Witchcraft and Aliens: Were Medieval Witches Actually Early Abductees?

Between the 14th and 18th centuries, somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 people on the European continent were tried and executed for witchcraft. Most of these people were burned alive in the public square of the nearest town, and most were also tortured before burning. Between 70% and 80% of all 'witches' executed were women, but many men, children, and even animals were executed as well.

What is most strange about the witchcraft trials of medieval Europe is that, despite being studied in great detail by historians and scholars of many stripes and biases, no single persuasive explanation has emerged for why they took place.

What is also interesting is that medieval 'witches' had much in common with today's 'abductees', and the witch hunters also resemble some of today's abduction 'researchers' in surprisingly consistent ways.

Something fairly powerful has to be going on either inside the public imagination or out in the real world or both, in order to sustain nearly four centuries of torture, carnage, and religious persecution. The Church did not simply try and burn witches: It aggressively sought them out to try and burn them.

The infamous Malleus Maleficarum (compiled in 1486) is a detailed instructional Church manual on how to identify a witch and what to do when you find one. Professional witch hunters, employed by the Church, roamed the European countryside searching out witches and delivering them into the hands of Church inquisitors who usually ended up torturing and killing them to save their souls.

Although the Malleus isn't a word-for-word precursor to Intruders or Missing Time, many elements are similar enough to warrant a closer look. 


How to Identify a Witch or Abductee

Although today we do not burn alive abductees alive, the modern process for identifying an abductee is remarkably similar to the medieval process for identifying a witch. Witches and abductees share the follow characteristics:

• Marks on the Body. Abductees and witches are both thought to be physically marked in some way. In the case of witches the mark might be a mole or birthmark, or if no such mark was found, the examiner  declared the discovery of 'an invisible mark.' In the case of abductees, researchers look for scoop marks, triangle-shaped scars, or evidence of alien implants. 
• Supernatural Sex. Witches were believed to have sexual intercourse with inhuman agents of the Devil called incubi (male demons) and succubi (female demons). Abductees are often believed to have intercourse with inhuman or half human alien beings during the abduction experience. 
• Flying by Night. Witches had the ability to fly through the night sky. Alien abductees often have vivid memories of flying or being transported through the sky or through space. 
• Messing with Animals. Witches were said to possess the ability to kill farm animals without drawing blood. Alien abductions are often associated with bloodless cattle mutilations or the draining of blood from small farm animals (chupacabra incidents are often paired with UFO sightings). 
• Miscarriage and Disappearing Fetuses. Witches were believed to have the ability to cause miscarriage or cause fetuses to disappear. Alien abductees often report disappearing pregnancies or mysterious anomalous events involving human reproduction. 
• Circular Meetings in the Deep Woods. Witches were thought to meet with the Devil in the woods, holding highly sexualized rituals naked in a stone circle. (See drawing above.) Abductees are taken into a circular craft, often from remote or wooded locations, where they are then examined naked on stone or metal slab.
• The Devil and the Greys. The physical description of the 'Devil' of the medieval witchcraft trials (to whom witches were said to agree to a pact or contract) bears remarkable similarities to the tall Greys described by abductees. Tan or grey in color, the Devil and the tall Grey both have cloven feet, strange skin, and demand perverse sexual allegiance. The Devil's eyes are said to 'pierce' the eyes of women and control them in this way. The Greys control by means of their hypnotic huge eyes. 
• Associations with Bright Lights in the Sky. Both Satan and aliens are associated with bright lights in the sky. Satan was said to be the "brightest angel in the sky" before he fell to earth for rebelling against God. Alien abductions are often (though not always) associated with brilliant lights in the sky (UFOs) that come down to earth to release frighting Greys with a baffling sexual agenda. 

David Hufford's The Terror That Comes in the Night

Folklorist David Hufford wrote a landmark paper about the relationship between sleep paralysis and the legend of the 'Old Hag'. This tale occurs in every age and across all cultures. In the story, a sleeping person wakes to find a hideous creature (the 'Old Hag') sitting or pressing down upon his or her chest. The victim is unable to move during this experience, which often includes sexual intercourse with the fantastic other. The incubus/succubus tales of medieval Europe are variants of the 'Old Hag' myth, and Hufford believes many alien abduction stories are modern variants of this universal tale.

