Source: https://coggle.it/diagram/ZjkTL2p2cQSai6tN/t/-

Abductions and other unusual personal experiences

In an exhaustive series of three national polls conducted by the Roper Organization in 1991, it was established that approximately one out of every five adult Americans has, at one time or another in their lives, woken up paralyzed with the sense of a strange figure or presence in the room. In addition:

• nearly one adult in eight has experienced a period of one hour or more in which he or she was apparently lost but could not remember why;

• one adult in ten has felt the experience of actually flying through the air without knowing why or how;

• one adult in twelve has seen unusual lights or balls of light in a room without understanding what was causing them;

• one adult in twelve has discovered puzzling scars on his or her body without remembering how or where they were acquired. 

The Roper polls, which had been nominally directed at gathering data about “unusual personal experiences,” were commissioned, and their results analyzed, by Dr. John Mack, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Dr. David Jacobs, Associate Professor of History at Temple University, John Carpenter, a psychiatric therapist from Springfield, Missouri, Dr. Ron Westrum, Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University, and Budd Hopkins, a New York based author, researcher, and counselor with specialist knowledge of the so-called “alien abduction” or “UFO abduction” phenomenon.13 Indeed, the specific but hidden agenda of the surveys, behind the more innocuous declared interest in “unusual personal experiences,” was to get some sort of statistical measure of the prevalence in the general  population of individuals who had been afflicted by the constellation of extremely unusual personal experiences associated with classic UFO abductions.

The belief that one might have been abducted by alien entities in an unidentified flying object is generally taken as a sign of an unbalanced mind in our society, and provokes ridicule. The pollsters’ strategy was therefore to avoid direct questions on this subject and to focus, more obliquely, on “experiences known to be associated with UFO abductions.”14 Such experiences, in their turn, had been extracted from thousands of hours of interviews with deeply troubled and perplexed people, conducted - often under hypnosis - by John Mack, John Carpenter, David Jacobs, and Budd Hopkins. The interviewees had all undergone distressing episodes in their lives, often beginning in childhood and continuing into adulthood, that felt real to them but that seemed objectively impossible. In many cases they shamefacedly attributed these episodes to abduction by “extraterrestrial beings” who took them up to “spaceships in the sky” (or sometimes underwater or underground) and did painful, humiliating, and unpleasant things to them there, before returning them to their home environments. More frequently, however, they did not remember exactly what had happened - only that something had happened - but under hypnosis had full recall of repeated “abductions by aliens” at intervals throughout their lives.

Because so many interviewees were unable to remember being abducted until the details were extracted using hypnosis, the questions in the Roper surveys concentrated on the kinds of odd experiences that these individuals had been able to recall prior to hypnosis - often the very experiences that had led them to seek therapy in the first place. The five “strong indicators” listed above (i.e. waking up para - lyzed in the night with a strange figure in the room, inexplicably flying, puzzling scars on the body, an hour or more of missing time, seeing balls of light) were reported particularly frequently by UFO abductees. The poll designers therefore decided that if any respondents answered yes to at least four out of the five indicators, then they would count these individuals as probable abductees. Altogether, 2 per cent of the total survey sample fell into this category:

This suggests that two per cent of the adults in the American population have had a constellation of experiences consistent with an abduction history. Therefore, based on our sample of nearly 6,000 respondents, we believe that one out of every fifty adult Americans may have had UFO abduction experiences.

In 1991, when the Roper polls were conducted, “one out of every fifty adult Americans” was equivalent to almost four million people.16

My own position on “UFOs” and “aliens”

Before going further, I wish to state, very clearly and for the record, that when I started to explore the avenue of investigation set out in this and the next five chapters I did not believe that UFOs were “nutsand-bolts” spaceships from other planets. Likewise I did not believe that the “aliens” frequently associated with UFO sightings were physical beings from extraterrestrial civilizations who for some reason visited the earth, abducted certain specially selected humans, inflicted all manner of strange and intimate procedures on them, and then returned them to their homes, only to abduct the same individuals again and again - often over periods of many years - in order to carry out more strange procedures.

In Chapter Three I described my own direct observations of entities resembling the popular conception of aliens - entities who appeared to me in hallucinations seen under the influence of ayahuasca. The absolutely convincing and indeed terrifying nature of these hallucinations (which included objects like flying saucers) raised the possibility in my mind that the UFO sightings and alien abductions so widely and sensationally reported all around the world in recent years are likely to be best understood as experiences stemming from altered states of consciousness rather than nuts-and-bolts physical encounters of any kind.

Now, as I write these words after completing my research, my lack of belief in physical, extraterrestrial explanations for UFOs and aliens, and my intuition that they must be visionary phenomena, has hardened into something close to a certainty. I give readers fair warning, therefore,  that nothing will be found in the pages that follow to support the idea that aliens are visitors from outer space. No one can rule out such a possibility entirely, but the evidence I have gathered suggests they are something far more interesting and far more mysterious than that.

There is one particularly unusual, distressing, and distinctive personal experience that people who believe they have been abducted by UFOs report more often and more consistently than almost any other. This is the humiliating and traumatizing experience of being subjected by the abducting entities to forced medical examinations and to painful and incomprehensible surgical procedures that often leave behind permanent visible scars and sometimes even mysterious implants in abductees’ bodies.17 For full details, the reader is referred to the published work of John Mack, David Jacobs, and Thomas Bullard, where hundreds of pages of such reports can be found.18 Here a few examples will have to suffice to convey the peculiar character of the overall phenomenon.

