Alien Abductions: The Real Deal?

Sleep paralysis with hypnopompic hallucinations (those that occur upon waking) can be so unexpected and terrifying that people routinely believe they're stricken with a grave neurological illness or that they're going insane. When faced with these prospects, aliens no longer seem so nefarious.

But sleep paralysis and abduction don't always go hand in hand. Consider the case of "Janet," a 52-year-old copy editor in Chicago. Eleven years ago she endured a terrifying out-of-body experience while lying in bed. Janet saw her head strapped in a vise as a group of men looked on. Fuzzy images were projected onto the back of Janet's eyes, visions she likens to "a 3-D hologram engraving something into my head." Her first thought on waking was of a brutal sexual assault she'd once read about. McNally believes it is the sense of powerlessness in being immobilized that triggers associations with invasive sexual procedures.

Janet experienced terror and helplessness in the wake of these messages she could not decipher, and sought the help of numerous therapists. But she says she "never thought this had anything to do with aliens. I thought it was something arising from the depths of my subconscious."

Why, then, do some people who experience violent hallucinations upon waking or falling asleep conclude that they have been abducted? One possibility is that people embellish their experience in the course of hypnotic regression. But McNally and Susan Clancy speculate that alien abductees aren't just amenable to suggestion under hypnosis; instead they actively create false memories. They drew this conclusion while studying one of the most contentious issues in psychology today: false memory syndrome.

The question of whether or not people repress traumatic memories was thrown into high relief 15 years ago, as psychotherapy patients increasingly recovered memories of sexual abuse, often through such porous techniques as hypnotic regression and guided imagery. Some cognitive psychologists, including McNally, argued that people rarely repress memories of abuse or trauma; if anything, they are more likely to recall the incident. Sexual-abuse victims remain silent "not because they are incapable of remembering, but because it's a terrible secret," says McNally. Other professionals argue that traumatic memories are easily repressed through specific dissociative mechanisms.

In 1996, McNally and Clancy became the first researchers to examine memory function in women who believed they had recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. They found that these women were significantly more likely to create false memories of nontraumatic events in a lab than were women who had always remembered being sexually abused, or women who had never been abused. (The findings are outlined in McNally's book, Remembering Trauma, published this spring. See review, page 81).

False memory was assessed by asking subjects to study semantically related words (such as candy, sugar, brownie and cookie) and then identify them on a list that includes false targets such as "sweet;" words that are thematically similar but not previously presented. Members of the recovered-memory group were by far the most likely to believe they'd seen the false targets.

But McNally and Clancy could not ascertain whether the women had in fact been sexually abused. Since it is unethical to create false memories of trauma, the researchers did the next best thing: They amassed a group whose recovered memories were unlikely to have occurred. Those people were, of course, alien abductees.

McNally and Clancy assembled a group whose members believed they'd recovered memories (usually under hypnosis) of alien abduction, along with a repressed memory group whose members believed they'd been abducted but had no conscious memory of the event. (This group inferred their abduction from physical abrasions, waking in strange positions or sometimes just from their penchant for science fiction.) There was also a terrestrially bound control group who reported no abduction experiences.

The recovered and repressed memory groups exhibited high rates of false recall on the word-recognition test. Those with "intact" memories of abduction fared worse than those who believed their memories were repressed.

But could this type of false recall be a function of memory deficits incurred through traumatic experiences? No, says Clancy: "Real trauma survivors exhibit a broad range of memory impairments on this task. Recovered-memory survivors--whether the trauma is sexual abuse or alien abduction--exhibit just one impairment on this task: the tendency to create false memories."