During the 1980s, ufologists began to devote more time to
investigating accounts of people who claimed to have not only seen various types
of spacecraft, but also to have been dragged aboard and forced to undergo
various medical-like procedures, the most common of which were various types of
body probes.
People having direct touch with entities in charge of
spaceships were reported to the UFO community.
These were usually accounts of amicable encounters with
extraterrestrials who delivered a warning about society's present direction,
which should be opposed by a renewed understanding of the Earth's place in the
wider realm of spiritual truths.
Contactees were described by ufologists as persons who
claimed to have had these types of encounters with extraterrestrials.
In the 1960s, the first reports that matched what would
become the general pattern of abduction accounts surfaced.
Betty Hill, a New Hampshire housewife, reported a UFO
experience to NICAP in 1961.
(the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena).
Uncertain aspects of the narrative came to light during
follow-up interviews with NICAP investigators.
One of them had a two-hour gap.
Betty and her husband were coming home when they saw the
sighting.
They came two hours after they were supposed to.
The pair eventually sought psychotherapy and detailed their
encounter with a group of entities described as around five feet tall, with a
huge hairless head, greyish skin, wide slanted eyes, a slit mouth, small nose
and ears, and long fingers, while under hypnosis.
They were examined and brought onboard a spaceship.
Betty's stomach was pierced with a needle.
They were advised to forget about the event before they
departed, and as the space ship left the earth, their memories of what had just
happened disappeared.
If writer John Fuller hadn't found the Hills and written a
book chronicling the events disclosed in the series of hypnotic sessions, the
Hill's story may have been buried within the massive databases of UFO accounts.
Fuller's book Interrupted Journey, released in 1966, as well
as a simplified version of the narrative published in Look magazine, put
abductions on the radar of the UFO community.
Other reports of forced contact with extraterrestrials have
been reported to various UFO groups, to be sure.
One of them, the narrative of Antonio Villas Boas, a young
Brazilian guy who claimed to have been kidnapped in 1957, was published in 1965
in Flying Saucer Review, a respected British UFO magazine.
Following the publishing of the Hill case, it was given a
full examination.
He was purportedly brought onboard the saucer and made to
have intercourse with a human-like lady, following which samples of his sperm
were collected and kept.
Despite the fact that two well-documented incidents were
already under investigation, new reports were sluggish to emerge.
It wasn't until the 1970s that a series of abduction
incidents rekindled interest in the phenomenon.
Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, two shipyard employees,
were kidnapped while fishing in Pasacagoula, Mississippi, in 1973.
Several others occurred in the same year.
Then, in 1975, six guys in Arizona claimed that one of their
coworkers had vanished as he approached a hovering UFO.
Five days later, Travis Walton emerged and proceeded to tell
his narrative of a forced meeting with the entity onboard the vessel.
Other lesser-known abduction incidents were reported again
that year, but more importantly, a made-for-TV movie on the Hill case aired on
NBC on October 20.
Through the conclusion of the decade, a rising number of
cases were documented each year.
The interactions themselves were usually years, if not
decades, previous to any investigator hearing of the abduction incidents, since
the abduction accounts generally contained an element of memory loss.
Betty Andreasson's situation was typical.
Despite the fact that her alleged kidnapping happened in
1967, Raymond Fowler's inquiry did not begin until 1976, and his book detailing
the event did not emerge until 1979.
However, his The Andreas Son Affair (1979) and Ann Druffel
and D. Scott Rogo's The Tujunga Canyon Contacts (1980) primed the UFO community
for a new look at the abduction accounts during the following decade.
In the 1980s, kidnapping tales would take center stage.
Budd Hopkins, a relative newbie to the subject, was in the
forefront of the demand that ufologists pay attention to abduction cases.
His 1981 book, Missing Time, documented a number of
abduction cases he had unearthed.
He also noticed parallels in the cases, such as the gray
humanoids that carried out the abductions, the physical examination that
included blood or skin samples, and special attention to the reproductive
organs.
Hopkins' investigation brought to light the fact that there
were a huge number of instances with a lot of quantifiable commonalities.
In 1987, when prominent horror fiction writer Whitley
Streiber was sued for his book Communion, in which he described the account of
his own abduction, interest in the work reached a new peak.
The book became a best-seller, bringing the UFO community a
level of attention it hadn't seen since the Condon Report (1969).
Folklorist Thomas E. Bullard stated the presence of more
than 300 incidents in a collection of cases published by the Fund for UFO
Research the same year.
The increased attention devoted to abductions in 1987
resulted in a significant increase in the number of reports.
These hundreds of cases, which have arisen from people who
are dependent on others or who are aware of abduction stories in general, tell
a very similar story, despite the fact that the details vary greatly.
Strange beings interrupt the abductee's life, and their will
to resist is weakened.
