On a dark September night Barney and Betty Hill saw something in
the sky; and what they saw changed their lives forever. If it was
what they came to believe it was, that is understandable, for they
had an experience which few if any mortals have been privileged to
have: an encounter with beings from another part of the universe. But
even if no such encounter took place, the fact remains that their
lives were changed, and that fact is central to any understanding of
their experience.
It is nearly forty years since Dr Simon and the Hills mutually
agreed to terminate their hypnosis sessions. During that period, the
crucial question, the only one that really matters - did the
encounter take place as ostensibly recalled? - has been left
dangling, unanswered. With so much hanging on the answer to that
question, it is astonishing that greater efforts have not been made
to answer it.
It is particularly astonishing that there has been no in-depth
reappraisal of the case. Fuller, who authored the only full-length
account of the matter, was a journalist: though we have no reason to
question his integrity, and though his book is a creditable piece of
reporting and so far as I am aware contains no major errors, it would
be reassuring to have a second opinion in so serious a matter.
Naturally the Hills’ story is narrated, and to a degree commented
on, in such publications as Clark’s UFO Encyclopedia: but we lack a
counter-investigation of the story, filling the gaps that Fuller
skipped over, perhaps because he did not even notice them, and to
provide answers to the questions he left hanging, perhaps because he
was in no position to answer them.
Perhaps our best starting-point is this comment from his book: "Short of acceptance of the whole experience as reality, which
contradictory evidence prevented the doctor from doing, the best
alternative lay in the dream hypothesis." (Fuller 1966: 274)
That hypothesis, though it has never been formally set out, is to
the effect that Betty’s dreams were a fantasy: a fantasy which she
communicated to Barney as the result of recounting her dreams to him,
and which both would subsequently recall in the course of their
hypnosis sessions.
For those who cannot bring themselves to accept the hypnotically
recalled scenario as fact, the dream hypothesis remains the option of
choice. However, this alternative explanation has its own
shortcomings: not least, that the part played by fantasy in human
behaviour, though it has been extensively explored, has yet to be
precisely formulated. It is common acceptance that we are all
influenced by myths, archetypes and stereotypes derived on the one
hand from our cultural environment, on the other from our personal
experience. But the processes are yet uncharted whereby the paths we
tread through this labyrinth can, when the circumstances are
appropriate, lead us to all kinds of anomalous experience ranging
from simple misperception - an advertising blimp becomes an alien
spacecraft - to total fabrication - the figure of an Old Hag enters
our bedroom and seats herself upon our body.
The first step towards evaluating the explanatory power of the
dream hypothesis for the Hills’ encounter is, therefore, to set it
in the wider context of anomalous experience. It needs to be
considered in the light of other experiences where it seems possible
that fantasy plays a crucial part.
This will not, of course, enable us to make an absolute yes-or-no
judgment on the Hills’ encounter. But it will enable us to gauge
the probability that this is what set the process in motion. We shall
then need to consider how such fantasy may be communicated from one
person to another, and then, how it can re-emerge as ostensibly true
memory.
Betty’s nightmares
Some ten days after their encounter - approximately 29 September
to 3 October 1961 - Betty Hill experienced a series of remarkably
detailed dreams which, when the disparate elements are brought
together, rearranged and ordered, form a sequential narrative. This
narrative offers a complete and coherent story in which the initial
sighting, which the couple consciously recalled, leads seamlessly
into related events of which they have no conscious memory whatever.
What makes the Hills’ experience so remarkable - unique, it may
be - is the fact that more than three years later, under hypnosis,
not only would Betty recall events which match her dreams in detail,
but Barney would echo her account. Understandably this would lead
many to the conclusion that both the dreams and the hypnotic recall
were literally narrating events that had actually taken place.
Could this be so? The interpretation of dreams had a long history
before Freud used it as the title for his landmark book. Dreams
requiring de-coding are notable incidents in the Judeo-Christian
Bible: the Roman statesman Cicero wrote a book about divination, and
dream books are as popular today as they were with Victorian
housemaids. But invariably we find it taken for granted that dreams
are not to be taken at face value. They must be interpreted: you must
read your Freud - or your gipsy astrologer - to learn what those
extraordinary happenings really signify.
None the less Fuller asserts "It is not uncommon for dreams
resulting from an experience of shock to be literal; i.e. a complete
re-enactment, so to speak, of an event that actually took place".
(Fuller 1966: 333) He provides no authority for this statement, which
I suspect is open to question: I have found no confirmation of it in
the literature. The general opinion, as expressed by John Antrobus of
the City College of New York, is that "dreaming refers to a
mixture of thought and emotional properties that are rare in normal
waking, but common in sleep". (Antrobus 1993: 98)
Though I am not aware of any case in the literature of dreams,
inquiry among my acquaintance elicited a case which at first seems to
confirm Fuller’s assertion. A car passenger was involved in an
accident in which a pedestrian was killed. Traumatised by the event,
she had repeated dreams of it, night after night. She said the dream
exactly matched the event.
However, there is a significant difference between this and
the Hill case: this lady had consciously experienced her traumatising
event, and retained conscious memories of it. The Hills, on the other
hand, even if they lived their encounter on a conscious level - it is
difficult if not impossible to learn from Fuller’s account what
state of mind the couple were in while participating in their
adventure - they certainly had no conscious memories of it.
So even if we give Fuller the benefit of the doubt and accept
as possible that Betty might be one of the exceptional people whose
dreams are indeed a re-living of actual experience - or, at any rate,
that on this occasion they were so - we must, because this is so
exceptional an occurrence, consider the alternative as no less
possible: that her dreams were - as most dreams are - a fantasy,
making more or less use of veridical events, combined with material
obtained, consciously or unconsciously, from every conceivable source
to which she had ever been exposed, whether derived from her personal
experience, from her cultural milieu or from her imagination.
The only scenario
There is one aspect of Betty’s dreams which is easily
overlooked: veridical or not, the dreams made a highly significant
difference to the couple’s situation. Before the dreams, their
experience comprised a UFO sighting followed by a period for which
they are amnesic. Afterthe dreams, the Hills are provided with a
possible account of what happened during that amnesic period.
