The story of Linda Porter is one of the oddest in High Strangeness. Troubled by recurrent images of huge ‘grasshoppers’ and moving inside a light beam, she was referred to a hypnotist, but found the memories that began to return so frightening that she refused to continue. But memories then began to return spontaneously—for example, of being inside the grey corridor of some kind of craft, and seeing a mantis-type being about eight feet tall. She was then about fifteen. On another occasion, she recalled being taken to some kind of undersea base off the coast near Santa Barbara where, above bright-coloured doors, there was writing that looked like Arabic or hieroglyphics. (This recurs in case after case.) At the age of seventeen, she woke to find a hole in the middle of her bedroom floor, and grey, shadowy beings climbing out of it. She also recalled being lowered down a shaft of light at such a speed she was terrified that she would die as she hit the ground; but she slowed suddenly when about four feet above the ground.
But her strangest story is of how she ‘changed bodies’. When she was twelve, she almost died of a badly infected throat, and had an out-of-the-body experience. Her parents did not believe in doctors, so she was left to recover without medical help.
Later, on board a craft, she saw a middle-aged man who was close to death, and watched as his soul lifted out of his body and moved to another identical body, which then came to life; she was told that the old body would be scrapped, since old bodies are no more than ‘empty beer cans’—that the ETs are amused by the human obsession with funerals. Then Linda Porter went through the same process—her soul was lifted out and placed in another body, since the infection had damaged the old one beyond repair.
She was afterwards shown her former body, and an alien scientist held her heart in his hand. The instrument he used to cut out the heart was a small silver-coloured tube with a blue light on the end, which used vibrations to cut the flesh without causing damage to the cells.
Linda Porter received the impression that the ETs who performed this operation were ‘trying to hide all this from some “higher” form of life—whatever the “authority” is that prohibits this soul transfer also prohibits them from interfering on this planet’. This authority is much more highly evolved than the ETs are, ‘and wields a great power over many, many other realms of existence’.
Like so many other abductees, Linda Porter was told that Earth is in immediate danger because of pollution and destruction of the environment: . . . there is a chemical poison spreading in our land . . . the result of some kind of secret testing done by our government in outer space. A dangerous by-product of that testing was created, and is now falling back into our atmosphere’. It would eventually lead to a deadly chain reaction culminating in ‘ignition’ or ‘sky fire’. (Linda Howe points out that Judy Doraty had told her something very similar in 1980.)
The language of the ETs, according to Linda Porter, is much more precise and compact than ours, and consists of ‘symbols that create emotions’. These appear as three-dimensional holographic sculptures. The universe itself is ‘built on sound patterns, which is why so many different worlds/dimensions can exist in the same space. Each is on a different frequency . . . There are countless different worlds/dimensions occupying the same space without being aware of one another, because of having their own individual octaves’. (These ideas seem to echo those of Gurdjieff, or those of the Cambridge archaeologist T. C. Lethbridge.)
Like so many abductees and contactees, Linda Porter did not wholly trust the aliens and the account they gave of their purpose. ‘I still feel there’s something fishy going on, something they don’t want us to know’.
She also told Linda Howe that she had a ‘gut feeling’ that crop circles were a subliminal message.
One of the purposes of the abductions, she thought, was to bring the abductees to emotional maturity through fear. ‘When the person becomes thoroughly saturated with this emotion, it causes them to move beyond it’. The people who had passed this test would be prepared for the time when ‘the great changes begin’. But she also seemed to feel that abductees are themselves ‘aliens’. ‘We are like exchange students in that we were created to come here, and live an earthly life within the limited human experience’. This seems to fit in with the notions that John Mack suggests at the end of his own book Abduction.
Another abductee, Wanna Lawson, described how she and her family were travelling near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in two cars when they saw lights in the sky, and she seemed to hallucinate lights and figures, ‘swinging what appeared to be lanterns’. Then, although the car was still travelling fast, her daughter Netta slumped over the steering wheel without causing the car to swerve. Both cars pulled into a rest area and they found themselves on the New Jersey Turnpike, a hundred miles or so from Harrisburg—yet both cars still had full petrol tanks.
