The alien abduction phenomenon
The classic alien abduction scenario was a feature of my childhood (I was born in 1957) and it remains an island of experience which, after thirty years of research and rigorous personal development and psychotherapy, still stands alone and unchanged by all the ‘explanations’.
My experiences followed the same pattern that many others describe.
- I would be woken up by a very bright white light shining in through my bedroom window.
- It would appear that the light had somehow dissolved the window and surrounding wall and a tall being would then step out of the light and into the room. He was the commonly described ‘Nordic’ with pale gold skin and blonde hair.
- Sometimes he would be alone, other times the archetypical small, grey creatures would come with him.
- The small grey beings would often do something to the back of my head and my spine which involved the sensation of metallic, pincer type instruments penetrating my skin. This did not hurt. There was a numbing cold with the sensation which had some kind of anaesthetising effect.
- The ‘Nordic’ man would telepathically communicate the message that all was well, he belonged to my real family and one day this would all make sense and they would come back to take me home.
- I experienced myself being taken up in a beam of light, being levitated up off the bed, out through the bedroom window and up into the night sky until I could see the horizon of planet Earth beneath me, hanging in space against a backdrop of stars.
- This is where conscious memory of the experiences would end. To this day I have no conscious memory of what happened next or how I got back into my bed and I have never felt inclined to try and ‘recover’ the missing segments.
As you can see, this has many typical features of the classic alien abduction scenario. These have been conscious memories all my life. I did not ‘recover’ them under hypnosis.
These experiences went ‘underground’ during my adolescence and early twenties then surfaced again in my late twenties, in a modified form, triggered by a UFO experience on New Years Eve 1985/86. The extraordinary experiences set off by this event transformed and revolutionised my entire life.
I have discussed these experiences with experts in the scientific/neurological model, the psychological model, the spiritual/mystical model and also an expert in alien abduction. Each one of these individuals was quite certain that their explanation was the right one. Needless to say the only one who believed it was actual alien abduction and did not re-route it through some alternative explanation was, of course, the expert in alien abduction.
So who do I believe?
Well, other things also happened to me as a child.
– I was sexually abused by my father.
– I had conversations with my deceased Grandfather and other beings who appeared to me as clear as daylight.
– I was locked in the cellar for a day by my Grandmother.
– I spent many happy hours talking to the fairies at the bottom of the garden.
– I ‘received’ creative inspiration from beings no one else was aware of – a tangibly different experience than my own imagination.
None of the above was believed by my parents, teachers or family GP, and the sanctions I experienced for innocently talking about the sexual abuse were devastating.
I also experienced debilitating headaches and physical pain for which no physiological reason could be found. It was therefore concluded that this was yet more ‘making up stories’ and ‘attention seeking’ on my behalf.
Thus I became aware at a very early age that what was considered ‘real’ by the larger community around me had nothing to do with what I actually experienced and I learned to keep a whole dimension of my existence secret.
Not surprisingly, as an adult, it became my mission to try and make sense of all this.
In my late thirties I had another thought provoking experience. I was witness to my husband being regressed under hypnosis where he relived the experience of his birth so powerfully that his whole body moved like a baby, even down to his toes moving individually and feet flexing and arching like a baby’s feet do. Along with this he was able to describe how he had been born too early, he had not been ready, and how this had impacted upon his life ever since. After this experience and the emotional catharsis that went with it, a level of anxiety he had lived with all his life disappeared.
The therapist conducting this regression was a clinically trained psychologist and psychotherapist and a faithful adherent of the conventional, scientific model. He later confided in me that he did not believe that what my husband had experienced was a real memory of events!! He did not believe that anyone could actually remember anything from such an early time because, according to the prevailing scientific model, the brain simply wasn’t developed enough to create memories at such an early age. When I asked how he then explained the remarkable change in my husbands wellbeing he said, “Oh well, that’s because he believed it.”
How does one break through such circular ‘logic’? And who’s ‘authority’ over what’s real and what isn’t are we to believe?
In the book, ‘Parapsychology – The Science of Unusual Experience’, the chapter on alien abduction concludes thus:
“The evidence relating to alien abduction does not support claims either that individual’s are really being abducted by aliens, or that they are in general deliberately lying about their experiences. The most plausible explanation in many cases appears to be that accounts of alien abduction are often based on false memories.” (p116)
Well how convenient is that? And what a dismaying and frankly frighteningly dismissive ‘explanation’ for those of us who seek help to come to terms with our very real experiences. To assert that false memories must be the most ‘plausible explanation’ may be most convenient explanation, but is it science? Would it not be far more accurate and scientific to simply say, ‘They are not lying, but we can’t explain it, so we just don’t know.’?
Let us not forget that Freud came to the same conclusion about sexual abuse. So perplexed was he by the accounts of childhood sexual abuse produced by his ‘hysterical’ female patients that he was unable to believe it could possibly be true. To believe it meant rocking the very foundations of the social structure of the time. So he determined that these accounts must be ‘fantasies’.
Unfortunately for me, I bore the consequences of Freud’s assumed ‘authority’ on this subject as did countless other children of my generation. But a massive change has occurred in my life time and now I can talk about this particular aspect of my experience in an open and honest way and be believed. (Although members of my own family still choose to pull out the ‘false memory’ card. They remain quite convinced that my father could not have done such things and that I have been led astray by the ‘evils’ of psychotherapy!)
So, in my own lifetime, some of the memories I was once told were false, the general consensus now agrees are real. It is now agreed that the sexual abuse of children is a reality. However, when we can be manipulated into doubting our own memories where does it end and who decides what’s real and what isn’t?
In my own healing journey another problem arose once the sexual abuse was a factor in play. I then came under tremendous pressure from various ‘authorities’ to ascribe the ‘alien abduction’ memories to the experiences of sexual abuse, as if the one ‘explains’ the other, which it quite simply does not. At no point in the resolving of the issues caused by my father’s sexual abuse did any causal connection between that and the ‘visitors’ occur. They are two separate issues.
John E Mack comes to the same conclusion in his groundbreaking work ‘Abduction – Human encounters with aliens’.
He writes of a client who has experienced both alien abduction and sexual abuse:
“Careful interviewing, however, has shown that one set of experiences does not explain the other, and that this woman is quite capable, when given the opportunity, of distinguishing the different effects of each.” (p401)
It is far too easy, and enormously divisive, to misdirect perception by laying the ‘explanation’ of unexplainable phenomenon upon unrelated traumas.
Mack goes on to write, “. . .when consciousness is the principle available epistemological tool – how do we decide what is ‘real’ and ‘true’. (p405)
This, to me, is the central issue surrounding all non-ordinary experience.
I found my way through the labyrinth of authoritative opinions by ultimately coming to the same conclusion as John E Mack who writes:
“Mystery and the sense of not knowing are antithetical to the need to maintain control . . . This might explain why it is the intellectual and political elite in our culture that seems most deeply wedded to perpetuating the materialist view of reality. . . . For it is, to a large degree, the scientific and governmental elite and the selected media that it controls that determine what we are to believe is real, for these monoliths are the principle beneficiaries of the dominant ideology.” (p411)
I did not reach this conclusion without coming to a profound personal crisis in which I finally had to decide who and what I was going to trust. Was I going to continue to give away my power to the authority of others, or was I going to take up my own authority and reclaim the power of my own knowing?
I confronted the very ‘sacred barrier’ that Mack describes when he writes,
“ . . . there is a core belief in our culture that is violated by the alien abduction phenomenon, namely that of the total separation of the spirit and the physical world. We have made that gulf inviolate, relegating to religion the spirit (subjective) world and assigning to science to the material (objective) domain. We simply do not know what to with a phenomenon that crosses that sacred barrier. It shocks the foundations of our belief structure. Our minds have no place to put such a thing.”
There is only one adjustment I would make to the above and that would be to say there is no place for our conditioned minds to put such a thing.
However, if we take the leap of faith and let go of our conditioned minds, if we chose to step into the “mystery and the sense of not knowing” we discover something truly transformational. We discover that this is the place where true freedom abides, in a unity of consciousness that transcends all illusions of separation.
In actual fact the alien abduction experience is not a new thing at all. It is on a continuum of described experience that can be traced back through the entire history of mankind most notably outlined in the work of Jacques Vallee and Michael Tsarion. And it is a far more complex and mysterious phenomenon than the ‘authorities’ would have us believe.
In the introduction to ‘Dimensions’, Jacques Vallee writes, “If these objects have been seen from time immemorial, as I will show, and if their occupants have always performed similar actions along similar lines of behaviour, then it is not reasonable to assume that they are ‘simply’ extraterrestrial visitors. They must be something more.’
I agree with this statement. The beings I have been in contact with all my life are only experienced as ‘alien’ when perceived from a state of conditioned ego separation. As I experience it these beings are emissaries of Universal Consciousness attempting to call us back from our self destructive state of dualistic thinking to the wholeness of our true nature.
John E Mack says, “It is an intelligence that provides enough evidence that something profoundly important is at work, but does not offer the kinds of proof that would satisfy an exclusively empirical, rationalistic way of knowing.” (p421)
In the foreword to ‘Dimensions’, Whitley Streiber, a notable contactee, writes, ‘If we come to a correct understanding of the UFO phenomenon, we may well in the process destroy the whole basis of our present beliefs about reality. Sensing this on an almost instinctive level scientists hide behind the facile posturing of self styled ‘debunkers’ who can be counted to distort or suppress unsettling data in order to leave our current ideas intact.’ (p vi)
Nowhere can this be seen more clearly at work than in Cremo and Thompson’s work, “Forbidden Archeology – The Hidden History of the Human Race” in which they present all of the archeological evidence that the scientific establishment chooses to overlook and ignore in order to uphold the accepted paradigm.
I am now well aware that I have exposed myself to the risk of being ‘laughed out of court’ as a crank and a ‘conspiracist’. So be it. I either have to live with such judgements or deny a vast, important and completely real level of my own experience. This is the challenge currently faced by an increasingly large number of human beings who find themselves plunged into levels of experience which defy the current paradigm’s ability to explain. Perhaps we are the grit in the oyster of the human ego and perhaps, one day, the ‘Pearl of great price’ will finally emerge into full human consciousness.
.
.