This is a very important well written article that I fully support in its perspective. If you are a patriarchal male or a supportive female of patriarchy you are in for some informative observations of your character.
Mary read this after an experience she had this morning. She had this to say:
This article is AMAZING. It is Interesting that I saw it today after waking up with a text from an experiencer with a very patriarchal attitude.
Read this article please:
Carl Sagan, astronomer, astrophysicist, and beloved science populist, ended his groundbreaking series Cosmos with an episode entitled “Who Speaks for Earth?” In this, the closing act of his personal journey through our universe, he explores the idea of first contact between our planet and a putative off-world civilization with whom we may one day interface. Although Sagan is well-known for his skepticism, especially through the quote that would become enshrined as the Sagan Standard (“extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”), serious students of his lifelong body of work might detect in that oeuvre something approaching a tone of reluctant mysticism. It seems Sagan was fundamentally unable to completely close the door on the possibility that there might be something after all to the fevered whisperings about extraterrestrial visitors.
I long to know what he would have to say about the current disclosure situation. His was a voice I have found comforting since childhood, when my seven-year-old self sat down in front of the TV on those fall nights in 1980, watched Cosmos, and felt the wonder thrum through me; the comfort of his counsel persisted into my adulthood, even as my own voyage drew me ever further from the currents of scientific materialism where he plied his trade.
What we do have at this historic moment are the words of his successor and mantle-bearer Neil deGrasse Tyson, and his words are… frustrating, to say the least. Maze to Metanoia tackled Tyson’s problematic response in a recent essay, digging into the thorny-but-intensely-relevant issue of who gets to speak for experiencers, and more pointedly who gets to profit, in social or literal capital, from what experiencers have witnessed and endured.
Meredith’s article resonates like a bell tolling in the soul of the experiencer. It claims important territory for us as a narrative begins to take shape: as UFOs/UAP are increasingly legitimized through efforts at disclosure, those who have historically mocked and discredited abductees, contactees, and other experiencers of anomalous contact are jockeying to position themselves as authorities on the subject. They want to be the ones to tell the experiencer story, and, undoubtedly, to benefit from it. It’s offensive, it’s confronting, and we experiencers should absolutely be pushing back against it.
And yet it’s a tale as old as time… the colonizers become the arbiters, curators, and profiteers of the colonial experience.
But it doesn’t just happen out there, in the world that has historically refused to truck with the very idea of UFOs. It happens within our own community, and as we experiencers work to secure control of our narrative on the world stage, we need to make sure we get our own house in order.
Because if we ask who speaks for experiencers, spoiler warning:
It’s men.
Linda and Kelly and Elizabeth and Travis (and a Double Standard)
I wager many of us are not surprised to once again feel that our stories are vanishing into the pit where all inconvenient things go. All too many of us have had tickets to this rodeo before. Even more to the point, many of us are female, and have seen the narratives, opinions, and frameworks of male experiencers consistently supersede ours. While historically some women, like Betty Andreasson, have been taken relatively seriously by the UFO community, this is the rarer circumstance. The annals of contact are positively littered with the stories of rejected and ridiculed women.
One of the more famous female experiencer accounts is that of Linda Napolitano who, in 1989, claimed she was floated out the window of her 12th floor Manhattan apartment by three beings and taken into a waiting craft, where she was experimented upon before being returned to her bed. Despite the alleged testimonies of 23 witnesses who could corroborate seeing both the UFO and Napolitano suspended in midair, silhouetted against the Brooklyn Bridge, her story was widely scoffed at. The mockery intensified as, more than a year after the incident, Napolitano made additional claims about having been stalked and kidnapped by a witness and shadowed by the proverbial Men in Black. She and her story were widely derided at the time, especially when none of the witnesses who had come forward could be produced when it counted, and when then-UN Secretary General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar (in one of the more bizarre twists of the tale) denied that there was any truth to accounts that placed him at the scene the night Napolitano says she was abducted.
