Alien Life Forms | UFOs & Aliens

There was one night where I recall waking up suddenly and across from my bed was a closet that was missing one door and I had hung a curtain over the side of the closet without the door. I wasn't aware of what time it was. I was just frightened. I don't recall dreaming or anything like that but I was terrified and I could make out a figure in there. How far away is he from you? Like five feet? No, he's right in front of me. Okay, so you get a good look at him now. Yeah. Describe him to me. Small body. You can see his ribs. No hair. Smooth head. He doesn't say anything. They allegedly number in the hundreds of thousands. Men and women who swear on their lives they have had extraordinary, inexplicable, sometimes invasive close encounters with aliens. Whether or not they are telling the truth is at the center of a worldwide controversy. Are alien visitations for real? And if there is life on other planets, have they been using Earth as a cosmic biology experiment? UFO and alien experts, as well as scientists who believe life exists beyond Earth but has yet to be found, are searching for clues and answers. The age-old quest to decipher if we are only part of a vast cosmic community has spawned many visions and stories of alien creatures walking the Earth. Despite the absence, so far, of credible scientific evidence, there remains a yearning to end our terrestrial loneliness and discover we're not the only planet that wonders and dreams about other worlds. This yearning also has prompted mainstream science to dedicate more and more time and money to the search for alien life. Armed with new findings from a grand array of telescopes and space probes, scientists are convinced that within the next two decades, they will be able to track down our closest ET neighbors, if they exist. Alien abduction proponents and their research subjects insist the aliens are already here. They point to the accounts of people such as Bob Smith and his mother Susan, who claim to have witnessed paranormal encounters with extraterrestrials. Sometimes the experiences are so traumatic, to find answers, those who believe they have encountered aliens turn to freelance abduction detectives, like Bud Hopkins. Hopkins, an artist in New York City, became intrigued with UFOs more than 25 years ago. Ever since, he has devoted himself to investigating tales of alien encounters and abductions. I remember my daughter would come down in the morning saying, what the heck was my brother doing all night long? Because I couldn't sleep because there was so much knocking going on in his room. Now, he shared the room with his younger brother, and they were petrified of the closet. They were petrified of the closet in that room. It was an attic bedroom. They were both afraid of the closet. And my daughter would complain about this banging noise she would hear in the boys' room. And there was one time where my daughter literally flew out of her room and down the stairs. How do you mean, flew? I mean, flew. I mean, her feet did not touch the ground. I was in the living room fooling around with something, plastic horses or something. My parents were cleaning up from dinner. My little brother was asleep under the dinner table, which was his habit at the time. And my sister was going up to her bedroom to continue with her homework or whatever. When I heard her reach her room, I was suddenly aware of a distant but loud sound, something yelling. And she screamed, came flying down the stairs. She told us that she went into her room, and there was a small being sitting on her bed. And when she entered the room, it screamed her name. And that being screaming her name is what I heard. What I essentially say I can no longer disbelieve is the idea that we are being visited by some non-human intelligences who have an incredibly advanced technology. Where they come from, I have no idea, but that they are picking up human beings in a regular, almost a scheduled, repetitive series of procedures, which has a particular goal that they are taking our DNA, sperm and ova samples, tissue samples and so forth, mixing it with their own and trying to produce some kind of hybrid mix. That is a staggering notion. It really requires the sort of evidence we haven't seen. And yet, on the other hand, attempts to explain it by known mechanisms really have not worked. For years, Jerome Clark has studied UFO and alien abduction phenomena. He likens today's tales of flying saucers and visitors to ancient accounts of fairies and mermaids. In historical time, as well as ancient time, people believed in the existence of things like fairies and merfolk because some people experienced them. These were experientially real. Now, that doesn't mean that fairies and mermaids live in the world, which I certainly do not believe. But I also believe that people did have vivid, extraordinary experiences which seemed extremely real. Stories of alien abduction, however, date back only to the late 1950s, roughly the same