WEBVTT - Long Road to Hacklebury 0:00:02.120 --> 0:00:05.640 Strange Arrivals is a production of iHeart Radio and Room 0:00:05.680 --> 0:00:09.920 and Mild from Aaron Mackey. For the best experience, listen 0:00:10.000 --> 0:00:20.120 with headphones. This is an outreach program from the Cosmos 0:00:20.280 --> 0:00:23.919 to the consciously impaired. There seems to be some effort 0:00:23.960 --> 0:00:28.000 to get through to us. Difficult. God is dead, you know, 0:00:28.160 --> 0:00:30.440 Mitchy said, so blah blah blah. So it's not easy 0:00:30.480 --> 0:00:33.280 to get through. But it does seem as if there 0:00:33.360 --> 0:00:38.199 is a creative intelligence at work here trying to create 0:00:38.320 --> 0:00:41.840 some kind of a connection reach us in some way. 0:00:46.280 --> 0:01:00.200 I'm Toby Ball and this is Strange Arrivals episode for 0:01:01.120 --> 0:01:11.240 Long Road to Hackelberg. I have to really clarify things 0:01:11.240 --> 0:01:14.880 that there are different kinds of experiencers, and I'm the 0:01:15.880 --> 0:01:21.919 ancestral experiencer, So experiences were in my family. My father 0:01:22.080 --> 0:01:25.320 was an abdictee experiencer. He might have even been a 0:01:25.400 --> 0:01:28.200 my lab because he had some pretty serious programming. He's 0:01:28.240 --> 0:01:32.679 still alive. My name is Elizabeth Anglin. I was an 0:01:32.720 --> 0:01:36.399 experiencer that worked with John Mack really from the beginning 0:01:36.959 --> 0:01:42.280 of his research into alien abduction starting in nineteen ninety 0:01:42.760 --> 0:01:46.319 did work in science for a while at MT and 0:01:46.840 --> 0:01:49.240 you know, just to dispel the miss at experience whos 0:01:49.240 --> 0:01:52.240 don't know anything about science, thank you very much. I'm 0:01:52.360 --> 0:01:56.560 used to work in physics as the secretary for Phobos, 0:01:56.640 --> 0:02:00.360 which was looking for the Higgs boson and nuclear engineering, 0:02:00.560 --> 0:02:02.280 but now I like to do art and I live 0:02:02.280 --> 0:02:07.520 in an anarchist community called Madrid in New Mexico and 0:02:08.240 --> 0:02:13.440 kind of spend my time being a freelance neo hippie musician. 0:02:13.800 --> 0:02:18.960 Intuitive so I guess that's me. Among people who believe 0:02:19.080 --> 0:02:23.160 they have had alien abduction experiences, there is a subset 0:02:23.200 --> 0:02:26.720 that sees themselves as the most recent in several generations 0:02:26.760 --> 0:02:30.800 of family members who have been abducted. Elizabeth believes that 0:02:30.840 --> 0:02:34.720 both her father and her grandfather were also abductees, or, 0:02:34.760 --> 0:02:42.720 in the preferred terminology, experiencers. My grandfather was also an experiencer. 0:02:43.240 --> 0:02:49.440 He was a farmer in northwest Alabama, and after one experience, 0:02:49.440 --> 0:02:52.040 he just refused to take the back road from Hamilton, 0:02:52.120 --> 0:02:57.560 Alabama to Hackelberg, Alabama. Elizabeth never actually met her grandfather, 0:02:57.800 --> 0:03:02.160 who died the year before she was born. My understanding 0:03:02.360 --> 0:03:08.400 from my father was that his father had seen a 0:03:08.520 --> 0:03:13.280 full out symbol shaped ship in the road in between 0:03:13.320 --> 0:03:17.520 Hamilton and Hackelberg, Alabama, and he was so traumatized and 0:03:17.720 --> 0:03:19.560 had missed some time. I don't know if it was 0:03:19.560 --> 0:03:23.280 three or five hours or something like that. Her grandfather 0:03:23.360 --> 0:03:26.240 had to make occasional trips to Hackleburg to get farm 0:03:26.280 --> 0:03:29.920 equipment that wasn't available in Hamilton, the closest town to 0:03:30.000 --> 0:03:33.119 his farm. He would take a back road, which made 0:03:33.120 --> 0:03:38.600 it a much faster trip, and he decided never to 0:03:38.720 --> 0:03:41.440 do that again, like he would go way way around. 