Japan's next prime minister might be nicknamed "the alien," but it's his wife who claims to have had a close encounter with another world.
"While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus," Miyuki Hatoyama, the wife of premier-in-waiting Yukio Hatoyama, wrote in a book published last year.
"It was a very beautiful place and it was really green."
Yukio Hatoyama is due to be voted in as premier on September 16 following his party's crushing election victory over the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party Sunday.
Families suspected a serial killer. The FBI mostly blamed alcohol and the cruel Alaska winter.
This fall, a movie distributed by a major studio and marketed as a “dramatization” of real events is offering another explanation for decades of disappearances and suspicious deaths in and around Nome:
Abduction by space aliens.
"The Fourth Kind," a thriller, hits theaters Nov. 6. Marketing from NBC Universal says it’s based on “archival footage” of a psychologist who stumbled upon “the most disturbing evidence of alien abduction ever documented” while interviewing Alaskans.
Spooky. Except it all looks to be a “Blair Witch Project” style fake-out.
No one has heard of the psychologist, including the state licensing board and president of the state psychologists association. And while there have indeed been disappearances in Nome — mainly people traveling to the hub city from surrounding Inupiat and Siberian Yupik villages — blaming a real-life tragedy on alien abduction is not sitting well with the non-profit that pushed the cases into the open.
“The movie looks ridiculous,” said Kawerak Inc. Vice President Melanie Edwards, who watched the trailer online Monday. “It’s insensitive to family members of people who have gone missing in Nome over the years.”
Universal Pictures is distributing the film in the United States. The star, Milla Jovovich, is a veteran of three “Resident Evil” movies about diabolical corporations and zombies. In the trailer, she introduces herself as an actress and tells the audience that “every scene in this movie is supported by archived footage.”
But it’s all fake, right? Did the film-makers ever go to Nome? What about the idea that all this trivializes a string of tragic Alaska deaths?
The studio has no comment, an NBC Universal spokesman said in an e-mail Tuesday.
Despite an FBI conclusion in 2006 that no serial killer was to blame, emotions over the missing and dead are still raw in the region.
Dallas Massie is a retired state trooper who has been filling in as Nome police chief since early this year. Soon after he arrived, a relative of a St. Lawrence Island man who went missing in October 2004 called. He had heard there was someone new at the police department and hoped to see a re-energized investigation.
The 2004 case is Nome’s most recent major missing-persons case, Massie said. Police, he said, are still looking for leads. Within reason.
“I have yet to hear anybody with the theory that aliens are taking folks out of the region,” Massie said.
VILLAGE DEATHS After years of rumors that Nome had become a dangerous place for travelers from the villages, local officials in 2005 released a list of about 20 disappearances and deaths in the city. The cases dated back to the 1960s. At the time, a Nome police officer was on trial for the murder of a young village woman, and some residents mistrusted city police.
The FBI stepped in, reviewing two dozen cases, eventually determining that excessive alcohol consumption and the winter climate were a common link in many of the cases. Unlike other commercial hubs in rural Alaska, Nome is a “wet” city, with bars and liquor stores.
Some of dead were killed by exposure or from falling off a jetty into the frigid Snake River, authorities said at the time.
Delbert Pungowiyi of Savoonga still believes that foul play claimed his uncle, who flew to Nome in 1998 to buy a snowmachine and never came home.
Despite the FBI’s conclusion, Pungowiyi suspects racially motivated, serial murders are to blame in at least some of the deaths.
As for the new movie?
“Oh my god, that is ridiculous,” he said.
To be fair, “The Fourth Kind” seems to be telling a different story altogether. Movie trailers can be deceiving, but the victims shown in the short clip don’t appear to be visiting villagers.
The movie’s title is a reference to a measurement system used to describe varying degrees of contacts with aliens. Think “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” A UFO sighting would be the first kind of contact. The fourth kind is abduction.
According to promotional materials from Universal, the film is framed around a psychologist named Abigail Tyler who interviewed traumatized patients in Nome.
But state licensing examiner Jan Mays says she can’t find records of an Abigail Tyler ever being licensed in any profession in Alaska.
No one by that name lived in Nome in recent years, according to a search of public record databases.
Still, there are shreds of “evidence.”
Try Googling “Abigail Tyler” and “Alaska.” You’ll get a link to a convincingly boring Web site called the “Alaska Psychiatry Journal” — complete with a biography of a psychologist by that name who researched sleep behavior in Nome. Except the site is suspiciously vacant, mostly a collection of articles on sleep studies with no home page or contact information.
