Professor David Jacobs, Temple professor and UFO researcher.

Skeptic questions famed UFO enthusiast

By: Aaron Sakulich

Posted: 9/30/05

Aaron Sakulich: ...also, this is the first interview that I've done. I think that people are getting tired of just reading, well, this is the thing that happened, I can't explain it, here are the options, decide for yourself. So I figured I would try to start to get more interviews, things like that...

David Jacobs: Well, did you come with a prepared set of questions and I'll answer...

Aaron Sakulich: Well, I did. There's a handful of them, they're kind of out of order, not in any particular order, but, also, I'm sure when I ask one it will raise a question in your response. So the way that the interview is going to work...this is a terrible printer...but the way that the...that I guess the article will work is I'll probably be able to get a full page for it from the design people, because I've done it for so long, but it'll start with "last..." what is this..."last Thursday I sat down with, you know..."who wrote one of the first UFO related doctoral theses or, uh...doctoral theses is I guess how you would say it...

David Jacobs: Dissertations?

Aaron Sakulich: Yes, dissertations, that's the word I was thinking of. You also teach one of the only regularly scheduled courses on...uh...

David Jacobs: The only regularly scheduled course on the subject in the United States, most likely in the world.

Aaron Sakulich: Right. So the beginning will just be a general introduction. If you have a particular picture you'd want to use, I'll give you my email address, just send it along.

David Jacobs: Uh...okay. Well, I'm associate professor of history at Temple, I've been here since 1975, I specialize in 20th century US history, primarily culture and popular culture. I also of course have done most of my research in things strange, mainly UFOs and UFO abductions. I've published 4 books on the subject, UFOs and abductions, and God knows how many articles. I am continuing my work, I do hypnotic regressions of abductees, in my spare time and I continue to write on the subject and continue to do research.

Aaron Sakulich: Sounds good. So, for your work, when you do these, these hypnotic regressions, interviews, things like that, I assume that the people find you somehow?

David Jacobs: I do not solicit. I try to maintain the standards of, or the ethics of the therapeutic community. So I do not solicit, and I do not advertise, and I do something very different than the therapeutic community - I do not charge for anything I do, which puts me in a very, very outside of that...

[Both talking at once. I seem to recall that I said "an abnormality" and Dr. Jacobs laughed]

...but yes, they do find me, in a lot of different ways. I'm of course, they seen me on television quite a bit, or word of mouth, or articles that I write, whatever, they know who I am. So I get solicitations, I get requests for hypnosis, virtually every day. From around the country, and of course I can only take people that live within...in a radius of around a hundred miles. Because, when a person wants to find out about their abduction experiences, and I take them on, we might have anywhere from one to twenty, or thirty or forty sessions together over a period of years, even. Until they want to stop. So in other words I go on for as long as they want to, not for as long as I want to. Of course the longer you go, the more you know about them, about what's going on with them, the more about the subject. My responsibility is to try to get their lives straightened out, try to make them aware of what's going on so that they don't have to fantasize about any number of things that are happening to them, so that they can get a grip on it, they can try to have emotional control over the situation, although I can't give them physical control, I can't keep this phenomenon from happening. Eventually they achieve that, and they go on to live a life free from obsessing about the subject, although not free from the subject certainly.
What people don't understand is that the abduction phenomenon begins in infancy, with great frequency, all the way through a person's life until they reach old age. We think it stops at somewhere, sometime but we're not exactly sure about the time that it stops. We do know it happens over and over and over and over and over again, so anytime anybody writes you and says 'I was abducted once in 1979", what they're saying is, 'I was abducted in 1979 and I remember part of that. All the other times that I've been abducted, I don't remember at all.' Is what...

