In reviewing the literature on alien abduction I was struck by how many times patterns are mentioned as a way of approaching the subject.
If you can’t find anything else, look for patterns
“Even from the very earliest days people recognised there were a lot of similarities in these stories, what I wanted to find out was, just how much, if we look at the overall picture, how much would we find. This is a roundabout way of doing science, but it’s one of the ways Stanton Friedman talked about, you know, it’s not as good as taking it into the laboratory, but it is a way of dealing with something, looking for patterns, if you can’t find anything else, look for patterns.”
Three of the most influential alien abduction researchers invested themselves in this pursuit of patterns to try to discover the root-cause of a collection of terrifying experiences that were reported to them.
Patterns were key for Budd Hopkins. With every confusing detail related to him from his subjects he attempted to make sense of them by fitting them within a template of alien abduction. As an artist he looked at how the tiniest detail might fit, or perhaps expand the pattern giving form – reality even – to an overarching (and sinister) phenomenon. He focused on the invariant details, but dismissed those that didn’t fit; he eventually allowed this process to lead his research to absurd levels of credulity.1
David Jacobs wrote “Everything is a matter of patterns” in Secret Life, at the outset of his involvement in alien abduction research. He claimed to have discovered a matrix of procedures that appeared to be linked in some way by a non-psychological cause – i.e. a real-life program of aliens capturing and breeding with humans. Seeing a pattern of resemblance in the stories he’d heard, he developed his method of studying the alien abduction phenomenon. In keeping this matrix of resemblance in mind during his investigations he thought he was mining away for hidden truths.
As with many academics who turn their hand to ufology and the related study of the unknown, the prospect of discovery became irresistible.
John Mack was also acutely aware of the allure of discovery, and he staked his prestigious career on these same patterns having some transcendent meaning. If accounts seemed to conform to the pattern of alien hybridisation that Hopkins and Jacobs had decided was their best guess about what was really going on, then he required no other evidence to form the belief that what was happening was exactly what people described. Because he had such faith in patterns he was quick to dismiss attempts to explain the mystery. He claimed there was no new psychiatric condition to be discovered that could explain the trauma his patients exhibited. Mack’s flirtation with discovery was more ambitious.
As suggested in the video clip above, looking for patterns appears to be the only way forward when attempting to study anomalous experiences that lack evidence other than the witness testimony. Yet even with the most thorough comparative studies of a broad range of reports, we have no way of confirming if very compelling coincidences of details between accounts indicate a meaningful pattern that shows they are caused by some external phenomenon.
A pattern of resemblance found may certainly be real, but it may also be an uninformative one, just a collection of impressive looking coincidences that reveal no special meaning about individual experience. It is these coincidences that fuel much of ufology to say that “looks like” equals “is”.
It’s Just a Ride
If it’s not already apparent this study has been an exercise designed to highlight what I see as one of the biggest weaknesses in the study of anomalous experience, if not ufology in general.
The assumption that because one thing looks like another that there is a causal link between them, and furthermore that they are connected to some overall phenomenon that defies direct observation.
It also demonstrates how musings about UFOs and alien intervention can be an irresistible catch-all explanation for things we have insufficient knowledge about.
Looking for a pattern in a topic leads to the creation of new hypotheses. The topic here is, Margaret Keane’s life and art, and it appears sufficiently enigmatic and in many ways is comparable to that of alien abduction for its lack of definite answers.
This study looked for patterns of resemblance between Keane’s art and the mythology surrounding Oahspe, and then did the same for the literature around alien abduction and it lead to two competing hypotheses:
A. Keane was inspired by the occult text, Oahspe, and the story of the failed Shalam colony.
B. Keane’s art was derived from her personal experience with aliens. She was an alien abductee who never went public about her experience.
We can then consider if either pattern seems useful and which possible explanation is most likely – or we can reject them both.
The apparent connection between Oahspe and Keane’s artwork was an unexpected find, and once found it became compelling. Margaret and Walter drawing inspiration from the story of the Shalam orphans as a way to sell their art is an explanation that seems more believable than hypothesis B, the idea that Margaret harboured a life long secret alien abduction experience, even though, there appear to be more reasons to believe B could be true.
For example, there are more apparent points of similarity between Magaret and the psychological profile of an abductee, not to mention the eerie visual coincidences between Keane’s figures, the titles she gave her work and the overlapping themes found in her work and alien abduction lore.
Yet my guess is that most people would favor hypothesis A over hypothesis B.
The Compulsion to Seek Patterns
In their investigations Thomas Bullard and John Mack both noted the narrative and descriptive similarities between alien abductions and shamanic initiations and described how they have the best quality resemblance compared to any other human experience. They share features such as: a feeling of disembodiment; travelling to an otherworldly realm; undergoing a traumatic encounter; seeing strange non-human beings with dark eyes and staring gazes; or receiving wordless instruction before being returned transformed. Bullard surmised that “These similarities seem too impressive to dismiss as chance.” .
