Alien Abductions

From SkepticWiki

Non-human creatures (usually aliens) are claimed by some to kidnap individuals - referred to as "abductees" - usually for medical testing or for sexual reproduction procedures. Many such encounters are described as terrifying or humiliating, but others are described as life-enhancing and pleasant. Reports of the abductions have been made from around the world, but have perhaps seen most mainstream attention in the United States.

[edit] Famous Cases

Allegedly genuine stories of kidnap by extraterrestrials go back at least to the mid-1950s, with the Antonio Villas Boas case (which didn't receive much attention until several years later).

Widespread publicity was generated by the Betty and Barney Hill abduction case of 1961 (again not widely known until several years afterwards), culminating in a made for television film broadcast in 1975 (starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons) dramatizing the events. The Hill incident was probably the prototypical abduction case, and was perhaps the first in which the abductors were explicitly identified as aliens (in this case apparently originating from a planetary system around the star Zeta Reticuli).

Travis Walton claims to have been abducted by a UFO on November 5, 1975, while working on a logging crew in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona. Walton did go missing, but reappeared after five days of intensive searches. The Walton case received considerable mainstream publicity, and remains one of the best-known instances of alleged alien abduction.

Supporters argue it is an important and persuasive case, because of the number of corroborative eyewitnesses (the vast majority of alien abduction reports are based on a single individual's testimony), the fact that witnesses passed polygraph exams in support of their accounts, and because in the more than thirty years since the event happened, none of the witnesses have changed their accounts, in spite of at least one cash offer to do so.

Prior to the Walton and Hill cases, stories of these alleged abductions do not appear to have received much attention, even from UFO enthusiasts, until J. Allen Hynek's UFO 'close encounters' classification system was popularized in 1970s.

[edit] Skeptical Response

Skeptics note that in the Walton case, he failed his initial polygraph examination and it is argued that there were problems with some of the other polygraph exams which call their reliability into question. Some suspect that the disappearance was a moneymaking scheme, and that there are troubling inconsistencies and problems with the tale.

Skeptics generally doubt that abductions occur literally as reported, and a wide variety of alternate explanations have been proposed, including drug misuse, hallucination, psychiatric disorders, epileptic seizures and dubious mental states associated with sleep (hypnogogic states, night terrors and sleep paralysis). Many accounts of abduction have apparently only come to light after the alleged abductees underwent hypnosis. The frequent reliance on hypnosis and its effectiveness have often been criticised: it has been demonstrated that hypnosis can unintentionally aid in confabulation and often has a part to play in False Memory Syndrome.

Commentators have noted parallels between alien abduction and so-called satanic ritual abuse (SRA). Both emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s; both often use hypnosis to recover allegedly lost or suppressed memories. Furthermore, the scenarios and narratives offered by abductees and SRA victims feature many similar elements: both are typically said to begin when the experiencer is in their youth; both are said to involve family members and to occur generationally; the alien examination table is similar to the satanic altar; both phenomena focus on genitals, rape, sexuality and breeding; witnesses often report that the events happen when they are in altered states of consciousness; both phenomena feature episodes of "missing time" when the events are said to occur, but of which the victim has no conscious memory.

Many events reported during purported abductions often have parallels in anthropology, folklore and religion: they frequently correlate with certain imagery persistent in shamanic experiences (e.g., surgery-like procedures, foreign objects implanted in the body) and faerie contact stories, for instance. It has been suggested that modern abduction accounts should be considered as part of this larger history of visionary encounters and that the phenomenon is a type of modern-day folk myth (like the historic belief in vampires).

In his book The Demon-Haunted World, astronomer Carl Sagan wrote that the alien abduction experience is remarkably similar to tales of demon abduction common throughout history. "...most of the central elements of the alien abduction account are present, including sexually obsessive non-humans who live in the sky, walk through walls, communicate telepathically, and perform breeding experiments on the human species. Unless we believe that demons really exist, how can we understand so strange a belief system, embraced by the whole Western world (including those considered the wisest among us), reinforced by personal experience in every generation, and taught by Church and State? Is there any real alternative besides a shared delusion based on common brain wiring and chemistry?" (Sagan 1996, p124)