Alien Abductions | What Do the Most Famous Alien Abduction Cases of All Time Have In Common?

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Visit SimpliSafe.com/licenses for alarm license information. A bright light rapidly descends upon you from the night sky, and you wake up miles away, hours later disoriented and disheveled. Over the next few weeks, vague memories turn to nightmares as you struggle to remember what happened that night. Since the 1950s, horrifying encounters like this have become so commonplace that they've inspired countless books, TV shows, and movies. But is there more to these tales? With so many commonalities between them, it's easy to see why so many believe. So today, by examining four of the most foundational stories of their kind, we attempt to uncover the truth behind alien abductions. This is Red Web. Welcome back, Task Force, to episode 300 of Red Web, the podcast all about unsolved mysteries. True crime, and of course, a sprinkling of the unknown. I am your resident mystery enthusiast, Trevor Collins, and joining me, celebrating 300 episodes of Red Web, Alfredo Diaz. They're going to have us ghost hunting until we're 90. Until we're 90? Until we're 90 out there. Like, "Yo, what a ghost." Yeah, you're my Hugh Jackman. I'm going to drag you in. At that point, I'm like, "Come get me. I'm one of you." I'm on the precipice. I can feel you better now. Yeah, right in between. 300 episodes is a massive milestone. We've done a lot of those independent as well. Resounding thank you, Task Force, so much. We keep doing it, you keep supporting, and episode 300 is absolutely wild. It's hard to comprehend. If I'm honest with myself, I told the guys right before we started recording, I was like, "This is 299 more episodes than I could have hoped for." We did the pilot episode on Cicada 3301 that really started it all, and then we did Lake City Quiet Pills, which launched the fire that is everything that we've done since. But 300 episodes, a lot has changed. We've grown a lot, and I think you're right. With age, we get a little bit closer to the ghosts. Maybe we can feel them more now that we're just an inch closer to death, but still far from it. I hope. But 300 episodes. So today we're going to celebrate big. We're going to talk about four of the most haunting alien abduction stories, the ones that have the most detail, the most nuance. And with the exploration of these four stories then, we're going to then take a huge step back. We're going to look at the commonalities that really run the gambit through most alien abductions. We talk about getting tossed off into a Wendy's, our slacks in the tree, and probing and everything. But there's something else going on here. I love to give a deeper analysis. Like, of course, you want to suspend disbelief. You want to believe that a thicked-up alien could take you home and meet the parents. But today, we've got a lot of interesting theories that really might help us understand why alien abduction stories feel like a cornerstone of the zeitgeist. And maybe give us a deeper appreciation for what people are actually going through. Of course, we don't have full, 100% bulletproof answers. But we do have a lot of interesting theories that really might help us understand why alien abduction stories feel like a cornerstone of the zeitgeist. I mean, I'd like to think that it's real and, you know, icing on the cake if it's thicked-up aliens abducting us. Keep talking about it. And I'll just keep wandering the streets late at night. Is that what you're doing? Because what is the alternative, right? The government's abducting you, playing with your butthole? Like, come on. I'm also, like, I mean, alien abductions is such a huge thing. And I really want to see if there's any ground to stand on. What is the evidence? Are there similarities between different abductions? Because I don't know then, right? Because if there's similarities, then I guess you could say we're being abducted by the same. You can't really narrow it down if it's, like, the same alien species or not. Because if it's different, is it a different alien species or they're just trying something new? Or maybe a different government, you know? Canada goes after you in a different way. It really could be. It could be a different part of the country or the government or whatever the heck on alien planet. The Canadian governments really love the belly button. They just get it right in there. I just feel like, though, because I was reminded earlier there was a reel that I saw that was like, my toxic trait is that if they opened a Jurassic Park theme park tomorrow, I would be there day one. Yeah, and you know it's a problem, but it's kind of like, but how do I not go? Well, I'm not going to not go. And then they went to the extent of, I would maybe even want that some of the dinosaurs to get released, just so I could have a little. I would live. That's the thing. I would live. We would be fine. And so here I'm thinking like, oh, you know, maybe the toxic trait for us is like, you know, maybe the toxic trait for us is like, maybe we see some lights. Maybe we just see some lights, you know? Maybe just off the ground we see some lights. Just a little bit. Just a little float. So your toxic trait you're telling me is, you want to be abducted, you want to see something, you want to lift a little bit, but then you're fine. Well, that's what the memory wipe is. They're going to do stuff to you and then they'll just zap your memory. So your toxic trait is you want just that whole package, but with the memory wipe? I want like, just, you know, the pop-up experience. Right. Oh, like maybe you're out there with a friend and they take your friend. Oh, that's, yeah, by proxy. I watch that. Yeah, okay, so your toxic trait is, aliens are real, they abduct people, and you're out there baiting them with your friend, but you're safe. Yeah, I bait them with my friend, or I just get a little bit of the, and then they're like, they put me back down. They try to grab you while they're getting abducted. You lift a little bit, and then. Just a little bit, maybe the light shines down on me, starts to pull me a little bit, I grab onto something, and then they're like, the light shuts off and they go. And I'm like, wow, I did it. That's as much of an experience as I want. You know how in America, between the helicopter and like the pad, you're holding onto a tree? Yeah, just want a little taste. I just want a little taste. Yeah, okay, well, just a little, mm. Okay, well, interesting, because honestly, and I'm not even hamming it up, a lot of these stories are genuinely terrifying. Oh, no. And we're gonna explore maybe the realities that could be behind that terror. Of course, one of those theories being that aliens are abducting people and doing tests on them and what have you. But the reality is equal to really terrifying as to what they're experiencing. And we're gonna get into all sorts of tests that people like Harvard University has run on people that have experienced things. But first, I think we need to walk it all the way back. And Fredo, as always, before we dive into today's episode, we have some housekeeping to do. This Wednesday, as always, [email protected], we are unveiling another research outline. This time, the Hinterkaifeck murders. It feels appropriate to revisit this one, because it was a haunting case, if you remember. Somebody was living in this house, somebody was there, and then suddenly a bunch of bodies were found. So if you want to revisit that case, you can do so with us on Wednesday. Hate that, but what I don't hate is this Thursday, France-Optober, thus, Loptember continues with Big Walk featuring our friends over at Midnight Snack. Again, free over at redwebpod.com. We love to give a little cheeky free stuff. Last Thursday, we did Invoker with Stinky Dragon, so if you want to go see that gameplay goodness right now, you can. And then this Friday, our monthly edited version of Break Room, which will come out on Friday, so if you missed it live in August, you can watch it this Friday. But with that, Fredo, let's just dive into this alien abduction goodness. So the term "alien abduction" refers to, as you know, the phenomenon in which people claim to have been kidnapped by extraterrestrial beings, oftentimes against their will. Maybe different if it's you and me, there's a little bit of willful, like, "Oh, take me a little bit." But while sightings of UFOs have been around for centuries, and I mean quite some time, it wasn't until the early 1950s that, at the time, contactees, or those who successfully made peaceful contact with these crafts, came onto the scene, right? So this is the original name for those who would see a craft and maybe communicate with something or someone that steps on out of those crafts. Contactees? Contactees. Okay. Not as cool. Not as cool. Yeah, probably better than, like, The Abducted or something, you know? Yeah, I don't want to be the disappear-y, you know, or the harm-y. You know what? I'll settle for contactee. Maybe that's a nice, soft, I'll have it. So, it starts with media culture at the time and we're going to talk extensively about this in the theories but films such as earth versus the flying saucers the invasion of saucer men the day the earth stood still all of these tell stories of ufo invasions and they're all incredibly popular and it's striking around a time where the space race is really hitting uh you know especially between soviet russia in in the united states but all of this kind of struck up a paranoia surrounding the idea of an alien invasion who they are what they could be capable of of course they take on godlike powers because they would be so much more advanced than what we could conceive of and so oftentimes these films books novels whatever would depict these aliens as sinister not peaceful but rather like wanting to enslave people eat people kidnap humans right i guess that's how it started off it kind of just became less intense because never really thought about that now people aren't automatically assuming alien abduction means you're you know going into captivity it's you know you get pulled up you see a bright light yep they check you out do some experiments and then a little boop-de-bop gently place you back out there yeah gently chuck you out yeah it's it's very interesting to really think about it and honestly this is a big part in my mind the role that pop culture has on this whole arena but then it's like it feeds itself like a chicken or the egg like did these experiences backwards inform pop culture or vice versa right true yeah now there was a pioneer in the contactee field it was a man named george adamski now in his prime time he worked with author desmond leslie to publish the book flying saucers have landed which detailed his stories of contacts with beings from venus mars and jupiter which immediately i'm horrified i don't want to meet any living entity that could walk the realms of venus or jupiter because the the necessary physical reality of a being living in a gaseous giant under immense pressure or in the hottest planet in the solar system immediately starts you off on a bad foot like the the the power level difference there you know what i mean there's a power level difference yep we'll anime it it makes it easier to say yeah and uh yeah no you just don't want to be on the bottom of that totem pole really anything that can evolve on venus excuse me i don't want to meet you i'm sorry yeah like yeah that's just too much yeah so in this book he's talking about crafts that he encountered and interestingly you know we know the saucers which is like an upturned plate with a teacup and then he's talking about the saucers which is like as you like to say yes it is that's the saucer we have the cigar shape which is obviously oblong kind of cylindrical like a pill or something you've got the flying v or the flying triangle you know those are the common shapes but preceding those we have this guy and he's talking about a cigarette shaped silver ship that he saw in desert center california so that cigar shape but much more cylindrical skinny and long and after seeing