Message #298 "MUFON_PUBLIC"
Date: 13-Jul-93 10:28
From: SHEPPARD GORDON
To:   All
Subj: Close Encounters 1/2
Previous Reply is Message #297.

* Original: FROM: SHEPPARD GORDON
* Original: TO:   ALL
* Original: AREA: UFO

* Forwarded by John Komar
* Forwarded Using QuickBBS 2.76a Ovr
* Forwarded at 16:26 on 15-Jul-93

Close Encounters With UFOs?
Aliens: Once the province of the tabloids, UFOs have found a place in
the college curriculum. A new book by a university professor tells of
abductions and bizarre sexual experiments.

05/20/92
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES   (LATM)


Public relations executive Karen Morgan says since she was a
child she has been periodically abducted by skinny beings with
oversized bald heads and big eyes who appear by her side in a glow
of light.

Patti Layne, a high school teacher, says that while on an
overnight camping trip when she was 15, she was lifted off the
ground by a beam of light and taken aboard an unidentified flying
object.

Each says she has been repeatedly kidnaped by aliens and
subjected to gynecological examinations and SEXUAL EXPERIMENTS.
Each says she has been forced to hold "HYBRID" BABIES the aliens
said were her own children.

The stories of Morgan and Layne (not their real names) and 54
other men and women is told in "Secret Life-Firsthand Accounts of
UFO Abductions," published this month by Simon & Schuster.
The people who write on this bizarre topic are not all writing
for the tabloids. "Secret Life" author David M. Jacobs is an
associate professor of history at Temple University in
Philadelphia.

Jacobs, who grew up in Los Angeles, has been a UFO researcher
for 25 years. With Budd Hopkins, an artist and author of two books
on UFO abductions, he has recently received a $200,000 private
grant-Jacobs will NOT REVEAL THE DONOR-to conduct in-depth research
on accounts of abductions by aliens.

John E. Mack, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical
School, has a $200,000 contract from Scribner to write his own book
about abductions. Mack has studied 50 people who describe being
kidnaped by aliens, and, with MIT physics professor David E.
Pritchard, will put on a symposium on the subject next month in
Massachusetts, where as many as 150 academics are expected.
Though Mack declined to be interviewed for this article, he
shows that he takes tales of UFO abductions seriously in the
introduction he wrote to Jacobs' book:
"The idea that men, women and children can be taken against
their wills from their homes, cars and schoolyards by strange
humanoid beings, lifted onto space craft, and subjected to
intrusive and threatening procedures is so terrifying, and so
shattering to our notions of what is possible in our universe, that
the actuality of the phenomenon has been largely rejected out of
hand . . . .

Jacobs has been fascinated by the UFO phenomenon since 1961 when
a New Hampshire couple, Betty and Barney Hill, a social worker and
postal employee, became the first to publicly claim to have been
kidnaped by aliens. They said that while driving they were
approached by a spacecraft and both lost consciousness. After
months of nightmares, anxiety and insomnia, they sought a
psychiatrist and said under hypnosis they remembered being abducted.
In 1973, Jacobs wrote his doctoral dissertation at the
University of Wisconsin on the controversy over whether UFOs exist.
His first book, "The UFO Controversy in America," was well-received
in 1975.

He was hired at Temple in the mid-'70s TO TEACH 20th-Century
AMERICAN HISTORY and culture, and quickly became known as the
professor behind American Studies 116-"UFOs and American Society."
To write his new book, Jacobs studied 300 abduction accounts and
interviewed 57 people through hypnotic regression, a technique
RARELY IF EVER USED by historians that has DRAWN CRITICISM OF
HIS QUALIFICATIONS from the medical community.

Three women in his book believe that aliens have implanted
fertilized eggs into their bodies. Each says she was taken into a
room and placed on a stretcher-like table. Each says procedures
were usually orchestrated by an alien who is taller than the rest.
Other women tell stories of fetal extraction. Men say machines were
attached to their bodies to collect sperm; women say they are were ASKED
TO HUG STRANGE-LOOKING CHILDREN.

"Most people find a way to cope with these incredible
experiences," says Jacobs. "Whether they know what has happened to
them or not, they find a way to lead normal lives."
Karen Morgan is one such person. A former technical writer, she
runs her own public relations company and is the mother of a
22-year-old son.

Morgan, 43, says she began experiencing a profound anxiety as
an adult, related to a recurring dream of having a strange being
with big eyes in her room. "Even in the dream I knew it wasn't a
dream, but I put it aside, thinking that there had to be an
explanation for it," she says.

Five years ago, she began seeing a psychiatrist who told her
that her anxiety had no psychological basis. Yet the anxiety
continued. Morgan heard about other people who were having weird
alien dreams and her sister told her about the Temple University
professor she'd read about who was studying the phenomenon.
Morgan says she has told her story to few people. "People would
respond with ridicule if I told them, and I would have a lot of
sympathy for them," she says during an interview at her home
outside Philadelphia. "For people to believe this takes a giant
leap, because there is no reason for them to believe this. If
someone had come up to me with these stories, and I wasn't an
abductee, I would have thought they were psychotic."
After extensive questioning and interviews by telephone
(standard procedure for Jacobs), Morgan went to meet him. On a
small sofa in a room on the third floor of the Victorian home
Jacobs shares with his wife and two sons, Morgan began to recall
parts of the dream she had never remembered.
Morgan underwent 26 HYPNOTIC REGRESSIONS, which she claims
unearthed a LIFETIME OF ALIEN ABDUCTIONS.

At first, she says, "I thought about it all the time. I was so
afraid to go to sleep that I would go for months without being able
to sleep.

Reviews of Jacobs' work are mixed. Temple's Robert Weinberg,
head of the school's American Studies program, says: "People can
see through a lot of this. I mean, if aliens are looking for humans
to reproduce, why not just put an ad in the paper? They'd get a
million responses."

Michael Zuckerman, University of Pennsylvania professor of
history and popular culture, compares the abductee phenomenon to
19th-Century phrenologists, spiritual groups that claim to bring
back the dead and people who are waiting for the end of the world.
"I think all of these answer to some kind of resistance to the
modern, scientific, rational world, telling you that there is just
a finite world out there."

Dr. Martin Orne, professor of psychiatry at the University of
Pennsylvania, is a leading expert on the use of hypnosis and has
worked with people who say they have been kidnaped by UFOs. He is
CUATIONARY about memory obtained through hypnosis.

"There is a long history of people describing that they have
been abducted by aliens, and the people who describe it tend to
describe it in a similar way. But memory as such is NOT RELIABLE.
That is why the courts no longer allow people to testify out of
hypnosis. HTPNOSIS FACILITATES THE FANTASY OF THE INDIVIDUAL,"
Orne says.

Jacobs says that one day his colleagues will uncover some form
of physical evidence-a tiny mechanical device in the brain, along
the nasal passage or in a woman's reproductive organs, all places
that abductees say aliens have implanted objects.

Accounts of UFOs and aliens are worth study in any case, Jacobs
says in his book. "If the abductees are relating events that do, in
fact, have an objective reality, then we are presented with what
might be one of the most important events ever to befall mankind.
"If, on the other hand, the events do not have an objective
reality and the abductees are imagining abductions, then we have
discovered something of immense importance. We have found a
fascinating and inexplicable new PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOCULTURAL
PHENOMENON unlike anything ever discovered in the human psyche
before."