The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters

by Story, Ronald

  The answer it seems is by using an immense pincher to take up samples, by winch, to their space ship. Blood subsequently falls from the sky—then, a decapitated gorilla’s head. Finally, the body of a man, partly skinned, is discovered with a diary confirming the worst.

  The man describes being placed in a transparent cubicle and seeing animals, humans, quantities of dirt, rocks, and seawater on display as though the ship were a combination of museum and zoo. He observes dissection experiments and, realizing his fate, straps his diary to his body in expectation of his remains being tossed overboard.

  The ship subsequently develops power trouble and settles into Trafalgar Square. The aliens are regrettably killed when rescuers cause air to rush inside the craft after making a hole in it. The hope is expressed that the aliens won’t be sending down another expedition. (Moskowitz, 1976)

  This was probably the first major story to adopt the premise of furtive extraterrestrials flying about our atmosphere engaged in abduction for scientific research. Sam Moscowitz argues it is unlikely Fort could have missed this story in his extensive reading. Pearson’s was one of the most widely read magazines in its day and was certainly in the New York Public Library, which was haunted by Charles Fort. The first corollary, that it played a role in Fort’s ruminations about extraterrestrial visitors—who found us mysteriously useful and caused various disappearances and sky falls—follows naturally.

  All the elements for the reconnaissance theory of UFOs seem to be present by 1913: belief in extraterrestrials, belief in furtive airships, the idea of examination, and paranoia. The only thing that seems to be miss ing is a Keyhoe and a Mantell case to lend his idea seriousness. Fort was too much the class clown to phrase his ideas in arguments that tried to convince. It also might be that the public needed the sensation of Arnold’s supersonic saucers to redirect their attention to aerial mysteries. Teasing out all the relevant factors and possibilities may keep historians guessing for years.

  Though no single episode of collective shame can be pointed to, as establishing the UFO mythos, the idea may provide a key to several mass manifestations of the UFO phenomenon. The major flaps subsequent to 1947 appear in concert with major historical episodes of national shame or humiliation.

  The 1952 wave coincides with an emotionally charged steel strike which caused allegations of treason: that steelworkers were undermining the war in Korea.

  The 1957 wave emerged in the wake of Russia’s launch of Sputnik and the realization that Yankee technological superiority had been called into question. It was easily the pivotal identity crisis of the fifties generation.

  The 1965 wave began within days of the first U.S. ground combat operations in Vietnam. It was quickly termed a “futile assault,” and in the weeks that followed the situation visibly deteriorated. After the initial pulse of the wave passed, the famous Watts riots kicked up a secondary peak in mid-August.

  The notorious “swamp-gas” flap of 1966 played against the backdrop of the first anti-U.S. demonstrations in Hue and Danang, then Saigon and elsewhere. Spectacular fiery suicides by religious figures were particularly agonizing to behold. Lastly, the 1973 wave blossomed in the heat of Watergate.

  Psychosocial historian Lloyd DeMause has asserted that staring eyes can be found during times of crisis in every country and every age—from ancient Egypt’s “Eye of Horus” to the “hypnotic eyes” of Adolf Hitler. Though they can be attached to foreign enemies, they are often pictured as simply floating above us—strange, unidentified staring eyes. (DeMause, 1984)

  Unidentified Flying Objects with their connotations of aliens-are-watching-us seem to be a variation of the paranoid delusions of observation prompted by ego crises seen both with individuals and groups.

  EYE IMAGERY

  “The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder…” Darwin confessed, as he tried to explain how the eye arose through the process of natural selection. (Colp, 1986) But the power of the eye to elicit this sense of the uncanny is itself a product of evolved instinct. Staring eyes provoke physiological arousal in many species of animal. The eye-shaped pattern emblazoned on the bodies of butterflies, birds, snakes, fish, and peacocks evolved because of the instinctive avoidance the eyes provoke. The predator does not want itself to become prey. (Grumet, 1983)

  Eyes are one of the first things recognized and tracked by infants. Experiments have shown that masks consisting of two eyes, a smooth forehead, and a nose will by themselves cause an infant to react with a smile. The absence of a mouth makes no difference and serves to prove the smile is not imitative. It is only the area of the eyes that innately provokes the response. (Campbell, 1959) After six months the response is limited to familiar faces. Strangers will elicit screams, particularly if they have large eyes (as when wearing spectacles) or show large teeth.

