What is “Positive” About the Abduction Phenomenon? || Reexamining the Data (Part I)

Bloodborne (2015), FromSoftware

In this article, I want to reexamine the abduction phenomenon — in particular, the claim (one that I have made myself on occasion) that we cannot know whether it is “positive” or “negative”, relative to the well-being of the involved persons and, by extension, humanity. I will do this by enumerating and then extrapolating upon the relevant data. I must be clear that my intent is not to couch any of this in terms of Good vs. Evil (perfectly serviceable words elsewhere), but in terms of the integrity of an individual and a collective development. I must also be clear that this exploration is neither euphemistic nor literalistic, and that whatever conclusions I make are made with an openness to alternatives. I do this according to true science as defined by Wilhelm Reich, when he wrote:

Being “scientific” means being open-minded, ready to accept anything if certain conditions of objectivity are fulfilled; of being positive, and not negative [that is, doubting and talking away everything, no matter how much evidence there is] in examining a new realm of knowledge.

There are a few things worth outlining, for context.

First: I appreciate the difficulty in, and resistance to, seriously following studies such as these. It is, in some sense, easier for us to entertain the possibility of infinite multiverses, or the existence of God, than it is the sighting of UFOs, and the accounts of contactees and abductees, pointing to occurrences within material reality. To me, it is surprising and unsurprising that a sober consideration of the vast, yet staggeringly consistent, modern abduction literature is ignored or dismissed out of hand partly because of a giggling discomfort around “anal probes”, deriving from Whitley Strieber’s book Communion, and parodied by media such as South Park.

But the matter is also, in another obvious sense, unthinkable. For decades, we have lived with a chasmic disparity between blockbuster movies’ aggressively non-subtle explorations of extraterrestrial contact; the scientific community’s highest hopes for extraterrestrial lifeforms being asexual, microscopic blobs somewhere under the mantle of a moon of Jupiter; and popular ostensible analyses of UFOs and related phenomena being relegated to bunk like Ancient Aliens or reduced to a few high profile cases, concluded to be hoaxes because of uncertain or complicating details, or because the scientific community’s rejection of the whole subject as one worthy of study has led to a predominance of credulous, babbling analyses. This has defined our general sense of reality, and of its possibilities, to such a significant degree that to think for longer than the whim of a moment that, perhaps, “contact” may already be occurring, and on quite a large and deep scale, is out of the question.

Second: I appreciate the attempts to render this topic with more complexity by hesitating to define the anomalous beings as extraterrestrials. These attempts have not been made because the contactee and abductee literature does not suggest it, but because of the presence of overlapping paranormal phenomena (such as the fae folk’s historical characteristics) and the unreliability of the beings’ own statements. My aim here is not to give these beings a hard originative definition, but I will be referring to them as “ETs” or “aliens” anyway, for the sake of convention; and because, while I find the folkloric interpretation, as originally and intelligently proposed by Jacques Vallée, interesting, I also find it descriptively insufficient. In its own way, it too avoids contending with the perhaps simpler, yet perhaps more disturbing, possibility that UFOs and ETs may be just what they appear to be.₁ In any case, feel free to substitute these terms with words like “beings”, “humanoids”, “occupants”, etc.

Third: I believe that focusing on UFOs, to the exclusion of abduction reports, is akin to practicing human sociology by studying photographs and videos of distant airplanes. The more I read the literature, the more I believe that the most critical dimension here is contactees’ and abductees’ experiences, to the point that the craft are almost trivial by comparison. I understand that UFOs are interesting for a variety of reasons, including their technological implications, effects on the environment, variety of forms, and public visibility (compared to the secret nature of abductions); but even if this or that photo or film of a UFO could be proven to be legitimate — as far as I’m concerned, this has already happened with the footage from Kumburgaz, Turkey₂ — , all we’d have figured out is that the craft in question has a physical/optical reality and certain external formal characteristics.

While the study of craft has long settled as a stagnating puddle consisting of a tiring obsession with the Roswell crash (and, now, the USS Nimitz case), a handful of multimedia, and U.S. government coverups — a stagnation contributing to a popular belief that the evidence for UFOs is minimal, and suspect, to the extreme — , the abduction phenomenon has evolved, right in front of our eyes, so to speak. Contactee and abductee accounts give us not only an abundance of interactive and communicative data, but data which, for decades now, have been internally consistent enough to at least give the abduction phenomenon an experiential veridicality (there are some supportive, repeating tangible details, such as foreign implants, skin abrasions/markings, and persons reported missing during the alleged abduction timeframe).

