The Andreasson Affair (15 page)

Betty:
I believe it
is
of God. But I still feel, who's going to believe me? I mean, I trust all of you and everything, but there is doubt in my mind that even you really believe me about an experience such as that, because it is unbelievable.

Could Betty's encounter with the huge bird best be described as an intense
religious
experience? One is tempted to propose that the stimulus for the event was Betty's strong religious background. This is quite possible, of course, and already we have some basis for such a suggestion.

Earlier we saw that Betty's Christian beliefs provided a desperately needed rationale when the alien beings passed through a closed door into her kitchen. “I'm thinking they must be angels,” Betty had said, “and scriptures keep coming into my mind.” Again, when the entities asked Betty for “knowledge tried by fire,” she showed them a Bible. When Quazgaa somehow produced four little books with blank, luminous pages, Betty automatically assumed that he had reproduced her Bible.

Throughout the abduction experience, Betty prayed within the context of her Christian faith, the very warp and woof of her life. Therefore, is it not possible that Betty's subliminal mind sought for theological meaning to an otherwise meaningless, terrifying, and painful experience? The very concepts of UFOs and extraterrestrial life had no place within the confines of fundamentalist Christianity. Perhaps, heightened by the effects
of hypnosis, Betty's subconscious mind accommodated and reinterpreted the troubling elements of her UFO encounter. The result? A vivid, relived compensatory dream.

This hypothesis might seem quite logical and appropriate at first thought, but it has a serious flaw. The experience, whether dream or reality, did not concern itself with some readily discernible aspect or symbol of
modern
Christianity. Quite the contrary.

Ray:
As far as you're concerned, there was no symbolic message or meaning behind these—things?

Betty:
Well, my sister and I were talking.… She had thought that she had seen that symbol someplace before, with the wings down. Some kind of Inca thing, Indian.

Ray:
The symbol for the United States is a bald eagle.

Betty:
But this had its wings down like this and my sister said, “That looks like a symbol that the Incas used, or Indians in times past.”

Ray:
On their uniforms they had what looked like a bird.

Betty:
That's right! [See
Figure 5
on
page 34
.]

Ray:
Was it the same type of thing?

Betty:
Yes, it was. It was the same type of thing. That's right!

Ray:
We have various symbols. We have the American flag flying everywhere.… I was thinking that maybe this symbol represented something for them. They thought that you would understand this, and then they seemed to explain it to you in a sense. They seemed to give you some kind of a message afterward—I was wondering if that was directly related to what you saw.

Betty:
Well, another thing—as I said, my sister Shirley looked up about the Phoenix bird.…

Indeed, upon investigation, we found that Betty seems to have witnessed the death and rebirth of the legendary Phoenix.
Collier Encyclopedia
describes a bird almost identical to what Betty reported:

Phoenix
, a legendary bird that builds its own funeral pyre and is reborn from its own ashes. Sacred in ancient Egypt, the Phoenix, which was always male and had a beautiful red and gold plumage, was fabled to live for 500 years or longer. At the end of that time, it built a nest from twigs of spice trees, to which it set fire.
Both the bird and its nest were consumed in the flames. Out of the ashes, a worm emerged
, from which the new Phoenix grew.
¹
[emphasis added]

It is interesting to note that the legendary Phoenix made its nest from “twigs of spice trees.”

Ray:
Did you feel any air or smell anything at all during this whole thing? Did you smell anything?

Betty:
I might have smelled something when that was burning.

Ray:
What was burning? The eagle?

Betty:
When that thing was burning. Sort of like a sweet incense smell when those ashes were burning—or whatever that thing was that was burning.

Smoldering spice-twig ashes would probably give off a smell like incense! Interestingly enough,
Collier Encyclopedia
adds that “The Phoenix figures prominently in
early Christian
art and literature as a symbol of immortality and the resurrection.”
²
[emphasis added]

Her confrontation with a mythical monster was unsettling, to say the least. Was there a relationship between the phoenix and the insignia of a bird on the aliens' uniforms? Exactly who or what was the
voice
? These and many other questions would occupy our minds for months during our lengthy analysis and evaluation of the Andreasson Affair. However, Betty's experience did not end with the bird. There was much more to come.

Betty's sobbing gradually ceased. From the expression on her face, it was obvious that her fiery ordeal was now over and something else was about to occur.

Betty:
Somehow, I'm being turned around. Oh, and that feeling is in my hands. “Oh, help me not to fear!” My hands feel—my legs and my feet. I'm going back on that thing [the track], and, ah, I'm stopping. And those angels—I guess—one is getting in front of me, and one is in back of me. And we are going along, and we are going through those crystals again. And the crystals aren't quite as shiny and like a rainbow as before.

We listened intently as Betty and the two entities retraced their original path via the black track. Betty began speculating out loud concerning the heaviness that she felt in her legs. It seemed as if the force that kept Betty glued to a position just above the track was also responsible for her severe physical discomfort.

Betty:
I think maybe why my feet are like that—I must be, uh, glued to that thing, because there are no railings and there's nothing holding me in. And I'm just gliding along that thing, and it's not very wide. Maybe it's so I won't fall off or something or other. Oh, my legs feel so heavy. And we are just gliding along on that
thing. And we're way up in the air. And that green and blue-colored atmosphere, it's just beautiful. Somehow, I just don't want even to leave. It's just so beautiful.