Moreover, it is an account which is remarkably detailed, remarkably
coherent. We do not know whether Barney played any part in helping
Betty organise the scattered incidents of her dream-content into a
smooth-running narrative, but in the light of his dismissal of the
dreams, it seems likely that it was Betty alone who arranged the
disordered tableaux into a rational sequence. As set down by Betty,
it is a complete and generally plausible story. Furthermore, it is a
story that is rooted in known fact - or, at any rate, in the
incidents related to the initial sighting and Barney’s panic,
details which the Hills regard as fact; so they can be forgiven for
speculating whether the dream-narrative, containing both the initial
sighting and the subsequent abduction, might be all fact.
Betty does not mention her dreams to their first interviewer
Walter Webb on 21 October 1961, and this is perhaps understandable in
view of the fact that at this stage, though the Hills recognise a
degree of amnesia in the course of their journey, they have not yet
been confronted with the challenge of the two-plus hours of missing
time. Though Betty found the dreams deeply disturbing, it is possible
that she at this stage regards them simply as fantasy, without it
even crossing her mind that they might bear some relation to real
experience. Even if she does initially have any such thoughts, she
might seek to put them out of her mind when Barney dismisses her
dreams as nonsense.
The "missing time" mystery emerges a month later, in the
course of the meeting with Hohmann, Jackson and MacDonald on 25
November 1961. At once the amnesia is perceived to be greatly more
significant. Betty says "This was the first time I began to
wonder if they were more than just dreams. Then I really got upset
over my dreams." It is at this point that hypnosis is suggested
to aid recall, and both Hills favour the suggestion. Barney hopes
that hypnosis "might clear up Betty and her nonsense about her
dreams". (Fuller 1966: 47-48) In fact, however, the hypnosis
proposal is not taken up at this point; on 25 March 1962 they decide
against it, and the possibility will not be raised again until a year
and a half later.
None the less, it remains a fact that, irrespective of Betty’s
uncertainty about her dreams, and whether or not Barney regards them
as "nonsense", they provide the couple with a possible
scenario for what is otherwise a gap in their lives. Even if they do
not accept it as a true account, it is the only account they have. It
is inconceivable, therefore, that it is not in the back of their
minds - to say the least - throughout the year and a half which
elapses before hypnosis is undertaken, a period in which no
alternative explanation is ever seriously considered because there is
no other account to consider.
Even if, in the light of Barney’s
dismissive attitude, neither of them ever actually speaks of the
dreams to the other, both of them must retain an awareness of the
dream-story, if only as a terrifying scenario they would prefer to
discard if only a better one were available.
Fact or fantasy?
The question, whether those dreams were a factual replay of
real events or a fantasy in which fact and fiction are inextricably
jumbled, is therefore a crucial one: but in the absence of any
independent evidence or corroborative testimony it is a question
which it is well nigh impossible to resolve. All we have by way of
confirmation are a pair of subjective accounts, not consciously
recalled but elicited under hypnosis. In support of their being true
memories, there is the fact that both witnesses tell substantially
the same story: against it, there is the fantastic nature of that
story and the lack of any external corroboration.
However, these very facts place the Hills’ experience in the
same state of existential instability as a wide variety of other
claimed anomalous experiences which, because they lie beyond the UFO
horizon, are rarely perceived as relevant to UFO issues. Thousands of
individuals have laid claims to have met the Virgin Mary, mother of
the Christians’ Jesus: thousands more have claimed to be, or been
diagnosed as being, possessed by evil spirits. Millions believe they
communicate with spirits of the dead, and ghost stories are as widely
reported today as they were two thousand years ago. Many of those who
were burned as witches in the 15th through the 17th century believed
they flew through the air to participate in sabbats: similar journeys
are claimed by shamans in primitive cultures who travel to
otherworldly destinations to consult with tribal deities.
By and large, these experiences are not today supposed to be
literal accounts of physical events: alternative scenarios have been
proposed which are generally preferred by behavioural scientists. At
the same time, they are accepted as literal fact by those who
perceive them as being countenanced by a particular belief-system.
Some years ago I attended a conference in Basel where a speaker told
us about a case of diabolical possession in which he had been
involved: to my astonishment, I suddenly realised that the speaker,
though a university professor, believed implicitly in the literal
reality of a possessing demon. Those who communicate with the dead
round the séance table are not always the credulous victims of
exploiting charlatans: many of them are intelligent, educated people
who believe they have sound and rational grounds for believing that
they are truly doing what they think they are doing.
So an examination of other marginal experiences by no means
implies that we are seeking to place the Hills’ experience in a
category occupied exclusively by fantasy: we must be prepared to
accept that any of these claims may tip either way, this way into
fact or that way into fiction. But at least, in the absence of either
confirmation or rebuttal of the Hills’ abduction scenario, a look
at some of these other limbo cases may enable us to take a broader
approach to their particular experience.
Case 1: Glenda and the spacewoman
In 1976 a 17-year old girl from Dagenham, near London,
England, told investigators of a series of strange experiences
culminating in a cigar-shaped UFO which followed her along a city
street. She revealed that five years earlier she had come home from
school one afternoon, gone upstairs to her room, only to be joined by
a spacewoman who walked in through the closed door, sat beside her on
her bed and talked with her for an hour or so. Ever since then, the
spacewoman had been a sort of companion, counsellor and friend -
generally unseen, but always felt.
Glenda had no doubt of her reality: I have the drawing she
made of her visitor. Did Glenda’s spacewoman exist? Probably not in
the literal, physical sense. Yet, paradoxically, in another sense she
did exist: for beyond question she played a significant role in
Glenda’s adolescent life, over a period of some five years. (Evans
1984: 15 et seq) That is to say, the fact of an entity’s
non-existence must not be allowed to stand in the way of its ability
to exert a very real influence on the individual who supposes
her/himself to have encountered it.
