Shedding Light on the Dark Side

After I had my contact experience in 1985, I began to go out into the woods alone at night to see if there would be a response from the visitors. The initial contact had been pretty awful. I was terrified and beaten up. I was raped, a fact it has taken me nearly twenty years to truly face.

But it wasn't all bad. In fact, it turned into fifteen minutes of a bad experience followed by years of wonder and fascination as I developed a relationship with the fearsome but marvellous presence I called `the visitors.' My mind was expanded. I lived a life of highest adventure. And not a hair was ever again harmed on my head.

We had groups of people to our cabin, who also had fantastic, life-changing experiences of contact. During one of these joyous encounters, a witness described the visitors as acting like some sort of `acrobatic troop' as they leaped about in a roomful of people. Even the children became involved, and we weren't scared when our son's friends reported encounters, and their parents weren't concerned about sending them to the cabin. In fact, many of them came in hopes of seeing the visitors, and were often rewarded.

What's more, of the thousands of letters we received about contact, the vast majority described wonderful or at least fascinating experiences. It looked to me as if mankind was about to experience the very best thing that had ever happened in history.

That's all changed. First, a kind of darkness entered our lives. We were driven from the cabin by a frankly suspicious series of circumstances that began with the theft of crucial financial records from our files. Then my experience became subtly more sinister.

Beginning about five years ago, the reports also began to change. The tales of wonder slowed down and finally stopped. There had always been horror stories, of course. But they were extremely rare, in our experience. Now, a "good" close encounter report is extremely rare. Most of them are sinister and terrifying. I no longer call the visitors in meditation. I fear what might show up. Now, I am thinking in terms of how we close encounter witnesses can band together to protect ourselves, and how we can warn the average person about the signs of the approach of the visitors, so that they can run like hell.

I'll be totally frank. Something has obviously changed. It used to be that Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs sounded like Cassandra's with their tales of abduction terror. No longer. Some of the best documented cases ever are recent ones, and they are ominous indeed.

I am intimately familiar with some of these cases and the experiences of the people involved. They are good people. They are not lying. And it isn't somehow their `fault' that they have, as some of our contact Pollyanna’s would have it, attracted the dark side.

I'm a realist and what is now real is that the only thing that appears to be left of the contact experience is the dark side. So that's what we have to face now.

There are two great dangers associated with the contact experience: first, that witnesses will be led only into a state of fear about it and given no way to overcome the fear and gain strength from what is happening to them; second, that they will be led to believe that what is happening to us is in some way loving, and they will innocently embrace a python.

The really well-documented cases, such as the "Cynthia" case that Brian Vike has reported so extensively on this website and on Dreamland, present a picture of ugly, brutal and dangerous bullying of helpless human beings by creatures that are, quite simply, monsters--and monsters in possession of extremely good and extremely dangerous technology.

I believe that there have been mutilation-murders. I cannot prove it, because, in each case, the FBI has supposedly appeared on the scene and stifled the flow of information. However, I know of nineteen cases of human mutilation. Although I have no proof, no documentation, I have every reason to believe that these cases are real, based on the way the information came to me. One is from Colorado, the rest are all from the US Northeast.

Let me be specific about what I do know. The Colorado case was being investigated by Linda Howe when the coroner suddenly clammed up and would offer no more information. But the body that had been found was dreadfully mutilated, with the same sorts of injuries seen in cattle mutilations. More recently, there was a bizarre case in Point Pleasant, Pennsylvania that I discussed on the radio with Peter Davenport. Apparently the FBI was present during this case, and an effort was made to suppress it and even, oddly, to discredit the victim by claiming that he was a drug user. The other seventeen cases were rumored to me by a medical professional who knew a coroner in upstate New York. But the coroner was told to keep them secret, and I never received any more information than that. It's not much, admittedly, but it's very disturbing.

I have no idea how many of these cases may be out there, and the government certainly isn't going to be talking about something so exceedingly awful that it cannot control in any way.

There may be a twentieth case developing now, assuming that the victim that was heard screaming in agony and dread in Morehead, Kentucky the other night is ever found. You can read researcher Kenny Young's report in our Insight Section and subscribers can listen to a very disturbing interview with him about this latest UFO terror case.

I consider this case an intentional provocation on the part of the visitors responsible. First, an object was seen by credible witnesses that functioned in ways that definitely identified it as an unknown. Then, after it shot away from ground level like a bullet, horrific screaming was heard in the field where it had hovered. A woman was screaming for help.

This screaming caused a flood of calls to the police, who mounted an extensive search and rescue within fifteen minutes, but nothing was found.

