by Gary Bates
The Roper organization allows for other questions to be tacked onto the end of its own regular polls. A representative sample of almost 6,000 were surveyed. Respondents were not directly asked if they had ever been abducted by aliens; instead, they were given a series of indicator questions about whether they had ever undergone the following experiences:
• Waking up paralyzed with a sense of a strange person or presence or something else in the room.
• Experiencing a period of time of an hour or more, in which you were apparently lost, but you could not remember why, or where you had been.
• Seeing unusual lights or balls of light in a room without knowing what was causing them, or where they came from.
• Finding puzzling scars on your body but neither you nor anyone else remembering how you received them or where you got them.
• Feeling that you were actually flying through the air, although you didn’t know why or how.[35]
A “yes” answer to four out of the five questions was taken as evidence of alien abduction. The 62-page report, with its introduction by John Mack, was vigorously defended by Hopkins and Jacobs on the basis that they were experienced researchers who had worked with nearly 500 abductees. It is true that they were already “true believers” — and skeptics would claim that they were looking for concurring evidence. Amazingly, this evidence was interpreted to conclude that up to 4 million Americans and 185 million earthlings have been abducted by aliens. The findings were mailed to over 100,000 psychiatrists, psychologists, and mental health professionals in the United States. Such conclusions would surely create an impact on the medical profession.
Hypnosis and repressed memories
Not so long ago, court judges recognized that memories of child abuse, if unlocked from a victim’s mind through the method of “regressive hypnosis,” must have constituted a real event in that person’s life. In short, it was evidence. This evidence was admissible until the courts rejected it for reasons explained below. Many innocent people have been sent to jail on the basis of events that never actually happened.
One of the problems with this method is the chance that the therapist, or the person conducting the hypnosis session, can inadvertently (or intentionally) plant suggestions into the patient’s mind. In turn, it is claimed, these can become false memories that hypnosis brings to the fore. Many of today’s health professionals also claim that hypnosis unlocks a person’s imagination (not just the memory), and when imaginative events come to the surface, they can be mistakenly interpreted as memories.
UFO researchers such as Hopkins and Mack have commonly used the method of memory regression when interviewing experiencers. They have been seen conducting such sessions on television for documentary purposes, and on the surface everything seems innocuous and straightforward. Their critics claim, however, that they are always looking for evidence of abductions, as shown by their biased Roper poll conclusions. So how can they be objective or impartial when questioning patients in a hypnotic state?
At a 1994 skeptics’ conference, John Mack defended his methods, saying that he had considered all other possibilities, such as sleep paralysis and nightmares, but he said that UFO abductions have “a quality all of their own.”[36] However, a virtual bomb was about to explode on Mack.
Donna Bassett, a former patient of Mack’s, who had participated in one of his studies, got up to speak. She revealed that she had been working undercover in an effort to find out more about his methods. In short, she had been “faking it.” Critics chimed in, claiming that if Mack did not detect her as a fraud, his methods were unreliable. Bassett seemed to suggest that Mack did not intentionally lead his patients, but that his scientific methodology was flawed. The conference reported on Bassett’s observations:
… many patients would often practice “overlay,” a term she said they invented to refer to their embellishing their stories. “They [the abductees] told John what he wanted to hear,” Bassett added. She said she felt that many of the patients were seeking attention.[37]
Journalist Mark Pilkington examines all the confusion in an effort to get to the bottom of what actually happens to experiencers:
Many people who undergo these experiences want to be told what has happened to them, calling on the visible “experts” who appear on TV or write books to do so. Often they are referred to abductee support groups where beliefs are reinforced and memories reshaped; this is how the mythology becomes reality. Gradually the inherent flaws in the CAS are becoming more widely recognized; but while the media can still make mileage out of alien kidnappers, change is likely to be a slow process, especially when the alternatives are complex and undefined. That some UFOs are truly unidentifiable is beyond doubt. There have been too many reports from reliable and multiple witnesses, too many radar and visual correlations by pilots, too many films and photographs, too many blacked out military and government documents. For them all to be hoaxes, misidentifications, and hallucinations seem more unlikely than most of the other explanations put forward over the years.[38]
Some psychologists suggest the power of emotional belief is enough on its own. Professor Richard McNally from Harvard University says:
If you genuinely believe you’ve been traumatized and recall these memories, you’ll show the same psycho-physiologic emotional reactions as people who really have been traumatized… . “Abductees” also believe in their experiences so deeply that they display real stress symptoms similar to those of traumatized battlefield veterans.[39]
Many other researchers have also noticed a strong predisposition of these experiencers to what many describe as “religious beliefs.” From an atheistic point of view, a religious belief would include any faith that entails the supernatural or mystical. However, McNally and other researchers have shown that this is not entirely the case. During his work with “abductees,” McNally noticed that the “religious” trend was distinctly toward one area alone — New Age beliefs:
Most of them had pre-existing new-age beliefs — they were into bio-energetic therapies, past lives, astral projection, tarot cards, and so on.[40]
The occult — real phenomena
There is a clear pattern. Impartial research shows that most abductees have, in the past, dabbled in what is commonly known as the occult, even if it was on a relatively minor basis. For some, they may not have been aware of the potential of unlocking this doorway to the supernatural when they dabbled in New Age practices. But regardless, their involvement in the occult subsequently increases, and they also become more prone to New Age beliefs and practices.
