Beyond Fear: What Barbara Lamb’s Clients Found

The popular picture of contact is the abduction: the paralyzed body, the cold examination table, the terror. Barbara Lamb, a regression therapist who has conducted more than 5,000 sessions with people who report contact, did not dismiss that picture. Her clients brought her real fear, and she met it with patience. But across her recordings, a wider and more surprising pattern comes through.

The same person might describe a frightening encounter one year and a profoundly loving one the next. Fear, in Lamb’s experience, often came from not knowing what had happened, and it often softened once a person could look at the experience directly.

This story follows that thread through Lamb’s own words and through the sessions of two women she worked with in the 1990s, whose identities we have withheld. One, guided back to an evening that had haunted her for twenty years, found herself in a room of gentle figures she could only describe as nuns. The other came to see her contact as a relationship, one in which she could ask and be answered.

Why she said “experiencer”

Lamb’s choice of word holds the argument of this story.

Lamb came to this work through her clients. Regression sessions meant to uncover the roots of ordinary fears kept leading to partly remembered encounters, and by about 1990 those encounters had become a large part of her practice. Early on, she settled on a word for the people she was helping.

“I tend to call people who experience this experiencers rather than abductees or contactees because any one person can be experiencing what they might view as an abduction or as a contact experience.”

Lamb declined to sort people into victims and chosen ones, because the people in front of her did not sort that way.

Barbara Lamb in Wiltshire, England, 1999. She spent many summers there studying crop formations. (Photo: Barbara Lamb Archive)

Sources: Barbara Lamb lecture, case_id -1 (#313A), segments 0 and 1.

The whole gamut

In Lamb’s experience, the same person could meet terror, neutrality and wonder.

In a lecture to fellow practitioners, Lamb laid out the range she had seen.

“So sometimes people experience these contacts with the extraterrestrials as negative and frightening. And sometimes it’s more of a neutral feeling in terms of emotion when this serious learning and training is going on. And sometimes they have experiences that are exceedingly positive where they’re in contact with incredibly loving, wondrous beings and have very inspiring, very transformational, spiritual experiences, sometimes even playful experiences. ... So any one person can have all of these, the whole gamut of experiences at various times, and with various beings.”

She illustrated the point with stories from her practice. In a 1994 lecture she described a man who, under hypnosis, recalled being guided into what seemed like open space and encountering a vast, translucent being that reminded him of a giant jellyfish.

“He was very terrified at first to see this big thing, wondering if it might engulf him or eat him or something, which it didn’t. But it actually, once he got comfortable with it, just seemed to be very conscious and very loving, very accepting, very inspiring.”

The movement in that account, from dread to something like grace, is one Lamb heard many times.

Sources: Barbara Lamb lecture, case_id -1 (#230A), segment 2; Barbara Lamb lecture, case_id 262 (part B), segment 52.

Fear and not knowing

Lamb came to believe that much of the fear grew from fragments.

Experiencers usually arrived at Lamb’s door with very little: a strange memory, a lost stretch of time, a feeling they could not shake. That uncertainty, she believed, was a large part of what frightened them.

“And part of the problem is that people tend to not really remember very clearly. Maybe there’s just a little glimpse or a fragment, a bizarre little piece of the memory or a sensing, but I think part of the fear is that they don’t really know for sure.”

Barbara Lamb with fellow regression hypnotherapist Dolores Cannon at the Glastonbury Symposium, 2002. (Photo: Barbara Lamb Archive)

Regression gave her clients a way to look at those fragments. It cannot certify what happened on a given night, and Lamb treated it with care (more on how we handle hypnosis-based accounts). When nervous clients asked what they might find, she was honest that she could not promise anything. But she told them what her years of practice suggested.

“I say, yeah, we don’t know at the outset, but chances are pretty likely, just because of so many people I’ve worked with, that if there are some aspects that are disturbing to you, you will have more of a chance of understanding eventually why those things are going on ... and also if you continue with the work you will probably find that some of your experiences are very enlightening and positive.”

