They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves

The History and Politics of Alien Abduction

Bridget Brown

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780814786352
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire sociale

Since its emergence in the 1960s, belief in alien abduction has saturated popular culture, with the ubiquitous image of the almond-eyed alien appearing on everything from bumper stickers to bars of soap. Drawing on interviews with alleged abductees from the New York area, Bridget Brown suggests a new way for people to think about the alien phenomenon, one that is concerned not with establishing whether aliens actually exist, but with understanding what belief in aliens in America may tell us about our changing understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.

They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves looks at how the belief in abduction by extraterrestrials is constituted by and through popular discourse and the images provided by print, film, and television. Brown contends that the abduction phenomenon is symptomatic of a period during which people have come to feel increasingly divested of the ability to know what is real or true about themselves and the world in which they live. The alien abduction phenomenon helps us think about how people who feel left out create their own stories and fashion truths that square with their own experience of the world.

1

Elusive Shreds of Memory

The Trauma and Recovery of Alien Abduction

Alien abduction expert Budd Hopkins estimates that he has worked with roughly seven hundred people, helping them to uncover the otherwise unfaceable details of their multiple abductions by aliens. Hopkins is the author of three popular books on alien abduction, Missing Time (1981), Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods (1987), and Witnessed: The True Story of the Brooklyn Bridge UFO Abductions (1996). He has played a central role in reinvigorating interest in the topic, manifested in the boom in accounts of abduction to emerge during the 1980s and 1990s. He now runs the Intruders Foundation, an online clearinghouse for information about alien abduction. He is a fixture on UFO lecture circuits and runs a New York City support group that many of the area abductees I have interviewed attend. He is, according to his promotional materials, “generally regarded as the world’s leading authority on the UFO abduction phenomenon,” and has appeared on the Today Show, Oprah, Good Morning America, Roseanne, and on numerous television specials on alien abduction from the more sensational series Sightings to the sober and high-minded PBS series Nova. His book Missing Time was made into a television movie starring Mare Winningham; Hopkins was played by Richard Crenna.

I first saw Hopkins speak at the 1994 Whole Life Expo, “The World’s Largest Exposition for Holistic Health, Personal Growth, and Positive Living,” in New York City. I was curious then about what exactly aliens had to do with “personal growth and positive living” and to see how abduction experts positioned themselves among UFO investigators, who have traditionally been more interested in outer space than the inner space of the human psyche. The “UFOs and the Coming Millennium” panel provided just the sort of overview of ufology celebrities that I had hoped to find. The emcee was Trish McCannon, a Pleiedian contactee and multidimensional channeller. Also on the panel were Fred Bell, former NASA engineer and speaker on ET technologies; Bob Dean, ex-soldier devoted to exposing the government cover-up of ET knowledge—the “cosmic Watergate” I discuss at length in chapters 6 and 7; Mike Rogers, friend of Travis Walton, the abductee featured in the 1993 film Fire in the Sky; and Vance Davis, a “decorated Army Intelligence Specialist who went AWOL before the Gulf War in 1990 with five other high level operatives after they received warnings about forthcoming Earth Changes along with Alien Visitation Craft and the aliens that control them.”¹

Fig. 2. Intruders cover. Budd Hopkins, Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods (Ballantine, 1987).

These panelists spoke confidently and authoritatively about the “end of one great cycle and the beginning of the next,” of the role in our lives of an elaborate hierarchy of alien races involved, for better for worse, in our inevitable march toward apocalypse. They spoke with a kind of heady paranoia about the lies and deceit of both aliens and the government and the conspiracy among the “forces of dark” to bombard humans with ELFs, or extra-low frequency waves, that make us tired, disoriented, and ultimately powerless in the face of our enemies. These ufologists seemed engaged in a discourse of aliens and otherness that came from a number of places: from science fiction, from eco-apocalyptic atomic age and millennial anxiety, from conspiracy theories that posit all occurrences as interrelated parts of a larger, covert plan. Then it was Hopkins’s turn to speak. Hopkins looks sort of rumpled and avuncular—a cross between character actors Hal Holbrook and Alan Alda. In the midst of this fantastic millennialism, Hopkins presents himself as an oasis, if not of reason then of reasonableness. Unlike his other panelists, he insisted, he did not KNOW what was going to happen to any of us; he knew nothing of prophesy or the coming millennium; unlike the others, he was not primarily interested in aliens, but in people. Hopkins maintained that he was less concerned with the existence of a “cosmic Watergate” than with treating and healing people who claim to have been abducted and traumatized by aliens. It is his mission, he declared to the capacity crowd, to “make these people whole again.”

