Michael E. Zimmerman
4571 words
In summer 1988, I saw in a bookstore the cover of Communion: A True Story, Whitley Strieber’s 1986 account of his terrifying and transformational experience of abduction at the hands of strange beings whom he called the Visitors. The face on the cover startled and attracted me, almost as if I had seen it before. Many other people have reported the same experience. Consider, for example, Garry Nolan, an accomplished immunologist and biotech designer who is a professor at Stanford Medical School. Co-founder of the SOL Foundation, a recently formed UAP academic research organization, Nolan has been forthright about his research showing that encounters with unknown aircraft (UAP) can have damaging biological consequences for people. In the July 2023 issue of Stanford Magazine, Sam Scott published a story about Nolan that included mention of his interest in UAP. Scott writes
"In an indelible childhood memory, Nolan recalls seeing an apparent spacecraft above the woods while on his newspaper route in his hometown of Windsor, Conn. In another, as a 5- or 6-year-old, he awoke to alien figures in his bedroom. Decades later in a bookstore, he saw the cover of Communion: A True Story, Whitley Strieber’s best-selling account of his own alleged encounters with aliens. “I just remember having a near nervous breakdown because it was what I had seen as a child in my bedroom,” Nolan says." (Emphasis mine.][1]
The famous Communion face resembles the classic “alien grey”: pear shaped, with small chin, mouth, and nose, and with enormous almond-shaped black eyes. The Communion face is light yellow, however, rather than grey. The origin of the painting is worth reviewing. In 1999 Will Bueché, who worked for years preserving the John E. Mack alien abduction archives (now housed at Rice University’s Archives of the Impossible), interviewed the cover’s artist, Ted Seth Jacobs. A well-known New York illustrator, Jacobs reports that Strieber sat close to him while he worked on the portrait.
"As I sketched, he would indicate how to change the portrait so that it would more match what he saw. It was, I believe, the process used by police sketch artists. Every last detail was corrected according to his instructions. At one point, he said the image corresponded exactly to what he had seen. With Whitley beside me for the subsequent session, I began to paint the image on a wooden prepared panel, going through the same process as for the drawing, until Whitley finally said the image was exact. ... As to the gender of the Alien image, to tell the truth, the subject didn’t come up. I don’t even know if they have gender as we understand it. Whitley corrected the developing image to have a certain fragility, a vulnerability. I suppose we Earthlings usually associate these qualities with femininity." [2]
When I purchased Communion, I had read about the abduction phenomenon in books by David Jacobs, Budd Hopkins, and Karla Turner, among others. Although empirical evidence for abductions was limited, the testimony of those reporting abductions was compelling. That abductions were often related to super-fast, self-cloaking UFOs suggested that modern Western humankind may not be the most advanced mode of intelligence around. The inability--then and now-- of our armed forces to control the skies above and the seas below threatens the legitimacy of the US government, one of whose principal obligations is protect its citizens from foreign/alien threats. Like many others, I put abductions and UFOs into the “what if?” category but did not develop a research interest in them until 1992, when I learned that John E. Mack, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and highly regarded professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, was working with patients reporting abduction by non-human beings. I had known of Mack for a decade during which we had both been actively involved in efforts to end the nuclear arms race and had also been exploring transpersonal philosophy/psychology. Arranging to meet him in Cambridge that October, I offered whatever assistance a philosopher might provide for his inquiry into this extraordinary phenomenon.[3] Thus began a working relationship that ended when he died in 2003. His two books on the abduction phenomenon maintain that spiritual/psychological transformations often ensue from abductions, even though initial experiences may be frightening.[4]
Around the year 2000, I was conversing with my late brother John about Mack’s abduction research. At one point, John asked if I wanted to hear about his own close encounter and experience of “missing time,” which may have involved an alien abduction. It had never occurred to me that someone in my own family might have experienced an abduction. I was fascinated by what he had to say. Because John died in 2019, our brother Rob and I composed an account of his experience based on our recollections of what he told us. Rob and John shared an apartment in Los Angeles during summer, 1986, when John’s experience took place.
In 2023 I asked my five surviving siblings (John and my sister Kate had both died by then) about whether any of them had experienced a close encounter or an anomalous event suggestive of one. Three of them—Barbara, Eric, and Philip—said that they had. Accounts of what happened follow John’s account. My thanks to them for their courage and generosity in allowing me to publish their accounts. Finally, I discuss my own strange and vivid “dream” in 1980 that may have been a screen memory of something else.
