Roswell incident: The Roach Abduction (1973)
Harder pressed on. “Did you get the impression that you were up on a table?” “Yes.” “Were your clothes on? Did they take your clothes off?” “I don’t remember.” “It might be hard for you to remember,” said Harder. “Did they tell you that you wouldn’t remember this? Did you get that impression that you wouldn’t remember?” Roach responded, saying, “They really didn’t talk to me.”
Harder asked her more about the creatures surrounding her, trying to learn what he could about their attempts, or the lack of attempts to communicate with Roach. She told him that she didn’t like their attitudes. She found them to be cold- hearted and cold-blooded. According to Roach, they were interested in gathering their data but cared nothing for her emotional state or her feelings.
Harder then tried to get a description of the beings. He asked her, “Can you remember what the face looks like?” “I remember the big eyes.” “And do you remember a pupil in the eyes, a round pupil, or was it a slitted pupil like a cat?” “It doesn’t matter… let me think. Cause they looked at me closer in my face.” “Did they?” asked Harder. “How big would you say their eyes were? The size of a quarter?” “They were big.” “A fifty cent piece?” “No. Quarter.” “Was it round?” “No… Oval. It had a big pupil. It was a round pupil.” “Was it black?” “Yes.” “What about the nose? Do you remember anything about the nose?” “Don’t remember a nose.” “What about a mouth?” “A fish.” “It looked like a fish?” said Harder. “Does that mean it didn’t have any lips?” “Yes.”
Harder then wanted to know how tall the beings were, suggesting three feet and then four feet. He wanted to know how their arms related, proportionally, to the bodies. He then said, “Remember their hands. What they looked like.” “They have those funny hands like Bonnie said but they’re orange.”
“Orange color? Did they seem to have fingers?” “Didn’t look like fingers.” “Did they move their hands ever?” “Yeah.” “Did they open their hands ever?” “Yes. They opened… it was almost like a clasp.” “Like there were two fingers, or three?” “I wouldn’t call them fingers, they were big…”
Harder worked to reinforce the hypnosis, saying, “That’s all right. You can remember it… I can understand that you didn’t like them. Did they seem to have feet that looked like ours. You really didn’t have a chance to see them?”
Harder continued for a few minutes more, asking about the appearance of the creatures and trying to learn what he could about how they were dressed. He asked specific questions about the belts the aliens wore and if their clothing was the same color above the belt as it was below.
Roach mentioned that the aliens had wiped her with something but she hadn’t understood the purpose. Harder speculated, “It probably didn’t hurt you. They probably were just taking a little skin sample or something superficial. Cells or something.” “I don’t know.” “You can really remember, you just don’t want to remember.” “I don’t want to.”
Harder, trying to convince Roach to remember, said, “I can imagine, you were worried about your children. You children may remember what happened and then afterwards you may want to. You will want to remember what happened to the children so that you can reassure them, probably. So it would be a good idea if you remembered what happened to you, if you can possibly do that without its bothering you too much.” “After I left that room, I wasn’t with the children.” “I see,” said Harder. “But they may be worried a little bit about what happened to them and you’ll want to make sure it isn’t too frightening. You don’t want to upset them unnecessarily.” “No.” “I want to ask you one question, and you don’t have to answer it. Did they put a needle in your stomach or anything like that? You can just answer with your fingers, you don’t have to say.” “I’d rather say, I don’t remember anything like that.” “You don’t remember any blood samples that they took?” “Nothing. They hooked me up to a machine. Checked everything, examined me from top to bottom. They put needles in me in places.”
“Do you remember what places?” “No.” “Perhaps in your arms or legs?” “They put needles everywhere it seemed like.” “Was it Chinese acupuncture do you suppose?” asked Harder. “I don’t know.”
Harder couldn’t learn anymore about the needles or the probing. He wanted to know if she had watched them work or if she had kept her eyes closed. He asked her about leaving the craft. He said, “Did they carry you?” “Yes, more or less. I don’t know how it was. I wasn’t really walking.”
