SHAMAN'S FANTASY TRANCES Shamans are "medicine men" or priests who flourished in world cultures for thousands of years, and who survive today in scores of countries everywhere. The Amerindian Black Elk, a 19^th century Oglala Sioux, is typical. Black Elk believed he could travel at will from Earth to other worlds via a "cosmic pillar," a perinatal tunnel/tube image often symbolized in shaman's sketches by a pole or tree. 

As Fig. 1-13 shows, Black Elk's typical fantasy trance or vision quest starts beside a tree. Shortly after a period of intense meditation and very likely ingesting hallucinogenic drugs, Black Elk is led by a "spirit guide" bird through a tunnel-like aperture in the sky and then upward into a UFO-like "flaming rainbow teepee." There he meets and communicates with a group of the other realm's sky-beings, which he describes as "wise grandfathers." 

At some point in many accounts, the shaman undergoes bodily dismemberment, a violent and traumatic process that is occasionally reported by abductees. During this bizarre event an otherworld entity removes every organ, bone, and even blood cell in the shaman's body. Then, after being cleansed and purified, the shaman's body and blood are replaced. (One of our supposedly real abductees had this experience, and Grof finds it frequently in memories of very difficult vaginal births.) Thus the shaman is physically and spiritually reborn -- that is, his fantasy/adventure in great part has parallels with perinatal memories -- and with renewed energies he finally returns to his people. Sometimes Black Elk came back riding on top of a little UFO-like cloud. 

The shaman's mythic, psychological journeys are as old as civilization, and so they belie the common assumption that abduction-like events are uniquely contemporary. DeMause cites a cave painting from c. 30,000 BC (Fig. 1-14), which proves the antiquity of the shaman/abductee analog. In the painting an entranced shaman wearing a ritualistic bird mask lies beside a spirit-guide bird atop a pole that symbolizes the cosmic pillar or mode of travel heavenward. The shaman even has the requisite penile erection that symbolizes his spiritual and physical revitalization and post-trance aftermath. 

The incredibly long history of shamanistic trance experiences is of major significance for a realistic - i.e., psychological, mythic, and perinatal -- interpretation of CE3 abduction claims. If there is a core abduction analog, it certainly has to be that of the shaman. The fact that shamans under various names among countless groups of peoples over millennia have practiced their craft so analogously is one of the great human cultural phenomena. It shows that the shaman filled an immeasurably deep need in human affairs. To the extent that modern CE3 abductions manifest the shamanistic tradition, they lay claim to some degree of enduring significance. But, unfortunately for True-Believers, the tradition is connected with fantasies, mythic creatures, and perinatal functions rather than aliens in physical vehicles from other worlds. 

The shaman/abductee parallels are obvious and extensive, and they indicate that the ancient shamanistic pattern or matrix has operated everywhere and always as an ongoing variable vehicle of myth. There were parallels in previous centuries with tricksters, demons, Satanic or saintly visitations, seductions by pixies or other "Little People." All these led to the contemporary technologically fashionable CE3 abduction version of the shaman's periodic fantasy visitation with members of a supernatural, non-human culture. 

The shaman's experience is ambivalent; that is, it appears to be personally threatening but it is also spiritually renewing. True-Believer abduction hypnotist John Mack and many abductees say that in the aftermath of their CE3s they, too, undergo personal growth or even attain spiritual transcendence. 

SHAMANS, THE ABDUCTION SEQUENCE, AND BIRTH But if the shaman's vision quest was the core analog for abductions, what is the origin of the shaman's transcendent experience? I believe that the earliest shamans looked within themselves, and found the core matrix for their sky-journey in perinatal memories. 

That the origins of Black Elk's vision quest are perinatal can be shown by a simplified symbolic comparison with parallels from a CE3 and a birth or perinatal sequence (P). Black Elk's "spirit-guide bird" is the UFO (Perinatally, it is time for a rebirth). Going through the "sky-tunnel" is entering the UFO doorway (P=cervical/vaginal passage). The "flaming rainbow teepee" is the UFO interior (P=the "big room" or womb). The "wise grandfathers" are other-world aliens (P=deliveryroom personnel, the mother). The "examination" for both shaman and abductee may be moral as well as physical, taking the form of tests of courage and honor (P=deliveryroom handling). The "message" is an offer of the values and wisdom of the elders/aliens, with a resultant spiritual renewal (P=the offered loving parental bond). Black Elk/the abductee accepts the values of the elders/aliens and returns, revitalized and transcendent (P=the acceptance of the bond). 

