Script

It’s a chilly autumn afternoon in November 1974, in a modest home in Rawlins, Wyoming. The wind howls outside, rattling the windows like an impatient visitor from the vast, empty plains. Inside, Carl Higdon, a rugged oil worker still recovering from his recent hospital stay, sits in a recliner, his eyes closed, his breathing steady but labored. Across from him, Dr. Ronald Leo Sprinkle, a soft-spoken psychologist from the University of Wyoming, speaks in a calm, measured tone, saying: Relax now, Carl. Let your mind drift back to that day in the forest. What do you see?

Under hypnosis, Higdon's voice trembles as fragmented memories flood back into his mind: a bullet crumpling in mid-air, a neckless humanoid in a black jumpsuit named Ausso One, a transparent alien ship transporting him to a distant planet. As the session unfolds, Sprinkle listens intently, his notepad filling with details that defy explanation.

For over three decades, Dr. Sprinkle would repeat these same steps – working with alien abductees and using hypnosis to recover their repressed memories of the experience. And over those decades, Sprinkle would become the go-to hypnotist for those claiming alien contact and unlock shocking memories.  Who was Dr. Sprinkle and how did he become the psychologist to so many of the famous alien abductees…and what stories of alien horror did he reveal?

I’m MF Thomas and this is My Dark Path through the unexplained.

Ronald Leo Sprinkle was born on August 31, 1930, in Rocky Ford, Colorado, a small farming town where the vast skies overhead sparked his curiosity about the universe. Raised in a modest family, Leo—as he was known—excelled in school, earning a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Colorado in 1952, followed by a master's in 1954 and a Ph.D. in counseling psychology from the University of Missouri in 1961. His academic path seemed conventional: he joined the faculty at the University of Wyoming in Laramie where he taught courses on personality theory, counseling techniques, and abnormal psychology. As he and his wife Marilyn raised three children, Sprinkle projected the image of a dedicated educator and family man.  Still, his wire-rimmed glasses and gentle demeanor belied his unusual personal connection to the unexplained and his esoteric research interests.   Dr. Sprinkle was anything but a typical professor of psychology.  He would interview and hypnotize more alien abductees than anyone in history.

Part 1 – First Contact

Sprinkle's first break into abduction research came in 1967 with the case of Herb Schirmer, a 22-year-old police sergeant of Ashland Nebraska. On December 3, around 2:30 a.m.,

he’d just returned to his routine midnight patrol after helping wrangle an escaped bull from a nearby farm.  Suddenly, he spotted flashing red lights ahead and assumed it was a stalled truck. As he approached and shone his high-beam headlights on it, the object revealed itself as a large, metallic, disc-shaped craft.  To his estimate, it was about about 20 feet wide and 15 feet tall.  Astonishingly, it hovered about 6–8 feet above the road. It had a shiny, polished aluminum-like surface that glowed and a row of about seven oval windows.  Blinking red lights flashed through the windows. The craft made a high-pitched whining or siren-like noise.

When Schirmer hit the high beams, illuminating the craft, it began to ascend slowly, emitted a flame-like or orange-red display from its underside.  He rolled his window down and watched the craft pass nearly overhead and before suddenly shooting upward into the night sky, before vanishing.

Schirmer jumped out of his patrol car with a flashlight to inspect the road where it had hovered.  He found nothing obvious at the time.

Schirmer returned to the Ashland police station and logged the incident at around 3:00 a.m.: “Saw a flying saucer at the junction of highways 6 and 63. Believe it or not!” As he documented the encounter, he realized he had an unaccounted-for gap of 20–25 minutes—the sighting itself seemed to last only a few minutes. Then, over the next hours, he suffered a severe headache, a persistent “weird buzzing” or ringing in his head, nausea, disorientation, and general weakness. A prominent red welt (about 2 inches long and ½ inch wide) appeared on the left side of his neck, below one ear. This mark was visible and noted by others before fading

.

The next morning, the Ashland Police Chief followed up on Schirmer’s report by visiting the site.  He recovered a small metallic fragment.   Nevertheless, Schirmer’s fellow officers learned of his report…and mocked him so relentlessly that eventually he sought psychological help from the UFO community.

Enter Dr. Sprinkle, who was invited by the Condon Committee—the University of Colorado's government-funded UFO study—to hypnotize Schirmer in February 1968. In a dimly lit room at the University of Colorado, Sprinkle guided Schirmer into a trance. 

Under hypnosis, a more complete narrative emerged consistently across sessions:

• As Schirmer approached, the craft’s presence caused his patrol car’s engine and radio to fail suddenly.

• A bright light or orange-red beam shone on his police car and entities emerged from the craft.  They used a greenish gas to paralyze him before escorting him aboard their craft. He recalled walking up a cold ladder or hatch on the underside.

