The Alien "Booger" Menace by Martin Kottmeyer As if life wasn't silly enough already, UFOlogists are warning us that aliens are flying around and sticking things up people's noses. We all knew aliens are supposed to be different, but who would have expected them to be as "geeky" as that. On the matter of believing this claim, we'd suspect even ole Ripley might pause and say, "NOT!" Such claims do exist, however, and have become more numerous in recent years. Stark incredulity may be the proper response, but my doubt took the form of wondering how such a notion came into being. It seemed likely that UFOlogists didn't plant the idea into their claimants' minds. Their comments exude puzzlement. Mind control was the first guess, but David Jacobs now includes at least four more possibilities in his discussion in Secret Life. They might be tracking devices. They might telemeter hormone levels in the body. They might be transceivers to facilitate alien-human communications. They might generate molecular changes necessary to transport humans through walls. Doubtless, there are future avenues yet to be explored. Some that occur to me: they are industrial "boogers" designed to harvest biochemical elixirs unique to human nasal secretions; they are "booger" exchanges meant as an olfactory sign of cosmic brotherhood (not blood-brothers but "booger"-brothers); or they might be a ritual transcultural initiation necessary as a legal formality before anyone from their society converses with outsiders. The problems common to all such guesses is that nasal implants would be potentially fatal to their hosts. The sinus passages are notoriously septic environments. No surgeon would countenance such procedures. They are impossibilities demanding to be treated as fantasy. A difficulty specific to the idea that implants are mind control devices is that implants have been tried and largely abandoned by neurologists. Early experiments with electrical probes in the brain elicited certain thoughts and sensations which seemed to open the possibility that implanted electrodes might one day be used to control behavior, hopefully to curb violent impulses. Wilder Penfield, the leading pioneer in these studies, came away with a different conclusion based on what he was seeing. Compelled behavior was never present and the brain had the ability to reroute impulses and relearn behaviors when brain tissue was removed.He declared mind control an impossibility. Other workers, inspired by the animal implant study, dramatically displayed by Delgado in a bullring, continued to try to develop the technology for human mind implants. Elliot Valenstein, critically reviewing the previous work in his 1975 Brain Control, suggested Delgado's work involved animal confusion rather than control and declared the obstacles to further advancement or refinement were of a fundamental sort implicit in the neurological flexibility of brain function. Penfield was right. Implants had little or no practical value. Brain implants were too deliciously insidious an idea to ignore, and Hollywood used it more than once in their products. The highpoint of the exploitation of the idea was The Terminal Man (1973). A man is implanted with a series of electrodes to help curb his psychopathic tendencies. Unfortunately, the pleasure centers are activated in a manner which sends him on a killing spree. Long before this, aliens were forcing humans into sabotage as early as Invaders from Mars (1953) and Battle in Outer Space (1960). In the former, the victims were placed unconscious on an operating table while a needle-like device forced an explodable implant into the back of the neck. In the latter, a man is driving along in his car when a strobing beam of light surrounds him while aliens implant a radio control device telling him he has become a new slave of their glorious planet. He then experiences missing time and finds himself blocking city traffic with a copy telling him his forehead is bleeding. I wondered for a time if an episode of The Outer Space titled "The Man with the Power" might have been an influence in originating the implant fad. A mousy fellow played by Donald Pleasance volunteers to have a small device called a "link-gate" implanted in his brain. It is implanted above the nose with the intention of funnelling cosmic energy into a form of super-psychokinesis. Raymond Fowler pointed out that an anonymous UFO witness known to him was told by an alien that an implant placed in the side of her body would hopefully result in better communication and power. I know of no other instances of implants being associated with power. None of these implant dramas, however, involved devices being stuck up someone's nose. (Well, yes, there is Total Recall and that hilariously large implant being pulled out of the nose, but that came too recently to be an influence.) Why was such a bizarre path of insertion being reported by the abductees? A Freudian might suggest it was a form of "displacement." Dreams often transform events in surreal ways. Perhaps it was some sort of transmutation of sexual intercourse. Ernest Taves suggested such a possibility in the Winter 1979-80 Skeptical Inquirer, but I distrusted it because the associated emotions didn't seem to jive with such an interpretation, at least not with the Andreasson affair's nasal implant. Serendipity stepped in to resolve the muddle with a goof by Phil Klass [of CSICOP]. Discussing a recent addition to the roster of nasal implantees, he asserted that [author Budd] Hopkins never mentioned nasal implants in his books and that [author Whitley] Strieber seemed to have started it off. I was sure he was wrong and began to reread Hopkins to freshen my memory about the details. I soon learned the first claimant was Sandra Larson. Pulling out my old paperback copy of Abducted! to verify Hopkins's research, I found the puzzle instantly solved. It all began in a hypnosis session dated Jan. 17, 1976, when Larson unveiled an account of a space mummy (ala the Pasagoula classic three years earlier) performing an operation that did something to her brain. During this operation, an instrument described as "like a little knife or cotton swab" scraped the inside of her nose and made it sore. The kicker is that the investigators note, inside parentheses, that shortly before her UFO experience, Larson had a similar operation for a sinus condition. It was quite painful, and she had been scheduled for additional treatment that she elected not to undergo. Now things start to fall into place. The regression had been a reworking of her fears about her sinus condition and its medical treatment. The Larson story appeared in print in 1977 in a mass market paperback by the Lorenzens. We quickly see the next nasal implant turn up in a hypnosis session dated June 18, 1977, involving Betty Andreasson. Andreasson relives Larson's sinus operation with enough fidelity to transform the cotton swab ever so slightly with a small ball with little prickly things. She adds an element of solidity to the event by including a drawing of the instrument. Raymond Fowler picks up on the likeness of Andreasson's account to Larson's and, elsewhere, concedes that Betty's familiarity with "uncritical UFO literature" might explain parallels like this. Fowler's only rebuttal is that Andreasson's story in its entirety contains parallels to many different cases, some quite obscure, and on the whole there are "too many similarities" to lay it all to "cryptoamnesia." It is interesting to observe that Fowler says nothing about Larson's pre-UFO sinus operation. This omission is also notable in Budd Hopkins's discussions of nasal implants in Missing Time (pp. 208-9, 217) and Intruders (pp. 58-9). Textbook companies routinely include minor bits of misinformation in their textbooks to trip up plagiarists. A copycat can ascribe similarities between texts to shared accuracy of knowledge. No such defenses exists if idiosyncratic errors also are being repeated. The phenomenon of nasal implants is a fine proof of the cultural nature of abduction accounts, for it constitutes a fingerprint of borrowed material as surely as a textbook plagiarist repeating the wrong birthdate of a president. Larson's alien sinus operation is easily understood as the fantastic artifact of a hypnotic regression_a bizarre misattribution and error. By recurring in case after case of alien abduction_Betty Andreasson, Meagan Elliot, Virginia Horton, Kathie Davis, Linda Napolitano, Jennifer, and several unknown others_it serves as a special demonstration that the repetition of a motif may only constitute a repetition of what others have said and not a corroboration of a materially real menace by furtive aliens. The proof has been right under our noses.