I interviewed Hopkins in May 1998 in the well-appointed Chelsea apartment he shares with his wife and two large-eyed, hairless, and suspiciously alien-looking cats. Hopkins spent most of our over-two-hour interview defending his position that alien abductions are real events, dismissing point by point various “debunking” arguments that have been made against him. He also went out of his way to discredit other experts whom he accuses of “having an agenda.” In contrast, he tries to position himself—as in his performance at the Whole Life Expo—as a man of reason. He insists that his approach in his books is evidence-driven: if he “discovers something important” he writes a book. “Data comes in,” Hopkins notes, “and I look at it as objectively as possible.” He roughly groups other camps into “New Age, Christian, paranoid/government-blaming, and cults.” In contrast, he claims not to impose an interpretation. According to Hopkins “there are many ways in which people understand what happened to them in order to cope and survive,” and he likes “to leave their coping styles in place.”

During our interview Hopkins also explained how he—an abstract painter of some standing in the art world—has become one of the foremost authorities on alien abduction. In 1964 Hopkins had a UFO sighting that initiated his interest in UFOs. In 1976 he wrote an article for the Village Voice about UFOs. After the Voice article Hopkins began to look into the claims of alleged alien abductees and, realizing that certain skills were required to get at the “truth” of the abduction experience, an experience that seemed almost always to be buried in amnesia, he entered what he calls a “seven-year apprenticeship” with a number of psychiatrists and psychologists, during which he learned about hypnotherapy and “gathered evidence.” In 1983 he began hypnotizing alleged abductees himself. Now he is busy year round “interviewing” some of the hundreds of possible abductees he receives letters from, performing hypnotic regressions, and facilitating a support group that meets in his apartment every two months or so.

Hopkins claims that for years—with several notable exceptions including the Hill and Andreasson cases, which I discuss below—few abductees came forward, because of shame. He suggests that many investigators and scientists were guilty of perpetuating a sort of collective denial that kept abductees quiet mostly as a result of “fear of allowing such an unknown into our life.” Once materials became available about alien abduction in the 1980s—including his own books—more and more abductees began to come forward. Hopkins notes that “unless there is an infrastructure of organizations and investigators [abduction] is not a ‘phenomenon.’” If people don’t know what to call it, he explains, it goes unrecorded.²

I agree with Hopkins on this last point, though he and I surely interpret its meaning differently. Hopkins means that members of this quasi-professional network serve the critical function of helping otherwise isolated and miserable individuals locate the extraterrestrial source of their anxiety, confront the hidden trauma of alien violation, and move on. I believe, and will seek to argue here, that this community of experts has played a central role in creating and shaping the abduction phenomenon. They have done so in large part because of the authority and legitimacy the hypnotherapeutic process confers on them through their ability to “treat” abductees, whom they have helped render victims in need of their assistance. They have built careers on their supposed aptitude at revealing “hidden truths” about people’s pasts, “truths” that are held up as evidence of the actual existence of aliens, particularly juicy and titillating evidence that has made its way into best-selling books or highly rated television talk shows. At the same time such experts are, I will argue, guilty of ignoring or eliding the very terrestrial sources of suffering that abductees talk about, both directly and indirectly, when they talk about their abduction by aliens. In this chapter and the next, I examine the way in which the eclectic coalition of experts who “treat” abductees have framed alien abduction as a psychological trauma, abductees as victims, and abduction experts as those capable, like the aliens themselves, of controlling the simultaneously painful and relieving process of confronting the past.

The Charisma of Hypnosis: The Postwar Context

Since the 1960s a growing coalition of UFO investigators, psychologists, psychiatrists, and noncredentialed therapists who use hypnosis to treat alien abduction as repressed trauma have helped construct the compelling notion that most of us are walking time bombs of buried information in need of release through the proper therapeutic methods. According to this quasi-professional community, one need only find the right hypnotist, or investigator, or therapist to unlock the truth about one’s individual past, which may indeed include repeated abduction by extraterrestrials. Many abductees acknowledge that if they had not contacted an expert such as Budd Hopkins, they might never have fully realized their hidden personal histories as alien abductees. Indeed, since the first account of a human abduction was published in 1966, the story of abduction has been about people seeking the help of those who were deemed capable of accessing parts of their pasts to which they themselves lacked access.