• The aliens were about 5 feet tall with grayish skin, long thin heads, slanted “cat-like” eyes that never blinked, flat noses, and slit-like mouths with no visible lips. They all wore silver-gray uniforms with gloves and helmets featuring a small antenna on the left side near the ear. Each uniform also had a distinctive emblem on the left breast: a winged serpent. Communication was entirely telepathic.

• The alien leader gave him a tour of their spacecraft. The interior featured control panels, computers, and screens with star maps with unfamiliar writing.

• The leader also described that their craft flew by using “reversible electromagnetism” for propulsion and gravity control.

• They said they came from another galaxy but were covertly monitoring Earth and its inhabitants to prevent humans from self-destructing.  As a part of this, the aliens were conducting a human breeding program as well, perhaps to ensure the continuity of the human race assuming a cataclysmic event.

• They warned Schirmer not to reveal too much of the encounter and stated they would visit him again in the future.

• The experience lasted about 15–20 minutes aboard before he was returned to his car. The craft then departed with the siren noise and flame effect.

After the last hypnosis session, Schirmer emerged exhausted but relieved. Sprinkle's report to the Condon Committee was cautious but supportive: he wrote of Schirmer: "The subject's emotional reactions suggest that he believes in the reality of the events he describes."  Schirmer passed a polygraph but the Condon committee labeled Schirmer's case as psychological. The metal fragment recovered by the police chief was dismissed.  And ultimately the Condon committee final report in 1969 deemed UFOs as unworthly of scientific investigation.

Undeterred, Sprinkle published his findings independently. While Schirmer's life unraveled a bit afterward—he faced ridicule but stayed on the police force for a time.  Nevertheless, Sprinkle remained a steadfast supporter, corresponding with him for years. 

The case became a template for Sprinkle's methodology of using hypnosis to retrieve buried memories. While critics later accused him of asking leading questions, proponents praised his empathy, noting how he helped abductees without judgment.

Sprinkle's work gained momentum in the 1970s, as alien abductions proliferated – or at least abductees felt more comfortable disclosing their experiences.  One of his most famous cases was that of Carl Higdon in 1974, with the case ultimately gaining so much notoriety that it appeared on multiple TV programs. Higdon, as I described earlier, experienced an alien abduction while hunting elk and reported being taken to an alien planet.

The event was so traumatizing to Higdon that soon after Higdon's wife Margery contacted Dr. Sprinkle who conducted sessions at their home.  Sprinkles hypnosis sessions uncovered vivid details of the alien named Ausso-One, his cube-shaped UFO that transported Higdon to another planet, and the ultimate rejection of Higdon's as an adequate specimen.  Sprinkle wrote exhaustively about the Higdon case in his 1979 chapter in the book UFO Phenomena and the Behavioral Scientist.  He believed Higdon’s experience was free of hoax or psychosis.  No matter your attitudes about alien abductions, it’s a fascinating case and you can watch an entire episode dedicated to Carl Higdon’s experience on my channel.

As we explore more of Dr. Sprinkle’s abductee cases, it’s reasonable to ask - what prompted his passion for UFO research?  What made him dedicate so much of his professional career to interviewing alien abductees?  Unlike other UFO investigators of his era who were outright skeptics, Sprinkle’s attitudes were formed by his personal personal encounters with the unknown.  These experiences changed him, in his own words, “from a scoffer, to a skeptic, to a believer in the reality of UFO phenomena.”  It turns out that Dr. Sprinkle had two own extraordinary UFO sightings of his own.

His first experience occurred in the fall of 1949 when he and a fellow student, Joe Waggoner, “watched a flying saucer…moving over the campus” of the University of Colorado at Boulder.  The two discussed their sighting but decided not to talk about it with classmates and other friends.  At the time, they felt that “only kooks see UFOs”.  But the event expanded his worldview, causing him to question what he had actually seen.

Then, seven years passed before his second sighting.  At this time, he had completed his undergraduate degree and a four-year enlistment in the US armed forces.  He was back on the University of Colorado Boulder campus, enrolled in a graduate program.  He and his wife were enjoying a summer evening in 1956 when, driving back to Boulder from Denver, they spotted an unusually brilliant red star.  But within moments, they realized it could not be a star as it suddenly began to move between them and the foothills of the rocky mountains.  “We watched it for several minutes.  It would hover, then move, hover, then move.  It had no sound and no features that I could observe, but I knew something unusual was going on because I could hear the honking of horns below us in Boulder.  The object went north and finally disappeared from our sight.  We expected to read a big story about the object the next day’s papers but there was nothing.”

