Given the proliferation in recent years of ufo/paranormal/dreamtime imagery in the media (VW's "Reverse Engineered From UFO's" ad comes glaringly to mind), do you feel that this is actually changing or affecting the phenomenon itself? Is the mass-media consciousness causing the UFO phenomenon to change the way it interfaces with us?

The way in which mass-media consciousness affects the evolution of the UFO phenomena is most apparent if we examine an individual case with multiple witnesses in which the group expectations caused the events to evolve accordingly.  I call this effect the "Alchemy of the Paranormal," and I have seen it in apparition or ghost cases as well as with UFOs.  The best example is a case in which I personally witnessed this psychophysical development.  It took place in Grass Lake, Illinois, a small farming community on the Illinois-Wisconsin border.  Starting in the mid-1970s, three separate families (eleven individuals) from around the tiny lake were calling the police and fire departments reporting strange orange lights in the sky.

The authorities responded over a dozen times, and on several occasions officers witnessed the lights, but realizing there was not much they could do to keep them away, they just stopped responding.  The families banded together and contacted a number of private research organizations, two of which asked me to investigate the case for them.  I spent several days at the lake interviewing the various families and trying to sort through their experiences.

One of the witnesses kept a logbook of everything that happened.  A few entries from her journal describe how innocently things began: 

"We went to the other side of the lake and talked to a witness who said it looked like a white light with a red rim. On closer inspection with binoculars, it resembles a fried egg--a dark dome with solid light rim, bordered with red and green lights.  Five witnesses watched it, and it showed up every night.  It was the size of a tennis ball at arm's length and started pulsating orange and white very fast.  Then after a few minutes, it moved northwest and faded just before it got to the trees."

Before long, the sightings of the UFOs became a regular occurrance.  The families started feeling more at ease with the phenomena and openly discussed what type of intelligences could be responsible for the strange displays.  They contacted a local New Age group, who taught them to communicate psychically with the wondrous lights. These efforts were deemed successful when some of the objects started blinking on and off in apparent response to group concentration efforts and later even blinked some messages back in International Morse Code, which the group had taught them telepathically.  However, with the escalation in contact and communication, some members of the group became apprehensive at what type of creatures they might be communicating with. 

Eerie poltergeist effects started immediately after that change in consciousness. Effects included loud knocking and clawing sounds, sounds of things falling but nothing dropping, sudden foul odors such as sulfur and fish, lights and radios turning on by themselves, clocks turning ahead, furniture falling over, unexplainable variations in room temperature, pillows soaked with water from nowhere, and the disappearance and later return of common personal objects such as pens, flashlights, house-slippers, and purses.  The men especially had a hard time accepting things and started telling stories about seeing creatures on the property that looked like Bigfoot or the "swamp thing" from the movie "Boggy Creek Monster." 

Not long afterwards, elusive humanoids began invading their homes, and the scariest ones were the reptilian figures the men had been telling stories about. Things continued to escalate until the reptilians started appearing out of a shaft of light and chasing family members.  Walls and furniture throughout the houses were ripped to pieces from huge six fingered claws, but the giant reptiles always disappeared just as they were about to tear into a terrified witness. 

One evening, I was sitting at the kitchen table going over a witness' testimony, when suddenly there was a loud thump on the outside wall.

Thinking something had hit the side of the house, I jumped up, ran over to a half-open dining room window, and stuck my head out.  I turned my head to my right and could see claw marks actually forming on the wood siding outside! It was cedar siding and six invisible claws were digging in about an eighth of an inch, revealing the fresh red wood underneath.  Before I glanced out, approximately three inches had formed, but when I started watching, the claws seemed to dig in deeper and went on for at least another four inches.  There was no way anyone could have faked that. It was simply too much for my mind to grasp at the moment and all I wanted to do was be alone and think about it. I did not exactly run screaming from the house, but I quickly excused myself without telling anyone what I saw and headed for my car, which I had parked at the side of the road.

Once in my car, I felt as if my brain was on fire trying to figure out explanations for what I saw.  All kinds of scenarios from sci-fi movies started to come to mind.  Then, as I started down the dark blacktop road, my headlights started blinking on and off in Morse code fashion!  I pulled to the side of the road and watched in amazement as the lights danced on and off with my ammeter remaining dead center steady, as if my lights were drawing their power from another source.  Even after I turned off the switch, they continued flashing.

Finally, after about five minutes, they stopped, and I pulled the switch on, after which they worked correctly all the way back to Chicago. 

The next day, when I took the car in to be checked by a mechanic, he could find nothing wrong with the wiring, but did discover that the left-hand side of the car had been magnetized.  One of his screwdrivers stuck to one side but not the other.  Furthermore, a Geiger counter I had in the trunk was pegged out full scale and ruined, even though it was turned off. 

I returned to Grass Lake a week later with a team of investigators ready to stake out the lake, but by that time the families were in real crisis and had already contacted a local church group.  Church leaders told the witnesses that they had brought demons into their homes by their "sinful" acts and started performing exorcisms in the houses. We were asked not to come back.  I took photos and wrote up the case in the JOURNAL OF UFOLOGY, but I think the Grass Lake incidents were simply too far out to be taken seriously.  I visited Nancy about three years later, and we sat together at the same kitchen table where my own encounter with the Other Side had begun.  I looked at her temples and noticed the dime-sized scars of electroshock therapy; she had suffered a nervous breakdown.  Her husband had left her, and her family had disowned her, and I could offer her no real comfort. 

I never saw any UFOs or creatures at Grass Lake, but what I did see has left an indelible mark on me too.  I am no longer a "hardware man," nor do I believe earth is being invaded from outer space.  Instead, we are being invaded from inner space, from realms in our own minds which lie waiting, ignored for too long.  I am convinced there is an unsuspected connection between human consciousness and reality, a connection that the longer we fail to acknowledge, the more forcibly it will intrude into our everyday existence.
 

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Dennis William Hauck is the author of HAUNTED PLACES: THE NATIONAL DIRECTORY
(Penguin 1996) and THE EMERALD TABLET: ALCHEMY FOR PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION
(Penguin 1999). He maintains websites at
<http://www.haunted-places.com/>
<http://www.alchemylab.com/>