Some lucky people can laugh at so-called Abduction Phenomena. I used to. I'm a skeptic and, aside from Church of the SubGenius philosophy, I'm probably what the average religious nut would call an atheist. I believe only in science and "Bob," and while those two are admittedly damned fickle, at least there's SOME sense to 'em. The SubGenius teachings may sound unscientific at first, but the authentic paid scientist Rudy Rucker has assured me that he can justify ANYTHING "Bob" says on a scientific basis.
Since "Bob" hadn't said much about alien abductions, I pretty much shrugged off those stories just like I shrug off "repressed memories" of Satanic Ritual Abuse on the part of my fellow white trash trailer home denizens. I wrote both off as combinations of wishful thinking, paranoia and unforgivable ignorance of common human dream states.
Then it happened to me.
I didn't start remembering childhood Satanic abuse on which I could blame my inability to hold down a job, no... but I did get abducted by aliens. Greys, to be specific. It was an ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING ORDEAL, and I no longer titter at those who have suffered that forced intrusion into their lives and brains. I would not wish it on my worst enemy.
What makes this confession particularly awkward is the fact that I'm a professional preacher/satirist who has specialized in the "high weirdness" arena. I make my living spinning wild yarns about UFOs, when I'm not researching "REAL" UFO lore or badmouthing UFO aficionados that I consider to be deluded. So I'm now stuck in the tricky position in which L.Ron Hubbard must have found himself when he had to start explaining, "Well, sure, I WAS an unsuccessful science fiction writer, and this Scientology religion I've founded probably SOUNDS like science fiction, but I swear to Zenu that it's FOR REAL, THIS time!" Likewise, I now know how Whitley Streiber must have felt while writing that nonfiction book about his own abduction experiences, Communion. He'd been writing horror and fantasy for many years, "crying wolf" so to speak, and now he was expecting people to believe that, THIS time, he WASN'T FAKING.
I still think Hubbard was full of crap, and while I never thought Streiber was lying exactly, I did think he was kinda nutty.
But here I am in the same boat, hollering about a very real wolf, and nobody with half a brain will believe me, just because I happened to have been BULLSHITTING about wolves on all previous occasions.
But I swear to God that I really experienced all that I'm about to describe.
I have a wife and two teenaged kids. In 1993 we were living in a large but very old and very rickety inner city house in Dallas. My daughter Sivet (not her real name) was 11 at the time, her brother a year older. He doesn't figure in this, I HOPE; as far as we know, he slept right through it.
It was a normal night. The kids were in their separate rooms sleeping, and my wife and I were in bed reading. Then...
>>LOST TIME<<
I have the feeling that it was very much later in the night, but I can't know for sure. It might have been mere SECONDS. Maybe I just fell asleep. But SOMETHING is missing from my memory. I dunno what happened in the interim, but all of a sudden I definitely wasn't just lying in bed reading. I was lying in bed with TWO STRUGGLING BRAINS inside my head. One brain knew that a terrible, unjust thing was being done to us, particularly to my little girl in the next room, and the other brain was saying, "EVERYTHING'S OKAY. NOTHING BAD IS HAPPENING. YOU ARE HAPPY AND WILL STAY IN BED SLEEPING." And THAT was the brain that was in control of the body. The terrified brain knew there was something unspeakably dreadful happening, BECAUSE it had to "stand by" helplessly and "watch" while SOMETHING KEPT ME FROM RUNNING INTO THE OTHER ROOM TO SAVE MY DAUGHTER. There is no way I can impart even the slightest inkling of what this felt like. Lots of scary things have happened to me -- getting chased and beaten by rednecks, almost drowning, bad acid trips, seeing my children injured or thinking they were lost, etc. -- but nothing can compare to the horror of being paralyzed, of having something else take control of your body and PREVENT YOU FROM TAKING DESPERATELY NEEDED ACTION. Well, I shouldn't say that. I've never been raped. Rape might well be the only comparison. The overiding emotion throughout this whole experience was one of revulsion at being violated. I hate to admit it, but that feeling of personal revulsion even overshadowed my parenting instincts -- at first, anyway.
My wife was awake too. The bedside lights were still on. There was a book in her hand. She looked at me and smiled. I smiled back. Nothing was more obvious to my Scared Brain than that these smiles were HIDEOUSLY FALSE. BOTH of us knew that THERE WERE "ALIENS" IN MY DAUGHTER'S ROOM AND THEY WERE DOING SOMETHING TO HER AND OVERPOWERING OUR MINDS SO THAT WE COULDN'T FIGHT BACK. And yet we were both being held in stasis, smiling at each other, as if the demons that had taken over our bodies thought that making the bodies smile at each other would help placate them. We were PUPPETS. Being a puppet makes you want to puke. But you can't, because the strings aren't making you puke. You can only dangle there with bile slapping against the back of your throat.
When I say we knew there were aliens in my daughters room, I'm not saying we thought there were creatures from outer space in there. I use the term "aliens" strictly as a pop culture reference. I knew only, but intuitively, that the things in Sivet's room were the same things that all those abduction accounts describe. I didn't know or care what they were, or how they got there, but I knew they were "the Greys." There was a "sense" of that. (At this point I hadn't actually SEEN a damned thing.) There was also a sense, probably implanted along with the paralysis, that this was somehow NORMAL, and had been happening to other people for hundreds of years. Something was making me feel like it was all part of some TRADITION, like I was SUPPOSED to lay there while "THEY" did "THINGS" to my daughter. Because that was how it had always been done.
So my wife and I sat there in bed smiling at each other, and pretending to read, while our, uh, "souls" were struggling to MAKE OURSELVES JUMP OUT OF BED AND GO HELP OUR DAUGHTER.
Apparently I have more will-power than my wife does. I'm definitely a whole lot CRAZIER than she is. And I have a very brief history of not being able to see UFOs when everybody else can. When we lived in the middle of the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation in 1975, a classic UFO hovered one night over the pond near our trailer court, perfectly visible to everybody who lived there EXCEPT ME. Perhaps my hard-core atheism/skepticism, or possibly some incipient schizophrenia, make me somehow "blind" to these things! At any rate, somehow, laying in that bed with that false rictus grin plastered on my face against my will, I was able to break the paralysis.
Let me try to describe what this was like. Maybe it could be compared to parachuting out of an airplane. Every nerve and brain cell in your body is telling you not to do it; your very TENDONS are trying to hold back; but somehow you make yourself leap out into the strong arms of gravity, anyway. An entire OTHER BRAIN was making every step away from my bed and toward my daughter's room like walking into a burning house. EVERY FIBER OF MY BEING except the essential core was screaming, "TO STAY IN BED READING IS GOOD AND NORMAL AND SAFE!!! TO DO OTHERWISE IS CERTAIN DEATH, AND YOU'RE INSANE!!" Every single step required a gigantic effort of will. It wasn't that it hurt to move, it was that it felt hideously WRONG. It went against every instinct except one, the one that (praise evolution) took precedence: the parenting instinct. HOW COULD I LIE THERE LETTING THIS FAKE BRAIN PRETEND EVERYTHING WAS OKAY WHILE THERE WERE "THINGS" BEING DONE TO MY LITTLE GIRL??? The fact that I had already been paralyzed so LONG added EXTRA HORROR and a sort of shame as well.
Somehow I fought what my interpretive mind remembers as a "paralysis ray." Funny how we have been trained by movies to think of such things in terms of "rays." In the movies, aliens use "rays" to do their dirty work, and that's how I still think of this paralysis. But I'm sure that the idea of a "ray" -- and, for that matter, the idea of "creatures from space" -- result from living at this particular level technological civilization. In another time, I would have been visualizing devils and curses.
Step by step. I was soaked in sweat and trembling violently. A kind of white light seemed to interfere with my vision, threatening to replace everything. It was like the nightmare in which you're trying to slog your way through waist-deep syrup or up an impossibly muddy, slippery road to reach some goal, but the monsters are closing in behind you. I mean this was BAD BAD BAD. That fake brain was yanking me back towards my bed with all its might, but I was somehow progressing, step by clunking, halting step, like Frankenstein's monster, to the hallway outside Sivet's closed bedroom door. I put my hand on her doorknob. The light was getting brighter and brighter. I was in utter full-fledged panic at this point, my heart slamming away like a jackhammer and my knees wobbling all jelly-like. But I yanked that door open. It was like cutting off my own hand. There was nothing in the room. My daughter was gone. But there was light pouring from the closet.
(I know, I know, I saw Poltergeist too.)
My daughter's closet provided the only access to the attic. A crude trapdoor in the ceiling, reached by climbing a ladder of boards nailed onto the closet wall, led up there. And I knew that Sivet was in the attic. With the THINGS.
I could barely see at all. I was running on madness and Daddy-instinct alone. But I yanked that closet door open. I tried to look up towards the trapdoor. Getting my neck to tilt my head up, and my eyes to focus upwards, was the hardest thing I have ever done. The light coming through the trapdoor opening wasn't really so bright as it was somehow INTOLERABLE to the NERVOUS SYSTEM. The panic ray was making me mess my pants. I lost my mind and started scrambling at the board-ladder that led up to the open trapdoor. And then something looked down at me from up there. A face looked at me. The panic took over completely. The face was so impossible that every nerve ending in my body felt like it was encased in ice. I can't describe the face except to say that I think it was the face of a Grey or the servant of a Grey. There was some sense of machinery and more faces and the next thing I knew I was tangled up in bedsheets in the dark, soaking wet with sweat, shaking like a whipped dog, whimpering, crying... my wife hugged me and comforted me AS IF IT HAD BEEN NOTHING MORE THAN A BAD DREAM. I stopped shaking and ran into my daughter's room, and she was sleeping safely, tucked in, snug as a bug in a rug.
Okay.
GRANTED:
Prior to this event, I had read probably three or four dozen cheesy paperback books on UFOs, from Keel to Cooper. (I've met both writers and I consider Keel a cool dude with a carny-barker background, and Cooper a transparently self-deluded asshole.)
Granted, I had read Streiber's Communion a couple of years before, and had seen the MOVIE of Communion for the SECOND TIME, on VIDEOTAPE, only THREE DAYS PRIOR TO THIS EXPERIENCE.
GRANTED, I had been working long hours for days, hardly sleeping, and GRANTED, I had run out of my favorite recreational herbal dream suppressant.
So why do I have the NERVE to think it wasn't a just a dream? The same way all UFO abductees know their abductions weren't dreams. The aliens ALWAYS make you THINK it was just a dream. THAT's how you know it was REAL. EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT. The Collective Conscious, from The Weekly World News to The X Files, says so. The bug-eyed Greys ALWAYS use the "dream" trick. That's why you only remember the SPECIAL details under hypnosis.
WHAT MORE PROOF IS NEEDED?
Heck, I can go on the talk show circuit now.
Now, I'm well aware that STUPID NEW AGE IDIOTS routinely convince themselves that their daydreams are past life visions or prophecies using EXACTLY THIS SAME LINE OF REASONING. But I'm not like that. I'm SPECIAL. I've been SINGLED OUT by SUPERIOR INTELLIGENCES who recognized ME as one of the few Mud Dwellers sufficiently sensitive to be OPEN to their HIGHER WAYS.
BUT IT GETS WORSE!!! Those poor crazy contactees and abductees don't know the HALF of it.
Did you ever see any of those Nightmare on Elm Street movies? The slasher films that you always get mixed up with the Friday the 13th series? With the evil murderous ghost, Freddy Krueger, the Boogyman, the burn victim mass murderer who lives only on the dream plane, but he can KILL YOU HORRIBLY if he gets into your dream? It's actually a fairly imaginative series. The plot device of mixing up dreams and reality allows the filmmaker to pull off the occasional TRULY STARTLING and SURREALISTIC scene. It's coloring-book surrealism for junior high kids, and they're inconsistent films, rife with dopey teenager stereotypes, but I've enjoyed them. They never SCARED me; I used to be a film special effects technician. But.
FREDDY KRUEGER IS REAL.
I know. He attacked me in a dream. He almost killed me. I woke up screaming. I rolled over in bed and hugged my dear wifey, sobbing with relief. She turned toward me and it wasn't my wife, IT WAS FREDDY AND HE WAS CLAWING MY EYES OUT WITH HIS RAZOR HANDS!
Needless to say -- sorry for the corny gimmick -- that was a dream too. But it was REALLY NASTY, so scary that I had to get up and go to the bathroom and dash water in my face to clear it from my head before I could go back to sleep. And when I looked up at the bathroom mirror, FREDDY WAS STARING BACK AT ME AND LUNGED OUT WITH HIS CLAWED HANDS AND STARTED TEARING MY THROAT OUT WITH A THOUSAND TIMES MORE CRUELTY THAN ANY MONSTER MOVIE COULD EVER IMPART!, until I woke up sweating and wrapped in sheets.
After that series of Freddy Krueger dreams, I tried to write up a little essay about them, and about how close is the dream world to the waking world, at least for lunatics like me, and how in some cosmic way, "You never can tell." I was sitting at my Mac, typing away at this essay, when FREDDY SUDDENLY LUNGED FROM THE SCREEN AND GUTTED ME FROM GROIN TO STERNUM!!
Then I woke up. And I have been "awake" since then, at least to the extent that Freddy hasn't returned. But YOU NEVER KNOW. This whole last year since Freddy was here might turn out to have been PART OF THE DREAM TOO!
Bummer.
Freddy was a lot meaner, and a whole hell of a lot more realistic, in the dreams than he is in the movies. But even in the movies, HE ONLY WORKS THROUGH DREAMS. So... you see the dilemma?? THERE IS NO WAY TO PROVE THAT FREDDY KRUEGER ISN'T REAL.
None.
The self-validating logic is circular and perfect.
There's no escaping from it. Freddy Krueger, as well as the Greys, cannot NOT be real... according to the definition they set up for themselves. Just when you THINK they're not real, THAT'S JUST WHEN THEY'RE THE MOST REAL. The lack of any empirical proof IS ITSELF THE PROOF.
Let's not dwell on how this logic might apply to any and all religions, political beliefs, philosophies, etc. In fact, let's JUST NOT THINK ABOUT ANY OF THESE DEVILS AT ALL. Again by definition, that's the only way to make 'em go away and leave us alone.
One time an acquaintance of mine was dozing on her couch in the middle of the afternoon when a HUGE, SWEATY, SEXUALLY AROUSED INVISIBLE PRESENCE suddenly woke her up with its disgusting vibes, held her in paralysis and attempted to rape her, until she woke up.
Since I was the only preacher she knew, the young lady asked me to come to her house and perform some kind of exorcism to banish the raping demon. I told her that I thought she had probably experienced nothing more than a "night hag" dream, that archetypal "helplessness" dream that everybody has sooner or later. I didn't tell her that I thought she was PRETTY DAMNED IGNORANT not to know that such dreams have accounted for all manner of superstition since humans started sleeping.
For that reason, I was pretty sure that I could banish this evil thing. My plan was to go to her house and stride around cussing at the ghost. My understanding of ghosts is that they're more scared of us than we are of them. I also believe that they don't exist in the first place.
Unfortunately, my friend could tell that I didn't take her demon rapist ghost attacker seriously enough to be able to exorcise it properly; she called another mutual friend, who did a much better job than I would have done. The more serious exorcist placed candles in all four corners of every room of the house, and muttered incantations and polite requests for the raping devil ghosts to skeedaddle.
And by God, what do you know? It worked.
Case closed.
Original file name: I Was Abducted by Aliens
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