The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters

by Story, Ronald

  Anybody who spends much time at airports knows that there are many different reasons for flying. With regard to interstellar travel, one might expect that the number of trips and travelers would be determined by the ease of the trip and the importance of the trip to whoever pays the bill.

  What assumptions can be made about alien motivation? It seems to me there is really only one: namely that every civilization would be concerned about its own survival and security. That certainly seems true on Earth. Compare the annual U.S. budget for national security concerns (Roughly $300 billion) with that for anthropology and astronomy: surely under $1 billion. Security concerns would certainly require that an eye be kept on all primitives in the neighborhood. Especially close scrutiny would be required for those civilizations that will soon be able to take their brand of friendship, when it is hostility as it is for Earthlings, out to bother nearby civilizations. It was perfectly obvious by the end of WW II to any alien observer that in less than a century (which is no time at all by cosmic standards) this primitive Earthling society would be able to reach the stars. Reasons for concern might be the simple fact that between 1939 and 1946, we Earthlings killed at least 50 million of our own kind and destroyed 1700 cities. Signs indicating that interstellar flight would soon be a reality were: (1) nuclear weapon explosions; (2) the flights of V-2 rockets gradually improved upon for intercontinental ballistic missiles; and (3) the use of powerful radar indicating mastery of a whole new area of technology.

  It should be no surprise at all that the only place in the world in July, 1947, where visitors could study all three new, futuristic technologies was Southeastern New Mexico. Trinity site on White Sands Missile Range was where the first atomic bomb was exploded. WSMR was also where dozens of captured German V-2 rockets were being tested (by their German builders, for the U.S.) and where the best tracking radar was installed to follow the missiles which often didn’t go where they were supposed to go. Roswell is not far away.

  In short then, it may well be that aliens are primarily visiting to evaluate our society, our technology and countermeasures for it, and to make sure that Earthlings do not move out into space until we get our act together. One often hears the ridiculous question “why don’t they land on the White House lawn, and say “take me to your leader?” Does anybody believe that the President of the United States speaks for six billion Earthlings?. The UN doesn’t allow membership for individual cities. Why would we expect the Galactic Federation to allow individual countries (as opposed to a planet or solar system) to apply for membership?

  Many astronauts have expressed surprise that so little progress has been made in terms of manned space exploration since our first moon landing in 1969. Many had expected that by now there would be bases on the moon and successful manned expeditions to Mars. Furthermore, it is not a trivial question as to why we didn’t launch Apollo 18, and Apollo 19 to the moon. All the hardware was built, the crews were selected and trained, so the excuse that it would have cost too much money sounds very hollow indeed. Are we being quarantined?

  An important aspect of this line of reasoning is that it would seem , since it takes so little time once one starts down the advanced technology road, (look back just 100 years) that during any period of a few centuries there are very few civilizations in the neighborhood going through the transition from being stuck on one’s own planet to being able to bother the neighbors. Our neighbors are either way behind us or way ahead. Hence, everybody in the neighborhood would be concerned about the activities of a primitive society (Earth) whose major activity is tribal warfare. Note that planetary military budgets total near $1 trillion per year. Yet every single day more than 30,000 Earthling children die needlessly of preventable disease and starvation. Quarantining us would seem to be expected rather than surprising. Remember that a major motto here, for dealing with strangers, is shoot first and ask questions later. If you were an alien,, would you want Earthlings out there?

  Obviously, if interstellar jaunts within our neighborhood are as routine for our visitors as transatlantic flights are for us, we might expect an enormous variety of motivations for traveling here. What follows is a relatively brief list:

  1. Perhaps our visitors are broadcasters with a weekly show called “Idiocy in the Boondocks.”

  2. Visitors might be mining engineers. Earth is the densest planet in the solar system which means more rare, expensive, dense metals than on any other planet including Rhenium, Gold, Uranium, Platinum, Rhodium, Tungsten, Osmium, etc. The California and Klondike gold rushes of the 19th century stimulated a great deal of often difficult travel.

