Alien Abductions In Sci-Fi

With Halloween around the corner I've been rewatching some of the scariest films I remember from my childhood about the alien abduction phenomenon. I shared my thoughts about these films on Facebook and thought those social media posts were thoughtful enough to record on this blog.

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INTRUDERS

Tonight’s film is ‘Intruders’ based on the late Budd Hopkins’ book about cases of alleged alien abduction. It is terrifying because it is based on experiences that people actually believe happened to them… and I’ve got no reason to disbelieve them… though it raises complex questions about what the word “real” actually means… can something exist without being physical, and therefore not have to obey the normal laws of physics that govern the physical universe? Is there a non-physical world that has its own separate laws? Are these alien abductions an example of these two linked but separate realities colliding? Is human consciousness a kind of bridge allowing this? These are some of the questions I will be considering as I take a look at some of the films and classic literature in this sub genre of UFOlogy.

Watch it HERE.

THE UFO INCIDENT

Next up on my Alien Abduction filmography list is ‘The UFO Incident’, a 1975 television film based on the bestselling book ‘The Interrupted Journey’ written by John G. Fuller. It documented the Betty and Barney Hill alien abduction case, the first widely publicised UFO close encounter of the fourth kind.

While I believe that the accounts of alien abduction experiencers are legitimate because of the large numbers of witnesses experiencing the same thing. The large numbers, perhaps as many as 5% of the population are alleged to be abductees, also makes me question if this is a physical phenomenon or not. In other words do these accounts of alien abduction represent “nuts and bolts metallic spacecraft” piloted by “flesh and blood” alien beings who have travelled to Earth from another planet in the physical universe, or, is something else happening? 

The lack of physical evidence had led me to conclude that although “real” in the sense that the experiences were not delusions or imaginary, that alien abductions must be a paranornal or non-physical phenomenon? In other words that a real external intelligence is interacting with human consciousness but no one is physically taken onboard an alien spacecraft. That alien abductions have more to do with ghosts and demons than extraterrestrials was my conclusion.

However the Hill abduction makes me want to rethink this conclusion for two reasons. One the famous “Star Map” Betty Hill recalled being shown onboard the UFO, which she drew and was discovered after years of research to (potentionally) match the postions of real stars, Zeta I and II Reticuli. 

The second reason is the dress Betty was wearing on the night of the alleged  alien abduction. Betty claimed under hypnosis that a large needle was inserted into her stomach, according to the alien beings this was a pregnancy test. Stains on the dress Betty was wearing in the region where the needle was allegedly inserted is evidence that something physical happened to the Hills.

Whatever the phenomenon of alien abductions represents, it appears to be able to move between the physical world and the metaphysical world in a similar way to how we can travel between land and sea.

One last note. Even if you are sceptical about alien abductions, ‘The UFO Incident’ is an excellent film, telling a very real love story. It would just as easily be a good choice for a Valentine’s film as a Halloween film and stars James Earl Jones (Voice of Darth Vader) who just recently passed away. 

Watch it HERE.

COMMUNION 

Probably the first Alien Abduction film I ever saw. I remember my dad having an audio book of the original book written by Whitley Strieber, read by Planet of the Apes actor Rodney McDowell, this was probably the first time I was ever scared by something being read from a book. 

Watching the film again and having recently read the new edition of the book, it is clear to me that the encounters are not always (if ever) in the physical world. Instead they occurred in a dreamworld. But these are no ordinary dreams as they have a real physical impact such as injuries. Also other witnesses report having similair experiences in the 1980s before series like the X-Files popularised stories of alien abductions. 

SETI are currently looking for radio signals from extraterrestrials in far away solar systems. Perhaps we are receiving messages from them, but not in the form of radio signals. What if the aliens can communicate via sending signals directly into the human mind? Perhaps using human imagination and expectations based on our folklore and popular culture to take form in dreams. Perhaps even using the human nervous system to create sensations like pain that can cause physical injury.

Watch it HERE.

Listen to the audio book HERE.

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT 

Perhaps the best ancient astronaut film. Before Erich von Däniken wrote Chariots of the Gods and popularised the idea that ancient aliens visited Earth in the past, Nigel Kneale got there first in Quatermass and the Pit. Originally a six part television series on the BBC it was later remade as a film by Hammer Studios and given the title “Five Million Years To Earth” for its American release.

While not an Alien Abduction film, the backstory is that ancient aliens abducted primitive apemen five million years ago, experimented on them to increase intelligence and the result were early humans. 

Ridley Scott referenced this film in the film commentary on the blu ray release of Prometheus, an ancient astronaut film that borrows far more ideas form Nigel Kneale’s script than the books of Erich von Däniken. The 3D holograms seen in the Engineer spaceship in Prometheus echoing a scene in Quatermass and the Pit where a “ghost” is seen by a soldier (offscreen) in the alien spaceship.

Considering that there are nearby stars which are much older than sun, it is possible that intelligent life evolved on planets orbiting these stars milllions of years before life started on Earth. Statistically it is more likely that aliens could have visited Earth in the remote past and gaps/leaps in mankind’s decelpment from apes to modern humans could be explained by alien engineers experimenting with human DNA. We are currently splicing DNA from plants and animals together. So why not? After all, until Charles Dawin’s Theory of Evolution the accepted explanation for most of human history for mankind’s existence was that the “Gods”, which became “God” in the later monotheist religions, created humans in their own image. So the concept that beings from the sky/stars created mankind is actualy an ancient one. 

RONEY: Quatermass - it’s a pentacle.

QUATERMASS: What? 

RONEY: Those marks. One of the ancient cabalistic signs. They were used in ancient magic(k).

From ‘Quatermass and The Pit’ (BBC, 1958-59). Later remade and adapted into ‘Five Million Years To Earth’ (Hammer Films, 1967)

DOCTOR WHO - THE DAEMONS

Doctor Who’s unofficial remake of Nigel Kneale’s ‘Quatermass and the Pit’ and my personal favourite Doctor Who story. I think this must have been my first exposure to the Ancient Astronaut Theory that Ancient Aliens have been helping humans develop for the last 100,000 years or more.

