Greetings Earthlings

Where: Medicine Bow National Forest, Wyoming, USA.
When: October 25, 1974.
Witness: Carl Higdon.

[A hearty Greetings Earthlings welcome to Graylien - the blog's very first guest poster. I hope he enjoys his stay and returns soon and often.]

Introduction

Celtic folklore is replete with tales of hunters who encounter otherworldly beings in enchanted forests. It was perhaps inevitable that this motif would later resurface in UFO folklore. One of the most vivid of such narratives was produced in October 1974 by a 41-year-old oil driller named Carl Higdon.

Event

Higdon's close encounter took place in the Medicine Bow National Forest, Wyoming. It began when he saw a group of five elk standing motionless in a clearing. He took aim at one with his rifle and fired. What happened next blatantly defied the laws of physics:

"The bullet left the gun's barrel noiselessly and in slow motion," he recalled. "It floated like a butterfly, finally falling to the ground about 50 feet from where I stood. All around me there was a painful silence - not a chirping bird or the rustling of leaves on nearby trees could be heard."

The eerie silence was broken by the sound of a twig snapping. Turning round, Higdon found himself confronted by a bow-legged "man-like" being wearing a tight black "wetsuit". "How ya doin'?" asked the being genially. "Pretty good, I guess," replied the astonished Higdon.

The stranger, who introduced himself as "Ausso", had a chinless face with small eyes and no visible ears. A pair of antennae poked out through his golden straw-like hair, and in place of hands he had pointed appendages. "Are you hungry?" he asked. Without waiting for a reply, he "floated" a packet of pills towards Higdon. "These are four-day pills," he explained. As if in a trance, Higdon obediently swallowed one and pocketed the rest.

It was then that he noticed a transparent cube-shaped object, 7 feet long and 5 feet wide, resting in the clearing. "Do you want to come along?" asked Ausso. Higdon shrugged his shoulders helplessly. Suddenly, he found himself sitting inside the cube. Like the TARDIS, it was much bigger on the inside than it appeared from the outside. The interior was roomy enough to contain Higdon, Ausso, a second humanoid, and a cage containing the five elk Higdon had seen earlier. ("We must have been shrunk - there's no other way!" he later surmised.)

Ausso placed a helmet "with a wire sticking out" over Higdon's head. Then he pointed his appendage at a control panel, causing a lever to move. Perhaps Higdon's subsequent experiences were merely illusions generated by the helmet, but it seemed to him that they were now in motion. Half-an-hour later, the craft arrived at Ausso's home planet, "163,000 light miles (sic) from Earth". It landed beside a tall tower festooned with multi-coloured flashing lights. When Higdon complained that the lights burned his eyes, Ausso retorted, "Your sun burns us too!"

Higdon noticed a small group of normal-looking humans standing near the tower. Then he suddenly found himself inside the building. Ausso led him into a "cubicle-type office" and placed him before an opaque "shield", which seemed to examine him. Then the alien escorted him back to the craft, saying, "We'll take you back since you're not any good for what we need".

The cube soon arrived back in the forest and hovered directly over Higdon's truck. For no apparent reason, Ausso pointed at the truck and made it disappear. Then he pointed at Higdon, causing the packet of "four-day pills" to float out of his pocket. Higdon suddenly found himself back on the ground, dazed and confused. He stumbled through the forest, unsure of who he was or where he was going. Eventually he found his truck, mired in mud, and radioed for help.

Higdon's rescuers reported that he seemed utterly delirious. At first, he did not even recognise his own wife among them. He was kept under observation in hospital until the next day. Fragmented memories of his close encounter gradually returned to him, later enhanced by sessions of hypnotic regression conducted by researcher Leo Sprinkle.

Aftermath

In evaluating Higdon's experience, it is perhaps best to begin at the end. Only three facts seem certain. Firstly, Higdon was found in a hysterical condition, suffering from exhaustion and amnesia. Secondly, his truck had somehow ended up stuck deep in mud, far from where he remembered parking it. Thirdly, while in hospital he repeatedly complained that his head hurt, although doctors could find no sign of physical injury. "The best way I can describe what I felt is to say it seemed as if someone had hit me over the head with a baseball bat," he later explained.

Much of the material recovered through hypnosis by Leo Sprinkle seems deeply suspect. The aliens, Sprinkle discovered, travelled using "magnetic force". They were visiting Earth in order to obtain animals and fish to breed on their planet. Unfortunately, our fish could not survive in their oceans, so they had to keep "coming back after them".

Higdon suspected that it was not just our animals that the aliens were breeding. He had, after all, seen a group of humans on their home planet. Perhaps they had only sent him back to Earth because they had discovered that he was unable to father children, having had a vasectomy. "I kind of sensed that they wanted young people," he told Sprinkle.

Thoughts

Alien breeding programmes and spacecraft that use magnetic forces have long been part and parcel of UFO folklore. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Higdon's story is an apparently minor detail that is rarely included in summaries of the case. All the while he was with the aliens, Higdon recalled, he only ever saw them from the front. "I was looking straight into their faces… [I] never looked at the side or back. There was just a direct front view - that's all I ever got".

It would be interesting to know whether Higdon had any Swedish ancestry. Swedish folklore tells us of a race of forest spirits called the Skogsra who are often encountered by hunters. Here is what Nancy Arrowsmith's A Field Guide to Little People has to say about them:

The males are shape changers… and can expand and shrink at will. Their true form is that of old men with wide hats, although they can appear as horned owls or come riding a storm or whirlwind… They have claws in place of fingernails and always keep their backs hidden. Anyone who manages to catch a glimpse of their backs will see either a long cow tail trailing out or will notice that they have no back - what should be solid flesh is instead a transparent hollow.

As well as using human males for breeding purposes, the Skogsra delight in leading them astray:

If they can make a man answer 'Yes' to one of their calls in the woods, he is in their power. They lead him astray for hours, forcing him through brambles and thorns, enticing him into bogs. If a man refuses to answer one of their calls, they can trap him in huge invisible nets from which he can only free himself at the sound of a church bell.

Arrowsmith tells us that hunters should always leave offerings for the Skogsra, and if possible "enter into a compact with them" over hunting rights. A sure way to attract the Skogsra's attention is to kill an animal that they consider theirs. Higdon - you will recall - encountered Ausso after shooting at a group of elk, which the alien subsequently bagged for himself.

Writing soon after the incident, Ufologist Timothy Green Beckley declared that Higdon's experience was "equal in importance to the famed case of Betty and Barney Hill". Today, the Higdon case is all but forgotten, while the Hill abduction continues to generate seemingly interminable debate. Why should this be so?

Perhaps Higdon's tale of visiting Ausso's home planet was too reminiscent of the fables told by the long-discredited contactees. Perhaps his revelation that aliens were travelling "163,000 light miles" to Earth in order to steal our fish was too reminiscent of bad science fiction. Or perhaps he was simply guilty of encountering the wrong sort of alien - spiky-haired blondes rather than little grey men. Nevertheless, for sheer richness of detail, Higdon's narrative remains one of the most compelling visions in the UFO canon - even if it has been relegated to the Apocrypha.

Sources:
1) Arrowsmith, Nancy, A Field Guide to the Little People (London: Macmillian, 1977).
2) Brookesmith, Peter, UFO! The Complete Sightings Catalogue (London: Blandford Press, 1995).
3) Green Beckley, Timothy, Strange Saga (USA: Global Communications, 2005).
4) http://www.ufoevidence.org/

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Added: August 8th, 2007
Tags: All, Fairy, Blond, One-Piece Suit, USA, contactee, 1974, Cube-shaped Craft, Hypnosis
Views: 2022
Comments: 2

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