THE TRUTH ISN’T OUT THERE

Say what? Don’t panic. Simon & Schuster knows what it’s doing. “It’s not a schlocky book, despite the provocative thesis,” says Fred Hills, the editor of The Threat. “What interested me was that this was a serious academic professor who . . . rigorously tested the reports of [people who claim to have been abducted by space aliens] against psychological categories that could otherwise discredit them.”

Author David Jacobs, Ph.D., is nothing if not “rigorous,” according to Hills, whose previous authors include Pulitzer prize winners, Nobel laureates, and Don Imus. Hills used the word “rigorous” four more times in the course of an interview. But despite the preview guide’s hype, Jacobs is not a terribly distinguished historian. He is an associate professor of history at Temple University, and all three of his books to date have been on the subject of UFOs. His first was a generally well-received history of the movement in the 1970s. His second (also published by Simon & Schuster), 1992’s Secret Life: Firsthand Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions, was a bit more tenuous, as all of the data were gleaned through his use of hypnosis on 39 subjects (Jacobs has no formal training in hypnotherapy, psychology, or psychiatry). But that didn’t stop Kirkus Reviews from extolling his “solid scholarship.”

Talking about alien abductions is no longer solely the bailiwick of comet- watching suicide cults, undersexed basement-bound sci-fi enthusiasts, and National Examiner cover girls who claim they’ve been transported away on a beam of light and returned to earth with their bras on backwards. Alien abduction is a billion-dollar secular religion: from the Barnes & Noble racks to the Learning Annex curricula, from the Learning Channel’s “Alien Invasion Week” to the hundreds of alien-centric films proliferating since the term ” flying saucer” was coined in 1947, to the seven television series that currently flirt with the topic, the Truth Is No Longer Out There. Now, the Truth Is Showing Up In The Gross National Product.

Entire towns are propped up by the alien industry (Roswell, New Mexico, pop. 45,000, harvests $ 5 million a year from its UFO museums and paraphernalia). Some companies even offer abduction insurance — with double indemnity for forced conjugal relations. A 1996 Newsweek poll showed 48 percent of all Americans believe in UFOs, and 29 percent think we have had alien contact. With all this interstellar action, there are, of course, some folks eager to make a quick buck off the business through cynical manipulation. But Jacobs isn’t one of them, and neither is the respected house of Simon & Schuster. Hills assures me that even though there are scores of “untrustworthy” UFO books “that are not rigorous in the examination of the evidence . . . Jacobs, to my mind was the one exception.”

So off I went to meet the world’s preeminent UFOlogist in his 19th-century Philadelphia home. With glasses, a brillo pad of gray hair, a fuzzy sweater’n’ Dockers ensemble, and a gap in his teeth that all work to make him look like a light-comedic version of himself, Jacobs leads me to his third- floor study which, after his 30 years in the business, contains enough UFO books to stock several municipal libraries.

He immediately displays his command of the subject when I walk past a boxed alien lifeform holding in his hand what looks to be a cobalt-blue bocci ball. Jacobs says a toy company sent it to him so he could comment on its realism. ” And the answer,” he snaps crisply, “is it’s not.” Everything is wrong, I learn in a crash-course exegesis on alien facial features and bone structure. Based on the “thousands of descriptions” we have, Jacobs asserts with absolute certainty that the shoulders are too broad, their necks are not wrinkled, they don’t have a waist, they have vestigial mouths, and as any idiot knows, the hands and fingers “should be long and thin.”

Sure, past abductees have said under hypnosis that alien hands were three webbed fingers and a thumb, had feathers, or were “clawlike.” But, he says, you shouldn’t believe what the abductees tell you at the outset, because ” they’re all over the place in the first two sessions.”

We adjourn to the hypnosis room, where Jacobs conducts all his interviews (some 700 so far, of 114 subjects). Out of the gate, he assures me that although his thesis sounds “pretty crazy,” he is not crazy like the other crazies. He’s not like his friend, Harvard’s John Mack, whose 1994 book Abduction was much discussed. “If you want to see bad scholarship,” Jacobs says of the man who wrote the introduction to his 1992 book, “read him. ” He’s not like that nutjob Whitley Strieber, who detailed his own abduction in the 1987 bestseller Communion. Strieber had “some hits, but many misses” in his descriptions of life Out There (Jacobs has never been abducted himself), though Strieber still pocketed a $ 1 million advance, had his book turned into a movie, and later claimed that the aliens were giving him material for his next book when they could get a telepathic word in edgewise (since he admitted hearing voices when no one was around).

Jacobs even disparages the faithful that he encounters at UFO conventions. ” When you walk through the book exhibits and people are standing around with pyramids on their heads, I just cringe,” he says.

So why is he here, insisting that aliens have been pirating our physiology with the goal of colonization, as they steal our ova and milk our sperm to create a hybrid species which looks part alien, part human — like a hydrocephalic version of supermodel Iman?

