The first contactees: Early CE3s and CE4s

[Mighty_Emperor]

Just reading through Susan Clancy's Abducted and she claims to have read every acocunt of alien abduction published and seen nearly every film with aliens in (pos. aliens kidnapping people) and she has a section about the earliest contact with aliens so I thought I'd throw in what she says and see if anyone knows of any other examples.

This is just for examing the earliest contact claims - if you are interested there is a thread on Clancy and her work here:

www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=23760

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Although life on alien planets has been discussed as far back as the Greeks actual contact with these inhabitants (CE3s) didn't come until much later:

Emanuel Swedenborg wrote about communications with people form other worlds (although he was going a bit nuts at the time) in his Arcana coelestia (1749-1756):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Swedenborg

After that we have odd encounters during the airship flap with 2 accounts from 1897:

A farmer in Missouri met a stunningly beautiful alien woman

A West Virginian saw 8 Martians emerge from an illimunuated craft. They were 11-12 feet tall and drank air and took small pills (I assume they weere looking for an early tournament game with the Harlem Globe Trotters but got their timing wrong),

Then in 1953 Adamski published his book about chats with aliens in the desert.

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These are all your close encounters of the third kind (CE3s) but according to her info abductions (CE4s) didn't happen until later.

The first encounters seem to be in fiction. Firts Invaders from Mars (1953), This Island Earth (1955) and in the early sixties The Outer Limits. The dealt with abduction but also hybridisation: The Children of Spider Country, Second Chance and Bellaro Shield.

The first major abduction case was the Hills which came to light in 1964.

However, she doesn't mention Antonio Villas Boas who claimed to have been kidnapped in 1957 and didn't need hypnosis to recover his memories. This article also mentions a number of accounts of (mainly) men being kidnapped for space nookie:
www.forteantimes.com/articles/121_aliensex.shtml

She also doesn't look further back to the pulp fiction of the 1930s:
www.skepticfiles.org/ufo2/unpredis.htm
and possibly even some similarities with the Shaver Mystery - all mentioned here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abduction_ ... on#History

It is interesting to see the change from the accounts of space nookie with nearly human women in the fifties to the nasty intrusions of the mid-sixties.

Anyone got any other info?

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CE Wikipedia entry (which has us as an external link):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_encounter

 

[Anonymous]

Might be interesting to corollate the male space-buggery to the advent of colonoscopy and the sinister sssssigmoidoscope. Sounds like psychopathia sexualis to me.

 

[Graylien]

Anyone examining the phenomenon of alien abductions within a historical context surely has to make reference to fairy folklore - with its many tales of diminutive humanoids capturing hapless humans. If Ms Clancy really has read every book on the subject, then she should be well aware of the pioneering work of Jacques Vallee in this area.

Swedenborg's conversations with angels are perhaps paralleled by the experience of Facius Cardan in 1491. Facius, a highly educated man, was visited by seven men clad in togas, "glittering boots" and "purple undergarments of an extraordinary splendour and beauty".

The strangers revealed that they were "made of air" and had a lifespan of three centuries. Rather shockingly, they denied the existence of an immortal soul. They also claimed that God made the Universe from "moment to moment" and that "should He desist for an instant, the world would perish". (This ran very contrary to the contemporary theological dogma that God had created a perfect, static Universe for all eternity). The strange septet then dematerialised, leaving Facius unsure whether they were angels or demons.

There was also a case of forcible abduction during the 1897 Phantom Airship flap. A man claimed that he had been seized by half-a-dozen goblin-like creatures who kept him aboard their airship for a week while they tormented him with hot pokers. (I can't find the reference right now, but the case has appeared in quite a few UFO books.)

 

[naitaka]

In the letters of Pliny the Younger there is an account which, though presented as a ghost story, sounds almost like an alien encounter. (taking hair samples for testing?)

To Sura:

I am extremely desirous therefore to know whether you believe in the existence of ghosts, and that they have a real form, and are a sort of divinities, or only the visionary impressions of a terrified imagination... [several ghost tales follow]

I have a freedman named Marcus, who is by no means illiterate. One night, as he and his younger brother were lying together, he fancied he saw somebody upon his bed, who took out a pair of scissors, and cut off the hair from the top part of his own head, and in the morning, it appeared his hair was actually cut, and the clippings lay scattered about the floor. A short time after this, an event of a similar nature contributed to give credit to the former story. A young lad of my family was sleeping in his apartment with the rest of his companions, when two persons clad in white came in, as he says, through the windows, cut off his hair as he lay, and then returned the same way they entered. The next morning it was found that this boy had been served just as the other, and there was the hair again, spread about the room.

General Letters Part X: LXXXIII

Pliny the Younger: Selected Letters c. 100 CE

 

[Graylien]

George Adamski is generally credited as being the first person in the modern UFO era to claim contact with self-professed extraterrestrials. However, the earliest 'First Contact' of this kind actually seems to be that of Jose Higgins - a Brazilian topographer who encountered a party of humanoids in July 1947.

As in the Adamski encounter, the entities communicated through a mixture of sign language and drawings - although they claimed to be from Uranus rather than Venus. They invited Higgins to board their craft, but he made his excuses and left. The aliens then spent half-an-hour frolicking around and hurling boulders at each other!

There are significant problems with the case. The initial arrival of the saucer was supposedly viewed by multiple witnesses, but they never seem to have come forward to confirm their presence. And the first half of Higgin's story - like Adamski's - reads like a particularily cliched 1940's sci-fi story.

Nevertheless, Higgin's claim that the aliens spent half-an-hour leaping around like children adds an intriguing element of High Strangeness to the story. I wonder if there are any precedents to this part of his tale in contemporary sci-fi?

Full account here: The Playful Giants

 

[Mighty_Emperor]

Good one - your site is really great resource

Faces of the Visitors gives their first CE3 as one from 1947 6 miles south of Lima. The witness saw a craft descend and when he approached it 3 creatures that recalled mummies (sounds a bit like that Doctor Who episode but their legs were fused together too).

Source: UFOs over the Americas and Encounters with UFO Occupants by Coral and Jim Lorenzen.

They have another section on abductees which starts with

Sara Shaw and Jan Whitley March 22 1953 in Tujunga Canyon, California. The creatures ar e black and slender with no facial features (as if they were wearing ski masks).

Source: The Tujunga Canyon Contacts by Ann Druffel and Scott Rogo; World Atlas of UFO Sightings by John Spencer.

They have a reliability scale (0 being the least relaible) and give this a 1 largely because the case only came to light 20 years laterafter one of the women saw a documentary on abduction. However, if you read the account it does sound "real" although what actually happened is up for interpretation esp. as the details of the abduction were recovered through hypnosis. However, there are actually a string of events that happened to the 2 women and a friend - one of them is a text book SP (she awoke in the late sixties and couldn't move and reported ugly faces floating above her). Another account involves Whitley and the third woman encountered a bright light whilst driving and were unable to move.

 

[Mighty_Emperor]

Good quick summary:

In 1896 one Colonel Shaw and a Miss Camille Spooner reported a near abduction by alien creatures with large black eyes who stood three feet tall. Similar reports came out of England in 1901, Baltimore in 1919, Australia in 1925, and Spain in 1944. All of these cases preceded Betty and Barney Hill's "abduction," George Adamski's Venusian flights, Antonio Villas Boas's alien party in Brazil, and police officer Lonnie Zamora's encounter with little folk in white coveralls.

www.csicop.org/sb/9706/taxonomy.html

 

[Graylien]

I'm afraid that's some rather sloppy research there. If they'd bothered reading the original witness statement they'd have realised that

1) 'Miss' Camille Spooner was actually a man

2) The 'three-foot-tall' aliens were actually "nearly seven feet high".

3) Colonel Shaw makes no reference to the colour of the eyes - merely describing them as "large and lustrous".

It just so happens that you can find Colonel Shaw's entire (and rather verbose) statement on my site here: Mars Attacks

(Well, you could do if the darn server wasn't down. Again.)

 

[rynner2]

I'm afraid that's some rather sloppy research there.

OK, let's draw straws to see who has to march up to CSICOP and tell them what a load of plonkers they are.

..or we could just send them an email.

 

[PeniG]

By coincidence, I just finished reading the Clancy book (which I liked very much) and the paragraph to which His Grace refers reads as follows:

In the past few years, I have become a reluctant scholar of alienography. I believe I've read every account of alien abduction ever published, and just about everything that social psychologists, psychoanalysts, postmodernists, journalists, physicists, biologists, and ex-military personal (sic)* have to say about them. In addition, with the help of some enthusiastic film school students, I've watched nearly every American movie and TV show ever made about aliens.

*I'm inclined not to hold this against her - since the advent of spellchecking, proofreading standards in the adult market have fallen abyssmally!

You'll notice that she has left herself multiple hedges, here. The book has source notes, but no bibliography - another increasingly common costcutting feature, alas - so it is impossible to say for certain that she didn't read Vallee; but if she did, the book shows no trace of it. She specifically comments on the cultural distribution of abduction reports and the paucity of South American abductions, which implies that she looked, in which case missing Villas-Boas is very strange. An American emphasis is not surprising, however, given the location of her research, and the degree to which her interest revolved around her specific subjects and the specific hypotheses her experimental designs were inclined to test.

Since her primary interest is in the process of memory formation and testing the various false memory paradigms, her emphasis is not on the validity of the claims (which she assumes to be false in the objective, factual sense but has been convinced are real in a subjective sense - she reiterates several times that abductees are not insane or hoaxers, and concludes that their belief is no more weird or dysfunctional than many other beliefs, including some she holds herself) and it's not surprising she's missed some and thinks she hasn't. It's always dangerous to say you've read everything, or nearly everything - that's a cue for finding a whole new section of library. She got into examining abduction claims because she was burned by doing memory work with sexual abuse victims and her results and purposes were widely misunderstood and misreported. That she thought abduction research would be less contentious is a good indication of how little cognizant she is of the wider world of UFOology!

I think if her omissions were pointed out to her she would be gracious about it, as there are several instances in the book of her chastising her younger self for arrogance or unscientific thinking. If she's moved on to other fields of research, though, she might not care much.

BTW, how much distinction is made in UFOology between Adamski-style contact and Hill-style abduction? They seem to me very different things.

 

[Mighty_Emperor]

I agree with most of your points. However, an academic work would probably not have a bibliography - she states her references after all.

It does show up the problems with the scientists approach to the area - they have to approach it from their specialist angle and time is often limited so they have to cram but are still not happy with acknowledging the limits of their understanding of a subject. If you are interested there is a thread on the broader aspects of her work:

www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=23760

This one was to check one of her claims.

 

[Graylien]

She specifically comments on the cultural distribution of abduction reports and the paucity of South American abductions, which implies that she looked, in which case missing Villas-Boas is very strange.

Not to mention missing the Antonio Da Silva case (almost as well known as Villa Boas) and the numerous attacks by Hairy Dwarves in the early 1950's. Of course, none of these accounts were retrieved by regression hypnosis - which is indeed - along with its bastard child, the grey alien - far more common in the USA than elsewhere. Had Clancy simply stuck to debunking hypnosis rather than claiming to be an instant expert on the entire UFO/Alien phenomenon, then I wouldn't take issue with her. As Jacques Vallee himself said in a recent interview

I've also antagonized a lot of people because I think that the way abductions are being handled is wrong. It's not only wrong scientifically, it's wrong morally and ethically. I've been telling people, don't let anyone hypnotize you if you've seen a strange light in the sky. I think a lot of those people prominent in the press and in the National Enquirer and in the talk shows and so on are creating abductees under hypnosis. They are hypnotizing everybody who's ever had a strange experience and telling them they are abductees by suggestion. And they are doing that in good faith. They don't realize what they are doing. But to my way of thinking, that's unethical.

Getting back to early CE4s, there's also the reasonably well known case of Swedes Hans Gustafsson and Stig Ryberg, who - at the height of the Adamski 'Space-Brother' era - were viciously attacked by jelly creatures. (See: Invasion of the Jellymen)

And from a far earlier era, what about Spring-Heeled Jack? His bouncing gait and glowing eyes are both reminiscent of many entity reports of the modern UFO era.

 

[PeniG]

Spring-Heeled Jack didn't abduct anybody though.

Fairies, now, they've abducted lots of people. If I had her in front of me, I'd give her lots of fairy narratives to read.

Ironically, if she'd read more widely, she would have found even more support for the thesis that abduction memories and stories are culturally constructed. And this would be true even if some entity or other has indeed been abducting human beings for centuries! This is, after all, the beauty of ambiguous data and why we love this stuff.

Well, it's why I love it, anyway.

 

[DougalLongfoot]

Then of course there are the Old Testament prophets Ezekiel with his glowing wheel and creatures (am I the only one who remembers the opening credits to Project UFO?), and Elijah gets taken off by the strange craft.

 

[Mighty_Emperor]

From Fort:

Daily Mail, May 20 -- that a man, named Lithbridge, of 4 Roland Street, Cardiff, Wales, had, in the office of the Cardiff Evening Express, told a marvellous story.(5) This story was that, upon the 18th of May, about 11 p.m., while walking along a road, near the Caerphilly Mountains, Wales, he had seen, on the grass, at a side of the road, a large, tube-shaped construction. In it were two men, in heavy fur-overcoats. When they saw Mr. Lithbridge, they spoke excitedly to each other, in a foreign language, and sailed away. Newspaper men visited the place, and found the grass [133/134] trampled, and found a scattering of torn newspapers and other debris.

5. "The phantom airship." London Daily Mail, May 20, 1909, p.5 c.1-2. For the local newspaper article: "Airship scare." Cardiff Evening Express and Evening Mail, May 21, 1909, p.3 c.3-4. C. Lithbridge. Caerphilly Mountain, not mountains. The two men were "busily engaged with something nearby" and later "jumped into a kind of little carriage suspended" from the construction; and, they spoke "a strange lingo -- Welsh or something else; it was certainly not English."

www.resologist.net/lo111.htm

I think this has been further expanded on in "The first contact of the century?" in the March/April 1960 issue of Flying Saucer Review as it seems the Cardiff Weekly News looked into the Lithbridge / Lethbridge (Fort seems to have got the name wrong) account again and expanded some of the details: the tube had wheels and what looked like a propellor and when the area was searched a red label with french writing on was found attached to a small chain and pin (similar to that used to regulate the pressue in airhsips).

This swings it back in line with the airship flaps but still....

 

[Graylien]

It's stretching a point to describe it as a 'Flying Saucer', but Swedenborg's own design for a "Machine to Fly in the Air" is still worth a look:

Swedenborg's Flying Machine