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Q. and A. with Raymond Fowler By Sean Casteel
Early on in his 20-year investigation of abductee Betty Andreasson Luca and her family, something triggered the return to memory of Fowler’s own buried abduction events, which most likely had fueled his obsessive interest in UFOs, astronomy and physics in the years leading up to that shattering realization. When “UFO” spoke to Fowler not long ago, he had just walked in the door after teaching a course on UFO abduction at his new home in rural Maine. “I dismissed my class so they could go home and watch ‘Taken,’” he said, laughing quietly. Perhaps one of the required textbooks for Fowler’s class should be his own recently published memoirs, “UFO Testament, Anatomy of an Abductee” (Writer’s Showcase, 2002). While Fowler says in the book’s introduction that it will be his last hurrah in the field, he is already hard at work writing a new book on synchronicity. In the following interview, Fowler reminisces about his early childhood abductions experiences, his time spent working for NICAP, his relationships with Betty Andreasson Luca and the late Dr. J. Allen Hynek, as well as discussing the sobering conclusions he has drawn after a lifetime spent in pursuit of the UFO mystery. * * * * * * * * * * * * Q. Okay, let’s start at the beginning. Can you discuss your earliest childhood experiences with abduction? Fowler: Well, the earliest thing was knowing when they were going to come. I had this feeling of apprehension as a child and I knew from experience that they would be coming. I called them “Chinaman,” sometimes a “clown.” It was very short, and wore a black robe with a strange thing over his head. I don’t know if it was a hood or what it was. I could never remember exactly what it was that was around his head. I’d wake up and know he was there and feel this tingling sensation coursing through my body and I’d sit up in bed and try to scream and I couldn’t. And I was completely paralyzed. At first, I would sort of lean back and try to get away, but I couldn’t because he was coming that way and there was no way out. And that’s all I could remember. But I just knew it was going to happen again, when I felt that feeling. Another time, I remembered waking up, walking in what we called “the little hall,” and looking behind me and seeing the same being walking behind me and looking sort of shocked at me when he saw me turn around, as if I wasn’t supposed to be awake. He looked at me and I immediately went out again. I’m just trying to remember the things I remembered consciously. Another time I was going from the little hall to the big hall, and I saw my father standing there naked. I assume that both of us were going to go somewhere. The funny thing is, that’s all I can remember about these little guys. I can’t remember going out of the house with them. They seemed to be able to control me and not let me see what was going to go on. The only time I can remember consciously, and this kept on coming back to me, then I would continue to forget it, I think when I saw “The Wizard of Oz” it came back to me, when I saw the lady in the ball of light coming down to Dorothy, I think the whole thing flashed before me. Another thing, a new kid had moved into the neighborhood and we were standing out in Dodge Court in front of the house and I happened to glance up at the big hall window and all of a sudden it came back to me, and I started telling him all these things. And then I had this feeling of guilt, that I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody about it, and I stopped. The time that I can remember leaving the house was when-I don’t know if it was a woman or a man with long hair that was all encased in light-that woke me from my sleep, with a beam coming through the window. And I went out the window, a closed window, with this being and I was frightened. Under hypnosis I actually relived feeling being in the air and kicking my legs and looking down at the ground scared stiff. And at that point, the entity made me close my eyes somehow or other and I just kept on going. I don’t remember what happened. The next thing I remember, I had this feeling of coming down and I opened my eyes and I saw the side of the house, the attic window, and I saw the whole outside of the house all bathed in light. And then we came through and into the big hall and he just said something to the extent that I was going to do something for mankind, or something like that. The next morning I woke up and I told my mother about it. All of this was sort of fading from me as I ran down the stairs. She wouldn’t listen to me. She said I had a dream, go back. I went upstairs again, and I was trying to retain all this knowledge that I hadn’t told and so forth. I went down again and she listened to me, but a lot of it just disappeared. These are just the salient things I can remember. I remember my going up to the attic stairs to see if I could find this woman, or this being. It was really strange. The only other strange thing I can remember consciously is sitting in bed alone. I had a cold and I was in bed, and my folks were downstairs. And this ball of light came in the room. It was about the size of a marble, very, very bright, and it came floating up. I was sitting up in bed and it just came up and it was right in front of my face. And I don’t know what