Extraordinary Encounters

EXTRAORDINARY ENCOUNTERS

An Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrials and Otherworldly Beings

Jerome Clark

B

Santa Barbara, California Denver, ColoradoOxford, England

Copyright © 2000 by Jerome Clark All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, inany form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Clark, Jerome.Extraordinary encounters : an encyclopedia of extraterrestrials andotherworldly beings / Jerome Clark.p.cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 1-57607-249-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 1-57607-379-3 (e-book)1.Human-alien encounters—Encyclopedias.I.Title.BF2050.C572000001.942'03—dc2100-011350CIP0605040302010010987654321 ABC-CLIO, Inc.130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911This book is printed on acid-free paper

I

.Manufactured in the United States of America.

To Dakota Dave Hull and John Sherman, for the many years of friendship, laughs, and—always—good music

Extraordinary encounters have been reportedfor as long as human beings have beenaround, and they are richly documented inthe world

’

s folklore and mythology. A full ac-counting of traditions of otherworldly belief would easily

ﬁ

ll many fat volumes. This book,however, is not about traditions but about ex-periences, or perceived experiences, of otherworldly forces as claimed by a wide range of individuals over the past two centuries (withthe rare look farther back if the occasion callsfor it). In other words, it is about things thatpeople, many of them living, say happened tothem, things far outside mainstream notionsabout what it is possible to experience, but, atthe same time, things that seem deeply real toat least the sincere experients (that is, thosepersons who have had the experiences). Noteveryone, of course, is telling the truth, and when there is reason to be suspicious of thetestimony, that consideration is noted.Mostly, though, I let the stories tell them-selves; I have left my own observations andconclusions in this introduction. Thoughmuch of the material is outlandish by any def-inition, I have made a conscious effort to re-late it straightforwardly, and I hope readers will take it in the same spirit. No single per-son on this earth is guiltless of believing some-thing that isn

’

t so. As I wrote this book, I triedto keep in mind these wise words from scien-tist and author Henry H. Bauer:

“

Foolishideas do not make a fool

—

if they did, wecould all rightly be called fools.

”

Most of us believe in at least the hypotheti-cal existence of other-than-human beings, whether we think of them as manifestations of the divine or as advanced extraterrestrials. Atthe same time most of us do not think of these beings as intelligences we are likely toencounter in quotidian reality. God and theangels are in heaven, spiritual entities whoexist as objects of faith. Extraterrestrials,though not gods,

“

exist

”

in much the same way, as beings who science

ﬁ

ction writers andscientists such as the late Carl Sagan theorizemay be out there somewhere in deep space,though so far away that no direct evidencesupports the proposition. When devout indi-viduals report feeling the

“

presence of God,

”

they usually describe a subjective state that thenonbeliever does not feel compelled to takeliterally.Of course we know there was a time whenour ancestors were certain that otherworldly beings of all sorts walked the world. Godscommunicated openly with humans. Onecould summon up their presence or encounterthem spontaneously. Fairies and other super-natural entities haunted the landscape as

Introduction

xi

things that existed not just in supernatural be-lief but in actual experience. We also know that our poor, benighted ancestors knew nobetter. Superstitious, fearful, deeply credu-lous, they mistook shadows and dreams fordenizens of realms that had no reality beyondthe one ignorance and foolishness assigned it.Finally, most of us are aware, even if only dimly so, that a handful of people in our ownenlightened time make more or less publicclaims that they have personally interacted with supernormal beings. Such persons arethoroughly marginalized, treated as eccentricand novel, as different from the rest of us; if they are not lying outright, we suspect, they are suffering from a mental disturbance of some kind. And we may well be right, at leastin some cases. As for the rest, we could not bemore mistaken. As it happens, reports of human interac-tion with ostensible otherworldly beings con-tinue pretty much unabated into the present.They are far more common than one wouldthink. The proof is as close as an Internetsearch, through which the inquirer willquickly learn that material on the subject ex-ists in staggering quantity. A considerable por-tion of it is about channeling (in which an in-dividual is the passive recipient of messagesfrom the otherworld, usually speaking in thevoice of an intelligence from elsewhere) froma wide assortment of entities: nebulous energy sources, soul clusters, extraterrestrials, as-cended masters, interdimensional beings, dis-carnate Atlanteans and Lemurians, naturespirits, even whales and dolphins. Besidesthese purely psychic connections with theotherworld, there are many who report directphysical meetings with beings from outerspace, other dimensions, the hollow earth,and other fantastic places. Not all of theseideas are new, of course. The hollow earth andits inhabitants were a popular fringe subject innineteenth-century America, and in the latterhalf of that century, spiritualist mediumssometimes communicated with Martians oreven experienced out-of-body journeys to thered planet. In 1896 and 1897, during whattoday would be called a nationwide wave of unidenti

ﬁ

ed

ﬂ

ying object (UFO) sightings, American newspapers printed accounts of landings of strange craft occupied by nonhu-man crews of giants, dwarfs, or monsters pre-sumed to be visiting extraterrestrials.But in the UFO age

—

that is, the periodfrom 1947 to the present, when reports of anomalous aerial phenomena became widely known and their implications much dis-cussed

—

a small army of

“

contactees,

”

re-counting physical or psychic meetings withangelic space people, has marched onto the world stage to preach a new cosmic gospel. Ina secular context, UFO witnesses with no dis-cernible occult orientation or metaphysicalagenda have told fantastic tales of close en-counters with incommunicative or taciturnhumanoids. Some witnesses even relate, underhypnosis or through conscious

“

recall,

”

trau-matic episodes in which humanoids took them against their will into apparent space-craft. The early 1970s, the period when mostobservers date the beginning of the New Agemovement, saw a boom in channeling

—

againnothing new (spirits have spoken through hu-mans forever) but jarring and shocking to ra-tionalists and materialists. The same decadespawned such popular occult fads as theBermuda Triangle and ancient astronauts(prehistoric or early extraterrestrial visitors),based on the notion of otherworldly in

ﬂ

u-ences

—

benign, malevolent, or indifferent

—

on human life. As cable television became ubiquitous, tele-vision documentaries or pseudodocumen-taries (some, such as a notorious Fox Network broadcast purporting to show an autopsy per-formed on a dead extraterrestrial, were thinly concealed hoaxes) served to

ﬁ

ll programming needs and proved to be among cable

’

s mostpopular offerings. Books alleging real-life en-counters with aliens, such as Whitley Strieber

’

s

Communion: A True Story

(1987),fueled interest and speculation. In the 1990sPulitzer Prize

–

winning Harvard University psychiatrist John E. Mack, who had hypno-tized a number of persons who thought they

xii Introduction

may have encountered UFO beings, champi-oned the idea

—

which not surprisingly gener-ated furious controversy and even a failed ef-fort to have him removed from his job

—

that well-intentioned extradimensional intelli-gences are helping an unprepared humanity toenter a new age of spiritual wisdom and eco-logical stewardship. Mack, along with otherprominent investigators of the abduction phe-nomenon such as Budd Hopkins and DavidM. Jacobs, pointed to the results of a 1992Roper poll as evidence that as many as 3.7million Americans have been abducted

—

a conclusion many critics, including some whoare open-minded about or even sympatheticto the abduction phenomenon, would dis-pute. Still, there seemed no doubt, based onthe experiences of investigators who havefound themselves inundated with reports, thatthousands of otherwise seemingly normal in-dividuals believe themselves to be abductees.The abduction phenomenon is undoubt-edly the most recent manifestation of the oth-erworldly-beings tradition, but older beliefsand experiences, though eclipsed, continue.Even into the 1990s, encounters with fairies

—

which extraterrestrial humanoids were sup-posed to have supplanted in the imaginationsof the superstitious and impressionable, ac-cording to any number of skeptical commen-tators

—

were noted on occasion. At least onerecent book from a reputable publisher

—

JanetBord

’

s

Fairies: Real Encounters with Little Peo- ple

(1997)

—

argued that such things are a gen-uine aspect of a universe

“

so complex that wecannot begin to understand it.

”

The BlessedVirgin Mary appeared, as usual, all over the world, as did other sorts of divine entities.The world, of course, goes on with its busi-ness as if none of this were true, taking serious(as opposed to tabloid) note only when belief in otherworldly beings goes horrendously wrong and thirty-nine cult members commitsuicide while awaiting the arrival of a space-ship following a comet. The March 1997mass death in San Diego of the faithful of Heaven

’

s Gate (a contactee-oriented groupthat, in various incarnations, had existed sincethe early 1970s) sparked big headlines even insuch august media as the

New York Times

andthe

Washington Post.

