Over the decades there have been a number of fictional tales of faked alien invasions. One of the more intriguing is Bernard Newman’s 1948 novel, The Flying Saucer. It tells of a secret group of scientists who fake three UFO crashes (one in New Mexico, no less – shades of the Roswell affair), as a means to convince the people of Earth that aliens are invading. In reality, it’s a big ruse. The reason: to try and unite the world and turn it into a (hopefully benevolent) New World Order-type future. H.G. Wells’ novel, The War of the Worlds, inadvertently provoked fears of an alien invasion when, in 1938, Orson Welles made a radio version of Wells’ classic 1898 book, which led some late listeners to the program to believe that a real extraterrestrial invasion was beginning.

In the real world, Annie Jacobsen’s 2011 book – Area 51 –included a story given to her by an elderly man named Alfred O’Donnell. The story told to Jacobsen controversially suggested that a strange and sinister plot between Joseph Stalin and crazed, deranged nut, Joseph Mengele was initiated in the late-1940s. The idea was to try and convince the United States that aliens were invading. And, how were they set on achieving it? According to O’Donnell, Mengele physically altered a number of children (so they would look “alien”), and who were remotely flown in a futuristic-looking UFO-type aircraft, all the way to the U.S. The plan was that when the craft was – again remotely – landed and the terribly mutated children climbed out, the U.S. would be plunged into a state of hysteria. It’s not unlike the Wells-Welles situation in 1938. But, so the story went, the craft didn’t land. Rather, it allegedly crashed in the wilds of Lincoln County, New Mexico, and – as a result – the U.S. government chose to hide what O’Donnell claimed really happened. It should be noted that UFO researchers have suggested that O’Donnell himself had been fed disinformation (knowingly or not), as a means to further hide the truth of whatever happened at Roswell. All of which brings me to an early 1960s-era show that just might have been the ultimate “faked alien invasion” saga.

It all revolves around a 1963 episode of the cult-classic sci-fi show, The Outer Limits – which, along with The Twilight Zone, defined 1960s-era, on-screen science-fiction. The episode in question is titled “The Architects of Fear” and it was broadcast on the night of September 30, 1963. It starred Robert Culp, Leonard Stone and Geraldine Brooks. In the story, the world is a very dangerous place. That much is obvious from the opening words of the show: “Is this the day? Is this the beginning of the end? There is no time to wonder. No time to ask why is it happening, why is it finally happening? There is time only for fear, for the piercing pain of panic. Do we pray? Or do we merely run now and pray later? Will there be a later? Or is this the day?”

Not only is the world a dangerous place, but it appears that an all-out nuclear Armageddon is right on the horizon, and with no return from the brink of destruction. Or is there? Just maybe there is. Cue the plans of a group that undertakes classified work for a variety of government agencies. Its name: United Labs. The highest echelons of the company plan to save the people of the world – and the world itself – by creating a faked alien invasion. In other words, if the Human Race can be deceived into thinking that an alien attack is looming large on the horizon, it will provoke the United States, Europe, China and the then-Soviet Union to combine their efforts to defeat the alien foe. The result: a world as one, rather than as a planet filled with nations that seem almost desperate to destroy each other.

Unbeknownst to the rest of the world, the people at United Labs have found evidence of alien life on a faraway world they call Theta. The staff even have one of their Thetans, which is held secretly in the company’s facility. The United Labs people have no idea of the real agenda of the Thetans: are they friendly, hostile or somewhere in between? The questions are many. The answers are nowhere in sight. So, a decision is taken to turn the Thetans against us, the Human Race, in a very strange and alternative way. Such is the advanced nature of the technology at United Labs, they have the ability to surgically alter a human being and transform them into the identical form of a Thetan. The plan, then, is to have one of the employees surgically altered, to resemble a Thetan, and then reveal the Thetan to the world – and the plans that the aliens have for our world: destruction. Of course, no-one knows if the Thetans really are hostile, but making it look like that is the primary goal.

The secret, manipulative program begins when the highest echelons of United Labs get together to decide which one of them will be the man to undergo the radical surgery to turn him into something less than human – or maybe even more than human. Upon drawing lots, the man for whom life will never be as it was, is Dr. Allen Leighton (played by Culp). A great deal of planning goes into the project. Dr. Leighton – a physicist – is naturally crushed by the bleak fact that the time will come very soon when he will never see his wife, Yvonne (actress Geraldine Brooks), again. That much is very clear: the top secret project requires for Dr. Leighton to be killed in a plane crash. Of course, there is no plane crash. Rather, that is the cover story which is given to Yvonne and the press. Now, behind closed doors, the mutation of Dr. Leighton can begin without intrusion – or so it seems, at first.

Dr. Leighton is subjected to a series of bizarre medical procedures – some of which will physically alter his appearance to a significant degree. Other aspects of the plan to turn a man into an alien involve grafting alien tissue onto and into Dr. Leighton. There is, however, a terrible side-effect: Dr. Leighton’s mind begins to change, too. His normal, human thought processes – even his very character – start to fragment and he becomes far more like a real Thetan than he does a member of the Human Race. Add to that the fact that Yvonne astutely comes to realize that there is something profoundly suspicious about the nature of her husband’s death and we quickly get to see how things are in danger of unraveling. On top of that, Yvonne finds herself pregnant, something which Dr. Leighton – or what is left of him – quite understandably cannot forget. So, the plan has to go forward – and quickly so, if it is to work and prevent the destruction of the planet by the super-powers.

