"In Her Own Words: An
Abductee's Story"
by Patrick Huyghe
|
OMNI Magazine, January-February 1996 By Patrick Huyghe Meet one Katharina Wilson, an attractive, intelligent, apparently well-adjusted, 34-year-old woman. Born in a small college town in the Deep South, Wilson now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her second husband, Erik. She sees herself as "an average American woman," a fitting self-description marred by just one fact: She also claims to be a UFO abductee. At first glance, Wilson's story sounds rather typical of other abduction lore. She claims to have been abducted and reproductively traumatized since the age of six by small alien creatures with large black eyes. Then, in her late twenties, she decided to come out of the UFO closet and tell all. What's different about Wilson's account, however, is in the way it comes to us--straight up. She has told her story--all of it, every dirty detail--on her own. It does not come to us secondhand, through a Budd Hopkins or a David Jacobs, to name just two of the most prominent UFO abduction researchers in this country. Instead, the story comes to us pure and wholly unfiltered in a book Wilson has written and published herself. Why is this so important? Because hearing about alien abductions directly from experiencers reveals aspects of the phenomenon long ignored--or perhaps just swept under the carpet--by most researchers. And in the end, these regularly hidden details may be vital in determining the cause of the UFO abduction phenomenon. Indeed, as a journalist who's investigated more than my fair share of UFO abductions, I've learned that many aspects of the so-called abduction phenomenon just don't make it into print. Instead, most investigators inevitably process the stories, molding the accounts to fit the theories they favor or the patterns they expect to find. Things that don't fit their preconceived notion of what's really happening "out there" are often deliberately left out of subsequent retellings of the tale. In the standard abduction scenario, a person may or may not have seen a UFO but is somehow whisked away from his or her home or car by small gray creatures and forced to undergo some sort of medical examination aboard a spaceship. The incident usually turns out to be one of many in the person's past involving a variety of reproductive assaults--semen sampling, artificial insemination, and fetus removal--resulting in the production of human/alien starbabies that the ETs keep. Generally lacking in the standard scenario, however, is the wide variety of other phenomena that the person often claims to have experienced as well--the psychic perceptions, the premonitions, the bedroom encounters with dead relatives, the ghosts, the time travel, and more. Despite what is often a nearly mind-numbing display of high strangeness, you would be hard pressed to find such descriptions in the published accounts. In the standard abduction scenario, as brought to us by the "experts," these messy details are summarily expunged. What we are left with is a cleaned-up story, a tale that stays unerringly "on mark," thus fitting the desired "alien" mold. Of course, to some extent information selection happens, often unconsciously, in every field of human inquiry. But in a proto-discipline like UFOlogy where the basic data is itself a subject of contention, this sort of filtering is particularly damaging. Now all this has changed, thanks to THE ALIEN JIGSAW, Katharina Wilson's courageous effort to buck the wave of censorship and tell all. In this brutally honest, firsthand account, Wilson describes a harrowing lifetime of encounters with what she sincerely believes are aliens. She holds nothing back, and provides numerous surprises along the way. To begin with she tells us of not one, or two, or a dozen abduction episodes, but an astounding 119 of them, occurring in a span of just 26 years. And her experiences involve not just your typical aliens, but also encounters with the dead, time-travel episodes, psychic experiences, and even a vision of an eight-foot-tall floating penguin--everything you can imagine and a whole lot more. In the middle of one abduction episode, for example, Wilson somehow encounters her present husband as a young man, years before she met him. Later in the episode she is terrified when told by the aliens that it is 1957--three years before she was born. Wilson also credits the aliens with saving her life; she twice had alien premonitions of nearly being killed by lightning, and on August 7, 1989 Wilson put on a pair of rubber-soled shoes just moments before lightning shattered the courtyard wall and nearly killed her. I don't think Wilson is perpetrating a hoax. If she were, she certainly would have left out the journal entry dated August 4, 1992. "I'm with Senator Gore," Wilson wrote, "and we are in a large room with many people. He is organizing something. Governor Clinton must be here, too--now I'm looking directly at President Bush. He really looks tired--beaten." When Wilson