Unfortunately, despite Dr. Simon's warning that hypnosis was not a magic wand to reveal hidden memories or truths, UFOlogists were thrilled with this potentially useful new tool. How often did innocent cases hide alien abductions, they wondered? Could hypnotic regression unlock the door to these secret parts of the mind? This question would dominate the UFO world from that day on, and over 30 years later it is still the central hub of much UFO research.
It is worth recalling that when the Hills were piecing together this memory (or fantasy) in Dr. Simon's surgery, only a handful of people knew about the Villas Boas case. An account had been placed with the British LTfO journal,
Flj•ing Saucer Review,
and would be published soon after the Hills case was documented by their doctor, but before it was yet on public record. Therefore, these two cases arc1 9 6 1 : A B D l C TI O \
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it would also propel mankind into space much further and faster than would ever have been the case had this been a purely scientific quest.
As Dr. Drake had failed to detect radio signals during his search of nearby suns, heartening news came in the discovery that some stars seemed to rotate more slowly than expected. It was believed that the 'drag' was as a result of as yet unseen planets circling around them - planets upon which aliens just might live. All we had to do now was find them.
undeniably independent of one another. Both feature alien kidnaps and both of those different versions of the same motif - medical tests and attempt� by the aliens to create 'babies' - one in an alien woman, another in a human woman who was not (and, as far as we know, did not become) pregnant.
Only then can we sec the curious way in which the Cynthia Appleton case also wcarcs into the same mixture. Soon after Villas Boas had his encounter, Appleton was visited by aliens and told she was having a baby which is somehow her own and fathered by her husband, yet different in a way that is never explained - a child of the alien world.
It is difficult to imagine that these things are simply a series of coincidences, but what did they represent? Was there really some kind of alien genetic experiment taking place? If so, it was well beyond the earth science of 196 1 (although by 1997 such an experiment is becoming more of a reality for doctors) . Was the purpose of the abductions to test our biological make-up -and to create a being that would not be entirely human? It is difficult to accept the truth of these independent stories and interpret them in some other way. Of course, if they are true, what of Cynthia Appleton's ·space baby' -who is presumably out there somewhere?
4 6 A L I E N C O N TA C T
1962:
UNDER WRAPS
S
ince the Roswell crash, there had been persistent stories that the recovered wreckage and alien bodies were located at Wright Patterson Air Force base. There is no doubt that this is where the Roswell debris (whatever it proved to be) was taken, as we have government records confinning the fact.If all this is true, it puts a new perspective on things. It means that the US Government knew that alien contact was happening from the very start of the UFO mystery and has therefore lied to the world for 50 years. Is this credible? Surely the truth would have been exposed by someone, somewhere, in a position to do so regardless of the risks or the consequences?
Researchers argue that this is precisely what has happened. We know what we know about the recovered bodies as a result of these leaks and
death-bed confessions. The stories are remarkably consistent. This either means that they reflect the truth or that each tale builds on the last one, becoming a fonn of space-age folklore.
There are claims that President Eisenhower was shown the bodies, preserved in ice, on February 20, 1954. Officially that day he was 'missing' for several hours to have dental treatment, but there are accounts that suggest he may have been otherwise engaged. Entertainer Jackie Gleason, a good friend of Eisenhower, told his wife just before his death that it was true. The alien bodies, he said, were real and it was the greatest secret in the world.
Len Stringfield, one of the most prominent researchers into crashed UFO stories, also interviewed a US Navy test pilot who claims he
In 1960 the typical UFO shape was not the 'flying saucer' or the 'flying disk', as indeed it never had been. Instead it was the oval as seen in this photograph from that year whose identity was othenvise shrouded in confusion.
J n o O n n i T
As these dramas unfolded well out of the pubic eye,
NASA
continued its exploration of space. john Glenn emulated Yuri Gagarin and became the first US astronaut to reach orbit. From then onwards, space flights became more and more frequent and their success rate was staggering. The space programme induced a sense of euphoria bordering on omnipotence, a belief that nothing could go wrong.Mariner 2 also set off for Venus and sent back the first information about the earth's nearest planetary neighbour. Science-fiction stories (and alien contactees) had, during the 1950s, told of how tills world was very much like our own and (the contactees alleged) the home of the tall, blond aliens that had been frequently reported. Unfortunately, Mariner 2 (and a series of space missions that followed) showed Venus to be a 'hellish' world, with enormous temperatures and poisonous gases - the result of the greenhouse effect gone mad. There was no possibility that humanoid aliens could exist there. Indeed, the prospects for any type of life there were considered very slim. Science had shattered the illusions
was leading a group of men running through Wright Patterson in April 1962 when they stumbled upon an intact UFO inside a secured hangar. Despite the pilot's top-security clearance, they were ordered to leave, and it was later intimated that they should keep the matter to themselves. What the pilot had stumbled across was the greatest secret in the US Government.
There were also stories from a higher ranking officer (a Colonel) that a retrieval occurred in the New Mexico desert in 1962 . The craft contained two small humanoid beings dressed in silver and tllis time they were taken to the more local Holloman Air Force b�L'Ie, from where they reached Los Alamos and were studied by security-cleared scientists.
One of the scientists who was, he claims, invited to participate in the study of the recovery of these craft and bodies was Dr Robert Sarbacher. Sarbacher told several CFOlogist'l
1 9 6 2 : U ;\ D E H W H A P S
4 7
of both the fiction writers and the contactees, whose influence was starting to wane very rapidly.
Meanwhile, the early attempts to usc radio telescopes to detect messages from distant solar systems drew to a close and top astronomer Professor Zdnek Kopal warned: 'If we should hear that space phone ringing, then do not answer. ' His reasoning was simple. Any race more advanced than ours would instantly see the threat that we posed to them and would probably decide to eradicate us, similar to a plague of vermin being killed before they take over your house. We were better off remaining isolated and invisible.
But as humankind moved inch by inch deeper into the solar system, all hope of isolation was gone. like it or not, we had clearly announced our presence to anyone out tl1ere who had the technology to listen. Indeed, our television signals were already ten light years from earth on a non-stop journey to the outer reaches of the solar system. It was illghly probable that sooner or later someone, somewhere, would intercept them!
j ust before his death that the subject was classified 'two points lligher' than the atomic bomb and was the biggest secret in the liSA. In addition to tills, he said that the scientific team had not been able to duplicate or even understand the UFO technology (possibly the reason for the continued cover-up) and that the craft were made of extraordinarily light material. Furthcnnore, he reported that the small alien pilot'� had bodies constmcted rather like certain insects on earth, \\ith low m'L'�S �md an ability to \\ithstand the enormous inertia forces incurred during the phenomenal accelerations produced by the l'FOs in flight.
All these people could, of course, be l)ing but why would so many of them tell such inter locking stories in the last few years of their lives? Could it possibly be due to the fact that they felt free to do so because their deaths would mean that they would soon be out of the reach of the government's policy of silence?