Of stars and bonfires

At home on the range with Robert Hastings, UFO abductees

Prelude to a midsummer night’s dream — dusk falls in the remote San Luis Valley.

Like a drooling chimera locked away in the cellar, alien abduction has been thumping against the floorboards of the UFO controversy for nearly 60 years. John Fuller’s seminal The Interrupted Journey broke the ice in 1966, with notable additions by Travis Walton (The Walton Experience) in 1978, Budd Hopkins in 1981 (Missing Time), Whitley Strieber’s Communion in 1987, and John Mack’s Abduction in 1994. Simultaneously horrific and the object of standup comedy ridicule, voluminous first-person accounts of getting snatched for medical and breeding experiments by spindly little lightbulb-headed grey extraterrestrials may have done more to deter scientific inquiry than anything the CIA’s debunking panel recommended in 1953. Abduction is pure kryptonite — it leaps light years beyond upside down physics and dares us to reimagine ourselves as lab rats.

In 2022, retired British entrepreneur Steve Aspin produced an exceptionally confident take on the phenomenon called Out of Time: The Intergenerational Abduction Program Explored. It rolled decades of testimonials, surveys and anecdotal patterns into the scope of his own personal waking nightmare. The ordeal inspired a unified field theory, of sorts, regarding the end game of the abduction “program.” Aspin predicted the truth as he saw it would be received with the sort of disconnect expressed by former SCOTUS Justice Felix Frankfurter to an eyewitness briefing on Nazi death camps.

In 1943, Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski huddled with Frankfurter in hopes of persuading him to alert FDR to the industrial-grade extermination of Jews in occupied Europe. Frankfurter’s reply: “I don’t believe you.” The Associate Justice quickly clarified for Poland’s ambassador, who was in on the meeting and vouched for Karski’s credibility: “I did not say that he is lying. I said that I did not believe him.” Aspin’s truth, however, makes Karski look like a piker.

“A race of extraterrestrial visitors,” he writes in Out of Time, “has been executing a covert program of subtle genetic modification of a small percentage of the human race for more than a century with the prime objective of quietly taking over control of human societies on Planet Earth.”

‘It’s only when you meet other abductees that you start to make some sense of it, because you recognize that these people don’t want to feel the way they do any more than you do’ — Steve Aspin

As Aspin makes his case, hardcore abduction researchers acquainted with the work of retired Temple University history professor David Jacobs will note familiar themes in Aspin’s narrative; other threads, however, are a bit more novel. Broadly speaking:

Extraterrestrials are kidnapping human beings in order to harvest sperm and ova and create a new species. Their subjects/victims descend from previously abducted family members in a timeline that spans generations. How and why certain families are targeted remains a mystery.

Also: multiple ET species, often characterized by hierarchies and divisions of labor, participate in this racket. The most common are little humanoid greys. These guys are the frontline worker bees, presumed by some to be manufactured biologically. They appear to be genderless and incapable of reproducing. Less common are the taller greys. They come across as mid-level managers, and abductees often report “male” or “female” vibes emanating from the taller ones. At the top of the ladder are the “mantis-like” beings, seven feet tall or more. These insectoid-looking omnipotents are the ones running the show.

Exchanges between abductors and subjects are intensely telepathic. Through stare-downs with the intruders’ spellbinding and massive black eyes, details of abductees’ interior lives are extracted through “mindscan” sessions. From the opposite direction flow information “downloads” – false or screen memories, amnesia, rote reassurances that things are OK – which obscure or disfigure accurate recall of the event.

Out of Time also reviews trace evidence, scars, scoop marks and other dermal aberrations associated with the alleged implantation of tracking devices. At last glance, 16 tiny metallic curiosities removed from digits and extremities by the late podiatrist Roger Leir emitted radio frequencies in the hertz, kilohertz and megahertz bands – only to cease transmission within weeks of excision. A 2009 analysis on one sample revealed that the isotopic ratios in four component elements – nickel, copper, magnesium and boron – suggested non-terrestrial origins. Scanning electron microscopy also detected “nanoscale” structures in the material, hinting at a potential for electrical current conductivity.

The real kicker, however, is the stealth ascendancy of the hybrids, or “hubrids,” into human society, perhaps the culmination of the program’s final phase. Ringing with cultural echoes from the Red Scare to Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, the abduction scenario is, of course, unthinkable. And it’s also suspected of being the ultimate firewall against UFO transparency. If the defense establishment were to formally confirm its inability to prevent UFO/UAP from making a joke of restricted airspace, then literally anything could be possible. Literally anything.