In 1961, Betty and Barney Hill claimed that they were followed in their car by a UFO and abducted by small humanoid beings with

rather odd-shaped heads, with a large cranium, diminishing in size as it got toward the chin. And the eyes continued around to the sides of their heads . . . The texture of the skin was grayish, almost metallic looking . . . I didn't notice any hair . . . I didn't notice any proboscis, there just seemed to be two slits that represented the nostrils.

Once on board the UFO, the couple were separated and Betty was subjected to a medical examination during which a long needle was inserted into her navel, causing her agonizing pain.

The high point of Sandy Larson's 1975 UFO abduction was a view “of the earth in space through the end of a luminous tunnel.” The low point was an extremely unpleasant experience of bizarre and radical surgery in which “beings” removed her brain and set it down beside her.

In the autumn of 1950, Betty Aho was abducted by humanoids that she described as about three feet tall with “pear-shaped” heads and large unblinking eyes. Dramatic events followed. The UFO “plunged into the sea and came out again, then entered huge crystalline caverns which broadened into a vast underworld.” Later, Aho was “floated” onto a table:

She felt stuck to it while the beings removed her right eye and implanted a tiny device deep within her head using a luminous needle. A being's hand on her forehead relieved her pain. They . . . implanted objects in her spine and heels. The beings passed hand-held instruments over her spine and pointed needle-like devices at her head, causing her to feel the implants inside her.

Some 40 years later, at the beginning of the 1990s, John Mack's patient “Scott” recalled that during one of his numerous abduction experiences, he found himself in what he took to be a spaceship, stretched out on a table flanked by two “doctor-like” figures. His head lay on a block, and four “prongs” were being pressed into his neck, “high up, just below the scalp.” Scott believed these were electrodes, Mack reports, “that were used to manipulate and control his movements and feelings.”

“Jerry,” another of Mack's patients, remembered an abduction in which she was brought into a large spaceship with a domed roof, and then into “a circular room” within it, which was “shiny and metallic-looking and contained what looked like equipment.”26 Here small, dark human-like beings performed incomprehensible tests on her body under the guidance of a taller, lighter entity who she thought of as male and as “the leader.” At one point he asked her telepathically (but confusingly) if “the medication has been okay up till now?” Immediately afterwards, she reported, “something sharp, like a needle” was driven from a high angle down into the side of her neck: “They're turning it! Ohhhh! It's inside of me . . . They stuck that thing inside me.”

Like many other abductees, “Catherine's” experience - having been brought against her will on board what she believed was a UFO - involved first being taken into a metallic room, “like burnished  aluminum but darker,” and made to lie on a table there. She noted that the room had muted lighting and that a number of small beings were present in it with her. The leader, or “examiner,” though taller than the others, was nonetheless shorter than Catherine. His skin appeared to be “very smooth - whitish gray,” and his manner was intimidating: “He's looking at me like you look at a frog before you dissect it.”

Next Catherine remembered being subjected to a series of painful gynecological procedures and was convinced that samples had been taken from her ovaries. We will return in Chapter Seven to the possible significance of these (also very common) “reproductive” aspects of the UFO abduction experience. Meanwhile, Catherine's ordeal was far from over. She described a metal instrument “maybe a foot long” that was inserted “perhaps six inches” into one of her nostrils - i.e. into her brain:

I could feel something breaking in my head. When he pushed it through, he broke whatever it was and pushed it all the way through, up even further . . . I’m wondering what they broke . . . I don't know the anatomy, and he broke something to get it through, to get it into my brain . . . I don't know what it was. I want to know if it's going to heal.

“Joe” recalled being abducted by a humanoid “with a triangular face and a large forehead, narrow chin, and large, black, elliptical eyes” that first “floated” him up to a spaceship that was “much bigger inside than outside” and then used mind control to make him lie on a table. Here he was suddenly surrounded by eight to ten small beings. One, standing to his left, fell upon him with “a large needle about a foot long, with a kind of hilt.” The needle entered the left side of Joe's neck below the ear, “against the skull,” causing severe pain: “They're putting a picture in my mind of a small, silver, pill-shaped thing that they're leaving there which has four tiny, tiny wires coming off it.” After the needle was removed, Joe reported that he received this telepathic message from the beings: “We are close. We are with you. We're here to help you. We're here to guide you, to make it through your difficult times.” On another occasion, Joe was abducted together with his baby son  Mark, and witnessed the beings holding “crystals” against the child's head and “shining a light on his eyes and on his hand.”

John Mack's patient “Eva” saw a gray spaceship, panicked, blacked out, then found herself on a table in a room with two beings inspecting her:

I was in a fetal position, my back to them. They were doing something to my spine. My entire spine was stinging and cold. It was awful! It felt as though they were going inside my body with some very sharp instrument and inserting it between my flesh and my skin.

