SUBJECT: THE DEVIANT UFONAUTS FILE: UFO3271 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS 11.THE DEVIANT UFONAUTS Most records of close encounters speak either of tall, fair, blue-eyed UFO occupants or of the small, bug-eyed abductors famous for staring chillingly out from the dust jacket of Whitley Strieber's best-sellers, but there also exists a set of often puzzling minority reports of yet other alien entities. Whether we explain this variety of beings as visitors from other planets in the far reaches of the universe, as infiltrators from parallel realities co-existent with terrestrial space or as paranormally induced vagaries in human perception, they are reliably reported and require consideration. 114 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS One of the most bizarre, and yet carrying in some strange way its own peculiar credibility, is the Kelly-Hopkinsville sighting of 21/22 August 1955, of which Allen Hynek, who studied it closely, remarked that "it seems clearly preposterous, even to offend common sense", but he also added drily that the latter "has not proved a sure guide in the past history of science." (Hynek 1972) The case is a classic and fully documented, but there are a few details worthy of particular note. First, that the UFO connection is clearly established, though playing little part in subsequent events, as the trigger, though only on the report of a single member of the Sutton family. Second, the characteristics of these hardy dwellers in remote Kentucky are important: they had no telephone, radio, television or books, and certainly therefore no preconceived ideas about UFOs or their 115 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS occupants. Their reaction to the approach of a small "glowing" man with very large eyes and his arms extended over his head was quite typical of the isolated rural farmer - they shot him, or at least they tried to shoot him and did indeed score a hit from twenty feet. There was a sound, described as "just like I'd shot into a bucket", the visitor did a quick flip over and ran back into the darkness. If the entity had intended his 'hands up' posture as a sign of non-aggression, that was not how the Suttons interpreted it. As representatives of our species in the encounter, this must be one test the Suttons failed. More creatures then appeared and also demonstrated their invulnerability to flying Kentucky lead, to the dismay of the family. They locked themselves in their farmhouse and watched the little people peeking in at them through the windows. After three hours of besieged bewilderment, all eleven 116 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS family members piled into two cars and made a dash for town, returning with a police escort. No ufonauts could then be found, but they returned when the police left. These events were very carefully investigated by Bud Ledwith, a technician and former employee of Hynek, who obtained sketches independently from all the witnesses. They stuck stubbornly to their story, despite the inevitable ridicule which local publicity soon evoked. About a year later they also confirmed it to Isabel L.Davis of New York, described by Hynek as "one of the most sincere and dedicated UFO investigators I have met." Seven adults and four children gave totally compatible accounts of the strange visitation. Though we can only speculate what reason these creatures might have had for appearing thus to this group of sturdy but unimaginative agriculturalists, it is 117 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS quite incredible that they either would or could have fabricated such a fantastic story. Though the Suttons might be judged guilty of an unprovoked attack on the entities, at least they could claim to be defending their homestead against an unknown threat. Humans have sometimes demonstrated aggressive responses to appearances by ufonauts, but there have been plenty of cases where unprovoked violence was shown by the entities too. A rather nasty little fellow achieved the distinction of an artist's impression of him in action on the front cover of Flying Saucer Review after his attack on two Finnish skiers at Imjarvi on 7 January 1970. (FSR Vol.16, No.5) It was sunset and very cold when Heinonen and Vilno, healthy men in their thirties, halted for a brief rest in a forest glade, only to hear a buzzing sound from a luminous cloud which was fast 118 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS approaching and inside which they could see the circular, metallic form of a saucer-type UFO. Heinonen was so close that he could have touched it with his ski stick and consequently suffered most afterwards. Suddenly a brilliant beam was emitted from the underside of the UFO, making an illuminated circle about a yard across on the snow, in which stood a little creature about ninety centimetres in height. It was hook-nosed and waxen faced, with small ears and thin limbs, wearing a green overall and knee-high boots also of green, the fairy colour. Though, as we all surely recall from our nursery days, there are bad fairies as well as good ones, and this one turned out to be quite a notable nasty. It had on a conical metal hat and was holding a box from which it directed a pulsating yellow ray at the unfortunate skiers, after surrounding them with a red mist and shooting coloured sparks at 119 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS them before finally disappearing. They