"Abducted" by Susan A Clancy

Why do people believe they have been abducted by aliens?

The author is a sceptic in that she believes that “there is no objective evidence that an alien spacecraft has ever visited Earth or that anyone has ever been abducted.” (Ch 6). Aside from that, this account is remarkably balanced. She has clearly taken these stories seriously. She claims to have read every account of alien abduction published and more or less everything written about abduction narratives. She's watched almost all of the films and TV shows. And she's personally interviewed dozens of people who believe they have been abducted. I feel confident that this book is an unbiased, even sympathetic account of alien abduction experiences.

Firstly, they're not mad. Abductees are no more likely to have psychiatric disorders than you or me. They are, however, often creative, imaginative and prone to fantasy.

Secondly, most of those who believe they have been abducted do not have any memory of the abduction. Most of them have had strange experiences (such as sleep paralysis which is a state where sleep overlaps with wakefulness so that people continue to dream even while awake) which they are desperate to explain and which they have subsequently realised are similar to the experiences reported by someone else who claims to have been abducted. There is more than a hint of 'confirmation bias' about this. When asked why they can't remember, they often claim that the aliens had erased their memories.

Thirdly, those who claim to remember abduction experiences have in almost every case reconstructed their memories with the help of "imaginational therapies" such as hypnosis. Clancy is clear that such reconstructed memories are unreliable. She asserts that it is a myth that hypnosis is like a truth serum; in fact it puts patients into a suggestible state when they are liable to confuse imagination with reality. "The key to generating false memories ... is the protected imaging of an event in the presence of authority figures [such as a hypnotist or 'alien expert'] who encourage belief in and confirm the authenticity of the memories that emerge.” (Ch 3) She points out that the 'memories' recovered during hypnosis are usually incoherent and only later woven into a coherent narrative. In fact, many abductees question the reality of their early memories. “After my first regression, I wondered if I was making it all up ... I still don't remember it like a real memory, like I remember walking to class yesterday.” (Ch 3) She also points out that many of the 'memories' generate intense emotions such as terror and that the very intensity acts as a validation to their perceived truthfulness: “What happened to me was - overwhelming. It was more real than my sitting here talking with you right now.” (Ch 5)

When asked why she doubts abduction reports when they are so consistent, she replies that they aren't. The narrative arc is similar but the individual details vary quite a lot. She also points out that there were no reported cases of alien abduction until 1962, after the first films and TV shows had offered fictional narratives about abduction.

In the end, she concludes that “Aliens are ... the imaginative creations of people with ordinary emotional needs and desires. We don't want to be alone. We feel helpless and vulnerable much of the time. We want to believe there’s something bigger and better than us out there. And we want to believe that whatever it is cares about us, or at least is paying attention to us. That they want us (sexually or otherwise). That we're special.” (Ch 4) Abductees can regard their abduction experience as the most traumatic thing that ever happened to them, or the best thing. Having the abduction explanation not only explains the problems they face (such as depression or insomnia) but also absolves them of responsibility (it's not my fault ...). “Every single abductee at some point during an interview said, ‘Things make sense now.’” (Ch 5) She points out the similarity between Christianity and abduction: “Alien abductions feature all-knowing, nonhuman, advanced entities whose presence resists the explanatory power of science. The entities bring moral guidance. They tell us that time is running out, that we must change our selfish ways or our planet will be destroyed. They have come to Earth for our sake, and they are working for humanity’s redemption.” (Ch 5)

Selected quotes:

• “Nursery schools were being shut down and teachers imprisoned because, after lengthy and suggestive questioning, children were describing bizarre episodes of abuse, some involving flying clowns and broomsticks and the killing of large animals.” (Ch 1)
• “Being abducted is creepy; it's painful; it involves terrifying sexual and medical experimentation; and claiming to have been abducted is a sure way to be labeled daft. Why on earth would people subject themselves to this without strong reasons?” (Ch 1)
• “Abduction beliefs poignantly reveal that the desire to find meaning and purpose in life is more fundamental than many of us realise.” (Ch 1)
• “If anecdotal evidence or the words of attractive authorities could be relied on, we’d have to accept that Yeti and the Loch Ness Monster exist, that Elvis Presley, James Dean and Jimi Hendrix are alive, that psychoanalysis causes schizophrenia, and that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq at the time of the 2003 invasion.” (Ch 2)
• “Our lives, after all, are only what we remember of them. It's unnerving to realize that our stories, feelings, memories of the past are reconstructed over time, and that we make up history as we go along.” (Ch 3)
• “The idea that a patient is an unbiased report of his or her experiences and the therapist is an unbiased listener, and that together they are engaged on an archaeological expedition of the past, runs counter to everything memory researchers know about the malleable, unstable nature of memory and especially about the way our memories are altered by our expectations and feelings.” (Ch 5)
• “Science demands reason, argument, rigorous standards of evidence and of honesty ... you must prove your case in the face of determined, expert criticism; diversity and debate are valued. The most we can hope for are successive improvements in our understanding, the chance to learn from our mistakes. Absolute certainty will always elude us. Nothing is ever known for sure, and there are no sacred truths.” (Ch 6)

Authoritative, exhaustive and hugely readable. Possibly the last word in the debate.

June 2024; 155 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"God Drives a Flying Saucer" by R L Dione

I love books like this. I love the warped and twisted logic. I love way rhetoric is deployed in place of rationality. And I admire the authors for being able to get a publishing deal for such transparent lunacy.

R L Dione offends scholarly standards of evidence in so many ways:

• The references that he gives for his claims are (deliberately?) uncheckable; for example: 
• “An ancient papyrus from Egypt” (Ch 1)
• “Research at Cornell University has established that ... electromagnetic radiation bypasses the auditory system, directly stimulating the brain, producing a buzzing sensation.” (Ch 4)
• “From recent flying-saucer reports it appears that saucerians can also glow and appear luminous - probably by means of a sterilizing device built into their uniforms.” (Ch 6)
• "Consider, for example, the two satellites of Mars, which many astronomers believe to be artificial.” (Ch 10)
• Sometimes the evidence he offers is completely absence, such as: 
• “UFOs appear and disappear by the simple expediency of adjusting their luminosity and color to blend with the luminosity and color of the background.” (Ch 2)
• “Remarkable heating effects characterize many UFO encounters.” (Ch 4)
• He uses the trope of 'things we don't yet know or understand': "UFOs operate on some electromagnetic principle not yet known to mankind - an electromagnetic principle which perhaps can create and control its own gravitational field.” (Ch 3)
• Alternatively, he uses the argument that 'since you can't prove me wrong I must be right': “theory can be neither proved nor disproved, and since its verification would explain all the flight characteristics of UFOs, thus eliminating the necessity for accusing millions of witnesses of having mass hallucinations or of lying, I can see no justification for assuming that it is in error.” (Ch 3)
• He claims certainty for things that are debatable: (my highlights)
• “Another established fact is that UFOs while in flight sometimes emit a tangible substance that drifts down to the ground." (Ch 4)
• “If the Lady can predict great disasters why can she not predict whether her people will obey? ... It seems obvious, therefore, that she is not supernatural.” (Ch 6) 
• “Surely he’s describing nothing else than a flying saucer” (Ch 7)
• He offers a limited set of alternatives and then dismisses the straw men he has set up, forcing us to choose his favoured alternative without considering the many other possibilities. For example, when discussing the truth or otherwise of miracles, he says that the alternatives are:
• “We can deny the truth of the Bible ...” (Ch 7)
• “We can accept it as true ... claiming supernatural powers are responsible.” (Ch 7)
• “We can accept it as true and explain it as a manifestation of supertechnological devices.” (Ch 7)
• He attacks those he doesn't like ad hominem while credulously believing in that trope of UFOlogists, the 'reliable witness': “Philosophers, other intellectuals and clergyman have bumbled, and continue to bumble, with the idea that the essence of man is a strange mixture of a physical and spiritual being. They bumble, because such a view is inconsistent with reason" (Ch 8)