This second encounter ignited a lifelong fascination with UFOs, prompting him to join the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) in 1962 and the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) in 1964. By the mid-1960s, Sprinkle began investigating local sightings, using his psychological expertise to assess witnesses’ mental states. He argued that UFO encounters were not mere hallucinations but potentially genuine interactions with advanced intelligences—a stance that set him apart from mainstream academia.

Four years into his academic career at the University of Wyoming, Sprinkle’s work was further inspired by psychiatrist Benjamin Simon’s role in the Betty and Barney Hill abduction case. Simon had accepted the Hills’ unusual aerial sighting but viewed the abduction as improbable, concluding that the event likely triggered Betty’s dreams, which then seemed real to her and influenced Barney. The Hill story is a fascinating one—you can watch my video about it here. A local UFO investigator referred Sandy to Dr. Sprinkle, who agreed to regress the witnesses and recover the missing hour.

Sprinkle wasn’t convinced. He suspected the abduction might be real and that hypnosis was the only way to help the two victims recall it. After appearing on television programs, calls poured in from across the country as people reported their experiences and sought his help. Over time, Sprinkle visited landing sites, interviewed and hypnotized scores of experiencers, collected their stories, and submitted a statement to Congress about UFOs. From 1964 to 1985 he also administered standardized psychological tests to some 300 people who believed they had seen, contacted, or been abducted by UFOs.

Hypnosis gradually became the accepted technique among ufologists for accessing abduction experiences. In Sprinkle’s view, only 25 to 30 percent of experiencers had any conscious memory of what happened; the rest recalled only vague images of a strange uniformly lit room or bright craft, feelings of lying naked on a table, or recurring dreams of humanoid faces. While hypnosis helped people “recall” their encounters, it also invited skepticism. As Philip Klass, retired senior editor of Aviation Week & Space Technology, and other debunkers pointed out, it is all too easy for the hypnotist—consciously or unconsciously—to influence the subject’s responses.

Despite mounting pushback from the university, his peers, and the media, Sprinkle maintained a visible presence and was often called into cases by local UFO researchers familiar with his techniques.

Part 2 – Mummy Aliens

Sprinkle's portfolio of famous abductee interviews expanded with his work in the Sandy Larson case in North Dakota in 1975, often referred to as the "Bismarck Alien Mummy" incident.  On August 26, 1975, near Fargo, North Dakota, the event centered around Sandy Larson, a 32-year-old woman, her boyfriend Terry O’Leary, and her 15-year-old daughter Jackie.

The incident began in the early morning hours as the group drove west on Interstate 94 from Fargo toward Bismarck. It was around 4:00 a.m., and the rural highway was shrouded in darkness, with few other vehicles in sight. Suddenly, they heard a loud, rumbling noise resembling thunder, which grew increasingly intense. Amid the noise, eight bright, glowing orange spheres appeared and descended rapidly from the sky. The orbs, described as basketball-sized or larger, approached their vehicle with eerie precision. Three of the spheres hesitated momentarily before reversing course and vanishing into the sky. The remaining five hovered nearby, emitting a blinding light that illuminated the surroundings. Sandy, Jackie, and Terry reported a profound sense of disorientation, and all felt "stuck" or paralyzed in their seats, unable to move or speak. Then each member of the party blacked out.

When they returned to consciousness, the spheres had disappeared, and the group was disheveled and confused. Their car was now parked at the side of the highway.  Sandra, who had been driving, was now inexplicably in the backseat, while Jackie was behind the wheel in the driver’s seat.

They composed themselves before Sandy slid back behind the steering wheel and they drove to the nearest gas station. Checking the time, they realized an entire hour had elapsed unaccounted for.  What should have been a brief stretch of road had somehow consumed 60 minutes. This realization shook them, but for the moment they attributed the events to fatigue from their early morning drive.  They continued on to Bismarck and did not immediately report their experience. Sandra later remembered physical discomfort at the time, including soreness in her nasal passages, which she linked to a recent sinus surgery she had undergone.

The story might have faded into obscurity if not for Sandra's decision to contact a local UFO investigator around October 20, 1975—nearly two months after the event. This timing is noteworthy, as it coincided with the broadcast of the NBC television movie that dramatized the Hill abduction, popularizing themes of alien medical exams and missing time.

Sprinkle conducted multiple hypnosis sessions with Sandra in late 1975 and early 1976, focusing on the period of amnesia. Under a trance, she described being lifted from the car by an invisible force and transported aboard a craft. The entities she encountered were not like the typical "gray" aliens.  Instead, she described beings that resembled mummies wrapped in elastic bandages, with bulging eyes peering out from the wrappings. Their arms were segmented, metallic rods giving them a robotic, inorganic appearance. Sandra estimated their height at around human size, but their movements were stiff and mechanical. The craft's interior was clinical, with Sandra placed on a slab-like table. She recalled being stripped naked alongside Jackie and Terry, who were "switched off" – seemingly immobilized during parts of the procedure.

