Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, September 2016
When a bewildered Abductee says Hynek advised him, “Internalize it. Don't publish it.” And other elements from the Realm of Oz
by: Brent Raynes
In the April issue of this magazine, I presented details of a retired aerospace engineer who recalled apparent 'alien abductions' going back to childhood . One particularly dramatic and lucid encounter in 1963, he brought to the attention of Dr. J. Allen Hynek and Mark Rodeghier of the Center for UFO Studies. Later, this engineer had experiences that seem to correspond with the so-called “Oz Effect” as described in my two previous columns.
During the last week of August 1985, this man was asked to fill a teaching position at a community college in the Chicago area. This new teaching assignment had its stressful moments and when those moments arose he began noticing a periodic burning sensation in his chest, similar to a heartburn. Initially he tried to ignore this, as it would generally subside after a minute or so, but as time wore on the sensation increased and became more persistent. At one point, he visited a doctor who found that he had extremely high blood pressure and referred him to a cardiologist. He made an appointment and went the following week, but after sitting in the waiting room for over an hour he grew impatient and left without seeing the doctor.
Then at the end of class one Friday afternoon in late November, as he grabbed his briefcase and was about to leave for the weekend, the teacher suddenly felt weak and dizzy. He made his way to a rest room and sat down in a chair. Then he heard like two clicks in his head as his right hand, arm and leg went limp. Though he stated that this “scared the living daylights” out of him, after awhile he found that he was able to stand again and walked about a block to his car dragging his right leg and driving home using his left hand and left foot. Once home, he began to feel much better and the feeling in his right leg began returning. For several hours, he repeatedly rubbed his right hand, arm, and leg using his left hand. Over the weekend, he seemed to return back to normal, and so Monday he returned to teaching class.
Next, on the first Saturday in February 1986, around 9 a.m., the teacher was opening his garage door when he experienced a very strong burning sensation in his chest. He went back inside the house and sat down in the bathroom. Suddenly, he felt a severe pain in his chest that he described as feeling like he'd been hit by a “steel sledgehammer.” It subsided briefly and then returned again with the same sledgehammer intensity. He sat for a few more minutes, and then realized that he must have had a heart attack. He got up and walked out, and informed an aunt who was also in the house what he suspected, and she drove him to a nearby hospital emergency room.
Soon he was taken to an exam room and run through “the usual tests”; blood pressure, pulse, blood and urine. He was told that enzyme levels showed that he had indeed suffered a heart attack. He spent ten days in the hospital. Before being released, he asked a social worker about the hospital bill and he said that he was told not to worry, that the bill (nearly $200,000) had been paid. He was discharged and his aunt picked him up around 3:30 in the afternoon and took him home. This aunt, his mother's sister, had raised him from age five as both of his parents were deceased by then.
He went to bed around 11 p.m., falling asleep while laying on his stomach. Next thing he knew he was awakened by a loud noise like someone beating rapidly on a huge and hollow tin can.
“It seemed to be approaching me from outside, over my head and into the house,” he noted. “Suddenly, as if on cue, I opened my eyes. I was lying on my back, on top of the sheet and blanket and noticed that the overhead ceiling light was on. All seven buttons on my pajama top had been opened and my chest was exposed. I quickly got out of bed, feeling somewhat confused. I noticed that the bed had been meticulously remade in military style. I was only vaguely aware of what was going on around me. I walked into the living room, still dazed, and pulled open the drapes, expecting to see the source of the unexplained sound. For some reason, I was expecting to see something UFO related. Then I went to the kitchen and the sound stopped. I placed both of my hands on the kitchen table and looked up at the circular, analog clock hanging on the wall. It read exactly 4:00. My eyes were focused directly on the clock seemingly similar to tunnel vision. The hands started to move in a normal clockwise motion, but the speed that the hands were moving was much, much faster than normal. I suddenly became aware of my surroundings but my eyes were again still focused on the clock. It read exactly 5:30. I was still standing in the same position, with both hands on the table, my eyes still focused on the clock. I soon realized that I could not account for the previous hour and one half which seemed to pass in the blink of an eye.”
