A Tale as Old as Time Travel
Reviewing three separate investigations that still struggle to solve the ET problem
Congressional hearing topic:
Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth.
In case you weren’t aware, last week congress had another landmark hearing on U.A.P. (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) and government transparency surrounding supposed evidence the Pentagon, C.I.A., and their contractors may still be hiding from the American public. This hearing by the House Oversight Committee coincided with the release of an annual sightings report now required by law from A.A.R.O (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office), a task force established in 2022 to record, study, and report on sightings of UAP.
The hearing clocked in at just over 2 hours and featured a rare bipartisan common interest in many of the same questions:
Who is hiding this information?
Why does it seem so hard to get an answer?
And are we really talking about the possibility of non-human intelligences screwing with our military?
Questions from the congressmen and congresswomen ranged from intelligent and reasonable to repetitive and bone-headed. You can find highlights of some of the key moments in the news and on highlight videos if you don’t want to sit through the whole thing. I turned it on while I was doing some drawing work and just let it run.
However, I am glad I watched the whole thing. What you don’t get in the clips of answers and highlights is a longer view of the overall tone and body language of our congressional leaders. As someone who follows this topic regularly, I found this display more interesting than what the witnesses were talking about.
As the whistleblowers were questioned on many of the same subjects brought up in the hearing last year, the camera in this video (linked above) focuses purely on the leaders as they listen and ask questions. It becomes very revealing to see which leaders listen intently or don’t listen, which ones seem confused or distracted, and which ones ask questions that were just asked minutes before either because they weren’t listening or they can’t think of anything better than the questions they planned.
If you follow the topic regularly (and I am sure this is true of every other hearing I don’t pay attention to as closely), it also becomes obvious which congress people are getting all their information from the internet, which ones read books, and which ones are genuinely interested in finding ways to solve the problems vs. which ones think it is somehow more important for them to prove they are more clever than the witnesses themselves.
So yeah, aliens aside, I still find humans way more interesting and frightening in the real world. Other than that, the hearing is worth a watch just to see what we are up against when it comes to ever getting the powers that be to show their hand about what they know--even to our own elected officials.
Alien Investigations
Lead investigator: George Knapp
Format: Docu-series
Where to watch: Netflix
Alien Investigations, the latest George Knapp exclusive investigation into government cover ups just dropped, and it’s not bad! George Knapp has become one of the leading U.F.O. investigators over the decades due to his reputation as a professional reporter taking on the alien topic before it was cool.
Quick disclaimer, in my humble opinion, I sometimes feel that Mr. Knapp’s reputation has in some cases become too large to fully trust him. What I mean by this is that his professional career has become tightly tied to the message of conspiracies he is delivering. For this reason, at times I have felt like there is some amount of confirmation bias and a need to distort the truth or ignore some counter-arguments to suit his branding.
That said, I still think George Knapp is one of the best resources we have for digging into these topics. The massive network of insider connections he has built over the years put him in a better position than just about anyone else to put truth to power when it comes to a situation like the congressional hearing a few days ago.
This Netflix series is in fact his direct response to the controversial AARO report that came out last year claiming there was no “there there” when it came to evidence of non-human intelligences being hidden in the Pentagon. The series is a thorough and well documented investigation that captures some compelling video and interviews that are worth viewing for anyone intrigued by this subject.
While some of the information feels a little stagnant at this point, some of the stories that came out of Brazil were especially interesting to me that I had not heard before. There is also a great video they captured of an orb entering the water off the coast of Mexico that is difficult to dispute as being anything other than anomalous.
For me, the most powerful piece came in the last episode when Knapp interviews a camera operator for the military who was tasked with recording nuclear missile tests in the 1960’s. There is a legendary story in the ufology community of a video where a UFO zips around a nuclear test missile in mid-flight disarming it and knocking it out of the air. The man interviewed, Bob Jacobs, is the person who filmed that recording which was quickly buried by the military, and he was told to never speak of it again. The emotion visible on his face during the interview speaks volumes and was enough to make the whole series worth watching for me.
I don’t think George Knapp is going to knock down any doors at the CIA or the Pentagon with this series, but it definitely gives a lot of good evidential reasons for us to keep fighting for disclosure.
Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens
Author: John E. Mack, M.D.
Category: Non-fiction/Psychology
Format: Book/audiobook
Year: 1994
Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens is both a legendary and highly controversial book about the phenomenon. It was written by a Harvard professor of psychiatry, John E. Mack, M.D., about his studies into the hypnotic regression of subjects claiming to have experienced abductions by non-human entities. This was Mack’s first book on the subject, and it led to him becoming a pariah in the Harvard community for his willingness to explore his patients’ claims with serious validity.
At the time when Mack first became interested in this topic, others such as Budd Hopkins and David M. Jacobs were writing about a pattern of experiences discovered through hypnotic regression in which people were recalling eerily similar encounters with these non-human abductions. The memories were mostly repressed and only recognizable to the experiencers because of missing periods of time in their memories, strange scars and injuries they could not explain, and finding themselves in unusual places with no memory of how they arrived there.