In the wake of thetragedy came all the predictable lamentationsabout alienation and irrationality in a worldthat more and more seems to have lost itsbearings. But the San Diego incident, al-though hardly unprecedented (history recordsnumerous episodes of group suicides commit-ted in the name of otherworldly powers), wasanomalous in one important sense: few whohold such extraordinary beliefs, including theconviction that they personally interact withbeings from other realms, harm themselves orothers. In fact, most incorporate their experi-ences into lives so seemingly ordinary thattheir neighbors, unless told directly (whichthey usually are not), suspect nothing.In the late 1970s, when I lived in a NorthShore suburb of Chicago, I met a likable, gen-erous-hearted family man named Keith Mac-donald. Macdonald recounted a UFO sight-ing (also witnessed by his family) after whichhe felt that something had taken place that hecould not consciously recall. Under hypnosis,he described what would later be judged a rather ordinary abduction experience: gray-skinned beings took him into the UFO andsubjected him to a physical examinationagainst his wishes. The experience, if that is what it was, frightened him severely. For a time I lost touch with Keith. When I next saw him, he told me he had been hearing mentalvoices and channeling messages from a planetcalled Landa, populated by wise, spiritually committed beings who looked like Greek gods and goddesses. Keith had learned that he was originally from that planet but had gonethrough many earthly incarnations so that hecould lead the Earth as it entered a period of turmoil and destruction before the ships fromLanda arrived to save the elect. Over the yearsI monitored Keith

’

s emerging beliefs and satin on a few

—

to me unimpressive

—

channel-ing sessions during which the all-wise David,his father on Landa, spoke on a level of verbaland intellectual sophistication that exactly matched Keith

’

s.

Introduction xiii

Though I never for a moment believed inthe literal reality of

“

those of Landa,

”

as they called themselves in their characteristically stilted syntax, I was struck by a number of things. One was the almost staggering com-plexity of the cosmos Keith had conjured upin his imagination

—

the only place that Icould believe such a cosmos existed, with itsmany worlds, peoples, religions, politics, en-mities, and alliances. None of it, I should add, was anything somebody could not have madeup, consciously or unconsciously. But all of it would have done credit to a gifted writer of science

ﬁ

ction. Though he possessed a keennative intelligence, Keith was neither a writernor a reader. He did, however, have some pre-viously existing interest

—

not profound orparticularly well informed, in my observa-tion

—

in UFOs, the paranormal, and the oc-cult. As I listened to him over many hours, Ibegan to feel as if somehow in his waking lifeKeith had tapped into the creative potentialmost of us experience in our dreams. As wedoze off to sleep and dream, images begin to well up out of the unconscious; in no morethan a moment we may

ﬁ

nd ourselves inun-dated with psychic materials sufficient to

ﬁ

ll a fat Victorian novel. When our eyes open inthe morning, all of that, alas, is gone. Keithhad the capacity, it seemed to me, not only tolive inside his dreams but to keep them stableand evolving.Only once, when asked outright, did I ac-knowledge my skepticism. The confession wasmoot because Keith had inferred as much frommy noncommittal responses to his typically ex-cited revelations about the latest from the Lan-danians. He had no doubt

—

well, maybe 98percent of the time he had no doubt

—

that he was in the middle of something real in themost fundamental sense of the word. He alsounderstood that he had no proof that wouldsatisfy those who, like me, found the Landani-ans

’

word insufficient. Therefore, he continu-ally implored the Landanians to provide himthat proof, and in turn they regaled him with a series of prophecies, often about explosive world events (bloody uprisings, devastating earthquakes), none of which came true; then,as if to add insult to injury, their rationaliza-tions for the failure of the prophecies to be ful-

ﬁ

lled bordered on, and sometimes surpassed,the comical. The prophecies and promises con-tinued in a steady stream until Keith

’

s prema-ture death in 1999, and his closest friend toldme that even at the end, Keith

’

s faith had notfaltered.Perhaps the most amazing aspect wasKeith

’

s manifest sanity, which he never lostthrough the many ups and downs of his inter-actions with the Landanians (not to mentionthe literally crippling health problems he suf-fered at the same time). He worked

—

as a garage mechanic in a Waukegan, Illinois, cardealership

—

until he was physically incapableof doing so any longer. He was a good hus-band to his wife, a good father to his twoboys, and a good friend to those who werelucky enough to claim him as a friend in turn.His children, in their teens at the initiation of Keith

’

s adventures with Landa, and his wifevividly recalled the original UFO sighting they too had experienced and Keith

’

s convic-tion that, after they had gone to bed and hehad continued watching the object, some-thing had happened. Still, they did not believemuch in Landa, and his older son told meonce of his certainty that his father

’

s commu-nications were psychological in origin. Yetthey loved him, and only those very close tohim had any idea that at any given moment a good portion of Keith

’

s attention was focusedon a world far, far away from the small subur-ban town where he spent much of his adultlife.In 1985, I

ﬂ

ew in a private plane withKeith and two others (both, incidentally, con-vinced of the literal truth of Keith

’

s messages)to the Rocky Mountain Conference on UFOInvestigation, held every summer on the cam-pus of the University of Wyoming in Laramie.The title is something of a misnomer; only a relative few who attend can be called

“

investi-gators.

”

The emphasis is on experience not just with UFOs but with the space people who

ﬂ

y them. The bulk of the attendees

—

the

xiv Introduction

number ranges from a few dozen to as many as two hundred from year to year

—

are in reg-ular contact with benevolent extraterrestrials.The aliens communicate through channeling,automatic writing (in which information isdictated to an individual from allegedly un-earthly beings), dreams, visions, or voices inthe head, or they are perceived as if physicalentities. (I use this last phrase deliberately; onclose questioning, the individuals involvedusually turn out to have a fairly elastic de

ﬁ

ni-tion of the in

ﬁ

nitive

“

to see

”

in all its permu-tations.) Few of the contactees assembled inLaramie matched the stereotype of the

ﬂ

am-boyant charlatan or nut case. A few

—

such asa young Japanese woman whom space friendshad guided to the United States in pursuit of her mission for them

—

had traveled some dis-tance. Except for the small detail of their asso-ciations with extraterrestrials, most were de-cent, ordinary local folk. The majority werefrom the small towns, ranches, and farms of the Great Plains, the sort of people to whomthe phrase

“

salt of the earth

”

is often applied. Among his own at last, Keith could nothave been happier. If he noticed that no oneelse spoke of Landa and its impossible-to-overlook plans for the Earth

’

s future, or thatevery other contactee had his or her specialspace friends, all with their own individualhard-to-overlook plans for the Earth

’

s future,he never said a word about it to me.Of course, nothing is as simple as we would like it to be, and as I look back on theepisode, I realize that I will never know

why

“

those of Landa

”

called on Keith. Not that Ihad any difficulty understanding who they were. However tangled some of the details,there was no mistaking their underlying ba-nality or their all-too-apparent shallow earth-iness, with their Greek togas, pretentiously fractured English, and (yes) Roman Catholicfaith. They themselves were not that interest-ing; what made them worthy of attention andre

ﬂ

ection was this curious paradox: to theman who had (unwittingly) created them,they had a nearly certain independent reality;to virtually any independent observer, therecould be no question of who had broughtthem (for whatever reason) into the worldand to whom they owed what passed for anexistence. Yet Keith was not crazy. Nor, according topsychological surveys of other space commu-nicants who attend the Laramie conferences,are his fellows. The evidence from this andother psychological inventories tells us that wecan be mentally well and yet hold beliefs

—

and, more dramatically, have vivid experi-ences

—

that are far outside the mainstream,far outside our conventional understanding of the possible. In a book-length survey of out-of-ordinary perceptions, three well-regardedpsychologists observe,

“

Notwithstanding thepresence of anomalous experiences in casestudies of disturbed individuals, surveys of nonclinical samples have found little relation-ship between these experiences and psy-chopathology

”

(Cardena, Lynn, and Krippner,2000, 4). The authors stress that psychothera-pists must understand the difference if they are to treat their clients effectively. Psychologi-cal research into extraordinary encounters of the sort with which this book is concerned isin its infancy.Still, to anyone who looks carefully at thetestimony regarding otherworldly contacts, itbecomes apparent that such phenomena donot arise from a single cause. There is, for ex-ample, little in common between the averagechanneler and the average witness to a closeencounter of the third kind (a UFO sighting in which, according to a classi

ﬁ

cation systemde

ﬁ

ned by the late astronomer and ufologist J. Allen Hynek,

“

the presence of animated crea-tures is reported

”

[1972, 138]). Typically,channelers have had a long history of occultinterests before they begin communicating with supernatural entities holding forth on fa-miliar metaphysical doctrines. Close-encoun-ter witnesses, on the other hand,

ﬁ

t the pro

ﬁ

leof witnesses to less exotic UFO sightings; inother words, they are pretty much indistin-guishable from their fellow citizens.Consequently, channelers look more likecandidates for subjective experience, and in-

Introduction xv

deed to every indication channeling is justthat. It is not veridical (that is, independently witnessed or otherwise shown not to be a subjective experience); no channeling entity canprove its existence, and the information pro-vided through the channeling process is sus-ceptible to neither veri

ﬁ

cation nor falsi

ﬁ

ca-tion. The

“

authority

”

of the channeling entity rests solely on its self-identi

ﬁ

cation. If you be-lieve he, she, or it is a discarnate Atlantean,space alien, or ascended master, you will be-lieve what he, she, or it has to say. If youchoose not to believe any of that, the channel-ing entity will prove helpless to get you tochange your mind. Experiences such as closeencounters, conversely, may be veridical in thesense that on occasion they involve multi-ple

—

or, more rarely, independent

—

observ-ers. In the case of multiply witnessed close en-counters, subjective explanations are appliedonly with difficulty. An investigator in searchof an explanation has limited choices, usually three: (1) the claimants made up the story; (2)they naively misperceived what were in factconventional stimuli; or (3) they underwentan extraordinary experience that de

ﬁ

es currentunderstanding.Between the extremes is a broad range of nonexperiential material, a modern folklore in which the world and the cosmos are rein-vented on the basis of believed-in but undoc-umented (and often, to those who care aboutsuch things, certi

