Abduction and Hypnosis: a Letter from the Past.

I have reservations about this post.

I've had a copy of the following letter for a few years, don't know how many other folks have read it, and don't know whether it's published anywhere. It makes a strong statement about alleged UFO abductions of a certain type.

This will be controversial. I've not put it on the blog before now because I know that it will irritate colleagues, even some friends of mine. We all, every day, make these sorts of decisions: what to say and what to leave alone. I'm going to try to say very little myself and just let the letter writer speak.

This is, as you will see, a person who has earned an opinion.

The following is merely a full transcript of this letter, written to Ted Bloecher in 1977. The author was writing him to mention a case involving a husband and wife in Connecticut, which Ted was interested in learning more about.

"Dear Ted,

Here is a case, if you're interested - complete with everything. I would put it in the contactee-type but Gail had hypnosis with Jim Harder last year and as a result told of being taken from bedroom on board a ufo when she was about 12 or 13 years old. She became a contactee. The interesting thing is recently her husband joined her and he believes he is one also.

Apparently they use self-hypnosis and believe that they are receiving earth-shattering information about ufos - their term, complete with descriptions of aliens, messages, and he is somewhat upset for she reads his mind, and always knows what he is doing, although innocent.

They had contacts with one investigator, who, after a while was walking around with a Bible under his arm, and muttering about the devil. However in the past, a high rate of ufo sightings occurred behind their home - and they have seen numerous ones, including landed ones.

I have never met them personally, but have talked for fairly long periods of time via phone. They are looking for reassurance that they are not crazy - of course, they are not. But they have done damage to themselves - how many I have worked with! A person has a fairly good sighting, and somehow he gets trapped into thinking he is a contactee - he is connected with ufos in some way, so his friends make all kinds of suggestions - meditation, self-hypnosis - and the person goes on to drag out of his own mind all kinds of weird, nonsensical thinkings which he begins to believe. It takes two to three years of actively working with this type of person to get them back on their feet - to trace back every thought and how it originated. At the moment I do not have the time; also distance involved to work with them by phone would be too expensive. Unfortunately, thousands are brain-washing themselves thru readings contacts and in some areas attendance at training sessions to put themselves in this unhappy situation. While others are making them, I am curing them. But I can not come out and tell them what is happening to them - they must learn to realize this themselves, and to pinpoint some basic need which is being satisfied by this, a real human need of being special in some way. The same kind of situation happened with Marianne, but fortunately she is cured now, and I was able to protect her from investigation until we had this success. We do not have this type of situation in NH. Maybe because people who have close contact, get in touch with me. 

It would be appreciated if you could contact them -- is it ok for me to give them your address?

Sincerely,

Betty Hill."

I'm going to say the minimum that I can shut myself up to say, and let this simmer.

1). Betty Hill had earned her opinion, particularly by 1977;

2). She uses the term "contactee" in her own broadly-conceived way [again, remember that this is 1977]. She includes any UFO encounter claimant who believes that these very close interactions are occurring to them all the time or "regularly." Whether "pleasantly informational" or just repetitively intrusive, she is concerned about people talking themselves into WAY more than what has actually happened to them;

3). Elsewhere, I have read Betty taking to task not only the self-hypnotizers [or even trusters in hypnogogic state imagery or dream memories], but particularly the, for her, abusers of bad and shallow unprofessional hypnosis techniques, who in her view were producing false beliefs in people who had certain personal and to-be-taken-seriously needs ... but which were not truly UFO related.

Historically, Betty did not know that she was talking to a Ted Bloecher who would take her views quite seriously [as he did everything which had any sense to it], but who also would find his flexibility of thought gradually eroded by the arrival in his research life [in a little over a year] of a UFO experiencer who would become the leading abductions hypnotist of all time.

I am probably in trouble with a lot of people now [if they meditate on the theoretical and actual consequences if Betty's views are correct], but ... well, I'm old and can try to just drift off into the sunset  on this subject. For some colleagues, it might clarify a little more why I have been an appreciator of cases like Betty and Barney's, or Buff Ledge [and a few others] without being a fan of the mass of modern abduction/regular contact claims.

Sorry, fellas.

Peace ... I mean it.

I SEE YOU: YOU SEE ME

Something quick, folks.

I have been trying to at least list the UFO cases which have piled up in, well, piles around here [i.e. outside the relatively organized and useful cabinet files], and naturally stumble upon intriguing cases here and there. This one I have to share.

