SUBJECT: THE DEVIANT UFONAUTS FILE: UFO3271
ALIEN ENCOUNTERS
11.THE DEVIANT UFONAUTS
Most records of close encounters speak either of tall, fair,
blue-eyed UFO occupants or of the small, bug-eyed abductors famous for
staring chillingly out from the dust jacket of Whitley Strieber's
best-sellers, but there also exists a set of often puzzling minority
reports of yet other alien entities. Whether we explain this variety of
beings as visitors from other planets in the far reaches of the
universe, as infiltrators from parallel realities co-existent with
terrestrial space or as paranormally induced vagaries in human
perception, they are reliably reported and require consideration.
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One of the most bizarre, and yet carrying in some strange way its
own peculiar credibility, is the Kelly-Hopkinsville sighting of 21/22
August 1955, of which Allen Hynek, who studied it closely, remarked that
"it seems clearly preposterous, even to offend common sense", but he
also added drily that the latter "has not proved a sure guide in the
past history of science." (Hynek 1972)
The case is a classic and fully documented, but there are a few
details worthy of particular note. First, that the UFO connection is
clearly established, though playing little part in subsequent events, as
the trigger, though only on the report of a single member of the Sutton
family. Second, the characteristics of these hardy dwellers in remote
Kentucky are important: they had no telephone, radio, television or
books, and certainly therefore no preconceived ideas about UFOs or their
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occupants. Their reaction to the approach of a small "glowing" man with
very large eyes and his arms extended over his head was quite typical of
the isolated rural farmer - they shot him, or at least they tried to
shoot him and did indeed score a hit from twenty feet. There was a
sound, described as "just like I'd shot into a bucket", the visitor did
a quick flip over and ran back into the darkness. If the entity had
intended his 'hands up' posture as a sign of non-aggression, that was
not how the Suttons interpreted it. As representatives of our species in
the encounter, this must be one test the Suttons failed. More creatures
then appeared and also demonstrated their invulnerability to flying
Kentucky lead, to the dismay of the family. They locked themselves in
their farmhouse and watched the little people peeking in at them through
the windows. After three hours of besieged bewilderment, all eleven
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family members piled into two cars and made a dash for town, returning
with a police escort. No ufonauts could then be found, but they returned
when the police left.
These events were very carefully investigated by Bud Ledwith, a
technician and former employee of Hynek, who obtained sketches
independently from all the witnesses. They stuck stubbornly to their
story, despite the inevitable ridicule which local publicity soon
evoked. About a year later they also confirmed it to Isabel L.Davis of
New York, described by Hynek as "one of the most sincere and dedicated
UFO investigators I have met." Seven adults and four children gave
totally compatible accounts of the strange visitation. Though we can
only speculate what reason these creatures might have had for appearing
thus to this group of sturdy but unimaginative agriculturalists, it is
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quite incredible that they either would or could have fabricated such a
fantastic story.
Though the Suttons might be judged guilty of an unprovoked attack
on the entities, at least they could claim to be defending their
homestead against an unknown threat. Humans have sometimes demonstrated
aggressive responses to appearances by ufonauts, but there have been
plenty of cases where unprovoked violence was shown by the entities too.
A rather nasty little fellow achieved the distinction of an artist's
impression of him in action on the front cover of Flying Saucer Review
after his attack on two Finnish skiers at Imjarvi on 7 January 1970.
(FSR Vol.16, No.5) It was sunset and very cold when Heinonen and Vilno,
healthy men in their thirties, halted for a brief rest in a forest
glade, only to hear a buzzing sound from a luminous cloud which was fast
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approaching and inside which they could see the circular, metallic form
of a saucer-type UFO. Heinonen was so close that he could have touched
it with his ski stick and consequently suffered most afterwards.
Suddenly a brilliant beam was emitted from the underside of the UFO,
making an illuminated circle about a yard across on the snow, in which
stood a little creature about ninety centimetres in height.
It was hook-nosed and waxen faced, with small ears and thin limbs,
wearing a green overall and knee-high boots also of green, the fairy
colour. Though, as we all surely recall from our nursery days, there are
bad fairies as well as good ones, and this one turned out to be quite a
notable nasty. It had on a conical metal hat and was holding a box from
which it directed a pulsating yellow ray at the unfortunate skiers,
after surrounding them with a red mist and shooting coloured sparks at
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them before finally disappearing. They were both afterwards very ill,
suffering partial paralysis and other symptoms akin to radiation
poisoning.
