I WAS ABDUCTED BY ALIENS
Copyright 1995 by Rev. Ivan Stang
Some lucky people can laugh at so-called Abduction Phenomena. I used to.
I'm a skeptic and, aside from holding a Church of the SubGenius philosophy,
I'm probably what the average religious nut would call an atheist. I
believe only in science and "Bob," and while both are admittedly damned
fickle, at least there's SOME sense to 'em. The SubGenius teachings may
sound unscientific at first, but an authentic paid scientist, Rudy Rucker,
has assured me that he can justify ANYTHING "Bob" says on a scientific
basis.
Since "Bob" hadn't said much about alien abductions, I pretty much shrugged
off those stories just like I shrug off "repressed memories" of Satanic
Ritual Abuse on the part of my fellow white trash trailer park denizens. I
wrote both off as combinations of wishful thinking, paranoia and
unforgivable, almost willful ignorance of common human dream states.
Then it happened to me.
I didn't start remembering childhood Satanic abuse on which I could blame
my inability to hold down a job, no... but I did get abducted by aliens.
Greys, to be specific. It was an ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING ORDEAL, and I no
longer titter at those who have suffered unexplainable forced intrusion
into their lives and brains. I would not wish it on my worst enemy.
What makes this confession particularly awkward is the fact that I'm a
professional preacher/satirist who has specialized in the "high weirdness"
arena. I make my living spinning wild yarns about UFOs, when I'm not
researching "REAL" UFO lore or badmouthing UFO aficionados that I consider
to be deluded. So I'm now stuck in the tricky position in which L.Ron
Hubbard must have found himself when he had to start explaining, "Well,
sure, I WAS an unsuccessful science fiction writer, and this Scientology
religion I've founded probably SOUNDS like science fiction, but I swear to
Zenu that it's FOR REAL, THIS time!" Likewise, I now know how Whitley
Streiber must have felt while writing that nonfiction book about his own
abduction experiences, Communion. He'd been writing horror and fantasy for
many years, "crying wolf" so to speak, and now he was expecting people to
believe that, THIS time, he WASN'T FAKING.
I still think Hubbard was full of crap, and while I never thought Streiber
was lying exactly, I did think he was kinda nutty.
Now here I am in the same boat, hollering about a very real wolf, and
nobody with half a brain will believe me, just because I happened to have
been BULLSHITTING about wolves on all previous occasions.
But I swear to God that I really experienced all that I'm about to describe.
I have a wife and two teenaged kids. In 1993 we were living in a large but
very old and very rickety inner city house in Dallas. My daughter Sivet
(not her real name) was 11 at the time, her brother a year older. He
doesn't figure in this, I HOPE; as far as we know, he slept right through
it.
It was a normal night. The kids were in their separate rooms sleeping, and
my wife and I were in bed reading. Then...
>>LOST TIME<<
I have the feeling that it was very much later in the night, but I can't
know for sure. It might have been mere SECONDS. Maybe I just fell asleep.
But SOMETHING is missing from my memory. I dunno what happened in the
interim, but all of a sudden I definitely wasn't just lying in bed reading.
I was lying in bed with TWO STRUGGLING BRAINS inside my head. One brain
knew that a terrible, unjust thing was being done to us, particularly to my
little girl in the next room, and the other brain was saying, "EVERYTHING'S
OKAY. NOTHING BAD IS HAPPENING. YOU ARE HAPPY AND WILL STAY IN BED
SLEEPING." And THAT was the brain that was in control of the body. The
terrified brain knew there was something unspeakably dreadful happening,
BECAUSE it was being made to stand by helplessly and "watch" while
SOMETHING KEPT ME FROM RUNNING INTO THE OTHER ROOM TO SAVE MY DAUGHTER.
There is no way I can impart even the slightest inkling of what this felt
like. Lots of scary things have happened to me -- getting chased and beaten
by rednecks, almost drowning, bad acid trips, seeing my children injured or
thinking they were lost, etc. -- but nothing can compare to the horror of
being paralyzed, of having something else take control of your body and
PREVENT YOU FROM TAKING DESPERATELY NEEDED ACTION. Well, I shouldn't say
that. I've never been raped. Rape might well be the only comparison. The
overiding emotion throughout this whole experience was one of revulsion at
being violated. I hate to admit it, but that feeling of personal revulsion
even overshadowed my parenting instincts -- at first, anyway.