0:03:41.480 --> 0:03:43.520 It'd take him an extra hour hour and a half 0:03:43.880 --> 0:03:46.680 to get to Hackleberg after that, because it was such 0:03:46.760 --> 0:03:51.200 a terrifying thing for him. And I think, to me, 0:03:51.320 --> 0:03:55.240 what that speaks of is that experiencers, by and large, 0:03:55.400 --> 0:03:58.880 we have these moments where we realize it's happening. It 0:03:59.000 --> 0:04:02.880 all cognitively gels like, oh my god, this is really happening. 0:04:04.000 --> 0:04:07.240 Elizabeth's father was the second generation of her family to 0:04:07.280 --> 0:04:11.200 have experiences. I know that my dad's were very similar 0:04:11.240 --> 0:04:13.480 to my own. They started really young. He used to 0:04:13.520 --> 0:04:15.680 get in trouble when he was a kid. His first 0:04:16.000 --> 0:04:20.200 remembered experience was at three when he went missing. And 0:04:20.600 --> 0:04:23.960 back in the day, you know, sparing the rod spoil 0:04:24.040 --> 0:04:25.680 the child was a thing, so if you were a 0:04:25.760 --> 0:04:27.880 kid who went missing, you got a lot of whippings. 0:04:28.600 --> 0:04:33.680 So he remembers going missing for hours, and as far 0:04:33.720 --> 0:04:36.400 as he knew, he went out by the laundry line, 0:04:36.760 --> 0:04:38.719 as you know, a three and a half year old. 0:04:39.000 --> 0:04:42.240 And then the next thing he remembers is everybody's upset 0:04:42.240 --> 0:04:44.640 with him and he doesn't know why, and he's getting 0:04:44.640 --> 0:04:48.880 a whopping. Her father's experiences meant that he understood what 0:04:48.960 --> 0:04:51.760 Elizabeth was going through and he did his best to 0:04:51.839 --> 0:04:56.000 provide support for her. He was much kinder to me 0:04:56.400 --> 0:04:58.600 and Anna's to protect me from that as much as 0:04:58.600 --> 0:05:01.480 he could. But he knew was going on when things 0:05:01.480 --> 0:05:04.400 were happening with me, and when I had my first 0:05:04.560 --> 0:05:09.600 remembered experience at three, it was a shared experience with him. 0:05:09.720 --> 0:05:13.799 He was in California studying for his masters in botany 0:05:13.920 --> 0:05:18.279 at the University of California, Berkeley. A group of students 0:05:18.279 --> 0:05:20.560 were on a field trip taking a bus up the 0:05:20.560 --> 0:05:22.960 side of a mountain to look at plants in different 0:05:23.000 --> 0:05:27.600 climate zones. Well, the bus was going up the side 0:05:27.600 --> 0:05:29.880 of a mountain with a drop off on one side, 0:05:30.120 --> 0:05:33.360 steep mountain on the other, and there was a little 0:05:33.520 --> 0:05:36.359 silver craft in the middle of the road, and the 0:05:36.440 --> 0:05:40.840 bus stopped. The bus driver stopped terrified, looked behind him 0:05:40.839 --> 0:05:43.800 and tried to back up down the mountain, and then froze. 0:05:44.760 --> 0:05:49.080 And my dad knew exactly what was happening when the 0:05:49.160 --> 0:05:51.240 bus stopped and he looked ahead of the driver, and 0:05:51.240 --> 0:05:53.120 then he saw the driver trying to back up down 0:05:53.200 --> 0:05:57.039 this mountain pass with his bus, and then everything froze. 0:05:57.360 --> 0:06:01.080 The bus missed nine hours, so everybody on that bus 0:06:01.720 --> 0:06:05.560 was either turned off or something else happened for nine hours. 