Flying Saucer to the Center of Your Mind: Selected Writings of John A. Keel (12 page)

We see this over and over again in the UFO cases. People will be driving along a highway (always a secluded highway with no other cars on it) and they will see something in the sky. On rare occasions, it will be a metallic object but, mostly, it’s a light, and the light is flashing. Now, some people can be hypnotized very easily with a flashing light if it flashes at a certain number of intervals. I used to use a strobe light in my investigations. It had an adjustment on it so that it would flash at different frequencies. I would set this up and have the contactee look at it. I would adjust the frequency until the contactee would go off like that, hypnotized. This is what happens with these lights. They’re driving along a highway. They see this light. It’s flashing, and suddenly they’re in a hypnotic trance. Now an hour later, or two hours later, or a day later, they come out of the trance and they find that they’re forty miles away from where they had been. Also, they find that it’s taken them three hours to travel a distance that normally would take them thirty minutes. They’re baffled by it.

In the beginning, the UFO investigators were baffled by it too, because they didn’t know anything about hypnosis, or about trance subjects or fairy lore. We have to take the “little people” seriously, because there’s an enormous amount of literature on them. More than there is on UFOs... The best minds of each generation have gone out and investigated fairies. There is a newsletter in England devoted to new sightings of the little people. It just goes on and on… Go to any good bookstore and pick up a book on fairy lore, and you’ll find that it is divided into sections just like the UFO books. There will be a chapter on time lapses. There will be a chapter on abductions. There will be a chapter on sexual experiences. And when you read it, you’ll think you’re reading a flying saucer book, except it’s all done in the fairy frame of reference. In the Middle Ages, the belief in fairies was very big. The fairy lights were also mentioned throughout this literature. These lights were, of course, the same thing that we’re seeing today: mysterious lights that blink on and off and put you in a hypnotic trance.

When you’re in this hypnotic trance and you think you’re conscious, you can see almost anything, and you will swear that it’s real. When you come out of the trance, you’ll swear, “I just saw an elephant walking down Main Street.” Of course, there was no elephant. Incidentally, every year we have
dinosaur
reports. In Italy, they turned out the Army a couple of years ago to chase a dinosaur. Of course, they never caught it. I really wonder what would happen if they had come upon this living dinosaur. They wouldn’t want to shoot it, and I don’t know of any way to catch a dinosaur. I think that the Army would have been in real trouble.
[laughter]

What fascinates me are the
kangaroo
reports that we get every year from all over the country. We know there are no kangaroos in the United States, but the police are chasing them every year. We have not just Mothmen running around, but we have kangaroos, dinosaurs, and a wide variety of sea serpents. I am very interested in herpetology (snakes). I used to lecture on snakes. People used to come up to me afterwards and tell their snake stories, about the gigantic snakes that had been seen – snakes that we know are not to be found anywhere in the United States.

Anyway, the trance subject is set off by this flashing light. We do not know the source of this light. You can say they’re from outer space; you can say they’re fairies; you can say they’re demons. It doesn’t matter. We don’t have an explanation for it. We just know that that is how it works. That’s the mechanism. And that’s only the first one.

TYPE 2: POST - HYPNOTIC CONTACTEES

The second type of subject is the
post-hypnotic
subject. Most of you know about post-hypnotic suggestion. When someone is hypnotized you tell them, “one hour after you wake up, I want you to stand up on a table and crow like a rooster.” One hour later, the subject is fully awake and all of a sudden, he doesn’t understand why he has this terrible urge to stand up on a table and crow like a rooster. That is post-hypnotic suggestion. We have that in the flying saucer phenomenon, on a large scale. This is where the witnesses just need a slight trigger. It doesn’t have to be a flashing light. It can be something else. It can be a sound over a radio or telephone that triggers them and puts them back into a trance. During this momentary trance, they will see something that isn’t there at all. One common trigger that’s used is Greek letters and Greek words. We don’t know why... UFO entities for years have been using Greek names and Greek letters. One of them called themselves “Xeno.” This was widely published for weeks before anyone realized that Xeno was the Greek word for “stranger.” It’s just Greek. Are we being invaded by Greeks from outer space? I doubt it.

