THE UFO FILES
JENNY RANDLES says our own technology suggests it’s time to reassess the idea of alien contact
Whenever I hear Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, instantly evoking Stanley Kubrick’s ground-breaking film 2001: A Space Odyssey, my mind travels back to the 1960s. I picture leaving the cinema awestruck after seeing this epic movie based on an Arthur C Clarke story.
I was working hard at school, with the aim of becoming an astronomer. Exploration of space was a decade old. We expected the wonders we saw in the film to be a reality by 2001. And, of course, some were. Multiple BBC TV stations born of futuristic technology made movie audiences laugh back then; BBC 2 was new in those days, but proved prescient. What about Pan Am flying in space? Who would have guessed that by 2001 Pam Am would not exist and everyday spaceflight be no nearer?
Two decades after seeing 2001, I was in Australia where I met a real astronaut heading for Mars. It has been nearly 30 years since he told me about his coming mission – and yet, in 2020, nobody is doing what he felt then was imminent.
It is interesting to ask why we have not yet accomplished what he was training hard to achieve back then. Given that this man’s mission to Mars never happened, perhaps it’s also interesting to ask why we still assume that aliens visiting Earth have crossed far greater distances to pick up people from cars to play games with them inside a spaceship.
Pondering the answers set me thinking about the link between these expectations and why I think we might need a reassessment of the whole concept of alien contact.
Consider some of the Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind that I have been involved with – particularly those that involve multiple participants. Most ‘alien contacts’ are single-witness events that take place late at night. But there are a surprising number where more than one participant is abducted together and these are perhaps more illuminating than we realise.
One of the earliest such cases was investigated in Essex, where I met the family. It happened in 1974 and involved a young married couple and their three young children hurrying home after a family visit. First they saw a strange light in the sky. Then they drove into a green mist – the car radio started sparking and was hastily disconnected – and then they were through the mist and home. Except it was now two and a half hours later than when they had driven into the mist just ‘minutes’ earlier.
They had no recall of what had happened until they underwent hypnosis. Then they described “floating” into a UFO and seeing themselves below in the car via some kind of out-of-body experience. When in the UFO they met two types of alien being and were split up – the father being taken to see the “engine room” of the craft, as if the experience was somehow matching his personal interests.
This pattern is not unusual in CE4 cases
One of the six-foot tall aliens was female and put on the witness’s high-heeled shoes to try walking in them
with more than one witness. It is often not a fully shared experience, though witnesses obviously talk about their individual recall to one another, so it can morph towards one. Yet it is not unusual for some witnesses to recall things vividly while others can offer nothing. Often, it is only hypnosis that releases imagery from a vague subconscious dream to become something more ‘concrete’.
In Shropshire in July 1981, for example, three women in their mid-twenties driving back from a nightclub at 2.10 am “went very quiet” as if “conditioned” when they saw lights across a field. They were close to home, but as the lights started to keep pace with them all power drained from the car. One of the women reported that they “coasted” past a landed object that then climbed up into the sky. With the engine now working again, the women drove to the nearest police station to report the incident and all spoke of feeling “odd”. Police logged this, but did little else beyond establishing that a witness’s watch was 15 minutes out of synch – seemingly the duration of the ‘missing time’.
A year later, two of the women were hypnotically regressed via our local research group in Machester. It is interesting how much of their experience was similar to that of the family in Essex. An out-of-body state, a sense of floating upwards, losing trains of thought and what I call the ‘Oz Factor’ all suggested they were in an altered state of consciousness. Indeed, both the witnesses shared the sensation of all sound disappearing around them and an inward focusing as the ambient noises faded.
However, after that their recall differed. One was medically probed by small hairless entities that beamed images into her mind and prodded her bones painfully. The other was merely observed by some kind of “robot” before being “floated” back inside the car.
The two women seemed to be kept apart from others when inside the UFO. The third woman, when regressed by a different doctor, again described being on her own and taken into another location with two different entities – these were six feet tall with white skin and long hair and dressed in long green cloaks. One was female and put on the witness’s high-heeled shoes to try walking in them.
There is much more to these cases, of course, and dozens more like them around the world – but one thing is obvious. These people share a genuine, partly physical experience, but then have a confusion of memory and lose sense of time and, via the Oz Factor, enter an altered state. But their subsequent memory of the ‘abduction’ is personal and often focused on the self and bypassing others who were present.
It is as if two separate things are taking place: a physically real, energy-triggered event shared by all involved and a very subjective sequel, personal and dreamlike, often only teased out via hypnosis.
So why do we presume these two elements are actually one experience and ascribe physical reality to all parts of it? And, if that’s not what’s going on, what might otherwise be happening in cases like these?
To consider that, think about what happened in real life space exploration since I met that astronaut in Oz (the country, that is).
Sending humans to the Moon was expensive and we stopped doing it soon after 2001: A Space Odyssey was released. Getting to Mars is far more difficult, as it is many times farther away from Earth. The journey to Mars is months long and hazardous. It makes sense to use an unmanned spaceship that constitutes only a financial loss if struck by asteroid debris en route, one that has no need of water and air, which, if compromised, partway there would leave astronauts without hope of rescue.
More significant even than these considerations is that technology has advanced in ways we could not easily forsee back in the late Sixties and has become in some senses superior to using humans.
We can send craft to Mars (indeed, three are heading for an early 2021 rendezvous now; see this issue’s Science column, p.16). They have very ambitious plans when they get there. However, throughout the Sixties only three of the first 13 attempts got that far; and they didn’t even land – by far the hardest part, as Mars has an atmosphere and weather, unlike the Moon.
Even with 21st century technology, a quarter of the missions sent there have failed. Needless to say, this would present an unacceptable risk if humans were aboard – especially as their needs would almost certainly produce a higher failure rate.
So instead of putting effort into risking lives, we changed tack and designed technology to do everything humans could do, but without the risks – even designing a helicopter to fly on Mars, controlled from millions of miles away. Rovers have been driving over the surface for years, taking spectacular pictures and digging into the ground to analyse data for evidence of life – still quite possible, as this arid world once had oceans.
Which brings me to the point. Our assumption in the Sixties that aliens would come here to kidnap passers-by to learn about us was based entirely on what we were doing in space at the time, not on the reality of credible exploration.
Of course, highly advanced means of travelling across space, as in Star Trek, might exist in the future. Or the distances may forever be insurmountable in a human lifetime. Either way, chances are that an alien intelligence exploring the Universe would be doing what we do now: finding inventive ways of probing Earth remotely.
When I was at college we could only speculate if any star had planets around it. Now we know for sure these are common and can detect atmospheres and broad physical parameters of thousands already discovered. Soon we will take images of them and actually see these other worlds.
It is all but certain that aliens aware of us would do this, and much more, first. So why even come here? Is it not more likely they would ‘investigate’ remotely rather than by traversing billions of miles of hostile space?
If, indeed, any CE4 cases are caused by alien contact and not some other phenomenon, then might they be an advanced ‘remote viewing’ technology ‘visiting’ Earth, but controlled from some distant world; in which case, there would be no need to traverse space to play games with late-night clubbers.
Why stalk vehicles on open roads and risk exposure? From afar, the aliens could use methods we can only imagine to probe for data, with UFO-like energy beams directed remotely. After all, we now study wildlife using satellite technology from space without herds of Zebra having any clue that an eye in the sky is filming their lives.
Alien contact is a rather emotive topic but it is not just an either-or case of ET flying a spaceship here or “it must all be nonsense”. There is a third option: alien life forms using highly advanced probing technology to investigate life on Earth without them needing to leave their distant abode. Perhaps the results of their investigations are what we mistakenly interpret as ‘UFOs’.