Sex with aliens

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‘Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.’   Democritus, 362BC 

“I’ve been sleeping with aliens for years,” a tall handsome chef tells me one afternoon in Miami at a Ford models’ party. Sampling his culinary wizardry, I had joked that this ‘roomful of tall, gaunt, dazzling creatures resembles a gathering of aliens--only aliens one would want to sleep with.’ With carefully tousled hair, bookshelf shoulders, pointy nipples and cinched waist, and his form-fitting Gucci pants and top, Zach blends in. But Zach is serious about sex with extraterrestrials. He tells me hypnosis has unveiled his sexual involvement with alien visitors aboard spacecrafts.  

Since 1961, when the Barney and Betty Hill abduction made it into Look magazine, thousands of ordinary Americans have provided consistent reports of abduction experiences. MIT physi-cist Dr. David Pritchard estimates that 1% of the nation’s population, two and a quarter million citizens, are abductees. Other studies place this number between 560,000 and 3.7 million. A 1991 Roper poll showed that several million Americans may have had abduction experiences. Taking into account that most people never share their stories with analysts, and that most abductions are supposed to be ‘quick in and outs’ (people are collected asleep from their beds and returned with no memory of what transpired), the actual number of sexually used abductees remains incalculable. 

The Ford party moves to a cavernous blinking booming club, where invisible foam machines soak the frenzied crowd in suds and ejaculate-like synthetic rain. I keep sliding on the sodden floor, my clothes clinging to my skin, until Zach suggests we go for a midnight supper. We cut through a throng of pushy clubgoers, oily mafiosi, gangly skateboarders, muttering drunks, wide-eyed loiterers in dirt-caked garments, and end in a bustling cafe on Ocean Drive. The trendy street before us is pulsing: Cuban girls in tiny bustieres, sumptuous black men in fashionably untied overalls, strutting gays in dishabille, and ubiquitous coltish models, compete for libidinal attention. Here the human body has trumped gravity: mammaries and backsides point uniformly to the sky.The flaunted physicality of this crowd is a modern maenadic celebration of the victory of technology over anatomy. 

It’s not a far cry from this to shapeshifting beings from other dimensions. Zach, in a mesh top, bangles and aviator glasses, is telling me about his life. He’s 34, the product of a conventional Protestant upbringing. As a child he went to Church and believed in the Holy Spirit. He did graduate culinary studies, married and has a 9-year-old daughter. He doesn’t consume drugs, alcohol, meat, sugar, caffeine. Some years ago he realized he was gay, but remains close to his wife. “My daughter is the reason I go on living as if none of this is happening,” he says. “My abductee-mentor, Lee, says I must make sure my daughter ‘knows’ and raise her with her alien spirit intact.” 

Zach’s ‘realization event’ came when he read an article in a local magazine and recognized the abductee symptoms--such as waking up with nosebleeds (ostensibly from nose implants) and tiny unexplained scars or ‘scoop marks’ (from blood-taking or serum-injecting procedures). The reporter referred him to Lee, a local activist who had just attended the 1992 MIT abduction conference sponsored by David Pritchard and Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, which was based on the premise that abductions may be our entry to the science of the 21st century.Lee explained to Zach the magnitude of the abductee phenomenon stays underreported because our anthropocentric pride in being the dominant intelligence, inhabiting a measurable objective reality, is the sacred assumption of our race. Like most credible abductees, Zach had never had exposure to UFO lore. He was apprehensive when he told Lee of his dream of a machine being placed on his penis and his semen being sucked out in a funnel; in response, Lee gave him a copy of Dr. David Jacobs’ Accounts of UFO Abductions  

Dr. Jacobs has interviewed abductees from vastly diverse backgrounds, after subjecting them to extensive psychological testing that pronounced them sane. His subjects reported 300 abductions that involved interspecies breeding experiments, during which the aliens induced in them rapid, intense sexual arousal and orgasm. When arousal was at its peak, aliens collected their ova or sperm, mixed it with alien DNA and implanted it back into the women. The impregnated women were re-abducted in time to have the hybrid (half human) fetus removed. These X-rated spacenappings followed such a familiar pattern that Zach realized his own experience was “like a broken record.”  

