187 lines
9.6 KiB
Plaintext
187 lines
9.6 KiB
Plaintext
![]() |
|
||
|
SUBJECT: CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE CHILLING KIND FILE: UFO2380
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
PART 6
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
From the Dallas Morning News
|
||
|
Wednesday, March 2, 1994
|
||
|
Today - Section C
|
||
|
|
||
|
ABDUCTED BY ALIENS? LIST GROWS
|
||
|
|
||
|
By Nicole Brodeur (Orange County Register)
|
||
|
|
||
|
This is a hard story for C.C. Peters to tell.
|
||
|
She drains her coffee cup a third time, lights a cigarette.
|
||
|
The smoke comes first, then the words.
|
||
|
"When I was 7 years old, I had this dream..." Ms. Peters stops
|
||
|
and levels a look across the kitchen table. "That's what I was told; that
|
||
|
it was a dream," she says. "That's what I believed at the time."
|
||
|
Now, 26 years later, the housewife believes something else: She
|
||
|
was abducted by aliens.
|
||
|
They came to her home in New Jersey, she says. Three of them,
|
||
|
each just over 3 feet tall, appeared at the base of her bed and asked-
|
||
|
telepathically-to play with her toys.
|
||
|
She remembers feeling woozy, then hearing a crunching sound, "like
|
||
|
someone taking a bite out of an apple," and feeling a sharp pain in her
|
||
|
nose.
|
||
|
She remembers floating: out of her bedroom window, over trees in her
|
||
|
front yard and into a round room, where she saw her mother lying on a
|
||
|
floating table, being examined by aliens.
|
||
|
She remembers an alien - a scientist of some sort - taking her into
|
||
|
another room, where "hybrid babies" sat like shoes in boxes in three rows
|
||
|
against the wall.
|
||
|
Finally, she was taken into a room filled with blinding white
|
||
|
light, where she encountered a feminine entity who exuded overwhelming
|
||
|
wisdom.
|
||
|
The next morning, Ms. Peters says, she awoke with leaves and twigs
|
||
|
in her bed. To this day, she believes she ripped them from the treetops as
|
||
|
she passed over them - evidence of her journey.
|
||
|
It's an incredible tale, but a familiar one to the people in the
|
||
|
abductee community, as active and organized as any PTA and growing all the
|
||
|
time.
|
||
|
"Definitely growing," says Debbie Kenna, a Fullerton, California,
|
||
|
hypnotherapist with 75 clients who believe they were abducted. "As more
|
||
|
comes out, people are beginning to educate themselves and become aware
|
||
|
of the possibility of abduction.
|
||
|
"Before, they may have thought they were going crazy."
|
||
|
At monthly support groups, people meet to talk about their
|
||
|
abductions. They also attend conferences and workshops to gather information
|
||
|
on the phenomenon. And the Psynetics Foundation in Anaheim, California,
|
||
|
hosts regular "abductee night," when stories are shared and discussed.
|
||
|
Abductees are all kinds of people. Professional and poor. Vocal
|
||
|
and silent. Believers and debunkers, and those who will wonder all their
|
||
|
lives.
|
||
|
"Abductees always seem to be simple, innocent people who have had
|
||
|
no prior interest in the subject," Ms. Kenna says. "Abduction is like an
|
||
|
awakening; a massive consciousness shift."
|
||
|
For Ms. Peters (not her real name), though, the abduction has meant
|
||
|
upheavals in an otherwise normal life: The daughter of well-to-do, loving
|
||
|
parents, she attended private schools and spent her summers in Europe. Now
|
||
|
33, she lives witrh her husband and young son in a sprawling home overlooking
|
||
|
Marbella Country Club in San Juan Capistrano, California.
|
||
|
"I know all this sounds crazy," Ms. Peters says again. "I know
|
||
|
it. And I keep wondering, `Why me? I'm just a housewife!'"
|
||
|
Most psychiatrists - as well as noted scientist Carl Sagan - believe
|
||
|
alleged abductions are simple hallucinations, bouts of fitful slumber when
|
||
|
a person is thrashing about in bed, half awake but still dreaming of lights
|
||
|
and almond-eyed beings.
|
||
|
"People can be absolutely convinced that aliens are kidnapping
|
||
|
them," says Dr. Robert Baker, professor emeritus of psychology of the
|
||
|
University of Kentucky. "It's an old science-fiction theme."
|
||
|
But Harvard University psychologist Dr. John Mack disagrees. Dr.
|
||
|
Mack, founder of the psychiatry department at Cambridge (Mass.) Hospital and
|
||
|
winner of a 1977 Pulitzer Prize for his psychoanalytic biography of T. E.
|
||
|
Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), has investigated almost 70 alleged abductions
|
||
|
and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews and treatment.
|
||
|
"When memories come back like that, I never have any question that
|
||
|
people are describing something that has authentically happened to them,"
|
||
|
he told the Boston Globe in 1992. "No one has been able to come up with a
|
||
|
counterformulation that explains what's going on."
|
||
|
The number of people who think they've been abducted is hard to
|
||
|
gauge.
|
||
|
However, a 1992 Roper poll of nearly 6,000 U.S. adults showed that
|
||
|
lots of people believe they've had alien encouters. The poll was funded by
|
||
|
Las Vegas developer Robert Bigelow and comissioned by a group of people who
|
||
|
believe in alien abduction, including author Budd Hopkins and Temple
|
||
|
University professor Dr. David Jacobs.