Harder said, “It would be very helpful for me to know as a scientist, what kinds of things that they are looking for. That would be very helpful if you could remember that… if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.” “They wanted to know how our minds work.” “That’s very interesting,” said Harder. “They want… to give them certain information that they don’t understand yet.” “What kind of information?” “How we think, how we feel, our emotions. They don’t know about us.” “That’s very interesting,” said Harder. “No… I don’t like what they want.” “You thought you were being intruded upon.” “Yes. They didn’t care, because they don’t have an understanding of emotions like ours. Maybe they’re trying to understand our emotions. I may be wrong…” “You know, Pat,” said Harder, “you’re one of the more intelligent people that have been in touch with this thing.”
That ended the first session. Roach had awakened at that point. Harder would conduct two more regression sessions, but all were contaminated by the first. Harder made no suggestion that Roach would be unable to recall what had been discussed. He believed that she should be aware of everything that had transpired. This was his investigative technique, believing that the following sessions would build on the first.
In fact, after the end of that session, Harder asked additional questions. She remember a few more details about what had happened. She now believed that Kent, her youngest son, had been on the craft. That was a detail she hadn’t known before the regression.
The problem here, as I see it now, is that Harder spent some of the time asking very leading questions. He didn’t take a neutral approach, but was searching for specific information. That does create problems about the credibility of the report. It isn’t always that Roach remembered something on her own, but was led to some of those ideas by the way the questions were being asked and the reinforcing techniques that Harder used.
And some of the things that Roach said were obviously derived from the Llanca abduction. Her discussion of the technology she saw seems to mirror that from the UFO Report article she had read. Rather than being a confirming detail here, it is another evidence of contamination.
That same afternoon, July 8, Harder interviewed the oldest daughter, Bonnie, to learn if she would corroborate what her mother had told us. In the letter to me,Roach had made it clear that her children had more memories of the situation than she did. If true, this would be a key factor.
The session with Bonnie was a disaster. She seemed apprehensive about hypnosis but Harder did manage to apparently induce a light trance. The distractions proved to be too great and no progress was made. Bonnie woke quickly without revealing anything to us.
A second attempt met with the same results. Although Harder could induce the hypnotic state, it wouldn’t hold as the probing moved to the abduction. The first question destroyed the mood, and Bonnie would sit up, blinking.
On the morning of July 9, Roach was ready to try again. She was sure that she could remember more, especially after she had a good night’s sleep. Harder had no difficulty putting her into a hypnotic state. Roach was a good hypnotic subject.
After describing, again, how she was moved from the house to the ship, Roach said, “They put me on a table and they hooked me up on one leg and one arm. I didn’t like their examination.” “Was it like a G-Y-N exam?” asked Harder. “That’s part of it,” she said. “I don’t like what they do with my head.” “What are they doing?” “Taking my thoughts…” Then angrily, she said, “They don’t have the right to take them.”
She and Harder discussed exactly what she meant by taking her thoughts. The aliens were making her relive past events as if building a catalog of human emotion. Roach said, once again, that they didn’t understand human emotions.
Roach leaped over a span of time and said, “I’m getting dressed. They don’t know.” Harder asked, “Don’t know what?” “They don’t know how we humans are. I called them stupid.” Roach laughed about that. “What did they say to that?” “They weren’t angry. They just do what they want to. The man was a regular man.” Harder wasn’t ready for that revelation. He asked, “What? What was that?
You thought there was a regular human being with them?” “Yes.” “Was he taller? Bigger?” “Yes. He was bald.” “Was he the one who did the examining?” “He helped.” Harder questioned her closely about the human being. She was sure there was a human with them. He was different from the aliens. He had regular eyes and human features.
