PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS
Psychological explanations suggest that abductions are generated in people’s minds for a variety of emotional reasons. These explanations do not come from people who suffer from organic brain problems or mental illness.
Fabrication
Fabrication is, of course, the first explanation that must be addressed. Debunkers have routinely said that people who claim to be abductees lead “humdrum lives,” and their fabricated abduction stories generate publicity, excitement, and maybe even money. The contactees in the 1950s set the precedent for this theory, with their tall tales of ongoing contact with benevolent, cancer-curing, war-stopping Space Brothers.1
Contactees provide the model for what is not legitimate, but their claims serve as a convenient touchstone for deciding which abduction reports are probably bogus and which may not be. Major differences exist between the contactees and the abductees. Contactee claims were deeply rooted in the popular science fiction of the period, and their tales were bounded by their knowledge of science. However, abductee claims contain events that include exact and minute details of procedures known only to a few UFO researchers. It is virtually impossible that nearly all abductees would chance upon these details at random and lie en masse to make their claims seem valid. Whereas most major contactees knew and supported each other’s claims, most abductees do not know each other, do not know much about UFOs, and are not familiar with abduction literature. Furthermore, while contactees talked of utopian worlds and compassionate Space Brothers, abductees describe aliens who use them as specimens. They feel violated and victimized. They fear the abduction phenomenon, they do not want it to happen again, and they wish that they could lead their lives free from it.
Contactees actively sought money and publicity, and devoted a tremendous amount of energy to getting both. Most abductees have sought neither. Rather, they are extremely concerned that their identities might be revealed and that they might lose their standing in the community and in their work. Only a few of the abductees that Budd Hopkins and I have worked with over the years have gone to the media to tell what has happened to them, and this was at our request and only after they engaged in considerable soul-searching. To the best of my knowledge, none has profited monetarily from these media appearances.
There have been instances in which a person has fabricated an abduction event. One woman who wanted to write an article about her experiences went to an abduction researcher for hypnosis. From the beginning, her story was unlike other abduction accounts. The aliens were tall monsters, all of the primary, secondary, and ancillary experiences were missing, and nothing else resembled known abduction reports. The investigator found her out very quickly. In another case, a person who was fabricating an account went to an abduction researcher who accepts all accounts as valid regardless of whether they are channeled information, dreams, abductions, and so forth. This well-meaning but unsystematic researcher simply accepted the woman’s story as true even though it also did not match any of the known abduction events. Thus, lying can fool an inexperienced researcher, but not one who is familiar with the abduction experience that has been confirmed so many times over.
Repression of Abuse
One of the most popular explanations for abductions in recent years has been that the accounts are “screen” memories masking the repression of sexual and/or physical abuse. This theory postulates that the victims are so traumatized by abuse they suffered as children that they forced the incidents out of their conscious memory; now, years later, the painful memories have resurfaced in disguised form.
Therapists have seized upon this explanation more than any other to get at the root of the abduction memories for two reasons. First, memories of abuse will suddenly be triggered in adulthood in much the same way as abduction memories. Second, abuse victims suffer many of the symptoms found in Post-Abduction Syndrome.
But there are serious problems with this explanation. Most abductees do not claim to have been sexually or physically abused as children (at least not by humans). If indeed they have repressed the abuse from their conscious memory, one would assume that they might spontaneously remember it at some point during hypnosis. However, this does not appear to be the case. No abduction screen memories have ever been stripped away to reveal a past history of abuse.
Those abductees who have been victims of sexual and physical abuse clearly remember the instances of abuse and have either come to terms with them or are working with a therapist to that end. They explicitly differentiate between the abuse that they suffered and the abduction memories. They have no psychological need for screen memories to convert their abuse into fantasy situations.
Furthermore, because the abduction phenomenon is ongoing, the memories are of events that happened in the very recent past, not screen memories of childhood when the abuse would have taken place. I have talked with abductees who have experienced abductions from a few days to only a short while before our meetings. They do not remember what happened to them, but they know something occurred. For example, one woman abductee took a nap on her couch in the afternoon and “woke up” standing in her backyard. She groggily walked into the kitchen and called me about eight minutes later. Jason Howard was in the process of getting ready to come to my house for a support group meeting. He was putting on his shoes by the front door a few seconds prior to going out, when he had the irresistible urge to lie down on his couch and go to sleep. When he woke up two and a half hours later, he knew something had happened. His shoes were off and he was lying on his bed upstairs. Within three minutes he called to tell me about it. A subsequent hypnosis session confirmed his suspicions and he related a complex abduction.
Although I have purposely not conducted hypnosis with children—not enough is known about how their knowledge of being abducted would affect their personal development—from time to time worried parents will either tell me about what is happening to their children or bring them to talk to me. I find this to be the most heartrending and frustrating aspect of the abduction phenomenon. Although the parents usually do not discuss abductions in front of them, children as young as two years old will talk about “egg-men” coming in through their windows at night and taking them places. “Bad doctors” come into their rooms and “hurt” them. When given a series of drawings of popular children’s storybook and television characters, the children readily point to a picture of an alien as the culprit.
Older children will sometimes consciously tell their alarmed parents about being abducted. The parents of one ten-year-old girl who had consciously described typical abduction events in detail took her to a gynecologist because she complained of pain. The physician found no evidence of sexual or physical abuse, nor did the child claim to have been abused. Although it is possible that parents would encourage their children to talk to a stranger about unusual events happening to them at night while in fact those parents were in the process of abusing them, it is highly improbable. To date, neither researchers nor therapists have found a single abduction case that is unequivocally generated from sexual or physical abuse.
Hysterical Contagion
Hysterical contagion, whereby people will believe that something has happened to them because they are aware that it has happened to others, is a real phenomenon that deserves discussion as a possible cause of abduction reports.2 Although this phenomenon is rare, well-known incidences of it have appeared in the psychological literature.
For example, in 1954 residents of Seattle, Washington, reported that a mysterious force was pitting their automobile windshields. Investigators found no such force. People had become sensitized to the problem through publicity, and when they examined their windshields, they found the pits, which had remained unnoticed until the concerned citizen carefully looked for them.3 In another example, in 1962 employees at a small clothing plant in Georgia reported being bitten by a mysterious “insect” that attacked their arms and faces, but no one could catch one of these bugs or even see them. In
vestigators found that no mysterious insects existed and that the employees were describing something that had no basis in objective reality.4
These classic examples of hysterical contagion contain several elements that must be considered in analyzing abduction cases and UFOs in general. In the Georgia incident, the workers were confined to one building where they could have daily mutual reinforcement about the reality of the “bugs.” The workers, however, could neither describe nor catch any of the bugs. The only thing they perceived was the effect of the bugs. In a few days the hysteria had passed. It had been limited in time and space and relied heavily on the workers’ mutual reinforcement within that space.
In the Seattle case, the “witnesses” actually saw nothing occur, but they had the pits as “evidence.” Newspaper publicity suggested to them that the pits were caused by something extraordinary. When people found normal road-wear pits on their windshields, they assumed it was the mysterious force that had caused the damage and hence the phenomenon spread. In a few weeks the idea that the pits were being caused by a single force (e.g., radioactivity from recent H-bomb tests in the Pacific) was discredited, and the entire affair dissipated. Although much more widespread than the Georgia incident, the Seattle case was still limited geographically and involved media reinforcement of commonly held beliefs. Also the subjects had the pits as “proof.” The phenomenon was short-lived with no recurrence.
Abduction claims do not fit the model of mass hysteria events. Although some claimants know each other, most do not. They are usually not in close proximity to one another; they do not engage in mutual reinforcement; prior to 1987 they were not subject to ongoing publicity about others with similar claims; and the phenomenon is not restricted in time or in geographic area. Furthermore, this is not collective behavior. Often the abductee claimant believes that he or she is the only person who has had an abduction experience. What we are dealing with is isolated individual behavior; only when taken together does it becomes collective.
Furthermore, the character of the abduction stories is quite different from that of hysterical contagion stories. The abduction claims sometimes involve more than one witness, and the narratives that are related are greatly detailed. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Recounting the episode often takes several hours. They do not involve only a single event, like the classic mass-hysteria cases. They contain a wealth of detailed information consistent with other abduction cases.
Unlike the people in hysterical contagion stories, abductees appear to have little in common. They usually do not know each other, and they often know little or nothing about abductions in general (although some may know about UFOs). While some abductees may have limited knowledge of the Barney and Betty Hill case, they also describe many common and critical parts of their experiences that are not in the Hill case. And some unpublicized parts of the Hill case routinely show up in the abduction accounts.
Finally, when first investigating their memories, the majority of abductees may suspect that something has happened to them, but most of the time they do not know what it is. This eliminates any overt conscious “hysteria” that they may be subject to. They are not reacting to events that they read about in the newspapers.
Prewaking and Presleeping States
Another psychological explanation involves hypnogogic and hypnopompic states—the periods between wakefulness and sleep, and between sleep and wakefulness during which the subject may feel paralyzed for a very short time. She might have vivid “dreams” in those moments that take on the shape of reality. Some people have great difficulty in telling the difference. Since many abductions take place when the victim is sleeping or about to sleep, hypnogogic and hypnopompic states are reasoned to be responsible.
