A believer in the objective reality of alien abduction might read all this and like to apply the principle of Occam’s Razor. They might surmise that the simplest explanation for why Margaret’s work resembles the visual descriptions given by hundreds of abductees is not the objectionable notion that they were somehow half-remembering her art or the various merchandise inspired by it communicated via mass media, but that she was, in fact, an abductee herself.
How else could her art be so consistently haunted by the images so familiar to abductees or experiencers?
To give credence to this argument, we can examine facts about Margaret we can be reasonably sure of that appear to support this idea (suspending for a moment any doubts about whether people really are being kidnapped by aliens).
When describing the kinds of people who have abduction experiences famed Harvard psychiatrist and abduction researcher John Mack wrote: “Efforts to establish a pattern of psychopathology other than disturbances associated with a traumatic event have been unsuccessful.” . He concluded that his abductee patients were not otherwise mentally or emotionally disturbed besides the trauma they reported from their anomalous experiences.
Psychologist Susan Clancy, also from Harvard, stands on the skeptical wing of the debate, and having met and interviewed several of Budd Hopkins’s subjects agreed: “Data from multiple studies indicate that abductees are no more likely than anyone else to suffer from psychiatric disorders.” So experts agreed, abductees or experiencers are not crazy. They are sane normal people from all walks of life.
One of the first psychiatrists to work with patients claiming to have experienced abduction by aliens, Dr. Leo Sprinkle, along with June Parnell, compiled a list of their psychological characteristics. .
They found that abductees have:
- “a reserved attitude” tending toward defensiveness
- long-term feelings of depression which aren’t alleviated by therapies or medication
- a compulsion to search for meaning, trying to find the “root-cause” of anxiety, or sadness, or a feeling of being somehow “different”
- a lingering sense that something has happened to them but they can’t access the memory of what it was
- …and that they are creative.
Jacobs makes a similar point in Secret Life, when he refers to what he calls Post Abduction Syndrome (PAS). He writes that abductees suffer from sleep disturbances: “To reduce the fear, these abductees will often sleep with lights, the radio, or the television on.”
They also have a profound desire to search for answers in New Age, spiritualist literature or religious sects: “Sometimes the aliens communicate that abductees should study religion, philosophy or occult wisdom” .
Other researchers noted the demographics of reported abductees. In the main they are middle to upper-class highly educated white North American women, .
Fitting the Profile
From the little we know about Margaret, and by her own description, there is not one of these characteristics that does not apply to her. That she was a sane, creative, North American, white woman appears self-evident. As we’ve seen above she described herself as struggling with a long-term unhappiness that she was not able to identify the root cause of. This troubled her even during the height of her fame and success, and before and after her marriage to Walter Keane.
In this 1962 newspaper clipping we see several things. Walter was not the focus of the article and Margaret is described as the commercial and critical success that was covered in part 2. It also shows that Margaret was inclined toward capturing melancholy “I try to bring out the underlying drives in my subjects…The inner quality of a person is reflected in the eyes” she said.
As we saw earlier Margaret described her own interest in occult literature in which she searched for answers. The hypothsis being that she discovered Oahspe and the story of the Shalam orphans while undertaking this journey. She also notes her exploration of spiritualism and religion. Eventually she found solace in the faith of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
While there’s no direct evidence of her having disturbed sleep but there were several newspaper stories about her avoiding sleeping at night, choosing to work through the nighttime and to sleep during the day.
27 March 1961
The Concealed Ways of the Universe
Elisabeth Klarer, a white South African woman, a meteorologist, pilot, and artist, and author of Beyond the Light Barrier claimed in 1956 to have met a handsome alien named Akon with whom she fell in love and gave birth to their half-breed son on the distant planet Meton. Among the contactees of the 1950s she stands out of a field almost entirely made up of men. Men who were not at all shy about spinning their unbelievable stories on radio and television or to the press, and who were despised by those hoping to bring scientific rigour to the study of UFOs and possible extraterrestrial visitation.
Unlike these men and their stories about advanced technology or nuclear weapons, Klarer framed her experience with aliens as a cosmic love story about her coming to terms with having to leave her hybrid son on a distant planet.
In many ways contactees like Adamski, Bethurum, or Van Tassel resembled Walter Keane in that they had a particular extrovert facility to tell their stories to the media. However, unlike the profitable war-wracked waifs story Walter used to sell Margaret’s waifs, the media attention the contactees received in the United States in the 1950s to mid 1960s resulted in considerable blowback. UFO stigma was significant with many avoiding the whole topic altogether for fear of being labelled crackpots.