The examination was invasive and grotesque. The entities performed a full-body scan, rubbing a mysterious clear liquid over her skin. More disturbingly, Sandra claimed her head was opened, and her brain was removed, examined, and replaced—a process she described as painless but disorienting. Still, she felt "smarter" afterward, as if her mind had received a "tune-up." A knife-like or swab instrument was inserted into her nostril, scraping tissue and causing the post-event soreness; Sandra later believed this implanted a tracking device. The entities communicated telepathically, assuring her no harm was intended, though the procedure felt like being "dissected like frogs."  Sprinkle noted Sandra's emotional distress during sessions, including tears and fear, which he interpreted as genuine trauma rather than fabrication.

Jackie and Terry underwent similar sessions with Dr. Sprinkle, but their accounts were less detailed and neither was hypnotized extensively.

Physical evidence was scant but intriguing. Sandra's nasal pain persisted, aligning with her recent surgery but exacerbated by the alleged probe. No unusual marks were reported on the others, and the car showed no damage. Investigations included sketches by reporter John Coleman of WLS-TV for a UFO documentary, depicting the mummy-like beings with their peculiar arms. The case gained regional notoriety in North Dakota, featured in local media.

Skeptical analyses, however, cast doubt on the narrative. Many in the media as well as UFO skeptics poked fun at the absurdity of the alien descriptions—unique in UFO lore, resembling "a space mummy made of school supplies"—suggesting the description was just made up.  I’ll make a rare editorial insertion here – how can robotic aliens be any more absurd than the alien grays?  Let’s not be robo-phobes here.

Ultimately, the Sandy Larson case endures today, largely because of the recovered memory of the mummy aliens.  And Sprinkle's involvement elevated the case in ufology circles and media coverage of his involvement strengthened his position as the go-to hypnotist – at least among abductees and UFO investigators.   And it was this publicity that pulled Dr. Sprinkle in a spectacular story that occurred just miles from his office in Laramie.  The story of Pat McGuire would become one of Dr. Sprinkle’s most famous hypnosis projects.

Part 3 – Close To Home

Pat McGuire was born in 1942 and led a life as a rancher until a series of extraordinary events transformed him into a national figure of ridicule and intrigue. Raised in a Roman Catholic family with a frontier heritage, McGuire was known for his skills in breaking horses, community involvement, and unassuming demeanor. He married his first wife, Wanda, and they had eight children, living on a 1,100 acre ranch near Bosler, Wyoming, about 30 miles north of Laramie.

McGuire’s paranormal saga actually began in 1971, when McGuire felt an inexplicable compulsion to dig a deep well on his otherwise dry ranch.  Experts he contacted who thought the effort to be a waste of time. Even drilling companies refused to take on the paying job as they thought it was a useless endeavor.  But McGuire was undeterred, saying later that he somehow knew that there was water there.  He got a friend to help him build a drilling rig – then he struck an underground aquifer at 350 feet, yielding thousands of gallons of water per minute and turning the property into fertile farmland. This "miracle" well, which he later explained came via instructions from aliens, marked the onset of bizarre phenomena.

While his ranch prospered, McGuire was uneasy.  A series of odd events unsettled him and disturbed his family and the ranch. In early October 1973, while elk hunting in the Teton Mountains with his brother-in-law, McGuire experienced his first documented encounter: an orange glow filled the sky, and they lost several hours of time, returning disoriented to their truck. This "lost time" episode is something we see over an over in other alien abduction episodes, but McGuire initially dismissed it. 

Then, on the night of September 12, 1976, five distinct craft hovered low over the ranch; two landed. McGuire and a hired hand observed shadowy humanoid figures inside the craft, walking and pointing toward the men. The objects returned the next night. McGuire took Polaroid photos that failed to develop.

Then, he found two mutilated cattle on his ranch.  Initially he was certain that that “some sex cults from the university were responsible.”  With this assumption in mind, McGuire and his brother in law were determined to catch the perverts.  While hiding in wait one night they observed an object in the sky night sky.  As the object drew closer, it was clear it wasn’t a start or meteor.  A disc shaped craft descended toward a ridge just two miles from his house.  McGuire watched the UFO hover over the ground just over another of his cows and her calf.  Then, the UFO disappered back into the night.  The next morning, McGuire went out to check on his livestock – and found the calf abandoned, leaving him certain its mother had been abducted by the UFO.  This event finally convinced McGuire that he needed help.

And in 1978 he connected with Dr. Sprinkle who lived less than an hour away in Laramie.  Sprinkle started a series of hypnosis sessions, revealing the full story of McGuire’s alien connection. 