Perhaps the most interesting concept borrowed by the Doctor Who writers from Nigel Kneale’s script is the concept that Magick (yes with a “k” on the end to differentiate the real power to manipulate reality from magic, which is simply a conjuring trick) could be developed into an advanced  science with practical applications.

Eyewitness accounts of odd symbols resembling Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs on wreckage/debris from alleged UFO crashes like the one at Roswell in 1947 are well known inside the UFO field. What if instead of writing these were occult symbols? What if instead of using physics to travel through space the aliens have developed an alternative science based originally on what we would call magick? 

Chemistry is an example of a science that began as a pseudo science. The treating of illnesses with magical potions. This was the beginning of treating illnesses with specific drugs to remedy a particular disease or other health problem. 

There is a certain amount of theatrics involved with cases of alien abductions. Why would the aliens want to scare the people they are abducting? The aliens should be capable of tranquillising the subjects of their experiments, so that they would have no distress or memory at all of anything happening. The way we do with animals, for instance, if a large and dangerous zoo animal needed to be seen by a vet.

It is widely believed in paranormal research circles that poltergeists feed off human fear and anger, and that the best thing to do if you are experience such a haunting is to simply ignore it until the poltergeist runs out of energy effectively. Could the aliens seen in abductions be using similar paranormal energies generated by negative human emotion to travel between different dimensions? Perhaps a non-physical realm where the laws of physics do not apply, making interstellar travel possible?

One last thought … it is suggestive that the alleged covert group set up by the US Government to study the alleged UFO wreckage found at Roswell in 1947 was called Majestic 12 … as in Magic or Magick 12. 

HAWTHORNE: Oh, you could go on all day and all night showing us pretty pictures. I mean, horns have been a symbol of power ever since

DOCTOR: Ever since man began? Exactly. But why? All right, Captain Yates, the curtains. Now creatures like those have been seen over and over again throughout the history of man, and man has turned them into myths, gods or devils, but they're neither. They are, in fact, creatures from another world.

BENTON: Do you mean like the Axons and the Cybermen?

DOCTOR: Precisely, only far, far older and immeasurably more dangerous.

JO: And they came here in spaceships like that tiny one up at the barrow?

DOCTOR: That's right. They're Daemons from the planet Daemos, which is?

JO: Sixty thousand light years away on the other side of the galaxy.

DOCTOR: And they first came to Earth nearly one hundred thousand years ago.

From ‘Doctor Who: The Daemons’ (BBC, 1971)

FIRE IN THE SKY

Probably the scariest of the Alien Abduction films, ‘Fire In the Sky’ is based on the alleged (the other witnesses passed lie detector tests) experiences of Travis Walton as described in his book ‘The Walton Experience’. If not for this case I would probably separate cases of alleged alien abduction and the UFO sightings into two distinct and separate types of phenomena, one involving “nuts and bolts” physically real but unknown aircraft. And the other real only in that it involves something (possibly intelligent) external affecting (possibly communicating) with the human mind. In the case of the latter, whatever it is using popular culture, folklore and religious beliefs to construct a lucid dream so real that it can cause physical injury on the experiencer.

…However, unfortunately it isn’t that easy to separate UFO sightings and alien abductions, and Travis Walton’s experience perhaps best documents why.

Walton was seen being struck by an energy beam from a UFO by multiple witnesses. It was clearly a physical object not a dream or hallucination. 

Perhaps then the UFO occupants can choose between many different communication channels to make contact with humans, much in the same way we decide between having a face to face meeting, or making a phone call or arranging a Microsoft Teams or Skype meeting. The only difference being that the UFO occupants can use consciousness itself as a communication channel when face to face encounters are not necessary or possible. 

Watch Joe Rogan interview Travis Walton HERE.

ROSWELL

Docudrama about Major (Later Lieutenant Colonel) Jesse Marcel, who in 1947 was the Intelligence Officer for the 509th Composite Group (509 CG), a bomb group of the United States Army tasked with the operational deployment of nuclear weapons. And in 1947 still the only such operational group at that time. It was the 509th that conducted the atomic bombings in Japan that ended the Second World War. Let that sink in for a moment. This group was about as elite and as important to defence as it possibly gets. 

Now consider this … it was the Major Jesse Marcel who as the Intelligence Officer of the 509th was the first army officer to investigate an alleged “Flying Disk” crash in Roswell, New Mexico in July 1947. And after seeing the wreckage confirmed it was wreckage from a flying saucer. This story was then realised to the press and went viral around the world, including the major British newspapers like The Times!

… Then the next day… the United States Army apologised and said it was all a big mistake… it was just a weather balloon. How anyone could possibly believe that someone with the background and position Marcel had could possibly make such a mistake boggles the mind. The story becomes even more ludicrous when you realise th at following this alleged mistake of comic proportions Marcel was promoted. It just doesn’t make any sense.

About 30 years later Marcel and dying, he finally broke his silence and confirmed it was not a weather ballon. It was what he originally said a “flying saucer”, a term which since 1947 had become synonymous with alien spacecraft. And the United States Army was forced to admit that the weather balloon story was indeed just a cover story as Marcel claimed. The new official account was that what was recovered was a giant sized, high altitude Mogal survaliance balloon, part of a top secret project to spy on Russia and determining if that had developed their own Atomic Bomb (which they finally did two years later in 1949). For me this still doesn’t make sense. A balloon is a balloon, no matter how big or top secret it is. I think I was about ten when I first heard this story in the 1990s, since then the offical story has just grown even more hard to believe. Nonsense about 6ft tall crash test dummies from the 1950s being confused with child sized dead aliens seem in the 1940s. Now people from a military town can’t tell the difference between dummies and dead aliens? 

I don’t believe it. I’ll believe Marcel.  Just think about logically, if it wasn’t for the implications, I don’t think anyone could possibly believe the ballon story.

Watch it HERE.

ALIEN

My favourite film. On the documentary that accompanies the DVD realease, the director Ridley Scott explains that the complex lifecycle of the Alien creature was based on real parasitic wasps, who inject their embryos into caterpillars which paralysis their host until the lava are ready to burst out. Combined with the “used future” look that Ridley Scott borrowed from the writer Dan O'Bannon’s first film ‘Dark Star’, the complex life circle of the alien gives the film a sense of realism lacked in the B movie space monster films of the 1950s that ‘Alien’ owes much of it’s film DNA to.