1. My brother John’s closer encounter and an accompanying episode of “missing time,” 1986.
John, who died of cancer in 2019 at the age of 64, was the sixth of eight children in our postwar Catholic family. We grew close during the summer of 1966 when we shared a bedroom while I was home from college. He was a precocious ten-year old. In college, he considered majoring in philosophy, while also pursuing his interests in guitar and musical composition. Excelling at advertising, he also won national awards for business leadership. When he described to me his episode of missing time, there was no doubt that he was telling me the truth as he understood it. He knew that I loved him. There was no need to impress me with tall tales. Indeed, while recounting aspects of his experience, which had occurred more than a decade earlier, the hair stood up on his forearms!
Missing time refers to episodes such as the following. While returning home at
night from a nearby store, a driver may notice an unusual light in the sky. Perhaps the light
begins to track the car or turns a different color. Upon arriving at the intended destination, she discovers that she is an hour or more late but cannot explain the gap in her recollection. Eventually, a person who experienced missing time may spontaneously recall aspects of what happened during that time, perhaps including a close encounter with a UAP or even an alien abduction experience.
The following account of John’s experience combines my recollection of what shared with me, as well as the recollection of our youngest sibling, Robert, who roomed with John in Los Angeles in 1986, when the close encounter occurred. Thirty years old, John was creative director of advertising at the May Company, a major Los Angeles department chain. That summer, he and a friend, whom I will call Bill, embarked on a week-long camp out in the San Gabriel Mountains outside of LA. After arriving, they set up camp with a dense forest behind them and a mountain lake in front. Bill, who was an experienced camper, cautioned John not to wander into the up woods beyond the firelight, since it was easy to get disoriented and lost in the darkness. While enjoying the mountain view after sunset, they noticed three bright orbs of light that emerged from behind the mountain and then hovered. Because John and Bill were several miles from habitation, they speculated about what the completely silent orbs could possibly be. At that moment, almost as if the orbs noticed that they had been noticed, they began moving again, this time across the lake and directly toward John and Bill. As they grew closer, the orbs resolved into a circular craft that stopped overhead, while projecting downward a beam of light that clearly illuminated the whole campsite. Panicking, John began running desperately in circles, recalling Bill’s warning about getting too far away from the campfire. Finally, he jumped from a rock into the darkness to escape from the intrusive light.
The next morning, upon awakening in their tent, John and Bill remembered nothing at
all about the frightening events of the previous evening. They assumed that they had doused the fire and turned in for the evening. Strangely, however, even though they had planned a week-long camp out, they decided to return home that very day. Somehow, things just didn’t feel right. When John arrived in LA that afternoon, his brother Robert tried unsuccessfully to elicit a more plausible explanation about the early arrival, as did Bill’s wife. Life went on.
The following year, while in a bookstore, John happened to see the face on the cover of Communion. At that moment, he experienced a flood of memories about the forgotten events at the campsite. John then phoned Bill, who began to recall the same sequence of events. Bill’s confirmation was initially reassuring, John remarked. “At least I knew that I wasn’t crazy!” On the other hand, he could no longer write off as “madness” the shocking UFO encounter that he had now recalled, and that Bill had confirmed. Bill then remembered something else that was troubling: He had experienced a similar UFO encounter on another occasion at the very same campsite! John was unhappy with this revelation. Why would Bill return to that place at all, especially when bringing along an unsuspecting friend? Bill explained that he had forgotten all about the previous encounter, just as the two of them had forgotten about what happened during their campout the previous summer. (That was the last time John ever went camping.)
Although John and Bill could now recall some events from that fateful night, they were still unable to recall what happened between fleeing the light and waking up the next morning. What happened during this period of time was missing—and remained missing--from their memories. I told John that if he wanted to pursue the matter, I could arrange a meeting with Dr. Mack in Cambridge. Alternatively, Mack could help identify a therapist in the Birmingham, Alabama, area (where my brother was then living) who could help him recall events associated with the missing time. John declined these options, however. What he could recall on his own had already shaken him to the core. Our sister Barbara told me years later that John had been “devastated” by the experience. By the time John spoke to me about his missing time experience, he had read narratives from experiencers who reported that four-foot tall, often gray-skinned creatures floated them through a bedroom window or wall and into a nearby UFO, forced them to submit to an intrusive physical examination, and then required them to engage in creating apparent human/alien hybrids. Little wonder that John preferred not to pursue recollection of such possible events. When I spoke with him about this in 2000, he gave no indication that a psychological or spiritual change had resulted from his encounter.
