Sleep paralysis has been offered as an explanation for some alien abduction experiences (I first read about it from Carl Sagan but I'm sure he wasn't the first), and the evidence shows the explanation is a good one. Seeing small shadowy staring entities with bad intent around your bed, being paralyzed, feeling yourself levitate and pass through the wall - all while the fear centers of the brain are going haywire - and then perhaps falling asleep to have a nightmare about an examination (or feeling you have been "put under")... It's no wonder that some people interpret this as a real event.

​Nobody I've spoken to (in real life), other than relatives who like me suffer from sleep paralysis, had ever heard of it. Apparently it's not well known among the general population, and perhaps not among therapists either - certainly it's not something abduction therapists could have explored deeply, or they'd realize it could explain many of their clients' experiences.

A metastudy looked at the correlation between sleep paralysis and various factors. Sleep paralysis usually occurs while falling asleep or waking up. The body is paralyzed as in REM sleep, to prevent you acting out your dreams. So your brain is awake, but your body hasn't caught up yet. Your eyes are open but you can't otherwise move, except for breathing.

You may experience:

• hallucinations (visual, auditory)
• evil presence
• pressure on chest
• illusory movement (e.g. levitation)
• out of body
• fear, distress
• bliss
• 60-80% of sleep paralysis episodes occur in the supine position (on your back).

Significant predictors of sleep paralysis - it's important to note these are not symptoms or causes of sleep paralysis, just things that a sufferer may also suffer from:

• General physical health problems (but no specific ones)
• Chronic pain
• Nocturnal leg cramps
• High life stress
• Shift work
• Trauma, PTSD
• Poorer general mental health
• Anxiety & panic disorders, hypomania
• Dissociative experiences (feeling disconnected from self/world)
• Being imaginative
• Being hypnotizable
• Trouble falling/staying asleep, poor sleep quality 
• Excessive or long daytime naps
• Nightmares
• ​Exploding head syndrome

​Possible significant predictors of sleep paralysis (some studies found, others did not):

• Drinking
• Smoking
• Paranormal beliefs
• Conspiracist beliefs
• Lucid dreaming
• Sleep walking, sleep talking, narcolepsy
• Depression
• Family members who also suffer

These factors were NOT found to be significantly correlated with sleep paralysis:

• Personality attributes (via 5-factor model)
• Mindfulness 
• Daydreaming frequency 
• Insomnia 
• Age 
• Sex

SOURCE: Denis, French, Gregory, A systematic review of variables associated with sleep paralysis. Sleep Medicine Reviews 38 (April 2018), pp. 141-157.

See also: Article on Skeptic.com by Heidi Love who suffered from extreme episodes of sleep paralysis and learned to enjoy them (I certainly never did). See also the reader comments. She describes it as a form of lucid dream.

No one really knows the prevalence of sleep paralysis, or its causes and cures. The research is all over my place so I did my best to summarize. The "evil presence" that visits me and levitates me off my bed is 4' tall shadowy alien greys. I force myself not to fall asleep, but rather to attempt to move and break the spell, so I've never had a dream immediately following an episode. I've never been "abducted" into an alien craft or regressed to "recover memories" about a paranormal experience. But I can absolutely understand how sleep paralysis may be misinterpreted, in our culture, as an alien visitation.

After talking recently to someone who experiences glowing orbs during sleep paralysis, which I never had, this week I had my first glowing orb experience! I woke up on my back, paralyzed as usual. First I saw a drone with a red light hovering in the room. It was rather like a robot vacuum cleaner, only about 6" diameter, 5' from the floor near the corner of the room, actually more on hubby's side of the bed. Is he a person of interest?

Then a brilliant, burbling glow rose up over the foot of the bed, surrounding a white orb. A second later everything vanished because hubby jabbed me in the arm which broke the paralysis and the spell. (I've trained him to do this.)

Glowing orbs in the bedroom are reported by experiencers. I assumed they were hallucinations or dreams but didn't associate them with sleep paralysis because I'd never seen one - but now that I have, I can add them to the list of symptoms. 

I created the graphic at the top for sharing. If someone describes an experience to you that includes these elements, but they've interpreted it as paranormal, perhaps take the opportunity to offer a different perspective.

It seems clear many alien abductions from beds could actually be sleep paralysis followed by a dream, which all seems real on recall. Hypnotic regression brings forth imaginative details and implants those fantasies as "memories".

My observation is that many experiencers (who believe they've been abducted or had a CE5) at some point talk about childhood abuse or neglect, or about substance use/abuse. So I have some thoughts on that.

Today I spoke to a relative - like me he grew up in a safe loving home, never felt threatened, always knew he'd be protected. He's suffered sleep paralysis episodes since early childhood. At age 8 he realized it wasn't real: he calls this milestone the development of his "critical consciousness." We all develop critical consciousness around this age - the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. A 6-year-old might think the real Elsa came to his birthday party. At age 9 he knows it's a lady in costume.

