Although the flowing water and other substances may have placental/umbilical relevance, these creatures’ anatomy and connections with elemental forces make them qualitatively distinct from the other six types. They can properly be placed in a seventh entity category.
There are a few elemental creatures in TV cartoons, comics, and folklore, but as far as I know they are not described in CE-3s. Perhaps there are too few elementals in contemporary sources, or their differences from other entity types are too subtle, to serve as models.
Other entity types: Although this seventh entity type can be considered the exception that proves the CE-3 six-category rule, additional kinds of entities are certainly conceivable. From time to time imaginative authors have proposed unusual creatures that would not be classifiable under the six CE-3 categories.
In astronomer Fred Hoyle’s novel, The Black Cloud, a vast intelligent cloud “lives” in interstellar space, with a molecular heart, a brain, and other necessary organs. It feeds on stellar energy and its central nervous system functions via radio waves.
Astrophysicist Ronald Bracewell has imagined “intelligent scum,” an enormous collective cellular civilization that thinks and acts as a single entity and controls its environment through a kind of evolutionary specialization.
Equally bizarre is astronomer Frank Drake’s fictionalized neutron-star life form: microscopic, macronucleic creatures weighing tons each and living out their accelerated lives on a 100-million-degree world in fractions of a second.
Philosopher Wilfred Desan describes a creature extended indefinitely in both space and time, making it quasi-infinite and immortal, and since there would be no other of its kind it would be a biological singularity.
These examples are fanciful, but one can infer that the infinitely resourceful universe could produce a greatly more varied range of alien entity types than scientists, writers, and CE-3 witnesses have conjectured.
Must ETs look like us? Considered opinion is divided on whether or not aliens would resemble Earthly life forms. Some exobiologists and SF writers believe that ETs would share many qualities with us. They point out that eons of evolutionary survival have shaped human anatomical and physiological makeup, and many characteristics seem too useful and widespread among other living creatures not to be essential. They conclude that aliens might not look much different from the rest of Earth life.
Let us speculate that alien lifeforms would be more efficient if they were not in a collective, but physically independent from others of their kind—though they could be linked mentally. If made of living tissue they would have to eat, they could get sick, be injured, or die. It is difficult to imagine a hitech space-traveler without something like a sizeable brain, several senses, and mobility. The brain needs protection, and the major sense organs should have short nerve pathways for efficiency; so something like eyes, ears, nose, and a mouth should be in that something like a skull covering the alien’s brain. Bilateral symmetry gives human beings survival-oriented 3-D vision and stereophonic hearing, though maybe those are not essential. But an upright stance could place an alien’s limb—with something like hands bearing something like fingers—within convenient distance of its eyes for manipulating food, weapons, and tools. The being would be neither a giant (too ponderous) nor microbe-sized (too few brain cells). It would have to be able to communicate. Telepathy would be the best mode, but speech is efficient too. And aliens almost certainly would be sexual creatures.
An ET space traveler could use traits such as curiosity, intellection, high skills, flexibility, imagination, and a value system with enough altruism to delay tangible rewards; and maybe an emotional nature that helps make existence fun or otherwise worthwhile. If their purpose is to observe Earthlings longitudinally, they need the capacity to feel joy and/or despair.
But other writers have warned against Earth chauvinism, the assumption that conditions for life elsewhere must be generally Earthlike: carbon-based, of moderate temperature, with available water, oxygen, and so on. They reason that different geophysical conditions could create living forms far different from any that have ever existed on Earth. A truly alien being might be something we cannot yet easily imagine, the likeness of which is not in our folklore or systems of traditional belief.
Again, consider the longterm effects of technology. If the dinosaurs had evolved into a smart reptile, it might have been an upright biped, verbal, sexy, and with tool-making hands—more than a little like us. But what would the surviving dinosaurs look like today, after a hundred million years of evolution and hi-tech genetic innovations? We are on the verge of modifying our human genome by seeking super babies with higher IQs, more attractive physiques, and better health. Even if an alien race started out as humanlike, after a few hundred millennia of super technology a species could evolve itself into unimaginable modes that CE-3 witnesses might perceive, but which would be unclassifiable within traditional Earthly life forms.
If aliens ever really come here and are like Travis Walton’s fetal humanoids or the Garden Grove exotics, they will leave physical traces and their presence will be provable. In the absence of physical evidence, CE-3s would gain more credibility if even a few abductees told us of a new category of entities, things without the familiar connections to folklore, myth, and tradition; things believable yet strictly alien to Earthly experience. Regrettably for true believers, no such CE-3 aliens have yet been described.
—ALVIN H. LAWSON
References
Bowen, Charles, ed. The Humanoids (Henry Regnery, 1969).
Bullard, T.E. UFO Abductions: Measure of a Mystery (Fund for UFO Research, 1987).
Fowler, Raymond E. The Andreasson Affair (Prentice-Hall, 1979; Bantam Books, 1980; Wild Flower Press, 1994).
Hopkins, Budd. Missing Time (Richard Marek, 1981).
