Far Away, So Close

Stills from Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising

It can get lonely out on the edge of convention, beyond the parameters of respectable thought. And we've tended to make it lonelier than it needs to be, and also kept ourselves less informed, by failing to speak to each other respectfully across serious disciplines which are all dismissed by the misinformed as mere fantasies.

For instance, and for the most part, the 9/11 and political conspiracy crowd haven't rubbed shoulders with the mind control/ritual abuse community; few in either camp have seen the value in studying occult, paranormal and psychochemical phenomena; and virtually no one wants to be associated with UFO research.

It's perfectly understandable why this happens. Each subject is generally considered, in its own right, "fringe," and so the advocates of each, contending for a hearing and a measure of respectability, assume a phobia of cross-contamination by other disreputable subjects.

Last Spring, at Toronto's 9/11 public inquiry, I heard an elderly woman share her difficulty in persuading others of the need to critically consider the evidence that the attacks were an inside job. She said, with sadness, that a typical response would be "Oh - and what do you think of UFOs?" Exasperated sighs of recognition filled the room. And though I knew what she meant - to gain acceptance, perhaps controversial issues need to be presented piecemeal - I also thought, Good question. Because if there is any validity at all to an inquiry it cannot be pursued in isolation. Particularly huge issues with tremendous consequences. Rather, they and their implications should help explain one other, contextually, on the Big Canvas.

We know conspirators compartmentalize, and task on a need-to-do basis. Because we need to see more, we can't mistake one portion - the one that most interests us, or the one we find most persuasive, or the one to which we actually bear witness - for the whole picture.

Sight Unseen offers interesting examples of the limits of compartmentalized analysis. Author Budd Hopkins heads the "Intruders Foundation," and has been a leading researcher in the phenomenon of UFO abductions for more than 30 years. His latest book presents some fascinating case studies that merit attention, but I find his conclusions to be handicapped by both his specialization, and his fixation upon the extraterrestrial hypothesis.

Hopkins notices a "curious pattern" among abductees of "personal, cherished objects...seeming to vanish and then reappear under highly unusual circumstances." For instance, a wedding ring placed on a kitchen countertop one moment and gone the next reappeared several days later beneath the tacked-down carpet of an upstairs bedroom. Hopkins doesn't know what to make of it, though he finds the pattern repeats enough to be "intriguing" and to "deserve mention." The pattern, while mystifying to someone searching the skies for ETs, should be immediately familiar to students of the "secret commonwealth": the traditional folklore of mischevious entities who have always been with us, but inhabit another here.

Hopkins tells the story of two credible witnesses who, while driving through the wheat fields of Iowa in 1952, "came upon an eerie sight: a little old man on a bicycle, wearing lederhosen and sporting a long white beard, like something one might see rendered in wood in a Bavarian souvenir shop." About a half hour later, when they drove over a gentle rise, they encountered the same little man, "pedaling happily along in the same direction, many miles ahead of the place they had first come upon him." There were no sideroads or short cuts the cyclist could have taken, and the men had not been overtaken by a vehicle which could have given him a lift. Hopkins isn't content to let the story stand on its own strangeness. Without any justification other than his presumption of an extraterrestrial hypothesis, he posits that the figure was actually a screen memory to mask an abduction and missing time episode. After all, we can't have odd, little elfen figures bending space-time in Iowa, now can we?

Hopkins also describes a number of instances of abductees' associations, sometimes for years, with humans of extraordinary paranormal ability who appear to serve as "go-betweens," sometimes described as having a "military" bearing. Hopkins does not consider an occult explanation - to him, apparently, the paranormal is not a human functionality - nor, seemingly, that these may be genuine military figures. To him, they merely look human. They are, he concludes, most likely transgenic, alien-human hybrids.

Consider Stewart, the bizarre acquaintance of abuctee "Sally," who came in and out of her life for 25 years, usually accompanying abductions, while he never seemed to age.

One night Sally awoke, startled to find Stewart standing next to her bed. Despite the fact that her apartment was on an upper floor, the windows were locked, and the door was securely bolted from the inside, there was Stewart, next to her bed. Frightened, Sally nevertheless felt compelled to get up and go with him into the living room. There she served both Stewart and herself a drink, and the two sat together on the couch talking audibly, not telephathically, as was sometimes the case. Stewart was, as usual, interested in her daily routine and questioned her about the mundane details of her life and secretarial job.

At one point, Sally told me, she gathered her courage and decided to ask him a rather basic question: "Are you real?" she wanted to know. "Are you a human being? What are you?" Stewart smiled and ignored the question.

Sally noticed some chest hair poking out over Stewart's shirt collar, reached for it and pulled it out. "He winced and gave her an angry look, but she was pleased to realize that on some physical level he was real and not a phantasm." (Hopkins, jumping to his conclusion, writes that "chest hair [is] something never before, to my knowledge, described as an alien feature." Presumably he is discounting the many accounts of hairy, dwarfish entities, and sticking to the grays.) A few moments after Sally plucks Stewart's chest hair, "three small gray aliens approached and she was taken out the window and into a hovering UFO for a more typical abduction experience."

The next morning, Sally checked all the locks and bolts on the doors and windows and they were all in place. Stewart should not have been able to enter, let alone the "three small gray aliens," but it wasn't a dream. Their unfinished drinks were on the kitchen counter, and her roommate Hannah remembered waking up in the night to "a roaring sound in my head":

I was very scared because I didn't know what it was and then I found that I couldn't move. Something was going on. I heard voices coming from the living room. Sally was talking and there was a man's voice. It was the middle of the night and I couldn't move, and I had no idea who was out there or what was happening. I guess I just must have gone back to sleep, which doesn't make much sense when I think about it. The whole thing was very scary, because there really was a strange man in the apartment and I couldn't even move.

A few years later, in another apartment, both Sally and her new roommate Molly shared an abduction experience. Molly had never before seen or heard of Stewart, but remembered having seen a man matching his description operating inside the UFO alongside the alien entities. She drew a picture for Sally, which Sally recognized as even a better likeness of Stewart than the one she herself had once drawn for Hopkins.

Then there's the middle-aged "Mr Nelson," who walked up to a 15-year old girl named "Terry" in a pizza parlour and invited her to interview for a vaguely-described job the following day. (Her mother, in a bizarre departure from character, saw no problem with her daughter being picked up by a stranger and driven to an "undisclosed location.") En route, Nelson recounted to Terry intimate details of her life which no one, least of all a stranger, should have known. ("That was a terrible thing that your stepfather did to you," he says, and "I know all about your day yesterday. At twelve o'clock you went to Jimmy's house," and told her what her and her boyfriend did. When asked how he knew, he said only, "Oh, I just know.")

The location of the "interview" appeared like an undressed set in a virtually empty office building, and became a scene of Nelson's clumsy sexual advance. Afterwards, supposedly driving Terry home, Nelson drove into the "middle of nowhere, woods and fields everywhere." Under hypnosis, Terry remembered they "came up to a little house on the left with a dirt driveway and we pulled in":

He asked me to sit in the car... I wonder why that house was there. It 's hard to see it. It's like...field grass covers it. Higher than grass...like straw...hay.... He goes in a door. It's like an overhang over it.... I keep seeing the roof like a smooth stone roof. No peaks. And I don't look at it because I'm too scared. I don't want whoever is in the house to see me. I knew that when he went in they were probably talking about me. So I slumped down on the seat so they wouldn't see me. I feel so shaky.... I'm afraid I'm going to be killed.

When Nelson exits the house, he's accompanied by "lots of the other ones.... They're smaller. All the same. No hair.... He comes out and just stands in front of the car, but these other things come out to the side and just look at me...."

Again, Hopkins can't let the phenomena be itself. Because he can't allow bizarre, small creatures to inhabit a stone house, in another here, the house must instead be a spacecraft, and the entities extraterrestials. (Remember, the abduction of Jose Antonio de Silva by dwarfish creatures ended in a stone chamber, not an alien ship.) Because Hopkins can't conceive of someone truly human with Nelson's paranormal ability, or working in concert with non-human entities, then he must have been an alien hybrid.

To understand our own disciplines - and let's respect our studies enough to call them that, regardless of the derisive laughter from those who don't know, and those who don't want to know - we need to be interdisciplinary. We need to talk to each other in order to understand ourselves. And something which should be a great conversational aid is the latest work of Peter Levenda, author of Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement in the Occult. Now, the three-volume Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft, may become one of the most important primers for what's become of us.

Jim Hougan, in his forward to the just-released first book in the series entitled "The Nine" (the second is due in December, and the third next June), describes Sinister Forces as "parapolitics at their most bizarre and, I suspect, their most illuminating":

Like UFOs, conspiracies and assassination, serial killers, mind control and the occult, "evil" isn't something that serious people are supposed to think about. If they did, the emergency reporting system would soon be overloaded. And you know what happens when that occurs. All hell breaks loose.

You know, most of what we talk about here and on similar sites, it's not really the "fringe," or even the "edge" - it's the depth. And it truly is scary as hell down there, because what binds these subjects together is that they are all the study of evil, of one order or another. But if we want to understand where we're going, that's where we have to go first.