August 10, 2017 • 51 mins
What are we to make of alien abduction experiences? Scientific investigation points to a barrage of logical explanations for abnormal sensory experience, from sleep paralysis and temporal lobe anomalies to false memory encoding. Interpret it all within the confines of a sci-fi narrative and you have a revealing, kaleidoscopic view of the 20th century zeitgeist in all its wonder, hope, anxiety and yearning. Join Robert and Christian for this Stuff to Blow Your Mind two-part examination of paranormal experience in the space age.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Seger.
And this is the second part of our episodes on
alien abduction. Now, if you haven't listened to the first part,
(00:23):
I highly recommend you go back and listen to that.
That's where we really established the grounding for what we're
talking about here. What is the common narrative surrounding alien
abductions and then what is the more common sort of
scientific explanation for what's going on. We looked at false
memory and plantation. We talked about ideas surrounding sleep paralysis,
(00:43):
things like that. This episode is going to be more
focused on the cultural fabric surrounding the twentie century and
how it kind of led us to this experience really
being popular between the sixties leading up to the nineties
and then kind of fading out after that. Yeah, and
this is a yeah, this this is a really chewy
part of this, uh, this exploration of of alien abduction,
(01:07):
Because on one hand, if you're looking at it from
a purely skeptical point of view and saying, yes, this
is just uh, you know phenomena occurring within the brain.
This is the memory, false memories and memory distortions. Then
you still have to say, well, how does this narrative
get stitched together? Where does this ultimately absurd narrative come
together of these sort of embryonic creatures arriving and flying
(01:29):
ships and uh in sticking probes into our bodies? Like
where does this come from? And what does it say
about the culture from which it emerges? And even if
you're not skeptical on all of this, if you're more
of a believer, like even some of the believers, uh,
you know, voice their concerns about about the various cultural
(01:50):
and media elements that could be coloring alleged actual abduction experiences.
There's like a weird feedback loop going on, which came
first the alien abduction or the science fiction after it?
And then you know what I kept thinking of was
that they they talk about how this really started in
the forties, right, And then I was thinking about the
(02:10):
nineteen fifties was really that big boom in comic books
for like science fiction e horror kind of comics where
like Mars attacks style aliens would come there earth, right,
and like have like, uh, what those like weird ray guns,
you know, stuff like that. Science fiction was exploding and
and and also this this rap That's one of the
(02:30):
big things I think is that the twentieth century is
the ground from which all of this emerges, and it's
a time of just such rapid advancement technological advancement, like
this is the this is the the century in which
humans split the atom. Uh, this is this century where
the distances between the various corners of the earth shrank
(02:51):
and the advent of of of transportation, technology, mass communication
uh comes together. And then it's it's also just a
time of enormous social change. And as we all know,
like when there's enormous social changes that that's occurring, you know,
rather swiftly. Uh. This this creates um, This can create anxiety,
this can create this certainly creates hope. But it's going
(03:15):
to have a cultural effect on people as they're trying
to come to terms with what the world is doing
and what the world is becoming and how they fit
into that world. Right. And the way that these cultural
effects seem to be taking places through what we referred
to briefly in the last episode as false memories, Right,
(03:35):
This is the terminology that's being used to describe this.
Psychologists believe these stories, they're they're distorting things like childhood
memories where an alien is standing in for a person
who abused the the abductee. Right. But then this has
been countered by abductee as you say, well I never
experienced child abuse, right, And then you've got false memory
(03:57):
implantation as an idea that it's not that you're remembering
something that didn't happen, it's that during the the therapy
session in which you were trying to figure out what happened,
somebody accidentally implanted a false memory. There. It's that easy. Yeah. Now,
one of the possible explanations that I I I'm not
saying i'd buy into this. I think it's an interesting
(04:20):
read on what could be occurring. This comes from psychologist
Frederick the Malmstrom. Yeah. So, in in this theory that's
presented by Melmstrom, the abductees are remembering their births and
the spaceship that they're seeing is actually a symbol of
their mother's birth canal. Now again, here's another one that's
been refuted by abductees because they say, well, I want
(04:43):
under a cesarean birth, So how would I possibly remember
the birth canal? Why would you possibly have any trauma
about that? Yeah? Exactly. You know who would have loved
this theory? Huh giga, Yeah, yes, very much so. But
but you know, when you break down the science of it,
I think it has a lot going forward because you
have to consider newborns have limited visual capabilities. They can't
(05:04):
see very far or in very much detail, and color
distinctions barely register. So this stigmatism smears the images that
they behold. So what do they see when they look
at their mom's face. They see two large, dark eyes
and an otherwise blurred and colorless face. So you can
make the argument that when that you know that that cooing,
wide eyed baby is looking up at you, mom or
(05:27):
dad or anybody getting caregiver, they're seeing a gray alien
staring down at them. And so the argument here is
the other we're we're drawing on that that old memory,
that's that's sort of rising to the surface. Uh, perhaps
in combination with any number of the scenarios that we
discussed in part one, something to remember the next time,
(05:48):
like a friend or a co worker brings in a
newborn and everybody just huddles around that newborn and just
you know, gets right on top of it in its
personal space. You are potentially creating a future alien abductee experience. Yeah,
that kid's gonna end up just being addicted to XCOM
based on what he experienced here today. But actually getting
(06:09):
into the false memory implantation aspect here, it's important to
recognize that hypnotherapists that are involved in this, they're actually
earnest about their desire to help a patient. I think
it's really easy for us to say, like either or
the patients lying or the hypnotherapist is like maliciously manipulating them. Right,
that doesn't seem to be the case. But experimental psychology
is shown that it's actually relatively easy to implant false
(06:32):
memories in an individual's mind, and in the study, researchers
were able to implant false memories of getting lost in
a shopping mall in participants. Another two thousand and one
study showed that even when events were unlikely, for instance,
an abduction by aliens, they can be implanted as false memories.
Suggestive information presented to the participants can actually increase the
(06:57):
plausibility of us Supposedly imply possible event to them. And
this was further shown in a two thousand nine study
by Utgar, Candele, and merkel Bach oh and also Wade
for four authors there, and they showed that you can
implant false memories of alien abduction by paying special attention
to the way that participants described the event during an interview.
(07:21):
And what they would do is they this also seems
crazy to me. Uh. They used children as participants, and
I wrote in the notes what they would take kids,
and they showed them the event during an interview. They
showed them these fake newspaper articles and that would allow
them to implant memories of alien abduction being a thing.
(07:42):
Then the kids, these were seven to twelve year olds,
and thirty three percent of them developed false memories during
the first interview. Then they did a secondary interview, another
six percent developed false memories. The younger children were more
likely to develop false memories and the older chidren were
But then get this, children were equally likely to develop
(08:04):
a false memory about alien abduction as they were to
develop a false memory about choking on candy. So they
had a control group where they were trying to also
implant memories of them choking on candy It worked the
same way, so the unlikelihood didn't seem to be a factor.
Why do you have to just throw in from my
(08:24):
own experience that the memories of small children. It's strange
because I'll take my my my son to school, pick
him up, and I'll say, hey, what what do you
do today? I don't know, I don't remember, like just
note and then he'll say, hey, do you remember that
dead spider we found like three years ago? You know,
bring up this this this minute memories like why are
you believe? Why do you remember that? Why are you
(08:45):
remembering it now? And then there's also there also be
there also incidents where there will there will be false memories.
Either it will be something that he doesn't remember but
we have told him about, and then he ends up
he thinks he has a memory of it, or will
be some thing that he just kind of completely fabric
like he knows it happened, and then he has a
memory that he's put together off it. And I think
(09:06):
if we, if each of us thinks back to our
earliest memories, we run into that that situation. You have
to ask yourself, is this something that I actually remember happening?
Is this something that my parents told me about, and
I'm kind of I've made a memory out of being
told what I should have experienced. Yeah, I've been thinking
about this lately. Um, My sister's grandfather in law just
(09:28):
passed away, and she's been trying to explain to her
three year old son they live in that they lived
in the house with her grandfather in law, and she's
trying to explain to her son where papa went. And
he's three. He doesn't have an understanding of the difference
between life and death, right, he's still struggling with that concept.
So she says to him, Papa is in heaven. Now, um,
(09:53):
you know that it gives him an idea of like, Okay,
there's this physical place called heaven that that he went to.
I'll see him again there or something like that, right,
And but she's having a really hard time with it.
And then he'll he'll occasionally like walk in the living
room and be like, where's Papa, And then he'll go,
He'll he'll self correct and he'll go, oh, wait, that's right,
(10:13):
He's in heaven. And then just kind of, you know,
trod on and keep doing his little kids stuff, and uh,
it keeps making me think, like, well, from my experience,
I don't really retain any memories from that age, But
is this something that he's going to remember later on
in his teenage years and he'll be like, oh, yeah,
like I had this firmly embedded idea of heaven as
(10:36):
a as a place on earth kind of intended. Well,
you know, I actually I know somebody who had you know,
similar everybody has situations I think where and I'll remember
the family dies while the child is too younger really understood,
and so they told him all of that, you know
this individuals in the sky now, like he went to
the sky. But I think it ended, if I remember correctly,
it ended up making the child a little afraid, more
(10:58):
afraid of roller coasters because they did not want to
go into the sky. That this guy was like where
everybody who had died? So creepy idea. Yeah, well, alright,
So all of this stuff leads scientists to the conclusion
that the improbability of an event isn't actually a leading
factor in false memory implantation success. And this leads us
(11:20):
back to good old McNally and Clancy, who we talked
about a lot last episode. They researched memory function in
women who believed they had recovered memories of childhood's sexual abuse,
and they actually found that such victims were more likely
to create false memories of non traumatic events when they
were visiting in the laboratory then women who had always
(11:42):
remembered being sexually abused or women who had never been abused.
So to study this further without unethically inserting false memories
of trauma into people, this is why they got into
the alien abductee study business. So they said, let's amass
a group of people who have these memories but that
they're unlikely to have actually occurred. Uh. And I want
(12:05):
to note here to very little of the research on
alien abductions actually focuses on the practice of the hypnotherapy itself.
Um So the like broader review of all this stuff
essentially recommends, look, we need to do further research until
the dynamics of hypnotherapy before we really understand the full
parameters of what's happening here now. In part one of
(12:28):
this two partner on alien abduction, we we talked a
good bit about media scripts cultural scripts, the idea that
when something strange occurs, you have these pre existing narratives
to draw upon to explain it, be it something to
be you know, magical ferries or ghosts or alien abduction,
(12:48):
and uh, there's a there's actually an interesting argument here that, like,
it's easy to get lost in the space age sci
fi aspects of alien abduction and think, well, this is
something wholly new. This is something that they just you know,
appears in the wake of the Second World War and
becomes the new cultural script for paranormal experience. But it
has a lot in common with older models as well.
