The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters

by Story, Ronald

  Whatever the answers to these speculations, the key to the human part of the UFO equation might be related to the mechanism and role of the contactee’s or abductee’s dissociation and relationship to other trancelike and psychopathological states, multiple personality disorder, gifted paragnosia, idiot savants, and genius.

  The complexity of the UFO phenomenon—considered from both human and extraterrestrial standpoints—raises momentous questions. Naturally, it would be desirable to know as much as possible about such a powerful force that can influence matter, alter our mental states, affect our health and behavior; and even thought it cannot be measured, this force can inspire, frighten, cause terror, lead to fanaticism, invention, creativity, and discovery.

  Perhaps what could be learned might be turned to constructive use, or perhaps the various manifestations and the social complications of the UFO experience suggest that, if what is known were more widely disseminated, it could have a disintegrative effect on society. If man’s basic mental mechanisms (e.g., denial, dissociation, projection, and so forth) fail to protect him, there could be individual and collective epidemics of chaos.

  —BERTHOLD E. SCHWARZ

  Psychosocial aspects of UFOs A psychosocial approach to the UFO phenomenon is one which asks: Are ostensible UFO events the physical happenings they seem to be? Or, do they originate in the psychology of the individual and take their shape from social factors ?

  There is no single psychosocial hypothesis to which all who adopt such an approach subscribe; there are probably as many variants as there are people proposing such an approach. What they have in common is a belief that a typical UFO-related event should not necessarily be taken to be what the experiencer claims (or believes) it to be, particularly when—as is the case with most, if not all such experiences—there are no independent witnesses and no convincing supporting evidence. Rather, it may well be a fantasy created subconsciously by the wit ness: a fantasy shaped and conditioned by their prevailing cultural milieu.

  For example, in the case of someone who claims to have been abducted by extraterrestrial aliens, a psychosocial view might be that he/she is subconsciously projecting his/her subjective preoccupations as an imagined objective event. The abduction scenario is chosen because it enables one to externalize their state not only outside oneself but outside humankind, and because extraterrestrial intervention has become the “authorized myth” of our time, which has generally replaced the demons, deities, and magicians who fulfilled the role in former times.

  The source material used to construct the fantasy may be of many kinds. Apart from the general climate generated by mankind’s first ventures into space, the influence of sciencefiction books and movies has been demonstrated by such commentators as Bertrand Méheust, Martin Kottmeyer, and Nigel Watson: virtually every feature of the post-1947 flying saucer phenomenon can be matched with parallels in the American sciencefiction pulps of the 1920s and 1930s.

  Alvin Lawson has suggested birth trauma: the abduction experience resembles the birth experience in several ways apart from the resemblance of the widely perceived “Gray” aliens to the human fetus. Hilary Evans has shown parallels with other types of entity experiences: religious visions, ghosts, spirits, and demons. Dennis Stillings looks to Jungian archetypes as a conditioning force. Jung himself perceived as early as 1958 that “flying saucers” were archetypal visions that represented “a modern myth of things seen in the skies,” though he could not foresee how rich and complex that myth was to become in the years that followed his death in 1961.

  In a typical psychosocial scenario, the subconscious mind confabulates such materials into a personal story in much the same way that our dreaming mind draws together elements from all kinds of sources to create our dreams. The result is a narrative that can often be coherent and plausible, rich in appropriate detail, convincing many that the event was physically real and took place as claimed.

  Few proponents of the psychosocial approach believe that the experiences are “all in the mind”: often the experience will be triggered by a physical event. This event may be genuinely mysterious: more frequently, though, as has been demonstrated by Randles, Hendry, and Monnerie among others, a banal event, such as an airplane with landing lights, an advertising airship, or the moon, can lead to an extravagant fantasy.

  The most sustained expression of the psychosocial approach has come from the small but highly influential British journal Magonia, which even in its earlier incarnation as the Merseyside UFO Bulletin cast a cold eye on face-value explanations and found them wanting. Currently edited by John Rimmer, whose The Evidence for Alien Abductions (1984) is an intelligent appraisal of the extraterrestrial and psychosocial alternatives, its staff and contributors have consistently invited readers to consider the psychosocial alternative to the extraterrestrial hypothesis.

  In the U.S., Dennis Stillings’ seminal 1989 collective Cyberbiological Studies of the Imaginal Component in the UFO Contact Experience provided a forum for those who felt there was no need to look beyond Earth for an explanation of the phenomenon.

  European UFOlogists have also published some excellent material representing the psychosocial: Thierry Pinvidic’s massive 1993 collective OVNI, subtitled “Towards the Anthropology of a Contemporary Myth,” brought together many psychosocially-inclined viewpoints. In Australia, Mark Moravec has made valuable contributions related to the interplay of psychological and cultural factors, such as the destabilizing effect of immigration.

  Few of those who favor the psychosocial approach regard it as the answer to every puzzle that has arisen in the UFO context. It is evidently not an explanation for those events which are better explained as secret manmade devices or for purely understood natural phenomena. But it is probably fair to say that its proponents see it as the preferred explanation in all cases where others look to an extraterrestrial explanation.

