Taking Action

Experiencers may feel pressed by their evolving knowledge and personal transformation to act in some way, but they are daunted by the enormity of the task. What can be done? they ask. All the information she has received is "really important," Nona says, but "what do you do with it? How am I supposed to tell the world that we're killing ourselves?" Karin protests. "Nobody is going to listen tome."

Yet some, certainly not all, abductees do find a way to participate directly, even fervently, in efforts to help protect the Earth's environment. This can occur as a result of their sense of urgency and from facing their fear and other distressing emotions directly."! have to do something," Sue said. "I knew it on a very deep level.... I had a choice, but I didn't have a choice." It was through her identification with the Earth that she was eventually to become an intensely committed environmental teacher and activist.

The environmental activism of abductees ranges from speaking with spouses and children about their new knowledge and concerns for the Earth to becoming, like Sue and Carlos, major teachers at a community and even national or international level. Some experiencers choose to work for environmental causes and organizations. More rarely, like Jim Sparks, they may become involved in direct political action. Not infrequently they come to regard themselves as people with a mission. "I'm not the chosen one," Carlos told us."I am a messenger."

In a "meeting" on the ship, the beings told Jim Sparks that they had made agreements with leaders of the Earth so that "steps would be taken to correct the environmental condition of your planet with our advice and technology," but that these had been broken. This was the reason why they were concentrating their energy on the "average" person like himself. He has been told,

Your air, your water is contaminated. Your forests, jungles, trees, and plant life are dying. There are several breaks in your food chain. You have an overwhelming amount of nuclear and biological weapons [that have brought about] nuclear and biological contamination. Your planet is overpopulated. Warning: It is almost to the point of being too late, unless your people act. There are better ways of deriving your energy and food needs without causing your planet any damage. Those in power are aware of this and have the capability of putting these methods into worldwide use.

When Sparks asked the beings in the "meeting" why these methods were not being used, he said he was told that "those in power" view such measures as "a military and security threat." Only if they were granted complete amnesty for their crimes against nature, the beings told him, would "these leaders come forward with the truth," and "it is necessary that you do this in order to work together and survive." Sparks has done precisely that, including initiating an amnesty bill (which he calls the "National Security Amnesty Bill") that would exempt from prosecution any official who chose to disclose government information concerning the alien abduction phenomenon. In addition Sparks has given a great deal of his hard-earned money to Earth-sustaining causes, has produced, largely with his own money, an educational video related to these matters, and is working with various foundations and environmental groups on projects of Earth preservation and protection. Sparks's desire to have his book documenting his alien education published derives in large part from what he has been taught about the danger to the planet's ecology.

Carlos is especially devoted to teaching his children about the positive interaction of all creatures in nature. He told us, for example, "We have scorpions here," but he tells his children not to kill them. "Think of this," he says to them. "These animals were on the planet for millions of years before us. If someone is invading its territory, it is we. I know that they can kill me, so we take them down to the field and let them go." These teachings have had a powerful impact on Carlos's children. Carlitos, for example, is enthralled with wildlife programs on the Discovery Channel, reads Time/ Life books about the natural world, and has developed great skill in catching insects without hurting them. When I asked him how he had developed his respect for nature, he replied, "My father taught me that."

When Carlos is able to bring information to people about the Earth, it is through helping them to feel things and not simply by telling. He likens the process to learning to swim. "You could talk to somebody for five years about how to swim and how to paddle and all that, but the person wouldn't understand one bit about swimming until he actually did it." Despite his feeling of aloneness and the resistance he encounters to his message, Carlos continues to feel that he has "a wonderful opportunity to transmit my experience." When he can bring his experience to other people, it "makes me feel alive."

At the Dusseldorf conference, Carlos issued a statement to the attendees in which he wrote of his certainty that "one of the manifestations of life" elsewhere in the universe is "living peacefully among us and respecting our human integrity." His experiences, he said, had led him to realize "the wonders of the planet we live in, a world based on human interaction and cooperation between each particle, from the smallest to the most complex, which is our own home, the Earth. Unfortunately mankind, us, has endangered our planet's integrity. We are headed toward extinction" (Diaz 1995). Nevertheless, he told us a year and a half later, "We can save the planet. We can save the planet."

Although there are cultural differences, and the craft and beings in Carlos's encounters appear to be quite different, Nona's commitment to bring back knowledge from her encounters is quite like his. Whatever "gifts" she has received from the beings, she feels, she must give back to others, especially to "care for the children of the Earth." In particular she decided to share the magic of her vision with her husband, mother, brother, sister, children, and other relatives and friends in her community.

Nona's children's sensuous appreciation of the feeling of water and air seemed to increase as she was "able to give them a better sense" of the energy that surrounds us. Her youngest child, Nancy, speaks to her mother of an underground place to which her mother believes she has also been taken. The walls are of a smooth stone, and there are spiral patterns on the floor. This place can be entered by water that runs into it. "The water was just sparkling and alive, Mommy, like diamonds," Nancy said. Nona tries to bring that feeling to their own land. "That happens here," she tells Nancy. As a Brownie leader, she can draw out subtly the joy of her troop in the potential beauty of the natural world. Having become more of an observer herself, Nona has become capable of enabling others to be observant of their own experiences.

