Alien Abductions

Alien Abductions

Have you ever found a bruise on your body and been unable to figure out how it happened? If so, how do you know it wasn’t from an injury sustained when aliens took you from your bedroom at night to study and experiment on you aboard their spaceship? It’s possible. Maybe they wiped the event from your memory. Have you been feeling a little off lately? Does something seem wrong but you can’t quite put your finger on it? Perhaps it will help if you visit a hypnotherapist, maybe one who specializes in recovering lost memories of traumatic events such as alien encounters.

After a few sessions of hypnotherapy, you can clearly recall many things about the night aliens took you away to do unspeakable horrors to your body. You feel a bit better now that you know what happened, but you are still haunted by the memories of your abduction.

This may seem like a weird and unlikely process to most people, but it’s no joke. Some people seem to believe sincerely that something similar to this happened to them, and they carry around a lot of pain and anxiety because of it. Some of their stories include horrifying experiments that sound a lot like torture and even rape. Others involve the harvesting of eggs or sperm and maybe the implantation of fetuses or alien technological devices. The skeptical view of all this, of course, is that no actual aliens were likely involved and it’s more reasonable to think this is probably a collision of imagination, highly questionable mental-health treatment, cultural influence, and the vulnerability of human memory to contamination by suggestion. According to one poll, nearly four million American adults believe they have “encountered bright lights and incurred strange bodily marks indicative of a possible encounter with aliens”.[19] If that is anywhere near accurate, it means a lot of people think they have been close to or were actually snatched by aliens. On top of that, we have to add all those who believe it has happened to other people.

In fairness to people who claim to have been abducted, I think it is important to point out that mental health, intelligence, and education do not seem to have much, if anything, to do with this belief. It’s important to mention this because alien abductees are often the butt of jokes in everything from casual conversations to Hollywood films these days. But be careful. Before you laugh at them, consider the fact that something similar might happen to you. Ever heard of sleep paralysis with hallucinations? This surprisingly common phenomenon may occur in as much as 20 percent of the adult population.[20] Think about this statistic: two out of every ten people. That represents a lot of people. And who knows? You might be next. When we fall asleep, our brains normally will restrict our physical movements so we don’t spend the entire night punching ourselves in the head while dreaming. As we wake up, our brains release our bodies from this state of partial paralysis. But sometimes, for some people, the brain “wakes up” before it frees the body. These people find themselves partially awake but unable to move. Add to that an ongoing dream/nightmare or hallucination, and you have the makings of a confusing and potentially disturbing event.

I have a close friend who has had several of these episodes but without the dramatic backdrop of a nightmare or a hallucination. She says she understands very well how one could easily confuse a dream for reality in that state. She also said she has been able to hear sounds and even smell things while unable to move. Fortunately for her, she has had enough of them to know not to panic and just go back to sleep or ride it out until she fully awakes. Clearly, sleep paralysis is a real phenomenon that would seem to set the stage perfectly for an imagined alien-abduction experience in some minority of people. But where do the specific and often-detailed memories of aliens, spaceships, and rude experiments come from? That is easily explained by clarifying how human memory works.

As Harrison explains in chapter 2 of his book, memory can fool the best of us. It’s just not anything close to a DVR playback system like most people imagine. We remember things by a weird process of constructing stories about things that may or may not have happened in the past. Without conscious consent, our brains serve up memories to us that can feel 100 percent accurate and reliable. But, in fact, they have been edited, trimmed down to reflect what is probably important and useful to us in a given moment. Elements may also be added whether or not they happened at another time in our lives, happened to someone else, or never happened to anyone anywhere. Our memories can also be heavily influenced by input from the stories we hear, the books we read, the movies we watch, and so on. Obviously, a therapist who believes in alien abductions and assumes it happened to a client could probably coax and encourage him or her into conjuring up such a memory.

Does any of this prove that no one has ever been abducted by aliens? Of course not. As strange and unlikely as it may be, it’s still possible. After all, it’s a very big universe. So far as we know, there is nothing impossible about intelligent beings visiting us. And if they did, it’s not unreasonable to think they might grab a few of us to study, much like an entomologist might snatch a few ants in the Amazon for close inspection. However, the absence of strong evidence, coupled with what we know about the ways in which people can come up with false memories, makes it clear that this is a conclusion that can’t be rationally defended.

Finally, stories of creepy home invasions in the middle of the night by weird nonhuman beings are nothing new. The only thing different today is that they park a spaceship on the lawn. The ghosts and goblins of our past seem to have been updated to reflect our high-tech, space-age times. Abduction skeptic Carl Sagan recognized this: “We had demons from ancient Greece, gods who came down and mated with humans, incubi, succubi in the Middle Ages who sexually abused people while they were sleeping. We had fairies. And now we have aliens. To me, it all seems very familiar.”[21]