave a lecture on the different types of entity she had encountered in her interviews with abductees—praying mantis, lizard, Bigfoot, Blond Hairs, Greys, and so on—and was startled by the number of people present who also claimed to have encountered one or other.
And a man whose identity she conceals under the name Ken Rose spoke of being taken on board a craft and seeing three female human bodies in glass cases, with cavities where the stomachs should be; they were covered in a gold-coloured dust, to preserve them from bacteria, and seemed to be in the process of being constructed.