SUBJECT: ANATOMY OF AN ABDUCTION FILE:UFO2838
BY A. J. S. RAYL for Omni
SUMMARY: By 1990 Leath Haley had begun recalling unsetting dreams of visits
aboard spacecraft with aliens; the images were at first so "strange" and so
"real" she sought professional help. Her therapist, Springfield, Missouri,
social worker John Carpenter, known for his work with UFO abductees, says
Haley's case is special. "The details were amazingly specific and corroborated
unpublished detail from the best case data we have so far." What's more, he
points out, Haley's story had a spin: Her "recollections" apparently involved
the United States military, which she claimed harassed her so she wouldn't go
public with her tale.
After undergoing hypnosis, Haley has come to believe her abduction dreams were
real. She eventually went public in 1993 with a self-published book, Lost Was
the Key, after legally changing her name to Leah A. Haley "to protect my
family and children."
Inventory of Claims
Memories from the Deep. In 1960 Haley, then nine years old, and her brother,
then seven, saw what they thought was a spacecraft landing in the woods near
their home in Gardendale, Alabama. "I saw three objects, two of which quickly
darted away," she explains. "The third was silver, completely spherical in
shape, and it sat still for a long time in the sky."
Decades later, in July 1990, Haley visited with her mother and brother in
Alabama, and during a conversation about extraterrestrials sparked by a
newspaper article, Haley recounted a "strange, very real dream. I was in a
spaceship, in a round room, lying on a platform with small chalky white
creatures with big black eyes doing some kind of medical things to me," she
recalls.
After the dreams increased, she contacted John Carpenter in hopes of finding
some mental illness or disorder to explain what was going on. Instead, during
15 sessions of hypnotic regression, she recalled countless specific
abductions starting at age 3. She even conjured an undersea alien facility,
complete with alien craft and a captive soldier, held against his will.
Military Intervention. During hypnosis and in flashbacks, Haley also recalled
her abduction by military personnel. For instance, she told of an alien craft
that she believes crashed near a beach while she was aboard, after which
military personnel escorted her away. Comments Carpenter, "That episode
unraveled as vividly as any I've heard."
Since September 1990, Haley claims, she has been "followed by military types
in navy blue of white cars," and occasionally by black unmarked helicopters.
She also claims she has been monitored via her telephone and in person,
because, she now speculates, "I was on that alien craft when it crashed and
the military wanted to glean information and make me shut up."
In April 1991, Haley charges, military harassment made its most insidious
appearance at the Columbus Air Force Base in the form of Major (then Captain)
Tracy Poole, whose wife was in Haley's accounting class. Haley says Poole
extended "an unusually persistent invitation" to view space shuttle Endeavour
during its stopover at the base. Armed guards surrounding the shuttle and
signs posted around the spacecraft warning that "Deadly force is authorized,"
Haley notes, explain why she considered the invitation "a possible setup to
interrogate or kill me."
Technology Gone Awry. Haley also reports loosened locks and window screens,
disturbances in the phone line, and the spontaneous disarming of her security
system, not to mention strange sounds throughout her house, leading her to
believe someone or something was inside.
Weird Body Marks. Haley has found "more than one hundred strange marks" on
different parts of her body, including injection marks, scoop marks, and red,
circular vaccinationlike marks, apparently made with three separate prongs.
She also reports other physical anomalies, such as "Morse Code-type beeps" in
her ears, intense back spasms, voices and imagery, and frequent soreness in
her ovaries. On numerous occasions, she says, "I have felt dazed, unable to
concentrate or focus."
Sane Psychometric Profile. Halely visited Florence, Alabama, psychiatrist
Thomas G. Shafer three times in 1992. Shafer, who has no connection to the UFO
field, concluded that there was "no evidence of organic psychoses such as
schizophrenia, organic brain syndrome, or bipolar illness." In a letter to her
and released to Omni, he wrote: "It is my opinion that you suffered some sort
of extremely traumatic experience in the woods that day long ago as a child.
Your descriptions of being naked, lying powerless, having your body explored
suggest very strongly to me that the actual experience was a sexual
molestation. It is my professional opinion," he concluded, "that you suffer
from delayed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) due to childhood
experiences, complicated by a paranoid state caused by the hypnosis sessions,
and I've recommended you undergo treatment by a licensed M.D. or Ph.D.
certified in hypnotherapy to help you resolve these issues."
In the fall of 1992, Haley also completed a Fantasy Prone Test given to
numerous abductees by the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS). According to
Carpenter: "It revealed that she was less likely than the normal person to be
fantasy prone. She fell in the frank, down-to-earth, conservative range."
The Investigation
Memory Lane. Like most abductees, Haley has recalled her alien encounters
primarily through hypnotic regression. "Haley deliberately did not read
anything and did not want to be an abductee or involved in any of this," says
her hypnotist, John Carpenter, who has to date regressed 90 other abductees.
"Under hypnosis, she had the classic response to all this; it brought tears."
Haley's brother, who is a law enforcement officer with the state of Alabama
and, as such, requested anonymity, was present at the first two hypnosis
session. "Carpenter did not ask leading questions; rather he tried to lead
her away from anything having to do with aliens," he says. After the sessions,
he says, "she was in disbelief, denial, shock, but there was no doubt in my
mind that she was deeply affected by what she was remembering."
All this, say critics, does not prove Haley's recollection to be real. Robert
A. Baker, psychology professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky, who has
studied psychological anomalies, says, "These 'encounters' are really
hypnagogic images, essentially waking hallucinations or dreams, and nothing
more." Adds Baker, researchers like Carpenter may be putting aliens in
people's heads.
