A Picture We May Not Wish to Gaze Upon

David Jacobs, PhD

The abduction phenomenon is something so strange, so unusual, it is very difficult to gain an understanding of it. When I was a UFO researcher strictly examining the outside shells of anomalous objects in the sky, most people thought the abduction phenomenon was purely and totally psychological. Even though there was, of course, the Barney and Betty Hill case. The Hills were obviously not 1950s-style contactees—which primarily meant charlatans.

One was required to have a lot of evidence to accept the idea that not only were there complex individuals inside the UFOs, but they were kidnapping humans. Furthermore, the Barney and Betty Hill case had embarrassing elements in it, such as a sperm sample taken from Barney, and a needle put in Betty’s navel (which she said was a pregnancy test, although it almost certainly was not). When more abduction cases were reported and researchers began to study them, the Hill case provided a model for understanding what was happening.

What happened to the Hills, and to others, seemed to suggest an experimental model; this was a learning situation. Aliens were running tests on humans to understand our physiology and our mental processes.

The experimental model fit and there was little reason to doubt it. The model became so strongly accepted it seemed to explain most of the evidence from 1966 to the early 1990s. I fully accepted this model in the first seven years of my abduction research. Then as the evidence mounted, I realized the experimental model was not holding. The evidence did not explain how this could be an experiment when they are doing certain procedures on people repeatedly around the world. For example, how many times does one have to run an experiment to learn that when people see horrible scenes of death and destruction, they experience anxiety?

Rather than an experimentally-based endeavor, the evidence began to conform more to a “program” model. As a program it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it is goal-directed. The ultimate objective of this program has eluded both Budd Hopkins and me. We do not know why this phenomenon is happening. But, we have an enormous amount of information about what is happening, how it is happening, what the plans are, and how they have been developing it over the years. It is something I find extremely disquieting.

From the beginning, this program had many facets. One was a strong reproductive aspect, and another was a neurological feature. Budd Hopkins had discovered egg harvesting and sperm extraction taking place in sterile-looking environments. Oftentimes I found these procedures were accompanied by a strange procedure in which an alien might stare into an abductee’s eyes from a distance of a few inches away or closer. The abductee is unable to avert his or her gaze. They feel something happening inside of their minds. They “see” both static and flashing images. Emotions are generated of one sort or the other. Memories are looked at. A whole world of neurological patterns is happening in their minds while this kind of neural engagement is occurring—which I unfortunately called “Mindscan” in my book Secret Life. I have regretted using that term ever since, because it sounds so “science fiction-y” but, in a sense, everything is “science fiction-y” about this phenomenon.

The taking of sperm and ova, the insertion of embryos into the woman, and the extraction of fetuses from her, are also commonly reported aspects of abduction activity. After these types of procedures, a small alien might take an abductee into a room filled with tanks containing a liquid in which fetuses are suspended—an incubatorium. For some reason when a woman is shown these tanks she is led to believe this is a gestation area in which the fetuses are growing and some of them might be hers.

Budd Hopkins also first discovered the “baby presentations” in the early 1980s. These entail aliens taking an abductee into another room onboard a UFO and having the abductee hold one or more babies in sequence. Sometimes abductees are required to feed the babies. The babies look like a mixture of human and alien. Some look more alien, some more human, and most a balanced mixture. Budd coined the term “hybrid” to describe them.

But what was the purpose of creating these children? Although at first there appeared to be no evidence for a motivation, the evidence was there; it just took some years of digging to find it.

The first clue came to me in a session with a young abductee in the mid-1990s. She had been engaged in conversations with an adult hybrid male who visited her often and whom she had known since she was a child. She would see this hybrid both onboard a UFO and in her home setting. During the conversations, she asked him about his mother and father. He told her his father was like him, and his mother was like her.

