Close Encounters : UFO Believers--and Abductees--Say It <i> Can </i> Happen Here

The 75 folding chairs were lined up in the meeting room, cookies and punch ready in the back. The club newsletter was neatly laid out by the door.

But this was no garden club meeting. Soon, three men and a woman--they looked like anyone you’d see at the shopping mall--would tell the hushed room about their abduction by aliens and being taken aboard a spacecraft.

It’s another local chapter meeting of the Mutual UFO Network Inc., better known as MUFON. Gathering each month at the Cameron Center in Thousand Oaks, the group is part of an international organization that takes the business of investigating the UFO phenomenon very seriously.

These are folks who want no part of the wackier fringe elements of UFOlogy, as they call it. Yet here they are, listening to a guy from Burbank talking about aliens implanting some little gizmo in his leg.

Jesse, as he was introduced, had undergone regressive hypnosis that had, with horrifying clarity, unearthed memories of multiple abductions. The little gray beings with big heads, he said, first snatched him when he was 5. Last year, there were nine abductions and several mornings when he awoke to find strange marks and wounds on his body. But most troubling was the forced cross-breeding with female aliens.

“Can we please not talk about my children?” he choked in response to a question.

Is it possible that little gray creatures are beaming their hapless victims up to their spaceship for bizarre medical procedures?

If common sense says no, a flurry of books published over the past few years suggests otherwise. More people are coming forward with stories of abductions, which, UFO believers claim, bear amazing similarities.

The UFO phenomenon is hotter than ever. The local chapter of MUFON, started just three years ago, has swelled to about 40 members, and its meetings sometimes draw double that. And it is not unusual to see earnest postings such as the recent newspaper ad from an Ojai man looking for others with whom he might share UFO experiences.

But all the hubbub over aliens and UFOs is taking a new twist. Some mental health professionals are now insisting that regressive hypnosis reveals fantasy, not fact. They say the abductions never happened, although the memories seem frighteningly real.

Believers, clearly, think otherwise.

“Anyone who has researched it, anyone who has really done their homework--I don’t know how they could say it doesn’t happen,” said Alice Leavy of Newbury Park, assistant director of the local chapter.

Beamed Up

Leavy, who owns a real estate appraisal business with her husband, believes that it happened a year ago in Camarillo. Since March, she and Mike Evans, director of the MUFON chapter, have been investigating the group’s first big Ventura County case, and it’s a doozy.

Two women turned to the group for help after months of anguish over a mysterious incident they say occurred on the Ventura Freeway on Nov. 20, 1992. (MUFON is keeping their identities confidential.)

According to MUFON’s account, the women--one in her 20s, the other in her 30s--were driving north on the freeway about 9:30 p.m. when a huge, bright light appeared above and ahead of them. It was racing downward toward the car. The women were terrified that it was an airplane about to crash into them.

The next thing they knew, they were exiting the freeway in Ventura. It was close to midnight, and they had no idea what had happened to the previous 2 1/2 hours. Both women agonized for months over the missing time.

Then MUFON steered them to Yvonne Smith, a Los Angeles hypnotherapist who specializes in abduction cases. During hypnosis, they recounted a terrifying scene in which the light that blinded them was an oblong UFO the size of a football field.

According to Smith and MUFON representatives, the women told this tale:

They found themselves aboard a spacecraft. One was stripped and examined by little gray aliens with big heads and big eyes who communicated telepathically. She was peered at by another creature that resembled a praying mantis.

The other woman was guarded by one of the aliens. Before the episode ended, the aliens told the women that they would be back.

Did it really happen?

Credible Sources?

Skeptics say such abduction memories are the workings of an imagination heightened during hypnosis. Or they are subtly suggested by the hypnotherapist. Or they are hallucination-like nightmares and pieces of other memories. One critic claims that the so-called abductees are reliving the birth experience. Even MUFON members aren’t unanimously supportive of the process of regressive hypnosis.

“Hypnosis turns on people’s imagination--that’s all it is,” retired Kentucky psychologist Robert A. Baker scoffed. “It’s very easy to do. I can teach anyone in five minutes.”

Baker serves on the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, a self-proclaimed skeptics organization, and contends that there are natural explanations for abduction memories, UFO sightings and missing time.

He claims that hypnotherapists are “scaring the hell out of people” by giving credence to the abduction scenario.

But Leavy and Evans, who were present when the two women involved in the Camarillo incident were hypnotized, contend that the experience was real--and wrenching.

“It’s terrible to go through the pain of regression,” said Leavy, who found herself weeping while witnessing the women’s agony.

“During hypnosis, they relive the experience--their coloring goes white,” said Smith, whose hypnotherapy practice includes 70 people who believe that they have had some sort of abduction experience. She even provides a support group for them. The most convincing fact, said Smith, who spoke recently to the Ventura County MUFON group, is that people all over the country who don’t know one another are recalling remarkably similar incidents.

Most are troubled by missing time, she said. Many are lifted to the spacecraft in a beam of light, usually from their bedrooms at night. The most commonly reported aliens--referred to as the Grays--are three to five feet tall with four digits, no hair, dark eyes and a small mouth that doesn’t seem to work. However, some abductees have reported human-sized “Nordic” aliens with light features; yet others report insect-like creatures. Some wake up with unexplained body marks, and for some, the entire abduction horror goes on repeatedly.

MUFON “broke new ground” during its investigation of the case involving the two women, according to Evans, a Simi Valley nurse. The group paid for the hypnosis sessions and X-rays of one woman’s ear, which has been troubling her since the incident. The X-ray ruled out the possibility, he said, that aliens had implanted a device.

The story has more bizarre twists. The results of the hypnosis session suggest that the two women may have been abducted previously. And on the night of the incident, they were returning home from their first MUFON meeting.