were both afterwards very ill, suffering partial paralysis and other symptoms akin to radiation poisoning. This use of disabling radiation by UFO occupants is fairly common, and five years previously Maurice Masse, the French lavender grower from Valensole, had observed two small creatures standing beside a landed UFO and examining his plants. He got within five yards of them when one turned and pointed at him a pencil-like object which stopped him in his tracks and left him immobilised for twenty minutes. Though fully conscious and with the functioning of his vital organs quite unimpaired, he was yet unable to move his limbs as he watched the ufonauts enter their craft and take off. Although Masse never admitted it, it is almost certain that he was abducted and he described his visitors as under four 120 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS feet tall, wearing green clothing and with fleshy cheeks, large, slanting eyes, lipless mouths and pointed chins. (Flying Saucer Review Vol. 14, No.1) When Aime Michel showed him the picture of a model which had been made of the landed UFO seen by patrolman Lonnie Zamora at Socorro, New Mexico, the previous year Masse was astonished and thought the picture was of the machine he had encountered. The paralysis of the skeletal muscles, which are sited in opposing pairs, was attributed by James McCampbell (in BUFORA 1987) to a series of microwave pulses affecting the nerves concerned, thus locking the muscle pairs and blocking nerve signals from the brain. All fairies, of course, had magic wands capable of this kind of thing; maybe magic is just technology we don't understand, and perhaps in bedtime stories for children of the future 121 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS the good fairy will just wave her pulsed microwave generator and all will live happily ever after. The UFO psychiatrists said to have abducted Betty Andreasson at South Ashburnham, Massachusetts on 25 January 1967 did not paralyse her - instead they put her whole family into suspended animation while they undertook what appears to have been a psycho-therapeutic process. This is a fascinating and probably unique case, investigated by Raymond Fowler (1979), which has provoked much discussion, especially concerning the symbolic significance of the therapy employed and its relation to the religious beliefs of the witness. It must, however, be stressed that the framework surrounding the abduction, including the sighting of the entities, is supported by the evidence of Mrs. Andreasson's father and eldest daughter, which makes it difficult to describe the incident as a 122 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS totally subjective experience. Fowler, moreover, claims that some parts of her testimony accord with details of similar unpublished cases, about which she could not have known, even though his own investigation, using regressive hypnosis, did not begin until ten years after the event. The family were watching television that night when the lights began to flicker, the electricity supply finally failed and a strange pink glow was visible through the kitchen window. Betty's father, Waino Aho, looked outside and saw four creatures about four feet tall and of the bug-eyed Strieber type, wearing skin tight blue uniforms each bearing a symbol described as a bird with outstretched wings. With the Ashland case in mind, one cannot help wondering whether the symbol might in fact have been a winged serpent or dragon. With her family frozen into immobility, Betty saw the four ufonauts enter the house through the 123 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS closed door and engaged them in telepathic conversation about food before being taken up into the waiting UFO. After a painful physical examination, she was enclosed in a fluid-filled compartment, where she floated pleasantly as if in an amniotic environment. Then the liquid was drained away and the birth symbolism continued by her passage through a dark tunnel, from which she was re-born into a series of semiotic environments, culminating in the immolation and regeneration of a phoenix. This was accompanied by a voice Betty believed to be that of God, telling her that she had been chosen for a special mission to be revealed later. This is a frequently recurring feature in abduction accounts. She was then returned to her home and put to bed, watched over by one of her abductors, while her family remained anaesthetised, but next 124 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS morning all seemed restored to normality. Scott Rogo considered her experience to have been "an objectified but symbolic journey in which the intelligence behind the UFO tried to help the troubled woman reconfirm her Christian faith." (Rogo 1990) He sees this abduction experience as akin to a session of psychotherapy, a personal and participatory drama producing purgation of the passions and hence therapeutic, but hastens to add that "this theory does not posit that these close encounters are subjective or otherwise imaginary. They really do take place in the physical world, but they tend to be ignited by a purely mental process." (ibid.) In this case he sees the causative factor as Betty Andreasson's anxiety about the health of her husband, at that time recuperating in hospital after a serious car crash. Not all ufologists would be prepared to accept the sophisticated 125 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS attempts of people like Scott Rogo to reconcile subjective realities with psychological objectivity. Some prefer more simplistic views, such as the reductionist perspective taken upon Fowler's third book on the case by Rudolf Henke in his review for the German Journal fur UFO-Forschung, No.1 of 1992. He attributes all experiences claimed by Betty Luca (as she now is) entirely to her own psychological condition, seizing upon Fowler's statement that a reputable psychiatrist has certified that she has no serious psychological problems. Henke wishes to stress the significance of the word 'serious' in this context, though surely no one, not even Henke himself, is without some psychological problems. He claims that her experiences arise from a demonstrably unstable personality, produced by the impact of a hysterectomy on a Christian upbringing, together with the trauma from the deaths of two of 126 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS her seven children in a motor accident. He believes her first alleged encounter with extra-terrestrials while still a young girl, during a walk in the woods, creates the suspicion that as a child she was sexually abused, though the connection seems as tenuous as his subsequent assertion that the suppression of this memory generated fantasies about extra-terrestrials. Despite psychiatrist R.J.Lifton's view that her experiences cannot be explained by any known psychological process, Henke still concludes that "Betty's horror stories are full of explicit sexual references; one wouldn't need to be deeply versed in Freudian psychology to see this ... The rampant abduction paranoia in certain American UFO circles bears traces of medieval witchcraft beliefs, as also do the supernatural explanations usually put forward." (My translation) 127 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS So it is all apparently quite straightforward and simple. For Henke there was no abduction and the whole affair was no more than the fantasy of a crazed woman, inflated by gullible ufologists. Though Fuller may have been in some respects too credulous, Henke is far too superficial in his scepticism and amateur psychology. The fact that the experiences reported by Betty Andreasson/Luca are difficult to interpret does not warrant their dismissal as of no significance at all. In cases of such uncertainty it is surely better simply to suspend judgement. In another very different abduction case at Pascagoula, Mississippi on 11 October 1973, the unique feature was the description given by two fishermen, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, of the ufonauts. The men were levitated aboard a UFO by three five feet tall beings with no necks, exceptionally long arms ending in crab claws, and 128 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS round feet. Hickson had total recall of a physical examination by a floating object like a huge eye, but Parker fainted from fear. After about twenty minutes both were deposited unharmed on the river bank. To the best of my knowledge, these entities have not returned to Earth since. Much less frightening were the three little creatures like winged Strieber types who flew into the sitting room of Jean, a Midlands housewife on 4 January 1979. They inspected the Christmas decorations and probed her mind telepathically, telling her they came from the sky. "We come down here to talk to people, but they don't seem to be interested," they complained, each accepting a mince pie Jean offered, but they fled back to their UFO, parked in the garden, when she showed them how to light a cigarette. These aerial creatures do sometimes seem 129 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS to have a strong fear of fire. They took with them their mince pies, however, and the local paper reported the incident with the amusing headline "TAKE ME TO YOUR LARDER". (Randles 1988) In February 1974 a Belgian blacksmith cycling to work at Hirson had precisely the opposite experience, for he was forcibly fed with a substance like chocolate by two burly ufonauts five and a half feet tall, wearing dark one-piece overalls and helmets covering the face, with long, five-fingered gauntlet gloves reaching almost to the shoulder. He suffered no ill-effects from his curious meal and the investigators subsequently found grass flattened in a circular area where he had seen their landed UFO. (Flying Saucer Review Vol.21, No.6, 1975) Difference of size is an obvious parameter for classifying the 130 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS various types of UFO occupant and some indeed have been reported to be ten feet tall. The Flatwoods monster in West Virginia was seen on 12 September 1952 and described as having the bulk of a very large man but without visible limbs. The face was blood red with glowing, greenish eyes and the head, shaped like the ace of spades, had a large circular window from which shone two fixed beams of blue light. Nearby was a black object twenty feet across, pulsating with a cherry red glow and also shaped like a spade ace. It is hardly surprising that one of the witnesses fainted with fright as the monster began to move towards him. (Sachs 1980) In April 1971 a young couple saw a saucer shaped UFO with rectangular windows in the upper section and circular ones below, through which were visible as silhouettes two humanoid forms also ten feet in height. Like the witnesses at Flatwoods, they too decided to 131 