“Karin” also found herself in a room on a spaceship: “They opened up my chest and took out my heart.” Similarly, “Carlos” told Mack of how he had been “floated” up through the sky “on a beam of light” to what he took to be a spacecraft. He found himself in the “rotunda” of this circular vessel in a spacious instrument-filled room where many small humanoid creatures went about their business, seemingly with no expectations of him. However, one of them eventually led him to another part of the ship, where he was placed on a table that he described as “a block of crystal.” Here a female being with huge oblique eyes, but “hardly a nose and hardly a mouth,” instructed “reptilian-faced, insectile-bodied, or robot-like entities” to perform an operation on him. The operation was excruciatingly painful and involved the use of crystals:

Whatever these crystals are, metal-like more than glasslike, there is light. I can see it . . . It is like a squared tube of crystal with the sides lopped off so that at the ends each tube appears eight-sided . . . And then the end of it is shaped like a step-pyramid. It shoots laser light into the body, but it feels like a needle because it hurts, and it resembles a needle.

I began to re-examine ethnographic studies of shamanism side by side with casebooks of UFO abductee reports to see if there were other such similarities. Gradually, I became fascinated and immersed - for there seemed not just to be similarities here but a whole network of closely interwoven and interdependent connections so intricate and extensive that they could not possibly have arisen by chance. 

An example is the way most abductees report that at the beginning of the experience they are “floated” out of their houses or cars and up to the sky to where the UFO awaits. Similarly, most accounts of shamanic initiations also begin with a sky journey (because the realm of the gods and spirits is located in the sky – for example Viho-mahse , the Tukano god of hallucinogenic snuff, lurking in the Milky Way). Now, the sky itself is universal to all cultures and periods, always over our heads, always beckoning, glittering with stars, so the fantasy of sky journeys might occur spontaneously to anyone and could easily have been invented independently by many different cultures. That was why I didn’t pay much attention to this obvious and elementary parallel until I began to look in detail at the methods used by abductees and shamans to reach the sky.

Underground, underwater

There were moments as I researched this material when I wasn’t sure whether I was reading a UFO abduction report or the account of a shaman’s psychedelic pilgrimage to the sky world. Despite surface differences appropriate to the very different cultural settings and periods in which the abductees and shamans had undergone their experiences, the clues kept mounting up that the two phenomena must, in some as yet unexplained way, be closely related at a deep structural level. 

For example, not all shamanic journeys lead to the sky. This is the most common scenario, but the reader will recall from Chapter Four that shamans in their trances also quite frequently report the experience of being transported into a cave – sometimes lined with crystals or calcite formations, and often illuminated by a strange diffuse light with no obvious source. In other cases they travel to an underwater location that lies at the bottom of a sea, lake, or river pool. 

These are not the sorts of destinations that one automatically associates with UFOs, which are, after all, unidentified flying objects. Nevertheless, we saw in Chapter Five that the UFO which abducted Betty Aho in 1950 “plunged into the sea and came out again, then entered huge crystalline caverns which broadened into a vast underworld.”

In 1979, in Florida, Filiberto Cardenas was abducted by humanoids dressed in what he described as tight white clothing. They took him to a beach, opened “a lock” in the side of a huge boulder, then transported him through a “tunnel beneath the sea.”

In 1981, Mexican photographer Carlos Diaz saw a UFO floating over his head. “It was made of millions of small dots of light. I tried to touch the object, but my hand went through the yellow light . . .” He felt disoriented, and suddenly noticed that the craft now appeared to be standing “inside a cave that was lined with stalactites and stalagmites . . . There was something strange about the illumination . . . It was everywhere but I couldn’t find a source.”

Even more to the point is the case of Lucy, abducted in October 1992 by beings who she construed as aliens, although UFOs did not feature in her experience at all. Waking up in the middle of the night, she felt a compulsion to drive her car into the Blue Ridge Mountains west of Washington DC. Finally she stopped on a deserted road, to the right of which there was a steep drop “to a field full of people in their pajamas and nightgowns.” She found herself floating in their direction and was then swept with the crowd into an opening in the side of the hill. “It led steeply down through the limestone under the hill to a large room with a high ceiling where the abductees congregated and the aliens inscrutably watched them . . .”

Similarly, Scott recalled hurtling down into “a huge underground rock-walled place” in a fast-moving elevator, and Joe found himself “in a subterranean room hewn from rock” lying on a table “surrounded by little people with big heads, and they’re putting a needle in my neck.” Many further examples could be cited, but the point has been sufficiently made that as well as going to technological venues in the sky – which themselves are matched in pre-scientific cultures by appropriate construals, such as flying shields and boats and aerial “wells” made of metal – UFO abductions frequently unfold in classic shamanic settings such as caverns or underwater.

 The power of transformation

Aliens, shamans, and the supernatural beings of the spirit realm have another completely unexpected and rather mysterious characteristic in common. Before I began this research I had no idea that therianthropes were the subject matter of the most ancient religious art of mankind. Nor had it ever occurred to me (as seems perfectly obvious now in the light of Lewis-Williams’ work) that many of the animals depicted in painted caves and rock shelters all around the world might be best understood as representations of transformed shamans or spirits in animal form seen during hallucinatory trances. 

