The
following review of Abducted: How People Come to Believe They
Were Kidnapped by Aliens by Susan A. Clancy (Harvard
University Press, 2005) has been published in the Journal of Scientific
Exploration, Vol. 20, No. 2 Summer, 2006.
Some years back, Carl Sagan wrote an article about UFO
abductions for the Sunday newspaper insert magazine, Parade.
This was in preparation for his next book, The Demon Haunted
World. I had received a copy of the manuscript and I noticed
a number of factual errors, not errors in interpretation but
errors of truth. I carefully noted the problems and sent the
manuscript back. When the article was published, all the factual
errors were included, except for one very small one: Barney and
Betty Hill did not say the aliens “slithered” as Sagan had
originally written.
What would possess a scientist to allow for known factual
errors in his publication? This is normally unthinkable in any
scientific or even a responsible popular article. But this type
of behavior is common in debunking and skeptical writings about
the abduction phenomenon. When it comes to abductions, scientists
become unscientific with speeds approaching that of light. Of
course, abductions are not in the normal scientific milieu. They
are so far out of the norm that it leads to a line of reasoning as
follows: “It does not matter how I get to my Explanation. Doing
careful research is a waste of my precious time. Everyone knows
that UFO abductions cannot and do not exist. Therefore, even
though a UFO fanatic out there might take issue with petty factual
problems, I am not required to get everything right because my
Explanation will, in the end, be correct.” Thus, when it comes to
abduction debunking, careful research and academic and/or
scientific justification or rationale is not necessary. The ends
justify the means.
In my forty years of UFO research, the last twenty of which
spent studying the abduction phenomenon, I have learned a simple
evidence truism: All debunkers make one or more of three
fundamental mistakes: They do not know the evidence, they ignore
the evidence, or they distort the evidence. Any one of these
errors would be catastrophic and perhaps even scientifically
dishonest when writing about something of accepted scientific
consequence. Leaving in mistakes is tantamount to ignoring or to
distorting the evidence. Unfortunately, when it comes to
abductions, all debunkers comply with the evidence truism. There
are no exceptions.
Susan Clancy’s book, Abducted: How People Come to
Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens, is the latest in a
dreary parade of debunking academics, scientists, and writers who
have an explanation for the abduction phenomenon while obeying the
evidence truism. Clancy has a Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard.
She has worked with Richard McNally who has done research in false
memories. She had a post-doc appointment in Harvard’s Department
of Psychology where she was also able to study false memories.
Eventually she came up with a study of abduction claimants. Now
she and her book have been all over the media, appearing on
Larry King Live, and many other television and radio shows.
To the uninitiated she appears to be a sensible and logical voice
carefully solving an exceptionally complex and difficult problem.
She has received positive reviews in Science, and other
media outlets.[1]
Her book does not actually have a new explanation for
abductions; she recycles old ones but puts a veneer of “science”
around them. She has a plethora of explanations from which to
choose. It might be instructive to list some of them. They are
in no particular order: Conscious lying for any reason
(encompassing many forms and variations), the desire to lead
glamorous lives, normal hypnosis, incompetent hypnosis, the
collective unconscious, millennial fears, false memory syndrome,
childhood sexual abuse screen memories, childhood physical or
verbal abuse, fantasy prone personalities, multiple personality
disorder, myth and folklore, psychosis (schizophrenia, bi-polar
disorder, delusions), brain tumors, gullibility, hallucination,
waking and lucid dreams, night terrors, sleep walking, hypnogogic
and hypnopompic experiences (sleep paralysis), birth trauma, the
will to believe, baby desires and fantasies, pseudocyesis,
stigmata, illegal drugs, psychogenic fugue state, media
influences, “epidemic hysteria,” hysterical contagion, mass
hysteria, post-modern anxieties, popular culture absorption, the
psychological creation of a physical alternative universe,
alternative realities, angels, demonic possession, temporal lobe
lability, guided imagery, tectonic plate stress, and/or a
combination of any of the above. This list is by no means
inclusive. I have left out many, and new ones come about all the
time. As I write, the soporific specter of Ambien looms.
