The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters

by Story, Ronald

  The Stanfords, whose writings have roots in George Hunt Williamson’s speculations, experienced a fantastic sparkling beam projected by a hovering UFO that raised their consciousness above earth man’s delusions. This illumination swept them into a whirlpool of ever expanding consciousness until it reached a numinous state of knowingness. It was felt to possess a very high resonant frequency or vibration, more visible with the third eye than with the physical eyes. Stanford, 1958)

  Eugenia Siragusa, who gained some fame as a European contactee, similarly reported an encounter in which a beam of light created a “redimension” of her personality. (Vallée, 1979; Keel, 1976)

  In July 1961, a student in France reportedly was transported to a large machine that had tapes that transmitted ideas into his brain. After three hours he was transported back to where he was before. He learned that eighteen days had actually passed. He now had psychic powers, improved memory, and a sense of mission.

  In May 1975, Chuck Doyle encountered a manta-shaped UFO that was probing the area with a green laser-like beam. The beam hit him and he felt paralyzed. Strange thoughts came into his mind like mathematical equations that made no sense, the symbol omega, a landscape with a red ocean beneath a green sky and blue ground underfoot, and sensations of floating in space with stars of many colors. When the beam went out, he fell on his face. (Stringfield, 1977)

  Eugenia Macer-Story, in her charming autobiography about the craziness of her life after becoming an UFO buff, reported an altered mental state following telepathic contact with a ball of light. She feels it made her a different person not fully in control of her personal mind set. (Macer-Story, 1978)

  STEALING THOUGHTS

  Abductees have claimed a notable variety of alien-influence episodes. Patty Price claimed aliens hooked wires to her head; and her thoughts, impressions, and emotions were taken and recorded. (Lorenzen, 1977) Charles Hickson of the Pascagoula classic has complained, “They took my mind.” He couldn’t remember things or think straight. (Clark, 1978) Aliens told Charles Moody that he had been “absorbed.” The Lorenzens, who investigated, took this to mean information was extracted from his mind. Trekkies remembering “Return of the Archons” will take a slightly different meaning. (Lorenzen, 1977) Aliens in the William Herrmann case utilize “inoculation” bars and chambers to enhance mental abilities. (Stevens and Herrmann, 1981)

  Still farther up the weirdness scale, there is the Sandra Larson case wherein aliens physically removed her brain from her body. She asserts that when they put it back in, they reconnected it differently and she lost control of her speech. Trekkies may think this a rewrite of the camp episode “Spock’s Brain,” but perhaps the fact that she thinks aliens can press a button to know what she is thinking, wherever she happens to be, may change their minds. (Lorenzen, 1977)

  Abductologist Yvonne Smith tells of a subject who perceived the top of his head being removed and something that seemed like welding being done to his brain. (Smith, 1993)

  IMPLANTS

  There has been a proliferation of claims about implants being inserted into humans in recent years. Many, particularly ones from the eighties and early nineties, involved them being shoved up the nose and apparently into the brain. Given the septic nature of sinus passages, this would, in real life, mean the person’s death. Betty Andreasson, Meagan Elliot, Virginia Horton, Kathie Davis, Casey Turner, to name a few, somehow survived to tell the tale. (Kottmeyer, 1993)

  James Gordon notes that while talk of implants would almost certainly point to paranoia, the claimants seem to recognize how crazy it all sounds and are less sure of what it means than most paranoids would be. (Gordon, 1991) This is probably because they function within an imaginary social world whose paranoia is constructed more by the beliefs of UFOlogists than their listeners.

