Introduction
As has been noted by writer Bertrand Méheust1, the fantastic alien encounter story of Carl Higdon contained uncannily similar themes and details to those found in Maurice Renard’s Le Peril Bleu (1911).
But, how this work of Merveilleux Scientifique would be known by a man in Wyoming in 1974 and why he reported similar details as his own experience was deemed a mysterious coincidence.
I have argued here for a partial solution to this problem: that an English adaptation, Up Above (1912), by John N. Raphael, may have provided the necessary language bridge for those ideas to be found in the United States—ideas about superior, elusive aliens in invisible spacecraft who abduct human beings by snatching them up and imprisoning them in transparent cells above the Earth while they await vivisection.
However, these proved to be inspirational themes that spoke to universal human anxieties—ones that various writers of a whole generation of homegrown American science fiction short stories would adopt in various iterations. So much so that by the time of Higdon’s retelling of his experience in 1974 they were deeply ingrained in the culture. It seems no surprise, then, that Higdon’s story—every single detail of it—should sound like so much science fiction. Not being aware of this cultural diffusion is one of the major flaws I see in alien abduction researchers of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. While experts in their own fields, these researchers demonstrated little to no knowledge of the history of science fiction, and so were unable to distinguish known fictional motifs from the details their subjects claimed to be real experiences.
Higdon’s testimony, mostly obtained using the problematic method of hypnotic regression, may have inadvertently drawn from this deep well of ideas. Hypnotism is known to cause source monitoring problems—confusion about the origin of an idea and whether it was actually experienced or fictional.
It should also be noted that Higdon’s story evolved over two hypnosis sessions conducted by Dr. Leo Sprinkle. The first took place on 2 November 1974, a week after the event, and the second took place weeks later on 17 November 1974, and the film of Higdon reconstructing the day’s events being hypnotised a third time with Dr. Sprinkle was filmed two years later.
Higdon’s Story
It’s worth reminding ourselves of some of the details from Higdon’s story. As we saw in the outline provided here, in the first interview, he described being out in a remote area of Medicine Bow National Forest, Wyoming, hunting elk, and meeting a man named Ausso One in a clearing in the woods. The being was dressed in a distinctive black uniform with a cross-brace, a star-shaped belt buckle, and a pouch or utility belt with a cloud-shaped emblem on it. The being glides “noiselessly” toward Higdon and does not appear to have hands, but somehow holds a rod-like device—which Higdon later says is pointed at his pickup truck causing it to move from one place to another. He gives Higdon “food pills” and invites him into a transparent cubicle—which is actually a craft of some kind. Higdon is seated, and a helmet with six wires “Two from the top, two from each side, going to the back,” is placed over his head which appears to interfere with his thoughts. Higdon was asked by Dr Sprinkle: ”Was information taken from you by some means?” to which he answered ”Yes”—the implication being this helmet was the means.
Higdon described being able to look through the floor of the cubicle. As he ascended in it he saw Earth below “like a basketball”. He claimed they traveled by “magnetic force”.
Higdon’s second interview reveals more detail about the alien world—with a “different sun”—he believes he was taken to, some “163,000 light-miles”2 from Earth. While in the first interview Higdon says he didn’t leave the cubicle craft, in the second interview he described leaving it and being taken to a building.
His description is disjointed and dreamlike. At first he recalled seeing bright rotating lights that hurt his eyes. They came from what he described as a “spiral deal” outside of the craft, then he described what appeared to be buildings “like a plaza.” He went on to describe a structure, a beacon, or a tower which he ascended inside an elevator.
After leaving the cubicle and entering into the “space tower” he moved along a hallway into a large room, which was empty except for what he described as a “shield” that came out of a wall, and a platform which he stood on.
Higdon’s adventure is disappointingly brief, and we hear nothing more about this alien world, or the reason for his abduction. After he complains about the bright light they bluntly tell him “We’ll take you back; you’re not any good for what we need” and do so, before unceremoniously dropping him out of the cubicle. He landed awkwardly, slipping and bruising his neck and shoulder.
Science Fiction Short Stories
To return to science fiction antecedents; we see the same themes and particular details appeared in American science fiction pulps decades before Higdon’s experience was reported. For example, these two short stories, The Wicked People by Ross Rocklynne (1942) and The Star-Brother by Stanley Mullen (1949), both of which appeared in Super Science Stories—one of the lesser-known science fiction pulps. It’s worth comparing them in synopsis to Higdon’s story.
The Wicked People (1942)
Barry Randal drives through a storm to find his love, Helen Jordan, who has been missing for a week. He sees lightning in the air and then darkness envelops the car.
