INTERVIEW 2: Stephanie Kelley-Romano

An interview with Stephanie Kelley-Romano, an associate professor at Bates College who has done academic work on alien abduction stories.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. In late May, I
spoke with Stephanie Kelly Romano, an associate professor of Rhetoric,
Film and Screen Studies at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.

(00:24):
She has conducted research into alien abduction narratives, having collected
stories from over three people who believe they have had
abduction experiences and examining these accounts for common themes and
what they can tell us about issues of control, rights, reality, identity,
and power in our society. I'm Toby Ball, and this

(00:46):
is Strange Arrivals. I am Stephanie Kelly Romano. I'm an

(01:07):
associate professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies at Bates College.
And for my dissertation research, I interviewed people who thought
they had been obducted by aliens. So what what kind
of caused you to be interested in that particular subject. Yeah,
that's a question I get a lot. I became interested

(01:29):
in this because, truthfully, when I was in graduate school,
I was watching The X Files and I really liked
the X Files. And when you're in graduate school, you
don't have a lot of extra time to do things
that you like, unless it's part of your research. Additionally,
I didn't necessarily want to just look at speeches of
like dead presidents, and so I started looking at the

(01:52):
X Files and conspiracy rhetoric, and of course there's the
whole theme about the abduction and Molder sister, and so
then I got interested in people who think they've been
abducted or claim experiences with extraterrestrials, and how do they
carve out space for themselves and legitimacy, right, Like, how
does that happen? I found when I was doing this

(02:14):
that there seems like there might be kind of a
feedback loop in between the X files and and the
population at large. Did do you have that perception that
you know, the X files obviously uses, you know, the
stuff that that Bud Hopkins at all have done to
kind of create this narrative, but then all these people

(02:36):
who get to see it, and it seems like the uh,
the instances of supposed abduction somebody to have an uptick. Um. Yeah,
I don't know if there's any type of uh correlation
in terms of the uptick and things like that. I
do know that, like, even I think it was Martin

(02:56):
Codomier did an article about Barney Hill and that episode
of the Outer Limits the Balero Shield and whether or
not there was a correlation or association there. So, like
the imprinting of cultural texts and the chicken or the
egg argument, you know, like which came first? I don't know, um,
but I do know that with the X Files, what's

(03:18):
really interesting, or the piece that I really look at,
is so in pop culture, we have certain characterizations of
extraterrestrial experiences and experiencers, right, and we have them not
only in the X Files but all kinds. People of
Earth was a recent sitcom about an alien abduction support
group that drew on those same tropes of abduction. What

(03:41):
I find interesting is that people who claim experiences with
extraterrestrials don't always have those same themes and tropes. But
people who are interested in the phenomenon but don't have
the experiences do so general pop culture. Like my students
when they come to my class and I say, what
do you know about alien abduction? They tell me all

(04:03):
the things that have been on the X Files or
in Steven Spielberg movies or whatever. But people who have
had actual encounters have a tendency to be a little
bit more distanced from that. Why don't you tell me
about the study that I guess form the basis for
your dissertation, and then um, several papers that I've read, right, So, So,

(04:26):
like I said, when I started this, I just I
wanted to study something in graduate school that I found interesting.
When you're getting work, when you're getting ready to do
doctoral work and to write a dissertation, you're going to
be studying it for years, literally, like this is going
to be the beginning of my career, and so I

(04:47):
thought this would be an interesting thing that would keep
my attention. I had no idea, I had no idea
how big it was. Um, I came to it very underinformed.
And so when I first started this, the questions that
I asked people who thought they had had these experiences

(05:07):
were very simple. They're they're open ended narrative questions because
I am a rhetorical scholar, so I studied myth. I
studied narrative and study the way that people use language
to make sense of their lives and who they are
right their actual identity. So the questions were really open
ended because I just wanted people to talk about their experiences.