However, Hufford's groundbreaking thesis was that the 'Old Hag' narrative was universal because it referred to a real human experience. 

This was controversial stuff in the dry, methodical world of academic folklore research. Up until the time of Hufford's paper it was assumed that narrative traditions and physical experience were rigidly separated categories. Stories were just stories. Folklorists collected them.

Folkloric tales were assumed by definition to refer only to imaginary events and experiences passed down by specific cultural groups for various sociological purposes: indoctrination into the mores of the group being one of the main purposes. Hufford was saying that at least some universal myths and legends appeared to be an attempt to convey the content of a genuine experience in the language of the culture and time in which the experience occurred.

So during medieval times when the Church held enormous power and controlled people through vivid descriptions of hellfire, damnation, and the wages of sin, the experience was interpreted as demonic and the abductor as Satan. In ancient Sumeria the experience was intrepreted as divine. In modern technological culture the experience is interpreted as extraterrestrial. But the same experiental elements are repeated in each instance; they are simply spun with a different explanation of what it all means.

Hufford was careful not to ascribe any particular interpretation to the raw experience underlying these stories; he only sought to make the argument that some kind of real experience was at the base of the stories. Hufford made a careful, exhaustive (and rather dry) philosophical argument that the scientific term 'sleep paralysis' is a description (and hence, another myth), not an explanation.

Hufford felt that the experience itself remains unexplained.

We don't know what causes these experiences. We don't know why the experience has these predictable and bizarre elements. We've just slapped a descriptive label--'sleep paralysis'--on something that has apparently been plaguing mankind for as long as man has been able to tell stories about it.

The Problem With the ET Hypothesis

One of the biggest obstacles to understanding UFO and alien abduction phenomena is the ET hypothesis, the belief that visitors from outer space are causing these experiences and events. We really don't know that, but the tendency to interpret all these phenomena through a modern technological filter is so strong that today the term UFO has today become synomymous with 'spacecraft', even though its original meaning was simply something flying through the sky that could not be identified. 'Unidentified Flying Object' means we don't know what it is. And we don't.

If we KNEW it was a spacecraft, then it would NOT be a UFO. It would be a spacecraft.

What are the chances that our current cultural filter is any more correct than the medieval one that ascribed these phenomena to devils, or the ancient one that ascribed them  to Isis, or the medical one that ascribes them to a mysterious brain disorder called sleep paralysis, or the northern Scandavian one that ascribes them to the appearance of the 'Old Hag' (a folkloric harbinger of death)?

Weirdly, Huffords ideas get little uptake in ufology because they are seen as acribing the phenomena to 'myth', which is popularly understood by ufologists (who seem not to actuall read this stuff) to mean 'made up story that isn't true in any way'.

That understanding is the exact opposite of the compelling original argument made by Hufford, an argument that supports the notion that something real is going on, but that we just don't know what it is. Hufford's work could be used to support further scientific or academic study or these phenomena, but in a weird twist of illogic, it is used to dismiss them by both camps.

At least we aren't burning people alive over the experience these days.

But it would be nice to know what it was actually all about.

Why Ufology is Dying a Slow Horrible Death

I recently had an unpleasant run-in on a ufology site that I realized is pretty much emblematic of why ufology today is on the decline.

The relative dearth of good, new books on ufos and anomalous experience is not just a function of lack of public interest.

The public is definitely very interested.

No, the decline is more a function of infighting within ufology itself and a struggle between various camps for 'authority' and control.

This infighting and nastiness is killing new inquiry, since mainstream science already shies away from any real research, and now new people who are willing to take a chance on entering the discussion have to face the wrath of these little, little self-proclaimed ufology gods and make offerings to them and so forth and so on to even be allowed to speak.

Not a good way to encourage new ideas.

