SUBJECT: CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE CHILLING KIND FILE: UFO2380
PART 6
From the Dallas Morning News
Wednesday, March 2, 1994
Today - Section C
ABDUCTED BY ALIENS? LIST GROWS
By Nicole Brodeur (Orange County Register)
This is a hard story for C.C. Peters to tell.
She drains her coffee cup a third time, lights a cigarette.
The smoke comes first, then the words.
"When I was 7 years old, I had this dream..." Ms. Peters stops
and levels a look across the kitchen table. "That's what I was told; that
it was a dream," she says. "That's what I believed at the time."
Now, 26 years later, the housewife believes something else: She
was abducted by aliens.
They came to her home in New Jersey, she says. Three of them,
each just over 3 feet tall, appeared at the base of her bed and asked-
telepathically-to play with her toys.
She remembers feeling woozy, then hearing a crunching sound, "like
someone taking a bite out of an apple," and feeling a sharp pain in her
nose.
She remembers floating: out of her bedroom window, over trees in her
front yard and into a round room, where she saw her mother lying on a
floating table, being examined by aliens.
She remembers an alien - a scientist of some sort - taking her into
another room, where "hybrid babies" sat like shoes in boxes in three rows
against the wall.
Finally, she was taken into a room filled with blinding white
light, where she encountered a feminine entity who exuded overwhelming
wisdom.
The next morning, Ms. Peters says, she awoke with leaves and twigs
in her bed. To this day, she believes she ripped them from the treetops as
she passed over them - evidence of her journey.
It's an incredible tale, but a familiar one to the people in the
abductee community, as active and organized as any PTA and growing all the
time.
"Definitely growing," says Debbie Kenna, a Fullerton, California,
hypnotherapist with 75 clients who believe they were abducted. "As more
comes out, people are beginning to educate themselves and become aware
of the possibility of abduction.
"Before, they may have thought they were going crazy."
At monthly support groups, people meet to talk about their
abductions. They also attend conferences and workshops to gather information
on the phenomenon. And the Psynetics Foundation in Anaheim, California,
hosts regular "abductee night," when stories are shared and discussed.
Abductees are all kinds of people. Professional and poor. Vocal
and silent. Believers and debunkers, and those who will wonder all their
lives.
"Abductees always seem to be simple, innocent people who have had
no prior interest in the subject," Ms. Kenna says. "Abduction is like an
awakening; a massive consciousness shift."
For Ms. Peters (not her real name), though, the abduction has meant
upheavals in an otherwise normal life: The daughter of well-to-do, loving
parents, she attended private schools and spent her summers in Europe. Now
33, she lives witrh her husband and young son in a sprawling home overlooking
Marbella Country Club in San Juan Capistrano, California.
"I know all this sounds crazy," Ms. Peters says again. "I know
it. And I keep wondering, `Why me? I'm just a housewife!'"
Most psychiatrists - as well as noted scientist Carl Sagan - believe
alleged abductions are simple hallucinations, bouts of fitful slumber when
a person is thrashing about in bed, half awake but still dreaming of lights
and almond-eyed beings.
"People can be absolutely convinced that aliens are kidnapping
them," says Dr. Robert Baker, professor emeritus of psychology of the
University of Kentucky. "It's an old science-fiction theme."
But Harvard University psychologist Dr. John Mack disagrees. Dr.
Mack, founder of the psychiatry department at Cambridge (Mass.) Hospital and
winner of a 1977 Pulitzer Prize for his psychoanalytic biography of T. E.
Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), has investigated almost 70 alleged abductions
and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews and treatment.
"When memories come back like that, I never have any question that
people are describing something that has authentically happened to them,"
he told the Boston Globe in 1992. "No one has been able to come up with a
counterformulation that explains what's going on."
The number of people who think they've been abducted is hard to
gauge.
However, a 1992 Roper poll of nearly 6,000 U.S. adults showed that
lots of people believe they've had alien encouters. The poll was funded by
Las Vegas developer Robert Bigelow and comissioned by a group of people who
believe in alien abduction, including author Budd Hopkins and Temple
University professor Dr. David Jacobs.
