Secret life: firsthand accounts of UFO abductions (2 page)

The two natural approaches of which we can conceive would be the genetic and the environmental. Is it possible that through a vast hybridization program affecting countless numbers of people, and a simultaneous invasion of our consciousness with transforming images of our self-destruction, an effort is being made to place the planet under a kind of receivership? This would not necessarily be for “our” good if this planet, on which humankind has broken the harmony of being, does not exist just for our pleasure, but in order to arrest the destruction of life and to make possible the further evolution of consciousness or whatever the anima mundi has in store. I do not say that this is true or offer it as a theory. I would merely suggest that if we could allow ourselves to reintroduce the possibility of a higher intelligence into the universe, and experience the numinous mystery of creation, this scenario is consistent with the facts of the abduction phenomenon.

David Jacobs has written in this book, “No significant body of thought has come about that presents strong evidence that anything else is happening other than what the abductees have stated.” He has made his case well and has greatly enriched our knowledge of what the abductees have to tell of their experiences. We must now go on from here.

John E. Mack, M.D.
Professor of Psychiatry
Harvard Medical School

This book is based on the testimony of some sixty individuals with whom I have explored more than 300 abduction experiences, and it includes transcripts or accounts of my interviews with more than twenty of them. A complete explanation of the techniques I used, including hypnotic regression, is included in Appendix A; Appendix B is a list of all abductees with whom I have investigated two or more abductions. In deference to the abductees’ wishes, I have changed all their names, but I have included their active occupations and ages.

All the major accounts of abduction in the book share common characteristics and thus provide a confirmation of one another. I have not included one-of-a-kind accounts—no matter how dramatic—because no reliable inferences can be drawn from them without confirming testimony from other abductees.

Because the majority of abductees in this study are women, and because women seem to have a larger number of more complex experiences, I have adopted the stylistic device of using the pronoun “she” throughout the abduction event, except, of course, when discussing specific male experiences.

The transcripts have been edited for brevity and clarity, but the information and the meaning have not been altered. At the end of each transcript I have included the abductee’s pseudonym, age at the time of the abduction, and year in which the abduction took place. Unless otherwise stated, I have personally investigated all of the abductions described in this book.

David M. Jacobs
Temple University

On an August day in 1986, I sat at my desk waiting for Melissa Bucknell to arrive at my house. Melissa was a twenty-six-year-old woman working in real estate management. She had experienced dreamlike recollections about strange little Beings examining her, and she suspected that she might have been involved in a UFO abduction. She was coming to me to learn if anything lurked behind these suspicions, and I was about to find out firsthand what such abductions were all about.

As I waited, I reflected on how I, a trained and seemingly rational historian specializing in twentieth-century America, had gotten involved in investigating anything as outrageous as UFOs and alien abductions. I am a tenured professor at an established university, where the majority of my teaching centers on political and cultural history. I have never seen a UFO.

Like many people, I didn’t pay much attention to the subject of unidentified flying objects when I was growing up. Even though I was a child of the space age, Sputnik, and the program to put a man on the moon, I was never attracted to science fiction. But when I was an undergraduate university student, the UFO phenomenon captured my imagination. During my spare time I casually began reading articles about UFOs in newspapers and magazines. This seemed a harmless diversion, but it also had the tantalizing, although farfetched, prospect of being the “real thing.” Then in 1966, when I
as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, the diversion became more serious for me. The April issue of
Life
magazine contained a large spread on an ongoing national wave of UFO sightings. I picked up a copy and stared at the published pictures amazed: something had been captured in the photographs. What were these objects?

Now I was more intrigued than ever. I read a few well-researched books in which credible witnesses consistently described apparently artificially constructed objects that seemed to be flying under intelligent control. I studied several debunking books as well, but it was obvious that these authors had their own particular axes to grind. In fact, except for perhaps a dozen or so books that presented solid, authenticated data based on responsible investigations, nearly all that had been written about UFOs, pro and con, was loosely researched and poorly documented; it was, quite simply, worthless. Still, enough was there for me to believe that UFOs were potentially an extremely important phenomenon that precious few people knew anything about.

In 1966 I read John Fuller’s
Interrupted Journey,
the now-familiar story of Barney and Betty Hill, who claimed that aliens removed them from their automobile, gave them physical examinations (including a “pregnancy” test for Betty), and then released them. I thought this was a fascinating but highly improbable tale. The psychiatrist who had used hypnosis with the Hills to bring out the mainly forgotten story thought the case was an example of a shared dream, and I was inclined to agree, even though the aliens the Hills described looked very much like the UFO occupants that witnesses had claimed to have seen near landed UFOs.

In 1970 I joined several national UFO organizations and read their publications. I subscribed to the British journal
Flying Saucer Review,
which presented lively scientific debates and translations of the best articles from foreign periodicals. Even articles from skeptics, like Harvard astronomer Donald Menzel, appeared in its pages. The more I learned about the subject, the more adept I became at separating the wheat from the chaff. I began to understand the difference between good investigating and poor investigating, good research and poor research. I even began to do my own field investigations of UFO sighting reports.

Since my graduate training was in history, I began searching for
historical patterns in the UFO phenomenon. I wanted to learn how society had “handled” UFOs since witnesses first reported them in the 1940s. I wanted to understand the role that the Air Force played in the UFO controversy. I wanted to look closely at the aura of ridicule that has surrounded the subject. I wanted to know why only a tiny percentage of the population had any solid information about UFOs despite the fact that sightings had been reported for so many years. I decided to write my doctoral dissertation on the history of the UFO controversy, even though only one dissertation had ever been written on a UFO-related subject, and that was in journalism. It certainly is not a common history subject. Professor Paul Conkin, who directed my studies and who was considered one of the most rigorous and systematic thinkers in the historical profession, was dubious when I first brought it up to him. He thought that UFOs were more related to social hysteria and fads than to anything else, but he allowed me to go ahead with the project. I finished my dissertation in 1973 and published a revised version of it in 1975.

