The Occult Section

We’ve done a lot of stories here at The Occult Section regarding sleep paralysis, which can account for most (if not all) paranormal encounters that happen when we are sleeping. Simply put, sleep paralysis occurs when our minds wake up incorrectly, if you will, and while our minds may be conscious, our bodies are still in a state of paralysis, something our brain does to our bodies so we don’t act out our dreams. To further add to the horrifying sound of all this, our brains can still be in a dream state while we are awake, causing us to hallucinate. Most skeptics say this can account for such phenomena as alien abductions, the stories of the incubus or succubus, and many more, even older, legends. I had a few bouts of sleep paralysis years ago, and even while knowing what it was, I was still terrified during the episodes  It’s not fun, let me assure you. Now it appears a filmmaker is making a short film based on this phenomena.

Yeah, this is pretty much how it happens. Just without the alien.

When filmmaker Carla MacKinnon started waking up several times a week unable to move, with the sense that a disturbing presence was in the room with her, she didn’t call up her local ghost hunter. She got researching.

Now, that research is becoming a short film and multiplatform art project exploring the strange and spooky phenomenon of sleep paralysis. The film, supported by the Wellcome Trust and set to screen at the Royal College of Arts in London, will debut in May.

Sleep paralysis happens when people become conscious while their muscles remain in the ultra-relaxed state that prevents them from acting out their dreams. The experience can be quite terrifying, with many people hallucinating a malevolent presence nearby, or even an attacker suffocating them. Surveys put the number of sleep paralysis sufferers between about 5 percent and 60 percent of the population.

“I was getting quite a lot of sleep paralysis over the summer, quite frequently, and I became quite interested in what was happening, what medically or scientifically, it was all about,” MacKinnon said.

Her questions led her to talk with psychologists and scientists, as well as to people who experience the phenomenon. Myths and legends about sleep paralysis persist all over the globe, from the incubus and succubus (male and female demons, respectively) of European tales to a pink dolphin-turned-nighttime seducer in Brazil. Some of the stories MacKinnon uncovered reveal why these myths are so chilling.

Sleep stories

One man told her about his frequent sleep paralysis episodes, during which he’d experience extremely realistic hallucinations of a young child, skipping around the bed and singing nursery rhymes. Sometimes, the child would sit on his pillow and talk to him. One night, the tot asked the man a personal question. When he refused to answer, the child transformed into a “horrendous demon,” MacKinnon said.

For another man, who had the sleep disorder narcolepsy (which can make sleep paralysis more common), his dream world clashed with the real world in a horrifying way. His sleep paralysis episodes typically included hallucinations that someone else was in his house or his room — he’d hear voices or banging around. One night, he awoke in a paralyzed state and saw a figure in his room as usual.

“He suddenly realizes something is different,” MacKinnon said. “He suddenly realizes that he is in sleep paralysis, and his eyes are open, but the person who is in the room is in his room in real life.”

The figure was no dream demon, but an actual burglar.

Myths and science of sleep paralysis

Sleep paralysis experiences are almost certainly behind the myths of the incubus and succubus, demons thought have sex with unsuspecting humans in their sleep. In many cases, MacKinnon said, the science of sleep paralysis explains these myths. The feeling of suffocating or someone pushing down on the chest that often occurs during sleep paralysis may be a result of the automatic breathing pattern people fall into during sleep. When they become conscious while still in this breathing pattern, people may try to bring their breathing under voluntary control, leading to the feeling of suffocating.

Add to that the hallucinations that seem to seep in from the dream world, and it’s no surprise that interpretations lend themselves to demons, ghosts or even alien abduction, MacKinnon said.

What’s more, MacKinnon said, sleep paralysis is more likely when your sleep is disrupted in some way — perhaps because you’ve been traveling, you’re too hot or too cold, or you’re sleeping in an unfamiliar or spooky place. Those tendencies may make it more likely that a person will experience sleep paralysis when already vulnerable to thoughts of ghosts and ghouls.

“It’s interesting seeing how these scientific narratives and the more psychoanalytical or psychological narratives can support each other rather than conflict,” MacKinnon said.

Since working on the project, MacKinnon has been able to bring her own sleep paralysis episodes under control — or at least learned to calm herself during them. The trick, she said, is to use episodes like a form of research, by paying attention to details like how her hands feel and what position she’s in. This sort of mindfulness tends to make scary hallucinations blink away, she said.

“Rationalizing it is incredibly counterintuitive,” she said. “It took me a really long time to stop believing that it was real, because it feels so incredibly real.”

