Andreasson, Betty

Betty Andreasson, who in 1967 claimed she experienced an encounter with UFO beings, became the subject of one of the first controversies over the claimed contact with extraterrestrials that engaged the whole community of UFO researchers. In 1979, Raymond Fowler wrote the first of four books discussing what became known as the "Andreasson Affair."

Andreasson's story began on the evening of January 25, 1967, in South Ashburnham, Massachusetts. The lights went out in her home, and her seven children and her parents, who were visiting, gathered in the kitchen. Her father looked out the back window, attracted by a pink light that was shining, and he saw several little creatures which he thought of as Halloween-like entities. He made a passing note of them, but did not do anything. The next morning, all appeared to be back to normal, except Andreasson had a strange feeling that something out of the ordinary had happened. Over the next few weeks she had flashbacks of humanoid creatures and an otherworldly environment, but it was not until 1977 when she underwent some hypnosis sessions that the entire story surfaced. It appears that soon after her father saw the creatures, all of the family was placed in a state of paralysis and several small gray beings entered the house and addressed her telepathically. They took her aboard their spaceship, an action requiring Andreasson to pass through the closed door of her house and to float toward the disc-shaped craft.

On board the ship she was run through a series of tests that included probes of her body with a needle and the removal of a small object from her head by a needle inserted into her nostril. She next had a visionary experience of traveling into another world where she met a being whom she, a Christian, saw as God. The voice told her that she was a chosen one. The events aboard the ship closed with a final lecture by an entity earlier identified as Quazgaa, who told her that she would forget what had occurred for a while, but that he and his companions loved humanity and had come to help. Humans needed to study nature to rid themselves of their self-destructive tendencies. They left her with a book, which she examined several days later, but again only remembered in 1977.

Her complex story mixed elements of what came to be known as UFO abduction accounts with contactee themes of a religious-like mission. While UFO investigators would study abductions intensely through the 1980s, they avoided contactee accounts (previously denounced as hoaxes or products of delusion) until a number of the abductee stories began to add contactee-like content. As her full story unraveled, Andreasson told of a series of encounters with the saucer entities that went back to her childhood. Following her marriage in 1978 to Bob Luca, she settled in Connecticut, where her home became the scene of a variety of psychic and unusual occurrences. Luca himself would undergo hypnosis to tell of a similar set of encounters to those already described by his new bride. New experiences continued into the 1990s.

The Andreasson Affair was integrated into the whole study of abductions during the 1980s, a study that continues. Though a number of leading UFO researchers have gone on record as believing the abduction stories, their work has yet to produce consensus or what many would see as hard evidence. Final evaluation of the Andreasson encounters awaits a final resolution of the issue of abductions. Skeptics have offered variant explanations from lying (the least credible hypothesis) to subconscious fantasy. Andreasson has continued to integrate her experiences, which she sees as evidence of the government of God over the world, into her Christian beliefs.

Sources:

Fowler, Raymond. The Andreasson Affair. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979.

——. The Andreasson Affair, Phase Two. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1982.

——. The Watchers: The Secret Design Behind UFO Abduction. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1990.

——. The Watchers II: Exploring UFOs and the Near Death Experience. Newberg, Ore: Wild Flower Press, 1995.

Taves, Ernest H. "Betty through the Looking-Glass." Skeptical Inquirer 4, no. 2 (winter 1979/1980): 88-95.