Solar Birds and Abductees
Having read through the majority of author and researcher Raymond Fowler’s 1990 book, The Watchers, which is mostly a case study of UFO abductee Betty Andreasson Luca, I have to say that Luca’s accounts are among the most detailed, bizarre, internally consistent, and evidentially supported within abductee literature I’ve read to date — and, because they are all these things, highly unsettling too. If one isn’t prepared to believe or tolerate the idea that Luca was taken aboard non-human craft, her accounts’ vividness even as flights of the imagination are stunning.
What I want to focus on is a twice-appearing detail recounted by Luca (with the assistance of hypnotic regression therapy), which seemed to me anomalous, yet which turned up in another abductee’s account: that of David Huggins, who was the feature of a 2017 documentary, Love and Saucers. I do not intend to draw any semiotic conclusions from the data, since it is so minimal; but, since I think that the most meaningful part of the UFO/ET/UT phenomenon is abductees’ experiences — partially because that is, after all, where the majority of publicly available data resides — , I also think that discerning patterns within these experiences may be equally meaningful; and I have seen no commentary on this particular cross-abductee pattern yet. Of course, if we are dealing with a phenomenon which is archetypally of the trickster mold, apparent patterns could be the most misleading thing of all.
The detail is first mentioned in The Watchers by Fowler on page 5:
Betty was taken inside [a larger craft] and was subjected to the effects of strange equipment and devices both before and after a physical examination. Then she was taken through a dark tunnel which egressed into an alien place. There she experienced what seems to have been a holographic recreation of the death and rebirth of a Phoenix-like bird, the same bird that was pictured on the uniforms of the aliens [italic emphases mine].
Fowler is making reference to an experience Luca had during 1967, first mentioned in an earlier book of Fowler’s. What to make of the bird’s representation on the beings’ uniforms, I’m not sure. Uniform symbols denote allegiance and/or accomplishment — at least in human cultures.
More details are provided on pages 338 and 339 of The Watchers:
Betty, floating along between two alien entities, entered a huge unearthly place. The trio floated above a trestlelike track high in the sky. Below, Betty saw distant domelike buildings, water, vegetation, and a strange flying craft. She also passed over a pyramidlike structure with a sculptured head affixed to its apex.
[Betty] It looked sort of like an Egyptian head, and it had like a, you know, how they wear those hats?
…As Betty traveled between her two abductors along the high trestle, she entered a beautiful crystalline structure to witness a holographiclike presentation of the death and rebirth of the Phoenix. After this astonishing object lesson, Betty heard a thundering chorus of voices blended together as one mighty voice which addressed her by name and asked her a question.
Voice You have seen and you have heard. Do you understand?
Betty No, I don’t understand what this is all about, why I’m even here.
Voice I have chosen you.
Betty For what have you chosen me?
Voice I have chosen you to show the world.
Let’s put aside the Egyptian-like structures and booming Oz the Great and Powerful voice. I want to go back to page 178, where Fowler details a hypnotic regression session involving an experience Luca had in 1988. For this session, and some others, Luca was coaxed into recounting the event as an observer, rather than a participant, so that she would not be overwhelmed by panic and/or pain. Here, she recounts the event by imagining it as if it were playing on a TV:
Betty It’s like I’m floating or flying or something through the area. […] Oh! There’s all sorts of — looks like crystal spheres way down below there… […]And there’s sounds on the television like a rumble, like a rumble of thunder. And I see the look on my face. Ahhhhh, there’ a huge shadow passing over me — huge, huge shadow passing over. And I look very frightened from it! […] And I see myself lifting my head and looking up. And I see, I see, I see the wingtip of a bird! A huge, huge wingtip of a bird on the television. It’s huge! […] A loud voice is calling my name! “Betty!” And I look and, and it, it seems as if I can’t answer. [pause] And the voice called again, my name. And I hear it say — “Equal balance, you’re seven complete.”
The connection I’m trying to make between Luca’s accounts is not inarguable, but I’m compelled to identify this later “vision” as a reappearance of the Phoenix bird partly because of subsidiary details like Betty floating through a nebulous space, the presence of crystalline structures, and the situation culminating in Betty being addressed by a disembodied voice bearing an ambiguous message. One might prefer to identify the bird, or bird-image, here as rather evoking associations with the Thunderbird, due to the thunderous sounds. Still, what we are left with is the presence of an enormous bird in a nebulous, partially crystalline space.
