The breaking of Jim Sparks, or, why the aliens
don't land on the White House lawn

Elaine Douglass, MS

Most everyone says Jim Sparks’ new book, The Keepers, is excellent. It is. The book is honest, unpretentious, earthy, intimate, engrossing. It is also a primer on how the aliens break people.

It took the aliens some five years of concerted effort to end Jim Sparks’ resistance, to precipitate his capitulation, and turn him into a collaborator. To me, Jim Sparks is a hero for fighting as long as he did, but in the end Jim broke because he just couldn’t fight anymore. Today, of course, Jim says it’s ‘all for the best,’ but then that is the hallmark of the capitulated abductee—everything the alien does is okay. The story of Jim Sparks answers the perennial question—why don’t the aliens land on the White House lawn? The answer is because they are not interested in humans in our natural, autonomous, state. They’re interested only in humans they can control.

Years ago, Whitley Strieber told us all about it, how the abductee’s skepticism collapses and resistance ends. In Transformation, Whitley captured the moment. Brought to a peak of terror by one of the alien’s staged psychodramas, Whitley felt he:

. . . could not bear to go on like this. I could not live with this fear and I did not know how to live without it unless I lied to myself and arbitrarily decided on my own to believe the visitors were benevolent.

Afterwards, Whitely writes, he “found acceptance.”

Today Jim Sparks too has found acceptance¾and more. He says he has found “the truth” about the nature of the aliens, their purposes, and a hidden relationship between them and the American government. The question, however, is whether all that Jim has come to believe is the truth, or whether it is a storyline that through a process of isolation and torture the aliens forced Jim Sparks to accept.

Subjected to trauma

The part of Jim Sparks’ abduction history he remembers begins in 1988. That year, for almost a year, Jim had dreams of being walked out of his house during the night. Abruptly, though, the modus operendi changed and he begins to be taken in a violent and terrifying manner. Later Jim will be extremely grateful to the aliens for those occasions when he is not taken in a terrifying manner.

“Pulled,” Jim calls it. At 3 am one night, “Suddenly I woke up. . .

and couldn’t open my eyes or move. I heard a low-pitched whirling sound, which slowly got louder. . . the pit of my stomach creeping up toward my heart. . . my heart began to race, and louder and faster came that whirling sound. Deep instinctual fear overwhelmed me, but I couldn’t open my mouth to scream. Cold sweat covered me. . . my heart was thumping so fast I thought it would jump out of my chest. My head filled with that sound, whirling. . .the whole universe was that sound and it wanted to burst open my head. Then a tremendous rushing. I was accelerating as if going down the steepest grade of a roller coaster without any safety harness. “I don’t want to die!” I screamed inside myself.

The psychological literature has a lot to say about the process of breaking people. In one book, Battle for the Mind, the author explains what has to be done to get an individual to “change long-standing beliefs, drop ordinary perspectives of common sense and become open to ways of thought quite foreign to the person’s previous life.” The first step, says the author, is to subject the individual to “intense trauma.”

The manner of taking Jim changed, so there must have been a reason for the change. Apparently, walking Jim out of his house wasn’t satisfactory, and the utility - of having Jim not remember what happened after he was walked out - had, apparently, also run out.

“Normally,” abductees are walked out, or floated out. They’re not taken in a whirlwind, a hurricane. And the terrifying manner of taking Jim continued for five years. The author of Battle for the Mind, William Sargant, mentions this. He mentions the usefulness in breaking people of subjecting them to not only one trauma, but to “repeated traumas.”

Taken in a hurricane

It is normal that the point comes when the abductee is made aware. And normally, the making aware is gradual—the abductee sees some flying saucers, snippets of memory seep into his consciousness. The alien is making the abductee consciously aware. It is part of the program. So making Jim aware is normal, but the whirlwind, the trauma, that was gratuitous. What does it mean? Was Jim a notorious case in alien circles? Was he so hard to break special techniques were needed? And Jim was not made aware in a gradual manner. In 1988, after “never having had a paranormal experience in [his] life,” Jim writes, with blinding suddenness and in full conscious awareness he emerges from a hurricane to find himself in a place he has never seen before. It is a place where Jim Sparks will experience complete, utter and abject powerlessness.

The hurricane of being pulled stops. Jim is awake, sitting:

I tried to move my eyelids. Slowly, I was able to open my eyes. I could only look ahead. I had no peripheral vision. When I strained to get up, I couldn’t. I could only move my head up and down and all I could see was a strange table and a wall screen. I sensed I wasn’t alone, but when I tried to look I couldn’t turn my head to the right or left. When I gazed down, I noticed I could slightly move the wrist and forefinger of my right hand. The fear was coming back. Then my head went up, moved by some force other than myself. My eyes involuntarily fixed on that gray wall screen.

I broke my cat in this manner. When I got her, she was semi-feral. She couldn’t stand to be touched. If I touched her, her skin crawled in revulsion. So I used to, with difficulty, capture her, then hold her by force in my lap and stroke her. It worked. Eventually she got to be a much closer to normal cat. A lot of abductees mention the animal analogy. They’ll say, We pick up animals in the wild, don’t we? We subdue them, tag them, perform medical procedures on them. Jim talks like that today too. “Higher intelligence takes advantage of and uses lower intelligence,” he says brightly, “not unlike the way we use cattle.”

Who are you bastards?

Jim’s eyes are involuntarily fixed on the gray wall screen. “In the middle of my head,” he writes, “a voice says, YOU WILL LEARN THIS. . . .I didn’t know where I was or why. And some booming Voice in my head was telling me what to do. . .I felt anger and rage. ‘No I won’t!’ I screamed.” The letter A and a “strange hieroglyph” appeared on the screen. Jim figured out he was supposed to write the hieroglyph on the table screen with his finger. “No!” he says, “No!”

Now, Jim writes, “the air pressure in the room changed. It pushed against my head and my ears, quite painful. My heart pounded again. I could taste fear again—body fear, fear of more pain that might come. Everything tightened. . .this discomfort would continue unless I cooperated, unless I drew the alien A on the screen. Still, I said, ‘No!’

