By Sean Casteel
UFO literature is replete with frightening accounts of kidnapping and other forms of assault by diminutive grey aliens and the taller intruders with distinctively reptilian features. But what is perhaps even more frightening are the less often reported “human-looking” aliens that can pass among us completely undetected and carry out their missions unhampered by “genuine” humans.
This is the aspect of alien life examined in “Mimics: The Others Among Us,” coauthored by Tim R. Swartz and myself, with contributions by numerous other stalwarts of UFO journalism and research. The cover explains that “They’ve Been Called Many Names Throughout Time – Gods, Angels, Demons, The Good Folk, Shapeshifters, Extraterrestrials. They Look Human . . . They Act Human . . . But They’re Not Human. They Are THE OTHERS.”
That sounds like it was taken from the promotional poster to a sci-fi movie from the 1950s, unashamedly sensational and intended to shock. But what takes that sense of shock to a higher level is the fact that the various writers for “Mimics” each make an excellent case for the presence of human-looking aliens being grounded in real-world facts and the stuff of nonfiction. We could indeed be surrounded by nonhuman entities that look exactly like us, which begs the question, how could we ever know?
Perhaps we CAN know by piecing together bits of evidence collected over the years of the modern era of UFOs as well as the historical record of scripture and folklore compiled over the millennia. There are enough clues on the surface to help us draw conclusions about what lies underneath, which is the approach taken by “Mimics” and its many contributors.
DISAPPEARING DAVID
In one chapter, written by Philip Kinsella, a clairvoyant medium and UFO investigator, we examine the story of a woman named Brenda Butler, who was an author of a book called “Sky Crash, A Cosmic Conspiracy,” about the famous 1980 Rendlesham Forest UFO incident involving U.S. Air Force personnel. Butler coauthored the book with Dot Street and UFOlogist/author Jenny Randles.
In November, 1984, Brenda received a distraught phone call from her writing partner Dot, who seemed to be in a state of complete shock.
“Dot proceeded to tell her,” Kinsella writes, “that a strange man had come to the door asking for Brenda. What scared Dot the most was the fact that one minute the man was standing in front of her, and the next he’d simply vanished, and had then appeared in her living room!”
Dot begged Brenda to get to her house as soon as possible, and Brenda reluctantly drove the thirty miles to her friend’s home. The strange man had particularly requested speaking with Brenda personally. When Brenda finally arrived, she was introduced to a tall, slim man with blonde, cropped hair, neatly parted in the middle. His eyes were the bluest she’d ever seen. His hands and fingers were exceedingly long. He looked to be in his late thirties and was extremely handsome.
“The man eventually spoke,” according to Kinsella. “He said his name was David Daniels and incredibly proclaimed that he was from the Pleiades and had arrived in a spacecraft.”
Brenda felt that was a little farfetched, to say the least, but, after researching the events at Rendlesham, it seemed that anything was possible. Brenda felt drawn to David, but Dot reacted to him in uncharacteristic hostility. David’s apparent ability to move from one place to another in the blink of an eye had obviously shaken Dot to the point where everyday logic went straight out the window.
In spite of the anger and hostility David brought forth from Dot, she nevertheless allowed him to stay in her home. Curiously, he never mentioned Rendlesham or the women’s book on the subject, though Brenda felt that that was what had drawn David to seek her and Dot out. Meanwhile, Dot explained that David only ate loads of greens, along with sweets to keep his energy levels up, and was reportedly appearing and disappearing in front of Dot all the time. She kept telling Brenda that David was dangerous and that she feared for her life.
Shortly after that, David decided to show Brenda his true self. He began to shake, and Brenda noticed the veins in his hands, neck and temple rose to about half an inch. This was followed by his appearance changing into what she could only describe as a Reptilian. His skin was like that of a snake. This shapeshifting episode lasted for about two minutes, and while he was in this state he began to speak in a strange language which Brenda could not identify. As he came around, his alien appearance disappeared. He was shaking, felt cold and remained silent for a moment while a shocked Brenda gathered her thoughts. She now no longer doubted that David was the alien he claimed to be.
