Alien Abductions

Welcome to the Paranoid Style Podcast! On this episode we are probing one of the most out-there tentacles of UFOlogy, a real grey area if you will…alien abductions!  We discuss the abductions of Betty and Barney Hill,  Antonia Vias Boas, Travis Walton and Debbie Jordan-Kauble, and we explore Amanda's fear of orcas.  We look at the commonalities among abductions and try to figure out if the CIA is involved.  Or Space ABBA.  

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Music used in this episode is from: Purple Planet Royalty Free Music  and sound effects courtesy of https://soundbible.com/. 

Opening theme music provided by Tony Molina. You can hear more of his music at https://tonymolina650.bandcamp.com/

Transcript

CCK: Hey Sister!

ARK: Hey Sister!

CCK: Hey, Listeners. Welcome back to the Paranoid Style Podcast. Don't worry. This is not one of our free-wheelin' extemperaneous style episodes. We are just trying on a new, business casual look for our intro. My name is Christine and I love the color green.

ARK: Hello. I am Amanda and I have orca fear.

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ARK: If you don't want those black-and-white demon fish to win this war, please take a moment to rate and review The Paranoid Style Podcast on your podcast listening app of choice, and consider subscribing, so you never miss a single second of this quality show. 

CCK: Today we’re going to be probing one of the most out-there tentacles of UFOlogy, a real gray area if you will…tell me what you know about *alien abductions* <Hokey Sound effect>

ARK: Promise me you aren’t going to add a bunch of hokey pokey sound effects to this episode…

CCK: I promise nothing, Earthling! <hokey sound effect> Answer my question!

 ARK: If Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of flying saucers over Mt. Rainier in Washington state on June 24th, 1947 kicked off the era of sightings of Unidentified Arial Phenomenon, the reported alien abduction of Betty and Barney Hill in September of 1961 in rural New Hampshire ushered in the age of extremely close alien encounters. Eunice Elizabeth Barrett, known as Betty was born in 1919 in Newton, New Hampshire.  She was a graduate of the University of New Hampshire, and was a social worker with the State Welfare Agency. Barney Hill, Jr. was born in 1922 in Newport News, Virginia and was a postal worker.  He and Betty had gotten married in 1960, which was a second marriage for both of them. Betty and Barney were both very active in the Unitarian church where they lived in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and they were both also members of the NAACP and dedicated to civil rights issues. Betty was white and Barney was black, and although interracial marriage was legal in New Hampshire, at the time they got married, it was still illegal in 17 other states in America and would remain so until the 1967 supreme court decision in the case of Loving versus the state of Virginia which ruled that laws prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional.  A Gallup Poll from 1960 in the United States showed only 5 percent of people surveyed approved of interracial marriage. 

CCK: In September 1961, sixteen months after they had gotten married, Betty and Barney Hill decided to take a honeymoon trip to Montreal and Niagara Falls. On September 19th, 1961 around 10:30 PM as they were driving home to Portsmouth, they noticed a strange point of light in the sky south of the town of Lancaster in New Hampshire. Betty thought it might be a falling star or comet, but then it seemed to move vertically and began to grow larger. She persuaded Barney to pull over at a picnic area near Twin Mountain so that their wiener dog, Delsey could take a little walk.  And also, so Betty could take a closer look at the weird light through some binoculars they had in the car. She saw a strange looking craft with multi color flashing lights pass in front of the moon. Betty was especially interested in this craft because years earlier, her sister had claimed to see a flying saucer. Betty passed the binoculars to Barney and he initially made the assessment that this was just a commercial airliner, until the object appeared to descend rapidly and started moving towards them.  Betty, Barney and Delsey wisely headed back to their car and continued heading home south on route 3 towards Lincoln, but this strange object was now closer and appeared to be following them.  They temporarily lose sight of the object and then it suddenly descended just 300 feet in front of their car.

