<>#8CREATURES FROM INNER SPACE? @6Have beings from other worlds met and talked with people of Earth - or are they creations of the subconscious mind? @2HYPNOSIS IS STILL A CONTROVERSIAL subject. Its significance becomes even more obscure when it is used to recover the blocked memories of a witness in a UFO contact case. Experts dispute the origin of the images that come to the mind of such a person in a hypnotic trance. Is the subject's psychic potential boosted? Does he become able to dredge information from the collective unconscious, potentially becoming aware of everything that has ever happened anywhere at all? Or is the abduction memory that comes to the witness simply a respinning by his mind of a story once read and now forgotten - the re-creation of a modern myth? For certainly alien beings and their spacecraft have attained the commanding status of myths of our time, whatever the reality that lies behind them. Or does regression hypnosis simply free the memory so that the barriers to recall can be hurdled and the 'missing' period relived? There is a very difficult problem of assessment whenever a witness in a type "C" case retrieves a 'memory'. What is its true significance? A case similar to that of the Day family occurred in June 1978, again in England. A young couple, their children and another adult were involved. The alleged abduction took place during a car journey in Oxfordshire; again there were many similarities with other abduction stories: for example, three- dimensional ('holographic') shows were displayed to the witnesses. But the story as a whole was quite unlike any of the 100 or more other type "C" cases that have been documented by ufologists. The aliens looked humanoid - indeed, very like those seen by John and Sue Day - and they told of the origin of their race on Earth and their emigration to the planet Janos. Now a horrific natural disaster had precipitated their flight back to Earth. They wish to move in with us...a million or so refugees from this cosmic catastrophe. What is interesting about this case is, partly, how it resembles in outline other incidents, such as the Day case (which had received publicity in the British press). But more importantly, the interests, attitudes and manner of questioning of the investigators found their way into the story that was told - as if the hypnotised witnesses were picking up 'cues' from the investigators and fitting them into their accounts as they told them. This is rather like the game in which you are given a series of objects - say, a book, a pen, a candlestick and a toy balloon - and are asked to use your imagination to weave a story in which they all figure. This curious problem is further illustrated by the experiences of young Gaynor Sunderland, from Oakenholt in North Wales. She and her family had many weird encounters, including contacts with aliens who, again, looked rather like the ones met by others who reported similar experiences. On one occasion Gaynor was having @2trouble sleeping because she kept seeing two aliens - one male, one female. (Later she found that they were named Pars and Arna.) I was then investigating the case and I suggested to her mother, Marion Sunderland, that she could tell Gaynor a white lie. Gaynor was told: 'If you put a loaded camera in the bedroom the aliens will not come because they do not like having their pictures taken.' A couple of nights later Gaynor was allegedly abducted to another world and taken on a tour of a city there by Arna and Pars. She was told that she was not really there: the experience was in her subconscious mind, a kind of dream. Yet the aliens maintained: 'We did not come to you because of the camera.' It is highly paradoxical that an alien entity should first admit to being a product of the unconscious mind and then claim to dislike being photographed. It seems that Gaynor's mind somehow wove the idea concerning the camera into her experience of the trip to another world. But she remained convinced of the reality of her experience and said it was far more vivid than a typical dream. We sometimes find that the initial stimulus for an abduction experience is an event that can be explained straightforwardly. This casts doubt on the remainder of the account provided by the witnesses. One of the most famous type "C" cases involved an American couple, Betty and Barney Hill, who were returning from holiday across the mountains of New England during September 1961. A mysterious 'craft' followed them and then came down nearby; Barney Hill watched it through binoculars before driving away in panic. All the classic features of such incidents were there: a psychic witness (Betty had experienced many types of weird phenomena throughout her life); a blank in their memory of events; strange dreams afterwards; and finally, under hypnosis, memories of abduction and medical examination on board the UFO. Yet it has been argued very convincingly that the light in the sky that marked the beginning of the whole train of events was nothing more than the planet Jupiter. This does not in itself tell us anything about the reality of the experience; witnesses often link completely unassociated events in their recollections of some incident, simply because those events happened to occur at roughly the same time. But it is just part of the process by which human beings misperceive events, distort their memories of them, and come to mistaken conclusions about them later. We should bear this complex process of interpretation and misinterpretation in mind as we consider the appearance presented by aliens and their craft in contact reports. What should we expect extra- terrestrial life forms to look like? This is a very hard question to answer, since our only examples of life come from one planet - the Earth. Yet when we see the amazing range of species hosted by our environment and recognise that mankind is just a link in a long evolutionary chain in which an even greater diversity of forms has existed, we find little reason to suppose that alien beings should look like us. Admittedly the humanoid form is well-adapted to a wide range of @2environments on the Earth's surface, and it may well be common on other Earth-like planets throughout the Galaxy; but the human form is presumable not a necessary condition for dominance. Since other worlds would have a great range of habitats, and local conditions would vary greatly, life there would undoubtedly be equally diverse. Carl