The question here seems to me to be one of interpretation. We are faced with the problems of data which are mostly intangible or invisible; the muddying of waters by disinformers, people suffering from schizophrenic delusions (delusions which may have their own reality, but a reality distinct from the ETs), and the ETs themselves; and a resistance, or even hostility, to the material once it reaches a threshold of bizarreness — or “negativity.” Overall, I believe that the most responsible sort of ufology will concern interactions with the occupants of crafts; not so much the crafts themselves. As David Jacobs, a long-time researcher of abductions, has said, what ufology needs is not the scientific assistance of physicists or astronomers, but of “gynecologists, neurologists, and urologists.” Of course, little to no assistance has been offered. Quite opposite of what it claims to do, the scientific community works within a highly academic, and thus highly normative, ideological framework controlled by funding, prestige, and politics.

Fourth: The abduction phenomenon as we know it today may be a new evolution of a very old, ever-metamorphosing condition; the introduction of a different form of intelligence with some resemblances to comparable phenomena; or a blend of the two. The psychoanalytic, psychiatric, and hypnotherapeutic work of persons such as John Mack, David Jacobs, John Carpenter, Budd Hopkins, Richard Haines, and Raymond Fowler has helped to chart this development. A skepticism of the accuracy of memory, or subjective recall, and, consequently, the practice of hypnotherapy is not out of line at all, provided it is genuine skepticism, and not prejudice masking itself as such (I must clarify that various abduction experiences have been recalled without the assistance of hypnotherapy; what hypnotherapy appears to do is uncover more details and instances of the abductions). As Mack himself writes at the end of Abduction:

…we have little understanding…why an altered state of consciousness, facilitated in a caring, protective setting, is so effective in recovering abduction memories.

But this skepticism should be willing to admit at least three crucial things. First:

…the more involved a person is in an event, the greater the likelihood that the central event is accurately remembered over time (Yuille and Tollestrup 1992). Emotion has been shown to aid memory for the central event of the story, although it undermines memory for more peripheral details (Reisberg and Heuer 1992).

Second:

…“it is illogical to reason from the fact that a memory has false details to the conclusion that there is no real incident from which this false memory is an accurate depiction (Scheflin, in press).”

And third₃:

…there is, as yet, no recorded abduction experience that proved, upon investigation, to be a reflection of trauma or experience, despite a great deal of effort on the part of investigators to find some other source for these experiences.

A portion of David Jacobs’ counter-response, from The Threat (1998), to the most popular academic sort of dismissal of abductions: that they are, ostensibly, cases of false memory syndrome.

(If unacquainted readers are up for contending with a rigorous and source-citing breakdown of pseudo-skeptical and prejudicial objections to hypnotherapy and the involved/implicated phenomena, I would refer to Greg Sandow’s essay, “The Abduction Conundrum”)

To return to the original bullet point: without this developmental specification, the layperson might presume that details such as the beings’ appearances, or their medical/operational preoccupations, have been a millennial constant, when, in fact— according to all of the available data — these details did not start to emerge within reports of craft crashes and abductions until, respectively, the 1940s and either the late ‘50s or early ‘60s. It is edifying to examine Vallée’s index of reports in Passport to Magonia and note earlier trends, such as the “typical” contactee encounter, throughout parts of Europe and the Americas, being an innocuous meeting with a coverall-wearing being who lands in a craft, looks human, and either appears to inspect the ship, says something disarmingly mundane, or invites the witness aboard (or does all three).

There is no hard cutoff point for these sorts of encounters, nor is it clear that they ever stopped; but the dominant reports one finds today involve around four ET typologies, all of which appear to be laterally or mutually invested in a biologically/reproductively oriented covert program. I will offer my interpretation of this program’s goal in a follow-up essay. Long-term studies such as Jacobs’ also reveal that the frequency of abductees’ abductions has been increasing (individual and mass UFO sightings, additionally, have never stopped or slowed, contrary to a persistent belief otherwise).

A group of alleged abductees discussing their experiences with researchers and a small audience. A valuable public record, worth viewing, if only to observe the persons’ fragility and reluctance.

So, onto the reexamination.

