Secret life: firsthand accounts of UFO abductions (37 page)

Psychogenic fugue state is a condition that has parallels with multiple personality disorder and with the missing time episode. In a fugue state, the individual will inexplicably travel to another geographic location, assume a new identity, and conduct her affairs with no recollections of what has happened in the past. A fugue state takes place when the individual is under a severe amount of pressure and stress. Usually a major conflict has just ensued with another person and the fugue victim lapses into this state. The act of going into a fugue state is an attempt to replace intolerable affairs with ones that are more psychologically manageable. Each experience is unique to that individual. The details of one person’s life in a fugue state differ from the details of another person’s life in a fugue state.

As with a fugue state, an abduction often takes place without the victim remembering the events. But the similarity ends there. People do not change their identities during an abduction, nor do they
travel to another geographic location where other people see them. They consider themselves helpless victims of the abduction rather than new personalities forging new experiences. Their accounts contain no personal elements and are remarkably consistent with the accounts of other abductees. Finally, their memories are often filled with fear and terror. They wish to escape from the memories of the abduction rather than from any precipitating causative event.

Dr. Michael Persinger, a professor of neurobiology at Laurentian University in Canada, has theorized that abduction accounts might stem from dysfunctions in the brain’s temporal lobe. He says that the temporal lobe could be stimulated by electrically charged particles in the atmosphere unleashed as a result of the earth’s geologic tectonic plate stress (sections of the earth’s crust rubbing against each other). These electrical discharges might stimulate temporal lobe instability that could lead people to hallucinate. Or, says Persinger, abduction accounts might also be triggered by temporal lobe epilepsy. When the temporal lobe is electrically stimulated in a laboratory, he says, the subject will have a series of perceptual experiences that closely parallel abductions. For instance, they might have a sense of a “presence” around them; they might feel that they are having a mystical experience; they might interpret unusual events “as being meaningful or as special, personal messages,” and they might have feelings such as a sense of unreality, internal vibrations, rising sensations, erotic thoughts, and anxiety. Persinger has even claimed that, with medication to control temporal lobe dysfunction, he has been able to “cure” an “abductee” of her “abduction” experiences.

Persinger’s theory is based on precarious ground. The electrical effects of tectonic plate stress are extremely controversial and not yet accepted by the geologic community. The effect that the electrically charged particles might have on people’s brains is highly conjectural and not accepted by the psychiatric community. Persinger presents no direct evidence to the contrary. Furthermore, the tiny population sample that Persinger worked with to obtain his abduction material was, by and large, not composed of abductees. Rather, it consisted of channelers, followers of mystically oriented Eastern religions and philosophies, and people with a few highly dubious “visitor” accounts that have never been fully investigated. And finally,
their narratives, which he says contain “substantial fantasy,” do not match the narratives of the abductees.
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Cultural explanations maintain that abduction accounts originate from the influence that prevailing culture and society have upon the individual.

Some critics have stated that the abduction phenomenon is related to the societal awareness of new fertilization methods, such as in vitro fertilization, artificial insemination, and surrogate motherhood. Women, and presumably men, who desperately want children might unconsciously internalize these ideas and bring them forth in obsessive fantasies based on their desire to have children.

But the abduction phenomenon was known long before the new fertilization techniques were developed. And if abductions represent the unconscious longings of women for a child, then their reports of not wanting to hold or touch babies during the abduction would not make much sense. Also, teenage boys and men are shown babies and have sperm taken with no evidence that these men so want to have children that they are inventing fantasies around the event. Furthermore, the new fertilization techniques almost exclusively focus on women. Of the fifteen women in this study who were shown babies, ten already had children and had no plans for more, one was planning on having a child in the near future, and four had no desire to have a child at that time. Finally, young children are often shown babies and their concern with the new fertilization techniques must be assumed to be negligible.

Other critics claim that people pick up their ideas about abductions from science fiction motion pictures. While it is true that science fiction movies are popular, none has been released with themes or events similar to abduction accounts. No science fiction movies have been made that portray invading aliens as being uncommunicative and refusing to give information about their origin, mission, or methods. Nor have any shown aliens collecting eggs and sperm
from their human victims with the intent of producing hybrid offspring.

Science fiction movies have recognizable and even formulaic plots: Aliens come here to wreak destruction; aliens come here to take over the planet; aliens come here to help mankind, etc. The three most widely seen science fiction movies of all time,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E, T.,
and
Star Wars
, were not at all similar to the abduction accounts (although
Close Encounters
did have an off-camera abduction suggestion). Even
Star Trek
, which has been seen probably by more Americans than any other science fiction television show, had no plots that resembled the abduction scenario. Moreover, many abductees are not science fiction fans. They do not see science fiction movies or television shows. They do not read science fiction literature. They are not involved with the world of science fiction at any level. Thus to dismiss their abduction accounts as coming from science fiction is unwarranted.

Some researchers have suggested that so-called abduction stories have occurred all through recorded history and that they are found in myth, legend, and folklore. However, these skeptics generally lump together all folklore accounts of “little people,” gnomes, trolls, dwarfs, and so forth, no matter what the context, into the abduction phenomenon simply because these characters are small or because they are said to have supernatural powers. The adherents of this theory disconnect such folktales from their original social and cultural context and then present them as fact in a completely different milieu as if they have a life of their own. The only difference, they claim, is that abduction stories are now more technologically advanced. But they present only vague and general similarities to show that the abduction phenomenon is related to myth, legend, and folklore such as superficial stories about “changelings,” little people, or gods who live in the heavens. For adherents of the folklore hypothesis, facile resemblances become complex modern duplicates.