  3. Visitors could be graduate students doing thesis work on the development of a primitive society, on foreign languages, on modern warfare.

  4. Earth could be the equivalent of a refueling station for Ocean going ships of the last century.

  5. Gas, food, lodging next exit.

  6. Perhaps this is the center of a vacation industry. Hunting and fishing; no license required.

  7. Perhaps Earth is the Devil’s Island of the local neighborhood with bad boys and girls having been dumped here. Might be why we are so nasty to each other. Georgia and Australia were initially settled by convicts.

  8. Perhaps visitors have come to observe a natural catastrophe they know will happen soon.

  9. Visitors might be collecting plant, animal, and human genetic material, of which there is an enormous variety, for breeding projects. Older planets might have much less variety available.

  10. Earth could be the “neutral” site for ET chess matches à la Fisher and Spassky on Iceland.

  11. We may have a convenient location from which one set of marauders might be attacking another as the U.S. and Japan fought terrible wars on native islands in the Pacific.

  12. Perhaps visitors are checking out a colony or colonies started here a long time ago.

  13. Some visitors may be completing cross-galaxy flying solos.

  14. Visitors may be intelligence spies for a variety of other civilizations in the neighborhood.

  15. Perhaps some visitors are gathering specimens for alien zoos.

  16. Buyers for ET curio and antique dealers may be collecting specimens.

  17. Perhaps some visitors are being punished. Spend two weeks near Earth, punishment to last a lifetime.

  18. Perhaps they are ET repairmen seeking the cause of interference with long existing communications, computing, or beacon services in the solar system

  19. Some ETs might be time travelers coming back to change things

  20. Some visitors might be ancestors from the distant past who have been traveling at close to the speed of light, coming back home to their descendants’ world. Like Methuselah living 900 years.

  21. Are some ETs talent recruiters for an ET sports group looking for bigger, faster, stronger recruits?

  22. Some visitors might be advance men for space religious missionaries. Earthling missionaries often go to the ends of the Earth.

  23. Artists, musicians, sculptures may be here to record new scenery in new ways.

  24. Perhaps this is the only planet in the neighborhood that doesn’t have a planetary government or where a host of languages are still in use despite space shuttle trips around the world in 90 minutes.

  25. Perhaps the rules of the local Galactic Federation require that a complete inventory of the fauna, flora, structures and resources of our planet be done every 2000 years.

  26. Remembering there are many reports of huge “mother” ships, which apparently carry much smaller Earth excursion modules, the situation could be as complicated as an aircraft carrier serving as a base for several dozen smaller aircraft. Such a traveling city has pilots, cooks, mechanics, analysts, and many other specialized crew members.

  As the reader has now seen, there is no problem coming up with possible reasons for alien visitors; in fact, the possibilities are virtually endless.

  —STANTON T. FRIEDMAN

  alien roots For readers interested i
n CE-3 (close encounters of the third kind) aliens, it is important to realize that once upon a time there was no such thing as a “Gray.” Before the publication of The Andreasson Affair (Fowler, 1979), Missing Time (Hopkins, 1981), Intruders (Hopkins, 1987), Communion (Strieber, 1987), and other popular works by a then new breed of proponent/investigators, abductees claimed to have observed a wider range of alien creature types. Since then, however, abductees have described primarily bug-eyed gray humanoids. Skeptics could point out that a change in witness descriptions following the publication of a few books is decisive evidence that abductions are fantasies and not physical events.

  Abduction proponents of the 1980s may have become dissatisfied with earlier CE-3 entity descriptions, because many aliens seemed to them to look unlike any others. It was as if different alien races from all over the galaxy were visiting the Earth simultaneously. Certainly the abductionists could see that the situation undermined their favored view, the extraterrestrial hypothesis. They did not accept the possibility that abductees’ accounts are fantasies, which are as individual as nightmares: two dreamers’ descriptions of an exotic monster are never exactly the same. There were many fetal humanoid reports in CE-3s, however, so the proponents focused their research (and later books and articles discussed at UFO gatherings) on an evolving humanoid Gray, consistently ignoring other entity categories. Thus a mere handful of advocates changed the direction of abduction studies.

