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  Since my graduate training was in history, I began searching for historical patterns in the UFO phenomenon. I wanted to learn how society had “handled” UFOs since witnesses first reported them in the 1940s. I wanted to understand the role that the Air Force played in the UFO controversy. I wanted to look closely at the aura of ridicule that has surrounded the subject. I wanted to know why only a tiny percentage of the population had any solid information about UFOs despite the fact that sightings had been reported for so many years. I decided to write my doctoral dissertation on the history of the UFO controversy, even though only one dissertation had ever been written on a UFO-related subject, and that was in journalism. It certainly is not a common history subject. Professor Paul Conkin, who directed my studies and who was considered one of the most rigorous and systematic thinkers in the historical profession, was dubious when I first brought it up to him. He thought that UFOs were more related to social hysteria and fads than to anything else, but he allowed me to go ahead with the project. I finished my dissertation in 1973 and published a revised version of it in 1975.

  After I received my Ph.D., I began teaching at the University of Nebraska and then in 1975 at Temple University in Philadelphia. At the same time I kept up my research on UFOs, published articles, and gave papers on the subject. As I continued to work in the area, I became aware of a major problem with the direction of that research. The study of UFO sightings was progressing well, but some of the most fundamental questions about the phenomenon were nowhere near being answered. Why, for instance, were these objects here? Why, if they were extraterrestrial, did they prefer to fly about and not make contact with humans? The answers to these and other questions could not be obtained from studying the outside shells of the objects. We needed to know more about what happened inside the UFOs.

  The only UFO reports that described the interiors of the objects and what happened in them were the abduction cases. But the few cases investigators had collected in the 1970s were so different from one another that it was almost impossible to tell what, if anything, had actually happened. Two men said they were abducted by elephant-skinned creatures with long, sharp noses and claw hands. Another claimed to have been abducted for five days straight and to have seen not only small aliens but a “human” one as well. A woman said that little Beings came right through her wall and transported her to another planet. Some of the “abduction” stories involved benevolent Beings who had come to bring peace on earth and personal growth to the happy recipients of the contact. Still others told of prophecies of atomic destruction. Even though similarities existed between these cases—for example, all the abductees reported that they had been given physical examinations—it was easy to relegate this melange into the hoax and mind-game category.

  Furthermore, there was the memory problem. Virtually all abductees suffered from a form of amnesia that prevented them from remembering exactly what had happened during the abduction. The preferred technique for retrieving these lost memories was hypnosis, but it was common knowledge that memories collected in this manner were not reliable. Indeed, some of the transcripts of the hypnotic testimony that I read revealed obviously leading questions and incompetent follow-up on answers. The lack of well-researched solid events did not inspire confidence.

  In 1982 a friend introduced me to Budd Hopkins, an internationally celebrated artist who has been interested in the UFO mystery ever since his own sighting in 1964. Since the late 1970s Hopkins had specialized in examining abduction cases, and his first book, Missing Time, was published in 1981. In this pioneering work, he investigated a small group of people who he thought might have had abduction experiences. I was immediately impressed with his skillful research. Using a psychologist to administer hypnosis, Hopkins had collected data much more systematically than anyone had before. He meticulously uncovered important information about abductees having puzzling sustained lapses in time, mysterious scars, bizarre physical examinations, and screen memories (false memories masking what may have been abductions), and he even theorized a possible generational link between parents who were abductees and their children.

  Hopkins’s work was excellent, but I found that the overall situation was still confusing. After all, people have always claimed that many sorts of strange events have happened to them. They have lived past lives. They have been in communication with denizens of the spirit world and even Space Brothers. They have seen ghosts, danced with fairies, and had near-death experiences with religious implications. To my way of thinking, all of this might be a demonstration of the mind’s mysterious workings. Perhaps these paranormal phenomena arose from the human tendency to create folklore. Or they might emanate from a collective unconscious. In any case, psychology rather than objective reality would explain these stories.

  The same might be true of abductions. The problem was that when I read abduction accounts I could get no real sense of the progression of events during an abduction from beginning to end. Most of the reports consisted of snippets of stories, beginning in some logical order but then either ending abruptly or swerving off into wild, fantastic flights of fancy. As a historian, I required a chronological narrative. Before I could accept a psychological answer to all this, I needed a clear idea of exactly what the abduction accounts consisted of. I wanted to learn the details on a careful, rigorous, second-by-second basis, beginning with an abductee’s first feeling that something extraordinary was happening to him and ending when the event was finally deemed to be over. I needed to be sure of my evidence.

  I knew that if I were to make sense of what was happening, I would have to do abduction research myself. This meant that I would have to learn hypnosis. I had never hypnotized anybody, and it was a frightening prospect, but I was determined to learn. By 1985 Hopkins was doing his own hypnotic regressions, and he invited me to sit in on his sessions. I discussed hypnosis techniques with him and other researchers. I read books about hypnosis. I attended a hypnosis conference. I learned about the dangers and pitfalls of hypnosis.

