Alien Abduction Or A Trick Of The Mind? A Down To Earth Explanation Of Close Encounters

For years, Steven Kilburn had felt uneasy when driving a particular stretch of road between Pikesville, Baltimore, and Frederick, Maryland. It was an uncanny feeling, not based in any solid memory; just an overwhelming sense of wrongness, like he was being watched. 

According to Steven, the feeling first started one night while driving home from the place where his college girlfriend had lived. “I don’t know whether someone was watching me or I was watching something strange,” he explained. “Whatever it was that particular time, I remember I felt that something maybe had just happened to me, or was going to happen, and it was this very weird feeling.”

Whatever was going on, Steven was sure of one thing: “Every time I passed that approximate area, I felt for some reason something right there had happened.”

This sense of unease persisted for years until May 1978, when Steven was introduced to Dr Girard Franklin, a psychologist who was training in hypnosis at the time. Curious to know whether Steven’s strange feelings were in fact the result of some sort of suppressed memory, Dr Franklin subjected him to hypnosis, which was increasingly used by people to access details their minds had supposedly “repressed”. What came next, however, was unexpected. 

Under hypnosis, Steven relived and narrated the events of the drive home that set this whole situation in motion. His voice was soft, almost slightly slurred as he recalled what he now “saw”. At first, the details of his drive home seemed normal, but suddenly, Steven paused, becoming hesitant. According to the events he was reliving, his car had inexplicably stopped working and he was forced to get out and investigate it on that lonely stretch of road. And then it happened: “It’s on my shoulder,” Steven cried out, “...a clamp... it hurts. I can’t move!”

Steven was terrified, his face streaming with tears, but he nevertheless continued explaining what he was seeing. Over the course of the next hour and a half, Steven relayed an incredible account of how, on that night years ago, he had been abducted by some unknown entities he described as being near human size, but with white skin and no hair on their heads. 

This account was recorded in Budd Hopkins’ 1981 bestselling book Missing Time, which detailed various first-hand experiences from people who believed they had been abducted by aliens with no or little memory of their ordeals. The book provides various accounts from people Hopkins and colleagues interviewed on the subject of their supposed abduction experiences, most of which were gathered by way of hypnotic regression. 

So many people came forward, each with memories that appeared to have been wiped by alien influence, that Hopkins became convinced there was effectively a secret abduction plague going on. As he recalled in Missing Time:

 “An inescapable conclusion to be drawn from all these cases is that anyone could have been abducted, with no memory of it, no conscious recall even of a preliminary event like the sighting of a UFO.”    

However, is this conclusion sound? The obvious answer is probably not, but that doesn’t mean something interesting wasn’t occurring. Unbeknownst to Hopkins, as well as many other unidentified flying object (UFO) researchers at the time, this collective work came to show how many so-called alien abduction stories were in fact the result of created memories produced by the hypnotist/subject interaction. Or, to put it differently, rather than revealing the extent to which aliens were nabbing everyday people, Hopkins’ work revealed how flexible memory can be and how false ones can be constructed. Today, this is one of the leading scientific explanations concerning alien abduction cases, but it is not the only one. 

Alien encounters and the memory wars 

Given the above account, you may be thinking one of three things. Firstly, that these people are mentally unwell and delusional. Secondly, they’re lying. Or thirdly, that it all must be true, and therefore aliens are routinely abducting people. Of course, the final possibility is a little hard to support as doing so would also require substantial evidence in other scientific fields related to physics, biology, and so on. 

There is also no doubt that many people who claim to have encountered aliens, seen UFOs, or even been abducted have deliberately lied, either for attention, boredom, or sheer mischief. But what about those accounts made by people who are completely sincere and, more importantly, do not exhibit signs of any other psychological issues that might produce hallucinations or delusions?

This is an important and consistent point. Anyone who reads Missing Time or abduction claims made since the 1980s will be struck by how earnest many speakers are. In fact, I have received incredibly frank emails from IFLScience readers who wish to state plainly how they are not looking for attention or notoriety, but they are convinced that they have been abducted, and it was real. One individual even told me he had not believed in aliens or UFOs until his own experience. It’s hard not to take someone at their word when they come across so earnest. 

