The Strange Case of Picnic at Hanging Rock

By Paul Meehan

“On Saturday, 14th of February 1900 a party of schoolgirls from Appleyard College picnicked at Hanging Rock near Mount Macedon in the state of Victoria. During the afternoon several members of the party disappeared without trace…”

So begins Peter Weir’s 1975 mystery-thriller Picnic at Hanging Rock. Based on a 1967 novel by Australian writer Joan Lindsey, the film follows the plot of the book fairly closely to weave an eerie tale of mass-disappearance that would become an urban legend and suggest deeper, more alien mysteries behind the strange events.

The girls at Appleyard College embark on their fateful picnic on Valentine’s Day, in the full heat of the Australian summer. They are transported in a horse-drawn wagon to Hanging Rock, a geologic formation comprised of weird volcanic monoliths. The spinsterish headmistress Miss McCraw (Vivean Gray) is in charge of the expedition, and warns the girls against any “tomboy foolishness,” but in spite of her admonitions four of the girls go off exploring by themselves. As Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert), Irma (Karen Robson), Marion (Jane Vallis) and Edith (Christine Schuler) traipse off to the Rock on their voyage of discovery, they are briefly observed by two young men, Michael (Dominic Guard) and his valet Albert (John Jarratt), who are also picnicking at the Rock with Michael’s parents. While they are gone Miss McCraw notices that all of the party’s watches have mysteriously stopped at exactly 12 noon.

Ascending amid strange-looking rock formations, the girls reach a plateau where they suddenly fall into a deep, mysterious slumber. Back at the picnic, all of the members of the Appleyard party also fall asleep, with the exception of Miss McCraw. Then, just as suddenly, the four girls awaken. As Edith watches in horror, Miranda, Irma and Marion march up the hill in lockstep as if they are in a trance. Edith also notices an anomalous red cloud hovering over the Rock as she is consumed in a sudden terror and runs back toward the picnic site.

When the picnickers return to the college late that evening the three girls, along with Miss McCraw, are missing, and a massive police manhunt from the nearby town of Woodend fails to find any trace of them. Edith’s recollections of the event are confused and fragmentary, but she does rememberseeing Miss McCraw walking toward the hill where the girls were last seen in an entranced state, wearing nothing but her underwear.

After a week goes by there is little hope that the girls or the headmistress will be found alive, but Michael, who harbors a lingering obsession with the students after glimpsing them on the day of the picnic, decides to look for them on his own. He winds up spending the night at Hanging Rock, and is found the next day in a confused state, clutching a piece of lace from one of the girl’s dresses, Soon afterward, Irma is discovered alive in a nearby cave. A medical examination reveals that she has not been raped, and that her feet are curiously unmarked although she is not wearing shoes or stockings. Oddly, her hands are bruised and her fingernails torn, and she was found not to be wearing her corset.

When she recovers, Irma can remember nothing that transpired during her disappearance at Hanging Rock. The strange goings-on cause a furor in the town as rumors fly, including a report of an anomalous light flashing around a pigsty on a farm about a mile from the Rock. Ultimately, the missing people are never found and the mystery is never solved. As one townsman wryly observes, “There’s some questions got answers, some haven’t.”

Weir’s offbeat film, shot on location at Hanging Rock, brilliantly utilizes the Australian landscape while deftly evoking the quirky sexual repressiveness of the late Victorian period. While the film is slow-paced by American movie standards, the director builds a powerful sense of mystery around the inexplicable events. The film was a critical success in Australia and overseas, and helped pave the way for the popularity of Australian cinema of the 1970s and 80s in the international market. Weir would go on to direct The Last Wave (1977) an imaginative apocalyptic thriller that explored the magical world of aboriginal shamanism.

A curious urban legend grew up around the events portrayed in the novel and the film. Joan Lindsey’s book coyly suggests that the story is based on true events. She wrote: “Whether (the book) is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems to matter.” Similarly, in an interview with the Melbourne Herald, Lindsay stated that, “I can’t tell you whether the story is fact or fiction…but a lot of very strange things have happened around the area of Hanging Rock…things that have no logical explanation.” However, after many extensive journalistic

investigations, no documentary evidence of the alleged event has ever surfaced, leading to the conclusion that the plot of Picnic at Hanging Rock is entirely fictive.