time the United States and Russia began launching man into space. In September 1961, Betty and Barney Hill say they saw a UFO while driving along a dark New Hampshire road. When they got home, the Hills were two hours later than expected, a missing block of time neither could explain. Under hypnosis, a sometimes controversial method of retrieving memories, each claimed they had been taken aboard an alien spacecraft, speaking with its occupants and undergoing medical examinations. Their account became a best-selling book. And a made-for-television movie. A short time after the TV movies airing, in 1975, six loggers in northeastern Arizona see a bright light in the sky. Travis Walton gets out of their truck for a closer look. And according to the others, is struck down by a blue bolt of light. Panicked, the others flee, thinking Walton dead. Five days later, he reappears, dazed and confused. Under hypnosis, he too tells a peculiar tale of being lifted into a spacecraft, surrounded by several small beings, and undergoing surgery. Walton also received the Hollywood treatment in the feature film, Fire in the Sky. Walton staunchly defends his story. Perhaps the most famous of alleged alien abductees is novelist Whitley Streber. He writes how he was taken from his upstate New York cabin, into the chamber of an alien ship, where he was operated on and internally probed. This has resulted in a number of books from Streber, including the best-seller, Communion. The hills in 61 were among the first to come forward, but thousands have followed. The experiences of Bob, Susan, and the many others Bud Hopkins interviews convince him that aliens target specific families, often over a period of years, perhaps to maintain a genetic link among abductees. He also believes aliens do not cover their tracks, and have left physical evidence of their presence. The point is, if something physical is happening, which involves some kind of an incision, it's a logical question to ask, you know, well, is there any sign of that after this is over? And in fact, there is. They fall in certain patterns, over and over again. Patterns are generally the straight line cut, almost like a surgical cut. There are a number of other types of marks that turn up all the time. The scoop marks, which are generally roundish, which are a serious depression, sometimes large, sometimes small. How'd you get that? I'm not sure. I don't know, actually. I don't know at all. Because it's so, like, centered there. It's quite geometrically correct. Yeah, it's right smack in the middle. So I think it's an interesting mark. People who believe they've been abducted come from every walk of life, every class and race, virtually every nationality. Even the skeptical have come to understand that most of the abductees truly believe something has happened to them. Co-author of The Abduction Enigma, William Cone is a clinical psychologist who believes there are more down-to-earth reasons for abductee scars. In general, these people are very sincere. They truly believe this happened to them. As far as the scoop marks, things like that, take any person off the street, take a good look at their body, and you're going to find a scar, a cut, a mark someplace that they've never noticed before because it hasn't been important. So you're able to, through some effort, take some disparate pieces of evidence and weave them into a fascinating story. The fact that you can do that doesn't make it true. Suppose you wake up some morning and you have a scar on your body and you can't explain it, then the answer is you can't explain it. I mean, just because you have a cut, a bruise, or a scar doesn't mean aliens did it. Similar cuts and marks were pointed to as proof of sorcery during the Salem witch trials in 1692. Whether abductee scars are natural or the work of aliens is just part of a fiery controversy. It challenges not only the stories of alien abduction, but the methods used to uncover them. Are there any other memories, experiences from your childhood you want to bring up? There was one night where I recall waking up suddenly. I wasn't aware of what time it was. I was shot up in bed. Across from my bed was a closet that was missing one door and I had hung a curtain over the side of the closet without the door. I saw a small white hand grasp the curtain from the inside and pull it to the side as if to open it. And I could make out a figure in there but I was terrified. I just slammed the light switch and screamed at the top of my lungs, no. The light came on. I recall being blinded by it and I saw the curtain flop back into place. The next thing I remember is waking up flat on my back in bed with the bedclothes on the floor and it was already morning by this point and I discovered a small scab in the corner of my eye perfectly scabbed over a circle. Every story of alien abduction has an explanation. It may be imagined. It may be real. Perhaps UFOs are kidnapping humans but it could also be an expression of our inner fears, maybe