Not long after I had been released from my sickbed and the inundation of UFO books, I went to the supermarket one morning, and there was a stack of pink flyers with “flea-market” type ads. I was looking for some additional computer equipment, so I picked one up and tucked it in my pocket. When I got home, I read over it and noted an ad for exactly what I wanted.
I called the number and talked to the woman. We began to chat about computers in general and specific. She asked, conversationally, what programs I used. I mentioned my astrology programs, which piqued her interest. This led to questions which led to a series of remarks about my hypnosis work. THAT really piqued her interest.
She began to “probe” a bit about the subject, and then asked about scheduling a session because something REALLY strange had happened to her back in 1987, and it STILL bothered her and she wanted to know why, or at least get relief from the internal anxiety it had caused.
The story was that she had been to the funeral of an aunt, accompanied by her 16-year-old son, and they were returning home to Maryland and were driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. (I don’t remember where the funeral was.)
It began to snow, and she saw a very bright light ahead, off to the side of the road, sort of bluish white, and she thought that it was a light that had come on to illuminate a billboard since the snow had made things a bit dark.
She then said that what happened next was so strange that, even in remembering it, she felt strange and uneasy. She said that she felt a paralysis come over her hands and arms as though someone had taken control of the car.
I immediately recognized the purported prodromal signs of a “missing time” experience as described by Budd Hopkins, so I casually asked what happened next.
She said that this was the crazy part because she couldn’t remember! After seeing the light and feeling the paralysis, the next thing she remembered was sitting at a traffic light 50 or 60 miles down the road. She did not remember making the turn off the main highway, and her son had just cut his finger on a tin of cookies he was trying to open. He was bleeding, and she “came to herself” saying “there’s a towel in the back seat.” To further add to her dismay, she arrived home much later than she should have, but, at the same time, still had an almost full tank of gas.
Certainly everyone has had the experience of dissociating while driving, running on auto-pilot, and suddenly coming back to themselves with no memory of going from point A to point B. I mentioned an experience of this type that I had myself, earlier in this book. What was unusual then was that I don’t have such experiences as a matter of habit like other people do. But I am aware that it happens to many and for some of them, quite often. The only difference between events of that sort and what this woman was describing was the emotional content. She was extremely distressed.
She was sure that it had been her aunt attempting to contact her psychically and she really needed to have an answer. What had her aunt been trying to tell her?
Well, the fact that she made no mention or claim about aliens made the whole thing far more interesting to me. And, of course, I did not want to even suggest anything about “aliens,” as I wanted to try to prove my theory about alien abductions being “psycho-dramas” in the same manner as past lives. I just told her that we could certainly clear the problem up quickly with hypnosis!
She made an appointment. I decided to make a videotape of this session rather than the usual audiotape. I wanted a record of my “proof” that the “alien abduction phenomenon” had another explanation!
***
On the evening of the appointment (she was caring for an ill husband and needed to come at a time when her kids would be home to look after his needs), it began to storm terribly. I was sure she would not come out in such rain and expected a cancellation. But she showed up.
We went through the normal pre-session interview, and then talked a bit about the event again. I wanted to get the times and details down about her general life situation, so I would have clues about areas of possible family conflicts that might be at the root of such a drama.
She was a real estate agent and also owned a medical reports business working under government contract. She talked a bit about her children and her disabled husband, who was dying. I was sure the stress of caring for him was an exacerbation of her problems.
Nothing was said about “aliens” at any point whatsoever. I carefully inquired about her interests. She had never been interested in metaphysics, much less aliens though she was certainly curious about astrology. She was a former devout Catholic who was now in a state of doubt about her religion. She was sure that I was not going to be able to hypnotize her.
She was a good subject and quickly went under.
I never transcribed this session or even viewed it from the time it occurred until I handed the videotape over to Tom French for his St. Pete Times article. Since he is the one who has viewed it over and over again and transcribed it for his own research, as well as having interviewed the subject afterward, (and hasn’t returned the tape), I am going to quote from the Times version of it here. You will get some idea of my hypnosis techniques by reading carefully.
***
“I wish that damn light would change,” said the woman on the couch.
Her eyes were shut, her body stretched out under a blanket. Her hands were folded above the blanket, making tiny movements. In her mind, she was still at the wheel.
Laura, sitting in her chair a few feet away, did not understand.
“What?”
“I’m just waiting for the light to turn green,” the woman said. Suddenly her voice changed. “Oh my God, Patrick! What did you do?”
Something was wrong. They had gone through it all together, Laura and the woman. Laura had gotten her to close her eyes and slow her breathing, and then the woman had gone under and resurfaced back inside that night out on the turnpike. She had already told Laura what happened. Now, still under hypnosis, she was telling it again, letting it run in her head, like a scene in a movie.
