It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim.

Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth’s atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain.

This highly speculative scenario is one of several described by a NASA-affiliated scientist and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University that, while considered unlikely, they say could play out were humans and alien life to make contact at some point in the future.

This topic was explored in a report titled “Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis”. Should first contact be negative, and we find ourselves threatened with possible extinction given our use of natural resources, we should remember the words “Klaatu barada nikto.”

As I probed further in scientific studies that draw upon zombies I found another instance where the channel has been willing to probe unusual territory. In the recent past channel aired “The Truth About Zombies,” which we air again on June 8.

I find this significant in that in years past National Geographic focused (and continues to focus) on topics like evolution, anthropology, genetics, and any number of mainstream scientific issues. Now, subjects which would have been considered little more than entertainment, and fringe at that, are the stuff at least quasi-serious exploration. This indicates that not only have the lines between various entertainment and scientific exploration been blurred, but also that science fiction,  horror, and even aspects of the paranormal are now mainstream genres that have moved beyond entertainment and into the popular imagination in ways that are drawn upon to explore serious cultural and social phenomena.

On March 11, 2011 these fears will be expressed in the new science fiction film Battle: Los Angeles. The film is based upon a real event which took place in the early months of 1942 over the skies of Los Angeles as an unidentified object appeared and drew military fire in the heightened sensitivities present as the incident took place just a few weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. YouTube includes a clip which incorporates an original radio news broadcast of the event with newspaper headlines from the time. Brenda Denzler describes this incident in her book The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs (University of California Press, 2001):

“Two days after a Japanese submarine surfaced near Santa Barbara, California, and fired upon gasoline storage tanks, a luminous object larger than an apartment house was sighted visually and by radar over Los Angeles. As powerful searchlights followed the object, antiaircraft weapons fired ineffectively on it for an hour, at which point the object vanished. During the incident, six people died — three from unexploded shells and three from heart attacks. The object itself never fired a shot. Authorities suspected that the object had been a Japanese airplane of some sort, so in the ensuing hours twenty Japanese-Americans in Los Angeles were arrested and accused of having used flashlights to signal to it.”

Battle: Los Angeles picks up on this incident as a form of alien invasion and brings it into the present with influences from big budget blockbuster science fiction films like Independence Day. Visit the film’s website here, and its Facebook page here.

Related posts:

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

“Aliens R Us: Science Fiction and the Other”

Claims of UFOs circling nukes and military bases are nothing new but what is new is the number of military personal willing to collaborate those sightings. It’s terrifying to think of someone or something being able to tamper with our nukes from a distance.

The Mail Online includes a more extensive discussion of this phenomenon in the U.S. and U.K. You can also view a CBC News clip that features an interview with one of the Air Force officers discussing his experiences on YouTube.

In the second news report various news outlets stated that the United Nations had approved a position for an “alien ambassador” who would serve as a point of contact for possible future extraterrestrial visitors. Although this story was widely circulated it appears to lack confirmation as the Guardian.co.uk reports.

Six years ago previously, a NASA probe returning to earth with samples of an alien life form, crashed over Central America. Soon after, new life forms began to appear, and half of Mexico was quarantined as an INFECTED ZONE. Today, the American and Mexican military still struggle to contain “the creatures”… The story begins when a US journalist agrees to escort a shaken American tourist through the infected zone in Mexico to the safety of the US border.

The film draws upon various elements, including horror’s giant monster, alien invasion (most notably a variant on The Andromeda Strain or TAS meets Cloverfield), fear of contagion, fear of the breakdown of social order, reverse search for extraterrestrial intelligence (this time SETI comes looking for us, and not through radio waves and giant listening devices), and the increasingly popular postmodern apocalyptic. I am still skeptical about the quality of this film, but the website includes positive quotes from Aint’ It Cool News and Twitchfilm.com. These endorsements, combined with the quality of District 9, and the mixed reviews for Splice, provides reason for optimism for this horror-science fiction hybrid.

Within just a few weeks of the [Kenneth] Arnold sighting [near Mount Rainier in Washington], the most famous alleged UFO incident occurred at Roswell, New Mexico. More significant in terms of its cultural impact than in terms of its scientific verifiability, this event, perhaps more than any other UFO event, has spawned a whole body of literature, numerous television documentaries, various movements, a network of conspiracy theories, and many fictional works (e.g., The X-Files, Roswell High and Independence Day).

The event in question involved a farmer finding metallic fragments on his property which he investigated after hearing an explosion. The military soon appeared on the scene to gather the fragments, eventually claiming that the pieces in question were part of a weather balloon. Over the years alleged testimony of those involved in the cleanup would claim that in reality a crashed UFO complete with alien bodies was retrieved which remains in the custody of the military. The conflicting accounts have fueled not only one of the greatest debates in American history, as well as an annual celebration that put Roswell on the national map, but this has also developed into a phenomenon that has taken on religious dimensions at times. Returning again to Partridge:

Roswell is now firmly established as what might be described as a key ufological ‘sacred site’. That is to say, whilst of course many ufologists would not interpret the significance of Roswell religiously, it does tend to inspire the same sort of behaviours as religion. In other words, it inspires implicitly religious attitudes and actions.

So while Americans clean up their streets, driveways, and parks after Independence Day celebrations, let’s not forget the annual anniversary of the Roswell UFO incident. For some, it’s downright sacred.

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”

Now, noted theoretical physicist and sci-fi fan Stephen Hawking has weighed in with his views on real alien contact in an Associated Press report:

Hawking claims in a new documentary that intelligent alien lifeforms almost certainly exist, but warns that communicating with them could be “too risky.”

He speculates most extraterrestrial life will be similar to microbes, or small animals — but adds advanced lifeforms may be “nomads, looking to conquer and colonize.”

The comments came in connection with the Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking series on the Discovery Channel. It sounds as if Hawking agrees with H. G. Wells in that future visiting aliens may be “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic.” See the news item as printed in The Detroit News, and a more extensive article here. And for a contrary perspective on the topic, consider this article.

Update: Michael Shermer has written a piece for the Scientific American titled “The Myth of the Evil Alien” disagreeing with Hawking.

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.”