Her ecological commitment has affected Nona's nine-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. In the 1950s citizens had created a four-acre pond by shoring up a beaver dam on a two-thousand-acre state reserve. It had become a popular recreation area and had drawn moose, wild cats, and other wildlife to the area. But the dam was breaking down, the fish in the pond were dying, and upon the recommendation of engineers, who said the dam was unsafe, the state Fish and Wildlife Department was planning to drain the pond rather than to pay for repairing it. When Elizabeth heard about this plan, she was very upset and angry, and beneath a drawing of the pond surrounded by deer, fox, and raccoon, she wrote a letter to "Deal* Mr. New Hampshire Person." In the letter she wrote, "Please don't drain Albert Pond. Many animals live there. Animals drink from the pond, owls, fox, deer, coyotes, heron, bear, moose, and raccoons. I live near the pond in a big light blue house."

Elizabeth gave the letter to her father to take to a meeting at which the townspeople would have a chance to discuss plans for Albert Pond with the director of operations of the Fish and Wildlife Department, Anthony Nigro. Nigro, a thoughtful, gentle man, read the letter at the meeting. Then he said that just this child's message had made him consider saving the pond, and he promised to look into this possibility. An article in the local paper covering these events concluded, "We hope that Mr. Nigro will tape Elizabeth's letter above his desk and look at it often as he consid ers such weighty matters as engineering surveys and the availability of state revenue" (January 1997).

At a follow-up meeting the next month, various possible plans for repairing the dam were considered. After this meeting an article in a major regional paper carried the headline Portsmouth Girl Brings State To Its Knees and showed a picture of a pleasantly smiling Anthony Nigro down on his left knee holding Elizabeth's right hand. The caption read, "Director of Operations for the New Hampshire Fish and Wildlife Department, Anthony Nigro, hopes that in the future Portsmouth third-grader, Elizabeth Skylar, will see eye-to-eye with him on the future of Albert Pond." The article concluded, "Especially touching was the way Mr. Nigro responded to the concerns of third-grader, Elizabeth Skylar, with a personal letter thanking her for her involvement with the issue." In November 1998 the state agreed to fund the final proposal for protecting the pond.

As with Nona and her children, Sue's urgency about the environment has paralleled her abduction experiences. It was as if someone kept telling her, "I have to do something." The range of her activities, which she only rarely relates publicly to her encounters, is remarkable. She designed an environmental awareness program for ten classes in three elementary schools in her home town, which included planting three hundred trees donated by a large timber company and a lecture by a forest ranger about ecological sustainability. In 1991 Sue became a local organizer for the Youth Environmental Sanity group, and she and her husband have donated a teacher resource library on nature, ecology, and the environment to their local library. She also works with the conservation trust in her town, taking students on nature walks.

In addition Sue has become an avid gardener and landscaper. She became president of her local earth gardeners club and landscaped the center of her town. Her "inner promptings" made her "know I had to feed the hungry," and she also worked in a food pantry in her town, opened a second one, and volunteered at a third in a large nearby city."I know after this there will be something else that I will need to do." She has spoken at various elementary and high schools in her region and on several radio programs and has connected her work with Greenpeace. Sue's thirteen-year-old son, whom she believes has had UFO-related experiences, is also very interested in and concerned about the environment.

In Dusseldorf Carlos said that many people ask, "What do the UFOs have to do with ecology?" In this chapter I have attempted to address this question by setting out the rich store of information that has come to some of the experiencers with whom I have worked in the course of their encounters and their responses to it. Some abduction investigators argue that the images that abductees receive about the destruction of the Earth are presented to them, not to change their awareness and impel action, but rather to test their reactions or to deceive them about the beings' true, more sinister purposes. I suspect this way of thinking reflects more the way our minds can work than the agenda of the alien beings. For in the end it seems quite a stretch to see as a test what so accurately reflects our reality, as has been documented by the best scientific information about the ecological state of the planet.

It is also argued that if the aliens are so concerned with the Earth's fate, why do they not do something more directly to help its cause? The answer, I believe, has to do with issues of responsibility and how human beings grow. The alien abduction phenomenon may, in fact, be thought of as a kind of intervention, sometimes harsh, that may have the purpose of bringing about change in the ways of humankind. But when it comes to our responsibility for the fate of the Earth, the "method" seems to be to bring about psychospiritual growth or the expansion of awareness.

Perhaps this is the method of Source, through its alien emissaries, by which we are being invited, urged, but not forced, to fulfill our responsibility for the care of the Earth. The abduction encounters, whatever their ultimate source, affect profoundly the Earth consciousness of many if not all experiencers. As much as any aspect of this remarkable phenomenon, change occurs as a result of the opening and expanding of human consciousness. However painful the realizations may be, experiencers become exquisitely aware that they are connected to a great whole, a vast web of life, for whose preservation they, together with all of us, bear responsibility. If we fail in this responsibility, it will not, as Carlos says, be because we need to know more or because we did not realize the consequences of continuing on our present direction.

In the mid-1980s Budd Hopkins discovered that at the center of the UFO abduction phenomenon there appealed to be some sort of project to create hybrid beings by joining human and alien beings (Hopkins 1987). As we will see in the next chapter, 1 have come increasingly to see this hybrid "project" in the context of the growing ecological crisis that the human species has wrought upon the Earth. We turn now to a consideration of this "project" and its possible interpretations.

Chapter 6

The Hybrid "Project"

He talked of the "future of mankind, "and of a new race that "will be able to reproduce, and they will know love and happiness like humans know, and they will know their soul and their consciousness like we don't know, and they will inhabit the planet and take care of it and make it a beautiful place. " Illustration by Karin.

Whatever race is dying out, unable to breed, [then] I don't mind being a part of the next one starting up.

- Nona

[This] intelligence is saying, "Well, we mean to 'impregnate' in a deeper, metaphoric, sense and you don't get it, so we'll try to make this in some form that you can get. "

- Eva

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