ﬁ

ably false) allegations. Mostpersons who circulate such stuff are sincere,but some of those who feed the stuff to themare not. Hoaxers provide documents, such asthe supposed diary attesting to Adm. RichardE. Byrd

’

s voyage into the hollow earththrough a hole at the North Pole, that believ-ers cite to prove their cases. Most observersbelieve James Churchward

’

s famous (or noto-rious) books on the alleged lost continent of Mu are literary hoaxes

—

Churchward wasnever able to produce the ancient documentson which he asserted he had based his work

—

but earnest occultists and New Agers cite hisbooks as overwhelming evidence that Mu(more often called Lemuria) was a real place.Of course, embellishments grow on top of embellishments, and every legend of a place, a world, or a realm that is home to otherworldly beings evolves and has its own rich history. Atlantis, for example, began as an advancedcivilization for its time, but by our time itspeople had come to be seen as advanced evenbeyond us, the creators of fantastic technolo-gies and even the recipient of knowledge fromextraterrestrial sources. The hollow earth of John Cleves Symmes (1779

–

1829) is not thehollow earth of Walter Siegmeister (a.k.a.Raymond W. Bernard, 1901

–

1965), any more than the imagination of one century isthe imagination of the century that follows it.Flying saucers were not part of Symmes

’

s world; consequently, they did not exist in hishollow earth. By the time Siegmeister wrote

The Hollow Earth

(1964), no alternative-real-ity book could lack

ﬂ

ying saucers.It is entirely likely that nothing in the book you are about to read will tell you anything about

actual

extraordinary encounters andotherworldly beings. If such exist, however, itis not beyond the range of possibility thatsomewhere amid the noise of folklore, belief,superstition, credulity, out-of-control think-ing, and out-of-ordinary perception a signalmay be sounding. If so, it is a faint one, in-deed. The world has always been overrun withotherworldly experiences, some of which cer-tainly appear to resist glib accounting; yet sofar it has proved exasperatingly tricky to estab-lish that otherworldly experiences are also oth-erworldly events. The otherworld, perhaps,can happen to any of us at any time, but wemay not live in it

—

at least if we know what

’

sgood for us

—

in the way that we live enclosed within the four walls of the physical structurein which we read these words. It is not wise topass through a world of physical laws whiledistracted by all-encompassing dreams. Evenso, there is still a nobility to dreaming. There isalso an undying appeal to the sort of romanticimpatience that imagines new worlds biggerand more wondrous than our own, then

xvi Introduction

A

“A” is the pseudonym Ann Grevler (a writer who uses the pen name “A nchor”) gives the Venusian whom she allegedly encountered while driving through South Africa’s EasternTra nsvaal on an unspecified day in the 1950s. Grev ler, a flying-saucer enthusiast sympathetic to the contactee movement (contactees are in-dividuals who claim to be in regular communi-cation with kindly, advanced extraterrestria ls), met A when her car inexplicably stopped on a rural highway. As she was looking under thehood, she became aware of a buzzing sound inher ears and looked up to see a smiling space-man standing not far away. Then a spaceshipflew tow a rd her and landed, and she and A stepped into it. With A and another spaceman,B, Grevler flew into space. They approa ched what Grevler describes as “a positively hugeMother Ship,” which tinier ships, similar to theone they were aboard, were entering.Once inside the mother ship, Grevler andher friends went to “the Temple, visited by re-turning crews to thank the Creator for a safevoyage.” Subsequently, either in the mothership or in the smaller scout craft (her accountis vague on this detail), she visited Venus andsaw beautiful buildings and a kind of univer-sity. At the latter, students were taught univer-sal knowledge and trained in extrasensory per-ception. They also learned “Cosmic Lan-guage—which is expressed simply by symbolsof various forms and colors, so that meaningsare the same in any language” (Anchor, 1958).Grevler had other space adventures. One was a visit to a depopulated, destroyed planet,the dreary result of science gone amok.

See Also:

Contactees

Further Reading

Anchor [pseud. of Ann Grevler], 1958.

Transvaal Episode: A UFO Lands in Africa.

Corpus Christi,TX: Essene Press.

Abductions by UFOs

Since the mid-1960s a number of individualsaround the world have reported encounters in which humanoid beings took them againsttheir will—usually from their homes or vehi-cles—into apparent spacecraft and subjectedthem to medical and other procedures. Asoften as not, witnesses spoke of experiencing amnesia, aware at ﬁrst only of unexplained“missing time” (a much-used phrase that hasbecome almost synonymous with abduction)consisting of a few minutes to a few hours.Later, “memory” would return, sometimesspontaneously, sometimes in dreams, andoften (and most controversially) through hyp-notic regression.

A

1

In the first case to come to the attention of ufologists, a Portsmouth, New Hampshire,couple, Barney and Betty Hill, experienced a close encounter with a UFO on the night of September 19–20 while traveling through the White Mountains. At one point, Barney Hillstopped the car and stepped out with a pair of binoculars; through them he saw humanlikefigures inside the craft. One was staring di-rectly at him. Terrified, the couple fled, all the while hearing beeping or buzzing sounds.Once back home, the Hills eventually realizedthat at least two hours seemed missing fromtheir conscious recall. In November Betty hada series of unusually vivid dreams in which be-ings forced her and her husband into a UFO.She and Barney were separated, and Betty un-derwent a medical examination with a gray-skinned humanoid, whom she understood tobe the leader. In January they sought outBoston psychiatrist Benjamin Simon in an ef-fort to deal with the continuing anxiety they felt about the incident. Dr. Simon had themhypnotized, and under hypnosis they sepa-rately recounted an abduction episode. Subse-quently, the story appeared in a Boston news-paper, and soon afterward journalist John G.Fuller wrote a best-selling book,

The Inter-rupted Journey,

on the case. A generally similar incident took place in Ashland, Nebraska, in the early morning hours of December 3, 1967, when police offi-cer Herbert Schirmer saw a hovering UFO a short distance from him. He originally be-lieved that the sighting had lasted no morethan ten minutes, but when he later realizedthat a half hour had passed, he got nervous,experienced sleeplessness, and heard a buzzing sound inside his head. Later under hypnosisSchirmer related an onboard experience withshort, gray-skinned humanoids with catlikeeyes.During a wave of UFO sightings in Octo-ber 1973, two Pascagoula, Mississippi, fisher-men claimed that robotlike entities hadfloated them into a UFO. The story receivedenormous publicity, as did an even more spec-tacular incident in November 1975, when a forestry worker from Snowflake, Arizona, dis-appeared after six colleagues saw a beam of light from a UFO hit him and knock him tothe ground. Travis Walton returned five dayslater with fragmentary memories of seeing two kinds of UFO beings, little gray men andhumanlike (but not human) entities. A few other stories, now being called “abductions” asopposed to “kidnappings,” saw print in theUFO literature but were little noticed elsewhere. The first book on the larger phenome-non of UFO abductions (as opposed to a single case, such as the Hills’s), Jim and CoralLorenzen’s book

Abducted!

was published in1977.From the Hill incident on, critics focusedon the use of hypnosis to elicit “re ca l l,” pointing out that confabulation under hyp-nosis is a well-documented psych o l o g ica l phenomenon, most dramatically manifesting in “m emor ie s” of past lives. As early as 1977 three California investigators attempted todemonstrate that volunteers under hypnosis,in s t ructed to imagine UFO abductions, toldstories indistinguishable from those re la te dby “rea l” abductees. Other investigators ando b s ervers disputed these conclusions, point-ing to methodological and logical pro b le m sin the experiment, and subsequent efforts by other rese a rchers to replicate it failed. On e later study indicated that nearly one-third of abductees consciously re m embe red their experiences; their testimony, folklorist T homa s E. Bul l a rd concluded, was indistinguishablef rom corresponding accounts emerging underhypnotic re g ression. Still, hypnosis and its va-garies would play a large and continuing rolein the controversy surrounding the abductionph eno m eno n . In the late 1970s Budd Hopkins, a New York City artist and sculptor, working withpsychologist and hypnotist Aphrodite Clamar,began to investigate the abduction reports.Through Hopkins’s work new dimensions of the phenomenon emerged, including not justlittle gray humanoids that would come todominate abduction reports but also experi-ences that began in childhood and recurred

2Abductions by UFOs

tion. Few observers believed that conscioushoaxing played much of a role in abduction-reporting. Unlike contactees, abductees sel-dom had any background in occultism or eso-teric interests, and hardly any sought proﬁt orpublicity.To every indication they believedthat they had undergone frightening, bizarreexperiences. Some psychological studiesfound that abductees often evinced all thesymptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder of the sort ordinarily associated with victims of crime, personal assault, or other threatening terrors.In 1987 Thomas E. Bullard, author of anIndiana University Ph.D. dissertation on therelationship of UFOs to folklore, released a two-volume study of all abduction accountsthen known, some three hundred. Through a searching examination of the narratives,Bullard concluded that a real phenomenon of strikingly consistent features existed, that “ab-ductions” were not simply an assortment of random fantasies. He noted patterns that hadescaped even the most attentive investigators,including “doorway amnesia”—the curiousfailure of abductees to remember the momentof entry or departure from the UFO. Besidesestablishing the uniform nature of hypnoticand non-hypnotic testimony, Bullard deter-mined that the phenomenon’s features re-mained stable from investigator to investiga-tor, thus casting doubt on a favorite skepticalargument concerning investigator inﬂuenceon the story. Beyond that, Bullard wrote, it was difficult to say more, except that “some-thing goes on, a marvelous phenomenon richenough to interest a host of scholars, human-ists, psychologists and sociologists alike as wellas perhaps physical scientists, and to hold thatinterest irrespective of the actual nature of thephenomenon” (Bullard, 1987).Hopkins’s next book,