On the other side of the equation I had, at the outset, no personal interest in, and possessed only rudimentary information about, the UFO abduction phenomenon, which I did not imagine would prove relevant to my investigation of the origins of religion. I began to change my mind after my own encounters, facilitated by ayahuasca, with friendly “light-beings” and a much less friendly large-headed “Gray” with a heart-shaped head and huge black eyes, who I had genuinely feared might abduct me in one of the flying saucers that also featured in the same vision (see Chapter Three). I was given further pause for thought when I realized that very similar figures of small humanoid beings with heart-shaped (or pear-shaped, or teardrop-shaped) heads had been depicted in the cave art of Upper Paleolithic Europe, and also in the rock art of the San hunter- gatherers of southern Africa. It was with my curiosity thus aroused that I then began to delve into the modern UFO-abduction literature of the West, alongside the extensive shamanic sources I already had to hand, and stumbled across the weird parallels and commonalities between spirits and aliens explored in the last two chapters. 

My mental picture of the aliens had been heavily conditioned by what I had seen in my ayahuasca visions, which in turn accorded very well with the physical descriptions given of aliens in hundreds of UFO-abduction reports and endlessly regurgitated in  the tabloid media. I was therefore completely unprepared for what I discovered next – which is that, just like spirits, these entities that Western abductees generally construe as aliens very frequently first present themselves in the form of animals, or with hybrid animal and alien characteristics, before appearing in their more familiar tabloid identity as small humanoid beings with heart-shaped heads, large eyes, etc., etc. 

Aliens as animal spirits

Let’s deal with the aliens’ side of this peculiar story first. Again, the most useful way to proceed is simply to allow the abductees to speak for themselves about what they saw and experienced. In Arthur’s case, the small “luminescent and semi-transparent” humanoids (with large dark eyes), who encouraged him to climb a thread of light in an episode cited earlier, for some reason strongly reminded him of rabbits: “so close to each other they’re touching each other . . . It’s like a bunch of rabbits. They huddle like rabbits.” This had the effect of endearing them to him. Similarly, Peter’s abduction began when a group of small beings appeared in his room and a beam of light lifted him off his bed. As he was floated out of his house and into the air, he got a close look at one of the beings. Its eyes, he said, were very dark and deeply set in its face: “like an animal’s eyes, like a raccoon’s eyes.”

While he was hunting in Medicine Bow National Park, Wyoming, in 1974, Carl Higdon saw five elk together in a clearing. Instinctively he took aim and fired his rifle but, as he did so, a zone of strangeness surrounded him, the sound of the shot seemed to come from far away and time slowed down so that Higdon was able to watch the bullet as it left the gun, traveled slowly through the air, and fell to the ground, “crushed and folded like a glove,” about 60 feet away. As he walked to pick up the bullet an odd-looking humanoid figure dressed in black appeared and gave him a “pill,” telling him that it would alleviate his hunger for four days. Higdon was then taken on a journey in what he presumed to be a spaceship, and later returned to the National Park, bewildered and disoriented, with his body covered in scratches.

Moments before her abduction by small humanoids, Virginia Horton remembered talking with an “intelligent gray deer,” and added: “there was a person inside this deer.” Another woman also reported seeing a deer looking at her through a window just before she was abducted. Indeed, John Mack, David Jacobs, and other researchers who interviewed large numbers of abductees found such accounts of encounters with therianthropic aliens – strange humanoids that either had certain animal characteristics or were fully transformed into animals – to be extremely common. “The aliens appear to be consummate shape-shifters,” wrote Mack, “often appearing initially to the abductees as animals – owls, eagles, raccoons and deer are among the creatures the abductees have seen initially.”

An abductee interviewed by David Jacobs saw a wolf in her bedroom one night:

The wolf was standing squarely on her bed, looking her in the eyes. She clearly remembered its fur, fangs, and eyes. Other abductees have claimed to have seen monkeys, owls, deer, and other animals.

Indeed, owls feature particularly often in abductee reports. For example Colin, aged two and a half, the youngest of Mack’s patients, frequently complained of being taken by “scary owls with big eyes” to a “spaceship,” which he also sometimes described as a “big boat in the sky.” The owls, he said, “floated down” from the sky to fetch him. On one occasion he confided that “monster owls” had “attacked” him on the spaceship, hurting his toe. The author Whitley Strieber was confronted by the large, hypnotic eyes of “a barn owl” staring at him “through the window” of his home at the start of an abduction in which the aliens made an incision in his right forefinger. The abduction experience of a woman on the west coast of the U.S.A. began when an entity that she construed as a “five-foot-tall owl” strode down the highway towards her parked Jeep and stared at her over the hood. One of Carol’s early abduction experiences began with a large owl that swooped down from the skies and hovered close to her face. Its wings did not seem to flap, and its “big dark eyes” filled “three quarters” of its head.

