by Budd Hopkins
It is in the nature of human psychology that an event as dramatic as contact with extraterrestrial intelligence can not be thought about _neutrally_, without deep-seated hopes and preconceptions. Most of us, I’m certain, prefer to believe that extraterrestrials would arrive on our planet as friendly, helpful beings, eager to share their technology and to aid us in solving our social and ecological problems. Upon this basic and very human wish certain people have erected a powerful set of interpretations of modern-day UFO reports. These hopes, hardened into a kind of theology, can be described as a modern religion, willed into existence after the decline of our more traditional deities. After all, we have been told more than once that God is dead.
On the other hand, our recent wars, both hot and cold, and the venality
and deceit we have seen in many of our political leaders have also
inspired an undercurrent of pessimism, global in extent. International
chaos, terrorism and governmental incompetence have trained many of us
always to expect the worst. And so, if the majority opinion, or hope,
is that extraterrestrials would arrive as space brothers, a strong
minority opinion fears the opposite – that we would find ourselves
taken over by a band of intergalactic conquerors. Our popular science
fiction films spell out these hopes and fears quite literally: We have
the kindly Space Brother, Michael Rennie, stepping out of a gleaming
spaceship to help earthlings through their troubles, and then we have
the Body Snatchers out to do us all in. I’ve dwelt on these basic
attitudes about extraterrestrial contact for an important reason: when
we examine reports of actual contact, especially as revealed in UFO
abduction encounters, we must always bear in mind our basic
preconceptions and how they might influence our reading of these
events.
After twelve years of experience investigating the abduction
phenomenon, I will not deal with the validity of such reports in this
paper. I’ve considered this issue elsewhere, in two books and a number
of articles, so we will here assume that the abductees I’ve worked
with, more than a hundred and fifty in all, are telling the truth as
they best recall it. I will concentrate instead on what information we
can derive from their accounts that might bear on the question of the
moral nature of the UFO phenomenon. Are the UFO occupants, as they are described by their abductees, good or bad, friends or foes, or is the situation just not reducible to such terms? The very first step, obviously, is to analyze what the abductees say they feel about their
captors, and that, every investigator knows, is a complex task. My
twelve years’ experience leads me to a distinct conclusion: each
abductee’s emotions are invariably intense and many levelled – and
usually mutually contradictory.
First of all, confrontations with UFO occupants are generally
experienced as frightening, so fear, at some point, is an almost
universal element in the emotional mix. Second, there is a kind of awe
or wonder at the power and seeming magic of the aliens’ technology.
This often translates itself into a kind of affection, even love, that
an abductee might feel for the particular captor with whom he or she
senses a special relationship. On the other side of the same coin there
is an almost universal anger – verging sometimes on hatred – that
abductees feel towards their abductors because of their enforced
helplessness, their sense of having been used, involuntarily, and even,
upon occasion, of being made to suffer severe pain. According to every
broad study of the abduction literature that I know of, and Edward
Bullard’s is the most authoritative [ParaNet members – see FUFOR.ORD],
fear, awe, affection and anger are the basic emotional components of
almost every UFO abduction experience. It is safe to say, then, that
_powerful and confusing_ emotions follow such experiences, and that
after their encounters abductees do not believe they have been taken
either by purely malevolent foes nor by selfless, angelic space
brothers. The situation is far too complicated for either simplistic
reading.
During the past eight years I have conducted an informal support group
for UFO abductees in the New York City area, and have kept in touch
with many others in various parts of the country. These circumstances
have allowed me to observe a number of men and women over an extended
period of time, and to see various patterns of response to their
abduction experiences. The weight of each component in the standard
emotional mix varies widely from individual to individual, and also
changes with time within any one psyche. But the basic components
always seem to remain, subtly at odds with one another, in each
abductee. Several things must be kept in mind, however, as we study the
abductee’s emotional charts. First, when one is abducted, he or she is
in something of an altered state, not unlike a hypnotic trance. The
abductee is _controlled_ by the abductors and his or her behavior is in
many ways far from normal. The abductee may be told things, shown
things, that may not be true or “real.” So in this context we must
consider the abductee’s occasional affection for his or her captors.
Psychologists have shown that this phenomenon, the “Patty Hearst“
syndrome, all too often appears in earthly kidnapping experiences.
Therefore in evaluating the four emotions commonly described by UFO
abductees, three seem appropriate but one must be dealt with warily.
Fear is something one would surely expect if the aliens actually look
and act as reported by their captives. Feelings of awe at the alien’s
technological magic, an emotion that again seems appropriate. Anger,
often to an extreme degree, seems to be most abductee’s reaction to
being paralyzed and controlled by their captors. The physically
invasive and sometimes painful operations performed upon them underline
this response, which is often deepened because the UFO occupants
usually refuse to discuss the purpose of these disturbing procedures.
One has no choice except to submit to needles, lights, knives,
“scanners” and so forth, with no power to protest or refuse. “I feel
like a lab rat,” one abductee said, her anger entirely appropriate to
her situation. It is the odd affection abductees often report feeling
for their captors that seems suspect, under the circumstances. Is this
feeling possibly an artificial emotion, induced telepathically through
some kind of quasi-hypnotic control? Is it a version of the “Patty
Hearst” syndrome? Is it a genuine reaction? Obviously no one can answer
these questions satisfactorily, but it seems to me that affection is
the one common abduction response that must be viewed with suspicion.
When one tries to tally up the pros and cons of an abduction experience
as it immediately and visibly affects human emotion, it can be said
that two reactions are essentially negative, or even damaging. Fear and
anger, which are often felt deeply as terror and hatred, are surely
disruptive of anyone’s life. The sense of awe, while basically neutral
and sometimes tinged with fear, may enhance one’s world view, and thus
contribute positively. The fourth and most suspect emotion, affection
for one’s captors, if genuine, is a positive one. So the emotional
“score” after an abduction experience does not support either a simple
“Space Brother” or “Body Snatcher” interpretation. Judging purely by
obvious surface reactions we are still in ethically mixed territory,
though to me and to many abductees the negative effects seem more
powerful than the positive.
Moving away from the patterns of the abductees’ immediate emotional
responses, we can evaluate the ethical content of an extraterrestrial
presence by considering another, larger plane. Is there any evidence
that extra-terrestrial intelligence has actively intervened in human
affairs, either helpfully or destructively? The modern era of UFO
activity begins in earnest in 1947, but many UFO reports surfaced
during World War II in the phenomenon labelled “foo fighters” by our
airmen. No force, either extra-terrestrial or otherwise, put a stop to
the Holocaust until the Allied armies conquered Nazi Germany. By then
it was too late for millions of innocent people, murdered by a system
no one seemed able to stop. The United States developed nuclear weapons
and used them to incinerate tens of thousands of children, women and
men. No one, terrestrial or otherwise, prevented those bombs from
falling. Continuing Stalinist butchery, international terrorism,
American intervention in a Vietnamese civil war – all meant that
thousands upon thousands of innocent people lost their lives because of
the cruelty or indifference of political leaders of every persuasion.
No one intervened. Michael Rennie, alas, never stepped out of his space
ship to save us from ourselves. We have polluted our planet, spreading
cancer by industry’s greedy indifference to the consequences of
chemical “bonanzas.” No one came to our rescue; the Chariots of the
Gods evidently drew up just to watch the damage deepen. And now we have
a new plague – the disease known by its ironic acronym AIDS…something
fresh and new that we apparently did not have before the advent of the
modern UFO era.
Now all of this means one thing. As a moral presence the UFO phenomenon
seems sublimely indifferent to what we do to ourselves. Intervention is
evidently not part of the plan, as diving into the surf to rescue a
drowning child is sometimes not part of an indolent sunbather’s plans.
On the other hand there seems to be no evidence that an
extraterrestrial presence has inflicted any excess pain upon us,
either. If Michael Rennie’s alien only saves us in Hollywood films, the
evil, intervening Body Snatchers seem only to exist there, too. I
believe that the cruelty that mankind has endured in this century has
an all too human origin; one doesn’t have to look to spaceships for its
cause. And we look to them in vain even for first aid, let alone
salvation.
But how should we evaluate what seems inescapable evidence of extra-
terrestrial indifference to human tragedy? I feel that the grades
should be harsh. The power and technology revealed by UFO report upon
UFO report indicates that intervention of some kind should have been
possible; help should have been given. Apologists for a Space Brothers
theory use the same argument as Christian Apologists: The UFO
occupants, like God, tolrate evils such as the Holocaust because life
is only a fleeting reality -the afterlife, or a reincarnated life,
renders this question moot. As a Humanist I disagree. The death of a
child at the hands of a gun-bearing adult is an abomination, not a
necessary learning experience. The only excuse I can offer for
extraterrestrial indifference is some kind of flaw in their apparent
power, some very real vulnerability that might provide them with an
excuse to avoid moral responsibility the way our indolent sunbather
could avoid trying to save the drowning child because he, himself,
might be unable to swim.
A few valid UFO cases contain accounts of healing, descriptions of
wounds healed, eyesight strengthened and so on, after UFO abductions or
encounters. However, these rare examples of healing raise more ethical
problems than they solve. If the occupants of UFOs _do_ have the power
to heal, why is it used so sparingly, so arbitrarily? Why save one
swimmer and let the others drown? A woman I’ve worked with and know
well was abducted along with her older sister; each had had childhood
abductions, each had lived uneasily with her memories. Last spring the
older sister was murdered in a park, by an apparently deranged
individual. The tragedy had nothing to do with UFOs, but my friend said
this to me: “I always thought, somehow, they were looking out for us,
watching over the people they’d taken in these experiments. Now I know
I’m no safer than anyone else. They don’t seem to care.” And yet in one
case I know about an abductee was apparently saved in a similar
situation. The arbitrariness of it all undermines any attempt to accept
a Space Brother reading of the entire phenomenon. Amorality is the term
that comes most quickly to mind.
If the immediate emotional reactions to UFO abductions are usually more
negative than positive, and there is literally no sign of benign extra-
terrestrial intervention in world affairs, there is still one more area
to examine, and it is extremely important. It is the long term
psychological aftereffects of UFO abductions experiences. Dr. Aphrodite
Clamar, a clinical psychologist with whom I have worked in many such
investigations, has stated that she feels almost every abductee she has
dealt with has been psychologically scarred by the experience. This is
surely my opinion also, and I believe that the psychological tests of
abductees administered by Dr. Elizabeth Slater, as well as the
psychological histories taken through Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in
New York City all provide support for this thesis. Though she points
out that cause and effect obviously cannot be established with
certainty, Dr. Slater describes the psychological profiles of the nine
abductees she tested as resembling those found with rape victims – a
low self-esteem, a distrust of their bodies, their physicality, their
sexuality, and a hesitancy to trust others. Not a pretty legacy from
our would-be Space Brothers.
My case files include three instances in which individuals – all males
and apparently somewhat depressed to begin with – committed suicide
after what were described by their friends and family as UFO abduction
experiences. And there is more on this debit side of the ledger,
including what seems to have been an accident following a car-stopping
incident and abduction; the driver, the only surviving parent of four
children, died later of complications suffered in this encounter. Two
female abductees I’ve worked with either planned or carried out suicide
attempts when they were ten years old, and another recent attempt
involves a frightened, despondent fourteen-year-old girl.
No one who has had this experience regards it as an unmitigated
blessing. Some live in perpetual terror. Some have suffered nervous
breakdowns, and as a result of their experiences and the chemical and
shock treatments administered by baffled and incompetent doctors, are
living thoroughly damaged lives. I have seen disfiguring scars on the
bodies of abductees who have involuntarily been used in the UFO
occupant’s “medical” procedures. Yet I have also seen abductees whose
lives have been undeniably broadened by their bizarre experiences;
survivors who have managed the human task of surmounting their traumas
and gaining something from them. The reports, again, are mixed, but the
pain and suffering are immense. Deaths, injuries, terrors and mental
breakdowns must be weighed against a philosophical broadening in many
individuals, an awareness that the universe is larger – and closer –
than anyone had imagined. The cost, of course, has been tremendous, and
the gain due more to human resilience than alien kindness.
But there is, I believe, an explanation for the apparently callous and often destructive behavior of the aliens who perpetrate these temporary kidnappings of innocent men, women, and children. One vivid example should make the point. Two years ago a man in Minnesota whom I shall call Earl wrote to me about his partially remembered UFO experiences.
Eventually I visited him on his farm, and we began a series of hypnotic
regressions. He recalled a time years before when his wife had been
helping him harvest a crop of hay in a rather isolated field. She lay
down to rest on the wagon while Earl worked a few hundred yards
away…but then he saw three small UFOs fly in at tree-top level and
hover above his sleeping wife. One of them lowered to the ground as
Earl put his tractor in gear and raced to her side to protect her from
whatever was happening. A normal looking blond man, speaking English,
stepped from behind the clump of trees where the UFO had landed and
asked Earl to stop; “Everything is all right,” he said. “She won’t be
hurt.” Earl ignored him and leaped off the tractor, continuing on foot
towards the wagon where his wife lay, surrounded now by small, gray-
skinned figures. Earl suddenly found himself paralyzed and helpless.
He stood there, unable to move, as the blond man continued speaking,
assuring him that “everything is all right. Nothing will happen to your
mate.” Earl watched in horror as his paralyzed wife was undressed. A
Long needle was pushed into her abdomen as she lay on a bed of hay,
crying out at the pain, but unable to resist. Skin and hair samples
were taken, and a thin probe was inserted into her vagina. Still frozen
in place, Earl cursed and raged, and the blond man seemed genuinely
surprised by his reaction. “We _want_ you to see this,” he said. “We’re
not hurting your mate. She’ll be fine. Why are you upset? We’re not
hurting her…”
The scene ended shortly thereafter, and the couple returned home, aware of a period of missing time, but with no memories of the UFO encounter. In the days and weeks after this event, Earl’s wife began suffering from nightmares, clawing in her sleep at the area near the bridge of her nose, between her eyes, and screaming for them to “take it out, it’s hurting.” She dug deep gouges in her forehead while the nightmares continued unabated. Other symptoms of her terror appeared, half-understood recollections of the events in the hayfield. Eventually, she had to be hospitalized, suffering from a severe nervous breakdown. She lives at home now, tranquilized and sadly no longer herself.
This story is but one of many which I could present to illustrate a
central point about UFO occupants and their relation to their human
subjects: they simply appear unable for the most part to understand us,
our feelings, our terrors, our love for one another. They seem
psychologically blind to basic human emotions. In my book _Intruders_ I
recounted case after case in which women were artificially inseminated
or endured ovaretrieval operations, but whose reactions of rage or
terror seemed surprising to their captors. These impassive UFO
occupants seem as remote from our “peculiar” human emotions as they are
from our obviously differing anatomy; perhaps more so. And their basic
lack of understanding provides us with a kind of excuse for their
callous behavior.
It seems to me that we are left with but two possibilities, neither of
which is very attractive. If the UFO occupants actually do understand
us and can empathize with our needs and emotions, then they are morally
deficient — even cruel in their single-minded selfishness. Not
malevolent or deliberately evil, but as callous as the sunbather who
watches the child drown in the surf. At some point, amoral behavior
becomes immoral behavior. But if these same alien beings _simply do not
understand our feelings_, then they have an excuse of sorts for their
behavior. And the evidence suggest they really may not know what
disasters they sometimes cause. A female abductee recently wrote me a
letter which goes in part:
I was watching a show about animals, because I love
animals. I don’t know if it was _Wild Kingdom_ or some
_National Geographic_ show, but these scientists were
tracking some polar bears. They had all kinds of weird
looking equipment and were using a white board which
rendered them invisible in the snow to the bears. As I
watched I got a real sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.
These scientists were dressed in identical white suits,
lured the bears closer, and drugged the big one with the
cubs. The whole time they were tagging her they were taking
blood samples, measuring fat, checking eyes, mouth, etc.
And whenever the bear struggled they would pet her, talk to
her, tell her everything was going to be fine. The cubs
stayed close. The scientists placed a device on her that
would track her for so many years. They even marked her
with a special paint that could be spotted from the air.
Then when they were through with her they ran and hid
behind the big screen so that when she woke up she wouldn’t
see them. She got up, looked around, and ran so fast her
cubs could hardly keep up. Imagine how she must have felt
the other times when they followed her in a helicopter. She
could run, but with that paint and homing device she could
never hide! I think all we are is a bunch of animals to
these beings. Some little experiment that has been ongoing
for who knows how long. I don’t like the idea of being
something’s lab animal.
I thought about her letter, her understanding of the animal’s plight and the traumas inflicted by the scientists upon the bear and its cubs. These zoologists – as well as the occupants of UFOs, one hopes – are all acting from decent, scientific motives. And yet in both cases, pain is inflicted, paralysis is imposed, and traumatic terror is the result. Some animals might abandon their cubs after such an experience or die of a mismeasured dose of a tranquilizing drug or even die from pure shock, just as some humans, like Earl’s poor wife, may never recover from the horror of their experience. Sad though this alternative seems, it is easier for me to believe that the occupants of UFOs simply do not understand what they are doing to us, what traumas they are inflicting, than to believe they do know and are merely indifferent to human suffering.
I have talked to many people who will not give up on the benign Space
Brother reading of these cases, no matter what. At the outset I said
that our quasi-religious hopes die slowly. And so, despite massive
negative evidence, there are still many people who cling to the idea
that somehow, some way there may be _two_ alien groups, one bad and one
good. The bad group, according to this theory, does the abducting and
experimenting while the good group really loves and understands us.
Sometimes a kind of sub rosa Aryan racism can be detected beneath these
hopes, in that the “grays,” as they have been called, are the bad
aliens, while the more attractive “blonds” are good. In my twelve years
of investigation, however, the more human-seeming aliens, whenever they
are reported (as in the cases of Earl and his wife or the Travis Walton
abduction), seem to be operating as a team right along with the so-
called “grays,” participating in abductions as usual. There is not a
shred of evidence that I know of supporting this simple-minded good-
guys, bad-guys dichotomy – but there is plenty of evidence that this
kind of wishful thinking is an all too common psychological habit.
The Contactee phenomenon, discounted by almost all serious
investigators, represents the triumph of hope against reality, of need
against evidence. The abduction cases I’ve studied over the years can
be defined as being, in effect, “all evidence and no ideology,” while
the contactee cults are essentially the opposite. Contactee messages,
as passed on through helpful “channels,” reduce themselves generally to
soft entreaties to love one another, to make peace, not war, and to
take care of our planet’s precarious ecology – in other words, the kind
of cliche’ even people like Reagan and Gorbachev routinely utter in
their formal speeches. (This kind of nebulous message, it should be
said, is sometimes also reported in valid UFO abduction cases. What we
really need, one abductee said to me, is actual alien help in solving
our problems, not just another newspaper editorial pointing them out.)
In short, there is no reason to assume that any benign group of aliens
anywhere has yet done anything truly helpful to our planet. Such
evidence simply does not exist.
The final difficulty in the cultist view of a “good alien – bad alien
duality” lies in the age-old problem of evil. If the bad aliens are
hurting us by their abductions, why don’t the good aliens prevent it?
For centuries we’ve asked ourselves, if God is omnipotent, how can he
permit, say, the torture of children? Many of us felt that since no
answer consistent with the idea of God’s omnipotence could satisfy us,
there was something seriously wrong with the theology. And so it is
with this kind of alien theology, apart from the fact that there is no
credible evidence of any kind indicating a struggle between rival alien
groups. If there are various groups of aliens from different places of
origin in the Universe, they are apparently all co-operatively doing
the same thing to us, the human race – and I for one think that what
they’re doing is, in the short term at least, immensely destructive.
Once again we are back to the only two viable alternatives. Either the UFO occupants have not grasped the psychological toll they are taking in these abductions and genetic experiments because they really do not understand human psychology, _or_ they must be viewed as a callous, indifferent, amoral race bent solely upon gratifying its own scientific needs at whatever the cost to us, the victims. The question of which alternative is true cannot be presently answered. There is evidence to support both interpretations, but I, for one, wish to choose the former.
Budd Hopkins
New York, September 1987