EXTRAORDINARY ENCOUNTERS:
AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EXTRATERRESTRIALS
AND OTHERWORLDLY BEINGS
by Jerome Clark
Introduction
Extraordinary encounters have been reported
for as long as human beings have been
around, and they are richly documented in
the world’s folklore and mythology. A full accounting of traditions of otherworldly belief
would easily fill many fat volumes. This book,
however, is not about traditions but about experiences, or perceived experiences, of otherworldly forces as claimed by a wide range of
individuals over the past two centuries (with
the rare look farther back if the occasion calls
for it). In other words, it is about things that
people, many of them living, say happened to
them, things far outside mainstream notions
about what it is possible to experience, but, at
the same time, things that seem deeply real to
at least the sincere experients (that is, those
persons who have had the experiences). Not
everyone, of course, is telling the truth, and
when there is reason to be suspicious of the
testimony, that consideration is noted.
Mostly, though, I let the stories tell themselves; I have left my own observations and
conclusions in this introduction. Though
much of the material is outlandish by any definition, I have made a conscious effort to relate it straightforwardly, and I hope readers
will take it in the same spirit. No single person on this earth is guiltless of believing something that isn’t so. As I wrote this book, I tried
to keep in mind these wise words from scientist and author Henry H. Bauer: “Foolish
ideas do not make a fool—if they did, we
could all rightly be called fools.”
Most of us believe in at least the hypothetical existence of other-than-human beings,
whether we think of them as manifestations of
the divine or as advanced extraterrestrials. At
the same time most of us do not think of
these beings as intelligences we are likely to
encounter in quotidian reality. God and the
angels are in heaven, spiritual entities who
exist as objects of faith. Extraterrestrials,
though not gods, “exist” in much the same
way, as beings who science fiction writers and
scientists such as the late Carl Sagan theorize
may be out there somewhere in deep space,
though so far away that no direct evidence
supports the proposition. When devout individuals report feeling the “presence of God,”
they usually describe a subjective state that the
nonbeliever does not feel compelled to take
literally.
Of course we know there was a time when
our ancestors were certain that otherworldly
beings of all sorts walked the world. Gods communicate openly with humans. One
could summon up their presence or encounter
them spontaneously. Fairies and other supernatural entities haunted the landscape as
Introduction
xi
things that existed not just in supernatural belief but in actual experience. We also know
that our poor, benighted ancestors knew no
better. Superstitious, fearful, deeply credulous, they mistook shadows and dreams for
denizens of realms that had no reality beyond
the one ignorance and foolishness assigned it.
Finally, most of us are aware, even if only
dimly so, that a handful of people in our own
enlightened time make more or less public
claims that they have personally interacted
with supernormal beings. Such persons are
thoroughly marginalized, treated as eccentric
and 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 least
in some cases. As for the rest, we could not be
more mistaken.
As it happens, reports of human interaction with ostensible otherworldly beings continue pretty much unabated into the present.
They are far more common than one would
think. The proof is as close as an Internet
search, through which the inquirer will
quickly learn that material on the subject exists in staggering quantity. A considerable portion of it is about channeling (in which an individual is the passive recipient of messages
from the otherworld, usually speaking in the
voice of an intelligence from elsewhere) from
a wide assortment of entities: nebulous energy
sources, soul clusters, extraterrestrials, ascended masters, interdimensional beings, discarnate Atlanteans and Lemurians, nature
spirits, even whales and dolphins. Besides
these purely psychic connections with the
otherworld, there are many who report direct
physical meetings with beings from outer
space, other dimensions, the hollow earth,
and other fantastic places.
Not all of these
ideas are new, of course. The hollow earth and
its inhabitants were a popular fringe subject in
nineteenth-century America, and in the latter
half of that century, spiritualist mediums
sometimes communicated with Martians or
even experienced out-of-body journeys to the
red planet. In 1896 and 1897, during what
today would be called a nationwide wave of
unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings,
American newspapers printed accounts of
landings of strange craft occupied by nonhuman crews of giants, dwarfs, or monsters presumed to be visiting extraterrestrials.
But in the UFO age—that is, the period
from 1947 to the present, when reports of
anomalous aerial phenomena became widely
known and their implications much discussed—a small army of “contactees,” recounting physical or psychic meetings with
angelic space people, has marched onto the
world stage to preach a new cosmic gospel. In
a secular context, UFO witnesses with no discernible occult orientation or metaphysical
agenda have told fantastic tales of close encounters with uncommunicative or taciturn
humanoids.
Some witnesses even relate, under
hypnosis or through conscious “recall,” traumatic episodes in which humanoids took
them against their will into apparent spacecraft. The early 1970s, the period when most
observers date the beginning of the New Age
movement, saw a boom in channeling—again
nothing new (spirits have spoken through humans forever) but jarring and shocking to rationalists and materialists. The same decade
spawned such popular occult fads as the
Bermuda Triangle and ancient astronauts
(prehistoric or early extraterrestrial visitors),
based on the notion of otherworldly influences—benign, malevolent, or indifferent—
on human life.
As cable television became ubiquitous, television documentaries or pseudo-documentaries (some, such as a notorious Fox Network
broadcast purporting to show an autopsy performed on a dead extraterrestrial, were thinly
concealed hoaxes) served to fill programming
needs and proved to be among cable’s most
popular offerings. Books alleging real-life encounters with aliens, such as Whitley
Strieber’s Communion: A True Story (1987),
fueled interest and speculation. In the 1990s
Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard University
psychiatrist John E. Mack, who had hypnotized a number of persons who thought they
xii Introduction
may have encountered UFO beings, championed the idea—which not surprisingly generated furious controversy and even a failed effort to have him removed from his job—that
well-intentioned extradimensional intelligences are helping an unprepared humanity to
enter a new age of spiritual wisdom and ecological stewardship.
Mack, along with other
prominent investigators of the abduction phenomenon such as Budd Hopkins and David
M. Jacobs, pointed to the results of a 1992
Roper poll as evidence that as many as 3.7
million Americans have been abducted—a
conclusion many critics, including some who
are open-minded about or even sympathetic
to the abduction phenomenon, would dispute. Still, there seemed no doubt, based on
the experiences of investigators who have
found themselves inundated with reports, that
thousands of otherwise seemingly normal individuals believe themselves to be abductees.
The abduction phenomenon is undoubtedly the most recent manifestation of the otherworldly-beings tradition, but older beliefs
and experiences, though eclipsed, continue.
Even into the 1990s, encounters with fairies—
which extraterrestrial humanoids were supposed to have supplanted in the imaginations
of the superstitious and impressionable, according to any number of skeptical commentators—were noted on occasion. At least one
recent book from a reputable publisher—Janet
Bord’s Fairies: Real Encounters with Little People (1997)—argued that such things are a genuine aspect of a universe “so complex that we
cannot begin to understand it.” The Blessed
Virgin Mary appeared, as usual, all over the
world, as did other sorts of divine entities.
The world, of course, goes on with its business 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 commit
suicide while awaiting the arrival of a spaceship following a comet. The March 1997
mass death in San Diego of the faithful of
Heaven’s Gate (a contactee-oriented group
that, in various incarnations, had existed since
the early 1970s) sparked big headlines even in
such august media as the New York Times and
the Washington Post. In the wake of the
tragedy came all the predictable lamentations
about alienation and irrationality in a world
that more and more seems to have lost its
bearings.
But the San Diego incident, although hardly unprecedented (history records
numerous episodes of group suicides committed in the name of otherworldly powers), was
anomalous in one important sense: few who
hold such extraordinary beliefs, including the
conviction that they personally interact with
beings from other realms, harm themselves or
others. In fact, most incorporate their experiences into lives so seemingly ordinary that
their neighbors, unless told directly (which
they usually are not), suspect nothing.
