Interview With Dr. Hans Holzer
By Sean Casteel
Professor Hans Holzer, Ph.D., is a parapsychologist and author with a long and distinguished career that spans many decades. He has authored 119 books dealing with many aspects of the paranormal, to include UFOs, ESP, ghosts, dreams, and astrology, and has had articles published in numerous magazines and newspapers, such as "Penthouse," "Cosmopolitan" and "The New York Daily News."
Holzer’s most recent book is called The Secret Of Healing: The Healing Powers Of Ze’ev Kolman, A True Story (Beyond Words Publishing, Inc., 1996), and the story it tells involves not only a visitation by a UFO, but the subsequent power to heal that is mysteriously given to the book’s hero, an Israeli shopkeeper named Ze’ev Kolman.
In 1974, when Kolman was on reserve duty with the Israeli army, he felt compelled to climb to the top of a mountain close to where his unit was camped. While there, he had a fairly routine abduction experience accompanied with a certain amount of "missing time." When he returned to his fellow soldiers at the camp, both Kolman and his bunkmates were astonished to discover a strange electric shock was being transmitted from his hands whenever he touched one of them.
Thus began Kolman’s struggle to both understand and to make compassionate use of his mysterious power to heal. Holzer tells Kolman’s story from that moment in the desert to his flourishing practice in alternative medicine, relating the events with both a believer’s awe and a skeptic’s need for factual documentation. Kolman has been able to help both private patients who had been told their case was hopeless as well as a long list of celebrities whose endorsements are also contained in the book.
We spoke to Dr. Holzer by phone from his office in New York, and he talked to us about not only Ze’ev Kolman’s UFO encounter and the healing powers that came afterward, but also about his own long and productive search for the truth behind the UFO phenomenon.
Q. I understand you’ve been at this for quite a while.
Holzer: Yes, I have been working on the UFO business for a long time. In 1977, I had a bestseller called The Ufonauts. I invented that term. The Ufonauts: New Facts On Extraterrestrial Landings. It sold 347,000 books, which was considered quite a good number at that time, I would think.
Q. My editor mentioned that book just the other day.
Holzer: I am now negotiating to have it brought up to date. I want to bring it up to date and republish it. The reason is this: shortly thereafter, I became involved in planning a documentary. Now, I’ve produced a number of documentaries. It’s no fun to do that. Trust me, it’s hard work. It’s much easier to write and produce a fictional thing because everything is controlled. But with documentaries, you have what I call "civilians" to deal with. And you have a lot of problems putting things together.
In preparing what was then meant to be a theatrical documentary--well, you know there are no more theatrical documentaries. Nowadays, you have television or cable. I did a lot of research and I have two cases full of that material sitting here. It included contacting people that I don’t think generally appear in the UFO press. And government people as well. And the upshot was, I had a distributor but I couldn’t get the money to do it. I shelved the whole thing, and it’s sitting here. I’m currently working again on doing it. But it is so complicated and so international and also quite expensive to do it properly. And it will involve a lot of people. But we reactivated this. My producing partner is a well known producer. It’s all about landings and physical evidence. It’s not about sightings, it’s not about anything like that. And I leave the abduction business primarily to Dr. Mack and others. I stick to the harder, material end of it, which I think is where it’s at. I own a piece of metal that comes from one of the crashed saucers, and I’ve got it stashed away somewhere. So, I know it’s real. So, do you have some questions, or should I just rattle on?
Q. I’d like to ask some questions. I mean, I don’t mind you just rattling on. That’s what I get some good quotes from. But--
Holzer: Okay. Then we’ll see. If you leave anything out, then I’ll add on to it.
Q. Sure. I want to ask, first of all, a question about Ze’ev Kolman. And after the first question on Kolman, I’ve got three or four questions on UFO/alien-related matters.
Holzer: Yes. By the way, I hate the word "alien," although I use it myself. I generally talk about extraterrestrials. Do you know why? To me, an "alien" is what you get when you walk into a kitchen in Los Angeles and yell, "Immigration!" Then you’ve got a bunch of "aliens" on your hands. The other words are "extraterrestrials" or "humanoids." "Alien" sets up hostility. And hostility is not what this is about.