Under hypnosis, McGuire shared that his well digging had not just been random.  Instead, in 1971 aliens had appeared and taken him aboard a spacecraft and placed in an oval room where aliens communicated telepathically.  Specifically, they instructed him where to dig the well.  The aliens were humanoid in appearance, 6 feet tall, 200 pounds with large eyes, very thin lips and noses without a bridge.  They dressed in black with a silver belt buckle that vaguely resembled the Star of David. They only communicated telepathically.

In an interview with the Casper Star-Tribune in 1980, McGuire shared some additional insights about the aliens that Dr. Sprinkle had uncovered during their hypnosis sessions. 

In all, Dr Sprinkle held 24 hypnosis sessions starting late 1977, uncovering suppressed memories of at least 16 abductions since 1970.  The aliens, he said, traveled to earth from another dimension via craft that used magnetic systems to create propulsion.  This same energy allowed the craft to fly faster than light as well as hover over the earth indefinitely.

The hypnosis sessions also revealed that McGuire had, at some point, shot at one of the aliens with a rifle.  Almost immediately, an alien paralyzed him from the neck down – a condition that lasted until they left.  McGuire told Sprinkle: “I don’t believe I’ll try that again.”

Alien spacecraft seemingly visited the McGuire family almost daily for a few months.  In a newspaper interview, McGuire’s 10 year old young son, said: “the UFOs used to be pretty exciting especially the first time you see one up close.  After that its king of like going to school, not such a big deal after the first day.” 

McGuire believed that the frequency of the alien visits was leading up to something: “they are getting more and more casual about letting us observe them.  In fact they want to be observed.  Why would they do that if they weren’t planning something?”

Sprinkle's therapeutic approach was empathetic yet rigorous. He said of McGuire: “the only question in my mind is whether it was a face to face encounter, mental programming or an out-of-body experience.”  He showcased McGuire in media, including  references to the case in a 1978 "In Search Of" episode that focused on Carl Higdon.

As Sprinkle documented his research, he also observed that other UFO investigators visited the McGuire ranch and had encounters with strange flashing lights in the sky and UFOs.   Dave Schultz, an electronics technician, experienced a loss of time when visiting the ranch in 1980.  A hypnosis session with Schultz found that he and two others had been abducted, taken on a UFO and had their minds probed. 

Sprinkle also reported that three young men from California who visited the ranch and camped overnight there.  They too had a lost time experience and under hypnosis had “memories of frightening encounters and a feeling that they ahd been told by alines that they were not ready, mentally or physically for space travel.”

Ultimately, the disclosures from the hypnosis sessions ravaged McGuire's life.  His paranoia spiked and he alleged the government was implanting him with alien devices and were sabotaging his crops and machinery. He sued the CIA, FBI, and Air Force. His marriage collapsed and the bank foreclosed on the ranch in the 1980s which was subsequently sold to the University of Wyoming. In 1982, he ran for Wyoming governor on a pro-alien platform, earning 15% in the Democratic primary but enduring ridicule as "insane."

McGuire’s claims created chaos in his young family.  Yet, in a 2023 HuffPost essay, his son David Lyndall Riedel said that his attitude towards his father had shifted from scorn to merely doubt.  Government disclosures about UAPs and whistleblowers like David Grusch caused him to change his opinion about his father.  Riedel said: “My dad was a famous alien abductee.  I thought he was a joke.  I’m not so sure anymore.” 

Skeptics blamed McGuire’s story on mental illness which was amplified by the stresses of running a ranch.  They faulted Sprinkle's hypnosis for exacerbating McGuire’s problems through his suggestive questions. Believers, though, cite the witnesses, and oddities like mutilations as proof that McGuire had been abducted. But no matter the truth, the case further elevated Sprinkle’s profile.

So what was it that prompted Dr. Sprinkle to interview and hypnotize hundreds of abductees?  Was it simply academic interest, motivated by his two sightings early in life?  Ultimately Sprinkle would undergo hypnosis himself.  But right before this most consequential hypnosis session of his life, Dr. Sprinkle was called to New Mexico to address an abductee case that opened the door to the Dulce Base story that thrives to this day.

Part 4 – Myrna Hansen and Dulce Base

On May 5, 1980, Myrna Hansen, a 27-year-old single mother and waitress from Eagle Nest, New Mexico drove her 1975 Oldsmobile along Highway 64 from a friend's house in Eagle Nest toward Cimarron. Her young son Shawn accompanied her.  Around 9pm as she drove home towards the town of Cimarron, she noticed unusual lights in the sky than then, bright orange orbs descended rapidly toward her car. One came close enough that it was clearly a disc-shaped spacecraft.  It hovered ahead of her, emitting a humming sound.  Alarmed, Hansen accelerated to escape, but a beam of light from the UFO engulfed the car, causing it to stall.  Her last recollections were of being paralyzed and floating.  Shawn was screaming in terror.  And then, she blacked out.

