Abducted

How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens

Susan A. Clancy

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780674029576
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Kognitive Psychologie & Kognition

They are tiny. They are tall. They are gray. They are green. They survey our world with enormous glowing eyes. To conduct their shocking experiments, they creep in at night to carry humans off to their spaceships. Yet there is no evidence that they exist at all. So how could anyone believe he or she was abducted by aliens? Or want to believe it?To answer these questions, psychologist Susan Clancy interviewed and evaluated "abductees"--old and young, male and female, religious and agnostic. She listened closely to their stories--how they struggled to explain something strange in their remembered experience, how abduction seemed plausible, and how, having suspected abduction, they began to recollect it, aided by suggestion and hypnosis.Clancy argues that abductees are sane and intelligent people who have unwittingly created vivid false memories from a toxic mix of nightmares, culturally available texts (abduction reports began only after stories of extraterrestrials appeared in films and on TV), and a powerful drive for meaning that science is unable to satisfy. For them, otherworldly terror can become a transforming, even inspiring experience. "Being abducted, " writes Clancy, "may be a baptism in the new religion of this millennium." This book is not only a subtle exploration of the workings of memory, but a sensitive inquiry into the nature of belief.

1

How Do You Wind Up Studying Aliens?

How did I come to study alien abductions in the first place? Many abductees I’ve interviewed believe I was drawn to the topic because I myself was abducted. Some people think I’m excitingly open-minded, or possibly just nuts. The truth is more prosaic. I was a little lost and I walked through a back door. Originally, I had no interest in aliens or alien abductions. I was interested in memory. Also in not spending my entire life in graduate school.

I began a Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard in the mid-1990s, during the height of the “recovered memory wars.” Could traumatic memories be utterly repressed and then recovered years later? The question was at the center of a bitter and volatile debate.

On one side were the trauma advocates, who believed that some experiences were so terrifying, painful, and overwhelming that they could be entirely forgotten. This forgetting, they said, occurred because of repression—a hypothesized defense mechanism that relieves the mind of pain by rendering traumatic memories inaccessible to conscious awareness. Although theoretically any type of traumatic event could elicit repression, the vast majority of reported cases involved childhood sexual abuse. Many psychotherapists, confronted with a wide range of puzzling and intractable symptoms in their patients, had come to believe that childhood sexual abuse was at their root—even if a patient could not remember that such abuse had ever happened. The therapists considered it their job to help the patient recover those memories and understand the profound trauma that gave rise to the suffering.

At the same time, skeptics—many of whom were academics—believed that the whole concept of repression was a clinical myth, unsupported by any real evidence. Most research showed that not only were traumatic events remembered; they usually were remembered all too well. So the skeptics believed that if patients “recovered” memories in therapy, they were probably remembering events they only imagined happening, under guidance from the therapist. They were creating false memories.¹

The debate continues today. What it really comes down to is whether memory works differently for traumatic events than for ordinary ones. Those who believe in repressed memories say it does: when events are traumatic, repression and dissociation (what many people call “spacing out”) set in as protection. The skeptics say it doesn’t: when events are traumatic they almost always get remembered, and no special emotional memory mechanisms exist. The most recent research indicates that although some details of traumatic events may be forgotten or confused, the core of the memory—what actually happened—generally remains intact.

No debate has ever done more to tear the field of psychology apart. A decade ago, during the bitterest phase of the controversy, the skeptics labeled repression advocates as fools, while the advocates came to see skeptics as arrogant or even as apologists for pedophiles. Passions ran high, for these theoretical arguments had real-world implications. Should alleged sexual abusers—often fathers—be imprisoned on the basis of their daughters’ recovered memories? Should psychotherapists encourage people with psychological problems to try to come up with what “must have” happened to them? Should the statute of limitations for reporting crimes be overturned in the case of recovered memories? Court dockets all over America were filling up with criminal cases pitting lawyers, victims, and expert witnesses against each other, with family relationships, truth and justice, and huge sums of money at stake. As more patients recovered memories in therapy, more families sued therapists for damages; as more people were sent to jail on the basis of recovered-memory testimony, more advocacy groups were formed to fight on behalf of the accused.

This was a minefield that I as a graduate student had no intention of going near. But in those days you could scarcely avoid it if you had any serious interest in psychology—or even if you didn’t. Celebrities were sharing their personal abuse histories on television, and bestselling books were encouraging people to go into psychotherapy to unearth their own. So many cases of recovered memory of satanic ritual abuses had been reported that the FBI was pressured to start an investigation. (It never found any physical evidence that such ritual abuse had ever occurred.) Women who had gone into therapy were discovering, with the help of hypnosis, that they sometimes had numerous personalities, and Multiple Personality Disorder was being described as a profound consequence of repressed childhood sexual abuse. Nursery schools were being shut down and teachers imprisoned because, after lengthy and suggestive questioning, children were describing bizarre episodes of abuse, some involving flying clowns and broomsticks and the killing of large animals.

