The Extraterrestrials of Indian Stream

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by Ellen Barry

To the hard-science wing of ufology, which still puts a great deal of stock in "old physics," Sandy Black's theories are -- to say the least -- frustrating. They are also spreading very quickly.

"I'm always disappointed in what people will believe," says Dr. Mark Rodeghier, scientific director of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, or CUFOS, in Chicago. "The standard of proof is pretty low. Most of these people are not trained in science. I've seen this time and time again."

The abduction story has made UFOs sexy again; cinema, television, and the popular press are saturated with images of inky-eyed Small Grays toddling into our homes. But far as Rodeghier is concerned, the field is in danger of getting mired in magical thinking.

"What has happened is, while there has been more interest, there has been less scientific interest," Rodeghier says. "The abduction phenomenon has had a negative impact on attracting serious people to the field."

The change began right outside Colebrook about 30 years ago, when Betty and Barney Hill electrified the UFO community with that first report of alien abduction. The Hills' account went this way: they were driving south on Route 3 when they saw a low-flying spacecraft, stopped the car, and immediately slipped out of consciousness. The next thing they knew, they were driving down Route 93, and had somehow "lost" two hours. Under hypnosis, the Hills said they had been paralyzed and taken on board the spacecraft, where they had undergone some kind of physical examination.

The conventional wisdom within the community now holds that aliens are abducting humans in order to crossbreed with them. Abduction stories have been cropping up more and more often in popular culture, and an oft-cited Roper Poll taken in 1991 concluded that more than half a million Americans had had supernatural episodes consistent with the abduction experience.

Once the abduction stories started, they changed the field of ufology forever. A rift opened up between the conservative, "nuts-and-bolts" ufologists -- who consider that the vast majority of sightings reports are bogus -- and the psychosocial abduction theorists like Mack or Budd Hopkins, who believe the interbreeding stories on the strength of witnesses' emotional authenticity.

And even for hardheaded ufologists who distance themselves from the abduction phenomenon, the ante has gone up. When people across the country can describe having sex with aliens, even experts admit that mere sightings are pretty humdrum stuff. People don't want to hear about how the aliens arrived when they can find out how they brought captive women to orgasm. As for strange lights -- well, forget about it.

"Nocturnal lights are blasé," says Ray Fowler, MUFON's national director of investigations, who is presently at work investigating a four-person abduction incident that took place on the Allagash River in northern Maine. "I'm very reluctant to even look into nocturnal lights. I get more excited about CE3s [close encounters of the third kind, or coming within 500 feet of an entity]. That type of experience is far more appealing to me now. People want something they can sink their teeth into."

And as the subjective approach comes to dominate the field, even investigators are involved on a fiercely personal level; it's not as simple as seeing lights in the sky. Where abduction is concerned, skepticism can be an insult.

"To me, if you're skeptical, that's just ignorance," Black says. "But if you're saying something to make [abduction theorist] Budd Hopkins look bad, then you're siding with the devil."

Both Black and Fowler hint at abduction experiences of their own. As representatives of the Mutual UFO Network, though, they don't talk about them to the press. They're not supposed to talk about what else they believe, either. It's right there in the Investigator's Manual, under the heading WORKING WITH THE MEDIA: "An impression of inextricable ties between UFO research and other esoteric pursuits serves to confuse the audience and erode the UFO researcher's credibility."

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Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry[a]phx.com.