Introduction

 The following paragraphs are taken from Budd Hopkins and Carol Rainey's book "Sight Unseen".

In the year 2001, I marked a quarter-century of investigation into the UFO abduction phenomenon. When I first began to examine accounts of alien abduction in 1976, researchers were aware of only a handful of these bizarre and intriguing reports. Although these accounts of alien abduction were apparently unrelated, they were often made by highly credible witnesses. As the years passed I received thousands of reports and was able to closely investigate hundreds of accounts with striking similarities. Unrelated individuals each described similar specific details, further adding to the credibility of the witnesses. As I examined and compared these cases, I was able to detect many recurring patterns. Portentous in the extreme, these patterns seemed to point inexorably to one plausible interpretation: Intelligent, nonhuman beings possessing a technology vastly superior to our own have arrived on our planet.

            Even more disturbing, these enigmatic visitors have apparently embarked upon a covert, highly systematic program in which thousands of our men, women, and children are repeatedly lifted out of their everyday lives. They are removed from their cars, backyards, beds, and schools and subjected to a methodical regimen of examination, study, and sample-taking. Though UFO investigators have amassed a great deal of information about the UFO occupants’ methods and the nature of their interest in us, we are still uncertain as to their ultimate plans, for our planet and for the human race. Various scenarios been proposed; few offer much peace of mind.

            It has taken years of careful comparative research to isolate scores of highly specific recurring patterns within what had at first seemed an idiosyncratic, almost random collection of incidents. At the present time we can confidently define the abduction phenomenon as a distinct body of hard-edged, precisely detailed, mutually corroborative recurring events that have involved thousands of individuals from all over the world.

            As I looked into case after case, one common pattern that I discovered has to do with particular types of scars found on individuals after abduction experiences, apparently the result of quasimedical sample taking procedures carried out by the UFO occupants. These telltale lesions are of two main types: circular “scoop marks” – depressions on to two centimeters in diameter and several millimeters deep – and neat, straight line “surgical” cuts ranging from two to nine centimeters in length. I have seen perhaps one hundred scoop marks – the more common of the two types and often appearing on the lower leg – and scores of straight-line cuts. Several physicians have noticed the similarity of scoop marks to the scars left by punch biopsies, but X rays and other forms of medical examination have not yet led to a consistent theory as to why these marks were made.

            The “screen memory” phenomenon is another pattern that I uncovered shortly after I began my investigations. A “screen memory” results when UFO occupants somehow substitute more palatable conventional imagery for an abductee’s traumatic recollections. Instead of recalling unnerving alien faces with large, impenetrable black eyes and gray, hairless skin, abductees have frequently reported conscious, pre-hypnotic memories of such things as five-foot-tall wingless owls; gray, hairless upright cats; or deer with expressive black eyes that communicate mind-to-mind. In one case, what was first perceived as a pileup of six wrecked automobiles with their headlights ablaze eventually revealed itself as a landed UFO, and in another case, a huge, motionless silver airplane initially stood in for a UFO in the sunny sky. The idea that these images are not self-generated but are implanted in the minds of abductees by their captors is supported by the fact that two or more people in the same encounter saw exactly the same (impossible) five-foot-tall owl staring at them, the same pileup of six empty cars on a deserted road, or the same telepathic deer.

            Scoop marks, straight-line scars, and screen memories are just a few of the many recurring patterns that have been documented by researchers in literally thousands of abduction cases throughout the world. Among the more than five hundred abductees I have personally worked with over the past quarter century, there are African-Americans. Catholics, musicians, a NASA research scientist, Mormons. medical doctors, Japanese, Muslims, Scotsmen, farmers, Israelis, nurses, Orthodox Jews, Brazilians, Protestant ministers, Australians, scientists, Hispanics, policemen, Hindus, actors, Canadians, psychiatrists, airline pilots, military officers, businesspeople, engineers, artists, students, professors – and even a prostitute or two. Their encounters with non-human occupants of UFOs have taken place in the city and the country, in forests and front yards, in groups or individually. These encounters are neither imaginary nor “imaginal” – whatever that portmanteau word actually means. They are not the results of hallucinations, sleep paralysis, or hoaxes. The skilled UFO researcher has learned how to identify such mundane explanations, thus avoiding pursuit of any vague, dubious, and unsupported accounts.

            Out of the mass of credible reports that remain, the supporting physical, medical, and photographic evidence is so consistent that none of the debunkers’ psychological or psychosocial theories can begin to explain it away. Over the years, for better or for worse, I have come to believe that UFO abductions are real, event-level occurrences. They constitute a truly extraordinary phenomenon, and it would seem a truism that an extraordinary phenomenon demands an extraordinary investigation.

            This bring us to one of the truly great human mysteries: that five decades of these consistent and alarming findings have escaped that attention of mainstream science. Not one penny of the National Science Foundation’s budget or the Nation Institutes of Health’s (NIH) $20.3 billion research budget has ever been applied to investigation of the UFO abduction phenomenon. (The NIH confidently predicts congressional approval to double that research budget by 2003.) Not one academic institution takes the phenomenon seriously enough to develop an accredited program of study around it. There have been, certainly, a few courageous individual scientists and scholars who have hacked paths into the tangled UFO jungle of skeptical hyperbole, myth, ridicule, and misidentification and found their way into the broad clearing of credible eyewitnesses reports. Unfortunately, many of those who have publicly announced themselves as being seriously interested in investigating the UFO mystery have paid dearly for their courage with professional careers that have been blighted by intolerant, even outraged colleagues.

            Researcher Richard Hall has said that we have two possibilities of obtaining meaningful answers to the UFO dilemma: one; if science and government wake up and begin to support its thorough investigation; and two; if the aliens decide to communicate their intent to us and make their presence undeniable. But, unfortunately, none of the parties involved seem very partial to either of these possibilities.

            One would think that the implications of the UFO mystery – which include the possible end of human culture and existence as we know it – would evoke a terrible outcry, a groundswell of demands to look into these reports. But this is not happening, especially at the governmental and scientific levels, where scorn and disavowal of interests in the subject prevail. We believe this is due less to concern about the potential danger of covert extraterrestrial presence than to the wide spread tenet in the realms of government, science, and the media that it is just not possible.

            As for the aliens, rather than the proverbial broadcast from the White House lawn, the aliens seem quite content with their program of secrecy. And why not? Whatever their ultimate purpose, they are able to dip in and out of our world with impunity. They don’t have to tell us what they are doing, because – to the best of our knowledge – no government, no power on earth is holding them accountable.

            In Sight Unseen, my wife, writer, and filmmaker Carol Rainey, and I propose to look directly at the question of what is possible – and what is not – in the so-called “impossible” UFO phenomenon. For instance, how can flying disc fifty feet in diameter simply vanish? Is it feasible that two little girls in a major city could be abducted from their cellar playroom in broad daylight with no one seeing it happen? Or, if nature has established a powerful barrier against interspecies breeding, how could we be receiving so many reports of human-alien “hybrids”? How could a car, a cow, or even a person, “levitate” up a beam of light? Is there any credibility to abductee reports of having their behavior  and emotions controlled by the UFO occupants? Is there any concrete science that we can refer to in exploring these seemingly paranormal events?

            We believe that by looking at some fascinating theoretical twists and turns as well as several quite bizarre discoveries in modern science, particularly in the field of physics, we can show how UFOs and their occupants may actually obey, not defy, the laws of physics and the natural sciences. We will demonstrate, once and for all, how phenomena conventionally thought to be impossible might actually be occurring now, presently, in our lifetime.

            But while we may find intriguing analogies between the mysteries of the UFO phenomenon and the kaleidoscopic new findings in biotechnology, neurophysiology, and quantum physics, we’ll resist the temptation to assume that likeness constitutes proof of the existence of radical UFO technology. For several reasons, applying scientific principles to UFO research through the time-honored methods of science has always been a problematic undertaking. Most often the researcher is not a direct observer of the UFO event or abduction and instead has to depend on the testimony of credible witnesses – on secondhand observations. However, as we have seen, specific details, reported over and over by individuals from different countries, ages, and backgrounds, from distinct and compelling patterns, and it is by thorough examination of those patterns that our knowledge of the UFO phenomenon advances. Furthermore, we believe that both out current and emerging scientific ideal will shed light on the UFO mystery, and light is what will ultimately give the UFO phenomenon plausibility and corporeal reality in the doubting eyes of the world.

            In the following chapters, we will explore several newly isolated abduction patterns that are both extraordinary and deeply unsettling. The consistencies of these cases form perhaps the most radical and disturbing aspects of the UFO phenomenon yet to be openly discussed. We don’t yet fully understand these events, nor are we able to prove their occurrence in the usual scientific manner. However, these events can newly inform a dialogue between abduction data and our earthly science’s fresh gleanings about the nature of reality. It is in this exchange between the elusive mystery of UFOs and, for instance, the eerie world of quantum particles that some common language may be found.

            A recent example of scientific support for “impossible” alien capabilities has to do with what I term “alien co-option.” In Witnessed: The True Story of the Brooklyn Bridge Abductions, I described how the abductee Linda Cortile seemed to have been temporarily “taken over” by the UFO occupants, behaving as if she were in complete sympathy with them, wholly accepting their goals and methods. Her behavior went far beyond what has been called the Stockholm syndrome, the tendency for long-term captives to identify with their captors. As revealed in a hypnotic regression, in less that an hour Linda changed from a reluctant prisoner to a forceful ally of the aliens, showing outright contempt for her fellow abductees. Even more remarkable, she scolded them about reckless human damage to the environment, mentioning specific materials such as basaltic lavas and the effects of pollution on the health of certain sea creatures – issues about which she apparently had no conscious knowledge. When the abduction ended, she changed from Mr. Hyde back to Dr. Jekyll and resumed her normal stance as a frightened, angry abductee who despised what the aliens had done to her and her companions. Her temporary co-option by the aliens had ended. “You know Budd,” she said later, “I flunked science in high school. I don’t know how I knew about these things.”

            At the time, as is my custom, I did not write or speak about what seemed to be a onetime report of a new element in an abduction account. But after a number of similar reports surfaced, I had to acknowledge that a new pattern had emerged. In several cases the co-opted abductees described themselves as dressed in smooth, bue, formfitting one-piece “alien” garments with no noticeable fasteners – garments they do not remember putting on or taking off. All felt both a deep-seated angel and a sense of profound humiliation after their experiences, in which their wills had somehow been completely overridden. All hated the fact that they had been used as involuntary conscripts, either to ease the fears of other frightened abductees or, as in Linda’s case, to preach a demeaning alien message.

            How is such a thorough co-option of abductees possible? Is it the result of a patient, long-drawn-out Manchurian Candidate type of alien brainwashing? Is it a chemical or psychological process? Or is it perhaps something more direct: a neurological shortcut that can be utilized as easily as pressing a light switch?

            In her perusal of the scientific literature, Carol Rainey had discovered a fascinating mystery involving a particular kind of spider that suggests, on an infinitely more primitive level, a parallel with alien co-option. She explains:

            One of the creepiest images that science fiction has planted in our cultural psyche is the idea of alien invasion of one’s mind and body – being taken over by another creature and made to do its terrible bidding. But scientists have recently discovered that at least one form of bizarre “mind control” is not just science fiction: It actually occurs on a regular basis deep in the rain forests of Costa Rica. As reported in the journal Nature by spider expert Dr. William G. Eberhard, scientists have discovered a parasitic wasp with the ability to manipulate its host’s behavior.

            Here in the deep-shadowed jungle, the ichneumon, or parasitic spider wasp, preys on the industrious orb-weaving spider, so named because of the perfectly round web it regularly spins. The distinctive web results from a five-step process: In the first two stages, the spider lays lateral cables as the web’s structural framework; it then interweaves row after row of delicate circular strands around the lateral frams. When the wasp attacks; it temporarily paralyzes the spider before laying an egg on the tip of the spider’s abdomen. With the “alien” wasp egg awkwardly out of it reach, the spider dutifully resumes its daily web-spinning. For two weeks the spider’s activities go on as before – except for the wasp larva clinging to its belly. Slowly sucking the life out of it host. Up to this point it’s your typical unsavory bodily-fluid-loss parasite story.

            But here’s the twist: The night before the wasp larva finally kills the spider, it somehow directs the spider to construct a totally different web. Like a zombie, the spider suddenly stops the daily rebuilding of its delicate, round web. With hours or minutes left to live, the spider host spins two thick, cable-like strands with strong cross-braces between them – a resting place for the stately, heavier wasp; a durable platform resistant to wind and rain, high above the marauding ants on the ground below.

            Mission accomplished, the wasp larva kills the spider and spins its own cocoon on the suspended platform especially constructed for it by its co-opted victim. Dr. Eberhard postulates that the spider has literally been reprogrammed, most likely by the wasp’s having injected some chemical into its host. But the internal target is clearly specific and alters the spider’s normal behaviour at just the right time to benefit the wasp. Essentially, the larva has manipulated a specific subroutine in the spider’s web-spinning program. Instead of its usual five-step process, the spider – under larval direction – can only perform the first two lateral steps over and over.