In the late 1970s, when I lived in a North
Shore suburb of Chicago, I met a likable, generous-hearted family man named Keith Macdonald. Macdonald recounted a UFO sighting (also witnessed by his family) after which
he felt that something had taken place that he
could 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 and
subjected him to a physical examination
against 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 mental
voices and channeling messages from a planet
called 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 gone
through many earthly incarnations so that he
could lead the Earth as it entered a period of
turmoil and destruction before the ships from
Landa arrived to save the elect. Over the years
I monitored Keith’s emerging beliefs and sat
in on a few—to me unimpressive—channeling sessions during which the all-wise David,
his father on Landa, spoke on a level of verbal
and intellectual sophistication that exactly
matched Keith’s.
Though I never for a moment believed in
the 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 complexity of the cosmos Keith had conjured up
in his imagination—the only place that I
could believe such a cosmos existed, with its
many worlds, peoples, religions, politics, enmities, and alliances. None of it, I should add,
was anything somebody could not have made
up, consciously or unconsciously. But all of it
would have done credit to a gifted writer of
science fiction.
Though he possessed a keen
native intelligence, Keith was neither a writer
nor a reader. He did, however, have some previously existing interest—not profound or
particularly well informed, in my observation—in UFOs, the paranormal, and the occult. As I listened to him over many hours, I
began to feel as if somehow in his waking life
Keith had tapped into the creative potential
most of us experience in our dreams. As we
doze off to sleep and dream, images begin to
well up out of the unconscious; in no more
than a moment we may find ourselves inundated with psychic materials sufficient to fill a
fat Victorian novel. When our eyes open in
the morning, all of that, alas, is gone. Keith
had the capacity, it seemed to me, not only to
live inside his dreams but to keep them stable
and evolving.
Only once, when asked outright, did I acknowledge my skepticism. The confession was
moot because Keith had inferred as much from
my noncommittal responses to his typically excited revelations about the latest from the Landanians. He had no doubt—well, maybe 98
percent of the time he had no doubt—that he
was in the middle of something real in the
most fundamental sense of the word. He also
understood that he had no proof that would
satisfy those who, like me, found the Landanians’ word insufficient. Therefore, he continually implored the Landanians to provide him
that 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 rationalizations for the failure of the prophecies to be fulfilled bordered on, and sometimes surpassed,
the comical. The prophecies and promises continued in a steady stream until Keith’s premature death in 1999, and his closest friend told
me that even at the end, Keith’s faith had not
faltered.
Perhaps the most amazing aspect was
Keith’s manifest sanity, which he never lost
through the many ups and downs of his interactions with the Landanians (not to mention
the literally crippling health problems he suffered at the same time). He worked—as a
garage mechanic in a Waukegan, Illinois, car
dealership—until he was physically incapable
of doing so any longer. He was a good husband to his wife, a good father to his two
boys, and a good friend to those who were
lucky 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 wife
vividly recalled the original UFO sighting
they too had experienced and Keith’s conviction that, after they had gone to bed and he
had continued watching the object, something had happened. Still, they did not believe
much in Landa, and his older son told me
once of his certainty that his father’s communications were psychological in origin. Yet
they loved him, and only those very close to
him had any idea that at any given moment a
good portion of Keith’s attention was focused
on a world far, far away from the small suburban town where he spent much of his adult
life.
In 1985, I flew in a private plane with
Keith and two others (both, incidentally, convinced of the literal truth of Keith’s messages)
to the Rocky Mountain Conference on UFO
Investigation, held every summer on the campus of the University of Wyoming in Laramie.
The title is something of a misnomer; only a
relative few who attend can be called “investigators.” The emphasis is on experience not
just with UFOs but with the space people
who fly 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 regular contact with benevolent extraterrestrials.
The aliens communicate through channeling,
automatic writing (in which information is
dictated to an individual from allegedly unearthly beings), dreams, visions, or voices in
the head, or they are perceived as if physical
entities. (I use this last phrase deliberately; on
close questioning, the individuals involved
usually turn out to have a fairly elastic definition of the infinitive “to see” in all its permutations.)
Few of the contactees assembled in
Laramie matched the stereotype of the flamboyant charlatan or nut case. A few—such as
a young Japanese woman whom space friends
had guided to the United States in pursuit of
her mission for them—had traveled some distance. Except for the small detail of their associations with extraterrestrials, most were decent, ordinary local folk. The majority were
from the small towns, ranches, and farms of
the Great Plains, the sort of people to whom
the phrase “salt of the earth” is often applied.
Among his own at last, Keith could not
have been happier. If he noticed that no one
else spoke of Landa and its impossible to overlook plans for the Earth’s future, or that
every other contactee had his or her special
space friends, all with their own individual
hard-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 the
episode, I realize that I will never know why
“those of Landa” called on Keith. Not that I
had any difficulty understanding who they
were. However tangled some of the details,
there was no mistaking their underlying banality or their all-too-apparent shallow earthiness, with their Greek togas, pretentiously
fractured English, and (yes) Roman Catholic
faith. They themselves were not that interesting; what made them worthy of attention and
reflection was this curious paradox: to the
man who had (unwittingly) created them,
they had a nearly certain independent reality;
to virtually any independent observer, there
could be no question of who had brought
them (for whatever reason) into the world
and to whom they owed what passed for an
existence.
Yet Keith was not crazy. Nor, according to
psychological surveys of other space communicants who attend the Laramie conferences,
are his fellows. The evidence from this and
other psychological inventories tells us that we
can be mentally well and yet hold beliefs—
and, more dramatically, have vivid experiences—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-regarded
psychologists observe, “Notwithstanding the
presence of anomalous experiences in case
studies of disturbed individuals, surveys of
nonclinical samples have found little relationship between these experiences and psychopathology” (Cardena, Lynn, and Krippner,
2000, 4). The authors stress that psychotherapists must understand the difference if they
are to treat their clients effectively. Psychological research into extraordinary encounters of
the sort with which this book is concerned is
in its infancy.
Still, to anyone who looks carefully at the
testimony regarding otherworldly contacts, it
becomes apparent that such phenomena do
not arise from a single cause. There is, for example, little in common between the average
channeler and the average witness to a close
encounter of the third kind (a UFO sighting
in which, according to a classification system
defined by the late astronomer and ufologist J.
Allen Hynek, “the presence of animated creatures is reported” [1972, 138]). Typically,
channelers have had a long history of occult
interests before they begin communicating
with supernatural entities holding forth on familiar metaphysical doctrines. Close-encounter witnesses, on the other hand, fit the profile
of witnesses to less exotic UFO sightings; in
other words, they are pretty much indistinguishable from their fellow citizens.
Consequently, channelers look more like
candidates for subjective experience, and deed to every indication channeling is just
that. It is not veridical (that is, independently
witnessed or otherwise shown not to be a subjective experience); no channeling entity can
prove its existence, and the information provided through the channeling process is susceptible to neither verification nor falsification. The “authority” of the channeling entity
rests solely on its self-identification. If you believe he, she, or it is a discarnate Atlantean,
space alien, or ascended master, you will believe what he, she, or it has to say. If you
choose not to believe any of that, the channeling entity will prove helpless to get you to
change your mind. Experiences such as close
encounters, conversely, may be veridical in the
sense that on occasion they involve multiple—or, more rarely, independent—observers. In the case of multiply witnessed close encounters, subjective explanations are applied
only with difficulty. An investigator in search
of an explanation has limited choices, usually
three: (1) the claimants made up the story; (2)
they naively misperceived what were in fact
conventional stimuli; or (3) they underwent
an extraordinary experience that defies current
understanding.