1968, Miraflores in Lima, Peru. A wife and Mom, who happened to own a well-to-do optical equipment store [telescopes and the like] was doing something that she and her two kids regularly enjoyed --- star-gazing through one of the family scopes. 

She, by eyeball, spotted a bright red object just at the star Rigel in the constellation of Orion. Swinging the telescope over that way, she saw a round red light with a white center. But that was the least of it.

The object went right over [i.e. in the line of sight] Rigel, occluding it. It then proceeded on a straight line to Orion's Belt made the appropriate turn, and occluded each of the belt stars in their turn. It then angled again to cruise in a straight line to Betelgeuse, and occluded that star as well. It then took off "north" towards Gemini, where it was lost. 

Thoroughly amazed, the lady and her children continued to scan the sky for it. About 15-20 minutes later, it suddenly appeared again right at Rigel as it had done before. This time it made a straight line through the Belt aimed at Betelgeuse, and occluded it. It then reversed course coming back directly towards Rigel, and, yes, occluding it again. This time it went away to the south. 

Twenty-five to thirty minutes later, the object manifested a Rigel again. This time it disappeared to the west without further ceremony. 

The witness, and her family, were personal friends of Richard Greenwell, the famous [now deceased] cryptozoologist, but maybe better UFO researcher from the middle APRO research days. I knew Richard somewhat, considered him a friend, published in his journal, and in my opinion, he was a pretty good investigator. Due to that, my confidence in this case is high. 

But what is really the "message" here? This lady and her sons were almost certainly the only persons on the face of our planet who could have seen these occlusions of Orion stars as the UFO flew its path. They were in their way amateur astronomers, and this UFO put on a special astronomy show JUST FOR THEM. 

"I SEE YOU; YOU SEE ME." 

This is pretty "personal". What does it mean? Why was it done? {readers of the blog know that I have about two dozen pretty good cases of this sort of what I call "astro-alignments".} 

Whatever it is, it is fascinating and creepy at the same time. Whatever agency flies these things knows EXACTLY where you are even at modest distances. If the "astronomy incident for the astronomers" thing is real, that agency may also know WHO you are. 

..... pause for meditation.

Till next time, folks, enjoy being in somebody else's "reality show." 

Just a Piece of "Practical" News

Folks, this is only a "notice" of something that all of us who have spent serious time researching these anomalies {and who have collected files} need to consider. I know most everyone knows this, but if my experience with my personal friends holds true, we don't really do anything about it. This is, of course, the concern over preservation of the phenomenological elements of the subjects {the data}, and the human-involvement elements of the subjects {the history}, plus the related issue of making these piles of information more widely available to responsible scholars today and in the future.

When I was "young" {say only 65... ha!}, I thought about this, and dismissed the thought-process after about 30 seconds. Now that I am closing in on 74, that process lingers. And so I've begun to do something concrete about this. I'm going to briefly describe this {also concretely} in the hopes of "inspiring" many of you to begin to plan AND DO something about your own materials, without boring everyone to death reading this.

The above picture is my scanning project in action. There's not much to it. There's a great tabletop scanner which whizzes material through itself in astounding fashion and high-quality results, and a computer to send the data to. There are stacks of files, upon the fronts of each are their labels {to be typed onto the "data bundles" the scanner creates.} All the "bundles" for one category are stored in a "cabinet" {i.e. dedicated folder} labeled for that category.

Data-bundles {individual hardcopy files} show up then {stacked here on the left} and will ultimately be stowed in the proper Cabinet {the folders at the bottom right}. Cabinets created so far include all the major Hynek-like case categories plus several more specific phenomenological or historical holdings {the one "in process" on the screen is the McDonald collection as it exists in my files in Kalamazoo.}

Ten Gbs going on fifteen.... Once a cabinet is {temporarily, you can always add to it} complete, it gets transferred {actually just "copied"; of course the original copy stays on your computer} to a flashdrive. I'll probably make a few sets of these. The theory is that these resource holders would be {over time and with serious thought} distributed to trusted researchers around the world, and thus produce widening ripples of availability and persistence into the future. The data would be preserved and potentially in the hands of those who mattered and who respected it. What happens to the "hardcopy" is something which no one, honestly, has an answer to ... but my nerves rest easier knowing that a flock of electronic libraries full of packed cabinets will be out there.

