The abduction phenomenon
Whilst the contactees of the 1950s had generally been willing travellers in spaceships – with the notable exception of Antonio Villas Boas – the experience of Barney and Betty Hill in 1961 marked a change in the relationship between humanity and the extraterrestrials. Driving home one night, they saw an unexplained light and at one point, Barney stopped the car to get out and have a closer look. Arriving home, they discovered that the journey had taken several hours longer than they had expected, which was puzzling. Over the next few months, both experienced a series of disturbing bad dreams, mostly around the subject of abduction and medical examination by distinctly unfriendly aliens. They eventually sought professional help and under hypnosis, described a different version of events during their unusual drive from those they could recall consciously. Instead of simply seeing a Nocturnal Light type of UFO, Barney had seen a structured craft. Both had been taken on board, where they described the medical procedures carried out by its alien occupants. Betty had a particularly traumatic examination in which a needle was inserted through her navel into her womb in what she was told was a pregnancy test.
The identity of the couple was not revealed when the case was first published in The Interrupted Journey by John G Fuller in 1966 and not all the details of the abduction were revealed. Nevertheless, over the next three decades, the number of similar cases increased steadily until, by the early 1990s, there were hundreds of documented alien abductions. Many shared common elements: an inability to recall the events of the abduction consciously, the element of missing time, the (often painful and mostly distressing) medical procedures, the presence of two distinct types of aliens (the so-called ‘grays’ and ‘Nordics’) and their seemingly magical ability to transport people through closed windows, doors and walls. All those that could not be dismissed as hoaxes or as mental illness were characterised by a high degree of ‘strangeness’: a sense that the normal rules of space and time were not operating and that the experiences had a dreamlike quality (although they tend to have more coherence and internal logic than true dreams).
There are several variants on the type of explanation for UFO phenomena that abduction experiences are alleged to provide. A word of warning needs to be injected at this point: although abductions are generally regarded as part of UFO phenomena because UFO experiences sometimes seem to be the ‘trigger’ for abductions (many only recalled later, under hypnosis), many abductions occur without any hint of UFO involvement. Nevertheless, as a working hypothesis, we can treat abductions as one of the phenomena that make up the broad spectrum of UFO related experiences.
One explanation – and perhaps the simplest – is that the aliens are engaging in some kind of experimentation, treating humans as zoological specimens. The idea that the aliens are here to observe and study life on earth is sometimes bound up with the view that they are responsible for so-called ‘animal mutilations’, another of the periphally related para-Ufological areas of interest. In this hypothesis, the aliens have no ultimate aim beyond the accumulation of knowledge, resembling human scientists.
Once questions of ulterior motives are asked, issues of control and domination are raised (given their evidently superior technology, there can be no question of the aliens being mere human agents). If the aliens are using people for a purpose, they seem to have an overwhelming interest in matters of reproduction: most of their medical procedures involve the sexual organs in some way. Some abductees report the collection of eggs and sperm, while others report unexplained pregancies and their equally unexpected (and symptom-free) sudden endings. Some report sexual encounters with aliens that (in the case of female abductees, especially) are essentially rapes.
The biggest difficulty with the abduction phenomenon is its lack of physical evidence. True, abductees often report waking up with curiously dirty nightclothes, previously unnoticed scars and injuries, sudden unplanned pregnancies (or their termination) and implants (often in the nose). However, all this ‘physical evidence’ – with the possible exception of implants – also tends to have mundane explanations. Even with implants, none has ever been shown to represent anything even remotely technological, let alone alien. Analyses have tended to suggest that they are of terrestrial origin, often consisting of stones, material of biological origin (such as fibrous substances) or tiny splinters of inorganic and inert materials. Attempts to obtain video evidence of abduction from repeat abductees have been thwarted by equipment failure, the actions of the abductess thenselves or for other reasons. There are no photographs of abductions in progress or taken by abductees (using a mobile ’phone, for instance) and few cases where there appear to be independent witnesses.
If all this sounds as if abductions are fantasies, then the evidence is overwhelmingly against the idea: abductees often suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, which is not produced by dreams, hoaxes or other fantasies. However, there is a leap of faith involved in associating the phenomenon with UFOs and thereby assuming that it somehow will enable us to understand them better.
Last updated 31 March 2006