My wife was awake too. The bedside lights were still on. There was a book
in her hand. She looked at me and smiled. I smiled back. Nothing was more
obvious to my Scared Brain than that these smiles were HIDEOUSLY FALSE.
BOTH of us knew that THERE WERE "ALIENS" IN MY DAUGHTER'S ROOM AND THEY
WERE DOING SOMETHING TO HER AND OVERPOWERING OUR MINDS SO THAT WE COULDN'T
FIGHT BACK. And yet we were both being held in stasis, smiling at each
other, as if the demons that had taken over our bodies thought that making
the bodies smile at each other would help placate them. We were PUPPETS.
Being a puppet makes you want to puke. But you can't, because the strings
aren't making you puke. You can only dangle there with bile slapping
against the back of your throat.
When I say we knew there were aliens in my daughters room, I'm not saying
we thought there were creatures from outer space in there. I use the term
"aliens" strictly as a pop culture reference. I knew only, but intuitively,
that the things in Sivet's room were the same beings that all those
abduction accounts describe. I didn't know or care what they were, or how
they got there, but I knew they were "the Greys." There was a "sense" of
that. (At this point I hadn't actually SEEN a damned thing.) There was also
a sense, probably implanted along with the paralysis, that this was somehow
NORMAL, and had been happening to other people for hundreds of years.
Something was making me feel like it was all part of some TRADITION, like I
was SUPPOSED to lay there while "THEY" did "THINGS" to my daughter...
because that was how it had always been done.
So my wife and I sat there in bed smiling at each other, and pretending to
read, while our, uh, "souls" were struggling to MAKE OURSELVES JUMP OUT OF
BED AND GO HELP OUR DAUGHTER.
Apparently I have more will-power than my wife does. I'm definitely a whole
lot CRAZIER than she is. And I have a very brief history of not being able
to see UFOs when everybody else can. In 1975, when we lived way out in the
South Dakota boonies of the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation, a classic UFO
hovered one night over the pond near our trailer court, perfectly visible
to everybody who lived there EXCEPT ME. Perhaps my hard-core,
psychically-insensitive, trogloditic atheism/skepticism, or possibly just
incipient schizophrenia, make me "blind" to these things! At any rate,
somehow, laying in that bed with that false rictus grin plastered on my
face against my will, I was able to break the paralysis.
Let me try to describe what this was like. Maybe it could be compared to
parachuting out of an airplane. Every nerve and brain cell in your body is
telling you not to do it; your very TENDONS are trying to hold back; but
somehow you make yourself leap out into the strong arms of gravity, anyway.
An entire OTHER BRAIN was making every step away from my bed and toward my
daughter's room feel like walking into a burning house. EVERY FIBER OF MY
BEING except the essential core was screaming, "TO STAY IN BED READING IS
GOOD AND NORMAL AND SAFE!!! TO DO OTHERWISE IS CERTAIN DEATH, AND YOU'RE
INSANE!!" Every single step required a gigantic effort of will. It wasn't
that it hurt to move, it was that it felt hideously WRONG. It went against
every instinct except one, the one that (praise evolution) took precedence:
the parenting instinct. HOW COULD I LIE THERE LETTING THIS FAKE BRAIN
PRETEND EVERYTHING WAS OKAY WHILE MONSTROUS THINGS WERE BEING DONE TO MY
LITTLE GIRL??? The fact that I had already been paralyzed so LONG added
EXTRA HORROR and a sort of shame as well.
Somehow I fought what my interpretive mind remembers as a "paralysis ray."
Funny how we have been trained by movies to think of such things in terms
of "rays." In the movies, aliens use "rays" to do their dirty work, and
that's how I still think of this paralysis. But I'm sure that the idea of a
"ray" -- and, for that matter, the idea of "creatures from space" -- result
from living at this particular level technological civilization. In another
time, I would have been visualizing devils and curses.
Step by step. I was soaked in sweat and trembling violently. A kind of
white light seemed to interfere with my vision, threatening to replace
everything. It was like the nightmare in which you're trying to slog your
way through waist-deep syrup or up an impossibly muddy, slippery road to
reach some goal, but the monsters are closing in behind you. I mean this
was BAD BAD BAD. That fake brain was yanking me back towards my bed with
all its might, but I was somehow progressing, step by clunking, halting
step, like Frankenstein's monster, to the hallway outside Sivet's closed
bedroom door. I put my hand on her doorknob. The light was getting brighter
and brighter. I was in utter full-fledged panic at this point, my heart
slamming away like a jackhammer and my knees wobbling all jelly-like. But I
yanked that door open. It was like cutting off my own hand. There was
nothing in the room. My daughter was gone. But there was light pouring from
the closet.
(I know, I know, I saw Poltergeist too.)
My daughter's closet provided the only access to the attic. A crude
trapdoor in the ceiling, reached by climbing a ladder of boards nailed onto
the closet wall, led up there. And I knew that Sivet was in the attic. With
the THINGS.
I could barely see at all. I was running on madness and Daddy-instinct
alone. But I yanked the closet door open. I tried to look up towards the
trapdoor. Getting my neck to tilt my head up, and my eyes to focus
upwards, was the hardest thing I have ever done. The light coming through
the trapdoor opening wasn't really so bright as it was somehow INTOLERABLE
to the NERVOUS SYSTEM. I lost my mind and started scrambling at the
board-ladder that led up to the open trapdoor. And then something looked
down at me from up there. A face looked at me. The panic took over
completely. The face was so impossible that every nerve ending in my body
felt like it was encased in ice. I can't describe the face except to say
that I think it was the face of a Grey or the servant of a Grey. There was
some sense of machinery and more faces and the next thing I knew I was
tangled up in bedsheets in the dark, soaking wet with sweat, shaking like a
whipped dog, whimpering, crying... my wife hugged me and comforted me AS IF
IT HAD BEEN NOTHING MORE THAN A BAD DREAM. I stopped shaking and ran into
my daughter's room, and she was sleeping safely, tucked in, snug as a bug
in a rug.
Okay.
GRANTED:
I had seen the MOVIE of Communion for the SECOND TIME, on VIDEOTAPE, only
THREE DAYS PRIOR TO THIS EXPERIENCE, and had read the book a few months
earlier. Granted, I had also read probably three or four dozen cheesy
paperback books on UFOs, from Keel to Cooper. (I've met both writers and I
consider Keel a cool dude with a carny-barker background, and Cooper a
humorless, self-deluded creep. No offense, Bill.)
GRANTED, I had been working long hours for days, hardly sleeping, and
GRANTED, I had run out of my favorite recreational dream suppressant.
So why do I have the NERVE to think it wasn't a just a dream? The same way
all UFO abductees know their abductions weren't dreams. The aliens ALWAYS
make you THINK it was just a dream. THAT's how you know it was REAL.
EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT. The Collective Conscious, from The Weekly World News
to The X Files, says so. The bug-eyed Greys ALWAYS use the "dream" trick.
That's why you only remember the SPECIAL details under hypnosis.
WHAT MORE PROOF DO I NEED?
Heck, I can go on the talk show circuit now.
I'm well aware that STUPID NEW AGE IDIOTS routinely convince themselves
that their daydreams are past life visions, or prophecies, using EXACTLY
THIS SAME LINE OF REASONING. But I'm not like that. I'm SPECIAL. I've been
SINGLED OUT by SUPERIOR INTELLIGENCES who recognized ME as one of the few
Mud Dwellers sufficiently sensitive to be OPEN to their HIGHER WAYS.
BUT IT GETS WORSE!!! Those poor crazy contactees and abductees don't know
the HALF of it.
Did you ever see any of those Nightmare on Elm Street movies? The slasher
films that you always get mixed up with the Friday the 13th series? With
the evil murderous ghost, Freddy Krueger, the Boogyman, the burn victim
mass murderer who lives only on the dream plane, but he can KILL YOU
HORRIBLY if he gets into your dream? It's actually a fairly imaginative
series. The plot device of mixing up dreams and reality allows the
filmmaker to pull off the occasional TRULY STARTLING and SURREALISTIC
scene. It's coloring-book surrealism for junior high kids, and they're
inconsistent films, rife with dopey teenager stereotypes, but I've enjoyed
them. They never SCARED me; I used to be a film special effects technician.
But.
FREDDY KRUEGER IS REAL.
I know. He attacked me in a dream. He almost killed me. I woke up
screaming. I rolled over in bed and hugged my dear wifey, sobbing with
relief. She turned toward me and it wasn't my wife, IT WAS FREDDY AND HE
WAS CLAWING MY EYES OUT WITH HIS RAZOR HANDS!
Needless to say -- sorry for the corny gimmick -- that was a dream too. But
it was REALLY NASTY, so scary that I had to get up and go to the bathroom
and dash water in my face to clear it from my head before I could go back
to sleep. And when I looked up at the bathroom mirror, FREDDY WAS STARING
BACK AT ME AND LUNGED OUT WITH HIS CLAWED HANDS AND STARTED TEARING MY
THROAT OUT WITH A THOUSAND TIMES MORE CRUELTY THAN ANY MONSTER MOVIE COULD
EVER IMPART!, until I woke up sweating and wrapped in sheets.
After that series of Freddy Krueger dreams, I tried to write up a little
essay about them, and about how close is the dream world to the waking
world, at least for lunatics like me, and how in some cosmic way, "You
never can tell." I was sitting at my Mac, typing away at this essay, when
FREDDY SUDDENLY LUNGED FROM THE SCREEN AND GUTTED ME FROM GROIN TO
STERNUM!!
Then I woke up. And I have been "awake" since then, at least to the extent
that Freddy hasn't returned. But YOU NEVER KNOW. This whole last year since
Freddy was here might turn out to have been PART OF THE DREAM TOO!
Bummer.
Freddy was a lot meaner, and a whole hell of a lot more realistic, in the
dreams than he is in the movies. But even in the movies, HE ONLY WORKS
THROUGH DREAMS. So... you see the dilemma?? THERE IS NO WAY TO PROVE THAT
FREDDY KRUEGER ISN'T REAL.
None.
The self-validating logic is circular and perfect.
There's no escaping from it. Freddy Krueger, as well as the Greys, cannot
NOT be real... according to the definition they set up for themselves. Just
when you THINK they're not real, THAT'S JUST WHEN THEY'RE THE MOST REAL.
The lack of any empirical proof IS ITSELF THE PROOF.
Let's not dwell on how this logic might apply to any and all religions,
political beliefs, philosophies, etc. In fact, let's JUST NOT THINK ABOUT
ANY OF THESE DEVILS AT ALL. Again by definition, that's the only way to
make 'em go away and leave us alone.
One time an acquaintance of mine was dozing on her couch in the middle of
the afternoon when a HUGE, SWEATY, SEXUALLY AROUSED INVISIBLE PRESENCE
suddenly woke her up with its disgusting vibes, held her in paralysis and
attempted to rape her, until she woke up.
Since I was the only preacher she knew, the young lady asked me to come to
her house and perform some kind of exorcism to banish the raping demon. I
told her that I thought she had probably experienced nothing more than a
"night hag" dream, that archetypal "helplessness" dream that everybody has
sooner or later. I had had one just the week before. I didn't tell her that
I thought she was PRETTY DURNED IGNORANT not to know that such dreams have
accounted for all manner of superstition since humans started sleeping.
For that reason, I was pretty sure that I could banish this evil thing. My
plan was to go to her house and stride around cussing at the ghost. My
understanding of ghosts is that they're more scared of us than we are of
them. I also believe that they don't exist in the first place.
Unfortunately, my friend could tell that I didn't take her demon rapist
ghost attacker seriously enough to be able to exorcise it properly; she
called another mutual friend, who did a much better job than I would have
done. This more serious exorcist placed candles in all four corners of
every room of the house, waved incense around, and muttered polite
incantations and requests for the raping devil ghosts to skeedaddle.
And by God, what do you know? It worked.
Case closed.
The Moral:
Don't ever believe anything a SubGenius says when he swears "to God" on it.
Oh, my alien abduction happened, all right. It just happened while I was
SOUND ASLEEP.
And there are people who will STILL say, "Stang, you UTTER FOOL! That's
just what the aliens WANT you to think!"
(end)
--
Copyright 1997 by Rev. Ivan Stang / 1st Orthodox Stangian
MegaFisTemple Lodge of People's Covenant Church of the
Wrath of Dobbs Yeti, Resurrected / The SubGenius Foundation,Inc.
PO Box 140306 Dallas TX 75214 / Fax 214-320-1561 / PRABOB
http://www.subgenius.com -- SubSITE of Slack