December 7, 2010 • 35 mins
Why are so many people convinced that they were abducted by aliens? In this episode, Julie and Robert explore the history of alleged abductions, along with the scientific explanations for the experiences of the witnesses. Tune in to learn more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
tell me, Julie. Um, this is kind of a personal question.
I hope you don't mind me asking, But have you
ever been abducted by aliens and probed in a UFO somewhere? Oh?
(00:27):
My goodness, that is personal. Um, No, I haven't. I
gotta be quite honest here. I would love to make
something up, but I have not. That's the weird thing.
Is like like when someone asked me that question, and
not that they ask every day, you know, just on
public transportation. But but but you do have to think
about it because you're like, I don't know, let me
(00:48):
let me think, because I think we all have I'm
generalizing tremendously here, but I think a lot of us
have little like half waking events in our lives, um,
you know, bits of dream etcetera. That they are kind
of suspect and means you can't explain, Yeah, things you
can't yeah, completely explain, and that if you really wanted to,
(01:12):
you could make a case that they're a part of
some phenomenon beyond you know, our understanding. No, yeah, I
think I've mentioned to you before that my grandmother that
you know, she's got some some more in the family
about how she and my grandfather saw a little green men.
But when you start to pick that apart a little
bit and ask her more questions, or when I had
(01:32):
asked her those questions, she couldn't really answer them, like
she didn't really want to talk about it. And then
I said, well, what about you know, Grandpa and what
was his deal, what was his take? And she said, well,
he didn't want to talk about it, which you know,
you could take that as like just and saying there
were no green aliens. But I'm not going to get
into this discussion, right. That's a I had a some
(01:54):
more thing in my family, had a couple of ants,
or my mom had two ants, and they live in
this house together, and one night they apparently saw a
triangle shaped UFO in the backyard. But they but it
was again one of these things where they never talked
about it. You we just hear, like, you know, you know, secondhand,
it's like, oh, well they saw UFO once, but they
don't like to talk about it, right. It was the
night that we shall not speak up right. Yeah. So,
(02:16):
and it seems like you see looking at some of
the studies that we examined researching this podcast, you do
you see that a lot with people. There's like a
lot of the people who have who at least claimed
to have experienced an abduction experience. And should note that,
according to uh, some of the numbers we're looking at, UM,
more people are are prone to say, yes I saw
(02:36):
a UFO than yes I was abducted by extraterrestrials. But
but among those that have UM, they tend not to
want to make a big deal out of it. Have
been abducted that that claimed to have been abducted? Yeah,
they're they're they're not necessarily out there, you know, on
the news, um, you know, pushing for interviews or publishing
(02:57):
their books. Yeah. Yeah, I mean if you look at
the stats on it, they're actually they're pretty like uh,
like Middle America if you're looking at the US, and
the majority of them don't have UM, any sort of
mental problems that would indicate that whatever they think they
saw was a figment of their imagination. So I guess
when you look at that and you say, well, what
(03:18):
you know, What's what's going on here? Why do so
many Americans think that they've been ferried from their bed
at night? Um and had all these experiences? Why? Why
do why do you just regular ordinary jo's have these experiences?
Now you said, did you just say feried isn't? Did you?
Did I hear that right? Or yeah? I did, says
(03:38):
start thinking about hades. Okay, Well I think that's that's
key though, because um, today it's aliens, yes, but in
previous times and in other parts of the world, it
kind of depends on the world view. You have lots
of unexplainable phenomenon or phenomenon that at least defy explanation
from certain view points, and throughout human history we've attributed
(04:01):
them to different things. We've attributed them to you know,
the the you know, the gods interfering when in human lives,
or you know, it's angels or its fairies, or it's
which is uh, you know the list is succuby, occupy
and yeah, we'll get into that in a minute. Um,
particularly with a dream thing. But your dream no, well,
(04:24):
no you or your dream? Oh yeah, this has sounded
very inceptionate. But I've been out more on that later.
But but yeah, like one of the accounts that I relate, um,
I like to to look at and uh and this
is more directly related to UFOs, was in seventeen in Fatima, Portugal,
a number of people claim to see these lights in
(04:46):
the sky right right. It was like a huge, a
huge event, and a lot of that was attributed you know,
like mass hysteria on one level. But but but the
interesting thing is that everybody like experienced it as as
this holy event. It was like the Virgin Mary descending
into the area and that right, like on a on
(05:07):
a cloud of light or something, right, yeah, descending into
this important to mention, highly Catholic area and uh and
and you know, and these people were not very scientifically
literate for the most part. Uh. You know, it's nineteen
seventeen and like you know, rural Portugal. So um, so
they ended up experiencing this in the form of a
(05:28):
religious event. Now, if that happened today in uh, you know, Huntsville, Alabama,
I'm thinking it would be a different experience entirely. Well
and I was actually thinking about I don't know if
you recall this, but a couple of years back there
was a woman in Georgia who claimed to see the
Virgin Mary in her old refrigerator, like the image burned
(05:49):
in or something. And I mean hundreds of people made
the pilgrimage and said, yes, indeed, I can see the
Virgin Mary and your refrigerator and not in literally but
on the outside of the refrigerator. And uh. And it
makes me think of like the just the pattern recognition
that your brain can't help but see because as humans
(06:09):
were just hardwired to sit there and say, oh, okay,
that that I do see that, I do see the
Virgin Mary. Yeah. I mean it comes down to like
if you draw, you know, a line and add two dots,
we see a human face. So it's it's not too
much more of a stretch to to see the human
form in anything. And then also, if I'm gonna travel
a hundred miles on the chance that I'm going to
see the Virgin Mary and a refrigerator, I'm going to
see the Virgin Mary and a refrigerator. Yeah, right right,
(06:32):
And yeah, and there's that excitement, there's that group think. Yeah,
so that or mass hysteria, as you had said in
a case of fatima. But let's let's look at some
of the stats. Um that within the numbers we have
out there regarding alien abduction. Um, tell me about that.
What is it the is it the roper Yeah, there's
(06:52):
a roper pole which basically says that something like four
million Americans have had a certain uh indicator or of
experience that maybe an alien abduction. Right, And this is
this is a highly suspect um study according to some people. Yeah. Actually, Um,
(07:13):
the study they dentually did a couple of different studies.
They did one report specifically in which they pulled four
thousand people and they asked them five questions. And when
people answered those questions, that's something like the predominantly four
out of five people answered yes to those questions. Right now,
the first question is where you abducted by aliens? Right? No,
that's the problem with it. There's no like, hey do
(07:35):
you do you believe in aliens? Have you ever been abducted?
The questions who are along the lines of have you
ever woken up paralyzed with a sense of a strange
person or presence or something else in the room? Okay,
well I've had that for sure. Yeah, yeah, I have
to Yeah, I've had you have experienced sleep paralysis, which
is what that sounds like. Uh. But the problem is
is that they took the study and they mailed at
(07:57):
something like one hundred thousand mental health professionals, and the
foreword was written by a man named John Mack, who
was a Harvard psychiatrist. So what happened is you've got
this sense of credibility creeping up in this study, and
all of a sudden you're talking to psychiatrists about what
(08:18):
sounds like it could be a real phenomenon. Yeah. And
and while we were talking earlier, I can I can
easily imagine if this were to hit the internet today,
you know, all the variations of it that would would
trickle down through all the blogs and Facebook's profiles would
be like would just be stuff like all MG, Harvard
dude says, alien abductions happened to everyone, right, Yeah, So
(08:40):
I mean that's that that was one thing that happened
that certainly could explain some of the uptipic we've seen
and the last couple of decades of people claiming to
have had alien abduction experiences, um, when in fact it
looks to us like it's more of a shared cultural script.
