What is “Positive” About the Abduction Phenomenon? || Reexamining the Data (Part II)
In this follow-up to my first piece on abductions, I believe it is worth reexamining a possibility I offered regarding the disparity between abductees’ positive and negative interpretations of their experiences:
We cannot underestimate the role the therapist plays here in potentially guiding the abductee to see beyond illusions or suggestibility. It may be that “conversion” indicates irresponsible hypnotherapy, while “revulsion” represents the opposite.
This appears to be David Jacobs’ inference in his book, The Threat, which draws from “more than 700 hypnotic-regression interviews with alien abductees and a Roper survey of 6,000 adults.” While giving John Mack due respect for the clinical work he offered to abductees — work that prompted the Harvard Medical School’s dean to initiate an unprecedented investigation in 1994 regarding Mack’s professional conduct (that is, Mack’s willingness to take the matter seriously) — , Jacobs cites a pattern within Mack’s sessions of falling “into the trap of accepting fantasies and confused thinking as reality”, and of “calling for information that is not within the scope of [the client’s] testimony.” He writes:
It is important to understand that in spite of their methodological problems, Mack and Fiore, like other hypnotists, uncover much of the standard physical and reproductive procedures that make up the core of the abduction experience. However, because of their training, they are not particularly interested in what has happened to the abductee. For Mack, as for many other therapists, investigation into the actual circumstances of a client’s experiences is not a primary concern. Finding out exactly what happened to the abductee is less important than what the client thinks has happened to him — the account’s accuracy or truthfulness is of little concern. […] Thus, when Mack conducts hypnosis, he first explains to his clients that he is “more interested in their integration of their recalled experiences as we go along than in ‘getting the story.’ The story. . . will take care of itself in due time.” The truth or falsity of a person’s experiences — the chronology, the procedural logic, and the accurate perception of the events — play a secondary role in Mack’s methodology.
This is Jacobs’ critique of psychologist Edith Fiore’s hypnotherapeutic work as well:
Fiore has a similar agenda. She states, “Because my main concern is to help people, it is not important to me if the patients/subjects report correctly the color of the aliens’ skin, for example. What is important is that the negative effects of encounters be released through regressions.” […] This mutual fantasy — a subtle form of leading — is a far more significant problem for abduction research than just asking leading questions. […] Researchers who have New Age agendas perpetuate the problem by uncritically accepting a wide range of “paranormal” accounts. Past lives, future lives, astral travel, spirit appearances, religious visitations — all assume legitimacy even before the believing hypnotist begins abduction research. When the abductee relates stories with false memories, the believing hypnotist is unable to recognize them and is therefore more than willing to take them seriously.
Lest accusations of prejudice against spiritual matters be made, it bears iterating that the problematics here do not consist in a mere proximity to New Age beliefs, but of, as Jacobs explains, a methodological, positivist₁ naivety which “is […] more interested in what the abductees think has happened to them rather than in what has actually occurred”; and, as I wrote beforehand, that there is “…a critical misalignment between a consistent set of physical acts, performed by the “ET”s, and the acts’ metaphysical rationalizations by ‘converted’ abductees”; that “…exceedingly few of these claims to enlightenment derive from anything inherent to the relevant recollected abductions”; and the fact that there is a “…remarkably linear and quick nature [to] the conversion process as it occurs within hypnotherapy.”
Consider these passages from Edith Fiore’s book, Encounters (which, despite its positivist bias, does indeed admit that “[usually] [the abductees’] experiences involved being taken against their will, and examined thoroughly and, at times, painfully”). Note the second passage’s explicit methodological contradiction, within the same paragraph, no less:
If a strict researcher had been peering over my shoulder, he would have frowned and shaken his head, because he would have been after proof of the validity of the contact, whereas my goal may have changed to quickly relieving anxiety that had surfaced.
When doing any kind of regression, I take a position of remaining very objective within my own mind as to an event’s validity; did it really happen? […] I have no desire to prove that these experiences really happened, any more than I do with my patients who “discover” they’ve been sexually abused.
Such problematics having been noted, consider now certain details from abductee Sandi’s case, as related in Encounters’ second chapter, in conjunction with said critical misalignment and a posteriori effect/affect:
SANDI: It was the one with the weird face. He wasn’t nice. […] He’s telling me that I was bad, telling me that I was no good, that I didn’t matter, that I was expendable, why should I care about my little self so much, and how dare I question him.
