‘These are reliable people,’ Sheriff Diamond said. ‘They had no reason to say this if it had not been true. I know something did happen to them.’
The sheriff said the ‘spacecraft’ was described as fish-shaped, about ten feet long with an eight-foot ceiling. The occupants were said to have pale silvery skin, no hair, long pointed ears and noses, with an opening for a mouth and hands ‘like crab claws.’
Inside the UFO, the two men were placed on a table and examined with a device that resembled a huge eye. They were later interviewed by Dr J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer whose work as a consultant for the US Air Force’s UFO investigation project, Blue Book, turned him from sceptic to cautious advocate of UFO reality. Hynek concluded that Hickson and Parker were in a state of genuine fright. Dr James A. Harder, a consultant for the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) who also investigated the case, described the UFO occupants as ‘automata’, or ‘advanced robots’, judging from the witnesses’ descriptions.
Many people who are sceptical of UFO and alien abductions state, quite reasonably, that an advanced spacefaring civilisation would not need to conduct the highly intrusive and traumatic experiments on human beings that their representatives are reported to conduct. The repeated taking of samples of blood, flesh, sperm and ova from unwilling subjects implies a curiously primitive medical technology for beings allegedly capable of building interstellar spacecraft. However, there is an intriguing correlation between the atrocities committed by ‘aliens’ on their human victims and those committed by Nazi ‘doctors’ (I use the term loosely) in the concentration camps during the Second World War. As we shall see later in this chapter, proponents of the Nazi-UFO Theory, such as W. A. Harbinson, have suggested that this may be due to an ongoing (and for the moment highly secret) Nazi plot to create a master-race from the raw material of humanity in its present form.
One of the most impressive and carefully investigated abduction cases occurred on 26 August 1976. Four art students, Charlie Foltz, Chuck Rak and brothers Jack and Jim Weiner were on a camping trip on the Allagash River in Maine, USA. While fishing in a boat on East Lake, they watched the approach of a large spherical light that frightened them considerably. The next thing they knew, they were standing on the shore of the lake, watching the object shoot up into the sky. There was nothing left of their blazing camp fire but a few glowing embers, implying that they had been away for several hours although they only remembered being on the lake for about twenty minutes.
Several years later, the case came to the attention of the respected UFO researcher Raymond E. Fowler, who investigated on behalf of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), the largest civilian UFO organisation in the world. Fowler arranged for the four witnesses to undergo hypnotic regression to recover their lost memories of the evening. Each of the men (who had promised not to discuss with each other their individual hypnosis sessions) recalled being taken into the UFO through a beam of light. Once inside, they encountered several humanoid entities who forced them (apparently through some form of mind control) to undress and sit in a mist-filled room. Their bodies were examined and probed with various instruments, and samples of saliva, blood, skin, sperm, urine and faeces were taken. When the examination had been completed, the men were forced to walk through a circular doorway, whereupon they found themselves floating back down to their boat through the light beam.
Fowler later discovered that Jack Weiner had had an ‘anomalous lump’ surgically removed several years earlier. The pathologist who examined it had been somewhat mystified and had sent it on for analysis to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. At Fowler’s request, Jack Weiner asked for his medical records and discovered that the lump had been sent to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) in Washington, D.C., instead of the Center for Disease Control. When Fowler telephoned the AFIP for an explanation, he was told by the public information officer that the AFIP occasionally assisted civilian doctors. ‘When Jack asked why the lump was sent to the AFIP rather than the Center for Disease Control, he was told by his surgeon’s secretary that it was less costly even though Jack was covered by insurance!’ (53)
The Pascagoula and Allagash encounters display many of the hallmarks of the typical UFO abduction, the principal elements of which can be listed as follows: (1) the initial appearance of the entities and the taking of the percipient; (2) medical probing with various instruments; (3) machine examinations and mental testing; (4) sexual activity, in which the percipient is sometimes forced to ‘mate’ with other humans or even with the entities themselves; and (5) the returning of the percipient to his or her normal environment. (54) Although an extremely wide variety of ‘alien’ types has been encountered by people all over the world, one type in particular has become more and more commonly reported (particularly in the United States). The so-called ‘Grey’ is now regarded as the quintessential alien being and is one of the most immediately recognisable images in today’s world.
