Alien Meccano-Mummy- North Dakota

Late at night on August 26th, 1975, Sandra Larson, her boyfriend and her daughter, Jackie, were driving to Bismarck, North Dakota when a collection of rumbling, orange orbs descended from the sky and approached their car. Suddenly all three reported a strange feeling of being "stuck", as if frozen in ice. Suddenly Sandra, who had been driving, was sitting in the backseat while her daughter had moved to the front. Feeling disoriented, the group pulled over at a gas station only to discover that they were missing a whole hour of time.

Later Sandra and Jackie would undergo hypnosis by psychologist R. Leo Sprinkle of the University of Wyoming. Sandra would recall being levitated towards one of the UFOs, where she was given a medical exam by a bizarre being. According to her, the creature had large, bulging eyes that stared out of a head covered in wrappings "like a mummy". It's arms were made out of jointed strips of metal like a Meccano set (a metal toy-building kit similar to an Erector set). It's body was covered in what she described as "brown vinyl".

The being performed several strange experiments on her, such as rubbing a clear liquid on her body and taking a painful scrapping of the inside of her nose with an instrument. At one point Sandra even felt as if her brain had been removed from her skull.

In later hypnosis sessions with Sprinkle, Sandra would recall being visited by this being and its fellows earlier in her life, including several instances where she was levitated through solid walls.

This bizarre case occupies a unique point in the history of UFO research. Since its inception, the field of ufology has been divided into two camps- those who try to examine the phenomenon of UFOs and alleged alien encounters from a scientific perspective, and those who approach it from a more spiritual or psychological angle. Scientific investigators tried to study these cases as either genuine visitations by extraterrestrial entities or as hallucinations caused by sleep paralysis, hypnogogia or misidentification of natural phenomena. Those looking at the phenomenon spiritually and psychologically focus on the perceptions and feelings of the abductees themselves. Some perceive the encounters as a sort of New Age communion with higher beings. Others see them as mental constructs that the abductees have created to deal with trauma and other emotionally-charged experiences.  The Sandra Larson case was one of the first to be examined by both camps and would eventually lead to a partial melding of the two groups which has continued into the modern era of UFO investigations.

SOURCES

The Big Book of UFOS by Chris A. Rutkowksi.

An article from Week in Weird on Abductions and Hypnosis

A chronology of UFO incidents

HowStuffWorks article on the encounter

The Curse of the Space Mummies

Pascagoula Wrinkled Robots-- Mississippi

On the cool evening of October 11th, 1973, Charles Hickson and his friend Calvin Parker, Jr. were fishing off a pier on the Pascagoula River. As they watched, a football-shaped, glowing craft zipped down from the sky and hovered over the river. Three bizarre beings floated out of the ship and approached the men. Hickson described the extraterrestrials as “robots” with wrinkled gray skin like an elephant’s, and claw-like hands. Their bullet-shaped heads had no necks, instead merging seamlessly into their shoulders. The creatures had slits for mouths and carrot-like growths where their noses and ears wouldhave be. They did not appear to have any eyes. Their cylindrical legs appeared to be welded together.

The alien robots somehow paralyzed Hickson and Parker and took them back to their ship. There, the men were floated into a bright, empty room and scanned by a football-shaped mechanical eye. According to Hickson, Parker quickly passed out during the encounter. Years later, under hypnosis, he would recall seeing shadowy beings watching the procedure from another compartment. Perhaps these were the creators and controllers of the wrinkled robots.

After a short while, both men were returned to the pier.  Once able to move again, they ran to their car and sat for a long time, regaining their composure.

So what exactly happened to Hickson and Parker that night on the Pascagoula River? Were they indeed paralyzed by wrinkled robots and taken about a spacecraft? Were the beings from another planet? Another dimension (perhaps the same higher dimension that was the possible home of the Van Meter Visitor and other bizarre phantoms)?

 Or was the whole encounter a vivid, terrifying hallucination? Joe Nickell, Ph.D., a Senior Research Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSA) wrote an interesting article for the May/June 2012 issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine which postulates that Hickson may have actually experienced a hypnagogic episode.

 Hypnagogia is the state between waking and sleeping where some people can experience vivid, dream-like hallucinations, often including strange lights and visions of frightening beings. Many  people also report sleep paralysis during this time-- a condition caused by the body being in “sleep mode”, though the mind is still partially active. 

Hallucinations and sleep paralysis, so Nickell hypothesizes, might explain the bizarre appearance of the wrinkled robots, as well as the way they paralyzed the two men. Parker, as was mentioned before, fell asleep at the beginning of the alleged encounter and did not wake up until afterwards. He only recalled details of the incident later. Perhaps his "recovered memories" were influenced by Hickson’s own genuine belief in the encounter.

Hypnogogic hallucination it may have been, but regardless the experience still haunted the men for years afterwards. Both suffered mental trauma from what they believed they saw. Parker was supposedly even hospitalized at one point after an emotional breakdown.

In an interesting possible sequel to this encounter, just six days later a metallic, wrinkly, robot-like being somewhat similar to the Pascagoula aliens was reported in Falkville, Alabama. I'll be detailing that incident in my next entry.

SOURCES

Joe Nickell's Skeptical Inquirer article

A detailed account of the Pascagoula Abduction on Cryptopia

A Bogleech.com article on the Pascagoula Aliens and other non-Gray extraterrestrials