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS leave the area rather rapidly. (Flying Saucer Review Vol.17, No.4,1971) No survey of deviant UFO occupants could ignore the various types of robot which have been observed in their company or operating alone. Mention has already been made of the squad of small robots that marched towards Ed Walters on the road at Gulf Breeze, but the robots who stopped the car of an anonymous witness at Warneton on the Franco-Belgian frontier one January evening in 1974 were quite different. Leaving their craft in a field at the roadside, two figures walked in a slow, rigid fashion to within a dozen yards of the stranded motorist. The smaller was about four feet tall, resembling the Michelin man in the tyre advertisements, with a round helmet whose window allowed a face to be seen inside. He held what seemed to be a short, thick stick with a pointed, pyramidal tip. The second entity was somewhat taller, 132 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS with a cubical helmet revealing inside a pear-shaped head with round eyes, identical to that of his companion. Each had a small nose, a lipless mouth with neither teeth nor tongue, and long arms reaching just below the knee. The creatures were interrupted by the arrival of another motorist and took off without any further interaction. (Flying Saucer Review, Vol.2,No.5, 1974) In September 1964 at Cisco Grove, California, there occurred what seems to have been a concerted attempt by two ufonauts, assisted by robots, to capture alive a human specimen. Donald S.. out hunting with a party of friends, became separated from the main group and the fires he lit to attract the attention of forest rangers brought instead a flying light, followed shortly by two entities about five and a half feet tall, who approached the tree in whose branches Donald had by then taken 133 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS refuge. They wore silvery uniforms with hoods or helmets that went straight up from their shoulders and showed large dark eyes as they looked up at their intended victim. Next there appeared a big black robot with reddish 'eyes' and a 'mouth' which dropped open on a hinge, from which a white anaesthetic vapour issued and with which, when the two ufonauts had tried in vain to climb the tree, the robot proceeded to render Donald unconscious. Fortunately he had secured himself to the tree trunk with his belt and later tried to drive off his attackers with burning pieces of his clothing. This had some success, but at dawn a second robot appeared and the two together produced a cloud of gas that put Donald out for some hours. When he awoke, his assailants had gone. (Lorenzen C.& J., 1967) The emotionless, apparently programmed, behaviour of some types of 134 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS UFO occupant inevitably raises the suspicion that they may not in fact be the autonomous individuals they have been thought to be, but merely android robots following out action patterns dictated by complex computer logic. Whitley Strieber felt that they might in some ways be compared to social insects such as ants or bees, in whose colonies the actions and interests of the individual are totally and innately subordinated to the aims of the whole. If there is any validity in such ideas, then the question of who or what has programmed them and to what end obviously arises. UFO occupants are sometimes neither robotic nor humanoid. At nine o'clock one October morning in 1973 at Greenburg, Pennsylvania, a dome-shaped object a hundred feet across, making a sound like a lawn mower, was seen to land in a field and soon afterwards two figures the 135 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS watchers at first thought to be bears were seen moving along by a fence known to have posts six feet high, from which it was deduced that the creatures were seven and eight feet tall respectively. Both were completely covered with long grey hair and had greenish-yellow eyes. Their arms hung down almost to the ground and they made whining sounds to each other, almost like those of a human baby crying. They also produced a strong sulphurous smell, rather like burning rubber. (Flying Saucer Review, Vol.20, No.1, 1974) It is difficult to envisage a single planet inhabited by such a variety of creatures as we have been considering, all with the independent capacity for space travel and each desirous of visiting our little corner of the galaxy. Even a series of planets, one for each type of visitor, seems highly unlikely. In the case of exceptional or unique 136 ALIEN ENCOUNTERS appearances by unusual entities it seems more probable that they have somehow arrived accidentally in our space-time continuum, slipping inadvertently through some temporal crevice and perhaps unable to find their way back at once. There may well exist within our own physical space an infinity of universes with differing temporal co-ordinates wherein creatures even stranger than any we have yet encountered could exist, but the appearances of deviant ufonauts seem entirely random, purposeless and seldom if ever recurring. If behind the more regular manifestations of UFO activity there exists a directing intelligence, we are unlikely to find any clues to its nature in the case histories of the deviants. 137 ********************************************************************* * -------->>> THE U.F.O. 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