Even after the story was proven to be fiction, fans of the movie and the book continued to try to solve the mystery over the years. In 1980, Yvonne Rousseau published a book entitled The Murders at Hanging Rock, which offered up a number of scenarios explaining the enigma. It theorized that the missing girls and their teacher could have been raped and murdered by Aborigines, or by Michael and Albert, or they could simply have been buried underneath a rockslide. In 1987, another book, The Secret of Hanging Rock appeared, which contained Lindsay’s previously unpublished chapter of the original novel that provided a more mystical resolution to the mystery. According to Lindsay, the girls were confronted by a kind of time warp and were transformed into little crab-like arachnid creatures who disappeared into the interior of the earth by crawling through cracks in the rocks.

But while more conventional explanations of the disappearances and Lindsay’s own bizarre resolution to the mystery fail to satisfy, there is one phenomenon that would seem to offer a more likely solution for the enigmatic events–alien abduction. Many of the anomalies described in the Hanging Rock narrative are consistent with features reported in cases of UFO close encounters.

First, there is the matter of the strange red cloud observed hovering above the Rock during the disappearance. As if to underscore a viewpoint looking down from above, Weir shoots the scene of Edith running from the Rock in terror from an extremely high angle. UFOs have long been associated with anomalous clouds, as evidenced in the encounter of Rex Heflin, an Orange County, California highway traffic inspector who took a series of Polaroid photos of a metallic craft transforming into a cloud in 1965.

Then there is the matter of the stopped watches at the picnic. In the famous abduction case of New Hampshire couple Betty and Barney Hill in 1961, both Betty and Barney found that their watches had stopped after the abduction event. In 1979, Minnesota Deputy Sherrif Val Johnson had a late night close encounter with a glowing UFO that damaged his police cruiser. Johnson’s mechanical wristwatch and the car’s electric dashboard clock were both found to be inexplicably running exactly 14 minutes slow. Some researchers theorize that UFOs are actually time travel devices that sometimes cause temporal anomalies to occur.

The odd behavior of the picnickers is also consistent with events reported during abductions. All of the students and staff at the picnic fall into a mysterious sleep, while only those who are slated to disappear awaken. This phenomenon parallels what is known as being “switched off” in UFO parlance, where those chosen for abduction remain conscious while those not selected are rendered unconscious. Non-abductees being “switched off” is a fairly common feature of abduction reports. Abductee Betty Andreasson, for instance, claims that several members of her family were switched off while she was taken aboard a UFO.

Abductees often report that they are compelled to perform certain actions as if they have been placed in some kind of hypnotic trance in which they are placed under the control of their abductors. Betty and Barney Hill, for instance, felt compelled to inexplicably turn off the main road they had been traveling on and onto a secluded side road where the abduction took place. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, Amanda, Irma, Marion and Miss McCraw are drawn to the place where they will disappear as if they are entranced.

When Irma returns, she has total amnesia about what occurred during the time when she was missing. This “missing time amnesia” is another common feature of alien abduction reports, and was first explored in depth in researcher Budd Hopkins’s 1981 book Missing Time. The Hills experienced this type of amnesia in connection with their abduction experience, the details of which only emerged as they underwent hypnotic therapy. Researchers don’t know if missing time amnesia is imposed upon abductees via alien mind control, or if it is a natural function of the human mind that suppresses unpleasant experiences.

Joan Lindsay’s novel was written in 1967, when little was known about the abduction phenomenon. Nonetheless, her work of fiction eerily anticipates exotic details of alien abduction narratives. There are other examples of life imitating art in the history of the UFO phenomenon. Bernard Newman’s 1948 novel The Flying Saucer, for instance, posits UFOs that stop automobile engines long before this became a common theme in many UFO reports. Similarly, Arthur Koestler’s 1933 play The Twilight Bar portrays a UFO that causes an electrical power blackout decades before this aspect of the phenomenon was reported in the UFO literature.

