Alien Abduction Experience, Part 1

What are we to make of alien abduction experiences? Scientific investigation points to a barrage of logical explanations for abnormal sensory experience, from sleep paralysis and temporal lobe anomalies to false memory encoding. Interpret it all within the confines of a sci-fi narrative and you have a revealing, kaleidoscopic view of the 20th century zeitgeist in all its wonder, hope, anxiety and yearning. Join Robert and Christian for this Stuff to Blow Your Mind two-part examination of paranormal experience in the space age.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian
seger In. Today we're talking about a topic that most
science podcast listeners would think, Wait, what why? Alien abductions?

(00:25):
Really you guys are going to take that seriously? Well,
I think the tone is the question, right, because a
lot of a lot of science brands will discuss alien abduction,
but they'll take a very hard, skeptical approach, And certainly
science is the bedrock of the show, and I feel
like we we tend to take a skeptical approach with

(00:46):
most topics. Now that being said, we always try and
make a point of of acknowledging that with paranormal experience,
there's still some sort of an experience going on. There
is off some sort of a memory, there's something something
that goes on in the human psyche that makes it
quasi real or real for the individual, and so we

(01:10):
always make a point of trying to honor that and
and respect that as much as possible while also keeping
you know, one foot firmly planted on the earth. Yeah, exactly,
And alien abduction is similar to some of the other
topics we've covered before, like say, uh, satanic panic and exorcisms, demons, angels,
also like the stuff that we did with John d.

(01:32):
And what's interesting to look at here is that there
is a quantifiable large amount of academic research into this topic.
It's it's actually interesting. Um. One of the pieces that
I looked at for this episode is by someone named J. D. Finkelstein,
and they basically look at a review of all the
academic literature in the last like, let's say, thirty five years.

(01:55):
And the thing that's interesting is they said, there's really
not that much available by me, like there is too
much to read for this episode. There was so much
out there. I mean I just saw in all the
research databases that we have access to, there's just wall
to wall uh information and really like what we put
together for this, it's gonna fill up probably two episodes, yes, yeah,

(02:18):
because because there are basically two large categories we have
to discuss. On one hand, there is the the the
experience side of it. So individuals claiming to have experienced
an alien abduction and generally in the process have seen
a UFO as well, uh, and they are so they're
all the various ways we can try and understand that
from a skeptical standpoint, you know what sort of hallucinations

(02:40):
or memory um false memory scenarios are going on to
make that possible, the power of belief, et cetera. And
then on top of that, there's this cultural idea too,
because you can you can certainly we'll get into this
more as we progress here, but you can go back
through history. You can find plenty of examples of individuals
having um wondrous or tariff and some often sexual encounters

(03:02):
with demons, angels, ferries, what have you. But it's only
in the twentieth century and a little bit beyond here
that we have had these experiences with extraterrestrials and UFOs.
So then he starts saying, well, okay, if this is
just the coding is this, if this is just the
sock puppet that we end up putting over this abnormal
sensory experience, then where does the sock puppet come from?

(03:24):
What are all the various cultural threads that come together
to weave that unique form. Yeah, it is. It's fascinating
when you look at it from that perspective, and it's
still fascinating. I think even if you, like some researchers,
think you've totally nailed it down and you've figured out
exactly how to explain what's happening here right Um. And

(03:44):
what's interesting is that even though we've got all this
fiction that really kind of slowed down I'd say a
little bit before two thousand, um, right around when the
X file started to fade. Uh, you know, we have
all this this alien abduction fiction that was really big
X Files, Close Encounters, etcetera. Um. Fire in the Sky,

(04:06):
which neither of us have seen you, but I'm planning
to check out before we do our trailer talk. Yeah,
that's what I want to watch before next week. In communion,
I've never seen either, have you seen that? I have not,
I'm familiar with I haven't read the book either, but
I'm I'm familiar with his story. I've read I want
to say, I read an Atlantic piece about him a
couple years back. But so there was a lot going
on between the probably like mid seventies up until the

(04:28):
end of the nineties that was in our entertainment about this.
So we all kind of think we know what this
is all about. We we we understand the alien abduction narrative. Yeah,
I remember as a kid watching a lot of Unsolved
Mysteries and uh, you know a lot of those episodes
that dealt with just unsolved normal crimes, and occasionally Matthew
McConaughey showed up right to reenact it. But they would

(04:52):
get into these supernatural elements and they would get into
alien abductions, and I remember just being um like terrified
and amazed by these tales because they presented them in
that kind of like hard boiled detective narrative way, where's like,
this is this is really happening. We don't understand it,
but this is what these people say happened to them.
And it made me. It made me kind of terrified

(05:14):
as to sleep at night for a while, because I
would imagine the aliens coming for me. I would I
would get a little nervous if I stared up into
the night sky too much, because it would be like,
all right, if I glimpse them, they'll know I saw them,
and then they will come for me. They're like, all right, well,
you forced our hands. Now we've got to abduct you.
I don't know what it is, but I've never been
susceptible to the scary factor of alien abduction. Yeah, like

(05:38):
when you didn't did you watch and solve mysteries? Because
I did. But like, I think that there was a
part of me, even at that age that was kind
of like, whatever happens, it's going to be pretty interesting.
It's interesting. Like like, and I guess too that I
was so immersed in Star Wars and Star Trek and
other science fiction that my mind wouldn't allow me to

(06:00):
go to the really horrific areas that alien abduction narratives
go to, right, Like I see a movie like what
was it, Dark Skies that came out like two or
three years ago, I think that was like maybe the
latest of these kind of horror movies, or that there
was one recently, the Phoenix Incident. I think it's like
a found footage one. Yeah, And then there was one
that came out a few years back, um, the Fifth Kind,

(06:23):
I want to say, Okay, yeah, And those have never
really resonated with me in the way. So, for instance,
the Demon Possession movies do right, And that's because I think,
like the way that my cultural background was set up,
that narrative was far scarier to me. Even though that
narrative could be placed on top of similar psychological experiences,

(06:44):
right in the way that alien abduction narratives are. Yeah,
you know, I guess it just really depends on how
you approach you, like, what your background and the culture is,
because certainly, growing up in rural Tennessee in the nineties,
I I've discussed before how there was definitely this this
this sense within certain circles that the demons were real,

(07:05):
that that the supernatural realm was real within the confines
of sort of fundamentalist Christian upbringing. But then at the
same time you were there were these voices of you know,
I want to say, you know, more scientifically sound, reasonable
voices that filter through into into stuff like unsolved mysteries,
and you watch that and you're saying, Okay, well, you know,

(07:27):
this seems like it could be true as well. So
it just I guess it depends on like where you're
firmly entrenched. Yeah, And so for that reason, I think
it's important for us to start off here with just
a bare bones basic description of what we're talking about
here with alien abductions. So, and alien abductions specifically is
when a person claims to have been taken by any