“The air pressure increased, upping my discomfort and anxiety. Unless I obeyed, it would go up again. But I was still angry. . .’No!’ I said, ‘I won’t do it.’ But I could bear only so much. After the next level of agony,” Jim cried out “‘I don’t want to die!’” and he wrote the alien letter on the screen. “Instantly the air pressure dropped.” His heart rate fell and “the anxiety and fear faded. Moreover,” Jim writes, “I felt euphoric. A very pleasant sensation flooded me.”

Psychologists tell us that sudden reversal of pain makes the subject embrace whatever lifted the pain, but that effect hadn’t kicked in for Jim yet, and soon “Anger stabbed through the pleasant feeling. . .Who are you bastards?” Jim demanded. “You don’t have the right to do this to me!” Instantly the answer came back in his head: WE HAVE THE RIGHT! WE ALWAYS HAVE! WE ALWAYS WILL! Jim goes home in the terrifying whirlwind again.

Force, fear, humiliating powerlessness, punishment, reward, authoritative commands. With these elements, the first hurdle is overcome. Jim has complied. But there is much more to do. Jim’s initial compliance is quite unwilling. He complies because he must. Anything but reconciled, Jim writes he felt “totally offended. . . .I loathed them for what they were doing to me.” And that is not what “breaking” a human being is about. Breaking a human being aims for willing compliance, for voluntary co-operation, for wholehearted acceptance. There is much more to do.

Isolation

Repeatedly abducted, Jim now descends into a hellish chaos in his personal life, marked by sleep deprivation and isolation. He tries desperately to escape the alien grasp and finds there is no exit. His wife betrays him, no one believes his story. Jim himself calls it “torture.”

One night, Jim writes, “I felt the familiar fear and the urge to fall asleep.” He fought it off. “’No way,’ I snarled.” He jumps in his car and frantically speeds down the roadway. Inexplicably (to him) he turns onto a little-used road. It’s completely dark. “Waves of drowsiness washed over me. I realized I had no choice.”

Is there nowhere to hide?

Jim “check[s] into a hotel, hoping to escape.” At 3 am he awakes, sees an apparition in the room. He leaps out of bed, grabs his packed suitcase, runs out of the hotel, goes to another hotel where he gets a room “without windows.” Then he hears that “low pitched whirling sound. Is there nowhere to hide?” he beseeches. He loses 30 lbs. He stops bathing and shaving. He starts drinking, heavily. He tells a few friends. They think he has a mental problem. He doesn’t tell his wife until, at one point he is abducted and he sees her in the alien setting, avidly drawing symbols on a screen. Next day he confronts her about “the strange creatures who’ve been taking us away.”

“What creatures, Jim?”
“You know what I’m talking about! Don’t you remember seeing me last night?”
“No! And we’re not supposed to talk about it.”
“You know what I’m talking about!”
‘You mean my ‘Helpers from Heaven’?”
“Please! I need to know what is going on.”
“Don’t ask me about it Jim, because I won’t talk about it.”

Betrayed

Jim tells his wife the pastor who married them is coming to counsel him. He ask her to “say something helpful so they won’t cart me off to an institution.” She says she’ll “try.” In the bathroom, Jim looks in the mirror. He sees “puffy red eyes peering out of a tired, pale face. My pants keep sliding down because of the weight I’ve lost.” The pastor listens at length to Jim’s story. Finally he pronounces. It’s either “demons” or Jim is taking drugs. Jim calls his wife into the room. “She gave me a look of sorrow” and told the pastor, “I have no idea what Jim is talking about.” Afterward she tells Jim, “I didn’t want him to think I was crazy.”

The night Jim found himself on the dark country road, he had pulled his wife out of bed and taken her with him. As they drive, “She said quietly, ‘You need to pull over.’ Her voice unnerved me,” Jim writes. “She didn’t ask what we were doing or where we were going. Louder she said, ‘You need to pull over.’ I ignored her. ‘Pull over!’ she screamed at the top of her lungs. She grabbed the steering wheel.” Jim veered off the road. “Why did you do that?” he asks, but she’d already slumped in the seat and he couldn’t wake her.

Jim finds he is living with a robot, an automaton. They are now divorced, and in Keepers Jim is very gallant about these episodes with his wife. To me, the actions of Jim’s wife gave me the creeps as much as anything in Jim Sparks’ book.

Jim told me that for five years the aliens would not permit him to write anything down about what was happening to him. “How did they enforce that?” I asked. Jim explained if he tried to write notes on his experiences or write any of the alien symbols, he was “overwhelmed” with feelings of “confusion, isolation” and fear. Still he would try. “I would sit in my living room and write. Now, suppose I get a symbol down on a piece of paper. I get pulled again, now I’m there in that room, at that table, that bench, that screen. And I’m paralyzed, and ignored - for hours."

Now they are all you have

So Jim is learning there is no escape from the abductions. And there is no one he can talk to about it. He realizes a force is controlling him that has penetrated to the deepest recesses of his life. He is isolated and trapped. In 1985, abductee Ida Kannenberg wrote about the function of isolation in the “initiation” of abductees. “The separation from other humans makes the abductee more vulnerable and susceptible to influence,” Ida wrote. “Via intense and on-going contacts, you become emotionally dependent on your UFO communicants. Now they are all you have. “

Unsurprisingly, Jim begins to break. He is at the alien screen yelling “No!” The aliens respond by paralyzing his mouth. Two small grays transform into uniformed policemen, then into armed soldiers glowering at him. “’Sorry!’ I yelled inside my head. You’re not frightening me.” Jim drummed his finger on the table to signify refusal.

“A wrenching pain passed through my body,” Jim writes, and then the supervisor came into the room. “I felt a powerful presence, just out of sight—a powerful significant presence. a male presence. The energy radiating from this being was so strong I can’t find words to describe it. Overpowering? Overwhelming? I could sense this being leaning down, its head no more than 3 inches from mine. . .as if I were strapped to a chair while some Tyrannosaurus Rex was sniffing me. . . It seemed like some 3-dimensional monster movie.”

The voice inside my head said LOOK, and the letter B appeared on the screen. I started crying. “The whole damned alphabet?” I sobbed. YES appeared on the screen. I felt a zap of increased air pressure against my ears and head, along with stepped up anxiety. I put up no fight. The sooner I got it to their satisfaction, the sooner I could go home.