He walked out of the kitchen and met his aunt coming down the hall. He asked if she had gone into his room and remade the bed. “Don't be silly,” she said. “You must have been dreaming.”
Within the week, the teacher returned to see the cardiologist for a follow-up exam. Soon after beginning the exam, he called in a nurse and ordered an EKG. “He watched the EKG and got a very strange, puzzled look on his face,” he noted. “He called in another doctor who examined the printout of my electrocardiogram. The doctor said, 'Are you sure that you had a heart attack because the EKG is showing that you never had one.' He then took a stethoscope and listened to my heart. He did not hear a heart murmur [one had been reported before he had left the hospital] and said that he wanted to examine me again at my next appointment.” The cardiologist then, the teacher recalled, wanted to send him to see a psychiatrist for possible depression as people who have had heart attacks are often depressed feeling that part of their heart had died. “I was elated that the doctor didn't think that I had had a heart attack, even though all the previous tests showed otherwise,” he added.
The teacher found that the psychiatric building was right across from the main hospital, a building perhaps 9 or 10 stories tall. This is when the “Oz Effect” mentioned in my last two column began to play out in this case. “I expected to see a modern building; rather it was an old building with old, antique hardwood floors and walls,” he stated. “The stairwell also had both hardwood stairs and walls. The main entrance opened into a large, long hallway with offices on both sides. I expected to see lots of people, but I saw no one, not one single person which I thought was odd.” His appointment was on the fourth floor. He took the stairs instead of the elevator. He found the office and a receptionist sitting at a desk told him to go on in, he was expected. “I was expecting to see a doctor's office,” he noted. “Instead it was a classroom filled with desks. I walked through the classroom door, into a windowless room and sat down in the third desk in the front row. Shortly after, the psychiatrist came in, sat down at the teacher's desk in the front of the room and introduced himself to me.”
“From the moment he entered the room, it just felt odd. He was very tall, at least six feet three, and extremely thin. He had medium length dark hair, piercing eyes and was wearing a white, calf-length lab coat with only about two buttons, buttoned below the waist. The upper buttons were not closed. He was wearing a name tag that was hanging on a lanyard around his neck. The name tag was outside of the lab coat and clearly visible. The tag read 'Physician' rather than Doctor or M.D. When I called him Doctor, he said, 'I am not a doctor. I am a physician,' emphasizing the word physician as he stood up and leaned towards me.”
“His first words to me were, 'How do you feel about what happened to you?'” The teacher asked him if he meant the heart attack, and said the 'physician' did not respond. He then explained why his cardiologist suggested he should make an appointment to see him, to help with possible bouts of depression, and then how later after his hospitalization he was told that tests then revealed that he had not had a heart attack. The psychiatrist then asked him how he would explain that and the teacher replied that he didn't know. “Oh come on, you have some idea about what happened, don't you?” he said the psychiatrist then stated. He did, he said, but added he was reluctant to say. “Come out with it,” the psychiatrist allegedly replied. “Well come on, explain! What do you think happened to you?”
At this point, our subject felt like “he asked for it,” and so he explained about the strange noise, waking up on top of the covers, the bed being meticulously remade, his pajama top being unbottoned, the unexplained movement of the clock's hands and how he was unable to account for an hour and a half of missing time. “Have you ever had this type of experience before?” the psychiatrist asked. “I have had similar experiences like this one, all of my life,” the teacher replied. He even told him that he felt that they were UFO abductions, to which the psychiatrist simply said, “Let's talk about this.” So he described his 1963 alien abduction that had been investigated by Dr. Hynek. He even explained how he had these experiences going back to childhood. He seemed “clinically detached.” But then there was one area that he seemed curiously interested in. “When I told him about the amphitheater scenario that occurred during the 1963 experience, he expressed a keen interest in focusing in depth on the subtle details. He asked me to describe what I said to the pale, red headed being during the amphitheater experience and what she said to me. He expressed interest in how she moved and the color of her skin. The majority of our conversation focused on the amphitheater and my experience with the being. Not once did he ask me about having a heart attack. He said, 'Okay, we'll continue this next time.' He stood up and abruptly walked out of the room and left me sitting at the desk.”