  Entity reports (formerly called occupant or landing cases) have been mired in credulousness and confusion from the very earliest CE-3s. This was so in part because most UFOlogists refused serious consideration of psychological and other non-extraterrestrial explanations for such reports. For many years this situation has obscured ties between CE-3 entities and earthly folklore, mythology, and literary tradition.

  Researchers have also ignored classifiable distinctions among CE-3 alien descriptions. Prior to the 1980s CE-3 creature reports were distributed more evenly into six categories: humans, humanoids, animals, robots, exotics (mutants or combinations of two or more types), and apparitions (ghostly creatures that can change shape or vanish). The six categories are based on physical characteristics only, and were not imposed on the data. They emerged from a study of scores of entity descriptions of CE-3s along with those of creatures from traditional and anthropological sources. This is not an attempt to construct an exo-biological tree of life for aliens. The subjects here are folklore and fantasy—not science—and the entity classifications offer some clarity to a mazelike segment of UFOlogy.

  CE-3 narratives are often fragmentary and sketches of aliens are amateurish, but most entity descriptions can readily be linked to one of the six categories. Witnesses’ awareness is acute and though they cannot always identify the type, they routinely capture key entity attributes, as these quotes show: “One looked human, but the others were little guys with big black eyes.” “Its face and hands—they were more like claws—were covered with thick hair or fur.” “It walked stiffly, like a robot.” “It’s got long hair…no appendages at all…no ears, no nose, and maybe one eye in the center.” “One floated upwards, then just disappeared, like a ghost.”

  PREVIOUS STUDIES OF

  CE-3 ENTITIES

  Indepth studies of UFO/CE-3 entities have been few. The Humanoids (Bowen, 1969) was an early collection of mostly anecdotal case reviews: Jacques Vallée summarized 200 1954 European landings, Coral Lorenzen described 29 U.S. cases, and Gordon Creighton discussed 65 Latin American occupant and landing reports. Also in 1969, in Passport to Magonia, Vallée collected a century of worldwide landing reports (1868-1968)—923 brief sketches of cases—many of which involved entity sightings. David Webb and Ted Bloecher produced catalogues of sightings for various years of the 1970s and maintained the Humanoid study Group, which had collected 1000 CE-3 reports. In these and other works, the writers made few attempts to classify the “humanoids” (then a newly coined synonym for aliens), and so possible entity distinctions are confused. Even so, the six entity types are evident in many of their accounts. In Webb’s 1973 study, witness descriptions were classifiable into six types, but the distribution is skewed (18 percent robots, 12 percent animals), perhaps because of same-year bias.

  Occasionally there are major studies such as Creighton’s piece on Brazilian abductee Antonio Villas-Boas. In the absence of meaningful case investigations of more than a handful of CE-3s, however, we plod through a mass of intriguing claims without guidance, and we do not learn much about ETs.

  The books, articles, and CE-3 narrative excerpts published by Ray Fowler, Budd Hopkins, and David Jacobs have focused on the fetal humanoid (though they don’t refer to its perinatal connections)—to the exclusion of the other five entity types. Jacobs (following Hopkins) implies that real abductees see only bug-eyed Grays, and the rest are mistakes. He dismisses the Imaginary Abductee Study in part because our subjects described too many entity types.

  T.E. Bullard’s lengthy study of about 300 abduction reports, UFO Abductions: Measure of a Mystery (1987), is an ambitious effort that will doubtless continue to be a resource for researchers. A problem is that the database for these abductions is fragmented, as Bullard admits. He cites 270 cases, but includes in his references several newspaper accounts and similarly questionable sources. He concedes that there are only fifty good cases (about one out of five), and that even these are seriously flawed. Bullard acknowledges that no unambiguous scientific conclusion can be made about such fragmentary, minimal, and uncertain data.

