Faces of the Visitors A Survey of "Alien" Contact Copyright (c) 1998 by Michael Lindemann All rights reserved in all media http://members.aol.com/kfrnkovich/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- http://www.cninews.com Introduction The modern era of UFO encounters, dating roughly from the end of World War II, contained from its inception an implicit argument over the character and motives of "the visitors." The earliest military studies of UFOs, undertaken in secret, were driven in part by a genuine fear of hostile invasion from space. That fear exploded into popular culture in the early fifties, epitomized by such films as "War of the Worlds" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." At the same time, while the first generation of serious civilian ufologists fixated on distant objects in the sky, an odd assortment of so-called contactees began attracting hordes of followers, some merely curious but many entranced and adoring, to hear their stories of benevolent, godlike beings from other worlds. The gross dichotomy between hostile invaders and benevolent space brothers might have been expected to fade as decades of research advanced our understanding of UFO phenomena. But exactly the opposite has happened instead. Today, the argument over the character and motives of "the visitors" is more starkly drawn than ever. It must of course be acknowledged at the outset that a more fundamental question overlays the questions of visitor character and motives -- and that is the question concerning whether or not UFO phenomena and alleged "alien visitation" represent anything otherworldly at all. But for purposes of this special report, that question will be set aside. Here we will assume that "the visitors" are real, in order to examine the deeply divided opinions about who "they" are and what they may be doing on our planet. Part One: The Beginning of the End? Among the current generation of serious researchers, Temple University history professor David M. Jacobs, Ph.D., stands out both as a scholar of the phenomena and as a proponent of the darkest scenario of alien invasion. Jacobs' concept of the invasion bears no resemblance to the popular six-gun mythology of films like "Independence Day," where grotesquely tentacled aliens stand in for Saddam Hussein and heroic American flyboys kick them back to the stone age. The "real" invasion -- and for Jacobs it is absolutely real -- is more terrifying than that, because it is utterly surreptitious yet unstoppable. We are doomed as a species, Jacobs believes, and we didn't even see it coming. "The aliens have fooled us," he writes in his disturbing new book, "The Threat: What the Aliens Really Want, and How They Plan to Get It" (Simon & Schuster, 1998). "They lulled us into an attitude of disbelief, and hence complacency, at the very beginning of our awareness of their presence. Thus, we were unable to understand the dimensions of the threat they pose and act to intervene. Now it may be too late. My own complacency is gone, replaced by a sense of profound apprehension and even dread.... Now I fear for the future of my own children." Jacobs is hardly alone in his forebodings. Budd Hopkins, arguably the most influential abduction researcher on earth, shares Jacobs' view that alien intruders are quietly engineering a huge population of hybrid beings, mixing human and alien genetic material toward the end goal of supplanting present-day humanity with an "improved" race answerable to the aliens' designs for planet earth. As Jacobs sees it, "It is now possible to discern at least four specific programs that the aliens have put into effect to achieve their goal: "1) The Abduction Program: The aliens initially selected human victims around the world and instituted procedures to take these humans and their progeny from their environments without detection. "2) The Breeding Program: The aliens collect human sperm and eggs, genetically alter the fertilized embryo, incubate fetuses in human hosts, and make humans mentally and physically interact with the offspring for proper hybrid development. "3) The Hybridization Program: The aliens refine the hybrids by continual alteration and breeding with humans over the generations to become more human while retaining crucial alien characteristics. Perhaps humans are also altered over time and acquire alien characteristics. "4) The Integration Program: The aliens prepare the abductees for future events. Eventually, the hybrids or the aliens themselves integrate into human society and assume control." Jacobs believes we are well into the end-game in this grand and malevolent strategy. While unsure of the exact timing of the takeover, he reports: "Many abductees feel that 'something is going to happen' soon and that the aliens have their goal within sight.... The indications are that this could mean from within the next five years to within the next two generations." And, lest one harbor any hope for fair treatment under the new regime, Jacobs spells out the likely fate of the majority non-abductee population of earthlings. Among abductees he has personally worked with, Jacobs says, some are told "that nonabductees will be kept as a small breeding population in case the hybridization program has unforeseen problems. [Others are] led to believe that nonabductees are expendable. The evidence seems to suggest that the future will be played out primarily with aliens, hybrids and abductees. The nonabductees will have an inferior role, if any at all. The new order