(13:10):
And this is explored in a in an article titled
He's making me feel things in my body that I
don't feel. This is by Patricia Felicia Barbado and it
was published in the Journal of American Culture the subtitle
The Body as Battleground in Accounts of Alien Abduction. So
she makes the case that the late twentieth century alien
(13:30):
abduction stories essentially powered by the seventeenth through nineteenth century
American obsession with the Native American captivity narrative. So, I
don't know if everyone's familiar with this. If you've watched
a lot of Westerns, you may have come across this,
And certainly if you've if you've studied history. I imagine
this has come up on stuff you missed in history
(13:50):
class o our sister podcast, Uh here at how stuff works.
But basically, you had you had these these in students
where and then the resulting tales and of course fictionalizations
in many cases where a Caucasian woman was abducted and
brutalized by by Native American tribes and in many cases
(14:12):
absorbed irreversibly into their culture. I want to say this
comes up in the the the John Wayne movie The Searchers.
I've never seen The Searchers, but I immediately jumped to
a more recent movie Bone Tomahawk, which you and I
both sort of enjoyed. Yeah, that plays on a similar narrative,
the idea that the you know, the the cultural other,
(14:33):
the barbaric cultural other, has come and taken someone away.
And there's a lot of fictionalization there. But of course
there were incidents of of things like this occurring, and
then there were the the the idea of reclaiming someone
from that ended up being far more problematic because either
they were irreversibly assimilated into that culture to varying degrees,
or there was just there was at the very least
(14:55):
a lot of trauma had taken place. Uh maybe the
most like popular film that people would be familiar with
that that that this trope showed up in his Dances
with Wolves, because, um is Mary McCormick. Her character his Caucasian,
and she's been living with a native tribe since she
was a kid, like basically raised among them. Yeah, okay,
(15:16):
so I either haven't seen her, it's been so long
that I don't remember anything about it. But yeah, I
think that that very much plays on it. And the
thing is that these there were accounts of these abductions
published in the thousands, so this is like the Boogeyman
of that time. Yeah, yeah, it was everywhere. And um
so the idea here is the captive woman in these
accounts serves as a kind of physical battleground for the
premise of noble white superiority over the you know, the
(15:39):
dark savage tribal other from beyond the frontier. So the
racist boundary here only exists artificially, of course, but the
captivity experience tears apart the fiction in no time. Yeah.
So here's what Barbados has to say. Quote. But while
accounts of alien abduction present us with stark racial, spatial
and culture world differences human and alien, Earth and outer space,
(16:03):
technology and nature that are reminiscent of Indian captivity narrative.
They do so only to turn our attention to the
way that the captive's body completely fails to impose boundaries
between them. It's interesting like that, like we used to
other human beings that were from different cultures, and then
(16:23):
we hit this point in the twentieth century where I mean,
it's not to say that we don't demonize other people,
because we certainly still do, but that we became sort
of more of a you know what if you want
to call it global village enough that you could sympathize
with most other cultures, so then the other ing had
to turn into something outside of Earth. Yeah. So I
(16:46):
mean that's that's just one one example of the kind
of like deep cultural and analyzes that that they can
and do take place concerning the alien aductive narrative, like
not only where does it come from, but why does
it have so much so much power over us? I mean,
you get into this a lot with with fiction, right
where you have like revenge tales. Revenge tails have always
(17:07):
been popular. The revenge tale itself hasn't really changed, but
it we just continually update it for our our modern
our modern world and whatever the latest technological or cultural
trend happens to be. Yeah, this is true. I think
you could probably like look at any year's worth of
films and you can like drop a pin and be like, Okay,
there's the revenge tail of the year, right, Like I
(17:30):
guess this year's would be like Atomic Blonde. Yeah. I
haven't seen it yet, but but it just me I
want to see a like a version of The Searchers
with alien abduction, but not cowboys versus aliens. Something I
think you. I think you just like like opened up
a bank account for somebody in Hollywood. All right, Well,
on that note, let's take a break and when we
come back, we will we'll dive deeper into the angst
(17:53):
of the twentieth century. All right, we're back. So there's
this twenty sixteen Boston Globe article that had a really
interesting take on the alien abduction phenomena, and it found
the following themes were essentially social currents that all fed
into alien abductions over the last few decades. The first
(18:17):
one we already mentioned space exploration in the fifties and sixties.
Then you've got the Cold War that's inspiring a fear
of invasions. You get stuff like invasion of the body snatchers, etcetera.
And then out of body experiences that we were having,
whether it be from mysticism or from drugs. Oh yeah,
I mean when you factor in the rise of the
(18:38):
counterculture movement and psychedelic experience on top of all of
this totally, and then the nineteen eighties fear of strangers.
And this is something that was easy for me to
forget because you know, we grew up in the eighties,
but obviously it wasn't like that before then, right there. Uh,
But there were so many stories about child abduction and
sexual molestation being reported in the news that this became
(18:59):
like a common cultural narrative. So you get all four
of those together, you you, you know, stir them up
in a pot together, and you get a perfect brew
for alien abduction stories. Now here's an interesting thing again,
X Files fan over here. I didn't know this. Apparently
Chris Carter was at San Diego Comic Con one year.
Chris Carter is the guy who was the showrunner and
(19:20):
creator of The X Files and he said, you know
why the show stopped working, It was because of nine eleven,
And he said the mood wasn't right anymore, that like
there was something about nine eleven that made the like
the magic of the X Files stick that was gone.
I don't know, I've watched a lot of X Files.
(19:41):
I think the show would pretty much petered out. Well, yeah,
it's not like we we abandoned magical the narratives after exactly. Mean,
certainly there was probably more of a mean, did did
stuff like uh, what was it twenty four? Did that
come out post nine level? Yeah? I'm pretty sure. So
maybe there was. I could see where there was an
opening for for stories that sort of you know, delivered
(20:03):
the type of content that might resonate more in the
wake of nine eleven. But certainly we still were into aliens,
were still into ghosts, and I mean all the ghost
Hunter shows seemed to have come sprung up in the
wake of very much. Did you ever watch that show Fringe?
I I watched a little of it. It looked it
was one of those shows that that looked really cool,
but I just didn't get hooked in it. It was fun.
It took me a while to like really get cemented
(20:24):
into it. But once I'd say, like after the second season,
I was like a die hard follower of it. But um,
that show did a good job of taking nine eleven's
trauma and mixing it in with the like general paranormal
stuff that the X Files was playing around with. Yeah. Um,
And I think that that is probably part of why
(20:46):
I was successful. But also I have to say, Chris
Carter uh just wasn't writing great stuff anymore. Man. I mean,
if you saw any of that X Files revival last year,
like all the episodes that he wrote were just like
cringe worthy, Whereas like the other guys who came back
to some of the best work, like Darren Morgan who
was talking about Last Time, Glenn Morrigan, and um, I
(21:08):
believe it's James Wong. Okay, Well, you know another source
that that I was looking at in terms of figuring
out the cultural residents of all of this, uh is
a wonderful paper and this is available online if you
look it up. It's called is It Tomorrow or Just
the End of Time? UFO Culture and Cultural Anxiety, And
(21:28):
this is by Connie Smarris and she's primarily a photographer
and video artist based out of l A. But she
put together this wonderful paper that it references a lot
of like deeper literature on it, but I think she
does a wonderful job which is sort of summarizing what's
some of what might be going on. Yeah, I read
over part of this too, and from my perspective, it
looked like she was doing the opposite of what the
(21:51):
literature review was in academia. She was reviewing the phenomena,
but not looking at all the like academic articles, but
more looking at the speriential narratives and compiling them together.
So she was part of the article she was pointing to.
Intruders Foundation funded Roper Pole in Truders Foundation is a
(22:11):
you know, a group that was you know, aligned with
alien abduction experiences and you know, the study of them, Uh,
anyway to determine the percentage of the US population abducted
by aliens and some of the we already hit on
some of the big findings that have come out over
the year in terms of percentage of the population that's
expressed these things. But here's some of the more particular
(22:32):
findings that she highlights here. It's a largely industrialized northern
hemisphere phenomenon mostly a US phenomenon. Abductees are mostly white
in middle class and uh, you know, it's worth noting
again that the first major case of alleged alien abduction
was that of Barney and Betty Hill. This was an
African American male and a white female, right, As we
(22:55):
mentioned last episode, that plays against the stereotype, right yeah, yeah,
And because for one thing, the majority of abductees are
when are actually women, though most of the movies and
TV representations involved men, And of course that just gets
into the you know, the sort of the sexist nature
of our our narratives, especially for most of the twentieth century.
(23:16):
If you're gonna make a TV show or a movie
about it or a book, it's going to be based
around a male um male character, right yeah, yeah, but
that ends up sort of skewing your public idea of
who's experiencing these in the real world. And there's also
the like this is related to the shark thing we
were talking about last time, there's like a kind of
like gross, I don't know, voyeurism about like the alien
(23:40):
abduction experience being performed on a woman, right in the
same way that like a woman in a bikini getting
eaten by a great white shark is somehow voaristic as well.
I can't quite put my finger on it. There's something
weird going on there. Well, it's like you're taking a
you're taking a potentially you know, unset only in an
(24:00):
unsavory real world scenario, and you're like, you're just subbing
in a fantastic element. So you're left with kind of
the same traumatic event. To your point that reproduction is
a common theme in these abduction tales. They might be
like a pregnancy tests, some sort of a false pregnancy,
egg harvesting, uh, you know, some sort of reproduction tinkering,
(24:21):
which again that that is something that is falls in
line with you know, incubine and succubie accounts and folklore
you know, throughout European history. But but in any rate,
there's the there's also this standardized daily and description. We've
talked about, this sort of embryonic looking grays. You see this, uh,
this use of telepathy, especially between like the leader alien
(24:43):
and the subject. The anal probing of males, which we
haven't we haven't spent a lot of time with that.
I feel like you gotta work up to anal probing. Well,
there's also Connie Samaris's article on this. The wording is
wonderful and how she she talks about how that it's
so we're so specifically worried about male abductees being probed,
(25:03):
and yet there's very little talk about female abductees being probed. Yeah, exactly. Uh. Now,
on top of the probing, sometimes there's this element of
seduction by the examiner alien And most of these points
out are vastly heterosexual in nature, like to the point
where it would seem, based on these accounts that aliens
never abduct like a you know, a gay, lesbian or
(25:27):
bisexual individual. But so so we have to sort of
factor that into the whole you know, psychoanalysis of what's
going on uh PTSD nightmares afterward, we've already touched on that. Um.