And my own psychology department was caught up in the fray. The chairman, Daniel Schacter, a leading memory researcher, argued that what appeared to be recovered memories were probably false memories, created in therapy sessions between enthusiastic psychotherapists and suggestible patients. My advisor, Richard McNally, a clinical psychologist, studied cognitive functioning in people who had been exposed to trauma. One day over lunch they discovered they both wanted to study memory functioning in people reporting recovered memories. Were such people more likely than others to create false memories in a laboratory setting? If so, the finding (while not completely disproving the repression hypothesis) would be consistent with the argument that repression did not exist and that some people were more likely than others to create false memories. It was a great idea for an experiment, and Dan and Rich needed a graduate student to help them get the job done.

At the time I was working on a study examining whether cardiac hyperreactivity was a genetic marker for alcoholism. My job was to find men with a family history of alcoholism, get them drunk on pure grain alcohol, administer a pain-sensitivity test to their right index finger, and then record their heart rates during the ascending and descending limbs of the intoxication curve (in other words, as they were getting drunk and then sobering up). This job required a unique skill set: I had to be able to mix drinks, attach electrodes, inflict pain, measure blood alcohol levels, and tactfully yet effectively slap away frisky men.

One summer morning, just after testing a subject so drunk that he didn’t feel the pain in his finger and suggested I apply it to his nipples, I bumped into Rich McNally walking his dog outside the Psych Department building. Normally too intimidated to talk to him, I asked if he might be looking for another graduate student to work in his lab. When he asked whether I would be interested in spearheading the false-memory project, it never occurred to me to say no. I had definitely lost interest in cardiac hyperreactivity as a genetic marker for alcoholism. The false-memory question interested bigwigs in my department (read: highly superior intellectual beings whose support could rejuvenate my flagging self-respect); it would be relatively easy to explore with standardized laboratory methods; and it was a wholly new area of inquiry. Not only would I complete my Ph.D. in short order, but I’d get to work with luminaries in my field and be the first person to scientifically explore memory functioning in people with recovered memories. I felt like a fieldworker on an archaeological dig who falls into a hole and, while scrambling out, skins her knee on the lost city of Atlantis.

In a nutshell, this was the plan. I was going to recruit female sexual abuse victims from the community. I was going to look for three groups: women who had “recovered” memories of their sexual abuse, women who had been sexually abused and always remembered their abuse, and women who had never been abused at all. Then I was going to bring them into the laboratory and run them through a number of experiments that would examine their memory functioning. The experiments would all be standardized, employing methods widely used in the field.

One of the experiments involved something called guided imagery. Skeptics of repression hypothesized that some types of techniques used in therapy may inadvertently cause patients to create false memories. In guided imagery, patients who were unsure whether they had been abused were asked by the therapist to imagine what such abuse might have been like. Prior research indicated that when people in a laboratory setting were asked to imagine events in vivid detail, they were subsequently more likely to believe the events had happened. One such paradigm showed that after college students were instructed to imagine unusual childhood incidents (ones that were very unlikely to have happened, such as a situation in which they’d knocked over a punch bowl at a wedding), they became more confident that such incidents had actually occurred.²

I used this “imagination inflation” protocol to test whether people with recovered memories—as opposed to those with no history of abuse—were more susceptible to thinking things had happened to them after merely imagining them in the lab. Why did it matter? Because if women with recovered memories were more likely to succumb to imagination inflation in the lab, it was possible they’d be more likely to do so in the real world as well.

Another series of experiments involved a list-learning experiment known as the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Subjects were asked to memorize a series of word lists. Each list comprised semantically related words (such as “sugar,” “candy,” “sour,” “bitter”) all strongly related to another word (such as “sweet”) that was not presented on the list. This unpresented word was called the “critical lure.” Researchers had repeatedly found that subjects often remembered the list as including the critical lure. That is, the subjects created false memories in the lab.

I recruited women who reported sexual abuse and those with no abuse histories. If the former group was more likely to create false memories in the lab, this would be consistent with the hypothesis that they were more susceptible to false-memory creation outside the lab as well.

Didn’t it occur to me that testing false-memory creation in sexualabuse victims would be controversial? Well, I was idealistic. I believed that science was protective—that if you tested reasonable questions with sound research methods and submitted your results to the arduous peer review process, you were removed from the front lines of any controversy. I wasn’t fighting; I was just collecting data. I was as neutral as Switzerland.

But getting the research done was not so simple. The fact that research and writing aren’t always fun was nothing. The tough part was hearing all the stories my research subjects told me. I interviewed more than two hundred men and women with sexualabuse histories, asking difficult questions about what exactly had happened. When? Where? How? Who was the perpetrator? The stories were heartbreaking, and I was totally unprepared for my reactions. Sometimes I started to cry during interviews and had to invent an excuse to leave the room.

I was equally unprepared for readers’ reactions once I had written up the studies for publication. I’d been very careful in my methods, and I submitted the data to the peer review process—a painful experience in which people smarter than you get to attack your research anonymously.