Last month, Aspin, and his wife Janis, crossed the ocean and traveled to the middle of nowhere in order to speak freely with fellow draftees into the “program.” The author turned out to be right about at least one thing. These are stories that the uninitiated are not likely to embrace.

Off the grid — UFO researcher/author Robert Hastings walks the walk at a little house on the prairie.

Colorado’s sprawling San Luis Valley stretches 122 miles north to south as it bisects the Sangre de Cristos. Two lanes of asphalt blow past a little blip on the map called Villa Grove, population 260, locally famous for geothermal baths at Mineral Hot Springs. Grazing cattle and pronghorn antelope outnumber the humans. Visitors dropping in from sea level will find their breathing shallow and mildly labored here at 7,900 feet. Salida, the closest town of any consequence, is 25 miles north.

The directions take you two miles or so off the main drag down an unpaved lane and a turnoff that ends at a chained gate to keep the critters out. Beyond lies a small but stylishly appointed adobe house that could serve as a backdrop for Warren Zevon’s “Splendid Isolation.”

Operating on solar paneling and a 250-foot well, this model of self-sufficiency retracts against the towering peaks and clouds. Huge picture windows provide an otherworldly vista on the weather as it rumbles, slides in ragged shadows across the valley, and rains fire in the sky. This is where Robert Hastings, author of a 2008 bombshell that exposed decades of UFO interactions with America’s weapons of mass destruction, has found sanctuary over the last decade.

Based on the testimony of more than 150 Air Force veterans, his 600-page UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites opus was a revelation that traced this hushed relationship back to the 1940s. In 2010, Hastings gathered seven military veterans to take media questions at a National Press Club event livestreamed by CNN. A followup documentary in 2016 presented additional on-the-record testimony from ex-USAF officers, and has been viewed more than 6 million times.

Confession as liberation

The Defense Department has for obvious reasons offered no official reaction to UFOs and Nukes or its citations of numerous security breaches over nuclear airspace. In March, the deeply flawed “Historical Record” report, concocted by the Pentagon’s equally deflating All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, ducked the strategic-arms controversy altogether. But Hastings’ book grabbed plenty of unofficial attention behind the scenes, from the likes of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, then-Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program director Lue Elizondo, and erstwhile Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Chris Mellon. The sum of their efforts has spurred Congress to press for accountability.

In 2019, two years after having been diagnosed with progressive heart failure, his field-research days over, Hastings produced his second book, Confession: Our Hidden Alien Encounters Revealed. No longer worried about alienating potential new witnesses, he went public with his own previously closeted and lifelong abduction experiences. His co-author, Bob Jacobs, is the former Air Force lieutenant who recorded allegedly still-classified footage of a UFO disabling a dummy warhead following a launch off Big Sur in 1964. Jacobs and Hastings decided to collaborate and ‘fess up to what they’d been concealing after discovering they shared a quirk of the abduction phenomenon. More later on that.

In late June, Hastings invited Jacobs, the Aspins and a handful of stakeholders in the outer limits of the UFO weirdness to a safe space in Colorado. Some came in RVs. Some camped out at Hot Mineral Springs. And during a three-day weekend, from the campground clubhouse to bonfires beneath the stars, all dispensed with hypothetical qualifiers and plunged straight into the confusion and disorientation now shaping their realities.

‘I’ve been to so many conferences and experiencer sessions, I’ve probably met thousands of abductees. I only kept quiet when I was in the military because I didn’t want to jeopardize my retirement and I was only a couple of years out’ — Jeff Goodrich

They were small with shadowed faces, and dressed like hooded monks in brown robes, according to former USAF Tech Sgt. Jeff Goodrich. He was stationed at Malmstrom AFB in Montana, where he was team chief of the Minuteman nuclear missile handlers with the 341^st Maintenance Squadron. He was living off base when they came for him. It was just one of many abductions and, since leaving the military in 1997, he has shared these stories with anyone who wants to listen — including Hastings in Confession.

But there are apparently limits to what the market can bear.

Five years ago, a production crew from History’s “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation” docuseries spent hours getting Goodrich on video. His most sensational encounter, from November 1994, didn’t make the cut. That’s when, paralyzed by two greys, he was guided through a glowing portal in his bedroom closet and into what appeared to be a cold, abandoned warehouse. He says he was interrogated by an Army colonel, an Air Force colonel, a hybrid with sparse white hair, and a “typical grey.” They wanted details on his previous encounter with the robed intruders. Goodrich told them what he remembered before being transported back to his bed.