ARK: Barney stopped the car, grabbed the binoculars, nd walked towards the craft which he would later describe as "a plane that was not a plane."  It was so large that it filled their field of vision and was pancake shaped with red, blue, amber and green flashing lights.  Betty said that it appeared to be rotating but was completely silent. Barney raised his binoculars and saw a row of windows in front of the craft and in the windows stood several humanoid figures dressed in black shiny outfits looking back out at them.  Then all but one of the figures moved away from the windows. Barney ran back to the car screaming, "They're going to capture us!" He threw the car in gear and sped out. At this point, they began to hear beeping and buzzing sounds reverberating through the car and their bodies. Betty and Barney described the sounds as causing them to lapse into an altered state of consciousness. A second round of beeping and buzzing snapped them out of their stupor and they found themselves 35 miles south with no recollection of having traveled that distance. 

CCK: Betty and Barney Hill finally made it home around dawn. Even though now safe at home, they described having feelings of unease. Betty insisted that their luggage be kept packed and by the back door, and both Betty and Barney took long and repeated showers.  Barney said that he felt compelled to examine his genitals though he found nothing unusual. And then there are the inexplicable things that they noticed such as both of their watches having stopped, Barney's shoes being scuffed and his broken binocular strap.  Betty's dress was ripped and covered in a mysterious pink powder and there were shiny concentric circles on the trunk of their car that had not been there previously. The couple tried to reconstruct their drive home but are unable to remember any details between the first set of beeps and the second which occurred thirty-five miles and two hours later. 

ARK: On September 21, Betty decided to report the incident to the nearby Pease Airforce Base. However, fearing that she would be labeled crazy, Betty purposely left some details out of her account. The next day, Major Paul Henderson would contact the Hills for a more detailed report, but he would ultimately dismiss the Hills experience stating that the couples sighting of a strange light in the sky was most likely just the planet Jupiter. Despite the helpful reassurance from the military, Betty and Barney continued to have confusion about the incident and Betty experienced terrifying nightmares for weeks that featured short, strange figures with grey colored skin and large black eyes. 

CCK: In her nightmares, two entities walk Betty and Barney up a ramp into a disk shaped craft one she refers to as the leader and the other the examiner. The couple are separated. Betty protests but is told the exam will take longer if she and her husband are in the same room. This was communicated to her in English, although the examiner seemed less fluent in English than the leader and was harder to understand.   Betty is seated in a chair in an exam room and a bright light is shined on her. The figure that Betty refers to as the examiner cuts off a lock of her hair, exams her eyes, ears, mouth, teeth and hands and saves trimmings of her fingernails.  He then examines her legs and feet and uses a dull knife to scrape some of her skin onto a sheet of something resembling cellophane. The examiner tells Betty he is going to give her a pregnancy test and thrusts a needle into her navel.  She is wracked with agonizing pain, but with a wave of the examiner's hand in front of her eyes, the pain vanishes. 

ARK: After the examination is done, Betty has a conversation with the leader in which she asks where they are from. The leader asks if she know anything about the universe to which she replies, not really.  The leader shows her a pull down map dotted with stars. Betty picks up a book with strange symbols on it which she asks to keep as proof of her encounter and the leader initially agrees.  But shortly after, while Betty and Barney are being escorted off of the ship, a disagreement breaks out amongst the entities, the leader then takes the book back from Betty and explains that the other men did not want the Hills to remember the incident.

CCK: Desperate for answers, Betty reached out to UFO researcher, Walter Webb. Webb met with the couple on October 21 and interviewed them for six hours finding the couple credible.  Betty and Barney would go on to speak about their encounter to UFO groups and gatherings.  During this time, both Betty and Barney continued to experience anxiety and sleep disturbances and would make regular trips to the location where they first spotted the strange craft, hoping that revisiting the scene would unlock memories.  In 1963, while attending one of the UFO talks, they met a man named Benjamin Simon.  Simon was a psychiatrist who had served during World War II as the chief of neuropsychiatry at the Mason General Hospital on Long Island, which was the Army's main psychiatric center. Simon was interested in the use of hypnosis to help soldiers suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder and recognized the symptoms of trauma in the couple. On January 4, 1964, Simon began regression hypnotherapy on the Hills. Betty and Barney were both hypnotized several times and always separately so they would not hear each other's stories. At the end of each session, Dr. Simon would reinstate amnesia so the couple would not remember what they had said during hypnosis.

