Orgies of the Gods

GARETH MEDWAY LOOKS AT EROTIC ESCAPADES IN THE SUPERNATURAL WORLD, AND SOME MORE DOWN-TO-EARTH CARRYINGS ON.

“We had sex with aliens”, ran a headline in the Metro, 21 January 2016. It featured two members of the Hybrid Baby Community, “a group of women claiming they have offspring by aliens, who live with their dads on spaceships.” Video game designer Aluna Venus, 23, of Los Angeles, was seduced by an ET, curiously, in a classroom with others watching: “All of a sudden, I’m sat next to this green reptilian creature and I’m so turned on looking at this being.” Next thing: “We’re making love in this classroom. Everyone turned their attention to us.” She became the mother of three alien spawn. Bridget Nielsen, 27, of Arizona, has had no less then ten children who combine “the best of human alien characteristics.” She had experienced “the best sex I ever had.” Lest anyone doubt them, they were photographed holding drawings of their sprogs, though they could not produce the children themselves for inspection.

For ufologists, this will not be news, though it might be for people who read free newspapers while commuting to work. What is perhaps surprising is how often, all through history, there have been reports of humans having sexual relations with otherworldly entities, though their nature varies considerably. What follows is a brief survey of such accounts, though I must apologise in advance for a few of them being cited from memory.

In 1963 the Brighton psychic investigator Leslie Roberts received a letter from a farmer in the north of England, who said that his wife believed herself to be haunted by an evil spirit. He travelled up there and was struck at once by the bleakness of the landscape, and the threatening atmosphere. The wife told him that she had been to a number of Spiritualist healers, but none could do much for her.

“It seemed that these personal problems had started one night when the wife had gone outdoors to take care of something to do with the farmyard and had been terrified by seeing a tall, ghostly figure approaching her. She had screamed and fled indoors, and the two farm dogs with her had been equally frightened... From then onwards she often seemed to hear a man’s voice talking to her. She became very nervous, a state which was shared by her husband when strange noises began to be heard in the house at night.”

Roberts suggested that she avoid Spiritualist practices for the time being, burn some sandalwood joss-sticks which had had brought for the purpose, and put bundles of herbs in the windows. Whilst she seemed willing to co-operate, she did not do so. He talked her about this.

“She made an amazing reply. She admitted that she did not want the obsessing entity removed, because, she said, he came to her in dreams as a lover and gave her sexual sensations which no man could produce. Her husband knew nothing of this; and it had been her husband’s idea to call Leslie in. What the woman actually said was more crudely expressed than this. Leslie was left in no doubt that he was in the presence of the phenomenon which old writers on demonology had called an incubus – a demon lover.”

He went ahead with an exorcism, during the course of which a gruff man’s voice spoke through her. Eventually she returned to normal. Roberts went home the next day, and never did learn the final outcome [1]

A famous Biblical passage tells us: “And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose... There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” [2]

Modern commentators have trouble with this passage, and often pass over it in silence. An exception is line-by-line commentators, who have to say something. Typical is The Oxford Bible Commentary: “It must be admitted that the meaning and purpose of this story remain uncertain after a long history of attempts to interpret it. Every verse presents difficulties.” [3]

Robert Graves and Raphael Patai offer a rationalist approach: “The explanation of this myth, which has been a stumbling block to theologians, may be the arrival in Palestine of tall, barbarous Hebrew herdsmen early in the second millennium B.C., and their exposure, by marriage, to Asianic civilization. ‘Sons of El’ in this sense would mean the ‘cattle-owning worshippers of the Semite Bull-god El’; ‘Daughters of Adam’ would mean ‘women of the soil’ (adama), namely the Goddess-worshipping Canaanite agriculturalists, notorious for their orgies and premarital prostitution. If so, this historical event has been tangled with the Ugaritic myth of how El seduced two mortal women and fathered divine sons on them, namely Shahar (‘Dawn’) and Shalem (‘Perfect’)... Unions between gods and mortals, that is to say between kings or queens and mortals, occur frequently in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern myth.” [4]

One problem with this interpretation is that, in the Book of Job, God says: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?... When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job, 38:4, 7.) This implies that the sons of God existed before the world did. Howsomever, they were right to say that such reports were frequent.

