extraordinary%20encounters

66 Close encounters of the third kind
few days later, since he had sought no publicity
and discussed it only with friends and family
members, who eventually leaked it to the
local press. Like Simonton, Wilcox had an
unimpeachable reputation among locals, and
psychological testing revealed no abnormalities.
Wilcox made no subsequent attempt to
exploit his story. Though his testimony made
no sense—even in 1964 scientists had abandoned
the hope of an inhabited Mars—
Wilcox seemed neither crazy nor dishonest.
As comparable claims came to the fore,
some ufologists speculated that UFO occupants
were lying to hide their true identity
and purpose. At the extreme this led theorists
such as John A. Keel and Jacques Vallee to
move beyond ufology’s venerable extraterrestrial
hypothesis (ETH) and into quasi-demonological
speculation about earthbound elementals
and other occult entities.
As if to compound the confusion, by the
mid-1960s ufologists were confronting a new
level of confrontation and contact between
humans and UFO beings. In 1965, under
hypnosis conducted by a Boston psychiatrist,
a New Hampshire couple, Barney and Betty
Hill, turned a consciously recalled CE3 (an
observation of figures aboard a hovering UFO
one night in September 1961) into an onboard
experience, including medical examination
by gray-skinned aliens and conversation
with the ship’s captain. All of this took place
during a two-hour period of which the Hills
had no conscious memory and for which they
had never been able to account; to them it
had always been a puzzling period of seemingly
inexplicable amnesia. “Missing time,”
hypnotic regressions, gray aliens, and medical
examinations would play large roles in the
emerging abduction phenomenon.
A drawing by a pupil at Ariel Primary School in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, where a group of children saw a UFO and aliens land
on September 16, 1994 (Fortean Picture Library)