Dr. Jacobs’s thesis is that the abductions serve for the production of hybrid children; it is an exegesis Budd Hopkins, an alien-abduction pioneer, introduced in Intruders, after studying 1500 cases. Both authors speculate that an alien race has been harvesting our fertility issue in order to replenish their genetic stock after a holocaust on their planet. The abductees feel violated and raped.  

Zach disdains this ‘anthropocentric’ view. He cites Dr. Mack who has described aliens as cosmic conservationists and abductees as members of an endangered animal population who are being tagged. The aliens, Zach explains, don’t need so many abductees to rebuild their race. Instead, they are preventing our own extinction in an upcoming cataclysm on earth. They’re crossbreeding our races until we’re indistinguishable, so we can gain their insights. They perform these genetic compatibility tests as the first step to an eventual dimensional merging. Hybridization is our species evolution in progress. Zach now feels pride for his nefarious participation in the salvation of our endangered planet; since he met Lee and began contributing willingly, he hasn’t had ‘memory wipes’. 

Ever since he was a toddler, Zach suffered from ‘old hag nightmares.’ “I always saw probing scary eyes, my body prone on an altar or table, and the same terrifying shadowy female raping me, sucking away my essence. Sometimes my testicles were pulled aside and tubes were inserted there. My penis showed signs of having ejaculated when I woke up, but I found no cum. All my life I slept with the lights on, the TV blaring, and tranquilizers.” His shrink attributed the dreams to his fear of women and his innate homosexuality. Another therapist suggested Zach might have been sexually handled by his mother as a baby and was suffering from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). 

He now lives with a shrink. “We’ve been monogamous 5 years, but my lover is increasingly threatened by my alien wife. It’s hard to be the spouse of an abductee who’s erotically involved with aliens. He’s receptive, but it’s affecting our sex life, as I spend more and more sexual energy with the entities. He’s out cold in bed when I’m ejaculating in space. In the morning, I’m too drained to respond to him. But he knows they hold the strings. It’s not up to me.” He sounds disturbingly sane. 

It was only after he met Lee and started undergoing hypnosis that Zach became conscious of his visits with his alien wife--a 7ft tall, dark-eyed ‘guardian angel’ with thin silvery-blond hair and a triangular head who vaguely resembles his ex-wife. (“When I first saw my ex, I felt I knew her and loved her.”) During regression, he remembers seeing various ‘Grays’ and ‘Reptilians’, but he always mates with this Nordic humanoid who he says originally took his boyhood virginity. “She’s my teacher, my sister, my lover, my friend, my soulmate,” he says, disgorging a loose collection of clichés. “She’s the best part of me. When I look into her huge, oval, nonreflective eyes, I feel she can see all the way through me. Everything goes into slow motion, foamy. She’s like a daffodil, with no muscles or veins, but she overpowers me. My stomach gets queasy. My bowels pinch. I feel bliss.”  

I recognize her as a descendant of the love-goddess born of sea foam, the siren or mermaid sailors ‘saw’ in distant seas. I tell Zach his succubus has been known as Baubo, Brizo, Lilith, Lamia, Brigit, Mirian. Hollywood and a few millennia of our mythmaking can easily imprint visions like his on our subconscious. Any contemporary mind, crowded with disparate images of ETs, starving children, Star Wars and Jurassic dinos, could produce these images during sleep or hypnosis.  

“But every time I hybridize,” Zach insists timidly, “I feel a palpable vigor. I don’t imagine that. I’ve seen scores of fetuses in incubators aboard the craft, hundreds gestating in one room. I’ve been shown hybrid toddlers and teens who look human without eyebrows. I was an incubator baby myself, born with no eyebrows; Lee says that shows I’m a dual referencer. My soul is the alien.” ‘Dual reference’ refers to the sense of many abductees that they are related to the aliens, much in the tradition of seers taking on the identities of deities or ghosts who speak through them. Some feel they were aliens in past lives. Others, like Zach and Lee, feel they have alien ‘blood’ in them. According to them, our DNA tests are too primitive to register these unconventional genetic nuances.  

