Interview with Leah Haley by Brent Raynes

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Leah Haley, the author of Lost Was The Key, and her latest book, Unlocking Alien Closets, shares in this interview her frightening experiences with the UFO abduction phenomenon, “missing time,” and apparent military harassment, and the ups and downs that have transpired in her personal life as a result. In addition, a lot of deep subject matter is covered here as the editor and Leah Haley discuss everything from “nuts and bolts” ufology to spiritual dimensions of reality. Leah Haley has lectured over the years about her experiences from coast-to-coast, making frequent appearances at conferences, and in interviews on radio and television. She and her husband Marc Davenport manage Greenleaf Publications, P.O. Box 8152, Murfreesboro, Tennessee 37133. Website: www.greenleafpublications.com

Editor: I’ve been reading your book, Unlocking Alien Closets. It’s very, very interesting. You’ve had quite a number of experiences. It looks like its been very difficult for you a lot of times to get the word out, in a lot of situations, with exactly what happened. A lot of your words have gotten misrepresented by others. So, at least with the interview here you have an opportunity to just whatever you want to say I’ll quote it exactly as you say it.

Leah Haley: Well, okay, okay. Thanks.

Editor: I know that in your book there was a televison program where you took a lie detector test and there was the impression that the public had, on the one hand, and it was misrepresented as to what actually transpired. And in the book you described that and similar situations.

Leah Haley: Right, but I understand that not all media people are like that. There have been some people who have reported things accurately and have not misinterpreted them, and I know about your work and I know that it will be fair.

Editor: Well, I guess first of all, are there any recent developments that you’d like to talk about?

LH: No, there really hasn’t been anything happen since the book, except that you know how I wrote at the end of it how information was coming to me? Just when I needed it, in order to finish the book. I really haven’t had any experiences to report since the book was finished but something else remarkable has happened, along the spiritual realm, and that is that I had no idea under the sun how I was going to afford to publish the book. I had no idea how I was going to pay for printing costs, or anything like that. I knew I was about to lose my job in accounting. I was working like 40 hours a week as a contractor for a large company and my contract was about to expire. So I knew that I wouldn’t be working very much longer, and the company that I own printed the book - and like I said I had no idea how I was going to pay to have it printed.

Editor: Right, because you had been doing UFO work for awhile full-time and it really didn’t pay.

LH: Exactly. It broke me. I had no idea where the funds were going to come from. But I just did it on faith. I printed the book on faith. I thought, Okay, these answers are coming to me from various sources. Towards the end of the book, I discuss how I got stuck when I was writing the book on various subjects and I didn’t have answers to my questions. But there was one place in my book where I got stuck and I left my cursor on my computer there, because I got a block. I needed some information to finish what I was writing about the Acclimation meeting that took place in Nevada in 1994 and 1995. Days went by, and maybe even longer than that, where I didn’t write anything in the book because I couldn’t go forward without that information. I didn’t know where to find it. I got a phone call from Sweden just giving me the information. It was like somebody, somewhere had read my computer files off of my computer, or maybe it was - I don’t know - an angel - I don’t know what it was, okay? All I know is that somebody called me, out of the blue, at 2 a.m. in the morning and answered my question that enabled me to get unstuck and finish the book.

Editor: And you really don’t know who this person was?

LH: The person identified himself, but I’ve never met him.

Editor: I know there are some incredible synchronicities that happen to people in these things.

LH: Ya. Well, these incredible synchronicities were happening to me at the very end of this book to help me get my book finished. So after that, when I got it finished - like I said I didn’t know how I was going to pay for it - and the printer allowed me to pay for it in three installments. I had to pay one third of the cost up front, one third when the books were shipped to me, and one third within 30 days. It was a lot of money.

Editor: Ya, thirty days isn’t long.

LH: No, and so what I decided was, ‘Okay, since all of these answers have been coming to me and enabling me to finish the book, undoubtedly there are higher forces’ - I don’t know whether they’re God forces, human forces who are monitoring me and know what I’m trying to do and they’re behind me - whatever. Something was helping me finish the book. And I thought, “Okay they’ll help me with the money too. Somehow.” So as soon as I finished the book, remarkably, 30 days before I finish the book a book company bought enough copies of my other book to pay the first one third of the printing, and their terms were net 30 days. So they sent me the check just in time for me to send the first one third to the printer. The second one third was not quite so remarkable. That one we could explain away - it’s not anything unusual really - but I still didn’t know that I was going to get such a big tax refund back. The final third - I had sold some books in the meantime for part of that last third and then a UFO museum bought enough copies to pay the rest of the printing cost.