Going home sooner

Jim has entered a stage of acquiescence, expedient cooperation. But it is cooperation. He begins to actively work at the task at hand—so he can “go home sooner.”

It is important to notice Jim was not impressed with the screen images of glowering policemen and armed soldiers. In the weeks that followed, the aliens tried other method to see what would impress and intimidate Jim Sparks.

Whatever it takes

‘Hello assholes,’ I said. The Voice said, ‘THIS IS NOT PLEASING TO GOD.’ ‘To God?’ I was incensed! ‘To God, you say? How dare you say that? Do you think for one minute you’re going to trick me into thinking you have anything to do with God? I’ll tell you what, turn me loose and I’ll squeeze your big heads off your skinny little necks. Do it! Turn me loose! Because I can’t hurt God, can I?

From the corner of my eye I could see two of the workers. They were staring at each other. They had no expressions of course, but I could tell they were stumped. . . .It seemed as though [the aliens] would try just about anything. . .

I spoke to Jim about this incident. “That was a trial balloon,” I said. “Were you going to buy into that they’re God’s emissaries?”
“Exactly,” Jim said.
“When you let them know you weren’t buying, they withdrew that right away,” I continued.
“Then they did the devil thing,” Jim said. “The opposite. It was like, okay, then we’re demons and you better cooperate because we’re evil and we’ll hurt you. I immediately responded with, ‘Yeah! Right! So the devil flies around in UFOs?’ Then they immediately stopped that game.

“I sensed how they screen image,” Jim went on, “meaning they project a visual in your mind—and this is what they do with all abductees—they project something in your mind. First they probe you, every fiber of your makeup, to know what your fears are, what your likings are, what you believe in. If you’re the type, for example, who believes in beautiful angelic beings that help people—when you’re abducted they will project in your mind that you’re with angelic beings. Whatever it takes. . .”
“Yes,” I responded, “whatever it takes.”

Science and nothing else

Jim says he learned to shake off screen imaging after he noticed each image was accompanied by “euphoria. When I got these sensations of euphoria, that triggered in my mind, hey, they’re screen imaging. I’d literally shake my head, hit my forehead and say ‘Bullshit.’ Then I would see what was really there. So I think it challenged them to try stronger methods, high tech methods, to throw this individual off and it would challenge me to try to mess it up. What I hung on to all those years was literally anger. And hate. I focussed on anger, and hate, and that this is science and nothing else!”

So Jim tried mightily to preserve his skepticism, including the idea there is nothing supernatural about the aliens - they do everything they do with science - while the aliens searched for the formula Jim would buy into. Soon, we will see, the aliens found a formula Jim bought into. That is why there are so many stories out there told by abductees, all stories fed to them by aliens who found the formula.

As for the screen images, there are eleven examples in Jim’s book. These are fully wrought, complex images, full of detail and likely to be completely credible to an unsuspecting abductee or researcher. The most creative was, “The boss wants ta see ya” abduction, in which a gray showed up “dressed like some 1930s style Chicago mobster,” Jim writes.

Screen memory euphoria

Researchers owe Jim Sparks a debt of gratitude for presenting these, especially since his recall is from normal consciousness. Jim’s unassailable descriptions of screen imaging, and the accompanying “euphoria,” puts to rest the question of whether all of what the abductees report is real—it isn’t. Of course, many researchers have known or suspected this for years, causing numbers of them to throw up their hands in despair saying, There’s nothing we can rely on in the abduction reports because any or all of it could be illusion.

My view is we can make our way through the litter of real and illusory in abduction reports if we have a central theory of what the abduction experience is about. What plot line or theory does a particular incident fit? Who benefits? What is the motive? My central theory is the aliens have put in place an elaborate program of psychological conditioning which begins in childhood and is applied relentlessly in pursuit of the desired result. The desired result is to get the abductee to accept, embrace, even celebrate, what is happening to him, no matter how exploitative it may be. This is difficult to achieve, which is why it took more than 5 years to break Jim Sparks.

The aliens finally found a formula Jim bought into and which led to his capitulation. The formula they found Jim likes is history and family—his own. The foreshadowing of what will happen emerges first in the abduction in which Jim sees his wife. Before he even left home, before he was “pulled,” Jim sees the word “experiment” flashed. He gets to his screen and is told, TIME TO COMPETE. Then he sees his wife down the hall skillfully executing the alien alphabet. COMPETE! COMPETE! he is told, and, SHE’S GOOD, ISN’T SHE?

Looking for the formula

Evidently this was intended to find out if Jim Sparks was a competitive personality who would try to do the alien letters as well or better than his wife, which would have drawn him more deeply into the task rather than doing it “just to go home earlier.” It didn’t work. Jim had no desire to compete with his wife.

Instead, he cries out, “That’s my wife! You bastards have my wife!” Comes the response: SHE’S NOT YOURS. SHE’S OURS. ALWAYS HAS BEEN, ALWAYS WILL BE. Now Jim sees a holographic slide show supposedly depicting scenes from his wife’s life, starting at birth.

“You’ve been keeping track of her all her life,” Jim says. It’s a statement. Then: “Me as well?” YES. “Why?” No response. “Is Teresa ok?” No response. “You have no emotions, do you?” No response.

The sight of Teresa has been removed, and dead silence fills the room. “I hate you!” Jim screams. “You have invaded me to my core being. I’d like to kill you all!” No response. “Suddenly,” Jim writes, “I just felt empty. I almost felt sorry for them and I almost apologized for my desire to kill them.”

What is the cause of Jim’s despair? It seems to have been the dead silent response to his beseeching questions. The hauteur of the alien, his condescension, devastates Jim, and forces out new threads of emotion¾he “almost felt sorry for them”¾since all the abductee’s habitual responses are dead ends. The aliens are immoveable, so the abductee must change.

Most important, though, is that for the first time Jim believes something the aliens are saying. He believes they have been “keeping track of her all her life.”
He didn’t believe the aliens are God. He didn’t believe they are demons. He didn’t believe their screen images, but he believes this, and, on his own initiative he jumps to the conclusion they have also been keeping track of Jim Sparks all his life. “Me as well?” he asks pathetically.

