Alternate Perceptions Magazine, December 2024
Alien Abductions, Satanic Rituals, and the Rites of Passage
by: Dennis Stamey
From July through September 1992, Budd Hopkins, more or less an authority on UFO abductions with books to his credit, historian Dr. David Jacobs, and sociologist Dr. Ron Westrum commissioned a Roper Poll to determine how many Americans might have been abducted by aliens. Of the nearly 6,000 queried, 119 answered that they had been taken in their sleep by extraterrestrials. Responding to several questions, most of them reported seeing strange lights, waking up paralyzed with a sense that something was in the room with them, experiencing the sensation of flying, and being unable to account for lost time )Hopkins and his colleagues called these indicators). Extrapolating the data, the three concluded that 3.7 million Americans had been abducted by aliens between those three months in question.
Before the poll was ever taken, Dr. John E. Mack, a professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School had said that he believed, from talking with patients, that hundreds and thousands of men, women, and children had been abducted by UFOs. He would go on to help design questions for the poll.
Dr. Susan Blackmore, a British professor, author, and skeptic questioned the findings and said that if these people had been abducted, they would have a better knowledge of the appearance and behavior of the non-human intelligence who took them. Instead, their stories are sketchy.
Blackmore experimented on her own with two groups of young people, 126 between the ages of 8 and 13 and 224 first-year college undergraduates over 18. She read a story to them about a girl who sees a strange object in the sky and then is visited in the night by an alien intelligence who takes her into a flying vehicle. She then gave them a questionnaire with five multiple-choice questions similar to those in the Roper Poll. Their answers seem to tally with the indicators of those claiming abductions. She noted that the adults who gave better descriptions of the fictitious aliens watched a lot of television. From these results, Blackmore concluded that TV shows about space visitors could influence people to imagine that in episodes of sleep paralysis, they have been transported into a spaceship.
So, are abductions nothing but media-induced fantasies? Not necessarily considering that there are two types. The first is where a person is kidnapped from his or her home while asleep and the second is where a person is kidnapped in the open. Both kinds of abductions are similar in content. There is capture, examination, conference, tour, a celestial journey, encounter with a divine being, return, and side effects. But that’s not always the case.
But with abductions in the open, somebody sees a strange object off in the sky, the UFO draws closer, and suddenly the individual blacks out and cannot recall anything else. They do remember waking up, looking at a clock or watch, and realizing that a couple of hours have passed. Troubled by this "missing time" the victim often undergoes hypnosis in an attempt to remember what happened to them. While under hypnosis the abductee recalls that alien beings took him or her aboard their craft, submitting them to an exhaustive and often painful physical examination and then releasing them.
With indoor abductions, there is the inability to fully wake up, the sensation of somebody being in the room with them, and the sensation of flight. Those from the Roper Poll who claimed alien contact were almost all indoor abductees.
The most famous example of outdoor abductions is that of Barney and Betty Hill who were driving through the White Mountains in New Hampshire in 1961 when they noticed a bright light approaching. When it got close, they saw that it was a disk-shaped craft. The craft emitted a series of beeps and then disappeared. The Hills returned home and then realized they could not account for two hours of their trip. Soon they began to suffer from extreme anxiety and nightmares. They eventually sought the help of a Boston psychiatrist who used hypnotic regression therapy so they could relive the lost two hours. Under hypnosis, the Hills recalled encountering a roadblock manned by diminutive beings with large heads and eyes, small ears and mouths, and hairless ashen skin. The aliens hypnotized the Hills and took them into their ship, where they put them through a rigorous and unpleasant medical examination. After the exam, the leader talked to Betty Hill using telepathy and then left them to go back to their car.
The second most notable example involves the claims of Travis Walton. On the night of November 5, 1975, Walton and six of his co-workers were riding home in a truck after working at the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona. Along the way, they spotted a saucer-shaped object hovering above them about 110 feet away. Walton jumped out of the vehicle to investigate. A beam of light shot down from the craft knocking him unconscious, and his colleagues drove away in terror. Walton claimed that he awoke in a hospital-like room where he was being observed by three short, bald creatures. He fought with them until three humans restrained him and put a transparent plastic mask over his face. He lost consciousness, and the next thing he remembered was walking along a highway five days later, catching a glimpse of the spacecraft as it disappeared into the sky. A lot of skeptics including Philip J. Klass have questioned Walton’s veracity but it is a fact that when he was found, he sported a full five days’ worth of beard growth, for example, and appeared significantly malnourished.
