A few years ago, Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, a leading researcher in the alien encounter phenomenon, approached me after seeing my recent film The Jew in the Lotus. He wanted me to consider making a movie about encounters with these alien life forms. I told him no. I knew next to nothing about alien abduction, had no interest and thought it was all rather foolish. Then, he invited me to meet some of the people who claim to have had these experiences. They seemed rather normal and spoke about their feelings of connection and longing for these uninvited intruders to return. I had stumbled into a world filled by people who had been touched by something … and had their lives blown apart because of it. I was mesmerized. I feel that I was abducted by John Mack.

This started my journey into the lives and minds of alleged abductees around the world, and into my own personal journey through skepticism, fear, insomnia, fascination, confusion and led to many many questions.

These “experiencers,” as many of them call themselves, bring with them reports of missing time, bodily probing, sperm extraction, impregnation, a strange project to create a hybrid/alien-human race and apocalyptic warnings. According to various studies, the number of people world wide reporting alien abductions reaches into the hundreds of thousands. As there is no conclusive physical proof, the debate as to whether these stories are true or not could go on forever. Instead, I became more interested in the people — those who have had their lives both torn apart and transformed by this experience.

His research has been detrimental to his professional and personal life-it has affected me, my mother, and Alex, my brother.

It’s not that he could be a lunatic-I don’t think he is. Most scholars in the field are conspiracy theorists and raving psychotics. At worst, my dad may just be a mediocre researcher who refuses to accept that his life’s work is a psychological phenomenon. (”I wish it were,” he says, “because then I could have led a normal life.”)

It’s not even the crazies that pop up every now and then in our home life. Not exactly. In the late ’80s, a woman who claimed to be an abductee turned out to be an undiagnosed schizophrenic making up stories to get attention. She called our house over and over again until he finally cut ties with her. Years later, another woman began calling five times a day with “emergencies.” When my dad told her to quit, she undertook a smear campaign against him, sending letters to Temple University, radio shows, TV stations, and other UFO organizations in an attempt to ruin him.

These aren’t lone incidents. They come with the territory of his work. His having lunatics as peers has nurtured a tendency in Dad and me to get extremely defensive about our sanity. Me, I’m proud of his accomplishments. I essentially believe that his work, not just his scientific method, is valid. But I know that talking about it is going to elicit strange responses. To this day, I’m wary about telling people about what my dad does. But my need for attention and validation from others, combined with my need to impress and entertain, usually overrides the instinct to keep my mouth shut. So I tell anyone who will listen.

I have sat in the ufo abductee support group circles, and for what its worth, there is a palpable sense of urgency.

Everybody (near 100%) of the people who have the experience say something is going to happen – soon.

I’ve been listing to Mike Clelland’s podcasts lately, which are interesting.  A very good voice – sincere and open, but careful about not being too credulous.  I actually read most of Chuck Weiss’s book recently, which was entertaining, but he sometimes seems to me to be reporting speculation as fact.  Then again, maybe abductees really are tapped into something I couldn’t possibly understand.  I did have another UFO dream last night – traveling on a UFO with a bunch of people – but then this topic is obviously on my mind a lot.

Meanwhile, Obama wants to spy on our internet activity.

Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

About this, Andrew Sullivan writes: “This logic would be a good basis for a science fiction story about the invention of telepathy, and the government’s inevitable insistence that it needs to tap into our brains.”

Wait, I’m writing that story.  At least, sort of.  But let’s look at this for a second: assume that ET UFOs are 100% real.  The government is deciding how and when to initiate contact.  Maybe the ET’s are saying – enough with the secrecy already, we’re doing this.  The government’s concern is that this could increase the amount of terrorism.  I won’t say this justifies the Patriot Act, or what Obama’s doing, but when you look at government action through the lens of the UFO issue, things change dramatically.  Al Qaeda is a front for attempts to control the population for entirely different reasons.  If UFO disclosure happened and fundamentalists of every kind starting losing their heads and bombing each other, would you want the government to spy on us?  Imagine if a 9-11 event didn’t happen once every ten years (or once a generation), but once a day.  If the UFO issue is that volatile – especially if UFO propulsion technology got into the wrong hands – at what point does the Patriot Act seem reasonable?  They’re planting the seeds now for when the world truly loses control.  A hypothetical scenario, not a desire.

The Luminosity blog reports this bit of fear:

A common dream that many abductees often have is that of witnessing a literal alien invasion.  I have had this dream countless times in many variations.  The most common of which is walking through a field and approaching a bridge.  While in this field, the backdrop of my dream is seeing alien ships flying everywhere.  This dream always leaves me with a sense of dread and wonder at the same time. Also there is a sense that I am witnessing a future event, mainly the world going crazy while this independence day scenario plays out.  I get the strong sense that “they” would much rather I go with the sense of wonder than the dread that is also present.  Whatever variation this dream comes in, I am always aware that I am on my way to meet certain people at certain places because I have a job to do.  The “event” is simply my activation, which finally allows me to access the information that has been hidden from my conscious mind.

Again, IF ET disclosure is going to happen, the “invasion” wouldn’t even have to be a bunch of lizard-looking aliens out to enslave and eat us.  If they said, “We come in peace,” their very presence would be seen as an invasion to those holding tightly to Apocalyptic religious traditions.  What they would be destroying is the current paradigm, not necessarily blowing up the Empire State Building.  People might do that all themselves. Could be wrong on that, of course, but I tend to trust primitive humans less than an alien race that might be a million years ahead of us.  If they’re that advanced, and they were intent on killing us, we’d be dead already.  Meanwhile, we kill each other daily.

Not a joke – but not necessarily exposing the secret Satanic worship by people in power – though if Dick Cheney did worship something, you’d think that it was at least friendly with Satan.  Video here:

Regardless of Alex Jones’ overstatements about this, the idea that Bush, Cheney, and others are participating in that ritual is weird no matter how you look at it. I argue on Darryl Sloan’s blog that they’re not necessarily worshipful of the “occult” – it’s just a stupid play to let off steam.  Even so, these are dark people playing around with dark rituals.  It could even influence their actions indirectly, creating a mood where they can do whatever the they want.  It’s got a serious “masters of the universe” vibe.  So it’s not a case of: we’re worshiping our God.  It’s: we’re fucking around with things we don’t understand – i.e how they run government.

It occurred to me that owls also show up in abduction literature.  From Mike Clelland’s blog:

After all my years of compulsively reading UFO literature, I was keenly aware of the reoccurrence of owls as a screen memories as part of the experience reported by abductees. Consequently, I was aware that this might be a possibility.

Coincidence?  Of course not.  There are none. So you have:

• Exhibit A: Powerful people worshiping a wooden owl.
• Exhibit B: Abductees describing occurrences of seeing owls – until it is revealed under hypnosis that the owls are just a stand-in for wide-eyed greys.

• Obvious conclusion: Powerful people worship the greys.

This is how insanity starts.

…has got an agenda of his own.  John Mack’s theories about space brothers guiding us into the new age millenium may err on the polar opposite side of the debate:

It doesn’t seem likely that the alien story is all bad or all good.  It may not even be a case of anything alien at all, but possibly a literal manifestation of our psyches.  When you add hypnosis into the mix, in which the hypnotist’s worldview can be imprinted on the subject – even telepathically without any aural cues – it makes the whole enterprise fairly dubious, even if it’s totally fascinating.  Like the rest of the UFO debate, something is happening, and until we know what that something is, we should never cast it aside.

I was disappointed as well to see Budd Hopkins cite David Jacobs work as credible in his recent memoir Art, Life, and UFOs.  Really, an incredible read, one of my favorite UFO books, along with Jacques Vallee’s journals, because Hopkins is so erudite and courageous about covering this issue knowing he could (and did) damage his reputation.  A good primer on Abstract Expressionism as well.  I knew little about his art and mostly knew his UFO research – but he’s obviously the real thing in every way.  I want a Budd Hopkins piece on my wall:

The main issue may be that Budd Hopkins is an authentically decent guy and I’m…not.  That is, he sees people as basically decent so ripping people from their bedrooms and studying them is totally invasive.  Me, I see humans as basically primitive and that possibly we’re being studied in the same manner we study mice.  And I’ve been involved in animal rights activism – I don’t (generally, sometimes) eat meat and much animal testing is cruel and unnecessary.  But I am not so blind that I cannot see that medical research has some real value for humanity’s future health.  Alien research could fall under the same category – we’re too primitive to understand why it’s being done, but it’s being done for a purpose that is not as nefarious as the research itself.

The most compelling stuff in Budd Hopkins’ research is when there’s physical evidence by those who don’t claim to be abducted – so there are witnesses to “lights” at the same time someone claims to be abducted.  Other cases of abduction by several different people in which they all tell a similar story are eerie – but again this could be a case of the hypnotist imprinting not only his view of the subject, but also what he’d learned from previous subjects about the same encounter.

It’s interesting that John Mack and David Jacobs both find subjects that confirm their theories about the abduction experience – though John Mack does report on the scarier, more-invasive encounters, which is why to me he’s more credible. Basically, you have one researcher citing that hybrids are here to help usher us into the Age of Aquarius, and one who thinks hybrids are here to enslave us.

The latter has gotten into some trouble.  Emma Woods, one of Dr. David Jacobs’ subjects, has this to say on her site:

1) I was Dr. Jacobs’ research subject between 2004 through 2007, and he investigated my anomalous experiences using hypnosis.

2) During that time, Dr. Jacobs told me that he was in danger from “hybrids/aliens” because of his “alien abduction” research, and in my opinion, his behavior became quite bizarre and paranoid.

3) Dr. Jacobs also believed that those “hybrids/aliens” could read my mind (and the minds of other abductees) because it is well documented that the communication that abductees remember having with “aliens” (whatever the actual cause of the phenomenon is), is primarily telepathic.

4) Consequently, while Dr. Jacobs had me under hypnosis, he planted suggestions in my mind that I had Multiple Personality Disorder. He did this ostensibly to try to fool the “hybrids/aliens”, not because he really believed that I had MPD.

5) Dr. Jacobs ostensibly believed that the “hybrids/aliens” would read my mind, see that he had a new theory ‘that everyone telling abduction stories was actually suffering from MPD’, and that the “hybrids/aliens” would therefore loose interest in him.

6) Dr. Jacobs told me that he actually believed in “alien abduction”. He said that he believed that his life was in danger from the “hybrids/aliens” because he knew that they had a “secret” program to infiltrate Earth by using “hybrids” to blend into human society.

7) Dr. Jacobs was ostensibly trying to use my mind as a shield to protect himself from “hybrids/aliens”, whom he said he believed would use mind control on him, or even possibly kill him, to stop his “alien abduction” research.

Read on…All in all, not that surprising.  But it’s really damaging to the future of abduction research.  And it can give rise to sites like Alien Abductions Incorporated:

When you choose an AAI Abduction Experience our doctors, hypnotists, and memory implant technicians work with you in pre-abduction orientation sessions to customize one of our hundreds of stock abductions to suit your personal taste. You can even pick one of our fetishist’s specials—interspecies breeding, medical experimentation—it’s all up to you. Whether you select a solo abduction or one of our special Group Abduction packages (great for corporate retreats, school groups, and theme parties), AAI gives you the best abduction for the lowest price.

Funny, but ouch.