At the time, I was asked to provide an explanation for
Glenda’s experiences, and I failed, utterly. I did not believe that
a spacewoman had visited Glenda, but neither could I say what had
happened to her to make her think she had been visited. Then a year
later I met a French girl who claimed to have met the Virgin Mary,
and this not only provided additional incentive to find an
explanation, but also suggested which way to look for one.
Case
2: Blandine and the Virgin Mary
In 1981, Blandine Piegeay was a 14-year old Catholic French
schoolgirl. One day, walking to school, she met an angel who told her
she would shortly receive a visit from Mary, the mother of Jesus, who
died some 19 centuries ago: and two days later she did indeed
experience the first of some fifty encounters. Every Saturday morning
- for the Queen of Heaven agreed with Blandine that a weekend day
would be more suitable than a study-disruptive schoolday - Mary would
descend from Heaven and visit with Blandine in the family kitchen. No
one else saw her, though her father claimed once to have heard her.
Her parish priest was sceptical, but thousands of pilgrims
beat a path to her door: she was featured on television, a nine days’
wonder. Today she is married, with a child, her adventure all but
forgotten. But Blandine insists: "I know my apparitions were
true. Why would I have invented them?" (Evans 1987: 9)
That question is the key to understanding her experience.
Instead of asking: Why would the Virgin Mary come down from Heaven to
meet with Blandine and tell her she eats too many bonbons? we should
ask, Why would Blandine claim such an experience?
The conclusion
must be that Blandine had a psychological need for such an encounter.
She needed someone - and not just anyone, an authority figure whose
word she could accept - to tell her she was important, she mattered.
If not to her fellow-pupils or her teachers, then to the Queen of
Heaven. Crudely put, the Virgin Mary came in answer to Blandine’s
identity crisis.
Looking back to Glenda’s spacewoman, hindsight suggests that
her manifestation took place for much the same reason. The 12-year
old English girl, like the 14-year old French girl, needed an
authority-figure to whom she could look for guidance, counsel,
reassurance. Not for her, though, the Virgin Mary of Catholic
Blandine: instead, a stereotype from her own cultural milieu, an
extraterrestrial entity.
Each such encounter is both stereotyped and custom-made. The
content is personal - each individual has his or her own agenda: but
the format is largely cultural. In the history of Marian apparitions,
the pattern has become almost as ritualised as a Japanese stage
performance, with stock episodes - the apparition of the
authority-figure in some isolated place, the conventionalised
appearance, the formularised message, the healings limited to a
certain range of ailments, the manifestation of a sacred spring. In
similar fashion, stories of abduction by aliens have become stylised
and run to a pattern with a greater or lesser degree of conformity.
(Bullard 1987: Brookesmith 1998)
This conformity has been seen as evidence both for and against
the authenticity of the claimed experience. On the one hand, the fact
that such narratives possess so many similarities, including very
specific details with which an ‘innocent’ experiencer could not
reasonably be expected to be acquainted, has been taken as supportive
of the view that the event was genuinely experienced. And indeed it
is not easy to explain how such details could have been acquired
unless the individual had been exposed to other experiencers’
accounts. On the other hand, the inclusion of such details - if it
can be shown that they could have been acquired in the course of the
individual’s casual daily reading or TV viewing - could point to
copycat replication. It is important to recognise that this would
almost certainly have been an unconscious process: the acquisition of
the details, and their assimilation into a personal experience, could
perfectly well have taken place on a subconscious level - and indeed,
more likely than not.
This issue remains unresolved, and those who make out the case
for the "abductions-are-real" case seem to have as strong a
hand as those who hold an "abductions-are-fantasy" view.
This is why we must look beyond the immediate issue, the stylised
pattern, to the individual encounter and the personal need to which
it responds. For then we find that each case is both one of a class
and one of a kind: both ubiquitous and unique.
Researcher Scott Rogo, investigating the 1953 Tujunga Canyon
abductions, went so far as to suggest:
Each time an abduction experience is uncovered, a psychological inquiry into the life of the witness should indicate that he or she was undergoing a life-crisis at the time or was recovering from a psychological trauma. (Rogo 1980: 239)
The objection can be made that the Hills’ encounter, being the
first to be widely publicised, can hardly have been conforming to a
pattern: if anything, it set the pattern. But this is to miss the
point. If subsequent abductions have tended to follow in the same
mould, it is because the Hills’ experience was an acceptable model:
it embodies elements to which later protagonists respond. Their story
may seem to have been the first of its kind: but it is none the less
a stereotype.
Case 3: Barbara and the Operators
The wisdom of Scott Rogo’s admonition to look before as well
as after is demonstrated tellingly in the book in which Barbara
O’Brien, an American professional woman, records her encounters
with otherworldly beings. (O’Brien 1958) Following on personal
problems, both domestic and at work, she begins to hallucinate a
number of entities, who identify themselves as denizens of some kind
of parallel world which interacts with ours. Though on one level she
is aware that they are hallucinatory, they are at the same time
totally real to her. She permits them to persuade her to leave home
and work, and wander for many months, living in two worlds at once -
the real world where she has to continue living as best she can, and
this strange other level of reality. Apart from occasional
breakdowns, she manages pretty well: and eventually she succeeds in
resolving her situation.
What makes her story so remarkable is her ability to
subsequently analyse it and to offer a diagnosis of what happened to
her. In retrospect, she realises that, triggered by her psychological
crisis, her unconscious had taken control of her life and substituted
its own unreal drama for the real play of events:
The unconscious stages a play: the conscious mind is permitted to remain, an audience of one, watching a drama on which it cannot walk out.... As you sit watching your Martian, it is your unconscious mind which is flashing the picture before your eyes.. more than this, it is blowing a fog of hypnosis over your conscious mind so that consciously you are convinced that the hallucinations you see and hear, and the delusions that accompany the hallucinations, are real. (O’Brien 1958: 5)
What happened to Barbara could be what happened to Glenda and
Blandine: the illusion they take for reality is a presentation staged
by their subconscious minds.
