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Doppelgänger Effect
Source and further reading.Doppelgängers in old fairy lore, modern science fiction and ufology
Text: Nigel Watson / Images: Jonathan Burton
November 2007
From FT205:50-53
Sometimes, it’s the small and apparently irrelevant details contained in UFO reports that open up whole new avenues of study, revealing a cluster of intriguing possibilities. Certainly, I found this to be the case when I came across several accounts of people encountering doubles of UFO investigators.
The first example I stumbled upon was contained in Berthold Eric Schwarz’s extensive interviews with the late Betty Hill (see obituary in FT195:24 and many earlier references). Although Betty was best known for her abduction by aliens in 1961, Schwarz’s work indicates that she also had a huge number of ghostly and supernatural experiences. It was while giving lectures about her abduction that Betty kept seeing a person in the audience who resembled her friend Raymond Fowler. At the time, he was a UFO investigator who is now best known for his long-standing investigation of the Betty Andreasson abduction case. [1]
More amusingly, Betty recalled seeing a man following her as she and her mother took a trip to Montreal to record a TV programme. When they saw that he was staying at the same hotel her mother had a word with him. It’s not recorded what she said, but that evening the man turned up at the hotel dining room wearing a false moustache that promptly fell into his soup. [2]
We might speculate that all the strange happenings experienced by Betty – which included trouble with the telephone and postal services along with break-ins and visitations by mysterious men – indicated that, as she toured the UFO lecture circuit sharing stories of her now-famous abduction, she was being closely monitored.
The writings of John A Keel are also notably full of stories in which contactees and abductees are plagued by similar occurrences. Keel himself received many strange telephone calls in the course of his investigations. Checking into randomly selected hotels where no one could have predicted his presence, Keel would find telephone messages waiting for him, left by someone who had already registered a room in his name. [3]
These events reached a peak in 1967, when Keel was investigating alien contacts, sightings of UFOs and the activities of monstrous red-eyed mothmen in West Virginia. These investigations became the basis for Keel’s most celebrated book, The Mothman Prophecies, adapted as a feature film in 2002 (see FT156:26–53; 62).
One of the strangest calls came at 1am on 14 July 1967, when someone rang Keel and introduced himself as ufologist Gray Barker of ‘West Virginia’. The voice was identical to that of Barker, but the man spoke as if he had never met Keel, referring to him as ‘Mr Keel’ throughout and making a number of obvious errors that the real Barker would never have made. Throughout the 10-minute conversation, Keel thought that the caller was under severe stress, and obviously not the real Barker. For several hours afterwards he received further calls from this person, as well as from strangers who wanted him to contact Barker. The following day, the real Gray Barker confirmed that he had not telephoned Keel at all.
A few days afterwards, several people received telephone calls from a ‘John Keel’ who tried to arrange midnight meetings with them in remote locations. The person sounded just like the real Keel… but it wasn’t him. In March 1968, ufologist George Clark got another call from this fake John Keel.
The strange telephone calls were so extensive that Keel kept a log of them and came to the conclusion that a single prankster could not have been responsible for them all. [4]
Given the scope of these activities – which have been experienced by many other people besides John Keel and Betty Hill – it’s tempting to conclude (as some people have) that government agents, aliens, or even a combination of the two, are at work.
We can understand that government agencies might be inclined to monitor the telephone conversations and activities of ufologists and other people closely connected with the subject, but why would they impersonate and even deploy doppelgängers of ufologists?
Rather than human agencies, of either the governmental or prankster variety, there is much evidence to suggest that these modern-day ufological doppelgängers are no more than a contemporary continuation of themes to be found in far older folkloric sources.
Like today’s aliens, fairies were believed to have deployed many devious methods to abduct human babies. In one story from Denmark, a troll kidnaps a pregnant woman and replaces her with a doppelgänger to cover his crime. The tale begins when a blacksmith working at his forge late one evening sees a troll driving a woman along the road. The blacksmith uses a red-hot iron to scare away the troll. When he takes the rescued woman to his house she immediately gives birth to twins. Thinking the woman’s husband will want to know what has happened, the blacksmith goes to their home the next morning. Much to his surprise he finds the man in bed with a woman who is the exact image of his wife. The blacksmith, knowing that this woman is a fake provided by the troll, kills her with a blow from his axe; after which, the man is reunited with his wife and the two new additions to his family. [5]
In the Orkney Islands they sometimes call the fairy folk ‘trows’. Trows are ugly little creatures, thought to live in the ancient mounds on the islands. Their homes are large, well lit, lavishly decorated and always contain plenty of fine foodstuffs. Generally, the trows are mischievous creatures that like to play tricks on people; they were mainly feared for their tendency to steal human babies. The trows’ own children were weak and sickly, so at any opportunity they would swap them for healthy human infants. To prevent this, women were carefully guarded by family and friends, both while they were pregnant and after giving birth.