ARK: Under hypnosis Barney remembered driving off after seeing the entities in the window of the craft, he noticed six beings standing in the middle of the dirt road and the car stalled. Three men approached the vehicle and told him not to fear them. Barney remarked several times about the beings mesmerizing eyes and said that he felt like their eyes were in his brain and like their eyes had pushed into his eyes. Similar to Betty's dream account, Barney was separated from Betty and taken into a room and examined by three men but kept his eyes closed for most of the exam.  He recalled a cup was placed over his genitals and although he did not ejaculate, he felt that a sperm sample was taken. His vertebrae were counted and a thin tube or cylinder was inserted into his anus and quickly removed.  Barney stated that the beings communicated with him through direct thought transference. 

CCK: Betty’s account under hypnosis was similar to her dreams about UFO abduction, but there were some noticeable differences including her actual capture and release, the technology of the craft and the physical appearance of the beings. Under hypnotic regression Betty’s and Barney’s stories were consistent with each other. During  the hypnosis sessions they both exhibited extreme emotional distress, screaming and crying while recounting parts of their story. 

ARK: Post hypnosis, Simon suggested that Betty draw a copy of the star map that she had been shown by the leader which she would later describe as more of a three-dimensional projection than a map.  Her drawing contained twelve prominent stars connected by lines and three smaller stars that formed a triangle. She said that she had been told that the stars that were connected by solid lines were trade routes and stars connected by dotted lines were less traveled areas. In 1972, an amateur astronomer and schoolteacher from Ohio by the name of Marjorie Fish saw a copy of Betty's star map and set about trying to identify a match in the sky. After hundreds of hours of research and photographing the night sky, she found a constellation called Reticulum that featured a remarkably similar configuration to Betty’s drawing which had two really bright stars in the foreground that matched the Zeta 1 & Zeta 2 stars in Reticulum. 

CCK: Doctor Simon speculated that Barney's recollection of the encounter was merely a fantasy that had been inspired by Betty's dreams and her belief in alien life based on her sister's UFO sighting prior to the Hill's experience. Dr. Simon would go on to write an article for the journal of psychiatric opinion in which he concluded that this was a psychological aberration, and the abduction did not happen, though he did feel like an experience occurred that was traumatic.  In a 1975 radio interview Simon stated that Barney's anxiety stemmed from being a black man in white society, with feelings of being watched and in physical danger. Despite the differing viewpoints of Simon and the Hills, both parties agreed that the hypnosis was effective, and Betty and Barney were no longer experiencing anxiety related to their abduction and were prepared to leave the experience behind them. 

ARK: Unfortunately, before the Hills could return to their pre-abduction life, on October 25, 1965, John Luttrell a reporter for the Boston Traveler published the story of the Hills abduction. This was done without their cooperation using an audio tape recording of a lecture the Hills had given, as well as notes from interviews with UFO investigators and information about their hypnotic regression. After this, the story was picked up by United Press International and earned world-wide attention including several books and a tv movie.  Barney Hill died on the 25th of February 1969 of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 46. Betty would never remarry after her husband's death and until her death in 2004 she continued talking about her experience and wrote and self-published a book called "A Common Sense Approach to UFO's." Upon her death, Betty bequeathed all of her personal papers including things like correspondence, journals, newspaper clippings and photographs to her alma mater the University of New Hampshire. That seven box collection of documents is open to the public and details Betty and Barney Hill close encounters of the first, third, fourth, fifth and possibly seventh kind.

CCK: Which makes what they experienced a close encounter of the eighth kind.  A close encounter of the eighth kind is whatever combination of encounters makes up an individual’s experience. The first three levels of the close encounter scale were created by J Allen Hynek, an American astronomer who acted as a scientific advisor for the US Air Force’s official Unidentified Flying Object investigations: Project Sign in 1948 which turned into the oddly named Project Grudge in 1949 and finally, Project Blue Book in 1952. One interesting note on Blue Book, it includes an entry for Betty Hill's report to the Pease Airforce Base after the abduction as well as an entry on the night of the abduction.  On September 19th, there is an entry from the North Concord Airforce Station in nearby Vermont, of a ground radar sighting of an aircraft sized object with relative low speed and high altitude coupled with an erratic course which was categorized as probably a balloon. 

