Aliens

Aliens Who Abduct Too Much,
And The Abductees Who Love Them

Scientific opinion on extraterrestrial life often runs along the lines of Arthur C. Clarke's relentlessly logical vision of placid creatures with jellyfish bodies and a cow-like disposition that float aimlessly on hot-air updrafts from a gas-giant planet like Jupiter.

That's all well and good, and while there may be many such delightful and fascinating aliens populating this awe-striking wonder-work of a universe, these scientific theories inevitably generate a consistent and predictable human response: Boooorrrring! If that's the best the universe can come up with, why bother?

No, screw those friendly space jellyfish, who have earned the sober approval of such luminaries as Carl Sagan. These are not the aliens with which we Earthlings must be concerned. Neither the floaters, nor the fascinating and friendly silicon-based Horta of Star Trek, nor even the furry but formidable Wookies of Star Wars.

In our world -- the real world if you like -- aliens are a bunch of ass-raping, memory-eating, fetus-stealing Nazi sickos. Their interrogation rooms make Abu Ghraib look like a day in the park (and remarkably they themselves resemble the waifish Lynndie England in both stature and demeanor).

People who are trying way too hard will tell you that the aliens have been coming for us since the days of prehistory, citing the existence of the pyramids, pictures of rockets in Mayan hieroglyphics, obscure biblical passages in which angels spawn freakish giant children with the daughters of men.

While we can't conclusively determine whether these accounts are rigidly accurate historical tracts or the rantings of demented perverts, there really isn't much of a consistent historical legend about alien beings.

There are scattered reports of alien sightings from the 1950s, which surely are only coincidentally timed to the first appearance of horrific alien creatures in Hollywood movies and the arrival of Martians in the War of the Worlds hoax. Most of the 1950s sightings are unique, each featuring a type of alien which has never been reported elsewhere. One of the most famous of these is the "Flatwoods Monster," which resembled a cross between a Dalek and the Flying Nun.

The modern era of alien encounters can only be conclusively documented back to 1961. That's the year of the first official "alien abduction," an event that changed the world in weird and confusing ways. After the Barney and Betty Hill case, the nature of the "alien threat" settled down into some very predictable configurations.

The Hills were a charming, well-adjusted couple who, whilst minding their own business as well-adjusted people are wont to do, were unexpectedly set upon by a UFO in September 1961. A light in the sky zoomed over their car on a lonely back road. The UFO landed some yards in front of them. Barney Hill looked at it through binoculars and saw shadowy figures within. The couple fled.

They were 20 minutes from their house, but when they got home it was two hours later. (All of this is strictly according to their own account, by the way.) Over the course of the next few weeks, they began to have recurring nightmares about "people" doing medical tests on them.

They went to a Boston psychiatrist, who hypnotized them in an effort to unlock their trauma. He found quite a bit to unlock. The story told by the Hills would become a kind of new mythology, one that swept the world with the same force and fervor that once favored Christianity.

Under hypnosis, the Hills "revealed" that they had been imprisoned by aliens on the UFO they had seen. The aliens fit a now-familiar mold -- there were short and slim and hairless, with gray skin and large catlike eyes that wrapped around their head. The aliens described by the Hills bore a striking resemblance to aliens featured on an episode of The Outer Limits just a week earlier.

The aliens performed medical tests on the Hills, they "recalled" under hypnosis, and showed Betty Hill a star map indicating where they came from. Later, enthusiasts would "identify" the location on the map as Zeta Reticuli, a relatively nearby solar system.

As you have probably inferred by the abundance of quotation marks in the preceding passages, much of the Hills' account is questionable to a reasonable person. The "encounter" was only the first, however, in a long line of reports that would eventually sprawl into an inescapable social zeitgeist. The sightings of grey aliens slowly increased until they became part of the popular culture.

There have been hundreds of sightings of Greys, as they are called. As initial reports spread and were discussed, more came to light. A mythology began to develop around the beings, as popular culture absorbed the images of the aliens and regurgitated them into movies and TV, which then led (amazingly enough) to more "sightings."

