Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

the alien ship in a beam of light (which no one else ever sees, of course), very much as in Star Trek. The 1993 release of the film Fire in the Sky elevated Travis Walton’s tall tale to the silver screen. In addition, there were numerous television programs, both fictional and labeled as nonfiction, that acquainted viewers with the details of what is likely to happen when one gets abducted.

In 1996 the PBS series Nova presented an examination of abduction claims titled “Kidnapped by UFOs?” In one telling sequence, Budd Hopkins goes to Florida to investigate a presumed abduction case involving a young couple and their two children. The wife tells of a late-night experience in which she had what she later interprets as an abduction experience. She is very explicit about how she concluded that she had been abducted. She says couldn’t figure out what had happened to her until, by chance, she read Hopkins’s book Intruders—and then it all “just fit so perfectly” and she contacted Hopkins to ask him to investigate. It’s fascinating to watch him do so as he hypnotizes her and then conducts interviews with her two young children. Using not-too-subtle leading questions and other techniques, he elicits what, for him, is strong evidence that this family has suffered from abductions. It is impossible (at least for me) to describe in words the absurdity of the conclusions that Hopkins draws from his obviously flawed methods, which I think he employs in good faith. The reader who has any interest in this topic should really get a copy of the video and watch it.

In another sequence in “Kidnapped by UFOs?” a woman who had gone undercover to investigate what goes on in John Mack’s UFO abduction support groups reported that before she even met him he had sent her a package of literature about what goes on during an abduction and that it was very obvious from that literature what an abduction experience was supposed to be like. It’s clear from the above that many people who contact Hopkins, as well as other alien abduction gurus, are very familiar with the “script” of an abduction well before they actually meet the guru, and are often hypnotized to obtain more memories. As noted earlier, hypnosis is an excellent means for producing false memories, especially when leading questions are asked of the person under hypnosis and when the hypnotist, a strong authority figure, pressures the person to have particular types of memories. This is the standard operating procedure for obtaining abduction reports via hypnosis.

“Kidnapped by UFOs?” also documents the use of another technique of persuasion—group pressure in the context of group therapy. Hopkins and Mack, at least, run support groups for abduction “survivors.” In a taped sequence of one such group meeting, it was obvious that some group members were pressuring others to accept the “reality” of their memories of the experience. Over time, such group pressure—and the considerable social rewards the group can use to reinforce the acceptance of belief in one’s own abduction experiences—can lead to a powerful belief in their reality.

It seems clear, then, that by far the most parsimonious explanation of the alien abduction memories is that they are vivid false memories created by a combination of variables, including exposure to the alien abduction “script,” presence of hypnopompic experiences, hypnosis of believers in the reality of these experiences, and group pressure from other believers. Of course, not all of these factors will be present in every case. In other words, the “mix” of causative agents will vary from person to person. Not all will have been hypnotized, not all will have been subjected to group pressure, and so on. An entire issue of the journal Psychological Inquiry (Pervin 1996) was devoted to the issue of the psychology behind alien abduction claims. It contains thirteen articles covering the range of explanations for this phenomenon and makes valuable reading. The papers by Clark and Loftus (1996) and Ome et al. (1996) are especially relevant to the notion advanced here that abduction reports are due to false memories created by various psychological processes. Bartholomew and Howard (1998) have also discussed the psychology of alien abduction experiences at some length. Their discussion is especially valuable for the way it shows the similarities between these current experiences and experiences with ghosts, witches, and fairies in earlier times.

Another question that can be asked about the UFO abduction reports is whether those who report such experiences are in some way different from those who do not. In the first edition of this book (Hines 1988), I suggested that those who believe in such experiences might be more fantasy-prone than those who do not. There was some evidence for this view in the results of a study (Slater 1985a, 1985b) of nine abductees, but more recent research has generally not found large differences in factors such as fantasy-proneness and hypnotizability between those who do and do not have abduction experiences (i.e., Spanos et al. 1993; Newman and Baumeister 1996; Orne et al. 1996). Rather, as Orne et al. point out, the degree of hypnotizability and fantasy-proneness found in most normal individuals may suffice to produce these sorts of memories when people are subjected to the amount of social and psychological pressure to which those who publicly espouse such memories have been subjected. In other words, it is not the experiencers who are different from the norm, it is the degree of psychological pressure to which they have been subjected that is different from the norm.

Certainly Budd Hopkins and John Mack are two of the best-known names in the UFO abduction business. But Whitley Strieber’s work also should be discussed. Whitley Strieber is an author of horror fiction whose best-known book, until Communion hit the best-seller lists, was Wolfen (1978), made into a movie in 1980. Communion is the “true story” of Strieber’s encounters with and abduction by some type of alien beings. During his terrifying experience, which began in December 1986, a needle was inserted into his head and an instrument of some sort was inserted into his anus.

Both Klass (1988) and Swords (1987) have critiqued Strieber’s accounts of his experience. Klass’s book is especially valuable, as it covers the entire subject of UFO abductions. Both critiques note that Strieber’s life has been filled with highly unusual and bizarre occurrences. When he was twelve, for example, he was assaulted by a skeleton on a motorcycle; earlier, he had had a threatening encounter with Mr. Peanut. In the early 1970s, he awoke one night and saw a tiny humanoid figure run by him holding a red light. In 1985 he was awakened while staying at his cabin in the Catskills and found the place surrounded by a strange blue light glowing in the fog. In all, Swords lists thirty-three separate highly unusual experiences of this sort reported as fact in Communion and finds no independent confirmation for fully thirty of them. For three experiences, the “confirmations” confirm only the most mundane aspects of the event. For example, Strieber reported that in 1982 he had a series of encounters with a mysterious white figure. A baby-sitter confirmed seeing a youngster in a white sheet outside a window. Strieber’s wife, Anne, “clearly says that she didn’t see anyone or anything, just was poked while asleep; and that W.S. first started talking about little white things. All her subsequent ‘description’ of a being was in response to imagining what it might look like” (p. 5). Strieber uses as further confirmation of some of the events he claims to have experienced the testimony of his son, born in 1979 and seven years old in 1986. Swords properly excludes the child’s comments from the class of confirming evidence “because of the powerful potential for idea suggestibility which exists” between father and son (p. 5).

Strieber is clearly obsessed with intruders, an obsession that apparently began long before he had his encounter with the aliens in 1986. He admits that late at night he often searches for possible intruders by “opening closets and looking under beds” and “especially [in] corners and crannies. I always looked down low in the closets, seeking something small” (Strieber 1987a, p. 101). He also has elaborate burglar alarms in both his New York City apartment and his cabin in the mountains.

Klass (1988) shows that Strieber has a history of telling stories he claims to be true but which turn out to be false. In an interview published in Winter’s (1985) book of interviews with famous horror fiction writers, Strieber described in graphic detail being present and nearly shot in 1966 when Charles Whitman killed many people in his sniper attack from the Texas Tower on the campus of the University of Texas in Austin. In Communion, however, Strieber admits that he was not present at the tragedy. Sprinkled throughout the book are other recantations of stories Strieber previously held out as true.

From reading Communion and hearing Strieber on several television and radio talk shows, I believe that he really believes that the encounters he says he had with the aliens were real. He is, however, not at all sure that the creatures are “only” members of an advanced civilization. He thinks they represent something even stranger, perhaps “mankind’s first encounter with a quantum reality in the new macrocosm” (Strieber 1987b, p. 8). He also feels that “the abduction experience is primarily a mystical experience” and that following the experience “spiritual and paranormal life events” become more common (p. 7).

THE END OF THE WORLD AND THE HOLLOW EARTH