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Norris awakens and senses the presence of some kind of being nearby. It reaches out and touches his forehead. He finds himself floating up to the ceiling. He is no longer in his room and can see stars through the porthole-like windows in what he realizes is an alien spaceship. A small crowd of grey humanoid creatures closes in around the operating table he is lying on, and he sees that they are holding sharp and shiny implements. He begins to scream, and struggles but can’t avoid the sleek metal snake they slide up his nose. The pain is unbearable and the creatures continue to do unspeakable things to him. It seems to go on forever. Eventually Norris awakens in bed, feeling shaken and uncertain of what has just happened. He has a feeling that he has been given telepathic instructions to forget the events that he had just experienced. Over the next days and weeks, the memories of this experience enter his awareness and create anxiety and feelings of panic. The first time this happens Norris is twelve years old, and it is October. For years he has a similar experience every year in the fall.
While there are many variations on alien abduction reports, most occur at night after the abductee has fallen asleep (Appelle, Lynn, Neuman, & Malaktaris, 2014). The core features of the alien abduction experience include being captured and taken to an alien craft where the abductee is subjected to an examination that may be physical, sexual, or even spiritual in nature. The abductee may also be given a tour of the craft or be taken on a journey to another realm. They may also be given telepathic messages, then returned to earth. These abduction experiences often leave troubling aftereffects that are physical and/or psychological in nature (Appelle, Lynn, Neuman, & Malaktaris, 2014).
It is difficult to determine how many people have had these experiences. According to surveys cited by Appelle, Lynn, Neuman, & Malaktaris (2014), 36% of the population of the United States believes that unidentified flying objects are actually alien spacecraft. Another survey found that 3.7 million Americans have had some form of abduction experience but the survey items allowed for the inclusion of experiences such as sleep paralysis that may not have been intended by the survey participants to be considered actual abduction experiences. One figure that has been cited is that about 2.5% of the people in the United States believe that they have been abducted by space aliens.
While many abduction experiences are reported as having happened after the individual went to bed, others have been reported as having occurred in various circumstances such as while the person was hiking in a forested area or was driving home late at a night. It is hard to pinpoint the very first alien abduction report, but an often-cited one is that of Barney and Betty Hill, an interracial couple who were involved in the civil rights movement. It is a familiar story to those who have studied the alien abduction phenomenon. This event occurred during the early sixties (September 19, 1961) as the couple was driving through the White Mountains of New Hampshire late at night. During their trip they had observed what appeared to be a bright object following them and when they got home felt that something very bad had happened to them. They also felt that they were missing several hours of time from the trip. Of note, this event occurred to them while they were likely under a great deal of psychosocial stress, were most likely sleep deprived, while on a trip through an isolated part of the country, and at a time of heightened tension and fascination with the accelerating destructive power of our weapons during the Cold War.
The couple gradually began to remember details that occurred during their missing hours and Betty started having nightmares. Two years after the event they consulted a psychiatrist and underwent hypnosis. Under hypnosis they were able to recall being taking aboard a flying saucer by grey aliens and subjected to probing with needles. The events described are truly chilling. Apparently Barney was very disturbed and frightened by the recollection but Betty gradually began to share the story and give talks on it. A book about their experiences was published in 1966 followed by a TV movie about their abduction that was aired in 1975. Following this movie, reports of alien abduction rapidly increased.
Reports of unidentified flying objects may go back as far as the Bible (e.g. Ezekiel, chapter 1), depending on how you interpret ancient reports. But reports of these objects being interpreted as alien space craft really only began in the 1940s. In the 1950s contact with aliens became a staple of early Cold War science fiction cinema. One of my favorites was “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951). In this movie, the earth is visited by a powerful alien and threatened with annihilation unless humans put aside their weapons of mass destruction, as alien peoples feared these weapons would come to endanger life everywhere in the universe.
Anyone who has heard president Eisenhower’s final report to the country as he was finishing his presidency in 1961 heard him use the frightening term “military industrial complex”. A short time after his speech, the Cuban missile crisis occurred and those times, like ours today, were tense and uncertain. Add in the stress of being involved with the highly charged and challenging efforts to promote civil rights and it isn’t hard to imagine that Barney and Betty were under significant stress, although they apparently didn’t believe this was a factor in their experience. It was, however, in that context that reports of individual alien abductions began to emerge.
While I can’t verify this, my first memory of being aware of UFOs as alien craft occurred around the mid-1960s. I believe I was watching “Astro Boy”, an early example of anime that was broadcast from Washington D.C and aired on a channel we were able to pick up in a small town in Virginia. The program recounted the first appearance of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) during World War II. These were observed by pilots on bombing missions and were known as bogeys. A few years later “The Invaders” (1967 – 1968) aired and took paranoia to a whole new level. During the Viet Nam and Cold Wars, this kind of programming fit right in.
My first opportunity to meet actual abductees occurred in the early 1990s when I attended a MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) convention with a relative who was, at that time, deeply involved in the UFO research world. Interestingly, there were people there who were very angry that their reports were not being taken seriously and that the government was doing nothing to help them. At that time, the book “Communion”, by Whitley Strieber was extremely popular and a central text in the abduction movement. In it Strieber described his own abduction experience. A major researcher and popularizer of alien abduction experiences was John Mack, a psychiatrist at Harvard, who extensively used hypnosis to recover memories of abduction experiences from patients. His credentials helped legitimize the belief in these events, even if his research methods were questioned. (Here is a link to a transcript of a fascinating interview with him on NOVA from the 1990s.) In the 1980s and 1990s, increasing numbers of people reported experiences of alien abduction and these accounts were incorporated into cinematic depictions of alien encounters.
There have been many movie depictions of alien abductions over the years. The above mentioned 1975 made for TV movie was an early example of this. It was followed by many others including “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), “Fire in the Sky” (1993), and “The Fourth Kind” (2014). “Close Encounters” popularized the scale, developed by Allen Hynek in the early 1970s, that listed the various levels of increasing theoretical contact that we could have with aliens. A close encounter of the first kind involves seeing an alien craft in close proximity. An encounter of the second kind leaves some trace such as people being placed in a trance or burn marks being left on the ground by alien technology. An encounter of the third kind involves actual contact with an alien being. Additions have subsequently been made to the scale beyond these three. For example, the fourth kind is alien abduction.
“Close Encounters” had the 1970s New Age feeling of beneficent aliens that could help humans develop to a higher level. “Fire in the Sky”, based on the reported 1975 abduction of Travis Walton, while not a perfect movie, gives one of the most harrowing and “realistic” depictions of a terrifying and overwhelming medical examination that would almost certainly leave the victim with a severe case of PTSD. “The Fourth Kind” despite its flaws was interesting in that it seemed to conflate two of our greatest fears – abduction by aliens and the demonic.
I will state at this point that while I tend to find the falsifiability and Occam’s Razor positions (discussed in the previous post) to be powerful arguments against the objective reality of these events, we cannot entirely rule out the possibility that abduction reports are accurate descriptions of actual events involving aliens. Clearly intelligent people like Strieber and Mack have found evidence that they find compelling enough to argue that these are not simply psychological phenomena. Before considering possible explanations for these experiences I want to address a number of other factors that might impact on how we interpret these reports.
The first thing that I want to make clear is that people who report these experiences are not psychotic and most are not simply advancing a hoax. In fact, going public with these reports can have a negative effect on your standing in most communities. There are, of course, communities of people, often with “New Age” beliefs, who accept these experiences as being objectively real and are supportive of each other, but this is not the typical social environment of most people today. There is risk in sharing one’s abduction story. Second, studies that have been done of the aftereffects of these events report injuries such as cuts and puncture wounds, vision problems such as sensitivity to light and pupil dilation, skin burns, stomach distress such as nausea and diarrhea, balance problems, and dehydration (Appelle, Lynn, Neuman, & Malaktaris, 2014). People have also reported being healed of illnesses and experiencing weight loss. There are a number of frequently reported psychological effects including anxiety and nightmares. Interestingly, despite the often negative aftereffects, most abductees report that they would still choose to have been abducted. This is because many abductees come to see these events as having added meaning and purpose to their lives and they may also feel that they have undergone positive personality changes as a result.