This is interesting the idea that sometimes these run in
the family, that there's like a family legacy of alien
abduction scenarios. So it's like Jaws, like that the shark
(25:50):
keeps coming after the same family members. Yeah, Like, I
this is something I want to see an alien abduction
fiction more the idea that it runs in the family,
like it puts a weird spin on it. Then there's
the introduction of the idea that aliens will eventually bring
about wide sweeping social change and this is This is
interesting because it brings up the idea like, is this
in a way you know that this is this is
(26:12):
taking the trauma and the nightmare and twisting it into
something more hopeful, something fantastic, but also getting into this
idea that is that the only way that that sometimes
we can perceive sweeping social change, and it has to
come from the outside and it can't come from within.
This reminds me of a quote that I've mentioned on
the show before, uh, and I'm having a hard time
(26:33):
placing where it came from, so sorry listeners, But Uh,
it goes something like this, it's easier for us to
imagine an apocalypse than it is for us to imagine
a positive society that doesn't exist within capitalism, right, Like,
it's so hard to imagine something that's outside of our
frame of reference that the only, no, the only way
(26:54):
we know how to imagine it is, uh, is by
destroying it. Oh. I know it was Frederick Jamison, Who's ah, well,
you know this. This factors into a lot of the
writings about alien abduction and certainly the scenarios where it
takes on this hopeful uh, you know, messengers from beyond um,
you know, coming here to make the world a better place.
That one of the other big elements of the twentieth
(27:14):
century is this angst over what we're doing to the planet,
over over pollution, over over the the threat of nuclear annihilation.
This all comes to hang over even the average individual's head.
And then how do we how do we process that,
and how do we how does it factor into these experiences?
You know what I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go down
(27:35):
a little bit of a sidebar here. But that's why
we did two episodes. Uh, I've been experiencing this lately,
and I haven't I haven't felt this way since like
the I guess early nineties, the Cold War fear of
the nuke, you know, like that was something that I
thought we were done with that I had kind of
gotten to a point in my consciousness where I wasn't
always worrying like, well, it could just happen at any time,
(27:58):
you know, and like um, the fear of nuclear winter
and all all these things that like, you know, you
saw a lot of this manifest in nineteen eighties films,
and now with all this stuff ramping up with North Korea, uh,
between the United States and North Korea. For those that
are in American back and forth, there's our media is
(28:18):
very much like, oh my god, like they've got I
c B M S. What's going to happen? You know,
Like I even like talking to my mother, she was like, well,
you gotta be careful where you live in the United
States now. You don't want to live on the West
Coast because you could just get bombed by the North Koreans.
And I was like, whoa, Like, where did that come from?
You know, um, we're right back there. Yeah, well, I
mean part of the disturbing answer is that, you know,
(28:40):
they're the risk of nuclear war never went away, It's right,
has It has remained this whole time, and and there
have been there have been, you know a number of
very committed individuals working around the world to try and
get us to a better place where it's it's it's
less likely to occur. But the reality is that we
we have these weapons, we have weapons systems set up
to to make it happen at the at any moment,
(29:03):
and those the humans and the systems are both both falliable. So, UM,
I wonder if you're going to start to see a
resurgence in uh, those kind of fears though again in
our fiction, I mean, yeah, I would. It will be
interesting to see if it's just a if it's a
complete rehash of how we manifested those fears before, if
(29:25):
there is some sort of new spin on it that
you know that we can't quite expect. Alright, Well, on
that note, on the note of nuclear annihilation, let's take
another break, and when we come back, we will continue
to discuss uh, this this paper by Connie Samaris and
uh and just the overall alien abduction scenario. Alright, we're back.
(29:47):
So uh. Samaris brings up two key individuals, um and
there their alien of abduction abduction researchers, And I wasn't
really that familiar with either of them, but they're both
fascinating in their own rights. So the is Bob Hopkins.
This is a guy who advocated the physical reality of aliens,
Like he believed that alien abductions were actually happening and
(30:09):
that we should be studying and listening to the individuals
who experienced them and you know, figuring out how to
help them. But he also, interestingly enough, believed that media
representations could be coloring the experiences as well, which I
find interesting because it's, as we've already mentioned, we want
to we tend to want to fall into a you know,
(30:30):
a skeptic or believer uh dichotomy here, the idea that
either alien abduction is happening or it is this you know,
skeptical model where people are having false memories, et cetera.
And even Bud Hopkins, who's more of a literalist here
is or was saying that, well, hey, we could have
this situation where it's actually happening, but then our sci
(30:51):
fi is coloring the experience as well. And then there's
this other individual, and this guy is really fascinating John E. Mac. Yeah,
this guy is all over the alien abduction literature, and
rightly so. He had a bestseller in the early nineties
about the research that he was doing. We We're gonna
go in a lot into Johnny Mac. Yeah. So he
was a psychiatrist and a parapsychologist. I mean, he kind
(31:14):
of started out as more of a pure skeptic, but
then as he he moved along, he's researching, he's talking
to individuals. He ends up taking on this more of
a this more of the spiritual model of what's happening.
Is he's seeing it as a spirit spiritual experimental phenomenon
in keeping with past quote visionary encounters experienced by humans
around the world, which on one hand is saying, you know,
(31:36):
that's what we've been saying, like clearly we've been having
the same experiences throughout human history, and we just wrap
it up in different rappers. But he ends up saying
that there's something there is something truly amazing happening beyond
like human understanding. Mac is one of these figures we
come across these characters occasionally. They're sort of like stuff
(31:57):
to blow your mind icons, like the sort of legendary figures.
And he actually passed away in two thousand and four,
but I'm thinking of like Sasha Shulgun or John C.
Lily or Jack Parsons. Right, he's like these thinkers that
were like they had one leg in science and one
leg and something else, right, And he's kind of like that, Yeah, yeah,
he really has a leg in both both areas. He's
(32:19):
able to I think piss off people Bethides exactly. So
I ran across a Nova interview with him, and he
said that one of our our problems is that we
want to explain alien reduction, and phenomenon is either a
literal encounter or with aliens, or or some sort of
a spiritual situation. And he argues that it's something in between,
or it could be something in between. So I have
(32:39):
a quote here from him, he says quote. So the
simple answer would be, yes, it's both. It's both literally
physically happening to a degree, and it's also some kind
of a psychological spiritual experience occurring and originating perhaps in
another dimension. And so the phenomenon stretches us, or it
asks us to stretch, to open to realities that are
(33:00):
not simply the literal physical world, but to extend to
the possibility that there are other unseen realities from which
our consciousness are, if you will. Learning processes over the
past several hundred years have closed us off. So I
think that's uh. I'm surprised this guy doesn't didn't really
(33:20):
amass a full cult following, like a pure religious following
based on the way he was navigating like both interpretations here. Yeah,
I told you this before we came to the studio. Actually,
I read an interesting bio piece about him and then
other researchers. So both McNally and Clancy, who I've been
siting throughout these two episodes, were also at Harvard University
(33:42):
at the same time Mac was. There was conflict between
their their views about the alien abduction experience. It was
interesting in that piece they described the alien abductees that
Mac worked with as being like acolytes to him, like
though the way that he was dreaming what was happening
to them was so appealing that it it did almost
(34:04):
have a kind of cultish quality to it. Yes, Samaris summarizes.
She says, the main drive of people like Mac, Jacobs,
and Hopkins is to assure us that these are not
the delusions of psychotic people, primarily women, but rather the
true experiences of normal, everyday people suffering great anguish, silence
(34:24):
and stress about having absolutely no control over repeated violations
of their psyches and bodies. And I think that's that's
rather telling you, because you also get down to I
think the skeptical view here and saying, well, you know,
what kind of trauma is, what kind of feelings about
your place in the world are at the heart of
of these the of you know, false memories and you know,
(34:45):
fantastic experiences that are reported. I think, let me see
if I can try to frame this in a way,
although you know he's passed, so I don't know how
well I can do this. But it seems to me
that what mac was trying to do was begin a
lie and of inquiry into what was going on with
alien abduction that wasn't immediately hostile in its skepticism, right,
(35:07):
That wasn't immediately saying you're a liar or you've been
duped by an evil hypnotherapist, right Like. He was trying
to unpack it in a way that had sympathy for
these victims, right, Um, But he wasn't quite all the
way there to the like the empirical unpacking that McNally
(35:28):
and clancy got to with sleep paralysis and false memory implantation. Yeah.
And I think also, I mean, just based on that
quote that I read earlier, you can tell that there
is a there is a like a spiritual element to
his interpretation that is just not going to sit well
with with skeptical audiences. Now, another point that to some
Mars makes is she says that that then in all
(35:50):
of these alien induction snares, there are other elements of
quotes quote progressive social order, racism, homophobia, heterosexual angst, fear
of white domin, desire by white people to be dominated
and taken, gender dysphoria. So she and she also argues
that there's a you know, obviously a lot of sexual
abuse and a general co opting a feminist sexual abuse
(36:13):
language by males. He's interesting interesting to end up with
these the scenarios where a you know, white middle class
American male in the seventies or eighties is having this
experience where he's lost control and is sexually violated by
this outside force. And so you can instantly think to
a number of different cultural elements that could be they
(36:36):
could be influencing that, Like is this individual like is
he afraid of the is there some sort of like
a deep hidden fear of of like what's going on
in the in the gay rights movement, cultural change in
that regard, Just trying to wrap your head around that,
like wrapping your like if you're I'm again like I'm
picturing like a real like Madman type character here is
(36:58):
like very straight laced, kind of by the books suburban,
straight white man who's in power, right, and like trying
to wrap your head around gay rights, are trying to
wrap your head around what was going on with women
in the seventies when they are coming forward with stories
about sexual abuse, stuff that you used to be covered up,
you know. I mean like maybe that's what what part
(37:21):
of this was, was them trying to understand it by
by making it about themselves. Yeah, yeah, trying to like
women's rights being a big issue and and and uh,
you know, reproductive rights especially, like you can imagine this
being sort of the weird treatment of that. I mean,
that's that's one of the the academic reads on Ridley
Scott's Alien is that you're you're taking a lot of
(37:43):
like sexual violence and sexual biology for the female and
transforming it into a horrific male experience. Yeah, I feel
like there is uh and maybe this is out there
and we just because there was so much research we
couldn't tap into it. But there's like definitely a feminist
read on on this whole phenomenon, right that you could
(38:05):
kind of take a look at it and see, like
why is it that like, for instance, like what you
were saying earlier that like in these stories, women are
the ones who are self reporting more than men, but
then subsequently media representations are more about men than they
are about women. Like there's there's all kinds of things
that are related to gender with this, which is not
something I expected to come away with when we dove
(38:26):
into the research. Yeah, I mean neither. Now. The other
thing that's interesting here too, is she is hearkening back
to the study that we briefly mentioned about Baumeister and Newman,
where they were essentially saying that, Yeah, this whole thing
is about essentially the victims or masochists and they just
like want to be dominated. Yes, And you know this
comes up if we both end up seeing fire in
(38:48):
the sky. I know this will come into play when
we look at the at the scene where the aliens
abduct the individual and perform experiments, because it is it
is very bondage. Is that essentially that like the the
individuals like sealed under a vinyl sheet and then they
still like cut through the sheet in order to probe them.
