UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

This article, along with others exploring the possibilities of alien life and other mysteries hidden beyond the stars, is featured in Newsweek's Special Edition: Life Beyond Earth? The Mission to Find the Answer.

The phenomena of UFO abductions is familiar to everyone—even if the experience of one has only ever been secondhand at best. But the ubiquitous perception may be largely inaccurate, stemming from the likes of hackneyed depictions in sci-fi films and clickbait fabrications on the internet. That’s unacceptable to the small but dedicated group of individuals who have pledged their lives to solving this mystery. “I continue my research no matter what, and nothing’s going to stop me, nor will it stop others in the field,” says Denise Stoner, one of the world’s leading authorities on UFO abduction reports and a member of the Mutual UFO Network’s (MUFON) Experiencer Research Team. Experts in the field know that the truth about abductions, whatever it may be, lies within the reports from thousands of people in dozens of countries.

For more than half a century, Americans have reported experiencing UFOs in an up close and personal way that alters their lives forever. In 1961, a media frenzy occurred when Barney and Betty Hill described the night a UFO containing several humanoids hovered directly above their Chevy Bel Air on a rural New Hampshire road. The couple claimed the rest of their drive was a hazy state of altered consciousness, but Betty’s inexplicably stained dress and Barney’s mysteriously scuffed shoes served as mementos of the experience. Another landmark case occurred in 1975, boasting the benefit of witnesses. During a logging job in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona, Travis Walton was struck by a beam from a mysterious craft as his crew looked on. He would disappear for five days until resurfacing some 30 miles away at a gas station—all while his crewmates proved their innocence in the matter by passing polygraph tests. Both cases, which only represent the tip of the iceberg concerning UFO abduction reports, remain a mystery to UFO researchers.

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Betty and Barney Hill pose with a newspaper describing their alleged abduction in 1961. The couple’s story became a TV movie in 1975 with Estelle Parsons playing Betty and James Earl Jones in the role of Barney.

UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/UIG/GETTY IMAGES

Some details may differ slightly from account to account, but the fundamental elements are intact in every encounter, fueling validation for both abductees and researchers. “All accounts are essentially the same,” says Dr. David M. Jacobs, author of books such as Secret Life: Firsthand Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions and Walking Among Us. Speaking from decades of experience in the field, Jacobs feels the common ground spanning the litany of cases gives considerable weight to each new report.

While Denise Stoner investigates many local reports for MUFON within Florida, where she resides, Jacobs’s experience informs his insistence that UFO abductions occur worldwide. “It is a global phenomenon,” he states. “It has nothing to do with the United States. We do not know if we are the center of UFO abduction activity.” One of the earliest UFO abductions on record supports Jacobs’ claim. The case of Brazilian farmer Antonio Villas Boas in 1957 has withstood even the most liberal application of UFOlogist scrutiny thanks to the intricate details provided by the abductee and the ceaseless physical ailments (including painful lesions) he suffered following the incident. Jacobs is certain the phenomenon has spread across the globe since then, noting that he has worked with abductees from nearly every continent—and they have all reported many of the exact same details. “That’s extraordinary,” he says. “That has never happened before in human history, where people will be saying, ‘This happened to me,’ and they’ll describe the exact same instruments used and the same procedures involved, and everything else is the same as everyone around the world is describing. Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, all saying the same thing, all knowing full well that it sounds crazy.”

Of course, researchers still do their due diligence to devote investigations to only the most credible of accounts. Any time an individual reports being abducted by a UFO, researchers first attempt to rule out mental illness as a cause. “When we first speak to an individual, we want to spend as much time as possible with them to discover whether or not they have ever had a diagnosis that includes mental issues, what kind of medication they’re on,” says Stoner. “There are several reasons for people to have these types of experiences, and we need to eliminate those when we’re doing an investigation.”

For the majority of his career researching UFO abductions, Jacobs has sought to root out any inconsistencies by conducting hypnotic regressions with abductees. Recognizing the skepticism surrounding a process that seeks to acquire information from hypnosis, he says, “It’s so ridiculous, and yet it works.” Jacobs explains that because the process spans over several sessions, trust is organically built between researcher and experiencer. “They don’t want to tell me things that didn’t happen,” he adds.

