Spoiler Alert! If you are convinced you were abducted by aliens, please do not read any further. I have neither the desire nor the ability to change your belief. That said, the research shows that the event perceived as an “alien abduction” is an altered state of consciousness. The belief that one has been kidnapped by extraterrestrials is not.
I just finished reading an engrossing study called Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens by Susan A. Clancy, PhD, published by Harvard University Press. Dr. Clancy, a post doctoral fellow in psychology at Harvard, was doing research with people with “recovered” memories of childhood sexual abuse. She became frustrated because there was no way to know with certainty whether these people recovered memories of actual abuse or factitious events. She decided to “repeat the study with a population that I could be sure had ‘recovered’ false memories. Alien abductions seemed to fit the bill. (p. 20)”
Dr. Clancy interviewed and conducted laboratory memory studies of over fifty volunteers who sincerely believed they were abducted. Her sense was that these people were not lying. Only one of her participants was psychotic. The rest were normally functioning people, most of who felt that the abduction experience, though harrowing, changed their lives for the better. The group included a physician, a librarian, a veteran, an MBA, a chef, a fitness instructor, a construction worker, Ivy Leaguers, geeks, housewives, teenagers, grandfathers and school teachers.
About the only personality characteristic the sample group had in common was schizotypy. People with schizotypy are more likely than others to be perceived as eccentrics, engage in magical thinking and experience perceptual distortions. For example, one might “sense” the presence of another person. They tend to interpret incidents and events as having a special and unusual meaning. They may be prone toward a belief in superstitions. While people with schizotypy are not psychotic, they have a greater likelihood than the general population to have close relatives with schizophrenia. Clancy concludes that “these people are not crazy. They tend to have unusual ideas, experiences, and beliefs – ones that don’t necessarily conform to mainstream social beliefs and tendencies. They believe not only in alien abduction, but also in things like ESP, astrology, tarot, channeling, auras, holistic medicine, and crystal therapy. (p. 134)”
So, how do people wind up believing they were abducted by aliens? The belief usually begins with an altered state of consciousness. In earlier posts I described a variation of hypnagogia that I suggested could occur during waking hours. However, standard hypnagogia refers to hallucinatory or quasi-hallucinatory events that occur in the process of falling asleep or upon awakening. During certain sleep cycles our bodies are immobilized by the nervous system so that we aren’t acting out our dreams. This is called sleep paralysis. If we wake up while we are still dreaming, the paralysis may persist into the waking state along with hypnagogic remnants of the dream including hallucinations of sights, sounds and tactile sensations. It can take up to a half a minute for our sleep – wake cycles to resynchronize and for the sleep paralysis and dream-like material to fade. As with any other hallucination, the sensations may seem very real. Most of us chalk these normal experiences up to what they actually are, but those who are so inclined may attach special meanings to such events.
Since the advent of science fiction movies of invaders from outer space, people who report abductions tend to tell the same general story:
An unsuspecting ordinary human gets kidnapped by extraterrestrial beings for medical examination or sexual experimentation… Both the details [big heads, wrap-around eyes, reversible amnesia, and probing needles] and the general plot existed n the movies and on TV before people ever reported personal knowledge of them…Alien abduction reports…began only after they were featured on TV and in the movies. (Clancy, p. 83)
Now, not all believers in alien abduction initially interpret the hypnagogic sleep paralysis as an extraterrestrial kidnapping for medical or sexual purposes. Rather, they sense something is wrong with them. Perhaps they have unexplained physical and mental ailments, such as strange marks, pain, changes in sexual functioning or panic attacks. Believing that alien abduction could be possible, they seek the services of a hypnotist to try to find out the cause of their symptoms. It has already been documented that hypnotic trance can unintentionally produce false recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. Thus, a hypnotist working with some people may unwittingly guide them into developing “memories” of an alien abduction. These “recovered” memories seem as real as memories of an actual event. Similar false memories have also been created in the laboratory.
Another complication reinforcing the belief in abduction in most of Clancy’s participants was the perception that the abduction was a “transformative [life] event.” Abductees reported that these experiences provided meaning in their lives, gave them wisdom, enlarged their word view or expanded their realities. “For many people, belief in alien abduction gratifies spiritual hungers.(p. 150)” “Not surprisingly,” according to Clancy, “once you ‘discover’ your place in the universe, you have a hard time being a skeptic. (p. 149).”
