Alien Abductions, Screen Memories and Subterfuge

I really like this blog posting I found. It's a personal recounting and criticism of the Abduction Phenomenon by someone who has given it considerable thought and study. Being a filmmaker who has made four UFO documentaries, including one that features two of the three Abduction researchers mentioned here, I have to sympathize somewhat with the author.

UFOS, Aliens, and Me

By pgrundy


Last night I watched the first episode of "UFO Hunters" on the History Channel. It was pretty stupid. Four guys, all supposed 'specialists' and scientists, go around looking for proof of alien visitation. They do not find it. Big surprise. It's no "Ghost Hunters," I'll say that much, though it is clearly patterned after that popular show. Same structure, same gimmick, only the volume is turned up about a hundred notches and the guys don't grow on you like the Ghost Hunter guys do. These guys are just annoying.

The show got me thinking though, about the evolution of the whole UFO phenomenon and my personal relationship to it, which has by turns, over time, been one of fascination, skepticism, irritation, confusion, and creative theory. As a child I was fascinated by the very idea of extraterrestrial visitation, and frequently had vivid dreams about it. I remember in particular one "Twilight Zone" episode about a creature on the wing of an airplane taunting the only guy who could see it. I was about 8, I think, and that one kept me up all night.

As a kid I had vivid dreams of flying and, curiously, vivid nightmares about the Virgin Mary, who has been connected to the UFO phenomenon by several prominent writers. The flying dreams felt absolutely real, and involved simply looking down over the terrain of the neighborhood I lived in while sailing over it. In the dream, the map of the terrain was fairly accurate with blocks being where they should be and everything occuring in real time, at night. The Virgin Mary dreams were much more bizarre. In these dreams I would peek into a neighbor's window and see the Virgin Mary standing in the center of the room. Upon seeing her, I would instantly feel utter, indescribable terror. It wasn't like seeing a live person, but rather like seeing something terrifying in a full-body Virgin Mary mask.

Folklorists and ufologists have long noted that BVM sightings (Blessed Virgin Mary) are often very similar to UFO sightings, with bright lights (think Fatima), apocalyptic messages (pray, the end is near), and virutally no physical proof that the phenomenon ever happened. I hit my teens and early twenties just as the UFO sighting craze was morphing into the alien abduction craze. Bud Hopkins was cranking out bestsellers and hypnotizing housewives all over the place, and wouldn't you know it, abductees were everywhere, just waiting to pour out the truth that Hopkins swore was out there. I read Hopkins first book and felt sick at my stomach throughout, 'recognizing' the aliens described as components of other vivid dreams and 'memories' of things that had never really happened to me. I wrote to Hopkins, and he called me on the telephone about a month later. He was floored by my letter, and he wanted to hypnotize me. he was absolutely sure there was much, much more under the surface...but first he wanted me to fill out a questionaire. When the questionaire came, I saw immediately that it was basically a 100-question primer for exactly what Hopkins expected abductees to say under hypnosis. He was coaching them with this 'questionaire' and anyone who didn't answer it correctly was crossed of his hypnotee list. This honked me off. What a charlatan. What a creep. I threw the questionaire away and resolved to figure the whole thing out myself.

I went to graduate school to study paranormal events and myth. By this time I was in my 30s, and determined to get to the bottom of something, even though I had pretty much no idea what it was. I took courses in psychology, philosophy, and philosophy of science. I got straight As and presented papers at academic conferences and forums. And, probaly most importantly of all, I had a nervous breakdown. Memories of a violent crime that damaged me badly in my twenties came crashing in on me so strongly they felt hallucinogenic. They were disruptive and crippling. I got myself a therapist and hobbled across the grad school finish line and into a part-time adjunct teaching gig that I quit after a year. About this same time, a professor at Indiana University did some experiments in 'false memory symdrome,' and they hit the press in a very sensational way. Because of that, and because of my own distress, it was important to me to verify my 'memories' of assault, and sadly, I was able to do this fairly easily. My family remembered, others remembered, it seemed I was the only one who had been out of the loop. Amnesia in a common and well-known reaction to trauma: often victims never remember car accidents, crimes, etc. I realized that my alien 'memories' were inextricably intertwined with my assault memories, and it hit me that they were protective screen memories. People don't deal well with the brutal victimization of others, but UfOs and aliens they like. In other words, socially speaking, it is much more acceptable to be an alien abductee than a victim of a violent crime--it makes people curious instead of horribly uncomfortable. Suddenly it all made sense.

I began to gobble up skeptical books by the dozens. I wrote to Hopkins and also to David Jacobs and John Mack and explained to them that they were wrong, and that what they were doing might be actually harmful to people who may have suffered real trauma and were covering it over with fantasy. No one responded, to my total lack of surprise. I wrote up my theory for the Skeptical Inquirer and they printed it up and praised it. That felt good, but not for very long. What bothered me was the vividness of all these non-memory UFO-related memories. They did not just feel real, they felt hyper-real, realer than real. In fact, to this day I can only dimly remember fractured bits and pieces of my assault, but I vividly remember exactly what an alien's face looks like and how it feels to look into it. I am in my 50s now, and quite happily recovered from any earlier trauma. I have a great life. When I watch UFO shows, I feel fairly convinced that a big part of the 40s and 50s incidents was a government psi-op disinformation campaign, designed to take the American public's mind off nuclear proliferation and other scary weapons in development. By the 70s and 80s, we were deeply into biological warfare, and suddenly the aliens were back, but this time they were abducting people and doing medical experiments on them. The parallels are hard to miss. But I still have come to no sweeping conclusions. The phenomenon will not die. It is somehow tied into our age, inscribed on our collective unconscious in ways that even we do not understand. The unifying theme is either deception, total loss of control, or apolcalypse, and sometimes all three. And people who have direct experiences never forget them, they just learn to shut up.

If only the 'UFO Hunters' weren't such clowns. That too is part of the whole scene: it seems you can't be a UFO investigator unless you have a tic or a bad toupee, and also a proclivity for reciting lines from bad sci-fi movies in an overanimated way. But it's okay. I have learned to live with mystery and confusion. It's called life. And maybe ultimately, that is what it's all about.