While I don’t think that just because someone has a paranormal encounter that wakes them up automatically means they were dreaming or suffering a form of sleep paralysis, I must say that it does seem to explain most of these instances. During my episodes of sleep paralysis, I was 100 percent convinced that there were small, alien creatures in my living room. Just out of sight. I could sort of hear them shuffling around, and I just knew they were there. At 10:00 in the morning. In broad daylight. It was scary as hell, but once I woke up a bit more, I realized what was happening and was very relieved. It just goes to show that the human mind can be a very effective trickster, and we must explore all rational explanations first before jumping to the paranormal conclusion.

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Well, we can now add Fran Drescher to the growing list of celebrities who claim to have been abducted by aliens (see Hagar, Sammy). The star of “The Nanny” is claiming that she was abducted by UFO occupants in junior high school and had an alien chip implanted in her that caused her to meet her ex-husband. Yeah…

I could see why aliens would want to abduct and probe her. Now if only they could have done something about her voice...

Fran Drescher, whose “Happily Divorced” has been a hit for TV Land, believes that she was abducted by aliens while she was in junior high. She also, very seriously, says that said aliens planted a chip in her hand and programmed her to meet her ex-husband, Peter Marc Jacobson, who inspired the TV series.

“You know, it’s funny because Peter and I both saw [aliens] before we knew each other, doing the same thing, driving on the road with our dads,” she tells HuffPo. “We were both in junior high.”

Years later, they met and compared experiences. “We realized that we had the same experience. I think that somehow we were programmed to meet,” she says, pointing out a small scar on her hand. “We both have this scar. It’s the exact same scar on the exact same spot.”

Jacobson doesn’t share her opinions. He suggests that Drescher got the scar from a drill bit or a burn from a hot beverage. “I said to him, that’s what the aliens programmed us to think,” Fran explains. “But really, that’s where the chip is.”

…It could explain some things.

Alien abduction stories are always a bit suspect for me. First off, I feel like most can easily be explained by sleep paralysis. Simply put, the brain shuts your muscles down when you sleep so that you don’t act out your dreams. But sometimes we wake up when our bodies are still paralyzed, and one can get the sense of being immobilized. And since the brain is still technically dreaming, hallucinations can occur, such as the feelings of an ominous presence nearby. The implanted chips, which are always thought to be extraterrestrial in nature, always turn out to be completely terrestrial in origin. They are weird, to be certain, but alien control devices? That has yet to be proven.

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I’m not sure how I missed this, but UFO author and alien abduction specialist Budd Hopkins died on August 21st. I read many of his books, and although at many times, I found them hard to believe, they were still compelling tales. His influence on the UFO community, whether you agreed with him or not, cannot be denied.

Budd Hopkins, a distinguished Abstract Expressionist artist who — after what he described as a chance sighting of something flat, silver, airborne and unfathomable — became the father of the alien-abduction movement, died on Aug. 21 at his home in Manhattan. He was 80.

The cause was complications of cancer, his daughter, Grace Hopkins-Lisle, said.

A painter and sculptor, Mr. Hopkins was part of the circle of New York artists that in the 1950s and ’60s included Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline.

His work — which by the late ’60s included Mondrian-like paintings of huge geometric forms anointed with flat planes of color — is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington and the British Museum, among others.

In later years Mr. Hopkins turned to large, quasi-architectural sculptures that seemed to spring from primordial myths. In 1985, reviewing one such piece, “Temple of Apollo With Guardian XXXXV” — it was part house of worship, part archaeological ruin, part sacrificial altar — Michael Brenson wrote in The New York Times:

“If the work is about sacrifice and violence, it is also about ecstasy and illumination. In the course of trying to re-establish the broadest meaning of the abstract geometry that has fascinated so many 20th-century artists, Hopkins makes us consider that ritual, worship, cruelty and superstition have always been inseparable.”

Some articles about Mr. Hopkins made much of the relationship between these pieces and his fascination with otherworldly visitors, for by then his books, lectures and television appearances had made him well known as a U.F.O. investigator. Mr. Hopkins, however, disavowed a connection.

He was also quick to point out that he had never been abducted himself. But after what he described as his own U.F.O. sighting, on Cape Cod in 1964, he began gathering the stories of people who said they had not only seen spaceships but had also been spirited away in them on involuntary and unpleasant journeys.

As the first person to collect and publish such stories in quantity, Mr. Hopkins is widely credited with having begun the alien-abduction movement, a subgenre of U.F.O. studies. Later high-profile writers on the subject, including Whitley Strieber and the Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, credited him with having ignited their interest in the field.

In eliciting the narratives — many obtained under hypnosis — of people who said they had been abducted, Mr. Hopkins was struck by the recurrence of certain motifs: the lonely road, the dark of night, the burst of light, the sudden passage through the air and into a waiting craft, and above all the sense of time that could not be accounted for.