While this dramatic transformation right in front of Brenda’s eyes certainly makes for a fascinating story, there is even more told in “Mimics” about David’s paranormal abilities and the humans who bore witness to them. But we’ll leave that to readers of the book and not give too much in the way of “spoilers.”
THE OUTER EXTREMES OF WHITENESS
Paranormal writer and experiencer Chris Holly contributes a chapter in which she writes about a strange family of albinos who used to live in her neighborhood when she was a teenager. Later, as an adult, her mother casually mentioned the family to her, who she hadn’t thought about in years.
“My mother went on about how striking they were,” Holly writes, “and how well dressed and groomed they were. My mother commented many times back when she saw them how beautiful the family was and always noticed what they were wearing, I never thought much about it then as I was in my teens but, as my mother went on and on about the albino family, I realized how very strange they really were.”
The family consisted of two adults and three children, all of them albinos. Holly had seen only a few other people with the albino condition but didn’t notice much difference between them and the family in her neighborhood. But, in talking to her mother, she began to realize how they were truly unusual people and not like other albinos.
The five members of the family were all over six feet tall, including the mother and the daughter. When they walked through the department store, they stood a head above most of the other shoppers. Each of them had thick, full, pure white hair. They had high cheekbones and model-like features. They all had the same color eyes, clear, big and very light blue. They kept to themselves and seemed to be quiet, polite people.
Holly would come to realize that they were a very “different” group of people. How likely was it that two beautiful albinos who looked so much alike in height and facial features would meet and marry?
“Although this is possible,” Holly writes, “I knew the odds had to be nearly impossible.”
Holly would recall reading an article about the eye problems that befell albinos and that their eyes tended to be pink or reddish. Her research did not turn up any albinos with blue eyes. The family in her neighborhood were either the result of some kind of incredible happening or they were simply NOT a family of human albinos.
Years after discussing the subject with her mother, Holly ran across a few articles on the Internet that talked about an alien species called the “Tall Whites.” When she looked at an artist’s rendering of the Tall Whites, she was completely taken aback as she saw the same tall people with the same beautiful faces – white hair, blue eyes, and high cheekbones – as the albino family that used to live in her Long Island, New York, neighborhood in the 1960s.
“I will never know,” Holly concludes, “if that strange, gentle family of tall, beautiful people was simply a very rare family of albinos or if they were a group of entirely different beings.”
Holly’s efforts to track down the family in the years since have proved fruitless. She was never able to find anything anywhere that would explain this odd group of people, adding that, “Maybe they just moved away to another state – or planet!”
HAUNTED BY THE LIVING
There exists a phenomenon that may seem new to you, called a “Living Ghost.” In a chapter by Paul Dale Roberts, a ghost hunter and UFO researcher, he discusses some little known sightings of various apparitions of people still living.
For example, in Chicago, Illinois, in 1974, a couple moved into a new neighborhood. They began to feel their recently purchased home was haunted because, always around 2 am, they repeatedly saw an apparition of a man walking over to the couch, after which an apparition of a woman appeared. The man confronted the woman and began slapping her. Then they both dissipated and vanished. The couple that had moved into this house saw this incident four times.
The couple was later invited to a neighborhood block party traditionally held every year on Labor Day. The host offered to let them thumb through his photo albums with photos of past events taken at the annual party.
As the woman perused one photo album, she was shocked and surprised to see the couple that had manifested in her home. She yelled out, “These are the ghosts in my house!” The host looked at the photo and said, “They are not ghosts. Both people are alive. They had domestic disputes and the police had been to the house a few times. They got a divorce. The woman lives five blocks down the road and the husband moved out of state. They are very much alive.”