Our eight-segment version of the abduction sequence was simple enough for our Imaginaries to pretty much know where it was going next, because they routinely anticipated a subject area before McCall was ready to take them there. But several of our subjects seemed to be pushing us toward steps on the CE3 sequence that our downsized version had not included -- to the alien's "realm"; to a "life review"; toward some transcendent experience. We wondered how Imaginary subjects, who were presumably CE3-innocent, could possibly know the "way" so well. They seemed to possess intuitive knowledge of an abduction sequence they had never consciously experienced. 

We had often also wondered how Imaginary abductees could narrate a detailed CE3 experience, with many of the specifics that "real" abductees describe. Other ufologists -- those who didn't dismiss our study outright -- wondered, too. Some have maintained that the general outlines of an abduction are "in the air" so to speak -- in movies and TV films and cartoons, and in dozens of books, magazines, and comic-book versions of allegedly real CE3 cases. But such sources do not account well for data such as the general capacity of nearly any Imaginary abductee to spin a fully detailed CE3 yarn about any given segment of the abduction sequence. The origin of such "knowledge" must be innate, and it almost certainly has to relate to perinatal memories.

THE PERINATAL BRAIN: THE EMOTIONAL MEMORY The basic assumptions of the Birth Memories Hypothesis are supported by results from recent brain research. The matter is vastly complex and for our purposes a brief outline from a few sources will have to suffice. Lloyd deMause makes the case succinctly: 

Daniel Goleman writes of the central part played by the amygdala in the brain's emotional memory: 

Goleman discusses the effect of early life experiences on the amygdala's emotional memory system: 

Goleman thus implicitly concedes that the amygdala's emotional memory system is functional in pre-natal life, though his discussion completely avoids relevant fetal behavior. But he discusses Joseph LeDoux's work and ideas (The Emotional Brain, 1996) about the significance of early childhood experiences: 

Goleman's emphasis on "wordless blueprints," the non-verbal nature of emotional memories, is consistent with the seemingly typical absurdity and banality of alleged alien-human verbal and other communication, including the infamous "messages" to abductees. But the sometimes chaotic and otherwise intense feelings during CE3s (they need not all be negative, and his discussion grants that) are also consistent with the perinatally purposeful bonding experience, which is unmistakably intense and can be either positive or negative in the extreme. 

Joseph LeDoux has a relevant comment about the early period of life and what Freud termed "infantile amnesia" -- another way of referring to the "missing time" of the amygdala's perinatal emotional memory: 

Thus there is indeed an emotional memory in the brain that starts working from an early prenatal phase onward -- and comparatively long before the declarative memory of the hippocampus is operational. The emotional memory keeps a non-verbal record of events through delivery and full bonding (the end of the first year), to some point around age 3 or 4, by which time the developing normal brain, mind, and memory have taken over. 

These first few years of life (including the pre-natal phase) comprise the temporal context of perinatal memories. They also contain the matrix for the beginnings of human nature -- a truly archetypal experience stored largely in our emotional memory, and which our wilder fantasies may recall for us, whether as young children or as adults, or as grandparents. It is the great universal human matrix we all share -- so similar and yet unique for each person. Reduced to its essentials, it is a shamanistic journey from the comforts, stresses, and changes of pre-natal life to the terrors of birth and the emotional security of bonding love and developmental growth. 

Exposure to trauma -- or, as I believe, wild fantasies -- can revivify parts of the emotional memory of the "missing time" we all have in our past, which helps explain why there is so much birth imagery in sci-fi (actually fantasy) films. Examples: the mother monster in the Alien series that lays acres of eggs; the allegorical infant at the end of 2001; the house yards full of vaginal tunnels and umbilical tubes in the climactic scene of E.T. It occurs even in daily TV soap operas. And, of course, in CE3 abduction narratives.

THE PERINATAL MATRIX AND THE ABDUCTION SEQUENCE The abduction sequence itself is intuitively perinatal. The source of our Imaginary subjects' CE3 knowledge is the collective emotional memories of perinatal experience. It begins in the womb, then proceeds to the birth-struggle, which ends with a bright new realm where there are other beings. In this new world there are physical, developmental, and moral tests calling for courage, persistence, and love. As the new infant grows into a young child, his/her sensibility takes over from the amygdala's emotional contexts, and a consciousness that was formed early on continues developing. Good-womb and bad-womb memories remain, along with a variety of perinatal experiences that please or haunt the mind. 