As Jacobs learned the first time he conducted a series of hypnotic regressions with an alleged abductee, though, the truth can be elusive, even if the subject isn’t trying to withhold it. He recalls working with a 7-year-old girl who claimed she was with a friend in the park when she felt arms wrap around her waist as she was suddenly pulled from the ground up into something. Now in an unknown setting, the girl noted seeing a humanoid with a pageboy haircut named Cosmo, who proceeded to place her on a table for a physical examination. Claiming she was then instructed to place her hand on the head of an extraterrestrial, the girl described feeling immense positivity and warmth. Before being returned to the park by Cosmo, the girl stated she met a group of extraterrestrials sitting at a table who told her she would live a “brave, courageous strong, wonderful life.” Ecstatic by what he had extracted from the hypnosis, Jacobs went to transcribe the story from his tape recorder that night, only to find that the girl’s mostly whispered words had not been picked up. Determined to capture the incredible descriptions, Jacobs had the girl retell the experience in a later session. She obliged, and the initial beats were consistent—the hands around the waist, the pageboy-haired Cosmo figure, the physical exam—only this time, there was no mention of placing her hand on the being’s head or receiving the affirming words from the table of extraterrestrials. Jacobs prodded for the missing pieces, but the young abductee claimed she didn’t remember those aspects and said she thought those things happened to the friend she was with at the time. “I knew at that time that I had no idea what I was doing, and I vowed I was never going to let that happen again,” Jacobs says.

As with any skilled trade, such as performing brain surgery or writing computer code, experience is the way to limit the frequency of errors in researching UFO abductions. The greatest mistake someone in the field can make, it seems, is allowing themselves to be abducted by the blinding beam of naysaying critics. But Jacobs and Stoner are both far from ignoring their decades of research in favor of believing only what accepted science is able to explain.

Stoner points to some skeptics dismissively chalking abductions up to mere dreams as an example she feels is easily countered by her research. “We’ve had many, many abductions that took place in broad daylight. And if you’re in broad daylight, and you’re driving or walking and this happens, you don’t have those excuses to give,” she says. “You don’t have people saying ‘Okay, you were dreaming, you were asleep, you were this or that.’ It happened, and there’s no way that anyone can tell you it didn’t.”

For Jacobs, the uncanny commonalities across reports stand as the reason for continuing research. “We know the abduction phenomenon is considered to be completely psychological by 99.9 percent of all psychologists, psychiatrists, etc.,” he says. “Except, of course, by those psychologists, psychiatrists, medical doctors and university professors who are themselves abductees and say the same things as the kid in Pakistan.”

This article, written by James Ellis, Senior Editor, was excerpted from Newsweek's Special Edition: Life Beyond Earth? The Mission to Find the Answer. For more on the possibility of alien life and potential answers pick up a copy today.

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Let’s face it, there have been conspiracy theories around for as long as we have had anything to conspire about. Such ideas have run the gamut from the plausible to the actually true, to the farthest reaches of eyebrow raising insanity. It is an interesting enough phenomenon in its own right that some of the most mind-bogglingly odd theories should catch on and coalesce into the minds of the masses, but some of these really take the cake with regards to sheer, flat out bizarreness. Some of the stranger of these concern evil plots by the the government or even more mysterious forces to infiltrate society and bring the world under control. From nefarious aliens, to secret mind control projects, to vat-grown clones and even supernatural creatures, there seems to be no end to the types of conspiracies that crop up. Here we will look at some of the more surreal, so leave your tinfoil hats at the door, forget about things such as evidence or even common sense, and come with me on a journey down the rabbit hole.

The most well-known, pervasive, and flat out bonkers conspiracy theory involving sinister forces invading the United States government is that of all of the alien lizard people who seem to be running around. The theory in essence says that there is a race of shapeshifting, reptilian humanoid creatures that are variously said to be aliens or inter-dimensional beings and which are said to be bent on controlling and subjugating humanity through various insidious means, mostly through infiltrating high level positions ranging from the government, to important corporations, to the entertainment industry. The lizard people have been blamed by conspiracists for everything from major wars, to the Holocaust, to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City, to, well, just about every tragic calamity we have faced for centuries.

Although the idea of secret societies lurking in the background secretly controlling civilization is by no means a new one, the idea that these forces should be reptilian lizard people was first popularized by former game show host and sports reporter for the BBC and now conspiracy theorist and New Age philosopher David Icke. In 1991, Icke came out with his complex theory in a BBC interview after percolating and brewing these ideas in his head for years, proclaiming that people in high positions of power or wealth were not who they seemed to be, but rather the lizard people taking human form.

