March 14, 2024 • 51 mins
It started with New Hampshire couple Betty and Barney Hill, who learned under hypnosis they’d been abducted and examined by aliens in 1962. Since then, possibly millions of people in the US alone came to believe they followed in the Hills’ footsteps. Why?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Ben's here again too. It's pretty much the
new status quo, which I have to say I like
a lot, and that makes the stuff you should Know.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Oh. I was about to say Jerry might get her
feelings hurt, but you know she won't even hear that.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
No, not a chance.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
If she's not, you know, overseeing that episode. It's not
like she goes, oh, I should listen in.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Yeah, I got to keep up with these guys. They're
so hilarious. That's not a Jerry thing to think.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Yeah, especially when it's more alien stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Yeah, we've done a lot of alien stuff and by god,
every second of it's been amazing. And I don't think
this is going to be any different.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
No, it's been a while, though we haven't. I feel
like we kind of had a little grouping of those,
you know, ten years ago or something.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
I think it was like last year, but we did.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Was it really?
Speaker 2 (01:02):
No, it was probably like within the last two years.
We did that two parter on Project blue Book.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Oh sure, I just remember years ago at Comic Con.
Did we do an alien thing there.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
We did one on UFOs. Yeah, yeah, for sure, that's.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
That's a brave thing for us to do at Comic
Con for sure.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
A lot of experts there. Yeah, yeah, So yeah, today
we're talking about something that definitely has a lot to
do with aliens, a lot to do with UFOs, but
also really has a lot to do with social psychology,
in sociology and history as a strange moment in time
where there was a you can almost call it a trend,
(01:43):
And I want to say right from the outset, we
are in no way, shape or for mocking anyone who
believes that they were abducted. After researching this, I fully
understand that people who who believe they were abducted by
aliens are traumatized by that experienceience and show all the
symptoms of a traumatic experience, and then on top of
(02:05):
that had the indignity of not being believed by anybody
and probably talk down to fairly frequently. So we're going
to try not to talk down. So I'm not in
calling it a trend. I'm not trying to diminish the
experience of anybody who's ever who believes they were abducted,
and that it had an impact on their lives. But
there was a period in time from about the nineteen
(02:28):
sixties and seventies through to the nineties where there were
a lot of people running around claiming to have been abducted.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yeah, it's interesting. It's fascinating because it dawned to me
when I was researching this, like, I just I haven't
heard one of these in a long time.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
No, And I looked up and saw a bunch of
different places that people attribute that to the advent of
ubiquitous camera phones.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Uh, that's inconvenient.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah, exactly. You can be like, nope, this is what
you saw. So it dried up at almost the exact
same time.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Okay, all right, that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
But before that there was like people have been seeing
weird stuff in the sky and being like UFO for
a while. But in our Project blue Book episode we
found like the moment it really kicked off, and that
was June twenty fourth, nineteen forty seven, and we talked
it up to a guy named Kenneth Arnold who was
a I think an amateur pilot or like a hobbyist
(03:30):
who saw what came to be considered the first flying saucer.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Yeah. And the alarming thing about this was he clocked
the speed at about sixteen hundred miles an hour, which
is at the time, you know, easily three times faster
than anything else could fly. And this is where the
term saucer came from. He said, they flew like a
saucer would if you skipped it across the water. And
(03:57):
so that's kind of where that term came from. And
this is you know, this is just after World War
Two and it's not like any no one had ever
claimed to have witnessed anything before this, but basically pre
this date it was one hundred percent well maybe not
hundred percent, who knows, but most people were saying like, oh,
that's just you know, some enemy technology or something that
(04:19):
we don't know about.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Yeah. So Kenneth Arnold kicked off what you characterize as
like the modern UFO movement, I guess right.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Yeah, as in, there's an alien driving not a Russian.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Yes, yeah, good point.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
And also the thing that really bolstered it within days
of that, within two weeks, the Roswell Crash happened, which
a lot of people say that's the advent of the
idea that aliens are actually visiting us and that the
government is covering it up right, So those two things.
It was a one two punch in nineteen forty seven,
(04:54):
in the summer of nineteen forty seven that really kind
of just debuted aliens to the world. And one of
the things is we'll see with abduction narratives or stories
or claims, they usually have a very dark, bad thread
to them. They're not a positive experience, and aliens have
(05:17):
kind of gotten in large part like that kind of
view by the public. If there are aliens out there,
it's not entirely clear that they are benevolent or kind.
But that's not how it was at the outset, was it.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Yeah, we can chalk that up to a dude named
George Adomski. I guess Adamski, Yeah, he was. He immigrated
from Poland and he founded a group called the Royal
Order of Tibet in southern California in the thirties. He
was a teacher of philosophy. He was, you know, he
was kind of out there a little bit, and in
(05:51):
nineteen fifty two he claimed that he met an alien
named Orthan, which is I mean, it's got to be
the inspiration from orson from work from work.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Right, probably because these were really popular books at the time.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Yeah, I mean it just sounds like you're saying morek
calling Orthon with a lisp, yeah, or how I say
it now with my tooth.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
It's like Tyson calling Orthan.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
But his narrative was a bit different. He was like, Hey,
this alien Orthan was a beautiful man. He had a
high forehead, he had hair which is, as you'll see,
pretty unusual from the grays that follow, and a uniform
on a brown uniform, and you know, was telepathic, could
like speak to him basically through his brain and brought
(06:39):
a message of peace, saying, hey, I'm from Venus and
you guys should stop with the nuclear weapons.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Right. So this was like how people kind of viewed
aliens visiting us at the time, Like this guy was
writing these books like they were nonfiction and people were
eating them up.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
So there was this idea that aliens are kind of cool,
they're more advanced than us, and they have our best
interests in mind. And then that took a serious, like
left turn just a few years later in the late fifties,
when a farmer in Brazil named Antonio vs. Boas claimed
that he had been taken aboard a spaceship and a
(07:19):
damski later claimed that he had been on a spaceship too,
But this was pretty new stuff that he had basically
been abducted and forced to have sex with what he
admitted was an attractive alien, but was a bit turned
off by the fact that she barked during sex and
then returned to his farm. And this was a this
(07:40):
is a brand new this is new ground essentially that
Boaz had started to trod.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Yeah, for sure, I mean, this is I couldn't find
an earlier one that mentioned any kind of you know,
sexual assault going on, right, was this the first one
from what I could tell? Yes, all right, so he
was of course, went to a doctor, They examined him.
They said, he's probably making this whole thing up. But
(08:09):
there was a group a UFO, an early ufology group,
that published this experience anyway, and in nineteen sixty five
it ran in an international journal called Flying Salcer Review,
which I get to copy of one of those, and
all of a sudden, you know, people all over the
world are hearing this story and this sort of you
(08:31):
know was happening in you know, it was international, but
it wasn't It didn't hit The American public quite liked
this story of Betty and Barney Hill, which really really
kicked things off here in the States.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Yeah, because his thing came out in the Journal in
nineteen sixty five and the Hill the Hills had an
experience in nineteen sixty one. They are widely seen as
the first credible abductees. If you believe that kind of stuff,
you probably are focused on Betty and Barney Hill. They
were an interracial couple in nineteen sixty one in New Hampshire.
(09:08):
Betty was a social worker and Barney was a postal officer,
and they had taken a delayed honeymoon to Montreal and
were on their way back when they noticed that they
were basically being chased by a light in the sky.
And when they grabbed their binoculars and stopped and got
out of the car, they could actually see that it
was essentially a flying saucer and that aliens were looking
(09:29):
at them through the windows. And the next thing they know,
it's five am. They're pulling into their house about three
hours later than they had expected to, and Barney's shoes
were scuffed and Betty's dress was torn and they didn't
know what had happened, but they were genuinely bothered by
the experience.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Yeah, and you know, we'll dive in a little bit
more with them. But the reason that you mentioned that
they were an interracial couple is because they were doing
a lot of work for civil rights and stuff like that.
So they all that to say, they had no reason to,
in fact, every reason not to kind of come forward
with this crazy story given their positions of doing like this,
(10:12):
you know, great civil rights work, because you know, it
would just all of a sudden people would call them
kooks and probably cast doubt on, you know, the genuine
good work they were doing. So they had no reason
to make something like this up.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
And everything to lose too.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Yeah, everything to lose. So they're trying to figure out
and make sense of what had happened to them, because again,
as you'll see with all these stories, whether or not
this happened or not almost does it matter in some cases,
because the trauma that's visited upon them afterward is very
much real, just like any kind of potential false memory.
(10:47):
So Betty starts researching, goes to the library and starts
looking at books from the ni CAP which we've talked
about before. Yeah, NIGHTCAP the National Investing Aations Committee on
Aerial Phenomenon and that's you know, that was some retired
military officers and you know UFO enthusiasts who had gotten
(11:08):
together this you know, pretty early research group. And afterward
they were, you know, they were suffering from PTSD, especially
the husband he was he had pretty severe anxiety from this.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
Yeah he did. Betty had trouble sleeping, Barney had a
bunch of anxiety. They just they were affected by this
experience and they had this missing time that they knew
they couldn't account for, and they wanted to know what happened.
So they were they were earnestly trying to look for
somebody to help explain what had happened to them and
why their lives were affected. First, they went to the
military and followed official channels because this is when Project
(11:44):
Blue Book was an actual thing, and like you were
encouraged to report any UFO citing to the military because
they were investigating it. And the military was like, you know,
this is not an important story, sorry, guys, we can't
help you. So they turned to their and apparently their
church was like this is way out of our league. Yeah,
maybe you saw God. And they're like, Noah, wasn't God.
(12:05):
They're like, yes, sorry, we can't help you either. So
they turned to psychiatry, and a psychiatrist named Benjamin Simon
agreed to help them. And this is a time where
you were there was a good chance you were going
to be hypnotized if you were on a psychiatrist's couch.