Another seed of reality that would go I noticed by most filmgoers in 1979 was the location of the alien planet in the film, Zeta II Reticuli system. The same star system where the humanoid “grey” aliens responsible for the Betty and Barney Hill abduction in the 1960s allegedly originated from.

Weirdly, the life circle of the fictional alien in the film in some ways echoes the bizarre reproductive experiments reported by alleged alien abductees under hypnosis in the real world. These experiments involve the hybridisation of humans with aliens, using human women as incubators before the unborn hybrid is removed and finishes gestating in an artificial womb onboard a UFO. Such bizarre stories are easily the most fringe and controversial aspect in an already fringe enough topic… but the stories are consistent.

Assuming these stories reflect something that is a physical reality and are not an attempt to communicate using symbolism via visions and dreams, what do these accounts potentially tell us about the greys and their motives for abducting people? 

Could it be that like the fictional alien in the Ridley Scott film, the greys can only reproduce by fusing their own DNA with that of another species and using this other species as a host to gestate their offspring? 

Zeta II Reticuli system is estimated to be twice as old as our own sun. Any potential life originating from there then, could potentially be twice as old as life on Earth, which could include intelligent life. Any intelligent life that left their home planet millions of years ago could possibly evolve to make hybridisation with other species possible. It would be the fastest way to adapt to the environment of a new planet and also avoid the fate of the Martians in HG well’s novel ‘The War of the Worlds’, where the Martians all died from exposure to Earth’s microbes that they had no immunity to. 

THE FOURTH KIND

The Fourth Kind is a disturbing film to watch, but very interesting. If aliens are travelling from other solar systems to Earth, it is impossible for them to be coming in nuts and bolts spacecraft travelling slower than the speed of light. UFOs are seen too often and seem to be reacting to current events on Earth too quickly. For example the first Atomic Bomb was detonated in 1945 and within two years in the same region flying saucers turn up, seemingly investigating our nuclear weapon tests. If these objects came from another solar system they would need to be at least approx 4 light years away. Meaning it would take a radio signal at least that time to reach our nearest neighbouring solar system. Then travelling at light speed take another four years to get to Earth. That’s eight years total. As UFOs were being seen in 1947 (and earlier) in the American Southwest and were seemingly interested in nuclear weapons, it would seem to indicate they could send signals and travel faster than light to get here two years after the first Atomic Bomb test.

While travelling faster than light is impossible in our physical universe, other universes could potentially have different laws of physics that allow objects to travel faster than light.

So if such a parallel universe existed it could be used as a kind of cosmic motorway. The only problem is how could an object travel between parallel universes?

Arthur C. Clarke famously said: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Could aliens be using what we would call magick (yes with a “k” to differentiate real magick from fake magic conjuring tricks) to open portals into other dimensions? This might sound absurd, but a lightbulb would appear to be magical to someone who had no knowledge of electricity. I’m only suggesting that there might be something to magick which could potentially be developed into another science one day. Perhaps a science of the Mind or Consciouness. 

With this in mind it is interesting that one of the aspects of real world alien abduction mythology which is highlighted in the film is the phenomenon of alleged screen memories. These are distorted memories of real events subtly altered either by the sub consciouness mind to make the memories accessible without driving someone insane, or, perhaps artificially altered by the aliens encountered during abductions to hide their activities. Put simply instead of remembering an alien, abductees remember other mundane things instead in their place. In the film the aliens are replaced in the memories of the protagonist by an owl, something which is widespread in real abduction accounts. Which is interesting because the owl has long been an important symbol in ancient religions. The owl was associated with the Ancient Greek godess of wisdom Athena. And even today owls are still allegedly ‘worshiped’ in outlandish rituals by the quasi secret group the Bohemian Club.

It could simply be that the large black eyes of owls lend the creatures to being good standins for the black eyed grey aliens mostly associated with abductions. But an alternative explanation could be that owl and other esoteric symbolism is somehow being used to generate somekind of energy or power (for lack of a better similarly as this psychic power may not  be energy in the scientific sense of the word that can be measured) which is used to phase in and out of our physical universe in ways we don’t yet understand.

In 2000 Guardian newspaper journalist Jon Ronson and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones secretly filmed the “Cremation of Care” mid summer ceremony conducted at the secretive Bohemian Grove. Watch The Secret Rulers of the World - episode 2 which was shown on Channel 4 HERE.

Author of the New Book ‘The Abominable Snowman of California' Dustin Severs on Modern Bigfoot Myth vs Historical Sasquatch Legend

I always thought it was weird that the words “Bigfoot” and “Sasquatch” are never mentioned once in the Hammer Horror film The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas.

It was realised in 1957. Of course, after I read Dustin Savers excellent narrative history book about the early years of Bigfoot research The Abominable Snowman of California, it made perfect sense. Not only the term “Bigfoot” but its possible connection to the Himalayan Yeti weren’t really made until 1958. I know there are accounts dating to before 1958,  particularly in Native American folklore, but it made me wonder how much of what we think of as being part of Bigfoot lore today, do we owe to the Yeti myth? 

Would our concept of what Bigfoot is be different if there were not stories in the 1950s media about the Yeti?

Would the modern idea of Bigfoot be closer to the Native American mythology? If there is a real Bigfoot could it be very different to the one of popular culture that emerged after 1958?

I liaised with Dustin Severs with these questions and below is his thoughtful reply…

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Dustin Severs: My take on the connection between Bigfoot and the Yeti are summed up in the title of the book: TheAbominable Snowman of California. My thesis is basically that Bigfoot was an appropriation or rip off of the Yeti, and that’s the argument I present in the introduction. Given the popularity of the Yeti in the 1950s, I think that an American version of the Yeti was inevitable, and so we got Bigfoot. The Sasquatch legend is independent from both the Yeti and Bigfoot, and also had a significant impact on Bigfoot’s arrival. I think you can draw a straight line between René Dahinden’s arrival in British Columbia and the Centennial Sasquatch hunt of 1957 and Bigfoot’s arrival in Northern California the next year. As I write in the book, the Sasquatch were always considered Wildmen, a tribe of giant Indians. So, Bigfoot was thought to be a Wildman too throughout what I call the classic period. It was the Patterson-Gimlin Film that changed the perception of Bigfoot to a giant ape rather than a Wildman, which is what John Green had long argued.

