Witches, devils, and UFOs

Originally published 1 June 1992

I’m begin­ning to feel left out.

You’d think I’d be the sort of fel­low the aliens would go for. As an enthu­si­as­tic ama­teur astronomer, I spend a lot of time under the night sky. Almost every clear night I’m out there scan­ning the skies. But I’ve nev­er seen a UFO, much less been abduct­ed by one. Why are they avoid­ing me?

Accord­ing to a sur­vey of 6,000 adult Amer­i­cans by the Rop­er Orga­ni­za­tion, approx­i­mate­ly one out of every 50 adult Amer­i­cans have expe­ri­enced at least four of the five char­ac­ter­is­tics of a typ­i­cal UFO abduction:

• Wak­ing par­a­lyzed with the sense of a strange fig­ure or pres­ence in the room.
• Expe­ri­enc­ing an hour or more of “miss­ing time.”
• Hav­ing a feel­ing of actu­al­ly fly­ing through the air with­out know­ing how or why.
• See­ing unusu­al lights or balls of light in a room with­out under­stand­ing what has caused them.
• Dis­cov­er­ing puz­zling scars on one’s body, with­out remem­ber­ing how or why they were acquired.

The Fund for UFO Research inter­prets these results to mean that upwards of 3.7 mil­lion Amer­i­cans may have been abduct­ed by extrater­res­tri­als. The Fund’s newslet­ter quotes Dr. John E. Mack, Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chi­a­try at the Har­vard Med­ical School, to the effect that the sur­vey “sug­gests that hun­dreds of thou­sands, if not mil­lions of Amer­i­can men, women, and chil­dren may have expe­ri­enced UFO abduc­tions, or abduc­tion relat­ed phenomena.”

Mack is a co-orga­niz­er of a by-invi­ta­tion-only con­fer­ence on the abduc­tion phe­nom­e­non, to be held at MIT lat­er this month [in 1992]. Among the 150 or so par­tic­i­pants invit­ed will be main­stream schol­ars who take abduc­tion reports seri­ous­ly. Some of them think an alien race may be inter­breed­ing with humans, or tam­per­ing with our genes.

There’s no point in rehash­ing here the old UFO debate. For almost half a cen­tu­ry, believ­ers have insist­ed that UFOs are extrater­res­tri­al, and that humans have been forcibly tak­en aboard space­ships for phys­i­cal exam­i­na­tions and sex­u­al encoun­ters. Debunkers have just as vig­or­ous­ly dis­missed such reports as frauds, delu­sions, or mass hysteria.

What is new in recent years is the appear­ance of a third slant to the debate, typ­i­fied by books such as Kei­th Thomp­son’s Angels and Aliens: UFO’s and the Myth­ic Imag­i­na­tion, and David Jacob’s Secret Life: First­hand Accounts of UFO Abduc­tions. Peo­ple in this camp tend to avoid the stark polar­i­ties of the tra­di­tion­al debate. 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 in to this sort of thing. If a per­son tes­ti­fies (often under hyp­no­sis) that she was removed from her home, sub­ject­ed to phys­i­cal exam­i­na­tion on a table aboard an alien craft, and per­haps tam­pered with sex­u­al­ly and/or genet­i­cal­ly, then I’m inclined to say either it hap­pened or it didn’t.

Abduc­tion researchers have a more slip­pery notion of real­i­ty. 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 on the cat­e­gories of old-fash­ioned science?

And why should an old-fash­ioned skep­tic, such as myself, believe this appar­ent non­sense? Well, because of the con­sis­ten­cy of abduc­tion reports — most vic­tims describe remark­ably sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences — and because many abductees have marks and scars on their bod­ies of unknown ori­gin. Or so say many abduc­tion researchers.

But per­haps there’s anoth­er expla­na­tion for the so-called abduc­tion expe­ri­ence, some­thing less dra­mat­ic than bug-eyed, lit­tle gray men in space ships. Con­sid­er the fol­low­ing par­al­lels between the abduc­tion phe­nom­e­non and the witch­craft hys­te­ria of the late Mid­dle Ages and Renaissance:

• The inves­ti­ga­tors of the phe­nom­e­non are most­ly male.
• The vic­tims are most­ly female, and most­ly young.
• The vic­tims are often wak­ened in the night and sense 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).

Few of us believe in witch­es any­more, or in night­time com­merce with dev­ils. We are inclined to view the witch craze of ear­li­er cen­turies as an aber­rant psy­cho-social phe­nom­e­non, brought to a time­ly end by the appli­ca­tion of old-fash­ioned science.

The schol­ars who will gath­er at MIT have an oppor­tu­ni­ty to make a worth­while con­tri­bu­tion to knowl­edge — if they focus on the real sub­ject. The so-called abduc­tion phe­nom­e­non is telling us more about our­selves than about bug-eyed humanoids in fly­ing saucers.