Date: Sun Jun 27 1993 09:44:00 UFO - My stepmother is an alien Mass abductions or mass hys

Date:   Sun Jun 27 1993  09:44:00
From:   SHEPPARD GORDON
UFO                            -------------------------------

My stepmother is an alien
Mass abductions or mass hysteria?  Kidnapping tales breed skepticism
in UFO circles
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
04/27/92

You are driving along an empty, unlit stretch of highway, alone
at night, when a hovering light that you first take for an airplane
suddenly descends over the roadway ahead and you find yourself
obeying an urge to stop the car.
Light floods the interior, and you are scared.  You sense
somebody - or something - outside the vehicle, and the last thing
you see before your consciousness fades is a silhouetted figure
staring at you through the window glass.
Its eyes are black.
Some time later, you discover you are still inside your car,
unable to account for two hours of lost time.  And you can't shake
off the nightmares that have disturbed your sleep ever since.
Has this ever happened to you?
If so, UFO researcher David M.  Jacobs, author of "Secret Life:
Firsthand Accounts of UFO Abductions" (Simon & Schuster), has a
theory: You could be one of thousands - possibly millions - of
Earthlings who have been abducted by alien beings and subjected to
grisly examinations aboard their spacecraft.
Worse, Mr.  Jacobs believes, hypnosis might uncover repeated
kidnappings over the course of your life, all part of a program to
breed alien-human hybrids whose purpose is unknown to us, but whose
existence becomes more difficult to reject as abduction accounts
pile up.
"What we see here is a program of systematic exploitation of
one species over another, in which people are mined - or farmed, if
you will - over and over and over again, over the course of their
lives, from infancy to adulthood," Mr.  Jacobs says during a visit
to Washington to promote his new book, a collection of stories from
the mouths of the abducted.
Such claims are hardly new.  For decades, people have been
describing bug-eyed creatures that took them aboard saucerlike
craft.  UFO researchers like Mr.  Jacobs and his mentor, Budd
Hopkins, have hypnotized and interviewed scores of alleged
abductees to discover what happened in those missing hours.
Celebrity abductee Whitley Strieber tells his own tale in
"Communion: A True Story," a 1987 best seller that became a 1989
movie starring Christopher Walken.
But Mr.  Jacobs' "Secret Life," with its claims of careful
documentation and scrupulous research, is touching off new sparks
in a still-raging intellectual firefight over alien abduction
accounts.  Though hundreds have sought the help of people like Mr.
Jacobs, and some mental health professionals laud his work, some
psychologists, fellow UFOlogists and skeptics have excoriated the
man.
Philip J.  Klass, an unpopular fellow in UFO circles, dedicates
his debunking text, "UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game" (1989), to
"those who will needlessly bear mental scars for the rest of their
lives because of the foolish fantasies of a few."
"If these {abduction} tales are simply fantasy, and I'm certain
they are," Mr.  Klass says in an interview, "then {abduction
researchers} are condemning dozens, hundreds of people who
participate in their cult to being psychologically disturbed or
fearful for as long as they live."
Mr.  Klass says that with hypnosis, you can convince just about
anybody he or she has been abducted.
UFO research is a field with its share of frauds and cranks,
Mr. Jacobs freely admits.  There is a history of hoax and ridicule
that has discouraged serious inquiry by mainstream science: Spirit
channelers who say they also do megaphone duty for
extraterrestrials.  "Contactees" who claim to carry messages of
benign concern from outer space.
Anyone wading into these waters might expect to have his sanity
questioned.
What David Jacobs brings to the subject are serious credentials
- he has a doctorate in history and is a professor at Temple
University in Philadelphia - and a willingness to apply academic
rigor and scrutiny to abduction accounts.
He says there are only two possible answers to the phenomenon
he charts: "It's happening as people are describing it, or it's
psychological. There isn't any middle ground.  You can't shade
this."

THE ACCOUNTS
Considering the implications of alien abduction, discovering
that abductees are simply crazy or using fantasy to suppress some
earthly childhood trauma might come as a relief.  Physical or
sexual abuse in childhood are popular but unproven theories of
late.
"We have a whole host of material that does not fit any
psychiatric or psychological model," says Mr.  Jacobs, who adds
that his forays into the alien have drawn ridicule from academic
colleagues.
Not to worry, he says.  "I've got tenure."
Mr.  Jacobs is professorial, all right, white-haired and
slightly mussed, even with a suit and tie, in the unkempt style of
the obsessed computer hacker or science-fiction buff.  The lid he
keeps on his enthusiasm for the subject - he is a career academic -
occasionally pops off when he is tackling a question.
The "material" he describes are the accounts themselves,
uncovered through hypnosis, of people who claim to have experienced
variations on the same ghastly theme:
One or more persons are plucked, from bedrooms, back yards,
cars, and taken aboard spacecraft where small, smooth-bodied aliens
with bulbous heads, large eyes and slits for nostrils strap them to
examination tables.
Abductees then have their skin smeared with laboratory stain.
Their brains and bodies are scanned, and their genitals are
painfully probed. Women are sometimes impregnated with alien brood;
they later have strange and seemingly abortive pregnancies.  Men
have semen extracted.
The abductees are released, with no outward memory of the
episode, or with "screen memories" implanted by aliens to block
true recall of the abduction.  Victims are, in effect, tagged and
tracked over several years. They will be abducted again and again,
as children, teens and adults, and they are powerless to stop it.
The only physical trace of trauma might be skin rashes,
splotches and small scars.
Mr.  Hopkins, an artist by trade and author of "Missing Time,"
a 1981 chronicle of abduction, claims a few cases have yielded
"implants" - tiny, ball-like objects retrieved from the nostrils of
abductees.  Extensive study of the devices has offered nothing
conclusive about their origin, he says.