(07:48):
being from outside Earth against their will, and these surged
in the nineteen sixties and then waned through the years
with the expansion of space technology and exploration. But you
have to be clear here, there's no physical evidence that
supports claims of alien abduction or even that extraterrestrial intelligence exists. Now,

(08:09):
skeptics say that these reports are either hallucinations or their lies.
On the other side of it, some scientists have attributed
these experiences to sleep paralysis or repressed trauma. And this
is probably a good point where we should say that
our sibling podcast Stuff They Don't Want You to Know,
has covered this extensively over the years. So if there's
other stuff you want to look for, podcasts also videos,

(08:31):
they've done a lot of videos. Yeah, it's kind of
bread and butter right exactly now. Before those of you
out there, and I felt the same way when I
was going to the research. Get too judgmental about our
friends and neighbors out there who have experienced this. I
want to throw a couple of stats at you that
you might find surprising. A twenty National Geographic poll found
that seventy seven percent of Americans believe that aliens have

(08:53):
visited Earth, so that's huge, and eighty percent believe that
alien life exists on other planets. A twenty fifteen IPSOS
poll found that fifty six percent of Americans believe in UFOs.
So either way you cut that, it's the majority of people.
Now for me, I guess like I fall on that,

(09:16):
Like I don't know if aliens have visited Earth or not,
but yeah, I mean we do the science podcast. We
talk about the possibilities of alien life all the time.
If I had to like vote one way or the other,
I would probably say yes, Yeah, I tend to fall
the same way. I think, well, yes, that's given what
we know of of life and based on the research
that we've we've done and the sources we've looked at, uh,

(09:39):
it seems entirely possible that there's life out there in
the universe somewhere. Now it gets a little more complicated
from there on out, because then you say, well, okay,
if there's life, then is it intelligent life? And then uh,
and you can say, all right, well, based on our model, yeah,
you can tweak the Drake equation in different ways. Look
at could could this intelligent life form actually evolve? And

(10:02):
then is it still around Okay, so maybe there's it's
not just a slime mold on another planet. Maybe there's
something out there that's capable of looking up into the
night sky and forming its own um anxiety ridden dreams
of visitations from other worlds. But then that visitation becomes
the next realm. Right, is it possible that this, this creature,

(10:23):
this alien life is capable of visiting our world? And
in this we get into an area we discussed a
little bit in our Interplanetary War episode, because even if
space faring aliens do exist, could they reach us? And
part of the problem here is distance staggering in the
interstellar distance and the lack of any concrete, proven technological
means to traverse those distances at a reasonable pace. Even

(10:46):
the more conservative estimates, and like the closer you know,
planetary homeworlds or out bases for for some sort of
civilization like this, it would still result in a trip
of years. Right, And if they did have spacecraft capable
of performing the sort of highs, the high speed maneuvers
that are described in UFO sightings, then physicist Michio Kaku

(11:09):
insists that technology for such a craft and the ability
for a living passenger to survive, it's g forces. Well,
those are well beyond humanities modern technology as well. So
do you think that they've visited Earth? Then like that's
a that's sort of are they capable of visiting Earth? No? Right, yeah,
and then would they want to or have that? Yeah? Well,

(11:31):
I mean if I mean, if you get to the
point where you say, yes, they exist, yes they're intelligent,
Yes they have spacecraft capable of visiting us, then we
again we come back to basing. We have to base
an alien life form more or less on how we
think and behave, and we know that we would want
to check them out, so they would probably want to
check us out. So yeah, I can, I can buy
into that, but it's coming over that that technological step,

(11:53):
that technological leap that is required, it's hard hard to
get past. Yeah, that's kind of where you get to that. Uh.
I guess I'm thinking along the lines of independence day
rather than communion, Right, So, like we jump to the
point of like where we've imagined a society that has
the technology, but all we can picture is ourselves. So
then subsequently we we apply our own reasoning this connect

(12:14):
BacT as fall Bard, this fall Bard episode, we do
a couple of weeks ago. Why would we go there
to exploit its resources? Right? Uh? So, I mean, but
we would love to think otherwise, right, like that they
they just want to communicate or do experiments on us.
But but the thing is, we come back around to
the proof. Right, if they've if they've visited the planet

(12:35):
in the past or are visiting it now, where is
the hardcore proof? And uh And likewise, if they've abducted
people for experiments, where's the proof? Because from a scientific standpoint,
there's just insufficient evidence to make a case for alien visitation.
I'm not saying there aren't people out there that are
attempting to provide evidence, but most UFO sidings depend on
infallible human accounts, imperfect footage, and just rampant conspiracy theory.

(13:00):
All of it tends to crumble under the scrutiny of
the scientific method. And and that's our best way of
determining what's reality and what is ultimately fantasy. And uh.
And also it's it's worth reminding everyone that you know,
scientific inquiry hinges on something called the null hypothesis, which
means the burden of proof is on anyone making a
positive claim. So if you say a dog gate your homework, great,

(13:23):
where's the testable evidence you saw an alien spacecraft? Excellent,
let's test and validate your story. So, in other words,
it's up to individuals who have seen the UFO. It's
up to individuals who have experienced the abductions or buy
into these stories. It's up to them to provide the proof,
and we just don't have it, you know, along the
same lines as an hypothesis, the scientific world doesn't go

(13:44):
on the defense every time someone sees a ghost, even
at the presence of testable evidence. Perfectly. Terrestrial claims demand
rigorous testing and a high degree of certainty and the results.
So I guess to put a cap in our position
going into this episode looking at the research. You know,
as I've said in the past, when we've talked about
sort of paranormal phenomenon and then try to shed a

(14:06):
scientific light on them. I may not believe in this,
but I believe that the people who believe are being honest.
I believe they believe. And uh, It's important to note
that most of the research has focused on attempts that
are either trying to prove or disprove the existence of aliens.
Rather than what's actually going on. What what makes us

(14:29):
want to focus on this is that it's an opportunity
to learn about our own psychology, right, That's what's really
interesting about the alien abduction narrative. And I wanna put
in a quote here that's from that J. D. Finkelstein
piece that I read for this. They said, in the end,
while the events abductees report are unlikely to have occurred,
the earnestness with which they endorse these memories is a

(14:52):
strong indicator that memory is a malleable and complicated phenomenon
with implications for a wide range of psychological topics. That
alone seems like it begs for stuff to blow your
mind to examine it. Yeah, every time I engage with
this topic or topics like this, I'm always left with
with the realization that approaching this kind of thing from

(15:15):
a skeptical, scientific, but open minded point of view, you
end up leaving the topic not feeling like you're you
have a safe distance from it, you know, like you
have a safe distance from an alien abduction experience touching
your life. You end up realizing, oh, well, it's actually
not that far away anyway. When you take into account
all of the all of the various psychological events that