Oddly, the fictional vanishings in Picnic at Hanging Rock also seem to prefigure a mysterious real-life disappearance that occurred in the same general area of Victoria, Australia. Just three years after the release of Weir’s film, on the evening of October 21, 1978, a young Australian pilot named Frederick Valentich was flying a Cessna 182 light aircraft on a relatively short flight from Moorabbin Airport in Victoria to King Island. While over the area of the Bass Strait, Valentich radioed that he encountered a large, brightly lit UFO that hovered over his plane. Soon afterward, all radio contact with the aircraft abruptly ceased. A massive, three-week search of the area failed to find any trace of Valentich or his airplane. No debris or even an oil slick on the water’s surface was ever discovered. Like the picnickers from Appleyard College, the young pilot seemed to have simply vanished into thin air under mysterious circumstances.

The Valentich disappearance remains one of the most puzzling incidents in the history of the UFO phenomenon. Like the Australian farmer in the film explains, “There’s some questions got answers, some haven’t.”

Related posts:

“Paul Meehan: SAUCER MOVIES: A UFOlogical History of the Cinema”

“Paul Meehan: Sleeping with the Aliens: Weird Encounters of the Fourth Kind”

“Paul Meehan: Alien Abduction and Sleep Paralysis”

VISITORS IN THE NIGHT: ALIEN ABDUCTIONS AND SLEEP PARALYSIS

by Paul Meehan

Since the 1960s, published accounts of humans allegedly being abducted by aliens and subjected to various medical and psychological procedures have captivated the public mind and have provided inspiration for a number of mass-market books and movies. The question is, do these fantastic tales have any basis in nuts-and-bolts reality or do they originate in dreams and the dark recesses of human imagination? More specifically, do these narratives emerge from the mysterious and little-understood phenomenon of sleep paralysis?

As readers of TheoFantastique are aware, sleep paralysis (abbreviated as SP) is a sleep disorder that occurs during the twilight consciousness between sleep and wakefulness, when the sleeper is either waking up or falling asleep. The sleeper seems to be fully awake, although the body feels paralyzed except for the eyes. Unusual light phenomena may be perceived, along with tingling bodily sensations and sexual arousal. Then a mysterious, usually threatening entity approaches the sleeper, sometimes speaking to them and pressing down upon their chest and preventing them from breathing. SP may segue into an out of body experience (OBE) in which the percipient has the subjective experience of leaving their body and being transported to some fantastic locale. In rare cases, SP may be experienced by more than one individual at the same time. It’s easy to see how an episode of sleep paralysis could be interpreted as an alien abduction by someone who has no knowledge of the SP phenomenon.

During the 1990s skeptics seized upon SP as an explanation for the majority of alien abductions. While there is much truth to this contention, it is not the whole story. Clearly, while some abduction narratives originate with SP/OBE experiences, the abduction phenomenon did not originate with SP, as a historical review of alien abductions will demonstrate.

The 1961 abduction experience of Betty and Barney Hill, an interracial couple from New Hampshire, provided the paradigm of the phenomenon. Prior to this incident, alien encounters consisted of highly dubious stories told by “contactees” about meetings with human-looking “space brothers,” or by fleeting confrontations with UFO “occupants” who were observed from afar while repairing their craft or gathering plant or soil samples. The Hill case, which involved the abduction of a husband and wife while they were driving from Canada to their home in New Hampshire, occurred while both of them were wide awake and driving in an automobile, and would later provide the basis for the 1975 NBC-TV telefilm The UFO Incident. There was corroborating evidence for their close encounter in the form of an anomalous radar track recorded at nearby Pease Air Force Base that night, an in a circle of warts that appeared on Barney’s groin after the incident.

Interestingly, the Hill case, popularized in John Fuller’s 1963 book The Interrupted Journey, did not immediately spark any further abduction tales for a decade. Then, in the 1970s, abductions began to be reported with more frequency. One of the most well-publicized close encounters was that of Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, who claimed that they were abducted by robotic “claw men” while fishing from a pier in Pascagoula, Mississippi in October, 1973. Another famous case was that of Travis Walton, a logger who was zapped by a beam from a UFO when he approached too close to the craft and was later found missing in November of 1975. Walton’s encounter with the UFO was witnessed by five other members of the logging crew, and was later dramatized in the 1993 feature film Fire in the Sky. The Pascagoula and Walton cases were widely reported in the media at the time.

