UFO ABDUCTIONS AND RACE FEAR

by Steven Mizrach

In the 1990s, we seem to be confronting two mysterious parallel social tremors. Lest anyone think that the UFO abduction panic has been driven into hiding by accusations of overeager hypnotists implanting false memories, they need only to turn to the recent Roper Poll (admittedly extremely flawed in its design) to see that the numbers of people believing themselves to be abductees is growing exponentially. The other social tremor which some people seem to think has vanished from our 'enlightened' and 'colorblind' society is a continuing anxiety over interracial marriage and 'cross-breeding' of the races.

As many people know, it is often the case that what the conscious mind claims it has integrated and accepted may still provoke unconscious hostility. Hence movies like Jungle Fever which remind us just how close precarious feelings about interracial dating are to some social fault line. Recently, a Southern principal tried to cancel a high school prom because of what he perceived to be 'widespread' interracial dating, and told an interracial child that she was a 'mistake' that her parents 'never should have had.' In both North and South (just look at Bensonhurst), white accusations still flow like a torrent whenever a black man is seen coming too close to a white woman.

As an anthropologist, I know full well that the biological basis of much of what is believed about 'race' is quite dubious. All of us belong to one race, the human race, because all humans can succesfully breed with each other, and produce offspring that are still fertile - as opposed to, say, the mating of horses and donkeys which produces mules. But race is a critical social construct, which informs many aspects of what people think and believe about their fellow humans. In the U.S., it is quite clear that (unlike Latin America) race is deeply polarizing and dichotomous. No intermediate shades or gradations are permitted. Either you're white, or you're not. If you've got even a drop of "black blood" (though, of course, all blood is red), then you're black, at least according to the laws in many Southern states. As one Southerner once pointed out, "If you take white paint, and mix in just a tiny drop of black, it's not white anymore..."

Are these two parallel social currents connected? Here I will attempt to argue that they are. Precisely because most people don't believe in the reality of UFO abductions, and refuse to recognize the reality of continued social disapproval of "race mixing," (in both the white and black communities - the latter starting to increasingly voice protest over adoptions of black children by white families) both of these currents are somewhat 'underground,' and maybe not dealt with by social scientists as much as they should be. Possible connections have been especially ignored.

The UFO abduction researcher James Pontolillo has made a great contribution to the literature in his Demons, Doctors, and Aliens, released by RDM Publications. Pontolillo points out the connections between the UFO abduction panic and two earlier episodes - the "witch craze" in Europe from the 15th-18th centuries, and the "white slavery" panic in the late 19th and early 20th. I find it interesting that the central factor in both panics was concern over the control of women's reproduction and the fear that they were mating with 'outsiders' of some kind. Many nationalist writers have often called women the "guardians of the race" - i.e. it is their task to reproduce the nation, physically and culturally.

During the "witch craze" period, there were many accusations that women (and men) were performing sorcery or committing blasphemy against Christian symbols and doctrine. However, the overarching concern of the inquisitors (in such typical works as the Malleus Maleficarum ) seemed to be the "consorting" of women with incubi and demons after being whisked off to their Sabbats. Questions always seemed to focus on the size and feel of the Devil's "member," and as to whether the women preferred the demons to mortal lovers. There was some argument over the matter, but it was generally felt that the result of such intercourse would be "demon children," and so when their mothers were burned, many of their children went into the pyre also. (Interestingly, this era in European history was one in which racial stereotypes were first beginning to emerge, largely due to greater contacts <and intermarriage> between Europeans and Moors, Indians, Turks, Asians, and so on.) It was thought that demon-human intercourse inevitably produced marks - the so-called "witches' teat," between the anus and vagina - which inquisitors sought with pins and other painful implements...

