An Interview with Karin and Paul Holloway

by Brent Raynes

Karin and Paul Holloway of London, England, are both UFO/paranormal experiencers who share a passionate commitment to a common goal. They both are working hard to help experiencers to come to terms and a better understanding with regard to their unusual situations. They help prepare and publish helpful (often therapeutic) e-books by serious and knowledgeable investigators and experiencers alike. Go to their website at: www.experiencers.net

Editor: Karin, in an earlier exchange, you informed me that you are a certified hypnotherapist with degrees in philosophy and education, and that you’ve been using regressive hypnosis on UFO experiencers since 1987. In addition, you’re a life-long “abductee” from Michigan yourself, though you’re presently living in London, England.

Please share with us how this all evolved, generally what has happened to you, and take us from being yourself an experiencer to becoming an investigator.

Karin Holloway: Woah! That’s too much to tell all at once! I’ve written a book about it.

When I was 35, Strieber and Hopkins published their first books on abduction and I had a very extreme reaction to them. I was repulsed! Eventually, I forced myself to read them and every page I said, “Oh, my God!” because I realized what the weird things in my life meant. My world fell apart; I lost faith in everything I’d ever been taught. I couldn’t sleep, walk by a window at night, or be alone. I couldn’t even have a deep thought! So I finally had to think about those weird events.

My experiences started with weird dreams as a young kid, then strange scars and scoops on my body, lots of close sightings of UFOs, some ghost visits of relatives (one which delivered a message for someone else that was crucial to them!), psychic one time only experiences of precognition (one through dreams and the other through a vision after seeing two UFOs) and telepathy, one Aware Sleep Paralysis, several different kinds of Out of Body Experiences, several onboard memories (some of which I may have gone to under my own power while OB), and several fully conscious experiences (what looked like a huge dragon flew over me and an insectoid crossed my hallway). I also had a ball of light give me an instruction and a bolide that should have been a news item but wasn’t.

The nicest was at the Ann Arbor Art Fair. A man with purple eyes smiled at me as though he knew me really well and when I turned to look at his back I saw he as holding hands with a Grey who was skipping! Or, maybe it was the spider incident which has changed me the most. When I was new here I’d walk alone to the shops in Stratford every day to get our groceries. On the way I’d pass a big garden spider, on her web. I’d say “Hello!” every day. One day, the last I saw her, she responded somehow! All of a sudden I was her! And I was in love with the Light, I was singing through every part of me this love and joy and desire to be closer to the Light! It only lasted a moment but it was a huge moment. Now, I look for garden spiders to say hello to.

And the worst experience was probably when I looked out my sliding glass door and saw a plane about to crash into my house! Only it didn’t. It slowly turned nose up, showing it was a dark triangle with twinkley lights around its edges, and then sank into the ground in my back yard! That one made me angry for making me think I was going to die. Really, the Aware Sleep Paralysis was far worse than that because it was like a battle even though it’s thought of as a “normal” parasomnia rather than having to do with alien interference.

I looked for a hypnotherapist to help me recover what I wasn’t remembering but couldn’t find one I could afford. I finally decided to learn hypnotherapy to help others and in the process I was the class guinea pig. I got good at altering my consciousness. I never looked for hidden memories. Instead my therapist/teacher asked me to go to the root of my problem. I saw myself as a baby boy hundreds of years ago, carried to a landed ship, and shown through an alien being’s close up eye stare that some part of me was one of them. And that this alien part had brought special cells to this planet when it was young. None of this made sense to me but I became emotionally healthy again and began to work for Michigan MUFON as an investigative hypnotist in 1987.

I didn’t work long before the issue of my past life experience in my own regression got me into trouble with the state directors. The prevalent idea at that time, and maybe is still, is that ufology can only handle so much weird stuff and the rest has got to be kept quiet.