In a typical case of this sort, the person will say that he was driving past, say, a billboard. He looked at the billboard and the next thing he knew, he saw this huge saucer directly over the billboard. It was a huge machine with legs sticking out of it and people waving from the windows. Actually, it’s the billboard that set him off. There was some word or letter on the billboard that triggered the post-hypnotic suggestion.

In investigating this type of case, I have to go over their whole life history. I do that anyway with every case but, here, you have to try to find some point in the past couple of years where they have lost some time. Usually it was where they had taken one of these drives and discovered it took them two hours to travel a distance that should have taken them thirty minutes. One has to assume that during these mysterious two hours, something happened to them. The post-hypnotic suggestion was implanted in their mind. Two years later, they come out with this absurd story. This is also a device that’s very handy for discrediting witnesses. Suppose someone has had this experience where they lost three hours. They go to me, or Dr. Hynek, or someone else and complain about it. We start investigating it. One day they call up and say, “I just saw this giant kangaroo jumping across the road.” The reason they saw the giant kangaroo was that they had been
programmed
to see it. Naturally we say, “Oh, if he’s seeing kangaroos, he must be a nut, so I’m not going to waste any more time with him.” But it’s more and more complicated, the deeper you get into it.

TYPE 3: HALLUCINATORY CONTACTEES

We have a category that really is scary, and this is what I call
induced hallucinations.
This is one I first stumbled across in West Virginia in 1966. I’ve come across it several times since, including on Long Island and in Ohio, and in some other states. Dr. Vallee has apparently come across it, too. In his book
The Invisible College,
he has one paragraph devoted to it. In the induced hallucination, you are driving along the highway or hitchhiking or whatever, and you see a light or hear a sound. You go into a trance or you pass out. You are not taken aboard a flying saucer; you are taken aboard a truck or a van. In areas of West Virginia where flying saucer reports were prevalent, in discussing it with people who lived in the area, I learned that there were a lot of mysterious trucks and vans running around. These local people are aware of
everything
because they live on the backroads; they don’t see anything
at all
for days and days. Suddenly, they’d see a mysterious van passing back and forth. They would take notice of it. These vans, as near as we can figure out, are used to examine people. Many of the abduction cases concern medical examinations. People are taken aboard these vans and they are examined. They are probably given some kind of drug, which we’ve never been able to isolate. A number of contactees have had some strange substance in their blood that we’ve never been able to identify. While they’re being examined and given these hypnotic drugs, what we call a
confabulation
is placed in their mind. This is done very easily in hypnosis, or with drugs. You simply tell the person that they have been to another planet, and they believe it when they wake up later on. They can fill in all the details. Their mind will fill in all the details. And they will come up with one hell of a good contact story. But the contact story doesn’t mean anything.

Now it took me a long time to get wise to this tactic. Then I realized that there was another memory
underneath
the confabulation. You have to hypnotize the person many times, over a long period of time, in order to install a second memory hidden below the first memory (the confabulation). The second memory is usually much simpler. It’s simply that they are being manhandled and thrown onto this table, and that they’re being injected with something. Lights are being flashed in their eyes. They’re going through what sounds like a standard medical examination. Then they’re released. But they’re released with that memory so buried that they remember only the wonderful trip to another planet. That doesn’t mean that
all
of our contactees who claim to have gone to another planet are victims of this, but it means that most of them are.