Normally, the subconscious sits there
in the background, letting our conscious self get on with things. But
when the need arises, it steps in and makes its presence felt.
When
that happens, the individual starts to function on two separate
levels of reality. Sometimes for a single never-to-be-repeated
occasion, sometimes over a long period. So Glenda, Blandine and
Barbara, each in her own way, function in this way: retaining their
ability to live on the plane of everyday existence, but at the same
time intermittently maintaining their otherworldly contact. (For a
fuller presentation of these ideas, see Evans 1989)
It is one thing to formulate a theory, quite another to apply
it in practice. In November 1980 there was a notable case in England
involving a police officer who, on patrol alone at night, encountered
a UFO. Subsequently, under hypnosis, he recounted a horrific,
dreamlike abduction experience. When I diffidently suggested that
Alan Godfrey’s abduction might be a fantasy triggered by
psychological factors, he was indignant, rejecting my reading of his
adventure, feeling I was accusing him of mental instability. Since
then, though, he himself has come to question the physical reality of
his experience: "It seemed real but it might have been a dream".
(Randles 1988: 90) Investigator Jenny Randles writes:
Godfrey is commendably honest, pointing out that he read UFO stories between the sighting and the hypnosis sessions months later. He acknowledges this could have coloured what he said in an altered state, which might therefore be open to other interpretations. While nobody can prove what happened one way or another, if the witness himself is unsure of the objective reality of the abduction phase of his story, we must be wary of forming earth-shattering opinions about extraterrestrial life. (Hough and Randles 1991: 189)
And she pertinently observes:
Of course, if it was a dream, the question is why it was so similar to everyone else’s dream of abduction. (Randles 1988: 90)
Which brings us back to the Hills…
Case 4: Madeleine and Jesus
When popular fantasy author Whitley Strieber published his
autobiographical Communion, the press release issued with it declared
"I was interviewed by three psychologists and three
psychiatrists, given a battery of tests... and found to fall within
the normal range in all respects" and carried an endorsement
from the Director of Research at New York State Psychiatric Institute
which stated "I see no evidence of an anxiety state, mind
disorder or personality disorder". (Strieber 1987: 2)
We can only assume that none of these highly qualified persons had
considered it relevant to their examination to glance at Mr
Strieber’s own non-fiction autobiographical writings. If so they
would have come across his description of the security arrangements
at the house where the alleged abduction took place, which by any
standards approached paranoia - though if his story is as true as his
dust-jacket says it is, perhaps in the light of what was to occur
paranoia was justified. They would have read of his erroneous belief
that he was present at the 1966 Charles Whitman massacre at the
University of Texas at Austin when he undoubtedly was elsewhere,
(Conroy 1989: 120) of his prolonged amnesia in the course of a visit
to Italy, and many other such incidents. Even from what he chooses to
reveal about himself, we can see that "disordered" would be
a mild description of both his mind and his personality both at the
time of his experience and, indeed, recurrently throughout his life.
(Strieber 1987 (1))
Similarly, abduction researcher Budd
Hopkins assures us, with regard to the abductees whose stories he
recounts:
Three psychiatrists and two psychologists have conducted hypnotic regression sessions over the years with a number of possible UFO abductees. Two other psychiatrists have interviewed our subjects... None of these psychological professionals have presented to me, even tentatively, a psychological theory that might explain these bizarre accounts. (Hopkins 1987: 25)
This is a truly astonishing assertion: one can only suppose that
the psychologists in question had never taken the time to study the
findings of their eminent predecessors. Simply among the best known,
we can find similar behaviours described by Freud, Jung and Janet.
Pierre Janet, above all, laid the scientific foundations for such
studies, based on his observations of hysterical patients at La
Salpetrière, Paris. His patient Madeleine, a gifted and articulate
lady, is convinced she makes periodic visits with Jesus - a spiritual
activity she describes as ‘very rich and very beautiful’, using
language which verges on the erotic:
No, the state I enter isn’t sleep: sleep is a kind of suspension of the life of the spirit, whereas mine is just the opposite.... my spirit and my heart soar over immense horizons into which they plunge and lose themselves in delight... no earthly pleasure can be compared to it! .. I am united to God and he to me! (Janet 1926, volume 1: 68 et seq)
There is no doubt in Madeleine’s mind that her meetings with
Jesus are real, nor that he will, one fine day, fetch her to live
with him permanently in Heaven. She speaks of her "life in
common" with Jesus, and Janet describes it as "the life of
a couple, even, dare I say it, a ménage". While he had no doubt
that none of this had any basis in reality, he sought to examine the
process whereby she had come to make the claim, and how she was able
to live simultaneously on two levels of reality - aware, indeed, how
remote one was from the other, yet unsurprised at her ability to pass
easily to and fro between them.
In so doing, he laid the foundations of the studies upon which we,
today, are building. Siegel’s exploration of hallucination, (Siegel
1992) Hufford’s study of "bedroom visitors" (Hufford
1982) and Schatzmann’s account of his patient Ruth (Schatzmann
1980) all show that under appropriate circumstances sane, healthy
people can have encounter experiences which are so vividly veridical
that, if only for the time being, the witness sees no need to attempt
any reality-testing, and unquestioningly accepts them as
actual.
Case 5: The New Zealander and the flying saucer photo
The process of self-delusion is fascinatingly devious, as this
trivial incident demonstrates. One day a gentleman from New Zealand,
a total stranger, visited me on business. The conversation touched
upon flying saucers, whereupon the visitor stated that he himself had
not only seen but photographed one. When I expressed suitable
amazement, he produced a glossy print and explained how, when and
where he had taken it - on a given date, at a given place in his own
country. However, I recognised it as a photo taken at an earlier
date, in the United States, by an American photographer.
Beyond
question, the man was lying: but was he lying knowingly? My guess is
that my visitor had somehow acquired a glossy print of the photo, and
from wishing he had taken it he had come to convince himself that he
was indeed the photographer. There must have been some part of him
that knew perfectly well he had not taken that photograph: but,
driven by whatever motivation, he chose to maintain the make-believe
which to him was belief.