He went in search of that lost time. What he found, in story after story, was this:

The aliens were technically sophisticated and many spoke improbably good English. They were short, bug-eyed, thin-lipped and gray-skinned, stripped their subjects naked and probed them with instruments, often removing sperm or eggs.

These narratives, Mr. Hopkins wrote, led him to a distasteful but inescapable conclusion: The aliens — or “visitors,” as he preferred to call them — were practicing a form of extraterrestrial eugenics, aiming to shore up their declining race by crossbreeding with Homo sapiens.

In 1989 Mr. Hopkins founded the Intruders Foundation, based in Manhattan, to help sound the alarm.

He wrote four books on the subject, including “Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods” (1987), which spent four weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and was the basis of a 1992 TV movie starring Richard Crenna.

Mr. Hopkins’s work drew inevitable fire; in interviews he sometimes likened his attackers to Holocaust deniers, an analogy that incurred further criticism.

Elliott Budd Hopkins was born in Wheeling, W. Va., on June 15, 1931, and at 2 survived polio. He earned a bachelor’s degree in art history from Oberlin College in 1953 and afterward settled in New York, where he soon made his artistic reputation.

After the Cape Cod sighting he described — a silvery disc over Truro, Mass. — Mr. Hopkins began researching U.F.O.’s. In 1976 he published an article about abductions in The Village Voice, which led to an article in Cosmopolitan.

The exposure drew sacks of letters from readers wondering if they too had been abducted, and his second career was born. By the 1980s, it had eclipsed the first.

Mr. Hopkins’s three marriages, to Joan Baer, April Kingsley and Carol Rainey, ended in divorce. Besides his daughter, Grace, from his marriage to Ms. Kingsley, he is survived by his companion, Leslie Kean; a sister, Eleanor Whiteley; and a grandchild.

His memoir, “Art, Life and UFOs,” was published in 2009 by Anomalist Books.

Unlike some writers in the genre who described their own abductions as spiritually transformative, Mr. Hopkins believed that no good could come of being the unwilling subject of a vast human genome project in the sky. He called his informants “victims” and ran group therapy sessions for them in New York.

Many who shared their stories with Mr. Hopkins had no conscious memory of their abductions at first. But they had lived for years, he said, with the nagging feeling that somewhere, something in their lives had gone horribly wrong.

Their condition, Mr. Hopkins said, was not as rare as one might suppose. By his reckoning, 1 in 50 Americans has been abducted by an alien and simply does not know it.

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Working my new schedule has kept me busy, tired and out of the loop a bit, and I completely missed this anniversary. The Betty & Barney Hill alien abduction case was huge news when it first broke, and I remember reading about it as a a kid in almost every UFO book I read, and I even saw the TV movie with James Earl Jones called “The UFO Incident.” The 50th anniversary just passed, and Fox News actually has a pretty good account of what happened and how the event is being commemorated. It’s lengthy but a good read. Truth be told, I was never one for alien abduction stories. They just seem almost too far-out even for this paranormal believer to buy into. But the Hills always seemed genuine, and in my mind, I believe that something happened to them. I’m not sure it was extraterrestrial, but who knows?

I like this plaque, and it’s good to have a marker where this allegedly happened.

LINCOLN, N.H. –  Fifty years after Betty and Barney Hill reported seeing a flat, cigar-shaped craft hovering over them in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, the state has put up a historical marker noting their close encounter with a UFO.

Returning from a vacation in Canada on Sept. 19, 1961, the Hills arrived home in Portsmouth puzzled by stains and tears on Betty’s dress, scuffs on Barney’s shoes and shiny spots on their car. Their watches weren’t working.

When they got home, they realized they had “lost” about two hours of time. They called family and reported the event to Pease Air Force Base in Portsmouth the next day.

Barney, who had binoculars, later told science investigators that he could see figures on the craft. The couple also reported seeing a fiery orb. In 1964, they underwent a series of taped hypnosis sessions — recalling they had been abducted and physically examined by “men” who did not appear to be human. Paintings and a sculpture of their descriptions depicted them with large, bald heads, slanted eyes and gray skin.

“They dragged me, kicking and screaming,” Betty told The Associated Press in a 1986 interview.

In 1965, their story, known to only a small circle of investigators, close friends and family, was leaked to the Boston Traveler, which published it. Their UFO experience was described in a best-selling book in 1966, “The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours Aboard A Flying Saucer,” by John Fuller; a 1975 television movie starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons, “The UFO Incident”; and numerous speaking engagements. Last week, Hollywood writer-producer Bryce Zabel, who developed the UFO conspiracy series “Dark Skies” in the 1990s, said he is planning to make a new film about the couple’s experience.