We can examine, by way of comparison, another prominent (and divisive) abduction case: that of Travis Walton. Made famous through his published narrative and its subsequent film adaptation Fire in the Sky, Walton was reportedly abducted by a UFO while working with a logging crew in the Arizona wilderness. He was missing for five days before resurfacing in a nearby community. Due to suspicion of foul play by Walton’s fellow loggers, there was a highly publicized police investigation, and all members of the crew (including Walton after he returned) were submitted to a polygraph test, which they were reported to have passed. Evidence from this investigation, plus evidence gathered at the site of the abduction, contains details proponents of the case allege support Walton’s claims; detractors find in some of the same evidence, as well as in other investigatory information, many reasons to suspect an elaborate hoax.
Both of these stories have been hotly contested, even within the UFOlogical community, but there is a difference in the tone of the criticism leveled at Napolitano. Whatever the merits (or lack thereof) of her story may have been, her case was not judged primarily on the actual evidence. An ad hominem verdict was passed on Napolitano by critics who overwhelmingly focused on her personal life and dismissed her as a bored, hysterical, attention-seeking housewife. Her mental fitness and capacity to be a reliable narrator of her own history were what was really on trial. By contrast, while Walton was suspected of staging his alleged abduction in an attempt to get out of a troublesome Forestry Service contract, his mental health and basic credibility were not questioned. In fact, his status as a working-class figure was one of the reasons he was seen as credible when the story first broke. It was almost as though being abducted while logging in a forest was a perfectly plausible occupational hazard for a red-blooded American man.
Two years before Walton’s 1975 experience, Calvin Parker and Charles Hickson claimed they were taken aboard an alien craft by crab-clawed entities while fishing on an October night in Mississippi. The men’s abduction story became famous as what has come to be known as the Pascagoula Incident, part of the widespread UFO flap of 1973. Their case was widely examined and given the stamp of authenticity by famed UFOlogist J. Alan Hynek. This was in spite of their story having no verified corroborating witnesses; additionally, there were suspicions of confabulation and that the men had been drinking on the night of their alleged contact. Despite the men refusing to take a polygraph, they were largely spared from pathologizing diagnoses of mental instability, and despite any lingering doubts about their claims, the case is still discussed today as one of the classics in the annals of close encounters. In 2019, the state of Mississippi unveiled an official historical monument honoring their experience, and a festival is held in Pascagoula every October to mark the anniversary of the famous close encounter.
Then there’s the story of Kelly Cahill. On August 7th, 1993, Cahill (a pseudonym) and her husband were driving near Melbourne, Australia, when they saw a large craft with orange lights in a field near the roadside. They witnessed the UFO zoom off at incredible speed before reappearing nearby, after which Cahill blacked out. When she recovered consciousness, the couple realized they’d had an hour of lost time and their car was hundreds of yards down the road from where they last recalled it being. Cahill discovered a triangular mark near her navel, and during the following weeks, she was troubled by nightmarish visitations from hooded figures with glowing eyes.
UFO researchers went out to do field research, and allegedly located several other witnesses who had remarkably similar encounters with a craft matching Cahilll’s description on the same stretch of road where Cahill’s experience occurred. Notably, other women who had seen the craft also reported triangular body marks near their navels.
Cahill quickly rose to fame as a UFO contactee, and her case was initially celebrated as a sort of “holy grail” case: extremely credible due to the corroboration of multiple independent witnesses. But the case ultimately collapsed due to withdrawal of these potentially validating testimonies, infighting amongst researchers, and, most importantly, an apparent campaign to discredit and silence her by branding her mentally unstable.
By her own admission, Cahill sought medical counsel after her initial encounter, receiving a brain scan to allay her and her family’s fears that she was suffering from a neurological disorder. (It was normal.) And even though he was in the car with her on the night of the original encounter, Cahill’s husband quickly distanced himself from her narrative, not only refusing to publicly affirm her claims, but instead spinning an alternate narrative that she was suffering from unhealthy obsession with UFOs and mental fixation on her contact experiences. Friends and family members openly treated her story as laughable. The prevailing social consensus among her peers was that she was experiencing “hysteria” or a frank psychiatric episode.