ARK: A close encounter of the first kind is visual sighting of an Unidentified Flying Object or Unidentified Arial Phenomenon. The second kind involves an encounter where there is some kind of observable interaction between the UAP and its environment, shorting of electrical equipment or marks in the ground where the phenomenon occurred.  The third kind are sightings where a pilot or animated creature are seen in conjunction with the UAP. Additional levels were added later, not by Hynek, to address more up-close encounters.

CCK: A close encounter of the fourth kind is one where a person is abducted by a UFO. The fifth kind involves some sort of communication between a human and an extraterrestrial intelligence. This kind of communication is frequently described as telepathy, or the silent transfer of information between minds.  The sixth level involves the death of a human or animal, such as cattle mutilations and the seventh kind is where things get really freaky with the creation of alien/human hybrids. 

ARK: And a man who can tell you the pains of having an alien baby mama was Antonia Vias Boas of São Francisco de Sales, Brazil. Four years before the Hills encounter, in October of 1957, the 23 year old farmer was working at night plowing fields when he saw what he described as a red star in the sky. The star moved towards him growing bigger until it became recognizable as an egg-shaped craft with a red light on its front and a rotating dome on top. The craft begins to land in the field at which point Boas tries to flee the scene on his tractor. However, the tractor stalls after only a short distance. Boas attempts to escape on foot but is seized by a five-foot-tall humanoid wearing grey coveralls and a helmet. Boas describes the being as having small blue eyes and making noises like barks or yelps. Three similar beings come out to help subdue Boas. After they drag him into the craft, Boas is stripped of his clothes and covered from head to toe in a strange gel. He is brought into a large semi-circular room through a doorway covered in strange red symbols which Boaz would memorize and later reproduce for investigators. Once inside this room, blood samples are taken from his chin and then he is taken to another room and left alone for half an hour.  While he is alone in the room, he claims that some type of gas was being pumped into the room that made him feel ill. Another humanoid enters the room, this one though is female, very attractive and dressed in her alien birthday suit. She is the same height as the other beings with a small, pointed chin and large blue cat like eyes. Her hair is long and white, but the carpet does not match the drapes. Because her underarm and pubic hair are bright red. Boas is very into this and they have sexual intercourse. When the deed was done, the female smiled at Boas, rubbed her belly, and pointed upwards. Boas interpreted this as the female saying she would raise their baby in space. 

CCK: Although Boas had what he described as a relatively good time, he felt that he had been used as nothing more than a stud horse for the humanoids. He was given back his clothes and taken on a tour of the ship. While on the tour, Boas attempted to steal a clocklike device as proof of his encounter but he was caught and prevented from taking it. They escorted him off the ship and he watched as it flies away.  When he gets home, he realized that four hours had passed. And now the real bullshit starts.  Following this event, Boas began to suffer from nausea, weakness, headaches, loss of appetite, burning of the eyes and skin lesions that looked like small reddish nodules with a central orifice that produced a yellowish watery discharge and were painful to the touch.

ARK: Space Herpes. 

CCK: Not quite, Boas was examined by a doctor, Olavo Fontez who concluded that Boas had been exposed to a large dose of radiation and was suffering from radiation sickness.  

ARK: For the rest of his life, Boas remained consistent in his alien abduction story and went on to become a lawyer, got married and had four earth children. It is unknown if they were ever told about their possible half space sibling. And he definitely did not tell his wife about his one-night encounter with the blonde alien seductress.  Which by the way, was that just a grey in a wig? 

CCK: Well, the grey aliens are the ones that most people are familiar with, and the kind most often implicated in alien abductions. The greys are humanoid in appearance, grey in color, small in stature, heads like sputnik, large eyes, slits for nose and mouth, skinny little bodies with little musculature no visible bones or genitalia and long, thin fingers one of which is a thumb. The greys are sometimes referred to as Zeta Reticulans after those stars which may or may not have been identified from Betty Hill's map. An Astronomy magazine writer who wrote a story on Marjorie Fish's Zeta Reticuli discovery in 1974 was fired, and a follow up article from the magazine in October 2016 referred to the identification as Zeta Ridiculi. 

