Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience Read Free

earliest crop circles were often merely that: circles. I could believe that some of these were made by a lot of men from MI5 carrying planks. But the Chilbolton face is a kind of giant newspaper photograph made by flattening corn so as to create shadows, and seems to raise the same problem as the great animal glyphs on the Nazca desert in Peru: how people on the ground could have ‘drawn’ them without the perspective that could be obtained from the air.
    As to the ‘pixel’ reply to the Arecibo transmission, I think that anyone who studies it closely would agree that it would have taken a group of crop hoaxers armed with strings and some ‘corn-flattening’ device many hours of hard work—always with the knowledge that they could easily attract attention or be noticed from the Chilbolton observatory. If SETI wants to convince the world that it is a hoax, then all they have to do is to duplicate the feat in a single night.
    It is the view of the author of Messages from Space , an account of Chilbolton by Jay Goldner, that the crop circles are formed more or less instantaneously, with some kind of energy beam in which the pattern is already encoded.
    Let me at his point make another attempt to reassess the whole UFO phenomenon. The original question was simply a matter of whether these were what they seemed to be, giant discs, or something more ordinary, like weather balloons. It certainly seemed fairly apparent to sensible people that most tales of ‘alien contact’, like those of George Adamski, were inventions.
    Then came a new phase, the ‘abductions’, of which one of the first was the case of police patrolman Herb Schirmer in 1967. ‘Abductees’ mostly seemed to lose all memory of what had happened until, like Schirmer, they underwent hypnosis and remembered being taken on board UFOs. Schirmer was told by the ‘aliens’ that they were conducting some kind of ‘breeding programme’ with human beings.
    This was also the conclusion arrived at by Professor John Mack, of the Harvard Medical School, when the artist Budd Hopkins persuaded him to meet a number of people who had reason to believe they were ‘abductees’. Mack, whose first reaction was that such people must be ‘crazy’, was soon convinced that most of them were as normal as he was. The result was his book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994), of which I speak in the first chapter of the present book. It almost caused him to lose his job at Harvard, but fortunately sanity prevailed.
    I had learned of the phenomenon of ‘alien abduction’ in the autumn of 1994, at a ‘Fortfest’ in Washington D.C., organised by Phyllis Benjamin, when I attended a lecture by David Jacobs, a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, called ‘Abduction and the Paranormal’. My wife and I had shared lunch with Jacobs, and I had asked him: ‘What do you think this UFO thing is all about?’ He then told me that he was at present writing a book on the subject, which he hoped would provide the explanation I was seeking.
    This finally came out in 1998, and I hastened to buy it. The title was The Threat , and it expressed the conviction that the aim of the abductions was to slowly replace the human race with a race of hybrids—a combination of humans and aliens.
    Now this conclusion was not all that strange to me, since Herb Schirmer had said as much in 1967. All that came as a surprise was that a person as balanced and sober as I knew Jacobs to be should utter such prophesies of doom (even though it seems his publisher thought up the title).
    But it was not quite as alarming as it might have been. To begin with, John Mack had already raised the same speculation at the end of Abducted . There he says (p. 399):
    My own impression, gained from what abductees have told me, is that consciousness expansion and personal transformation is a basic aspect of the abduction phenomenon. I have come to this conclusion from noting in case after case the extent