According to Icke, it started with a group of aliens he called the Annunaki, from the planet Niburu, and arrived on Earth looking for gold, of all things. In order to mine the gold they found here they genetically engineered human-Annunaki hybrid slaves, which became humans, but some of them further interbred with their masters to become the lizard people. The creatures who were able to preserve a purer reptilian bloodline then rose to power and proceeded to subjugate the rest, instigate wars, feed us poison to keep us compliant, hypnotize us, enact methods to depopulate the planet, and generally manipulate humanity in any way possible, wary of the fact that since humans outnumbered them they could never last in an all out war with us and thus forcing them to work behind the scenes.

The list of people who have been accused of being lizard people is quite vast and fascinating. Among their numbers have been said to be such notable figures as Queen Elizabeth II, George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Bob Hope, Mark Zuckerberg, and Justin Beiber, among many, many others. Some of these powerful figures and celebrities have had a bit of a sense of humor about the accusations. For instance, in 2014 New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, who was so suspected of being a lizard person to the point that there was an Official Information Act request filed for the truth, gamely responded to the question of whether he was a reptilian alien thus:

To the best of my knowledge, no. Having been asked that question directly, I’ve taken the unusual step of not only seeing a doctor but a vet, and both have confirmed I’m not a reptile. So I’m certainly not a reptile. I’ve never been in a spaceship, never been in outer space, and my tongue’s not overly long, either.

Then again, that is what he would say, isn’t it? It is perhaps no surprise that many have scoffed at this idea and labelled Icke as a nutcase, but what is surprising is just how quickly these ideas have entrenched themselves and festered within portions of the conspiracy theorist community. Icke has become a sort of hero and savior among this new movement of reptilian conspiracy theorists, and he has gone on to churn out numerous books on the matter, including The Biggest Secret, in which it is revealed that the British Royal family is absolutely crawling with lizard people, as well as the David Icke Guide to the Global Conspiracy, and there are numerous websites devoted to these ideas, which truly take the whole mythology down the rabbit whole and are at times rather perversely believable in their own way to an extent. Perhaps because of this, unbelievably, nearly 13 million American people, or about 4% of the population, truly believe that there are shapeshifting lizard people among us trying to shape us and control us.

If secretive, shadowy plots involving lizard people from outer space are not bizarre enough for you, then how about government created brainwashed servants and clones? Bear with me here, because this one goes deep. The whole theory starts with the dark experiments of the government project MKULTRA, which sought to explore mind controlling techniques and which I have covered here at Mysterious Universe before. Although the program was eventually disbanded, there are those who think that that didn’t really happen at all, and that the experiments continued and the technology was further perfected.

The theory goes that the project changed its name to “Monarch,” and went abut conditioning young children through various mental and physical trauma to become virtual blank slates onto which could be programmed pretty much anything the government wanted. These subjects then have identities that are carefully nurtured to make them seem to be powerful figures in society, but in reality they are actually ticking time bombs, sleeper agents waiting to be activated. The theory can most often supposedly be seen in stars or officials who have meltdowns that are explained away as not personal issues, but rather glitches in their programming, and their “rehab” is merely them being taken in to be reprogrammed.

The theory is particularly aimed at those in the entertainment industry, where the list of supposed MKULTRA mind-controlled puppets is long. Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, and many, many others have been accused of being mind-controlled operatives, mostly based on their noticeable personality and fashion changes from their younger days. On occasion, it is not a famous person, but rather a normal person brainwashed into committing atrocities, such as is the case with John Lennon’s assassin. What, what?

On December 8, 1980, assassin and overall whacko Mark Chapman ruthlessly shot the beloved singer to death outside of Lennon’s apartment. Chapman would go on to allegedly claim that he had been urged to commit the crime by an incessant voice droning on in his head over and over again “do it.” This was only three years after the official closure of MKULTRA, so conspiracy theorists immediately jumped on the case. Evidence presented for this far-out theory was that Chapman had held a copy of the J.D. Salinger novel Catcher in the Rye, onto which was scrawled “This is my statement.” What does this book have to do with any of this? Glad you asked.

The book has oddly been linked to a variety of assassinations and shootings, including John Hinckley Jr., who killed former U.S. president Ronald Reagan, as well as Robert John Bardo, who assassinated the upcoming actress Rebecca Schaeffer, both of whom had copies of Catcher in the Rye. It’s a well-known, popular book, so it should make sense that many people would have it, but no, the conspiracy theory is that it held certain codes and keys for mind control to those who were conditioned to it. In this theory, Chapman was more or less a “Manchurian Candidate” style mind-controlled assassin, just waiting for his orders to kill, and with the book having some inscrutable part to play in it all.