Suddenly I realized the concept of hybridization was different than I had envisioned. I had originally thought the aliens would take an egg and sperm, put them together, then alter or add something—perhaps DNA—to the zygote, and then implant it in the woman. Eventually, it would grow into a hybrid whose appearance fit on a bell-shaped curve: Some of the offspring would look mainly alien, some mainly human, and most would look like an even mixture of both alien and human. But what her hybrid said was different than that, and I began to realize the hybridization process was far more complex than what I had originally imagined.

What I posited was that rather than adding just alien DNA to the fertilized ova, the DNA from a hybrid is put in that zygote. What results is a skewed bell-shaped curve where more of the offspring look human-like, less look in the middle, and less look alien-like. When the aliens repeat that process enough, the product is hybrids in various stages of increasingly human appearance.

I have arbitrarily divided these hybrids into early-stage, middle-stage, late-stage, and human-stage hybrids. The early-stage ones look quite alien, although they have some hair, they are very thin, and they have large black eyes with a little bit of white corneas in the eyes. They have very thin, wispy hair and oddly shaped faces with pointed chins. Their bodies are thin as well. They are seldom seen outside the confines of a UFO, in which they do tasks required of them to help out with the abduction program.

The middle-stage hybrids look more human. They have large black eyes with more white showing. They have thin, but more, hair. They have bodies that are not so thin. They also help with abduction procedures.

The late-stage hybrids are attached to abductees as personal friends and help the abductees to learn to work projects for “the future.” They are seen in public and can often pass for human. They live onboard the UFOs and make forays into normal human life as part of the abduction program. They do not have a life here among us.

The human-stage hybrids mainly deal with abductees in their normal human environment. They are, on the surface, indistinguishable from humans. They have different biological and neurological processes than humans that give them special abilities, such as being able to control humans.

Most hybrids onboard a UFO can be identified by their clothes, which I call “hybrid garb.” For the females, it is a pull-over shift, usually with three-quarter length sleeves, that comes to about six inches above the floor. The males wear slacks and a top, both of which are usually beige or off-white. Early- and middle-stage hybrids almost always wear this type of clothing. The late-stage hybrids onboard an object may at times wear the same hybrid outfit, but more often they wear regular human casual clothes. The human-stage hybrids wear human clothes.

For the past ten years abductees have been describing more hybrid activity onboard a UFO than they did before. The growth of hybrid activity is exceptionally significant when trying to discern the motivations for the abduction program. For a number of years I have heard reports of abductees taken into a room and their attention is directed to a screen-like device on a wall on which they might see images. They might see a scene of normal human activity, for example, a picnic. People are at a barbeque, kids are throwing a ball, there is a table and chairs, people are standing around talking. Everything is typical and they will hear a voice in their mind that says, “Can you tell the difference between you and us?”

The abductee will look at the screen and say, “No, I can’t tell the difference. Everyone looks the same to me.” Then they will hear, “See? Isn’t that wonderful? Soon we’ll all be together. Soon we will all be here and everyone will know his place.”

I have heard accounts of abductees seeing a family reunion-style photograph with everyone standing in a big conglomerate. The abductee gazing upon this picture will hear, “Point out which ones we are.” The person will look at the people in the “photo” and have a great deal of difficulty doing it. Sometimes they will be able to do it, but most of the time they will not be able to separate out the hybrids from the humans. They also would hear, something like, “See, we can blend in really well. Isn’t this wonderful?”

There was another aspect to these odd events. Some abductees were describing rescue scenes in which they had to save an alien or a baby, either from a natural event, a flood or fire, or from a human-caused event like warfare. These rescue scenes might be played out in a person’s mind through a neural engagement procedure that generated the scenario (what I call Envisioning), or, they might be displayed on a screen attached to a console with operating equipment on it.

For example, one woman was shown an interactive screen attached to one such console. She had a control panel in front of her which she was supposed to operate to save an alien running from a mob of enraged humans. She understood she had to maneuver a UFO to a point where the alien could be rescued. She was able to do this and the aliens were very pleased with how well she had performed.