  The power of the eye is constantly alluded to in love poetry through the ages. Eye make-up highlights and exaggerates the allure of the eye in a manner that ethologists term “supernormal sign stimulation.”

  Exaggeration of the size of the eye is commonplace in art and sculpture. Eye idols, and idols with eyes twice the normal size, have been found in places where cultural diffusion is an improbable explanation, such as the Olmec culture of Mexico and cultures of the Indus and Euphrates. (Jaynes, 1976)

  Divine eyes have been regarded as a universal motif in mythology. (Meslin, 1936) Though such images can connote, in their benevolent aspect, the love of a parent for the child, it can also connote the authority of parent and society.

  One finds eye imagery exaggerated in paranoid art, because of the focused attention on the eyes looking for any faint cues of disapproval. Film buffs will recall movies of the fifties, the era of the blacklist, as often possessing scenes of montages of disembodied eyes connoting disapproval of an anxious or harried outcast from society. Films of the alien invasion genre often possess exaggerated eye imagery in connection with a varied array of paranoid motifs. Some aliens are little more than giant eyes, such as in the films It Came from Outer Space (1953), War of the Worlds (1953), The Crawling Eye (1958), The Atomic Submarine (1959), the “Moonstone” episode of Outer Limits (1964), and “The Robot Spy” of Johnny Quest (1964).

  Humanoids with oversized eyes are also commonplace in science fiction and pulp horror illustrations.

  The alien invasion genre of films provides an accessible body of paranoid fantasy with which to demonstrate certain facets of the psychodynamics of paranoia. The facet to be demonstrated here is the relationship between cataclysmic themes and supernormal eye imagery.

  Probably the best place to start is with the movie War of the Worlds (1953). The world of Mars is dying, so the Martians decide to wipe out mankind and take over our planet. Their space ships crash into the Earth as fiery meteors. The first thing to emerge from the crater is a large mechanical eye, which spectacularly destroys anything in its gaze. Here is the old fear of the Evil Eye updated with a vengeance.

  It later transpires that the Martians themselves aren’t much more than eyes with spindly arms and legs. The film is an orgy of fire and explosions and doom. Only the hand of God, the original term for plagues, ends the invasion.

  It Came from Outer Space (1953) also opens with a fiery meteor crashing to earth. A scientist goes into the crater to investigate and confronts a huge spherical spaceship that resembles a huge eyeball with a hexagonal pupil. A rockslide starts descending around him at the sight of it, and he flees with no proof. The rest of the film dabbles in dopplegangers, Men-in-Black, mysterious phone noises, and other paranoid paraphernalia.

  Killers From Space (1954) is an especially fascinating work possessing a nakedly paranoid structure. It opens with an A-bomb going off and the crash of a plane researching the effects of the blast. The project official in the plane stumbles into base after the crash with amnesia and a surgical scar over his chest. While recuperating, he awakens one evening to see a pair of disembodied eyes floating towards him. He encounters the eyeballs again on a later occas
ion, as he is driving down a highway. He complains that people regard him as a mental case.

  Then he is caught passing along military secrets to an unknown party. Sodium pentathol is injected into him and out pops a story of his being operated on by aliens with eyes like painted Ping-Pong balls. They learn the aliens had removed his heart and repaired the damage he received from the plane crash.

  He is shown a screen on which appears the image of the aliens’ home world and their dying sun. It looks like an eye. The aliens, one billion strong, intend to invade our world by releasing monster insects and reptiles to wipe us out.

  Aware of the threat, now that the amnesia is lifted, the official contrives a plan that results in the destruction of the alien bases of operations via a surreally tilted nuclear blast that vindicates his sanity.

