Sunday is Earth Day. For those who wish to celebrate that, I will leave a link:
But Sunday is also the auspicious Alien Abduction Day! And since I won’t have time to watch all nine seasons of X Files I will instead write a post.
Since I love to ramble, I’m actually going to go back in time. Stories about other worldly beings abducting people go back many thousands of years. In the Bible, we have the story of Enoch: The text reads that Enoch “walked with God: and he was no more; for God took him” (Gen 5:21–24). There have been a lot of controversial ideas about this, and some may not even believe Enoch existed, but there is the story. The book of Genesis was written between 1450 BC and 1400 BC, though there is no way to know how old the oral tradition it was based on is.
In The Iliad we have the story of Europa, who was abducted and then impregnated by Zeus. The Iliad was written about the eighth century BC, though, again, we have little way to know how long ago the oral tradition runs. And yeah, this was Zeus in the story. But who knows what “really” happened. Maybe Europa was abducted by aliens who left a little eugenics gift in her belly.
Other examples, including Ezekial’s wheel come to mind. And the stories from Celtic mythology and medieval folk tales about fairy rings and people getting entranced for years, losing time, being carried away by small bipedal beings with magical abilities in some ways resembles the modern UFO abduction phenomenon.
The first quasi modern account I can find for an attempted abduction is in 1896. Two years before H. G. Wells The War of the Worlds, we have a Colonel Shaw who was traveling with a friend, and they were “harassed by three tall, slender humanoids whose bodies were covered with a fine, downy hair who tried to kidnap the pair”.
The next event I can find is the “Battle of Los Angeles”. A mere three months after Pearl Harbor, on the night of February 24 1941, objects were reported in the sky over LA, and everyone was terrified the Japanese were attacking the city, and shelling began to shoot the objects out of the sky. Evidently the shelling had no effect. The government (which as we know is always trustworthy) stated that the objects were weather balloons. That does not look like weather balloons to me, but then, what do I know.
The next incident is the most infamous of all time. The one that got Fox Mulder all hot and bothered on The X Files (why….oh why don’t I have hair like that?).
Something crashed onto a Roswell ranch in the summer of forty seven, and the conspiracy world has never been the same. The government at first released a statement saying that they had recovered a “flying disc” from the crash site. That statement was later rescinded and the government claimed (again) that all that was involved was a weather balloon. Rumors of alien bodies, and even live aliens having been recovered from the site persist to this day.
While Roswell is the Holy Grail of UFO sightings, the mass of true abductions begins with the Brazilian case of Antônio Villas Boas, and the 1961 case of Betty and Barney Hill. Antônio Villas Boas says he was subdued by three aliens five foot tall, stripped of his clothes, blood samples were taken, a gas made him sick, and then he had sex with a female alien. If it isn’t true….I may try to smoke what he had….
The Betty and Barney Hill story was one of the most creditable of the time. They were some of the earliest members of the NAACP, Betty being a white woman, and Barney a black man, which was at the time all but taboo. They saw an object, reported it, but the object followed them. They ended up with missing time, somehow winding up 35 miles away but not nearer their destination, with strange scuffs on their shoes and a pink powder on their clothes. Their reports were still challenged, and who knows what really happened, but something strange went down.
What do you think? Are there aliens out there? Are they abducting people and conducting experiments on us? Or are all these people cooks and zanies? Please feel free to comment. Meanwhile, here are links to other sites for more information. Have a happy Alien Abduction Day!
https://www.oclc.org/research/wtworldcat/extraterrestrial-abduction.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_abduction
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/aliens/wheresphysev.html
Tired Midnight Blogger (What Blogs at Midnight) 