But they seem to do a pretty fantastic job of
(39:10):
drawing upon actual alien abduction related experiences, sort of Nightmarrick
Cinematic Dream scenarios and also B D s M culture
like they somehow wrap it all up in a in
a in a fresh package. I'm looking forward to checking
it out. I noticed it's on Amazon Prime, so I'm
gonna try to watch. Uh and and again I haven't
(39:32):
seen it, but from what I saw in the trailer,
Communion seems to have a sort of similar vibe to
it as well. Oh yeah, Communion is a that's that
is a whole uh, that's a that's a whole kettle
official into itself with the author Whitley Strieber Um, it
was like publication. Communion a true story was the name
of the book, and then was made into a film
with the Christopher Walkin. I write the trailer looks a
(39:55):
little ludicrous because of our sort of associations with Christopher
Walkin now in that voy but it seems menacing. Yeah. Yeah,
it came up in some of the research here because
I know that he was kind of he was kind
of a divisive figure even within like alien abduction communities.
There were there was at least one of one of
(40:15):
the There was one critic in particular I think that
was was not happy with the like the sexual aspects
of his uh, his alleged encounters, and they were just
kind they were kind of ridiculing him within the alien
abduction community. All right, well, I'm gonna try to do
my homework before we hit a trailer talk, which would
be the trailer talk will actually come out probably the
day after this episode airs, but for you, for all
(40:38):
of you, I'll have like a good seven days. Now.
I want to come back around to Mac again, because
there's this interesting thing that's going on at Harvard University.
Back in two thousand three, it was ground zero for
this debate over what was actually going on with alien abduction.
So you've got John Mac on one side, and Susan
Clancy and Richard McNally and another, and they're all there.
(41:00):
Mac argued that the experiences couldn't be understood in the
Western rationalist tradition of science, while you've got McNally and
clancy countering, well, actually, Mac, the answer to alien abduction
is is very simple. And then they outline, you know,
they say, we don't think the abductees are lying, but
that Mac himself is just entertaining far fetched ideas in relation. Right,
(41:21):
He's not really, he doesn't seem like he's really using
Okham's razor here, right, yeah, yeah, and uh so this
was actually quite a problem for Harvard University, is so
to be clear here though, I don't want to malign mac.
This guy performed hypnotherapy on his patients and published thirteen
of those encounters in his book Abduction, which I mentioned
earlier as being very popular. He was a firm believer
(41:43):
in that practice, and he believed he retrieved his own
memories of his mother's death, which occurred when he was
eight months old. So that's how much of a proponent
he was for hypnotherapy. He was said to prize the
experiential narrative over empirical data, so you can see where
scientists would feel like, well, that's definitely drawing a line
(42:05):
in the sand that we don't want to be on
that side of. Uh now. So to give you a
sort of outline of his Harvard experience, he was on
the faculty there since nineteen fifty five, and then in
nineteen eighty two he founded the Center for Psychology and
Social Change. There, his work often straddled conventional science and
altered states of consciousness. Sounds just like our kind of guy.
(42:26):
When he founded the Department of psychiatry at the Cambridge
Hospital in nineteen sixty nine. This ended up attracting innovative
Eastern oriented psychiatrists, and then Mac himself studied the guided
meditation of Werner Erhard as well as Stanislav Gravs holotropic breathwork,
which essentially seeks to induce an altered state through rapid breathing.
(42:49):
And the faculty at Harvard were not thrilled with all this,
and especially with his alien abduction research, so they actually
had a committee conduct a fifteen month investigation into his work.
But at the end of all that there was no
no formal censure. Essentially, the interviews with like the head
of the department, he was just like, look, we just
want him to be empirical about the way he's going
(43:10):
about this, that's all um. But I don't think they
could find anything that was like enough for them to
you know, get rid of him. But to be clear here,
Mac distanced himself from whether or not aliens were real.
Every time somebody asked him about that, he said, you know,
what I'm more interested in is a consensus reality that
we've created that precludes us from ever entertaining the idea
(43:34):
of alien abductions, so he's more interested again in the
sort of cultural reality. So this is kind of fascinating
this guy, like he was countercultural in his own way,
but at the same time, he wasn't like fully dipping
his toe into the alien abduction experience. And then he's got,
you know, later in his career, he's got these colleagues
(43:56):
who show up at Harvard and they're like, actually, like,
we think we've got the answer here. Looks looks pretty straightforward.
We think it's a sleep paralysis combined with magical thinking,
combined with false memory implantation. Yeah, and then he's saying, no,
I'm not quite I'm not quite ready to admit that.
I think there's this there's this middle ground, and we
haven't quite explored it. Yeah. I think all of this
(44:18):
presents an interesting vision though, that that, you know, that
of people who felt the weight of of a century
of technological and social change, who then experienced something or
assume the experience in varying ways that allowed them to
testify to it physically. You know, it's almost I really
almost get the sense of of people, and not just
(44:40):
like scattered individuals, but like large groups of people. In
the second half of the twentieth century who really felt
lost and unmoored and just powerless in what was happening,
and this was this was kind of a way to
to connect part of them to a to to some
sort of a guiding force. Yeah. And while I've never
had any kind of alien abduction experience growing up in
(45:03):
that period of time, and you know, I'm an adult now,
I look back and I have sympathy for that, Like
there's a certain amount of that that makes sense, you know,
the feeling like there wasn't anything that was really grounding
me to the community I existed in. Um, let's do
a quick review of what we came to here, and
then I think we can close out this two parter. So,
(45:25):
all right, what do we understand about alien abduction? Scientifically,
there doesn't appear to be any difference between abductees and
the general population in terms of their psychopathology and their
personality type. So we established that. But there do seem
to be individual factors that can increase the likelihood of
people developing false memories for alien abduction, And the biggest
(45:47):
of these is the belief and interest in paranormal phenomenon.
When you combine that with a susceptibility to hypnotic suggestions.
Individuals can interpret events like sleep paralysis as alien in
abduction events, then it's possible for abductees to recover those
false memories that have been accidentally implanted over the course
(46:08):
of hypnotherapy. And I think you know from that review
that I was going over from Finkelstein, the big thing
to take away from this is further research really seems
to be needed into the hypnotherapy aspect of it, which
was John max sort of realm of inquiry, right, like
he was really into that. But what we need more
research on is sort of the dynamics of how the
(46:30):
hypnotherapy is interacting with the human consciousness. Yeah, and of
course there's so many questions than about suggestibility, and yeah, uh,
this is definitely one of those episodes where I feel
like we we kind of end with more questions than
we began. I mean, I'm still very much in the
(46:50):
in the category of of saying that I do not
think that aliens have visited our world, and I do
not think that the they have abducted people. But that
doesn't make what's going on any less amazing and interesting
and and and ultimately like a little mysterious because we
have to try and piece it all together, both the
(47:11):
scientific side of it and the cultural side of it.
And that's that's where I think the really fascinating mysteries
here are. And this is a phrase that stuff to
blow your mind. Listeners are probably sick of me making
on the show, But it seems to me like these
are canaries in a coal mine, right that, like when
you've got a subset of the population that is all
they're coming up with this narrative that's incredibly similar and
(47:32):
we don't know where it's coming from. Rather than dismiss it,
look at it and say, what is this saying about us? Like,
what's what's going on? And but I don't mean that
this is like a warning bell like oh, aliens are
real and they're gonna attack or something. That's not what
I mean, but that there's something going on psychologically that
we need to understand better about ourselves before we perceive.
(47:55):
Because the other side of it, too is there were
not only the individuals that that claim to have these experiences,
but everybody else was eating it up and it still
is eating it up, you know. So it's even if
you're not directly participating in the in the experience, you're
still engaging in a vicarious experience with it, Like there's
something about that alien abduction narrative that still speaks to
(48:18):
to so many denizens of the century. Yeah, I think
I mentioned this to you. But Close Encounters of the
Third Kind is coming up on its fort anniversary and
they're rereleasing it in theaters for a week, and my
wife wants to go see it because she has fond
memories of that film. And I really thought to myself
for a second, I was like, I love that movie,
(48:38):
but is that Is that a movie that like a
lot of people want to go see in the theater again?
And clearly it must be if they're going to put
the effort into that kind of marketing. And it makes
you think, you know, forty years later, there's still enough interest,
even in that fictional version of it, that there's got
to be something going on. There's some kind of bell
that's ringing deep in the back of our mind. Mhm,
(49:01):
al right, Well, as do what that bell is and
why it's ringing. We would we'd love to hear from
everyone out there, and we we'd specially love to hear
from you. If you yourself have had a UFO or
alien abduction experience, and I'd love to just I'd love
to read what you have to say in terms of
you know, self analysis of that and dissecting that, like
(49:22):
what do you think was going on there? Um? You know,
why did you why did you experience it? And how
have you how have you dealt with it since then?
And I really hope that like the way we've presented
these two episodes on alien abduction have have shown that
we are sympathetic to this experience, but that we're trying
to look at it through the lens of the research
that's been done on it. Yeah. I mean, just because
(49:43):
I don't think the aliens are real, it doesn't mean
that I think that the experience is invalid or that
the experience is not real for a variety of reasons
that we discussed in these episodes. So if you want
to get in touch with us about that stuff, here
are some ways you can do so. We're all over
social media. We're on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on Tumbler,
and we're on Instagram. Uh, you can also visit our
(50:04):
website stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where
you're gonna find uh these episodes, You're gonna find all
of our blog posts and all of our videos. In fact,
uh we do have an older episode back when Julia
was co host about alien abduction too, so it might
be nice to listen to that and kind of see,
like over the years, like what the transformation has been
(50:25):
in in our perspective. Yeah, yeah, and uh hey, and
on Facebook, we have the the the Discussion module. Check
that out. That's our Facebook group. If you want a
more you know, personal interaction with other stuff to blow
your mind fans and with the with the host, then
you can go there. It's a new project we've rolled
out and so far I think people are digging it.