The results of the guided-imagery paradigm were surprising: women with recovered memories were less prone to imagination inflation. Contrary to my hypothesis, they were not particularly susceptible to creating false memories in the lab.³

It was hard to interpret this finding. In contrast to the control subjects, about half of the recovered-memory subjects seemed to catch on to the purpose of the experiment. They would say things like, “Oh, I see what you’re doing—you’re trying to find out if you can get us to create false memories.” These subjects—who were particularly concerned about the purpose of the experiment, and how the results might affect the way sexual abuse was treated and understood—were quick to see through our method (and to get ticked off). In psychological jargon, it was a “transparent paradigm.” The most I could say after concluding the experiment was that vigilance against false-memory creation could perhaps protect a person from imagination inflation in the lab.

In contrast to the guided-imagery paradigm, the DRM paradigm yielded fairly clear results. These indicated that people with repressed memories were more likely than others to create false memories in the lab, a finding consistent with the idea that such people might be particularly likely to believe in the reality of events that they had merely read about or imagined.⁴ The fact that sexual-abuse victims were prone to creating false memories in the lab could be explained in several ways. Two obvious ones conflicted with each other. Either the abuse had never occurred and the individuals had developed false memories of events they merely imagined. Or the abuse had occurred and was so horrific that they had repressed their memories, and this repression had led to memory impairments that manifested themselves in their lab performance.

But since my article didn’t discuss the matter in sufficient detail, many outsiders concluded one thing: I believed that these people had not been abused. The phone started ringing off the hook. How could I do this to the victims of such crimes? Why was I hurting them even more than they’d been hurt? One published letter called me “a friend of pedophiles everywhere.” Not only was the public at large upset, but I was being vilified by many in my own scientific community. A trauma researcher at Harvard Medical School told a New York Times reporter that my research had a “political agenda.”⁵ Grad school friends stopped talking to me. A Harvard Medical School psychiatrist took me to lunch and over tepid baked scrod told me that I should pick another research area, because otherwise I’d be unlikely to get a job when I graduated.

Ten years later, I finally understand what was going on. The theory of repression is inextricably tied to childhood sexual abuse, and after centuries of being denied or ignored, sexual abuse was finally being acknowledged for the evil it is. A theory had been yoked to a social movement; and if I was questioning repression, I had to be questioning the existence of sexual abuse. When I said, “You’re prone to creating false memories,” people heard: “I don’t believe you’ve been abused.” This wasn’t what I was saying, but it didn’t matter. Any research looked like a threat to the progress that advocates for victims of sexual abuse had fought so hard to achieve.

Science had been sold to us graduate students not as a collection of facts, but as a process aimed at the pursuit of truth—one in which there were supposed to be no forbidden questions. Yet when it came to sexual-abuse research, this certainly was not the case.

I hated the controversy, and I hated being seen as a secret enemy of all those people who had shared their painful memories with me. But then a safer way to study the creation of false memories turned up.

After Harvard Medical School had concluded its investigation of John Mack’s research methods, Mack was encouraged to apply a multidisciplinary approach to his study of alien-abduction claims. Accordingly, in the spring of 1999, he invited a group of academics ranging from astrophysicists to anthropologists to come to Harvard’s Divinity School, where they brainstormed with mental health professionals and a number of abductees.⁶ Rich McNally returned from the conference impressed by the conviction with which the abductees spoke about their experiences. He wanted to bring them into the lab and examine their psycho-physiology as they were in the act of remembering their encounters. Did they react to scary abduction memories the same way they reacted to scary events that had actually happened? Did I want to collaborate?

I liked the idea immediately. Here was a group that had “repressed memories,” but the memories would be much less painful to hear about than memories of childhood sexual abuse.

Even better, alien abductees were people who had developed memories of a traumatic event that I could be fairly certain had never occurred. A major problem with my research on false-memory creation by victims of alleged sexual abuse was that it was almost impossible to determine whether they had, in fact, been abused. I needed to repeat the study with a population that I could be sure had “recovered” false memories. Alien abductions seemed to fit the bill.

The plan was simple: find people who believed they had been abducted by aliens, get them into the lab, interview them about their memories, and then run them through some of the paradigms I had used with the sexual-abuse victims. When tested with a variant of the DRM paradigm, would abductees be more likely than other people to create false memories in the lab? Would they yield the same results as the sexual-abuse victims with recovered memories? If so, this addressed the corroboration issue (since it was certain the event hadn’t happened) and provided further support for the hypothesis that people who “recovered” memories were creating false memories of events they had merely imagined.

It took three months to convince Harvard’s Institutional Review Board that this was a viable research project, but at last I got the green light and ran the first of many newspaper ads seeking subjects: “Have you been abducted by aliens?”⁷ By 10:15 a.m. my voicemail in-box was full.

Most of the calls were from local TV stations, radio shows, and newspapers curious to know why Harvard was interested in aliens. Some were from ticked-off Bostonians (“Doesn’t Harvard have better ways to spend all its goddamn money?”). A few painful calls came from Latin Americans who had misunderstood the ad, and thought we were looking for illegal immigrants abducted by U.S. bord...