Here is a non-exhaustive, but still fairly comprehensive, list of the alleged traits comprising these abductions and the progression of events:

• People taken against their will, usually at a very early age — sometimes as early as three years of age. During these earlier timeframes, the sexual/reproductive aspect is absent; abductees rather relay encounters with ETs as one might interactions with an “imaginary friend.”
• A clandestine aspect. Everything about the circumstances of abductions reveals a programmatic need for secrecy. As dense as the literature is on the topic of UFOs, reported eyewitness accounts of abductions occurring is next to nonexistent. The only exceptions to this of which I am aware are the case of Linda Napolitano, bizarre in the extreme in its full details, yet remarkable for involving multiple independent eyewitnesses; and the case of Amy Rylance. Various reports, however, include the detail of people looking for the abductee during the time of their abduction and finding them missing.
• Medical procedures which frequently are painful, invasive, humiliating, and/or non-negotiable. These medical procedures tend to involve a sexual/reproductive aspect: the extraction of semen from men and ova from women, the insemination of women (beginning as early as eleven years of age) — and, later, the removal of the fetus/infant — , and/or forced intercourse with an ET or another human.
• Emotional manipulation, wherein the frightened person is tranquilized or made to feel sexual arousal. Abductees frequently remark how this is situationally inexplicable. This seems to be achieved by an ET staring into the person’s eyes or waving a hand or tool over their body.
• The blocking of memories of these events. A number of these may be recollected via hypnotherapy, or partially recalled many years later by an evocative event (e.g., an abductee’s sibling mentioning an anomalous light). The insertion of these memorial barriers appears to be intentional, as evidenced by the ETs stating that the person will not remember, or will only remember “when the time is right.” I will reiterate Mack’s point about the curious effectiveness of hypnotherapy; why or how this technique can (apparently) overcome barriers placed by beings with the apparent ability to control everything else about a person’s cognitional, dynamic, and emotive functions is unknown.
• Hypnotherapy sessions of great emotional intensity — whimpering, screaming, clutching, shaking, crying, yelling. These are not all mild-mannered or monotonous recountings, as might be imagined.
• If the abductee has a family or partner, the involvement of these persons in the abductions; in other words, an intergenerational pattern of abduction. The work by Jacobs, Mack, Hopkins, et al has revealed that this pattern appears to be the rule. As Jacobs writes:

If a person is an abductee, then the possibility that his [or] her mother or father has had abduction experiences is extremely high. Unfortunately, this means that all of the children of an abductee and a non-abductee will be abductees.

• Recurrence spanning most of the person’s life. Abductions categorically are not singular events. According to reports where abductees have been taken to crafts with other abductees present, and have been asked by the therapist to gauge age ranges, the cutoff point for abductions’ continuation appears to be around the mid- to late-70s — a detail perhaps having to do with elderly persons’ physiology and sexual/reproductive potency or abilities, compared to younger persons’.
• The ETs’ withholding — usually — of ostensible intent. If an intent is given, it involves some admixture of ecological restabilization, the preservation of the human form, and a hybridization/colonizing program, wherein humans will be dependent upon the ETs and hybrids for leadership; or perhaps will become outmoded and inexorably replaced. Consider these passages from Mack’s Abduction:

With considerable resistance Scott admitted that the intention of the aliens was to ‘live here’ (on Earth) but without us, unless ‘humans change’, in which case ‘we might be able to live together.’

And:

Jerry, like many abductees, has dreams of the world as we know it coming to an end and relates her breeding role to this eventuality.

And:

[Peter] expressed further resentment . . . [and] spoke of a process occurring ‘throughout the world’ whereby ‘common knowledge’ of the abduction process was developing and that he was one of the people who would ‘stand up’ and be ‘comfortable with the possibility of alien beings coming to the planet.’

• The imparting of “apocalyptic” scenes and prophecies which do not come to pass, even on the occasion when an exact date is given. A striking example of such an unfulfilled prophecy comes from Jacobs’ book, Secret Life, with the case of an abductee named Jason Howard (as with most of the names of abductees whose cases I cite, this is a pseudonym, used for obvious, although unfortunate, reasons). During his abduction experience, Howard is brought by an ET to a room with a screen and is shown what is explained as a future enormous atomic explosion blooming from afar. How distant in the future? Howard is not given a year, but is told that it will occur a month before he is forty-years-old — a specification seemingly, and helpfully, ruling out the ambiguities of a relativistic perception of time. When this account was given, Howard was 17. The year was 1976. If this timeframe were accurate, the catastrophe would’ve happened well before 2022. Obviously, it did not.
• The presentation, mostly to female abductees, of very small and listless humanoid infants which are explained to be the abductees’ own progeny — presumably developed from their sperm, ova, or grown in their womb for a short period of time (usually within the first trimester) and then extracted. Abductees are encouraged to perform certain actions, like holding the baby or pressing their hand into the stomach, to provide a vitalizing effect. Perhaps this indicates an energetic, but correctable, deficiency in the infants.
• The involvement of the abductee with the rearing and educating of a hybrid child, teenager, or young adult. This detail, among all others, must be the one which strains the limits of good faith and the readiness to entertain hypotheticals at even the furthest critical distance. It is also the latest development of the phenomenon’s evolution, is perhaps its most invasive, coercive aspect, and is the one which most pressingly asks for evidence. Most of the abductees who claim to be thus involved are not, to my knowledge, engaged on happy, willful terms.