I think that this event was intended to spread terror. In my experience, the visitors don't do things by accident. They did this to frighten the hell out of those of us who know that it's real. Why? They obviously want to see what kind of resistance we might mount. But also, and this must never be forgotten: they WANT fear, they WANT suffering. So, no matter how hard it is, no matter how dreadful the experience seems, always remember: the lighter your approach, the more you can bring love and even laughter to the process of protecting yourself, the better off you will be.

That a human being probably suffered and possibly died in order to fulfill their goal of spreading fear apparently matters not to them. Or, more likely, that was a big part of the reason they did what they did.

From the beginning, I was concerned that mankind had been led by a combination of government secrecy and scientific insanity into not addressing the visitors in an organized way. In the early years, I saw this as the waste of a grand opportunity. And it may have been. In any case, the experience I had and what happens now seem to me to be very different things, almost as if somebody good has left and somebody surpassingly evil has remained here.

Last night, I received a call from a relative who told me that he'd just come back from a night hike where one of the hikers had seen a black, triangular-shaped UFO. Again, I do not think that this was an accident. I have communicated with the visitors for too long to make any such assumption. This was meant as a warning to me. Again, an operation is under way. They want to see what we will do.

Unfortunately, whatever that is, it will not be the kind of organized, concerted action that would really be a threat to their activities. At most, a few abductees and interested parties might be somewhat more on their guard, but the visitors will remain free to do whatever they wish, because no organized human social institution is going to acknowledge their existence in any meaningful way--not government, not science, not the media.

You may be warned. A few others. But for every person who can effectively resist them--and it probably isn't all that hard, as long as you don't let them get too close to you-- there will be millions who will remain totally helpless and totally unaware.

It became clear to me in about 1988 that the government was keeping major UFO secrets, and therefore that it must be acting out of either compulsion, necessity or extreme foolishness. I still don't know its motive, but I suspect compulsion.

An ignorant population is a helpless population, and the visitors seem to need secrecy if they are to carry out their grotesque program, which appears to involve kidnapping, the theft of genetic and sexual materials, and, sometimes, murder. If they were powerful, they wouldn't need secrecy and complex social control. They would simply do what they wanted to do without caring how we reacted. But that's not how they operate. They come by night, when we are sleeping. They capture using surprise. Therefore, it seems possible that, if we were highly organized, they would not be able to continue what they are doing, even if we lacked weapons to stop them.

As matters stand, even the most well prepared of us can easily be abducted. A few things we can do may help, but, in the end, if they are intent on doing this to somebody, they are going to do it.

This means one thing to me: if we want protection, we need to figure out what works and do it. Those of us who know that this is a real concern are going to have to do what we can to help ourselves. Unless our social institutions acknowledge the problem, the vast mass of humanity is going to remain completely helpless.

I have written elsewhere that official acknowledgement itself may be a weapon against us, in the sense that the visitors' ability to penetrate our world may in some way be connected to our belief in their existence. Fortunately, at the moment, the chances of meeting the visitors are probably lower than the chances of dying in a car wreck or a fire. If there is any chance at all that official acknowledgement would raise that threshold, then I hope to God the government keeps its mouth shut. But those of us on the front lines need to be prepared, and I am convinced that we can be better off than we are now.

Those who spread the horror stories without offering any support see this as a social issue. They're Paul Reveres. Their job, as they see it, is to warn society of the menace and sound a call to alarm. If they seek any kind of protection, it is via a process of government disclosure. The hope is that their stories will compel the government to admit its folly in concealing UFO realities, and that it will then afford us the protection we need. I don't think that it can disclose. The picture that presents itself is not one of a government acting foolishly. It is a picture of a government being forced under extreme coercion of some sort to keep secrets it does not want to keep. It is also a picture of a government that is helpless to protect us, and will continue to be so.

The one benefit of disclosure would be that people would be warned. But if it leads to an expansion of the threat, then who wants it?

One thing we do know for certain: the visitors want a combination of two things. They want people to be afraid or they would not be spreading terror. And they want this to be secret because they apparently feel a need for the element of surprise.

The policy of the government to deny the existence of the visitors coincides with their own policy of secrecy. Indeed, they are so secretive that they actually erase memories, usually leaving people only with the physical effects of their encounter experiences, or memories of just the initiating moments, and nothing of the incident itself. Even the sense of `missing time' is usually happened upon accidentally.

No conventional call to alarm is going to matter because our society has been manipulated into not responding to the existence of the visitors. Because of official denial, our science has failed at every level to address the reality of the visitors and now lives in a fantasy world when it comes to them. Otherwise responsible scientists universally ignore the plain and obvious physical evidence of their activities among us. Supposedly responsible media outlets actually react to contact with laughter, which has always been a fantastically delusional response, given the evidence .