The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours Aboard a Flying Saucer, written by UFO investigator John Fuller and published by Dial Press in 1966, acts as a sort of origin story in alien abduction discourse. The first published and mass-distributed account of abduction by aliens, it tells the story of Betty and Barney Hill, an interracial couple living in New Hampshire who claimed to have encountered a UFO while driving home from a trip to Canada in 1961.³ The Hills’ story is referred to in almost all subsequent published accounts of abduction, and served as a conversational touchstone in most of the interviews I conducted with New York area abductees. The Interrupted Journey contains many of the features that would come to distinguish abduction accounts from previous stories of UFO or alien contact. These include the decision made by most abductees to seek therapeutic treatment for their alleged contact with extraterrestrials. As its subtitle suggests, The Interrupted Journey is fundamentally concerned with the theme of retrieving or reconstructing lost time. The day after their purported encounter with a UFO the Hills became aware that they had “lost” two hours during that trip; they could remember nothing between seeing the UFO and driving along a particular stretch of New England highway. In the wake of this experience, Betty began to have long, detailed nightmares about being taken on board the UFO and examined by aliens. Barney developed insomnia and his ulcer became aggravated. He also began to worry about a mysterious ring of warts around his groin that appeared after they had returned home from the trip. Betty became driven by a desire to know whether her dreams were really memories of an actual, forgotten event. She became determined to “know one way or the other because . . . well maybe my dreams are something that really happened.”⁴ Likewise, Barney asked a friend, referring to his UFO sighting, “How do I know that this thing happened? How do I know that I wasn’t just seeing things?”⁵ And so, like thousands of alleged alien abductees to follow, the Hills set out to find answers that would relieve them both of “crippling anxiety” and the unbearable burden of uncertainty.

In order to determine whether her experience was “illusion, hallucination, dream, or reality,” Betty Hill first turned to members of the UFO investigative community already in place in the early 1960s for help.⁶ Walter Webb of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) was dispatched to handle this intriguing new type of case. At his urging the Hills decided to retrace their original journey. As Fuller writes, “the compulsion grew in both of them that they must return to the scene of the incident, as Walter Webb had suggested, and relive the experience trying to recapture the elusive shreds of memory.”⁷ Betty in particular believed that retaking the trip from Montreal to their home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, would “spark a chain of memory that would suddenly bring back their recall.”⁸ When repeated reenactments of their mysterious trip failed to jog their memory, which remained frustratingly elusive, the Hills decided to seek the help of a hypnotist.

The Hills decision to seek certainty through the retrieval of lost time was made at a time when ideas about the nature of memory and its relationship to truth were at issue in both popular and political culture. Hypnosis—long a popular form of stage entertainment—gained increasing visibility and credibility in the wake of World War II. U.S. intelligence agencies including the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) dabbled with hypnosis (under the broader rubric of “mind control” and “brainwashing”) as possible means through which the United States might seek to sabotage enemies. Though efforts to create unwitting assassins through such means neither succeeded nor gained much credibility within the national security state as a whole, the notion that expert agents might control and manipulate an individual’s mind and memory was a powerful one. The Manchurian Candidate—both Richard Condon’s best-selling 1959 novel and John Frankenthaler’s 1962 film—widely popularized this notion.⁹

On a less sinister but no less intriguing level, the process of unearthing and treating trauma through memory was also already in place in the national project of healing a nation in the wake of war. In Interrupted Journey, Fuller credits family friend Major James MacDonald, an Air Force intelligence officer who had just recently retired from active duty, with suggesting hypnosis as “a way to penetrate the unyielding curtain that began to descend” when Barney tried to recall what happened after he exited the car to view the descending UFO. MacDonald, it seems, could testify to the credibility of hypnosis which, under “controlled medical conditions” could “produce some strikingly dramatic results in the rehabilitation of servicemen suffering from war neuroses.”¹⁰ MacDonald’s suggestion was supported by another military man and member of the Hills’ church group, Captain Ben Swett from Pease Air Force Base. Swett, according to Fuller, was “well known for his study of hypnosis.”¹¹ Finally Barney’s psychiatrist, with whom he had been exploring the possible emotional and social problems of being an interracial couple, and of being subjected to racism, also suggested consultation with a hypnotist. It was Barney’s psychiatrist who referred the Hills to Dr. Benjamin Simon, a Boston psychiatrist and neurologist. Simon came to his interest in hypnosis through the treatment of “military psychiatric disorders” during World War II. Fuller goes to great lengths to establish Simon’s credibility and legitimacy. Fuller notes with special interest that Simon had served as advisor to, and appeared in, a 1946 documentary about the psychiatric treatment of war veterans called Let There Be Light, directed by John Huston. Marshalling military and scientific authority, Fuller makes his case...