CORROBORATION
Mr.  Klass, who has spent 25 years examining and debunking UFO
sightings and encounters, challenges the existence of such objects.
"No one has come up with a single piece of physical evidence,"
he says. "No one has come back with a physical artifact."
Whatever the truth about physical traces, it is the
psychological scars - in the form of nightmares, depression, dread
of places where abductions supposedly occurred - that apparently
run deepest.
Abduction stories are told by lawyers, doctors, secretaries,
nurses, homemakers and even newspaper reporters, according to Mr.
Jacobs, who uses pseudonyms to protect the identities of his
interviewees.
"I've done to date 350 {hypnotic} regressions {with more than
60 self-described abductees}," Mr.  Jacobs says, "and people from
all over the country - black, white, Jewish, gentile, young, old,
rich, poor, educated, uneducated, across ethnic groups,
intelligent, unintelligent - all say the same thing in precise
detail."
Many of those corroborative details - specifics about
examinations, about alien behavior and the innards of their
spacecrafts - never have been publicized even in the most esoteric
UFO-buff journals, says Mr.  Jacobs, who also wrote "The UFO
Controversy in America" (1975) as well as a doctoral dissertation
on UFOs.
One skeptic says, however, that corroboration is the most
damning thing about abduction tales.
"It's not that hard to do," says James Randi, professional
magician and debunker-at-large, who says self-described abductees
like Whitley Strieber have refused his invitations to debate

PUBLICITY OR RELEASE?
As Mr.  Klass wrote in a recent edition of his UFO skeptics
newsletter, "In UFO abductions, plagiarism is not a sin; it's a
required virtue."
Skeptics say many abductees might "plagiarize" for the same
reasons:
"Most of them are looking for something in the way of a
transcendent experience," says psychologist Robert A.  Baker, a
retired University of Kentucky professor.  "They really want to
feel something important has happened to them."
But Mr.  Jacobs insists abductees want no part of their
experience, just release from the pain it inflicts.
"These people need help," he says.  "They need someone to
listen to them."
Mr.  Jacobs says he has learned through trial and error, and
detailed screening interviews, to weed out true victims from fakes
or wannabes.
He tests conventional explanations for abduction claims, the
historian says, and finds they all come up short.

FANTASY AND TRAUMA
The Jacobs approach has won admirers.
"I found his work very thoughtful and careful," says Harvard
University psychiatrist John Mack, who wrote the introduction to
"Secret Lives."
Dr.  Mack will not say whether he believes in alien abductions
- "I have to be more cautious" - but he confirms that he, too, has
seen patients who manifest the symptoms described by Mr.  Jacobs
and others, "and there's no conventional explanation for this."
Others disagree.
Dr.  Baker calls Dr.  Mack naive and says abduction fantasies
mask real trauma that "abductees" will never properly confront as
long as people like David Jacobs continue to preach abduction.
"When someone goes to you and tells you you were abducted by
aliens, that's much easier to accept than believing you were raped
as a child by your father," Dr.  Baker says.
Author of "Hidden Memories: Voices and Visions from Within"
(1992), Dr. Baker says an "abductee" is someone who is likely to
mingle personal trauma with a tendency to fantasize; past exposure
to vivid science fiction, including abduction tales; and an easy
suggestibility toward people who present themselves as authority
figures - such as Mr.  Jacobs.

PANIC BUTTON
Dr.  Baker accuses Mr.  Jacobs and others of worsening the
anxieties of already disturbed people, pointing to one case in
which an alleged abductee committed suicide.
"The saddest thing is that these amateurs like Hopkins and
Jacobs and so on are alarming the public," Dr.  Baker says.
"They're spreading all kinds of rumors.  Jacobs says he hopes
{alien abduction} isn't true, but {says} that these people need
someone to talk to them, because psychiatrists and psychologists
won't help them.  . . .
"This is absolute nonsense," he adds.  "This is what we call an
`iatrogenic disorder,' one that's being created by the therapists
themselves."
But Mr.  Jacobs says he actively discourages people who come to
him, and warns them of the dangers of uncovering abduction
experiences.
Michael Shea, a government lawyer who went public with his own
abduction account four years ago in The Washington Post Magazine,
applauds Mr.  Jacobs' book and calls the author "a legitimate guy."
"I think it's one more hammer strike on a kind of Berlin Wall,"
Mr. Shea says.  "But I just don't think in my lifetime there's
going to be a dramatic change in {public perception of} this."

THE QUESTION
One basic question remains unanswered: If aliens exist, why are
they abducting us?
"That is the ultimate question in UFO research," Mr.  Jacobs
says. "What are they doing with those {human-alien} hybrids?  Where
are they taking them?  {Aliens} probably have manufactured, in a
way, tens of thousands of them over the past several decades - 40,
50, 100 years.
"Now, if this were psychological," he continues, "if this were
internally generated, if {abductees} were making it up, we'd know
the answer.  They'd just make up the answer.  And we have a model
for that: . . . the `contactees' of the 1950s.  They made up
answers to every question you asked.  Channelers do that, too.
"But with this subject, we simply don't know.  And the
abductees don't know.  And that is extraordinary."
Or maybe just clever?