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I learned how strange abduction
stories can be -- and how hard it is to think about them -- when I
first talked to David Jacobs. Jacobs, of course, is one of the
leading abduction investigators, by day a tenured history professor
at Temple University in Philadelphia. I was interviewing him for a
magazine piece, and I'd read much of the abduction literature,
including his own book Secret Life. But I wasn't prepared for what
happened when I asked him an obvious journalistic question, whether
there was physical evidence that abductions are real.
"Wanna see?" he replied. Then he trotted off to another room,
and returned with plastic bags containing a t-shirt and a blue
flowered bed sheet, both stained, he said, with a alien
substance.
Speaking purely as a reporter, I can state the following:
The stains were shocking pink (though Jacobs, with evident
surprise, said they'd faded). They had no texture and no smell. · ·
Jacobs said they'd been analyzed, by a man heÌd only identify
as "a scientist at a major Midwestern university." The analysis
supposedly showed that the stains weren't any known substance. · ·
When I asked where the stains came from, Jacobs told me that three
members of a family had fallen asleep in three difference places, the
mother on a couch in the living room, the daughter upstairs in her
parents' bed, the son at a friend's house down the street. All woke
up the next morning with memories of having been abducted, and with
these stains on their clothes or their bedding -- as did a fourth,
unrelated person, somewhere in the same neighborhood.·
Jacobs, like a responsible man of science, added that the
analysis didn't prove anything. There are, he told me, so many known
chemical compounds, that a new one doesn't have to come from space.
Still -- and this is me talking now, not him -- it's clearly notable,
not to say downright spooky, if the same new compound really showed
up on four people simultaneously ÷ if, of course, such a thing
really happened.
I add that last qualification because I can't prove that it did. I
have less trouble with the anonymous scientist., because I've learned
his name, and could ask those who know him to persuade him to talk to
me. Besides, IÌve run into an anonymous scientist myself; I
understand the pressures that would lead a researcher with mainstream
credentials to keep publicly clear of the taint of UFOs.
Still, a hardnosed journalist could be forgiven for doubting
everything that Jacobs says. It's all hearsay, by the time it reaches
me. The story of the family and the stains is even double hearsay --
the people involved told Jacobs what they say happened, and he told
me. I can't vouch for any of it.
But my personal, non-journalistic reaction might matter even
more. Privately, speaking simply as a human being, not as as an
investigator, I believed what Jacobs told me. But I also got
intensely skeptical. "Alien stains? Gedouddahere!" (My New York
upbringing rears up at times like this.) I felt like the American
Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, in an anecdote the dean of
abduction investigators, Budd Hopkins, relates in "A Note to the
Reader" at the start of his book Intruders. During World War II,
Frankfurter met a Polish refugee, Jan Karski, whoÌd seen some
of the horrors of the Holocaust, details of which were just beginning
to be known. Quoting Hopkins now (who in turn is quoting The Terrible
Secret, a book on the Holocaust by Walter Laqueur):
Karski told Frankfurter of what he had seen and heard, but
Frankfurter replied that "he did not believe him. When Karski
protested, Frankfurter explained that he did not imply that Karski
had in any way not told the truth, he simply meant that he could not
believe him -- there was a difference."
I could relate to that. I didn't doubt Jacobs' honesty, or, to
be blunt about how far IÌve stretched my own credulity, his
own readiness to believe the stories he hears. But I couldn't believe
him. Or, more precisely, I didn't want to believe him. It's one
thing, I learned from all this, to read about abductions in books,
the pages clean and dry, no pinkish goo anywhere in sight. But once
the spoor of aliens is thrust under my nose, an urge to disbelieve
wells up, prompted as much by fear as by skepticism or good
sense.
This urge to disbelieve is rampant, I think, in much of the
abduction debate. (It's also endemic in skeptical discussion of UFOs
in general, but that's a larger story.) But then it's also true that
some people are just as quick to accept abduction tales, for equally
emotional reasons which can range from a longing for alien salvation
to the simple faith that abduction experiencers can't all be
lying.
These emotions, on both sides, confuse the discussion.
Abduction investigators ask us, in effect, to believe in their
sincerity, and in the sincerity of the abduction experiencers they
work with. But they don't provide verifiable evidence. Skeptics,
meanwhile, take swipes at abduction research, presenting unproved
theories of their own -- that abduction tales are generated by the
media, for instance, or that they're planted in experiencers' minds
by careless or unscrupulous researchers. These swipes get made with a
force that seems excessive, since the skeptics don't have evidence
themselves.
In the end, it's the truth that suffers. And despite welcome
bursts of objectivity -- Eddie Bullard's 1987 analytic tome for the
Fund for UFO Research, or the 1992 abduction conference at MIT
(proceedings of which have been published), or Stuart Appelle's
recent summary of abduction theories and evidence in The Journal of
UFO Studies -- the debate still tends to generate more heat than
light.
What, then, are some of the abduction arguments that need to
removed from the emotional haze? I'll start with a skeptical
chestnut: The assertion that hypnosis isn't a reliable way to
retrieve buried memories. Often this is stated in a tone that implies
"Gotcha!" And, indeed, two things are clear:
1. The skeptics are accurately reporting the results of current
psychology research. 2. 3. Abduction investigators like Budd Hopkins,
David Jacobs, and Raymond Fowler should be spanked for not
acknowledging this research in their books. (Though to be fair I
should add that, according to surveys published in psychological
journals, even psychotherapists aren't always aware of the alleged
problems with hypnosis. John Mack, to his credit, does address the
negative results of current hypnosis research, as he'd damn well
better, since he's a psychologist, and ought to know what's published
in his field. Less to his credit, he saved this examination -- and
his defense of hypnosis -- for the second, paperback edition of his
book Abduction, which, as he himself notes, was revised to address
objections to his work. And he tosses his discussion into an
appendix, making no mention of these problems in his main text, where
he transcribes hypnotic sessions as casually as Hopkins, Jacobs, or
Fowler.) 4.
But let's take a closer look at this. I don't claim to be a
psychologist, but what I read in psychology journals is both clear,
and not as simple as the skeptics like to think. It's true, of
course, that for more than ten years, psychologists have taken no
prisoners where hypnosis is concerned. As I perused a database of
papers in psychology journals, it was easy for me to learn that
(quoting from two abstracts) that "controlled laboratory studies have
consistently failed to demonstrate any hypnotic memory improvement,"
and, even worse, that hypnotically prompted recollections "appear to
be less reliable than nonhypnotic recall."
And yet I also couldn't help noticing that all this research
was conducted in sanitized lab environments, far from the vivid --
but scientifically inconvenient -- passions of everyday life. Nor had
psychologists failed to notice this, since one of the authors
IÌve just quoted, summarizing what's in the literature, also
notes that "the relevancy of these laboratory studies may be
questioned because they used verbal, frequently nonmeaningful stimuli
in a low arousal environment."
In plain English, I might put the problem this way. These
experimenters, good academics all of them -- and, let's note,
experimental rather than clinical psychologists, which means they
wouldn't do much work with the messy functioning of memory in normal
life -- recruit a group of undergraduates. They ask these
experimental subjects to memorize data nobody could possibly care
about, and then declare that even under hypnosis nobody remembers
much, and certainly can't remember any more than a control group that
hasnÌt been hypnotized.
But what does this prove? That hypnosis can't retrieve memory,
or just that nobody remembers meaningless nonsense under any
circumstances? Some psychologists -- spurred, I'd like to think, by
common sense -- wonder whether highly emotional memories might behave
differently. It's not hard to find literature saying that they do,
though the scholar who raised the question I quoted earlier --
Marilyn C. Smith, of the Scarborough College Life Sciences Division
of the University of Toronto -- notes that she thinks research
indicates otherwise, at least in circumstances involving hypnosis:
"Several recent studies that have used more forensically relevant,
arousal-provoking stimuli persist in showing no hypnosis advantage."
(She stresses forensic relevance because her overall subject is the
hypnotic memory enhancement of witnesses in court.)
What, though, might those those "arousal-provoking" stimuli be?
There's a classic, frightening experiment in which subjects were
asked to push a button that, they were told, would shoot painful
jolts of electricity into someone seated, helpless and writhing, in a
wired chair on the other side of pane of one-way glass. The whole
thing was a setup, of course, and nobody really got any electrical
shocks. The idea was to see whether the subjects would follow orders,
and, unhappily, they did.
Psychologists who study hypnosis and memory haven't quite have
the courage -- if that's the word -- to set up real traumatic
situations. (Though Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologists who conducts
her own kind of memory experiments, once got children to falsely
believe that theyÌd been lost in a mall.) Instead,
theyÌre likely to show their subjects films of simulated
crimes, which, one can suspect, aren't involving in any person way.
In another study, two unintentionally comical psychologists used
words instead. These were Robert A. Baker (yes, the implacable UFO
skeptic, who also holds the belief, extreme in mainstream psychology,
that hypnosis isn't a distinct mental state) and Bonnie S. Parker,
both at the University of Kentucky. They showed 34 undergraduates
what they describe as "a visual display made up of common objects and
8 nonsense syllables," along with "an emotionally arousing message."
Forty-eight hours later, the kids were hypnotized, and, predictably
enough, couldn't remember any more of the nonsense than could a
control group whoÌd been a shown a message that was "neutral
and innocuous."
Evidently, "emotional arousal" (the experimenters' own words)
has no effect on hypnotic recall. But just how aroused should we
imagine these undergraduates might have been, when they read their
verbal message? As aroused as they might be if they fell in love,
learned their best friend died, or were abducted by aliens? Call me
shallow, call me unscientific, but somehow I doubt it. Nor do I doubt
it any less when I read, in a paper on memory and emotional states,
that the relevance of lab experiments to real-life memories is (at
least in the authors' opinion) at best "uncertain."
So now let's ask how hypnosis would fare if the tiny details to
be memorized were linked to something genuinely traumatic? The answer
is that nobody knows. And if we ask about trauma so serious that it
leads to loss of memory -- the kind of trauma most directly relevant
to abductions -- the answer is the same. As Stuart Appelle (himself a
university psychologist) writes in his critical review of the
abduction evidence: "There are no systematic investigations of the
accuracy or efficacy of hypnotic recall in trauma-induced
amnesia."
As for non-traumatic real-life memory, four papers since 1979
have studied its relation to hypnosis, and all four concluded that
hypnosis does improve recall:
· Helmut Relinger of the VeteranÌs Administration
Medical Center in Martinez, California reviewed the scientific
literature on hypnosis and memory enhancement, concluding that
"hypnosis consistently enhances recall of meaningful material when
recall is measured in a free narrative format." ("Hypnotic
hypermnesia: A critical review." American Journal of Clinical
Hypnosis)· · William S. Kroger and Richard Douce of UCLA studied how
police departments used hypnosis, and declared: "Hypnosis was of
value in providing investigative direction, and, in the [23]
cases described, has led to the solutions of major crimes."
