Kevin Randle - Alien Abductions

Kevin Randle (co-author of The Abduction Enigma) outlines his views on the "alien abduction" phenomenon in this short clip from an interview I conducted with him in 2001.

Paul Kimball

John Mack - Hypnosis and "alien abduction" research

In this clip from footage I shot of the press conference at the 2001 MUFON Symposium in Irvine, California, Dr. John Mack answers a question about the efficacy of using hypnosis for "alien abduction" research.

Paul Kimball

The Strange Case of Robert Salas

An account of a recent lecture given by Robert Salas, who contends that he was involved in a UFO incident at Malmstrom AFB in 1967, features a claim by him that I had not heard before, and which casts new light on his alleged UFO experience at Malmstrom and his activities since he began speaking and writing about it in the 1990s.

It turns out that Salas thinks he is an alien abductee. Here is the account as reported in UFO Digest:

After making his case for the cover-up and possible future disclosure, Salas told the story of another personal encounter with the UFO occupants. In 1985, when he lived with his wife Marilyn and their two children in Manhattan Beach, California, he saw a blue light emanating from the living room as he lay in bed. It was an unusual shade of blue and was glowing. He woke up his wife and she also saw the blue light. Salas tried to get up to investigate but suddenly realized he was unable to move.  

"I remember fighting very hard to get my mobility back," he recounted. "I couldn’t move anything. I couldn’t move my arms, my legs. I fought and fought. I fought because I had two small kids in the house and, of course, my wife." 

He tried to get Marilyn to help him but she was now unconscious. He saw someone in the doorway that appeared to be wearing a hood and had no discernible face. He next floated off the bed toward the locked bedroom window, which he felt certain they would be unable to unlock. Nevertheless, he went through the window in an upright position and was taken onboard a craft. He was shown a needle, eight to twelve inches in length, which was inserted into one of his testicles in order to collect semen. The pain was excruciating, and when Salas complained to his abductors, the pain suddenly ceased. This was followed by a physical checkup in which his back seemed to be of primary interest. He next remembers moving through a curved hallway and seeing a bright light before suddenly finding himself back in his bed.  

Salas at first had no conscious recall of most of what happened that night. He was able to piece together the experience after working with three different hypnotherapists. A couple of weeks after his abduction, while it was still submerged in his memory, he recalls working in his yard and thinking to himself, I’ve been in space.  

There are other elements in the aftermath of the experience that feel more like a dream or a vision to Salas. He recalls a large, black, oval, glassy eye with a rim around it; Marilyn in a large room being trained and "working" on a large metal box; a large tabletop screen with some sort of plan for Earth, activities and locations; and a doctor dressed in black who looks into a box containing instruments.  

The experience continues to be very real for Salas and he does not doubt that it actually happened. He said he was speaking about it publicly because he thinks it is important to take alien abduction seriously. 

I have taken some stick from James Carlson and others about Salas and the Malmstrom case over the past couple of years because it appeared in my film Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings (view the excerpted video clip for the case here). As I have explained more than once, its inclusion in the film came about not because I thought it was a great case (I did not), but because the UFO researchers I polled thought it was a great case. Subsequent work by Carlson and others has shown that there is no reliable evidence for a UFO encounter at Malmstrom, and I consider the case solved beyond any reasonable doubt.

That leaves us with the question of what to make of Salas. Given that his account of Malmstrom has been debunked, we are are left with only two possibilities. Carlson and others believe Salas has been lying since the beginning, and I concede that this is a possibility. But there is a second possibility: that Salas honestly believes the story he is now telling because he has confabulated events (his confusion caused in part by the hypnosis he underwent in the 1990s), and possibly because he is suffering from some sort of psychological issues. 

Does the "alien abduction" account that he relates above provide further evidence for the psychological angle and the conclusion that Salas, whilst honest, is confused. Or does it indicate that Salas is doubling down on his original story by expanding the lie and looking for a new angle to gin up the audience (a pattern that could be seen with many of the Contactees in the 1950s, for example, or Billy Meier). If I had to choose between the two, Occam's Razor tells me that even though my default position is to believe the best about people, Carlson et al are correct, and Salas is just another genial huckster in a long line of hucksters who present ever-changing stories. But I don't think the alternate possibility can be ruled out, even if it is perhaps less and less likely as his story grows more convoluted.