And if you think about it the incubus, the succubus
(09:02):
um and incubus and succubus uh. For those of you
who aren't included into the dungeons and dragons as much
as we are. Um, this is uh in folk tales
and stuff, and it can can be very light. But yeah,
the the the succubus correct wrong is the female demon
and the incubus or incubi plural is the male demon.
(09:23):
And these are demons of lust that come to you
in the night. Right. So if you're a nun or
let's say a virgin in the mediaval ages, and you
wake up in the middle of the night and maybe
during sleep paralysis, you may imagine yourself to be pinned
down by a succubus or an incubus. So these are
(09:44):
the sort of cultural MEM's ideas that have evolved into
what I think now is is the the alien succubus
if you will, incubus. Yeah, yeah, a number of experts. Yeah,
the Boogeyman or the was one. I have to look
at my sleep paralysis section of the notes. Yeah, this
(10:04):
one came up, and I believe this was in the
and the Susan Blackmore article. She mentioned the Old Hag
of Newfoundland that presses on people's chest. And I find
that particularly amazing because I lived in Newfoundland for a
few years as a child, but was never but it
was never visited by a strange hag that that like
stepped in my chest. But when I lived in Tennessee,
(10:29):
I was pretty sure at once. And this was like rural,
middle of nowhere Tennessee, during the height of my um
paranoia about alien abductions, thanks a lot unsolved mysteries, Um,
I was yeah, and well luckily I was no. I
think later I was watching a Fause two, which did
not help at all, but the that the unsolved mysteries
(10:49):
especially had me terrified. And and I do remember waking
up kind of like you know again, feeling kind of
paralyzed and feeling like there was something setting on the
edge of my bed, and uh, you know, so so
clearly according to the Roper study, it was it was
an alien abduction. Yeah. And now you need to go
to a support group. Yeah, And I need to go
to see a therapist to find out what the rest
(11:10):
of it is. Right, One of those therapists on that
list that received one of the copies of that report
would be great too. Because I could really substantiate your experience. Now,
now real quick, back at the Roper poll one last time.
This is again controversial early nineties, but according to the
I think these are like two of the people polled
claimed to have been abducted, abducted by aliens. So the
(11:30):
extra extrapolating that you get to the premise that four
million Americans may have been abducted by aliens, which is
a lot and and and and got and garnered some
international attention, right, I mean people were wondering what's going
on in America? Right, yeah, yeah, I mean if you
actually get back to Susan Blackmore, she was actually put
(11:51):
on assignment by BBC because BBC said, what what's going on? Why?
Why are so many people in America claiming to be abducted?
So she actually, um, I started looking into it. And
first she started to look at the brain and how
the brain can trick us. And one of the things
we've already mentioned is sleep paralysis. Sometimes we become mentally
(12:14):
alert and we can't move um when we've just woken up,
and that feels really unsettling, and that can actually uh
make our body brain d synchronize. And then when that happens.
We can have hallucinations. So if you think about that too,
look at the logic behind that. You're in bed, you're paralyzed,
(12:37):
your brain is fritzing, and all of a sudden you
think you see something at the end of the bed
sounds does a start to sound like the cultural script
that we've been hearing about with aliens. I was in
my bed, I couldn't move and something was there. Something
was there. It spirited me off. By the way, this
is another time the during sleep paralysis is desynchronization when
(12:58):
you might feel like your floating or you're having out
of body experience. And this also seems to um I think,
like a lot of aspects of the abduction experience. It
really keep keys into a central fear in just our
animal nature, the fear of something happening to us while
we're asleep and vulnerable. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Yeah. We've talked
(13:20):
about this before with animals and how they sleep and
unit hemispheric sleep, so they shut they can shut off
one part of their brain and just kind of keep
one eye on the action. So we've evolved to the
point where we don't necessarily need to worry about predators, right,
So you're right, there could be a little bit of
an evolutionary hangover there. Yeah, to call back to another podcast,
but you know it's something that you know, our our
bodies are saying, Hey, you may not be eating in
(13:42):
your sleep now, but it might happen later. So we're
just gonna keep that that level of neural fear alive
for a while. Um. And and like of people tend
to experience sleep paralysis, so it's uh, it's it's a
fairly common thing. Yeah. And actually Blackmore didn't stuff there.
(14:04):
She went and visited a neuroscientist named Michael Persinger, and
he is someone who believes that out of body experience
and alien abductions are linked to excessive bursts of electoral
electrical activity in the temporal lobe. And this is the
God helmet guy, right, Yeah, he created the God helmet.
That's what it's called. I think he actually calls it
the octopus or something like that. Um, it's actually a
(14:26):
helmet with solenoids that deliver pulses of magnetic field that
stimulates the temporal lobe and induces the what he thinks
are the types of hallucinations that people experience. Stuff tied
to near death experience stuff tied to encounters with the
supernatural experiences with ghosts, and again ghost is another thing,
another version well ghosts or another way that we sometimes,
(14:50):
I think interpret these strange encounters. Yeah, another cultural script
that we explain, try to explain the things that happened
in our brain. But she went and she visited him
and UM, which she learned is that people vary in
temporal lobe mobility. So some people have a high mobility
and some people have a low mobility. The high ability
(15:10):
people have unstable temporal lobes and they exhibit frequent bursts
of energy. So if you're on the low end, then
you're not obviously having that much activity with UM with
those sort of bursts of energy. But the people with
the high ability that those people have been thought to
be more creative in the sense that they tend to
have reported experiences of deja vu to mystical and psychic experiences.
(15:34):
So the thought that is the thought that there is
that they're a little bit more predisposed to have some
sort of imagination in that area that might be tripped
off by this UM electromagnetic field. And another really interesting
thing that Blackmore found out about person goer is that
he reports that strange experiences tend to peek in the
(15:56):
weeks and the months before earthquakes when magnetic changes may occur.
So his ideas that that these magnetic changes are influencing
the temporal lobe and UH and and if you're more
susceptible to those kind of changes, then who knows what
you'll see right right? And on top of that, you
may have UM, you may have post traumatic stress syndrome
(16:17):
and some sort of delayed UM reaction to that. UM,
you may have other sorts of traumatic experiences that could
arise in that sort of environment. And black Moire herself
actually underwent the experiment, and she indeed felt some sort
of presence uh during this time. And in fact, she
was this was really interesting. She wasn't so much freaked
(16:39):
out by the UM, by the fact that she had
just put on this helmet with you know, but and
had this experience, but the fact that Persinger was actually
messing around the solenoids, and her thought was, well, okay,
you know, so what if I have this hallucination, what
about this guy messing around with my magnetic field? I mean,
how can we look at that? You know that use
(17:02):
that could someone be an evil genius and and start
missing with us purposely in some way. So that was
for experience of that, which is pretty cool. This presentation
is brought to you by Intel sponsors of Tomorrow. Now.
