Early on in my research I had a long talk with Miriam Delicado, someone who would fit the definition of a contactee, a term implying an ongoing communication with benevolent aliens. She has been an outspoken presence, sharing her experiences since the publication of her 2007 book, Blue Star: Fulfilling Prophecy. During that conversation, I asked her what she tells people when they ask about the reality of these experiences and, without skipping a beat, she said, “Just look at my email inbox.”
In the years since that conversation, I’ve been speaking out about what has happened to me. And now, like Miriam’s, my email inbox is overflowing with people reaching out to me. They are telling me their experiences, and most of these letters have a desperate tone. I understand this deep need for someone simply to listen.
This journey has been terribly confusing, especially when I first started looking into my experiences. During those initial years, I sent out letters just like the ones I’m now receiving. I mailed them off to the researchers and experiencers who, I thought, might be able to offer help. What I am receiving, for the most part, is coming from abductees. Even if they don’t say it, their stories certainly include clues and events that imply a hidden abduction experience. I read their accounts, try to offer some kind words, answer their questions, and then new ones arrive.
Each one of these stories should be investigated, yet that isn’t happening. Just from the number of emails I receive, this phenomenon is much more pervasive than anyone would dare consider. Yet, there isn’t the money, manpower or time, truly to deal with the magnitude of what is being reported.
At the heart of each account is a real person, and, in many cases, a family who are struggling with something beyond comprehension. It’s one thing to catalog the reports and compare the details, but it’s something altogether different to try to come to grips with what it all might mean. Any attempt to reframe the UFO debate requires a deeper awareness that these experiences are terribly complex and deeply personal.
There’s a lot of subtle (and not so subtle) clues that imply abductions are something widespread and common. If this is true—and from my point of view it certainly seems to be—shouldn’t it be considered important?
UFOs are not ambiguous, they are a part of us, they are interwoven into our human consciousness. But what does this even mean?
The word consciousness has become a sort of catchphrase for anything that might deal with the mind, or perhaps the higher mind. Telepathy, psychic weirdness, collective memories, spiritual awakenings and divine transformations all get lumped into the big consciousness basket. I’ve heard established UFO researchers being warned by their peers not to go down the path of consciousness. Better to stick with the pragmatic details, like government documents and reports from credible witnesses. The fear is you’ll lose all credibility by even considering something so intangible.
Anything seen as new-agey gets ignored by many who want to cling to something tangible, things like metal spaceships. The more ethereal aspects are swept aside for fear of “turning off” the greater public. Better to frame it as something easier to wrap your mind around.
Another reason this weirder stuff gets ignored is some folks feel a need to be taken seriously. I would love to be taken seriously, too, but I also feel a need to honestly share what’s happened to me.
I have spoken to a few abductees who are out there telling their stories in a very public way. They keep to their script, and what they share is both remarkable and strange. But, when I take them aside and ask if anything else is going on, they will whisper something extremely bizarre—I mean like really freaky shit. When I ask why they don’t share that part too, they’ll say they need to be taken seriously. I get this, yet the dilemma remains. Much of this phenomenon is just too outlandish even to bring to the table.
While at a UFO conference, I spoke briefly with journalist Lee Speigel, who covers (among other things) UFOs for the Huffington Post. I asked him why I never see any articles about abduction in his reporting. He told me that he doesn’t want to write anything that would “turn off” the readers. The way he said it was very matter-of-fact and practical.
Moments later I talked with filmmaker James Fox. I asked him if his upcoming feature-length UFO documentary would include anything about abductions. He pretty much gave the same answer, “No, we’ve decided we want be taken seriously, we don’t want to lose our audience.”
I’ve heard this a lot. Journalists, authors or filmmakers who specialize in UFO reporting will shy away from the topic of abductions. Or, if they do cover it, they’ll only reference events that are decades old, like Betty and Barney Hill.
The problem with the abduction subject is that it seems to have two layers. The surface layer is what we’ve all seen on late-night cable TV documentaries—creepy gray aliens taking people from their cars on lonely roads. The deeper layer is much more challenging. Things become absurd; alternative realities get jumbled up with mythic imagery. This is obviously a simplistic way to look at it, and the whole thing probably goes ten layers further down. Hardly anyone wants to address that surface layer, and pretty much nobody wants to go any deeper.
Anne Strieber, the late wife of author Whitley Strieber, had a simple way of evaluating the validity a report of UFO contact. She said, “If it’s not weird, I don’t trust it.” She referred to this little phrase as her BS detector. Author Nick Redfern has said something similar. When trying to describe the complexities of UFO research, he’s said, “It’s not just that it’s weird, it’s too weird.”
This is what I’m drawn to: the accounts that are so weird they defy any logical explanation. I am pulling on this thread because it’s been my own direct experience.
I’ve been finding that, within some stories, is a confusing collision of overlapping experiences, a mess of twists and turns, and all the details are so weird. Things feel mixed up with threads running off everywhere and synchronicity spills over the edges like an unattended sink. For me, this chaos is a sign to trust the event as legitimate. The more complicated the interwoven details, the more valid it seems. For me, this is a shaky form of proof, but proof of what?