In the unlikely event that the reader is unfamiliar with this image, we can briefly describe the Greys’ physical characteristics as follows: they are usually described as approximately four feet tall (although some are as tall as eight feet), with extremely large craniums and enormous jet-black, almond-shaped eyes. They have no nose or ears to speak of, merely small holes where these should be; likewise, their mouths are usually described as no more than lipless slits. The torso and limbs are described as being very thin, almost sticklike, and more than one abductee has reported the impression that they seem to be made of an undifferentiated material, with no bone or muscular structure. Their hands are long and thin, sometimes with three fingers, sometimes with four. In addition, the Greys are frequently reported to be rather uncaring in their attitude towards humans, treating us much as we treat laboratory animals. Indeed, they have been described by some as militaristic and by others as hivelike in their demeanour, as if they had no individual consciousness of their own but were carrying out commands from some higher source.
It is clear that any claims of a Nazi origin of modern UFO encounters must take account of the bizarre creatures associated with the discs. This problem might seem insurmountable in view of the fact that, while we may not expect the UFO pilots to be strutting around in black leather trench coats and jackboots, they would surely nevertheless be recognisable as human beings. However, the research undertaken by W. A. Harbinson may offer a way around this apparent impasse, as well as providing us with some extremely unsettling food for thought.
Harbinson’s thesis, that UFO occupants may well be cyborgs — biomedically engineered amalgamations of human and machine — is supported to a certain extent by medical research conducted since the 1960s. Although this research was at the time highly secret, the gruesome details have since come to light in the form of books and articles that describe not only the nature of the experiments conducted but also the frightening attitude of some members of the medical profession. According to David Fishlock: ‘Even today there are people who believe that convicts, especially the criminal lunatic, and even conscientious objectors, should be compelled to lend themselves to science.’ (55)
Referring to The People Shapers (1978) by Vance Packard, Harbinson reminds us of the direction in which medical research was heading more than 30 years ago.
[I]n the Cleveland Clinic’s Department of Artificial Organs, not only medical specialists, but ‘mechanical, electrical, chemical, and biomedical engineers, as well as biochemists and polymer chemists’, were, in their busy operating theatres, enthusiastically engaged in ‘surgery connected to the development of artificial substitutes for … vital organs such as the liver, lungs, pancreas, and kidneys’. Conveniently within walking distance of the Cleveland Clinic’s Department of Artificial Organs are the Neurosurgical Research Laboratories of the Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital, where great interest was being expressed, as far back as 1967, in the possibility of transferring the entire head of one human being to another. Switching human brains from one head to another would be complicated and costly, but, as Packard explains: ‘By simply switching heads, on the other hand, only a few connections need to be severed and then re-established in the neck of the recipient body.’ (56)
This procedure was successfully carried out on monkeys at the Cleveland Clinic, with each head apparently retaining its original mental characteristics when attached to its new body. In other words, if a monkey had been aggressive before the operation, it would remain so when its head was transplanted to another body. The eyes of the monkeys followed people as they walked past, implying that the heads retained some level of awareness. The unfortunate subjects of these procedures only lived for about one week.
Of course, the main problem in a procedure of this kind would be the regeneration of the severed spinal cord so that the brain could send nerve impulses to its new body; and yet even this feat seems not to be outside the bounds of possibility. In June 1976, a Soviet scientist named Levon A. Matinian ‘reported from the fourth biennial conference on Regeneration of the Central Nervous System that he had succeeded in regrowing the spinal cords of rats’. (57) Harbinson suggests, almost certainly with some justification, that this area of research must have been continued ‘behind closed doors’ at military and scientific establishments since then. It is surely reasonable to