The Seventies was THE decade for Bigfoot. The Legend of Boggy Creek from 1972 had a big impact. But the real watershed moment was the CBS documentary Monsters! Mysteries or Myth? which aired Thanksgiving weekend 1974 and was watched by about 60 million people. Yep, TV drew those kind of numbers before cable and the internet.

Zoological Journalist - Richard Freeman, Considers the Question: Is Bigfoot A Man, Another Ape, An Unknown species of Bear, or All of the Above?

...And we're back!

During my long hiatus from updating this blog, I have become increasingly fascinated by accounts of the Himalayan Yeti and North American Sasquatch, often called Bigfoot because of the large humanlike footprints of these mystery animals or 'wild men' leave in the forests of North America, and the wild, remote mountains of Asia. 

Roger Patterson with Bigfoot print cast from 1967

  Yeti footprint taken by Himalayan mountaineer Eric Shipton in 1951

Yeti footprint taken by Himalayan mountaineer Steve Berry in 2016
(Lost Kingdom of the Yeti, 2018)

Although the name 'Bigfoot' was not coined by newspapers until the 1950s, the phenomenon of an ape-like wild man living in the forests and mountains had been recorded in the storytelling cultures of different Himalayan peoples and Native American tribes for centuries. How could it be possible that two almost identical legends could develop independently from one another, separated by vast oceans in complete isolation, with a traceable lineage that extends over centuries? 

Further, if there are no native ape species in America; how is it possible then that Native Americans seem to have appeared to have known what an ape looked like before contact with European-American settlers? 

At the very least this would suggest that something resembling an ape must have been known to the ancestors of modern Native Americans. Could this be a race memory from the time before the Native Americans arrived on the American continent, presumably from Asia where the Yeti dwells? 

After combing YouTube for every documentary I could find, and joining Kindle Unlimited to read up on what Arthur C. Clarke called in his popular 1970s series Mysterious  World, "The Missing Apemen", I had more questions than answers.

Back in 2009, I had the privilege of asking Zoological Journalist, Richard Freeman, a few questions about his Cryptozoology research into mystery animals not yet accepted to exist by the scientific establishment. This was Freeman's response when I asked him about the Yeti:

The yeti, possibly a surviving form of the giant ape Gigantopithecus blacki that lived in China and India 500,000 years ago. Hair has been analysed in the UK, USA and China. The results were the same: unknown primate.

The full Q&A text interview can still be found HERE. Over a decade on, I decided to get back in touch with Richard Freeman to see if he had any thoughts on some of the questions I had. It would take a book for anyone to answer all of my questions, so in our email correspondence we focused on the following topics for discussion:

Is Bigfoot an ape more closely related to known apes? Or is it an offshoot of earlier forms of humans that survived into modern times? Is it a bear, an ape, a man, or three different creatures including all of these?

What are the similarities and differences between the footprints found in Asia and North America? 

The Patterson-Gimlin film. What is the best evidence it is real?

The famous Yeti scalp that was was found to be a fake. Is it possible it could be a form of clothing worn by real Yetis? 

Below is Richard Freeman's full, informative and thoughtful reply to my questions.

Richard Freeman

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Orang Pendek drawing from the documentary The X Creatures
(BBC/Discovery, 1998)

There is more than one type of mystery primate around the world. Some of these, like the Orang pendek, seem to be undiscovered species of ape. Others like the Almasty seem to be relic hominins - relations of the ancestors of man. The long and short of it is that we do not know for sure until we get a type specimen. 

We found hair near Orang pendek tracks in Sumatra. These were analyzed by Lars Thomas, an expert in animal hair based at Copenhagen University. He concluded that they were similar too but distinct from the Sumatran orangutan. Lars concluded that there is a large, unknown species of primate on Sumatra. I think this is the fourth extant species of orangutan. 

Startling new evidence for the Yeti has emerged recently. TV vet and naturalist Mark Evens, formally a Yeti skeptic, took an expedition into the mountains of Bhutan to make a documentary called Lost Kingdom of the Yeti. Water was taken from a pool in the mountains where the Yeti had been reported. From this environmental DNA was taken. Known as eDNA for short, this consists of traces of DNA an organism leaves in the environment. It is a relatively new development and could prove an invaluable tool for cryptozoology as the techniques for extracting traces of eDNA improve. Back in the lab the eDNA from the water was tested and several known species were discovered but there was also anomalous DNA. It came from a primate that shared 99% of its DNA with humans. Chimps share 98%. Whatever left that eDNA at the drinking hole was something unknown to science and closely related to man.

Dr Eva Bellmaine and Mark Evans discuss eDNA testing (Lost Kingdom of the Yeti, 2018)

I contacted Dr Eva Bellmaine, the French geneticist involved in the project. She confirmed the details and said that the samples were being held by a French company called Spygen. I contacted Spygen in order to see if we could conduct further tests. Spygen said that they were not the legal owners of the sample and later claimed it had been destroyed.

Some have suggested that it is nothing more than a bear. Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner claimed in his 2000 book My Search for The Yeti that the creature was nothing more than a brown bear. This is curious as on previous occasions he had claimed to have seen the Yeti and described it as a primate-type animal.

I once interviewed the actor Brian Blessed, a renowned explorer, and mountaineer himself, for a long-defunct and not very good magazine called Quest. Blessed, who is a friend of Messner, said that he had told him of his encounter with a Yeti. Blessed said that Messner had walked around some rocks and came "face to face" with the creature. He said it was not a bear, was 7 feet tall, man-like, and stood erect.

There are other occasions when Messner’s descriptions sound precious little like a bear. Julian Champkin of the Daily Mail wrote on August 16th, 1997, that Messner has:

…encountered the Yeti; and not once, but four times, once close enough to touch it. More importantly, he claims to have photographs of the creature, including a mother Yeti tending her child, and a Yeti skeleton.

