Are Alien Abductions Real?
To claim membership in the group of people who retell of abduction by extraterrestrials is to place yourself on the fringes of science, and often ridicule.
But what is truly the explanation for those humans who retell of being taken onto spaceships and many times experimented on?
There are hundreds of ordinary individuals who claim to have been abducted by aliens. They struggle with vague memories of contact with humanoid creatures, hovering over their beds while they experience some type of paralysis.
Psychological tests find these persons are rarely psychotic or mentally ill. Many describe instances of forced medical examinations that emphasize the abductee’s reproductive system.
The earliest of these cases is the Betty and Barney Hill abduction which occurred in 1961.
Examination of the abductee’s mental health is now considered, instead of just calling them a liar. Many academics and skeptics doubt that the experience as reported is entirely accurate.
Skeptics believe theses instances are examples of folk myth or vivid dreams. Others point out that abductees share common psychological traits
Dr. Elizabeth Slater conducted a blind study of nine abduction claimants and found them to be prone to ‘mildly paranoid thinking’, nightmares and having a weak sexual identity. According to Yvonne Smith, some alleged abductees test positive for lupus, despite not showing any symptoms.
Abductees also report a higher incident of paranormal events and abilities. They also describe the sensation of being both alien and human. This is referred to as “dual reference", where during hypnosis a subject describes pre-birth or pre-life existence as being of the same species as the abductors.
According to a Gallup poll conducted in 2021, 41% of American believe that sightings of UFOs are alien in origin, however 50% believe they can be explained by human activity or natural phenomena. Seventy-five percent said that “life of some form” exists elsewhere in the universe.
John E. Mack M.D. in his book Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens (1994), argues that “experiencers” were actually abducted by extraterrestrials. His critics claim that his theories can’t be measured in a laboratory. What both camps agree on is that those who describe an abduction experience are not lying, the question is what is the nexus of this belief.
Peter Faust described to Mack: “that I didn't realize that I was having sex with aliens until just a few months ago. Things unfold: it went from sperm samples to knowing that it had something to do with hybrid children, to knowing that my sperm was somehow being used with extraterrestrials, to see myself with an extraterrestrial female."
This unfolded over 18 months and 8 hypnotic sessions Faust had with Dr. Mack.
Most of the 100 reports Mack took from different "abductees", described implants into sinuses and eyeballs. Men described anal probes and sperm-taking; women described artificial insemination and removal of embryos. The common author of these experiments were the aliens known as Grays.
Mack argues that the experiences didn't sound like they had a psychiatric origin, but instead were trauma, which comes from outside.
By 2003, Mack had interviewed more than 200 abductees, and he endorsed their reports because he found his subjects to be mentally competent, but some were highly traumatized.
Critics of the abduction scenario, point out that the reports of alien encounters have risen dramatically with the proliferation of space movies about aliens.
Roy Baumeister, Ph.D. a psychologist at Case Western Reserve Universities argues these abducts are “masochists” who want to relinquish control of their lives, even if it’s at a subconscious level. The loss of control is manifest in humiliating encounters with an alien race, many of which describe elaborate sex during the abduction. One study found that 80% of women and 50% of men abductees reported being placed naked on a table, then being examined by humanoid beings. These experiences are then blamed for sexual dysfunction and emotional disturbances. Many abductees report false pregnancies, out-of-body-experiences and apparition sightings.
According to Baumeister: "The main features of masochism—both actual activities and fantasies—are pain, loss of control, and humiliation. All three of these themes dominate UFO abduction accounts.”
In a 2018 study, 4,000 Americans were surveyed about their sexual fantasies. One of the questions involved fantasies about aliens. Most of these fantasies generally involved receiving pain, being humiliated and being tied up.
Psychologists have posited abductees may be prone to absorption, fantasy and daydreaming.
Harvard psychology professor Richard McNally, an expert on cognitive processing in anxiety disorders posited that in regards to the experience of sleep paralysis "sleep-related aspects of the experiences might be correlated with different parts of the REM cycle."
Sleep paralysis is called kanashibari by the Japanese, which is represented by a devil stepping on the sleeper’s chest. The Chinese refer to it as ghost pressure or gui ya.
Why, then, do some people who experience violent hallucinations upon waking or falling asleep conclude that they have been abducted?
According to Professor McNally and Susan Clancy alien abductees aren't actively create false memories. They drew this conclusion while studying one of the most contentious issues in psychology today: false memory syndrome.
According to Clancy people instead of repressing memories of trauma, recall the incident very well. In the case of sexual abuse victims, she said they remain silent “not because they are incapable of remembering, but because it's a terrible secret.”
McNally and Clancy held a study made up of a group of people with recovered memories (usually under hypnosis) that included alien abductions. They also had a group who believed they had been abducted but did not have a conscious memory of the encounter. They came to believe the abduction scenario due to physical abrasions, waking up in a strange position, and sometimes from a penchant for science fiction. The third group were those who did not believe they had ever been abducted.
Those with “intact” memories of abduction had the highest rate of false recalls, followed by the recovered and repressed memory groups.
Clancy dispelled the belief the memory was suppressed due to a traumatic experience. She said:
Real trauma survivors exhibit a broad range of memory impairments on this task. Recovered-memory survivors--whether the trauma is sexual abuse or alien abduction--exhibit just one impairment on this task: the tendency to create false memories. Human memory is not like a video recorder, it's prone to distortion and decay over time. This does not mean that abductees are psychiatrically impaired. I don't think they should be considered weird. If anything, they're just more prone to creating false memories.
McNally and Clancy concluded the equation to the abduction phenomenon was a susceptibility to creating false memories, couple with a disturbing experience like sleep paralysis and a culture that allows abduction by extraterrestrials. They published their finds in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology.
The question remains why do abductees have so much emotion invested in their abduction story, including responses that met the criteria for PTSD. Part of the answer lies in the individual’s fertile imagination.
The difference between experiencers and survivors of real trauma is in their attitude. Abductees unanimously state they’re glad they were abducted despite scenarios they were assaulted by aliens, because they also feel special.
Mack’s second book, Passport to the Cosmos follows stories of abduction across cultures. He found evidence of sexual and ecological parallels to American abduction reports on almost every continent.