Coming in third is the case of Antônio Vilas-Boas, a young Brazilian farmer who said that he had been forcibly taken aboard an egg-shaped UFO in 1957 where had sex with a lovely female after the occupants had a blood sample from his chin. The woman was about five feet tall and had cat-like eyes. After intercourse, she pointed to her stomach and then to the sky, apparently indicating that she was going to have their baby back on her home planet. This seems to be the first recorded alien abduction.
The indoor adductions are more personal and many of them can be found on social media. We did come across one story in the esteemed Harvard Gazette for February 20, 2003 (“ Alien Abduction Cases Examined” By William J. Cromie). A man identified as Mark H. says he woke up one night, unable to move anything but his eyes. He saw flashing lights, heard buzzing sounds, experienced feelings of levitation, and felt electric tingling sensations. Most terrifying were the nonhuman figures he saw by his bed and believed they were aliens. Later, he underwent hypnosis to try to recall exactly what had happened to him. While under hypnosis, Mark remembered being whisked through an open window to a large spaceship. The aliens took him into some kind of medical examining room and he had sex with one of them. Afterward, his abductors brought him back to Earth and returned him to his bed.
Back in 2010, a Reddit user named TBatWork described some of his experiences that culminated in an alien abduction: “The first night I had it was odd. I felt locked into bed, and I felt someone watching over me. My first thought, which was unfortunate I think, was that my roommate was being an asshole and was watching me sleep. Eventually, my muscles went slack and I looked around the room. Nothing. Some people associate the experience with their immediate area being haunted. I had shit to do in the morning, so I went for and succeeded at round two of sleep.
“I had a few other incidents, two I can't readily recall, one where I honestly thought I had been hurled out of bed by something and was falling. Then came the alien abduction night. “My dad raised me on alien stories and had trained me to give the Vulcan salute and ask for the lottery numbers if I ever met alien life. There are two things I experienced that night that are often associated with abduction.
1.) The flash of blue: it's something they say happens during the abduction. In my paralysis, my vision was confounded by what looked like a vivid blue strobe light.
2.) Ascent: my body was contorting upwards uncomfortably. My breath was coming out in ragged gasps. Eventually, my body went slack again and I slid back into bed. I looked around just to be sure I was in my room. Nothing was disturbed, so I went back to sleep.”
What is sleep paralysis anyway? By definition, it’s a temporary inability to move or speak that may occur after falling asleep or before waking up where the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness are blurred. People usually maintain consciousness during these episodes resulting in hallucinations and a sensation of suffocation. As far as hallucinations, there are three types: 1.) intruder hallucinations where the sleeper perceives a dangerous person or presence in the room, 2.) chest pressure or incubus hallucinations where the sleeper feels they are suffocating or that someone is sitting on their chest (frequently occurring in tandem with intruder hallucinations), and 3.) vestibular-motor (V-M) hallucinations where the sleeper senses they are flying or having out-of-body sensations. All three of these hallucinations are reported in the indoor abduction cases.
Most of us have experienced sleep paralysis. Ours usually comes after a bad dream where we’re trying to wake up but can’t. We see the room but we also see fragments of the dream. These bouts are rare for us and we've never really undergone any of the aforementioned hallucinations. We have known people who regularly suffer from this condition which is a symptom of narcolepsy. One woman once told us that she woke up one night and couldn’t move and sensed a malignant presence in the room with her. In the 19th-century novel Moby Dick, the main character Ishmael experiences an episode of sleep paralysis. and sees something malevolent in the room.
Here’s a description of a sleep paralysis episode related by a young Indigenous Alaska woman who sought help at the Counselling Office of the Anchorage Community College (we’re referencing the article “Eskimo Sleep Paralysis” by John D. Bloom and Richard D. Gelardin published in Arctic, Vol. 29, No. 1 (March 1976)): “Sometimes it starts with a buzzing. Sometimes I can almost see something and it scares me. My grandparents told me it was a soul trying to take possession of me and to fight it.
“After the buzzing sound, I can't move. Sometimes I really start feeling like I am not in my body anymore, like I am outside of my body and fighting to get back. If I don't get back now I never will. I really get panicky. It takes me a long time to move sometimes, like forever. I feel like if I don't get back into my body I am going to die. That is the first thing that I think of. I finally wake up and move and my heart is just pounding, and I am all shaken up and frightened.”
Reddit user TBatWork said that he was more or less weaned on alien stories while the Eskimo woman was weaned on native traditions about how during sleep the soul is believed to be more vulnerable to influences from spirits and more likely to leave the body. Does this mean that what people see or experience during sleep paralysis is colored by their beliefs? Or are they colored by our collective cultural beliefs? Was Mark H. a UFO enthusiast? How about those who claimed in the Roper Poll to have been victims of alien kidnappings? Were all of them fascinated by UFOs?
