by Colin Wilson
Now, through John Mack’s book, I found out. Its opening paragraph made me aware that my ignorance was nothing to be ashamed about. In 1989, Mack had been asked by a psychiatrist friend if he would like to meet Budd Hopkins. Mack asked, ‘Who’s he?’ When told that Hopkins was a New York artist who tried to help people who believed they had been taken into spaceships, Mack replied that he must be crazy, and so must they.
But Mack is a reasonable, open-minded sort of person, and a few months later agreed to meet Hopkins. And he learnt, to his amazement, that all over America there are people who claim that they have been taken from their beds by little grey-skinned aliens with huge black eyes, transported aboard a UFO, and there subjected to medical examination, often painful and traumatic. Sometimes they suffer nosebleeds because a tiny ball has been inserted through the top of the sinus. Back in their own beds, they usually have no memory of what happened, or only some vague impression which they mistake for a bad dream. Under hypnosis, they could frequently recall the experience in great detail.
Mack’s natural suspicion was that their ‘memories’ of the abduction were somehow implanted by the ‘leading questions’ of the hypnotist. He also suspected that such people were neurotics who needed some drama to brighten their lives, and that they had probably derived their ideas about little grey aliens from TV, or books like Whitley Strieber’s Communion. But, when he met some of the abductees, he was struck by their normality; none of them seemed psychiatrically disturbed. Moreover, a large percentage of these people had no previous knowledge about abductees and little grey men (a claim I found easy to accept in view of my own ignorance about the whole phenomenon). There was an interesting sameness about their descriptions of the inside of the spacecraft, their captors, and what happened to them. Clearly, they were telling what they felt to be the truth.
When Hopkins suggested that he should refer cases from the Boston area to Mack, Mack agreed. Between spring 1990 and the publication of Abduction four years later, he had seen more than a hundred ‘abductees’, ranging in age from two to fifty-seven. They came from every group of society: students, housewives, secretaries, writers, business people, computer industry professionals, musicians, even psychologists.
A typical case concerned Catherine, a twenty-two-year-old music student and nightclub receptionist. One night in February 1991, she suddenly decided to go for a drive after working at the nightclub. When she arrived home, she was puzzled to discover that it was so late: about forty-five minutes seemed to be missing. She was also suffering from a nosebleed—the first in her life. The next day, she saw on television that a UFO had been seen in the Boston area. Someone recommended that she see John Mack.
After a number of hypnotic sessions, memories of abduction began spontaneously. She recalled that her first abduction had occurred when she was three, and another when she was seven. Finally, she recalled what had happened in the missing three-quarters of an hour. She had found herself driving into some woodland, where she experienced a kind of paralysis. She was taken out of her car by aliens, and guided into a UFO, where her abductors began to remove her clothes. When she asked them angrily why they didn’t go and rent a porn movie, they looked blank, and it dawned on her that they didn’t know what a porn movie was.
She was taken into an enormous room, with many tables, with human beings lying on them. She was made to lie on a table, and an instrument was inserted into her vagina. When it came out, there seemed to be a foetus on the end of it, about three months old. (Three months before, she had found herself driving along deserted roads in the middle of the night, and pulled in at a rest stop; although she had no further memory of what happened, she believes she may have been impregnated at this time.) Her experience would seem to support the statement by Herb Schirmer’s captors that the aliens are engaged in some kind of breeding experiment.
Her attitude towards the aliens was at this time one of rage, but, during the course of the sessions with Mack, she came to take a more balanced view, suspecting that the aliens may be ‘more advanced spiritually and emotionally than we are’. She finally became one of the most active members of Mack’s support group, reassuring others who found the abduction experience terrifying.
The Catherine case occurs about a third of the way through Mack’s book, and by that time I was beginning to suffer from information overload. There was also the obvious question of whether people like Catherine are suffering from ‘false-memory syndrome’ induced by the hypnosis.
