Southern Baptist Alien Abduction
Alien abductees rendezvous in Roswell True believers undeterred by doubts, ridicule of skepticsHide Details
© Fort Worth Star-Telegram
July 6, 1997
Reprinted in the college textbook, A Reader for College Writers (Mcgraw-Hill), edited by Prof. Santi Buscemi
By Barry Shlachter
ROSWELL, N.M. - Ever suspect that you were once abducted by aliens?
You are not alone.
Speakers at Roswell UFO Encounter '97, including a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist, contended that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Americans of every race, creed and sexual orientation have been spirited aboard spacecraft.
Some have even been involuntarily used for the birth of alien-human hybrids, they said.
At the six-day event, marking the 50th anniversary of a purported flying saucer crash near here, all one needed to do was shout: "Any abductees here? I need to talk to an abductee. " A half-dozen hands shot up each of the six times the appeal was made. Of course, that could say more about the sort of person attracted to the UFO event, which ends today.
Skeptics in academia attribute the abduction stories to hallucinations, "waking dreams," delusions, post-traumatic stress, temporal lobe epilepsy or, as the late scientist Carl Sagan once suggested, mass hysteria. Some might have picked up suggestions of an abduction, intentional or not, while under hypnosis.
Some who say that they have been abducted, such as Leah A. Haley, 46, say they wish that they did have any one of the disorders - so they could be "cured." Haley said she had lived a quiet, middle-class, Southern Baptist life in Mississippi as a wife, mother and certified public accountant until her world was turned upside down by a series of alien abductions.
"I'd prefer being in my office doing tax returns," said Haley, a soft-spoken woman who has written an account of her experience, Lost is the Key, which she sold from a concession booth.
"But I had to speak out," she said, "even though it cost me my job, my first marriage and my not being invited to my older daughter's wedding this month. The public has a right to know.
"My husband didn't mind my being abducted. He just didn't want me to talk about it," Haley said, adding that sexual contact with aliens also played a role in the marriage's breakup. She declined to elaborate.
After being examined by doctors and hypnotherapists, she said, she finally accepted that she had been on a craft from Sirius.
"It usually begins at night," Haley said. "I would be awakened by a beam of light and taken aboard the spacecraft. I would be strapped down, and they would conduct medical exams, extract tissue samples and ova.
"I've seen transparent, suspended incubators containing infants that were half-human, half-alien. The grown aliens were off-white in color, had almond-shaped eyes, hairless and ear-less and had holes for a nose.
"They communicated telepathically to me, telling me they wouldn't hurt me, that they were working for the continued existence of our species. " No disbelievers were among the speakers invited to the conference, sponsored by Roswell's International UFO Museum & Research Center.
Possibly as a result, people such as Jennica Dumas, a 19-year-old college student from Tarrytown, N.Y., who arrived in Roswell a skeptic, are today not so sure. After a lecture on the history of alien abductions, Dumas said, "I'm afraid they may be true. " Since the first reported abduction in the early 1960s, the descriptions of the aliens seen by Americans have been similar to Haley's. Aliens are called "grays" and "modern grays," said Michael Lindeman, a futurist and editor of an Internet Web site called CNI - for Contact with Non-Human Intelligence.
Nearly all aliens have relayed messages urging world peace and nuclear nonproliferation, said Budd Hopkins, a hypnotherapist who specializes in treating people who believe they have been abducted.
He said that the aliens' pitches have uncannily reflected the moderate-liberal stance of New York Times editorials.
Dr. John Mack, 67, a Harvard psychiatrist and author of the 1994 bestseller Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, said he has heard similar details from 150 self-described abductees.
"What's convincing are the power and the conviction of the accounts," Mack said. "I don't claim to understand it. " Abductees, he said, generally see a bright light, become paralyzed, are "floated" out of their homes and into a craft, encounter human-like beings with big black eyes and hairless pear-shaped heads. The aliens have computers and seem to extract information from abductees, who undergo intrusive medical procedures - some on the brain, some to extract sperm from men and ova from women. Abductees sometimes see hybrid infants with big eyes, scraggly hair and small features.
"The aliens seem to have a hunger for us, and us for them. " Mack said. There is sexual contact, he said, but abductees report that it's "not that great. " Mack, 67, is a tall, charismatic man who won the Pulitzer Prize for Prince of Our Disorder, a 1977 biography of T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. Today, Mack is regarded as the champion of those who believe that they've been carried off by aliens only to face disbelief and ridicule upon their return.
"The implications are vast," he said to hearty applause from an audience of 450. "It shows we are not alone. And we are not the most intelligent beings in the universe. It changes our sense of who we are. " In 1994, Harvard colleagues became so upset by Mack's UFO work that the school conducted an investigation into his methods.
After a year, the medical school said it had urged Mack to be careful, in his enthusiasm, not to violate high standards of clinical conduct. But it said he could use his academic freedom to study people who believe they've been abducted by aliens. His tenure was not affected.
The stories of the "abductees" have convinced few other scholars.
Charles Ziegler, an anthropologist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., said that the similarity in the descriptions of aliens is not surprising, considering the popularity of science fiction TV series and films. Others believe that more than 10 percent of the population is prone to fantasy that goes beyond daydreaming.
But why are people having these experiences?
While lying in bed, have you ever felt as if you were falling or that someone was standing nearby?
That's a hypnagogic, or waking, dream, which some scholars say accounts not only for many of the alien stories but, in other cultures and times, for reports of angels, trolls, leprechauns and fairies, said Elizabeth Bird, a cultural anthropologist at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
The fact that most of the abductions occur after a person has gone to bed appears to point to a waking dream, Bird said, citing a 1987 article by psychologist Robert Baker, a professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky.
But Paul Diekmeyer, 51, a Cincinnati jeweler, insists that his abduction did happen. He was one of several who responded to a reporter's call for abductees after Mack's lecture. "I felt like I knew them for my whole life. They were not like strangers. I haven't told anyone until today. " He said his abduction occurred while he was in bed, but not asleep.
Communion, a best-selling book by Whitley Strieber, recounts an incident in which aliens threatened his family and tried to set his roof afire. Afterward, Strieber went back to sleep, Baker noted.
`If something so dramatic happened in real life, you would take action," Bird said. "Those who have these experiences never do.
"And, after a while, they have invested so much emotionally in their abduction experiences, that, if they were proven false, the result could be devastating.
Alien abductees rendezvous in Roswell True believers undeterred by doubts, ridicule of skepticsHide Details
© Fort Worth Star-Telegram
July 6, 1997
Reprinted in the college textbook, A Reader for College Writers (Mcgraw-Hill), edited by Prof. Santi Buscemi
By Barry Shlachter
ROSWELL, N.M. - Ever suspect that you were once abducted by aliens?
You are not alone.
Speakers at Roswell UFO Encounter '97, including a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist, contended that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Americans of every race, creed and sexual orientation have been spirited aboard spacecraft.
Some have even been involuntarily used for the birth of alien-human hybrids, they said.
At the six-day event, marking the 50th anniversary of a purported flying saucer crash near here, all one needed to do was shout: "Any abductees here? I need to talk to an abductee. " A half-dozen hands shot up each of the six times the appeal was made. Of course, that could say more about the sort of person attracted to the UFO event, which ends today.
Skeptics in academia attribute the abduction stories to hallucinations, "waking dreams," delusions, post-traumatic stress, temporal lobe epilepsy or, as the late scientist Carl Sagan once suggested, mass hysteria. Some might have picked up suggestions of an abduction, intentional or not, while under hypnosis.
Some who say that they have been abducted, such as Leah A. Haley, 46, say they wish that they did have any one of the disorders - so they could be "cured." Haley said she had lived a quiet, middle-class, Southern Baptist life in Mississippi as a wife, mother and certified public accountant until her world was turned upside down by a series of alien abductions.
"I'd prefer being in my office doing tax returns," said Haley, a soft-spoken woman who has written an account of her experience, Lost is the Key, which she sold from a concession booth.
"But I had to speak out," she said, "even though it cost me my job, my first marriage and my not being invited to my older daughter's wedding this month. The public has a right to know.
"My husband didn't mind my being abducted. He just didn't want me to talk about it," Haley said, adding that sexual contact with aliens also played a role in the marriage's breakup. She declined to elaborate.
After being examined by doctors and hypnotherapists, she said, she finally accepted that she had been on a craft from Sirius.