After that I worked for Dan Wright and the Alien Abduction Transcription Project as an investigative hypnotist. If any of you are interested in aliens this is research you should be familiar with and you can read Dan’s special MUFON report at: http//www.beyond-the- illusion.com/files/Aliens/Abduction/Reports/aubd-rpt.txt We also sell his “Five Themes,” a further examination of the evidence collected. After the project I worked with people who found me through word of mouth and something like great good luck.

No two anecdotes about abduction by aliens have been alike although there are elements that are common. In my book, Close Encounter Analysis, I urge investigators, researchers, and therapists all to never diagnose an abduction by one symptom alone but to instead look for a complex of physical/emotional/memory symptoms, or evidence clusters. Just dreaming of aliens isn’t enough to warrant the label “abductee”!

There are different kinds of experiencers. Some who never have abductions. But all of us experiencers have experienced a wider multiverse than the conventional model. Oneironauts are an interesting group in that they appear to learn through their dreams, by traveling and meeting characters in an inner/outer space. Some of these are the same sorts of aliens other experiencers see in abductions.

A very good book to help close encounter experiencers analyze their experiences is Ida Kannenberg’s UFOs and the Psychic Factor. Our e-book company doesn’t handle this book but Ida is one of our main authors. She’s amazingly sharp and insightful. Her experiences taught her to do telepathic dictation. She works with some fascinating personalities, bringing us their information in an orderly, rational way. Her latest book, which we have in the works, is a personal view of Atlantis and of the time travelers who escaped its disaster and who are among us now. It’s fascinating! Hopefully, some day it’ll be made into a movie. It’s perfect for the big screen!

Editor: And, alas, I’m curious as to how you ended up in England, and as to how the UFO climate compares there to the U.S.?

Karin Holloway: A friend suggested I join the mostly British Fortean List, online, and share my experiences and views with them. It was tough going as the Forteans are fascinated by all the mysteries they’ve never themselves experienced! Skeptics all save one. Some guy who kept following my posts with scientific explanations backing me up! We wrote many letters to each other, both crossed the Atlantic and spent time in each other’s countries, and then we got married. Paul’s mother and daughter needed him here and we hoped my son would join us soon so we chose to stay in London. We may change our minds as conditions have changed. We’re as close as two emotionally healthy people can be and we’re very happy except for this horrible toxic mold we came down with a year after we married. The projects we’re involved in require both of us, strangely. Neither one of us could accomplish this on our own nor could we have survived this illness alone. Kismet!

The UFO “climate” here seems to be a bit more muted than back home in the States. I just read in “The Times” that the UFO convention in Leeds had only 120 people attend this year. BUFORA, like MUFON, is hesitant to accept that there are actual folk on those ships and some of us have met them. Unfortunately, unlike MUFON, BUFORA doesn’t have an investigator’s training program for its members.

I did take part in research done by Professor Chris French, of Goldsmith’s College in London, paid for by the Bial Foundation in Portugal, which concluded that “experiencers have a different psychological profile to non-experiencers” and that we’re more likely to hallucinate, dissociate, and be fantasy-prone. Same old stuff! Interestingly, the researchers had trouble finding abductees to participate.

Phillips’ Journal, our first e-book journal, has UFO occupants who time travel. Phillip is an English abductee. He’s illustrated it himself, which I encourage all experiencers to do. Again, it’s utterly fascinating! And very different from anything I’ve heard of in the States.

Right now, I think there may be differences between American and European experiencers, but I’m not yet ready to prove it.

Editor: Paul, what have your experiences generally consisted of?

Paul Holloway: I was fortunate in that my mother was a believer in psychic phenomena. She had seen ghosts, and frequently had accurate premonitions, so I was primed to have an open mind about such things. My earliest odd memory is from when I was about 5 years old. I recall thinking, “I think I’ll go for a drive,” and then remembering, “Oh I’m not an adult now, I can’t do that anymore.” This suggests to me that I had a previous life. Around the same age I used to stare at the wallpaper, presumably going into a trance state, and little beings would emerge and talk to me. I don’t remember what they told me, but I do remember when they told me, when I was about 7 years old, that I was too old, and that they wouldn’t be coming to see me again. This deeply distressed me, but they didn’t come back, and I didn’t see them again until more than thirty years later, when I smoked some salvia divinorum, a legal hallucinogen, but that’s another story.

