Flying Saucer to the Center of Your Mind: Selected Writings of John A. Keel (41 page)

UFO percipients usually suffer mental blackouts, amnesia, and disorientation in time and place. Additional UFO experiences can occur, sometimes on a daily basis, after initial contact. These events usually taper off within a few months, rarely lasting beyond a year. But they can recur again, several years later.

Contact is preceded by a long sequence of preparatory events that are so subtle they are seldom noticed by the potential percipient. In several cases, we have traced these back as far as five years before the overt contact finally took place. In a few cases, these events began in childhood, even though the percipient was not formally contacted until he or she reached adulthood.

The divorce rate among contactees is very high. Part of the contactee syndrome involves divorcing their present spouse and later remarrying a person presumably selected for them by the “entities.” in a number of cases, both parties in the new marriage became convinced that they were actually “space people” themselves! Outwardly, these people are perfectly normal in all other respects. Their UFO obsession rarely seems to require extensive psychiatric treatment. The UFO “entities” become a part of their everyday lives – a very secret part.

A majority of all UFO percipients are medically sound, and not heavy drinkers. In fact, many are teetotalers. Yet chronic alcoholics suffer from many of these same symptoms. After several years of hard drinking, there is a distinct deterioration of personality. The hallucinations of delirium tremens are followed by “korsakoff’s psychosis,” which results in amnesia and disorientation of time and place. Confabulation becomes a prominent symptom, and fictitious episodes are created, to the extent that the severity of the amnesia may not be at first apparent. The patient becomes impulsive, untruthful, and unreliable, and divorce often follows naturally.

The contactee syndrome could be based upon some still undefined form of schizophrenia. The unconscious mind is directly involved. The synapses (memory circuits) of the brain appear to be tampered with in some inexplicable fashion. The percipient’s memory is sometimes overloaded with information (to account for periods of time that collapsed during the contact experience). Thus, a percipient may have vivid total recall of a sequence of non-events that seemingly took several hours, while the actual elapsed time was considerably shorter. Memory of these non-events can include detailed sensory information regarding smell, touch, etc. This is mental hyperbolism – over-programming of the percipient’s mind.

These non-events are often allegorical, and may be meant to convey hidden meanings to those capable of properly interpreting the data.

Two techniques are employed by the UFOs. Some percipients are forced to forget their experience by a block that cuts off the memory cells from the conscious mind. Then, as in the case of Betty and Barney hill, the subconscious may feed this hidden data upwards, through dreams and nightmares. The only way to circumvent the block is through the skilled use of hypnosis. However, information extracted through hypnosis cannot be totally trusted.

Other percipients have the memory cells of the actual experience altered in some manner, and false data replaces the true memory. This false data can take incredible forms. The monsters, flights to the other planets, etc. may be remembered with absolute clarity and total conviction. These confabulations seem as real to the witness as his memory of what he had for breakfast that morning.

Fragments of the real experience can remain buried in the unconscious mind. Uninformed psychiatrists and researchers usually make the mistake of merely trying to obtain further confirmation of the remembered experience through hypnosis. They do not try to dig for a deeper, alternate sequence of events.

No contactee event can be accepted on the strength of the percipient’s surface memory alone. Paradoxically, total recall of an event may indicate that the event never actually took place. The percipient is able to remember every minute detail because those details were carefully implanted in his memory banks. Witnesses of this type may clearly remember extended visits to the “caves of the Deros,” or to the splendid cities of some distant planet, when actually their bodies never left the spot where the contact occurred. This type of non-event is most common in Irish “fairy” lore, occult records, and religious “miracles.”

We cannot, of course, exclude the possibility that some percipients may have undergone a genuine physical experience. But our studies indicate that most, if not all, percipients suffered mind-tampering rather than a real experience. This led to deterioration of personality, insanity, paranoid schizophrenia, and other emotional aberrations.

Non-smokers, teetotalers, and vegetarians seem to have a higher rate of contact. LSD users have a very high rate, and can reveal all of the symptoms. Metabolic changes can occur after contact.

Doctors working with alcoholics and schizophrenics have discovered that vitamin deficiencies can disturb the oxidative metabolism of the brain. It is possible that a similar chemical imbalance is present in the brains of the UFO percipients.

One of the most common symptoms of the contactee syndrome is the involuntary, unconscious, convulsive seizure that produces muscular soreness and migraines, sometimes lasting for weeks after the experience. Victims of hallucinosis can suffer repeated attacks after each new hallucinictims. Specific areas of the brain are affected. These seizures, and all the accompanying effects, are well known to medical science. It is apparent that most – if not all – contactees undergo dramatic changes in the forepart of the brain, possibly induced by electromagnetic waves from an exterior source.

Recently, we were involved in a case in Forest Hills, NY, in which a 12-yr. old girl began to experience hallucinosis followed by mental blackouts and many of the common symptoms of “Jacksonian” seizures. She underwent extensive medical and psychiatric examinations, and the attending doctors discovered she often blacked out when in the presence of fluorescent lighting.

Their rather far-out conclusion was that the girl’s brain was “tuned” to the same wavelength as such lights, and their radiation directly interfered with her mental processes. The girl frequently saw, and conversed with, beings that she described as resembling Native Americans. She saw these apparitions in the family kitchen and in school. Fluorescent lighting was used in both places. Interestingly enough, her mother also saw these apparitions on a number of occasions, but claimed they were diminutive (the girl said they were of normal size and form). The family has now moved, convinced that their old home was “haunted.” The girl’s seizures have diminished since she now avoids rooms with fluorescent illumination.

We first became aware of the pseudo-epileptic effect during our investigation into the peculiar events around Cherry Hill, NJ in 1966. In that case, the principal witness, a healthy young karate instructor with no history of convulsive seizures, suddenly collapsed. It was while he was being returned from the hospital that he and three others saw a gigantic object hovering above an RCA factory in Cherry Hill. We have dealt with many similar cases since.

Often witnesses to low-level UFO activity later complain of muscular soreness. They recall being transfixed or paralyzed, but they rarely recall any period of unconsciousness. Careful interrogation, however, usually indicates that they suffered a mental blackout ranging from a few seconds to several hours. This produces the well-known “time lapse” effect. Cryptomnesia (when a forgotten memory returns without it being recognized as such by the subject, who believes it is something new and original) is another frequent result.

Flying Saucer Review
(vol. 16) recently discussed an intriguing event in Finland in which two young men suffered these classic medical effects, together with actinic ray burns. Numerous other cases have been discussed superficially in the UFO literature. Unfortunately, thorough medical examinations and investigations have been rare, and few researchers have made any effort to study the available medical literature.

For many years now, parapsychologists have been studying the pineal gland’s relationship to hallucinosis and psychic manifestations. It is probable that the same “source” or electromagnetic influence that generates some psychic-type apparitions
also
produces most of the UFO contactee experiences. Those sections of the brain that produce the classic UFO/psychic effects are also the sections that control visual and audio perception.

The meaning is obvious. Images, sounds, and other sensory impressions could conceivably be introduced into the brain by an electromagnetic wave that bypasses the normal channels. The remembered experience would not, therefore, be “real” in the usual sense of the term. An overcharge of this EM wave could produce a deleterious effect and might even lead to a cellular breakdown – a possible explanation for the death by brain tumor of British contactee Arthur Bryant.

Percipients in religious miracles and visions traditionally suffer this pseudo-epileptic effect. The trance state followed by muscular soreness, etc., is common in all frames of reference. It would seem that the purest form of this type of mental reconditioning is found in the cases of “mystical illumination” or “cosmic consciousness” (see the works of Dr. Bucke for details on this). More destructive variations occur in demonopathy. Schizophrenia is often induced in some percipients. A variety of chemical and emotional problems could be responsible for some cases.

In earlier times, many learned men devoted a large part of their lives to studying and documenting the fairy and/or elemental manifestations. The late sax Rohmer, the creator of
Fu Manchu,
was also a demonologist. His book,
The Romance of Sorcery,
has been reprinted in paperback. In that work, he quotes extensively from a book published in 1801 that described and defined the basic elemental manifestations (pages 43-50) and included obvious descriptions of what we now regard as UFO occupants. The materializations of strange, unearthly animals are also described in much of this early literature.

We have frequently observed that the UFO occupants employ variations of nouns from ancient Greek and Roman mythology. Many of the nonsensical names brandished in the UFO contactee literature are clearly derivative and, in many cases, based upon sources so obscure that the reporting contactees could not have possibly been aware of their origin or meaning. All of this constitutes a slight twist on the well-known fairy “name games” of earlier epochs.

In
Beyond Condon,
we discussed the contact claim of Maris DeLong of Glendale, CA (1967). Mrs. DeLong allegedly met members of a race from the planet “Kronin.” This was apparently a variation of Kronos (also spelled Cronus), the youngest of the Titans, son of Uranus and Gaea.

Other ufonauts names stem from old demonological terms. One that baffled us for some time was “skow.” Contactee Truman Bethurum claimed that the little men who first approached him in 1952 termed their vehicle a “skow.” Now we have located a literary reference. Sir Walter Scott was a learned demonologist. In 1830, a collection of his letters on demonology was published, called
Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft.
On page 98 we find: “The actors in these disturbances [are said to be] the Skow, or Biergen-Trold, i.e., the spirits of the woods and mountains, sometimes called ‘subterranean’ people, which appeared in deep caverns and among horrid rocks…”

Many nonfiction books describe UFO contactee-like experiences completely outside the limits of the UFO frame of reference. One of the most fascinating is
The Ultimate Frontier
by Eklal Kueshana. This is purportedly the biography of a young man who began to have experiences with “elementals” at the age of 12. UFOs are not mentioned at all, but the myth of the planet “klarian” is presented on page 32. Researchers who have been involved in personal studies of contactees will recognize the many contactee-type experiences outlined.

The elementals that appeared before the young man did not pose as spacemen, but represented themselves as members of a “powerful, ultra-secret brotherhood.” Much of the information in the book is identical to the information usually passed along to contactees. Just as the fairies of the Middle Ages represented the “secret Commonwealth,” the modern “brothers” have posed variously as the “Illuminati” or as representatives of some super-civilization in the sky.

In
Ultimate Frontier,
this “X-group” is referred to as “The Black Mentalists.” This is fairly well-defined in the book. The Black Mentalists are another variation of the “Mind patrol” so popular in whispered UFO lore.

The contactee syndrome has not been adequately studied by qualified medical researchers. There is no clinical precedent for these manifestations within psychiatry. Yet there seem to be many thousands of “silent contactees” in the U.S. alone. Some of these people have been living in a secret hell for years. We have outlined some of the major symptoms here. An intelligent, properly organized study of these people can give us important insights into the real nature of the overall phenomenon. The
stories
from the non-events can provide no basis for study. We must examine the
people
themselves in-depth, and systematically…

In studying subjects working in the vicinity of an electromagnetic field of low radio frequency (0.5KHZ to 30MHZ), Russian observers found: changes in the EEG, glycemic curve, increase in gamma globulin, deviations of the brain nerves, pyramidal symptoms (motion disorders), slight enlargement of the thyroid gland, increases in leukocyte (white bloodcell) count, and slight shifts in the protein composition of the blood, along with headaches, insomnia, irritability, and fatigue.

A study of two groups of mice irradiated with an electromagnetic field (operating at 27.2 MHz at room temperature, and in the cold) respectively demonstrated that the same field strength of electromagnetic waves that killed the mice at room temperature had little effect on the mice in the cold environment. As might be expected, mice irradiated in the cold environment seemed perfectly content. In contrast, mice not irradiated exhibited a behavior of misery, shivering, failing respiration, and indifference to other physical stimuli.