by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”
In 2010, an article by Jeremy Vaeni headlined “The Incredible Visitations of Emma Woods” appeared in the November issue of UFO Magazine. The story that was detailed therein caused people in the UFO community to take hard look at the methods and conclusions of the two most prominent people in alien abduction research at that time. “Emma Woods” was the pseudonym of a woman who lived in England, and she was one of David Jacobs’s research subjects. She had posted some tapes of her hypnosis sessions with him that contained some details that Jacobs probably would have preferred had not been made public. Woods provided more details in an interview she gave on March 29, 2010, on the Paratopia podcast hosted by Vaeni and Jeff Ritzman, which appear in the UFO Magazine article. The article prompted Budd Hopkins’s wife, Carol Rainey to write an article of her own headlined “The Priests of High Strangeness” published in 2011 in Volume 1, Number 1 of Paratopia magazine detailing some of Hopkins’s methods with his subjects as well. Last week we looked at the experiences of Woods during her interaction with Jacobs. This week we’ll look at the aftermath and the reaction of some in the UFO community to Woods’s story.
ParatopiaMag_vol1_1-15-11Rainey’s article in Paratopia begins with Rainey telling the reader she “had intended to wait several more years before writing my hard-won insights into the alien abduction phenomenon.” Her insights included what she saw as abuse of patients, ethics violations, and some researchers manipulating the alien abduction narrative “into a rigid doctrine.” She wrote that she “had much to lose and nothing to gain by speaking up” but the story of Emma Woods “electrified me out of my silence and into action.” Rainey then proceeds to describe the cases of individuals who were subjects of Hopkins in response to the question written to the editor of UFO Magazine by Ray Fowler: “I wonder how many Emmas there are out there?”
By describing some of the cases Hopkins worked on, Rainey gives examples that reinforce her views that the field of alien abduction research “is afloat in hoaxes and partial hoaxes,” that Hopkins’s and Jacobs’s claims of “powerful evidence” for alien abductions and alien-human hybrids being among us are based “primarily on their hypnotic repetition of their own claims,” and that the people they feature in their books are “not the norm for abduction experiences.” While she points out the shortcomings of alien abduction research, she doesn’t deny that there might be something behind the phenomenon and wrote that a lot of the people she saw coming to Hopkins “had undergone genuinely inexplicable human experiences.”
According to Rainey, for over 20 years before she met Hopkins, she worked with scientists and epidemiologists producing and directing films about medicine. She wrote that in doing so, she learned a lot about scientific protocol, rigor, and “the need to protect subjects of the experiment.” In contrast, she describes Hopkins and Jacobs working alone, unsupervised, and without any medical training. She points out that UFO researchers working with human subjects are not required to get authorization from the Institutional Review Board, which uses peer review to approve studies and requires researchers to report back with their findings.
Rainey points out, however, that researchers like Hopkins and Jacobs are at least offering help to people who report traumatic experiences that universities and health institutions “won’t touch.” She describes the work of many UFO researchers as lonely and often costly in terms of status, relationships, and out-of-pocket financial expenditure. She asks what the reader supposes happens to researchers in a world with no structures, no boundaries, no standards, and no supervision, and in particular to two “who are also each other’s best friends in the world.”
Rainy then looks at the Emma Woods case. We looked at this case last week, and at the heart of the problems Woods ran into with Jacobs, was Jacobs’s belief that alien-human hybrids were threatening him to stop his work with Woods in instant messages that were written on his webmaster’s computer. He believed they were channeling them through this person, who is identified by the pseudonym “Elizabeth Smith.”
Woods believed this person was writing the messages on her own, and her disagreement with Jacobs led to them parting ways. Their split was less than amicable and Woods posted tapes of hypnosis sessions Jacobs was conducting over the phone (he was in the U.S. while Woods was in England) on her website, which is no longer active. We mentioned a couple of instances last week where Jacobs was captured displaying what many might consider questionable judgment, but moments that most would almost certainly agree crossed the boundaries of just about any researcher-subject relationship were one when where Jacobs recommends that Woods send him the unwashed panties she was wearing when she was supposedly raped by a hybrid so Jacobs could test them for alien sperm, and another where he suggests she wear a chastity belt with strategically located nails. He told her he’d find one for her from “a sex shop that specialized in bondage/dominance, a place that I frequented quite often.”
In spite of her criticisms, Rainey doesn’t portray Hopkins and Jacobs as outright fabricators. She describes them as being trapped in a “surreal, richly imaginative blend of fantasy and reality that is generated around anyone that is deeply involved in paranormal research.” According to her, Hopkins and Jacobs believed in the narrative they’d helped create to the point where they’d lost touch with consensus reality and justified their actions believing they were warning the world about a coming alien takeover.
Rainey doesn’t deny that there is a need for alien abduction researchers. Her problem lies with Hopkins and Jacobs not being open to interpretations of the phenomenon that don’t match theirs. She ends the article thanking them for their “courageous and dedicated work,” but closes with this:
“We just don’t think it’s possible that you alone, you two, exclusively hold The Truth about this human experience with the other. Face it, you’ve been engaged in an activity that makes it impossible for you to see clearly; not any more you don’t.
So, thanks, but we’ll take it from here.”
Just as Hopkins had his defenders and detractors within the UFO community in the wake of revelations about the Linda Napolitano case, Jacobs had his as well after the Woods story got out. Things got quite heated after Michael Schuyler of The Paracast got into an exchange with Woods on the Paracast forum. Shuyler ended the exchange with this:
“Well, I think you are bat-sh*t insane, myself. I think you need to get out more. I think you are obsessed and criminally harassing the man. I would be happy to testify on behalf of Dr. Jacobs should it ever come to that, which I doubt, and should I have anything useful to say.”
The exchange was read out loud by Vaeni and Ritzman at the end of the Paratopia episode featuring Woods’s tapes. They were already at odds with the folks at The Paracast, and while they acknowledged this for the listener, they had some strong things to say against Schuyler and Paracast Executive Producer and Host Gene Steinberg.
Jacobs was a guest on the October 18, 2015 episode of The Paracast, and there was debate about it on the forum. The fact that Woods’s case wasn’t discussed is brought up, and Steinberg commented “we deliberately chose not to mention the EW case. He mentioned her slightly in passing but we don’t pursue it. And we won’t. The value of Jacobs’ work, or lack thereof, doesn’t rest on that episode.”
Woods has since moved on. She wrote a book about her anomalous experiences as she saw them titled Glimpses of Magonia, which was published in 2022. She appeared as a guest on the podcast Some Other Sphere to talk about the book. She answered in the positive when asked if the “more other-worldly aspects” of her experiences fit best into the UFOlogy field, but said she thought that “probably,” whatever was behind them was a part of the natural world and had probably “been with us from the beginning.” There was no mention of Jacobs.