“On my way out, the secretary gave me my new appointment time and said, 'Your next appointment is on the 9th floor.' She said, 'Don't take the stairwell. Take the elevator.' I thought it strange that she somehow knew that I took the stairs to the fourth floor for this appointment.”
“At my next appointment, again I saw no one in the building. It was as if I were completely alone. As instructed, I took the elevator to the 9th floor and got off. The room was located on the right side of the building. When I opened the door, a woman was sitting at a small desk. She looked vaguely familiar. It wasn't an office. There was just a chair and a small desk. 'They are expecting you,' she said. I opened the door, walked in and looked around. It was a circular room about the size of two small bedrooms. There was a hardwood chair sitting in the middle of the circular room, where I sat down. There were about a dozen people, that I assumed to be male, with expressionless faces, all wearing white lab coats who were sitting in chairs forming a circle in the room above, looking down at me. For some reason, I didn't focus my attention on them.”
“After adjusting to my surroundings, someone walked in. I have no recollection of what transpired during my 'appointment.' None whatsoever. When I got outside, I do remember looking at my watch. I was there for at least an hour and a half. I entered the building again and returned to the 9th floor. The room was totally empty. No one was there. When I went back home, I muddled over the day's events in my mind in an effort to determine what had happened. I called the same number that I was given by the original cardiologist to make a return appointment with the psychiatrist. Each time I called, no one ever answered. I tried again and again, for several days, but no one ever answered. It has been thirty years since this occurred and I still have no conscious recall of what transpired.”
Later when he returned for his second appointment with the cardiologist he learned that he had left the university and had been reassigned elsewhere. He then met with a different cardiologist, who had been an old classmate of his. During the exam, he told his old classmate about seeing the psychiatrist. “Why did you do that?” the cardiologist asked. So he explained about the depression explanation that he had been given. “I suppose it's okay,” the doctor said, suggesting I believe that this ordinarily wasn't normal procedure. When he asked the cardiologist about the initial tests that showed he'd had a heart attack, the doctor speculated that perhaps it had been a case of false angina.
Greatly puzzled and feeling extremely anxious over what had transpired, the teacher/engineer notified one of the investigator's involved with looking into his 1963 “abduction” experience. He met with him at a local restaurant and explained what had happened. The investigator suggested that he call Dr. Hynek, the one who had been the principal investigator of his “abduction.”
“When I phoned Dr. Hynek in Flagstaff, his wife Mimi answered the phone,” he recalled. “She told me that Dr. Hynek was ill, but reluctantly put him on the phone after I told her who I was. I explained everything that happened to me, from the heart attack to the psychiatrist. He told me that he had investigated several cases that were very, very similar. He said, “Situations like this have an ever increasing high degree of strangeness. The greater the degree of strangeness, the more likely it is a UFO incident.' He could offer no other explanation other than that. He said 'internalize it. Don't publish it.' He said in this situation it is best to leave it alone. It was my impression that he knew something about what had happened to me, but didn't want to share the details. Then he said, “Listen, I am going to give you the name and number of a person who is a Jesuit priest in Chicago. Give him a call and make an appointment to talk with him and tell him that I recommended that you talk with him.'”
“I followed Dr. Hynek's lead and phoned the Jesuit priest the next day. We made an appointment to meet a few days later. When I met with him, I shared all the details of my recent experiences. He asked about the 1963 experience and about Dr. Hynek. He said that the aliens, in his opinion, were a product of the subconscious, that they are a projection of our human mind and they use us to project themselves into our 3-D world. When they want to exist in our dimension, they can cordon off an entire area and allow the experiencer to participate in whatever it is that they are trying to do. In the mean time, life outside the cordoned off area is going on as usual. He thought that this is probably what happened in my case, that I did have a heart attack and the beings intervened to ensure my healing. He said, “Just internalize the experience and leave it alone.”
Dr. Hynek later passed away on April 27, 1986, of a malignant brain tumor at the Memorial Hospital in Scottsdale, Arizona. He was 75.