  These people are presenting themes familiar to most students of abnormal psychology. Malcolm Bower’s study of the nature of emerging psychoses notes that fragmentation of self-experience—the loss of the sense of self—is common. The first case he speaks of involves a gentleman who believed his thoughts were stolen. (Bowers, 1974) “Thought-stealing,” we have already seen, is repeatedly claimed in abductee accounts. The sense of mission that follows some UFO contacts also frequently accompanies the onset of psychosis. Ideas of reference—a term given to notions that others are responsible for the thoughts one is thinking—is the most common delusion shared by schizophrenics. Some diagnosticians speak of it as a “first-rank” symptom of schizophrenia. (Torrey, 1983)

  INFLUENCING MACHINES

  In trying to explain how his erstwhile persecutors inject thoughts into his mind, the schizophrenic frequently develops a belief in the existence of influencing machines. Viktor Tausk presented a description of this process among schizophrenics back in 1918. Tausk found the belief evolves out of an originating sensation of inner change accompanied by a sense of estrangement. The need some people have for causality yields belief in a persecutor. As the delusion develops over time, it focuses first on one person, then to a circle of conspirators. The mechanism was grasped only vaguely at first but, in time, buttons, levers, and cranks would flesh out the image. The machine manipulates magnetic or electrical forces or air currents or telepathy or some mysterious radiations beyond the patient’s knowledge of physics. In identifying their persecutors, the victim will commonly point to ex-lovers, employers, and physicians. However, they can also be picked from the general culture surrounding them—the CIA, Einstein, movie characters, computers, and, of course, extraterrestrials. (Tausk, 1953)

  These fantasies can become quite elaborate. In one schizophrenic’s autobiography, the girl began fantasizing about an electronic machine capable of blowing up the Earth and which robs all men of their brains. They would then all be robots obedient to her will. She calls it the “System.” As her delusions progressed, she discovered the System had become a “a vast world-like entity encompassing all men.” Subsequently it turned on her and forced her into self-destructive acts like burning her own hand and refusing food. At the end, the System was involved in saying silly and innocuous things and finally just sunk “beyond thought” with the loss of the delusion. (Sechehaye, 1968)

  In a second autobiography, a corps of Operators armed with stroboscopes plagued the victim. They would probe minds, feed in thoughts, and take out information. They were a gabby lot and had a whole vocabulary to cover aspects of their job. Their motive was purportedly a sporting one. He who gained the greatest influence over something was the winner. (O’ Brien, 1976)

  The novel autobiography of the scientist John C. Lilly presents another illustration of the marvelous nature of influencing machine fantasies. Lilly helped to advance brain electrode technology in a desire to help ferret out the brain/mind duality problem. He dreamed of the possibility of lacing the brain with electrodes and seeing whether playing back its own impulses would yield an identical or different experience.

  When the secret intelligence possibilities of mind control created an ethical conflict in him, he abandoned his work for dolphin and isolation tank research. In time, he became involved in taking the drug ketamine. He experienced a startling hallucination involving the Comet Kohoutek, then passing near the Earth, wherein it spoke to Lilly and offered a demonstration of its “power over the solid-state control systems upon the earth” by shutting down Los Angeles Airport.

  Lilly reports the demonstration was successful. As the delusion evolved over the ensuing months, Lilly lived within a cosmology where computerization would take over the Earth and remove its corrosive air and water. Solid-state civilizations roamed the galaxy and they tried to convince Lilly to develop machines to “take care of” man. Everywhere, Lilly began to find evidence of the “control of human society by these networks of extraterrestrial communication.”

  As ketamine’s effects seduced Lilly, he shot up every hour and became convinced of solid-state intervention in human affairs to the extent that he tries to contact the President to warn the go
vernment. Lilly came to believe Elliot Richardson was being controlled by these alien forces, then television networks as well. Lilly felt he himself was being controlled by these solid-state entities to see messages in things like a film on the Kennedy assassination.

  Lilly hedged on admitting the unreality of the experiences while taking ketamine, but it is a model of psychosis from the precipitating shame of helping spies, the withdrawal from society, estrangement and fears of encroaching death, the conspiratorial pseudo-community relating real to fictional entities, overinterpretations of events as encoding messages to oneself, manic thought, and inevitably, the motif of the influencing machine. It serves here, as it usually does in paranoia, the function of disowning or alienating (in the archaic sense of the term) his unwanted hallucinations and those aspects of technocratic civilization he senses are running out of our control. (Lilly, 1978)

