Reports of Unidentified Flying Object: Testimony from Africa – Abductions
Whilst abductions are the current enthusiasm of ufologists, I am finding that whatever abductions are-whether a psychological subconscious concept or an absolute reality-they are certainly occurring in Africa. Unfortunately, I have not come across any cases where brown skinned Africans are involved . Indeed, this would be a tremendous breakthrough. However, even with the few cases I now have, it still shows that UFO events occur in waves .
When there were lights in the sky, lights in the sky were visible in Africa. When craft landed on the ground , some of the best CEIII cases occurred. And since my return to Africa from the MUFON/Fund for UFO Research Conference in Washington , DC in June 1987, I have inter viewed several abductees. I must admit that my first reaction was that of ambivalence: how come the abduction reports from the sixties and seventies were almost totally unacceptable (Elizabeth Klarer/Edwin of Durban) and now suddenly in the eighties, they were genuine physical affairs?
On the other hand, Budd Hopkins’s investigations were thorough and professionally conducted with positive re ports from psychologists. The psychological implications, according to Hopkins, had been carefully examined and he had been assured that the abductees were not suffering from some mental aberration; they were not schizophrenic nor paranoiac. If they were reacting to an abnormal experience, it was because the experience was abnormal.
But whereas in Great Britain, Australia, Europe, and America, books such as Intruders by Budd Hopkins, Ab ductions by Jenny Randles and Communion by Whitley Strieber must stir the imagination of their readers, in most of Africa such books are not available.
I have found that when dealing with witnesses in ab duction cases in Africa, there is an innocence to their awareness; they are embarrassed by the story they are telling me because it is not like anything they have heard before. They know no one has experienced what they have experienced and they are afraid of the ridicule, and a little ashamed of repeating it aloud . They have never heard of Budd Hopkins, Kathy Davis or Whitley Strieber: they would never apply the term “abduction” to their experience, nor are they sure it is a UFO case.
In December, 1988, I interviewed Janet from Bulawayo in Zimbabwe. For me, her experience, which occurred in 1982, was an exciting one. It came to her in the form of a dream where she dreamed she was in a large room made entirely of metal-the floors, the walls, the ceiling. The room was filled with rows of tables on which were lying many medical instruments. Janet cannot recall being examined except that she could feel the people in the room putting something on her head, something like a cap. They were normal people except that they were dressed in one piece suits of a shiny white or silvery color.
When she awoke the following morning there was a lump the size of a five-cent piece on the right-hand side of her head. She showed the mark to her mother. The mark is now very much reduced but still visible. I did see it, but frankly, it could be anything . However, the importance of this case is that Janet was not aware of people having pellets implanted into their heads , and when I mentioned such a possibility at the end of our interview she did not appear to be particularly interested.
Since the dream, Janet has noticed many different things. She now has an adverse reaction to anything electrical. When she uses her hairdryer or curling tongs, the surge of electricity is unpleasant and her head is painful where the mark is. During thunderstorms, frequent in summer in tropical Zimbabwe, she experiences a disturbing tingling sensation whenever lightning strikes .
In 1984, while working in a London office, she was sitting at her desk and moved backward (she is not sure for what reason she did this!) when a string of neon-tube lights fell and broke on her desk. On another occasion, in her dining-room, a neon light bulb fell and shattered on the table, barely missing her. More recently, while in her kitchen, a similar incident occurred, when an ordinary light bulb and its light shade fell and shattered a few centimeters from where she was standing. She commented that in each instance she recalls moving away from the spot where she had been standing, seconds before the lights fell, thus avoiding injury.
Apart from some recurring astral traveling dreams, she records only one other psychic experience. She was in the garden of her home when she saw two creatures she de scribes as ” fairies. ” They were very small , about six centimeters perhaps, dressed in long, flowing white gowns and with gossamer wings . As Janet told me this, she laughed and appeared embarrassed. I felt she did not re ally want to talk about the “fairies” to me; she parted with the information reluctantly. They were stationary just above some golden nasturtiums and she saw them only briefly. One moment they were there, and the next, they were gone.
With regard to her “dream, ” I asked who she thought the people were and what they wanted from her. She did not know, she said, but she has become increasingly afraid that they are coming to take her away. And yet, she added, if they want her to go with them, she would do so. She would like to go somewhere else; to another planet, per haps. She feels there is little on Earth that can make her happy. She also had an emotional problem at home (she did not clarify this) and has not found a satisfying relationship for herself although she is a very attractive young woman; slight, small in build, with wide blue eyes and blonde hair. She told me she was a “loner” and really prefers her own company.
A second Bulawayo witness was Jenny. Briefly, her story is the retelling of a dream which she has had at various times of her life going back some twenty years. The significance of the dreams was that they were precognitive and involved a man dressed in white who would take Jenny to places prior to her going to live there; in fact, without any knowledge on her part that she and her husband would be moving. She would only recognize the area when her husband was posted there (he was in the British Army at the time). She was convinced that these dreams were different from ordinary dreams. The reports on the whole were not particularly out of the ordinary except for one incident.
Jenny recalls being taken over a choppy sea toward an octagonal building with large windows, floating on top of the water. She was taken inside where there was a hive of activity monitored by people dressed in blue. A beautiful woman (obviously humanoid) came to Jenny and explained that “they” were watching our Earth. A young man, to whom she pointed, was monitoring an earthquake condition about to occur in Turkey. Jenny was distressed.
She says, “Although they were very kind , some sort of manipulation was going on, in our own interests, they said, and helping with the over-population of our planet. ” An extension of the abductee ‘s own thoughts on the matter? After all, even the most uninvolved in Africa must realize the basic problem of the population explosion among our people. Or indeed, is there some form of manipulation really going on by an alien civilization older and wiser than we are?
MB of Masvingo, Zimbabwe, had a less explicit experience. Her alleged abduction was rather vague, with humanoid beings of great physical attributes. Again, in this case there was no exposure to contemporary UFO reading matter, nor to media reports of small beings with slanting eyes and sexless appearance.
With MB, the interesting feature of her report was the sudden appearance, during the night, of a round, silvery object humming “like a swarm of bees. ” The object appeared a second time two years later when she was taken inside the craft.
She described flying in the craft and being so close to the ground that she could see small pebbles on the Earth and the furrows of ploughed fields. At one time she found herself in a corridor with a choice of doors. (Some emotional indecisiveness in her personal life?) When she realized “they ” were taking her back to Earth, she panicked.
She pleaded with them to keep her there-wherever “there” may be. Janet of Durban, South Africa, says she was drinking coffee late one night when she saw a man step out of her wardrobe, which appeared to change into a long, endless tunnel . The man beckoned to her but she was determined not to go to or with him, and clung to the sides of the bed. She found that she had no free will and subsequently felt herself dragged down the tunnel .
In the morning she had difficulty in raising her bruised arms and was unable to comb her hair. (There is no corroborative evidence for this as Janet was divorced and lived alone.) She recalls being taken to a room with a table (examination table?) and a strange smell .
Caroline of Chipinge, Zimbabwe, has the most interesting story of all. She was lying on her bed awake when she saw a ball of light shoot through the ceiling and come down to the floor.
The following then occurred:
- (a) Caroline was paralyzed by the object.
- (b) The light, which was extremely bright, beamed downward.
- (c) Caroline felt “they” wanted to take her up in the beam.
- (d) She was able to see through the ceiling of her bed room to the trees and sky outside.
- (e) She tried to call out but no sound came from her throat.
- (f) When the object had gone, she rushed to call her mother, putting on the lights as she moved through the house. (During our War of Independence most farmers used extensive security lighting in the immediate vicinity of their homes. This has been retained despite the end of the war, owing to terrorist attacks.) All the lights went out.
- (g) A whirring sound accompanied the movement of the object.
- (h) When Caroline was talking to her sisters after the event, they maintain that her words were confused and distorted. She also noticed that her sisters, when speaking to her, were slurring their words. (This slurring of speech occurred in the Nullarbor Plain case in Australia, 1988.)
I am surprised at the number of reports I have received in the space of a year. And why now and not before?
Overall the average number of cases of all types varies from one or two per month to about five or six per month in a busy period. But most of these used to be misidentified lights in the sky, which Dr. Willy Smith, an able and respected colleague, would soon identify for me: a bolide; part of a meteorite shower (all so clearly visible in the unpolluted skies of Africa) ; space debris; or a satellite. · But abductions are different. There can be no misidentification as the story is so clear: the witness is aware of what is happening and is taken aboard or away by, presumably, alien beings. And although on occasions the witness admits that it occurred during a dream, why does this dream stand out so clearly from all others? Abductions don’t happen every night, or even once a month. They usually occur once in a lifetime, sometimes twice. Only in the case of Jenny did meetings happen more frequently.
The witnesses do not speak readily or eagerly of their experience, and because they usually don’t know who to tum to, some stories don’t come to light for years. And how many hundreds are never revealed?
With me, at least the witnesses know that I am sympathetic and understanding: they know they can talk to me, and that in itself is a release. But I cannot answer their questions: Why did this happen and why to them?
Of course, there is a pattern, but with wide margins. I know, for example, that the abductions happen mostly to women: they are all good-looking-some exceptionally so. They were young when it first happened, although not in terms of Budd Hopkins’s seven-year-old syndrome. There are other major factors, but they do not apply to everyone, and with only five or six cases I cannot formulate a distinct enough pattern. So I will just have to wait and see.
As far as I know, the psychologists have not yet pro vided an answer either. Thus the enigma remains, and it grows on a psychological level. When UFO events were all physical , it was interesting but remote. Now that there is interference with the mind and control of the will , should not our voices be more clearly heard?