Magonia 84, March 2004
In March 1980, a young rural Pennsylvania couple was interviewed concerning an experience they shared aboard an alien craft. A person attending a lecture on UFOs given by Eugenie Macer-Story told her about the couple’s experiences. She travelled to their home – they had no telephone – and they cordially allowed her to tape the story of their encounters with the aliens. Frank and Alice had not contacted any UFO organisation and there was no use of hypnosis at any point preceding or during Macer-Story’s interview.
As they tell it, both of them had been interested in ESP and the supernatural prior to the events of April 1975 and Frank_ in particular, had been trying to communicate telepathicaly with UFOs. He had been seeing lights over nearby mountain peaks at least once or twice per week in the period leading up to the experience. He emphasised that one must go out and observe the sky and take nothing for granted. Every time he saw a UFO, he would try to make contact by flashlight. He said he had a drive to leave this earthly existence because he had been so depressed.
On the night of the primary experience, as Frank tells it, the couple were in bed just about to fall asleep when both were compelled to go outside. They both saw a luminous round object near an electric light pole and were sucked up into it. They floated into a circular chamber and bobbed around for a while in mid-air. Doors opened and they met beings dressed in silvery-blue suits. One, a female, led Alice away to another room, while two men staved with Frank and chatted with him about star tracks and the nature of the universe. Though he saw star charts on which he recognised the Milky Wav, the men told him there was more beyond the stars. There were other dimensions. Thee telepathicaly got him to know they come from “another sub-level dimension attached to what we call the ‘astral-plane’.” Knowing this, his mind felt expanded. His whole concept of the universe changed and that’s all they wanted to do. At least that is, with Frank. Alice, however, got a different sort of treatment.
As she tells it, both of them had fallen asleep when suddenly she felt she was sitting up. The room was very luminous. Through the door, she saw a 6-foot tall being. Next, they were both on the porch, and the ground was white like snow. On the road was a vehicle the size of a car. Samples of rocks and stuff were being picked up and put in containers. There was also a light by the side of the house and she felt being pulled up under her arms and going through a circle of light at the bottom of the craft. She remembers floating in the room, like Frank did, wondering if they were being decontaminated.
She remembers, too, being led away by the female to another room. It resembled a medical clinic and had very similar equipment. There was also desk at which the female alien later filled out papers. The female lifted her hand and Alice found herself lifted up and positioned on to a table. An instrument bearing a light came down and was run over her body. A panel on the wall showed the internal organs of her body in real-time. It was displayed in blues and purples. During the examination, she relayed telepathically concerns over her ovaries that she sought medical help about in the past. She asked if the aliens could fix them. Easily, it turned out. The alien went to the desk, filled out some forms, and then returned with a rack of instruments. One was selected, briefly tested on a thick paper, and then passed over her ovaries. It initially stung and the instrument was readjusted. A smaller energy probe was used on only one of the ovaries. After completing treatment the female made some more notes and helped Alice off the table.
Alice followed her down the hallway to an elevator that eventually led them back to the chamber where the aliens were chatting with Frank. “She was carrying papers.” Alice recalled Frank’s conversation with the aliens as including such topics as ecological balance and the fuel that runs cars. Alice was surprised that these aliens felt humans were more advanced than they realised. Humans were aware of the problems they’ve created. “Pollution will be corrected.” Her impression was that one of the aliens was religious like a priest. There was also a living star map that might have shown their base, but she couldn’t even be sure where the Milky Way was on it.
Neither Frank nor Alice recalled how they got back to the cottage. Both awoke the next day as usual, each thinking they had experienced dreams. Alice, however, had tingling in the region of her ovaries for several days. Several months later, both were surprised to learn Alice was pregnant. Her gynaecological problems had evidently been cured. At 8 months, Alice had a 45-minute missing time episode while she was watFching television. After this, she knew, in her own mind, the pregnancy would be normal. She would have a girl. But, beyond a feeling that she had made a vow to remember the examination beneath the time lapse, she had no real details. Sometimes there are flashes of memory and they seemed to tice together over time. But Alice didn’t get into the matter during that interview.
This account is whittled down from Macer-Story’s article published in the Fall 1980 issue of Pursuit, the magazine of the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained. [1] It may or may not surprise some readers that this story is considered an alien abduction experience by UFO researchers. It matched the standard abduction scenario just well enough to make it into Eddie Bullard’s list of Top 50 abduction experiences. Specifically, it is No. 50 on the list. [2] That made it better than over 200 other cases on record, or put another way, better than 80% of the abductions collected by 1985. It impresses in a formal sort of way. It is ostensibly an experience shared by two, not merely a single claimant. They sought no attention; contacted no ufologist. Macer-Story came to them. There is no involvement of hypnosis.This last point is a significant virtue, since there is no chance of the testimony having been generated by the enthusiasm of an investigator. Abduction advocates, in debate, like pointing to such stories – at least in the abstract – as validating the stories retrieved under hypnotic regression since they tell essentially the same experience. [3] Or so they claim.
When you start scratching around at a story like this the sameness crumbles away without much effort. To be fair, a few bits and pieces echo other abduction cases. The star map stuff loosely resembles the Hill abduction. The examination device coming down from the ceiling echoes Pascagoula. Alice indicated that the walls were illuminated without sources like bulbs, something familiar froth the Moody case. The order of the story elements is also correctly Bullardian: capture – examination (only Alice) – conversation – theophany (only Frank) – aftermath.
The thrust of the story, however, hardly fits in with the modern portrait sketched by Hopkins, Jacobs, and Mack. Alice does not have eggs harvested from her ovaries in a terrifying ordeal. A light passes over the ovaries and she is cured. There is nothing about aliens returning with a hybrid child in the intervening five years – as is regularly seen in the abductions of the 90s, Frank is spared the nonsense of the various sperm extraction procedures spoken of by other male abductees. Instead he is given a surprisingly brief lesson in metaphysics and told other dimensions exist.
They are spared the standard falsehoods about a near future cataclysm: instead, we get a message that humans will solve their problems about pollution – this seems unique not only for its lack of paternalism, but also for being right
They are also both spared the standard falsehoods about a near future cataclysm familiar to both contactee and abductee experiencers. Instead, we get a message that humans will solve their problems about pollution – this seems unique not only for its lack of paternalism, but also for being right. Most measures of pollution have improved in the last couple of decades. [4]The aliens seem closer to human norms than to Greys. Frank said they were bluish-silvery. “They had eyes, nose, and ears, but not as much of a mouth as ours.” Alice indicated the silvery-blue colour involved the suits. The fabric stretched over the top of the head (as in Schirmer’s drawing) and that prevented her from telling if they had any hair.
The female sported bulb-like things over her eyes to probably protect her vision. She had small spots in the nasal area, and while there was some cartilage, the nose was not pronounced. The presence of a bosom clearly defined the one with Alice as a female. The face was a little longer and the chin was more pronounced. While we would prefer a situation where they specifically commented on the size of the head, there isn’t much ground for thinking they were looking at Greys. The bosom, minimally, is problematic given the usually genderless nature of Grey bodies. The absence of any talk of large black eyes exerting mental control on either Frank or Alice particularly distances the tale from Grey mythology.
Finally, and probably the best proof of non-Grey status. Alice affirmed they were not much different from us. “They just didn’t have a mouth.” This presents an amusing turn. It is not the fact that Frank slightly differs from Alice when he says they didn’t have as much of a mouth. It is rather that a certain ufologist berated sceptics for falsely stating the entity in the Hill case had no mouth. More precisely, in the Cosmos science series, the aliens are described as mouthless creatures. [5] Regardless of the accuracy of that criticism, how curious is it to see an alien whose look reinforces a supposedly false trait?
Next, what should we make of the presence of a desk in the alien spacecraft and the fact that the alien needs to fill forms and carry paperwork around with her down the hallways? It would be an irksome challenge to ask ufologists to search for more examples of this in their abductee databases. I doubt they would be very enthusiastic to see more examples of this for surely even they realise; first, the time spent would only emphasise how much this is not the norm; and second, it is blatantly un-futuristic. Such record-keeping should be done on, indeed preferably by, computers. The cure of the ovaries by light may be indistinguishable from magic in a way appropriate to advanced technology; the need for paperwork, assuredly, is not.
The scanning real-time display of the body’s internal organs, though a nice short glimpse into the probable future, didn’t require much imagination. A closely similar scene appeared in Star Trek – The Motion Picture (1979). Ilya lies on a table and a light tube travels under the body showing the internal organs in detail. The heart pump is shown in operation. The preferred colour in the display, as in Alice’s dream, seems to be blue. I do grant however, a good fraction of the display is in red and that was not a colour mentioned by Alice. Such real-time display of the body’s interior was nothing new to science fiction. tion. Ray Hanyhausen showed an alien looking at the skeleton of a living woman in a Selenite scientist’s examination chamber in First Men in the Moon. (1964) While more examples could probably be found if we looked, I suspect the more important point is that X-ray scanning technologies were widely known to be advancing at the time. CAT-scans, invented in 1972, first appeared in clinical settings between 1974 and 1976. The first were used only on the head, but whole body versions were available by 1976. [6]
The incongruities of the story within the larger theory of the Alien Breeding Programme are perhaps bad enough, but the case is one you probably would prefer to keep hidden away from representatives of official science. Regardless of whether or not you could force a stalemate on the issue of the case being ‘explainable’ in absolute terms, you would never win them debating the relative possibilities. Is it more probable this is real than some sort of psychologically based experience? No takers. To begin with, Frank’s volunteered statement that he was trying to contact aliens with flashlights in the prior weeks is a deadly detail that no scientist would dismiss as coincidence. The talk of telepathy is suspect and suggests literary license to subvert language issues. The revelation that the aliens come not from distant planets, but “another sub-level dimension attached to what we call the ‘astral’ plane” reeks of New Age bafflegab and links to spiritualism and the tradition of channelling aliens.
There are issues of disparate testimony. Frank and Alice tell the beginnings of the story somewhat differently. She talks of light filling the bedroom and seeing a tall figure. He doesn’t. When Alice returns from the exam, she sees Frank chatting about issues he failed to mention in his separate interview. Frank’s impression that their primary motive was to enlighten him is discordant with the events that happen to Alice, for whom the purpose seems to be study of their local environment – the rock sampling at the beginning – and study of her body. If we had only Frank’s account to work with, this would have to be treated as a contactee tale. Alice’s version is more mainstream; echoing themes found in the writings of the Lorenzens and John Fuller. Her version suggests a scientific expedition.
The cure of Alice’s barrenness by aliens, evidenced by a successful pregnancy and birth of a healthy girl, impresses to some degree. One could regard this as a physical effect. It is also disarming how it is done so casually. The aliens didn’t come to Earth with a mission to cure her, they simply do it because she’s there, she asks, so ‘why not?’ However, we have only her word that aliens are responsible. No doctor’s testimony or medical records are cited in support of it, so, by the standards of scientific investigation, we should not be totally convinced.
The couple’s initial impression that the experiences were simply – or not-so-simply – dreams, weighs heavily in any scientific assessment of the case. While the fact that Frank and Alice’s accounts match to some degree is perhaps problematic, it is harder to ignore the fact that the interview comes five years after the primary event. Over such a span, the vagaries of memory and ‘improvement’ of the story could be invoked to explain away any difficulty. The experiences may have initially been more discordant, but over time they reason away some of the differences, one deferring to the other over points of the dream they are uncertain about.Such dismissal through unproven speculation would inevitably rankle advocates of abduction reality as unfair. But stare at the alternative. Interdimensional entities bearing telepathic abilities happen to respond to the flashlight summons of a depressed man wanting to escape his earthly existence. This could never convince scientists as happening in the real world. It has more than enough clues to decide the case breaks down into a psychosocial phenomenon.
References:
- Eugenie Macer-Story, “Pennsylvania Woman Healed by Alien Practitioner” Pursuit, Fall 1980, pp. 1469.
- T.E. Bullard UFO Abductions: The Measure of a Mystery. FFUFOR, 1987, p. 313.
- Example: Greg Sandow on UFO Updates, 17 February 2003: “Eddie Bullard has shown that the stories retrieved under hypnosis aren’t notably different from the stories told from conscious memories.” Luis Gonzalez discussed quality-control problems in these conscious memory cases in a subsequent posting dated 2 March 2003.
- Ronald Bailey, Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse. St. Martin’s Press, 1993, pp. 72-3, 160-1.
- Cosmos debuted September 28, 1980.
- Imaginis, “Brief History of CT” at http://imaginis.convict-scan/history.asp