This use of disabling radiation by UFO occupants is fairly common,
and five years previously Maurice Masse, the French lavender grower from
Valensole, had observed two small creatures standing beside a landed UFO
and examining his plants. He got within five yards of them when one
turned and pointed at him a pencil-like object which stopped him in his
tracks and left him immobilised for twenty minutes. Though fully
conscious and with the functioning of his vital organs quite unimpaired,
he was yet unable to move his limbs as he watched the ufonauts enter
their craft and take off. Although Masse never admitted it, it is almost
certain that he was abducted and he described his visitors as under four
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feet tall, wearing green clothing and with fleshy cheeks, large,
slanting eyes, lipless mouths and pointed chins. (Flying Saucer Review
Vol. 14, No.1)
When Aime Michel showed him the picture of a model which had been
made of the landed UFO seen by patrolman Lonnie Zamora at Socorro, New
Mexico, the previous year Masse was astonished and thought the picture
was of the machine he had encountered. The paralysis of the skeletal
muscles, which are sited in opposing pairs, was attributed by James
McCampbell (in BUFORA 1987) to a series of microwave pulses affecting
the nerves concerned, thus locking the muscle pairs and blocking nerve
signals from the brain. All fairies, of course, had magic wands capable
of this kind of thing; maybe magic is just technology we don't
understand, and perhaps in bedtime stories for children of the future
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the good fairy will just wave her pulsed microwave generator and all
will live happily ever after.
The UFO psychiatrists said to have abducted Betty Andreasson at
South Ashburnham, Massachusetts on 25 January 1967 did not paralyse her
- instead they put her whole family into suspended animation while they
undertook what appears to have been a psycho-therapeutic process. This
is a fascinating and probably unique case, investigated by Raymond
Fowler (1979), which has provoked much discussion, especially concerning
the symbolic significance of the therapy employed and its relation to
the religious beliefs of the witness. It must, however, be stressed that
the framework surrounding the abduction, including the sighting of the
entities, is supported by the evidence of Mrs. Andreasson's father and
eldest daughter, which makes it difficult to describe the incident as a
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totally subjective experience. Fowler, moreover, claims that some parts
of her testimony accord with details of similar unpublished cases, about
which she could not have known, even though his own investigation, using
regressive hypnosis, did not begin until ten years after the event.
The family were watching television that night when the lights
began to flicker, the electricity supply finally failed and a strange
pink glow was visible through the kitchen window. Betty's father, Waino
Aho, looked outside and saw four creatures about four feet tall and of
the bug-eyed Strieber type, wearing skin tight blue uniforms each
bearing a symbol described as a bird with outstretched wings. With the
Ashland case in mind, one cannot help wondering whether the symbol might
in fact have been a winged serpent or dragon. With her family frozen
into immobility, Betty saw the four ufonauts enter the house through the
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closed door and engaged them in telepathic conversation about food
before being taken up into the waiting UFO. After a painful physical
examination, she was enclosed in a fluid-filled compartment, where she
floated pleasantly as if in an amniotic environment. Then the liquid was
drained away and the birth symbolism continued by her passage through a
dark tunnel, from which she was re-born into a series of semiotic
environments, culminating in the immolation and regeneration of a
phoenix. This was accompanied by a voice Betty believed to be that of
God, telling her that she had been chosen for a special mission to be
revealed later. This is a frequently recurring feature in abduction
accounts.
She was then returned to her home and put to bed, watched over by
one of her abductors, while her family remained anaesthetised, but next
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morning all seemed restored to normality. Scott Rogo considered her
experience to have been "an objectified but symbolic journey in which
the intelligence behind the UFO tried to help the troubled woman
reconfirm her Christian faith." (Rogo 1990) He sees this abduction
experience as akin to a session of psychotherapy, a personal and
participatory drama producing purgation of the passions and hence
therapeutic, but hastens to add that "this theory does not posit that
these close encounters are subjective or otherwise imaginary. They
really do take place in the physical world, but they tend to be ignited
by a purely mental process." (ibid.) In this case he sees the causative
factor as Betty Andreasson's anxiety about the health of her husband, at
that time recuperating in hospital after a serious car crash.