0:06:07.000 --> 0:06:09.960 Elizabeth wasn't on the bus with her father. She was 0:06:10.000 --> 0:06:13.760 back home in Michigan with her mother. I was having 0:06:14.120 --> 0:06:17.120 a dream about bad men having my daddy, and these 0:06:17.200 --> 0:06:19.599 little bad men were gray and they had a gun 0:06:19.640 --> 0:06:22.120 to his head, but the gun shot light. And so 0:06:22.160 --> 0:06:25.280 I'm waking up running to my mom, going, hey, something's 0:06:25.320 --> 0:06:27.880 going on with dad and it's not good and these 0:06:27.920 --> 0:06:30.640 bad men have him. What ended up happening is my 0:06:30.720 --> 0:06:34.200 dad quit his program for his master's degree and went 0:06:34.240 --> 0:06:38.560 home to Michigan to try to protect me, you know, 0:06:39.680 --> 0:06:43.000 and that didn't go so well, but you know, that's 0:06:43.080 --> 0:06:46.400 kind of how that played out. And then from much 0:06:46.400 --> 0:06:49.279 of my life until I was sixteen. I was actually 0:06:49.279 --> 0:06:51.719 afraid of aliens until I went through a lot of 0:06:51.720 --> 0:06:56.039 work with doctor mac. Elizabeth had spent almost her entire 0:06:56.160 --> 0:06:59.760 life with the specter of these alien encounters hanging over her, 0:07:00.320 --> 0:07:02.640 and up to a point, she had relied on her 0:07:02.640 --> 0:07:06.640 father to provide understanding and support. But as was often 0:07:06.680 --> 0:07:10.000 the case with other traumatic situations, there came an event 0:07:10.040 --> 0:07:13.280 which caused Elizabeth to realize that she needed more help 0:07:13.320 --> 0:07:18.640 than she was being provided. Mine was a group of 0:07:18.680 --> 0:07:22.720 aliens came into my apartment and I was awake. I 0:07:22.560 --> 0:07:25.160 hadn't gone to sleep yet, and then I was awake, 0:07:25.200 --> 0:07:27.880 and then all of a sudden, I was paralyzed. And 0:07:28.240 --> 0:07:32.240 the cat ran downstairs to see what was going on, 0:07:32.320 --> 0:07:35.080 because they like knocked over a lamp as they came in. 0:07:36.080 --> 0:07:38.560 And the cat went growled and ran down the stairs, 0:07:38.720 --> 0:07:42.120 and I went for my baseball bat. At that age, 0:07:42.120 --> 0:07:44.880 I kept a baseball bat beside my bed just in 0:07:44.920 --> 0:07:47.880 case of intruder. So I was going for the baseball bat, 0:07:47.960 --> 0:07:50.640 and in mid grabbed for a baseball bat before I 0:07:50.640 --> 0:07:53.640 got to and I was paralyzed, And then I could 0:07:53.720 --> 0:07:58.320 hear all these footsteps downstairs and I had a cat 0:07:58.440 --> 0:08:01.320 toy attached to a b in the ceiling, and the 0:08:01.440 --> 0:08:05.600 upstairs is a balcony bedroom. This cat toy was a 0:08:05.600 --> 0:08:08.880 panda attached to a leg stocking with a bell on top. 0:08:09.480 --> 0:08:12.200 You'd pull the stocking back and let it go. The 0:08:12.200 --> 0:08:15.360 panda would bounce around, the bell would ring, and the 0:08:15.440 --> 0:08:18.400 cat would go after the panda. From where she lay 0:08:18.480 --> 0:08:22.360 upstairs paralyzed, she heard the bell ringing below and the 0:08:22.400 --> 0:08:28.400 cat scampering. Someone or something had pulled it. And I'm 0:08:28.440 --> 0:08:31.000 getting this sense in my mind of happiness, in mirth, 0:08:31.120 --> 0:08:33.079 and then I hear this voice in my head saying 0:08:33.080 --> 0:08:35.760 I'm coming up the stairs now and I'm trying to 0:08:35.800 --> 0:08:38.040 move and i can't move, and I'm thinking I'm gonna move, 0:08:38.120 --> 0:08:40.480 and then the voice is like, okay, I'm almost at 0:08:40.520 --> 0:08:42.200 the top of the stairs. I hear it in my 0:08:42.240 --> 0:08:45.280 head and then I'm looking at the top of the 0:08:45.320 --> 0:08:50.360 stairs from my position paralyzed, and there's this little blue 0:08:50.360 --> 0:08:53.000 alien who's looking at me, saying, okay, here I am, 0:08:53.040 --> 0:08:55.800 look at me. And I'm like, I'm not looking at you. 0:08:55.840 --> 0:08:58.920 I'm gonna move and swearing at it. In my mind, 0:08:59.440 --> 0:09:01.120 this is not really look at me. And he turned 0:09:01.440 --> 0:09:03.400 from side to side so I could see, you know, 0:09:03.440 --> 0:09:06.600 each side of his face and says, see, see, look 0:09:06.640 --> 0:09:09.360 at me, I'm really here and we're related. And I 0:09:09.400 --> 0:09:10.800 was like, I don't care. I'm going to beat the 0:09:10.800 --> 0:09:14.280 crap out of you. And eventually I got up enough adrenaline. 