 

Needless to say, none of his pictures have been forthcoming. Messner goes on to be quoted in the newspaper article to claim:

“...I searched for a week, 12 hours a day, in an area with no trees,” he says. “I didn't expect to find one so soon. First, we saw a mother with her child. I could only take a photograph from the back. The child had bright red fur, the older animal's fur was black. She was over two meters tall, with dark hair, just like the legend. When they saw us they disappeared.”

Two days later, he claimed to have come across and filmed a sleeping Yeti. The film is just as noticeable as the photos by its absence.

In an article relating to the BBC’s Natural World documentary on the Yeti, Messner describes seeing one from a range of 30 meters in Southern Tibet. The article says Messner is sure it is some kind of primate. He describes it in the article thus:

It was bigger than me, quite hairy and strong, dark brown-black hair falling over his eyes. He stood on two legs and immediately I thought he corresponds to the descriptions I heard from Sherpas and Tibetans.

So why did Messner write a book trying to explain away the Yeti as a bear when this transparently was not the creature he claimed to have seen? Was it because of fear of ridicule? And what became of the photos and film? Was Messner trying to take the focus away from these or make them seem less important by saying the yeti was just a bear? Could this be because the film and photos did not exist?

Sherpas become angry when Westerners say that the Yeti is just a bear, and quite rightly. The animal they pick repeatedly as looking most like the yeti is the gorilla but walking on two legs rather than four. The Yeti has a flat, ape-like face. The Yeti walks almost constantly on two legs. The Yeti can manipulate things with its hands and hence must have opposable thumbs. It is said to sometimes hurl large rocks and swing clubs. Bears have none of the above features. The Yeti is clearly some kind of primate, most likely a great ape. Until he delivers the goods, I’m inclined to dismiss Messner’s claims.

The term ‘Yeti’ is applied to three different creatures. The Dzu-teh is a hulking biped eight to ten feet tall with dark hair. It leaves massive, manlike footprints. 

The Mi-teh is more man-sized and moves both bipedally and on all fours. It has reddish hair and leaves tracks that have a divergent big toe. 

The smallest type, around four feet tall is known as the Teh-lma and has light brown to yellowish hair. The creatures have many regional names and are reported from the Himalayas, Tibet, China, Malaysia, and India.

The Dzu-teh seems identical to the North American Sasquatch. It may have crossed over the land bridge between Asia and North America during the ice age. The prime candidate for this larger kind is a massive ape from the fossil record known as Gigantopithecus blacki. This creature is known only from its massive fossil teeth and jaws. The fossil teeth were first found in a Chinese apothecary shop in 1935 by Dutch paleontologist Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald. They were being sold as 'dragon's teeth'. Koenigswald recognized them as the molars of a titanic ape. Post-cranial remains have never been found but extrapolating from the size of the teeth and jaws Gigantopithecus may have stood ten feet tall and weighed 1300lb. The flaring of the lower jaws made Grover Krantz and Jeff Meldrum conclude that the neck extended directly under the creature's head meaning that it walked upright on two legs.

Pitting and wear patterns on the teeth of Gigantopithecus suggest a fibrous diet similar to that of the giant panda. The creature probably fed on bamboo, but fossil seeds found lodged between the teeth prove that it also fed on fruit. Gigantopithecus fossils have been found in China, Vietnam, and India. It was a hugely successful primate species existing for over two million years before becoming extinct 100,000 years ago due to climate change. However, some think that the animal simply retreated into the mountain forests and still exists today.

Another theory holds that the Yeti is some huge relic hominin.

The Yeti is not white. Its hair ranges from reddish to brown to black. In all my years of research, I have only come across two reports that give the Yeti white hair. The confusion comes from a mistranslation of one of the beast's many names, Metoh-kangmi, Sino-Tibetan for 'abominable man of the rocks'. It was mistranslated as 'abominable man of the snows. This is where we get the western term ‘Abominable Snowman’ from. It is also where the false idea of a white, snow-dwelling beast comes from. Above the snowline, there is little for a large primate to eat. The lush forests in the lower valleys make much more sense for a Yeti habitat. The term ‘Yeti’ is Tibetan for 'rock beast'.

The witnesses I spoke to in the Garo Hills in Northern India described the Yeti, known there as 'Mande barung', described it as ten feet tall and looking like a huge, upright gorilla.

The wild men of the former USSR, Mongolia, and Central Asia sound much more man-like than the hulking Yetis of Tibet, the Himalayas, and north India. The Russians took them so seriously that they even had an official Snowman Commission to investigate the creatures. At the time it was thought that they may be a relic form of Neanderthal. Since then, however, we have discovered that Neanderthals looked very much like us. It has been said that if you washed and shaved a Neanderthal and put him in modern clothes, he could walk down the street in any major city without raising anybody's eyebrows. Sure, he may look somewhat ugly by our standards, but he would clearly be human. Neanderthals used fire, made sophisticated tools and clothes, and may have even had a concept of religion and an afterlife. They sometimes buried their dead with grave goods. This is clearly not what we are dealing with here.

It is more likely that the wild men reported today are an offshoot of a much more primitive species of hominin. In recent years both fossil, sub-fossil and genetic evidence has unearthed many new species of human relatives. We know that Neanderthals interbred with modern humans. The genomes of all non-African people contain 1.5-4 % Neanderthal DNA.

In March of 2010, a tiny fragment of finger bone was found in the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains. The bone was so well preserved that the whole genome was intact within it. It turned out to be from a new species of archaic human that have since been named the Denisovans. Only fragments of this species have been discovered - the finger bone, a toe bone, and two teeth - so the appearance of the Denisovans is unknown. However, they interbred with both Neanderthals and modern humans. Between 4 and 6% of the genome of Melanesians (people from New Guinea and the surrounding islands) is inherited from the Denisovans.

Some hominins are suggested not by any fossil remains but by genetic markers on populations of modern man. As well as Denisovan DNA Melanesians appear to have inherited DNA from another hominin currently unknown from the fossil record. Yet another unknown archaic hominin appears to have left genetic material in the populations of sub-Saharan Africans.

In 2003, some sub-fossil remains were found in the Liang Bua cave on the island of Flores in Indonesia. The remains were of a tiny species of hominin that were named Homo floresiensis. The remains were dated to around 50,000 years ago. The creatures would have stood no more than three feet, seven inches tall. The remains were found with stone tools and weapons as well as evidence of fire making. They seemed to have hunted giant rodents and pygmy elephants that lived on the island.