In addition to these well-publicized events, a number of more obscure abduction cases also came to light during the 1970s. In August of 1975 Sandra Larson reported being abducted while driving in a car late at night along with her daughter and a male friend, the latter two being immobilized (or, in abduction parlance, “switched off”) while Ms. Larson was taken aboard a UFO and subjected to a medical exam. David Stephens and his friend “Glen” (a pseudonym) were driving around a lake area near Norway, Maine in the early hours of one morning in October, 1975, when their car was immobilized and Stephens was abducted. Three women, Mona Stafford, Louise Smith and Elaine Thomas were returning to their homes in Liberty, Kentucky one night in January, 1976, when their car was reportedly levitated into a UFO and the women were subjected to a series of frightening and painful ordeals. In Essex, England, John and Elaine Avis and their three children reported being abducted from a country road in October of 1974. The abduction of the so-called “Allagash Four” occurred during August, 1976 when four men were abducted while night fishing in a boat in the Allagash Waterway recreation area in Maine.

Note that all of the cases cited above involved multiple witnesses and all of them occurred while the abductees were fully awake. Additionally, there were a number of single witness abductions that took place under similar circumstances. Mr. Carl Higdon reported an abduction while he was hunting in the Medicine Bow National Forest in Wyoming in October, 1974. Air Force sergeant James Moody reportedly underwent an abduction experience while watching a meteor shower in the desert near Alamagordo, New Mexico one night in August of 1975.  “Steven Kilburn” (pseudonym) reported an abduction and medical exam conducted by gray aliens during the 1970s while driving from Fredrick to Baltimore, Maryland one evening to researcher Budd Hopkins. These types of abductions continue to be reported decades later.

It’s difficult to see how any of these cases could be related to sleep paralysis, but as the abduction phenomenon emerged into public consciousness, researchers began to investigate another type of scenario: the “bedroom visitation,” which was clearly related to sleep paralysis. Perhaps the earliest of these was the experience of Pat Price, a single mom living in Utah who awakened to find two intruders in her room and later, under hypnosis, told a tale of being taken aboard a UFO by spacemen who recorded her thoughts. Ufologist John Keel, author of The Mothman Prophecies, was the first researcher to link what he termed “bedroom invaders” to alien abductions in the early 1970s. But it was Whitley Streiber’s bestselling book Communion, published in 1987, that cemented the link between SP and abductions. Streiber, author of popular horror novels like The Wolfen and The Hunger, wrote that he was asleep in his cabin in upstate New York and woke up to be confronted by a diminutive humanoid creature who paralyzed him.  He was then floated out of his bedroom and into an alien craft where he was examined and later returned. Streiber’s book later became the subject of a 1989 feature film..

Streiber’s Communion experiences, which in retrospect resemble an episode of SP/OBE much more than they resemble the earlier abduction stories, served to bring sleep paralysis narratives within the orbit of alien abductions as UFO researchers, who knew nothing of SP, began to interpret SP experiences as abductions. In 1992, a poll conducted by the Roper organization designed to measure the prevalence of abductions within the general population incorporated several questions that are more indicative of SP than of alien contacts.  Questions like, “have you ever awakened paralyzed, sensing a figure or strange figure or presence in the room?,” and “Have you ever felt like you are actually flying through the air without knowing why or how?,” and “Have you ever seen unusual lights or balls of light in a room?,” are all indicative of SP and OBE.  On the basis of responses to the Roper Poll, researchers concluded that abductions, now conflated with SP, were thought to be fairly prevalent within the American population.

The Roper Poll’s methodology was criticized at the 1992 Abduction Conference held at M.I.T. by folklorist and SP expert David Hufford, who had been invited to present a paper on SP and its relevance to abductions. Hufford’s paper made it glaringly obvious that many bedroom encounters were in reality episodes of SP, but in the wake of these revelations, skeptics like Carl Sagan and others in the media seized upon SP as an explanation for all abductions.  Reviewing the UFO literature on the subject, the cases involving SP/OBE become glaringly obvious. One individual who reported awakening from sleep and seeing balls of light in his room, stated that, “My body would be completely paralyzed. I couldn’t yell or scream, but I wanted to. I could feel the pressure of something or someone coming toward me, then I’d feel pressure on top of me, and then I wouldn’t be able to see.” Another alleged abduction report described a woman’s experience as follows: “One night in the 1980s, she was abruptly awakened from sleep to find an entity standing by her bed. It was a type she had seen before and had even painted in oil paints on paper…Although terrified and unable to move, she physically broke through the paralysis and lunged at the creature,” which promptly dematerialized. Anyone familiar with SP will see that these experiences most likely represent SP dream imagery rather than close encounters with extraterrestrial visitors.

