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URECAT - UFO Related Entities Catalog

OCTOBER 8, 1978, BIRMINGHAM, WEST MIDLANDS, U-K., A CHILD:

Brief summary of the event and follow-up:

According to Albert Rosales, in "Aliens Among Us" - a source not specified more than that - in Birmingham, England, on October 8, 1978, late in the night, a boy aged 11 "remembered" getting into bed and turning off the light and thinking how odd it was that he could see everything in the room clearly, even though it was pitch black outside. It was as if there was pale light shining from the walls.

He started drifting off to sleep, but was awoken by a banging noise. It was his bedroom door, which was opening and slamming shut repeatedly. This happened about six times and he became frightened, he tried to shout for his mother but no sound came out and he now could clearly see the shape of something standing there in front of the door.

It was something small, about three feet tall, but he could not make out any detail. He could hear a heavy breathing coming from it and could vividly feel its presence. The boy panicked and attempted to get up from bed but could not move a muscle. Even though it seemed like an eternity, the figure stood there for about 7 seconds before appearing to dissolve into the door.

When it had gone, the room became very dark to the point that he could not see anything at all. He was now able to move so he ran to his mother's room and was surprised to find her awake. She told the boy that she had woken suddenly for no apparent reason and felt something standing next to her, watching her.

Basic information table:

Narratives:

[Ref. ar1:] ALBERT ROSALES:

Albert Rosales indicates in his catalogue that in Birmingham, England, on October 8, 1978, late at night, the 11-year old witness remembered getting into bed and turning off the light and thinking how odd it was that he could see everything in the room clearly, even though it was pitch black outside. It was as if there was pale light shining from the walls, He started drifting off to sleep, but was awoken by a banging noise. It was his bedroom door, which was opening and slamming shut repeatedly. This happened about 6 times and he became frightened, he tried to shout for his mother but no sound came out and he now could clearly see the shape of something standing there in front of the door. It was something small---about three feet tall but he could not make out any detail. He could hear a heavy breathing coming from it and could vividly feel its presence. The witness panicked and attempted to get up from bed but could not move a muscle. Even though it seemed like an eternity, the figure stood there for about 7 seconds before appearing to dissolve into the door. When it had gone, the room became very dark to the point that he could not see anything at all. He was now able to move so he ran to his mother's room and was surprised to find her awake. She told the witness that she had woken suddenly for no apparent reason and felt something standing next to her, watching her.

Albert Rosales indicates that the source is "Aliens Among Us."

[Ref. ud1:] "UFODNA" WEBSITE:

The website says that on 8 October 1978 at "01:00", in Birmingham, UK, "The 11-year old witness remembered getting into bed and turning off the light and thinking how odd it was that he could see everything in the room clearly, even though it was pitch black outside. It was as if there was pale light shining from the walls, He started drifting off to sleep, but was awoken by a banging noise. It was his bedroom door, which was opening and slamming shut repeatedly. This happened about 6 times and he became frightened, he tried to shout for his mother but no sound came out and he now could clearly see the shape of something standing there in front of the door. It was something small---about three feet tall but he could not make out any detail. He could hear a heavy breathing coming from it and could vividly feel its presence. The witness panicked and attempted to get up from bed but could not move a muscle. Even though it seemed like an eternity, the figure stood there for about 7 seconds before appearing to dissolve into the door. When it had gone, the room became very dark to the point that he could not see anything at all. He was now able to move so he ran to his mother's room and was surprised to find her awake. She told the witness that she had woken suddenly for no apparent reason and felt something standing next to her, watching her."

The source indication is a broken link.

Points to consider:

"Aliens Among Us", given by [ar1] as the reference of the source, is obviously an unacceptable manner to reference a source. It is possible that this is actually the book of the same title by "New Age" seer Ruth Montgomery.

Ruth Shick Montgomery (1912 - 2001), initially a journalist by profession, self-proclaimed "Christian psychic", sort of high priestess of all things "New Age", wrote numerous books on these topics. She claimed she had discovered her gift of "automatic writing" by which she could write her books, and communicate with various deceased personalities. She wrote about the alleged "psychic powers", alleged "Out-of-body experiences" ("OBE"), alleged communication with deaths, and a book in which she wrotes stories of alien encounters, "Aliens Among Us", including this case, short, anecdotal and apparently unmentioned in more... traditional ufology sources.

