News clippings

UFO; Americans look to the skies while skeptics prepare counterattack
Continued from PageD-1
" ?""8er," "The Wolfen") was the first out of
..y5,9 month with"Communion" (Morrow)
gruesome "true story" of how Strieber
®",T "Js family were repeatedly tonnented by creatures hecalls The Visitors includes such delectable interludes as
need es stuck into the brain ("What can we do." a female alien
inquires, *to help you stop screaming?"), a sort of anal rape
^ ® device, a thin probe shoved through thenostril to the temporal lobe and other manifestations of what
btrieber assumes is a form of interspecles research. With his
son haunted by night terrors and his marriage crumbling.
Strieber —hoping for mere madness —turned to neurology,
psychiatry and hypnosis. Still the horrors persisted, obliging
him finally to regard The Visitors as somehow real, even to
find a grudging empathy for their purposes.
He says he wasn't keen to write the book until he met
several similarly afflicted persons through Budd Hopkins (a
leading investigator of abduction claims and the author of
another saucer-season volume, detailed below) and saw the
human suffering." Publishers were equally reluctant: Of the
13 houses to which he submitted the manuscript, five "turned
it down with contempt and a number rejected it as a favor to
me —with the recommendation that I never ever publish it"
lest his reputation be ruined. But four houses felt otherwise,
and the bidding finaliy reached $1 million for hard-cover
soft-wver and other rights. It may have been a bargain-
Sunday Communion" hit the No. 7 spot on The New York
Times non-fiction best-seller list.
Strieber. who says he has continue to have visitations
since writing the story, Is not too surprised by the success '
Visitors told me they would help me
with the book. He's even founded a company to make a
creatures should be displeased?
Well, Strieber says, "if The Visitors are realand completely
separate (from our own minds), and. I,were to sell this to
somebody they didn't like. I'd be In more trouble than I can
toagme. After that: a book on how the experience affected
his wife and 8-year-old son.
It would be easy to dismiss Strieberas a guilt-sodden wacko
who concocted his nightmare avengers from obsessive apoca-
lyptic fears ( Warday" and '^Nature's End** concern nuclear
holocaust and environmental devastation, respectively) com
bined with remorse at his father's death. And by his own
account, he's a bit odd: "I remember being terrified as a little
j?, V ®u appearance of Mr. Peanut." But he preempts muchcntlwm by his obstinate skepticism. Even after psychoanaly*
sis. hypnotic therapy and a CAT scan found him sane and
healthy, Strieber does not, finally, insist that The Vlsitore
exist Independently of his family's experience of them, and his
book ends in a plea for further resean^.
It can't come too soon for the agonized subjects Budd •
Hopkins describes in "Intruders" (Random House. April)
Hopkins, a successful New York artist with works in the
Corcoran and Hirshhom museums here, has spent the past 12
years studying 132 persons who claim to.have been abducted
by aliens,employing psychiatrists,psychologists and lie-detec
tor experts to screen his subjects.
In "Intruders." he recounts the experiences — often re
vealed through hypnosis — of more than a dozen victims and
their relatives. Despite wide divergencein region,age, sex and
social class, the subjects share an alarming similarity: Mem
bers of the same family "seem to have been systematically
abducted, at varying times and locations" for anatomical
examination.
There are accounts of sperm and ova ripped from their
donors, tubes Inserted and withdrawn while victims He there
like laboratory meat, babies artificially blrthed and stolen.
The stories are so alike in pattern and detail, writes Hopkins,
55, that they reveal "a central purpose behind" the abduction
phenomenon" — namely, "a genetically focused study of
particular bloodlines." A hideous notion, "but I have the case
material and I'm stuck with it."
The book's credibility chiefly depends on the assumption
that so many people could not be lying in such eerily identical
ways when they have nothing to gain except public humilia
tion. (And pain. Listening to his subjects, Hopkins says, "I'd
match them tear for tear.") He purposely withheld from the
book certain of the victims' key recollections (such as the alien
writing they saw) as a benchmark for subsequent stories.
Without physical evidence, he concedes, "There's no smok
ing gun.But we're gonna find It one of thesedays." Andfacea
saucerload of angry aliens whose cover is blown? "The weird
thing is," says Hopkins, "I don't even think they care."TTiey
work covertly according to their own pattern."
He first got Interested In the subjectin 1964. He thought he
saw a, UFO on Cape Cod, and when he mention^ it later at a
..^arty, pMple began regaling him with their own sightings. "I
realized, 'i^opklns says, "that there was kind of an pnder-
- gfound of people who had kept It to themselves."
