On the Lam, Part One: A Hill to Die On

Something very, very, very strange is going on in Washington

Not to burst anyone’s bubble, but I don’t believe that Earth is being visited by space aliens. I do think we’re dealing with what I’ve called “elusive companions,” entities who have been observed for millennia and recorded in roughly similar descriptions.

I may not believe in space aliens, but I do believe that the occult is very real, and that the “phenomenon” (as some call it) is more of a metaphysical manifestation than anything else.

This isn’t news to anyone who’s followed The Secret Sun over the years, but what is new is how increasingly open very powerful and influential figures in American politics have been about expressing very similar opinions.

A strange new faith is quietly spreading through the halls of American power. Forget little green men; this belief system posits that UFOs are not extraterrestrial, but supernatural—’angels and demons.’

This is the exact claim media personality Tucker Carlson recently made during an early November 2025 appearance on ‘The Megyn Kelly Show.’ He separately suggested on Steve Bannon’s ‘War Room’ podcast that the US government is hiding these ‘spiritual entities’ and may have even ‘made a deal’ with them to receive nuclear technology. - International Business Times

OK - Carlson, Bannon, Kelly? Those are just talk show hosts. Who else are we talking about here?

Extraterrestrials or aliens have absorbed the human imagination for decades. Two major political figures, however, have suggested a potentially spiritual side to the question of life beyond Earth. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene recently appeared on an episode of HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher where she discussed that she believes aliens are fallen angels, oftentimes referred to as demons. - Beliefnet

OK, Greene is a fairly notorious figure in Congress, and for all the coverage she gets, isn’t particularly powerful or influential. Who else?

In an interview with the New York Post, Vice President JD Vance said that he believes UFOs could be either angels or demons and speculated that flying saucers may be supernatural forces that intend to harm humanity.

“​I’m a big believer that there are things out there that we can’t explain. And so if another person sees an alien, maybe I see an angel or a demon. So, I’m a big believer that there are like spiritual forces working on the physical world that a lot of us don’t see and a lot of us don’t understand and a lot of us don’t appreciate.” - Jason Colavito blog

The Vice President? OK, then. That’s a different story.

So let’s wind the clock back to the glory days of old-fashioned UFOlogy and see if we can unpack all this. Steel yourself, because this will end up taking us back to the present day, and do so in ways you’d never expect...

Most UFO researchers point to the Barney and Betty Hill event in September of 1961 as the start of the modern “alien abduction” era, the same way that occult researchers point to Aleister Crowley’s 1918 Amalantrah Working as the first appearance of a classic (or near-classic) Grey-type in the modern era.

But what if I told you that the two events are connected in a direct and tangible way, as well as through some stunning semiotics?

First, let’s cover the basic facts...

Late at night on Sept. 19, 1961, they were driving through the White Mountains of New Hampshire, returning from a Canadian vacation to their home in Portsmouth when they spotted an object in the sky with lights, which at first seemed like an airplane. But when the “airplane” began to rapidly descend in their direction, they quickly continued driving south along Route 3.

Just south of the Indian Head resort, the Hills stopped in the middle of the road and said the silent, cigar-shaped craft hovered above their car. Through binoculars, Barney claimed to see several “strangely not human” figures at the object’s windows. Fearing they were about to be captured, Barney quickly drove away.

The next thing the Hills remembered was that they were 35 miles farther along on their journey and approximately two hours had passed which they couldn’t account for.

This amnesia continued to bother them, leading to physical and mental disorders until finally, three years after the experience, time-regression hypnosis was used to extract the lost information. Under separate hypnotic sessions, the Hills produced details of a reported kidnapping by aliens on board a spacecraft.

Eventually, a well-known psychiatrist and neurologist, Dr. Benjamin Simon, used a technique called regression hypnosis to help unlock the Hills’ forgotten memories. Through many separate hypnotic sessions, the Hills recounted a tale of being abducted by alien beings into the UFO and given physical examinations before being returned to their car with their memories erased.