Now I want to bring in David Huggins, whose experiences I’m less familiar with. Huggins has received curious attention over time for his dozens of “outsider art” or “naive” paintings, all of them charged with an ugly, surreal energy, and all depicting what he claims to be his own experiences with alien beings. In a 2017 article, written and published in response to the aforementioned documentary film, author Andrew Whalen writes:
Other memories Huggins has recovered aren’t alien, but something else entirely. He once had a vision of floating through a tunnel, only to encounter a very large bird that burst into flames, then collapsed into a pile of ash [italic emphases, again, mine]. “And out of that ash came a long, dark caterpillar or worm,” he said. A friend later connected his vision to the phoenix, though Huggins hadn’t been familiar with the mythical bird.
Unfortunately, I can’t find any other articles online which provide more information about this account, such as when it occurred (if Huggins indeed can assign a date to it) or if Huggins was familiar with Luca’s story. It is also unclear what is meant by “vision.” Note especially the paralleling detail of floating through some dark, perhaps subterranean passage.
Near the end of The Watchers, Fowler does some speculating over what he terms “the Phoenix symbol of immortality” and “overpowering object lesson of immortality.” Fowler himself is an alleged abductee, and so — as I have wondered about abductees in general — I question if that experience primed him for a strangely optimistic tone regarding the whole matter. It is strange not just because of Luca’s own significant trauma from the experiences, but because of Fowler’s trauma too. His own hypnotist “…had performed many age regressions in his time. But he had never seen such a violent reaction before.” Could this shift to positivity reflect the human ability to usefully integrate trauma by interpreting it as a stepping stone for growth? Sure. It would be a grave error to presume that self-evolution must be a smooth, Good-Vibes-Only process. Yet the nigh-messianic specialness — “I have chosen you to show the world” — ETs have conferred upon countless abductees never bears out. So, again, why feed them that story? By all appearances, and like the hope for and anticipation of imminent “disclosure” by many Ufophiles, its fulfillment is perpetually locked into a subjunctive zone. Let us not forget the matter of the invasive medical aspect of abduction experiences either.
On page 345 Fowler writes:
The Watchers seem to be telling us that Man’s true essence can coexist in more than one plane, not only in this life but in the next. Their message also implies that Man, in some form, may have preexisted in the world of light prior to being born into the plane of existence which we call life.
Maybe. Maybe not.
Let’s ask, though: after decades of compiling abductees’ accounts, more and less detailed; and if we are to grant the possibility that Huggins’ “vision” may have been an abduction experience, or something stimulated by the UFO phenomenon…why are there, to my knowledge, only two reports of this super-specific encounter, or vision? Is this something which could be drawn out by sustained hypnosis with other abductees? How many people who have not reported their experiences witnessed the same thing? And what of that ever-present question looming over the bulk of UFO-bound instructive or predictive experiences: why are such things locked behind memory blocks, and why is bypassing these blocks so often a painful procedure, as if one were accessing something off-limits?
I’ll repeat something I wrote above: “…if we are dealing with a phenomenon which is archetypally of the trickster mold, apparent patterns could be the most misleading thing of all.” It is possible that what is meaningful is not the interpretable symbolic content of certain patterns within the UFO phenomenon — this would be Fowler’s takeaway, at least in The Watchers — but the propagation of those patterns; or, put another way, not the signs themselves but the system of signs.
Especially interesting to me is that, should we propose that the UFO phenomenon constitutes, in the broadest possible sense, a form of communication, the “object lesson” of the Phoenix was pretty much a dud. As Luca said, “I don’t understand what this is all about”, and Huggins had no awareness of the Phoenix to begin with. Why settle on a Chosen One when your chosen symbol for immortality— one which is, in fact, well known the world over — doesn’t even register with them, and depends upon future human intervention for mere identification? Recall that the voice asked, “Do you understand?”, and did not say, “You will understand.” Despite its initial strangeness, the latter expression would make a kind of sense — more sense than the question!— when contextualized by the phenomenon’s precognitive attributes. To me, then, these oversights seem to be something… well, more than oversights.
