The reports we are considering may very well disclose evidence of the most important event on our planet since the beginnings of sentient life. Either we are being visited by some kind of alien intelligence, equipped with a technology and purpose beyond our present-day understanding, or the power of human invention, delusion and self-deception is, in the language of another earthly issue, reaching critical mass. Do these thousands of reports of UFO abductions and subsequent medical experiments describe actual events, or are they some new, pervasive, world-wide form of fantasy?
Those who recall their own UFO abduction encounters are convinced that what happened to them is real, while those who have not experienced such traumatic events usually reject the idea that such things are even possible. Experience, our surest and most persuasive teacher, provides each group a convincing but contradictory lesson. Waiting patiently in the wings, however, is a more formal and obviously more learned tutor - recorded history - always ready for an instructive dialogue with the present. And history does, in fact, provide a specific parallel with the issue I have posed: the problem of separating fantasy from reality in the case of UFO abduction reports. Naturally the current circumstances are different from those of an earlier time - they always are - but the historical analogy nevertheless has something important to tell us.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century, in Vienna, Sigmund Freud was treating his neurotic patients by a slowly evolving personal therapy which included hypnosis as part of the technique. As the months and years passed Freud found that most of his patients recalled, both consciously and through hypnosis, disturbing incidents of childhood sexual molestation, seduction and abuse. He therefore posited the eminently reasonable theory that these incestuous childhood sexual incidents had led to the later neurotic - hysterical problems from which his patients suffered. It was a sensible theory that, for a number of reasons, he was soon to abandon.
Obviously it had been difficult for Freud to accept the idea that incestuous behavior was widespread among the good bourgeois Catholic and Jewish Viennese who were his patients, neighbors and peers. And in the meantime he had also begun to realize that children and even infants possessed their own form of developing sexuality - surely Freud's most significant discovery. For these and other, apparently more personal reasons too complex to discuss in this paper, Freud made a drastic change of mind. He decided that these commonly reported memories of childhood sexual abuse - recollections which often came to light through the process of hypnotic regression - were nothing more than elaborate fantasies invented by his neurotic male and female patients. These sexual seductions and molestations had never happened; they were merely the wishful dreams and imaginings of hysterical people, originating inside their heads rather than in the actual, physical world. Though this explanation required the acceptance of the idea that a child's mind was a steamier and more complex place than previously imagined, on another level we could all breathe easier; incest and the sexual abuse of children was largely imaginary.
In An Autobiographical Study of 1925, Freud described his view of his admittedly disturbed patients this way:
"... I must mention an error into which I fell for a while and which might well have had fatal consequences for the whole of my work. Under the influence of the technical procedure which I used at that time [hypnosis], the majority of my patients reproduced from their childhood scenes in which they.were sexually seduced by some grown-up person... I believed these stories, and consequently supposed that I had discovered the roots of the subsequent neurosis ... My confidence was strengthened by a few cases in which relations of this kind with a father, uncle or elder brother had continued up to an age at which memory was to be trusted. If the reader feels inclined to shake his head at my credulity, I cannot altogether blame him..."
Freud was obviously deeply embarrassed at having temporarily believed that childhood sexual abuse might be relatively common in repressed nineteenth century Viennese families. We know, now, that Freud was right to feel that way, but not for the reason he stated. We know that incest, childhood seduction and sexual abuse are common at the present time and undoubtedly were common then, when Freud decided that these traumatic accounts were mere fantasies. The psychological problems many of his patients faced were more likely the result of real events rather than artifacts of wishful, self-generated fantasies. Freud, it must always be remembered, was a therapist and a theoretical, analytical thinker, not an investiqator. Since his theories led him to disregard automatically a patient's sexual molestation memories he apparently made no effort to examine the possible objective reality of these claims. Naturally he never visited the patient's house to conduct interviews with other members of the family, nor would he attempt in any way to ascertain if his patient might have actually been the victim of adult depredations. He was a physician, a healer, not a detective, and for him the problems began and ended inside the patient's damaged psyche.
It has only been in the last few decades that trained psychiatric social workers, sociologists and other mental health professionals have - unlike Freud - actually begun to investigate the event-level reality of these reports. They have come to the conclusion that childhood sexual molestation, seduction and abuse are rampant in the real world, and probably always have been. Furthermore, contemporary psychoanalysts and writers such as Jeffrey Masson, Milton Klein, David Tribich and others have attacked Freud's position that the neurotic problems he was treating had their sole origin inside the heads of his patients, that they were due to "developmental mechanisms" and were not the result of real events. Masson in particular claims that Freud's theory that his patients were merely fantasizing such childhood traumas in effect blames the victim and often deepens a sufferer's problems. (In a parallel way, if UFO abductions are actually taking place as event-level occurrences, labelling them as fantasies is immensely destructive to those who suffer their after-affects). The more investigators have raised valid questions about Freud's monolithic theories, the more the number of strict Freudian analysts has shrunk. Other therapies, more oriented to real, event-level problem solving, are clearly in ascendence.
What are the lessons that history, our silent tutor, would have us learn from these revisions of basic Freudian doctrine? First, that any theory of human psychology unconnected to solid, objective information about the subject's actual experience and family background is a flimsy reed indeed. The isolated examination of a person's feelings, memories and beliefs apart from the hard data of his/her life can be dangerously misleading, and investigation into fact and circumstance is essential if objective truth is to be arrived at. Freud's sudden change in attitude about childhood sexual abuse also teaches us how easily disturbing information can be shunted aside, even by highly intelligent people. Above all, we should learn to be wary of labelling as fantasy any consistent, widespread body of felt experience. Serious, objective inquiry must precede any such glib pronouncements, whatever our private, subjective doubts. It is all too easy to be wrong.
It is indisputable that in the last few decades literally thousands of very similar UFO abduction reports have been collected and investigated world-wide.(1) The sheer number of such reports obviously eliminates hoaxes as a single, umbrella explanation for the phenomenon, though undoubtedly some deceptions have occurred. We are left with two other explanations: either some - perhaps even most - of these reports describe real, event-level occurrences, or virtually all of them, instead, represent a contemportary, "mental," psycho-social phenomenon of some kind. Since systematic psychological testing of those claiming UFO abduction experiences has revealed no psychological explanation for their accounts, the only remaining explanation is the most philosophically unacceptable one: the witnesses are describing actual events. (2) To discover the truth about this undeniably extraordinary phenomenon we must begin with a few basic questions:
(1) What is the literal content of the initial report?
(2) Why did the percipient feel he/she should make the report in the first place? (Thousands of individuals have reported their bizarre experiences to official agencies such as the pol'ice, the FBI, the Air Force and NASA, and to civilian UFO investigators and organizations, with no hope of personal gain and with a legitimate fear of ridicule.
(3) Where and when did the reported incident take place?
(4) Was the incident discussed with family and/or friends at the time it occurred?
During the fifteen years in which I've been publically identified with UFO abduction research, thousands of people have called or written to me to report their experiences in detail, and consequently my personal data pool is extensive. Because the preliminary questions I've just outlined are so very important, I will dip into this pool for a few examples. The following are typical, unprocessed, uninvestigated reports as I first received them. I've spent a great deal of time investigating each of these reports, and in my opinion each eventually turned out to be what I consider to be truthful accounts of UFO abduction experiences. The information each contains - apparent content, date, location and number of witnesses - illustrates the complex circumstances which any theory of UFO abduction reports must satisfactorily address at the outset. I ask you, the reader, to consider the details of each of these reports in the light of a single issue, do they seem to be real-world events, or the product of simple, wishful fantasy?.
A young married couple is driving home from a weekend at the Jersey shore in the summer of 1974. It is late Sunday afternoon on a clear, sunny day. In what is perceived by both as the very next instant, it is pitch dark - night - and they are sitting in their silent car. The engine is not running, no lights are on, and their automobile is in the middle of a field rather than on a road. They are terrified, lost and unbelieving. Many unremembered hours have obviously passed. The husband starts the car and they bounce over the field for several minutes before he locates a dirt road and begins to find his way home. In the next few months there ensues a series of panic attacks which affect the husband particularly deeply. Neither he nor his wife thinks for a moment about UFO abductions; neither had read about such phenomena, and, since no UFO sighting is involved, would not consider their experience to be related in any case. It will not be until early 1988 - fourteen years after the event in the field - that the woman in this example encountered a questionaire I had written for Omnimagazine and began to suspect that there might be a connection between the missing time incident in the field and other odd events in her life. As a result of these suspicions she finally contacted me and the investigation began.
About 7:00 p.m. one evening in the winter of 1968, Mrs. R is watching the TV news with her five-year old daughter and twelve-year-old son. Her teenage daughter T is clearing the supper dishes. Mrs. R's baby is in his crib, and her oldest son has just driven off with his grandfather to go Christmas shopping. Suddenly the voice and the image on the TV screen change; an odd face appears, and Mrs. R becomes frightened. Her daughter T senses her mother's fear, and becomes even more afraid because she seems transfixed, unable to move. In what seems to be the next instant Mrs. R is heard screaming - but now from her bedroom at the back of the house. The twelve-year-old son has disappeared from the living room and is later found hiding in a closet in his bedroom, though he does not remember what he is hiding from. Simultaneously, the family car pulls into the driveway; to those inside the house it seems the oldest boy and his grandfather have returned apparently only minutes after their 7:00 o'clock departure, and yet the clock shows that it is now after 9:00 p.m.. An enormous noise begins suddenly and the house vibrates as if a jet plane is about to crash into it, sending everyone into deeper panic. T looks out the window; the surrounding area is lit by a light brighter than the sun; her brother is standing beside the car, pointing up at something above the house. He is unmoving, rigid, as is his grandfather standing next to him. The noise abates, the light vanishes, and moments later the brother bursts into the room with a descriptions of a huge UFO which had been hovering directly over the house, and of his paralysis while observing it. He calls the state police to report the sighting, and is astounded to discover that though he drove up and spotted the UFO at a little after 9:00, it is now past 11:00 p.m.; he has evidently been outside, unmoving, for nearly two hours.
The confusion of time and location and behavior is alarming to all six involved family members, but it is ascribed to "excitement" over the noise and the UFO and the strange image on the TV screen. Nevertheless the incident is remembered and frequently discussed by the entire family. Evidence of trauma remains for months and even years; the twelve-year-old boy insists on sleeping with a baseball bat next to his bed and T will only qo to sleep with all the lights on in her room. Twenty years later this same daughter watches a TV broadcast on which I am appearing; she relates the information I present about the UFO phenomenon to her family's trauma, and subsequently she contacts me.
In November of 1978 a young man is driving home from work near East Islip, Long Island. He experiences a flash of light and in the next instant he finds himself sitting alongside a different road with his car nowhere in sight. He stands up, dazed and confused. He feels nauseated and discovers some unpleasant physical circumstances: his shirt is buttoned incorrectly, his shoes are untied, his socks are folded neatly in his pants pocket, and worst of all, he has, apparently involuntary defecated. Then he remembers being in his car while it was stopped, and trying to hide under the dashboard from a group of small, huge-eyed figures who finally pull him out of the vehicle. As these and other related traumatic memories flash into his mind, he eventually finds his car with its lights ablaze, off the road and mired in the underbrush, with no tracks leading to it through the foilage. During the first few hours of confusion he does not identify these frightening recollections and physical sequelae with the UFO phenomenon per se, but he eventually makes that connection and I learn about the case.
On a very cold and snowy winter day in 1979, a fourteen-year-old girl goes for a ride on her snowmobile. She recalls heading into a level field, but then her memory fades. About an hour later a neighbor passing by sees her standing about thirty feet away from her snowmobile which is now lying on its side. He approaches her, asking if she needs help. She is clearly dazed and frightened, and the neighbor also notices that she is not wearing a coat. Moments later he finds her gloves, coat and scarf neatly folded next to the overturned vehicle. She does not remember what happened. The neighbor drives her home and her step-father, a surgeon, examines her carefully for any injuries, particularly to the head. He finds nothing - no mark or sign of an accident, or even any trace of hypothermia. CAT-scans follow, as well as several other neurological tests, all negative. Equally perplexing, nothing turns up in the flat, level ftield which could have caused the normall stable snowmobile to fall onto its side - no skid marks, no hidden wires, holes, rocks, etc. The girl recovers quickly, but begins to suffer from a recurring nightmare in which she finds herself standing immobile beside the overturned vehicle as a group of small, shadowy figures approach.
In 1988 this same young woman is returning from a park near Washington, D.C. with a fellow student. They approack a deserted warehouse/factory area and come upon what they both recognize as a six-car pile-up of wrecked vehicles. The lights of all vehicles are blazing, but the scene is totally deserted. There are no police, no spectators, no drivers, no passengers; no sounds, no emergency lights, no flares. They drive past this strange tableau without stopping and without even thinking that they should report the accident. (They assume it must have just occurred.) The young women arrive home inexplicably late, musing on the oddness of the scene they had passed and their uncharacteristic indifference to the plight of any possibly injured people. Eventually the young woman reads Intruders and writes to me about her snowmobile accident and subsequent dreams; it will be many months before she mentions the odd six-car pile-up witnessed by her friend as well as herself. Neither young woman, nor anyone in either family, initially think of either of these events as connected in any way with the UFO phenomenon.
In April of 1961, a young second lieutenant is driving from New Jersey to Fort Jackson, S.C.. Somewhere in North Carolina he realizes that he has only about 1/4 tank of gas, and resolves to stop for fuel in the next town. He slows to a stop as someone he assumes is a policeman flags him down; he is instructed to turn left and detour down a dirt road. He obeys, and as he drives down the narrow, dark lane his car lights go out and the motor dies - yet his car continues on its own to move forward and to rise in the air. The terrified officer begins to pray, and in what he perceives as an instant later he awakens in a motel room, lying fully clothed on top of the bed. He rushes down to the front desk and finds that the motel is just outside the gate to Fort Jackson. Completely bewildered, he goes to the parking lot and locates his car, which, he discovers, still shows 1/4 of a tank on the gas gauge, and about the same mileage reading as he saw the night before on the odometer. The officer decides he must have been drugged by the military in some kind of esoteric training experiment, and that his car was shipped down to its present location on a flat bed truck. For this reason he tells no one except his wife about this "impossible" military exercise - a theory he abandons reluctantly after weeks of consideration. It will be another twenty years before he associates this experience with the UFO phenomenon; he hears a radio program on which periods of missing time are being discussed and contacts me.
In the spring and summer of 1989, a married couple in northern California becomes troubled by their four-year-old daughter's frequent nightmares, in which she describes "monsters," small, black-eyed figures who come into her room at night "through the wall" and carry her off with them. The child's mother, uninformed about the UFO abduction phenomenon, tries to assure her daughter that she was only dreaming despite the child's claim that the monsters are real. The most frightening moment for the parents comes when they are awakened one night by their daughter's screams from the front yard. The father unbolts the front door and rushes outside. The little girl stands there terrified, telling her parents through her tears that the monsters with the huge black eyes took her outside and into a "round thing" in the yard; they put her on a table and pressed a needle into her. To her father the most unnerving aspect of this event is the fact that when he searches the house he finds no unlocked windows, and each of the doors, like the front, is securely bolted from the inside. There is simply no way the child can have gone outside. In talking about this traumatic and impossible event with friends, the girl's mother first learns about similar reports which are allegedly connected with the UFO phenomenon. This disturbing information leads her finally to relate her child's story to me when I visit the city in which the family resides.
These six examples from my files illustrate the routes by which suspected abduction cases come to the attention of investigators, but more importantly they illustrate exactly the circumstances and details which comprise an individuals initial report. Obviously, these details are either the result of fantasy and self-delusion or are accurate accounts of what the percipients feel has happened to them. The first five of my examples have subsequently been thoroughly investigated. (The sixth, involving a very young child, by necessity rests upon a parent's testimony, an as it will not be included in this analysis.) These five cases involve a total of twelve witnesses. All the details I've related were remembered normally; hypnosis is not an issue. All five reports include periods of missing time and "impossible" or illogical physical dislocations. All involve inarguable signs of trauma. In only one case is an actual UFO sighting involved, and ' only one (different) report includes a clearly recollected group of "aliens." Just one of the five reports was initially characterized as a "UFO case" by the witnesses, none of whom were well-informed about the abduction phenomenon at the time of their encounters.
Since the history of public awareness of UFO abductions is crucial to the viability of all psycho-social theories of the phenomenon, an exact chronology is essential. The first American abduction report became publically known in 1966, but seven years would pass before a second such case would be featured by the media. In 1975 a third abduction report became known and a made-for-TV movie on the subject appeared, but it was not until the late eighties that such events were seen by the public in somewhat familiar detail. In this context it is highly significant that one of my five examples predates even the first publically known abduction case and another predates the second 1973 incident. A third example, from 1974, still predates the TV movie and any detailed general public awareness of UFO abductions, and the other two cases I recount predate both of my books on the subject. Thus, any theory of the UFO abduction phenomenon must deal with the fact that these reports (among thousands of others) arose prior to any general public knowledge of the abduction scenario and its sequence of detail. To make this point absolutely clear, all five of these bizarre events were described to other people - family members, friends, etc. - at the time they first occured,.i.e. in 1961, 1968, 1974, and so on - and in none was an abduction experience suspected. In each case that suspicion surfaced later - days, months, years, even decades later.
Beyond argument these reports cannot be considered artifacts of "belief in UFOs" or the products of folkloristic contamination by material absorbed from various nineteen-eighties UFO books and TV programs. As we have seen, the perplexing incidents which make up these reports are physical; they deal with the hard-edged kingdom of objects and sites, not the misty land of inward musing and fantasy. All five cases describe genuine trauma, confusion, clear cut periods of missing time, and "impossible" dislocations experienced by the witnesses. (Similar accounts of vehicular dislocation, it should be mentioned, do not occur in movies and books until decades after these witnesses first reported them). Anyone wishing to theorize about the UFO abduction phenomenon as fact or fantasy must begin with an explanation of the details contained in these initial reports. Obviously, any theory of UFO abductions must satisfactorily account for the material I have just elucidated - or be discarded. For the record it should be mentioned that hypnosis was eventually used in my five sample cases to help the witnesses recall the unremembered portions of their encounters, and to explore other UFO incidents not included - or recalled - in their initial reports. From the outset and throughout their investigation, these five cases have conformed to the patterns present in hundreds of others I've explored; they are in no way remarkable.
Having established the initial requirements for theorizing about the nature of the UFO abduction phenomenon, let us now consider the types of evidence which support the least torturous, least convoluted explanation of these reports. That is, of course, the idea that these thousands of credible people are simply relating what actually happened to them. Sometimes the shortest distance between two points actually is a straight line.
On Jan. 3, 1979, in a rural area of southern Florida, Filiberto Cardenas, a male friend and the man's wife and teenage daughter were driving home from a trip to some local farms. When their car inexplicably stopped, Cardenas and the driver stepped out to lift the hood to check the battery cables. All four saw a blinding light shoot down in front of them, accompanied by a buzzing sound. Cardenas was lifted up and out of sight as the two female passengers in the back seat of the car screamed in terror. The three stunned survivors reported the abduction to the police. Roughly an hour and a half later, Cardenas was found dazed and confused some sixteen miles away from the place where he had been lifted up into the sky. He was hospitalized with physical symptoms similar to those reported since in other abduction cases (pain in the legs, vision problems, an abrasion and so forth). Hypnosis subsequently revealed details both typical and atypical of such abduction accounts, but centrally important is the eyewitness testimony of an abduction seen independently by non-abductees with clear, normal recall.
This type of corroborating testimony involves the witness's observing pre- or post-abduction details which are highly suggestive though not absolutely conclusive. To make this more subtle point as clear as possible I will cite three different examples:
In the summer of 1983 in Indianapolis, Kathie Davis underwent a UFO abduction when a small craft landed on her property. At approximately the same time as the abduction ended and the craft took off, a nextdoor neighbor saw a brilliant flash of light through the trees, emanating from the place the UFO had apparently rested, according to the ground traces which were subsequently observed. Immediately after the flash the neighbor heard a loud roar approaching her house; the lights flickered, there was a power outage, and then all was still as the lights came back on spontaneously; no fuses were blown and no circuit breakers had been tripped. The neighbor immediately informed her husband, when he arrived home that evening, of the frightening sequence of events; weeks later the two neighbors talked about their experiences and discovered the exact coincidence of time and event.
In October, 1990, an intelligent, well-trained medical doctor was involved in a serious, personal conversation with his friend and house-guest, another physician. Though the hour was early, the guest abruptly interrupted their discussion, announced that he was sleepy and immediately left the room to retire. The host watched his friend leave, feeling uneasy about the uncharacteristic behavior he had just observed. After a while he heard, just outside the house, a whirring, turbine-like sound which, in his phrase, "chilled him to the bone." - yet he was absolutely unable to bring himself to look outside for the source of the noise. Then, after a small, indeterminate sound in the house caught his attention, he turned and saw, in a virtually subliminal glimpse, a diminutive, large-eyed creature moving through the room. The doctor, who happens to be trained in psychiatry, found himself unable to do any of the things he wanted to do: investigate, go to help his friend, sound the alarm, or whatever. He had only one strong thought which came into his mind as if emanating from elsewhere: "This is none of my business." He finally stood up, went directly to his bedroom, lay down and instantly went to sleep. It was not until the next morning that he was able to think clearly about his own completely uncharacteristic behavior.
His house-guest, as later investigation suggested, had been the sole target of the abductors, and was, indeed, taken that night. The most important thing to be remembered about this example is that a trained medical professional witnessed what turned out to be preliminary incidents in the abduction of another physician by UFO occupants. Over and over again, non-abductee witnesses in other UFO abduction cases have described what seems to be the temporary, external control of their behavior; it seems the UFO occupants can do whatever is necessary to make sure potential-witnesses to an abduction do not interfere with their operations. So despite the importance of the witness's observation of an "alien" figure in this case, it is almost as significant that a mature physician, thoroughly trained in psychiatry, personally experienced the efficacy of apparently external, anomalous control over his own reactions and behavior.
A third example of this kind of second-party circumstantial-testimony involves two young women, first cousins and recent college graduates, in Houston, Texas. They shared a two-bedroom apartment, and late at night one of the young women awoke with the sensation of having being dropped from a few inches above her bed. Within moments she remembered - clearly - having just been inside a spacecraft; the memory was dreamlike but extraordinarily vivid. ' She recalled seeing small, black-eyed figures, a group of whom were carrying out some kind of physical procedure upon her naked roommate who lay stretched out on a metallic table. Alarmed by the realism of her "dream," she went into her friend's bedroom to check on her condition. She was shocked to find the room empty, though both young women had retired hours ago. The window was closed and locked, the bathroom unoccupied. Now thoroughly disturbed, she unbolted the front door and went outside to look for her roommate's car; it was exactly where it should have been, in the parking lot behind the building. She returned to their apartment and again searched for her friend. The bedroom was still empty so she decided she must imform the police. As she picked up the receiver and began to dial she heard a moan from her roommate's quarters. Rushing in, she found the missing woman face down on the bed, naked, her head at the foot of the bed and her feet on the pillow - and this only moments since she had last searched the room. She roused her roommate, and slowly, gradually, the young woman came to consciousness. Their memories of the UFO interior coincided exactly. There are many other corroborative details in this fascinating joint account, and though it seems that both women were abducted, one was apparently returned first and allowed to operate normally, outside any kind of "alien control." Thus she functioned as an independent, circumstantial witness during that time period.
It should be no suriprise to anyone that when an abduction involves more than a single individual - and there are apparently thousands of multiple abductions - the witnesses' descriptions corroborate one another. This is true even when the incidents are investigated separately, in different localities, years after they occurred, with the use of regressive hypnosis and with different investigators involved in the research. But the most important corroborative details are those small, unpublished descriptions which investigators carefully save and store. For instance, I maintain a secret file of what might be called notational symbols - numbers, letters, whatever, that dozens of witnesses have reported seeing in and on UFOs during their abductions. I have shown examples of the two basic, closely related systems to a very few trusted colleagues; all have been astounded at the similarity - even identity - of these recollected symbols. But since these symbols operate as a means of testing the validity of new cases, I still cannot make this area of evidence public. This is indeed unfortunate because these notational systems provide evidence that undeniably places corroborating abductee testimony beyond the realm of chance.
Another specific example arises from the thousands of reports of physical examinations conducted during UFO abductions. It is highly significant that in no abduction report I've seen has a witness ever mentioned that the UFO occupants were curious about the one organ most central to our own thoughts about human anatomy - the human heart. Alien interest in the lower abdomen and the genitals is almost universally described, as well as procedures involving the head and nasal cavity. But never - never - the heart. Surely if fantasy were at all involved in these reports we would be hearing frequently about alien "EKGS" and the like, since we, ourselves, are so naturally preoccupied with this one vital organ. The fact this has never yet occurred in thousands of abduction reports proves once again that fantasy can not be the creative factor in these accounts. Folklore, fantasy, dreams: these cover a limitless spectrum. The specific events actually reported do not; they consistently remain within the narrow range of actual, felt experience.
1. Do physical traces accompany UFO abduction reports? Yes. Ground traces of affected soil where the craft have landed abound, as well as physical scars of two highly specific patterns on the bodies of abductees.
2. When people report abduction experiences, are they physically missing from their homes/cars/bedrooms, etc/.? Yes. I have dozens of cases in which people who were literally missing were searched for during these "missing time" UFO experiences.
3. When people awaken in bed and remember having been taken abducted and taken outside, is there ever any evidence that this is so, and that the memories are not merely dreams? Yes. Many abductees find themselves with muddy feet, grass and leaves in their beds, and other such indications that they've been literally outside their houses.
4. Are there other extensive categories of evidence suggesting these experiences are physically real, but which space does not allow us to elaborate upon? Yes, unfortunately, many.