(50:45):
So so check it out and see if it's for
you or if you just want to write us personally.
We'll have a like intimate discussion one on one that
would be on email and it's that blow the mind
at how stuff works dot com for more on this
(51:08):
and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff Works
dot com. M
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Seger.
And this is the second part of our episodes on
alien abduction. Now, if you haven't listened to the first part,
(00:23):
I highly recommend you go back and listen to that.
That's where we really established the grounding for what we're
talking about here. What is the common narrative surrounding alien
abductions and then what is the more common sort of
scientific explanation for what's going on. We looked at false
memory and plantation. We talked about ideas surrounding sleep paralysis,
(00:43):
things like that. This episode is going to be more
focused on the cultural fabric surrounding the twentie century and
how it kind of led us to this experience really
being popular between the sixties leading up to the nineties
and then kind of fading out after that. Yeah, and
this is a yeah, this this is a really chewy
part of this, uh, this exploration of of alien abduction,
(01:07):
Because on one hand, if you're looking at it from
a purely skeptical point of view and saying, yes, this
is just uh, you know phenomena occurring within the brain.
This is the memory, false memories and memory distortions. Then
you still have to say, well, how does this narrative
get stitched together? Where does this ultimately absurd narrative come
together of these sort of embryonic creatures arriving and flying
(01:29):
ships and uh in sticking probes into our bodies? Like
where does this come from? And what does it say
about the culture from which it emerges? And even if
you're not skeptical on all of this, if you're more
of a believer, like even some of the believers, uh,
you know, voice their concerns about about the various cultural
(01:50):
and media elements that could be coloring alleged actual abduction experiences.
There's like a weird feedback loop going on, which came
first the alien abduction or the science fiction after it?
And then you know what I kept thinking of was
that they they talk about how this really started in
the forties, right, And then I was thinking about the
(02:10):
nineteen fifties was really that big boom in comic books
for like science fiction e horror kind of comics where
like Mars attacks style aliens would come there earth, right,
and like have like, uh, what those like weird ray guns,
you know, stuff like that. Science fiction was exploding and
and and also this this rap That's one of the
(02:30):
big things I think is that the twentieth century is
the ground from which all of this emerges, and it's
a time of just such rapid advancement technological advancement, like
this is the this is the the century in which
humans split the atom. Uh, this is this century where
the distances between the various corners of the earth shrank
(02:51):
and the advent of of of transportation, technology, mass communication
uh comes together. And then it's it's also just a
time of enormous social change. And as we all know,
like when there's enormous social changes that that's occurring, you know,
rather swiftly. Uh. This this creates um, This can create anxiety,
this can create this certainly creates hope. But it's going
(03:15):
to have a cultural effect on people as they're trying
to come to terms with what the world is doing
and what the world is becoming and how they fit
into that world. Right. And the way that these cultural
effects seem to be taking places through what we referred
to briefly in the last episode as false memories, Right,
(03:35):
This is the terminology that's being used to describe this.
Psychologists believe these stories, they're they're distorting things like childhood
memories where an alien is standing in for a person
who abused the the abductee. Right. But then this has
been countered by abductee as you say, well I never
experienced child abuse, right, And then you've got false memory
(03:57):
implantation as an idea that it's not that you're remembering
something that didn't happen, it's that during the the therapy
session in which you were trying to figure out what happened,
somebody accidentally implanted a false memory. There. It's that easy. Yeah. Now,
one of the possible explanations that I I I'm not
saying i'd buy into this. I think it's an interesting
(04:20):
read on what could be occurring. This comes from psychologist
Frederick the Malmstrom. Yeah. So, in in this theory that's
presented by Melmstrom, the abductees are remembering their births and
the spaceship that they're seeing is actually a symbol of
their mother's birth canal. Now again, here's another one that's
been refuted by abductees because they say, well, I want
(04:43):
under a cesarean birth, So how would I possibly remember
the birth canal? Why would you possibly have any trauma
about that? Yeah? Exactly. You know who would have loved
this theory? Huh giga, Yeah, yes, very much so. But
but you know, when you break down the science of it,
I think it has a lot going forward because you
have to consider newborns have limited visual capabilities. They can't
(05:04):
see very far or in very much detail, and color
distinctions barely register. So this stigmatism smears the images that
they behold. So what do they see when they look
at their mom's face. They see two large, dark eyes
and an otherwise blurred and colorless face. So you can
make the argument that when that you know that that cooing,
wide eyed baby is looking up at you, mom or
(05:27):
dad or anybody getting caregiver, they're seeing a gray alien
staring down at them. And so the argument here is
the other we're we're drawing on that that old memory,
that's that's sort of rising to the surface. Uh, perhaps
in combination with any number of the scenarios that we
discussed in part one, something to remember the next time,
(05:48):
like a friend or a co worker brings in a
newborn and everybody just huddles around that newborn and just
you know, gets right on top of it in its
personal space. You are potentially creating a future alien abductee experience. Yeah,
that kid's gonna end up just being addicted to XCOM
based on what he experienced here today. But actually getting
(06:09):
into the false memory implantation aspect here, it's important to
recognize that hypnotherapists that are involved in this, they're actually
earnest about their desire to help a patient. I think
it's really easy for us to say, like either or
the patients lying or the hypnotherapist is like maliciously manipulating them. Right,
that doesn't seem to be the case. But experimental psychology
is shown that it's actually relatively easy to implant false
(06:32):
memories in an individual's mind, and in the study, researchers
were able to implant false memories of getting lost in
a shopping mall in participants. Another two thousand and one
study showed that even when events were unlikely, for instance,
an abduction by aliens, they can be implanted as false memories.
Suggestive information presented to the participants can actually increase the
(06:57):
plausibility of us Supposedly imply possible event to them. And
this was further shown in a two thousand nine study
by Utgar, Candele, and merkel Bach oh and also Wade
for four authors there, and they showed that you can
implant false memories of alien abduction by paying special attention
to the way that participants described the event during an interview.
(07:21):
And what they would do is they this also seems
crazy to me. Uh. They used children as participants, and
I wrote in the notes what they would take kids,
and they showed them the event during an interview. They
showed them these fake newspaper articles and that would allow
them to implant memories of alien abduction being a thing.
(07:42):
Then the kids, these were seven to twelve year olds,
and thirty three percent of them developed false memories during
the first interview. Then they did a secondary interview, another
six percent developed false memories. The younger children were more
likely to develop false memories and the older chidren were
But then get this, children were equally likely to develop
(08:04):
a false memory about alien abduction as they were to
develop a false memory about choking on candy. So they
had a control group where they were trying to also
implant memories of them choking on candy It worked the
same way, so the unlikelihood didn't seem to be a factor.
Why do you have to just throw in from my
(08:24):
own experience that the memories of small children. It's strange
because I'll take my my my son to school, pick
him up, and I'll say, hey, what what do you
do today? I don't know, I don't remember, like just
note and then he'll say, hey, do you remember that
dead spider we found like three years ago? You know,
bring up this this this minute memories like why are
you believe? Why do you remember that? Why are you
(08:45):
remembering it now? And then there's also there also be
there also incidents where there will there will be false memories.
Either it will be something that he doesn't remember but
we have told him about, and then he ends up
he thinks he has a memory of it, or will
be some thing that he just kind of completely fabric
like he knows it happened, and then he has a
memory that he's put together off it. And I think
(09:06):
if we, if each of us thinks back to our
earliest memories, we run into that that situation. You have
to ask yourself, is this something that I actually remember happening?
Is this something that my parents told me about, and
I'm kind of I've made a memory out of being
told what I should have experienced. Yeah, I've been thinking
about this lately. Um, My sister's grandfather in law just
(09:28):
passed away, and she's been trying to explain to her
three year old son they live in that they lived
in the house with her grandfather in law, and she's
trying to explain to her son where papa went. And
he's three. He doesn't have an understanding of the difference
between life and death, right, he's still struggling with that concept.
So she says to him, Papa is in heaven. Now, um,
(09:53):
you know that it gives him an idea of like, Okay,
there's this physical place called heaven that that he went to.
I'll see him again there or something like that, right,
And but she's having a really hard time with it.
And then he'll he'll occasionally like walk in the living
room and be like, where's Papa, And then he'll go,
He'll he'll self correct and he'll go, oh, wait, that's right,
(10:13):
He's in heaven. And then just kind of, you know,
trod on and keep doing his little kids stuff, and uh,
it keeps making me think, like, well, from my experience,
I don't really retain any memories from that age, But
is this something that he's going to remember later on
in his teenage years and he'll be like, oh, yeah,
like I had this firmly embedded idea of heaven as
(10:36):
a as a place on earth kind of intended. Well,
you know, I actually I know somebody who had you know,
similar everybody has situations I think where and I'll remember
the family dies while the child is too younger really understood,
and so they told him all of that, you know
this individuals in the sky now, like he went to
the sky. But I think it ended, if I remember correctly,
it ended up making the child a little afraid, more
(10:58):
afraid of roller coasters because they did not want to
go into the sky. That this guy was like where
everybody who had died? So creepy idea. Yeah, well, alright,
So all of this stuff leads scientists to the conclusion
that the improbability of an event isn't actually a leading
factor in false memory implantation success. And this leads us
(11:20):
back to good old McNally and Clancy, who we talked
about a lot last episode. They researched memory function in
women who believed they had recovered memories of childhood's sexual abuse,
and they actually found that such victims were more likely
to create false memories of non traumatic events when they
were visiting in the laboratory then women who had always
(11:42):
remembered being sexually abused or women who had never been abused.
So to study this further without unethically inserting false memories
of trauma into people, this is why they got into
the alien abductee study business. So they said, let's amass
a group of people who have these memories but that
they're unlikely to have actually occurred. Uh. And I want
(12:05):
to note here to very little of the research on
alien abductions actually focuses on the practice of the hypnotherapy itself.
Um So the like broader review of all this stuff
essentially recommends, look, we need to do further research until
the dynamics of hypnotherapy before we really understand the full
parameters of what's happening here now. In part one of
(12:28):
this two partner on alien abduction, we we talked a
good bit about media scripts cultural scripts, the idea that
when something strange occurs, you have these pre existing narratives
to draw upon to explain it, be it something to
be you know, magical ferries or ghosts or alien abduction,
(12:48):
and uh, there's a there's actually an interesting argument here that, like,
it's easy to get lost in the space age sci
fi aspects of alien abduction and think, well, this is
something wholly new. This is something that they just you know,
appears in the wake of the Second World War and
becomes the new cultural script for paranormal experience. But it
has a lot in common with older models as well.
