We were introduced by a mutual friend. “Ronnie” was a middle-aged man who, despite having a master’s degree, felt barely capable to hold down a job as a hospital orderly. He was on psychiatric drugs for anxiety, depression and insomnia—one for each. I took a standard intake. When asked what made his anxiety worse, he paused and said, “I suppose it would be OK to mention here. I am a UFO abductee.” He went on at great length to describe how he had been abducted and how terrible an experience it was. “They treat us just like we treat cattle or something. It is completely violational.” He described a typical scenario in which the aliens stole genetic material by making an incision on the scrotum. His girlfriend was similarly accosted and after the aliens returned to show her the cross-bred baby produced with her genes she committed suicide. They were members of an alien abductee survivor’s support group.If I’d been tactless, my mouth would have been hanging open for several minutes. My apprentice, sitting in on the case, also held her tongue. Rather than asking additional questions about something I knew only by reputation—and so far, it seemed he was telling a fairly typical UFO abductee story—I simply said, “What do you think would help you?"
“I need to be more grounded,” he replied. Well that made sense. It seemed likely that a grounded person would not be lifted off the ground so easily! This also matched the physical symptoms. He tended to hunch over a little bit, as if protecting the emotional centers in the stomach area. That would be the solar plexus, where we feel a “thump on the belly” when the enteric or animal brain, i.e., the autonomic, is stimulated by deep, instinctual, or emotional reactions. (As I was later to learn, the aliens are entirely counter-instinctual.) There was also the fact that a stomach ulcer was his major physiological complaint. The tongue was red, shrunken, and dry, an indication of mental anguish (heat rising to the head) and poor assimilation. We often see the red tongue in psychiatric cases. In traditional Chinese medicine it is said that the heart (which maintains psychological equilibrium) is overheated, the fire rises, and the mind is agitated. Psychiatric drugs tend to exaggerate the redness of the tongue.
My apprentice knew her stuff, so I asked Julie, “What would you give here?” “Wood betony,” she answered without hesitation. That’s the remedy for lack of groundedness, a feeling of disconnection from the world. It is excellent for older people in their declining years. It is also a remedy that strengthens digestion and assimilation, improving food and water uptake, thus indicated when the tongue is dry and shrunken. I decided to add goldenseal in very small doses, because it is such a good remedy for ulcers.
I tried to make conversation, partly out of interest, but after a while our visitor became agitated. His eyes darted back and forth. “I feel like they might be operating in the area,” he remarked.
Within a month the ulcer was gone and he felt much better emotionally. In three months he got a job teaching at a small Midwestern university in his field of choice. I considered that to be a success—he was finally able to pursue his career after hiatus of several years. I can’t remember if he discontinued the psychiatric drugs. I lost track of him after the move to his new job.
I say it would be impossible for me to be a practitioner of conventional therapy, not only because of the unusual cases I take on, but because of what happened next.
Several months later I was having dinner with the mutual friend that had introduced the two of us. I kept on thinking about those aliens. They were so real to the client. In fact, as dinner proceeded, I got rather obsessed about them and finally I had to excuse myself.
On the way home—I was driving down St. Clair Avenue in St. Paul at about dusk—I had a strange experience. All of a sudden, in my inner eye, a hole opened up in the clouds and my consciousness was brought up through the opening. I heard a chorus of angels singing “Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord God Almighty” as my mind passed upwards. I could see the massive feet of God sitting on a throne. I supposed it was the “throne room of the Third Heaven,” or something. In a clear voice in my inner ear God said, “I have made a covenant with the Earth, that the Earth will not be destroyed.” Great, I thought. I wonder why He’s telling me this right now. “And I’m not relying on the human race to help me.” We think we’re going to solve everything but we are making all the problems! “They are a weak reed to lean on,” He added by way of explanation. Since I was not raised on the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible I was little surprised to hear God speaking like that. Not the kind of thing I would have made up.
A question arose in my mind: “but what’ll happen to the human race?” God turned out not to be like some unfortunate person you could corner at a party and bore with you’re questions. He started to fade off and I couldn’t tell whether it was Him or my own hopeful inner voice that added the answer: “They can come along for the ride if they want too.” It didn’t sound very Biblical in tone, so I was left wondering.
Well, the aliens, it turned out, had an answer. About 2:30 in the morning I was awakened by a presence that, again, I saw in my inner eye. It was one of those big-headed, squinty-eyed little aliens about three and a half feet high. He (or she) stuck a probe in the canthus of my left eye and stated in bold, clipped words: “The earth is dead and therefore we are going to launch an evacuation, to save the people, and we would like you to be one of the leaders, so that people wouldn’t feel so terrified by us.” As a matter of fact, the whole time I felt nothing but complete terror. End of transmission, probe removed, terror gone, alien gone.
The only other time I’ve ever felt total terror was also about 2:30 in the morning. I was awakened by a blood-curdling scream coming up from the swamp behind my house. It sounded like a woman screaming, but no woman would have the lung capacity to scream for that long. The dial in my brain was turned to terror for the entire time, which seemed like about two minutes. The next day I suggested to my neighbor that it was a “chupagabra,” a goat-headed, blood-sucking gargoyle from Mexico. It was about three weeks before I read of mountain lion sightings in my neighborhood.
Well, at any rate, I lay in bed for the rest of the night, rather numbly thinking about what the alien said. But didn’t God say the exact opposite? They say the earth is dead and He says it will not be destroyed. In the morning, still rather dazed, I asked several of my closest friends what they thought. None of them thought very highly of the aliens, who, besides having the exact opposite view of the Lord God Almighty, and striking terror in me from start to finish, were also considerably less capable of punctuating their sentences correctly, compared to the Big Voice.
Matthew Wood is a practicing herbalist and homeopath. He is the author of several books and is renowned throughout the country as a teacher in the field. Call for his class schedule. His office in Minneapolis is 3525 Hennepin Ave. So. and in Mound at 6001 Sunnyfield Road. He can be reached at 952-472-8057.