I believe they kept track of Jim Sparks all his life because that is the pattern of abduction. But Jim Sparks did not know that. At this point, Jim Sparks had not read any abduction books (and still hasn’t), and had not talked to any abductees. He does know the aliens are good at creating pictures, and the only “proof” offered Jim of “keeping track of Teresa all her life” is pictures. Under extreme stress, Jim’s ability to question what is being told to him is shutting down.

Next time Jim is under alien control, he has his first positive moment. He can’t draw the alien letter H. “I looked up. Two workers were standing there, placidly staring at me as usual. ‘Can’t do it,’” he says. “’Maybe I could use some help.’ Suddenly my arm and hand felt like a long glove someone had slipped their fingers into. My forefinger began to move on its own. . .

“I appreciated this. . . ,” Jim writes. “How did you do that?” he asks. WE’RE STAR PEOPLE. “If I wanted to go with you—travel the universe—would you take me?” YES. “I sensed they were telling the truth. . .[and] they were actually responding and listening to me. Back to the letters. There was no fight left in me. I decided to go along with their agenda.”

Back home, after having enjoyed the reward of playing with the alien’s thought-activated balls and cubes, and having the aliens “truthfully tell me they would take me on a tour of the universe,” Jim is mulling it over. Presently his anger returns and he makes plans to go to North Carolina. “Maybe there I’ll be safe,” he thinks. Jim is entering a period of vacillation. For a while now, sometimes he’ll feel rage, and sometimes he won’t. He notices that and thinks it “. . .odd. Despite the fear and the crazed feelings—all this was getting interesting. Mental powers to move things. Telepathy! Aliens! An offer to tour the universe.” He “didn’t know why [he] was feeling this way. I just had to point my car in a direction and drive.”

The formula is found

The next key event is a negotiation between Jim and the aliens. Jim has worked on a lesson and “was looking forward to the reward. I guess they had me pretty well trained by this time.” Instead another lesson appears on the screen. He is told to LEARN THIS.

“Why?” Jim asks. No response. Jim says he’d experienced “enough freedom in NC to get rebellious again. ‘I demand an answer, you bastards!’” His “mouth froze. They’d paralyzed it.” The workers change into menacing police, marines, army generals, but that doesn’t work. “Soon,” Jim writes, “I felt an overwhelming mental presence swarm into the room. The thing almost smelled of power, of swelling symphonic music, of a mighty and dominant presence.” It was the supervisor. An agreement followed that Jim must write out his questions in the alien script.

Now Jim is given the “answer” to his question, Why me? Jim is told the aliens have been keeping track of his family line for 2 million years, and Jim believes it. The story is conveyed in a holographic slide show. Scene one depicts WWII and one of the characters “looks just like me!” Jim writes excitedly. “That chin, that nose, those dark eyes and brows, they were just like mine! The hair was even curly. . .” he writes tenderly.

Next is a Victorian-era scene with another character who look just like Jim! Now a scene from the 15th century and another guy who “look just like. . .I went straight to the screen and got a thrill as my fingers seemed to know the characters to express my question: ‘Have you been following my family line?’ YES. The 12th century comes next. “I couldn’t help but laugh. . .” Jim writes. Rome. Ancient Rome. “Sure enough there’s a guy in the Roman Senate who. . .’Have you really been following my family line that far back? Rome?’” LOOK. Hologram of cavemen. (That’s about 2 million years ago.) Jim is unsteady now, and he lurches. “Bullshit! You’re trying to tell me you had something to do with human evolution!” No response.

“They seemed to sense my rage and they left me alone for a while,” Jim writes. “Then they made the presentation again, in written form, ending with WE’VE BEEN AROUND FOR A WHILE. WE’VE BEEN WORKING WITH YOUR PRESONAL FAMILY LINE. WE KNOW YOU WELL. HUMANS ARE OURS.”

Jim Sparks is ours

That is the close. The sale is made. Jim’s own literature for his book calls it “a surrender.” Had the aliens told the truth, they would have said, JIM SPARKS IS OURS. All that is left is a mopping up operation to seal the deal.

About the months that followed, Jim writes, “I could communicate with the creatures better, clearer, faster. The reward sessions became more complex and interesting and the semen extractions more pleasurable. I started to build a sense of trust with the creatures. I saw they didn’t want to kill me, and my instinctual fear was dying. I would request to be allowed freedom to move around and explore. This was always denied or ignored. I know it was really my fault. I still felt lots of animosity toward them. They didn’t trust me.” Jim calls them “my alien buddies.”

Until the aliens tossed Jim a lifeline, he was a drowning man, engulfed in a sea of helplessness. “Boot camp,” Jim calls it, and yes, as in the Army, Jim’s personality has been torn down. Now it will be rebuilt along new alien-determined lines. A current book, A Question of Torture, 2006, by Alfred McCoy, cites these elements the CIA uses to get prisoners to talk: sexual humiliation (semen extraction and anal probes); sensory deprivation (sitting for six hours before the screen, paralyzed and ignored); sleep deprivation; manipulation of daily routines to cause dissolution of personality and regression to an infantile dependency upon the torturer (“The whole alphabet?” he sobbed); dietary adjustments (Jim is told to stop eating meat); isolation (his wife betrays him, friends do not believe him); sensory overload (“ecstasy beyond compare,” See Keepers); near drowning (being pulled); genital electroshock (the wand used to stimulate Jim’s testicles).

But more than just torture is going on here. There is a larger objective. No one is trying to get Jim to “talk.” The goal of what Jim was subjected to, as William Sargant wrote in Battle for the Mind, is to cause this individual to “change his world view. . .see himself as part of a new group. . .and become open to ways of thought quite foreign. . .” So Jim must be restored. He has been torn down, and he must be put back together, but in new ways. There is stick and there must also be carrot.

A lab rat of significance

The first big carrot the aliens throw into the mix is the slide show intended to persuade Jim the aliens have been following his family line for 2 million years. So far, Jim Sparks has been nothing but a lab rat. But now content is added that entrains Jim Sparks personally. He is still a lab rat, but not a completely anonymous one. Now he is a lab rat with an explanation, a lab rat of significance. You’ve followed my family line all the way back to ancient Rome? This suggests Jim Sparks is important, and that is what he so desperately needs to feel. After having pulverized the abductee’s identify and self-esteem, the aliens now begin to restore self-esteem with new identify elements. Jim cannot resist this—and no human could.