•III 1975 h^WriJtb up an account of a mass sightingHn New
Jersey for The Village Voice. The piece was 'reprinted in
Cosmopolitan and suddenly Hopkins was a name to be
reckoned with. He began collecting stories of peoplewho had
lost hours or days out of their lives to abductions. In 1981, it
became bis first book, "Missing Time." And there'll be
another after "Intruders," though he concedes (hat "you have
to ipso facto be crazy" to believe in his thesis. "But if this is
true, then It's the biggest story there is."
Gary Kinder agrees. His book, "Light Years" (Atlantic
Monthly Press, April), re-examines the notorious case of
Eduard Meier, a Swiss laborer who in the late '70s convinced
thousands that he was in constant contact with an amiable
outfit from the Pleiades.
Meier amassed hundreds of photographs of the aliens'
saucers, thousands of pages of notes on their science and moral
lore (ostensibly conveyed to him by Semjase, a comely
Pleiadean about 330 years old), and yards of film of UFO
maneuvers. For months, fans, reporters and film crews flocked
•to bear the one-armed, self-educated Meiersermonize; no one,
however, actually saw his mentors. Then, in 1980, it all came
apart. Several UFOlogists, after more or less research,
declared bis photos bogus, bis story a fraud.
The case is "unadulterated hogwash," says Walt Andrus
from MUFON's Seguin, Tex., headquarters. "An absolute'
hoax," says Sherman J. Larsen, director of the Center for UFO
Studies In Glenview, 111. Andrusand several other UFOlogists
were so worried that a resurrection of the case would open
their pursuit to ridicule that —without reading the book —
they implored the publisher to dump it.
"I'm catching so much hell," says Kinder, 40, an Idaho '
lawyer-tumed-writer who cameacross the subject whileon the"
promo trail for his last book, "Victim," the 1983 account of a "
Utah murder. The original investigators in the Meiercase (who
hold the copyright to much of the film, tape recordings and -
other primary materials) were looking for someone to write a,-
book on the subject. After seeing the films and photos In the '
fall of 1983, Kinder was hooked.
Threeyears, a modest advanceand $30,000 In expenses later,"
he has turned up a number of name-brandscientists, technicalv.
experts and eyewitnesses who stipulate that Meier's films,...
metal samples and recorded saucer sounds —whatever they ••
a^e — are no simple hoax. (Research chemist Marcel Vogel, a •
27-year veteran of IBM and holder of numerous patents,
examined a metal specimen Meier allegedly got from the.-.;
aliens. Though he wouldn't say,it was extraterrestrial, he -
confirmedthat "with any technology that I know of, we could
not achieve this on this planet.") By the end of the narrative, -,
the colorful case becomes plausible,if not convincing. Though •.?
"the truth of the Meiercontacts will never be known," Kinder •*
says. "I thought the field fascinating. There really is some-
thing flying around out there. I'm convinced of that."
It's still a minority opinion in the science establishment.
Astronomer-exobiologist Carl Sagan, who regards the seareh•'
for intelligentlife In the universeas "exceedingly imiwrtant." ••
thinks the odds against its landing here are. well, astronomi- "
cal: Even assuming that our galaxy contains 1 million :'
advanced civilizations, each one would have to send 10,000
missions a year just to find us among the billions of possible
venues." . "
Philip Klayof Waahiytnn »nr.»rih..Hr,p nf •
Aviation Week 5t Space Technology, dean of UFO debunkers .
0' new books: "Since themid-60s. the UFO movement has grown so desperate to
BMtain momentum that they have embraced such tales of
abduction.
If such events actually happened, Klass wonders. "Why has "
not n single one of them ever reported the abduction to the
FBI? Moreover, "WeAmericanslove to collectsouvenirs Biit ••
not a single one of these 100 or 200 alleged abductees has "
broughtback a physical souvenir" or even the explanation of "
a new scientific fact. "There's not a single piece of physical
evidence." •'
Strieber Is worried that the new books will bring all sorts'
of nuts and kooks out of the woodwork — thus distracting J
attention from the few intriguinglyunexplained caseshe calls ,
'true UFOs" or "TRUFOs." Thegeneralpublic,he says, "isn't
going to know what to make of it. since there are so many-
hoaxes."
The most recent Gallup Poll on the subject was taken in '
1978. At that time, 57 percent said they believed UFOs were "
rea\ and 9 percent said they had personally seen something •••
they thought was a UFO. Last June, the National Science
Foundation released the results of a nationwide survey that '
found that 43 percent of adults surveyed agreed that "it Is *
likely that some of the unidentified flying objects that have ••
been reported are reaUy space vehicles from other dviliza- .
tions." Hie NSF saw dismaying evidence of scientific illitera- "
cy: book publishers may see a market.