The universe is a very large place, little explored directly by humans, and may be only one aspect of a vastly greater, indeed infinite, multiverse (Green, 2011). We have been systematically observing the universe for the past few thousand years, and only during the last 400 years have we had tools such as the telescope to see much beyond the nearest planets and stars. Since the 1990s vast numbers of planets have been observed around other stars. I think that even with the progress that humans have made, we need to be humble about what we say concerning what exists in the vast expanses of space-time.
The lack of obvious alien visitation, say with a landing by an alien space ship on the White House lawn, has been dubbed the Fermi Paradox after the physicist Enrico Fermi who asked, “Where are the aliens?” He reasoned that there must be many planets in the galaxy that could support alien life, and noted that even at sub-light speeds, over millions of years it would be possible for an advanced civilization to spread throughout the Milky Way. Some of the explanations for why we haven’t met them in an obvious way include: we are the only advanced civilization in the galaxy, other advanced civilizations have wiped themselves out with their own technologies, or they exist but have chosen to not make contact. Of course, for alien abductees, these ideas are absurd because, for them, the reality of alien contact is clear. There is no lack of evidence - they have experienced it themselves.
Other scientists have tried to imagine what far advanced civilizations could potentially do after a long period of exponentially advancing growth in science and technology. The Kardashev Scale was an effort by the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev to use a theoretical scale of energy usage to measure the development of advanced societies. A type 1 civilization would have the ability to use all of the energy and control the events on an entire planet. A type 2 civilization would be able to use the energy resources of an entire solar system. A type 3 civilization would be able to use the output of an entire galaxy. Even more advanced civilizations have been proposed. On this scale, we on earth have not yet reached a type 1 civilization.
If intelligent entities could reach the levels of types 2 and 3, it is easy to see that they could be virtually beyond comprehension to us with our relatively crude technological means. I believe it was the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku who once used the analogy of the ant and the superhighway. If there were a truly advanced civilization capable of spanning the vast distances of the cosmos, then, to us, their activities might be indistinguishable from the workings of nature itself. Consider the ant walking along the edge of a superhighway. It only sees hills and valleys with occasional rocks here and there. It would, we assume, have no comprehension that the thing it was walking on was built by other creatures who possess a type of technology far advanced beyond the tunnels and rooms in the earth it can construct.
How would such advanced alien entities go about contacting us? Would they use things we can recognize such as space ships or medical instruments that we could have fabricated in the 20th Century? More abstract depictions of contact with alien beings have been presented in works such as “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), “Contact” (1997), and “Interstellar” (2011). These show aliens (or possibly our future selves in the case of Interstellar) as vastly more advanced than those using the kind of space ships usually reported in typical alien abduction accounts. On the other hand, these movies also suggest that the aliens might use familiar-seeming props to help us gain some understanding of them. So perhaps, these typically reported space ships and medical instruments are meant to facilitate communication between us and an otherwise incomprehensible intelligence.
At the other end of the scale, according to the rare earth hypothesis, it seems that life of a simple nature may be very common in the universe, while more complex forms may be less so, and intelligence may be very rare indeed, perhaps having happened only once so far. In this case movies such as “Andromeda Strain” (1971), “Alien” (1979), and “The Thing” (1982) might be closer to what would be expected for first contact. In the case of aliens of these kinds, panspermia would be the most likely means of contact. Panspermia is the idea that simple forms of life could spread slowly and accidentally throughout space by being attached to asteroids and comets and would introduce the new life forms to the planets they happen upon. It could also include the deliberate release into space of “instructions” carried on tiny craft or existing objects like asteroids in the form of genetic information that could then assemble more complex life forms once it had reached a hospitable environment.
We have now explored the nature of the alien abduction experience and considered some possible factors relating to the probability that they represent actual contact with alien entities. In the next post I will delve deeper into the possible explanations for them, including sleep phenomena.
Appelle, S., Lynn, S.J., Neuman, L., & Malaktaris, A. (2014). Alien abduction experiences, in Cardena, E, Lynn, S.J., & Krippner, S. (Eds.). (2014). Varieties of Anomalous Experience, Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
Greene, B. (2011). The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. New York: Vintage Books.
