Secret Life

by David M. Jacobs

  The Collective Unconscious

  Some researchers have suggested that the abduction accounts embody certain archetypal memories that are inherent in all human minds, and that, when taken together, form part of what psychoanalysts call the “collective unconscious.” The concept of the collective unconscious is a staple of Jungian and psychoanalytic dream interpretation. Freud and Jung found certain images in dreams that they thought had universal applications. When a person dreams certain images, they are symbolic of other more deep-seated desires and fears. The collective unconscious suggests that people can share the same thoughts across cultural and technological barriers.

  Jung addressed the problem of UFO sightings from this point of view in his 1958 book Flying Saucers. His position was that if witnesses were not actually seeing objectively “real” objects, they might be seeing archetypal images, similar to those found in dreams. Like dreams, abduction accounts could be grand metaphorical stories masking or symbolizing more profound mental events.14

  The collective unconscious challenges the theory that humans are born with a “clean slate,” suggesting instead that we have preprogrammed, richly detailed, and complex memories that can easily generate abduction stories. To date, however, the psychological community has made no discoveries to indicate that common, detailed thought patterns exist, lodged deep in the psychic lives of all people. Of course, the healthy survival instinct makes all people think about food, reproduction, and the prevention of death. But, beyond such considerations, generalizations about what goes on in people’s unconscious minds are open to question.

  If abduction events are part of the collective unconscious, then the theory would have to be expanded to take into account any of the abduction’s unique characteristics: multiple abductions, physical effects, disappearances, and so forth. Furthermore, it would have to consider the puzzling fact that the abduction syndrome is a recent phenomenon confined to the twentieth century. It would have to prove that the collective unconscious is dynamic and can come into being and change around the world at any given time regardless of the culture.

  If the collective-unconscious theory turns out to be valid, it is revolutionary in the extreme. It fundamentally changes the way in which human beings think and react to their environment. It removes much of the control that people have over their own thoughts and lives and places it within the genetic makeup of the species. The implications for humanity are enormous. If the theory is true, a new psychology of human experience based, to a large extent, on hypnosis would have to be devised because it is through the use of this tool that the collective unconscious would be brought forth.

  We must also bear in mind that Jung himself, writing in 1958 when only minimal knowledge of the nature of the UFO phenomenon was available, understood the dangers of trying to place UFOs within the collective unconscious. He pointed out that although UFO sightings might have a psychic component, “we are dealing with an ostensibly physical phenomenon distinguished on the one hand by its frequent appearance and on the other by its strange, unknown, and indeed contradictory nature.”15

  Birth Trauma

  Professor Alvin Lawson, who mounted the study of imaginary abductees, has also championed the birth trauma theory to explain abduction accounts. He states that the profound mental effects of being born are remarkably similar to abductee stories of going through a dark passage and then seeing little fetuslike people with large heads in bright rooms while lying on a table. The traumatic memories of being born are lodged deep within people’s psyches, and abduction reports are transmuted manifestations of these memories.16 However, advocates of the birth trauma theory fail to explain how a baby would see other fetuses. They fail to explain why people born in a cesarean procedure have related accounts similar to those of people born vaginally. They fail to demonstrate how the rest of the abduction material would fit into the birth trauma scenario.

  If true, however, birth trauma, like the collective unconscious, would suggest that current theories about the development of fetal brains are wildly erroneous, and that all newborn minds are extraordinarily more sophisticated than the evidence indicates. The minds of newborn abductees would have to contain countless bits of specific identical information relating to their birth environment, regardless of whether their eyes were closed, whether they were born in a dark area, whether other people were present, and so forth. Presumably, all babies would retain the endless details of many other “traumatic” events as well.

  Alternative Realities

  Finally, some theorists—agonizing over the inability to explain abduction evidence—have resorted to suggesting that the human mind can in some way create a physical reality through mental processes. In other words, abductees “think up” a real, alternative universe that has aliens in it who can cause scars, disappearances, and the other physical phenomena of abductions. If abductees can do this, it would neatly answer all the problems created by their accounts.

  This theory substitutes one bizarre series of events for another. If it was possible, then human beings would be creating many alternative realities and would have been doing so for all time. But the creation of an alternative reality that would terrorize its creator, cause her to experience physical damage, and then make her live in fear that it will happen again seems unreasonable when people might instead create physical realities wherein their deepest pleasurable fantasies could be played out. No evidence whatsoever has been presented to suggest that this theory has any viability.17

  • • •

  All of these explanations—psychological, psychiatric, cultural, and exotic—fail to account for critically important aspects of the abduction event. They ignore the richness and abundance of similar, frequently exact detail and the extraordinary convergence of the abductee narratives across all cultural boundaries. For example, Mindscan, visualization, and many other abduction procedures have never been publicized or written about even in the most esoteric UFO literature, yet virtually all abductees describe them. Abductees tell essentially the same story regardless of their age, race, religion, upbringing, occupation, economic status, educational level, intelligence, life-style, or ethnic or cultural background. This would not be so if the accounts were internally generated.

