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By Root 569 0

on numerous television shows with alien abductees. I have little doubt that most of them are genuine in their recounting of the emotional trauma of the experience of being abducted. One of these abductees was Whitley Strieber, author of the spectacularly best-selling account of his abduction, Communion, which has become the bible of the alien abduction community. I met Strieber in the green room at Bill Maher’s television series Politically Incorrect. While we were chatting before the taping of the show began, I asked him what he did when he wasn’t writing about being abducted by aliens. He told me that he writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels. “Of course!” I thought to myself. “He either made it all up or fantasized it in his creative imagination.”

The key word here is imagination. People often seem incredulous that anyone could concoct such fantastic stories of alien encounters, implying that they must therefore have some measure of verisimilitude. In fact, people make up such encounters every day. They’re called science fiction and fantasy writers. Consider the alternative worlds of Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Star Trek, Avatar, and the rest. We have the fantastic ability to project ourselves into other worlds of make-believe, and the line between conscious fiction and subconscious imagining is a fine one. Reality and fantasy may blur in the recesses of the mind and come to the forefront under certain conditions, such as hypnosis and sleep.

Hypnosis. Many of these abduction experiences are “remembered” years or decades after the fact through a technique called hypnotic regression, in which a subject is hypnotized and asked to imagine regressing back in time to retrieve a memory from the past, and then play it back on the imaginary screen of the mind, as if there’s a diminutive homunculus sitting inside a little theater in the head reporting to the brain’s director what he is seeing. This is not at all how memory works. The metaphor of memory as a videotape-playback system is completely wrong. There is no recording device in the brain. Memories are formed as part of the association learning system of making connections between things and events in the environment, and repetitive associations between them generate new dendritic and synaptic connections between neurons, which are then strengthened through additional repetition or weakened through disuse. Use it or lose it.

Do you remember your tenth birthday, or do you remember your mother’s memory of your tenth birthday that she recalled for you when you were fifteen, or is it the photographs of your tenth birthday that you reviewed when you were twenty? It is likely all of the above, and much more. So, when an alien abductee is “recovering” a memory of an abduction experience, what is actually being recovered? Analysis of hypnotic regression tapes used by abduction “therapists” who employ hypnosis shows that they ask leading questions and construct imaginary scenarios through which their subjects may concoct an entirely artificial event of something that never happened.10 In fact, memory contamination through suggestive questioning by the hypnotist and by the imagination of the hypnotized person is what happened in the disastrous “recovered memory movement” of the 1990s that resulted in dozens of fathers being convicted of child molestation based on nothing more than adult women’s “recovered memories” planted by therapists.

Sleep anomalies. Abduction experiences that are not generated through hypnotic regression typically occur late at night or early in the morning during sleep cycles that strongly resemble hypnagogic (just after falling asleep) and hypnopompic (just before waking up) hallucinations, and appear to be related to lucid dreams and sleep paralysis, which have been well documented among subjects in experiments and patients in sleep labs and contain most of the components of the abduction experience. Hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations occur in the fuzzy borderlands between wakefulness and sleep, when our conscious