  It should be emphasized that influencing machine fantasies and ideas of reference are defensive strategies to retain some measure of self-esteem against crazy thoughts and shameful impulses and actions. The individual does not want to call himself crazy and blames others for the unwanted situation he is in. Though a primary sign of schizophrenia because it indicates the mind is misbehaving and flooding the consciousness with primitive thought, loose associations, or blocking mechanisms, it is also a sign of a positive prognosis. The mind is at least defending itself and not passively giving in. It is in this sense, equally a sign of normality. It is a defense potentially available for most people and can be called upon for less challenging dilemmas than schizophrenic episodes. As we saw up front, fiction writers call them up frequently for dramaturgical purposes. They have license to use fantasy mechanisms and retain the presumption of normality. Some of the UFO cases cited earlier probably involved psychotic episodes and some are just stories. Either way, the presence of these motifs justifies the presumption of unreality unless very extraordinary proof is marshaled against its likely impossibility.

  In the course of paranoid psychoses, influencing machine fantasies and ideas of reference generally appear after the hypochondriacal phase and at the beginning of the reintegration of the ego. Their appearance defines what workers call the projection phase.

  This terminology unfortunately invites confusion with everyday forms of psychological projection, wherein one’s impulses are mirrored onto someone else. Though this is undeniably part of what is seen in this phase, the salient features are more concerned with the disowning of unwanted mental content and blame being shifted onto an external agent or locus of control. Externality might be a better term, but it also had milder everyday counterparts.

  It has been demonstrated elsewhere (see THREAT, UFO-ET) that the history of UFOlogy exhibits a pattern of changes reminiscent of how paranoia evolves over time. Delusions of observation, end-of-the-world fears, and hypochondriacal fears cluster in the early years. The appearance of influencing-machine fantasies cluster in a later period, as the following chronicle will demonstrate.

  FORTEAN INFLUENCES

  Nearly every significant speculation in UFOlogical thought seems to be prefigured somewhere in the writings of Charles Fort; control fantasies being no exception. Sometime before writing the Book of the Damned, Fort wrote a book titled X that was organized on the idea that our civilization was controlled by certain rays emanating from Mars. The process was akin to the way images on photographic film are controlled by light rays. To the “X,” Earth is a sensitive photographic plate and all of our reality is an artistic medium.

  Theodore Dreiser saw it and thought it was an amazing new idea. Publishers rejected it and Fort later destroyed it. (Knight, 1970) Fort did not totally abandon the notion, since a decade later in a letter to the New York Times (in 1926) he opined “for ages Martians may have been in communication with this earth and have, in some occult way, been in control of its inhabitants.” (Fort, 1926)

  A subtler variant, briefly mentioned in his books, was that aliens communicated with esoteric cults that sought to direct humanity. (Fort, 1919) In this respect and many others, Fort is the veritable Lovecraft and Wells of UFOlogy.

  THE UFOLOGISTS SPEAK

  The first generation of UFOlogists following the start of the flying saucer mystery was dominated by the ideas of reconnaissance and eventual contact. None of the major authors of the period—Keyhoe, Heard, Scully, Wilkins, Jessup, Girvan, Ruppelt, Michel, Stringfield, and Barker—voiced any notions about alien influence or control. Some lesser figures, as we saw in connection with the contactees, had fantasies of the relevant form, but only one bears notice here. George Hunt Williamson straddles categories in that he was one of the first contactees, but he also had sufficient interest in studying UFOs as a historical phenomenon to regard him as an UFOlogist.

  In The Saucers Speak (1954), Williamson discusses the raw contact claims of alien communication to his circle of friends by means of radiotelegraphy, Ouija boards and automatic writing. It would be difficult to find a more bizarre collection of cosmological misinformation. The sun is cool. Pluto is not. All the planets can support life. The motif of influence surfaces in a moment of sublime inscrutability.