Intruders

(1987), in-troduced fresh features that would figurelargely in all subsequent discussions. From hislatest investigations he had come to suspect a reason for alien abductions: the creation of a race of hybrid beings to replenish the extrater-restrials’ apparently exhausted genetic stock.Female abductees would find themselves preg-nant, sometimes inexplicably; then, following subsequent abductions involving vaginal pen-etration by a suction device, they would dis-cover that those pregnancies had been sud-denly terminated. In later abductions they would be shown babies or small children withboth human and alien features. The abductors would explain that these were the women’schildren. Hopkins also uncovered a pattern of cases of sexual intercourse between male ab-ductees and more-or-less human alien women(perhaps adult hybrids).Other investigators began finding similarcases. Hybrids were a new wrinkle, signifi-cantly augmenting the already considerablepeculiarity of the abduction phenomenon. Aslong ago as 1975, in his book

The MothmanProphecies,

investigator John A. Keel noted, inpassing, a pattern of what he called “hystericalpregnancies” in young women who had hadclose encounters. Even so, the reports met with skepticism among scientiﬁcally sophisti-cated ufologists, for example, Michael D.Swords, who said that such hybridization isbiologically impossible. Other critics arguedthat mass abductions for such purposes wouldnot be necessary; once the basic reproductivematerials were collected, they could easily beduplicated. Most damning of all, independentinquiries by physician-ufologists found no ev-idence of mysteriously ended pregnancies incolleagues’ experiences or in the pediatric lit-erature. Still the reports continue. Another signiﬁcant development in 1987 was the publication of

Communion

byWhit-ley Strieber, heretofore known as a novelistspecializing in horror and futuristic themes,now a self-identified abductee with a series of strange adventures in his past. The gray-skinned, big-eyed alien on the best-selling book’s cover triggered a flood of “memories”among many who saw it. Even ufologists whohad been abduction literalists grew puzzled,then uneasy, at the apparent quantity of re-covered abduction recollections. Strieber also was the first to express a kind of New Ageview of the abduction phenomenon, now seen

4Abductions by UFOs

not as an entirely negative experience (asHopkins and others held it to be) but as aninitiation, however painful, into an expanded,enlightened view of large cosmic realities. What to Hopkins were “intruders” to Strieber were “visitors.”

Communion

was only the ﬁrstof a series of books Strieber would write re-counting ever more exotic experiences withaliens possessing vast paranormal powers.By now UFO abductions were no longerthe property of abductees and ufologists. They had expanded into popular culture, and thegray alien became a staple in cartoons, adver-tisements, television shows, and more. Alarmed at the spread of what they regardedas a popular delusion, skeptics and debunkerssought to discredit the phenomenon. In 1988the ﬁrst book-length attack on the phenome-non, its claimants, and its advocates, Philip J.Klass’s

UFO-Abductions: A Dangerous Game,

lambasted its subject as the product of delu-sion and deceit.Though the phenomenon itself remainedelusive, psychologists understood that at leastthose who claimed to have experienced itcould be studied. Using standard psychologi-cal tests, they documented the essential psy-chological normality of the average abductee.They also found that, contrary to one populartheory, abductees were not prone to fantasy orimaginative ﬂights so intense that they couldbe mistaken for reality. Little if anything seemed to distinguish abductees from theirneighbors.The phenomenon’s most notable cham-pion, Harvard University psychiatrist John E.Mack, became a lightning rod in the contro-versy.To his colleagues, who went so far as totry to have him removed from his professionalposition, he was a good scholar gone bad. ToNew Age–oriented saucerians on the otherhand, Mack was almost something of a prophet. His controversial book

Abduction

(1994) argued for a benevolent interpretationof abducting aliens, paranormal and interdi-mensional intelligences who, in Mack’s view,are here to teach us—particularly those of us who live in the industrial West—to embraceother realities and to take better care of eachother and the world we live in. Mack weddedthe contactee message to the abduction expe-rience, to the consternation of Hopkins, Ja-cobs, and others who refused to draw largermetaphysical inferences from the abductionexperience. Jacobs, if anything, went to theopposite extreme. A history professor at Tem-ple University, Jacobs worked with abductees whose testimony, usually under hypnosis, ledhim to the radical hypothesis that the abduct-ing extraterrestrials are creating a populationof hybrids to replace the human race at somepoint in the not-distant future.From their interactions with their rea ders and other members of the public, Hopkins and Jacobs came to suspect that the abduction ex-perience, far from rare, was ubiquitous. Hop-kins, for example, wrote as early as 1981 thatthere may be “tens of thousands of Americans whose encounters have never been revea led” (Hopkins, 1981). In 1991 he and Jacobs wereg iven funding for a survey to be conducted by

Abductions by UFOs5

Dr. John E. Mack, Harvard University psychiatrist, 1993(Dennis Stacy/Fortean Picture Library)

the Roper Organization. Using ﬁve “indicator”questions, they sought evidence for possible ab-duction experiences among those surveyed. Pollsters interv iewed 5,947 adult Americans. Intheir reading of the results, Hopkins and Ja cobs deduced that “the incidence of abduction expe-riences appears to be on the order of at least2% of the population” (

Unusual Personal Ex pe-r i e nc e s ,

1992). That comes to 3.7 million ab-ductees. Critics rejected this assertion, arguing that the study contained too many method-ological ﬂaws to mean much. Three social sci-entists, all with backgrounds in ufology, exam-ined the poll and came to a wholly differentconclusion: “For the present we have no reli-able and valid estimate of the prevalence of theUFO abduction phenomenon” (Hall, Rodeg- hier, and Johnson, 1992). In a study of the various theories advancedto explain UFO abductions, psychologist Stu-art Appelle observed that all testable, more orless conventional hypotheses (confabulation,fantasy proneness, false memory, sleep halluci-nation, and the like) stand on shaky empiricalground. On the other hand, literalistic inter-pretations suffer from an absence of anything like solid, veridical evidence. All that can besaid with certainty is that abduction experi-ences have the feeling of reality to those whoundergo them. Most do not fall into an easily identiﬁable psychological category.They ap-pear to be reasonably consistent in their corefeatures, and some cases involve multiple wit-nesses. These last cases, in Appelle’s view,“may provide the greatest challenge to prosaicexplanations” (Appelle, 1995/1996).

See Also:

Alien DNA; Aliens and the dead; Cocoonpeople; Contactees; Dual reference; Gray Face;Hopkins, Budd; Hybrid beings; Insectoids; Keel, John A.; MU the Mantis Being; Nordics; Puddy’sabduction; Reptoids; Strieber,Whitley; Walton’sabduction

Further Reading

Appelle, Stuart, 1995/1996. “The Abduction Expe-rience: A Critical Evaluation of Theory and Evi-dence.”

Journal of UFO Studies

6 (new series):29–78. Appelle, Stua rt, Steven Jay Lynn, and Leonard New- man, 2000. “Alien Abduction Experiences.” InEtzel Cardena, Steven Jay Lynn, and Sta nley K rippner, eds.

Varieties of Anomalous Ex pe r i e nc e : Examining the Scientiﬁc Ev i d e nc e ,

253–282. Wa sh-ington, DC: American Psychological Association.Bulla rd, Thomas E., 1987.

UFO Abductions: T he Me a s ure of a My s t e ry. Volume 1: Compara t i ve St ud y of Abduction Re ports. Volume 2: Catalogue of Ca s e s .

Mount Rainier, MD: Fund for UFO Resea rch. ———, 1989. “Hypnosis and UFO Abductions: A Troubled Relationship.”

Journal of UFO Studies

1(new series): 3–40.———, 1991. “Folkloric Dimensions of the UFOPhenomenon.”

Journal of UFO Studies

3 (new se-ries): 1–57.———, 2000. “Abductions under Fire: A Review of Recent Abduction Literature.”

Journal of UFO Studies

7 (new series): 81–106.Cla rk, Jerome, 2000. “From Mermaids to Little Gra y Men: The Prehistory of the UFO Abduction Phe- nomenon.”

The Anoma l i s t

8 (Spring): 11–31.Fuller, John G., 1966.

The Interrupted Journey: TwoLost Hours “Aboard a Flying Saucer.”

NewYork:Dial Press.Hall, Robert L., Mark Rodeghier, and Donald A. Johnson, 1992. “The Prevalence of Abductions: A Critical Look.”

Journal of UFO Studies

4 (new series): 131–135.Hopkins, Budd, 1981.

Missing Time: A Documented Study of UFO Abductions.

NewYork: RichardMarek Publishers.———, 1987.

Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods.

New York: Random House. Jacobs, David M., 1992.

Secret Life: Firsthand Ac-counts of UFO Abductions.

NewYork: Simon andSchuster.———, 1998.

The Threat.

NewYork: Simon andSchuster.Keel, John A., 1975.

The Mothman Prophecies.