The desperation of the abductee’s predicament leads to the jettisoning of critical thinking. It is a matter of priorities. Jim can either reject the alien’s “explanation” of what is going on—that the aliens have been following his family line for 2 million years—and continue to feel bad, or he can accept this explanation and feel better. Later Jim will say all his suffering is redeemed because he understands the big picture.

For Jim, feeling better is more urgent than anything else, and in order to feel better he must not question the plausibility of the “explanation” being offered him. Later, Jim will declare many things to be true for which his only evidence will be that the aliens told him so. For example, he will say “doubtless” the aliens have collected seeds and genetic material of every species on earth. He will not reflect on the implausibility of this idea, nor will he reflect on the implausibility or illogic of other allegations made by the aliens, or entertain alternative explanations for what will be conveyed to him by the aliens.

We had to be sure

The aliens now begin to consolidate their control over Jim Sparks, the mopping up I spoke of earlier. EXPERIMENT. The motif of the abduction is announced. Jim sees a living ant crawling on the table screen in front of him. KILL says the Voice in his head. “’No!’ I said loudly. ‘I won’t kill.’” He gets the increased air pressure treatment. Jim told me in an interview he feared this was the first step in training him to be a Manchurian Candidate, and I thought the same thing when I first read the passage. KILL! “’No! You will never force me to kill.” However, they would in about five minutes.

This was “one of the most tormenting moments so far,” Jim writes. The supervisor approaches him. “I could feel probing, mental fingers pushing through the fibers of my mind, searching for a weakness. Suddenly a 3-D image sprang before me.” Jim sees his brother in a hospital room “clutching at his heart.

“I knew I had to draw the alien symbol to kill the ant or my brother would die,” Jim writes. “I broke down and copied the kill symbol. [The ant dies.] The supervisor backed off, turned, and left.” Clearly, it no longer takes much to convince Jim Sparks. Why did you believe your bother would die if you didn’t kill the ant? I asked Jim. “I didn’t want to take a chance on it,” he told me lamely.

“I just sat there, weeping,” Jim writes. “’Why did you do that to me?’” WE HAD TO BE SURE. “’Sure of what?’” THAT YOU’RE NOT A KILLER. In fact, the experiment had just demonstrated the opposite, at least as far as ants are concerned. What was the real purpose of the experiment? It seems the purpose was to demonstrate to Jim himself that he was not a threat to the aliens, that he has been purged of any lethal hostility, and I believe that is what he was weeping about—his emasculation. This becomes clear in light of what happened next.

Jim is harmless

What happens next is we find Jim at home halfway through a fifth of vodka with a loaded gun in his hands. “My forefinger massaged the trigger. I was going to shoot anything and everything resembling aliens—even holograms,” he writes. Presently he hears “a loud thump on the roof.” Then “shuffling footsteps in the attic” and a sound as if “those things were moving boxes up there.” He remains in his living room chair and considers shooting at the ceiling. “My finger tightened on the trigger. My heart was pounding and I was sweating like a racehorse.”

Good writing, isn’t it? I told you Keepers is a good book.

“I closed my eyes—but didn’t shoot. ‘No, not yet,’ I thought. ‘Wait until they come into the living room.’ [It was] unbearable,” he writes. “A few seconds later two of the [worker] aliens walked from the hallway into my living room, their big eyes shining like curious children. They examined my belongings, played with the lamps, walked into knick-knacks like clods, and knocked things over. One of them was moving the ashes around in the fireplace.”

Isn’t this astonishing?

The “trigger was cocked and the barrel of the gun pointed at the back of [the alien’s] bulbous head.” Jim “took a large gulp of vodka, began to squeeze the trigger, and yelled. . .’I’m going to kill you!’”

“But even through the alcoholic haze,” Jim writes, “I head what they had recently told me, WE KNOW YOU ARE NOT A KILLER. The sentence sounded through my head, and I knew they had been right. I lowered the gun. The creatures stayed in the house until daybreak.”

So now everyone knows Jim is harmless, safe. It has been demonstrated he will not “twist your big heads off your skinny little necks,” even if given a chance. His resistance has come almost to an end.

The aliens’ next move is what I would describe as intensification of humiliation. Here the aliens unveil more about the true price of association with them. Before going to that, let’s look at the issue of Jim Sparks’ memory of his abduction history.

Jim says he remembers “98 percent” of everything that has happened to him. Keepers begins in 1988, and although Jim never directly says so, readers might assume 1988 is Jim Sparks very first contact with the aliens.

Actually, the extent of what Jim recalls from the better part of 1988 is being “walked out of his house.” We also learn, in Keepers, that early on Jim was presented with a daughter, a hybrid apparently and about 12 years old. That would mean she was conceived around 1977. Furthermore, there is a childhood incident Jim recalls, which Jim and Budd Hopkins examined.

All this suggests Jim Sparks has a long, unknown-to-him history of abduction contact stretching from perhaps 1957 to 1989 or 32 years. There is nothing surprising about this. It fits the pattern of most other abduction cases. What it does is remind us the alien controls what the abductee remembers, and we have to ask ourselves why he permits certain memories and blocks others?

Intensification of humiliation

In particular, why does the alien permit male abductees, such as Jim Sparks, to remember semen extraction and anal probes? These procedures are profoundly humiliating to men. They could be blocked from the abductee’s memory! Why aren’t they?

What fits is if we see it as an intensification of humiliation, as capitulation progresses, a stricter and stricter test of what the abductee can be made to endure without alienating him. Can the abductee be made to accept even this with a smile on his face?

The first time Jim recalls semen extraction is after the “surrender” described in his promotional literature, and after what I believe to be the capitulating event, the slide show of Jim’s putative 2 million year history with the aliens. Nonetheless, on return to his hotel room he feels “defeated.” Jim is not yet accommodated to semen extraction.

In the beginning of the process of breaking an abductee, it is all force, coercion, and intimidation. There is also an avid search for the ideological formula that will be believed by the individual and win him over. As this formula is found and applied, and the abductee moves toward an embrace of the alien, we begin to see decompression. Slight accommodations are offered, such as the aliens begin to answer some of Jim’s question. The harsher and more intimidating a tormenter has been, the more the abductee will meet even a small accommodation with immense and disproportionate gratitude. This precipitates the abductee into an approval-seeking posture with respect to the alien, and approval-seeking becomes the habitual posture of the abductee.

