In Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Abducted by Aliens (Harvard, 2005), Susan Clancy recounts interviews with fifty or so "abductees." Each person's experience is unique, but the various stories can be melded into a composite narrative. "I was having problems with anxiety and depression. I was at Fenway Park with my buddies watching a game. The next thing I remember, I was on Mission Hill and it was five in the morning. I was always interested in science fiction. I read Communion; I saw E. T and Close Encounters. I went to a hypnotist, and memories started flooding back. I started sobbing uncontrollably. They were long and tall, with huge black eyes that went around their heads. I remembered them fastening a device like a suction cup to my genitals to suck out the sperm painfully. They inserted a foot-long tube into my nostril. I know it happened because I get nosebleeds. My dad thinks it's a transmitter they put in there. They've programmed other memories to disappear. Until I experienced the aliens, life was empty, meaningless. Now that I have my memories, I understand everything. What happened to me was overwhelming. It was real. I can't explain-- I felt it. I was changed from the person that I was. It was the most positive event of my life. It helped me to see life as beautiful, as a gift."
Alien abductees may hold to false beliefs, but they have powerful faith. Clancy reports that once, at a convention of abductees, she tried to talk about the unreliability of anecdotal evidence, the fragility of memory, the nature of the sleep-paralysis syndrome, the creation of false memories under hypnosis, Occam's Razor (the employment of the most economical hypothesis to explain a phenomenon), etc. According to Clancy, there was a long silence, and then one of the participants said, "tell her about the metallic tube that came out of Jim's nose, the one that went down the sink before you both could catch it."
Eventually Clancy brings herself to discuss the obvious parallel of abduction to religion, which, she says, she is reluctant to do because she has "about a thousand Irish Catholic relatives [she] doesn't want to offend." Nevertheless, she concludes that "alien-abduction beliefs can be considered a type of religious creed, based on faith, not facts." Kind to her extended family, Clancy does pursue the argument to the next logical step: that ordinary, accepted beliefs of supernatural intervention in human affairs are exactly as credible -- no more, no less -- as belief in macrocephalic waifs with black wraparound eyes who stick needles into your navel to produce hybrid children.
She also reports that one of her informants, when challenged, responded, "I trust my gut and my gut says aliens." Is there a better argument for listening not to our guts but to our brains?
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Posted by: Pradeep Aggarwal | March 23, 2006 at 11:09 PM