Q. Right. I understand. Okay, could you please tell us the story of how you heard about Ze’ev Kolman, how you made his acquaintance and then ultimately wrote The Secret of Healing?
Holzer: Well, I had heard that Kolman’s people were looking for someone to take his personal memoirs to a professional level. They were looking for a ghost writer, basically. Well, I was curious about it, and so I went to see them and I took a look at the personal memoirs and I knew they were not publishable. They were a simple man’s, you know, personal memoirs--rambling, amateurish stuff. But he had a lot of interesting things in there. Some wonderful confessions. And remember, this was already a translation from the Hebrew because Kolman does not speak much English. So, I was impressed with it and I suggested at first that a journalist friend of mine should do the job, because I felt someone who was not as committed to the reality of UFOs and extraterrestrials as I am might be an easier sale. But it turned out that she really couldn’t do it because there was so much parapsychology involved. And I am an academic parapsychologist. I have a professorship, and I taught parapsychology for eight years at the New York Institute Of Technology. So, I ultimately was drafted back and was told I had to do it. And I felt the Good Lord would not have made me meet these people if it wasn’t meant to be. And I did it. But I did it on one condition: that I was absolutely in charge, that I could ask any questions I wanted, talk to anybody I wanted and write anything I wanted. That’s what I’ve done.
I interviewed him with the help, of course, of a friend of his who spoke both languages. I interviewed the people who had been healed by him and also the doctors he was involved with so that everything in the book, as you know, is documented. It’s not faith healing or a guru or religion. This is hard, medical alternative medicine by a man who has had an extraordinary gift. Now, the fact that he has this gift is interesting, but how he got it is even more interesting. And when I heard about his experience, which is in the book, about his encounter on the mountain in the Sinai--let me put it this way: Anybody else who had been in my shoes at this point who wasn’t as familiar with the UFO scene, would have said, "Oh, sure, sure." And I’m sure outside, hostile people who do not know the evidence would feel this way. Because we are living in a country where people make up their minds without knowing the facts. However, I knew this man was guileless--he’s a very simple, not-very-educated man. He ran a small shop and he had never had any interest in psychic phenomena or about UFOs or anything like that. And it happened to him. And he reported what he saw. But what he reported was so exactly like other incidents with extraterrestrials that he couldn’t have known about unless he had read up with an extensive library, and I made sure that he hadn’t. That was one thing.
The second thing is that he is not the only one who has been abducted and who has come out of it a changed person. You may find in the literature, I don’t know his name, but there was a case of a Canadian police officer in the countryside--it’s always in the countryside, away from too many witnesses--who was stopped by a UFO, apparently taken aboard for the usual examination, and afterwards became a fabulous psychic. Whether it’s done by intention or is the result of being in a different electro-magnetic field or different gravity field, that’s a moot question. But something has happened to a number of people who have been abducted and then had gifts that they didn’t have before.
Q. Yeah, that relates to my next question. Ze’ev Kolman’s healing powers begin with a UFO encounter, yet the presence of the aliens in the book is more implied or sensed as opposed to being overt. Is it your opinion that Kolman is similar to a typical abductee, one who has had numerous encounters but has no conscious memory of them?
Holzer: I don’t think so, because, first of all, you can’t prove that. I don’t think he had any prior experiences. Because the setting for this was so perfect from "their" point of view--a very isolated area--
Q. But, excuse me for interrupting, but in the book you also talk about his having four or five childhood experiences? Holzer: But that was nothing to do with UFOs. He fell and hit his head and had an out-of-body experience. That’s all it is. They were strictly out-of-body experiences. They weren’t even psychic experiences per se.
Q. I don’t mean to interrupt again, but, for instance, in Raymond Fowler’s The Watchers II, his research subject Betty Luca experiences a form of abduction called "Out-Of-Body Abduction." Instead of the aliens abducting the entire physical body, they simply take the soul or whatever--
Holzer: Well, I cannot comment on Mr. Fowler’s book. There is no evidence to prove Mr. Fowler’s opinion. I don’t think there’s anything factual about this.