even our desires. An abduction is a wonderful antidote for anyone who feels alone, lonely and detached. Because here, after all, whether for sexual reasons or any reasons whatsoever, here is a being, usually a very intelligent being, who's interested in you. They want you. They want parts of you. They want to inspect you. They want to examine you. How many people go through life yearning for that from another human being and not getting it? And in alien abduction, you get that royally. Feelings like fear and desire, such as experienced by abductees, can be inspired by things that really happened. Or by things that never did but that somehow became real in the mind. Psychologists have offered another possible explanation. There is a common condition called sleep paralysis, a waking dream in which the body is unable to move or in which, during the twilight between dreaming and alertness, one senses a foreign presence. Almost half of us in our lives will at some time have a sleep paralysis episode. This is a very common experience. Yet almost no one knows what it's called or what it is or that it is a common experience. And the closest thing we have in our pop culture to that experience is alien abduction. Those in the sleep paralysis camp note that the vast majority of these incidents happen at night when the victims are in bed. Abduction researcher and believer Bud Hopkins thinks there's another logical reason for that. I think they're more at night because obviously it's easier to mask and conceal the activity. This is a covert phenomenon. And of course at night, if somebody is wakened up and there's someone in the room and they fall asleep and they wake up in the morning and they're put back to sleep, they can easily call it a dream much more easily than if they lose two hours on a 15-minute drive back from the supermarket in the middle of the afternoon. Jim Dellitoso is a successful computer inventor and engineer who moonlights as a crack UFO investigator. A single object that's flying, changing shape, having lights flying. People that say that they have been abducted have been kidnapped. They've been taken against their will. They've been poked and probed. They've been usually hypnotized in an elegant, high-tech way so that when they are brought back, they don't remember. They report thousands of cases across the board, very similar pieces of information. They were short, gray-looking, smooth-skinned, ominized-looking creatures. It is time, man. Our popular culture has a long history of portraying alien life forms as looking basically human. In addition to depictions of grays, there have been Nordics, lizard men, hairy dwarfs, to mention just a few. Biologist Clifford Pickover has given a lot of thought to the difference between the way we imagine aliens and how they might in reality appear. Humans, I think, are rather special in the sense that if you had a world even similar to Earth, which is unlikely because of many reasons in the environment, that evolution is so chaotic, you wouldn't evolve something that looks so, so much like us. I think some of the typical aliens that we hear about and see in the literature, these grays and these Nordics, they're all too humanoid. It doesn't make sense to me that these creatures would evolve on planets with totally different conditions. The appearance of aliens, as we put it, by alien abductees seems to evolve through time. In the early 40s, we had little green men. And only in the early 60s, about 1961, do we get creatures something like this with the large black wraparound eyes. It's very doubtful that evolution would follow a path that led to this type of creature on other worlds. One interesting model for an alien would be an octopus. Not many people realize that the octopus is a highly intelligent creature. Some say it's about equivalent to a dog, which is remarkable for such a strange creature. Its brain is highly textured. It's weird. It wraps around the esophagus. Octopuses are highly emotional. Their emotions are revealed with their color changes. They can't even shield their emotions from us. One wonders if we met an alien race that couldn't shield their thoughts from us, how that would affect our negotiations. Likewise, what if all our inner thoughts revealed to alien life, just by their looking at us or sensing things about us, how that would affect their interactions with us. UFO and alien enthusiasts may differ from mainstream scientists over ideas of what aliens might look like. What is less and less in contention is their actual existence. Even, surprisingly, right within our own solar system. We are fascinated by alien life forms, from the pictures in books and magazines to the surreal images at the movies. As it turns out, we may have no further to look than the cosmic equivalent of our own backyard, the solar system. Recent pictures and other data sent back from the Galileo space probe have shown signs of water on one of Jupiter's moons. What's more, the Mars Pathfinder has detected