Lee Spiegel, “Betty And Barney Hill UFO Abduction Story Commemorated On Official N.H. Highway Plaque”:

A plague concerning the event at the Indian Head Resort reads as follows:

On September 19, 1961, while driving on US Rt 3 to their home in Portsmouth, NH, the Hills observed a large, silent, hovering disk-shaped object. The Indian Head resort is the last property they remembered prior to becoming aware that they were 35 miles south of Lincoln and of a two-hour period of “missing time.” ...

In another Spiegel article, the appearance of the Hills’ captors was described:

“As far as appearance, we described them as four-and-a-half to five feet tall, humanoid-like, very large eyes that slanted upward, very flat nose, just a thin slit for a mouth, a grayish complexion, and that they were all dressed alike. I don’t think I was really prepared for their appearance -- I was terrified,” Betty recalled.

Based on the descriptions from the hypnotic sessions and a sketch provided by Barney an artist named David Baker created a sketch and explained his understanding of the creatures and noted large, slanted eyes, oversized heads, weak, pointed chins, immobility of facial expressions, lack of hair and ears and an inability to distinguish male from female.

In other words, the classic Grey prototype, which has been reported for several thousand years.

Echoes of the Greys have appeared in art and pop culture over the past hundred years or so, but they’ve been largely absent since ancient times. It was with the Betty and Barney Hill episode that the archetype burst back into the collective consciousness in a major way.

Of course, they’d done so with Aleister Crowley’s Lam contact, 43 years earlier.

Here were see Baker’s depiction of the Hills’ captors and Crowley’s sketch of Lam. Neither are as evolved as the Greys we see on the cover of Communion, for instance, but the basic architecture is the same.

So we know the Hills’ basic contact story: what about Crowley’s?

At the outbreak of WWI, Crowley set sail from his native England aboard the Lusitania, bound for the USA....he returned to New York and moved into furnished rooms on Central Park West. Roddie Minor, a married woman living apart from her husband, joined him there circa September/ October 1917 and together they set about exploring the wilder shores of magica sexualis.

Under the influence of hashish and opium, (Minor) described to Crowley a series of archetypal visions involving (among others) a king, a small boy and a wizard who introduced himself as “Amalantrah”--who delivered exhortations to “find the egg.”

...the details are unclear, but it seems that some stage during the proceedings he underwent a form of contactee experience involving a large-headed entity now known to occultists as Lam. - Ian Blake, Excluded Middle

The “egg” has since been interpreted by some observers as a UFO, which makes sense given the fact that Lam looks like a Grey. Though this working has become legendary in recent years, I can’t find any evidence that any record of it was widely published until Kenneth Grant’s The Magical Revival in 1972. And I don’t believe the portrait of Lam was republished until several years after that.

In other words, there’s not much chance that Crowley’s drawing had much of an effect on the culture at large, and certainly no evidence the Hills ever saw it.

Grant then devised his own Lam liturgy called The Lam Statement, which seemed for all intents and purposes to be a contactee ritual in the tradition of the Mithraic Liturgy.

Note also the banishing ritual, an occult tradition in which the entities summoned are believed to be sent back to their native realms:

The Mode of Entering the Egg may proceed as follows. Each votary is encouraged to experiment and evolve his own method from the basic procedure:
1) Sit in silence before the portrait.
2) Invoke mentally my silent repetition the Name.
3) If response is felt to be positive...enter the Egg and merge with That which is within, and look out through the entity’s eyes on what appears now to the votary an alien world.
4) Seal the Egg, i.e., close the eyes of Lam and await developments.

Grant also warned his followers to be patient, which might makes sense given the 43 years between the first Lam sighting the Hill case:

It may take years to accumulate significant evidence of contact with Lam, and - if Lam is the Gateway - with Those who lie Beyond. It may be that communion with the dikpala lies through congress with a Priestess chosen by Lam, or with one who possesses certain characteristics peculiar to this office, in which case new procedures will have to be devised.

OK, you might be saying, just more of your typically-cringey Thelemite occultism. Nothing new there. What does it have to do with Betty and Barney Hill?

Stay tuned to find out…