Yet it was also clear that, even if this were so, the problem remains just as baffling. A poll conducted over three months by the Roper organisation in 1991 indicated that hundreds of thousands of Americans believed that they have undergone abduction experiences. If all these are false memories, then we have merely shifted the problem; it now becomes: why do such a vast number of people experience hallucinations about abduction?
The case that most fascinated me—and I finished the book between leaving Boston and arriving home in Cornwall twelve hours later—was that of a young man whom Mack calls Paul. Sessions with a female psychiatrist had been unsuccessful in resolving ‘weird’ problems, for she found herself unable to cope with the ‘alien’ material that was beginning to emerge. Once, during a session, he asked for some sign of the reality of his experiences, and a loud bang occurred, which frightened the psychiatrist. Later, at home, she experienced something like poltergeist phenomena; her bed had bounced up and down, as a result of which she had made some kind of attempt to exorcise the house of ‘evil spirits’. Presumably she was not sorry when Paul terminated the treatment.
At his last session with the psychiatrist, Paul had recalled an abduction when he was about three. The alien had come into his room and taken him by the hand into a ‘ship’. There he felt that something had been injected into his leg, causing numbness.
Paul also recalled how, at the age of six and a half, he had one night experienced ‘a familiar voice in his head’ telling him to go outside. On the porch, he saw the ‘ship’ overhead, huge and round, and brightly lit. Then he was joined by a group of aliens, all about the size of a six year-old child (although one was taller), with whom he felt at home. He was placed naked on a bench in the UFO, and examined. Later, one of the beings showed him the controls, and explained that ‘you’re from here’. He was taken to a ‘floating’ bed, which he was told was his own. In fact, the quarters felt oddly familiar, as if he had been there many times.
At this point in the hypnotic session, Paul seemed to break through an ‘information barrier’, and to recognise that he had a dual identity, as an alien and a human being. He came from another planet, and ‘there are a lot of us here’. Their purpose was to integrate with humans, but it was slow work. ‘Everyone here is so wrapped up in power’. The aliens, Paul said, had access to a higher form of consciousness. Yet, with all their intelligence, they could not understand why human beings are so destructive, and so resistant to change.
At one point, Paul remarked plaintively, ‘I want to go home’.
He went on to comment that the aliens had been to Earth thousands of years ago, and had made an earlier attempt to influence its life forms, in the days when the highest life forms were reptilian.
Like Catherine, Paul ended by becoming an active and valuable member of the abductee support group. Another member of this group told Mack that she believed she had met Paul on ‘the ships’, and Mack comments that such ‘recognition’ is common among abductees.
The case of Paul interested me more than any other I had read so far because it reminded me of Stan Grof’s experience with Flora. Both were apparently dual identities, although Paul’s ‘secondary personality’ was less menacing than Flora’s. It seemed to me that the most important thing they shared was that they could both be regarded, from a purely psychiatric point of view, as fascinating examples of dual personality and self-delusion, yet that there was something about both of them that resisted such an interpretation.
Flora’s childhood h
ad been traumatic: she became a criminal and a drug addict, and suffered feelings of guilt about her lesbianism. So a violently antisocial alter ego might well have developed on an unconscious level, which expressed itself as her ‘demonic’ personality. As to Paul, he admitted that he had his first glimpse of an alien—on the stairs—after smoking marijuana. Paul had also had a difficult childhood and been physically abused by his stepfather. He had always felt a misfit. So the fantasy of being ‘one of them’, an alien in disguise, charged with some mission on Earth, would obviously provide him with a satisfying sense of identity.
Yet, plausible as these explanations seem, both leave behind an element of doubt—particularly when viewed in the light of other similar cases. I had written extensively about multiple personality, and had at first accepted the standard notion that the ‘other selves’ are dissociated fragments of the total personality. But some cases described by psychiatrists like Adam Crabtree, Ralph Ellison, and (more recently) David Cohen had refused to fit the pattern, and reluctantly led me to conclude that ‘spirit possession’ must be considered a possibility. And, where Paul is concerned, Mack himself notes how many abductees feel that they themselves are part alien, and belong elsewhere than on Earth.