So that happened, and to me that was a big thing. I could be homeless right now.

Editor: So still after all that has happened to you, this still surprises you and puts you in awe?

LH: It does! It does! It puts me in awe that these higher powers are working in my life and it made me realize that if you take things on faith, if you’re doing the right things like you think God wants you to do then it’s going to work out a lot better.

Editor: I know from the time that I’ve been involved in the field a lot of times the spiritual comes up. I know that Dr. Leo Sprinkle, the Wyoming psychologist, has noted that a lot of times people having these experiences seem to be engaged in a lot of spiritual issues. Sometimes they’re going through a struggle with positive and negative influences in their lives, or with these beings apparently. Some have speculated that it’s almost like a kind of psycho drama, a part of their spiritual evolution or something. Since we’re talking about this I wonder if you would feel if this is something that happens in a lot of cases and has just not really been flushed out or talked about openly by a lot of mainstream researchers over the years.

LH: I think that you’re exactly right about that. I’ve concluded that the spiritual and the physical are all tied up together as part of this phenomenon. It is not just a physical issue. But spirituality is involved in it. With Jesus, as spiritual as he was, he was tested, on many occasions, to see if he’d pass the tests.

Editor: So we shouldn’t feel too bad.

LH: Right. Right. And I bet that’s one of the ways that I’ve managed to get through this stuff. It has been difficult. It really has been tough. But I’ve come out of it okay. I’m all right now. It has taken me ten years to get there (she laughs), but I’m all right now, and I kind of put these things in perspective and say although I’ve had my bad days and I’ve whined a lot - and that’s another reason you need to finish reading the book, because I’ve whined so much at the very beginning. At the end of it it’s like I’ve wiped away the tears and said okay I’m going to rise from these ashes now and emerge as a stronger and better human being, as a result.

Editor: You described your experiences where it was very difficult. You didn’t know what was happening to you. There were periods of amnesia, missing time, unusual body marks and UFOs - and not just one experience but you had a number of them. Then as you found out more you looked at both extraterrestrial and military aspects. Having to come to terms with those areas would have to shake anybody up a lot.

LH: Yes, it certainly departs from the norm, or at least what I thought the norm was going to be in life. These experiences have me take a look at humanity. In fact, I guess I could say I probably learned more about human nature as a result of these experiences than anything else. All of the kinds of reactions that I’ve had. All of the debunking, people ridiculing, tormenting, calling me crazy. Trying to ruin my reputation. But then, on the other hand, I’ve seen the other side of it too. There have been so many good people who have tried to help me out and tried to help me get the word out - strangers who would send a $100 in a greeting card so I could buy groceries while I was trying to educate people about the subject. So it helps me to look deeper into the human psyche.

Editor: So you feel it has strengthened you and made you a better person? These experiences? Or if you had it to do all over again would you rather not go through these things?

LH: Oh ya. If I had it to do a over again I would rather it be you instead of me (laughs).

Editor: I gather you like where you’re at now but you’d rather not have to go through all of that.

LH: You’re right. I still have a long, long spiritual road to travel. I realize that. I think that this entire life time is a journey on a spiritual path. But I think that I’m much farther along now than I was ten years ago, and it’s a result of these experiences. These experiences forced me to talk to God more, to read the Bible more, to try to understand other people more - to be more tolerant of other individuals because I wanted people to be tolerant of me and how different I was and to accept what I say. So I have to be open minded when I am listening to other people when they’re telling me things. I have to pay attention and listen and not be so quick to judge. So I think that I’ve been helped in that way a lot.

It would have been nice for me to have arrived at the point where I am now without having gone through all the trouble but I think that’s asking for a lot. That’s just not the way things happen and I have to accept that. But no, I’m not happy that these things happened to me. But again, I have to put that in perspective too. I’m not the only person who has had to endure a lot of hardship and trauma. I look at the people who just got through fighting the war in Iraq for instance. Their lives aren’t easy. People who have cancer, or people who have handicaps of some kind.