Although this is real work, {no one should think that it's going to be really quick --- there are actions that each file should have done to it pre-scanning, like destapling, maybe rending and pasting up outsized paper documents, getting a proper label written on each folder for some "assistant" who might be helping you with the scanning, etc.}, it's not back-breaking and can be done on the pace you desire. Unpacking your filing cabinets CAN stress your space, however. I do it because I think that it's a duty that I have --- good old Catholic guilt strikes again. But I think that all of us with files should be doing this.

One further thing should go on: I'm lucky in that I have so many good and "invested" friends so that once I get this sort of thing done, I have a natural {and somewhat deep} initial audience to distribute the material to. I intuit that everyone might not be so fortunate. We need a method for people to inform other responsible people about what they have and if they're ready to share it. I don't know how to pull that off. I have friends whom I believe might be willing to help in that facilitation, but I personally am really busy with my own stuff {and other life projects, before it's too late}. With encouragement, I'd probably agree to participate as an associate facilitator of such information selective-sharing, just, as usual, due to Catholic guilt. Anything of this nature would probably involve several members of The UFO History Group.

Anyway ... the future of Anomalies Research is Out There, or should be, if we are to be a healthy explorative civilization. Each of us has some responsibility towards that, methinks. Contribute not only to the Present but also to the Future if you can.

Peace, friends.

What Do UFOs Do?

"What do UFOs do?"

Whereas we might give that limited question an honest try, we must admit that it will be unlikely that we'll come to clarity on WHY they do it. Some of us have been quite frustrated about that, even leading to retirement from the field of UFO research with bad feelings. I'm not.

Researching this mystery has been some of the greatest fun. In a way, it's nice that it hasn't resolved quickly. In most ways the "fun" of it would be gone. I'll happily take it either way: all-knowledge-revealed-tomorrow or go-to-the-grave-not-having-it-all. UFOs, fascinating as they are, are peripheral to our lives [or should be], as we can wake up each morning and live and love and be good members of society whether they're around or not. It is my opinion that even those people who think that they are having a more intense experience with these things still have the choice as to how they're going to live their waking lives.

So, rightly or wrongly, my view is that UFOs have been "spice" in my existence but not the meat and potatoes of it. But how does one stay interested in any intense or at least ongoing way if THE Answers don't come? Well... I think that answers DO come, just not final ones. ALL the truths about human foolishness [the poor way we handle the subject] can come and this embeds within it profound knowledge about ourselves and our individual and organizational flaws. I've learned more about humans and academia and the military through UFO Studies than any classroom or "normal" life experience.

But we also have learned things, little fragments of things, about the phenomenon itself. We haven't spent decades learning nothing.

To learn these fragments we must immerse ourselves in the phenomenology --- the cases, and LOTS of them. I continue to be stunned as to how many persons [even those who define themselves as "UFOlogists"] have minimalist familiarity with the incidents which should make up the foundation of their opinions. Due to this, I have [and this is hard to say without sounding like an overinflated ass] almost no respect for the vast number of persons, academics, or UFO commentators when they open their mouths to give us the "benefit" of their unearned conclusions. STUDY THE CASES DAMMIT!!

But enough of that. Raving doesn't help. What I'd really like to do today is to explore a little more into the case files and just see if anything can be seen today. Maybe some little thing slightly new will arise; maybe just a slightly different thought; maybe nothing at all except a bit of fun in wonderland.

What do UFOs do?

If you and I were sitting alongside Colonel George Garrett at the USAF Pentagon Collections desks in the late 1940s, and the military and civilian sightings were trickling in, we would almost assuredly come to the same tentative conclusion that he did: these things were aerial technology of a very advanced sort, but they don't have any particularly noticeable agenda. They seem to be involved with overflights, but why? They don't get particularly close to anything, and when they do, it could be seen as just accidents of coincidence --- i.e. we and they only happened to be in the same general area at the same time. One might entertain the idea that these things were not much interested in us "personally" at all.

That, of course, changed. Maybe it was always changed, but the dominant feeling about the phenomenon seemed "distant." When this seemed to change however, it still didn't take on the up-close-and-personal flavor until the bizarre wildness of the 1954 European and South American waves, which were difficult to credit if you were a distrustful American. The USA up-close-and-personal seemed to wait until the 1957 "electromagnetic interference" wave. Even there, for the most part, the feeling was that these encounters could just as easily been accidents of paths crossings rather than deliberate. But maybe we should have looked more closely.

What should we have been looking for and chronicling? How might the UFOnauts have decided to become more interpersonal? How could they have become more "directed", and DID they?