“(The History crew) were with me for 14 hours,” Goodrich recalled, “and all that stuff regarding the milabs part of it wound up on the cutting room floor.” Milabs is jargon for perhaps the most controversial aspect of the abduction phenomenon – a human military presence. “It seemed like a waste.”

“You told them about the milabs?” wondered Army veteran John Blitch. Blitch is a robotics pioneer who served for five years as a senior cognitive scientist with the 711^th Human Performance Wing at Wright-Patterson AFB.

Goodrich: “Absolutely.”

“Really?” Blitch said. “Well now I’m even more pissed off at those guys. Son of a gun . . .”

“I just think it’s an important story that needs to be told,” replied Goodrich, who still lives in Great Falls and works with nuclear waste disposal at Malmstrom. “I’m tired of being laughed at, and I just don’t care anymore.”

‘The equivalent of radar data’

Nearby, fellow USAF veteran Terry Lovelace couldn’t help but nod. He shared an X-ray of what may be yet another implant in his leg. He discovered it just a few days ago.

In 2018, the former state prosecutor for Vermont and American Samoa wrote the first of two books — Incident at Devil’s Den: A True Story — about his own surreal history. The most mind-blowing abduction occurred in 1977, when he was with the 351^st Missile Wing at Whiteman AFB. Operating alongside the greys were four or five dozen humans wearing “tan uniforms with red or orange insignias.”

Nobody wanted to hear about that, either. According to Hastings, contact info for both Lovelace and Goodrich was forwarded to AARO, but neither were approached by the Pentagon’s public relations agency. John Blitch, however, speaking on behalf of no one but himself, wanted to hear more.

A former Special Forces officer who first made national headlines in 2001 when he assembled a fleet of small mobile robots to run recovery operations through the ruins of the World Trade Center, Blitch is openly disgusted with the way the DoD has bobbled its UFO investigation. The one-time project manager for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency spreads his arms in exasperation. “I mean, Terry’s got new injuries just this week. To my mind, this is the equivalent of radar data on lights in the sky.”

Hastings encourages everyone here to speak freely, but some, like Jared Tarbell, aren’t ready to bite. Tarbell is the co-founder of Etsy, and he financed Hastings’ documentary, “UFOs and Nukes: The Secret Link Revealed.” A celebrated generative artist, Tarbell’s work is splashed across the cover of Aspin’s Out of Time. He’s clearly been through something, but he takes a pass on the invite.

“I don’t know if I’m comfortable (with sharing),” he says. “It feels like an invented memory to me. I can’t corroborate it.”

Robert Hastings, flanked by Jeff Goodrich, left, and Terry Lovelace: ‘You don’t need to zig-zag from point A to point B. I maintain they’re doing these exotic maneuvers to catch the attention of observers on the ground. Those are intentional display behaviors. They’re saying, look at us.’

At least two attendees don’t want their names printed. One wants to be described only as a “former intelligence officer.”

Like Tarbell, his footing on what happened is tenuous. What he will say is, it occurred inside a bubble of missing time, in 2014. He was back from another classified mission overseas, trying to decompress by hiking an 11,000-foot mountain summit. When freezing weather caught up with him sometime around 2-3 a.m., he settled down to build a fire. When he came to, the sky was pale with dawn, but the fire was blazing as if no time had elapsed.

He also noticed a triangular pattern of marks on his leg. He’d seen the same configuration before, cause unknown. This time, he submitted to a full medical exam, a brain scan, DNA analysis, bloodwork. If only it ended there . . .

“My kids are showing some similarities in presentation, and they’re being monitored as well because of some incidents that occurred around the house. So now they’re involved in a population study. I volunteered for a lot of interesting shit for the government over the years, and I was already attached to the . . . subject matter. But when your kids are suddenly involved? Then it becomes, what the actual fuck? They didn’t sign up for this.

“I’ve been told,” he continues, “that this is not a unicorn anymore, that there’s a pattern. I’m afraid if this study were expanded to the general population, the uniqueness of some of these cases would be less unique.”

The River of Forgetfulness

But cases of what? He alludes to the blurred lines between near-death experiences, out-of-body travels, and bilocation phenomena as he borrows a legend from Plato’s “Republic.” A slain warrior named Er is about to reincarnate, but he must first complete a final ritual.

