The Mtstery Chronicles

by Joe Nickell

  When I was nineteen I had my first OBE. ... I should say here that, to my knowledge, all my hundreds of OBEs throughout the years have been conscious ones, meaning that they’ve all occurred in the state just before sleep, where I am fully conscious and aware of the paralysis, the vibrations that occur, and of the actual separation. ... On the night of March 15, 1989,1 went to bed and fell asleep normally. Sometime during the night I awakened to find myself softly bumping against the ceiling, already separated from the physical. ... I felt myself being turned around. 1 “saw” a being standing in the middle of the open room, approximately fifteen feet away. A telepathic voice asked if 1 was afraid.

  The woman then goes on to describe a stereotypical alien (73-74).

  Such “telepathic” voices—which are often part of a waking dream —are, of course, the person’s own. Even abduction guru David Jacobs admits that reports of telepathic communication with aliens may be nothing more than confabulation (the tendency of ordinary people to confuse fact with fantasy [Baker and Nickell 1992, 217]). Says Jacobs, “Abductees sometimes slip into a ‘channeling’ mode—in which the abductee ‘hears’ messages from his own mind and thinks they are coming from outside sources—and the researcher fails to catch it” (Jacobs 1998, 56).

  No fewer than 18 letters in the Strieber collection describe one or more OBEs, or such related phenomena as “astral travel” or floating or flying dreams. The relationship between OBEs and sleep paralysis is demonstrated by a percipient who had “the strangest type of dream” up to three times a week. He would awaken to hear crackling noises followed by a loud boom, “at which point,” he says, “I would immediately go into paralysis. Then I would slowly begin to float toward my ceiling, unable to move a limb” ( Strieber and Strieber 1997, 130).

  In a few instances the “abductee” is not in bed when the (apparent) waking dream occurs. He or she may be watching television, riding in a car, or—as in the case of one woman—sitting with her child in a rocking chair. “We must have rocked for twenty minutes, and I was actually becoming drowsy. My eyes were closed. Then an odd thing happened: I got a vision of three ‘grays’ standing in front of the rocking chair. It was as if I could see through my eyelids” (17). The salient point is that the waking dream may occur virtually anywhere, as long as the person is in the state between waking and sleeping.

  In fact, the subject may have experiences similar to those in waking dreams when he or she is simply exhausted; that is, suffering from mental or physical fatigue (Baker 1992, 273). Such might be the explanation for eight of the reports, like that of one woman who told the Striebers:

  I was going home from work [i.e., presumably tired], and in the middle of the Seventh Avenue subway rush hour crowd I saw a little man about four feet tall. He had a huge head, but it was the quality of his skin that first caught my attention. It didn’t look like human skin, but more like plastic or rubber. I knew he wasn’t human. I tried to follow him with my eyes, but he quickly got lost in the crowd. No one else seemed to notice. This disturbed me; J thought I was seeing things [emphasis added].

  This person also had “recurrent dreams” of “spaceships hovering over the Hudson River and the Palisades. These dreams were always very vivid and powerful” (207).

  Other accounts in The Communion Letters clearly indicate ordinary dreaming, nightmares, “lucid” dreams (vivid dreams that occur when one is fully asleep), and the like—in all, reports by some 22 letter writers. At least four reports almost certainly involved somnambulism (walking or performing other activities while asleep). The letters also reported “near-death experiences” (two writers) and hypnosis (another two instances). A majority of the narratives contain more than one phenomenon, but in all at least 59 of the 67 letters consist of one or more instances of probable sleep-related phenomena such as those discussed thus far. (In addition, there were such reported conditions as migraines, panic attacks, posttraumatic stress disorder, and even schizophrenia—one example of each. As many as eight people had a number of the traits associated with what is termed “fantasy proneness.”)

