Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (16 page)

This problem of what might be called ‘deliberate unbelievableness’ occurs again and again in UFO literature.
Craig was lucky he was not asked to investigate the Sutton farm siege of 1955, one of the most outrageous examples of sheer absurdity in UFO history—it would surely have made him resign from the committee in disgust.
The siege took place in Kentucky during the night of 21 August 1955, during which a family named Sutton, and married visitors named Taylor, stayed awake trying to hold off little shining men, who somersaulted backwards whenever struck by a bullet, with a noise like a shot being fired into a pail.
One creature climbed on the kitchen roof; struck by two bullets, it fell—then floated forty feet and landed on a fence, and walked away.
During a break in the siege, the whole family—eight adults and three children—fled in two cars to Hopkinsville, Kentucky, seven miles away, to summon the police.
But the police could find nothing, and left—whereupon the siege resumed, with the shining men, three feet tall, peering in at the windows.
They finally left at dawn.

It certainly sounds like a hoax—only one member of the group claims to have seen the UFO that brought the aliens, although a neighbour later said he saw its lights.
Yet the whole family undoubtedly piled into two cars in the middle of the night to get the police, and undoubtedly did a lot of shooting.
Those who have studied the case are unanimous in agreeing that something really happened that night; eleven people had no reason to lie.

The little shiny men did not even look like the ‘greys’ who feature in so many abduction cases.
A sketch based on witnesses’ reports shows them as having huge, floppy ears, long sticklike legs and arms that came almost to their feet.
Only one witness said she had not seen the goblins, and that was because she was too scared to look up.

Any reader of Craig’s book can see why he ended as a total unbeliever.
As case after case failed to provide the solid evidence he hoped for, he must have become increasingly convinced that the whole thing was a tissue of illusions and deceit.
I must admit that, even when I had reached only the halfway mark, I felt much the same.

The problem with this state of mind is that it induces a kind of irritable impatience that is the reverse of open-mindedness.
And I have only to turn to Coral Lorenzen’s book
Flying Saucers
(1965) to see what has gone wrong with even as honest an investigator as Roy Craig.
She begins by describing how, when she was nine years old (in 1934), a friend pointed out a white object in the sky, which she thought was a parachute.
Coral Lorenzen says she thought it was more like an open umbrella without ribs, and that it was travelling in a leisurely manner with an ‘undulating’ motion.

On 10 June 1947—now a young married woman—she was sitting on her back porch looking for meteors when she saw a tiny ball that rose quickly and vanished among the stars.
In fact, June 1947 was a month in which dozens of reported sightings occurred, the most famous of which was Kenneth Arnold’s on 24 June.
And there were many more sightings after this, which she lists and describes.
The most impressive is described in a letter from a Mrs.
King, who was leaving Mombasa at the end of June when she saw a huge, cigar-shaped vessel as long as the ship, which travelled alongside them for a few moments, then sped away, shooting flames from its rear.

Now clearly, Coral Lorenzen is in a totally different frame of mind from Roy Craig.
She did not say to Mrs.
King: ‘Come on, prove you saw it’.
She has seen one—perhaps two—herself, and then gone on to collect hundreds of sightings and interview dozens of witnesses.
She doesn’t need to be convinced that UFOs exist.
She wants to know what they are, and what they want.
She is half inclined to believe that they intend a mass landing, and that their intentions may not be entirely friendly.
But her attitude throughout the book is one of intelligent questioning.
There is no suggestion of a cultist, for whom flying saucers have become a kind of substitute for religion.

And, quite obviously, she and Roy Craig are never going to agree, simply because their minds are on completely different tracks.

Craig was never to find the answer he was looking for, and—to do him justice—hoping to find.
But this is partly because, by the time he was six months into his investigation, he had become so wearily cynical that he was convinced there was very little to investigate.

The disadvantages of this attitude can be seen clearly in another of Craig’s cases, that of Patrolman Herb Schirmer.

On the night of 3 December 1967, at about 2:30 a.m., the twenty-two-year-old ex-marine was on the edge of Ashland, Nebraska, when he thought he saw a stalled truck at an intersection of Highway 63.
When he turned his spotlight on it, he was staggered to see that it was a UFO—a football-shaped object on three tripod-like legs, with red lights on it.
Seconds later, it took off.
He returned to the station, and wrote in his logbook: ‘Saw a flying saucer at the junction of Highway 6 and 63.
Believe it or not!’

One thing puzzled him.
It was now 3:00 a.m., and it took only ten minutes to get from the spot where he had seen the UFO to the station.
What had happened to the other twenty minutes?
He felt sick, and had a tingling sensation all over his body.
There was also the odd fact that he had a red welt on his neck.

Schirmer began to suffer nightmares.
He woke up trying to strangle his wife, or to handcuff her.
He also had a ringing noise in his ears.

His sighting came to the attention of the Condon Committee, who asked him to come to their headquarters in Boulder, Colorado.
There he told his story of the football-shaped UFO.
The committee was particularly interested in the missing twenty minutes, as well as in the welt on his neck and the tingling sensation he had experienced.

‘They really hammered me on those missing minutes’.

The committee decided to try the effect of hypnosis, and a professional psychologist swung a pendulum back and forth in front of his eyes.
After a while, the psychologist asked him if there was more to tell, and Schirmer said yes.

Craig’s account is not as clear as it might be.
He is obviously bored with the whole thing, and suspects that Schirmer was only pretending to be hypnotised.
Instead of quoting a transcript of the session, he merely mentions that Schirmer said he had been taken on board, shown the propulsion system of the craft, and that it was from another galaxy, whose inhabitants were friendly.
This, says Craig dismissively, is ‘typical UFO lore’.
And the psychology professor who did the hypnosis admitted that he personally believed that extraterrestrials are conducting a survey of the Earth.
The implication is that the psychologist asked leading questions that prompted Schirmer’s replies.

Craig has no more to say about the case, except that he would like to see physical evidence of a landing, rather than witness a hypnotic session, where the interviewer may merely be stimulating the subject’s imagination or responsiveness to suggestion.

What he does not go on to tell us is what happened next: that Schirmer went back home, and was soon promoted to head of the department, becoming Ashland’s youngest police chief.
But as the headaches continued, until he was ‘gobbling down aspirin like it was popcorn’, he quit the job.

It seems that the psychologist at Boulder had not told him what he had revealed under hypnosis, and he badly wanted to know.
Therefore he contacted Eric Norman, a writer on flying saucers, who advised him to go to a professional hypnotist.
On 8 June 1968, with Norman and the author Brad Steiger present, Schirmer was hypnotised by Loring G.
Williams, and regressed to the day of the encounter.

Now he told how, when he switched on his spotlight, the object had flown over to him, and how its occupants had approached his car.
One of the beings produced a device that enveloped the car in green gas.

When he tried to draw his revolver, the alien pointed a rodlike device at him, which paralysed him.
And, soon after that, something was pressed against the side of his neck, which left the red welt.

The being asked, ‘Are you the watchman of this place?’
Then it pointed at a power plant and asked, ‘Is that the only source of power you have?’
He was also asked about a nearby reservoir.
He gathered that the visitors wanted to charge up the power units of their spacecraft.

Next he was invited to come on board.
A circular doorway opened in the bottom of the craft, and a ladder appeared.
Schirmer noted that the ladder and the interior of the craft were unusually cold—an observation that tends to recur in abduction cases.

In a large control room, Schirmer observed video consoles which showed areas outside the ship.
He was told that the ship was a small observation craft, made from pure magnesium, and that it generated a force field around itself when landing.
He was also told that they had bases on Venus and other planets, as well as underground bases on Earth at one of the poles, and on the coast off Florida.
All this was communicated in a kind of broken English, and the voice seemed to come from the creature’s chest area.

The crewmen were between four and five feet tall, and wore silvery uniforms, with an emblem of a winged serpent on the right breast.
They wore helmets with antennae sticking out of the left side.
They looked at Schirmer with unblinking eyes, and he did not notice if they were breathing.

The ‘leader’ also made the interesting admission that the UFO inhabitants want to puzzle people, and to confuse the public’s mind.
Schirmer said, ‘They put out reports slowly to prepare us .
.
.’.

The leader was pushing buttons as he spoke to Schirmer, and he felt signs of headache.
He was told that they were putting things in his mind, and that they always did that with everyone they contacted.

Contactees, he was told, were chosen at random, because they happened to be in a lonely place, or sometimes because they were the son or daughter of someone who was already a contactee.
(This was 1967, long before Budd Hopkins and others began to suspect that abductions sometimes occurred repeatedly in families.) The ‘aliens’ had been observing Earth for a long period of time, and felt that if contactees slowly released information about what had happened to them, it would somehow help the aliens.

They had a programme called breeding analysis, in which some humans had been involved.
He saw a kind of logbook on a table, but said that the writing was more like ‘the stuff we see in movies about Egypt’ (i.e., hieroglyphics).

Schirmer was told, ‘Watchman, one day you will see the universe’.
He was also told that he would be contacted twice more in his life.
The being then told him, ‘I wish that you would not tell that you have been aboard this ship .
.
.
You will not speak wisely about this night’.

And, the next thing Schirmer knew, he was watching the spacecraft take off, with no memory whatsoever of what had happened since he first saw it.

We can see why Craig felt dubious about the case—particularly in the light of his negative experiences so far.
But we can also see that the whole story is a great deal more plausible than Craig lets on.
He dismisses it all as possible suggestion by the hypnotist, ignoring the fact that Schirmer went back to the police station twenty minutes later and logged the sighting.
The tingling sensation, the headaches and nightmares that followed suggest that something had happened during that twenty minutes, and that Schirmer was affected by radiation.

When Schirmer went home after the first hypnotic session, he became police chief, and yet resigned from a good job because of the headaches.
This again suggests that he is not inventing the story for the sake of attention.
Finally, his need to know what happened led him to a second hypnosis, when so much interesting information emerged—much of it anticipating things suggested by Budd Hopkins twenty years later—that it provides clues to many other abductions, and possibly to the motivation of the aliens in general.
For all these reasons, the Schirmer case seems obviously genuine, and Craig’s refusal to take it seriously demonstrates the danger of developing a negative attitude.

Was Craig
never
convinced by any of his witnesses?
Only in one case—an air force colonel, Lewis B.
Chase, who encountered a UFO when he was commanding a B-57 on 18 September 1957.
They took off from Forbes, Texas, at night, and flew down the coast over the Gulf of Mexico, then towards the Fort Worth–Dallas area.
Over Jackson, Mississippi, Chase saw a ‘real bright light’ coming towards them at about their own altitude.
He told the crew to prepare for evasive action.
The light came on at what Lewis called an ‘impossible closure rate’, so fast that the colonel had no time to react as it crossed the nose of the aeroplane.
He asked the copilot if he saw it, and the copilot replied cautiously, ‘I did if you did’.
Then they joked about having seen a flying saucer.
The radar operator soon said that he had picked it up again, staying abreast of them about ten miles away—at about 425 miles per hour.
The colonel tried slowing right down, then accelerating to top speed; still it stayed alongside—although now visible only on radar.
The colonel called Fort Worth–Dallas, and they told him they could see both of them on the ‘scope’.