Sagan, the eminent astronomer, has even proposed possible life forms capable of surviving on Jupiter: such as living balloons in the oceans of water that may exist in the warm depths of the planet, below the perpetually frozen clouds that we see. The last thing we would expect is a menagerie of alien races looking more or less like us - and yet, according to contactees, this is precisely what we do find. Only 7 per cent of contact cases involve creatures that are not humanoid. Such beings as the giant white maggots that crawled across a road in Yssandon, France, in 1960, during a UFO sighting, are rare. There are three distinct groupings among the humanoids that form the bulk of the data: small - below 5 feet (1.5 metres) tall, and usually about 3½ feet (1 metre); medium - 5 to 6 feet (1.5 to 1.8 metres); and large - up to about 7 or 8 feet (2.1 to 2.4 metres). In type "B" ('bedroom visitors') encounters, the entities witnessed are fairly normal, with a slight tendency to larger sizes. In no fewer than 41 per cent of type "A" cases, on the other hand, the entities seen are small. There are other fairly common features, such as large eyes, fair skins, and angular features. But other factors, such as clothes, show great diversity. One might not consider this to be a problem. After all, people on Earth wear a wide variety of clothes, and human beings of different ages, races and sexes are extraordinarily diverse. But the difficulty with contact cases is more fundamental: the aliens are described are just too much like us. They usually speak the language of the contactee, whether it be English or Serbo-Croat. Nearly always they speak is faultlessly, and without any noticeable accent. This means of course, that they are speaking in the same accent as the contactee himself (a vital, but usually overlooked, point). Their fashions, too, are far too similar to those on Earth. It seems nonsensical to imagine that an alien from a planet light years away should wear a cloak buttoned at the neck and sport a badge on the breast of a jumpsuit-style garment. Yet this is what contactees claim, and it is all too reminiscent of the limited imaginations (or wardrobe budgets) of science-fiction film-makers. If a witness asks for the origins of an alien, he is almost invariably told that the entity comes from space. In the earlist contacts the aliens' home planets belonged to our solar system - Mars, Venus, Saturn and so on. Now we know that humanoid life on these worlds is impossible, and present-day contactees are told the aliens come from planets circling distant stars. As yet, of course, science know little about the very existence of such planets, let alone their suitability for life. What is it like inside an alien @2craft? The witnesses' answers to this question also raise grave questions about the nature of their experience. Imagine a Stone Age man transported through time and taken onto the flight deck of a Concorde airliner. The instruments and controls would be quite incomprehensible to him. How could he possibly describe what he saw in any intelligible way, knowing nothing of the purpose and importance of what he was seeing? This would be the predicament of any Earth-dweller taken inside an alien starship. Yet these amazingly advanced visitors, who traverse interstellar space at a whim, apparently do so in spaceships that would not look out of place in one of our engineering museums. They use levers and valves, wires, and old-fashion bulky computers. They have flashing lights, in the manner of Star Trek and Doctor Who. They are slow in catching up with our primitive technology. They are just getting round to using lasers and holograms (which they did not have before we did), and they do not as yet have the liquid crystal displays that are now standard on our watches and calculators. What is more, their spaceships are always breaking down.... Not frequently the aliens enlist the help of Earth-dwellers to sort out their problems. Once they asked an eight-year-old boy to fix their propulsion unit. Evidently the origin of all this is not the face-value explanation beloved of the alien spacecraft theorists. Once the contactees are aboard, the aliens usually carry out a medical examination. Taking blood samples is an integral part of this. The Irish ufologist John Hind points out that the doctor is the symbol of authority who plays the greatest role in the lives of many people. There seem to be significant resemblances between these examinations by aliens and the contactee's previous experience of medical treatment. One Canadian abduction appeared to feature a replay of an appendicectomy that the witness had earlier undergone. The memory blocks in type "C" cases present an interesting problem. If aliens can suppress memories, why do they do it in such an ineffective way? The memories usually filter through spontaneously and are easily retrievable in full by hypnosis. Why block them at all? Unless the memory block in fact works successfully in most cases - implying that there are thousands of people who are abducted and have no inkling of the fact afterwards. Whatever the reason for these memory blocks, the lapse of time between the original occurrence and its subsequent recall severely impedes the investigation of the case. And this, of course, may be the most significant function that the memory loss serves. When aliens give us messages they are almost always of one form: warnings about the future of the Earth, with hints of nuclear war and impending doom. If only we were sometimes given something startling and original - a new scientific theory, a helpful invention, a cure for cancer. But no; we are told that, because of our nuclear tests, 'the balance of the Universe is being disturbed.' Occasionally there is some light @2relief. In spring 1978 a Red Army officer was abducted by the shores of the Pyrogovskoye Lake in Russia. Once he had got used to his humanoid hosts, he suggested they ought to toast this cross-cultural contact with a suitable drink. They did not understand. So he sketched out the chemical structure of alcohol, and the aliens retired and immediately made some. 'How is it that such a highly developed civilisation does not use something like this?' the Russian asked. 'Maybe if we had used it we would not be so highly developed,' was the response. A teetotal message in the form of a joke makes a welcome change from the usual run of communications from other worlds. end.