happened. All I can remember is screaming for my mother to come, and she wouldn’t come. She told me to be quiet and wait until she’d had her supper. By the time she did come, as soon as I heard her feet on the steps, this thing zipped somewhere. I thought it might have gone into a closet. I made her look in the closet and all over the place for it. It was very similar to Betty Andreasson’s experience with a ball of light when she was a child. So those are the things that I can remember as a child. Q. Well, part of your growing up involved your father’s precognitive experiences. Did he basically prove your skepticism wrong? Fowler: I couldn’t understand it. At that time, I was a very Fundamentalist Christian, and I believed that some of these things happened but I believed that they were Satanic at the time. However, since then I’ve become more of a liberal in my theology, and I’ve had some of these experiences myself. And I’ve talked to my two brothers, who have had precognitive experiences, and talked to others, so yeah, I would accept that these things happen now. There’s no problem with it. And looking back now, at my father, I wish I was more kind to him about some of the things he was trying to share with me, because I find the same thing now. I try to share things with people and I’m getting my due desserts and experiencing the same thing. I think what bothers everybody that has precognitive experiences is that it seems to indicate that maybe there’s no such thing as “free will” if you can see the future. My father and I have also seen things that happened now that had actually happened in the past, which indicates that maybe time is an illusion and everything that we have done and everything that we’re going to do is already happening. We sort of live in a linear time, and we only experience these things one at a time. And of course that doesn’t make sense, but people who have Near-Death-Experiences, somehow experience their whole life at once, sometimes they actually experience some of the future things that are going to happen. And so when they return from this experience, these things actually happen. So it’s a complete new way of looking at reality, which can be very scary, because you really don’t know what it all means for us. Q. Your output for both NICAP and MUFON was tremendous, to say the least. What gave you the drive to be so thorough in your investigations and to work so hard? Fowler: That’s a good question. At the time, I just felt compelled to do so. It was almost like a mania, that I had to do so. It’s the same thing with astronomy. I had to build an observatory. I had to build a planetarium, which seemed crazy really. I think looking back at it, it’s just because buried in my unconscious, I had all these experiences, and it worked like a synchronistic experience. You know, the unconscious was telegraphing me that there was something significant here, and it was there. My unconscious was working itself out through this very, very strong interest in the subject and trying to find out what it was all about. I think that’s probably the reason why I had that drive, that was because of these experiences that were buried and hadn’t come to fruition yet. Although I did see a UFO on July 4, 1947, which also got me very interested in the subject, of course. I was interested in anything to do with space. I collected everything I could on experiments with V-2 rockets and experimental aircraft. I was of course convinced that UFOs at that time, flying saucers, flying discs, were just secret weapons of our country, whereas my father was telling me all along that, “Oh, no, they’re spaceships.” No one else was talking about spaceships. And I was just giving him a hard time about that. Q. There’s a chapter in the book that deals with the possibility that NICAP may have been infiltrated by the CIA and basically shut down by them. Why do you feel that’s likely to have happened? Fowler: It’s possible. I’m not sure it was. I think I presented the pros and cons in the book. There were former CIA and Air Force personnel on the board of directors of NICAP. NICAP, at one end of the spectrum, seemed to tell its members that they were anti-Air Force, and anti-secrecy, and pushing for Congressional hearings to expose this and so forth. But on the other hand, they seemed to, and this was unknown until through the Freedom of Information Act a lot of this came to light, they were also cooperating with the Central Intelligence Agency and with the Air Force. Unknown to us, the form that we were using to investigate, the new forms that were given to us, were actually supplied to us by the United States Air Force. And Dick Hall was given a clearance and was supplying information to the Central Intelligence Agency. So it’s possible that when they felt that the use of NICAP was no longer needed, they shut it down. I really don’t know this. There are arguments on both sides. I lean toward the fact at least that there was cooperation between the government and NICAP. It would be a wonderful way to collect information-to attack the Air Force on one hand, and get public sentiment and get public reports and so forth, from people who may not want to report to the Air Force because of the Blue Book policy and so forth. But they would report to NICAP, and then NICAP of course would just turn this material over to whoever in the government