At first I was extremely skeptical of these accounts. Skepticism is the competent abduction researcher’s most important tool. But then, people with whom I had been working for years, and whose accuracy had been tested positively over and again, told me of these procedures. Repeatedly I heard this, and those who were telling it to me did not know other abductees were saying it as well.

I also began to hear disturbing accounts of other procedures that abductees had to perform but that seemed far more realistic than the rescue scenarios. An abductee will be told he or she has a specific job to do in the future. One of the most common jobs is crowd control. The abductee is to stand on a street and move people along—panicked humans, running and screaming. His job is to calm them, tell them it is okay, “everything is going to be all right, just move this way, keep moving, keep moving this way.” I wrote about this in my book, The Threat, and I have had all sorts of accounts like this since. I think to myself, what does this mean?

I remember Budd telling me accounts of bizarre “job interviews” early on in which a person goes to a job interview under mysterious circumstances, has an interview with nothing said about the job description or salary, and then returns with some memory loss. I had no idea what this kind of event could possibly mean. However, some years later I also began to hear of situations very similar to these interview accounts. People were taken into abandoned buildings but for reasons other than job interviews. Hybrids might be there for sexual encounters and other procedures with abductees. And there were other even more ominous cases that had a strange “normal world” aspect to them.

For example, a woman was driving in a small town in New Jersey on an errand. She passed by a block of abandoned storefront buildings with empty apartments on top of them (the buildings were to be torn down). She noticed a woman standing in front of one of the buildings and she immediately and inexplicably pulled over into a parking space. She sat in her car and waited.

The woman who had been standing on the sidewalk came over and opened the car door. The two went inside an open store, walked back to a staircase, and went up to an apartment. They entered an empty room where two chairs were set up and four or five adolescent or young adult human-stage hybrids were standing there.

She sat down on a chair, and one of the female hybrids came over and stared into her eyes. A rapid flow of questions began about human relationships: What kind of relationships are different? Which are the same? What is the relationship between a husband and a wife? With children? With friends? Why would you do things for friends? All of this was very quick. The female hybrid asked an array of questions, all relating to human relationships of a specific kind, yet relating to human relationships in general. Then she left and another hybrid came over, an adolescent boy.

He also asked all sorts of questions but he focused on computers. “How does a computer work?” She did not know. “Is a computer static or does somebody change it?” She did not know what he meant. He asked, “Does it just stay the same?” She answered that you can replace parts of it, you can put certain software in it, you can change it, and you can do all sorts of things with it. “Why would someone want to do that?” he asked. “What kind of things can you put on it?” These questions continued for a while.

When he was finished, another one came over to her and told her she was not going to remember anything (I assume he was doing this because she was a person who had been giving them trouble by remembering events consciously). He carefully and very strongly pounded into her she would not remember these events, especially the location of the “meeting.” I did a session with her the day after it happened and she related to me exactly what she was not supposed to remember. This event happened in February 2006, but I have many other events like this that are happening constantly now. Furthermore, this is occurring across the country and almost certainly in other countries as well.

I have worked with many people for long periods of time. Some of them have been with me for many years. During hypnosis sessions it is fascinating to discover change in abductions over time. (Multiple people who are unaware of the original accounts must, of course, corroborate these changes.) One woman, with whom I have had many sessions over a period of five years or so, had been doing a variety of tasks, including crowd control. But for the past year or so, she has been describing other functions that she now has.

She relates an experience where she is going onboard a UFO within the context of a standard abduction, but then she is taken into a room with other human abductees. After standing there a short time, five or six human-stage hybrid adolescent boys come into the room. They have standard human clothes on—shoes, shirts, pants, even sports coats sometimes. The abductees are supposed to look these young people over very carefully and then comment on their attire. “Will the way they look allow them to blend in, or will they stand out? How do their shoes look? Are they correct? Are their shirts okay? Are the pants all right?” And the abductees would say, “Yes, this looks okay,” and so on.

