Almost from the start, sex and UFOs were inseparable bedfellows. The adventure of 23-year-old Antonio Villas Boas on 16 October 1957 in Brazil is probably the most famous case of interstellar intercourse.
Antonio was ploughing a field on the family farm when the engine of his tractor cut out; at the same time, an object with purple lights descended from the sky. Humanoids in spacesuits emerged from the object and took him into their craft, subjecting him to what seemed like a medical examination.
They stripped him, spread a strange liquid over him and took a sample of his blood. He was left alone in a room for what seemed a long time, until a beautiful, fair-haired woman arrived.
She was naked and Antonio was instantly attracted to her. Without speaking or kissing, they had sex, during which she growled like a dog. Despite his strange circumstances or perhaps because the alien liquid had Viagra-like properties Antonio was soon ready for a second helping. Interviewed later, he said: "Before leaving she turned to me, pointed to her belly, and smilingly pointed to the sky." Before letting him go, his captors gave Antonio a guided tour of the spaceship. Antonio went on to become a successful lawyer and still stood by his story over 30 years later.
Equally lurid stories of sexual liaisons with UFO occupants came from the world-famous contactees of the 1950s. Howard Menger, for one, had regular meetings with Marla, a beautiful blonde from space who claimed to be 500 years old. She projected "warmth, love and physical attraction," which he found irresistible.
Menger divorced his wife to marry Marla (aka Connie Weber). From July 1952, Truman Bethurum had many meetings with Aura Rhanes, the captain of a flying saucer, whom he found to be "tops in shapeliness and beauty".
Bethurum's wife wasn't so impressed with this "queen of women" and cited Rhanes in her divorce petition. From the late Forties to the early Sixties, female contactees in contrast to today's female abductees are few and far between. This is more than made up for by the astonishing story of Elizabeth Klarer, who in 1956 fell in love with Akon, a scientist who took her to his home planet, Meton. There, he seduced her, saying: "Only a few are chosen for breeding purposes from beyond this solar system to infuse new blood into our ancient race."
This smooth talk worked;
"I surrendered in ecstacy to the magic of his lovemaking," she wrote later.
Klarer said their "magnetic union" produced a perfect and highly intelligent son named Ayling.
She was sent back to South Africa alone and died in 1994; as far as we know her starman and son live on somewhere beyond Alpha Centauri. Rather ordinary tales of 'contact' are thus transformed into heroic fantasies of youthful virility.
Antonio Villas Boas claimed to have done what any healthy young man would have done in the same situation; he and Elizabeth Klarer delivered the goods, helping to save an alien race from extinction. Scientific ufologists, more interested in 'hard' evidence (like radar traces, photographs and forensic samples) condemn this 'wet' material as too subjective, relegating claims of sexual assault and abduction to the fields of psychology and folklore (which they likewise distrust).
The early contactee literature provides a rich variety of such stories and, whatever their validity, it is a pity they have been largely neglected or ridiculed.
Antonio Villas BoasWhen ufologist John Keel visited college communities in Northeast America during the mid-1960s, several young women told him they had been raped by aliens, and young men confessed that aliens had extracted their semen.
By the 1970s, the idea of hybrid 'space babies' was more widely known but taken seriously only by UFO cultists who, said Keel, feared, that "the flying saucer fiends are engaged in a massive biological experiment creating a hybrid race which will eventually take over the Earth."
A decade later, these notions were part of mainstream ufology. Serious researchers some of them academics, like John E. Mack and David Jacobs openly declared their belief that the 'Greys' were taking sperm and ova from human abductees. It was common to hear female abductees tell of being impregnated, of the ftus taken from their wombs, and of later being shown their hybrid babies in a nursery on a flying saucer.
Historically, pregnancy and abortion have been surrounded by a constellation of myths and old wives' tales and it is, perhaps, no surprise to find UFO mythology being used to explain unexpected pregnancies, 'mysterious' discharges and missing or malformed babies.
In the 1970s, a 19-year-old Californian girl attributed the birth of a blue-skinned, web-footed baby to being gang raped by six blue-skinned web-footed humanoids who attacked her after she watched their spaceship land on a beach.
Similar stories of lusty mermen (the ocean has some affinity with space) can be found in folklore and are usually given as explanation for the birth of deformed babies with reptilian or fish-like characteristics.
Some researchers are aware of intriguing similarities between the lore of witches and fairies and modern abduction reports, and nocturnal sexual encounters with supernatural beings of all types can be found in most cultures to the present day. In the past, hundreds of men and women confessed (not always under torture) to sexual intercourse with demons.
Some shapeshifting demons were said to lie with a man (as a succubus) to obtain sperm and then (as an incubus) impregnate a woman with it.
Ufologists, in particular, have been aware of the structural similarities between accounts of fairy and alien encounters. A recent study by James Pontolillo compared 1517th century accounts of sexual relations with demons to 20th century encounters with aliens and concluded that both traditions expressed a fundamental fear of female sexuality but today the male body and mind are just as likely to be under attack.
Communion author Whitley Strieber famously described being sodomised by a narrow, 1ft (0.3m)-long alien probe.
He felt that, while inside him, it seemed alive and was surprised, on its removal, to find it was a mechanical device. In my own research I have interviewed 'Martin Bolton' who had visions of, and telepathic communications with, three young space women.
On behalf of these entities, he window-shopped for female attire and watched porn films.
They were the 'goodies'; the 'baddies' beamed pain to his brain and for a three-year period stretched his penis during the night. On several occasions they afflicted him with phantom pregnancies.
Ridley Scott's movie Alien (1979) dramatised the nature of the alien sexual assaults; the proof of their inhumanity is that they don't always differentiate between the sexes or even between species.
Historian David Jacobs who offers accounts, in his book, of abductees compelled to have sex with fellow victims while aliens watched speaks for many who believe that the apparently spontaneous experience of abduction by so many different people implies the phenomenon really exists as an objective threat.
Yet Rogerson has demonstrated that most of the elements of the abduction narrative appeared together as early as 1967 in "The Terror Above Us" by Malcolm Kent.
This science fiction novel anticipated such ufological themes as the 'Oz factor' (the sensation of being transported to a different reality), the supernatural cold, the doorway amnesia (the informant cannot remember what went on inside a room after entering), the alien in disguise, and impersonal scientists experimenting on humans.
For good measure, the story also includes a male protagonist having his genitals examined before sex with an alien female.
Another critic of the hybrid-breeding idea is British ufologist Peter Brookesmith, who compared the described activities of the alien 'doctors' with the procedures used by terrestrial fertility specialists. He found that the alien inseminators singularly fail to take their subjects at the premium time for egg removal, namely within 48 hours of ovulation.
And the aliens are just as likely to be confused by 'missing' fetuses as are humans, given the general difficulty of diagnosing pregnancy within the first eight weeks. For all their cosmic superiority, the alien inseminators can make pretty elementary, and farcical, errors. Aliens inserted a long needle into Betty Andreasson's navel.
They said their purpose had to do with creation and were puzzled to find 'something' missing. Andreasson had to explain to them that she'd had a hysterectomy.
Whatever the genesis of such reports, we have to consider that folk have reported sexual contact with all manner of supernatural beings throughout history. Either the aliens have been conducting their beastly experiments for millennia, or such stories meet some deep-seated socio-psychological need. Until any solid medical evidence is provided, the latter hypothesis seems the more likely.