Editor: Early on there was the Betty and Barney Hill abduction case that first came to light I think in 1966, and of course it happened in 1961 - but when that case first became public knowledge the features of abduction, missing time, those were still pretty new to the UFO field. In fact, they seemed pretty much like fiction to a lot of people. But now of course, in recent years, particularly I think after Budd Hopkins’s Intruders and Whitley Strieber’s Communion, there were thousands of people who came out of the woodwork. Establishment, mainstream ufology was like, “Where did all of these people come from? What’s going on here?” Of course, the people are still looking for hard answers, looking at it from the physical, extraterrestrial, or was it some kind of sociological manifestation, was it the power of suggestion. What do you say, from your own experience, to all of these issues and questions and concerns?

LH: That’s a real good question, and one of the things this phenomenon made me do was examine the Bible more because I grew up as a Southern Baptist and we didn’t talk about this kind of thing in church. So I searched and searched trying to find out if these things happened why isn’t it in the Bible, and I finally found it. It’s there in Genesis, chapter 6, verses 1 through 4. Those are the verses that show that our experiences with extraterrestrials have been going on for thousands of years. What they talk about is where the spirit beings came down from the sky and bred with the daughters of men and produced hybrid children. I’ve written about that in Unlocking Alien Closets. I’ve discussed in there Biblical references backing up the existence and visitation of extraterrestrials, and also the existence of ghosts. I found that in the Bible too.

Editor: Well I know how many times people who describe having close encounters and abduction memories, or contact memories, often describe right afterwards a heightened psychic element. Sometimes there are cases of poltergeist activity. Which for some people is as traumatic as the encounter itself. In some cases, the people told me they thought they were losing their minds.

LH: Well, it would certainly be very easy not to be able to pull out of this so well. In fact, I know some abductees personally who are not coping quite as well as some of the others of us. There have been times I didn’t cope so well. But I’ve always been able to function on a day-to-day basis, pretty much, except for maybe a few set backs. I might have a few days here and a few days there where I was just totally debilitated, but I eventually spring back. But ya, I do know some abductees who have not sprung back at all. I know one in particular who lives in California who just cannot cope at all. She’s unable to work. She hardly leaves her home. She won’t go to a movie because military and government people follow her everywhere she goes, and she just can’t deal with that. And that’s another aspect of it, by the way. The mind control, which is one of the subtitles in my book - I’ve undergone mind control, and I’ve finally concluded that the mind control is the reason that there is still a group of people trying to cover up this phenomenon. There’s one group of people - and I’m simplifying things here - military, government, leaders, scientists - who are trying to educate the public about the abduction phenomenon, and then there’s another group who is trying to keep a lid on it. Based on my own experiences and in talking with other abductees like me, this malevolent group is using abductees in mind control experiments. It seems to me that abductees would be the best candidates to us for mind control experiments, because if there’s a group conducting mind control on us and we tell somebody, who the heck is going to believe us. Because people will say, “That’s a UFO nut. That person is crazy anyway.” So we’re the perfect subjects for those experiments. I really honest to goodness believe that that’s why some people are still trying to debunk this subject.

Editor: So they could test some of their techniques and at the same time explore people’s memories and associations closer and more carefully? They could still study the phenomenon, if maybe they’re curious about it, and still at the same time maybe see how disinformation works too?

LH: Right. Maybe this should be off-the-record. I don’t know. But I think that one of the reasons that we were able to succeed so well in Iraq is because our military employed some of these mind control techniques. I think that’s why our military has been so successful in getting those people who were on the deck of cards to give themselves up and surrender. Not too long ago, on a news broadcast that I was watching on TV, one of the Generals was being interviewed and he admitted that our military did use some techniques that were still secret, and I believe that those techniques that are still secret are mind control. We know that these things have been tested on people here in the U.S.

And one of the major points that I wanted to bring out from writing the book is that there are so many people who have experienced this phenomenon of abduction experiences. The Sci Fi Channel commissioned the Roper Poll to conduct a study back in the Fall, and the Roper Poll said that as many as two percent of the American public have had abduction experiences, or probably have had abduction experiences. Two percent of the American public translates into six million people!

Editor: That’s a lot of people.

LH: It’s a lot of people, but I really think that it’s probably true, and the reason that I say that is this. When I talk to people about the subject, based on a one-on-one basis, I find a lot of them - a huge percentage of them - have either seen UFOs, have had some kind of experiences they can’t explain like missing time or bright lights stunning them when they were out somewhere alone, or they know somebody who has, somebody close. If you’re in a group setting of people, your everyday people that you work with, and you talk about this subject, you might get a little bit of ridicule. But if you take every single one of those individuals out separately and talk with them, then you’ll get stories.