I had bought the book mainly to find out what John Mack had to say about UFOs; by the time I had finished, I was convinced that, whether abductions are a delusion or not, they demand to be taken very seriously.
Now I have to admit that, before encountering Mack’s book, I had always found it difficult to work up any deep interest in Unidentified Flying Objects. The first widely publicised sighting had occurred two days before my sixteenth birthday. On 24 June 1947, a businessman named Kenneth Arnold had been piloting his private plane near Mount Rainier in Washington State, when a brilliant flash had drawn his attention to nine ‘bright objects’ flying at a tremendous speed—he estimated it at 1,700 miles an hour—and bobbing up and down as they flew, like boats on a rough sea. Arnold concluded that they were some secret weapon of the US Air Force. When he later told a journalist that the craft had bobbed up and down ‘like a saucer being skipped over water’, the term flying saucer was born.
The news unleashed a flood of sightings—no fewer than eighty-eight on Independence Day, 4 July 1947, alone—four hundred people spread across twenty-four states. And four days later, the commander at the Roswell army base announced that a flying saucer had been found and recovered from a ranch seventy-five miles away—only to take back the statement almost immediately. By that time, there were reports from England, Chile, Italy, Japan, and Holland—the Chile sighting was made at the De Salto Observatory, where astronomers estimated that the saucer was travelling at 3,000 miles an hour.
All this failed to arouse my interest. In a few days’ time I was due to leave school, and my family expected me to find a job and contribute to the household budget. Since I had failed to achieve a credit in mathematics, I would be unable to apply for a job with Imperial Chemicals, where I had hoped to begin a career as a scientist. That meant I had to take some kind of a labouring job in a factory.
But that was not all that dragged on my spirits at the age of sixteen. For the past three years, I had been burdened by a feeling that life is meaningless and futile. It had started one day in the clay-modelling class, when we had started a discussion on where the universe ended. If you could travel in some spaceship to the end of the galaxies, how far would empty space extend? For ever and ever? I had read Einstein, and the assertion that space is spherical, and curves back on itself, but the notion that space—which is merely another name for emptiness—is curved struck me as absurd. Yet the idea of infinity seems equally absurd. We talk about infinity, but we never actually think about what it means—something that goes on forever, totally contradicting our idea of a world where everything has an ending.
As we talked, I began to feel a horrible sense of insecurity. I had always lived in a good, solid world, a world of my parents and my grandparents and my home and school. There were unanswered questions, but science was busy looking for the answers . . . And suddenly, I was confronting a question that had no answer. It was as if the ground beneath my feet had collapsed. I left the class that day with a sense of dizziness, and a deep-seated fear, as if some terrible disaster had occurred. It was suddenly horribly clear to me that the apparently solid, normal world around us was a very thin facade, and that what lay behind it might be very disquieting indeed. We had no idea of who we were or where we came from or where we were going.
I had no way of knowing at the time, but this insight was just about the ideal preparation for looking into the problem of UFOs.
From that point, my universe went on crumbling; new cracks appeared all the time. I could see that the pleasant securities of childhood, all of those warm little human emotions, all of those trivial aims and purposes that we allow to rule our lives, were an illusion. We were like sheep munching grass, unaware that the butcher’s lorry is already on its way. I got used to living with a deep, underlying feeling of uncertainty that no one around me seemed to share. It was rather like living on death row.
Even so, periods of intense depression were interrupted by flashes of the feeling I called—after a phrase of G. K. Chesterton—‘absurd good news’. It often happened early on a summer morning, when I set out on a long cycle ride, with a bag of sandwiches and a bottle of lemonade in a knapsack: the feeling that the world was infinitely rich, and that the problem lay in the limitedness of consciousness itself. In this state, the feeling that all our human values are illusions seemed unimportant, for our values are part of our ordinary state of consciousness. And these moments seem to offer the possibility of a far richer form of consciousness. Even in my states of deepest depression, I could recognise that depression is merely another name for low pressure, and that our inner pressure depends, to a large extent, on our assumptions. If we wake up feeling today is going to be futile, it probably will be.