Another site, www.alaskanewsarchive.com, features a story from the Nome Nugget about Tyler moving to Nome for research. The problem? The story is credited to Nugget editor and publisher Nancy McGuire, who says it's baloney and she never wrote it.
Both the news site and the medical journal site were created just last month, according to domain-name research sites.
Ron Adler is CEO and director of the Alaska Psychiatric Institute. Denise Dillard is president of the Alaska Psychological Association. They said this week they’ve never heard of the Alaska Psychiatry Journal, or of Abigail Tyler.
SHOT IN BULGARIA “The Fourth Kind” follows a Hollywood tradition of releasing films set in Alaska but filmed somewhere else. Recently, the horror flick “30 Days of Night” told of vampires invading Barrow during the sunless winter. It was shot in New Zealand, according to Internet Movie Database.
“The Proposal,” a romantic comedy released this summer and set in Sitka, was actually filmed in Massachusetts. The state has created a tax incentive program to encourage Hollywood to actually shoot its Alaska-based movies in the state. But film office manager Dave Worrell said some of the biggest activity lately has been reality shows about rural law enforcement and wildlife officers.
Filmmakers shot the “The Fourth Kind” in Bulgaria, according to IMDB. That may explain why the trailer shows a city surrounded by lush mountains rather than a flat tundra town at the shore of the Bering Sea.
Nome Chamber of Commerce director Mitch Erickson watched the movie trailer at the city’s visitor center Monday. That fictional Nome is a pretty place, he said.
“I wish we had those trees.”
(Can't get the trailer video to play at the top of this story? Click here for the official movie site.)
The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) Abduction/Experience Research Committee is launching the first of four studies it will conduct over the next few years - Omega Three.
Participants in the study are being recruited through an advertisement in the MUFON Journal as well as through OPUS.
The Journal ad states that MUFON is looking for "abductees, contactees and control group participants."
From the ad: "If you believe you have been abducted or had contact with an alien entity we need your help. We are also looking for those people interested in participating that do not believe they have been abducted or had contact for inclusion in the control group.
Those interested in participating should contacct Lester Velez, co-chairman and assistant state director for MUFON in northern California at Lesterv424@aol.com or at 408.268.2837.
The following was written by co-chairman Robert B. LeLieurve.
For 40 years the Mutual UFO Network has undertaken the scientific study of Unidentified Flying Objects. In the main these investigations focused on sightings, physical traces, and other forms of observable events or effects.
In 2008 MUFON extended its mission into new avenues, one of which was the systematic study of the abduction phenomenon. The Abduction/Experience Research Committee, consisting of 12 individuals from a variety of scientific and professional disciplines, was charged with developing a comprehensive research strategy and program. The committee is chaired by Lester Velez.
Over the course of months the committee identified several possible studies it might conduct. Omega Three is the first of four studies to be conducted over the next several years. The committee as a whole is conducting the study, but two psychologists, Robert B. LeLieuvre, Ph.D., and Michael Freeman, Ph.D., are serving as the principal investigators. The study is being conducted under MUFON's auspices, and is funded by MUFON, which has allocated $2000 to cover the costs of preparation of materials and mailing of survey packets.
Ring and Rosing (1990) conducted the first study of individuals who reported UFO encounters, comparing them to a second experimental group, individuals who reported Near Death Experiences. Both these groups were also compared with two control groups --- individuals who had an interest in UFO encounters, but no direct experiences, and individuals who had an interest in the near-death phenomenon, but no near-death crisis. They found a great degree of similarity between the UFOErs and the NDErs. Both groups reported childhood experiences with alternate realities and psi phenomena, as well as histories of abuse and trauma. The combination of the above led to a dissociative style in times of heightened stress. Moreover, there was a discernable pattern of psychophysical and attitude-belief-value changes, similar for both groups of experiencers.
LeLieuvre, Larson, and Remington (2008) replicated some of the Ring and Rosing findings, but did not confirm the abuse-trauma-dissociation pathway. Ring and Rosing did acknowledge that the UFO experimental group was not homogenous for a type of UFO encounter. Rodeghier, Goodpaster, & Blatterbauer (1991) also argue that the lack of homogeneity among subjects might account for the different findings on a number of personality characteristics and personal style patterns often reported --- for example, encounterers, including abductees, are found to be fantasy prone in some studies and not fantasy prone in other studies, etc. Both sets of authors have called for a comprehensive study of abductees, comparing them with a matched community control group. This is the study now under way. It seeks to discover what, if any, psychological antecedents lead to sensitivity to and experiences of alien contact; it also seeks to discover what the long-term consequences of contact are.