Sources: Barbara Lamb lecture, case_id 262 (part A), segment 4; Barbara Lamb lecture, case_id -1 (#230A), segment 3.

A room full of nuns

One woman’s session shows that shift taking place in real time.

In the mid-1990s, a woman came to Lamb with a fear she could not explain. Driving to an evening class filled her with dread: the feeling of being lost, of something bad about to happen, of not knowing how she had gotten where she was. Lamb guided her back to its source, a night some twenty years earlier when she believed she had arrived at class and found herself somewhere else entirely.

Under hypnosis, she described a bright room and a large table. Around her stood figures in black robes and hoods, with very pale faces and large dark eyes. The closest thing she could compare them to was nuns. She was terrified.

In the transcript, Lamb does not push. She reassures.

“Well, I know that this is scary and, of course, very confusing. And disorienting for you. But if you could remember even just a little bit of what they’re saying, what they seem to be trying to impart to you, just know that you can discontinue hearing at any point that you want to.”

The woman’s answer marks the turn of the session.

“I mean, they’re not telling me anything scary. I’m just too scared to listen.”

As the session continued, she began to look more closely. She described graceful white hands, long tapered fingers and small wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, like smile lines. Then, almost in surprise, she said:

“The more I sit here and look at them, the better I like them.”

She sensed that the figures had noticed her fear and changed their manner in response.

“It seems like they’re trying hard to be gentle. That they were more business-like when I got there and I was scared. ... And now they’re trying really hard just to be really nice.”

And then came a distinction that sits at the heart of this story:

“I’m just scared because I’m there, not because they did anything. ... They didn’t hurt me or anything.”

She was clear that this place was different from others she remembered. “It’s not like all of those, like the other places I’ve been with the equipment and the tables and stuff,” she said. “It’s not, it’s not that kind of place.” What the figures were trying to share, she came to feel, was “some kind of ecology lecture,” a warning about polluted water and a damaged Earth. That theme runs through many sessions in Lamb’s archive and will be the subject of a later story in this collection.

Sources: regression session, case_id 138 (part A), segments 0 to 21 (quotes from segments 7, 8, 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20).

Give and take

For some experiencers, fear gave way to something like a relationship.

Lamb remembered the first experiencer she worked with, a young woman who arrived, in Lamb’s words, “just so terrified.” Lamb told a 1994 audience how that story ended.

“She just came in one day with smiles and she said, ‘You know what? I figured out that this is really pretty special. And I must be specially chosen for this, and there must be a really big mission going on, and I’m part of it.’ And she came for maybe one other session after that, and that’s all she needed, even though these things were going to continue to happen.”

Another woman, in a 1995 session, described how her own outlook had changed after years of experiences. She had begun talking openly with others about them.

“Just simply telling people about some of the stuff I went through, and stuff is still going on, and then telling them that, you know, I’m not afraid like I was, and that I invite them in, and that they’re making more conscious contact, and they do communicate to me, and they come by and respond to requests I make, showing them that the positive comes out of all of this.”

Lamb’s reply put a name to what she was describing.

“You’re really showing that there’s a reciprocal nature going on here. This isn’t just like a perpetrator to victim sort of thing going on, but there’s definitely some kind of give and take here.”

Sources: Barbara Lamb lecture, case_id 301 (part A), segments 1 and 2; regression session, case_id 174 (part B), segments 6 and 7.

Why the whole range matters

A frightening story is only part of what experiencers report.

If contact accounts are heard only as horror stories, the people who tell them are heard only as victims, and the many who describe wonder, curiosity or a kind of partnership drop out of the record. Lamb’s archive keeps all of them in view. That matters for disclosure, which will eventually have to reckon with what contact means to the people who report it, and it matters to experiencers, who deserve to know that a frightening memory need not be the end of their story.

Lamb held her own conclusions lightly. In the same 1995 session, she offered a line that could stand over her entire archive.

“Nobody, I believe, on earth knows the whole picture by any means.”

Sources: regression session, case_id 174 (part B), segment 5.

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