0:09:14.280 --> 0:09:16.280 Then I moved and then I just heard all these 0:09:16.320 --> 0:09:18.760 popping noises. The one that was at the top of 0:09:18.760 --> 0:09:21.160 the stairs went through the skylight. I heard all these 0:09:21.160 --> 0:09:25.880 swaps swop swap, swap, swap swap, So whoever was downstairs 0:09:25.880 --> 0:09:28.560 either went through windows or walls or whatever, but it 0:09:28.640 --> 0:09:32.120 made this swopping noise. And then the cat came back 0:09:32.200 --> 0:09:38.640 upstairs and proceeded to very happily in contentedly washed himself, 0:09:38.679 --> 0:09:41.120 like how that was fun. And I freaked out and 0:09:41.200 --> 0:09:43.560 I didn't sleep for four or five days. The friend 0:09:43.600 --> 0:09:46.880 of mine had told me about Bud Hapkins, and I 0:09:46.920 --> 0:09:49.400 got Bud's number and I called him and he called 0:09:49.440 --> 0:09:53.320 me back. We talked about Bud Hopkins in season one 0:09:53.360 --> 0:09:56.440 of Strange Arrivals. He was an artist who became a 0:09:56.480 --> 0:09:59.960 prominent UFO researcher and was the first person to theorize 0:10:00.160 --> 0:10:03.079 that huge numbers of people were being abducted by aliens. 0:10:03.880 --> 0:10:07.920 The important thing here is that Elizabeth contacted Hopkins and 0:10:08.080 --> 0:10:12.200 he introduced her to John Mack. I ended up meeting 0:10:12.280 --> 0:10:14.440 John through but because But said, well, we had a 0:10:14.440 --> 0:10:18.040 guy in Boston who wants to look into this, and 0:10:18.480 --> 0:10:20.560 if he decides he wants to go ahead, would you 0:10:20.559 --> 0:10:22.360 be interested in talking to him? When I said fine, 0:10:22.400 --> 0:10:25.079 anything that will get me to go to sleep. Her 0:10:25.120 --> 0:10:28.080 work with John Mack would fundamentally change the way she 0:10:28.160 --> 0:10:35.840 understood her strange experiences. After the break, Strange Arrivals will 0:10:35.880 --> 0:10:52.240 return in a moment. We met John Mack in the 0:10:52.320 --> 0:10:55.720 last episode when he flew to Zimbabwe to interview the 0:10:55.800 --> 0:10:59.480 students who were involved in the aerial school encounter, but 0:10:59.600 --> 0:11:03.280 the school interviews were something of an anomaly for Mac. 0:11:03.800 --> 0:11:08.880 His investigations, heavily influenced by Bud Hopkins, mostly centered on 0:11:08.960 --> 0:11:12.880 people like Elizabeth who believed that they'd been abducted by aliens. 0:11:13.880 --> 0:11:18.800 Following in hopkins footsteps, Mac used regression hypnosis, a practice 0:11:18.840 --> 0:11:21.960 that is now considered to be of little evidentiary use, 0:11:22.120 --> 0:11:26.800 to investigate these claims. But unlike Hopkins and as we 0:11:26.840 --> 0:11:31.960 will see David Jacobs, John Mack was a trained psychiatrist, 0:11:32.000 --> 0:11:36.280 and his name lent considerable gravitas to alien abduction theories 0:11:36.880 --> 0:11:41.079 of the three main figures investigating alien abductions, a group 0:11:41.080 --> 0:11:45.600 that skeptical writer Robert Schaeffer calls the Troika. Mac was, 0:11:46.000 --> 0:11:50.840 despite being the only one scientifically trained, the most spiritually oriented. 