DR. FIORE: When he said that to you, how did you feel?
SANDI: I just felt really defenseless. I kind of thought maybe he was right. […] He just kept overpowering me and telling me that I was bad and . . . and finally . . . finally I thought maybe I’d better do what he said.
DR. FIORE: Now, I want you to remember the very last thing that was said to you by those beings.
SANDI: I think they said, “Goodbye.”
DR. FIORE: Did they thank you?
SANDI: In a weird sort of way, I think so. But it wasn’t the way we do it. It wasn’t so much thank you as it was . . . they knew that I knew. It’s like they didn’t have to say it. They knew that they . . . had benefited and they knew that I had benefited.
DR. FIORE: Let yourself know how you benefited from that experience.
SANDI: It’s like . . . they gave me an experience to make me a more whole person. To experience that, they said, would be good . . . or they implied it would be good for me.
Note that Sandi’s explanation of how she benefited is not only blatantly tautological — “I benefited because they implied that I benefited” — but vague to the extreme on how the explanation of self-benefiting was relayed to her, to the extent that it’s not evident such an explanation was even provided. Rather, Sandi’s recounting has all the signs of an imposed suggestion, or a sort of overlay — a suggestion led on by Fiore, implanted by the figures, or derived from both. Again, as I wrote: “exceedingly few of these claims to enlightenment derive from anything inherent to the relevant recollected abductions. That is to say, it is not rendered by anything the “ET”s reportedly communicate or do.” Tellingly, Fiore does not pursue this thread at all, seemingly satisfied with what Sandi has said because it meets Fiore’s aim of “quickly relieving anxiety”, and ends the hypnotic session soon afterward.₂
Excellent contemporary examples of this aforementioned positivism in action, and the “pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo” it coaxes out, are Geraldine Orozco’s monologues and regression sessions. Orozco, an abductee who alleges maternal involvement with the hybridization program, came to my attention while I was listening to an interview with Jon Sumple and Jack Roth, the co-writers for the 2019 documentary film, Extraordinary: The Seeding. Yet very little about Orozco’s experiences and post-epiphany trajectory are extraordinary at all, right down to the time — 3:33am — of her first consciously recalled abduction. Rather, Orozco has joined a decades-old demographic of people who seem to have been infected by a contagious, overlaying transmission of an ostensibly utopic orientation, the core elements of which are relatively stable but the arrangement of which keeps shifting, as if the myth reconstitutes itself with each new host — and, again, a story the host or their therapist barely, or never, interrogates or cross-references with other transmitted stories.
Although, as I have said, I find the folkloric hypothesis insufficient — which is to say, I do believe it offers some descriptive utility — , the content and material of Jacques Vallée’s 1979 book, Messengers of Deception, is just as relevant as it was more than forty years ago, if not more so. In the book’s second chapter, Vallée is keen to point out that “just because a message comes from heaven doesn’t mean it’s not stupid”; and, in the third, that “[the] new belief [of contactees] is completely lacking in logic. That is the key to its power. It serves to keep scientists away. The more absurd the statement, the stronger its effect. When the Establishment is rational, absurdity is dynamite.” On August 13, 1975, Vallée attended a meeting on Stanford’s campus, organized by would-be-cultists who called themselves H.I.M., or Human Individual Metamorphosis. This meeting was organized around two persons — Bonnie Nettles and Marshall Applewhite, the couple who would go on to found the notorious Heaven’s Gate group. Vallée reports a particularly interesting, and telling, interaction from this meeting:
A man who must have come to some personal conclusions regarding the deception broke in to ask: “How do you know that you’re not being deceived by demonic forces?” The answer was less than adequate:
The potency of the information speaks to you. When you get the information and you read through it and you realize that you understand it, that you’re being pulled toward it, and you don’t know why and you can’t figure it out on a conscious, rational, human level, that’s the clue right there [Vallée’s emphasis]. Something inside you says you know you’re going to do it, you know you’re going to do it.
Someone in the audience yelled, “That’s how demonic forces work!” Another disciple picked up the ball: “That’s an impossible question to answer. Except that in this particular process those individuals in that next kingdom are so close that they step in and take over and keep any force from this level from influencing you otherwise.”