If the neonate-parent bonding is good, then it is probably transcendentally good; and those peak-experience events will become part of the individual's good perinatal memories. If not, then there may be bad perinatal memories. There is a mix of communication, good feelings and bad ones, and always there is change. And what is true for the neonate is also true for the shaman, or an abductee. 

THE ABDUCTION SEQUENCE AS A PERINATAL STIMULUS It can be shown that the eight-step version of the abduction sequence we used in the Imaginary study helped stimulate perinatal data from our subjects. Each step contains perinatal potential because the entire sequence is a matrix based on birth experiences. The matrix was evident from the earliest human times in the shaman's vision quest, and it is currently manifest in CE3s. There is an order to the sequence, but within limits it is flexible and variable -- not immutably fixed, as some would have it. One may follow our eight steps in sequence and observe some (not all) of the perinatal connotations of one or another of our first four Imaginary abductees' responses: 

1. Subject sees UFO. All of our first four Imaginary subjects felt that the UFO was "watching" them, which suggests that they felt they were being observed for some purposeful end from the start -- an obvious analogy with the shaman's "spirit-guide bird," or the perinatal end-purpose of bonding. (Many "real" abductees feel "watched," too.) In addition, S #1 sees the placental disc hovering just overhead, and she hears it "purr" (she is reliving good-womb memories of placental/fetal comfort, and pacifying womb sounds). S #2's UFO is a flat disc (placental) when seen from outside, but it becomes womblike seen close-up or inside. Other subjects' UFOs have similar transformations. 

2. Subject boards UFO. Entering the UFO doorway is symbolically like birth or re-birth. All four of our Imaginary narratives confirm this, and hundreds of "real" ones do also. Two Imaginaries are sucked into the craft through body-tubes lowered to them by the UFO, through the solid bottom! Another has the UFO land on her, and it brings her up somehow through its solid floor. All of these "birth-entries" are cervical, vaginal, or both. 

3. The UFO interior. All of the Imaginaries described the interior as essentially a "big room," a perinatal echo of relief after vaginal compression. Subjects #1 and #3 were specific about the size (c. 30 feet in diameter). Subjects #2 and #4 described the interior as a womb-like chamber: one said the only way out is through the now "solid...bottom"; the other said the womblike walls curve up and close overhead. But even the womb-rooms are large, though darkness prevents #4 from estimating its size. Later, he senses sudden movements and inertial effects, as if remembering being in the womb, and experiencing the mother walking around. 

4. Entities. Whatever type of entity an abductee describes (human, animal, robot, exotic, etc.), an alien in the womb-like UFO is like a fetus in its maternal womb. As a result, there is a consistent identification between Imaginary/real subjects and the alien/fetus during all phases of the abduction, even when there are negative or indifferent "vibes" between them. This helps explain the usual ease with which "bonding" occurs between "real" witnesses and fetal aliens, and also why fetal humanoid and human type entities make up more than half of the reported entity types. Examples are provided by S #3's fetal humanoid and S#4's apparitional entity that shape-shifted itself (under RY's mental direction) into a fetal humanoid face and body. 

Stanislav Grof describes six types of entities in his revivified birth memories study that match very closely the six types I have described (see Realms of the Human Unconscious). Abductees of course are mostly adults who have learned even as young children about various types of entities, through literature and exposure to TV and film. They certainly know about animals, and also exotic beasts, robots, and ghostly apparitions. These classes of creatures are parts of the materials of human fantasy which adults gain from literature, folklore, and cultural tradition. 

It is not surprising that these creature types show up in entity reports in CE3s. It is significant, however, that all the known CE3 entities can be classified into one of the six categories -- and doubly so that no CE3 (that I know of, at least) contains an entity that can not be so classified. This means that there are no truly "alien" categories of entities in CE3 narratives. If abductions were actual events, we might expect at least one or two aliens to be creatures that have not been anticipated by Earthly folklore, science-fiction tales, or TV animated fantasies. The absence of such truly alien types in CE3 reports is persuasive evidence that the origins of CE3 entity descriptions are mundane -- they are from Earth and its cultural traditions, not from other worlds. (Entities will be discussed fully in a later section.) 