My interest in the paranormal led me to look at dowsing, with rods and with a pendulum, telepathy, clairvoyance, psychic healing and out of body experiences. I had a natural inclination toward science, and studied mostly scientific subjects at school, and I believe that this gave me a scientific basis for investigating these subjects. To my surprise, I found that these things seemed to work. Perhaps I simply have a talent for these abilities, but I suspect that anyone could make them work if they tried. Most people simply don’t try.

A couple of examples that I enjoy sharing with skeptics. When I was living with my mother, she drove in her car to visit her sister a few miles away. I had been reading a book that gave instructions for what we would now call “remote viewing.” The technique involved deeply relaxing, then picturing the person you wanted to remotely view as if looking at them through the wrong end of a telescope. I tried this with my mother, and had a startlingly vivid vision of her sitting down, and the seat collapsing beneath her. This was so vivid I wrote it down with the time and date, and signed it. I thought perhaps she had been trying to adjust her car seat and it had shot backwards, but I wasn’t sure. When she returned I showed her my signed account of what I had seen, and she was amazed. She told me that she had been at my aunt’s house and had sat on a chair that had collapsed, and she ended up on the floor. Even putting my skeptic’s hat on, I could not interpret this as a coincidence. The odds against me imagining such an event accurately by chance must be astronomical.

The other tale is about dowsing. When I was nine or ten years old I was given a set of dowsing rods, the bent wire kind, with a couple of plastic tubes for them to rotate in. I followed the instructions, and was soon digging up all sorts of interesting things in my mother’s garden. I found that I could get a reaction, dig out a pile of earth and then dowse the hole and the pile of earth to narrow down where the object was. I found brass buttons, and old horseshoes. My mother’s house was an old pub so there was plenty to find. Skeptics inevitably tell me, at this point of my story, that I could probably have dug anywhere and found something. Well a few years later I saved up my money and bought a metal detector. I found nothing in my mother’s garden; the dowsing rods had found every metal object.

One other oddity; when I get tired and frustrated electrical appliances malfunction around me. Streetlights often go out as I pass them, supermarket checkouts go crazy (chip and PIN doesn’t, thank goodness), computers do weird things. As I used to look after computers as a large part of my job, that is sometimes a problem.

I could tell other tales, but to cut a long story short, my conclusion was that there is some truth to dowsing, and to other so-called paranormal abilities. An out of body experience some years ago made me seriously consider that ‘I’ am more than my body. The things that really struck me were my overwhelming sense of freedom, and the reality of the experience, and my revulsion by my physical body. Since then I have had no fear of death. I fear pain and suffering, yes, but not death. Rationally I know that experience could have been a hallucination, but there are non- intellectual levels of belief, and on some level I know that ‘I’ will survive my physical death.

When I encountered Karin on the Fortean List, as she had mentioned, I was struck by her rational approach to the subject of alien abduction and the paranormal. Most of the people in that group seemed to be non-experiencers with an interest in the paranormal, but with a disturbing tendency to ridicule believers. When a couple of people tried that on Karin, she defended herself elegantly, and very intelligently, but I couldn’t resist putting my oar in. Someone berated her for believing in things we can’t see, for example, so I butted in, pointing out that we believe in lots of things we can’t see, like electrons, black holes, love and many other things. It rapidly became clear that Karin and I had similar ways of thinking about these subjects, and we started a personal correspondence that culminated in our marriage.

Editor: And, since you’re both experiencers, have you shared some experiences together?

Paul Holloway: When we were first getting to know each other I ‘remote viewed’ Karin from London while she was in Michigan, using the technique I described earlier. I saw her next to water, and some big golden fish. When I emailed her with this information she confirmed that day she had been working in a garden next to a lake, and she had spend some time watching some big golden fish. But I suspect this isn’t quite what you had in mind.