Further, skeptics seized on passages in her 1996 book Abduction that detailed her prior out-of-body experiences and non-ordinary states of conscious awareness as evidence of a potential dissociative disorder and a fantasy-prone personality, and concluded that her famous encounter was most likely the consequence of a psychotic break.
The Australian UFO research group Phenomena Research Australia (PRA) claimed to have a 300-page report containing medical and psychological evaluations proving Cahill’s sanity and the physical reality of her body marks. However, Cahill and her now-former husband sought to block the release of the report pending redaction of their private medical and psychiatric profiles, with the result that it was never released to the public or to other potentially corroborative researchers. Ultimately, this move backfired. Detractors argued that if the psychological reports genuinely absolved her of claims of mental illness, she would want them publicized. The suppression of the records led both skeptics and once-supportive UFO researchers to assume the psychiatric evaluations actually contained evidence of underlying psychological instability, destroying the case’s credibility.
Cahill quickly and permanently vanished from the public eye.
In 1954, South African woman Elizabeth Klarer traveled from her native Johannesburg to a place in the Drakensberg mountains known as Flying Saucer Hill, where the local Zulu people had been reporting appearances of a “lightning bird” in the sky. On December 27th of that year, she claimed to have seen a spaceship descend over the area, with an entity visible inside. Extreme heat prevented her from approaching the craft, which eventually took flight and disappeared. Two years later, she returned to the hilltop after rumors that the “lightning bird” had returned. This time, she was taken aboard what she described as a 60-foot-diameter scout ship piloted by humanoid occupant Akon, a traveler from a planet called Meton. Akon, an astrophysicist, was accompanied on the scout ship by a second pilot. As she watched through a lens in the craft’s floor, they were transported to what Klarer described as a huge, cigar-shaped “mother ship.” She toured its garden-like interior and met some of the inhabitants before being returned to the South African wilderness.
Klarer claims Akon told her that his people had lived on Venus until it had become uninhabitable, after which they fled to Meton, a planet in the system of Proxima Centauri, approximately 4.3 light years away. He communicated telepathically in perfect English, and said that he had been living on Earth for a short time, and that there were others like him living surreptitiously among humans. But Akon had even more shocking revelations: Klarer had been one of his people in a past life, and she was his long-lost soul mate. They exchanged physical intimacies after he told her that they sometimes took Earth women as wives to strengthen their race through hybridization.
Her autobiography Beyond the Light Barrier tells of continued encounters with Akon, during which she received a ring that enhanced their telepathic contact as well as conceived the couple’s child. Their contact culminated in her being taken to Meton for four months, where she gave birth to a son. Her heart supposedly responded poorly to the vibrations of the Metonian atmosphere, requiring her to stay thereafter permanently Earthbound, although Akon and their son Ayling continued to visit.
It may be reasonably supposed what the public made of Klarer’s claims. While she was the darling of local UFO groups, she was widely lampooned by the international press, who printed her risqué tales of interplanetary passion to boost readership while openly mocking their content. Astronomers and other scientists dismissed her observations of the Proxima Centauri system and the planet Metron as “impossible.” Nor did she win any support for her detailed descriptions of how the highly advanced electro-gravity manipulation and light propulsion technologies of Akon’s civilization worked, details which were thoroughly dismissed by physicists and aerospace engineers.
This ridicule was heaped on Klarer despite the “credible witness” shield that should have protected her, as it has protected scores of male close encounter witnesses with similar military or intelligence background. Cambridge educated, Klarer held a highly responsible position within RAF Intelligence during the second World War. Because she was trained to analyze threat data and recognize aircraft, her claims about what she witnessed in the sky should not have been so easily dismissed. She was also a trained pilot and meteorologist, which should have further protected her from such rapid and summary dismissal as someone not qualified to know what she was seeing in the skies, or possessed of the rationality to soberly and accurately account for her experiences.