During the "white slavery" panic of the early 20th century, it was thought that swarthy foreigners were kidnapping white women and selling them into slavery in foreign lands. Once again, moral outrage seemed to be directed not at these rumored acts of kidnapping and sale. It was that these non-Europeans were impregnating white women and making them bear interracial children, and the implication in many cases was that the women were consenting to it willingly. That this was a nativist period in American history was fairly clear. It was a time when the eugenics movement was picking up force, and anti-immigrant hostility against Eastern and Southern Europeans was causing many immigration restrictions to be passed. One of the effects of the "white slavery" panic was that it gave men a tighter rein over their wives - after all, if they didn't stay in the home, some wicked foreigner might kidnap them and take them off to Frodobia...

Both episodes show a certain psychic similarity. Both occurred in periods when white Europeans (or 'WASP/Euro-Americans') were starting to become concerned about women becoming involved with nonwhite men. Abram Kardiner, in his Psychological Anthropology texts, suggested that many of the systems of myth and folklore in a society can be seen as symbolic projections of experiences from childhood or other anxieties. The "witch craze" and "white slavery" panics both involve symbolic concerns over the coming of "outsiders" carrying off women and breeding with them. Anyone who has not already noted the parallel with UFO abductions may not have been awake for the last ten years...

Budd Hopkins, John Mack, DavidJacobs, and other UFO investigators have been strongly promoting the "hybridization hypothesis" of UFO abductions. The "Grays" are supposedly kidnapping women and impregnating them, then returning nine months later to steal the fetuses before they can be born. The Grays are apparently doing so in an effort to revitalize their genetic pool, creating some sort of 'hybrid race' from mixing with us. The issue of how such reproduction can be possible - considering the existing genetic differences that must exist between the 'aliens' and us - is glossed over. What I find most interesting, of course, is this color: gray is the color you get when you mix black and white together.

Though UFO abductions do appear to be an international phenomenon, the lion's share of cases seem to come from Anglo-Saxon-rooted countries like the United States, England, South Africa, and Australia. Interestingly, all of these countries face race problems - whether it be with Aborigines, African-Americans, Zulu and Xhosa, or Caribbean blacks from the commonwealth. In the Third World, many people from these First World countries commonly encounter "organ removal" panics. Rumors have spread like wildfire that Americans in Guatemala are kidnapping small children and "harvesting" their organs for transplants. The similarity between these panics and UFO abductions should also be fairly obvious....

The connection between the UFO phenomenon itself (long before the current wave of abductions) and race is curious and bizarre. Many of the first group of UFO "contactees" - who went aboard the flying saucers willingly, to make love to gorgeous Venusians (but never producing offspring) - were loosely affiliated with the "Silver Shirt" movement of the 30s and 40s, a sort of homegrown American fascism which, among other things, opposed Roosevelt and WW II. The 50s contactees seemed to report that the majority of the saucer pilots were "Aryans" - long-haired, blonde, tall beings from Venus or other planets in the solar system. The "Aryans," when not warning humanity about atomic war, often gave messages promoting race harmony, but softly warning against racial intermixture and the "population explosion" of the Third World masses...

There has been a lot written about the UFO-Nazi connection. Some of the Nazi elite are thought to have held the theory that there was a hidden race deep within the Earth (the masters of the Vril) which they could make contact with through the poles. One of the early theories about UFOs was that they were craft piloted by Nazis who had fled after WW II and made contact with this race within the hollow earth (an idea that Ray Palmer, UFOlogy's "father," often assented to.) Today, there are groups of neo-Nazis who believe that the different races of the planet were "seeded" in various geographical locales by different alien groups, and charged with competing for planetary dominance...

These Neo-Nazi groups are obsessed with the idea of extraterrestrial "bloodlines" in human groups. Many think that "star seed" people are descendants of the Celtic races - Basques, Irish, Welsh, Bretons, etc. - and that one of the hallmarks of their extraterrestrial origin is the Rh Negative blood type. The migrations of the Celtic peoples were a result of "racial memory chromosomes" implanted by their ancestors. Some of this neo-Nazi literature suggests that the other "lower" races were the result of genetic experimentation by the aliens - attempts to crossbreed "pure" Aryan types with animals and other lifeforms.