Not all ufologists would be prepared to accept the sophisticated
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attempts of people like Scott Rogo to reconcile subjective realities
with psychological objectivity. Some prefer more simplistic views, such
as the reductionist perspective taken upon Fowler's third book on the
case by Rudolf Henke in his review for the German Journal fur
UFO-Forschung, No.1 of 1992. He attributes all experiences claimed by
Betty Luca (as she now is) entirely to her own psychological condition,
seizing upon Fowler's statement that a reputable psychiatrist has
certified that she has no serious psychological problems. Henke wishes
to stress the significance of the word 'serious' in this context, though
surely no one, not even Henke himself, is without some psychological
problems. He claims that her experiences arise from a demonstrably
unstable personality, produced by the impact of a hysterectomy on a
Christian upbringing, together with the trauma from the deaths of two of
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her seven children in a motor accident.
He believes her first alleged encounter with extra-terrestrials
while still a young girl, during a walk in the woods, creates the
suspicion that as a child she was sexually abused, though the connection
seems as tenuous as his subsequent assertion that the suppression of
this memory generated fantasies about extra-terrestrials. Despite
psychiatrist R.J.Lifton's view that her experiences cannot be explained
by any known psychological process, Henke still concludes that "Betty's
horror stories are full of explicit sexual references; one wouldn't need
to be deeply versed in Freudian psychology to see this ... The rampant
abduction paranoia in certain American UFO circles bears traces of
medieval witchcraft beliefs, as also do the supernatural explanations
usually put forward." (My translation)
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So it is all apparently quite straightforward and simple. For
Henke there was no abduction and the whole affair was no more than the
fantasy of a crazed woman, inflated by gullible ufologists. Though
Fuller may have been in some respects too credulous, Henke is far too
superficial in his scepticism and amateur psychology. The fact that the
experiences reported by Betty Andreasson/Luca are difficult to interpret
does not warrant their dismissal as of no significance at all. In cases
of such uncertainty it is surely better simply to suspend judgement.
In another very different abduction case at Pascagoula,
Mississippi on 11 October 1973, the unique feature was the description
given by two fishermen, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, of the
ufonauts. The men were levitated aboard a UFO by three five feet tall
beings with no necks, exceptionally long arms ending in crab claws, and
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round feet. Hickson had total recall of a physical examination by a
floating object like a huge eye, but Parker fainted from fear. After
about twenty minutes both were deposited unharmed on the river bank. To
the best of my knowledge, these entities have not returned to Earth
since.
Much less frightening were the three little creatures like winged
Strieber types who flew into the sitting room of Jean, a Midlands
housewife on 4 January 1979. They inspected the Christmas decorations
and probed her mind telepathically, telling her they came from the sky.
"We come down here to talk to people, but they don't seem to be
interested," they complained, each accepting a mince pie Jean offered,
but they fled back to their UFO, parked in the garden, when she showed
them how to light a cigarette. These aerial creatures do sometimes seem
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to have a strong fear of fire. They took with them their mince pies,
however, and the local paper reported the incident with the amusing
headline "TAKE ME TO YOUR LARDER". (Randles 1988)
In February 1974 a Belgian blacksmith cycling to work at Hirson
had precisely the opposite experience, for he was forcibly fed with a
substance like chocolate by two burly ufonauts five and a half feet
tall, wearing dark one-piece overalls and helmets covering the face,
with long, five-fingered gauntlet gloves reaching almost to the
shoulder. He suffered no ill-effects from his curious meal and the
investigators subsequently found grass flattened in a circular area
where he had seen their landed UFO. (Flying Saucer Review Vol.21, No.6,
1975)
Difference of size is an obvious parameter for classifying the
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various types of UFO occupant and some indeed have been reported to be
ten feet tall. The Flatwoods monster in West Virginia was seen on 12
September 1952 and described as having the bulk of a very large man but
without visible limbs. The face was blood red with glowing, greenish
eyes and the head, shaped like the ace of spades, had a large circular
window from which shone two fixed beams of blue light. Nearby was a
black object twenty feet across, pulsating with a cherry red glow and
also shaped like a spade ace. It is hardly surprising that one of the
witnesses fainted with fright as the monster began to move towards him.