(13:10):
And this is explored in a in an article titled
He's making me feel things in my body that I
don't feel. This is by Patricia Felicia Barbado and it
was published in the Journal of American Culture the subtitle
The Body as Battleground in Accounts of Alien Abduction. So
she makes the case that the late twentieth century alien
(13:30):
abduction stories essentially powered by the seventeenth through nineteenth century
American obsession with the Native American captivity narrative. So, I
don't know if everyone's familiar with this. If you've watched
a lot of Westerns, you may have come across this,
And certainly if you've if you've studied history. I imagine
this has come up on stuff you missed in history
(13:50):
class o our sister podcast, Uh here at how stuff works.
But basically, you had you had these these in students
where and then the resulting tales and of course fictionalizations
in many cases where a Caucasian woman was abducted and
brutalized by by Native American tribes and in many cases
(14:12):
absorbed irreversibly into their culture. I want to say this
comes up in the the the John Wayne movie The Searchers.
I've never seen The Searchers, but I immediately jumped to
a more recent movie Bone Tomahawk, which you and I
both sort of enjoyed. Yeah, that plays on a similar narrative,
the idea that the you know, the the cultural other,
(14:33):
the barbaric cultural other, has come and taken someone away.
And there's a lot of fictionalization there. But of course
there were incidents of of things like this occurring, and
then there were the the the idea of reclaiming someone
from that ended up being far more problematic because either
they were irreversibly assimilated into that culture to varying degrees,
or there was just there was at the very least
(14:55):
a lot of trauma had taken place. Uh maybe the
most like popular film that people would be familiar with
that that that this trope showed up in his Dances
with Wolves, because, um is Mary McCormick. Her character his Caucasian,
and she's been living with a native tribe since she
was a kid, like basically raised among them. Yeah, okay,
(15:16):
so I either haven't seen her, it's been so long
that I don't remember anything about it. But yeah, I
think that that very much plays on it. And the
thing is that these there were accounts of these abductions
published in the thousands, so this is like the Boogeyman
of that time. Yeah, yeah, it was everywhere. And um
so the idea here is the captive woman in these
accounts serves as a kind of physical battleground for the
premise of noble white superiority over the you know, the
(15:39):
dark savage tribal other from beyond the frontier. So the
racist boundary here only exists artificially, of course, but the
captivity experience tears apart the fiction in no time. Yeah.
So here's what Barbados has to say. Quote. But while
accounts of alien abduction present us with stark racial, spatial
and culture world differences human and alien, Earth and outer space,
(16:03):
technology and nature that are reminiscent of Indian captivity narrative.
They do so only to turn our attention to the
way that the captive's body completely fails to impose boundaries
between them. It's interesting like that, like we used to
other human beings that were from different cultures, and then
(16:23):
we hit this point in the twentieth century where I mean,
it's not to say that we don't demonize other people,
because we certainly still do, but that we became sort
of more of a you know what if you want
to call it global village enough that you could sympathize
with most other cultures, so then the other ing had
to turn into something outside of Earth. Yeah. So I
(16:46):
mean that's that's just one one example of the kind
of like deep cultural and analyzes that that they can
and do take place concerning the alien aductive narrative, like
not only where does it come from, but why does
it have so much so much power over us? I mean,
you get into this a lot with with fiction, right
where you have like revenge tales. Revenge tails have always
(17:07):
been popular. The revenge tale itself hasn't really changed, but
it we just continually update it for our our modern
our modern world and whatever the latest technological or cultural
trend happens to be. Yeah, this is true. I think
you could probably like look at any year's worth of
films and you can like drop a pin and be like, Okay,
there's the revenge tail of the year, right, Like I
(17:30):
guess this year's would be like Atomic Blonde. Yeah. I
haven't seen it yet, but but it just me I
want to see a like a version of The Searchers
with alien abduction, but not cowboys versus aliens. Something I
think you. I think you just like like opened up
a bank account for somebody in Hollywood. All right, Well,
on that note, let's take a break and when we
come back, we will we'll dive deeper into the angst
(17:53):
of the twentieth century. All right, we're back. So there's
this twenty sixteen Boston Globe article that had a really
interesting take on the alien abduction phenomena, and it found
the following themes were essentially social currents that all fed
into alien abductions over the last few decades. The first
(18:17):
one we already mentioned space exploration in the fifties and sixties.
Then you've got the Cold War that's inspiring a fear
of invasions. You get stuff like invasion of the body snatchers, etcetera.
And then out of body experiences that we were having,
whether it be from mysticism or from drugs. Oh yeah,
I mean when you factor in the rise of the
(18:38):
counterculture movement and psychedelic experience on top of all of
this totally, and then the nineteen eighties fear of strangers.
And this is something that was easy for me to
forget because you know, we grew up in the eighties,
but obviously it wasn't like that before then, right there. Uh,
But there were so many stories about child abduction and
sexual molestation being reported in the news that this became
(18:59):
like a common cultural narrative. So you get all four
of those together, you you, you know, stir them up
in a pot together, and you get a perfect brew
for alien abduction stories. Now here's an interesting thing again,
X Files fan over here. I didn't know this. Apparently
Chris Carter was at San Diego Comic Con one year.
Chris Carter is the guy who was the showrunner and
(19:20):
creator of The X Files and he said, you know
why the show stopped working, It was because of nine eleven,
And he said the mood wasn't right anymore, that like
there was something about nine eleven that made the like
the magic of the X Files stick that was gone.
I don't know, I've watched a lot of X Files.
(19:41):
I think the show would pretty much petered out. Well, yeah,
it's not like we we abandoned magical the narratives after exactly. Mean,
certainly there was probably more of a mean, did did
stuff like uh, what was it twenty four? Did that
come out post nine level? Yeah? I'm pretty sure. So
maybe there was. I could see where there was an
opening for for stories that sort of you know, delivered
(20:03):
the type of content that might resonate more in the
wake of nine eleven. But certainly we still were into aliens,
were still into ghosts, and I mean all the ghost
Hunter shows seemed to have come sprung up in the
wake of very much. Did you ever watch that show Fringe?
I I watched a little of it. It looked it
was one of those shows that that looked really cool,
but I just didn't get hooked in it. It was fun.
It took me a while to like really get cemented
(20:24):
into it. But once I'd say, like after the second season,
I was like a die hard follower of it. But um,
that show did a good job of taking nine eleven's
trauma and mixing it in with the like general paranormal
stuff that the X Files was playing around with. Yeah. Um,
And I think that that is probably part of why
(20:46):
I was successful. But also I have to say, Chris
Carter uh just wasn't writing great stuff anymore. Man. I mean,
if you saw any of that X Files revival last year,
like all the episodes that he wrote were just like
cringe worthy, Whereas like the other guys who came back
to some of the best work, like Darren Morgan who
was talking about Last Time, Glenn Morrigan, and um, I
(21:08):
believe it's James Wong. Okay, Well, you know another source
that that I was looking at in terms of figuring
out the cultural residents of all of this, uh is
a wonderful paper and this is available online if you
look it up. It's called is It Tomorrow or Just
the End of Time? UFO Culture and Cultural Anxiety, And
(21:28):
this is by Connie Smarris and she's primarily a photographer
and video artist based out of l A. But she
put together this wonderful paper that it references a lot
of like deeper literature on it, but I think she
does a wonderful job which is sort of summarizing what's
some of what might be going on. Yeah, I read
over part of this too, and from my perspective, it
looked like she was doing the opposite of what the
(21:51):
literature review was in academia. She was reviewing the phenomena,
but not looking at all the like academic articles, but
more looking at the speriential narratives and compiling them together.
So she was part of the article she was pointing to.
Intruders Foundation funded Roper Pole in Truders Foundation is a
(22:11):
you know, a group that was you know, aligned with
alien abduction experiences and you know, the study of them, Uh,
anyway to determine the percentage of the US population abducted
by aliens and some of the we already hit on
some of the big findings that have come out over
the year in terms of percentage of the population that's
expressed these things. But here's some of the more particular
(22:32):
findings that she highlights here. It's a largely industrialized northern
hemisphere phenomenon mostly a US phenomenon. Abductees are mostly white
in middle class and uh, you know, it's worth noting
again that the first major case of alleged alien abduction
was that of Barney and Betty Hill. This was an
African American male and a white female, right, As we
(22:55):
mentioned last episode, that plays against the stereotype, right yeah, yeah,
And because for one thing, the majority of abductees are
when are actually women, though most of the movies and
TV representations involved men, And of course that just gets
into the you know, the sort of the sexist nature
of our our narratives, especially for most of the twentieth century.
(23:16):
If you're gonna make a TV show or a movie
about it or a book, it's going to be based
around a male um male character, right yeah, yeah, but
that ends up sort of skewing your public idea of
who's experiencing these in the real world. And there's also
the like this is related to the shark thing we
were talking about last time, there's like a kind of
like gross, I don't know, voyeurism about like the alien
(23:40):
abduction experience being performed on a woman, right in the
same way that like a woman in a bikini getting
eaten by a great white shark is somehow voaristic as well.
I can't quite put my finger on it. There's something
weird going on there. Well, it's like you're taking a
you're taking a potentially you know, unset only in an
(24:00):
unsavory real world scenario, and you're like, you're just subbing
in a fantastic element. So you're left with kind of
the same traumatic event. To your point that reproduction is
a common theme in these abduction tales. They might be
like a pregnancy tests, some sort of a false pregnancy,
egg harvesting, uh, you know, some sort of reproduction tinkering,
(24:21):
which again that that is something that is falls in
line with you know, incubine and succubie accounts and folklore
you know, throughout European history. But but in any rate,
there's the there's also this standardized daily and description. We've
talked about, this sort of embryonic looking grays. You see this, uh,
this use of telepathy, especially between like the leader alien
(24:43):
and the subject. The anal probing of males, which we
haven't we haven't spent a lot of time with that.
I feel like you gotta work up to anal probing. Well,
there's also Connie Samaris's article on this. The wording is
wonderful and how she she talks about how that it's
so we're so specifically worried about male abductees being probed,
(25:03):
and yet there's very little talk about female abductees being probed. Yeah, exactly. Uh. Now,
on top of the probing, sometimes there's this element of
seduction by the examiner alien And most of these points
out are vastly heterosexual in nature, like to the point
where it would seem, based on these accounts that aliens
never abduct like a you know, a gay, lesbian or
(25:27):
bisexual individual. But so so we have to sort of
factor that into the whole you know, psychoanalysis of what's
going on uh PTSD nightmares afterward, we've already touched on that. Um.