(17:23):
It's interesting you mentioned that that the creative, more creative
people are more prone to some of these temporal lobe anomalies. Yeah,
and uh and and this this centers on something that
I've I've thought a lot about, like the idea that like,
creative people are more more prone to be crazy sometimes
or at least and sort of self destructively crazy, and
a lot of that I feel And I'm kind of
(17:45):
I'm kind of building my own thing here out of
you know, some some New Age stuff I've I've gotten
here and some research stuff I've gotten here. But but
we're less creative people. Both of us are both we're
both writers, and uh and I feel like as as writers,
you're you're more prone to create things that are story shaped.
You want to craft things into a story. And human memory,
(18:06):
as it turns out, is a lot about crafting a story.
And uh. And this actually falls back on something that
Susan Blackbourne mentioned, and that's that we use stored information
to reconstruct plausible accounts of past events. That that our
memory is based on taking all this sense data and
building a little story and then filing that story away.
(18:27):
And um. And we're humans. So a lot of the
stories we create, I mean, we're at the center of
all these stories because we're selfish little creatures. And uh.
And a lot of these stories are you know, they're
we can create awesome, amazing stories with these brains of ours,
but we often create little pathetic stories and little sad
stories and little you know, poor me stories and uh.
And so I've wondered at time if at times, if
(18:49):
if creative people are simply just we're faster at it,
Like you give us some like mildly depressing stimuli and
plan we can turn that into a story with us
at the center of it drop of the hat, where
someone less creative it would maybe it would take a
little more effort and a little more determination to make
a sad story or a like ego inflating story out
(19:11):
of said stimuli. HM. That's interesting. So it's sort of
like left handed people have a with the theory is
that they've got a quicker uptake with information processing. So
we'd have a quicker story making machine up there with
our our little monkeys are cranky amount a lot faster. Yeah, huh,
I've got to think. Well, I think too. With writing,
there's the compulsion to write, right, And if you think
(19:34):
about Freud and Um was the compulsion repulsion theory that
you continue to work thrings through your mind so that
you can master them. So I don't know. Maybe maybe
it's just because we're inherently um freaks perhaps, But but
back to alien abduction, this ties back into that because
we talked about all right, So let's say I think
(19:56):
an alien might have said on my bed and I
was a child, all right, and and I and I'm
meeting one of the criteria for possibly having been abducted
by an alien according to the Roper Report. So I
go to a therapist to try and unlock these uh,
these memories that are hidden from me, right, okay, right,
and I'm already you know that memory is not something
(20:16):
that's locked down or that's completely true. Right again, it's
just you know, all this stimuli turn turning it into
little stories. So as as it turns out, it is
possible to create false memories. Now this this can't this
is not something that can account for all the abduction
stories out there. So it's you know, this is just
one one more item in the how it works. Is
(20:37):
this because you might, as a creative think already have
a script in your mind or is it also because
you're being led by the for the therapists. I think both.
I think that's that's one thing we mentioned, like if
you're going to a therapist, you know, to to unlock
these these secrets uh off your past. For one hand,
you could go to a therapist that is going to
be more inclined to help you create that that version
(21:00):
of events. So it's sort of like the person who
who claims to have esp and starts to sort of
hint around and say so your cousin starts with a
j that, so they're sort of leading leading the witnesses.
And under hypnosis you can you can implant ideas, and
you can you can sort of steer the creation of
so called false memories. So that's sort of that meant,
(21:23):
that's another layer there that that helps us to explain
why people are having these memories of these thoughts. Right,
He's like, the key is that false memories can be
created through through hypnosis or even through just I mean,
if you've ever dealt with anybody who like is, you know,
has a lot of denial going on, you can see
that we can create visions of versions of reality, you know,
(21:46):
well whatever will actually fit our needs. And they've actually
done this in studies before they've recreated they've implanted false
memories under hypnosis, and they've actually had I remember I
can't remember what the premise was, but um, what they
did is they worked with the discipant and then they
had the family later on corroborate the events and so
the person so when they brought that up they said
(22:06):
do you remember that time that dada happened? The person
would say why yes I do, and would have like
this full story of what had happened. And it was
hard for the people who are conducting the studies. After
they debriefed them, after the study was done, they actually
said this didn't happen, and they said, no, no, it
actually did happen. They had to convince them like, no,
we we implanted this. It's like the old adage if
you tell a lie what three times five times, then
(22:28):
you come to believe that lie. And and also for
you know, anytime you hear a story about an actor,
like a method actor being a little crazy because they
become they believe their character or you know, or you know,
I hear stories all the time of like pro wrestlers
who confuse their real self with their um there there
fake um you know on you know, And that's because
(22:53):
a false memory is conducted is like a little story
built out of these little pieces. But a real memory
is also a little story built out of these little pieces.
So the difference between a false memory and a true
memory is not that that huge. Okay, So that makes
sense if you look at a fantasy and reality, we're
pretty good at distinguishing between the two. But when you
start to look in the more gray areas of memory
(23:16):
and reality and these things that are happening in your
brain while you're sleep and the fact that you've you
may be more predisposed to creating these sort of stories,
then you can really start to see how these things
came together, especially when you look at the cultural factor
of us telling these stories over and over again to
explain the unexplainable. So the thing that I want to know, though,
(23:40):
is why why are abductee is always probed or molested
or raped, or getting something implanted in their nose or
I mean, what's what's up with that? Well, on one level,
I think it. You know, I was talking about earlier
about how the fear of being attacked or eaten in
your sleep is pretty basic. Um. I also you know,
also I think the fear of sexual attack is pretty basic.
(24:05):
And the fear of something being taken from or put
into your body. Yeah, I mean, because that's that's basically
we've had to deal with parasites for for ages. That's
you know, it's part of our evolutionary history. And a
lot of these boiled down to, oh, you know, I
have this abduction then, and oh I have strange scars
that I can't explain. That's actually one of the the
(24:26):
questions on the Roper questionnaire was do you have any
strange scars you can't quite explain? And of course we
all have a lot of us have scars that are
that we can't necessarily place. But but the idea is
that some people began to think that something was taken
from them. Um you see, um, like some like women
who have occasionally lost pregnancies, You see, this get incorporated
(24:48):
into an abduction. So the traumatic experience of that is
explained to it, right, so that the child was taken
from them by the by the alien or or countless
people that that again insist that um, some sort of
tracking device was placed in their body by by aliens. Yeah,
and Susan black Mare also points out that when you
do have sleep paralysis, it's quite possible that at that
(25:13):
moment you could be experienced some sort of sexual arousal,
which usually happens during the dream stay, which is when
sleep paralysis happens. So it's not too far fetched to
think that you might be having some sort of um
sex thing dream and then you say, oh, okay, that
aliens are now part of this and yeah, because yeah,
because a number of us have I'm sure had these
(25:36):
types of dreams and they tend to there's a sexual
aspect and then just a completely looney dream aspect going on.
So it becomes this like the incubi or the succuba,
some sort of bizarre and maybe terrifying event that at
the same time has some sort of sexual charge to it,
and uh, you know, and and it's left to the
brain to a simple story out of that. Yeah. The
(25:57):
best example I've seen about this came out in the
news not too long ago, and uh, there's a farmer
in China and he claimed to have been visited by
a female humanoid, which he thought was an alien, who
was three meters tall, had twelve fingers in braided leg hair,
and all she wanted to do with make love to him,
(26:19):
and uh they ended up levitating in in coitus for
about forty minutes, he claims. And I thought, wow, that
is really specific. I was like, okay, you know, and
then levitating again to go back to Um. The hallucinations
is something that you might feel like an out of
body experience. Um. Uh so sex, aliens, um, levitation. Um,
(26:43):
it's probably not happening unless you're dating David Blaine. Well. Well, also,
you know other sleep things that going uh there. We
also have false awakenings, which if you've ever seen our
movie with a dream sequence in it, you know this.
