Abducted!
Imaginary traumas are as terrifying as the real thing
By Michael Shermer
In the wee hours of the morning on August 8, 1983, while I was traveling
along a lonely rural highway approaching Haigler, Neb., a large craft with
bright lights overtook me and forced me to the side of the road. Alien beings
exited the craft and abducted me for 90 minutes, after which time I found
myself back on the road with no memory of what transpired inside the ship.
I can prove that this happened because I recounted it to a film crew shortly
afterward.
When alien abductees recount to me their stories, I do not deny that they
had a real experience. But thanks to recent research by Harvard University
psychologists Richard J. McNally and Susan A. Clancy, we now know that some
fantasies are indistinguishable from reality, and they can be just as traumatic.
In a 2004 paper in Psychological Science entitled "Psychophysiological Responding
during Script-Driven Imagery in People Reporting Abduction by Space Aliens,"
McNally, Clancy and their colleagues report the results of a study of claimed
abductees. The researchers measured heart rate, skin conductance and
electromyographic responses in a muscle that lifted the eyebrow--called the
left lateral (outer) frontalis--of the study participants as they relived
their experiences through script-driven imagery. "Relative to control
participants," the authors concluded, "abductees exhibited greater
psychophysiological reactivity to abduction and stressful scripts than to
positive and neutral scripts." In fact, the abductees' responses were comparable
to those of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients who had listened
to scripts of their actual traumatic experiences.
In 1983, in rural Nebraska, I was abducted by aliens.
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The abduction study was initiated as a control in a larger investigation
of memories of sexual abuse. In his book Remembering Trauma (Harvard
University Press, 2003), McNally tracks the history of the recovered memory
movement of the 1990s, in which some people, while attempting to recover
lost memories of childhood sexual molestation (usually through hypnosis and
guided imagery), instead created false memories of abuse that never happened.
"The fact that people who believe they have been abducted by space aliens
respond like PTSD patients to audiotaped scripts describing their alleged
abductions," McNally explains, "underscores the power of belief to
drive a physiology consistent with actual traumatic experience." The vividness
of a traumatic memory cannot be taken as evidence of its authenticity.
The most likely explanation for alien abductions is
sleep
paralysis and hypnopompic (on awakening) hallucinations. Temporary paralysis
is often accompanied by visual and auditory hallucinations and sexual fantasies,
all of which are interpreted within the context of pop culture's fascination
with UFOs and aliens. McNally found that abductees "were much more prone
to exhibit false recall and false recognition in the lab than were control
subjects," and they scored significantly higher than normal on a questionnaire
measuring "absorption," a trait related to fantasy proneness that also predicts
false recall.
My abduction experience was triggered by sleep deprivation and physical
exhaustion. I had just ridden a bicycle 83 straight hours and 1,259 miles
in the opening days of the 3,100-mile nonstop transcontinental Race Across
America. I was sleepily weaving down the road when my support motor home
flashed its high beams and pulled alongside, and my crew entreated me to
take a sleep break. At that moment a distant memory of the 1960s television
series The Invaders was inculcated into my waking dream. In the series,
alien beings were taking over the earth by replicating actual people but,
inexplicably, retained a stiff little finger. Suddenly the members of my
support team were transmogrified into aliens. I stared intensely at their
fingers and grilled them on both technical and personal matters.
After my 90-minute sleep break, the experience represented nothing more than
a bizarre hallucination, which I recounted to ABC's Wide World of Sports
television crew filming the race. But at the time the experience was real,
and that's the point. The human capacity for self-delusion is boundless,
and the effects of belief are overpowering. Thanks to science we have learned
to tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
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Michael Shermer is publisher of Skeptic (www.skeptic.com) and author of
The Science of Good and Evil.
MORE SKEPTIC:
Turn Me On, Dead Man
The Feynman-Tufte Principle
The Fossil Fallacy
Abducted!
Quantum Quackery
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