Secret life: firsthand accounts of UFO abductions (32 page)

The first problem is emotional isolation. Although the abductee desperately wants to discuss the phenomenon with friends and relatives, she finds it very difficult to tell anyone about her experiences. The person that the abductee confides in may think she is “having a breakdown” or is mentally unstable. She may be ridiculed outright. It is not uncommon for an abductee’s spouse (particularly a husband) to disbelieve her. The same is true for parents of children-abductees; these parents tend to think that it is a phase the child will
outgrow. (Yet most abductees manage to find at least one friend or relative to believe them or to take them seriously.) If an abductee is not married, then she wonders if she can ever get married. Will she put her spouse in danger? Can she lead a normal married life? Does she have a responsibility to her future spouse to warn him of the danger?

Knowledge can also bring a new round of nighttime fears. The abductee becomes extremely anxious when she goes to bed. Any unusual sound in her house or apartment sends her into extreme fear. Driving at night can be frightening, especially in isolated areas. She is constantly aware that an abduction can take place at any time.

Abductee parents are concerned for the safety of their children. They fear that they can do nothing to protect them. They may even have seen their children during an abduction, and they suffer intense guilt feelings because they were powerless to help them.

For some abductees, the idea of being taken against one’s will by nonhumans and undergoing a variety of physical and mental procedures is overwhelming. They prefer to think of their experiences as fantasies or dreams. They want the phenomenon to be benevolent and insist, against all evidence, that it is. This is why many abductees, after discovering what is happening to them, continue to embrace channeling. The thought that they might be victims of abductions rather than “chosen people” who are looked after by Space Brothers is difficult to cope with. They willingly retreat into the comfortable scenario of channeled information from kindly and benevolent aliens, in which, instead of being victims, they are cooperative participants who have some measure of control over their destinies. Other abductees face the facts squarely. They know what has happened, and after wrestling with the fear and the terror and coming to terms with their predicament, they want to get on with their lives.

It must be emphasized, finally, that PAS does not occur in all abductees. In fact, most people find a way to cope with these incredible experiences. Whether they know what has happened to them or not, they find a way to lead normal lives with only minor repercussions from the events that have occurred to them. The fact that a person has had abduction experiences does not automatically mean that she is suffering from the most psychologically destructive aspects of them.

No matter how they handle the experience, all abductees have
one thing in common: They are victims. Just as surely as women who are raped are victims of sexual abuse or soldiers can be victims of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, abductees are victims who require sensitivity and, if needed, help in understanding what has happened to them and the possible consequences that abductions have had for their lives.

Abductees desperately want the abduction experience to stop. They have tried by pleading with the aliens, threatening them, and being willfully uncooperative. They have moved to another house, to another city, to another state, trying to get away from them. They sleep with a knife or a gun. They stay up all night—fearfully waiting, hoping that they can defend themselves. But the abductions continue.

Even biology has no effect. Physiological changes in a woman’s reproductive cycle do not prevent abductions. Women who have had tubal ligations and hysterectomies and who have had their ovaries removed continue to be the victims of abductions, although they are spared the typical gynecological procedures. We have not had enough experience with men who have a low sperm count or who have had vasectomies to know whether these conditions forestall abductions.

Little headway has been made in preventing abductions, although we have had some success with the use of a video camera. The camera makes it impossible for the aliens to maintain secrecy during an abduction, and in some cases it is able to effectively forestall the experience. For example, Melissa Bucknell began to have abduction experiences almost on a daily basis. We decided to use a video camera to try to “catch” the aliens in the act. We set up a camera and a VCR on a dresser top pointed at her bed. Melissa had been abducted the night before we set up the equipment. But after we installed it, days went by with no activity. We viewed all the tapes and she was sleeping at all times. Then one day she reported that she thought “something might have happened” to her that morning. She had gone to sleep very late the night before and had slept until noon. The tape had run out at 6:00
A.M.
Investigation revealed that the abduction took place sometime between 6:00 and 12:00. I thought this was a near miss and the taping continued. Weeks later she had another abduction episode. This time she had slept on the living room couch to get away from the noise of her neighbors arguing upstairs—once again it was impossible for the camera to record the abduction.

A few months later Karen Morgan agreed to use a video camera and a similar pattern began to emerge. As long as the camera was trained on her, no abductions took place. But when Karen was away from the camera her problems began. When she went out of town to visit friends or relatives, she would be abducted. When she went to Michigan for a wedding and to Virginia to spend a night on a friend’s yacht and to New York to visit relatives, she had abduction experiences. When she “forgot” to set up the camera or VCR for the night, there was a good possibility that she would be abducted.

More abductees wanted to use the camera, and, as we gained experience with it, we began to notice that the video equipment would sometimes mysteriously malfunction or be turned off—and an abduction would follow. Unusual power outages that affected only the immediate surroundings (sometimes not even other rooms) would cause the VCR to go off and an abduction would take place. After one abduction Karen noticed that the camera wires had been pulled from the back of her VCR. Another time she noticed in the morning after an abduction that the video camera was off when she had specifically remembered turning it on and seeing the red light indicating that it was in the “record” mode.

The problem that the camera was generating for the abduction was overcome in other ways as well. For example, an abductee felt the urge at 5:30
A.M.
(her camera put a time stamp on the tape) to get out of bed, walk over to the VCR, and turn it off—all of which
was duly recorded on tape. She later remembered seeing Small Beings who were standing just outside of camera range directing her to do it. In another case, a young woman abductee felt very nervous one night and had the irresistible urge to get out of bed (and out of the camera’s field of view) and sleep in her parents’ room. As soon as she was away from the camera, she was abducted. One woman had the urge to go to bed three hours before she normally did. An abduction took place before the VCR was programmed to go on.

Six people have used a video camera and all have had similar experiences. The video camera does not stop abductions from happening; it only forestalls them. Nevertheless, the video camera is the only mechanism known that brings relief to the abductee at night. It helps to alleviate feelings of helplessness and gives the abductee a sense of fighting back and a slight measure of control over her life. It is a form of intervention that forces the Beings to contend with a detection device—something that they do not want to do.

A video camera has its drawbacks, however. It quickly becomes a crutch, and abductees feel that they cannot sleep without it. If they go on a trip and do not have the video camera with them, they can become beset by fears that an abduction will occur. Furthermore, sleeping for long periods of time under a video camera is something that no one looks forward to.

There are other methods of intervention that can be employed during the abduction itself. These appear to be able to affect the course of the procedure, and to switch control of the situation, if only for a moment, to the abductee. For example, several abductees have planned in advance to ask the aliens a question. It does not matter what the question is; the act of asking is most important. During the actual episode, the question is often extremely difficult to remember because of the changes in the abductees’ consciousness, but some abductees have managed to do it. The aliens’ answers have been vague and singularly lacking in information, but the important thing is that they seem to be caught off guard. This has given the abductee a sense of control, no matter how small. For a few minutes the abductee calls the shots and might even slightly change the course of the abduction.

During one abduction Karen Morgan was able to ask her question as the Taller Being was beginning Mindscan. As usual, the situation is more revealing for the way in which the alien dealt with the question than for the information imparted to Karen.

And then I ask it the question, “How long have you been doing this?” And it says, “That knowledge isn’t given to you.” And I say, “Jesus Christ, will you answer a question for the love of God? How long have you been doing this, and stop with those stupid answers.” I’m so pissed off at it. And it sort of just smiles and doesn’t answer. And I say, “Have you been doing this forever?” I don’t think it understands forever. And then I ask what it’s doing. “What are you doing?” It wants me to give it my mind, and then it will show me what it’s doing. I say, “No dice, I don’t care that much. No thanks, I’m not that interested.” It says, “Why are you afraid? Why are you worried? Don’t be afraid.” All the same bullshit that it always wants to give you.

(Karen Morgan, 38, 1987)

Ken Rogers had intended to ask a predetermined question in several abductions but found it was too difficult to remember. Based on the idea that the aliens appear to be attracted to anything unusual on a person’s body, he decided to put dots on his chest with a washable marker. He hoped that the aliens would be drawn to the marks on his chest, and that their interest would in turn prompt his memory, and he would ask the question. The question he was to ask was similar to Karen’s: “How long are you going to continue to do this?” Nothing happened for a period of weeks. Then he was abducted. As predicted, the aliens immediately focused their attention on the dots. After the examination, they sat him up on the edge of the table and, while the Small Beings watched, the Taller Being pointed to the dots and asked him what the marks were. Instead of asking the question, however, Ken became a little bit frightened and simply stated, “They are dots.” The aliens tapped his chest and looked a little more. When he was leaving, several more Taller Beings approached and he had to lift up his shirt while they carefully surveyed the dots.

Determined to gain enough control to ask the question, Ken decided to try again with a new query, “Do you sleep?” Once again he had an abduction experience, and once again the aliens were drawn to the marks on his chest. This time he asked the question. The answer was evasive. “We are always sleeping.” After this event, however, Ken was led into a special room off to the side of a large examining room where several Taller Beings carefully examined his
chest and performed Mindscan procedures on him. Ken was convinced that the mental activity was related to the marks.

Other abductees have attached various objects to their bodies in the hope of causing the aliens to depart from their routine and contend with the new object. One abductee wrapped a piece of masking tape around her arm and went to bed. That night she woke up and had the strong urge to take the tape off, which she did. An abduction event followed. At another time she wore a special bracelet that a friend had made for her that had battery-powered flashing lights on it. When the abduction event began, she could see the aliens carefully detaching the bracelet from her arm before they took her. Later she had an extremely “penetrating” Mindscan that she felt was directly related to finding out what the bracelet was for.

Will Parker decided to write a letter to the aliens telling them, in essence, to leave him alone. He folded the letter up; on the outside he drew a picture of a smiling alien’s head and wrote, “Have a nice day.” He taped the letter to his lower leg on and off for several months, but he had no abduction events. Then one day he woke up and the letter was gone from his leg. He frantically searched the room and his apartment for more than two hours for the missing letter but could not find it. Two days later, he awoke and was stunned to find that the letter was taped to his leg again in exactly the same place as before.

We conducted a regression session about these two episodes. The first abduction event was odd. Instead of the characteristic sense of rising up out of bed, Will distinctly felt as if he was sinking down. He found himself lying on a table, with a Taller Being looking into his eyes, but this Taller Being did not have the sense of familiarity to him that was usual. He could see two others doing something to his legs. Suddenly one of the Beings abruptly and painfully pulled the letter off his leg. Another Taller Being put the letter right up to his face and stared at the picture of the smiling alien as if he were doing Mindscan on it. The aliens said nothing and asked him nothing about it, but, according to Will, the Mindscan procedure was particularly “deep.”

The second abduction was with the familiar aliens, ones with whom Will had been involved for some time. In this episode, the Taller Being communicated something to the effect that a mistake had been made and that “everything was going to be put right, the
way it was before.” Then when Will woke up he was dumbfounded to find the letter taped to his leg again. The letter appeared not to have been opened and the seal was intact.