Uh how this works. The person wakes up, they think
they're awake, Oh, it's still in the nightmare, and then
you wake up for real. Um. And and so this
(27:07):
this is something that that is also really important. You know,
when we talk about the mind and its ability to
create a reality, a false reality is that just think
of your dreams, any dream you've ever had that at
the time seems real. That's your neural equipment up there
creating a false reality for you. Now that false reality
may fade away rather quickly when you enter the waking world,
(27:30):
but it's proof positive that that it can play all
sorts of tricks on you, right, and that you have that.
That's what's so fascinating to me is you've got this
analog of your reality, and if you look at just
a little bit closer, it might be a little bit
off right. The lighting is not quite right, there's something,
there's something in the dream that you think, Okay, there's
I'm working through my usual stuff. I'm getting up, I'm
(27:51):
brushing my teeth. But wait, I'm not. I'm not actually awake,
which is such a disconcerting moment. It really makes you
doubt yourself in your mind, I think, which is the
really interesting part about this, about how we could go
so wrong in our minds and and misremember things, and
and back to the the the talk of the sexual
(28:14):
aspects of the encounters. You do see an alarming number
of of probings uh showing up in these accounts. And
we mentioned the American study, but there have also been
Canadian studies that show a tremendous amount of of alien
abduction encounters going on. There's a two thousand and one
University of Ottawa School of Psychology study and they found
(28:35):
that forty percent of those poll believed in UFOs and
thirty three believe in abductions. And then this is this
was really interesting. Two I believe that they had been
abducted before, which is the same percentage that the roper
report um. And this was all and this was like
people profiled in uh the area of Ontario. They're all students,
(28:57):
all around twenty eight years of age. So may but
then again, maybe aliens are just really into probing Canadians
in in the that are in their you know, late twenties. Ye,
pro bono proctologists from space. You never know. So what
what are the problems and what's what's the basic problem
(29:18):
with with the alien abduction in terms of logistics, Well,
there there's some some pretty obvious ones, being that, you know,
why isn't our aliens wasting so much time probing Americans
and or Canadians now China and now China and then
and why switched to China. Are they like, all right,
the rectal probing is complete for the North American continent.
(29:40):
Let's move on to China. Let's see what's going on
over here. So so there's just some common sense things
about that. Also, travel through space is is a huge one.
This is more of a like an alien visitation on
Earth kind of argument in general. If that's that the
universe is just vast huge distances and uh, and based
(30:02):
on what we know about about relativity, traveling these huge distances,
uh either requires uh, you know it would we just
require a lot of time and just an enormous uh
level of patients and uh. And then these you know,
the different like UFO and encounters that have taken place.
People have seen these things and recorded them moving in
ways that that no like living thing that we understood
(30:25):
stand could possibly survive the g forces in Okay, So
Terence McKenna, who um was a self described psychoanot um
and someone who was he was a shame and he
was all sorts of things. And in fact, I'm not
doing him um much justice and describing him that way,
but just for sake of brevity, know that this is
(30:46):
someone who was really interested in space and in particular
in aliens and other dimensions. And he would probably take
issue with that because he seemed to think that d
m T, which is a drug, was a bit of
a warm hole to get around all of that. In
other words, that would connect you directly to some sort
of hyper space to mension where you could talk to aliens.
(31:09):
And he was pretty adamant about this. Yeah. I guess
the big thing here though, is that you can't prove
any of that with science, and when it comes to
UFOs and alien abductions, Uh, we're still waiting on the
evidence to show up for someone to you know, put
it on the table. Here's the UFO, here's the Yeah, Hey,
I had a probe and planned to me by an alien.
(31:29):
Here's the scar. Can you get that out? And it's like, oh,
I try it. There it is, let's take it out
and scan. It hasn't happened, right, right, And so that
also comes down tonal hypothesis. Right. So even though Terence
mckennam might have had this experience and feels like if
if we all took d m T we could be
talking to aliens right now, the burden of proof is
on the individual, right, Yeah, you can't walk into you know,
(31:49):
walk up to a scientist and be like, all right,
aliens are visiting the planet. Proved me wrong, man, You
can't do that because it's not on them, it's on
it's the burden of proof is on the person making
the the the claim that there are aliens visiting, that
they're aliens probing us and abducting us. Yeah, and it
should probably be said to the for people who have
said that they've been implanted with something, there have been
(32:10):
many people who have said, well, let's get a third
party in here, and let's get some m R I
imaging and look at that implant. And nobody so far
has succumbed to that. Um, so it's we don't. We
still don't have any sort of souvenir from the aliens,
so to speak. So I think what all this UH
is pointing to is the fact that it's just it's
(32:31):
in mention in our cultural fabric. We can't help it. Yeah,
we're encountering strange things we can't understand, and we have
to build a story out of those events using the
resources at hand and UH and using the most believable
that we live in an age that's heavily influenced by science,
and so the explanations, no matter how fantastic, are going
to be based in science. Well, and so I'm thinking
(32:53):
that if you're still not convinced, um, and you love
coffee table books, that you should know the new coffee
table book came out. It's called The Art of Close Encounters,
and it's one hundred and fifty illustrations made by alleged
abductives describing their experience. And if you've ever seen one of,
like one of these illustrations, like in a news broadcast
for an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, they're amazing. I mean,
(33:16):
I mean, I'm being a little judgmental. If I had
to draw my own alien abduction experience, it would look
equally stupid because I am not an artist. So it's
an entire book of this sort of thing, and I
can't wait to see it. I bet you'd have a
really good drawing. But well, now you know what to
get me for the holidays. Excellent. So if you want
to learn more about these topics, we have a number
(33:36):
of resources on the website. We have an excellent article
by Stephanie Watson Um titled how UFOs work and This
is an excellent overview of just the UFO phenomenon and
some and some info about alien abduction. And then I
recently wrote kind of a follow up to that called
what are UFOs Really and that deals with some of
the issues that we discussed here. So together between those
(33:58):
two articles, I feel like I have a nice complete
pack it. Also, be sure to check out if you're
not already, check out Stuff they Don't Want You To
Know with Matt and Ben. That is a great video
podcast from How Stuff Works that deals exclusively with unexplained
phenomena and strange encounters alien territory. Yeah, and and as
for you guys, if you have any kind of strange
(34:20):
encounters in your past, alien encounters, if you've seen UFOs,
if you've been abducted, then by all means please email us.
We're open minded, We're not gonna make fun of you. Um.
I think this podcast has has relayed the point that
that all of these experiences are are valid. That they
may not actually be happening, but the experiences are a
real thought. So I'm delighted to hear more about people's
(34:43):
uh experiences with with alien abduction or UFOs and hey,
prove me wrong. I would I would love to be
proved wrong in this. I really would like to believe.
And then as long as they're not trying to abduct me, yeah,
and you can. You can email us that Blow the
Mind at how stuff works dot com, and you can
also follow us on Twitter and Facebook, where you can
(35:03):
also find us as blow the Mind. Thanks for listening.