Clancy’s book is based on interviews with and tests of
self-reporting abduction claimants whom she got from placing ads
in newspapers. She soon noticed they have had their experiences
at night and they had viewed media depictions of abductions. For
Clancy, this means that they have suffered from sleep paralysis
with its fears and sometime hallucinations. Searching for the
meaning of these poorly understood events, she found that some
sleep paralysis victims might think that they were abducted. If
they do not at first think this, they “fall into the hands of”
(57, 63) an abduction researcher who convinces them to undergo
hypnosis. The hypnotist, also influenced by popular culture and
the media, leads these vulnerable people into thinking that space
aliens have indeed abducted them. Victims, also having absorbed
media abduction depictions, buy into it willingly. This theory is
based on several variables that must all fall into place neatly:
Sleep paralysis is correctly diagnosed, abduction researchers’
analyses are wrong, hypnosis is not correctly conducted, false
memories are generated, those memories are influenced by media
abduction accounts in both the victim and the hypnotist, and the
two people incorporate them into a belief system that becomes
hardened as a “real” memory.
The explanation has some problems, the first of which is
the content of abduction testimony. One would think that when
writing a book about a subject it would be incumbent upon the
author to know something about that subject in order to ascertain
a baseline of what people actually say when they are abducted.
However, for abduction debunkers not knowing the evidence (number
one on the truism list) is not worrisome. In fact, ignorance of
abduction activity is a driving force behind all previous
debunking explanations. Clancy does appear to be vaguely
cognizant of this problem and she reassures the reader that she
does indeed know something about the subject. Says Clancy: “I
believe I’ve read every account of alien abduction ever published,
and just about everything that social psychologists,
psychoanalysts, postmodernists, journalists, physicists,
biologists, and ex-military personal [sic] have to say about
them. In addition...I’ve watched nearly every American movie and
TV show ever made about aliens.” (82) But because her book
contains no bibliography, one must carefully analyze her
references. In fact, most are from debunking sources. This
accomplishes two important things: It allows her to go forward,
free from a having to engage in serious research into the
phenomenon (she read a few popular books about it) with all its
pesky disconfirming evidence for her explanation, and it allows
her to appear as if she has read “experts” on the subject, when in
fact most of the authors she has read are debunkers and, like
Clancy herself, anything but experts.
Furthermore, given the large number of abduction accounts
that have been published (if she had looked in my edited book
UFOs and Abductions:
Challenging the borders of Knowledge, she might have
noticed a bibliographic section of books written by abductees, but
her references do not indicate that she has done that), it is
unclear how many she actually read. What is clear is that she
apparently gained much of her abduction information by watching
television shows. One might recoil in horror at this thought, but
it, along with her lack of knowledge of the phenomenon, enables
her to not have to deal with the abductions wie est eigenlicht
gewesen ist (“as it actually was”)-- to quote nineteenth
century German historians who strove for accurate narrative
history.
I do not want to suggest that Clancy is entirely ignorant
of the abduction phenomenon. She has a superficial awareness of
some its reproductive aspects like sperm taking, egg harvesting,
holding babies, and examinations. This knowledge comprises a very
tiny amount of the information known about abductions, most of
which has never appeared in the media. About seventy-five percent
of the information I included in my 1992 book
Secret Life had
never been in the media or written about in even the most esoteric
UFO literature. Yet, the abductees with whom I was working were
describing procedures and events with remarkable accuracy and
consistency that I, as the hypnotist and researcher, had never
heard before, and of which neither I, nor the abductees, knew the
meaning. The people who described these procedures and events so
precisely were unaware that others were saying the same thing with
the same exact details.
As I learned about the phenomenon it became far more
complex than I ever imagined but all within fairly narrow
procedural pathways. When I wrote
The Threat in 1998,
I had learned quite a bit more and once again most of the
information in that book had not been in the broadcast media or in
print. Rather than going into the complexities and precise
details of the abduction phenomenon, it is simply worth mentioning
that Clancy’s book does not display the slightest awareness of any
of the material that Budd Hopkins or other researchers discovered.
More disturbingly, she displays no awareness of anything that
does not “confirm” her theories.