Q. But even so, there does exist the concept of an out-of-body--
Holzer: Yes. Well, that’s possible, but I’ve never heard it before. And, while I respect Mr. Fowler and his views, I don’t think they’re exactly scientific views. There is nothing to back that up in the evidence I know. You’d need to have cases where this has happened and people have actual memories through regression of having been somewhere else. But I don’t know of any such cases.
Q. So you feel that the handful of brief encounters Kolman remembers are his only experiences?
Holzer: I’m positive.
Q. You also say in the book that Kolman’s relationship with the aliens and his subsequent healing powers should be viewed in a non-religious context, as something different than a revival tent meeting or a form of faith healing. Why do you feel that way? Why do you feel it’s more accurately viewed in a non-religious context?
Holzer: Because I’m a scientist and we’re dealing here with nothing that is religious. First of all, Kolman is not a religious person at all. He’s really not interested in religion. I see nothing that would in any way indicate anything more than a civilization from somewhere else having found a suitable subject to experiment with. And, as a result, whether intentionally or unintentionally, the person gets a bonus. The gift of healing is the bonus. Just as I’m very firmly convinced--and I know your editor and I disagree on this--that there’s nothing supernatural, there’s nothing spiritual, there’s none of the fancy stuff involved in any of the UFO business except machines, people who make mistakes, people who crash, and who don’t understand us very well. To some degree, they are terrified of us because we are a pretty bad people.
Q. Okay. Well, if the aliens are trying to send a non-religious message--
Holzer: Well, messages by aliens of a religious nature that are verifiable or that I would accept . . . Are you referring to the so-called "Space Brothers" nonsense? That I have heard for years and years. I have done 20 years of research for the documentary and I talked to all the big people in this field, including some that are not so well known. If I may digress here--because you brought this up--when a person is abducted, A) 99 percent of these people are relatively simple, naive people, that is to say, empty vessels. And they’re easily impressed and they don’t ask questions. People like you and I might ask questions, but these people don’t. They’re either terrified or they’re not so articulate as to ask questions. So, the ideal person is a very natural, simple person to be examined by them. Secondly, it usually occurs in a remote area. Not always, but usually. And third, in a large number of cases, they are either told nothing, or, if they are told anything, they’re told the kind of message that is designed so they won’t be believed. In other words, depending on who the person is or what his social standing is, the abductors will give him a cock-and-bull story that, when he talks about it, everybody will laugh. This is a CIA approach. They’re covering their backs. From their point of view, they don’t want to be understood or explored, so they give "information" about Space Brothers and their concern about our warlikeness. All of this goes down very well with the abductee and, of course, it doesn’t go down well with the press because they don’t believe it and I don’t either.
Q. This is just my personal response as a reader, but you say Kolman is not a very religio us person. But to me his Jewish heritage sort of puts him in the same context as the Old Testament prophets--
Holzer: Nonsense. This man is a very simple, mundane, secular person.
Q. Or the healing powers of Christ, who was also Jewish--
Holzer: Well, I’m not talking about Jesus Christ. Because I don’t think Jesus was the Son of God either. I think he was a great prophet and a great healer and a great medium. But I don’t like mysticism and organized religion, which is manmade, to be brought into a subject which is purely a matter of people from other planets visiting here for their own purposes and nothing else. They couldn’t care beans about us. They care about what they can get out of us in terms of knowledge and understanding.
Q. That’s what Budd Hopkins also often says.
Holzer: I’ve known Budd Hopkins for 25 years. He’s a brilliant man. But I don’t offer opinions. I go on what I have personally investigated. The only remote connection between anything in the paranormal and the machines that come here is the use of telepathy. Telepathy and teleportation, perhaps. But even with teleportation, I think they’ve found a different system, which I’m very familiar with, in moving from one place to another. And, yes, telepathy. Telepathy’s not supernatural. Telepathy is a natural gift we all possess to some degree. But I want to firmly establish there’s no religious message, there’s no saving the world, there’s no Space Brothers. This is strictly an abduction of what was to them an interesting subject. Maybe there was something about this man that interested them that I don’t see. And as a result of it, he becomes a healer. It may well be that this is one of their experiments, to see what he will do. That we would not know.