Homo floresiensis was thought to be a dwarf island form of Homo Erectus, the hominin that was the ancestor of not only modern humans but Neanderthals, Denisovians, Homo heidelbergensis, and Homo antecessor. More recent examination of the remains however showed that they were more closely related to Homo habilis a more primitive hominin that has never been recorded outside of Africa and died out some 1,5 million years ago. So, Homo floresiensis not only half a world away from where it should have been but also nearly one and a half million years out of time. It also begs the question “what else is out there?”

TV Naturalist Mark Evens compared with the height of Homo floresiensis (Yeti: Myth, Man or Beast, 2016)

More recently, two, as yet un-named species of hominin dating to only ten thousand years ago (an eye blink in evolutionary terms) have been unearthed at Red Deer Cave in southwest China. They seem also to have affinities to Homo habilis. It seems that Homo habilis may have had its own lineage outside of Africa alongside Homo erectus.

As for the Patterson-Gimlin film, I will share my own thoughts, looking at the film through the eyes of a natural historian.

Firstly, the creature is a female, with visible breasts. If you were going to fake a film of bigfoot by using a tall man in an ape suit, where in the equation would you think of adding large hairy breasts? Such an artifact would make the costume more expensive and harder to create. In known ape species, the females have fairly flat breasts. Human females have rounded breasts as a counterbalance to the large buttocks. Humans are bipeds and walk upright. The gluteal muscles keep the body level when the legs are lifted. Human female pelvic girdles are broad in order to accommodate the birth canal. Hence the buttocks of human females are larger and more rounded than males. Great apes are knuckle walkers and move on all fours, ergo they lack developed buttock muscles and the pendulous breasts that counterbalance them. A hypothetical upright walking female ape would have rounded buttocks and breasts. The creature in the Patterson-Gimlin film possesses both of these. 

Secondly, the creature turns its head sideways and the viewer can clearly see a thick brow ridge and a forehead that slopes away at an angle to make a cone-shaped head somewhat like that of a gorilla. Fossil hominins display this same acutely sloping forehead above a thick brow ridge. The human forehead rises up directly above the brow. If the creature in the film was a man in a suit his human head would not fit into a mask with such a sloping forehead, there simply would not be enough room unless the mask was very oversized like some kind of carnival headpiece which it is clearly not.

Thirdly, the limb and body proportions of the creature are non-human. The torso is longer than a human's and the hip proportionately lower. The arms are 10% longer than a human's. The upper legs are longer than a human’s and the lower part is shorter. Even if you could make such a convincing costume, you could not get a human to fit into it. The arm and leg joints cannot be made to line up. Muscles can clearly be seen moving under the hair. In short, the subject in the film is not a man in a costume. 

 

And then we have the footprints. Jimmy Chillcutt a crime scene investigator and latent fingerprint examiner from the Conroe, Texas Police Department has taken fingerprints of many primates in zoos. He has examined many of the sasquatch print casts in the collection of Jeff Meldrum. He has found dermal ridges that lay parallel to the edge of the feet. 

The ridge flow pattern and the texture was completely different from anything I've ever seen. It certainly wasn't human, and of no known primate that I've examined. The print ridges flowed lengthwise along the foot, unlike human prints, which flow across. The texture of the ridges was about twice the thickness of a human, which indicated that this animal has a real thick skin.

The Yeti scalp from Nepal was an artifact made from the skin of a serow, a type of wild goat. However, it is thought that the monks used it in rituals where they dressed up as the Yeti. 

Khumjung's famous Yeti scalp (The X Creatures, 1998)

There are no reports of yeti wearing clothes. Their thick fur would give them ample protection and they are forest dwellers and not creatures of the eternal snows of the mountain peaks.

The sasquatch has on rare occasions been seen wearing human clothes. It seems they had stolen the clothes and put them on for amusement. Known apes and monkeys have been recorded as doing this. The Russian Almasty is said to sometimes do the same thing.

Big thanks to Richard Freeman for doing this!

Please visit his Amazon Author Page where you can find all of his books.

Visit The Centre for Fortean Zoology to find out more about Richard Freeman's Cryptozoology work: cfz.org.uk

Adam Davies (Monster Quest) answers some questions about the similarities 

between the Himalayan Yeti and North American Bigfoot.

A Room 101 Interview with Andrew May – Author of ‘Conspiracy History’

In his new book Conspiracy History – A History of the World for Conspiracy Theorists, Andrew May shows how conspiracy theories have been used to explain important political events long before the JFK assassination, going back as far as the time of Ancient Egypt. 

  

ROOM 101: In the first chapter you start by defining the term conspiracy theory; why do you think so many people associate the term with the paranormal when conspiracies have been a regular occurrence throughout history? 

  

ANDREW MAY: That’s a good question! I hadn’t really thought about it before, but I guess part of the answer is there’s a big overlap in the readership of the two subjects. People who are interested in conspiracies are also often interested in the paranormal. They’re people who don’t automatically believe what they’re told – people who are always questioning authority. The media slaps the “crackpot” label on both interests, but there’s an important difference. Paranormal phenomena, whether or not they’re real, have a big problem in that they conflict with well-established laws of physics. But conspiracies are completely consistent with the laws of human nature. That’s why the same types of conspiracy recur over and over again throughout history.

   

ROOM 101: It is often said that the JFK assassination was the event that gave birth to the widespread belief in conspiracy theories in the United States, however, it could be argued there is a conspiracy theory in the US constitution. The Second Amendment guarantees Americans the right to “keep and bear arms” as a safeguard against the government turning tyrannical. Any thoughts on this? 

   

ANDREW MAY: I’m not sure I would put it quite like that. When the Second Amendment was formulated, the idea of democracy was very new, and people must have seen it as very fragile. Most of the world at that time was controlled by a small number of powerful monarchies and empires. There must have been a real fear that the US could revert to that situation. But your question reminds me of something I was just reading about – Gödel’s Loophole. Kurt Gödel was a 20th-century mathematician, who was famous as a logical thinker – some people say he was the greatest logician in history. At one point he claimed to have discovered a logical flaw in the Constitution that would allow the US to become a tyrannical dictatorship. But no one knows what his argument was – he never wrote it down! 