While we have no reason to suppose that the Hills had any wish
to see a UFO, still less to meet its occupants, it is possible to
argue that Barney’s aggressive hostility to UFOs had its roots in a
subconscious desire to do so. But this is pure speculation. What this
anecdote reminds us, though, is that there are people whose unspoken
motives can lead them to do and say things which consciously they
would indignantly reject. Once again, only a detailed examination
would disclose what motives were driving my visitor.
Case 6:
Allan Kirk and his otherworldly life
A notable feature of O’Brien’s experience is the way she
accepts her otherworldly Operators into her life: their fantastic
nature seems, at the time, something she can take in her stride. This
seems to be generally true of those who meet with aliens. A Canadian
lady, who described to me how aliens visited her every evening in her
kitchen to report on the day’s progress in helping the Mexican
government perfect a cure for cancer, was well-dressed, articulate,
seemingly normal in every other respect.
American psychoanalyst Robert Lindner had the opportunity to
study at first-hand an extreme case of living on two different
levels. (Lindner 1954) Not long after World War Two he had a patient
referred to him, a physicist engaged in highly classified government
research, whose psychological condition was affecting the quality of
his work.
What Lindner gradually unravelled was that Allen Kirk, aside
from being a physicist on Earth, had been aware since childhood that
he was also a prince on a distant planet, to which he would return on
almost a daily basis. His written account of his other existence
comprised some 14,000 pages, accompanied by hundreds of drawings,
maps and sketches.
The creation of imaginary worlds is nothing new: apart from
the many utopian writers who have imagined alternative civilisations,
there are such people as the Brontë sisters whose fantasy creations
went beyond literary invention to play a role similar to those
imaginary playmates with which many children enrich their childhoods.
But Kirk’s world surpassed these not only in the detail of the
fantasy, but also the intensity with which he believed in it. He
himself told Lindner:
How can I explain this to you? One moment I was just a scientist, bending over a drawing board in the middle of an American desert; the next moment I was Kirk Allen, Lord of a planet in an interplanetary empire in a distant universe, garbed in the robe of his exalted office, rising from the carved desk he had been sitting at, walking towards a secret room in his palace, going over to a filing cabinet, extracting an envelope of photographs, studying the photographs with intense concentration.
It was over in a matter of minutes, and I was again at the drawing-board - the self you see here. But I knew the experience was real, and to prove it I now had a vivid recollection of the photographs, could see them as clearly as if they were still in my hands... (Lindner 1954: 183-184)
What puzzled Lindner was this:
The chief difficulty was that he regarded himself as completely normal, was thoroughly convinced of the reality of all that he experienced, and could not comprehend its significance in terms of his sanity. (Lindner 1954: 185)
In all such cases, if we look for a simple, blanket explanation,
we shall almost certainly miss the point. Even if the fantasy itself
falls into a specific category - the Münchhausen syndrome, (Schnabel
1993: 26) say, which drives those it afflicts to claim false
identities and experiences, or the Jerusalem syndrome (Sieveking
1999: 21) whose victims come to believe they are chosen to give an
apocalyptic message to the world - even then, we have to ask why that
particular individual developed the syndrome. Putting people into
pigeonholes is a neat way of sorting them out, but more important is
to find out what got them that way in the first place. Lindner was
able to trace Kirk’s fantasy back to childhood problems: the
fantasy, for all its stereotypical nature, was custom-made for his
personal needs.
Case 7: Christi Dennis’s confession
Particularly revealing in this context is an incident which
occurred at one of the Rocky Mountain reunions which Professor Leo
Sprinkle holds every year at the University of Wyoming at Laramie.
Most attendees are abductees and contactees, who get together to
compare notes and share experiences in a supportive environment.
Experiencers tell their stories, and enjoy counselling from Leo and
his colleagues and the sympathetic support of others like themselves.
In May 1981, one of the speakers was a college student,
housewife and mother from Arizona named Christi Dennis. She told how
she been confined to bed after an accident, practising spiritual
exercises such as OBEs. One day she suddenly had the impression there
were otherworldly entities in her room. She found she could talk with
them. Subsequently she was transferred to their planet, where she met
a female entity over 7 feet tall who gave her instruction.
Christi provided a detailed and coherent account of her
experiences. She described her room which contained, among other
things, a television set where she could watch TV from earth from any
period in time, and much other sophisticated gadgetry. Her
presentation was lucid, sensible, impressive. (Proceedings of the
Rocky Mountain Conference on UFO Investigation 1981: 104) She was
welcomed by the delegates, most of whom had passed through similar
experiences, as one of themselves.
The following year, she wrote a
letter to Sprinkle, which he in turn communicated to the
conferencers, in which she confessed:
I am not a contactee. I have never had an extra-terrestrial experience! The stories I have told and the book I have written are nothing more than fair science fiction. (Proceedings of the Rocky Mountain Conference on UFO Investigation 1982: 105)
Her letter made it clear this was no crude, sensation-seeking
hoax; rather, it was the outcome of some spiritual crisis. Christi
had projected herself into this imaginary scenario as a way of
working her way out of her personal psychological predicament. The
abduction process provided her with a ready-made scenario onto which
she could project her individual concerns.
Apart from vividly demonstrating the difficulty of
distinguishing between a true and a false abduction experience, the
Dennis case demonstrates the force - even the therapeutic value - of
the authorised abduction myth. For her, as for O’Brien, the myth
provided an existential framework for her personal situation. It
could be reasonably suggested that, just as a medicine contains
ingredients which the human biological system may from time to time
require, so the encounter myth may contain elements for which the
individual may have a psychological need. In the cases of Glenda and
Blandine, that need was met relatively simply by the ostensible
meeting and subsequent dialogues with a suitable authority-figure: in
the cases of O’Brien and Dennis, more mature persons with more
complex psychological needs, the psychodrama was more elaborate, but
the process was the same. As to why it took the form it did, we are
back with Scott Rogo’s requirement for a before-the-event analysis.