Mack became interested as a professional psychiatrist because he thought the phenomenon needed a more scientific approach to what these memories may represent and the methods used to retrieve them. Budd Hopkins, after all, was an artist first and more of a hypnotic regression enthusiast, but he did not hold a degree in psychiatry as Mack did.
Having read several other books about the abduction phenomenon, I will say I have never felt more disturbed as I have while listening to this particular book. Everyone often points to Whitley Strieber’s Communion as particularly unsettling which it definitely is, but I have always gotten a feeling of self-indulgence from Strieber’s books because he is often referring to his own experience. I don’t want to discount the legitimacy of Strieber’s claims or the importance of his contributions. All I am saying is that as a reader, something about Mack approaching the encounters as an outsider with a non-judgemental, scientific approach feels more authentic and visceral to me.
Mack does not accept anything without a thorough discussion of all the possibilities of trauma, and yet he remains open to everything his patients describe as an actual experience of their reality. It became clear as I listened to more cases this acceptance is a necessary component of giving the patients needed validation to open up and begin healing their trauma.
I found this approach to be the most respectable part about Mack’s writing: he is always a psychiatrist first and an explorer of the phenomenon second. Mack’s first concern in every case is to help his patients find their way to healing from traumas that are affecting their lives in very meaningful ways.
For example, in one case, a woman is unable to enjoy sex with her husband because of violations she experienced from the abductions. After facing these memories directly and working through strategies with Mack to approach her intimacy, he helps her to experience a more healthy and loving marriage. In another case, a woman was unconfident and retreating from others because she could not express or own her experiences for fear of ridicule. Because of Mack’s acceptance of her experiences, he was able to offer her his open mind and connect her with a community of other experiencers with whom she could relate her unusual traumas. The results showed in the woman becoming happier and more confident in her day-to-day life.
All that said, the experiences Mack uncovers in each highly detailed patient study in this 464 page book are not for the faint of heart. The abductees vacillate between describing both abstract, dreamlike experiences with aliens to very real, physical violations of their bodies that are extremely upsetting. Things like metal instruments being inserted into the nose, the neck, and genitals come up in multiple cases in vivid detail including sounds and sensations that make me wince even as I write this. The aliens seem to justify their cold violations in a variety of ways, most often ending with something like, “You won’t remember this anyway, so you will be fine.”
What makes the encounters become all the more believable is the way Mack guides his patients through their memories with empathy and understanding. He never makes assumptions about what the experiences could mean even though he regularly searches for the possibility of trauma caused by more human culprits. His empathy also makes me as the reader feel more for these poor people and how awful their alleged experiences must have been. Regardless of whether they are real physical experiences as described or something purely psychological or occurring in some other dimensional space, whatever they experienced seems very real to that person and deserving of sympathy.
Beyond the more horrifying traumas described by the patients, many patients come to a variety of spiritual, philosophical, and altruistic conclusions about the purpose and meaning of their encounters. A common theme is the aliens showing the humans images of our planet dying and being ravaged by pollution. This message seems a little paradoxical to me because unless they are trying to influence them subconsciously, it seems like a weak marketing strategy to send a message out consciously through people whose memories will be wiped at the end of each encounter.
There is also often a conclusion that the abductees discover their familial relationship to the “alien” abductors. In more cases than one, this relationship manifests as the person describing having a human identity and an alien one coexisting simultaneously. Sometimes they are the alien one in the other dimension and the human identity in ours while others say they can be both at the same time.
Regardless of whose conclusions are more valid or whether these responses are all fabrications of the human mind to help the individuals cope with trauma, one thing is certain: it is all absolutely strange.
For those of us who do not have these experiences, though, I think it is important to ask ourselves how we might possibly cope with such unexplainable memories if we were in their shoes. Would you carry the burden and repress these thoughts out of fear and the risk of ostracizing your real world human relationships? Or would you embrace the experiences and attempt to make sense of what your abductors may be trying to communicate? The true answers to these questions may only be known when we are actually faced with such a strange reality ourselves.
If you are interested in this subject, Abduction is a must read. Mack’s work was groundbreaking, and so far, I think it is one of the most objective works on hypnotic regressions from what I have read.
On a side note, if you want to see Mack working in the field, be sure to check out the documentary, The Ariel Phenomenon, which I reviewed previously on Next Stop Unknown. This is one of the most famous close encounters with multiple witnesses which took place in Africa in 1994 on a school playground. Mack traveled to Zimbabwe just days after the encounter to interview the over 60 witnesses who were all school children ranging from six to twelve. His careful, sensitive questions and listening skills bring the first-hand witness responses home in a way that is hard to discount.
Sterling Martin is a writer, artist, and designer living in Chicago, IL. His background includes drawing, writing, theatre, teaching, improv & sketch comedy, and whatever else he can get his hands on to be creative. You can find him on the internet at:
Instagram: @sterfest.art
Website: sterlingmartin.design
Cara: sterfest@sterlingmartin
Threads (well, I’m on it): @sterfest
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