In ancient and medieval times, there was a strong belief in the Old Hag or a witch who would sit on people's chests at night preventing them from moving. Dr. David J. Hufford, who examines this legend in his book The Terror that Comes in the Night: an Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions asks: "Why is a particular believed narrative stable across time and space?”
Closely related to the Old Hag and certainly more prolific is the mare. This being or witch as it is sometimes referred is featured in Scandinavian folklore and Nordic legends associated with sleep and nightmares. The mare sits on the chest of a sleeping person and gives them bad dreams. Hence, the word nightmare. Derivatives of the mare can be found throughout the world.
Beside the Old Hag and the mare are the incubi and succubi. These are male and female demons who not only straddle people in their sleep but seduce them as well. The incubus will mount a woman while sleeping and get her pregnant, the offspring being witches, demons, or the deformed while the succubus will straddle a man to receive his semen to survive. These tales are universal and date back to ancient Egypt and Sumeria. The incubus comes in a variety of forms from a dwarfish creature to a fiery light. Like in the Old Hag stories, those visited by these demon rapists supposedly felt a heavy weight is felt on their chest or the inability to wake up. Thomas Aquinas discussed these entities in his Summa Theologiae and suggested that they can switch genders, extracting semen from men as a succubus and then turning it into an incubus and depositing it into a female.
Sexual assaults by ghosts and demons persist even today. G.L. Davies in his 2014 book Ghost Sex: The Violation chronicles a British woman’s alleged sexual abuse from two paranormal entities. 40 years earlier, in Culver City, California, a woman named Doris Bither was sexually tormented by unseen beings. The case inspired Frank De Felita’s 1978 book The Entity which was made into a 1982 film. Paranormal 2 actress Natasha Blasick, who starred in Paranormal II, claimed to have had sex twice with a ghost. Other celebrities like Lucy Liu have also claimed sexual encounters with spirits. Some suggest that these are examples of spectrophilia, a fetish where someone is attracted to ghosts or spirits, but there is no scientific evidence for this condition. A more plausible theory is False Memory Syndrome where vivid dreams or fantasies may be misremembered as actual events, especially in suggestible individuals or those expecting paranormal experiences. This is similar to what Dr. Susan Blackmore believes is the cause of alien abductions. Maybe in part, she’s correct.
Whether alien abductions are real or not, they have certain similarities with witchcraft lore. In the Black Mass, a perverted version of the Catholic Mass, the participant is magically whisked away often from their bed where they meet an otherworldly figure who requires some form of body fluid. Afterward, the participant has intercourse with the devil, whose penis is large, black, and ice-cold. Many of the accused witches admitted that they preferred sodomy over vaginal intercourse.
Under hypnosis, Betty Hill mentioned being pierced in her navel with a large needle and Barney said his sperm was taken after being probed anally. But that’s not uncommon with these types of cases. In his investigations, Dr. John Mack found that many claimants said that they were immobilized while those with them were rendered comatose, recounting flights through walls or closed windows into craft for examination, women having their eggs extracted and men having their sperm taken. Some of these abductees would say that in later encounters they would meet their hybrid offspring.
The current belief among Ufologists that the world is being populated by alien/human hybrids echoes the fear among demonologists during the witch mania of the 15th and 16th centuries that demon/human hybrids were being spawned by witches.
In his book Communion, Whitley Strieber described being abducted by aliens who inserted a one-foot-long anal probe inside him. It felt like a living entity, but when it was taken out he was surprised to see it was a mechanical device. He also drew comparisons between his experiences and visitations by the succubi. In one episode, he alleged that he was penetrated by a female alien. Similarly, Calvin Parker said that during his 1973 abduction in Pascagoula, Mississippi, a female alien stuck her long finger down his throat.
Walter Stephens in his book Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief contends that the interrogators in the witch trials set the narrative for the testimonies of the accused especially when it came to stories about how they fornicated with demons or the Devil himself. By amassing confessions about copulation with demons the reality of these creatures and subsequently angels could be proven. It also erased any doubt they had about the supernatural.
There are other correlations such as the wearing of masks. The Devil in Sabbat ceremonies wore a mask while the aliens encountered by abductees also wore masks or helmets covering their faces. There’s also abduction and flight. The accused witches said they were lifted in the air and transported miles away to attend a Black Mass. At the same time, abductees recount levitating into the sky, teleporting aboard a UFO, and flying into space. For a detailed analysis of these comparisons, we highly recommend the article “Flight and Abduction in Witchcraft and UFO Lore” by John Brent Musgrave and James Houran published in Psychological Reports, 2000, 86.