evidence of ancient water on our nearest planetary neighbor. H2O, of course, is a key ingredient to life. In coming years, NASA plans to launch another probe toward Jupiter and its moons to take a closer look. Almost all NASA's missions in the coming decades are aimed at finding evidence of alien life forms. Its Origins program, for example, is searching for the origins of life itself in the universe. The Origins program really brings together what is, in fact, a very ancient human quest, which is to look for life in any environment we can find it. It's a spirit of exploration or adventure. It goes back 2,000 years with the ancient Greeks wondering, was there life beyond the Earth? What we now have and what NASA's recognized is we have the technological ability to actually investigate these questions directly. I have the coolest job in the world. I get to look for life on other planets. And in terms of what that would mean to me personally and to humans in general, I mean, come on. To answer the question, are we alone out there? I can hardly think of any bigger question. Over the last few years, evidence of at least the proper conditions for alien life has caused considerable excitement. When the Galileo spacecraft sent back images of Europa, one of Jupiter's four largest moons, the pictures distinctly showed the surface blanketed by a crust of ice. The high-resolution data from Galileo have given us even more hope that there really is a liquid ocean underneath there. We see things that look like cracked ice and basically frozen-in-place icebergs on the surface. And by measuring the gravity of Europa, we've been able to determine that the thickness of this water-layer combination of ice and water must be about 100 kilometers thick, 60 miles. Scientists theorize a deep ocean, warmed by a hot inner core, which itself is heated by internal friction from gravity between Europa and its mother planet, Jupiter. The answer to whether life could exist in such environments may already have been found right here on Earth. More than a mile beneath the sea, near the coast of Ecuador, just off the Galapagos Islands, where Darwin contemplated evolution, lies the Galapagos Rift. Ancient volcanic fissures in the ocean floor are shrouded by never-ending darkness. Here's a place where the pressures are great enough to crush a ship like the Titanic, like an empty Pepsi can, where there's toxic chemicals coming out of the ground that are superheated to 750 degrees Fahrenheit, where there's never been any sunlight. Here's a place where there should be no life at all, and yet we're finding more life than we can ever imagine. In some places, we're finding a diversity and density of life that are higher than the tropical rainforest. And this has totally revolutionized our view of life on this planet and in other places in the solar system as well. In 1977, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute sent a three-man submersible into the Galapagos Rift's deadly waters. Researchers were stunned to find a bizarre array of creatures. The volcanic chimneys teemed with red, plushy-headed, mouthless tube worms. Giant clams fed off bacteria that thrived on chemicals generated by the intense heat. The science fiction-like sea organisms found deep within the Galapagos Rift have scientists re-evaluating the odds of life beyond Earth. One of those potential environments for alien life forms may be the ocean that many believe lies beneath the ice of Jupiter's moon, Europa. NASA extended the Galileo mission an additional two years, in part so it could focus on Europa, amassing a collection of close-ups that may, under further analysis, hint at the existence of underwater alien life there. In the long run, I think NASA's very interested in sending a number of missions to Europa, first to map it, and then the longer term to put down landers and start trying to break down below the ice and see what we can find. In addition to the Europa orbiter mission, NASA hopes one day to launch a mission to Europa's surface. Remote-controlled underwater probes, called hydrobots, would melt through the ice, hunting for alien life forms in the waters beneath. Ultimately, I have friends that are oceanographers who are just champing at the bit, waiting to get a mission to Europa where they might be able to bore down or melt down and actually get a little robot submarine in the ocean of Europa. We believe that that environment is, in many ways, similar to the environment on the Earth's ocean floors. Maybe the Earth's ocean floor is many billion years ago when life began forming on the Earth. You get lots of different opinions from different scientists as to whether, then, it's likely that life would form or not likely that life would form. In a very real sense, the only way to find out is to go and look, because our theories just aren't good enough to tell us that. We have only one example of a planet with life on it that we can study, and that's right here. To answer that question about how