The UFO Singularity (15 page)

We continued discussing her grandmother’s experience, as well as the general subject of alien abduction and, before we parted ways, I passed my card along to her.

“Let me know if you think your grandmother would ever be interested in talking about this,” I said. “And you can tell her I’m legit. This won’t be appearing in
The National Enquirer.
”

Within just days of being told even the sparsest details about this strange encounter with “humans” aboard an exotic aircraft, one of the listeners of my weekly podcast contacted me to relate another odd UFO incident, which also seemed to deal with humans seen on board a UFO:

Hi Micah,

Ever wonder how many UFO sightings never get talked about? I played banjo in a band up in northern New York State where I was living in 2000. I used to ride with our fiddler to many of the events where the band played and he told me about seeing a UFO back in the 80’s near where he lived
near Chippewa Bay on the St. Lawrence River. He told me not to tell anyone because he didn’t want the ridicule that he started to get when he told a couple of people about it, so I never talked about it to people. He passed away in 2008, so I see no harm in sharing his story now with someone who can appreciate it (I am a listener of The Gralien Report). I have to wonder how many other stories never get shared due to fear of ridicule.

He said that he was driving on Route 37 when he came to the intersection of Triangle Road, which went to Chippewa Bay, when he saw what he thought was a very low-flying airplane over the woods behind an abandoned farmhouse. As he got closer, he noticed that the object was not moving very fast, and actually appeared to be hovering, like a helicopter, over the trees. Curious about it, he slowed down and pulled his pickup truck over to the side of the road. The more he looked at it he began to realize that it didn’t look like anything he had ever seen before. He said it looked like a small building with large lit up windows in it, floating in air. He compared its appearance to one of the restaurants in Watertown, NY that had a classic diner theme (stainless steel exterior with large windows). The object floated over the road behind him and he turned his truck around and tried to follow it. He took a couple of side roads and managed to again get close to the object, close enough so that he said he could see people inside as the object got closer to him. He said the people
appeared to be dressed like doctors, and there were what looked like stainless steel tables inside. He said that he began to feel uneasy as the object got closer to him, and suddenly he just had to get away from it. He drove away as fast as he could, fearing that it might now be following him. He said that later when he told people about it, they made fun of him and asked what he’d been drinking (or smoking), so he quit talking about it. One of the people he shared the story with said that they saw what looked like a large shooting star on that same evening.
³

Needless to say, the description of there being “people” on board the UFO craft during the encounter had fascinated me. Still, I surmised that the average witness to circumstances such as those described here might compare any generally anthropomorphic figure that they may have seen to being “people.” I responded to the message, asking whether the gentleman who witnessed the craft had noted the shape or rough dimensions of the craft itself, as well as to see if I could get further clarification on the appearance of the “doctors” he had seen through the windows of the craft. This is the reply I received:

My friend really didn’t go into great detail about the shape of the craft when I asked about what it looked like. He must have felt comparing it to a local landmark I was familiar with at the time would best convey his description to me. The
building he compared it to had been a place called Vinnie Bink’s Classic Diner, which has since been torn down, I believe. It was a rectangular building with an “Art Deco” fashioned exterior that had a metallic look and large windows. It kind of does look like what I think a UFO might look like, based on other descriptions and artwork I’ve seen, although not a strict “saucer” or “triangle” shape.

He did not lead me to think that the figures he saw inside were other than human beings. What he said was, “doctors or people in lab coats.” He didn’t elaborate on the color of what they were wearing in his description and I didn’t press for more detail. I just imagined the green doctor’s smocks or white lab coats. I wish I had asked more questions, but he didn’t seem comfortable talking any more about it, so I dropped it.

My friend died in ’08 at the age of 88 and his wife followed him about a month or two later (odd how that happens).
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So far as my contact had been able to discern, the witness had seemed to indicate that the beings on board the craft had been human, or at very least, had appeared as such. Though the circumstances related above already outline the curious “human” aspects that many UFO reports seem to involve, another classic was recounted by Jacques Vallee in his book
Dimensions,
which nonetheless helps to drive the point home. On March 23, 1966, an aircraft electronics instructor had been driving to work at
approximately 5 a.m. near Temple, Oklahoma, when he saw a bright light emanating from someplace along the roadway ahead. The light was soon revealed to be coming from a strange object resting on the highway, resembling “an aluminum airliner with no wings or tail and with no seams along the fuselage.”
⁵
Crouched near the object had been a man, described by the witness as “a plain old G.I. mechanic…or a crew chief or whatever he might happen to be on that crew. He had a flashlight in his hand, and he was almost kneeling on his right knee, with his left hand touching the bottom of the fuselage.”
⁶

This sort of scenario also begins to present itself within a number of different reports of alien abduction that have appeared throughout the years. Consider a few very famous cases, such as the November 5, 1975 abduction of Travis Walton, which we touched on briefly in the Introduction. Indeed, although Walton claimed to have recollection of meeting the fairly prototypical “greys,” his more notable interactions on board what he perceived to be an alien craft had involved humanlike beings that were unordinary only in that, to borrow Walton’s description, they were the “epitome of their gender.”
⁷
These beings then led him to an area where he was laid on a table, and an item that resembled—to a suspicious degree—an oxygen mask just like an anesthesiologist might use to administer aerosolized or gaseous drugs to a patient. Of course, Walton then blacked out, as might be expected of any man having anesthesia administered. This aspect of his story presents us with a surprisingly common conundrum that
reoccurs throughout UFO abduction reports: The “alien” beings on board what are obviously highly advanced aircraft nonetheless utilize rather unsophisticated surgical procedures on the humans they examine. No better example of this exists, perhaps, than Betty and Barney Hill’s famous abduction in 1961, during which strangely antiquated tests for pregnancy were allegedly performed on Mrs. Hill.
⁸
I would not be the first to say that these beings, had they managed to develop technology that brought them all the way from Zeta Reticuli, would likely have also developed less-archaic tests for such things as determining pregnancy.