Between the extremes is a broad range of
non-experiential material, a modern folklore in
which the world and the cosmos are reinvented on the basis of believed-in but undocumented (and often, to those who care about
such things, certifiably false) allegations. Most
persons who circulate such stuff are sincere,
but some of those who feed the stuff to them
are not. Hoaxers provide documents, such as
the supposed diary attesting to Adm. Richard
E. Byrd’s voyage into the hollow earth
through a hole at the North Pole, that believers cite to prove their cases. Most observers
believe James Churchward’s famous (or notorious) books on the alleged lost continent of
Mu are literary hoaxes—Churchward was
never able to produce the ancient documents
on which he asserted he had based his work—
but earnest occultists and New Agers cite his
books 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 advanced
civilization for its time, but by our time its
people had come to be seen as advanced even
beyond us, the creators of fantastic technologies and even the recipient of knowledge from
extraterrestrial sources. The hollow earth of
John Cleves Symmes (1779–1829) is not the
hollow earth of Walter Siegmeister (a.k.a.
Raymond W. Bernard, 1901–1965), any
more than the imagination of one century is
the imagination of the century that follows it.
Flying saucers were not part of Symmes’s
world; consequently, they did not exist in his
hollow earth. By the time Siegmeister wrote
The Hollow Earth (1964), no alternative-reality book could lack flying saucers.
It is entirely likely that nothing in the book
you are about to read will tell you anything
about actual extraordinary encounters and
otherworldly beings. If such exist, however, it
is not beyond the range of possibility that
somewhere amid the noise of folklore, belief,
superstition, credulity, out-of-control thinking, and out-of-ordinary perception a signal
may be sounding. If so, it is a faint one, indeed. The world has always been overrun with
otherworldly experiences, some of which certainly appear to resist glib accounting; yet so
far it has proved exasperatingly tricky to establish that otherworldly experiences are also otherworldly events.
The otherworld, perhaps,
can happen to any of us at any time, but we
may not live in it—at least if we know what’s
good for us—in the way that we live enclosed
within the four walls of the physical structure
in which we read these words. It is not wise to
pass through a world of physical laws while
distracted by all-encompassing dreams. Even
so, there is still a nobility to dreaming. There is
also an undying appeal to the sort of romantic
impatience that imagines new worlds bigger
and more wondrous than our own, then
xvi Introduction
brings these worlds and their marvelous inhabitants into our own. If extraordinary encounters are occurring only with otherwise hidden
sides of ourselves, they are still—or surely all
the more so—worth having.
—Jerome Clark
A
“A” is the pseudonym Ann Grevler (a writer
who uses the pen name “Anchor”) gives the
Venusian whom she allegedly encountered
while driving through South Africa’s Eastern
Transvaal on an unspecified day in the 1950s.
Grevler, a flying-saucer enthusiast sympathetic
to the contactee movement (contactees are individuals who claim to be in regular communication with kindly, advanced extraterrestrials ) ,
met A when her car inexplicably stopped on a
rural highway. As she was looking under the
hood, she became aware of a buzzing sound in
her ears and looked up to see a smiling spaceman standing not far away. Then a spaceship
flew toward her and landed, and she and A
stepped into it. With A and another spaceman,
B, Grevler flew into space. They approached
what Grevler describes as “a positively huge
Mother Ship,” which tinier ships, similar to the
one they we re aboard, we re entering.
Once inside the mothership, Grevler and
her friends went to “the Temple, visited by returning crews to thank the Creator for a safe
voyage.” Subsequently, either in the mother
ship or in the smaller scout craft (her account
is vague on this detail), she visited Venus and
saw beautiful buildings and a kind of university. At the latter, students were taught universal knowledge and trained in extrasensory perception. They also learned “Cosmic Language—which is expressed simply by symbols
of various forms and colors, so that meanings
are 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 individuals
around the world have reported encounters in
which humanoid beings took them against
their will—usually from their homes or vehicles—into apparent spacecraft and subjected
them to medical and other procedures. As
often as not, witnesses spoke of experiencing
amnesia, aware at first only of unexplained
“missing time” (a much-used phrase that has
become almost synonymous with abduction)
consisting of a few minutes to a few hours.
Later, “memory” would return, sometimes
spontaneously, sometimes in dreams, and
often (and most controversially) through hypnotic regression.
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 Hill
stopped the car and stepped out with a pair of
binoculars; through them he saw humanlike
figures inside the craft. One was staring directly at him. Terrified, the couple fled, all the
while hearing beeping or buzzing sounds.
Once back home, the Hills eventually realized
that at least two hours seemed missing from
their conscious recall.
In November Betty had
a series of unusually vivid dreams in which beings forced her and her husband into a UFO.
She and Barney were separated, and Betty underwent a medical examination with a gray skinned humanoid, whom she understood to
be the leader. In January they sought out
Boston psychiatrist Benjamin Simon in an effort to deal with the continuing anxiety they
felt about the incident. Dr. Simon had them
hypnotized, and under hypnosis they separately recounted an abduction episode. Subsequently, the story appeared in a Boston newspaper, and soon afterward journalist John G.
Fuller wrote a best-selling book, The Interrupted Journey, on the case.
A generally similar incident took place in
Ashland, Nebraska, in the early morning
hours of December 3, 1967, when police officer Herbert Schirmer saw a hovering UFO a
short distance from him. He originally believed that the sighting had lasted no more
than ten minutes, but when he later realized
that a half hour had passed, he got nervous,
experienced sleeplessness, and heard a buzzing
sound inside his head. Later under hypnosis
Schirmer related an onboard experience with
short, gray-skinned humanoids with catlike
eyes.
During a wave of UFO sightings in October 1973, two Pascagoula, Mississippi, fishermen claimed that robotlike entities had
floated them into a UFO. The story received
enormous publicity, as did an even more spectacular incident in November 1975, when a
forestry worker from Snowflake, Arizona, disappeared after six colleagues saw a beam of
light from a UFO hit him and knock him to
the ground. Travis Walton returned five days
later with fragmentary memories of seeing
two kinds of UFO beings, little gray men and
humanlike (but not human) entities. A few
other stories, now being called “abductions” as
opposed to “kidnappings,” saw print in the
UFO literature but were little noticed elsewhere. The first book on the larger phenomenon of UFO abductions (as opposed to a
single case, such as the Hills’s), Jim and Coral
Lorenzen’s book Abducted! was published in
1977.
From the Hill incident on, critics focused
on the use of hypnosis to elicit “recall , ”
pointing out that confabulation under hypnosis is a well-documented psychological
phenomenon, most dramatically manifesting
in “memories” of past lives. As early as 1977
three California investigators attempted to
demonstrate that volunteers under hypnosis,
instructed to imagine UFO abductions, told
stories indistinguishable from those related
by “real” abductees. Other investigators and
observers disputed these conclusions, pointing to methodological and logical problems
in the experiment, and subsequent efforts by
other researchers to replicate it failed. One
later study indicated that nearly one-third of
abductees consciously remembered their experiences; their testimony, folklorist Thomas
E. Bullard concluded, was indistinguishable
from corresponding accounts emerging under
hypnotic regression. Still, hypnosis and its vagaries would play a large and continuing role
in the controversy surrounding the abduction
phenomenon .
In the late 1970s Budd Hopkins, a New
York City artist and sculptor, working with
psychologist and hypnotist Aphrodite Clamar,
began to investigate the abduction reports.
Through Hopkins’s work new dimensions of
the phenomenon emerged, including not just
little gray humanoids that would come to
dominate abduction reports but also experiences that began in childhood and recurred throughout abductees’ lifetimes. Some bore
scars, the causes of which were mysterious
until hypnosis revealed them to have been the
result of alien medical procedures. A number
claimed that their abductors had placed implants, usually through the nose or ear, inside
their bodies. Hopkins and his colleagues took
their cases to mental health professionals,
whose tests of abductees suggested that they
were psychologically normal.
