Wake-up call on alien visits

By Stephen Pincock

Over the past 30 years or so thousands of people around the world have reported being abducted by aliens. The basics of their experiences are familiar to us all, courtesy of a host of television shows and documentaries.

It goes something like this: one moment they were lying in bed or driving along a lonely road, and the next they'd been whisked away to a flying saucer and subjected to shocking experiments by extraterrestrials with big heads, almond eyes and slits for nostrils.

The people who report such visitations are utterly convinced they happened, but there is no evidence that aliens have ever been on the planet. In an effort to understand this disparity, researchers have been studying the psychology of alien abductees, with some revealing results.

A recent study was reported by Professor Chris French, head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

French and his colleagues wanted to compare the psychology of a group of 19 people who believed they had had experiences of alien encounters and another group of 19 age-and gender-matched people who hadn't. The team subjected all the people to tests that measured their tendency to have paranormal beliefs and hallucinations, the ease with which they become engrossed in experiences and their propensity to enter into altered states of consciousness.

On all those scales, the 19 who said they had experiences of alien encounters scored significantly higher than the control group.

"What was interesting was that the 'experiencers' scored more highly for paranormal beliefs and other paranormal experiences," French says. "It's not just that these people have one-off experiences - they have a range of them."

The researchers also asked the subjects if they had experienced a little-known phenomenon called sleep paralysis, a condition that takes place when our sleep cycles slip out of synchronisation. Rather than moving easily between sleeping and waking, we get caught midway.

The result is that our mind "wakes up" before our body does, leaving us in a dreamlike state, unable to move. This is something that about 40 per cent of the population is said to experience at least once in their lives, and is often associated with hallucinations, a feeling that some malevolent person or thing is in the room with you, and a sense of a crushing weight on your chest.

"It all seems very real and it's very, very frightening," French says. "But what is happening is that people are still in a kind of REM sleep - the kind associated with dreams - which is coming through into consciousness."

Most people who experience sleep paralysis shrug it off, but a fraction are more concerned about the experience. In some cultures, the phenomenon has been thought of as a sign that evil spirits or other nasties have taken over your body.

In our high-tech world we scoff at the idea of evil spirits. But some people who experience sleep paralysis associate it with alien abduction, as Susan Clancy, a psychology researcher from Harvard University, describes in her recent book Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens.

She recounts stories told to her by several people who think they were abducted. James, a 50-year-old dermatologist, described it like this: "I found myself waking up in the middle of the night, seized with fear. There were beings standing around my bed, but I was totally paralysed, incapable of moving. I felt surges of electricity shooting through my body."

For researchers such as Clancy and French, this sounds a lot like sleep paralysis. They see alien abduction as part of a wider matrix of paranormal experiences, such as seeing ghosts and past-life memories.

Clancy says most people she has spoken to who think they have had encounters with aliens don't initially have memories of the experience. They "simply believed that they'd been abducted", she writes.

In many cases, those who do acquire memories do so after undergoing techniques such as hypnosis, regression therapy or guided imagery designed to help them "retrieve" their memories of events. These processes can create memories of things that never happened.

Even without hypnosis, false memories can be generated in the right person, Clancy notes. The key factor is protracted imagining of an event in the presence of an authority figure who encourages belief in the memories that emerge. This, she says, is what happens when alien abductees fall into the hands of abduction researchers who help them "recover" abduction memories.

"We've all seen The X Files, we know what alien abduction is supposed to be like," French says. "So people weave together their expectations, beliefs and so on into what they convince themselves is true." For people who have the psychological profile he found among his alien experiencers, this may be an easier task than for others.

French goes further and hypothesises that at least in some cases, childhood trauma such as sexual abuse, physical abuse or terrible illness may trigger a kind of psychological coping mechanism that allows people to become absorbed in a fantasy life as a way of escaping from unpleasant reality.