Her next conscious memory was of arriving home disoriented, with over an hour of missing time. Her son Shawn exhibited unexplained burns on his arms and legs, and both suffered from nightmares, headaches, and anxiety in the following days. Hansen initially attributed the event to a vivid dream or hallucination but grew concerned when Shawn drew pictures of "monsters" but refused to discuss events of that night.

Disturbed, Hansen finally contacted local authorities and then was connected with New Mexico State Police officer Gabe Valdez — then deeply involved in investigating widespread cattle mutilations across the state.  In turn, he referred her Albuquerque physicist Paul Bennewitz. 

Before being contacted by Myrna, Bennewitz had lived in the quiet suburbs bordering Kirtland Air Force Base.  He was a brilliant physicist and President of Thunder Scientific Corporation,  a company that made precision humidity sensors and had contracts with the Air Force Base and Sandia National Labs. His home was on the edge of the base’s highly restricted Manzano Weapons Storage Area.  His life had been a model of normalcy and productivity…right up until the night he began filming strange lights flying over the weapon’s range.

His interest piqued, Bennewitz started attending public meetings on cattle mutilations. And in April of 1979, he was picking up what he believed were alien radio transmissions from the base next door. Convinced he had stumbled onto a genuine extraterrestrial threat, he built antennas, wrote detailed reports, and delivered them straight to the Air Force — thinking he was helping protect the country.

So when Hansen reached out to Bennewitz, he was already convinced he was monitoring alien activity from his home beside Kirtland Air Force Base.  He invited Hansen and her young son to stay at his house.

Seeking professional help for the witness, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), recommended that Bennewitz contact Sprinkle.  After a phone conversation, Bennewitz personally paid for Sprinkle to fly from Laramie to Albuquerque. On May 11–12, 1980, Sprinkle conducted the hypnotic regression sessions inside Bennewitz’s garage. Hansen was seated in the back of Bennewitz’s Lincoln Town Car, which the increasingly paranoid physicist had completely wrapped in aluminum foil “to block alien signals.”

Under hypnosis, Hansen's recollections expanded dramatically. She described being levitated into a craft by a beam, where gray-skinned, humanoid entities with large eyes and slit mouths examined her. The beings communicated telepathically, assuring no harm yet used invasive probes to evaluate her.

Shockingly, she recalled a horrific event that had occurred when she was aboard the alien craft - a cattle mutilation.  The aliens had beamed up a cow, which the aliens dissected mid-air with laser-like precision, removing organs and blood without mess.  If you want to hear the story of a horrific alien abduction that resulted in the death of the human subject, you may want to watch my episode on the Billings Reservoir man – an event that took place in Brazil.

After witnessing this cattle dissection, Hansen claimed she and Shawn were transported to an underground facility, possibly beneath Archuleta Mesa near Dulce, New Mexico. There, in vast caverns, she saw rows of translucent vats containing dismembered human bodies, as well as floating fetuses.  For some reason, she believed these to be human-alien hybrids.  Humans in military uniforms patrolled the underground base, implying that there was strong human/alien collaboration. Before releasing her, the aliens implanted a device in her head and warned her against having it removed.  They also knew, somehow, that they erased parts of her memory.  And it was at this point that the aliens returned her and her son to her car.

Shawn's hypnosis, which Dr. Sprinkle conducted separately, corroborated a few elements of her story: Shawn described "ugly monsters" with "big black eyes" and being poked with needles. Sprinkle noted the child's trauma, including bedwetting and fear of the dark post-incident. Over at four documented sessions, Sprinkle employed relaxation techniques and emphasizing therapeutic support for what he believed was genuine PTSD from extraterrestrial contact.  

Bennewitz, more technically inclined, analyzed Hansen's descriptions of base layouts and signals, integrating them into his theory of an alien invasion coordinated from Dulce. He installed monitoring equipment at Hansen's home, detecting anomalous radio frequencies he attributed to implant activations.

In reports to the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), Sprinkle praised Hansen's consistency and her lack of prior UFO knowledge.  To him, this seemingly reducing the risk that the encounter was a deliberate hoax on her part or that media generated false memories.

With the hypnosis sessions complete, Sprinkle’s involvement in the case faded even as Bennewitz’s paranoia spiked.  And what happened next is now one of the most thoroughly documented psychological operations ever conducted by the U.S. government against one of its own citizens.

Just as Bennewitz was engaging Sprinkle to help Hansen and her son, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) decided to exploit Bennewitz’s growing obsession. They assigned Special Agent Richard C. Doty to the case. Doty’s mission, later admitted by both him and ufologist William Moore, was simple: feed the man exactly what he wanted to hear — and then some.

