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There Were Humans Among Them
By Scott Corrales
FATE :: May 2003

Even those who have never considered science fiction their preferred form of entertainment remember the premise of Invasion of the Body Snatchers--a movie so haunting it has undergone two further remakes since the original. Alien "pods" land on Earth and begin to project tendrils into sleeping human beings, creating perfect replicas known as "pod people" among the embattled, unreplicated protagonists. Although the movie addresses the fears of a Communist infiltration of American society in the Cold War 1950s, the possibility that human turncoats could be working with nonhuman presences on earth, or that nonhumans could adopt human form to move more freely in our midst, has manifested itself more than once in UFO lore. What would such a "fifth column" gain from service to nonhuman forces, whether extraterrestrial or interdimensional? The short answer is a position of power or at least preeminence in a scenario involving the subjugation of humanity by inimical outsiders.

Maybe the answer to this hypothetical question isn't quite so complex. If we are able to conceive of a race of intelligent beings able to cross the vast gulfs of interstellar space, or transition from one dimension of the universe to another, wouldn't they also be able to confect their own versions of the denizens of planets they intend to visit, if only to put the locals at ease? The average human has a hard time overcoming ingrained prejudices toward his fellows, so fathoming the barrier between species could be even harder. A physically attractive, smiling construct of his own kind would go a long way toward calming the hapless abductee taken aboard an alien craft or spirited to an alien world.

Jacques Vallee mentions a case in Dimensions that occurred in Temple, Oklahoma, in 1966. A flight instructor saw a brilliant machine parked on a shoulder on the interstate, got out of his car to take a snapshot of it, and noticed a "man in military fatigues...a plain old G.I. mechanic carrying out repairs on the wingless, tapered fuselage. It had no visible means of propulsion, yet it took off vertically at an astounding speed."

But the "plain old G.I." mechanic was apparently not the only fifth columnist: The "Pat Price" abduction case of October 1973 caused a stir among UFO researchers at a time that was rife with accounts of UFO abductions both in the U.S. (the Hickson/ Parker abduction in Pascagoula, Mississippi) and abroad (the Dionisio Llanca case in Argentina). Hypnotic regression had revealed that the pseudonymous housewife and her children had apparently been abducted by two slender, dwarfish alien beings and taken aboard a "spaceship." Mrs. Price recalled undergoing a physical probe of her brain and other tests at the hands of the unfeeling nonhumans, but the most remarkable feature of her regression was the fact that she had seen a human being assisting the aliens in their operation. "He looked like a person. He kept bending over me," she told Dr. James Harder, who performed the hypnosis session in 1975.

The details, which were made known in the June 1976 issue of SAGA UFO Report, suggested that the human was a bespectacled male in his mid-50s with graying hair, clad in black and holding a rubber glove in his hand. Kevin Randle, who wrote the article, observed that "the human working with them is something that has been reported before, but is still frightening. It means that he was either a ‘traitor' or that he was under complete mind control. Either of these ideas is terrifying in its implications."

The presence of "ordinary humans" allied to aliens was also a significant element of the Travis Walton abduction. Walton, who was part of a team of tree cutters working in the Sitgraves National Park near Snowflake, Arizona, in 1975, found himself aboard a UFO after having been on the receiving end of a beam of light fired by the strange craft. Although he described his captors as being the macrocephalic, bug-eyed entities which another generation would come to know as "Greys," the terrified logger was even more startled by the appearance of what seemed to be a fellow human. "I turned around, and there was a man standing there near the door," Walton is quoted as saying in Bill Barry's Ultimate Encounter (Pocket Books, 1978). "He was a man just like a human being...he was human enough, so if I was walking down the street in a crowd, he'd be an unusual looking person in passing...I thought he could be American just as far as I could tell..."

Walton did his best to make himself understood to the being he took for a compatriot, but to no avail. Smiling benignly, the human took him through the "space vehicle" to a place where Walton encountered a pair of golden-hazel-eyed humanoids who looked like twins. Trying to communicate with them yielded no better results; a struggle ensued with the humanoids, who placed some sort of "gas mask" over Walton's face. When he awoke, he was on a road on the outskirts of Heber, Arizona ...

Read the rest of this article in the May 2003 issue of FATE

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