You may not remember the incident right away. Instead you might simply find some period of time unaccountably missing, and puzzle over it. Because all this seems so weird, you’re a little concerned about your sanity. Naturally you’re reluctant to talk about it. At the same time the experience is so disturbing that it’s hard to keep it bottled up. It all pours out when you hear of similar accounts, or when you’re under hypnosis with a sympathetic therapist, or even when you see a picture of an ‘alien’ in one of the many popular magazines, books, and TV ‘specials’ on UFOs. Some people say they can recall such experiences from early childhood. Their own children, they think, are now being abducted by aliens. It runs in families. It’s a eugenics programme, they say, to improve the human breeding stock. Maybe aliens have always done this. Maybe, some say, that’s where humans came from in the first place.
As revealed by repeated polls over the years, most Americans believe that we’re being visited by extraterrestrial beings in UFOs. In a 1992 Roper opinion poll of nearly 6,000 American adults -especially commissioned by those who accept the alien abduction story at face value – 18 per cent reported sometimes waking up paralysed, aware of one or more strange beings in the room. About 13 per cent reported odd episodes of missing time, and 10 per cent claimed to have flown through the air without mechanical assistance. From nothing more than these results, the poll’s sponsors conclude that two per cent of all Americans have been abducted, many repeatedly, by beings from other worlds. The question of whether respondents had been abducted by aliens was never actually put to them.
If we believed the conclusion drawn by those who bankrolled and interpreted the results of this poll, and if aliens are not partial to Americans, then the number for the whole planet would be more than a hundred million people. This means an abduction every few seconds over the past few decades. It’s surprising more of the neighbours haven’t noticed.
What’s going on here? When you talk with self-described abductees, most seem very sincere, although caught in the grip of powerful emotions. Some psychiatrists who’ve examined them say they find no more evidence of psychopathology in them than in the rest of us. Why should anyone claim to have been abducted by alien creatures if it never happened? Could all these people be mistaken, or lying, or hallucinating the same (or a similar) story? Or is it arrogant and contemptuous even to question the good sense of so many?
On the other hand, could there really be a massive alien invasion; repugnant medical procedures performed on millions of innocent men, women and children; humans apparently used as breeding stock over many decades – and all this not generally known and dealt with by responsible media, physicians, scientists and the governments sworn to protect the lives and well-being of their citizens? Or, as many have suggested, is there a massive government conspiracy to keep the citizens from the truth?
Why should beings so advanced in physics and engineering –crossing vast interstellar distances, walking like ghosts through walls – be so backward when it comes to biology? Why, if the aliens are trying to do their business in secret, wouldn’t they perfectly expunge all memories of the abductions? Too hard for them to do? Why are the examining instruments macroscopic and so reminiscent of what can be found at the neighbourhood medical clinic? Why go to all the trouble of repeated sexual encounters between aliens and humans? Why not steal a few egg and sperm cells, read the full genetic code, and then manufacture as many copies as you like with whatever genetic variations happen to suit your fancy? Even we humans, who as yet cannot quickly cross interstellar space or slither through walls, are able to clone cells.
How could humans be the result of an alien breeding programme if we share 99.6 per cent of our active genes with the chimpanzees? We’re more closely related to chimps than rats are to mice. The preoccupation with reproduction in these accounts raises a warning flag, especially considering the uneasy balance between sexual impulse and societal repression that has always characterized the human condition, and the fact that we live in a time fraught with numerous ghastly accounts, both true and false, of childhood sexual abuse.
Contrary to many media reports,* the Roper pollsters and those who wrote the ‘official’ report never asked whether their subjects had been abducted by aliens. They deduced it: those who’ve ever awakened with strange presences around them, who’ve ever unaccountably seemed to fly through the air, and so on, have therefore been abducted. The pollsters didn’t even check to see if sensing presences, flying etc. were part of the same or separate incidents. Their conclusion – that millions of Americans have been so abducted – is spurious, based on careless experimental design.
[* For example, the 4 September 1994 Publisher’s Weekly: ‘According to a Gallup [sic] poll, more than three million Americans believe they have been abducted by aliens.’]
Still, at least hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, claiming they have been abducted, have sought out sympathetic therapists or joined abductee support groups. Others may have similar complaints but, fearing ridicule or the stigma of mental illness, have refrained from speaking up or getting help.
Some abductees are also said to be reluctant to talk for fear of hostility and rejection by hardline sceptics (although many willingly appear on radio and TV talk shows). Their diffidence supposedly extends even to audiences that already believe in alien abductions. But maybe there’s another reason: might the subjects themselves be unsure – at least at first, at least before many retellings of their story – whether it was an external event they are remembering or a state of mind?
‘One unerring mark of the love of truth,’ wrote John Locke in 1690, ‘is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.’ On the matter of UFOs, how strong are the proofs?
The phrase ‘flying saucer’ was coined when I was entering high school. The newspapers were full of stories about ships from beyond in the skies of Earth. It seemed pretty believable to me. There were lots of other stars, at least some of which probably had planetary systems like ours. Many stars were as old or older than the Sun, so there was plenty of time for intelligent life to evolve. Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had just flown a two-stage rocket high above the Earth. Clearly we were on our way to the Moon and the planets. Why shouldn’t other, older, wiser beings be able to travel from their star to ours? Why not?
This was only a few years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maybe the UFO occupants were worried about us, and sought to help us. Or maybe they wanted to make sure that we and our nuclear weapons didn’t come and bother them. Many people seemed to see flying saucers – sober pillars of the community, police officers, commercial airplane pilots, military personnel. And apart from some harumphs and giggles, I couldn’t find any counterarguments. How could all these eyewitnesses be mistaken? What’s more, the saucers had been picked up on radar, and pictures had been taken of them. You could see the photos in newspapers and glossy magazines. There were even reports about crashed flying saucers and little alien bodies with perfect teeth stiffly languishing in Air Force freezers in the southwest.
The prevailing climate was summarized in Life magazine a few years later, in these words: ‘These objects cannot be explained by present science as natural phenomena – but solely as artificial devices, created and operated by a high intelligence.’ Nothing ‘known or projected on Earth could account for the performance of these devices.’
And yet not a single adult I knew was preoccupied with UFOs. I couldn’t figure out why not. Instead they were worried about Communist China, nuclear weapons, McCarthyism and the rent. I wondered if they had their priorities straight.
In college, in the early 1950s, I began to learn a little about how science works, the secrets of its great success, how rigorous the standards of evidence must be if we are really to know something is true, how many false starts and dead ends have plagued human thinking, how our biases can colour our interpretation of the evidence, and how often belief systems widely held and supported by the political, religious and academic hierarchies turn out to be not just slightly in error, but grotesquely wrong.
I came upon a book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds written by Charles Mackay in 1841 and still in print. In it could be found the histories of boom-and-bust economic crazes, including the Mississippi and South Sea ‘Bubbles’ and the extravagant run on Dutch tulips, scams that bamboozled the wealthy and titled of many nations; a legion of alchemists, including the poignant tale of Mr Kelly and Dr Dee (and Dee’s 8-year-old son Arthur, impressed by his desperate father into communicating with the spirit world by peering into a crystal); dolorous accounts of unfulfilled prophecy, divination and fortune-telling; the persecution of witches; haunted houses; ‘popular admiration of great thieves’; and much else. Entertainingly portrayed was the Count of St Germain, who dined out on the cheerful pretension that he was centuries old if not actually immortal. (When, at dinner, incredulity was expressed at his recounting of his conversations with Richard the Lion-Heart, he turned to his man-servant for confirmation. ‘You forget, sir,’ was the reply, ‘I have been only five hundred years in your service.’ ‘Ah, true,’ said St Germain, ‘it was a little before your time.’)