(15:38):
can play into it, like the the basic, the basic reality,
that perception of reality is its own form of hallucination.
When you start counting all of that in and just
how how easily memory can be manipulated by yourself or others,
then you realize, oh, well, I'm not safe from this
kind of experience. It could it could easily, It could
easily happen under the right scenarios. Yeah. Absolutely, Actually, in

(16:00):
preparation for this episode, I revisited one of my favorite
X Files episodes, uh, jose Chung's from Outer Space, which
if if nobody out there is seeing it, I highly recommend.
Even if you've never seen any X Files, you don't
need to. It's in season three, uh right, smack in
the middle. I think it doesn't connect to any other episodes.
It's written by Darren Morgan, who, in my opinion, is

(16:22):
one of the best writers of the show ever, and
it is a fantastic but also relatively amusing examination of
a lot of what we're going to talk about here today.
And they look at it from that perspective that, like
human psychology and how we perceive the world is so
inherently skewed that there's a lot of different ways to

(16:45):
take a look at this, and in the in the
episode itself, there's sort of like three or four different
viewpoints of the alien abduction narrative, right, and like how
it could play out. I don't want to say too
much more than that, other than that it's I love it.
It's a fantastic episode, and it has a Jessie the
Body venture and it too. Why I was hoping you'd
get a chance to check out because he's sort of
a surprise figure that pops up as he shows up

(17:07):
as a man in black. All right, well, maybe I'll
get to watch it for next week. Yeah, that'd be cool.
I think it's time for a visitation of our own
here though. We should probably take a quick commercial break,
and when we come back, we will dive into the topic.
We'll start talking about some of the recurring elements of
the sort of standardized alien abduction UH experience, and then
go from there. Sounds good than all right, we're back,

(17:32):
so let's get into the recurring elements. And now this
is one of the fascinating things for somebody like myself,
who's you know, I've seen a lot of X files.
I thought I kind of knew everything, you know, that
there was to know, but like, really looking at the
homework here, there are parts of the recurring elements that
I wasn't quite aware of. Well, one of the interesting
things here is that you kind of have two levels

(17:52):
and they're not they're not isolated from each other. So
you have what people began reporting about alien abduction scenarios
across the decades, and then you have what was portrayed
in the media and in science fiction. And then the
media portrayals begin to influence the experience, so it becomes
a little messy there. But it's like a weird or

(18:14):
a borrows that's like eating itself. Yeah, yeah, it's true. Well,
all right, let's go down. Here's some bullet points just
about like what are recurring elements that we're going to
unpack so that we can get a sense of what's
actually happening here. Now, alien abduction stories usually involve the
alien abductor conducting experiments or other procedures on the abductive Okay,

(18:35):
that's one that we all pretty much know, right. They
usually occur in an isolated area, with very few cases
involving more than one person being reported. Now that's interesting because,
as we'll talk about later, the very first big case
of this involved two people, but usually they involve people
on their own. They usually begin with the sighting of

(18:56):
a UFO or some kind of lights in the sky,
and then most report it's involved an individual being placed
in a trance like state while they're being experimented on. Now,
some people report that the the exams and stuff like
that that happens in their homes rather than on a
ship or something like that. Here's one of the things
I always had a problem with with with these explanations.

(19:18):
The assumption is that you're taken into outer space when
this happens, right, But I always thought, well, what that
seems like a lot of work for the aliens. Wouldn't
they just stay in orbit or stay like stay within
the atmosphere somewhere, you know what I mean? Like like
it seems like why do they have to fly all
the way down and all the way back up again?
Well two answers. If I'm gonna go with just the

(19:39):
straight up sort of skeptical technological uh profile here, I
would say, well, their ships are apparently crazy powerful anyway,
able to grip around it unbelievable speeds, So going back
into orbit for them is no big deal. Maybe if Yeah,
the other side of this would be that you look
back at these past paranormal experiences and what one has
taken to the fairy realm. One is one sends into

(20:02):
heaven and therefore this this matches up more with their
mythological expectations for visitation. Right, absolutely, So that's why I
think it's maybe more surprising when it occurs in the home,
right that that's like less along the lines of what
we're expecting. But then again, when the angel visited Mary
in the Bible, it was just in the home. She

(20:22):
didn't get to go visit orbit or heaven. Hey man,
that was a one of a kind thing. Uh. Look though,
other common factors that show up in these narratives are
beams of light, and the beams of light can both
paralyze and make you float, as well as abductors, implanting devices,
collecting tissue samples, and as we know, probing orifices using

(20:44):
strange machines. Now, some people also report psychological experiments related
to memory or pain. Now, this is that was one
thing that I had never heard of before. So that's interesting,
and then once the procedures are done, the abductees are
usually returned home. Now, the aliens are usually described as
small figures with smooth, shiny skin, large heads, and bulging eyes.

(21:06):
This is the similar gray aliens that were depicted in
early science fiction films. And there's a hierarchy that's sometimes
described between the aliens, where the small ones perform menial
work while the large ones are the leaders. They are
usually said to communicate telepathically. Now, of course, Robert and I,
one of the first things that we started talking about

(21:27):
when we were prepping this episode was, gosh, I guess
it's two years old now, maybe that Saturday Night Live
uh skit with Kate McKinnon and Ryan Gosling. Uh. They're
they're playing alien abductees who are explaining their experience to
like the Pentagon or something like that, and they have
vastly different experiences, right, Yeah, Like most of them have

(21:47):
this pleasant, hippie dippy kind of experience and then one
of them has this more traumatic experience with the aliens. Yeah,
and it's it's sort of explained in the narrative of
the skit that it's because there's different hierarchies of aliens, right,
Like there's the larger leader aliens and then there's the
smaller aliens. And I believe the way that Kate McKinnon
refers to it was that she wasn't dealing with the
top brass, which is always amusing to me when I

(22:10):
watched that. It's a great skip because Ryan Gosling is
having extreme difficulty holding it together the entire So back
to this, though, the victims, they don't seem to immediately
recall their experiences. This is an important part, right, So
my assumption was was always like, well, you just kind
of like wake up in bed and you're like, WHOA,
I was abducted by aliens, right, But it's not actually

(22:30):
along those lines. It's usually you don't recall what happens.
You notice that you've lost a chunk of time from
your memories, and then you start experiencing panic attacks, stomach pains,
or psychological distress afterward, and then it's because of those
symptoms that you start kind of looking inward and why
am I feeling like this? So sometimes people don't realize

(22:51):
they've been well, they don't come to the realization of
their abduction until after treatment. And and this is usually
in the form of hypnosis us Now, abductees often experience
a range of maladies, both physical and psychological, and this
leads them to go consult a mental health professional, and
that can include anything from anxieties to phobia's, nightmares, aches