If you mean alien related experiences surprisingly, perhaps, we haven’t. Unless you count one morning when I woke up with a large bruise on my thigh, and Karin with a black line drawn on her inside ankle. When we came downstairs we found the front door open (never happened before or since) with the chain still on, and an empty tin of cat food in the bin with a silver foil lid on it. Karin always feeds our cat (we only had one back then), and never leaves the silver foil lid on when she throws out the tin for some odd reason. Also it was the last tin we had, so she would definitely not have given it to her until the next day. Odd, but inconclusive. We have wondered if Black Ops did something to us that night, maybe infected us with the fungus that has plagued us since. We also had a break-in around that time, in which the only thing stolen was my leather jacket with my address book in the pocket. Cash a few feet away on open display was ignored. It is easy to become paranoid about such things, and we have noticed paranoid people don’t seem to be very happy, so we shrug our shoulders and get on with life as best we can.

Editor: Interestingly, you mention that for the last five years, since you became infected with a toxic mold after moving to London, you have not had “a single weird thing happen.” Is this true also for Paul? Obviously you’ve given this fact some thought, and mention how you’ve just recently decided to write an article on it. What’s your thoughts on this matter?

Karin Holloway: My last experience was awakening in bed to a dullish flash of light, the sound of sand falling, which got me to open my eyes, and a double ring of green light above the bed. A few weeks later I was very ill. I’ve never gone for five years without an experience of some sort before. I suspect a number of reasons for this change. Perhaps I had an alien attachment (one of my childhood experiences was seeing a clear body step out of my own during Communion) which then had to leave me because mold is nasty everywhere in the multiverse and they understand that better than we do. Or, the nasal implant I suspect I have was damaged by the fungus. Although I think it would have been repaired if I were still being monitored/directed.

I felt an implant in my arm. Twice. The first time I felt it, it moved further inside me, with its own volition. That freaked me out. It’s a really weird feeling to have something in your body, hiding from you. I felt it again after I got ill. It was lifeless and didn’t react to my pressing on it. I think it was “dead.”

I haven’t even seen a UFO since the green light rings! I’ve only seen one UFO here in London. I did meet some ghosts here before I got ill, though. A group of boys who’d died in a fire in our building when it was an industrial school woke me. I showed them how to go play in the Light and they all, but one, quickly left. That one was a small dark creeping blob who felt guilty, I think. I told him to go play, too, and it left.

I don’t know anything for sure other than that no one of us can know everything for sure, either. But, when so many of us just want the experiences to stop (enough already!), well, our knowing that toxic mold is one way out may be valuable in the future. It should be documented somewhere.

Editor: You mentioned to me earlier various book projects that you’ve worked on and have worked on, dealing with UFOs, as well as touching upon matters of spirituality and so-called “past lives.” Could you review this area of the work that the two of you are doing, what has motivated your efforts, and what you hope to see accomplished through your efforts.

Karin Holloway: Ida gave us all of her essays and a few outlines for works not completed. They’re a rich treasury, with explanations for many of our mysteries, and Ida’s own sure voice instructing us to think straight. At 91 she knows a great deal about a great many things. Her e- books are beautifully illustrated, too. I can’t over express this. Ida’s books are incredible! Every time I pick one up again I’m sucked into it, engrossed in learning truly important things about how things really are. I’m not religious, but her works are more relevant than the Bible to modern humans. They’re the new gospel. So, we’re working to be able to offer all of them for sale soon. We have her workbook for experiencers and a collection of her smaller essays now ready for sale.

Then we have a growing section of e-books that are the journals of experiencers. Up until now I’ve rarely read anything by an experiencer that hadn’t been filtered through a researcher first. This is a revolution! Directly from the experiencer! We’re preparing the third of these now, the journal of Matthew Delooze, who also happens to be our favorite conspiracy researcher. (We have his essays for free perusal at our website: www.Experiencers.net) Experiencers have wonderfully incredible lives and their journals are fascinating reading.