In other times and in other cultures these bedroom visitations would be interpreted as encounters with “ghosts,” “witches,” “vampires” or “incubi.”  Our technological culture, however, interprets these same experiences as “alien abductions.”  Drawing upon imagery derived from pop culture science fiction or UFO literature, these creatures of the night are transformed from supernatural beings into extraterrestrials during episodes of SP augmented by hypnogogic or hypnopompic dream imagery.  Oddly, some UFO researchers have reversed this trend.  In her 1998 book How to Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction, respected ufologist Ann Druffel theorizes that these bedroom visitations are caused by jinns, spirit beings in Islamic folklore thought to be creatures that are intermediate between men and angels.

Given the above, it’s easy to distinguish between bedroom visitant/SP/OBE “alien” encounters and the original abduction paradigm of events that take place during a waking state of consciousness, frequently have multiple witnesses and sometimes leave corroborating evidence. There is, however, another connection between these two disparate types of experiences. The trauma of alien encounters have been known to produce sleep disorders in abductees. In the Hill case, for instance, their experiences first surfaced as terrifying nightmares. It appears that abductees can suffer from episodes of SP after having undergone non-bedroom type close encounters as part of what researchers call “Post-Abduction Syndrome.”  Abductee “Steven Kilburn,” who had first experienced an automobile abduction, later underwent bedroom visitations that were probably inspired by his initial abduction. Jim Weiner, one of the “Allagash Four,” also seems to have developed SP as a result of his alien encounter. SP alien visitations and non-bedroom abductions do not appear to be mutually exclusive.

There are other links between dream states and abductions as well. Some skeptics theorize that night-time highway abductions are the result of  “highway hypnisis,” an altered state of consciousness caused by driving down straight roads at night that reportedly produces hypnogogic dream imagery of ET encounters. It should also be noted that virtually all abductions, bedroom and non-bedroom alike, involve the abductee being put into a state of full or partial paralysis by the aliens. Finally, many abductions are recalled under hypnosis, which is a type of trance or dream state.  The relationship between sleep paralysis and alien abduction experiences is complex and multifaceted. Further research is needed into both of these fascinating and enigmatic phenomena in order to define the distinctions between them.

Related posts:

“Paul Meehan – SAUCER MOVIES: A UFOlogical History of the Cinema”

“Sleeping with the Aliens: Weird Encounters of the Fourth Kind”

The groundbreaking and initial scholarly research into this phenomenon was conducted by Dr. David Hufford, Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Psychiatry at the Penn State College of Medicine, and Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Hufford began his research in Newfoundland through interviews with individuals who claimed experiences with an entity they called “the Old Hag.” As Hufford’s research continued he connected the dots to similar experiences in other countries and cultures. It is now common to see references to the Old Hag and sleep paralysis as expressions of the same phenomenon. Hufford compiled his research into the book The Terror That Comes at Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982). His research on this topic has continued and a more recent and updated form of his thoughts on the subject can be found in an article titled “Sleep Paralysis as Spiritual Experience” in the journal Transcultural Psychology Vol. 42, No. 1 (March 2005): 11-45.

For those unfamiliar with the phenomenon, Hufford describes the Old Hag/sleep paralysis as including the following features: “(i) awakening, (ii) hearing and/or seeing something come into the room and approach the bed; (iii) being pressed on the chest or strangled; and (iv) being unable to move or cry out.” Consider a few of the stories of those who have lived through these frightening experiences. The first comes from William James as relayed in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience in Lecture III, “The Reality of the Unseen,” as he describes the experience of a friend of his:

It was about September of 1884 …. Suddenly I felt something come into the room and stay close to my bed. It remained only a minute or two. I did not recognize it by any ordinary sense, and yet there was a horrible ‘sensation’ connected with it. It stirred something more at the roots of my being than any ordinary perception. The feeling had something of the quality of a very large tearing vital pain spreading chiefly over the chest, but within the organism — and yet the feeling was not pain so much as abhorrence. At all events, something was present with me, and I knew its presence far more surely than I had ever known the presence of any fleshly living creature. I was conscious of its departure as of its coming; an almost instantaneously swift going through the door, and the ‘horrible sensation’ disappeared.