Zach’s fine-featured face contorts when I press him to describe the sex. After a few minutes’ unblinking reflection, he grows exhilarated and says: “My body remembers every detail. She is soft. Cold. Yellow. I’m naked. She usually straddles me. My penis feels hollow and flexible, not fully hard. My testicles are little bumps. She fills my mind with spinning erotic images. She’s the dominant, even when she props me up on top of her. She stares at me until I know my submission, then rubs against my penis and collects my cum. I don’t think they have sex organs, but they create facsimiles for the sex act so we can relate to them. She has breasts. The idea that this superior being is milking my ejaculate is what’s terribly arousing. Sometimes when it’s time to go, I cry. I feel I’m hers. Nothing in life prepared me for these experiences.” That’s true of all love, I muse.  

“I’m glad you’re not gawking in disbelief,” he sighs. “I’m sensitive to doubt. I’m still afraid of ridicule. This is a skeptical society, even though you’d die if I told you the names of all the movie stars and police chiefs who are abductees.” How come you’re not gay in space? I ask. “No one can be. Sex for the sake of pleasure or intimacy alone is foreign to them.”  His almond eyes keep straying from mine. He looks jittery, haunted. “I know that nothing out there is safe,” he adds. “Right before a visitation, I get a terrible dread of apprehension. It can accelerate into blind panic if I let it.”  

As I see it, aliens are our ghosts-of-the-moment. Copulating with immaterial species is the postmodern version of being seduced by nymphs, fairies, spirits and demons. For millennia, people have firmly believed in otherworldly creatures who could kidnap or paralyze innocent or predispos-ed passersby, stealing their senses and wits or endowing them with supernatural gifts. Until the 16th century, madness was a sign of being ‘touched’ by gods. The UFO is the newest echo of our oldest fear coming down through history: We are not safe. We’re not alone. By naming our pursuers, we can assuage and define our fears. By fucking them, we can become them: we become miraculous. 

Santa Fe looks like a toy town, so uniformly pretty it could be the prototypical Disney-city. My hotel, like every building, even banks and gas stations, is a pink, dainty adobe. The streets are clean and safe, bustling with middleclass tourists, helpful locals, shy Navajos and well-preserved retirees. Souvenirs include rubber aliens, and alien earrings, cookies, and embryos in jars. I don’t find a single properly dilapidated, crude adobe wall to confirm the antiquity of Santa Fe’s aesthetic.  

Zach’s mentor, Lee, and his girlfriend Jill, are young, New Age, retirees. They have turned their back on secular ambitions to do the aliens’ bidding: their task is to spawn hundreds of hybrids. “We are the human link,” they tell me. “It’s our evolutionary mission.” They ask me to alter their identities because they are ‘committed to living outside the corrupting media matrix.’ “I fear humans more than anything else,” Jill gravely explains. They remind me of missionaries, enthusiasts who would die for their beliefs. Their ‘metaterrestrials’ provide them with a heroic cause that absolves and redeems them from the quotidian mire. They have left their jobs, he as a home builder and she as a counselor for sexually abused children, and now sell UFO drawings in local galleries, lead ‘astral therapy’ and ‘hybrid awareness’ classes, and ‘try to live in balance with nature’.  

Lee picks me up at Alburquerque airport in a UFO T-shirt, swaggering with open-legged bravado, his camouflage pants tightly sashed at the waist. He has a stubborn jaw, Mongolian eyes, a silver thumb ring, and never raises his brittle voice. He sees himself as a spy, ‘a double agent between worlds.’ His father was a career-military man (“Joe Authoritarian, whipping out his belt if I didn’t get an A”). Lee worked as a fireman in his youth, until he was abducted from his truck, and returned ‘upside-down’; he later joined the Peace Corps and had another abduction in Peru, during which he was ‘contracted to an infinitesimal point’: “I was returned to bed huddled up in a fetal ball. That taught me to let go of my need for power and control. I refused to lord it over the Incas.” Now he drives about chasing hunches, keeping tags on clandestine government activities against aliens.  