In his much-read book Missing Time
(1981) Hopkins argued for a literal interpretation of abduction stories. In other words, he
held that extraterrestrials were literally taking
human beings and doing things to them without their consent. Other ufologists disagreed.
Ufologist Alvin H. Lawson, who had overseen
the earlier “imaginary-abduction” experiment,
offered his own exotic hypothesis that abductees were suffering imaginary experiences
in which they relived the “trauma” associated
with their births. More modestly, others proposed more conventional psychological explanations, such as hallucinations and confabulation. Few observers believed that conscious
hoaxing played much of a role in abduction reporting. Unlike contactees, abductees seldom had any background in occultism or esoteric interests, and hardly any sought profit or
publicity. To every indication they believed
that they had undergone frightening, bizarre
experiences. Some psychological studies
found that abductees often evinced all the
symptoms 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 an
Indiana University Ph.D. dissertation on the
relationship of UFOs to folklore, released a
two-volume study of all abduction accounts
then known, some three hundred. Through a
searching examination of the narratives,
Bullard concluded that a real phenomenon of
strikingly consistent features existed, that “abductions” were not simply an assortment of
random fantasies. He noted patterns that had
escaped even the most attentive investigators,
including “doorway amnesia”—the curious
failure of abductees to remember the moment
of entry or departure from the UFO.
Besides
establishing the uniform nature of hypnotic
and non-hypnotic testimony, Bullard determined that the phenomenon features remained stable from investigator to investigator, thus casting doubt on a favorite skeptical
argument concerning investigator influence
on the story. Beyond that, Bullard wrote, it
was difficult to say more, except that “something goes on, a marvelous phenomenon rich
enough to interest a host of scholars, humanists, psychologists and sociologists alike as well
as perhaps physical scientists, and to hold that
interest irrespective of the actual nature of the
phenomenon” (Bullard, 1987).
Hopkins’s next book, Intruders (1987), introduced fresh features that would figure
largely in all subsequent discussions. From his
latest investigations he had come to suspect a
reason for alien abductions: the creation of a
race of hybrid beings to replenish the extraterrestrials’ apparently exhausted genetic stock.
Female abductees would find themselves pregnant, sometimes inexplicably; then, following
subsequent abductions involving vaginal penetration by a suction device, they would discover that those pregnancies had been suddenly terminated. In later abductions they
would be shown babies or small children with
both human and alien features. The abductors
would explain that these were the women’s
children. Hopkins also uncovered a pattern of
cases of sexual intercourse between male abductees and more-or-less human alien women
(perhaps adult hybrids).
Other investigators began finding similar
cases. Hybrids were a new wrinkle, significantly augmenting the already considerable
peculiarity of the abduction phenomenon. As
long ago as 1975, in his book The Mothman
Prophecies, investigator John A. Keel noted, in
passing, a pattern of what he called “hysterical
pregnancies” in young women who had had
close encounters. Even so, the reports met
with skepticism among scientifically sophisticated ufologists, for example, Michael D.
Swords, who said that such hybridization is
biologically impossible. Other critics argued
that mass abductions for such purposes would
not be necessary; once the basic reproductive
materials were collected, they could easily be
duplicated. Most damning of all, independent
inquiries by physician-ufologists found no evidence of mysteriously ended pregnancies in
colleagues’ experiences or in the pediatric literature. Still the reports continue.
Another significant development in 1987
was the publication of Communion by Whitley Strieber, heretofore known as a novelist
specializing 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 who
had been abduction literalists grew puzzled,
then uneasy, at the apparent quantity of recovered abduction recollections. Strieber also
was the first to express a kind of New Age
view of the abduction phenomenon, now seen not as an entirely negative experience (as
Hopkins and others held it to be) but as an
initiation, however painful, into an expanded,
enlightened view of large cosmic realities.
What to Hopkins were “intruders” to Strieber
were “visitors.” Communion was only the first
of a series of books Strieber would write recounting ever more exotic experiences with
aliens possessing vast paranormal powers.
By now UFO abductions were no longer
the property of abductees and ufologists. They
had expanded into popular culture, and the
gray alien became a staple in cartoons, advertisements, television shows, and more.
Alarmed at the spread of what they regarded
as a popular delusion, skeptics and debunkers
sought to discredit the phenomenon. In 1988
the first book-length attack on the phenomenon, its claimants, and its advocates, Philip J.
Klass’s UFO-Abductions: A Dangerous Game,
lambasted its subject as the product of delusion and deceit.
Though the phenomenon itself remained
elusive, psychologists understood that at least
those who claimed to have experienced it
could be studied. Using standard psychological tests, they documented the essential psychological normality of the average abductee.
They also found that, contrary to one popular
theory, abductees were not prone to fantasy or
imaginative flights so intense that they could
be mistaken for reality. Little if anything
seemed to distinguish abductees from their
neighbors.
The phenomenon’s most notable champion, Harvard University psychiatrist John E.
Mack, became a lightning rod in the controversy. To his colleagues, who went so far as to
try to have him removed from his professional
position, he was a good scholar gone bad. To
New Age–oriented saucerians on the other
hand, Mack was almost something of a
prophet. His controversial book Abduction
(1994) argued for a benevolent interpretation
of abducting aliens, paranormal and interdimensional intelligences who, in Mack’s view,
are here to teach us—particularly those of us
who live in the industrial West—to embrace
other realities and to take better care of each
other and the world we live in. Mack wedded
the contactee message to the abduction experience, to the consternation of Hopkins, Jacobs, and others who refused to draw larger
metaphysical inferences from the abduction
experience. Jacobs, if anything, went to the
opposite extreme. A history professor at Temple University, Jacobs worked with abductees
whose testimony, usually under hypnosis, led
him to the radical hypothesis that the abducting extraterrestrials are creating a population
of hybrids to replace the human race at some
point in the not-distant future.
From their interactions with their readers
and other members of the public, Hopkins and
Jacobs came to suspect that the abduction experience, far from rare, was ubiquitous. Hopkins, for example, wrote as early as 1981 that
there may be “tens of thousands of Americans
whose encounters have never been revealed”
( Hopkins, 1981). In 1991 he and Jacobs were
given funding for a survey to be conducted by the Roper Organization. Using five “indicator”
questions, they sought evidence for possible abduction experiences among those surveyed .
Pollsters interviewed 5,947 adult Americans. In
their reading of the results, Hopkins and Jacobs
deduced that “the incidence of abduction experiences appears to be on the order of at least
2% of the population” (Unusual Personal Experiences , 1992). That comes to 3.7 million abductees. Critics rejected this assertion, arguing
that the study contained too many methodological flaws to mean much. Three social scientists, all with backgrounds in ufology, examined the poll and came to a wholly different
conclusion: “For the present we have no reliable and valid estimate of the prevalence of the
UFO abduction phenomenon” (Hall, Rodeghier, and Johnson, 1992).
In a study of the various theories advanced
to explain UFO abductions, psychologist Stuart Appelle observed that all testable, more or
less conventional hypotheses (confabulation,
fantasy proneness, false memory, sleep hallucination, and the like) stand on shaky empirical
ground. On the other hand, literalistic interpretations suffer from an absence of anything
like solid, veridical evidence. All that can be
said with certainty is that abduction experiences have the feeling of reality to those who
undergo them. Most do not fall into an easily
identifiable psychological category. They appear to be reasonably consistent in their core
features, and some cases involve multiple witnesses. These last cases, in Appelle’s view,
“may provide the greatest challenge to prosaic
explanations” (Appelle, 1995/1996).
Abraham
Channeler Esther Hicks heard from abraham
in the early 1980s. She renders the name in
lowercase because abraham is not an individual but a collection of highly evolved entities
speaking in one voice. In 1986 she and her
husband, Jerry, confided their experiences
with abraham to business associates, who
soon were peppering them with financial and
personal questions they wanted abraham to
answer. When the Hickses saw how satisfied
their friends were with the results, they decided to take abraham to a larger public.