5. The examination. The Imaginary subject's examination is symbolically the neonate's post-natal deliveryroom handling; everything from probes of body orifices to bathing to blanketing. Subjects #2 JM and #3 EJ have the best exam segments because #1 and #4 were apparently blanked out by maternal drugs during that segment. Both JM and EJ described good head-to-foot perinatal exams. 

JM's body-probing exam is clearly a deliveryroom memory. Probes of the head (ear, eyes, nose, throat) and body are routine, though JM's body is probed by beams from the single huge eye of very odd-looking exotic aliens. JM also suffers leg paralysis, which occurs in Grof's birth struggle revivifications, but it may reflect the habit of snugly wrapping the neonate after the initial post-natal bath. When JM's entities suddenly stop probing and retract their beams, they stand back and stare at her face for a time, oddly. This should have been a ripe moment for the alien "stare" to suggest bonding to JM. But she is not interested in bonding with these bush-shaped, cyclopean creatures. 

EJ makes many references to perinatal imagery and processes in the course of probably the best examination segment in our Imaginary series. She goes through a series of events that have parallels with typical neonatal deliveryroom procedures: examination, probing, medication, foot printing, bath, blanketing, and bonding -- though her emotionless alien has no bonding appeal for her. The alien "leader" checks her heartbeat and takes blood with a needle on a vacuum tube. Her comment that his soft fingers are "kind of cold and clammy" suggests a memory of a doctor or nurse's rubber-gloved hand. The other entity checks her feet, toes, ankles, and legs (foot printing for ID?). EJ breathes into one tube and puts a saliva sample in another tube (umbilical parallels). The alien wipes sweat off her forehead and chest and collects it for analysis (bathing procedures). 

They take "just a little bit" of skin from her arm painlessly, using a machine, and they somehow suddenly stop the bleeding. The scar resembles a "scoop mark" that many "real" abductees claim they have; EJ had no actual marks of this kind. The leader alien feels her head, checking the bumps and its size. (The neonate's fontanels, or unfused skull areas, are normally checked carefully.) EJ's emotions are edgy but controlled all through her session, but she loses it when they take a fluoroscope of her body that lights up her genital area -- and understandably so.

EJ's exam account is painfully honest and her emotional involvement is real. We know that her exam wasn't a part of an actual abduction, yet her emotional memories, like JM's, seem consistent with a neonate's emotionally stressful experiences in the deliveryroom. 

6. Message. Communication is the essence here, and the banal content of all CE3 messages implies that what is being communicated is not verbal and intellectual but emotional and symbolic. In perinatal terms it is an offer of bonding love by a symbolic parent figure (the alien). Subject #1, RM, accepted and was led into feelings of deep joy. ("Bonding" is one of John Mack's primary concepts, for he sees it as his abductees' doorway to transcendent fulfillment.) I suspect that a "good" or "bad" bonding with aliens implies a similar quality of bonding in our subjects' own perinatal history, although that of course was unverified. If so, it is sobering that only one of the four subjects (RM) achieved a clearly positive bond. 

7. Return. Perinatally, if all goes well, the return means a return to the mother, with the neonate's acceptance of the offered bond of love. Bonding is not passive, however, but active; some infants do not feel comfortable with the mother right away; and sadly, some mothers feel the same about their baby. It often takes time and work by both parent and infant before there can be a mutually acceptable bond. A positive experience with bonding leads S#1 RM to what may be a revivified memory of an emotional "peak experience." Two other Imaginaries are turned off by emotionless or repulsive entities. S#4 is given a bonding task that leaves him feeling ambivalent. 

8. Aftermath. Subjects depart from their CE3 carrying the emotional baggage of the memory of a positive or negative bonding experience. A failed bonding can be as momentous a personal memory as a good one. Perhaps it is the aliens' connection with the bonding experience that makes the fantasy of alien confrontation such an unforgettable and extraordinary event for witnesses. A good or bad bonding may be the most intense aspect of birth (or a CE3 fantasy) in memory. RM feels transcendent about her experience. JM is convinced that no one will believe her, and because she has never before hallucinated such things she asks herself -- was this CE3 Imaginary or not? Though EJ was disturbed by her exam, and the emotional emptiness of her entity let her drift into indifference, overall the CE3 seemed "fascinating" to her. RY followed a directive to pass an encoded bar to someone predestined to get it, but while he was proud to have played a part in a mystery, it was less than fulfilling. 

RESISTANCE TO PERINATAL IDEAS Many others besides True-Believers will disagree with some or all of my ideas about perinatal data and CE3s. But the simple truth is, there is no interpretation of CE3 abduction fantasies that is more viable than our theory of perinatal processes -- from the aliens' fetal appearance to birth imagery and bonding events. 