this craft he said he saw a being that he described as being quote from another world and according to adamski the figure was around five foot six inches tall 167 centimeters and roughly 135 pounds so when you look at humans kind of right in the middle of what you would expect the weight to be for someone of that height yeah i mean i'll be honest i feel like i could maybe take that i could i could drop kick a 5 6 135 pound thing entity 135 i got like 50 pounds on them hmm what if he's like a featherweight champ though what if he takes you to the ground starts grappling good okay look now if i if i what i would do is do a visual pat down and if i saw cauliflower ears i'm not messing with you absolutely not what if an alien doesn't have ears what are you gonna do uh let's see if he's got any scars or something because you gotta look for cauliflower ears if he does then he's he's looking for a fight you know i'm saying there's probably his yeah like his captain or higher-ups are like let's just do this gently and he's like if they step out online give me a reason and i don't want to be the reason you know what i mean you might be that reason you don't want to be choked out but i buy a 135 pound five and a half foot thing from another world no that's not how i'm trying to go that's not a good look for for the world you know but what's interesting is his description of the world and he's like i don't want to be the reason you know but what's interesting is his description of this alien because of course we know the grays kind of short three foot maybe four foot big head small body gray skin big black eyes no nose that's the very common thing we talk about but this one was different this figure's skin was as he said suntanned and they had shoulder length brown hair that framed their round face with a high forehead and then upturned gray eyes is this just like someone from a tropical island honestly honestly yeah is it some sort of xenophobia happening here just like it's just a beautiful person from another world or another country see if this is one of the earliest sightings then we really got away from it because you never hear about aliens with hair not often on a rare occasion you do but not very often yeah so we've we've we've taken this and ran with it in terms of what the ship looks like uh we've softened kind of what they want from us to be a little bit more nebulous and little less nefarious and we've given them we've taken the hair away for some reason we we robbed them of their beautiful long looks of their hair i wonder if it's just jealousy you know species jealousy like look at that hair denses that follicle health you know it was someone with a big time receding hairline i was like they don't got no hair take their hair you know what i didn't see any hair on take that away i didn't see nothing on that just a race is in the air on his pencil drawing yeah he pulls out the big eraser yeah well we did aliens dirty in the 50s by robbing them of their hair and they never got it back they never got it back okay but what he experienced maybe not the the physical aesthetic of the alien but what he experienced with the craft coming down some sort of encounter this would set the standard for alien encounters for years to come now of course there are still some elements that are different and nuanced but you'll see they kind of start to fall into a similar repeating pattern and i don't know if that says something about it if it's if that's proof or if that's you know evidence of a farce or of copycats we'll talk about that more but he said these aliens came down from venus in peace out of concern over the recent nuclear testing right so to give some context just just a few years before this the first nuclear bomb was tested and subsequently deployed on our own human fellows over in japan in 1945 twice so it kind of makes sense that this would be on the mind and the alien warned that the earth was in danger of destroying itself and the surrounding planets now we've learned since then if you've watched oppenheimer there was an actual fear that by launching and deploying the first nuke that it would start to split all the atoms it came in contact to until the earth was engulfed in flame and destroyed we know now that that's not the case uh with a very daring first test but but i wonder if this element here is a product of that either misunderstanding or the fear of this immense immensely powerful weapon yeah you know it's just of the times a lot of things that we do that we say that we create is of our time and you know i don't think we're going to be able to answer that what's relevant of that time and so you know something so powerful so unknown to happen and come out like yeah why why would you not think that why would that not be on everyone's minds pulling and creating from the subconscious of those thoughts yeah absolutely and i think those are all important nuggets to hold on to you know as we as we go on but what is interesting and i the invaders that would come to enslave or consume us. So he's saying that these aliens are coming in peace. And this offers the idea that these are friendly warnings rather than threats. And so this created a more peaceful and less concerning narrative for at least a few years. Until the turn of the 1960s, public outlook would take a shift at that point. And from here, now we're in the 60s, reports started to creep up about stories of extraterrestrial contact that they're not trying to enslave you, they're not trying to eat you, but they're also not coming in peace. Instead, they're kind of disappearing people for missing amounts of time. And this is where the contactee gets relabeled and becomes the abductee. And the first widely popularized case of alien abduction was that of Betty and Barney Hill. While the incident happened in 1961, it managed to stay in local news for several years. And their story leaked to the press in October of 1965 and quickly became national news. Now I will say, if that sounds familiar to you, about five and a half years ago, we covered in depth the Betty and Barney Hill incident. episode, so if you want all the juicy details and the theories specifically around that case, go check out that episode when we're done. But I will give you a crash course about that case here in this episode for the sake of our conversation about abductions and some of the commonalities. But it is a cornerstone, and this then started a wave of alien abduction narratives that ebbed and flowed throughout the decades, with interest peaking again in the 1980s, and then this came on with the onset of more published works detailing abductions. You have historians, novelists, even psychiatrists getting in, conversating about abductions and what's going on there. And as the abduction wave continued to build, there were some common alien descriptions that arose to frame those stories. Yeah, at that point, I'm like, how much are people taking from each other, you know? Right, right. And we'll get into that, man, because it's, I mean, you got, you have to. Yeah. Yeah, you have to a little bit. People pulling from each other, and then that kind of creates this standard, which is interesting, too. So before we dive in, I'm going to start with some similarities as far as what these stories tend to be shaped like. And then we're going to go through four incredible and interesting and terrifying encounters. And then on the back end, I'll wrap up with the similarities amongst these stories, and then the many theories that might attempt to answer. What's going on? Is there an explanation? Is there something beyond just aliens? We'll have that conversation. But among these stories, first, these beings became more of an alien-human hybrid kind of thing. They appeared very similar to the alien look that we heard in this first story, but again, stripped of hair, a little bit shorter. And honestly, it's kind of like that The Greys look. Lanky bodies, gray skin, upturned, angled dark eyes, hairless, large oblong heads with round, large foreheads. The second detail that was kind of common in these stories is that many of the abductees had forgotten all or parts of their abduction. And then in order to seek their memories, to try to regain them, they would oftentimes turn to hypnosis, which there's lots to say about that. But many abductees would go through hypnosis techniques, and these repressed memories, or at least these encounters and these emotions would bubble up. So again, we'll explore that in the theories and through these stories. But then the third commonality to think about is that some believe, or most of them believe, right, that this was like a medical or research-oriented goal. That the abduction was purely to kind of assess the human biology. You know, getting poked, getting prodded. We talk about, you know, getting probed, which is a common element here. Some of them getting injected with things, etc. But being ultimately tested by aliens in a medical environment. Yeah, I mean, that's what you'd think it would be, because. Because that's probably what we would do ourselves. I mean, we wouldn't go in trusting it. We wouldn't go in guns a-blazing. We'd probably go in and want to capture, want to study. We want to bring samples home. The people that we're sending aren't just going to be us. Hey, go check it out, right? They're going to be top scientists in their fields, pilots, military personnel, etc. Not just whoever. And so they're going to have a mission and want to do it. And so they're going to have a mission and want to do certain things and come back with information and learn more. And I think that's just the nature of everything. You can apply that to different life forms and plants. I mean, unless they want to just infest and destroy, but then they wouldn't be capturing like that. They would just do it. Yeah. It is interesting that this is the ultimate goal. Nothing controlling. Let's conquer them and use them as a workforce and nothing like let's let's fold you into the galaxy's e-commerce or just like the commerce at large. You know, instead, it's like, let's poke and prod. Let's do this capture and release. Maybe stick a few like tag their ear or something and throw them back out and see what they do. Let's see what it always reads to me like a prank, like some teens just like picked up someone poked and prodded, sent them back home and said, they'll never believe you. That's a good point. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like all those Bill Murray stories. Yeah. Just a backwater planet, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And they're. Just like, yeah, that primitive planet over there. Let's go mess with them. It's like, dang, that would suck to find out that this whole time there's just this whole galactic kind of like empire government or whatever. And they just deemed us to be primitive and not intelligent enough to be a part of it or not ready. You know, I'd believe it, though. I would so believe it. I would, too. Oh, 100 percent. We humans think so highly of themselves. Right. We think we're at the top food chain, et cetera. But we're still just hitting each other with sticks, dude. Oh, yeah. Advanced sticks. But still. Yeah. We would get humbled so fast. Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah. Imagine Star Wars is real, but it's happening all around us, you know, and then they're just like completely oblivious. Yeah. They're using force and like magics and powers and like, you know, they can light speed get around. And we're just like, so anyway, I bombed a neighboring nation and like, OK, great. Awesome. I mean, that being said, they're blowing up planets. So, right. Yeah. It's a whole. Yeah. Maybe I don't want to be part of that. Maybe I don't. You can keep your lightsabers if you don't blow up our planet. Yeah. This episode of Red Web is sponsored by Factor. Summer is seen as a season of travel and busyness for a lot of people. And I was no exception. I had a number of trips that I had to take. And as a result, it impacted my schedule and my availability, especially when it came to trying to eat healthy and stay on top of what my meals looked like. But that is where. Yeah. Factor comes in to save the day. Factor makes chef crafted dietitian designed, ready to eat meals. So you don't have to choose between real food and convenience with over one hundred seventy five band ingredients. Every Factor meal is designed around what supports a healthier lifestyle and nothing that doesn't. The best part. Factor meals are ready in two minutes and require no prep and no cleanup. So even on the days your schedule is completely out of control, eating well is still available. I cannot overstate how much I love the convenience of Factor. Meals again, you have something delicious and healthy in two minutes. It makes it so much easier to handle the timing and nonsense of day to day busyness life when you don't have time to do a full meal prep. So let's eat real head to Factor meals dot com slash Red Web 50 off and use code Red Web 50 off to get 50 percent off and one free breakfast item per box for one year while supplies last until October 31st, 2026. That's code Red Web 50 off at Factor meals dot com Red Web 50 off at Factor meals dot com. See website for more. This episode of Red Web is sponsored by BetterHelp. If I could wake up tomorrow and be better at one thing, I can tell you exactly what it would be. And it would be putting my dang phone down. I have developed an actual problem. I spend so much time scrolling and consuming short form vertical content that I now have trouble just being able to put the stupid screen down and spend time just being present with my own thoughts and emotions. and just be with myself. And that's something that I want to work on because it's something that I don't like not being able to do. And that's the beautiful thing about therapy is it's one of the best places for me to work on something like this so that I can feel better about this, this choice, this, this habit that I'm actively trying to break. And the good news is better is a feeling defined by you. And for better help, it's a better help therapist who really gets you. It's a focus on global emotional wellbeing with thousands of therapists and millions of members in over 100 countries. It's progress. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com slash red web. That's better H E L P.com slash red web. Tammy regularly hauls stuff to her kids at college. That's why she shops at BJ's wholesale club, saving up to 25% off grocery store prices, beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods. Even they can't screw up. Have you met my kids? And with BJ's gas, she gets there first. They call me the road warrior. This is your home road warrior, mom home of the save join for just $20 at BJ's.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months open soon. Limited time offer new members only BJ's home of the save. All right, without further ado, I want to dive into our first story, which again, will be a kind of quicker recap of the Betty and Barney Hill episode. Again, all those details of this story and the other stories. This one we've covered before, so you can go listen to it now. The other ones we might cover in depth in the future. So, but for the sake of conversation, I wanted to squeeze in as much different stories as possible. So Betty and Barney Hill were an American couple who claimed they were abducted by aliens in rural New Hampshire. And this would have been back in the 1960s. So Barney was a world war II veteran and later became a postal worker. And Betty was a social worker. Both were incredibly passionate civil rights activists who lived in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. And then on September 19th, 1961, around 1030 PM, the pair were headed back from Portsmouth from a vacation in Niagara Falls. So they were just south of Lancaster, New Hampshire, when Betty saw a moving bright light in the sky. It was moving in a steady line. And she thought, hey, maybe it's a falling star, something of that nature, a stellar object. But oddly, it was moving upward, which wouldn't really make sense. It didn't seem too strange at first until the light started moving erratically. And then it grew bigger and brighter and seemed to be moving closer. She then told Barney to pull over so they could take a closer look. And so the two of them do that and they get out of the car with their dog, Delcy, and they stop at a picnic area south of Twin Mountain. Betty then took a look through her binoculars when she saw what she called an odd shaped aircraft. It was flashing multicolored lights going across the face of the moon. In fact, I have an image of what she drew kind of depicting what she was seeing that night. Yeah, I see a picture, New Hampshire UFO chiller holding newspaper up. What is this? Yeah, this is so interesting. Yes. How would this even fly? You know, it's just like a circle. It's a puck. It's a puck. Yeah, it's a puck. It's like a thin puck. And then I guess it has like a viewing deck because it has just windows. Yeah, I don't know. What is it? Some kind of like alien tour? Because there's so many windows and they have drawings of multiple aliens at the window. Yes, there's like beings in the windows, which I think is so interesting because in the stories we're going to talk about today, that's kind of common, but you don't often see beings in portholes or windows. But at the time, I believe Barney thought he might have seen, you know, this was an airplane going to Vermont. But years later, it kind of dawns on them that they might have seen a flying saucer of some kind. Years later. Yeah, when it really starts to break out. They're looking through these binoculars, taking a closer inspection of this aircraft. And they're trying to figure out what it is. And this is when Barney realizes that the craft is moving too erratically to be his initial thought of a plane. So the pair slowly keeps driving along back in the car. The object is coming closer and closer. And then suddenly the object shoots down out of the sky right towards their car. And this causes Barney to slam on the brakes right in the middle of the highway. It's hovering now about 100 feet or 30 meters just above their car, to the point where when they look out the windshield, they can see nothing but the underside of this craft. Lovely. I don't know what I would do here, but he gets out of the car and he moves closer to the object. He's using the binoculars to once again, try to get a better look. Look at the details of this craft. And inside the craft, he sees what he describes as eight to 11 humanoid figures peering out of the windows. They were wearing shiny black uniforms and black hats. He said that in unison, all but one of them moved away from the window. And that one remained there looking at Barney, at which point he said, I don't know what I would do here, but he gets out of the car. I don't know what I would do here, but he gets out of the car. I don't know what I would do here, but he felt a message come to him in his mind. And it said, quote, stay where you are and keep looking. At that point, red lights begin to emerge out of the sides of the aircraft. As you can see in the lower image, they kind of fan out almost like wings maybe. And then a long structure descends from the middle. So of course, Barney wisely runs back to the car and the couple speed away because this is a terrifying encounter. They're saying, don't move. And they're essentially lowering the net. And as they try to escape, they start to hear what they describe as a strange beeping sound, and the car begins to vibrate. And that is the last thing they remember. Because when they woke up, they were just outside of Concord, which would have been a hundred miles away or like 161 kilometers, something like that. And they could still hear the beeping sounds when they came to, but it started to fade away. Now they continue to drive home. They pull into the driveway from this new destination. When they look at the clock, it's 5 a.m. And this is two hours later than they had originally planned to be home. So they're estimating that two hours had passed missing, that something happened and they don't know what. And they also start to notice some other unexplainable things. Their watches were broken. They were failing to work. Some of their clothes were torn or scraped, including the strap of the binoculars. And Betty noticed that there was a pink powder on her dress that when she tried to remove it, left it permanently stained. Now, two days after the incident, Betty called the Peace Air Force Base in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Now this is where I'll gloss over some details here, but ultimately she gives the officer a brief description, initially fearing that she would be viewed as kind of crazy and kind of dismissed. Nobody would listen to her because it sounds so outlandish. But the call, this officer, I should say, reassures her. They've heard stories like this before and they want to keep having these interviews. And then 10 days after the incident, Betty starts to have intense, vivid nightmares about her experience that very night. And it leads to intense anxiety. And in her dreams, she remembers seeing creatures that they saw on board this aircraft. She says they were intelligent. They took her and Barney aboard for medical examinations. And these nightmares kind of go on for a little bit. And then the following summer, this is when Barney starts to succumb to some physical symptoms because his anxiety now is so like prominent and spurred on that he's having like stomach ulcers and pains and things like that. So in search of healing from their experiences, long story short, they turn to psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon and they undergo hypnotherapy. In fact, I have an image of them doing just that right here. Oh, yeah. They're both sitting in a chair, eyes closed, heads tilted down. Mm hmm. This is so vivid. It's so vivid. It's so much more vivid than most stories. This one predates pretty much all of them. The arrival of this story does actually bring the arrival of a story out of Brazil, which we'll talk about next. But what's so interesting about this one is that it really doesn't have much to, dare I say, copycat off of. And so it's almost laying the blueprint. Now, while they were under hypnosis, the pair would recall what happened after they heard the beeping sound. And these things are recorded. They go under multiple hypnotherapy sessions. And they're kind of unlocking these memories. They become very distressed while under hypnosis as well. And Barney adds to the memories here. He recalls that the figure had odd shaped heads. He says that they were almost oblong, large with pointy chins. In fact, we have some kind of pencil sketches here. But these are the two he drew while under hypnosis. It's weird because they had uniforms. Yeah, they were like black, shiny outfits and black hats. Yeah. This is so different than where we are today. Oh, big time. I mean, also, you know, it's entered the zeitgeist of the media. It's taken it. Entertainment's taken it. People have taken it into their own hands. So I just never knew kind of like what the first encounters were really like in descriptions of them. Oh, yeah. We cut our teeth on some wild stories. Yeah. But as you can see in these pictures, they're not necessarily, I mean, he described them as oblong, but they're not as big as what, you know, we conjure up today where essentially they would threaten a minor neck. You know, the grays have weird proportions that would only live maybe in zero G. But he says that they had slanted eyes that seemed to wrap around the sides of their head like they were really like oval and long rather than like the spherical kind of shapes that we have. But they would also communicate to him telepathically. They would tell him not to be scared. There was almost like this forced sense of fear. And he said, you know, I don't have any sense of calm that would take over them. So despite their conscious fear, they felt very calm. Now, while having this memory on one of the recordings, he says this, he yells this out, quote, Oh, those eyes, they're in my brain. Please can't I wake up? End quote. So he's vividly