(23:13):
and pains, and as we mentioned earlier, the missing time thing.
Sometimes victims don't know what happened to them. So it's
not like they visit this person and they say, I
know that this is an alien thing. I just need
you to confirm it, right. Usually they're they're terrified because
they're like, am I having some kind of brain event?
You know? But you know, you can imagine a certain

(23:33):
amount of self diagnosis going on here as well, where
you're you have some sort of symptom. That's if it's
not completely unexplainable, then at least it's it's bothersome, it's
causing some anxiety, and then you start casting around for
some sort of of an explanation. Now, maybe, you know,
for the modern listener, you go to web m D
or something and you start looking at symptoms and driving
yourself crazy that way. But you could also very easily

(23:56):
go to an alien abduction reddit, bore do or a
message board of some kind, or watch an episode of
Unsolved Mysteries back in their anything to start thinking, oh
my goodness, what maybe this is what happened to me,
or another like paranormal narrative like ghosts or angels visited.
What you know, It really depends on kind of what
fits your cultural world view. Yeah, if the if the

(24:19):
soil is fertile for that idea to really grow. Okay, so,
and another thing that I didn't realize, and this seems
really important, is that most abductees report the experience as
being positive. They see it as a life changing thing.
In fact, Susan Clancy, who's somebody we're going to cite
a lot in this episode. She wrote a book in
two thousand and seven about the phenomenon, and she found

(24:39):
that it's often related to humans need to believe in something.
She says, quote people go through life trying on belief
systems for size. Some of these belief systems speak to
powerful emotional needs that have little to do with science.
The need to feel less alone in the world, the
desire to have special powers or a bill of these,

(25:00):
the longing to know that there's something out there, something
more important than you, that's watching over you. For many people,
belief in alien abduction gratifies spiritual hungers. It reassures them
about their place in the universe and their own significance. Now,
one abductee actually said to her in the interviews, said

(25:22):
he at the experience made him realize he wasn't alone
in the universe, and that there were beings out there
who cared about him, and that getting to that point
was a really arduous journey. It was like a hero's
journey for for this person, because there were a lot
of people along the way who wanted to deny his experience. Yeah,
I think these are very important points because on on

(25:44):
one hand, yeah, everyone wants to be a part of
a just a human community. And and what brings a
community more together more than than shared beliefs. So if
you can you can find people that that also say, yeah,
I think this is really happening. This happened to me.
It brings you together. And then on the other hand,
people want to believe in something, you know, bigger than themselves.

(26:04):
They want to they want some sort of a spiritual model.
But there's often this, uh, the problem of proof. How
do you how do you really cement that belief. And
you know, there's a whole argument that the witchcraft persecutions
of the past a lot of that. But I've talked
about this in the show before. The author Walter Stevens
goes into it in his book of titled Demon Levers,

(26:25):
where he talks about witchcraft persecution being largely away for
individuals within the church with a conflict of faith to
be able to say, look, here's physical proof of the supernatural,
because this witch had sex with a demon, and the
demons are real and so are angels. So if you
have been saying if if you've been experimented upon by
an alien, that's your your experience. And certainly if you

(26:48):
have you know, you can point your arm and say
like this, I think there's a chip under here, then
you can this is physical proof. This is your physical
proof of something greater than yourself, of this essentially a
ritual world you have connection to. And ultimately, what's the difference,
what's the difference between the stigmata and uh, you know,
the scar of the microchip and plant that you believe in. Yeah,

(27:10):
that's a really good point, right, and I think it
speaks to a larger thing that we're gonna get into
further down the road here, but just that we are
at a point in time where religion and government and
family and they're not necessarily as communally universal as they
used to be, right, And so subsequently we find ourselves

(27:33):
turning to other avenues for that human desire for belief,
whether it's you know, uh stigmata, whether it's video games,
whether it's a fandom, right, Like, there's all manner of
things to find your version of community in, right, and
I think this can fall into that. But how does
that compare to other paranormal events then, well, you know,

(27:56):
we we've brought up the episode that we did a
while back on Satanic panic in the satanic ritual abuse situation. Yeah,
I agree with you. I think there's a there's a
lot of there are a lot of connecting threads there,
and really, alien abduction is so much better something you
can instally Such are more positive uh fiction to layer
over your your your mind because you're not victimizing anybody,

(28:18):
like you're not pointing at another human and saying other
than yourself. Right, Yeah, And I can see where in
certain models that could take on a harmful um a
harmful form, but yeah, you're not you're not making legal
charges of of abuse against somebody. You're, if anything, you're
you're accusing aliens of physical abuse. Yeah, this immediately made

(28:41):
me recall no pun intended the book Michelle remembers from
the seventies, which we talked about in their Satanic Panic episode,
that this was like, this was a thing going into
the eighties, like recalling memories that had been repressed. Right,
and as we learned then and we're gonna learn through here,
sometimes those called memories weren't necessarily real. Now along those lines,

(29:05):
there is a historical trajectory of the alien abduction experience.
The reports really seemed to be marked by the nineteen
forties and nineteen fifties golden age of science fiction is
right in the US, and it was very popular due
to the dawn of the space age. I'm speaking of
the science fiction stuff, not of the alien abductions. Also,
we have to remember the Roswell incident, which we now

(29:29):
sort of think of it as being this fantastical thing
that's connected to TV shows. It was a real thing
that happened in New Mexico in nineteen seven, So that
panicked people as well. Uh, this grew into the nineteen
sixties and then afterwards, hundreds of thousands of people have
reported being abducted. That's important, Like when I think of this,
I think like there's probably like a hundred people out there.

(29:51):
It's way more than that. Like, this is a way
more common experience than you would think. Now. Of course,
with then that, we're talking about the self reports of
paranormal varience. So within that community, like you have to ask, well, okay,
how many people are just straight up making it up.
How many people are in that weird area where they're
they're kind of lying but there they've gotten to the

(30:12):
point where they believe it. How many people are like
just legitimate behind what they're saying. I mean, there's a
there's a wide spectrum there, I think for for individuals
buying into the beliefs that they are uh aspounding. I
mean we see that in religion all the time. You know,
how many people are just die in the wool believers

(30:34):
who can say that they had a a personal you know,
supernatural experience. And how many people are you know, elsewhere
on the scale. Yeah, And it's interesting too because the
like I said earlier, the researchers tend to focus a
little bit more on that, like are you lying or
are you not, rather than what's happening here? And the
research that we looked at for today is is more
about what's happening here. Um, we have to mention this

(30:58):
one case because I briefly talked about it earlier. But
the most famous early cases Barney and Betty Hill, and
this was in nineteen sixty one. They were driving near
Indian Head, New Hampshire, when they saw a bright object
in the sky. It followed their car and they stopped
and they saw a disc shaped craft that had windows,
and the windows were filled with watching figures. They drove

