From: UFO UpDates - Toronto <ufoupdates@virtuallystrange.net>
Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2003 11:41:18 -0500
Fwd Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2003 11:41:18 -0500
Subject: London Daily Mail On 'Taken' 


Source: The Daily Mail - London

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/

Saturday, January 11, 2003

After 50 years of ridicule, denial and cover-up, is the real truth
about alien abductions about to be revealed?

by

Geoffrey Wansell


On a hot, sticky July afternoon in 1987 Jason Andrews is
celebrating his fourth birthday at his family's cottage near
Slade Green in Kent when the heavens open.

As the thunder crashes all around, there is a single flash of
lightning. Suddenly, a stream of numbers starts pouring out of
Jason's mouth: fantastic numbers, complex mathematical
equations, even algebra - all from a boy who struggles to count
to ten.

Seconds later the windows and doors begin to shake violently and
the four-year old announces to his mother, father and elder
brother: "They're waiting for me. I have to go.'

Jason's father, Paul, grabs his son and stops him from walking
out into the downpour, but the boy struggles violently, and as
he does so the house shakes to its very foundations until,
finally, he seems to wake from a trance and the shaking stops.

It is the first sign that Jason Andrews is no ordinary little
boy and, in the eight years that follow, that is dramatically
confirmed.

It wasn't until 1995, when he was almost 12, that Jason told his
astonished parents exactly what had been happening to him -
  aliens had been abducting him from his bed at night.

"It's always the light that comes first", he confessed to his
mother, Ann. "Then I see the tall one rise up at the foot of the
bed.

Suddenly there's lots of little ones everywhere. They're fuzzy
and indistinct, and they move very fast. I can't move or speak,
but I'm awake and I can see and hear and feel. I want to scream
and run, but the sound doesn't come out and my body doesn't
move.

I hate them. I hate them", the boy sobbed. "I have to go with
them.

They take me to an operating theatre, like at the hospital. It's
all white and shiny Some times it's a circular room with It's
always cold.

They're there. The big one touches me but I don't feel it, like
as if I've had an anaesthetic." Then he added poignantly: "But
you don't believe me, you just think I'm making it all up." In
fact, Ann did believe him, and went on to explore the phenomena
affecting her son's life in a hook, Abducted. This decent,
uncomplicated wife and mother came to the conclusion that we may
not be alone.

Now, the rest of the world may be about to agree with her After
five decades of ridicule, official denials and alleged cover-
  ups, the possibility that aliens. may have visited Earth is
beginning to be taken seriously - and not just by sci-fi
fanatics and UFO freaks.

Scientific researchers are increasingly convinced that thin,
grey-skinned beings about 4ft tall, with large almond-shaped
eyes set in an oval, hairless, head, may not only have landed on
earth, but have also abducted human beings for bizarre
experiments; while all the time there has been an official
conspiracy to keep their visits secret.

Tonight American filmmaker Steven Spielberg, the man who brought
the world Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and ET, will bring
those convictions - and aliens - to life in his new mini-series,
Taken, on BBC2.

A cunning mixture of. fact, conjecture and fiction, based on the
latest research, it tells the story of how aliens affected the
lives of three American families over the past half century.

A massive hit in the U.S., where it was broadcast on consecutive
nights last month, Spielberg's series is the most expensive TV
science faction drama ever made - with a budget of more than =A325
million - and it's certain to re-ignite public debate on this
forever-contentious subject.

But surely all this talk of aliens is far-fetched? As a natural
sceptic, I've always believed so, but over the past weeks and
months of reviewing the evidence I've come to the conclusion
that it does, in fact, warrant the closest investigation.

There certainly seems to have been an official conspiracy to
keep the facts secret.

In the past few months, for example, firm evidence about
unexplained events connected with Unidentified Flying Objects
(UFOs) and extraterrestrial phenomena has begun to appear for
the first time as governments around the world have released
previously secret documents.

And, for the first time, politicians have started to admit that
evidence on the possibility of extraterrestrial life has been
concealed.

In October last year, for example, former White House Chief of
Staff John Podesta, who worked for President Clinton, called on
the U.S. government to de-classify "records that are more than
25 years old" and "to provide scientists with data that will
assist them in determining the real nature of this phenomenon."