Within ufology there are a few major camps and you have to choose one straight up and be accepted to get any uptake--no small task in itself--and the thing is, not one of them has the whole answer:

1. The New Agers. These folks tend to believe that aliens are here to raise our consciousness and save the planet, and often have a whole cosmology of alien types and agendas readily at hand, with complex attendant beliefs and explanations that have to be learned and publically accepted if one is to gain entrance to their temple. No matter if any of it is correct. 
2. The Conspiracy Theorists. Be afraid, be very afraid. The government is behind every bad thing that ever happened in your life, most especially abductions and ufo sightings and remember that time you stubbed your toe when you were 8? MK-Ultra. And BTW you'd know that already if you were as informed as those in the inner sanctum but clearly you are not, hence your ignorance you ignoramus you. (Would you like a little abuse with your abuse? How about some abuse for dessert?)
3. The Aliens-Are-After-Our-Wimmin Witch Hunters. OK, I'm just going to say it. Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs creep me out. They might be nice guys, they might have positive motives, but I have my doubts. Neither of them has had any direct experiences of UFOs or aliens, and both spend all their time sitting on the bedsides of hurting people with painful sexual memories involving aliens, luridly transcribing every word and publishing it. They brook no criticism and have already decided what is going on and who knows the most about it: Them.
4. The Folklorists and Neoplatonists. I like these people the best because at least they are aware of the magic words, "I don't know," and are willing to say them out loud in front of others. Basically they see these anomalous phenomena as modern manifestations of something very old and very earthly. Most of them reject the entire ET hypothesis but do believe that another intelligence is at play. 
5. The Debunkers. These folks are just annoying. They're always about 'bring me the flying saucer,' totally ignoring the fact that millions of sightings and contact reports are in and of themselves enough reason to ask, "Um, what's going on here?" One of the most famous debunkers, Joe Nickell of Skeptical Inquirer fame, spends much of his time questioning other people's credentials. He himself holds a bachelor's degree in English. Wow.

Why would I even care about the decline of a pseudoscience anyway?

Because I want a good answer, and mainstream science won't look for one. It's really that simple.

Modern science is clearly in trouble, and that means we are all in trouble. What science can't explain, it tosses aside. Plus, the language of science is so exclusive and the population at large so undereducated that only a very select few people get to participate in any scientific discussion of anything at all.

So if, like me, you are hooked by an unexplained experience or event, you're kind of doomed to roam the margins of the known, looking for like-minded others with firing brain cells. When those others bite you too, it's even worse than being gaslighted by mainstream academia.  Lots of brilliant people--Jacques Vallee being my favorite, but there are others--have given up on ufology for this reason.

Science is not bad. Science gave us radios, and computers, the electric car, and quantum physics and so forth, but one look at the world today and it's clear that something is wrong with science, epistemologically speaking. Science should not be a worldview. It's more like a tool, like a hammer.

To a guy with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Hence, ever since the 17th century, science has been like a runaway truck barrelling backwards down a mountainside. It's a very powerful tool, yes, but if you don't know how to drive and you don't have a map, well, stuff goes wrong and keeps going wrong, faster and faster. (Kind of like now.)

The pace of change today is so ridiculous that geezers like me have to buy cell phones by the six pack because by the time the one we own breaks, we'll need all new skills when its time to replace the damned thing. (Seriously, some of us just want to make phone calls on them. That's really true.)

We know how to punch holes in the bottom of a sea bed and to get to oil two miles down, but we don't know what to do if something goes wrong. We know how to make chickens grow to three times their normal size and pop eggs out of their mouths (OK I just made up that second thing), but we have no idea what effect that will have on the humans who eat them. We'll figure we'll invent something later to fix that.

Sure we will.

So I'm interested in fixing that flaw, that runaway train quality to modern life, by finding a way to ground us culturally, and I think that UFO phemonena offer a way into that. I think that for a lot of reasons. So did Jacques Vallee. So do a lot of people way smarter than me who nevertheless know better than to poke a rattling snake with a sharp stick at a ufology conference.

It isn't easy to stay open in the face of a great mystery, but what if that is exactly what is required?

It would be really nice if someone could. Or would.

Whitley Strieber Revisited

I've been re-reading Whitley Strieber's UFO books and listening to old interviews with him on Coast to Coast and other You Tube radio and TV clips, and frankly I'm finding the exercise a lot more enjoyable than the first time around, back in the late '80s when Communion was selling like hot cakes and everyone and their mother suspected aliens were lurking in their closets (or at least their driveways).

Coming back to this stuff after 25 years or so, it is striking how the whole alien contact/abduction thing has become normalized and at the same time, bracketed off, more or less put on the shelf indefinitely.

Aliens? Oh, that. Aisle 5, right next to the werewolves.

I think U.S. government intelligence helped this mainstreaming process along, but it's also a function of the enormous tension the topic generates. It's hard to stay hyped up forever.

