The following is an article from the August '96 (Vol. 4, #8) issue of The
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                            This One's a Keeper
                            by Martin Kottmeyer
Late in the evening of November 19, 1980, a man and woman were driving home
to Longmont, Colorado, and had a strange experience. An intense beam of
blue light locked onto their car. A noise as loud as a jet engine at
takeoff but similar to the whish-whish of a bull whip accompanied the
light. The radio filled with static and faded out. The headlights on the
car dimmed. The rear wheels of the station-wagon left the pavement as the
car lifted up at an angle. Then, abruptly, sound and light ceased and they
were rolling along at 50 m.p.h. Checking their watches they discovered over
an hour had vanished from their lives. Though, technically, they had not
actually seen a UFO, nobody could doubt one was present. The resemblance to
Neary's railroad crossing encounter in Spielberg's blockbuster Close
Encounters of the Third Kind leaps out at you.
Stopping at a gas station to pick up some cigarettes, the husband found his
equilibrium was messed up and walked straight into a door jamb. The
attendant looked at him like he was drunk. Subsequently, his wife found a
rectangular shape on her abdomen and had a vivid dream of a strange craft
in a field and an unusual, charismatic man or entity who communicated
without speaking. She later contracted an extremely severe case of
streptococcal pneumonia which nearly killed her.
The man asked around about who to discuss all this with and ended up with
Richard Sigismond, a social psychologist with a developed technique in
regressive hypnosis. Linda Howe acted as a technical assistant. Three
hypnosis sessions ensued with the man and a story emerged to fill in the
missing time. The car had not, of course, just been lifted halfway, but
taken wholly into the UFO. A heavy mist with an electrical smell
reminiscent of a missile base the man once worked in surrounded him and his
wife.
He met a gray-skinned, big-bald-headed humanoid wearing a shiny gold
uniform of unusual design. It had very long fingers. The inside of the
craft had glowing walls with arches that radiated orange on their outside
edges. The man was restrained by silver bands on his arms and found himself
lying naked on a table. A light floated overhead. His wife was similarly
naked but was standing in a zombie-like state, "switched off" in
contemporary UFO parlance. The entity stripped his mind, but put it all
back and more. He was given certain abilities. "Knowledge! The man gave me
something," he remarked. He now knew -- there are more dimensions, "things
co-existing." He had a new power to go into himself, but it was a strength
that he resisted wanting to develop. He had too many responsibilities as it 
was.
Torn by conflicts involving this responsibility and his conservative
conditioning to "regard UFO people as fringe people," the man bowed out and
subsequently moved on, leaving no forwarding address or phone number. The
hope that his wife might be eventually hypnotized to give corroborative
testimony had been put aside because of the severity of her illness at the
time. Now it was completely eliminated. This left the case with an
ambiguous status, as the investigators were the first to admit.
The case of the Longmont couple's alien abduction was still thought
interesting enough to write up and publish. They were given the pseudonyms
of Michael and Mary and an account appeared in the Center for UFO Studies
(CUFOS) International UFO Reporter (Volume 7, #5, September/October 1982,
pp. 9-15) with a forward by J. Allen Hynek asserting the instructive value
of the case despite its frustrating denouement. It was reprinted verbatim
in Flying Saucer Review a year later (Volume 29, #2, December 1983, pp.
21-26) and demonstrates the case had a cachet to it. The reprint drew a
letter from Paul Johnson, a British investigator, who asserted two unnamed
couples were attacked by a whish-whish noise the very evening as the
Longmont abduction over in Norfolk county in England, an area full of
military airfields. Nothing is said of bright light or other Longmont-type
effects, however.
A capsule account of the Longmont abduction appeared in Richard Hall's
Uninvited Guests (Aurora, 1988, pp. 311-312). Still better, in Bullard's
exhaustive survey of pre-1985 abductions, the case’s match to standard
patterns not only got it into his list of top 50 cases but got it a ranking
of #16. This places it well above such classics as Antonio Villas Boas,
Herb Schirmer, Pascagoula, and Travis Walton. Beyond this, however, the
case has languished in obscurity. Most works never cite it, even those that
aspire to a measure of historical comprehensiveness like those by Jenny
Randles and Peter Brookesmith.
Most UFO buffs would have a hard time trying to recall the case, but a few
might recognize one thing about it. The man in the Longmont abduction was
an art instructor and he produced some charcoal sketches of his encounter.
His drawing of the humanoid he encountered is memorable and has been
reproduced. In a few respects, it seems like your standard Gray. The head
is bald and larger than normal. There are no ears. The long fingers seemed
to Sigismond very similar to an autopsy drawing of a Gray's hand in Len
Stringfield's retrievalist file.