ARK: Whatever you want to call them, various versions of those grey aliens have appeared in movies such as Close Encounters of The Third Kind, Communion, which is based on the abduction story of writer Whitley Strieber, and Fire in the Sky, another based-on-a-true-story-film about the abduction of Travis Walton. Travis Walton was an 18 year old forestry worker, working on a job at the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest near Snowflake, Arizona. After work on November 5, 1975, while driving in a truck with six of his coworkers, they spotted a mysterious light through the trees. Deciding to drive towards it to find out what it was, they encountered a gold saucer shaped object, hovering above the ground and making a high-pitched buzz. Walton got out of the truck and approached the object, much to the horror of his coworkers.  Suddenly a beam of light from the craft engulfed him and knocked him unconscious. In a panic, the remaining men drove away from the scene, assuming Walton was dead. 

CCK: But after driving a short distance, they decided to go back and check to see if Walton is still alive. One of the men thought he saw the craft above the tree tops streaking away across the sky.  When they returned to the location where Walton had been, they were unable to find him. They decided to return to town and alert the authorities who after hearing their story are fairly sure that one or more of these guys killed Travis Walton.  And this belief intensified over the next five days as search efforts failed to locate any trace of Walton. 

ARK: Meanwhile, back on that gold flying saucer, Travis Walton comes to, lying on his back in excruciating pain and when his vision becomes clearer, he thinks he has been brought to a hospital. When he tries to sit up, something is pressing down on his chest, preventing him from doing so.  That is when he notices a strange device around his body extending from his arm pits to just a few inches above his belt that curves down on each side of his ribcage. He sees that there are three figures in the room who he assumes to be doctors because they are wearing surgical masks and caps but their surgical gowns are bright orange.  As his vision clears he realizes that these doctors are not human, they are creatures with large brown eyes the size of quarters. The eyes have no whites showing, no lashes or eyebrows. The mystery medical personnel were under five feet in height but had a basic human form, two legs and arms and five fingers and a disproportionately large round head with extremely thin lipped mouths and small rounded noses. Their thin bones were covered with white marshmallowy looking flesh.  They had very small feet and and their hands were small and delicate with thin round fingers which were soft and unwrinkled with no finger nails.  Travis swings at one of them knocking it into the another one.  He described the sensation of touching the alien as being spongy, more like fat than sinew

CCK: Rude.

ARK:  Walton lunges to his feet knocking off the restraint and grabs a thin transparent cylinder about 18 inches long sitting on a table.  He swings this ineffectively at the aliens telling them to stay back.  The aliens make no sounds, but suddenly turn and scurry out of the room. Walton leaves the room and goes down a narrow, curved, dimly lit passage and enters a large domed room with a single unoccupied chair in the middle.  As he is examining it, someone comes into the doorway and when he turns and looks, it's a human being.  A man about six foot two inches tall wearing a helmet and a tight fitting bright blue velour jumpsuit with a thick black belt and black boots. 

CCK: Yes mama, boots the house down, eleganza extravaganza. I know it’s velour but can it be felt?   

ARK: Walton tries to talk to the man who comes forward, takes Walton by the arm and brings him to another room remaining silent the entire time, despite Walton's pleading and questions. Walton is led through a large open, warmly lit space that has cool air with a current that makes Walton instantly lose the headache and chest pain he has been experiencing and he is taken into an adjoining room that contains a table, chair and three other humans, two men and a woman all wearing the same blue jumpsuits and no helmets. They are all tall, muscular and unnaturally good looking.  They gently lead him to the table and effortlessly lift him up onto it, and before he can protest they cover his mouth and nose with a clear soft plastic mask, like an oxygen mask, but without tubes which causes him to lose consciousness. When he regains consciousness, he is lying on the pavement of a highway. He gets to his feet and manages to make it to a gas station in the nearby town of Heber, Arizona. He uses a payphone and calls his sister, it's 12:05 AM, five days after his initial disappearance. 

CCK: Wait a minute. Are you telling me that Hollywood has misled me once again?  The movie Fire in the Sky has no jumpsuit wearing, ABBA looking, supermodels on the ship and way more slime.  Also, the space craft looks like a giant glowing rock filled with lava. 