“Plato talks about a River of Forgetfulness, just before Er jumped down the Spindle of Necessity before coming back in physical form. He took a drink before he crossed the river, and that kinda hazes your recollection of previous lives. It’s quite a spectacular discussion. It just goes to point out that we’ve been having some form of this discussion long before now.”

There are animated exchanges about UFO disclosure strategy. Some favor the more cautious pace advocated by retired Army colonel Karl Nell, who assisted the Pentagon’s transitional UAP Task Force several years ago. Nell is lobbying for a controlled, orderly and incremental declassification of information in order to avert a leak that could trigger a “catastrophic disclosure.” Blitch says no, that this glacial trickle-down “is gonna destroy us.”

But a second “former intelligence officer” who prefers anonymity says it’s not as simple as a data dump. “It’s not just, ‘OK, here’s the goodies, here’s the freakin’ craft.’ There’s contracting fraud that will go to the Supreme Court, there’s ontological shock, there’s a ton of bad stuff they’re gonna have to develop a release process for.”

Blitch is unmoved: “I respectfully disagree with these gentlemen.” Seventy years of stovepiping the truth “is enough.” He says “We’ve gotta rip the bandage off” because people deserve to know. Blitch argues only radical measures, like the Boston Tea Party, can break the gridlock. “The Boston Tea Party was not a catastrophic event,” he says. “Nobody lost their life – all they did was dump a lot of tea into the water.”

Only half in jest, Tarbell interjects, “The death came later.”

Like something out of ‘2001’

Mario Woods described how he actively sought a return to the moment where “you don’t know whether to shoot at it, run from it, or shit yourself, your senses are so overwhelmed.”

In November 1977, Woods was assigned to the 44^th Security Police Squadron at South Dakota’s Ellsworth AFB. He was on the graveyard shift when he and his CO were dispatched to a launch control facility reporting an electronic breach. Upon reaching the LCF gate, they were dazzled by a silent, Wal-Mart-sized sphere with swirling orange-red colors, hovering 15-20 feet off the ground.

Hands gripping the steering wheel, Woods’ sergeant was paralyzed by fear, or something else, as Woods noticed maybe half a dozen small beings – one slightly taller than the rest – approaching their vehicle. Voices in his head repeated the words “Do not fear.” The next thing he remembered was being summoned over the radio to report their location. It was sunrise. Their vehicle was resting next to the dam of a lake located miles away from his last memory at the LCF. Woods’ face was red with sunburn.

What followed was an extensive debriefing with the Wing commander and a civilian, urinalysis and tissue samples, a string of strange dreams and, long afterwards, anomalous electromagnetic activity and sightings at his home in Georgia. Forty years after Ellsworth, at Hastings’ suggestion, Woods would attempt to recover the fragments through a series of hypnotic regressions. His recall was almost rhapsodic.  

“—and all of a sudden I came to a thin veil, I mean literally, a veil. And it’s giving me the chills thinking about it right now, man.” Instead of finding himself aboard the archetypal alien spacecraft, Woods entered a scene every bit as bewildering as the final bedroom/starchild sequence from Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“I had a vision inside of that vessel and a room where they showed all these old devices, an old sewing machine, an old iron, an old box TV and in the corner was a round black window.” He tried in vain to harness what he saw with puny words. His attempt to describe its enormity was like trying to put an ayahuasca experience in a jar, the way everything inside lit up, where “everything was a machine, it was like an inner city, there were so many levels, hundreds of levels, like this triangular thing was hanging over me, not a device but a field, and I was held underneath it . . .”

AARO actually reached out to Woods, whose story was on file with Hastings’ Confession. After hearing what he had to say, they never called back.

‘We will friggin’ ruin you’

Could America’s covert UFO research program die of attrition, an inability to recruit new blood into the hypersecret realm? That’s what a recent escapee from the suffocating dark world predicted. He didn’t want his name mentioned.

“There’s a lot of interest (in UFO tech) out there,” he says. “But you come in for a job interview, you say you’d like to get involved, and they’ll say ‘Yeah, it’s pretty cool, but I can’t tell you about it until you sign this nondisclosure agreement,’ and they’ll be like, no, I’m 25 years old, I just got my MS in electrical engineering. I wanna publish, I wanna progress the rest of my career, so I’m not gonna do something where I get zero credit, zero career enhancement. I go into a black hole for years and you can’t even tell me what it is until I sign a nondisclosure and now I’m stuck in it?

“My generation’s like, fuck this. And that’s the problem.”

“Yep,” agreed John Blitch. “You sign the NDA, we buy you, we own you. And then if you bail, we will friggin’ ruin you.”