Most abductees have just had the experiences like you were describing earlier. The type that Barney and Betty Hill had, where they just had the alien abduction experiences. They’ve not had to deal with military and government harassment and they’ve not had to deal with mind control. Most abductees it’s just the aliens conducting the experiments. It’s only a small percentage of abductees who have had these other weird things happen like I have.

Editor: And at the time those happened you were close to military bases.

LH: Right.

Editor: And I remember at one point when you moved away the activity let up considerably.

LH: It did. It certainly did let up considerably. The only thing that I’ve seen here that has been ongoing, and still continues actually - oh ya, you asked me earlier if I had experiences lately - only with black helicopters. I have had them, but that happens so much now that I really don’t pay too much attention to it. But here in Tennessee I still have had the black helicopters fly over wherever I happen to be. Or wherever I went. And, I’ve begun to notice a pattern about these helicopters lately, and I’m more likely to see them if I have some indication of having had an experience or when I divert from my usual schedule. It’s almost like somebody who is watching me has lost me and they’re trying to find me. Just a few weeks ago, I went out of town to mail a bunch of - well, when this book came out a lot of people had pre-ordered it and so when the book finally arrived from the printer I had to package up a whole lot of them and ship them out. Well the post offices in the town where I live are insufficient to handle the amount of volume of customers who come through and I knew that I would have to stand in line for about an hour to mail those books, and the people behind me would just be extremely upset in having to wait for me to get postage on all of those things, so I decided to drive to another town to mail the book, where I knew that post office was not very busy and would actually welcome the business. So I drove out of town and I was gone for hours that day - didn’t tell anybody I was going - didn’t talk to anybody on the phone about what I was going to do that day. I just got in my car and left and was gone for hours. Well, as I was driving back through the countryside one of the black helicopters flew real, real low just over the roof of my car, and so just that by itself wouldn’t be any big deal, but the point is that it happens every single time I do something out of the ordinary like that.

Editor: Now are these helicopters the unmarked kind?

LH: I have never been able to see any markings on them. If they have markings they’re so tiny that you can’t see them when they’re close to you.

Editor: Do they appear to be identical, or are they different types of black helicopters?

LH: It’s always the same kind. There’s a picture in Unlocking Alien Closets. It’s that same kind every time. And I don’t know what they’re doing. Like I said, based on their activity it seems to happen when there is something odd going on, and I don’t know if you got to this part in the book or not, but I freaked out when I saw the movie Vanilla Sky - apparently the movie was triggering something. Was trying to trigger a memory and it upset me a whole lot. I went out in the parking lot of the theater and just sat there in the car and was just horribly upset for about an hour, an hour and a half. Couldn’t even drive home, I was so upset. I told my husband on my cell phone, as soon as I got in the car, and told him about the movie and how it upset me and how I thought it was about to trigger something, and about five minutes into that conversation one of those helicopters flew right over my vehicle at the theater. And then about an hour and a half later, when I got ready to leave the theater, it came right back over me again, so it gave me the impression that it had landed and was just trying to monitor my conversation over the cell phone. So that kind of thing still goes on.

But I’m not really so afraid of them anymore. In a way, I feel kind of protected, in a weird sort of way. At least I know that if a mugger comes up and mugs me some of these dudes are watching, and apparently they’re not going to kill me because if they were going to do that they would have done it already. They’ve had thousands of opportunities, so I’m not afraid of them anymore.

Editor: So you feel there’s a military involvement and the alien element, so you feel they’re extraterrestrial. What do you feel like the UFOs are, as far as your own personal theory?

LH: I think there’s a mixture there. I think that yes indeed there are extraterrestrials. I do think that they exist. I do think that they visit human beings and they conduct various experiments. I do think that is going on. I do think, however, that some UFOs probably are manufactured by our own military and government complex, and they are abducting some of our citizens and conducting experiments on their own, and interrogating our citizens who have been abducted, about their alien abductions experiences of course, so that they can learn more about the alien abduction. So I don’t think that it’s a simple thing.

And one of the things that I reported in my book was an abduction that I actually had by human beings, and I actually saw for a fact that the so-called alien was not an alien at all but a human wearing an alien costume. So I know that is going on. Humans are abducting other humans. Interestingly, there was an X-Files episode that came on a few months after that happened to me. I’ve spoken about it in several of my lectures and then there was an X-Files episode made, and that’s something that I’ve pointed out in this book, that often time people accuse abductees of making up their stories based upon something that they’ve seen on TV, and it’s the other way around. TV producers are listening to what abductees are saying and writing, and then they’re making TV shows based on it.

