BARBARA:
The Story of a UFO Investigator
by Barbara Bartholic
As told to Peggy Fie1ding
An original publication of AWOC.COM, P O Box 2819, Denton, TX 76202
Copyright © 2003, Peggy Fielding, All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
ISBN: 0-9707507-7-3
Revised: March 2004
DEDICATION
For Bob Bartholic, who has allowed me to be who I am.
FOREWORD
When I was a kid growing up in the Ozarks, I lay in mountain meadows gazing up into the stars. I challenged my mind to probe the edges of infinity, a concept I still find impossible to comprehend. It seemed unlikely that there wouldn’t be something out there other than God. Intelligent life, surely, with an urge as powerful as mine to contact others in the universe. I sometimes pleaded, when very young. for little beings to come down, land, and let me take a look at them. I was disappointed that none ever did.
Skeptics are likely to view with suspicion those among us who believe they have had correspondence with aliens. Who have been abducted, experimented on, taken for flights, or used rather like lab animals by superior intelligences. To the skeptical, what someone believes or, worse yet, feels must come subordinate to what he can see, touch, taste, smell and submit to the scientific rule. The vast majority of UFO sightings and abductions simply cannot pass this test.
However, like Barbara, I became a hypno-investigator. I learned hypnotism while on the police department to use as an aid to jogging the memories of witnesses. Having also possessed a long-time fascination with reincarnation and psychic phenomena. I was soon experimenting with willing subjects in the areas of pre-natal regression and previous life experiences. Although my evidence might not be liable to the scientific rule in any real sense. I soon came to believe in what the renowned psychic Edgar Cayce called “the startling possibility of reincarnation.”
Some things you simply have to submit to raw logic without supporting evidence. Therefore, when it comes to UFO sightings, aliens and other related matters. I resort to what I call the “grain of sand” argument.
Walk out onto a long stretch of sandy beach. How many individual grains of sand can you see? Trillions upon trillions. Pick up a single grain, look it over, drop it. Do you think you could ever find it again? More significantly, do you think the entire beach exists for the sole benefit of that one grain of sand?
Change the elements of the argument so that the one grain of sand becomes the earth. The beach becomes the universe of stars and planets. Are we humans SO presumptuous as to believe that the entire universe, infinity itself, was created solely for the benefit of this single grain of sand we call Earth?
Charles W. Sasser, best-selling author of over 50 non-fiction books and novels.
INTRODUCTION
In the early 1980’s I had just returned from 21 years of living in countries outside the United States. Newly divorced, still mourning the lost marriage, and finding myself a stranger in my own country, I set about trying to make up a new life.
I resolved to accept any invitation which came my way simply because I desperately needed friends, as well as a way of making a living, and I certainly needed something to focus upon outside of myself.
A man whom I had only talked with a few times, invited me to a dinner party at his house. I accepted, of course. At his townhouse I found him still in the throes of preparing the meal. No other person graced his living-dining room space.
Oh, darn, I thought, or maybe it was, Oh, shoot. After all, I am an Okie. It was certainly one of those epithets. Anyway, I thought, most uncharitably as it turned out, that I’d been lured to his lair with promises of food, talk and friends and I’d been offered none of those things. I was sure I would get the food.
After all, he was madly chopping and slicing and stir-frying just about a foot or so away from where I perched on one of his barstools. I’d been a wife for 21 years so I didn’t quite know how I would handle what I was sure would be offered me after the dinner.
Well, John D, let this stand as a public apology for my inner “darns” and “shoots.” I answered the door because you had your hands full and I ushered two couples through the narrow hall to the long table you’d set up and in moments we were all sitting down to eat. Your promises, John, were fulfilled. All those folks became my friends. The beautiful, tall, blonde woman was the kicker, though. I, who had always been a thoroughly unregenerate heterosexual female, could not take my eyes off the woman at the other end of the table. I wanted her to talk and I wanted everyone else to shut up.
As it happened, that woman was Barbara Bartholic and she had my undying attention. I worried a little about myself but not much. I had always been so man crazy. What was it about this woman that attracted me so? I learned over the following years, that I was only one of a throng of people who felt the same way. It wasn’t a sexual thing at all. It was just that Barbara Bartholic was Big, Beautiful and Beguiling and we all wanted to hear her tinkling laughter as well as her soft, slightly off center speech.
I tend to be straightforward and direct so during the meal I tried putting the woman through the third degree but she slithered right out of my clutches quite nicely, thank you. She threw out fascinating tidbits but never answered any of my pointed questions. She told me later that she was frightened to talk of her work to people she didn’t know because she was afraid they “wouldn’t understand.” In other words she didn’t want to be called crazy anymore if she could help it.
