Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of iHeart Radio and Room
Speaker 1: and Mild from Aaron Mackey. For the best experience, listen
Speaker 1: with headphones. This is an outreach program from the Cosmos
Speaker 1: to the consciously impaired. There seems to be some effort
Speaker 1: to get through to us. Difficult. God is dead, you know,
Speaker 1: Mitchy said, so blah blah blah. So it's not easy
Speaker 1: to get through. But it does seem as if there
Speaker 1: is a creative intelligence at work here trying to create
Speaker 1: some kind of a connection reach us in some way.
Speaker 1: I'm Toby Ball and this is Strange Arrivals episode for
Speaker 1: Long Road to Hackelberg. I have to really clarify things
Speaker 1: that there are different kinds of experiencers, and I'm the
Speaker 1: ancestral experiencer, So experiences were in my family. My father
Speaker 1: was an abdictee experiencer. He might have even been a
Speaker 1: my lab because he had some pretty serious programming. He's
Speaker 1: still alive. My name is Elizabeth Anglin. I was an
Speaker 1: experiencer that worked with John Mack really from the beginning
Speaker 1: of his research into alien abduction starting in nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: did work in science for a while at MT and
Speaker 1: you know, just to dispel the miss at experience whos
Speaker 1: don't know anything about science, thank you very much. I'm
Speaker 1: used to work in physics as the secretary for Phobos,
Speaker 1: which was looking for the Higgs boson and nuclear engineering,
Speaker 1: but now I like to do art and I live
Speaker 1: in an anarchist community called Madrid in New Mexico and
Speaker 1: kind of spend my time being a freelance neo hippie musician.
Speaker 1: Intuitive so I guess that's me. Among people who believe
Speaker 1: they have had alien abduction experiences, there is a subset
Speaker 1: that sees themselves as the most recent in several generations
Speaker 1: of family members who have been abducted. Elizabeth believes that
Speaker 1: both her father and her grandfather were also abductees, or,
Speaker 1: in the preferred terminology, experiencers. My grandfather was also an experiencer.
Speaker 1: He was a farmer in northwest Alabama, and after one experience,
Speaker 1: he just refused to take the back road from Hamilton,
Speaker 1: Alabama to Hackelberg, Alabama. Elizabeth never actually met her grandfather,
Speaker 1: who died the year before she was born. My understanding
Speaker 1: from my father was that his father had seen a
Speaker 1: full out symbol shaped ship in the road in between
Speaker 1: Hamilton and Hackelberg, Alabama, and he was so traumatized and
Speaker 1: had missed some time. I don't know if it was
Speaker 1: three or five hours or something like that. Her grandfather
Speaker 1: had to make occasional trips to Hackleburg to get farm
Speaker 1: equipment that wasn't available in Hamilton, the closest town to
Speaker 1: his farm. He would take a back road, which made
Speaker 1: it a much faster trip, and he decided never to
Speaker 1: do that again, like he would go way way around.
Speaker 1: It'd take him an extra hour hour and a half
Speaker 1: to get to Hackleberg after that, because it was such
Speaker 1: a terrifying thing for him. And I think, to me,
Speaker 1: what that speaks of is that experiencers, by and large,
Speaker 1: we have these moments where we realize it's happening. It
Speaker 1: all cognitively gels like, oh my god, this is really happening.
Speaker 1: Elizabeth's father was the second generation of her family to
Speaker 1: have experiences. I know that my dad's were very similar
Speaker 1: to my own. They started really young. He used to
Speaker 1: get in trouble when he was a kid. His first
Speaker 1: remembered experience was at three when he went missing. And
Speaker 1: back in the day, you know, sparing the rod spoil
Speaker 1: the child was a thing, so if you were a
Speaker 1: kid who went missing, you got a lot of whippings.
Speaker 1: So he remembers going missing for hours, and as far
Speaker 1: as he knew, he went out by the laundry line,
Speaker 1: as you know, a three and a half year old.
Speaker 1: And then the next thing he remembers is everybody's upset
Speaker 1: with him and he doesn't know why, and he's getting
Speaker 1: a whopping. Her father's experiences meant that he understood what
Speaker 1: Elizabeth was going through and he did his best to
Speaker 1: provide support for her. He was much kinder to me
Speaker 1: and Anna's to protect me from that as much as
Speaker 1: he could. But he knew was going on when things
Speaker 1: were happening with me, and when I had my first
Speaker 1: remembered experience at three, it was a shared experience with him.