This is the early to mid nineteen sixties. And so
they were hypnotized over a series of sessions, and all
(12:29):
of a sudden, these these memories have been repressed, that
covered that chunk of time where that they couldn't account
for started to come forward.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
That's right, which was abduction. Yeah, little great creatures. You know,
this is the sort of the beginning of the stereotypical
gray as we know them, gray, little skinny bodies, the
big heads, the big oval eyes. They brought them on
board the spaceship and did the you know, the usual
kind of stuff, which is, let me probe you, let
(13:00):
me sample you. Apparently they put a needle into Betty's stomach,
which is what they assumed was like a pregnancy test.
They were very entranced by Barney's dentures, and then they
wiped their memories out. I guess men in black style,
and that's where the lost time comes from. And these
(13:21):
were like, these were real deal, super emotional hypnosis sessions
with a very qualified psychiatrist. But even after all that,
the psychiatrists Sigmon was like, I don't know, I think
they have a shared delusion going on exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yeah, So he was like, you guys weren't abductive, but
you both believe you were abducted and it's having an
effect on you. He actually drilled down a little further
and suggested that it was actually latent racial tensions that
existed in their marriage that they were equipped to deal
with and were purposely kind of subverting into these weird
(13:59):
you know, alien face fans. But that really that's what
it was. And they were like, no, dude, you're wrong,
we were abducted. All of these memories are real. And
he's like, have you heard of false memories? And the
Hills were like, no, we haven't, and they just kept
moving on. So the psychiatry couldn't help them either. And
as they went further and further along trying to get answers,
they kind of were pushed further and further out of
(14:19):
the mainstream and toward the fringes, where they were welcomed
with open arms.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Oh, of course, the story got published. In nineteen sixty five,
a guy named John Lutriel from The Boston Traveler reported
on this UPI picks it up, and then a guy
named John G. Fuller made it into a book in
nineteen sixty six called The Interrupted Journey Colan Two Lost
Hours Aboard a Flying Saucer, which eventually became a TV
(14:46):
movie in nineteen seventy five called The UFO Incident, which
you can watch on YouTube if you want to see
a relatively young and you know, pretty in great shape
James Earl Jones movie. Did you watch it? I'd kind
of scrub through it looking for the good stuff.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
I didn't watch it this time. I watched it when
I was younger, for sure.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Yeah, it like most of the movie, like eighty five
percent of it, looks like it takes place in the
psychiatrist's office, for sure. And I didn't see just scrubbing
through any good alien stuff till kind of toward the end.
I guess they were just wanted to wait to for
the big reveal or whatever. But Stelle Parsons's plays the
(15:29):
Wife and Barnard Hughes from Doc Hollywood. He was the
old doctor in Doc Hollywood played Simon. And it was
a big deal movie. And it was like, you know,
it's a t moo movie at a time when TV
movies were big. It's if you're around these days and
you're not familiar with how things were back then, a
(15:50):
big TV movie like this could be a sort of
a national phenomenon.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Yeah, Because I mean, you had a very limited amount
of choices of what to watch on any given night.
So if there's a big TV movie, they promoted the
heck out of it, and all the the whole country
could be talking about it for the next couple of weeks.
You'd be reading about it in the newspaper. It would
be a big deal, right, So yeah, and this was
a big deal too. You mentioned that there wasn't much
alien stuff in there, and apparently Betty Hill was very
(16:15):
disappointed that James Earl Jones and the producers had kind
of taken this story that to her was a legitimate
alien abduction story and used it to explore the themes
of like interracial marriage, civil rights, being black in a
largely white state Barney's general experience as being a black
man in the in the sixties, and she was like, yeah,
(16:37):
that probably has something to do with it, but really
we need more aliens, right. It had a huge hard
to argue with that exactly. And it had a huge
effect too because it kicked off so everything we know
about alien abductions, the whole narrative, the whole thread, all
(16:57):
the claims that followed are based largely on Betty and
Barney Hill's experience.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Yeah, and it should come as no surprise that after
that movie airs, a lot more of these stories start
to pop up. Very famous one just a couple of
weeks later after the movie aired nineteen seventy five, is
when the logger Travis Walton in Arizona was you know,
beamed up into that spaceship became a movie Fire in
(17:25):
the Sky in nineteen ninety three. He was gone for
about a week, came back said that he was examined
by what we would now call the Grays, a little
short baldies. Yeah, and it just, you know, things really
start to ramp up, almost in lockstep with stories ramping up,
if that makes sense, Like we're kind of feeding each other.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Yeah. By the way, Travis Walton was roundly exposed as
a hoaxter and so was everybody in his group. And
they saw it attributed to his boss, the head of
this logging company, wanting to get out of an unlucrative
contract with the federal government, so they concocted this story.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
It's a good way to do that.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Yeah, that is so seventies. You know that, that's how
you would get out of a movie contract.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Uh, not a bad movie, though, Fire in the Guy
was pretty good.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
I never saw it.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
Yeah, it's that bad. D B.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Sweeney, Yeah, was he on Saturday Night Live? Why do
I think that?
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Uh? You're thinking there was another swinge Julius Sweeney.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
I know, but I thought dB sweet Sweeney was too.
Maybe I'm conflating Julius Julius Sweeney and G. E. Smith
and Saturday Night Live Band and coming up with dB.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
SWEENEYH Maybe so G Smith was great?
Speaker 2 (18:40):
Yeah? I saw G. Smith and the Sara Night Live
Band backing up halland Oates at the first ever concert
I ever saw.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Now, my friend I knew you went and saw Hall
of Oates. I did not know that G. Smith was
in the SNL band? Was the band?
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Yes? And the I think it was the sect player
who wore like the floor length mink coats, like the
whole shebang. It was like the tick of Ala abandoned.
That's who was touring with Hall.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
And Oates, and Oates was like, can you tone it down?
Can get rid of that coat?
Speaker 2 (19:06):
It's competing with my hair and mustache.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
All right, I think we should probably take a break. Yeah, yeah,
all right, and we'll be right back and talk about
more grays right after this. All right. So that was
(19:50):
in the sixties and seventies, but basically from the fifties
on through the seventies, there were all kinds of encounters
and there were a lot of different kinds of aliens
that people were reporting, ranging from a headless wing bat
kind of thing in England to a pointy eared, glowing
(20:12):
eyed creature in North Carolina. And this is when UFO
research groups, who very much want people to believe that
UFOs and aliens are real, I get the feeling behind
the scenes are like, guys, we got to consolidate around
to look here because all these weird aliens that people
are reporting are not doing ourselves are any favors. Basically,
(20:36):
so can we settle on the Grays and they did.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yeah, and that somehow or another, that is exactly how
it happened, and it ended up in mainstream pop culture
being adopted like that, where Like, as the Grays became
more and more widespread, it was like a positive feedback
where more people portrayed aliens as the Grays because that's
what aliens looked like, and it just kept spreading from
(21:00):
there until the general streamlined understanding of what aliens looked
like was the Grays over time. And I just want
to point out that probably the greatest X Files episode
of all time, Jose Chunks from Outer Space, turns this
process on its head, where there are two gray aliens
that turn out to be human actors in costumes who
(21:23):
themselves have an actual legitimate alien encounter with an alien
that looks like one of the just bizarre kind from
the fifties. It's like has fur, it's a cyclops with
a horn, and it has like a chicken legs, and
that's like the actual alien. And I just think that's
just as sharp as can be, that they took that
thread and just twisted it around.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
I don't remember that episode. I was not an X
Files watcher at the time when it aired. Huh. I
got into it in the uh. Although when did it stop,
you know, like the early two thousands. Okay, well what
I did it was syndicated while it was still going then,
I guess because I started watching reruns and syndication in
(22:08):
like ninety seven, and don't I don't even know if
I kind of started at the beginning and watched it
all the way through. But when I was living in
New Jersey, I ended up watching a lot of X Files,
so then enjoyed it quite a bit.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
This is a standalone episode. You don't have to know
anything that's going on to and joy. Yeah. Yeah, if
you do know what's going on, it's even more enjoyable.
But jose Chung is this science fiction author who has
a book or something called from Outer Space, and he's
played by Charles Nelson Riley. There's stories of the Men
in Black showing up, and the Men in Black are
played by Alex Trebek and Jesse the Body Ventura as themselves,
(22:45):
but they're Men in Black. Oh yeah, it's an amazing episode.
It's so great, So.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
I definitely don't remember that one.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
You need to go see it. It's really worth all right,
it's worth your forty four minutes of your time.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Were you into X files from the beginning, like Live
Run or whatever?
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Pretty much?
Speaker 1 (23:03):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Yeah when I watch it now, though I used to
when originally I was like, God, get this stupid monster
stuff out of let's get back to the alien right.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Now as a grown up, I'm like, that alien conspiracy
thing is so played out. I really enjoy the Monster
of the Week episode. Yeah more.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
Yeah, I think the mix of the two was kind
of what made it so great.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Yeah, it was very smart, all right.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
So the other thing we should mention about the Grays
is that when Betty at one point they had her
recreate a star map that the aliens who captured her
had shown her, and when she described what she had seen,
a lot of people said, it sounds a lot like
Zeta Reticuli, which is a star system about thirty nine
(23:47):
light years from Earth. And so you might hear them
called Grays, but if you ever hear any anyone in
the in the BIZ, I guess refer to the aliens
as Zeta reticulans. That comes from that.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
Yeah, Like we said, a lot of the just the
basics of alien abduction stories were founded by the Hills,
unaccounted for missing time, being abducted, being probed just yeah,
exactly all that stuff originally with the Hills, but it
formed the basis or foundation that other people that come
(24:22):
just kind of slowly built on. And there was one
person who contributed quite a bit, an artist from New
York named Bud Hopkins, who said that he had a
close encounter. I guess it would be the second kind
where they just saw like a flying saucer over Cape
cod But it was enough, it was enough of an
experience that he kind of became, I don't know if
(24:44):
obsessed as the right were, but deeply interested in the
idea of UFOs and aliens. So he started kind of
researching the whole thing and ended up writing a book
in nineteen eighty one called I Got to Take a
Deep Breath Missing Time. Colon documented stories of people kidnapp
by UFOs and then returned with their memories or race.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Yeah, he didn't want to leave anything to chance as
far as people misunderstanding what his book was about.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
Yeah, Colan, does that make sense.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Right, Colan, I'm talking about aliens, baby. So that was
a pretty big book and it established that pattern that
we've been talking about of these abduction stories where you
see the UFO and sometimes you don't remember anything and
you just wake up in bed or whatever. Not accounting
(25:31):
for the time there was a young woman in the book.