You can find these articles and many more every day
at how stuff works dot com. For moral this and
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast
icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The
(35:24):
how stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it
today on iTunes
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
tell me, Julie. Um, this is kind of a personal question.
I hope you don't mind me asking, But have you
ever been abducted by aliens and probed in a UFO somewhere? Oh?
(00:27):
My goodness, that is personal. Um, No, I haven't. I
gotta be quite honest here. I would love to make
something up, but I have not. That's the weird thing.
Is like like when someone asked me that question, and
not that they ask every day, you know, just on
public transportation. But but but you do have to think
about it because you're like, I don't know, let me
(00:48):
let me think, because I think we all have I'm
generalizing tremendously here, but I think a lot of us
have little like half waking events in our lives, um,
you know, bits of dream etcetera. That they are kind
of suspect and means you can't explain, Yeah, things you
can't yeah, completely explain, and that if you really wanted to,
(01:12):
you could make a case that they're a part of
some phenomenon beyond you know, our understanding. No, yeah, I
think I've mentioned to you before that my grandmother that
you know, she's got some some more in the family
about how she and my grandfather saw a little green men.
But when you start to pick that apart a little
bit and ask her more questions, or when I had
(01:32):
asked her those questions, she couldn't really answer them, like
she didn't really want to talk about it. And then
I said, well, what about you know, Grandpa and what
was his deal, what was his take? And she said, well,
he didn't want to talk about it, which you know,
you could take that as like just and saying there
were no green aliens. But I'm not going to get
into this discussion, right. That's a I had a some
(01:54):
more thing in my family, had a couple of ants,
or my mom had two ants, and they live in
this house together, and one night they apparently saw a
triangle shaped UFO in the backyard. But they but it
was again one of these things where they never talked
about it. You we just hear, like, you know, you know, secondhand,
it's like, oh, well they saw UFO once, but they
don't like to talk about it, right. It was the
night that we shall not speak up right. Yeah. So,
(02:16):
and it seems like you see looking at some of
the studies that we examined researching this podcast, you do
you see that a lot with people. There's like a
lot of the people who have who at least claimed
to have experienced an abduction experience. And should note that,
according to uh, some of the numbers we're looking at, UM,
more people are are prone to say, yes I saw
(02:36):
a UFO than yes I was abducted by extraterrestrials. But
but among those that have UM, they tend not to
want to make a big deal out of it. Have
been abducted that that claimed to have been abducted? Yeah,
they're they're they're not necessarily out there, you know, on
the news, um, you know, pushing for interviews or publishing
(02:57):
their books. Yeah. Yeah, I mean if you look at
the stats on it, they're actually they're pretty like uh,
like Middle America if you're looking at the US, and
the majority of them don't have UM, any sort of
mental problems that would indicate that whatever they think they
saw was a figment of their imagination. So I guess
when you look at that and you say, well, what
(03:18):
you know, What's what's going on here? Why do so
many Americans think that they've been ferried from their bed
at night? Um and had all these experiences? Why? Why
do why do you just regular ordinary jo's have these experiences?
Now you said, did you just say feried isn't? Did you?
Did I hear that right? Or yeah? I did, says
(03:38):
start thinking about hades. Okay, Well I think that's that's
key though, because um, today it's aliens, yes, but in
previous times and in other parts of the world, it
kind of depends on the world view. You have lots
of unexplainable phenomenon or phenomenon that at least defy explanation
from certain view points, and throughout human history we've attributed
(04:01):
them to different things. We've attributed them to you know,
the the you know, the gods interfering when in human lives,
or you know, it's angels or its fairies, or it's
which is uh, you know the list is succuby, occupy
and yeah, we'll get into that in a minute. Um,
particularly with a dream thing. But your dream no, well,
(04:24):
no you or your dream? Oh yeah, this has sounded
very inceptionate. But I've been out more on that later.
But but yeah, like one of the accounts that I relate, um,
I like to to look at and uh and this
is more directly related to UFOs, was in seventeen in Fatima, Portugal,
a number of people claim to see these lights in
(04:46):
the sky right right. It was like a huge, a
huge event, and a lot of that was attributed you know,
like mass hysteria on one level. But but but the
interesting thing is that everybody like experienced it as as
this holy event. It was like the Virgin Mary descending
into the area and that right, like on a on
(05:07):
a cloud of light or something, right, yeah, descending into
this important to mention, highly Catholic area and uh and
and you know, and these people were not very scientifically
literate for the most part. Uh. You know, it's nineteen
seventeen and like you know, rural Portugal. So um, so
they ended up experiencing this in the form of a
(05:28):
religious event. Now, if that happened today in uh, you know, Huntsville, Alabama,
I'm thinking it would be a different experience entirely. Well
and I was actually thinking about I don't know if
you recall this, but a couple of years back there
was a woman in Georgia who claimed to see the
Virgin Mary in her old refrigerator, like the image burned
(05:49):
in or something. And I mean hundreds of people made
the pilgrimage and said, yes, indeed, I can see the
Virgin Mary and your refrigerator and not in literally but
on the outside of the refrigerator. And uh. And it
makes me think of like the just the pattern recognition
that your brain can't help but see because as humans
(06:09):
were just hardwired to sit there and say, oh, okay,
that that I do see that, I do see the
Virgin Mary. Yeah. I mean it comes down to like
if you draw, you know, a line and add two dots,
we see a human face. So it's it's not too
much more of a stretch to to see the human
form in anything. And then also, if I'm gonna travel
a hundred miles on the chance that I'm going to
see the Virgin Mary and a refrigerator, I'm going to
see the Virgin Mary and a refrigerator. Yeah, right right,
(06:32):
And yeah, and there's that excitement, there's that group think. Yeah,
so that or mass hysteria, as you had said in
a case of fatima. But let's let's look at some
of the stats. Um that within the numbers we have
out there regarding alien abduction. Um, tell me about that.
What is it the is it the roper Yeah, there's
(06:52):
a roper pole which basically says that something like four
million Americans have had a certain uh indicator or of
experience that maybe an alien abduction. Right, And this is
this is a highly suspect um study according to some people. Yeah. Actually, Um,
(07:13):
the study they dentually did a couple of different studies.
They did one report specifically in which they pulled four
thousand people and they asked them five questions. And when
people answered those questions, that's something like the predominantly four
out of five people answered yes to those questions. Right now,
the first question is where you abducted by aliens? Right? No,
that's the problem with it. There's no like, hey do
(07:35):
you do you believe in aliens? Have you ever been abducted?
The questions who are along the lines of have you
ever woken up paralyzed with a sense of a strange
person or presence or something else in the room? Okay,
well I've had that for sure. Yeah, yeah, I have
to Yeah, I've had you have experienced sleep paralysis, which
is what that sounds like. Uh. But the problem is
is that they took the study and they mailed at
(07:57):
something like one hundred thousand mental health professionals, and the
foreword was written by a man named John Mack, who
was a Harvard psychiatrist. So what happened is you've got
this sense of credibility creeping up in this study, and
all of a sudden you're talking to psychiatrists about what
(08:18):
sounds like it could be a real phenomenon. Yeah. And
and while we were talking earlier, I can I can
easily imagine if this were to hit the internet today,
you know, all the variations of it that would would
trickle down through all the blogs and Facebook's profiles would
be like would just be stuff like all MG, Harvard
dude says, alien abductions happened to everyone, right, Yeah, So
(08:40):
I mean that's that that was one thing that happened
that certainly could explain some of the uptipic we've seen
and the last couple of decades of people claiming to
have had alien abduction experiences, um, when in fact it
looks to us like it's more of a shared cultural script.