  Lest it be thought that the eight remaining letters are reports of genuine abductions, 1 consider three to be extremely doubtful, raising more questions than they answer and even containing internal inconsistencies or outright contradictions. Of the other five, two are reports of nothing more than unexplained knocking sounds and three consist merely of rather typical UFO sightings (two possibly weather balloons), with one writer specifically stating, “I do not believe that an abductee experience is in my recent history” (180).

  Strieber’s correspondents have, of course, read his books, Communion, Transformation, and Breakthrough, and they clearly have been influenced by them. Indeed, one writer’s experience with “the visitors”— an alleged abduction—“happened the night after I finished your last book, Breakthrough” (Strieber and Strieber 1997, 144)! Another, who has “had plenty of UFO experiences,” wrote: “I couldn’t get the picture of the being on the Communion cover out of my head” (134-35). A woman stated: “When I saw the cover of Communion I felt compelled to buy it. When I began to read it, I felt nauseated, burst into tears, was shaking, and was elated. Most books don’t elicit this reaction in me as I read the first few chapters” (148). A policeman wrote: “Frankly the books scare the hell out of me. I did not sleep well for weeks following Communion. I again feel very restless after reading Breakthrough. I cannot explain this. Tell me I am imagining things” (122). Obviously, such correspondents are quite impressionable, to say the least.

  Many who wrote did so in response to similar events reported by Strieber. Significantly, Strieber’s own abduction claims began with his having a waking dream! According to psychologist Robert A. Baker (1987, 157):

  In Strieber’s Communion is a classic, textbook description of a hypnopompic hallucination, complete with the awakening from a sound sleep, the strong sense of reality and of being awake, the paralysis (due to the fact that the body’s neural circuits keep our muscles relaxed and help preserve our sleep), and the encounter with strange beings. Following the encounter, instead of jumping out of bed and going in search of the strangers he has seen, Strieber typically goes back to sleep. He even reports that the burglar alarm was still working—proof again that the intruders were mental rather than physical. Strieber also reports an occasion when he awakes and believes that the roof of his house is on fire and that the aliens are threatening his family. Yet his only response to this was to go peacefully back to sleep. Again, clear evidence of a hypnopompic dream. Strieber, of course, is convinced of the reality of these experiences. This too is expected. If he was not convinced of their reality, then the experience would not be hypnopompic or hallucinatory.

  Why some people’s waking dreams relate to extraterrestrials and others to different entities depends on the person’s expectations, which in turn are influenced by various cultural and psychological factors. Thus, given different contexts, a waking dream involving a shadowy image and sleep paralysis may be variously reported: someone sleeping in a “haunted” manor house describes a ghostly figure and is “paralyzed with fear”; another, undergoing a religious transformation, perceives an angel and is “transfixed with awe”; yet another, having read Communion, sees an extraterrestrial being and feels “strapped to an examining table.”

  Many of the communicants in The Communion Letters even show a willingness to reinterpret their original experiences in light of what they have since read in Strieber’s books. This transformational tendency seems quite strong. One woman, for example, who had “imaginary playmates” as a child in the 1940s, now reports to Strieber: “The beings that I saw looked like the ones in your book” (Strieber and Strieber 1997,93). Another, who saw an entity during an obvious waking dream, reported that her first reaction after reading Communion “was to wonder if, in fact, what I recalled was all that had taken place the night of my experience” (119). Still another, a man who would sometimes “wake up with little gray people around me,�
� admitted: “I never associated them with UFOs. As soon as I’d open my eyes, they’d all run away, right through the walls!” (134). Now that he has read Communion, he believes he was “manipulated” into buying it. This same person also had a “memory” that “came in the form of a vivid dream” and that involved himself, Strieber, and the aliens. “When I awoke,” he reported, “I felt as if you had been looking at me intently” (136). In The Threat, David Jacobs even tries to convince his readers that they should revise their perceptions of their experiences. He suggests that their “ghost” or “guardian angel” experiences should be considered possible alien encounters, and that they may therefore be “unaware abductees” (Jacobs 1998, 120).