Speaker 1: He was in California studying for his masters in botany
Speaker 1: at the University of California, Berkeley. A group of students
Speaker 1: were on a field trip taking a bus up the
Speaker 1: side of a mountain to look at plants in different
Speaker 1: climate zones. Well, the bus was going up the side
Speaker 1: of a mountain with a drop off on one side,
Speaker 1: steep mountain on the other, and there was a little
Speaker 1: silver craft in the middle of the road, and the
Speaker 1: bus stopped. The bus driver stopped terrified, looked behind him
Speaker 1: and tried to back up down the mountain, and then froze.
Speaker 1: And my dad knew exactly what was happening when the
Speaker 1: bus stopped and he looked ahead of the driver, and
Speaker 1: then he saw the driver trying to back up down
Speaker 1: this mountain pass with his bus, and then everything froze.
Speaker 1: The bus missed nine hours, so everybody on that bus
Speaker 1: was either turned off or something else happened for nine hours.
Speaker 1: Elizabeth wasn't on the bus with her father. She was
Speaker 1: back home in Michigan with her mother. I was having
Speaker 1: a dream about bad men having my daddy, and these
Speaker 1: little bad men were gray and they had a gun
Speaker 1: to his head, but the gun shot light. And so
Speaker 1: I'm waking up running to my mom, going, hey, something's
Speaker 1: going on with dad and it's not good and these
Speaker 1: bad men have him. What ended up happening is my
Speaker 1: dad quit his program for his master's degree and went
Speaker 1: home to Michigan to try to protect me, you know,
Speaker 1: and that didn't go so well, but you know, that's
Speaker 1: kind of how that played out. And then from much
Speaker 1: of my life until I was sixteen. I was actually
Speaker 1: afraid of aliens until I went through a lot of
Speaker 1: work with doctor mac. Elizabeth had spent almost her entire
Speaker 1: life with the specter of these alien encounters hanging over her,
Speaker 1: and up to a point, she had relied on her
Speaker 1: father to provide understanding and support. But as was often
Speaker 1: the case with other traumatic situations, there came an event
Speaker 1: which caused Elizabeth to realize that she needed more help
Speaker 1: than she was being provided. Mine was a group of
Speaker 1: aliens came into my apartment and I was awake. I
Speaker 1: hadn't gone to sleep yet, and then I was awake,
Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden, I was paralyzed. And
Speaker 1: the cat ran downstairs to see what was going on,
Speaker 1: because they like knocked over a lamp as they came in.
Speaker 1: And the cat went growled and ran down the stairs,
Speaker 1: and I went for my baseball bat. At that age,
Speaker 1: I kept a baseball bat beside my bed just in
Speaker 1: case of intruder. So I was going for the baseball bat,
Speaker 1: and in mid grabbed for a baseball bat before I
Speaker 1: got to and I was paralyzed, And then I could
Speaker 1: hear all these footsteps downstairs and I had a cat
Speaker 1: toy attached to a b in the ceiling, and the
Speaker 1: upstairs is a balcony bedroom. This cat toy was a
Speaker 1: panda attached to a leg stocking with a bell on top.
Speaker 1: You'd pull the stocking back and let it go. The
Speaker 1: panda would bounce around, the bell would ring, and the
Speaker 1: cat would go after the panda. From where she lay
Speaker 1: upstairs paralyzed, she heard the bell ringing below and the
Speaker 1: cat scampering. Someone or something had pulled it. And I'm
Speaker 1: getting this sense in my mind of happiness, in mirth,
Speaker 1: and then I hear this voice in my head saying
Speaker 1: I'm coming up the stairs now and I'm trying to
Speaker 1: move and i can't move, and I'm thinking I'm gonna move,
Speaker 1: and then the voice is like, okay, I'm almost at
Speaker 1: the top of the stairs. I hear it in my
Speaker 1: head and then I'm looking at the top of the
Speaker 1: stairs from my position paralyzed, and there's this little blue
Speaker 1: alien who's looking at me, saying, okay, here I am,
Speaker 1: look at me. And I'm like, I'm not looking at you.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna move and swearing at it. In my mind,
Speaker 1: this is not really look at me. And he turned
Speaker 1: from side to side so I could see, you know,
Speaker 1: each side of his face and says, see, see, look
Speaker 1: at me, I'm really here and we're related. And I
Speaker 1: was like, I don't care. I'm going to beat the
Speaker 1: crap out of you. And eventually I got up enough adrenaline.