________. Intruders (Random House, 1987; Ballantine, 1988). Jacobs, David M. Secret Life (Simon & Schuster, 1992).
Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia (Henry Regnery, 1969; Neville Spearman, 1970).
alien types Since the late 1960s, a few UFO researchers have tried valiantly to establish a typology of creatures said to be of an extraterrestrial nature. But so great is the variety of alien lifeforms reported in UFO incidents (critics like to point out that there are as many types of aliens as there are people who report them) that classification systems have generally failed to cover the entire range of alien types, or take into account the dozens of small differences among the reported entities.
To address this problem, and to counter the notion popularized by the media that the “Grays” are the only “real” aliens, this writer developed an alien classification system based strictly on phenotype (or the observable physical characteristics) of the aliens reported in UFO incidents. This classification system has been detailed (with some 50 sample cases, which are fully illustrated) in my book: The Field Guide to Extraterrestrials (Avon, 1996).
I found that just about all the “aliens” seen during the past century could be categorized as belonging to one of four broad classes.
The first class, the Humanoid, describes beings with an essentially human shape: a head, torso, two arms, and two legs. The second class, the Animalian, refers to entities that are far more animal in appearance than human. The third class, Robotic, describes those that look distinctly mechanical. About 95 percent of alien reports fall into these three classes. The other 5 percent can be lumped together into a catch-all category that, for want of a better term, I call Exotic.
I then divided each of these four classes of aliens into a variety of distinct types. Among the Humanoid, the first and the most recognizable are what I call Human simply because they look so much like us that it would be impossible to tell “them” from “us” on any busy metropolitan street corner.
The second type are the Short Grays, which thanks to Hollywood, if not the aliens themselves, are the preeminent alien type reported today. But since many short humanoid aliens do not in any way resemble Grays, e
ither because of their extreme hairiness, green skin tone, or bulky spacesuit, I created a separate type called Short Non-Grays.
Rounding out the Humanoid class are two other types, the Giants, for those entities that stand 8-to 15-feet tall, and the Non-Classic, for those that do not fit into any other humanoid type—like the odd being with pointed ears and mummy-like skin seen in Pascagoula, Mississippi in 1973.
The second major class of beings, the Animalian, consist of entities as different as Bigfoot, swamp creatures, goblins, and fairy-like aliens. For the names of the five Animalian alien types—Mammalian, Reptilian, Amphibian, Insectoid, and Avian—I simply drew upon their resemblance to either hairy mammals, reptiles, amphibians, insects, or birds.
I found that all Robotic aliens could fit comfortably into one of two types. Either the robots appear to be entirely “Metallic,” and are so named, or a part of them, like their appendages, resemble flesh and are therefore called “Fleshy” Robots. Likewise, I divided the Exotic class of aliens into two types: the “Physical” Exotics, which resemble the classic blobs of science fiction, and the “Apparitional” Exotics, which are at least partially transparent or ghost-like in nature.
The Field Guide to Extraterrestrials was generally well received and is widely regarded as the standard reference on alien types.
—PATRICK HUYGHE
Allagash abductions This was a multiplewitness abduction that involved four art students, whose encounter occurred while on a camping trip in the state of Maine. The case involved identical twins, Jim and Jack Weiner, and their companions, Charlie Foltz and Chuck Rak, who were abducted from a canoe on the Allagash Waterway on August 26, 1976.
The investigation took place between January 1988 and mid-1993. It resulted in a 702-page (10-volume) report and a book entitled The Allagash Abductions written by Raymond E. Fowler and published by Wild Flower Press in 1993. The investigators of the case included: MUFON Director of Investigations, Ray Fowler; a physicist who specialized in UFO entity cases; a MUFON consultant in hypnosis; and consultants in the areas of polygraph and psychiatric testing.
The UFO encounter was initially reported to Ray Fowler by one of the percipients (Jim Weiner) during a UFO symposium at Waltham, Massachusetts, in May of 1988. Jim told Ray that he, his twin brother Jack, and two friends had a close encounter with a UFO while camping on the Allagash Waterway in a wilderness area of northern Maine. Concurrent with the encounter they had experienced a period of “missing time,” which had bothered them for years. Years later, Jim was referred to Ray Fowler by his personal physician during treatment at Both Israel Hospital in Boston. What follows is a synopsis of the abduction accounts and the subsequent investigation.
On Friday night, August 20, 1976, the four young art students (all in their twenties) left Boston, Massachusetts for a canoe and camping trip on the Allagash Waterway. Upon arrival at a staging area, they hired a pontoon airplane, which flew them and their canoes to Telos Lake on the Allagash River. During the next several days they canoed and camped along the waterway.
On the evening of Thursday, August 26th, they reached Eagle Lake, where they set up camp and later decided to go night fishing for trout in a canoe. The pitch darkness of the area necessitated the building of a huge bonfire to mark their campsite, so that they could find their way back. Shortly after beginning to fish, Chuck Rak became aware of a feeling that he was being “watched.” He said: “I turned toward the direction from where I felt this and saw a large bright sphere of colored light hovering motionless and soundless about 200-300 feet above the southeastern rim of the cove.”
