Awakening to Obscured Memories

By Jeff Selver

How and why are the memories of contact events being obscured? What mechanisms in the brain would allow this to occur? In this essay I will explore my experience of having obscured memories of alien contact, and the plausible different ways this could be happening using research on the brain, and what is recorded in the abduction phenomenon. Presently, the means in which memories are being obscured is still a mystery. 

When my contact experiences came to light, I wasn’t just stunned my memory of the events was being obscured, it seemed to also occur on a deep subconscious level because I never got triggered. In different periods of my life I had seen the classic image of an alien - big downward pointing eyes and bulbous head - yet never felt I had seen that in real life, and this seems to be the case with plenty of abductees. Though a number will have some kind of unexplainable event that allows them to piece together that they have had alien contact, such as having missing time, or after a close encounter with a UFO then being locally displaced and not recalling how they arrived at their new location. When I hear about these type of events, such as missing time, I think of them as a purposeful markers left by the alien species for the human. A method of communication used by them telling the human that alien contact has taken place. I say this because of how infrequent overt events like this occurred to me; I was left with very little overt markers, beside some UFO sightings while travelling, and subconscious impressions that left very vivid and emotionally rich dreams, otherwise in some cases the event on the outside looked mundane and I was easily able to overlook it, like in the middle of a U-turn on a road, such as my ninth contact event. This shows me that in other well recorded contact events, when the aliens leave any overt indication of contact for the human, it is deliberate. When an abductee is aware they have had alien contact, the memory may still be obscured and be deep enough to not allow for a trigger. Some of those abductees who know they have had alien contact will use hypnotic regression to uncover what happened to them, but not all, and even then, they may or may not be able to retrieve the memories of the contact event, showing just how inaccessible they can be.

The question could be asked; if the Beings are obscuring memories, then how do we know contact is real is real? I asked this question myself for the first couple of months after awakening to my memories. Can a mind make up false memories? Maybe I was suffering from some delusion. According to the abduction researcher Dr. David Jacobs, yes, the mind can produce false memories, but that is typically under the circumstances of one event, not a lifetime of abduction memories. But also, abductions can provide anecdotal evidence which a false memory cannot account for, and this was the case for me. Between the paranormal events, strange scars, sightings of UFOs, geotagged memories of locations in nature that I had long forgotten, and the large body of commonalities between my memories and those of other contactees, I knew these were not false memories.

What was also shocking about my memories was that in every contact event I am aware of the previous contact. July 1st, 2019 was the day I confirmed for myself I had alien contact, as discovered from having a screen memory, as laid out in my book. Within the first week of trying to put together what had happened to me in those early teenage years, I thought at first that the Rising was created from a single contact event. When I realized multiple events were involved, I at first logically assumed the Beings must have been new to me every time. Very quickly did I put together, shockingly, that as a young teenager, between contact events, I would regain my awareness of my previous experience with them; it was a part of my awareness they turned on in my mind. When I realized this was the nature of my memories it was totally shocking with a distinct feeling that I had literally held a double life. This was unsettling and hard to wrap my head around. How could this be?

In human psychology there only appears to be one instance of this, multiple personality disorder, also known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). In this case, personalities can live out full lives without the other personalities' awareness. The person I am, and my family and friends have witnessed, has never displayed DID. What’s more, I’ve never experienced the symptoms associated with DID, such as memory loss, hallucinations, or black outs. Nor am I aware of other contactees who might regularly display these symptoms, or is there any research indicating contactees display these symptoms. What this suggests is the biological underpinnings that create DID or not occurring in the obscuring of memories in contact events, though how DID occurs in the brain is currently a mystery. What’s also an interesting mystery is DID increases activity in the insula of the brain which reduces introspective awareness. While alien contact has long been associated with an expanse in consciousness, which would be linked to creating introspective awareness, as was the case with myself as demonstrated in my story. Therefore DID appears to have no neurological link to obscured memories of alien contact.

The Brain and the Encoding of Memories

While I was researching the brain to understand my own experience with obscured memories, I was fascinated to learn that the brain in and of itself does not encode the passage of time, but uses the process of memory making to do this. If these memories are removed then the mind would never know that time has passed, as it has nothing to base the passage of time on.

My case in point, I refer to the story of Travis Walton, one of the most famous in the abduction phenomenon, in which Travis was missing for five days after being abducted by a UFO. When he awoke on a road he assumed a single night had passed simply because the last thing he remembered was it being nighttime. When he was picked up by his brother and was told he had been missing for five days, he didn’t believe it. His brother referred to the five days of beard growth on Travis’s face as evidence for how long he’d been gone.

The feeling that time hasn’t passed is one of the ways it seems people don’t notice an abduction has occurred. Until it happens to you, most people assume they would “feel” an abduction has occurred to them. The shocking part is you don’t feel anything. If you're not aware of the event, it becomes a blip in your existence, a hole in your awareness that the Beings simply seal up by erasing the memory.

Being a long-term meditator has helped me identify the location of different sensations in my brain. It is in the memory of my fifth contact event, in May of 1997, that I clearly felt my memory of alien contact was turned on or activated in a place behind my pineal gland. This could likely be the hippocampus, the region of the brain where long-term memories are recorded. Abduction researchers have postulated that the process of memory removal and then retrieval by the aliens may be to store contact event memories in the long-term memory system, by-passing the short-term memory. Doing so would prevent the triggering mechanism in the short-term memory that would allow for its reconstruction outside of a contact event.

