By Annie MacFie

Tying up last month's abduction material for the BLUEGRASS BULLETIN got me wondering - as I hope reading it got you wondering - what do I think about all this? Like most of you, I've read enough about it to believe something other than mass hallucination is going on, and I would sure-as-shootin' like to know what!

Hypotheses are many: Are abductions involuntary experimenter-guinea pig relationships between our kind and some other? A program of cosmic enlightenment to prepare us earthlings for some higher-vibrational advancement? An elaborate charade of thousands of special effects dramas carried out by some very human conspiracy? Is the whole phenomenon only a 20th Century wrinkle in some mythos that's been playing itself out since the dawn of human consciousness? Whether the answer is any, all or none of the above, we're still left with that other big question - WHAT FOR?

I read somewhere that the scientific approach to a problem is to first consider the simplest solution and disprove that before you go for the complicated stuff. To my way of thinking, the guinea pig hypothesis is the simplest. Whether the "others" are extraterrestrials, interdimensionals, time travelers, etc. is up for grabs. We don't know if there are other worlds a few vibrations away sharing the space we think of as earth, but we do know there are other worlds other than our own, possibly surrounded by inhabited planets. We don't know if time can be traveled, but we do know that space can be navigated. The planets of our solar system don't appear to be habitable, and interstellar space seems too vast to be crossed by the thousands of UFOs that visit us for them to be from light-years away; however, because we can't live in these environments and we can't jump the speed-of-light barrier doesn't prove it can't be done. The old E.T. theory, unfashionable as it's become in some UFO circles, does work out to be the most down-to-earth guess as to who these aliens are.

What people who claim to be abducted by them tell us is consistent with what happens to lifeforms on our own planet (animals) being studied by more powerful lifeforms than themselves (us). I've heard it quipped that because we see so many UFOs, we must be the Disneyland of the galaxy. I rather think earth could be the Serengeti Plain of our galaxy, visited by every biologist with a grant and a film crew.

Think about it: We are at a unique and crucial time in the evolution of an intelligent species. Human beings at this red-hot moment are at once living as neophyte spacefarers, as neolithic hunter/gatherers and at every notch along the ladder in-between. How often does one planet provide that kind of diversity for intergalactic science to sink its food-capturing apparatus into?

The awesome number of abduction reports and the variety in descriptions of the type of creatures who are doing it indicate that a lot of different groups are involved. We've got everything from pint-sized soil-samplers to reptilian rapists coming here, doing pretty much as they please. So where does that leave us?

A polar bear darted with angel dust, weighed, temperature rudely taken and fitted with an aggravating thing around its neck doesn't know it's being tracked to calculate how large a territory some caring zoologist will petition some bureaucrats to mark off for a wildlife sanctuary. All it know is it's had a scary, painful and sinister-feeling experience.

Possibly that's what's happening to us. The problem is we don't know if we're being nabbed by a Jane Goodall, who respects and strives to protect the animals she studies, or by a John Rossi, City of Hope's notorious vivisector. For that matter, we could be at the mercy of any student with a science project and the keys to its dad's space coupe! And if we are, are "they"doing anything to us that isn't being done every day here on earth by us to beings we happen to be powerful enough to abuse?

Maybe the lesson to be learned here is: DO UNTO OTHER LIFEFORMS AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM DO UNTO YOU. Now, if only it were exclusively the cruel who were being taught it.