  None of these theories explain the lack of strong personal content in the abduction accounts. For instance, the narratives contain little about the abductee’s past life, personal life, or fantasy life. Abduction accounts contain almost no material related to a person’s social, cultural, familial, or occupational activities. Events happen to them. They are unwilling participants.

  None of the explanations account for the fact that when victims claim to have been abducted, they are physically missing from the place where they are supposed to be. Never has an abductee claimed to be abducted and later been physically accounted for during that exact time.

  None of the explanations explain the unusual physical effects apparently derived from the abduction event, such as scars, bruises, cuts, hemorrhages, and bloody noses, to name a few. None account for the phenomenon of one person seeing another being abducted while the witness herself is not abducted. None explain the “switching off” phenomenon. And even if a theory can be made to account for one of two abductions, it still fails to deal with the great number of them.

  To take the argument that abductions are internally generated one step further, we would logically expect certain things to take place. For example:

  We would expect reports of a great variety of sizes and shapes of aliens, as in the Lawson study. In fact, the opposite is true. Although abductees do see a limited variety, the vast majority of the accounts describe small beings with large heads, distinctive eyes, and so forth.

  We would expect that people would describe a vast array of procedures and events that happened to them during an abduction. As with the contactees, they might take trips to the moon, they might engage in leisure activities, they might eat lunch and dinner. In fact, the events that happen to abduct
ees are narrowly focused, and virtually all abductee accounts fall within these narrow parameters.

  We would expect a significant number of abductees to say that the communication that takes place between them and the aliens is aural. In reality, virtually all abductees describe communication as telepathic.

  We would expect abductees to claim that communication that takes place with aliens is widespread and deeply searching. As with the contactee reports or channeled information, we would know about where the aliens came from, what their planets were like, why they were here, how many wives or husbands they have, what their children are like, whether they have death, taxes, divorce, and so forth. In fact, abduction accounts contain no such information. We know nothing about the aliens’ home environment. We do not even know if they have a home environment. We have no knowledge about the aliens’ lives outside the UFO.

  We would expect at least some of the abductees to conjure up aliens who show some interest in human affairs. But, in fact, according to the abduction accounts, the aliens virtually never express any overt interest in what people are doing, in human society, culture, politics, and economics.

  We would expect abductees to describe a wide range of intentions that the aliens would have. The aliens would want to take over the world, force world peace, benevolently cure disease, use humans for food, etc. In fact, we find a singular lack of information about the aliens’ ultimate intentions except the tantalizing bits and pieces of information about what is going to happen to the babies.

  We would expect abductees to report that the aliens opened and closed the window to transport them out of the room. But virtually all the abductees who say they floated through a window or screen describe it as being closed.

  We would expect that the abduction events would have a strong personal content reflecting fears and other aspects of the abductee’s life. In fact, we get the same accounts over and over again, regardless of the background and upbringing of the person who is relating them. The accounts do not draw on personal lives for their contents.

  We would expect that the baby and child presentations during abductions would be not only loving and happy but directly related to the person’s inner desires for children. In fact, many of the instances of baby and child holding are described in horrific tones. Babies appear to be so oddly formed that the women often recoil when being told to touch them. Some women have to be physically forced to hold the babies. This unpleasant experience suggests the opposite of a deeply desired wish fulfillment.

  We would expect that the totality of the events would remain permanently random, without the congruence and richness of detail that characterize abduction accounts. In fact, we find many accounts to be so precisely similar that, in order to match other random, internally generated accounts, the abductees would have to be not only extremely well versed in published abduction literature, they would also have to know the minutiae of events that have never been published in the literature and, indeed, that even most abduction researchers are unaware of.

  We are left with a puzzle. No viable alternative theory has emerged that takes into account the totality of the data in the abduction experience. Some theories address specific parts of abductions, but none even comes close to explaining the mechanism of the internal generation of these stories. No significant body of thought exists that presents strong evidence that anything else is happening other than what the abductees have stated.

  If the abductees are relating events that do, in fact, have an objective reality, then we are presented with what might be one of the most important events ever to befall mankind. If, on the other hand, the events do not have an objective reality and the abductees are imagining abductions, then we have discovered something of immense importance. We have found a fascinating and inexplicable new psychological and sociocultural phenomenon unlike anything ever discovered in the human psyche before. It is obviously worthy of intense scientific attention. No matter what the origin of the abductions, whether subjective or objective, this phenomenon cannot be ignored.