This anti-epistemic trend matches one of the entries among Vallée’s catalogue of contactee (and, by extension, abductee-convert) themes: intellectual abdication. Near the book’s end, Vallée stresses that “[sources] of information should be severely scrutinized, not only for human error, instrumental accuracy, and observational bias, but also for deliberate deception [Vallée’s emphasis].” While it is true that the (what should be scandalous) active disinterest the overt scientific community has demonstrated towards UFOs and “ET”s illustrates a paradigmatic myopia, more concerned with respectability, a sort of intellectually timid and unctuous political correctness lined with Catch-22s, than with exploring the data, it is also true that New Age, ET-oriented communities have a myopia their own: an unwavering fidelity to the message from on high’s indisputable — and, often, subtly or obviously humanity-belittling — truths. This ties into a portion of a statement Vallée gave during a closed U.N. conference, attended by international UFO experts in 1978, and included as Messengers of Deception’s appendix:
In the absence of serious, unbiased research on the subject, the belief in the imminence of UFO “contact” undermines the image of Man as a master of his own destiny. In recent years we have seen many books arguing that the Earth had been visited by space travelers in prehistoric times. Although this theory deserves serious study, it is leading many people to suggest that the great achievements of mankind would have been impossible without celestial interventions: the development of agriculture, the mastery of fire, and the bases of civilization are credited to so-called “higher beings.” Not only does this idea contradict many archaeological facts, it encourages passive expectation of another visit by friendly space creatures to solve current human problems.₃
It is common — to the point of it being a sort of communal refrain — for contactee and abductee converts, when presented with less-than-positive or negative information surrounding “ET” activities, to insist that traumatic perception correlates with an individual’s resistance. Yet the possibility that a lack of resistance may just as will constitute a pernicious submission to whatever the forces desire is dismissed or excluded. On the YouTube page UFO HUB (an excellent resource of testimonies), the video with the highest number of views — around 375,000 — is a positivist monologue given by Grant Cameron, “Tales of Unity and Oneness that the Government Doesn’t Want You to Know” (Cameron’s knowledge of abduction reports’ developments was, even at the time of the video’s upload in 2017, over twenty years out of date; moreover, he insists, using the broadest logical leap, that anything possessing as high of an intellectual and technological capability as the “ET”s apparently do would be constitutionally incapable of harm). Conversely, an interview with Lisa O’Hara, “Abducted and Furious, Military Abductions and More”, which details O’Hara’s dehumanizing and life-disrupting abduction experiences, has less than three-thousand views.
This small-scale comparative example represents an expanding and confusing rift between the involved demographics and communities — of converts’ inability, or unwillingness, to consider the full range of available data without a utopic haze clouding their sight, despite all their declarations of open-mindedness. The point I am attempting to make here is not that the “negative” interpretation is settled and total (to do so would be to fall prey to the very myopia I rebuke), but to demonstrate that, at the very least, it is foolish and marginalizing to claim, like Edith Fiore’s patient Sandi, that this has all been to humanity’s benefit, and to explain-away any ambiguities or negative aspects as misunderstandings deriving from the “wrong” emotions. It is quite conceivable, however, to imagine that we may not be too far away from a bizarre time when “Alien Lives Matter” has become a rallying slogan for the most visible face of ET-oriented groups.
Certain literate and interpretatively inclined readers might have taken exception to my description of “physiological degradation” on the basis of reports wherein the person is healed of an ailment after a UFO’s appearance or their abduction. A classic case is that of “Dr. X”, a French doctor whose recent and chronic debilitations were reportedly cured after he witnessed a UFO in 1968. This, like the “ET”s’ physiological and procreative procedures, is one of those details uniting the apparent discoveries of various hypnotherapists, despite methodological differences. One of Fiore’s clients, Linda, described her and her family’s experiences with this (recall, here, the intergenerational pattern of abductions):
“My sister Sherry called to tell me about a dream she had had the night before. And that in itself is unusual, because she rarely remembers her dreams. She dreamed she was taken into a spaceship and they treated her yeast infection with a blue gel. The next morning, the yeast infection was gone. She’d only had it for a few months, and it was pretty bad, but right after the dream it cleared up. She called me in the morning while I was still in bed, so I didn’t relate it to myself until that evening, when I realized my yeast infection was completely gone. That’s a miracle, because nothing the doctors prescribed did anything except get rid of the itching, never the discharge. It’s been gone for a few weeks now. And my mother, who had a yeast infection for forty-three years, is cured too, since Sherry’s and mine cleared up.”