At some point, there's the dog and the wife and the electric bill.

Life goes on.

Today no one really cares too much about this UFO stuff anymore except for people with direct experience, and even those people have come to some conclusion about it all long ago and have either 1) let it go and moved on with their 'normal' lives, or 2) started their own religion, web page, investigative organization, or whatever based on UFOs, aliens, or New Age philosophies.

UFO interests today subdivide into odd but passionate little factions: the religious contactee New Agers, the dark Malleus-wielding 'investigators' and their victim devotees (a la Hopkins and Jacobs), the MUFON folks and other mechanistic pseudoscientists, the annoying and often woefully un-credentialed debunkers (if you're going to ridicule and be snotty, shouldn't you yourself have a leg to stand on?), the consciousness gurus, the neurologists and psi researchers... it's quite the circus, and you have to pick your act, straight up.

Declare your bias or bug off.

Strieber is almost unique in being a direct experiencer who not only has no axe to grind, he refuses to pick any specific bias or declare it. Instead, he insists on the importance of not pretending to know more than we really do. This is refreshing coming from anyone talking about UFOs these days, since most folks seem to want to impress you with their credentials immediately (or at least slam someone else's credentials and then compare themselves favorably by contrast). 

Strieber on the other hand talks repeatedly of the importance of not choosing a box and not putting this stuff on the shelf prematurely, of allowing the mind to stay open and admit, "I don't know what this is or why it is happening."

That's really hard to do.

It's SO hard to do, in fact, that I think it may well be the whole point of the experience--at least from the human side. Can you let go of certainty? Can you stop yourself from forming an explanation that nails it to the wall? Can you stop yourself from labeling it evil OR good and just let it be what it is?

Most people can't. Not for long.

As a culture we value knowledge and authority, but personal experience we discount ruthlessly. I believe we've paid a high price for this highly selective epistemology. In fact, I personally think it is killing us.

Descartes said that his cogito statement was founded in a moment of radical doubt. It seems to me that the ability to stay open in the face of mystery requires exactly the opposite--a moment of radical trust.

This is not to say that Strieber's 'greys' are trustworthy--if anything they are the penultimate tricksters--but only to say that perhaps the medicine for runaway rationalism and its ill effects involves openness and a willingness to dream--no matter how strange the dream, no matter where it takes you.

Strieber's current website is called Unknown Country, his broadcasts Dreamland, and he refuses to even use the word, 'paranormal' because it doesn't mean anything.

There is no normal versus paranormal experience. There is only experience. Experience is what it is. If we don't edit it, sometimes we are utterly amazed at what we find.

Mac Tonnies on the Crypto-Terrestrial Hypothesis

Fascinating guy. I just discovered him, and sadly he died very recently at only 34 years of age. But this is pretty close to what I think is going on with much of the abduction phenomena.

My Weird Alien Dreams

At the age of 36, in the middle of what I took to be a normal life, I awoke inside the following bad dream:

I am sitting at a kitchen table with my brother, who in real life is one year younger. In the dream, we are eight and nine years old or so—not quite into puberty, but not little kids either.

The table belongs to one of those 1950s Formica-topped dinettes, the kind with grooved chrome side trim, metal legs, and matching chrome chairs with red vinyl seats. 

(Today these retro sets are popular fixtures in soda shops, hamburger joints, and Atomic home décor. When I was a kid, every household had one.)

The Formica table, my brother, and I are all suspended in black space. The scene reminds me of one of those 1950s existential stage plays in which the theater goes completely black except for a spotlight on an actor or two who blather on about (supposedly) deep stuff.

My brother is wearing pajamas, also from the 1950s, the seersucker kind with cowboys and Indians and lassos printed all over them. His expression is blank and a little strange. I reach out to shake his shoulder, as he seems to be in some sort of trance, and just as I begin to stretch out my hand I hear a voice inside my head hiss, “Don’t touch him!”

But it’s too late.

By the time I hear the voice I’ve already touched his shoulder. The moment my hand makes contact, he is suddenly not my brother anymore but some alien creature with huge deep eyes as black as space itself, only much, much deeper and vast beyond imagining. ‘Hypnotic’ is a shallow word for these eyes—They are infinite and alive, dark in a way that almost gleams or shines.