and the people who reported the incident would never know about it and would think they were reporting it to NICAP. Most likely, if there is serious government interest in the problem, and at least we had some transparency that there was in the earlier days, it’s logical that they would have moles, I guess you’d call them moles, within civilian groups that collect this information. It’s just a logical thing to do. Q. Well, looking back from where you are now, what do you feel are some of the most significant aspects of your longtime relationship with Betty Andreasson Luca and her family? Fowler: I think that it’s a privilege to be able to work with one family for so many years, and not only Betty but Bob with their children as well. I’m not sure that anybody else has had this opportunity to just stick with a family for about 20 years and investigate it. That was certainly a significant thing to do. I think that the most significant thing that came out of my investigation was the fact that up to that time I had no suspicion whatsoever of the UFO business in my life. The abductions, the childhood experiences. But as soon as I started to investigate Betty’s childhood experiences, it triggered my memory of all these different things that happened to me as a child. Q. Do you think there’s a genuine religious element in Betty’s story? Fowler: We were talking about that tonight, actually, at the class. I don’t know. Betty-if you knew Betty, she was just saturated with the Bible. She knew her Bible inside out. She read extra-Biblical sources and so forth and so on. And if you just take the Book of Revelation, for example Chapter Four, all of the elements are there. To compare with Betty’s childhood experience, for example, to go see “the One.” She went to see this marvelous “One” in this place that seemed to be made of glass, and she went through-she called it “the Great Door.” She saw white-robed beings called “Elders.” And she did this in an out-of-the-body experience, and the writer of the Book of Revelation also entered a great door and saw all of these things, and he saw it in an out-of-the-body experience. The thing that amazes me is how under hypnosis-it was always under hypnosis-that she could just relive these things seamlessly. You could go back maybe later on, in another hypnosis session, and have her relive the same thing and it would BE [italics] the same thing. And how could she superimpose her religious beliefs into these experiences so seamlessly? I mean, they were just part of what was happening. She didn’t have any script to follow. This was all cold turkey. So there are possible alternatives, that there is a connection, that she took these memories that she had of Biblical knowledge and somehow was able to do this. Although the other thing is she may have done it intentionally, although that seems completely out of character with her. We really don’t know. I tend to think that somehow or other she incorporated her belief system onto these experiences, but I’m not sure. Q. Can you talk about having your report on the Exeter Incident submitted to the Congressional Record in 1966? Fowler: What happened was, I was ticked off at some of the explanations that Blue Book and the local Pease Air Force Base was giving to the Exeter sighting and other sightings in that area. So I sent my report to our local congressman, Congressman William Bates, and he read the report and he got ticked off, too. So when the House Armed Services Committee had their symposium or committee meeting on UFOs, he said he was going to bring the report in there and see what he could find out about it. And of course, they actually had to back down and admit that what they saw was an “unknown.” So that’s how that came to be. Q. You were friends at one time with the late Dr. J. Allen Hynek, right? Fowler: The first time I met Hynek was before he was out of Blue Book. He came to Boston and we had been communicating. I had been sending him reports and we’d been writing back and forth and maybe telephone calls. So he wanted to meet me, and I met him at the Parker House, in Boston, and he told me at that time that Blue Book was going to be closed down and asked me if I would come to work for him at what they were going to call the Center For UFO Studies. And I didn’t feel that I wanted to get involved. I had a good job at GTE and I had a planetarium and an observatory, I had everything I wanted where I was. He wasn’t too happy about that. Q. You would have had to move to Chicago? Fowler: Yeah. He had great ideas for the Center, which never came to fruition anyhow. But yeah, if I’d gone out there, I would have lost an awful lot. I always felt that he may have had a double identity or be playing a double role, working with civilian UFO investigators but he possibly may have been giving some of this stuff back to his employers, but there’s no way to prove that. I’d had someone tell me that one time, a source, and I wrote to him and told him that I had heard that. Usually it took him an awful long time to answer letters, but a letter came right back demanding to know who it was and so forth. And he denied it so much that I thought maybe there was something to it. Q. By his employer, you mean the Air Force? Fowler: Yeah, right. Or whoever. Q. But there were some pleasant moments between you, right? Fowler: Oh, yeah. I never had any problems with him. He