Abducting the truth

Originally published 15 January 2006

Susan Clan­cy, a post­doc­tor­al fel­low in psy­chol­o­gy at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty, has just pub­lished a book called Abduct­ed: How Peo­ple Come to Believe They Were Kid­napped by Aliens. Her com­pas­sion­ate but skep­ti­cal analy­sis is espe­cial­ly to be wel­comed since until now the most noto­ri­ous account of alien abduc­tions came from anoth­er Har­vard aca­d­e­m­ic, the late and lament­ed John Mack, Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chi­a­try at the Har­vard Med­ical School and Pulitzer Prizewin­ning biog­ra­ph­er of T. H. Lawrence.

In Mack­’s 1992 book, Abduc­tion: Human Encoun­ters With Aliens, he claimed that “hun­dreds of thou­sands, if not mil­lions of Amer­i­can men, women, and chil­dren may have expe­ri­enced UFO abduc­tions, or abduc­tion relat­ed phe­nom­e­na.” He based his belief on more than a hun­dred inter­views, often involv­ing hyp­no­sis, with men and women who “remem­bered” hav­ing been tak­en aboard space craft for bizarre sex­u­al exper­i­ments, involv­ing sperm-tak­ing, arti­fi­cial insem­i­na­tion, removal of embryos, sur­gi­cal implan­ta­tion of “tag­ging” devices, and probes of body cavities.

Need­less to say, Mack­’s book was some­thing of an embar­rass­ment to his Har­vard col­leagues. At the time, I wrote a Boston Globe col­umn on the book point­ing out the strik­ing par­al­lels between the alien abduc­tion phe­nom­e­non and the witch­craft hys­te­ria of the late Mid­dle Ages:

• the inves­ti­ga­tors of the phe­nom­e­non are most­ly male.
• the vic­tims are most­ly female, and most­ly young.
• the vic­tims are often wak­ened in the night with a sense of strange pres­ences in the room. They are tak­en away through the ceil­ing and par­tic­i­pate in expe­ri­ences of a sex­u­al nature.
• the tes­ti­mo­ny of the vic­tims about their expe­ri­ences shows remark­able con­sis­ten­cy. Hand­books are writ­ten describ­ing typ­i­cal expe­ri­ences. The con­sis­ten­cy of the tes­ti­mo­ny is tak­en as evi­dence that the phe­nom­e­non is objec­tive­ly real.
• vic­tims are some­times afflict­ed with puz­zling scars, injuries or pains.
• the phys­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics of the abduc­tors, their pre­sumed place of ori­gin, and their mode of trans­port are con­sis­tent with the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion of the time.
• the inves­ti­ga­tors par­tic­i­pate in elic­it­ing tes­ti­mo­ny from the vic­tims (tor­ture, then; hyp­no­sis, now).

It seemed to me that these sim­i­lar­i­ties were suf­fi­cient to sug­gest that the alien abduc­tion phe­nom­e­non has a psy­cho­log­i­cal expla­na­tion, unless, of course, one wants to con­clude that traf­fic with the Dev­il is real or that aliens vis­it­ed Earth in the late-Mid­dle Ages. Now Clan­cy has come along to but­tress the psy­cho­log­i­cal hypoth­e­sis with sol­id research and cogent pro­fes­sion­al analy­sis. In par­tic­u­lar, she swipes away at the sup­posed real­i­ty of alien abduc­tion with Occam’s razor, show­ing that there are less far-fetched expla­na­tions for the recov­ered mem­o­ries of the abductees.

Peo­ple in Mack­’s camp avoid par­si­mo­nious expla­na­tions, as they reject stark polar­i­ties of phys­i­cal real­i­ty ver­sus delu­sion, fraud or wish­ful think­ing. They reject, in Mack­’s words, “bound­aries between the mate­r­i­al and the psy­cho­log­i­cal, the myth­ic and the real, as well as dis­tinc­tions between sym­bol­ic and lit­er­al, and even…the polar­i­ties of true ver­sus hoax.” It’s dif­fi­cult to get one’s teeth into this sort of thing. If a per­son tes­ti­fies (often under hyp­no­sis) that she was removed from her home, sub­ject­ed to phys­i­cal exam­i­na­tion on a stain­less-steel table aboard an alien craft, and per­haps tam­pered with sex­u­al­ly and/or genet­i­cal­ly, then a sci­en­tif­ic real­ist would say it either hap­pened or it did­n’t. Abduc­tion enthu­si­asts have a more slip­pery notion of truth. Some­thing is going on, they say, that we can’t hope to under­stand, involv­ing tech­nolo­gies and real­i­ties beyond our wildest imag­in­ings. If the abduc­tors can trav­el here from anoth­er plan­et, pass through walls, and ren­der their vic­tims invis­i­ble, then who are we to insist upon the knowl­edge cat­e­gories of mere­ly human science?

When my Globe col­umn appeared in mid-1992, John Mack tele­phoned and we had a chat. He was fun to talk to — thought­ful, intel­li­gent and sin­cere. I liked him imme­di­ate­ly, and did­n’t doubt for a moment his earnest con­vic­tion that he was help­ing his patients by tak­ing seri­ous­ly their reports of alien encoun­ters. Of course, nei­ther of us con­vinced the oth­er of the cor­rect­ness of our views. Some weeks after our chat, a friend gave me an audio tape of one of Mack­’s pub­lic lec­tures in which he referred to our tele­phone con­ver­sa­tion, then added: “Final­ly, in exas­per­a­tion, I said to him — Look, Chet. A UFO could land on Boston Com­mon. Chan­nel 5, Chan­nel 7, and Chan­nel 4 could all have films on the night­ly news to show us. The Boston Globe, the Boston Her­ald could have big arti­cles about it, and you still would­n’t believe, would you?’ And Chet said, ‘No, I would­n’t.’ ” Big laugh from Mack­’s audience.

I don’t remem­ber the details of our tele­phone con­ver­sa­tion, but what Mack said is a fair rep­re­sen­ta­tion of my views. I would­n’t want to fall into what biol­o­gist Richard Dawkins calls “the Argu­ment from Per­son­al Increduli­ty”: If it seems impos­si­ble to me, it must not be true. Any­thing, even abduc­tion by aliens, is pos­si­ble. How­ev­er, the arrival of a UFO from space would be an event so far beyond our nor­mal expe­ri­ence that any sen­si­ble per­son should ask for com­pelling, irrefutable evi­dence. After all, there are oth­er pos­si­ble expla­na­tions for TV and news­pa­per reports of a Boston Com­mon land­ing: an April’s fool’s joke, a hoax, an episode of mass hys­te­ria. I’d want to go to the Com­mon and see the ship with my own eyes. Or, fail­ing that, I would want reli­ably-doc­u­ment­ed eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mo­ny from skep­tics, not elicit­ed under hyp­no­sis. I would want mate­r­i­al evi­dence: close-up pho­tographs tak­en by cre­den­tialed news pho­tog­ra­phers, space­ship arti­facts, a few of those “tag­ging” devices removed from the bod­ies of abductees by skep­ti­cal doc­tors, and so on. As Carl Sagan has said, extra­or­di­nary claims require extra­or­di­nary evidence.

Review­ing Susan Clan­cy’s book in Sci­ence, Stu­art Vyse, a psy­chol­o­gist at Con­necti­cut Col­lege, writes: “Clan­cy nev­er los­es sight of the seri­ous ques­tions raised by the alien abduc­tion phe­nom­e­non, nor does she waver in her respect for the abductees. Hav­ing con­clud­ed that these peo­ple are not dis­mis­si­ble as igno­rant or crazy, she is left with a more unset­tling truth: under the right cir­cum­stances, nor­mal peo­ple can come to hold very bizarre beliefs. Fur­ther­more, the imag­ined expe­ri­ence of being kid­napped by aliens, while trau­mat­ic and fright­en­ing, often seemed to pro­vide Clan­cy’s abductees with a kind of spir­i­tu­al mean­ing they had not found else­where. Unlike peo­ple who recov­er mem­o­ries of sex­u­al abuse, many alien abductees said that, giv­en the choice, they would still want to be abducted.”

As read­ers of my book Skep­tics and True Believ­ers know, this sto­ry has an amus­ing epi­logue. I end­ed a 1994 Globe col­umn on John Mack and alien abduc­tions with this state­ment: “Tell you what, John. Pass the word through your abductee con­tacts. I’ll be wait­ing on the col­lege quad at mid­night a week from tonight. I vol­un­teer myself for alien abduc­tion exper­i­ments. I doubt if any­one will show up to spir­it me away — but I’m pre­pared to be aston­ished.” The result was pre­dictable, and I should have antic­i­pat­ed it. Almost imme­di­ate­ly after the col­umn appeared, signs went up all over my col­lege cam­pus: “See Ray­mo abduct­ed by aliens! On the quad. Mid­night, Mon­day, April 18.” On the appoint­ed night, a thou­sand high-spir­it­ed, spring-fevered stu­dents gath­ered on the quad, many of them in alien cos­tume (con­sum­ing dozens of rolls of alu­minum foil). A land­ing area had been roped off. The col­lege radio sta­tion had set up a spe­cial booth and was blar­ing Star Wars theme music into space. Reporters from the local news­pa­pers had been alert­ed and were on hand. I could­n’t stay at home. So I joined the throng, with an overnight bag con­tain­ing a volu­mi­nous (ersatz) sperm sam­ple and a fresh change of under­wear. At mid­night, a thou­sand voic­es, many of them cheer­i­ly ine­bri­at­ed, count­ed down the moment of truth. A rous­ing good time was had by all. I wish John Mack had been there; I think he would have had a good time too. The aliens did­n’t show.