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Friday, February 13, 2004
Alien Lovers: Documentary explores human side of meetings from beyond
Karin, an attractive woman in her late 20s with short-cropped hair and a quick smile, is fairly certain that her first experience with extraterrestrial beings came when she was just two and a half. Playing with a new gumball machine in a dry creek bed outside of her Florida home, Karin remembers a small being with large, black eyes coming out from behind a tree. He asked her to accompany him; she did. She remembers that they entered an "egg-shaped" vehicle.
The being introduced her to a boy slightly older than she and asked if she would share her gumball machine with him. She did. The next thing she knew, she was "mid-frame, running towards the house." She and her mother hunted all around the creek bed for that gumball machine. They never found it, though over 20 years later, Karin found the young boy whom she believes was in the egg-shaped vehicle with her, now a man living in his native Scotland.
As an adult, Karin has frequently been awakened by an intense feeling of electric current coursing through her slim frame. She's seen an eerie blue light, an unnatural screaming hue, repeatedly illuminate her bedroom windows. She's been aroused from deep slumber only to find herself completely unable to move. She is certain that her ovaries have been pierced, eggs removed. She believes that she's met her half-alien children, small "young beings" who are also tinged an uncanny blue. She cries as she says this. She appears to be perfectly sane.
Karin is one of the estimated hundreds of thousands of people who claim to have experienced alien abduction. As featured in filmmaker Laurel Chiten's latest documentary, Touched, Karin is just one of a handful willing to tell her story. Startled by such remarkable tales, most of us tend to scoff at them. When a Harvard professor of psychiatry gravely researches them as being true, opinions sometimes change.
Dr. John E. Mack is one such psychiatrist. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a biography on T. E. Lawrence, Mack has devoted the last decade to working with subjects who believe that they have been abducted, writing about them (resulting in at least two nonfiction works, Abduction and Passport to the Cosmos) and defending himself for his research against colleagues at Harvard, who launched a two-year investigation of his work before finally exonerating him as worthy of his tenure.
Mack invited Chiten, whose work he was familiar with from her earlier documentaries (Twitch and Shout, about Tourette's syndrome, and The Jew in the Lotus, an autobiographical study), to make a film about his patients and their experiences. She resisted until he dangled a free meal. Arriving for a dinner in honor of Mack's clients, many of whom spoke at eloquent length of their experiences, Chiten became struck by the simple force of each person's humanity. These weren't raving lunatics, but rather ordinary people whose lives had unwillingly, it seems, been irrevocably changed.
Touched focuses primarily on Karin and another alleged abductee named Peter, who believes that he was used as a sperm resource while in his 20s for alien half-breed production. Peter, a handsome man who trains as an acupuncturist during the course of the film, is married to the long-suffering Jamy, a therapist.
Remaining skeptical, Chiten trained her lens on the human aspect of this underground drama. "I am someone who is completely outside the experience," she says. "Jamy is me; she's the audience. I think that the major thing that I wanted people to walk away from the film with is that it is purposefully ambivalent [about the subject of alien visitation], because I am. I'm agnostic about it. It's real; it's not real. I believe them; I don't believe them. You're never quite sure. But it's not really just about alien abduction per se; it's about the human drama, what happens when something comes into your life."
Perhaps most brilliantly, Chiten interviews thinkers outside of Mack's field, speaking to the Vatican's own demonologist and to a myth and folklore expert whose specific discipline is daimonology. Speaking in Italian through an interpreter, the Vatican priest reveals that the Catholic Church is heartily ready to embrace the idea of alien visitation. Explaining that the fallible art of human narrative forms the basis of our shared history and certainly of the Christ tale itself, the elderly priest leans forward in his chair and says, "Who are we to believe that we are the only life in the universe? It's stupid," his voice trailing the translator: "stupido."
As Mack patiently explains earlier in Touched, Westerners have the only culture in the world that doesn't readily accept the duality of an alternative existence to the human one.
"There might be 100 people who have a psychological explanation; there might be 12 people who have a neurological explanation; there might be hundreds of people who have sleep paralysis--but that still," she says, her voice rising slightly, "doesn't explain all the rest of the people who have experienced this."
By Gretchen Giles
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