("Hypnosis in criminal investigation," International Journal of
Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis) · · A team from the University of
Arizona reported that hypnosis had successfully been used to restore
the memory of a man suffering amnesia after heÌd been raped.
("Amnesia as a Consequence of Male Rape: A Case Report," Journal of
Abnormal Psychology.)· · David Chamberlain -- though this does seem
hard to believe -- hypnotized children and their mothers to retrieve
memories of the childrenÌs birth. The children had no
conscious birth memories, but their accounts were similar enough to
what their mothers reported for Chamberlain to write that "children's
birth memories appeared to be real rather than fantasy."
("Reliability of birth memory: Observations from mother and child
pairs in hypnosis. "Journal of the American Academy of Medical
Hypnoanalysts.)·
What can we conclude? First, that hypnosis isn't infallible, a
fact that abduction researchers ought to stress. (I've heard Budd
Hopkins say as much to abductees he works with, but he needs to say
it in print as well.) We should also note that in recent years
hypnosis has been attacked even more sharply, because of therapists
who use it, or so it's plausibly charged, to generate false memories
of sexual abuse. The American Psychiatric Association strongly
cautions that recovered memories are "of uncertain authenticity
[and] should be subject to external verification." This
verification is, to put it mildly, a tricky business when
weÌre dealing with abductions, since -- obviously -- we
donÌt know whether anything about abductions is real. More on
that below. But it has not been proved that hypnosis canÌt
retrieve lost memories.
Moreover, the hypnosis debate sidesteps something well known
about abductions: Many abduction memories surface with no hypnosis at
all. Some experiencers consciously remember a full abduction
scenario, some remember part, and virtually all of them remember
something -- if they didn't, why would they visit an abduction
investigator in the first place?
All this is plainly set forth in the abduction literature (In
Bullard's 1987 study, for instance, in a paper by David F. Webb on
abduction reports up to 1980, and in Bullard's recent report on a
1992 survey of abduction investigators.) All sorts of questions still
need to be answered -- are there, for instance, some abduction
episodes that only come out hypnotically? But anyone who meets
abduction experiencers can easily verify that the overall abduction
narrative, along with key details like the appearance of the aliens,
might well emerge without hypnosis.
For some time, I should say, IÌve been observing Budd
Hopkins's work. I began by interviewing him for an article in a
mainstream magazine, began to sit in on some of his sessions with
abductees, and, for a study in International UFO Reporter (the
publication of the Center for UFO Studies) reviewed the evidence,
much of it unpublished, that documents his controversial "Linda
Cortile" case (in which an abduction from a New York city highrise
apartment was supposedly witnessed by several people, including an
internationally known political figure.)
Naturally, I've met many of the abduction experiencers Hopkins
works with. One of them, a 29 year-old insurance executive who asked
me to call her just "Renee," told me sheÌd encountered the
familiar gray aliens all her life. ("Renee" isn't even her real first
name; like most abductees, she doesn't want her real identity
revealed.) She'd never told anyone about these beings. Who'd believe
her? Clearly no one else knew the beings existed, because no one
talked or wrote about them. One day, she said, she came across one of
Hopkins's books at an airport, with one of those creatures on the
cover. She told me this calmly, but it's clear she was shocked. It
took her a year, she said, to get up the courage to all Hopkins and
arrange a visit, and even then she brought a friend along, in case he
turned out to be crazy.
"Bill" (another abductee IÌve met) says he remembers
being taken, with his family, into a craft he describes as "a
merry-go-round with lights.ÌÌ "Christine" says that
throughout her childhood she encountered a small gray creature that
she called "skeleton man." John Velez, one of the few experiencers
willing to let his full name be printed, remembers lying on a table,
surrounded by beings that stuck needles into him.
Accounts like these are available to anyone who studies
abductions, and -- pending some future proof (unlikely, in my
opinion) that all these people are lying -- even skeptics need to
acknowledge that abduction accounts don't need hypnosis to emerge.
Details like the beings' huge black eyes can be documented entirely
from conscious memories, which suggests that hypnotic accounts of
those eyes have been corroborated. Besides, the hypnotic accounts
confirm each other. It might sound odd to talk about corroboration,
when we still don't know that what's corroborated is truly real. But
imagine an FBI investigation. A serial killer is at large, and
several people think they got a fleeting glimpse of him. These
witnesses are hypnotized, let's say, and, amazingly, each recalls the
license plate on his car. Maybe they differ on a digit or two, but
the recollections are substantially the same. Wouldn't the FBI rush
out to find who owned the car?
At the very least, if abductees' accounts confirm each other --
and especially if hypnotically derived details are confirmed by
conscious recall -- we canÌt write these abduction tales off
as false memories, or simple hypnotic confabulation. If one person
told the standard story under hypnosis, we could challenge it, and in
fact we should, but if dozens do, or hundreds, or thousands (as in
fact is the case), and if others who don't need to be hypnotized say
they have the same memories, then something else is going on. We
haven't proved that the memories are real, but the whole debate about
hypnosis starts to seem irrelevant.
And here's a fascinating, speculative, and no doubt
controversial thought. Has any other puzzling situation -- something
that might be real, or again might not -- been subjected to such
detailed hypnotic examination? I doubt it. So isnÌt it at
least remotely possible that abductions might turn out to be a test
case for hypnosis? Suppose we grant even a tiny possibility that
abductions might be real. Don't we therefore grant the possibility
that hypnosis really does retrieve abduction memories? And if that
were true, then abductions would have told us more about hypnosis
than hypnosis research ever told us about abductions.
As for some other skeptical objections (emotional ones, I
suspect) ÷
1. Do abduction investigators plant abduction stories in
experiencers' minds?
We must understand that this is a hypothesis. It hasn't yet
been proved. In fact, there isn't even evidence for it yet, except
for fragmentary excerpts from abduction books or brief film clips on
TV, which might (or, in fuller context, might not) show investigators
asking leading questions.
Worse, this hypothesis is linked to the assumption -- which, as
we've seen, is false -- that abduction stories always emerge through
hypnosis. Experiencers, according to this view, are helpless once
they're hypnotized. They're ready to be victimized by leading
questions -- if, that is, theyÌre not simply commanded to
remember an abduction scenario, or at the very least are so awed by
the investigatorÌs expectations that they manufacture the
story on their own, drawing on books, TV, and what theyÌve
heard from other experiencers at support groups.
Not, of course, that this theory requires hypnosis. Abductees,
obviously, know what they're getting when they go to see Budd
Hopkins. They've seen him on TV, or read his books. They know he
thinks they've been abducted. That's why they come to him, so he can
tell them that's what happened. They're Play-Doh in his hands.
My experience, for what it's worth, indicates that this might
not be so. The experiencers I've met (admittedly a small and hardly
random sample) all told me that they hoped it wasn't true, that they
desperately resisted any belief that their abductions were real.
But then this ugly supposition -- that abduction researchers
are puppeteers, at the very least naive, though more likely out to
promote themselves and their nonsensical beliefs -- has deeper
problems. It ignores the early history of abduction research, when
investigators were as surprised as anyone else to hear abduction
tales. It ignores Betty and Barney Hill, who 30 years ago unveiled
the first standard-issue abduction story, to a psychiatrist who'd
never heard anything like it before.
This theory of investigator influence ignores abductees who've
told me they were wary under hypnosis, because they were afraid Budd
Hopkins would do exactly what the skeptics claim. It ignores
transcripts, videotapes, and audio tapes of interviews with abductees
(some of them published, others not, but available, IÌd think,
to anyone doing serious research), which donÌt show
investigators prompting or leading anyone. It ignores what
IÌve observed when I've watched Budd Hopkins work, and also,
maybe more to the point, observations by Gibbs Williams, a New York
psychoanalytic psychotherapist, whom IÌve interviewed, and who
by no means is convinced that abductions are physically real.
Williams, too, has watched Hopkins work. Neither of us has seen
Hopkins encouraging people to believe they'd been abducted, or
feeding them details of what he thinks has happened to them.
Both of us, moreover, have seen the letters abductees write to
Hopkins, before he ever talks to them. WeÌre both struck by
how consistent they are, both in the experiences they report --
unexplainable lights in their bedrooms, beings by their beds, missing
time when they were children, UFO sightings -- and, as Williams
stresses, by their consistent psychology. Williams says he can't
conclude that their experiences are real. But he's certain that the
letter-writers manifest something, if only a psychological syndrome,
that Hopkins isn't creating.
1. Abduction stories are created by the media. 2.
By now theyÌre surely spread by the media, since they've
been published in books, shown in the movies, and splashed all over
tabloid TV. I sat in on Hopkins's first meeting with an experiencer
who'd read no end of abduction books. As it happens, this man was
careful to explain, with no prompting, how his recollections differed
from what he'd read. (He also worried that hypnosis would create
false memories.) But media influence can't be ruled out.
That said, we now need to ask what generated the standard
abduction story in the first place. Here the trail of influence -- so
wide and brightly lit for contemporary abduction accounts -- gets
lost in shadows. IÌve seen three attempts to map it. One of
them came from skeptic Martin Kottmeyer, who found an episode of the
science fiction TV show Outer Limits that showed an alien with the
now-familiar wraparound eyes, and that was televised less than two
weeks before Barney Hill first told his abduction story under
hypnosis.
Gotcha! But neither Kottmeyer -- nor the American public
television science show, Nova, when it trotted out this Outer Limits
episode, in an inquiry into abductions -- bothered to ask Betty Hill
to comment. (Barney couldn't be asked, of course, because he died in
1969.) According to Jerome Clark, who did ask her when he wrote an
entry on the Hill case in his UFO Encyclopedia, she'd never heard of
Outer Limits. Neither she nor Barney would have watched that kind of
show, she said, and in any case he worked nights, and often wasn't
home on evenings when he didn't work, because both he and she were
active in community affairs.
The other two other abduction sources IÌve seen cited
are even wispier. Robert Shaeffer, who served as token skeptic at the
MIT abduction conference, disinterred a 1930 Buck Rogers comic strip,
in which aliens bring the heroine into their ship for a medical
examination. Fortunately he reproduced the strip in the published
proceedings, allowing us to notice a few tasty deviations from the
standard abduction account. The aliens are feline, they grab the
screaming woman with a "great mechanical claw," and they're
talkative. Amazed, they ask: "Is it possible earth people are not
evolved from the cat species?"
And finally there Ìs Killers from Space, a painfully
obscure 1954 movie, touted as a precursor of abduction reports
because aliens medically examine a captive human. Make that a
reanimated captive human, though, because, as IÌve learned
from the respected (if not exactly professorial) Psychotronic
Encyclopedia of Film, the story of the film goes something like
this:
While his brother Billy was working on The Seven Year Itch, Lee
Wilder was busy churning out another substandard science fiction
film. This one features hilarious aliens with hooded sweat suits,
mittens, striped belts, and eyes made out of Ping Pong ball halves.
They bring nuclear scientist Peter Graves back to life in a cave
complete with used electronic equipment. To demonstrate their powers,
they show Peter stock footage of lizards, lava, and giant insects. He
figures out their futuristic VU meters and causes the secret
headquarters to blow up. Earth is saved again!
If any of this happened in real abduction accounts, abduction
books would be more fun to read. In any case, though, the very
obscurity of all these supposed abduction sources tells us something
striking: that the abduction story we know so well today evidently
can't be found in standard science fiction. And since it isn't,
weÌre entitled to ask how the abduction tale -- if in truth it
started with Buck Rogers and Killers from Space -- has taken root
with such ferocity, and such powerful emotion. Why haven't people
said they've been abducted by giant insects, blobs , or robots, all
of which were powerfully injected into popular culture by movies like
Them and The Day the Earth Stood Still?
Besides, where are the studies by social scientists, telling us
why some -- but hardly all -- of the nightmares floating in our
culture burrow into us so deeply that some people think they're real?
What other beliefs, besides abductions, have spread by a hysterical
contagion thatÌs actually been documented?
As it happens, there really is a study of the second question,
by sociologist Robert Hall, who measured abduction reports against
cases of mass psychogenic illness and mass delusion, which he says
are the only documented phenomena that spread by any kind of
irrational contagion. He found "crucial" differences, and concludes
-- with an explosion of rhetorical fireworks -- that "attributing
these reports to mass psychology leaves us just as much an anomaly as
attributing them to extraterrestrial visitors." He's overstating his
case, but if skeptics want to contradict him, their research had
better be just as detailed.
3. Abductions are a kind of folklore.
At this point IÌll confess that -- in the best (or
worst) tradition of people doing UFO research without proper
credentials, and instead coming into it from unlikely, unrelated
fields -- I am by profession a musician and music critic. Once, when
I was a graduate student at Yale, I took a course in "Aural
Analysis," in which we'd listen to music we knew nothing about, and
attempt to describe what was going on. In particular, we chose a lot
of music from other cultures, which we absorbed with worshipful but
blind respect. One afternoon all of us, professor and students alike,
marveled at a recording of folk music from eastern Europe.
WeÌd never heard rhythms like this before. They were
blindingly intricate, we thought, incomprehensible to our
impoverished Western rhythmic palette.
But then a student who knew a lot about eastern European folk
music made a belated appearance, and told us that these folk
musicians were only playing badly. Their apparent rhythmic
complexities were simply mistakes.
Sometimes I wonder whether something similar -- an uncritical
respect for foreign folk traditions -- isn't at work when we're told
that abduction tales are just another kind of folklore. The notion is
seductive, I'll admit, IÌll admit that the notion is
seductive, based as it is on the elegant and wordly observations of
people who seem know more about the folktales of other cultures than
we do. Somehow these other traditions -- whose cosmology, let's say,
wouldn't convince us of much -- acquire a glittering prestige as soon
as we talk of anything paranormal. Many cultures, we're told, report
contact with unearthly beings. Sometimes these beings transport
people to unearthly realms. In Newfoundland, people think they're
visited at night by unpleasant entities they call "old hags," which
means ÷ but what does it mean? What's being alleged here?
There are two roads we might go down to answer these questions.
On the first, we'd take the western scientific stance, which means we
think that people who see fairies and old nocturnal hags are
superstitious. The beings they believe in don't exist. Abduction
tales resemble these superstitions; therefore they, too, are
false.
But why are we assuming there's a connection between abduction
beliefs and the folklore of other cultures? Any resemblance might be
just coincidental. If the resemblance was preternaturally close, then
we might have a priori reasons for wondering about abductions. But
how close is it, really? How closely do these folklore tales resemble
each other, and how closely do any of them resemble the normal
abduction account? (Eddie Bullard, whose doctorate is in folklore,
says they aren't close at all.) How many cultures have abduction-like
beliefs, especially beliefs about beings that might grab anybody,
anywhere, at any time? Do beliefs like these turn up all over the
world? If so -- and assuming thereÌs a relationship between
abductions tales and those beliefs -- why did our version of the
worldwide myth emerge, at least as a mass phenomenon, just 30 years
ago?
But now suppose we take the other road, and decide that these
experiences described in other culturesÌ folklore might
possibly be real. Now weÌre in fascinating territory, explored
most notably, of course, by Vallee. Could it really be that all of us
-- the Irish with their fairies, Newfoundlanders with their worrisome
old hags, Americans with the big-eyed grays -- are encountering the
same phenomenon? All over the world, people experience the same
unearthly beings, but since the experience is not perceptible to
anyone in its true reality -- suddenly we're getting almost Kantian
-- or because nobody is ready to perceive it, we all see it through
the proverbial clouded glass, replacing whatever's really there with
interpretations we've distilled from our various cultures.
But how we know other cultures really see? How thoroughly have
their experiences been investigated? How do we know that the
situation isnÌt exactly the reverse of what this theory says?
How do we know that other cultures donÌt really meet the
grays? Why can't we decide that we're the only ones who see the
beings clearly, because we're the only scientific culture?
This notion might sound arrogant, but there's data in abduction
lore to support it. If you've read abduction books, you know that the
aliens supposedly can cloud our minds. Or maybe we ourselves veil our
recollection, because we're in shock. Who knows? But either way,
abduction experiencers are said to have their thoughts befogged by
what investigators (borrowing a Freudian phrase) call "screen
memories," which most commonly are images of animals. Question an
experiencer closely, says the lore, and these animals evaporate, to
be replaced by -- eeek! -- the grays.
Here's a typical example, from Budd Hopkins's book Witnessed.
An experiencer Hopkins calls "Marilyn Kilmer" is telling him of her
abduction:
As she floats upward toward the skylight she sees two small
figures levitating behind her, creatures she describes as "white
cats." I ask if they are long-haired or short-haired cats. "They
don't have any hair," she replies, and adds that they are very
big.
How could the cats be cats, Hopkins wonders, if they were
hairless and gigantic? In another, unpublished case, one Hopkins
cherishes for its absurdity, a woman told him that she was driving
late at night and found the road blocked by an owl, which stood in
front of the car, its eyes level with the windshield. This woman
never stopped to think that owls arenÌt big enough to do that
-- not, that is, until Hopkins asked her how tall she thought the owl
was.
Now, if we have screen memories, why shouldn't people from
cultures around the world have them? And, since other cultures are
more open to paranormal experience, why shouldn't their screen
memories be codified, so that everyone generates the same image? If
we grant that abductions might possibly be real, then we have to
accept the possibility that these screen memories might function as
advertised, thus -- potentially, at least -- blowing the this second
version of the folklore theory right out of the pond.
I haven't mentioned psychological explanations for abductions,
because I think they're on a different plane. Not many have ever been
formally proposed, at least in psychology journals, and there's some
noise mixed with the signal -- a paper by a team headed by Nicholas
Spanos (cited by the American Psychological Association, in an ad in
the New York Review of Books, as "one of the worldÌs most
renowned psychologists") which with great misplaced certainty unfurls
the theory of investigator influence, offering no evidence except a
few citations to UFO ¸berskeptic Philip Klass (whose own
derisive abduction book is innocent of any research that would have ,
you ask how big its ears are. YouÌre implying that it does
have ears; if abductees tell you, repeatedly, that the aliens are
earless, you conclude that they're sticking to their recollections,
which thus are very likely genuine.
Are these techniques reliable? Gibbs Williams, the therapist I
mentioned earlier, has seen Hopkins using them, and tells me he's
impressed. But have repeated inquiries and counter-leading been used
elsewhere, by hypnotherapists, or by hypnotists working with police?
Current orthodoxy holds that confabulation can't be detected by
questioning alone, so Hopkins and Jacobs appear to be swimming
against that conventional tide, and in fact are asserting something
truly radical: That itÌs possible to distinguish between true
and false abduction tales, or in other words that in abduction
research, just as in investigations of ordinary UFO sightings, it's
possible to distinguish between a UFO and an IFO.
To elaborate, if I see a bright light on the horizon and the
planet Venus turns out to be right where I was looking, then very
likely I saw Venus. Similarly, Hopkins and Jacobs might say, if I
claim I was abducted along with John F. Kennedy, and they ask me if
Jimmy Carter was also there and I say yes, then my memory is very
likely false (Carter being far too young to have been JFKÌs
equal, even in an alien abduction). The signs of a true abduction
would be that the story stays the same when investigators gently
challenge it, and that it's consistent with other abduction
accounts.
This supposed consistency has been challenged, of course, as
being either not as real as it seems to be, or else imposed by the
investigators themselves. But there's one claim abduction
investigators make that's truly a bombshell. Allegedly, abduction
stories corroborate each other even in tiny unpublished details. In
Budd HopkinsÌs Witnessed, for instance, we learn that "Linda
Cortile" (the central abductee in the case) was X rayed, and that the
X ray showed a possible alien implant, "a cylindrical shaft ÷
with two thinner, spiraling extensions -- one at the top of the shaft
and one at the bottom -- that curl out away from [Linda's]
face."
Later, hypnotically regressed, Cortile said that her alien
abductors took "a long needle with a small object on its tip," and
inserted that object into her nostril:
As she described it [Hopkins writes], this small
metallic object did not have anything like the protruding, curling
spirals that showed up in the X ray.
This detail is important because of two earlier cases in which
female abductees described objects being removed [his
emphasis] by the UFO occupants. The apparent implants were taken
from the ear of one woman and from the navel of the other. In both
hypnotically retrieved accounts the women were shown simple,
shaftlike cylinders. When these narrow cylinders were touched by the
aliens handling them, small, flangelike appendages popped out from
their sides.
What are we to think? Is it true, as Hopkins also writes in
Witnessed, that abductees who report humans working with the aliens
always see these humans dressed in blue uniforms? Is it true, as
David Jacobs writes in his book Secret Life, that abductees mention
smaller beings that do the grunt work, and larger ones that appear to
be in charge? Is it true that, when the beings touch an abductee,
that the larger ones feel "rough" and "leathery," while the smaller
drones are "soft" or "plastic"?
If true, these corroborations are, quite simply, dynamite. And
there's more abduction evidence that, potentially, could be
devastating. How about that ghost story Jacobs told me, about unknown
stains appearing on four people at once? Jacobs told me that he
recognizes many supposed alien implements. Once an abductee describes
an instrument, he knows exactly what the aliens will do with it.
Scars, like stains, allegedly appear on abductees overnight.
Abductees supposedly are abducted, and returned in someone else's
clothes. Hopkins told me that not one abductee has ever described a
chest examination to him. The aliens -- no matter what else they do
to our bodies anywhere -- allegedly ignore our chests, something hard
to believe abductees would so uniformly invent, if they were making
these stories up.
Are these things true? I can't verify any of them, and I can
fault Hopkins for not even keeping statistics. How many abductees
report the familiar scoop marks on their legs, photographs of which
he's displayed in his books, in lectures, and on his website? Hopkins
can't tell us. What we're dealing with, as I said right at the start,
is hearsay -- stories Hopkins and Jacobs talk and write about, which
any of us can only accept out of a personal conviction that they (and
the experiencers who tell many of the stories in the first place)
aren't lying.
But if this provocative evidence could be verified -- if, let's
say, outside observers could confirm that abductees give the same
unpublished descriptions of alien medical tools, over and over --
wouldn't the ballgame be over? Wouldn't we then have to conclude that
abductions were real, or at the very least that we're dealing with
some equally exotic unknown, some kind of mass telepathic
confabulation? (With stigmata, of course, if we verify that marks
really do appear with no apparent cause.)
For what it's worth, I have verified the existence, at least,
of one dramatic piece of abduction evidence. Or, rather, more than a
dozen pieces of it, samples of alleged alien writing (or perhaps
alien symbology), that more than a dozen abductees supposedly
glimpsed on board the alien craft, and later wrote down from memory.
Budd Hopkins has assembled these, and they do look just about
identical. They need to be published, of course, and subjected to
formal study, but I'd be lying if I didn't say they gave me a deep
and scary chill. I've promised not to describe what they look like,
but I can put it this way: If the "writing" had been Morse code, what
I would have seen, as I turned the pages of Hopkins's scrapbook,
would have been dots and dashes on every page, unstained by
squiggles, circles, curves, vertical lines, or diagonals. IÌve
also spoken to two of the experiencers who said they'd seen these
symbols, and who provided two of the samples. Both of them told me
that they remembered this writing consciously, no hypnosis needed.
Only after they'd drawn what they remembered did Hopkins show them
other versions of the same thing. Both were far more shocked than I
was; one of them, John Velez, who's in his late 40's with two grown
children, said he broke down sobbing.
Of course, I can't prove that Velez isn't lying. I can't prove
that Hopkins didn't fabricate his scrapbook. But these writing
samples -- or whatever we might like to think they are -- push the
envelope dramatically. They're either genuine or hoaxed, and if
they're genuine, then something extraordinary is going on. And the
simplest explanation -- the most parsimonious, the one that best
accounts for all reported data, and doesn't make us postulate a
separate, new, unknown phenomenon -- is that abductions really
happen.
I could end here, concluding with my most dramatic stroke, but
the sheer weirdness of the subject -- and the urge most us have, I
think, to disbelieve -- impels me to go one step further. Or perhaps
I'm taking one merciful step away from any confrontation. I want to
note a more abstract arguments against abduction reality, a group of
what I'd call a priori arguments, because essentially they say that
no evidence could be convincing, that abductions can't be real,
because ÷
1. The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (of what UFOs are) hasn't
been proved.
It's hard to believe anyone ever argued against abductions this
way, but IÌve seen it done. Cart before the horse, I'd say.
Like claiming no one ever saw a flying disc, because we don't know
for sure there are such things. ItÌs doubtless true that
someone who already thinks UFOs are alien will be more ready to
believe that aliens are abducting people. But itÌs not
unreasonable for someone who was never convinced by UFOs to look at
the abduction evidence -- Budd Hopkins's alien writing, maybe -- and
say "OK, fine, I see it now. Aliens are really here."
2. Abductions can't be happening, because real aliens wouldn't
be humanoid.
And how, exactly, do we know that? We have theories about
evolution, based on insufficient data, because (think about this) we
have only one example to base our thinking on. We've seen life evolve
on one planet, our own. How can we be sure we know how it might
evolve elsewhere? It's perfectly plausible to theorize that, on the
contrary, intelligent life must be humanoid, (as Michael Swords, the
former editor of the Journal of UFO Studies once did)because
evolutionary pressures would always work the same way. Or, rather,
it's no more or less plausible argue that way, than to theorize that
another intelligent species couldn't possibly look like us.
And plenty of other theories are possible. We could imagine
that our visitors are cousins. Maybe they created us. Maybe we
created them, and forgot about it. Maybe we're both members of the
same interstellar clan, established long ago, so deep in our
antiquity that we donÌt know about it. Not that I'm putting
money on these speculations. But it's easy to explain the existence
of another humanoid race. The truth is that we donÌt know
what's out there, so weÌre in no position to rule anything
out.
1. If aliens want to breed a hybrid race, they'd do it
technologically, with no need to take our sperm and get us pregnant.
2.
This, from Jacques Vallee, is the most persuasive a priori
objection, an obvious one -- obvious once someone thinks of it,
anyway -- that doesn't seem to have occurred to anybody else. We
earthfolk can accomplish miracles of genetic engineering. Why would
aliens, advanced enough to fly here from wherever, resort to plain,
old-fashioned sexual reproduction? Why incubate a hybrid fetus so
perilously, in a human female (as abduction lore claims the aliens
do)?