  Skipping ahead to the more familiar territory of Star Trek, we can point to the award-winning episode “The Doomsday Machine” as another illustration of the relationship. Starship Captain William Decker is found catatonic after losing his crew. He had beamed them down to a planet, but couldn’t rescue them when an immense automated planet-killer reduced it to rubble. Events lead him to command the Enterprise and take it into futile battle. As they approach the machine, the planet-killer looms up with the appearance of a giant eye.

  Decker eventually commits suicide and Kirk destroys the planet-killer by imploding the engines of Decker’s abandoned ship. Speaking of planet-killers, the Death Star of Star Wars also presents the appearance of a giant eyeball that shoots lasers from its pupil.

  The reason for this intertwining of cataclysmic imagery and eyes is psychiatrically elementary. Paranoia is intimately tied to the experience of shame. It is shame that creates delusions of observation. Same also has the effect of fragmenting the ego and this is accompanied by fantasies of world destruction or other images of cataclysm. (Freud, 1953)

  Paranoiac reactions, with their enhanced stimulus sensitivities and loss of discrimination, will stimulate many idiosyncratic concerns, but these two are archetypal and structural.

  UFOlogy, not unexpectedly, provides many examples of this relationship. Donald Keyhoe, our premier advocate of the belief that we are being watched by other worlds, also expressed numerous apocalyptic fears in his early books: super-atomic bombs he feared would throw Earth out of its orbit or propel large chunks out of the planet with unpredictable results. Aliens might be here to play audience to a replay of Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision (1950). He also feared that Russians would stage a mass A-bomb attack in 1954, employing rumors of saucer attacks to paralyze communication and transportation networks. (Kottmeyer, 1991)

  Most of the early believers in the reconnaissance theory held some form of fear that catastrophe was impending. Albert Bender believed the polar ice caps were ready to capsize the Earth in 1953 with an attendant array of natural disturbances. (Bender, 1953)

  Harold T. Wilkins warned that lithium bombs would turn the Earth into a flaming nova. Morris Jessup feared either a pole-shift, a cosmic storm, or atomic holocaust would befall the Earth before 1980. Aimé Michel regarded saucers as a sword of Damocles hanging over us, portending “the greatest catastrophe in human history” if they should contact us and learn of our inferior ethics. The Lorenzens felt the saucers embodied an urgency comparable to Pearl Harbor and speculated Earth faced a crisis of the Velikovskian variety. (See this writer’s entry on PARANOIA AND UFOS for more examples.)

  This relationship breaks down around 1974 as cataclysmic fantasies decrease in response to the reintegration of the ego taking place around that time in UFOlogy. It is not surprising that ambivalence about the reality of alien reconnaissance takes place about then. A complete rejection however is difficult, since this might be tantamount to denial of the existence of a superego or conscience and so a threat to the recovering ego.

  There are numerous independent criteria pointing to the reintegration taking place at that time: the appearance of influencing machine fantasies, the decline in hypochondriacal pleas to diagnose the flying saucer problem as real, decreased death fears about mass poisoning or galactic experiments in cremation. The shift in viewing Earth as a fiercely barbarous race and a prison or asylum to viewing Earth as a tourist attraction, and an anthropologist’s prize, similarly signals the increase in self-worth attending the ego reintegration of the paranoid over time. (Kottmeyer, 1989)

  UFO experiencers also show evidence of this relationship. One example concerns the case of the abductee William J. Herrmann. On the 10th of November, 1981, Herrmann was fired from his position as a children’s church teacher, because the church believed he had become involved in satanic things when he spoke on TV about UFOs. On November 14th, Herrmann received by “automatic transmission” from his alien contacts a diagram of the power unit which contains images of a pair of eyes. That same day, he wrote an essay titled “Inevitable Destruction,” in which he warns that geopolitical events may soon lead to the entire Earth being engulfed in an “eternal firestorm.” That these things turned up so soon after the humiliation of a public excoriation makes a clear case that a paranoiac reaction was in process. (Stevens, 1989)

  In the Liberty, Kentucky, triple abduction we find our paired motif (the watchful eye and world destruction), but separated into two individuals. Under hypnotic regression, Mona Stafford sees a large “eye” ob serving her as she lies on a table. Humanoids in surgical garb then examine her and she is transported to a room in a volcano. (Lorenzen, 1977)

  She then experiences traveling at the speed of light while glued to a stool. She later revealed a belief that she had been tested to be a messenger of God’s warning that man had to better his way. “It’s going to be a terrible time,” as Revelation predicts. She believed the effort to be as futile as warnings before Noah’s flood. She was personally convinced her life was going to be destroyed and she would never see another birthday.

