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