The rest of the family wanted to forget the whole thing, but Wanna and her daughter had vague memories of being examined by humanoids. They submitted to hypnosis, and Wanna remembered a large room of humanoid bodies in glass containers. Linda Porter had described the same thing. Somehow, Wanna Lawson was transferred from her own body into that of a tall humanoid female—although she also recognised this new body, says Linda Howe, as ‘her own’. In her new body she had sex with a male humanoid whom she recognised as a long-time companion. Linda Howe comments, ‘The implication is that humanoid bodies were put on and taken off at will for a specific goal’.
This goal seems to involve ‘seeding’ the human race with a higher species, for which purpose certain beings like Wanna, who are actually aliens, return to Earth again and again in a kind of reincarnation. The aim of what she calls ‘the watchers of man, the creators of man’ is to ‘take a sub-creature and evolve it to (their) level’. One problem they have encountered is that ‘some humans are so evil that it just about cripples us [aliens] to be around them’.
At a UFO conference, soon after she met Wanna Lawson, Linda Howe gave a lecture on the different types of entity she had encountered in her interviews with abductees—praying mantis, lizard, Bigfoot, Blond Hairs, Greys, and so on—and was startled by the number of people present who also claimed to have encountered one or other. And a man whose identity she conceals under the name Ken Rose spoke of being taken on board a craft and seeing three female human bodies in glass cases, with cavities where the stomachs should be; they were covered in a gold-coloured dust, to preserve them from bacteria, and seemed to be in the process of being constructed.
Linda Howe encountered the reincarnation theme raised by Wanna Lawson in interviews with an abductee named Jim Sparks, who has described his own experiences in a book called Star People, Outsiders—Us or Them? (1996). Sparks, born in 1954, describes how he is usually ‘taken’ at about 3:30 in the morning; he experiences a ‘whirling’ sensation in the pit of his stomach, which expands to his head; he blacks out, and finds himself on board a craft. There he is subjected—whether he likes it or not—to a learning experience, being forced to learn the alien alphabet. Noncooperation brings a burst of physical agony. The alien symbols are not, like ours, designed to be drawn on a flat surface, but in three dimensions. It took seven years, from 1988 until 1995, for him to learn these symbols.
One day, in the alien environment, Sparks found himself reading a story, written in English, about a close friend, which depicted the friend’s life in accurate detail. But, when the story reached the present, it continued, describing the future. He was so enthralled that when the story continued in the alien language, he carried on reading, and found he could understand it. Finally, he found he could understand one small symbol, the size of a fifty-cent piece, and see that it contained information that would normally occupy twenty pages.
Jim Sparks’s account of the alien language was sent to a psychologist, Dr. Mario Pazzaglini, who has become an expert in symbols reproduced by abductees since the 1980s. His lengthy analysis is presented in full in Linda Howe’s book, and concludes: ‘While we cannot definitely say that the Spar
ks script is alien (nothing is definite in this field), we can say that it does not follow the common characteristics of hoaxed or made-up script. It is the description of a complex system which possibly is capable of forming a communication between totally dissimilar minds’.
When Sparks asked the aliens, ‘Why me?’, they made him write his question in the writing they had taught him. When he had done this, he was shown a holographic scene that seemed to be of World War Two. He saw German and Italian officers conspiring in some kind of a coup, and recognised himself as one of the Italians. (Sparks is Italian.) This scene made him feel somehow ashamed for the human race.
Next he was shown a scene that seemed to be in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century: there was a horse-drawn buggy in front of a factory building, and he recognised himself in the buggy, wearing a black suit and top hat; he sensed he was the factory owner.
Then he saw a scene which he guessed to be about the fifteenth or sixteenth century: a man and a woman were in a field overlooking the sea, farming the crop; the man reminded him of himself. After this, there was a medieval inn, with men and women around a crude wooden table, drinking from pewter mugs. Again, one of the men reminded Sparks of himself.