In a later debriefing, we tried to recover Betty's impressions of this odd landscape on this, her “second time around.”

Fred:
When you were in the green place, was there a sky?

Betty:
The green atmosphere was the sky, and then it was also blue. It was green—beautiful green—and it was also blue.

Ray:
Was there a separation between the green and the blue?

Betty:
No, the green and blue were mixed. It was bright, bright green—emerald green—and then it was like blue.

Fred:
Were there shadows? In other words, I'm looking for a light source. Was there a light source?

Betty:
I don't remember any shadows. The only thing that I remember is going in through the crystals. It was bright, and there was a rainbow all around, but going out it was not as bright, and the rainbow was much dimmer.

Fred:
Was there a horizon?

Betty:
Yes, there was. There was like a top, but it's funny because—ah, what we were traveling on had no girders or anything. It was just in the air.

Fred:
Suspended?

Betty:
Yeah.

Fred:
Did you feel weightless at that point?

Betty:
My legs felt heavy, my hands felt heavy. The rest of me just felt regular, I guess.

The hypnotic impression of the landscape matched her previous description:

Betty:
And, uh, we are just going along on that thing. I see water all around, and it's not as choppy as it was before. Oh, my legs feel just like bricks. Why? My hands and my legs, they just feel like they're stone. Ah, but it's like a sea, a clear calm sea. Oh, my
legs! And, uh, we are just going
down
. And I see mist to the side. And we keep on going. Seems like a long way, and I'm coming to—uh, there's that pyramid again. Ah, it has that white on the edges. And that head and those bridges, or something or other. I don't know.

Later, during debriefing, Betty elaborated.

Betty:
There was—uh, there was water that was very choppy when I was going, like a big sea. There was land, but it was, if you call it a horizon, it was like there was mist all around, but yet it did go into the green. The green blended into the green, and yet at times I was seeing the colors of the plants. I saw the color of the—the fish, bird fish. I saw the color of the pyramid, and yet it was green.

Again she obtained a brief glimpse of the city-like structure off in the distance.

Betty:
Off to the side there is some kind of—something like a city or something. I don't know what it is. It is too different than I've ever seen before. I just can't explain it. It's beautiful. Oh, my feet and my legs! I'm just going along and the atmosphere is getting green, all over the place—green.

As they came closer to the entrance to the red area, the transportation track continued to dip downward. Again, they approached the partition that divides the green and red realms.

Betty:
We are coming up to something that is [
Sigh
]—a veil? Or something. Not a veil, but a division of color or something or other, ‘cause we are coming to that red stuff again. We are just going down. We are going into that red atmosphere. It seems somehow there is a
circle
there. It is divided from green and the red—and it's, uh, like I've been in solidity. And all of a sudden I'm going into another solidity of red. And, uh, it doesn't feel solid, but it is solid. And it's red—very, very pulsating—like red. It's the same place.

Betty found it hard to describe the green and red atmosphere. As she later recalled while out of trance, each was so dense and prominent that they appeared like two solids separated by a circular membrane.

Fred:
Okay, I'm interested in the
red place
you went. Where do you think that was? Do you have any thoughts? Can you tell us anything about that?

Betty:
No, I think it's a place. I think it's a place, a particular place.

Fred:
Was there a sky there? Could you see a sky?

Betty:
Just the red atmosphere. It was solid, and yet it had air like this. It was like—I don't know how to explain this, but it was solid.

Fred:
Same color red everywhere?

Betty:
Yes, same color—no, no, I mean, how can I explain that? I don't know how to explain.

Fred:
What do you mean by solid? Like moving through water? Were you like under the water, and it was red water with light everywhere, and you were moving through that? Or was it like moving through a solid material?

Betty:
It was a solid, but it was—

Fred:
Like moving through the earth? Is that what you mean? Like you were going through ground?

Betty:
I felt just like I am right now. I felt the air moved about me, but I knew it was solid. It was like a—

Fred:
You were in a vehicle?

Betty:
No, I was just standing on that thing there, just gliding. It was just a track that you just stood on, and it felt like my feet were just glued to it. It felt heavy from my knees down—like two stones were there. I felt pricking, a constant pricking like pins and needles.

Fred:
And you were moving through something solid?

Betty:
I was going through something solid, but it seemed just like this.

Ray:
When did you think it was solid?

Betty:
When I came back. Not until I came back.

Ray:
This is the impression that I got: you didn't really talk about this “solid” bit until you realized that the green and the red had some kind of veil between them, and there was no mixture. It's as though there was something invisible that was keeping the red out of the green.

Betty:
That's right. If you took—okay, if you had a square solid block of red glass and then you had a green one, and you just put the two together. That's what it was like.

Ray:
Suppose you took a solid block of clear glass and you had an—I'll say an invisible force field, for want of a better term. And then, you put red gas in the left and green gas in the right, and you somehow could pass through that force field. Is that what you mean by solid—that they couldn't mix?

Betty:
That's right, they couldn't mix. But I don't know.

Ray:
Is that why you called it solid? Because they couldn't mix?

Betty:
Yes, they couldn't mix. There was a
circle
that allowed us to go through it—from the green into the red. And then from the red into that tunnel. Going back, I saw a corridor, and it just kept on whirling and whirling and whirling. We were going through it, but it had no sides.

Back in the “red zone,” they again passed between the square buildings with their grotesque occupants. Betty shuddered as they glided by the little stalk-eyed creatures.