He passes out. Then he wakes up in his car. The storm is gone, but he has been transported into a world—a billion years in the future.
He finds himself on a road with a metallic surface and sees a shining city in the distance.
A huge figure, a friendly, thinking humanoid robot named Four, appears, towering over him.
The robot witnesses Barry emerge out of thin air and warns him not to approach the city where the Wicked People live, saying they will “take him apart” to “see what makes him run.”
Coincidentally, Helen Jordan has also been transported to this strange place. She is being held in a pit in the city and kept under observation by machines.
Like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, Four is rusted and requires oil. Barry conveniently happens to have an oil can in his car and gives it to the robot.
Barry goes into the city in search of Helen and meets “the wicked people”—winged creatures who share some of the archetypal features of what would become known as the alien “Grey.” They have: “Thin, frail torsos from which dangled flabby arms and long, spindly legs; globular head, sporting flat, emotionless eyes; noses consisting only of nostrils, thin lips that reached around almost to touch small, furry ears.”
They lift Barry up and take him into their city, where he is placed in a softly illuminated room lined with chairs and inspected by a dozen of his captors. He is interrogated and told that he is a distant descendant of these highly evolved winged-men, before he is taken to the pit where he is reunited with Helen.
Machines watch them constantly. Barry and Helen consider the reason for their close observation: “maybe they’re reducing our thought-patterns down to a series of wavy lines that they can inject into another machine and read.”
Suddenly, the winged creatures return and take them. They are dragged into a room with “instruments of surgery”. A robot tears Barry’s clothes off and he’s restrained.
There are “white robed, flat-eyed surgeons” accompanied by three assistant automatons.
“You need feel no fear” the surgeon says, “However, in the interest of science, it is imperative that you be dissected”.
The procedure is about to begin, and Barry struggles helplessly.
Suddenly, as if to repay Barry for his kindness in giving him the oil, Four arrives and rescues them. In a series of brutal scenes, the robot kills all who stand in their way.
They are free and dress in the robes of their dead captors.
Four takes Barry and Helen to an electrical machine that can re-establish the link back to their own time. We’re told the revolving galaxy is connected by a “fourth dimensional line” and the machine can reopen that pathway allowing them to return to their own time.
Barry and Helen implore Four to return along with them. With only a moment to spare more winged-men descend on their position this time they bare “tubular, lensed weapons, held in their small hands.”
They escape, bringing Four back through the “time field” with them—emerging above the ocean and splashing down into it. While Barry and Helen surface, Four—weighing close to a ton—sinks beneath the surface to be lost forever.
The Star-Brother (1949)
Kelland, the sole survivor of the spaceship Todalla, becomes the first human on Venus after the ship plummeted through the dense, foggy atmosphere and crashed.
He’s knocked unconscious, but survives the wreckage. To his surprise, he is able to breathe the atmosphere.
He looks across a landscape, deserted except for a “metal tower, built like a series of metal rings, diminishing in size as they rose above the flattened surface,” a globe on the top shines a beam of “incredibly bright light pointed directly upward”.
He’s unable to send a radio signal back home to Earth because of the thick cloud, so he makes an expedition to the tower hoping to try again there. It’s 100 ft in diameter, with no doors or windows and is plated with metal like “translucent pale-green porcelain.”
As he walks he discovers a city “built of the pure, blazing colours of the rainbow, it rose in smoothly rounded curves…slender glittering spires.” As he approaches it he sees “a long, exquisitely curved ramp” leading upward.
As he travels deeper into the city he remarks on its exotic materials: “Floor, walls and ceiling were apparently of one substance, some translucent metal fused into a single mass. Illumination came from deep within, giving a glareless, shadowless light.”
He goes further encountering his first room: “Imperceptibly the walls drew back, the ceiling lifted. He found himself in a high, vaulted chamber.”
Then he finds himself in a smaller space: “The passage ended abruptly in a small, roughly circular cell, where a square block of metal protruded from the floor.”
Kelland experiences discomfort in his eyes. He has to sit down and the lights go out. He senses a presence, then a disembodied alien voice, described as a “group consciousness,” communicates via telepathic “word-images.” He receives a vast amount of “breathtaking knowledge” directly into his mind.
The alien’s advancement astounds him: “He felt as nakedly hideous, undeveloped, incomplete as a dog must feel in the presence of man.”
The aliens tell Kellard that they have been observing Earth for a long time. They had longed to “reach across the gulf and raise [the human] species to a higher state”.
However, they decided not to make contact and to conceal themselves instead.