I’ve been using the term paradox syndrome to describe this frenetic pattern. A paradox is an attempt at sound reasoning, but the conclusion appears unacceptable. A syndrome is a group of related or coinciding things, events, and actions. I don’t understand why it works this way, but all the messy threads must tie into some core event, and the challenge is not to get lost in the mayhem. I’ve been collecting and cataloguing precisely these kinds of stories. My own Confirmation Event, told earlier, is one of those stories.
If we are trying to reframe the debate, we need to be aware that these more complex accounts are not easy to categorize or share. It takes a great deal of patience to sit and listen to what people have been through. The bar is set pretty high for what I consider too weird, yet I’ve met plenty of people who tell me stories that stretch what I can fathom. It would be easy to dismiss these folks as unreliable, but I feel strongly that the clues to unravel this mystery are tucked away within their experiences. Here’s my advice to any UFO researcher, you need to listen to the abductees, even if what they tell you is challenging.
I spoke to a researcher with a focus on sighting reports and he told me, “I used to do abduction research, but it just took up so much time.” My heart sank, yet what he said seems fair—it’s easier and less time-consuming to study UFO sightings than to get dragged down into the bottomless pit of abduction research.
I had a friend call me out on how I do my research; he was frustrated and said I wasn’t being scientific. My response was ‘what do I care, I’m not a scientist.’ He was right by pointing out that I’m not objective. I’m not trying to approach this muddle of divergent experiences with science as a tool. Instead, I see my role as more of a folklorist. I’m simply collecting stories and letting these narratives speak for themselves.
There are cries that the UFO phenomenon should be studied scient
ifically. Perhaps it should, but that isn’t my concern. The scientific community has either ignored or denounced the UFO phenomenon for close to 70 years. With very few exceptions, UFO researchers, who try to wrestle with this mystery using any kind of scientific rigor, end up framing it merely as metal spaceships from another planet. They want to measure burn marks in a farmer’s field. They don’t want to cloud their tidy documentation with the strange invasion of consciousness that gets reported when you listen carefully to what experiencers are saying. These challenging stories are being lived by real people, and I sense an even deeper story hidden below the water line.
To examine this subject rationally seems tenuous, so I’ve been putting more of my efforts into trying to read the symbolic clues. I’ve come to see these experiences playing out with a sort of dream logic. Instead of looking to a pragmatic UFO investigator for answers, it might be better to ask the gypsy fortune teller.
At this point, I see the skills of a dream interpreter being an appropriate tool when analyzing someone’s experience. Scrutinizing reality as if it were a dream has become normal for me. This kind of thinking probably puts me on the “outs” with most of the mainstream researchers, but I can’t help it. This is an esoteric mystery and it requires esoteric methodologies to peel back its secrets.
If you see a UFO, is it better to call a MUFON investigator, or the local shaman from the nearby Indian Reservation? The no-nonsense investigator will ask what time you saw the object, and to describe what it looked like. The shaman might ask very different questions. What has been going on in your spiritual life leading up to your sighting, and what has changed in the aftermath? He might inquire about dreams, premonitions, gut feelings and intuitions.
This is not a call to dismiss the role of the nuts and bolts investigator. There is a responsibility to walk out into the witness’s yard and measure the burn mark in the grass, then write that down in your notebook so it can be compared with other cases. This is an important part of the role of the overall process. But it’s equally important to look beyond the physical clues. They’ll need to ask the witness how their soul has been influenced by what they’ve experienced—and then pay close attention to the answers. We are dealing with a phenomenon that can seep its way into our reality in ways that are both outlandish and profound. My advice to any new researcher would be to expect absurdities and to trust their gut.
Leo Sprinkle spoke with me about his own journey, from UFO researcher to an instantaneous realization that he was himself an UFO experiencer. It happened in a group meeting where he listened to a witness describe the uniform worn by an alien being—the pants had feet connected, like a child’s pyjamas. He was hit with a flood of memories and was suddenly sobbing. One of his patients said, “Good, now Leo is suffering like the rest of us!”
Suffering with these experiences is entirely accurate. Leo described the challenges of coming to terms with this realization: “It was a long journey, but finally I accepted that I was on the path, and the way to follow that path is to not only be conscious of what is happening at the head level, but also to be accepting at the heart level or the intuitive level.”
This is good advice for self-examination, as well as for looking at the overall contact phenomenon. Many of the people involved have endured something traumatic, and they need help as well as compassion.
Jeffrey Kripal is a historian of religions, and a professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He is the author of multiple books on the mystical experience, including The Super Natural, which he co-authored with Whitley Strieber.
Jeff has studied ancient manuscripts and also worked with people who tell of their own anomalous experiences. These might be religious epiphanies, or a UFO contact event. In the quote below, Jeff describes what I’ve encountered many times. He articulates clearly the challenges of listening to people as they share what has happened to them and the task of making sense of these stories.