  This viewpoint received strong experimental support when California professor Alvin Lawson, with his colleague McCall, conducted the “imaginary abductee” experiment that demonstrated the ability of ordinary people to fabricate complex experiences. Though virulently attacked by dissenting UFOlogists, this experiment simply demonstrated, in a UFOabduction context, processes well enough known to psychologists.

  Another important dimension drawn from psychology has been the suggestion that UFO witnesses and abductees are “fantasy prone” personalities. Though Bartholomew and Basterfield were unsuccessful in their attempts to show that abductees conformed to the classic fantasy-proneness mold, their thesis received convincing support from the research of Kenneth Ring who established that UFO witnesses show a psychological profile that is not entirely typical, leading him to postulate that there is a class of people who are “encounter prone.” The inference is that UFO incidents and abductions are more likely to be experienced by some people than by others, which in turn suggests a psychological origin for the experience.

  The weakness of the psychosocial approach is that it relates to human behavior, an area of study in which it is difficult to obtain consensus views. The behavioral sciences still remain largely uncharted, and their findings are often controversial. Consequently, the debate largely consists of speculation and a balancing of probabilities.

  Some of the evidence points either way: for example, the fact that currently fashionable themes such as ecology and resource abuse recurs frequently in claimed messages from aliens could be because the aliens really are concerned with such matters, or because witnesses are projecting their own preoccupations into an external framework. The fact that one abduction case will resemble another in close detail has been seen by some, such as folklorist Thomas Eddie Bullard, as evidence that they are physically real; but it is equally possible that the similarity derives from unconscious imitation, or even from the fact that all witnesses are drawing on the same pool of archetypal imagery.

  Particularly significant are those cases where it has been demonstrated that the claimed event did not physical
ly take place. Some abductees, notably Maureen Puddy in Australia, have been seen not to be abducted when they claimed to be so. However, such cases are rare, for the abduction witness is generally isolated and unobserved, and while it is all-but-impossible for them to prove that their experience is real, it is equally difficult for the critic to prove it is not. So, although the psychosocial approach can occasionally be proved valid in individual cases, there may be no way to establish its overall validity.

  In the end, it comes down to a question of probability. Each of us must make up our own mind which is more likely: that humankind is under threat from abducting aliens, as investigators such as David Jacobs suggest, or that a collective mythmaking process is at work, fuelled by psychological and social factors.

  —HILARY EVANS

  Q

  Quarouble (France) encounter One of the best-known sightings of UFO occupants in France took place near Valenciennes on the night of September 10, 1954. It was such a strange incident that it received international press notice.

  Marius Dewilde, thirty-four years old at the time, was a metalworker in the Blanc-Misseron steel mills on the Belgian frontier. He lived with his family in a small home in the midst of fields and woods about a mile from Quarouble. His garden was adjacent to the National Coal Mines railway track running from Blanc-Misseron to St. Armand-les Eaux, and grade crossing 79 was next to his house.

  On the night in question, Dewilde was reading after his wife and children had retired. It was 10:30 P.M. when he heard his dog Kiki barking, and thinking there was a prowler in the vicinity of his property, he took a flashlight and went outside.

  Dewilde walked to his garden, found nothing en route, then spotted a dark mass on the railroad tracks less than 6 yards from his door. He thought at first that someone had left a farm cart there. At that point his dog approached, crawling on her belly and whining, and simultaneously he heard hurried footsteps to the right of him. The dog began barking again and Dewilde directed his flashlight toward the sound of the footsteps.

  What Dewilde saw startled him greatly. Less than 3 or 4 yards away, beyond the fence, were two creatures, walking in single file toward the dark mass at the tracks. Both creatures were dressed in suits similar to those of divers, and light was reflected off glass or metal in the area of their heads. Both entities were small, less than 3 ½ feet tall, but had very wide shoulders. The legs looked very short in proportion to the height of the little “men,” and Dewilde could not make out any arms.

  After the first fright passed, Dewilde rushed to the gate, intending to cut them off from the path or to grapple with one of them. When he was about 6 feet from them, he was blinded by a very powerful light somewhat like a magnesium flare which came from a square opening in the dark mass on the tracks. He closed his eyes and tried to scream but couldn’t, and he felt paralyzed. He tried to move but his legs would not function.

  Shortly, Dewilde heard the sound of steps at this garden gate, and the two creatures seemed to be going toward the railroad. The beam of light finally went out and he recovered the use of this legs and headed for the track. But the dark object had begun to rise, hovering lightly, and Dewilde saw a kind of door closing. A low whistling sound accompanied a thick dark steam which issued from the bottom of the object. The object ascended vertically to about 100 feet altitude, turned east, and when it was some distance away it took on a reddish glow. A minute later it was completely out of sight.

  After he regained his senses, Dewilde woke his wife and a neighbor, told them of this experience, then ran to the police station in the village of Onnaing, a mile distant. He was so upset and his speech so confused that the police thought he was a lunatic and dismissed him. From there he went to the office of the police commissioner where he told his story to Commissioner Gouchet.