Approval-seeking combined with the abductee’s desperate need to find some modicum of self-esteem leads him increasingly to embrace the aliens. Whitley Strieber once wrote: “If we choose to deepen our relationship with the Visitors. . .we would be to some small degree in co-equal control of the relationship.” Whitley will settle for “some small degree,” and so does Jim. And that leads to our next scene in 1994 in which Jim is asked to voluntarily submit to semen extraction, and he does, although there is “a bit of a slip.”

A bit of a slip

Jim is set up at the beginning by being taken without apparent force. Jim is elated and extremely grateful. This was the occasion the screen-imaged gangster-dressed alien walks into Jim’s bedroom and says “The boss wants ta see ya.” No terrifying hurricane. The two walk down to the beach in Florida and enter a floating craft, “almost like you would board a 747 airplane,” Jim says. “I could have run, but I didn’t. After 6½ years of abductions, this was the first time I was in control of my motor functions,” he writes.

Inside, Jim writes, “I heard the supervisor’s voice in my head: WOULD YOU PLEASE LIE DOWN ON THIS TABLE? After years of forced procedures, this guy was actually asking me,” Jim writes. “’Sure,’ I thought, ‘why not?’

“You have to understand,” Jim explains, “the intense terror and helplessness I’d had before. Now I felt they considered me almost a significant person. They had some kind of respect.”

The theme of the abduction has been set from the top. It is a voluntary abduction and Jim is a volunteer. Accordingly, on the table, Jim is not paralyzed. Everything is going swimmingly. But, Jim has a vagrant thought: “’I could just kick the bastard, he’s so close.’

“It was only a whim. I sure didn’t want to get myself in trouble with these things that had such power over me.” They put the apparatus over Jim’s groin. “It’s difficult to tell you how abusive this feels,” he writes. Attractive women appear. He ejaculates. Then “the sense of abuse came over me again. ‘This isn’t natural!’ I yelled. Almost reflexively, I jerked away and my leg kicked up, hard, into the supervisor beside me.”

A crime of protest

Pandemonium breaks loose in the room. The kick, Jim writes, “startled me as much as it did him. I fell back on the table. The women vanished. All signs of reality overlay were snatched away. Gone were all the false images. Suddenly, the supervisor seemed frail, atrophied, his head a large mass of wrinkles like some very old man. And I got an incredible jumble of thought beams projected at me. HOW COULD YOU DO THAT TO ME? YOU KNOW BETTER! I TRUSTED YOU! YOU BETRAYED MY TRUST! YOU DISAPPOINTED US. YOU DID THIS ON PURPOSE. YOU TRIED TO HURT ME! WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO HURT ME? DON’T YOU KNOW THIS IS BAD? And on and on, in a gush, a mind-blast.”

Yes, of course. Jim was supposed to have understood he was supposed to let aliens abuse him without protest. He was supposed to cooperate in his own humiliation and abnegation. Bad boy, Jim. Furthermore, Jim had a glimpse of the forbidden. He saw the supervisor as “frail, atrophied, some very old man.” After 6½ years in which the aliens did everything possible, attended to every detail, marshaled every special effect to intimidate Jim Sparks, now this unfortunate development!

Back home, though, Jim is curiously untroubled. He was, as he puts it, “of two minds. On the one hand I was elated to have been able to explore their ship. I was moving forward. At the same time, I felt depressed. Maybe I’d blown the whole thing. Maybe I’d failed a test. Of course, even if I’d hurt the supervisor it wasn’t badly. And they knew they were doing things to me I felt were abusive and I was simply reacting. Though I’d taken a big step forward after 6½ years of confusion, there had been a bit of a slip.”

For your own good

So here’s what the aliens did. Jim is not 100 percent reliable. It’s just a fact. Even after 6½ years of brainwashing, he’s still capable of kicking a supervisor. I presume they put Jim under closer surveillance after this incident, and they also did something else. They persuaded Jim the humiliating medical procedures were done for his own good. The semen extraction, that’s done for the good of humanity, the good of the project, the good of the mission. But the anal probes, those are done for Jim’s own personal benefit, he now is asked to believe.

In 1995 Jim finds himself face down on a table with an instrument inserted in his rectum and snaking through his lower bowel. “Why are you doing this to me?” he demands. AN EXAMINATION OF YOUR SYSTEM. IT IS NECESSARY YOU STOP EATING ANIMALS. YOUR SYSTEM IS OVERLOADED WITH TRASH. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO KILL TO SURVIVE. Some 30 days later, another anal probe. “Damn it! I told you I stopped eating meat.” WE KNOW. WE HAD TO MAKE SURE IT WAS HELPING YOU. AND IT IS.

There’s nothing about implants in Jim’s book, so I asked him about that. He told me he assumes he has implants but he has no memory of receiving any and, he said, he doesn’t try to find out because it might “screw up” his relationship with the aliens. So thinking about implants is off-limits for Jim Sparks, and that makes it a whole lot easier for him to believe the anal probes are done for his own good.

The mass abduction

The climax of Keepers is Jim’s initiation into the alien organization, his meeting with the reptilians when he accepts his assignment. But before that, there is another event, an event which tells all. That event is the mass abduction.

Jim finds himself in a “forest clearing” and he hears “the dreadful sound of people crying and moaning. About 15 people were sprawled on the ground around my feet, men and women,” Jim writes. To his left was a young man, standing. “People were in their nightclothes; a few were nude. The young man was paralyzed but could speak. He was panicked and murmured, ‘The last thing I remember was driving home. . . ‘ The people on the ground had been abducted in their sleep. They lay paralyzed, disoriented, completely conscious. One blond woman was in a fetal position, rocking back and forth on the ground and screaming uncontrollably. I was calm,” Jim writes.

“Twenty yards to the left, another dozen people sprawled on the ground. Above them stood an alien. Twenty yards beyond that was another group. The young man near me was losing control, shrieking terribly. An alien appeared beside me and said, CALM HIM.” Jim did. “The blond woman was even more distraught. The alien said, CALM HER.