They ask Kelland why he has come to Venus, but don’t wait for him to reply—they retrieve the answer from him telepathically.
The aliens tell him that his arrival was unexpected and that they had quickly created an artificial atmosphere, allowing him to breathe, as well as the holographic cityscape to make him feel a sense of familiarity. Actually, his ship was destroyed on impact—as was he—yet they have replicated both it and him, reproducing the “memory, identity, and all the manifold patterns of thought-culture” that made him. He is his own clone.
The aliens tell him he must be examined: “it is necessary that I complete the examination. It will be unpleasant for you, but there is no choice”, “I must absorb your consciousness, your complete identity.”
Kelland balks at this threatened indignity and tries to escape on foot but is restrained by “invisible bonds” and lifted onto the block “spread-eagled.” Then “Something cold and alien crowded its way into his brain. His very thoughts seemed drawn from him in hideous mental vivisection.” Kelland likens it to “spiritual death and resurrection.”
After probing Kelland’s mind, the aliens are disappointed with humanity, finding the inferior species repulsive because of their “brute nature” and lack of “unity.” Yet they have pity on him and allow him to escape in the duplicate ship, sparing him rather than killing him or letting him die on Venus. They project a message out to all humanity that there will be no further thought of exploring Venus until humans have become “civilized.”
Simultaneously, they erase all memory of the events that occurred on Venus from Kellard’s mind.
Comparison
The two stories share remarkably similar structure and detail, not just to Higdon’s story, but also to each other. This similarity highlights how well understood their shared themes were—and these are just two stories hand-picked from a vast number of science fiction pulps published in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. They involve humans transported to distant alien worlds, losing consciousness, dazzled by bright lights, captured, probed and analysed, and returned with a crushing sense of inferiority, and significant amnesia. These stories, and others like them, are the antecedents of the narrative pattern found by scholars of the alien abduction phenomenon [such as the work of folklorist Thomas Bullard outlined here] and this similarity between real life reports and science fiction needs to be better studied if the phenomenon of alleged alien abduction is to be properly understood.
The goal here is to compare the common elements of these two science fiction stories with how Higdon described his allegedly real experience.
The Blinding Light of a New World
Higdon complained about the bright lights, presumably it is light from the alien world’s different sun that is more intense than that of Earth’s. When he returned he’s treated in hospital and reports increased sensitivity to light. In The Wicked people – Barry is dazzled by the lightning. It marks his transformation through time. In Star Brother a bright light shines from a globe on top of an alien structure. Kelland has discomfort in his eyes that he experiences as a “hard cramp”.
Capture: Small Room, Big Room
Both stories and Higdon’s report depict capture and analysis or examination in a softly illuminated room.
Barry Randal is lifted by the winged creatures and placed in a room “through which soft light filtered” there are chairs around the room from which the strange beings question him. He’s later taken to the pit with Helen. It has sheer walls “seventy-five feet” high and they are looked down on by machines with camera lenses.
Likewise, Kelland found himself in a vaulted chamber. Then, he’s taken along a passageway and held in a circular cell with a single piece of furniture in the middle—a table on which he is forced to lay “spread-eagled”.
This motif of a room with a single piece of furniture, sometimes described as a Y-shaped table, but usually some version of a cold, sterile examination table, would be found in dozens of later alien abduction reports.
Higdon recalled being taken into a big tower and into a large room “twenty four by maybe thirty [feet]…with the platform in it”. He describes a device like a glossy shield which appeared to scan him while he stood on the platform in the middle of the room.
Hovering Humanoids & Alien Weapons
Ausso One is a peculiar-looking humanoid who glides over the landscape toward Higdon never touching the ground. Similarly, the “Wicked People” are winged humanoid creatures who also hover effortlessly. They also have unusual features, and they lift Barry Randal by the arms and transport him from place to place. Later they attempt to fight using handheld, tubular weapons3 similar to the wand-like “¾” pointed stick” that Ausso One and his companions use to move items, or make things disappear.
Humiliation & Rejection
Higdon reported that information was extracted from his mind by the strange helmet they placed on his head. He was examined somehow—a process that Higdon isn’t able to adequately explain—however, the conclusion, rapidly reached, was that he was told that for some unspoken reason he wasn’t suitable.
Barry Randal experiences the humiliation of being held by mechanical hands and stripped naked by machines created by the “wicked people”—before the looming horror of forced surgical procedures by surgeons attended by robot servants. This foreshadows Higdon’s story but is also similar to the earlier description of humans held in transparent cells before vivisection found in Le Peril Bleu and Up Above. The combination of surgeons attended by automata is another detail that would become a frequent feature in alien abduction accounts, where the short Greys are seen as the cold, efficient minions to the taller “doctors.”