Only four years ago, former Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher
hinted to British UFO researcher Georgina Bruni that there was
considerable secret information on the subject, adding
mysteriously: "You can't tell the people."

Bruni was so struck by the remark that she used it as the title
for her 2001 book on alien sightings in Suffolk in 1980. Shortly
afterwards, former Tory Secretary of State also confided to her
on the subject: "I know a lot, but I tell a little."

After a campaign by Bruni and other researchers, the Government
last month released scores of secret files on UFO sightings in
this country, all of which suggest that aliens can no longer be
dismissed merely as the product of fevered imaginations.

Certainly the majority of the public now seem to believe that
aliens do exist. As the editor of the British UFO magazine,
Graham Birdsall, points out: "Sixty years ago, 90 per cent of
the population thought the idea was "absolute rubbish.

Now every single opinion poll on the subject shows that
millions of people firmly believe in UFOs."

Last June, for example, when it was announced that Bonnybridge
in Scotland boasted more UFO sightings than any other place in
the world, a Sky News poll showed 65 per cent of its viewers
believed in UFOs.

Five years earlier - in one of the biggest telephone polls ever
conducted on TV - 100,000 viewers phoned ITV to answer the
question "Have aliens already visited Earth?" and 92 per cent
voted "Yes."

"There's strong evidence to suggest that Earth has been visited
by extraterrestrial intelligence", insists Birdsall.

"And after my own research I am prepared to admit that it is no
longer possible to dismiss people such as Birdsall as 'cranks'."

Spielberg, whose film Close Encounters Of The Third Kind
dramatically raised the issue of alien encounters for a global
audience, is certainly convinced they've happened.

Fascinated by the possibility from childhood, he's devoted part
of his life to discovering the truth and has become an authority
on the subject as a result.

But there is a striking difference between Spielberg's approach
in his TV series Taken and the one he took two decades ago in
ET.

This time the aliens he is depicting are not trying to phone
home they're here to subvert, and ultimately control, the human
race.

And the new TV series, his first since the award-winning Band Of
Brothers, is not only about the arrival of aliens, it's also
about 'alien abductions'.

"I thought I couldn't do justice to this genre in a two-hour
movie", Spielberg explains.

"We would need a lot more time to do justice to the history of
alien abductions, starting back in 1947, right through to
today."

Watching the first episodes, it's clear that Spielberg has done
everything in his power to create a fictional series' on the
edge of fact. This is no sci-fi comic book, no Invasion Of The
Body Snatchers, but a compelling and all-too-plausible - drama.

British UFO expert Mike Soper, of Contact International, is as
convinced as Spielberg that alien abductions have happened.

"The telling fact is that there are features common to all the
people's stories", he maintains. "They all remember being taken
to a craft, and often talk about being 'examined'..... "Many
talk about something being 'implanted' in their bodies, and when
they return they often have triangular marks on their bodies and
aren't wearing exactly the same clothes they were before the
abduction."

Ministry of Defence civil servant Nick Pope, 37, agrees.

"Abductions most definitely do occur", he says. "And although
the phrase 'alien abductions' is a gift to those people who want
to deride it, there are genuine, ordinary people who believe
they have been in extraordinary situations."

Pope isn't a man with an anorak and a slightly weird look in his
eyes. He is a down-to-earth civil servant who had no interest in
aliens at all until 1991, when the MOD asked him to investigate
reports of UFOs, alien abductions and other strange phenomena.

"The 100 or so people I interviewed about being abducted by
aliens weren't publicity seekers merely after their fifteen
minutes of fame", he explains.

"I came to the conclusion that some of these people had to be
telling the truth. And if just one of the abductees' reports is
true, the implications for the human race would be profound and
disturbing."

One person who helped to convince Pope was 37 year old British -
  born make-up artist Bridget Grant, whom he met seven years ago.

She addressed an audience of 750 people at the British UFO
conference in Leeds in 2001, where she talked about her
abduction. She explained that in February 1993, when she was
living in Los Angeles; she was driving with a friend in the
Brentwood area at 5.50pm one bright, sunny day when she drew up
at a set of traffic lights.