We’re hoping for every experiencer to make their journal available to the public! Either using a nom de plume or their real name. We hope many will choose Experiencers.net to publish them. We’re accepting new authors!

Then we have a section of e-books written by experts in the field. Dan Wright has two fascinating essays on the themes found in his abduction research, and one on “Marian Visitations.” And Dr. Mel Redfern, whom you just interviewed, has a fascinating book aimed mainly at therapists but full of spiritual insight and miracles. And I’ll soon have a series of books for offer on everything you ever wanted to know about Close Encounter Analysis (investigation, therapy and counseling of CE Experiencers).

My Past Life Clues Workbook is in the process of being illustrated. We plan to offer it both as an e-book and as a lovely hard covered “real” book through Lulu.com. It will form the basis of a series of classes I’ll be giving here in London. I used to do past life presentations back in Michigan and they were a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to doing that again, especially since I now have a textbook we can use. After my own past life recollections I realized that my life had held a million clues about these lives far before I knew about past lives. This isn’t a book for therapeutic work, but for fun and self-knowledge.

And, there’s my most prized book, the angel book. It doesn’t have a title yet. It’s sessions I did with a child who recalled a series of memories about being Dick, the soul carrier angel, in between all of his incarnations on many planets. It’s been an honor to work on it; my belief in powers beyond our ken and in multitudes of angels and in heaven and hell is now part of my personal philosophy. I know I’m blessed! This is a powerful book! It’s just filled with amazing tales that make so much sense! It will be ready soon! I hope everyone will read it.

What’s motivated us? Michael O’Sullivan of the College of Integrated Therapies asked me to write a course on Close Encounter for hypnotherapists. I worked on it through three years of horrible illness. Dr. Mack was looking at it to endorse it when he died and now I’m turning the e- course into e-books that anyone can read. Everything else just flowed from that. Perhaps our illness made it possible; otherwise we would have been too busy having normal lives of work and family and friends and vacations!

We envision Experiencers.net as a primary source for information for and about experiencers.

Editor: What belief or conclusion have you reached that seems to explain for you the phenomena associated with UFOs?

Karin Holloway: With UFOs Ida has a great way to tell if they’re illusory or real. The ones that wobble and bobble and don’t shoot off straight above or disappear, that are symmetrical and don’t have anything oddly sticking out of them, the ones that leave impressions behind, are real, solid ships. Sometimes they can’t avoid having to be here in person.

I try to stay away from conclusions! I’ve seen how some researchers have painted themselves into corners. I find these phenomena to be far too deep and wide and impressive for me to make any conclusions about them, and my beliefs keep transforming themselves, and me!

But, having read just about everything printed on this subject, and having worked with a good many experiencers over the last 18 years, I’d say that Ida’s writings “jive” best with the data I’m aware of.

Personally, right now I think that we live in a multiverse peopled by beings who understand the structure of this multiverse better than we do. Some of them take advantage of our innocence; others are working to assist our evolution out of that innocence.

I believe we’re special; we live short lives, compressed and condensed compared to many others, and we’ve learned a lot about being with each other. Now we’re adding senses, or we’re being returned, to be able to tell what’s “out there,” beyond the limited senses we take for granted.

Before the toxic mold, I was just beginning to “see” into my surroundings. Like many other experiencers I could see beings watching me. It began back in Michigan with just one small humanoid being. He’d crack me up! He was funny! I saw him twice. The first was when I was being all solemn about having my very own office, in a professional building. He came sashaying in with a huge sombrero on! Then, the last time, I “saw” him air skiing behind our car all the way to Florida. Here, in England, I “saw” a group of men in lab coats that got excited when I waved at them and I then later “saw” an Insectoid watching me. I know this sounds crazy to non- experiencers and to experiencers who haven’t had this happen (yet), as it sounded suspect to me before my own experiences of it.

Perhaps the rest of the multiverse is waiting for us to mature into peaceful beings before they make themselves plainly known to us and until then we’re open game to any alien with fancier technology than we have.