“I could move. I realized what was happening¾I was being trusted again. I hadn’t blown it when I kicked the supervisor. . .” Suddenly someone yelled, “’Look! The ships are coming!’ Silently and gracefully,” Jim writes, “three ships descended in gorgeous, magnificent splendor. Their beauty took my breath away. I thought maybe I’d been trained for just such a moment. I tried to signal the ships in the symbology I had learned, tracing it in the air.” But apparently the ships weren’t listening, and Jim “blacked out.”

He wakes up, on board, with all the abductees around him, and is told, LEAD THEM. He heads “down a corridor and the people followed.” They enter a “huge room filled with rows and rows of monitors and desks. SEAT THEM.

“It was rather nice,” Jim writes, “knowing exactly what I was supposed to do and performing my function perfectly.” Perfect or not, “as soon as the last person was seated,” Jim blacks out. He wakes up in a chair and thinks, “Gee, all they had to do was ask me to sit down and I would have. Or, maybe not. I had been scanning the room, getting curious again.”

So we can see, with heart-sinking regret, that Jim Sparks has now been brought to the point where all that concerns him is how well he can please his alien masters.

The assembled are treated to a slide show of earth in glory and earth in decline, and provided with the obscure, hitherto hardly-ever-discussed-among-human-beings idea that THE EARTH IS DYING. Ever eager to please, Jim attempts to “translate the alien symbols on the slides. NO! says a voice in his head.” Undaunted, Jim writes, “I can’t tell you how emphatic and truthful this environmental message was. I felt it with every fibre. . .” He blacked out.

Now everyone is in a “smaller room” like a “locker room with benches. My group of people surrounded me,” Jim writes, “all naked, all showing fresh scars from surgical procedures. . .and the people were whimpering with terror. An alien walked in: CALM THEM. FIND AND PUT ON YOUR OWN CLOTHES. The clothes were thrown all over the room.”

Back home, Jim felt “good.” He felt, he writes, “an odd enjoyment of the experience and a sense of accomplishment. I felt as though I had a place in whatever strange scheme was happening. I was starting to see more of how I fit into all this.” Jim told his abductee support group, which he was now in, about the mass abduction. They all thought it was “cool,” Jim writes.

Eerily anesthetized, deserted by normal apprehension, absent of critical faculties, one for whom few rationalizations are too voluminous to swallow, that is the frame of mind of the capitulated abductee.

Collaboration

Jim is eased into his role as collaborator without difficulty. His inevitable response to being told the earth may not survive as a habitable planet is to ask, What can I do? Just keep doing what you’re doing, he is told, keep meeting with other abductees.

Soon the aliens impose more definition on Jim’s role. It is now a “duty.” Jim is taken to a dark room and left there “for some time,” he writes, “until I heard a voice in my head. The voice, followed by other voices, lectured me. They wanted me to take responsibility when I spoke of them. This was a duty—bearing the message to others.” Jim says he didn’t care for “the tone or the method, so they left me in pitch black. STAY HERE AND THINK IT OVER.”

Eventually the lights came on and “the supervisor led me to a full length mirror. He stood me in front of the mirror and said, LOOK. The figure in the mirror was me, only altered. My hair is dark brown, full and thick. The image showed me with thin dark brown hair mixed with blond. My chin seemed pointier. My image had no eyebrows and my moustache was gone. My eyes were slightly larger and my body more frail.”

Jim says Budd Hopkins suggested the purpose of the mirror exercise “was to make me believe I was one of them.” Quite so. I take it as a mild version of the identity replacement used with most abductees. They are told their mother is an alien, or their father is an alien, or they are secretly married to an alien, or they were an alien in a previous life, or they carry alien genes, and several other variations. In this manner the abductee is provided with a new identity which bonds him to the alien civilization and detaches his identity to the human race. Perhaps in Jim’s case as time goes on he will be given a more fully blown version of the story, whose purpose is to persuade the abductee that “you are really one of us.”

A deserted carnival yard

Jim decides the lecture in the dark room was actually “reasonable” and he doesn’t resent it any more. Now he is ready for his initiation. One evening Jim is gently taken, sailed through the air and deposited in a deserted carnival yard where he encounters a circle of reptilians. There, statements are imparted to Jim concerning the American government and the aliens’ relationship to the American government.

As Jim descends he sees “about a dozen large creatures.” He blacks out. On reviving he hears. . .WHAT YOU HAVE BEEN A PART OF AND WHAT YOU MUST DO. . .WE HAVE BEEN IN CONTACT WITH YOUR GOVERNMENT. . .SECRET AGREEMENTS. . .SOME OF YOUR PEOPLE HAVE BEEN HURT TO PROTECT THIS SECRET. OUR HANDS HAD NO PART IN THIS. WE CONTACTED YOUR LEADERS BECAUSE YOUR PLANET IS IN GRAVE TROUBLE. . .AGREEMENTS AS TO WHEN YOUR PEOPLE WOULD BE MADE AWARE OF OUR PRESENCE. . .AGREEMENT HAS NOT BEEN KEPT. IT WAS ALSO AGREED STEPS WOULD BE TAKEN TO CORRECT THE ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITION OF YOUR PLANET WITH OUR ADVICE & TECHNOLOGY. WE SAY ‘ADVICE’ BECAUSE WE RESPECT THAT THIS PLANET IS YOURS. THEY ALSO BROKE THIS AGREEMENT.

Jim writes he “felt an awful wave of emotion from them¾the feeling of abandonment. ‘You aren’t giving up on us, are you?’ “ A long pause, and finally, “NO.”

“I felt an immense sense of relief,” Jim writes. Warnings about environmental damage, population and WMD follow. “IT IS ALMOST TOO LATE. THERE ARE BETTER WAYS TO DERIVE ENERGY & FOOD WITHOUT CAUSING YOUR PLANET DAMAGE. THOSE IN POWER ARE AWARE OF THIS & HAVE THE CAPABILITY. . . ‘Why aren’t we doing it?’” Jim asks. Silence. “I was willing to wait,” Jim writes. “I had come a long way to be treated like this by them. . . apparently I had earned their respect and trust. . .I was getting truthful answers.”

