Kary Mullis - the PCR Nobel Prize laureate and the "alien racoon"

Kary Mullis (1944-2019)

 from evilleeye

 from karymullis.com

I was sadden to hear of the passing of Kary Mullis, who I had interviewed in my research of the Peter Khoury case.  I was interested in the man who had contributed to revolutionising biochemistry with the discovery of PCR and the strange story he told of a weird night up at his northern Californian cabin, and the bizarre fallout of the experience.  Here is my account of his experience:

From my “Hair of the Alien” manuscript (2005)

The Nobel Laureate

Thanks to Kary Mullis for his information and interview, and of course for his remarkable PCR concept that ultimately transformed the field of biochemistry. Thanks for the invitation to relax with a beer and “watch the boats go by” some day in California, but just the same I think I’d like to hang out for a while at his Mendocino county property “racoon” hunting, if the opportunity arises. 

The PCR DNA scientific work would not have been possible without the Nobel Prize winning discovery of the concept by Dr. Kary Mullis.  His indirect contribution via his PCR concept discovery to the work carried out by biochemists working with me as part of the Anomaly Physical Evidence Group (APEG) should at least be alluded to.  There is however a rather remarkable aside that directly involves this famous and controversial scientist in the general alien abduction controversy.  I spoke directly with Kary Mullis to verify what follows.

On a Friday night in April 1983, Dr. Kary Mullis a biochemist was driving up to his cabin in Mendocino county in northern California.  During that drive to his Anderson Valley cabin Mullis conceived one of the great discoveries of modern chemistry - the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a surprisingly simple method for making unlimited copies of DNA, thereby revolutionising biochemistry almost overnight.  Kary Mullis described his discovery in Scientific American.[i]  Mullis was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery.

On another Friday night, during the summer of 1985, Kary Mullis drove up to his cabin.  Arriving around midnight after driving for about 3 hours, Mullis dumped groceries he bought on the way, switched on the lights (powered by solar batteries) and headed, with torch in hand, to the outside toilet located about 50 feet west of the cabin.  He never got there that night.  Quoting from his 1998 book “Dancing naked in the mine field” Mullis encountered something extraordinarily weird on the way.  “...at the far end of the path, under a fir tree, there was something glowing. I pointed my flashlight at it anyhow. It only made it whiter where the beam landed.  It seemed to be a raccoon.  I wasn’t frightened.  Later, I wondered if it could have been a hologram, projected from God knows where.”

“The raccoon spoke. “Good evening, doctor,” it said.  I said something back, I don’t remember what, probably, “Hello.”

from globalgreyebooks

“The next thing I remember, it was early in the morning.  I was walking along a road uphill from my house.”

Mullis had no idea how he got there but he was not wet from the extensive early morning dew.  His torch was missing.  He was never able to find it.  He had no signs of injury or bruising.   The lights of the cabin were still on, along with the groceries on the floor.   Some 6 hours had gone by unaccounted for.  Later in the day he found that an area of his property - “the most beautiful part of my woods” - had inexplicably become a place of dread.  A year or so later Mullis exorcised this fear John Wayne style shooting the wood up. While his attempt at psychotherapy proved successful it did not help him find out what had happened that night in the summer of 1985.   Mullis would become the only known Nobel prize laureate to claim an experience of what might be an alien abduction.

 from my friend Dr. Horace Drew

Kary Mullis describes himself as “a generalist with a chemical prejudice”. Others have described him as “Hunter Thompson meets Stephen Hawking” or  “the world’s most eccentric and outspoken Nobel Prize-winning scientist”. It is not easy to dispose of Mullis’ experience as a drug or alcoholic hallucination.  Mullis states he was not affected by either, that midnight.  In turned out he was not the only one to have experienced strange events at the cabin.  

His daughter, Louise, disappeared for about 3 hours after wandering down the same hill.  She also reappeared on the same stretch of road.  Her frantic fiancée was about to call the local sheriff.  Mullis had told no one of his experience until his daughter called to tell him to buy a book - Whitley Strieber’s “Communion”.  She was ringing to also tell her father about her strange experience.  By coincidence when she rang, Mullis had already been drawn to the book and was up to the point where Strieber reports strange “owls” and little men entering his house.

In his book, Mullis concluded, “I wouldn’t try to publish a scientific paper about these things, because I can’t do any experiments. I can’t make glowing raccoons appear.  I can’t buy them from a scientific supply house to study.  I can’t cause myself to be lost again for several hours.  But I don’t deny what happened.  It’s what science calls anecdotal, because it only happened in a way that you can’t reproduce.  But it happened.”

Kary Mullis confirmed all this and more when I spoke with him in 1999.[ii]  Another person encountered a “glowing raccoon” between the cabin and the toilet. This was a friend of Mullis, who did not know of the “raccoon” story and was a first time visitor, during a party at the cabin after the announcement of the Nobel Prize win in 1993.  This man did not stick around and fled up the hill towards the house.  On the way he encountered a small glowing man, which then suddenly enlarged into a full sized man who said something like, “I’ll see you tomorrow”.  The man, who was not experiencing a drug or alcohol induced hallucination left with a friend without informing anyone.  They returned to their hotel at a nearby town.  That night the man inexplicably found himself outside in the hotel car park troubled and terrified by the impression he had somehow been back at the Mullis cabin.  He and his friend returned the following night to the Mullis cabin.  The celebratory party was carrying on from the previous night.  As the man arrived he was shocked to see the “full sized man” seen as an enlarging apparition the night before drive up in a car.  This was too much for the first time visitor.  He left in a panic, holding Mullis somehow responsible for the previous nights events.  Sometime later in tears he revealed the full story to Mullis, who identified the man his friend he had seen as his elderly neighbour.  Mullis checked with his neighbour and sure enough he had come to the party on the second night, arriving to be seen by the terrified visitor.  However he was certain he was not there on the first night, not in person and not lurking as a glowing raccoon or a small glowing man that enlarged into a vision of himself.  

Given this sort of activity on his property it perhaps isn’t surprising that Kary Mullis told me he thinks the nature of his experience is even stranger than abducting ETs.  Instead he speculates about multi-dimensional physics (a la Michio Kaku’s “Hyperspace” (1994))[iii]at a macrocosmic level - “like anything can god-damn happen and the speed of light is not really the limit in terms of interactions with other cultures or whatever.  This stuff about grabbing people or subjecting them to all kinds of experiments - its just anthropology at a level we don’t understand quite yet”.  As for PCR testing of biological samples from abductee experiences he indicated, “You might imagine that I thought of that myself.  As for instance in “you can have some of mine, if I can have some of yours”.”  He feels that the idea of an alien culture needing our DNA to survive is very unlikely and an alien presence on a scale suggested by some of the bleaker takes of the alien abduction scenario seem improbable. Mullis had become aware of “The Threat – the secret agenda: What the aliens really want … and how they plan to get it”, a 1998 book by historian and abduction researcher David Jacobs that argues for an alien secret agenda to create alien-human “hybrids”, which are in the process of integrating into our planet and supplanting mankind.[iv]  Kary Mullis speculated with me that any culture that could conquer the barrier of space-time could have easily conquered the far simpler problems of complex biochemistry and would not need us in the manner described in the grey alien - human “hybrid” agenda theories.  

The very strange nature of the experiences that befell Kary Mullis, his daughter Louise, and his friend remind us of the bizarre dimension of this alien abduction controversy.  Strangeness and reality unbound are the siren calls of this phenomenon. Discontinuities of memories feature aplenty.  Extraordinarily bizarre recalls are often ignited by seemingly innocuous events or by revisiting ground zero.  Sometimes memory is seemingly contorted, manipulated or just shut down during a person’s engagement with this strange phenomenon. The boundaries of reality and the unreal become blurred. Sometimes it seems our world is intersecting or interacting with a bizarre quantum hyperspatial playground.   

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[i]“The Unusual Origin of the Polymerase Chain Reaction”, by Kary Mullis, Scientific American, April 1990. The complex evolution of the PCR process and Kary Mullis’ role is covered in the book “Making PCR – a story of Biotechenology” by Paul Rabinow (University of Chicago Press, 1997). A briefer account in the context of the extraordinary contribution of DNA analysis is described in “The Improbable Origins of PCR”, a chapter in “Blood Evidence” by Dr. Henry Lee & Frank Tirnady (Perseus Publishing, 2003).

[ii]This is the extent of the story Kary Mullis told in his book “Dancing Naked in the Mind Field” (Bloomsbury, 1998), Chapter 13 “No Aliens allowed.” The rest of his story came out in my interview with him on April 4 1999.

[iii]See Michio Kaku, “Hyperspace – a scientific odyssey through parallel universes, time warps, and the 10thdimension” (Oxford University Press, 1994).

[iv]See David Jacobs, “The Threat” (Simon & Schuster, 1998)