Aaron Sakulich: [garbled sound]

David Jacobs: ...is what they usually say. And that these are chosen, only because their mother or their father was an abductee. There's no particular aspect of a persons' DNA we think that would cause them to be abducted other than the DNA that was given to them from their mother or their father, who was an abductee. There's nothing overtly different about these people, it is a global phenomenon. It is not, this is extremely important to understand, not strictly an American phenomenon. It spans the world, it spans cultures, it spans every conceivable kind of line you could put up. Educational, intellectual, geographic, political, economic, social, cultural, every line, religious, ethnic, racial, whatever it is, it cuts across these lines. And it is extremely widespread. So we're dealing with a very large phenomenon with a lot of people, people who are from...people who have never quite been able to get it together, people who have never held a job, who have dropped out of elementary school, to people who have PhDs and are in very high functioning positions throughout society, or other professional degrees. They all say the same thing, it doesn't matter who they are, they all say the same thing. And they say it in tremendous detail. It's not like 'I was abducted, and I really liked them, and they really liked me, and they put me back and I forgot about it.' There's a series of procedures that are administered to them, physical, mental and reproductive, there's a lot of other things that happen as well. This all happens in fairly narrow confines. If this were psychological, there wouldn't be these confines, and they are so precise and detailed that we know the function of instruments, we know what procedures lead to other procedures, we know that if they're having procedure labeled let's just say A through Z, if they're having procedure D, that procedure E will follow thereafter, whether they know it or not. Now, the problem here, of course, is that, you're dealing with human memory recovered through hypnosis...

Aaron Sakulich: Right...

David Jacobs: ...administered by amateurs.

Aaron Sakulich: I think that I have that exact quote right here..."human memories recovered through hypnosis administered by amateurs. It is difficult to imagine a weaker form of evidence." (from a webpage Dr. Jacobs wrote for the International Committee on Abduction Research.)

David Jacobs: And it is hard to imagine a weaker form of evidence, it's really at the bottom of the pile. Problem is that, we have such an enormous pile of it, and we have more than that. There is a physicality involved here, people are physically missing from their normal environments. There are no cases, there are no serious cases, of investigated abductions where a person is not missing. The Australians like to bring forward a case that happened 15 years ago, or longer, the Marine Putty case, where she said she was being abducted, and she was sitting in a car with a researcher, and the researcher had his eyes on her, and she wasn't abducted, therefore, they have said, well, you see, abductions happen when the person is really there. Well, Marine Putty obviously isn't an abductee. Because we have thousands, that's not hyperbole, of other cases, where people are...that [Marine Putty] was the exception that proves the rule, in a sense, where people are...

Aaron Sakulich: It's the black swan, the one that proves that...

David Jacobs: It proves that Marine Putty was not an abductee is what it proves. And that people have strange minds, and there's a lot of strange people out there. And people who are delusional, who think they are being abducted, who are not. I've had people who talked to me that were schizophrenic that think they're being abducted and are not. It's rare, believe me, that is rare. Most people don't know what's going on. Most people know that they have lived a life where strange events have happened. When I think of myself, my family, other people I know who are not abductees, basically, strange things do not happen. They don't have periods of an hour or two hours or three hours of missing time, where they don't know where they were during that time and no one else saw them during that time. They have that only if they've had a stroke, or a TIA, or there's a brain malfunction, and that's going to show up in an MRI generally speaking, not always, but often, if it's happening to them for that long. There's going to be a problem. There's going to be a medically obvious reason, a tumor, something is going to be wrong, neurologically. Now, this happens over and over again, and I've had people that have gone to neurologists, and they've had MRIs, and they've had neurological workups, and everything is fine. And everything is fine in every other aspect of their lives, except that they have these missing time experiences, they are traveling in a car, they pull the car over to the side of the road, there's a UFO waiting for them, they don't remember anything after that. Or they're 'traveling on the Astral Plane', they go out and they're traveling somewhere and they can see everything, including how dirty their gutters are, on the roof of their house. Which would be an odd thing to remember when you're on the Astral Plane, you know what I mean?

Aaron Sakulich: I'd be "hey, look at me, I'm on the Astral Plane! Wooo!"