0:11:51.960 --> 0:11:55.760 This is former New York Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal, author 0:11:55.840 --> 0:12:00.880 of The Believer, Alien Encounters Hard Science. In the Passion 0:12:00.920 --> 0:12:05.800 of John Mac. He was a very conventional in many ways, 0:12:05.880 --> 0:12:09.120 a psychiatrist, very eminent. He had done a lot of 0:12:09.160 --> 0:12:13.280 work in childhood development and nightmares, and he was very 0:12:13.360 --> 0:12:18.120 socially progressive. He protested against nuclear weapons. He worked for 0:12:18.280 --> 0:12:21.960 mental services for the poor. But he was very grounded 0:12:22.000 --> 0:12:25.480 on earth. He had written a pollit surprise winning biography 0:12:25.480 --> 0:12:28.200 of Lawrence of Arabia, so he got very interested in 0:12:28.280 --> 0:12:32.000 peace in the Middle East. Mac was very involved in 0:12:32.040 --> 0:12:36.400 the peace movement and the nuclear disarmament movement. So he 0:12:36.440 --> 0:12:38.880 had all these social causes, and then a little by 0:12:38.920 --> 0:12:41.160 little he went out to Esselyn, that think tank on 0:12:41.200 --> 0:12:45.120 the Pacific, and he got interested in something called holotropic breathing, 0:12:45.679 --> 0:12:50.720 where you control your consciousness by regulated breathing. Esselyn is 0:12:50.760 --> 0:12:53.720 an educational and retreat center on the Big Sur coast 0:12:53.800 --> 0:12:57.720 of California. It was founded in nineteen sixty two and 0:12:57.840 --> 0:13:00.760 became a center for what we're considered un edge mental 0:13:00.760 --> 0:13:04.680 health treatments in the sixties and seventies, such as gestalt therapy, 0:13:05.040 --> 0:13:10.400 peace movement activities, and the exploration of alternate realities. Today, 0:13:10.600 --> 0:13:15.640 their website states, our curiosity and research explores new ideas 0:13:15.679 --> 0:13:22.280 around creativity in the brain, body work, spirituality, leadership, gastalt, 0:13:22.640 --> 0:13:28.839 plant medicine, citizen diplomacy, superhumanism, the survival of bodily death, 0:13:29.320 --> 0:13:34.959 extraterrestrial intelligence, and more end quote. In nineteen eighty seven, 0:13:35.360 --> 0:13:38.960 Mac was at Esslin when a Czech emigrey, the psychedelic 0:13:39.040 --> 0:13:44.800 researcher Stanislav Graf ran workshops on holotropic breathing, a technique 0:13:44.840 --> 0:13:49.480 involving deep rhythmic breathing and music to create over time 0:13:49.640 --> 0:13:53.440 in altered mental state, and it kind of opened up 0:13:53.679 --> 0:13:55.720 a new world to him of a kind of a 0:13:55.760 --> 0:13:59.160 spiritual world of things that he didn't really understand what 0:13:59.360 --> 0:14:02.760 was going on in his consciousness. In addition to the 0:14:02.800 --> 0:14:07.760 holotropic breathing, Mac also took four LSD trips. He reported 0:14:07.800 --> 0:14:11.680 that quote the four LSD trips I did probably did 0:14:11.720 --> 0:14:15.600 more to open up the spiritual universe than anything quote. 0:14:16.679 --> 0:14:20.680 Mac was in fact interested in a variety of subjects, 0:14:20.760 --> 0:14:24.960 including astrology and near death experiences, which caused him to 0:14:25.040 --> 0:14:29.560 question the very fundamentals of Western science. In his influential 0:14:29.600 --> 0:14:34.600 book Abduction Human Encounters with Aliens, Mac related a meeting 0:14:34.640 --> 0:14:38.160 he had with Thomas Keune, the author of the Structure 0:14:38.200 --> 0:14:43.560 of Scientific Revolutions. Mac writes, what I've found most helpful 0:14:43.640 --> 0:14:47.800 was Kuhne's observation that the Western scientific paradigm had come 0:14:47.840 --> 0:14:50.880 to assume the rigidity of a theology, and that this 0:14:50.920 --> 0:14:54.600 belief system