Secret life: firsthand accounts of UFO abductions (36 page)

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.

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.”
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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.

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.

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.
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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.

Throughout the history of the abduction phenomenon, it has been the abductees who have taught the researchers. The abductees have outlined the major events of the experience and set its parameters. The investigators, hypnotists, and researchers have learned about abductions not by imposing some sort of purposeful structure on abductee accounts but by patiently listening to what the abductees say. Furthermore, a significant percentage of abduction accounts are related by the abductee without the aid of hypnosis. Their stories are essentially the same as those related while under hypnosis.

A comprehensive study of abduction accounts written by Dr. Thomas E. Bullard demonstrated that the “same key traits” (examination, table, etc.) showed up in accounts regardless of how the information was retrieved. He found no significant differences between material collected by experienced hypnotists, inexperienced hypnotists, and by hypnotists who believed in abductions and hypnotists who did not. His findings indicated that “hypnosis makes far less difference than critics have claimed.”
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In 1978, Alvin Lawson, a professor of English at California State University at Long Beach, conducted an interesting study using eight volunteers to see if the abduction phenomenon was psychologically built into the unconscious minds of individuals. He screened each subject to filter out those who knew something about the UFO phenomenon (although he did not screen for abductions, a serious error because one of his subjects may have been an abductee) and had a physician hypnotize them; then he told them that they were to relate a UFO abduction event. They then proceeded to describe their “abduction.” The stories they told were all different from each other. The details within the stories were also different from each other. The aliens all looked different from each other. One looked like a lizard, one was cone-shaped with no head, one had an asymmetrical head with no eyes, one looked like a wise man with a beard. The subjects reported no egg or sperm sampling. They had no secondary or ancillary experiences. Except for one, the subjects felt no emotional content in their stories. They described no natural progression of events during the course of the “abduction.” For example, they were told that they would be taken aboard a UFO and were encouraged to describe how they got on board. They then described the interior and the aliens. Lawson specifically had to tell them that they were going to have a physical examination. Although a few details resembled those found in real accounts (e.g., they lay on a table, a machine was used to X-ray one, and a few said they could not move), the majority of them were not related to abductions and did not match what is known. Lawson showed that imaginary abductees were just that—imaginary.
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Hypnosis has been used to explore claims of “past lives.” Under hypnosis, subjects deliver accounts of living lives in the past, complete with details about geography, society, and significant areas of personal life. Thus the case can be made that abductions are akin to past-life regressions in which subjects remember long, sometimes complicated scenarios about their former status. But past-life accounts are all different, more akin to “channeling.” They lack the great mass of confirmatory detail that abductees report. They are personally idiosyncratic. Critics who claim that past-life stories and abduction accounts are related fail to take into consideration multiple abductions, the physicality of the event, psychological trauma, and the remarkable similarity of detail.

In truth, there are sincere people who are not channelers who
make extravagant claims about being abducted that fit only loosely into the scenario that researchers have developed. These people might indeed be abductees but have not had the opportunity to undergo competent hypnosis. Therefore they carry mental images of atomic destruction, pollution problems, and kindly Space Brothers more typical of contactee accounts. Only competent hypnosis can reveal the origin of these images and feelings. When the hypnotist does not have an adequate knowledge of the subject, the true nature of the abduction may never be revealed.

Finally, it has been posited that the physical effects associated with abductions—scars, internal injuries, blood loss, and gynecological and urological sequelae—are a form of “stigmata” very much like the stigmata that can result in rare cases when a person is so extraordinarily obsessed with the crucifixion of Christ that he develops the wounds from it.

If abduction sequelae are stigmata, however, then stigmata or other psychosomatic physical symptoms can achieve a life of their own apart from the conscious thoughts and activities of the victims. For example, the abductee may have only a passing and vague concern with abductions, but she may develop marks on her body associated with them even though she is not in any way obsessed with the subject or aware that she might be an abductee. Far from being obsessed with it to the point of incorporating some functions of the abductions into the physical structure of her body, the aware abductee usually desperately wants the abductions to end. Moreover, scars are often found by accident: a friend will notice it behind the abductee’s knee, or the abductee will feel something “funny” on her body and then notice the mark. Thus the physical aftereffects of an abduction do not conform to our knowledge about stigmata.

Psychiatric explanations of abduction accounts suggest that they originate either from organic brain problems or from serious mental disorders.

It is possible that abductee claimants are mentally disturbed people whose fallacious stories are an integral part of their illness. Psychiatrists
believe that mental illness affects, in one degree or another, a significant percentage of the population of the United States and probably the world. To some debunkers the mere fact of claiming an abduction is prima facie evidence of mental illness. Even the eminent physicist Philip Morrison has said, “Go into a state hospital and every tenth person will tell you the same [abduction] story.
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It is true that mentally ill people will sometimes claim contact with Beings from other planets. But their claims are usually part of their psychoses and are consistent with a whole range of bizarre and confused thought patterns and behavior that characterize their lives. Their stories are inconsistent and incoherent. The details in their stories do not match the details in any other people’s stories. Sometimes broad patterns of psychotic thought disturbances are similar (“The FBI is plotting against me,” “Voices are speaking to me”), but even within this context the details are confused and jumbled.

Legitimate abductee claimants do not mistake fantasy for reality in the normal course of their daily existence. Most are productive members of society and are not mentally ill.
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They claim events have happened to them that are inconsistent with anything else in their lives. For most of them, the abductions are unprecedented events that do not fit a pattern of other bizarre or unaccountable experiences.

And even though some of the abductees might seek psychological help, no evidence exists to show that they are schizophrenics, manic-depressives, or have delusionary personalities (although people with these traits may also be abductees). “Blind” psychological testing of nine abductees, including the administration of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, has shown that they exhibited characteristics of people who had been “violated,” e.g., raped, and were more “wary” than usual. All the abductees were well within the psychologically “normal” range and exhibited no pathology.
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In spite of the lack of evidence for mental disease, some critics have said that the serious illness of disassociated personalities, or “multiple personalities,” may have a bearing on the abduction phenomenon. The people who suffer from this unusual disorder may have one or more personalities separate from their dominant one, and they may or may not know about the others. The alternate
personalities may engage in antisocial, immoral, or just different behavior from the other personalities.

In no case has an abduction researcher uncovered an individual who exhibited traits of multiple personality disorder. No abductee has spontaneously shifted into another personality during a hypnosis session, as if the abduction were happening to someone else. Nor has an abductee displayed other personalities independent of the regression session. When an abductee remembers the abduction, it is fully integrated into the structure of her life without resistance; it would not be if it were another person’s problem.

Generally, people with multiple personality disorder come from backgrounds filled with severe and prolonged sexual abuse. Their disassociated personalities can be understood as a psychological attempt to escape from the traumas of their “real” existence. Although some abductees have been sexually abused, we have no evidence to suggest that the frequency of abuse is any higher among abductees than among the general population. Moreover, the abductees’ accounts of abductions do not occur in response to the abuse and are exactly the same as those made by people with no known history of sexual abuse. Thus multiple personality disorder does not seem to be a likely candidate as the causative factor in the reports of abductions.