|
||
|
The questionnaire contained queries as benign as "Have you
|
||
|
experienced self-esteem problems?" and as off-the-wall as "Has someone in
|
||
|
your life claimed to have witnessed a ship or alien near you or witnessed
|
||
|
you being gone?"
|
||
|
The conclusion: Two percent of all Americans believe they have
|
||
|
been abducted, many repeatedly, by beings from another world.
|
||
|
Impossible, says Dr. William Cone, a Newport Beach, California,
|
||
|
psychologist who specializes in treating alleged abduction cases.
|
||
|
"There is no data. But I really, honestly think it's very few
|
||
|
people."
|
||
|
A former marriage and family couselor, Dr. Cone developed an
|
||
|
interest in alien abductions after reading Whitley Strieber's "Communion,"
|
||
|
a 1987 best seller that brought the idea of alien abduction into the
|
||
|
mainstream.
|
||
|
"This wasn't my game plan, to spend my career on the fringe," Dr.
|
||
|
Cone says with a smile. "But if you think you've been abducted, you come
|
||
|
to me."
|
||
|
|
||
|
HORRIBLE EXPERIENCES
|
||
|
|
||
|
Abductees compare their experiences to that of rape victims: taken
|
||
|
against their will, undressed and examined by strangers, then returned to
|
||
|
their lives shaken, scared and dysfunctional. Many suffer post-traumatic
|
||
|
stress, sleep and sexual problems, and have trouble maintaining jobs or
|
||
|
relationships.
|
||
|
"There's no self-help book for abductees," Dr. Cone says. "I just
|
||
|
try to make the experience a piece of their life, rather than their whole
|
||
|
life. I de-stress them, give them coping skills and help them to function
|
||
|
as humans again."
|
||
|
Some clients are children, as young as age 4, who tell Dr. Cone of
|
||
|
their trips aboard spacecraft with "snowmen," "doctors," and "little
|
||
|
friends" hovering around them.
|
||
|
"The parents are completely freaked out," Dr. Cone says.
|
||
|
Does he believe their stories?
|
||
|
"I don't disbelieve anything. I'm interested in paranormal
|
||
|
experiences, but I have no way of verifying their stories."
|
||
|
The abductees' stories are intriguing in their similarity.
|
||
|
The most common symptom is missing time - one to several hours
|
||
|
when they cannot account for their whereabouts.
|
||
|
Abductees also suffer from sleep paralysis, a condition in which
|
||
|
they remember being awake in bed but unable to move. Some feel heavy weight
|
||
|
on their chests, as if something is sitting on them.
|
||
|
Once paralyzed, abductees see aliens - about 3 feet tall, with
|
||
|
almond-shaped eyes and gray bodies - before them.
|
||
|
The aliens take the abductees from their homes or cars and lead
|
||
|
them aboard a spacecraft, put them on a table in a round room and subject
|
||
|
them to what appear to be medical procedures.
|
||
|
"At times, these `examinations' are very painful," Dr. Cone says.
|
||
|
"Some people have also reported other humans involved in their abductions,
|
||
|
some in military uniforms."
|
||
|
Russ Estes - a San Diego-based producer who, with Dr. Cone, has
|
||
|
interviewed at least 100 abductees for a documentary on the phenomenon - says
|
||
|
the similarities of the stories were "absolutely astounding."
|
||
|
"Granted, the media has brought a heck of a lot of information to
|
||
|
the public, but even the smallest details are highly similar," Mr. Estes
|
||
|
says.
|
||
|
Does he believe them?
|
||
|
"Tough question," Mr. Estes says. "I don't disbelieve them. Most
|
||
|
people have no reason to lie. And why would they subject themselves to
|
||
|
ridicule?"
|
||
|
|
||
|
JUST DAYDREAMS
|
||
|
|
||
|
Dr. Baker, of the University of Kentucky's department of psychology,
|
||
|
believes abduction stories are "a false belief or delusion."
|
||
|
"These are hoaxes!" he bellows in a recent telephone interview.
|
||
|
"Every one of these things that (abductees) take as evidence of something
|
||
|
strange going on, of aliens abducting 3 to 4 million people annually...every
|
||
|
one of the things they argue can easily be explained with a simple
|
||
|
understanding of human psychology.
|
||
|
"We all daydream," he says. "We read a page when we are tired and
|
||
|
can't remember a thing we have read."
|
||
|
Sleep paralysis is common too. "When you're half awake and half
|
||
|
asleep and see, for example, balls of light coming at you from the walls.
|
||
|
These people aren't crazy, because the paralysis is real," Dr. Baker says.
|
||
|
What about scars and scoop marks abductees bear as proof of their
|
||
|
experience?
|
||
|
"Those can be done at night by fingernails and toenails," he says.
|
||
|
"We do that to ourselves all the time. In no way do we have any physical
|
||
|
evidence that it can be established and agreed upon by competent scientists
|
||
|
that we have ever had any visitations by extraterrestials," he says.
|
||
|
All of which means nothing to the members of the Out There Group,
|
||
|
a gathering of 24 alleged abductees ages 10 to 56. They meet every month
|
||
|
in the Mission Viejo, California, home of hypnotherapist Jane Lake.
|
||
|
Some abductees enjoy the experience, Ms. Lake says.
|
||
|
"They feel they are doing something for humanity, contracting with
|
||
|
the extraterrestrials to help us all."
|
||
|
|
||
|
[DISTRIBUTED BY KNIGHT-RIDDER TRIBUNE NEWS WIRE]
|
||
|
|
||
|
--End Of File--
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
**********************************************
|
||
|
* THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo *
|
||
|
**********************************************
|