ARK: That's right, Christine, I hate to break it to you but Hollywood thought Travis Walton's description of what happened was too vague so they brought in Tracy Torme to punch up that script. Tracy Torme, as you may know, is the son of America's Sweetheart, the velvet fog himself, Mel Torme. 

CCK: Are you from the past?

ARK: But even if Hollywood didn't appreciate Travis' story, The National Enquirer did, awarding Walton and his coworkers, $5000 for the best UFO case of the year after having passed polygraph tests. Skeptics point to this National Enquirer payment as evidence that the whole thing was a hoax by the men to get attention and money, but it does seem remarkable that the six coworkers would be willing to let themselves be murder suspects for five days in the pursuit of a relatively small amount of cash.   

CCK: So let’s say I’m a person…

ARK: I knew it!

CCK: A person who is skeptical of alien abduction and is searching for explanations that go beyond the level of a hoax perpetrated for money or attention, because I feel like 1) it’s not like saying you were abducted by aliens necessarily gets you positive attention and loads of cash when you announce it. Wouldn’t it be easier to swallow frozen honey on tik tok or something? and 2) many people who report abduction seem to have some genuine trauma at the heart of their experience, so if it isn’t really alien abduction what is it?

ARK: Owls? Jupiter? Partially deflated weather balloon?

CCK: If you say swamp gas…

ARK: I would never!!  What do you think I am, a government shill?? Let’s discuss common denominators in cases of reported alien abduction and explore existing theories about what’s going on if it isn’t jumpsuit wearing Swedes from outer space kidnapping people. First, we’ll parse out some of the commonalities among abduction stories, and to do this, we’ll take a look at the Copley Woods, Indiana Encounter of Debbie Jordan-Kauble. The following information is from debshome.com, Debbie Jordan-Kauble’s website, where you can find the full story of her abduction experience in her own words as well as links to research and interviews she has done over the years.  At the time of her experience on June 30th, 1983 she was living with her two young children at her parents house in Copley Woods, Indiana.

CCK: From what I could tell looking at Google earth and some extracts from “Intruders” Budd Hopkins’, 1987 book about the incident, Copley Woods is a neighborhood in Indianapolis, Indiana. 

ARK:  On the evening of June 30th, Debbie was supposed to be going to a neighbor’s house about a block away after dinner with her mom and sons. Her father was working late at a local auto factory. Debbie was doing dishes before leaving and out of the kitchen window she saw a strange light coming from near the swimming pool pump house in the back yard. She thought about staying home because of the light and pointed it out to her mother who told her not to worry and to go to the neighbors where Debbie had been earning some extra money in the evenings by helping to cut out costume patterns. Debbie left her house and went to the neighbors, which was about three minutes away. When she arrived, she called her mother to check in and her mom said everything was fine and not to worry.  As soon as she hung up the phone though, her mom called back and said, “I want you here now” and “I don’t want anyone but you.” Debbie hurries back home. At the time, her mother could not remember exactly why she asked Debbie to come back, but about a week later, she suddenly recalled that there had been a basketball sized glowing orb in the back yard.

CCK: Strange lights check!  In all three of the cases we’ve discussed so far, strange lights have caught the experiencers attention prior to actual interaction with any entities. Experiencers is a term that is preferred by many people who have reported abduction incidents. And Debbie’s mother’s inability to initially remember why she called Debbie back is typical of the amnesia associated with details of abduction events that sometimes alleviates as time passes allowing memories to return.

ARK: Once she is back home, Debbie grabs her father’s unloaded shotgun and she goes out into the now dark back yard.  

CCK: I do not want to point fingers…

ARK: Why are you pointing your finger?

CCK: One thing that I notice as a common denominator of abductions is an unhealthy desire to figure out what is going on. I might be wrong about this, but I feel like if I saw a mysterious craft, my first inclination would be to power walk away in the opposite direction.

ARK: ?

ARK: Once she is out in the yard, Debbie heads to the pool house and sees nothing, but in the garage near it, her dog is hiding under a truck, whimpering. When Debbie tries to pull the dog out, the dog was yelping and whining and refused to budge. Debbie looked around the rest of the garage and finding nothing, turns to exit but a strange sensation starts to affect her skin, making it feel like she is burning, she then attempts to run from the garage and is struck in the chest by a bright, electrified light. Debbie describes being hit by the light as what she imagines it would be like to be struck by lightning. She is at first in searing pain over her entire body, but then once this subsides, she is unable to move.