David Jacobs: Right, stuff like that, you wouldn't pay attention to a clogged gutter. [laughs] That's an actual case. And people tend to see deceased relatives who come back to say goodbye to them, even though the deceased relative died ten years ago and they can't imagine why they're coming back to say goodbye now. Or tell them everything is okay, or they see religious figures, angels, devils, you know, this sort of thing, and they have all of these sort of things, and yet they're perfectly normal. They're concerned about, what is this, what is going on , what is happening with me, and often times they sort of go to New Age organizations, they go to some therapists, they go to their ministers, they get diagnoses of what it is, their minister says 'it's demonic possession', therapists will say "well, it's sexual abuse in childhood, or it's temporal lobe instability, there's a million of these explanations for it. The latest one now is sleep paralysis. It's sort of the explanation du jour, that's going around, which of course totally ignores about maybe half, if not maybe 60% of all the abductions we have that take place during the day, when the person isn't asleep, is driving or whatever it is. As my colleague Budd Hopkins likes to point out, the first 20 years of our knowledge of the abduction phenomenon and all the explanations that came forward, we didn't have a single case of an abduction that took place when the person was sleeping. Now it's all the rage, books are coming out about it, in Harvard University in print, or, it's false memory syndrome. The amount of explanations for this is so long it's literally staggering. Your jaw flies open when you hear all the explanations for this. And there can only be one explanation for this, the correct explanation, because it's so complicated and so precise, that only one thing will cause this kind of precision. That means that all the explanations for it, that 'this is not happening', all the explanations for this except for one will be wrong. But debunkers never, ever question other arguments, they never debate among themselves, it's a very bizarre group of people who dedicate their lives to trying to disprove this, it's a strange group, it's a far stranger group than abductees are, who come from everywhere and everything, who are university professors, I'll have you know, and physicians, and psychiatrists and psychologists themselves, and attorneys, and elementary school teachers, and...

Aaron Sakulich: I got an email from an elementary school teacher one time, "oh no, you're wrong I know that they're there, because they abducted me." I guess it was right after her husband died, and I couldn't tell if there really had been something, or if she was really upset about her husband dying, or if...

David Jacobs: That's possible, you can't rule that out.

Aaron Sakulich: And I have no background in psychology, so it's my best guess, but...

David Jacobs: Right. And that's typical of what people say, but you really can't tell, every one has to be investigated. There's a questionnaire on my website, and they fill it out and they expect me to give them a diagnosis as to whether they're an abductee or not.

Aaron Sakulich: Well you answered yes to 18 questions, therefore...

David Jacobs: Yeah, the way I look at it is, sometimes it's a sledgehammer between the eyes, obviously, this person is an abductee. You see how he's answering the questions, so you say it, but ethically you can't. You can't say anything. All you can say is that we can't really tell what has happened to you until it has been competently investigated by a person who knows both the abduction phenomenon and the problems of hypnosis, and then you can tell, and that's the best I can do. So the fact is that you don't know what happened to that woman, she might be an abductee, but remember that if she is this has happened over the course of her life. It wasn't just that one time, that you know is going to be wrong.

Aaron Sakulich: When you talk about the problem of hypnosis, which you just mentioned, I remember during your lecture at the free library, you had a picture of an alien wearing like a sweatshirt, or a hood or something like that, and you said that was an example of confabulation. I assume you're alluding to that when you say things like "hypnosis performed by amateurs". Do you believe that, obviously you do or you wouldn't be doing it, that the good parts of hypnosis outweigh the risks, as long as you're sure of it, and what are those risks?

David Jacobs: Let me just say that everybody in hypnosis, in abduction hypnosis, is an amateur. There are no professionals. My colleague Budd Hopkins and I are as close to professionals as you can get, and we're not professionals. We have trained hypnotists and psychologists and psychiatrists how to do hypnosis for abduction, because everybody can do hypnosis. You can do hypnosis. It takes place in the person you are hypnotizing' mind. If they want to be hypnotized, they will, and what you say can be skilled, can be unskilled, but whatever it is, you can still hypnotize. If they want to be.

Aaron Sakulich: Right. Is it like they show on TV, with the laying down, and the calm soothing voice, and the pocket watch going back and forth?

David Jacobs: No, that they don't do. But it's usually just relaxation techniques. But the fact is that, people tend to say things that are not true in hypnosis, all the time. And you've got to be very careful. It took me a long time...it didn't take me a long time to learn that, it took me a long time to separate out the wheat from the chaff. There are ways to do that. A competent hypnotist will do things like ask purposefully misleading questions that sound right, but aren't, things that we've never seen in the abduction phenomenon. And ask that question in a leading way, to see if they...

