Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact - Above Top Secret

short perpendicular line on each end. This horizontal line would represent the lips withoutthe muscle that we have. And it would part slightly as they made this mumumummingsound. The texture of the skin, as I remembered it from this quick glance, was grayish,almost metallic looking. I didn't notice any hair – or headgear for that matter. I didn't noticeany proboscis, there just seemed to be two slits that represented the nostrils.There are some obvious contradictions between the two descriptions. Betty speaks of very darkhair; Barney did not notice any. The men described by Barney do not exactly evoke in my mind thepicture of Jimmy Durante! On the other hand, the creatures are strikingly reminiscent of the UFOoperators of a large number of stories unknown at the time outside a very small group specialists.Apart from disagreement on the nose and lips, Betty's statement matched the description made byBarney of the shape of the head and the color and appearance of the skin. Another remark by Bettyis significant in this respect: "I got the impression that the leader and the examiner were differentfrom the crew members. But this is hard to say, because I really didn't want to look at the men."Two other elements are outstanding in this case. One of them is the manner of communication withthe strange beings. They communicated among themselves through an audible language, which wasdefinitely not understandable to the witnesses. Yet when they communicated with the Hills, theirthoughts came through in English. Betty thinks that they spoke English "with an accent," whileBarney feels that the words and the presence of the entity were two separate things:I did not hear an actual voice. But in my mind, I knew what he was saying. It wasn't as if hewere talking to me with my eyes open, and he was sitting across the room from me. It wasmore as if the words were there, a part of me, and he was outside the actual creation of thewords themselves.This remarkable statement, an excellent description of the mechanism that triggered thecommunication, may well be a clue to the entire episode, and it certainly places the case in thedomain of the Theory of Apparitions – as it is treated, for instance, by parapsychology pioneer G.N. M. Tyrrell in his celebrated 1942 Myers Lectures before the British Society for PsychicalResearch, of which he was president. Thus, it is noteworthy that the apparent absurdity of thesequence of actions constituting the episode should be reducible to the triggering of high-levelperception patterns within the witness's brain and not necessarily through any normal physicalprocess. And this characteristic, in its turn, is reminiscent both of neurophysiological experimentsand of reports by the most reliable observers of "ghosts," although, of course, ghosts aredistinguished from the class of phenomena we are studying here by the absence of material traces –which makes their interpretation a good deal simpler. And while it is possible that a complete theoryof ghosts could confine the phenomena to parraments within the human nervous system, the same isnot true of UFOs. For this reason, therefore, it is crucial to pursue the investigation of pastapparitions in relation to reports such as that of the Hills.The "experiment" performed on Betty Hill by the entities is also remarkable. It will be recalled thatwhile she was in the craft, Betty was submitted to a simulated medical test. Under hypnosis, shereported that a long needle was inserted into her navel, that she felt pain, and that the pain stoppedwhen the leader made a certain gesture with his hand in front of her eyes. A fifteenth-century Frenchcalendar, the Kalendrier des Bergiers, shows the tortures inflicted by demons on the people theyhave taken: the demons are depicted piercing their victims' abdomens with long needles. In fact, thepsychological invariant in all these stories is unmistakable. The problem, then, is not to identify it,but to relate it in a rational manner to the physical features encountered during the observations –for example, the tracking by military radar operators of the UFO seen by the Hills.Perhaps we should illustrate the difficulty of this problem by using a case less well known than theHills' incident, though it is quite as dramatic. It has never appeared in English UFO literature andtherefore cannot have influenced American UFO lore. Even in France it is practically unknown. Thewitness was a woman, and the incident took place on May 20, 1950, at about 4:00 P.M. in the