CCK: Feeling odd physical effects in proximity to where strange crafts or lights are or have been seems to be another item on the checklist and drowsiness or being rendered paralyzed or unconscious, check and check!

ARK: Debbie sees a basketball sized orb of light floating about five feet above her that seems to be moving up and down her body as if doing an inspection. The orb then disappeared into an egg shaped craft near, and about the same size as the pool house, around 8-10 feet tall.

CCK:  Egg and saucer shaped crafts, adding to the list. I feel like aliens would totally be into brunch. 

ARK: Debbie then sees six small figures standing in the yard in front of her. They were shorter than she was at 5’3”, with large heads and small bodies. She remembers at this point hearing someone say, “It’s over.” And she suddenly feels panicked about the safety of her children but the same voice assures her they are okay. 

CCK: I have to give them, aliens are certainly good communicators.  They always seem to be able to speak the language of the people they interact with, frequently telepathically. 

ARK: Just as suddenly as they appeared, they seemed to be gone and Debbie walked back to her house, with each step forgetting more of what happened.  By the time she got to the house, she tells her mom, “Everything’s cool.” 

CCK: Space Roofied by aliens, check.

ARK: At this point, surprisingly…Debbie goes back to the neighbors who were extremely worried after she’d gone to check on her mom and had not called them or come back for two hours.  Debbie could only remember 15 minutes of the time between when she’d left the neighbors and when the aliens told her “It’s over.”

CCK: Lost time, one of the most common commonalities among experiencers. 

ARK: Debbie had no explanation for her neighbors, but did not feel like sewing and instead suggested they return to her house for a swim. 

CCK: Wait wait wait…what?

ARK: It’s not my story, but I do think it sort of jibes with the desire among people who have abduction experiences to get in water after it’s over to wash off the feeling.  Debbie, her neighbor and her neighbor’s 14 year old daughter go back to her house and when they are heading to the pool, the daughter steps on a patch of dead grass that makes her foot feel numb.  They all get into the pool, but after 15 minutes, they all started feeling nauseous and they end their swim, saying goodnight.  In the aftermath of that night, Debbie experienced anxiety, illness and panic attacks.  Debbie’s dog, who was only 6 years old on the night of the encounter became seriously ill and when examined by a vet two months later, he was shocked the dog was only 6 as she appeared to be much older, and he advised them to put her down as she was riddled with cancer and suffering greatly. 

CCK: Varying degrees of physical and psychological damage associated with the abduction experience crops up again and again, which is why many doctors and psychiatrists involved in examining experiencers are convinced, even if they don’t believe in aliens, that some legitimate trauma occurred. 

ARK:  In the backyard, there’s an 8 foot circle of dead grass where nothing grows for five years and which everyone instinctually avoids as it induces major heebee jeebees. 

CCK: Heebee Jeebees, check.

ARK: A mini-series of the event was produced by CBS in 1992 staring Mare Winningham.

CCK: Big or small screen reenactment, totally a commonality. 

ARK:  In an interview on Debbie Jordan-Kauble’s website, she is asked if she knows why the aliens chose her for abduction and she says she has no idea why but she wonders if there is something about her genetics that predisposed her for the experience since many people in her family also had strange experiences, which is especially interesting if you remember that Betty Hill’s sister claimed to have seen a UFO. Also, Travis Walton, his older brother, and his mother were described by the Navajo County, Arizona sheriff as "longtime students of UFOs". So maybe there is something to it running in families? 

CCK: Stay away from aliens, AMANDA!  I don’t want any tiny grey dudes messing with my beautiful mind.

ARK: Er…Moving on. So there’s some of the commonalities, now let’s talk non-alien explanations for what’s going on. These explanations range from the scientific to the…

CCK: Paranoid Style?

ARK: Exactly.  As an example of that paranoid style, let’s start with the CIA.  

CCK: Those guys again??