A registered nurse from the north-eastern United States, Carol’s abductions were of special interest to me because another of her encounters with strange, compelling owls included further levels of transformation, as well as unexpected symbolism that she herself recognized as shamanic. John Mack, whose patient she was, takes up the story:

She was lying on a grassy mound or hillside, unable to move as she watched a small speck in the sky that seemed to be spiraling down toward her. She felt a wind, heard a high-pitched buzzing sound, and saw bright light around her. As the object seemed to come closer, it appeared to be an owl, and she felt a mixture of fear and awe. She turned her head and saw what looked to be a typical shaman, with a heavy fur robe and an antlered headpiece. Carol took this to be Cerunnos, an ancient Celtic deity, half animal and half person, that presides over animals of the forest. As the owl from the sky came closer, Carol realized that it seemed much too large for an owl – its black eyes were at least four inches across, and it had no other owl-like features, such as feathers or a beak . . . Then the experience seemed to “escalate” quickly into a negative one . . . The owl was not an animal at all, and she was no longer outside on a hill. Instead she felt panic in the presence of a familiar small being who stood over her “watching and controlling” . . . Mainly she remembered the eyes [of the being] which seemed like black “bulbous eggs – maybe that’s what’s giving me the image of an owl.”

Bernardo Peixoto, a shaman of the Brazilian Ipixuma tribe, gained a PhD, qualified as an anthropologist, and held a teaching post during the 1990s at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. He is, in addition, a UFO abductee, and identifies the sinister small-bodied, large-eyed beings usually known in the West as “Grays” with spirits that the Ipixuma call the ikuyas. Remembering his childhood in the Amazon, he told John Mack about an occasion during a tribal ceremony when the figure of an owl was seen perching at the top of a tree. The elders chanted, “Ikuya! Ikuya! Ikuya! ” Bernardo asked them why they thought the creature was an ikuya and not simply an owl: 

They said that, because they were in a trance, they could see light and force around the owl, which told them it was a humanoid in disguise. Also when they shoot arrows at the ikuyas disguised as owls, the arrows seem to pass through them without killing them.

Shamans and their spirit helpers

Lacking the benefits of Peixoto’s worldwide travel and contacts, most shamans from remote tribes have never heard of aliens or of UFO abductions, but as we have seen, they know a great deal about spirits that behave in  many of the same strange ways that aliens do. The reader is already familiar from previous chapters with the transformations of spirits and shamans into animals and therianthropes that are experienced in deeply altered states of consciousness. Emerging from this, an important universal theme has been identified: shamans acquire supernatural helpers or guides – spirits who teach them how to become great healers. These spirit guides almost always appear in the form of animals or therianthropes,  and frequently begin to play a role in the future shaman’s life while he is still a child, long before his initiation. In this respect, too, there is a parallel with UFO abductions, which also often begin in childhood and continue into adulthood. 

Mircea Eliade reports that the “helping spirits” of future Eskimo shamans are usually animals appearing in human form; 

they come of their own volition if the apprentice shows talent. The fox, the owl, the bear, the dog, the shark, and all kinds of mountain spirits, are powerful and effective helpers.

Among the Cahuilla of southern California, the shaman’s powers are believed to be transmitted to him by Mukat, the Creator, through the intermediary of guardian spirits in the form of owls, foxes, coyotes and bears. The Paviotso, another southern Californian tribe, say that it is the “spirit of the night” that gives shamans “power for doctoring,” which is transmitted with the help of “water-babies [i.e. water fairies or sprites], eagle, owl, deer, antelope, bear, or some other bird or animal.”

Mun-yir-yir, an Australian Aborigine of the Murngin tribe, reported the following experience at the onset of his shamanic calling: 

I leaned over and drank out of the water-hole. When I did that a doctor soul caught my nose and made me sink down into the water. The doctors, they were two boys and a girl . . . They looked like opos-sums . . . They opened my nose and eyes and mouth and made me well.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the anthropologist Franz Boas recorded the experiences of a Kwakiutl Indian who received his shamanic calling and became a healer after the intervention of an animal spirit – a wolf – that had at first made itself useful to him as a hunting companion:

One day, however, his wolf friend pressed its muzzle against his chest bone and vomited all its magical force into him. He fell into a deep sleep and dreamt that the wolf changed into a human being and told him he would now be able to heal the sick. When he awoke he was trembling all over. Now he was a shaman.

The Gitksan shaman Isaac Tens, whom we have met in previous chapters, received his calling at the age of 30 when he began falling spontaneously – sometimes in the midst of other activities – into deep and disturbing trances. When he awoke, he was often injured and bleeding, and reported stressful experiences involving owls, very similar to those undergone in modern times by UFO abductees. This was what happened to Tens around the year 1890 at the end of an afternoon spent cutting wood in a forest:

Before I had finished my last stack of wood, a loud noise broke out over me . . . and a large owl appeared to me. The owl took hold of me, caught my face, and tried to lift me up. I lost consciousness. As soon as I came back to my senses I realized that I had fallen into the snow.

On another occasion, while out hunting, Tens said he “glanced upwards” and “saw an owl” at the top of a high cedar: 

I shot it, and it fell down in the bushes close to me. When I went to pick it up it had disappeared. Not a feather was left; this seemed very strange . . . A trance came over me once more and I fell down unconscious . . .

When a shaman-to-be amongst the Aborigines of eastern Arnhem Land, Australia, received his calling, he construed the frightening beings that initiated him during his trance as other shamans ( marrnggijt) transformed into huge birds. This is his account, recorded by ethnographers in 1935:

He heard the marrnggijt slapping their sides with their wings. One was close behind his head, and the second was up in the tree above him. Opening his eyes he saw the one in the tree, in appearance like a jabiru [a large bird of the region, a species of stork] but with eyes like an owl. Almost immediately the one behind him hit him on the head with a stick and half stunned him, while the one in the tree jumped on his chest and stood there . . . The marrnggijt then proceeded to thrust all manner of pointed objects into his body . . . saying, “We are doing this to let you know that from now on you will be a marrnggijt.”