Speaker 1: Then I moved and then I just heard all these
Speaker 1: popping noises. The one that was at the top of
Speaker 1: the stairs went through the skylight. I heard all these
Speaker 1: swaps swop swap, swap, swap swap, So whoever was downstairs
Speaker 1: either went through windows or walls or whatever, but it
Speaker 1: made this swopping noise. And then the cat came back
Speaker 1: upstairs and proceeded to very happily in contentedly washed himself,
Speaker 1: like how that was fun. And I freaked out and
Speaker 1: I didn't sleep for four or five days. The friend
Speaker 1: of mine had told me about Bud Hapkins, and I
Speaker 1: got Bud's number and I called him and he called
Speaker 1: me back. We talked about Bud Hopkins in season one
Speaker 1: of Strange Arrivals. He was an artist who became a
Speaker 1: prominent UFO researcher and was the first person to theorize
Speaker 1: that huge numbers of people were being abducted by aliens.
Speaker 1: The important thing here is that Elizabeth contacted Hopkins and
Speaker 1: he introduced her to John Mack. I ended up meeting
Speaker 1: John through but because But said, well, we had a
Speaker 1: guy in Boston who wants to look into this, and
Speaker 1: if he decides he wants to go ahead, would you
Speaker 1: be interested in talking to him? When I said fine,
Speaker 1: anything that will get me to go to sleep. Her
Speaker 1: work with John Mack would fundamentally change the way she
Speaker 1: understood her strange experiences. After the break, Strange Arrivals will
Speaker 1: return in a moment. We met John Mack in the
Speaker 1: last episode when he flew to Zimbabwe to interview the
Speaker 1: students who were involved in the aerial school encounter, but
Speaker 1: the school interviews were something of an anomaly for Mac.
Speaker 1: His investigations, heavily influenced by Bud Hopkins, mostly centered on
Speaker 1: people like Elizabeth who believed that they'd been abducted by aliens.
Speaker 1: Following in hopkins footsteps, Mac used regression hypnosis, a practice
Speaker 1: that is now considered to be of little evidentiary use,
Speaker 1: to investigate these claims. But unlike Hopkins and as we
Speaker 1: will see David Jacobs, John Mack was a trained psychiatrist,
Speaker 1: and his name lent considerable gravitas to alien abduction theories
Speaker 1: of the three main figures investigating alien abductions, a group
Speaker 1: that skeptical writer Robert Schaeffer calls the Troika. Mac was,
Speaker 1: despite being the only one scientifically trained, the most spiritually oriented.
Speaker 1: This is former New York Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal, author
Speaker 1: of The Believer, Alien Encounters Hard Science. In the Passion
Speaker 1: of John Mac. He was a very conventional in many ways,
Speaker 1: a psychiatrist, very eminent. He had done a lot of
Speaker 1: work in childhood development and nightmares, and he was very
Speaker 1: socially progressive. He protested against nuclear weapons. He worked for
Speaker 1: mental services for the poor. But he was very grounded
Speaker 1: on earth. He had written a pollit surprise winning biography
Speaker 1: of Lawrence of Arabia, so he got very interested in
Speaker 1: peace in the Middle East. Mac was very involved in
Speaker 1: the peace movement and the nuclear disarmament movement. So he
Speaker 1: had all these social causes, and then a little by
Speaker 1: little he went out to Esselyn, that think tank on
Speaker 1: the Pacific, and he got interested in something called holotropic breathing,
Speaker 1: where you control your consciousness by regulated breathing. Esselyn is
Speaker 1: an educational and retreat center on the Big Sur coast
Speaker 1: of California. It was founded in nineteen sixty two and
Speaker 1: became a center for what we're considered un edge mental
Speaker 1: health treatments in the sixties and seventies, such as gestalt therapy,
Speaker 1: peace movement activities, and the exploration of alternate realities. Today,
Speaker 1: their website states, our curiosity and research explores new ideas
Speaker 1: around creativity in the brain, body work, spirituality, leadership, gastalt,
Speaker 1: plant medicine, citizen diplomacy, superhumanism, the survival of bodily death,
Speaker 1: extraterrestrial intelligence, and more end quote. In nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 1: Mac was at Esslin when a Czech emigrey, the psychedelic
Speaker 1: researcher Stanislav Graf ran workshops on holotropic breathing, a technique
Speaker 1: involving deep rhythmic breathing and music to create over time
Speaker 1: in altered mental state, and it kind of opened up
Speaker 1: a new world to him of a kind of a
Speaker 1: spiritual world of things that he didn't really understand what
Speaker 1: was going on in his consciousness. In addition to the
Speaker 1: holotropic breathing, Mac also took four LSD trips. He reported
Speaker 1: that quote the four LSD trips I did probably did
Speaker 1: more to open up the spiritual universe than anything quote.