The following is from the Greek historian Herodotus’ description of Babylon, which he says was divided into two halves by the river Euphrates: “There is a fortress in the middle of each half of the city: in one the royal palace surrounded by a wall of great strength, in the other the temple of Bel, the Babylonian Zeus. The temple is a square building, two furlongs each way, with bronze gates, and was still in existence in my time; it has a solid central tower, one furlong square, with a second erected on top of it and then a third, and so on up to eight. All eight towers can be climbed by a spiral way running round the outside, and about half-way up there are seats for those who make the ascent to rest on. On the summit of the topmost tower stands a great temple with a fine large couch in it, richly covered, and a golden table beside it. The shrine contains no image and no one spends the night there except (if we may believe the Chaldeans who are the priests of Bel) one Assyrian woman, all alone, whoever it may be that the god has chosen. The Chaldeans also say – though I do not believe them – that the god enters the temple in person and takes his rest upon the bed. There is a similar story told by the Egyptians at Thebes, where a woman always passes the night in the temple of the Theban Zeus and is forbidden, so they say, like the woman in the temple at Babylon, to have any intercourse with men; and there is yet another instance in the Lycian town of Patara, where the priestess who delivers the oracles when required (for there is not always an oracle there) is shut up in the temple during the night.” [5]

Gilgamesh, who may have been an early king of Uruk, was a Sumerian hero, the subject of an epic which was so successful that it was translated into Babylonian, Hittite, Hurrian, and Elamite, though all of these versions are now fragmentary. He was enigmatically said to be two-thirds divine, and only one-third mortal, but, curiously, no surviving tablet narrates his birth. Nevertheless it was eventually told by the Greek writer Aelian. According to him, king Seuerchoros of the Babylonians was warned by his magicians that a son born to his daughter would usurp his throne. So he shut her up under close guard ‘at the Acropolis’ Of course, the word Acropolis is Greek – perhaps Aelian meant a ziggurat. Despite this, she became pregnant “by an obscure man” and begat ‘Gilgamos’. Fearing that the king would blame them, guards cast him from the summit, his life being saved by an eagle who caught him. [6]

Perhaps in the original version the obscure man who seduced the girl was some God who had sneaked in. Aelian himself drew a parallel with the legend of king Acrisios, who locked his only daughter Danaë in a guarded bronze underground chamber, for the same reason as Seuerchoros: that an oracle had told him that he would have no sons, but that his grandson would kill him. These precautions were of no avail, because Zeus himself entered by transforming himself into a shower of gold that fell into her lap. The resulting child was Perseus, who would grow up to slaughter the Gorgon, rescue Andromeda from a sea monster, and (accidentally) kill Acrisios. [7]

Generally, these matings were supposed to have taken place in the heroic age, that is, before the start of recorded history. But, among the Greek aristocracy, it became a matter of pride to be able to number some deity among one’s ancestors. Plato could trace his descent from both Poseidon and Apollo. The aristocracy of Boeotia claimed descent from Harmonia, who was the daughter of Aphrodite and Ares. Later, the Roman aristocracy traced their ancestry to Aeneas, who was likewise a child of Aphrodite (or Venus). Since Aeneas had been a Trojan (on his father’s side), under Roman rule Troy was granted exemption from taxes. [8] Nor was this confined to the western world: to this day, the Emperor of Japan owes his position to the fact that he is a direct descendant of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu.

It is said that one Greek king was so displeased by the frequency of such reports that he made it a capital offence for a maiden to say that she was pregnant by a deity, as this was belittling to the Gods and so blasphemous. But one can glimpse a motivation: if a single woman gave birth, her child would be ostracised as a bastard. If, however, she were to say that it had been fathered by Mercury, then her offspring would be honoured for that fact.

Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion, a play about an early Christian, was first performed in 1912. In the printed version of the text, he included a long preface giving the Shavian view of Jesus. There he remarked: “Those who claim a literal divine paternity for him cannot be silenced by the discovery that the same claim was made for Alexander and Augustus.” This work provoked an even longer critical essay by Aleister Crowley, entitled 'The Gospel According to St Bernard Shaw'. His response to this sentence was: “This is true enough, because such persons are not accessible to reason... We are face to face with the fact that it was an invariable custom to honour any distinguished man by attributing divine parentage to him. It may have begun in magic or religion; but by the time of the alleged life of Jesus, it had become hardly more than a literary flourish. In saying that Romulus and Remus were begotten by Mars upon a vestal virgin, no one with any sense of poetry combined with common sense would understand that the person making the statement wished to do more than to emphasize their greatness as warriors, and accentuate the chastity of their mother.” [9]

A possible indication of a beginning “in magic or religion” is provided by the kings of Amathus in Cyprus, who were also high priests of Aphrodite, the city’s guardian Goddess: “. . . they married a priestess and consummated the marriage in the temple. This marriage used to last for a calendar year during which the chosen priestess represented the goddess... Children born from these temporary marriages were considered divine and one of them would succeed to the throne when it became vacant, the rest with their families of these their in-laws, formed the aristocracy of the city.” [10]

Lucian, who wrote in the second century, put down stories such as Minos, the legendary king of Crete, being the son of Jupiter, Aeneas of Venus, and Autolycus of Mercury, as being astrological in origin: “For what powers soever are in their proper houses at the moment of birth into this life, those powers like unto parents make men answerable to them in all respects... So Minos became a king because Jupiter was in his ascendancy, Aeneas fair by the will of Venus, and Autolycus a thief, whose thievery came to him from Mercury.” [11]

The early Christians interpreted those controversial sons of God as having been angels. Though they were supposed to be sexless, they were attracted by the depraved women of earth, and in coming to mate with them fell away from their semi-divine status. They accordingly taught mortals all wicked and harmful things, the men how to make armaments and go to war, and the women how to use make-up.