  It is distressing that such simple phenomena as waking dreams, sleep paralysis, and out-of-body hallucinations can be transformed into “close encounters.” The mechanism is what psychologists call contagion—the spreading of an idea, behavior, or belief from person to person by means of suggestion (Baker and Nickell 1992, 101). Examples of contagion are the Salem witch hysteria of 1692-1693; the spiritualist craze of the nineteenth century; the UFO furor that began in 1947; and, of course, its sequel, today’s alien-encounter delusion, the dissemination of which is aided by the mass media.

  Perhaps we should not be surprised that those who are hyping belief in extraterrestrial abductions ignore or underestimate the psychological factors. Strieber, for example, is a fiction writer, and Budd Hopkins, who helped boost public interest with his 1981 book Missing Time, is an artist. However, one would think that history professor David Jacobs would profit from the mistakes of the past and not help repeat them. Even more curious is the involvement of clinical psychologist Edith Fiore (1989) and psychiatrist John Mack (1994). Both confess, though, that they are less interested in the truth or falsity of a given claim than in what the individual believes happened, and the resulting significance to therapy and, in the case of Mack, to “the larger culture” (Mack 1994, 382; see also Fiore 1989, 333-34; Jacobs 1998, 48-55).

  All of these abduction promoters have books to offer. Let the buyer beware.

  REFERENCES

  Baker, Robert A. 1987. The aliens among us: Hypnotic regression revisited. Skeptical Inquirer 12, no. 2: 147-62.

  ————. 1992. Hidden Memories: Voices and Visions from Within. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.

  Baker, Robert A., and Joe Nickell. 1992. Missing Pieces: How to Investigate Ghosts, UFOs, Psychics, and Other Mysteries. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.

  Drever, James. 1971. A Dictionary of Psychology. Baltimore: Penguin Books.

  Fiore, Edith. 1989. Encounters: A Psychologist Reveals Case Studies of Abductions by Extraterrestrials. New York: Doubleday.

  Jacobs, David. 1998. The Threat. New York: Simon & Schuster.

  Mack, John. 1994. Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. New York: Scribners.

  Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.

  ————. 1997. A study of fantasy proneness in the thirteen cases of alleged encounters in John Mack’s Abduction. In The UFO Invasion, edited by Kendrick Frazier, Barry Karr, and Joe Nickell. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.

  Strieber, Whitley. 1987. Communion: A True Story. New York: William Morrow.

  Strieber, Whitley, and Ann Strieber. 1997. The Communion Letters. New York: HarperPrism.

  26

  “Visitations”

  After-Death Contacts

  Those who suffer the loss of a loved one may experience such anguish and emptiness that they are unable to let go, and they may come to believe that they have had some contact with the deceased. “It’s commonly reported that the deceased person has communicated in some way,” says Judith Skretny, vice-president of the Life Transitions Center, “either by giving a sign or causing things to happen with no rational explanation.” She adds, “It’s equally common for people to wake in the middle of the night, lying in bed, or even to walk into a room and think they see their husband or child” (quoted in Voell 2001). These experiences are sometimes called visitations (Voell 2001), and they include deathbed visitations (Wills-Brandon 2000).

  During more than 30 years of paranormal investigation, I have encountered countless claims of such direct contacts (as opposed to those supposedly made through spiritualist mediums [Nickell 2001a; 2001b]),

  I have also occasionally been interviewed on the subject—most recently in response to some books promoting contact claims (Voell 2001). Here is a look at the evidence regarding purported signs, dream contacts, apparitions, and deathbed visions.

  “Signs”

  In her co-authored book Childlight: How Children Reach Out to Their Parents from the Beyond, Donna Theisen relates a personal contact she believes she received from her only son, Michael, who was killed in an auto accident a month before. She was browsing in a gift shop when she noticed a display of dollhouse furnishings. Nearby, on a small hutch, were a pair of tiny cups that were touching, one bearing the name “Michael,” the other the words “I love you, Mom.” Although at the time a “strange, warm feeling” came over her, she was later to wonder: “Was I merely finding what I so desperately wanted to see? Was I making mystical connections out of ordinary circumstances?”