likely it is someplace else is you've got to go look in those places. There's another icy, forbidding place, right here on Earth, that may offer clues to life on another planet. In Antarctica, scientists have discovered the rocky remnants of millennia of meteor showers that may contain fossil traces of alien organisms. These rocks could offer a partial answer to how life evolves. A team from NASA's Johnson Space Center thinks it may have uncovered signs of past extraterrestrial life within one of these Antarctic meteorites. Some believe tiny microbes embedded in the Martian crust were cast up into space as debris when a huge meteorite slammed into that planet more than 13,000 years ago. Could this be proof that life once existed on Mars? Even more incredible, could this life that hitchhiked to Earth have been the beginning of life on our planet? It's a Genesis theory called panspermia that suggests E.T. is staring back at you in the bathroom mirror. That life on Earth evolved from Martian microbes. It's a fascinating idea, but take it with a large grain of salt. I think it's very much not proven that the things that they're looking at actually resulted from microbes on Mars. I think we have a much better chance when we bring back samples from different environments on Mars for actually looking at that. This has been a good test case, but I think the things they're talking about are too small. I don't think the chemistry really proves the case that these people are making. Microbes in a rock aren't exactly what our popular culture has in mind when it imagines strange beings from another planet. Those slow-eyed alien greys from the TV and movie screens, the ones allegedly making personal visits to our friends and neighbors, have a lot more sex appeal. And though certainly profoundly intriguing, we cannot be sure that there are real extraterrestrials lurking in the memories of alleged alien abductees. However, the alien lifeforms scientists agree could exist on other places in our very own solar system might be the first pieces of a grander puzzle. When complete, it could amaze us with proof of alien worlds in our galaxy and the greater universe. We may be part of an astounding cosmic family tree. Life is very hardy and it's very tenacious. And what I can say is, if it's out there and it's in our solar system, I think we'll find it. Maybe beyond our solar system. Who knows? Take a stroll through your neighborhood toy store or novelty shop. You'd think we were the alien nation. The obsession with UFOs and ET visitors has overtaken our pop culture with all the zeal of a new religion. When you sip your latte from a cup with an alien gray on it or wear a t-shirt that says the truth is out there, you're not only making a fashion statement, you're also making a nod to the approximately 50% of the American public who say they believe we've been visited by beings from other worlds. Oh, I definitely believe in UFOs and aliens. I had a friend once that claimed to have encountered an alien. I feel that there's no scientific evidence for them in the universe. We're from Pennsylvania. And I don't think we have any aliens in Pennsylvania. My grandmother used to say a funny thing when I lived in Kansas. She said, you know, when you go out the back door, make sure you don't trip over the little green men. Some of the stories are pretty unbelievable about people being abducted. But I think, I think probably, maybe, I think maybe something like that has happened. I don't know. And I'm actually pretty content in saying that I don't know. I think they come to explore us. I would love to be abducted. So if they're listening out there, please, I'm waiting for my ride. We seem to be so fascinated by aliens. And we see it in the movies and on TV shows. It probably tells us something about humans' desire for the unknown. Or perhaps we feel a kind of cosmic loneliness. And we're hoping that we're not alone in the universe. The ongoing debate raging over the existence of aliens has firmly divided the camps of ufologists who are convinced they're already here and mainstream scientists. For the latter, the hunt for alien life became a legitimate scientific effort when, in 1960, the young astronomer Frank Drake conducted the first microwave radio search for signals from other solar systems. He later founded SETI, which stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. And we all know that it would be the most wonderful adventure to learn of the creatures of other worlds, what they're like, what their histories have been, how they live, what their technology might be. It's just one of the most fascinating things, not just to scientists, but to everybody. Of course, we have now entered an era where we have a real chance to detect other civilizations. Scientists don't expect to find anything pop culture recognizes as an alien within our own solar system. What does intrigue them, however, is whether the alien life forms we may find on other planets and moons could evolve from a primitive state elsewhere in the universe. Whether over millions of years, aliens capable of using tools could fashion a complex civilization. I'm very doubtful that intelligent, space-faring, technological creatures have evolved on other worlds. I know this sounds somewhat heretical with the vast universe we live in, but it seems to me that intelligence is not necessarily selected for. It's not the inevitable result of evolution. 