Alien Abductions: The Real Deal?

What leads people to believe they've been abducted by aliens?

By Kaja Perina, published on March 01, 2003 - last reviewed on August 30, 2004

People who believe they've been abducted by aliens have always resided at the farthest fringes of science, and the recent claim by a UFO cult known as the Raelians that they had cloned a human being does little to endear abductees to the mainstream. The sect's leader, Rael, maintains that he was plucked from a volcano by almond-eyed aliens who granted him an audience with Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad, each of whom confirmed that humans are descended from extraterrestrials.

But for every Rael, there are hundreds of workaday individuals who claim to have been abducted by aliens. These individuals do not flower into gurus; they struggle alone with memories of unintelligible messages, temporary paralysis and humanoid creatures hovering over their beds. Their stories don't always check out, but their minds do: Psychological tests confirm that abductees are rarely psychotic or mentally ill. Some 3 million Americans believe they've encountered bright lights and incurred strange bodily marks indicative of a possible encounter with aliens, according to a recent poll.

It is a quandary that polarizes researchers at Harvard University. One embattled psychiatrist, John Mack, M.D., argues that these experiences cannot be understood in a western rationalist tradition of science; researchers in the department of psychology, Richard McNally, Ph.D., and Susan Clancy, Ph.D., counter that the explanation--though multifaceted--is hilarious in its fundamental simplicity.

Mack, of Harvard Medical School, is a long-time champion of alien abductees and a paranormal philosopher king of sorts. His 1994 bestseller, Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens, drew international attention with the argument that "experiencers," Mack's term for the men and women he has debriefed, probably are being abducted by aliens.

More recently, McNally and Clancy introduced alien abductees to the laboratory to study trauma and recovered memory in an experimental setting. They believe their subsequent findings explain the entire abduction experience, including abductees' refusal to accept the fact that transcendent, technicolor encounters with aliens are no more than five-alarm fires in the brain.

Harvard's ideological clashes over the interpretation of anomalous experiences date to William James' tenure at the university one century ago. Both Mack and James studied psychology after training in medicine and tried to bridge the gap between psychology and spirituality, only to be rebuffed by Harvard's powers that be. For James, this culminated in Varieties of Religious Experience, which rejected a rigorous standard of evidence for divine experiences. "There is a clinical literature and an experimental literature, and they don't refer to each other," states Eugene Taylor, Ph.D., a biographer of James and a historian who lectures on psychology at Harvard Medical School. "Mack is a clinician making observations about human experience, as opposed to cognitive behavioral scientists, who say that if you can't measure it in the laboratory, it doesn't exist." When it comes to people who believe they've been abducted by space aliens, the two camps agree on only one thing: "These people are almost never psychotic," says McNally. "They're not lying. But Mack entertains a range of explanations that are farfetched at best."

Will Bueche, a 34-year-old media director, has long had nighttime paralysis and visions that "have no resolution and seem out of place." For years, he considered them merely suggestive--until he began witnessing beings while wide awake. Some abductees had far more traumatic encounters. Peter Faust, a 45-year-old acupuncturist, believes he endured years of sexual probing by hooded creatures who implanted chips in his anus and stimulated him to ejaculation. After eight hypnotic-regression sessions with Mack, and a battery of psychological tests in the early 1990s, Faust concluded that he is yoked to a female alien-human hybrid with whom he has multiple offspring.

The abduction narrative is a strange hybrid in its own right: humiliating surgical invasion tempered by cosmic awareness. Experiencers travel through windows and walls, tunnels and space-time to reach the starship's examining table, where young women's eggs are extracted and men's sperm are siphoned off. Despite waking bruised and violated, abductees say their love for beings in the alien realm can surpass any human bond and generate a sense of oceanic oneness with the universe that rivals the experiences of a world-class meditator. Faust says he "realized we're not alone in the universe. There are beings out there who care about us. But getting to this point is a long, arduous journey, with a lot of people who want to deny your experience."

Personality-driven explanations for why people with no overt psychopathology report alien encounters have proliferated apace with blockbuster movies about aliens. Psychologist Roy Baumeister, Ph.D., of Case Western Reserve University, argues that abduction reports are made by "masochists" who unconsciously want to relinquish control of their lives. The loss of control is manifest in humiliating encounters with an alien race. To be sure, there is a surfeit of elaborate sex in abduction reports; one study found that among abductees, 80 percent of women and 50 percent of men reported being examined naked on a table by humanoid beings. In fact, many abductees blame aliens for sexual dysfunction and emotional disturbances.