  Bullard mentions only three types of entities (human, humanoid, and animal), and ignores or confuses evidence for the robot, exotic, and apparitional classes that make CE-3 entities consistent with entity types in mythology and folklore. Following earlier writers, he calls all entities “humanoid,” as if unaware that the word can also refer to a specific type of alien. But there are clear descriptions of robots in the Larson and Hickson cases, unmistakable exotics in the Garden Grove and Kendall reports, and a marvelous apparitional entity in a South African case. These CE-3 categories won’t go away, but his study doesn’t acknowledge their significance for entity typology.

  EXAMPLES OF SIX

  CE-3 ENTITY TYPES

  As the following examples show, most entity types in CE-3s and folk traditions classify themselves. Human and humanoid entities are self-evident and plentiful. Animal entities are rare in abduction lore but sometimes appear as part-animal exotics. Most robots are easy to recognize, whereas exotics are more complex. Consider two examples of exotic entities: the marvelously weird human/insectoid monster from the 1987 film Predator, and the 9-foot-tall floating biped with elephantine feet from the Garden Grove CE-3 hoax. These two entities have wildly varying anatomical particulars, but they are exotics in that each is a mutant or combines features of two or more other entity types. Apparitional beings are recognizable by their supernatural powers even if they are also shape-shifters, in which case their “home” shape determines their apparitional identity.

  Type #1. Human entities: Human-appearing UFO creatures have the physical form of human beings and are identified as such by witnesses. Height: 5 to 7 feet. Facial features, skin color, and hair are recognizably human. Bodily movement is normal, as are voice and manner, except for cases in which these beings are telepathic. Both genders are reported. Some humans are described as “Nordics”: tall, blond, of seeming Germanic or Scandinavian lineage. Clothing is usually a one-piece jumpsuit, as in the MUFON idealization which follows (in Figure 1).

  Type #2. Humanoid entities: Humanoid (humanlike) entities are the most frequently reported type of CE-3 alien, and are the original Little Green (now Gray) Men. (See Fig. 2.) Their appearance is almost always distinctly fetal or even embryonic: a short, frail stature; a disproportionately large head; pallid skin color; underdeveloped facial features; and a hairless body. The dominant feature of the Gray is their enormous, usually unblinking black eyes. Their size and distinctive slanted, almond shape has since become the stand
ard. The pupils are usually double-sized and dark, with little or no white; some are cat-like and vertical.

  Body movement is normal to stiff, with frequent reports of floating. Telepathic communication with a witness is routine, though voice communication is sometimes reported. Despite their small stature and feeble physique, humanoids are reportedly very strong. They are usually clothed in a silver or gray skin-tight jumpsuit, although a few have worn a bulky “space suit” with an apparent breathing apparatus. Taller humanoids function as leaders or interact with the abductee during an abduction.

  Behavior ranges from impish teasing to brutal torment, but is usually clinically objective. Gender is usually unspecified, and although male and female humanoids are reported, when seen unclothed most humanoids show no genitalia. But not all: Antonio Villas-Boas’ 1957 claim was only the first of many alleged alien/human sexual encounters. This “sexy CE-3” trend reappeared suddenly in the 1980s, especially in the works of Hopkins and Jacobs, and quickly became (and has remained) the primary focus of many abductees and investigators. The abductee may “bond” with one humanoid abductor during the course of the examination or its aftermath. The bond may or may not be sexual, though sexual involvement leading to pregnancy or “genetic” activities between humanoids and abductees has allegedly occurred.

  Type #3. Animal entitles: CE-3 animal entities, rare except in Latin American reports, show distinctly mammalian, reptilian, or other animalistic features. (See Fig. 3.) They exhibit fur, claws, a tail, scales or similar epidermal texture, pointed ears, enlarged teeth, and nonhuman eyes with vertical pupils (sometimes glowing). There are a few reports of insect-like creatures, with exoskeletons and pincers. Height: 2 to 8 feet. Most animal entities assume an erect stance, although some slouching, ape-like postures and body movements are reported. Communication modes range from growls to telepathy. Gender is undetermined and few clothed animals are described. Animal entities sometimes carry an unpleasant odor.