As to whether this has any bearing on the Hill case, this must remain
an open question.
Case 8: The New Ager and the aliens
Few books about abductions are as revealing as Betty Hill’s
own aptly-titled A Common-sense Approach to UFOs. It includes several
cautionary tales:
In the mid-1970s, a woman phoned to say she did not know if she
was crazy or had been abducted by a UFO. Her problems began when she
enrolled in a New Age psychic development class. They would lie on
the floor and were put into a light trance. They were ‘connected’
to different kinds of UFOs… Over a period of time she began to
think her fantasies were real.
She sought out hypnotists. Every hypnotist gave her a
different abduction. She became fearful as she believed the "aliens"
were watching her through her windows, unlocking her doors, coming in
and giving her injections. She became suicidal. She was under
psychiatrists for fifteen years. She had all kinds of delusions. She
knew she was an alien who was forced to move to this planet.
Under hypnosis, it emerged that as a child she had been
mistreated by her family: her grandmother continually hit her, and
her mother followed the example. The resulting trauma was transferred
to the aliens. She preferred to believe her anxieties were the result
of UFO contacts, rather than the cruel treatment by her grandmother
and mother. (Hill 1995: 75)
In connection with the Hill case, the possibility of trauma
stemming from the fact of their mixed marriage has inevitably been
raised, and generally dismissed. Probably correctly: there seems
little doubt that their marriage - a second marriage for each of them
- was a very successful one. But we do not know the circumstances
under which their previous marriages broke up, and the possibility of
trauma resulting from those circumstances cannot be entirely
dismissed. Without going so far as to trace a cause-and-effect
process along the lines of the case just cited, we should bear in
mind that trauma may have been lying dormant in the subconscious of
one or both of the Hills, and that they could have been transferred
to the aliens in a similar way, as a contributory if not a causative
factor.
Case 9: The party guest and the lost doll
The trigger for belief need be nothing more than simple
suggestion, though that probably implies a suitably susceptible
recipient. At a party at Betty’s house, a hypnotist offered to
uncover his guests’ UFO abductions:
They all laughed, for they knew they were never abducted. He requested a volunteer: a middle-aged woman volunteered. He put her into a light trance and began to question her. To our amazement, she told how she had been taken on board a UFO, made pregnant, came home and later gave birth to a ‘big, fat baby girl’. She gave it a name.
Six months later the UFO came back and took the baby with them.
None of this was true. She lived in the same neighbourhood all her life: no pregnancy, no birth, no police looking for the body of a missing baby. So why had she told this tale?
One day, we were looking through her old family albums. Suddenly we saw a picture of her about the age of five, sitting on the front steps. What was she holding? A big, fat baby doll. Name? The same as the one she had used in her hypnosis. Where was this doll? She did not know, for it disappeared one day and she was never able to find it.
Finally, the solution to the tales she told under hypnosis was found. She took a real experience and turned it into a UFO abduction, while in a trance. (Hill 1995: 77)
Yet again, only a study of the experiencer’s past life could
reveal the roots of the experience. But for the accident of the
family album, Betty’s question, "So why had she told this
tale?" might have remained forever unanswered. While we have no
reason to suppose that a glimpse of the Hills’ family snaps would
have been equally revelatory, such a possibility cannot be excluded.
Case 10: The abductee and the demons
Hypnosis is often fingered as the cause of fantasy and
fabrication: but other and more down-to-earth factors can induce an
altered state of consciousness. Fasting undoubtedly underlay many
visionary experiences among religious people of the middle ages. For
example, the 7th century hermit Guthlac of Croyland left a
sufficiently detailed account of his personal life for researchers to
deduce that he probably suffered from protein and vitamin B
deficiency, among whose likely consequences might be hallucinatory
states: which could explain why he was continually troubled with
horrifying visions of demons. (Kroll and Bachrach 1982) In the
sixteenth century, a similar factor led to outbreaks of convent
hysteria, in which cloistered nuns would fancy themselves possessed
by demons, causing them to indulge in a variety of behaviours ranging
from outbursts of blasphemous language, obscene gestures and orgasmic
convulsions: the more open-minded doctors of the day traced it to the
effects of diet and fasting, and of the cloistered and celibate
lifestyle. (Wier 1560)
Taking drugs, or not taking drugs, can have similar effects,
as illustrated by another of Betty’s cases:
A woman told her doctor she thought she had been abducted by
aliens. He referred her to me: I suggested she should be tested for
her lithium level. She was given lithium treatment and became normal
again.
Then she said she didn’t need lithium any more. She ran
naked round the garden, claiming the aliens were everywhere. She told
me demons were in her basement, while the UFO people were in the back
yard trying to get into the house to save her. The demons prevented
them doing this. She started destroying the house, finally setting
fire to it. She was sent off to a mental home while her husband faced
a huge bill for the damage.
[In the end Betty convinced her to
face facts] I said: "UFOs are real, but the aliens stay on board
their crafts - remember you see them only when your lithium level is
down". (Hill 1995: 62)
While it would be naïve to suggest that the Hills ate something
in the Colebrook restaurant which triggered a shared fantasy, Betty’s
common-sense diagnosis of this case reminds us not to ignore the
possibility that a factor as mundane as body chemistry can have
otherworldly consequences.
Case 11: Quintero and the thunderstorm
Clearly, there are a wide variety of circumstances in which
people will fantasise. Regrettably, fantasy is often associated with
hallucination; and to many psychologists, especially in America,
hallucination is perceived as an indication of a pathological
condition. If you see a ghost or the Virgin Mary or an alien visitor,
you are hallucinating; and if you are hallucinating, you must be
mentally afflicted.
But what constitutes mental affliction?
Studies by Israeli scientist Sulman show that "weather-sensitive
patients encompass about 30% of any population", and other
studies show that about 5% of the population are so sensitive to
climate that an altered state of consciousness can be induced.
(Sulman 1980)
Consider, in the light of these findings, the case of
Colombian cowman Anibal Quintero:
In 1976 Quintero told investigators how a luminous egg-shaped vessel landed close to him near his cowsheds. A number of people emerged, including three long-haired women. Though he knocked four or five down, they overcame him and took him into their spacecraft.