"It usually begins at night," Haley said. "I would be awakened by a beam of light and taken aboard the spacecraft. I would be strapped down, and they would conduct medical exams, extract tissue samples and ova.
"I've seen transparent, suspended incubators containing infants that were half-human, half-alien. The grown aliens were off-white in color, had almond-shaped eyes, hairless and ear-less and had holes for a nose.
"They communicated telepathically to me, telling me they wouldn't hurt me, that they were working for the continued existence of our species. " No disbelievers were among the speakers invited to the conference, sponsored by Roswell's International UFO Museum & Research Center.
Possibly as a result, people such as Jennica Dumas, a 19-year-old college student from Tarrytown, N.Y., who arrived in Roswell a skeptic, are today not so sure. After a lecture on the history of alien abductions, Dumas said, "I'm afraid they may be true. " Since the first reported abduction in the early 1960s, the descriptions of the aliens seen by Americans have been similar to Haley's. Aliens are called "grays" and "modern grays," said Michael Lindeman, a futurist and editor of an Internet Web site called CNI - for Contact with Non-Human Intelligence.
Nearly all aliens have relayed messages urging world peace and nuclear nonproliferation, said Budd Hopkins, a hypnotherapist who specializes in treating people who believe they have been abducted.
He said that the aliens' pitches have uncannily reflected the moderate-liberal stance of New York Times editorials.
Dr. John Mack, 67, a Harvard psychiatrist and author of the 1994 bestseller Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, said he has heard similar details from 150 self-described abductees.
"What's convincing are the power and the conviction of the accounts," Mack said. "I don't claim to understand it. " Abductees, he said, generally see a bright light, become paralyzed, are "floated" out of their homes and into a craft, encounter human-like beings with big black eyes and hairless pear-shaped heads. The aliens have computers and seem to extract information from abductees, who undergo intrusive medical procedures - some on the brain, some to extract sperm from men and ova from women. Abductees sometimes see hybrid infants with big eyes, scraggly hair and small features.
"The aliens seem to have a hunger for us, and us for them. " Mack said. There is sexual contact, he said, but abductees report that it's "not that great. " Mack, 67, is a tall, charismatic man who won the Pulitzer Prize for Prince of Our Disorder, a 1977 biography of T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. Today, Mack is regarded as the champion of those who believe that they've been carried off by aliens only to face disbelief and ridicule upon their return.
"The implications are vast," he said to hearty applause from an audience of 450. "It shows we are not alone. And we are not the most intelligent beings in the universe. It changes our sense of who we are. " In 1994, Harvard colleagues became so upset by Mack's UFO work that the school conducted an investigation into his methods.
After a year, the medical school said it had urged Mack to be careful, in his enthusiasm, not to violate high standards of clinical conduct. But it said he could use his academic freedom to study people who believe they've been abducted by aliens. His tenure was not affected.
The stories of the "abductees" have convinced few other scholars.
Charles Ziegler, an anthropologist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., said that the similarity in the descriptions of aliens is not surprising, considering the popularity of science fiction TV series and films. Others believe that more than 10 percent of the population is prone to fantasy that goes beyond daydreaming.
But why are people having these experiences?
While lying in bed, have you ever felt as if you were falling or that someone was standing nearby?
That's a hypnagogic, or waking, dream, which some scholars say accounts not only for many of the alien stories but, in other cultures and times, for reports of angels, trolls, leprechauns and fairies, said Elizabeth Bird, a cultural anthropologist at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
The fact that most of the abductions occur after a person has gone to bed appears to point to a waking dream, Bird said, citing a 1987 article by psychologist Robert Baker, a professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky.
But Paul Diekmeyer, 51, a Cincinnati jeweler, insists that his abduction did happen. He was one of several who responded to a reporter's call for abductees after Mack's lecture. "I felt like I knew them for my whole life. They were not like strangers. I haven't told anyone until today. " He said his abduction occurred while he was in bed, but not asleep.
Communion, a best-selling book by Whitley Strieber, recounts an incident in which aliens threatened his family and tried to set his roof afire. Afterward, Strieber went back to sleep, Baker noted.
`If something so dramatic happened in real life, you would take action," Bird said. "Those who have these experiences never do.
"And, after a while, they have invested so much emotionally in their abduction experiences, that, if they were proven false, the result could be devastating.