In contrast, her contemporary George Adamski claimed regular meetings with beautiful, blonde-haired Venusians who took him on trips around the solar system. Rather than being laughed off as a lonely fabulist, Adamski was taken seriously enough to attract a massive international following, secure private audiences with international celebrities, and publish best-selling books. His nearly identical embrace of space-romance themes was treated as philosophical space diplomacy possessing a certain gravitas, instead of the pulpy ravings of a sex-starved woman of a certain age.
Adamski’s earned reputation as a con-man and huckster did little to diminish his ability to pack venues with rapt audiences who shelled out handsomely for his books and copies of his alleged UFO photos. His tales inspired other men such as George Van Tassel and Truman Bethurum to come forward with their own claims of contact, thereby forging the community of Space Brothers, an intergalactic club of physically attractive, intellectually exceptional, and spiritually evolved (does it have to be said?)…men.
John Mack and the female credibility gap
Very few, if any, close encounter witnesses – regardless of gender – are allowed to come forward with their claims and not be met with a range of challenging responses, from intense skepticism to outright mockery. The problem of the female experiencer is that they face distinct forms of critical judgment, psychological pathologization, and cultural dismissal that male contactees generally avoid. As in many aspects of life, the hysteria trope automatically prejudices against the experiences of women.
One of the most prominent examples of this outside the UFOlogical context is the disclaim that surrounds women’s narratives in the medical environment. The statistics there are sobering:
- Women wait an average of 65 minutes for analgesic treatment in the ED for acute abdominal pain, compared to 49 minutes for men
- Women are seven times more likely to be misdiagnosed and discharged during a heart attack than men
- Women are less likely than men to have a continuing disability recognized when evaluated by a male doctor
- Despite similar presenting conditions, women often receive less proactive care for their issues than men
- 70% of women report having their physical pain attributed to psychological causes
- Women are twice as likely as men to have physical, organic disease symptoms misdiagnosed as a mental health issue like anxiety or depression
- Historically, medical studies have excluded females, using male physiology as the default, which results in poorer diagnostics and treatment for women
In medicine, there remains a fundamental unwillingness to simply believe women. We are not considered reliable narrators of our own history and experience. This is the result of deep institutional misogyny that springs from a more fundamental refusal to allow women the control of our own bodies.
That such refusal shades so deeply into the experiencer world is likely due to the depth of UFOlogy’s connection to the world of psychiatry through the involvement of John Mack. In the 1990s, Mack, head of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, began a decade-plus study of the claims of UFO abductees. When his evaluations of people who allege to have had such contact with UFOs and NHIs failed to find evidence of psychological disorder, he began to ask deeper questions about what may be going on.
Although he remained generally agnostic about the ultimate nature of the experiences, he believed these people were experiencing something deeply transformational, and never belittled or cast aspersions on his interviewees. That a respected clinician at one of the world’s most prestigious educational institutions took the claims of contactees seriously elevated Mack to a position of near reverence in the experiencer community. (Mack, for his part, was doomed to replay William James’ ideological clashes with Harvard University of a century before; both men were medically trained but ran afoul of the academy for their efforts to explain anomalous experience by attempting to close the institutionally enforced gap between science and spirituality.)
The overwhelmingly more common tone among the psychiatric and psychological professionals who have studied the “alien abduction phenomenon,” as it came to be insinuatingly known, was set by Richard McNally and Susan Clancy, contemporaries of Mack’s later years at Harvard. However, McNally and Clancy didn’t set out to explore claims of UFO abduction when they began their collaboration in 1996; instead, they were the first researchers to seriously study women who believed they experienced recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse.
When Clancy heard of Mack’s work, she had the idea that it would be easier to test their theories about the function of memory in such sexual abuse claims if they had a control group about whom they could ensure the memories were not real. The solution? Use those who have claimed alien abduction as your control group. (NO WAY their memories are real, right?)