Today the couple conduct workshops, put out
a newsletter, and lecture widely out of their
San Antonio, Texas, headquarters.
Abraham teaches that each of us is a physical extension of an essence that begins in the
spiritual realm. Each is here because he or she
has chosen to be so, and we are here to exercise freedom and experience joy. The universe
is benevolent, and it gives us the potential to
realize all of our dreams. There is no such
thing as death; all of us live forever.
Abram
Folklorist Peter M. Rojcewicz relates the experiences of a young university student to whom
he gives the pseudonym Polly Bromberger. In
the early 1980s Bromberger conjured up a
spirit guide—a “personal archetype,” she
sometimes called it—and gave it the name
Abram. With long, unkempt hair and wearing
a white robe and sandals, Abram looked “biblical.” He came more clearly into focus after
Bromberger had undergone a period of meditation and reflection.
A student of the great psychologist and
philosopher C. G. Jung, Bromberger used a
process she learned from Jung's writings—
“active imagination”—to bring Abram into
her life. In time she came to feel that he had a
kind of independent existence. She told Rojcewicz that “sometimes I feel he can be a force
opening me on purpose to make me stretch
myself, and work myself, and sometimes I get
frustrated with it.” On the whole, however,
she was convinced that Abram was a positive
influence in her life.
Further Reading
Rojcewicz, Peter M., 1984. The Boundaries of Orthodoxy: A Folkloric Look at the UFO Phenomenon.
Ph.D. dissertation. University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia.
Adama
Adama, who channels through Dianne Robbins, is an Ascended Master and High Priest
of Telos, the great Lemurian city now located
under Mount Shasta in northern California.
Because of his pure thoughts, Adama, like the
million other persons who live in the city, is
able to live for hundreds of years. He is currently more than six hundred years old. He is
a descendant of the Lemurians who fled inside
the mountain when Lemuria and all else on
Earth’s surface were destroyed in a nuclear
holocaust. Only twenty-five thousand Lemurians escaped in time.
Since then the Lemurians’ consciousness
has evolved significantly. Besides attending to
their spiritual betterment, the Lemurians
have fought off marauding extraterrestrials
who are causing harm to surface dwellers .
“We are all part of God’s grand plan for the
Universe,” Adama says, “and WE ARE NOW
MERGING OUR THOUGHTS INTO ONE
THOUGHT FOR THE ENTIRE HUMAN
RACE. Soon we will all be on the same wave
band of consciousness, broadcasting our love
and light to all in the cosmos and letting the
cosmos know that we are ready to join with
them in one grand FEDERATION OF PLANETS” (“Adama,” 1995).
Adamski, George (1891–1965)
Though largely forgotten today, George
Adamski was once an international occult
celebrity, perhaps the most famous of all flying-saucer contactees. His claimed meeting
with a Venusian in the California desert in
November 1952 electrified esoterically inclined saucer buffs. In three books published
between 1953 and 1961 he recounted his
trips into space along with extensive encounters with benevolent Venusians, Martians, and
Saturnians. In 1962 he boarded a spaceship
and flew to Saturn to attend an interplanetary
conference. By 1965, when he died, many of
his most devoted followers had broken their
connection with him, convinced either that
he was lying or that evil space people were
misleading him.
Born in Poland, Adamski emigrated with
his parents to upstate New York when he was
one or two years old. In the early 1920's he
moved to California, where he eventually established a role for himself on the local occult scene as head of the Royal Order of
Tibet, a metaphysical school based on channeled teachings from Tibetan lamas. When
flying saucers became an object of popular
interest in the late 1940's, Adamski produced
photographs of alleged spacecraft; some of
the pictures were said to have been taken
through his six-inch telescope.
Published in
the popular occult and paranormal digest
Fate in 1950 and 1951, the photos along
with accompanying text afforded Adamski
his first wide exposure. On November 20,
1952, as six others (including contactee and
fringe archaeologist George Hunt Williamson) watched from a distance, Adamski observed the landing of a saucer and the emergence of the beautiful, blond-haired Orthon ,
a visitor from Venus, who expressed concern
about the human race’s warlike ways. (In
later years Adamski would tell confidants
that his first contacts with extraterrestrials
occurred in his childhood, but he never said
as much publicly.) Three weeks later Orthon
returned in his scout craft over Adamski’s
Palomar Gardens residence and allowed the
ship to be photographed. The resulting pictures would generate enormous controversy
and, for many, virtually define the image of a
flying saucer as a domed disc with a three ball landing gear.
A fifty-four-page account of Adamski’s
early contacts was added to an already existing
manuscript (on supposed space visitations
throughout history) by Irish occultist
Desmond Leslie and published in 1953 as Flying Saucers Have Landed. Two years later, in
Inside the Space Ships, Adamski expanded his
claims to encompass further interactions with
extraterrestrials, both on Earth and aboard
saucers. According to Adamski, the “Space
Brothers,” as he called them, had come to
help the human race out of its backward, violent ways, which were leading inexorably to
nuclear war. They espoused a benign occult
philosophy much like the one Adamski had
taught for many years.
Though revered by many, Adamski also
had bitter critics, none more so than conservative ufologists who dismissed his stories as
absurd and feared that he was bringing
ridicule to all of UFO research. Some ufologists actively investigated his claims and uncovered discrepancies and other evidence of
untruthfulness. One found, for example, that
the weather on a particular day on which
Adamski claimed contact was not as he had
described it. Most photo analysts concluded
that the pictures of “spacecraft” were in fact of
small models. On one occasion skeptical ufologists proved that one Adamski allegation was
unambiguously false. Adamski had reported
that as he was traveling to Iowa to give a lecture, the train suddenly stopped en route.
When he stepped out to take a short walk,
space people met him and flew him to his destination. From interviews with the train crew,
investigators learned that the train had made no such stop. In these circumstances Adamski
tended to blame his accusers of being agents
of a sinister “Silence Group” trying to destroy
the space people’s good works. But in later
years, following his death, several individuals
disclosed that Adamski had acknowledged to
them that his stories were not true.
By 1959 Adamski’s renown was such that
he was able to embark on a worldwide tour,
first to New Zealand and Australia, then to Europe. In May of that same year, Queen Juliana of Holland received him, igniting fierce
commentary in the press and a riot at the
University of Zurich when Adamski
attempted to give a lecture in Switzerland.
Adamski charged that the students—and indeed most of his critics—were agents of a sinister Silence Group, which sought to frustrate
the moral reforms and technological advances
advocated by the space people and their terrestrial allies. Though the reality of Adamski’s
audience with Queen Juliana was never in
doubt, other purported meetings with notables, including President John F. Kennedy,
Pope John XXIII, and Vice President Hubert
H. Humphrey, that figure in the Adamski legend almost certainly did not occur outside
Adamski’s imagination.
In the early 1960s, after Adamski openly
embraced psychic approaches of which he
had, till then, been outspokenly critical, some
of his followers started to question his sincerity, especially when he began doing psychic
consultations for profit. His associate C. A.
Honey circulated damning evidence that
Adamski was recycling his 1930s-era Tibetan masters teachings and putting them in the
mouths of space people. When Adamski
claimed that he had flown to Saturn, the story
only fueled growing doubts even among devoted followers.
His career in decline, his credibility never
lower, Adamski went on a final lecture tour
through New York and Rhode Island in
March 1965. For the preceding month, his financial resources exhausted, he had been living with Nelson and Madeleine Rodeffer in
Maryland. He died of a heart attack at their
home on the evening of April 23.
