Why UFOs? Part 3: It gets scary

This is Part 3 in a series where I examine my lifelong interest, despite all reason, in UFOs. Here are links to Part 1 and to Part 2.

It was late September in 1988.

I was at my friend Brad's house and we were watching Unsolved Mysteries. Delightful! That night, Robert Stack led viewers in an examination of what would later be called The Gulf Breeze Sightings. This was a spate of UFO sightings in, as the name implies, Gulf Breeze, Florida. Not only were there sightings, but there were also a series of spectacular photographs. Many of those photos came from a man named Ed Walters. Here's one of them:

It was taken from inside an automobile and you can see the reflection of the UFO in the glass of the windshield. Brad and I were quite convinced. Later, as I understand it, plenty came to light that strongly suggested most of these photographs were hoaxes. I invite the reader to look into that and decide. Regardless, even if I knew the photos were fakes on that night in 1988, it wouldn't have helped me.

You see, Brad lived a fair ways out in the country. To get back home, I would have to drive along a two-lane state highway through nothing but lonely cornfields after dark. And let me tell you, it does get dark in rural Indiana. The sky is filled with stars. Sometimes one of those stars moves and proves itself to be a plane. Maybe.

Chilling. Why was I so afraid? Was I scared to see a UFO? Not really. I was more scared of what would happen if one saw me.

That's because just one year before, I had read a book called Communion by Whitley Strieber.

As I might have mentioned, I am in a terminal degree program for nonfiction writing. Every once in a while, I am asked what my favorite nonfiction book is. I don't know about favorite, but if I were to answer what nonfiction book had the most profound effect on me, I would have to be honest and say Communion, for it made me sleep with all the lights on for at least a few weeks afterwards, and fueled my nightmares for years.

Communion is Whitley Strieber's account of his alleged numerous alien abductions. At this point in my ufological experience, we're talking mid-high school, I had already known of at least a few cases of people claiming to have been brought aboard UFOs, sometimes not by choice. Travis Walton would be an example of such cases. Communion was different. While Strieber was not the first to make claims of this kind, nor was he the last, he was, I would argue, one of the primary forces that thrust what would be known as "the abduction narrative" into public consciousness. Here's how that template narrative goes:

Someone wakes up in the middle of the night. They find themselves unable to move or speak. Strange beings appear at the foot of the bed. These beings are typically between three and four feet tall, with large, bulbous heads, pale skin, spindly forms, and their trademark feature: the black, almond-shaped eyes. A depiction of one is at the top of this post (it also happens to be the art that adorns the cover of Communion.) Through various methods, often levitation, the hapless, paralyzed victim is brought aboard a saucer-shaped UFO.

Image from CrystalLinks.

Once onboard the craft, the abductee is subjected to a series of medical tests, and most of them aren't much fun. They are said to be invasive, painful, and all the more traumatizing as the abductee is rendered immobile, save for responding to the telepathic commands of the, we presume, aliens. Later, the abductee is returned to their bed. The abductee awakes with no memory of what happened...for the time being. Bits and pieces come back in traumatic flashes. They may even have scars that they cannot explain or bouts of "missing time," where hours elapse which they cannot account for.

There are variations on this narrative template. Sometimes, as I feared would happen to me that night in 1988, the aliens may take someone on an isolated rural road. Other accounts speak of broad daylight abductions, or abductions involve multiple parties such as the Allagash Incident. As I said, however, the template for the narrative and the genre constraints are more or less standard, despite the occasional and inevitable outliers.

The uniformity of abduction narratives is actually one of the arguments against it as a real phenomenon. This template enters the public consciousness and it becomes a part of the subconscious, thus perhaps creating vivid dreams or hypnagogic dreams/hallucinations. There is also the criticism that abductees often recall their alleged experiences only under hypnosis, which is an imperfect practice at best. Additionally, more than a few abductees have been found to have sexual abuse somewhere in their past. Alien abduction might be how the brain masks such awful events, making it easier to deal with rather than facing the reality of a family member or someone else being responsible. Ultimately, aside from a few scars, there is precious little concrete evidence for this as a legitimate phenomenon, despite 3% of Americans claiming it has happened to them.

And yet...

And yet...

Even if my teenage self knew that in 1988, it would have done no good. It still would have scared me. To be honest, it still scares me today. Logically, I understand all of the valid counterarguments. Sometimes when I'm home alone, though, or sometimes when I'm walking my dogs under dark skies and a light moves in the sky...I shiver. Is this the time when they come for me?

That's because when I read Communion and encountered the abduction narrative as a whole, the entire narrative arc of UFOs changed for me. The aliens no longer looked like us. They resembled us, but those ominous eyes convey no warmth, rather they are expressionless and calculating. The rhetorical stance of the visitors shifts from "space brothers" to at worst hostility to at best indifference. They could take anyone from their bed, or anywhere else, against the person's will and perform invasive tests and experiments. There would be nothing you could do to stop them. In fact, one abductee is said to have been able to ask the aliens why they were doing this. The alien telepathically responded with a deadpan:

"You do it to lesser evolved species, don't you?"

Fair point.

Whitley Strieber's book conveys all of this experience in striking literary fashion. In certain regards, I am of the same rhetorical stance as I was upon reading it at age 17. I remain convinced something happened to him...I just don't know that it was aliens doing it. Could it happen to me? Therein is how the UFO phenomenon came to be something that caused me genuine fear.

In fact, abduction narratives, as I see them, are ghost stories of old, updated in brand new drag. Human folklore is replete with stories of people being taken in this night by strange creatures and later returned (maybe). What's more, many abductees report having sperm extracted or embryos implanted, thus creating alien/human hybrids. This is closely related to ancient myths of incubi and succubi. Skeptics would say that this is further evidence that abductions are linked far more with human psychology and mythology (Derrida's "ever-expanding archives") than with space people. Proponents would say that the folklore means this has been happening for a very long time.

Either way, this new dimension to the narrative changed my view of Ufology forever and not really for the friendlier. Still, like a good horror story, I could not help but remain fascinated, regardless of just how scared I was. One of the ways I dealt with this fear was by constructing snarky, mocking abduction stories with Brad. We were teenage boys and when you're that gender and age, that's kind of your super power. One of the experiments many abductees report having is an anal probe. You can just imagine what we did with that. Trondant!

Raunchy and scatalogical rhetoric? Sure. But laughing at it, shifting the stance thrown at me as invasive to ridiculous and absurd in a Camus-like way, helped me sleep at night. I can't speak for Brad, but I was genuinely scared. As I said, still sort of am.

Just one month later in 1988, NBC would air a prime-time special called UFO Cover Up Live. It featured UFO sightings, including Gulf Breeze. It covered abduction. It also introduced me to a whole other dimension of the narrative.

They know, and they can't let us know what they know, otherwise we would know that they knew.

More of that next time...



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