Many psychologists contend that the interrogators in witch trials, the hypnotists in alien abduction cases, and the prosecutors in Satanic ritual abuse (SRA) litigations are setting the narrative. That might be true in part but overall no. The indicted witches generally gave the same details about their meetings with the Devil, regardless of the country they were in, just as the abductees give the same details about their meetings with extraterrestrials even though some know little or nothing about UOs. Children in SRA trials describe imaginary evil rituals that closely match portrayals of the Black Mass, something they could not possibly know about.
But not all alien abductions have sexual overtones. Travis Walton’s abductors placed him on a table and his “shirt and jacket were pushed up around my shoulders, exposing my chest and abdomen. A strange device curved across my body. It was about four or five inches thick and I could feel that it extended from my armpits to a few inches above my belt. It curved down to the middle of each side of my rib cage. It appeared to be made of shiny, dark gray metal or plastic.”
In 1966 19-year-old Robert Matthews, an airman in the United States Air Force, was assigned to the North Truro Air Force Station In Massachusetts. Matthews took a bus on October 1 to Truro and then used a payphone at a grocery market to call the station. He told them he had arrived and the person on the other end told Matthews a truck would come pick him up. This was around 8:45 p.m. As he waited by the side of the road the airman noticed strange lights moving back and forth across the night sky. Getting scared, Matthews called the Station again but the airman told him a truck had been dispatched nearly an hour ago. When the driver arrived at the market he couldn't find Matthews and had returned to the base. Matthews looked at his watch and saw that was 9:45 p.m.
This wasn’t the first strange experience Matthews had. When he was five or six years old he woke up one night and saw a glowing green figure standing next to his bed. He tried to scream but was paralyzed. The luminous green entity pulled up his pajama top and proceeded to do something (Matthews wasn't sure what) to his chest. In the morning he told his mother that he had seen a ghost in his room but she reassured him he only had a nightmare.
In 1984 when Matthews was long out of the Air Force, he noticed a copy of the book Missing Time by Budd Hopkins. The creature depicted on the cover reminded him of the green ghost he had seen as a child. Matthews contacted Hopkins who quickly answered his letter. The author informed him that he had also a strange object off the coast of Truro in 1964. Back then, Hopkins had a studio on Cape Cod where he painted.
Hopkins arranged for Matthews to have a hypnotic session. The hypnotist brought Matthews back to that missing hour in Truro. While in a trance he described how the lights he had seen came down from the sky and landed near the market. Matthews entered the craft and encountered four alien beings. Much as they did when he was a child, the creatures examined his chest before putting him back on the street,
Author Peter Muise dug into the history of Truro and uncovered two strange tales about the supernatural that have sexual subtexts. In the 1800s, Captain Sylvanus Rich and his crew dropped anchor off the shore of Truro. He sighted a small house in the dunes and decided to row ashore, hoping the owner would have milk. When he returned, he told his men that only an old hag lived in the hut and that she wore red shoes. He was nevertheless able to purchase fresh milk. After they set sail, a terrible gale arose but the captain refused to come out of his cabin.
In the morning after the storm abated, Rich emerged and told his crew that the milk was bewitched because he fell into a deep sleep after he drank it. That was when hag came into his room. She threw a bridle over his head and climbed onto my back, riding him up and down Cape Cod like a racehorse, digging her red shoes into his sides if he closed down. The captain lifted his shirt and showed them the bruises made by the heel marks. The hag rode Rich every night as his ship drifted into the Atlantic. Finally, a merchant vessel captained by one of Rich's sons caught up to the floundering ship and the young man was somehow able to break the spell.
There was a similar yarn about a sailor who, in 1780, stole some doughnuts from an old house in the dunes of Truro. When he got back to his ship, a witch started visiting him every night riding him along the shore of Cape Cod. Eventually, he loaded a musket with a silver bullet and shot the hag, thus ending the curse. These two tales, undoubtedly apocryphal, remind us of the Old Hag myths.
And not all bedroom invaders involve aliens. A Reddit user named Vokarius (we are skeptical about stories on social media but we sometimes refer to them since these platforms have become a forum for modern folklore), wrote that he “suffered a lot from sleep paralysis from childhood through my late teens where I thought things were in my room.” He added: “When I was between 6 to 8, I had dreams about these witches that would come flying down the attic stairs into my room, hover about, then fly out the windows of my room.” Besides witches, Volkarius “had vivid dreams during that time being on a sort of factory conveyer belt, and some of the neighbor kids were there, but they seemed to be in pieces, but still alive, being put together.”