Aenstrians
For a time in the mid to late 1960's, Warminster, Wiltshire, was the focus of a series of mysterious sightings of UFOs and hearings of apparently related sounds. The excitement
produced what was called the “Warminster
mystery,” which was also the title of a popular
book by Arthur Shuttlewood, a reporter for the
Warminster Journal Shuttlewood, who led sky
watches and became the leading publicist of
the phenomena, also reported receiving phone
calls from self-identified extraterrestrials, as well
as a personal visit from one. The aliens said
they were from a planet named Aenstria. .
The first calls came in early September
1965. The calls continued for a period of
seven weeks, according to Shuttlewood. The
callers were three Aenstrians: Caellsan (the
senior spacecraft commander), Selorik (an interpreter), and Traellison (the queen of Aenstria). In each case they phoned from a public
booth in a particular district in the city,
though Shuttlewood wrote that he never
heard the sound of coins dropping before the
voices began to speak.
The messages we re standard contactee fare Earth is in trouble because of atomic weapons
and environmental pollution. Human beings—
the product of special creation, not evolutionary
processes—should return to simpler, more spiritual ways. The Aenstrians lived long lives and
suffered few illnesses. Traellison, for example,
was 450 years old, a fairly young age on her
home planet. The Aenstrians were communicating with Shuttlewood so that he could pass
on their information to Earth’s “councils . ”
On May 24, 1967, Shuttlewood The
Warminster Mystery was published. In it he relegated the story of the Aenstrians’s phone calls
to an appendix, where he suggested that they
were no more than an interesting hoax. On the
afternoon of the twenty-sixth, the phone rang
at the Shuttlewood residence. It was an Aenstrian named Karne, expressing displeasure at
what the author had said of his colleagues’
trust worthiness. Shuttlewood responded that
if Karne wanted to prove he was who he
claimed to be, he should pay a personal visit.
Karne took up the challenge and showed up at
Shuttlewood’s door seven seconds later.
Karne, who spent a total of nine minutes
with the journalist, looked like an ordinary man
in most ways, except for an apparent absence of
pupils in his eyes, which we recovered by thick
glasses. He also had blue blotches on his cheekbones and lips. He also had a manner that unnerved Shuttlewood, who felt that the ostensible extraterrestrial had powers that, if provoked ,
could instantly destroy him. Karne said that
Traellison, Caellsan, and Selorik had returned
to their home “cantel” (planet). He spoke of an
imminent war in the Middle East—the Six - Day
War erupted the following June—and of further UFO appearances, this time of cross -
shaped craft, in the fall. He said a Third World
War was almost inevitable at some point in the
not-distant future. If it was fought with nuclear
weapons, he hinted, extraterrestrials would intervene 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 difficulty with his breathing,” Shuttlewood wrote.
“From time to time, as I shot questions at
him . . . he glanced at the pale gold disc on his
wrist. He replied to certain queries immediately, shaking his head in the negative over
others, after looking at his ‘watch’” (Shuttlewood, 1978). At one point Shuttlewood
asked if George Adamski’s contact claims were
genuine. Karne replied sternly that he could
not answer that question, though he hinted
that the late California contactee was not of
earthly origin. At the conclusion of the meeting, Shuttlewood gripped Karne’s wrist and
left thumb in what he intended as a gesture of
good will, but the visitor winced in pain. Earlier, at the commencement of their meeting,
Karne had not responded to Shuttlewood’s
outstretched hand.
Shuttlewood watched him walk, turning
stiffly to wave farewell, then continue up the
street. “From the waist up,” Shuttlewood
wrote, “his bearing was smart, military, almost
arrogantly proud. From the waist down, however, his movements were slow and deliberate.
His legs seemed weighted, feet slightly dragging; yet to a casual onlooker he would have
been 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 like
Karne at a Warminster park. He was looking
upward as military jets flew by, shaking his
head in disapproval. His left hand was bandaged as if it had been recently injured. That
was the last either saw of Karne.
Aetherius
Aetherius is one of the Cosmic Masters who
preside at the Interplanetary Parliament on Saturn. In 1954 Aetherius made his presence
known psychically to George King, a London
man with longstanding occult interests. Soon
King was channeling other space people, including Jesus. By January he had gone public
with the cosmic gospel—essentially earthbound occult doctrines ascribed to philosophical extraterrestrials—and soon was issuing a
mimeographed bulletin titled Aetherius Speaks
to Earth (later Cosmic Voice). In August 1956
King established the Aetherius Society, among
the most successful and enduring contactee
groups. 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 in
constant warfare. From time to time, during
crisis situations, the Cosmic Brotherhood will
place its spaceships above Earth and direct
positive energy downward. Society members
receive the energy and make sure that it
reaches its targets. Over a three and a half year
period, beginning in 1958, King climbed no
fewer than eighteen mountains at the behest
of the space people.
The society maintains headquarters in
London and Los Angeles, as well as chapters
all over the world.
Affa
Affa first appeared in 1952 among the extraterrestrials who communicated to a small
Prescott, Arizona, occult group headed by
George Hunt Williamson. Affa, identified as
being from the planet Uranus, first spoke
through automatic writing, then later allegedly by radio, warning of threats to Earth
by 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 urged
Swan to alert the United States Navy so that it
could receive his radio messages. Swan told
her neighbor, retired navy Adm. Herbert B.
Knowles, about Affa’s request. Knowles, a
UFO enthusiast, sat in on a writing session
and addressed questions to Affa. Impressed by
the answers, he wrote the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), which on June 8 sent two
officers to Swan’s house. They also asked questions of Affa, who promised a radio transmission at 2 P.M. on June 10. When none came,
ONI lost interest and turned the letters over
to the navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics. John
Hutson, a security officer, was curious enough
to fly up to Eliot for two days in late July. On
his return he spoke with an FBI agent, but the
agency chose not to pursue the matter.
In the summer of 1959 navy Commander
Julius Larsen, an ONI liaison officer to the
CIA’s Photographic Intelligence Center in
Washington, DC, stumbled upon a file on the
incident. Larsen, a navy pilot who harbored a
private fascination with spiritualism, called on
Swan and Knowles. At one point Larsen tried
automatic writing and believed he had communicated with Affa, though Swan insisted he
had not contacted her Affa.
Back in Washington Larsen talked with
Center Director Arthur Lundahl and Lundahl’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 to
prove his existence, Affa replied, “Go to the
window.” Lundahl saw nothing but clouds,
though Neasham seemed convinced that a spaceship was hiding in them. Neasham
would also claim that radar operators at
Washington National Airport told him that
that particular portion of the sky was mysteriously “blocked out.” No independent evidence supported that allegation.
Neasham notified Major Robert Friend,
head of the air force’s UFO-investigative
agency, Project Blue Book. For Friend’s benefit Larsen even related telepathic messages
from Affa and other space people, but the
aliens refused his request for a flyover. Friend
wrote a memo on the episode and sent it to
his superiors. Nothing further was done. The
incident remained buried in Pentagon, FBI,
and CIA files until the early 1970s, when
Friend shared his notes with UFO historian
David M. Jacobs. Subsequently, some exaggerated accounts of the episode were published in the UFO literature, a few even
claiming that the CIA itself had communicated with extraterrestrials.
Agents
“Agents” are human beings whom extraterrestrials have contacted and who have agreed to
help the space people in their benevolent mission to Earth. George Hunt Williamson wrote
that agents, who come from all social and economic 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 instructions. The Agents conduct a variety of
tasks. They introduce persons who are of potential use to them to each other, recommend
books, ask provocative 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 .
Extraterrestrials get in touch with Agents in
assorted ways. Sometimes it is through a car or
ham radio, sometimes via thought waves, on
occasion by direct, physical encounter.