With the benefit of hindsight, one might deride oneself with the viewpoint that the UFOs had already done this en masse during WWII in both theatres of war. The foo fighters seemed definitely "interested." Incident after incident they paced our planes. They didn't seem to want to interfere with anything, but pace they did. This happened so often that no statistician could claim random behavior or coincidental placement. Of course we civilians weren't privy to the extent of the foo fighter phenomenon, and the military refused to release information [they still to a degree refuse], and so it's hard to complain about John Q Public not seeing this about UFOs, but we can be free to question the military's obtuseness in not focussing on it later.

Still this military density points the way to our conversation: what, without blunt overt landings in DC, might the UFOs do without getting too spectacular?

UFOs could show interest in several ways --- my imagination isn't good enough to spell out a long list, but here are a few behaviors. A). the UFOs could engage in some forms of appearance which were/are obvious displays for the "benefit" of individuals or groups. As UFO research has matured, several sorts of these display behaviors have been noted and described. I'm personally proud of the "astro-alignment" form of directed display --- sorry for the ego-trip but can't help being human. These sorts of displays could be interpreted as being somehow for the benefit of the audience displayed to, even if we cannot figure out what that benefit is.

B). the UFOs could engage in forms of responsive behavior --- Father Gill's waving UFOnauts, UFOs which return light flashes, or which engage in motions coincidental to actions taken by us humans. There are many other such cases showing seemingly responsive behavior. This sort of thing could too be interpreted as for the benefit of the observer, again even though we might not be able to define the nature of that benefit.

C). the UFOs might engage in some sort of persistent motion or presence apparently keyed upon an individual or group or even a structural form, while we are watching. This behavior is messier. It could be labeled "monitoring", or maybe "curiosity", or it might be labeled simply "pursuit" without any further human interpretation, or it might be labeled as some form of "stalking." It is in that latter designation that one would "turn a corner" as far as interpreting the actions of the UFOs. At this point, the behavior seems to shed the "for our benefit" aura, and transform into "for THEIR benefit."

Do UFOs "stalk?"

I'm going to delay my feeble analysis of that question for just a minute to look at "monitor", "curiosity", and "pursuit" because maybe that will be useful in deciding whether we should put the emotional "stalking" adjective into these affairs.

Do UFOs "monitor?" Well, I believe that such a descriptor is legitimate. The foo fighters seem more like "monitors" than anything else to me. The disturbingly regular flyovers of places like Oak Ridge and Los Alamos/White Sands seem the same. In 1952, a disk-shaped object parked itself over the Douglas Aircraft facility in Santa Monica, CA resulting in the establishment of a private in-house study group of elite aerotech engineers wanting to research UFOs. During the 1950s, at two different time periods, a gold-metallic globe appeared about monthly in the same part of the sky in sight of the Goldstone Tracking Station near Banning, CA. I can't help saying "monitoring", when I read such cases. Certainly they occasionally are acting in SOME sort of intentional behavior.

Do UFOs show "curious" behaviors? My sister-in-law's best friend had a father who worked the nightshift at the aluminum refining plant at ORMET, OH. He was on break when he saw a structured UFO turn out of the region of the hills to the north and begin to fly precisely down the center of the Ohio River, When it got to the dock area of the plant, it turned sharply to its right and flew over his head into the plant area. It slowly dived down, as if to get a better look at the buildings, and cruised through. After getting to the end of plant property, it rose back to its original height, turned north into the mountains, and went its way. "Curious?" Seems so to me.

In the lower diagram above, non-military pilots were flying over Pasadena, CA airspace when three red-orange disks cruised by, then broke off their flight path to make a rapid circle-and-a-half around the plane. they then shot off on another path. Was this "curiosity", or just showing off what they could do? They didn't try to intimidate the pilots, just "fly rings around them."

The well-known and extremely odd case from Logrono, Spain leaves us straining to interpret the action as anything other than curiosity. In the encounter a smallish bright BOL entered the seminary student's window and noiselessly floated across the bedroom. When it got opposite the audiotape deck, it emitted a coherent beam of light which entered the slot of the recorder [where one would normally place a tape.] Shortly the beam was retracted [this thing acted like the cases of "solid light"; it even seemed to "bump" an object once upon touching it] , the BOL moved about the room a short while more and then left by the window as it had entered. Although the witness himself was terrified, that doesn't seem to have been the intent of this "intrusion." Still, this whole beam-in-the-recorder business seems absurd in the bigger picture, so what the actual intent was remains obscure.