(05:28):
And then I also went to some conferences. I went
most notably to the Leo Sprinkles conference out in Wyoming
because I did my graduate work in Kansas, so it
was close by. I also solicited people on the internet
I had. I was on various message boards. I got

(05:50):
in touch with several different researchers and also UM therapists
who work with populations of experiencers, and they would hand
out the survey anonymously. The survey was anonymous UM, and
they would hand it out and then I would collect them.
So after I first I got my first way back,

(06:13):
I realized how many questions I also needed to ask
right in addition, and several people were super good, I
mean amazing, amazing people in terms of answering my follow
up questions as I kind of learned what it was
I needed to know in order to answer my research questions.
So there were several people who would answer each time

(06:35):
I would send out another query UM. And then the
instrument grew little by little until I had a pretty
decent instrument to capture kind of the experience and how
people attributed it and what people thought of different aspects
of it. UM and then once I had all that.

(06:55):
I mean I have I have hundreds. I have over
three hundred people now who claim experience is And as
you probably know, most people who have an experience have
more than one. Most people that I've spoken with or
communicated with have been have had experiences since the time
they were a young child, over the course of their
lives for many years. So each experiencer might have two

(07:18):
three experiences that we have talked about or they've described
to me of where of where corresponded about. Um So
I have a humongous repository of information and then I
just look at it with different questions over the years.
I've been doing this now for twenty five years, and
so when different things happen oftentimes in the world, I'll say,

(07:41):
you know, how does this relate? How does this go on?
And so for example, right now, UM, I just recently
did a program about coronavirus conspiracies, and on it we
were kind of talking about how science can be used
in order to prove non scientific or pseudos scientific things
like how do methods of research and gathering information gain legitimacy,

(08:06):
And it immediately made me think about alien abduction discourse,
and uh, David Jacobs and John mac and the various
things that they say in order to kind of co
opt the discourse of scientific legitimacy while at the same
time critiquing it. Right. So it's it's this tension that

(08:27):
goes on and so um. Over the years, I've just
kind of looked at race or gender or implants or
truth or whatever is interesting to me when you're getting
things back from people. How much does the believability of
the experience the reality of the experience, How important is

(08:49):
that or is that just not important at all? You know?
Truth is probably one of the biggest questions that I
grapple with that constantly, is underneath whatever questions we are
asking of extraterrestrial existence, experience, interaction, right um. And I

(09:09):
really like the distinction between something being true and something
being real. Right. So, I do not know the truth
of an experience, whether or not it empirically happened in
this reality in another reality. I have no idea. I
do not know, and that's not my area. I don't
have the means by which to evaluate that. I do

(09:31):
know that the criteria that I use is whether or
not these people believe these experiences to be real. If
they are real for them in the sense that they
have consequence in their life, then I care about it, right.
So it's very much similar to any type of faithful discourse.
I I don't necessarily know if God is true, but
for me personally, God is real, right, So so that

(09:54):
distinction is one that I make. It's very hard for
me and I try very much to avoid making any
type of evaluations about which experiences are true, because this
is a phenomenon that we don't know things about UM
and David Jacobs talks about it in the beginning of

(10:16):
UM I think It's Secret Life, where he talks about
the fact that now he can kind of intuitively sense
which accounts are true and are in line with other
abduction narratives. But my problem is that as a culture,
as a society, as people, we naturally fill in our
stories so that they move toward other people. There's this

(10:38):
reciprocal thing that happens because we're building relationships, and so
that UM, that tendency to adhere is something that I
always think about in terms of truth, is it true
or is it not? And so I just deal with
what's real and if it's real. For the people who

(10:59):
claim to have experience, then I include them. I also
do do some kind of cross checking of narrative elements
and consistency, right, make sure that the stories that they're
telling me have coherence and fidelity insofar as they can
remain consistent over time. Um. But of course, what that
does is that then eliminates anyone who does not want

(11:22):
to be contacted again, who wants to remain entirely anonymous,
or those people who don't contact me, right, And those,
of course are the people I want to talk to,
people who have had experiences who don't tell anyone. Um.
But it's it's hard because we only get I only
get people who are willing to come forward with their experience.

(11:46):
What's um, so, so who's getting abducted? M hmm. Well,
most of the work that I did was in the
early two thousands, um and UM. At that point, you know,
Thomas Bullard Eddie Bullard had done that huge store, that

(12:08):
huge study about abduction accounts. Christopher Bader has also done
a lot of work in terms of religious studies, as
as Christopher Partridge. And then I also did a piece
for the general UFO studies, and and my sample of
experiencers was very similar to what other people's reports were

(12:29):
kind of reflecting. And so while in the past it
had seemed as though more women were being abducted, the
kind of balance between men and women even out it
seems as though it's just about equal now. My sample
seemed to be made up of people who have a

(12:50):
higher than average education or at least attend more school
than average kind of census data. But of course I'm
collecting my data at abduction conferences and via the internet,
both of which require disposable income, leisure time, and and

(13:11):
a class privilege that also is correlated with educational attainment. Right, So, um,
I think that, Um, I think that the people and
totally I can tell you that the people that I
talked to about their experiences were not the people that

(13:32):
I anticipated. They were just regular people, and they had
regular lives and regular jobs and regular families, and they
just thought that they had been abducted by aliens or
had these encounters. And and there was also when I
was when I was reading your paper about this, there
was sort of racial disparity compared to the population at large. Yes,

(13:57):
absolutely alien abduction, at least those abjectives who are willing
to or experiencers who are willing to come forward are
overwhelmingly Caucasian. Um. But again, and and it does seem
to be And there have been several articles that have
been written about like, you know, why, you know, why
the aliens only abduct white folks? And I think it's

(14:18):
a valid question. Um, But you know, culturally, I think
there are several explanations for that in terms of the
way abduction stories can be used to kind of explore
racialized discourse or kind of race more broadly. Do you
have an example? Yeah, so the ones I'm thinking of

(14:41):
are all related. Oh I know, yes, Okay, I was thinking.
I think a lot about gender because a lot of
the stuff that I've been doing lately is more feminist stuff,
and so I have all kinds of gender examples at
the ready. In terms of um, you know, David Jacobs
writes about these extra gestational units that are implanted into
men so that they can then incubate and kind of

(15:04):
bring these alien human hybrid fetuses to life literally, and
so kind of I interpret that as somewhat this co
optation of birthing narratives and pregnancy narratives by men, right,
because that's historically a story that they've left entirely out
of that they're not allowed to experience and that they
can't have, but through these extra gestational units they can.

(15:28):
In terms of an example for race, I think that
just the fact that experiencers talk about a multiplicity of
types of aliens and that the aliens have different characteristics. So,
for example, the little gray aliens that are so popular
in pop culture are oftentimes those beings that are um

(15:50):
kind of worker beings. They don't necessarily have personality, they're
not particularly developed or advanced in a lot of ways. Technologically,
certainly they are, but they're very focused on conducting experiments
or um or doing that kind of thing. Whereas people
also talk about Nordic aliens, and Nordic aliens have a

(16:11):
tendency to be more human looking and they are, you know,
characteristically Caucasian and blonde. Um, and those aliens are the
ones that are compassionate. Those aliens are the ones that
are kind. So there have been a bunch of different
studies or a couple articles anyway, that talk about gray

(16:33):
aliens as being kind of the combination of black and white, right,
and so this ambiguous racialized mixture, But also the fact
that the advanced aliens are Caucasian, I mean, coupled with
ancient alien theories, which are inherently racist in some ways. Um,

(16:53):
you know, race is clearly underneath it all. The fact
that any um, non westernized, non on colonized society couldn't
have made whatever it is, the Pyramids and ask a
lines whatever, um, and they needed to have help from extraterrestrials,
but westernized Caucasian societies didn't is a little questionable. Okay,

(17:17):
So sort of change in direction a little bit. Can
you explain the concept of a living myth? Sure? Um,
so myth unlike kind of the pejorative negative connotation, right
that people have Oftentimes when people say when I say
I study myth, people who have had experiences get initially

(17:40):
really defensive. They're like, you're not going to tell me
this isn't real. You're not going to tell me this
is fake and made up. Because when we think about myth,
we think about fake stories. But when we talk about
myth academically, right intellectually, when we're talking about myth, we're
talking about those stories that orient us towards the world,

(18:02):
those large framing stories that help us make sense of
our personal identities of our communities and literally of the universe. Right, So,
living myths can be or myths, It can be anything. Religions,
for example, our myths. And that's not to to be
disrespectful to religion. What it means to say is that

(18:25):
religions are orienting stories that tell people what their purposes,
what the universe is about, how the universe got here,
how society should be. They give us all of these
kind of ways to behave They tell us what we
should do and should not. Um So, so religions are
like living myths, And in my work I argue are

(18:46):
are like myths. Excuse me, And in my work I
argue that living myths are those stories that can bubble
up in communities or in societies that help do the
work that orienting work of myth, but aren't codified and
written down and aging in a way that makes them irrelevant. Right.