Agharti
Agharti is a subterranean kingdom, which allegedly exists in Tibet or Mongolia. It is, depending on whom one believes, a paradisiacal
realm or a sinister lair of sorcerers and other
evildoers—mostly, however, the former. The
legend of Agharti seems loosely based on the
Buddhist realm of Shambhala, a city of adepts
and mystics said to be located in a hidden valley (called “Shangri-La” in James Hilton’s
popular novel Lost Horizon [1933] and in the
movie of the same name). Shambhala first appeared in a 1922 Polish book, soon afterward
translated into English as the best-seller Beasts,
Men and Gods.
The author, Ferdinand Ossendowski
(1876–1945), fled Russia in the wake of the
Bolshevik revolution. An anti-Communist,
Ossendowski participated in the White Russian government, that nation’s short-lived experiment in democracy between the overthrow of the tsar and the triumph of the
Communists. He wandered through Mongolia, itself torn by political unrest and bloody
conflict. There he learned, he said, of a mysterious “King of the World.” A lama in the
town of Narabanchi took him into a temple
in which there was a throne. Ossendowski was
told that in 1890 horsemen had ridden into
town and instructed all the local lamas to
come to the temple. One of the horsemen sat
on the throne, at which point all present “fell
to their knees as they recognized the man who had been long ago described in the sacred
bulls of the Dalai Lama, Tashi Lama, and
Bodgo Khan. He was the man to whom the
whole world belongs and who has penetrated
into all the mysteries of Nature. He pronounced a short Tibetan prayer, blessed all his
hearers and afterwards made predictions for
the coming half century. This was thirty years
ago and in the interim all his prophecies are
being fulfilled” (Ossendowski, 1922). The
King of the World lived in an underground
realm called Agharti.
Whether this King of the World, or even
the author’s supposed informant, ever existed,
he and his kingdom soon entered occult lore.
In Darkness over Tibet (1935) Theodore Illion
recounted his allegedly true adventures in an
underground city in a distant valley. At first
he thought he had entered a utopia, but soon
he realized that the inhabitants, for all their
advanced spiritual knowledge and supernatural powers, were cannibals. Illion wrote that
his reported experiences proved the existence
of Agharti. In 1946 Vincent H. Gaddis, a regular contributor to Amazing Stories who later
achieved a degree of fame as the inventor of
the concept of the Bermuda Triangle, picked
up on the theme, depicting Agharti as a city of
evil that was linked to tunnels all over the
world. He incorporated Agharti into the
Shaver mystery, the subject of a series of tales
Amazing Stories was running about an alleged
underground realm populated by deros, demonic entities in possession of a fantastic Atlantean technology, which they used to torment surface humans.
In a variant of the legend, Robert Ernst
Dickhoff’s Agharta: The Subterranean World
(1951) contended that two and a half million
years ago Martians landed at Antarctica, thena tropical region, and created the first humans. Then reptoid (that is, biped reptilian)
Venusians attacked, forcing the Martians and
their human associates to create two huge underground cities, connected by tunnels of vast
length, in order to protect themselves. One of
these cities was Shambhala, under Tibet, and
the other Agharta, under China’s Tzangpo
Valley. Eventually, the Venusians conquered
Agharta, sending their evil minions into the
world until 1948, when the Martian/human
alliance reclaimed the city and slew its ruler,
the King of the World, and many of his
troops.
There is no real-life Central Asian tradition
of Agharti, though Chinese and Tibetan
equivalents to Western fairy lore spoke of magical caves, on the other side of which the traveler would find a beautiful land and lovely but
ultimately treacherous supernatural beings.
Akon
Akon appeared to Elizabeth Klarer on April 6,
1956, when his spaceship landed in the Drakensberg Mountains of Natal, South Africa.
She was flown to a waiting mothership,
where she met other friendly space people and
learned that they came from the beautiful
planet Meton in the orbit of Alpha Centauri
four light years away. The Metonites, she
learned, are vegetarians who live in a utopian
society without conflict or disease. They are
also a passionate people, and in due course, as
the contacts continued, Klarer and Akon became lovers. She bore him a son, Ayling, during a four-month stay on Meton.
Klarer became well known in saucer and occult circles in South Africa and Europe where
she lectured from time to time. She distributed
photographs of Akon’s spacecraft and showed
inquirers a ring she said he had given her.
Though many dismissed her stories and evidence as bogus, her friend Cynthia Hind, a
well known ufologist from Zimbabwe, believed her to be sincere and has helped keep her
name and story alive. On the occasion of her
death in February 1994, Hind wrote, “Elizabeth Klarer died in comparative poverty. . . .
Her incredible story brought her some fame (or
more accurately, notoriety!) but certainly no
riches” (Hind, 1994)
Alien diners
An alien family ate at a restaurant and stayed
overnight in a motel in suburban St. Louis in
May 1970, according to ufologist John E.
Schroeder, who interviewed employees and
heard 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 the
incident soon after its occurrence.
Simpson was examining billing documents
at her desk at 10:30 A.M. on May 15 when a
“whistling sigh” sounded. She looked up, and
on the other side of the desk stood four tiny
people, apparently members of a family: a
couple and their two children. All looked
strikingly alike. All were youthful in appearance, and the children were nearly the height
of the ostensible parents. They were so short
that they barely reached the level of the desk.
They were all expensively dressed, the males
in tailored suits, the females in pastel peach
dresses. Their hair did not look real. Odd as it
seemed, Simpson suspected that they were
wearing wigs.
In a falsetto voice the man said, “Do you
have a room to stay? Do you have a room to
stay?” She told him what the charges would
be, but he seemed not to understand what she
had said. He turned to his female companion
as if expecting her to clarify matters, but she
remained silent. An uncomfortable period of
silence followed, broken finally when the man
reached 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 some
quick informal testing suggested they were
not. She took two twenty-dollar bills from the
stack and gave the rest back.
Because the man was too small to reach up
to fill out the reservation form, Simpson said
she would do it for him. He said his name was
“A. Bell.” As he stepped forward she got a better look at him and was able to compare his
face with his companions’. According to
Schroeder, whose composite description
comes from his interviews with Simpson and
other motel employees who saw them, they
were “wide at eye level, their faces thinned
abruptly to their chins. Their eyes were large,
dark and slightly slanted. . . . Their noses had
practically no bridges and two slits for nostrils, and their mouths were tiny and lipless—
no wider than their nostrils. All look uniformly pale. (Color descriptions varied from
pearl to pale pink to light grey.)”
“And where are you from?” Simpson asked.
At that the man’s arm shot upward as if pointing to the sky, and he said, “We come from up
there. Up there.” The woman pushed his arm
down and spoke for the first time. She said
they were from Hammond, Indiana, and she
gave a street address. The man signed the register but did it so awkwardly that Simpson
thought 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 store
their bags while they ate. At the manager’s insistence Simpson checked the Indiana address
and learned that both the name and the address were bogus. The bellhop checked the
parking lot for a car with an Indiana license
plate but found none.
The hostess who led the strange family to a
table in the restaurant noticed that the chins
of even the adults barely reached the top of
the table. The man read aloud from the menu
and kept asking odd questions about where
milk, vegetables, and other common foods
come from. The woman ordered peas and
milk for herself and the children, and for the
man peas, a small steak, and water. Their eating was similarly peculiar. Each picked up a
single pea with a knife, brought it to his or her
tiny 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 same
time. The man produced a twenty-dollar bill and gave it to the waitress, who went to get
change; when she returned, they were gone.
When the bellhop saw them, he retrieved
their baggage and stepped into the elevator to
lead them to their room. When the elevator
door opened, though, the family recoiled in
fright and confusion. The bellhop had to assure them that there was no danger. After letting them into the room, he turned on the
lights. Suddenly the man began shouting at
him that the light would hurt the children’s
eyes. Suddenly frightened himself, the bellhop
fled without waiting—one suspects futilely, in
any case—for a tip.