  Now Melissa Bucknell was on her way to my house, wondering if I could unravel whatever had been troubling her. She had written to Hopkins describing some of her unusual events and suspicions; because she lived in Philadelphia, he had referred her to me. I tried to exude confidence when she arrived, but underneath I was anxious. I had no idea what was going to happen, whether I could successfully hypnotize anyone or whether I could enable her to remember events in her past. Luckily, Melissa had been hypnotized before, so when I began the induction, she slipped quickly into a trance state. It was easy. The difficult part was asking the right questions, in the right manner.

  In the first regression session, Melissa described being a six-year-old child playing in a field in back of her house with a friend. Before she knew it she was being transported into a UFO by aliens. Her clothes were removed and a physical examination was performed on her. Her genitals were probed with a needlelike instrument. She felt that some sort of implant was inserted near her left ovary.

  I was amazed. On the first regression, Melissa had spontaneously “remembered” being taken on board a UFO, being given an examination, and having her genitals probed. What was I to make of this? I had no way of being sure of the truthfulness of what I had heard, although the material she recalled was very similar to what Hopkins had been finding. I did not know what to do with this testimony other than to just note it.

  Melissa continued to come for sessions on a regular basis, and soon other people were coming as well: Ken Rogers, a professional bicyclist; Barbara Archer, a university student and reporter; George Kenniston, an attorney; Karen Morgan, a public relations specialist, to name a few. I decided that the best way to go about gathering systematic information was to conduct as many hypnosis sessions on as many “suggestive” events in an individual’s past as was possible. Over the next five years I had more than 325 hypnosis sessions with more than sixty abductees. The abductees were, by and large, average citizens who did not desire publicity, who
were not trying to commit a hoax, and who, with one exception, were not mentally disturbed. They were Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, white, black, male, female, younger, older, professional, nonprofessional, married, single, divorced, employed, unemployed, articulate, and inarticulate. The people who came to me fit the random quality among abductees that Hopkins had also found.

  I discovered that, in general, it made little difference where the abductions occurred. The people I interviewed described being abducted from every region of the country (and around the world as well), from cities and rural areas, highways and isolated roads, single homes and apartment complexes. Although in the main they did not know each other, they all told the same stories: They were abducted by strange-looking Beings, subjected to a variety of physical and mental “procedures,” and then put back where they had been taken. They were powerless to control the event, and, when it was over, they promptly forgot nearly all of it. Most were left with the feeling that something had happened to them, but they were not sure exactly what it was. I also found that some of the abductees remembered events without the aid of hypnosis; their stories were the same as those whose memories were recovered with hypnosis.

  The events that the abductees related were completely implausible. Time and again they would describe physically impossible situations, such as floating through a closed window or communicating telepathically, that made no scientific sense whatsoever. But the abductees were not asking me to believe them. For the most part they were just as puzzled as I was about the meaning of what had happened to them. Often they would describe abduction events that I had heard perhaps a hundred times and then look and me and ask, “Has anybody ever said anything like that to you before?” Most of them were grateful for having the opportunity to recall what had been locked up inside them, sometimes for many years, and for having somebody who would listen to them without ridicule.

  Whether or not their experiences were real, they were all people who had experienced great pain. They seemed to be suffering from a form of trauma related to a combination of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the terror that comes from being raped. Nearly all of them felt as if they had been victimized.

  As I listened to them, I found myself sharing in their emotionally wrenching experiences. I heard people sob with fear and anguish, and seethe with hatred of their tormentors. They had endured enormous psychological (and sometimes physical) pain and suffering. I was profoundly touched by the depth of emotion that they showed during the regressions. I did my best to reassure and to help them, but I felt almost as powerless as they did.

  Dealing with my own emotions was also a difficult task. During the first year of my research into abductee narratives, my impulse was to deny everything I heard. I reasoned that I had probably been glimpsing an unknown form of psychological fantasy that was causing the abductee tremendous fear and pain. Anything seemed better than the possibility that what people were describing had actually happened to them. Yet I could not ignore the convergence of minute detail, the lack of personal content, the physical evidence of unusual scars and other marks on their bodies immediately following an abduction, the missing time lapses during the supposed abduction, the multiple abductions, and other witnesses. There must be explanations, but no one seemed to be coming forward with a psychological theory that fit the evidence.

  As I continued the hypnotic regressions, it became apparent that, as incredible as it seemed, it was possible that these accounts might be true. The stories I was told seemed to take on an air of greater reality as I became more competent in my hypnosis techniques. My questioning became so close and so careful that I began to uncover information no one else had ever heard. For example, Lynn Miller came to me because of missing time episodes that she had experienced over the past few years. I took a history of her background, and, among other events, she remembered that when she was twelve years old she had “flown with the angels.” When we conducted a session about this event, it turned out to be another abduction episode.