Somewhat surprisingly, many of these sources have slowly converged into a somewhat consistent, if still fairly ridiculous, storyline.

The alpha-primate among UFO theories holds that there are a handful of alien species duking it out in our skies (and up our anuses) in a never-ending battle for alien truth, alien justice and the alien American way. There are three major types of alien, according to this school of thought:

The Greys

The Greys are considered to be the major abductors among alien species, and they're the aliens who abducted the Hills to get the whole ball rolling. They are presumed to come from Zeta Reticuli. A crackpot minority (relative to the majority crackpots) have speculated that the Greys might be human beings from the far future who have traveled back in time to visit us cavemen.

The Greys enjoy performing medical experiments on humans, especially experiments laden with sexual overtones such as taking semen samples, extracting ovums from the ladies, and anally probing everything in sight. They seem to take a special delight in inserting their instruments into rectums and noses. (South Park's Eric Cartman encountered the Greys in the premier episode, "Cartman Gets An Anal Probe.")

Greys get their name from their skin color, which is gray. However, there are numerous variations on the theme in the annals of UFO abduction, including blue Greys and white Greys.

The Greys played a starring role in The X-Files and have been lampooned in everything from The Simpsons to Star Trek.

The Nordics

Taller than average humans, and a damn sight better looking, the Nordics also abduct people for the purposes of science, but also for hot monkey love. While they perform all the usual experiments and probes, they also engage in good, old-fashioned intercourse. A testimonial from a woman abductee on one investigator's Web site said "It went far beyond anything we can do on this earth plane. The orgasms were constant, fast, furious, and savage."

Nordics are sometimes seen with Greys. Some abductees report that the two work together. Other "sources" say the two races are at war over some indeterminate issue. Nordics also occasionally deliver messages of inspiration and doom in a manner similar to that attributed to the Virgin Mary.

The Reptilians

Well, OK, in most people anyway. Pamela Stonebrook, a jazz singer described by L.A. Weekly as "the favorite entertainer of the late Gene Roddenberry," claims to have been abducted by Reptilian aliens. As she explained on her Web site:

[My forthcoming book] will tell about my reptilian encounters, a subject that very few women are prepared to go public with or speak openly about. I praise the courage of the few that already have - and endured public ridicule as a result. Reptilians are not a politically correct species in the UFO community, and to admit to having sex with one - much less enjoying it - is beyond the pale as far as the more conservative members of that community are concerned. [...]

Certainly, the reptilians use sex to control people in various ways. They have the ability to shape-shift and to control the mind of the experiencer, as well as to give tremendous pleasure through their mental powers. I have wrestled with all of these implications and the various levels of meaning and possibilities represented by my encounter experiences. I will say, however, as I have said before, that I feel a deep respect for the reptilian entity with whom I interacted, and a profound connection with this being.

Some "investigators" claim the U.S. government has a secret treaty with the Greys which allows them free abduction privileges in exchange for their technological support of the Masonic-Illuminati conspiracy that rules the world. That would indeed be a scoop... One wonders how Woodward and Bernstein missed it.

The Truth Is In Here...

Alien noise reached a near fever pitch a couple decades back, thanks to a series of developments, some of which require quote marks and others which must be italicized. In the latter category, Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released in 1977. A couple of years later, "researchers" "discovered" a "government" "cover-up" of a "UFO crash" in Roswell, New Mexico, which purportedly led to the creation of the "above top secret" "government organization" Majestic-12.

All this media attention led, not surprisingly, to an increase in the number of abduction reports. UFO enthusiasts will tell you that the news reports triggered suppressed memories. Skeptics will point to the sort of mob mentality that accompanies allegations of Satanic abuse.

Either way, the peak of this cultural feedback loop came with Whitley Strieber's Communion, published in 1987. Communion was the New Age epic to end all New Age epics, providing a lavish back story to the grey aliens and their ilk.