In his UAP close encounter and episode of missing time, my brother experienced a combination of terror and “ontological shock.” Such shock, as Mack pointed out in Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994), follows from an encounter that is impossible according to the standards established by the modern worldview. (A comparatively mild case of ontological shock can occur upon witnessing the outcome of a spectacular magic trick, after which distressed shouts of “That’s impossible!” and “What the…?” may ensue.) Thousands of experiencers wrote Mack letters that are now housed at Rice University’s Archives, but which were originally stored at the Cambridge office of Macks Program for Extraordinary Experience Research (PEER). In Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters (1997) Mack explored in greater depth the transformational aspect of the abduction experience that had often been overlooked by previous researchers.[5]
2. Barbara’s experience, 1968.
My sister Barbara is fourth in sibling birth order. After receiving her undergraduate degree in political science, she married and raised six children while pursuing a successful career in corporate and university personnel management. Barbara is particularly perceptive and an excellent writer who notices things that others may overlook. In 1968, when she was eighteen, she was awakened by a very bright light shining through the bedroom window. At first, she thought it might be a prankster with a flashlight, but immediately realized that this explanation could not account for the scale and intensity of the light, which illuminated the room, even though her sister continued sleeping soundly in the nearby twin bed. During this event, Barbara reports experiencing a sense of dread, “unique in its depth and darkness. My inability to speak of it [this was the first time she had ever mentioned it to anyone in all those years] is curious to me as well…. Whatever happened, the light was intrusive, threatening, and loathsome.” Pulling the covers up over her head, she tried going to sleep as soon as possible. That is the last thing she remembers about the event.
I have read many accounts of an impossibly bright light shining through windows or of illuminated orbs floating around bedrooms. Despite (or perhaps because of) the frightening character of such inexplicable events, experiencers often report pulling up the covers and going to sleep. Dropping off to sleep is reported even after someone reportedly sees three or four short, large-headed intruders standing at the foot of one’s bed. Ordinarily after such strange events, an adrenalin rush would preclude a rapid transition into sleep. Barbara had no problem in doing so, almost as if she had been induced to drop off.
3. Eric’s experience, 1983.
Eric is the fifth in sibling birth order. A West Point graduate (1976), he received his PhD in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech (his dissertation was on a topic in thermodynamics) and served in the Army in various assignments, before becoming an engineering professor at West Point. After retiring from the Army as a Lieutenant Colonel, he worked as a government employee within the Army Corps of Engineers for an additional 16 years. Here is his account.
"It was the spring of 1983 in Germany where I was in the Army finishing up a three-year duty assignment. I was married and had two young children, a boy (3) and a girl (15 months). We lived in a 3rd floor “walk up” apartment in a US Army Military Housing complex… I had recently completed over two years of Company Command of an Engineer unit supporting US Forces. Someone suggested I attend a Catholic retreat weekend a couple hours away that was sponsored by our local church. My wife encouraged me to go, and it was an amazing experience.
"Abou two weeks after my return from the retreat I was spending what little free time one has with two young children reading the Bible and trying to be open to the Spirit. We lived in a small two-bedroom apartment with our two children sleeping in the bedroom across the hall from where my wife and I slept. At around 2am I awoke and made what I thought would be my typical trip to the bathroom in the middle of the night. However, my trip was anything but typical... As I emerged from my bedroom to head down the hall, I was startled to encounter a bright white light streaming into the hall from the open door of our children’s bedroom. I
had never seen anything like it. Looking back – and I have thought about this moment many times – it was like there was a giant spotlight outside our apartment and it was aimed at the children’s window (it was quiet outside – no sound of a helicopter or the sort). It was not like a flashlight – it was like the window must have “extruded” this beam into our apartment... If you can imagine a box which would enclose a large kitchen refrigerator – the light took the shape of a square to rectangular shape – like a refrigerator box as it streamed through the bedroom door onto the hall floor...
"But – honestly – despite my reading the Bible and wanting to KNOW my God, Jesus and the Spirit better – I was absolutely and ashamedly TERRIFIED... Yes – I wanted to KNOW God – but I was NOT ready... I made NO attempt to glance up through the door from where the light was streaming – I was afraid of what I might see. I suppose I just did not think I was worthy or ready... My pace from the time I entered the threshold of my bedroom door to enter the hall on my way to the bathroom was brought to a near stop as I slowly traversed through the light – the highest point of the stream of light was probably waist high at that point. I just slowly walked to the bathroom and slowly returned, past the light again, into my bed and CLOSED MY EYES... Not sure how long it took me to get to sleep. I woke up the next day with questions about “what the heck was that last night?” running through my head. One thought was perhaps it was a full moon –but I had NEVER seen such a light from a full moon and have not since... It was just too coherent – somewhat shimmering. Our apartment did not have another building next to ours from the direction the light was coming from – the window overlooked a farmer’s field... I asked a couple people at work if anyone had noticed a bright moon the night before and no one had. And I looked into the sky the next night and the moon was not anything special in terms of brightness... The light shining into our hallway the night before had not been bright to the point of needing to shield my eyes – but it clearly illuminated the hallway – I could see the dust in the air from that stream of light from my children’s room...
"I could not explain any cause for such a light other than from the Lord... At the time – I was not sure if God was calling me or something – I just felt a bit guilty that I had not been “strong” enough spiritually to look up into the source of the light – I had just kept my eyes down... Now, about 40 years later, I wonder if there could have been another explanation."
After reading Eric’s account, which I shared with our other siblings, Barbara had this to say: “Eric, your account was weirdly like my own except I was sure there was nothing spiritual about the light I saw.” It is weird indeed that both siblings had such strikingly similar experiences with unnaturally and inexplicably bright lights shining through upper story bedroom windows. In view of John’s apparent abduction experience, it is possible that both Barbara and Eric underwent an abduction, facilitated by the visitors who induced both of them to go to sleep so quickly.
4. Philip’s account, sometime in the 1980s.
Philip is seventh in sibling order. After graduating from college with a degree in civil engineering, he founded an environmental engineering company, which he later sold to Rust Engineering. He went on to become an ordained minister, received a master’s degree in theology, and later a PhD in organizational management. He shared this account of a UFO sighting many years ago that occurred while driving to a party with his wife, Jennifer.
"I saw an anomaly in the sky (red, green, and blue lights in a circular pattern) that
was plainly visible from our car for about two miles while Jennifer and I were driving to an outdoor party. I’d been seeing the lights and wondering if it they were from a low-flying helicopter, but I couldn’t see a craft associated with the lights. Just the lights. I thought it could be a UFO, but certainly didn’t want to spook Jennifer, so I said nothing, hoping she’d see the same thing I was seeing in the sky.
"As we pulled onto the long drive leading to the event, the lights lowered to our level and hovered about 300 yards in front of our car. Now I was spooked, and while still looking at them I slowly asked Jennifer, “Do you see those?” And immediately after I spoke, the lights rushed toward us and then just disappeared. I had goose bumps all over and told Jennifer that we just saw a UFO. She was oblivious to the whole thing. [My emphasis.]
"We went to the party, and I kept an eye out to see if the lights returned. They didn’t, and I’ve never seen anything like that since. I have no idea what I saw, other than I saw what I saw and can’t explain it."
It is worth remarking on the fact that Jennifer was “oblivious” to what Philip experienced. Among the strange aspects of at least some UFO sightings is that not everyone present sees what the others claim to have seen. Years ago, I read an account of a dramatic nighttime sighting at a beach in Florida. Eight or nine people were at a picnic table on a beach. Suddenly, someone noticed lights in the sky moving in a way impossible for any known aircraft. Four people, however, despite increasingly frantic gesticulations on the part of the others, claimed that they could not see the lights. Understanding how such a disjunct in perception is possible with a group of apparently competent observers is not easy. Perhaps whatever/whoever is producing the light selects those who will be able to experience it.[6]
5. Michael’s account, 1980.
I received my PhD in philosophy in 1974, then went on to be a university professor for 41 years before retiring in 2015. My research interests include 19th and 20th century European philosophy, philosophy of technology, environmental philosophy, philosophy and gender, integral theory, and Buddhism.
In an interview in 2024, I said that I had never been abducted, as far as I know, nor have I ever seen a UFO. After the interview, however, there came to mind an unusual and vivid dream involving an encounter with strange birds. This event occurred in 1980 while I was living in London, long before I was conversant with alien abductions or “screen memories.” Sometime in May, I experienced a very intense, life-like “dream.” Next to my second floor flat on Belsize Square a large horse chestnut tree was flowering. In the middle of the night, I suddenly awakened to find that—to my amazement---three or four large birds had entered my bedroom by climbing through a large open window. The colorful and animated birds, about four feet tall, were moving toward me as if intent on doing something. I cannot recall anything else about this episode, but it deeply affected me. I shared this experience with several people afterwards. It all seemed so realistic, but four-foot-tall birds in my bedroom? Surely, not.
Except, the UFO and abduction literature is replete with accounts of screen memories of birds, deer, and other animals. For example, what may appear to be an owl turns out to be a screen or mask concealing something beneath, typically an alien grey. In The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity, and the UFO Abductee, based on conversations with many experiencers, Mike Clelland shares striking instances of such screen memories. Several of his interlocutors report driving in the country at night, only to be forced to stop because a four foot tall owl was standing in the middle of the road. Such an encounter, strange enough in itself, becomes the more so when the driver begins to realize that owls are never four feet tall. Often such an encounter triggers missing time.
In being transfixed by the alien face on the cover of Communion decades ago, was I recalling something that I had seen earlier in my life but had forgotten? I have thought long and hard about this question and keep coming back to the incident described above, which might be part of the same pattern as reported by my siblings. When five out of eight siblings—accomplished, sane, and with no tendency to confabulate—discovered that each of us has had such strange encounters, we became more convinced than ever that something very strange and very real (in its way) happened to us. My siblings report that their encounters have remained present as an inexplicable and strange intrusion into everyday life.
Notes
[2] Will Bueché, “Ted Seth Jacobs: An Interview with the Artist”, 6 October 1999.
[3] My research into the abduction phenomenon led me to publish two academic essays on the topic: “The Alien Abduction Phenomenon: Forbidden Knowledge of Hidden Events,” Philosophy Today, 41, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), 235-253, https://www.academia.edu/37782252/The_alien_abduction_phenomenon_Forbidden_knowledge_of_hidden_events and “Encountering Alien Otherness,” The Concept of the Foreign, ed. Rebecca Saunders (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2002), 153-177. https://www.academia.edu/82397884/Encountering_Alien_Otherness These essays were so far out that they went virtually unnoticed until the 2017 New York Time articles helped to reinvigorate interest in UFOs and to legitimate study of them by academics.
[4] See John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994) and Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters (1997).
[5] Since then, this transformational aspect has been empirically demonstrated in Beyond UFOs: The Science of Consciousness and Contact with Non-Human Intelligence, Vol. 1, edited by Rey Hernandez, Jon Klimo, and Rudy Schild, published by the Dr. Edgar Mitchell Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences (FREE) in 2018.
[6] In a book co-authored with Bob Jacobs, Confessions: Our Hidden Alien Encounters Revealed (2019), UFO researcher Robert Hastings offers a startling example of this phenomenon. In the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) files, he found a 2006 letter from Christopher Smith, a retired USAF jet engine mechanic. In 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, Smith had witnessed an extraordinary UFO encounter at Loring AFB, Maine. According to Smith, shortly after two airborne, nuclear-armed B-52 bombers reported a mid-air emergency and returned to base, a huge, cigar-shaped craft suddenly appeared at low altitude and briefly hovered over Loring’s aircraft taxiway, as hundreds of Air Force personnel gaped in wonder. Unbelievably, after the UFO left, these men mysteriously behaved like oblivious automatons, calmly returning to their duties without even mentioning the amazing incident to one another. Smith wrote, “No one spoke of the UFO then or later. Our branch chief and all of the shop chiefs were sitting there having coffee [even though] they had all been out on the [aircraft parking] ramp and saw the same thing we had … Not a word then or later was said about this extraordinary event, which was both highly unusual and bizarre. But at the time, it didn’t even occur to me that it was. It was like a dream or as if it never happened, but it did.” Although Smith and the others were apparently fully aware of the UFO incursion, they strangely had no desire to discuss it and just went about their business in an essentially unfazed manner. It was as if some powerful mental suggestion had been planted in their minds not to wonder or worry about it. Similar cases, involving large numbers of witnesses, have been reported elsewhere in the ufological literature.
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