12. WISHFUL THINKING? In a 2003 Harvard study, 70% of self-professed abductees stated under hypnosis that they had been used for breeding or sexual experiments by their alien captors.
These accounts parallel medieval reports of men seduced by succubi or women violated by incubi. Many historical, folkloric, and biblical accounts show remarkable similarities between reported activities of demons, angels, fairies, or other spirits . . . and aliens. Mythology has many legends of “gods and goddesses” mating with humans.
Many UFO “abductees” reveal their experiences under hypnosis. This is not proof that the abduction really happened; it only shows that subjects believe the experience was real.
According to Harvard psychologist Susan Clancy, hyp¬nosis makes it easier for people not only to recall experiences but also to construct “false memories.” This is largely because hypnosis “stimulates the imagination and relaxes reality con¬straints,” she suggests.
First thing I wonder . . . is how these aliens can be so stupid. If they’re smart enough to fly between the stars as easily as we fly from D.C. to Montana, they should be able to figure out our basic anatomy. But during just about every abduction, it takes them hours to figure out that our navels are not our reproductive organs. Why don’t they share that information with other ships? Why do they find our bellybuttons so fascinating?
13. HARD TO SEE THE CONNECTION, BUT . . . Allen Cheyne, a psychologist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, says
that those who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens are often prone to experiencing sleep paralysis.
As reported in the Washington Post (11/20/2005), psy¬chologist Frederick V. Malmstrom, visiting scholar at the Air Force Academy, notes that most self-proclaimed alien ab¬ductees describe their captors about the same way: little crea¬tures with big heads and eyes, virtually no mouth or ears, grayish skin, smooth features.
He suggests that they may be unconsciously describing the “prototypical female face” as seen through a newborn’s fuzzy vision, which tends to diffuse facial features into blurry blobs— like huge, wide-angle alien eyes. This facial template is in the brain’s hard wiring, designed to enhance a baby’s bonding with the mother. It is a survival mechanism, much as newly hatched chicks instinctively flee from shadows shaped like predators.
But what is Mommy doing in a UFO? Is that perception a subconscious yearning for the protection of her apron?
14. C’MON, GET IT OFF YOUR CHEST. In Newfoundland, sleep paralysis is called the “old hag” because it is associated with visions of an elderly woman crouching on the sleeper’s chest. In the West Indies, the phenomenon is said to occur when a ghost baby bounces on the snoozer.
Aliens are the ghost or devil stories of modern times. All cultures have some version of the creature “pressing down” or “sitting on” the victim’s chest. But why are so many of these apparitions “hags” or old women?
15. IN SPACE, NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SNEEZE. Streptococcus mitis, a bacterium that infects the nose and throat, was inadvertently sent to the moon aboard the Surveyor 3 probe. The bugs were still alive when Apollo 12 astronauts retrieved the probe’s camera two and a half years later.
Bugs live. And stuff gets around—even alien stuff. Re¬cently Godfrey Louis, a physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University, speculated, in Astrophysics and Space Science, that unidentifiable red cells from two months of rain in Kerala, India, in 2001 may be alien microbes. The tiny reddish cells (10 microns across) lack DNA; yet, they can reproduce, even in water superheated to 600°F—more than twice the tem¬perature any earthly life form can survive. Are these alien bacteria that evolved on some high-temperature planet or adapted to brutal conditions in space?
Over 40 tons of cosmic dust drops onto the Earth’s sur¬face every day. How much of it contains living alien matter, or its building blocks? Exobiologists see evidence that this might be the case. Professor Milton Wainwright of Eng-land’s University of Sheffield stated on March 26, 2006, “These are living bacteria. . . . We think there are large quantities impinging on the Earth all the time.”
20. MAYBE WE’RE THE ALIENS. Maybe we are the aliens—or at least their offspring. Some theorists believe that space it¬self, not just the planets, is teeming with life. Supporters of “panspermia” offer the image of intergalactic life blowing like a wind across the universe, seeding planets with material to use in their particular evolutions.
This could be one answer to Fermi’s Paradox. Enrico Fermi (1901–1954), a Nobel Prize–winning Italian physicist, was subjected to a lengthy harangue about the certainty of intelligent life among the hundreds of billions of star systems. It was impossible, said a colleague, to believe that we are not regularly visited by technologically advanced beings. Fermi shrugged and quietly asked, “So, where is everybody?”
Short form answer: We’re right over here, Enrico.
|