A Philadelphia Artist Recounts 20-Year Tale of Alien Abductions

By DAVE HAMILL
(May 1990, Big Shout Magazine)

“Bower Hill Road in Pittsburgh rides like a rollercoaster: down one side of a hill and then up a precarious incline. It was January and the dead of winter as I clung onto my mother’s seat in the back of her blue Volkswagen. I was watching the light reflect off of hanging icicles as we maneuvered the curves. The day was beautiful — crisp and cold but sunny and bright.

“The light looked like diamonds bouncing off the ice and the radio played merrily as we headed out to do some kind of errands or shopping. We rounded the corner and hit a short, straight stretch of road that paralleled a tiny creek. The radio stopped. The car stopped, too. In the middle of broad daylight the car and radio stopped. But what was more frightening was the object sitting in the creek bed: a large silver disc. The world must have stopped to catch its breath. Light streamed all over the scene, and coming from the disc, heading directly toward the car, were six small, big-headed aliens.

“The bright daylight gave them an even eerier inhuman glow. Their skin glistened like the reflection of a scalpel off operating room lights before a terrible and cruel experiment. My skin crawled. I hated them. I bit my lip and could feel it shaking.

“I can’t tell you how we got back into the car. All I remember was the car being in motion again. I sat down in the back seat and felt an incredible flood of peacefulness wash over me.

“When my head hit the cushion, a bubble popped open in my mind. It was the most amazing thing. It was as if I could see the world from a hundred miles out, turning and beautiful. It was also as if everything on the planet was perfect and harmonious and that, in that instant, I could see how everything worked and wove in and out of one another like one huge interrelating macrocosm. It was how some Indian gurus describe enlightenment. I was astounded, amazed and pleased. I had to tell this incredible thing to my mom.

“‘Mom! Mom!’ I screamed.

“She slowed to a stop at the light and looked back at me.

“‘Yes?’

“She was watching the road as she pulled around the final curve at the end of Bower Hill.

“‘I… saw… saw…’

“Instantly and aggravatingly, the vision and the day’s memories vanished. Not a trace of it remained in the minds of either my mother, my brother or me. Not a word was spoken about the day’s events between us. The only souvenir remaining is a small, kidney-shaped scar on my right wrist and the memories that stayed locked up inside my head.”

— from “Beings: Contact with Another Life Form”

When dealing with the subject of UFO phenomena, public opinion seems divided into three basic camps: those who believe in the existence of extraterrestrial visitation, those who don’t — and a small percentage who say they’ve actually had visual or even physical contact with alien lifeforms.

Daria Marmaluk, a 30-year-old Philadelphia singer/songwriter whose works appears on the most recent Taste of Philadelphia compilation tape and video, can take the last category one better. Over a 20-year period between the ages of seven and 27, she claims to have been abducted over 30 times by otherworldly creatures and forced to participate in a series of experiments concerning human reproduction. What’s more, she’s go both physical and anecdotal evidence to back her up.

Thanks to nearly a year’s worth of hypnotic regression therapy — and over 400 pages of transcripts — Daria (who generally goes by her first name only) has recently been able to retrieve many of the details of these experiences from the depths of her subconscious. And in a move that could be considered either career-enhancing or career-threatening, she has decided to bring her incredible story to the public in the form of a book that chronicles her experiences. Titled “Beings: Contact With Another Lifeform,” it weaves an intricately detailed, frighteningly logical account of what the author called “the largest scientific experiment of all time — one in which the human beings are not the scientists, but rather the subjects.”

Wait a minute, you say, this is utter nonsense. Surely it’s the product of a confused or, worse yet, commercially-calculating mind. But a lengthy conversation with Daria leaves doubts in even the most ardent of skeptics. She is intelligent, passionate and above all, sincere. From every indication, her motives for going public are more humanistic than capitalistic, and this interview was obtained only after both reporter and subject had become comfortable enough with one another to speak as friends. If the story you are about to read is a lie, it’s a damn good one. You be the judge.

“Probably eccentric and hopefully intuitive and talented”

Even without the inclusion of her extraterrestrial adventures, the first 27 years of Daria’s life could hardly be considered run-of-the-mill. Born in Pittsburgh, the third-generation Russian found herself in frequent conflicts with her parents, whose Old World values clashed with her own liberal philosophies.