wrote the forewords to two of my books, and he was at the house and we had good chats. A very likeable person, and his wife, I used to meet with his wife. His son lived down in this area. A strange thing, one of these synchronistic things that happen is that I met his son and his wife at their house with Hynek. And quite a few years later, they divorced. The next thing I know is that my next-door neighbor brings over this girl, and says, “Do you know who this is?” And it was Hynek’s son’s former wife living next door. Weird. Q. Well, as is typical of abductees, you experience both terror and unconditional love at various points in your abduction history. Do you feel that’s also typical of the God of the Bible, that people in the scriptures both fear and love the Deity as they interact with Him? Fowler: I guess you could say it was typical, but there’s no convincing evidence that God and UFOs are directly connected. People saw angels in the Bible and were terrified, and the angel would say, “Do not fear.” But as far as a feeling of unconditional love, time and time again and, in fact, even this evening when we were going over some of Betty’s hypnosis regression sessions, there was terror when for example on an occasion in 1973, a light came in the driveway and she woke up wondering who was driving in the driveway and tried to wake up her husband and he wouldn’t wake up, and the light came through the window and all of a sudden there was this being. And she was scared stiff. As soon as the being looked in her eyes, all of a sudden, even in her tone of voice, she was calm. And I think it’s possible that this feeling of unconditional love from the beings could be induced to calm the abductee down so they won’t be afraid, and also might be part of the controlling mechanism that they use to have abductees do what they want. It might not be a feeling of unconditional love at all. It might be like giving someone a shot of morphine or something. I don’t know. It’s a wonderful feeling. Q. Can you summarize your concept of metaphenomenon for us here? Fowler: Abductees have out-of-the-body experiences, and Near-Death-Experiencers have abduction experiences, according to Dr. Kenneth Ring. UFO witnesses consistently, since way back, have experienced all kinds of paranormal phenomena, poltergeist phenomena, seeing apparitions. The aliens use telepathy, and people who have had UFO experiences also have precognitive dreams. And people who are in and out of a Near-Death-Experience, or an out-of-the-body experience, seem to be able to coexist in at least two planes of existence, and of course you have the same thing with the UFO entities. They can appear in a ball of light, and that opens up and all of a sudden you’ve got a UFO entity, and the entity disappears at the other end. UFOs appear on radar and you see them visually in one place but you never see them go from A to B. They seem to implode into another dimension, and then appear somewhere else. And so the whole thing seems to indicate that all these phenomena seem to be different aspects of one whole that is interconnected. That’s the feeling that I get, because they all overlap each other. Q. Is there anything you wish to add? Is there some question I haven’t asked or some kind of final comment you’d care to make? Fowler: It seems for the most part that whatever it was shut down. I’ve had some strange things happen. I wake up with blood on my bed and have dreams of being out of my body, and looking down at myself struggling with something on the floor. Some very strange things. But there was a time of maybe a little bit over a decade where that stuff was going on sometimes night after night or every other night. It was hard to sleep because of it. I don’t know why it was. Maybe it was just for the sake of recording it in the book. I feel like I’ve been put out to pasture. We’ve actually moved away from where we lived for forty years. Now here I am up in Maine, away from everything. I’ve just got this feeling that maybe I’ve done what I’m supposed to do and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. I really don’t know. I know my father, when he got to a certain age, was older than I am, told me that he was told his body was not strong enough to do the things that they were doing with him in the past, so they stopped. I don’t know. The whole thing is so crazy. I’m studying synchronicity now because I’m writing a book about it, and [psychoanalyst Carl G.] Jung, who was more interested in the effect upon people who saw UFOs rather than the physical aspects of UFOs, though he didn’t deny the physical nature of UFOs, but after all his studying over the years he said that all he could say is that SOMETHING IS SEEN [italics]. And when I get right down to the bare bones, I guess something is seen and something is experienced. And we all have different ideas of what it might be, but we may be way off course and not have the slightest idea of what’s going on. We try to fit all of this stuff into our own worldview, and we have different people thinking it’s this and thinking it’s that, but we really don’t know what’s going on. And life is probably too short to find out what’s going on. This might go on for years to come and might be part of a preparation for something that they’re doing. But they aren’t wasting their time, whatever they are. They’re up to something. THE END |