The last few days, I've done a number of hypnosis sessions that turned out much differently than expected. In a number of cases, I hadn't planned for them to be close encounter regressions, but in several, they turned out to be just that. In all of these cases, I knew that the person was interested in UFOs, as that's the context in which they found and hired me. So it's entirely unsurprising that there would be CE4 material lurking underneath the surface. Yet in most cases, the person had little or no overt indication of CE4 activity.
In more than one such case over the last little while, quite plainly put, the person has turned out to be an extensive experiencer. They have had a lifetime of encounters buried beneath the surface of their awareness and appear to have been a focus of the phenomenon. In most cases, they were largely unaware of this.
In at least one case, the person involved had had only a couple of events in their life. In each case like this, it appears someone they knew was an experiencer and apparently, they were what I would call "collateral" experiencers.
In a third category, the person turned out to have seen entities, apparently doing something not involving the witness. In many cases like this, the witness tends to be at least somewhat of a psychic/sensitive, and thus, they may be able to see through the veil. I wonder if in cases like this, the witness was able to see the Visitors nearby, possibly a glimpse of someone else's encounter.
In each of these cases, of course, there is only the anecdotal account of the event. Most of these events happened many years ago and any potential evidence has long since been lost or degraded by time. In addition, the people involved were interested in UFOs and thus had had many years of exposure to material on abduction in the media. Yet in each case, I asked some of the 'check' questions which CE4 researchers keep in their hip pockets. And in each case, the person passed the test. If they were making it up, they did a damn good job of it.
Of course, the other possible hypothesis is more metaphysical; perhaps there is a field-consciousness or psychic group-think effect associated with any given group social group or thought movement. The more people think and feel in a similar way, the more the members experience this group mind-field, eventually resulting in a critical mass of like-minds linking together. The mind-field, in turn might reinforce the person's own consciousness, showing up as archetypal thoughts, metaphors, ideas, etc. And during hypnotic regression, perhaps they show up as experiences. This is one possible null hypothesis for the spate of abduction events, though it makes them no less real to the experiencer. In each case, fear can be just as deeply felt and in such cases healing is needed just as much as if the beings were physical aliens in physical spacecraft.
The Jungian paradigm simply makes them even more extraordinary. In fact, such a Jungian archetypal or mind-field effect might even be more interesting than a nuts-and-bolts alien presence. It would teach us far more about the reality of the world we live in. And further, it does not mean that the Visitors are not real - it only means that the effect of a critical mass of close encounters might just take a parapsychological life of its own.
On a related note, I recently read the book, The Alien Abduction Survival Guide by Michelle LaVigne-Wedel. The book has some very interesting points. However in it, she pretty much tends to 'side with' the aliens. The author describes how she actually consults with her alien 'teacher,' a being named Hatar - of which I was a bit skeptical. However in a larger sense, what she suggests tends to be a relatively healthy approach to the Visitor phenomenon. In short, it is one of acceptance and cooperation, forgiveness and healing. Many experiencers (though certainly not all) have found this to be a useful approach.
Though she does not specifically say so, Wedel appears to take the viewpoint that these are physical events, and they are largely benevolent. Even though they certainly don't seem very benevolent to experiencers at many times during their abductee 'careers,' in the end they are somehow 'for our own good'. This is definitely one school of thought, though there are many other points of view that are far less positive. When I read the reviews of her book on Amazon, I found that there were two distinct reviews - the 5-star reviews, very supportive, and the 1-star reviews, harshly critical of her ideas. In short, I think that nearly any viewpoint on the phenomenon will probably have a host of experiencers identifying with it.
Another thing Wedel describes is the different classes of experiencers - the collateral experiencers [my term, CL], the 'in and out' experiencers who have 'quick' medical procedures done than are returned to their homes, and the 'extensive' experiencers who are deeply involved in the phenomenon. These groupings do not include the contactees and other groups who are involved in the phenomenon in very different ways. For the moment, I'm only talking about abduction events. Still, the resemblance between what Wedel described, and what I noticed in the last several encounter narratives were striking. In these cases, the 'collateral' or 'single event' encounter, the 'quickie' and the 'extensive' experiences seemed to be quite clearly defined, pretty much as Wedel described.
In many cases, I think the literature is reinforcing what I have found, or vice-versa. Yet in other cases, what I have found is very different indeed. As I describe in The Cosmic Bridge, there are a large number of 'nonstandard' cases that don't seem to fit any mold, while there are others with varying degrees of conformance to what I call the 'standard model' of close encounters. And in the case of the events surfacing in the last few weeks, I think I have again seen this spectrum of conformity. Many appear to be closely conforming, falling into the categories I described above. Yet others, like the 'ten-tentacled creature from Andromeda' that I described in The Cosmic Bridge, some seem to fly in the face of the standard alien-abduction model.
Each case gives me pause for reflection. Each case is another data point, another pixel in our picture of the phenomenon. Like always, I find that picture confusing - lately perhaps more confusing than ever. Yet distinct, if shifting, patterns seem to emerge. Whether they are illusory clumps in what is really random data, or whether they truly represent a pattern, I think we still need to sort out. Still, the large number of people that appear to be remembering their encounters gives me encouragement.
Hypnotic regression will probably never tell us how the alien warp drive works, and it will probably never even tell us whether the events are physical, metaphysical or something else entirely. But I believe they will tell us increasingly more about the nature of the phenomenon that lurks in the shadows of our experience. Each encounter narrative brings us closer to some form of understanding, each providing us with a few more glimpses of the extraordinary.