I recognize this creature. In fact to this day I can see its face clearly and vividly. I have never forgotten it. The face is so real that in the dream it feels hyper-real, as if it is somehow more real than everyday reality, and it is clear to me right away that the warning voice and this thing are in fact one and the same.

The thing has staged this scene somehow for my benefit, but my touch has destroyed the illusion and now I am face to face with it instead, locked in its gaze. It is nearly impossible to explain how this feels, but the moment includes extreme terror, paralysis, and the sense of being completely controlled by this other being.

The creature’s skin glistens golden or slightly green-golden, iridescent, like the skin of some colorful Amazon frog. The eyes take up most of the bulb-shaped head. There is no nose to speak of and no proper mouth.  Beneath the eyes, which dominate the entire top half of the face, in the place where the mouth and nose should be, a network of what looks like veins or ridges or some kind of wrinkled skin disappears into an almost nonexistent neck.

Then suddenly this thing, which has no mouth, smiles. It smiles with its eyes somehow and yet it feels like the whole face smiles. The smile is transmitted telepathically in some sense, and yet looking at the face it is still clear that it is in fact smiling—in somewhat the same way you know that a dog is smiling even though dogs don’t have human features.

The smile is not reassuring at all, but weirdly sickening and terrifying. I sense that the creature means to reassure me by smiling, but the smile is so ‘off’ that it only deepens my terror. 

                *************

The dream ends abruptly. I wake to find myself sitting bolt upright in bed, shaking and drenched in sweat. Relieved that I’ve only been dreaming after all, a deep unease and mild nausea settles in nonetheless.

I am convinced against logic that this vignette has not been a normal sort of dream but something dreadfully familiar and all too real, and I now feel as if I am losing my mind. Yet my experience is so visceral I cannot make myself chalk it up to hallucination.

The next night, a follow-up nightmare seems tailor-made to validate these fears:

In this second dream I believe that I am just waking up, as if I am not asleep at all but am in my normal bedroom about to start my day. Standing at the foot of my bed is the creature from the night before, only this time, I sense that there are others with him nearby, even though I can’t see them.

The minute I see this creature again I am frozen in terror. I can’t move and I can’t cry out. The thing is absurdly dressed in what looks like a very ornate, heavily embroidered medieval red robe, and is holding a thin white metallic rod about a foot long that is slightly pointed at the end. The tip of the rod glows.

This thin rod looks exactly like the sort of ‘magic wand’ a stage magician might use as a prop, and the ridiculous ornate costume that the thing is wearing heightens that absurd association. I seem to already ‘know’ that this rod holds a charge of some kind—I recognize it--and I immediately begin to plead in my mind with the thing to please, please not touch me with it.

Of course it does touch me with it, and the second that it does, I am no longer frozen in my own bed but find myself running hard through a downtown alleyway at night, still dressed in my bedclothes.

Just as in the scene from the night before, the run through the alleyway feels hyper real—more real than real—I can feel the cold night air on my skin and I recognize the location.

I come round a corner (I am ostensibly running from this creature though I don’t see it anywhere) and run smack into a street person, a man, in very dirty clothes and wearing an odd expression. He smiles in a way that is oddly reminiscent of the smile on the thing in the other nightmare, but he’s clearly human. I can smell him, and he doesn’t smell good.

“Are you all right?” he asks me solicitously, and reaches out his hand. The minute his hand touches my shoulder (again, much like in the dream the night before where I reach out to touch my brother’s shoulder) I wake up.

                *************

Once again I wake from this dream in my own bed, drenched in sweat, short of breath and more than a little nauseous, still smelling this street person and still stuck with the sick feeling that none of this is a dream, that it’s all way too real and way too horrible.

That same day, I return some books to the public library downtown and check out some new ones. The books I check out are about trauma, PTSD, and multiple personality. I hold a BA in psychology and have a legitimate academic interest in these topics, but my interest is also personal. I’m trying to figure out if I’m cracking up, and if so, exactly what the nature of my insanity is.

I’m about to walk out the door when I feel a hand on my shoulder. I wheel around, and standing there in front of me is the very same bum from my dream, still smiling that odd, inhuman (but not really threatening, just weird) smile, still dressed in the same dirty clothes and still smelling really bad.

“Are you OK?” he asks, and then goes on, “I was worried about you last night.”

I run, literally run, out of the library without responding.