“This is an example of ‘living ghosts,’” Roberts writes. “The negative energy released into this home replays itself over and over again. Very strong negative residual energy. You do not have to be dead to be a ghost.”
Roberts notes that in Japan they also believe in living ghosts, but their interpretation is somewhat different. Their version involves a disembodied spirit that leaves the body of a living person and subsequently haunts other people or places, sometimes across great distances. This is in contrast to the spirit of a person who is already deceased.
Roberts also writes about the better known “Doppelganger” phenomenon, in which an exact duplicate of a living person is seen. He was called in to assist a family suffering from an invasion of ghosts, some of whom mimicked the appearance of the recently widowed mother of the household as well as her granddaughter. At the end of the investigation, Roberts conducted a Roman Catholic cleansing of the home, which was a very emotional process for the mother.
THE TEENAGE DOPPELGANGER
Researcher, writer and radio show host Paul Eno also writes about a “Doppelganger,” again a circumstance suffered by a family enduring minor poltergeist phenomena in the mid-1970s. Kitchen cabinets would rapidly open and close on their own, books and other objects in different rooms would move, and family members and guests heard occasional heavy footsteps in the attic and on the stairs. There were loud banging sounds on several occasions.
The phenomena seemed to follow the family’s fifteen-year-old daughter Lucy, not only at home but at the homes of friends. On investigating the case, Eno began to feel that the entities causing the poltergeist activity were not your normal haunting “demons” but seemed instead to be more like “provocateurs” or “cosmic mosquitos,” focusing on causing negative emotions in people, like anger, fear and frustration. They would “eat up” the energy of these unhappy feelings like “food.”
Lucy’s experiences had been triggered by her experimenting with a Ouija Board, with which she eventually summoned a spirit calling himself “Arten” and several of his associates.
“This was the classic pattern,” Eno writes, “a parasite-mimic finding an ‘in’ to make a girl, and perhaps her entire family, into a hot lunch. The Ouija Board and the ‘Arten’ persona were the ins. The resulting phenomena stirred up fear and other negative emotions that fed the parasites.”
In the midst of all this spiritual drama, various members of Lucy’s family saw a female with long, blonde hair – looking just like Lucy – looming over the girl’s bed while she was asleep. This took place not only at their family home in Glastonbury, Connecticut, but nearly 100 miles away, at their vacation home in Rhode Island.
Was the Lucy-like figure the family members saw really a mimic? Or perhaps another facet of Lucy from a parallel life looking in on her out of concern?
According to Eno, “We have seen overwhelming evidence that the latter is possible, because parallel worlds often have very different laws of physics, and thus heightened layers of multi-versal awareness and access.”
In the ensuing years, Eno has run into many more parasites who were mimics, and he shares a few more of those encounters in “Mimics: The Others Among Us.” Again, those stories are better off left to readers of the book.
OUR UNNAMABLE REFLECTION?
In his introduction to the book, publisher, editor and writer Tim R. Swartz writes: “We have tried throughout the centuries to put names to that which tries to remain hidden and unnamable. Nevertheless, despite their efforts to keep to the threshold of human awareness, it’s clear that the others have been with us since the beginning, taking on the roles of teachers, messengers, protectors, tricksters and adversaries.
“Modern UFO lore,” he continues, “from the very beginning of the 1950s contactee era, referenced how the Venusians, along with other visitors from nearby planets, looked so much like us that they managed to clandestinely secure jobs in major corporations and even high-ranking political positions.”
Is that idea really just a matter of “over-the-top” paranoia? Join contributors Timothy Green Beckley, Scott Corrales, Paul Eno, Chris Holly, Hercules Invictus, Philip Kinsella, Brent Raynes, Paul Dale Roberts, Gene Steinberg, Lon Strickler, Nigel Watson and John Weigle as they grapple with the idea of mimics from various intriguing approaches in their attempt to provide answers to the many mysteries posed by the presence of those who look just like us but are different – different in ways that are both profound and terrifying.
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