Posted on 10/18/2005 12:50:27 PM PDT by laney
CAMBRIDGE -- Susan Clancy is sick of space aliens.
The Harvard psychologist figures she has read every book and seen every movie ever made about extraterrestrials, and she has interviewed roughly 50 people who claim to have been abducted by aliens.
All in the name of scientific truth, not science fiction.
"I have become a reluctant scholar of alienography," Clancy said.
Clancy is bracing for a fresh round of hate mail once her book, "Abducted: How People Come To Believe They Were Kidnapped By Aliens," is published by Harvard University Press later this month.
Those who believe aliens are among us haven't taken kindly to her theory that abductees have created "false memories" out of, she writes, a "blend of fantasy-proneness, memory distortion, culturally available scripts, sleep hallucinations, and scientific illiteracy."
That doesn't mean Clancy thinks her subjects are crazy. In fact, she was surprised how many of them seemed quite normal, intelligent and articulate.
"Arguing weird beliefs is a very normal thing," she said in a telephone interview from Nicaragua, where she has a research job. "It's very human for us to believe in things for which there is no scientific evidence."
When she arrived at Harvard in 1996, Clancy didn't set out to debunk the stories of little green men kidnapping people from their bedrooms and using them for painful experiments. Instead, she started her research on false memories by studying victims of sexual abuse.
She quickly found herself the target of angry "outsiders" who accused her of trying to discredit victims. One irate letter-writer called her a "friend of pedophiles everywhere."
Around the same time, Harvard Medical School started investigating the research methods employed by Pulitzer Prize-winning psychiatrist John Mack, who used hypnosis to retrieve memories from people who claimed to be alien abductees. (The school decided not to censure Mack, who was struck and killed by a drunk driver in London last year.)
Mack's work gave Clancy an idea: Wouldn't it be easier to test her theories if she could be certain that her subjects' memories were not real? She and her adviser, Harvard psychologist Richard McNally, placed a newspaper ad that asked, "Have you been abducted by aliens?" It took less than a day for callers to fill her voice mail.
As Clancy and McNally interviewed the abductees, they started to find some common threads. Many of them, for instance, described the terrifying experience of waking up and being unable to move, certain that an intruder was lurking in their room.
To the Harvard psychologists, it was obvious that their subjects had suffered an episode of sleep paralysis -- a state of limbo between sleep and being awake, sometimes punctuated by hallucinations.
"It's a little bit like a hiccup in the brain. It's harmless," said McNally, adding that 20 percent of the population will experience sleep paralysis at least once.
Many of the abductees also could be described as "spiritual people" who have abandoned conventional religious beliefs, McNally added.
"The people convinced of this are getting genuine spiritual payoff," he said. "To encounter a naturalistic account of it is deeply offensive."
Everyday people 'abducted'
In her book, Clancy describes her subjects' stories of abduction in detail, changing only their names.
One man, "an articulate, handsome" chiropractor with a "strikingly attractive wife" and twin sons, claimed to have fathered hybrid babies with an alien, a "streamlined, sylph-like creature."
Another subject, a 34-year-old artist with a college education, couldn't put a finger on her "disturbing sleep-related experiences" until he was hypnotized by an abduction researcher he found on the Internet.
During his second hypnosis session, the artist said he recovered memories of being abducted by aliens who strapped him down on a black marble table and subjected him to a painful sexual experiment.
Clancy said a wealth of research shows that hypnosis makes it easier for people to create false memories.
"This is in large part because it both stimulates the imagination and relaxes reality constraints," she writes in her book.
However, Clancy learned it was impossible to categorically disprove alien abductions.
"All you can do is argue that they're improbable and that the evidence adduced by the believer is insufficient to justify the belief," she wrote. "Ultimately, then, the existence of ETs is a matter of opinion, and the believers have their own opinions, based on firsthand experience."
Believers lash out
One of those "believers" is Will Bueche, a 36-year-old Arlington resident who was working for Mack when Clancy and McNally interviewed him several years ago.
Bueche said he has had more than a dozen "encounters" with aliens since he was a young child. These encounters with the "pale, thin beings," he said, usually happen at night, in his room, and he feels alert but "a little bit drugged" while they communicate with him telepathically.
"It's not like they're speaking English in my mind," he said. "It's a mixture of music, pictures, feelings and impressions."
Bueche said Clancy's theories about alien abductions, including sleep paralysis, cannot fully explain what he's experienced.
"I think her book comes close to the truth in many ways, but it isn't able to see the potential out there for another breakthrough in how we see reality," he said.
Clancy's conclusions aren't shared by David Jacobs, an associate professor of history at Temple University. Jacobs, who teaches a class called "UFOs and American Society," said Clancy's "Abducted" is a "typical debunking book."
Klaatu Barrada Nikto
'"It's very human for us to believe in things for which there is no scientific evidence."
Funny they did mention Spaghetti Man in alien abductions...
Who are the overlords of the UFO?
I have had it too, but once you know what it is, you know it's happening when it's happening.
I have been inducted by aliens. I escaped by telling them I was a democrat, so I was useless to their brain research experiments. ;o)
You have it every time you dream. It's a necessary part of sleep to keep you from acting out your dreams. Sure is weird waking up like that. I can see how some could think they were being abducted. I wonder how many "abduction" cases there were before television.
Wasn't Peter Jennings last TV special all about UFO's.
All in the name of scientific truth, not science fiction.
It may be that space creatures are really out there peeking in on us lowly earthlings but as the saying goes... I'll believe it when I see it.
My experience also. They gave a decent amount of coverage to the weather balloon theory, which I suspect is correct.
While buying some goodies at the souvenir section, which was by a flight of stairs, I told the guy he ought to have someone dressed up as an alien come down the stairs and say "Hey, Ed, I was working on the books and . . ." He laughed and said "Hmmm". Dunno if he did so, but that's what I would have done. (And have a security camera catch the visitors' reactions).
Because they're sticky?
;-o
What happened to the Raelians?
What happened to the Raelians?
She is probably saying this because she is one of them.
Klatu Barada Niktu Farrakhan
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.