UFO Abductions

Secret Life: Firsthand Accounts of UFO Abductions

Most people doubt their existence but I know they’re out there. I know they’re out there – because I’ve seen them. I have stood in a room with them and spoken to them. I communicated with them quite easily, talking to them and understanding them without difficulty. I have eaten strange unidentifiable sandwiches with them. I was not afraid.

After an outbreak of sightings in the 60s and 70s, recent years have seen the public’s belief in their existence on the wane. Evidence of sightings is discredited, and those who report sightings are dismissed as cranks or subversives, as self-deluded, lonely, and (mainly) Americans.

But I am here to tell you that they do exist and they are just like us. There is, outwardly at least, nothing to reveal who they are, or what they are doing here. At this very moment, large numbers of them could be mingling, unnoticed, in the high streets and offices of every city in the land.

You may find it difficult to believe, but I know they’re out there: People who have been abducted by aliens.

It happened at one of those dark and moody preview theatres in Soho, the ones that provide weird sandwiches and dry white wine, at a screening of the film ‘Communion’, directed by Philippe Mora, based on the international bestseller by Whitley Strieber (“the gripping and compelling story of a novelist whose recurring nightmares of alien encounters prove to be a terrible reality”).

I was due to interview the star of ‘Communion’, Christopher Walken, and so the PR working on the film smuggled me into the last remaining screening. It was not until I got there that I realised: everyone in the room was like Whitley. The screening had been specially convened for people who had been abducted by aliens (or claimed that they had), lifted onto spacecraft, subjected to “intrusive and threatening procedures” by teams of “strange humanoid beings” before being returned to their daily lives on earth.

I could overhear snatches of their stories: a “flashing light” here, a “big, concave-shaped eye” there. From time to time, one of the women would lift her shirt up, out from under her trousers – presumably to show where aliens had entered her belly button, taken out her ovaries and impregnated them before returning them. I felt that, at any given moment, someone would feel obliged to bend over and demonstrate the way aliens had performed a rectal probe on them. For the most part though, despite an alarmingly high proportion of anoraks and round glasses, people who have been abducted by aliens looked like you or I. They did not, I can say almost categorically, look like Christopher Walken.

Strained and intense, Walken’s face is a fascinating, Bacon-esque spectacle at the best of times, a troubled canvas of alienation and pain, plagued by internal horrors that most of us can only imagine.

In ‘Communion’, Walken’s face proves something of a distraction. As Whitley, the man who has been abducted by aliens, Walken looks weirder than ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’, and more alien than the aliens. (Besides this, the film is most notable for the fact that we learn that, even in bed, Walken still wears a black polo neck).

The aliens that abduct Walken/Whitley are “slim, willowy ones with big eyes” (wispy, wistful creatures bearing an enigmatic resemblance to Munch’s ‘The Scream’) and “the little blue doctors” (chuckling, ugly little aliens who have a horrible resemblance to stunted, chubby blue Toby Jugs), and rather difficult to believe in they are too.

And yet, according to David Jacobs’ new book ‘Secret Life: Firsthand Accounts of UFO Abductions’ (Fourth Estate), if aliens do exist, this is how they probably look.

This is according to the “firsthand” accounts of more than 60 “abductees” and 300 “abduction experiences” upon which Jacobs’ book is largely based. Jacobs (who lectures at Temple University in Philadelphia) estimates there are more than a million “experiencers” in the USA alone, the majority of them women.

The book is not proof, he says, but a “trip to what might be the farthest reaches of believability”. Only evidence corroborated by 3 or 4 “abductees” is used, although much of it is imparted under hypnosis. The abductees’ names have been changed, but their professions and ages are given – which Jacobs seems to think is just as solid. But as most of the book consists of transcripts of interviews, this does nothing to diminish the feeling that they could just as easily all be invented.

Although Jacobs maintains his stance is one of scepticism and neutrality, you can’t help but think that his use of capitals (“The Taller Beings closely resemble the Small Beings except that they are slightly taller”) is a bit of a giveaway.

Jacobs’ case (that not only do aliens exist but that they are coming to earth to achieve the conception, gestation and incubation of human and/or human-alien hybrid babies) seems to be based mainly on the sheer volume of evidence. Jacobs takes considerable steps to avoid seeing, or believing the flaws in their evidence. Not only is his faith in hypnosis total, his faith in the abductees is positively touching.

When an abductee maintains she saw a wolf in her bedroom – no alarm bells are sounded: this, Jacobs states categorically, is a “screen memory” for her sightings of aliens. Another reports seeing “strange animals on another planet” but his faith remains unshaken.

As many of the victims have “neither sought nor made any personal profit or benefit” from their stories, for Jacobs, this validates them, and precludes the possibility that the abductees are lying. The idea that they might be deluded or deceived, or just lying – not personal profit – does not seem to have occurred to him. He does not mention the possibility that the abductees might simply enjoy the attentions of academics like himself, or the rewards of local celebrity, but refers in passing simply to “fantasy-prone personalities”, presumably dismissing it by not elaborating any further.

The fact that the majority of victims suffer from amnesia is put down to the cunning of the aliens and the quality of their own hypnosis techniques. Any inconvenient inconsistencies in the abductees’ stories are brilliantly dismissed: it simply proves that the aliens’ own hypnosis is stronger than us mere mortals’. In this way, amnesia is not part of the problem, it becomes part of the proof.

The fact that the majority of abductions are taken from secluded areas, and at night (usually when the victims, or their families, are asleep) also adds authenticity: after all, the aliens are too intelligent to snatch someone in broad daylight or in crowd scenes. This is what they would do. The lack of photographic or video evidence likewise simply confirms the effectiveness of the aliens.

As far as Jacobs is concerned, the onus is on the sceptics to disprove the abductees’ stories, stressing in particular that there is “no evidence that under hypnosis abductees have invented or distorted significantly their memories of an abduction experience”. And obviously most of them probably do believe they were abducted.

The consistency of the abductees’ versions of what happened to them is solid enough to add weight to his interpretation – but then they do (mainly) conform to modern society’s concept of what abduction would be like.

When abductees’ reports differ, no lesser significance is given to what they say – even when one alien is reported (under hypnosis) as having had a scarf on.
“A scarf?” Jacobs writes, not indicating how much of a note of incredulity he had in his voice.
“Yes, like a winter scarf…around his neck.”

There is also a suspicious amount of confusion as to whether aliens wear “skin-coloured” clothing or have clothes-coloured skin, or indeed whether one blurs invisibly into the other.

It does appear though that aliens have no teeth, no tongue, no ears, no pupils, no genitals, no ribs, no stomach, no nipples, and are never seen eating or drinking. Although most of them have “no nose”, one abductee reported “elephant-skinned creatures with long, sharp noses and claw hands” and another an “ordinary” nose. They invariably have “a clear, odourless liquid over the body”, thin, blond hair, large slanted eyes. None of them, sadly, look like David Bowie or Jeff Bridges (‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’).

After they are abducted, “alien bonding” is frequent, as is “mental testing” (a sort of aliens’ ‘Krypton Factor’). Almost all abductees are subjected to varying types of probes – excitedly summarised by Jacobs in phrases such as “the Small Beings work fast. They are dedicated to performing their tasks”.

Most abductees are examined, given strangely painless incisions, “scrapes”, before being subjected to what Jacobs calls “sperm sampling” and “ova harvesting”.

Blood is taken without cuts, milk is (“inexplicably”) taken from women who aren’t pregnant, and men’s genitals are “palpated”. Needles are painlessly placed through belly buttons. Implants are inserted, usually in the ear, the tear duct or the left ovary. Jacobs states, without comment or scepticism, that “several abductees have reported that a ball-shaped object either dropped out of their nose or was expelled when they blew their noses” (sophisticated, these aliens).

Unfortunately, for research purposes, no-one seems to have had the presence of mind to have collected these “ball-shaped objects” and had them scientifically examined.

“Incubatoriums” are frequently sighted containing up to a hundred hybrid human foetuses gestating in a “jell-o” like substance.
“What do these things (foetuses) look like?” Jacobs asks one abductee (under hypnosis).
“Like hamsters.”
“You mean, they’re animate?” says Jacobs, sounding suspiciously as if he’s leading the witness and changing the subject simultaneously.
“Bald hamsters.”

Perhaps understandably, the abductees find returning to their daily lives somewhat difficult. Along with the amnesia and the “strange dreams”, cuts, scars, haemorrhages, bruises, marks and rashes often appear (to be explained to disbelieving partners). One victim woke up the next day with “something brown painted between her legs”. Another had “dark, orange stains” on her t-shirt, as did the teddy bear that she had with her. At such times, though, unfortunately photographic evidence was not on the abductees’ minds.

The abductees suffer from nosebleeds, earache, “discharges and vaginal problems”, “sleep disturbances”, “psychosexual dysfunction”, “birth trauma”, and “fears, anxieties and depressions”. On the plus side, some abductees believe that after their experience, they have been cured of pneumonia and diphtheria.

Recurring dreams about nuclear war are common, as is a feeling that the aliens will cure cancer, and put an end to war and destruction. Most of them believe in the concept of “eco-aliens”, and vehemently feel that the aliens are not hostile (but then, let’s face it, if the aliens really are of a superior intelligence, they would believe that, wouldn’t they?).

On the whole, they look like a group of people praying to be saved – to escape the world we have made, for a better world – with no war, no cancer etc.: like a group of people in the Liberal Democrats Party then.

In the end, despite all this, an edge of doubt remains. Can all the sightings and stories be invented, imagined, the result of “birth trauma”, “desire for a baby”, “collective unconscious”, repression of abuse, “hysterical contagion”, “fantasy-prone personality”, “psychogenic fugue state”, “temporal lobe dysfunction” and the influence of science fiction?

Can we really be so narcissistic to believe we are the universe’s superior species, living on the only inhabitable plane?

Surely, some of the sightings must be true. If we don’t believe in aliens, shouldn’t we at least believe in the law of averages? If they are all hoaxes, why don’t we get more of them? Why don’t we get any hoaxes over here, or even in Europe? Are aliens only interested in America, like the rest of us?

We try. Sadly, as hard as we might try, in the end, the bombardment of bizarre anecdotal evidence and the unchallenged nonsensical example, starts to serve against him. Like Hollywood, the aliens we believe in are not real, not really like that. They are literally fantasies to us.

‘Secret Life’’s case for existence of aliens is disappointingly unconvincing. In fact, in the end, it’s enough to convince us otherwise.