And perhaps we’ll always be the emotionally and mentally retarded ones, at their mercy, never fully understanding, just reacting and either accepting what we’re told or suffering our suspicions.

Hopefully we are maturing and they’re here to help with and document our next evolutionary “jump.”

Some experiencers have had rough handling; some have been treated with great love and care. An elegant answer for this inconsistency is that they use whatever is in our own minds to create illusory experiences for us and thus we get back what we need to work on, if anything. Ida says we can learn more from our experiences if we analyze them for their symbols. If we all had the same experiences the problem would be a whole lot simpler to even define! But we don’t. We share enough to validate that it’s not just something coming out of our individual minds. We aren’t fantasizing this. It’s “real” in a way that nothing else has been and so we struggle with understanding it. Religious experience has been this sort of “real” for some humans, as well, but we haven’t done a great job at figuring out what’s going on there, either. These are transforming experiences whether they’re filled with delightful things or horrors.

My own experiences seem to have been tutelages, as though I’ve been shown what we humans could be. I’ve rarely had anything happen twice. I once saw the same UFO twice, but that’s it for repeats. I’ve never been hurt, my childhood was protected from being aware this was happening, and I would say that, although I’m pleased I’m through being an experiencer, I’m honored to have been taught that we live in a mystery we’re ignoring.

But, on the other hand, there appear to be renegades to this plan to educate us, who abuse their human prey. There are Bad Guys! According to the women who’ve shared their secrets with me, some of these are invisible. Some women have invisible lovers and some of these are rapists and mental torturers. I’ve had lots of ideas on how to stop these invisibles but once a woman, or man, is involved with them it’s difficult to get rid of them. Some have said they’re angels but even these have acted without concern for their human lovers. We have a fascinating account of a positive form of this kind of relationship at our website. For anyone battling invisibles I suggest they get familiar with the work of Robert Bruce. He has a lot of protective techniques online and his books are worth studying. One of our experiencer e-zines was about protective techniques. It’s archived at our website.

I’ve begun to take free will far more seriously since I began studying close encounters, now realizing its power to protect and propel us. We can say “No! Go away!” and we can also say, “Hey, I want to help, too!” We can change our minds. That’s the great thing about free will. (And as it’s a handy dandy thing to know and not many know it, you have to ask for help from beneficial beings. They can’t interfere with your free will) Dangerous thing for us is that we don’t understand we truly have it and we’re not taught at the young age we need to be taught how to avoid being deceived out of our free will.

Editor: What do you think or hope that the future of ufology looks like for us?

Karin Holloway: I can imagine ufology will become something like a science in that it will have set methodologies: for data collection and verification, for sharing that data with everyone, and for consulting those involved worldwide.

Hopefully we’ll realize we’re making hypotheses and we’ll check them, test them out, before we go making scientific theories about what’s going on. We already have loads of unscientific theories. No one in ufology has been using any limiting methodology in research that I know of. For instance, even those kindly hypnotists who’ve been working for free helping abductees all these years haven’t been conforming to any sort of investigative technique. They’ve done very well at helping people feel better but the data collected can’t be thought of as scientific.

One of the problems of working with frightened people is that you feel you have to help them right away and this can confuse data extraction with data informing. You can end up colluding or altering the data. It’s contamination of the well of knowledge! I counsel that we should get contactees to write their journals before we work with them. It gets the conscious data down before hypnosis and any discussion. It gives us a guide to work from in our exploration of their experiences, and it brings therapeutic relief to the contactee without interference. All without our contaminating their experiences and warping the data. After we do the investigative work we can then help them through therapy and counseling, where our interference will be beneficial.

I believe the study of abductees will tell us a great deal about ourselves as well as about the multiverse we’re now aware we’re so ignorant of. I think it looks as though we’re slowly being prepared for this; more and more spiritually aware people are talking about who we are and what we mean. Gee, we’re just becoming aware of our relationship to our own planet! So, little by little, we’re bravely creeping out from Plato’s Cave.

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