Along with her obvious lack of knowledge of the subject,
Clancy seems unaware of the debates that have taken place over UFO
abductions in the past forty-five years. For that matter she even
seems entirely oblivious to the debates that have taken place
about her own specific explanations. She does not appear to know
about a book that came out five years ago, The Abduction Enigma,
(one of whose authors is a clinical psychologist) that gave
practically her same explanation. Well, I believe that she
believes that she has read every academic work on the subject.
So, how can we explain her vacuity about the phenomenon itself?
The answer is that if you have The Explanation, you need not be
bothered by having to acquire this knowledge and therefore in
spite of her belief system, she obviously is profoundly ignorant
of the phenomenon about which she is writing an academic book.
If she had learned a little more about abductions, she
would have realized that her explanations must take into account
some of the phenomenon’s verities: During abduction events,
abductees are missing from their normal environments. Police have
been called, search parties have been sent out, parents have
frantically searched for their children, etc. When people
remember abductions, they sometimes return with marks on their
bodies – not just any marks, but with seemingly impossible fully
formed scars. They sometimes return with broken bones and they
have no idea how they happened. Sometimes people return with
unusual stains on their clothes that were not there before the
abduction. Attempts to discover the nature of these stains have
been unsuccessful. They return with their clothes on backwards,
and/or inside out. They return wearing someone else’s clothes.
When people are abducted, they are often abducted with others who
can confirm the details of their abduction, as with Barney and
Betty Hill. Often it is family members, but there are instances
when friends or bystanders witness the abduction as well. People
are abducted while fully awake, driving a car, gardening, and so
forth. Clancy either ignores or is not aware of all of this.
It is also critical to understand that about half (I am
being generous here because my own statistics, based on about
seven hundred abductions, indicate about 40%) of abductions take
place at night in bed. That does not mean that people are
sleeping. Many of them were in bed but had not gotten to sleep
yet and might be watching television, reading a book, or just not
asleep. In fact, about 100% of the people who were sleeping wake
up right away and realize that something is happening to them.
Some of them feel paralyzed and others do not. Clancy
automatically and without evidence interprets all of this as sleep
paralysis. Sleep paralysis has long been known to overlap
superficially with the edges of abduction activity. I wrote about
it in Secret Life.
Skeptics have bandied this about for many years as they tried
their best to force the abduction phenomenon into it. It died
down for a number of years but now it is back in vogue. In sleep
paralysis, people cannot move, some people sense a “presence” or
even “figures” in the room, some can even feel a floating feeling,
and they can sometimes visualize “light.” Sleep paralysis is
relatively common, but its effects differ in their frequency. It
makes a tempting answer to the abduction problem, especially when
you do not know what abductions are.
But Clancy, aside from not knowing what the problems are
that have to be surmounted when coming up with a sleep paralysis
explanation, has another void in her knowledge that is even more
appropriate to her “study.” She has no criteria for establishing
who is or who is not an abductee. For Clancy there are no such
things as true abductees, there are only people who erroneously
think they are abductees. Therefore, uninvestigated, unfiltered
people who do not meet a long-established criteria for having
abduction events are, for her, “abductees.” Everyone is the same
when it comes to abductions because she is “fairly certain” that
abductions had never happened to anyone because the victims convey
the events anecdotally and the confirming physical evidence is too
thin. In fact, Clancy’s qualifier of “fairly certain” reads as
“impossible” in her book. One cannot prove a negative, as she
points out, but the book conveys a powerful sense that for her
this negative is fact.
Sensing some weakness in this area she covers herself by
saying that as a graduate student she was taught that there should
be no “forbidden questions.” But she learned differently when
doing research on sexual abuse and there had been forbidden
questions. She did not like this. (19) Alas, when it came to
abductions, the lesson did not take. She does have a forbidden
question: “What criteria will I use to discern whether people
might be abductees before I include them in my study?” She never
asks this question and it is one of several critical questions at
the heart of the abduction controversy. But Clancy does not care
if her self-proclaimed population of “abductees” might have a
variety of causative factors as long as one of them is not being
abducted by aliens.
Armed with her “abductees” Clancy makes sweeping claims
about the evidence she develops to show that people are not being
abducted. She used the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) test to
demonstrate that abductees fashion false memories. In this test a
person is given a list of closely related words and then asked to
remember them. One of the related words was not on the list.