These, it seemed to me, are the really interesting questions: how we could raise the intensity of consciousness, how we could cease to be what Nietzsche called ‘human, all too human’. It seemed obvious that the feeling of happiness and expectation is a state of mind, which has nothing to do with the actual circumstances of our lives. You could feel it as easily in a rubbish tip as standing on top of Mount Everest. In that case the great riddle lay inside us, not in what happens around us.
All of which explains why I was totally uninterested in news items about flying saucers. If they were visitors from another planet, no doubt they would finally make themselves known. But I could not really believe that they were Martians or Venusians. And, to tell the truth, I didn’t care much.
I felt rather the same when my grandmother had talked to me about spiritualism. As a child, I had taken an interest in ghosts and spirits; now they seemed absurdly unimportant in comparison with this question about the meaning of human existence.
A few years later, when I read George Adamski’s claims that he had been taken to Venus in a flying saucer, I was confirmed in my belief that people who believe in flying saucers must be idiots.
In due course, events caused me to broaden my perspective. In the late 1960s, I was asked to write a book about the paranormal. As soon as I began to look into such matters as telepathy, precognition, second sight, out-of-the-body experiences, it became obvious to me that they cannot be shrugged off as delusions. I remained convinced that most people are interested in the paranormal for the wrong reasons—out of a kind of escapism—but felt nevertheless that the evidence for ghosts or poltergeists or precognition is as strong as the evidence for atoms and electrons.
Towards the end of The Occult, I felt obliged to include a section on flying saucers—merely for the sake of completeness. I discussed Kenneth Arnold’s sighting and the crash of Captain Thomas Mantell’s plane when chasing a UFO in January 1958. Then I went on to discuss a case that, in retrospect, I now see to have far more significance than I realised at the time.
A Californian friend, Richard Roberts, told me the story of a Dutch yogic practitioner named Jack Schwarz, who was able to lie on a bed of long sharp nails, with a heavy man sitting on top of him. The nails would sink deep into his body, yet the wounds would not bleed, and Schwarz obviously suffered no discomfort.
In 1958, Schwarz had been the welfare officer on a Dutch ship going through the Suez Canal. The troops were being entertained by a magician. Suddenly, a tall, thin Arab approached Schwarz, announced, ‘You are my master’, and kissed his feet. Then he walked away. Schwarz tried to follow him, but he had disappeared, and the watch at the gangway had not seen him.
A year later, as he was leaving a lecture in Los Angeles, a small man approached Schwarz and said he wanted to talk to him. In spite of his wife’s misgivings, Schwarz got into his car. The man kissed his hand, then reminded Schwarz that he had once kissed his feet and called him his master. Schwarz was baffled; this little man bore no resemblance to the lanky Arab. But the man—apparently reading his mind—said, ‘We can appear in any shape we desire’—and explained that ‘we come from a tribe of people who crash-landed in a rocket ship on Earth thousands of years ago’. He then told Schwarz that he was bringing him a message from his master in Nepal. The message was that ‘You should now begin teaching the spiritual truth that is being given to you inspirationally. You are God’s vehicle to bring the truth that is meant to be’. Promising to be in touch, the little man let him out of the car.
A few years later, Schwarz began receiving telepathic messages about his ‘mission’. And a woman patient spoke in a metallic voice, telling Schwarz that he was from Pluto and that he—the voice—was from Venus. The Venusian, who called himself Linus, went into technical detail about the ‘gaseous’ inhabitants of Venus, which was completely beyond the intellectual capacity of the woman patient (who was amazed when the tape was played back). Two months later, Linus again spoke to Schwarz through the mouth of another patient. And a psychic girl in Vancouver told him that she had travelled astrally to Venus the previous night, and that she had seen him there in company with Linus.