Although their findings did eventually pressure McNally and Clancy to admit it was impossible to categorically disprove alien abduction, their riposte to Mack only served to further entrench the perception of anomalous experience as pathology, bringing to bear on it all the sexist and scientistic prejudices extant in the field, including medical disregard for the female body in general, and for its specific inherent value as narrative canvas.
Despite her ultimate equivocation, Clancy still dismissed the experiencers she interviewed as suffering from a “blend of fantasy-proneness, memory distortion, culturally available scripts, sleep hallucinations and scientific illiteracy.” More importantly, this framing clinically tied women’s UFO stories to sexual trauma and psychological coping mechanisms, two arguments that were repeatedly used thereafter to destroy female credibility within a subject that already had a huge credibility problem.
Captivating narratives and the sci-fi shift
A full accounting of how female experiencers got to be where we are requires us to go back further into history.
Alien abduction accounts are conceptually and thematically related to Indian captivity narratives, a popular form of literature widely published in the U.S. from the mid 17th to late 19th centuries. As with alien encounters, these tales of abduction by native tribespeople involved both men and women, but only women were explicitly idealized as sacrificial victims on the liminal frontier. That modern-day abductee narratives are so gendered owes much to these captivity tales; where stories involving male victims typically communicated messages of physical strength, canniness, and skill at wilderness survival, those involving women focused more on religious endurance, spiritual purity, prurient male voyeurism, and the body as moralizing tableau.
In the earliest forms of the captivity trope, great care was taken to avoid mention of sexual violation in accordance with Puritan sensibilities, where even hinting at rape would have invited permanent moral compromise on the victim and created an undesirable distraction from the didactic purpose of such stories as instruments of religious galvanization. By the late 18th century, however, cultural trends had changed. Publishers were eager to cater to the burgeoning literary taste for sexual innuendo, allowing captivity tales to evolve into efficient vehicles for communicating male ideas not only about political concepts like manifest destiny, but also about the female body and female agency.
Over the course of the 19th century, there was a profound structural shift where traditional non-fiction male captivity memoirs were absorbed or transmuted into other genres, including the slave narrative and the Western frontier adventure novel. Society no longer wanted stories of white men suffering as vulnerable victims; they wanted stories of white male territorial dominance. Traditional captivity narratives henceforth centered almost exclusively on women and emphasized a persistent threat of forced marriage with its implications of rape and non-consent. They concretized into literary forms that emphasized the authority of the male gaze, explored sadistic and masochistic expression, and contributed significantly to the types of female idealization that would contribute to the rise of pornography in the Victorian age.
These trends persisted into the 20th century and into the era of the alien abduction scenario, where they mapped onto new anxieties about technology that were shaped in large part by the parallel evolution of science fiction – the modern form of the frontier novel. Male UFO abduction experience largely sought contextualization by referencing sci-fi frameworks of strength and courage in the face of the unknown. Even when men were relatively disempowered by alien scenarios, they nonetheless maintained the possibility of bodily redemption through philosophy and recovery of agency through technological innovation as a sort of righteous vengeance.
Women abductees had none of this possibility. To the extent that their stories were told at all, they were largely told by men and cast as highly sexualized encounters that emphasized gynecological horror. Though subjection to genetic engineering and hybridization programs became persistent features of the experience of both genders, male involvement was typically limited to sperm extraction, which occasionally occurred as part of eroticized sexual encounters with female aliens. As a result, men suffered far less scrutiny from experience-as-medical-procedure and far less sexual dysfunction and bodily shame. Again, it was the red-blooded-male defense: who would blame a man for wanting to get it on with a hot alien, and who would deny him some pleasure in the midst of his horror? All perfectly natural.