When he came to, he found himself being massaged by the three
females. They were naked, and behaved so provocatively that he
started caressing one; she responded enthusiastically, and in no time
they were making love. He described her as very hairy, with short
legs, but very attractive, even if she communicated like a dog
barking.
Afterwards he was given an injection and everything went
black. He woke to find himself lying on the grass, while dawn was
breaking. (Bowen 1977: 48)
However, there is an interesting additional aspect:
His wife told the investigators Anibal had come home from work that evening in an unusual state, throwing himself into a hammock where he had fallen asleep. Shortly after, a violent thunderstorm occurred. Quintero woke, feeling queer, as though something was about to happen to him, and dashed out of the house. When the storm eased off, he walked towards the cowsheds, feeling that he was "controlled by some inexplicable external force".
This behaviour makes no sense if what occurred was indeed a
surprise visit by real aliens. On the other hand, it could be very
relevant if Quintero was one of those who are strongly affected by
meteorological conditions. If this was the case, the oncoming storm
could have triggered an alternate state, in which he hallucinated the
spaceship fantasy.
Case 12: Maureen and the broken date
While there is virtually no independent, external evidence for
abductions taking place, there is evidence that some alleged
abductions did not take place. The classic case is that of 37-year
old Australian housewife Maureen Puddy:
On 3 July 1972 she had a UFO sighting while driving home from visiting her son in hospital - that is to say, at a time when we may reasonably suppose that she was undergoing personal stress. Further odd experiences followed, then in February 1973 she alerted two prominent ufologists, Paul Norman and Judith Magee, that she had a rendezvous with the aliens. At the location, Magee and Norman joined her inside her car. She saw an alien figure, outside, beckoning, though her companions saw nothing. She then gave a detailed account of being aboard a spacecraft: yet all the time she was sitting right beside them. (Basterfield 1992: 13)
During the witchcraft outbreak of the Middle Ages, sceptical
observers would watch a supposed witch while she claimed to be
attending a sabbat. (Spina 1523) Back in our own time, nine-year old
Gaynor Sunderland was witnessed by her mother, lying on her bed in a
deep trance-like sleep: subsequently she described participation in
an abduction. Jenny Randles, who investigated, concluded, "There
is every reason to assume that these experiences were not objectively
real, but were psychic in nature." (Randles 1981) Yet there is
no reason to question the honesty of the witnesses who claimed these
experiences: here again, their ostensible reality was totally
convincing to the individual.
The question of communication
Every one of these case histories involves a single
individual, without corroboration of any kind. What makes the Hills’
case uniquely impressive is that Barney and Betty tell essentially
the same story under hypnosis.
One way of looking at this would be to say that it was the
Hills’ exceptional good fortune that they had each other to provide
corroboration: perhaps many if not all of these other experiencers
might have found corroboration if their experience had not taken
place when they were alone. That is certainly a possibility, though
we must bear in mind that there are tens of thousands of
single-witness cases for each collective case, and that many
collective cases are of questionable authenticity.
Alternatively, we should consider the possibility that the
shared quality of the Hills’ experience may point equally
effectively against its being a real experience: that the very fact
that Betty's story is corroborated by Barney is an argument against
its basis in fact. Fuller makes a significant observation when he
tells us:
After the first sessions with Barney, Dr Simon began to assume that the illusions and fantasies were his - and that Betty had absorbed them from him. But with the completion of Betty’s second trance, it appeared that the reverse of the doctor’s initial assumption might be true. If the total experience were not true, a dream of fantasy initiated by Betty might have been absorbed by Barney, who appeared to be more suggestible. (Fuller 1966: 191)
In fact, Dr Simon noted that the things Barney experienced in the
abduction portion of the incident were in Betty’s story. On the
other hand, very little of Betty’s abduction sequence was included
in his story. His recall of being taken through the woods was vague
compared to hers. The details of the examination aboard the craft
were much more extensive in Betty’s story than in his.
Karl Pflock has pointed out that Simon was in error when he gave
the impression that everything in Barney's narration can be found in
Betty's: "There's a good deal of important material in Barney's
recollections that doesn't appear in Betty's". [personal
communication] None the less, Betty's narrative was sufficiently
richer than Barney's that Simon could arrive at his estimate of the
process which probably took place.
The question of contagion in
human behaviour is a complex one which has been insufficiently
explored. If we knew more about it we would be better able to
interpret multiple-witness cases.
The phenomenon known as folie à deux, though well known, is not
well understood: a substantial number of well-attested ghost
sightings are multiple in nature, but the mechanism of collective
hallucination is as uncertain as the nature of ghosts themselves. The
authors of the Society for Psychical Research’s landmark study of
apparitions were convinced that this could be explained - as could
the apparitions themselves - by telepathy, (Gurney, Myers and Podmore
1886) though most researchers today would consider that this
explanation is over-simplistic. Be that as it may, there is little
doubt that what takes place in such cases is either some form of
extra-sensory communication, or some psychological process as yet
unidentified which successfully transcends normal modes of
communication. If the matter were better understood, we would find it
easier to tease out the process which led from the Hills' experience,
first to Betty's dreams, then to their independent recall. As it is,
we can only speculate, balancing the probabilities.
As suggested above, some degree of open discussion of Betty’s
dreams must surely have taken place between herself and Barney, if
only for him to reach the conclusion that they were "nonsense".
It is hard to believe the subject would be dropped, never again to be
raised between them throughout the months that followed - months,
don’t let us forget, when the couple were making repeated
excursions into the New Hampshire countryside in search of
topographical confirmation of their experience: the need to
understand the experience led to the need to substantiate it, and the
search for the geographical location was a primary requirement. But
even though their efforts were directed at something as down-to-earth
as the here or there of the experience, we must bear in mind that
those efforts were directed towards finding the location of events
for which there was no evidence outside Betty’s dreams. This is to
say that, even if we accept that it was tacitly agreed between them
that the dream-scenario should not be openly discussed, that scenario
must none the less have been in the back, if not the forefront, of
their minds, since it was the only scenario they had, and thus was
the only starting-point for their repeated car searches of the New
Hampshire countryside.