In essence, the people most likely to believe they were abducted by aliens are those who are predisposed to favor paranormal over scientific explanations. Without conscious awareness they apply their interest in and exposure to stories of extraterrestrials to provide a complex explanation to what most people accept as a normal altered state of consciousness. They often have physical and/or emotional symptoms for which they don’t seek common explanations. Some may “recover” memories of being abducted through hypnosis or other forms of guided imagery. The belief in abduction then tends to become sealed in stone when it fills an otherwise spiritual void.
Further reading:
Clancy, Susan A. Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005
Mavromatis, Andreas. Hypnagogia: The Unique State of Consciousness Between Wakefulness and Sleep. London: Routledge, 1987. (3rd Ed 2010 avialable)
The PsychMinder 
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Profoundly underwhelmed. People who believe in esp believe they’ve been abducted by aliens. This thesis sheds zero light on those who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens and a great deal of light on those supporting this thesis. Pure materialists demonize any data that suggests that pure materialism explains everything.
In any case the thesis is fatally flawed. Those who believe in esp and those who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens are not significantly overlapping populations.
There is data supporting esp, including during controlled experiments carried out by professional researchers in laboratory settings; there is none supporting alien abduction.
Better insight into alien abduction narratives can be found in folklore scholarship, for example lauri honko on memorates and folk belief
on sleep paralysis of course. One would read David Hufford.
P.S. If modern psychiatry / psychology claims that people who honestly believe that they have been abducted by space aliens are “not crazy,” or not mentally ill, then the problem is with psychiatry’s / psychology’s definition of, and ability to diagnose, recognize and describe mental illness.
Exploiting this population and its pathology, evident perhaps to everyone except psychologists, in materialist triumphalism does not advance understanding.
Sorry. I am not sure what you mean by “exploiting this population.” I do appreciate your comments, however.
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Anyone who believes in alien abductions is, at the very least, delusional. I think RationalWiki is a good place to start.
I guess it depends on how you define delusional. The research I reported was trying to understand people who believed they were abducted by aliens. The research shows that most such believers are not psychotic. People hold onto beliefs in many things for which there is no evidence, but they accept on faith. Does that mean they are delusional? If I have a memory of an event that actually didn’t take place, would that mean that I am delusional? I would rather think of people who believe they were abducted as having developed false memories, rather than automatically categorizing them as delusional.
I was discussing hypnagogic hallucinations with a friend the other day and she mentioned her aunt’s claim of having been raped by a ghost. Most of the usual descriptions obviously apply to this incident, seeing the room, being unable to move, some sort of dark shadow entering, and sensory impressions of being groped. However, my friend said right after the incident her aunt had shown my friend’s mother some hand-shaped marks on her legs that were larger than her own hands, and I’m wondering what could account for those if they weren’t merely imagined. My friend seems to really believe her aunt was violated by a ghost although she admittedly didn’t dare look at the “evidence” herself.
My immediate reaction is that you are hearing the story fourth hand. Friend’s aunt – friend’s mother – friend – you. And, I am hearing it fifth hand. Stories can get intentionally or unintentionally embellished along the way, not to mention the possibility that memories get a little altered each time a story is told, much like sending a fax of a fax of a fax. If the purported events happened exactly as described, there is always the possibility of a more parsimonious explanation: that a living person had sex with the aunt. Thank you for reading the blog and sharing with us. EBG
Actually I was looking for an alternative explanation for why people “lose time.” I don’t buy in to the alien abduction theory, but there have been people who apparently lose time and even disappear for a period of time. They are awake, they are with other people, they are driving, they are actively engaged in doing something or going somewhere, etc., so I’m not talking about those who wake up in a hypnagogic state. I’ve looked up fugue states and dissociative amnesia, but these seem to require some sort of extreme stressor, pre-existing mental illness, or trauma to cause them. What might explain a time loss in someone who is healthy, sober, and has nothing going on that would stress them into a psychiatrically significant dissociative state? I’m thinking that people who believe they were abducted because they experienced “missing time” may, for no apparent reason, have simply slipped into a dissociative state for an hour or two. Could such states be more common than we think, perhaps something that we all might experience at any time for any reason as simply a consequence of possessing such complicated brains? Could there be subtle causes such as allergies or chemical sensitivities, some unknown seizure or migraine disorder, unusual responses to sensory inputs (sounds, smells, lights), that might affect an otherwise normal, sober, healthy person such that they perceive a period of “missing time?”