Our journey toward this book began that night. I have spent many days, weeks, months since then without Barbara’s company because I became deeply involved in Tulsa’s writers’ community, and through my writing I’ve built myself a good life, but every once in awhile, I’d stop and wonder what was happening with my pal Barbara and when we met it was just as if we had never had those days, weeks, months of absence from each other. For a long time I congratulated myself that our relationship was a rare and special thing. Then I began to notice… everyone who came under Barbara’s spell believed that very same thing about his or her relationship with the woman. She has the magic of making the worst clods among us think we are special even if we see her and speak to her for only a moment.
That observation finally gave me some comprehension as to why the suffering abductees clung to her. And why each of them who consulted with her took away something from Barbara which Barbara gave them freely. (Some people may have donated something to her for her work, certainly I never saw any money changing hands.) She gave them ease and understanding and demanded nothing in return.
I have tried to follow Barbara’s story as closely as possible but interviews and tapes sometimes leave something out or include something that wasn’t really in, so I apologize in advance should there be any mistakes or foul-ups. I’ve known Barbara a long time and have attended many of her meetings. I have also taken suffering friends to her for regressions sessions, which were conducted without my presence, of course, so I tried to come as close as I could to Barbara’s true story. I take full responsibility for any glitches that may appear anywhere in her book. She always gave everything to her UFO search and her help for abductees.
That’s what she did for me, too, and I’m not even suffering. She tells me I’m probably an abductee myself but I won’t admit to that. And she doesn’t insist. Anyway, we’re still friends and this is her story.
Peggy Fielding
> May 2001
Chapter 1
SHOCK
I’d already been investigating UFO phenomena for a few years and had worked with a well-known European UFO scientist when I turned our family room and dining room into a meeting room. My husband, Bob Bartholic, and I began to host meetings in our home about once a month, sometimes oftener.
The people who attended were usually interested in UFOs or some other supernatural field. Usually I spoke, showed videos or introduced other speakers who’d agreed to enlighten us about their specialties.
One of our speakers had been a well-known teacher, hypnotherapist, Dr. Curtis Reeves, who’d traveled regularly across the country sharing his skill with medical doctors and osteopaths, teaching them the art of hypnosis as a useful tool in their treatment of patients. Dr. Reeves’ skill fascinated me and I begged him to teach me what he knew. He agreed.
I’d begun my work with him and had progressed to being able to hypnotize a person under his supervision. I really looked forward to the day that I could hypnotize and treat people who’d had UFO experiences. Regressing clients to relive their abduction experience was my goal. Letting people relive a traumatic experience was one way of helping them heal.
For the few years I’d been looking into UFO sightings, cattle mutilations and suspected abductions, I’d always tried to calm the fears and worries that sometimes overwhelmed my clients. I did that by reassuring them that the aliens meant them no harm. Of course, the aliens sometimes did things that frightened or angered my clients but I assured my friends that the intruders weren’t really bad, merely different from us.
During the meetings we held I always included the good news that the aliens appeared to be wishing us well, that they wanted only the best for us. Calm, interested, pleasant. That was always the face I endeavored to present to the gathered crowds.
At one of our monthly meetings in 1988, I was, just as usual, assuring the 26 people in attendance that the aliens meant us no harm.
“Of course, we suspect that the aliens are using us for experimentation but even so, most of us in the field agree that, in general, they mean well.” I laughed lightly and let my gaze move across the small audience. “They are going to make our world better it seems. Several people who...”
A man, a doctor from Dallas, shouted something. I looked at him. He was someone I had just met. He had come with an older person, a person also unknown to me. He looked to be in his early twenties, wearing jeans and what I thought to be an expensive cashmere sweater. His black hair stood on end because he’d just run his fingers through the curly mass. He took off his glasses and spoke again.
“Lady, you don’t know one damned thing about aliens.”
“And you do?” This kind of thing had never happened in our meetings before. I glanced at our visiting speaker. He nodded and stood.
“I know what happened to me. You want to hear about that?” The Texan was already out of his chair and moving toward me.
“Well, if Mr. R. will take over for me, you and I can step into one of the other rooms where we can talk privately.” I gestured toward my office and he followed me, a frown creasing his forehead. I couldn’t understand why this man was so set on disrupting our meeting but I intended to find out. A glance back at the visiting speaker moving to the front of the room assured me that our other truth seekers were in good hands.
Inside my office I turned to face the man who had interrupted my talk. My suspicion was that he wasn’t a skeptic come to make life miserable for us “crazies” as some in the community called us. (I did not want to use the word “crazies” in this context but my co-author insisted. She swears that every time she has heard anyone talking about UFOs or about people who have had any dealing with UFOs, she has heard the word crazies or loons or something equivalent to those words either muttered or spoken loudly.) More likely, I suspected, the man who had interrupted was an innocent who had had some unexplainable experience for which he wanted an explanation.