Clancy says that people who claim to be abductees will say that
they remember the unlisted word in greater frequency than those
who do not claim to be abductees. Thus, they made up false
memories. There might be quite a bit of data behind this test,
but the actual meaning and reason for “hearing” the false word is
unclear. Does this mean that by remembering a “false” word they
also remember a lifetime of complex events in which they and
others were participating? Does this mean that they were just
mistaken about the word and therefore it does not really have any
significance? Does it mean that abduction experiences cause one
to think that they heard a word that was not there because of the
commonly reported telepathic communication during abduction
events? Does it mean that people think they are abductees but
they are not? Of course, Clancy does not have a way to determine
this. There are other problems. Why does falsely remembering
words increase with age? Does age correlate with the abductees
who did or did not falsely remember the words? Why was not
another abduction debunker able to replicate her data?[2]
Some of the people in her study did seem to have the
experiences that would argue for strange things happening to them,
but with no set criteria for determining whether they had
experiences that abductees have had before they even thought were
abductees, there is no way of filtering out who scored what on
which test. Oddly, the book has no test results or numbers. The
readers are required to believe her story that the abduction
claimants responded the way they did.
In Clancy’s world, the media has the power to supply the
key information for false memories, if not the false words. This
is a hardened fact; if it appeared in the media, it filtered into
the abductees’ consciousness and became actual memories of events
happening to them. It is an idea with direct causative factors
that allow for no doubt. A movie comes out and people think that
they are living within it. Motion pictures and television shows
about aliens are so powerful that they enable people to think that
aliens have abducted them. It is all so simple and obvious.
Memories, of course, are also a prime culprit. They are
pliable and so extraordinarily unreliable. In Clancy’s world they
are of little use. She gives a personal account of misremembering
a pleasant series of events that happened to her years before.
Memories appear to be so untrustworthy that it would be pointless
for me to remember what happened to me yesterday (and I have to
admit, the older I get the more difficult that becomes). Even
without popular culture absorption, memories degrade, they change,
they can be totally wrong. They can have no relation to reality
whatsoever: They can even be of alien abductions. Memory, the
basic element that gives us our identity, our sense of an
independent self, and is the storehouse of information needed to
survive, is all but worthless. I have investigated abductions
that happened only a few hours before. But what difference does
it make? Memory will never be accurate.
This, of course, would be news to the psychiatrists,
psychologists, physicians, attorneys, professors, nurses,
teachers, and other PhDs and MDs who are quite aware of sleep
paralysis, the problems with hypnosis, the problems of media
contamination, the problems of memory, and so forth. They are all
abductees whose cases I have investigated. In Clancy’s simple
world, her idea of causative factors for very difficult problems
allows for no doubt. Investigation is not an option. She takes
her self-described abductees at their word, never wondering
whether some of them are lying about their memories to skew the
results of her study. One would assume that this is not true, but
who knows?
The same is true of Clancy’s assertions about the interplay
of hypnosis, media, false memories, and of abductions. They are
just that – assertions. The science behind her claims is either
thin or nonexistent. She overreaches her evidence so much that
she launches herself into inner outer space.
She tries to impress the reader that she is compassionate
towards her subjects. She takes great care to say throughout the
book that abductees are not crazy (I have known a few who were, in
fact, both crazy and abductees). She feels somewhat sorry for the
poor people who are led to believe that they are abducted. She
tries to explain to them calmly and rationally that they were not
really abducted but they will not hear of it. They think it
happened to them and they will not be talked out of it. It is
just the way people are, they cannot help it and she cannot help
them. Her book contains an extremely unpleasant condescension
throughout.
Even though she tries to display compassion for her
population she points out that the abductees scored higher than
average on a test for schizotypy which, she says, indicates that
they are more imaginative and might believe in paranormal
phenomena like telepathy and clairvoyance. They are perfectly
normal but they are often “loners” (a loaded word in this serial
killer society). Rather than leaving it at that, she puts in a
zinger: “if symptoms of schizophrenia lie on a continuum, alien
abductees are perhaps closer to being schizophrenic....” (129)
She mitigates this by saying they are thus inclined to “magical
thinking,” and “perceptual aberration” but the subtext is there:
These people are further along the road to being nut cases. Once
again, we do not know which “abductees” scored higher and which
scored lower on the lunacy continuum.