tells Gore that she has never voted Republican, Bush looks at her "with a look of disgust on his face." Later, she realizes that Gore and Clinton are preparing a feast, and she watches as it grows larger and larger. Following this journal entry, Wilson writes: "Although I did not remember seeing any alien beings associated with this encounter, it felt the same way all of my other visitations felt. It was extremely vivid." I asked Wilson if she had actually seen Bush, Gore, and Clinton. "I hope not," she replied with just a touch of humor. But that's a contradiction, I pointed out. You say your alien encounters are real and that this encounter with political figures was just as real as those you have with the aliens. "Did I say that?" she said. "Well, I don't think it was Gore because he was very short. I thought that was some form of camouflage." Wilson regards this episode as an alien-inspired vision of the Clinton and Gore win in November 1992. Wilson also believes one of the beings actually helped her with the book, pointing out before the book went to press that she had transcribed five journal dates incorrectly. Though some may think Wilson's account ridiculous, it is, in fact, typical of the sort of outre material that abductees consider part and parcel of their alien experiences. It's no wonder that investigators intent on proving the alien root of UFO abductions often leave such material out of their published stories. It clearly weakens their case. What does Wilson think about her verboten account, so potentially damaging to the alien hypothesis and contrary to UFOlogy's unwritten code? "Some people suggested that I cut out some of this material," she told me, "but I thought there is a lot more going on, and even though we don't understand it, it doesn't mean that it shouldn't be reported. As far as I know, this has not been done before. The book was really put out there for other experiencers, because I know they are experiencing things that they cannot account for by reading Budd Hopkins' INTRUDERS and David Jacobs' SECRET LIFE." Despite her candid attitude, Wilson's ultimate conclusion echoes that of the abduction gurus: "The aliens are probably collecting ova," she opines, landing strictly within the standard-issue abduction scenario and sounding a lot like Budd Hopkins, who was the first to investigate her case back in 1988. In fact, like Hopkins, who has penned the introduction for THE ALIEN JIGSAW, Wilson tends to blame aliens for just about all the weirdness. "I know that penguins aren't eight feet tall, and they don't float in midair," she explains. "That was an instance of camouflage and screen memory. And I don't really think dead people are visiting me. I think that's a form of alien manipulation. I do believe that the time travel is real, but I think there have been a few occasions where they manipulated me into thinking that happened." If you think about it, of course, the surrealistic scenes described by Wilson have the fantastical feel of dreams. Is she, in fact, recalling nocturnal images from the land of dreamy dreams--concocted by a trick of consciousness, cooked in the fires of REM, and transformed in the morning to a cocktail dish of aliens, starbabies, and UFOs? When I ask Wilson for the temporal context of her encounters, her response is typically straightforward--and telling. "I would have to say that the last thing I remember prior to most of these experiences," she said, "is going to bed." Isn't that sequence--going to bed, falling asleep, getting "abducted," and waking up--suggestive of the nightly journey we all take to the imagistic outback of the dream? "That's a fair question," she replies. "But I happen to have dreams all the time and, even if I don't leave my bed, abductions and dreams just do not feel the same." Whether Wilson is reporting from the land of Nod, the domain of aliens, or some other realm yet unknown, we may never know. But whatever the truth of the matter, it's time to applaud her tell-all book and attitude. Her story is, in fact, far more typical of abduction cases than we have been led to believe. And the only way to learn the truth behind the UFO abduction phenomenon is to let it all hang out. Wilson's candid tale may have already opened the floodgates. Some researchers new to the field have begun to balk at the prepackaged version of the abduction phenomenon we have been spoon-fed by the experts, and other abductees are beginning to step forward with stories of their own. A 24-year-old businessman from Harrison County, West Virginia, for example, has come forth claiming that he has been abducted by aliens at least 1,500 times. Reprinted by permission of OMNI, ©1995, OMNI Publications International, Ltd. Link to OMNI's site. http://www.omnimag.com ©1993-1996 Katharina Wilson. All Rights Reserved. Puzzle Publishing, PO Box 230023, Portland, Oregon, 97281-0023, USA. The preceding is reproduced with permission of the Author. http://www.alienjigsaw.com |
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