She believed humans existed on Earth before the dinosaurs, that the first humans were giants and had produced offspring with large animals, Centaurs, satyrs and nymphs, that remnants of the alleged disappeared continents "Mu" and "Atlantis" would rise from the sea after a "Polar Shift", she claimed he prediction power allowed her to tell world War III would occur in 1985, she used to claim repeatedly that the next US president would be a "Walk-In", i.e. some supernatural alien beings, that between 2010 and 2012, Florida and California would be destroyed, etc. etc, all prediction based on her alleged powers, and all failed predictions.

Even if the credibility issue is forgotten, what we have here is likely a textbook case of hypnagogic hallucination with sleep paralysis.

First, the witness is a little boy, aged 11. This is an age when frightful dreams, hypnagogic hallucinations, sleep paralysis, are even more common than in adulthood.

Second, we have all the signs it was an hypnagogic hallucination:

• A noise, a light, both "unusual", though the slamming door is unusual only in the sense that it probably did not usually slam. These are tipically stimuli that put the person just a bit out of the sleeping state, and if the person was into a dream at this time, the hallucination hypnagogic has all the chances to occur.
• The witness "can't move", he is paralysed. This is obviously sleep paralysis. When the mind was partly awoken, the body was still in its normal "paralysis" state. This is a normal mechanism that prevent people to stand up and get hurt when they are sleeping and dreaming.
• The witness has the double feeling it lasted very long and lasted only a few second. This is again a typical characteristic of hypnagogic hallucination episodes.

How and why hypnagogic hallucinations occur can be discovered by reading these references:

• "The Old Hag phenomenon as sleep paralysis: a biocultural interpretation", paper by R.C. Ness, in Cultural and Medical Psychiatry, vol. 2 #1, pp 15-39, March 1978.
• "Lucid Dreaming: The Paradox of Consciousness During Sleep", book by Celia Green and Charles McCreery, Routledge publisher, U-K., 1994.
• "Wrestling With Ghosts: A Personal And Scientific Account Of Sleep Paralysis", book by Jorge Conesa Sevilla, Xlibris Corporation publishers, U-K., 2004.
• "Hallucinations and pathological visual perceptions in Maupassant's fantastical short stories - a neurological approach", by L.C. Alvaro, in Journal of the History of Neuroscience, vol 14, #2, pp 100-115, June 2005.
• "Effects of hypnagogic imagery on the event-related potential to external tone stimuli", paper by N. Michida, M. Hayashi, T. Hori, in Sleep, Vol. 28 #7, pp 813-818, July 2005.
• "Sleep and Society: Ventures into the (Un)Known", book by Simon A. Williams, Routledge publisher, 2005.
• "Mental representation of space: Insights from an oblique distribution of hallucinations", paper by T.A Girard, D.L. Martius, J.A. Cheyne in Neuropsychologia, vol. 45 #6, pp 1257-1269, 2007.
• "Parasomnias", paper by D.T. Plante, J.W. Winkelman, in The Psychiatric Clinics of North America, Vol. 29 #4, pp 969-987, December 2006.
• "Paranoid delusions and threatening hallucinations: A prospective study of sleep paralysis experiences", paper preview by J.A. Cheyne, T.A. Girard, scheduled in Consciousness and Cognition for April 2007.

List of issues:

Evaluation:

Probable hypnagogic hallucination.

Sources references:

* = Source I checked.
? = Source I am told about but could not check yet. Help appreciated.

• [---] * "Aliens Among Us".
• [ar1] * "1978 Humanoid Reports", compiled by Albert Rosales, circa 2007, at www.ufoinfo.com/humanoid/humanoid1978.shtml
• [ud1] * "8 Oct 1978 - Birmingham, UK", web page by the UFOdna website, circa 2010, at thecid.com/ufo/uf19/uf6/196546.htm

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This page was last updated on May 21, 2012