Witches, mystics, and prophets, oh my
In contrast, women’s experiences became thematically bound up with other narratives of female sexual trauma, which were weaponized against them by the psychological and psychiatric communities that became the custodians of their testimonies. Despite the passing of more than 60 years since the Age of the Abductee began with Betty and Barney Hill, this approach to hearing and holding women’s narratives has remained the dominant paradigm. Just as women have been perpetually trapped in the Madonna/whore duality, the female experience of contact has been shoehorned into a witch/prophet dynamic, through which society interprets, medicalizes, and socially punishes female alien abductees. It frames the female abductee either as a hysterical, delusional victim or as a chosen, enlightened messenger.
Just as historical witch narratives claimed nighttime commerce with demons or incubi, women who today report nighttime visitations, missing time, and out-of-body experiences are labeled delusional or hysterical. Like the historical witch, she is marginalized and disbelieved, her agency stripped away; her testimony is treated not as a reality, but as a symptom of psychological or social deviance.
The investigators of the witchcraft persecutions were overwhelmingly men: judges and inquisitors who often brutally interrogated women, forcibly extracting stories which confirmed their suspicions, only to then take ownership of those distorted testimonies. In modern UFOlogy, male investigators and researchers similarly have the power to monopolize the narrative, utilizing questioning and “research” to elicit and “validate” evidence of alien encounters, which are heavily skewed toward emphasis on trauma and gynecological subjugation.
The alternative to outright ridicule and condemnation is to be framed as a seer or a “chosen one” capable of connecting humanity to extraterrestrial intelligences, a reversion to the earliest years of the captivity narrative when women’s trauma was mined for spiritual didactics. The path of prophet is potentially one of redemptive agency, as by choosing to share information entrusted to them by nonhuman intelligences, women are able to both honor the mandate given to many contactees to share the knowledge given to them, as well as to maintain agency over their experience.
Through this route many women have been able to enter a world to which they otherwise had no access or agency. In medieval Europe, women were barred from becoming clergy, but they were able to become spiritual teachers and authorities in their communities by virtue of their visionary experiences, which share many commonalities with modern experiencer accounts. (As long, that is, as they had the patronage of male clerics and theologians, whose benefices served to help shield them from accusations of heresy, witchcraft, and delusion, and served as a vital bridge between female religious experience and orthodox institutional power.)
I wrote a bit about this in an earlier essay – this previous time in Western culture when human anomalous experience had a bit of a moment. The rational revolutions that marched forward from the Renaissance, eventually coalescing in the hardened scientism of the 20th and 21st centuries, had not yet happened. The known world was enflamed by visions, and saints and mystics were thick on the ground.
Just as numerous, however, were the Inquisitors, the armies of male demon-sniffers and witch hunters in constant search of those who ran afoul of both Church law and patriarchal authority. A woman who received direct cosmic messages was an independent source of authority in her community, bypassing and thus threatening the male clerical hierarchy. Women experiencers were already in a vulnerable position, and even more so if they ventured into the world of prophecy. Those who claimed direct, divine revelation operated on a knife’s edge. If a woman positioned herself as a mouthpiece for God’s prophecy and those predictions failed or angered, it constituted “proof” that the woman lacked the rational capacity to resist the devil and was likely to be vulnerable to demonic incursion.
Inquisitors did not necessarily deny that these alleged encounters with nonhuman intelligences occurred, but they used powerful theological and ecclesiastical frameworks to re-classify nonhuman entities as demons in disguise. By systematically framing those entities as demonic, the Inquisition successfully stripped these women of their visionary status and maintained strict institutional control over who was allowed to speak for the unseen world. A woman’s claim of cosmic or spiritual contact was weaponized against her to prove she was a heretic or a witch in a process nearly identical to modern attempts to use psychopathology to dismiss the accounts of female alien contactees.
When women attempt to transition from the witch archetype (victim of an invasive abduction) into an enlightened prophet (a contactee carrying an otherworldly message), however, they face immense social and community risks. If their messages fall on deaf ears or present content contrary to what is acceptable for a woman to voice in a given context, the transmutation will not succeed. And when the prophet identity collapses, society routinely strips away their spiritual authority and thrusts them right back into the role of witch, potentially resulting in legal, financial, and psychological ruin.
