On a wet and windy night in November 1980 Mario Luisi was walking through sodden meadows by a river outside his home village of Burneside in the English Lake District. In the darkness he saw what he took to be a cow. Then he thought it might be a crudely constructed sheep shelter. But then he saw that the object was hovering 1 metre above the ground and looked like nothing so much as a distorted aeroplane. It was about the size of a helicopter and had what seemed to be a tailplane, but no wings. It bore strange symbols, the like of which Luisi had never seen before.
As he stared at the weird object glinting in the beam of his lantern, he became aware of a squelching sound. He realised that someone was approaching him across the soggy ground and turned the beam of the lantern in the direction of the sound. He saw two figures, apparently human, about 2 metres away, beside an old oak tree. They were wearing dark, skin- tight suits. At that instant one of them, apparently female, raised a small pencil-shaped object in her hand. A bright light shot out from it, striking the face of Luisi's lantern. The glass front shattered and as Luisi watched, the metal reflector became warped and twisted.
The remainder of Mario Luisi's encounter took place by the light from a paper mill on the other side of the river. The female figure spoke to him, telling him that she and her companion meant no harm and had come to the Earth in peace. (Presumably, then, their "attack" was a defensive measure against what they had taken to be a weapon - the lantern.)
Luisi was told that he must not reveal the strange symbols on the ship, nor those on the lapel badges worn by both figures. He could only stare, his legs shaking, as the two beings, who were fair-skinned, entered their craft by means of a ladder that descended from it. Presently the object shot upwards, leaving a glow in the sky.
The encounter left Mario Luisi with a memory that would change his outlook on life. For him, at least, there was no longer any doubt - no need to question whether the human race is alone in the Universe. He "knew" that we are not.
This problem has fascinated mankind ever since it was realised, in the 16th century, that the planets are other worlds and the stars are other suns, possibly possessing their own planets. The human race seems to abhor the idea of being alone in an immeasurably vast Universe. This sentiment was exploited to great effect by Steven Spielberg's epic film "Close encounters of the third kind", which was released in 1977. Spielberg brought the idea vividly to life. He himself is keenly interested in UFO's and is associated with the Centre for UFO Studies, in Evanston, Illinois, USA, which is run by J. Allen Hynek.
The most fantastic type of evidence on the question consists of the numerous accounts of the close encounters of the forth kind - of which Mario Luisi's is one. These go beyond close encounters of the third kind, in which aliens are merely seen: witnesses claim to have met, talked to, travelled in company with, or even been abducted by creatures not of this world.
Four varieties of close encounters of the fourth kind have been distinguished. Mario Luisi's experience is typical of type A, which embraces straightforward encounters where the witness fully remembers what took place. There are no memory blocks, no intervals of time that the subject is unable to recall, no obvious reason to doubt that the experience was of something completely real. It is just as much a part of the sequence of events as getting up that morning.
These type A events are the most sober evidence for the reality of aliens. And they are by no means rare. Although close encounters of the fourth kind as a whole make up no more than about 1 or 2 per cent of the total number of UFO reports made each year, this still amounts to many hundreds of cases since the Second World War. They come from almost every country and all social groups. And over half of these encounters are of type A. It is thought that they could be even more common than the figures suggest, for there is evidence that witnesses are unwilling to talk about this kind of experience.
Seeing an unidentified light in the sky is almost commonplace these days and people are more willing to report it than they once were. But talking to a creature from another world is, for many people, something to keep quiet about. This is unfortunate, since it means that researchers are unsure of the true scale of the phenomenon. But the information supplied by courageous witnesses is sufficient to indicate that something truly extraordinary is going on.
But serious problems arise, even in these seemingly rational type A accounts. The Mario Luisi case is typical in this respect. He volunteered the lantern for scientific study. The results of two independent analyses were identical: in the opinion of experts the damage was done by ordinary means, probably by a blow- torch. Had Luisi concocted his story and damaged the lantern himself, it would have been odd for him to be so cooperative. And it is not possible to disprove his claim, by which he stands, that the lantern was struck by a beam from an alien weapon. Certain other points in Mario Luisi's story support his claims. But support is not proof: and we never do get proof in cases of close encounters of the fourth kind that a witness is not Iying.
The difficulty, of course, is that even if the witness is telling the truth, there is no guarantee that his alien contacts are not using materials and technology indistinguishable from our own. Nevertheless, when what is presented as evidence could perfectly well be of earthly origin, one is bound to become suspicious.
A number of researchers have been conducting studies into close encounters of the fourth kind, analysing the features of the stories in detail. Type A cases stand out from the other reports in many ways. They tend to occur outside the usual surroundings of the witness - in the open, perhaps in a field and so on. They happen at any time of the day, even though UFO's are predominantly nocturnal. The average number of witnesses per case is well below the average for all UFO cases but close to the average for all close encounters of the fourth kind.
Photographs purporting to show alien beings are, disappointingly, rare. This seems highly significant when it is remembered that UFO photographs are very numerous. If the number of pictures of aliens where of the same proportion as the number pof contact cases, 1 or 2 percent then we would have a great deal of material to work on. In fact there are no more than two or three photographs and none that, beyond reasonable doubt, link an alien being with a UFO.
Yet we cannot complacently dismiss the phenomenon as unreal. For there are cases in which several witnesses see aliens. One example occurred on 3rd March 1980, at Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico. Two teenage children, Vivian and Jose Rodriguez, were woken at 3.3O a.m. by a barking dog. They looked through the window of their farm to see five strange creatures, with pointed ears and webbed feet, wearing tight-fitting clothes. The aliens seemed interested in the family's chickens. No UFO was observed by the children.
Next day it was discovered that at the same time of night two men nearby had seen the same creatures. The witnesses had been sleeping in a parked car, resting during a long journey. They had woken up and had seen a large domed object on the ground. Beings fitting the description given by the children had emerged from the object and headed in the direction of the Rodriguez farm.
Such a story, if true, is very hard to explain as anything other than a real, physical event. The apparent subjectivity of these type A cases should not be over-stressed.
The second group of contact cases, type B is quite different. The aliens involved are often called "bedroom visitors" because as many of them make their appearance in the bedroom; the witnesses usually claim to have experienced the encounter while wide awake. These encounters have a good deal in common with ghost sightings that happen in the bedroom.
What distinguishes these events from type A cases is that they possess obvious distortions of reality - parts of the sequence of events are completely forgotten, there are jumps in the story from one scene of action to another, as in a film or a dream. The reality of the events is much more doubtful than that of the type A cases.
For example, on 5th January 1980 a 33- year-old house-painter awoke at 5 a.m. in his bedroom at Trowbridge, Wiltshire, in southern England. He saw a glowing green figure, 2.1 metres tall, at the foot of his bed. It looked more like a projected image than a solid figure. The alien told the witness that the people to whom he belonged regularly shipped human beings off to other worlds in order to colonise them. When a planet became overcrowded they started a war in order to reduce the population. This behaviour seemed to be in conflict with other efforts that they were making to protect us: it seemed that our planet was liable to split in half and the alien visitors were desperately trying to plug the cracks by injecting a liquid cement from their remotely controlled space vehicles!
Interestingly, the witness's wife was in bed beside him all this time, yet she did not awaken, nor did it occur to him to disturb her. It seems most unlikely that anyone would make up such a story and expect anyone to believe it. It is not necessary to doubt the witness's sincerity - but neither is it necessary to take this weird story at all seriously. Type B cases are rarer than type A - they form about a quarter of all contact reports. They are far more subjective, since they are almost exclusively single-witness encounters. By far the majority of them occur in the home or its immediate surroundings - fully two thirds of the cases occur in the bedroom. And most of them happen in the early hours of the morning.
This seems to suggest that the two types of contact are different in nature: type A sound like real contacts with something physical type B sound like some kind of hallucination. It seems a plausible working hypothesis, though there are cases in which it is hard to decide whether a case belongs to type A or type B.
The third category of contact report, type C, involves an experience that is not immediately remembered. The experience of an English family, the Days, will illustrate how disturbing this can be.
One evening in October 1974, John and Sue Day were driving to their home at Aveley, in Essex. They had been visiting relatives and were now hurrying, hoping to catch a late night television play. Their three children were with them and fell asleep during the journey. Then their parents saw a blue light pacing the car. They watched it for some time but were unable to identify what it could be.
P ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Then the light disappeared - and the car turned a corner and ran into a well-defined bank of eerie green mist. The Days were in the mist for only a few seconds, but the car radio sparked and crackled. John instantly yanked out its wires to prevent a fire hazard. After recovering their composure the family drove the few hundred yards to their home.When they got home they switched on their television set, but the screen remained blank. It was two hours later than they had thought and the station had closed down. Someone or something had stolen a piece of their lives.
The family were naturally perturbed by this mysterious time lapse. Over the next few months they had several dreams about it fleeting visions of weird faces, occasional strange impulses to refrain from eating meat or drinking alcohol. Eventually two UFO investigators, Andy Collin's and Barry King, heard of the event. They brought in the help of a medical hypnotist - Leonard Wilder, a London dentist. The Days underwent regression hypnosis in the hope of retrieving memories of that missing time. And the memories came.
Under hypnosis John and Sue told stories that were in close agreement. However, there were some differences, and they did indeed claim to have been separated for much of the "missing" time. The children also seemed to recall the experience in subsequent dreams.
A UFO had landed and the family had been taken on board. They were given medical examinations and shown around the craft. They were informed about its propulsion system and the way of life and intentions of the alien visitors. Eventually they were returned to their car by a process akin to astral projection and they continued their journey. But their lives could never be the same again.
To those who interviewed them, the Day family seemed a group of pleasant and sincere people who had never tried to force their story onto anyone, or to make money from it. Something quite certainly happened to them that night... but what?
In type C contacts, something blocks the witnesses' memory. Occasionally recall of the "missing" events is triggered by normal events. Not infrequently the subject has dreams that hint at what took place during the missing minutes, hours - or even, in a very few instances, days. But the most common means by which the floodgates of memory are opened is regression hypnosis.
Type C abductions are remarkably consistent. One in five stories of alien contact involves amnesia and alleged abduction.
Type C cases are more subjective than ordinary UFO sightings, since they tend to involve fewer witnesses; but they have a higher number of witnesses per case than type B or, surprisingly, type A cases. The aliens involved usually resemble human beings and are usually the normal human size, or larger; there are very few entities of small stature, unlike those featured in type A cases. The most common time for type C incidents to occur is between about 10 p.m. and midnight. And a very large proportion of them involve young couples driving cars along quiet roads (quite often carrying children with them). It is also common for one or more of the witnesses to have a history of strange experiences - witnessing ghosts or poltergeists, for example. And the way of life of the subjects may undergo drastic changes, even before the memory of an apparent abduction is at last retrieved and the cause of the changes made apparent.
The fourth group of close encounters of the fourth kind comprises very few cases. It consists of those experiences in which the encounter does not seem to involve physical contact: communication is by means of telepathy, automatic writing, or something of the kind. We shall not these in this article. We shall try instead to see whether among all the details of the cases of types A, B and C there is a clue to the reasons why such experiences occur.
Hypnosis is still a controversial subject. Its significance becomes even more obscure when it is used to recover the blocked memories of a witness in a UFO contact case. Experts dispute the origin of the images that come to the mind of such a person in a hypnotic trance. Is the subject's psychic potential boosted? Does he become able to dredge information from the collective unconscious, potentially becoming aware of everything that has ever happened anywhere at all? Or is the abduction memory that comes to the witness simply a respinning by his mind of a story once read and now forgotten - the re-creation of a modern myth?
For certainly alien beings and their spacecraft have attained the commanding status of myths of our time, whatever the reality that lies behind them. Or does regression hypnosis simply free the memory so that the barriers to recall can be hurdled and the "missing" period relived? There is a very difficult problem of assessment whenever a witness in a type C case retrieves a "memory". What is its true significance?
A case similar to that of the Day family occurred in June 1978, again in England. A young couple, their children and another adult were involved. The alleged abduction took place during a car journey in Oxfordshire; again there were many similarities with other abduction stories: for example, three- dimensional ("holographic") shows were displayed to the witnesses. But the story as a whole was quite unlike any of the 100 or more other type C cases that have been documented by UFOlogists.
The aliens looked humanoid - indeed, very like those seen by John and Sue Day - and they told of the origin of their race on Earth and their emigration to the planet Janos. Now a horrific natural disaster had precipitated their flight back to Earth. They wish to move in with us... a million or so refugees from this cosmic catastrophe. What is interesting about this case is partly, how it resembles in outline other incidents, such as the Day case (which had received publicity in the British press). But more importantly, the interests, attitudes and manner of questioning of the investigators found their way into the story that was told - as if the hypnotised witnesses were picking up "cues" from the investigators and fitting them into their accounts as they told them.
This is rather like the game in which you are given a series of objects - say, a book, a pen, a candlestick and a toy balloon - and are asked to use your imagination to weave a story in which they all figure.
This curious problem is further illustrated by the experiences of young Gaynor Sunderland, from Oakenholt in North Wales. She and her family had many weird encounters, including contacts with aliens who, again, looked rather like the ones met by others who reported similar experiences.
On one occasion Gaynor was having trouble sleeping because she kept seeing two aliens - one male, one female. (Later she found that they were named Pars and Arna.) I was then investigating the case and I suggested to her mother, Marion Sunderland, that she could tell Gaynor a white lie. Gaynor was told: "If you put a loaded camera in the bedroom the aliens will not come because they do not like having their pictures taken." A couple of nights later Gaynor was allegedly abducted to another world and taken on a tour of a city there by Arna and Pars. She was told that she was not really there: the experience was in her subconscious mind, a kind of dream. Yet the aliens maintained: "We did not come to you because of the camera."
It is highly paradoxical that an alien entity should first admit to being a product of the unconscious mind and then claim to dislike being photographed. It seems that Gaynor's mind somehow wove the idea concerning the camera into her experience of the trip to another world. But she remained convinced of the reality of her experience and said it was far more vivid than a typical dream.
We sometimes find that the initial stimulus for an abduction experience is an event that can be explained straightforwardly.
This casts doubt on the remainder of the account provided by the witnesses. One of the most famous type C cases involved an American couple, Betty and Barney Hill, who were returning from holiday across the mountains of New England during September 1961. A mysterious "craft" followed them and then came down nearby; Barney Hill watched it through binoculars before driving away in panic. All the classic features of such incidents were there: a psychic witness (Betty had experienced many types of weird phenomena throughout her life); a blank in their memory of events; strange dreams afterwards; and finally, under hypnosis, memories of abduction and medical examination on board the UFO. Yet it has been argued very convincingly that the light in the sky that marked the beginning of the whole train of events was nothing more than the planet Jupiter.
This does not in itself tell us anything about the reality of the experience; witnesses often link completely unassociated events in their recollections of some incident, simply because those events happened to occur at roughly the same time. But it is just part of the process by which human beings misperceive events, distort their memories of them and come to mistaken conclusions about them later.
We should bear this complex process of interpretation and misinterpretation in mind as we consider the appearance presented by aliens and their craft in contact reports. What should we expect extra-terrestrial life forms to look like? This is a very hard question to answer, since our only examples of life come from one planet - the Earth. Yet when we see the amazing range of species hosted by our environment and recognise that mankind is just a link in a long evolutionary chain in which an even greater diversity of forms has existed, we find little reason to suppose that alien beings should look like us.
Admittedly the humanoid form is well- adapted to a wide range of environments on the Earth's surface, and it may well be common on other Earth-like planets throughout the Galaxy; but the human form is presumably not a necessary condition for dominance. Since other worlds would have a great range of habitats, and local conditions would vary greatly, life there would undoubtedly be equally diverse.
Carl Sagan, the eminent astronomer. has even proposed possible life forms capable of surviving on Jupiter: such as living balloons in the oceans of water that may exist in the warm depths of the planet, below the perpetually frozen clouds that we see.
The last thing we would expect is a menagerie of alien races looking more or less like us - and yet, according to contactee's, this is precisely what we do find.
Only 7 per cent of contact cases involve creatures that are not humanoid. Such beings as the giant white maggots that crawled across a road in Yssandon, France, in 1960, during a UF0 sighting, are rare. There are three distinct groupings among the humanoids that form the bulk of the data:
SMALL - Below 1.5 metres tall and usually about 1 metre);
MEDIUM - 1.5 to 1.8 metres); and
LARGE - Up to about 2.1 to 2.4 metres.
In type C (bedroom visitors) encounters, the entities witnessed are fairly normal, with a slight tendency to larger sizes. In no fewer than 41 per cent of type A cases, on the other hand, the entities seen are small. There are other fairly common features, such as large eyes, fair skins and angular features. But other factors, such as clothes, show great diversity.
One might not consider this to be a problem. After all, people on Earth wear a wide variety of clothes and human beings of different ages, races and sexes are extraordinarily diverse. But the difficulty with contact cases is more fundamental: the aliens as described are just too much like us. They usually speak the language of the contactee, whether it be English or Serbo-Croat. Nearly always they speak it faultlessly and without any noticeable accent. This means, of course, that they are speaking in the same accent as the contactee himself (a vital, but usually overlooked, point).
Their fashions, too, are far too similar to those on Earth. It seems nonsensical to imagine that an alien from a planet light years away should wear a cloak buttoned at the neck and sport a badge on the breast of a jumpsuit-style garment. Yet this is what contactee's claim and it is all too reminiscent of the limited imaginations (or wardrobe budgets) of science-fiction film-makers.
If a witness asks for the origins of an alien, he is almost invariably told that the entity comes from space. In the earliest contacts the aliens home planets belonged to our solar system - Mars, Venus, Saturn and so on. Now we know that humanoid life on these worlds is impossible and present-day contactee's are told the aliens come from planets circling distant stars. As yet, of course, science knows little about the very existence of such planets, let alone their suitability for life.
What is it like inside an alien craft? The witnesses answers to this question also raise grave questions about the nature of their experience. Imagine a Stone Age man transported through time and taken onto the flight deck of a Concorde airliner. The instruments and controls would be quite incomprehensible to him. How could he possibly describe what he saw in any intelligible way, knowing nothing of the purpose and importance of what he was seeing? This would be the predicament of any Earth-dweller taken inside an alien starship.
Yet these amazingly advanced visitors, who traverse interstellar space at a whim, apparently do so in spaceships that would not look out of place in one of our engineering museums. They use levers and valves, wires and old- fashioned bulky computers. They have flashing lights, in the manner of Star Trek and Doctor Who. They are slow in catching up with our primitive technology. They are just getting round to using lasers and holograms (which they did not have before we did) and they do not as yet have the liquid crystal displays that are now standard on our watches and calculators. What is more, their spaceships are always breaking down... Not infrequently the aliens enlist the help of Earth-dwellers to sort out their problems. Once they asked an eight-year-old boy to fix their propulsion unit. Evidently the origin of all this is not the face-value explanation beloved of the alien spacecraft theorists.
Once the contactee's are aboard, the aliens usually carry out a medical examination. Taking blood samples is an integral part of this. The Irish UFOlogist John Hind points out that the doctor is the symbol of authority who plays the greatest role in the lives of many people. There seem to be significant resemblances between these examinations by aliens and the contactee's previous experience of medical treatment. One Canadian abduction appeared to feature a replay of an appendicectomy that the witness had earlier undergone.
The memory blocks in type C cases present an interesting problem. If aliens can suppress memories, why do they do it in such an ineffective way? The memories usually filter through spontaneously and are easily retrievable in full by hypnosis. Why block them at all? Unless the memory block in fact works successfully in most cases - implying that there are thousands of people who are abducted and have no inkling of the fact afterwards.
Whatever the reason for these memory blocks, the lapse of time between the original occurrence and its subsequent recall severely impedes the investigation of the case. And this, of course, may be the most significant function that the memory loss serves.
When aliens give us messages they are almost always of one form: warnings about the future of the Earth, with hints of nuclear war and impending doom. If only we were sometimes given something startling and original - a new scientific theory, a helpful invention, a cure for cancer. But no; we are told that, because of our nuclear tests, "the balance of the Universe is being disturbed".
Occasionally there is some light relief. In spring 1978 a Red Army officer was abducted by the shores of the Pyrogovskoye Lake in Russia. Once he had got used to his humanoid hosts, he suggested they ought to toast this cross-cultural contact with a suitable drink. They did not understand. So he sketched out the chemical structure of alcohol and the aliens retired and immediately made some. "How is it that such a highly developed civilisation does not use something like this?" the Russian asked. "Maybe if we had used it we would not be so highly developed," was the response.
A teetotal message in the form of a joke makes a welcome change from the usual run of communications from other worlds.