ARK: They get around.  There are some that believe, including Dr. Jacques Vallee, who worked on the network information center, that was a precursor to the modern Internet. He is a computer scientist, venture capitalist, author, ufologist and astronomer and splits his time between San Francisco, California and Paris, France. Vallee seems to have a sort of multi-pronged explanation for the alien abduction phenomena and one of those prongs is our old friends at the Central Intelligence Agency.  Vallee believes that as with programs like MK Ultra, staged abductions made to look like they are alien in nature may be another form of experimentation on the general populace or a form of psychological warfare. Vallee claims to have seen a CIA document that confirms simulated abductions in Brazil and Argentina. 

CCK: Vallee is interesting because he’s not suggesting that all or even the majority of reported alien abductions are CIA ops. In the past he has argued for the validity of extraterrestrial life, and the possibility that the Miracle of Fatima in 1917, Our Lady of Lourdes apparition in 1858 and even the revelations reportedly given to Joseph Smith in the 1820’s that led to the creation of the Mormon church may have been the result of UFO activity.

ARK:  By 1969 though, Vallee began to move beyond a strictly Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (or ETH) and included other phenomena in his studies that seemed to have commonalities with UFO encounters, like run ins with demonic or angelic beings, hauntings, sightings of cryptozoological creatures and psychic phenomena. Vallee came to believe that   multidimensional visitations might be more plausible than extraterrestrial ones. Vallee listed the following reasons for why ETH seemed less likely than MultiDVs. 1) Close encounters with extraterrestrials are more numerous than would be required for a physical assessment of earth. 

CCK: Of course, maybe those are all different aliens coming to visit us even though we perceive them as the same.

ARK: 2) The relatively humanoid body structures of the alleged "aliens" doesn’t seem likely to have originated on another planet and isn’t especially well adapted for space travel.

CCK: Maybe some memo went around the universe telling all the aliens that when they encounter humans to put on a standard alien suit to look grey and non-threatening and reduce the amount of screaming.

ARK: 3) The common types of examinations and interactions described by experiencers doesn’t point to very useful data gathering methods. 

CCK: I’ll give Vallee that one. Not sure what skin scrapings and butt probes would tell you about the human race, other than that as a whole we are bigger fans of axe body spray than fiber?

ARK: 4) Reports of strange abductions throughout human history predate UFO sightings

CCK: I won’t give you that one Vallee.  Maybe UFO’s have been visiting us for much longer than earth has had the technological capability to identify the technology.  One man’s troll from under the bridge might be another man’s little green man from space. 

ARK: and 5) the apparent ability of UFOs to manipulate space and time suggests radically different and richer alternatives, like those multidimensional visitations.

CCK: So we’ve got, CIA and inter, not extra, dimensional beings as possible suspects, what else?

ARK: Well, now we’re heading into the more science-y stuff.

CCK: Groan…

ARK: Sleep paralysis, False memories induced by suggestions given during hypnotic regression, lucid dreaming, hypnopompic hallucinations that occur in the morning just as you are waking up, sometimes in conjunction with sleep paralysis, Fantasy prone personalities and the Illuminati.

CCK: The…did you say…illuminati? 

ARK: Yeah, that’s not science-y but I thought I’d just throw it in there to see if you were still paying attention.

CCK: I am now!!

ARK: This one isn’t even remotely backed by anything even vaguely proof-like, I hesitate to even mention it because I half suspect the CIA put this out there to throw suspicion off themselves, but there are those who believe that a certain very small segment of the human population is rich and powerful to an extent that would shame the known space billionaires we see in the media, and that they live in a breakaway society that has technology beyond what any individual or government outside of that society can imagine. They have been called the Illuminati, the Octopus, the Cult of the Moon Beast and the New World Order.  And what we pleebs perceive as UFO’s are actually spacecrafts that they have invented and use to get around between earth and their vacation homes on the dark side of the moon.

CCK: But what about the abductions? 

ARK: Have you ever seen videos of those tuxedo colored hell-spawn we call killer whales tossing around seals for kicks?

CCK: Yes…

ARK: Well, to the Illuminated Cult of the Moon Octopus, we’re all just plump amusement seals put here for their enjoyment. 

CCK: Sister, I say this to you as a friend, you need to work through your orca issues.