Clancy’s actual knowledge of abduction patterns is severely
limited. She is aware of the reproductive activities of the
abduction phenomenon -- sperm and egg taking, and baby holding.
Beyond that her knowledge appears to drop off considerably. In
addition, she has no idea of the great mass of material that has
never been publicized or appeared in the media. If she actually
were, as she calls herself, “an alien-abduction researcher,” she
would know that the phenomenon is not one in which all abduction
stories are completely diverse with no details except the grossest
matching.
Every abductee with whom Clancy talked had a different
story. If she knew about the abduction phenomenon she would have
a variety of reasons to pick from that would explain this
phenomenon, one of which would be hers; they are not being
abducted. The other reasons for this more than adequately deal
with the difficult problems of consciously remembered events.
Rather than go into why these disparate stories exist among
consciously remembered events, it is important to understand that
researchers have found most conscious memories of abductions to be
notoriously inaccurate and scattered. I would refer the reader to
my discussion of these problems in
The Threat.
Although a minority of abductees are fairly accurate in the
conscious memories, researchers and hypnotists who automatically
take abductee remembrances at face value tend to make fatal
errors.
Everything comes together in Clancy’s revealing discussion
of Betty and Barney Hill, probably the best known abduction case
in history. How could two people say the same thing about being
abducted, especially when all abductions are different? Easy.
You see, she explains, the material was retrieved through
hypnosis which was bad enough, but a few days before the hypnosis,
an episode of the science fiction TV show The Outer Limits
called “The Ballero Shield” had aired. In it, she points out,
“the aliens looked remarkably similar to those of today: they had
big, black, wraparound eyes, no noses or mouths, and delicate
waif-like bodies.” (89) This show, she suggests, was the genesis
of the gray beings so commonly described today. I would urge
anyone who has access to “The Ballero Shield” video to view it (I
bought mine at my local video store). In it there is only one
alien. He is a normal-sized guy in a jump-suit type of clothing.
He does have a large head, but his actual eyes are his normal
eyes. He has a flattened nose and a regular mouth. His body is
normal and not waif-like. Every fact that she describes about the
show is demonstrably wrong. But Clancy would certainly know this
because she says that she has seen nearly everything on television
ever made about aliens. She is making a crucial point in an
academic book about an extremely important case. Surely, she has
seen this Outer Limits episode. It would be academically
reckless, or worse, to not have seen it. If she did see it, one
wonders if she were deliberately distorting the evidence. If she
did not see it, it suggests even more serious problems with her
research.
Curiously, Clancy appears to be unaware that in 1997 UFO
researchers and debunkers had debated the role of “The Ballero
Shield” episode in the Hill case. Thus, when Barney described
wrap-around eyes that he had never seen before she proclaims: “The
problem is that contrary to what Barney said, he had seen
eyes like that. ‘The Ballero Shield,’ which had aired twelve days
before his regression session, featured the same eyes.” [her
emphasis] (97) Once again, I urge readers to look at Barney’s
drawings and then view “The Ballero Shield” and judge for
themselves.[3] More than that, when this came into debate in 1997, Betty
Hill (Barney died in 1969) was asked about whether she had seen
The Outer Limits. She had never even heard of the
show. Not only that, Barney worked nights. When he was home they
were usually busy with community activities.[4] But, for Clancy, I suppose, this is just anecdotal
nonsense. And besides, what difference does it make if your facts
are wrong? In the end The Explanation will be right.
In her book Clancy builds basically an unfalsifiable
system. If it is not sleep paralysis, it is hypnosis. If it is
not those two, then it is fantasy prone personality. If it is not
that, it is popular culture absorption. If it is not that, well
abductees are after all, on that continuum to schizophrenia. If
not that, then it is the psychological need to believe in gods
from above, if it is not that then it is a form of hysteria, if it
is not that, it is a combination of two or three or more reasons.
Her pool of explanation-combinations is virtually inexhaustible.
