One of the least skeptical TV programs catering to the love of the occult is "Unsolved Mysteries," with Robert Stack as narrator. In his gravelly baritone, I listened once as Stack recounted several cases of people claiming to have been abducted by aliens. In each case, the abductors had subjected their victims to various horrendous tortures. One expert on alien abductions [sorry I didn't catch her name or credentials] noted how she's studied many cases where women have had their fallopian tubes twisted or strange things done to their uteruses. Stack asked the question, "Are there aliens doing reproductive surgery on these women?" Or something to that effect.
The grocery store tabloids frequently carry stories of alien abductions. Most of us are familiar with the typical picture of an alien they present: small, bald, big cranium, small chin, large oriental eyes and, of course, pointed ears and white, gray or green. I'll leave the interpretation of this picture to the psychologists and dream interpreters. To me the question to ask here is `What's more likely? That aliens are hovering around Earth, occasionally abducting somebody to experiment on or that these accounts are based on fraud or error?
If a woman told me that she could prove by her disfigured reproductive organs that aliens had abducted her and done reproductive surgery on her, I'd sooner believe that she'd been to an incompetent abortionist than believe her story about alien abduction. If a man told me that he'd gone to the corner store to buy some cigarettes and was abducted from the parking lot, taken to an alien ship where he was interrogated about life on earth and then put to sleep and magically transported back to his bed, I'd sooner believe that the man hallucinated, had a nightmare, or was lying than believe that his story was true. If a rancher finds his cattle mysteriously mutilated, I'd sooner believe that earthly predators were responsible than that aliens were harvesting cattle organs and blood for some unearthly purpose.
When I read of a Harvard psychiatrist who publishes a book in which he claims to believe his patients who claim to have been abducted by aliens, I consider it most likely that he is wrong or lying. And even after the Harvard Medical School issues a statement saying that the psychiatrist in question remains a member in good standing after a thorough investigation, I remain skeptical of his claims. I can understand Harvard's concern for academic freedom. I can understand why a professional might lie to gain the trust of his patients or to cash in on a gullible public. I can even understand an intelligent psychiatrist being unable to come up with a better explanation for his patients' claims. It is a common mistake to think that being deluded means that one is either crazy or stupid. So, until the good doctor or one of his patients produces physical evidence that abductions have occurred, I think it is more reasonable to believe that he and his patients are deluded or frauds. Of course, the good doctor can hide behind academic freedom and doctor/patient privacy privilege. He can make all the claims he wants and refuse to back any of them up on grounds that he would violate his patients' rights. He can then publish them and dare anyone to take away his academic freedom. He is the position any con man would envy: he can lie without fear of getting caught.
If I pick up a book like Whitley Strieber's Communion: A True Story with its claims of alien visitations, or a book that promises me an out of body experience in 30 days, I do not feel a need to suspend judgment on these issues until I thoroughly examine all the evidence. On the other hand, I don't assume that the authors are either insane or frauds. But I would sooner believe that decent, honest, normal people are deluded than believe they saw aliens set their roof on fire or that they travel to distant planets and back during the night or that they alone can see the aliens and their spacecraft while others see nothing. I will admit to having read some of Strieber's account and I must confess that he seems like a very disturbed person, but one who really believed he was seeing and being harassed by aliens. Bill Ellis compares Strieber to people who have been indoctrinated or gone through a religious conversion. The classic process begins with intense overstimulation of the nervous system, either naturally because of a very stressful environment or artificially by agents or missionaries intent on indoctrinating or converting someone. Often, because of the anxiety and stress, the subject doesn't sleep well, or the indoctrinated person is not allowed to sleep. Strieber describes his feelings precisely enough to warrant believing that he was in a very agitated psychological state prior to his visitation by aliens. A person in this heightened state of anxiety will be prone to hysteria and be especially vulnerable to radically changing behavior or belief patterns. The person might suddenly quit her job or he might shave his head, get an ear pierced and buy a motorcycle. When Strieber was having an anxiety attack he consulted Budd Hopkins, an alien abduction researcher, and his analyst, Robert Klein. Then, under hypnosis, Strieber started recalling the horrible aliens and their visitations.
I don't see how any reasonable person can believe Strieber was really visited by aliens. Assuming his account is an honest account and not a deliberate attempt to deceive others, a reasonable person would conclude that Strieber is deluded. I realize that it would probably be as difficult to convince Strieber and his followers that he's deluded as it would be to convince someone who thinks they've seen the Virgin Mary that it was just a reflection of light and not the Virgin herself.
I do think it is highly probable that there is life elsewhere in the universe, and that some of that life is probably very intelligent. I believe this because of the mathematical probabilities that among the billions of stars in the billions of galaxies that exist, it is very likely that there are billions of planets in age and proximity to a star analogous to Earth and our Sun. The chances seem to me to be very good that on some of those planets life has evolved. I believe this though, until very recently [Jan. 1996], there has not been significant observational evidence that there is even one other planet outside our solar system. It seems highly unlikely that our part of the universe came about in a completely unique way. It seems more likely that it came about in the same way that the rest of the universe came about. If so, there should be planets and moons and asteroids, etc., in all the galaxies and around many of the stars in those galaxies. And I have read enough Stephen Jay Gould to make me doubt that the life out there, if it does indeed exist, would be exactly like ours. There is apparently good reason to believe that even if our initial conditions were duplicated, evolution would not be exactly the same as it has been on our planet. Still, I think the probability is high that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, though I recognize that the possibility exists that we are unique.
I also realize that the closest star (besides our Sun) is so far away from Earth that travel between the two would take more than a human lifetime. The fact that it takes our Sun about 200 million years to revolve once around the Milky Way gives one a glimpse of the perspective we have to put space travel in. Anyway, while I think it is probable that there is intelligent life in the universe, I think the odds are infinitesimally small that any space travelers aimed in any direction they please are likely to hit one of those inhabited planets. Such travelers would need a very long amount of time to be successful, I think, and thus would require two things: (1) people who can live hundreds or thousands of years without aging significantly in some sort of hibernation for most of that time, and (2) equipment that can last for hundreds or thousands of years and be repaired or replaced in the depths of space. I am not saying that these are impossible conditions, but they seem to me to be significant enough barriers to make interstellar, much less intergalactic, space travel, highly improbable. The one thing I believe necessary for such travel that would not be difficult to provide would be people willing to make the trip. It would not be difficult to find many people who would believe they could be put to sleep for a few hundred or thousand years, only to be awakened to look for life on some strange planet. They might even believe they could then gather information to bring back to Earth where they would be greeted with a ticker tape parade down the streets of whatever is left of New York City by the time they get back.
Belief or disbelief in UFOs and alien abductions rests upon two things: (1) the plausibility of aliens traveling billions of miles to Earth, and (2) the testimony of eyewitnesses. I've given my reasons elsewhere [in the entry on UFOs] for thinking it is implausible that space travel will bring any beings, intelligent or otherwise, from one solar system to another. So, here I will limit my comments to those regarding the alleged eyewitnesses of UFOs and alien abductions.
Studies have shown that some eyewitnesses are frauds and some are crazy, but most seem to be fairly normal people. Also, most don't seem to be moneygrubbers, using their weird experience as a chance to get on Oprah or have movies made of their lives. In other words, the testimony is often, if not mostly, made by normal people without ulterior motives. If their claims weren't so bizarre, it would be indecent to distrust them. But the fact is that their claims are unbelievable on their face. Defenders of the reasonableness of belief in alien abductions point to the fact that not all accounts can be accounted for by "confabulation" and to the fact that accounts all over the world are "remarkably similar." As to the first point, hypnosis is often used to access memories of abduction and hypnosis is an unreliable method of gaining access to accurate memories. Furthermore, it is very likely that such "eyewitnesses" are very fantasy prone. Being fantasy prone is not an abnormality, if abnormality is defined in terms of minority belief or behavior. The vast majority of humans are fantasy prone, otherwise they would not believe in God, spirits, immortality, demons, sex with dead spirits, fountains of youth, Madison Avenue, esp, bigfoot, etc., etc. It seems to me that just about anybody on the planet is a potential alien abductee, in the sense that most of us are capable of fantasy and believing in fantastic, even impossible, things.
Hypnosis has been used extensively to uncover forgotten lives or abductions, and the reliability of hypnosis--independently of the leading-the-witness-on problem--is very questionable. There is no evidence that a memory recalled under hypnosis is any more reliable than one recalled in a normal awakened state. There is evidence that fantasy is more prevalent under hypnosis. But even if hypnosis were not used to get to the memory of aliens and abductions, the accounts given need not be assumed to be reliable just because the witness is not crazy nor led on by a hypnotist.
I am willing to accept, for the sake of argument, that all witnesses to UFO and alien abductions are sane, honest and of at least average intelligence. So why don't I believe them, then? After all, their accounts are so similar! That fact, if it is a fact, is insignificant. They've all seen saucer or cigar shaped ships that dart around or hover, have flashing lights, and little gray or green creatures with pointed ears and almond eyes with no pupils or eyelashes. They've all experienced some sort of time loss, where they `lose' two or three hours while they're with the aliens. The believer thinks these similarities indicate not just similar experiences but that the experiences were real, not fantasized. My own feeling is that the reason the accounts are so similar is because they've all seen the same movies, read the same stories, seen the same television programs and bought the same children's toys. It seems more reasonable to believe that the few people on the planet, relatively speaking, who have experienced being abducted by aliens, are deluded than to believe that they really had these experiences. They are similar to the people who have near-death experiences of going down the dark tunnel to the bright light, or who see Jesus beckoning to them. These shared experiences don't prove that the experiences weren't fantasies. They are likely due to similar life experiences and death expectations than to really dying, going to another world, coming back and living again. The shared experiences of mystics around the world don't prove that their experiences were really experiences of contact with God. The ecstatic mystics all describe their experience in terms any lover would understand and the experience of love and sex is universal and not supernatural, though it is a useful metaphor for religious ecstasy. The contemplative mystics all describe their experiences in terms anyone who has ever had a good night's sleep would understand. Having a dreamless sleep is a universal experience, not a supernatural one. The point is that shared recollections of experiences do not prove that the experiences were not delusions.
Because of the nature of the claim being made, a reasonable person should require more than an honest, intelligent, sane witness before believing such accounts as aliens causing cars to break down in remote places, abducting people for a couple of hours to abuse and torture them either physically or psychologically by giving them a lecture on the benefits of world peace or nuclear disarmament, and then inducing sleepiness and amnesia in their victims. Some sort of physical evidence should be required before we find the aliens guilty of trespassing, kidnaping, mutilation, and tampering with normal people.
In closing, it should be noted that alien abductions and visits from creatures from another world are not new. Most religions are full of tales of people who were taken to heaven or hell, visited by the Angel of Truth or Jesus or God or the Virgin Mary. Not long ago thousands of people descended upon a small Catholic Church in the town of Colfax, near Sacramento, California. The television news crews were there to interview people who came for a glimpse of an apparition by the Virgin Mary. The faithful saw what they came to see and will go to their graves believing their eyes and taking comfort in the fact that many others saw, too. Skeptics claimed that the apparition was being caused by a reflection of the sun off some light fixtures. The skeptics were scoffed at by the true believers, but the first day it was cloudy and rained, the Virgin Mary did not appear. The skeptic took this as validating his view. The true believer took it to mean that the Virgin doesn't appear in the rain or she leaves when there are too many negative vibrations caused by skeptics in the area.
See related entries on area 51, cattle mutilations, crop circles, flying saucers, Roswell, and UFOs and ETs.
Scientific skepticism, UFOs and the flying saucer myth
The Internet Unidentified Flying Objects Group [IUFOG] Hyperlinks Page
-----Paranormal Phenomena (San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1991), from the Opposing Viewpoints Series, chapter 2, Are UFOs Real?
Baker, Robert. "The Aliens Among Us: Hypnotic Regression Revisited," The Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 1987-88.
Kurtz, Paul. The Transcendental Temptation: a Critique of Religion and the Paranormal (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1986).
Loftus, Elizabeth F. Memory, Surprising New Insights Into How We Remember and Why We Forget (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., 1980).
Loftus, Elizabeth F. Eyewitness Testimony(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979).
Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World - Science as a Candle in the Dark, ch. 4, (New York: Random House, 1995).