zodiac1 Nov 2005

Is there any consensus about the psychology of alien abduction? Prior research has yielded a few insights, some of which are hardly surprising: People who believe they've been abducted tend to be fantasy-prone and eccentric, for one. On the other hand, they don't tend to be crazy. Most abductees are regular Joes, with decent jobs; though they have varying levels of education, they are predominantly white and middle class. In addition to an appetite for fantasy, researchers have identified several mental phenomena that often accompany a person's belief that she's been abducted: One is sleep paralysis, a relatively common experience during which the brain and the body desynchronize briefly before waking up. The body remains paralyzed (as it is during REM sleep) while the mind enters a state between sleeping and waking, in which some people hallucinate. The theory goes that a subset of the hallucinators, primed by popular culture to believe in visits from otherworldly kidnappers, interpret their experiences as abductions.

The second contributing factor is the mind's capacity to create false memories, particularly under hypnosis—which is how many abduction "memories" have been retrieved. In fact, it was the study of false memory and trauma that led Clancy to the aliens. She started graduate school in the mid-'90s, as psychologists were duking it out over the validity of "recovered" memories, and signed on to assist two professors with a study of sexual-abuse victims. The professors gave subjects lists of words to memorize—"sugar," "candy," "sour," "bitter"—that were all related to another word, "sweet," that was not on the list. People who had allegedly recovered memories of sexual abuse while in therapy, it turned out, were more likely than a control group to remember "sweet" as having been on the list—that is, to produce false memories in the lab.

Of course, this did nothing to prove whether the women's abuse memories were themselves false, and Clancy and her colleagues were roundly attacked by victims' advocates and other scientists. So, the researchers went looking for another set of subjects—people whose memories were assumed by most people to be false—and they wound up with alien abductees. Again, their work revealed that abductees were also more likely to misremember words than a control group.

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