6
Hallucinations
[A]s children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror . . .
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
(c. 60 BC)
Advertisers must know their audiences. It’s a simple matter of product and corporate survival. So we can learn how commercial, free-enterprise America views UFO buffs by examining the advertisements in magazines devoted to UFOs. Here are some (entirely typical) ad headlines from an issue of UFO Universe:
• Senior Research Scientist Discovers 2,000-Year-Old Secret to Wealth, Power, and Romantic Love.
• Classified! Above Top Secret. The Most Sensational Government Conspiracy of Our Time Is Finally Revealed to the World by a Retired Military Officer.
• What Is Your ‘Special Mission’ While on Earth? The Cosmic Awakening of Light Workers, Walk-Ins, & All Star-Born Representatives Has Begun!
• This Is What You Have Been Waiting For. 24 Superb, Incredible Life-Improving UFO Seals of the Spirits.
• I Got a Girl. Do You? Stop Missing Out! Get Girls Now!
• Subscribe Today to the Most Amazing Magazine in the Universe.
• Bring Miraculous Good Luck, Love, and Money into Your Life! These Powers Have Worked for Centuries! They Can Work for You.
• Amazing Psychic Research Breakthrough. It Takes Only 5 Minutes to Prove that Psychic Magic Powers Really Work!
• Have You the Courage to Be Lucky, Loved and Rich? Guaranteed Good Fortune Will Come Your Way! Get Everything You Want with the Most Powerful Talismans in the World.
• Men in Black: Government Agents or Aliens?
• Increase the Power of Gemstones, Charms, Seals and Symbols. Improve the Effectiveness of Everything You Do. Magnify Your Mind Power and Abilities with the Mind Power MAGNIFIER.
• The Famous Money Magnet: Would You Like More Money?
• Testament of Lael, Sacred Scriptures of a Lost Civilization.
• A New Book by ‘Commander X’ from Inner Light: The Controllers, the Hidden Rulers of Earth Identified. We Are the Property of an Alien Intelligence!
What is the common thread that binds these ads together? Not UFOs. Surely it’s the expectation of unlimited audience gullibility. That’s why they’re placed in UFO magazines – because by and large the very act of buying such a magazine so categorizes the reader. Doubtless, there are moderately sceptical and fully rational purchasers of these periodicals who are demeaned by such expectations of advertisers and editors. But if they’re right even about the bulk of their readers, what might it mean for the alien abduction paradigm?
Occasionally, I get a letter from someone who is in ‘contact’ with extraterrestrials. I am invited to ‘ask them anything’. And so over the years I’ve prepared a little list of questions. The extraterrestrials are very advanced, remember. So I ask things like, ‘Please provide a short proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem’. Or the Goldbach Conjecture. And then I have to explain what these are because extraterrestrials will not call it Fermat’s Last
Theorem. So I write out the simple equation with the exponents. I never get an answer. On the other hand, if I ask something like ‘Should we be good?’ I almost always get an answer. Anything vague, especially involving conventional moral judgements, these aliens are extremely happy to respond to. But on anything specific, where there is a chance to find out if they actually know anything beyond what most humans know, there is only silence.* Something can be deduced from this differential ability to answer questions.
[* It’s a stimulating exercise to think of questions to which no human today knows the answers, but where a correct answer would immediately be recognized as such. It’s even more challenging to formulate such questions in fields other than mathematics. Perhaps we should hold a contest and collect the best responses in Ten Questions to Ask an Alien’.]
In the good old days before the alien abduction paradigm, people taken aboard UFOs were offered, so they reported, edifying lectures on the dangers of nuclear war. Nowadays, when such instruction is given, the extraterrestrials seem fixated on environmental degradation and AIDS. How is it, I ask myself, that UFO occupants are so bound to fashionable or urgent concerns on this planet? Why not an incidental warning about CFCs and ozone depletion in the 1950s, or about the HIV virus in the 1970s, when it might really have done some good? Why not alert us now to some public health or environmental threat we haven’t yet figured out? Can it be that aliens know only as much as those who report their presence? And if one of the chief purposes of alien visitations is admonitions about global dangers, why tell it only to a few people whose accounts are suspect anyway? Why not take over the television networks for a night, or appear with vivid cautionary audiovisuals before the United Nations Security Council? Surely this is not too difficult for those who wing across the light years.
