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The alien anal probe has become such a cliché that it now stands as synecdoche for the entirety of Ed.V’s alien abduction experience. Why it is that aliens want to probe our friend Ed.V’s butt; or, more specifically, when exactly did people start claiming that aliens gave him anal probes? This may seem to be a silly question, but silly questions often end up revealing hidden layers and secrets. In this case, asking the uncomfortable question of why aliens are so interested in Ed’s anal orifices reveals a fascinating story about the dark side of the alien abduction media industry and its effects on those who participate in it. There must be something more to the story.
In A UFO Hunter’s Guide (2012), Brad Lueder simply denies that there were any anal probes, dismissing the formulation as “misinterpreted and misunderstood” sexual experiments on board alien craft. He’s wrong, of course, but it shows that some ufologists want to distance themselves from what Lueder calls the “sneers and jokes” of “modern popular culture.” On the other hand, author Zen Benefiel self-published a book called Alien Agendas and Anal Probes (2014) that promised to investigate “the science behind the anal probes” and what these probes can tell us about why the aliens are really here. But his book isn’t a history so much as New Age-influenced fringe speculation, so it is of limited use in peeling back the layers of the abduction experience. In 1992, David M. Jacobs claimed in Secret Life that aliens conducted rectal examinations with an instrument shaped like a wire whisk. Also in 1992, UFO researcher Karla Turner defined anal probing as one of the key elements of an alien abduction: “genitalia and anal probes are performed, on children as well as adults.” She said “numerous” reports confirmed anal probing. So let’s go back still further to horror fiction writer Whitley Strieber’s Communion (1987), widely considered to be the most influential alien abduction account, even though Strieber did not specifically identify the creatures that abducted him as space aliens. He was almost certainly familiar with the Hill abduction material before he wrote his book, and in 1989 he even recorded the audiobook of The Interrupted Journey. Although he never uses the phrase “anal probing” in recounting what he supposedly “remembered” of his 1985 alien abduction while undergoing hypnotic regression, he does discuss the aliens violating him anally:
Soon I was in more intimate surroundings once again. There were clothes strewn about, and two of the stocky ones drew my legs apart. The next thing I knew I was being shown an enormous and extremely ugly object, gray and scaly, with a sort of network of wires on the end. It was at least a foot long, narrow, and triangular in structure. They inserted this thing into my rectum. It seemed to swarm into me as if it had a life of its own. Apparently its purpose was to take samples, possibly of fecal matter, but at the time I had the impression I was being raped, and for the first time I felt anger.
Before his death, the painter and ufologist Budd Hopkins—who consulted with Strieber before he wrote Communion—took the rape analogy still further and argued that the actual procedure is not, as Strieber suggested, to collect a stool sample but rather electroejaculation stimulation to collect a semen sample through prostate stimulation. Hopkins had become convinced that aliens had a reproductive agenda, not a scatological one.
Sen. Haskell wouldn’t take no for an answer and in 1979 gave the FBI jurisdiction over cattle mutilations by helping pass a law to do so. He also seems to have been involved in popularizing the aliens’ taste for cow rectum. In an August 29, 1975 letter to the FBI on official U.S. Senate letterhead, he wrote that as part of the “bizarre mutilations” that the “rectum and sex organs of each animal has (sic) been cut away.” Media accounts from the era also tended to focus on, as OUI magazine put it in 1976, “the anus … cow vulvas and bull dongs.” Decades later, the chupacabra (itself a myth created by a combination of a sci-fi movie with folklore) would take over many of the aspects of the cattle mutilation myth, leading Lynn Picknett to report in the Mammoth Book of UFOs (2001) that the chupacabra not only was witnessed entering passing UFOs (or could be an alien itself) but also was involved in anally probing its victims: “Sometimes the rectal area showed evidence of having been probed.”
Similarly, stories of anal probing don’t seem to become common before the invention of colonoscopies in June 1969. The procedure gradually expanded in use in the 1970s, though generally only after a colon cancer diagnosis, so it was still largely unfamiliar to most Americans of the era. It did not become a procedure widely used for the general public as a preventative measure until after—wait for it—January 1987, when Ronald Reagan famously underwent the procedure to remove polyps from his colon. Shortly after colonoscopies had their moment in the sun, aliens seem to have decided to make use of the same technology. It doesn’t seem like this gives enough time for Strieber to be influenced by it, given the long lead time on books, but it must have helped make it one of the key details from his book that subsequent abductees seized upon.
Ed?