  Williamson provides some background in his first work, Other Tongues—Other Flesh (1953). The origin of man is traced to a migration of spirit from the star-sun Sirius that fuses with the native apes of Earth. Extraterrestrial influence nowadays comes in two types. One comes from the Orion nebula and takes over weak-bodied earth people, making them agents subservient to their will. They are used as instruments to introduce people to others and to ask leading questions at lectures. These agents tend to run amuck and upset the plans of other space intelligences. Benevolent space people regard these materialistic types as pirates of creation or universal parasites. They are identified by the strange, faraway glassy look in their eyes and by muscle spasms or throbbings in the neck. Heavy drinkers were also said to be at risk of submitting to telepathic Orion control.

  The other influence is a general background of cosmic radiation bearing Universal Knowledge. Williamson variously refers to it as a “music of the spheres,” a Great Cosmic Intelligence permeating space, or a universal influx from outer space. Magnetic anomalies on Earth associated with fault lines and volcanoes act as amplifiers of this music. Great civilizations spring up over these anomalies and yield a refinement in the arts and living conditions. Williamson adds that the entire solar system is entering a new possibility area of the universe in which everything will change for the better in all fields of life from economics, politics, eating habits to religion and science. This is possible because he believes the brain acts as a radio set for this radiation. Everything man thinks, says, does, and creates is magnetism, and magnetism is a Universal “I AM.”

  This phrase may indicate roots in Guy Ballard’s doctrine of the I AM, which in turn is rooted in Theosophy’s doctrine that man is a spiritual being who is an emanation of the sun. Beneath man’s passions and reasonings can be found pure being, the pure “I.” (Williamson, 1953; DeCamp, 1980; Hastings, n.d.)

  Williamson coauthored a third book with John McCoy entitled UFOs Confidential! (1958) It had far fewer ambitions than the previous book. Artificial chemicals in our food supply are said to be controlling man’s emotional nature. McCoy reveals that ringing in the ears indicates that space people are beaming instructions into the subconscious mind. He also advocates we seek love and not lustful sex. “No master of darkness can project LOVE frequency,” he proclaims. Naïve, to be sure, but overall you’ve got to give the cosmology points for imagination.

  One other lesser figure of interest here is Leon Davidson who graced the pages of Flying Saucers with his notions of how the CIA was hoaxing parts of the UFO phenomenon. He explained how George Adamski was not taken to outer space by Venusians, but escorted to Camp Irwin, California where agents and operatives faked his contact using movie technology and drugs. Davidson was a chemical engineer with atomic energy projects through the forties and fifties, including Los Alamos and
Oak Ridge. (Davidson, 1954)

  The sixties, despite a voluminous literature, saw at best two or three figures advancing alien mind-control notions. John Cleary-Baker, during a lecture in April 1966, expressed a belief that flying saucers were involved in tampering with people’s brains, perhaps by a medical operation that would cause the victim to act in accordance with alien suggestions. He asserted he could identify people possessed by an alien spirit who were occupying positions in society. John Michell did not particularly accept Cleary-Baker’s idea, but noted flying saucers were “ideally calculated to disturb the order of our thoughts, to put us in a state of mental anarchy which must start a new phase of our history.” He reviewed many tales from mythology that indicated to him the spark of civilization was ignited by gods borne in sky vehicles, though this was not consistently a pre-meditated act.

  Michell viewed the renewed interest in extraterrestrials as a return to an older orthodoxy represented by the religious observances in antiquity. “The possibility that our whole development has been influenced by extraterrestrial forces, with which we may again have to reckon some time in the future, is still hardly considered.” Michell would prove himself remarkably prophetic with that little sentence. (Michell, 1967) In the decade that followed, most UFOlogists would reckon with that possibility.

  The Lorenzens first advance alien mind control notions in UFOs Over the Americas (1968). Confronted with indications of hallucinations in the Peruvian case of “CAV,” they speculate that the UFO occupants projected thoughts designed to influence him to describe images and activities he thinks he saw, but what he actually saw is not remembered at the conscious level. In a different vein, they suggest the beeping sounds in the Hill case suggest the presence of a mechanical device by which UFOnauts lure and control humans through magnetic fields or hypnotic sounds. Though granting the notion seems like rank science fiction, they grant it plausibility on the grounds that the brain is “nothing more or less than a very complex computer.” The error is telling, even if commonplace. (Lorenzen, 1968)