Yet it is also quite different. The eyes are way too small and
undistinctive. The neck should be long and thin, but probably isn't. A
layered ornamental collar, something never reported before or since,
surrounds it. The nose is not vestigial and seems peculiarly folded or
wrinkled or slitted like gills. It wears clothes, and they are
loose-fitting rather than skin-tight. Sigismond did not remark on these
departures from type. In fairness, the type in part did not yet exist as we
now describe it. Yet such departures are clearly a problem now. Do they
prove the case is flawed, or the current image of Grays?
Some additional information should help you answer part of this question.
On December 5, 1964, an episode of a science fiction/horror anthology
series called The Outer Limits aired, which offers a necessary clue. Its
title was “Keeper of the Purple Twilight.” The episode has been described
as a wild potpourri of science fiction stereotypes: neurotic mad scientist,
death rays, emotionless aliens, and a threat of invasion. The erstwhile
villain of the piece is a big-domed alien named Ikar. He swaps minds with a
frustrated scientist working on a disintegrator weapon. The faces of the
aliens consist of a big set of horizontally aligned gills with a pair of
eyes wedged in it. Photos of Ikar and his alien storm-troopers were widely
used in promoting the series. Set those photos next to the Longmont
humanoid and the similarities seem hard to dismiss.
The gills or folds in combo with the big-bald-head immediately evoke the
sense of a resemblance. The Longmont version is conventionalized to be
sure, the folds covering less of the face, but they are so unusual that no
other alien even comes to mind as close. We soon notice the very long
fingers shared by both. The outfits are both loose-fitting jumpsuits with a
cummerbund about the waist. The suits are single-colored and patternless
with no zippers or buttons in evidence. Both show a ridge around the wrist.
The shape of the brow above the eyes also matches well.
It needs to be granted the match is imperfect in some interesting respects.
Ikar has no ceremonial collar, albeit one might regard the bunching of
fabric around the neck as a potential jump-off point for the elaboration.
Ikar has pointy ears in contrast to the earless Longmont alien.
Understandable that the post-Star Trek Longmont artists might want to
suppress embarrassing allusions to Spock that the pre-Star Trek make-up
artist could not foresee. The eyes are small and completely black in the
Longmont alien while Ikar's eyes are whitish and faintly goofy. The
Longmont alien's jumpsuit has ridges around the elbows and knees; Ikar's
doesn't. The differences seem deliberate improvements rather than haphazard.
Part of the plot of the Longmont abduction may also have been derived from
the Outer Limits episode. The conflicted protagonist of "Keeper of the
Purple Twilight" trades off his emotions to acquire the knowledge and
ability to complete the equations necessary to finish his science project.
The Longmont artist’s sense that his mind was taken and knowledge added
hinges on the same magical assumptions about alien mind powers that
underpin "Keeper." It is not identical to the extent that emotions are not
traded off in the Longmont abduction, but with such exotica, coincidence
would still be hard to argue.
With a fictional source revealed as an influence on the imagery and plot of
this case, the departures from type are readily understood. The case is
flawed. It will inevitably be wondered if the fault is methodological --
hypnosis? cryptamnesia? -- or witness-centered -- a hoax? delusion? The
presenting claim of being in a car partially lifted off the road while
rolling at 50 m.p.h. as a brilliant light and tremendous noise assaults two
witnesses’ senses seems solidly immune from prosaic explanation. It is
either pure fiction or an alien close encounter. Sigismond gives no
evidence of looking for corroborative witnesses. A tremendous noise and
brilliant light could hardly have escaped attention over a significant area
if the encounter was real. No claims of validating physical evidence are
offered. The fact that the witness pulled out with no forwarding address
some time after the wife became deathly ill looks suspiciously like it was
an aborted hoax, the husband either having the fear of God thrown into him
by the unexpected calamity or unwilling to try to pull it off alone. If
some want to regard that as too facile a judgment, be warned that the flaw
an artifact of hypnosis and memory. Skeptics would probably enjoy that
conclusion more, but sincerely it seems irrelevant here. The drawing seems
more a conscious than unconscious invention in my opinion.
Ufologists will reject this and blame the presence of cultural material as
a red herring. Deeper probing would have got Sigismond the true image of
the present Gray. The methods of the time, the investigative assumptions,
were more primitive. The tricky corollary, however, is this: how does the
hypno-ufologist ever know when he has gone deep enough? Sigismond mentioned
no doubts and nobody at the time complained that the image looked dubious.
Are present investigators stopping at a layer where cultural assumptions
stop or just where they stop recognizing them? Does deeper really mean
truer? Or is it an extra chance to get a story straight?
Tough questions admittedly face ufologists accepting that a hoax is
involved here. Do they just throw it away? Yet it got into Bullard's Top 50
because of how well it fitted in with the main patterns of the abduction
phenomenon. There must be lessons here both needless to articulate and
still to be learned. You won’t finish the jigsaw puzzle if you start
throwing pieces away. This one is a keeper.
--- msgedsq 2.0.5
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