Chuck yelled for the others to look behind them. There, rising above the trees was a huge oval glowing object. As their eyes became adapted to its intense brightness, a gyroscopic motion was noted as if there were pathways of energy flowing equatorially and longitudinally from pole to pole. This divided the sphere into four oscillating quadrants of bright colored light. The color changes were very liquid and enveloping, as if the entire object had a plasmatic motion to it, like a thick sauce does as it starts a rolling boil.
Charlie Folz grabbed a flashlight and blinked it on-and-off toward the object. Simultaneously, a tube-shaped beam of light erupted from the object and hit the water. A glowing ring with a dark center reflected on the water’s surface, indicating that the beam was low. The object and its extruding beam of light began moving toward the canoe. Terrified, the campers began paddling frantically toward their glowing bonfire and camp, as the beam swept across the water and engulfed them.
It was from this point on that the conscious memories of the four differed according to each of their vantage points.
The next thing Charlie remembered was paddling for shore and then standing at the campsite with the others, watching the object move away.
Chuck Rak remembers staying in the canoe after the others had piled out in panic onto the shore. Transfixed, still holding his idle paddle, he could not take his eyes off the object.
Jack and Jim were able to consciously remember a bit more about the tail end of the chase. Jack explained that “it was just behind us, and I could see that we were never going to outrun the beam. It was advancing too fast and I remember thinking ‘Holy Shit’! This is it! We’ll never get away.” The next thing I knew, we were on the shore getting out of the canoe looking directly at the object which was now about 20 or 30 feet above the water. The beam was still coming out of the bottom of it like the object was sitting on the beam. It hovered there, right in front of us, completely silent for what seemed like four or five minutes.
“Suddenly the beam was pointing up towards the sky. The object began to move up and away from us towards the southwestern sky and then shot into the stars and was gone in just a second.”
Jim Weiner added: “There was no mistake that the beam was coming directly to us. Then I remember standing on the lake-shore watching the object hovering above the lake 50 to 75 yards in front of us…. Then the search beam went upward into the sky and we saw it moving away at a tremendous speed. We all seemed to be in a state of shock…. We just stood there unable to move or talk.”
The object left with a step-like motion. It would suddenly implode into nothing and than appear further in the sky and then repeat this strange flight path before streaking out of sight.
When the strange anesthetizing effect wore off, Chuck got out of the canoe and joined the others as they trudged dreamily up the beach to their camp. Even in this state, they were dumbfounded when they realized what had happened to the huge bonfire that had just been blazing a seeming several minutes ago.
“‘When we left to go fishing,” said Jim, “we set very large logs on the fire to burn for a good 2 to 3 hours. The entire experience seemed to last, at the most, 15 or 20 minutes. Yet the fire was completely burned down to red coals.”
At that time, they had no memory of what happened during the time it took for their huge bon fire to burn down. This remained a puzzle to them for years.
Several years after the Allagash incident, Jim suffered a head injury, which caused tempero-limbic epilepsy. During treatment, Jim began to have nightmares about he and his camping companions being nude and in a strange place with bug-eyed humanoids around him. He also awoke at night to see strange creatures around his bed. Sometimes he felt as he were being levitated from bed; and other times after being overcome with paralysis, he felt something was being done to his genitals. Jim’s doctor noticed that he was overtired and asked him what was the matter. Jim refused to tell him at first but when the doctor told him that it was affecting his medical treatment, Jim confessed to what was happening to him. He also told the Doctor about his prior “missing time” experience on the Allagash waterway. Jim’s physician was familiar with the abduction phenomenon and advised him to contact a UFO researcher. At that time Jim was reluctant to do so. However, later the doctor saw a newspaper story about Ray Fowler lecturing at a symposium in the area in May of 1988. He phoned Jim and convinced him to attend the lecture
and talk to Ray about the UFO experience.
In January of 1989, Ray Fowler initiated a formal investigation with MUFON UFO entity specialist and physicist David Webb and MUFON hypnosis consultant Anthony (Tony) Constantino. The investigation was conducted in a careful and meticulous manner over a period exceeding two years. After the four witnesses completed and signed MUFON UFO-sighting forms, they were interrogated. Their stories were cross-checked for consistency and a character check was performed to check their credibility.
It was obvious that the period of missing time had to be sandwiched between sighting the object and reaching shore. The beam of light engulfing the canoe seemed to be the dividing point between memory and amnesia. During the first of a long series of hypnosis sessions, it was decided to concentrate on this segment of the terrifying encounter.
Under hypnosis, all four witnesses relived detailed and traumatic UFO abduction experiences during the period of missing time. All were transferred from their canoe into the UFO by the hollow tube-like beam of light. On board, they encountered strange humanoid creatures that exerted some kind of mind control over them, so they could not resist their demands.
All four were made to take their clothes off and sit on a plastic-like bench in a misty area illuminated by diffuse white light. After looking at their eyes and in their mouths with a pencil-sized rod with a light on its tip, the entities placed them in a harness and flexed their arms and legs. Then, one by one they were made to lie on a table where each was examined by a number of strange handheld and larger machinelike instruments that were lowered over their bodies. During this segment of the examinations, the entities removed samples of saliva, skin scrapings, blood, feces, urine, and sperm from each of the abductees.
The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters Page 11
