Twilight Zone; ‘The Invaders’
The Lead-in: ‘This is one of the out-of-the-way places, the unvisited places, bleak, wasted, dying. This is a farmhouse, handmade, crude, a house without electricity or gas, a house untouched by progress. This is the woman who lives in the house, a woman who’s been alone for many years, a strong, simple woman whose only problem up until this moment has been that of acquiring enough food to eat, a woman about to face terror which is even now coming at her from…the Twilight Zone’
The woman goes up to her roof to investigate a noise, and finds a flying saucer with two, tiny, robot-like creatures emerging from it. The creatures torment the woman, until finally she grabs and batters one of the creatures into lifelessness. With an axe she destroys the saucer. Before the final creature is killed, he sends a message to his home planet not to send any more ships to this planet. The lettering on the side of the saucer reads ‘U.S. Air Force’.
I was reading portions of this
Dimensions; A Casebook of Alien Contact
Jacques Vallee
the other day and was reminded of the above Twilight Zone episode, ‘ The Invaders’ and the true xeonophobic reaction I had when I first saw this episode as a kid: 'How dare they kill the US of A!!! Our Karate is unstoppable!!!' But this passage from the book has nothing to do with that…
The Confusion Technique in the Contact Ritual
Earlier I recounted the story of a witness who was asked the time by a UFO occupant. ‘ It is 2:30’, the witness replied. ‘You lie; it is four o’clock,’ said the occupant.
I am indebted to Gerald Askevoid for bringing to my attention the fascinating story by Dr. Milton Erickson, a pioneer in modern hypnosis, concerning ‘The Gentle Art of Reframing’:
One windy day…a man came rushing around the corner of a building and bumped hard against me as I stood bracing myself against the wind. Before he could recover his poise to speak to me, I glanced elaborately at my watch and courteously, as if he had inquired the time of day, I stated, ‘It’s exactly ten minutes to two,’ though it was actually closer to 4 P.M., and walked on. About a half a block away, I turned and saw him still looking at me, undoubtedly still puzzled and bewildered by my remark.
After quoting this story, psychologist Paul Watzlawick comments in his book ‘Change’:
This is how Erickson described the incident that led him to the development of an unusual method of hypnotic induction which he later called the ‘Confusion Technique’. What had taken place?
The incident of bumping into each other had created a context in which the obvious conventional response would have been mutual apologies. Dr. Erickson’s response suddenly and unexpectedly redefined that same context as a very different one, namely, one that would have been socially appropriate if the other man had asked him the time of day, but even that would have been bewildering because of the patent incorrectness of the information, in contrast to the courteous, solicitous manner in which it was given, The result was confusion, unalleviated by any further information that would have reorganized the pieces of the puzzle into an understandable new frame of reference. As Ericson points out, the need to get out of the confusion by finding this new frame, makes the subject particularly ready and eager to hold on firmly to the next piece of concrete information that he is given. The confusion, setting the stage for reframing, thus becomes an important step in the process of effecting second-order change and of ‘showing the fly the way out of the fly-bottle’
Was the alleged UFO pilot trying to show the witness the way out of a similar maze? Is this confusion technique deliberately used to effect change on a major scale? Answering such questions could also help us to understand the strong resemblance that anyone who has examined the beliefs of esoteric groups could not fail to note between certain UFO encounters and the initiation rituals of secret societies. This ‘opening of the mind’ to a new set of symbols that is reported by many witnesses is precisely what the various occult traditions also try to achieve.
Perhaps, it would have been better to just enjoy the cup of coffee and the winter sky…
this Twilight Zone episode was written by Richard Matheson;
his novel 'I am Legend' brought us the following films:
'the Last Man on Earth' with Vincent Price, wind blown gas masked burning bodies
'The Omega Man' Chuck Heston, leather chair sitting brandy gulping, losing a chess match to himself
and soon to be completed and released
'I am Legend' with Will Smith