UFO Expert Keeps His Feet on the Ground : Garden Grove author says that people who claim to have been abducted by aliens are actually reliving their birth experiences.

It frosts Alvin Lawson’s glasses a bit when he sees the racks of UFO books on store shelves or reads about some new Little Green Men expert’s $200,000 book contract.

He has his own UFO book, the result of about 10 years of work. Spread out on the dining table of his richly appointed, UFO-less Garden Grove home, it would seem to have everything one could ask for from such a tome: There’s the always-spooky theme of UFO abductions; the sprawl of extensive research, with genuine charts and graphs; detailed hypnosis accounts of abductees’ gross encounters, and witness renderings of alien beings, some of whom look rather like linty gingerbread men.

But Lawson’s book remains in loose-leaf form, without a publisher. And the author says he is a pariah to others in his field--not that great a loss considering that, as a group, UFO experts rank somewhere around water snakes in the public esteem.

Lawson thinks he’s left outside because, rather than spew more sensationalism, his book debunks the whole mystery of UFO abductions. To hear him tell it, the reason for the hundreds of reported space kidnapings has far more to do with Dr. Spock than Mr. Spock.

For nearly two decades Lawson has run a UFO hot line, listed in the white pages under UFO Report Center of Orange County (no need to bother with crank calls--he’s already heard them all). He and Anaheim medical doctor William C. McCall have hypnotized more than 100 subjects--both purported abductees and people asked to imagine being abducted--and has come to the conclusion that all the cases are “involuntary fantasies” of people reliving their birth experiences.

When his hypnotized subjects talk of a spacecraft, Lawson sees a womb; the ship’s dilating door is a cervix; the tube or beam transporting the subject is vaginal, and alien examiners are delivery room personnel (who fortunately don’t have big malpractice payments to make). A common birth imagery, he notes, also runs through accounts of shamanistic trances, near-death experiences and LSD hallucinations.

Lawson, now 62, became entranced with UFOs in 1947, when the first sightings were reported. By 1973 he was “just a harmless professor” on the English faculty at Cal State Long Beach--where he remains on a semi-retired basis--when that year’s bumper crop of UFO sightings rekindled his interest. He began teaching a class on critical thinking called “UFO Literature: The Rhetoric of the Unknown,” a topic that wasn’t regarded as so far out then, he said, given that the department also had a course devoted to reading pornography.

He also started his UFO hot line, which received some 400 reported sightings in its first year. Some callers also claimed to have been abducted, which fascinated Lawson. With McCall, a GP with decades of clinical hypnosis behind him, Lawson undertook hypnotizing folks who reported CE3s, the trade slang for Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

According to Lawson, “We were believers then, and we started out with some rip-roaring abduction cases.” Among those was a Garden Grove man, appropriately initialed BS, who related fantastically detailed accounts of his CE3 experiences.

“We began thinking we’d be up for the Nobel prize, because this guy had been up six times, and there was unexplained phenomena ongoing in his house.” BS came up with blueprints of the spacecraft and quotes in ancient Greek from the aliens. But he also had a tape recorder hidden in his clothes dryer to create the “mysterious” voices and sounds heard in his house. On closer examination, his story turned out to be pure blarney.

“After the third week we knew more or less that he was a hoax, but we were cordial and kept doing sessions with him. But he got worse and worse. He started channeling with these aliens and used to call me for at least two hours a day.”

With a somewhat more skeptical outlook, the two continued their investigations and hit on the idea of hypnotizing non-abducted humans to compare their imagined accounts with those of the supposedly real thing.

“We got a group of 16 people, most of whom didn’t know anything about UFOs, and were only told we were doing a study in imagination. We had expected the people imagining the abductions would be giving us real predictable, stultified, cardboard encounters. But they made up incredible stuff. It was just as rich, variable and interesting as the supposedly real abductions,” Lawson said.

“And we were stunned by the correlations, because we didn’t suspect they would be so like the ‘real’ abductions. They were nearly undifferentiated.”

It was in searching for an explanation of the motifs common to all the stories that Lawson hit on the theory of birth memories.

“We were very reluctant to propose this idea, we didn’t want to see it,” Lawson said, “but we couldn’t ignore the evidence we were getting. In one case, for example, the woman said she couldn’t board the UFO because the opening was too small, so she twisted. Well, that’s fetal rotation during birth.”

Lawson also made a special study of people who had troubled births, getting them to imagine abductions under hypnosis.

“The first woman we had was a frank breech birth, buttocks first, and we had her imagine a UFO abduction. In most cases there is a passageway, which is vaginal, they go through to the ship. The doors open on the side of the craft and close up magically; well, that’s a cervix, obviously. She said that she exited the UFO by sitting over a trap door and falling to the ground, which is how she came out at birth. Another fellow who was born by forceps imagined being taken from a hammock by some kind of grabbing instrument.”

He thinks such CE3 experiences are the modern version of relived birth experiences that in earlier times were instead interpreted in a mystical context. His book includes an illustration by the 12th-Century Christian mystic Hildegard, showing an infant getting its soul through an umbilical cord hanging from a “placental vehicle,” and a strikingly similar stone carving of Buddha’s soul traveling via a similar jalopy.

Lately, Lawson has been coming to think that birth imagery comes into play in nearly all fantasy writing, from religious texts to editorial cartoons. He may not have placentas on the brain, but he does tend to see birth imagery popping up just about everywhere now, from car ads to playground slides.

“Have you seen the ad for this automobile that is put in this clear thing and carried through this warehouse? It’s a fetus in an amnion. It’s a collective fantasy symbol,” he insists.

Lawson has an agent shopping his “UFO Abductions and Birth Memories” book, and he still hopes to find a publisher someday. In the meantime, calls to the hot line have dwindled to a few a week, and a recent one of those was an irate woman demanding, “Is this the United Fathers Organization or not?”

Lawson did recently receive his first obscene alien phone call. “She’d heard a lot, I guess, about the sexual affairs on board flying saucers. She was coming on as an alien, and she was inviting me to participate. She didn’t leave her number,” Lawson said, with some relief.