Hesitant at first, then excited at the idea, I decided that if he asked I would try to regress this man using my new and hard-earned hypnotic skills. Fear and something else fluttered in my chest. What could we discover together?
“Well...?” I looked at him questioningly. Let him do the talking I reminded myself.
Again he ran his fingers through his black hair. He turned slightly away as if he were hesitant to confide in me. He remained silent for long moments.
“Do you believe you’ve had some sort of UFO experience?” I asked. Maybe he’d need a bit of drawing out. “Have you had some missing time?” No answer. “Do you think you’ve been abducted?”
“Think! Think! I damn well know I have been.” Fingers through the hair again. “And it’s driving me crazy.” His haunted looking brown eyes turned toward me again. “I’m going nuts.”
This man was no troublemaker. He was in trouble and he needed help. My help.
“What would you like me to do for you?”
“For one thing I’d like you to tell the truth about those guys. They aren’t the guys in the white hats that you say they are. They’re bad news through and through.”
“You’re talking about aliens, UFO entities?”
“You bet your booties.”
I asked if he wanted me to try to hypnotically regress him to explore his experience. He rejected that idea out of hand.
“Why the hell would I want to relive what was the worst moment of my life?”
When I explained that he’d be comfortable and if not, he could be wakened at anytime, I must have said something that reassured him, because in minutes he was stretched out on a pallet I’d made out of the couch cushions and I plopped down to sit on the floor beside him. I’d checked the tape recorder and laid out paper and pencil. I pressed the record button on the machine and so we began our adventure together.
Much abbreviated, this is the story the young doctor began to relive; “My fiancée and I parked in a remote area. We both heard a noise and saw a strange light. We were so frightened that we drove off and arrived at home, still scared to death.”
In essence that is all he and the young woman had remembered afterward. During the rest of the regression session there in my office, he remembered much, much more.
I learned that his fiancée had been raped repeatedly by the “beings” who had abducted them. Those beings he described were clearly not the benign outer space scientists who had only the best in mind for our earth. But that wasn’t all.
Oh, no. To his horror, he had been strapped to a chair much like a reclining dental chair and subjected to repeated electric shock torture for the amusement of the gray aliens. He could hear their laughter every time his body jerked with an electric jolt. What the man from Texas described, then drew, on several different sheets of paper, during our regression session, almost tore me apart. His drawings, made under hypnosis, shook me to my core. Even though I had never seen the dreadful being he drew, the picture triggered both fear and recognition within me on some deep unconscious level.
I knew I was, at last, looking the enemy square in the face. I also knew that although I had never seen these alien creatures so far as I knew I must have done so. I could not recall any experience with such creatures. Even so, I could not sleep the entire night after our talk. My new client’s experiences had filled me with fear and recognition on some deep unconscious level. His recollections had traumatized me.
That moment is when I cracked the egg of all my preconceived notions of reality and UFO intruders. It was at that moment that I truly began to react fully in synch with my clients and with their experiences.
Chapter 2
THE BABY IN THE BUBBLE
The Missouri sky frothed. Clouds wrenched upward, then burst into horizontal columns as explosions of light dashed from one formation to the next. It was August, 1944.
This was a day just two months before 178,000 troops had pushed through the gray fog and landed on the coast of Europe, and one year be
fore the sky over Japan burst into atomic chaos. But here, now, for most of the people of St. Louis, the churning atmosphere meant nothing more threatening than rain.
If anyone had paused to take more than a brief glance at the heavens they might have seen that these clouds were different. Different from the thunderheads that precipitate the air mass thunderstorms, which are so common to the summer skies of the Midwest. If anyone did pause and study the phenomenon, they left no record of their observations.
In Kirkwood, Missouri, just a few miles from St. Louis, I was the five year old girl who stood in her yard and gazed up at the fast changing cumulus. I knew that the strange clouds were the sign that the strangers were coming.
“Um hum.” Better get ready, I thought. I giggled and ran inside, saying aloud to myself. “Dolly.”
My mother, busy with dinner preparations, turned, I suppose, just in time to see me disappearing down the hallway.
“Where’re you... ?”
“Attic.” I called over my shoulder. I was in a hurry. I didn’t want to have to explain. I was sure she knew I visited with those people sometimes.
“Well, slow down.” Mom turned back to her partially peeled potato.
In the attic, I knelt on the rough floor, I clutched the doll and focused my gaze on the empty space in front of me as I’d been taught by them. I focused and concentrated on what was occupying the void between me and the sloped ceiling of the attic.
“Hello,” I said.
I smiled and hugged my doll as I felt myself enveloped by the secure warmth. Like something was around me but I could still see through it. Like... like a bubble, I decided, not really a bubble, what enclosed me couldn’t be seen and even though I could see clearly from inside the space but I wasn’t sure I liked the feeling.
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