Despite the wide variety “beings” commonly reported in various UFO literature, the specific appearances of humanlike extraterrestrials had become prevalent enough by the 1980s for them to garner a few specific names, including terms such as “Nordics,” “Space Brothers,” and the popular title of “Pleiadians,” which remains in use today by the UFO Contact Center International.
⁹
Though some reports of alleged “Nordic” entities describe them as being slightly larger than the average human, they otherwise tend to be remarkably consistent in their resemblance to the average Earth-dweller. All things considered, it is a bit strange that beings appearing to resemble humans so closely are nonetheless categorized alongside different varieties of supposed “extraterrestrials.” Perhaps what this really illustrates for us is the insidiousness of the extraterrestrial
meme
, supplanted within the public subconscious early on; whether this was through the intentional use of
misinformation, or merely as a result of speculation by a pre-Space Age scientific establishment regarding what UFOs might be, we cannot be certain. The end result, however, is painfully obvious: When the obvious presence of
humans
appears in the recollections of contactees and victims of UFO abduction, they are typically referred to as being merely “humanlike” at very best, though far more often as being aliens from another world—despite what their appearance might otherwise betray about the circumstances.

Humans hard at work de-ionizing a “flying saucer”?

Admittedly, I am not a person who claims to have had interactions with anything that appeared to be an extraterrestrial being in my life, and thus my attempts at
humble speculation on the subject of alien abduction and, more specifically, “alternative theories” in that regard do often draw criticism. This is especially the case with individuals who report having had their own encounters. Shortly after an article I wrote on the subject, with regard to the existence of a possible human element present amid some alien abduction and UFO reports, a rather scathing exchange appeared online, a portion of which I’ve excerpted here:

I still get sick with worry that (my abduction experiences) can’t be real…but why do others with me see the same thing??

Quit this BS theorizing by talking heads who like the attention [they get from] telling scary stories and showing how smart they are by trying to explain it away.
¹⁰

I’m well enough beyond getting incensed these days when such commentary appears to be directed at me; in fact, if anything, I find myself gravitating toward earnest feelings of sympathy for those who claim to have had troubling experiences like this, which neither party—abductee or ufologist—can seem to explain entirely. Indeed, having not “been there” myself, it is difficult to surmise what others who say they have had the intrusive experience of alien abduction occur in their lives must be feeling. Of course, I imagine this is especially the case when a researcher like me comes along and begins asking questions, which may appear to be aimed at contradicting their claims.

And yet, I feel that there may be common ground between the two camps. Although the apparent presence of an extraterrestrial intelligence behind the mystery seems questionable, it would require a significant leap in our assessment of the situation to assume that the abductees are purely imagining their experiences. Researcher Kevin Randle illustrated very similar feelings during a February 2012 appearance on the popular
Paracast
radio program, where he noted his own gut feeling that “the abduction phenomenon has terrestrial explanations, and that there is nothing extraterrestrial about it.”
¹¹
Randle also described various discussions he had shared with abduction researcher Kathleen Marden, who is also the niece of Betty Hill, where they seemed to share the opinion that factors such as sleep paralysis could underlie at least a few abduction reports. “Some abductions are explainable that way, but not all of them, so there are other mechanisms operating there. But I see nothing to suggest that there’s an extraterrestrial component to it.”
¹²

Shortly after I authored the aforementioned article regarding the “human factor” that seems apparent within reports of UFO abduction, I was directed to the work of a researcher named Martin Cannon, whose 1990 essay “The Controllers: A New Hypothesis of Alien Abductions” represents one of the most thorough alternative hypotheses available within the UFO literature regarding abduction research. Cannon’s approach deals less with reports of actual UFO craft, and instead focuses on parallels that exist between common aspects of reported alien
abductions and intelligence programs involving mind control. “The myth of the UFO has provided an effective cover story for an entirely different sort of mystery,” Cannon notes.
¹³
By removing the warring diametric elements of the “believer” versus “skeptic” mentalities, Cannon believed he had indeed uncovered some aspect of truth surrounding the strange (and at times seemingly
absurd
) stories that comprise the realm of alien abduction. As one might already expect, Cannon’s emerging hypothesis has little to do with aliens from outer space; it would, however, incorporate things we might expect from a highly advanced form of “behind the scenes” technology—akin in many ways to that which the Singularitarians might ascribe—and perhaps several decades ahead of mainstream science today. Still, although it fits the scope of this discussion quite neatly, it may be surprising nonetheless to assume that such technology could also be one that is likely of terrestrial origin.

“Both Believer and Skeptic,” Cannon writes, “miss the real story. Both make the same mistake: They connect the abduction phenomenon to the forty-year history of UFO sightings, and they apply their prejudices about the latter to the controversy about the former.”
¹⁴
As researchers, when we begin to remove some of the preconceptions and stop overlooking the stranger, often more revealing elements tucked away within the UFO mystery, at least some of the accounts of alien abduction become more plausible. In many instances, they also betray a number of quirky details that seem entirely inconsistent with the
idea of an advanced extraterrestrial race with knowledge that exceeds our own. As noted here, and several times already in this chapter, also central to Cannon’s argument is the fact that UFO abductors, which are often presumed to be “alien,” seem to use technology that is startlingly underwhelming in its sophistication: