Abducted, from 2005, is by a Harvard researcher who studied alien abduction accounts.
It is not an investigation into whether the recounted experiences actually happened—author Clancy doesn’t take that possibility seriously—but an attempt to better understand the people who claim to have had such experiences, to see if and how they differ from the general population, how they came to believe what they believe, how strongly they believe it, etc.
She’s surprised in her research to find that it is by no means universal that supposed abductees (I’ll just say “abductee” and “abduction” without the “supposed” from here on, to save time) claim to remember having been abducted. Many do, but there are plenty of others who are attempting, albeit lamely, an inference to the best explanation. Given that they have certain little scars on their body that they don’t remember getting, given that they can’t account for two hours of their life that happened one night after they saw some strange lights, given that they once sneezed out some mysterious little piece of metal (that, alas, they forgot to keep), etc., what else could it be but that they were kidnapped by aliens, who then wiped their memories clean of the kidnapping?
For those who do have memories, many of them “recovered” the memories through therapy and hypnosis. For some who do not have memories, in some cases they too are undergoing hypnosis to try to recover and bring back to consciousness the memories of their abduction, but they just haven’t had the breakthrough yet. For others who do not have memories, they have shied away from the idea of trying to recover the memories, being unconvinced that they want to know all the details of what was surely a traumatic experience. It’s enough for them to know that it happened; they don’t crave all the particulars.
The process of belief-acquisition that she’s describing actually follows quite closely the bogus “recovered memory” sex abuse panic. For a time that reached epidemic proportions of (mostly) women claiming that in spite of having previously had no memory of abuse, all of a sudden they were sure that during their childhood their father or whoever had sexually abused them—maybe for years, maybe accompanied by other perpetrators, maybe in a way involving something occult or supernatural, etc. Unfortunately this idiocy never has disappeared; fortunately it is down considerably from its peak.
But the typical cases have strong parallels. A person hears about how common sexual abuse of children (alien abduction) are and how victims initially often do not even remember being victimized. She reads books by quack therapists and finds that there are all kinds of things about oneself that constitute evidence of such victimization, and realizes that “Uh oh, I have a lot of those.” (In the case of unremembered childhood sexual abuse, for instance, it might be anxiety, sexual hang-ups, distrust of men, abuse of drugs and alcohol, etc.—the idea being that if you’re plagued by things like that as a woman, then it’s because you’re aware on some unconscious level that you were traumatized by being molested, and your body is manifesting the damage.)
She then goes to a therapist who is an “expert” in recovering memories of such victimization, and is received with great sympathy and understanding, and they set off with hypnosis to dig up these memories they’re sure must be in there somewhere. And eventually, if she’s manipulated long enough and skillfully enough, she reports that now she does “remember” that her father used to come to her room every night from age 11 to age 15 or whatever, and force her into various sex acts (or that alien beings whisked her from her bed up into their spaceship and performed various painful and invasive sexual experiments on her).
Indeed, Clancy had previously been researching just this topic of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse before switching to this alien abduction project. In her naiveté, she had assumed that as a social science researcher, her work would be judged according to its objective scientific merits. Instead, by not concluding—or assuming—that recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse have to be true, she generated great hostility from many parties. She realized that in this particular area, the merits of your work aren’t what people (at least certain especially loud and fanatical people) care about; what matters is what side you’re on. To them, if you don’t validate the recovered memories, then you favor silencing women, you support the patriarchy, you favor molesting children (probably because you do so yourself), etc.
Not that she gets zero grief from her abduction research.
She tries to be non-argumentative with her subjects, and emphasizes that she’s not investigating or passing judgment on the truth of their claims, but is merely trying to better understand those claims. Some people accept that and are fully cooperative, but a few are angered by anything other than full agreement with their claims. The latter especially get upset if she asks them about plausible alternative hypotheses.
But failing to embrace the claims of abductees doesn’t generate remotely close to as much hostility as failing to embrace the claims of women who have supposedly recovered memories of having been sexually abused in their childhood.