I'm going to shortshrift the "responsive" category --- there are many cases, some sort-of-distant objects, some not-right-on-top-of-you close encounters [there seems to be a "civilized distance" wherein these responding UFOs act generally] in which the UFO seems [usually clearly] to react to something that the humans do --- most often flashing lights at it, or turning lights off. As to the agenda here, one might only say that the operators of the UFO are affirming the reality of their presence to the witnesses. These responses are almost always extremely simple and not long-lived before the UFO goes its way.

So let's get to the question of pursuit and "stalking." Do UFOs "stalk" humans?

This is a question that I can't in honesty answer. The reason for that is, as we've hinted earlier, the concept "stalk" has a large interpretive emotional element to it, which resides in the heads of the purported stalker and the alleged stalkee. We only have the person experiencing the possible stalk to talk to. ... not the ideal situation.

Still, let's stumble on. I have about eighty case files which might be considered relevant to the issue of stalking. Whether any of them seem more "curious" or "simple pursuit" vs "stalking" [I'm using stalking now as a concept containing some negative impact on the witness --- deliberate frightening, deliberate intrusion into their secure space, deliberate maneuvering the witness into doing something that they don't want to do], you and I will have to guess for ourselves.

In my opinion, the majority of these cases could easily be interpreted as simple pursuit or curiosity. But not all.

Here are a few reasons [from the files] that one might defend the theory that some encounters have an "unfriendly" nature:

A). There are a handful of cases where the UFO not only "dogs" the car or plane but penetrates the driver's area or the cockpit with either a beam or an engulfing light;
B). There are about the same number or more cases where the UFO seems clearly to take over the control of the car, or, in the famous Coyne Helicopter case, the helicopter, for a time before releasing it;
C). In several instances the UFO/BOL not only dogs the automobile but continues in an apparent menacing proximity wherein the occupants are screaming and driving recklessly, and in the case of two different cycling encounters, are driven off the road;
D). In several walking encounters, young women are terrorized by BOLs or objects, and in a few cases these objects will park themselves right over the heads of the concerned observers.

Perhaps "strong-minded" observers could take these sorts of actions in stride, but these witnesses were usually terrified by them.

Why would knowing if these events were deliberately "negative" be important? I have my own theoretical context wherein I try to see if I can understand what's going on, as some of you know. For widely cast reasons, I think that it is a reasonable viewing point to think that very advanced civilizations will be of one of three types. There will be civilizations which have come to the conclusion that there are important moral considerations to living life, a Spirit, a God, a Moral Demand. Or, there will be civilizations which have come to the exact opposite conclusion: no Spirituality, no God, an Amoral Condition regarding "others." Or, there will be civilizations which are still open to the Big Questions of Existence, and take a "anxious to still learn" attitude.

I've described elsewhere how each of these three types of civilizations would have almost no incentives to interfere with newly discovered planet's cultural development. One would not as it would be an immoral violation of freedom. Another would not as the only thing we might offer them would be our "novelty" upon which they could stealthily vicariously prey. And the third would also wish to keep our novelty pure [not imitative] in the hopes of learning from our fresh path.

But these three attitudes seem to me to differ slightly in terms of what behaviors might be on their agenda. The Moral Civilization would rarely if ever become overt even to an individual. Particularly they would not "stalk." The Searcher Civilization {number three in the above paragraph} would only very gingerly tinker with the lives of people in a society which they wished to remain freshly on its own path. But the Vicarious Predator Civilization might well choose to be crudely interactive with individuals, while keeping the culture as a whole blissfully going its own "original" ways.

If UFOs actually "stalk", that could be a sign that at least the Vicarious Predator Civilization is around.

Still, that is far far from being a conclusive thing. Some encounters seem benign. Some seem just delightful. {The drawing about is the array which showed itself to a lady returning from one nearby New Mexico city to her home, and the Array kept its distance AHEAD of her all the way down the road to her neighborhood.} A BOL in Paxson, AK seemed to move so as to save a State Trooper's life. Other encounters have been more openly playful. Maybe the "playful" or beautiful ones are courtesy of the other civilization types, or maybe the vicarious thrill seekers like all the emotions.

There could be lots more said about this, and lots more researched. For me, at least at this moment, I think that we are lucky: whoever's "out there" watching, they don't want to be doing too much messing around --- almost none with "cultural development" and not a lot even individually in any great percentages. Maybe that restraint is self-imposed; maybe it is imposed by the other two super-civilization types.

Either way, or some other way I can't crystallize, the UFO phenomenon doesn't seem THAT scary.

Peace and gentle dreams, folks.