UFO C ONTACTEES AND A BDUCTEES

The UFO contactees are men and women who are convinced that they encountered alien "space intelligences" and that they remain in direct communication with them through telepathic thought transference. In many cases, UFO researchers have observed that there does seem to be a heightening of what one would normally consider manifestations of extrasensory perception after the contact experience with an alleged benevolent space being. Along with psychic abilities, the contactee is often left with a timetable of certain predictions of future events.

In spite of such setbacks as unfulfilled prophecies, a good many of the contactees continue to be instilled with an almost religious fervor to spread the message that has been given to them by the space beings. A distillation of such messages would reveal concepts such as the following:

Humankind is not alone in the solar system and now brothers and sisters from outer space have come to Earth to help those humans who will listen to their promise of a larger universe. The space beings want humankind to become eligible to join an intergalactic spiritual federation. The space beings are to assist the people of Earth to lift their spiritual vibratory rate so they may enter new dimensions. (According to the space beings, Jesus, Krishna, Confucius, and many of the other leaders of the great religions came to Earth to teach humanity these same abilities.) The citizens of Earth stand now in the transitional period before the dawn of a New Age of peace, love, and understanding. If the earthlings should not raise their vibratory rate within a set period of time, severe Earth changes and major cataclysms will take place.

How do the flying-saucer contactees encounter the space beings? A synthesis of such experiences reveals the following.

They first saw a UFO on the ground, hovering low overhead, or heard a slight humming sound above them that drew their attention to a mysterious craft.

Next, a warm ray of "light" emanated from the craft and touched the contactees on the neck, the crown of the head, or the middle of the forehead. They may have lost consciousness at this point and, upon awakening, may have discovered that they could not account for anywhere from a minute or two to an hour or two of their time. Those contactees who later claim direct communication with space beings generally state that they have no recollection of any period of unconsciousness, but they maintain that they "heard" a voice speaking to them from inside their own heads.

Many contactees are told that they were selected because they really are aliens, who were planted on Earth as very small children.

After the initial contact experience, nearly all contactees seem to suffer through several days of restlessness, irritability, sleeplessness, and unusual dreams or nightmares.

After a period of a week to several months, the contactee who has received a message from the space beings feels prepared to go forth and share it with others.

None of the flying-saucer contactees seem to feel any fear of their solar brothers and sisters and most of them look forward to a return visit from the space beings.

Family and friends of the contactees report that they are different and changed persons after their alleged experience with the space beings.

Most UFO contactees agree that the space beings' most prominent characteristic is wisdom, and they seem to take their scientific knowledge for granted. After all, contactees reason, if they have traveled through space from other worlds to Earth, then they must be extremely intelligent.

Hard-nosed Earth scientists, however, remain singularly unimpressed with the specific technical information that has been relayed by the contactees. Those sympathetic to the contactees might argue that the UFO crews deem their science to be incomprehensible to humankind at this point; other theorists suggest that the contactees are not communicating with alien entities at all, but rather, with a higher aspect of their own psyches.

Some researchers have observed that the space beings appear to function as do the angels of more conventional theologies. Both beings are concerned about Earth; they seem to be actively trying to protect it and the people in it. Both the space beings and the angels are powerful entities who appear to have control over the physical limitations of time and space—yet they are benevolent in their actions toward bumbling, ineffectual humankind. It seems that space beings have deliberately placed themselves in the role of messengers of God, or that humans hope that there exist such beings who can extricate humankind from the disasters of its own making.

Although most of the contactees claim an initial physical contact with a space being, the operable mechanics of the experience seem reminiscent of what can be seen in Spiritualism as the medium works with a spirit guide or a control from the "other side." In Spiritualistic or mediumistic channeling, the sensitive individual enters the trance state and relays information through the guide, who contacts various spirits of deceased human personalities. The mechanism in the Flying Saucer Movement is often that of the contactee going into some state of trance and channeling information from space beings. George King, George Van Tassel, Gloria Lee, George Hunt Williamson, and several other contactees have been members of psychic development groups.

It is impossible to estimate how many men and women claim to receive messages from space beings. Groups continue to rise from dynamic contactees, each with their variations of previous revelations and their own occasional individual input. There is also the category of revelators that UFO researchers term the "silent contactees"—men and women who have not gathered groups about them, but who have established contact with what they feel to be entities from other worlds and who have directed their lives according to the dictates of those space beings. Many of these men and women continue to work in conventional jobs, confiding their experiences only to close associates and family members.

While the number of UFO contactees remains nebulous at best, estimates presented at a conference on the alien-abduction phenomenon at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in June 1992 suggested that as many as several hundred thousand to more than three million adults in the United States alone have had abduction experiences with UFO beings. While such a figure seems mind-boggling to say the least, some UFO researchers say that the true figure would be much higher.

Dr. R. Leo Sprinkle, formerly on staff at the University of Wyoming in Laramie and now in private practice, has speculated that there may be hundreds of thousands of people who have had a UFO encounter but who were not even aware of it at the time. Sprinkle lists several characteristics common among people who have had such experiences:

An episode of missing time. Under hypnosis many people remember driving down the road and then being back in their car. They know that "something" happened between the two points of consciousness, but they can't fill in the missing time. Disturbing dreams. The abductee will dream about flying saucers, about being pursued and captured, and being examined by doctors in white coats. Daytime flashbacks of UFO experiences. While they are doing tasks in their normal daytime activities, abductees will flash back to some kind of UFO image or UFO entity. Strange compulsions. Sprinkle told of one man who for seven years felt compelled to dig a well at a particular spot. Under hypnosis he revealed that a UFO being had told him they would contact him if he dug a well. A sudden interest in UFOs. The abductee may suddenly give evidence of a compulsion to read about UFOs, ancient history, or pyramids and crystals, without knowing why.