In one situation she was in, the shoes were in question. A male abductee said most people do not wear shoes like that anymore but these would nonetheless pass muster. It was apparent this exercise amounted to one of the final steps before these particular hybrids would enter into society. The woman, with whom I work with regularly, has now been doing this on almost a weekly basis.

I have heard other stories of people seeing a hybrid and being required to teach them how to fit into society in a real world situation. An abductee and human-stage hybrid go into a department store and the abductee teaches the hybrid how to buy something: how to pick something out, stand in line at the register, and give the cashier the merchandise. The abductee tells the hybrid the cashier will process the transaction and ask for payment. The abductee instructs the hybrid to give the cashier the required amount of money (they usually have it), and wait for change. The cashier might say something and they will respond by saying “Thank you,” or, when first coming up to the cashier, saying “Hello.” Then the cashier will put the objects being bought in a bag and the hybrid can take it out of the store.

Recently, I had a case in which a woman walked into a supermarket and found a familiar late-stage hybrid waiting for her there. He told her to go about her normal shopping and he would watch. She went about shopping and he asked her questions about each object that she put in her cart. “What are these?” “These are eggs.” “How do you make eggs?” “You can fry them. You can boil them. You cook them in some other way.” He continued to ask questions of the items and she was required to answer. At one point she put a loaf of bread into her cart and he said, “Do you cook that too?” He was trying to learn.

In the last eighteen months I have been hearing these types of accounts from people with whom I have worked for many years. All of these accounts, to put it bluntly, point to a future in which human-looking hybrids will be here amongst us. The evidence is now so strong I can no longer look at alternative motivations for them. Everything I have learned about this subject in the past 20 years inexorably points to this conclusion. I cannot escape it.

I have heard everything about abductions many times over in the past 20 years. I have investigated over a thousand abduction accounts. In the standard abduction scenario, procedures continue according to a set, albeit flexible, plan. Therefore, the accounts in which I hear the same thing repeatedly help in building up verification and validation. After one researches abductions in a systematic way and learns what happens in them, one finds that the information flow to the researcher proceeds at glacier-like speed. Only about every seventh session would I hear something I have never heard before. It might be a procedure the aliens did a little differently, or a new way of doing something, or it might be something else that was related to the standard procedures that I had not heard before. That would keep my interest up and help to propel me forward intellectually.

Now I am constantly hearing things I have never heard before. All sorts of people who for many years had been telling me primarily the standard abduction procedures now tell me new things. And new people with whom I have just begun to work tell them to me too. Furthermore, people with whom I have not had a hypnosis session for many years, come back and want to have a session so that they can fully remember the new and extraordinary events that have happened to them recently. Why is this happening? Is something changing? Are we in a new phase now?

In my research in the mid-1990s, I had heard the aliens talking about what they called “The Change” when they would be here with us. What this meant exactly I was not sure. I was even less sure when it would happen. They used the term “soon” which is somewhat meaningless. I thought that if this were to happen, perhaps it would take 30 years or so to begin. Now I am not sure. Now I think that the evidence indicates “The Change” might be happening a lot sooner than I had thought.
It was not very long ago, when people would ask me if I thought hybrids were walking around in normal human settings, that I would answer, “Of course not!” To me, the evidence had never indicated that. And I knew that to answer affirmatively would label me even more fringy than I already sounded. Even then, however, I would think to myself, “Maybe I am wrong. Maybe they have learned how to do a job interview. Maybe they are walking around in human society.” But I never voiced this publicly because the evidence was not strong enough for me.

Now what I hear is much more about interfacing with hybrids, and teaching hybrids, and getting hybrids “ready,” and making sure everything is all right. One woman, for example, told me she went into a room that was set up like a cafeteria. There were about 15 or 16 adolescent hybrids getting food (a brown, hard substance), and sitting at a table and eating it. (Before hypnosis, the abductee consciously thought they were eating hamburgers.)