The bellhop, the manager, and Simpson
vowed to watch for the little people’s departure in the morning, but they were never seen
again, 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 interviewed
all five employees who had interacted with the
family. All seemed sincerely bewildered by the
curious series of events.
Alien DNA
Physical evidence of abduction experiences is
hard to come by, and physical evidence of actual 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 began
on the night of July 12, 1988, when Peter
Khoury, a Sydney resident of Lebanese background, was awakened suddenly when he
sensed 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 or
four small hooded figures with wrinkled,
shiny black faces. Through telepathy they assured him he would not be harmed. Khoury
then saw two other figures on his left. “These
two,” he later told investigator Bill Chalker,
“were thin, tall with big black eyes and a narrow chin.” They were “gold-yellow in color.”
One of these beings shoved a needle into the
left side of his forehead, and he passed out.
The next day he showed the puncture
wound to his fiancée. Later he showed it to
his doctor, who thought he had walked into a
nail. When Khoury told him what had happened, the physician laughed at him. He
found that this was a typical response and
grew despondent and anxious, worried about
the strange nature of the experience, about
the future, about his inability to communicate with anyone who would listen to him.
Eventually, his fiancée found a copy of Whitley Strieber’s Communion (1987), detailing
the author’s personal abduction experiences.
In time he heard about and joined a local
UFO group but left it still unsatisfied. In
April 1993 he founded the UFO Experience
Support Association.
On July 23, 1992, Khoury had a second,
even stranger encounter. He was suffering from
the effects of an assault by three men at his job,
and as a consequence he was on strong medication and mostly bed-ridden. On the morning in
question, he managed with considerable difficulty to drive his wife—he was now married—
to the train station so that she could get to
work. Once home he crawled back into bed and
passed out, only to awaken a few minutes later.
He was sitting straight up and staring at two
nude women sitting on the bed.
They were strange-looking, with a weird ,
glassy - eyed expression. One looked generally
Asian, something like an East Indian; the
other was blond, with eyes two or three times
larger than normal. Their cheekbones seemed
abnormally high. The dark woman was watching her companion closely, as if the blond we re
demonstrating something to her. The blond
pulled Khoury toward her breasts, apparently
initiating a sex act. He tried to resist, but she
was too strong for him. As he struggled, he bit
her nipple so hard that he bit it off. He could feel it in his throat. The woman only looked at
him in puzzlement. She did not act as if she
were in pain, and there was no blood. At that
point the two vanished .
The nipple was caught in his throat, causing him to cough persistently for hours. Eventually, he was able to swallow it. In the meantime, feeling pain in his genital region, he
examined his penis. There he found two hairs
wrapped tightly around it. He had no idea
how they had gotten there, unless they had
been placed on his penis as he was sleeping.
As he untangled them, he felt enormous pain.
He preserved the strands—one about twelve
centimeters long, the other about six—in a
plastic bag.
Though many abductees have reported sexual experiences with aliens (or, as some researchers think, alien/human hybrids), none
have come out of the experience with a supposed part of an alien body.
In 1999 Chalker, a chemist by profession
and a well-regarded UFO investigator by avocation, brought the strands to a group of biochemists for analysis. The analysis reads in
part:
The blonde hair provides for a strange and unusual DNA sequence, showing five consistent
substitutions from a human consensus . . .
which could not easily have come from anyone
else in the Sydney area except by the rarest of
chances; is not apparently due to any sort of
laboratory contamination; and is found only in
a few other people throughout the whole
world. . . .
While it may not be impossible for him to
have had sexual contact with some fair skinned, nearly albino female from the Sydney area, such an explanation is ruled out by
the DNA evidence, which fits only a Chinese
Mongoloid as a donor of the hair. Furthermore, while it might be possible to find a few
Chinese in Sydney with the same DNA as
seen in just 4% of Taiwanese women, it
would not be plausible to find a Chinese
woman here with thin, almost clear hair, having the same rare DNA.
Finally, that thin
blonde hair could not plausibly represent a
chemically-bleached Chinese (including the
root) because then its DNA could not easily
have been extracted.
The most probable donor of the hair must
therefore be as the young man claims: a tall
blonde female who does not need much color
in her hair or skin as a form of protection
against the sun, perhaps because she does not
require it. Could this young man really have
provided, by chance, a hair sample which contains DNA from one of the rarest human lineages known . . . that lies further from the
mainstream than any other except for African
Pygmies and aboriginals? (Chalker, 1999).
Aliens and the dead
In the view of UFO-abduction investigator
David M. Jacobs, aliens sometimes take on
the 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 Martinson. Vacationing with her mother in the Virgin Islands in 1987, Martinson woke up in
her hotel room to observe the apparition of
her dead brother watching her from the foot
of the bed. The experience comforted her.
Later, however, when Jacobs put her under
hypnosis, Martinson saw the individual she
had thought was her brother as, in Jacobs’s
words, “a person without clothes, small, thin,
no hair, and large eyes.” He calls such individuals as Martinson “unaware abductees.”
Unaware abductees “explain their strange experiences in ways acceptable to society, interpreting the entities they see as ghosts, angels,
demons, or even animals.”
Allingham’s Martian
According to Flying Saucer from Mars (1954),
Englishman and author Cedric Allingham
witnessed the landing of an extraterrestrial
spacecraft while vacationing in Scotland in
February 1954. A tall man, human in all ways
except for an unusually broad forehead,
stepped out of the vehicle. The occupant, who
indicated that he was from Mars, spoke in a
friendly fashion, saying that he had earlier visited Venus and the moon. He asked if earthlings would soon visit the latter world, and
when Allingham replied yes, the Martian
acted concerned. He wanted to know if a war
would soon erupt on Earth. After this conversation, which occurred mostly by gestures, the
Martian reentered his craft and flew away,
though not before Allingham had photographed him (from the back) and his ship.
The book asserted that a man named James
Duncan had witnessed the entire encounter.
A year earlier George Adamski had published his account of a meeting with the
Venusian Orthon in the southern California
desert. Allingham’s tale thrilled British saucerians, who now felt they had their own contact. Waveney Girvan, who had published the
British edition of Adamski and Desmond
Leslie’s book, wrote, “If Allingham is telling
the truth, his account following so soon upon
Adamski’s amounts to final proof of the existence of flying saucers” (Girvan, 1956).
Allingham proved strangely elusive, however, making only one public appearance. He
showed up in the company of a virulently anti UFO science writer and media personality
Patrick Moore. That, plus the failure of inquirers to find the alleged witness to Allingham’s
contact, should have warned British saucerians
that all was not well with the story told by their
native Adamski. In 1956 Allingham’s publisher—also the publisher of Moore’s books—
released a statement asserting that the contactee
had died of tuberculosis in a Swiss sanitarium.
In a book on British UFOs published thirteen years later, journalist Robert Chapman
reported that he had found no evidence that a
Cedric Allingham had ever existed. In his
judgment, Flying Saucer from Mars amounted
to “probably the biggest UFO leg-pull ever
perpetrated in Britain” (Chapman, 1969). It
was an open secret among Moore’s friends
that he and a friend, Peter Davies (the “Martian” in the photograph), had written the book
as a spoof on those gullible enough to believe
Adamski’s contact tales. Moore, well known as
a practical joker, once had regaled a contactee
magazine with letters, written under an assortment of absurd pseudonyms (including
“L. Puller”), claiming scientific confirmation
of the contactee cosmos.
Eventually word of Moore and Davies’s involvement trickled down to British ufologists.
Two of them, Christopher Allan and Steuart
Campbell, interviewed Davies who admitted
the hoax and added that he had rewritten the
original manuscript to disguise Moore’s distinctive literary style. After the hoax was exposed for the first time in print in the London
ufology journal Magonia, Moore professed to
be outraged, threatened legal retaliation, and
then retreated into telling silence.
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