It was the first time that anyone had claimed to
have been abducted twice, a young woman named Virginia Horton
when she was six, so I guess she was a
little girl then and then at sixteen years old. And
this also follows a pattern in the second one, she
(25:53):
followed a deer into the woods and then woke up
at home with a bloody nose and following an annial
into the woods. As a story that pops up kind
of quite a bit. You're talking about alien abduction.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Yes, exactly. So one of the other things that Bud
Hopkins contributed was the idea that people were being repeatedly abducted.
Some people were, and that he's like, probably what's going
on is they're being impregnated and then you know, they
give birth and then this hybrid alien human baby is born,
(26:27):
and that's really what's going on.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Here, and that they take that baby daily.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Yeah, but I think he also suggested that this was
for the benefit of the human race that this was
that they were actually benevolent as brutal or I guess
uncomfortable as their tactics may have seemed.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
Yeah, for sure. So things are really cooking at this point.
Finally we get to a very very popular book. Those
guy named Whitley's Streber, who was a writer already in
this really helped, you know, the fact that he was
already a writer and had like the backing of publishers
get this book out there. But he was a horror
(27:06):
and science fiction writer and an eighty seven published the
book Communion, which had if you look up the cover
of Communion, the illustration that was done by Ted Jacobs
along with you know, Striber, because he was like, this
is what I saw. You got to draw this that
that is as stereotypical alien head as you could imagine
(27:27):
on the cover of this very popular book.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Yeah, like if the Grays had kind of been percolating
throughout pop culture, this is like where all that all
those different threads got pulled into one alien image and
then from that moment on, that's essentially what the Grays
looked like that cover illustration. Because it was just such
a widely read book and Streiber says and always has said,
(27:52):
from what I can tell, he's never broken character. If
this was a hoax, He's never ever even intimated that
it was. He's He said that until he started realizing
that he had been abducted, he had never really been
much into aliens, had never done much research, so he
was giving the impression that all of his accounts were fresh.
(28:14):
He went into him fresh, like George Costanzo right, he
didn't know what he was talking about when he was
writing about this. This was a legitimate memory. And as
he remembered more and more and more, he realized that
this had been going on since childhood, and the entire
chunks of his life were fabricated memories that had been
implanted by the aliens that abducted him to cover up
(28:38):
the memories of his actual abductions and what they were
doing to him on their ships. And so in addition
to that cover alien of the image of the Grays.
One of the big things that Whitley Striver contributed to
the whole I guess phenomenon is the idea of screen
memories that now no longer was it just missing time.
(28:59):
You might not be missing time, You might not even
remember having been abducted, but you just knew you'd been abducted,
and if you thought about it enough, or if you
went and tried to get to the bottom of your
repressed memories, those screen memories would fall away and the
true memories of your abduction would bubble up to the surface.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
Yeah, and it was a very, very big book. It
became a movie in nineteen eighty nine, a Christopher Walkin movie.
I'm pretty sure I saw it back then. I don't
know if I saw it in the theater or not.
It feels like a VHS movie to me, Yeah, for sure.
But Walkin played him. If you look up the trailer
on YouTube, it's a terrifying trailer. It's really unsettling. You
(29:40):
should watch it. With the music and everything. They portray
it as like a horror movie basically. But he is
one that also Stryverer, that is, who never also claimed
like officially that they were space alien. He was just like, hey,
this happened to me. I'm not saying there's space aliens necessarily.
(30:02):
He actually said they could come from another dimension, or
maybe it could be something else. I know. In one
of our UFO episodes, I talked about the fact that
there are some people who think that the Grays are
just humans from the future. Yeah, and that's what we
eventually evolved to look like because our brains get bigger
(30:22):
and bigger, so our heads bigger, and the actual outer
ear is superfluous to the real hearing mechanism, So that's
why they don't appear to have ears or noses. They
just have ear holes and nose holes. And you know,
as we go on, the eyes are supposedly getting bigger
as we evolve, So that's you know, that's one theory.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
Right or another one is that they're from another dimension,
not necessarily from space. One of the other things that
Striver contributed was the idea that you would be probed
anally or sexually in some way, shape or form. Remember
Boas the Brazilian farmer, was the one who contributed being
(31:02):
sexually assaulted aboard a spaceship the UFO exactly, But apparently
most scholars trace the anal probe trope to Whitley Striber.
He said that there was a large object with a
network of wires on the end that was inserted into
his rectum. And what's interesting is that bears a strange
(31:25):
resemblance to what Barney Hill claimed too. He said that
he had been anally probed and that there was a
needle with a network of wires or something along that line.
He didn't use that exact phrase, but that it had
been left out of the book by John G. Fuller,
that detail had it was only it was only it
only showed up in a nineteen sixty five Nightcap report,
(31:48):
So it wasn't well known at the time. Although it's
entirely possible that if Whitley Striver was a hoaxer, you
can imagine as a writer, he would have done enough
research to go back and read a nineteen sixty five
report about the quintessential abduction experience.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Yeah, And as far as the anal probe goes, I've
given this a lot of thought over the years, uh huh,
and so like why that's always a thing, And the
only thing I could come up with is that, you know,
there are only so many holes. There are only so
many areas of entry in your body, you know. Yeah,
And there are reports of you know, nose probes and
(32:24):
bleeding noses and stuff like that, And I think the
the hidden quality, the hidden nature of the butthole might
entice aliens to be like you know, there they see
the nose, they see the ears, they see how the
obvious ones, and then there's like ooh, there's a hidden one, right,
like what treasure awaits us?
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Yeah, that's universal, not just among humans but around the universe,
Like what is in that butthole? Yeah, that's a great
good stuff. I like that. Uh so, yeah, that's that's
just kind of like a little like a lot of
people chuck that up to Whitley Striber, which may or
may not be Yeah, correct, but that is interesting. That
(33:02):
was nineteen eighty nine that the movie community came out,
what'd you say, nineteen eighty seven for the book that
had a huge effect. The X Files, like we said,
came along and took all this stuff. Like if you
watch the X Files back then or now or whenever,
all of this is just so familiar. Like Chris Carter
apparently read up on the abduction phenomenon and just turned
(33:25):
it into different plot lines, right, so yeah, pure goal. Yeah,
and so that just spread it out into the pop
culture even further. And then there was a guy named
John Mack who was the head of Harvard's psychiatry department,
who was far and away the most credentialed person to
come out and say I'm pretty sure these people are
(33:46):
telling the truth in some way, shape or form.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Yeah, And everyone was like, sure, you want to come
out with us?
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Yeah, and he did very bravely. He was one of
those people who railed against science just kind of having
its own dogma, keeping its head in the sand about
things that couldn't explain. He didn't like that very much,
so that kind of fit with his vibe from what
I can tell, But he kind of lent a little
bit of legitimacy, especially if you were on the fringes.
The fact that he was saying the stuff just gave
(34:15):
you so much support. Right then.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
Yeah, he had a book in ninety four about thirteen
different abduction cases called Abduction colon Human Encounters with Alien Parentheses. Btw,
I teach at Harvard.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Right, did I mention? Yeah? So I say we take
another break and come back and talk about what scholars
who don't buy the fact that these are actual alien
abductions make of all this.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Yeah, it gets pretty interesting after this.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
I think, Okay, Chuck, there's a couple of nuts and
(35:17):
bolts things you should know about UFO subculture and it's
so extensive, and it's been around for so long, and
the people who are into it are so into it
that just by glossing over it, we're probably gonna get
stuff wrong, or we're just going to walk past some stuff.
We're not experts, We've never claimed to be experts, and
we're not experts of UFO subculture, So just want to
caveat that. Probably should have said that at the outset
(35:40):
of this episode. But in UFO subculture, from the research
I've seen, there's a you can kind of divide people
into two groups. One are contactees people who have met aliens,
and the other is abductees, and those are people who
have been taken by it millions. And if you'll remember
(36:01):
back to our Project blue Book episode, there was an
astronomer named Jay Allen Heinek who was a debunker of
UFOs until he just became a true believer. He's the
guy who came up with the close encounters classifications. Yeah,
he left off with close encounters of the third kind contact.
What abductees brought to that was close encounters of the
(36:23):
fourth kind, where you were taken against your will into
a spaceship. And among those two different groups there's two
very different views of aliens between contact e's and abductees.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
Yeah, for sure, if you're a contactee, you're much more
likely to relate a positive experience. Basically, I think a
lot of the contactees I've read that they feel like
they're like a feeling of being chosen, like in a
good way. Abductees, it's kind of the other way around.
There's all kinds of stories of probing, non consensual encounters,
(37:00):
medical procedures going on. You know, all the stuff that
you hear about shoving things in different holes of your
body are not positive experiences for most abductees. And it's
really interesting. I think that the contact ease can feel
like chosen or touched. Where's the abductees feel violated?
Speaker 2 (37:20):
It is super interesting. There's also kind of a subgroup
of abductees. Those are the people who have no memory
of being abducted, but they're sure that they were abducted.
They probably have unaccounted time in their life that they
can look back on and think like what happened there?
They just get the sense that they're abducted too.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
Right, So yeah, which is interesting.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
It is super interesting. The thing is this is really
really important. I saw this in a lot of different
places with people who research UFO abductees. They say that
there are definitely people who are hoaxters. Yeah, there are
definitely people who have like serious mental illness and are
actually delusional, but that by and large, on the whole,
(38:07):
UFO abductees are sane, sincere, genuine people who truly believe
that they were abducted by aliens and whose lives have
been in a lot of cases wrecked by it because
they display the symptoms of trauma. They have post traumatic
stress disorder symptoms from being abducted. And so if you're like, well,
(38:28):
you know, I don't really buy any of this as
being alien in nature, Like how would you explain it?