Saint Augustine, commenting on this for the benefit of those who might be inclined to doubt it, wrote: “Still, according to the entirely reliable testimony of Scripture, angels appeared to men in such bodies that they could be not only seen but also handled [i.e. by sensual women.] Moreover, there is a very widespread report, corroborated by many people either through their own experience or through accounts of others of indubitably good faith who have had the experience, that Silvans and Pans, who are commonly called incubi, often misbehave towards women and succeed in accomplishing their lustful desire to have intercourse with them. And the tradition that certain demons, termed Dusii by the Gauls, constantly attempt and perpetrate this foulness is so widely and so well attested that it would seem impudent to deny it.” [12]

Romantically inclined demons did not always have the traditional horrendous diabolical form but could take on human shape, even it was believed, convincingly imitating particular individuals. This was proved by an incident related in the Life of Saint Jerome. A certain devil became jealous of the holiness of Silvanus, archbishop of Nazareth. So the devil turned himself into the archbishop’s form and likeness, then entered a respectable lady’s bedroom at night and made amorous advances. She cried out loud, bringing others running, who found what they believed to be Archbishop Silvanus hiding under her bed. Thus was the holy man defamed, until by a miracle the devil was compelled to appear at the tomb of Saint Jerome, in his true, hellish shape, and confess his deception; after which Silvanus’s holy reputation was restored. This proves that fallen angels can imitate humans – or is it the other way around?

The Merovingian dynasty, who ruled parts of France and Germany from the fifth to the sixth century, traced their ancestry from Merovée, an obscure character whose name probably comes in part from mer, sea, and who had two fathers. When his mother was already pregnant by her husband king Clodio, she went swimming in the ocean. There, she is said to have been seduced by a Bestia Neptuni Quinotauri similis, ‘a marine creature similar to a quinotaur’. A quinotaur was presumably a starfish – not, one would have thought, the ideal paramour – but this one had occult powers that he passed on to his semi-descendants. [13]

Once upon a time a Count of Anjou married a woman named Melusine, and they had four children. But his wife was reluctant to enter a church; or, she would enter, but make an excuse to leave before the mass was said. One day the Count got four knights to hold her in place, with the result that when the priest held the Host aloft, she shrieked, tore her cloak off, rose up in the air and exited through a window, taking two of her children with her. They were never seen again. She had of course been the daughter of Satan. One of the surviving children became the ancestor of the Angevin dynasty, and hence the Plantagenet dynasty of England. This story was widely believed in the twelfth century. [14] Nowadays, the Royal Family trace their ancestry to a sixth century chieftain named Cerdic, but the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle makes Cerdic a descendant of Woden, the Germanic God better known as Wotan or Odin . [15]

In the Middle Ages it was occasionally remarked that there were women who believed that they flew about at night, sometimes mounted on beasts, and led by Diana or some other Goddess. A few theologians such as Regino of Prum declared that it was heretical to believe this, but did not pursue the matter further. Martin of Arles, a French lawyer, reported the case of a woman who claimed to have had intercourse during one of these nocturnal flights - an early form of the mile high club? – and found it more enjoyable than ordinary intercourse.

In the fifteenth century, having run out of heretics to burn, the Inquisition turned their attention to what they called lamias, striges, sagas, veneficas, phitonissas, words all usually translated as ‘witches’. In addition to flying about on broomsticks or pitchforks, an unforgiveable crime in itself, they were accused of many other things, eating their relatives, firing invisible arrows at people to cause lumbago, and of course having sex with devils. Typically, the Inquisitor of Como burned forty-one women alive for this offence in the year 1485 alone.

The women, naturally, could see their paramours. “But with regard to any bystanders, the witches themselves have often been seen lying on their backs in the fields or the woods, naked up to the very navel, and it has been apparent from the disposition of those limbs and members which pertain to the venereal act and orgasm, as also from the agitation of their legs and thighs, that, all invisible to the bystanders, they have been copulating with Incubus devils; yet sometimes, howbeit this is rare, at the end of the act a very black vapour, of about the stature of a man, rises up into the air from the witch.” [16]

Johannes Weyer, a sixteenth century physician who wrote about witchcraft from a somewhat sceptical point of view, suggested that, if nuns who said that they had had sex with demons were to be examined, they would be found to be virgins. It seems that he never got to try this experiment. But it does imply that it was widely believed that these were actual physical events.

The Lorraine judge Nicholas Remy, based on his experience of having tried numerous people for witchcraft (and sentenced them to death), wrote that this sort of intercourse was unpleasant: “At Dalheim, Petrone of Armentières declared that, as soon as he embraced his Abrahel, all his limbs at once grew stiff. Hennezel at Vergaville, July 1586, said that it was as if he had entered an ice-bound cavity, and that he left his Schwartzburg with the matter unaccomplished. (These were the names of their Succubas.) And all female witches maintain that the so-called genital organs of their Demons are so huge and so excessively rigid that they cannot be admitted without the greatest pain. Alexée Drigie (at Haraucourt, 10th November, 1586) reported that her Demon’s penis, even when only half in erection was as long as some kitchen utensils which she pointed to as she spoke; and that there were neither testicles nor scrotum attached to it. 