will be insectlike aliens in control, followed by other aliens, hybrids, abductees, and finally, nonabductees." By "insectlike aliens," Jacobs refers to tall "greys" with mantis-like features, as have been often described in abduction literature. In "The Threat," Jacobs refers to other types of aliens as well, including smaller greys, grey-type beings with differing skin tones, "Nordics" and "reptilians." He suspects that the often-reported Nordic or distinctly human-looking aliens are actually hybrids created by the tall greys. He admits some uncertainty regarding reptilians and other exotic, less-frequently reported types. But he leaves no doubt that the insectlike tall greys are in charge of the changes underway on earth. Though Jacobs' research is meticulous and passionately reported, his conclusions are disputed by many other voices in the UFO community. Jim Marrs, author of the recent book "Alien Agenda," concedes that human evolution may have been manipulated by aliens more than once, but he doesn't believe in a malevolent invasion. "I take a more positive attitude," he told CNI News in a recent interview. "If there were alien races out there who wanted to come and somehow enslave this world, particularly in an overt fashion, I think they would have done it long before now. The historical record shows that this alien presence has been here since before the recorded history of mankind. Surely they wouldn't have waited until we've got the capability of going off planet, laser weaponry and so forth. I don't see any reason to get overly fearful at this point." Hollywood special effects artist Steve Neill, a life-long abductee whose graphic depictions of grey aliens and abduction scenarios have been featured in numerous television shows, says he can understand Jacobs' point of view but thinks something more gradual and positive may be taking place. Speaking with CNI News, Neill admitted that he's experienced big "mood swings" about his encounters, from deep fear and anger on one hand to a kind of giddy euphoria on the other. Now, he says, he's found a middle position that he's happy with. In his view, the visitors are certainly manipulating the human race -- but they are simply part of the grand pattern of nature. "The swings I've been through kind of encapsulate what this is all about -- going from one extreme to the next, and then arriving at the middle," he says. "That's something that everything in the universe tries to do, reach a balance no matter what. In the end, I don't really view this as good or bad. I view it as part of what I'm part of, this amazing mechanism of the universe that makes nature function as it does. Every creature is caught up in some aspect of it, no matter where you go." Asked about Jacobs' view that aliens might be engineering the end of humanity as we know it, Neill suggested that our current situation may be comparable to an earlier period of human genetic advancement. "In a way, Jacobs is right," Neill said. "Consider that Neanderthals no longer exist. That was an extinction. But I'm not in the position to decide if it's something that should be viewed as evil -- one species developing or being engineered into another. I think Cro Magnon was an improvement on the Neanderthal. And I'm starting to believe that what we're looking for as 'hybrid' human beings has already existed for a very long time. There are numbers of hybrids in our society today, in fact more than we can possibly imagine. The people who are having these experiences themselves, I feel, may be sorts of hybrids who have been genetically engineered and altered, going back generation after generation in their families. I am starting to see children in this world who are so incredibly brilliant, and have this light [inside] like no other children I've seen. I've met some of these kids. If it's what I think it is, it's brilliant, because it will be slipped in so smoothly, and these kids are so powerful, that they are bound to change the world." Not everyone, of course, can be sanguine about a situation in which everything we now regard as human is being gradually manipulated into something else -- even if that something else is "better" on some cosmic scale of value. Other researchers and experiencers hold views greatly different from Jacobs, Hopkins and even Neill. For these people -- Jacobs refers to them as "Positives" -- visitors to earth are unambiguously benevolent and have our physical well-being and spiritual advancement foremost in mind. Notable among this group is Dr. Steven Greer, founder of CSETI (Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence ) and a leading proponent of human-initiated close encounters or CE-5s. Also noted for such views are psychologist Richard Boylan, author of "Close Extraterrestrial Encounters: Positive Experiences with Mysterious Visitors"; and Lyssa Royal, author of "Visitors From Within" and "Preparing for Contact," whose writings are primarily the product of channeling. Such articulators of the "Positive" outlook generally agree that extraterrestrial intelligence is widespread, diverse, highly organized (in the sense of a Galactic Federation or similar cosmic government) and benevolently active on the earth for the express purpose of assisting humanity through a time of turmoil and transformation. For the most part, though not unanimously, they argue that the fearful and negative views of abduction put forward by David Jacobs and his allies are products of human misunderstanding, not alien misbehavior. Even