Introduction (Manuel Lamiroy)
One concept that is closely related to the alien abduction phenomenon is 'missing time.' By now, most people are familiar with the stories of individuals going for a walk or driving their car, who then see a bright light or a UFO, and suddenly two hours have gone by, and they have no recollection of what happened in that time. Usually, if they want to find out what has happened, they’ll need to resort to hypnotic regression.
Most abductees that I know have experienced missing time episodes. Missing time is however not limited to the abductees themselves, but often also happens to the people who are with the abductees at the time of an encounter. Often, they are not abducted themselves, but they are 'switched off.' It seems like they’re 'frozen in time' for the entire duration of the abduction. Oddly enough, as the story by Bill Konkolesky below illustrates, it really seems like nothing happens during that time, and that time just 'stood still' for them. It’s like somebody pressed a 'Pause' button on their experience of time, while time just continued normally for the rest of the world.
The amount of time that is not accounted for can vary greatly from case to case. In the majority of the cases the missing time period lasts between one and a half to three hours. But there are cases where only some minutes seem to have passed by. And in Passport to the Cosmos John Mack mentioned a case of student who had a whole week in Italy that was not accounted for, and that she had no recollection whatsoever of.
Missing time is not the only temporal anomaly contactees and abductees have experienced. Many people who have gone aboard the beings’ craft - be it voluntarily or involuntarily - describe how time behaves differently on board. Sometimes what seems to be minutes in reality took hours, and vice versa. I know of a case, e.g, where a contactee was invited on board a ship, and went for a quick tour in space. She thought the whole trip had taken about half an hour, but was surprised to find out the whole experience had taken less than three minutes.
These 'warped time' occurrences do not seem to be limited to cases where experiencers are aboard an alien ship. I am aware of several cases where people experienced the opposite of 'missing time' and where time in 'the outside world' seemed to go slower than for them. Take, e.g., the case where people are travelling by car, and the trip, which they often make, is supposed to take 90 minutes, but when they arrive they notice they completed it in only 40 minutes. I know of similar cases where somebody reads a book, and reads a number of pages that would typically take double or three times that amount of time to read.
Other incidences of 'warped time' seem to be where different parts of the house suddenly appear to be in zones where time evolves differently, resulting in the clocks in the house suddenly all showing different times. And more often than not, if this is the case, it happened when an encounter has taken place.
In the articles below, Bill Konkolesky tells us about one baffling instance of missing time he has experienced. Thomas Minderle tries to come to grips with the concept of temporal anomies itself.
Have you experienced any temporal anomalies? If you have, we’d love to hear from you.
A Summer Morning (Bill Konkolesky)
One of the common components in my personal contact experiences is the temporal anomaly. There have been many occasions where I have encountered a warping of time during contact and I have described several of these events multiple times over the years in talks I’ve done and things I’ve written. However, there is one occurrence of temporal anomaly that I rarely discuss due to the somewhat personal nature that, well, it happened in the bathroom. This is what occurred.
It was a summer morning during the 1990’s. I awoke at 5.30 am, needing to use the bathroom, which was conveniently just a half-dozen steps from my bed. As I got up, I looked over at my girlfriend in the pre-dawn light, who was asleep face-down under the covers, and then I headed in.
When I was done, I washed my hands, and stepped back into my bedroom. To my surprise, the sun had risen significantly, the clock now said 6.29 am, and my girlfriend was now asleep face-up on top of the covers.
In my estimation, the whole trip took about a minute and, yet, an hour had passed.
I settled back into bed and pondered this only momentarily as I quickly fell back asleep.
A few hours later, as my girlfriend (also an experiencer) and I woke for the day, she spoke first, telling that she’d been taken sometime during the night where a grey being and military looking human with short-cropped hair were doing levitation exercises with her in a sterile activity area. Her recall of the experience was as limited and sketchy as that.
While my initial guess had been that I was possibly taken without my recall during the missing time, her admission led me to believe that I was more likely temporarily switched-off while they took only her. This would explain how she significantly changed position (in what seemed like only a minute to me).
During breakfast, I started looking back for breaks in time continuity during that hour between 5.30 am and 6.29 am when my switch-off might have been triggered.
