Are Nick Redfern’s WIB witnesses nuts?

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As some of you know, from reading Nick Redfern’s latest book, Women in Black, an inconsiderable number of persons have claimed they were harassed, scared, terrorized by women in black, much as many UFO witnesses have been, allegedly, troubled by men in black.

But are the encounters, noted by Nick in his 294 page book, real or hallucinatory?

While persons seeing odd things – often having what is ascribed as an hallucination – they actually “see” what they think they are seeing.

But is there an actual, tangible “thing” before their eyes?

Starting on Page 48, Chapter 4, Nick provides a number of MIB, WIB, and even Children in Black episodes that involved UFO author John Keel.

John Keel was “tuned into” many paranormal events, and a proponent of the 1966 Mothman sightings in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, Keel seeming to attract and promote weird events.

(There does seem to be anecdotal accounts of some people favored by paranormal activity; such activity ranging from the earliest times and reaching a crescendo in the Middle Ages and, apparently, in the United States in the 1960s. Nick provides  litany of paranormal activity outside the 1960s time-frame, much of it centered on Men in Black and their counterparts, Women in Black.)

Nick offers a story [Page 153 ff.] about a man named Dan Seldin who told Bud Hopkins, in 1985, under hypnosis (!), about a 1969 experience that has been counted as a UFO abduction.

Seldin related that after his “experience,” he had a “dream” from which he awoke, and saw. “standing in the dark shadows … a trio of large-headed, emotionless [sic] humanoids with black eyes and dressed all in black …Then, as if out of nowhere, the face of a human-looking woman loomed into view. It was a chilling sight for Seldin. The malevolent looking she-hag had long, black hair – which awung, or blew, wildly in Seldin’s face/ In addition, she had dark eyes, and rather oddly, no teeth.

“Seldin was terrified but he admitted that although the woman gave off an air of ‘evil,’ she ‘looks petty too …’”[Page 154]

This is not an atypical story among those provided by Nick.

But what are we to make of it?

One can see a resemblance, minus the UFO/humanoid descrips, to one of Freud’s famous cases: “The Wolf-Man” recounted in The Wolf-Man, by the Wolf-Man: The double story of Freud’s most famous case, edited by Muriel Gardiner [Basic Books, NY, 1971]

The “Wolf-Man” [Sergei Konstantinovitch Pankejeff] was a man treated for his neurotic problems, who had a Don Quixote-like fixation, at one point in his life, on a woman named Therese:

“I had arranged with my mother that after a week I would pay her a short visit … and then return to Therese. On the evening before I was to visit my mother Therese and Iwent to the well-known Berlin variety theater Wintergarten … I was in … high spirits …[but] when we had returned to the hotel [Therese] made a dreadful scene of jealousy. She raged and screamed …

“I lay awake the entire night, trying to figure out … Therese’s outburst of rage …” [Pages 76-77]

Of course, Freud saw The Wolf-Man’s problem(s) as having a sexual orientation, much as he did with patient Dora, a notable case of hysteria [Dora – An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria [Collier Book, NY, 1963]

And this, about hypnosis and “phantasy” in Freud’s famous case of Anna O:

“It was observed that, while the patient was in her states of ‘absence (altered personality accompanied by confusion), she was in the habit of muttering a few words to herself which seemed as though they arose from some train of thought that was occupying her mind. The doctor, after getting a report of these words, used to put her into a kind of hypnosis and then repeat them to her so as to induce her to use them as a starting point. The patient complied with the plan, and in this way reproduced in his presence the mental creations which had been occupying her mind during the ‘absences’ and which had betrayed their existence by the fragmentary words which she had uttered. They were profoundly melancholy phantasies – ‘day dreams’ we should call them – sometimes characterized by poetic beauty, and their starting-point was as a rule the position of a girl at her father’s sick-bed.  When she had related a number of these phantasies, she was as if set free, and she was brought back to normal mental life.”

One could go on and on with the sexual orientation in hysteria and it’s concomitant delusional component hallucination.

More can be found in Sigmund Freud’s Collected Papers, Volume 3 [Basic Books, NY, 1959]

I’ve always posited that alien abductions have an underpinning of a sexual element, repressed but breaking into the open with fantasies of alien abductions. [See rrrgroup.blogspot.com]

Yet, do encounters with Women in Black (or MIB) denote an hallucination with sexual underpinnings?

I suggest they do, but does that mean the persons being visited by WIB (or MIB) haven’t had a real visitation by actual persons (or beings)?

There are too many recitations, as Nick provides, to discount that all – all – encounters are fantasy-ridden.

A tale of a hissing WIB is told by Nick in his Chapter 25 [Page 250 ff.].

It took place in 1893 in Rhineback, New York, and was reported in the town paper, the Sunday Herald and headlined “A Woman in Black.”

“It is the story of a strange creature who glides noiselessly along country roads at dead of night … She invariably halts long enough to stretch out her long arm from beneath a black veil and at the same time make a hissing noise.” [Sunday Herald]

Nick has a plethora of such sightings, from long ago right up to the present.

Like Kevin Randle’s Roswell liars, can all of Nick’s “witnesses” be pathological, fraught with hysteria and hallucinations?

The numbers belie hallucination, in toto.

Some, like UFO sightings, have to be real – actual observations of WIB. Crazy can’t account for all the overwhelming recounted observations/encounters. It can’t (or else we are living in a society or world that is basically constructed of madness).

Get Nick’s book, and have a good, edifying read. Then let me know what you think.

RR