She and her teenage son, Patrick, were returning from a funeral in Pittsburgh. It was snowing. There was fog and ice. They took a detour onto another highway, trying to find better weather. Then the woman sees the light in front of the billboard. The light is an iridescent blue, a pale oval of baby blue, and the oval is hanging there in front of the billboard, it makes no sense, and the woman thinks she is imagining it, she is rubbing her eyes, but it isn’t working, the light doesn’t go away, it just keeps getting bigger, and so she asks Patrick if he sees it, but he doesn’t, only he does say something about electricity, and then she feels something taking control of the car, now she’s not driving it anymore, something else is, and the light is still growing.
Then the skip.
Suddenly she and her son are somewhere down the road. Now they are in a little town called Waynesboro, off the highway, just north of the Maryland state line. Something has happened. Fifty miles have ticked by on the odometer, and they do not know where the miles have gone. All they know is that they are sitting at a traffic light in Waynesboro. The woman is at the wheel, waiting for the light to change, and her son is beside her, trying to open a tin of cookies someone gave them after the funeral. But he can’t open them, so she tells him to look in the glove box, there’s a penknife, and he gets the knife, and he works at the cookie tin, and he cuts himself. Now he is bleeding. They are at the light, and Patrick’s hand is bleeding.
“Oh my God, Patrick!” the woman was saying. “What did you do? There’s a towel in the back seat. Get it.”
Still in her chair, Laura studied the woman carefully. {Frank Scott}, a friend of Laura’s, was watching, too, videotaping the session from the corner.
By this point the woman had grown agitated. Something was upsetting her, and not just the cut on her son’s hand. She was breathing faster. She had raised her arms to her chest and crossed them, as though she was trying to protect herself.
Laura told the woman everything was fine. She reminded her that she and her son were safe. But they needed to go back to the beginning, back to the turnpike, and start over.
“Let’s go through it again,” Laura said. “A little more slowly this time.”
It was the night of Thursday, April 15, 1993. Laura and Frank and their subject were working in Laura’s living room in her home in New Port Richey, there on Montana Avenue. Outside it had been storming. Inside, all was quiet, except for the interplay between Laura’s voice, soothing yet insistent, and the woman’s voice, confused and edgy. Occasionally there were the chirping sounds of the family’s cockatiels; there were also murmuring noises as Frank whispered a few words to Laura.
Now here she was, lying in Laura’s living room with her eyes closed, driving again through that night. Every time she replayed it for Laura, it came out the same. She and her son would be driving on the turnpike, and they would take the detour, and then she was seeing the blue light. Then the skip. The same skip, every time. Suddenly they would be at that traffic light in Waynesboro, 50 miles down the road, and her son was opening the tin of cookies with the knife and cutting his hand.
Laura was determined to find out what had happened during those 50 miles. Frank, videotaping from the corner, already thought he knew. That was why he was so excited.
“This is an alien abduction,” he told Laura.
Frank was big on UFOs. He was well aware, as was Laura, that a growing number of Americans — the exact number remained unclear — had come forward in recent years with stories of disturbing encounters with creatures that had traveled here from other planets. Many of these people believed, or claimed to believe, that aliens had abducted them from their cars or bedrooms, somehow rendered them helpless, then taken them aboard a spacecraft of one kind or another, subjected them to medical or scientific experiments, then returned them to their lives with all memories of the abductions blocked from their minds. When these people would try to recall what had happened, they would simply draw a blank; their recollections of the aliens typically surfaced later, often under hypnosis.
Frank believed these people’s stories demanded attention. So did others who followed the phenomenon, including John Mack, a Harvard psychiatrist who had interviewed some of the alleged abductees.
Laura was not so sure. At Frank’s urging, she had been reading about the abduction accounts but had found them unconvincing. Laura was open to believing in many things; her whole life was devoted to considering possibilities in the universe that others found ludicrous. Still, she had trouble believing that little gray men were stealing people away by the hundreds or even thousands and playing doctor with all of them on some fancy mothership in the sky. If it was happening to so many, why was there no proof? Why could no one produce a single indisputable snapshot of one of these aliens or even one of their ships? Where was the video? Why weren’t these aliens appearing on Geraldo?
Like many others, Laura found it far more likely that these people had undergone some serious trauma — possibly sexual abuse, suffered during childhood — and that now they were subconsciously transforming their buried memories of these experiences into encounters of another kind. Perhaps it was easier for them to imagine an alien illicitly entering their bedroom and violating them, rather than to confront the fact that it was really their stepfather or their mother’s boyfriend.