(19:09):
One one could argue that the Catholic Church, for example,
has not kept up with scientific knowledge, it has not
kept up with feminist positions, it has not kept up
with kind of cultural social justice issues, and so for
many the framework of of Catholic myths or Christian myths

(19:35):
might not resonate anymore, right, they might not feel as
though they can be a part of that. And I
think that people seek out most people seek out those
spaces of belonging and those explanatory ideologies and world views
that comfort us and inform us. And so I don't

(19:55):
think it's a bad thing. I always feel like defensive
when I have to talk about myth UM. I don't
think it's a bad thing. I think it's just an
amazing faculty of humans that we use narrative to make
sense of our lives. And these are the stories that
we tell. Strange arrivals will return in a moment. And

(20:29):
then so you took a look at these um, these
narratives and kind of identify some emergent stories right of
you know, thematically similar stories. Mm hmm, yeah I did.
There are several different themes, and themes have changed over

(20:50):
the years. Right in my initial dissertation, I wrote about
themes of physical salvation, where the extraterrestrials were here to
kind of rescue us, whether that was actual physical rescuing
like taking people off the planet via ships or collecting
our DNA to be able to um remake or you know,

(21:13):
keep alive humanity in the future. So those were narratives
of physical salvation. There were narratives of hybridization, which are
the stories that we hear about a lot in both
the abduction community, the UFO community, and also in pop culture.
And those are the stories about the alien human hybrid

(21:35):
kind of program, this UM drive to make a master race.
And and within narratives of UH narratives of hybridization, we
have this tension between both those stories where the extraterrestrials
are it's kind of the John mac story of they

(21:57):
are spiritually advanced. They're here to help us, They're here
to help us evolve, They're here to help us have
that ontological shock that will allow us to be integrated
into the galactic community UM, versus the stories that are
told by people like David Jacobs, where the aliens are

(22:17):
not at all good. They are very manipulative, they're very
deceitful UH, and they are not here for anything other
than their own personal use of the human as a
resource right to to carry out this program. So hybridization
has this tension between the two that I find totally fascinating.

(22:38):
So UM. The third narrative type was betterment of humanity,
and in those narratives, the extraterrestrials were coming in order
to help humans evolve themselves. But it's a very in
those So in those stories, people would be compelled to
advance spiritually, engage in meditation, they would be compelled to

(23:00):
change jobs and do things that were more service oriented
like e. M. T. S or doctors. And what's really
interesting or what distinguishes the betterment of humanity narratives from
the cosmic community narratives is the fact that embedterment of humanity,
the individual is the focus. So it's not about humanity,

(23:24):
it's not about UM the universe. It's about the individual's
personal journey of betterment um that and it's intimated that
that is for the betterment of humanity certainly, But in
terms of making distinctions, it was the fact that it
was still focused on the individual, whereas the later narrative category,

(23:46):
cosmic community, is much more about the collective whole and
the collective move towards UM, you know, integration. And then
the four thematic thing that I found in my dissertation
research was these narratives of cosmic community. And in the

(24:08):
narratives of cosmic community, it's really this more full articulation
of almost a religious discourse of this idea that the aliens.
Oftentimes it's the aliens are us and we are them.
The DNA is all shared, but it's not necessarily turned on.
Also in this category are narratives that talk about kind

(24:28):
of the inter dimensional or intergalactic nature of these entities
UM and whether or not they are us from the
future and uh and and other things like that. So
what I found and the reason why I did that
thematic analysis was I found that depending on the motive

(24:50):
that people believed right the individual experiencer, depending on what
they believed why the aliens were here, the narrative qualities
of their store ease were similar. So, for example, in
stories of um cosmic community, oftentimes people didn't talk about abduction,