Linda and Kelly redux
The history books are littered with cases of discredited and rejected female experiencers-cum-oracles, a trend that links them directly to Linda Napolitano and Kelly Cahill. For both of those women, attempts to pivot to the role of prophet in the wake of initial criticism ultimately failed.
Cahill was unlike many experiencers who come back compelled to share messages from benign (or at least neutral) intelligences seeking to save Earth and its inhabitants from planetary destruction or to assist humanity in some sort of spiritual leveling-up. Her experiences led her to feel it was her duty to warn the public about a spiritual and malevolent deception orchestrated by entities masquerading as benevolent extraterrestrials. She asserted that The Phenomenon utilizes psychological and spiritual trickery to bypass our free will, leaving victims physically and emotionally violated while programming them to misinterpret the true, dark nature of the event through screen memory and lost time, with the ultimate goal of stealing human souls.
But Cahill’s message came at a time when the New Age sensibility, with its tendency to view nonhuman intelligences as overwhelmingly benevolent, still held powerful sway in the UFO community. New Age spirituality transformed the extraterrestrial from a simple space visitor or probable military threat into a technological angel or spiritual savior sent to guide humanity into a golden era of global harmony. The New Age movement adapted concepts borrowed from eastern religions and Theosophy that told of wise, unseen spiritual masters, and used those models to reclassify aliens as benevolent Space Brothers (à la Adamski, which of course kept the movement anchored in male authority) who had transcended material limitations and were returning to help humanity elevate its consciousness.
David Jacobs, one of UFOlogy’s most ardent proponents of the “hostile alien” agenda was only just beginning to publish his opinions during Cahill’s relatively brief time in the public eye, and her singularly alarmist take on ET intent certainly seems to have played a role in how quickly and thoroughly her voice disappeared from public discourse. Perhaps she would have fared better if she had come along at a time when she was in a position to benefit from Jacobs’ authority on the matter, or perhaps not.
Napolitano, in contrast, sought to use her sudden global platform to share the profound spiritual insights and warnings about impending Earth catastrophes given to her by her alien captors, yet her efforts to speak for herself were largely overshadowed by the influence of her champion, investigator Budd Hopkins, leading to the heavy commodification of her story. She was featured on talk shows like Ricki Lake and was even profiled by Vanity Fair magazine, which imprisoned her in the role of tabloid sensation, not as a serious spiritual teacher and authentic messenger; thus her urgent plea for the importance of environmental sustainability and other efforts to protect the planet went largely unheard. Hopkins’ “advocacy” was both a blessing and a curse – without him, she would undoubtedly have had a far more limited reach, but it came with the cost of being reduced to a stereotype for consumption by the UFOlogy machine.
The final insult for Linda was the release of the 2024 Netflix documentary entitled The Manhattan Alien Abduction. Although the docuseries accurately presented the basic facts of Napolitano’s story, it was slanted heavily against her by the prominent and unfavorable testimony of Carol Rainey, Hopkins’ former wife. Once a supporter of Napolitano, she later changed her mind when it seemed that her ex-husband had lost his objectivity, and she has now become one of Napolitano’s chief detractors. What could have been an honest reevaluation of the case came across as, in the words of Joel Keller for The Decider, “two now-senior citizens litigating a decades-old beef,” casting the two women as pitiably comic caricatures implicitly in conflict because of a man – hardly the sympathetic accounting Napolitano might have hoped for. Napolitano ended up filing a lawsuit against Netflix, claiming the media intentionally edited the video to make her look grotesque and haggard – transforming an experiencer-oracle into a literal witch. Make what you will of her claims, but the historic pattern couldn’t be any clearer.