(31:20):
away from this, but then they felt a tingling sensation
in their bodies. When they got home, they realized it
had actually taken them two hours to get there. Betty
afterwards kept having recurring nightmares. Both of them underwent hypnosis
therapy with a psychiatrist and this brought out their story
of an alleged abduction and examination and the experience that

(31:42):
this is interesting and maybe if we do trailer talk
we can try to find something on this. But there
was a nineteen seventy five made for TV movie called
the UFO Incident where James Earl Jones played Barney. I
was totally unaware of that. I mean, it's such an
interesting case because again it's it's the the early nineteen sixties,
and it's say it's a biracial couple. Uh. And and

(32:02):
just the fact that it's a male and a female, because,
as as we'll discuss later, for a long time, you
saw a far more female uh individuals claiming they had
an abduction experience. Meanwhile, you saw more male representations in
media because that's the kind of fiction that was predominant.
But yeah, you go back to sort of K zero

(32:24):
and it's this uh, you know, this, this weird, this
this kind of strangely diverse sampling. It plays against the
stereotype that has been established for sure. Do you want
to talk about Fatima because this is actually close to
an episode that I've been proposing that we do for
a while now, but we have to find a place
to land on it. I've I've always wanted us to

(32:44):
talk about the Marian apparitions, and this is Fatima was
where one of those happened. Oh yeah, so this is
essentially a UFO encounter in terms of you know, unidentified
flying object, but in nineteen seventeen, before any of the
alien abduction stuff took off in what is what has
subsequently been explained as everything from stratospheric dust to mass hallucination.

(33:05):
You have thousands of people claiming to witness, um uh,
this paranormal experience in a predominantly Catholic town. They claim
to see Virgin Mary will arrive in quote an airplane
of light. So before the advent of Christianity, the same
sort of event would have likely been viewed through the
lens of you know, a pagan belief system. Um, But

(33:27):
how do you how do you think such an event
would be interpreted today? In a world flavored more you know,
by scientific dominance, uh, the decline of religion and mainstream
science fiction, you would think that it's some sort of
an alien being visiting our world. Like if I looked
up and saw that, I would That's really where my
mind would probably go first. Yeah, right, And also I'm

(33:50):
not as familiar with the fatimas areas I'd like to be.
But why would we automatically assume it's Mary unless even
if it appears as a female human being, death doesn't
necessarily strike the narrative chord. That's common with the two
of us at least. Yeah. Yeah, I mean you look
at the people in the place and the time and
you and you realize this was their predominant narrative for

(34:12):
supernatural occurrences, and though that is what they went to,
that's what their minds went to when they when they
observe this or experience this. Alright, on that note, we're
going to take a quick break, and when we come back,
we're going to discuss, well, what's what's actually happening. We've
we've mentioned the idea that there are you know, their
hallucination and memory issues, sleep paralysis, etcetera. We're going to

(34:35):
get into those. We're going to discuss those explanations when
we get back. Than alright, we're back, So all right,
what's actually happening? We've pretty pretty much outlined, like the
cultural narrative of alien abductions, what's common for the cases. Obviously,
what we what we were speaking of there is in generalization.

(34:56):
You know, if there are specific cases, they could play
out in any variety of ways. But what do we
think is actually going on here? Like what what has
come about from our scientists sitting down and interviewing and
studying abductees. Yeah, this is where it gets. It gets
pretty fascinating because it's the the abductees that you can

(35:17):
you can study, because when it comes to just seeing
a UFO, there's not a lot you can do, Like
there's there's no physical signs of that. And we've already
discussed some of the problems that come into play when
you're talking about footage. Uh. In fact, that's that's one
of the arguments that that has been made that we
that that people are believing less in alien abduction and

(35:38):
UFOs because everyone has a camera phone now and you're
not seeing like the that the wealth of UFO sidings
that that you might expect if they were actually occurring. Well,
and also c g I is becoming something that people
can do in their home, you know, Like I think
about the episode that you and Joe did on on
Kenny Valley and the idea that like, we're about to
hit a point technologically where we and replicate a real

(36:01):
human being but put them in a scenario where they
act out and say things that they didn't actually do
in real life, and then you apply that to something
like this. Who knows what you can believe in. It's
just the footage, but with the individual, you know, there
there we have that physical or that alleged physical proof
that can be evaluated to varying degrees, be it physical

(36:22):
or psychologically. Yeah, so there's all kinds of possibilities, from
hallucinations to lucid dreams which we've talked about extensively on
the show before, or just plain fantasies, right, and the
explanations range from sleep apnea to sleep paralysis, to hysteria
to psychosis. Now, sleep paralysis seems to be a really

(36:43):
interesting landing point for a lot of more empirically minded
researchers on alien abduction, and in fact, Robert has done
a fantastic sleep paralysis video that you can find on
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That was a
fun one. Yeah, and I believe we've talked about about
it on the show, but for two probably more in
terms of like incubi and succubi and whatnot. But but yeah,

(37:05):
I mean the basic idea is in your dream, you
could have a dream about being a kung fu fighter,
for instance, but your body is on lockdown, and that's
to keep you from kung fu fighting anyone who's in
bed with you or you know, falling out, destroying lamps.
That's sort of thing. That's the basic idea, But there
are very various um conditions that can interfere with that,

(37:25):
and one of those is sleep rouses. And in this scenario,
you wake up, but your body is still on lockdown.
And on top of that, it's also not just a
who I'm awake now, my body won't move, which is
frightening enough, but you're also going to be in that
that another space between dream dreaming and being awake. You're
gonna be in that hypnopomic state where you're susceptible to

(37:48):
these hallucinations. I think a lot of us have probably
experienced this to some degree. You know where you're There
are two versions of this. One is descending into sleep
and one is a rising um. I've experienced the former,
where I'm like reading, if you're forcing yourself to read
a book and you you really should go to sleep,
you're trying to keep going, and then you start reading
things that aren't there though. That's one example of this

(38:12):
another space we're talking about. The other is if you've
ever woken up and been enough in the dream state
that you still sort of perceive the dreams in reality. Like,
the best example I have of this is I remember
being a kid and having a dream about having this
like robot toy that was just amazing and uh and

(38:34):
and then I woke up and at least for like
a split second, it was it was there in bed
with me, and then it wasn't. Now, there are a
few things as an adult that an individual, you know,
wants as much I think as a child wants a toy.
But so maybe that's one reason I've never experienced anything
like that since. But but you know, it's an example
where I was, I was somewhere in between dream and wakefulness. Yeah,

(38:58):
my wife actually used to get night terrors, and we
if we had anything hanging up in the bedroom that
had like an odd pattern on it, she would wake
up in the middle of the night and not realize
that she was still sort of in a dream state,
and she would think like spiders or something was moving
around on whatever it was, whether it's a poster or