A levelheaded overview of the least believable part of the UFO phenomenon, given by David Jacobs.

Having laid out these traits, I am going to venture the observation that very little about any of this strikes me as positive, even on the level of a collective hallucination. In fact, it seems unambiguously negative.

An unwillingness to make a judgment either way may derive from a sort of idealism, done in the adventurous spirit of the recognition of a mystery, and a belief that a lack of the complete facts of the matter obliges us to be cautious with discrimination. Yet, given that the abduction phenomenon has not remained static but has evolved, is it not reasonable to ask: when shall we be allowed to make a “fair” judgment? What is the threshold for the imposition of our ethical, moral sensibilities?

It should then be remarkable for one to learn that, as I mentioned in another essay, a number of abductees, who are aware of their situation, report an interpretative shift from negativity, or relative neutrality, to positivity. Input from one of Mack’s patients, Eva, exemplifies this shift:

Abductees, Eva said, ‘are souls that have, for their individual purposes and reasons, chosen the probability of physical form.’ But through their experiences they ‘are regaining their memory of source . . . The process of abduction is one form of such, of regaining of memory.’ The abduction ‘experience itself’, Eva said, ‘is a mechanism to remove’ the ‘structures that impede the interconnection with source,’ and ‘to purify the physical vehicle in such a way to serve to regain better memory and to bring knowledge to others.’ The ‘physical and emotional torture’ of the abductions themselves, she said, is part of a balancing process.

The problem — the first problem — with passages such as these is not necessarily that they resemble what Jacques Vallée, in The Invisible College, calls “pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo” when referring to a 1971 hypnosis session with (the genuinely gifted) Uri Geller, who served as the mouthpiece of an “alleged cosmic intelligence” (as an aside: there has been a hugely voluminous production of ET-involved channeled material since the fin de siècle, from Edgar Cayce, to Allen Michael’s The Everlasting Gospel, to L/L Research’s The Law of One). It is that they rather — or also — give a vague, spiritual post-justification for a situation which, in all other apparent respects, is organized around a species-hierarchalizing program of hard science. There is, in other words, a critical misalignment between a consistent set of physical acts, performed by the ETs, and the acts’ metaphysical rationalizations by “converted” abductees. It is as if one disparate narrative has been fitted on top of another. Eva’s explanation is especially interesting, since it assigns an impediment-removing and physically purifying rationale to abductions, despite the surrounding details of high secrecy, forced amnesia, and physiological degradation demonstrating the exact inverse of this rationale.

Books by Garnet Schulhauser, who alleges an ongoing spiritual-corporeal exchange, and whose written work typifies the curiously recent, ecologically oriented channeling phenomenon.

Some readers may have caught onto another crucial problem: exceedingly few of these claims to enlightenment derive from anything inherent to the relevant recollected abductions. That is to say, it is not rendered by anything the ETs reportedly communicate or do. There is no dominant pattern wherein the abductee recalls being brought before a committee of aliens to be educated about souls, energy, and love. Rather, all of this comes across as a sort of a posteriori effect/affect.

This issue implicates another, which is the remarkably linear and quick nature of the conversion process as it occurs within hypnotherapy.

The general progression to “conversion” is as follows: a client who has had certain anomalous experiences, and wants to uncover their full range, or understand what really happened, finds a hypnotherapist. The client, while curious and doing this of their own volition, is so unnerved by the paranormal possibility — of having to live with its reality — that they would prefer the diagnosis of a neurological condition (this detail and its commonality conflicts with the charge that abductees seek to be identified as such). An initial session leaves the client disoriented, frightened, and life-questioning. A follow-up is hesitatingly scheduled and attended. The client, to put it a certain way, now cannot help but look. It is during this or the third session that the client tends to unearth a much earlier memory of having been abducted, and the realization that this has been long-occurring. By around the fourth session — and this might be as soon as a few months later — , the client claims to have come to terms with their situation, has told their partner and/or family, and might be making statements such as those expressed by Eva.

I must stress the curiousness of this progression and its recurrence with “converts.” How persons who have suffered decades of traumatic intrusions, allege little to no prior exposure to or interest in UFO/ET material, avail themselves of hypnotherapy with a fear so strong it almost makes them reconsider, and might otherwise express no spiritual inclinations arrive at this point so quickly, and so consistently, within the relevant cases is a fact which should arouse suspicion and scrutiny.