The difference with sleep paralysis is: it feels realer than real. If you don't know what it is, your critical consciousness doesn't kick in. It's like the 9-year-old grows up still thinking Elsa came to his party. He may even misremember her appearance, as he plays back the memory in his head, as looking like the cartoon. Just as I perceive the entities in my room as short shadowy humanoid shapes observing me, but remember them later as alien Greys with huge eyes (details that weren't actually "seen" in the hallucination).

So while adults may apply critical consciousness to every other area of life, a sleep paralysis sufferer who still thinks it's "real" isn't applying critical consciousness here. And culture tells them how to interpret the experience (old hag, succubus, tokolosh, jinn, demon, alien).

When he was very young, my relative would try to resist the entity as it yanked him by the ankle off the bed. Every time he fell to the floor, he immediately found himself back on the bed again. This helped him realize that it wasn't real and that nothing bad would happen. He was, after all, living in a household where bad things didn't happen. It was easier to just let the non-existent entity win.

​He also describes the entity tugging at him, then catapulting him through the wall. He learned to let it happen because on the other side of the wall a lucid dream was waiting for him. (He is highly interested in improving his lucid dreaming skills, and found that changing his drug/alcohol habits, whether increasing or decreasing, tended to increase the chance of lucid dreaming. Since he strongly associates lucid dreaming with sleep paralysis, it's possible altering drug habits will also increase sleep paralysis episodes.)

For the three main cases covered on this site, I've added links to my relevant Twitter threads that cover aspects of each case in summary form.

The tweets are linked as bulleted lists from the main page for each case:

• Travis Walton
• The Hills
• Anjali

My pinned tweet lists a few additional threads, including for these cases:

• Ariel schoolchildren
• Skinny Bob:
  • Film overlays and puppetry
  • Possible involvement of a creature creator

In May someone on Twitter told me about an alien abduction case where two guys on different continents woke up wearing each other’s shirts. Then he mentioned Travis Walton, who I'd never heard of, and I read some stuff and made this site.

Since then I've looked into a handful of cases that interested me, bitten the heads off a few people who think they know better than me what I should be interested in, and written some Twitter threads. This is a retrospective from my point of view of the past 8 months, itemizing some things I've learned.

• Creature maker Ben Phillips (& co.) created 37 seconds of animation using his own props and a Mars Attacks puppet, slapped on a few filters, uploaded it to YouTube, and fooled a bunch of people that it showed a visiting alien crew from the 40s. Ben gets his kicks talking about how amazing his own footage is - so amazing, he concludes, that it must be real.
• On r/SkinnyBob, the guy who runs the sub uses sockpuppets to argue with himself but he and his alts are all in agreement that Skinny Bob is real because darn it he looks so real. He offered 30K to the creator, if a hoax, but says he can withdraw the prize at any time thus making it worthless.
• I am 100% certain that if and when Skinny Bob is proven beyond doubt to be a hoax, it won't stop the people who believed in him and now have to admit they were wrong from tracking down the next alien video or leaked top secret files so they'll have something else to believe in.

Happy new year. May all your dreams come true, and, if you chase the truth, all your beliefs be shattered.

The name Skinny Bob kept coming up on Twitter. Every time I googled the name, I ended up at YouTube videos depicting alien creature sightings with titles like: "This looks like Skinny Bob."

But who was Skinny Bob?

I figured the name was a generic term for emaciated Grey aliens, taken from American pop culture perhaps. When I was finally directed to the correct videos, I realized I'd seen the footage a while back but evidently not paid much attention. "Skinny Bob" is the name given to the alien by the video uploader. Despite being anonymously in possession of this earth-shattering footage courtesy of the KGB, Ivan0135 had no qualms about giving his details to YouTube - the videos are monetized.

This case interests me for two reasons - the passion with which fans of Skinny Bob support his reality, and my personal (admittedly limited) interest in animation. I've written an ongoing thread on Twitter looking at the 37 seconds (from a total of 5 minutes across 4 videos) that show Skinny Bob alive and moving. My conclusions, that he is a modified Mars Attacks stock motion puppet, come from work done on Reddit last year mostly by two users, BrooklynRobot and RedDwarfBee.

I did some further research on the puppets to understand how they were built and used. (In the end, Tim Burton's Mars Attacks movie used CGI based on the puppets, not stop motion animation.) Comparisons between the puppet and Skinny Bob only convinced me further. Some of the similarities:

• identical body proportions, other than the head (puppet's lower jaw removed, foam latex skull modified)
• identical tendons, fingernails, and shadows on the hands (which are heavily painted on the puppet, though it's not clear in the image below)
• identical features of the skull (eye sockets, cheekbones)
• mobile brow (which is articulated on the puppet) while rest of face doesn't move other than slight parting of lips.

Additionally, it looks like the Skinny Bob footage was shot in such a way as to hide any shortcomings of the animation:

• very poor quality: low res, high contrast to wash out details, distressed film - all of this can be done in post-production
• Bob never talks or moves his lower face, and never manipulates objects with his hands
• Bob's entire eye sockets are always in deep shadow, so his eyeballs can't be seen (CGI eyes are hard enough to render realistically; puppet eyes definitely don't look real)
• the only complex movement he makes is walking, and that scene is shot with extreme camera shake and blur.

