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because of their experiences, that they had become better people, that their lives had improved, and, most of all, that their lives now had meaning. Will Andrews said, “I was ready to just give up. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I knew something was missing. Today, things are different. I feel great. I know there’s something out there—much bigger, more important than we are—and for some reason they chose to make their presence known to me. I have a connection with them…. The beings are learning from us and us from them and ultimately a new world is being created. And I’ll have a part in it, either directly or through the twins.” Will’s wife (the one on this planet) gave us an additional motive for Will’s invention of invisible alien progeny when she plaintively wondered to Clancy, “Would things have been different if we had been able to have kids?” 31

At the final stage, once the experiencers have accepted the alien-abduction theory of their problems and retrieved their memories, they seek out other people like them and read only accounts that confirm their new explanation. They firmly reject any dissonance-creating evidence or any other way of understanding what happened to them. One of Clancy’s interviewees said, “I swear to God, if someone brings up sleep paralysis to me one more time I’m going to puke. There was something in the room that night! I was spinning…. I wasn’t sleeping. I was taken.”32 Every one of the people Clancy interviewed was aware of the scientific explanation and had angrily rejected it. In Boston a few years ago, a debate was held between McNally and John Mack, a psychiatrist who had accepted the abductees’ stories as true.33 Mack brought an experiencer with him. The woman listened to the debate, including McNally’s evidence about how people who believe they were abducted are fantasy prone and have come to misinterpret a common sleep experience as one of seeing aliens. During the ensuing discussion, the woman said to McNally, “Don’t you see, I wouldn’t believe I’d been abducted if someone could just give me one reasonable alternative explanation.”McNally said, “We just did.”

By the end of this process, standing at the bottom of the pyramid at a far distance from skeptics like Michael Shermer, experiencers have internalized their new false memories and cannot now distinguish them from true ones. When they are brought into the laboratory and asked to describe their traumatic abductions by aliens, their heightened physiological reactions (such as heart rate and blood pressure) are as great as those of patients who suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder.34 They have come to believe their own stories.

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False memories allow us to forgive ourselves and justify our mistakes, but sometimes at a high price: an inability to take responsibility for our lives. An appreciation of the distortions of memory, a realization that even deeply felt memories might be wrong, might encourage people to hold their memories more lightly, to drop the certainty that their memories are always accurate, and to let go of the appealing impulse to use the past to justify problems of the present. If we are to be careful about what we wish for because it might come true, we must also be careful which memories we select to justify our lives, because then we will have to live by them.

Certainly one of the most powerful stories that many people wish to live by is the victim narrative. Nobody has actually been abducted by aliens (though experiencers will argue fiercely with us), but millions have survived cruelties as children: neglect, sexual abuse, parental alcoholism, violence, abandonment, the horrors of war. Many people have come forward to tell their stories: how they coped, how they endured, what they learned, how they moved on. Stories of trauma and transcendence are inspiring examples of human resilience.35

It is precisely because these accounts are so emotionally powerful that thousands of people have been drawn to construct “me, too” versions of them. A few have claimed to be Holocaust survivors; thousands have