The questionnaire contained queries as benign as "Have you
experienced self-esteem problems?" and as off-the-wall as "Has someone in
your life claimed to have witnessed a ship or alien near you or witnessed
you being gone?"
The conclusion: Two percent of all Americans believe they have
been abducted, many repeatedly, by beings from another world.
Impossible, says Dr. William Cone, a Newport Beach, California,
psychologist who specializes in treating alleged abduction cases.
"There is no data. But I really, honestly think it's very few
people."
A former marriage and family couselor, Dr. Cone developed an
interest in alien abductions after reading Whitley Strieber's "Communion,"
a 1987 best seller that brought the idea of alien abduction into the
mainstream.
"This wasn't my game plan, to spend my career on the fringe," Dr.
Cone says with a smile. "But if you think you've been abducted, you come
to me."
HORRIBLE EXPERIENCES
Abductees compare their experiences to that of rape victims: taken
against their will, undressed and examined by strangers, then returned to
their lives shaken, scared and dysfunctional. Many suffer post-traumatic
stress, sleep and sexual problems, and have trouble maintaining jobs or
relationships.
"There's no self-help book for abductees," Dr. Cone says. "I just
try to make the experience a piece of their life, rather than their whole
life. I de-stress them, give them coping skills and help them to function
as humans again."
Some clients are children, as young as age 4, who tell Dr. Cone of
their trips aboard spacecraft with "snowmen," "doctors," and "little
friends" hovering around them.
"The parents are completely freaked out," Dr. Cone says.
Does he believe their stories?
"I don't disbelieve anything. I'm interested in paranormal
experiences, but I have no way of verifying their stories."
The abductees' stories are intriguing in their similarity.
The most common symptom is missing time - one to several hours
when they cannot account for their whereabouts.
Abductees also suffer from sleep paralysis, a condition in which
they remember being awake in bed but unable to move. Some feel heavy weight
on their chests, as if something is sitting on them.
Once paralyzed, abductees see aliens - about 3 feet tall, with
almond-shaped eyes and gray bodies - before them.
The aliens take the abductees from their homes or cars and lead
them aboard a spacecraft, put them on a table in a round room and subject
them to what appear to be medical procedures.
"At times, these `examinations' are very painful," Dr. Cone says.
"Some people have also reported other humans involved in their abductions,
some in military uniforms."
Russ Estes - a San Diego-based producer who, with Dr. Cone, has
interviewed at least 100 abductees for a documentary on the phenomenon - says
the similarities of the stories were "absolutely astounding."
"Granted, the media has brought a heck of a lot of information to
the public, but even the smallest details are highly similar," Mr. Estes
says.
Does he believe them?
"Tough question," Mr. Estes says. "I don't disbelieve them. Most
people have no reason to lie. And why would they subject themselves to
ridicule?"
JUST DAYDREAMS
Dr. Baker, of the University of Kentucky's department of psychology,
believes abduction stories are "a false belief or delusion."
"These are hoaxes!" he bellows in a recent telephone interview.
"Every one of these things that (abductees) take as evidence of something
strange going on, of aliens abducting 3 to 4 million people annually...every
one of the things they argue can easily be explained with a simple
understanding of human psychology.
"We all daydream," he says. "We read a page when we are tired and
can't remember a thing we have read."
Sleep paralysis is common too. "When you're half awake and half
asleep and see, for example, balls of light coming at you from the walls.
These people aren't crazy, because the paralysis is real," Dr. Baker says.
What about scars and scoop marks abductees bear as proof of their
experience?
"Those can be done at night by fingernails and toenails," he says.
"We do that to ourselves all the time. In no way do we have any physical
evidence that it can be established and agreed upon by competent scientists
that we have ever had any visitations by extraterrestials," he says.
All of which means nothing to the members of the Out There Group,
a gathering of 24 alleged abductees ages 10 to 56. They meet every month
in the Mission Viejo, California, home of hypnotherapist Jane Lake.
Some abductees enjoy the experience, Ms. Lake says.
"They feel they are doing something for humanity, contracting with
the extraterrestrials to help us all."
[DISTRIBUTED BY KNIGHT-RIDDER TRIBUNE NEWS WIRE]
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