There’s an additional disturbing fact in The Wicked People: the “aliens” Barry Randal encounters are not extraterrestrial. Instead, they are hyper-evolved humans from a billion years in the future, whose vast separation from us in time removes any moral compunction about dissecting their less-evolved distant relatives.
This extreme superiority is echoed in disembodied alien spirits on Venus, a consciousness that threatens Kelland with, not a physical trauma—although that appears to be in their power also—but an equally disturbing “mental vivisection.” Kelland is compelled to acknowledge his relation to the aliens is as a man is to a dog. They also reject him and his visitation to their world. Having “read” him, they see all of humanity is brutish and uncivilized.
Return & After-Effects
Related to this sense of being inferior to a far more evolved alien intelligence are the aftereffects experienced by the story characters.
Barry and Helen worried that their “thought-patterns” (their human essence) were being copied, to be cheaply reproduced in otherwise unthinking machines. They are returned to their world (their time) not to their exact place of departure on solid ground, but are dropped into the roiling ocean, disoriented, and in need of rescue from a passing boat.
The alien presence on Venus communicates with Kelland telepathically using “word images.” At first it provides him with a kind of information download of “breathtaking knowledge”4—needless to say this is another common feature of close encounters—and he is allowed to escape in a new spacecraft they create for him. But, he’s given the instruction—like a post-hypnotic suggestion—to never think of returning to Venus. The rest of his memory—of the city he saw, what he did, and what knowledge he was shown—is wiped from his mind.
Higdon’s encounter follows this same pattern. He is brought back to the forest where he met Ausso One and is indignantly dropped from the cubicle just above the ground a few miles from where they first took him. He’s also left disoriented and lost in the woods, suffering from significant memory loss about what exactly happened to him during his several hours out of contact. He then consented to undergo hypnotic regression therapy in an attempt to recover his memories from the period of missing time.
Uncanny Illustrations
In addition to the textual similarities between these stories and Higdon’s testimony there are the illustrations to consider.
The drawings for The Wicked People by the prolific science fiction illustrator Leo Morey, also share similarities with Higdon’s story. The winged creatures hover effortlessly above the ground, just as Ausso One and his peers did. They are depicted clutching Barry Randel—dressed in what appears to be workwear with a shirt collar, not dissimilar to the hunting jacket or denim shirt we see Higdon wearing in the filmed reconstruction of his experience—beneath the arms, which reminds us of Higdon’s description of how he was transported from one place to another without transition. In the story, the winged creatures move Barry between an inquisition hall and imprisonment in the pit.
Behind them are the spires and towers of the “Shining City.” It almost seems inevitable that descriptions of buildings on another world should automatically include soaring towers of unusual design.
Star-Brother has just one illustration, yet there is an uncanniness between it and how Ausso One’s appearance is described. It shows the astronaut Kelland approaching the Venusian city along a winding pathway. He’s seen from behind and is dressed in a space suit without a helmet. We should remember that Higdon remarked that Ausso One does not wear a helmet because they have technology of “force fields” that allows them to breathe Earth’s atmosphere. Similarly in the SF story the atmosphere is engineered by the aliens to be breathable by Kelland. His suit is very similar to that worn by Ausso One. It is also dark and close fitting, and includes a distinctive cross-brace and a utility belt with a pouch.
Kelland strides toward the strange looking spires of the city—a presentation devised by the aliens to make him feel more comfortable. It’s worth considering the appearance of these buildings alongside Higdon’s description of a “space tower” which he said looked like a “Christmas tree light—big at the bottom and small at the top.” It’s as if Higdon is remembering this specific illustration while under hypnosis.
Drawings by Carl Higdon (left and middle), and one (right) by his friend, art teacher, Rick Kenyon.
There are yet more specific details of Higdon’s story that have science fiction antecedents.
Thought Helmet
The helmet with trailing wires that he says was placed on him is referred to as a Thought Helmet, and it’s a motif found in dozens of science fiction short stories which fantasize about mastering the ultimate human to machine interface. For example:
(1) The Machine of Destiny, Wonder Stories Quarterly, Summer, 1931, depicts a diving bell-like helmet with wires trailing from it is used to predict a man’s death by reading his thoughts.
(2) The Mind of the World, Astounding Stories, 1935, depicts a thought helmet used to unify all knowledge, granting its wearer omniscience. [It also just happens to bear an uncanny resemblance to The Flatwoods Monster, an alien being that would not be reported and drawn by its witnesses until 1952].