"I suddenly saw this silver tip out of the corner of my eye",
she explained. "Then, I saw that it was a solid silver craft,
with a red-orange colour underneath it, about 35 - 45 ft in
diameter. It came right above the car and I leaned towards the
steering wheel and looked up."

The craft "flew really, really low" over her head, she said, and
away to the west, Her friend Jane, sitting in the passenger
seat, saw it, too.

Grant was so disturbed by the experience that in September 1998
she went to see the American UFO researcher Budd Hopkins, of the
Intruders Foundation in New York, to undergo four sessions of
'regressive hypnosis'.....

She wanted his help to remember the exact details of what
happened on that afternoon in 1993 because she thought she had
forgotten something. It appeared that she had. For when this
pale young 'woman, with shoulder length dark hair; addressed the
Leeds audience she told them she'd not just seen the spacecraft
but had been abducted by it, even though she thought she was in
her car the entire time.

"There is often a time shift element in the stories of
abduction, where the individual doesn't realise that time. has
passed", explains Nick Pope.

"My hands were gripping the steering wheel", Grant explained to
the conference. "But then I felt a pressure, like my body was
being sucked. It felt like all the atoms of my body were going
through the steering wheel.

Then I saw this being. I was fascinated by its appearance - it
was transparent, had white hair and was carrying a baby."

Hard though it may be for some to believe, and Grant is
reluctant to discuss the events further, there is no doubt that
the artists' impression of the being which she said she saw
looks uncannily like many of the other descriptions of aliens
that have surfaced in recent years.

However, as sceptics point out there have been so many
depictions of 'space creatures' with dome heads and large oval
eyes that it is hardly surprising that this has become something
of a stereotype.

When Spielberg was researching the aliens for Close Encounters,
he held lengthy consultations with the veteran American
astronomer Dr J. Allen Hynek - a once-fierce critic of UFOs and
alien phenomena who changed his mind completely after he became
a consultant on the subject for the United States Air Force.

Hynek assembled the authoritative American dossier on alien
encounters, Project Blue Book, and advised Spielberg what aliens
looked like.

But the idea that little grey - rather than green - men with
elongated fingers, legs and neck, sounds incredibly far-fetched
- until you talk to Georgina Bruni. "When I interviewed Lady
Thatcher a few years ago,' Bruni explains, "I was describing to
her the fact that US military personnel here in Britain had
reportedly had contact with, aliens, and an alien spacecraft, in
Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk in December 1980. I expected her
to tell me that I'd been watching too many episodes of the X
Files, But she didn't look shocked at all. She just said, twice:
'You can't tell the people.'"

With Bruni's encouragement, in the wake of this conversation
Lord Hill-Norton, a former Chief of the Defence Staff tabled 18
Parliamentary questions in the House of Lords - as a result of
which the Government released more than 200 previously secret
files concerning UFOs and aliens.

One of the files revealed that then Prime Minister Sir Winston
Churchill wanted the matter investigated in 1952.

He sent a memo to his scientific adviser, Sir Henry Tizard,
asking: "What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount
to? What can it mean? What is the truth?"

After several months, Tizard reported that all the sightings
were "explicable by natural events", although shortly afterwards
the Government explicitly banned RAF personnel from discussing
sightings with anyone not from the military.

The U.S. Government had adopted a similar policy of official
secrecy five years earlier, in the wake of a spate of incidents
near the US Air Force base at Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1949
- incidents that Spielberg uses as his starting point for his TV
series.

And so the modern history of UFOs, aliens and official coverups
was born.

British UFO researcher Jenny Randles, who has spent more than 20
years investigating UFO and alien phenomena, maintains that in
more recent times alien kidnapping has become much more common,

"An ever growing tide of people suspect that they may be alien
abductees", she says.

So is it fact or fiction? I'm not certain, but the evidence of
witnesses such as Jason Andrews and Bridget Grant is hard to
ignore. And it's clear that, as the 2lst century begins,
opinions are changing.

The Government announced recently that it was "open-minded'
about the "existence or otherwise of extraterrestrial life
forms' a markedly different official position from the one taken
half a century ago.

Perhaps the politicians are beginning to accept that we are not
alone.

Steven Spielberg certainly does.