The teacher told me that Dr. Hynek thought that the grays might be what were once known as angels, and he admitted that he had wondered the same thing himself.
I think it's no big deal if a professional academic wishes to seriously entertain the possible existence of angels, other dimensions and paranormal realities so long as they are striving to be scientific and objective with the interpretive process of their investigations and research. Scientist or not, we're all human and have a right to entertain our deepest philosophical questions and thoughts, right? However, some skeptics obviously feel that such a mindset is skating perilously close to the edge of sober logic, reason, and common sense. Apparently, only died in the wool New Agers and downright lunatics can even begin to entertain the possibility of other realities beyond current science, according to certain mindsets.
An article in the Skeptical Inquirer by John Franch back in 2013 (Vol. 37.1, Jan/Feb) made much out of the fact that Dr. J. Allen Hynek's 1966 conversion from astronomical Blue Book consultant and UFO debunker to what he called an “ardent apostle of the UFO gospel” was not quite what it seemed. The SI author attempted to show how the astronomer's conversion from skeptic to believer was not quite what it seemed, that underneath it all, as he had reportedly once confessed to his friend and colleague Jacques Vallee, Hynek said he had become an astromer to discover “the very limitations of science, the places where it broke down, the phenomena it didn't explain.”
As a young man, Hynek became a voracious reader, thanks to scarlet fever that confined him at home at age 7 and his mother who had introduced him to the joys and wonders of reading. Before long, he began reading textbooks, including high school astronomy books. Then he began reading “esoteric subjects,” particularly drawn to the Rosicrucian secret societies and the hermetic philosophers; in particular the works of Rudolf Steiner. As a high schooler, he spent $100 (a lot of money back then) on purchasing Manly Hall's large and heavily illustrated, An Encyclopedia Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy.
Although Hynek initially saw UFOs as “a post-war craze that would disappear as quickly as the hula-hoop,” the reports kept pouring in and then there was the 1952 wave and Hynek began to speculate on a natural phenomenon he called “nocturnal meandering lights.” Capt. Edward Ruppelt, the first director of Blue Book, thought Hynek was becoming “very much pro-UFO” even back then.
I met Dr. Hynek myself at his home in Evanston, Illinois, back in September 1972. I recall how at the time I expressed some doubt about John Keel's interpretations regarding the paranormal in connection with the UFO phenomenon, but Hynek surprised me by stating that he thought Keel might actually be onto something, that he found what he had to say interesting. This is when and how I first discovered that Hynek was opening up to and admitting an interest in alternative theories and possibilities, including those of a Keelian perspective. We talked also about the heavy concentration of UFO activity being reported around the Yakima Indian reservation in Washington state and how he wanted to get boots on the ground to investigate such active locations. He autographed a copy I had purchased of his newly published book, The UFO Experience. [Which I still have] He told me how he wanted to create a serious UFO organization, and the following year he did, called the Center for UFO Studies.
Another Frozen Time Incident
In my last common, you'll recall (if you read it) I had written about instances wherein people described how time slowed down or seemingly froze for a brief period of time. About a week ago, I was reading The Pine Bush Phenomenon (2005) by one Vincent Polise, who had done some serious investigative work at the well-known UFO hotspot in New York known as Pine Bush. The book details his many unusual sightings and paranormal episodes.
Interestingly, one of Polise's earliest memories though of something strange happening to him went well before his ufological research and investigations later in life. Instead it goes back to his childhood, back to the late 1970s, when he was only 6 or 7. It was summer and he was in the back seat with his older brother as his father was driving down New Jersey's Garden State Parkway headed for Jersey shore to visit aunts and uncles. He was staring out the car window when he noticed traffic had come to a stand still. He didn't think that was too strange, as traffic congestion often happened along the highway in the summertime. But then he began looking around, everything appeared to be motionless. “Slightly panicked, I glanced at my parents and saw that they, like the cars on the road, were frozen solid,” he noted. “My brother next to me in the backseat was also frozen!” Then after about 5 or 10 seconds, everything returned to normal. That experience stayed with him for the rest of his life.
