Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience

by Colin Wilson

  Vallee would undoubtedly point out that the case bears an obvious resemblance to cases of abduction by fairies, as well as to the engineering student described in the introduction to The Invisible College, who was taken on board a UFO and spent some hours connected to a ‘teaching machine’—then returned to find he had been absent for eighteen days.

  We also note its resemblance to the herd of cows that vanished and reappeared near Warminster in 1967. And John Mack would certainly point out its similarity to modern abduction cases. For example, one evening in 1943, as a normal American family was having dinner, the father—a violin teacher—stood up and said, ‘I’m going to get a pack of cigarettes’. His family stared in astonishment—he was a nonsmoker. But he had been odd for some time, suffering strange lapses of memory. He drove away, and his car was later found parked outside the local grocery store. But he was never seen again. Nine years later, he was declared legally dead.

  But why assume that he was ‘abducted’? Because of the events that followed. More than half a century later, in June 1992, John Mack and other academics organised a conference on abduction at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and two of the many abductees who came to tell their story were women who lived and worked together on a horse farm: Anna Jamerson and Beth Collings—the latter the granddaughter of the man who vanished in 1943. And Beth Collings had reason to believe that she was at least the third generation that had been abducted, and that it might be happening to her son and granddaughter.

  Years later, her father told her of an incident that had happened in 1930, when he was twelve. One morning, he and his brother were playing on a beach in Virginia, and he bent down to pick up a shell. When he looked up, his brother had vanished. Suddenly, dense sea mist rolled in. He walked up and down the seashore, calling to his brother. A shiny object caught his eye in the sand, and he bent to look at it. When he looked up, his brother was back. But his brother had also been searching up and down the beach . . . When they got home, their grandmother was frantic, and had called the police. The time was 3:45 p.m.—although only a short time before it had been 10:00 a.m. They had lost several hours.

  After that, her father admitted, there had been frequent episodes of ‘missing time’. In fact, he had shared one with Beth. In 1954, when Beth was five, she accompanied her father on a business trip to Doylestown, Pennsylvania. It was a hot day, and they were on a dirt road between fields when the car stopped. Her father got out to look under the bonnet, and Beth felt inexplicably nervous, and longed for him to come back.

  Then, suddenly, the car was full of freezing air, and she began shouting in alarm. Her father put his arm round her shoulder, and, as he was soothing her, the car started of its own accord. Yet he seemed unsurprised. When they finally reached Doylestown, there was a note on the office door saying, ‘Sorry I missed you’. They were many hours late—yet the place where the car had stalled was only a short drive away.

  Her father would later admit to many strange episodes of missing time—but said that he had thought he was dreaming or hallucinating. He also told her that his own father had been a concert violinist. But he had begun to behave erratically, occasionally failing to show up for concerts. He began teaching the violin to students in his own home, but still missed appointments. Then, that evening in 1943, he walked out and disappeared.

  Beth had started to become aware of episodes of missing time in 1989. But they had obviously been going on since her childhood. When she was fourteen, she began to experience all the symptoms of pregnancy—cramps, morning sickness, tender breasts. Yet she was a virgin. Her father took her to a doctor, who performed pregnancy tests, which proved to be positive. She insisted that she could not be pregnant—she had never experienced sex. She had a boyfriend, but the affair was platonic.

  One night, she went out to meet the boyfriend in a bus park. He was not there. She climbed on a bus, and woke up the next morning to find herself in Little Rock, Arkansas. A woman pointed out a restaurant that would soon be open for breakfast. But as she sat outside, on a bench, her father’s car pulled up. She climbed in, and she was driven home, without a word being spoken. Years later, when she was asking him about the ‘missing time’, she asked him how he had found her so far from home. He admitted that he did not have the slightest idea. He had simply ‘known’ where she was.

  The same thing happened several times more during her teens, and each time her father somehow knew how to find her.

  The implication would seem to be either that her father was ‘psychic’, or that he was somehow being told where to find her.

  A few months after the Little Rock episode, she was taken for her prenatal examination, and the doctor announced that she was no longer pregnant—nor even showed signs of a miscarriage. Oddly enough, that was the end of it. No one else ever mentioned it again.

  In 1987, after she had been married, divorced, and brought up a son alone, Beth saw an advertisement for a stable manager at a horse farm in Virginia. It was run by a woman of about her own age called Anna Jamerson. The two liked each other immediately, and Beth moved in. Oddly enough, Anna felt she had met Beth before; years later, they realised that they had met as children—in England—encountering each other by chance and having a long conversation. Such ‘coincidences’ occur with curious frequency in abduction cases.

  Two years after Beth moved in, they saw three lights, in triangular formation, over the horse farm. It could have been an airliner, but there was no sound. Then the lights halted above them and one broke away, and disappeared.

  On 15 December 1991, Beth was driving back after spending the day with her parents when she saw three bright lights over the top of the trees. She halted her car, feeling oddly alarmed. The lights were dazzling, and she got out to look more closely. One of the lights moved away from the others. And, quite suddenly, she found herself driving at a dangerous speed, five miles away, with no knowledge of how she got there. When she arrived back at the farm, she realised that it was far later than she thought—she was missing about two hours.

  It happened again a few days later. Driving along, she saw the lights and groaned aloud, ‘Oh no, not again!’ She blinked, then found she was eight miles farther on, having passed the farm. Strangest of all, a Christmas package she was carrying had been opened, and resealed with masking tape in a crude and clumsy manner. Apparently someone had opened it to find out what it contained, but had not touched the cookies in it.

  Beth’s parents received a visit from two air force officers. They explained that it was a routine check, due to the fact that Beth’s son Paul had just been promoted in the intelligence branch. But, instead of asking about him, they asked questions about Beth; her father finally told them to go away and ask her themselves.

  In April 1992, Beth woke up feeling sick, and discovered that she was bleeding from her navel. Over the next days she began to show all the signs of pregnancy—morning sickness, sore breasts, and obsessive house cleaning. But pregnancy was impossible—she had had a hysterectomy when she was twenty-three. Finally, she went to see a doctor, and tests showed she was three months pregnant. Her vagina was so inflamed that he asked her if she had been raped. The following day, her navel was bleeding again, but all signs of pregnancy had vanished.

  The day Beth’s symptoms disappeared, Anna went through the same experience—morning sickness and enlarged breasts. A home pregnancy test showed she was not pregnant—but she learnt later that, when an embryo is implanted direct into the womb (as is done in surrogate pregnancies), it does not show up on pregnancy tests. Then one morning she woke up to find herself normal again.

  One day, Beth was sitting with her four-year-old granddaughter when she noted that the child was drawing a ‘flying machine’ with a red light, and faces looking out of the windows. Down in the corner was a small man; the child explained that this was ‘Nu’, and that he had taken her through a long tunnel. Nu, she said, was grey all over and had big eyes. As they were going to bed, the child turned to t
he open door and said, ‘Goodnight, Nu’. Then she added, ‘Nu is saying goodnight to you too, Grandma’.

  Anna woke up in the night to find a huge man in her room. She felt no fear, but simply switched on the light. There was no one there. Then both of them woke up to see small grey figures in the room. It was at this point that Anna decided to contact a UFO help organisation. And this, in turn, led to their appearance at the UFO conference at MIT. There they met the newspaperman Courty Bryan, who would write about them in Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind, and also Budd Hopkins, who would invite them to New York and hypnotise them both.

  During the conference, Beth had an odd experience. As she sat in the hall, everything suddenly became totally silent—as if she had become deaf. Then she found herself on a landing with a blue-tiled floor—she felt it was elsewhere on the campus. Someone seemed to be urging her to go back, and she resisted, then gave way. She found herself back in the conference hall, looking at herself and Anna (from above and slightly to one side, as has been reported by many people who have had out-of-the-body experiences), then she felt herself sink back into her body as if it was a feather mattress.

  As they returned to the motel, the row of motorway lights blinked out in unison as they drove past. Beth was surprised, but Anna commented that it happened to her all the time—she records as much in the book Connections which she later co-authored with Beth. This book also contains an enormous mass of material for which there is no space here; unexplained electrical failures in their bedrooms but not in the rest of the house, lights and televisions turning themselves on, even when unplugged, pillows rearranged during the night. When Courty Bryan was tape-recording the two women, the tape recorder switched itself on when there was no one near it, and later the tape jammed in the machine and refused to come out; it looked as if it would have to be taken out by force—until the women left the room, when it immediately ejected normally. There are as many of these small and relatively trivial events as in Puharich’s Uri, and they would make equally exhausting reading if summarised here.

  One of Beth’s most crucial experiences happened in September, when she took a four-day holiday in the West Virginia National Park. On her first day there, a huge golden bee appeared, which she dubbed Goldie, and which followed her around like a pet bird.

  That evening she saw a fog bank up above her cabin, and felt uneasy. Then she woke up and found herself in her bed; fully dressed. It was the next day, and she felt sick. When she removed her jeans, she was puzzled to find she was wearing no panties, which she had certainly been wearing the previous day.

  Her car keys were missing, and the car proved to be in the middle of the roadway. As she was about to climb into it, she suddenly remembered what had happened the day before.

  The fog bank had ‘walked’ down the slope; then three grey figures had emerged from it, and the fog had vanished. The small grey creatures seemed oddly familiar.

  She grabbed her car keys and rushed for the car. The three ‘greys’ stopped in front of it, and one pointed his finger at the bonnet. The gear stick felt loose. Then a thought came into her head: ‘Come with us.’

  She agreed, but said, ‘I want to remember this one’.

  They climbed to the ridge where she had seen the fog bank, then she was engulfed in a blue-white light.

  She found herself in a room, and a taller ‘grey’ approached her—over five feet; it had a huge head perched on a thin neck, and black almond-shaped eyes. He took her to another room, where there were three more like him; then she recalled that she had known him before, and that he was the ‘doc’.

  Liquid was injected into her hand below the thumb. When she cried out, she was told, ‘There is no pain’, and the pain went. Then she was undressed, and a needle driven into her navel. When she asked why this was being done, she was told, ‘It is part of the change’. Later she was shown horses on a tiny screen, and told that they had also been ‘changed’. So had cows. Then the ‘doc’ told her, ‘You must eat only cow things’.

  The creatures dressed her, forgetting her panties, and finally let her finish dressing herself. Once dressed, she took a step towards the ‘greys’, and was immediately paralysed; she realised they were afraid of her.

  Then she woke up in bed, fully dressed . . . The ‘greys’ had allowed her to remember.

  Her car refused to start, and a mechanic told her that the wires were all burnt out, and would be very expensive to repair. Anna arrived the next day, and the rest of their stay passed without incident.

  The story sounds, of course, as bizarre and incredible as any of John Mack’s cases, and even has touches of John Keel. (The women began to receive mysterious phone calls, one of them in a language that sounded like gibberish, although each word was carefully pronounced; the speaker became increasingly angry at his inability to make himself understood.) And, when Budd Hopkins—who entered the case as a result of meeting them at MIT—hypnotised both women, he uncovered memories of abductions dating back to childhood. What was even more incredible, some memories indicated that Beth and Anna had been abducted together since childhood, which seemed to suggest that their whole lives had been manipulated by aliens. Hopkins was confirmed in the view he had formed as a result of years of study of such cases: that the ‘greys’ were engaged in some kind of biological experiment with human beings which involved implanting foetuses in the womb, and removing them when they were a few months—or weeks—old.

  Anna had always been convinced that she had been raped by her father when she was twelve, when they were on a fishing trip. She could not recall how her pants had been removed, but thought that something had been inserted into her, and that, when she cried out, the assault stopped. Under hypnosis, she recalled this as her first abduction experience, during which her father was paralysed, and that it had resulted in the loss of her virginity.

  If Beth Collings is to be believed, her family had been subjected to abductions for decades—at least since the late 1920s.

  One of the most intelligent and perceptive of English ufologists, John Spencer, is inclined to doubt whether hypnosis is of any value whatever in abduction cases, on the grounds that it is too easy for the hypnotist to create false memories. But, while this is obviously true, it is hard to see how this should influence our view of the case of Beth and Anna. It would be easy to accuse them of a kind of folie a deux, and of simply being too imaginative. Certainly, if a book like Connections is taken in isolation, it would be easy for a sceptic to dismiss it as fantasy—lights going on and off on motorways, voices on the phone speaking gibberish, grey figures in the bedroom. Yet as soon as we turn from this to John Mack’s Abduction, or Budd Hopkins’s Missing Time and Intruders, or David Jacobs’s Secret Life, or the vast transcript of the MIT conference, Alien Discussions, it is obvious that Connections fits neatly into a far larger pattern, and that, if we are going to dismiss the experiences of Beth and Anna, then we must dismiss everything else.

  It is often stated that the 1961 abduction of Barney and Betty Hill is the first abduction case on record, and that little else happened until Budd Hopkins began to uncover cases of ‘missing time’ in the 1970s. In fact, one of the earliest recorded cases dates back as far as 1953. Two women who preferred to shelter under the pseudonyms of Sara Shaw and Jan Whitley were awakened at 2:00 a.m. by a bright light at their cabin in Tujunga Canyon, near Los Angeles; Sara knelt on the bed to look—and suddenly realised it was 4:20 in the morning, and she felt giddy and confused. Years later, under hypnosis, she described how she and Jan were floated up to a UFO and medically examined by aliens, then floated back.

  The well-known psychic investigator Scott Rogo decided that the story was pure fantasy based on Sara’s dissatisfaction with the lesbian relationship, but there is no evidence that this is true.

  In 1957, there occurred the famous case of Antonio Villas-Boas, the Brazilian farmer who claimed to have been taken on board an egg-shaped craft, and seduced by a naked blonde. Although it sounds preposterous, hi
s story has been subjected to detailed investigation, and is widely accepted as true. Villas-Boas later added that, in a second act of intercourse, the alien woman took a sperm sample, a fact that he had originally suppressed because it implied that he was merely being used. (Barney Hill probably had similar motives when he asked John Fuller not to mention in his book that a sperm sample had been taken from him during the abduction.)

  One of the most admirably detailed investigations of a sexual encounter with an alien was recorded by Hans Holzer in a book called The Ufonauts in 1976. As a result of an advertisement in a UFO magazine, Holzer established contact with a pretty blonde woman named Shane Kurz.

  She told Holzer how, one evening in April 1968, she and her mother—who lived in Westmoreland, New York—saw a cigar-shaped object overhead. Later both women woke at 2 a.m. to find the bedroom flooded with white light, which came from behind the house of a neighbour across the road. Finally, the light moved up into the sky. The neighbour verified that he had also seen it.

  On 2 May, Shane’s mother realised that her daughter was not in her bed—they slept in the same room. She assumed Shane had gone to the bathroom. Later, she woke up to find that her daughter was lying on her bed wearing her robe, and mud-covered slippers. Muddy footprints led down the stairs to the open front door. More footprints led across the street to the field where they had seen the flashing light.

  She shook Shane awake; the girl felt as dazed as if she had been given a sleeping tablet. When she showered, she noticed a red triangle on the lower part of her abdomen, and a red line running down from her navel.

  For the next few days she felt deeply depressed, and found it hard to sleep. Her eyes were red and swollen, and, when she went to an oculist, she found that her vision had suddenly deteriorated. She suffered from headaches, and her periods stopped. Her hearing became abnormally acute—an effect noted by other abductees, including Beth Collings.