The belief that aliens are controlling or possessing you is more common than you might think. For a variety of reasons, these kind of thoughts can suddenly occur and can have tragic consequences.
At the moment there is an ongoing trial in New South Wales, Australia, of an unnamed 44-year-old woman. She is accused of killing her young daughter sometime after Christmas 2000, to sacrifice her to the ‘wolfman’.
Michelle Hanlon, a friend of the woman, told the NSW Supreme Court in Newcastle that by the late 1990s her personality had changed and had become very melancholic. After taking LSD the woman disappeared for three days, and on returning said she had gone to the top of a hill to wait for aliens to take her home.
The wolfman, who rode a motorbike and was allegedly stalking her, was trying to prevent her from going with the aliens. To stop him, the woman believed she had to kill her daughter to distract the wolfman and enable the aliens to save her.
A similar harrowing and tragic case involved 57-year-old grandmother Gloria Stephens. Fearing that an alien machine, like a giant vacuum cleaner, was going to suck her two grandchildren to another planet, she stabbed one of them to death with a kitchen knife. She thought that by killing 10-year-old Tasha, 7-year-old Andrea and herself they would escape the aliens and get together again in paradise.
At her Old Bailey trial in June 1986, it was revealed that Stephens had boasted that in past lives she had been ‘Diana the huntress’ and various kings and queens. Her interest in all things psychic was dominated by a fear of aliens, who allegedly made regular visits to her and on several occasions had beamed her onboard their craft. She even kept clothing and personal effects in plastic bags ready for the day when she expected the aliens to take her away for good.
In June 2004, schizophrenic Graham Abram leapt out of bed and drove off in a car shouting: “Can you see the force, can you see the force?”
He thought he was St Peter being chased by demonic aliens, as he drove at high speed on the wrong side of the road in Leeds, Yorkshire. After covering two miles he was overtaking cars on Hill Top Road, Bramley when he drove head-on into a car being driven by 75-year-old pensioner, Dennis Rose. Mr. Rose died at the scene of the accident. At Leeds Crown Court, Judge Trevor Kent-Jones said that 47-year-old Abram had suffered a ‘quite sudden and unexpected severe relapse’.
As the following cases show, driving away from an alien menace seems to be a common factor.
A year earlier, on Saturday 19 July 2003, Roderick Nigel Martin was involved in an alien-induced accident. After nearly hitting six vehicles he finally had a head-on collision with a car driven by 66-year-old Raymond John Turner. Mr Turner died from his injuries.
When Martin appeared at the Ballarat Magistrates Court in Victoria, Australia in 2005, his defence was that he had stolen the truck to escape aliens whom he thought were trying to take over human bodies. He was given a 14-year jail sentence and ordered to serve at least 10 years in prison.
At 4.51am on 21 June 2000 Eric Michael Clark was driving his pick-up truck in Flagstaff, Arizona when he was pulled over by police officer Jeff Moritz. Clark, a 17-year-old high school senior, shot dead the officer. His defence was that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. He had thought his parents were aliens and that the town was also populated by aliens, and that some disguised as government agents were out to kill him.
A chain of tragic events started when Scott Krause’s girlfriend kicked him out of their home. On the afternoon of 6 January 2004 he stole a truck from a petrol station and sped off towards Nevada County Airport. Swerving and weaving across the traffic lanes of Highway 49 he eventually hit a UPS truck being driven by 34-year-old Drew Reynolds. The UPS truck careered into a utility pole killing Reynolds.
Krause’s defence was that he believed he was being pursued by ‘man-eating subterranean beings’ whom he thought were trying to capture him and send him to China. He called these beings ‘hemodrones’. He drove erratically because alien voices in his head increasingly warned him that they wanted to eat him alive.
27-year-old Allison Lamont Norman went on a shooting rampage in April 2005. It began when he shot to death Jamell Weston and wounded his cousin Marcus Cannon at the Carvel Gardens apartment complex in Laurel, Delaware. Wearing a bulletproof vest and brandishing a hand gun he went to a nearby shopping centre where he shot and wounded another man. Stealing a car he drove to Salisbury, Maryland, where he shot two dogs, wounded two more men and shot to death DaVondale M. ‘Pete’ Peters.
During his trial, held in Delaware in June 2007, defence attorney Brendan O’Neill told the court that Norman went on this spree because: “He thought there were aliens everywhere.”
Surprisingly, such delusions have a long history, with incidents stretching as far back as the 19th century. Chris Aubeck, the author of a forthcoming book on this subject, has discovered several instances, including one described by the Philadelphia Inquirer of 14 February 1896 as a ‘queer case’. This concerned a vagrant called John Moriety who said he and his brother were shot to Earth from the Moon by a mortar. Landing in Jersey he said it was his mission to reform the laws of the State.
In October 1900, a suspicious man lurking on a street corner in Anaconda, Montana ran away from the police. When he was caught they asked him why he ran away. His reply was that he had jumped out of the moon and he thought any man who jumped out of the moon had a right to run.
Another vagrant called Carmichael, who was arrested in Western Australia in 1907, declared he was from Mars. Allegedly he was 5,000 years old and his mission was to collect information that would make it easier for his Martian friends to signal the Earth.
This possession or control by alien entities can be viewed as a variant of the demonic possession that has long haunted humanity. Alien possession is a mental phenomenon that might be triggered by trauma, drugs or underlying psychological or psychiatric problems.
Some, however, take the more direct option that alien possession is exactly what it says. The late Dr. William J Baldwin believed that aliens in nearby spacecraft are able to communicate with your mind when you are in an altered state of consciousness. He thought aliens are scientists and technicians who are conducting a long-term genetic experiment with the human race.
Another strand to this viewpoint is that secret government agencies are brainwashing people and that they have equipment that can control minds at a distance. Some even think that these activities are done in conjunction and with the cooperation of the aliens.
Whatever the causes, the outcome of a belief that aliens are trying to get us or our loved ones can lead to tragic and fatal consequences.