  Chapter 12

  Questions

  Suppose that everything the abductees report is essentially true. Suppose that we are dealing with extraterrestrial Beings and activities. From this admittedly precarious perspective, let us try to generalize about the meaning of these events.

  When UFO research dealt merely with sightings, we could not answer any questions about the activities inside the objects or their purpose for being here. Speculation was rife and culture-bound; They are reconnoitering our atomic sites in preparation for takeover. They are surveying our geography for a scientific mapping expedition. They are here to prevent Earthlings from destroying themselves in a nuclear war. They are here because humans need help (for whatever reason) from benevolent, superior races. They are here to raise our consciousness about the multiplicity of life elsewhere. All of this speculation was based on little or no knowledge.

  Today, if the abduction reports can be believed, we have gained knowledge. For the first time we can pose the correct questions and even supply some tentative answers based on new evidence.

  Why are UFOs here? One of the purposes for which UFOs travel to Earth is to abduct humans to help aliens produce other Beings. It is not a program of reproduction, but one of production. They are not here to help us. They have their own agenda, and we are not allowed to know its full parameters.

  Why are UFOs sighted at all? If people can be rendered invisible and float through solid matter to similarly invisible objects, and if secrecy is a priority of the abduction phenomenon, then the reason for UFO sightings is unclear. There have been, of course, many sightings by people who were not abducted. But it is possible that many, if not most, low-level sightings may be related to abductions. This may be true of a significant number of high-level sightings as well. Abductees might have only a few conscious sightings during their lives. If this is the case, then abductions might greatly outnumber sightings.

  What is the magnitude of the abduction phenomenon? At first it appeared to be an isolated phenomenon that had occurred to just a few people around the country. That was wrong. We have evidence of thousands of abductions, and that is perhaps only a small fraction of the total number.

  An unpublished survey that I conducted of more than 1,200 students at Temple University who answered a written questionnaire suggests that as many as 5.5 percent of them have potentially had abduction experiences. Similarly, a study done of 275 respondents to a magazine’s survey searching for potential abductees came up with 6 percent. Projecting that number to the population as a whole yields as many as 15 million people in the United States who might have had abduction experiences. Let us assume that this number is ridiculously high, and that abductions are only happening to one half of one percent of the population. If that is true, we are dealing with over a million possible abductions in the United States.

  Furthermore, abductions are not confined to the United States. British UFO researcher Jenny Randles has catalogued many abductions in the United Kingdom, and we have evidence that the geographic scope of the phenomenon might extend around the world. As researchers learn how to investigate these types of cases, the data are mounting not only that abductions are apparently taking place everywhere, but that the same material is beginning to come out of the accounts—namely, that the focus of the abduction is the production of children.1

  If abductions have occurred for more than half a century, why have we not learned about them before? Abductees have been coming forth with accounts for many years, but in the past UFO researchers have not been well versed enough in the phenomenon to recognize them. For example, in 1977 I listened to an account about a UFO hovering above a group of stores in a shopping center in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. It was about 9:00 P.M. and an employee was going home from work. One of the last people out, she walked into an almost deserted parking lot. She was about to open her car door when she saw a UFO, which was quite close to her. She could see details of the craft, includi
ng the “windows.” When I asked her if she could see inside the windows, she said that she could see white walls, the ceiling, and other details, although from where she was standing it would have been almost impossible to see these things. It did not occur to me then that she might well have been describing the interior of the object from inside.

  In another case I investigated in 1972, an elderly couple was traveling at night near Madison, Wisconsin. They saw a UFO in front of the car and stopped to get a better look at it. They then felt the overpowering urge to go to sleep, which they did. When they woke up the UFO was gone and they resumed their journey. I listened to their story, but I was unable to recognize that something else might have happened to them.

  Many other abductions have been couched in personal and cultural terms—visits from deceased relatives, encounters with angels, devils, and other religious figures, mystical meetings with animals, out-of-body experiences, and so on. We are now learning how to sift through these stories to see which ones indicate abduction activity. For the first time UFO researchers are recognizing potential abduction accounts, and they are actively seeking out possible abductees. The climate of opinion has made it “safer” for them to come forward.

  Who is selected to be an abductee? The selection criteria are largely unknown. But the generational aspect of abductions is extremely important. There is a good chance that one or both of the abductees’ parents may have had these experiences, and our research indicates that if a man or woman is abducted, the chances that his or her children will also be abducted may increase. The spouse, however, may not be an abductee and might be “switched off” during each abduction sequence. Evidence suggests that people who have been abducted only once are targeted as a matter of expediency and are in close proximity to an abductee during an abduction.