UFO researcher Joe Jordan helped reveal the true identity of the “alien” entities. He has since helped hundreds of experiencers.
Even for seasoned New Agers who already believed and practiced the occult, the escalation in occultic activity after their “abduction” still comes as a surprise. Why? I don’t believe that anyone can expect, and be prepared for, the experience of being abducted by “alien” beings. The whole concept of what has taken place is so earth-shattering and so profound (e.g., “the space brothers chose me”) that it completely changes their world view and attitude toward such phenomena. For example, if they subsequently perceived the aliens to be real, then they would have no doubt that their New Age messages are true as well, and then shape their lives according to these ideas. It’s as if the so-called aliens are mimicking Jesus by providing their victims with a “Damascus Road” experience[41] and then proclaiming “follow me” — sadly, many do just that.
Far from the abductee population including all those with religious beliefs, there is one group of people that, by and large, is notably absent. They are Christians. Here we have to be careful about the definition of what constitutes a Christian. Many people in the world claim to be a Christian; that is, they have Christian ideals or morality, attend church and may even regard themselves as good people. Some in this group still regularly claim abduction. But I am talking about what are known as “born-again,” Bible-believi
ng Christians — those who are often (these days unflatteringly) described as “Christian fundamentalists.” It is as if ETs tend to avoid this select group of people. This reality has been largely ignored by many UFO researchers. But one group gets credit for discovering this startling fact.
CE-4 is an alien abduction research group founded by Joe Jordan and Wes Clark. The group has a dozen or so members based in Florida. Each member is also a trained field investigator for MUFON (Mutual UFO Network), arguably the most respected clearinghouse for UFO reports in the world. Joe Jordan, CE-4’s president, is also a state section director of MUFON.
Because there were so many experiencers in the Florida area, CE-4 decided to conduct their own research independently of MUFON. They wanted to see if they could establish any significant patterns or factors that may have been overlooked by other researchers. The cases they studied had all the usual hallmarks of the CAS. They wondered, Where to go from here. Perhaps it was time for a completely new approach. One of the researchers posed the question, “Are Christians being abducted?” Clark says about himself at the time:
I had a belief in God, but that was about the extent of my spirituality. Joe was a crystal-rolling New Ager. Neither one of us had ever even considered a spiritual origin of the phenomenon. We had a hunch we were onto something.[42]
At first, this line of investigation bore no fruit. Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, agnostics, all seemed to claim abduction experiences. As more case studies were examined, a puzzling trend emerged:
The Christians reporting the abduction experience tended to be people who intellectually espoused the existence of God, but didn’t apply it personally. But there seemed to be an obvious absence of devout, Bible believing, “walk the walk” Christians. Where were they in this equation?[43]
Jordan and Clark then remembered an earlier interview with an experiencer named Bill D. (see box).
{See Bill’s paradigm-changing abduction}
The answer to halting abduction experiences
It was the first time these experienced field investigators had ever heard of an abduction being stopped, and this man did it by just calling on the name of Jesus. Many researchers had previously recognized the spiritual nature of abductions, but no one had attempted to specifically research the spiritual aspects on their own merits. The folks at CE-4 began to look a bit closer at the data and the findings of other researchers.