was held in place by the structures, categories, 0:14:54.600 --> 0:14:58.560 and polarities of language, such as real unreal, exist, does 0:14:58.600 --> 0:15:03.840 not exist, objective, subjective, introphysic, external world, and happened, did 0:15:03.880 --> 0:15:08.760 not happen. He suggested that in pursuing my investigations, I suspend, 0:15:08.840 --> 0:15:11.120 to the degree that I was able all of these 0:15:11.240 --> 0:15:15.560 language forms and simply collect raw information, putting aside whether 0:15:15.720 --> 0:15:18.880 or not what I was learning fit any particular worldview. 0:15:19.440 --> 0:15:22.160 Later I would see what I had found and whether 0:15:22.200 --> 0:15:26.880 any coherent theoretical information would be possible. This by and 0:15:27.000 --> 0:15:30.040 large has been the approach that I have tried to follow. 0:15:31.600 --> 0:15:35.080 But this approach came after he began to investigate claims 0:15:35.080 --> 0:15:38.480 of alien abductions, a subject he came to through a 0:15:38.520 --> 0:15:43.080 meeting with Bud Hopkins, and then he met fellow psychiatrist 0:15:43.120 --> 0:15:46.160 who told him about a fellow named Bud Hopkins, who 0:15:46.240 --> 0:15:48.560 was an artist who was doing all this research with 0:15:48.680 --> 0:15:52.960 people who had stories of countering aliens. So he first 0:15:53.200 --> 0:15:55.480 John mac wasn't interested at all. He thought it was 0:15:55.560 --> 0:15:58.920 kind of crazy, which it is in many ways. He 0:15:58.960 --> 0:16:01.760 found himself in New York. He went to visit Bud Hopkins. 0:16:01.880 --> 0:16:04.040 He saw the letters that people had written to Bud 0:16:04.080 --> 0:16:08.120 Hopkins about their experiences with aliens, and he got hooked. 0:16:08.480 --> 0:16:10.720 So that's how he got involved, and he did a 0:16:10.720 --> 0:16:13.400 lot of research on his own. He did not understand 0:16:13.440 --> 0:16:16.800 what was going on, as of course we don't understand. 0:16:17.040 --> 0:16:20.400 There's no easy way to describe this phenomenon. He was 0:16:20.480 --> 0:16:23.720 interested enough to really spend time with these people who 0:16:23.720 --> 0:16:26.160 were not, by the way, mentally ill. That much he 0:16:26.240 --> 0:16:30.360 knew he was a psychiatrist. It was around this time 0:16:30.440 --> 0:16:35.160 that Elizabeth England contacted John Mack about her abduction experiences 0:16:36.240 --> 0:16:38.840 at the time, I didn't know why he was interested. 0:16:38.880 --> 0:16:41.400 But what I liked about what I was told about 0:16:41.440 --> 0:16:43.960 him was that he was a child trauma psychiatrist, and 0:16:44.200 --> 0:16:48.080 you know, you want somebody who is going to fairly 0:16:48.120 --> 0:16:51.600 inadequately evaluate you when you're in trauma. Is this real? 0:16:51.720 --> 0:16:54.080 Is it's not real. Our first interaction was over the 0:16:54.120 --> 0:16:56.280 phone and I was at work and he called me 0:16:56.360 --> 0:16:58.880 at work. I was working for the Department of Environmental 0:16:58.880 --> 0:17:02.560 Protection at the time, and we just had a brief 0:17:02.600 --> 0:17:06.840 interview over the phone, and he said he wasn't at 0:17:06.840 --> 0:17:10.800 that time ready to do anything yet. He needed to 0:17:10.840 --> 0:17:15.280 talk to some more people, and he didn't do hypnotism 0:17:15.400 --> 0:17:17.879 or and he didn't do regressive hypnosis at that time. 0:17:18.000 --> 0:17:21.679 So he said, well, you know, I'll get back to 0:17:21.680 --> 0:17:24.720 you when I'm ready to if I decide, And he 0:17:24.800 --> 0:17:28.000 wasn't really even decided. So part of the interview was 0:17:28.520 --> 0:17:30.400 do I really want to work with these people, Let's 0:17:30.400 --> 