(39:20):
a tapestry or whatever. Um So we've we've kind of
you know, gotten used to that now and try not
to hang up things like that that would invoke that state.
But yeah, whereas like I've never had an experience like
that other than uh in this uh satanic panic episode
and in the Exorcism episode. I've mentioned my experience when
I was younger and I had snowblindness and I thought

(39:41):
there was a demon in the room with me, but
but nothing, nothing like that, whether you know, I didn't
know if I was dreaming or awake. Now, sleep Paralysis,
we're gonna we're gonna break it down here, but I
got to recommend this movie The Nightmare if people really
want to spend like a good hour and a half
with the concert up to sleep Paralysis. I believe it's

(40:01):
on Netflix right now, Yeah, I think so. And it's
done by the same people who did that great documentary
on The Shining Room two thirty seven. Uh So, definitely
check that out. It taps into the alien abduction narrative
stuff too, But this one is more This is at
more of a legitimate documentary, right because the thing about
the Shining documentary is that it's a documentary about a
fake conspiracy, like it basically a conspiracy theory that was

(40:24):
made up and multi conspiracy theory that that just ended
up like having a sort of truthiness to it, like
you could see, like, oh I could I could see
Stanley Kubrick faking a moon landing because he was guilty
about blah blah blah blah. Yeah, exactly, whereas the nightmare
is more like they're actually interviewing people who have had
sleep paralysis experience. They re enact some of the experience
they do. Yeah, so you're you wake up in the

(40:47):
state of sleep paralysis. Okay, and uh, and things are
not waking reality onto and and things could be you
could be essentially be experiencing a sexual hallucination that's colored
by your subconscient just and the exact nature of that
hallucination could depend, like your dreams, on just the nature
of your relief system, your cultural literacy, what you watched

(41:09):
on television the night before. Um, you know, what you're
really into or what you're doing. I mean, just think
to your dreams, you know, and you can see the
the diversity that is in play. I can give you
a perfect example of this based on last night, right. Okay,
so the day we're recording this is the you know,
the television show at midnight. This is today's the last day.

(41:30):
It's it's canceled, and this is gonna be the last episode.
And I read about that right before I went to
bed last night, and then I had a dream that
I was stuck with Chris Hardwick in a dorm room
and that we were packing up his dorm room because
he had to move out of there, and it just
kept going and going and going, and it was it
was one of those dreams, like we talked about this

(41:51):
in our Lucid Dream episode, where you can't quite get
out of it, like even if you wake up, go
to the bathroom and come back and fall back asleep again,
Like it kept going, and I was convinced that I
was stuck. I had to help him pack up all
this stuff and there was just like an infinity of
things in his room that no matter how long we packed,
it would never finish. Well's This is interesting because the

(42:13):
the dorm room narrative, the dorm room situation, I'm just
gonna guess and say, this is probably not one that
you draw from a lot. This is probably not something
you're using in your in your in your fiction or
your comics. You're you're not reading like college dorm literature.
But but the brain just latches onto it and it's like,
all right, this is what we're going with well, yeah,
I mean I know exactly where this came from. My

(42:34):
wife and I are planning to move in the next
couple of months, so I've already, like, for instance, I've
started going through things and packing them up and putting
him in boxes and thinking about like what do I
need to get rid of to make moving out easier? Right,
And then I just read that small piece of information
and it somehow got lodged into the back of my
subconscious and then manifested as Chris Hardwick in my dream.

(42:55):
All right, well, I'll come back to this frend just
a second, but I believe you have a little more
to say about sleep routs. Yeah, I just want to
give our audience a little more information here. It's often
attributed as a catalyst event that leads to the formation
of false memories, and what we're talking about here is
the basics. It's a non pathological phenomenon that occurs because
of a temporary discordance in rapid eye movement sleep, and

(43:19):
it causes sensory input to be blocked and motor output
to be inhibited. So subsequently, a sufferer of this is
experiencing both internal dream stimuli and external sensory stimuli. Again,
you say like, I've never heard of this, This sounds ridiculous, right, Well, actually,
thirty percent of the population has had at least one

(43:40):
instance of this in their life. Five percent of the
population experience vivid, visual, auditory, and tactile hallucinations, and it
should be made clear too that these are without drugs
or alcohol. In relation to this, the Japanese actually have
a term for this. It's so common called kanishi bari
and it is represented as a devil stepping on a

(44:02):
sleeper's chest, while the Chinese call it gui yah or
ghost pressure. I want to see a movie called ghost pressure. Uh.
And then I got to come back to Susan Clancy.
As I mentioned, a lot of her research related to
alien abduction really kept popping up all over the place
for this episode. She's one of the main researchers on

(44:23):
sleep paralysis as an explanation for alien abductions, and she
categorizes it into three different groups based on qualities. The
first one is called intruder sleep paralysis, and this is
when you have hallucinations that include the sense of a
threatening presence in the room as well as strange noises, footsteps,
voices in the physical sensation of somebody touching you. Then

(44:46):
there's the incubus sleep paralysis, which leads back to you
mentioned we've we've talked about it before. This includes hallucinations
of breathing difficulty as well as a sensation of impending
death or bodily harm. So that's your ghost pressure are
essentially right, something's pushing down on you and then down
on you. And then the last one is vestibular motor

(45:09):
sleep paralysis, and this manifests as sensations of movements such
as falling or accelerating upward out of bed. I think
a lot of us have experienced that, right, or at
least in my case, it's the one where you're like
walking down uh stairs in a dream and then all
of a sudden the stairs give out from underneath you. Yeah,
or slipping. I've slipped and fallen in dream states and

(45:29):
woken up now. Now, the first two of these, intruder
and incubus are heavily implicated in alien abduction phenomena. But
in a twenty oh five study McNally, who's like a
partner of Clancys and Clancy, they interviewed ten abductees and
they describe their experiences of alien abduction. In terms of
sleep paralysis, it all lined up. All the elements reported

(45:52):
were consistent with these kind of hallucinations, but they were
only recovered by the individual following hypnotherapy. And of course,
in all this is just important to remember that when
you're talking about memory, you're talking about something that is notable.
Every time you recall a memory, it's susceptible to change.
That's super important to remember. So and then, and that

(46:13):
also means I think I've actually pointed this out. This
was on the there's a line on the television series
The Expanse where they've mentioned that the memories that are
the most important to you're the ones that you can
trust the least because you've drawn them out so much
and you've you've manipulated them. So you can imagine the
situation with a life changing uh event, like an alien
abduction scenario, like this is a memory that is even

(46:35):
more untrustworthy because you keep touching it, you keep it's
like a lump of clay. If you've taken it out,
reforming it and then putting it away exactly dries up
a little. If you're going to and you might be
letting other people touch it as well and influence it.
So you've got to take that into case. Now, one interesting, uh,

(46:56):
I think example of the two of the skeptical approach
to all of this is um the experience of Michael Schermer. Now,
if you're not familiar with Michael Schermer, you should seek
him out on social media. He has He's very active there. Uh.
He is always sharing his opinions on a number of
different scientific and and uh and of course you know,

(47:17):
criticizing pseudo scientific endeavors. He's the the editor of the
of Skeptic magazine. UH. So he's he's been active for
a number of years in the skeptic community. But he
himself experienced an alien abduction, or rather what happened is
he collapsed from sleep deprivation and exhaustion following an eighty

(47:37):
three hour bike ride uh in a transcontinental race, and
as Shermer's support team rushed over to him to tend
to him, uh, Shermer saw them through the filter of
awaking dream and he perceived them as aliens from a
nineteen sixties television series. Yeah, this is very much in
the line of that Jose's Chunk from Outer Space episode. Uh.