Rita Elkins, a reporter with the well-known Florida Today newspaper, was interested in this research and she extensively interviewed both Jordan and Clark. The published article drew an immediate response from experiencers in the local area, like this one:
Recently I read the Florida Today account of your research. I’m especially interested in the “religious component” that you seem to be discovering in some UFO abduction cases. Back about 1973 my wife had a strange experience in the middle of the night. At the time we knew nothing about UFO abductions, so we had no category in which to place it other than extremely “lucid nightmare.” It has many of the abduction “components.” The point is that she stopped the entities and the whole experience with the name of “Jesus.” … It’s vital to get this information out.[44]
Clark said that many of the respondents claimed to be Christians who told of their own abduction experiences. He felt that they were happy to have someone to talk to; they usually felt uncomfortable talking about their experiences because most UFO investigators had New Age inclinations and ideas that opposed their own beliefs. In addition, the Christian church is not equipped to deal with such reports because the UFO phenomenon has been largely misunderstood and dismissed by organized religions. Clark comments:
As the number of cases mounted, the data showed that in every instance where the victim knew to invoke the name of Jesus Christ, the event stopped. Period. The evidence was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.[45]
The Florida Today article also appeared online, and it then made its way to an Internet news journal called CNI News. From here it turned up in Europe’s most high-profile and respected UFO journal, The Flying Saucer Review. CE-4 received responses from all over the world, with dozens of reports of abductions being halted in the name of Jesus Christ. Another three major researchers told Jordan, off the record, that they had similar cases, but they would not officially report them, fearing damage to their credibility. Jordan gives some insight into why anyone would suppress such findings. He says that most UFOlogists share his former New Age beliefs (he has since become a Christian), and would not trade their religious beliefs for another more traditional view. He adds:
These people go from one thing to another looking for development of a higher consciousness… . Any place but in traditional religion.[46]
CE-4 then tried to canvass Christians to hear of any abduction experiences that this group of people might have encountered. They claim that most of the responses were of a type that said, “I’m a Christian, and I’m abducted all the time, and I’ve seen Jesus on the ship.” This was initially confusing to Jordan and Clark in trying to understand why certain types of Christians were being abducted, and others not. For further insight, they researched the Christian’s own book — the Bible — by taking Bible study courses. Gradually, things became a little clearer. They started to understand that these events were completely spiritual in nature, and resembled ancient stories and descriptions of what the Bible calls “demons.” It seems amazing that the ET-believing UFOlogists, and even skeptics, have noticed that modern alien abductions resembled ancient stories of demons, yet they have ignored the world’s most famous and best-selling book, which explains their origins. The similarity was not lost on John Keel. He wrote:
Demonology is not just another crackpot-ology. It is the ancient and scholarly study of the monsters and demons who have seemingly coexisted with man throughout history. Thousands of books have been written on the subject, many of them authored by educated clergymen, scientists, and scholars, and uncounted numbers of well-documented demonic events are readily available to every researcher. The manifestations and occurrences described in this imposing literature are similar, if not entirely identical, to the UFO phenomenon itself. Victims of demonomania (possession) suffer the very same medical and emotional symptoms as the UFO contactees… . The devil and his demons can, according to the literature, manifest themselves in almost any form and can physically imitate anything from angels to horrifying monsters with glowing eyes. Strange objects and entities materialize and dematerialize in these stories, just as the UFOs and their splendid occupants appear and disappear, walk through walls, and perform other supernatural feats.[47]
Yet many investigators disregard these similarities, due to their own particular beliefs. The UFO believers think that these were merely primitive descriptions of aliens, and the skeptics think they were imaginary. Consequently, the Bible’s account has been treated with disdain by both groups, despite seeming to have the answers to explain the phenomenon. Unlike others, Clark and Jordan were doing their homework. Despite not being Christians at the time, they wanted to know what the Bible had to say.
War in another dimension
CE-4 had discovered that the Bible described a battle fought in the spiritual realm. To Bible-believing Christians, this concept is known as “spiritual warfare.” In explaining this premise of spiritual warfare, Jordan and Clark attempted to describe why some Christians are abducted, why some are left alone, and why abductions can be halted easily in the name of Jesus Christ.
They describe Christians as falling into two categories. One type is the person who has given mental assent to Christian ideals but who is still what the Bible calls carnal; that is, mostly guided by his natural impulses. He does not necessarily apply Christian concepts to his lifestyle because he hasn’t learned to, or he doesn’t want to. He cannot discern spiritual things, and he remains subject to spiritual attack from these entities. They describe this Christian as a “talk the talk” Christian. It is possible that some who fall into this categ
ory might not be truly “born again,” and therefore not truly Christian by the Bible’s own definition (John 3:3–7).
The other type is a person who has given his life over to following Jesus Christ, the author of Christianity, and the one whom the Bible claims is the Creator of the universe. This type of Christian applies biblical/Christian principles in his daily life, and he looks for a spiritual reality beyond the world around him. Because of this discernment, these Christians would view abduction experiences by entities/demons as a spiritual attack, and deal with them in the appropriate manner — in the authority of the name of Jesus Christ. Clark describes this type of person as a “walk the walk” Christian.