Editor: Have you ever had the opportunity to talk with Betty Hill?

LH: Yes, I have. I’ve met Betty. She’s a very nice person and she seems to have come out of her experiences a lot stronger. I haven’t seen her in a long time though.

Editor: I haven’t either. It’s been a few years. She’s a very beautiful person really. I know that she really struggled with coming to terms with her experience and really was very skeptical with all of the stories of abductions that were cropping up. I think that as a former social worker she projected a lot of psychological explanations and motivations behind a lot of that, and I think she was disturbed, as were a lot of researchers in the field, by the sheer great numbers of people coming forward. In her own mind, she really believed that she had had an experience.

I’m from Maine originally, and I got to know Betty real well, and we went around talking with other people who said they were abducted or contacted. I know that it was a difficult thing for her to deal with, just that element alone.

LH: What Betty doesn’t realize, or what she was unable to realize I think, is that she paved the way for other people to be able to talk about their experiences. I know that she thinks that there aren’t as many people out there who have been abducted as I believe there are. Ya, there are some people who say they’ve been abducted who haven’t. Of course there are. You’ve got that that you have to deal with any phenomenon. There are people who say they’re medical doctors and they’re not.

Editor: Of course, with the early UFO movement there were the contactees telling about going to Venus and Mars and some of the stories were just obviously very hocky, and some of them we look back and say, “Well, maybe there was something to that, but we dismissed it.” Major organizations like NICAP didn’t want anything to do with a UFO report where it landed. After awhile they eased up and said it can land but no being can come out of it and talk to anyone, because they had been so put off by the contactee stories. Such stories fell upon deaf ears. Finally the Betty and Barney Hill case brought respectability and credibility to it.

LH: Right. But I think there are more people who have been visited than Betty thinks, and it may be that when she and Barney were visited maybe there weren’t quite as many people who were. But she and Barney allowed people to come out and say that it happened to them.

You can’t explain all of it away psychologically either, because of the physical marks on their bodies. So many of us have had - for instance, all of the ones that I’ve had. There have been times that I have awakened with injection marks on my body, with little scoops of skin missing, with brand looking marks, like there’s a photo in my book of a triangle that was on my body one morning when I woke up. Where did that come from? Why was there a red triangle on my shoulder? You can’t explain those things away by some kind of psychological problem.

Editor: With Betty Hill we’d talk about the psychic and poltergeist element, and she had come across this and had experienced it herself, but she tried to put a different spin on it. There were physical manifestations, she mentioned once about doors opening and shutting in the house and there was a UFO over the house and she yelled out the window at it. Things would disappear and reappear. She came to express that there were two different elements. There were the nuts and bolts UFOs and then there was the psychic, spiritual, astral things that people were mistaking for the nuts and bolts. She tried to keep them all separate.

LH: I can see where she would think that. I don’t claim to have the right answer either, but to me it seems - you have to base things on your own experiences - and in talking with other people who have had both the alien abduction experiences and the abduction by human beings - that all of those things are intertwined. It’s very complex. It’s like a matrix. Everything is dependant upon everything else. Everything co-exists and is interrelated, and I don’t think that you can separate them out.

Editor: What comes to my mind right now, and this may sound off-the-wall, but the Native American belief that everything has two sides to it. There is a physical and a spiritual side too, and there’s like a speck of the creator in all things, like it’s all part of a great hologram, or matrix if you will.

Of course, I think life itself is a miracle. I don’t think that we really understand a lot of things that we take for granted, day to day.

LH: I think you’re right about that.

Editor: I know that to a lot of people that might sound off-the-wall.

LH: No, I understand what you’re saying, and I agree with that.

One of the things that really, really bothers me is that I have had missing time and I wonder what I was doing. Where was I? Who was I with? Was I doing something that we would consider illegal or immoral or unethical? That’s really a difficult aspect, being an abductee is having these lapses and not having a clue what you were doing. That’s really hard, and I worry about that a lot. Especially if I were undergoing some kind of mind control experiment. Is it possible that someone could have made me do something that I in this conscious reality would not do? That’s a big question that I have that emerged as a result of my experiences.

Editor: I can see where it would be disturbing.

LH: But I think about that a lot, and I probably think about that as much as any other aspects of the things that have happened to me.

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