The Hybrid “Project”

Whatever race is dying out, unable to breed, [then] I don’t mind being a part of the next one starting up.
~ Nona

[This] intelligence is saying, “Well, we mean to ‘impregnate’ in a deeper, metaphoric, sense and you don’t get it, so we’ll try to make this in some form that you can get.”
~ Eva

The Hybrid “Project” in an Ecological Context

Since the publication of Budd Hopkins’s pioneering Intruders, some investigators have come to see the creation of a race of human/alien hybrid offspring as an important, if not the central purpose or meaning of the abduction phenomenon (Hopkins 1987; Jacobs 1992 and 1998). Although I do not perceive the hybrid “project” as so literally biological as do these researchers, experiences related to some sort of human/alien sexual and reproductive connection are an important aspect of the phenomenon in many, though not all, cases in my work. I have gradually come to see the hybrid “project” in the larger context of the ecological crisis, as discussed in the last chapter.

Some abductees report that the hybrid “project” grows out of the fact that the beings made their own planet unlivable and destroyed their own capacity to breed. Now, they say, the aliens are replenishing their stock by mating with us. Jim Sparks, for example, says that the aliens need humans “for their long-term survival” and “to create worker beings for trade and commerce.” He finds it remarkable that “aliens, with all their wondrous technology, still need a human mother to incubate.” In addition some experiencers see the beings as using images of their own past ecological and biological devastation to confront human beings with what we are currently doing to the Earth and ourselves.

Some abductees report that the hybrid phenomenon is more directly related to the damage we are doing to ourselves and the Earth. “My husband is a physician,” Sue says, and he sees that “women and men are becoming more infertile at an alarming rate.” She relates this to the toxic pollution of the soil. “It’s going to take centuries for us to truly get rid of it,” she says, “unless we come up with some technology that can eliminate it.” Sue also sees the reported taking and examination of ground samples (see Hopkins 1996, p. 254) and animal parts (Howe 1993) by the beings as related to the deterioration of the Earth’s capacity to sustain life. Catherine believes the hybrids are being created “so that if humans did destroy the planet there would still be alternatives” (Mack 1995, chap. 7). Perhaps, she suggests, by crossbreeding with humans, “the aliens are trying to come up with a form that would be more physical but could still exist in the other realm.” Some experiencers, like Karin and Jim Sparks, perceive the hybrid “program” (Sparks’s word) as related to the needs of both species. Jim has been shown a “little hybrid girl” that “could have possibly been a part of me.” He believes that “if we fail to correct our seriously endangered environment,” the “hybrids will be used to repopulate the Earth.” The hybrid program is thus, he says, “a secret club” or “insurance program,” a “backup plan.” Perhaps the hybrids, Sparks suggests, being “a bit more intelligent” and “a bit less emotional than we are,” will “have a bit more respect for the environment.” Similarly, Nona sees the hybrid “project” as related to our potential for “wiping out the entire planet.” At times she seems to accept the taking of her genetic material as a contribution to the preservation of both species.

The Reproductive Sequence and Its Actuality

Budd Hopkins first brought to our attention the fact that at the center of the alien abduction phenomenon was some sort of vast “project” or “program,” seemingly initiated by the beings, to create a hybrid race that combines human and alien characteristics. Since Hopkins’s discovery (1987) that reproductive activity might be a regular feature of the phenomenon, abduction investigators, including myself, have consistently replicated a number of Hopkins’s findings (Jacobs 1992 and 1998; Bullard 1994b; Mack 1994). As we shall see, in considering the apparent reproductive and sexual dimensions of the human/alien connection, difficult ontological distinctions become of particular importance.

Although many of the details vary from experiencer to experiencer, the basic elements of the hybrid “project” that have been reported are as follows.

Sperm is forcibly taken from males and eggs from females of childbearing age. Later the teenage girls or women experience that they are pregnant as a result of the reimplanting by the beings of a fertilized conception, which presumably contains an added alien component. Subsequently, during another visitation, the fetuses are taken from the human females. On the ships the abductees may see rows of incubators containing hybrid babies in early gestation. Later women experiencers—and less frequently, men—are brought together and urged to nurture one or more hybrid offspring, which they are told are theirs and which they usually recognize to be their own offspring.

