Dr Helmut Lammer and Marion Lammer
Lilburn, GA (USA); IllumiNet Press, 1999, $14.95 (www.illuminetpress.com)
The alien abduction phenomenon is the most interesting and baffling thing on the contemporary alternative agenda. I have no idea what is going on; I have no idea if the hundreds (thousands?) of people who now report being abducted are having a real experience of not; nor even, if I give it more than a moment’s reflection, what ‘real’ means in the preceding sentence. In Confirmation, the sequel to his Communion, the account of his own encounter with aliens, Whitley Streiber reported that after Communion’s publication he received over a quarter of a million letters, 30,000 of which described something like alien abduction.(1) A quarter of a million letters about anything is an astonishing thing.(2)
At the same time, from the reports of abuctions, there appears to be not one piece of reliable, objective evidence: not one indisputable fragment of a souvenir has been returned to earth clutched in the sweaty palm of an abductee from all those ‘journeys’. For the sceptics – and the Skeptics – there is no intellectual problem: ‘abductees’ are people having fantasies or delusions of one kind or another. But if so, why are so many people having similar fantasies?
The Lammers focus on accounts of abduction in which ‘abductees’ describe meeting normal (American) military personnel, and sometimes ‘aliens’ working with normal military personnel. Having made this selection of the ‘data’ they offer as hypotheses the following.
It seem to us that there are indications that more than one human agenda, possibly three, may be involved in the currently unexplained alien abduction phenomenon……..one group may be interested in advanced mind-and-behaviour-control experiments….. …..a second group seems to be interested in biological or genetic research….a third group seems to be a military task force, which has been operating since the 1980s…. (emphases added).
‘Indications…may be…. may be…. seems …seems’ – this is tentative in the extreme.
The Lammers selected ‘abductees’ who had ‘seen’ soldiers or human scientists. These ‘abductees’ are presumed to be reporting accurately on their ‘real’ experiences. But on what grounds do we determine that other ‘abductees’, who do not report seeing soldiers or scientists, are not reporting accurately? In other words, why believe this sub-set of the data? The Lammers solve this problem by simply ignoring it.
Their book opens with a quotation from the faintly mysterious and spooky Dr. C. B. Scott Jones. In 1994 Scott Jones had meetings with Dr. John Gibbons, the scientific advisor to President Clinton, at which various bits of evidence about UFOs were presented to Gibbons.(3) On 17 February 1994 Scott Jones wrote to Gibbons,
…I urge you to take another look in the “UFO Matrix of Belief” that I provided you last year. My mention of mind-control technology at the February 4 meeting was quite deliberate. Please be careful about this. There are reasons to believe that some government group has interwoven research about this technology with alleged UFO phenomena. If that is correct, you can expect to run into early resistance when inquiring about UFOs, not because of the UFO subject, but because that has been used to cloak research and applications of mind-control activity (emphasis added).
Given Scott Jones’ status and his years of access to high level military, intelligence and political circles in the US, this is extremely interesting. But if he knows anything substantial about these mind control experiments, to my knowledge he has chosen not reveal it. He may simply have read the Martin Cannon piece, like the rest of us!(4)
The Lammers are working in the incredibly difficult area where allegations of ritual child abuse, mind control and abductions overlap. All three areas have one thing in common: it is virtually impossible to work out what is going on and whom to believe. Every time I read material in this area I have the feeling that an hypothesis is about to emerge which will make the pieces slot into place. I had the feeling again reading the Lammers’ book; but, alas, once again the puzzle remains unsolved.
Notes
- Don’t write and tell me the figures are wrong. It is a while since I read the book and maybe it was 300,000 and 25,000.
- Confirmation is his account of the search for confirmation that the aductions are real. He does not produce much.
- These events are described in Armen Victorian’s essay in Lobster 33.
- See Lobster 23.