In July, the state erected a historical marker to the “Betty and Barney Hill Incident” in Lincoln near some cabins at the Indian Head Resort on Route 3, one of the last places the couple recalled seeing that night.

The resort is the site of a conference Sept. 23-25 devoted to what the state marker describes as “the first widely-reported UFO abduction report in the United States.” Kathleen Marden, the Hills’ niece, will give a guided tour of places they stopped at during their encounter.

“How many states have courage enough to do something like that? Even the state of New Mexico hasn’t put up a plaque for Roswell,” asked Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist who was the first civilian investigator of the Roswell incident, a purported UFO crash on a ranch in July 1947. The military later declared it was a top-secret weather balloon.

Friedman has authored papers and books on his UFO research, including one co-authored in 2007 with Marden, “Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience.”

“I started off kind of neutral,” Friedman said when he first heard of the Hills’ story back in the 1960s. “After meeting with them, I was very impressed with them. … I saw no enlargement at all, no attempt to make more of the story than was there.”

Friedman, another conference speaker, said the state marker gives some credibility to UFO sightings and research.

Michael Stevens of Farmington, who started a petition for the marker in 2008, said the state’s Division of Historical Resources was “very clear from the get-go that they weren’t necessarily backing that the event happened.

“What they could back up — the report and the cultural effect it had — was in and of itself historical, and that’s what they could go on to get the marker through,” he said.

Stevens said he had no connection to the case or to the Hills; he said he’s just always been interested in their story. “I just thought it was one of those important things that history was going to overlook because it didn’t fit into society’s little box of `normal.” The one-paragraph marker was backed up by 20 footnotes and 28 references that Marden provided to the state.

The Indian Head Resort is dedicating its own bronze plaque to the Hills next weekend. It’s also having fun with the event — the gift shop has alien-themed green golf balls, lollipops, “UFO Crossing” signs — even a juicer shaped like a flying saucer.

“One of the things we’re hoping to do with this event is to explore the potential for this being a UFO ‘destination,’ similar to the area around Roswell,” said Stew Weldon, resort marketing manager.

The Irving Notch Express gas station on Route 3 in Lincoln also pays tribute with a mural of an alien and a flying saucer. Inside, it sells alien-themed hats and balloons — and summarizes what happened in what it claims is the “First Rest Room Museum Dedicated to Alien Abduction.”

The gas station is at the site of what used to be a farmer’s field and apple orchard where Barney had said the UFO descended, hovering less than 200 feet above him and his wife.

Chris Berlo, a gas station cashier, said some people who have dropped by have full knowledge of the Hills’ story. Others ask, ‘What’s with the aliens?”‘

Marden, who was 13 at the time, recently put together a self-guided tour of the places where her aunt and uncle stopped that night, in response to a number of queries. She was a teacher and social worker before beginning research on the story in 1990.

“I think I had always secretly harbored the desire to investigate this for myself, to attempt to determine whether or not it was real or fictitious — not that they would have made it up, but that perhaps the abduction was more of a fantasy event than a reality,” Marden said.

“I believed, I always believed, that they had a close encounter with an unidentified flying object,” she said. She believes her aunt and uncle were telling the truth about their capture.

Marden, who grew up in Kingston but now lives in Clermont, Fla., said the couple weren’t seeking attention.

“They never wanted this to be released to the public. It would be the worst thing that could have happened to them. They were prominent citizens in the state of New Hampshire and in their community.”

The interracial couple — he was a U.S. Postal Service worker, she was a social worker — were actively involved in civil rights causes. “They were both members of the NAACP, the state and regional board.” She said the governor appointed him to serve on the New Hampshire advisory committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

Marden said they were afraid of losing their jobs — which didn’t happen — not to mention their reputations. But after meeting with family members, they decided to speak publicly.

Betty died in 2004 at age 85; Barney died in 1969 of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 46.

In 2009, the University of New Hampshire held an exhibition and seminars devoted to the Hills. Betty’s dress and other artifacts are part of UNH’s special collections. Betty was a 1958 UNH graduate.

“I think that she wanted to make sure the materials were available for serious study,” said David Watters, director of UNH’s Center for New England Culture. “She said to me that she wanted the dress to be preserved, so that when our science caught up with alien science that it would be able to determine what the chemicals were on her dress, for example. Or the star chart that she made under hypnosis — some day she thought it would be possible to have that confirmed through astronomy.”

In 1991, Betty told The Associated Press she was retiring from making public appearances because of her age and her “disappointment in the way the UFO field is headed.” She said too many people with “flaky ideas, fantasies and imaginations” were making UFO reports.

“If you don’t know the answers to something, you can always dream them up, whether they are true or not,” she said. “A lot of the UFO field certainly is not sticking to the facts.”

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