And if you think about it the incubus, the succubus
(09:02):
um and incubus and succubus uh. For those of you
who aren't included into the dungeons and dragons as much
as we are. Um, this is uh in folk tales
and stuff, and it can can be very light. But yeah,
the the the succubus correct wrong is the female demon
and the incubus or incubi plural is the male demon.
(09:23):
And these are demons of lust that come to you
in the night. Right. So if you're a nun or
let's say a virgin in the mediaval ages, and you
wake up in the middle of the night and maybe
during sleep paralysis, you may imagine yourself to be pinned
down by a succubus or an incubus. So these are
(09:44):
the sort of cultural MEM's ideas that have evolved into
what I think now is is the the alien succubus
if you will, incubus. Yeah, yeah, a number of experts. Yeah,
the Boogeyman or the was one. I have to look
at my sleep paralysis section of the notes. Yeah, this
(10:04):
one came up, and I believe this was in the
and the Susan Blackmore article. She mentioned the Old Hag
of Newfoundland that presses on people's chest. And I find
that particularly amazing because I lived in Newfoundland for a
few years as a child, but was never but it
was never visited by a strange hag that that like
stepped in my chest. But when I lived in Tennessee,
(10:29):
I was pretty sure at once. And this was like rural,
middle of nowhere Tennessee, during the height of my um
paranoia about alien abductions, thanks a lot unsolved mysteries, Um,
I was yeah, and well luckily I was no. I
think later I was watching a Fause two, which did
not help at all, but the that the unsolved mysteries
(10:49):
especially had me terrified. And and I do remember waking
up kind of like you know again, feeling kind of
paralyzed and feeling like there was something setting on the
edge of my bed, and uh, you know, so so
clearly according to the Roper study, it was it was
an alien abduction. Yeah. And now you need to go
to a support group. Yeah, And I need to go
to see a therapist to find out what the rest
(11:10):
of it is. Right, One of those therapists on that
list that received one of the copies of that report
would be great too. Because I could really substantiate your experience. Now,
now real quick, back at the Roper poll one last time.
This is again controversial early nineties, but according to the
I think these are like two of the people polled
claimed to have been abducted, abducted by aliens. So the
(11:30):
extra extrapolating that you get to the premise that four
million Americans may have been abducted by aliens, which is
a lot and and and and got and garnered some
international attention, right, I mean people were wondering what's going
on in America? Right, yeah, yeah, I mean if you
actually get back to Susan Blackmore, she was actually put
(11:51):
on assignment by BBC because BBC said, what what's going on? Why?
Why are so many people in America claiming to be abducted?
So she actually, um, I started looking into it. And
first she started to look at the brain and how
the brain can trick us. And one of the things
we've already mentioned is sleep paralysis. Sometimes we become mentally
(12:14):
alert and we can't move um when we've just woken up,
and that feels really unsettling, and that can actually uh
make our body brain d synchronize. And then when that happens.
We can have hallucinations. So if you think about that too,
look at the logic behind that. You're in bed, you're paralyzed,
(12:37):
your brain is fritzing, and all of a sudden you
think you see something at the end of the bed
sounds does a start to sound like the cultural script
that we've been hearing about with aliens. I was in
my bed, I couldn't move and something was there. Something
was there. It spirited me off. By the way, this
is another time the during sleep paralysis is desynchronization when
(12:58):
you might feel like your floating or you're having out
of body experience. And this also seems to um I think,
like a lot of aspects of the abduction experience. It
really keep keys into a central fear in just our
animal nature, the fear of something happening to us while
we're asleep and vulnerable. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Yeah. We've talked
(13:20):
about this before with animals and how they sleep and
unit hemispheric sleep, so they shut they can shut off
one part of their brain and just kind of keep
one eye on the action. So we've evolved to the
point where we don't necessarily need to worry about predators, right,
So you're right, there could be a little bit of
an evolutionary hangover there. Yeah, to call back to another podcast,
but you know it's something that you know, our our
bodies are saying, Hey, you may not be eating in
(13:42):
your sleep now, but it might happen later. So we're
just gonna keep that that level of neural fear alive
for a while. Um. And and like of people tend
to experience sleep paralysis, so it's uh, it's it's a
fairly common thing. Yeah. And actually Blackmore didn't stuff there.
(14:04):
She went and visited a neuroscientist named Michael Persinger, and
he is someone who believes that out of body experience
and alien abductions are linked to excessive bursts of electoral
electrical activity in the temporal lobe. And this is the
God helmet guy, right, Yeah, he created the God helmet.
That's what it's called. I think he actually calls it
the octopus or something like that. Um, it's actually a
(14:26):
helmet with solenoids that deliver pulses of magnetic field that
stimulates the temporal lobe and induces the what he thinks
are the types of hallucinations that people experience. Stuff tied
to near death experience stuff tied to encounters with the
supernatural experiences with ghosts, and again ghost is another thing,
another version well ghosts or another way that we sometimes,
(14:50):
I think interpret these strange encounters. Yeah, another cultural script
that we explain, try to explain the things that happened
in our brain. But she went and she visited him
and UM, which she learned is that people vary in
temporal lobe mobility. So some people have a high mobility
and some people have a low mobility. The high ability
(15:10):
people have unstable temporal lobes and they exhibit frequent bursts
of energy. So if you're on the low end, then
you're not obviously having that much activity with UM with
those sort of bursts of energy. But the people with
the high ability that those people have been thought to
be more creative in the sense that they tend to
have reported experiences of deja vu to mystical and psychic experiences.
(15:34):
So the thought that is the thought that there is
that they're a little bit more predisposed to have some
sort of imagination in that area that might be tripped
off by this UM electromagnetic field. And another really interesting
thing that Blackmore found out about person goer is that
he reports that strange experiences tend to peek in the
(15:56):
weeks and the months before earthquakes when magnetic changes may occur.
So his ideas that that these magnetic changes are influencing
the temporal lobe and UH and and if you're more
susceptible to those kind of changes, then who knows what
you'll see right right? And on top of that, you
may have UM, you may have post traumatic stress syndrome
(16:17):
and some sort of delayed UM reaction to that. UM,
you may have other sorts of traumatic experiences that could
arise in that sort of environment. And black Moire herself
actually underwent the experiment, and she indeed felt some sort
of presence uh during this time. And in fact, she
was this was really interesting. She wasn't so much freaked
(16:39):
out by the UM, by the fact that she had
just put on this helmet with you know, but and
had this experience, but the fact that Persinger was actually
messing around the solenoids, and her thought was, well, okay,
you know, so what if I have this hallucination, what
about this guy messing around with my magnetic field? I mean,
how can we look at that? You know that use
(17:02):
that could someone be an evil genius and and start
missing with us purposely in some way. So that was
for experience of that, which is pretty cool. This presentation
is brought to you by Intel sponsors of Tomorrow. Now.