What is this evidence? First, it is the testimony of tens of thousands of human beings. This testimony, much of it articulate and supported by multiple-witness observations, has been tossed on the trash heap.

If as many people were reporting normal hallucinations, it would be regarded as a frightening mental health epidemic and studied carefully. Fantastically, these reports are not even regarded as a mental health issue. They are ignored and not studied at all.

This is not a normal, rational choice on the part of behavioural scientists. It is induced by social control at a higher level that affects the scientific culture deeply.

The same is true of the physical evidence. Objects are frequently removed from the bodies of close encounter witnesses, objects that cannot be explained in any rational way except as intentional implants. The objects are encased in membranes made from their own skin, membranes that cannot occur naturally and that cannot be manufactured. Some of these objects are without question scientific unknowns.

But there has been no study of these objects and their appearance in the human body, or the means of implantation. No scientific journal would ever publish such a study, even if, by some miracle, it was given grant money. The National Academy of Sciences takes the bizarrely inappropriate position that UFOs are unworthy of scientific study. They are the only observable natural phenomenon to receive this treatment.

For a scientist even to declare interest in this subject or any aspect of it, is for him to place his career in immediate danger of destruction. Should anybody apply for grant money for study of it—except, of course, for study that is rigged to explain it in some innocuous and non-threatening manner— they are liable to be forced out of their employment, and likely out of their profession altogether. On this week's Dreamland, researcher Ann Druffel tells the tragic story of a prominent scientist who faced the evidence for what it is, and for his trouble ended up a suicide.

Meanwhile, people like President Carter, who openly stated that, if elected, he would reveal UFO secrets, and George W. Bush, who said the same on at least two occasions, ignore the issue once in office. Within the government, it's considered absurd even to address it. But deeper inside, the reason is known. Somebody is enforcing our society's refusal to address this issue, and I think that somebody is the visitors themselves.

Close encounter witnesses who do not buy the official line that they are idiots, on the other hand, are hammered with three equally disempowering messages: either that what is happening to them cannot be prevented, that their dreadful experiences are somehow their fault, or that we all we need to do is to get the government to acknowledge this and help us.

All of these messages are cruelly disempowering. They are guaranteed to abandon witnesses to the control of the experience.

In fact, the government, science, the media and the some elements of the UFO community are, in effect, banded together with a single large purpose: to leave the people on the front lines of close encounter feeling powerless, helpless and alone.

The effort to keep us in ignorance is so extensive that it amounts to the primary means that the visitors use to control the human species.

My mission, even when I was not sure that my own close encounter experiences were physical, or even negative, was to find ways of empowering myself and others in the face of this unknown. When I was having and seeing good experiences, I wanted to facilitate contact. Now that contact has changed, I have changed. I want to find ways of effectively protecting us.

I view the spreaders of disempowering messages to be de facto under the control of the visitors, whether they are operating from some concealed agenda, under some sort of mind control, or simply from their own fear. If you preach fear without empowerment, as far as I am concerned, you're working for them. The same is true if you preach the bald faced lie that they are in some way loving toward us and that our fear is our fault. This is pure fantasy, and also does their work for them, in that it keeps us passive toward what is happening to us.

So, what is to be done?

Unfortunately, ordinary means do not offer us any help. The government is obviously unable even to warn people of the dangers involved. Otherwise, it would have publicized the murders I have referred to and openly studied things like implants and the physical effects of abduction which, though little researched and poorly understood, appear to be many.

The amount of physical evidence is so extensive that research would be quite easy. The truth is that the skeptics' lie that there is no physical evidence of abduction is just that: a complete falsehood. There is, in fact, an abundance of physical evidence readily available to science.

I think that protection will come from two things: mutual support and knowledge. I don't think that abductee groups are the answer, though. I tried such groups early on and they were a disaster. People with religious and `space brothers' agendas rushed to them. Mentally ill and otherwise disturbed people who want to ascribe their personal problems to the stress of contact appeared, bringing their baggage with them. Even the groups that came together well were, ultimately, unproductive. What can we really do in these groups? In the end, they became repetitive and did not offer what we need. Counselling and post-abduction support is important, of course. But what we need is a means of controlling our exposure to close encounters in the first place.

Ten years ago, I was saying that what we needed was a means of perfecting communication and learning how to live in the context of encounter. Of course I was. Except for my initial experience, I'd had a wonderful time. And I still can't fault it. The visitors took me beyond the edge of known reality, and I saw spread before me hidden glories.

However, I am also a down-to-earth realist, and I am not seeing any of that sort of thing anymore. We need to learn how to anticipate contact and how to avoid it. If there are still visitors out there who have something good to bring us, they'll find their own way, I feel sure. But right now what we've got to deal with is awful, and the key to doing this is avoidance.

