Alien Abductions
Alien Implants and Foreign Bodies
Alien Implants and Foreign Bodies
"By the Pricking of My Thumbs, Something Wicked This Way Comes"
by Paul B. Thompson Four hundred years ago, the best legal minds in Western Europe devised a series of tests to determine whether or not accused persons were guilty of certain criminal acts. The charge: witchcraft. The evidence: any anomalous wart, or teat, or sunken spot in the flesh was considered "the devil's mark," gotten by the accused when she/he submitted to the foul will of
Satan. Satan would then gash the miscreant, marking them as his own. When accused witches were brought in for examination, they were stripped and searched for unusual marks. Sharp pins were run through these welts, and if the examinee exhibited no signs of pain, they were judged guilty. The end result was a short ride to the scaffold for an auto da fe.
In the last two decades of the twentieth century, people are again being examined for signs of evil, though in this case the marked ones are seen as victims of alien abduction instead of willing cohorts of Satan. Stories of alien implants have been around for a while, mostly apocryphal accounts of
hard foreign objects ejected from abductees' noses following nose bleeds, etc. Jerome Clark (in FATE magazine some years ago) described a man who told him of a strange little metal sphere that allegedly came out of his head. He was sure it was an alien device. It proved to be a BB, a hard brass pellet usually associated with Daisy airguns.
People have the odd habit of inserting all kinds of strange objects into their body, either out of compulsion, curiosity (toddlers often poke beans up their noses), or pleasure. I won't subject you to a list of objects reported found in people's body cavities or the reasons why they were put there, but if you're a diligent and overly curious reader, you can find out yourself.
One of the featured speakers at the July 1996 MUFON Symposium in Greensboro, N.C., was Dr. Roger K. Leir, of Thousand Oaks, California. Dr. Leir is a podiatrist (a foot doctor), not a surgeon as is sometimes reported. According to his own account, Dr. Leir has been interested in UFOs since hearing his father describe the Roswell Incident to his mother in 1947. He later joined MUFON and became one its medical consultants.
In June 1995, Dr. Leir met Derrel Sims, of Houston, Texas, at UFO Expo West. Sims, who styles himself an "Alien Hunter," presented a report on some abductees he was working with. One woman had an X-ray of her foot which showed some kind of foreign object imbedded in it. Being a podiatrist, Dr. Leir was naturally intrigued. At first glance, the X-ray seemed to show stainless steel sutures, such as are used in orthopedic
surgery. Sims told Dr. Leir the woman had never had foot surgery. The possibility that the object in her foot was somehow connected to her alleged abduction interested both men, and Dr. Leir offered to remove the object for free if the woman could be brought to his clinic in California. Money was donated to get the woman from Texas to California, and Sims mentioned another abductee who had a foreign object stuck in his hand. X-rays sent to Dr. Leir were examined by a radiologist who offered his
opinion that both objects were metallic, and definitely not natural cysts or growths. Both abductees were to come to Dr. Leir's clinic to have these object removed. They met in Houston on August 19, 1995, and proceeded to California.
The woman, Patricia Damly, says her abduction experience occurred in October 1969. She and her family were on a camping trip in rural Texas when they experienced a nighttime episode of missing time and vague memories of some kind of abduction. The site of her experience has since been submerged
by a lake, but it was near a famous Civil War-era iron bridge.
The second abductee, Pat Parrinello, has had several UFO sightings over the past forty-two years. The abduction may have occurred in 1954, when he was only six years old. The node in his hand wasn't detected until 1971. Parrinello had a car accident in Venezuela, and X-rays were taken of his
injured left arm. It was then the foreign body in his hand was first noticed.
Damly and Parrinello arrived at the clinic. The proceedings were videotaped. Ms. Damly was first under the knife. Dr. Leir, well versed by now in the literature of alleged alien implants, had blood drawn and separated from the patients. This serum was used to hold the objects after removal, as Dr. Leir had heard accounts of implanted objects disintegrating or vaporizing upon exposure to air. Derrel Sims administered hypnosis as the primary anesthesia, though a local, injected anesthesia was also used.
Once Ms. Damly was prepped and ready, Dr. Leir made an incision in her left big toe. It took him almost an hour to find the object. When he located and touched the object with his probe, Ms. Damly spasmed, almost jerking her foot off the table. Dr. Leir found this surprising, yet hypnosis is an unreliable method of anesthesia (which is why hospitals use drugs). After
an hour, the local was probably wearing off. Dr. Leir seems to think Ms. Damly's sensitivity to his probing was preternatural.
Eventually a tiny triangular object was removed from Ms. Damly's toe. After removal, Dr. Leir made some crude attempts to dissect the little nodule, without much success. It was small, slick with blood (but it didn't evaporate!), and tough, much as one would expect from a foreign body imbedded in living tissue for thirty-odd years. I have a piece of pencil
lead in the palm of my left hand, and I daresay it would be hard to dissect too, after 32 years under my skin. A visible cortical had grown around it, isolating it from the sensitive tissues. That's how the human body deals with stray matter that gets inserted into it. Photographs in the MUFON Proceedings show a three-lobed object, rather like a Mercedes star, about the size of a tomato seed.
The procedure was repeated on Mr. Parrinello, with the pseudonymous "Dr. A" doing the honors. A similar grayish object was removed, but this time no one tried to bisect it. Though Dr. Leir asserts in the captions under the pictures in the Proceedings that Parrinello's object was "similar in size and shape" to Ms. Damly's, the picture shows a teardrop nodule about 5 millimeters long.
The excised objects were taken back to Houston for study. Some unimpressive facts emerged, such as the fact that the objects fluoresced under a black light. Big deal! Many common substances glow under ultraviolet light -- Vaseline, aspirin, many organic compounds. Ever looked at friend's teeth by black light? The enamel glows brightly. Is it significant that the removed objects fluoresced? Not especially.
Analysis of the membrane around the objects was a no-brainer, too. It was made of coagulated blood proteins and keratin, the protein that makes up our hair and nails. In other words, the body detected a foreign object and created a sheath of blood and keratin around it to protect the body -- exactly what you'd expect to happen.
Dr. Leir notes that there was no evidence of inflammation around the objects, no fibrosis, etc. "This is not the usual finding in foreign body tissue reactions," he wrote. I'd like a second opinion, doc. What is the usual state of inert foreign matter in the body after it has been in situ for twenty, thirty years? The pencil lead in my hand is not inflamed and
never has been.
At the core of the nodules were slivers of metal, the analysis of which has not been revealed (even though they were removed in August 1995). I have a theory, not very exciting or exotic: that these objects are simply metal slivers both patients acquired in the active lives. The fact that they were
in the hand and toe of the patients I find particularly enlightening; after all, what parts of the human body come on constant contact with the sharp, slivery, pointy parts of the world? Our hands and feet, of course. Unless more dramatic evidence is presented (and I'm not holding my breath), these
so-called implants fall far short of being evidence of alien abduction, or even anomalous.
This is not to say I am denying the UFO experiences of Ms. Damly or Mr. Parrinello. I have not investigated them or their claims, so I am not qualified to comment on them. But the objects cut from their extremities in August of last year should not convince any rational person that aliens are implanting weird devices in human test subjects, any more than the devil was marking his worshippers in central Europe, four centuries ago.