This idea that a similarity could be so impressive as to not be considered chance was intriguing and a catalyst for this study. I wondered if an example could be found where a strong pattern of resemblance could be demonstrated which could be said to be useful but that is not actually true.
I argue this study presents such examples, and:
It is useful in that it allowed for the story of the Shalam colony to be retold and a connection to be made between Oahspe and alien abduction. But not true in that that the Keanes’ may not have known anything about Oahpse or the Shalam colony.
It is useful in that it allows for a consideration of how Keane’s big-eye images may have influenced a generation of alien abduction accounts, but not true in that this shows Margaret Keane was an alien abductee herself.
Media Triggered Archetypes
The role the media (or mass marketing) play in manufacturing the coincidences that make up patterns of resemblance that become the building blocks of belief was also of interest.
Carl Jung in his book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky describes what he calls the collective unconscious – a vast repository of images and motifs common to the myths and dreams of peoples throughout the world. Contained within it are, “Archetypal images that are not derived from recent UFO sightings but have always existed.” These archetypes are not limited to UFO sightings or to alien abduction accounts but are common across all our experiences, and the assumption I make is that media of all kinds can trigger our awareness of these archetypes.
It seems true that Margaret Keane’s artwork, because of its mass production and high visibility, can be considered an influential form of media. It also seems true that, independent of any effect it may have had on alien abduction accounts, it tapped these archetypes and that Keane’s particular non-verbal articulation of them was a reason for their incredible commercial success.
This might explain why intellectualising the meaning behind her paintings was so unnecessary, and why the war-wracked waifs story was so superfluous. Art critics couldn’t decide if the Keane waifs had artistic value yet the buying public simply “got” her work; they found something in it. Perhaps something archetypal that satisfied what Jung called a “vital psychic need”, something that didn’t need to be explained to them by some expert.
But could this media effect also explain why the hybrid humans reported by so many abductees just happen to share similar features to the fictional images of Keane’s art?
We are reminded of Walter Keane’s ambition; he stated to LIFE magazine a desire for his (really Margaret’s) images to “be seen” and to “infect a lot of people’s lives” and that Andy Warhol famously praised Keane’s efforts to reach so many people saying, “I think what Keane has done is just terrific. It has to be good. If it were bad, so many people wouldn’t like it.”
Given the reach of industrial-scale media in the United States, some airy notion of a collective unconscious that lacks a comprehensible process for archetypes in the ether to cross the barrier to our consciousness becomes unnecessary. All that is required is recognition of the concrete real world materials that could cause such an effect through direct observation. In this case Keane’s paintings and merchandise (and those she inspired like the Little Miss No-Name doll). They were inexpensive, plentiful, easily obtained, and widely distributed cultural artefacts. They already lived inside the homes of millions of people in the United States. As Walter desired, they were seen and many of the details recalled of alien abduction experiences appear to be a result of their memetic infection.
So, no mysterious delivery mechanism other than the United States Postal Service was required to deposit these images into the visual libraries of millions of Americans. This was a process that began in the late 1950s, well before alien abductions reached its epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
More Useful Outcomes From Seeing Patterns
A Way of Talking About Alien Abduction?
Did Margaret Kean’s art provide a way of talking about alien abduction?
In his book The Terror That Comes in the Night, David Hufford observed that in the US there wasn’t the same tradition of naming or talking about the “old hag” phenomenon – an amorphous collection of disturbing night time experiences with strange beings – (part of which is referred to as sleep paralysis) that shares a number of characteristics with that of alien abduction. He writes:
One function of the Old Hag tradition in Newfoundland, then, is to provide both convenient language for talking about this widespread experience, and another is to indicate a consensus that it is acceptable to have undergone it.
David Hufford
Did Margaret Keane’s art serve a similar function to “old hag” in that for many people who have had some indefinable “anomalous” experience, her – at times strange – images provided a way to talk about, and therefore accept those experiences (whatever their cause may actually be)?
Critics of the repressed memory myth might agree with this.
The notion of repressed or hidden memories – a crutch of abduction researchers – has since been thoroughly undermined by scientists working in the field (such as Elisabeth Loftus) whose studies demonstrate that memories don’t exist independently as nuggets waiting to be panned out from surrounding mental material, but instead are elementarily constructed in each act of recall and are perpetually subject to distortion. They point to the problems of using hypnosis to “uncover” memories.
By the late 1980s the majority of alien abduction reports were from the United States and many of them were recalled in detail by subjects under hypnosis. Could it be that in the investigation of many of these cases Margaret Keane’s images provided reassurance that what was expected to be remembered in therapy – whether hypnotised or not – is acceptable because others have seen it also?
A potential abductee might only have a collection of feelings with no actual memory, but once these feelings can be attached to something real – like Keane’s images – and gain further validation from abduction support groups a snowballing process might occur establishing a consensus opinion about the appearance of aliens and their hybrid offspring.
Oahspe May be a Hoax But its Influence is Real
What appears true is that the spiritualist text Oahspe, despite any questions about whether it was solely the work of John Ballou Newbrough, had an underrated cultural influence that is still felt today.
