Yesterday, I met with another experiencer over lunch and a couple of beers. It’s always reassuring to talk with someone who has had similar experiences, because sooner or later one of us says, “Wait… that happened to me, too.” There’s something oddly grounding about that. You spend years wondering whether a particular experience was just some bizarre one-off, and then someone casually describes something nearly identical. Suddenly the thought becomes: Okay, so this weird thing I’ve never heard anyone talk about happened to someone else too. Maybe I’m not the only one collecting strange stories nobody asked for.
He told me about something that happened to him when he was a boy in 1977. His part of the story sounded almost comically ordinary: he stayed in his bedroom playing with Legos for three hours “Three hours,” he said, still sounding exasperated decades later. “What boy stays in his room playing with Legos for three hours?”
Fair point.
The strange part, though, wasn’t what was happening inside his bedroom. It was what was happening outside. While he remained in his room, his parents were outdoors on a clear, sunny day with hardly a cloud in the sky. They looked up and saw what they described as a seamless silver disk hovering directly above them.
In the report he later submitted to NUFORC, he describes the object this way:
“A silver disk came over the water and stopped overhead about 100-150′ up. The craft had no seams, rivets, edges, lights or windows. The craft was spinning about its vertical axis. There was no noise. It stopped for a period of time and then left.”
The object was reportedly about thirty feet across. His parents remembered seeing it for only a few minutes. He remembered spending roughly three hours in his room. That discrepancy bothered.
His parents seemed to have experienced missing time, something frequently reported in abduction accounts. What they remembered as only a few minutes may have represented a much longer period. Meanwhile, their son stayed safely tucked away in his bedroom, apparently very interested in Legos. Except he remembers something else.
He felt an unusually strong urge not to go outside. Just stay in the room. Keep playing. Don’t leave. As someone who has had experiences, that immediately got my attention. One of the strangest aspects of these encounters is what I can only describe as mental influence: thoughts or impulses that feel completely reasonable at the time, even though they make absolutely no sense afterward.
My friend Terry, another experiencer, and I have discussed this many times. He described it as having thoughts that were “inappropriate” to the situation. I’ve experienced exactly that, too. Imagine waking in the middle of the night and seeing the underside of a spacecraft outside your window. What would be the appropriate reaction? Screaming would be reasonable. Running would be reasonable. But thinking, “Hmm, I should go back to sleep”? Probably not. Yet that is exactly the kind of thought I experienced: I should just go back to sleep. And somehow, at the time, it feels perfectly sensible.
The boy from the 1977 encounter never forgot those three hours. He knew something about that day didn’t make sense. Why had he stayed in his room for so long when, like most young boys, his attention normally bounced from one thing to another? The question lingered in the back of his mind. Then one night, he suddenly woke up with a thought blazing through his mind like a giant neon sign, “There was someone else in the room!”
For him, it was a eureka moment. He became convinced that someone had been in the bedroom with him, watching him and making sure he did not leave while something else was happening outside. And I’ve had an experience that felt disturbingly similar. The difference is that, in my case, I remember seeing the being. I believed it was there to make sure I stayed where I was while my wife and child were taken. But that is another story I’ll write about in my book.
What fascinates me about all this is the power of suggestion. People have less control over their thoughts and behavior than most of us would like to believe. I learned this years ago while reading books on hypnosis and psychology. Under certain experimental conditions, hypnosis has been used to influence people into performing actions they would normally reject… like assassination.
And this isn’t science-fiction. There are declassified CIA documents describing exactly this:
CIA document and page number: 190691, pp. 1, 2
Title: Hypnotic Experimentation and Research
Date: 10 February 1954A posthypnotic of the night before (pointed finger, you will sleep) was enacted. Misses [deleted] and [deleted] immediately progressed to a deep hypnotic state with no further suggestion. Mis [deleted] was then instructed (having previously expressed a fear of firearms in any fashion) that she would use every method at her disposal to awaken mis [sic] [deleted] (now in a deep hypnotic sleep), and failing this, she would pick up a pistol nearby and fire it at Miss [deleted]. She was instructed that her rage would be so great that she would not hesitate to “kill” [deleted] for failing to awaken.
Miss [deleted] carried out these suggestions to the letter including firing the (unloaded pneumatic pistol) gun at [deleted] and then proceeding to fall into a deep sleep. After proper suggestions were made, both were awakened and expressed complete amnesia for the entire sequence. Miss [deleted] was again handed the gun, which she refused (in an awakened state) to pick up or accept from the operator. She expressed absolute denial that the foregoing sequence had happened.”
Afterward, both women were awakened from their trance. The report says they expressed complete amnesia for what had happened. Even more interesting, when the woman who had fired the pistol was later handed the gun while fully awake, she refused to take it and denied that the previous sequence had occurred. That is the part I find unsettling.
If human beings, using relatively crude techniques developed decades ago, could influence someone to behave in ways completely outside her normal character, what could an intelligence millions of years ahead of us potentially do?
That possibility frightens me far more than flying saucers. Because if some nonhuman intelligence eventually reveals itself openly and begins interacting with humanity, the question won’t simply be whether they are friendly. The deeper question will be whether we are truly capable of saying “no”.
If another intelligence can influence our emotions, perceptions, decisions, or even our sense of what we want, then the relationship would never be between equals. They wouldn’t necessarily need armies. They wouldn’t need prisons. They might not even need threats. If they could control us mentally, they could simply make us accept whatever place they chose for us. They might even make us happy about it. And that is not the future I want for my children.