The Embodied Apokalypsis
The New Age spiritualization of UFOs only accelerated the discipline’s split into stark ontological duality, anchoring its frame in the language of good vs evil, and paving the way for the current attempts to cast aliens as demons here at the edge of apokalypsis. In the way that history so often rhymes, it feels we’ve spiraled around again into a moment that’s deeply resonant with many of these medieval prefigurings. The mood is heady, as though we’re locked in another battle between a male-dominated institutional architecture and a deeply embodied crazy wisdom edge where what’s at stake is the freedom of those in direct contact with the anomalous to speak from the village square and not incur the censure of state or inquisitor.
And we also must have the ability to speak as female experiencers without the need for male platforms, promoters, or proxies. We must have agency and autonomy. We must be believed just as much as men, included just as much as men, and respected for the unique sensibilities we bring not only to the experiencer conversation but also to the larger discourse around UFOs/UAP, disclosure, consciousness, and contact with nonhuman intelligences.
This is one reason I believe so strongly in the necessity of centering embodiment and somatic wisdom along the experiencer journey. Women’s bodies especially have long been a battleground, their legibility bartered and obscured and arbitrated from the outside. We must to reclaim authority over our bodies so that through integration of body and experience we can fully command our narratives, which I believe reside deeply within our physicality.
For all that contact ultimately becomes a spiritual endeavor for most, to me it begins in the very fleshly body, and there is something essential to connecting to our experience at that level. I believe it’s part of the mystery of why human incarnation seems to be so valuable across all the types of beings we have encountered through anomalous experience. And I believe that it has never been more important as experiencers than it is now to do the work of somatic connection and integration so that we can meet the present cultural moment around disclosure, when our voices and stories will be needed more than ever.
Who REALLY speaks for Earth?
It turns out that “who speaks for Earth?” has never really been the question. Experiencers have been doing the talking since time immemorial.
There may indeed be a cinematic mothership moment one day where the political and military elite get their moment to walk out and meet the craft and its occupants on the White House lawn, because I acknowledge that there are infinite realities and infinite timelines and infinite beings at play in all this. But The Phenomenon is a trickster. Be careful what you wish for.
The larger story, the deeper story, the story indelibly interwoven with our human story, is the story of forever contact. It’s not new. Not even sort of. It’s not only happening now. It’s probably always been happening. If you are inside the community of experiencers, this you know from the hollows of your bones to the dust encircling distant stars.
If you are not inside this community, might I suggest, as you grapple with whatever disclosure means to you, that you hold space for discernment about who you allow to tell the story. Not only to you, but to the world. Who you allow to speak for Earth. Because it matters.
It’s perhaps what matters most.
It turns out that the irony of speaking for Earth in the context of current governmental big-D “Disclosure” really means who we allow to speak about contact to our own kind. To other humans. Do we really believe that nonhuman intelligences advanced enough to get here across light years and across dimensions need us to also tell them who they have been apparently watching and visiting for at least 80 years by Disclosure’s own reckoning? The residents of Planet Earth are the ones who need to be brought up to speed on what’s been going down, not the aliens.
And it shouldn’t be the job of the ones who stand to profit most from the telling, but those are the ones you will see jockeying for prime position as the story unfolds. Some of them will likely be, like deGrasse Tyson, people who have formerly rejected the truth experiencers hold, and contributed to the historically hostile environment that has greeted those brave enough to step forward and speak aloud their travelers tales. The ones coming forward and attempting to use their credentials to convince you their narrative is the one that matters. The ones attempting to say that their position in the science establishment or in the hierarchy of Church or State qualifies them to suddenly compass the wisdom, knowledge, and experience of the ones they have ridiculed and completely failed to even attempt to understand up until the time they felt the wind shift and sensed that relevance and financial gain lay along a different route. And now here they are, course correcting faster than visitors are pouring into WAR.GOV/UFO. (Currently over a billion since it went online on May 8; logging 340 million hits in just the first twelve hours.)
Remember that these are the current avatars of a millennia-long lineage of co-opters, infantilizers, pathologizers, deniers, abusers, witchfinders, exploiters, and pimps. Consider choosing the stories of experiencers, mystics, visionaries, especially if they’re women. And believe them.
Because it matters.