A more recent experience comes through one of the many interviews Hufford has conducted into this phenomenon, in this case with a Pennsylvania medical student:

What woke me up was the door slamming. ‘OK,’ I thought, ‘It’s my roommate….’ I was laying on my back just kinda looking up. And the door slammed, and I kinda opened my eyes. I was awake. Everything was light in the room. My roommate wasn’t there and the door was still closed….

But the next thing I knew, I realized that I couldn’t move…. But the next thing I knew, from one fo the areas of the room this grayish, brownish murky presence was there. And it kind of swept down over the bed and I was terrified….And I couldn’t move and I was helpless and I was really — I was really scared …. And this murky presence — just kind of — this was evil! This was evil! You know this is weird! You must think I’m a — … This thing was there! I felt a pressure on me and it was like enveloping me. It was a very, very, very strange thing.

While such experiences may be difficult to fathom for those who have never gone through them themselves, I struggled with this in my childhood years as a part of various sleep disorders, as did my brother. Thankfully insomnia is the worst that I suffer from at present. Hufford’s research, and the research of others into this phenomenon, indicates that sleep paralysis is experienced by a significant percentage of the population. Hufford also reminds us that “[u]ntil the seventeenth century the primary referent of nightmare actually was what we call sleep paralysis, and it was consistently associated with supernatural assault.”

Although sleep paralysis is usually explained by researchers as a form of neurophysiological experience, there are a number of interpretations given to the phenomenon, both from those who experience and research it. These interpretations are found across a spectrum from naturalistic to the spiritual. These include physiological explanations, with the vast majority of those who experience the Old Hag opting for spiritual explanations, including Christians who view it as a form of demonic attack, to paranormal interpretations.

Sleep paralysis experiences have had a significant aspect on religion, spirituality, and popular culture. In the history of Christianity those who have experienced sleep paralysis have interpreted the phenomenon as a form of witchcraft (possibly a factor in the Salem witchcraft trials) or demonic activity, and those who understand it as paranormal make connections to out-of-body experiences, alien abductions, and spirit contact. In the history of folklore the experience may have played a part in stories of the incubus and succubus. The experience has also impacted the realm of the fantastic. As I commented previously, Guy de Maupassant had experiences with the Old Hag that inspired his story Le Horla, which in turn was adapted into the horror film Diary of a Madman starring Vincent Price. In science fiction sleep paralysis experiences have impacted portrayals of alien abductions as evidenced most recently by The Fourth Kind. It would make for an interesting project to research the creators of horror and science fiction to learn the extent to which sleep paralysis may have served as an inspiration.

Those who struggle with sleep paralysis experiences often do not share them with others for fear of ridicule. This situation is made worse by a large percentage of therapists who are unaware of the phenomenon, and many who are choose naturalistic physiological, anthropological, and physiological interpretations to the frequent consternation of many who experience the Hag and who understand it as a core spiritual experience. Interestingly, Hufford believes that folk belief concerning such experiences and scientific knowledge can co-exist. He states that “there is nothing specific within our scientific knowledge of SP that contradicts spirit interpretations.”

Those who wrestle with sleep paralysis should know they are not alone. As a way of addressing concerns several resources are available. These include David Hutton’s book, finding an online group in order to share experiences, and finding a professional knowledgeable in sleep paralysis who can discuss ways to address the phenomenon.

In the future TheoFantastique will explore other facets of sleep paralysis, including an interview with Louis Proud, author of Dark Intrusions: An Investigation into the Paranormal Nature of Sleep Paralysis Experiences (Anomalist Books, 2009), and an interview with Paul Taitt, one of the producers of the documentary Your Worst Nightmare: Supernatural Assault (Soul Smack Live).