This is the thing about this material, you think you’ve heard the last strange thing, and then it gets stranger. What the debunker [rationalist] thinks is that, no—if we just had enough information it would all make sense and all the strangeness would go away.
But my experience with these folks is exactly the opposite. The more they tell you the weirder it gets. Part of the reason is that they don’t quite trust you in the beginning, so they tell you just sort of the surface of the story. And then they tell you a little more, and a little more. And the more they tell you the stranger it gets. It does not make more sense; it makes less sense. And I think that this is important. I think that is part of the phenomenon, that it’s absurd, and that it’s meant to confuse us. And I think that, when we look for it to make sense, I think we are going down the wrong path. Because it doesn’t.4
I understand this in my bones, because I have lived it. Seeing a UFO on a clear starry night is just the smallest part of my story. There is so much more. Coming to terms with what I have been through has required abandonment. I was desperate for a pragmatic answer, but any hope of that stayed beyond my reach; it just floated away and then disappeared. I had to give up and, in doing so, I’ve reached a place of calmer waters. I’ve had to leave the comfort of that brightly lit lamp-post, step off the pavement, climb into the thorny bushes, and be content in the darkness. In many ways, this describes the owl, a creature at home in the dark.
After the publication of Communion in 1987, Whitley Strieber received a flood of letters, this in an era where people wrote on paper and mailed them in envelopes. His wife, Anne, spent the next few years reading upwards of a quarter of a million of these letters. What she read were heartfelt accounts sent by people describing their own contact experiences at the hands of alien visitors:
Mr. Strieber, I’m scared. After this happened, I felt like I had been standing on bedrock, and that it had dropped out from under my feet, leaving me floating in an ocean whose bottom I could not see. I felt as if everything I thought I’d been clear about for seventeen years—the things that people learn—were lies, and that this was what was important. But it scared me, and I wasn’t sure that I wasn’t crazy. I in fact tried to commit suicide because I didn’t want to be a lunatic.5
This kind of personal testimony is common; I’ve heard it often. These experiences can be horribly traumatic. Even the good experiences will leave people adrift without any easy way to deal with the sudden disappearance of their sense of reality. Your old way of thinking crumbles, and then something new needs to be rebuilt to take its place.
For me, this has already happened. I have suffered through the realization that I am, for lack of a better word, an ‘abductee.’ These trying events would make normal life for anyone nearly impossible. This new awareness is sometimes referred to as the trauma of enlightenment.
A collective myth has blossomed within the UFO community: “Disclosure with a capital D.” Many of the true believers foresee a press conference where the President of the United States will declare that UFOs are real, but I’m not holding my breath.6
I don’t need someone in authority to tell me what I already know, and I certainly won’t wait for some kind of approval. Fuck all that.
Trying to frame it all as something simple isn’t working. We want a nice British actor with a deep voice stepping from his shiny flying saucer like that scene in The Day The Earth Stood Still. I’ve spoken to hundreds of abductees, and never once have I heard anyone describe seeing an alien walk out of a landed craft (that said, I’ve read some accounts like that, but very few). Instead, a lot of people have told me of little beings just stepping into their bedroom through a swirling vortex in the wall. But this is rarely mentioned out under that lamp-post.
I am no longer in a position to wait for others to make ripples in this pond. It’s my job to say what I feel in my heart in a way that will be heard. This is an arena that most people will ignore, or dismiss with contempt. Simply talking about these ideas is considered crazy in the eyes of many.
But there is a need to be brave. Mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote about the challenge of the inner quest, “You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path.” He was referencing the Knights of the Round Table, as they embarked upon their quest for the Grail. The UFO subject is just a long list of unknowns with no path to follow, yet you can still press on in that darkness.
Everyone is fragile and we all bring our own baggage to the table. Trying to grapple with these ideas seems to reflect some deeper part of ourselves back at us. The reporter who spoke with Leo Sprinkle was right when he said the experience is important—it has the power to change you.
I really have no idea what is happening and what it all might mean; my thoughts change with the wind. What I feel strongly on Monday fades away on Tuesday, replaced by some new perspective on Wednesday. Ideas form, shape up into something viable, and then collapse. We are confronted by a mystery, and nothing would be more gratifying than to actually solve it. But I don’t expect that to ever happen.
This is a deeply personal journey, and it feels like a mistake to depend on others for approval. There are times when I feel like I’m chasing my tail, stalling out, or just plain overwhelmed. Yet I wallow forward, trying to make sense of the madness. There is something about this stuff that just feels important, I don’t know how else to say it.
It’s not my job to remedy problems in the UFO community, but it’s my responsibility to proceed onward doing the best I can. This is hard work, and the hardest of all is looking inward.
THE FUTURE LEADS TO THE PAST
Jack Brewer
It seems to have been with us a long, long time, whatever “it” may be. Researchers such as Jacques Vallée suggest humankind’s dance with the strange, including odd sights in the sky, is virtually inherent to our existence. The unknown and misunderstood apparently manifested in tales of fairies, trolls and, of course, aliens and their flying machines.
UFOs- Reframing the Debate Page 7