   

ROOM 101: Why do you think in recent years with films like V For Vendetta the image of Guy Fawkes has become a symbol for many people who believe in conspiracy theories? 

   

ANDREW MAY: I think it largely came about as an accident, although it’s a very neat one. I’m a big fan of Guy Fawkes – the real historical character – so I love the way he’s now seen as a hero instead of a villain. As I say in the book, he may have been the victim of a government conspiracy himself. People think of him as an anarchist, because he tried to blow up Parliament. “The last man to enter Parliament with honest intentions” – I think that’s a great phrase. But really Fawkes wasn’t an anarchist at all – he just wanted a better deal for Catholics at a time of extreme religious intolerance.

   

ROOM 101: In chapter two you write about false flag operations like “Operation Northwoods” the Pentagon’s insane plan to create a pretext for war with Castro by staging attacks on the United States and blaming Cuba. Is it too much of a leap of faith from this to question the official history of the events surrounding the JFK assassination or 9/11 as many conspiracy writers do? 

   

ANDREW MAY: The answer to this one is a definite “yes and no”! Yes, the Operation Northwoods document proves the US is prepared to mount a false flag operation in order to achieve its objectives. But I’m doubtful whether they’re competent enough to pull off a really large-scale operation successfully. As you say, Operation Northwoods itself was a pretty crazy idea. An earlier operation against Cuba, the Bay of Pigs invasion – which was effectively a false flag operation in its own right – was a complete disaster. A double disaster, in fact – the invasion failed, and the world knew right away that the US was behind it. So, I’m skeptical that they could have pulled off 9/11 all by themselves. On the other hand, I’m sure the Bush administration turned a blind eye to warnings of a big attack because they thought they could use it as an excuse to invade Iraq.

    

ROOM 101: Do you see any parallels between the Lincoln assassination and the JFK assassination a century later? 

   

ANDREW MAY: Well, there are a lot of parallels between the two assassinations, but I’ll focus on aspects that are of particular interest in the context of conspiracy theories. To start with, both assassinations happened in the wake of massive crises – the Civil War in the case of Lincoln, and the Cuban Missile Crisis in Kennedy’s case. Predictably, the official view places the blame on the obvious “enemy” of the day. We’re told that a small group of disenfranchised southern rebels was responsible for the plot against Lincoln, while a pro-Cuban communist sympathizer acted alone against Kennedy. But when you look at the evidence more closely, it makes more sense for the brains behind both attacks to be people who were supposedly on the same side as the victims. They had far more to gain from an assassination than the “enemy” did. 

   

ROOM 101: What do you think of the widespread belief within conspiracy research circles that the Illuminati pre-dates 1776 and continues to exist today? Is it a simple way to explain a complex and rapidly changing world, or is there an element of truth to the idea of a secret group steering, if not controlling exactly, world events behind the political and financial scenes? 

   

ANDREW MAY: The book discusses over 70 historical conspiracies, spread over a period of thousands of years, but they all have one important thing in common. The people behind the conspiracy wanted to see results right away, in their own lifetime. That’s even true of the Bavarian Illuminati, who may have been behind the French Revolution. I find it difficult to believe in long-term conspiracies that require many generations before they come to fruition – that’s simply not the way human nature works. On the other hand, history has a way of repeating itself, so Illuminati-like groups do crop up again and again. Some of them may even adopt the name Illuminati, but I don’t believe they’re doggedly following the same agenda century after century. 

  

ROOM 101: Are there any controversial conspiracy theories that you think could be true? 

   

ANDREW MAY: In a way, the very essence of a good conspiracy theory is that it “could be true” – that’s why they have such appeal. Conspiracy theories usually fit all the known facts just as well as the conventional narrative does. The key question is whether the conspiracy theory is MORE LIKELY than the conventional view. The most obvious case where this is true is the JFK assassination. The idea that it was simply the work of a lone gunman – an attack out of the blue, which took the authorities completely by surprise – is almost impossible to believe. There are at least a dozen conspiracy theories that are more likely than that! 

   

ROOM 101: Thanks for doing the interview. Where can readers buy Conspiracy History and your other books? 

  

ANDREW MAY: The book is published in Britain by Bretwalda Books. The paperback should be available from all good booksellers in the UK, and through online retailers such as Amazon in other countries. There’s also a Kindle version, which may be easier for people outside the UK to get hold of.

READ RICHARD'S ROOM 101 COLUMN FOR BINNALL OF AMERICA

Radio Replay - 27th July 2014

 
Could ghosts be 3D psychic recordings? 

 

Are humans the descendants of apes genetically modified by ancient astronauts? 

 

Was the Rendlesham Forest incident really a mind control experiment? 

 

Just some of the topics touched on in this interesting discussion.

Nigel Kneale - Richard's Room 101

Born on the Isle of Man, Nigel Kneale was a writer active in television, film, radio drama, and prose fiction. He wrote professionally for over fifty years and was, in many ways, the father of serious science-fiction drama on television. Kneale’s most famous creation is the legendary Professor Bernard Quatermass, a heroic rocket scientist who saved humanity from a range of very different alien menaces in a trilogy of stories written by the Manx writer in the 1950s. 

   

The trilogy began with The Quatermass Experiment, in which the first-ever manned space rocket returns to Earth with two of the three astronauts on board missing and the third possessed by some kind of hostile alien organism. In time, this organism consumes and changes the last astronaut into something horrific: a creature that threatens to possess and consume all other life on Earth. However, Quatermass confronts the monster and, with a moving speech, reaches what is left of his friend's humanity, persuading him to sacrifice himself to save the rest of mankind.

   

In the next story, Quatermass II, the professor is asked to examine strange meteorite showers falling in rural England. His investigations lead to him discovering a vast conspiracy involving alien infiltration at the highest levels of the British Government. Somehow these aliens, who have a group consciousness similar to the Borg in Star Trek, can control the minds of people exposed to an alien parasite concealed in their meteorite-like projectiles. The aliens plan to colonise the Earth, but Quatermass manages to stop them by destroying their asteroid base in orbit, very sadly losing his close friend and colleague Dr. Pugh in the process. 

    

Finally, in the best and last story of the 1950s trilogy, Quatermass and the Pit, Quatermass becomes involved in the discovery of a strange object near some apemen remains that are millions of years old, at an archaeological dig in Knightsbridge, London. The odd object is first thought to be an unexploded World War II bomb, but then more apemen remains are found mysteriously inside the back of the object and later, more disturbingly, the decaying bodies of dead insect-like creatures are found inside the front. The object turns out to be a nuclear-powered spaceship, five million years old, the creatures: Martians and the apemen: their creations … us … the human race.

  

In the story, we learn that when Mars was dying, the ancient Martians had tried to create a colony on Earth by proxy. They altered mankind’s early ancestors, giving them minds and abilities like their own, but with a body adapted to Earth. More worryingly, they also passed on to mankind their genocidal instincts to destroy anyone different from themselves. In effect, making us the Martians now. Fortunately, the Martians died out before completing their plan, and, as humankind bred and further evolved, most outgrew their darker Martian inheritance.

  

Unfortunately, somehow the spaceship reawakens the old Martian instincts, transforming more and more people into genocidal Martians on a race purge, destroying anyone unaffected by the ship’s evil influence. However, Quatermass finds a way to stop the ethnic cleansing before the Martians turn the Earth into a second dead planet. He also tragically loses another friend in doing so.

  

   

  

In each of the three Quatermass stories, Kneale managed to tap into the popular interests and, more importantly, anxieties of the time. In The Quatermass Experiment, he played on the mass interest in the early space race and the new threat of nuclear war. The UK conducted the earliest post-war tests of captured Nazi V-2 rockets in Operation Backfire, less than six months after the war in Europe ended, and the development of a British launch system to carry a nuclear device started in 1950. So there was a real fear that one of these rockets could come falling out of the sky bringing with it destruction, as one does in The Quatermass Experiment. Then, in Quatermass II, before Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Kneale exploited the popular paranoia about the threat of communist infiltration and subversion of the West. Like nuclear war, this was a real fear at the time. For instance, in 1951, two members of the British establishment, Burgess and Maclean, had made international headlines by very publicly defecting to the Soviet Union. And, finally, with the Notting Hill race riots of 1958 still very much fresh in peoples' minds, Kneale wrote Quatermass and the Pit admittedly as a fable about race hate.

  

Kneale’s Quatermass trilogy clearly had a huge impact that continues to be felt even today, influencing everyone from Chris Carter to Gene Roddenberry. The Quatermass Experiment (1953) was the very first science fiction production to be written especially for an adult television audience and cleared the way for the many others that followed it. Also, the three basic alien invasion storylines were first pioneered on television by Kneale in the Quatermass stories. In The Quatermass Experiment, we go to the aliens and bring them back, in Quatermass II the aliens come to us, and in Quatermass and the Pit, we discover that the aliens were here all along.

  

But it would be a mistake to think that Nigel Kneale only wrote stories involving alien possession and invasion. An excellent example of this is The Abominable Snowman, a 1957 Hammer horror film based on Kneale’s own BBC television play The Creature. Again tapping into popular interest at the time, the film follows the exploits of an English anthropologist with an American expedition as they search the Himalayas for the legendary Yeti, the apemen of Tibet. In the real world, speculation about the existence of an unidentified creature living in the Himalayas had been sparked off in November 1951, when Eric Shipton and Michael Ward of the Everest Reconnaissance Expedition found several large footprints as they traversed the Menlung Glacier, and, two years later, Edmund Hillary made a similar discovery during his historic conquest of Mount Everest.

   

In the film, Kneale turns perceptions on their head by suggesting that the so-called Abominable Snowman is not so abominable at all and, perhaps, even a great deal better than mankind who turn out to be the real monsters. The central idea being that the Yeti are our collateral descendants from the apes and are patiently and peacefully waiting for mankind to destroy himself, either quickly through war or slowly through pollution, before descending from the mountains to inherit the Earth. 

  

Another excellent example is The Stone Tape, a Christmas ghost story from 1972 and Kneale’s last major original work for the BBC. Like Quatermass and the Pit before it (which suggested that poltergeist activity could be explained by the psychic abilities left to us by the Martians), The Stone Tape combined science fiction with the supernatural. The television play revolves around a group of scientists who move into a new research facility: an allegedly haunted Victorian mansion. Curious, they investigate the alleged ghost but soon determine that it is really just some kind of recording of a past event somehow stored by stone in one of the rooms (the stone tape of the title). Believing that this discovery may lead to the development of a whole new recording medium, which they were originally brought together to find in the first place, they throw all their knowledge and high-tech equipment into trying to find a means of playing back the stone tape recording at will. However, their investigations only serve to unleash a far older and more malevolent force, with tragic consequences. Of course, The Stone Tape is where “the stone tape theory” familiar to many paranormal researchers today originates. 

   

Kneale also wrote three excellent dystopian texts, a fourth Quatermass story The Quatermass Conclusion, a 1954 television adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four for the BBC, and The Year of the Sex Olympics. It is the last of these that proved to be the most prophetic. Broadcast in 1968 The Year of the Sex Olympics seemed to accurately predict the creation of reality TV in the 1990s.

 

Set “sooner than you think” in the TV play society is divided between “low-drives” that receive no education and “hi-drives” who control the government and media. The low drives are controlled by a constant broadcast of pornography that the hi-drives believe will pacify them. But after the accidental death of a protester during the Sex Olympics gets a massive audience response, the authorities create a new TV programme, The Live Life Show. In the new show, a family is moved to a remote Scottish island while the low-drive audience watches. 

   

Hopefully, this goes some way to answering the question of who Nigel Kneale was. Of all the great science fiction writers to emerge from these islands since World War II, including the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, perhaps only Nigel Kneale comes anywhere close to matching H G. Wells in terms of lasting public impact and sheer brilliance. Both successfully tapped into the mass anxieties of their time and placed them at the centre of their stories, making science fiction accessible to the general public. In short, what Wells did for science fiction in print, Kneale did on television, clearing the way for intelligent science fiction drama on the small screen.

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