What meaning can there be to a body-tube dropping down from a UFO's bottom and sucking a subject inside -- except as a rehearsal of human birth and/or its associations? Why do any aliens at all resemble a human fetus if not to show that CE3s are Earthly and human events -- not alien? And why does human bonding play such a large part in even the ET-True-Believers' belief system, if not to tell us that the focus is on human, not alien, relationships? 

CE3 perinatal processes are interpreted by True-Believer investigators as alien genetic experimentation. But it can not be genetics because there is never any talk of the actual bio-technologies that would be involved. No medical labs with the equivalent of electron microscopes; no cellular splicing; no molecular intrusions; no gene identification techniques; no molecule-capable video viewing screens to help explain it all to the "victims" -- those who have often given their sperm or eggs without so much as a thank-you, let alone a decent orgasm (or so they say!). And afterwards, there is never any hospital, doctor, or other human medical verification of the supposed victims' claims of births, miscarriages, interrupted pregnancies, etc. Not a single verification of any "alien genetics" claims in all these years! Nada! 

The genetics explanation for the perinatal data in CE3s doesn't wash. It is a dream-world version of what the technology of human/alien hybridization would be like if someone with no scientific experience or knowledge described it all -- vague, generalized, and at times resembling a scene from ER, maybe, but not persuasively so. It is like the futile attempts at descriptions of alien technology from our Imaginaries: "electronic-type stuff" and "consoles and things," etc. Genetic experiments are highly technological processes that witnesses cannot describe because they never actually see them, so they have to fabricate them, and they are not good at it.

The Birth Memories Hypothesis asserts that CE3 abductions are fantasies; proponents say they are physical events. Here the BMH has a great advantage in terms of validation, for the BMH does not need the same kind of physical evidence that the alien genetics theory and the ETH do -- they need a real live alien, or its physical traces. The BMH can be tested (that is, falsified) very simply, in one of several ways. One of these is by finding a fully developed abduction case narrative that does not have perinatal imagery or processes in it. I am convinced that no such case exists. (I will discuss other tests for the BMH in Section 2.) 

BIRTH MEMORIES ARE EVERYWHERE, & THUS MEANINGLESS? One objection I have heard repeatedly about the Birth Memories Hypothesis is that birth images are everywhere, and therefore they are too omnipresent to have meaning. But perinatal details are not everywhere. They are excluded from vast areas of non-fiction prose (two-thirds of any library!); most technical and/or scientific writing; most of the world's everyday work in business, manufacturing, transportation, journalism, medicine, and TV news, weather, and documentaries -- none of these ordinarily have a hint of birth (or of fantasy). 

Perinatal imagery flourishes only where people are fantasizing. And since we don't spend all our time in fantasies, many areas of human endeavor are birth-image free. But when we start thinking discursively about our hopes, fears, disappointments, our possible future, our past, and especially our childhood -- then we become fantasizers; and we utilize perinatal imagery in our fantasizing. 

Even if perinatal symbols are widespread, it does not follow that they are recognized and understood. Birth imagery and processes were staring me in the face in the form of CE3 narratives for four years before I began to understand what they were and a little of how they worked. New disciplines like neonatology and fetology have sprung up only in the past few decades. Technologies such as ultrasound and computer-aided visualizers for monitoring the fetus have been developed comparatively recently -- largely because there was felt to be a need to understand and comprehend early human development. 

What such developments suggest is that that birth and perinatal memories have played a much larger role in human psychology and culture than we have realized. That is progress. If we also find that what were thought to be alien abductions are perinatal fantasies, that is progress, too, though maybe not so much fun. But we won't know for sure unless we look into it. That is why I do what I do. 

TOWARD A REPLICATION OF THE IMAGINARY STUDY Some critics have dismissed our Imaginary Abductee study in part because our subjects failed to give birth to hybrid offspring or fly to other realms or whatever. We feel we would have obtained verification of our ideas with almost any protocol, but this objection is silly. We could have added an additional eight to ten steps to our protocol, or regressed some of our subjects 30 times, as David Jacobs says he has -- and our Imaginaries surely would have gone to other realms, seen a birth laboratory in a vast room on the UFO, or whatever. But such alternatives would have made our 16 hypnosis sessions (each one already an hour and a half long) unworkably lengthy, and would have collected only another batch of familiar CE3 narrative patterns -- and redundantly plentiful perinatal imagery. 