(17:23):
It's interesting you mentioned that that the creative, more creative
people are more prone to some of these temporal lobe anomalies. Yeah,
and uh and and this this centers on something that
I've I've thought a lot about, like the idea that like,
creative people are more more prone to be crazy sometimes
or at least and sort of self destructively crazy, and
a lot of that I feel And I'm kind of
(17:45):
I'm kind of building my own thing here out of
you know, some some New Age stuff I've I've gotten
here and some research stuff I've gotten here. But but
we're less creative people. Both of us are both we're
both writers, and uh and I feel like as as writers,
you're you're more prone to create things that are story shaped.
You want to craft things into a story. And human memory,
(18:06):
as it turns out, is a lot about crafting a story.
And uh. And this actually falls back on something that
Susan Blackbourne mentioned, and that's that we use stored information
to reconstruct plausible accounts of past events. That that our
memory is based on taking all this sense data and
building a little story and then filing that story away.
(18:27):
And um. And we're humans. So a lot of the
stories we create, I mean, we're at the center of
all these stories because we're selfish little creatures. And uh.
And a lot of these stories are you know, they're
we can create awesome, amazing stories with these brains of ours,
but we often create little pathetic stories and little sad
stories and little you know, poor me stories and uh.
And so I've wondered at time if at times, if
(18:49):
if creative people are simply just we're faster at it,
Like you give us some like mildly depressing stimuli and
plan we can turn that into a story with us
at the center of it drop of the hat, where
someone less creative it would maybe it would take a
little more effort and a little more determination to make
a sad story or a like ego inflating story out
(19:11):
of said stimuli. HM. That's interesting. So it's sort of
like left handed people have a with the theory is
that they've got a quicker uptake with information processing. So
we'd have a quicker story making machine up there with
our our little monkeys are cranky amount a lot faster. Yeah, huh,
I've got to think. Well, I think too. With writing,
there's the compulsion to write, right, And if you think
(19:34):
about Freud and Um was the compulsion repulsion theory that
you continue to work thrings through your mind so that
you can master them. So I don't know. Maybe maybe
it's just because we're inherently um freaks perhaps, But but
back to alien abduction, this ties back into that because
we talked about all right, So let's say I think
(19:56):
an alien might have said on my bed and I
was a child, all right, and and I and I'm
meeting one of the criteria for possibly having been abducted
by an alien according to the Roper Report. So I
go to a therapist to try and unlock these uh,
these memories that are hidden from me, right, okay, right,
and I'm already you know that memory is not something
(20:16):
that's locked down or that's completely true. Right again, it's
just you know, all this stimuli turn turning it into
little stories. So as as it turns out, it is
possible to create false memories. Now this this can't this
is not something that can account for all the abduction
stories out there. So it's you know, this is just
one one more item in the how it works. Is
(20:37):
this because you might, as a creative think already have
a script in your mind or is it also because
you're being led by the for the therapists. I think both.
I think that's that's one thing we mentioned, like if
you're going to a therapist, you know, to to unlock
these these secrets uh off your past. For one hand,
you could go to a therapist that is going to
be more inclined to help you create that that version
(21:00):
of events. So it's sort of like the person who
who claims to have esp and starts to sort of
hint around and say so your cousin starts with a
j that, so they're sort of leading leading the witnesses.
And under hypnosis you can you can implant ideas, and
you can you can sort of steer the creation of
so called false memories. So that's sort of that meant,
(21:23):
that's another layer there that that helps us to explain
why people are having these memories of these thoughts. Right,
He's like, the key is that false memories can be
created through through hypnosis or even through just I mean,
if you've ever dealt with anybody who like is, you know,
has a lot of denial going on, you can see
that we can create visions of versions of reality, you know,
(21:46):
well whatever will actually fit our needs. And they've actually
done this in studies before they've recreated they've implanted false
memories under hypnosis, and they've actually had I remember I
can't remember what the premise was, but um, what they
did is they worked with the discipant and then they
had the family later on corroborate the events and so
the person so when they brought that up they said
(22:06):
do you remember that time that dada happened? The person
would say why yes I do, and would have like
this full story of what had happened. And it was
hard for the people who are conducting the studies. After
they debriefed them, after the study was done, they actually
said this didn't happen, and they said, no, no, it
actually did happen. They had to convince them like, no,
we we implanted this. It's like the old adage if
you tell a lie what three times five times, then
(22:28):
you come to believe that lie. And and also for
you know, anytime you hear a story about an actor,
like a method actor being a little crazy because they
become they believe their character or you know, or you know,
I hear stories all the time of like pro wrestlers
who confuse their real self with their um there there
fake um you know on you know, And that's because
(22:53):
a false memory is conducted is like a little story
built out of these little pieces. But a real memory
is also a little story built out of these little pieces.
So the difference between a false memory and a true
memory is not that that huge. Okay, So that makes
sense if you look at a fantasy and reality, we're
pretty good at distinguishing between the two. But when you
start to look in the more gray areas of memory
(23:16):
and reality and these things that are happening in your
brain while you're sleep and the fact that you've you
may be more predisposed to creating these sort of stories,
then you can really start to see how these things
came together, especially when you look at the cultural factor
of us telling these stories over and over again to
explain the unexplainable. So the thing that I want to know, though,
(23:40):
is why why are abductee is always probed or molested
or raped, or getting something implanted in their nose or
I mean, what's what's up with that? Well, on one level,
I think it. You know, I was talking about earlier
about how the fear of being attacked or eaten in
your sleep is pretty basic. Um. I also you know,
also I think the fear of sexual attack is pretty basic.
(24:05):
And the fear of something being taken from or put
into your body. Yeah, I mean, because that's that's basically
we've had to deal with parasites for for ages. That's
you know, it's part of our evolutionary history. And a
lot of these boiled down to, oh, you know, I
have this abduction then, and oh I have strange scars
that I can't explain. That's actually one of the the
(24:26):
questions on the Roper questionnaire was do you have any
strange scars you can't quite explain? And of course we
all have a lot of us have scars that are
that we can't necessarily place. But but the idea is
that some people began to think that something was taken
from them. Um you see, um, like some like women
who have occasionally lost pregnancies, You see, this get incorporated
(24:48):
into an abduction. So the traumatic experience of that is
explained to it, right, so that the child was taken
from them by the by the alien or or countless
people that that again insist that um, some sort of
tracking device was placed in their body by by aliens. Yeah,
and Susan black Mare also points out that when you
do have sleep paralysis, it's quite possible that at that
(25:13):
moment you could be experienced some sort of sexual arousal,
which usually happens during the dream stay, which is when
sleep paralysis happens. So it's not too far fetched to
think that you might be having some sort of um
sex thing dream and then you say, oh, okay, that
aliens are now part of this and yeah, because yeah,
because a number of us have I'm sure had these
(25:36):
types of dreams and they tend to there's a sexual
aspect and then just a completely looney dream aspect going on.
So it becomes this like the incubi or the succuba,
some sort of bizarre and maybe terrifying event that at
the same time has some sort of sexual charge to it,
and uh, you know, and and it's left to the
brain to a simple story out of that. Yeah. The
(25:57):
best example I've seen about this came out in the
news not too long ago, and uh, there's a farmer
in China and he claimed to have been visited by
a female humanoid, which he thought was an alien, who
was three meters tall, had twelve fingers in braided leg hair,
and all she wanted to do with make love to him,
(26:19):
and uh they ended up levitating in in coitus for
about forty minutes, he claims. And I thought, wow, that
is really specific. I was like, okay, you know, and
then levitating again to go back to Um. The hallucinations
is something that you might feel like an out of
body experience. Um. Uh so sex, aliens, um, levitation. Um,
(26:43):
it's probably not happening unless you're dating David Blaine. Well. Well, also,
you know other sleep things that going uh there. We
also have false awakenings, which if you've ever seen our
movie with a dream sequence in it, you know this.