It is argued here that it was a likely inspiration for Margaret Keane’s decision to paint waifs and was transposed into a tale about war-torn Europe for theatrical purposes. It’s conceivable that the unfashionable occult origin of its claims would have carried a similar stigma to that of talk of UFOs or aliens, and was something the Keanes’ sought to avoid.
As Bullard might say the similarities between the Shalam colony story and the fictional rationale for the Keane waifs, as well as many visual similarities between Newbrough’s paintings and Keane’s art, “seem too impressive to dismiss as chance”.
In turn Oahspe is also a rich source of a large amount of UFO lore. It contains elements repeatedly found in stories from the first contactees to abductees or experiencers. For example it describes a previous epoch with civilizations once populated by an ancient race of superior little people; starships – spacecraft that travel the universe like ships sail the seas; angels that are, in reality, aliens, human biological intervention by extraterrestrials; telepathy, and remote viewing.
As is typical in investigations of the unknown such as ufology, that is currently experiencing a boom in interest, without new data coming to light we’re not able to reach definite conclusions.
Possibly, Maybe
While there may be a compelling pattern of resemblance between Margaret Keane and the profile of an alien abductee, hypothesis A lacks support.
We cannot say if Margaret Keane believed she was an abductee or experiencer herself. There’s no direct evidence that she was even conscious of the supposed phenomenon or its growing body of literature. Only inferences can be made from the facts we do have.
Her paintings do appear to contain visual precursors to the alien abduction literature that would follow, and so the question was – in the absence of proper enquiry – to what does this art really refer? The titles she gave some of her work appear to indicate a keen awareness of science fiction, but it is only a guess that she was also interested in the alien abduction topic.
We should be wary of jumping to conclusions about the meaningfulness of apparent patterns of resemblance. The eerie prescience of Space Maid could more likely be derived from the incredible photographs by Lennart Nilsson published in LIFE magazine 30 April 1965 – just a few months before they would profile the Keanes. The Drama of Life Before Birth, brought the first colour photography of the stages of human embryo growth to a mass audience.
Similarly Margaret appearing to fit the profile of an abductee could be another chimaera. An example of the Barnum-Forer effect – the illusion of relevance created by seemingly specific character traits that are in fact quite generic and that could apply to a large section of the population. While the personality traits mentioned in the studies [in part 14] appear to chime with both how Margaret was described and described herself we cannot be sure they really have any relevance at all. I’ve seen no interview where a question of this type could have been posed to her. Sadly, since her death, this cannot be answered.
We should also question if the characteristics of a likely abductee are really so specific to begin with, and whether the apparently coherent pattern found in Margaret’s biography and that of alien abductees is simply an unremarkable uninformative coincidence. After all, the experts who devised the list of characteristics had a very limited sample size to work with (genuine alien abductees being not the most readily available population for study).
Intriguing Consequences
If Margaret Keane was an alien abductee it would cast her whole body of work and her biography in a completely different light. Every image she created and every word she uttered in interviews would then need to be reevaluated with that new reality in mind.
However, If the claim is bunk and she was not an experiencer of any kind, it doesn’t bode well for the reality of alien abduction as a whole because it suggests her art, rather than being based on her anomalous experience, inspired and contributed to alien abduction as a social phenomenon because it preceded it by at least a decade.
Which pattern is correct? We simply may never have enough data to know.
The Abduction
What is definitive is that in at least one sense Margaret Keane really was abducted.
For over a decade, little people with large, dark, penetrating eyes hindered the full expression of her personality. These were not extraterrestrial visitors, but the currency she was compelled to produce and live with as the fantasy of being a successful artist family became reality.
For an artist with such a long career, media coverage and search engine results for “Margaret Keane” invariably refer to Walter Keane’s domination of her.
Just like with alien abductees who’s fears made them reluctant to speak publicly, this story became bigger than her. In retellings of her life story, such as Burton’s film, the misplaced emphasis on their authorship dispute overshadows everything else. Her relationship with one of her three husbands distracts us from an appreciation of her life and work at the expense of understanding her real artistic inspiration.
The more complex reality appears to be that Margaret’s own narrative journey resembles that of Shamanic Initiation as much as it does alien abduction. It begins with her seeking transformation before she even met Walter Keane. She is transported into another realm of wealth and celebrity and endures the trauma that went along with that relationship, eventually she finds contentment, perspective and motivation to continue to produce her art.
Her art may appear simple, but after reading this study, I hope you’ll agree that there is more to wonder about Margaret Keane, and that she is a far more complicated lady.
Special Thanks to:
Jeff Knox – for provideing archive materials
Isasc Koi – for providing archive materials
Charlie Wiser – for taking the time to read through this whole esaay and for offering much needed edits and suggestions.
References
Footnotes
- For more on that read http://www.carolrainey.com/pdf/ParatopiaMag_vol1_1-15-11.pdf by Carol Rainey, for a frank assessment of their time spent investigating supposed alien abductions.