0:17:33.080 talk to this one, see how she seems, blah blah blah. 0:17:33.119 --> 0:17:36.199 So he wasn't even there yet in January when I 0:17:36.280 --> 0:17:40.879 talked to him. When John mac did start actively investigating, 0:17:41.280 --> 0:17:43.960 he was entering a subject that Hopkins and to a 0:17:44.040 --> 0:17:48.800 lesser extent Jacobs had already largely defined. In the Introduction 0:17:48.840 --> 0:17:53.960 to Abduction, he wrote about what he felt Hopkins had established. One, 0:17:54.240 --> 0:17:58.399 abduction cases were associated with unaccounted for time periods and 0:17:58.480 --> 0:18:05.720 associated symptoms. Two, there were consistent details among cases. Three 0:18:05.960 --> 0:18:09.480 there was physical evidence, including scars and scoop marks in 0:18:09.520 --> 0:18:12.760 the flesh and even small objects that have been implanted 0:18:12.800 --> 0:18:16.720 in the experiencer. And for that there was a sexual 0:18:16.960 --> 0:18:21.720 or reproductive element to these abductions. He thought, though, that 0:18:21.880 --> 0:18:26.160 this framework described the factual characteristics of the abduction phenomenon 0:18:26.600 --> 0:18:31.480 while ignoring what he felt was most important. None of 0:18:31.520 --> 0:18:34.560 this work, in my view, has come to terms with 0:18:34.680 --> 0:18:39.080 the profound implications of the abduction phenomenon for the expansion 0:18:39.080 --> 0:18:43.480 of human consciousness, the opening of perception to realities beyond 0:18:43.560 --> 0:18:47.640 the manifest physical world, and the necessity of changing our 0:18:47.680 --> 0:18:51.200 place in the cosmic order if Earth's living systems are 0:18:51.240 --> 0:18:56.200 to survive. The human onslaught So here you can see 0:18:56.240 --> 0:18:59.399 two things. One is the way that he positions the 0:18:59.440 --> 0:19:02.960 abduction phenomenon is inevitably leading to the importance of his 0:19:03.040 --> 0:19:07.399 own views about the Earth's environment. Secondly, he is moving 0:19:07.440 --> 0:19:10.880 beyond the realm of the scientific and into the spiritual. 0:19:11.520 --> 0:19:14.600 And this is a departure from Hopkins and Jacobs, who 0:19:14.600 --> 0:19:18.720 are not trained scientists but hoped to gain scientific recognition 0:19:18.800 --> 0:19:21.879 for their work. And they certainly believed that this was 0:19:21.920 --> 0:19:26.240 a real physical phenomenon, not one that required an expansion 0:19:26.280 --> 0:19:32.359 of human consciousness to perceive. John was so not interested 0:19:32.400 --> 0:19:36.679 in saw it. I'm Carol Rainey and I was married 0:19:36.720 --> 0:19:41.119 for ten years to Bud Hopkins, abstract expressionist painter and 0:19:42.000 --> 0:19:47.800 UFO researcher. It came from a background spending twenty years 0:19:48.560 --> 0:19:54.520 making films for epidemiologists in the Boston area. Carol was 0:19:54.560 --> 0:19:57.960 not only Hopkins' wife but his partner in his research, 0:19:58.359 --> 0:20:01.480 to which she brought experience working with scientists at a 0:20:01.520 --> 0:20:07.080 better grasp than Hopkins of scientific practices. Here she talks 0:20:07.080 --> 0:20:11.240 about a conversation she had with mac once. I was 0:20:11.280 --> 0:20:15.160 sitting on a porch in Newport at a Newport bed 0:20:15.200 --> 0:20:18.480 and breakfast, where a bunch of people interested in the 0:20:18.560 --> 0:20:21.800 subject gathered every summer. I was in the middle of 0:20:21.840 --> 0:20:25.520 writing side unseen with Bud, and I started to tell 0:20:25.600 --> 0:20:30.960 him about this really exciting find I had that science 0:20:31.040 --> 0:20:35.040 research had just developed the use of a laser beam 0:20:35.160 --> 0:20:40.159 of light that would pull objects up the light, which 0:20:40.240 --> 0:20:43.520 was exactly what was being reported by abductees that they 0:20:43.520 --> 0:20:47.560 were pulled up the light, which sounds science fiction crazy, 0:20:47.720 --> 0:20:51.680 But I was out there researching cutting edge scientific discoveries. 