THOSE IN POWER VIEW IT AS A MILITARY & SECURITY THREAT. “You mean to tell me the people in power have the ability to save and better this planet and they aren’t doing it?” The reptilians tell Jim amnesty is necessary. THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN SUPPRESSING THE TRUTH CAN’T BE HELD LIABLE FOR ANY WRONG DEEDS. IT IS THE ONLY WAY THESE LEADERS CAN COME FORWARD WITH THE TRUTH.

“How do I fit? What can I do?” The reptilians tell Jim to keep doing what he is doing. Eventually, Jim hears, IT’S TIME TO GO. “A rare courtesy,” Jim thinks.

A turning point

Back home, Jim awoke “with fresh excitement. I had been approached almost as an equal. I mattered,” he writes. “There was a reason for all I’d gone through. My 1995 meeting at the carnival site was indeed a turning point. I knew then precisely what my task was¾to help spread the message I was given by these ETs.”

He decides the environmental destruction of earth “doesn’t suit their purposes. They need us. They consider us some kind of crop, and I say that in the best sense. These creatures were neither evil nor benevolent,” he writes. “They were just different. It simply does no good to try to use human measurement and morals to embrace their ET designs.” [Italics added]

Soon Jim receives thought monitoring and advice on what to say on the radio, concluding with GOODBY FOR NOW. Delighted, Jim remarks on “this courtesy,” and their “honest attempts to respect my fear. When I was confused. . .they advised me. Then they gave me the truth of it all. One day soon I’d have the privilege of watching them land, greeting them face to face, and walking on board. And now, this courtesy¾this privilege¾a farewell and the promise they’d see me again.”

Transformed

Jim is galvanized, and his attitude toward the aliens has been transformed. Where once he “loathed” them, he now feels reverence. Furthermore, he has decided the aliens cannot be judged by human moral standards.

I talked to Jim about what the aliens told him. “Why don’t they disclose?” I asked. “And why is there is a link between help from the aliens and disclosure? Why do the aliens want disclosure?”

He tells me humans have the technology the environment needs. So I ask again, “If the aliens want disclosure so badly, why don’t they go ahead and disclose?” He tells me the aliens need earth because they get things from here. Again I ask, “What’s this about they’re pressuring our government and if the government does not disclose, well then disclosure won’t take place?”

He tells me the cover-up people are worried about being thrown in jail if there was disclosure. I understand that, I say, so why don’t the aliens disclose? And he tells me again about people in government worried “about their own butts. If you expose them without amnesty, the whole thing is counterproductive.” Amnesty, though, “will get everything out on the table—all the tools we can use. . .” The aliens did the “proper” thing by contacting heads of state, Jim continues, but humans used alien technology “to make more money and more weapons.”

“How do you know that?” I asked. “The aliens told me!” he said. Furthermore, he added, it “really makes sense.”

It does? Obviously Jim Sparks could not say why the aliens don’t disclose because he doesn’t know and hasn’t thought about it. He just runs with whatever he’s told because that’s “the truth.”

Why don’t they disclose?

He’s said disclosure without amnesty would be “counterproductive.” But disclosure must come before amnesty, whoever does the disclosing, because what part of government is going to grant the amnesty unless they already know there’s something to disclose?

But that’s only the beginning of the questions. How is it the aliens are telling us we have to get THEIR technology from somebody else? If the aliens want earth to have environment-saving technology, why don’t they provide it to several thousand scientists? There wouldn’t even need to be disclosure. The aliens could just hack into the dreams of the many, many scientists on earth who are desperately searching for an answer to our energy problem.

The aliens want to help the human race? Why does the help depend on disclosure? And why does the government have to be the one doing the disclosing? It seems the alien has terms and the terms are: We will help earth only after disclosure, and the United States government must be the one to disclose. Frankly? It sounds like a game of “lets you an’ him fight,” i.e., lets us fight with our government while the aliens who instigated the fight stand by and watch.

As for amnesty, according to the aliens and Jim Sparks, the secret government has violated human rights, failed to disclose the truth of the alien presence, and failed to use alien-derived technology for the betterment of the human race. If that’s true, what have the aliens done? Do the aliens need amnesty too?

We have established that Jim Sparks believes most of what the aliens say, and we know why that is true. Now we must leave Jim and his predicament behind, and ask ourselves, What do we think of the aliens’ political message?

This message is about a struggle going on between the aliens and the United States government. It is not a message about the environment. It is a message intended to discredit the US government and make the aliens look good. Will we in the UFO community be as credulous about this message as Jim Sparks is? Are the aliens trying to break the United States government like they broke Jim Sparks? It looks to me like they are.

What I say is not intended to absolve our government’s role in the UFO cover up. It is not intended to dispel the possibility of MILABs, for which there is accumulating evidence, some of it in Jim Spark’s book. It seems to me entirely possible the United States government has fallen into a deep pit from which it is going to be exceedingly difficult to extricate itself. But one thing is certain—the United States government didn’t start this mess.

And for the aliens to stand there and tell me earth’s environmental is in horrible shape, and they could help us, but before they will my government has to disclose their existence? And stand there and tell me the only solution is for me to get THEIR technology out of the hands of the government? Excuse me? It’s their technology!

It’s their technology

Furthermore, they tell me, my government has violated the rights of human beings. The aliens, who have the blood of tens of thousands if not millions of abductees on their hands, abductees whose lives have been taken over, who have been haunted and hunted and hounded and terrorized and tortured in some kind of really funny cosmic joke, whose bodies have been shamelessly used in unthinkable genetic experiments, whose reason and self-esteem has been degraded, whose personal lives have been expropriated and their freedom destroyed, for whom the sacred bond of trust between man and wife, between parent and child, has been invaded and usurped—and they’re telling me my government is guilty and must have amnesty?

According to Jim Sparks, “It simply does no good to try to use human measurement and morals to embrace their ET designs.” That’s the line the aliens have peddled to Jim Sparks, but it doesn’t go over with me. I see nothing that interferes with my ability to make moral judgments about the aliens.

As for their political analysis, the alien version of international relations as imparted one night in a deserted carnival park to a fellow who used to belong to himself but doesn’t any more, I’m afraid there are too many holes in it for me to accept it as “the truth.”