Links to the explanations are either not made, or are so tenuous
that they do not rise even to the level of bad social science.
Ultimately, she buys into most of the common debunking
explanations except that abductees are not “crazy,” or at least
not yet. And even this “liberal” view of abductee claimants
suggests her lack of knowledge. She is apparently unaware that
that most debunkers gave up on this explanation long ago because
the evidence never supported it. She is also unaware of Budd
Hopkins’ 1983 battery of psychological tests including the MMPI,
TAT, Wechler, and others, given to nine abductees which showed
that they do not display evidence of mental illness.
If Clancy had carefully filtered her population and kept
two categories of those who did and those who did not fit the
patterns of abduction activity (heaven forbid, she might have had
to call in an actual abduction researcher for help), she might
have had an argument that would tell us something important about
the two populations. But she did not and she does not.
How could a book as flawed as this one be published? The
fault lies squarely with Harvard University Press. HUP has
published two books about the UFO phenomenon: Donald Menzel’s 1953
diatribe, Flying Saucers, and Clancy’s book. In both cases
the manuscripts were either refereed by people incompetent in the
subject matter or it was not refereed at all. The problem was
just as egregious in Menzel’s case. As the head of the Harvard
Observatory and a nationally known astronomer, Menzel’s word
carried weight. Thus, when he claimed that some UFO sightings
were caused by mirages from mountaintops, HUP’s referees were not
about to take issue, even though his own data proved him wrong.
He went forward with the wrong numbers and nobody bothered to
check. Because in the end, it did not matter that his facts were
wrong, his explanation that UFOs were not extraterrestrial would
be right.[5]
Clancy could have avoided her problems by learning
something about abductions. But, like her, most academics are not
aware that there has been significant research into UFOs and
abductions. They have no idea that there are academics who
actively engage with the evidence free from the inadequacies that
so taint this book. Ironically, if Clancy had read my second book
on abductions, The Threat,
she would have seen my fairly extensive critique of John Mack’s
methodology and conclusions and she could have used it to good
effect to make her arguments. She might have also read my
critique of incompetent hypnotists, their lack of controls in
hypnosis and the damage that hypnotists and therapists had done to
abductees and to abduction research. Clancy was not far from the
truth when she criticized hypnotists. But, in Clancy’s black and
white world, all abduction hypnotists are unaware of the problems
of hypnosis. All abduction hypnotists do not know enough to
control for false memories, suggestibility, leading, and so
forth. In Clancy’s world few potential abductees are aware of the
problems of hypnosis or popular culture osmosis or sleep
paralysis. Indeed, for Clancy no abduction hypnotist is aware of
these things either. It is the incompetent Svengalis leading the
ignorant, already suggestible and vulnerable Trilbys deeper into
media fantasies, false memories and alien abductions. Or if it is
not that, it is something else equally as explainable.
There are many other problems with Clancy’s book, some
factual: In 1969, the National Academy of Sciences did not
“sponsor a study of all available UFO evidence.”(137) John Fuller
was not an abduction researcher, etc. (111) More importantly; her
book reveals much deeper problems than just factual errors. It
displays the deep inadequacies of the academic confrontation with
the abduction phenomenon. It is a depressing story of thoughtless
assumptions, flawed methodology, and wrong explanations, all based
on ignorance and dubious facts. The problems are not unique to
Clancy; they are ubiquitous. But, if one has the will to believe
that he or she has the solution to the mystery, nothing else
matters.
David M. Jacobs
Department of History
Temple
University
Philadelphia, PA
[1]
Stuart Vyse, “The Outer Limits of Belief,” Science, 25
November 2005: Vol. 310. no. 5752, pp 1280-1281.
[2] See
Christopher French’s attempts to replicate Clancy’s DRM on
www.johnemackinstitute.org/center/center_news.asp?id=301
[3] A
wait-up photo of the alien is available at
www.scifilm.org/tv/outerlimits/outerlimits1-20.html
[4]
Jerome Clark. The UFO Book. Visible Ink Press.
Detroit: 1998. p. 291.
[5]
Bruce Maccabee, “Still in Default,”
www.nidsci.org/pdf/stillindefault.pdf
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