FT267

Over the past couple of issues, I have looked at some cases reported to me that involve alien contact. Hopefully, this has shown how these strange affairs seem to tiptoe across the divide between many areas of the supernatural. They have elements of out-of-body and near-death experience and mediumship, while witnesses describe a life history of paranormal events. Last issue, I looked at possible physical causes like severe migraine attacks or temporal lobe epilepsy. However, there are three other sets of clues that embrace different possible interpretations. In coming issues I will look at metaphysical and alien perspectives, but here review some of the options that have arisen from the search for psychological triggers.

Learning Curves

Juliet, from the well-known UFO hotspot of Rossendale, Lancashire, was brought up on the moors that lead out to Todmorden, where famed abductee policeman Alan Godfrey had his 1980 encounter. Juliet saw her first UFO when she was just three. As she told me: “I awoke in the middle of the night to find the bedroom bathed in light. I remember going to the window which was where the light came from and… I saw three large orangey-white lights in a triangle formation only a metre or so from the outside of the window.”

This story was interesting, because I have other nearly identical cases from this same small area where children recall bedroom visions like this one. All of them went on to have psychic episodes, missing time, UFO sightings, and several had alien contacts.

In Juliet’s case, this bedroom sighting had physical consequences. But there were also major psychological changes. She rapidly underwent a ‘learning curve’ in which she started to become an avid reader and soaked up know­ledge to the extent that her family were stunned by her abilities well beyond her age.

Juliet thought she was perhaps “reading far too much into these events and linking them with the UFO without any proof”. If this were an isolated instance then I might agree, but I have observed a clear pattern in which – whatever its origin – an early event such as this trigg­ers a boost in mental prowess. I’ve termed these glowing lights ‘psychic toys’, as they appear to act as learning aids to psychological development, just as ordinary toys aid physical progress.

Evolving out of the ‘psychic toys’ is another noticeable trend – a tendency towards early life recall. Most people can only remember events in their lives from about the age of three, yet large numbers of alien contact witnesses claim to have earlier memories, some even back to the time of their birth.

This might be a consequence of the ‘learning curve’, but this assumes some real trigger mechanism creating changes in the brain. Another option is that there’s something unusual in the way these individuals process memories that makes them able to perceive strange phenomena and experience accelerated psychological development.

But there is a third possibility, revealed by research into FPPs (Fantasy Prone Personalities) – individuals with such vivid imaginations that they have trouble distinguishing dreams and fantasies from reality. They, too, have unusual recall of early life, suggesting that this is somehow tied to how their minds process image-based experiences. FPPs also have the same record of seeing and believing in strange phenomena, though the question remains: do they believe in these things because they perceive them or do they perceive them because they believe?

Other indications are that both FPPs and alien witnesses have great artistic creat­ivity. Many of the latter, I’ve found, are talented artists, poets or fiction writers – it’s as if they need to get something out of their system.

An Inside Job

Witnesses often refer to how the aliens communicate, reporting that: “They use my thinking voice,” or “They are talking inside my head,” or “I knew what they wanted without them saying so.”

These statements infer that the source of the messages might not be external. Alan Godfrey’s human-like aliens told him: “We know all about you.” He also ‘knew’ the name of the lead alien (it just popped into his head): Yosef. But the doctor interviewing Godfrey was called Joseph, a suggestion as to the possible source of such messages. In another case, a witness told a US researcher that he was taken by the ‘greys’ into a room with human-looking entities who asked him to look at a model of the human brain and point to the subconscious mind! Psychologists will readily suggest how to interpret that.

Are these hints that the essence of an alien contact is some dynamic process going on within the consciousness of the witnesses? Are they somehow singled out by their early life experiences with the supernatural? This might resolve some oddities in the evidence. For instance, I interviewed one of the witnesses from an Essex family who had undergone an alien contact in 1974. Under hypnosis, she suddenly started acting like a medium: I was talking through her to the aliens she had met as if they, not she, were on the couch. Only possible, you might think, if the aliens were part of her consciousness.

I also once told a frightened young girl facing regular alien contacts to put a camera in her bedroom, as “Aliens don’t like to be photographed.” This proved an effective deterrent, and it was some time before they returned, admitting: “We did not come because of the camera.” It seems likely that, rather than aliens being scared of cameras, I guided the ongoing contact experience by implanting an idea via the subconscious of the witness.

Will the real alien please stand up?

We can tie these clues together with a very illuminating case. The witness was a young man called Alan from Hertfordshire who for 15 years had been undergoing alien contacts. Over time, he learned to plant cues into his subconscious to help remember these dreamlike episodes that previously he’d tended to block from memory. The events began when he was a small child playing in the garden. A series of white glows had burst from the sky around him and small beings surrounded him. Then he blacked out. From then on, he had recurr­ent strange experiences and became very creative – even writing a long ‘story’ involving aliens with a creed of cosmic philosophy that just “poured out”.

Alan was at first convinced these events were real ‘contacts’, but eventually concluded they were deep psychological experiences that owed more to his own beliefs than external reality. He suspected they might metaphorically reflect his sense of being ‘alien’.

Why had he made this startling about-turn? Because he had found some notes that he wrote immediately after one of the early encounters; the contents were quite different from the version in his memory, having vivid, childlike alien imagery that had morphed over the years to incorporate things he’d read about in UFO books. This process turned the original encounter into something more real and drama­tic, which, without this original note, Alan would never have recognised as a false recall.

So, memory is fluid, alien contacts are malle­able and psychology has a major role to play in what we see. However, Alan insisted that the starting point – the encounter in his garden – was a real, life-changing experience that had no easy psychological solution. The quest for the final answer must continue.

Click here for Life With the Aliens Part 1