On Crashed Saucers, Little Grey Men, and Things That Go Bump In the Night

opinion by Anson Kennedy

In July of 1947, a flying saucer crashed near the small town of Roswell, New Mexico. The Army Air Force sent out a team to retrieve the spacecraft and the dead (or, in at least one case, dying) bodies of its alien crew. A security lid was clamped down, and everyone connected with the crash -- civilian and military -- were threatened, ordered, and otherwise coercedt o keep their mouths shut about what they had seen. The seal was so tight that it wasn't until some thirty years later, in the late '70s, that rumors of the "event of the millennium" began to surface. By then, the United States government had entered into a clandestine agreement with the aliens (now commonly called "Greys" because of their skin color) to allow American citizens to be abducted and bizarre experiments, mostly sexual, performed on them. In exchange, the US received advanced alien technology, later incorporated into our stealth fighters and bombers. Only through the efforts of intrepid investigators, working in spite of the obvious risks to life and limb, have these revelations come to light.

No, this isn't the plot of some bad sci-fi movie, although it could be. Instead, this is the core of a belief system. It is the One True Faith of Ufology, that eclectic religion which seems to accept any wild claim, perhaps out of fear that to reject one might call into question one's own story. You have the alien abduction "Case of the Century" of Linda Cortile (a pseudonym) in New York some years ago, the fervid picketers who chant "Yo, yo, UFO! The public has a right to know!" outside the Pentagon and selected Senator's home offices, to the "crashed-saucerites" who will not hesitate to regale you with stories of the Roswell Crash, the Kecksburg Crash, and on, and on...

This patchwork quilt of conspiracies (JFK's assassination even figures into it at some point), wet-dream stories (some tell of semen samples taken at night by handy Greys -- no word about spots on the sheets in the morning), and even the occasional sighting of an actual flying saucer (although these seem to be on the decline nowadays) make up the worldview of the UFO Believer. This person is always ready to tell you that the government will come clean about UFOs "by the end of this year." Such claims have been made nearly every year for decades. This person's fundamental faith, however, is in the Greys, a schizophrenic species who abducts humans and steals fetuses on the one hand, and will soon reveal themselves and solve humankind's environmental problems on the other.

The Greys, now there's a creature from out of some grade B sci-fi movie. Maybe I Married a Monster From Outer Space, or Killers From Space. Roughly four feet tall with an overdeveloped cranium and tear-drop shaped "wrap around eyes," the Greys, we are told, come from the star Zeta Reticuli. Or, some say, they come from our own far future to revitalize a human gene pool decimated by disease and war. Or, still others will say, they are both and neither. Whatever the case, the Greys are both the heroes and the villains of Ufology; its God and Satan rolled into one -- a Holy Duality of the UFO. They are devils to Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs, authors of some of the Holy Books of the religion, and gods to John Mack, the Harvard psychologist whose book Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens is the challenger as the new Gospel of the Greys.

Greys come as thieves in the night, to fly their sleeping victims (through walls and closed windows if need be) to UFOs hovering outside. Funny how these waiting spacecraft are never seen by neighbors or passers-by -- save in that spectacular "Case of the Century." It was witnessed by no less a personage than the Secretary General of the United Nations, but we're told he won't talk. Once on the ship, the still-sleeping victim is subjected to an examination which includes probing every orifice and the extraction of "genetic material" (semen from men and unfertilized ova from women -- the procedure may be less uncomfortable for the men than the women). The "Experiencer," to use the correct religious term, is then returned to his or her bed. Apparently this "harvested" material is combined with the aliens' genes and the fertilized hybrid eggs implanted in women on subsequent abductions. But these developing fetuses are never allowed to come to term, not in their mothers' wombs anyway. A few months after implanting, they are again "harvested" by the Greys.

So much for the deviltry perpetrated by these little bad guys. They also reveal their angelic side to the Experiencers, warning of impending environmental cataclysms and promising to save the world before they happen. Some Experiencers claim to be "enhanced." These Chosen Ones are called "Prodigies" by some researchers. Some Prodigies find themselves suddenly able to understand the most complex theoretical physics and mathematics, still others to possess vastly widened consciousnesses. Unfortunately, none of them have actually produced any tangible and significant advances in any field (except that of Ufology perhaps).

So why would any non-Experiencer care about this odd sub-culture? The growth of belief (and the sustained suspension of disbelief) carries with it a strange fascination: how do these things form? The quest for the answer to this question is what draws many of us. The religious imageryis clear.

The world of the UFO Believer is a study in the development of myth and religion, a fact which has been apparent from the fifties right up to the present. From Leon Festinger's When Prophecy Fails published in 1956 to Curtis Peebles' Watch the Skies! published this year, this question has intrigued researchers.

So now we have a Holy Grail of the skeptics: the search for an explanation. In this sense we are not unlike the UFO Believers, who also look for answers but find them in the Higher Power of the Greys. Unwilling, or unable, to believe, we look for the reasons why people see a flying saucer when only Venus is in the sky, why they tell stories of alien abductions when no evidence of the events exist, why stories of Things That Go Bump In The Night are so beguiling.

We may never find the answers, but often it is the case that the quest itself is its own reward. And if we do find the answer to one of the questions, we'll always have another to take its place.

[Comment on this opinion] [Return to Anson Kennedy's Home Page]