(25:11):
which I found fascinating um. Instead, they would talk about
the significance of the experience. They would talk about the
consequences of the experience. And so I argue that those
stories have kind of been internalized more and are much
more a part of the person's identity, whereas stories of
like physical salvation and evacuation, when the aliens are going

(25:34):
to come in a ship and take us away, or
take our d n A. Those stories are very granular
in their detail. The textual detail is tiny. So they
talk about the the the appearance of the beings and
of the ships. They can talk about the smells. Oftentimes
people report smelling sulfur. They talk about the attitudes of

(25:56):
the beings, they talk about telepathic communication and in play.
They're talk in great detail about what goes on during
the experience, particularly um the capture portion of the experience,
where they're paralyzed in bed or compelled to drive to
a remote location, whatever it may be. But those stories

(26:16):
are very much specific in their in their details, and
people are much more likely to use qualifiers and to
say things like I know this might sound crazy, or
I don't know what I think about this, or I'm
not sure, or this may have been a dream right.
There are a lot more qualifiers in those other narratives

(26:39):
as well, and so with the four of them, I
argue that they're kind of like Russian nesting dolls in
terms of the process of belief, and so as someone
comes to believe something, as someone interprets their experiences right
there having these anomalous experiences that they don't know what
to do, with and then suddenly extraterrestrials make sense. It

(27:03):
resonates as true for them, and so of course at
first they're going to say, I'm not sure about this.
I don't know. But then as they come into their belief,
as they get more affirming UM and and confirming evidence,
then they get more and more developed in exactly the

(27:24):
significance of that experience. So is your sense that these
different themes UH can like sort of happily coexist, you know?
I I do think that they can. They can well
happily coexist. I don't know about happily coexist. I think

(27:46):
that whenever UM reality is being created, which reality is
always being created through language, like that's how we get
things that are real, you know. UM. But whatever that
is happening, there are inconsistent and other narratives that contradict

(28:06):
the status quo or the party line. Right, So we have,
for example, a history of race in the United States
that until recently ignored the you know, colonization and murder
of indigenous people, and ignored the degree to which UM

(28:27):
capitalist society was based in slavery. So, but now we're
getting those kind of corrective narratives. So I think that
with any with any truth, with any reality, we have
this kind of competitive narrative thing that goes on. So
I find it really interesting the tension between people who

(28:48):
claim that the extraterrestrials are here to help us and
people that claim the extraterrestrials are here to hurt us
because they don't have room for each other, right, because
it can't be both um. Although some people do say
that there are certain ones that are here to help
us and certain ones that are here to hurt us.
But for the most part, these tensions of motive I

(29:08):
think really speak to kind of the tensions in our
culture and tensions in our society. Interesting. Um, so you
use you use Jacobs and you use mac what Um
Was there a reason why you didn't use Bud Hopkins.

(29:29):
I did do um well for my dissertation. I did
primarily I used the narratives that I had collected. Right subsequently,
I've looked at and Hopkins. I think certainly I've read
his work, and he's part of the trajectory of authority

(29:49):
and trajectory of narrative, and that's tense to just in
terms of the release of his book Versus Whitley, Strieber's book,
and the timing of all of that, and and the
privilege ching of particular narrative types. So I think that
for me, Mac and Jacobs are the primary kind of
touchstones because of their credentials quite truthfully, right m d

(30:14):
pH d um. Those credentials are oftentimes highlighted in their work.
At the top of every page of I Think It's
Secret Life, it says David Jacobs PhD. You know, on
the cover of Abduction. For John Mack it says John
Mac m d um. And so I think that the

(30:36):
the pushing of the credentials along with the narrative makes
it digestible to general society. Not necessarily experienced there's, but
general society in a different way. One of the things
that I find really interesting about abduction discourse and alien
experiences is the focus on reproduction. And there is uh

(31:00):
a book by a woman named Brown, I think, who
writes about the kind of correspondence between reproductive rights politics
and abduction accounts. Timing. So, for example, Betty and Barney
Hill happens right as kind of Row v. Wade in

(31:23):
vitro fertilization. All of these kind of things are swirling
around reproductive politics, and suddenly, not suddenly, but simultaneously we
have aliens who are focused on reproduction and on making
this kind of hybrid race. And I think that when

(31:44):
I talk about FUCO and biopower, what biopower does is
biopower really gives us away to think about, to take
a step back from the actual narrative or from the
story and try to understand who gets power from this
or how is this working for the individual or for society.