And so sociology and psychology have said about trying to
explain it, neither ones really kind of rung the bell fully.
Speaker 1 (38:43):
Yet, Yeah, for sure, there is there as plenty of
research that's been done, even though they haven't you know,
like you said, they haven't come to it like a
great conclusion about it. But abductees their memories. The idea
is like, if you're an abductee or you claim to
(39:03):
be an abductee, then you're probably more prone to false memory,
and there are some different tests they can do. One
is called the Deese Rodiger McDermott task DRM, and that's
where they give you a bunch of words that are
sort of linked together, but there's a one word. They
call it a lure word that's missing. So lyvia put
(39:26):
together an example of snooze, blanket, snore or dream pillow bed.
They don't use the word sleep in there, very key,
but obviously that's the one word that's missing. And the
people that are asked to sort of recount this and
if they insert the missing word that there was never mentioned,
(39:48):
like if they say sleep, then they're saying, all right, well,
you're more susceptible to a false memory because we never
said sleep.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
So there, Yeah, that's exactly how they present it to
yeh at the end of the study. It's very humiliating,
but yeah, that's kind of one of the general premises
that people who believe that they were abducted by UFOs
and whose lives are really affected by it negatively just
are more susceptible to generating false memories, and some research
(40:14):
backs that up. There have been studies that show that
they do report more critical lower words than other people.
Who don't believe they were abducted. Other studies say, we
tried the same thing and found no difference whatsoever between
the two, but we did find differences in other psychological
traits like disassociativity, like having like reality seems unreal to you, absorption,
(40:42):
which is a predisposition to get deeply immersed in sensory
or mystical experiences, the likelier to have paranormal beliefs, likelier
to believe that they have psychic abilities, fantasy proneness, difficulty
differentiating between fantasy and reality, and a tendency to hallucinate.
(41:02):
And that so these people are like, no, it's not
a proneeness to developing false memories. It's all these other
traits that are basically they're luring these people into this
kind of fantasy world that they're not distinguishing from reality,
and that that essentially has become part of their life
to them, they've adopted that as part of their life.
Those seem to be the two dominant rival psychological explanations
(41:26):
for this.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
Yeah, and there's another sort of not sort of it
sounds incredibly cruel. Test that was done, or a study
rather when they got kids together either seven or eight
year olds or eleven and twelve year olds, and they said,
you were abducted by an alien when you were four
years old. In fact, here's your mom and she's gonna
(41:49):
reinforce this by telling you this happened. And here's a
fake newspaper. Well they don't say fake, but here's a
newspaper report that talks about these abductions being you know,
pretty calm, and it's totally made up, of course. And
then if these children go on to describe a lot
more detail about the memory of being abducted when they
(42:11):
were four years old, then their classified as having false memories.
And I just I can't believe that they were allowed
to get away with doing it.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
Yeah, from what this one, I think a British Psychological
Association or society article found that they could find two
studies that tried to implant false subduction memories into kids.
One was from nineteen eighty four and they actually ascribed
abductions to basically suppressed or repressed memories of being born.
(42:40):
And then this one from two thousand and nine with
Oatgar and friends, right, and like, yeah, it's deeply unethical,
and they debriefed the kids. They said, no, this is
all just a study or whatever, so you don't walk
around thinking like this actually really happened to you, but
who knows if that really worked. But it raised a
really important point, really as unethical as it was, showed
(43:03):
how easy it is for false memories to be implanted,
especially if you are being told that by someone in
a position and of authority like your psychologists or therapists
or psychiatrist. Right. Yeah, And there's a really big rift
in the field of psychology and psychiatry between whether you
(43:25):
whether traumatic memories can be repressed, and if so, that
means they can probably be recovered through good therapy, or
if you don't actually repress traumatic experiences, and that if
you do try to recover memories, what you remember is
going to be false memories that are accidentally implanted. So
that whole premise that you have missing time, and that
(43:46):
if you go see a therapist who's sympathetic and understands
what you're going through, they will help you recover those memories.
It strongly suggests that all those are our false memories,
even though again they're causing real legitimate pain in these
people's lives.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
Yeah, for sure. And I know we talked about this
and maybe Project Bluebrik Book, but some others as far
as what else this could be why you're having these
false memories, and sleep paralysis always seems to come up.
We did an episode on this. About fifteen percent of
the population experiences it. It's when you wake up in
(44:23):
the middle of the night. You can't move, You might
hear some buzzing sounds, you might see flashing lights. You
almost always, it seems like, see pretty frightening shadowy figures
in your room, maybe hovering above you or at the
foot of your bed. So sleep paralysis could explain some
of this, or theoretically it could. And then another one
(44:43):
which is interesting as far as the hypothesis goes, is
magnetic disturbances by plate tectonics that are causing hallucinations. And
this is what's really interesting to me, distorted recollections of
meta procedures while you're under anesthesia, like as you're going out.
(45:05):
I think anyone who's ever done the twilight sleep thing
for some you know or major you know surgery, When
you're fully under that six or seven seconds where you're
laying there with the bright light above you and people
hovering over you, it gets weirder and weirder, and people
think that this could be associated with that because a
(45:26):
lot of the people who had reported abductions had undergone
surgery recently.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
Yeah, that's pretty pretty interesting as far as coincidences go.
That's anesthesia awareness, and I think I think we did
a whole episode on it. The idea that you can
have memories if you're not under quite enough, and that
if it's a medical procedure, yeah, you could remember that
as aliens, you know, probing you or whatever.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
Sure, Yeah, that's what it feels like.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
Yeah, well guess so for sure, I just remember being like, man,
I'm so wasted, reminding myself like, oh yeah, I'm allowed
to be These people got me wasted, right. Sociology, for
their part, has done some study too, and just kind
of quickly what they've come up with is that if
you are very religious, you're probably less likely to believe
(46:17):
in aliens and even less likely to believe you were
abducted by aliens. But if you are untrusting of the government,
you're far likelier to no surprise, yeah, to believe that
you were abducted by aliens.
Speaker 1 (46:32):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And also the
fact that who is it Joseph O. Baker's a sociologist
who studies this stuff a lot, and he's like, post Watergate,
you saw a lot of this stuff happening, and that's
you know, when a lot of people have had big
distrust of the government. So it sort of there's a
correlation there at least for sure.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
And then I say we wrap it up on that
study by Bud Hopkins, the artists who've gotten real deep into.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
Abduction lore, Yeah, let's do.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
It, Okay. So in the nineties Bud Hopkins worked with
some academics and came up with like a legitimate random
survey that sought to see how many of the population,
like what percentage of the population believes they were abducted,
And they came up with a like five like a
questionnaire that got to the bottom of whether somebody felt
(47:22):
like they had experienced five different aspects of abduction, right
waking up paralyzed, with a sense of strange presence in
the room, losing an hour or more of time that
lost an accounted for a time. Feeling of flying could
also correlate with witchcraft. Seeing strange lights in a room
and then finding odd scars on your body and being
like I have no idea where the scar came from.
Speaker 1 (47:44):
Yeah, So they did that this in the early nineteen nineties.
They did some they know, controlled the data or did
some controlling for the data, and they found that two
percent of the sample had four of those five related
experien variance has happen to them, which is about three
point seven million Americans. That number, I think at UFO
(48:08):
ologists and you know, people who study this stuff say, now,
you know that number is really really high. It's probably
more like thousands, but three point seven million people experience
at least for of those five things.
Speaker 2 (48:20):
Yeah, a lot of people. So a lot of people
use that in like articles and stuff on that, like,
three point seven million is a big number. But yeah,
I just want to point out they they had a
really ingenious way of separating out the fibers from the outset.
One of the questions was, you know, does the word
trondant mean have special meaning for you? And about one
(48:43):
percent of respondents said, yep, that really does you know
what I'm talking about? And Trondon is a made up
word that they used to catch fibers. And I think
Trondon is like a really great band name too, especially
because of the background it.
Speaker 1 (48:56):
Has Yeah, Space Rocket, good one.
Speaker 2 (49:00):
You got anything else? Yeah, Yeah, I mean, the whole
thing's still ongoing. There's plenty of people out there who
believe they were abducted, and psychology is still struggling to
get to the bottom of it fully, So hopefully it will,
so it can help all those people whose lives are
affected by it negatively.
Speaker 1 (49:16):
Yeah, And at the very least we've gotten some fun
movie and TVs out of.
Speaker 2 (49:19):
There for sure. If you want to know more about
alien abductions, there's a lot to read out there, and
you can do that. And in the meantime, we're just
going to go ahead and have a listener mail.
Speaker 1 (49:31):
Hey, guys, been listening since twenty thirteen. Since then, you've
been with me through college graduation, brain surgery, a wedding,
COVID at, my teaching career, IVYF and.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
Our new baby Wowee.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
Since Amber was born in last July, and catching up
on missed episodes. In August twenty twenty three, I think
you had a couple of EPs about language acquisition. This
is so in my wheelhouse because I'm a middle high
school Spanish teacher and it maybe think of this anecdote
relating to language act posician frequently pepper Spanish into my
daily vocabulary. And I also hate squirrels. This is right
(50:07):
up your alley, Josh. I frequently refer to them in Spanish.
One day last summer, I asked my husband, who is
a gringo, what he thought the Spanish word for squirrel was.
He hesitated and then guessed, bendejo. I'll let you look
up at that word actually means, but it's definitely not squirrel.
After listening to the Para Social Relationship episode, I got
(50:29):
too embarrassed to tell you this anecdote anecdote right away
after the language episodes, but I decided to send it
anyway now. Currently listening to the twenty twenty three Halloween
special and hope to be caught up by June. And
that is from Becky Hill.
Speaker 2 (50:43):
Thanks a lot, Becky, and congratulations to you and your
husband on the birth of Amber. And from what I
know about bendejo, like that's a pretty accurate.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
Term for squirrel.