The keys to this are the physical sensations that they feel. When you’re dreaming and a mosquito comes along and bites you in the eye, you may start having a dream that you are being chased by cannibals with spears. They’ve stuck you in the eye because your mind is translating that feeling into the dream. This works in much the same way in the UFO contact. The physical sensations are the only important things in these stories. The women, especially, feel that a needle has been thrust into their stomach around the belly button. As you know, Betty Hill claimed that. But there are many other cases of that, and we’re baffled by it. One theory is that they’re using these long needles to reach the ovaries, and that may be. But I think there must be something else to it, because we find that this “needle in the navel” was important in witchcraft lore, too.

With the men, the physical pains that they feel are often around the fingertips. Needles have been poked into their fingertips. And, by golly, if you look at their fingertips two or three days later, you’ll see marks where something has been thrust into their fingertips. Also, with the men, something is placed underneath their chin. There are glands there, and it may be some method of draining substances from these glands. Again, there’s no way to speculate, but they do have marks afterwards under their chin, where something has been definitely poked there. There are those who like to yell, “Hoaxes and liars!” But how would someone go about poking themselves under the chin with a hypodermic needle? I think it’s a little grizzly. Most people wouldn’t do it just to provide evidence.

We don’t know what these trucks are up to. We don’t know where they’re from. We know that a couple of years ago in Montana, they did have signs on the sides that said “Smithsonian Institute.” We checked immediately with the Smithsonian, and they didn’t have any trucks running around Montana. They didn’t know what the hell was going on. So we’re dealing with a human-based group. The deeper you get into it, the scarier it gets. Those of you who read Dr. Vallee’s latest book know that he now accepts that notion. He believes that it’s an old religious cult, which is maybe a workable idea. But it doesn’t make too much sense that anyone would go through all that trouble.

In 1967, Russia had an outbreak of flying saucer attacks like this. Russia immediately issued a very long diatribe claiming that the CIA was doing it to Russian citizens, as a method of reviving religion in Russia…

TYPE 3 SUBGROUP: DISTORTIONS OF REALITY

My last book,
The 8
^th
Tower,
was originally titled
Distortions of Reality.
I’ve had a number of cases where people have suffered distortions of reality. In contactee cases, it’s common for the people to say that a UFO landed beside the road and took them aboard and so on. When they go back later to find the spot where the UFO landed, they can’t find it, even though they know the road like the back of their hand… Betty and Barney Hill went back again and again to the mountains of Vermont, looking for the exact spot where they had seen this UFO. I don’t think they ever found that spot. There are many cases of this, because they’re suffering from distortions of reality. There could be a house or a landmark that doesn’t exist. You go back; you’re looking for “the white house with the red shutters.” But there is no white house with red shutters, because it never did exist. Ghost stories are filled with cases like this.

These distortions of reality are well known, in every age. In other ages they were often blamed on witchcraft. They would finger the black magicians, or the “X group.” The fairies got a lot of the blame during the Middle Ages. There’s case after case of distortion of reality in the fairy cases.

TYPE 4: ASTRAL PROJECTION CONTACTEES

There’s a couple of other kinds of contactees which, in many ways, are much more interesting than the space contactees. The fourth type is the
astral projectionist.
We get a lot of this, where people claim to have the ability to project themselves out of their bodies via the “out-of-body experience.” They claim that they go to spaceships thousands of miles above the earth that travel to other planets, and so on... Back in the early ‘70s, Otto Binder, a science writer, was onto a case with a lady who was a marvelous astral projectionist. I have a file at home that’s this thick, of transcriptions of things she said while in this state. She would lie down and go into this hypnotic state, and then she would start to describe where her “alter body” was going, and what it was seeing. It was all very fascinating. At one point, Otto wanted to do a book about it, but it never materialized. With out-of-body experiences, usually the person doing it has a “guide.” As soon as he pops out of his body, this guide shows up and conducts him on a tour of space or whatever. The guide usually is an Indian or a Tibetan. But in modern times, we’ve got a lot of spacemen acting as guides. They usually fit the classic description you find in many of the UFO accounts. Astral projection has to be recognized as part of the UFO phenomenon.