Retired Temple
professor David Jacob in his Wyndmoor home. (Andrew Thayer
/ Staff Photographer)
While most
people might write off UFO believers as deluded, conspiracy-theorist kooks,
Jacobs isn't your typical believer.
He was a
tenured professor at Temple University, where he taught American history for 36
years before retiring in 2011. He's a married father of two who lives in a
picturesque, 134-year-old Victorian just over the Philadelphia line, in
Wyndmoor. He makes his case with well-reasoned, articulate explanations and
applies a scholarly approach to his research, which he has shared in four books
- printed by well-known and academic publishers.
Jacobs has
interviewed about 150 people who say they've been abducted by aliens, the
forgotten details of their cosmic kidnappings resurfacing in relaxation
sessions the self-taught hypnotist does in his home.
Citing public
polls, he estimates that aliens have abducted more than a million Americans.
He readily
admits that the evidence of extraterrestrial life and body-snatching is
"weak," muddied by an abundance of blurry photos and confabulation
(phony or misinterpreted "memories").
Yet he insists
evidence exists:
* Abductees
independently report similar experiences and recall common details, such as the
humanlike or insectlike appearance of aliens and their mission to breed.
Many abductees
told Jacobs that aliens stared deeply into their eyes, sometimes touching
foreheads, in a neurological scan that enabled them to harvest human sperm and
eggs. Women frequently claimed that aliens impregnated them, removed the
alien-human hybrid fetuses from their wombs and forced the women to nurse the
hybrid babies.
* People are
physically absent during the time they say they were abducted, Jacobs said.
Some families even have reported loved ones missing or seen them vanish, he
added.
* Abductees
sometimes are taken in groups; strangers who never met on Earth recall each
other from their deep-space experiences, Jacobs said.
* People
return with unusual marks, injuries or scars - including scar tissue that
formed overnight, "a biological impossibility that I have seen myself,"
he said.
His
inconvenient truth
For years,
Jacobs shunned speaking locally about alien abductions.
"I knew
that it was embarrassing to the university," he said, remembering one
Temple donor who threatened to end his charity unless Jacobs quit teaching his
UFO class, the only one like it in the country.
But he didn't
quit. Still, his beliefs carried a cost: Tenured in 1981, he said he was twice
rejected for promotion and never became a full professor at Temple.
"I was
not rewarded for my views," Jacobs said. "But you do not often find
yourself in the middle of a phenomenon that allows you to make a contribution
to something that could be of unsurpassing importance in human history."
Jacobs is
among a small but surprising array of well-known folks who reportedly believe
in extraterrestrial life, including former U.S. presidents Jimmy Carter and
Ronald Reagan, former astronauts Edgar Mitchell and Gordon Cooper, theoretical
physicist Stephen Hawking and celebrities Mick Jagger, Dan Aykroyd, Muhammad
Ali and William Shatner.
On the
skeptical side
Critics aren't
swayed by the big names.
Even smart
people can believe weird things, said Michael Shermer, founder and editor
of Skeptic magazine and a Scientific American columnist.
Shermer
interviewed Jacobs for his weekly NPR show, shortly after Jacobs' 1999
book, The Threat, was published. Shermer said Jacobs "spoke
like an academic" but that his beliefs are rooted in his "circular,
impenetrable argument" that sneaky aliens have lulled skeptics into
disbelief and complacency.
William
Hartmann, a senior scientist at the Arizona-based Planetary Science Institute,
described Jacobs' methods as concerning: "Dr. Jacobs' website describes
'alien abduction' reports extracted under hypnosis, but my sense is that most
of the scientific community gives little credence to reports coming from
hypnosis," Hartmann said.
Hartmann said
he and other scientists examined "photo evidence" of UFOs as members
of the U.S. Air Force's "Condon Committee" in the late 1960s.
"I went
in hoping to find real evidence of some extraordinary phenomena, but I came out
feeling we had no convincing evidence we could take back to Congress or the
USAF or public, and that the sociology of the UFO phenomenon was much more
interesting than any actual physical evidence like the alleged photos," he
said.
The SETI
Institute is a private, nonprofit science group based in California that
searches for signs of extraterrestrial life. But a spokesman declined to
comment on Jacobs or the possibility of aliens on Earth, saying that SETI hunts
for signs of alien life in deep space, not here.
No 'gee-whiz
thing'
Jacobs himself
says he has never seen a UFO nor been abducted by aliens. "I've never been
to Japan either, but that doesn't mean Japan doesn't exist," he said.
He remains
undaunted by skeptics. He has been a believer since he first began researching
extraterrestrial life in 1970.
As a college
student, he read about aliens and UFOs "for R&R" - but became
entranced when he thought: "This could be real," he said.
At the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, he switched his doctoral dissertation from the
portrayal of women in pre-1915 films to the UFO controversy in America.
He began
focusing on alien abductions in the 1980s and vows to continue that research
even as it terrifies him more each day.
"I used
to think it was the most amazing, wowee, gee-whiz thing," Jacobs said.
"But the more I learn about it, the more I fear it, the more I don't want
to have anything to do with it."
That's because
he suspects that aliens are intent upon planetary domination, as humans remain
mired in ignorance and denial.
"This is
a clandestine phenomenon," Jacobs said. "There is one thing that I
can say for sure: They don't want us to know what they're doing - because what
they're doing benefits them and not us."
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