Speaker 2 (50:54):
Yeah. Okay, if you want to be like Becky and
get in touch with us and just share some great
stuff about your life, we love to hear that. You
can send it off in an email to Stuff Podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
(51:17):
favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Ben's here again too. It's pretty much the
new status quo, which I have to say I like
a lot, and that makes the stuff you should Know.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Oh. I was about to say Jerry might get her
feelings hurt, but you know she won't even hear that.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
No, not a chance.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
If she's not, you know, overseeing that episode. It's not
like she goes, oh, I should listen in.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Yeah, I got to keep up with these guys. They're
so hilarious. That's not a Jerry thing to think.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Yeah, especially when it's more alien stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Yeah, we've done a lot of alien stuff and by god,
every second of it's been amazing. And I don't think
this is going to be any different.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
No, it's been a while, though we haven't. I feel
like we kind of had a little grouping of those,
you know, ten years ago or something.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
I think it was like last year, but we did.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Was it really?
Speaker 2 (01:02):
No, it was probably like within the last two years.
We did that two parter on Project blue Book.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Oh sure, I just remember years ago at Comic Con.
Did we do an alien thing there.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
We did one on UFOs. Yeah, yeah, for sure, that's.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
That's a brave thing for us to do at Comic
Con for sure.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
A lot of experts there. Yeah, yeah, So yeah, today
we're talking about something that definitely has a lot to
do with aliens, a lot to do with UFOs, but
also really has a lot to do with social psychology,
in sociology and history as a strange moment in time
where there was a you can almost call it a trend,
(01:43):
And I want to say right from the outset, we
are in no way, shape or for mocking anyone who
believes that they were abducted. After researching this, I fully
understand that people who who believe they were abducted by
aliens are traumatized by that experienceience and show all the
symptoms of a traumatic experience, and then on top of
(02:05):
that had the indignity of not being believed by anybody
and probably talk down to fairly frequently. So we're going
to try not to talk down. So I'm not in
calling it a trend. I'm not trying to diminish the
experience of anybody who's ever who believes they were abducted,
and that it had an impact on their lives. But
there was a period in time from about the nineteen
(02:28):
sixties and seventies through to the nineties where there were
a lot of people running around claiming to have been abducted.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yeah, it's interesting. It's fascinating because it dawned to me
when I was researching this, like, I just I haven't
heard one of these in a long time.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
No, And I looked up and saw a bunch of
different places that people attribute that to the advent of
ubiquitous camera phones.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Uh, that's inconvenient.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah, exactly. You can be like, nope, this is what
you saw. So it dried up at almost the exact
same time.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Okay, all right, that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
But before that there was like people have been seeing
weird stuff in the sky and being like UFO for
a while. But in our Project blue Book episode we
found like the moment it really kicked off, and that
was June twenty fourth, nineteen forty seven, and we talked
it up to a guy named Kenneth Arnold who was
a I think an amateur pilot or like a hobbyist
(03:30):
who saw what came to be considered the first flying saucer.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Yeah. And the alarming thing about this was he clocked
the speed at about sixteen hundred miles an hour, which
is at the time, you know, easily three times faster
than anything else could fly. And this is where the
term saucer came from. He said, they flew like a
saucer would if you skipped it across the water. And
(03:57):
so that's kind of where that term came from. And
this is you know, this is just after World War
Two and it's not like any no one had ever
claimed to have witnessed anything before this, but basically pre
this date it was one hundred percent well maybe not
hundred percent, who knows, but most people were saying like, oh,
that's just you know, some enemy technology or something that
(04:19):
we don't know about.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Yeah. So Kenneth Arnold kicked off what you characterize as
like the modern UFO movement, I guess right.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Yeah, as in, there's an alien driving not a Russian.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Yes, yeah, good point.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
And also the thing that really bolstered it within days
of that, within two weeks, the Roswell Crash happened, which
a lot of people say that's the advent of the
idea that aliens are actually visiting us and that the
government is covering it up right, So those two things.
It was a one two punch in nineteen forty seven,
(04:54):
in the summer of nineteen forty seven that really kind
of just debuted aliens to the world. And one of
the things is we'll see with abduction narratives or stories
or claims, they usually have a very dark, bad thread
to them. They're not a positive experience, and aliens have
(05:17):
kind of gotten in large part like that kind of
view by the public. If there are aliens out there,
it's not entirely clear that they are benevolent or kind.
But that's not how it was at the outset, was it.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Yeah, we can chalk that up to a dude named
George Adomski. I guess Adamski, Yeah, he was. He immigrated
from Poland and he founded a group called the Royal
Order of Tibet in southern California in the thirties. He
was a teacher of philosophy. He was, you know, he
was kind of out there a little bit, and in
(05:51):
nineteen fifty two he claimed that he met an alien
named Orthan, which is I mean, it's got to be
the inspiration from orson from work from work.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Right, probably because these were really popular books at the time.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Yeah, I mean it just sounds like you're saying morek
calling Orthon with a lisp, yeah, or how I say
it now with my tooth.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
It's like Tyson calling Orthan.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
But his narrative was a bit different. He was like, Hey,
this alien Orthan was a beautiful man. He had a
high forehead, he had hair which is, as you'll see,
pretty unusual from the grays that follow, and a uniform
on a brown uniform, and you know, was telepathic, could
like speak to him basically through his brain and brought
(06:39):
a message of peace, saying, hey, I'm from Venus and
you guys should stop with the nuclear weapons.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Right. So this was like how people kind of viewed
aliens visiting us at the time, Like this guy was
writing these books like they were nonfiction and people were
eating them up.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
So there was this idea that aliens are kind of cool,
they're more advanced than us, and they have our best
interests in mind. And then that took a serious, like
left turn just a few years later in the late fifties,
when a farmer in Brazil named Antonio vs. Boas claimed
that he had been taken aboard a spaceship and a
(07:19):
damski later claimed that he had been on a spaceship too,
But this was pretty new stuff that he had basically
been abducted and forced to have sex with what he
admitted was an attractive alien, but was a bit turned
off by the fact that she barked during sex and
then returned to his farm. And this was a this
(07:40):
is a brand new this is new ground essentially that
Boaz had started to trod.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
Yeah, for sure, I mean, this is I couldn't find
an earlier one that mentioned any kind of you know,
sexual assault going on, right, was this the first one
from what I could tell? Yes, all right, so he
was of course, went to a doctor, They examined him.
They said, he's probably making this whole thing up. But
(08:09):
there was a group a UFO, an early ufology group,
that published this experience anyway, and in nineteen sixty five
it ran in an international journal called Flying Salcer Review,
which I get to copy of one of those, and
all of a sudden, you know, people all over the
world are hearing this story and this sort of you
(08:31):
know was happening in you know, it was international, but
it wasn't It didn't hit The American public quite liked
this story of Betty and Barney Hill, which really really
kicked things off here in the States.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Yeah, because his thing came out in the Journal in
nineteen sixty five and the Hill the Hills had an
experience in nineteen sixty one. They are widely seen as
the first credible abductees. If you believe that kind of stuff,
you probably are focused on Betty and Barney Hill. They
were an interracial couple in nineteen sixty one in New Hampshire.
(09:08):
Betty was a social worker and Barney was a postal officer,
and they had taken a delayed honeymoon to Montreal and
were on their way back when they noticed that they
were basically being chased by a light in the sky.
And when they grabbed their binoculars and stopped and got
out of the car, they could actually see that it
was essentially a flying saucer and that aliens were looking
(09:29):
at them through the windows. And the next thing they know,
it's five am. They're pulling into their house about three
hours later than they had expected to, and Barney's shoes
were scuffed and Betty's dress was torn and they didn't
know what had happened, but they were genuinely bothered by
the experience.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Yeah, and you know, we'll dive in a little bit
more with them. But the reason that you mentioned that
they were an interracial couple is because they were doing
a lot of work for civil rights and stuff like that.
So they all that to say, they had no reason to,
in fact, every reason not to kind of come forward
with this crazy story given their positions of doing like this,
(10:12):
you know, great civil rights work, because you know, it
would just all of a sudden people would call them
kooks and probably cast doubt on, you know, the genuine
good work they were doing. So they had no reason
to make something like this up.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
And everything to lose too.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Yeah, everything to lose. So they're trying to figure out
and make sense of what had happened to them, because again,
as you'll see with all these stories, whether or not
this happened or not almost does it matter in some cases,
because the trauma that's visited upon them afterward is very
much real, just like any kind of potential false memory.
(10:47):
So Betty starts researching, goes to the library and starts
looking at books from the ni CAP which we've talked
about before. Yeah, NIGHTCAP the National Investing Aations Committee on
Aerial Phenomenon and that's you know, that was some retired
military officers and you know UFO enthusiasts who had gotten
(11:08):
together this you know, pretty early research group. And afterward
they were, you know, they were suffering from PTSD, especially
the husband he was he had pretty severe anxiety from this.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
Yeah he did. Betty had trouble sleeping, Barney had a
bunch of anxiety. They just they were affected by this
experience and they had this missing time that they knew
they couldn't account for, and they wanted to know what happened.
So they were they were earnestly trying to look for
somebody to help explain what had happened to them and
why their lives were affected. First, they went to the
military and followed official channels because this is when Project
(11:44):
Blue Book was an actual thing, and like you were
encouraged to report any UFO citing to the military because
they were investigating it. And the military was like, you know,
this is not an important story, sorry, guys, we can't
help you. So they turned to their and apparently their
church was like this is way out of our league. Yeah,
maybe you saw God. And they're like, Noah, wasn't God.
(12:05):
They're like, yes, sorry, we can't help you either. So
they turned to psychiatry, and a psychiatrist named Benjamin Simon
agreed to help them. And this is a time where
you were there was a good chance you were going
to be hypnotized if you were on a psychiatrist's couch.
This is the early to mid nineteen sixties. And so
they were hypnotized over a series of sessions, and all
(12:29):
of a sudden, these these memories have been repressed, that
covered that chunk of time where that they couldn't account
for started to come forward.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
That's right, which was abduction. Yeah, little great creatures. You know,
this is the sort of the beginning of the stereotypical
gray as we know them, gray, little skinny bodies, the
big heads, the big oval eyes. They brought them on
board the spaceship and did the you know, the usual
kind of stuff, which is, let me probe you, let
(13:00):
me sample you. Apparently they put a needle into Betty's stomach,
which is what they assumed was like a pregnancy test.
They were very entranced by Barney's dentures, and then they
wiped their memories out. I guess men in black style,
and that's where the lost time comes from. And these
(13:21):
were like, these were real deal, super emotional hypnosis sessions
with a very qualified psychiatrist. But even after all that,
the psychiatrists Sigmon was like, I don't know, I think
they have a shared delusion going on exactly.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yeah, So he was like, you guys weren't abductive, but
you both believe you were abducted and it's having an
effect on you. He actually drilled down a little further
and suggested that it was actually latent racial tensions that
existed in their marriage that they were equipped to deal
with and were purposely kind of subverting into these weird
(13:59):
you know, alien face fans. But that really that's what
it was. And they were like, no, dude, you're wrong,
we were abducted. All of these memories are real. And
he's like, have you heard of false memories? And the
Hills were like, no, we haven't, and they just kept
moving on. So the psychiatry couldn't help them either. And
as they went further and further along trying to get answers,
they kind of were pushed further and further out of
(14:19):
the mainstream and toward the fringes, where they were welcomed
with open arms.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Oh, of course, the story got published. In nineteen sixty five,
a guy named John Lutriel from The Boston Traveler reported
on this UPI picks it up, and then a guy
named John G. Fuller made it into a book in
nineteen sixty six called The Interrupted Journey Colan Two Lost
Hours Aboard a Flying Saucer, which eventually became a TV
(14:46):
movie in nineteen seventy five called The UFO Incident, which
you can watch on YouTube if you want to see
a relatively young and you know, pretty in great shape
James Earl Jones movie. Did you watch it? I'd kind
of scrub through it looking for the good stuff.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
I didn't watch it this time. I watched it when
I was younger, for sure.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Yeah, it like most of the movie, like eighty five
percent of it, looks like it takes place in the
psychiatrist's office, for sure. And I didn't see just scrubbing
through any good alien stuff till kind of toward the end.
I guess they were just wanted to wait to for
the big reveal or whatever. But Stelle Parsons's plays the
(15:29):
Wife and Barnard Hughes from Doc Hollywood. He was the
old doctor in Doc Hollywood played Simon. And it was
a big deal movie. And it was like, you know,
it's a t moo movie at a time when TV
movies were big. It's if you're around these days and
you're not familiar with how things were back then, a
(15:50):
big TV movie like this could be a sort of
a national phenomenon.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Yeah, Because I mean, you had a very limited amount
of choices of what to watch on any given night.
So if there's a big TV movie, they promoted the
heck out of it, and all the the whole country
could be talking about it for the next couple of weeks.
You'd be reading about it in the newspaper. It would
be a big deal, right, So yeah, and this was
a big deal too. You mentioned that there wasn't much
alien stuff in there, and apparently Betty Hill was very
(16:15):
disappointed that James Earl Jones and the producers had kind
of taken this story that to her was a legitimate
alien abduction story and used it to explore the themes
of like interracial marriage, civil rights, being black in a
largely white state Barney's general experience as being a black
man in the in the sixties, and she was like, yeah,
(16:37):
that probably has something to do with it, but really
we need more aliens, right. It had a huge hard
to argue with that exactly. And it had a huge
effect too because it kicked off so everything we know
about alien abductions, the whole narrative, the whole thread, all
(16:57):
the claims that followed are based largely on Betty and
Barney Hill's experience.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Yeah, and it should come as no surprise that after
that movie airs, a lot more of these stories start
to pop up. Very famous one just a couple of
weeks later after the movie aired nineteen seventy five, is
when the logger Travis Walton in Arizona was you know,
beamed up into that spaceship became a movie Fire in
(17:25):
the Sky in nineteen ninety three. He was gone for
about a week, came back said that he was examined
by what we would now call the Grays, a little
short baldies. Yeah, and it just, you know, things really
start to ramp up, almost in lockstep with stories ramping up,
if that makes sense, Like we're kind of feeding each other.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Yeah. By the way, Travis Walton was roundly exposed as
a hoaxter and so was everybody in his group. And
they saw it attributed to his boss, the head of
this logging company, wanting to get out of an unlucrative
contract with the federal government, so they concocted this story.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
It's a good way to do that.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Yeah, that is so seventies. You know that, that's how
you would get out of a movie contract.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Uh, not a bad movie, though, Fire in the Guy
was pretty good.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
I never saw it.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
Yeah, it's that bad. D B.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Sweeney, Yeah, was he on Saturday Night Live? Why do
I think that?
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Uh? You're thinking there was another swinge Julius Sweeney.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
I know, but I thought dB sweet Sweeney was too.
Maybe I'm conflating Julius Julius Sweeney and G. E. Smith
and Saturday Night Live Band and coming up with dB.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
SWEENEYH Maybe so G Smith was great?
Speaker 2 (18:40):
Yeah? I saw G. Smith and the Sara Night Live
Band backing up halland Oates at the first ever concert
I ever saw.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Now, my friend I knew you went and saw Hall
of Oates. I did not know that G. Smith was
in the SNL band? Was the band?
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Yes? And the I think it was the sect player
who wore like the floor length mink coats, like the
whole shebang. It was like the tick of Ala abandoned.
That's who was touring with Hall.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
And Oates, and Oates was like, can you tone it down?
Can get rid of that coat?
Speaker 2 (19:06):
It's competing with my hair and mustache.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
All right, I think we should probably take a break. Yeah, yeah,
all right, and we'll be right back and talk about
more grays right after this. All right. So that was
(19:50):
in the sixties and seventies, but basically from the fifties
on through the seventies, there were all kinds of encounters
and there were a lot of different kinds of aliens
that people were reporting, ranging from a headless wing bat
kind of thing in England to a pointy eared, glowing
(20:12):
eyed creature in North Carolina. And this is when UFO
research groups, who very much want people to believe that
UFOs and aliens are real, I get the feeling behind
the scenes are like, guys, we got to consolidate around
to look here because all these weird aliens that people
are reporting are not doing ourselves are any favors. Basically,
(20:36):
so can we settle on the Grays and they did.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yeah, and that somehow or another, that is exactly how
it happened, and it ended up in mainstream pop culture
being adopted like that, where Like, as the Grays became
more and more widespread, it was like a positive feedback
where more people portrayed aliens as the Grays because that's
what aliens looked like, and it just kept spreading from
(21:00):
there until the general streamlined understanding of what aliens looked
like was the Grays over time. And I just want
to point out that probably the greatest X Files episode
of all time, Jose Chunks from Outer Space, turns this
process on its head, where there are two gray aliens
that turn out to be human actors in costumes who
(21:23):
themselves have an actual legitimate alien encounter with an alien
that looks like one of the just bizarre kind from
the fifties. It's like has fur, it's a cyclops with
a horn, and it has like a chicken legs, and
that's like the actual alien. And I just think that's
just as sharp as can be, that they took that
thread and just twisted it around.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
I don't remember that episode. I was not an X
Files watcher at the time when it aired. Huh. I
got into it in the uh. Although when did it stop,
you know, like the early two thousands. Okay, well what
I did it was syndicated while it was still going then,
I guess because I started watching reruns and syndication in
(22:08):
like ninety seven, and don't I don't even know if
I kind of started at the beginning and watched it
all the way through. But when I was living in
New Jersey, I ended up watching a lot of X Files,
so then enjoyed it quite a bit.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
This is a standalone episode. You don't have to know
anything that's going on to and joy. Yeah. Yeah, if
you do know what's going on, it's even more enjoyable.
But jose Chung is this science fiction author who has
a book or something called from Outer Space, and he's
played by Charles Nelson Riley. There's stories of the Men
in Black showing up, and the Men in Black are
played by Alex Trebek and Jesse the Body Ventura as themselves,
(22:45):
but they're Men in Black. Oh yeah, it's an amazing episode.
It's so great, So.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
I definitely don't remember that one.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
You need to go see it. It's really worth all right,
it's worth your forty four minutes of your time.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Were you into X files from the beginning, like Live
Run or whatever?
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Pretty much?
Speaker 1 (23:03):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Yeah when I watch it now, though I used to
when originally I was like, God, get this stupid monster
stuff out of let's get back to the alien right.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Now as a grown up, I'm like, that alien conspiracy
thing is so played out. I really enjoy the Monster
of the Week episode. Yeah more.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
Yeah, I think the mix of the two was kind
of what made it so great.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Yeah, it was very smart, all right.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
So the other thing we should mention about the Grays
is that when Betty at one point they had her
recreate a star map that the aliens who captured her
had shown her, and when she described what she had seen,
a lot of people said, it sounds a lot like
Zeta Reticuli, which is a star system about thirty nine
(23:47):
light years from Earth. And so you might hear them
called Grays, but if you ever hear any anyone in
the in the BIZ, I guess refer to the aliens
as Zeta reticulans. That comes from that.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
Yeah, Like we said, a lot of the just the
basics of alien abduction stories were founded by the Hills,
unaccounted for missing time, being abducted, being probed just yeah,
exactly all that stuff originally with the Hills, but it
formed the basis or foundation that other people that come
(24:22):
just kind of slowly built on. And there was one
person who contributed quite a bit, an artist from New
York named Bud Hopkins, who said that he had a
close encounter. I guess it would be the second kind
where they just saw like a flying saucer over Cape
cod But it was enough, it was enough of an
experience that he kind of became, I don't know if
(24:44):
obsessed as the right were, but deeply interested in the
idea of UFOs and aliens. So he started kind of
researching the whole thing and ended up writing a book
in nineteen eighty one called I Got to Take a
Deep Breath Missing Time. Colon documented stories of people kidnapp
by UFOs and then returned with their memories or race.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Yeah, he didn't want to leave anything to chance as
far as people misunderstanding what his book was about.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
Yeah, Colan, does that make sense.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Right, Colan, I'm talking about aliens, baby. So that was
a pretty big book and it established that pattern that
we've been talking about of these abduction stories where you
see the UFO and sometimes you don't remember anything and
you just wake up in bed or whatever. Not accounting
(25:31):
for the time there was a young woman in the book.
