Not Alone: Barbara Lamb’s Experiencer Group

Many of the people who came to Barbara Lamb had kept their experiences to themselves for a long time. Some worried about how family and coworkers would react. Others simply had no one who would take them seriously.

Regression could help one person at a time. Lamb also wanted the people she worked with to hear from each other, so alongside her practice she ran a monthly experiencer support group, which was still meeting more than a decade after she first described it in public.

This story follows the group through Lamb’s own lectures and through a 2007 interview with one of its members. As always in The Experiencer Field, the identities of group members are withheld.

Someone to talk to

Lamb believed many experiencers simply needed to be believed.

In a 1994 talk at a bookstore, Lamb told her audience why she did this work at all.

“I do this kind of work because there’s so many people out there looking for somebody. You know, whom they can really talk to, whether or not they have a regression, but just to talk and get some perspective and have somebody to talk to who will actually take them at their word, you know, believe them, because that part’s really important.”

Barbara Lamb in a crop formation in Wiltshire, England, August 2003. (Photo: Barbara Lamb Archive)

Being believed by a therapist was a start. Being believed by people who had lived through something similar was another kind of relief, and that is what the group was for.

Sources: Barbara Lamb lecture, case_id 262 (part A), segment 40, 1994.

A long evening and a potluck supper

Once a month, experiencers gathered to compare notes.

In a lecture about her regression work, Lamb described the group she ran alongside her individual sessions.

“I also have a support group of people, and we meet every month for a long evening, beginning with a potluck supper.”

She chose its name with care, because the people who came were not all describing the same thing.

“I call it an experiencer support group rather than calling it an abductee support group because people are experiencing many, many different aspects of this phenomenon, and many people are experiencing some very positive aspects.”

Sources: Barbara Lamb lecture, case_id -1 (#313A), segment 1; Barbara Lamb talk, case_id 203 (part A), segment 3, 1994.

A sense of recognition

Some members felt they had met before.

Lamb told more than one audience about something that happened when the group first came together. Two newcomers who had never knowingly met felt an immediate connection.

“We have one man and one woman who immediately recognized each other when they came to the first group meeting, even though they had not consciously seen each other anywhere before. But they knew that somehow they knew each other.”

Lamb said that each of them, in separate regressions, later described working and learning alongside the other in their experiences with extraterrestrial beings.

“But as they’ve done the regression work and it’s all coming out, they realize, oh, yes, that’s right, you were in that school of learning too.”

No recording can tell us where that sense of recognition came from (more on how we handle hypnosis-based accounts). What the archive preserves is how strongly the two of them felt it, and how much it meant to find someone else who did.

Sources: Barbara Lamb lecture, case_id -1 (#313A), segment 2; Barbara Lamb talk, case_id 203 (part A), segment 7, 1994.

Just normal like me

A member of the group described what it gave them.

In 2007, a member who had been coming to the group for about a year and a half was interviewed for a documentary. They had arrived unsure of what would be expected of them.

“And at first I thought, what am I going to have to bring? I haven’t been hypnotized, but I came, and I’m glad I did. The people are just normal like me, like everybody else, having out-of-the-ordinary experiences.”

What they valued most was listening, and being listened to.

“I love listening to them. I wouldn’t call them stories, because to me that’s putting down the reality of them having experiences.”

“And what’s nice about it, when you’re sharing experiences, the person will say, ‘Oh, yeah, I saw that room,’ or ‘Yeah, I’ve been in that.’ And you feel like, ‘Wow, you’re not so alone.’”

Later in the same interview, they put it more simply.

“That’s what I love about this group, with Barbara, because you feel like, hey, there’s other people who come across just as normal, as normal as we can be in today’s society, and we can share that we’ve had these experiences.”

Sources: interview with a member of Lamb’s support group, case_id 233 (part A), segments 68 and 69, and (part B), segment 4, 2007.

Why it matters

Disclosure will reach people, not only files.

Records and hearings can establish what institutions knew. They cannot tell someone who has lived with an unexplained experience that they are not the only one. Lamb’s group did that in the plainest way possible, with a shared meal, a long evening and people willing to listen.

As more of the UAP record comes into public view, more people may recognize something of their own lives in it. Many will want what Lamb’s group offered: a place to speak openly and be taken at their word.

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