The Emma Woods Case

November’s cover story in UFO Magazine, written by Jeremy Vaeni, gave people a rare look behind the curtain that’s drawn across the tactics of certain alien abduction researchers. While some people were vocal and heart-felt in their disgust and outrage, there was almost total silence from the leadership and more senior members of the community. Since returning to Manhattan, I’ve had many personal exchanges with Emma and listened to her painstakingly excerpted audio clips taken from 180 hours of “treatment” and hypnosis by Jacobs— over the telephone, no less, and across the sea. Wafted about for 180 hours on waves of alien/hybrid/sci-fi imagery, bits of memories and dreams, all mixed in with shivery slivers of Jacobs’ pre-hypnosis suggestive anecdotes, the trusting and vulnerable patient delivered up to Jacobs his hoped-for narrative of predatory hybrids among us— exactly what he ordered for the book he was writing. However, it’s anything but a typical abductee’s experience: violent sexual encounters with a human/alien hybrid; a request by the good Doctor (Ph.D. in history, non-medical) to send him her panties, unwashed, so they could be tested for alien sperm; and a proposal that she wear a chastity belt with nails across the vaginal opening, which he’d locate for her from (in Jacobs words) “a sex shop that specialized in bondage/dominance, a place that I frequented quite often.” s1Woods, E.: "Dr. David Jacobs' Hypnotic Suggestions to Wear a Chastity Belt - (MP3)", My Anomalous Experiences

In later sessions, Jacobs, hyperventilating, can be heard telling Emma that he’s in terrible trouble—that an outraged hybrid (who knows that Jacobs is the only person on the planet, other than Hopkins, who knows the evil fate that aliens are planning for humanity)—that this hybrid is sending him threatening Instant Messages on his AOL account to make him cease and desist his work with the abductee Emma Woods. Jacobs is “the man who knows too much.”

Personal IMs from a bloodthirsty hybrid who is entirely theoretical. It doesn’t get more Drawing by alleged abductee E.N. (Photo, C. Rainey with permission of E.N.)hallucinatory than that.

Afraid for his life, Jacobs panics. To throw the wily hybrid off his trail, the good researcher deliberately instills into the hypnotized Emma’s mind the information that he is now an expert on this “public epidemic,” that she suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder—not alien abductions—and she “needs to take medication for the disorder.” s2Woods, E.: "Dr. David Jacobs' Hypnotic Suggestions of MPD - (MP3)", My Anomalous Experiences (Note to Jacobs: Multiple psychiatric journals state that medication is not recommended for someone with this disorder and that Multiple Personality Disorder, now known as Disassociative Identity Disorder, is serious, chronic and the sufferer is at risk for suicidal attempts, self-injury, violence, substance abuse, and repeated victimization by others. Good call, DoctorPracticing-Medicine-Without-a-License. Save your own skin and the patient be damned.)

I ask you: What would happen to a licensed psychotherapist who falsely assured a hypnotized patient that she had an incurable mental illness which would make the rest of her life a living hell? He’d get the pants sued off of him, his license suspended or revoked and would possibly never be allowed to practice again. A panel of peers would review his professional conduct and make appropriate rulings.

But, evidently, in the unstructured world of ufology, nothing at all happens to such a “doctor.” Jacobs underwent some drubbing on certain blogs and radio shows (especially in the bold coverage of the case by Jeremy Vaeni and Jeff Ritzmann of Paratopia and Gary Haden of Speculative Realms.) His employer, Temple University, didn’t scent a powerful law firm in the offing and so claimed Jacobs wasn’t doing research, just “taking an oral history.” And Budd Hopkins jumped in with a letter to Emma that compared her to George W. Bush invading Iraq, causing the deaths of thousands, if she exposed his friend’s longdistance bedside manner. Ufology’s two best-known abduction researchers continue to take victory laps over the airwaves, while the leaders in the field are largely closemouthed about the cringe-inducing revelations. Neither the two researchers nor the UFO community seemed to have learned anything from the mistakes. In fact, on November 28, 2010, Hopkins stated on the popular Coast-to-Coast radio show that he and Dave “are very close in the way we handle abductees who come to us.”

Throughout December, both men have been heard on multiple forums still making extremely confident assertions about “what we know” and “our powerful evidence” for alien abduction and “our absolute certainty” that alien/human hybrids are living among us and that the prospects for humans are grim. Everything asserted confidently, without a mote or molecule of tangible proof. Not even a snippet of hybrid DNA, which would be fairly easy to bring back from one of these earthly encounters—especially the alleged violent and sexual ones. An object that is even touched by one of these alleged creatures could readily be analyzed with current DNA technology. The experiencer could discreetly pick up a glass, a hair, a spoon, anything the being contacted and bag it, then contact a lab or their local MUFON representative. If the claim of “hybrids among us” is indeed “a falsifiable hypothesis,” as Jacobs often states, there must be a reason it remains simply all hot air.

People drawn to the great mystery of UFO sightings and abduction accounts are becoming all too aware that nothing new has been learned about the phenomenon for a very long time. For years, the abduction stories have remained essentially the same at the core: just the names, places, and a few details change. Once when I was on a Mindshift Institute panel in Maine, someone in the audience asked me if it wasn’t just fascinating and so exciting to live in the middle of all this UFO and abduction activity. “Uh, actually, no,” I blurted out. “It was fascinating for the first four or five years. But six, seven, eight years later and you’re still hearing the same story over and over, it gets a little tedious. I kept hoping for a new perspective, another handle on what this thing is! But it almost never happened.”

Budd Hopkins would never acknowledge this, but his actions showed that he felt equally frustrated by lack of new insights. After an initial interview and a hypnosis session in our home with a perfectly credible, yet run-of-the-mill abductee—especially one who regarded the grey beings with a sort of New Age, accepting gaze—Budd seldom did more than a single hypnotic regression with people like that and rarely returned their follow-up phone calls (some becoming increasingly frantic). To me, that was a bit like opening up someone’s head with a rusty can-opener, then skipping town. We had arguments that went nowhere. It appeared that he dropped people because he was looking for something with a higher-octane level.

It was going to be hard for Budd Hopkins to find a case that had anything near the intrigue and high strangeness of the account that he’d presented in his 1996 book Witnessed: The True Story of the Brooklyn Bridge Abductions.