Assaults on Masculinity
The Betty Andreasson case is dramatic, and like the Barney and Betty Hill incident, is particularly piquant because a woman is the focal point. Men, though, are no less apt to be abducted. On November 5, 1975, aliens removed Arizona forest ranger Travis Walton from Sitgreaves National Forest and held him against his will. He was found five days later, huddled near a convenience store. Walton claimed to be the victim of medical experiments, and later claimed that accounts of his experience given by others were inaccurate. Frustrated by bad reporting, as well as by the aliens’ attack on his masculinity (forest rangers can be expected to be tough and self-possessed), Walton wrote a book, The Walton Experience, in 1978. That volume inspired Fire in the Sky, a reasonably popular 1993 film with D. B. Sweeney and James Garner.
Military men, another group with honed physical skills and internalized tendencies to be wary, can also fall prey to extraterrestrial abduction. While driving across the nighttime desert on August 13, 1975, Charles L. Moody, a sergeant attached to New Mexico’s Holloman Air Force Base, was startled by an immense disc—fifty feet across and twenty feet high—that hovered above the ground. Moody’s car abruptly died, and although the sergeant initially had no memory of what happened next, he came to his senses in time to witness the craft’s departure. A glance at his watch told Moody that he had “lost” about ninety minutes.
Two weeks later, via meditation initiated by Moody and monitored by the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, the sergeant recalled the following: He left his car and then struggled physically with two humanoids that emerged from the craft. Each creature wore a skin-tight black coverall, and stood about six feet tall. Moody was overpowered and then subdued with temporary paralysis. His mobility returned inside the ship, where he was greeted by another, shorter humanoid, with the outsized pale head and eyes typical of grays.
Because scent memory is strong, Moody clearly recalled the sickly sweet odor that permeated the ship. His captors revealed that the craft was now hundreds of miles above Earth, in the proximity of a mother ship. When Moody was given an unexpected tour, he took considerable interest in the craft’s propulsion mechanism, a large device powered, apparently, by large crystals that mounted a central drive rod.
The aliens explained that, for now, they were simply curious about Earth and its inhabitants. A public visit would not occur, Moody was told, for twenty years or more. Not long after this conversation, the aliens again rendered Moody insensible, and then returned him to the desert.
Moody’s adventure (at least as the sergeant recalled it) did not involve a physical examination. In this, the Moody story differs sharply from many abduction accounts; something other than human physiology seems to have captured the aliens’ attention. Holloman AFB was an obvious point of interest, but the base’s location may be even more salient than the base itself. Holloman was established in 1942, some six miles southwest of Alamogordo, a modest city bordered by New Mexico’s Sacramento Mountains. In the darkness of early morning on July 16, 1945, the world’s first atomic bomb—dubbed “the Gadget”—was successfully test-detonated on a tower erected in the desert about sixty miles northeast of Alamogordo. The concussion shattered windows in Silver City, New Mexico, 120 miles west of the explosion, and the light of the flash was visible on the horizon in Albuquerque, fifty miles north. Dangerous levels of radioactive dust contaminated the desert in a diameter thirty miles from ground zero. Cattle thirty miles from the tower suffered radiation burns.
Although local ranchers had been moved from their property in 1942, so that the military could conduct “test bombing runs,” some people remained. They received no advance warning of the blast—the explosion was, after all, a secret.
Unsuspecting citizens were shortly contaminated by their water, vegetables, milk, and the air itself.
Trace radiation was recorded as far east as Indiana.
These consequences are serious, with negative, long-lasting implications for everything that breathes. The first atomic test, then, may be the event that brought Sergeant Moody into contact with curious aliens thirty years later.