They are transported onboard a space ship, sometimes with
the assistance of levitation, and subjected to an intrusive physical
examination.
In most cases, the victim is made to forget the occurrence,
and it is only years later, when troubled emotions develop in nightmarish
dreams, that the victim seeks psychotherapy or hypnosis, during which the
recollection of the abduction resurface.
The element of memory loss, combined with the intrusive
invasion of the body during the examination, has led to comparisons of
abduction stories with a very similar story of Satanic ritual abuse, in which
stories emerge of people being forced to participate in a Satanic ritual where
they were raped while undergoing psychotherapy and/or hypnosis.
They eventually forgot about the incident (s).
The abduction and satanism stories have combined to form a
new term for the lost memory condition.
As fundamental research on abductions progressed, experts
were split on how to interpret the findings.
Many ufologists, like historian David Jacobs, agreed with
Hopkins that the instances were fundamentally true and that they were the
greatest proof of an alien presence on Earth.
More crazy elements woven more insane stories of government
conspiracies and extraterrestrial alliances.
Most abductees, on the other hand, have merely wanted to
know what had happened to them, and have been relieved to hear that others had
had similar experiences.
They've been looking for a bigger significance in this
occurrence for a long time.
The majority of studies have determined that the abductee
has no psychopathology and has no motivation to give such a terrible account.
The huge number of reported interactions is a source of
criticism to the story's literal acceptance as evidence of alien contacts.
Given the current level of interstellar travel, the amount
of spacecraft that could or would come to Earth to account for all of the
connections is quite unlikely.
The many exams of reproductive organs also raises concerns
about the aim of bodily probing.
What is there to gain? Furthermore, although the tales are
supported by their consistency, they lack independent supporting evidence.
Evidence may have been lost in many situations involving
reports of long-ago occurrences.
However, there has been little cooperation overall.
Some hoped to find proof in things implanted in contactees'
bodies, however such foreign objects detected in abductees' bodies have shown
out to be completely commonplace in nature.
The claims' closeness to abduction and Satanic abuse
accounts was highlighted once again by the absence of supporting proof.
Others, both sympathetic and antagonistic to the abductees,
have come up with their own explanations.
The abduction claims have been criticized by certain UFO
debunkers, headed by tradition critic Philip Klass, as either frauds or
delusions.
A purely psychological view has been endorsed by several
psychologists.
The most appealing argument stems from the concept of the
forgotten ten memory condition, which also accounts for the extremely similar
Satanic abuse claims.
This hypothesis proposes that the abductee has been through
a true trauma, generally sexual molestation as a kid, but that during efforts
to retrieve the memories, a tale is created that validates the trauma while simultaneously
disguising it in a Satanic cult or a spacecraft.
The abduction tales started to blend with the contactee
stories in the 1990s, adding another crucial aspect to the abduction accounts.
In the sequel to Communion, Transformation: The Breakthrough,
Whitley Strieber focused attention to this feature of abduction accounts
(1988).
Strieber recounted a series of encounters with the
"Visitors" that started when he was a boy, and his developing feeling
that their interference into human existence was fundamentally good.
Leo J. Sprinkle, who had been organizing yearly contactee
gatherings at the University of Wyoming each summer, finally joined him in this
assessment.
As other abductees attended the meetings, he saw the lines
between their accounts dissolving over time.
In a similar vein, psychiatrist John Mack discovered that
when the accounts of the abductees he counseled were placed in a wider
framework of personal growth and changes in consciousness, they could be
explained.
They came to believe that the experience was best viewed as
a difficult but necessary lesson that led to spiritual growth and change.
In the New Age community, both Strieber and Mack found a
large following.
Though ufologists lost part of their attention on the
reports in the 1990s, probably owing to a lack of fresh material, there is no
such thing as a consensus when it comes to abductions.
The investigation looked to have come to a halt.
They haven't yielded hard physical evidence of
extraterrestrials, such as a spaceship, alien materials, or an alien, like
other areas of UFO research.
Further Reading:
Bullard, Thomas E. ‘‘Abduction Phenomenon.’’ In Jerome Clark, ed. UFO Encyclopedia. Detroit: Apogee Books, 1999.
Druffel, Ann, and D. Scott Rogo. The Tujunga Canyon Contacts. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980.
Fowler, Raymond. The Andreasson Affair. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979.
Hopkins, Budd. Missing Time: A Documented Study of UFO Abductions. New York: Richard Marek Publishers, 1981.
Jacobs, David J. The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.
Klass, Philip J. UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1988.
Mack, John E. Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994.
Pritchard, Andrea, et al., eds. Alien Discussions: Proceedings of the Abduction Study Conference. Cambridge, Mass.: North Cambridge Press, 1994.
Strieber, Whitley. Communion: A True Story. New York: Beach Tree/William Morrow, 1987.
Transformation: The Breakthrough. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1988.
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