The Andreasson Affair (33 page)

Twenty police officers, some with service revolvers and handcuffs dangling from their belts, sat in the classroom at Pine Manor Junior College eyeballing the goateed man standing before them.

Dr. Harold Edelstein was going to introduce the seasoned officers to a new investigative technique: Hypnosis…is a relatively new tool for local police. Methuen police detective Bill Rayno was introduced to hypnosis last May and used it on a case that was at a standstill after two years investigation. Three Combat Zone prostitutes had been found murdered north of Boston, one in Rayno's jurisdiction.

“We'd exhausted all leads,” admits Rayno. “Then a witness agreed to hypnosis and was able to recall time and details of a vehicle seen in the area where one of the victims had disappeared.” Today, Rayno is working on new leads.… During the Chowchilla kidnapping investigation in 1976, the driver of the school bus underwent hypnosis and recalled the descriptions of the three abductors, their van and five of the six numbers on the van's license plate. California, Oregon, and Alaska courts have ruled information obtained under hypnosis as admissible.

…The key to hypnosis is developing a bond of confidence between the subject and hypnotist. Edelstein doesn't use the stereotypical swinging pendulum to put a subject in a “trance.” Instead, he prefers to have a subject concentrate on a focal point about eyelevel as he counts backwards from five. At the numeral one, the subject's eyes are closed. Then Edelstein begins a monotone series of suggestions to relax the muscles in the body starting with the head. “By the time the whole body is relaxed, the subject should be ready to respond to commands,” said Edelstein.

…For witnesses or victims who might be traumatized by recalling an event blotted out of their consciousness, Edelstein advises police to use the hypnotic suggestion of viewing events through a TV screen. “He feels like a spectator of what occurred instead of having been ‘personally involved,'” says detective Rayno.… “Hypnosis doesn't put you in a trance,” said Sgt. Sid Goodman, of the Boston Police Academy, an early student of Edelstein's.… John Peters, staff executive to the Braintree Police Chief…says hypnosis aids officers to relax, build confidence, heighten sensitivities,
and lower anxieties.… Apparently, police departments around the state agree with Peters. Wednesday, 23 detectives will begin Massachusetts Training Council classes in hypnosis conducted by Dr. Edelstein at the Braintree Police Academy.

Extracted from Volume I, Section V, pp. 1, 2 of UFO Report CE-III/MA-77 (67-41A)

Betty's artistic ability, coupled with a vivid hypnotic recall of the experience, enabled her to reconstruct the bizarre episode pictorially. Some of the remarkable drawings reproduced earlier in this book depicted the physical appearance of her captors. We decided to go a step further. In early June 1977, plans were made to attempt to construct a three-dimensional head and shoulder bust of Quazgaa.

Because Fred Youngren's daughter, Faith, was skilled in the art of sculpting, she was asked to perform this task. Betty's drawings were employed as an initial guide in the preparation of a preliminary model. This was completed late in June. Soon after, Fred visited Betty at her home in Ashburnham to obtain her comments. Betty recommended changes be made to the eyes and to the cheek contour.

On July 16, Quazgaa's evolving head was unceremoniously carried to session 12 in a mop bucket for further examination and suggested modifications by Betty. Fred performed the necessary changes during the session, with Betty's guidance and final approval. By the next session, Fred had been able to make a hollow rubber mold from which he would be able to cast a number of plaster duplicates. A plaster outer mold was constructed to support the rubber mold.

By the end of July, plaster casts of the model began rolling off the assembly line. Sandpaper applied in the correct places shaped and smoothed the tiny busts in preparation for painting, the final step that would transform each into the fetus-like, staring image of Quazgaa.

Fred experimented with a number of shades of gray spray paint in order to obtain the right color and
wet
look for the skin. Obtaining the proper color of blue for the suit also was a problem. Finally, by the end of August, all colors had been selected and approved by Betty. A total of 12 busts were carefully painted. Betty, Becky, and each of the principal investigators were given one. It was an apt memento of the strangest case that I have ever investigated.

In addition, Fred Youngren discovered that the various rooms and corridors logically fit within an object of the size and shape Betty had described. (See
Figure 11
on
page 48
.)

Figure 41:
Fred R. Youngren's reconstruction of the craft. Drawn December 28, 1977
.

In his final report, Fred stated: “The internal consistency in the sketches that Mrs. Andreasson made for us over a period of months is great and provides them with a degree of self-validation. Even more important, however, is the fact that the combination of these sketches into a
coherent
craft has produced a powerful corroboration of the witness' account.”

It should be noted, however, that Fred's drawing assumes that Betty remained in the
same
craft. If she boarded a smaller vehicle that ascended and merged with a larger craft, Betty would have thought she was merely moving from one room to another within the same vehicle.

There are some hints of this—first, Betty's description of the size of the craft in the backyard retrieved under hypnosis during session three on April 23, 1977. When field investigator Jules Vaillancourt asked Betty, “How big is the ship?” Betty replied, “It looks small.” A craft of the size drawn by Fred would have just barely fit behind Betty's former house and would have been very conspicuous; thus, it is more logical to assume that Betty boarded a small shuttle craft.

Betty recalled the craft that she initially entered as a small room with curved walls. Upon entering, she felt weightless (“I feel weightless and icky”) for a considerable time (“I'm tired of just standing there”). It could very well be that during this time, Betty was experiencing the effects of rapid acceleration upward to rendezvous with larger craft containing chambers of the size and dimensions pictured by Fred Youngren. Betty then would have been examined, placed in the liquid-filled chair, and brought to the alien place by this larger raft.

The Andreasson case is an ongoing investigation. There are bits and pieces that we are still trying to fit together. Dr. Edelstein warned us that once the basic event was remembered via hypnosis we could expect further things to be remembered. And indeed, over the months, both Betty and Becky have been experiencing flashbacks of memory of segments of the event that we had not explored in the report.

For example, the possibility exists that a total of
five
(not four) aliens initially entered the Andreasson home. One alien may have stayed behind to watch over Betty's family during her abduction.

This conjecture is based upon some curious and previously unresolved statements Betty and Becky made during the hypnotic regression sessions, and also by Betty in her initial correspondence to Dr. Hynek. In this letter, Betty stated that she thought a total of “five beings in all” had entered her house. We sought to confirm this during the second hypnosis session on April 9, 1977. Let us now go back in time hypnotically to the time when Betty first saw the entities enter her home through the kitchen door.

Betty:
As they came through the door, it was like form after form after form.

Harold:
How many?

Betty:
Four, I think.

Harold:
I want you actually to look at them and count them as you look at them.

Betty:
One, one—they're kind of directly behind each other, so it—there's one, two, three, four, but it seems—

Harold:
Are you sure there's only four, and not five?

Betty:
It seems as if—there's—you know how steam is left behind? That's still there.

Harold:
Is that another being, or isn't it?

Betty:
I don't think it's another being. I think it's vapor.

Later, when Betty led the aliens from the kitchen into the living room to show them the Bible, she noticed that this “vaporous form” accompanied the entities.

Betty:
The Bible was right there on the end table.

Joseph:
Did you hand this to the leader?

Betty:
Yes, I took that—the leader came in, and the others came in with him, and they stood at an angle to the right of him, and I—

Harold:
When they stood at an angle to the right of him, they're all in view? Am I correct?

Betty:
Yeah, they're all in view.

Harold:
I want you to look at them and count them, and tell me how many there are.

Betty:
There's something strange there all the time because there seems to be a “shade” [a dark shape] or something I can't make out. I don't know if it stands directly in back of the leader, or what it is. It seems to be a shade or something. I don't know.

Under hypnosis, as it turned out, Betty could only see
four
entities in the kitchen and the living room at any one time.
Four
accompanied her to the craft. To further add to her confusion, when she entered the craft into the half-bubble-shaped room, there were a total of five. One was probably already in there waiting for them. She was very puzzled about this.

Recent memory flashbacks during the ongoing investigation paralleling the writing of this book have provided further information on this matter. Later, during a memory flashback to her experience, she came to believe that a
fifth
alien in the group had entered the house through the kitchen door. During an interview on June 8, 1978, Betty was asked to sum up her thoughts about this for the record.

Betty:
When they [aliens] came in, remember Dr. Edelstein kept on telling me, “Count them”? There was an additional one, but he disappeared over to the side. Remember the
shadow?

Jules:
Yeah, we thought it might be the mist.

Betty:
The vapor? But it was
his
vapor,
his
slot,
his
place, or whatever. I just saw them come through, and I knew there were five, but it was confusing because when they were standing there, there were four. When Dr. Edelstein kept on about counting them, I knew I had seen five, but I only counted four, and then there was a form [the shade] and this troubled me for a long time, you know? The
form
behind Quazgaa. There was a
form
there, not a person, but a
slot
. The other being had gone where my father was.

In other words, Betty thinks the “shade” was the vacated slot that the fifth entity had traveled in and that she had entered when she moved out of the house with the other aliens.

See, what happened was, the
other
being stayed in the house. A lot of different things are coming back, and I was mentioning it to Becky. She says that for months now, things have come back to her and there
was
a being left behind in the house.

Under hypnosis, Becky had originally told us that when she woke up temporarily from suspended animation, she saw her mother looking at the blue book with the aliens. Then she remembered waking up in bed the next morning. However, she also remembered seeing one of the aliens holding a white glowing ball of light; at that time, she could not recall when.

I had assumed that she must have awakened briefly when one of the aliens with the glowing ball put her to bed. This made sense because
during session 11, on June 26, 1977, as Betty described her family's state after being returned to her house, she seemed to describe Becky's brief awakening.