Aaron Sakulich: "Oh, so there's a gorilla standing in the corner of the room, what's he doing?"

David Jacobs: Or say something like, well, you know, people have reported that there's always an alien dressed as a gorilla that stands in the middle of the room, in every abduction we see that gorilla. What's he doing?

Aaron Sakulich: And if the guy says, no, there's no gorilla there, that lends credence to what he is saying?

David Jacobs: Yeah, exactly, if they're suggestive. And if they say, yes, that gorilla is there, everything that they say afterwards, you have to be either disbelief or you have to be super careful with. Because they just said yes to something that was not true. 99.9% of the time, they say no, I don't see any guy in a gorilla suit. Then you ask things like, as you're laying on the table and you look up, can you see where the ceiling meets the walls, at the corner, something like that. And they'll say, no, it's curved, there's no corner. That's a direct misleading question, and I am doing it for a reason. There's a lot of them. There's a million of them that we can ask. If they say something I've never heard before, I put it on the back burner and wait for confirmation.

Aaron Sakulich: And if more and more of them start showing up, you can...

David Jacobs: That are unaware of that testimony. Then there's this whole world of... we've built up a sort of a story, a database, an outline of what happens during an abduction, and dose it fit this outline that's been put together with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of...it's like the MMPI, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, what you do is see how people with a certain problem and illness answer these questions. Then you have normal people answer these questions and see how they stack up against it. With this phenomenon, it's similar to that, we've tried to see if fits or not, and if it doesn't, put it on the back burner and wait for more reports. There are a lot of things that over the years, and I've been doing this for over 20 years, 19 years, whatever, that did not fit in at all in the beginning. As the years went on, I realized that I was wrong.

Aaron Sakulich: Do you have any specific examples? Things that somebody said that you went, well that can't be right and then more and more people said it.

David Jacobs: Right. Well, for example, almost everything. I started out doing this research just based on the research that Budd Hopkins had done with a researcher in New York, he is a pioneer, one of the great researchers. I'd read some other books, but my knowledge of the subject as I look back on it, I started research into UFOs in the 1960s, about 1965, but I didn't start doing research into abductions until the early 1980s, and I didn't start doing my own hypnosis until 1986. But, our knowledge of it in 1986 was rudimentary to say the least. Our sense was that people are abducted, they are given physical examinations, and they are released. That there's some sort of a study going on here, it's an experiment, they're learning about us, that whole model didn't hold up. Yes, they were giving physical examinations, but for very different reasons. We didn't know anything about this subject other than that people are getting abducted, they're getting their clothes removed, put on a table, and then things are happening to them. Other than that, we just didn't know at all. My colleague Budd Hopkins in the early 1980s discovered the reproductive aspect of it, although it had been there before, but we never confirmed it, we didn't really know it. He discovered that people were shown odd looking babies from time to time, that looked like crosses between humans and aliens. So when I began to look at this, I decided to start fresh, and start from zero, all bets were off, I didn't know what was true and wasn't true. I couldn't figure out what the hell was happening. I figured I'd just go slowly to one, and then to two, and let's just see what happens in an abduction event from the time that a person is aware it is happening to them until it is not happening to them. And when I began to do that, began to realize that people say things that are not true, which was a great gift given to me by the very first person that I worked with, who in their very first session told me things that turned out not to be true, that I discovered only through a fluke. The gods were with me, because my tape recorder did not work properly, and I had not understood that what she whispered in this session would not be picked up by the tape recorder, and so after several months of working with her, we re-did the first session and it came out very different than what I'd originally heard, and I was shocked to my very core. Because at that moment, at that instant, I realized that I did not have the slightest idea what I was doing. I had believed her when she told me things that were wrong. It's not because she was lying, she though they were true, but they weren't. At that point I realized right away that I had to go back to the starting board and develop a set of controls like we already talked about. Most people don't know that, they take everything...

Aaron Sakulich: They assume that you take everything you're told you go "eh, that's got to be right."