In 1976 Carl Higdon, a 41-year-old Wyoming oil-field worker, claimed to have been kidnapped by alien beings while he was hunting elk in a remote wilderness area. Higdon said that he was lifted aboard a spacecraft and taken millions of miles to another planet where he saw other earthlings living with alien beings. It was Higdon's impression that the aliens had been taking people from Earth for many years—as well as a sizable stock of various animals and fish. Higdon was given a physical examination by the extraterrestrials, told that he was unsuitable for their needs, and returned to Earth.

Sprinkle hypnotized Higdon a number of times and gained remarkable details of the experience. Higdon had gone to the north edge of the Medicine Bow National Forest to hunt wild game. About mid-afternoon, he walked onto a rise and spotted five elk grazing in a clearing a few hundred yards away. He picked out the largest buck, lined it up in his telescopic sights, and pulled the trigger. He could not believe his eyes when the powerful bullet from his magnum rifle left the barrel noiselessly and, in slow motion, floated like a butterfly for about 50 feet, then fell to the ground.

Higdon heard a twig snap, and he turned to face a strange-looking entity more than six feet tall, about 180 pounds, with yellowish skin color. The being possessed a head and face that seemed to extend directly into its shoulders, with no visible chin or neck. The humanoid had no detectable ears, small eyes with no brows, and only a slit of a mouth. Two antenna-like appendages protruded from its skull.

The alien being raised its hand in greeting to Higdon and floated a package of pills in his direction. Higdon remembers that he swallowed one of the pills upon the direction of the entity, and the next thing he knew, he was inside a cube-shaped object with the being, at least one other alien, and the five elk. Higdon was strapped to a seat with a football-like helmet on his head. Then he underwent a bizarre trip through space in a small, transparent craft.

Most of the details of Higdon's fantastic journey were gleaned during the hypnosis sessions with Sprinkle. Higdon told the doctor that he witnessed portions of what appeared to be a futuristic city of tall spires and towers and revolving multicolored lights. After a physical examination, he was returned to the space vehicle. When he looked out of the transparent sides, he observed five other beings who appeared to be humans.

The UFO set down again in Medicine Bow National Forest. Higdon was placed back in his truck, his rifle was returned, and he was relieved of the pills that the being had given him. Dazed by the strange experience, Higdon managed to radio for help. Then he apparently blacked out until he was found several hours later. Higdon spent three days in the Carbon County Memorial Hospital at Rawlins, undergoing extensive tests and rambling and shouting about four-day pills and men in black suits.

Higdon apparently experienced a miraculous healing of a tubercular-type scar on his lung. A problem with kidney stones also disappeared after his trip to outer space. Dr. Sprinkle has observed that such unexplainable recoveries from ailments often occur among people who claim to have been examined by alien beings.

David Webb, an Arlington, Massachusetts, solar physicist, cochair of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a top UFO research organization, believes that space aliens have abducted one out of every eight people who have reported seeing UFOs. In Webb's research, in many cases the victims undergo some kind of examination, but they usually remember nothing of the onboard experience.

In the course of the numerous hypnotic regressions that he conducted with UFO abductees, Dr. James Harder said that he had found much evidence to support the theory that alien abductors return to find and to reexamine abductees at various intervals, sometimes throughout a person's lifetime and sometimes without his or her being aware of it. Harder observed that it is as if some sort of extraterrestrial group of psychologists is making a study of humans.

Harder and other researchers have discovered that a high percentage of people who have been abducted have undergone multiple experiences with UFO entities. Most abductees who have had more than one experience with UFO aliens usually undergo the first encounter between the ages of five and nine. These abductees remember the alien as friendly and quite human in appearance. Upon further hypnotic regression and careful probing, however, the investigators have learned that the entity did not look human at all.

In most cases, the entity usually tells the children that it will be back to see them throughout the course of their life. It also admonishes the children not to tell their parents about the encounter.

Harder has also discovered that during the adult abductee experience, those men and women undergoing the encounter will often report having a vague memory of their abductor, and they will later say that they feel as though they have seen the entity before. In Harder's opinion, the multiple UFO abduction is not a random occurrence.

The abductees speaking at the Mutual UFO Network's Washington, D.C., conference in June of 1987 reported frightening and disorienting aspects of their UFO experiences. They said that they often remembered the events only in fragments and flashes until they underwent hypnotic regression. For the abductees speaking on the panel, the interaction with the UFO entities had seemed primarily to be negative. They told of the frustration of being partially paralyzed and taken without their consent to undergo medical examinations.

Whitley Strieber, author of the best-selling book Communion (1987), said that he had attempted to deal with his tension and anxiety over having undergone an abduction experience by writing about his encounter. Strieber told the group assembled for the abductee panel at the Washington, D.C., conference that when he first realized what had happened to him, he was suicidal. Then he began to investigate some UFO literature and discovered that others had had similar experiences. He sought out the services of a hypnotist, thinking that perhaps that would be the last of the ordeal. It wasn't, of course, and he wrote the book hoping that the memories and the feelings would go away. Regretfully, the memories returned.

Strieber went on to say that he had received thousands of letters from other abductees—people who do not welcome publicity, including entertainers, political leaders, and members of the armed forces in high positions. According to Strieber, all of these abductees had reported a basic progression of emotions, moving from uneasy, fragmented recollections to a clear memory accompanied by fear. If the abductees consented to undergo hypnotic regression, they usually became even more terrified. Instead of attempting to glean more and more information about the abductee through hypnotic regression, Strieber suggested that concerned researchers should be trying to help these individuals with their fright and helping them gain more understanding about what had happened to them.