50 billion species have evolved, and only one on Earth has this technological capacity. I personally think that this issue of whether life can arise in other environments in the solar system will probably be answered in the next generation. And if the astronomy capabilities continue to progress, we may even have similar answers about some other star systems within a generation. That's being somewhat optimistic. Dr. Johnson's optimism is already being borne out. April 1999. An especially stunning announcement comes from the world's most prolific planet hunters. Three teams of astronomers have discovered the first solar system beyond our own. Because so far, we can't directly see the planets with telescopes. They were identified by the gravitational path of the star around which they orbit. The telltale wobble is caused by the gravitational tug of at least three planets orbiting Upsilon Andromeda, a star very like our sun, 44 light years away. I think it's both a major step and a baby step. I think it's a baby step because we have so much further to go. I think it's a major step because it has, I really think, confirmed, at least in my mind and the mind of many people, as I say, these solar systems are common. And this is going to give us an enormous impetus to look at other nearby stars in much greater detail. Looking for these things involves looking at a level of faintness that we have never tried to reach before. And so the first thing that we have to go for are extremely large telescopes. And we started making those at the university some 20 years ago now. Mount Hopkins, outside Tucson, Arizona, has been home to the Multiple Mirror Telescope Observatory. Six perfectly aligned mirrors that 20 years ago were cutting edge, state of the art. Now, with enormous advances in computer and telescope technologies, the multiple mirrors have been replaced by a single mirror. It increases the power of this observatory by a factor of two and a half, and will allow it to examine more astral targets at greater distances than almost any other telescope on Earth. The telescope's 21 and a half foot mirror was made at a specialized facility, the Stuart Mirror Lab in Tucson. There, they also crafted twin 27 foot mirrors to go into an even bigger telescope operated by the University of Arizona. Nick Wolfe is convinced his mirrors will discover other worlds. We had to build a special facility to make the telescope mirrors because there was nobody else making the mirrors that we needed at that time. And that telescope will be sensitive enough to detect the kind of dust that we have in the solar system, but around a star that is up to 50 light years away. But even these exquisitely made instruments have their limitations. To see further and even more precisely, we have to get above our atmosphere, escape the bonds of Earth, and view the universe from space itself. NASA has an ambitious agenda of projects for launch over the next two decades to succeed the Hubble Space Telescope, which will finish its work in 2010. Using new technologies, they will probe the depths of the universe with greater power than ever before. The first of these assignments is a mission that's a mouthful, the Space Infrared Telescope Facility, SIRTF for short. It's the first major project of the NASA Origins Program. Infrared telescopes observe stars and planets by measuring their heat signatures. In pursuing clues to the birth and evolution of galaxies, stars, and planets, SIRTF will also be identifying possible homes to alien lifeforms. The Next Generation Space Telescope, or NGST, with a launch date of 2007, has on paper the capacity to gather nine times more light than the Hubble Telescope. The view it brings back to Earth should revolutionize our thinking about the universe. Perhaps the most exciting mission on the drawing board so far is the Terrestrial Planet Finder. Set to launch around 2015, TPF will use four separate but tightly aligned mirrors, reducing the glare of stars by a factor of more than 100,000. It will examine the hundreds of stars closest to Earth to find every nearby Earth-size or larger planet, some perhaps harboring alien life. But I think the greatest contribution that TPF will make is help us to understand how the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology come together to create life. TPF actually will be an experiment, not so much for the astronomers as for the biologists. If we can give the biologists 20 or 30 planets where life is evolving in ways that are totally different from the way they're evolving on Earth, that will really