Blitch got a glimpse of student interest in the phenomenon when he was teaching at the Air Force Academy in 2018. In fairness, there were other factors – like unreimbursed guest lecturers’ fees he had to eat – hastening his disillusion with the Academy’s system. But with everyone buzzing about the New York Times’ 2017 coup on the DoD’s clandestine UFO program, Blitch figured, since the cat’s out of the bag, working the topic into the curricula was a reasonable proposition.

‘If anybody should’ve responded to (Pentagon whistleblower) Lue Elizondo’s divulgences, it should’ve been the Air Force. Am I right?’ — John Blitch

But when he started talking up the possibilities with faculty members, he couldn’t get the time of day. He was, however, teaching a course in critical thinking. Evaluating information and sources, particularly the latter, requires skilled discernment. He wanted his young cadets to ponder this: what motivates people to lie?

“On the contrapositive side of it,” Blitch said, “let’s look at these UFO guys. What would they get out of it? Hey Jeff,” he called to Jeff Goodrich. “You didn’t write a book, did you?”

Goodrich: “No, and I don’t know anybody who’s written a UFO book and gotten rich off of it.”

“Right. None of the motivations to lie are there. I had seven cadets stay after class to talk about it, and that never happens. The only reason kids stick around after class is to complain about the grades they got. But not this time. They wanted to know more about the missile incursions.

“The feedback I got from faculty was, ‘Don’t be talking about this stuff in the damn classroom!’ One of the guys had a missile badge, he was a missile launch officer. It was like, ‘Blitch, pick another topic, you could probably use different examples.’ Well of course I could use different examples. And as an indicator of how important this was, I resigned my teaching position after that semester.”

What threw Blitch off a little was the impression that a lot of his colleagues were Trekkies; for special occasions, some liked to dress up as members of the Starship Enterprise crew. One might think a crowd like that would show some enthusiasm.

“If I had a single faculty member who expressed just a 3 out of 10 level of excitement for this subject? I would’ve stayed and pushed it hard. What’s happening here is not a flatline. It’s active suppression, it’s an oppressive field. And in an academic institution, you’re supposed to be able to bring stuff into the classroom and consider anything.”

The dread of returning to the noise and clatter of civilization — a tourist trap at Canon City.

The night before the guests started arriving, Hastings, 74, woke up at 4:44 a.m. In Missouri, one time zone east, Bob Jacobs, 86, woke up at 3:33 a.m. This has been going on for years. They got a chuckle out of it; at least this time, there was no blood on the pillow.

Hastings calls it the Triple-Digit Thingy, TDT. A subset “of all self-aware abductees,” he writes in Confession, report being jolted from nightmares involving aliens at precisely 1:11, 2:22, 3:33, 4:44, or 5:55. Given the potential vibes a crowd like this might project over a few days, the digital calling card seemed auspicious. A few openly wondered if an event lay ahead.

Friday night was a rainout. Save for a waning gibbous moon, Saturday and Sunday nights were perfect for star-gazing and swapping rumors. Scuttlebutt around the open flames touched on whispers of recent shootdowns of UFOs over the Pacific by American pilots using directed-energy weapons. Speaking of which: Blitch proposed investigating the hippocampus – the brain’s memory-navigation region – of people claiming blackouts and missing time during prolonged interactions with UFOs.

“When you mess with the hippocampus, you’re messing with encoding and you’re messing with memory retrieval. I have no problem believing we can do easily with directed energy what we can already do pharmacologically. Sometimes,” he said, “from a behavioral standpoint, if we’re studying human behavior, we need to be deceptive. We need to disappear.”

He wondered if memory wipes might be “a form of benevolence.” What if you could erase the residue of trauma from your dog’s brain every time you took it to the vet?

The skies over the valley stayed quiet. Every now and then someone jabbed a laser pointer at movement in the glittering void, just to double check. Sometimes, all that broke the blessed silence was the snap and crackle of kindling.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I spent the last night on the road in a Colorado Springs hotel near the airport, where I had this weird dream. I was in a room with several strangers, including director Steven Soderbergh, whom I’ve never met. We were reviewing a screenplay outline; I’ve never written a script. He offered a bar chart showing, by percentages, what elements the film should contain. I don’t remember the categories, or much else, other than the bars on the chart were blue.

The other details fled when I got up to take a leak. The nightstand clock read – seriously, I’m not making this up – 3:33. I guess you could say I lucked out. Maybe. At least for now.