We made our point twenty years ago, with a eight-item protocol. Anything more, given our successful results, would have been overkill. Some will disagree. But few things in this world are as certain as that no new and enlarged version of Imaginary Abductee transcripts will ever satisfy or convert the True-Believers! 

Some will complain that I did not include enough hypnosis transcripts, as if these four excellent examples have not effectively proved that we need a replication of the study by independent researchers. Others will object that I have not included with the Imaginary group the "real" case transcripts, with analyses, and commentaries. Three of the "real" transcripts are copyrighted materials so permissions would be required, but I don't think my analyses of them are necessary for an understanding of the Imaginary study. Anyway, I discuss the cases at length in later sections. Again, the full texts of the Betty Hill and Sandy Larson cases are referenced and available, and the Judy Kendall case will be included in a later section of this series. Elaine Thomas is deceased, and permissions regarding her narrative are unclear. But surely I have met objections fairly by using a total of twelve "real" cases in my comparison averages, certainly an adequate sampling. 

VII. FOUR IMAGINARY TRANSCRIPTS, ANALYZED AND CRITIQUED 

This section includes the complete transcripts of the first four of our sixteen Imaginary Abductees, given full PTA analyses and segment-by-segment critiques. The Imaginary results revolutionized our abduction research perspectives, for we found that the similarities between Imaginary and real CE3s were extensive and subtly mysterious, and we felt increasingly that they gave us reason to be very skeptical of abduction claims. We write currently as informed skeptics. Even the most zealous proponents, if they take the study seriously, should be surprised and troubled by the pattern parallels in Imaginary/real CE3s. We do not claim to have completely fathomed the perinatal, archetypal, and psychological implications of Imaginary/real CE3s and their analogs. We are happy about what we have found, but there is an ocean of remaining enigmas for future researchers. 

PERINATAL TRANSCRIPT ANALYSIS (PTA) We begin with an informative application of Perinatal Transcript Analysis, which we use to quantify pattern parallels and a variety of other matters across ten data categories between Imaginary and "real" narratives. PTA analysis requires a familiarity with many CE3 narratives and UFO sighting reports. Also, it needs a sound comprehension of the perinatal revivification research and observations by psychoanalyst Stanislav Grof (Realms.of the Human Unconscious, 1975), and the work of Psychohistorian Lloyd DeMause (Foundations of Psychohistory (1982) and selected essays from The Journal of Psychohistory), and other perinatal specialists. 

A proper analysis of a CE3 narrative utilizes informed and practiced skills along with subjective judgments; thus PTA is both science and craft. The difficulties vary. Our Imaginary transcripts were orderly and mostly clear and so were easier to analyze, but "real" CE3 transcripts are another matter: their repetition, digressions, lack of clarity, and occasional fragmentary nature often makes accurate analysis difficult or impossible. 

In an attempt to demonstrate the reliability of PTA analysis, I chose a famous prose passage that has absolutely nothing to do with UFOs -- Lincoln's Gettysburg Address -- and analyzed it by the same methodology and standards I applied to CE3 transcripts. I wanted to show that pattern data similarities in Imaginary/real narratives were neither accidental nor illusory. I also wanted to show that birth imagery can be found in unexpected places. (Underlined passages relate to one or more PTA categories.) 

 
PTA CATEGORIES -- 
1:PATTERN  2:POSSIBLE PATTERN  3:NO PATTERN  4:STRANGENESS 
5:SUBJECT BIAS  6:POSSIBLE PSI  7:SUBJECT EMOTION  P:PERINATAL DATA 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
 P 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 
| | | | | | | | |
|2| | | | |1|1| | Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth 
|P| | | | |2| |1|on this continent, a new nation, conceived in 
| | | |1| |2| | |liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are 
|P| | |1| |1| |1|created equal.
| | | | | |2| | | Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether 
|P| | | | |3| |1|that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, 
| |1| | | |2| | |can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that
| | | | | |3| | |war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a
| |1| | | |2| | |final resting-place for those who here gave their lives so that
| | | |1| |2| | |nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper 
| | | | | | | | |that we should do this.
| | | | | |1| | | But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate -- we 
| |1| | | |3| | |cannot consecrate -- we cannot hallow -- this ground. The 
|P| | | | |3|1|1|brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have 
| |1| |1| |2| | |consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. 
| | | |1| |2|1| | The world will little note, nor long remember, 
| | | |1| |2| | |what we say here, but it can never forget what they did 
| | | | | |2| | |here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated 
| | | |1| |2| | |here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have
| |1| |1| |2| | |thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here
| | | |1| |1| | |dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that 
| | | |1| |2| | |from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that 
| |1| |1| |2| | |cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion;
| | | |1| |2| | |that we here highly resolve that these dead shall
| |1| |2| |2| | |not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall 
|P| | | | |2| |1|have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the 
| |1| | | |3| | |people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish
| | | | | | |1| |from the earth.
 