"Baker has not looked at my work or my methods," responds Carpenter. "My
trademark is deliberately suggesting logical responses to the point of
misleading these abductees. These abductees come from all walks of life and
economic status, and yet they all tell the same story about the same little
guys. It doesn't make sense that these are all falsely created from the
individual imaginations."
But Ronald K. Siegel, associate research professor of psychiatry and
biobehavioral sciences at UCLA and author of Whispers: The Voices of Paranoia
(Crown), does not agree. "Those details don't point to anything more than a
common mental experience, not unlike parasitosis, the belief you're being
infested by parasites," Siegel says. "Medical history documents that people
who suffer from parasitosis reported the same parsites and drew the same
drawings, with the same details. Given an infinite variety of stimulations,
the brain responds in a finite number of ways."
"Theoretically, Haley could be experiencing and altered state of
consciousness--caused by anything from a food allergy to a physical problem
in the brain--and having these fantastic experiences in which she has
seemingly real feelings and images associated with being abducted by aliens,
and which can even include physical manifestations," adds psychologist Keith
Harary, research director of the Institute for Advanced Psychology in San
Francisco.
Military Coup? Acting as tour guide, Haley drove Omni around the Columbus Air
Force Base looking for a onestory building where she believes she was taken
and interrogated. No building, however, seemed familiar. Haley also gave Omni
the name of a disgruntled civilian employee at Columbus she said might know
about the UFOs. When Omni tracked this man down, however, he said, "I just
don't have the kind of security clearance to know about these things."
As for Major Poole, he has confirmed that he did give his wife, a student in
Haley's accounting class, a space shuttle Endeavour pass to give to Haley and
did invite her to view the shuttle on its stopover at the base. "But it wasn't
a personal invitation," he says. "We have standard roped-off areas, where the
public can stand and take pictures, and that's what I invited her to do. On
the night in question, I did go to the classroom, but it was to wave to my
wife."
Official Denial. Have UFOs ever been tracked over Columbus Air Force Base?
According to Sergeant Debbie O'Leary, Columbus AFB Public Affairs: "No, there
have been no UFOs tracked here, and we have not interrogated here any people
who claim to have had an alien encounter."
Tammy McBride at the POW/MIA office at the Pentagon, meanwhile, conducted a
search for one Larry Mitchell, a name that appeared on a soldier's uniform in
the underground alien facility Haley described under hypnosis. McBride found
three Larrys and one Lawrence all with the last name of Mitchell. All four
were killed in action in Vietnam. All bodies have been recovered.
Vehicular Interference. Tony Scarborough, physics professor at Delta State
University in Cleveland, Mississippi, and state director for the Mutual UFO
Network (MUFON), confirmed that "a graphite-black helicopter came over a
building where Haley was speaking and scared the students to death" in the
summer of 1991. "A year later, s similar helicopter came over my house, then
flew at about 500 feet, traveling parallel to me on my way to meet her at
Delta State University," he adds, "but the connection between these
helicopters and Leah Haley is, of course, speculative."
As for Air Force cars following her, Poole says, "We have cars running up and
down Highway 45 all the time."
HomeBodies. John Beard, who heads up Golden Traingle Security Alliance in
Columbus, the company that installed Haley's home security system, confirmed
that Haley has experienced an inordinate amount of trouble. "This particular
system had an inherent engineering and design flaw, which the manufacturer has
admitted. Consequently, we no longer sell it, and we have had to go out and
change components on most of the systems we installed. There are at least 20
other customers who have had the same problems."
Haley's former housekeeper, Eunice Eggleston, however, insists there were
strange things happening inside the house. "One day I was upstairs cleaning,
and I heard chords clearly on the piano. I was sure the house was all locked
up, and I was the only one there. In addition, the answering machine would
start without the phone ringing, and the air vent once dropped on the floor."
But these events, says psychologist Harary, who has studied the psychology of
coincidence, don't add up to much. "A string of seemingly inexplicable events
that occur around the same time are not necessarily related," he says. "You
would have to thoroughly investigate each and every one. Sure, there could
have been someone physically in the house; unfortunately, no one was seen, and
it's almost impossible to get to the bottom of what was happening after the
fact."
Body Scoops. The plethora of unusual marks on Haley's body would seem to be
significant physical evidence; however, everyone agrees that without a
thorough examination of her environment and sleep patterns, they mean little
in the end.
"Strange marks appearing overnight is just not that unusual, and without
observing Haley close up during the times these tings occur, you cannot draw
any kind of valid conclusion about what's going on," says Harary. "We would
have to rule out all conventional explanations, including, for example, the
possibility that she could be doing these things it herself in an altered, or
even an ordinary, state of consciousness."
Get Out the Ink Blots. While Shafer stands by his evaluation of Haley,
psychologist Siegel insists Haley may test out as sane because "there's an
internal reality that everyone shares." Abduction imagery is a manifestation
of the limbic system, not outright insanity, Siegel says. "Haley is truly an
abductee, but the aliens are not out there--they're in her own brain. The
scary thing is, we all have the same details in our nervous system; anybody can
become an abductee."
Conclusion:
Despite the fact that some UFO researchers have called the Haley case one of
the most intriguing and apparently best-documented abductions ever, without
more data it's impossible to know what Haley has experienced, and why. There
is no hard evidence and no conclusive circumstantial evidence that proves
abduction by extraterrestrial biological entities. Given the caveat that this
investigation remains incomplete, there is also no conclusive evidence that
Haley has been monitored or harassed by military operatives.
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