In the next scene he saw the Roman senate, and he himself listening to the others speak in some important debate, ‘as if he had all the power’.
When he asked how far they had followed his family line, he was shown a scene of the African savanna, with patches of trees and apelike creatures. From this, Sparks understood that the aliens were telling him that they were responsible for human creation—a theme Linda Howe had already raised at the beginning of the previous volume.
She also points out the parallel between Jim Sparks’s learning experience and a similar scene described by Betty Andreasson, whose case has been presented in four volumes by researcher Raymond Fowler. Betty Andreasson described how she had seen her daughter Becky tracing raised alien symbols with her fingers on a console, and was told by a ‘grey’ that they were training her.
In another scene described in Jim Sparks’s book, he found himself in a huge hangar, in which a man and a woman were inside two transparent containers. Sparks became angry as an alien touched the woman with a metal rod, and was disciplined by a being who seemed to be human, who pressed the back of his hand repeatedly with a rod that stung, and which left red marks afterwards. A friend of Sparks confirmed to Linda Howe that he had seen Sparks’s hand covered with red marks, and that Sparks had obviously been unwilling to discuss it. (Sparks explained to Linda Howe that he did not want it to be real.)
Sparks also explained that, in his view, there were three levels of American government. The first was the normal US government; the second was the level that covers up secrets like the recovery of the Roswell craft; the third, which Sparks called the Black Budget Boys (or BBB), is a Secret Club, whose existence is unknown to the other two levels.
Sparks believes that the aliens have been among us for thousands of years, and that they have been ‘farming us’. (Charles Fort suggested once that ‘We are property’.) ‘We are a self-perpetuating crop’. But now humans have taken a path that seems to lead to inevitable self-destruction, with nuclear waste and environmental pollution, the aliens have to face the possibility that all their ‘farming’ has been wasted. Jim Sparks feels that the decade from 1996 until 2006 may be crucial to the question of whether the human race can survive. The present interaction of aliens and human beings—the whole emergence of the UFO phenomenon—is, he believes, an attempt on the part of the aliens to avert this catastrophe.
Sparks’s view is, relatively speaking, optimistic. Other abductees have stated that nothing can avert the catastrophe, and that part of the Earth will be destroyed. The human race will continue, but on a smaller scale. Sparks clearly feels that the situation is not yet as extreme as this—something can be done, but it is urgently necessary for us to be awakened out of our complacency.
There is another aspect of Linda Howe’s work that I have deliberately refrained from raising until this point: her conviction that there has been contact between the aliens and the US government, and that the ‘Black Budget Boys’ are deliberately concealing this from the public.
At the beginning of High Strangeness, she quotes a long passage from Maj. Donald Keyhoe’s 1960 book Flying Saucers, Top Secret, which makes it very clear that the military is fully aware of the reality of UFOs and is engaged in a deliberate cover-up. In 1958, Keyhoe was asked by the director of television programmes at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas if they could quote from his book The Flying Saucer Conspiracy. He was sent a script of the programme which acknowledges the reality of UFOs, and cites such cases as the disappearance of an F89 interceptor fighter pursuing a UFO over Lake Superior on 23 November 1953. On radar, the UFO ‘blip’ had merged with the oncoming fighter, and both had simply vanished.
The programme also acknowledged that there was an official order muzzling all military personnel, members of the Defense Department and other agencies, on the subject of UFOs, backed by threats of fines and imprisonment.
Not surprisingly, the programme—which was for internal consumption at Lackland only—was cancelled; it is hard to fathom how the director came to believe that it could ever have gone ahead. But, since the air force script is quoted at length by Keyhoe, it is undoubtedly genuine.
In 1983, three years after A Strange Harvest was broadcast, Linda Howe was asked to make a programme about UFOs and extraterrestrial involvement. Two UFO organisations had tried to sue the American government to obtain information about UFOs under the Freedom of Information Act, but the Supreme Court turned them down.