Speaker 1: Mac was in fact interested in a variety of subjects,
Speaker 1: including astrology and near death experiences, which caused him to
Speaker 1: question the very fundamentals of Western science. In his influential
Speaker 1: book Abduction Human Encounters with Aliens, Mac related a meeting
Speaker 1: he had with Thomas Keune, the author of the Structure
Speaker 1: of Scientific Revolutions. Mac writes, what I've found most helpful
Speaker 1: was Kuhne's observation that the Western scientific paradigm had come
Speaker 1: to assume the rigidity of a theology, and that this
Speaker 1: belief system was held in place by the structures, categories,
Speaker 1: and polarities of language, such as real unreal, exist, does
Speaker 1: not exist, objective, subjective, introphysic, external world, and happened, did
Speaker 1: not happen. He suggested that in pursuing my investigations, I suspend,
Speaker 1: to the degree that I was able all of these
Speaker 1: language forms and simply collect raw information, putting aside whether
Speaker 1: or not what I was learning fit any particular worldview.
Speaker 1: Later I would see what I had found and whether
Speaker 1: any coherent theoretical information would be possible. This by and
Speaker 1: large has been the approach that I have tried to follow.
Speaker 1: But this approach came after he began to investigate claims
Speaker 1: of alien abductions, a subject he came to through a
Speaker 1: meeting with Bud Hopkins, and then he met fellow psychiatrist
Speaker 1: who told him about a fellow named Bud Hopkins, who
Speaker 1: was an artist who was doing all this research with
Speaker 1: people who had stories of countering aliens. So he first
Speaker 1: John mac wasn't interested at all. He thought it was
Speaker 1: kind of crazy, which it is in many ways. He
Speaker 1: found himself in New York. He went to visit Bud Hopkins.
Speaker 1: He saw the letters that people had written to Bud
Speaker 1: Hopkins about their experiences with aliens, and he got hooked.
Speaker 1: So that's how he got involved, and he did a
Speaker 1: lot of research on his own. He did not understand
Speaker 1: what was going on, as of course we don't understand.
Speaker 1: There's no easy way to describe this phenomenon. He was
Speaker 1: interested enough to really spend time with these people who
Speaker 1: were not, by the way, mentally ill. That much he
Speaker 1: knew he was a psychiatrist. It was around this time
Speaker 1: that Elizabeth England contacted John Mack about her abduction experiences
Speaker 1: at the time, I didn't know why he was interested.
Speaker 1: But what I liked about what I was told about
Speaker 1: him was that he was a child trauma psychiatrist, and
Speaker 1: you know, you want somebody who is going to fairly
Speaker 1: inadequately evaluate you when you're in trauma. Is this real?
Speaker 1: Is it's not real. Our first interaction was over the
Speaker 1: phone and I was at work and he called me
Speaker 1: at work. I was working for the Department of Environmental
Speaker 1: Protection at the time, and we just had a brief
Speaker 1: interview over the phone, and he said he wasn't at
Speaker 1: that time ready to do anything yet. He needed to
Speaker 1: talk to some more people, and he didn't do hypnotism
Speaker 1: or and he didn't do regressive hypnosis at that time.
Speaker 1: So he said, well, you know, I'll get back to
Speaker 1: you when I'm ready to if I decide, And he
Speaker 1: wasn't really even decided. So part of the interview was
Speaker 1: do I really want to work with these people, Let's
Speaker 1: talk to this one, see how she seems, blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: So he wasn't even there yet in January when I
Speaker 1: talked to him. When John mac did start actively investigating,
Speaker 1: he was entering a subject that Hopkins and to a
Speaker 1: lesser extent Jacobs had already largely defined. In the Introduction
Speaker 1: to Abduction, he wrote about what he felt Hopkins had established. One,
Speaker 1: abduction cases were associated with unaccounted for time periods and
Speaker 1: associated symptoms. Two, there were consistent details among cases. Three
Speaker 1: there was physical evidence, including scars and scoop marks in
Speaker 1: the flesh and even small objects that have been implanted
Speaker 1: in the experiencer. And for that there was a sexual
Speaker 1: or reproductive element to these abductions. He thought, though, that
Speaker 1: this framework described the factual characteristics of the abduction phenomenon
Speaker 1: while ignoring what he felt was most important. None of
Speaker 1: this work, in my view, has come to terms with
Speaker 1: the profound implications of the abduction phenomenon for the expansion
Speaker 1: of human consciousness, the opening of perception to realities beyond
Speaker 1: the manifest physical world, and the necessity of changing our
Speaker 1: place in the cosmic order if Earth's living systems are
Speaker 1: to survive. The human onslaught So here you can see
Speaker 1: two things. One is the way that he positions the
Speaker 1: abduction phenomenon is inevitably leading to the importance of his
Speaker 1: own views about the Earth's environment. Secondly, he is moving
Speaker 1: beyond the realm of the scientific and into the spiritual.