Strieber brought a scientological rigor to the discussion which had not previously manifested. Previously a successful fantasy novelist, Strieber told a tale of multiple abductions and laid out a rough sketch of experiences which has evolved into a widely discussed notion of alien conspiracy. How widely discussed? Strieber reports have received half a million letters from readers, many of whom reported similar experiences to his own.

In the wake of Communion, a series of ever more incredulous books began to emerge in which remote viewing, channeling and all manner of "deductive reasoning" and "investigative reporting" were brought to bear on the problem of alien visitors... such as the mind-boggling Above Top Secret, which related tales of unimaginable conspiracies and highly improbable leaps of logic with a poker face to die for.

Above Top Secret helped popularize some of the more ridiculous claims of UFOlogy (on the relative scale of ridiculousness that one must employ when looking at the body of material out there). One of the few naysayers to the extended mythology is Strieber himself, who comes across as a really reasonable guy trying to come to grips with a difficult reality while a bunch of kooks strew fairywebs across his path.

"Like everyone assumes there are little gray visitors here from Zeta Reticuli," Strieber commented in an interview. "What? How did we come to that? We came to that through a lot of very vague, hypnotized recall and examining star maps that may or may not have had some sort of relevance to the real world. And it became engraved in stone. But it's nothing. It's fantasy. It's superstition." Which is, of course, a relative evaluation. While Strieber draws the line at Zeta Reticuli, there are many, many people who draw the line much more conservatively, including the vast majority of mainstream scientists.

While mainstream scientists are often a joyless, narrow-minded lot, they do have a point. Alien abduction stories are a tough sell, especially in light of the overwhelming absence of hard evidence to support these claims. UFO enthusiasts (or whatever you want to call them) claim that there have been more than 4 million abductions. It's extremely difficult to credit the idea that 4 million people have been abducted, probed and/or implanted without producing a single piece of conclusive physical evidence.

As appealing as the notion may be, a reasonable person could be forgiven for concluding that there are not any little gray men running around, nor a massive government conspiracy to cover up an alien invasion.

Moreover, the mainstream scientists can actually offer some reasonably compelling explanations of why so many people may report the same sort of experience, an explanation with a little more weight that just saying that somewhere between 500,000 and 4 million people all saw the same episode of The Outer Limits.

The most popular skeptical explanation of alien abduction phenomena has to do with a syndrome known as "sleep paralysis." Alien abductions almost always occur late at night. Abductees most often report being taken from their beds or being abducted on long, lonely roads.

Sleep paralysis is a fairly common syndrome, which affects as many of half of all people at some point in their lives. In sleep paralysis, someone who has just fallen asleep or is between sleep and waking, experiences a sudden feeling of heaviness and an inability to move. The same feeling is frequently reported by alien abductees, who blame the effect on some sort of rohypnol-laced lubricant designed to facilitate the insertion of objects into the abductee's rectum.

While sleep paralysis, combined with the onset of dreaming or a hypnotic trance produced by late night driving, might account for some of the tales of abduction, there isn't a strong body of evidence showing that sleep paralysis can be commonly associated with the sort of hallucinations required to produce a full-blown abduction experience.

A recent theory might be better suited to explaining the seeming universal notion of the abduction experience. Scientists (and casual users) have noted that the hallucinogenic drug DMT frequently produces a hallucination that closely matches the abduction experience, right down to the little gray men. When DMT is synthesized into a concentrated form (similar to how opium is refined into heroin), it produces an extremely consistent abduction experience.

DMT is a chemical produced naturally by the brain. Under normal circumstances, it exists in the brain only in trace amounts. But the same mechanism that regulates its presence in the brain is responsible for regulating sleep patterns via serotonin production. Tie sleep paralysis to DMT production, and you might be on to something.

Of course, there's still the question of why these experiences are so similar to each other. And there's the interesting quirk that the gland which regulates DMT in the brain is the pineal gland, which is located right where mystics believe you can find the "Third Eye" chakra. Happily, when science closes a door, the creative imagination jimmies a window. Maybe there are no little grey men, but that doesn't mean something even weirder isn't just around the corner.

The Wow Signal