02-Goode-45291.qxd 7/2/2007 12:21 PM Page 33 PART 2 BELIEVING THAT ONE HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED BY EXTRATERRESTRIALS 33 02-Goode-45291.qxd 7/2/2007 12:21 PM Page 34 BEING ABDUCTED BY ALIENS AS A DEVIANT BELIEF An Introduction married man claims to have two children with an alien being.“I know they’re out there, A and they know who I am.”His wife is “confused, angry, and alienated.”All of a sudden, she says,her husband “goes from being a normal guy...to being...well...kind ofnutty, I guess.I don’t believe him,but I don’t disbelieve him either....Would things have been dif- ferent if we’d been able to have kids?”she asks herself.“Basically,I deal with it by trying not to think about it too much”(Clancy, 2005, p. 2). The first widely publicized account of an extraterrestrial kidnapping was reported in the 1960s by Betty and Barney Hill. By the 1990s, a public opinion poll, conducted by the Roper organization, indicated that 3.7 million Americans believe that they have been abducted by space aliens (Hopkins, Jacobs, & Westrum, 1991). In the 1990s, Harvard psychiatrist John Mack (1995) lent academic respectability to such reports by arguing that he believed these claims to be true. The accounts, ranging from the look of the creatures to what they do with abductees, have by now become so standardized as to be eerily predictable. What makes the claim of having been kidnapped by aliens a form of deviance? Mack’s (1995) support of such claims produced stunned incredulity in his colleagues. Clearly, his endorsement of extraterrestrial kidnappings was deviant in the academic and psychiatric fra- ternity.The Harvard Medical School formed a committee, which spent over a year investigat- ing Mack’s research on abductees, eventually concluding that Mack had the right to reach his own conclusions on the matter.Still,academically respectable topics do not attract such skep- ticism; his colleagues wondered why a Harvard psychiatrist, a Pulitzer Prize winner, a physi- cian at the pinnacle of his career would make such an unbelievable claim.Indeed,most people who believe they have experienced an abduction are reluctant to come forward and make what is clearly a deviant assertion. They know that it will be greeted by ridicule and stigma. And yet,in spite of the ridicule and the stigma,the skepticism and the incredulity,such claims are made and believed—and in abundance.What’s behind them? What leads people to believe and make such an assertion? At first glance, the claim of alien abductions does not seem outlandish. Most scientists— the late Carl Sagan perhaps most well-known among them—believe that extraterrestrial life exists somewhere in the universe.With billions of galaxies, says Sagan, each of which contains billions of stars, it is practically a certainty that at least one planet out there harbors some 34 02-Goode-45291.qxd 7/2/2007 12:21 PM Page 35 Being Abducted by Aliens as a Deviant Belief 35 Photo 2.1 Roswell UFO Enigma Museum. Many Americans believe that a space ship with extraterrestrials aboard crashed in 1947 in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico.Actually, the available evidence indicates an Earthly origin for the debris, but the unofficial myth is more appealing—and more plausible—to much of the public. SOURCE: Reprinted with permission from Douglas Curran. form of intelligent life.Polls indicate that nearly half of the American public believes that alien space ships have visited the Earth (see Photo 2.1).Why, then, is the claim of alien abduction so strange? Scientists are suspicious, skeptical, or dismissive of alien abduction tales because the evidence supporting such assertions is entirely anecdotal. What scientists refer to as “hard” data—physical evidence of any kind,artifacts,documents,anything that investigators can lay their hands on and analyze—is entirely lacking.In fact,according to Dr.Mack (1995),to insist on such evidence represents a bias in favor of “the physical laws set forth by Western science” (p. 17). The people he interviewed claimed that the extraterrestrials (ETs) they observed and interacted with were able to transcend the laws of nature: They passed through solid objects, used beams of light as energy sources, and performed mind-to-mind telepathic communica- tion. Moreover, these aliens caused bodily transformations (such as scars and pregnancy and birth) that they then caused to disappear altogether (pp. 14–36). Clearly, given such assump- tions, to call for physical evidence under such circumstances is futile. The fact is, claims of 02-Goode-45291.qxd 7/2/2007 12:21 PM Page 36 36 PART 2 BELIEF IN KIDNAPPING BY EXTRATERRESTRIALS extraterrestrial kidnappings lie well outside the mainstream, as the reception to Dr. Mack’s support of them indicates.And while scientists say they are dismissive of claims of first-hand ET contact because such assertions lack systematic, physical evidence, supporters of these claims argue that their assertions are dismissed out of hand because of social and cultural biases. Such assertions mark someone off as odd, eccentric, strange, even bizarre, a person who is likely to draw ridicule and stigma—someone whose stories are not to be trusted. All available studies of abduction claimants indicate that these people are not mentally disordered. They are, in fact, as psychologically “normal” as you and I. And yet, they make claims that,in the absence of material evidence,are almost certainly false.How do perfectly normal people come to believe they were kidnapped by aliens? And how do they construct their stories? Why are these stories so invariant,so remarkably consistent with one another? What are the basic elements of such claims, the common themes, the justifications, the arguments? And what constitutes evidence to back up such claims? What satisfies these claimants that their stories are true? How do they come to accept as true what is almost cer- tainly false? In her book Abducted, Harvard psychologist Susan Clancy (2005) has interviewed and studied hundreds of people who believe they were abducted by extraterrestrials. They are aware of, and dismiss, explanations that attribute their beliefs to sleep paralysis, hypnosis, and suggestibility from science fiction films and television programs.They know their abduc- tion beliefs are true because they experienced them as real. And how else, they ask, could so many others have had the same experiences? The many accounts from many and varied sources tell the same story: Intelligent creatures from another planet snatched them up, examined them, probed and poked at them, even subjected some of them to unusual sexual experiences.What’s behind such experiences? How can so many people experience something that almost certainly never happened? In this section,Christopher Bader provides an overview and history of the alien contactee/ abductee phenomenon, emphasizing the fact that it has evolved as a subculture with its own vocabulary and beliefs.Stephanie Kelley-Romano examines the contactee/abductee phenom- enon from the point of mythology, emphasizing the sources of its appeal to believers. And while not a personal account, Susan Clancy’s article asks the basic question every skeptic raises:“How do people come to believe they were abducted by aliens?”As she says, she takes alien abduction accounts seriously, but she does not believe them because they lack physical documentation. Clancy (2005) argues that the belief that one has been abducted results from a combination of a phenomenon called sleep paralysis and its accompanying “night terror” and culturally available explanations pointing to alien abduction.“At other times and other places in the world,”says Clancy,“such night terrors have been interpreted as Satan, demons, witches, dragons, vampires, large dogs, and angels and erect gorgons. Today, it’s extraterres- trials”(p. 49). The belief that one has been abducted is likely to be met with derision by most Americans; it is, in other words, a form of deviance. Still, sociology demands an understanding of such a belief. Perhaps, however, nonbelievers will never find satisfying any answer to the question, “How do normal people come to believe that they were abducted by aliens?” 02-Goode-45291.qxd 7/2/2007 12:21 PM Page 37 Alien Attraction 37 REFERENCES Clancy, S. A. (2005). Abducted: How people come to believe they were kidnapped by aliens. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hopkins, B., Jacobs, D. M., & Westrum, R. (1991). Unusual personal experience: An analysis of the data from three national surveys. Las Vegas, NV: Bigelow Holding Company. Mack, J. (1995). Abduction: Human encounters with aliens. New York: Ballantine Books. Alien Attraction The Subculture of UFO Contactees and Abductees Christopher D. Bader n the spring of 1983, a 50-year-old writer John is a practicing psychiatrist in New Jersey. I named Beth had her first UFO abduction expe- He began dating Betty in 1990 and the two quickly rience. It was 2:25 A.M. Unable to sleep, Beth was became very close. After they had been dating for tossing and turning in her bed when a bright light some time, Betty confided in John about several shone through a bedroom window. Beth stumbled encounters with what she believed to be alien to the front door and walked outside to see what beings. John was skeptical of her claims. was causing the glow. She was shocked to find a One evening, John dropped Betty at her house large, disc-shaped craft hovering above the front after a dinner date. He arrived at his home around yard.After watching the motionless object for what midnight to find the phone ringing. Betty was on seemed to be a couple of minutes, Beth retreated the line, hysterical, claiming that “the aliens” were indoors, only to find her clock reading 5:30 A.M.