That’s easy, he says: “I have to be intellectually honest, and this is where the evidence leads me.” The “evidence,” he freely admits, is the weakest form: anecdotal, and collected under hypnotic regression at that. Hypnosis has been used to retrieve abduction memories since the first high- profile reported abductions in the ’60s. The technique is necessary, according to abduction doctrine, because the aliens supposedly alter human consciousness to hide their tracks. Jacobs is brutally aware of the disparate swipes from quibbling skeptics, and purports to have debunked the debunkers’ common allegations — that his subjects are lying, repressing abuse, have fantasy-prone personalities, or are suffering from hallucinations, psychoses, psychogenic fugue states, temporal lobe dysfunctions, or a laundry list of other disorders.

The stock criticism, borne out by numerous experiments by trained clinicians, is that subjects will confabulate under hypnosis, making things up at the interviewer’s prompting, fashioning details from dreams, imagination, or out of the cultural ether, which can later be processed as a conscious memory. (Jacobs often talks about how memory is stored. Though he’s a history professor, not a neurologist, he does keep a “Complete Anatomical Chart Series” next to the couch to help him understand rudimentary neurological processes. He got it from the Nature Company.)

Jacobs partially cops to this critique. “The problem is that in hypnosis,” he says, “people say things that are not true.” He hastens to add that “about 20 percent of the people remember things without hypnosis. That is extremely important to remember.” But when I press him on how much information he gathers without it, he says, “Maybe 5 percent or so, not a whole lot.”

Admitting the unreliability of hypnosis would seem to hamstring his entire body of research, but Jacobs has a ready answer for that. The trick, he confides, is to have an acute bull detector, to be steeped in the phenomena so that you can ask the right questions at the right time and guard vehemently against contradictory data. “It’s not an exact science,” he says, ” which is why in abduction research, you’ve got to build up patterns, corroborating detail and data.”

No matter that standard scientific methodology involves positing hypotheses and then attempting to disprove them. Jacobs has streamlined the problem of bothersome inconsistencies. “If they say, ‘An alien is talking to me with its mouth,’ I say to myself, ‘I don’t think so. This does not sound right to me.’ And since in 11 years of doing this I’ve never heard that, that one’s not going to reach print.” (It’s reached print elsewhere, however, as numerous non-Jacobs abductees have claimed aliens have spoken in everything from British to Danish accents, with Strieber even hearing auditory utterances that were “startlingly Midwestern.”)

Jacobs answers skeptics with the observation that the abduction stories must be true because they echo each other to “every precise detail,” albeit with “wide variation, within a narrow scope.” Jacobs tells me that he never includes an abduction detail in his data unless he’s heard it twice. Unless, of course, you count an entire chapter in Secret Life entitled “Sexual Activity and Other Irregular Procedures.” These, he writes, “may occur many times to an individual abductee although other abductees may never experience them.”

One of the procedures described is hybrid sex, in which the abductee reports that a loved one’s face phases in over the alien’s. Mental tricks like these are frequently played through “mindscan,” a term Jacobs hates but was forced to coin in constructing the new discipline. Intercourse, he says, ” takes place without much preliminary stimulation.” Bad news for the ladies, but male earthlings can breathe easy, since “the insertion of the ‘penis’ is quick, and . . . does not feel normal, it is usually very thin and very short. ” (They may take our women, but damned if they’re going to keep them.)

As you might expect from interstellar nooky, some of the goings-on are weird. Women abductees are sometimes brought to orgasm through mindscan, though it “is not a pleasurable event.” And men who are getting irrigated for their life-serum are often brought “to ejaculation but not necessarily orgasm. ” These all raise questions that need answers, though history professor Jacobs admits he doesn’t have them, as he is not a urologist or gynecologist. (He does keep a plastic uterus next to the couch. He got it from Today’s Sponge.)

Talking for hours to Jacobs, even a putterer like myself picks up on some inconsistencies, such as the delicate matter of sperm extraction. In Secret Life, abductees report all matter of pumping from vacuumlike hoses connected to machines, but in our interview Jacobs describes the aliens putting humans in sexual positions, and before the moment of truth, forcing withdrawal to collect specimens in a container. Why wouldn’t they rely on the machines, which are, after all, much more tidy? “I think they do sex when the mechanical devices don’t work,” says Jacobs, “and there’s a certain amount of evidence to that.”

Phil Klass has documented in his book UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game how the number of abduction reports dramatically increases after airings of UFO-themed movies of the week. But “many of them don’t even read the books or see the movies,” Jacobs tells me — although in his book, he reports that many abductees “buy every book they can get on the subject, compulsively talk about it, and seem unable to concentrate on much else.”

How does he assess the mental fitness of those who claim to have been abducted? Why, with Question #20 from his screening interview: “Have you ever been hospitalized for psychiatric or psychological disorders? Are you on medication for emotional or psychological problems?”

I ask him how many abductees he’s had psychological evaluations performed on. “Just a few,” he says, and then takes a long pause, “. . . who’ve given me their own evaluations.” But he doesn’t just take their word for it, because he’s an excellent judge of character: “You know how off the wall you’d have to be to believe something was happening to you when it wasn’t?”