Her father, Joseph Marmaluk, lived a true Horatio Alger story, climbing the corporate ladder to become head of Mergers and Acquisitions for Price Waterhouse and eventually preside of several companies. The family moved to the Philadelphia area when Daria was 11; she left home before finishing high school, joining a Skinnerian commune in the rural Ozarks.

“It was a little late for the ’60s, but damn it, I was going to do what I wanted to do” she recalls with a hearty laugh. From there, she spent some time in the Appalachians, where she studied with the native folk musicians and augmented her guitar skills by learning to play the dulcimer.

When Daria returned home, her relationship with her parents improved. They helped send her to Friend’s World College, a Quaker college-without-walls where she gained a year’s life credit for her previous work in the Appalachias. As part of her curriculum, she spent 1980-81 in Peru, learning to play the harp, collecting native music and mastering the Quechua language. Several of their hauntingly beautiful folksongs remain in Daria’s repertoire.

Once back in the States, Daria tried to find a niche in the workplace to support her music habit. “I did every job under the sun, from delivering papers to growing sprouts to my own little business promoting other artists,” she recalls. One such job, with an artist management group in New York put her in touch with a number of black rhythm-and-blues producers. As a result, she recorded with several well-now R&B artists, including Grandmaster Flash. The results, however, didn’t quite match her artistic vision.

Other musical incarnations followed, including an all-female band that dissolved due to conflicting interests among the musicians. Most recently, Daria has gone the solo route; she has completed five masters that are garnering serious interest from a trio of major labels, and she plans to release a cassette single this summer on Universal Arts, a local independent. Her song, “Shy Boy,” along with a video of “Loves Ya Back Again,” were included in the Taste of Philadelphia double cassette and video package which was distributed at the SXSW Music & Media Conference in Austin, TX this past March 1990.

Citing Suzanne Vega, Bruce Coburn, Joan Armatrading and Kate Bush among her inspirations, Daria describes her music as “blues-based folk rock.” Of herself, she admits to being “probably eccentric — and hopefully intuitive and talented.”

From a purely artistic standpoint, this may be a fair assessment. But if we are to believe the events described in “Beings,” it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. To say Daria has been subjected to a series of out-of-this-world experiences would be more than glib commentary; it would be hitting the nail on the head.

A secret life discovered

Ever since the age of seven, Daria had been troubled by distressingly persistent images and shadowy memories of events half-buried in her subconscious. “I always thought I was weird,” she says. “I couldn’t understand why I had these strange thoughts and feelings.”

Then one evening in 1985, a seemingly innocuous event opened the floodgates for a series of incredible revelations. While watching an HBO special on UFOs, Daria was transfixed by an artist’s rendering of one of the aliens. So unexpectedly violent was her reaction that she nearly stripped the dial of her television trying to make the image disappear. But it wouldn’t — it remained in her memory, disturbing her sleep and disrupting her concentration.

Shortly thereafter, Daria got in contact with Rosemary Osnato, one of the subjects of the HBO special who claimed to have been abducted by aliens, and told her of her reaction to what she had seen. Osnato suggested that Daria seek out a hypnotist and attempt to recapture what may have been submerged memories of a similar encounter. Although skeptical, Daria agreed.

At the age of 26, Daria underwent her first hypnosis session with David Jacobs, PhD, a noted authority on UFO abductions, which revealed the details of her first encounter at age seven. While catching butterflies with her girlfriend, Daria felt a sudden heat on her back and turned to find herself bathed in an intense white light. She became dizzy and nauseous, and when her senses cleared she found herself in the vice-like grip of a seven-foot-tall “man” standing in the hatchway of a silver ship, hundreds of feet in the air. Surrounding them were three small, ugly creatures with glowing skin, over-sized heads and large, almond-shaped black eyes.

“I’m sick, I’m dreaming. I’m having a nightmare…” she assured herself, when a voice inside her head suddenly interrupted her thoughts. “Don’t worry, we won’t hurt you,” it said. A beautiful “woman” appeared and led Daria down a hallway of the ship and into an examining room, where she was subjected to a series of tests — the last of which involved the placement of a small bead-like implant inside her lower abdomen.

When she was returned to the place from which she had been taken, Daria and her friend were left with only a vague recollection that “something has happened here.” That is, until Jacobs unearthed the incident almost two decades later.

Rather than relieving her anxiety, however, the recovery of this lost memory began to stimulate others, which bubbled up to the brink of Daria’s consciousness with stubborn persistence. Over the next eight months, subsequent regressions uncovered a series of some 35 separate abductions.

“A kind of sickening sense”

After compiling between 40 and 50 hypnosis tapes, the entire series of abductions had seemingly been recaptured. At about the same time, the visitations came to a halt. It has been nearly four years since an incident, and Daria feels confident that her part in this grand experiment is finished.

Trying to come to grips with the newfound knowledge of her past, Daria joined abductee support groups in both Philadelphia and New York, where she was able to share her experiences with such individuals as Whitley Strieber (author of “Communion” and “Transformation“) and Rosemary Osnato. She also began transcribing the tapes for the purpose of creating a chronology. This chronology grew into the chapter summaries of her current book proposal. What began as an organizational chore has since revealed itself to be much more.

“When I started doing the chapter summaries, everything started to make this kind of sickening sense,” she recalls. “What had happened, how it happened, started orchestrating itself way beyond anything I could have imagined. It shocked the hell out of me.”

During her abductions, Daria observed two basic types of aliens: the small, large-eyed ones who did most of the work, and the tall, humanoid-looking “friends” who were involved in most of the interactions. They were never observed eating, drinking or excreting waste, and communication was strictly telepathic — “like you’re thinking to yourself, except you’re not the one doing the talking.”

The portion of the ship’s interior that Daria visited was extremely utilitarian, with no examples of art or culture in evidence. But most shocking of all, the aliens were apparently unfamiliar with the fundamental concepts of birth and death; in fact, the process of human reproduction was the stated object of their research.

From the time a mold of Darie’s body was taken during one of her initial visits — apparently for cloning purposes — to subsequent attempts at initiating pregnancy and later success at test-tube fertilization, the alien’s primary goal appeared to be the creation of life in their own “human” image. Daria believes that rather than organic beings from another solar system, these visitors come “from another dimension — something that falls between the cracks of our understanding.”

“They have no idea that they come from the XYZ Galaxy or anything,” she explains. “They’re just ‘here.’ They just ‘are.’ Which leads me to believe it might be more dimensional. What we’re talking about is not a parallel lifeform; it’s something very different.

“My personal belief is that they’re something between a ghost and an energy form with an entirely different definition of physicality, dying to know what it’s like to be physical. We’re very physical beings dying to know what it’s like to be something more.”

Following this same line of reasoning, Dara disagrees with researchers such as Jacobs — whom she says “gave me back my life history” — when they express the opinion that the aliens are treating humans as mere guinea pigs in a clinical experiment.

“My belief is that there really was a communication and an attempt to learn from us,” she says. “They were pretty ignorant in the beginning, but they genuinely wanted something from us, and we weren’t like guinea pigs to them. They really did care — in their own way; they tried to give back and share things with us.

“It was almost an exchange. They’ve come here to learn the mysteries of what it’s like to be in a body, in three dimensions; and we learn from them what it’s like to be fluid, unencumbered by our bodies — to be more spirit and less physical.

“I think this just proves that there’s much more to life than we know, or that our culture is willing to accept,” she concludes. “Whether it’s psychic things, telepathic things, feeling things — I think it’s shown me once and for all that we as human beings are amazing creatures. There’s an inherent dignity in us, and there are some pretty amazing things about the way we function and feel.”

In addition to her book-in-progess, Daria has appeared with other experts and alleged victims of UFO abductions on several local talk shows, including AM Philadelphia, People Are Talking and the Morton Downey Jr. Show. She still carries physical as well as emotional reminders of her experiences, including a distinctive pattern of skin-graft scars that are nearly identical to those found on other alleged abductees.

While she admits that the publicity surrounding her assertions could have an adverse affect on her musical career, Daria feels a need to reassure others with similar suspicions that they aren’t candidates for psychiatric counseling.

“I never wanted to write the Great American Novel,” she says. “I just want to tell my story, and this seems to be the best way to tell it.”

As Jack Palance would say: Believe it… or not.