This is something that struck Hopkins and many other avid alien encounter investigators over the years; people who underwent hypnosis to retrieve “lost” memories not only believed they were genuine encounters but were deeply traumatized by them. The whole phenomenon baffled Hopkins to such an extent that he became convinced he had stumbled on some sort of secret untold reality whereby countless unknowing people had no conscious memory of being abducted by aliens he believed were ultimately non-malevolent but nevertheless terrifying. 

In some cases, women who had supposedly become pregnant after an abduction – despite having no memory of the event or having had sex with anyone since then – would suddenly find they were no longer pregnant. Such strangeness was explained away as the person having been impregnated by an alien and then re-abducted before their due date, all so the visitors from outer space could collect their hybrid infants. 

It was this genuine sincerity that helped Hopkins’ work become so popular. In fact, his approach even convinced Professor John E. Mack, who, during the early 1990s, was a Pulitzer Prize winner and eminent head of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. This led Mack to publish his own lengthy book on the subject of alien abduction accounts retrieved by hypnosis, which the author utterly believed were real. For Mack, alien abductions were even positive things, ultimately leading to spiritual enlightenment, and were akin to religious experiences scattered throughout history.

Anyone who’s been reading to this point has likely noticed a repeated part of these stories – hypnotic regression. This tricky, sneaky technique is now largely recognized as highly controversial at best, or otherwise completely untrustworthy by mainstream scientific communities. To be sure, there’s a whole history of hypnosis I couldn’t do justice to here, but suffice it to say that hypnotic regression became particularly contentious in the so-called “memory wars” of the 1980s and 1990s. This was an extremely complex situation where the validity of supposedly recovered memories led to accusations of childhood sexual abuse. 

In short, under the influence of “memory recovery” techniques like hypnosis, some people became convinced they had been abused as children but had subsequently suppressed the memory. That is, until the hypnosis allowed them to “re-” discover them, often resulting in trauma and significant upset for the individuals and their families. In some cases, the recovered memories involved satanic rituals, cannibalism, and human sacrifice. And, as you can now probably guess, many such claims turned out to be the result of the hypnosis that assisted in creating and structuring these terrifying but untrue memories. To be clear, these were not lies; many people who had their memories “recovered”, like their alien-abduction counterparts, believed they were real.

Unfortunately, child abuse is a very real and far more prevalent phenomenon than many would like to believe, and so such cases should be taken seriously and investigated properly. However, in this context, the “memory wars” really demonstrated how slippery memory can be and how prone to imagination it is. 

Aside from these perspectives, there are other psychological factors that can lead some people to believe they’ve experienced an alien encounter more than others. Past research has demonstrated that people who measure higher for fantasy-proneness (a tendency to engage in vivid and elaborate mental worlds inside your own head), dissociativity (one’s susceptibility to a sense of separation from the world around them), and absorption (the trait of becoming lost in an activity), all correlate with paranormal beliefs, experiences, and even false memories.  

Then there is the fascinating but complex subject of sleep paralysis, which has been identified as a likely source for alien abduction experiences, as well as those related to other fantastical creatures, such as witches, vampires, and demons from across the world. 

For more detail on this, especially in relation to alien abduction claims, I would thoroughly recommend reading anomalistic psychologist Chris French’s new book: The Science of Weird Shit.  

Fantasies, fairies, and techno-folklore 

When it comes to UFOs, alien encounters, and even alien abductions, Dr Robert Bartholomew is clear about one thing: “They're living folklore. They're modern myths in the making,” he told IFLScience.

Bartholomew, a medical sociologist and Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Auckland’s Department of Psychological Medicine, is not alone in linking modern alien encounters with folklore traditions. Even during the heyday of alien abduction reports, folklorists identified parallels between alien encounters and fantasy /supernatural elements found in folklore. For example, in 1989, the folklorist Thomas E. Bullard wrote that “UFOs defy physical laws by making right-angle turns at high speed or disappearing in mid-flight. Short beings reminiscent of fairies appear from inside the craft. Men in Black haunt witnesses and share significant properties of traditional devils.”

Bullard went on to note that “for all the science fiction trappings, abduction reports sound like rewrites of older supernatural encounter traditions with aliens serving the functional roles of divine beings or nature spirits.”

Folklorists have identified multiple themes in abduction narratives that have been present in human storytelling and individual experiences for centuries. Aside from obviously being an encounter with some non-human beings (e.g. fairies, spirits, elves, djinn, or goblins), abductees are often taken to some otherworldly place (e.g. the fairyland, the realm of the dead, and so on). 

The person may experience lost time, which is also a phenomenon present in many folklore traditions when someone stumbles back into the real world several days later, believing they had only been gone a few hours. In many instances, the entities are ambiguous creatures, sometimes cold and distant, while other times providing wisdom or a warning. In many cases, these encounters serve as personal ordeals, causing some sort of transformation for the abductee (such as offering spiritual enlightenment or literally allowing them to develop psychic powers). 

These are just a few examples of crossovers between folk traditions and modern abduction stories. To be sure, the literature on this topic is rich. But why have these themes persisted? Some might argue that this is evidence that something really has been going on for centuries, and this continuity proves it. However, given the paucity of evidence outside of personal testaments, plus the malleability of such claims, this seems doubtful. Instead, it is likely that such narratives speak to a deeper part of human consciousness and experience, especially in today’s secular society. 

“They are very exciting. They’re interesting. They open the door to a different world with different laws of physics and stuff like that,” Bartholomew told IFLScience. In addition, he added, they offer people a chance to be part of something bigger.

“All you have to do to be part of one of the greatest ‘mysteries’ in the world is to go outside into your backyard and look up into the sky. Maybe you just saw an extraterrestrial spacecraft. Or maybe you just saw Starlink. But which one is more alluring?”

“I think it's part of the human condition. You know, we want to believe. We want to think that there's something greater than us.”

For Bartholomew, this is one of the secrets to the power of alien abduction and encounter stories. They serve as a kind of folkloric bridge between the secular modern world and old psychological or cultural needs for something more. They re-enchant the world. In fact, ideas about aliens within wider alien-believer communities has reached a point where they have essentially become vehicles for, as Bartholomew explained, “transcendence” in a similar way to some religions. 

For instance, some people believe that aliens built the pyramids and visited Earth millennia ago, helping to kick-start civilization and shaping humanity. Such entities are effectively gods due to their unparalleled technology or their abilities to move between dimensions, and so on. One day, perhaps these aliens will share these secrets with us and so we too will become immortal. 

The same is true for stories about ghosts because, as Bartholomew said, “if ghosts are real, then they offer proof of life after death”. They offer a sliver of hope that there is something beyond our everyday mortal experience. 

At the same time, people who believe in aliens and things like cryptids – Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster, or chupacabra – are taking part in beliefs that undermine the power of science, the darling of the secular age. To put it another way, if someone local, say a farmer who lives down the road, claims to see Big Foot, even though science says Big Foot is not real, then they have secret knowledge that limits the knowing gaze of science more generally. This opens up the possibility for more things “science” does not know, meaning it ultimately has less power. 

This latter factor represents the point where fringe ideas meet politics, where the former becomes a reason to reject trust in the latter. In this sense, some people arm themselves with these types of beliefs not just because they enrich their world and themselves with something meaningful, but because they also undermine the established order. 

In many ways, the near-contemporaneous Satanic Panic of the 1980s and early 1990s serves the same purpose: it represented an example of mass hysteria that reacted to perceived societal changes related to family structures and shifting values concerning sexuality, feminism, and secular education in America. And, like all good folktales, these stories persist, transforming and adapting with each generation.  

As such, it is probably not worth looking to the sky for evidence of extraterrestrial beings, but rather within our minds, and at, as Bartholomew explained, “what deep-seated psychological needs are being fulfilled? In other words, why do we need our monsters, why do we need our aliens, what need is being fulfilled?”