There are 386 pages in this book and to be honest I had only read through a few before I groaned. Fowler is a man who had the reputation of being a good old fashioned Ufologist who dug into cases until he solved them or they were left as unidentified.
Now I am beginning to wonder and re-assess.
Just how the whole Andreasson Affair as it is known stretched to so many books and won accolades I have no idea. I read the original book when it was published in...1979? At that time I thought the account was mind-blowing but I had concerns as things never sounded quite right -that dawned on me after the second reading.
Betty Andreasson (Luca after marrying another "abductee", Bob Luca) is a person with fundamental Christian beliefs -a little like Fowler. Normally a person's faith is unimportant (some say that it is) but on reading the books it is evident that some aspects of Betty's experiences are tainted by those beliefs. At one time this case was called "the best investigated abduction" but I am sorry to say that, in the abduction research, it can be called anything but.
Just as Dr Karla Turner's books are classic examples of how a rational person can be drawn into believing that they have undergone UFO abductions after no real interest in the subject so Fowler has provided us with a classic case of "Ufologist turned abductee". Investigating abduction claims can be mind blowing if you are not prepared and in Fowler's case he notes how even a standard CE3K would have been labelled as "crackpot claim" in the early days of his work. In the books we see him slowly stagger into the belief that he has been abducted from an early age and -as noted before- others do not verify things he believed happened when he was with them. Fowler also seems to put far more faith in hypnosis than he should have.
In this book, as with the previous ones, Fowler admits that he is totally blown away by the things Betty declares under hypnosis and how it indicates a technology we can only see as magical because it is beyond our understanding. We are led to one conclusion and hypothesis after another as Fowler tries to grasp just what is going on. At not one point, despite the incredible things Betty 'reveals', does Fowler even begin to question things. In fact he points out that he was basically on the edge of his seat waiting for the next taped hypnosis session to arrive in the post.
Now, whether Betty is prone to altered states -and some people (probably far more than we suspect) are- I do not know. The questions and study needed to ascertain this never seem to have been undertaken. To be fair, I do not think that the concept of altered states even entered the Ufology subject when this saga began. I was only made aware of it in the mid 1970s. Study the subject for yourself. A person can quite literally "zone out" in front of you and everything that happens to them in that state is real and happened. It actually did happen for them but did not happen for anyone else.
Again, I need to emphasise that this is not a mental illness. These people do not require locking up or referral for a psychiatric hospital. Their brains are active in a way that is normal for many people but not others. While some people see music in colours (synesthetes) others can see the world as numbers and equations. While some are highly literate others cannot be and suffer dyslexia and there are people with sharp mathematical minds others suffer a numerical dyslexia known as dyscaculie. Musical geniuses and the tone deaf. Not everyone's minds work the same. We need to study how this all works far more and for UFOs and the "paranormal" I set out guidelines in UFO Contact?
Think about the abductee who claimed to have started miscarrying a foetus and how the bathroom floor was covered in blood yet she got to a barn where she hid the hybrid foetus in a jar but then carried on normally. I've known women who have had premature births or lost babies in early pregnancy and they do not simply get up and on with the daily routine. And why did the abductees spouse not see all of the blood or his wife leavuing the house and bleeding profusely? The same reason an abductee claims to have had to go help the imbecilic alien hybrids hiding out on Earth to buy and move furniture and arrives home supposedly late but no one notices. The mind is a complex thing.
The problem with the Andreasson case is that hypnosis was used. Not in a sensible and measured way but with an almost cavalier manner. Because the hypnotist working with Fowler, Fred Max, could not make enough time for sessions and when Betty and Bob moved to Florida it was Bob who took over hypnosis sessions after Max implanted an hypnotic suggestion so that Betty could be regressed to the point covered in her last session. At this point I actually threw the book onto the floor. Bob had trained up with hypnosis and felt confident but let's make some points here:
(1) Only a professionally qualified hypnotherapist should be employing regression hypnosis and here I am far from the way Max was using this.
(2) Bob was not an experienced and qualified hypnotherapist and without someone such as the investigator overseeing sessions and monitoring questioning this makes the sessions tainted.
(3) Bob and Betty had discussed their UFO experiences and Bob was in his mind an "abductee" which makes his controlling the hypnosis sessions an extreme "no-no!" Do we ask bank robbers to investigate other bank robbers? The very idea that one person who claims to be a UFO abductee and who marries another claimed UFO abductee and that they discuss their experiences and he is put in charge of the regression hypnosis -that is almost unbelievable until you realise that you are talking about Ufology.
(4) Let's assume that Dr Leo Sprinkle was correct and that in some cases there may be a basic form of telepathy then where does that put us in this case?
Even excluding telepathy this is on a par (almost) with David Jacobs and his phone sessions. Looking at it another way this could have been one big act with Betty and Bob deciding in advance what they were going to put on tape. As evidence those tapes are valueless. In fact, I think it can be safely said that the Andreasson books demonstrate that Dr Benjamin (who correctly used hypnosis on the Hills) and his worst fears were realised and that hypnosis was going to be misused and seen as a a tool to get unquestionable 'truth' from UFO percipients (again see UFO Contact?).
Looking at it from an investigation point of view the assertion is made that "so many people under hypnosis come up with the same descriptions and facts -so these have to all be genuine accounts!" No. People here or see TV shows and think "Odd. I'm sure that happened to me -does that mean....?" Waking up at various times naturally now becomes an "indicator of abduction" and "I have a scar and even my mother can't remember how I got it (30-40 years ago) -does that mean...?" And time and again we read or hear "I was walking through the mall and I saw this alien face on the book cover and it struck a chord in my memory" -they buy the Streiber or Hopkins book with that image on the cover and start reading. After months or weeks at best, they contact a Ufologist who is told all the usual guff and he/she declares "Sounds like you are a UFO abductee" and I am sure that more than one sees a book or TV appearances coming up.
There is a great deal of cross-contamination amongst alleged UFO abductees accounts and where things do not match no panic -we know Jacobs can put a twist on that and we have learnt that Hopkins "stacked the decks" to make things match. People read the Streiber, Hopkins, Jacobs and Fowler books to see whether they "might" be abductees and then you have the influence of TV shows. All of this gets into the memory and when the hypnotist says "Can you dig deeper and think of anything else about that incident?" in pops the appropriate false memory as 'fact'.
The hypnosis sessions with Andreasson spans the 1970s and into the 1980s (for this book published in 1990) and the number of sessions is something that any serious person should baulk at as the mind will build on one sessions revelations after another. Hypnosis should only be used by someone who is fully qualified and only when it is necessary to help a possible percipient with something that is causing mental and or physical health issues. "Let's see...we had Part 1 then Part 2 so let's go for Part 3!" is not acceptable.
I do not think that Fowler deliberately exploited Andreasson and neither did he oversee the misuse of hypnosis. In fact he did not oversee the sessions carried out by Bob and he, like many Ufologists, fell into the false belief that regression hypnosis only revealed true events -hence he fell into the trap of self delusion -believing he is a UFO abductee- as well as false belief in that "aliens own our bodies and souls" and that we are so far beneath them technologically that we can do nothing and, possibly, maybe these are not extra-terrestrials. All based on jumping head first into a case he was not prepared for.
We have the first classic -Karla Turner then the second classic case of a Ufologist allowing himself to believe that he is a UFO abductee and the third classic; the Andreasson Affair where things started easily but soon spiralled out of control to the point where everything is abduction oriented. Turner, Fowler and Andreasson (as a case) should be must reading for anyone who is thinking of concentrating solely on CE3K/Alien Entity cases which are rarer than Ufologists would have you believe and the massive pop culture "Greys generational abduction of humans" has bogged the subject down for over three decades.
The book is fascinating reading but for the wrong reasons.
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