The earliest commercially successful UFO ‘contactee’ was George Adamski. He operated a tiny restaurant at the foot of California’s Mount Palomar, and set up a small telescope out back. At the summit of the mountain was the largest telescope on Earth, the 200-inch reflector of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the California Institute of Technology. Adamski styled himself Professor Adamski of Mount Palomar Observatory. He published a book – it caused quite a sensation, I recall – in which he described how in the desert nearby he had encountered nice-looking aliens with long blond hair and, if I remember correctly, white robes who warned Adamski about the dangers of nuclear war. They hailed from the planet Venus (whose 900° Fahrenheit surface temperature we can now recognize as a barrier to Adam-ski’s credibility). In person, he was utterly convincing. The Air Force officer nominally in charge of UFO investigations at the time described Adamski in these words:
To look at the man and to listen to his story you had an immediate urge to believe him. Maybe it was his appearance. He was dressed in well worn, but neat, overalls. He had slightly graying hair and the most honest pair of eyes I’ve ever seen.
Adamski’s star slowly faded as he aged, but he self-published other books and was a long-standing fixture at conventions of flying saucer ‘believers’.
The first alien abduction story in the modern genre was that of Betty and Barney Hill, a New Hampshire couple, she a social worker and he a Post Office employee. During a late-night drive in 1961 through the White Mountains, Betty spotted a bright, initially star-like UFO that seemed to follow them. Because Barney feared it might harm them, they left the main highway for narrow mountain roads, arriving home two hours later than they’d expected. The experience prompted Betty to read a book that described UFOs as spaceships from other worlds; their occupants were little men who sometimes abducted humans.
Soon after, she experienced a terrifying, repetitive nightmare in which she and Barney were abducted and taken aboard the UFO. Barney overheard her describing this dream to friends, co-workers and volunteer UFO investigators. (It’s curious that Betty didn’t discuss it with her husband directly.) By a week or so after the experience, they were describing a ‘pancake’-like UFO with uniformed figures seen through the craft’s transparent windows.
Several years later, Barney’s psychiatrist referred him to a Boston hypnotherapist, Benjamin Simon, MD. Betty came to be hypnotized as well. Under hypnosis they separately filled in details of what had happened during the ‘missing’ two hours: they watched the UFO land on the highway and were taken, partly immobilized, inside the craft where short, grey, humanoid creatures with long noses (a detail discordant with the current paradigm) subjected them to unconventional medical examinations, including a needle in her navel (before amniocentesis had been invented on Earth). There are those who now believe that eggs were taken from Betty’s ovaries and sperm from Barney, although that isn’t part of the original story.* The captain showed Betty a map of interstellar space with the ship’s routes marked.
[* In more recent times, Ms Hill has written that in real abductions, ‘no sexual interest is shown. However, frequently they help themselves to some of [the abductee’s] belongings, such as fishing rods, jewelry of different types, eyeglasses or a cup of laundry soap.’]
Martin S. Kottmeyer has shown that many of the motifs in the Hills’ account can be found in a 1953 motion picture, Invaders from Mars. And Barney’s story of what the aliens looked like, especially their enormous eyes, emerged in a hypnosis session just twelve days after the airing of an episode of the television series The Outer Limits’ in which such an alien was portrayed.
The Hill case was widely discussed. It was made into a 1975 TV movie that introduced the idea that short, grey alien abductors are among us into the psyches of millions of people. But even the few scientists of the time who thought that some UFOs might in fact be alien spaceships were wary. The alleged encounter was conspicuous by its absence from the list of suggestive UFO cases compiled by James E. McDonald, a University of Arizona atmospheric physicist. In general, those scientists who have taken UFOs seriously have tended to keep the alien abduction accounts at arm’s length, while those who take alien abductions at face value see little reason to analyse mere lights in the sky.