Two Theories How Memories are Being Obscured

Is it possible memories are being obscured from a natural effect of the Being’s presence? In my nineteenth contact event, I distinctly felt the environment change, like an electromagnetic charge filled the air.

Electromagnetic fields (EMF) can cause memory loss, but all our research regarding EMFs on the brain focuses on exposure from commercial utilities, such as powerlines, or Wi-Fi. Thus, our research here is inconclusive. It is not clear if a technology is creating a change in the electromagnetic field during an alien contact event, or if it is being generated in some other way. 

Or could it be that memories of alien contact become obscured from something the Beings are doing to the mind of the individual? The Beings have long been documented for having psychic abilities, they are known for communicating in telepathy, and for being able to read thoughts. The ability to erase memories seems to be a psychic ability also. As abduction researchers gather information, they have rarely seen a hypnotic process or machine involved in the erasing of memories. If the ability to erase minds is a psychic ability, so far it seems no one understands how they are able to do this.

The best evidence that the obscuring memories is created from the psychic ability of the aliens is from their use of screen memories. Sigmund Freud coined the word screen memory when he was studying children who had created false memories in place of traumatic events. It is a distorted memory created when the mind experiences a traumatic event that is so shocking it makes up or fills in something less threatening, such as an image of an animal.

Many contactees experience screen memories. A typical alien screen memory will appear as a normal memory, one that you think occurred, and even remember details of, but upon analysis may not make logical sense. In the abduction phenomenon I have heard of screen memories of animals, from deers to owls, but also wildly different symbols like restaurants, hospitals, ambulances, or car crashes. My screen memory I refer to in my book was of an owl with highly reflective eyes that sat perched on a tree, never flew away, and on the entrance to the path into Mundy Park where the contact event took place, almost like it was symbolically guarding the memory.

At first, abduction researchers assumed that the screen memory was because the contact event was so traumatic for the contactee that they had blocked it out of their mind. Now there’s substantial evidence that the Beings themselves put screen memoires into the minds of the human. This evidence is from multiple people who have been abducted together and have matching screen memories.

And lastly, for me, my own second contact event displays that screen memories definitely are not designed to cover up something traumatic because that contact event wasn’t traumatic at all; I was the one excited to see these Beings. So, I can deduce it’s only purpose was to cover up the event.

My Theory How My Memories were Obscured

Currently, I believe there are three methods the aliens used to obscure my memory, making it so effective, a perceptive teenager, and young adult wouldn’t find out about their contact events for twenty years.

1) In the presence of the Beings I’m in a phased or electromagnetic state that does affect my mind and my memory. I deduce this from the way my body felt in their presence.

2) I also believe the Beings were in control of my memory, whether this was a psychic ability or with technology I’m not clear. I deduce this from their ability to remotely make me the “me that knows them” outside of the craft before I engaged with them as recorded in several different contact event.

3) More obviously was the Elder creating a power of suggestion in which I agreed to help them block our agreement from my own mind; that if I ever noticed anything suspicious to turn my mind away from it, as relayed in my first contact event.

There are my best educated guesses as to how the Beings were successfully able to obscure my memories even from a subconscious trigger.

Why are Memories Being Obscured?

Why would the Beings obscure memories? It's unclear if that has ever been shared with humans and it may vary depending on the person or situation, but with myself I can see a pattern.

The Beings seem very ok giving information or experiences to individuals that may be considered extreme or traumatic. For example, seeing my mother on a bed with a large needle going into her pregnant belly, when I was five or six years old, is a traumatic thing to see. Traumas are formed when repeated thoughts form groves of connecting synapses in the brain. Yet the erasing of the memory at the conscious level removed the possibility for the trauma to impact my brain as I grew older. But then, in another contact event years late, when they need me to draw on that memory, it’s there for them.

Also, they may be providing experiences that require a degree of maturity to understand, and at the age they occur I do not have it. If you recall the psychological split I experienced as soon as I came out of the white room, the persona was too incomprehensible for my everyday mind to understand, yet over time, I gained the wisdom to understand its value in my life.

I do see wisdom in the Beings erasing memories - the only way the mind can accept large truths that are unacceptable to itself is by having them doled out in pieces over time.

Believe what you will, but after all these years, I now see the brilliance of the Beings in their mastery of the human brain and psychology, and their ability to obscure memories so effectively, all while still knowing how to motivate a human to work with them the entire time (well almost; except for the fall of 1998).

Now, I’ve come to terms with their method, and don’t regret my involvement with them.

Resources

Cepelewicz, J., “How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past”, Quanta Magazine, 12 Feb 2019,

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-brain-creates-a-timeline-of-the-past-20190212/

Fowler, R. (1994) The Andreasson Affair: The Documented Investigation of a Woman’s Abduction Aboard a UFO. Wild Flower Pr.

Jacobs, D. M. (1998) The Threat. Simon & Schuster.

Keller, T. L. 2019, ‘“Long Distance” ETI Communication?’, The MUFON Journal, no. 616, pp. 18-21

Krause-Utz, A., Frost, R, Winter, D., Elzinga, B, M. (2017). Dissociation and Alterations in Brain Function and Structure: Implications amd Borderline Personality Disorder. Current Psychiatry Reports, 19(1), 6. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11920-017-0757-y

 Lai, H. “Exhibit D: An Update on Neurological Effects of Nonionizing Electromagnetic Fields”, European Commission, 26 Nov 2021, https://ec.europa.eu/health/scientific_committees/emerging/docs/emf_6.pdf

 Walton, T. (1997) Fire in the Sky. Marlowe & Company.