(32:04):
And so with with notions of biopower, what we have
is we have two poles, and on the one pole
we have the individual, and on the other pole we
have society. And for CO argues that there are mechanisms
that can strain and kind of limit both the individual
and society, and um alien abduction discourse kind of really

(32:27):
demonstrates that in the sense that it's highly focused on
the individual and the individual's reproduction and what the individual
gives and what the individual can do. And so you
can talk about that, right, so the individual can talk
about the fact that they have just stated several of

(32:48):
these pregnancies, they have had these pregnancies taken, and then
they can have ownership over all of that trauma, right,
because the rhetoric trauma is huge, and so then those
feelings are then given an outlet. Similarly, when we think
about kind of the whole body politic, we also have

(33:12):
kind of rules that are being made around the future
of the species, so to speak, in the sense that
the aliens are targeting particular types of people or types
of characteristics that are deemed desirable. So most notably oftentimes,
when people claim that they've been they've had these experiences,

(33:34):
when I ask them why they're chosen, oftentimes people will
say that they're chosen because they have the ability to
be more intuitive, to be more spiritual, to rely less
on the rational world, to distance themselves from capitalist consumer society,
whatever the case may be. And so what we really
see and there is a critique of enlightened rationalism and

(33:59):
this idea of that spirituality, intuition, individual experience are all valid, right,
They're all important ways of knowing, and that the scientific
method should not be the only privileged way of knowing.
And that particular tension is most clearly shown when people

(34:21):
will say to me, I don't care that you know,
people try to refute it, I know what happened to
me right, So the primacy of that experience interesting. Is
there anything that I haven't asked you about that you
think is important for people to understand? What I'm thinking
about is I'm thinking about the fact that I do

(34:44):
believe that the people with whom I corresponded and interviewed
and everything else, I do believe that these people believe
what has happened to them, right, And I believe that
they believe that it's true. Um, And so I guess us,
what I hope is that researchers, both the researchers of

(35:06):
all types, are able to kind of help people find
ways to talk about these stories and talk about the
larger cultural reflections. Kenneth Burke rights that language selects reflex
and deflex reality, and I absolutely believe that is true, right. So,

(35:28):
so abduction discourse to some degree selects particular aspects of
reality and magnifies it basically for us to see. And
so the focus on reproduction, the focus or the the
exclusion of racial diversity, all of these things I think
are indicative of kind of our current political cultural times.

(35:59):
Next week, on the final bonus episode of this season
of Strange Arrivals, I talked with documentary filmmaker Carol Rainey
Bud Hopkins ex wife and former research partner. She talked
to me about her experience in the midst of the
abduction heyday of the nine nineties and early two thousand's.

(36:21):
Bud and Dave regarded their findings as they interpreted them,
showing that if the aliens were here to harm us,
and we didn't know maybe they were, but they certainly
were here to do us any good, that they used
us basically as research subjects. They had no compunction about

(36:44):
coming into our bedrooms at night, or dipping into our
cars or wherever we happened to be and vacuum us
up and either experiment with eggs s firm. You know,
none of this makes sense scientifically over decades and decades.

(37:09):
Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grimm and Mild from Aaron Mankey. This episode was written
and hosted by Toby Boll and produced by Miranda Hawkins
and Josh Thane, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick,
and Aaron Manky. Betty Hill was portrayed by Gina Rickikey.
Barney Hill was portrayed by Jason Williams Special thanks to

(37:33):
the MILNS Special Collections and Archives at the University of
New Hampshire, John Horrigan, w y Am in Norwich, Connecticut,
John White, and David O'Leary, the executive producer of the
History Channel's dramatic series Project Bluebook. Learn more about the
show over at GRIMM and mil dot com. For more

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podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite else