Secret Life

by David M. Jacobs

  Pressure on the Air Force mounted as Congressmen Gerald Ford and Weston Vivian, sensing Air Force ineptitude, called for hearings on the Air Force’s handling of the UFO problem. The first of those investigations was held in April 1966. A House committee strongly urged that the Air Force allow universities to look into the UFO matter. As a result, the Air Force contracted with the University of Colorado to conduct a study of the UFO phenomenon and issue findings on whether the objects represented a threat to national security. If UFOs were not a threat, then the Air Force could gracefully retreat from the UFO battleground and close Project Blue Book. Noted physicist Edward U. Condon led a committee of about a dozen scholars that was to take a fresh look at the UFO evidence and recommend whether further study was warranted.

  But Condon’s flip attitude toward the subject, his controversial managerial style, and internal disagreements over procedures and evidence severely hampered the committee’s investigation. In spite of the committee’s serious split, Condon recommended in the 1968 final report that the Air Force give up UFO investigations because “further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced,” and UFOs do not “pose a defense problem.”3 For Condon, the entire UFO affair was an enormous waste of time filled with hoaxes, bogus contactees, and weak-thinking UFO enthusiasts awash in the “will to believe.”

  Based on these recommendations, the Air Force closed Project Blue Book in December 1969, and its public investigation of UFO reports came to an end. It had never mounted a serious full-scale investigation of the phenomenon. It had never systematically analyzed reports. After 1952, the main thrust of the Air Force’s UFO policy was to treat it as a public fad.

  In fact, the Condon Report left an unsolved mystery. Even though it had come to strongly negative conclusions, the report still presented a strong case for UFOs as anomalies. The committee could not identify more than 30 percent of the cases it had investigated. Many of the reports were simply labeled as unidentified. In one case a UFO was called an “extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disk-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial.”4 Buried within the report was a solid body of evidence that this was a phenomenon requiring at the very least more study and attention.

  The Condon Report, however, did its damage. Scientists who had not bothered to read the entire report concluded that Condon’s recommendations were the final word on the subject and that the UFO mystery had been laid to rest once and for all. UFO “buffs” dropped their membership in UFO organizations, assuming that there was no further reason to support research into the subject. The media played up the “case closed” angle. Although the Condon Report hurt UFO research, it had absolutely no influence on the UFO phenomenon itself, which continued to be reported, unaffected by societal events.

  In 1973 another massive wave of sightings took place, but for the first time since 1947 the Air Force stayed out of it. The wave occurred in exactly the same way the other waves had—without reference to societal events and displaying the full range of UFO activity: high-level sightings, low-level sightings, “trace cases” where the object left evidence of its existence in the form of an affected environment, reports in which witnesses claimed to see UFO occupants, and even a few oddly puzzling abduction cases.

  But in the absence of government interpretations of these objects in the sky, the American people could at last indulge in unrestrained interest in the phenomenon. Hynek, now fully committed to the extraterrestrial origin of UFO sightings, took the opportunity during the 1973 wave to announce the opening of the Center for UFO Studies, which was to be the first scientific organization devoted to studying the mystery. In addition, the new Midwest (later Mutual) UFO Network came to the fore as a leading UFO investigative organization, and the two groups worked together to collect and analyze reports.

  By the end of the 1970s, the study of UFOs had become much more sophisticated than ever, and a great amount of knowledge had been acquired about UFO patterns, effects, appearances, and residues. But UFO researchers felt frustrated by the seeming decline in public interest, and they had great difficulty in piercing the armor of mystery around UFO behavior. And even though Hynek and others strenuously tried to convince the scientific community of the importance of the subject, ridicule still remained a critical negative factor for its study. The scientific standing of UFOs was still very much where it had been from the beginning: intriguing but “illegitimate.” Yet even though the Air Force was ostensibly out of the UFO business, documents released in the mid-1970s showed that it was still doing investigations of UFO reports made by military personnel or on military installations. Some documents spurred concerned UFO researchers to continue searching for evidence of even more extensive clandestine government activities.

  Underneath the surface of these public events were some remarkable cases strongly suggesting that the UFOs were involved in the abduction of humans. January 1965 brought the first publication of an abduction case. The event had occurred in 1957 in Brazil. Antonio Villas-Boas was the son of a rancher. He was working on his father’s farm at night when he saw a UFO land near him. Four large-headed, small Beings quickly came out of the object and forced Villas-Boas inside. They took off his clothes and spread a clear, odorless liquid over his body. They then cut his chin and collected some blood into a cup. Villas-Boas claimed that a small, naked female Being then entered the room. She had thin blond hair, large slanted eyes, high cheekbones, an ordinary nose, a small, thin-lipped mouth, and a sharply pointed chin. Her body looked human, her feet were small, and her hands were long and pointed. She was about four and a half feet tall. She began to hug and caress him. He became uncontrollably sexually excited. They had intercourse twice. Then the female Being abruptly broke off their intimacy and left Villas-Boas with the feeling that he was being treated like “a good stallion to improve their… stock.” He was then let off the object.5

  To UFO researchers at the time, this report seemed ridiculous and lurid; it reeked of pulp science fiction. Having spent the better part of the 1950s battling the contactees, they did not need another outlandish case to complicate their job of winning scientific legitimacy for the phenomenon. But Villas-Boas’s story and actions did not match those of the contactees. He received no messages to relay to mankind. He had no mission given to him. He made no money from the story. He simply told his story and then retreated to the normal activities of his daily life. (He eventually went to law school and became a respected attorney. He maintained the truthfulness of his account until he died.)

  While this case stood out for the next few years as an embarrassing anomaly, another case came along that was more difficult to dismiss: The Barney and Betty Hill case not only became a source of great debate, but it also ranks as perhaps the most important and well-known case in the history of the UFO phenomenon. It was the subject of a two-part story in Look magazine in 1966, a popular book in the same year, and a 1975 NBC television movie.6

  The Hills said that while driving from Montreal to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, small Beings with large heads and eyes abducted them from their car into a landed UFO. The Beings separated them into different rooms and subjected them to physical examinations. They inserted a needle into Betty’s abdomen and told her that they were giving her a “pregnancy” test. They obtained scrapings of the Hills’ skin and performed other physiological tests. A larger Being, whom Betty thought was the “leader,” communicated with her telepathically. After the “medical” procedures were completed, and after some other events happened, the Hills were allowed to exit from the object and watch its departure. They immediately forgot what had happened to them, resumed their trip, and arrived home about two hours later than they should have. All they remembered was that they had observed a UFO close up. They recalled nothing of the abduction. Over the next few months they were bothered by strange dreams of being on board an alien craft; when they suffered continual anxiety related to their UFO sighting, they sought
help through psychological counseling. They were referred to Benjamin Simon, a well-known psychiatrist proficient in hypnosis. Through the use of hypnotic regressions, they recovered the memories of what had transpired that evening.

  Although John Fuller’s 1966 book about the episode, Interrupted Journey, described the “pregnancy test” performed on Betty, he decided not to include the fact that the Beings had extracted a sperm sample from Barney. This was too embarrassing for the Hills and for Fuller in the mid-1960s, and he did not mention it lest it detract from the veracity of the account.

  The Hills’ story broke like a thunderbolt in the UFO research community. They were an interracial couple whose credibility was above reproach. Barney Hill was a member of the NAACP and the New Hampshire Civil Rights Commission, and Betty Hill was a social worker. They were respected, churchgoing members of their community. This was not the type of couple who liked to attract “lunatic fringe” attention to themselves. But did the events as the Hills described them actually happen? Researchers had no way of knowing.

  The Hill case split the UFO research community. Many UFO researchers agreed with University of Arizona atmospheric physicist James E. McDonald when he complained that because of the relationship to the contactee stories, the Hill case put UFO research back twenty years. But, like the Villas-Boas case, the Hills’ account seemed to be unrelated to the 1950s-style contactee claims. The Hills were not concerned with making money from the tale (although they received money from the publication of the book), nor did they embellish and change the story as time went on. They did not receive a “mission” from the Space Brothers. They did not say that they were chosen for any particular reason. They were not members of a flying saucer cult. In fact, until his initial sighting Barney had been hostile to the idea that UFOs existed.

  A crucial aspect of the Hill case was that their information was retrieved through the use of hypnosis. Benjamin Simon, the psychiatrist who administered the hypnosis, was never convinced that an abduction had actually occurred. He preferred to think that the two had experienced a “shared fantasy” or a condition known as folie à deux, even though the details of their “fantasies” were quite different because they had been put in separate rooms and had different experiences. The transcripts of the hypnosis showed that Simon spent a considerable amount of time unsuccessfully trying to get the Hills to admit that the events had never really happened, or to catch them in contradictions.

  After the Hill case, other reports of abductions slowly began to surface, but the number was still so small that they caused very little comment among UFO researchers. They represented an anomaly outside the more conventional sighting reports that dominated the field. Yet the abduction claims persisted. In October 1973, two residents of Pascagoula, Mississippi, said that strange-looking aliens floated them into a UFO and physically examined them. In 1975 forest worker Travis Walton claimed that he was taken aboard a UFO and, while he thought he was gone for a few hours, he appeared to be missing for five days. Inside the object he remembered lying on a table and seeing small Beings with large heads and eyes. That same year an Army sergeant saw a UFO headed for him while he sat on the hood of his car. A numbness spread over his body before the object left. He noticed that he was inexplicably missing about one and one half hours of time. The next few days brought a sore and inflamed back and a rash from his chest to his knees. He later remembered small Beings with large heads and eyes performing a medical examination on him while he lay on a table.7

  In January 1976 three women in Kentucky observed a bright-red object hovering some distance from their car. The next thing they knew, they were eight miles down the road and it was an hour and a half later. They continued home and experienced burning sensations on their faces when water touched them. They then noticed that they had similar red marks on the backs of their necks. Hypnosis was administered by Leo Sprinkle, a professor of counseling psychology at the University of Wyoming and an early investigator of abductions. The three women remembered being physically examined by small, gray, humanoid figures while they lay on tables. One woman felt that they were conducting an experiment on her to learn about her emotional and intellectual processes. Another woman could see a human she didn’t know lying on a table next to hers.8

  In 1977 a ten-year-old report came to light in Massachusetts. Betty Andreasson claimed that she and her family were put in a state of “suspended animation” when five small Beings entered their home by walking through a wall. She was taken to a bizarre location where, among other things, she was examined, saw strange animals on another planet, and saw a giant phoenix-like bird rising from ashes. She also reported various events that she interpreted as profoundly religious. UFO investigator Ray Fowler wrote three books on her experiences, but the events were so bizarre that UFO researchers were at a loss to separate reality from fantasy.9

  By the late 1970s and early 1980s, abduction accounts began to be reported in ever-increasing numbers. Some researchers were beginning to theorize about an apparent reproductive link that recurred in these accounts. As early as 1972 researcher Marjorie Fish hypothesized that a needle inserted in Betty Hill’s navel might have been for experimentation with human eggs, and in 1977 psychiatrist Berthold E. Schwarz discussed the idea of a laparoscopy (a method of examining internal organs by using a viewing scope) being performed on Betty. Based on cases that she investigated, in 1980 researcher Ann Druffel suggested that aliens might be interested in human sexual life-styles.10

  Most UFO researchers, however, still considered abduction reports to be exotic and bewildering anomalies—perhaps true and perhaps not. Although patterns were slowly emerging from the abduction stories and the people involved seemed to be credible, the specter of the contactees still intimidated most UFO researchers. In fact, some 1950s-style contactees were still around, claiming trips to the planets and gab sessions with friendly aliens. To complicate matters, some abductees who seemed to be sincere individuals and who did not fit the contactee model were reporting contactee-like abduction experiences. They claimed that they were given prophecies of death and destruction for our society, or that they had experienced Christian religious experiences. Others were enamored with kindly, handsome, space people who were here on a benevolent mission of some sort. How these reports could fit into the scheme of “legitimate” abductions was impossible to comprehend.

  To make matters worse, there was the increasing popularity of “channeling,” a process in which, by placing oneself in the proper mental state, a person could contact benevolent aliens at will. Prior to the 1950s, channelers, whose activities are related to automatic writing, speaking in tongues, and a number of other “psychic” phenomena, had mainly communicated with spirits. Now aliens, a phenomenon that had been known in UFO cult groups for more than thirty-five years, became the contacts of choice. In channeled messages, the Space Brothers, frequently said to be from the Pleiades or Zeta Reticuli star systems, freely discussed their reasons for visiting Earth, the propulsion systems of their vehicles, and life on the idyllic planets where they resided, and their philosophy of life. They took Earth people to task for befouling the environment, causing wars, and so forth. They expressed love for Earth and Earthlings, and gave advice on how we should be more loving to each other. Much of the channeled information was taken up with trivial matters along the lines of “pop” psychology and self-help advice—urging vegetarianism and other health measures, providing metaphysical and spiritual messages, and discussing the place of Earth and its people in the universe. Ultimately they wished to lead us through a spiritual passage into a New Age. For some UFO researchers, channeling confused the issue and made the abduction phenomenon seem all the more improbable.

  In 1981 UFO research was fundamentally altered by the publication of Budd Hopkins’s Missing Time. Unlike most UFO researchers, who treated abduction cases as simply another “sighting” category, Hopkins investigated seven abduction cases for patterns, similarities, and convergences.11 He found that the qu
estion of inexplicable oneto two-hour gaps of time was more pervasive than had been realized in the past. Among other things, he discovered the significance of an unaccountable bodily scar that often accompanied abduction reports. He demonstrated that a person could be an abductee without having a UFO sighting and that abduction accounts could be hidden beneath the surface of strange “screen memories.” Hopkins’s research confirmed the prevalence of the examination that seemed to take place with nearly every abductee. He showed how the people who had experienced these events were normal people who had not manifested serious mental disorders. He also demonstrated that many of the abductees had family members who were also abductees and that the phenomenon might be intergenerational.

  In Missing Time Hopkins invited readers who felt that they might have been abducted to write to him. He received hundreds of letters as a result of the book and more after his subsequent radio and television appearances. UFO researchers began to realize that the scope of the phenomenon was far larger than anyone had imagined.

  Yet the question remained: why were there so many abduction accounts now and not after the Hill case? The answer may be that when John Fuller published Interrupted Journey in 1966, he did not embark on a television and radio tour for the book and make the idea of abduction accessible via the media to millions of people. Nor did Fuller include a note in his book asking people who might have had these experiences to write to him. Therefore, abductees did not have an easily reached outlet for their stories. Furthermore, as researchers looked back at older cases, it became evident that some abductees did try to report their experiences as they remembered them, often with fragments and screen memories, but UFO researchers could not understand the import of what they were hearing. For instance, people would report that they had had a close view of the underside of a UFO; or that they had the strange feeling that they had floated out the window upon seeing a UFO; or that they had seen a UFO from their car, had the urge to stop the car, and become confused over what happened next; or that, although they had seen a UFO hovering 100 feet from them, they had the idea that they could tell what was inside. The UFO investigators would record the details of the case, but there would be no back-up or in-depth investigation other than of the sighting itself.