Introverts like Margaret (if she was in fact an experiencer) would likely not have reported their experience in such an unfavourable media climate where even those seeing UFOs were unlikely to speak up, let alone those claiming to have met, fallen in love with and had children with their occupants1.
Instead of coping with residual damage from a botched mastoid operation, did Margaret really obsess about painting eyes as therapy due to her own experience with aliens? Was it a means of recovery from post traumatic stress disorder (or Post Abduction Syndrome), of being taken against her will? Or perhaps it was to recover from the ontological shock associated with contact with another non-human intelligence?
We should recall Margaret’s reluctance to talk about her early life. There is almost nothing published about her life prior to her marriage to Walter Keane. As we saw with Tim Burton’s film Big Eyes, his profile of her life begins abruptly with the end of her first marriage. There is no account of what led to the break up of that marriage – could it have been their inability as a couple to process or discuss an anomalous experience that she had at a time when these things were only discussed by “space cadets”?2 There is also no description of her teenage years or childhood, other than snippets about her lifelong interest in, and reliance upon, art.
done at age 10 or 11
Again, we’re only offered a glimpse into Margaret’s thinking by the available archived materials, but this quote from a 1964 newspaper article The Bohemians With a Mansion, about the Keane’s during the height of their success – when viewed through this lens of alien abduction culture – is one of the few statements of her artistic intent. In it Margaret says:
My artistic interest is in life’s mysteries and the concealed ways of the universe and what eternal meanings may stretch beyond them…my paintings are my way of saying what I believe…that is the ‘why’ of the elongated bodies and faces which predominate in my work. [Emphasis added].
Margaret Keane
Like the people who stay quiet when they see a UFO for fear of ridicule, abductees tell of a similar fear of being rendered invisible by reporting their abduction experience for fear of the story becoming larger than they are. With this in mind did Margaret choose to remain, as writer John Keel would call them, a Silent Contactee?
We must listen to what Margaret says. Her paintings are her way of saying what she believes without expressing those beliefs in words. But are they also a way of showing what she saw?
So, while keeping in mind the notion that Margaret might have been an alien abductee we should pay attention to what might be the clearest indication that she knew much more about the topic of alien abduction than she was ever willing to discuss publicly.
In a number of the accounts of child presentation found in the literature of various abduction researchers – including Hopkins, Jacobs and Mack – there is the repeated occurrence of abductees witnessing rooms or areas within UFOs where translucent glass-like containers contain foetuses. Jacobs called them “incubatoriums” and one subject of his described the sight as similar to that of biology class in college and the props used to teach about each stage of development in the womb.
So it may be no surprise to discover a 1967 Margaret Keane painting that appears to depict these themes almost like the story panes of a graphic novel.
Against a black background reminiscent of the depths of space the painting contains three sections. Reading left to right they show what resembles an embryo as seen under a microscope. Next to it is one of the spherical faces we saw earlier in Reborn (1972) and which Margaret referred to as a “soul”, and on the right is what appears to be a translucent cuboid containing the refracted image of a more developed infant head. Its large almond shaped eyes are almost completely black and its skin pale.
The title of the painting is ‘Space Maid,’ with ‘maid’ spelled M-A-I-D, but it could just as easily be spelled M-A-D-E, as in ‘made’ in space. Was this a deliberate play on words?
Here we’re reminded of a detail in the Vilas-Boas story, that had only circulated as a rumour before it gained public attention after it was published in the magazine Flying Saucer Review in 1966-68 – that after having sex with the female alien on the UFO in Brazil he described her patting her stomach and pointing upwards toward space, where presumably his seed would be given life.
Keane’s painting predates stories of incubators seen on UFOs or hybrid children shown to abductees by more than a decade.
Was Margaret aware of similar stories or had she herself had a similar vision?
Summary
- Abductees and UFO witnesses suffered stigma and were mostly reluctant to go public
- Psychologists and psychiatrists created an alien abductee “profile”
- Margaret appears to fit this profile
- More of Margaret’s art appears to reference alien abduction lore – especially that of “Child Presentation” and incubators seen in UFOs – in particular Space Maid, 1967
Continute to Part 15 – Keane’s Allusions to Other Artists
References
Footnotes
- Most UFO Sighters Silent, Omaha World-Herald, 28 Sept 1973
- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/space_cadet