Speaker 1: And this is a departure from Hopkins and Jacobs, who
Speaker 1: are not trained scientists but hoped to gain scientific recognition
Speaker 1: for their work. And they certainly believed that this was
Speaker 1: a real physical phenomenon, not one that required an expansion
Speaker 1: of human consciousness to perceive. John was so not interested
Speaker 1: in saw it. I'm Carol Rainey and I was married
Speaker 1: for ten years to Bud Hopkins, abstract expressionist painter and
Speaker 1: UFO researcher. It came from a background spending twenty years
Speaker 1: making films for epidemiologists in the Boston area. Carol was
Speaker 1: not only Hopkins' wife but his partner in his research,
Speaker 1: to which she brought experience working with scientists at a
Speaker 1: better grasp than Hopkins of scientific practices. Here she talks
Speaker 1: about a conversation she had with mac once. I was
Speaker 1: sitting on a porch in Newport at a Newport bed
Speaker 1: and breakfast, where a bunch of people interested in the
Speaker 1: subject gathered every summer. I was in the middle of
Speaker 1: writing side unseen with Bud, and I started to tell
Speaker 1: him about this really exciting find I had that science
Speaker 1: research had just developed the use of a laser beam
Speaker 1: of light that would pull objects up the light, which
Speaker 1: was exactly what was being reported by abductees that they
Speaker 1: were pulled up the light, which sounds science fiction crazy,
Speaker 1: But I was out there researching cutting edge scientific discoveries.
Speaker 1: So I'm telling John this, I'm excited. He looked at
Speaker 1: me and he just said, Carol, I'm not interested in science.
Speaker 1: I just started laughing, because that was the hope of
Speaker 1: people liked Bud and Dave, who knew they were scientists
Speaker 1: and didn't really have any interest in science. They hoped
Speaker 1: that John would come into the field and bring serious
Speaker 1: scientific research into the field. I mean, they genuinely did,
Speaker 1: and that wasn't John's interest. He was definitely more interested
Speaker 1: in an extraterrestrial outreach program and something that would be
Speaker 1: a welcoming program for any beings who might approach the Earth.
Speaker 1: Max's book was written after he had worked with many experiencers,
Speaker 1: and it could be argued that he merely reported on
Speaker 1: what he found. I find myself wondering, though, if his
Speaker 1: predisposition towards a certain worldview influenced the stories he was
Speaker 1: told and or how he interpreted them. Mac biographer Ralph
Speaker 1: Blumenthal says this about his work with his patients. He
Speaker 1: also found a aspect of this in which he heard
Speaker 1: from his patients that they were transformed by the experience
Speaker 1: and they were sort of in touch with kind of
Speaker 1: a spiritual epiphany, connecting with God or some spirit. This
Speaker 1: was in stark contrast to Hopkins and Jacobs, for whom,
Speaker 1: as we will see, the reasons for alien abductions were
Speaker 1: at best inscrutable and at worst profoundly sinister, and Hopkins
Speaker 1: and Jacobs believed that abductions were physical and took place
Speaker 1: in our reality. Mac was less sure about this. These
Speaker 1: fissures would be highlighted in nineteen ninety three when abduction
Speaker 1: researchers presented their work to a group of receptive scientists
Speaker 1: and therapists at a watershed conference on the campus of
Speaker 1: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Mac would become more
Speaker 1: convinced that the answers to abductions would not be found
Speaker 1: in our reality. Next time on Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals
Speaker 1: is a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild from
Speaker 1: Aaron Manky. This episode was written and hosted by Toby
Speaker 1: Ball and produced by Rima l Kaali, Jesse Funk, and
Speaker 1: Naami Griffin, with executive producers Alexander Williams, Matt Frederick, and
Speaker 1: Aaron Manky and supervising producer Josh Thain. Learn more about
Speaker 1: the show at Grimm and mild dot com slash Strange Arrivals,
Speaker 1: and find more podcasts from iHeartRadio by visiting the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.