London, England — 9 February 1678
Landing of a large ship
In a diary entry entitled A Transport, Jane Lead writes: “In the Morning after I was awaked from Sleep, upon a sudden I was insensible of any sensibility as relating to a corporeal Being, and found my self as without the clog of an Earthly Body, being very sprightly and airy in a silent place, where some were beside my self, but I did not know them by their Figures, except one, who went out, and came in again: and there was no speaking one to another, but all did set in great silence.” Lead’s ordeals could not be closer to the situation of a modern abductee: She is woken up in a disoriented trance-like state, possibly confusing reality with a dream or a recent half-forgotten memory; around her are ‘figures’ she does not know, except for one; there is an eerie silence; next, Lead recalled seeing a gold-colored craft “come down” to “a pretty distance” from where she was. “It was in the form of a large Ship” with four golden wings. The ship “came down with the greatest swiftness as is imaginable.” She asked some of the figures beside her if they could see what she could, and mysteriously they said they couldn’t! No doubt puzzled by their answer, Jane looked again and saw herself m front of the others, “leaping and dancing and greatly rejoicing to meet it.” Bar the detail about a third-person view of herself when the ship landed, this is the kind of account given by people whose cases fill countless UFO books today, and whose stories are often taken at face value. It is not sufficient to accuse abductees of confabulation and of sharing science-fiction fantasies because the same ‘fantasies’ have been reported and believed for hundreds of years, since long before the popularisation of the genre. Was Lead’s vision a muddled memory of an earlier experience? Lead’s diary entry of February 9 concludes: “But when I came up to it [the Ship], then it did as suddenly go up again, withdrawing out of sight, unto the high Orb from whence it came. After which I found my self in my Body of sense, as knowing I had been ranging in my Spirit from it for a while, that I might behold this great thing.” th
Source: The Works of Jane Lead, op.cit. Case: W249