On the face of it, these correctives would appear to offer the plainest evidence for benevolence — both because of a “commonsensical” association we have between medical attention and compassionate care, and because these correctives offer opportunities to quantifiably verify anomalous physical developments, provided that the involved doctors dare to go on record. The case isn’t clear cut, though. If abduction is a life-long occurrence for abductees, it would stand to reason that their abductors would want to keep their resources in basic functioning order (especially if those resources are rarer than we presume; the universe is almost certainly teeming with life, but life of our sort may be precious, all the more so if it serves the biological requirements of another comparable typology’s survival). Jacobs suspects just as much:
This is not in any way related to the contactee Space Brother concepts of benevolent aliens coming to Earth to cure cancer. Rather, in special circumstances it appears that the aliens feel obliged to preserve the specimen for their own purposes. As one abductee said, “It’s equipment maintenance.”
It bears repeating, counter to the Good Vibes Only framework, that various people have suffered adverse physiological afflictions or deformities following their abductions. These issues are distinct from cases wherein persons are, for example, exposed to high, yet strangely not immediately fatal, levels of radiation emanating from a craft. I will here reiterate the examples of the permanent degradation of Debra Kauble’s eyesight and Kelly Cahill’s profuse, weeks-long vaginal bleeding and womb infection. Gynecological and urological problems are not uncommon — to say nothing of the psychosomatic effects of knowing you will continue to be abducted, and can do nothing about it: effects which can leave relationships in ruin, or create a situation wherein the abductee hides ongoing trauma for fear of that ruination.
Abductee Bruce Cornet shared a recording this year, from 1995, wherein hypnotherapist Fred Max regresses Cornet to a 1981 abduction. During the regression, this exchange occurs:
Bruce Cornet: And I feel them stimulating me. I’m having an orgasm.
Fred Max: Does it feel good?
Bruce Cornet: Yes, at first it feels good, but they keep on making me have an orgasm, and it gets more and more painful. I can’t stop, and I start crying out, “Stop!” And the one next to me looks into my eyes. [deep breath] I don’t like him looking into my eyes. [deep breath]
Responding to a comment on the video, Cornet provided this information:
My doctor in 1983 said a large cyst-like growth developed on my right testicle, which sonic scans [showed] to be solid like a testicle, while my left testicle shrank dramatically in size after the abduction. My left testicle became smaller presumably due to my left renal vein being replaced (5 hr operation in 1958) after a childhood accident at age 12 (being hit by a baseball bat during baseball practice in middle school). Because there was less blood flow to my left testicle, I suspect the ET surgeon removed part of my left testicle and attached it to my right testicle. At the very least, that change in testicle size soon became noticeable in the months following my abduction. The Wrinkled-Brow alien who did the surgery told me telepathically that his operation should improve my semen production. It didn’t. There were no other memorable marks or bruises on my body.
One of Fiore’s patients, Mark, recounts a procedure wherein the “ET”s slid a small “fishing wire-type thing” down his urethra, perhaps somehow entering the ejaculatory duct, to extract semen.
DR. FIORE: How do you know that it hurts?
MARK: Just by watching myself, I can tell that it hurt. And I just remember something now. I don’t have kidney stones, but when I go to the bathroom, sometimes it hurts bad, and that can be from them doing that.
Material like this is bound to draw out the impulsive explanation that alien abductions must, after all, be screen memories of sexual abuse. But there is, as yet, no significant psychological study on record demonstrating a statistically notable association between memories, or conflations, of abductions and instances of sexual abuse. Instead, the reverse has been shown: that is, various abductees have memories of being sexually abused which, when competently scrutinized, turn out to be abductions. One such person held the memory of, while on a walk with his sister in a wood behind their house, encountering a man wearing “dark glasses” who somehow sexually abused him. Careful questioning of the exact details of this eighteen years-old event, during hypnotic regression, revealed it to be a “routine” abduction. Of equal importance is the fact that some abductees have sought further hypnosis under the suspicion of a screen memory, only to find that their recollection of having been raped is accurate.