David Jacobs: And that's a fatal error, and it leads to all sorts of things, religious things, all sorts of things, so I was far more careful than I had ever been, than I should have been, that I figured I'd err on the side of conservatism than on the side of acceptance. I probably should have used the word skepticism rather than the word conservatism. So over the years, I began to build up this information that matched and matched and matched until a general sort of picture emerged, and I understood that this phenomenon was falling into a sort of pattern that we hadn't yet realized, and that the more I delved into it, the more the whole concept of this being a study, or a learning situation, or an experiment, was not holding although even then in those days, the late 1980s early 1990s, I couldn't even talk about it without saying "they're experimenting on us." It was so ingrained in me and in my colleagues that it turned out not to be true. It was wrong. It was evidence-free.

Aaron Sakulich: Evidence free. I remember that phrase from your lecture at the free library.

David Jacobs: Oh, it's a great phrase to use, because it sums it up perfectly. I continued on and developed more and more information, and I realized that everything that was happening in this phenomenon was logical, rational, was pointed to a reason. It wasn't something that was so strange and so alien we could not understand it. It wasn't something that was beyond our mental abilities because it was so advanced we couldn't understand it. I realized that everything that was going on was in the realm of comprehension. I couldn't understand it. Other people couldn't. That it was technical in some way. I was able to discover things that I stumbled on completely by accident. The, 'Oh! That's what it is!' sort of phenomenon. For instance, early on, the abduction reports of Betty and Barney Hill and others, people would say they'd lay them on a table and they'd run their fingers down their backbone. I could never figure out what that was, or sense what it was. An examination of the spine, bony growths, how a person is developing, they'd spend particular attention on the coccyx, the tailbone, and go back up it again, and so forth. And I couldn't figure out, what is that? And one day I'm reading a book on how to conduct neurological exams....

Aaron Sakulich: A little light reading for down the shore.

David Jacobs: Yeah, there was this examination of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system that just went right down the spine, and I realized, oh, that's what they're doing, it's not a growth or development thing, it's a neurological thing. And that's what it is, we can tell. A person who was a neurologist would figure that out right away, but me, I'm an historian, I just stumbled on it. So everything turns out to be rational, reasonable, and logical, and usually not what we expected. People have accused us of, well, it's under hypnosis, people are suggestible, vulnerable, we're putting things in their mind. And the reality is that it's the exact opposite. The reality of it is that they tell us things that we resist listening to or believing, things we've never even thought of before, and then force us, as the force of information and evidence comes, force us to believe that it is happening, through just the evidence that we've been given. It really is ther opposite, almost everything that I've heard I've resisted, I don't like that, I don't want that, you know, and in fact it turns out to be true, from what we can tell. And what you have to understand here, this is little digression for you here, Aaron, just to make life more difficult, people are claiming that they're being abducted by little gray men from another world, or whatever, in order to claim something like that, and it's not happening, there's got to be a serious problems with you. In order to claim that you're being kidnapped by denizens of another world on a routine basis, brought on board their spaceship, and it's not happening, doesn't suggest a quirky personality. It doesn't suggest he just got mistaken one time. It suggests a serious thought processing problem.

Aaron Sakulich: A severe mental issue of some sort.

David Jacobs: A sever mental...this is not just scratching your arm because you think a junebug is biting you, as in the Georgia junebug mass hysteria event. This is massive delusion, complicated, long delusion, and if that is happening to you, it is going to affect everything in your life. It can't be limited to just that tiny, limited pathway. It's going to affect what you eat in the morning, it's going to affect all of your...

[END OF SIDE ONE OF MY MICROCASETTE TAPE.]

Aaron Sakulich: There we go.

David Jacobs: These are going to affect your whole mentality. You're going to be nuts, to put it in the scientific vernacular. And these people are not nuts. That's one of the odd things about it. These people are perfectly sane. Well...there are people who are insane, and say these things, but I don't work with them. Because I am not competent to work with people who have serious mental problems. And I don't want to, because there's nothing I can learn from them. The fact is, though, that these people are not insane. They have taken tests, and they have taken MMPIs, and they have gone through a battery of whatever, and they're not. They're able to carry on high-functioning lives and have families and kids and no-body suspects, etcetera etcetera, it's not as though they're covering it up in a way nobody would suspect. Sometimes that does happen. This is a situation in which they are perfectly sane. And they are exquisitely aware of the fact that what they are telling me is completely crazy. They know that. They are well aware of that. They require anonymity, they don't want anyone to know they're with me, they don't want anyone to find out their names, they are aware of the enormous downside of talking to me about this. There is no upside. This is a no upside phenomenon, this is all downsides. It destroys their work situation, if they're working for somebody, everything is destroyed. But they are not crazy. Let's just say that they are not crazy and that everything is normal, and yet they are seeing these things, and this is happening to them at all times. We've dealt with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people, and they are all saying the same thing. None of them are crazy, none of them have serious mental problems- and this [alien abduction] is not happening. What are you left with, then, if this phenomenon is not happening, and these people are saying it is and they are not suffering from mental delusions? When you put it in that way, you start to suddenly float around in this never-never land of cognition, mentality, of a world of maybe collective unconscious...right now, sleep paralysis, well, it's not really happening, but...

Aaron Sakulich: They're mistaking something else that really is happening.

David Jacobs: Yeah, they are mistaking something else, but when they do that...see...I don't want to get into this, but all debunkers make one or all three of three mistakes: they don't know the data, they distort the data, or they ignore the data. They all do that. There are no exceptions to that, Aaron. There are no exceptions to this. This is the way it has developed, and this is the way that it is. With sleep paralysis, they ignore all of the events that happen during the daytime when the person is not asleep. They also ignore...if the abduction phenomenon goes from A to Z, say, and there's Aprime and Asuper and this and that and forms of B and forms of C and it goes to Z. What they do, they take A. And in the first part of A, people get a sense of floating, and that there's a presence in their room, and they might even see what some people think is a light. I've solved the abduction phenomenon! They ignore all the others, they ignore B through Z. Just ignore it. Or they'll say that's just caused by popular culture and hypnosis; they've been affected by popular culture and bad hypnosis. There's no evidence for that. They just say that.

Aaron Sakulich: Do you find that the...I guess the word I want isn't popularity, but the...presence of facts about alien abductions, things like that, in TV shows and movies, you can go down to Kmart and get a backpack shaped like one of those alien light bulb-shaped heads, with the big eyes, do you feel that that taints, pollutes, or somehow effects your research? If you've been doing this for 20 years, you must have seen something. I think when the X-Files came on TV was the beginning of it.

David Jacobs: Actually, you have to go back a little bit further.

Aaron Sakulich: Well, I can't go back that much further. [note- I was 11 when the X-Files came on TV.]

David Jacobs: It really started around 1987.

Aaron Sakulich: So have you seen any difference in the work you did before 1987 and the work after people and culture became aware of it?

David Jacobs: What I have seen is change over time that has no relation to popular culture whatsoever. I've seen a change in the phenomenon. I've not seen any osmosis of popular culture into it. When people come to me, they know two things: I'm aware of the problems of hypnosis, I'm aware that people can be lead, they all know leading, they all know they don't want to be lead by me. And I can understand that too. That's the least of the problems of hypnosis, is leading. People don't understand that there are many more subtle problems to doing hypnosis with abductees than just leading. You can deal with that. But they know that. They also know that they don't want to pick up stuff from the popular culture and parrot it back to me as if it were true. Those are the two things they're all aware of. They don't want that to happen, they're all on guard about that. The fact is, in popular culture, the real knowledge of the abduction phenomenon is still very low.

Aaron Sakulich: Only for nerds and TV junkies like me.

David Jacobs: It's still extremely low, even then. When I watch things, there's a bunch of new alien shows on for some reason or another...

Aaron Sakulich: Yeah, there's like four.

David Jacobs. Probably because of War of the Worlds, but, though, the first one was Speilbergs' Taken a 13-part show on the Sci-fi channel that was...in my opinion, had some good points and some bad points, and on balance it was awful. And they had some abduction stuff too, and every once in a while, they'll get some tiny little concept that happens in the abduction phenomenon right. All the rest of the time when they're talking about them being abducted, it has no relation to what we know. That's the stuff that would be showing up, and we don't see that showing up. Now, I have to say that people who I deal with are screened fairly carefully as best I can. I talk with them, I have them fill out my questionnaire, and I only accept the ones who I think are the ones that have had a series of abductions and fit the model and all that. So I don't work with people who are not abductees. I try not to work with people that are not abductees. To the best of my knowledge. I can't really tell until I sit down with them and do some research. But I work with the ones that have a potentiality there that the other ones don't. We just haven't seen that. It would be interesting to see how that works, how that would work, how it would fit in to these scenarios if we didn't have that screening, if people said things that didn't fit that scenario. Of course, I'm on guard for it. I've done things in hypnosis, I've taken to doing things, just to see if it will have any effect, of telling people 'what you're telling me really does sound like a dream, it really does sound like sleep paralysis and like a dream. THIS IS A DREAM." Then I'll do my introduction and relax them, and see if the last words they heard, me commanding them that this is a dream, affects it. And it has no effect whatsoever. Absolutely none! Zero! Couldn't care less. Or I'll say, 'I think this is just a remembrance of a previous thing that might or might not have happened, it doesn't sound like it actually happened to you.' No effect whatsoever! 'You know, I don't want to hear anything bad, I don't want you to tell me anything bad....'

Aaron Sakulich: 'Just tell me the good stuff.'

David Jacobs: Just fun, good stuff, how kind they are, how good they are, and it doesn't do any good. Nothing I say will affect them in that commanding way. But the problem with hypnosis is not that. The problem is that they will say things that are wrong. And if you don't catch it right then and there, what you can do is believe that it is true...there's a case that...

[At this point, a portion of the tape is 'off the record'. We're discussing something only obliquely related to abductions. Just a couple of old girls dishing on the neighbors. I'm new to giving interviews, so I've erred on the side of taking too much out rather than too little. ]

Aaron Sakulich: Could you talk a little about where you believe your research has led you?

David Jacobs: Well, what people began to describe early on, even before I began to do my own hypnosis, was that they'd see these weird looking babies, that were sort of half-human, half-alien. Some looked quite human, some looked quite alien. They'd see them as toddlers, as little kids, and eventually we uncovered many many accounts of seeing older kids, adolescents, young adults, and as adults. And we would see them therefore in different roles onboard the ship; helping with abductions, doing this or doing that, depending on their age. And one of the great questions we always had was, if this is happening, and this is a capital I, if this is happening, why is it happening? What's the point here? It didn't seem to be a study or experiment, it seemed to be more of a program. It was almost assembly-line fashion. People being abducted over and over again, seeing these things that happened. It really was industrial, almost. And it was happening around the world, so you knew right away that there was a lot of time and energy being put into this program. As a program, it is therefore goal-directed. It has a reason, and it started at sometime. You figure if it's goal directed, there's a beginning, a middle and an end. If the goal is getting resources, the end will be when they use up all the resources. There's got to be a beginning, a middle and an end to most programs. And this one seemed to have that. And from time to time, people would have these experiences, and the first time I heard it I said "forget it", but I heard it enough times to take note. They'd be shown a screen, and on the screen would be, for example, and American style picnic. Bunch of people standing around, barbecue going, some people playing ball, throwing a ball back and forth, they'd see it on this screen. Maybe there's other abductees with them, that are seeing this too. In their minds, they hear somebody speaking to them, who says "can you tell the difference between us and you?" And the people will look at the screen, see these people standing around like everything's fine, and they'll say "no, I can't. Everybody looks the same to me, what are you talking about?" They're puzzled that this question is even being asked, because the screen shows just regular people. And the voice will go "see, isn't that wonderful? Isn't that great? Soon we will all be together. We'll all be living together, here, essentially, you can't tell the difference, and we'll just be here, and it'll all be wonderful." I began to hear that so many times that I began to realize that these hybrids, the ones who look more human than anything else, and who look like 'us', as they are (and there's a reason for this, and I've sort of discovered how they do this) this might be an integration program into this society for reasons we cannot understand. If we can understand these reasons, we will have solved the UFO and abduction mysteries, hands-down. But we don't have those reasons yet. I would like to have that reasoning before I write my next book, but it doesn't look like I'm going to get it. In 1949, Enrico Fermi posited what he called the Fermi Paradox. At lunch, in an informal manner, with some other physicists he was sitting with, apparently, they were talking about life on other planets. At the time, no-one knew anything about UFOs. They were talking about what aliens would do if aliens were living in our proximity, and they used humans as a model. What we did was came out of Africa, and we spread around the world. We colonized the world, basically. Eventually, this will happen to humans, we'll expand to other planets, and we'll colonize those planets. If there are aliens out there that are very much more advanced than us, we would be seeing colonizations going on. We haven't seen that. If there are aliens, where are they? This is what we'd expect to see. That's the theory.
The fact is that we can't tell how much life there is out there. If there's us, then there's probably a whole lot of other life. If the UFO phenomenon is real, that makes two, if there's two there's two trillion. You can make a legitimate argument for one: us. But it's a dumb argument, a stupid argument, and all science is now showing that it's impossible, because they're finding other planets. If they're finding other planets, even if they're gas giants, they're going to find other ones, smaller ones, ones like earth, and there's going to be billions and billions of them. I can't say that for an absolute fact, but the chances are extremely high.

Aaron Sakulich: Once we get ourselves some better telescopes.

David Jacobs: Right. It's all technology. We can see the gas giants in various ways. But the fact is that this might indeed be a fulfillment of Fermi's paradox. This might be a colonization program of sorts. We might be seeing something that Fermi predicted, although he didn't know what he was talking about. But we might be involved in something like that. There's the "you can't get here from there" argument that all scientists get involved with, distances are so great, even at the speed of light blah blah blah blah. It doesn't matter. The question is, are they here or are they not? How they got here is an engineering question, a physics question, an astronomy question. It's something for the future. Are they here or not? That's the question we have to answer. It's not "we can't figure out how they got here, so they can't be here." The only thing you can do is go on the evidence we have now. That evidence shows that they are here now, in my opinion. It's a sledgehammer between the eyes. It's not a subtle body of evidence. This is not subtle. This is not soemthign you have to tease out, 'oh, I think they might be here.' This is massive, this is overwhelming. It's mind boggling, once you get into the evidence. Most scientists will not get into the eviedence, they think this is a nonsense subject and there's no sense in wasting any time on it. Most scientists just will not give it the time of day. Even if that time is relative, at the speed of light.

Aaron Sakulich: (groans a little.)

David Jacobs: The fact is that you cannot get here from there, therefore they can't be here is a non sequitur. It's based on ignorance. It's an ignorant argument. So, when you go to the real question, are they here or are they not here, you're in a different realm altogether, it's very different. But scientists don't think about those things. The SETI community, for example tries to distance itself from the UFOs, because the SETI community, which is the fringe of astronomy, they're all considered fringe people within the conservative astronomical world, they try to say "well, we might be off to the edge, but we're not crazy like those UFO people." It puts this whole thing off to the side, it's marginalized, you see it on television all of the time, it's not just a popular culture issue, it has a huge public history. I teach a course on it, and it's mostly public history, studies that were done by the air force and the scientific communities...

Aaron Sakulich: [The air force] had to keep the communists from having an advantage on us.

David Jacobs: Yeah, it got involved in the cold war, and that really destroyed the UFO phenomenon for science. The cold war really did it. They could never get off on the right foot after the cold war, that this was somehow endangering American national security, because the Soviet Union could use bogus UFO reports to attack the country, and there were all sorts of other reasons why the Soviet Union got involved in this. We thought the Soviets were involved with this, anyway. The fact is that this is a phenomenon that is happening, it is a global phenomenon, it's not going to stop, it might even be accelerating now for what we know, everything is the same as it was before, only more so, and yet, we are swimming in evidence. We have evidence all over the place. You have people like SETI or cosmologists that are people that are into planetary studies, who have nop evidence of life in outer space at all. Their knowledge of life in outer space is well below the zero range. They have found no evidence, at all, of evidence in outer space, other than markings on an asteroid, which is in debate. So their knowledge is zero. And here we are sitting with all this anecdotal evidence recovered through hypnosis, but we're seeing a picture that is astonishing, a world that is just incredible. A world that is so consistent, regardless of who the person is or where that person was born, or the upbringing of that person, that at least sociologically, you can look at this subject from that point of view, thousands of people seeing all these odd things, that match, you'd think it would interest social scientists in some way, and it only....