This is interesting the idea that sometimes these run in
the family, that there's like a family legacy of alien
abduction scenarios. So it's like Jaws, like that the shark
(25:50):
keeps coming after the same family members. Yeah, Like, I
this is something I want to see an alien abduction
fiction more the idea that it runs in the family,
like it puts a weird spin on it. Then there's
the introduction of the idea that aliens will eventually bring
about wide sweeping social change and this is This is
interesting because it brings up the idea like, is this
in a way you know that this is this is
(26:12):
taking the trauma and the nightmare and twisting it into
something more hopeful, something fantastic, but also getting into this
idea that is that the only way that that sometimes
we can perceive sweeping social change, and it has to
come from the outside and it can't come from within.
This reminds me of a quote that I've mentioned on
the show before, uh, and I'm having a hard time
(26:33):
placing where it came from, so sorry listeners, But Uh,
it goes something like this, it's easier for us to
imagine an apocalypse than it is for us to imagine
a positive society that doesn't exist within capitalism, right, Like,
it's so hard to imagine something that's outside of our
frame of reference that the only, no, the only way
(26:54):
we know how to imagine it is, uh, is by
destroying it. Oh. I know it was Frederick Jamison, Who's ah, well,
you know this. This factors into a lot of the
writings about alien abduction and certainly the scenarios where it
takes on this hopeful uh, you know, messengers from beyond um,
you know, coming here to make the world a better place.
That one of the other big elements of the twentieth
(27:14):
century is this angst over what we're doing to the planet,
over over pollution, over over the the threat of nuclear annihilation.
This all comes to hang over even the average individual's head.
And then how do we how do we process that,
and how do we how does it factor into these experiences?
You know what I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go down
(27:35):
a little bit of a sidebar here. But that's why
we did two episodes. Uh, I've been experiencing this lately,
and I haven't I haven't felt this way since like
the I guess early nineties, the Cold War fear of
the nuke, you know, like that was something that I
thought we were done with that I had kind of
gotten to a point in my consciousness where I wasn't
always worrying like, well, it could just happen at any time,
(27:58):
you know, and like um, the fear of nuclear winter
and all all these things that like, you know, you
saw a lot of this manifest in nineteen eighties films,
and now with all this stuff ramping up with North Korea, uh,
between the United States and North Korea. For those that
are in American back and forth, there's our media is
(28:18):
very much like, oh my god, like they've got I
c B M S. What's going to happen? You know,
Like I even like talking to my mother, she was like, well,
you gotta be careful where you live in the United
States now. You don't want to live on the West
Coast because you could just get bombed by the North Koreans.
And I was like, whoa, Like, where did that come from?
You know, um, we're right back there. Yeah, well, I
mean part of the disturbing answer is that, you know,
(28:40):
they're the risk of nuclear war never went away, It's right,
has It has remained this whole time, and and there
have been there have been, you know a number of
very committed individuals working around the world to try and
get us to a better place where it's it's it's
less likely to occur. But the reality is that we
we have these weapons, we have weapons systems set up
to to make it happen at the at any moment,
(29:03):
and those the humans and the systems are both both falliable. So, UM,
I wonder if you're going to start to see a
resurgence in uh, those kind of fears though again in
our fiction, I mean, yeah, I would. It will be
interesting to see if it's just a if it's a
complete rehash of how we manifested those fears before, if
(29:25):
there is some sort of new spin on it that
you know that we can't quite expect. Alright, Well, on
that note, on the note of nuclear annihilation, let's take
another break, and when we come back, we will continue
to discuss uh, this this paper by Connie Samaris and
uh and just the overall alien abduction scenario. Alright, we're back.
(29:47):
So uh. Samaris brings up two key individuals, um and
there their alien of abduction abduction researchers, And I wasn't
really that familiar with either of them, but they're both
fascinating in their own rights. So the is Bob Hopkins.
This is a guy who advocated the physical reality of aliens,
Like he believed that alien abductions were actually happening and
(30:09):
that we should be studying and listening to the individuals
who experienced them and you know, figuring out how to
help them. But he also, interestingly enough, believed that media
representations could be coloring the experiences as well, which I
find interesting because it's, as we've already mentioned, we want
to we tend to want to fall into a you know,
(30:30):
a skeptic or believer uh dichotomy here, the idea that
either alien abduction is happening or it is this you know,
skeptical model where people are having false memories, et cetera.
And even Bud Hopkins, who's more of a literalist here
is or was saying that, well, hey, we could have
this situation where it's actually happening, but then our sci
(30:51):
fi is coloring the experience as well. And then there's
this other individual, and this guy is really fascinating John E. Mac. Yeah,
this guy is all over the alien abduction literature, and
rightly so. He had a bestseller in the early nineties
about the research that he was doing. We We're gonna
go in a lot into Johnny Mac. Yeah. So he
was a psychiatrist and a parapsychologist. I mean, he kind
(31:14):
of started out as more of a pure skeptic, but
then as he he moved along, he's researching, he's talking
to individuals. He ends up taking on this more of
a this more of the spiritual model of what's happening.
Is he's seeing it as a spirit spiritual experimental phenomenon
in keeping with past quote visionary encounters experienced by humans
around the world, which on one hand is saying, you know,
(31:36):
that's what we've been saying, like clearly we've been having
the same experiences throughout human history, and we just wrap
it up in different rappers. But he ends up saying
that there's something there is something truly amazing happening beyond
like human understanding. Mac is one of these figures we
come across these characters occasionally. They're sort of like stuff
(31:57):
to blow your mind icons, like the sort of legendary figures.
And he actually passed away in two thousand and four,
but I'm thinking of like Sasha Shulgun or John C.
Lily or Jack Parsons. Right, he's like these thinkers that
were like they had one leg in science and one
leg and something else, right, And he's kind of like that, Yeah, yeah,
he really has a leg in both both areas. He's
(32:19):
able to I think piss off people Bethides exactly. So
I ran across a Nova interview with him, and he
said that one of our our problems is that we
want to explain alien reduction, and phenomenon is either a
literal encounter or with aliens, or or some sort of
a spiritual situation. And he argues that it's something in between,
or it could be something in between. So I have
(32:39):
a quote here from him, he says quote. So the
simple answer would be, yes, it's both. It's both literally
physically happening to a degree, and it's also some kind
of a psychological spiritual experience occurring and originating perhaps in
another dimension. And so the phenomenon stretches us, or it
asks us to stretch, to open to realities that are
(33:00):
not simply the literal physical world, but to extend to
the possibility that there are other unseen realities from which
our consciousness are, if you will. Learning processes over the
past several hundred years have closed us off. So I
think that's uh. I'm surprised this guy doesn't didn't really
(33:20):
amass a full cult following, like a pure religious following
based on the way he was navigating like both interpretations here. Yeah,
I told you this before we came to the studio. Actually,
I read an interesting bio piece about him and then
other researchers. So both McNally and Clancy, who I've been
siting throughout these two episodes, were also at Harvard University
(33:42):
at the same time Mac was. There was conflict between
their their views about the alien abduction experience. It was
interesting in that piece they described the alien abductees that
Mac worked with as being like acolytes to him, like
though the way that he was dreaming what was happening
to them was so appealing that it it did almost
(34:04):
have a kind of cultish quality to it. Yes, Samaris summarizes.
She says, the main drive of people like Mac, Jacobs,
and Hopkins is to assure us that these are not
the delusions of psychotic people, primarily women, but rather the
true experiences of normal, everyday people suffering great anguish, silence
(34:24):
and stress about having absolutely no control over repeated violations
of their psyches and bodies. And I think that's that's
rather telling you, because you also get down to I
think the skeptical view here and saying, well, you know,
what kind of trauma is, what kind of feelings about
your place in the world are at the heart of
of these the of you know, false memories and you know,
(34:45):
fantastic experiences that are reported. I think, let me see
if I can try to frame this in a way,
although you know he's passed, so I don't know how
well I can do this. But it seems to me
that what mac was trying to do was begin a
lie and of inquiry into what was going on with
alien abduction that wasn't immediately hostile in its skepticism, right,
(35:07):
That wasn't immediately saying you're a liar or you've been
duped by an evil hypnotherapist, right Like. He was trying
to unpack it in a way that had sympathy for
these victims, right, Um, But he wasn't quite all the
way there to the like the empirical unpacking that McNally
(35:28):
and clancy got to with sleep paralysis and false memory implantation. Yeah.
And I think also, I mean, just based on that
quote that I read earlier, you can tell that there
is a there is a like a spiritual element to
his interpretation that is just not going to sit well
with with skeptical audiences. Now, another point that to some
Mars makes is she says that that then in all
(35:50):
of these alien induction snares, there are other elements of
quotes quote progressive social order, racism, homophobia, heterosexual angst, fear
of white domin, desire by white people to be dominated
and taken, gender dysphoria. So she and she also argues
that there's a you know, obviously a lot of sexual
abuse and a general co opting a feminist sexual abuse
(36:13):
language by males. He's interesting interesting to end up with
these the scenarios where a you know, white middle class
American male in the seventies or eighties is having this
experience where he's lost control and is sexually violated by
this outside force. And so you can instantly think to
a number of different cultural elements that could be they
(36:36):
could be influencing that, Like is this individual like is
he afraid of the is there some sort of like
a deep hidden fear of of like what's going on
in the in the gay rights movement, cultural change in
that regard, Just trying to wrap your head around that,
like wrapping your like if you're I'm again like I'm
picturing like a real like Madman type character here is
(36:58):
like very straight laced, kind of by the books suburban,
straight white man who's in power, right, and like trying
to wrap your head around gay rights, are trying to
wrap your head around what was going on with women
in the seventies when they are coming forward with stories
about sexual abuse, stuff that you used to be covered up,
you know. I mean like maybe that's what what part
(37:21):
of this was, was them trying to understand it by
by making it about themselves. Yeah, yeah, trying to like
women's rights being a big issue and and and uh,
you know, reproductive rights especially, like you can imagine this
being sort of the weird treatment of that. I mean,
that's that's one of the the academic reads on Ridley
Scott's Alien is that you're you're taking a lot of
(37:43):
like sexual violence and sexual biology for the female and
transforming it into a horrific male experience. Yeah, I feel
like there is uh and maybe this is out there
and we just because there was so much research we
couldn't tap into it. But there's like definitely a feminist
read on on this whole phenomenon, right that you could
(38:05):
kind of take a look at it and see, like
why is it that like, for instance, like what you
were saying earlier that like in these stories, women are
the ones who are self reporting more than men, but
then subsequently media representations are more about men than they
are about women. Like there's there's all kinds of things
that are related to gender with this, which is not
something I expected to come away with when we dove
(38:26):
into the research. Yeah, I mean neither. Now. The other
thing that's interesting here too, is she is hearkening back
to the study that we briefly mentioned about Baumeister and Newman,
where they were essentially saying that, Yeah, this whole thing
is about essentially the victims or masochists and they just
like want to be dominated. Yes, And you know this
comes up if we both end up seeing fire in
(38:48):
the sky. I know this will come into play when
we look at the at the scene where the aliens
abduct the individual and perform experiments, because it is it
is very bondage. Is that essentially that like the the
individuals like sealed under a vinyl sheet and then they
still like cut through the sheet in order to probe them.
But they seem to do a pretty fantastic job of
(39:10):
drawing upon actual alien abduction related experiences, sort of Nightmarrick
Cinematic Dream scenarios and also B D s M culture
like they somehow wrap it all up in a in
a in a fresh package. I'm looking forward to checking
it out. I noticed it's on Amazon Prime, so I'm
gonna try to watch. Uh and and again I haven't
(39:32):
seen it, but from what I saw in the trailer,
Communion seems to have a sort of similar vibe to
it as well. Oh yeah, Communion is a that's that
is a whole uh, that's a that's a whole kettle
official into itself with the author Whitley Strieber Um, it
was like publication. Communion a true story was the name
of the book, and then was made into a film
with the Christopher Walkin. I write the trailer looks a
(39:55):
little ludicrous because of our sort of associations with Christopher
Walkin now in that voy but it seems menacing. Yeah. Yeah,
it came up in some of the research here because
I know that he was kind of he was kind
of a divisive figure even within like alien abduction communities.
There were there was at least one of one of
(40:15):
the There was one critic in particular I think that
was was not happy with the like the sexual aspects
of his uh, his alleged encounters, and they were just
kind they were kind of ridiculing him within the alien
abduction community. All right, well, I'm gonna try to do
my homework before we hit a trailer talk, which would
be the trailer talk will actually come out probably the
day after this episode airs, but for you, for all
(40:38):
of you, I'll have like a good seven days. Now.
I want to come back around to Mac again, because
there's this interesting thing that's going on at Harvard University.
Back in two thousand three, it was ground zero for
this debate over what was actually going on with alien abduction.
So you've got John Mac on one side, and Susan
Clancy and Richard McNally and another, and they're all there.
(41:00):
Mac argued that the experiences couldn't be understood in the
Western rationalist tradition of science, while you've got McNally and
clancy countering, well, actually, Mac, the answer to alien abduction
is is very simple. And then they outline, you know,
they say, we don't think the abductees are lying, but
that Mac himself is just entertaining far fetched ideas in relation. Right,
(41:21):
He's not really, he doesn't seem like he's really using
Okham's razor here, right, yeah, yeah, and uh so this
was actually quite a problem for Harvard University, is so
to be clear here though, I don't want to malign mac.
This guy performed hypnotherapy on his patients and published thirteen
of those encounters in his book Abduction, which I mentioned
earlier as being very popular. He was a firm believer
(41:43):
in that practice, and he believed he retrieved his own
memories of his mother's death, which occurred when he was
eight months old. So that's how much of a proponent
he was for hypnotherapy. He was said to prize the
experiential narrative over empirical data, so you can see where
scientists would feel like, well, that's definitely drawing a line
(42:05):
in the sand that we don't want to be on
that side of. Uh now. So to give you a
sort of outline of his Harvard experience, he was on
the faculty there since nineteen fifty five, and then in
nineteen eighty two he founded the Center for Psychology and
Social Change. There, his work often straddled conventional science and
altered states of consciousness. Sounds just like our kind of guy.
(42:26):
When he founded the Department of psychiatry at the Cambridge
Hospital in nineteen sixty nine. This ended up attracting innovative
Eastern oriented psychiatrists, and then Mac himself studied the guided
meditation of Werner Erhard as well as Stanislav Gravs holotropic breathwork,
which essentially seeks to induce an altered state through rapid breathing.
(42:49):
And the faculty at Harvard were not thrilled with all this,
and especially with his alien abduction research, so they actually
had a committee conduct a fifteen month investigation into his work.
But at the end of all that there was no
no formal censure. Essentially, the interviews with like the head
of the department, he was just like, look, we just
want him to be empirical about the way he's going
(43:10):
about this, that's all um. But I don't think they
could find anything that was like enough for them to
you know, get rid of him. But to be clear here,
Mac distanced himself from whether or not aliens were real.
Every time somebody asked him about that, he said, you know,
what I'm more interested in is a consensus reality that
we've created that precludes us from ever entertaining the idea
(43:34):
of alien abductions, so he's more interested again in the
sort of cultural reality. So this is kind of fascinating
this guy, like he was countercultural in his own way,
but at the same time, he wasn't like fully dipping
his toe into the alien abduction experience. And then he's got,
you know, later in his career, he's got these colleagues
(43:56):
who show up at Harvard and they're like, actually, like,
we think we've got the answer here. Looks looks pretty straightforward.
We think it's a sleep paralysis combined with magical thinking,
combined with false memory implantation. Yeah, and then he's saying, no,
I'm not quite I'm not quite ready to admit that.
I think there's this there's this middle ground, and we
haven't quite explored it. Yeah. I think all of this
(44:18):
presents an interesting vision though, that that, you know, that
of people who felt the weight of of a century
of technological and social change, who then experienced something or
assume the experience in varying ways that allowed them to
testify to it physically. You know, it's almost I really
almost get the sense of of people, and not just
(44:40):
like scattered individuals, but like large groups of people. In
the second half of the twentieth century who really felt
lost and unmoored and just powerless in what was happening,
and this was this was kind of a way to
to connect part of them to a to to some
sort of a guiding force. Yeah. And while I've never
had any kind of alien abduction experience growing up in
(45:03):
that period of time, and you know, I'm an adult now,
I look back and I have sympathy for that, Like
there's a certain amount of that that makes sense, you know,
the feeling like there wasn't anything that was really grounding
me to the community I existed in. Um, let's do
a quick review of what we came to here, and
then I think we can close out this two parter. So,
(45:25):
all right, what do we understand about alien abduction? Scientifically,
there doesn't appear to be any difference between abductees and
the general population in terms of their psychopathology and their
personality type. So we established that. But there do seem
to be individual factors that can increase the likelihood of
people developing false memories for alien abduction, And the biggest
(45:47):
of these is the belief and interest in paranormal phenomenon.
When you combine that with a susceptibility to hypnotic suggestions.
Individuals can interpret events like sleep paralysis as alien in
abduction events, then it's possible for abductees to recover those
false memories that have been accidentally implanted over the course
(46:08):
of hypnotherapy. And I think you know from that review
that I was going over from Finkelstein, the big thing
to take away from this is further research really seems
to be needed into the hypnotherapy aspect of it, which
was John max sort of realm of inquiry, right, like
he was really into that. But what we need more
research on is sort of the dynamics of how the
(46:30):
hypnotherapy is interacting with the human consciousness. Yeah, and of
course there's so many questions than about suggestibility, and yeah, uh,
this is definitely one of those episodes where I feel
like we we kind of end with more questions than
we began. I mean, I'm still very much in the
(46:50):
in the category of of saying that I do not
think that aliens have visited our world, and I do
not think that the they have abducted people. But that
doesn't make what's going on any less amazing and interesting
and and and ultimately like a little mysterious because we
have to try and piece it all together, both the
(47:11):
scientific side of it and the cultural side of it.
And that's that's where I think the really fascinating mysteries
here are. And this is a phrase that stuff to
blow your mind. Listeners are probably sick of me making
on the show, But it seems to me like these
are canaries in a coal mine, right that, like when
you've got a subset of the population that is all
they're coming up with this narrative that's incredibly similar and
(47:32):
we don't know where it's coming from. Rather than dismiss it,
look at it and say, what is this saying about us? Like,
what's what's going on? And but I don't mean that
this is like a warning bell like oh, aliens are
real and they're gonna attack or something. That's not what
I mean, but that there's something going on psychologically that
we need to understand better about ourselves before we perceive.
(47:55):
Because the other side of it, too is there were
not only the individuals that that claim to have these experiences,
but everybody else was eating it up and it still
is eating it up, you know. So it's even if
you're not directly participating in the in the experience, you're
still engaging in a vicarious experience with it, Like there's
something about that alien abduction narrative that still speaks to
(48:18):
to so many denizens of the century. Yeah, I think
I mentioned this to you. But Close Encounters of the
Third Kind is coming up on its fort anniversary and
they're rereleasing it in theaters for a week, and my
wife wants to go see it because she has fond
memories of that film. And I really thought to myself
for a second, I was like, I love that movie,
(48:38):
but is that Is that a movie that like a
lot of people want to go see in the theater again?
And clearly it must be if they're going to put
the effort into that kind of marketing. And it makes
you think, you know, forty years later, there's still enough interest,
even in that fictional version of it, that there's got
to be something going on. There's some kind of bell
that's ringing deep in the back of our mind. Mhm,
(49:01):
al right, Well, as do what that bell is and
why it's ringing. We would we'd love to hear from
everyone out there, and we we'd specially love to hear
from you. If you yourself have had a UFO or
alien abduction experience, and I'd love to just I'd love
to read what you have to say in terms of
you know, self analysis of that and dissecting that, like
(49:22):
what do you think was going on there? Um? You know,
why did you why did you experience it? And how
have you how have you dealt with it since then?
And I really hope that like the way we've presented
these two episodes on alien abduction have have shown that
we are sympathetic to this experience, but that we're trying
to look at it through the lens of the research
that's been done on it. Yeah. I mean, just because
(49:43):
I don't think the aliens are real, it doesn't mean
that I think that the experience is invalid or that
the experience is not real for a variety of reasons
that we discussed in these episodes. So if you want
to get in touch with us about that stuff, here
are some ways you can do so. We're all over
social media. We're on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on Tumbler,
and we're on Instagram. Uh, you can also visit our
(50:04):
website stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where
you're gonna find uh these episodes, You're gonna find all
of our blog posts and all of our videos. In fact,
uh we do have an older episode back when Julia
was co host about alien abduction too, so it might
be nice to listen to that and kind of see,
like over the years, like what the transformation has been
(50:25):
in in our perspective. Yeah, yeah, and uh hey, and
on Facebook, we have the the the Discussion module. Check
that out. That's our Facebook group. If you want a
more you know, personal interaction with other stuff to blow
your mind fans and with the with the host, then
you can go there. It's a new project we've rolled
out and so far I think people are digging it.
(50:45):
So so check it out and see if it's for
you or if you just want to write us personally.
We'll have a like intimate discussion one on one that
would be on email and it's that blow the mind
at how stuff works dot com for more on this
(51:08):
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