Category: Cultural Background of UFO Abduction Reports

Hopkins’s descriptions leave something to be desired. The godly aliens of CE3K trash the home of the little boy Barry and they terrorize his mother as they abduct him. They disrupt the life and mind of Neary. Kindly and spiritual Klaatu happens to have a robot with him who is all business. His offer to leave the police force is eminently pragmatic. The comparison is frivolous in either case since any UFO aliens matching these descriptions go into the contactee file. Hopkins professes it is instructive that his abductees are not devoured like in War of the Worlds, but how would a myth devour a person? That Hopkins is ignorant of science fiction would be apparent to any fan by the fact that he […] Read More

What, then, are we to make of the 1930 comic strip story “Tiger Men of Mars” in the series “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century“? It adheres to Bullard’s structure most excellently. Wilma experiences: (i) capture by a giant clamp leading into a spherical alien spaceship, (ii) examination while lying on a table in an electro-hypnotic trance, (iii)conference with a subordinate and then a leader, (vi) theophany while gazing at the Earth from an off-world vantage point, (vii)return, In the aftermath, there is an instance of what Bullard calls “networking” in the aliens abducting Wilma’s sister, Sally. There is also an apocalyptic finale in which the Martian moon Phobos crashes on Mars.[18] Some idea of the structural impressiveness of this narrative can be gained […] Read More

He follows this with Jose Parra’s sighting of six small hairy creatures by a saucer and they’re transfixing him with a bright light. [24] In Betty Hill’s nightmare she must fight for consciousness and she finds herself surrounded by four short men. Barney is unconscious and is being dragged by another group of men. They numbered eight to eleven when standing in the middle of the road. They are taken from the car to a glowing saucer-shaped craft. The behavior of the aliens is very professional and businesslike and they are dressed in somewhat military style. They are not frightening per se. This is very much in keeping in tone with Keyhoe’s speculations that aliens were making a scientific study of the planet out […] Read More

Any similarity between Kelston’s star map and Betty Hill’s is almost purely accidental. The paradox they share, however, is not. Betty’s sketch has the two planets Kelston’s lacks. (Marjorie Fish treats them as stars, ironically. Stars don’t have terminators.) But when the alien asks Betty where on the map the Earth is, she relives the movie-goer’s puzzlement. She has no idea. The sizes of the planets bear comparison to the planets in the starfield in the credits of the film, incidentally. Parenthetically, the script of “Invaders From Mars” has Kelston present a large scrapbook with newspaper columns about saucer activities to the boy before the star map discussion. This was not in the 78-minute video I saw, but an 82-minute “European” version exists that […] Read More