Q. What you were saying there relates to another question I wanted to ask. You say in the book that the bioenergetic power that Kolman uses to heal is actually something we all possess. Why then are only a handful chosen to be healers?
Holzer: I don’t like the word "chosen," because who’s doing the choosing? Over the years, I’ve done a number of books on the subject with maybe 20 to 25 bioenergetic healers. It’s body energy. Physical energy. The only thing that is different between Kolman and the ones that I have known is the amount of it. With the healers I have worked with and examined, it’s like they’re a 60 watt bulb. It’s the same energy, but now it’s not 60 watts. Now it’s 500 watts. And the results are accordingly much more powerful. That’s the only difference. Different in strength, not in kind.
Q. So, you really can’t say then what made Kolman a logical choice.
Holzer: Except for one thing that is profound and is typical for an abductee in general. A simple man and not too educated. No opinions, no knowledge of space or the paranormal. A very typical specimen. All of the people that I have personally worked with are typical specimens of humanity and very uninteresting.
Q. What is the status of Kolman and his career at present?
Holzer: He’s a healer. He’s doing his work. I’ve written the book and I’ve written the film that will follow it. We’re currently discussing the possibility of a film.
Q. Well, can you bring us up to date on some of the ups and downs Kolman has experienced since the book was completed?
Holzer: There were no ups and downs. He’s heard from lots of people and gotten lots of letters. And he’s responded to them whenever he could. But his power is the same. Now he begins to understand more what it is that he has, and he’s come to terms with it.
Q. Yeah. One thing I was very encouraged about--have you seen the movie "Phenomenon" with John Travolta?
Holzer: Oh, my God. That is a piece of Scientology propaganda. I know the producer, a nice lady, very well. But I’m appalled at this film. The first two-thirds of it are pretty good, then we have this idiotic ending. I was at the screening before it opened. The ending is stupid because nobody has that kind of ability due to brain cancer. It’s just stupid. But then I understood where he’s coming from. "The New York Times" pointed out, side by side, some of the lines from that film are lines from the L. Ron Hubbard so-called Bible of Scientology. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but there’s an active movement in this country to have these people outlawed, and they have been in many other countries. They’re a dangerous bunch. Unfortunately for Hollywood actors like John Travolta and who else? What’s his name? The vampire guy?
Q. Tom Cruise?
Holzer: Tom Cruise has also fallen victim to these people. You know what their philosophy is--that there is no God, no spirituality. We can do anything ourselves. Everything is natural within us. Now, the whole Scientology business is due to the fact that Ron Hubbard wrote a science-fiction book many years ago. He was a science-fiction writer. And people believed this stuff! He realized he had started something he had not intended to do and it became a religion. Because in America, as P.T. Barnum pointed out, a sucker is born every minute. You can quote me on that.
Q. Well, I probably will. The book has the initial UFO encounter that starts this whole psychic business--
Holzer: No question about that.
Q. But you have a happy ending where the man lives on and goes on healing and so forth, a much more truly inspirational thing.
Holzer: It is inspirational in the sense that those who have been told by the medical people that there is no hope may have hope that there’s a man who can do things, maybe. Not for everybody, but do not give up. Do not listen to people like Dr. Kervorkian and commit suicide. Do not listen to the doctors who say there is no hope. You don’t know for sure. Fight back. Let your positive energies work for you. Kolman has always said that. After he’s done his healing, he wants people to work on themselves through self-healing, which he explains in the book. Because we have energy inside us that can fight back. We’re supposed to be well, and a lot of the illness is caused by our wrongful thinking, by false emotions, by allowing things to happen to us. We don’t need to be sick. And in that sense, it’s a very inspirational thing, yes, but not inspirational in the sense of organized religion, is what I meant.
Q. I wanted to get back to your previous work with UFOs. You studied UFOs and various related phenomena for many years before encountering Kolman. Would you care to summarize your research in the field and the books that resulted from that research?