If we were not able to avoid them, they wouldn't need to sneak up on us as they do. So knowledge matters. Social agreement matters. But our best tools, the government with all its various resources and the scientific community with its ability to explore and gather information, have been denied to us by a process of clever social control, or possibly for good reason, as discussed above, by the government itself.

Most abduction researchers offer no help, or `help' that's actually worse than nothing. Being told that it's horrible and there's nothing to be done except wait for `disclosure' that will never come doesn't help. It freezes us and tells us we are impotent until and if our captured or neutered government acts. Being told idiotic things like we made an "agreement" of some sort with the visitors "on the soul level" to go through this is shameful and childish rubbish.

On a frank, physical level, the only things that I know help are two:

1. Stay in heavily populated areas, especially at night.

2. Move every few years. In recent years, Anne and I have moved seven times,

and we are typical of witnesses. However, running is ultimately not an answer.

Being informed helps. Knowing the signs of possible visitor involvement in a given area helps.

What are these signs? Listen to the interview with Kenny Young. All the signs are present in this case. The first is the presence of UFOs in the area. The visitors often, but not always, make their presence known in this way, perhaps because they cannot conceal the craft, or do not care to.

They know that the media won't provide useful information about their presence. Another way to find out is to visit the National UFO Reporting Center often. This isn't a perfect system, but its the best we have.

The second sign is if you should notice any manifestations around you. If you actually see a UFO, for example. Or if your area suddenly becomes extremely quiet. Birds and animals stop, insects stop. An eerie silence falls. If this is followed by an eruption of animal sounds—dogs howling and barking, cats pacing, wildlife squalling, it means that the visitors are on the ground.

Personally, I would stay awake and together in a lighted room. Don't venture out. Don't express any interest in them. And if there is the least sign of their presence near you— knocking on walls, sudden shadows flashing about in the house, your pets becoming agitated—do not go to sleep no matter how sleepy you get. Fight it. Turn on music, the TV, make phone calls. And don't go to sleep in the predawn. The hours from three until sunrise are favorite contact times. Stay awake until well after dawn, when the world is active again.

Ultimately, as a species, we have no escape from this. Even if the government were to announce that the visitors were entirely real, and publish all it knows about them, and do everything it possibly could now or in any conceivable future to free us from them, we would not succeed in escaping them. In fact, no amount of struggle is going to dislodge them.

Maybe not from the world, anyway. But from your life—yes. You can help yourself. It is not only about avoiding encounter, it is about coping on a personal as well as a social level.

As to the question, `why have the visitors changed,' maybe they haven't. Look at what's happened from another perspective. What if astronauts from earth discovered another world. Perhaps, for a time, strict rules of contact that respected the native population would be observed. Maybe, though, in time, those rules would be relaxed, especially as travel to the new world became easier and cheaper.

 Exploitative people would arrive, people carrying their religious and ideological agendas. These would be lesser people than the noble astronauts—believers and fanatics intent on imposing their fantasies on the helpless aliens. Then there would be those seeking resources of some kind, who wanted results and didn't care how they got them. And there would be the evil, the sadists, the scum.

For whatever reason, I think we have been left to the exploiters and the scum. Who knows? Maybe the good guys gave up or lost a war. Maybe those of us who got good treatment were simply being deceived.

The point is, we must always approach this from a practical standpoint, and at the present time, contact is awful and dangerous. If the visitors want it to be different, then they need to find a way to change it. For our part, we must seek to find the good in our own souls, and let the dark presence that slips along the paths of the night know that we know it is there, and we will do everything we can to avoid it.

My journal entries get a lot of comment, and for that I am so grateful to you. Some of it is quite, quite wise, and I thought that this, from a knowledgable abductee, is particularly valuable. Take it to heart. This reader writes:

"In your recent journal entry, "Shedding Light on the Dark Side," you advise people who suspect visitors are present to:

"...I would stay awake and together in a lighted room. Don't venture out. Don't express any interest in them. And if there is the least sign of their presence near you— knocking on walls, sudden shadows flashing about in the house, your pets becoming agitated—do not go to sleep no matter how sleepy you get. Fight it. Walk. Turn on music, the TV, make phone calls. And don't go to sleep in the predawn. Not until the sun comes up."

"I have been through such experiences and am now undergoing one of the most brutal and extended, along with my two children. One of the most important keys to psychological survival is humor. Your suggestions are all excellent, but the manner in which you present them suggests an atmosphere of paralyzing dread. It is imperative to take whatever steps you must to dispel that atmosphere. Fear feeds this experience, almost literally. Confidence is also critical.

"Frankly, I feel this is so important, I'd wish you'd add an addendum stressing this point. I know it would help many people out there having a tough time."