New York: Saturday Review Press/E. P. Dutton andCompany.Klass, Philip J., 1988.

UFO-Abductions: A Dangerous Game.

Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.Lawson, Alvin H., 1980. “Hypnosis of Imaginary ‘Abductees’.” In Curtis G. Fuller, ed.

Proceedings of the First International UFO Congress,

195–238.New York: Warner Books.Lorenzen, Jim, and Coral Lorenzen, 1977.

Abducted! Confrontations with Beings from Outer Space.

New York: Berkley Medallion.Mack, John E., 1994.

Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens.

New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.Strieber,Whitley, 1987.

Communion: A True Story.

New York: Beach Tree/William Morrow.Sw ords, Michael D., 1988. “Ex tra terrestrial Hy- bridization Unlik ely.”

MUFON UFO Journa l

247: 6–10.

6Abductions by UFOs

Unusual Personal Experiences: An Analysis of the Data from Three National Surveys Conducted by the Roper Organization,

1992. Las Vegas, NV:Bigelow Holding Corporation.

Abraham

Channeler Esther Hicks heard from abrahamin the early 1980s. She renders the name inlowercase because abraham is not an individ-ual but a collection of highly evolved entitiesspeaking in one voice. In 1986 she and herhusband, Jerry, confided their experiences with abraham to business associates, whosoon were peppering them with financial andpersonal questions they wanted abraham toanswer.When the Hickses saw how satisfiedtheir friends were with the results, they de-cided to take abraham to a larger public.Today the couple conduct workshops, put outa newsletter, and lecture widely out of theirSan Antonio, Texas, headquarters. Abraham teaches that each of us is a physi-cal extension of an essence that begins in thespiritual realm. Each is here because he or shehas chosen to be so, and we are here to exer-cise freedom and experience joy.The universeis benevolent, and it gives us the potential torealize all of our dreams. There is no suchthing as death; all of us live forever.

Further Reading

Melton, J. Gordon, 1996.

Encyclopedia of AmericanReligions.

Detroit, MI: Gale Research.“A Synopsis of Abraham-Hicks’sTeachings.” http:// www.abraham-hicks.com/bio.html.

Abram

Folklorist Peter M. Rojcewicz relates the expe-riences of a young university student to whomhe gives the pseudonym Polly Bromberger. Inthe early 1980s Bromberger conjured up a spirit guide—a “personal archetype,” shesometimes called it—and gave it the name Abram. With long, unkempt hair and wearing a white robe and sandals, Abram looked “bib-lical.” He came more clearly into focus afterBromberger had undergone a period of medi-tation and reﬂection. A student of the great psychologist andphilosopher C.G. Jung, Bromberger used a process she learned from Jung's writings—“active imagination”—to bring Abram intoher life. In time she came to feel that he had a kind of independent existence. She told Roj-cewicz that “sometimes I feel he can be a forceopening me on purpose to make me stretchmyself, and work myself, and sometimes I getfrustrated with it.” On the whole, however,she was convinced that Abram was a positiveinﬂuence in her life.

Further Reading

Rojcewicz, Peter M., 1984.

The Boundaries of Ortho-doxy: A Folkloric Look at the UFO Phenomenon.

Ph.D. dissertation. University of Pennsylvania,Philadelphia.

Adama

Adama, who channels through Dianne Rob-bins, is an Ascended Master and High Priestof Telos, the great Lemurian city now locatedunder Mount Shasta in northern California.Because of his pure thoughts, Adama, like themillion other persons who live in the city, isable to live for hundreds of years. He is cur-rently more than six hundred years old. He isa descendant of the Lemurians who fled insidethe mountain when Lemuria and all else onEarth’s surface were destroyed in a nuclearholocaust. Only twenty-five thousand Lemu-rians escaped in time.Since then the Lemurians’ consciousnesshas evo l ved significa n tly. Besides attending to their spiritual betterment, the Lemuriansh a ve fought off marauding extraterrestria ls who are causing harm to surface dwe lle r s. “We are all part of Go d’s grand plan for theUn i verse,” Adama says, “and

W EA R ENOW ME RGINGO U RTHO U GHTSIN TOON E TH OUGH TF ORT HEENTI R EH U M A N R AC E

. Soon we will all be on the same waveband of consciousness, broadcasting our loveand light to all in the cosmos and letting thecosmos know that we are ready to join withthem in one grand

FEDER ATIONOFP LA N

-

E TS

” (“Adama,” 1995).

Adama7

See Also:

Lemuria; Mount Shasta

Further Reading

“Adama,” 1995. http://www.salemctr.com/newage/center36.html.

Adamski, George (1891–1965)

Though largely forgotten today, George Adamski was once an international occultcelebrity, perhaps the most famous of all fly-ing-saucer contactees. His claimed meeting with a Venusian in the California desert inNovember 1952 electrified esoterically in-clined saucer buffs. In three books publishedbetween 1953 and 1961 he recounted histrips into space along with extensive encoun-ters with benevolent Venusians, Martians, andSaturnians. In 1962 he boarded a spaceshipand flew to Saturn to attend an interplanetary conference. By 1965, when he died, many of his most devoted followers had broken theirconnection with him, convinced either thathe was lying or that evil space people weremisleading him.Born in Poland, Adamski emigrated withhis parents to upstate New Yo rk when he wasone or two years old. In the early 1920s hem oved to California, where he eventually es-tablished a role for himself on the local oc-cult scene as head of the Royal Order of Tibet, a metaphysical school based on chan-neled teachings from Tibetan lamas. W h e nflying saucers became an object of populari n t e rest in the late 1940s, Adamski pro d u c e dphotographs of alleged spacecraft; some of the pictures we re said to have been takent h rough his six-inch telescope. Published inthe popular occult and paranormal digest

Fa t e

in 1950 and 1951, the photos along with accompanying text afforded Ad a m s k ihis first wide exposure. On November 20,1952, as six others (including contactee andfringe archaeologist George Hunt Wi l l i a m-son) watched from a distance, Adamski ob-s e rved the landing of a saucer and the emer-gence of the beautiful, blond-haired Ort h o n ,a visitor from Venus, who expressed concernabout the human race’s warlike ways. (Inlater years Adamski would tell confidantsthat his first contacts with extraterre s t r i a l so c c ur red in his childhood, but he never saidas much publicly.) T h ree weeks later Ort h o nreturned in his scout craft over Ad a m s k i’sPalomar Ga rdens residence and allowed theship to be photographed. The resulting pic-t u res would generate enormous controve r s y and, for many, virtually define the image of a flying saucer as a domed disc with a thre e -ball landing gear. A ﬁfty-four-page account of Adamski’searly contacts was added to an already existing manuscript (on supposed space visitationsthroughout history) by Irish occultistDesmond Leslie and published in 1953 as

Fly-ing Saucers Have Landed.

Two years later, in

Inside the Space Ships,

Adamski expanded hisclaims to encompass further interactions withextraterrestrials, both on Earth and aboardsaucers. According to Adamski, the “SpaceBrothers,” as he called them, had come tohelp the human race out of its backward, vio-lent ways, which were leading inexorably tonuclear war.They espoused a benign occultphilosophy much like the one Adamski hadtaught for many years.Though revered by many, Adamski alsohad bitter critics, none more so than conser-vative ufologists who dismissed his stories asabsurd and feared that he was bringing ridicule to all of UFO research. Some ufolo-gists actively investigated his claims and un-covered discrepancies and other evidence of untruthfulness. One found, for example, thatthe weather on a particular day on which Adamski claimed contact was not as he haddescribed it. Most photo analysts concludedthat the pictures of “spacecraft” were in fact of small models. On one occasion skeptical ufol-ogists proved that one Adamski allegation wasunambiguously false. Adamski had reportedthat as he was traveling to Iowa to give a lec-ture, the train suddenly stopped en route. When he stepped out to take a short walk,space people met him and ﬂew him to his des-tination. From interviews with the train crew,investigators learned that the train had made

8Adamski, George

Europe. In May of that same year, Queen Ju-liana of Holland received him, igniting fiercecommentary in the press and a riot at theUniversity of Zurich when Adamskiattempted to give a lecture in Switzerland. Adamski charged that the students—and in-deed most of his critics—were agents of a sin-ister Silence Group, which sought to frustratethe moral reforms and technological advancesadvocated by the space people and their ter-restrial allies. Though the reality of Adamski’saudience with Queen Juliana was never indoubt, other purported meetings with nota-bles, including President John F. Kennedy,Pope John XXIII, and Vice President HubertH. Humphrey, that figure in the Adamski leg-end almost certainly did not occur outside Adamski’s imagination.In the early 1960s, after Adamski openly embraced psychic approaches of which hehad, till then, been outspokenly critical, someof his followers started to question his sincer-ity, especially when he began doing psychicconsultations for profit. His associate C.A.Honey circulated damning evidence that Adamski was recycling his 1930s-era Tibetan-masters teachings and putting them in themouths of space people. When Adamskiclaimed that he had flown to Saturn, the story only fueled growing doubts even among de-voted followers.His career in decline, his credibility neverlower, Adamski went on a final lecture tourthrough NewYork and Rhode Island inMarch 1965. For the preceding month, his fi-nancial resources exhausted, he had been liv-ing with Nelson and Madeleine Rodeffer inMaryland. He died of a heart attack at theirhome on the evening of April 23.

