Back in August, in "Some Thoughts on Fermi's Paradox", I proposed some explanations for why there's no evidence of intelligent alien species. But I left out what seems like the most obvious explanation of all: they do exist, and they're already here.
This may well be the most popular answer. To judge by polls like this one from 2002, almost half of American adults believe that intelligent aliens have visited the Earth. (Ironically, The Onion actually gets this percentage right in its deadpan take.) And it's not just visiting Earth, either: the same poll shows that 20% of Americans - which is on the order of 60 million people - believe that some human beings have been abducted by aliens or have otherwise physically interacted with them. Even some fringe Christian groups believe in this, although they tend to believe that aliens are demonically aligned, if not demons themselves.
I've written previously about sleep paralysis, which figures into many claims of hauntings and is probably at the root of most alien abduction claims as well. The common symptoms of sleep paralysis - inability to move, strong sensation of a menacing presence, mild hallucination - are perfect parallels to the usual elements of an abduction story.
To complete the tale, many alien abduction claimants undergo hypnosis to "remember" their experience. In reality, hypnosis makes a person highly suggestible and prone to confabulate. When primed with leading questions by the therapist, a subject under hypnosis is very likely to invent details which they later believe to be real memories. In fact, some studies have shown that abduction claimants are more likely than the general populace to concoct false memories. In this way, alien abduction becomes a self-sustaining phenomenon, as the stories and images in popular culture seed the abduction reports of the next generation of true believers.
What I've always wondered is, if aliens are really visiting Earth and abducting us, why is it so easy for people to find out about it? To judge by the accounts of abductees, it is extremely easy to recover the details of their experience under ordinary hypnotic regression. I would imagine that a race advanced enough for interstellar travel would either not care about concealing themselves, or would be able to hide their presence so effectively that we would be completely unable to detect them.
Even today we have drugs, such as scopolamine, that can block the formation of memories (it's often used by date rapists and other criminals, and in the past was given to mothers in labor), and as an added bonus, makes recipients highly cooperative and suggestible. Hypnosis is ineffective at helping a person recall what they did under the influence of this drug, because the memories are never stored in the first place. Wouldn't highly advanced aliens have something at least as effective as this?
And for that matter, why would they need to keep abducting us? Couldn't a species so advanced just abduct one human and then reverse-engineer our genome to run whatever experiments they wanted? And couldn't they come up with implants and sensors that could be read out remotely and wouldn't need repeated visits? (Don't aliens have Wi-Fi?)
Ultimately, alien abduction has simply become another modern-day religion, with advanced extraterrestrials taking the place of gods, angels and devils. Like latter-day prophets, some of them come to warn us of planetary catastrophe or guide us toward salvation. Others, like demons, come to torment and terrify us. Some true believers have created elaborate Manichean cosmologies where some aliens are good and others are evil. And, like all religions, these convoluted and fantastic claims are always advanced without a scrap of real evidence.
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You are criticizing people who hold ridiculous beliefs based on irrational myths and you have swallowed one hook line and sinker.
Whoever you are, you are not an experience psychiatrist or clinical psychologist. False memories are utterly different in secondary manifestations, content, and in the area of the brain that are active compared to recovery of repressed traumatic memories. (Repressed traumatic memories, and not false memories, are often associated with the psychogenic symptoms noted in supposed "alien abduction" experiences. It's easier for children to imagine that the original attacker was an alien or a monster rather than a loved one.)
The whole nonsense called False Memory Syndrome was concocted by a psychology researcher cum lawyer who may well have emotional issues of her own. The False Memory Mythology has been usurped and distorted by defense lawyers who are interested in winning cases and not in ascertaining truth.
If you had read any of the experimental work on false memories, then you'd be aware that the studies involve experimental situations like showing subjects photos of car wrecks with a body lying on the ground in front of the car, and then asking subjects whether they noticed either "A broken headlight" or "THE broken headlight". It doesn't take a trained psychiatrist to realize that more study subjects claim to have remembered "THE broken headlight". Obviously, if the experimenters had asked whether the subject remembered seeing "A body" or "THE body", this would make little difference to accuracy of reporting! The only value of such research is to teach those who question anyone professionally (police, social workers, psychiatrists, etc) to avoid leading questions, particularly concerning the small details.
If you knew anything about false memory studies, then you'd know that many experimental subjects are immune to implantation of memories. Some studies recruit parents to tell their child of an event, such as disliking soft-boiled eggs, that the child supposedly experienced but does not recall. Hypnosis is not used for this. Some imaginative kids are able to visualize the described event and to come to believe that it actually happened. It's easy to understand how this can happen--when we read a novel, we visualize the characters, the places, and the events about which we read.
Now, think about how different the experience of being beaten or sexually traumatized is in comparison to recalling broken headlights or imagining that you disliked soft-boiled eggs. Worlds apart. As a therapist who treats traumatized women, I can assure you that the therapeutic work involves letting the patient recover the memory without any leading questions. In fact, if I ever try to clarify a detail and get it wrong, my patients are utterly clear on which detail was accurate. When victims of childhood trauma recover a memory, they don't just remember it the way you or I would consciously recall a faded 'episodic' memory of an event, they RELIVE it with all the intensity and sensations of the original event. It's upsetting to witness, and there is no way on earth that a therapist could either implant such a memory or that they would wish to.
Don't take my word for all this any more than you've believed lawyers or psychologists-with-issues, look up a reputable site on childhood abuse, repressed memories, or dissociative identity disorder, and listen to those who help victims rather than perpetrators.
I'm sorry that this is so long. I get utterly frustrated with the impact of denialist nonsense on my patients. Another tragic component of this prevailing denial is too frequent misdiagnosis and mistreatment by incompetent psychiatrists, social workers, and psychologists.
Comment by: salient | October 21, 2007, 10:24 am