The Extraterrestrials of Indian Stream

Page 3

by Ellen Barry

Sandy Black rolled in here from Herndon, Virginia, five years ago. She thought at the time that her new home "would be something like that TV show, Northern Exposure." But as she and her husband made their way farther north, the landscape just got emptier. The road signs read FROST HEAVES and then FALLING ROCK and then MOOSE COLLISION. It wasn't much like anything she had seen on TV. "I kept thinking we'd driven off the end of the earth," she remembers.

In a way, she had. Certain influences just don't penetrate into the North Country, or if they do, they penetrate at a very slow pace. This 256,000-acre strip of land is actually classified as a different meteorological zone from the more temperate areas to the north, south, east, and west of it, Hulse says. There are towns here with no retail at all. "Down below" means "south of Portsmouth." Ask locals for phone numbers, and many of them will give you four digits.

Over time, the area's isolationist credo has rubbed off on Sandy Black. Once active as a union lobbyist on Capitol Hill, she has stopped following politics altogether, because she considers most of what is released to the public "a diversion." A lifelong Democrat, she has begun to see the appeal of Pat Buchanan. Everything below the Notches has begun to seem more distant.

"I lost interest in what's going on in the world. It's not concentrating on what's important," she says. What's important, in her view, is the way we are "destroying the planet" with chemical poisons and toxic sludge and volcanoes spewing carbon into the air, she says. She sees disaster in the future.

Black did bring one thing with her: ideas. She had seen UFOs before, when she lived in Arizona, but in her 30s she became deeply involved "as part of a personal-growth thing," and offered her services to MUFON, the world's largest UFO-investigation network. An avid fan of Harvard psychologist and abduction theorist John Mack, she is part of the New Age wing of UFO theory.

This line of thinking goes far beyond flying saucers; it is suffused with environmentalism, politics, and spiritualism. According to Mack, encounters with aliens are mystical and subjective, and they may have the potential to change your life for the better. Essential to the theory is a deep concern for the environment. Mack suggests that the aliens are warning us to stop ravaging our planet, like "butterflies coming back to stop the caterpillars from denuding the bushes." When they return from their abduction experience, abductees -- or "experiencers," as Mack prefers to call them -- are transformed people.

In stark contrast to the nuts-and-bolts recordkeeping of 1950s ufology, this new school of thought has dispensed with the task of physical proof, convinced that encounters and abductions are happening in a "fifth dimension."

In his academic-sounding 1994 alien-abduction manifesto, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, Mack writes that "experience, the reporting of the experience, and the receiving of that experience through the psyche of the investigator are, in the absence of physical verification sufficiently robust to satisfy scientific requirements of proof (there is physical evidence but not proof), the only ways that we can know about abductions." Crucial to the abduction theory are phenomena "for which we can conceive of no explanation within a Newtonian/Cartesian or even Einsteinian space/time ontology."

In other words, physical science is no longer a useful tool for dealing with abduction stories. You just have to believe. To Black, scientific method is not simply beside the point; it is an obstacle.

"Scientists work in the three-dimensional world. That's all they can relate to. They want to hear about metal -- knock knock knock on the side of the craft," she says over waffles at a diner. "I have no interest in knowing how these things fly, propulsion systems and so on," she says. "It might be how women look at things, as opposed to men."

A form of this philosophy has rubbed off on locals. Their explanations veer from the extremely mystical to the extremely literal. "I think they're looking for a place to move to," says Cheries, who has seen a "Star Wars-type thing" the size of a 10-story building hovering over her own house.

"It's something about the 45th parallel. There's a fifth dimension," explains Gifford, whose wife, Beverly, reported a UFO to Black. "Also, it's sparsely populated up here, so there's more room."

Black, meanwhile, looks with some pity on scientifically minded people who are "stuck in their little three-dimensional box." She considers acceptance of the physically impossible to be a sign of forward thinking -- a survival skill for the next millennium.

Here's an example: Black recently took a report from a lady who said a two-and-a-half-foot sphere of light had come floating in her window in the middle of the night. The ball of light stopped, and four or five aliens emerged.

How tall? I ask. Black holds her hand four feet off the ground.

How could five four-foot aliens fit in a two-and-a-half-foot sphere? I ask.

"See?" she says. "You're dealing with old physics."

Page 4

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