It was the first time that anyone had claimed to
have been abducted twice, a young woman named Virginia Horton
when she was six, so I guess she was a
little girl then and then at sixteen years old. And
this also follows a pattern in the second one, she
(25:53):
followed a deer into the woods and then woke up
at home with a bloody nose and following an annial
into the woods. As a story that pops up kind
of quite a bit. You're talking about alien abduction.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Yes, exactly. So one of the other things that Bud
Hopkins contributed was the idea that people were being repeatedly abducted.
Some people were, and that he's like, probably what's going
on is they're being impregnated and then you know, they
give birth and then this hybrid alien human baby is born,
(26:27):
and that's really what's going on.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Here, and that they take that baby daily.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Yeah, but I think he also suggested that this was
for the benefit of the human race that this was
that they were actually benevolent as brutal or I guess
uncomfortable as their tactics may have seemed.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
Yeah, for sure. So things are really cooking at this point.
Finally we get to a very very popular book. Those
guy named Whitley's Streber, who was a writer already in
this really helped, you know, the fact that he was
already a writer and had like the backing of publishers
get this book out there. But he was a horror
(27:06):
and science fiction writer and an eighty seven published the
book Communion, which had if you look up the cover
of Communion, the illustration that was done by Ted Jacobs
along with you know, Striber, because he was like, this
is what I saw. You got to draw this that
that is as stereotypical alien head as you could imagine
(27:27):
on the cover of this very popular book.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Yeah, like if the Grays had kind of been percolating
throughout pop culture, this is like where all that all
those different threads got pulled into one alien image and
then from that moment on, that's essentially what the Grays
looked like that cover illustration. Because it was just such
a widely read book and Streiber says and always has said,
(27:52):
from what I can tell, he's never broken character. If
this was a hoax, He's never ever even intimated that
it was. He's He said that until he started realizing
that he had been abducted, he had never really been
much into aliens, had never done much research, so he
was giving the impression that all of his accounts were fresh.
(28:14):
He went into him fresh, like George Costanzo right, he
didn't know what he was talking about when he was
writing about this. This was a legitimate memory. And as
he remembered more and more and more, he realized that
this had been going on since childhood, and the entire
chunks of his life were fabricated memories that had been
implanted by the aliens that abducted him to cover up
(28:38):
the memories of his actual abductions and what they were
doing to him on their ships. And so in addition
to that cover alien of the image of the Grays.
One of the big things that Whitley Striver contributed to
the whole I guess phenomenon is the idea of screen
memories that now no longer was it just missing time.
(28:59):
You might not be missing time, You might not even
remember having been abducted, but you just knew you'd been abducted,
and if you thought about it enough, or if you
went and tried to get to the bottom of your
repressed memories, those screen memories would fall away and the
true memories of your abduction would bubble up to the surface.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
Yeah, and it was a very, very big book. It
became a movie in nineteen eighty nine, a Christopher Walkin movie.
I'm pretty sure I saw it back then. I don't
know if I saw it in the theater or not.
It feels like a VHS movie to me, Yeah, for sure.
But Walkin played him. If you look up the trailer
on YouTube, it's a terrifying trailer. It's really unsettling. You
(29:40):
should watch it. With the music and everything. They portray
it as like a horror movie basically. But he is
one that also Stryverer, that is, who never also claimed
like officially that they were space alien. He was just like, hey,
this happened to me. I'm not saying there's space aliens necessarily.
(30:02):
He actually said they could come from another dimension, or
maybe it could be something else. I know. In one
of our UFO episodes, I talked about the fact that
there are some people who think that the Grays are
just humans from the future. Yeah, and that's what we
eventually evolved to look like because our brains get bigger
(30:22):
and bigger, so our heads bigger, and the actual outer
ear is superfluous to the real hearing mechanism, So that's
why they don't appear to have ears or noses. They
just have ear holes and nose holes. And you know,
as we go on, the eyes are supposedly getting bigger
as we evolve, So that's you know, that's one theory.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
Right or another one is that they're from another dimension,
not necessarily from space. One of the other things that
Striver contributed was the idea that you would be probed
anally or sexually in some way, shape or form. Remember
Boas the Brazilian farmer, was the one who contributed being
(31:02):
sexually assaulted aboard a spaceship the UFO exactly, But apparently
most scholars trace the anal probe trope to Whitley Striber.
He said that there was a large object with a
network of wires on the end that was inserted into
his rectum. And what's interesting is that bears a strange
(31:25):
resemblance to what Barney Hill claimed too. He said that
he had been anally probed and that there was a
needle with a network of wires or something along that line.
He didn't use that exact phrase, but that it had
been left out of the book by John G. Fuller,
that detail had it was only it was only it
only showed up in a nineteen sixty five Nightcap report,
(31:48):
So it wasn't well known at the time. Although it's
entirely possible that if Whitley Striver was a hoaxer, you
can imagine as a writer, he would have done enough
research to go back and read a nineteen sixty five
report about the quintessential abduction experience.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Yeah, And as far as the anal probe goes, I've
given this a lot of thought over the years, uh huh,
and so like why that's always a thing, And the
only thing I could come up with is that, you know,
there are only so many holes. There are only so
many areas of entry in your body, you know. Yeah,
And there are reports of you know, nose probes and
(32:24):
bleeding noses and stuff like that, And I think the
the hidden quality, the hidden nature of the butthole might
entice aliens to be like you know, there they see
the nose, they see the ears, they see how the
obvious ones, and then there's like ooh, there's a hidden one, right,
like what treasure awaits us?
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Yeah, that's universal, not just among humans but around the universe,
Like what is in that butthole? Yeah, that's a great
good stuff. I like that. Uh so, yeah, that's that's
just kind of like a little like a lot of
people chuck that up to Whitley Striber, which may or
may not be Yeah, correct, but that is interesting. That
(33:02):
was nineteen eighty nine that the movie community came out,
what'd you say, nineteen eighty seven for the book that
had a huge effect. The X Files, like we said,
came along and took all this stuff. Like if you
watch the X Files back then or now or whenever,
all of this is just so familiar. Like Chris Carter
apparently read up on the abduction phenomenon and just turned
(33:25):
it into different plot lines, right, so yeah, pure goal. Yeah,
and so that just spread it out into the pop
culture even further. And then there was a guy named
John Mack who was the head of Harvard's psychiatry department,
who was far and away the most credentialed person to
come out and say I'm pretty sure these people are
(33:46):
telling the truth in some way, shape or form.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Yeah, And everyone was like, sure, you want to come
out with us?
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Yeah, and he did very bravely. He was one of
those people who railed against science just kind of having
its own dogma, keeping its head in the sand about
things that couldn't explain. He didn't like that very much,
so that kind of fit with his vibe from what
I can tell, But he kind of lent a little
bit of legitimacy, especially if you were on the fringes.
The fact that he was saying the stuff just gave
(34:15):
you so much support. Right then.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
Yeah, he had a book in ninety four about thirteen
different abduction cases called Abduction colon Human Encounters with Alien Parentheses. Btw,
I teach at Harvard.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Right, did I mention? Yeah? So I say we take
another break and come back and talk about what scholars
who don't buy the fact that these are actual alien
abductions make of all this.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Yeah, it gets pretty interesting after this.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
I think, Okay, Chuck, there's a couple of nuts and
(35:17):
bolts things you should know about UFO subculture and it's
so extensive, and it's been around for so long, and
the people who are into it are so into it
that just by glossing over it, we're probably gonna get
stuff wrong, or we're just going to walk past some stuff.
We're not experts, We've never claimed to be experts, and
we're not experts of UFO subculture, So just want to
caveat that. Probably should have said that at the outset
(35:40):
of this episode. But in UFO subculture, from the research
I've seen, there's a you can kind of divide people
into two groups. One are contactees people who have met aliens,
and the other is abductees, and those are people who
have been taken by it millions. And if you'll remember
(36:01):
back to our Project blue Book episode, there was an
astronomer named Jay Allen Heinek who was a debunker of
UFOs until he just became a true believer. He's the
guy who came up with the close encounters classifications. Yeah,
he left off with close encounters of the third kind contact.
What abductees brought to that was close encounters of the
(36:23):
fourth kind, where you were taken against your will into
a spaceship. And among those two different groups there's two
very different views of aliens between contact e's and abductees.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
Yeah, for sure, if you're a contactee, you're much more
likely to relate a positive experience. Basically, I think a
lot of the contactees I've read that they feel like
they're like a feeling of being chosen, like in a
good way. Abductees, it's kind of the other way around.
There's all kinds of stories of probing, non consensual encounters,
(37:00):
medical procedures going on. You know, all the stuff that
you hear about shoving things in different holes of your
body are not positive experiences for most abductees. And it's
really interesting. I think that the contact ease can feel
like chosen or touched. Where's the abductees feel violated?
Speaker 2 (37:20):
It is super interesting. There's also kind of a subgroup
of abductees. Those are the people who have no memory
of being abducted, but they're sure that they were abducted.
They probably have unaccounted time in their life that they
can look back on and think like what happened there?
They just get the sense that they're abducted too.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
Right, So yeah, which is interesting.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
It is super interesting. The thing is this is really
really important. I saw this in a lot of different
places with people who research UFO abductees. They say that
there are definitely people who are hoaxters. Yeah, there are
definitely people who have like serious mental illness and are
actually delusional, but that by and large, on the whole,
(38:07):
UFO abductees are sane, sincere, genuine people who truly believe
that they were abducted by aliens and whose lives have
been in a lot of cases wrecked by it because
they display the symptoms of trauma. They have post traumatic
stress disorder symptoms from being abducted. And so if you're like, well,
(38:28):
you know, I don't really buy any of this as
being alien in nature, Like how would you explain it?
And so sociology and psychology have said about trying to
explain it, neither ones really kind of rung the bell fully.