His station wagon contains binoculars, tape-recorders, CB radios, cameras, UFO magazines, military IDs. His premise is a familiar one, most convincingly presented by Dr. Richard Boylan, a psychologist and outspoken abductee: America’s Star Wars defense system is aimed at aliens. That is why, Lee says, SDI funding has increased by 33% each year since the Soviet collapse; America has hijacked UFO technology and is building electromagnetic pulse/laser weapons and test-flying noiseless saucers across these desert skies. The government runs a disinformation campaign denying the presence of aliens until it develops weapons to defeat them; in fact in 1994 the government conceded that most UFO sightings of the past 50 years were sightings of secret experimental military aircraft. This is not an esoteric scenario. 49% of all Americans believe the government is concealing evidence of alien visitations. John Lear, son of the LearJet founder, has claimed on TV that the government is in possession of the aliens who reportedly crashed at Roswell N.M., in 1947, and they are giving uncle Sam technology in exchange for abductees. Philip Corso, an army colonel and author of The Day After Roswell, has tried to prove that everything we know about fiberoptics, laser beams and computer circuitry, is the result of technology we seized from the crashed spaceship. Roswell’s UFO Enigma Museum and International UFO Museum and Research Center are thriving. 

The Kirkland Air Base in Albuquerque houses the DOE’s Strategic Defense Initiative headquarters, the Sandia National Labs (developing Stars Wars weapons), the Defense Nuclear Agency headquarters and the National Atomic Museum. The National Solar Observatory, the Army Frequency Surveillance Station and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory are located nearby. The Los Alamos Labs (housing nuclear fusion research centers and the Human Genome Project) and the Tonopah USAF Headquarters and Test Range are within driving range. This nucleus attracts believers like Lee. He moved here in 1994, after an OOBE abduction in Miami when he was transported to a desert planet he recognized as home.“My planet once had trees and water, but science destroyed it,” he says; “we made something we couldn’t stop. So my life on earth has to be planetarily useful.” 

Recent experiments with electrical disturbances on the temporal lobe of the human brain (the interpretive cortex) have shown that UFO images may be naturally produced effects of high-ampli-tude electromagnetic pulses caused by tectonic plate movements. People who live near transmitter towers, power lines, fault lines, railway lines etc. are more vulnerable to them. If radiation is causing a global ‘UFO’ psychosis, this area is extremely prone. More generally, if any collective disturbance to our subconscious, caused by the impact of modern science on human life, has materialized in an observer-created reality, Lee believes it has come to impart wisdom and a warning of an impending ecological destruction. Abductees share the premonition that a great apocalypse is going to happen soon, and that they’ll be personally involved in it. And if abduction is not a new psychiatric phenomenon or a millennial hysteria, alien spaceships may be our future intergalactic Noah’s Ark. 

Lee has most of his ‘encounters’ while driving around. This too is typical: most people who are not abducted from their beds are abducted from their cars in back roads. The person’s car (that quintessential American womb-tomb symbol) gets stalled, a crown of dazzling light shines, and a ‘Gray’ being--spineless, hairless, noseless, odorless, genitalless and genderless, four-fingered and big-headed, naked or in a seamless uniform--taps the window or opens the door and, in an indescribable flash of time, an American citizen is transported, floating through a slit, into a luminous cigar-shaped disc and inside the aliens’ cold circular labs. The bright flash which persists in the craft resembles near-death experiences, and experiences during orgasm. Even the nonsexual encounters qualify as orgasmic, since orgasm is a consciousness-altering experience that can seem ‘out of body’  

These experiences uphold a religious tradition: Ezekiel in the Old Testament and John in the Apocalypse saw a fiery brightness and winged four-headed humanoids who lifted them up; Emperor Constantine saw a fiery cross in the sky when he conquered Rome, and Joseph Smith saw a pillar of light and two bright creatures in the air who spoke to him. Each of these raptures led to the founding of a church.Like the UFO cultists, early Christians lived in disenfranchised communes and preached of salvation from a corrupt and dying world through abstinence or controlled procreation. Is it a stretch to expect that we may one day be worshipping a boneless Doctor ‘Gray’ and wearing little gold dirigible-shaped discs around our necks, as ancient Phoenicians and Mythraists once did? 