That the onset of some shamanic initiations and of some UFO abductions should be marked by the sudden materialization of owls - or of other birds and animals with huge owl-like eyes – is mysterious enough in itself. But what I thought made the coincidence even stranger was the way this sort of imagery seems to pick up a reflection from the caves of Upper Paleolithic Europe. A prehistoric engraving on the wall of Trois Frères in south-west France features Humanoid owls of Trois Frères two large owls, which archaeologists judge to have distinctly humanoid characteristics. In the same cave, the famous therianthrope known as the Sorcerer is also found. Thought to be more than 15,000 years old, it has the legs and upper body of a human being, its face is dominated by large owl-like eyes and a beak, and antlers jut from the top of its head. It could serve as an alternative model for the antlered shaman figure seen by Carol in the abduction described earlier that also featured “an owl with black eyes at least four inches across.” 

Knowledge

Whatever animal or hybrid form they appear in, and whether terrifying or friendly at first, the purpose of a shaman’s spirit guides is to bestow upon him the power and teach him the requisite skills to shamanize: to travel freely and at will in the spirit world, to negotiate with its inhabitants, and to return to earth equipped to heal the sick, influence the weather, control the movements of animals, and find out the truth of hidden things – not for his own benefit but for the benefit of the tribe. Very frequently, as noted above, such supernatural helpers first make their presence felt when the shaman is still a child – particularly during episodes of stress related to his unusual abilities and personality, or during a severe illness or emotional crisis. I’m reminded of John Mack’s patient Joe, quoted in Chapter Five, whose alien abductors told him: “We are close. We are with you. We’re here to help you. We’re here to guide you, to make it through your difficult times.” This pleasant expression of solidarity, as the reader may recall, immediately followed a much less pleasant experience in which “a large needle, about a foot long, with a kind of hilt” had been thrust into Joe’s neck at the base of his skull. But such apparent paradoxes are as rife in the accounts of abductees as they are in accounts of shamanic initiations. 

Together with all the piercing, cutting, insertion of implants, counting of bones, removal and replacement of organs, etc., etc. with which we are already familiar from the reports of UFO abductees, it is also clear – despite their frequent feelings of confusion and trauma - that they regard their encounters with the aliens as important learning experiences. For example Jean, a social scientist and lecturer living in the western U.S., is convinced that her frequent abductions have greatly strengthened her creative powers and insights. She believes that her encounters with the aliens have in some way “neurologically reprogrammed” her to “take in knowledge and put it out for others.” Similarly, Jim Sparks, a real-estate contractor in his mid-forties, told John Mack that immediately before each abduction the aliens project a hologram-like symbol, “most often an owl,” into his visual field. When the owl appears, Sparks understands that it is time to “prepare for school or to learn.”

Is it a coincidence that shamans likewise regard their initiatory trances as learning experiences by which their own inner resources are bolstered and specific information is conveyed to them? Amongst the Auracanian Indians of Chile, the future shamaness (machi) ascends in trance to the sky. There not only does she “meet God,” as Mircea Eliade reports it, but also “supernatural beings show her the remedies necessary for cures.” Similarly, in the Kalahari, the bushman shaman Bo told anthropologist Bradford Keeney that he climbed the ropes to the sky in order to learn from “the Big God” and his retinue of spirits: 

That’s one of the ways we learn new songs, dances, and more knowledge about how to heal others. They show us what plants to use for a certain sickness or how to treat a specific person.

Kgao Temi, another shaman of the !Kung, had the same experience: They teach you things and give you more power. They actually talk to you. They tell you about the dance [the trance dance that the bushmen use to attain altered states of consciousness]. They also teach you about the plants.

In the Peruvian Amazon, Mestizo shamans are adamant that the ayahuasca beverage takes them to a realm where spirits, sometimes in the form of animals and sometimes in the form of “small people of a beautiful and strong constitution,” teach them everything they must know in order to shamanize. Referred to as doctorcitos (“little doctors”), these beings equip them with icaros, the magic songs used during ayahuasca sessions, show how illnesses may be diagnosed, and instruct them in detail on what plants to use, and how they are to be mixed with other plants, extracted, cooked, etc., in order to effect cures.

Very occasionally, when shamans receive their stern lessons of pain and knowledge at the hands of the spirits, one of them may be given something more than oral teachings and demonstrations. There are cases on record in the ethnographies where a shaman claims to have been given a book. Maria Sabina, a Mazatec Indian shaman who practiced in the village of Huatla de Jimenez in Mexico in the 1950s, attained her visionary state by consuming a species of psilocybin mushrooms known since time immemorial in Mexico as teonanactl (literally “flesh of the gods”). This she did, like all true shamans everywhere, in order to heal. In one particularly strong vision, during which she penetrated further than ever before into “the world where everything is known”:

A duende, a spirit, came toward me. He asked me a strange question: “But what do you wish to become, you, Maria Sabina?” I answered him, without knowing, that I wished to become a saint. Then the spirit smiled, and immediately he had in his hands something that he did not have before, and it was a big Book with many written pages. “Here,” he said, “I am giving you this Book so that you can do your work better and help people who need help and know the secrets of the world where everything is known.” I thumbed through the leaves of the Book, many written pages, and I thought that unfortunately I did not know how to read. I had never learned and therefore that would not have been any use to me. Suddenly I realized I was reading and understood all that was written in the Book and that I became as though richer, wiser, and that in one moment I learned millions of things. I learned and learned.