  Dewilde’s fear was so evident that Gouchet realized something extraordinary must have taken place, and the next morning his report brought investigators from the Air Police and the Department of Territorial Security. These teams, along with police investigators, questioned Dewilde and then examined the area where the dark object had rested. They found no footprints in the area, but the ground was very hard. However, they did find five places on three of the wooden ties which had identical impressions, each about 1 ½ inches square. The marks were fresh and sharply cut, indicating that the wooden ties had been subjected to very great pressure at those five points.

  The impressions were never satisfactorily explained, but railroad engineers who were consulted by the investigators, calculated that the amount of pressure required to make the marks was approximately thirty tons.

  An examination of the gravel of the roadbed showed that at the site of the alleged landing the stones were brittle as if calcined at very high temperature.

  Lastly, several residents in the area reported that they had seen a reddish object or glow moving tin the sky at about the time Dewilde indicated that the object had left.

  —CORAL & JIM LORENZEN

  References

  Lorenzen, Coral and Jim. Flying Saucer Occupants (Signet/NAL, 1967).

  ———. Encounters with UFO Occupants (Berkley Medallion Books, 1976).

  R

  Randle, Kevin D. (b. 1949). Born in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Kevin Randle received his undergraduate degree from the University of Iowa and has done graduate work at the University of Iowa, California Coast University, and the American Military University. He has earned a Masters Degree and Doctorate in psychology and a Master of Military Science.

  Kevin Randle

  Randle is a former U.S. Army Helicopter pilot who served in Vietnam, and a former Air Force intelligence officer who rose to the rank of captain. He was at one time a field investigator for APRO, and a special investigator of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies.

  He has published more than fifty magazine articles, and more than a dozen books about UFOs. His 1991 book, UFO Crash at Roswell was made into the Showtime original film, “Roswell.” His work on alien abductions, along with that of Russell Estes and Dr. William P. Cone, has suggested important new information on the topic. In addition, Randle has written more than eighty novels including several science fiction books. (His pseudonyms include: Eric Helm, Cat Brannigan, James Butler Bonham, and B.R. Strong.)

  Address:

  P.O. Box 264

  Marion, IA 52302

  U.S.A.

  E-mail:

  krandle993@aol.com

  POSITION STATEMENT: I believe that we have been visited by extraterrestrial creatures. I base that conclusion on my research into the Roswell UFO crash, my interviews with the men and women involved on that case, and the limited documentation available.

  That said, I must add that I believe that the visitations have been extremely rare. Most of the information circling in the UFO field today has little factual base. Many of the subsets of UFOlogy, crop circles, cattle mutilations, MJ-12, the Allende Letters, and half a dozen other areas, have little or no legitimate basis. They are made of hoaxes, lies, misidentifications, fabrications, and anonymous and useless documents. By eliminating these, we begin to see the real picture.

  One subset of the UFO field, alien abductions, is extremely dangerous. Although I don’t believe that alien abduction is real, I do believe that those claiming abduction are sincere people who truly believe what they say. The answer to the problem does not lie with alien spacecraft, but with the researchers, therapists, and investigators, as well as human psychology. We can answer all the questions without the need of alien intervention.

  The bottom line is that I accept little of what has been said in the UFO field. Although I now believe that we have been visited, that does not require me to accept all of the ancillary areas of UFO research. Once we reduce the noise, we will find the answers.

  —KEVIN D. RANDLE

  Randles, Jenny (b. 1951). Jenny Randles joined the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA) in 1969 and became a council member in 1975. She served as Director of Investigations (l981-
1994) and created the democratic, one person one vote, National Investigations Committee as a team of loosely integrated UFO investigators. During her tenure she was a driving force behind the implementation of a “Code of Practice” to govern ethical behaviour for UFOlogists (l982). There was also a BUFORA ban, still in force, on the use of regression hypnosis (l988) and she wrote and then administrated a six-month postal training course for new investigators (l990). From l989 to date Jenny has continued to write and record BUFORA’s “UFO Call”—a weekly news and information service available to all telephone subscribers in the U.K.

  Jenny Randles

  Randles worked closely with the British Flying Saucer Review, serving behind the scenes under editor Charles Bowen. Since leaving FSR she has worked closely as British representative for the J Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) and contributes regularly to the International UFO Reporter as British consultant. Since l974 she has edited the magazine Northern UFO News —making her one of the world’s longest running editors to still publish the same UFO journal. Jenny has been a member of the paranormal research group NARO (Northern Anomalies Research Organization), formerly known as MUFORA, and also worked closely with ASSAP, the Society for Psychical Research and Fortean Times. For over 20 years she has handled UFO cases referred to her by the world famous astronomy and science centre at Jodrell Bank.

  In l978 Jenny became a professional researcher, funding her own work through writing. She has since published articles in many prestigious sources, including The London Times and New Scientist. Her 42 books have covered a wide range of paranormal topics but 26 have been about UFOs. Editions have appeared in 26 countries and over one million copies have been sold. Library lending figures regularly place Jenny amongst the most loaned authors in the U.K.