In a study by Alvin Lawson of California State University, Long Beach, eight subjects, pre-screened to eliminate UFO buffs, were hypnotized by a physician and informed that they had been abducted, brought to a spaceship and examined. With no further prompting, they were asked to describe the experience. Their accounts, most of which were easily elicited, were almost indistinguishable from the accounts that self-described abductees present. True, Lawson had cued his subjects briefly and directly, but in many cases the therapists who routinely deal with alien abductions cue their subjects, some in great detail, others more subtly and indirectly.
The psychiatrist George Ganaway (as related by Lawrence Wright) once proposed to a highly suggestible patient under hypnosis that five hours were missing from her memory of a certain day. When he mentioned a bright light overhead, she promptly told him about UFOs and aliens. When he insisted she had been experimented on, a detailed abduction story emerged. But when she came out of the trance, and examined a video of the session, she recognized that something like a dream had been caught surfacing. Over the next year, though, she repeatedly flashed back to the dream material.
The University of Washington psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has found that unhypnotized subjects can easily be made to believe they saw something they didn’t. In a typical experiment, subjects will view a film of a car accident. In the course of being questioned about what they saw, they’re casually given false information. For example, a stop sign is off-handedly referred to, although there wasn’t one in the film. Many subjects then dutifully recall seeing a stop sign. When the deception is revealed, some vehemently protest, stressing how vividly they remember the sign. The greater the time lag between viewing the film and being given the false information, the more people allow their memories to be tampered with. Loftus argues that ‘memories of an event more closely resemble a story undergoing constant revision than a packet of pristine information’.
There are many other examples, some – a spurious memory of being lost as a child in a shopping mall, for instance – of greater emotional impact. Once the key idea is suggested, the patient often plausibly fleshes out the supporting details. Lucid but wholly false recollections can easily be induced by a few cues and questions, especially in the therapeutic setting. Memory can be contaminated. False memories can be implanted even in minds that do not consider themselves vulnerable and uncritical.
Stephen Ceci of Cornell University, Loftus and their colleagues have found, unsurprisingly, that preschoolers are exceptionally vulnerable to suggestion. The child who, when first asked, correctly denies having caught his hand in a mousetrap later remembers the event in vivid, self-generated detail. When more directly told about ‘some things that happened to you when you were little’, over time they easily enough assent to the implanted memories. Professionals watching videotapes of the children can do no better than chance in distinguishing false memories from true ones. Is there any reason to think that adults are wholly immune to the fallibilities exhibited by children?
President Ronald Reagan, who spent World War Two in Hollywood, vividly described his own role in liberating Nazi concentration camp victims. Living in the film world, he apparently confused a movie he had seen with a reality he had not. On many occasions in his Presidential campaigns, Mr Reagan told an epic story of World War Two courage and sacrifice, an inspiration for all of us. Only it never happened; it was the plot of the movie A Wing and a Prayer – that made quite an impression on me, too, when I saw it at age 9. Many other instances of this sort can be found in Reagan’s public statements. It is not hard to imagine serious public dangers emerging out of instances in which political, military, scientific or religious leaders are unable to distinguish fact from vivid fiction.
In preparing for courtroom testimony, witnesses are coached by their lawyers. Often, they are made to repeat the story over and over again, until they get it ‘right’. Then, on the stand what they remember is the story they’ve been telling in the lawyer’s office. The nuances have been shaded. Or it may no longer correspond, even in its major features, to what really happened. Conveniently, the witnesses may have forgotten that their memories were reprocessed.
These facts are relevant in evaluating the societal effects of advertising and of national propaganda. But here they suggest that on alien abduction matters – where interviews typically take place years after the alleged event – therapists must be very careful that they do not accidentally implant or select the stories they elicit.
Perhaps what we actually remember is a set of memory fragments stitched on to a fabric of our own devising. If we sew cleverly enough, we have made ourselves a memorable story easy to recall. Fragments by themselves, unencumbered by association, are harder to retrieve. The situation is rather like the method of science itself where many isolated data points can be remembered, summarized and explained in the framework of a theory. We then much more easily recall the theory and not the data.
In science the theories are always being reassessed and confronted with new facts; if the facts are seriously discordant -beyond the error bars – the theory may have to be revised. But in everyday life it is very rare that we are confronted with new facts about events of long ago. Our memories are almost never challenged. They can, instead, be frozen in place, no matter how flawed they are, or become a work in continual artistic revision.
More than gods and demons, the best-attested apparitions are those of saints, especially the Virgin Mary in Western Europe from late medieval to modern times. While alien abduction stories have much more the flavour of profane, demonic apparitions, insight into the UFO myth can also be gained from visions described as sacred. Perhaps best known are those of Jeanne d’Arc in France, St Bridget in Sweden, and Girolamo Savonarola in Italy. But more appropriate for our purpose are the apparitions seen by shepherds and peasants and children. In a world plagued by uncertainty and horror, these people longed for contact with the divine. A detailed record of such events in Castile and Catalonia is provided by William A. Christian Jr in his book Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (1981).
In a typical case, a rural woman or child reports encountering a girl or an oddly tiny woman – perhaps three or four feet tall -who reveals herself to be the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. She requests the awestruck witness to go to the village fathers or the local Church authorities and order them to say prayers for the dead, or obey the Commandments, or build a shrine at this very spot in the countryside. If they do not comply, dire penalties are threatened, perhaps the plague. Alternatively, in plague-infested times, Mary promises to cure the disease but only if her request is satisfied.
The witness tries to do as she is told. But when she informs her father or husband or priest, she is ordered to repeat the story to no one; it is mere female foolishness or frivolity or demonic hallucination. So she keeps quiet. Days later she is confronted again by Mary, a little put out that her request has not been honoured.
‘They will not believe me,’ the witness complains. ‘Give me a sign.’ Evidence is needed.
So Mary – who seems to have had no foreknowledge that evidence would have to be provided – provides a sign. The villagers and priests are promptly convinced. The shrine is built. Miraculous cures occur in its vicinity. Pilgrims come from far and wide. Priests are busy. The economy of the region booms. The original witness is appointed keeper of the sacred shrine.
In most of the cases we know of, there was a commission of inquiry, comprising leaders civic and ecclesiastic, who attested to the genuineness of the apparition, despite initial, almost exclusively male, scepticism. But the standards of evidence were not generally high. In one case the testimony of a delirious eight-year-old boy, taken two days before his death from plague, was soberly accepted. Some of these commissions deliberated decades or even a century after the event.
In On the Distinction between True and False Visions, an expert on the subject, Jean Gerson, in around 1400, summarized the criteria for recognizing a credible witness of an apparition: one was the willingness to accept advice from the political and religious hierarchy. Thus anyone seeing a vision disturbing to those in power was ipso facto an unreliable witness, and saints and virgins could be made to say whatever the authorities wanted to hear.
The ‘signs’ allegedly provided by Mary, the evidence offered and considered compelling, included an ordinary candle, a piece of silk, and a magnetic stone; a piece of coloured tile; footprints; the witness’s unusually quick gathering of thistles; a simple wooden cross inserted in the ground; welts and wounds on the witness; and a variety of contortions – a 12-year-old with her hand held funny, or legs folded back, or a closed mouth making her temporarily mute – that are ‘cured’ the moment her story is accepted.