They were adolescents so they were talking with each other and playing around, that sort of behavior. She was supposed to say if everything was okay, and if not, teach them the proper methods of obtaining food in a cafeteria. She said that everything was not okay. She pointed out one must first obtain a tray. Then the food must be put on a plate which in turn is placed on the tray. One would need eating utensils as well. The hybrids then asked a number of questions about why one would need a plate, tray, and the function of utensils. They were serious about this. She also said there was too much “horsing around,” and they had to be quieter. She was a school teacher many years ago, and she has definite ideas about proper decorum.

So I get the sense we are now in a stage of movement. New things are being reported. A few years back Budd Hopkins, John Mack, and I participated in a symposium put together to help publicize the Steven Spielberg-produced TV series, Taken. I gave my introductory talk about the element of surprise in the abduction phenomenon—how it has surprised us at almost every turn. In spite of the glacial pace of change, over the years we have found enough things that take us aback, that we had never thought of before, in terms of how the abduction phenomenon works and is being played out.
For example, the questioning of abductees about separating out hybrids from humans was something I never expected to hear and would never have thought of. Debunkers often accuse abduction researchers of using hypnosis to lead people into certain areas of thought and to have them tell us what we want to hear. In fact, it is the opposite. They have been telling us things we could never have imagined, and they are telling me things I do not want to hear. Researchers are being pulled along for the ride.

All of this is to say that one of the things I am focusing on in my research is the possible process of hybrid insertion into the society. Originally I thought we might wake up one day and “they” would all just be here. That is what popular culture teaches us. Abductees tell us a very different story. It is much more complicated and different than we had thought.

The evidence seems to suggest that it takes a great deal of coordination between all sorts of different aliens and hybrids who have been trained in different functions for the smooth operation of this program. Every one of them appears to have a job. They all seem to have their task to perform and so do some abductees. So, what we might be dealing with is a much more complicated phenomenon, both for hybrids, for aliens, for abductees and, of course, for researchers who are trying to discern what is happening. Researchers do not have guides explaining how to do this; everybody is learning on the fly. We are learning things as they are being revealed to us in bits and pieces and trying to make sense of them.

We have gathered an enormous amount of information about the subject. It is not disparate information; it is confirmatory, and substantive. It is rather like putting the pieces of a puzzle together. We do not have all the pieces, but we can see the picture clearly now. Each piece adds to our understanding. Each piece gives us insight into the motivations and goals of the picture’s creators. There are, of course, many important pieces to fill in. If researchers accept abductee accounts, then we must ask why people are being trained in crowd control. We do not know what the role of non-abductees will be in the future. We do not know how the power of neural engagement will be used on humans once they integrate into the society. Neural engagement means they can control us and we cannot control them. We still need to learn a lot more about this most perplexing and unnerving program.

Obviously, we do not know everything. Most importantly, we still do not know why this entire program of integration into the society is happening. This lack of knowledge is actually extremely important because if this were psychological, we would know why this is happening; if abductees were psychologically generating all this material, many, if not most, would generate the ultimate reason for the project as well. But they don't.

In popular culture, many outer space-themed movies have involved a flying saucer coming to earth, an alien coming out of a flying saucer and saying, “My name is Xabdork. I come from Venus. I have come because you have been doing unacceptable things. You must shape up.” In these movies, we know exactly who they are, where they are from, and why they are here. But this phenomenon does not follow popular culture, as skeptics would want us to believe. It has its own internal dynamics apart from the abductees and the researchers. As John Mack said, the phenomenon is what it is. That means it is not what we want it to be.

Budd Hopkins and I have been doing this work for a cumulative total of over 45 years. We have interviewed, listened to, read letters from, and worked with thousands of abductees and we still do not know why the aliens have initiated this program. In a sense this lack of knowledge helps to validate what we have learned. Once we know the aliens’ original motivations for starting the program, we will have gone far towards answering the ultimate question about abductions. In the meantime, we have greatly progressed towards answering most of the important questions about this phenomenon and those answers are both surprising and disturbing. They are not answers I had ever expected. They are not answers I wanted to hear. The pieces of the puzzle form a picture I do not wish to gaze upon.