Some of the most disturbing and poignant moments for the experiencers, and especially persuasive ones for investigators, occur when the experiencers recall or relive how it feels to be brought together with a creature toward whom they feel a strong maternal or paternal attachment but whom they may never see again. A number of experiencers, in the course of the investigation, may learn that they have an alien, hybrid, or even a human mate in the “other world” with whom they feel a strong bond, sometimes creating a moral dilemma for marriages of this Earth plane. (This subject will be discussed more fully in chapter 13.) I am convinced that the reproductive narrative is powerfully real for the experiencers. To the best of my knowledge, after thousands of hours of investigation with scores of abductees, no Freudian or other individual psychodynamic explanation seems to account for its basic elements. In other words I have found nothing in the experiencers’ histories, current personal lives, desires, needs, or conflicts, conscious or unconscious (as might occur, for example, in hysterical pregnancies where the underlying wish to be pregnant is obvious), that would explain this strange part of the story.

Whether hybrids are being created literally on the material plane of reality, or whether the phenomenon needs instead to be looked at some what differently—as, for example, an aspect of collective consciousness occurring largely in another reality—has important implications for our understanding of it. A literalist interpretation could understandably give rise to a threatening scenario involving an agenda of alien colonization of the Earth for selfish purposes (Jacobs 1998). An “interdimensional” view would be more complex and could include energetic, mythic, and metaphoric components with an emphasis on the understanding of human consciousness and spiritual evolution. My own investigations found evidence to support both views. I will present these data as objectively as I can and invite the reader to join me in trying to make sense of this compelling mystery.

For most, but not all, of the abductees with whom I have explored sexual and reproductive experiences, the encounters and images are so vividly present, so real and emotionally intense, that their language becomes quite literal. In Andrea’s experience the aliens are “feverishly collecting the seeds of life,” and “the hybrids are here to populate the Earth as an insurance policy.” Andrea is the mother of two daughters from her twenty-year marriage. They “got me at my weakest point,” she says—her motherliness. “They really know how to do it. It just feels real. I’m already a mother. I know what it feels like. It feels like I have a son.” Nona believes she has many hybrid children on “these large ships that I’ve been on, but I don’t know that for a fact.” Jim Sparks sees the aliens as literally taking body materials from us. “They use us,” he said. Credo Mutwa believes the mantindane are “mining” or “harvesting” us.

“Perhaps we’re just walking stock with a little bit of brains,” Isabel suggested in a cynical moment.

For many abductees the reproductive experiences, including unmistakable symptoms of pregnancy and subsequent loss, are so vivid and real that they use the language of genetic biology and speak of DNA alteration and genetic harvesting, although no studies of which I am aware document actual genetic changes. Nor, for that matter, has research successfully documented the fact of sperm or egg harvesting, alien impregnation, or the existence of hybrids in the material world as we know it.

Obstetricians and gynecologists do sometimes find that their patients have pregnancy symptoms and positive pregnancy tests, then subsequently discover that there is no fetus and the symptoms have subsided.

From the physician’s perspective, this is a “missed” abortion; the fetal tissue was reabsorbed or passed without the patient’s knowing it. In a few cases abduction researchers have even correlated such accounts with recovered abduction memories that occurred at the time that the fetus seems to have been lost (or taken). But to my knowledge no gynecologist has been able or willing to verify that the product of conception may have been taken by alien beings or even ended mysteriously. (For a careful discussion of the diagnostic questions involved in regard to diagnosing an “alien pregnancy” see Miller 1994, pp. 262–70.) Having, however, gone through over and over again with abductees the pain, trauma, and resentment associated with the apparent taking of sperm or eggs and the processes of impregnation and fetus removal, together with the sensitive discrimination of which some abductees are capable between “alien” and ordinary pregnancies, I have become persuaded that whether or not babies have literally been created, something of great power and intensity has occurred (see also Mack 1995).

Impregnation and Pregnancy

The concrete sparseness, consistency, and certainty of abductees’ descriptions of their reproductive experiences, their clarity of recall about the impregnation and gestation cycle, and their conviction about its actuality, virtually rules out the possibility that fantasy alone can explain these accounts.

It may start, Karin said, with “a needle thing that goes way in you” when they take her “seed.” In another instance a fetus was “vibrationally planted.” The being “turned my stomach into light, and so it became penetrable.” The timing of this “needle thing” for her is odd, as it seems to occur “a week after a typical ovulation” (emphasis mine). Perhaps, she suggests, this is when “they do the implant.” Isabel has the impression that the beings “really need” to take her physical body to maintain her health as a breeder (“for tune-ups”). As part of this process, they give her a bitter liquid to drink and “put in” her what she calls a “vaccine.” “I don’t remember seeing any actual needles,” she said, but afterward “I had a mark on me.” The drink, she believes, is “just like a medicine” or “a super vitamin.” “If I’m healthy, their babies will be healthier,” she presumes.