Screen memories which switch around relatively unacceptable, or sociologically inexplicable, scenarios for relatively explicable ones, crop up elsewhere among contactee/abductee experiences. Jacobs, for instance, explains how, within the pattern of abductees sometimes observing black, unmarked helicopters close to their place of residence, “analyses of some helicopter reports reveal that the ‘helicopters’ have no tail assemblies, and no rotors, and are more circular than tubular, and make no noise” — in other words, that these “helicopters” actually have all of the formal characteristics of a flying saucer. Similarly, author and illustrator Mike Clelland has noted how apparent owl sightings can be substitutes for “ET” encounters (mind, however, that Clelland presumes that these substitutions are made so as to not frighten the person):
“It’s very common for people to say, ‘Oh, I was driving down the road at night, and I saw this great big owl, and I pulled right up to it, and it was looking at me over the hood of the car. And then I drove on, and when I got home I was home a few hours late.’ […] …but the therapist might ask, ‘Oh, so describe this owl.’ And the person under hypnosis might say, ‘Well, it’s got big black eyes, it’s about four feet tall, it’s got a little space suit on, it’s got a big bald head’ — and so they’re describing something that’s not an owl. The implication is that there is a psychic projection coming from these alien beings that is somehow projected into the mind of the observer, and instead of seeing a little gray alien, which would be scary, they instead see an owl.”
Given the multiplicity of routes to explore, and their potential depths, I would prefer to round the bend, towards a conclusion, by examining certain spiritual and sociological elements of this topic — elements intersecting with critical prospective considerations. Please join me in the next and final installment of this essay series as I scrutinize the pattern within abductions of abductees being shown globally catastrophic imagery, converts’ claims regarding the ostensible total superiority of the “ET”s, and the misanthropic, self-alienating sentiments and outlooks cutting across vast demographics which, I believe, have highly troubling implications when contextually situated within UFO/“ET”/abduction activity.
To be concluded in part III.
⁂
₁ I use this word not in the sense of logical positivism but of a bias, primed to view and understand the relevant material using an anti-epistemic lens which largely equates “negativity” with toxic, doom-and-gloom pessimism.
₂ Consider this passage from Jacobs’ The Threat:
Abductee Leah Haley, who related her experiences in her book Lost Was the Key, believes that members of the American military — somehow in conjunction with the aliens — abducted her on many occasions and held her in a barrackslike building. Yet despite these clearly negative experiences, her view of the aliens is positive. In her children’s book, Ceto’s New Friends, Haley tells the story of the gray alien Ceto who comes to Earth and meets little Annie and Seth. The three play together, and Ceto invites them on board his UFO. They are happy to go, float up into the object, play various “games”, and then are floated back. On the final page, the two happy but weary children look longingly toward the UFO, and the story concludes with Haley writing that “the Spaceship flew away, but Ceto will come back soon to visit his new friends on Earth.” Although most abductees have not gone as far as this in “humanizing” and sentimentalizing the aliens, Haley’s viewpoint is a logical extension of the desire — perhaps the need — for the aliens to be friendly and helpful.
Haley later revised her viewpoint along definitively negative lines, claiming that UFO abductions rather comprise one part of a human-made program oriented around experiments in mind control — perhaps an extension of programs such as MKUltra. Given the data, Haley’s viewpoint may be partially correct. It is possible that private companies have been working with certain ETs for some time now within the constraints of a program involving the exchange of resources/information. Contemporary knowledge of abductions, however, reveals that abductees report meeting with adult hybrids — ones which pass pretty well for typical adult humans — just as often as they meet with visibly alien beings, if not more often. It might be, then, that Haley’s reconsideration accounts for this increasingly “human” presence.
₃ Among many of the curious ironies perpetuated by converts stems from the belief that, long ago, extraterrestrials seeded, or created, humanity. If this were true, then humanity’s proclivities which have led to this or that catastrophe are not its own kind of Original Sin, but an engineering “defect.” Yet these same converts praise the perfect knowledge and abilities of the ETs while tut-tutting humanity for its charaterological constitution. Dimensions of this important aspect of belief will be analyzed in part III.
