Thursday, April 29, 2021

Part 1 : Extraordinary Encounters....A to Allingham's Martian

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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