As can be seen in Fig. 1-16, most of the transcript analysis is negatively responsive to Lincoln's text, and that is at least a mild-mannered validation of the PTA methodology. It should be no surprise that the average differential between Lincoln and Imaginary/real narrative averages is 18.58 points, and its graph profile is vastly dissimilar. Lincoln's brief wartime speech has a significant "birth" content, which may seem odd, but in that respect it is consistent with many rhetorical responses to the very high fantasy-level subject of war (discussed in Section 2 to come). "Patterns" are non-existent except for perinatal parallels. Two analytical categories have zero details, and the crucial #3 "No Pattern" column is nearly off the scale. Only one near-match occurs, in #7: Subject Emotion (.29), and the solemn occasion and emotional subject matter easily explain that. Category #5: Subject Bias is higher than both CE3 averages because, after all, Lincoln's eloquent and idealistic speech is nevertheless a polemical and militaristic call to arms amidst a bloody civil war that killed over half a million people, most of them young men such as those being mourned.  

WHY DO WE SEE BIRTH IMAGERY IN CE3s? A natural question: why do we see perinatal images and processes in abduction narratives? In response, we repeat that certain types of fantasy activities such as sci-fi films, TV soap operas, Rock music videos, and narratives about wildly imaginative subjects (such as CE3s) -- all contain or stimulate perinatal imagery. It is difficult to find a full-blown sci-fi film that lacks birth imagery -- because in part most such films contain less sci-fi than fantasy. And when people in fiction, drama, film -- or real life -- fantasize in larger-than-life or otherwise uninhibited ways, birth-related matters emerge more or less naturally.

Because (as we believe) CE3s are narrative records of fantasies, it is impossible to find a fully developed abduction transcript (Imaginary or real) that doesn't display significant amounts of perinatal language and incidents. We have established an average of 17 - 21% of all significant imagery in such narratives to be perinatal, ranging from a low of 11% to a high of 24%.

Most of our Imaginary subjects were symbolically "reborn" inside their UFO, and the adventures they have there are evidently influenced by their birth histories. For example, the apparent facts are that two of our Imaginaries (S#1, RM and S#4, RY) show what seems to be the post-natal effects of maternal anesthetics. Their "alien examination" segments, which mirror the period just after birth with the deliveryroom examination and bath, were severely underdeveloped. An anesthetized mother's child stays sedated for hours after birth. Neither Imaginary subject even tried to describe the normal "head-to-foot" exam procedure, and their entire exam segments rambled.

Both subjects use the term "drugged" to describe their explicit memories of how they felt before recovering. RM says, "It seems like I've been asleep -- or drugged." At the end of his exam segment, RY asserts, "I don't feel drugged anymore." These and their other comments provide real evidence of actual maternal drug-caused sedation, and the probability of perinatal memories related to those conditions.

Why do we see perinatal images and processes in abduction narratives? We see them because they are there -- though not always in the form of such gratuitously obvious perinatal data as these "drugged" Imaginary subjects. Along with scores of other good birth-related images and processes in our four Imaginary narratives, the incidents from the two anesthetized witnesses have helped in a special way to validate the Birth Memories Hypothesis of CE3 abductions. 

PTA IDENTIFICATION OF PERINATAL DATA The way the Perinatal Transcript Analysis system identifies perinatal language, images, and events in a CE3 narrative is to look for birth-related particulars, some of which are listed in the abduction sequence (see Fig. 1-11), the series of events that structure CE3s. These include any suggestions of events relating to the perinatal period in an infant's life, when the amygdala's "emotional memory" stores the only record the mind has of these times. Events include embryonic development, fetal life, delivery, the bonding period (to the end of the first year), and developmental processes of the period up to the age of 3 or 4 when the conscious mind and memory are sufficiently functional to supplant the amygdala.