The spirit would not allow Maria to keep the book, which, she said, “remains in the sky.” How likely is it to be a coincidence that almost exactly the same story, transferred to a UFO setting, was told by Betty Hill? During her abduction in 1961, the being that she identified as the leader of the aliens gave her a large book, but reclaimed it before allowing her to leave the ship.87 Another abductee, Betty Andreasson, was given “a small blue book with 40 luminous pages” but it too soon afterwards disappeared.

The materialized psychism and the bottomless void

Even if spirits are real – which is basically what shamans the world over have claimed for millennia and scientists have denied for about a hundred years – we still have to ask ourselves what business they have with us. The scientific faction, of course, says that spirits have no business with us at all, on the grounds that the spirit world does not exist and supernatural beings are just empty projections of the human mind that may naively be believed in at rudimentary stages of culture but must inevitably be abandoned in the light of modern thought and technology. Anthropologist Weston La Barre tells us, as though these things have been proven in a laboratory, that “the notion of an ec-static or body-separable soul (brainless mind or organismless life) that can wander in space and time has long since been banished. . . and all the supposed attributes of the soul can be better explained in terms of the sciences.” Babbling triumphantly about the progress of the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the influential journalist and critic H.L. Mencken praised the scientists who had pioneered this now unstoppable revolution in knowledge: 

One by one the basic mysteries yielded to a long line of extraordinarily brilliant and venturesome men . . . The universe ceased to be Yahweh’s plaything and became a mechanism like any other, responding to the same immutable laws . . . Heaven and Hell sank to the level of old wives’ tales, and there was a vast collapse of Trinities, Virgin Births, Atonements and other such pious phantasms.

If shamanic experiences of spirits and modern experiences of aliens are essentially a single phenomenon, however, then it becomes harder to maintain certainty that all such apparitions are “phantasms,” and that the universe is just “a mechanism like any other, responding to the same immutable laws.” This is because it is very difficult to understand how the human mind, without any real, objective, and consistent external stimulus, could consistently generate the same bizarre sequences of unexpected procedures and experiences in two groups of people as far apart culturally as shamans in hunter-gatherer societies and UFO abductees in the United States. 

We are, of course, talking about hallucinations here – which are conventionally defined as perceptions that are thought to be real but that lack any objective stimulus:

“Hallucination” derives from the Latin deponent or half-passive verb alucinari, “to wander in the mind” . . . In careful, present-day usage, hallucination indicates a false appearance, in sensory form, hence seemingly external, but occasioned by an internal condition of the mind, the central suggestion of the term being its subjectivity and ground-lessness . . .

Entoptic phenomena in the early stages of trance are recognized by science as universal human experiences in altered states of consciousness (and ascribed to the structure of the nervous system, as we’ve seen). But established opinion holds that full-blown iconic and representative hallucinations – Stage 3 hallucinations in Lewis-Williams’ model – are not only not real in any sense, but also that their contents are “derived from memory” and life experiences, and “are all culture specific: at least in some measure, people hallucinate what they expect to hallucinate.”

If this established model is correct, then we need to explain what common cultural factors and common memories have led people all around the world at all periods of history to hallucinate being abducted to the sky (or underground or underwater) by small humanoids with large heads and eyes who are capable of shape-shifting into the form of animals, who perform agonizing and extraordinary surgical procedures on  them and who teach them transformative knowledge. 

It is at this point that I begin to feel baffled. I just don’t see the common memories, common life experiences, and common cultural influences that could explain, for example, Isaac Tens’ 1890 hallucination of a large owl hovering directly in front of him (which he said caught him by the face and tried to lift him up) and Carol’s 1990 hallucination in which a large owl swooped down from the skies and hovered close to her face. I just don’t see the common memories, common life experiences, and common cultural influences that could explain why both Arthur in the U.S. and Mabolele Shikwe in the Kalahari should hallucinate floating up “threads of light” in order to encounter beings in the sky. I just don’t see the common memories, common life experiences, and common cultural influences that could have led both the illiterate Maria Sabina in her remote Mexican village in the 1950s and the highly literate Betty Hill in the U.S. in the 1960s to hallucinate being given a book (which later disappears) by a powerful otherworldly being. I just don’t see the common memories, common life experiences, and common cultural influences that could lead UFO abductees in the West and shamans in Australia and South America to experience the implantation of foreign objects in their bodies or piercings by long needles or spears, etc., etc. 

All in all, I just don’t get it, and what it says to me is that yes, the experiences that shamans and UFO abductees have are indeed hallucinations, but no, hallucinations may not always be specific to the individuals who have them and may sometimes not be conditioned very much by the cultures that they come from at all. I refer here not to superficial differences that undoubtedly are influenced by cultureas Lewis-Williams puts it, “a San shaman may see an eland antelope; an Inuit will see a polar bear or a seal” – but to the underlying perception that both share of the presence of some kind of spirit animal. Similarly, I can understand the cultural conditioning behind construals of flying objects seen in the sky as spaceships on the one hand, and as aerial “boats,” “shields,” “wells of metal,” etc. on the other, but what interests me is that there is an underlying perception in both cases that something strange is present in the sky and that it is real. 

I repeat that for people all over the world to have massively recurrent shared cross-cultural experiences involving massively recurrent shared external real-world events is one thing. It is quite another thing, however, when people all over the world have massively recurrent shared cross-cultural experiences in situations where science can see no evidence for any external real-world stimulus at all. I suppose one possibility that would not entirely contradict the scientific-materialist paradigm would be that some hitherto undiscovered “library” of extraordinarily detailed mental images, sensations, and information is hard-wired into our brains, that it is the same library for all of us, and that it can be accessed only in altered states of consciousness. In that case, we would need to discover not only how such an eerie and otherworldly mental archive was compiled in the first place, but also why it is so important – presumably to our survival – that evolution has gone to the trouble of programming the entire collection into all our brains at the genetic level. These are interesting questions, and we will pursue them further. 

Even more edgy and challenging, because they collide head-on with the fundamental beliefs of Western science concerning the nature of reality, are the arguments of William James, Aldous Huxley, Albert Hoffman, and Rick Strassman, cited in Chapter Five. According to these thinkers, it is quite possible that hallucinations do arise from valid external stimuli that are outside what Hoffman calls the “receiver wavelength” of our brains when they are in normal states of consciousness. 

We have seen that hallucinogenic drugs, rhythmic dancing, “audio-driving” (with loud, repetitive drumming, etc.), sensory deprivation, self-torture (e.g. the agonizing body piercings of the North American Indian sun dance), starvation, and other extreme austerities are all amongst the techniques that shamans have used since prehistoric times to alter their consciousness and enter the spirit world. But it is well known amongst anthropologists – Eliade discusses the matter extensively – that there have always also been shamans who have no need of any of these tried and tested “techniques of ecstasy,” because they have acquired the gift of falling spontaneously into trance (often following a period of illness or an inner crisis marked by disturbed dreams). These specially gifted shamans, the spontaneous trancers, obviously provide the closest parallel to UFO abductees, whose experiences are also  spontaneous and not deliberately induced. 

The limited amount of scientific research done on the abduction phenomenon – notably the Roper Organization survey in 1991 (see Chapter Five) – suggests that around 2 per cent of the U.S. population has had the constellation of shamanic experiences that we label UFO abductions. Precisely because human neurology has remained unchanged for at least the last 50,000 years, but remembering always that our brains may be receivers as well as generators of consciousness, it is therefore very likely that around 2 per cent of every human population possesses this same spontaneous ability. For the remaining 98 per cent of us, who lack the genetic gift but who yet feel a calling to gain knowledge of the otherworld, it is a gratuitous grace of nature that chemicals closely related to key brain hormones are found in commonly available plants and fungi distributed all over the world. 

Whether by ingesting these plants, or by stressing our body chemistry sufficiently through extended periods of rhythmic dancing like the !Kung  bushmen of southern Africa, or by means of some of the other mental and physical techniques outlined above, we all have the ability to alter our brain chemistry and temporarily “retune” our consciousness to the same remarkable experiences as the spontaneous trancer. 

Either way, since 2 per cent of the population seem to be born to trance, and since the rest of us can be made to trance through judicious use of the (maybe not so gratuitous?) graces of nature, the implication is that sooner or later every culture is going to encounter the characteristic experiences, landscapes, and intelligent otherworldly beings that these trance states unvaryingly reveal. That such experiences have indeed been recorded by every culture at every period of history does not – of course – prove that the experiences are real. But the remarkable mutual corroboration and cross-tallying descriptions provided by such different and completely independent witnesses as UFO abductees and shamans increases my confidence that their experiences might be real in some way that science – with its exclusive “this world” focus – has so far been unable to contemplate. 

In 1958, the great psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, as ever far ahead of his time, committed scientific heresy when he considered the possibility that “UFOs are something psychic that is equipped with certain physical properties.” But he also asked, “Where would such a thing come from?” and commented that “the notion of a materialized psychism opens a bottomless void beneath our feet.” Elsewhere in his treatment of UFOs, however, Jung tantalizingly suggests exactly where he thinks “materialized psychisms” might come from when he proposes that “all reality” could be “grounded on an as-yet-unknown substrate possessing material and at the same time psychic qualities.” What he has in mind here, he makes clear, are the parallel universes envisaged by quantum physics.

This brings me back to the point I raised a few paragraphs ago. Let’s say for the sake of argument that spirits are real, that they have found ways, and a variety of quasi-physical forms (of which “aliens” are only the most recent), in which to manifest in our material universe, and that they have been doing so for thousands of years. Even so, what business do they have with us? Why are they here? What do they want? What’s in it for them?

In my hunt through the ethnographic sources and UFO abduction reports, I found one thing – most surprising and unexpected – that spirits and aliens do seem to want very much indeed from their human counterparts. This is the subject of the next chapter.