Could the meeting, in heightening their awareness of UFOs, have influenced the pair? Maybe. But MUFON member Lance Lorien, a computer programmer, was also traveling home from the meeting that night.

When he got home to Goleta, he told his wife that he had seen a strange white light in the sky between Camarillo and Ventura. “It was an odd light that frightened me,” he said. “It went from right to left really fast.”

It wasn’t until months later that he heard about the two women. He still has no idea what it was he saw or whether it was the same light they saw. Nor is he convinced that aliens are abducting people off the highway or from their bedrooms.

Evans is more of a believer. As a nurse, he once worked in a Los Angeles psychiatric ward. Some patients, who claimed contact with aliens, were passed off as nut cases.

“Looking back on it now, they may have had actual abductions,” he said.

Evans, like Leavy, is a field investigator trainee for MUFON, which has extensive standards for certification. But calls about strange sightings in the Ventura County sky are not frequent.

What happens more often is that someone who has seen or experienced something bizarre will nervously approach Leavy or Evans during a meeting and take them aside. “They’ll start by saying, ‘I know I’m not crazy,’ ” Leavy said.

That’s how the group received another abduction case to investigate recently. About a year ago, Leavy said, a Thousand Oaks man awoke to see an alien by his bed. He too was referred to Smith for hypnotherapy.

It Can Happen to You

UFOlogy is gaining new respect, Evans and others say, as more people come forward to talk about sightings. Many of these events occurred years ago, when fear of ridicule made it risky to go public.

MUFON member David Gordon, a physician practicing in Woodland Hills, took it upon himself to find out how many people believe that they have seen UFOs and even aliens.

Last year, Gordon, a general practitioner, began a survey of his patients, many of them from Ventura County. What he found out surprised him. Out of 1,050 patients surveyed, 115 (11%) said they had seen a UFO. Of those, 60 were able to sketch the thing on one of Gordon’s prescription pads. Eight patients related abduction experiences. Four others reported seeing aliens.

They detailed incidents from around the world--from Tehran to Death Valley--with some occurring decades ago. But a number popped up in Ventura County, especially Simi Valley. For instance, there was the 61-year-old woman, driving home from work in 1976, who thought that she saw a huge UFO with yellow and red lights sitting on a vacant lot at a Simi Valley intersection.

“She told her husband, but she never told another living soul until I asked her about it,” Gordon said.

There was the maintenance worker who said he chased a cigar-shaped UFO for 10 minutes after it flew over a Simi road. The restaurant owner who pulled off the Simi Valley Freeway to watch a disk-like object in the sky at dusk. The woman, driving the same freeway, who saw a silver UFO hovering over the road. The woman soaking in a hot tub who recalled three triangular-shaped craft that flew over the house without a sound. And the nurse, on her way to The Oaks mall, who swore that she saw a UFO hovering near the freeway exit.

Gordon, a card-carrying field investigator for MUFON, feels one need only patiently “sky watch” and eventually a sighting will occur. With other UFO believers, he has gone on “stakeouts” to UFO hot spots north of Los Angeles and has seen puzzling objects in the sky.

His physician wife, Eva, an allergist, says she saw a UFO a year ago--a silver disk, larger than a 747, over Topanga State Park. Now she too is surveying her patients about sightings.

UFO debunkers say sightings generally can be explained as airplanes, satellites, shooting stars, blimps, weather balloons and clouds. Even the planet Venus has fooled people.

Frank Barr of Newbury Park admits that he was fooled once. Barr, an engineer who attends MUFON meetings, said he saw a strange object in the sky one night.

“It made no sound. It was fast. It looked like a wobbling UFO,” he said. He rushed to get his binoculars and, when he focused, he saw an owl perched 50 feet away.

But Barr, like many MUFON members, has witnessed other, more puzzling sights over the years.

Dan Campbell’s close encounter came 13 years ago, when he was startled to see a red light hanging over the night skies of Thousand Oaks. Then he saw what looked like military aircraft approaching the light before it made a 90-degree turn and disappeared in a red streak. It was as close as 500 feet above his house, he said.

“What it was, I have no idea,” said Campbell, a co-founder of the local MUFON chapter. Campbell works in vocational education and believes that 99% of the UFO sightings can be explained. “It’s the 1% I’m interested in.”

Mention the word government and Evans and others will rail that the United States knows a great deal more than it is telling. (The group’s monthly newsletter, Swamp Gas, is a play on the government’s early explanation of UFO sightings.)

“It’s been one great big cover-up since 1947,” Evans said, referring to the year a mysterious object--thought to be a UFO by some--crashed near Roswell, N. M.

It’s a Conspiracy

At meetings, MUFON members share theories and information about UFO developments, listen to speakers and sometimes watch films, such as a videotape recently taken from an airplane flying over isolated spots north of Los Angeles.

The mission was to surveil buildings owned by major aerospace firms--Northrop and Lockheed among them--that some MUFON members believe may camouflage underground bases for UFO activities. It was a hunch that not everyone in the audience bought.

“I don’t see any evidence of it being anything other than a research facility,” one woman said after the film. “My response is, ‘So what?’ ”

And it’s certainly a hunch the firms quickly dismiss.

“There is no UFO activity at Lockheed, I can tell you that,” said Jim Ragsdale, spokesman for Lockheed Advanced Development Co., which operates a facility near Helendale north of San Bernardino that measures radar signals.

Nonetheless, a dozen MUFON members armed with cameras took an eight-hour field trip to the area one weekend, skirting the sites by car to look for suspicious activity.

Although members view the UFO enigma seriously and want to be taken seriously, the meetings are not without humor. After one meeting, Barr mused on the notion that aliens are abducting people.

“The jury is still out on regressive hypnosis,” he said. “When it happens to me, you can take it to the bank.”