After I received my Ph.D., I began teaching at the University of Nebraska and then in 1975 at Temple University in Philadelphia. At the same time I kept up my research on UFOs, published articles, and gave papers on the subject. As I continued to work in the area, I became aware of a major problem with the direction of that research. The study of UFO sightings was progressing well, but some of the most fundamental questions about the phenomenon were nowhere near being answered. Why, for instance, were these objects here? Why, if they were extraterrestrial, did they prefer to fly about and not make contact with humans? The answers to these and other questions could not be obtained from studying the outside shells of the objects. We needed to know more about what happened inside the UFOs.

The only UFO reports that described the interiors of the objects and what happened in them were the abduction cases. But the few cases investigators had collected in the 1970s were so different from one another that it was almost impossible to tell what, if anything, had actually happened. Two men said they were abducted by elephant-skinned creatures with long, sharp noses and claw hands. Another claimed to have been abducted for five days straight and to have seen not only small aliens but a “human” one as well. A woman said that little Beings came right through her wall and transported
her to another planet. Some of the “abduction” stories involved benevolent Beings who had come to bring peace on earth and personal growth to the happy recipients of the contact. Still others told of prophecies of atomic destruction. Even though similarities existed between these cases—for example, all the abductees reported that they had been given physical examinations—it was easy to relegate this melange into the hoax and mind-game category.

Furthermore, there was the memory problem. Virtually all abductees suffered from a form of amnesia that prevented them from remembering exactly what had happened during the abduction. The preferred technique for retrieving these lost memories was hypnosis, but it was common knowledge that memories collected in this manner were not reliable. Indeed, some of the transcripts of the hypnotic testimony that I read revealed obviously leading questions and incompetent follow-up on answers. The lack of well-researched solid events did not inspire confidence.

In 1982 a friend introduced me to Budd Hopkins, an internationally celebrated artist who has been interested in the UFO mystery ever since his own sighting in 1964. Since the late 1970s Hopkins had specialized in examining abduction cases, and his first book,
Missing Time
, was published in 1981. In this pioneering work, he investigated a small group of people who he thought might have had abduction experiences. I was immediately impressed with his skillful research. Using a psychologist to administer hypnosis, Hopkins had collected data much more systematically than anyone had before. He meticulously uncovered important information about abductees having puzzling sustained lapses in time, mysterious scars, bizarre physical examinations, and screen memories (false memories masking what may have been abductions), and he even theorized a possible generational link between parents who were abductees and their children.

Hopkins’s work was excellent, but I found that the overall situation was still confusing. After all, people have always claimed that many sorts of strange events have happened to them. They have lived past lives. They have been in communication with denizens of the spirit world and even Space Brothers. They have seen ghosts, danced with fairies, and had near-death experiences with religious implications. To my way of thinking, all of this might be a demonstration of the mind’s mysterious workings. Perhaps these paranormal phenomena
arose from the human tendency to create folklore. Or they might emanate from a collective unconscious. In any case, psychology rather than objective reality would explain these stories.

The same might be true of abductions. The problem was that when I read abduction accounts I could get no real sense of the progression of events during an abduction from beginning to end. Most of the reports consisted of snippets of stories, beginning in some logical order but then either ending abruptly or swerving off into wild, fantastic flights of fancy. As a historian, I required a chronological narrative. Before I could accept a psychological answer to all this, I needed a clear idea of exactly what the abduction accounts consisted of. I wanted to learn the details on a careful, rigorous, second-by-second basis, beginning with an abductee’s first feeling that something extraordinary was happening to him and ending when the event was finally deemed to be over. I needed to be sure of my evidence.

I knew that if I were to make sense of what was happening, I would have to do abduction research myself. This meant that I would have to learn hypnosis. I had never hypnotized anybody, and it was a frightening prospect, but I was determined to learn. By 1985 Hopkins was doing his own hypnotic regressions, and he invited me to sit in on his sessions. I discussed hypnosis techniques with him and other researchers. I read books about hypnosis. I attended a hypnosis conference. I learned about the dangers and pitfalls of hypnosis.

Now Melissa Bucknell was on her way to my house, wondering if I could unravel whatever had been troubling her. She had written to Hopkins describing some of her unusual events and suspicions; because she lived in Philadelphia, he had referred her to me. I tried to exude confidence when she arrived, but underneath I was anxious. I had no idea what was going to happen, whether I could successfully hypnotize anyone or whether I could enable her to remember events in her past. Luckily, Melissa had been hypnotized before, so when I began the induction, she slipped quickly into a trance state. It was easy. The difficult part was asking the right questions, in the right manner.

In the first regression session, Melissa described being a six-year-old child playing in a field in back of her house with a friend. Before she knew it she was being transported into a UFO by aliens. Her
clothes were removed and a physical examination was performed on her. Her genitals were probed with a needlelike instrument. She felt that some sort of implant was inserted near her left ovary.

I was amazed. On the first regression, Melissa had spontaneously “remembered” being taken on board a UFO, being given an examination, and having her genitals probed. What was I to make of this? I had no way of being sure of the truthfulness of what I had heard, although the material she recalled was very similar to what Hopkins had been finding. I did not know what to do with this testimony other than to just note it.