Staged Visitors, Real Fears

What if the most unsettling UFO stories aren’t random at all, but meticulously staged scenes meant to guide how we think? Paul Meehan, author of “The Alien Abduction Phenomenon: Science, Evidence and The Unknown” writes about that in his book and talks about it on the YouTube show/Podcast “Paranormal Yakker’. In the interview we dive into decades of encounters that look less like field research and more like theater: small beings collecting soil under bright headlights, vehicles immobilized on empty highways cleared by phantom road crews, and Men in Black in glossy Cadillacs that appear and vanish as if hitting a trapdoor. The pattern points to logistics, planning, and a deliberate performance that puts witnesses exactly where they’re meant to be.

Together we follow the evolution from 1950s contact tales to 1960s abductions, noting how costumes and settings shift with the message. The bulky diving suits disappear; clinical actors and telepathic shows take the stage. Eyewitnesses describe translocation, missing time, and even storerooms stocked with cones and detour signs—props for a roadside play. We unpack the Terry Lovelace saga, where implants, a woman in black, and telepathic recall intersect with a chilling command: do not seek proof. We also examine bizarre recruitment tactics—bogus interviews in empty buildings at odd hours—that echo grooming and isolation strategies, all while maintaining a careful, theatrical veneer.

The conversation spotlights researchers like Bud Hopkins and David Jacobs, whose work argues for a coordinated hybrid agenda rather than benevolent guidance. That stance isn’t comforting, but it’s consistent with reports of stolen and returned jewelry, police radio outages, and witnesses who feel watched long after the lights fade. Our takeaway is simple and serious: be curious, but be cautious. If someone wants to be seen, ask why—and who benefits from the scene. If this story resonates, follow the show and share it with a friend who loves high strangeness.

Chapters

• 0:00 Framing The Phenomenon
• 1:45 Theatrics Of Early UFO Encounters
• 4:18 From Suits To Abductions
• 4:54 Staged Car Encounters Explained
• 8:43 Phantom Road Crews And Empty Highways
• 11:35 Translocation And Missing Time
• 14:45 Police Logs And Radio Blackouts
• 16:25 Men In Black In Cadillacs
• 21:28 Hybrids, Implants, And Intimidation
• 25:42 Bogus Job Interviews As Lures

Transcript

0:00

Hi everyone, I'm Stan Mallow. Welcome to welcome to Paranormal Yakker. My guest on today's show is Paul Meehan. He's the author of several books on science fiction, film noir, and horror films, and he contributed to the Noir Sentinel, the Journal of the Film Noir Foundation, and to the Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire. I'll be talking with him about his book,