the term "abduction" is generally dismissed by them as wholly unfair and misleading. Less well known than Greer or Boylan, but equally representative of this "Positive" position, is Nancy Malacaria, a New England resident who, with her husband Jack, claims to have had numerous communications with ET representatives of a highly organized, earth-based enterprise known simply as The Project. Nancy and Jack are the parents of five children, run a successful rug-cleaning business out of their home, and by all outward appearances are normal, solid citizens of Norwood, Massachusetts. But on May 12, 1990, their lives suddenly changed when Jack had an unexpected experience in the garage of their home. It was the middle of his work day, and he was busy washing a rug. Nancy described what happened in a recent interview with CNI News: "Jack kept seeing a bright flash of light. It looked like a mirror reflection of the sun flashing in through the window. He kept looking up, thinking that somebody was stepping up to the door. Then there was another bright flash of light, and this time it stayed lit up. There was a doorway of light, standing up like a hologram in the middle of the floor -- like you're in a dark room, and you have a closet light on and you open the closet door and all you can see is the light, not the frame. It opened, and there was a figure standing in the doorway, a silhouette. It looked sort of like a man. Of course, my husband was very afraid. It was between him and the only way out of the garage. In his mind he heard a man's voice saying to him, 'This image is scaring you, so I'm going to make it disappear, but I'm still going to talk to you.' Then the doorway closed up again, just the way it opened. "As soon as it shut, my husband left the garage. He was very afraid. It was the only logical thing to do. So he came into the house -- I wasn't home -- and he thought about what happened. His mind was reeling. In about 20 minutes, he went back outside again, because he had left all his equipment on and he had to finish his work. He peeked in the garage. Everything looked normal. He realized that all the equipment was still on. He didn't know what to think -- he wasn't calm enough to think about it. So he finished working. "And while he was working, this voice kept talking to him. It was telepathy. The voice told him, basically, that there are 30 other worlds visiting earth that are concerned for the ecological state of our planet, and that they were not going to let man destroy our planet. This was the very first message. It really is not the whole purpose of their being here, but that was a very straightforward introduction." >From that unlikely beginning, Nancy told CNI News, she and her husband found themselves engaged in a "furious" series of telepathic, and sometimes physical, contacts with a wide assortment of beings. "There were about 100 point blank encounters in the first 18 months, and then about 100 more in the next two years," Nancy says. "We've met many different people... aliens of different races. We've learned a lot about their abilities. We've learned why aliens visit us, why they don't let people see them, how it is that people assume they've been abducted." In time, Nancy says, she and her husband were told of no less than 170 different alien groups currently represented on earth. Most of these groups, though not all, are formally associated with a highly organized, earth-based enterprise known as The Project. "There's one Project for earth. There are other projects, but they're for other worlds," Nancy says. "The Project is the organization of all the visiting life for that planet. That occurs when the beings on that planet reach a point in their evolution where they can start to understand other life." Among the many alien groups that Nancy claims to have met are several that answer to the description and behavior of the so-called greys. She offers a novel variation on the widely-held idea that the greys are principally responsible for human abductions, and that they behave as if indifferent to human rights. "The greys are working with genetics, and they are creating races. Their methods are not as advanced as some of the other aliens that visit us. Not all of our visiting life is working with genetics, but two particular [grey] races that I know about are. As their technology improves, so will their methods. In the meantime, their methods prevent them from being able to join the Project. But some of the Project beings are working with them to help them improve communications and improve their methods, and they will eventually join the Project." Needless to say, one might wonder how Nancy Malacaria can speak so matter-of-factly about such outlandish things and expect to be taken seriously. Yet, Steve Neill speaks with similar self-assurance about aliens he has met; and although David Jacobs inserts an occasional self-deprecating admission that his ideas sound absurd, he is just as committed to his dark views as Nancy is to her own. Nancy Malacaria -- much like Steven Greer, Richard Boylan and Lyssa Royal, among others -- believes that "the biggest reason there is so much human negativity about our visiting life is human nature. It's the way we think and assume. Where there's very little understanding, we automatically assume the worst. "There's really no sensitive way to say this, but [ufology] attracts people who really don't understand what they're saying, and don't understand the reputation they're giving our visiting