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Alien Abductions Are Down Dramatically 53

Why alien abductions are

down dramatically

By Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

Denise Stoner was 2½ years old the first time
she remembers the alien taking her. She was at
home in Hartford with her grandfather. Her
mother was at the hospital giving birth to her
younger sister. She remembers staring out a
large picture window and seeing an egg-shaped
object in the sky, hovering over some power
lines. “What’s Humpty Dumpty doing up in the
sky?” she asked. She remembers the fear in her
grandfather’s face when he suggested it was
time for bed.
Later that night, as she lay staring at her
nursery rhyme-themed wallpaper, an entity
walked through her wall. “He looked like a
monk, he had a robe, and he was carrying a light.
I wasn’t afraid of him,” she said. “He put out his
other hand for me to take it, and I did. We
walked out into the hallway.” The alien pointed
his light at the wall, and they disappeared
through it; she remembers being in a large,
dome-shaped room with a lot of other children,
and they seemed to be learning something. In the
morning, she was back in her bed.Since then,
she says, she has been taken more than 50 times, stories about Hillary Clinton’s alien baby at the experiencers would describe similar missing
from her home, from the street, from her car, the supermarket checkout line. Today, credulous time or have bizarre dreams and flashbacks of
last time only three years ago, driving through stories of alien visitation rarely crack the things they couldn’t understand. Many would
the mountains in Colorado. Each time, it’s the mainstream media, however much they thrive use hypnotic regression to recall their
same being responsible. “He looks like your on niche TV channels and Internet forums. But experiences.
typical gray [alien], but he’s one of the tall ones. we also still want to believe in accounts that Over the next two decades, the alien
It’s just the very subtle shape of his face, his chin scientists, skeptics, and psychologists say there abduction narrative wound its way into the
is a little wider,” she explained. She calls him is no credible evidence to support. American consciousness, fed by science fiction
her escort. “There’s no friendship. . . . He comes The abduction phenomenon began with films like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”
to get me, and I know I’m going to be safe,” she strange case of Betty and Barney Hill. On Sept. and breathless news reports of mysterious
said. “He’s also going to oversee whatever is 19, 1961, the Hills were driving from Montreal incidents. In 1966, a Gallup poll asked
done.” to their home in Portsmouth, N.H. Betty spotted Americans if they’d ever seen a UFO; 5 percent
Stoner, 68, lives in Florida with her a UFO following them. Barney stopped the car said they had, but they meant it in the literal
husband. Now retired, she works with fellow on the highway, near Indian Head in the White sense of an unidentified flying object — only 7
“experiencers,” people who feel they have had Mountains, and got out to look at the craft percent of Americans believed that the UFOs
contact with intelligent nonhuman entities. She through binoculars. Seeing humanoid figures in were from outer space. By 1986, a Public
also conducts investigations on behalf of the Nazi-like uniforms peering through its windows, Opinion Laboratory poll found that 43 percent
Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON. Being an he ran back to the car, screaming, “Oh my God, of respondents agreed with the statement: “It is
experiencer is very much part of her identity. we’re going to be captured!” They drove off, but likely that some of the UFOs that have been
Her story is coherent, she doesn’t ramble or get two hours later, they found themselves 35 miles reported are really space vehicles from other
lost in the telling. from the spot where they’d first seen the craft civilizations.”
Do you believe her? (there is now a commemorative marker at the Some experiencers said the aliens were
If you said yes, then you might be among site), with little memory of how they’d gotten here to save us and study us, some said they
the 77 percent of Americans, according to a there. Soon after, Betty began having were here to harvest our organs and enslave us.
2012 National Geographic poll, who believe that nightmares. But by the late 1980s, people whose stories
aliens have visited Earth, or the 30 percent of In 1964, the Hills underwent would have been dismissed as delusional a
Americans who believe that the government has hypnotherapy. Under hypnotic regression — generation earlier were being interviewed by
covered up evidence of alien visitation, hypnosis with the intent to help a subject recall Oprah and “true stories” of alien experience,
according to a 2015 YouGov poll. Or maybe it’s certain events with more clarity — the couple such as Whitley Strieber’s “Communion” and
happened to you: There are few hard numbers, said that they had actually been pulled on board Budd Hopkins’s “Intruders,” were bestsellers.
however, a 2014 survey for a British talk show the vessel by aliens and subjected to invasive By the 1990s, those who believed in the literal
found that one in 25 respondents believed they’d experiments. The Hills’ story, revealed to the truth of alien abduction stories gained an
been abducted by aliens. public in 1965 with an article in the Boston important ally in John Mack, a Harvard
Belief that alien life exists on other Traveler and a year later in the book “The professor and psychiatrist who compiled his
planets is persuasive, sensible; nearly 80 percent Interrupted Journey,” launched a flurry of public study of the phenomenon into a 1994 book titled
of Americans do believe it, according to a 2015 fascination with abductions. “Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens.”
poll. But belief that the aliens are already here Barney died of a cerebral hemorrhage in He later told the BBC, “I would never say there
feels like something else, largely because it 1969, but Betty went on to become a kind of are aliens taking people away . . . but I would
requires a leap of faith longer than agreeing that sage of paranormal experiences. Their story say there is a compelling, powerful phenomenon
the universe is a vast, unknowable place. became the blueprint for alien abduction here that I can’t account for in any other way.”
Abduction and contact stories aren’t quite the experiences in the years that followed,
fodder for daytime talk show and New York especially after the airing of the 1975 made-for-
Times bestsellers they were a few decades ago. TV film “The UFO Incident,” starring James (Continued on Page 54)
The Weekly World News is no longer peddling Earl Jones as Barney Hill. Subsequent