re-experiencing something. And he also remembers as he's trying to drive away, they're trying to flee. The light, the beeping, it's all happening. They said they reach a traffic stop and at this traffic stop, they say six men standing in the shadows approaches them. Now I'll give you a crash course on some of the theories and maybe an explanation of this moment in a bit. But for now, the story is that these were the aliens approaching them from the ground. Now he says he was then forced into the aircraft that his eyes were glued shut and he only opened them once when he was being placed on a table in the aircraft that looked like a hospital style room of some kind. Beings poked and prodded him, guided him back to his car when the examination was done. And he stated that the car was still running. It was idling down below. And he felt giddy when he saw Betty separately approaching the car, knowing that she was okay. Then they got into the car, watched the ship fly away, and then it turned back into a ball of light as it got distant. Then they drove home in that very daze. But once they arrived at their house, that's when anxiety really settled in. That sense of calm that they seemingly had forced upon them vanished. Like a curtain was lifted. And to exacerbate that, Betty is sharing her encounter. She has a similar story, but unlike Barney, she says she kept her eyes open the entire time. She's trying to speak to a man that she believed to be the leader. And this being has a strange accent, she says. It's telling her not to be afraid. And neither of them would be harmed. They were just being studied. And then she said she was brought aboard, placed in a medical room alone. She asked to see Barney, but they told her that. one person was being inspected at a time. Then there was another man. So they said man, you know, human person, man. And that person was dressed as a doctor. They entered the room, began to examine her. They looked at her arms, scraped her with a dull knife, kind of taking a skin scraping. Nothing too invasive just yet. You know, they're looking at her ears, looking at her mouth. And at first she says she feels no fear. But then the doctor approaches her with a needle and starts to stick it into her belly button. She begs not for this to happen. that it's incredibly painful, and once they were done, She seems to ask the leader, who are you? Where are you from? What is the meaning of all this? And the doctor simply pulls up a map of outer space, shows her on the map, but none of the planets are familiar. Like it's some sort of strange cryptic, maybe galactic map, just not of this solar system. And then he shows her a book with strange symbols on the cover. She's flipping through it. It's a language she doesn't recognize. In fact, she says she's tried to steal it, but then they caught her and said, no, you can't take this back. But she wanted proof that she was there. And then Dr. Simon thought, you know, when hearing these hypnotic stories being told, she thought Betty's nightmares might have influenced the couple's memories, right? Because over the following months of her having these nightmares, her anxiety is spiking. Barney's anxiety is starting to spike. And it is possible, right? That this hypnosis is then building false memories. This would be incredibly common, especially since you're in a state of suggestion. So that is one of the kind of cornerstone theories here. But beyond that, skeptics offered several other logical explanations for what happened that night. You know, some believe that the pair were sleep deprived from their travels. They might've mistook the bright planet Jupiter for a, for a UFO, which would be quite difficult, but it's a common theory. Many theorize that, you know, you have to remember this is the early sixties, an interracial couple, is not common. And we are during a time where there's a lot of racial tensions, right? And so an interracial marriage on top of that could have led to racial traumas, fear of attack. In fact, they might've actually been attacked and then suppressed that and maybe filled that gap in with a more fantastic idea of what happened that night in order to kind of maybe protect their consciousness or protect themselves from maybe whatever the truth was, right? Six men approaching them at a, at a stoplight. It doesn't have to be aliens. Yeah, that's true. I mean, when you first said that, I was like, oh, this is the, the MIB, like what's, what's going on here? Yeah. Yeah. But again, it's just, there's so much detail and it's still so interesting to me how drastic, maybe because it's so drastically different because we started one way and then nowadays it's another, but this is so detailed as opposed to now it's a lot more obscure. I saw light. I saw glimpses of stuff. I came back and I was butt naked in a cornfield. Right. As opposed to here, they're speaking English, you're being taken to rooms and she was awake and asking for, you know, their significant other. And like, this is, this is a whole story. Yeah. And psychosomatic or not, she remembers feeling pain afterwards and it's only under her control. Her hypnosis that, you know, she starts to fill in the gaps as to why she had pain in her abdomen. So again, false memories are incredibly possible. We're going into the depths of abduction theories at the end of all these stories, but I, you know, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the micro theories for each case, but ultimately some believe that this could have been a hoax, could have been fabricated for fame or what have you. Those are always on the table, but ultimately this is one of the first and most famous cases of alien abduction. And not only did this become the blueprint for so many other alien abduction cases to come, but it also shone a light on a previous claim and other previous claims that didn't receive that media attention, that they popped up, no one believed them and life moved on. So this one really burst the bubble and kind of maybe removed some of the stigma for media to talk about that. And one of those cases is that of Antonio Vilas-Boas out of Brazil, which Brazil, by the way has. So many stories of alien encounters that it's, it's like outside of the, um, Southwest United States, I feel like Brazil is just a huge hotspot. You know, you have the Varginha incident, you have the lead masks case. You have many other alien encounters that are very vivid and very unique. Yeah. I've heard about Brazil having a lot of encounters and like, why is that? You know, it, again, those theories are interesting and grounded. Yeah. I mean, oftentimes covert military operations, but why Brazil and the United States, but not, I mean, okay, there's plenty in the UK and across Europe, plenty around the world, but it's interesting that certain spots become more hot. And is it because it's in the zeitgeist or is it because there's more to it? That's like the omnipresent conversation. And it could just be what they are intrigued by. It could just be something that the culture is just very. Fascinated with. Yeah. We did a case. I think that was in Africa too, where like a bunch of children said they were abducted and stuff. Yeah. But this one is equally interesting. I mean, and they're all vivid and terrifying, but we're actually going to go backwards in time before we then go forward into the next few decades for the following two stories. So Antonio Villas-Boas was a 23 year old Brazilian farmer at the time of his alien abduction or his alleged abduction, right? In order to avoid overheating, he often worked during the night. So the sun wasn't blazing down. On him during the day on October 15th, 1957, he was working in the fields near South Francisco de Salas plowing at night and then he saw what he described as a red star in the night sky. And of course, very similar to what we just described, this strange red light starts to approach rapidly. It's flying right at him and it's growing in size as it's descending and it's coming closer. And then he notices it's actually circular. It's got a red light on the front and a road. It's rotating dome on top. Now, interestingly, red light is, I think, the most common light color we've seen outside of white. It's usually red, then white, and then it's like a multicolor thing. Those are the lights I usually hear about. So this circular thing with a dome on top starts to lower down. It lands on the field he's plowing. Three legs extend from the bottom and frightened, Boas tries to flee from the scene initially on his tractor, which I imagine. Can't be all that fast. However, he only makes it a short distance before the lights and the engine on his tractor completely die. He hops out, he flees on foot. It's only then that he feels seized from an entity, a figure that's roughly five feet tall, 150 centimeters. It's a humanoid creature that was wearing gray coveralls and a helmet. And he said that the creature had small blue eyes and could only make noises that resembled, interestingly, barks or yelps. And as he's being detained by this kind of small thing, two more beings appear and they help subdue him before then dragging him onto this circular aircraft. And once inside, he claims he was stripped nude, covered in a strange gel, and he was then led to a semicircular room with red symbols all over it. And the being started to take a blood sample, interestingly, from his chin, right? We don't know if he was injured and that's why they did it or if that's, you know, why they took it from the chin. But that's what he remembers. And after this, he was taken to another room and left alone for about 30 minutes while a gas was pumped into the room that made him violently ill. Shortly after this, he was joined by another humanoid. This time, the entity seemed female in nature. He doesn't, we don't have an exact explanation why, but we can fill in the gaps, maybe. But he claims that she was very attractive with a small pointed chin, large cat-like blue eyes and hair. So blonde that it almost looked white. And she was also naked, of course. And in his strong attraction, he claimed the two had intercourse. And when it was all over, he claimed that she smiled at him, rubbed her stomach and then pointed upwards. And he thought this meant that she would be raising their child in space. And this made him angry because he then felt like he was just being used for some sort of strange alien mating purpose. But let it be known, thicked up aliens are real. That, okay. Yeah. I mean, even now we're getting explicit, but it's, oh man, again, I just keep comparing it because this is just so, you know, I've never heard the early stories, but now, nowadays the stories are a lot more subtle. This is, uh, I mean, who's to say they didn't refine the technique, you know, of abducting humans. Yeah. The less detail you give, the less critique you can kind of like analyze maybe. Yeah. Um, a lot. A lot more apparel on them. Uh, we got a helmet this time. Yeah. Coveralls, suits, helmets, hats. It is interesting. They're not like these just gray naked things running around. But also it's a, why go straight to intercourse? I don't know. I mean. Well, isn't that just fundamental human nature? Yeah, I guess so. Like we did some stuff. I'm going to bang that alien. Yeah. I'm going to bang this alien. True. I mean, we joke about it. It just sounds like a guy's perspective of an alien abduction, to be honest. Yeah. Yeah. He's like, I don't know. It's pretty chill. Then, uh, then one of the hot aliens walked in and we just kind of, you know, it was hot. And then, you know, they started speaking a different language and it was just, it was just so hot. She was just whispering this other language in my ear and it was just sweaty hot, you know? I mean, he is a 23. It's like, yep. It's a guy. He's a 23 year old young man, young adult man. So after all this happens, you know, it is. interesting this isn't the first of its well okay it's an early maybe first of its kind but it's it then becomes commonplace there's a lot of sexual oriented abductions that happen moving forward you don't often hear about them because you hear about the probing and what have you um but apparently a lot of abductions do feature some level of sexual activity or something sexual now after all this went down his clothes are kindly returned to him we don't know if it was in a slump or if they were neatly folded we'll never know but then he was given a tour of the ship he then just like betty years after this he attempted to take a device that kind of looked like a clock because he too wanted proof of his encounter now he was caught he was forced to return it and afterward he was then escorted off the ship he then watched it fly back off into the night sky he goes home and that's when he discovers four hours had gone by it's like almost in the blink of an eye because this encounter didn't feel that long in the following days he began suffering from nausea weakness headaches and even skin lesions which is wild because that's like wow that's that physical tangible stuff that i really want to hear about so so what's that what's going on there well he's contacted by a journalist who had placed ads looking for people who had similar ufo experiences and from all of this he's put in contact with a man named olavo fontes a the national school of medicine in brazil and this man examines him and concludes that he had been exposed to a large amount of radiation and was suffering from mild radiation sickness and we don't really without diving into the further details of this story we don't really know what really that could have been maybe in the future we'll dive into all of that but while his story remains largely unexplained it has been suggested that he made it all up right borrowed stories from here and there to create his own however he maintained until his death in 1991 that this was a legitimate experience he went on to marry and have kids and everything but again he maintains the veracity until he died i mean we're getting we're getting a little bit here and there i mean honestly we're kind of getting a lot i'm getting a lot yeah it is a little bit a lot some stuff you gotta take at face value some stuff i feel like it'd be nice to chase down a little bit you know rewind it a little bit but at the same time it's it's just it's a little bit of the same thing that we saw in the movie where he had uh some kind of powder or something on her on her apparel and then rubbed it and it stained they couldn't get it out i'm like get that to a lab asap right right well i mean with that in mind you know we do a full analysis on betty and barney hill it's just long enough ago that we don't have all the details that are fresh memories here fredo and i but task force go listen stories stand out to you and you want us to explore them all the way like this next one i think is a great candidate let us know in the comments like tell us if you want us to do a deeper dive and then we will go through every nook and cranny all the details all the theories but yeah i think the uh the pink powder is very interesting i think one of the theories was that it might have simply been blood but ultimately i think it never had its own definitive answer as to what it was all right the next case a wild one because some maintain the oligarch abduction case remains one of the most famous abductions in history we have two and one episode claiming to be the most famous so let's talk about it this one now a few decades later it starts in august 1976 you have twin brothers jack and jim weiner i think it's weiner it might be weiner we'll leave it be they went camping right with their friend chuck rack and their guide charlie foltz the group was set to embark on a two-week journey they're gonna go camping canoeing up in the forests of maine which itself is home to many disappearances there's a lot you could go disappearing in the forest like that now a few days into their trip a group was camping in the area called mudbrook as they were settling in for the night they saw a super bright object up in the sky and they believed it simply to be a star however jim thought it looked a little off a little strange and he too had binoculars so he whips those things out i feel like everybody born before 1980 just had binoculars in their pocket i mean there was a time when like binoculars were just in abundance i don't know why they were just cool in the 90s i grew up i was like they were just around and they were cool they were around you're just like oh what's like sunglasses in their pouches were around yes yes like why the hell do we need this well i guess we have our phones that do 100x zoom now and that's kind of it's kind of it i don't know were we looking at stuff enough from at a distance where we needed this i don't know i don't know why they were so prominent that's its own mystery dude yeah so okay well he's camping maybe he's a bird watcher so that's why he's got him so it makes sense so he whips these things out he's looking he's looking up at this thing and he realizes that's no star instead it's a flying object hovering somewhere around 200 feet just above the tree line and as he's looking at it it quickly disappears it like blinks away so as soon as it arrives it disappears and the men go well let's think nothing of it let's move on with our night right because who's to say what it was maybe it was a trick of the light two nights go by the group decides to go canoeing to a remote campsite called smithbrook this is about three miles five kilometers away from their previous campsite so close but on foot not too close they set out to go night fishing they build a bonfire on the coast so that way in the pitch dark they can't lose themselves they paddle out in their canoes out into the water at night and once they reach about a quarter mile from the shore out into the lake chuck got a little bit of this very eerie sense that he was being watched you know that feeling when you're in the dark or when you're surrounded by vantage points you just feel that so he looks up and again he sees a large pulsing sphere of light hovering two to three hundred feet above the cove and you book it well you're in a canoe oh yeah i mean you book it i mean you paddle you paddle for your life but yeah you're kind of yeah that's you're just helpless yeah they do that i mean they they immediately start trying to paddle for their lives because they're not going to be able to paddle for their lives because chuck described this bright globe of a light he says it was about 80 feet in diameter though admittedly it would be difficult to discern 200 feet above you like there's no maybe context for its size but he's saying the color is changing it would go from white to red to green and the motion was like liquid but let me just give an insert here because this was my study i will say airplanes faa requirements your wing lights are red and green and your reverse lights and your headlights are white so these are prominent aircraft like light colors red green and white just put it out there right but it's like a liquid fire of like white red green white red green and the men were stunned charlie points it out he he signals with his flashlight i believe sos and morse code and almost as a response it it acknowledges them and the orb shoots at them rapidly and it stops 50 feet above them so you can imagine this enormous orb flinging at you stopping right above you it shoots a cone of light down onto the water very much like i'm picking up cow up off the ground into a into a flying saucer you know the abduction beam shoots a beam of light down onto the water they're terrified they're paddling for their life now of course it's like flashlight tag this thing just scans across the water nabs them they're caught in the beam and the canoes themselves are physically dragged almost rapidly back to shore and the orb then bobs in front of them before then shoots away disappearing into the sky and the men now are exhausted they're bewildered they're confused and they turn in for the night they go to bed and the next day they spoke about it briefly but then simply went home but once they returned home this is when jack began to have vivid nightmares specifically from that night and in them he describes seeing four fingered beings resembling insects with large heads long necks glowing at lidless eyes and in his more vivid dreams he's being examined while the rest of his group is sitting nearby unable to intervene with whatever's happening jack and his brother jim begin researching ufos and strange occurrences trying to figure out what might have happened that night what did we see and why are we having these you know nightmares and so they're working with ufologist raymond fowler they tell their story to him and he's convinced that they need to go under regressive hypnosis to again you pull these memories out i mean yeah why wouldn't you use i guess at that point what could be considered modern science fringe science still probably but if you believe in it yeah if you believe again it's got many faults but unprecedented experience right is i mean like what do you do you know you can't go to the doctors you'll be like hey i saw aliens yes i've been abducted or i've seen aliens yes i've been abducted or i've seen aliens yes i've been abducted or i've seen aliens yeah let us refer to the alien section of the medical book and let's go ahead and get you looked at right so they go take these pills and chill out you know yeah i guess if you're desperate and scared enough it's just like any old horror movie once you've gone through all the natural sciences that could possibly explain what you you went through and you're still desperate for answers i can totally understand turning to something that would maybe give you those answers even if it is outside of the realms of demonstrative science and you're still desperate for answers i can totally understand turning to something that would maybe give you those answers even if it is outside of the realms of demonstrative science and you're still desperate for answers so according to the transcripts from their hypnosis sessions each of the men described being trapped inside a dark tube with swirling dust-like particles. I believe that these sessions were done separately, and so they kind of corroborated each other's stories. Now, of course, they could have planned ahead of time or what have you, but a lot of people believe that that's what implies its truth. That they, again, much like a witness taking the stand, you have a similar story, so there must be some truth to it. Now, at the end, they were, they said, surrounded by machines, examination tables, endless hallways and chambers, almost like a maze, and Jim then saw the creatures. He describes them as thin and spidery, with bug eyes. Oh, okay. Take me back to the other aliens with hair. Right, I'll take the beautiful aliens with blue eyes and hair, but this one's spidery, it's got bug eyes, but it's like Shelob wearing a skin-tight bodysuit, because they're also in these suits. Chuck, however, has a hard time focusing on the beings. When he's trying to tune back to his memory, he kind of likened it to like when you're dialing in the old FM radio, and you just get fuzzy radio, you can't get that crisp, clear signal. That's what he said it was like trying to do when trying to think back. Now, in pencil sketches, both the brothers drew elliptical eyes, kind of like a pointy chin or a beak-like mouth, it's been described. I also see in various reports that they're turkey waddle necks, but I don't see them in the drawings, and they also said that they drew hands, those four-finger hands without throats. So, take a look at these next two images. Jack's is the more basic image with the huge eyes there on the left, and Chuck's is the drawing with the bodysuit on the right, if you want to take a look at those. Whoa, a lot more reptilian, kind of. Yeah, you can see that bug-like energy. Yeah, bug-like, for sure. Interesting. Okay, I kind of see it now with the apparel. I mean, it's just, it's an alien with a big head, big eyes, a very pointy chin. Long neck, and then he's got like a SWAT uniform or something going on, like he's a part of the Avengers or something. Yeah, it's like, kind of like armor, like you'd see in a sci-fi movie. At some point, we just stopped telling the story of aliens with body armor, Kevlar, whatever the heck is on them. And shoulder pads. Yeah. It's interesting. I think this gets us really close to a more detailed version of those greys, but man, kind of freaky looking, because you do see the similarities in their drawings, the big eyes, the kind of ridged nose, the bug-like kind of energy to the head. One's got a long neck that I feel like you could just push that head over and snap it, you know, bop, bop, and then get out of there. The other one's like, no neck, and so good luck with that one. Can't choke him out. Or is it like Signs, where they read from the book of Dr. Bimboo? I don't remember that detail, but hit me with it. That they, you know, as they're reading the book, it's like, oh, they might have smaller bodies because they haven't had the need to evolve their physical form. Well, they better start evolving because us humans, we're kind of jacked sometimes. Yeah, we're kind of jacked sometimes. But it's also very much like they haven't needed to because they have either inventions or some type of mental capability. And so I'm like, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I can see that, especially with a lot of these stories being like they're telepathic or they can move things with their minds. Of course, their muscles will atrophy. Or like in Signs, they essentially got nature's version of pocket sand where, you know, they got that straw in their wrist and they could just gas you, you know, so they wouldn't need to have a physical altercation. They just blast you and knock you out. Right. And a big part of that was the camouflage. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, I can't believe I forgot about that. But yeah, vamos, children, vamos. And then, you know, that like big foot walk thing as he kind of fades into view. I watched that movie too many times as a kid. Maybe that's how I got here. But coming back to these four men, their stories did have a lot of similarities. Right. And so let's take those away. They remember being naked in a trance, almost paralyzed. They could obey telepathic commands. They were subject to intrusive prodding. The examination ended and they were returned to their boat, pushed ashore by an unseen force. And no one could say how long they were on board this ship. Various versions of this show that they were gone for roughly two hours. But again, you have that missing time. Now, ufologist, again, Fowler found that all of their descriptions were pretty consistent and that all the men were mentally stable and passed lie detector tests. But despite this, their stories did draw heavy criticism. Many believe that this could be the result of false memories induced by hypnosis or potentially recreational drug use. But I think what's interesting is that Chuck himself would later recant the claims about being abducted. He did maintain, in fact, though, that he saw a strange bright light in the sky that night, that something happened that was unexplained, but that all of the alien stuff was kind of just flavor added on. So we don't know about the other three, but that's where that one kind of ends. It's interesting how the hypnosis is kind of being used, against them, because they passed the lie detector test. I would assume they're not trained individuals to pass lie detector tests. Not the most accurate thing in the world, but multiple people passing it. And then so. Yeah, it starts to stack up a few like patterns that help build an idea here. But yeah. So I think this is very interesting. Um, oh man, it's just, there are certain things that you think would be, you know, hey, we had a liar. It's just, there are certain things that you think would be, you know, hey, we had a liar. So she sees this triangular wound above her belly button, and she too, much like the other groups, uses hypnosis to unlock the repressed memories from this lost time. She deduces from this that upon seeing the lights for the second time, Andrew had pulled over, and the pair then exited the car to get a better look at this object on the side of the road. Then seemingly another car had parked behind the Cahills, so we have more witnesses. They get out of their car. They're staring up at the night sky. And as the group is all looking up at this craft hovering above the road, a tall figure appears in front, and Kelly hears this sentence telepathically. It says, quote, let's kill them, end quote. And as more beings surround, an energy force is released that sent Kelly to the ground, and she screams to her husband then, Andrew, quote, they've got no souls, they're evil, they're going to kill us, end quote. And that's where her memory for the night ends. See, I mean, aliens back then just seemed so much messier than aliens nowadays. Yeah, very messy, getting into it. That's kind of wild. So were they telepathically talking to her, or were they talking to each other and she was able to listen in? Ooh, that's a great question. As far as we know, this is just what she remembers, that they talked to her, and from this, like, burst of energy, she's kind of, like, floored. She's thrown to the ground, or falls to the ground. And that's, and that's, you know what, this, honestly, you mentioned signs earlier. I wonder if this is the, like, the case that really spurred on the idea of conflating aliens and demons. Nope, that's Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke. Spoiler. But, like, the idea here is, like, this feels very demonic. Physical things happening on the body, talking about souls, talking about, um, you know, wanting to kill, or what have you. So, from what I could find, the only picture I can see related to this story is a drawing that Kelly made of the aliens that she saw, which I've just sent to you guys, but that's, that's really the only thing related to any kind of, like, photographic proof or evidence of what was happening with this story, at least that we have access to. Okay. Six to seven feet tall is pretty gnarly. Yeah, wide range, but, you know, that's tall. I mean, I guess, what, our range average is, like, five to six. Yeah, I mean, if you were to describe me and Fredo, you'd say six to seven feet. We might be closer to the bottom end, but we're in there. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, we're in that range. Red eyes. Now, that's, those round red eyes remind me of the Varginha incident of Brazil, but those little guys were, like, scurrying around like children, those tiny little creatures. Yeah, I think, yeah, those are the kind of little details that come and go. Mm-hmm. Again, that's, that's the kind of stuff that people just say different colored eyes do different colored things. Right. So, again, glossing over a few details here, but ultimately, through newspaper ads, the second car is tracked down, and we're able to get their story from them, and it's almost identical to Kelly's, except they have greater detail. So now we have the other couple that pulled up that night, that, which is weird, because I feel like that detail was only remembered through hypnosis, so that's interesting. Wait, yeah, so they also remember the detail of the speaking? Well, they remember the encounter, and so it is, it does seem that, unless someone's lying because they just put out a newspaper ad, that somebody else was like, "Oh, yeah, that was us. We're the car that pulled up behind you." We remember things and have even more details. That's a good point. It is a newspaper ad. But it's two women, and the women reported that they had the same triangular wounds near their belly buttons, so I don't know if this is some sort of body scan or what have you. Maybe it only appears on, on women for some reason. But some reports mention a third car that was driven by a local lawyer who also had a story that seemed to line up with these other accounts. But ultimately, as time goes on, momentum of this story slows, and by 1998, Kelly had disappeared almost entirely. She's now divorced from her husband, Andrew, and with other witnesses never coming forward publicly to back her story beyond what we just described, she's kind of like, wants to move on from it. Yeah. And similarly, there was a report generated because she was talking to them, the PRA, the Phenomenon Research of Australia, and that 300-page report, I believe, per the PRA director, John O'Kettle, I, I want to say, they had a report that they also didn't publicize, and they let the case fade into the background, and he said that at some point we might post the report, but it's now been pared down from 300 pages to 100 pages, et cetera. And so, the veracity, right, like, the strength with which this feels plausible starts to fade quickly, with everyone kind of, like, getting timid and backing away. As for Kelly, she says she sent ufologist Bill Chalker all of her files, right? She sends him three large archival boxes in the early 2000s, and then she herself leaves the country. She's seeking a quieter life, wants to put this story in her past, and ultimately, theories from this case have ranged from a genuine encounter to, once again, criticizing this whole thing as being a crime. I don't know. I don't know if it's true. I don't think it's true. I don't think it's this whole thing as being a product of hypnotic regression and false memories. There's also the theory of social contagion from other stories in decades past, because by the time the 90s are rolling around, you know, UFOs had freshly peaked again in the 80s. Yeah, it had a resurgence. Again, like interesting that hypnosis here again, once again, takes a, I guess like a negative turn in terms of someone's validity with their story. I mean, whether you believe or don't, or whether you believe in the power of hypnosis or don't, or suggestion even, it's hard to like, it is a, an access point for this whole conversation. Because all of these memories are predicated on these individuals going through hypnosis and then coming out with the details. And so it's almost like if you want to prove it or disprove it, that's kind of where you got to go. Yeah, it's double-edged sword because, but again, it's like we're using it, but we're not believing it. We're not believing it, right? Yeah. We need this to get the information out of them. We've got the information and it's like, well, I don't believe it because we use this. Well, I don't want to conflate two parties, right? They believe because they want some answers. You ufologists and the paranormal researchers might believe, but then when it goes to the broader public, that's when the other people come to play being like, I never believed this, you know? So that is true. Yeah. They, they put them through hypnosis because they want the answers and it's just people. Yeah. Not validating the method. So again, is implanted, but could you, I guess you could, I'm like, could you record it? But then it's like, well, you could just stop the recording and then do whatever the hell after before or after the recording. So then that kind of. Yeah. And they did, they recorded at least on tape, maybe not film for the one in the 1960s, the hills. But then it's just like, okay, well, what about before? What about after? You know, you can poke and prod holes. It's, it's, it ultimately then comes down. To what do you believe? Cause that's really what we've got. But I think our conversation around the theories will be just as interesting. If you're a believer and we're going to wreck your, your belief, I think reality can be just as interesting as the ideas of aliens coming down and abducting people. I think the conversation here is, is fascinating, but before we dive in, let's recap the similarities, all the things that have kind of been the through thread commonly, and then we'll dive in. 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Overhappening plan starting around a dollar a day. Right now, get 60% off your new system with professional monitoring at simply safe dot com slash Spotify. Visit SimpliSafe.com slash licenses for alarm license information. So similarities include two to four hours of missing time. These locations are usually isolated, remote locations somewhere in the dark at nighttime. They feature paralysis. They feature telepathic communication. There is often a sense of forced calm, almost like a sedation in a weird way. They're being poked. They're being prodded. They're often naked. Maybe that's where probing comes from. But it's ultimately like medical observational areas is what they see. Common alien descriptions are kind of all over the place. Sometimes small blue eyes, sometimes big red eyes, but ultimately you have your common grays. Big bald head, right? Robbed them of that luscious hair. Big, usually black or dark gray oblong eyes, sometimes insect-like with no lids, no nose, pointy chin, shorter. You know, oftentimes I hear usually between three and four feet. But today our stories featured five feet up to five and a half feet, or the last one was like six to seven feet. Six to seven, right? Yeah, the last one. Oh, don't say it together like that. You know, you gotta do the hand gesture. So I don't know where that's from. Yeah, the youth. You got skin-tight suits, sometimes helmets. These mid-century aliens are more civilized than our nude gen-zines. Z-aliens. Yeah, man, they're more nudist. Yeah, all right. Let's see. Glowing lights in the sky that approach very quickly and then vanish just as quick. A beam of light sometimes that illuminates them before they have a jump in memory. And then that jump of memory is usually only dissected through hypnosis. We saw two stories where people tried to take physical objects as proof. And both of those stories were unaware of each other. I think that's interesting. Nightmares. Psychological trauma following the event. And again, hypnosis is the main tool. Now, of course, while every abduction case does vary at least a little slightly, there are some overarching theories of what could be happening here. By no means can we diagnose and dissect every single one, but I do think that there might be a way to answer a wide swath of these cases. And so I'm interested to get your thoughts. Really? Possibly. We're not going to debunk them all, but I think. I think that a lot of them can be addressed in one of these shapes or forms, right? Yeah. Okay. Let's start with that researcher at Harvard that I wanted to get to. This is like a double-pronged sleep paralysis mixed with hypnosis conversation. So researchers at Harvard University conducted an experiment to determine if memories of an alien abduction would prompt the same physiological response as others who had gone through different traumatic experiences, right? So basically, in this study, it's not a huge sample size. I will say that. But they recruited 10 people, six women, four men, who claimed to be abductees. Some of them more than once. While under hypnosis, seven of the 10 reported having sexual contact with aliens or having their reproductive fluids extracted for mating. Then each person would write a script telling their story of the abduction. This is all under hypnosis. The research team would then take those scripts and they would, I don't know if they got like voice actors, or whatever, but they would then record these stories in a very neutral voice, put them onto an audio tape, they would play these tapes back to the abductees. So now that they're not hypnotized, now that they're awake, I should say, they're hearing their own story back to them in a neutral manner. And they're getting their body and their physiological responses measured. Now they did the same thing with a different group. I would say almost like a control group. It featured eight individuals who each suffered, severely traumatic experiences unrelated to aliens. And that way they could see how does somebody who reacts to something, should I say, dare I say, traditionally traumatic, right? Or something corporeal, something human oriented, something of this earth. Let's see how they react to their own stories, read back to them neutrally and measure that and compare that to how an abductee would hear their own story back to them. Is there any similarity, right? That's what they're looking for. Because I think the theory would be, the thesis here is that if they're making up an abduction, they shouldn't have a physiological response similar to somebody going through PTSD, for example, right? Okay, yeah. That's kind of what they're after. Maybe looking for heart rate, maybe looking for movement. Yeah, different things in the body, sense it. So they found that the alien abductees showed strong physiological reactions to their tapes being read back to them, either basically equal to, or greater than, the group who was suffering severe traumatic events, unrelated to aliens. However, the researchers did not consider the stories that were given under hypnosis to be legitimate. And so this then starts to put bias into the results, right? But they start to wonder, okay, they are physiologically reacting to these stories as if it really happened, but they don't themselves believe that it could be aliens. So they then go, okay, what else could it have been? What's the. The logical explanation. They point towards sleep paralysis. We did an entire episode on sleep paralysis, demons, and like what people see, why there's like shadow people and the hat man and demons, succubi are common. When you're in that frozen sleep paralysis state, you shared a story of your own. But long story short, go listen to the episode task force. It's deeply fascinating. But in sleep paralysis, it's not unusual for individuals to hallucinate, sometimes seeing beings or a setting, that actually isn't there because you're in this kind of hypnagogic state, right? The state between being awake and asleep. So when you're trying to revive these memories via hypnosis, it's possible, right? That the wires are getting crossed and for false memories to be conjured. So not only are you trying to remember a moment that you went through during maybe that hypnagogic state, but now you're trying to make sense of that state when oftentimes dreams can readily be mixed with reality. In a way that's very convincing. And so maybe you're basically like, you remember crumbs of a nightmare and in hypnosis, you're trying to ground those nightmares in reality. And when doing that, you're creating a false story that stitches them together, right? Does that make sense? It does just, but it, man, it just ends up becoming so convoluted. You're trying to stitch together so many things and it's like, how do you, how do you do that? Right? How do you pull? It out from them and show it back to them and have them react to it. And then I don't quite know what that is. And then at that point, are we inducing these reactions because of the environment? And because of the stress that we're implementing all these things, I feel like come into play that just create these new factors. Yeah, it's, there's a lot to assess here. I think you're totally right. Like becomes so hard to measure. So hard. To measure so hard to measure. It's why I don't think we have an answer, but hypnosis can absolutely pull in false memories. Those false memories can be informed by that same level of suggestibility that enables hypnosis. But again, we have small sample size. We have a group of researchers who they themselves don't subscribe to the alien idea here. And so they are trying to ground it. They are trying to understand it. And I think what they're coming to the conclusion on, on here makes sense, especially when you realize that the researchers noted down that the average abductee in their group had a predisposed interest in things like reincarnation, astral projection, telepathy, astrology, energy therapies, and alternative healing practices. And so I think, you know, our experiences color our beliefs. And so when you put all that into a pot, we're not getting a bulletproof explanation to all of them, but you know what? You might end up with kind of what our next theory is exploring, a perfect storm of moments of beliefs mixed with sleep paralysis, mixed with fear that then comes from remembering that subconsciously, and then the unique moment of going into hypnosis to try to remember that. And again, your interests color what you pull out during hypnosis. It's convoluted as hell, but I think there's something in there that could explain some of these cases for sure. Now, as I kind of teased here, and it's very similar to the theory we just explored, some believe that there are several different pieces all involved that could then culminate and lead to a UFO abduction experience. As I mentioned, there are several criticisms of hypnosis, especially when used as a kind of source of truth to a story. Many argue that it cannot be relied upon as a legitimate explanation or as evidence due to how sensitive it is and how easy it is to recall false memories or be suggested even in the moment. Others have added that one's trauma could also have a hand in alien abduction claims. Those who claim to have been abducted often show many of the physiological signs of someone undergoing something like PTSD. And because of this, some have argued that it's possible for someone to be more susceptible to suggestion. Basically, that you're so suggestible that under a false story, under the truth, you just genuinely believe this false story so much that your body is responding. And I mean, when you're watching this video, watching a horror movie, your body's responding, but you're not there or when you have a placebo effect pill like a sugar pill i was just about to say placebo effect and that's what i was saying at what point do you start injecting you know and influencing essentially yeah that's that's a weird study yeah it's hard it's hard to nail down but then again how else would you get it i don't know yeah yeah or what if there's yeah oh man it's there's so many what-ifs again not bulletproof by any means but i do think there's room in here that helps explain many cases unless you just want to be like they're all wrong you know they're all hoaxes but others generally speaking have pointed towards mania or psychosis they've pointed to those who have an intense affinity for fantasy and they have said that some of these individuals might have a harder time grounding themselves in reality and as a result they might be more likely to recount a story and they might be more likely to recount a story and they might be more likely to recount a story and they have said that some of these individuals might have a harder time stories under a specific set of circumstances now i you know we can't psychoanalyze all the people we talked about today but you know without knowing all that it's possible but i do you know like we said with the betty and barney hill story it's possible that their own like they have their own theory with that case rooted in trauma yeah that maybe what they did was suppress what truly happened in place of a more fantastic idea that aliens abducted them and that could be again in to protect their consciousness or or protect themselves from what truly happened that maybe humans can be that evil and that they are being hounded or that they could be attacked again and so you just kind of want to oh maybe it was just aliens and maybe maybe it's something else right the mind is is is powerful yeah they could have been they could have done that through a different form yeah i 100 agree like that the trauma right it protected them by manifesting in a certain way and that being the form of this grand story of aliens again i don't want to throw out what they experienced it's just again a theory but it is plausible oh no yeah for sure but i mean it is to say i think it still acknowledges the fact that they experienced something and but more so that something that was real and traumatic and then their mind made something else up to block that you know right right yeah because either way however you slice it they did lose some time and they did experience something and then only under hypnosis does it take the form of aliens so the mind can repress now this is where i start to get into my personal subscriptions and my uh one of these is like my own personal interest but i think honestly fredo i'm really interested to hear what you think we can assess the mind i love psychology there's plausibility all over the place there but let's talk about top secret military aircraft tests you and i have been on and off talking about this for a long time and i've been talking about this for a long time and i've been talking about this throughout the years and yes this study comes from the cia who maybe wants to cover up aliens i get it but per studies that have come out from the cia they said and i have images of both these aircraft if you want to take a look the lockheed u2 and the lockheed martin oxcart a12 likely accounted for half of the ufo sightings reported through the late 50s in the early 1960s respectively these are incredible aircraft some of my favorite the a12 is the precursor to the sr71 blackbird but what you got to know about these puppies yes they're all stealthed out in black but they fly up at 60 000 feet and i believe the beta prototypes of the u2 flew without any paint which would have been like aluminum silver and pilots would have seen these impossibly high altitude flying aircraft glinting sun off of them and a pilot would say nothing can fly higher than 20 000 feet that's where we fly what could possibly be that high up it must be a strange light must be an alien something of that kind it's it's a uap right right yeah i mean we talked yeah like you said we talked about it before or not everyone i would say most people aren't privy to the latest technology that our government's working on right you know and so it's like that we're not nothing flies that high that you know of that you know of right we're constantly building innovating etc so yeah you just don't have clearance for that information right and who's to say maybe a few decades go by and we declassify an orb shaped or saucer shaped object or a triangular shaped plane that can absolutely dart around left right and center yeah i was about to say darting around yeah and i'm sure when like when planes were first going up not everyone knew what the heck was going on and you know there's a first for everything absolutely and we're constantly pushing innovation we're constantly trying to evolve ourselves technology yeah it could literally be that simple an unpainted craft that is being tested that no one knows about bang dude i mean that's that's the pure definition of an unidentified flying object just something in the air we don't know what it is doesn't have to be aliens oftentimes it's attached but that's the thing is the timing works out perfectly they're not declassified yet they're flying in the mid 1950s and beyond and they're not going to be able to fly in the mid 1960s and beyond and they're not going to be able to fly in the mid 1960s and beyond i believe it was 1960 maybe 61 for the a12 and then there's other aircraft that i'm not even talking about that happened throughout the 60s and 70s sr71 blackboard is one of them but like it is very possible that with the arise of and i'm kind of merging this into the next theory but with the arise of the space race and sci-fi you also have reality with this advanced aircraft and uh and that explains why suddenly aliens are going to be able to fly in the mid 1960s and beyond pop onto the scene throughout the 50s and 60s and then copycats keep it going throughout the 90s and 2000s yeah i mean that's a good that's a very good point again of its time right of its time yeah and what is going on in the news around the world yeah now what's interesting and i didn't know about this part is that there are top secret operations that were also happening throughout the 50s you have operations high dive and operation excelsior both featured high altitude balloons and the testing of high altitude multi-stage parachutes the first one the high dive was kind of anthropomorphic dummies like crash test dummies falling out but they're wearing like high altitude suits to keep themselves alive and if somebody were to see one of these things or if that were to happen near roswell uh yeah we want to keep that top secret but also like that looks like an alien to the untrained eye yeah you know yeah excelsior featured a i forget his name dang it but but a man jumping out of these uh of these uh of these uh of these uh of these uh of these high altitude balloon now of course if that's what's going on allowing citizens the government saying hey you believe it's aliens this is the easiest cover-up in history it's so much more maybe they fuel that maybe they add more stories maybe they operation blue book we talk about that in the episode on it maybe that was all a farce which is why the eventual head of operation blue book was like this is nothing this is a farce this is just a misdirect maybe it was because it's so much easier to get people to believe that this is a farce and it's so much easier to get people to look the other way if they already believe something else and you're now hiding your top secret programs in in plain sight now the soviets can't know that you're flying at 60 000 feet taking photos of their air bases which is what was happening with with a plane that could outrun missiles 100 uh just keep the information flowing right just keep making noise it's really it's really what it is and i'm sure it happens nowadays too with like oh god and give me to like track your information and serving you specific ads and all that kind of stuff it's you know now back then it's like yeah sure let the noise run let them run in circles chase their tail continue to do what we want to do yeah now we're being fed stuff oh man the times could you imagine how people would feel if it came out proven fact that aliens were just a macro level psyop like like it's just one of those psyops that you can't even imagine like it's just one of those psyops that you can't even imagine like it's just one of those psyops that you can't even imagine like it's just one of those psyops that you can't even imagine like it's just one of those psyops that keeps coming out oh we gotta like it's just one of those psyops that keeps coming out oh we gotta hide these top secret planes hide these top secret planes because we're spying on the soviets oh we're doing this other stuff because we're spying on the soviets oh we're doing this other stuff bring out the aliens and you just bring out the aliens and you just keep doing that it's possible that is a theory i oh it's it's not keep doing that it's possible that is a theory i oh it's it's not far-fetched at all if that happened far-fetched at all if that happened i would not be surprised yeah i'd be like damn yeah that's it that's why they're never going to declassify no aliens you're never going to see an alien body they're going to keep you on the hook because if it's real panic and if it's fake psyop right it's like there's there's no win to answering definitively one way or the other which leads us to the the kind of last theory in this realm which is society and culture right space race going on emerging technologies are going on it's hard to live in the 1950s and 60s and not dream of space not think of aliens and so you know it's very possible that people were just susceptible to these ideas and being so primed to see a ghost you might see a ghost being primed to see a strange light in the sky we saw it with drones yes there's weird things flying around but when you but a lot of those claims can be debunked because more people look at the sky and the more people look up the more people see things that can be explained and so it adds noise so alien abductions might be real but there's a lot of noise within there of course you know i don't need to do this at length but there's the idea that these are uh fake made up for money made up for popularity selling a book selling a movie they're hoaxes just for the sake of fun somebody wants their 15 minutes of fame it's always part of the conversation but then that leads us us to the last angle for many believers the commonalities between all these stories point to only one thing that the aliens are real have visited us and have taken us aboard testing us wiping us down wiping our memories whatever it is and then sending us back home with missing time into this maybe planetary zoo that we call earth who knows why but that i mean is possible it's possible it is possible i i mean i'm sure many of us don't believe that we're the only intelligent species out there yeah odds are definitely not statistically speaking we will never ever hear from them ever if you know what i mean the fermi paradox is maybe a whole episode in and of itself i've teased it for years but what's wild fredo and i never knew this but studies show that somewhere close to five maybe even six percent of the general population alleged to have had an abduction encounter really i find that so yeah i find that so fascinating task force if you you've had an alien abduction encounter and you're willing to share i'd love to hear it you know i would love to just like even just the story of it yeah that's way more than i thought yeah but again as with everything man i even even even even if it's real there's always going to be i feel like 99 percent noise and so like maybe one person did finally see an alien or or a ghost or something doesn't matter you you can try really hard to prove that you're gonna have so many copycats going like that's that's a great story yep and then i too have my story i have my tail look at me give me the attention people do that with true crime people do that with murders i did it like get out of here guys right and there's actual like jail time involved or could be you know you could go to jail for that et cetera et cetera and so yeah we were gonna do this about that or what consequences do they have yeah right the only consequence is like maybe some people looking at him sideways but hey at least i sold a book or got on the news or whatever you can spread your conspiracy you can say the world is flat and there you go i don't you know i don't know but that brings us to an end i think we're gonna say this next week because we record out of order but this is two of our record length episodes in a row we've been on a tear we're gonna have to have some like palate cleansers coming into october some spooky stories things are getting a little eerie as we get into the season but task force man thank you again so much for supporting us 300 episodes is rarefied air this is not something that many podcasts get to celebrate and it's so cool to be here with you talking about aliens dude i mean we get to sit here and do all kinds of conversations sometimes adventurous sometimes a little fearful but it's always a good time and 300 episodes like you were saying we did the pilot didn't know where that was gonna go and then you know we continued to do the show and then went independent and we didn't know where that was gonna go all right task force we're a few shout outs before we go we've got rj who was our newest elite member over at redwedpod.com i hope you go and enjoy all the friends slop timber that's coming this month and then our buff scientists of the week we got bob of hydra and then our squonks just to name a few thank you all so much for keeping the lights on we got james hill wall squonk evan guillen and nefarious bees i like that nefarious bees i like it too such good names in our task force but uh yeah won't stay much longer because this was a long one but fredo alien abductions still yeah i mean we got a story about a thicked up nice alien still looking for harder evidence though yeah we need more evidence thicker evidence thicker evidence yeah with that said fred i'll see you right back here next monday for yet another mystery tammy regularly hauls stuff to her kids at college that's why she shops at bj's wholesale club saving up to 25 off grocery store prices beef jerky microwave meals laundry pods even they can't screw up have you met my kids and with bj's gas she gets there for less they call me the road warrior this is your home road warrior mom home of the save join for just twenty dollars at bjs.com slash mesquite and save ten cents per gallon for six months open soon limited time offer new members only bj's home of the save