This was the cry from Barney Hill while reliving his supposed abduction experience under hypnosis. The aliens’ large black eyes are their instrument of power over humans. Various abductees tell us how aliens compel them to stare deeply into their eyes causing irresistible hypnotic control, sometimes they feel calmed, sometimes they feel robbed of their thoughts or emotions, or that some overwhelming message beyond articulation by any language is being communicated to them telepathically.
As a subject of David Jacobs described it, it can be oppressive and sinister, “Their eyes go inside you. You are just held. You can’t stop looking. If you wanted to, you couldn’t look away. You are drawn into them, and they sort of come into you…” . Or as John Mack described it, revelatory: “The beings’ awesome eyes appear to contain huge treasures of knowledge and love and draw the abductees into their seemingly limitless depths.” .
With the change in physical form of aliens, between the 1950s and 1980s, came a new narrative about the reason for the apparent abductions. There were hints of it in the Vilas-Boas intercourse, the needle Betty Hill claimed the aliens inserted into her navel, and the humiliating sperm extraction from Barney, but all for what purpose?
Speculation about the strategy behind alien abductions included the idea that the aliens are ethereal spirits curious about our biology. They sample us so that perhaps they too could become embodied. Maybe it was so they could seed other planets with elements of themselves because they lacked humans ability to reproduce – somewhat like faerie folklore of supernatural beings that are unable to have children of their own. Or perhaps it was a more sinister plot by aliens who are escaping their own dying planet and need to clandestinely create a population of hybrid human / alien beings who would gradually take over Earth while avoiding detection or disclosure of their dastardly plan.
That last explanation was developed by Hopkins, in Intruders: The incredible visitations at Copley Woods, 1987, and Jacobs, in Secret life: Firsthand accounts of UFO abductions, 1992 and The Threat, 1998. They focused intently on accounts from abductees reporting sperm, eggs or even unborn babies taken from them by force.
A distinct sub-narrative to this pessimistic assessment of alien encounters with humans emerged. While not accepted as typical by all abduction researchers it was a dramatic turn with distinct visual images that gained much greater media attention and made prior extraterrestrial contact seem quaint. While contactees would bring back tales of being shown the wonders of our solar system, or unfathomably beautiful cosmic landscapes from distant star systems, the abducting aliens of the 1980s were engaging their captives in the less glamorous, weird ritual of “child presentation”.
Child Presentation
According to Jacobs the scheme of interweaving human and alien biology is not achieved in a single step. It is an iterative process done in stages with hybrid beings seen in incubators and nurseries on UFOs producing gradually more human-looking aliens.
Early stages of alien/ human hybrids look quite alien. They have an oddly shaped head and a pointed chin, high cheekbones, and “only a small amount of white in their eyes.” The next stages produce even more human-looking beings that might only be detectable by their having “too much black in their pupils, or lack of eyebrows or eyelashes.” . While “late stage hybrids”, as he calls them, are almost indistinguishable from humans yet still retain a telepathic ability through their unusually large captivating eyes.
Further involvement is required from the abductee. After a prior abduction a person is taken into a UFO again, perhaps months or years later.
Jacobs writes, “Some hybrids look very much like aliens, some look like combinations of human and alien, and some look extremely human.” In clumsily enforced bonding sessions abductees are, “required either to observe or physically interact with bizarre-looking “offspring.”” .
Jacobs continues, outlining the child presentation ritual, and the commands given to abductees:
Frequently the offspring that the aliens tell the woman to hold is a child who appears to be between two and ten years old…he has a larger than usual head, large eyes with small whites, a small nose, a small mouth with thin lips, small ears, and thin hair…his eyes have a hypnotic quality to them. These offspring are usually dressed in white “smocks” or loose fitting gowns. [underline added]
An abductee, speaking under hypnosis, describes a meeting with a group of four-year-old hybrid children, “…they’re all wearing the same thing…a little tunic or something. You don’t see any shoes or anything.” .
Accounts from Hopkins’ subjects become virtually interchangeable with those in Jacobs’ work (they were best friends). Here, multiple-time abductee Kathie Davis (a pseudonym for Debbie Jordan-Kauble) describes a similar vision:
…and then a little girl came into the room…and she stood in front of the doorway…she looked about four…she was just a doll…Her eyes were so blue and huge, and her pupils were so blue. Her skin was creamy, it wasn’t grey. She was pale and soft and creamy, [underline added].
In the same book we hear that “She sensed that the girl was absorbing everything “like a sponge.”” These accounts are intensely real for the experiencer. Kathie (her presentation happened October 1983) tells Hopkins:
Budd, you know I have a daughter, too…I don’t know where she is…and I never gave birth to her, but I know I have a daughter. I think I’ve even seen her. I know what she looks like…and I know something else. I’m going to see her again. I know it.
Hopkins’ book Intruders ends with Kathie wishing the aliens would come back so that she could see her hybrid daughter again.
Another abduction researcher, clinical social worker and trained hypnotist, John Carpenter, worked with a number of abductees in the late 1980s. At the watershed Abduction Study Conference held at MIT in Massachusetts in 1992,1 he described a female patient of his who had a phobia of dolls. She had “locked away for thirty years, unprocessed, unresolved” details of being abducted inside a “football field-sized” UFO where she encountered children with abnormally large heads and eyes that tried to smile at her. Carpenter’s patient claimed to have no prior knowledge of UFO literature on hybrid alien children, and so developed a phobia about her dolls that had similar facial expressions to what she saw.
It’s here that we have to note how this subset of alien abduction accounts catalogued by Hopkins, Jacobs, Mack, and others during the 1980s consistently produces descriptions that are remarkably similar to the paintings Margaret Keane was making decades before in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. The descriptions underlined in these abductee accounts [above] could just as easily refer to Keane’s waifs or, as we’ll see, her portraits of adolescents, as they do to partially alien beings. Also, let’s not forget what could be the genesis of these images, the Shalam orphans and how similar orphans in a colony are to hybrid beings in a UFO. After all, the orphans were described using similar language, and they were placed on a pedestal as a new more advanced chapter in human existence. Also, similar to abductees, women were solicited to leave the cities and go to the colony to provide warmth and care for them.
Returning to Carpenter’s patient with the doll phobia we must remember that she is recalling her encounter in the 1980s, in the United States, where, at that time, half of all abduction cases were being reported. We have to question cases like hers, where recollection is performed under hypnosis years after the supposed event took place, and ask if what is described really refers to the objective reality of an encounter with hybrid alien children, or whether she could have been influenced by the mass-produced and mass-marketed images created by Margaret Keane.
Sketch of a hybrid child seen by Kathie Davis, made after a hypnosis session, from Intruders, Hopkins, 1987 (right)
If we consider the descriptions of hybrid children, in this and other abductee accounts detailed above, we see how neatly they map onto Keane’s art. As we saw earlier, Keane’s art is unlike anything seen in popular culture before. The children in her paintings are depicted in peculiar isolation, placed in strange abstract environments, they are dressed simply and have oversized eyes, have an imploring staring gaze, and barely perceptible facial expressions, occasionally they smile.
Summary
- Aliens’ big dark eyes wield hypnotic power over humans
- Hybrid humans are described as looking like half-alien and half-human beings
- A new theme in alien abduction emerges – people being shown hybrid children aboard UFOs they
- have eyes with large irises and little whites
- try to smile or communicate with human abductees
- are dressed simply and in the a uniform way
- resemble dolls
- Descriptions of these children closely resemble those of Keanes’ images of children, but also of the Shalam orphans