It is not clear, however, where to direct the scrutiny. It is very possible that this implicates not hypnotherapy itself but its application between practitioners. After all, there are no programs for certification if one wishes to specialize in abductee hypnotherapy. In this sense, every hypnotherapist who has worked with abductees has been “unprofessional.” But we must be careful to not fall into making an appeal to authority — as when John Mack’s Harvard ties are referenced, as if this made him less prone to fallibility. Institutional standardization is not a panacea, although it can serve as a control factor that highlights deviation.

The Nightmare (1781), by Henry Fuseli

Considering the data on abductions, it is my inclination to wonder if something about this conversion process ultimately stems from the abductions — if the hypnotherapeutic process might not inadvertently act as a mechanism which simultaneously unlocks memories and sets in motion a latent “emotional suggestion which grows over time into a nigh-religious conviction.” I understand that this hypothesis both re-invites suppositions of subconscious motives and contradicts what “converts” might feel with the most intense and sincere belief; but I hardly think it is inappropriate, given the universal precedent of the ETs’ influence over human mentation. Is it not conceivable that the instances of persons finding themselves suddenly aroused aboard a craft has a more profound resonance in the “test subject” believing they are “special”, of Peter’s sense that the abduction process has, partially, a grooming function?

Two notable factors complicate this hypothesis. The first is that not every abductee reaches the same sort of conclusion or makes the same judgments during regressions. For example: one abductee, Karen, recalls being taken to a display room where she was forced to observe idyllic scenes.

I don’t like this because they know that this is what I think is beautiful. Maybe everybody is seeing something different. And I know that they never show you anything unless they’re trying to manipulate you. […] …the message is that this is the way, all of these beautiful things that they keep showing us, this is the way the world will be. It’s just like Big Brother. There’s no difference.

If the hypnotherapeutic process acts as a sort of sympathetic trigger for compliance, it’s unclear why a discrepancy would exist. Perhaps the discrepancy points, again, towards varieties of hypnotherapeutic methodologies. We cannot underestimate the role the therapist plays here in potentially guiding the abductee to see beyond illusions or suggestibility. It may be that “conversion” indicates irresponsible hypnotherapy, while “revulsion” represents the opposite. Or, this may point to the variety of psychologies on the part of clientele, some of whom might be naturally more resistant, or perceptive, than others. Or, it may be a combination of the two.

The second problem is why ETs would rely upon the arbitration of the individual who, realistically, might never go to hypnotherapy, and/or hold no more than a dim, decades-old memory of some lights in the sky, for programmatic compliance. Indeed, given the likelihood that most abductees do not even know that they are abductees — or, again, have retained just a singular memory which they shrug off as a bizarre dream or withhold for fear of estrangement — , this would seem to be an arrangement of great contingence. Here, I might hypothesize that a sympathetic trigger could be implanted upon an early abduction, and that all that is required for its activation, inexorable or sudden, is a conscious, integrable encounter. Such an encounter would encompass a hypnotic regression, which is relived as a real-time encounter, or — and there is no other way for me to say this — an unveiling of the ETs.

To be continued in part II.

⁂

₁ The ET hypothesis does not rule out paranormal involvement. The mistake, to be clear, is the presumption that, since UFOs and ETs appear to intersect with “supernatural” phenomena, they are supernatural themselves. But this merely reinforces a materialistic framework. Once we accept the possibility that there is no supernatural, but only the natural — aspects of which may be perceived along different lines relating to psycho-biology — , we can also accept the possibility that other beings of an evolutionary range might interact with things beyond our own notions of locality, or materiality.

₂ The best “skeptical” explanation for this footage is that it depicts the upper part of a cruise ship — an explanation so desperate to be willfully ignorant that I am amazed anyone has bothered to demonstrate its errors.

₃ A common dismissal of the abduction phenomenon is that it constitutes hallucinations inspired by traumatizing media. Ignoring the question of, if this were true, why the scientific/psychological community has not made a concerted effort at studying a decades-long global mass hallucination event (a phenomenon without precedent in human history), and ignoring the fact that abductions are united by a commonality of specific details escaping the purview of fiction, it is interesting to note that, in my experience, the most common story I have heard of people being traumatized by UFO/ET media involves the 1993 film, Fire in the Sky (a film having almost nothing to do with Travis Walton’s abduction experience); yet no abduction accounts mention details paralleling the movie’s.