Claude Fellet (at Mazières, 2nd Movember 1584) said that she had often felt it like a spindle swollen to an immense size so that it could not be contained by even the most capacious woman without great pain. This agrees with the complaint of Nicole Morèle (at Serre, 19th January 1587) that, after such miserable copulation, she always had to go straight to bed as if she had been tired out by some long and violent agitation. Didatia of Miremont (at Preny, 31st July, 1588) also said that, although she had many years’ experience of men, she was always so stretched by the huge, swollen member of her Demon that the sheets were drenched with blood.” [17]

Remy thought it ‘absurd’ to believe that this kind of intercourse could result in children, but there were still occasional reports of it. In the year 1275, as a result of such a connection, it was recorded that Angela de la Barthe gave birth to a monster with a wolf’s head and a serpent’s tail, and that she fed it on babies that she stole from her neighbours; however, she seems to have been the invention of a fifteenth century chronicler. [18] Merlin and the prophetess Mother Shipton were believed to have had diabolical parentage. By now, though, there were various theories about this: “Servius Tullius, who became king of the Romans, was the son of a slave-girl and Vulcan, according to the ancient authors; of a salamander, to the Cabalists; of an incubus demon, to the demonologists.” [19]

In contrast to Remy, Ludovic Sinistrari, an Italian theologian of the seventeenth century, thought that Incubi could sometimes become fathers, but that this showed that they were part corporeal and not pure spirit. As evidence: “It is a most marvellous and well nigh incomprehensible fact that the Incubi whom the Italians call Folletti, the Spaniards Duendes, the French Follets, do not obey the exorcists, evince no dread of exorcisms, and show no reverence for holy things, at the approach of which seemingly they are not overawed.” This, he observes, contrasts with mainstream Demons, who always take flight at the name of Jesus or Mary, or the imposition of Holy Relics. He gives two case histories, the first of which he heard from “a good confessor of Nuns, a man of integrity and fair repute, and most worthy of credit”. 

 A young maiden who resided in the convent as a boarder was troubled with an Incubus who “incessantly besought her to lie with him”. Though she filled her room with holy objects, continually prayed, and underwent exorcisms, he would not go away. Eventually “a very profound Theologian” who was consulted “observing that the maiden was of a thoroughly phlegmatic temperament, surmised that the Incubus was an aqueous Demon”. So he prescribed a continual suffumigation of some twenty (fiery?) ingredients. The Incubus would not again enter her room, and after she confronted him in the garden, armed with “most exquisite perfumes”, he “suddenly disappeared and was never more seen by her.”

Some time later Sinistrari was himself consulted by the Vicar of a Carthusian monastery in Pavia, where a young Deacon named Augustin “was subjected by a certain Demon to excessive, unheard-of, and scarcely credible vexations.” (He does not explain what they were.) Remembering the above-related instance, he prescribed suffumigation, and since the Deacon was fond of snuff and brandy, advised that he perfume them with musk. But the Demon seemed to thrive on this treatment. Eventually Sinistrari realised that, unlike the aqueous Demon in the nunnery, this one was igneous, so instead he advised the junior monk to “take herbs that are cold by nature, such as water-lily, agrimony, spurge, mandrake, house-leek, plantain, henbane, and others of a similar family”, and strew them about his cell. The Demon appeared just once more, stayed outside, and “burst into invectives against me for giving such advice, disappeared, and never returned thither again.” [20]

It is interesting to notice that, centuries before women were describing how the alien take away their space babies, the same was being said of demon seed. In a thesis submitted to the University of Rostock in 1698, Johann Klein cited “the confession of a woman who claimed to have given birth first to a tapeworm and later to a girl the size of a jug, which sucked her breast. Her incubus, David, removed both. By another incubus, Hansen, she had a boy and girl, both of which Hansen took away from her. She confessed that her incubi continued to consort with her in prison, and that she bore there a further child, which was also removed.” [21]

In seventeenth century Sweden death certificates often gave the cause of demise as “involvement with a Skogsnufva”. These are gentle-looking female trolls who can “gain control over men, and madden, sicken or kill them. If they can make a man answer ‘Yes’, to one of their calls in the woods, he is in their power. They lead him astray for hours, forcing him through brambles and thorns, enticing him into bogs, watching him peel off his soaking clothes and then, with demoniacal laughter, tumbling him cold and shivering onto dry land. If a man refuses to answer one of their calls, they can trap him in huge invisible nets from which he can only free himself at the sound of a church bell. But the Skogsnufva only gains complete control over a man once she has slept with him. No matter how hard he then tries, he will not be bale to forget her and will sicken and die from longing. Some exceptional men do not sicken immediately, but fall prey to loneliness, melancholy and madness, all because of their night with the Skogsnufva. Children born of these unions are either monstrous abortions who are later changed for healthy human children, or humans possessed with elfin powers.” [22]

By now, some were beginning to treat all this as a purely medical problem. Richard Lower, in a 1669 treatise On the Heart, said that he knew a man who, though otherwise strong and healthy, was extremely subject to the Incubus. (He did not explain just what occurred.) This only happened when he was lying on his back, and, according to Lower, lying on the back sends fluid into the brain. Accordingly, in the end he used to take a manservant to bed with him. This man would turn his master on to his side as soon as he heard groans and sighs, the usual prelude to an attack, and this always prevented them. [23]

John Bond, in the middle of the eighteenth century, mentioned a similar cure for the Incubus or Nightmare: “A robust servant Girl, about eighteen years old, was severely oppress’d with the Night-mare, two or three nights before every eruption of the Menses, and us’d to groan so loudly as to awake her Fellow-servant, who always shook or turn’d her on her Side’ by which means she recover’d She was thus afflicted periodically with it, ‘till she took a bedfellow of a different sex, and bore Children.” In another case was of a fifteen-year-old girl, who one night groaned so loudly as to wake her father in the next room. He ran into her chamber, “and found her lying on her Back, and the Blood gushing plentifully out of her Mouth and Nose.” She told him that she thought some great heavy man had come and stretched himself upon her. The next day, however, “she had a copious eruption of the Menses, which, for that time, remov’d all her complaints.” [24]

John Waller, in 1816, observed that the Incubus was called Ephialtes by the Greeks, and that “both of which names are expressive of the sensation of weight and oppression felt by the persons labouring under it, and which conveys to them the idea of some living being having taken its position on the breast, inspiring terror, and impeding respiration, and all voluntary motion.” People said “that it only happens to persons lying upon the back, and who have eaten large suppers”, so that it might be cured by “a change of position, together with the avoiding eating any supper”, though he admitted that this did not work. [25]

In 1964 Nandor Fodor, described by his publishers as “the world’s foremost psychic sleuth”, published “the story of a demon lover and his beloved – in the 20th century when such things are supposed to be the superstition of past ages.” Following his appearance on Long John Nebel’s TV programme in January 1961, he was contacted by ‘Jean’, a 26-year old woman. She had become haunted by ‘John’, who had died shortly after his 34th birthday. It appears that his real name was not given because he had been quite famous in life, whoever he was, as “Jean knew him through his organization, admired him, loved his books and was corresponding with him.” She told Fodor that, as soon as he had died, she had felt his presence. 

“Slowly the invisible presence became more intimate. Touches on her body followed, she felt his manhood, accepted his lovemaking, and experienced an ecstasy from which “wild horses could not drag her away”. Soon, however, the enormity of the situation dawned on her mind and she tried to protect herself by prayer.” She took to wearing “the crudest chastity belt that anyone could devise”, a large iron crucifix, which she hung “over her vulnerable part.” Perhaps this was partly effective, as in a letter of 4 April, she told him that “He is back. He is now annoying me in the rear.” On the telephone, she mentioned that: “During my menses nothing bothered me.” The final outcome, if there was one, is not known. [26]

But a new era would begin in which otherworldly paramours were no longer Gods, Demons, or the spirits of the departed. The case of Antonio Villas Boas has so often been retold at length that a brief summary will do here. A young Brazilian farmer (in later life a lawyer), he was ploughing a field at night when a UFO landed and several men in spacesuits grabbed him and took him aboard. They took his clothes off and left him alone in a room which was bare except for a couch. A noxious smoke invaded the room. Then, a naked female entered and they did it twice. He was released, but suffered adverse physical effects for some time afterwards.

As John Keel put it: “If the UFOnauts are essentially alien but human in form, it might make sense for them to conduct crossbreeding experiments in an effort to produce beings with the full capability of breathing and functioning in the earthly environment. Such experiments have purportedly been going on for several years, although the victims are very reluctant to reveal their identities for perfectly obvious reasons. In these cases, young men, usually from college communities, are taken aboard the objects and introduced to alien females. A student from a West Virginia college underwent this type of experience in the spring of 1967. Immediately after he was released from the UFO he went to a local hospital and submitted himself to a thorough examination which confirmed his claims. Two young men on Long Island also told me the same kind of story in the summer of 1967. One claimed to have performed as a voluntary breeder several times. He later suffered a spell of amnesia.” [27]

Another example occurred in Northern Ireland in October of that year. Eugene Brown was walking home from a jazz club in Belfast when he saw a craft projecting a yellow beam of light, and he blacked out. “The next thing he knew he was lying on some kind of table in a strange oblong room which had no windows.” He found that he was fastened down. Four men and a girl came in. They untied him and encouraged him to have sex with her. “She had long blond hair, blue eyes, high cheekbones and very thin lips.” This is very similar to the description of Villas Boas’s outer space lover. “The girl told him that they came from another galaxy.” He passed out again and woke up in a field. [28]