Holzer: Basically, the reason I wrote The Ufonauts, New Facts On Extraterrestrial Landings, was that I felt there were three things going on at the same time. And I was not part of any of the three, but of something different. There was, first of all, the purely academic, scientific approach, relatively friendly but on conditions that excluded many of the events. There was then the extreme right, so to speak, of true believers. People who assembled in Flat Rock and places like this waiting for the UFOs to take them away.
Q. Contactees?
Holzer: With the early contactees, the majority was fantasy, but not all. There were real ones as well. Because the real and the fanciful got intermingled, the public rejected everything because they didn’t know how to distinguish it. Nowadays, with people like John Mack being in the field, respectable people, it makes more sense. And the word "contactee" is no longer a dirty word. But I have done a lot of work with Betty Hill, for instance. Do you know who that is?
Q. Oh, yeah.
Holzer: I met Betty Hill and I brought her back. And I got a helluva lot more out of her than the doctor did because the doctor was hostile. He wasn’t interested in proving anything. He was interested in disproving.
Q. You mean the Boston psychiatrist?
Holzer: Yeah. I mean, save me from the psychologists, the psychoanalysts and that ilk, please. Save me from that. And I wrote about Betty Hill and, because of her, we know about the "Star Map." Are you familiar with that?
Q. Right. The Zeta Reticuli?
Holzer: Yeah. We also know, of course, that it was this wonderful Ohio lady astronomer who built the space models that they found it with. Then it was a Russian astronomer five years later who found that Zeta Reticuli was a binary star, not a single star. So, this is wonderful stuff. And I am pretty sure, and I’m sure others are also, that some of the people who come here come from a planet that is 37 and a half light years away, but we also know that if we tried to go there with our present barbarous, primitive system, we could get there in 20 months through time dilation. You are familiar with that?
Q. Is that Bob Lazar’s principle?
Holzer: Within 10 percent of the speed of light. Which is still not the answer, because they don’t use such small, slow methods. They use hyperspace. There are three methods of transportation. One is the long distance, hyperspace. Like the Concord, first normal and then fast. And in hyperspace, they are protected from disintegration by a system they apparently have allowing them to be in a module of some sort that has its own gravity and is not affected by the enormous MACH numbers that would have to be with this method of transportation. It’s close to teleportation, but I don’t know exactly how it works. But in the Andreasson-Luca case, there’s some talk about an Earth person having to be immersed in some kind of a liquid in order to be transported. Do you remember that?
Q. Yeah. Betty Andreasson-Luca.
Holzer: So, they know something. And I think that’s how they get here pretty fast. But, of course, there must be hundreds of thousands of planets around other suns. But what galls me is that astronomer, you know who I mean, from Cornell?
Q. Carl Sagan?
Holzer: Yes. For a man with his intellect and his learning, he’s so profoundly stupid. Please don’t insult him in print, but you know what I’m trying to say. They talk about waiting for a sign of life on our planet. They’ve had it here for all time, but they don’t want to hear about it. They don’t want to see the facts. I am a scientist. I have a doctorate and a professorship. And I am telling you that we have plenty of evidence, plenty! But these people don’t want to hear about it. This is just pure disbelief. And disbelief is like a religion, you know. You can’t talk them out of it. Now, that is why I have recently revived my UFO project, the documentary for television. Because theaters don’t run this sort of thing. But a serious, serious television documentary. I don’t want to give you the name, but my partner is a well-known producer in television. We are working now on starting this as a major thing. But it has to be under our control. Because the things I have to say are startling, to say the least. When The Ufonauts came out originally, I was approached by the late Jack Webb, remember?