The answer might be pretty simple, though. Abduction lore also
says the aliens meld their minds with ours, give some of us missions
in life, teach our children psychokinesis, and, maybe most crucially
for anyone arguing against Vallee, ask human mothers to touch and
love their hybrid babies. The aliens seem to need us! Or, to put it
more quietly, whatever they're doing, they want us to be involved. We
don't have to believe that these things are really going on. But if
you want to imagine reasons why the aliens aren't building hybrids in
the Zeta Reticulan equivalent of test tubes, abduction lore suggests
a speculative answer. For some reason we can't fathom (and why should
we be expected to?) the aliens don't just need our genes. They need
us -- our emotions, our particicpation, our hearts and our
(unconscious) minds.
1. Abductions can't be happening, because nobody can float a
human being through solid walls.2.
Yes, the aliens are said to do that, but, for the last time,
how do we know that they can't? I feel like dragging out every
clichÈ every written about future science. If people from the
19th century saw a pocket calculator, they'd be dumbstruck. As J.
Allen Hynek wrote, "There will surely be, we hope, a twenty-first
century science and a thirtieth century science, and perhaps they
will encompass the UFO phenomenon as twentieth century science has
encompassed the aurora borealis, a feat unimaginable to nineteenth
century science, which likewise was incapable of explaining how the
sun and stars shine." Or this, from Arthur C. Clarke: "Any
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." If
advanced aliens are really visiting, how can we predict what they can
or can't do?
This objection reminds me of the SETI scientists -- Frank
Drake, Carl Sagan, and others involved with a search for
extraterrestrial life, usually by listening for alien radio signals
-- who almost all believe that aliens can't visit us, because
interstellar travel is impractical, verging on impossible. Meanwhile
Drake also speculates that some civilizations in the galaxy are a
billion years ahead of us! And yet he's certain he knows their
capabilities.
Essentially -- as physicist Paul Davies point out in his
philosophical book on extraterrestrial life, Are We Alone? -- Drake
and others make a crucial but unspoken assumption, that we, even
after just three centuries of science, have discovered fundamental
laws of the universe that will never be contradicted, not even if we
join our supposed ET neighbors in the billion-years-of-civilization
club. We believe that the speed of light canÌt be surpassed,
and that even approaching it would use more power than could ever be
available -- and we believe we're right about those things, not just
now, but forever.
You could call this assumption arrogant. You could call it
smug. I'd prefer, though, to call it metaphysical, in the sense that
the word was used by logical positivist philosophers, who wanted to
exclude from philosophy all statements that can't be verified. This
certainly is one of those. Even if we waited a billion years, and the
laws of the universe still appeared unchanged, thereÌs always
the chance that theyÌd look different after new discoveries
were made one year after that. We can't prove we know the basic laws
of nature, and the belief that we do know them is simply that -- a
belief, not anything scientific, but essentially a matter of
faith.
And part of this faith leads otherwise sensible scientists to
believe that extraterrestrial visits are unlikely. Not that I'm
saying they are likely, but how can we measure whether they're likely
or not, when we donÌt have any data? We donÌt even know
that intelligent life beyond the earth exists at all. And if it does
exist, how common is it? The only way to gauge the likelihood of
visits would be to consult a copy of the Galactic Almanac (assuming,
just for the sake of amusement, that there is such a thing). If it
said there were only two other races in our galaxy, far away from us
and not interested in interstellar travel, then fine -- they won't be
coming here. But if the Galactic Almanac said civilizations were
widespread and that several very active traveling ones had outposts
just a few light years from earth, then weÌd know weÌd
better dust off the welcome mat.
To put this slightly differently, and to turn back toward
abductions, imagine that we're talking to a representative of the
Galactic Federation, someone sophisticated and well-informed, who can
tell us with authority what's going on in our neck of the
universe.
"You know," we say to him, or her, or it, "some of us say
they've been abducted by little gray beings with big eyes. Would you
know anything about that?"
"Oh, God, no!" replies our distinguished visitor. "You've got
Zorphs! They're such pests, playing games with their stupid medical
experiments. I can't blame you if you're confused. They've got this
way of muddying your thoughts."
For all we know, abductions, in the galaxy at large, are as
common as roaches are in New York apartments. And if anyone thinks
this line of reasoning is a license to believe anything at all, I beg
to disagree. Once I met an abduction experiencer (not someone who'd
worked with Budd Hopkins) who told me that she'd seen me on the
ships. "You were working with them," she declared. "You were my
mentor!" Since I can't remember this, I reserve the right to shake my
head. Nor do I have to believe (to pick an example from elsewhere in
ufology) that Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter issued the MJ-12
briefing document, and misstated his own rank.
But if we're going to deal with the unknown -- which is what we
do the moment we allow even the possibility that UFOs are alien (let
alone that they're abducting us) -- we're going to have to take some
intellectual risks. Albert Camus, in his philosophical study The
Rebel, discussed the problem of political rebellion. Since killing is
wrong, he asked, how can you take up arms to fight for your rights,
even against the most oppressive regime? His answer was that there
isn't any answer -- you go to the barricades, as he more or less
said, with a gun in your hand and a lump in your throat.
UFO research is something like that. We're dealing with giant
questions, questions that challenge our understanding of who we are
and where we fit in the universe. Worse still, we can't even imagine
the limits of any possible answers. Does that leave us helpless? It
shouldn't. We just have to keep our wits about us -- and agree in
advance not to rule anything out.