(47:59):
Their their interview young an abductee, and in multiple different
scenarios during the interviews she sees them. She either sees
them as aliens, or she sees them as men in black,
or she sees them as soldiers in the army. Right,
So there's different lenses that the perception is coming through. Yeah,
But in Sherman's case, I think one of the cool
things is like he's I've never seen him indicate like, yeah,

(48:20):
I was super into that ninety sixties TV show, Like
it's just it's It's as if the brain just casts
about for some one of these lenses something that will
make sense of what's happening, and suddenly there it is.
And then a lot of it falls to what you
do with it afterwards. Like Shermer approach it from a
skeptical point of view, had was in the position to
then say, oh, well, this is what was happening. Obviously

(48:41):
I wasn't in, you know, visited by aliens. He also,
of course had the experience of being able to talk
to the team who came in and uh and attended
to him like you know, he knew straight up this
was not an alien abduction, and he was able to
work from that point on in his life. But with
someone else might not have the same tools, the same
opportun tunities, and they're left to pursue a different route

(49:05):
in understanding what happened, right, Yeah, And that's the important part.
Two is that, like, we need to be able to
distinguish memories, and then what's the difference between false memories
or recovered memories? Because these terms get thrown around a lot, right,
And for him, it's very easy for him to say, oh,
that was a false memory because there were other people
there with me, right, and they helped to clarify. But

(49:27):
then the question is, can can a false memory and
a recovered memory be the same thing? And it seems
like the answer should be no. Specifically, researchers are interested
in whether recovered memories are authentic, right, and if they're not,
is that because the people who are relating them are lying,
or is it because this is a manifestation of an

(49:48):
involuntary mechanism that we don't have any control over. You know,
the latter seems to be more probable based on evidence.
So the discussion tends to focus on the idea of
what we're calling false memories here. Yeah, false memories is
a fascinating area unto itself and one I think one
of the important things to remember about false memories versus

(50:10):
authentic memories is to first of all, get into the
area we realize memories are not a video recording and
and ar again, every time we draw them out, we
manipulate them a little bit. So memory this is why
you have such a problem with eyewitness testimony and in
in so many criminal trials. So when you when you
say and also you have to break down their different

(50:31):
there we remember things in different ways. Memory work is
more complex than just this sort of videotape kind of
metaphor that we often draw upon. There's an excellent book
on this topic titled The Seven Sins of Memory, How
the Mind Forgets and Remembers by Daniel Shackter, highly recommended.
But he breaks it down into a few different categories,
you know, those seven sins. There's transience, which is the

(50:54):
weakening or loss of memory over time. So you know
this is just the idea of someone's older and they
have their memory's have faded. There's absent mindedness. So this
just see us down to attention in memory. You weren't
actually that attentive to a series of events, and then
afterwards your brain is kind of filling in the the details.
Like one of the examples of this is September eleven,
people who remember what they had for for breakfast and

(51:16):
what they were wearing, etcetera. And actual investigations of this
have turned out that that's often not the case. You
don't actually remember all that stuff, but your brain is
kind of working in a way where it's like, hey,
you just focus on surviving and we'll just make up
all the details for what you ate for lunch. Um,
there's blocking, So these are failed attempts to recall tidbits
of memory of face and name. There's misattribution. This is

(51:40):
when we recall an authentic memory, but aspects of it
are misattributed. And this could include a potential scenario, say
where one is dealing with a an actual traumatic experience,
maybe an actual case of abuse or even sexual abuse,
but then you end up your recalling it wrapped up
in some sort of fantastic form or there is I

(52:01):
believe there's one account that the chapter himself referred to
where an individual was an assaulted in a room and
there was somebody on the television screen and she identified
her attacker as the individual on the television screen. Uh,
just because that's how the brain stitched it together, That's
how the memory is formed. There's of course suggestibility power

(52:21):
suggestion that of course is a huge factor in our
satanic panic episode, where if you have someone who is
going to make heavy suggestions that some sort of scenario
took place, then that can influence your memory of what happened.
And then there's bias as well, just the power of
bias or racial bias coming into play, and then persistence.

(52:43):
So this is a the failure of the memory system
involves the unwanted recall of information that is disturbing. So
this just I think I just present all this to
to to to drive home that memory is this, uh,
is this complex system with multiple moving parts, and all
of those parts can contribute to the creation of false memories.

(53:05):
And then there's this whole additional area of of of
describing what's happening in the brain when one is having
a paranormal experience. UH. Neuroscientist Michael Persenger points the finger
to the brains temporal lobe. Here seizures can produce feelings
of deja vu. Persenger believes that the temporal lobe anomalies
when combined with certain cultural experiences such as belief in

(53:27):
angels or aliens, can mislabel imagined experiences as actual events.
So uh so, yeah, we're getting also getting into not
only like sort of the misfiring of memory systems, with
the misfiring of other parts of the brains as well,
but even while without the aid of neurological misfiring. Again,
human memory is complex, it's fallible. Every day we encounter

(53:48):
new experiences and then craft that experience into an imperfect narrative.
We convince ourselves that we can, you know, ultimately convince
ourselves nearly anything, especially when it fulfills a need, such
as explaining what happened. Yeah, and even with explanations like
our realizations that memory is imperfect or the thought that oh,

(54:10):
something's going on here in the actual organ of the brain,
some people just assume, well, anybody with an alien abduction story,
they must be crazy, right, that's got to be what's
going on. In fact, that the the gag in Jose
Chung's is that every single person they talked to about
it starts off by saying, well, this is gonna sound crazy,
but dot dot dot Now, the study by Clancy and

(54:34):
McNally that I mentioned earlier, it actually showed that the
mental health of abductees doesn't differ dramatically from the general population.
They tested ten abductees. Four of them didn't qualify for
a single diagnosis in the d s M four. The
others had phobias that are pretty common. They were scared
of insects, They had anxiety disorders, alcoholism, bipolar disorder, maybe