  She said that during the experience one of the procedures performed on her had involved a tall Being giving her a piece of “paper” with “boys’ names” on it. She was told that she had to remember the names, and that the Being would come back to her later and retrieve the names. She stood there looking at the paper. “What could this be?” I thought to myself. Why would they want the names? Why did she have to remember them? Why couldn’t they remember the names themselves? I had absolutely no idea what was happening in this account. As I tried different lines of inquiry, I at last hit upon the right question. The answer opened up a world of completely unknown testimony about supposed procedures. Question: “What is he doing while you are doing this?” Answer: “He seems to be staring at me.”

  I was surprised by this answer. When I asked the question I had thought that perhaps the Being was doing something in the room while leaving Lynn to her task. But as soon as she said that he was staring at her, I began to be suspicious. Perhaps the point of this event had very little to do with memorization. I asked other abductees what the Beings were doing when they said that they were required to observe or concentrate on something. In virtually every case the answer was that the Being was staring at them, very closely, and usually at their eyes. I began to realize that this event might be part of a complex series of mental procedures that were administered to abductees.

  No one had ever heard these procedural accounts before. It seemed unlikely that so many people would independently come up with the idea that they were being stared at closely. What kind of a psychological mechanism was this? It became evident to me that this and many other details that were described to me would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to attribute to internally generated psychological fantasies.

  I wanted to discuss the research I was doing with my fellow UFO researchers. Although sympathetic to my work, most of them were still involved with investigating the sightings of UFOs and knew very little about abductions. They also felt, as I once had, that abductions were probably psychologically induced. When I broached the subject with my colleagues at the university, I was met, with few exceptions, with instant ridicule. Jokes about my sanity followed as they tried to humor me. And who could blame them? The material seemed so outrageous and ridiculous that expressing interest in it was obviously a waste of time. Some criticized me for veering from my normal history research. A few pointed out that my academic career could be effectively halted by this research.

  I knew I was on shaky ground in terms of both my own analysis and science. I was using primarily anecdotal evidence as the basis of my research. Stories that people tell are a weak form of evidence for most scientists. Stories of space aliens abducting people and performing strange biological procedures on them were not going be considered evidence for anything other than mental aberration. In the discipline of history, one spends years learning how to analyze documents and other forms of evidence, put them together into a coherent, logical whole, write serious historical works, and make knowledgeable contributions to the field. In order to do this the historian has agreed-upon events to guide him and a chronology to structure the evidence. Discovering previously unknown historical facts adds dimension and insight into a larger body of known material.

  This was not the case in abduction research. I had no ground rules or signposts except Hopkins’s work to help me make sense of these abductions. In the beginning of my investigations, I floundered with my data. When I started doing regressions it was immediately apparent that significant parts of the stories were impossible to understand, and some of these were pretty “wild.” The more I learned, the more I understood that some of what was being told to me was the product of confabulation (the unconscious invention and filling in of memories), false memories, and dream material. I had to learn to distinguish the unreliable material from what appeared to be legitimate memories. After much trial and error, I finally became confident in my ability to perceive what was happening in various abduction accounts
and to make connections. I now was ready to put the material into some sort of theoretical framework.

  I noticed that the abduction accounts were forming themselves into distinct patterns of activity. Practically all the abductees said that they were experiencing similar physical, mental, and reproductive procedures. Each abductee contributed a piece of the puzzle, but no single abductee related the entire structure of the abduction. The more data I gathered, the more I began to realize just how structured this phenomenon was. Certain physical procedures were almost always followed by other procedures. Certain reproductive procedures led to other reproductive procedures. The same was true of the mental procedures. I devised a matrix consisting of three tiers:

  Primary experiences, which involve procedures that the aliens perform the greatest number of times on the greatest number of people and that set the structure for all other procedures to come.

  Secondary experiences, which occur less frequently. All abductees have some secondary experiences, but not during every episode, and some procedures might never be performed on individual abductees.

  Ancillary experiences, which involve specialized sexual and other irregular procedures. These happen infrequently to the abductee population as a whole, but may recur many times to an individual abductee.

  I arranged these experiences into the physical, reproductive, and mental categories that abductees described. I worked on this matrix for two and a half years—revising, adding, subtracting, and rearranging the data and the categories as I gained more information and as my understanding of events became more sophisticated. The structure of the abduction was bizarre, fantastic, and alien. Yet it had fit neatly into a pattern. All the procedures appeared to be linked in some way. Even the smallest details of the events were confirmed many times over. There was a chronology, structure, logic—the events made sense. Like any scientific or historical inquiry, my investigations had lent themselves to systematic study, and they displayed an extraordinary internal integrity. I found areas that were difficult to understand because the abductees described apparently superior technology and biotechnology, not because the events were nonsensical.