The beings need her physical body, she says, to hold the “funny-looking” babies or to try to have her breast-feed them.

Within twenty-four hours of the experience in which she believes she was impregnated “my belly’s bloated,” and she has the sensation “of a mild pregnancy” that she distinguishes from “real pregnancies” that she has also had. In the alien pregnancy “the body shifts chemically. It’s subtler. I don’t get morning sickness like I do with a normal pregnancy.” For three months Karin’s periods are “not right, where I almost don’t bleed.” She has been shown, after about three months, how they “took it out when they opened the tummy with light.” “When they take you physically,” Isabel has said, “that’s when I wake up with bruises or my whole pelvic region hurting.” When she is experiencing an alien pregnancy, she will “feel things in my womb, like little tummy tickles,” but much earlier than with a normal pregnancy. “At five weeks the movement is like the way it would be if you were four or five months pregnant. I had three children, so I know what the fluttering feels like,” she says. “My breasts got tender. I just got the whole nine yards, pregnancy symptoms.” On one occasion she was so “absolutely positive” that she was pregnant that she took a pregnancy test, which was negative.

Something like this process is familiar to Credo Mutwa. He says that the mantindane (his description of them is virtually identical to our gray aliens) “are sexually compatible with human beings and are capable of making terrestrial women pregnant.”1 Like American abductees, he was shown, in the place to which he reported being taken by the beings, “something that was swimming in a big bottle. . . . I could see this fetus moving like a little frog inside this liquid. I couldn’t understand a thing, and this creature, sir, was trying to make me understand what I was seeing” (see also p. 211).

The Hybrids

The straightforward and highly detailed way abductees describe hybrids and their relationship to them is very convincing and leaves little doubt that these experiences, and the hybrids themselves, are in some sense real.

But this does not mean that they are flesh-and-blood babies or children in a purely physical sense. Nona, for example, reported a memory of “these children” who came “walking off the ship” and “formed a semicircle in front of me. They looked very much like my daughter” Elizabeth (who is especially short), she said. “Their bodies were short for their heads. Their heads seemed oversized. They had very blue eyes. They had very thin, wispy hair. . . . I would say they were probably three and a half feet tall, but they all looked the same age.” “You’re our mother and we need you,” they said. Nona felt conflicted and told them, “‘ I can’t go. I have my family and I can’t go.’ I felt badly about saying no, but I couldn’t just go. I couldn’t leave.” Isabel has seen “funny-looking” children on the craft and also dreamed about “weird-looking babies.” She describes these “creatures” as solid but lighter in weight or density than human children. Of one of them, she said, “Her face was mottled. It had dark and light patches. She had long limbs, and she wrapped her limbs around me, and I held her like this on my hip and her leg was in front. The other one was dangling.” The “skin looked dry and scaly and flaky, like she needed lotion. She looked so lonely. I felt she was mine in a biological sense.” A year later Isabel described a boy who “looked like he was made of marble toast.” He had “two-tone skin,” which looked “really rough, very thick.” He was “very small” and had patchy hair and nails that looked almost like claws. Another baby had a “squarelike” head and big eyes. He was a “tan baby” and looked weak and even smaller.

Isabel has dreams of being in a room, surrounded by all these strange children.

Isabel, like Nona, felt conflicted about holding and nurturing these babies. “I’d like to say I feel maternal instincts, but I don’t. . . . At first it’s almost repulsive, like I don’t want to touch the babies. But then the babies are so sweet, so beautiful, their disposition is so sweet and curious.” I asked how their bodies feel. “Very fragile,” she replied, “like you had to hold her gently. She didn’t feel solid. She was so light—so very light.” Sometimes Isabel has “dreams” in which the babies are “wanting me to hold them and breast-feed them, but I don’t have any milk.” These dreams feel like real experiences. When she wakes up, her nipples are sore and she still has “that feeling of holding that child.” She does not want to be helped to “remember everything. I don’t want to remember what it’s like to give birth to all these babies because, being a mother, I know I would constantly be worrying about them.” Sometimes experiencers in our sessions relive elements of the “reproductive cycle” with such precise detail and such powerful emotions that it is hard to believe that what they are reporting did not literally happen just as they describe it. Karin remembered a recent abduction experience in which a “live fetus” was extracted from her and put inside an “incubator.” Crying out in pain, she recalled watching the beings take out of her a “little, little, bitty thing” that she estimated was less than two inches long.

“God, it’s ugly. It’s so sad and so ugly. They’re so small,” she said. The head was “pink, kind of reddish.” One of the beings took the thing in his hands. Then they took it through “kind of a U-shaped doorway” that was “off to the right, down the hallway.” This time the beings told Karin telepathically that they were going to show her where they took the conception. It was “time to learn it,” she said, “like it’s part of the science class.” “Normally we don’t have to move this quickly,” she was told, “but because we have a live fetus, we need to get it into its incubator.” A hybrid “nurse,” who Karin estimated was about five feet tall and was known to her, led her along. Karin and the nurse followed three other beings. One of them had the “fetus” in its hand and led Karin to a “wedge-shaped” and “reddish, rust-colored” room to the left that was dark, “except for these things that are lit up. And there’s the bubble sound I always hear. We always hear these bubbles. It’s like a fish tank.” They put the fetus into one of these tanks and attached “this thing over its head and it goes in its ears” because it cannot just “free float.” This “thing” seemed somehow to connect the fetus to the tank.

“They say it doesn’t hurt,” Karin said, “and you’re thinking, ‘God, it’s so small.’” Karin said she saw lots of “other incubators all around in the room, and lots of other little hybrids” at “different stages.” A foot-long creature was floating in a nearby incubator, “but his eyes are covered.

That’s weird. You could see where he had big black eyes, but they were covered with skin” or a “membrane. You could see the slit, like when a lizard closes its eyes.”

Trauma

Needless to say, several aspects of the sexual/reproductive sequence can be intensely traumatic for the experiencers and fill them with resentment and sadness. They may become particularly troubled when they fear or believe that their children, especially teenage daughters, are being used in this process. In Abduction I wrote of the bitter humiliation for men of having their penises stimulated, ejaculation induced, and sperm taken against their wills. Credo Mutwa confided, “I don’t know why the mantindane stole semen from me. Once a mantindane has dealt with you, you become afraid of making love to a woman. The moment your semen comes out, you recall that terrible day and something becomes rather flat in you at night, I assure you.” For women the whole process of being used as a “breeder” can be hurtful, which is compounded by the sadness and loss associated with feeling they have offspring on the ship or in whatever place or realm the hybrids exist.

Karin is frustrated that the beings take her eggs and her fetuses. “You have these babies,” she says, “and they just take them.” In one of our sessions, her rage boiled over as she recalled an intrusive vaginal procedure. She was in the ob-gyn position, like “in the stirrups.” “So there you are in this spaceship, and your legs are spread again. Then this needle thing, this thing I don’t like, is inserted in my body, right through my uterus.” Although there was “this gentleness about them,” Karin said, “I don’t want to do this right now.” After such an intrusion, “my body’s going to be screwed up again for the next three months.” She “knows” she has a son, whom she calls Barien, “out there.” “I’ve always been subconsciously traumatized by the loss of that child. . . . It was my child, and even at a really young age, it’s within your womb, and your brain knows it. Deep inside, your soul knows it. . . . I’ve never wanted children since then, largely because I’m still subconsciously mourning the loss of that one.” Nona has been troubled by “the idea of taking eggs from my body. I had difficulty with that, and with the potential for being bred without knowing it. Sustaining their race, or whatever it is,” is “okay with me,” she said, but she feels anger and hurt that the beings do not “share that with me.” She cannot allow herself to think about the pain associated with her “emotional attachment” to her hybrid offspring.

The general subject of relationship between experiencers and alien beings will be discussed in chapter 13. Here I will note only that about three years after I began this work, experiencers began increasingly to report to me instances of powerful, loving connection with the beings, especially in the context of the hybrid “project” (see, for example, Peter in Abduction, chap.13). In some instances they tell of intense, intimate relationships with alien or human/alien beings whom they consider to be their mates in the other realm and with whom they may create and parent hybrids. This may bring with it jealousies and a potential feeling of betrayal on the part of a spouse on Earth, which provides a challenge for the couple to work out together.

Andrea, for example, has described to me with strong emotion and great detail her ecstatic, erotic relationship with a human/alien mate that she carries on “up there.” She believes that a little boy and a little girl have come from this union. The boy in particular, she says, “wasn’t made the way they make babies”—that is, by the elaborate artificial sequence described in this chapter, in Abduction, and by other investigators (Hopkins 1987; Jacobs 1992 and 1998). Together Andrea and this man, she believes, are the parents of this boy, as a result of their intimate connection.

All of this is so real to her that she feels guilty that she may be betraying her husband, whom she loves. But this guilt is mitigated by the fact that the relationship with her space mate is not occurring on Earth, although Andrea believes he “is living here in human form at least some of the time.”

The Hybrid “Project” is an extract from Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters by John E. Mack, M.D., Published by White Crow Books.