UFO Publicity

As part of the publicity plan for my new book, The Close Encounters Man, I'm writing a series of UFO-related articles that we'll be placing in various publications and websites. They're fun to write, in part because I get to touch on some things that I didn't have space for in the book, and in part because--as you'll see--I can be a little less serious than I am in the book.

Here's a sneak peek at the first of the "op-ed" articles:

Ten Ways to Tell if You’ve Been Abducted by Aliens

If you go by sensational stories on UFO websites and claims on UFO-themed cable TV shows, more people than ever before are claiming to have been abducted by aliens and taken aboard UFOs. The abductions are taking place around the world, and involve people of all ages and all walks of life.

And those are just the people who have reported such experiences. The late UFO researcher Dr. J. Allen Hynek estimated that for each UFO experience that is reported there could be as many as ten more that go unreported. Why the imbalance? Because many people who have had UFO experiences—especially extreme experienced such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind involving possible interaction with intelligent beings—are terrified to tell their stories. Some are afraid of being ridiculed by family, friends, co-workers, and the media, of course, but others live in genuine fear of reprisal by their abductors.

Famed UFO abductee Charles Hickson

Then there are those who are convinced for various reasons—chief among them an inexplicable incident of “missing time”—that they’ve had an abduction experience, but have no conscious memories of the event.

Are you one of these amnesiac abductees?

Exotic tales of alien abduction have been in circulation since the early 1960s, when New Hampshire couple Barney and Betty Hill claimed to have been taken aboard a glowing craft and examined by strange men from a distant star system. The Hills were, in fact, the first UFO witnesses to experience “missing time;” they were allegedly abducted along a highway while driving home from their honeymoon, and didn’t realize at first that they had returned home from their trip two hours later that they should have arrived.

Abduction cases took on an added element of menace in the 1980s after the publication of best-selling books like Whitley Strieber’s Communion and Budd Hopkins’s Missing Time and Intruders, all of which presented haunting first-hand accounts of abductions by alien beings. But, where the Hills’ alleged abduction took place on a deserted mountain highway, the stories told by Strieber and Hopkins, and soon studied by Harvard psychiatry professor John Mack, often involved terrifying home invasions by entities who stole children, adults, and sometimes whole families from their beds as they slept.

And the strange stories continue, like an endless succession of X-Files episodes that keep creeping into our consciousness and forcing us to reexamine what is real. In my experience as a writer and investigator of all things UFO-related, I have consistently come across tell-tale indicators of potential interaction with alien entities. Based on my own research, and on the evidence in some classic alien abduction cases, I have assembled a list of ten prominent traits present in alien abduction narratives. If any of these apply to you or someone you know, you might have been one of those unique souls to have been abducted by aliens.

1.     1) You have had more than one UFO sighting in your life

A great many UFO witnesses have had more than one such experience in their lives, and my five years of investigating UFO reports leads me to believe that those who have had multiple UFO sightings are at greater risk of being abducted. But, how do we account for this? Is it a case of the witness always watching the skies and waiting for them to come back, or of the aliens keeping watch on the “subject”?

2.     2) One or both of your parents have had abduction experiences

Alien abduction researcher and author David M. Jacobs has researched over 1,000 abduction incidents, by his count, and has found the phenomenon to be intergenerational. “The children of abductees often themselves report being abductees, as do their children,” Jacobs wrote in his 2015 book Walking Among Us. What’s more, Jacobs finds, there are typically at least one grandparent and at least one great-grandparent in the same families with the same abduction histories. This familial aspect of the phenomenon involves speculation that aliens regularly mate with us earthlings and give birth to hybrids, who live among us as regular humans.

That's two. The other eight will be revealed in time...