In February 1983 Colin Regan, a policeman in rural Berkshire, had series of UFO sightings, culminating one night when he saw a white flash and passed out. When he recovered consciousness he was in a small metal room, naked. The air smelt of sulphur and he thought he was going to be sick, but the feeling passed. It occurred to him: “He was inside the spaceship.” A door opened and a beautiful woman entered. “The woman had shoulder-length blonde hair, parted in the middle. Beneath it sparkled the bluest eyes he had ever seen, piercing orbs which fixed him with an unblinking stare. Her cheekbones were high and her face seemed to taper to a markedly pointed chin” Once again, this description closely resembles that of Villas Boas, including the detail that the paramour had blood red pubic hair. He passed out at the end of the inevitable act, coming to again outside his own house. His wife was worried because he had been away for over two hours. [29]

Nor were the fair sex neglected by the Andromedans. Claudette Cranshaw “claimed that she was walking along the near Blanca, California, one evening, in the autumn of the year” – we are not told which year, but it appears that 1965 is meant – “when she saw a strange luminescent globe land. A half-dozen eerie semihumanoids emerged, garbling horrible sounds at one another. The sextet caught sight of, and began pursing, the girl. She was swiftly caught, overwhelmed, and raped by the six monsters – twice each! Subsequently, the nineteen-year-old is supposed to have given birth to a blue-skinned, seven-fingered, web-toed baby.” [30] Another source tells us: “There is also a deposition by her doctor who testifies to having treated the young woman for a premature delivery of a stillborn baby that seemed to have been the product of highly dubious mixed breeding.” [31]

If the aliens were really engaged in cross-breeding programmes, they seemed rather unsuccessful at that time. A Michigan girl, Jean Sheldon, was driving on a summer night in 1966, and stopped for a breath of fresh air. Suddenly a silvery saucer appeared, about fifty feet in diameter, with a glowing reddish dome. She was grabbed by a force field which lifted her up into the craft, where she was greeted by three naked humanoids. They told her by telepathy: “My dear earthwoman... we wish to mate with you.” She was taken to a bed, and had an hour of intercourse with all three, experiencing “spasms of unnatural delight mixed with shame and revulsion”. Afterwards, they told her that by mating with her ‘experimentally’, they were sure that their two races were compatible, then released her. But she did not, in fact, become pregnant.

Miss Marlene Travers of Melbourne, Australia, said that on 11 August 1966, having had supper with some friends in the country, she went to get some cigarettes from a store half a mile away. Half way there she heard a humming sound, and a craft landed in a field; once again , it was “a silvery disk about 50 feet across”. A man in a “loose-fitting metallic green tunic” came out, and told her by telepathy that she had been selected for the honour “of being the first woman on earth to be a child by a man from his planet.” He led her on board his saucer, and though he did not use force, she felt obliged to obey him, and described what then happened as ‘rape’. Later, a doctor confirmed that she was pregnant. Otto Binder, who told this story, concluded: “Presumably, Miss Travers has had her baby by now but a cloak of silence from Australia hides any news of what the child is like.” [32]

“A California schoolteacher, Cordelia Donovan, claims that in 1966 she met a man in a long white robe who kidnapped her in a black Cadillac and gassed her. When she awoke, she was aboard a flying saucer, where she was raped by a well-endowed spaceman.” We are not told whether she fell pregnant or not, but “There are innumerable rumours of space babies being born in England, Australia, South America, Mexico, and the United States.” [33]

Since such a lot of alien interbreeding, successful or not, was happening in 1966-1967, it is hardly surprising that Ancient Astronaut authors turned their attention to it. Robert Charroux, going back to Genesis, pointed out that the word translated as ‘giants’ is nephelim (‘the Fallen Ones’) in the original Hebrew. He concluded that the ‘sons of God’ were in fact astronauts, and then apparently confused the giants with their fathers when he wrote:

“The meaning is clear: the Nephilim, by breeding with the women of Armenia, Iran, the Caucasus, the Rocky Mountains and the Andes, engendered children who were stronger and more intelligent than native earthly children.” [34]

Among the Dead Sea Scrolls is one known as the Genesis Apocryphon. It is in very bad condition, because the finder buried it in his back garden while he negotiated a price for it, forgetting that the scrolls had survived for two millennia because of the dry air around the Dead Sea, so that by the time he had found a buyer much of it had decayed away. In a surviving portion, Lamech suspects that his son may not be his, but fathered by one of the Sons of Heaven, who were presumably the same as the Sons of God. Erich von Däniken commented on this: “Does not this seriously pose the question whether the human race is not an act of deliberate ‘breeding’ by unknown beings from outer space?” He went on to suggest the following scenario:

“Dim as yet undefinable ages ago an unknown space-ship soon found out that the earth had all the prerequisites for intelligent life to develop. Obviously the ‘man’ of those times was no homo sapiens, but something rather different. The space men artificially fertilized some female members of this species, put them into a deep sleep, so ancient legends say, and departed. Thousands of years later the space travellers returned and found scattered specimens of the genus homo sapiens. They repeated their breeding experiment several times until finally they produced a creature intelligent enough to have the rules of society imparted to it.” [35] Gerard de Sède gave a new slant to the story of Mérovée and his Quinotaur father by saying that the Merovingians were extraterrestrials. [36]

We were also told of Orejona, said to be a woman with four fingers on each hand, who in a past age came to South America from Venus in a golden spaceship, and gave birth to the human race (who were only seventy-strong at first, but that is still a lot for one mother) by mating with a tapir. [37] This last detail is so odd that one feels that it must be based upon a ‘genuine’ legend, as surely no-one in the twentieth century would have made it up.

Lobsang Rampa (1911-1981) claimed to be a Tibetan lama whose spirit had taken over the body of a Devonshire man named Cyril Hoskins. From 1956 to 1980 he turned out a number of books on occult themes. In his first, The Third Eye, he coined the term ‘Chariots of the Gods’, [38] but it was only in his last, Tibetan Sage, that he touched briefly upon the themes dealt with here. His story, should you choose to believe it, is that as a young monk he was taken by a senior lama to an underground UFO base in the mountains near Lhasa. This was deserted, except for a group of men in suspended animation. The senior lama said: “These men are alive, there is no doubt about that, but if we bring them back to full life what if they are savage... it seems clear to me that if these men are allowed to live then they have such knowledge that they can do us harm which we could never overcome because these people treat us as cattle, as things on which to carry out genetic experiments. Already they have done harm because of their sexual experiments with our women, but you are too young to know all about that yet.” He also dealt with the issue of giants on the earth in those days: the ufonauts “tried to find women who would be much too small for them and their association with the women would be an absolute torture to the latter... when they could not get women of their own race to go with them they came to Earth and picked out the biggest women they could find. Events were not at all pleasant because the men were physically too big for the women...” It is not clear if this was agony for the women because the aliens’ penises were too large for them, or because the ensuing babies were too large for a comfortable birth. [39]

Whilst there may have been innumerable human-alien offspring in prehistory, there was evidently a paucity of them at the present day. But in September 1983 Budd Hopkins, a New York artist who used to hypnotise people who believed that they might have been abducted by aliens, received a letter from ‘Kathie Davis’ (Debbie Twomey), an Indianapolis woman who had read his book Missing Time, and thought that something similar might have happened to her. She and a friend named Dorothy had seen a mysterious light in late 1977, around the time that she started to date her husband-to-be. Early in 1978 she discovered that she was pregnant, so the date of the wedding was brought forwards to April. But in March she had a period, and a test showed that she was no longer pregnant. “She was distraught, and her doctor was clearly somewhat mystified.” The final conclusion was that the foetus had been fathered by an alien, who had then taken it away to continue it to full term, and bring it up, on another planet. [40]

Another Hopkins abductee, ‘Linda Cortile’ (Linda Napolitano), believed that she had part alien ancestry, and said that a Man in Black had addressed her as a ‘half-breed’. She also said that family tradition said that they were descended from Joan of Arc. This is rather curious, since conventional history has it that Joan of Arc died a virgin, but perhaps she too had engaged in alien love-making. [41]

David Jacobs, an American historian who also regresses abductees, concludes that “Everything the aliens do is logical, rational, and goal-oriented. With the use of superior technology, both physical an biological, they are engaging in the systematic and clandestine physiological exploitation, and perhaps alteration, of human beings for the purposes of passing on their genetic capabilities to progeny who will integrate into the human society and, without doubt, control it.” [42]

‘Sherry’ moved from a city to a desert home in Southern California, which she thought would be a more suitable place to bring up her eight-year old daughter. She was fascinated by the stars in the clear sky. She used to sit up and look at them, and then started seeing golden globes dancing around. One summer night in 1992, “after watching the golden globes dancing from the mountains to the pastures near her house” she went to bed. “In what she thought was a dream, she felt a warm sexual tingle between her legs. The tingle grew to waves of orgasmic passion as she felt something hard penetrating her in a way that could not be mistaken for anything other than raw sex. In the sleep, she reached for whatever it was between her legs, pushing it deeper into her. She had an orgasm so explosive that she remembered little else.” On the suggestion of friends she joined a support group for alien abductees, and concluded that this had also happened to her. She even gave a television interview in January 1995. Then, she fell into a deep depression, for which the doctor prescribed Prozac. A few months later she told a researcher that all the ‘strange stuff’ had since stopped. No more lights, no more noises in the night, and, she added, “No more sex.” [43]

NOTES

1. Doreen Valiente, The Rebirth of Witchcraft, Robert Hale, London, 1989, pp.160-61.

2. Genesis 6:1-4.

3. John Barton & John Muddiman (eds.) The Oxford Bible Commentary, Oxford University Press, 2003.

4. Robert Graves & Raphael Patai, Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis, Greenwich House, New York, 1983 (1st 1963), p.104.

5. Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt, Penguin Books, 1982, pp.113-14.

6. Aelian, On Animals, 12.21.

7. Apollodorus, The Library of Greek Mythology, II.4.2-4.

8. Stass Paraskos, Aphrodite Cypris, Interworld Publications, London, 1988, pp.24, 40.

9. Aleister Crowley, Crowley on Christ (reprint of The Gospel According to St Bernard Shaw), C. W. Daniel, London, p.23.

10. Paraskos, p.43.

11. Lucian, Astrology, paragraph 20.

12. St. Augustine, City of God, Book XV, Chapter 23.

13. Michael Baigeant, Richard Leigh & Henry Lincoln, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Jonathan Cape, London, 1982, p.202.

14. Alfred Duggan, Devil’s Brood: The Angevin Family, Corgi, London, 1975, pp.11-12.

15. G. N. Garmonsway (translator), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Everyman’s Library, 1975, p.2.

16. Sprenger & Kramer, Malleus Maleficarum (1487), Part II. Qn 1. Ch.4, translated by Montague Summers, Dover, New York, 1971, pp.111, 114.

17. Nicholas Remy, Demonolatry, translated by E. A. Ashwin, Frederick Muller, 1970, pp.13-14.

18. Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, Paladin, 1976, pp.126-28.

19. J. A. S. Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire Infernal, Paris, 1818, p.267.

20. Ludovic Sinistrari, Demoniality, Montague Summers edition, Dover, New York, 1989, pp.13-14, 55-59.

21. Quoted in Rossell Hope Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, Peter Nevill London, 1959, pp.465.

22. Nancy Arrowsmith, A Field Guide to the Little People, Hill and Wang, New York, 1977, p.200.

23. Richard Lower, Tractatus de Corde, London, 1669, p.148; English translation by K. J. Franklin, Oxford, 1932.

24. John Bond, An Essay on the Incubus, or Night-mare, London, 1753, pp.47-49.

25. John Waller, A Treatise on The Incubus, or Night-Mare, London, 1816, pp.9-11.

26. Nandor Fodor, Between Two Worlds, Paperback Library, New York, 1967, pp.146-159.

27. John Keel, Strange Creatures from Time & Space, Sphere, 1979, p.179.

28. Brinsley le Poer Trench, Operation Earth, Tandem, London, 1974, pp.18-19.

29. Frank Taylor, The Uninvited 3, Star, London, 1985, p.122.

30. Paris Flammonde, The Age of Flying Saucers, Hawthorn Books, New York, pp.180-81. He does not give a reference, though in general the book is heavily annotated.

31. Brad Steiger and Joan Whritenour, Flying Saucers are Hostile, Tandem, London, 1967, p.66.

32. Otto O. Binder, Flying Saucers are Watching Us, Belmont Tower Books, New York, 1970, pp.32-34. He says that the Sheldon story had appeared in The National Tattler on 2 April 1967, which suggests that it may have been an overdue April Fool’s item.

33. John A. Keel, Our Haunted Planet, Futura, London, 1975, p.139.

34. Robert Charroux, Masters of the World, Sphere, 1979 (1st 1967), p.229.

35. Erich von Däniken, Chariots of the Gods?, World Books, London, 1971, pp.66, 76-77.

36. Gérard de Sède, La Race fabuleuse, Paris, 1973, cited in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, p.418.

37. Robert Charroux, Le Livre des Secrets Trahis, Robert Laffont, Paris, 1965, p.153.

38. Erich von Däniken’s book was originally called Erinnerung an die Zukunft, ‘Memories of the Future’, a title he had borrowed from a section heading in The Morning of the Magicians. It was presumably his English translator, Michael Heron, who changed it to Chariots of the Gods?. Soon, publishers found it profitable to include the word ‘Gods’ in titles. His follow-ups accordingly included Gold of the Gods and Miracles of the Gods, whilst a biography was entitled Disciple of the Gods. Henriette Merz wrote an extended essay arguing that the Chinese discovered America before Columbus. This appeared in 1953 as Pale Ink, but when it was reissued in 1972 it had become Gods from the Far East. Tony Morrison’s 1978 book on the Nazca lines of Peru came out as Pathways to the Gods. More recently, Graham Hancock had a bestseller with Fingerprints of the Gods.

39. Rampa, Tibetan Sage, Corgi, London, 1980, pp.30-31, 102.

40. Budd Hopkins, Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods, Sphere, London, 1978, p.147.

41. Budd Hopkins, Witnessed: The True Story of the Brooklyn Bridge UFO Abductions, Bloomsbury, 1997.

42. David M. Jacobs, The Threat, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1998, p.257.

43. Kevin D. Randle, Russ Estes, & William P. Cone, The Abduction Enigma, Tom Doherty Associates, New York, 1999.