advance our understanding of life itself. The data collected from NASA's big new telescopes will be analyzed for signs of the basic building blocks needed to spawn alien life forms. At that point, life is not just a single event that happened once in the entire universe, but it's actually a phenomenon that we can study, investigate that's happening all over the universe. And in that sense, it's a paradigm shift. Many people believe that life is widespread in the universe, but that's very different from knowing it and starting to study it beyond our own Earth. If we ever do make such a discovery, it would be as revolutionary as Copernicus and Galileo discovering that Earth is not the center of the universe. Despite the UFO and alien abduction proponents who believe extraterrestrials are already here, this is the scientific revelation that would irrevocably alter our thinking, our faith, our planetary way of life. In New York City, at the first national alien abduction conference, alleged abductees and researchers mingled, gossiped, and attended exhibits and lectures to learn the latest news of sightings and kidnappings. But the important reason for bringing this up is Betty under hypnosis described how she's asked the aliens, the captain, the leader, where he was from. This was also all consciously recalled. Hypnosis was neither used and contemplated, unlike the case of many abduction stories since. The reliability of testimony taken under hypnosis is at the crux of the debate over the reality of alien encounters. Hypnosis is, of course, a complication in the investigation of abduction reports, and hypnosis can be misused. In my observation and the observation of psychological professionals who have watched Bud Hopkins at work, for example, Hopkins does a good job. The issue of following this up and looking into it using hypnosis, I'm curious about your feelings about that subject of exploring this further. Through hypnosis or any other method, I would actually be very interested because I'm conflicted. I really feel like something happens, has been happening, and will continue to happen. That's not precedented by everyday life, but I'm also aware of the activity of my imagination. Skeptics argue that the pervasive influence of TV, movies, books, and magazines about UFOs and aliens, and leading questions from investigators are responsible for the elaborate stories spun. The basic complaints that are made are that somehow I'm implanting these ideas and that somehow, rather, we're leading the witness and these witnesses are just sort of simple-minded pieces of putty in the hands of the hypnotist. Well, the point is that can be easily tested. All you have to do is to come to sit on a session and see whether, in fact, that's happening. That first instant will come clearly back to your mind, your memory. One, you're lying in bed. Something is going to change. Two, right on the edge now. Three. Hopkins suggests that the sheer volume and similarity of accounts he's accumulated is proof that some other outside force is at work. Tell me your emotions, your feelings, what you sense. Scared. At the time, this was very scary. You were scared. You wanted to go out the window. But I want to find out what you're scared of. I said you may see something, you may hear something, you may just sense something. Tell me what is the first thing that you notice. Feel my hand. Something. Something moving. How far away is he from you? Like five feet? No, he's right in front of me. Okay now, so you get a good look at him now. Yeah. Describe him to me. Small body. Thin. You can see his ribs. Is that through his shirt? No, he looks naked. No hair. Smooth head. He doesn't say anything. He's just looking at me. You're going to feel a great sense of relief too. One of the things about that relief is you realize that parts of your life, memories of whatever they are really, but clear memories, have been hidden from you or taken from you and now you have them back. Hopkins claims that details his hypnotized subjects tell him could not have been picked up from TV or movies, nor are they suggested by him. A person describes being in a room and aliens and so forth and they say the only furniture in the room is a table and I'm saying, now this is important. From where you're standing, can you just see two legs of the table or all four legs of the table? Now, no one has ever described a four-legged table in the UFO experience. I'm using a simple example. This can be multiplied a thousand times because an investigator with experience knows what the patterns are and can ask very subtle leading questions. For two centuries, hypnosis has been an effective tool in treating pain, phobias, and other forms of mental illness. But no one really knows how it works. Throughout history, hypnosis has been used for one purpose and that is to implant memories in people. For example, if you came to me and wanted to quit smoking, I would hypnotize you and tell you, you don't want to smoke anymore. You no