As far as the alternative hypotheses—i.e., explanations for how people might come to believe they had been abducted by aliens other than that they actually were—I’ve kind of been talking about one of them already. That is that these “memories” typically come about through a process of therapy and hypnosis conducted by someone who is already a believer in the phenomenon, and that that process is an extremely poor one for generating accurate memories.
Experiments have shown repeatedly that you can get people to think they “remember” just about anything, no matter how blatantly untrue. Hypnosis just makes people even more apt to let their imaginations run wild and come up with all kinds of outlandish shit.
The whole idea of recovered memories rests upon a discredited notion of how memory works—that it’s a matter of complete and accurate representations of experiences being stored somewhere in the brain, which may or may not be immediately retrievable consciously, but that if not immediately retrievable can sometimes be accessed through the process of hypnosis.
Where in fact, memories are much more constructive and fallible than that. We constantly create and recreate memories from a vast array of data, that includes but is not limited to sense-data, accompanying thoughts, etc. from our experiences.
The other key alternative hypothesis—more for those who didn’t have to “recover” their memories, because they remembered the abduction as soon as it happened—is that of sleep paralysis.
Sleep paralysis is surprisingly common. It can happen when you are passing from being awake to sleep, or from sleep to being awake.
It’s a malfunction where, in effect, part of you is awake and part is asleep. Typically you cannot move (because your body is asleep). But you feel like you’re awake as you look and listen around you. You don’t realize that your mind can still be in a dream state during these times, because it doesn’t feel the way you’ve come to associate with dreaming. But you’re still hallucinating, your mind is still generating dream-like delusions, even if subjectively it feels more like normal waking perceptions.
Your mind, trying to account for the odd things you’re experiencing, including this scary paralysis where your body isn’t responding to you, generates whatever fanciful explanation it can come up with. In most cultures most of the time, this means that you imagine some supernatural being (a demon, a succubus, a vampire, a witch, whatever) is lying on you, sitting on you, holding you down, or just magically preventing you from moving without having to touch you.
Nowadays, in the United States of recent decades, your sleep paralysis delusions might well take the form of aliens from outer space invading your bedroom and dragging you off against your will to their spaceship.
It’s no more real than any other dream, but, like I say, it feels more real, feels more like something you’re experiencing while awake rather than something you’re dreaming.
Clancy finds, to her surprise, that the overwhelming majority of abductees are quite aware of the unreliable recovered memories hypothesis and the sleep paralysis delusions hypothesis. They’re used to skeptics bringing these things up to them, often—in their perception, at least—in a mocking or pompous way, and they’re used to dismissing them.
So when she mentions these things, they don’t respond with “Well that’s interesting. I’ll need to think about that. That may well account for my memories better than the alien abduction hypothesis,” but with “Oh, this again!” like these objections have been dealt with countless times already and are just tiresome by now.
As far as why the alternative hypotheses are quickly dismissed, it sounds like typically it’s a matter of assuming that perceptions and memories are self-confirming, that you would only need some kind of indirect argument if you hadn’t had the experiences yourself. “I’m not just guessing or inferring here; I actually had the experience of being abducted by aliens. I remember it (even if I didn’t always). No argument is going to trump direct experience.”
Which really means they just don’t understand the alternative explanations. If you’ve had a false memory generated by a flawed therapy process, or if you had a waking dream during an instance of sleep paralysis, (or if you’re having any delusion or hallucination), of course it feels real. That’s the whole point.
“But I experienced it myself, so I know it happened,” is the equivalent of saying, “I know it’s not an optical illusion that one of those lines is longer than the other, because I can see with my own eyes that one is longer.” All that means is that you don’t understand the concept of an optical illusion.
One point that Clancy reiterates many times throughout the book is that abductees are not crazy. But what she herself says about them indicates otherwise. For the most part these are loons living in a fantasy world. I think she’s just reluctant to label them as crazy or mentally ill, because it’ll come across as pejorative, and she likes and feels sympathetic toward most of them that she has gotten to know through her work. I mean, these are people who cooperated in her research, and who opened up to her (often reluctantly or self-consciously—“Believe me, I know how crazy this sounds”), and she feels some gratitude toward them. She doesn’t want to now insult them.
Though really it comes down to what one means by terms like “crazy.” It’s true that very few of the abductees are crazy in the sense of being unable to function in society, as needing to be institutionalized, or as being the sort of folks you might see stumbling down the street mumbling about the Kaiser stealing their string. They’re mostly “normal,” in the sense of having jobs, families, being able to behave in socially acceptable ways in most areas of life, etc. Their abduction beliefs are more the exceptions, not merely one example of how their entire worldview is insane and random. (Though, actually, they do tend to test as more fantasy prone, and so they typically have more New Age or paranormal or other cuckoo beliefs than the average person in the general population. But only as a modest matter of degree.)
So, OK, most of them aren’t raving lunatics. But their mental processes for acquiring and retaining beliefs are highly flawed. They don’t understand—or refuse to accept—that experiences, or more accurately one’s interpretations of one’s experiences, are not self-confirming, even when it is explained to them, and even when alternative explanations are explained to them.
I think Clancy would say, “Yeah, but humans in general aren’t ideally rational Mr. Spock types. If you label the abductees crazy, then you’d have to say the same about people who hold a lot of mainstream religious beliefs, QAnon followers, people who believe in luck or superstition, etc.—surely the majority of the human race.”
To which I say, “OK.”
I concluded long ago that the overwhelming majority of people are stupid or crazy. Ours just isn’t a rational species.
From what she says, the typical abductee is only modestly less sane than the typical person plucked from the general population. But that’s a really, really low bar.
But let’s talk about a couple of important questions Clancy addresses.
She finds that a common challenge when people find out she’s not a believer is “If people are just imagining the abductions, how come the stories they tell are so similar?”
Her response is twofold. One, the amount of consistency from one abductee to the next is overrated; they really don’t all tell the same story. In fact, there’s quite the variety of tales.
Two, insofar as there are certain fairly common elements, common themes, they tend to be just the ideas that are widely disseminated in the culture.
If you were to ask people right now, who’ve never had an abduction experience, “Imagine you were abducted by aliens tomorrow night. Tell me what you see happening,” most people would describe being paralyzed and somehow magically transported into an alien spaceship where gray men with big heads and big eyes, and small or nonexistent noses or mouths, stretch them out on an examining table where intrusive medical examinations are done on them, their vagina and/or anus is probed, sperm or eggs are extracted from them, etc. Beyond that there would be a lot of individual variation, but the basics of the alien abduction experience are quite well known by now, from books, movies, talk shows, the Internet, word of mouth, etc.
A hundred years ago? No. You’d never have gotten this scenario. But by now people know how the alien abduction story is supposed to go. They just regurgitate what’s already in the culture around them.
I mean, there’s a reason that the aliens described by the first famous abductees—Barney and Betty Hill—were suspiciously similar to those of the most recent episode of The Outer Limits. (Speaking of mysteries, why did it never occur to me until just now that Barney and Betty Hill have the same names as the Rubbles?)
Finally, there’s the question of why so many people believe they’ve been abducted by aliens. Of all the culturally available delusions, why do so many people land on this particular one?
Clancy’s conclusion is that it is because in their eyes it gives their life a certain meaning. It can be seen as a quasi-religious thing. Like being singled out by God, certain people are singled out by aliens, who are vastly smarter and more technologically developed than humans. Their genetic bits are harvested so that they can in some sense live on in some faraway galaxy in unimaginable circumstances.
Humans are important enough to warrant this attention, and they as individuals are especially important as the specific humans who are selected.
The aliens, who conveniently speak English or are able to communicate in some sort of mysterious telepathic manner, convey all this to the abductees, ensuring them that however frightening or painful this experience may be in the moment, be assured that it’s all for a higher purpose.
Which is why, when abductees are asked what is the most traumatic thing they have ever experienced they almost unanimously cite their abduction, and when they are asked what is the most positive or meaningful thing they have ever experienced, they almost unanimously cite their abduction.
It’s just the story certain people tell themselves to give their life meaning, and therefore not, she concludes, much if at all more crazy or condemnable than conventional religious belief.
Which, again, I say is a really low bar. Even granting the accuracy of everything in her descriptions of abductees and their beliefs, I’m still inclined to say that they’re basically loons.
Philo on Books 