(3) Deserted Universe, Astounding Stories, September, 1936, features another thought helmet used to convey a man’s thoughts after death.
Thought Helmets as depicted in various short science fiction stories, (left to right), The Machine of Destiny, The Mind of the World, and Deserted Universe.
It should also be noted that the same edition of Super Science Stories that features the Star-Brother story includes an (uncredited) illustration of another “thought helmet” in the story Minion of Chaos. It’s notably similar to the helmet with wires trailing from it that Higdon described.
Viewing Earth Below Through A Transparent Spacecraft
Seeing Earth from above is perhaps one of the oldest science fiction motifs with roots in the pre-space age works such as Popular Astronomy (1880) by Camille Flammarion.
La Terre dans l’espace
The particular version in Higdon’s testimony was vividly foreshadowed by Hans Wessolowski, in the pulp story: Baby on Neptune, Amazing Stories, December, 1929—decades before Higdon’s hypnosis.
The story features The Neptunian, a human-made interplanetary ship built in the year 2347. Its hull has transparent walls allowing the crew to observe the scene outside from the protection of its interior. When it first leaves Earth it’s described this way:
“There was the earth rapidly dropping away from them below…Land, water, mountains, valleys beneath them were rapidly coalescing and rounding into a sphere…In a few seconds the earth appeared no bigger than a bass drum.”
Coincidentally, the abducting aliens in both Le Peril Bleu and Up Above pilot craft of the same shape, nicknamed “subaerians” — or aerial submarines — which trawl Earth’s surface looking for animal and human specimens. These crafts and everything in them are also completely transparent.
Food Sharing, Companionship, Magnetic Propulsion, and Levers
It’s interesting that Leo Sprinkle didn’t do more to acknowledge the similarities between Higdon’s story and that of a book he actually mentioned during their conversation.
The book is Passport to Eternity, by Lawrence W. Foreman.
It was published in 1970, a few years before Higdon’s claimed alien encounter. It details the allegedly true story of an interaction between its author Larry, a regular blue-collar American—just like Carl Higdon—and his extraordinary companion, Bill, who he first encounters while camping in the desert in 1959. They spend many hours together, eating various meals, and conversing while sitting by a campfire.
Bill, it turns out, is an alien. He gradually reveals this truth to Larry over the course of several conversations, and eventually shows him a flying saucer, introduces him to others of his kind, and even takes him for a ride. In a detail which is mirrored exactly in Higdon’s story the propulsion mechanism of these amazing machines involves some kind of “magnetic generators,” and at one point we hear Bill “pulled a lever, which lifted us a few inches off the ground.” Higdon says a few times during his hypnosis sessions that Ausso and his kind travel by “magnetic force” and he describes a control lever inside the cubicle craft inscribed with letters. The movement of the levers causes the ship to ascend or descend.
Passport to Eternity, from the one-on-one meeting between simple-hearted men who find a bond of friendship in the wilderness and share food—Higdon was offered 4-day food pills by Ausso One—to the same kind of mysterious magnetic force drive that is controlled by industrial-era levers, is uncannily similar to Higdon’s account. This similarity should have alerted Dr. Sprinkle to the possibility that Higdon’s story may not be entirely based on his own experience.
Super Science Stories contains the familiar disclaimer we used to see on works of fiction:
Any resemblance between any character appearing in fictional matter, and any person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and unintentional. Worth noting is the absence of any reference to similarities with people in the future; this coincidence of detail between science fiction and allegedly real-life experiences continues to fascinate.
References
The Wicked People – Ross Rocklynne, Super Science Stories, February, 1942 (pp.96-108) https://dn720004.ca.archive.org/0/items/super-science-stories-february-1942/Super%20Science%20Stories%20February%201942.pdf
Star-Brother – Stanley Mullen, Super Science Stories, September, 1949 (pp.88-99) https://ia801400.us.archive.org/19/items/Super_Science_Stories_v05n04_1949-09_Gorgon776/Super_Science_Stories_v05n04_1949-09_Gorgon776.pdf
Baby on Neptune, published in Amazing Stories in December 1929. https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v04n09_1929-12_-ifc_ibc_bc_sas/page/n21/mode/1up
Footnotes
- In his 1978 book Science-Fiction et soucoupes volantes ↩︎
- A term which makes little sense because it uses a unit of distance instead of time. It is thought that he meant “light years” ↩︎
- Again, these mysterious rod-like devices are the weapon of choice for alien combat and are found in dozens of SF stories [for example in Moselli’s, La Fin Dilla]. ↩︎
- The information “download” is another motif deserving of its own essay. ↩︎