Speaker 1 (38:43):
Yet, Yeah, for sure, there is there as plenty of
research that's been done, even though they haven't you know,
like you said, they haven't come to it like a
great conclusion about it. But abductees their memories. The idea
is like, if you're an abductee or you claim to
(39:03):
be an abductee, then you're probably more prone to false memory,
and there are some different tests they can do. One
is called the Deese Rodiger McDermott task DRM, and that's
where they give you a bunch of words that are
sort of linked together, but there's a one word. They
call it a lure word that's missing. So lyvia put
(39:26):
together an example of snooze, blanket, snore or dream pillow bed.
They don't use the word sleep in there, very key,
but obviously that's the one word that's missing. And the
people that are asked to sort of recount this and
if they insert the missing word that there was never mentioned,
(39:48):
like if they say sleep, then they're saying, all right, well,
you're more susceptible to a false memory because we never
said sleep.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
So there, Yeah, that's exactly how they present it to
yeh at the end of the study. It's very humiliating,
but yeah, that's kind of one of the general premises
that people who believe that they were abducted by UFOs
and whose lives are really affected by it negatively just
are more susceptible to generating false memories, and some research
(40:14):
backs that up. There have been studies that show that
they do report more critical lower words than other people.
Who don't believe they were abducted. Other studies say, we
tried the same thing and found no difference whatsoever between
the two, but we did find differences in other psychological
traits like disassociativity, like having like reality seems unreal to you, absorption,
(40:42):
which is a predisposition to get deeply immersed in sensory
or mystical experiences, the likelier to have paranormal beliefs, likelier
to believe that they have psychic abilities, fantasy proneness, difficulty
differentiating between fantasy and reality, and a tendency to hallucinate.
(41:02):
And that so these people are like, no, it's not
a proneeness to developing false memories. It's all these other
traits that are basically they're luring these people into this
kind of fantasy world that they're not distinguishing from reality,
and that that essentially has become part of their life
to them, they've adopted that as part of their life.
Those seem to be the two dominant rival psychological explanations
(41:26):
for this.
Speaker 1 (41:27):
Yeah, and there's another sort of not sort of it
sounds incredibly cruel. Test that was done, or a study
rather when they got kids together either seven or eight
year olds or eleven and twelve year olds, and they said,
you were abducted by an alien when you were four
years old. In fact, here's your mom and she's gonna
(41:49):
reinforce this by telling you this happened. And here's a
fake newspaper. Well they don't say fake, but here's a
newspaper report that talks about these abductions being you know,
pretty calm, and it's totally made up, of course. And
then if these children go on to describe a lot
more detail about the memory of being abducted when they
(42:11):
were four years old, then their classified as having false memories.
And I just I can't believe that they were allowed
to get away with doing it.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
Yeah, from what this one, I think a British Psychological
Association or society article found that they could find two
studies that tried to implant false subduction memories into kids.
One was from nineteen eighty four and they actually ascribed
abductions to basically suppressed or repressed memories of being born.
(42:40):
And then this one from two thousand and nine with
Oatgar and friends, right, and like, yeah, it's deeply unethical,
and they debriefed the kids. They said, no, this is
all just a study or whatever, so you don't walk
around thinking like this actually really happened to you, but
who knows if that really worked. But it raised a
really important point, really as unethical as it was, showed
(43:03):
how easy it is for false memories to be implanted,
especially if you are being told that by someone in
a position and of authority like your psychologists or therapists
or psychiatrist. Right. Yeah, And there's a really big rift
in the field of psychology and psychiatry between whether you
(43:25):
whether traumatic memories can be repressed, and if so, that
means they can probably be recovered through good therapy, or
if you don't actually repress traumatic experiences, and that if
you do try to recover memories, what you remember is
going to be false memories that are accidentally implanted. So
that whole premise that you have missing time, and that
(43:46):
if you go see a therapist who's sympathetic and understands
what you're going through, they will help you recover those memories.
It strongly suggests that all those are our false memories,
even though again they're causing real legitimate pain in these
people's lives.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
Yeah, for sure. And I know we talked about this
and maybe Project Bluebrik Book, but some others as far
as what else this could be why you're having these
false memories, and sleep paralysis always seems to come up.
We did an episode on this. About fifteen percent of
the population experiences it. It's when you wake up in
(44:23):
the middle of the night. You can't move, You might
hear some buzzing sounds, you might see flashing lights. You
almost always, it seems like, see pretty frightening shadowy figures
in your room, maybe hovering above you or at the
foot of your bed. So sleep paralysis could explain some
of this, or theoretically it could. And then another one
(44:43):
which is interesting as far as the hypothesis goes, is
magnetic disturbances by plate tectonics that are causing hallucinations. And
this is what's really interesting to me, distorted recollections of
meta procedures while you're under anesthesia, like as you're going out.
(45:05):
I think anyone who's ever done the twilight sleep thing
for some you know or major you know surgery, When
you're fully under that six or seven seconds where you're
laying there with the bright light above you and people
hovering over you, it gets weirder and weirder, and people
think that this could be associated with that because a
(45:26):
lot of the people who had reported abductions had undergone
surgery recently.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
Yeah, that's pretty pretty interesting as far as coincidences go.
That's anesthesia awareness, and I think I think we did
a whole episode on it. The idea that you can
have memories if you're not under quite enough, and that
if it's a medical procedure, yeah, you could remember that
as aliens, you know, probing you or whatever.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
Sure, Yeah, that's what it feels like.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
Yeah, well guess so for sure, I just remember being like, man,
I'm so wasted, reminding myself like, oh yeah, I'm allowed
to be These people got me wasted, right. Sociology, for
their part, has done some study too, and just kind
of quickly what they've come up with is that if
you are very religious, you're probably less likely to believe
(46:17):
in aliens and even less likely to believe you were
abducted by aliens. But if you are untrusting of the government,
you're far likelier to no surprise, yeah, to believe that
you were abducted by aliens.
Speaker 1 (46:32):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And also the
fact that who is it Joseph O. Baker's a sociologist
who studies this stuff a lot, and he's like, post Watergate,
you saw a lot of this stuff happening, and that's
you know, when a lot of people have had big
distrust of the government. So it sort of there's a
correlation there at least for sure.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
And then I say we wrap it up on that
study by Bud Hopkins, the artists who've gotten real deep into.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
Abduction lore, Yeah, let's do.
Speaker 2 (47:01):
It, Okay. So in the nineties Bud Hopkins worked with
some academics and came up with like a legitimate random
survey that sought to see how many of the population,
like what percentage of the population believes they were abducted,
And they came up with a like five like a
questionnaire that got to the bottom of whether somebody felt
(47:22):
like they had experienced five different aspects of abduction, right
waking up paralyzed, with a sense of strange presence in
the room, losing an hour or more of time that
lost an accounted for a time. Feeling of flying could
also correlate with witchcraft. Seeing strange lights in a room
and then finding odd scars on your body and being
like I have no idea where the scar came from.
Speaker 1 (47:44):
Yeah, So they did that this in the early nineteen nineties.
They did some they know, controlled the data or did
some controlling for the data, and they found that two
percent of the sample had four of those five related
experien variance has happen to them, which is about three
point seven million Americans. That number, I think at UFO
(48:08):
ologists and you know, people who study this stuff say, now,
you know that number is really really high. It's probably
more like thousands, but three point seven million people experience
at least for of those five things.
Speaker 2 (48:20):
Yeah, a lot of people. So a lot of people
use that in like articles and stuff on that, like,
three point seven million is a big number. But yeah,
I just want to point out they they had a
really ingenious way of separating out the fibers from the outset.
One of the questions was, you know, does the word
trondant mean have special meaning for you? And about one
(48:43):
percent of respondents said, yep, that really does you know
what I'm talking about? And Trondon is a made up
word that they used to catch fibers. And I think
Trondon is like a really great band name too, especially
because of the background it.
Speaker 1 (48:56):
Has Yeah, Space Rocket, good one.
Speaker 2 (49:00):
You got anything else? Yeah, Yeah, I mean, the whole
thing's still ongoing. There's plenty of people out there who
believe they were abducted, and psychology is still struggling to
get to the bottom of it fully, So hopefully it will,
so it can help all those people whose lives are
affected by it negatively.
Speaker 1 (49:16):
Yeah, And at the very least we've gotten some fun
movie and TVs out of.
Speaker 2 (49:19):
There for sure. If you want to know more about
alien abductions, there's a lot to read out there, and
you can do that. And in the meantime, we're just
going to go ahead and have a listener mail.
Speaker 1 (49:31):
Hey, guys, been listening since twenty thirteen. Since then, you've
been with me through college graduation, brain surgery, a wedding,
COVID at, my teaching career, IVYF and.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
Our new baby Wowee.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
Since Amber was born in last July, and catching up
on missed episodes. In August twenty twenty three, I think
you had a couple of EPs about language acquisition. This
is so in my wheelhouse because I'm a middle high
school Spanish teacher and it maybe think of this anecdote
relating to language act posician frequently pepper Spanish into my
daily vocabulary. And I also hate squirrels. This is right
(50:07):
up your alley, Josh. I frequently refer to them in Spanish.
One day last summer, I asked my husband, who is
a gringo, what he thought the Spanish word for squirrel was.
He hesitated and then guessed, bendejo. I'll let you look
up at that word actually means, but it's definitely not squirrel.
After listening to the Para Social Relationship episode, I got
(50:29):
too embarrassed to tell you this anecdote anecdote right away
after the language episodes, but I decided to send it
anyway now. Currently listening to the twenty twenty three Halloween
special and hope to be caught up by June. And
that is from Becky Hill.
Speaker 2 (50:43):
Thanks a lot, Becky, and congratulations to you and your
husband on the birth of Amber. And from what I
know about bendejo, like that's a pretty accurate.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
Term for squirrel.
Speaker 2 (50:54):
Yeah. Okay, if you want to be like Becky and
get in touch with us and just share some great
stuff about your life, we love to hear that. You
can send it off in an email to Stuff Podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
(51:17):
favorite shows.
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