                                        *************************

Well, there's more to this story, a lot more, but I won't go into it here.

I wonder how many people have these odd experiences and never discuss them for fear of ridicule. I have been unable to completely swallow the ET hypothesis when it comes to alien encounters, and weirdly, since all this happened I have found some of the weirder, more ridiculous elements of my dreams (like the wand, the ornate clothing, the wrinkled 'mouth' of the creature) repeated in other people's stories, giving the whole thing a sort of credence that is not exactly welcome.

One thought I've been entertaining lately now that the movie Inception is in theaters is that someone or some thing may well know how to move in and out of other people's dreams for a purpose. This idea is not as fantastic as it sounds. In fact, modern scientific culture is the first in history to NOT believe that such things happen routinely.

That being the case, it does make you wonder WTF.

More later.

Alien Encounters as Personal Deconstruction

If you want to feel better about not being able to afford or attend college, pause right now for ten minutes or so and educate yourself about the philosophy of famous 20th Century Frenchman Jacques Derrida, a philosophy more popularly known in academic circles as Deconstruction.

Just click the hot links in the above paragraph and start reading. Then come back.

OK, done yet?

No, it sure doesn't take long to have more than enough of that, thank you very much. In all fairness though, most philosophy reads like that, not just Deconstruction. The only differance between Derridian texts and other kinds of philosophy is sheer Europineal attitude, but then the guy was French.

He had a cultural standard to uphold. Not to mention a sartorial one.

Anyhoo, Derrida's big philosophy idea du jour was that the bit that's excluded or absent from any given text is what makes the whole text meaningful, and that if you locate that bit--that excluded bit that he referred to as differance--if you find that central differance embedded in any given text and invert it, you can then take apart the whole sense of the thing, as in, unravel the text completely (as in, literally de-contstruct it) and render all the meanings therein utterly nonsensical.

Voila!

Start with Shakespeare. End up with overcooked spaghetti!

What could be better than that?

OK, a lot of things could be better than that. OK, ok.

But here's my point:

What if UFO encounters are personal, experiential deconstructive moments?

Think about what happens to an individual's view of reality and self after such an encounter. At first, the experiencer may just feel a bit stunned and awed by the whole incident, but as minutes, hours, days, and eventually months tick slowly by, more and more questions about the very nature of reality and self begin to present themselves, whether that person is ready for such questions or not.

Often, the experiencer becomes increasingly aware of a little glob of 'missing time', a break in the normal personal narrative of memory that seems to attach itself to other bits of existing memory that once seemed fairly solid, but now, not so much.

It's a contagious little bit of nothing, this 'missing time', and it seems to have a penchant for dissolving all the little certainties and assumptions that make life possible and pleasant. Gradually, lots of things the person thought he or she 'knew' for sure about the present and the past and about who he or she actually is seem to be up for grabs, interpretively speaking.

In the end, the contagion may spread to the experiencer's very sense of self. Many abductees eventually come to see themselves as having dual identities: one human, one alien; and they discover that these blank moments of absence stretch all the way back to their earliest childhood recollections.

When strung together, these deconstructive moments create an alternate history that is bizarre in the extreme, a sort of shadow self and shadow reality that looks like the direct inverse of this one. 'Real' life at this point becomes somewhat dreamlike and the dreamlike alien encounters become primary.

When things get to this stage, we pretty much have our pile of deconstructive spaghetti.

But why?

Well, that's the gazillion dollar question. Why indeed!

Here are a few possible answers:

(What? You thought I was going to give you the one right answer just like that, just off the top of my head? Au contraire, sugar bear!  Clearly you haven't been reading UFO stuff for very long if you actually thought that was going to happen...)

1. Somebody is actually doing this on purpose to individual people: the government, evil magicians, aliens, guys who wear too much black clothing and smoke funny little cigarettes... who knows? The thing is, we know it can be done on purpose, so maybe someone or some thing is doing it on purpose for reasons we have yet to understand.
2. The organizing structure of the experiencer's consciousness has lost all functionality, and the deconstructive alien encounter is a sort of massive spontaneous 'reset' experience; kind like rebooting a computer when it's all bugged up or frozen, or reinstalling the operating system. 
3. The deconstruction of individual personality and personal history is part of an initiation experience similar to the kind of vision quest sought by shamans in premodern cultures. Post-experience, many abductees and contactees exhibit increased psychic abilities, and many also develop an acute awareness of how permeable the membrane that separates dream states from waking states really is. 
4. The experience is exactly what it seems to be, and the whole of what we refer to as 'real' life is implanted into our consciousness by creatures with big eyes and suction cup fingers--kind of like in The Matrix. Sometimes I do wonder if people aren't actually larval aliens and the whole fabric of our lives isn't just one big pupated dream. We'll wake up one day on Zeta Reticuli.