This book is also distinguished by the author's errors in simple Physics, such as when he confuses mass and weight, so deciding that the "neutralization" of Earth's gravitational field would make a spaceship's inertial mass zero (Ch 3) or when he describes momentum as “the force which throws drivers against windshields in car accidents” (Ch 3)

Other selected quotes:

•  "No system of logic yet devised can resolve the inconsistencies and paradoxes inherent in the belief that man is inhabited by a mystical supernatural and immortal something called a soul.” (Ch 8) 
• “Aristotle was on the right track when he said, ‘ if the eye were a body, Vision would be its soul.’ in other words, the soul is the function of the body: the thoughts, the acts and all the emotions ... but ... the existence of spiritual characteristics, such as emotions, does not validate the dualistic view that man is both spiritual and physical. If it did, then by the same reasoning we could prove that a car or a radio or any other inanimate object is both spiritual and physical.” (Ch 8)
• “Most of us believe that God wants us to live a good life and to believe in Him, for which He will in the end reward us with life everlasting. ... The question is, What does God get out of it?” (Ch 10)
• "God ... brags, He cajoles, and He even threatens us in an attempt to win our faith in Him and our love for Him. ... If the father of a family on earth were to demand love a respect the way that God does of His family, he would be considered a psychopath.” (Ch 10)

Entertaining nonsense. April 2022; 131 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The 37th Parallel" by Ben Mezrich

Most of this book tells the purportedly true story of Chuck Zukowski, a self-taught UFO investigator, as he gathers evidence, both anecdotal and physical, about UFO sightings and strange animal mutilations, which he considers to be a corollary. The human interest comes from the fact that his growing obsession with UFOs has to be tolerated by his (sceptical) wife, who ends up working two jobs so that he can work half a job and still afford the travel costs and to purchase the increasingly expensive equipment (and lab costs etc) that his researches demand. The book culminates by showing that most of the phenomena that Chuck talks about are located within 1 degree of latitude from latitude 37oN, a sort of UFO highway (or perhaps runway) that stretches more or less across the entire US.

It is written in a lively tone, following Chuck, full of lots of details about his family life, his possessions, etc, to give the whole thing massive verisimilitude. This is of huge importance; given that I was, like many other readers, hugely sceptical about the UFO side of things, it is important to establish solid grounded fact for the mundane part of the book; it makes the rest seem more real. There are some great throwaway lines:

• “for all he knew she had a cemetery full of dead people on speed dial.” (Ch 1, 2)
• “Some of the best portable equipment that overextended credit cards could buy.” (Ch 3, 15)
• “The tracker had claimed that on that night he and his girlfriend - a woman with the Hollywood ready name Trudy Truelove - ‘ were lying in the back of my pickup truck, buck naked, drinking beer and having a good ol’ time when all hell broke loose’.” (Ch 17, 123)
• “lately, even her silent stares had the feel of liquid nitrogen.” (Ch 25, 191)

The final page of the book, in which Chuck may find key evidence, is heavily redacted, with big black boxes censoring key words. It’s a brilliant way to end!

Selected quotes:

• “Supposedly, Sedona had numerous hotspots where vortices appeared, resembling electrically charged tornadoes that spiraled up and down with a [page break] spiritual energy. The Native Americans would use these specific locations to communicate with spiritual beings, and to communicate with their ancestors in the stars.” (Ch 4, 49 - 50)
• “The Apache referred to their ancestors as ‘star people’, pale, white, skinny humanoids with blue eyes who travelled in craft described as ‘birds with many colors’ that’ glowed with the sun’.” (Ch 10, 69)
• “The way the aliens had moved was always described in the exact same way: hunched forward, shuffle step, feet always touching the ground.” (Ch 14, 98)
• “Bigelow ... firmly believed that future generations would look at the current belief system as ignorant and egocentric.” (Ch 19, 147)
• “Chuck knew that the human mind was built to seek out patterns and that much smarter men than he had driven themselves crazy chasing symmetries that seemed to make sense in the dead of night, but were nothing more than shapes and shadows in the bright light of day.” (Ch 28, 233)

Lively and thought-provoking

February 2022; 247 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God