UFO researcher Jacques Vallee has written extensively about the similarities between fairy abductions of yore and today’s alien abductions noting analogies such as diminutive kidnappers and missing time. The outdoor alien abductions especially mirror fairy folklore but instead of people being taken into a mound or some subterranean abode, they are taken inside a spaceship.
W.Y. Evans-Wentz in his The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries discusses many incidents of people being spirited away by the little people. Evans-Wentz interviewed a man named James O'Conway who lived in the village of Rosses Point in Sligo County, Ireland who told him that a young man in nearby Drumcliffe had been taken by the fairies, known locally as the Daoine Maithe, while in a "trance." Another individual whom O'Conway knew quite well was supposedly "haunted" by these beings for a year and was intermittently taken away while also in "a dream or trance state.”
A few of these fairy abductions involve sex. The Scottish ballad of Leesom Brand tells about how a boy aged ten who finds his way to “an unco’ land where the wind never blew and no cocks ever crew.” There he meets and falls in love with a woman only eleven inches tall. Despite her tiny stature, this lady often went to bed with other men, and the young boy, despite his youth, was next in line, getting her pregnant in the process. Both are forced to flee back to the human world.
During the 1600s, the printer and bookseller Moses Pitts, who produced the first Atlas, documented, in a letter to the Reverend Dr. Edward Fowler, Bishop of Gloucestershire, the case of a young woman named Ann Jeffries who was also abducted by fairies. The incident occurred in 1645 when Jeffries was working as a house servant for the Pitts. One morning she was in the garden and heard a ringing noise. She noticed six small men with large eyes and dressed in green approaching her. They somehow paralyzed the maid and took her to "a castle in the sky." Here she had intercourse with her captors, which must have been quite a sight.
The Pitts discovered the maid missing but after a few hours found her lying in the garden. Jeffries kept seeing the little men for over a year. Finally, she told the Pitts about her experiences and they quickly had her arrested for witchcraft. Despite being deprived of food while in jail, the woman continued to thrive, asserting that the little people kept her fed. Miraculously enough, she was released and later went on to practice medicine, knowledge that she said had supposedly acquired from her fairy abductors.
In old European tales of the Wild Hunt people were said to be snatched out of bed by the flying legions of Odin. This seems to have continued through modern times. The German folklorist Friedrich Ranke in his 1914 study of the supernatural entitled Sage und Erlebnis noted that epileptics and those who had been swept away by the Wild Hunt both reported roaring sounds, a sensation of flying, and a loss of memory.
Now what do stories of alien abductions, the Satanic panic, or the Black Mass remind you of? Have you ever pledged yourself to a college fraternity or sorority and remembered being awakened in the middle of the night, taken away, and put through a series of humiliating, physically and mentally abusive, and sometimes even sexually abusive hazing activities? These are rites of passage and they can be found in the military, motorcycle gangs, prisons, religious sects, the playground, or wherever there is a group. To belong, you must pass the test and after that, you are transformed either figuratively or literally. Even when you start a job, you may have to get coffee and doughnuts since you’re the new hire. Even worse, you might be assigned shitty tasks nobody else wants.
Rites of passage are as old as time and they can be extremely brutal as well as sexually degrading. In parts of Africa, young girls are required to have intercourse with older men while among tribes in New Guinea and Australia, the boys must also submit to adult males. These disturbing initiation rites were also practiced in ancient Greece and Japan during the Edo period.
The purpose of these rites is not only to find out if you’re worthy to be a member of the clan but to tear down the old self and create a new one. Anyone who has undergone the rigors of boot camp will testify to this.
Dr. Mack in his book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens describes how many abductees in the nearly 60 cases he investigated went from being raped or abused to becoming enlightened, He found that these people were more spiritual including having concerns about environmental issues. Bret Oldham, who said he had been abducted numerous times by aliens since he was five, which he details in his autobiography Children of the Greys, has interviewed other abductees and notes that some became adept at the healing arts. Bill and Rose Shelhart who were invited aboard a UFO in 1994 are now herbal healers. Ann Jeffries who said she was taken into the sky by the little people and had sex (or was she rapred?) acquired the art of healing from her captors.
The witch initiates had to endure the degradation of the Black Mass only to receive magical powers at the end or so they imagined.
Rites of passage, those ceremonial events that mark the transition from one social or religious status to another, some of them horrific, continue to be played out not only in this realm but also in the realm of the paraphysical. .