But Lee doesn’t see abductions as a topical makeover of a timeless anxiety or psychic need. He’s even inclined to believe that aliens have been responsible for all the paranormal or divine phenomena in history. I ask: Did aliens appear to Buddha under the banyan tree, Mohammed in his cave, Christ in Egypt, and all the seers who formulated our faiths? Lee enlightens me rigidly: “That is known since the ’80s. The origin of all religion may be E-terrestrial, since they’ve mastered time. When I describe to you an abduction as sequential/linear, I’m translating it to earthly time. But their visits these days are a reality check for our planet. They use people like me who are genetically open to them to communicate with us. They’re measuring our impulses to determine when it’s safe for them to appear to everyone. They come to instruct, like a parent who sees a child going astray.”  

Christ was also a consciousness that embodied our physicality in order to bridge, however unsuccessfully, the spiritual and material worlds, and to instruct us how to reconnect with each other at a time of crisis. These latest messengers of a greater intelligence may be the effect of the overwhelming presence of technology in our lives merged with our primal religious instinct. When religion was strong and science weak, we took magic for medicine; now we take science for magic.What we ‘see’ depends on the predominant belief structure of our culture. In an age when marvel has been supplanted by machines, when space tourism and human cloning are feasible, when the Genome project ridicules our spiritual singularity, the UFO represents our restored holy circle. As God has been subsumed by technology, a more powerful technology has to come in to qualify as divine. 

Lee says I ‘anthropomorphize’ too much--trying to fit the aliens into what we know. He says I’m just like the church fathers who condemned Galileo to save our governing laws. So I suggest we talk about the sex instead. “The alien body,” Lee replies pedantically, “is subtle--hermaphroditic or neuter. It feels like padded cartilage, pliable. Of course, we have no words for any of this. I could tell you I’ve fucked photoplasmic cavities and polymer vaginas, I could tell you I’ve fucked in shuttles, on Mars, floating about, levitating, and it’s all as accurate as it’s not. They take on host bodies. Our sex union is mystical, like alchemy. Sometimes we lock in embrace and rock. Sometimes we’re in the cockpit of a ship orbiting earth, lit by the blues of the control lights, and the alien has gray-blue skin and white pubes and we fuck against the controls and it’s so cold I see the steam coming out of my mouth. The most accurate version is when they put a faucet-like device on my dick connected to a box with electrodes and stimulate me into orgasm. Our bodies are not used to such contact--it’s sensory-vibrational overload. I feel like the first amphibians who crawled on shore. I come and come.” No buttocks, no tits, no food or alcohol, no wrists and elbows and knees and ankles, and he comes? Is this the proverbial mind fuck? “They’re conditioning me to survive a nuclear war. The first step is to fuck not with my male eyes but my willpower. When I had sex competitively, it held me captive to the culture. Women took up all my time and turned me into a jealous, paranoid maniac. Now I’m a free man. I can lie next to a naked girl and not be torn by desire or worry about my penis size. I react the same to every corporeal manifestation. I’m on the sexual frontier. And when I come, I have reason. As a donor, I put my seed in evolution.” We’re back to a familiar doctrine: the first step to eternal salvation is sexual self-control; true freedom begins with freedom from the flesh.  

Back in Lee’s sparsely furnished and TV-less adobe duplex, we find Jill arguing points of abductee scripture with her friend Paula. “I say aliens are drawn to menstruating women, like dogs,” Paula is saying. “And I think they know the meaning of rape. Instruments can deform the body. I don’t consider that sex. Until I see someone having sex with an alien down here, I’ll stick to men.” Jill is a petite 37-year-old blonde with a kind, modest face, earnest eyes and raw, outdoorsy beauty. Paula is 53, moon-faced and pudgy, in powder-blue slacks and shirt, a high-school history teacher.  