In the end, however, it doesn't really matter what motivated Robert Salas or what he believes, because the Malmstrom case has been solved (which means that at least in this one case Best Evidence was a success, as its intent was to foster a dialogue and encourage people to investigate the cases further). Robert Salas is now just another act in the never-ending Ufological circus, and the same rule applies to him as it does to the others: caveat emptor.  

Paul Kimball

New excerpt from rough cut of Carol Rainey's documentary "Priests of High Strangeness: Co-Creation of the Alien Abduction Phenomenon"

Even as a rough cut, this is more compelling material from Ms. Rainey.

One thing to note - while I suspect that many people will focus on "Linda Cortile's" sharing in the profits from Hopkins' work on her "case", I see nothing wrong with that, in theory. It all depends on the context, and timing.

One could just as easily say that if "Cortile" received nothing, and Hopkins was the sole person to profit from her story, that he was exploiting her for profit.

The issue of whether a witness should profit from their story, and to what extent, is not an easy question to answer, and it varies from case to case, and person to person. However, a good basic rule of thumb, at least to me, is that anyone who looks for money up front is incredibly suspect; anyone who is offered a piece of the profits by a researcher after-the-fact might not be telling the truth, but if they're lying it's probably not because they're motivated by profit.

Having said that, I'll add that the part of this segment from Ms. Rainey's rough cut that stands out to me is the story about someone trying to kidnap "Cortile" - how ridiculous the story seems on its face, and how easily and completely Hopkins swallows it, and immediately links it to her alleged "abduction".

If someone tried to grab me on the streets of New York, or anywhere else, I would report it to the police, not Budd Hopkins. Wouldn't you?

Ms. Rainey is absolutely right about one key thing: what Hopkins was engaged in wasn't objective research.

Paul Kimball

The Big Picture

A 2005 lecture from Dr. Susan Clancy in which she talks about her research into "alien abductions", and her conclusions.

The blurb:

Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens

They are tiny. They are tall. They are gray. They are green. They survey our world with enormous glowing eyes. To conduct their shocking experiments, they creep in at night to carry humans off to their spaceships. Yet there is no evidence that they exist at all. So how could anyone believe he or she was abducted by aliens? Or want to believe it?

To answer these questions, psychologist Susan Clancy interviewed and evaluated 'abductees' – old and young, male and female, religious and agnostic. She listened closely to their stories – how they struggled to explain something strange in their remembered experience, how abduction seemed plausible, and how, having suspected abduction, they began to recollect it, aided by suggestion and hypnosis.

Clancy argues that abductees are sane and intelligent people who have unwittingly created vivid false memories from a toxic mix of nightmares, culturally available texts (abduction reports began only after stories of extraterrestrials appeared in films and on TV), and a powerful drive for meaning that science is unable to satisfy. For them, otherworldly terror can become a transforming, even inspiring experience. 'Being abducted,' writes Clancy, 'may be a baptism in the new religion of this millennium.' This book is not only a subtle exploration of the workings of memory, but a sensitive inquiry into the nature of belief.

An important work that most UFO researchers either passed on at the time, or simply accepted the "party line" that was put forward by the leaders of the "alien abduction cult" when the book was released. I also recommend my interview from September, 2010, with Kevin Randle, about his book, The Abduction Enigma.

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To all of those UFO researchers who are still inclined to defend the practices and ridiculous "theories" of these cultists, answer this one question:

If aliens from other worlds have technology sufficiently advanced to allow them to travel the vast distances between the stars (and even in our own "neighbourhood", those distances boggle the mind), and abduct people here, there and everywhere when they get here, then what kind of person would believe that a plucky little bunch of "abduction researchers" (artists, associate history professors, and so on) could manage to beat these aliens at their own game, and defeat their technlogy and discover their plans?

It's laughable, and it has always been laughable.

In the meantime, people who probably needed real psychiatric help have wasted their time going to these "cultists" for help. Serious UFO research has suffered, and been tainted by this ridiculous circus. Finally, if there really is some sort of paranormal aspect to a few abductions (and I don't rule that out, anymore than I rule out the possibility that some people have direct experiences with a non-human intelligence in any context, "God" being the pre-dominant manifestation throughout human history), then any opportunity to discover such an intelligence has been squandered for decades.