But this explanation fails to account for those abductions that take place when the victim is awake, not tired, not in bed, and not even inside a room. A large percentage of abductions take place in broad daylight when the victim is pursuing normal activity or driving a car. Furthermore, hypnogogic and hypnopompic states have idiosyn cratic, dreamlike content that does not match that of the abduction accounts.
The Will to Believe
Some critics say that the abduction phenomenon is a prime example of “the will to believe.” In other words, people want to be abductees and therefore they allow themselves to believe that they are. This claim lumps abductees together with New Agers and occult practitioners who actively demonstrate the will to believe. But abductees differ in that they are unable to summon forth an experience at will. Furthermore, for the most part, their recollected stories are not dreamlike or surrealistic; they proceed in a consistent, step-wise fashion, and they are extremely disturbing to the abductee. Abductees universally wish the abduction had never happened, and they are often desperately frightened that it might happen again. For most, the trauma is so great that they refuse to confront it, fearful of bringing it into memory because of the terrifying feelings it might unleash. Some have even contemplated suicide as an escape from the buried horror’s pressure. It seems absurd to suggest that the abductees would will themselves to believe in something so terrifying or destructive.
Channeling
Critics like to point to the popularity of channeling—wherein a subject goes into a trancelike state and contacts benevolent space alien spirits—and suggest that the abduction accounts are simply channeled variants that have the same point of origin: the mind. But channeled information is very different from abduction accounts. It is devoid of any physical aftereffects or other evidence. It is almost always personally directed toward the channeler, and the space spirits relay messages with much the same content as those given to the contactees. In short, these tales have virtually no points of congruence with the abduction information. For channelers, the spirits are benevolent, informative, advice-giving folks who have the best interests of the channelers and the human race at heart. They tell the channelers where they are from, how they got here, and what they are doing. Except in some broad areas, most of the channeled information is inconsistent with itself. Furthermore, channelers do not claim abduction events as the normal course of obtaining information.
Hallucinations
Some critics have suggested that people who claim to have been abducted are simply hallucinating, and that all humans have hallucinations at one time or another. Hallucinations are, according to Professor Ronald Siegel of the University of California at Los Angeles, “previously stored memories or fantasy images woven together or projected onto the mind’s eye” that are “usually accompanied by simple geometric patterns.”5
But the abduction phenomenon has no strong element of personal fantasy. There is nothing in our society or in people’s backgrounds that would call forth such concepts as imaging, Mindscan, staging, and hybrid touching. Most abductees’ lives contain nothing that would have such a strong effect upon them that they would hallucinate a full-scale, copiously detailed abduction event that they desperately do not want to have.
Abductions are profoundly alien. They contain few reference points upon which to hang personal content. Abductees do not know what is happening to them; they find nothing in the accounts that would allow them to lead better lives; and they find very little about the effect that relates to their lives.
Fantasy-Prone Personalities
Another theory is that people who generate abduction accounts have fantasy-prone personalities—in other words, that they spend an inordinate amount of time fantasizing about themselves as willing participants in erotic or dramatic adventures.
In order for the fantasy-prone individual to spin abduction yarns, she would have to be so inordinately affected by her daydreams that she would be unable to distinguish them from reality. Like hallucinations, the fantasies of fantasy-prone individuals are almost never completely divorced from idiosyncratic personal content, and simply dreaming up a complex abduction event is just as unlikely for them as it is for non-fantasy-prone individuals. Furthermore, the abduction accounts
are not pleasant experiences designed to bolster or shield the ego of the abductee.
Of course, some people do spin fantasy-abduction tales. But their idiosyncratic stories do not match the accounts given by other abductees. They have not usually undergone competent hypnosis. They act more like a combination of channelers and contactees seeking publicity and perhaps money and yet still not fabricating a conscious hoax.
The Influence of Hypnosis
A popular theory suggests that it is the use of hypnosis itself in the hands of an incompetent practitioner that calls forth abduction stories. People can be suggestible while undergoing hypnotic regressions, and it is possible that the abductees might be responding to leading questions asked by the hypnotist. If so, their accounts might represent material that was confabulated, or invented from the unconscious mind, either to please the investigator or to “fill in” when the answer is not truly known.6
Yet experience has shown that most abductees refuse to be led. When asked intentionally leading questions by the hypnotist, they will nearly always reject the suggestion and reply in the negative (“No, it wasn’t like that”). For example, while investigating the Barney and Betty Hill case, Dr. Benjamin Simon was intent on getting the Hills to admit that their incident had no objective reality. For months he deliberately tried to instill the idea while they were under hypnosis that events did not happen the way they described. He looked for contradictions and tried to get them to agree that it was just a dream. Still he was unable to get them to admit that any part of their stories did not occur as they had described.
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