Participants are being recruited through an advertisement in the MUFON UFO Journal, as well as through OPUS. All individuals who agree to participate sign an informed consent document, complete a demographic and experience qualification form designed to allow placement in the experiencers or the community control group, and complete a research survey packet, including the eight instruments used by Ring and Rosing, as well as the Persinger and Makarec (1991) Personal Philosophy Inventory. The plan is to recruit 100 abductees/experiencers and to compare them to a sample of 100 community control participants. Once the data are analyzed, a manuscript will be submitted to a UFO journal or to an applied psychology journal.
Any person interested in participating can contact Lester Velez at LESTERV424@aol..com.
References
LeLieuvre, R. B., Larson, T., & Remington, H. (2008). Ring's “Omega Project” revisited: Antecedents and consequences of UFO encounters and alien abductions. MUFON UFO Journal, 479, 8-11.
Persinger, M. A., & Makarec, K. (1991). Psychometric differentiation of men and women by the Personal Philosophy Inventory. Journal of Personality and Individual Differences, 12, 1267-1271.
Ring, K., & Rosing, C. J. (1990). The Omega Project: A psychological survey of persons reporting abductions and other UFO encounters. Journal of UFO Studies, 2, 59-98.
Rodeghier, M., Goodpaster, J., & Blatterbauer, S. (1991). Psychosocial characteristics of abductees: Results from the CUFOS abduction project. Journal of UFO Studies, 3, 59-90.
Edit: This poor woman's body was found in a lake. Looks like she was assaulted and her throat slashed. However, I still find it interesting that there were UFO sightings in the area on the day she went missing.
Wow this is a very interesting story of a missing woman from The Canadian. I'm going to follow up to see if this lady shows up.
Scenario: A woman goes out for a three and a half mile run in the forest preserve; while she's out, she calls a friend and leaves an urgent message that she "had seen something"; she has yet to return from her run; at approximately 7pm, calls come in to Chicago Heights police reporting a UFO hovering over the forest preserve area!
I truly hope she's ok. Read on:
Chicago authorities were documented as being expected resume their search for a Chicago Heights woman who reportedly disappeared while jogging late in the evening in a forest preserve. This is an alleged UFO abduction case. A 39-year old woman was on a three and a half mile run through the forest preserve on 26th and Euclid Avenue near Chicago Heights in the evening when she disappeared on 28 October 2007.
Police spent all day Monday searching the forest preserve for clues into the UFO abduction disappearance. Around 7:00 PM that evening the mother of three called her sister and a friend on her cell phone before her run. Her last words were, “Hello please call me back, I had seen something, this is very important! Please hurry up! This is urgent!
The last call was placed to her best friend.
Her friend said, “She never just left. Her kids are worried. She has three kids. She has a 5-year old, an 18-year old and a 14-year old. We just want her back”, said her friend. Police say they have traced the signal from that cell phone to somewhere in the forest preserve.
Also, around 7:00 PM a few unidentified callers called into the Chicago Heights police station reported a strange craft hovering over the forest preserve. They said the object was making a loud whizzing sound and had numerous multicoloured lights and it was dome-shaped. About 8:00 PM another relative tried to call her but couldn’t reach her. Two hours later family members found her late model sport utility vehicle in a parking lot.
Poor doggie. Wonder what kind of awful procedures those nasty aliens performed on him? And what did they need with a car and a tent?
Maybe - just maybe - that guy lost all that stuff in a poker game and didn't want to have to go home and tell his wife about it, so he made up the "aliens abducted my stuff" story. But I could be wrong. I'm not trying to dis the guy, but this one sounds kinda far-fetched to me. But who knows? Maybe those aliens needed a car, a tent, and a dog because they were planning to head out on a hunting trip? I'll let you decide.
Read on...
LONDON, Feb 8 (Reuters Life!) - The abduction of a dog stood out among 135 reports of UFO incidents received by Britain's Ministry of Defense last year.
Flaming objects, bright lights behaving erratically, odd shapes flying in the sky and even a village blackout following silently exploding lights are also among the reports of unidentified flying objects from all over the country, according to details released Friday under freedom of information rules.
But the report from Wales of the dog abduction grabs attention.
"The witness saw spaceships and then said that one of them abducted his dog, car and tent when he and some friends were out camping," reads the report received on Jan 3 this year.
In a report from central England in December last year the witness reported a giant craft shining a light into a rear window before shooting off, while another in June counted 15,000 lights in the sky.
Japan's next prime minister might be nicknamed "the alien," but it's his wife who claims to have had a close encounter with another world.