UFO researchers wonder why they get no respect from the mainstream media?

Some even talk in dark tones of a conspiracy.

It's a conspiracy, all right - a conspiracy of self-marginalization by men and women who live in a fantasy world of mediocre 1950s science fiction.

All the while, the real mysteries remain - ephemeral, a bundle of possibilities which, if real, are far more exciting than anything UFO researchers (with a few notable exceptions) have been able to conjure up in the past sixty years. It's not just that they don't have the answers; they don't even have the imagination to ask the right questions.

Paul Kimball

Kevin Randle - Animal Mutilations (and some other things)

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Part II of my interview earlier this month with Kevin Randle, wherein we discuss animal mutilations, a few more points about the "abduction" phenomenon... and some miscellaneous subjects, including a certain Colonel of the Israeli-founded S3!

"Maggots, mutilations and myth: Patterns of postmortem scavenging of the bovine carcass", the Canadian Veterinary Journal article that I reference in this episode, can be read in its entirety here.

Paul Kimball

P.S. Here is a picture of yours truly in June, 2009, inside the secret S3 HQ in Prague!

Kevin Randle - The Abduction Enigma and the Will to Believe

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On September 8, 2010, I recorded an interview with veteran UFO researcher Kevin D. Randle, most famous for his work on the Roswell case, wherein we discussed two particular topics that he has conducted extensive research in, but has rarely been interviewed about - animal mutilations, and the “alien abduction” phenomenon.

In this segment, Kevin and I discuss “alien abductions” - how it’s not caused by aliens from Zeta Reticuli (or anywhere else), what some of the non-paranormal explanations are, and why the truth has been overlooked by the vast majority of the UFO research community for the past 25 years, to the benefit of “researchers” like David Jacobs and Budd Hopkins, and to the detriment of the people they claim they have been trying to help.

For more information about Kevin’s research into the “alien abduction” phenomenon, you should get a copy of his excellent book The Abduction Enigma, co-authored by Dr. William Cone and Russ Estes.

Paul Kimball

Kevin Randle on The Other Side of Truth - next week!

Just a note to let folks know that I'll be interviewing Kevin Randle next week for my podcast, The Other Side of Truth.

Our discussion will center primarily around two subjects which Kevin has researched extensively - animal mutilations, and the abduction phenomenon.

Needless to say, we'll be taking the kind of skeptical look at these two areas that you don't often hear on other paranormal-related programs.

I'll let everyone know when it will be available - I anticipate next Friday.

Paul Kimball

The only "Abduction" book that's worth reading...

Or, as I wrote in The Alien Abduction Cult three years ago:

Kevin Randle, Russ Estes and William Cone got it right in The Abduction Enigma when they wrote, at p. 359:

"Here's what it all comes down to. There is not a single shred of physical evidence that alien abductions areaking place other than the tainted testimony of the abductees. The physical evidence to support the claims is nonexistent. What has been offered as proof has been eliminated through testing by objective scientists or additional research by unbiased investigators. The scars, the missing fetus, or the implants do not carry the proper medical documentation to make a strong case, and in fact, suggest something else altogether."

I'll go further than Randle, Estes and Cone, who confined their critique to stating that the abductionologists had simply not proven their case. In my view, this has become an Alien Abduction Cult (of personality), aided and abetted by some in ufology who should know better. The abductionologists themselves are beyond irresponsible - they are dangerous, causing real pain and suffering to people who in at least some cases no doubt need real help.

Perhaps it's high time that the proper authorities take a closer look, not at "alien abductions", but rather at those who claim to be investigating them, because, with one or two notable and courageous exceptions like Kevin, "ufology" has proven itself wholly unwilling to confront the creators and purveyors of the Alien Abduction Cult.

Meanwhile, the ultimate irony for anomalists is that, should there really be a paranormal element to a few of these "abduction" cases, the Alien Abduction Cult has so muddied the waters with their bunk that it will be almost impossible to ever chart a different course.

Paul Kimball