Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience

by Colin Wilson

  The aliens told her, she claims, that they are testing our soil for poison, and that for the same reason they are conducting tests on animal reproductive systems.

  Later, she found herself watching her teenage daughter Cindy, who was also on a table on the UFO; Judy was terrified that they intended to harm her as they had harmed the calf. And, since she speaks of being ‘pulled back to her body standing beside the car’ after the experience, it would seem that the ‘abduction’ could have been basically an ‘out-of-the-body experience’, of the kind that ‘Helen’ described to Jacques Vallee.

  The programme A Strange Harvest was broadcast on 25 May 1980, and the phones began ringing immediately. One caller told Linda how a group of ranchers, sick of the mutilations, had gone out heavily armed to a place where several mutilations had occurred. They saw a light overhead, although there was no sound, and a kind of searchlight beam came from it. The men were ‘frozen in their tracks’, and stood there with the hair standing up on the backs of their necks. No one thought of shooting. When the ‘helicopter’ had flown away, they went quietly home. The next day, two mutilated cattle were found within yards of each other in the pasture.

  A teacher from Briggsdale rang, to tell of two calves found mutilated, the ground below them baked so hard that liquids would not soak in. It sounded as if the ‘beam’ might be, in part, composed of microwaves—which would also explain the nauseated feeling and running eyes.

  Perhaps the oddest thing of all was that, when some of the mutilated tissue was examined under a microscope, the scissor-cut that had removed the portion showed cells destroyed by the scissors; but, in the actual mutilation, there were no broken or divided cells.

  When Linda Howe drove back from a lecture, with some mutilated tissue in her car—which she was taking to a laboratory—there was a strange high-pitched sound in her car, which she was unable to trace, and which continued all the way home, ceasing only when she drove into her garage.

  It seemed that no one had actually seen an alien near a mutilated cow—until she heard from a rancher in Texas. In April 1980, he was looking for a missing cow that was ready to calve when he saw two green-clad creatures, about four feet tall, carrying a calf between them. Their eyes were like ‘large dark almonds’, and they had egg-shaped heads with ‘pointy’ tops. Their clothes fitted as tight as leotards. The farmer decided not to wait to see more, but—he told Linda—ran all the way back to his truck. Later, he found the calf’s hide and its skull on the ground, the hide turned inside out with the skull inside it.

  Whether or not these aliens were basically well intentioned, their conduct was certainly terrifying. Dr. Sprinkle worked on a case that had

  occurred near Cimarron, New Mexico, involving a twenty-eight-year-old mother, Myrna Hansen, and her five-year-old son. She had been driving when her car had suddenly filled with a blinding white light, after which she saw five UFOs in a field. One moved towards her and she felt herself paralysed. She was afraid for her son. Then she found herself able to drive, and her son was beside her. She carried on to her destination, and when she arrived, found it had taken her six hours to drive twenty-eight miles.

  Under hypnosis, she revealed that she and her son had been taken to an underground facility, which she thought might be near Roswell. Struggling, she had been stripped, and a cold object inserted in her vagina. She also saw the aliens ‘operating’ on a cow that was still alive. ‘They’re pulling it apart’. She speaks of ‘real hot light’ and adds, ‘Heat must come from the light’. One of the aliens was female, and seemed to be sorry for her as she was painfully examined. By now she was very cold. Then a taller being in white came in and seemed to be angry with the others. She was allowed to get up, and was told that all this was necessary. Then she was taken to some kind of underground cavern with a river flowing through it. She saw a room with a humanoid figure floating in a vat of reddish liquid, which she thought had something to do with the tissues removed from animals, and that this somehow sustained the immersed creature.

  As in many other accounts, this one suggests that some of the aliens are ‘mindless robots’, while others—the larger ones (or ‘talls’)—are some kind of doctors or scientists.

  After the abduction, Myrna Hansen became seriously ill with a vaginal infection that the doctor was unable to identify; he said she survived only because he gave her massive doses of gamma globulin to boost her immune system. Her son seems to have been well treated—at one point she heard him laughing—and came to no harm.

  In another Colorado abduction seven months later, a husband and wife were examined separately, and the husband felt that the aliens had somehow studied his memory bank, pulling it out of his head; meanwhile, there was a high-pitched sound. (It raises the possibility that Linda Howe’s memory was being examined during her drive in the car with the high-pitched sound.) One of the aliens was a hairless tall man in a blue robe and high collar, and they both felt overwhelmingly drawn to him. But the woman felt violated and raped, and had a serious illness after the abduction, which resulted in the baby she was carrying being born two months prematurely.

  Later, the couple recalled being told about a catastrophic event that would take place in their lifetimes, and which would destroy a large part of the world’s population.

  In her second book, Facts and Eyewitnesses (Part 1 of Glimpses of Other Realities, 1993), Linda Howe describes being present at the hypnosis of Judy Doraty’s daughter, Cindy. Judy had apparently not discussed the experience of seeing the UFO with Cindy, even after her own hypnosis five years later. Cindy was by then twenty-two years old and married, and had resisted the idea of hypnosis. But ten years later, in 1990, now divorced, she consented to hypnosis. It took place in Springfield, Missouri, and the hypnotist was Dr. John Carpenter.

  Cindy recalled the bright light, and crossing the field with someone she assumed to be her mother. Asked by the hypnotist to look more closely at her mother, she suddenly realised this was not her mother. ‘She doesn’t look right . . . They’re screwin’ with my mind’. That is, they were exercising some form of thought control or hypnosis to make her believe that it was her mother leading her across the field. ‘It’s my mom but it’s not my mom’. There were two creatures, and they reminded her of some kind of ‘bug’—skinny and sticklike, with large eyes. They moved ‘mechanically . . . like a robot’. There was a kind of moisture in the air, which seemed to be associated with the light streaming down from the UFO.

  Then she saw the calf being raised in the yellow beam, and added, ‘It acts like it’s bawling, but you can’t hear it’. This seems to suggest that the aliens have some method of cutting off sound—which may explain why UFOs are so often silent.

  After that she was taken on board, and described a ‘kind of sweet, smelly air’. They made her lie on a table, and seemed astonished at the braces she wore on her teeth. Then a probe was placed against her forehead, and she felt deeply relaxed, ‘almost like a sedative . . .’. They examined her stomach and navel, and looked down her throat with some sort of instrument. Finally, she was allowed to sit up—she had the impression that the aliens felt she was too young and undeveloped for their purposes. She saw her mother looking at her through a kind of window, obviously frantic.

  So Cindy’s analysis seemed to confirm in detail the account of her mother.

  Linda Howe also spoke to a Missouri horse-farm owner named Karl Arnold, who in 1975 had been turning into his driveway when he and his son saw a small grey-suited entity with a plastic bubble over his head, standing near the gate. As they watched, it faded away. Later, he and his wife saw a silver disc in their horse pasture, and the soil under it was as hard as ceramic. In the same pasture, five of their horses were found mutilated.

  The ‘strangeness’ increases suddenly in the next account. In July 1983, Ron and Paula Watson of Mount Verson, Missouri, saw bright silver flashes in a pasture across the road. Looking through binoculars, they saw a black cow lying on its side, and two silver-suited bein
gs running their hands over it. As they watched, the cow floated up from the grass and into a cone-shaped craft that was almost invisible, because its mirror-like surface reflected the leaves, grass and sky.

  Standing by the ramp that led into the craft was a creature like a cross between a man and a lizard, with green skin, and on the other side of the craft was a ‘Bigfoot’ covered in hair. After they had all entered the UFO, the craft disappeared. Paula found the whole thing, apart from its strangeness, deeply worrying, and begged Ron not to intervene.

  When the farmer who owned the pasture told the couple that one of his cows had vanished, they tried to tell him what they had seen—but he did not want to hear. Understandably, he regarded this talk about lizard men and Bigfoots as some kind of lunacy.

  Finally, after suffering from anxieties and insomnia, the Watsons asked John Carpenter to hypnotise them. The hypnosis seemed to reveal that she had been abducted ten days earlier by the same beings. This was why she had experienced such intense anxiety as they looked through the

  binoculars.

  Another of Linda Howe’s cases seems to shed some possible light on this complicated problem. Jeanne Robinson, of Springfield, Missouri, a single mother, wrote to Budd Hopkins because she was convinced that she had been abducted since she was four, by small, grey creatures with almond-shaped eyes. Hopkins referred her to John Carpenter. A battery of psychological tests revealed that she did not suffer from any kind of mental instability or proneness to fantasy.

  Like Rivail’s Becquet sisters, Jeanne Robinson would experience a sudden urge to seize a pencil and allow her hand to rush across a sheet of paper, trying to set down the thoughts that poured into her mind, then the urge vanished just as suddenly. She explained that she felt that ‘something out there’ was communicating telepathically.

  According to Jeanne Robinson’s ‘messages’, the ‘greys’ are ‘manufactured replicates’, or some kind of robot. But the other type of alien—sometimes described as the ‘praying mantis’ type—are the ‘ancients’, the ‘Great Mother of many species’. Now unable to reproduce, they can only pass on their genetic ancestry by creating hybrids.

  The ‘reptilians’, according to Jeanne Robinson’s ‘communicators’, are servants, possessing great bodily strength—‘what your dinosaurs would be had they survived’.

  There are also blond ‘Nordics’ who have been on Earth for many thousands of years. ‘They are your early ancestors’. While the ‘praying mantis’ type need human genes to reproduce, the Nordics are still able to do so normally. ‘They are more concerned with your spiritual evolvement’. They are of an emotional, more gentle race, whose nature baffles the ‘ancients’ as much as human violence does.

  The messages explained: ‘We use substances from cows in an essential biochemical process for our survival. The material we use from cattle

  contains the correct amount of protein substances needed for biochemical absorption . . . While we respect all life, some sacrifices must be made.’

  The animal mutilations, apparently, are performed by a ‘concentrated beam of photon energy’.

  In a vivid dream, Jeanne Robinson saw a bull on a raised platform. A computer-like screen had some kind of X-ray image on it.

  A grey being took a penlike tube with a light on the end and stuck it in the bull’s rectum. Somehow, the light continued to move inside the body after the ‘pen’ was removed. There was a smell of burning flesh and hair. On the screen a moving dot showed the ‘light’ cutting around rectal tissue, which was then pulled out.

  Merely a ‘dream’, of course. But we still have to explain how the excisions can be bloodless, why they leave a peculiar hard, serrated edge, and how they manage to cut ‘around’ cells, leaving them intact, when we possess no technology that can do this.

  In the second volume of Glimpses of Other Realities—High Strangeness—Linda Howe describes the experience of a man who prefers to be known as Steve Bismarck, a Seattle shipyard worker. On the Saturday before Easter 1977, he was uprooting vine maples on his parents’ farm near Everett when he saw a Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, walking out of the woods. It was about eight feet tall, had a cone-shaped head, and long black hair. He lay down, hoping the creature would not notice him, and it vanished into the trees. He hurried home, and was asked by his father, ‘Goddamn it, kid, where have you been?’ He protested that he had only been gone about fifteen minutes; his father pointed out that it was nearly dark, and that he had been gone several hours.

  He told friends at work, but was laughed at. Then snatches of memory began to return—memory of small creatures and some kind of UFO. He contacted the sheriff’s department, and an investigator there put him in touch with a hypnotist.

  Under hypnosis he recalled that the experience had started when he saw a small man, about four feet tall, wearing a ‘sparkly blue metallic suit’. This being stepped into a kind of transparent egg with a device like a helicopter blade on top. Another similar creature came out of the woods, and both of them flew above the trees in these one-man helicopters. A large UFO then descended at such speed that he thought it was going to crash; in fact, it hung suspended above the trees, causing a kind of whirlwind. He then became aware of ‘specks’ in the air like the ‘snow’ on an old black-and-white TV set; these suddenly came together into a shape like a wolf, which moved swiftly towards him; as it reached him he received an electric shock. He was aware that the wolf was some kind of illusion. The same thing happened several times. Then he saw a Sasquatch being lowered from the craft on a cable—presumably to intimidate him. (The evidence of hundreds of sightings make it clear that the UFO denizens are nervous of humans.)

  After that, he remembered—dimly—being taken aboard the craft, and being paralysed by a kind of mild electric current. He could recall a radio, from which there came the sound of voices speaking many languages, including English and Russian. Then he recalled a man with a shaved head who removed Steve’s eyeball to examine it. His next clear memory was of being back on the ground, and seeing the Sasquatch walk out of the trees—apparently all other memories had been blotted out.

  The sheriff’s office had told Steve Bismarck that they had appointed an investigator because so many people were reporting strange lights and unusual animal deaths. Linda Howe quotes a man named Dwain Wright, a UCLA graduate, who describes how, in 1980, he and a friend were in Sand Springs, Oregon, a place where, in the previous year, Wright had found a dead cow lodged in the upper limbs of a huge Ponderosa pine. They met a cowboy who asked, ‘Do you believe in flying saucers?’ When Wright said he did, the cowboy told him, ‘Well, they come across the desert here at night. I want to show you something’. He then took them to a dead bull that had dented the ground as if it had fallen from a great height; it had been castrated, and various other organs were missing. The cowboy told them that coyotes would not touch these mutilated animals, and even flies failed to congregate around them. The cowboy had seen cattle floated up off the ground, into glowing discs.

  High Strangeness is certainly one of the most extraordinary books ever written on the subject of UFOs. Some of its bewildering suggestions are presaged in the opening chapter, ‘Military Voices’, containing interviews with military personnel who claim to have had encounters with aliens, and had often been debriefed by military intelligence. One of them is a staff sergeant who was at the Bentwaters Air Force Base in Rendelsham Forest, in Sussex, UK, when a famous ‘close encounter’ took place during Christmas 1980. That a UFO was seen at close quarters was acknowledged publicly by the deputy base commander, Lt. Col. Charles Halt.

  Staff Sergeant James Penniston claims not only to have seen the UFO at close quarters, but to have touched raised symbols on its surface, from which he received some kind of information. This seems to have been received telepathically. Penniston recalled under hypnosis that the UFO entities were engaged in research. Asked, ‘To help them with what?’ Penniston replied, ‘Themselves. They are time travellers. They are us . . . From the future’
. The entities, Penniston said, are here to take chromosomes, mainly from the head and stomach. Asked why, he replied, ‘They are in trouble’.

  This notion that the UFO entities are time travellers from the future occurs a number of times in High Strangeness. Penniston explains later that the entities can travel only backward in time, because it is impossible to travel into the future. But a moment later he makes it clear that he means the future of the entities, not our future. And this raises obvious contradictions. Why should they be able to travel backward and forward in our time, but not into their own future?

  In fact, the whole notion of time travel will strike most people as self-evidently absurd. If I reverse a film showing a child falling down, I can make him stand up again. But life is not a film; it seems to be ‘for real’. Besides, if I could travel back to yesterday, I could speak to the ‘me’ of yesterday, and perhaps even persuade him to come back with me into tomorrow—in fact, I could accumulate billions of ‘me’s’, one for every instant of my life. (This notion, as we shall see in the last chapter, is known as the ‘many-worlds’ interpretation of quantum theory.)

  But no sooner have we dismissed time travel than we recall cases of precognition, and of time slips into the past, which seem to leave no doubt that time is rather more strange and complex than our commonsense view suggests. If the two women at Versailles can go back into the past, then perhaps the UFO entities can do the same . . .

  Linda Porter, a Californian woman who contacted Linda Howe in 1991, told her, ‘They can manipulate time. They can take a person out of our time frame, and keep him, or her, as long as they please. Then reinsert them back into time so the person wouldn’t even know he’s been gone . . .’