If the switch-off had occurred on my way to the bathroom, the sudden appearance of full daylight would’ve occurred while I was still in my bedroom and I would’ve certainly noticed.
If the switch-off would’ve occurred upon entering the bathroom, while there are no windows in that room to notice a daylight change, the pressure to relieve myself was constant and I don’t think I could’ve held out an additional hour.
Almost certainly, a time break didn’t occur in the midst of relieving myself and the sound of the flush persisted until I was back in my daylit bedroom.
I’m left with nothing but questions. So where did the time break when every second was accounted for? Could they switch me off for an hour while I was standing? Why didn’t they just wait one minute until I was back lying down in bed. Was it really necessary that I leave the room to take my girlfriend? Was the timing of my brief absence merely a coincidence?
I eventually got regressed to examine this strange morning and no further details emerged, as if nothing out of the ordinary happened to me. My girlfriend was not regressed.
These beings certainly have a way to manipulate time in some peculiar ways.
This leads to the big question I so often ask after my experiences, “So what do I now after I’ve once again experienced the impossible in the midst of the mundane?”
A Wider Perspective (Thomas Minderle)
What we perceive with our five senses consists of matter and energy distributed across three dimensions of space and one dimension of linear time. That’s what we take to be reality. But as quantum physics teaches, this so-called “objective reality” is neither objective nor real; it is merely a suggestion.
At the scale of atoms, solid matter is mostly empty space. Particles pop in and out of existence and interact both forward and backward through time. Particles can teleport and influence each other at speeds faster than light. That is what goes on at the quantum foundation of the world as we know it.
It is only when you go up in scale and average these quantum fluctuations across billions of atoms that all you’re left with is a boring and predictable collective “shape” and “tendency” that constitutes our everyday world.
Think of a large crowd: at the level of the individual, there is much random movement and activity, but seen from high above, the crowd as a whole stays put and has a definable boundary. That’s because there is no collective coherence to the people’s motions. If, however, shots rang out from the west side, the crowd would collectively run east.
Likewise, if certain quantum fluctuations were to become coherent, then instead of averaging out to nothing they would add up to something big enough to show up in our everyday world as a major anomaly. Synchronicity, telekinesis, time warps, portals, invisibility, and time travel may turn out to be macroscopic quantum phenomena.
Sometimes anomalies are natural in origin and a person happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time to experience a breakdown of consensus reality. Fortean literature is full of such accounts. But sometimes they are artificial and intentional. Consider how much of nature mankind has already harnessed through technology. Would it not be possible for beings more advanced than us to have command over the quantum world as well?
Everything we know about UFOs and their occupants suggests they have a deeper access to “reality” than we ordinarily do. It appears they can cohere the quantum world in ways we cannot comprehend. To them, space, time, matter, and energy are mutable and editable. But what does that make us? Unfortunately, it makes us pawns on their chessboard, characters in their novel, rats in their maze.
The human body and brain are completely locked into three-dimensional space and linear time. Due to the fallibility of our feeble brains, even without temporal control aliens can suppress and alter our memories through psychic and/or technological means, say to erase memory of an abduction or replace that memory with something innocuous like the typical example of remembering an owl by the window last night instead of a gray alien looking in.
Now if you combine that ability with time manipulation technology, you quickly realize that movies like Dark City, The Adjustment Bureau, The Matrix, and The Forgotten may be uncomfortably close metaphors for what is actually going on. In other words, the classic missing time cases recounted in abduction lore may only be the tip of the iceberg. There may be a more widespread time and memory manipulation happening that doesn’t only involve bedroom or highway abductions.
But more importantly, these and other anomalies like synchronicity, paranormal phenomena, extrasensory perception, bilocation, etc. are cracks in invisible prison walls of the five senses. They point outside the matrix to a bigger reality of which ours is merely a low-resolution subset.
Further, this means that as long as we think, feel, perceive, and act from our 3D biology, we will always be under the heel of beings with superior consciousness and hyperdimensional technology. Fortunately, we are more than our physical bodies and latent spiritual abilities exist within us that can level the playing field if nurtured and brought to manifestation.