SLEEPING WITH THE ALIENS
WEIRD ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

by Paul Meehan

The enigma of alien abduction is one of the enduring mysteries of our time.  Beginning with the famous case of Betty and Barney Hill in 1961, in which a couple were allegedly abducted while driving down a New Hampshire highway late one night, these reports of extraterrestrial kidnappings have continued unabated into the 21st Century.  While a minority of abductees claim that the experience is a positive one, most of those who have purportedly been taken relate terrifying stories about being subjected to strange medical experiments and mysterious mind games.

Alien abductions reached the zenith of their popularity in 1987 with the publication of horror writer Whitley Strieber’s book Communion and UFO researcher Budd Hopkin’s Intruders, which were serious explorations of the phenomenon that made the New York Times bestseller list.  Because abduction reports were so similar to each other and presented a very limited narrative format (people are picked up, prodded and let go), the experience has not translated well onto the screen.  Only two theatrically-released features were based on real-life cases, the film version of Strieber’s Communion (1989) and the abduction account of Arizona logger Travis Walton, Fire in the Sky (1993).  Two telefilms, NBC-TV’s The UFO Incident (1975), a faithful rendition of the Hill abduction case starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons and CBS’s Intruders, based on the Hopkins book, were the two most powerful screen treatments of the abduction theme.

Now comes writer/director Olatunde Osunsanmi’s The Fourth Kind (2009) with a tale of alien abduction allegedly based on 65 hours of “archival footage” of “actual case histories” relating to a series of purported abductions in the Nome, Alaska area in October of 2000.  The film’s title is a reference to the typology of UFO sightings formulated by the legendary ufologist Dr. J. Allen Hynek that was used for the title of Steven Spielberg’s UFO opus Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with abduction being the fourth level of an ET encounter.  Resident Evil star Milla Jovovoch plays Alaskan psychiatrist Abigail Tyler, who is mourning her husband Will after he was knifed to death by an unknown assailant in their home and is caring for her two children.  Abigail is counseling Nome residents with sleep disorders who all tell the same story of waking up in the middle of the night and seeing a scary-looking owl staring at them and hearing voices speaking in a strange language.  When one of her patients, Tommy (Corey Johnson), goes nutzoid after a hypnosis session and kills his family and himself, Nome Sheriff August (Will Patton) suspects that Abigail’s therapy was somehow responsible for the tragedy.  Abigail and her psychiatrist colleague, Dr. Abel (Elias Koteas) fire back by citing dozens of mysterious deaths and disappearances that have occurred in the Nome area since the 1960s.  “There’s something going on in this town that we don’t understand,” she warns the Sheriff.

Things continue to go bump in the night as Abby finds a weird-looking mark on her body and suspects that she herself may have been abducted and that aliens may have been responsible for her husband’s death.  An expert in ancient Near Eastern tongues identifies the language on the police tapes of Tommy’s murder/suicide as ancient Sumerian, the first written language in history dating back to the Fourth Millennium B.C.E.  The mysterious voice seems to be saying, “Our creation…examine, ruin and destroy,” in the ancient language  Then another patient, Scott (Enzo Cilenti) insists on being hypnotized in the wake of an abduction experience he describes as “the worst you could ever imagine,” and is possessed by an alien force during the session that causes him to levitate and go into convulsions that literally break his back.  A chagrined Sheriff August orders Abby confined to house arrest after this debacle, but a UFO descends on her house in the middle of the night to abduct Abby’s young daughter, Ashley (Mia McKenna Bruce).  Despite the fact that a police officer witnessed the UFO while the police video recorder conveniently goes blank, August still blames Abby for her daughter’s disappearance.  In the movie’s climax, Dr. Elias hypnotizes Abigail in an attempt to probe her own abduction memories and ultimately solve the riddles of her husband’s murder and her daughter’s disappearance.

Writer/director Osunsanmi presents this narrative using split screens that reportedly show the “real” Abigail Tyler (as portrayed by an uncredited actress) and her patients on “documentary” videos on one half of the screen going through the identical actions that are dramatized by Jovovich and the actors on the other half.  Osunsanmi even becomes an actor in his own movie when he appears as Abigail’s interviewer in a tape purportedly made at Chapman University, a real college in Orange, California.  In an effort to take The Fourth Kind “back over the line from fiction to reality,” (in the film’s own words), the movie attempts to pass off bogus video archival footage of therapy sessions and police videotapes as real documents.  In addition, the release of The Fourth Kind was accompanied by a clever ad campaign designed to mislead audiences into believing that the events depicted are factual, even going so far as to set up a phony website about Dr. Abigail Tyler’s Alaskan medical practice and manufactured Internet stories about her.  A September 1, 2009 investigative piece written by Kyle Hopkins for the Anchorage Daily News convincingly debunks the existence of Dr. Tyler and the events depicted in the film.  As for the mysterious deaths and disappearances, of which there have been about 20 since the 1960s, an FBI investigation conducted in 2005 concluded that most of the deaths were related to alcoholism and exposure to the elements in Nome’s harsh environment, with no hint of alien involvement.