John Lennon

Well, maybe not everyone here is mind-controlled, maybe they are just cloned from scratch instead. One theory that has made the rounds is that the U.S. government has perfected cloning technology, and has used this to resurrect dead people of power or, more ominously, to replace them. Many of these wild theories can be traced back to the testimony of an individual named Donald Marshall, who in 2011 came forward with an amazing story of having been born and brought up under a secret cloning facility run by an organization he called “The Vril Society.” Marshall claimed that he himself was a clone, and that such secretive cloning centers were buried all over the country. According to him, this all started just after World War II, and the clones bred there were meant to be used for a wide variety of purposes, such as entertainment, infiltration, and back-ups for rich organ donors, and Marshall would claim:

The political people started bringing movie stars and musicians there to hang around with them, they can control who remembers the cloning facility and who will remain oblivious even though not remembering still damages you.

Marshall continued this astounding story with the claim that the Queen of England and indeed much of the royal family and other were in fact clones, and said of this in one of his rants:

The royal family of England,… yes Queen Elizabeth, Phillip Duke of Edinburgh and Prince Charles are the worst of them, unbelievable depraved perverts all showing off for the celebrities that go there, Elizabeth has the children there call her “lillibet” and does ungodly things to them, some she fakes being nice to, some she is terrible to, cutting them with swords while they scream, the decent people that are there against their will are afraid to say anything against them, most have their children there as a kind of hostage, to be torn apart if they even think of informing anyone, but as they have been torturing me terribly anyway I will tell all, Vladamir Putin loves to put the fear of torture and death into people but is essentially a cowardly pervert himself.
Most of the famous people are ashamed to speak or be seen by me there very much,as they’re ashamed of the perverse and disgusting gatherings, I am a decent person and will not participate in these acts, so they use me as an example and torture me for my being a good person.

Queen Elizabeth II

Wow. No word on what the reptilian lizard men theorists think about all of this. This all launches into the list of people who those who subscribe to this theory think of as cloned goons. Britney Spears pops up here again, as she was in a horrific car accident in 1998 with then boyfriend Justin Timberlake, which supposedly burned Timberlake and killed Spears, after which she was cloned. Marshall himself would go so far as to claim that the cloned Spears was giving hints in her music, with the pods featured in the animated video of her song “Break the Ice” claimed to look exactly like the cloning pods at the facility. Other famous supposed clones include the rappers Eminem, Gucci Mane, and Kayne West, as well the singers Miley Cyrus and of course Britney Spears (wait, I thought she was a mind-controlled puppet!), as well as even Hillary Clinton. You can’t make this stuff up.

Perhaps even more bizarre and insidious than reptilians and clones infiltrating society is the idea that the U.S. government is crawling with fairy folk. As completely off-the-wall as this might sound, there are those out there who think so. One group of New Agers calling themselves “The Fairy Congress,” who believe in fairies and claim to regularly commune with them, truly seems to believe that the American government is infested with these magical entities. One statement on the group’s website claims:

The humans are vastly outnumbered at the Congress by the fairies, devas and other Light beings who are in attendance. How many fairies and devas attend? We are assured it is in the thousands. Fairies and devas of many ranks and sizes attend. Some are similar in size to the small ‘hand-size’ fairies we see represented in the common press. Others are immense beings of great power. Remember though, that size is not necessarily an indicator of knowledge, wisdom or power. The fairy beings who attend the Fairy Congress are fully as intelligent (and often much more so) than the human participants. We approach the fairies and devas with respect and love as co-creators of this event. We are meeting as equal participants. The fairies and devas have a concurrent Congress as well as interacting with the human participants during circles and joint meditations. … It is a rare event for humans to experience so much fairy energy and such an outpouring of fairy/devic blessings.

Well, it seems that size really doesn’t matter after all. This is all just scratching the surface, and these bizarre theories all go much deeper than this, but here has been an overview of some of the odder ideas out there. There is a lot to take in with all of this and it is often hard to know what to think. I certainly have no desire to disrespect those who fully believe such ideas, but these are certainly confusing, often contradictory opinions which go far towards profoundly pushing the boundaries of what we know with little in the way of convincing evidence. The title of “insane theories” might shift with more to show otherwise, but for now these can undeniably be classified as fringe to say the least. Or maybe we are all wrong. Maybe we are overrun with clones, fairies, and reptilian humanoids bent on our downfall. Perhaps even I am one. You never can tell.