Roach began describing other features of the abduction and finally said, “They need us… I don’t know why they need us. They’re very intent. They need information quickly.” Roach began to talk about her children and started to cry. In seconds she was awake again. She sat for a moment, as if thinking about what she had just seen, and then wanted to talk about the experience. She said that the human was about 55, had a fringe of gray hair, wore glasses, dressed in black and wore one glove.
Harder had been worried because Roach had failed to show any emotions during the first session. For Harder, Roach’s emotions during the second session had added a dimension of realism to the story. He was now convinced that Roach had been abducted by the crew of a flying saucer.
This idea, that emotional response is somehow related to the validity of the experience, has been disproved. In research conducted with Vietnam Veterans, it was seen in some cases that those who told horrific tales of combat with the proper display of emotion were later found to have not experienced the combat, had not been in Vietnam, and in one shocking case, the man had never served in the military. What this demonstrated was that the emotional content of the tale had no relation to the validity of the experience.
During the afternoon, Harder thought that everyone should get away from the house for a while. He wanted to move to neutral ground where everyone would have an opportunity to relax. Sitting in an ice cream parlor, Harder discussed some of the other abduction cases that had been reported over the last decade, including the Hill case. He went into some detail about what Betty Hill had reported. Harder told Roach about Betty Hill’s belief that a needle had been pushed into her stomach and eggs removed. She had said, more than once, that she believed there were lots of little Betty Hills running around in space.
The final session was held was held on the evening of July 9. Of Roach’s children, only Bonnie seemed to slip into a hypnotic state. In interviews conducted with the other children everything they had to say had been uncovered.
Their tales were no where near as robust as that told by their mother. They told fragmented stories that provided a measure of corroboration if it was forgotten that they all lived together for two years before Roach wrote to me. From Roach’s letter, it was clear that they had discussed the events of October 17 many times and in great detail. Further attempts with hypnosis would be of no value and failed.
Using a room at a local hotel, both Roach and her daughter would put under. While Bonnie was left alone to concentrate on her experiences, Roach was given a pen and paper and asked to draw one of the aliens. She sat for a moment, as if looking at something, and then sketched, quickly, the one of the creatures.
With that accomplished, Harder again questioned Roach, asking for more details about what she had seen on the ship. She described the interior of the craft, mentioned a “clock” with lots of hands, and told of the human who worked with the aliens.
Again, after she had been floated back to the house, Roach began to worry about her children. She began to cry, and slipped out of the hypnotic state. Now she remembered the needle and thought that it had been pushed into her stomach.
Remember, this was after Harder had asked the specific question in an earlier session, and had related, in detail, the experiences of Betty Hill to Roach. With her mother awake, Bonnie too, slipped out of the hypnosis. Now she remembered being on the craft. She was standing near a wall and could see her mother on a table that floated, surrounded by alien creatures. She said that she didn’t watch too closely because her mother had no clothes and she was frightened.
Then, Bonnie said one thing that excited Harder. She said, “I can see a human with them.” She went on to say, “He was taller and he had an ear like a regular ear.” Bonnie then took the paper and sketched the scene as she remembered it. The drawing agreed with Roach had said earlier. The numbers of beings and the positions of them were all correct, just shown from a different angle.
According to Harder, the descriptions provided by Roach matched several other reports, some of which hadn’t received any wide circulation. Only someone who had studied the phenomenon would be aware of the reports. There certainly was no way for Roach and her children to be aware of many of those cases.
Of course, the problem was that Harder was well aware of the descriptions and his questions sometimes lead to the description he wanted. At the time, I didn’t realize that the phrasing of a question, the tone of the hypnotist’s voice, and the gentle probing until he found the clue he wanted, dragged the report in the direction he wanted. It was quite subtle, and I’m not sure that Harder realized what he was doing as he questioned Roach. I certainly didn’t notice it until studying the case years later.
https://scienceandspace.com/ufos/roswell-ufos-and-the-unusual-the-roach-abduction-1973-part-1/
https://scienceandspace.com/ufos/roswell-ufos-and-the-unusual-the-roach-abduction-1973-part-3/