My use of words "surely" and
"must" underline the fact that this can only be
speculation: but it is essential to appreciate the psychological
context in which those searches took place.
Dr Simon himself seems to have recognised that the least
improbable alternative was "that an actual experience had taken
place on a sensitised background. A background existed on which could
be imprinted illusions or fantasies, later to be re-experienced in
dreams." (Fuller 1966: 190: these appear to be Fuller’s words,
though based on his interview with Dr Simon)
In considering what might constitute "a sensitised
background" we run up against a crucial issue which divides the
proponents of a psychosocial explanation for the UFO phenomenon from
those who find the extraterrestrial hypothesis more probable. (For
fuller discussion of these contrasting views, see Clark 1998: 749;
Evans 1997; Evans 2001; Magonia, passim) Several researchers, notably
Méheust, (Méheust 1978; 1985; 1992) and Meurger (Meurger 1995) have
demonstrated the pre-conditioning created by the literature of
science-fiction, folklore and suchlike cultural influences. Opponents
have responded by pointing out that only a negligible fraction of
flying saucer witnesses would be likely to have read pre-1939 popular
fiction.
Yet despite this objection, it seems unquestionable that cultural
contamination does indeed take place: this is supported by the fact
that there is no aspect of the flying saucer phenomenon which was not
foreseen by the American pulps of the 1920s/1930s. (Evans 1993: 4 et
seq) It is noteworthy that some of the details of the Hills’
encounter - notably the long-nosed, uniform-wearing aliens described
by Betty (though not by Barney) - seem closer to Amazing Stories than
to today’s "greys".
So, when Dr Simon suggests that "a background existed"
onto which the Hills could impose their own personal encounter, he is
not implying any out-of-the-way predisposition, but noting that no
one, in America in 1961, could have escaped cultural contamination to
the extent of being unaware of the possibility of alien visitation,
or without having acquired some subconscious ideas regarding what
form the aliens, and any encounter with them, would take. The
experiments of Lawson and McCall (Lawson 1983: 8), even though some
researchers dispute their conclusions, provide ample demonstration of
how firmly the abduction scenario is implanted in the minds of people
who claim no interest in the subject, serving as the basis for
fantasy "memories" whose only substance must be what has
been more or less subconsciously picked up from their cultural
milieu.
Despite his insistence that he was indifferent to UFOs, and
that he and Betty had not talked about them for four years previous
to their encounter, Barney could hardly have reacted to their
sighting as strongly as he did unless he felt he knew what UFOs are
and what harm they might do to Betty and himself. His actions in the
course of the sighting point not only to a strong awareness of UFOs,
but also to a strong fear - hence his sustained efforts to deny that
it was a UFO at all, his determination to hide from Betty that he is
scared, his feeling that he must get a weapon.
His fear at the time seems in marked contrast to his
subsequent indifference. This indifference may well be, as Karl
Pflock has suggested [personal communication], a psychological
defence position, adopted to conceal an underlying fear beneath a
cloak of rationalisation. None the less it remains a fact that,
throughout, it is Betty who takes the initiative - it is she who goes
to the library to find Keyhoe’s book and who writes to him, it is
she who suggests the return trips to the encounter location and so
on. Barney is presented as always reluctant, going along with Betty
against his own feelings, and dismissing her dreams as nonsense.
Moreover, the dream-scenario is largely, and probably
entirely, Betty’s handiwork. Her dreams, written up at an
unspecified date, are given coherence only when she edits them into a
sequential narrative. Her statement "I will attempt to tell my
dreams in chronological order, although they were not dreamed in this
way. In fact the first dream told was the last one dreamed,"
(Fuller 1966: 333) is extremely significant, for it implies an
awareness that the dreams represent a sequence of events, a sequence
which adds up to a plausible narrative. This could indicate a
subconscious knowledge that the dreams are factual: but equally it
could be her subconscious at work, persuading her to impose order on
a jumble of dream incidents.
The recall
The most remarkable element in the entire Hill case is that
both witnesses, under hypnosis, should recall substantially the same
events. But another feature is also worthy of remark: that both Betty
and Barney should respond in the same way to hypnosis. Both recall a
sequence of events seemingly devoid of fabulation. If they were
indeed both recalling true fact, it is remarkable that they should
both do so, given that most people introduce fantasy into hypnosis.
To have one veridical recaller is unusual enough, to have two is
remarkable.
On the other hand, if they were both recounting a fantasy, the
fact that both narrated the same fantasy would be consistent with
psychological experience. Material learnt in one altered state of
consciousness can be forgotten in the normal state, but recalled when
again in an ASC, as this trivial anecdote illustrates:
An Irish porter to a warehouse, in one of his drunken fits, left a parcel at the wrong house, and when sober could not recollect what he had done with it; but the next time he got drunk, he recollected where he had left it, and went and recovered it. (Macnish 78)
The fact that both the Hills recall substantially the same events,
and recall them as lived experience, proves nothing either way: it
can be used to support either the veridical or the fantasy
hypothesis. Indeed, the same is true of each of the paradoxes
presented by their story.
Setting the Hills’ adventure alongside other extraordinary
experiences does not resolve the matter. However, it enables us to
see that there exists in every one of us a faculty for mythmaking -
that is, combining material derived from the individual’s cultural
framework with other material with personal content, to create an
authorised yet made-to-measure myth. Each of us, given the
appropriate circumstances, could find ourselves living a fantasy with
the total conviction that we are really experiencing the events we
are actually imagining, or recalling imagined experiences with such
vividness that we are convinced they took place in reality.
Is this what happened to the Hills? We cannot say for sure,
and perhaps we never will be able to say. But at least, by seeing
their story alongside other stories, we can see that the
dream-fantasy scenario envisaged by Dr Simon is a possible one.
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