I want to know

Today is the Third of March. On this day in 1972, police officer Ray Schoke was on his way to Loveland, Ohio, when he spotted a three-foot-tall upright creature with leathery skin like a lizard and the face of a frog near the Little Miami River. It was later spotted by fellow officer Mark Matthews and a local farmer. Both officers have since changed their names because of the ridicule, and Matthews moved to Florida. Then in July 1985 two boys saw a 'frog' in the river. 'I thought it was a boulder at first', said an 11-year-old who didn't wish to be identified. He described it as being about the size of a big dog. Ohio is weird.

I'm not about to say that frog critter was an alien, but Phil said something about 'all the UFOs and abductions in the news' the other day, and it made me think. The way he asked the question implied a direct connection between the two phenomena (naturally, you might think). But no such connection appears to exist, outside of the popular media.

Reliable statistics are hard to come by in the field of UFO- and abduction research. This is for a lot of reasons of course, not least of which is the number of what I affectionately call kooks collecting the data, but another very significant reason is that so few of the reports agree in enough details to be reliably linked or grouped together. In the same way that we can't compare apples and oranges in order to speculate about the Nature of Fruit, we just don't have enough case reports which are similar enough, in enough ways, to make comparison study -well, fruitful. That being said, the abduction reports I've read only occasionally include descriptions of the insides of rooms (which may or may not be aboard a 'spaceship' or 'UFO'), and even more rarely were either preceded or followed by a sighting of a Unidentified Flying Object.

In other words, people see UFOs, and people report being abducted by non-human-appearing creatures, but few if any report both as part of the same event.

It's a subtle distinction, I'll admit, but I think it's very significant. For one thing, it suggests that the two phenomena may not be related after all. We see things in the air that we can't identify (UFOs), and we see what we call 'aliens' (in many different forms, but incidentally never -not once in the literature- 'little green men'), but we only see them together perhaps 1% of the time. Linking them inextricably is akin to defending spontaneous generation.

It seems that we link them together in our heads, only because we heard it that way from someone else. I've gone looking for that person, some original source, for years now with no good answers. "Little green men" seems to have appeared out of nowhere in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, in a farcical newspaper story. UFOs have been reported since we started writing. Abductions seem to have started in the 1960s (unless you count the apocryphal reports of villagers disappearing under 'fairie mounds,' which go back almost as long as UFO reports).

The more I read, the more questions I have. Something is happening, whether it's happening in conventional (shared) reality or not. People are seeing UFOs: hoax-detecting technology is improving, the reports are remaining unexplained, and the frequency of multiple unrelated witnesses of single events is increasing. At the same time, other people seem to be honestly debilitated by encounters with intelligent non-human entities in a startling variety of forms, so varied as to suggest that we are under surveillance by at least a dozen different cultures and/or species, but sometimes similar enough to suggest that those reporting the encounters simply focused on different aspects of the creatures, or were confused by their surroundings.

I'm not ready to offer any theories or hypotheses, yet. For the record, I'm more interested in UFO reports than abduction studies, but if you feel you've been abducted and you'd like to talk about it, I'd love to hear about it and I'm a good listener. I won't pass judgment; I won't try to tell you it didn't happen, or didn't happen the way you say it did. I'm really, genuinely curious.

Even if it's not happening in our conventional, shared reality, then something interesting is happening in those abductees' and witnesses' heads. I want to know.