The folktales also become evidence that the UFO abduction phenomenon has been going on for centuries. Of course, hundreds of folktales have been collected about little people, giants, gods, flying machines, people being kidnapped by trolls, and other material that the uninformed might decide were like the UFO and abduction phenomena,
but the actual content of myths, legends, and folktales has almost nothing in common with abduction accounts. Typically, folktales, myths, and legends have been orally transmitted. They have been changed and altered over the years depending on the “spin” that the teller puts on the tale. That alteration is determined by the personality of the storyteller and the culture in which he lives. Folklore is a dynamic process that is constantly changing. Getting at the kernel of truth that may lie behind the tale is often quite impossible.
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The victims of abductions are not telling stories that they had previously heard from other people. They are relating accounts of sometimes ongoing events that they believe happened to them.

Let us suppose that abductee claimants have no discernible psychological or psychiatric dysfunction and that they are not internalizing cultural events but are still relating episodes that have no basis in objective reality. Given this presumption, how can we explain these claims? Critics have often dipped into the exotic and bizarre to explain these accounts, as they try to replace one strange set of circumstances with another.

Some researchers have suggested that the abduction accounts embody certain archetypal memories that are inherent in all human minds, and that, when taken together, form part of what psychoanalysts call the “collective unconscious.” The concept of the collective unconscious is a staple of Jungian and psychoanalytic dream interpretation. Freud and Jung found certain images in dreams that they thought had universal applications. When a person dreams certain images, they are symbolic of other more deep-seated desires and fears. The collective unconscious suggests that people can share the same thoughts across cultural and technological barriers.

Jung addressed the problem of UFO sightings from this point of view in his 1958 book
Flying Saucers
. His position was that if witnesses were not actually seeing objectively “real” objects, they might be seeing archetypal images, similar to those found in dreams. Like dreams, abduction accounts could be grand metaphorical stories masking or symbolizing more profound mental events.
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The collective unconscious challenges the theory that humans are
born with a “clean slate,” suggesting instead that we have preprogrammed, richly detailed, and complex memories that can easily generate abduction stories. To date, however, the psychological community has made no discoveries to indicate that common, detailed thought patterns exist, lodged deep in the psychic lives of all people. Of course, the healthy survival instinct makes all people think about food, reproduction, and the prevention of death. But, beyond such considerations, generalizations about what goes on in people’s unconscious minds are open to question.

If abduction events are part of the collective unconscious, then the theory would have to be expanded to take into account any of the abduction’s unique characteristics: multiple abductions, physical effects, disappearances, and so forth. Furthermore, it would have to consider the puzzling fact that the abduction syndrome is a recent phenomenon confined to the twentieth century. It would have to prove that the collective unconscious is dynamic and can come into being and change around the world at any given time regardless of the culture.

If the collective-unconscious theory turns out to be valid, it is revolutionary in the extreme. It fundamentally changes the way in which human beings think and react to their environment. It removes much of the control that people have over their own thoughts and lives and places it within the genetic makeup of the species. The implications for humanity are enormous. If the theory is true, a new psychology of human experience based, to a large extent, on hypnosis would have to be devised because it is through the use of this tool that the collective unconscious would be brought forth.

We must also bear in mind that Jung himself, writing in 1958 when only minimal knowledge of the nature of the UFO phenomenon was available, understood the dangers of trying to place UFOs within the collective unconscious. He pointed out that although UFO sightings might have a psychic component, “we are dealing with an ostensibly physical phenomenon distinguished on the one hand by its frequent appearance and on the other by its strange, unknown, and indeed contradictory nature.”
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Professor Alvin Lawson, who mounted the study of imaginary abductees, has also championed the birth trauma theory to explain abduction accounts. He states that the profound mental effects of
being born are remarkably similar to abductee stories of going through a dark passage and then seeing little fetuslike people with large heads in bright rooms while lying on a table. The traumatic memories of being born are lodged deep within people’s psyches, and abduction reports are transmuted manifestations of these memories.
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However, advocates of the birth trauma theory fail to explain how a baby would see other fetuses. They fail to explain why people born in a cesarean procedure have related accounts similar to those of people born vaginally. They fail to demonstrate how the rest of the abduction material would fit into the birth trauma scenario.

If true, however, birth trauma, like the collective unconscious, would suggest that current theories about the development of fetal brains are wildly erroneous, and that all newborn minds are extraordinarily more sophisticated than the evidence indicates. The minds of newborn abductees would have to contain countless bits of specific identical information relating to their birth environment, regardless of whether their eyes were closed, whether they were born in a dark area, whether other people were present, and so forth. Presumably, all babies would retain the endless details of many other “traumatic” events as well.

Finally, some theorists—agonizing over the inability to explain abduction evidence—have resorted to suggesting that the human mind can in some way create a physical reality through mental processes. In other words, abductees “think up” a real, alternative universe that has aliens in it who can cause scars, disappearances, and the other physical phenomena of abductions. If abductees can do this, it would neatly answer all the problems created by their accounts.