  Louise Smith, one of the other abductees, did not experience seeing an eye during her regression. Instead she relived fluid material covering her that made her gasp for breath. She thinks they were making a mold of her body. She subsequently learned the aliens were coming from a dying solar system, but admits that this made no sense to her since she was unaware that a solar system could die.

  This may have been derived from Earth versus Flying Saucers (1956) whose aliens hail from a “disintegrating solar system.” Smith’s aliens allegedly could control rain. The movie’s aliens were able to induce meteorological convulsions on Earth to warn everyone of their power.

  One can also see the pairing of motifs in Whitley Strieber’s Communion (1987). The eyes of the alien are horrifically blank, black, and inhumanly large. Subsequent to his nightmare, he felt one evening the sky was alive and watching him. Strieber had full awareness this was a paranoid fantasy. (Strieber, 1987) In a hypnotic session he experiences an image of the world blowing up.

  Edith Fiore reports an instance of a friend who felt faint and whose heart beat wildly upon picking up a copy of Communion. Fiore felt this reaction was peculiar and was able to elicit memories of a CE-IV (Close Encounter of the Fourth Kind or abduction) from this individual.

  This should not be too surprising, given the large staring eyes on the book’s jacket. As mentioned earlier, staring eyes stimulate physiological arousal in many animals besides man. Fiore’s ability to elicit a CE-IV experience from this individual is deeply suspicious since it proceeded from the false premise that her friend’s reaction was unusual. But wouldn’t most people find the image of Strieber’s alien unsettling to some extent?

  Barney Hill’s experience lacks a cataclysmic motif, but deserves attention here because of the issue it raises about eyes and the UFO experience. It is safe to say that we would never have heard of The Interrupted Journey if Barney Hill had not reacted so dramatically to the image of the UFO he saw in the binoculars.

  This incident was not an artifact of the hypnotic sessions; it was consciously experienced and remembered. As he looked at the U
FO, he felt the leader was staring at him. On experiencing this he rips the binoculars from his face, tearing the straps, and runs screaming back to the car. This is very untypical behavior, for Barney had served three years in the Army and handled himself well in crisis situations. He didn’t seem to be the type to panic over something like being looked at. Getting to the car he threw it into gear and told Betty, his wife, to look out for the craft. Later, she admitted she thought his imagination was being overactive—because when she looked up, she saw nothing. (Fuller, 1966)

  These facts alone point to the presence of a paranoid reaction, but we also know that he was in this state before the UFO experience. When they stopped to eat earlier at the restaurant, Barney complained that everybody in the street was looking at them. This complaint, “all eyes are on us,” is a delusion of observation just like the image of the staring leader in the saucer. Barney himself realized everybody was actually behaving in a pleasant manner and that he had better get a hold on himself.

  What is also interesting about Barney’s account is the drawing of the UFO itself. As Alvin Lawson has pointed out, it has the general form of an eye in the sky. (Lawson, 1982) This is an important point, since the context of the eye-like UFO demonstrates its psychological origin beyond reasonable doubt.

  Barney Hill’s UFO is not alone in the UFO literature in having a resemblance to an eye, and it will doubtless be argued that coincidence could account for some or all of these instances of eye-like UFOs. Flying saucers oblige at least one circle in their form, and aesthetic symmetries would doubtless lead to other circles and radiating lines. This writer agrees, yet we can see the psychological processes at work, for example, in dreams reported in Carl Jung’s book on flying saucers. Consider this one: