extraordinary%20encounters

2 Abductions by UFOs
In the first case to come to the attention of
ufologists, a Portsmouth, New Hampshire,
couple, Barney and Betty Hill, experienced a
close encounter with a UFO on the night of
September 19–20 while traveling through the
White Mountains. At one point, Barney Hill
stopped the car and stepped out with a pair of
binoculars; through them he saw humanlike
figures inside the craft. One was staring directly
at him. Terrified, the couple fled, all the
while hearing beeping or buzzing sounds.
Once back home, the Hills eventually realized
that at least two hours seemed missing from
their conscious recall. In November Betty had
a series of unusually vivid dreams in which beings
forced her and her husband into a UFO.
She and Barney were separated, and Betty underwent
a medical examination with a grayskinned
humanoid, whom she understood to
be the leader. In January they sought out
Boston psychiatrist Benjamin Simon in an effort
to deal with the continuing anxiety they
felt about the incident. Dr. Simon had them
hypnotized, and under hypnosis they separately
recounted an abduction episode. Subsequently,
the story appeared in a Boston newspaper,
and soon afterward journalist John G.
Fuller wrote a best-selling book, The Inter -
rupted Journey, on the case.
A generally similar incident took place in
Ashland, Nebraska, in the early morning
hours of December 3, 1967, when police officer
Herbert Schirmer saw a hovering UFO a
short distance from him. He originally believed
that the sighting had lasted no more
than ten minutes, but when he later realized
that a half hour had passed, he got nervous,
experienced sleeplessness, and heard a buzzing
sound inside his head. Later under hypnosis
Schirmer related an onboard experience with
short, gray-skinned humanoids with catlike
eyes.
During a wave of UFO sightings in October
1973, two Pascagoula, Mississippi, fishermen
claimed that robotlike entities had
floated them into a UFO. The story received
enormous publicity, as did an even more spectacular
incident in November 1975, when a
forestry worker from Snowflake, Arizona, disappeared
after six colleagues saw a beam of
light from a UFO hit him and knock him to
the ground. Travis Walton returned five days
later with fragmentary memories of seeing
two kinds of UFO beings, little gray men and
humanlike (but not human) entities. A few
other stories, now being called “abductions” as
opposed to “kidnappings,” saw print in the
UFO literature but were little noticed elsewhere.
The first book on the larger phenomenon
of UFO abductions (as opposed to a
single case, such as the Hills’s), Jim and Coral
Lorenzen’s book Abducted! was published in
1977.
From the Hill incident on, critics focused
on the use of hypnosis to elicit “re c a l l , ”
pointing out that confabulation under hypnosis
is a well-documented psyc h o l o g i c a l
phenomenon, most dramatically manifesting
in “m e m o r i e s” of past lives. As early as 1977
t h ree California investigators attempted to
demonstrate that volunteers under hypnosis,
i n s t ructed to imagine UFO abductions, told
stories indistinguishable from those re l a t e d
by “re a l” abductees. Other investigators and
o b s e rvers disputed these conclusions, pointing
to methodological and logical pro b l e m s
in the experiment, and subsequent efforts by
other re s e a rchers to replicate it failed. On e
later study indicated that nearly one-third of
abductees consciously re m e m b e red their experiences;
their testimony, folklorist T h o m a s
E. Bu l l a rd concluded, was indistinguishable
f rom corresponding accounts emerging under
hypnotic re g ression. Still, hypnosis and its vagaries
would play a large and continuing ro l e
in the controversy surrounding the abduction
p h e n o m e n o n .
In the late 1970s Budd Hopkins, a New
York City artist and sculptor, working with
psychologist and hypnotist Aphrodite Clamar,
began to investigate the abduction reports.
Through Hopkins’s work new dimensions of
the phenomenon emerged, including not just
little gray humanoids that would come to
dominate abduction reports but also experiences
that began in childhood and recurred