The Alien Abduction Phenomenon: 0:31

Science, Evidence, and the Unknown. It traces how the alien abduction phenomenon evolved from the 1940s flying saucer era, and the contactee and occupant sightings of the 1950s, to the abduction stories of the 1960s and beyond. Paul Meehan, welcome to Paranormal Yakker. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it. People who reported not just seeing UFOs, but having direct sightings, close encounters, while the alien occupants of these crafts was widespread from the 1950s to the 1970s. You Paul say deception played a part in these occupant sightings. What was that deception? Well, I have a background in film, and what I see is theatrics. I see deliberately staged events, even costuming. What I think happened was this. The aliens, whoever they are, were trying to create the impression that they were scientists or astronauts who were studying the Earth scientifically. And I think this was deliberately planted. What was seen were these small humanoids taking samples of soil or plants or animals or water, and they were doing it in a place where they could be observed. They could have done these, if they were actually doing studies, they could have done this in some remote place where they would not have been seen. Instead, these observations were being seen on farms or rural areas, mostly. There was no interaction with people, except that when they thought perhaps that they were in danger or something, they would paralyze you. So it went something like this. A witness would see these little humanoids, like scraping up stuff from the ground and putting it in little sacks. And when they were seen, the occupants would run right back into their little flying saucer and scoot away. To me, this is misdirection. One of these witnesses said that he thought that what he saw reminded him of astronauts in the Apollo program taking samples on the moon. And I think that was exactly the impression that they were trying to give. Now, when the abduction phenomenon came along, well, first of all, the occupants a lot of times wore what were described as diving suits, which were like the old time deep sea diver suits with the big helmets and all, and wearing some kind of protective gear or something supposedly that enabled them to survive in our environment. When the abduction thing came along, boom, no more diving suits, no more space helmets. What was that all about? Because it was a costume. It was fake. It was phony. And at least that's my take on the situation. Staged UFO car encounters and phantom road workers are also explored in The Alien Abduction Phenomenon. Could you elaborate on that? Sure, the highway hijinks. In the 1960s, there were a number of what were called UFO car encounters. Someone would come around, a bend in the road, and boom, there's a UFO just sitting there. Why? They wanted to be seen. Like the occupants, they wanted to be seen in a very limited fashion. Sometimes they would chase after cars, and sometimes they would even take control of the vehicles. Now skeptics say, why would aliens come gazillions and gazillions of light years over here just to chase a car down the road? It's a dry run for vehicular abductions, at least in my opinion. Then you get into this business of phantom road crews. Now, it's frequently reported that a well-traveled highway will have no traffic on it. How? Why? How is this done? Well, in one case during the Hudson Valley sightings that was investigated by Philip Ambrogio. I'm not sure I'm pronouncing his name correctly. There was a man who was a computer programmer, and he was returning to his home late at night from Connecticut into upstate New York. And there was no traffic on the road, and he was abducted into a giant triangle. So later on, the researchers contacted a man who used that route every night and he said that he was detoured off the road by a bunch of road workers with wearing outfits and glow sticks that detoured him off the highway, supposedly so that the abduction could take place. And of course, it's not the only example of this either. There was a very well-known case from Africa where a couple was driving from Rhodesia to Durban in South Africa. and they passed what they said was a policeman who was sitting by the side of the road in some strange metallic outfit with something that looked like a walkie-talkie in his hand. And again, there was no one on this highway, and it happened to be a South African Holiday, National Day, when you would expect that the roads would be jammed. Nobody there. How did that happen? The strangest case of this was investigated by Nick Pope, who told of a narrative about a man and 2 women who were driving from Orlando to Boca Raton, Florida. And they were on a turnpike. And on this turnpike, it obliges you to take a ticket when you get on and then to surrender the ticket when you get to your destination. There was a period of missing time, and then the next thing they knew, they were in Boca Raton, and they had not surrendered the ticket. And this may be an example of what you call translocation, where the aliens will pick up a car and plop it down somewhere else. The man underwent a regressive hypnosis, and this was his story. So the car was lifted up to the entrance of this craft. The two women were put in suspended animation. The man got out of his car, walked into this craft, and down this corridor. And this is what he saw. He looked into what was apparently a storeroom, and inside were cardboard boxes with duct tape on them. And inside the boxes were detour signs and orange cones, stuff like that that you would use in a highway by Phantom Highway workers. After that, he just got back in his car, and the next thing he knew was in Boca Raton. So I think that maybe something that's behind roadways being cleared. There was another case of Bill Foster, who was abducted