longer like cigarettes and you would walk out not wanting to smoke. So the idea of hypnosis is to put ideas in people's heads. This is something that seems to have been lost on researchers of abductions because they're inadvertently putting ideas in people's heads thinking that they're actually recovering them, but they're actually putting them in there. According to the master mental wizard and entertainer known as the Amazing Kreskin, about 90% of the population is susceptible to hypnosis. Kreskin believes that hypnosis does not coax back repressed memories. It's nothing more than pure imagination sparked by the power of suggestion. Suggestibility is the capacity to experience ideas. It has nothing to do with people who are fantasy prone or trance prone or go into dissociative states or multiple personalities. It's the idea that if you and I are exposed to a series of thoughts that we have feelings, people who empathize with others are usually more suggestible. People who are less suggestible are people who go to a restaurant and order the same meal every time and have a very rigid kind of lifestyle basically because they don't want to open themselves to outside ideas and thoughts. On a hot summer's Sunday in Nyack, New York, Kreskin offers a demonstration. He says he can use the power of suggestion to implant false memories of alien abductions. These volunteers have not been informed of what he is about to do. In his questioning of the volunteers, none of whom have ever had a close encounter, Kreskin subtly asks questions that will linger and then explode into seemingly real events. You just took a walk outside. How have you changed since you walked outside? Well, I feel really excited. It triggered a memory that I had when I was about two years old. You never do it before now? No, but I remember it as it came into my mind. First, I walked to the garden and saw like a Madonna figure with water coming out and I started getting chills. I started getting feelings and I felt kind of quiet and contemplative and it made me think of a time when I was sleeping in my Aunt Tootsie's house outside of Philadelphia. How old were you? I was two years old and I woke up and I felt something behind me and I was afraid to turn around and look at it. I just had a bad feeling and when I looked around, it was an alien-like creature and what woke me up was that he pinched me. I felt like he put a needle in me or something like that in my behind and when I turned around, I looked at him and he stood there smiling at me almost impishly but he came again and again and again and again and he would talk to me but he wouldn't talk to me with his mouth. He would talk to me just like through his consciousness and he would tell me that in my 50s I would write a book of the messages that he would send to me and it's so ironic because I just started a professional writing course, six credits that I'm taking and working fervently on and he's come many times to me even as an adult but I don't really recall what he says. He's there, I wake up and see him and I go back to sleep. What I did is I tapped into what was within them. I did not define the boundaries. Because in cartoons you see what the E.T. figures look like even in children's comic books so there's nowhere on the face of the earth anymore that you will be able to avoid the contamination of a preconceived notion of what it looks like to have an alien or an alien abductor. In the majority of cases that I've looked at abduction memories actually start with a dream. A person has an unusual dream and then they tell a friend and the friend says you know that dream sounds like something I read in this book and you may have been abducted and then if they believe that they'll call up an abduction researcher. The abduction researcher will say yes if you had a dream like that it means that this really happened and after you undergo hypnosis and recall the dream again you will recall it as a real experience. Clear memories have been hidden from you and as that progresses abductees find it very difficult to tell the difference between their dreams and what really happened to them. In general these people are very sincere they truly believe this happened to them they've been convinced of that through the media through the so-called researchers through hypnotherapy they've been led to believe something that is not true. I feel I've been a completely objective and open-minded person about this I had no agenda to start with so where I've ended up is where I feel the data has led me. Some believe we may never meet an advanced alien civilization some insist that we will and some are adamant that we already have. In our lifetime the most radical news of aliens may come not from proof of UFOs or alien abductions but when we're able to prove that there's even rudimentary life beyond earth. Meanwhile the secret thrill or even the tinge of fear that keeps our imaginations alive to the possibilities will persevere. Nothing can stop a good story.