It doesn’t really matter if the supposed abductees aren’t completely sound, since once they’ve reached Jacobs, “they’re at the end of the line. . . . The quest is over. They can get their lives in order, they understand what’s happening, they leave me, they can lead a normal life as best they can.” Because, the history professor insists, more than a researcher, he must approach his subjects as a therapist: “Ethically, it is the only way to proceed.”

Unless of course his subjects get into the high cotton, psychologically speaking: “If they are so depressed they wind up in a hospital, I tend not to work with them, because I’m not a therapist.” But he plays one in real life, since he can tell there’s nothing “seriously wrong or delusional” with most of his subjects. Except when there is, like when a student he hypnotized 10 times “became paranoid the psychology department secretaries were plotting against her” and shortly thereafter “descended into florid schizophrenia.” Jacobs, scrupulous empiricist that he is, “used nothing” from her interviews. “I don’t care whether she was telling the truth or not,” he says.

Jacobs’s work in the field is, you see, basically altruistic, because even though the alien-human breeding program is “the largest scandal in the history of science,” he’s in no danger personally of being abducted. He has discovered that being abducted is, in fact, “intergenerational” — it’s hereditary (like some mental illness). How does he know this? From the evidence, of course. “Everyone” was abducted from the time they were small children, and parents have reported their children being abducted. But when I ask him if he’s ever seen abductees produce any missing-person reports, he replies: “You’re going to have to ask them. A person comes to me — I’m not the interrogator giving them the third degree. . . . Obviously, there’s a certain presumption of truthfulness here.” He would not supply any names or phone numbers, however, so I couldn’t ask them.

To his credit, Jacobs is as compulsively honest when getting called on an embellishment as he is prone to embellish. When I ask him how many of his subjects were used for reproductive chores, he replies unequivocally, “All the men have sperm taken from them, all the women have eggs taken from them and have babies extracted from them.” All 114? Really? “I can’t say that,” he admits, “not all, because 25 percent of the people who see me only have one session, and then they get too scared.”

When I ask him to go to his files and tally exactly how many people have told him some approximation of this story, he determines that 39 out of 70 women told him about how they had been used sexually, and 20 out of 44 men did the same. But still, he stresses, just because they didn’t tell him about it “doesn’t mean it never happened to them. The chances that it happened are almost certain.”

And the fact of the abductions themselves is an equal certainty, as there is more than mere anecdotal corroboration; there is physical evidence, such as anomalous scarring. I point out to Jacobs that he had told me earlier how ” the aliens can do things to the human body that are astounding, like surgical procedures. . . . There’s no scar, no nothing.” He responds: “Not usually, although, sometimes, there are major scars. . . . It depends on the procedure. ”

And how does he know that, say, ovarian scar tissue isn’t from some pedestrian earthbound operation? “Well, that’s what they tell me,” Jacobs says, though he does work with “one gynecologist who’ll remain anonymous who does all my abductee work . . . and who’s seen things he’s never seen before in his life.”

Nearly all abductees report that they received alien implants in their noses, brains, and sinus cavities. How many of the implants, which he says have even been expelled, has he seen? “Over the years, we have gotten X-rays and MRIs of objects. We’ve had people with extraordinary things.” But has he seen any of the actual implants himself?. “No,” he says, but he has seen two X-rays of “anomalous white spots.” And did he actually order the X-rays himself? “No, but I looked at the MRIs and read the report.”

Finally Jacobs becomes ruffled. My approach, he informs me, is “stupid” and “disturbing.” He accuses me of being an “amateur investigator . . . a researcher you ain’t.” Because, Jacobs explains, his patience nearly depleted, “What you’re doing, Matt, what I got to admit is really annoying, is searching for contradictions.”

It was after my interview with Jacobs that I spoke to Fred Hills at Simon & Schuster (the rest of the house brass — including publisher Carolyn Reidy and editorial director Alice Mayhew — didn’t return my numerous calls). When I pointed out to Hills that Jacobs provides no diagnostic breakdown of samples, no quantitative analysis of which anecdotes apply to how many subjects, no discussion of conflicting answers, Hills’s enthusiasm for the book seemed to be dampened.

“I think those are questions you should be putting to him. I’m not the author of the book,” he responded. Does Simon & Schuster, one of America’s most distinguished publishing houses, have any responsibility in this regard? “We would not consciously publish stuff we believe to be egregious or calculatedly deceitful,” but nevertheless, this particular project “calls for a certain suspension of disbelief to enter the portals of this subject.”

One final question, Mr. Hills: Does it trouble you that historian Jacobs has no background in any of the disciplines that might actually lend credence to his scholarship? “I’ve worked with authors in every subject area long enough to no longer be impressed by the initials Ph.D.,” Hills said. “Fools and knaves come with every kind of academic degree attached. So no, that doesn’t trouble me.”

By Matt Labash; Matt Labash is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD Why Is a Reputable Publishing Firm Bringing Out a Book that Alleges an Interstellar Sex Conspiracy?