None or all of the above could be true. We just don't know, really. And we aren't likely to find out any time soon. But since most of us are out of a job these days anyway, throwing out ideas is not a bad way to pass a Thursday afternoon. Derrida probably wouldn't like it.

But he's just another dead white guy now.

The Roswell Before Roswell

Right now I am reading and enjoying a book by Jim Marrs called Alien Agenda.

Marrs is a natural story teller, which gives his book a narrative hook that many UFOs books just don't have.

Even if you think UFOs are rot and nonsense, it's fun to read Marrs because he can spin a good yarn.

When Marrs gets to Roswell, (he starts on the moon, moves to the 1876 airship mystery and ancient aliens, and then heads for New Mexico), he goes into some detail about the Roswell that came before Roswell on June 24, 1947 on Maury Island in Washington State's Puget Sound.

(The Roswell story began a week later on Tuesday, July 1st, 1947.)

According to Marrs, the Maury Island incident began when:

"Harold A. Dahl, a harbor patrolman, reported that at 2:00 PM he--along with two crewman, his teenage son, and his dog--had guided his boat into a Maury Island bay to escape bad weather when they saw six doughnut shaped objects about two thousand feet in the air. They were described as gold and silver metallic objects approximately one hundred feet wide with a hole in the center and what appeared to be portholes around the perimeter and a dark hole underneath."

A small explosion in one of the UFOS caused hot slag to suddenly shower down from above, killing Dahl's dog and burning his son's arm. Dahl took some photos and upon his return gave his camera and some samples of the hot slag to his boss, Fred Lee Chrisman.

Although this incident is rarely discussed in UFO lore today (outside of Marrs' book), it is significant because Fred Lee Chrisman was a CIA guy whose weird little career linked him to all kinds of government disinformation campaigns over the course of many years.

When Kenneth Arnold (yes, that Kenneth Arnold) was dispatched to investigate the sighting, he found that the slag samples looked like ordinary rocks and that he wasn't able to see Dahl's son at all--the excuse was that the boy was in the hospital for his UFO burns. All the motel rooms in the town were filled up, yet someone had mysteriously prepaid for a room for Arnold in the best hotel.

The whole thing smelled, and when the small cargo plane on which the rocks were sent on their way to DC crashed for no apparent reason, the whole thing smelled even worse.

Marrs goes on to talk about how Arnold was never convinced that the Maury Island sighting was a hoax, even though the military ended up dismissing it easily, but what seemed clear to me on reading Marrs' speculations was that the US intelligence was mucking about with planted UFO stories well in advance of Roswell, and it was working out pretty well for them.

I have always thought that Roswell felt like a psychological operation and that the whole thing seemed planned in advance: the initial announcement that a saucer had been recovered, the quick retraction and lame weather balloon story, the subsequent rumors about alien bodies and reverse engineering: All designed to get people talking and keep them talking.

Look over there. Not over here.

In Melanie Klein's political critique The Shock Doctrine she talks about Nazi research into how to use shock to make prisoners more compliant and easier to control, and how the US government picked that research up and continued it after the war. Marrs talks a lot about the Nazis too, and how they seemed to have been working on a saucer shaped craft right before WWII ended.

What we do know for sure is that Roswell diverted the attention of the American populace away from weapons development and nuclear build up and toward little men from space. In fact, to this day UFOlogy is used effectively over and over again to divert attention away from military activities and government malfeasance.

For instance, whenever the public seems a little too itchy about biological warfare or covert military research of any kind, the Pentagon just leaks some tantalizing bit of info to Linda Moulton Howe about cattle mutilations and then retracts it, and boom! We're off to the races again.

Problem solved.

I'm not saying that all UFOs are fake or made up by the US government.

But it seems clear to me that at least some of them are, and that the American public is still falling for it hook, line, and sinker.