How to be abducted by aliens
Greg Newkirk is going to teach me and forty other rapt attendees how to get abducted by aliens.
Greg contends that one in four of us already has been abducted and subjected to painful but unspecified experiments. We don’t recall these incidents, he says, because our memories have been wiped out or repressed.
I’m at Scarefest, billed as the nation’s largest horror and paranormal convention. I pass up a seminar on “the many temperaments of asylum spirits” and a bishop discussing “demonology and possession” to find out how I can get abducted by aliens.
Cleancut, thirtyish, Newkirk is a self-described “paranormal adventurer,” writer, and director of a 2011 film about a hunt for Bigfoot that featured a man named Rick Dyer, who claimed to kill a hairy 8-foot-tall creature in Texas, and a 2005 film about three days in the lives of ghost hunters in Pennsylvania. Newkirk wears shiny black shoes and a T-shirt saying “alien cave base task force,” a reference, he tells us later, to an investigation he once undertook of an “underground alien base station” in a cave in the mountains of North Carolina.
Newkirk’s fascination with aliens dates to his childhood, when his father gave him one of those highly produced Time Life hardcover books, a silver foil-covered volume about UFOs. It launched Greg on a lifetime quest. It also, he says, gave him terrible nightmares.
As proof of the widespread existence of alien abductions, Newkirk offers up “raw footage” of a subject named Jason, who, under hypnosis, reveals his “implanted memories” of an alien abduction. (To avoid quotation overload, imagine the rest of the piece being read aloud in a tone of ironic bemusement.)
As Newkirk and two Scarefest volunteers (T-shirts emblazoned “STAPH”) spend the next twenty minutes fiddling with a laptop and a video projector, I listen enviously to the asylum spirits audience laughing uproariously next door. I and my fellow conventioneers wait patiently in amiable silence. Next to me, a blonde teen in knee-high laced sneakers, ripped fishnet stockings, fingerless fishnet gloves and spiked leather bracelets picks at her peeling black nail polish.
When the video finally launches, we see Jason, portly in shorts, T-shirt and baseball cap. He is, for some reason, shoeless, wearing only white, saggy socks, slumped on a chair in what looks like a motel room. Cameras and mics rolling, Newkirk tapes the hypnotist Lonnie, with a salt-and-pepper beard, as he draws out Jason’s “memory” of abduction.
In a clear voice, eyes squeezed shut, Jason describes reluctantly falling into line with a group of strangers who are marched into a spaceship and forced to sprawl on tables behind a translucent wall. “All I can see in the shadows,” he says, are “very pale” creatures who move fluidly among the captives “like boneless cephalopods.” Amid whirring noises, after being treated like so many human guinea pigs, Jason and the others are released, leaving behind vials of purloined bodily fluids and a slew of questions.
“He was tortured by octopus-like creatures on a ship,” Newkirk concludes. “It’s not like ET or the X-Files. He was led there and had all these memories filed in his own head…and we pulled them out.”
Why Jason? What has he got—surely not those droopy socks—that aliens want? It’s unclear whether Jason’s memories were “implanted” by Lonnie or by the aliens. Aren’t “implanted” memories, by definition, false? And how does Jason’s story help me or anyone else become an alien abductee?
All this ambiguity is, after all, the point. Perhaps, like the star of his Bigfoot project, who later admitted to being a serial hoaxer, Newkirk is fessing up: he does not necessarily believe in aliens or UFOs or human experiments. The joke’s on us. But next time, I’m going with the asylum spirits. At least they know they’re loony.
