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."
Neuralizer strikes again!
That didn't take long.
bump 'til I can order the book.
Or so you think.
I’ve been abducted and molested by women I swear were aliens – now I no longer hang out in bars at closing time.
It's very un-PC like to hurt people's feelings by telling them the truth.
None -- BUT there were lots of folks who said "demons" or "succubus" paralyzed them and had their way with them. TLC or Discovery ran a program awhile ago about abductions and compared them to medieval reports of succubi and middle eastern "jinn" stories, the similarities were fascinating.
"Satan's greatest trick is convincing man that he doesn't exist."
Klatu Barada Niktu Whitey!
You can always tell the space aliens at F.R. They are the ones who double click when posting comments.
You can always tell the space aliens at F.R. They are the ones who double click when posting comments.
Neutralize – a successful government plot!
LOL, maybe she's trying to throw us off the trail? Maybe we're getting to close to the truth. Paging Scully and Mulder...
Yeah, but did she study Dan Rather and Tim Russert? If they're not cases of "alien abduction" returned to earth with new innards then they are simply space aliens masquerading as humans....
LOL.
OMG, You've been outed!
Time for a screename change!
Fortunately, my anti-double-post Firefox plugin prevents that kind of thing from happening to me.
LOL.
OMG, You've been outed!
Time for a screename change!
Fortunately, my anti-double-post Firefox plugin prevents that kind of thing from happening to me.
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
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I read his book, it was called 'encounters' I believe. It was actually pretty interesting, but seemed to me at the time a little farfetched. I must admit his followup of a report on aliens that landed in a school yard in africa and he interviewed the kids and teaechers etc... was pretty intriguing. This incident has been seized upon by alien conspiracy folk everywhere.
LOL! I was expecting the joke for some time now, but am pleasurably impressed with the execution.
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