  However, the fact that those two cups were displayed together, out of the dozens of others sold there, convinced Theisen that the incident “defied the odds.” Soon she “began looking for more strange occurrences” so as to confirm that the cups incident was “a real sign.” Her book chronicles them and the experiences of other grieving parents (40 of 41 of them mothers). One, whose son was killed by a train, was wondering whether to give her son’s friend some of his baseball equipment when she heard a train whistle blow; she accepted this as an affirmation. Others received signs in the form of a rainbow, television and telephone glitches, the arrival and sudden departure of pigeons, a moved angel doll, and other occurrences (Theisen and Matera 2001).

  To explain such signs or “meaningful coincidences” (conjunctions of events that seem imbued with mystical significance), psychologist Carl Jung (1960) theorized that—in addition to the usual cause-and-effect relationship of events—there is an “acausal connecting principle.” He termed this synchronicity. However, in The Psychology of Super the mystery chroniclesstition, Gustav Jahoda (1970, 118) suggests there may often be causal links of which we are simply unaware.

  Even in instances in which there may in fact be no latent causal connections, other factors could apply. One is the problem of overestimating how rare an occurrence really is. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez (1965) told how, while reading a newspaper, he came across a phrase that triggered certain associations and left him thinking of a long-forgotten youthful acquaintance; just minutes afterward, he came across that person’s obituary. On reflection, Alvarez assessed the factors involved, worked out a formula to determine the unlikeliness of such an event, and concluded that 3,000 similar experiences could be expected each year in the United States, or approximately 10 per day. Synchronous events involving family and friends would be proportionately more common.

  A related problem is what psychologist Ruma Falk (1981-1982) terms “a selection fallacy” that occurs with anecdotal events as contrasted with scientifically selected ones. As he explains:

  Instead of starting by drawing a random sample and then testing for the occurrence of a rare event, we select rare events that happened and find ourselves marveling at their nonrandomness. This is like the archer who first shoots an arrow and then draws the target circle around it.

  Some occurrences that are interpreted as signs probably have mundane explanations. Although unexplained, they are not unexplain-able. For example, the mother of a severely handicapped little boy reported that on the morning of his funeral, she awoke to see a small, glowing red light on the dresser where his baby monitor had been. It was in fact a tiny lantern on her keychain. “It had never been turned on before,” she said. “In fact, I didn�
��t even know it worked! The moment 1 touched the light, it went out.” This happened for several subsequent mornings (Theisen and Matera 2001, 192). How do we explain such a mystery? One possibility is that the light was not turned on at all, but only appeared to be lit as sunlight reflected off its red cover; when it was picked up, the illusion was dispelled.

  Photographic “signs,” which are also becoming common, may be easily explained. I recall a Massachusetts woman approaching me after a lecture to show me some “ghost” photographs. I immediately recognized the white shapes in the pictures as resulting from the camera’s flash bouncing off the stray wrist strap—a phenomenon I had previously investigated and replicated (Nickell 1996). In fact, in one snapshot, the strap’s adjustment slide was even recognizable, silhouetted in white. But the lady would not hear my explanation; instead, she took back the pictures and stated defiantly that her father had recently died and had been communicating with the family in a variety of strange ways.

  In addition to numerous glitches caused by camera, film, and other factors, photographs may also exhibit simulacra, random shapes that are interpreted, like inkblots, as recognizable figures (such as a profile of Jesus seen in the foliage of a vine-covered tree [Nickell 1993, 34-41]). These can easily become visitation signs, as in the case of a photo snapped from a moving vehicle at the site of a young man’s auto-accident death. “When this photo was developed,” the victim’s mother wrote, “the tree branches formed a startling figure that looked just like Greg wearing his hat. In addition, there appeared to be an angel looking out toward the road.” She added, “we all viewed this photo as more evidence of Greg’s ongoing existence” (Theisen and Matera 2001, 47).