Q. Right.
Holzer: He had picked up the book and he waved it in my face and said, "I want to do this book! I’m going to NBC’s president tomorrow! We’re going to get us a budget and we’re going to do this!" And I said, "Well, Jack, how do you see this?" He said, "Well, we’re going to get some actors and some special effects." I said, "Jack, this is not how I want to do it. This is a true story." He said, "Ah, c’mon, you don’t want to have real people in there." I said, "I’m terribly sorry. I have to turn you down. Because this is a story that deserves to be treated respectfully with the real people. I want the real people to go back to where it happened and reenact their own experience. And then we blend in the photographs we have, and they’re authentic, and we tell the story." And Jack Webb wouldn’t have this. So, his lawyer tried to buy the book and we wouldn’t sell. And finally he goes to the government, to Project Bluebook, and of course they give him all the idiotic cases they have, especially all the most unlikely cases, and he does a series called "Project UFO." It just ran one season. It died. And I met him again in Hollywood, and I said "Jack, you know you should have done it the way I wanted to do it--documentary style." Webb said, "Oh, I went to the government." And I said, "But the government doesn’t tell you the truth." He said, "What do you mean? My government’s going to lie?" I laughed and I shook his hand and I walked away. There was nothing I could say when a man says that. This was before Nixon, too. So, I actually have all the material for this. I do want to do it properly. Among the people that I’ve picked up willing to cooperate is the man in charge of crashed UFOs in the CIA. I showed him some pictures and I know the places where these things are stored--the bodies and the parts. These idiots at Roswell took the flying saucer they found apart and then they transported it. And then they tried to figure out how it worked, you see. They should have taken it as it was, but they didn’t do it. It was 1947, and the military got into the act of course. And I know the Roswell Incident is quite true. I have no doubts about it. Now, we come to a subject which I think your editor and I fully disagree on. You know, the bodies. I think they’re genuine. The producer of the autopsy film and I had a very long discussion. I know him very well, and we were going to do something together, but we didn’t. I have no doubts that they’re real. I heard about them a long time before anybody else. It’s funny that whenever something shows up that doesn’t fit, everybody immediately denounces it. There’s one thing I want you to remember. Just because something can be faked doesn’t mean it is faked. That’s how they operate, though. They say, "Oh, well, it can be faked, so it is faked." Just because you have a gun, are you going to murder somebody? I have no doubts whatsoever that this is authentic.
And Bob Guccione [the publisher of "Penthouse Magazine"], of all people, is running some pictures in his magazine. Now, those are models copied from the bodies which are in what the CIA likes to call "The Space Museum" at Langley Field, Virginia. That’s where it’s all being kept. It’s long disappeared from the Air Force base at Wright-Patterson. I spoke at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base years ago for the women officers and being curious, I talked to some of the officers. And I got stonewalled, you know. "What do you mean we have alien things here? We don’t know anything about that." They’re all lying. They have to lie. No government will admit that there’s something flying out there that they can’t cope with. So, don’t expect the truth from the government. From any government.
But then along comes a stupid film like "Independence Day." A badly made film. The special effects were third rate. It’s like a B-movie from the ‘50s. And it is hyped to the sky. Hype works. People are eager to hear about this business. I think it sets it back. And I saw the screening before it opened and I was shocked at the quality of it. I did a special for FOX where I told them what I thought about it.
But, yes, I think the bodies are real. And my information comes from one of the guys who was entrusted with it.
Q. Is there anything you wish to add?
Holzer: Well, there is something that you didn’t ask about that I want to explain. Why are they coming here? And where are they from? They’re from many places. Although the majority have been those short fellows with the large heads and big eyes, there are also a significant number of others. There are tall ones. There are some with different color skin and so on. And then of course there’s an intermixed breed. There’s been a number of cases of inter-breeding. I personally am also familiar with a case of a woman who was stopped on the highway in Florida, and the result was a son who looks not like anything on this earth. He’s human, but like a cross between an Italian and a Japanese. She was very worried about this because they kept on monitoring her. So, I know inter-breeding is a fact. Betty Hill saw a man who looked to her like a normal human being inside the UFO, so inter-breeding has taken place. Why are they here? I think that to them we are pretty much what the primitive animals in the rain forest are to us. They are way ahead of us, and somehow they’ve lost something which we still have. They’ve lost the emotions as we have them, the anxieties, the fears. And they apparently have overcome illnesses because they are puzzled by our infirmities and by our emotional responses. So, to them, they’re studying us.
What they’re not here for are Space Brothers or something angelic trying to save us from ourselves. No, I think this is a pretty selfish operation. But I don’t think they’re here to harm us.
That’s why I’m trying to produce with my partner a decent picture of what is real and what is not real. Because a lot of it is not real. A lot of it is questionable. And we’ve got to somehow try to separate those things.
THE END