A particularly rich source of perinatal imagery is available in the work of Stanislav Grof, who used hallucinogenic drugs to aid in the revivification of birth memories in a variety of patients. Grof has collected over 30 specific birth-related images and processes that are interesting to me because I found the identical images and processes in Imaginary and "real" CE3 transcripts -- most of them numerous times. If you wish to learn about perinatal functions and abduction narratives, read Grof (Realms...). (Or read my Section 2, which discusses Grof along with the BMH.)

Any mention of Grofian imagery, or any of the following in a CE3 narrative is considered perinatal, and is accordingly marked in the PTA sidebar. (I include no pathological or other abnormal medical conditions here. Nor is this listing necessarily a complete compilation.) Again, a sampling of perinatal phrases and conditions:

Also, body imagery and movements such as the allegedly real abductee who said she had to twist her shoulders 90 degrees in order to enter a small UFO doorway -- a clear reference to fetal rotation during birth (and, incidentally, there is no "doorway amnesia" there at all!). (See Druffel and Rogo, The Tujunga Canyon Contacts (1980), pp. 47-48.) There are of course many perinatal echoes in CE3 transcripts that have sidebar marks because of the narrative context or related matters. 

"MISSING TIME" IN IMAG/REAL CE3s There are many Imaginary/real narrative parallels, but the concept of missing time has become the best known. Perinatal mechanisms may be responsible for "missing time" events in both Imaginary and real CE3s, for there are at least three sources of amnesia or unconsciousness in perinatal processes. These are: 1) The release of the chemical oxytocin, at the peak point of delivery, may induce unconsciousness or amnesia in the fetus/neonate. 2) Anesthetics released into the maternal system before or during delivery may affect the fetus, and therefore the completeness or accuracy of birth memory recollection. Some of these drugs may induce (accidentally or by design) amnesia in mother, infant, or both. 3) The "emotional memory," a pre-conscious emotional record of embryonic/fetal, natal, and later events that researchers are convinced is centered in an area of the brain called the amygdala. The emotional memory is gradually supplanted by the declarative memory system, centered in the hippocampus, by the age of 3 or 4. This "amygdala amnesia" is the largest blank period in birth memories, and so it is the best candidate for explaining some aspects of the illusion of "missing time."

In older children and adults, the emotional memory is not normally available to rational consciousness, but is thought to emerge usually through body memories or trauma. This helps explain why periods of "missing time" connect with actual traumatic events, or imagined ones such as a CE3. The contents of the emotional memory -- whatever else is stored there -- would certainly include major and minor perinatal details from before, during, and after birth. Anything that stimulates this storehouse of memory would produce some birth-related data. I believe that certain types of wild fantasizing, such as that characteristic of Imaginary/real CE3 narratives do indeed stimulate the emotional memory. That helps explain why perinatal language is so abundant in abductions and similarly uninhibited fantasies.

The "hidden" nature of the amygdala's emotional memory may relate to the ease with which alleged abductees "forget" parts or wholes of their supposed CE3s. The data from the emotional memory usually need some traumatic or other unusual stimulus to be made accessible. Such memories may be inherently difficult to keep in normal consciousness, at least until the subject grows comfortable with them after trauma or hypnotic recall. Thus the amygdala's perinatal functions may help explain the phenomenon of "missing time."

There is no reason to assume that the amygdala's emotional memories are not accurate, since they are mostly inaccessible to normal discursive thought processes, and, one can assume, thus immune from routine biases that afflict our regular memories. On the other hand, once they become a part of the regular memory system, they are as vulnerable as any other common memory to bias, inaccuracies, and more. Caution is always the best policy when evaluating any recollections.

PERINATAL SYMBOLISM: A WORD TO THE LITERAL-MINDED While reading these comments, the transcripts, and the critiques, skeptical and proponent readers alike should keep in mind that -- like any other symbolism -- perinatal symbolism is best interpreted not literally but liberally. Words are fluid and flexible things, and can have more than one perinatal meaning. For example, a UFO is placental, and also womb-like; and it may be a "big room" as well. A subject may enter or leave a UFO's doorway, and be "reborn" either way! (It is the passageway and the passing through that are significant.) And perinatal events do not necessarily happen in chronological birth order; a witness can have head and chest pain, or umbilical distress, at any time. Birth memories are probably recalled and operate on dreamtime, because they originate not in the conscious mind, but in the emotional memory, the apparent source of all perinatal recollections.