You never know. I am okay about talking about my experiences, but I think they will, be unsatisfying to a reader. They are neither neat nor clear cut. But, briefly, here is an outline.
- I saw a UFO when I was 14. I was out just before dawn waiting for friends to join me in trout poaching when a saw a huge cigar shaped form very low down, well below the top of Mt Wellington in Tasmania, which is just over 4,000 feet. I watched it for a while before running down the hill to get a telescope. It was gone when I got back.
- Back then I didn’t know UFOs. Afterwards I entered a phase of intense psychism that lasted 4-5 years - but I have no way of connection the two things. It’s only now I have read of others having events that trigger psychism that I make the connection.
- I had a disturbed childhood. I often woke up with my pyjamas inside out and with my head at the foot of my bed – which was tightly tucked in and I knew that turning around by accident wasn’t easy. It was hard to get out, even when I was panicking and desperate for air. This is similar to reports from abductees.
- I had a very lucid out of body experience after an acid trip (early 1970s) in which I found myself on a metal slab with greys around me. At this stage I knew nothing about UFOs or greys. I pulled out of the experience and got pulled back. I was terrified by the experience and pretty well buried it. In 1995 I read an article that described exactly the same thing and memories flooded back -and the emotion as well. Some will, say that anything linked to an acid trip is likely to be just a hallucination. That’s rubbish in my view – but make up your own mind.
- That article got me into reading on UFOs for the first time. I was living in Bathurst in western New South Wales at the time and one Saturday morning I was heading off for a coffee and a read of the paper. I walked past a bookshop that had just opened, walked in and before I had any idea of what was going on I had bought Mack’s Abduction. I read that flat out.
- The next weekend I attended a psychic fair and met a woman who did hypnotic regression and had done work with abductees and I arranged to travel to Sydney for a session.
- The morning I was to head off my car (a Mazda 626) would not start at all the for the first time ever. By the time it did start it was too late and I tried to make a new booking. But I was assailed by such a profound sense of threat and the feeling I could be injured if I persisted. I gave up. I trust my intuitions.
- Every time I tried to contact her and another person she suggested I should meet the communications lines became very warped and strange. It was very clear that some agency was intent on ensuring that I did not go down that route. By that I mean there was deliberate interference that was accompanied by a palpable sense of threat. By that stage I had trained in ritual magic and had experiences dealing with unwanted agents. Whatever it was I had encountered this time was potent and not to be messed with. I quit any attempt at regression.
- Back in the early 1970s I fell in with a group seriously into contacting ET. I was sceptical but curious. I was walking back to where we were staying in a Sydney suburb about 2.00am and as I passed a racecourse I saw a UFO on the ground and beings walking nearby. I stopped and watched and then realised that I was looking through a cyclone fence at the scene scarcely 100 yards away – and they could see me, so I walked away quickly.
- The next day, early evening, I was sitting with the group in the kitchen. The conversation was intense, but I forget what it was about now. I was fighting off an increasingly insistent urge to go outside. The conversation was too interesting. Suddenly I was yanked out of my seat and frog marched down the back steps and firmly placed on the ground. It was an invisible agent that did that. I stayed there for a few minutes, and, as nothing was happening, I went back inside. Soon after, one of the group noticed I had been scrawling something madly over a newspaper. She asked me what I was doing. I had no idea. I was not even aware my hand was moving.
- I ended up writing pages and pages of a strange script -at least my hand did. My ability to do that lasted for about 4 years. Never did make any sense of it.
- I was also manifesting other psi phenomena with no control at all, and often no awareness. It was not a pleasant time. In fact, it was deeply troubling, and members of the group were not happy. So I left. I then entered a disturbing period of wild psi phenomena and ended up hooked up with more people into ET and UFOs. I got away from them as soon as I discovered that was what they were into.
- I remained deeply sceptical of claims about contacting ET. I knew something was going on with me but I did not like that so many people said they knew what it was and I had to believe them. I had learned to doubt interpretations – especially neat ones that do little more than confirm delusions. I came across a lot of people I had a deep sense were dead wrong about what they believed.
- That wild psi period lasted for around 5 years. I came out that period wrecked and traumatised, and it has taken me decades to recover. I am not going to detail what happened during that period.
- For a bunch of reasons, I now know I was abducted as a child – and probably into adulthood.
- I am very much in tune with Whitley Strieber’s view that there’s more to ET than most suppose.
It is evident that people have very different experiences of abduction and encounters with ET. Mine were not so much negative as intense to the point of trauma. I was deeply worried for my sanity – and for good reason. I came close to cracking several times. I think maybe I was so stupid I needed to be shaken up seriously.
I don’t have a theory of ET. I was struck by an account in Abduction when a woman (during an abduction experience) described her disappointment at being led into a room that looked completely terrestrial. ET was surprised. They understood she wanted to ‘conference’, so they created a conference room. That means ET is operating in a very plastic domain that can be adapted at will. That suggests to me that so much is metaphysical and analogical. I have other reasons for thinking that too.
I read the theories and none seem to me to sufficient – no more than partial glimpses at best. I don’t have problems with things moving from the metaphysical to the physical. It happens all the time – though we do it in clunky laborious ways. But we haven’t mastering moving the other way – and that is what wrecks our capacity to imagine and to theorise.
What is real is more astonishing than we can imagine most of the time – so I don’t see any point in making theories. I prefer to try to allow myself to imagine what is – and allow that it will mostly transcend my rationality.