In cinematic terms, The Fourth Kind does establish considerable screen tension and uses the Blair Witch-inspired technique of filming people who are acting intensely frightened in order to induce similar feelings in the audience.  Osunsamni’s style is documentarian, utilizing shaky hand-held camera setups, naturalistic lighting, time-coded video and split screen cinematography.  The photogenic Milla Jovovich carries much of the film with her earnest portrayal of the tormented Abigail, but she is sometimes upstaged by the intense performance of the odd-looking unknown actress playing the “real” Dr. Tyler, who often appears onscreen in the same split frame.  Professional thesps Will Patton and Elias Koteas lend their support, but none of the supporting characters is drawn in any depth.  The film seems to take its cue from The Mothman Prophecies (2002), both in its subject matter of mysterioso goings-on in a backwater stretch of rural America and in its coy avoidance of showing anything overtly extraterrestrial.  Much of The Fourth Kind was shot in Bulgaria, lending its “Alaskan” locations a temperate, forested look in lieu Nome’s real landscape of frozen Arctic tundra.

While purporting to be a true-life archival record of the abduction phenomenon, The Fourth Kind offers up a smorgasbord of ufological cliches and half-truths.  To set the record straight, no abductee has ever murdered anyone as a result of their experiences, nor has anybody ever levitated or suffered back-breaking injury during a hypnotic recall session.  Contrary to popular belief, alien abductions are not connected in any way we know of with missing persons cases, murders or unexplained deaths.  According to research carried out by legitimate abduction investigators like Budd Hopkins, Raymond Fowler and David Jacobs, abductions are ongoing, intergenerational studies that would be severely impeded by its human subjects dying, and although abductees report painful and terrifying experiences, no one has been seriously harmed during abductions.  The Sumerian language angle is derived from the work of rogue archaeologist Zecharia Sitchin, a theme which has been amplified in recent novels by Whitley Strieber but does not appear in mainstream abduction research.  On the other hand, the film’s owl imagery has frequently been reported as what is termed a “screen memory” of gray aliens used to mask their true appearance, but whether this is a function of the human mind or an illusion produced by the aliens is open to debate.

Despite its many flaws and execrable advertising campaign, The Fourth Kind does manage to capture the mind-numbing terror of the abduction phenomenon, as anyone who has listened to the hypnotic regression tapes of Betty and Barney Hill can attest.  But it’s also possible that the director is describing an entirely different phenomenon, that of sleep paralysis.  This is an experience that occurs in a twilight state between sleep and wakefulness in which one seems to awaken paralyzed in bed.  Some kind of being or entity is perceived to enter the room and approach the bed.  The “entity” then begins to exert pressure on the sleeper’s chest until they awaken, only to find themselves alone in the room.  Sometimes anomalous lights can be perceived, and sexual arousal can be a feature of the experience.  Sleep paralysis is frequently found in people who suffer from bouts of sleepwalking, or somnambulism, and is also related to hypnopompic and hypnogogic sleep hallucinations.  Alaska, where there are months on end of darkness or sunlight, is a prime location for sleep disorders (think of Al Pacino trying to get some shuteye in the Land of the Midnight Sun in the 2002 crime thriller Insomnia).

It’s easy to see how episodes of sleep paralysis, which is reported in many cultures around the world, could be interpreted as a close encounter with a ghost, a vampire, an incubus—or an alien.  Indeed, all alleged alien abductions that begin in a sleep state are suspect.  The abduction experiences described in The Fourth Kind all occur during sleep, and I suspect that director Osunsanmi has had a personal experience of sleep paralysis that provided the inspiration for this film.  In other words, he may have been “sleeping with the aliens.”