Switzerland is a strange place where powerful people are known to reside. It’s the land of bankers.

In 1894, a woman named Hélène Smith, from Martigny, Switzerland, was first documented claiming she had contact with aliens at the age of 33 that same year.

For the next 5 years, she claimed to “communicate with aliens” and actually “visit mars.” Perhaps even more interesting, she said she went into a trance-like state and had visions beforehand, and she made works of art depicting what she saw such as this one.  Does DMT come to mind?

She was a French national, whose real name was apparently Catherine-Elise Müller: however the name change doesn’t necessarily mean she was some kind of con-artist, as somewhat condescending mainstream media articles about this story have implied.

According to one of those articles, from the Express:

“The idea that aliens existed on other worlds dates back as far as at least the fourth century BC.

By the 1750s most educated people across Europe accepted there were extraterrestrials out there, and by the nineteenth century, many people thought there was intelligent life on Mars, Venus, and the Moon.

However, Mrs Smith, who claimed to be a medium, is believed to be one of the first people on record to claim to have so-called contact with aliens.”

However, her reputation is not improved by the fact that she apparently also claimed to be the reincarnation of a Hindu princess, and Marie Antoinette.

Mrs. Smith claimed to write out Martian speech, and translate it to French like “automatic writing.” Her claims were analyzed by a Professor of Psychology at the University of Geneva, Théodore Flournoy, who published a book about it in 1899.

Understandably so, many people took interest in her story. A wealthy American spiritual man dubbed Mrs Jackson hired the woman to continue writing down her experiences in 1900.

Although the professor who wrote about her sensationalized the story, he admitted she was having “infantile imaginings” and that it was made up. A couple psychologists named Warren Jones and Leonard Zusne studied the case, and concluded:

“Although it sounded decidedly foreign, frequency analysis of words and letters and an examination of the syntax convinced Flournoy that the language had all the basic structural characteristics of French, Hélène Smith’s native tongue.

In a subsequent investigation, Flournoy reported that the source of a short phrase that she had written in Arabic during her Indian cycle probably came from having seen an identical phrase inscribed in a book owned by a Genevan physician.

She had retained a visual image of the script and, in due time, copied it from memory in an uncertain hand.”