It's amazing the degree to which racial nationalists of all kind have seized onto the UFO abduction phenomenon. In DC, I encountered a black nationalist at a fair whose table had literature linking the sinister "Grays" to the International Bankers' Conspiracy and the Zionist Peril. In a nutshell, this pamphlet merely restated the paranoid theories of 50s contactee John McCoy, suggesting that the "International Bankers" had made a deal with the aliens, the substance of which largely being that they would plan UFO abductions and sightings so as to create international financial panics which would allow them to grab up the world's currency.

That UFO abductions have something to do with race fear appears to be fairly plain. The U.S. is currently dealing with the fact that its white majority is decreasing... thus provoking all the debates about "multiculturalism." White supremacists take to the talkshow airwaves every day to proclaim the dangers of "race betrayal" by those who "miscegnate" and "pollute" the race. And Budd Hopkins tells us that women - the majority of whom are white and WASP, heartland, middle-America types - are being carried off by aliens to achieve a "hybridization" of them and us...

Yes, nonwhite men are abductees, too. Just look at Barney Hill. (The interesting thing about this case, to which many have pointed, is that his wife Betty was a white woman, and a civil-rights worker. The couple faced a great deal of hostility, and thus lived a semi-reclusive existence, due to their interracial marriage. It is curious that this case in 1961 pretty much "set off" the abduction wave which followed.) I think we must separate the abduction phenomenon from its interpretation by various groups. I have elsewhere suggested that UFO abductions may involve 'real,' if nonphysical experiences, and that they happen to all kinds of people.

However, what is curious to me is that the majority of abduction investigators have chosen to focus on white, middle-class women as abductees. They have chosen women because of their 'hybridization' hypothesis - after all, just look at all those 40s and 50s sci-fi comics where the Green Martian is dragging off some poor housewife, kicking and screaming - and perhaps have ended up mostly focusing on white women because of certain class/race prejudices about the reliability of certain kinds of witnesses. They have chosen to focus on the sexual/reproductive aspects of abductions, and not to examine others... and to look for marks - scars, cuts, etc. - as the telltale stigma of abduction.

One other aspect of abductions that few people have pointed out, which is also reproductive in nature, is that mechanical devices are often used to achieve the result. Some people have reported alien-human intercourse. But the majority of cases involve impregnation (or the removal of sperm/ova) through the use of some mechanical device. Some complex psychological phenomenon - perhaps growing anxiety over the impersonality of new fertility techniques or abortion - may be what is being 'projected' here. However, I suspect it is linked to another unconscious anxiety - the growing unease that people are beginning to feel over the intersection of the mechanical and the human, (Just look at that classic movie Demon Seed , where a computer rapes and impregnates a woman, giving birth to a 'cyborg' baby.)

This is an aspect of UFO abductions which these investigators have completely ignored. Their focus on the 'hybridization hypothesis' shows the extent to which race fear may be one of the unconscious logics behind the UFO abduction panic. But I would urge other investigators to separate the panic from the phenomenon. Abductions have to do with more than just race fear. Something very complex is going on, just as was the case with the "witch mania" in Europe. While the inquisitions of that period have everything to do with the inquisitors' obsession with women's contact with demons, this is entirely separate from the question of what constituted the perhaps very real basis of the witch-cult.

Margaret Murray suggested that the witches' religion was a survival of pre-Christian goddess worship and paganism. Other commentators think that many of the witches were simply midwives and herbalists who were resisting the growing dominance of male-practiced "physick" or medicine. The point is, other things were involved besides just male control of European women's reproduction. I think that the same thing can be said for the UFO abduction phenomenon. To say it is nothing but a projection of race fear and reproductive control is reductionist; but to ignore the role that race fear has played in its continuing interpretation is naive.