life," she declares. "That's one of the biggest reasons why the aliens don't let people see them, because everybody would just believe everything they've ever heard, and none of it is accurate." If Nancy Malacaria can be believed, "The Project" is intended to assist humankind through its present time of planetary turmoil and bring earth to a point of readiness to join a wider galactic community. It is a view widely shared by the "Positives," and diametrically opposed to the apocalyptic visions of David Jacobs, Budd Hopkins and their sympathizers. "As much as I want to be optimistic, I find little to fuel hope for the future," writes David Jacobs. "In a way, I wish I could be like the Positives, existing in a naive but happy dreamland, awaiting the coming of the Benevolent Ones who will engulf us all in love and protection... [but] I must go where the evidence leads me. I have come to view the alien abduction phenomenon and its purpose as an asteroid hurtling toward the Earth -- discovered too late for intervention. We can track its progress and yet be utterly incapable of preventing the collision." If alien visitors are really here, do they portend the beginning of the end, or the beginning of something much grander than humans have ever known before? Or are both these views too extreme, too dogmatic and too implausible? What about the great in-between, reported by many experiencers, where diverse visitors display behavior and motives spanning the entire moral spectrum? And what about the possibility that the visitors -- some of them, at least -- are not extraterrestrials at all, but something even stranger? Part Two: Stranger Than Fiction Phillip H. Krapf worked for 30 years in the newspaper business as a reporter, photographer and editor. He spent 25 years as a copy editor for the Los Angeles Times metro division, sharing in a Pulitzer Prize the Times won for its coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Krapf took early retirement in 1993 and was enjoying an eminently ordinary and leisurely life in Ventura, California until the evening of June 10, 1997. That night, he says, he got abducted by aliens. Krapf tells his remarkable story in a new book from Hay House called "The Contact Has Begun." In the book, Krapf says he was teleported right out of his bedroom by a blue beam and taken aboard a huge mothership that orbits in the vicinity of the moon. The ship is piloted by beings he calls Verdants. They originate on a planet in another galaxy. Their spacecraft are so advanced that they can travel anywhere in the universe. They are by no means the only extraterrestrials out there -- there are thousands of other intelligent races, they say -- but the Verdants are currently the most numerous. Krapf says he remained conscious throughout three full days on board the Verdant ship, except for normal periods of sleep. In this respect, he says, he was treated very differently from scores of other humans he saw the very moment he arrived. These people were laid out on row upon row of tables in a huge gymnasium-sized room, all unconscious and attended to by one or more Verdants. Krapf says it was explained to him that the Verdants had been engaged for many years in the process that has come to be called abduction. These people on the tables -- ordinary abductees -- were being inspected medically. None of them were ever harmed. Most of them would remember nothing. Moreover, Krapf was told, the time for this kind of abduction is at an end. Very soon, it will stop completely. Abduction was never about procreation or the making of hybrids, the Verdants told Krapf. It was simply about studying the human species in every possible way. Now the Verdants know everything there is to know about humans -- vastly more than humans know about themselves -- so there's no more need for study. Instead, it is now time to prepare the human race for admission into the Intergalactic Federation of Sovereign Planets. Krapf was told he was abducted wide awake because the Verdants wanted to give him a detailed briefing and a modest assignment in the overall program of preparation. His book, "The Contact Has Begun," is the fulfillment of his assignment, he says. According to Krapf, the Verdants don't have huge black eyes like the better-known "Greys," though in general build and stature they sound fairly similar. But the Verdants talk out loud (Greys are generally described as employing telepathy); they eat and enjoy food in human fashion (Greys are usually said to lack a human-type digestive system); and they engage in sex for pleasure and bear children like humans (Greys are said to have lost the ability to procreate). In an interview with CNI News on March 3, 1998, Krapf insisted that his story is completely true to the best of his understanding. No one, he says, could be more surprised than himself. He professes to have had no prior knowledge of, nor interest in, the abduction phenomenon. He says he had been indifferent to UFO stories his whole life and had happily accepted the prevailing wisdom at the Los Angeles Times that people who see UFOs are either insane or lying. Moreover, he had always been a religious agnostic, tending toward atheism. Suddenly, in June 1997, all that changed. With no prior exposure to abduction claims other than the little he haphazardly saw on late night TV, Phillip Krapf apparently does not know how his story compares with tales told by other abductees and contactees. He claims to have been so impressed by the qualities of the Verdants -- including patience, kindness, vast knowledge and spiritual wisdom, as well as superlative technical achievements -- that it never occurred to him to doubt the literal truth of everything he experienced and was told. Some of that was quite startling. Of all the things Krapf learned during his three day adventure, however, nothing could compare with the revelation that the human soul is real, human life is eternal and God exists. Krapf, the agnostic/atheist, says the assurances given him by the Verdants on these realities left him utterly dumfounded. But he says he believes them completely. To any person familiar with other renderings of the abduction/contact experience, one of the most peculiar features of Phillip Krapf's account is its absolute physicality. Everything about the Verdants, their ship and their mission seems material and three-dimensional. So physical is their universe of experience that even heaven is described as a physical location. They have been there, the Verdants tell Krapf. Why, you can plot it on a chart. Temple University historian David Jacobs, in his recent book "The Threat," paints a picture of contact with aliens that is horrifyingly bleak compared with Krapf's cheerful tale. But Jacobs' aliens are also described as physical creatures. They are apparently bonafide extraterrestrials from other planets in our galaxy, he says. His reports from over 100 abduction subjects include a wide diversity of strange details, but these can be attributed, he says, either to very advanced technology (indistinguishable from magic, in Arthur C. Clarke's terms) or to manipulation of the abductee's mind. Jacobs' aliens do practice telepathy, though. By whatever means, they do walk though walls. They are considerably stranger, by human standards, than Krapf's Verdants. Jacques Vallee is the most influential UFO researcher in America to insist that the idea of merely physical ETs from other planets is patently absurd. He has suggested instead that UFOs and their occupants might be inter-dimensional entities. He has also observed that UFOs seem to function in the role of a "control system," having a profound but always inscrutable and subliminal influence upon the development of human consciousness and culture throughout history. Despite this theoretical control function, however, Vallee regards the idea that aliens in UFOs repeatedly abduct thousands or millions of people to do medical procedures as simply hilarious. Needless to say, Vallee was criticized for this heresy by leading abduction researchers, especially Budd Hopkins -- so much so, in fact, that Vallee finally withdrew from ufology altogether, after darkly warning that UFO research seems doomed to perpetual irrelevance by its inherent silliness and lack of intellectual rigor. Vallee did not, however, deny that abductions take place. He recognizes that they really do, although perhaps less often than popularly believed. It is the mechanism of abduction that other researchers have wrong, Vallee says. Real abduction is perpetrated by humans, not aliens. It is probably part of some terrible and desperate political agenda, employing a grotesque caricature of real UFO contact to instill a useful brand of fear in average, dull-witted humans. Meanwhile, Vallee says, the real aliens are far stranger than we can even imagine -- not ETs at all, but interdimensional chimeras, forever unknowable and out of reach. UFO investigator Bob Pratt feels quite comfortable with Vallee's thesis, and Vallee rewarded Pratt's good judgment by writing a glowing foreword to Pratt's 1996 book, "UFO Danger Zone: Terror and Death in Brazil" (Horus House Press). "This is field research as it should be done," Vallee said, "and we can only deplore the fact that [Pratt's] work has not been repeated in other parts of the world." But if Pratt's UFOs are interdimensional, as he says in the end, they certainly have a startling way of intruding into the physical plane on earth. For Pratt's book, as its title implies, is a positively numbing litany of horrors, meticulously researched by himself and a host of Brazilian colleagues over a period of some fifteen years. Pratt's subjects are mostly poor rural Brazilians -- fishermen, farmers, subsistance laborers. These are people who watch little or no TV; many cannot read. But these people tell stories of intruders who rain down terror from the sky. Pratt tells of people being paralyzed and lifted off the ground by beams of light; of having their health instantly destroyed by a chance encounter in the woods or along a rural road; of being stalked, repeatedly assaulted and sometimes killed by UFOs. There are dozens of cases, many with multiple witnesses. None have a happy ending, and none make any discernible sense. Why are these people brutally attacked, and by whom? There is no answer. But the terror and the broken bodies say there is truth in the accounts. Dr. Stephen Greer, founding director of CSETI, has theorized like Vallee that abduction cases, if they really occur, are perpetrated by humans intent on giving aliens a bad name. At the same time, Greer speaks of genuine extraterrestrials -- people from other planets -- who are coming here to make contact with right-minded humans. It's part of a grand process of global transformation, Greer says. Extraterrestrials stand ready to assist human society in rising to a higher spiritual level conducive to wider and more open contact with other intelligent races. In that belief, Greer is hardly alone. Phillip Krapf agrees completely. So, in effect, does Nancy Malacaria, who says that some 170 different extraterrestrial races are currently assisting humanity through a time of turmoil and transformation -- even if that assistance sometimes looks like abduction. A more subtle, complex -- but ultimately positive -- outlook is expressed by one of America's most famous abductees, Betty Andreasson-Luca, whose life has been meticulously chronicled by researcher and author Raymond Fowler for over twenty years. When Fowler first wrote about Betty's case in the mid-1970s in "The Andreasson Affair," he described a classic alien abduction scenario in terms that have since been repeated countless times by other researchers. But in the intervening years, Fowler's own views have evolved enormously, along with Betty's. In the fifth and final volume of his Andreasson study, "The Andreasson Legacy" (Marlowe, 1997), Fowler emphasizes repeatedly that abduction is a "paraphysical phenomenon." Its UFO component is physical in that it leaves ground traces, shows up on film, disrupts electrical systems. Its contact component is physical in the sense that abductees are (sometimes) physically missing during an abduction event, and often come back with body scars such as scoop marks related to physical procedures. Fowler surmises that some abductees probably have physical alien implants. But abduction is simultaneously paranormal or metaphysical in the sense that it can occur as an out of body experience and often includes psychical elements such as telepathy, teleportation and time distortion. It is very definitely concerned with human reproduction and the creation of hybrid creatures; but it is just as definitely concerned with the human soul and the ultimately spiritual nature of humanity and reality. It is the furthest thing from absurd or disorderly. It is undeniably and definitely purposeful. And there is teaching involved, Fowler insists. Abductees are given urgent messages about the perilous state of our world and the changes ahead for humanity. David Jacobs has heard all that from his abductees, too. He agrees that they are given powerful images and messages about the environmental crisis on earth, or the peril of nuclear war, or terrible changes to come. But Jacobs thinks the aliens don't really care about any of that. They are not interested in preserving the earth for humanity's sake. They're intent on taking over. Katharina Wilson, another lifelong abductee who has written eloquently of her own experiences in "The Alien Jigsaw" (Puzzle Publishing, 1993), has heard it all too, first-hand. In a recent interview with hypnotherapist Deborah Lindemann, Katharina Wilson said that she, like Jacobs, thinks the aliens can induce powerful images in the human mind for purposes of deception or manipulation. "My experiences and visions I'm shown with aliens, even the ones that appear very human-like, seem to involve a level of manipulation. The aliens are interested in how we react to the information in the vision, or they use the vision for distraction or screen memory purposes." Wilson has had her share of alien sexual procedures and similar horrors. She doesn't trust alien motives at all. But Wilson also makes an important distinction between alien abductors and other entities that she calls "super-conscious beings." These beings have shown her powerful images too, but the experience seemed entirely different. "I just remembered everything consciously the next morning. It was just so unbelievably intense," she told Deborah Lindemann. "What they were showing me was that thoughts are things and that what you think and believe, you will create. They took me through my neighborhood and showed me, using visual imagery. I saw them come down out of the sky on this golden rope; it was like a little swing. There were four of them. They were the most beautiful feminine little angels. They were... super intelligences. A piece of the golden rope touched me, and just touching that strand of rope was like I was sitting in the lap of God. It was the most unbelievable positive experience, just to touch it. But they wanted to get on with what they had come to teach me and show me." Though Wilson uses the term "angel," she's not sure if that's appropriate. "I'm cautious about how I categorize these experiences, because I have a responsibility as a reporter of this phenomenon. If these SCBs (super conscious beings) really are just another form of aliens, I don't want to mislead people," she says. Asked by Deborah Lindemann how the experience of SCBs differs from her alien encounters, Wilson said, "They don't experiment on me or treat me like a lab animal. I don't get the feeling they are manipulating me. I realize they show me visions of the future and I know the aliens do this too. But I sense a caring and a deep love and concern that is totally different than my experiences with the aliens. I realize that the aliens can look into your eyes and make you feel a whole array of wonderful things. But these SCB's don't look into my eyes or force their will on me like the other beings do." Given the incredible -- one might even say absurd -- diversity of reported human experiences with our alleged visitors, is it possible to say who or what we are dealing with? Perhaps the closest we can get to the truth is an idea that confounds and infuriates literalists everywhere: the visitors are finally and forever in the eye of the beholder. They are real, but their perceived character is dependent upon the conscious level of