False recall is a source-monitoring problem, an inability to
remember where and when information is acquired: You think a friend told
you a piece of news, for instance, but you actually heard it on the
radio. "Human memory is not like a video recorder," says Clancy. "It's
prone to distortion and decay over time. This does not mean that
abductees are psychiatrically impaired. I don't think they should be
considered weird. If anything, they're just more prone to creating false
memories."
Subjects whose personality profiles indicated a high level of
absorption or inclination to fantasy were the most likely to perform
poorly on the word-recall task. Furthermore, says McNally, every abductee
in the recovered memory group described what appears to be sleep
paralysis.
Clancy and McNally outlined their findings in the Journal of
Abnormal Psychology last fall, whittling the abduction phenomenon down to
an equation of sorts. Susceptibility to creating false memories, coupled
with a disturbing experience like sleep paralysis and a cultural script
that allows for abduction by aliens, may lead one to falsely recall such
an encounter. "You don't necessarily have to endorse these experiences to
create false memories," says Clancy. "You may have just seen 'The
X-Files' and thought, 'That's crap,' but then you have an episode of
sleep paralysis that freaks you out, and the show is still in the back of
your mind."
And among people wavering about whether or not they've been
abducted, hypnosis can push them to embrace this interpretation. In a
1994 experiment that simulated hypnosis, psychologist Steven Jay Lynn
asked subjects to imagine that they'd seen bright lights and experienced
missing time. Ninety-one percent of those who'd been primed with
questions about UFOs stated that they'd interacted with aliens.
Still, if the abduction experience is a misinterpreted bout of
sleep paralysis, why do abductees invest it with such emotion? A
videotape of a tearful Peter Faust undergoing hypnotic regression is so
powerful that Mack says he stopped showing the footage; it freaked out
even nonabductees, causing many to erect "new defenses." Terror in the
face of potentially false memories was one issue McNally hoped to study
with abductees. This question brought him, in part, to the Divinity
School conference. "I wanted to know whether people really have to be
traumatized to produce a physiological reaction."
McNally collected testimony from 10 subjects with recovered
memories of abduction then confronted them with the most frightening
details of their own accounts--from violent trysts to swarms of aliens
around their beds. Six out of 10 subjects registered such elevated
physiological reactions, including heartbeat and facial muscle tension,
that they met the criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder
(PTSD).
Interestingly, subjects with PTSD react physiologically only to
their own traumatic experiences, but the abductee group had heightened
responses to additional stressful scripts, such as the violent death of a
loved one. They even reacted to positive scripts, such as viewing their
newborn infant for the first time. Such reactivity, coupled with high
levels of absorption, has been linked to the ability to generate vivid
imagery, according to McNally. In other words, abductees are more likely
to experience a traumatic--or positive--scenario as real, in part due to
their fertile imaginations. They will then react to it as such. "Emotion
does not prove the veracity of the interpretation," McNally
concludes.
For McNally, the most telling difference between abductees and
survivors of "veritable" trauma is not physiological but attitudinal.
Experiencers unanimously state that they're glad they were abducted.
"There's a psychological payoff," says McNally. "This makes it very
different from sexual abuse." Trauma survivors of all stripes cite
positive spiritual growth, but, "no Vietnam vet says, 'Gee, I'm glad I
was a POW.'"
It is understandable that memory lapses, as measured by poor
performance on a lab test, pale in comparison to communication with
unknown beings. And while abductees may feel assaulted by aliens, they
also feel special. For that reason, "They are not trying to demystify
their experience," says McNally, whose deconstruction of sleep paralysis
for one woman was met with a polite smile and the exhortation that he
should "think outside the box." When McNally finally broached the term
"sleep paralysis" at Mack's conference, he says, "There was an awkward
silence, as if someone had belched in church."
"I'm not personally interested in what Susan Clancy found," admits
Bueche, for whom the memory test was "50 bucks and free Chinese food." I
don't need evidence or proof. Most experiencers are well beyond that.
This is about what you can learn regardless of whether it is physically
real or interdimensional or something grand that the mind is
generating."
Mack counters that no combination of sleep paralysis and the Sci-Fi
Channel explains phenomena such as alien sightings by school children in
Zimbabwe who are wide-awake. "It doesn't even come close," he says.
Mack's second book, Passport to the Cosmos, chronicles abduction as a
cross-cultural phenomenon; he finds evidence of sexual and ecological
parallels to American abduction reports on almost every continent.
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