Alien Abduction

This is another weird one which is near the top of abuses of hypnotherapy. Can there be such thing as alien abduction? I doubt it, but it is impossible to prove the lack of existence of anything. I cannot prove that the cow did not jump over the moon. I can categorically claim that knowing what we know about the laws of nature, it is extremely unlikely that the said cow performed such feats of space travel.

I wish to give three personal stories before I actually write about this:

  1. Many, many years ago, (in the ninteen-fifties before the flight of the Sputnik) my aunt told me a story of when she was eight of having seen some fairies or angels. In Iran where I come from, often we would sleep outside in the summer time to keep cool. My grandfather's house had a large garden of a few acres. My aunt told me that one night she woke up and she saw this bright pink light above her and she saw it float around the garden. My aunt continued that as she stared at the light transfixed, the light approached her.  It was a pink sphere about the size of a basketball. She knew this was some form of an angel or a fairy and felt extremely elated.  Later on in 1975 (after the moon landings) she repeated exactly the same story with one major change. The facts of the story did not change. However, her interpretation of what she saw changed radically.  This time the pink sphere was a flying saucer or UFO. The point is that we have experienced nocturnal lights forever. We used to call them fairies, angels or even demons when that was our perceptual milieu and now they have become UFOs.
  2. I have mentioned somewhere else that I first experienced hypnosis thanks to Dr. Stephen Black of London. A few years after first meeting Dr. Black, I was watching a TV program on BBC (I was living in England at the time) on people who had seen UFOs. One of the scientists interviewed in the program was this same psychiatrist, Dr. Black. He talked about a theory that he had about people who observed UFOs. He said that like C.G. Jung, he thought UFOs were psychic phenomena not actual objective physical machines. He tested five people who had claimed to have seen UFOs. By Dr. Black's own account less than five percent of the population are deep trance subjects and yet every single one of the people who had observed a UFO was tested to be a deep trance subject. A quick calculation puts the probability of this happening by chance one in three in ten million. I remember another aspect of this program. They had twenty or thirty people in a darkened room and then shined a point light at one wall. There is a well- known visual phenomenon that when you look at a point light in a totally dark room the light appears to move. This is caused by the natural movements of the eyes. In normal condition the visual system of the brain compensates for the movements of the eyes and the visual field remains stationery even though we move our heads and bodies and eyes. But in the darkened room there are no points of reference for the brain to compensate for the movements, so the points appear to move. It is as though a camcorder has the anti-shake mode turned off. Now this is the interesting part of the experiment. They had the people in the room shout aloud where the point was moving. In the beginning there was chaos and bedlam as some would say, "Left," others, "Right," "Up," "Down," and so on. However, soon the people's minds became synchronized and everyone would say in unison, "left, left, up, down..." And then there were "Ooohs...," and "Aaahs..." as everyone was fascinated by the fact that the light appeared to move in the same direction for all. In the program this was given as an explanation of many people mistaking Venus or another heavenly body for a flying saucer.
  3. I recently saw another TV program about a natural physiological phenomenon when one's breath stops while dreaming and one wakes up in the middle of the night imagining that ghosts or something similar have been pressing down on one's chest. I know I have experienced this a few times and immediately after waking up I would be exceptionally scared, but in a little while would calm down. In this TV program they mentioned that this sleep phenomenon was thought of as devils and incubi and succubi attacking one in the middle of the night. They showed old paintings which had such supernatural beings typically attacking young women (but then most artists in those days being men had female models). These paintings were to a certain extent reminiscent of the scenes described by people who had been abducted by aliens. The implication of the program was that most, if not all, reports of alien abductions were caused by this phenomenon.

All three of the above stories tell me that the UFO phenomenon has existed since time immemorial. The chances are that this is a psychic (subjective experience). However, as a true skeptic I am even ready to admit the slight chance that some of these phenomena may be caused by external objects. The point is that our interpretation (like my aunt's) has changed because of our technology .

Now, finally to hypnosis and the alien abduction phenomenon. As I have mentioned in other articles: there is a very little line between elicitation of memory (bringing out real objective memories) and installation of false memories. This leads to the well know false memory syndrome.

The modern alien abduction story appears to have started with the Betty and Barney Hill story. The Hills claim to have been abducted by aliens on September 19, 1961. Betty first "remembered" her abduction during a series of nightmares. Later the Hills recalled the most vivid version of their story under hypnosis.

Like the Near Death Experience (NDE) there is a generic abduction experience:

If the phenomenon is psychic (subjective) and is caused by sleep paralysis, it makes sense that most people who experience it as alien abduction (rather than my own where I felt a disembodied entity pressing down on my chest) and then have amnesia for what they felt, end up with similar experiences which are then discovered by "hypnotists" or other diggers of "truth."

For more information see.