A Journey to the Dark Side

The closing event at the recent MUFON conference in Denver was a speakers’ panel.  I was standing in line when the young man ahead of me stepped up to the microphone.  After expressing appreciation for the speakers’ contributions, he proceeded to ask a most provocative question.  “I take issue with the term visitors”, he said.  “Visitors knock on the front door and you let them in.”  The so-called visitors and humankind, he went on to say, are in direct competition.  The implication was clear — when two species compete for the same resources, only one wins. 

           

A silence fell over the meeting hall.  It was as if the ghost of J. Allen Hynek had walked across the stage.

The young man’s question slithered through a dark recess of my mind as I flew back across the Rockies and the vast emptiness of the Great Basin.  Why are the visitors here?  What do they want?  Does their presence offer us an opportunity?   Or do we stand in their way?   

The narratives of alien abduction paint a discomforting picture.  Unwilling ‘victims’ taken from misty fields, stalled cars or dark bedrooms in the dead of night . . . awakening on surgical tables surrounded by gray, unfeeling doctors.  This is not the behavior of enlightened, benevolent space brothers.  And there are darker intimations too.  Stories of cows or horses being drawn up in beams of light then dropped in secluded areas with their eyes, udders and reproductive organs surgically removed.  Their bodies drained of blood.  Scavenging animals, it is said, won’t go near the carcasses, as if they are contaminated or cursed.   

(Photo by Mugley, Alien Inferno)

 

Fortunately, serious human injuries and deaths in relation to contact with UFOs are rare.  Two well-known exceptions are the Cash-Landrum incident and the chupas of Parnarama, Brazil.  Betty Cash and Vickie and Colby Landrum were driving through the wooded Texas countryside at night when they came upon a diamond-shaped UFO hovering at treetop level.  The object was expelling flame below it like rocket exhaust.  Later, all three experienced nausea, diarrhea and vomiting.  Betty Cash, who had spent the most time outside the car, was hospitalized with burns and other symptoms of what appeared to be ionizing radiation.  She never fully recovered her health.  

 

Jacques Vallee recounts the story of Parnarama, in his book, Confrontations. In this remote region of Brazil, flying boxlike UFOs shot local hunters with painful beams of light.  Reportedly, at least five people died from their injuries.  A similar case on Colares Island near Belem in 1977 was extensively documented by the Brazilian Air Force.  

 

The Cash-Landrum incident may well have been due to experimental military aircraft, since the UFO was later seen in the company of Chinook helicopters.  However, in the Parnarama and Colares Island cases there are no similar indications.  Close contact with UFOs in other cases have led to radiation burns.  Therefore, if a UFO lands in your backyard, I suggest that you grab your camera — but use the telephoto setting.  Close interaction with alien craft can be hazardous to your health.

 

When asked about the prospect of an interplanetary war, some ufologists offer the staid reassurance that after at least sixty plus years of contact Independence Day has not come to pass.  Ufonauts haven’t turned off the planet’s electrical grid or blasted the White House into confetti.  If the visitors intend to do us harm, their methods and aims are more subtle than a full frontal attack.  

 

Unlike the Texas case, in which Betty Cash and her friends found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, the chupas of Parnarama and the island of Colares stand out in the UFO literature as rare examples of unprovoked, intentional harm to humans.  In abduction accounts, the visitors conduct their business with clinical detachment.  Indeed, they seem puzzled by if not a bit envious of human emotion.  If we can find the semblance of morality in their wan reassurances spoken telepathically, we must also note that calming their terrified subjects is certainly self-serving.  Yet, such palliatives suggest an at least rudimentary grasp of human psychology, which is not surprising given that fear is the most universal of emotions, wired to the instinct of self-preservation.

 

The young man is right — the visitors do not knock on the front door.  They magically appear at the foot of the bed.  They approach as we are walking or driving down a lonely road.  Or even in a well-populated suburb.   Close encounters of the Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs kind tell us that the visitors want something, and they are willing to take it without asking.  If we are to find a ray of hope in this parasitic gloom, it is that visitors need us.  They need our sperm and our ova.  They need our DNA, presumably because theirs is defective.  Perhaps they even need our souls. 

 

The lingering question then becomes — what happens when they don't need us anymore?