Over the next several years, Doty and Moore showered Bennewitz with forged “classified” documents, phony photographs, and elaborate briefings. They confirmed his worst fears and invented new ones. There really was a secret underground alien base at Dulce, New Mexico, they told him. Grey aliens and the U.S. government were partners in a horrifying treaty. Human abductees and mutilated cattle were being traded for advanced technology. Genetic experiments were underway in vast underground chambers. An invasion was coming.

And Bennewitz believed every word.

By 1988 the once-rational scientist was a shattered man. He accused his own wife of being an alien agent. He turned his home into a fortress. Terrified and exhausted, he was involuntarily committed to the psychiatric ward at Presbyterian Anna Kaseman Hospital. He never fully recovered. Paul Bennewitz died in 2003, broken and largely forgotten outside UFO circles.

Then operation’s own architects later confessed.  In July 1989, at a MUFON conference in Las Vegas, William Moore stood before a stunned audience and admitted he had deliberately helped push Bennewitz “over the edge” into mental illness as part of a government disinformation campaign. Richard Doty has since repeated the admission in multiple interviews, documentaries, and books, including the 2013 film Mirage Men. His clearest statement: he was ordered “to make Bennewitz believe there was an impending alien invasion.”

The Air Force, though, has never officially confirmed or denied the accounts.

The damage, however, spread far beyond one man’s life. The wild stories Doty planted — the Dulce underground base, the secret government-alien treaty, the body-part vats, the Majestic-12 documents, became cornerstones of modern UFO conspiracy lore.   Of course, Sprinkle had arrived in the middle of this government operation against Bennewitz – provided the hypnosis sessions – inadvertently feeding the scientist’s paranoia.  Sprinkle visited Bennewitz again around June 3, 1980. By then Bennewitz was openly armed and terrified for his family’s safety.

Sadly, a legitimate observer had noticed something genuinely unusual near one of America’s most sensitive military installations. Rather than investigate quietly, the government chose to weaponize the man’s curiosity, his patriotism, and ultimately his sanity. In the midst of this government manipulation, Hansen faded from public view, reportedly suffering long-term trauma and anxiety. Shawn's whereabouts are unknown.

Just as the Hansen and McGuire cases hit the news in 1980, Dr. Sprinkle kicked off his first conference: the Rocky Mountain Conference on UFO Investigation.  It was the inaugural gathering of what became an annual event focused on individuals claiming UFO encounters, particularly contactees and abductees.  That first year, the conference drew about 50 participants, many sharing personal stories under confidentiality, and laid groundwork for the event to run for over a decade with the final conference in 1992.

It was in 1980 that hypnosis would play a decisive role in Sprinkle's own life. He had long been aware of his own childhood memories that matched the ones that UFO experiencers had been telling him about.  Many times he had experienced the tell-tale signs – being awakened with an unexplained bloody nose or feeling that he had been "visited" during his sleep or had had a peculiar "nightmare."

Most alarming among these vague memories was a very specific one from his childhood of "a strange man walking through the bedroom wall” in his bedroom.  Eventually Sprinkle asked a colleague to hypnotize him.

In that hypnotic trance, Sprinkle found himself at age 10, "standing on board a craft, looking out a huge window into space. A tall, human-looking guy, wearing a one-piece suit tucked into his boots, was on my left with his right hand on my shoulder. I looked up into an Impressive open face, and I found myself wondering, while I was still in trance. 'Am I making this up from everything I've heard?' and then i felt a kind of shiver on my shoulder like the one I feel sometimes when I’m listening to music or feeling close to a client, and I knew it was the truth."

The alien’s message, communicated telepathically, was simple, "Leo, learn to read and write well so that when you grow up. you can help other people learn more about their purpose in life."

After he recovered his memory. Sprinkle felt relieved. The mysteries of his childhood were were all in "preparation for my UFO research work.  The psychological dilemma was over. I accepted myself as a contactee. Now I had a social dilemma. I had encouraged others to speak out and now I had to do the same."

Initially, he did not share this outside a group of close friends and the confidential confines of his annual conference.  But slowly, cautiously, he started to share his own abduction story broadly, while continuing to engage and support abductees across the country.

As he did so, he found more cases where the alien encounters overlapped with more traditional paranormal experiences like that of Joyce in

Part 5 – Joyce Updike

It was 2 a.m. in August 1967, rural Colorado. Thirty-five-year-old Joyce, mother of seven, stood barefoot in her kitchen washing varnished cupboard doors. She tended to do housework after her children were asleep.  Suddenly the wood she was cleaning blazed with a bright light reflected from some outside source. She looked out the window. The entire farmyard was flooded in searing blue-white glare.   Normally a fiercely protective mother, Joyce did not run to her sleeping children. After seeing the light, she simply turned off the lights, locked the door, and went to bed fully clothed.  She woke before seven, refreshed, and joked about “the lights” at breakfast. That was the last normal moment of her life.