0:20:52.359 --> 0:20:55.960 So I'm telling John this, I'm excited. He looked at 0:20:55.960 --> 0:21:00.520 me and he just said, Carol, I'm not interested in science. 0:21:01.119 --> 0:21:05.320 I just started laughing, because that was the hope of 0:21:06.320 --> 0:21:09.680 people liked Bud and Dave, who knew they were scientists 0:21:10.000 --> 0:21:13.040 and didn't really have any interest in science. They hoped 0:21:13.080 --> 0:21:17.320 that John would come into the field and bring serious 0:21:17.440 --> 0:21:22.720 scientific research into the field. I mean, they genuinely did, 0:21:23.119 --> 0:21:29.680 and that wasn't John's interest. He was definitely more interested 0:21:29.880 --> 0:21:35.480 in an extraterrestrial outreach program and something that would be 0:21:36.200 --> 0:21:41.800 a welcoming program for any beings who might approach the Earth. 0:21:43.520 --> 0:21:47.360 Max's book was written after he had worked with many experiencers, 0:21:47.840 --> 0:21:50.359 and it could be argued that he merely reported on 0:21:50.440 --> 0:21:54.000 what he found. I find myself wondering, though, if his 0:21:54.240 --> 0:21:58.439 predisposition towards a certain worldview influenced the stories he was 0:21:58.520 --> 0:22:03.879 told and or how he interpreted them. Mac biographer Ralph 0:22:03.880 --> 0:22:08.639 Blumenthal says this about his work with his patients. He 0:22:08.800 --> 0:22:11.800 also found a aspect of this in which he heard 0:22:11.840 --> 0:22:15.200 from his patients that they were transformed by the experience 0:22:15.280 --> 0:22:17.240 and they were sort of in touch with kind of 0:22:17.240 --> 0:22:23.280 a spiritual epiphany, connecting with God or some spirit. This 0:22:23.359 --> 0:22:26.840 was in stark contrast to Hopkins and Jacobs, for whom, 0:22:26.920 --> 0:22:30.440 as we will see, the reasons for alien abductions were 0:22:30.480 --> 0:22:35.760 at best inscrutable and at worst profoundly sinister, and Hopkins 0:22:35.760 --> 0:22:39.359 and Jacobs believed that abductions were physical and took place 0:22:39.400 --> 0:22:43.919 in our reality. Mac was less sure about this. These 0:22:43.960 --> 0:22:47.800 fissures would be highlighted in nineteen ninety three when abduction 0:22:47.880 --> 0:22:51.760 researchers presented their work to a group of receptive scientists 0:22:51.760 --> 0:22:55.639 and therapists at a watershed conference on the campus of 0:22:55.680 --> 0:22:59.880 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Mac would become more 0:23:00.119 --> 0:23:03.720 convinced that the answers to abductions would not be found 0:23:04.040 --> 0:23:17.400 in our reality. Next time on Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals 0:23:17.480 --> 0:23:20.680 is a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild from 0:23:20.680 --> 0:23:24.280 Aaron Manky. This episode was written and hosted by Toby 0:23:24.400 --> 0:23:28.480 Ball and produced by Rima l Kaali, Jesse Funk, and 0:23:28.600 --> 0:23:33.879 Naami Griffin, with executive producers Alexander Williams, Matt Frederick, and 0:23:33.960 --> 0:23:38.400 Aaron Manky and supervising producer Josh Thain. Learn more about 0:23:38.440 --> 0:23:42.560 the show at Grimm and mild dot com slash Strange Arrivals, 0:23:42.840 --> 0:23:47.359 and find more podcasts from iHeartRadio by visiting the iHeartRadio app, 0:23:47.560 --> 0:24:01.520 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.