See Also:

Contactees; Orthon; Ramu; Williamson,George Hunt; Yamski

Further Reading

Adamski, George, 1955.

Inside the Space Ships.

New York: Abelard-Schuman.———, 1961.

Flying Saucers Farewell.

NewYork: Abelard-Schuman.———, 1962.

Special Report: MyTrip to the Twelve Counsellors Meeting That Took Place on Saturn, March 27–30th, 1962.

Vista, CA: Science of Life.Bennett, Colin, 2000. “Breakout of the Fictions:George Adamski’s 1959 World Tour.”

The Anom-alist

8 (Spring): 39–84.Ellwood, Robert S., 1995. “Spiritualism and UFOReligion in New Zealand: The InternationalTransmission of Modern Spiritual Movements.”In James R. Lewis, ed.

The Gods Have Landed:New Religions from Other Worlds,

167–186. Al-bany, NY: State University of New York Press.Good, Timothy, 1998.

Alien Base: Earth’s Encounters with Extraterrestrials.

London: Century.Heiden, RichardW., 1984. Review of Zinsstag andGood’s

George Adamski—The Untold Story.The A.P.R.O. Bulletin

32, 5 (August): 4–5.Leslie, Desmond, and George Adamski, 1953.

Flying Saucers Have Landed.

NewYork: British Book Centre.Moseley, James W., ed., 1957.

Special Adamski Ex- posé Issue.Saucer News

27 (October).Zinsstag, Lou, 1990.

UFO... George Adamski:Their Man on Earth.

Tucson, AZ: UFO Photo Archives.Zinsstag, Lou, and Timothy Good, 1983.

George Adamski—The Untold Story.

Beckenham, Kent,England: Ceti Publications.

Aenstrians

For a time in the mid to late 1960s, Wa rminster, Wiltshire, was the focus of a series of mys- terious sightings of UFOs and hearings of ap-pa rently related sounds. The excitement produced what was called the “Wa rminster my stery,” which was also the title of a popular book by Arthur Shuttlewood, a reporter for the

Wa rminster Journa l .

Shuttlewood, who led sky watches and became the leading publicist of the phenomena, also reported receiving phone calls from self-identiﬁed extraterrestrials, as wellas a personal visit from one. The aliens saidthey were from a planet named Aenstria . The ﬁrst calls came in early September1965. The calls continued for a period of seven weeks, according to Shuttlewood. Thecallers were three Aenstrians: Caellsan (thesenior spacecraft commander), Selorik (an in-terpreter), and Traellison (the queen of Aens-tria). In each case they phoned from a publicbooth in a particular district in the city,though Shuttlewood wrote that he neverheard the sound of coins dropping before thevoices began to speak.

10Aenstrians

The messages were standard contactee fare.Ea rth is in trouble because of atomic wea pons and environmental pollution. Human beings—the product of special creation, not evolutiona ry processes—should return to simpler, more spiri-tual ways. The Aenstrians lived long lives andsuf f ered few illnesses. Traellison, for example, was 450 years old, a fairly young age on herhome planet. The Aenstrians were communi-cating with Shuttlewood so that he could pass on their information to Earth’s “councils.” On May 24, 1967, Shuttlew ood’s

T he Wa rminster My s t e ry

was published. In it he rel-egated the story of the Aenstria ns’s phone calls to an appendix, where he suggested that they were no more than an interesting hoax. On theafternoon of the twenty-sixth, the phone rang at the Shuttlewood residence. It was an Aens- trian named Karne, expressing displeasure at what the author had said of his colleagues’trust w orthiness. Shuttlewood responded that if Karne wanted to prove he was who heclaimed to be, he should pay a personal visit.Karne took up the challenge and showed up atShuttlew ood’s door seven seconds later. Karne, who spent a total of nine minutes with the journalist, looked like an ordina ry man in most ways, except for an apparent absence of pupils in his eyes, which were covered by thick glasses. He also had blue blotches on his cheek-bones and lips. He also had a manner that un-nerved Shuttlewood, who felt that the ostensible extraterrestrial had powers that, if provok ed, could instantly destroy him. Karne said thatTraellison, Caellsan, and Selorik had returned to their home “ca ntel” (planet). He spoke of an imminent war in the Middle East—the Six -Da y War erupted the following June—and of fur-ther UFO appearances, this time of cross- shaped craft, in the fall. He said a Third World War was almost inevitable at some point in thenot-distant future. If it was fought with nuclear weapons, he hinted, extraterrestrials would in-tervene in some unspeciﬁed fashion. A new order, in which earthlings would be trained to become cosmic citizens, would be put in place.“I noticed that Karne sometimes had diffi-culty with his breathing,” Shuttlewood wrote.“From time to time, as I shot questions athim... he glanced at the pale gold disc on his wrist. He replied to certain queries immedi-ately, shaking his head in the negative overothers, after looking at his ‘watch’” (Shuttle- wood, 1978). At one point Shuttlewoodasked if George Adamski’s contact claims weregenuine. Karne replied sternly that he couldnot answer that question, though he hintedthat the late California contactee was not of earthly origin. At the conclusion of the meet-ing, Shuttlewood gripped Karne’s wrist andleft thumb in what he intended as a gesture of good will, but the visitor winced in pain. Ear-lier, at the commencement of their meeting,Karne had not responded to Shuttlewood’soutstretched hand.Shuttlewood watched him walk, turning stiffly to wave farewell, then continue up thestreet. “From the waist up,” Shuttlewood wrote, “his bearing was smart, military, almostarrogantly proud. From the waist down, how-ever, his movements were slow and deliberate.His legs seemed weighted, feet slightly drag-ging; yet to a casual onlooker he would havebeen dismissed as an old gardener type or old-fashioned and hard-worked farm laborer”(Shuttlewood, 1978).The next day Shuttlewood’s sixteen-year-old son, Graham, saw a man who looked likeKarne at a Warminster park. He was looking upward as military jets ﬂew by, shaking hishead in disapproval. His left hand was band-aged as if it had been recently injured. That was the last either saw of Karne.

See Also:

Adamski, George; Contactees

Further Reading

Dewey, Stephen, 1997. “Arthur Shuttlewood and the Warminster Mystery.”

Strange Magazine

18(Summer): 16–21, 56–58.Shuttlewood, Arthur, 1967.

The Warminster Mystery.

London: Neville Spearman.———, 1978.

UFO Prophecy.

NewYork: GlobalCommunications.

Aetherius

Aetherius is one of the Cosmic Masters whopreside at the Interplanetary Parliament on

Aetherius11

Saturn. In 1954 Aetherius made his presenceknown psychically to George King, a Londonman with longstanding occult interests. SoonKing was channeling other space people, in-cluding Jesus. By January he had gone public with the cosmic gospel—essentially earth-bound occult doctrines ascribed to philosoph-ical extraterrestrials—and soon was issuing a mimeographed bulletin titled

Aetherius Speaks to Earth

(later

Cosmic Voice

). In August 1956King established the Aetherius Society, among the most successful and enduring contacteegroups. King died on July 12, 1997, in Los Angeles, where he had been living for many years.In the theology of the Aetherius Society,good and evil extraterrestrials are engaged inconstant warfare. From time to time, during crisis situations, the Cosmic Brotherhood willplace its spaceships above Earth and directpositive energy downward. Society membersreceive the energy and make sure that itreaches its targets. Over a three and a half yearperiod, beginning in 1958, King climbed nofewer than eighteen mountains at the behestof the space people.The society maintains headquarters inLondon and Los Angeles, as well as chaptersall over the world.

See Also:

Channeling; Contactees

Further Reading

Aetherius Society, 1995.

The Aetherius Society: A Cos-mic Concept.

Hollywood, CA: Aetherius Society.Curran, Douglas, 1985.

In Advance of the Landing:Folk Concepts of Outer Space.

NewYork: AbbevillePress.Saliba, John A., 1995. “Religious Dimensions of UFO Phenomena.” In James R. Lewis, ed.

The Gods Have Landed: New Religions from Other Worlds,

15–64. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Wallis, Roy, 1974. “The Aetherius Society: A CaseStudy of a Mystagogic Congregation.”

Sociologi-cal Review

22: 27–44.