The United Labs staff create a high-tech vehicle which, they hope, will be assumed by the governments of our world to be an alien spacecraft. In reality, though, it’s one of ours. The plan is for the “alien spaceship” to land outside the United Nations headquarters in New York. Dr. Leighton – by then – will be completely alien in appearance and character. He will also be armed with a highly destructive weapon. The team hopes that when Leighton makes it clear to the elite of the U.N. that war with the Thetan race is all but inevitable, all of the powerful countries of our world will come together as one and fight the alien foe. It’s a brilliant idea – and a brilliant ruse, too. Unfortunately for United Labs, it doesn’t work as it should. In fact, it all ends in complete and utter disaster. The craft is not quite as reliable as the scientists assume. The result is that it crashes back to Earth and very near to the United Labs. And, nowhere near the United Nations. Dr. Leighton – in alien form – exits the crashed craft and stumbles through the surrounding woods, in which he is attacked and shot by a trio of terrified hunters. Severely injured, he makes his stumbling way towards the place where the whole, sinister plot began: United Labs. Yvonne, perhaps using a more than liberal degree of psychic power, still suspects that her husband did not die in a plane crash, makes her way to the labs, demanding to know the truth of what really happened to him.

As fate would have it, both Yvonne and what was once Dr. Allen Leighton arrive at the labs at pretty much the same time. As Allen Leighton dies in the lab, Yvonne realizes to her eternal horror that the alien monster before her is actually her beloved husband. One man is dead, a wife is in a state of turmoil, a secret project has quite literally come crashing down, and the threat of nuclear war is as likely as it was before the strange operation was initiated.

Back in the 1970s, Paul Bennewitz – who died in 2003, in Albuquerque, New Mexico – had his own company that stood adjacent to Kirtland Air Force Base, also in Albuquerque. Its name was Thunder Scientific. All was good, as Bennewitz had a number of solid contracts with the military. And living and working so close to the base made things comfortable and handy for Bennewitz. It was the perfect relationship. Until, that is, it wasn’t. In shockingly quick time, Bennewitz’s life began to fragment in chaotic fashion. But, how and why did such a thing happen?

It’s important to note that by the late 1970s Bennewitz had been interested in UFOs not just for years but for decades. He had a large library of books on the subject and subscribed to a number of newsletters and magazines on the subject. On occasion, Bennewitz had seen – late at night and in the early hours of the morning – strange, unidentified objects flying over Kirtland Air Force Base and the nearby, huge Manzano Mountains. They could have been early drone-like craft being tested secretly. But, for Bennewitz they were alien craft.

Bennewitz’s head spun: he came to believe that aliens were in league with the U.S. Air Force, and that much of the secret program was run out of Kirtland. And he shared his views with staff at Kirtland, the CIA, the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, his Senator, his Congressman, and just about anyone and everyone in a position of power and influence. It was all but inevitable that by firing off lengthy letters about a secret alien-human operation at Kirtland someone would take notice. That’s exactly what they did.

While one school of thought suggests that Bennewitz was indeed tracking the movements of UFOs in the skies over Kirtland, another suggests that Bennewitz had actually stumbled on test-flights of new and radical aircraft, of the aforementioned drone kind. In the latter scenario, the government (as a collective term for all of those agencies and individuals that Bennewitz approached) decided to first politely, but quietly, request that Bennewitz bring his research to a halt. This was like a red rag to a bull. Bennewitz would hear none of it. He was primed and ready to go after the U.S. Government and to confirm what he saw as the dark and sinister truth of Uncle Sam’s liaisons with aliens. One man against the government? It was clear who was going to win; although Bennewitz couldn’t envisage such a thing at all.

Manzano Mountains

In ingenious fashion – but from the perspective of Bennewitz, in terrible fashion – a plot was initiated to, in essence, give Bennewitz exactly what he wanted to hear. So, well-placed government agents, intelligence operatives, and experts in the fields of counterintelligence and disinformation, all fed Bennewitz fictitious tales of dangerous ETs, of thousands of people abducted and mind-controlled in slave-like fashion by the aliens, of terrible experiments undertaken on people held below a huge “underground base” in the town of Dulce, New Mexico, and of a looming confrontation between the human race and the deadly creatures from another galaxy.

That the data was all coming to him from verifiable insider sources impressed Bennewitz and led him to believe their every word – which is precisely what the government was gambling on. The government then tightened the noose even tighter around Bennewitz’s neck: they fed him more and more horror-stories of the alien variety. And, slowly and bit by bit, Bennewitz’s paranoia grew. He couldn’t sleep, he became stressed to the point where he required medication, and eventually had a nervous collapse and was hospitalized. The result: he walked away from UFOs, secret projects, and cosmic conspiracies as a crushed man. Which may well have been the intent of the government, anyway.

“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” These were among the many memorable quips from the late Arthur C. Clarke, whose visionary scientific mind bordered the uncanny with his ability to foresee future technological trends and developments.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Clarke was certainly among those “distinguished but elderly scientist” types who were willing to place more bets in the possible camp than the cautious and careful realms of conventional thinking. Clarke, after all, was often willing to look where no other scientists of his day were willing to go, regularly dabbling with a cautious interest in fringe subjects as chronicled on his television series Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World. 

Clarke’s fascination with the mysterious cosmos was perhaps most evident with his views on alien life. “Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe,” Clarke said, “and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.” As a science fiction writer, many of his works dealt with ideas pertaining to alien life on other worlds. In his short story “The Star,” he tells of a scientific mission to a distant world, where the evidence of civilization discovered there is one that is long gone.

The story is told from the perspective of the mission’s chief astrophysicist, who also happens to be a Jesuit flirting with a crisis of faith. After he and his group conclude their study of the remains of an ancient world consumed by a supernova, he says to himself: “There can be no reasonable doubt: the ancient mystery is solved at last. Yet, oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?”

The blend and, often, contrasts between themes of deism and alien life were common in Clarke’s writing. Another common feature in his science fiction had been his apparent knack for predicting future innovations and discoveries. In his 1973 novel Rendezvous with Rama, Clarke predicts not only asteroid impact early warning systems the likes of which are being developed today, but also the discovery of an alien spacecraft under circumstances that bear an eerie similarity to one recent–and controversial–astronomical discovery.

Rendezvous with Rama begins in the year 2077, as an asteroid impact occurs in northern Italy which prompts the creation of a system capable of detecting such threats in advance. While Clarke’s threat detection system doesn’t come along until 2077, it bears a remarkable similarity to the present-day Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), a robotic survey and early-warning system in development at the University of Hawaii and funded by NASA. ATLAS is designed to detect near-Earth objects in advance of a potential impact with Earth by as much as several weeks and targets smaller objects which previously might have been missed by astronomical surveys.

The “prediction” of an asteroid early detection system isn’t the only unique coincidence in Clarke’s novel. Rather, Clarke’s introduction of this early warning system allows for the discovery of a distant object outside the orbit of Jupiter, which is spotted half a century after the Italian asteroid impact. Initially mistaken for being a distant asteroid, the object, dubbed “31/439”, is later revealed to be an alien spacecraft. Probes are then sent to observe the object, which is given the name “Rama” after the famous hero of Hindu mythology, which is revealed to be a featureless cylindrical object nearly 35 miles long.

Artist’s rendering of the interior of Clarke’s “Rama” spacecraft

(public domain).

If the description above sounds familiar, you aren’t alone: the mysterious space rock 1I/2017 U1, or ‘Oumuamua as it is more popularly known, was almost named Rama instead, due to the remarkable similarities between the circumstances surrounding its discovery, and the plot line of Clarke’s novel. (This was only one of several remarkable coincidences that appear in Clarke’s writing, and an online search will reveal other cases where themes in the famous futurist’s writing apparently “predicted” future innovations.)

While the similarities between Rendezvous with Rama and the real-life discovery of ‘Oumuamua are interesting, to say the least, there may be more to be gleaned from the comparison.

In a recent interview with Haaretz that we touched on here at MU, the chair of Harvard University’s Astronomy Department Avi Loeb, defending his controversial speculations about “light sail” technologies that might be propelling ‘Oumumua through our solar system, said that “As soon as we leave the solar system, I believe we will see a great deal of traffic out there.”

“Possibly we’ll get a message that says, ‘Welcome to the interstellar club.’ Or we’ll discover multiple dead civilizations — that is, we’ll find their remains.” Again, Loeb’s comments bear similarities to things Clarke had written about in stories like The Star decades ago; perhaps he’s a fan of the late futurist, too.

So much has been written of what is arguably Clarke’s most famous work, 2001: A Space Odyssey, that it hardly requires additional mention here. Nonetheless, it would be worthwhile to point out that Clarke’s fictional scenario about the influences of alien life on humankind over time, and the idea that humans might be “invited” further out for play in the great intergalactic forest as our technological capabilities progress, is also thought-provoking in light of current discoveries.

“The only way to discover the limits of the possible,” Clarke once said, “is to go beyond them into the impossible.” This may be the best summary of Clarke’s approach, both toward the eventuality of human contact with alien life, and the future in general. Thus, it may be why he saw more success than many of his contemporaries: his remarkable vision of the future was one that saw beyond what was possible in his day, and likely well in advance of what is possible even in the present day.

One of the weirdest phenomena of the paranormal world is that of what are called Shadow People. The term Shadow People covers a wide range of ghostly phenomena involving mysterious vague specters that seem to lurk just on the periphery of our perceptions for reasons that are unknown, often just appearing to watch or observe. Although descriptions vary, they are typically said to be very tall and thin, all black like a humanoid shadow, generally male in shape and with indistinct features, and often appearing almost 2 dimensional in nature, as if projections that lack any real substance. It’s not uncommon for them to be described as wearing thick cloaks or capes of old fashioned designs, and tall, brimmed hats are often reported as well. Although no facial features are typically noted, some accounts mention glowing eyes. Generally, they are only fleetingly glimpsed, often out of the corner of the eye, seeming to fade or vanish when directly observed, but not always. Although they usually look like a shadowy silhouette of a man, they can also be more amorphous masses, mists, or blobs, sometimes shifting shapes right before a witness’ eyes.

Shadow People are most commonly seen as merely observing, rarely if ever interacting with people or the world around them, and although they don’t seem to do anything to any negative effect they are almost always reported as possessing a malevolent or sinister air about them, emanating a sense of foreboding and dread. They are also known to vanish or flee when detected, and as scary as they are, Shadow People are mostly seen as rather shy and harmless in the grand scheme of things. Yet some encounters can be very intense and terrifying, and among some of the most frightening of these are accounts when these entities appear in homes, often looming over the bed of a sleeping person, who usually wakes to see the demonic looking figure standing there, and finds themselves paralyzed with fear or held in place by some unknown force.

Such weird reports are rather numerous, and share some similarities and common traits in that the witness is faced with a mysterious black figure standing in their room and overcome with a sensation of overwhelming dread, terror, and of being helpless or unable to move. One Reddit account is a good example of this type of report, and comes from a witness who wasn’t even asleep when the paranormal came for him. He says that he had just taken a shower and was settling into bed when things took a turn for the bizarre, which he describes as follows:

One night I stayed up kinda late and decided it was finally time for bed. I took my shower, got ready, turned my nightly podcast on and hopped into bed. Suddenly, I feel like something is watching me. I look up towards the window and I see a large black figure standing there. I’d say somewhere between 6 – 6 1/2 feet tall. He was completely black and I couldn’t see his face. Just a dark shadowy figure. I had a sudden feeling of fear and utter terror, I turned my head away from the window, covered my face and attempted to forget about it. I hardly slept that night.

The next night I walked over to my window and checked to see if I could see the figure again. I didn’t see anything so I turned off the lights and tried again to sleep. Within minutes of me putting my head onto my pillow I felt like I was being watched again. I peeked up over my covers and saw the same figure standing at my glass door and looking at me. This time I just stared back at him for a little bit before getting scared and covering my face again. He had a pretty fair build, wasn’t to big but also wasn’t too skinny. Just fair. Again, he had no face and was looking at me.

This kept happening for the next few nights, each time he appeared closer to me. The next he was at my screen door, then the foot of my bed, then in the middle of my room, and finally looking over me beside my bed. I felt so heavy and fearful. I felt as if I was being pushed into my bed. I could move and all but I just couldn’t shake the heavy feeling. I started to get irritated and yelled out “BE GONE! I DON’T WANT YOU HERE!” I then prayed over and over till I finally fell asleep. The next night he wasn’t there. I have exactly zero idea what it was and that’s probably one of the most strangest things I’ve seen in this house.

It is interesting to note that this encounter happened when the witness was totally awake, making it unlikely that it was all just the result of a bad dream. A similar experience of a witness who would see this phenomenon while awake was reported on Yahoo Answers by an Adam Norton, who relays the strange incidents experienced by his brother-in-law, Victor, of which he says:

He is 48 years old now, and he claims that he has had a dark, hooded figure appear to him, again and again, throughout his entire life. To him, the figure looks like an old, robed, monk. It doesn’t speak. It doesn’t gesture. It just appears, and stares at him. This is not while he’s coming in or out of sleep. This is when he’s wide awake. Obviously, this can be quite startling at times since it’s always unexpected. But he’s not afraid of the figure. He was when he was younger, but over the years it’s just become a part of his life. This is just something he sees at times, and he knows it means him no harm after years of just being watched.

Another tale typical of bedroom Shadow People encounters is told by another witness who says that in the days leading up to her experience she had been plagued by feelings of being watched at night as she lay in her bed, of scarcely glimpsed movement out of the corner of her eye, and that there was an anomalous feeling of negativity and coldness emanating from her closet and mirror. She tried to put this out of her mind, thinking that she was just tired and that it was her imagination playing tricks on her, but then one night it would apparently turn out to be anything but. She says:

When I woke up, the figure was RIGHT in front of me, & the first thing I saw was its hand. I didn’t look up at its face or anything, but just from looking at its hand, I could tell that it was dressed in a robe-like outfit, kinda like back in the day when Jesus was alive. I also had the feeling that the figure was very tall. Anyways, when I saw its hand, it was opened, almost like it was telling me to take it. That’s not the creepy part tho. The creepy part started when I had a complete feeling of fear come over me. It was almost like my soul was frightened. Then, (get ready for this) it tried to pick me up!

Now when I say that I was being lifted by this black figure, I don’t mean my physical body. It LITERALLY felt like my soul was being lifted from my body. (But then again, I’m starting to wonder if it was my soul or just my astral body). Anywho, all I remember saying during all of this was “No! No!” but I also had the thought “please don’t take me” running through my mind. It ended up letting me go, & then I woke up again, almost as if I was double-dreaming. Now I’m well aware that astral projection can seem like double-dreaming or lucid dreaming, so I’m starting to wonder if it was just a dream or if I was on the verge of astral projecting. Either way it goes, something was very weird about that night.

There is also the experience of a witness from Ireland who gives her experience on Your Ghost Stories. She claims that she had been haunted by these occurrences for about 4 years, and that they had started rather suddenly, for no discernible reason. It began rather innocuously enough, with the feeling of eyes upon her or of someone being in the room when no one was around, and there was also the odd fact that this bedroom was always noticeably colder than the rest of the house, but it would rapidly escalate from there, and she says of the unfolding bizarreness:

I started waking up in the middle of the night to see a dark figure standing beside my bed, looking at me or sometimes closer up to my face. I couldn’t make out a face just a dark figure. I felt it was male. When this happened, for some reason I would wave my hand in front of its face, for it to go away, as if I’m clearing it or something. It went then. I was never afraid of this, I just thought it was an annoyance that I had been woken up! I usually would fall back to sleep straight away after this. I never thought it was anything more than my imagination, when it first started happening. I used to joke to my friends about it, calling it my hallucinations! I always hoped that it was in my sleep!

Then weird things started to happen. I’d be lying in bed and I’d feel my blankets being pulled from the bottom of the bed. I didn’t look to see what it was or anything, as I was freaked out. Then other times I would feel like somebody was sitting on my bed, like down by my legs. I could actually feel the indent on the bed. It felt kind of like a parent would sit on your bed. It felt so real. Again I didn’t look, as I was so scared, so I would pray really hard and try to go back to sleep. Sometimes when I was lying on my side in bed, I could feel the blankets being taken off me from behind me. It would get cold. Again I’d just pull my blankets back, not look, and try to go back to sleep. Another thing that has happened, on a few occasions, is I’ve felt as if I’m being tucked into the bed, all the way around me! One of my friends thinks if it is a spirit that it’s friendly because of the way they sit on my bed or tuck me in!

Interestingly, whatever this entity was seems to have followed her when she moved away and began living with three roommates. At first there were no further incidents, and she began to feel as though she may have left the strange occurrences behind, but she would soon see that she was wrong. Not only was it back, but it seemed to be becoming more ominous and threatening. The witness goes on to say of this:

Since I’ve been living in my new house (the one I’m sharing) I’ve started to experience kind of the same things. I wake up and see the figure standing beside my bed looking down at me. I shake my hand and it goes away. I go back to sleep again. However, the last time this happened, when I waved my hand it didn’t go away. So I pulled back the curtain (the window is right beside my bed) and it went away then. The next morning when I woke up, my curtain was open. This really freaked me out, as it was kind of like proof that I am awake when I see this thing! This hasn’t happened in a few months now. I’ve moved to a new bedroom, in the same house, and also I have started wearing eye shades when I’m in bed. I haven’t woken up in the middle of the night since then.

Some of these experiences can be quite disturbing and very sinister, with a distinct, hovering sense that these entities mean us harm, despite not actually doing anything to that effect. A very scary account was given by a witness named Matt Cardin on the site Teeming Brain. The experience allegedly happened in 1993, and was so distressful and terrifying that it has stayed with him ever since. He says:

I emerged circa 3 a.m. from a sleep so deep that it was almost a coma, to find myself paralyzed by a dark figure hovering over me at the foot of the bed. When I say I was paralyzed by the figure, that’s precisely accurate: I had the sense that this thing was responsible for the awful state of paralysis that had unaccountably taken hold of me. And yes, I do know, and I think I may even have known then, about the physical paralysis that naturally occurs during REM sleep. In the presence of that dark figure, I was immediately panicked, horrified, positively sickened with terror and dread, in a way and to a degree that I had not only never experienced but had never even conceived. And this horror was a result not only of my paralysis, nor of the figure’s presence and frightening appearance, but of the awful knowledge of its reason for being there, which gripped me suddenly and totally. The thing was a vaguely man-shaped vortex of darkness, and I knew, with a kind of psychological weight that I had never imagined, that it was the anti-me, that it was like my own personal black hole, and that its presence, in fact its very existence, meant my utter annihilation. I actually felt it sucking my entire being into it, like a roaring, devouring hurricane meant for me and me alone.

It is all quite horrific and full of existential dread, and the incident left such an impact on him that Matt has done a great deal of research into the phenomenon. In some instances, more than one Shadow Person are witnessed, such as in the frightening case relayed by a witness and self-proclaimed medium on The Ghost Diaries, who says he began waking up at night to see faces peering at him from the dark, usually two or three of them. This went on for several years, but he claims that he learned to control it with his abilities of mediumship. The witness explains:

Many years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night to what I thought were people standing over my bed. I quickly reached out my hands as though to protect myself from an intruder. As I blinked a few times, I realized there was nothing standing there. Every night I would see a different face, sometimes two or even three. This happened for years–I would wake up suddenly and open my eyes to see someone staring back at me. It is something I still have not gotten used too.

Around that time this started happening, my mediumship abilities started to grow really strong. I started learning about my gifts as a medium and practiced doing readings on people. It came easy to me and I was able to communicate with spirits on the other side. I would see them hanging around people at the store, see them in cemeteries, and even speak to ghosts that were trapped here. I became pretty amazing with my gift. But one thing always puzzled me, who are the people standing around my bed at night? Who are these spirits that I can see so vividly? I can see them even more clearly than when I am awake doing a reading. I can see the wrinkles in their skin, their eye color, and even the details of their clothing.

So I decided to start asking them directly: “Who are you and what do you want?” Every night I would get the same answer, nothing. I have been trying for years to get an answer out of these spirits and have yet to hear a damn thing. The spirits that startle me almost every night have nothing to say, which is something I can’t seem to comprehend because when I do readings I can’t get the spirits to shut up.

Then I learned to call in my spirit guides and set up my shields before bed. As I got better at this, I was no longer being woken up at night. Every once in a while, one will slip through, but it has happened to me so many times that I just don’t get scared anymore. I get pissed. I have been know to yell a few cuss words, telling the to get the “F” out. It works every time.

It would perhaps be easy to explain such accounts away by saying that this is the result of a phenomenon called sleep paralysis, wherein a person wakes to feel as if they cannot move, often infused with terror, and usually sensing something inhuman in the room with them. It could also be indicative of a state called hypnogajah, which is a realm between sleep and wakefulness during which “waking dreams” can occur, or some other sleeping disorder. This is all mostly written off as having a neurological basis, and that it is more or less all in the head of the one experiencing it, but this does little to explain cases in which the witness was awake at the time, and certainly cannot explain accounts in which more than one person have seen the same entity, of which there are a few. One such report comes from a Reddit poster who says his experience happened to him as a child as he was staying at his uncle’s house. This house apparently had a shadowy black figure that was sometimes said to stare out of the closet of the bedroom, something which his friends had seen and which had disturbed them to the point that they refused to stay over. The witness tells of the series of strange events that followed:

My older brother was babysitting my twin brother and I, and we all played hide and seek, my twin and I went hiding, while my older brother seeked. I ran into my uncles room on the right, and into his closet. I sat down on the floor, and I felt a hand on my shoulder. At the time, I thought it was my twin brother, I remember asking “hiding in here too?”, to which there was no reply. Five minutes pass and I felt cold, so I left the closet THINKING my brother was following me. I went upstairs to the living room and both my brothers were sitting on the couch asking where I hid. They couldn’t believe where I told them because they think that the basement in general is creepy.

Fast forward a few nights, and my older brother was babysitting again, only my twin brother went grocery shopping with my mother and uncle at around 7 pm. We were rough housing and wrestling in his room, and we acted like we wrestled “outside of the ring” and into my uncles room which we considered a backstage. Mid-wrestle, the closet door swung open on it’s own like a blast of wind… My brother and I stopped wrestling, and stared in awe. A tall, dark, shadow man walks out of the closet and my brother books it out of the room leaving me behind. The shadow figure walks towards me, and stops in front of me. I proceed to run out of the room and down the hallway, up the stairs and by then, my uncle, mother and twin brother got home as I started crying on the stairs.

Rent went higher, we moved and that was that, or so I was told from my mother. A few years ago, I get around to asking my uncle if his room was creepy in that house. He told me that yes, his closet would open on it’s own in the middle of the night. He told me that a shadow man would sometimes walk out of his closet and would sometimes stand at the foot of his bed. He also told me that this shadow figure wasn’t evil, and that he had a comforting presence, so he didn’t complain much. The shadow figure only came around once every few weeks. My uncle then told me the house’s grim history and the real reason we moved… My uncles closet, had a cubby hole which lead to underneath the house, and conjoined my brother and uncles closets together which made one long closet. A man was murdered in that house in the 70’s and his body was found in that cubby hole. My mother found out, freaked out and moved us, blamed it on “higher rent”. My uncle knew but vowed never to tell us.

There is also the idea that these frightening figures and sensations experienced during sleep paralysis could be not just a misfiring of the brain or hyper realistic dreans, but rather have a more paranormal origin. Matt Cardin, who as we have seen has had his own encounters with these nighttime intruders, speaks about this at length in a great article called Shadow Visitors: Sleep paralysis and Discarnate Dark Ones, which delves deep into sleep paralysis and the paranormal, and includes an interesting part from a book Louis Proud titled Dark Intrusions: An Investigation into the Paranormal Nature of Sleep Paralysis Experiences, of which Cardin says:

A week or so ago I finished reading Louis Proud’s fascinating book ‘Dark Intrusions: An Investigation into the Paranormal Nature of Sleep Paralysis Experiences.’ Published just last year, it argues that sleep paralysis is actually a cousin to spirit mediumship, in that the experience represents an actual visitation by paranormal entities that live constantly among us. Usually we remain in a condition of mutual ignorance — we don’t see these entities, and they don’t see us — but sometimes they become aware of us, and then, if they’re the lower and more craven kind, they latch onto us to feed on our life energy. Sufferers of sleep paralysis thus serve as conduits to the spiritual or daimonic realm in a manner roughly similar to mediums or, in a slightly different context, the teenager that’s typically identified as the focal point for a poltergeist disturbance.

The whole article is rather fascinating and I recommend you read it, but for our purposes here the idea is that these entities are perhaps very real, and are coming between some veil that separates us through the phenomenon of sleep paralysis. It is a pretty weird concept, and it invites speculation on whether they actually cause the sleep paralysis or merely use it as a gateway, as well as the matter of, if these things are real, then what exactly are they and what do they want? If they exist, then some of the theories as to their nature are that they are ghosts or demons, as well as the idea already stated that they are things from some other parallel reality, a different dimension.

As to what they might want, it is impossible to tell, but their generally observing nature suggests that they may be just watchers studying us for inscrutable purposes or even bystanders somehow caught up in the phenomenon themselves, every bit as startled and perplexed as we are. Are these shadow beings lurking out there on the periphery of our reality, peering in at us even as we peer out at them, or the other way around? Or is this really all just the result of hallucinations caused by sleep disorders, trauma, psychological conditions, or sleeplessness? It seems that wherever the answer might lie, it is certainly not something one wants to see looming over them as you sleep.

Whitley Strieber’s 1987 best-selling book, Communion, brought the world of alien abductions to a massive, mainstream audience. During the course of investigating his experiences that prompted him to write Communion, Strieber discovered something intriguing: that the name “Aura Rhanes” – an alleged human-like alien encountered by a man named Truman Bethurum in 1952 – was extremely similar to “Aerach Reann,” a Gaelic term that translates approximately to “heavenly body of air.” It must be said that the fashion by which Bethurum became entranced by Aura Rhanes (“tops in shapeliness and beauty” was how smitten Bethurum described her) mirrors those centuries-old cases of hapless and helpless men falling under the spell of the fairy queen. Strieber pursued this Gaelic issue.

In the same time-frame that Truman Bethurum was under the hypnotic spell of Aura Rhanes, a controversial man named George Adamski claimed encounters with human-like extraterrestrials in the deserts of California. There’s no doubt that Adamski was, and still is, the ultimate Contactee – regardless of what one might make of his claimed experiences with the long-haired, human-looking “Space Brothers,” as he termed them. What is particularly interesting is that one of Adamski’s alleged brothers from the stars was named Firkon. Strieber says of this: “Fir or fear when used as a prefix means ‘man,’ and Conn, meaning ‘Head,’ is the name of a seventh-century Irish king whose son, tradition tells us, was abducted by a beautiful lady in a flying craft. Firkon means, in Gaelic, ‘man of Conn.’”

Then there are the experiences of a young man named Bob Renaud. On one particular night in July 1961, Renaud picked up an extraordinary message while “browsing around the shortwave bands” in his small, Massachusetts town. It began with a series of bleeps but was soon replaced by a female voice, which later identified herself as Linn-Erri from the planet Korendor. As was the case in so many Contactee-themed cases of the 1950s and 1960s, Renaud had repeated and extensive chats with his newfound alien friends, many of which were focused on the aliens’ fears that we, the Human Race, were on the verge of destroying ourselves. Also closely following the trend of so many Contactees, Linn-Erri and her comrades took Renaud on trips to secret, alien installations, and taught him to create complex machines, one of which was somewhat akin to an old-style television set. It reportedly allowed Renaud to see Linn-Erri in the flesh, so to speak. She was, said Renaud, a ravishing blond, who looked to be about nineteen years of age, but who claimed to be closer to her mid-seventies – in human years.

It’s not unreasonable to suggest that this could all have been provoked by nothing stranger than the late night, hormone-driven fantasies of a young man run wild. But, as with the equally controversial saga of Truman Bethurum, there is something that makes Bob Renaud’s story intriguing, as Strieber states in his work. Strieber notes that the aliens’ alleged home planet, Korendor, is very similar to a Gaelic term that Strieber described as “a place of oracle.”

Betty Andreasson is someone who has had a lifetime of profound interaction with other-world entities and whose encounters caught the attention of Strieber. On one occasion in the 1960s, when Andreasson was deep in channeling-style conversation with a small, large-headed alien being named Quaazga, a curious statement was made to Andreasson in a language that she could not understand. One person didunderstand it, however: a man named Leonard Keane. Listening to audio-recordings of Andreasson relating the statement word for word, he concluded the alien was speaking in a form of ancient Gaelic, which translated to the following: “The living descendants of the Northern Peoples are groping in universal darkness. Their mother mourns. A dark occasion forebodes when weakness in high places will revive a high cost of living, an interval of mistakes in high places, an interval fit for distressing events.”

Coincidence or something more? A UFO-Gaelic Connection?

On September 19, 1961, a New Hampshire husband and wife, Betty and Barney Hill, were driving to their New Hampshire home, after taking a welcome vacation in Montreal, Canada. We might argue they needed another vacation after experiencing what was lurking and looming on the horizon. As the pair headed home, and at around 10.30 p.m., as they drove south of Lancaster, New Hampshire, they were puzzled by the sight of a strange light in the night sky above. Viewing the lighted object through binoculars convinced the Hills that what they were seeing was not an aircraft – of either a commercial or military kind. As they continued their drive through the mountains, Barney and Betty developed an uneasy sense that whoever was flying the craft was specifically watching them; playing a game with them, toying with them, and practically goading them into following the maneuvers of the mysterious vehicle.

Matters came to a sudden hair-raising head when the object approached their car and dropped to a height of around ninety feet, causing a terrified Barney to bring the car to a sudden stop, in the middle of the road, on the darkened, mountain pass. Pancake-like was how Barney later described the unearthly-looking vehicle, after stepping out of the car and staring into the dark skies. As Barney focused on the craft with the binoculars, he couldn’t fail to see close to a dozen beings – wearing caps – milling around and peering down at the now deeply frightened pair. When the machine began to close in on the Hill’s car, Barney shouted to Betty that the things inside were going to kidnap them. They jumped back into the car at sped off at high speed – which is hardly surprising. Craft and crew did not follow – or so it seemed at the time.

The traumatic encounter was far from over: it didn’t take long at all before Betty and Barney realized that there was something very wrong about their journey – around two hours of time was missing from it. Gone. Obliterated from their memories. Finally, after nightmares, restless nights of tossing and turning, and picking up on fragmented memories suggesting there was far more to the incident than they consciously remembered, the pair received help from a psychiatrist and neurologist in Boston, Massachusetts, Dr. Benjamin Simon – who began a series of hypnotic sessions with the Hills in January 1964.

What surfaced out of those sessions, while Barney and Betty were rendered into altered states by the doctor, was, to put it bluntly, astounding: if the results of the hypnosis were not the product of fantasy or suggestion, both of the Hills had been taken on board what was nothing less than an alien spacecraft, and subjected to a number of medical procedures that clearly left Betty and Barney in states of lasting turmoil. One of those procedures – specifically performed on Betty – gave an indication that human reproduction somehow played a role in the matter.

The story is a remarkable one, and one that is comprised of Betty and Barney’s own memories that flooded back into their mind during distressing dreams, and data that surfaced during the hypnosis sessions with Dr. Simon. According to Betty, while under the control and sway of the strange creatures that stood before her on the craft, she experienced something deeply traumatic: laid out flat on something similar to an operating table, Betty – to her horror – witnessed one of the entities inserting a needle-like device into her navel, after informing her he was going to check if she was pregnant.  In addition, Betty said the alien performing the procedure assured her that the test would be very helpful – but in what way, and why, exactly, was not explained. Nor was it explained who the procedure would be helpful for: Betty or the ETs. One suspects the latter.

According to Betty, the needle was somewhere between four and six inches in length and had a tube attached to it. Far from feeling like the slight discomfort associated with a regular, medical needle, however, Betty said that the pain – as it was inserted – was more along the lines of what she thought it would feel like to have the blade of a knife plunged into her.  In other words, it was excruciating. Both the entity carrying out the task, and an additional one that was perceived by the Hills as the leader, reacted in a surprised and concerned fashion – to the extent that the creature overseeing the situation waved his hand across Betty’s eyes, something which immediately removed all of the agony. At least, that was the scenario in Betty’s dreams.

Under hypnosis, however, the story was that the pain did not go away: Betty was still in pain and deeply stressed. This is highly suggestive of the probability that her subconscious state had attempted to place a more positive, and far less traumatic, slant on the experience – but one that the hypnosis sessions demonstrated was far worse than her mind was trying to telling her. In fact, such was the stressful, pain-filled, and fear-dominated state that Betty was in, Dr. Simon took the immediate step of bringing the hypnotic session to a rapid halt. This particular aspect of the Hill affair brings us to the matter of something called amniocentesis.

When a woman becomes pregnant, the developing fetus is enveloped in what is termed amniotic fluid. It is a liquid that is very much like water, and from a study of which a great deal can be ascertained about the health and development of the fetus. Alpha-fetoprotein and developing skin cells are two of the main things that the Amniocentesis procedure focuses on, as it seeks to confirm the condition of the fetus. During the process, a needle is inserted into the mother’s uterus, via her abdomen, usually between fifteen and eighteen weeks into pregnancy. Since the procedure can at times be a tricky one, it is constantly overseen via ultrasound scanning. The goal is to use the needle to secure a small amount of amniotic fluid, which can then be studied and analyzed.

Typically, the procedure is performed for genetic reasons, such as to determine if the developing baby may have Muscular Dystrophy, Cystic Fibrosis, or Down syndrome. It’s a procedure which is very often undertaken on women in their mid-thirties or older (and who have a markedly higher chance of developing chromosomal disorders), and those who have given birth to a previous child with either physical or mental disorders. It may not be a coincidence that when Betty was subjected to that curious procedure, she was already in her early forties. It must be said that there is one notable difference between amniocentesis and the procedure that Betty Hill experienced. Namely, that the needle inserted into Betty went via her navel. In amniocentesis, it’s via the abdomen and then into the uterus. Nevertheless, it’s still intriguing that Betty’s aliens informed her that the needle-inserting procedure was linked with determining if she was pregnant.

Those doubtful of Betty’s account might take note of the fact that in 1930, the team of Leland E. Holly, Thomas Orville Menees, and J. Duane Miller, performed an amniocentesis procedure on a pregnant woman. In this case, it involved injecting dye into the amniotic sac, specifically to study the placenta and the fetus. Could Betty have heard of, or read about, these early, pre-1960s era examples of amniocentesis? Certainly, it’s not impossible. In addition, in 1960, only one year before the encounter of the Hills, and for the very first time, amniocentesis was used to identify hemophilia-related issues relative to mother and fetus. It was a development reported on, at the time – albeit primarily in the pages of in-house medical journals. If Betty did have an awareness of what amniocentesis is, it’s not impossible that buried memories of reading about it had a bearing on both her dream-based and hypnotic recollections. But, on the other hand, why would Betty say the needle was inserted into her navel, if she knew that amniocentesis was a technique that was focused only on the abdomen and the uterus?

In some respects, what Betty told of sounds far more like a laparoscopy, in which a small insertion can be made into the belly and a lighted tube is inserted to allow for an examination of the pelvic organs to be undertaken. So, given that the pelvic organs include the uterus, the Fallopian tubes, the vagina, and the ovaries, a case can still be made – to a degree – that the procedure performed on Betty was of a gynecological nature, even if it wasn’t a case of amniocentesis.