Uh how this works. The person wakes up, they think
they're awake, Oh, it's still in the nightmare, and then
you wake up for real. Um. And and so this
(27:07):
this is something that that is also really important. You know,
when we talk about the mind and its ability to
create a reality, a false reality is that just think
of your dreams, any dream you've ever had that at
the time seems real. That's your neural equipment up there
creating a false reality for you. Now that false reality
may fade away rather quickly when you enter the waking world,
(27:30):
but it's proof positive that that it can play all
sorts of tricks on you, right, and that you have that.
That's what's so fascinating to me is you've got this
analog of your reality, and if you look at just
a little bit closer, it might be a little bit
off right. The lighting is not quite right, there's something,
there's something in the dream that you think, Okay, there's
I'm working through my usual stuff. I'm getting up, I'm
(27:51):
brushing my teeth. But wait, I'm not. I'm not actually awake,
which is such a disconcerting moment. It really makes you
doubt yourself in your mind, I think, which is the
really interesting part about this, about how we could go
so wrong in our minds and and misremember things, and
and back to the the the talk of the sexual
(28:14):
aspects of the encounters. You do see an alarming number
of of probings uh showing up in these accounts. And
we mentioned the American study, but there have also been
Canadian studies that show a tremendous amount of of alien
abduction encounters going on. There's a two thousand and one
University of Ottawa School of Psychology study and they found
(28:35):
that forty percent of those poll believed in UFOs and
thirty three believe in abductions. And then this is this
was really interesting. Two I believe that they had been
abducted before, which is the same percentage that the roper
report um. And this was all and this was like
people profiled in uh the area of Ontario. They're all students,
(28:57):
all around twenty eight years of age. So may but
then again, maybe aliens are just really into probing Canadians
in in the that are in their you know, late twenties. Ye,
pro bono proctologists from space. You never know. So what
what are the problems and what's what's the basic problem
(29:18):
with with the alien abduction in terms of logistics, Well,
there there's some some pretty obvious ones, being that, you know,
why isn't our aliens wasting so much time probing Americans
and or Canadians now China and now China and then
and why switched to China. Are they like, all right,
the rectal probing is complete for the North American continent.
(29:40):
Let's move on to China. Let's see what's going on
over here. So so there's just some common sense things
about that. Also, travel through space is is a huge one.
This is more of a like an alien visitation on
Earth kind of argument in general. If that's that the
universe is just vast huge distances and uh, and based
(30:02):
on what we know about about relativity, traveling these huge distances,
uh either requires uh, you know it would we just
require a lot of time and just an enormous uh
level of patients and uh. And then these you know,
the different like UFO and encounters that have taken place.
People have seen these things and recorded them moving in
ways that that no like living thing that we understood
(30:25):
stand could possibly survive the g forces in Okay, So
Terence McKenna, who um was a self described psychoanot um
and someone who was he was a shame and he
was all sorts of things. And in fact, I'm not
doing him um much justice and describing him that way,
but just for sake of brevity, know that this is
(30:46):
someone who was really interested in space and in particular
in aliens and other dimensions. And he would probably take
issue with that because he seemed to think that d
m T, which is a drug, was a bit of
a warm hole to get around all of that. In
other words, that would connect you directly to some sort
of hyper space to mension where you could talk to aliens.
(31:09):
And he was pretty adamant about this. Yeah. I guess
the big thing here though, is that you can't prove
any of that with science, and when it comes to
UFOs and alien abductions, Uh, we're still waiting on the
evidence to show up for someone to you know, put
it on the table. Here's the UFO, here's the Yeah, Hey,
I had a probe and planned to me by an alien.
(31:29):
Here's the scar. Can you get that out? And it's like, oh,
I try it. There it is, let's take it out
and scan. It hasn't happened, right, right, And so that
also comes down tonal hypothesis. Right. So even though Terence
mckennam might have had this experience and feels like if
if we all took d m T we could be
talking to aliens right now, the burden of proof is
on the individual, right, Yeah, you can't walk into you know,
(31:49):
walk up to a scientist and be like, all right,
aliens are visiting the planet. Proved me wrong, man, You
can't do that because it's not on them, it's on
it's the burden of proof is on the person making
the the the claim that there are aliens visiting, that
they're aliens probing us and abducting us. Yeah, and it
should probably be said to the for people who have
said that they've been implanted with something, there have been
(32:10):
many people who have said, well, let's get a third
party in here, and let's get some m R I
imaging and look at that implant. And nobody so far
has succumbed to that. Um, so it's we don't. We
still don't have any sort of souvenir from the aliens,
so to speak. So I think what all this UH
is pointing to is the fact that it's just it's
(32:31):
in mention in our cultural fabric. We can't help it. Yeah,
we're encountering strange things we can't understand, and we have
to build a story out of those events using the
resources at hand and UH and using the most believable
that we live in an age that's heavily influenced by science,
and so the explanations, no matter how fantastic, are going
to be based in science. Well, and so I'm thinking
(32:53):
that if you're still not convinced, um, and you love
coffee table books, that you should know the new coffee
table book came out. It's called The Art of Close Encounters,
and it's one hundred and fifty illustrations made by alleged
abductives describing their experience. And if you've ever seen one of,
like one of these illustrations, like in a news broadcast
for an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, they're amazing. I mean,
(33:16):
I mean, I'm being a little judgmental. If I had
to draw my own alien abduction experience, it would look
equally stupid because I am not an artist. So it's
an entire book of this sort of thing, and I
can't wait to see it. I bet you'd have a
really good drawing. But well, now you know what to
get me for the holidays. Excellent. So if you want
to learn more about these topics, we have a number
(33:36):
of resources on the website. We have an excellent article
by Stephanie Watson Um titled how UFOs work and This
is an excellent overview of just the UFO phenomenon and
some and some info about alien abduction. And then I
recently wrote kind of a follow up to that called
what are UFOs Really and that deals with some of
the issues that we discussed here. So together between those
(33:58):
two articles, I feel like I have a nice complete
pack it. Also, be sure to check out if you're
not already, check out Stuff they Don't Want You To
Know with Matt and Ben. That is a great video
podcast from How Stuff Works that deals exclusively with unexplained
phenomena and strange encounters alien territory. Yeah, and and as
for you guys, if you have any kind of strange
(34:20):
encounters in your past, alien encounters, if you've seen UFOs,
if you've been abducted, then by all means please email us.
We're open minded, We're not gonna make fun of you. Um.
I think this podcast has has relayed the point that
that all of these experiences are are valid. That they
may not actually be happening, but the experiences are a
real thought. So I'm delighted to hear more about people's
(34:43):
uh experiences with with alien abduction or UFOs and hey,
prove me wrong. I would I would love to be
proved wrong in this. I really would like to believe.
And then as long as they're not trying to abduct me, yeah,
and you can. You can email us that Blow the
Mind at how stuff works dot com, and you can
also follow us on Twitter and Facebook, where you can
(35:03):
also find us as blow the Mind. Thanks for listening.
You can find these articles and many more every day
at how stuff works dot com. For moral this and
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast
icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The
(35:24):
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