our perception. Dr. John Mack, Harvard University psychiatrist, is one researcher who seems to have arrived at this conclusion. Perhaps for this reason, he is regarded with suspicion or disdain by those who insist upon a hard-edged, literal interpretation of the visitor experience. Mack responded to an inquiry from CNI News by sending a summary of his viewpoint, distilled from the scores of abduction cases he has personally investigated. Mack agrees with David Jacobs that "the human/alien sexual and reproductive process, which the abductees with whom I work report in excruciating detail, appears to result in the creation of a hybrid race that will some day come 'down' to earth. For experiencers, this hybrid 'project' is altogether real and does not appear to me to be the product of delusion or other mental aberration." That said, however, Mack points out problems with the "literalist, entirely material, interpretation" of alien encounter. "Most obvious is the absence of solid evidence of actual pregnancy, genetic changes or the physical existence of the hybrids themselves. "But that is only the beginning," he says. "Some abductees perceive this process as occurring in another realm or dimension with different space/time qualities and possessing what they often describe as a higher vibrational frequency. Sometimes they themselves notice that they are in a different state of consciousness, as if between sleeping and waking, and that the images and events around them seem 'fuzzy.' "One may argue that it is a matter of research, of collecting more or better evidence to document the physical reality of all this, and that the main obstacle is that the aliens are so deceptive, subtle or furtive. But it may not be simply a matter of physical evidence," Mack says. "The fundamental difficulty may be more one of philosophy, consciousness and method. The matter may be more mysterious than we appreciate, requiring different ways of knowing or thinking about it. "For instance, the hybrid project might be thought of as a reflection not so much of biological procreation or colonization [as] of an evolution of consciousness. But in order to consider this, we would need to put aside or overcome the radical split between mind or spirit and matter, or between the visible and invisible worlds, that have dominated both Judeo-Christian tradition and Western science. If we could allow the possibility of an interpenetration of consciousness and matter, or even that physical images or the physical world itself could be a manifestation of consciousness or spirit, then the apparent and sometimes real physicality of the alien-human sexual and reproductive process could be seen as the expression in concrete, physical form of what may be a cosmic energy or intelligence, responding to a problem -- in this case, the evident threat to earth's life forms that is the result of human blindness and destructiveness. "This is not to say that the aliens or hybrids are not entirely real. Rather, I would argue that the process might be occurring largely in another realm, one with a different vibrational frequency, a kind of in-between domain -- neither pure formless spirit nor dense matter -- which, under certain circumstances, can penetrate our world, and be perceived with such vividness as to bring intense experiential conviction and even subtle physical manifestations for abductees. "If we think of the phenomenon this way, and not simply in terms of whether it is good or bad for the human species, we may see it as less threatening. We might then learn from it about our evolving relationship to the earth, to the unseen intelligence or intelligences of our cosmos, and, ultimately, about our own evolving psychological and spiritual existence and identity," Mack concludes. Without doubt, for some experiencers and researchers, the subtleties of Mack's view are beside the point, because to them it already seems clear that the earth is being invaded by alien forces who can bring an end to human life. Yet, others insist that the visitors bring benevolent warnings, offers of spiritual counsel, even invitations to membership in a cosmic Federation. Meanwhile, for some, the visitor experience is as physical as driving in a car; while for others, the experience resides in a realm of dreams and shadows, speaking less to the body than to the soul, less to time than to eternity. Can "an answer" be distilled from all these diverse and passionate impressions? Very likely not -- at least, not yet. Says John Mack: "At the very least, we should admit that we do not ultimately know what [alien encounter] means or whence it comes, and that we are only beginning to penetrate its depths." [Dr. David Jacobs can be emailed at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Katharina Wilson's web site is http://www.alienjigsaw.com. Phillip Krapf's email is [EMAIL PROTECTED] Nancy Malacaria's web site is http://members.aol.com/earthsistr/2.index.html. The CNI News website is http://www.cninews.com. Deborah Lindemann can be emailed at [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Michael Lindemann can be emailed at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dr. John Mack's next book on further research into the alien abduction phenomenon will be published by Crown Publishing in Spring 1999.] Webmaster: D. Oszuscik - - Design: L. Lowe - -Content: M. Lindemann This page has been served times. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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