Laura thought she detected an element of mass hysteria in the proliferation of abduction accounts. With the approach of 2000, maybe these people were simply going a little nuts. “Millennial disease,” she called it.
All of which explained why Laura was taking such pains to find out precisely what had happened to the woman she was working with this night. Before hypnotizing her, Laura had asked the woman about her childhood, probing for any sign of abuse or family problems or anything suggesting emotional or mental instability. But she had found nothing to account for the missing time in the woman’s story.
Laura was undeterred. She decided to take the woman under even deeper, getting her to slow her breathing even more and replay that night yet again. This time, the woman remembered a parking lot. She could see the blue light growing, and feel the car leaving the highway, and now she and her son were stopped in the parking lot of a diner, just off the road, not far from the billboard where she’d first seen the light.
“What happened next?” said Laura.
“I wish that damn light would change,” said the woman.
Back to the skip. Whatever it was, it had happened somewhere between the moment in the parking lot and the moment when her son cut his hand.
So Laura tried again, taking the woman as deep as she knew how. Speaking softly, she asked her subject to imagine herself sitting inside a favorite room. Maybe the family room at her home; maybe a study. Anyplace where the woman felt safe. Inside this room she was asked to imagine a recliner. She was sitting in the recliner, resting comfortably, and in front of her was a television. On that television, she was to project the scene from that night, unfolding on the screen, and describe what she saw.
Laura told the woman she had a remote in her hand and could manipulate the action before her. She could fast forward, rewind, turn it off. Whatever she needed to do to feel safe and in control.
Back onto the highway went the woman, her son at her side. They were taking the detour. The billboard was coming up.
Slow it down, Laura told her. Use your remote, and hit pause, and let the tape advance one frame at a time.
The light. She saw the blue light. It was in front of the billboard. It was growing. She was losing control of the car. It was leaving the road. Then they were in the parking lot. They were in the lot, outside the diner. They did not know why. Wait. Someone was coming. Someone was approaching the car.
Laura asked her to describe who it was.
“I can’t,” said the woman. She was getting agitated again. She was hyperventilating; her upper arms were twitching; she was rubbing her hands, as though she were in pain.
“What do you mean, you can’t?” said Laura.
“Because they won’t let me.”
Laura pressed the woman to tell her what was going on. Who was she talking about? Who was stopping her from saying?
The woman just shook her head.
“I can’t tell,” she said. “I can’t.”
That evening, when the woman on the couch grew so upset, Laura decided to end the session. She wanted to keep probing, but for the moment it was too traumatic. So Laura brought the woman out of hypnosis and told her that they would try again, in another session. Laura was left to consider the implications of what her subject had revealed. Was Frank right? Had this woman and her son been abducted by aliens?
At first, Laura remained skeptical. Then, in the weeks that followed, something happened that chipped away at her doubts. The newspaper and TV were reporting multiple sightings of UFOs in the area. From mid to late April in 1993, more than a dozen people in Pasco, Hernando and Pinellas counties said they had seen a large, boomerang-shaped craft moving across the sky. One of the witnesses, a Hernando County sheriff’s deputy, said the craft carried no markings, was adorned with blue lights and had a wingspan of at least 200 feet. He watched it for several minutes, he said, before it accelerated away from him at a speed that would have been impossible for any human-made craft.
“Based on what I know now, no, I don’t think it’s from this planet,” the deputy told a St. Petersburg Times reporter. “Nothing on Earth could hover and haul ass like that.”
Reading the accounts in the newspaper, Laura was startled to discover that the first alleged sighting of the boomerang-shaped object had been made in New Port Richey on the evening of Thursday, April 15, the same night she was conducting her hypnosis session with the woman in her living room. The person who had seen the object that night lived only six blocks or so from Laura’s house; she said she had seen the craft through her bedroom window after 10 p.m. that evening, after L.A. Law came on.
As Laura read the details of the account, she realized something else. The witness claimed that she had seen the giant boomerang at the exact time Laura was deep into her session; in fact, she said she’d seen it hovering over Laura’s own neighborhood.
To Frank, this was all more proof that the woman with the missing time had been telling them something dangerous that night, something the aliens didn’t want her to share. That’s why her memory block was so strong, he said; that explained what she’d meant when she said “they” wouldn’t allow her to continue with the story.
Laura still was not ready to buy Frank’s theories. As far as she was concerned, the rash of sightings was just another outbreak of millennial disease. One person claimed to have seen the giant boomerang, and the rest had probably heard the claims, then gotten excited and imagined seeing the same object. If there were so many spaceships out there, carrying all these aliens and snatching all these poor earthlings, where was the proof?
“Where’s the evidence?” she asked Frank. “Show me a damned alien, for God’s sakes.”
As it turned out, no more evidence was forthcoming from the woman with the missing time that night in Pennsylvania. After the first session with Laura, she called and said she’d changed her mind. She would not be returning for another session. (End quote from the article: “The Exorcist in Love”, Thomas French, St. Petersburg Times, Feb. 13, 2000)
The front page of the St. Pete Times on Feb 13, 2000, inviting the reader to check out the special section.
***
Yes, I admit freely that my intent was to expose the “alien abduction” phenomenon as a fraud; as the psychodrama I believed it to be. Having the video tape to work from, Tom described the session probably better than I would have.
If ever there was proof that a hypnotherapist with a pre-formed belief cannot influence the recall of a subject, this case is a classic in that regard! I am ashamed to admit my assumptions now, and I freely admit that it was not the proper approach to the problem, but then again, the subject was not claiming to have been abducted by aliens – at least not consciously. And I was going to be very careful not to lead in any way, so the “experiment” would be uncontaminated.
To say that I was puzzled and frustrated is an understatement. I had never encountered a blocked memory that I could not find some way to access. This was one of my specialties. I could find the “back door” of the mind, ease the pain, and get to the root of the problem. But try as I would, nothing worked! She repeated: “I can’t! I can’t!” So, in frustration I asked: “why?” and her answer raised the hair on my head and chilled me to the bone: “Because they won’t let me!”
For a few moments I was completely nonplussed. I had never encountered a “They” who could so effectively block memory and cause pain and suffering when attempts were made to access it.
I realized that I was clearly dealing with a deeply repressed trauma. I wanted to believe that it related to something in childhood, or perhaps even a past life, but I couldn’t shake the eerie sensation that washed over me when she cried “THEY won’t let me!”
I knew that I could not lose the professional “control” and I decided that perhaps she just needed to be in a deeper trance to access this information. But, I was not going to push any further at this moment. Sometimes a subject must be “conditioned,” over time. So I started the suggestions that would make her feel good, make her like hypnosis, make her want to do it again, and help her to go into a trance more easily in the future so that a deeper state could be achieved and we could “deal” with this thing. Then, I brought her out.
We discussed a future appointment and she agreed that she would like to try again and that was that, except for the fact that she called and cancelled on the day of the next appointment.
Okay, fine. End of story? Nope.
The reports of the black boomerangs that came in conjunction with this session did not make me happy. In fact, it gave me the absolute creeps!
It also made me think.
If we conjecture that this “alien phenomenon” is part of some deep government conspiracy designed to experiment on people – perhaps to make them think that they are being abducted by aliens so that they will assiduously seek greater controls and protection from “Big Brother” – we have a curious problem with this case. The problem becomes: how could such a hypothesized group engineer the response to this session that did, in fact, manifest?
I was very careful not to mention the word “alien” or “abduction” to the woman on the phone prior to the session. If phone conversations are being monitored, how did this one get selected for special attention? Such monitoring, even for “key words” that would trigger a need for personal attention, suggests a conspiracy of such vast and complex proportions that the logistics of it stagger the mind.
Well, suppose it is a government conspiracy. Suppose that they do have such monitoring capabilities, that they are monitoring my phone, the woman’s phone, or the phones of everybody by computer. As a result, suppose they knew I was going to hypnotize her and sent out a flotilla of stealth type aircraft to beam some wave at her (or something like that) which would prevent her from talking to me.
Why would they go to all that trouble?
It seems to me that it would be easier to just send one of those nice white panel trucks we see in the movies to park a block away from my house for their “wave beaming” activities.
Well, okay; maybe they just thought it was a handy time to create a UFO flap at that moment for general purposes: to get everyone all excited, to reinforce the “alien phenomenon” scenario they are creating.
We are still looking at logistics that stagger the mind.
The next question we have to ask is this: since this woman appeared in my life at precisely the moment I had been familiarized with the phenomenon sufficiently to recognize the symptoms, how do we deal with that synchronicity? If it is a government conspiracy that was aiming at taking me in by gradual degrees, by creating a series of events in my life that would lead me to give up my rational explanations of the phenomenon, what kind of surveillance and management does that suggest?
Again, it boggles the mind.
Thinking these thoughts produced a strange feeling in me of being watched in ways hard to describe. It was so strange a synchronicity that I couldn’t help but think that the appearance of these craft related to our activities. I tried to sweep this thought under the rug, but it kept coming back.
Well, there was a final article in the Times about this series of sightings and this last article was designed to put it all to rest; it was a suggestion that what had been seen was a “stealth bomber”.
It was all just a strange coincidence. My comfort zone was reestablished and I could rest at night.
For a while.
Continue to Chapter 39: Flying Black Boomerangs Redux
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