(55:00):
one of them had PTSD, and then panic disorder. Okay,
but these are, you know, fairly common things. I think
if you'd sample like a room full of your coworkers,
those would be common. But none of them qualified for schizophrenia.
In fact, their mean depression and anxiety scores were well
with the normal limits, and the only place where they

(55:20):
differed from the general population was primarily in three areas
that they scored higher in. And these are really interesting.
First is dissociative experiences, so they measured this with a scale.
They This basically looks at the mind's ability to tap
into alterations of consciousness, so for instance, h zoning out
when you're driving, or not being able to recognize your

(55:43):
own reflection when you're looking in a in a mirror. Yeah.
The second one of these was the absorption scale, and
that looked at an individual's proneness to being absorbed in
imagery experiences. Imaginary experiences for instance, reading a novel or
watching a movie right like the the the level that
you let yourself be enthralled by the narrative. And then

(56:05):
the magical ideation scale that assesses the individual's beliefs in
paranormal phenomena such as ghosts, aliens, psychic powers, in the
existence of magic. Now I read about these three scales
and my first thought was, you, Joe and I need
to take these tests. We need to get them to
send those tests here and then we should take them.
That seems like it would be a great Facebook live event. Likewise,

(56:27):
researchers Hugh and Rogers did another study in two thousand
and eight and they compared twenty six alien abductees with
twenty six non abductees, and they use scales to measure
their fantasy prone nous and their emotional intelligence, and they
found there was no significant difference between the abductees and
the non abductees in their self reporting. Now, again, this

(56:49):
led to the conclusion that abductees and the general population
really aren't all that different. Psychologically, the differences seem to
be more on like kind of an individual level than
a cheological level. The abductees tend to be more interested
in UFOs or aliens before they actually have this experience. Likewise,
they tend to seek a therapist who is also interested

(57:11):
in that subject matter. And there does seem to be
a relationship between abductees and dissociation, absorption, and magical ideation.
You know that this lines up a lot with what
with actually what Carl Young said, because he was actually
asked about UFOs and whatnot an interview, and he said, quote,

(57:32):
in our world, miracles do not happen anymore, and we
feel that something simply must happen which will provide an
answer or show the way out. So now these UFOs
are appearing in the sky. And in the late nineteen nineties,
psychologists Roy F. Bombastmeister and Leonard S. Newman they further
this viewpoint by arguing that abduction encounters are essentially subconscious

(57:54):
attempts to rid one's self of self awareness through massochistic fantasy,
and in lieu of mystic conviction, our minds staff these
fantasies with little gray men. Now, of course, our cultural
frame of reference continually changes. Some observers have have even
equated the recent declining UFO sidings with the rise of

(58:16):
the Internet. Uh. You know. For instance, a cultural critic
ZOD and sod are suggested, instead of projecting our hopes
and peers into space, we're projecting them into cyberspace. I
have to say, this makes me wonder. So if you
go with this argument that people are experiencing alien abductions
less and they're reporting them less, which again is arguable,
why are we not seeing more people explaining or or

(58:40):
draping their paranormal experiences in within the idea that we're
potentially living within a computer simulation. That that theory, Like,
maybe that theory just hasn't it hasn't exploded in in
the mainstream. Yeah, like I can. I could easily imagine
a scenario where that becomes the new near heard if
if it picks up anough steam, someone's like, hey, I

(59:03):
had this experience, Uh, and I clicked out of our
reality and I was in the real reality for a
little bit. Yeah, essentially the matrix scenerio so related. I
have a couple of notes here about that Newman and
Boo Meister study. Uh, they basically created a model for
explaining this, and they called it cognitive motivational hypothesis, and

(59:25):
this maintained that people who claim alien abduction experiences are
looking for a narrative that will provide us an escape
from ourselves, and that it represents a massochistic wish to
experience pain, powerlessness, and humiliation on a grand cosmic level.
Baumeister himself actually said, the abductees are masochists who unconsciously

(59:48):
want to relinquish control of their lives. And I immediately
thought that this is like, uh, cosmic horror as some
kind of existentialism, right, Like it's like I want there
to be something so big and beyond my understanding that
that can make my existence makes sense. Well, you know,

(01:00:08):
we'll probably we're gonna do a part two for this episode,
and we'll probably we're gonna get into more of the
cultural stuff there. But you know, one one thing that
we're going to discuss, and that is some of the demographics,
like the idea that that for the long despite the
original demographics of the sort of the the case zero
of alien abduction, you saw mostly white American kind of
middle class males experiencing these things, and there's this this

(01:00:32):
idea like these these might have been some of the
key individuals who were we're pining for this release that
they're kind of in this situation where like, here you go,
it's the it's the nineteen eighties, it's the American dream.
Go nothing stopping you just go out there, work hard
and build your life. And so there's this there's this
kind of this uh, this this pressure then on that

(01:00:52):
individual to to you know, to fulfill this American dream.
And then here's this, there's this out you know, this
is idea that like I can't achieve it because this
happened to me. It's kind of like if like the
fifth or sixth season of Madmen was Don Draper got
abducted by aliens, that would have been a great sequence
or maybe I would have gotten for that. Maybe they'll

(01:01:13):
do an extra episode where that that takes place. Um,
it is important, though, Like you're right, there's this argument
going around that UFO sightings have gone away, right, and
that there's another argument that says, no, they haven't gone away,
but that online forums have simply allowed people just an
accessible inside group where they can share their stories yeah.
I mean, imagine if you had an experience like this,

(01:01:35):
or you felt you had an experience like this, where
would you go to? Now? Whereas someone ten and twenty
years ago might have run to the nightly news or
caught up the newspaper sting. Now a our media is changing.
You tweet it, or you go to Reddit and you
look up the alien abduction board. I visited that board
just just yesterday out of research for this episode, and

(01:01:58):
there people talking about alien abduction, uh and and talking
about their experiences. Those are the places you're gonna go to.
And then when you go to these places, these online
communities to discuss it, you're kind of gonna gonna be
in the same sort of echo chambers that everyone is
in these days. Uh, you know, cut away in their
own little social or socio political realm, their own cultural realm,

(01:02:20):
and then you know, talking occasionally talking about all the
crazy stuff that other individuals are doing outside of your bubble. Alright,
So really in all this we come back again too,
the sock puppet. You know, we we've we've talked in
broad strokes about all the various um psychological, neuroscientific events
that could be occurring. And then you know how we're

(01:02:40):
manipulating memory. But but then how we end up having
to stitch that sock puppet together, that that explanation, that
sort of flavoring, that narrative that describes and fills in
the details of this paranormal experience. Where do we get
that from? And what does it say about the twentieth century.
We're gonna get into that the next episode. So this

(01:03:01):
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(01:03:22):
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(01:04:05):
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(01:04:26):
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