“It’s easier for people on the coasts where the support groups and the Budd Hopkins are,” Paula instantly complains to me. “But those are the people who go on the TV shows,” Jill interjects. “We face discrimination,” Paula persists. “Abductees can’t call 911 or an 800-hotline. People sympathize with rape victims, but if you say you were sexually assaulted by aliens they laugh. All we have is each other.” But don’t abductees feed on each other’s forebodings? Don’t other people’s stories spark more memories? “My head’s being messed with anyway,” Paula says. “They know everything about me. They stick a thing in my ear and show me pictures. I get panic attacks so bad I need someone to say it’s OK. That’s the group support. Just touching another abductee is calming” 

“I know the Beings mean no harm and that I should feel chosen,” Paula continues over tea, after Lee leaves. “But when I’m taken from my ranch to a lab to have tests conducted on my naked body by aliens, and they insert this gross thick liquid in my mouth and make me swallow, and tie my feet to stirrups and probe my vagina with a tube like I’m a specimen, I feel fear, anger, hatred. I just don’t like it. Would you?” I recognize my own fear of dentists and gynecologists: the terror of having a machine enter prone mortal flesh, orally or vaginally; but, despite stories of dentists infecting their patients with AIDS and surgeons amputating the wrong limbs, medicine has programmed us to trust its impersonal practitioners to invade our bodies for our own presumed good. “Aliens do that too,” Jill explains. “The terror stems not from the probes, but from the breakdown of our reality, if we acknowledge our experiences as real. Our minds can go so far, then our self-imposed censorship takes over--because we limit our senses to the physical world. Then we live in pick-up anxiety.” 

“Even after the details of my abductions surfaced during hypnosis,” Paula tells me, “I tried to block off the access, never talk about them, not read the literature, ignore it. I told my daughter, who is a nurse, that I was delusional and she should put me on brain pills. I wanted to be crazy, to get hospitalized, to get better. Then I caught my 3-year-old granddaughter playing with imaginary balls of light ‘the gray people’ had given her, and talking of white children in a ward up in heaven and of passing through walls. I saw there is no way out. My grandson is on Ritalin. He gets confusional and spaces out. Classic abductee. My father and grandfather used to disappear for hours and not know where they had been. One time Dad came back and didn’t need his reading glasses any more. The last time my grandpa vanished from his car, he never returned. Now my grandkids have relationships with the aliens; I can’t spank them and forbid them from talking to strangers, so I have it where I can keep an eye on it. Abduction is generational. My daughter is now writing tons of poems they’re dictating to her. She has no choice.” I suggest abduction may be a fantastic alternative to routine problematic relationships, a consuming romance at the intersection of science and pop culture; the alien is the abductee’s love object and creation in one, an x-rated Tinkerbell-cum-Muse. 

“And how do you explain the Missing Time?” Paula asks. “If you find yourself unable to account for your time, if you’re driving continuously and reach your destination 2 hours later than you should, if you don’t recall the last 90 miles, you’ve probably been abducted, sexually examined and inseminated.” What about sleeping at the wheel, highway fatigue, road mirage, absent-mindedness caused by stress or old age? “That doesn’t leave you pregnant! After my first time lapse, I had nausea, cramps, back pain, swollen breasts, no period. My doctor thought I was with child, but the test kept coming negative. I had a CAT scan, ultrasound, I thought it was cancer. Under hypnosis, I recalled being on a table and having my fallopian tube artificially inseminated with a painful syringe of sperm.” The alien has supplanted the trickster with the lantern who implanted the baby soul. 

“In my second trimester,” Paula continues excitably, “I was abducted again. They induced labor pains and sucked the halfling baby, while I was bleeding. It was the size of a fist and it had no weight. I didn’t want them to do this again, so I’ve had my tubes tied. Since then, they float me up periodically to watch me interact with the baby. I tell it stories, sing to it. I’ve nursed it.” The baby, I muse, is her changeling, her modern Minotaur; a virgin-birth hybrid that may one day be the Messiah of an alien Second Coming. “I’m afraid it’s more pedestrian than that,” Jill elucidates. “We all have our jobs up there. Because with knowledge comes responsibility. Paula is a Caregiver. Lee is a Teacher: he educates new abductees on nonlinear time structure and ego-surrender. I’m an Empath; they are training me to replace people’s fear with trust telepathically. Our basic lesson is uncondi-tional, unlimited, eternal love. The second lesson is to be prepared--for the breakdown of all life.”  

When she was 10, Jill went camping with her father; that night she felt him come into her sleeping bag and sexually penetrate her. She didn’t speak on the way home and, some years later, after undergoing incest memory retrieval, she stopped speaking to him altogether. Her family, a Southern clan of judges and philanthropists, resented her accusations and saw her as a black sheep. When she was 30, she immaculately conceived. Her test came back positive. She had an aversion to being sexually touched all her life and hadn’t been sexual since she ‘reclaimed the incest wounds.’ Baffled, she read on blighted ovums and pseudocyeses, and chanced upon Jacobs’s reports on ‘the missing fetus syndrome,’ a physical aftereffect of abductions. She recalled that, before her pregnancy, she had had erotic dreams that involved penetration. Three months later, she was not pregnant. Her doctor thought it had been ectopic, but she had no miscarriage, bleeding or discharge. She decided it was a question of interpretation. She underwent hypnosis. “I recalled the Beings telling me about universal motherhood,” she says. “We conversed telepathically. ESP is the purest form of communication; there’s no room for lies or manipulation.They apologized for putting me in my dysfunctional family: they had orchestrated my conception for a worthy reason. I felt held in the light.” 

Some psychiatrists believe that ET sexual memories, like ritual abuse memories, are common outcomes of childhood abuse. Abused children dissociate from their grim physical realities by creating an alternative fantasy world to inhabit, where they can feel special. As adults, they blame their uneasiness and anxiety about sex on alien or ritual abuse. Jill feels her case disproves this: under hypnosis, she remembered her first alien ‘insemination’ had happened on her camping trip with her father. “I was little and the needle hurt me badly, so I had blamed my earth Dad for not protecting her. I was relieved to learn I wasn’t molested by him. I felt grateful to them for opening my eyes. The pain was necessary to penetrate the density of my denial. It helped me undergo tremendous personal growth. I felt compelled to dedicate my life to helping others come to terms with this.”  

Until then, she had been terrified of sexual intimacy. During sex, she used to lie paralyzed, feeling used and powerless; she felt safe only when she said no to a man. “I realized sex brought back the fears I had when I was first abducted. That healed me. Now they can touch me on the forehead with their longest finger and I orgasm.” Jill claims to have incubated 42 hybrids. Sometimes she is taken to a maternity ward and picks out her offspring by smell. She’s mated with dazed male abductees (“We don’t speak; he enters me, does his thing and walks off”), and hybrids (“Sexual dysfunction is a problem for hybrids, so the doctors check if a hybrid can reach ejaculation, and retrieve it from me to test the sperm count”). I ask about her sex with Lee. She looks at me as if I come from another planet. “We have soulmate sex. We’ve learned it from the aliens. The [alien] penis is not physical but a light fluctuating contour of energy. It’s nothing like human sex. Nothing personal is at stake.” Europa was raped by a bull and spawned a continent, Semele was raped by golden rain and gave birth to Bacchus; our interspecies sexual abductions weren’t always so numinous or hygienic.  

Jill suggests we spend the night at the mesa where she had her most recent encounter. We pack sleeping bags and drive through a majestically stark, desolate landscape. She says she and Lee see ‘them’ every day. Some come from hundreds of million of miles away. Some are busy technicians; others are loving, vulnerable allies. She sees ‘them’ so easily she can channel them at will. “It’s reassuring to be with them; but if I have to focus on my consensus reality, I screen them out. If you really look, you’ll see one behind that bush over there watching us.” I only see tangled shadows.  

“Do you feel you belong to this world?” she asks. I have moments when I don’t recognize my surroundings, I admit. “Did you feel watched as a child?” I was  impressionable, I say; I ‘saw’ creatures hiding in shadows and sometimes made up stories about them. In this voguing world, we count if we are watched. “My intuition knows a contactee,” Jill exclaims. “You’ll know what it is when they come; if they haven’t come already. Try hypnosis.” But do you feel desire for them? I ask, deflecting the issue. “If I don’t have an interaction, I feel undernourished, neglected, unloved. I yearn for them. Lee loves me, but this is a big cosmic love. When I’m with them, I feel larger than I am, electric. My body bursts into a million pieces of light, free of the physics that limit us. The human body is such a poor piece of machinery compared to the soul. So I give them my body, and they give me their wisdom. We’re all extraterrestrial in a way: our psyches are not confined to earth.”   

I don’t believe it’s our body that fails us. I think of how the charisma of a repressed homosexual renamed Do, the passage of the Hale-Bopp comet, and the existential anomie of living ‘in no context,’ led the Heaven’s Gate cult in San Diego to deliver themselves of their problematic earthly ‘vehicles’ by committing mass suicide in 1997. Their Web site was marked with a doe-eyed glowing alien. Their message was obedience, brotherhood, and castration. I think of the Raelian cult whose 35,000 members believe that cloning is the key to eternity, the Bible was written by aliens, every miracle can be attributed to technology, and that our age of Revelation, entered in 1945 with the bombing of Hiroshima and man’s mastery of matter, will culminate in the coming of our alien creators by the year 2035 when we’re technologically ready. I wonder why even people who view the soul as DNA espouse the abductees’ vision of a hybridized ‘single-multiversal’ future which echoes the Christian promise of heaven. I can only reason that, as the unconfirmable joys of heaven convinced hundreds of generations to do without the joys of life, so our aliens reinforce our puritanism that puts duty above pleasure and mind over body and sex back in the brig of procreation.  

In his book, The Religion of Technology, historian David Noble has proposed that Western religion and technology have been feeding off one another for a millennium with the result that modern technology ‘remains suffused with religious belief.’ By religion, he refers to Christianity with its perfectionist work ethic and its belief in an eventual restoration to the original unsullied life of Eden. According to Noble, from the Middle Ages onward, technology became eschatology. The Church sanctioned man’s domination of the natural world and draped technology with an apocalyptic destiny that came down to us as the mythology of progress. Noble warns that, instead of serving our needs, ‘the technological pursuit of salvation has become a threat to our survival.’    

We’re still helpless before the physical world. We can’t control our bodies. Haunted by our desire for unalloyed mastery, worried about the future of our children, we look for new archetypes; we find them in ultra-advanced intelligences that inevitably confirm that we are not in control. We construct myths of abduction and powerlessness because we sense that we can never catch up with the technologized new world that’s ruled by lab-dwelling scientists we don’t understand. 

So Jill and I recline under an expanse of shimmering billion-times-billion stars and whisper like girls at a slumber party. I tell her science says everything alive traces its ancestry to a bacterial cell that combusted 3.5 billion years ago, whose genetic code we all share; our bond is in our bodies. What we really are is flesh that can dream. She tells me stories of flying in the moonlight over dunes and clinging to ‘them’ to keep from falling, and my eyes widen. Starry nights evoke our inconse-quence, our living in the proverbial colony of fleas in an elephant’s hide--who think everything has been ordained for their existence, until the elephant sneezes. I see a dozen mutely falling stars.  

The two of us lie in wait, hunters of an ingenious exotic prey, pretending to be falling asleep. Hours pass. I’m not roused by any white light. Suddenly Jill, I think in desperation, knowing I’m leaving the next day and wanting me to bear witness, goes into a trance. Her eyelids flutter, her eyes glimmer half-shut, her body shakes vehemently, insensible to my comforting touch. Her lips move with the economy of a ventriloquist’s, as her firm counselor’s voice shifts into the voice of a little girl (who I understand is Jill), an old man (a Doctor-Mentor who sounds as if he’s coming through a scrambler), and a general ‘we’, ethereal and playful (who must be the hybrids). The voices communicate vague directions for my future (‘trust in the universe, follow your heart’) accented with fairly accurate details from my past and also from past lives I can’t verify. Jill sobs, pants and empathizes, then sighs and smiles benignly, looking utterly cleansed and blissful. When she comes to, she says that my eyes sparkle ‘re-ensouled’, lucid and bright like the stars. I sleep like a baby, free of dreams.