Affa

Affa first appeared in 1952 among the extra-terrestrials who communicated to a smallPrescott, Arizona, occult group headed by George Hunt Williamson. Affa, identified asbeing from the planet Uranus, first spokethrough automatic writing, then later al-legedly by radio, warning of threats to Earthby evil humans and menacing aliens from the“Orion Solar Systems.” Affa later surfaced in automatic-writing communications to Frances Swan of Eliot,Maine, beginning in 1954. Mrs. Swan’s Affa,like Williamson’s, did his communicating from a giant Uranian spaceship. Affa urgedSwan to alert the United States Navy so that itcould receive his radio messages. Swan toldher neighbor, retired navy Adm. Herbert B.Knowles, about Affa’s request. Knowles, a UFO enthusiast, sat in on a writing sessionand addressed questions to Affa. Impressed by the answers, he wrote the Office of Naval In-telligence (ONI), which on June 8 sent twoofficers to Swan’s house. They also asked ques-tions of Affa, who promised a radio transmis-sion at 2

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.on June 10. When none came,ONI lost interest and turned the letters overto the navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics. JohnHutson, a security officer, was curious enoughto ﬂy up to Eliot for two days in late July. Onhis return he spoke with an FBI agent, but theagency chose not to pursue the matter.In the summer of 1959 navy Commander Julius Larsen, an ONI liaison officer to theCIA’s Photographic Intelligence Center in Washington, DC, stumbled upon a ﬁle on theincident. Larsen, a navy pilot who harbored a private fascination with spiritualism, called onSwan and Knowles. At one point Larsen triedautomatic writing and believed he had com-municated with Affa, though Swan insisted hehad not contacted

her

Affa.Back in Washington Larsen talked withCenter Director Arthur Lundahl and Lun-dahl’s assistant, Lt. Cmdr. Robert Neasham, a navy officer. In their presence Larsen entered a trance state and supposedly contacted Affa while Lundahl and Neasham peppered him with questions. At one point, challenged toprove his existence, Affa replied, “Go to the window.” Lundahl saw nothing but clouds,though Neasham seemed convinced that a

12Affa

spaceship was hiding in them. Neasham would also claim that radar operators at Washington National Airport told him thatthat particular portion of the sky was mysteri-ously “blocked out.” No independent evi-dence supported that allegation.Neasham notified Major Robert Friend,head of the air force’s UFO-investigativeagency, Project Blue Book. For Friend’s bene-fit Larsen even related telepathic messagesfrom Affa and other space people, but thealiens refused his request for a flyover. Friend wrote a memo on the episode and sent it tohis superiors. Nothing further was done. Theincident remained buried in Pentagon, FBI,and CIA files until the early 1970s, whenFriend shared his notes with UFO historianDavid M. Jacobs. Subsequently, some exag-gerated accounts of the episode were pub-lished in the UFO literature, a few evenclaiming that the CIA itself had communi-cated with extraterrestrials.

See Also:

Williamson, George Hunt

Further Reading

Emenegger, Robert, 1974.

UFOs Past, Present and Future.

New York: Ballantine Books.Fitzgerald, Randall, 1979. “Messages: The Case His-tory of a Contactee.”

Second Look

1, 12 (Octo-ber): 12–18, 28–29. Jacobs, David M., 1975.

The UFO Controversy in America.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Williamson, George Hunt, and Alfred C. Bailey,1954.

The Saucers Speak! A Documentary Report of Interstellar Communications by Radiotelegraphy.

Los Angeles: New Age Publishing Company.

Agents

“A g ents” are human beings whom extraterrestrials have contacted and who have agreed tohelp the space people in their benevolent mis-sion to Earth. George Hunt Williamson wrotethat agents, who come from all social and eco-nomic backgrounds, sometimes have a “strange, far-away, glassy look in their eyes.” Their necks may throb or jump spasmodically,indicating that they are receiving telepathic in-structions. The Agents conduct a variety of tasks. They introduce persons who are of po-tential use to them to each other, recommend books, ask provoca tive questions, and in other ways, subtle or obvious, get people thinking about space visitors and spiritual reform. They also minister to the needy and have a particular interest in orphaned children.Ex tra terrestrials get in touch with Agents in a ssorted ways. Sometimes it is through a car or ham radio, sometimes via thought waves, onoccasion by direct, physical encounter.

See Also:

Williamson, George Hunt

Further Reading

Williamson, George Hunt, 1953.

Other Tongue— Other Flesh.

Amherst, WI: Amherst Press.

Agharti

Agharti is a subterranean kingdom, which al-legedly exists in Tibet or Mongolia. It is, de-pending on whom one believes, a paradisiacalrealm or a sinister lair of sorcerers and otherevildoers—mostly, however, the former.Thelegend of Agharti seems loosely based on theBuddhist realm of Shambhala, a city of adeptsand mystics said to be located in a hidden val-ley (called “Shangri-La” in James Hilton’spopular novel

Lost Horizon

[1933] and in themovie of the same name). Shambhala ﬁrst ap-peared in a 1922 Polish book, soon afterwardtranslated into English as the best-seller

Beasts, Men and Gods.

The author, Ferdinand Ossendowski(1876–1945), ﬂed Russia in the wake of theBolshevik revolution. An anti-Communist,Ossendowski participated in the White Rus-sian government, that nation’s short-lived ex-periment in democracy between the over-throw of the tsar and the triumph of theCommunists. He wandered through Mongo-lia, itself torn by political unrest and bloody conﬂict. There he learned, he said, of a myste-rious “King of the World.” A lama in thetown of Narabanchi took him into a templein which there was a throne. Ossendowski wastold that in 1890 horsemen had ridden intotown and instructed all the local lamas tocome to the temple. One of the horsemen saton the throne, at which point all present “fellto their knees as they recognized the man who

Agharti13

a tropical region, and created the ﬁrst hu-mans. Then reptoid (that is, biped reptilian)Venusians attacked, forcing the Martians andtheir human associates to create two huge un-derground cities, connected by tunnels of vastlength, in order to protect themselves. One of these cities was Shambhala, under Tibet, andthe other Agharta, under China’sTzangpoValley. Eventually, the Venusians conquered Agharta, sending their evil minions into the world until 1948, when the Martian/humanalliance reclaimed the city and slew its ruler,the King of the World, and many of histroops.There is no real-life Central Asian tradition of Agharti, though Chinese and Tibeta n equivalents to Western fairy lore spoke of mag- ical caves, on the other side of which the trav-eler would ﬁnd a beautiful land and lovely butultimately trea cherous supernatural beings.

See Also:

Reptoids

Further Reading

Dickhoff, Robert Ernst, 1965.

Agharta.

NewYork:Fieldcrest.Kafton-Minkel, Walter, 1989.

Subterranean Worlds:100,000 Years of Dragons, Dwarfs, the Dead, Lost Races and UFOs from inside the Earth.

PortTownsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited.Ossendowski, Ferdinand, 1922.

Beasts, Men and Gods.

New York: Dutton.

Ahab

On a camping trip through eastern Oregon inthe summer of 1975, a young married coupleidentified as Darryl and Toni M. stoppedalong the banks of the Owyhee River to cooltheir truck. They spotted an odd objectparked on a nearby hillside. The next thing they knew, it was two hours later, and theirtruck started as if it had long since cooled off.Later, under hypnosis, they recounted the ex-perience of wandering into the UFO in a trance state. Hairless humanoids with slits foreyes, mouth, and nose, with gray, wrinkledskin assured them via telepathy that they meant no harm. As Toni watched, the aliens, who communicated with each other with a “buzzing bee” sound, subjected Darryl to anapparent physical examination by light beam.Sometime later Toni awoke to find a figure with a skull-like face and a small mouthstanding at the foot of her bed. He spoke toher, but all she could remember was that hehad told her his name was Ahab.

Further Reading

Hartman, Terry A., 1979. “Another Abduction by Extraterrestrials.”

MUFON UFO Journal

141(November): 3–4.

Akon

Akon appeared to Elizabeth Klarer on April 6,1956, when his spaceship landed in the Drak-ensberg Mountains of Natal, South Africa.She was ﬂown to a waiting mother ship, where she met other friendly space people andlearned that they came from the beautifulplanet Meton in the orbit of Alpha Centaurifour light years away.The Metonites, shelearned, are vegetarians who live in a utopiansociety without conﬂict or disease. They arealso a passionate people, and in due course, asthe contacts continued, Klarer and Akon be-came lovers. She bore him a son, Ayling, dur-ing a four-month stay on Meton.K la rer became well known in saucer and occult circles in South Africa and Europe whereshe lectured from time to time. She distributedphotographs of Akon’s spacecraft and showedinquirers a ring she said he had given her. Though many dismissed her stories and evi-dence as bogus, her friend Cynthia Hind, a well-k nown ufologist from Zimba bwe, believed her to be sincere and has helped keep her name and story alive. On the occasion of herdeath in Februa ry 1994, Hind wrote, “Eliza- beth Klarer died in comparative poverty....Her incredible story brought her some fame (ormore accurately, notoriety!) but certainly noriches” (Hind, 1994).

Further Reading

Hind, Cynthia, 1982.

UFOs—African Encounters.

Salisbury, Zimbabwe: Gemini.———, 1994. “MUFON Forum: ContacteeKlarer.”

MUFON UFO Journal

315 (July): 18.———, 1999. “Ufology Proﬁle: Elizabeth Klarer.”

MUFON UFO Journal

379 (November): 10–11.

Akon15

Klarer, Elizabeth, 1980.

Beyond the Light Barrier.

Cape Town, South Africa: Howard Timmins.