in North Carolina one night. Actually, his whole car was lifted up into this craft. And he was like a newspaper guy in a local newspaper, and he went public with his story. A while later, he gets anonymously, he gets a log, a handwritten log from the local police department. And on this log, it states that all of the police radios were down for two hours at the same time that the abduction took place. Now, how do you figure that? What Paul can you tell me about Men in Black in vanishing Cadillacs? Yes, very strange. I came up with three cases of this. Somebody once said, I don't know what context, if something strange happens. But one time is coincidence, a second time is happenstance, the third time is enemy action. So I figure if I get three examples of something, I've got something solid. First case, it was in England in 1971, in the rural part of Britain, where a man had a very conventional sighting of a light in the sky, nothing dramatic. So afterwards, he gets a visit from these two men in suits, who say they're and they from the Ministry of Defense, tell him, oh, what you saw was a Russian satellite. That was it. Now why dispatch two people from the Ministry of Defense to explain a very conventional light in the sky? No reason. Afterwards, the witness starts to see this black Jaguar car with two people in it, outside of his home every night. He got a little perturbed about this. And he contacted a researcher named Derek James. Derek James had a relative who was in the local police department, the East Midlands Police Department. And they concocted a story. They said, well, you can't tell these people that there's Men in Black out there. So they said, well, we think it's thieves that are casing this factory, and they're going to make a robbery. After a while, they sent some police out there to look around. They checked out the car. They checked out the license plate on the car, which did not compute. One night, two policemen decided to investigate. They came on the car on each side. They looked inside. They saw two men wearing black outfits, could barely see inside this car. And as they were about to tap on the window, the car just disappeared, just vanished into thin air. There was another case in 1975 in Minnesota. They're very few details about this case, it was reported to J Allen Hynek. A man in Minnesota was driving down a highway, and a big black Cadillac came along and forced him off the side of the road. Got very angry, got back in the car, chased after the caddy, and the car just went up into the air and disappeared. What can I say? Case number three, this happened in 1995. There was an anonymous witness. This case was reported to a Canadian UFO group. There was a man who was driving from Glacier National Park to a town in British Columbia. So as he's going down this road at night, he comes to an intersection, and suddenly out of nowhere, this Cadillac comes tearing out. It almost hits him. He squeals on the brakes, and his headlights go inside the car for a moment. He can see three men wearing black coats and black hats, and one of them on the passenger side is looking right at him. The car just keeps on going, and then suddenly it's gone. So the guy thought it was an accident. He gets out of his car. The first thing he sees is at the intersection, it's not a paved road. It's like a grade, like a mining grade that goes down to this valley. When he saw the vehicle, it was kind of like bouncing along as if it was actually going along this road, which meant it was like a material object. It was not an illusion or anything. There was nothing left but a cloud of dust. The car was gone. There were no skid marks. There was no sign of an accident. Nothing. Gone goodbye. That's the story of disappearing vehicles. Wow, and that's another wow, a double wow, maybe. Terry Lovelace, a lawyer and former assistant attorney general claimed to have been abducted by aliens, had an object implanted in him by them, and years later was visited by a mysterious Woman in Black. How did that whole saga unfold? Okay, my contention is that the MIBs are actually hybrids. They share a lot of characteristics with hybrids. They're able to communicate telepathically. Sometimes they actually draw attention to themselves. They're flamboyant. Again, it's stagecraft. It's intimidation. It's setting the stage. Anyway, so Terry Lovelace, who was abducted from Devil's Den in 1977, had taken up jogging for health reasons. And in 2012, he got a really bad pain in his right leg, and he went to have it x-rayed. It turned out the pain was due to something called the Baker cyst, I had one once. It just goes away by itself. But the x-ray showed that he had a metal object inserted in his leg. Lovelace was starting to go public with his story of the Devil's Den abduction, and he was contemplating getting this object removed for study. So then, one night in 2017, he wakes up, and he's not in his bed. He's in his living room. He's in his living room easy chair, and And seated across from him is a woman, a small, scrawny-looking, four-foot-tall woman dressed entirely in black with a black wig that didn't fit too well, and wearing dark glasses. And he also notices that there's some kind of weird kind of odor in the room, and he kind of feels he's in kind of an altered state of consciousness. So this woman apparently had familiarity with him, it came out later that she had been in some of his previous abductions. And what she told him was that her hosts, as she put it, would not allow him to have these objects removed from his leg, because it would prove that there was an alien presence. And at some point, she took off her dark glasses, and she had these black, almond-shaped eyes, and he realized that he was not dealing with something human. During this experience, she also projected images of his previous abductions into his mind telepathically. And eventually, she said that she was a hybrid. She said, I'm a hybrid, and therefore I'm incapable of having children. Then she said to him, These objects are going to be removed. We don't need to abduct you. We will remove them when you're sleeping. And And less than a month later, he had pains in both of his legs, and it turned out he had another implant in his other leg that he didn't even know about. And he arranged for an x-ray, and the object that was previously x-rayed was no longer there. Amazing, amazing story. Bogus job interviews and your experience at Grand Central Station in New York City are written about in your book. What was that all about? Well, that was one that really had the alarm bells ringing, as far as I'm concerned. Around 1998 was the first report of this phenomenon, this bogus job interview business. These witnesses reported getting a telephone call from someone they didn't know, telling them to go on this interview. In one case, a man just walked up to this young girl in a pizza place and told her that he wanted to interview her for a job. Now, in these instances, the applicants, the so-called job applicants, are not told the nature of the job, the company that they're supposed to be working for, salary, or any questions about the job applicant's background or job experience, nothing like that. And so when they go on these interviews, it's generally conducted in a shabby, kind of deserted building someplace. again, this is stagecraft, this is setting. It's like a simulacrum of an office. They'll just have one place, they had a wastebasket, they had a telephone, and like a computer that wasn't hooked up to anything. So it's like a stage set. They go into this interview and eventually they wind up getting abducted. And sometimes in case of women, they may have been sexually assaulted during these instances. So now something happened to me was back in 1982. I thought it was odd at the time, but I didn't really connect it with anything until I read Bud Hopkins' book, Sight Unseen in 2003. And when I read that book, alarm bells went off because something quite similar had happened to me. Now, I'll say up front, I've never seen a UFO. I don't consider myself an abductee, although there are some rather strange things in my background, which I will not go into. So I was 1982, I had graduated from college a few weeks earlier. I went into Manhattan. I was not on business. I was not looking for a job. I didn't have a suit and tie on, going along with a resume or anything. I was just dressed casually. I was living in Queens at that time, the borough of Queens. And going to Manhattan, it was called The City, for libraries or stores or, you know, whatever. So there I am. I'm coming out of Grand Central Station and I'm coming to the Vanderbilt Avenue exit, which is an enclosed space. And in front, there's like maybe like eight doors. You know, it's Grand Central Station. People are coming and going and coming and going, right? So I'm walking along minding my business and a man comes up to me out of nowhere, approaches me. And this man was absolutely normal. There was nothing odd about him. I'd say he was in his late 20s, brown hair, a little taller than me, wearing a white shirt and slacks. And he struck me as being like a salesman. That he had some kind of a charisma about him. So he walks up to me out of nowhere and he says, Are you looking for a job? And I'm flabbergasted. I said, Well, yeah, yeah, I am. And he says, I have a great job for you. Now, he doesn't give me a business card. He doesn't give me a flyer. He doesn't tell me what the company is. He doesn't tell me what the job is. He doesn't tell me what the salary is. He doesn't ask me anything about myself. He says, I have a great job for you. And from somewhere, he takes a piece of scrap paper and he writes down an address, a date, and a time. And he hands me this piece of paper and he says, Be there. It's a great job. For some reason, I didn't ask him anything else. I was just flabbergasted. I said, Oh, hey, I got a job. I walked out. I walked out in the street. And so, later on, I told my wife about this and she says, No way. No way you're going to go on this thing. So the thing of it was, I had to figure out where this job interview was supposed to take place. It was not taking place in Manhattan, where you would think, where any job I ever went to when I was living in New York was in an office building in Manhattan. Instead, it turns out that this address, and I had to look this up on a map, this address is somewhere in the area called Long Island City in Queens. The other suspicious thing was that the interview was supposed to take place at eight o'clock at night. And I'm scratching my head. I'm like, What the hell? This is for real. But I had this notion that I was going to go there and see this for myself. For all I knew, it was legitimate. So, with that telling my wife, one afternoon, I go out to this place, and it's not easy to get to. I've got to take a bus. I've got to take a train. And finally, I get to the streets in Queens, New York, are very, very confusing. I've got 63-22 33rd Road. It wasn't easy to find, but I found this place, and it was this old, decrepit building. And I looked at that, and I looked at the area, and I said, There's no way I'm coming out here at eight o'clock at night in New York City. No way. And at that point, I didn't pursue anything further. And I don't know what was going on with this business, but sometimes I think maybe if I went there, I might have wound up with my liver and kidneys in a styrofoam container or something. But it struck me how similar it was to these other accounts that I had read about. Could you Paul share details about a female abductee stolen and returned jewelry? This is something that's really crazy. Again, you find, you know, the third time is enemy action. I came up with three cases for the book. First case was Betty and Barney Hill. One day, they, after the abduction, They came home at night, and there on the table of their home was a pile of dried leaves. And they took the leaves away, and there were the pair of Betty's earrings that she had worn on the night of the abduction that had been missing, and now were suddenly returned. She took the earrings and put them in her jewelry box and never wore them again. Second case, Debbie Jordan, who Bud Hopkins wrote about in Intruders, she had a ring that she was very fond of, had been given to her by her fiance, and the ring disappeared. So she was very upset. Of course, she looked everywhere, and then she had a notion that it was in her son's room. So she moved the furniture. She saw a bulge that was underneath the carpet. She pulls up the carpet, pulls up the backing, and there's the ring. How did it get under the carpet? It sounds to me like that's in poltergeist cases. They have things called a ports, where matter goes through solid matter. And that kind of seems like what this was. That's just my take on it. Case number three, Louise Smith, one of three women who were abducted in Kentucky in 1976. She had three rings that she used to wear all the time. One night, she's awakened at 3.30 in the morning, she gets this notion in her head, go to the abduction site. So she gets dressed and she goes. And while she's there, these three rings on her fingers, are pulled off somehow into the night and go vanish. Sometime later, she comes back home, and she finds one of the rings on her doorstep, and she just picked up the thing and threw it in a nearby creek. Now, since I wrote the book, there are another couple of cases that come up. Another one had to do with Debbie Jordan again, and again, it had to do with rings. One day, she wakes up in her bed in the morning, and she's got all kinds of grass and twigs running down her back on her feet and in the back of her head. And she looks down at her hand, and her wedding rings are gone. And not only that, her hand is all kind of chapped and red. She looks all over the place for these rings, can't find the rings. And then, a few days later, she's cleaning up and boom, out of nowhere, the rings fall down on her bed. And another one happened to one of Yvonne Smith's patients. She's a researcher in Los Angeles area. One of her patients was a woman she called Lacey. This person told her that she was abducted when she was 14 years old on Catalina Island off the coast of California. She was scuba diving. When she was abducted, apparently the aliens were confounded by her wetsuit, didn't know what it was. She had a turquoise ring that had been given to her by her father. The ring had gone, the ring had vanished. However, many years later, when she was an adult, the ring mysteriously reappeared on her bedroom dresser. And she took the ring and she gave it to Yvonne Smith and of course never wore it again. And there's a pattern, it's like these pieces of jewelry are like tainted somehow and the people, in most of the cases, the people don't wanna have anything to do with them anymore. Now, what's going on here? I thought it might have something to do with some kind of psychological experiment or something, where there was these items reappeared in the home, like in the Hills home, and it kind of was a violation of their privacy. Another possibility is that the aliens are doing something called psychometry, which is looking at an object that someone owns and trying to assess information just from the object itself. Of course, women are very attached to their jewelry. What else, what could they be more attached to really? And that's what I think is going on there. Also included in your book are key researchers who have sought to understand the nature and intentions of alleged extraterrestrial beings, or UFO-naughts, I like that word, while addressing skepticism about the subject. Who are these researchers? The one that I really appreciate the most, I think, is David Jacobs, who I met many years ago very briefly. I think he's the guy that's really got the handle on this. He has retired. He's no longer doing research. Of course, Bud Hopkins, who I also met very briefly, I think that those two people are the most accurate about the nature of the phenomenon. Now, what I have seen in the several decades is that this phenomenon is so terrifying. It's so disturbing that people are putting a happy face on it, that they're kind of reverting to this kind of contactee space brother, benevolent aliens mindset. I think that's the reason. In addition to examining firsthand encounters with non-human entities and attempting to uncover the forces behind these sightings, you argue that there could be unforeseen consequences if this phenomenon is ignored. What, Paul, are these unforeseen consequences? I think a lot more apprehension is warranted. I think that people are looking to this alien intelligence almost in a religious way. They're looking for the space brothers to save us from ourselves. I don't think that's warranted. I think that we should be very cautious and very wary about this. According to people like Jacobs, it's a planetary acquisition situation. And that is extremely frightening. It's extremely worrying. And I hope with all my heart that it's not true. Be honest with you. Should viewers of Paranormal Yakker want to buy The

Alien Abduction Phenomenon: 28:56

Science, Evidence and the Unknown, and also learn of the other books you've authored, how Paul can they do that? The books are for sale on Amazon.com BarnesAndNoble,com or wherever fine books are sold, as they say. And that's where you can get it. Paul Meehan, I thank you for being my guest on Paranormal Yakker. It's been a pleasure yakking with you. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.