When trows abducted adults (or animals) they would cover their crime by replacing them with exact replicas. These replicas were called ‘stocks’ and were usually left in the person’s bed (or animal’s stall) to hide the act. [6]
In many regions, it was thought that an infant was particularly vulnerable to being replaced by a fairy changeling before it was christened. To ward off this danger, open scissors would be placed on the baby when it was left alone; alternatively, a cross made out of mountain ash or a red thread placed round its neck were probably safer options. In Ireland, according to George Waldron, you can get rid of a changeling baby by putting a mixture of oatmeal and boiling digitalis in its mouth, or by putting it on a red-hot shovel; needless to say, neither of these courses of treatment should be tried at home! [7]
If parents believed their child was a changeling, they had an excuse to beat, whip and torture it to force the fairy parents to return the real human infant. In the 16th century, it was feared that some humans would actually help the fairies to steal babies; as a result, midwives had to swear not to substitute babies or to use magical incantations during childbirth. As David Sivier put it:
“These beliefs have the function of explaining the occurrence of deformed children and assuaging the grief felt by their parents when they eventually pass away. After all, if the children were really malicious spirits, and not the couple’s own children, then there was no point in grieving over their deaths. On the contrary, if the creatures were evil, their final demise should be a cause of celebration.” [8]
Today, instead of fairies, it’s often the authorities who are blamed for swapping babies. One such case in the 1990s involved a couple in London, who had a Downs Syndrome baby they would not accept as their own. The mother had given birth to four healthy babies previously, and could not believe that her fifth was any different. Both mother and father thought that the hospital staff had swapped this baby with their healthy one. [9]
The fears surrounding birth might account for the phenomenon of changelings, and indeed some other forms of double, but don’t really explain the doppelgängers of Raymond Fowler and John Keel described above. Here, the work of Colin Wilson can be of some help. In his book , Wilson postulates that doppelgängers might be a form of astral or mental projection which often appear at destinations that the person intends to visit in the near future. Wilson gives the example of New Yorker Erkson Gorique who went on a business trip to Norway in 1955. The clerk at his Oslo hotel said it was good to see him again, and a businessman said he had met and spoken to him two months earlier. Yet, this was Gorique’s first trip to Norway. [10] This form of anticipatory doppelgänger is certainly reminiscent of the occasions when Keel’s double seemed to have turned up at motels before his own arrival.
Folklore, superstition and anecdotal stories are all suggestive of the idea – or the fear – that forces like Keel’s ‘ultraterrestrials’ have been continually manipulating us throughout human history for their own nefarious ends.
These folkloric fears of the doppelgänger are echoed in many works of fiction (especially those by such 19th-century writers as James Hogg, ETA Hoffman, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Oscar Wilde and, most particularly, Edgar Allan Poe) in which often the hero is forced to commit suicide to escape the haunting presence of his double. At least two films use the term doppelgänger as their theme and title. The most chilling and memorable fictional doppelgängers are the alien ‘pod people’ found in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Here, while the victims sleep, the aliens are able to grow perfect replicas of them; when the replicas are ‘born’ from their seed pods, the sleeping originals die or are killed and the replicas take over their lives. The story, originating in a 1955 novel by Jack Finney, has proved so potent that three film versions of it have been produced (definitively in 1956 by Don Siegel, and with less success in 1978 and 1993 by Philip Kaufman and Abel Ferrara) and another version is slated for release in 2006. Such stories play powerfully on our fears about the coherence and stability of our own identities and the forces that seek to shape and change them out of all recognition to our ‘original’ selves.
More prosaically, Dr Peter Brugger of Zurich University Hospital, Switzerland, has put forward the idea that there is a ‘Doppelgänger Syndrome’. This syndrome, according to Dr Brugger, is an extension of the phantom limb delusion often experienced by amputees (see FT133:16). In the case of Doppelgänger Syndrome, though, it’s not just a missing limb but the whole of one’s body that is sensed as something outside of oneself and beyond one’s control. On a neurological basis, Brugger suggests that we carry an internal representation of the self that is transferred into the outside world when we are put in stressful and/or lonely situations, or if the brain is affected by injury, tumours, epileptic episodes and the like. For Brugger, this neurological phenomenon would explain the ‘imaginary playmates’ reported by many children, as well as the belief in guardian angels, psychic helpers or aliens shadowing or guiding our lives. [11]
On a far less sophisticated level, it’s obvious that our own general expectations in any given situation tend to colour our perceptions. We’ve all had the experience of seeing someone in a crowd who looks just like someone we know but who, on closer inspection – perhaps even after the embarrassment of engaging the lookalike in conversation – turns out to be a complete stranger. Such expectation and mistaken perception could certainly provide an utterly mundane explanation for Betty Hill’s frequent sightings of Raymond Fowler.
To conclude, we have a mixture of mundane, psychological, folkloric, supernatural and alien theories and explanations for the appearance of doppelgängers, doubles, telephone tricksters and the other strange events that befuddle ufologists.
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I met my `dopplegangr` in real life many years ago now, a woman living not too far from me who could pass for my twin! I did used to wonder why I kept getting folks asking me if I`d been in x y or z town recently as they`d seen me, when it hadn`t been me. Mystery solved. We stayed friends for many years until I moved away.
Originally Posted by Dorian
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