There's lots more information on my Twitter thread - including speculation about where the Skinny Bob footage may have been shot - and I'll update that as new information comes in. I've also started a discussion at r/SkinnyBob on Reddit.

Why would anyone modify an expensive puppet, make an animation, and then compile it with UFO footage, slap on some filters, and upload it to YouTube with a narrative about a crashed saucer in Russia? I can't say, but if I had the skills and equipment to do it for fun... I just might.

I get emails. Sometimes they are sent by people in an RPG who appear to believe I am in the same RPG. It's pretty funny.

Dear Charlie Wiser,
 
I have addressed you by name, but I am not at all certain that is your real name.
 
That is an advantage you admittedly have over me, my friend [redacted], and the rest of the well meaning and often gullible UFO community – in today’s world, anyone and everyone can become an instant authority just by claiming to “be in the know,” without qualification or verification. I have been closely examining the information on your Three-Dollar Kit website. A lot of thought and work has gone into this criticism of the basic narratives associated with two of the most significant Alien Abduction cases on record, Travis Walton and the Betty and barney Hill Encounter.
 
If you are sitting where I think you may be sitting when you read this, you probably have direct access to law enforcement and intelligence databases such that you can instantly establish my identity and history. I am a retired [redacted] who has had a lifelong interest in the UFO Mystery. (Here is the best way I can present my perspective [redacted links to an interview and a personal website].)
 
From my perspective, you are an unidentified source. I am trained to evaluate not just the information or evidence presented, but the quality and significance of a particular source from the perspective of how much weight would be given the evidence by a prosecutor or defense attorney. Is the evidence qualified and admissible by a qualified witness who would be sworn and subject to cross examination. Admittedly, this is way beyond the standard of the public in general.
 
You could be, for instance, a member of an Intelligence agency furthering the apparent goal of an Orwellian rewrite of UFO history so that when completed, there will be nothing left that occurred before 2004 and doesn’t originate with Tom DeLonge, Luis Elizondo and the TTSA. You might also represent QAnon, or a foreign government helping to further doubt and fear by any means possible. Or you may be also a very skilled researcher with a keen interest in chasing down the ever elusive Truth.
 
But your explanations for Travis Walton and the Betty and Barney Hill Encounter depend upon a lot of “It’s possible…” assumptions. You haven’t identified your sources of information, or your experience or professional qualifications. When I saw that you had targeted Travis Walton and the Hills, I started wondering if there was a deeper agenda. I noted that you don’t have an “About” tab on your website, and your FB page has just about nothing on it except your alleged name.
 
At the same time I am an investigator at heart. If it turned out that either of these events was hoaxed, then that revelation will become part of the history of human interaction with something alien, otherwise known as the UFO Mystery.
 
So my question is: Charlie Wiser, who are you really?
 
Respectfully,

[some guy I've never heard of]

Hi [redacted]

Thanks for your email.

On the assumption your email is in jest, I have responded in kind. Feel free to divulge any of the information I am about to reveal, although doing so may result in increased black helicopter activity in your vicinity as well as mine.
 
I am known as Charlie Wiser.
 
I claim no authority in the well meaning and often gullible UFO community.
 
I appreciate your close examination of Three-Dollar Kit, which is hosted by Weebly.
 
I have instantly established your identity and history by visiting the two URLs you kindly provided.
 
I am not aware of any Intelligence agency with the apparent goal of an Orwellian rewrite of UFO history so that when completed, there will be nothing left that occurred before 2004 and doesn’t originate with Tom DeLonge, Luis Elizondo and the TTSA. You're freaking me out, sir.
 
I may consider an offer to represent QAnon if, and only if, they will pay me in unmarked canisters of pure adrenochrome (ethically sourced).
 
I am Australian but do not represent my government. To my knowledge, the Australian government does not further doubt and fear in the United States. Australians would rather you visit with your tourist dollars and pet a koala.
 
I am flattered that you entertain the possibility that I am a very skilled researcher.
 
I have identified my sources of information as far as I’m able, namely: original reports on the cases, which I have excerpted; books, which I have quoted; and recorded interviews with witnesses, which I have linked to.
 
I am not above ending a sentence with a preposition.
 
I have no agenda but the truth.
 
I have no About tab because it didn’t fit along the menu bar in an esthetically pleasing manner.
 
I haven’t bothered to fill in my FB profile but am open to ideas.
 
To answer your question, I am known as "Charlie Wiser", a "suburban" "mum"*.

C

*mom

Three-Dollar Kit aims to collect evidence for popular UFO sightings and alien abductions, starting with the Travis Walton case from 1975 which inspired the website's name. You'll see why.

Before you yell at me, remember: I don't care how many witnesses there are, or how "nice" the players are. Gimme the evidence.

If you still want to yell at me, write to me penultimateburn@gmail.com. If my blood sugar level is high I may write back with wit. If my blood alcohol level is high I may write back with sarcasm.

​Or I may ignore you. I may even quote you here, although without attribution unless you're (in)famous.

Comment on the blog to engage with other like-minded folk. (Don't blame me if they don't like your particular mind.)

Let's do this thing!!