Based on later information, it seems that what happened next is that the air force decided to take action to anticipate future attempts to force its hand by launching a campaign of disinformation, which began with an apparent surrender. Peter Gersten, the attorney who had presented the case under the Freedom of Information Act, was invited to have dinner with Special Agent Richard C. Doty, of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI).
Over the meal, Doty acknowledged that there had been a UFO landing at Kirtland Air Force Base in 1983, and that, when a guard had approached the disc-shaped object with a shotgun, it took off vertically at great speed. Moreover, when a UFO had landed at Ellsworth Air Force Base six years earlier, in 1977, a guard who pointed a gun at an ‘alien’ had his gun disintegrated by a ‘light beam’, which also burnt his hand. Gersten and Doty discussed a highly classified study group, set up by the military to examine UFOs, called Majestic 12, which included some prestigious names, including (incredibly) the arch-sceptic Prof. Donald Menzel.
Doty told Gersten that the US government had been in contact with aliens and had made an agreement, according to which the aliens were given a base at Groom Lake, near Las Vegas (and known as Area 51), as well as permission to mutilate cattle and abduct human beings, in exchange for teaching US experts about alien technology.
This certainly sounds conclusive. Or was Doty deliberately trying to spread confusion by simply repeating back some of the wilder theories of the conspiracy theorists?
Linda Howe was herself granted a meeting with Doty, for which purpose she flew to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Doty was supposed to meet her, but failed to turn up at the airport. Finally, with the help of Jerry Miller, a scientific adviser at the base, she met Doty, who claimed he had been waiting at the airport.
As they drove back, he went on to confirm another story Linda had heard recently: that a UFO had actually landed at Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico. But he said she had got the date wrong. It was not May 1971, but April 1964. The same craft had landed the day before at Socorro, and been seen (in a famous incident) by Patrolman Lonnie Zamora (see p. 101)—this was because there was some confusion about the place and time. The following day, it landed, as scheduled, at Holloman, for its official meeting with the US Air Force . . .
In his office, Doty told her that her programme
A Strange Harvest ‘came too close to something we don’t want the public to know about’. He then showed her a paper entitled ‘Briefing Paper for the President of the United States’, which began by admitting a number of crashes of UFOs, beginning in 1946, and including Roswell (two of them); Aztec, New Mexico; and Kingman, Arizona. Alien bodies and discs had been recovered from the later crash near Roswell in 1949 (not the famous one in 1947) and taken to Los Alamos for analysis. Five dead aliens and been found, and one alive. This creature, known as Ebe (extraterrestrial biological entity), told investigators (telepathically and in words) that its civilisation originated on a planet five light years from Earth, and have been visiting Earth for 25,000 years. There is a colony of them underground on Earth. They have been manipulating DNA, and aiding human evolution. It was also stated that Jesus was an extraterrestrial, created by the aliens, placed on Earth to teach men about love and nonviolence.
Linda Howe was not allowed to copy or make notes on any of this. But she was told that Doty’s superiors intended to release to her film footage of crashed UFOs, aliens, and the alien called ‘Ebe’.
Understandably, she was wildly excited at this scoop, and lost no time in telling the backers of her programme about it. They were just as excited. Then nothing happened. The promised film footage and information never arrived. Discouraged, the backers dropped the whole idea of a programme on UFOs.
This, it seems obvious in retrospect, was the intention. By offering so much information and raising such expectations, Doty was almost certainly setting out to wreck the project.
A year later, in 1984, another briefing paper for the US president (Eisenhower) was sent anonymously to a television producer named Jaime Shandera. It was on a roll of film, claimed to be by the CIA Director Admiral Hillenkoetter, and was about the ‘Majestic 12’ group. It claimed that four dead aliens had been found at the earlier crash at Roswell in 1947. Unfortunately, the signature of Harry Truman was almost (but not quite) identical to one on another document. The highly respected UFO investigator Timothy Good published the document in his book Above Top Secret, stating his belief in its genuineness, but later concluded that it was a hoax. He continues to feel that Majestic 12 did exist, and that the document contains a mixture of truth and falsehood.