Alien diners

An alien family ate at a restaurant and stayedovernight in a motel in suburban St. Louis inMay 1970, according to ufologist John E.Schroeder, who interviewed employees andheard a strange and comic tale. Dorothy Simpson, a front desk clerk at the motel and a fellow member of the UFO Study Group of Greater St. Louis, tipped Schroeder off to theincident soon after its occurrence.Simpson was examining billing documentsat her desk at 10:30

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.on May 15 when a “whistling sigh” sounded. She looked up, andon the other side of the desk stood four tiny people, apparently members of a family: a couple and their two children. All lookedstrikingly alike. All were youthful in appear-ance, and the children were nearly the heightof the ostensible parents. They were so shortthat they barely reached the level of the desk.They were all expensively dressed, the malesin tailored suits, the females in pastel peachdresses. Their hair did not look real. Odd as itseemed, Simpson suspected that they were wearing wigs.In a falsetto voice the man said, “Do youhave a room to stay? Do you have a room tostay?” She told him what the charges wouldbe, but he seemed not to understand what shehad said. He turned to his female companionas if expecting her to clarify matters, but sheremained silent. An uncomfortable period of silence followed, broken finally when the manreached into his pocket and pulled out a thick wad of bills, many of large denomination.The bills were so crisp and new that Simpson wondered if they were counterfeit, but somequick informal testing suggested they werenot. She took two twenty-dollar bills from thestack and gave the rest back.Because the man was too small to reach upto fill out the reservation form, Simpson saidshe would do it for him. He said his name was“A. Bell.” As he stepped forward she got a bet-ter look at him and was able to compare hisface with his companions’. According toSchroeder, whose composite descriptioncomes from his interviews with Simpson andother motel employees who saw them, they were “wide at eye level, their faces thinnedabruptly to their chins. Their eyes were large,dark and slightly slanted....Their noses hadpractically no bridges and two slits for nos-trils, and their mouths were tiny and lipless—no wider than their nostrils. All look uni-formly pale. (Color descriptions varied frompearl to pale pink to light grey.)”“And where are you from?” Simpson asked. At that the man’s arm shot upward as if point-ing to the sky, and he said, “We come from upthere. Up there.” The woman pushed his armdown and spoke for the first time. She saidthey were from Hammond, Indiana, and shegave a street address. The man signed the reg-ister but did it so awkwardly that Simpsonthought he seemed not to know how to use a pen. The woman wanted to know where they could eat. Simpson indicated the direction of the motel restaurant.Meanwhile, the bellhop came over to storetheir bags while they ate. At the manager’s in-sistence Simpson checked the Indiana addressand learned that both the name and the ad-dress were bogus. The bellhop checked theparking lot for a car with an Indiana licenseplate but found none.The hostess who led the strange family to a table in the restaurant noticed that the chinsof even the adults barely reached the top of the table. The man read aloud from the menuand kept asking odd questions about wheremilk, vegetables, and other common foodscome from. The woman ordered peas andmilk for herself and the children, and for theman peas, a small steak, and water.Their eat-ing was similarly peculiar. Each picked up a single pea with a knife, brought it to his or hertiny mouth, and inhaled it with a sucking sound. The father was unable to get even a small piece of steak through his slit of a mouth. They stopped eating all at the sametime. The man produced a twenty-dollar bill

16Alien diners

and gave it to the waitress, who went to getchange; when she returned, they were gone. When the bellhop saw them, he retrievedtheir baggage and stepped into the elevator tolead them to their room. When the elevatordoor opened, though, the family recoiled infright and confusion. The bellhop had to as-sure them that there was no danger. After let-ting them into the room, he turned on thelights. Suddenly the man began shouting athim that the light would hurt the children’seyes. Suddenly frightened himself, the bellhopﬂed without waiting—one suspects futilely, inany case—for a tip.The bellhop, the manager, and Simpsonvowed to watch for the little people’s depar-ture in the morning, but they were never seenagain, though the front door was the only door they could pass through without setting off a security alarm. The alarms were checked,and nothing was amiss. Schroeder interviewedall ﬁve employees who had interacted with thefamily. All seemed sincerely bewildered by thecurious series of events.

See Also:

Extraterrestrials among us

Further Reading

Schroeder, John E., 1987. “The Strangers among Us.”

The UFO Enigma

7, 7 (June): 36.

Alien DNA

Physical evidence of abduction experiences ishard to come by, and physical evidence of ac-tual aliens is all but nonexistent. A case from Australia may be an exception. Biochemists were able to analyze, with curious results, a strand of what was reported to be the hair of an alien woman.The events that led to the analysis beganon the night of July 12, 1988, when PeterKhoury, a Sydney resident of Lebanese back-ground, was awakened suddenly when hesensed that something had grabbed his ankles. A numbness crept up his body from the feet,and soon his entire body except for his eyes was paralyzed. To his right he spotted three orfour small hooded figures with wrinkled,shiny black faces. Through telepathy they as-sured him he would not be harmed. Khoury then saw two other figures on his left. “Thesetwo,” he later told investigator Bill Chalker,“were thin, tall with big black eyes and a nar-row chin.” They were “gold-yellow in color.”One of these beings shoved a needle into theleft side of his forehead, and he passed out.The next day he showed the puncture wound to his fiancée. Later he showed it tohis doctor, who thought he had walked into a nail. When Khoury told him what had hap-pened, the physician laughed at him. Hefound that this was a typical response andg rew despondent and anxious, worried aboutthe strange nature of the experience, aboutthe future, about his inability to communi-cate with anyone who would listen to him.Eve n t ua l ly, his fiancée found a copy of W h i t-ley St ri ebe r’s

C o mmu ni o n

(1987), detailing the author’s personal abduction experiences.In time he heard about and joined a localUFO group but left it still unsatisﬁed. In April 1993 he founded the UFO Ex pe r i ence Sup po rt Association.On July 23, 1992, Khoury had a second,even stranger encounter. He was suffering fromthe effects of an assault by three men at his job,and as a consequence he was on strong medica-tion and mostly bed-ridden. On the morning inquestion, he managed with considerable diffi-culty to drive his wife—he was now married—to the train station so that she could get to w ork. Once home he crawled back into bed andpassed out, only to awaken a few minutes later.He was sitting straight up and staring at twonude women sitting on the bed.They were strange-looking, with a weird, g la ssy -eyed expression. One looked generally Asian, something like an East Indian; theother was blond, with eyes two or three timeslarger than normal. Their cheekbones seemedabnormally high. The dark woman was watch-ing her companion closely, as if the blond weredemonstrating something to her. The blondpulled Khoury tow a rd her breasts, apparently initiating a sex act. He tried to resist, but she was too strong for him. As he struggled, he bither nipple so hard that he bit it off. He could

Alien DNA17

feel it in his throat. The woman only looked athim in puzzlement. She did not act as if she were in pain, and there was no blood. At thatpoint the two va nished. The nipple was caught in his throat, caus-ing him to cough persistently for hours. Even-tually, he was able to swallow it. In the mean-time, feeling pain in his genital region, heexamined his penis. There he found two hairs wrapped tightly around it. He had no idea how they had gotten there, unless they hadbeen placed on his penis as he was sleeping. As he untangled them, he felt enormous pain.He preserved the strands—one about twelvecentimeters long, the other about six—in a plastic bag.Though many abductees have reported sex-ual experiences with aliens (or, as some re-searchers think, alien/human hybrids), nonehave come out of the experience with a sup-posed part of an alien body.In 1999 Chalker, a chemist by professionand a well-regarded UFO investigator by avo-cation, brought the strands to a group of bio-chemists for analysis. The analysis reads inpart:

The blonde hair provides for a strange and un-usual DNA sequence, showing ﬁve consistentsubstitutions from a human consensus... which could not easily have come from anyoneelse in the Sydney area except by the rarest of chances; is not apparently due to any sort of laboratory contamination; and is found only ina few other people throughout the whole world.... While it may not be impossible for him toh a ve had sexual contact with some fair-skinned, nearly albino female from the Syd-ney area, such an explanation is ruled out by the DNA evidence, which fits only a ChineseMongoloid as a donor of the hair. Fu rt h e r-m ore, while it might be possible to find a few Chinese in Sydney with the same DNA asseen in just 4% of Taiwanese women, it would not be plausible to find a Chinese woman here with thin, almost clear hair, hav-ing the same rare DNA. Fin a lly, that thin blonde hair could not plausibly re p resent a chemically-bleached Chinese (including theroot) because then its DNA could not easily h a ve been extracted.The most probable donor of the hair musttherefore be as the young man claims: a tallblonde female who does not need much colorin her hair or skin as a form of protectionagainst the sun, perhaps because she does notrequire it. Could this young man really haveprovided, by chance, a hair sample which con-tains DNA from one of the rarest human line-ages known... that lies further from themainstream than any other except for AfricanPygmies and aboriginals? (Chalker, 1999).

See Also:

Abductions by UFOs; Hybrid beings;Strieber, Whitley

Further Reading

Chalker, Bill, 1999. “Strange Evidence.”

Interna-tional UFO Reporter

24, 1 (Spring): 3–16, 31.Strieber,Whitley, 1987.

Communion: A True Story.

New York: Beach Tree/William Morrow.

Aliens and the dead

In the view of UFO-abduction investigatorDavid M. Jacobs, aliens sometimes take onthe form of deceased relatives in the interest of keeping their activities secret.He recounts the experience of a woman to whom he gives the pseudonym Lily Ma rt i n-son. Vacationing with her mother in the Vi r-gin Islands in 1987, Ma rtinson woke up inher hotel room to observe the apparition of her dead brother watching her from the footof the bed. The experience comforted her.La t er, however, when Jacobs put her under hypnosis, Ma rtinson saw the individual shehad thought was her brother as, in Ja c ob s’s w ords, “a person without clothes, small, thin,no hair, and large eyes.” He calls such indi-viduals as Ma rtinson “una w a re abductees.” Un a w a re abductees “explain their strange ex-periences in ways acceptable to society, inter-preting the entities they see as ghosts, angels,demons, or even animals.”

See Also:

Abductions by UFOs

Further Reading

Jacobs, David M., 1998.

The Threat.

NewYork:Simon and Schuster.

18Aliens and the dead