(Sachs 1980) In April 1971 a young couple saw a saucer shaped UFO with
rectangular windows in the upper section and circular ones below,
through which were visible as silhouettes two humanoid forms also ten
feet in height. Like the witnesses at Flatwoods, they too decided to
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leave the area rather rapidly. (Flying Saucer Review Vol.17, No.4,1971)
No survey of deviant UFO occupants could ignore the various types
of robot which have been observed in their company or operating alone.
Mention has already been made of the squad of small robots that marched
towards Ed Walters on the road at Gulf Breeze, but the robots who
stopped the car of an anonymous witness at Warneton on the
Franco-Belgian frontier one January evening in 1974 were quite
different. Leaving their craft in a field at the roadside, two figures
walked in a slow, rigid fashion to within a dozen yards of the stranded
motorist. The smaller was about four feet tall, resembling the Michelin
man in the tyre advertisements, with a round helmet whose window allowed
a face to be seen inside. He held what seemed to be a short, thick stick
with a pointed, pyramidal tip. The second entity was somewhat taller,
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with a cubical helmet revealing inside a pear-shaped head with round
eyes, identical to that of his companion. Each had a small nose, a
lipless mouth with neither teeth nor tongue, and long arms reaching just
below the knee. The creatures were interrupted by the arrival of another
motorist and took off without any further interaction. (Flying Saucer
Review, Vol.2,No.5, 1974)
In September 1964 at Cisco Grove, California, there occurred what
seems to have been a concerted attempt by two ufonauts, assisted by
robots, to capture alive a human specimen. Donald S.. out hunting with a
party of friends, became separated from the main group and the fires he
lit to attract the attention of forest rangers brought instead a flying
light, followed shortly by two entities about five and a half feet tall,
who approached the tree in whose branches Donald had by then taken
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refuge. They wore silvery uniforms with hoods or helmets that went
straight up from their shoulders and showed large dark eyes as they
looked up at their intended victim. Next there appeared a big black
robot with reddish 'eyes' and a 'mouth' which dropped open on a hinge,
from which a white anaesthetic vapour issued and with which, when the
two ufonauts had tried in vain to climb the tree, the robot proceeded to
render Donald unconscious. Fortunately he had secured himself to the
tree trunk with his belt and later tried to drive off his attackers with
burning pieces of his clothing. This had some success, but at dawn a
second robot appeared and the two together produced a cloud of gas that
put Donald out for some hours. When he awoke, his assailants had gone.
(Lorenzen C.& J., 1967)
The emotionless, apparently programmed, behaviour of some types of
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UFO occupant inevitably raises the suspicion that they may not in fact
be the autonomous individuals they have been thought to be, but merely
android robots following out action patterns dictated by complex
computer logic. Whitley Strieber felt that they might in some ways be
compared to social insects such as ants or bees, in whose colonies the
actions and interests of the individual are totally and innately
subordinated to the aims of the whole. If there is any validity in such
ideas, then the question of who or what has programmed them and to what
end obviously arises.
UFO occupants are sometimes neither robotic nor humanoid. At nine
o'clock one October morning in 1973 at Greenburg, Pennsylvania, a
dome-shaped object a hundred feet across, making a sound like a lawn
mower, was seen to land in a field and soon afterwards two figures the
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watchers at first thought to be bears were seen moving along by a fence
known to have posts six feet high, from which it was deduced that the
creatures were seven and eight feet tall respectively. Both were
completely covered with long grey hair and had greenish-yellow eyes.
Their arms hung down almost to the ground and they made whining sounds
to each other, almost like those of a human baby crying. They also
produced a strong sulphurous smell, rather like burning rubber. (Flying
Saucer Review, Vol.20, No.1, 1974)
It is difficult to envisage a single planet inhabited by such a
variety of creatures as we have been considering, all with the
independent capacity for space travel and each desirous of visiting our
little corner of the galaxy. Even a series of planets, one for each type
of visitor, seems highly unlikely. In the case of exceptional or unique
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appearances by unusual entities it seems more probable that they have
somehow arrived accidentally in our space-time continuum, slipping
inadvertently through some temporal crevice and perhaps unable to find
their way back at once. There may well exist within our own physical
space an infinity of universes with differing temporal co-ordinates
wherein creatures even stranger than any we have yet encountered could
exist, but the appearances of deviant ufonauts seem entirely random,
purposeless and seldom if ever recurring. If behind the more regular
manifestations of UFO activity there exists a directing intelligence, we
are unlikely to find any clues to its nature in the case histories of
the deviants.
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