Within days her long, healthy hair began falling out in clumps; she wore a hairpiece for two years. Her eyes and her two-year-old daughter’s burned red and oozed mucus for weeks. Sixteen years later both still needed artificial tears every morning.

Oddly, poltergeist activity erupted. Lights flicked on and off by themselves. Knick-knacks flew from shelves. Ashtrays sailed across rooms. Objects vanished, then reappeared in ridiculous places. She also began experiencing odd time-perception issues, stating that “When I go, the clock stops; when I stop, the clock goes.”

The odd experiences continued for twenty years, until in 1989, Joyce was watching the TV documentary The Strange Harvest about cattle mutilations and UFOs.  During the program, she heard about Dr. Sprinkle and his work regressing abductees. She immediately contacted him, had her son-in-law drive her to undergo a hypnotic regression. Under hypnosis, a vivid and consistent narrative surfaced—not only of the 1967 Colorado event but also of a previously unknown childhood abduction in October 1959 near North Platte, Nebraska when she was about 5 years old.

During the session she revealed the following memory beyond the bright light in the yard:

• The bright light had come from a UFO that had landed in her yard.  The entities or aliens that emerged were peaceful, human-like “space brothers”: average height, well-built, wearing space-suit-like outfits with thick-soled shoes. Their helmets resembled old-style diving helmets with a small nose guard and little golden winglets on the sides.   She felt comfortable with them and liked the beings.

• These aliens took her aboard their spaceship and placed her on an examining table.

• One being wore a loose three-piece “surgical” outfit with a hood and smoke-colored visor over the eyes, plus gauntlet gloves ending in pointed pincer-type clamps. He gently raised her right arm by the elbow during the exam.

• Communication was telepathic. They discussed their Plan for humanity, describing that media and advertising were a form of benevolent “brainwashing” for humanity’s good.

In addition to conducting Updike’s hypnosis sessions, Sprinkle included her testimony in the proceedings of the Rocky Mountain Conference on UFO Investigation. Updike presented her story publicly at the 1989 conference. Interestingly, the regressions contrasted with much of the other abductees Sprinkle had worked with.  The regressions brought Updike a sense of peace and purpose rather than trauma.

Part 5 – the Backlash

As Sprinkle's reputation as an investigator grew, he faced institutional backlash. Colleagues at the University of Wyoming mocked him as "Dr. Space," and funding dried up.

His academic career ended slowly, then suddenly. He told researcher Ruth Montgomery about his abduction experience that that be revealed through hypnosis.  She included his story in her book Aliens Among Us published in 1985.  And then came the final blow to his career.  In 1987 the National Enquirer picked up Sprinkle's story.  The headline read "Space Aliens Abducted Me as a Child Claims College Professor," and the article was the predictable disaster. In 1989, two years after the Enquirer’s story, Sprinkle succumbed to considerable pressure and resigned his tenured professorship.

Despite this public derision, Sprinkle continued to meet with abductees and research UFO encounters.  And in 1988 he published in Psychotherapy in Private Practice a article titled: Psychotherapeutic Services for Persons Who Claim UFO Experiences

And in it, he lays out his philosophy about UFOs and abductees based on his 25 years of UFO research and 20 years of providing therapeutic support for those individuals who claimed alien encounters.

The earth is being surveyed by spacecraft which are controlled by representatives of an alien civilization or civilizations.

There is sufficient evidence to accept the hypothesis that many UFO witnesses have experienced encounters with space craft that are piloted or controlled by intelligent alien beings.

   “The major hypothesis, or speculation, is that UFO activity is an educational program: A gradual, but persistent, conditioning of human awareness for a new age of science and spirituality (advanced technology and advanced morality).”

   “My personal and professional bias is to accept tentatively the claims of UFO abductions as ‘real.’ However, I do not know if these ‘abductees’ have experienced physical abduction or whether they have experienced ‘out of body’ events. In either case, the experiences seem real to the abductee.”

I hope that this episode has seen me approach a complicated subject with as much balance as possible.  Whether we believe in these abductions or the thousands of documented cases, I think it’s worth considering one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Sprinkle:

“When you bring up the subject people get frightened and skeptical.  Despite the ridicule those of us who have encountered this know that something strange is going on…and it has to be discussed.”

What do you think of Dr. Sprinkle’s work?

Thank you for joining me on this dark path through the fringes of the unexplained. I’m MF Thomas. Until next time, good night.