Dreamcatcher

Four hundred years ago, the best legal minds in Western Europe devised a series of tests to determine whether or not accused persons were guilty of certain criminal acts. The charge: witchcraft. The evidence: any anomalous wart, or teat, or sunken spot in the flesh was considered “the devil’s mark,” gotten by the accused when she/he submitted to the foul will of Satan. Satan would then gash the miscreant, marking them as his own. When accused witches were brought in for examination, they were stripped and searched for unusual marks. Sharp pins were run through these welts, and if the examinee exhibited no signs of pain, they were judged guilty. The end result was a short ride to the scaffold for an auto da fe.

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, people are again being examined for signs of evil, though in this case the marked ones are seen as victims of alien abduction instead of willing cohorts of Satan. Stories of alien implants have been around for a while, mostly apocryphal accounts of hard foreign objects ejected from abductees’ noses following nose bleeds, etc. Jerome Clark (in FATE magazine some years ago) described a man who told him of a strange little metal sphere that allegedly came out of his head. He was sure it was an alien device. It proved to be a BB, a hard brass pellet usually associated with Daisy airguns.

People have the odd habit of inserting all kinds of strange objects into their body, either out of compulsion, curiosity (toddlers often poke beans up their noses), or pleasure. I won’t subject you to a list of objects reported found in people’s body cavities or the reasons why they were put there, but if you’re a diligent and overly curious reader, you can find out yourself.

One of the featured speakers at the July 1996 MUFON Symposium in Greensboro, N.C., was Dr. Roger K. Leir, of Thousand Oaks, California. Dr. Leir is a podiatrist (a foot doctor), not a surgeon as is sometimes reported. According to his own account, Dr. Leir has been interested in UFOs since hearing his father describe the Roswell Incident to his mother in 1947. He later joined MUFON and became one its medical consultants.

In June 1995, Dr. Leir met Derrel Sims, of Houston, Texas, at UFO Expo West. Sims, who styles himself an “Alien Hunter,” presented a report on some abductees he was working with. One woman had an X-ray of her foot which showed some kind of foreign object imbedded in it. Being a podiatrist, Dr. Leir was naturally intrigued. At first glance, the X-ray seemed to show stainless steel sutures, such as are used in orthopedic surgery. Sims told Dr. Leir the woman had never had foot surgery. The possibility that the object in her foot was somehow connected to her alleged abduction interested both men, and Dr. Leir offered to remove the object for free if the woman could be brought to his clinic in California. Money was donated to get the woman from Texas to California, and Sims mentioned another abductee who had a foreign object stuck in his hand. X-rays sent to Dr. Leir were examined by a radiologist who offered his opinion that both objects were metallic, and definitely not natural cysts or growths. Both abductees were to come to Dr. Leir’s clinic to have these object removed. They met in Houston on August 19, 1995, and proceeded to California.

to be continue