Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

In the forty-one years since her close encounter (her husband Barney died in 1969), Betty Hill has become a guru of the UFO movement. Her close encounters have continued, multiplied, and are described in a short item in the fall 1978 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer:

Now that Mrs. Hill is retired, she divides her time between giving UFO lectures and watching UFOs land at the semi-secret “landing spot” she claims to have discovered in New Hampshire. Mrs. Hill’s recent claims are straining even the almost boundless credulity of the UFO groups, Mrs. Hill claims that the UFOs come in to land several times a week; they have become such a familiar sight that she is now calling them by name. Sometimes the aliens get out and do calisthenics before taking off again, she asserts. One UFO reportedly zapped a beam at her that was so powerful that it “blistered the paint on my car.” Mrs. Hill also reports that window-peeping flying saucers sometimes fly from house to house late at night in New England, shine lights in the windows, and then move on when the occupants wake up and turn on the lights. (p. 14)

The same item reports that when at her secret UFO landing site, Mrs. Hill is unable to distinguish street lights from UFOs.

On October 20, 1975, NBC-TV broadcast a made-for-television movie based on the Hills’ close encounter. It was called The UFO Incident. In the months following this broadcast, numerous similar close encounters were reported (Sheaffer 1981) containing the same major elements as those found in the Hill story and in the movie: abduction and medical examination by aliens. (I’ve always wondered why the aliens were so interested in and ignorant of human anatomy and physiology. A species capable of sending ships across the galaxy certainly ought to be able to obtain a few basic anatomy and physiology texts without kidnapping innocent earthlings.) The cases also featured missing periods of time, just as in the Hill case. Sheaffer (1981, chap. 5) described several of these cases. It is difficult to take them seriously, but they are taken very seriously by the UFO groups. In their book Abducted , James and Coral Lorenzen, founders of APRO, worry that too many teenagers are spending too much time in deserted areas. This is dangerous because it is from just such areas that most UFO abductions occur. “Each and every inhabitant of this earth is a potential victim” (Lorenzen and Lorenzen 1970, p. 210), we are told.

Sporadic reports of UFO abductions continued to be made in the early 1980s. One of the most productive finders of abducted individuals was Dr. Leo Sprinkle, a psychologist at the University of Wyoming. He hypnotized witnesses who had seen UFOs and found, in a surprisingly high number of cases, that the witnesses had been abducted. Strangely, the witnesses usually were unaware of having been abducted until Dr. Sprinkle, who is apparently unaware of the problems with hypnosis noted above, hypnotized them.

By the late 1980s UFO abduction reports had become the new standard in the UFO movement. Just plain old sightings were way too mundane to be very exciting anymore, what with people being abducted so frequently. Several books claimed that humans were being abducted by the tens of thousands and subjected to various invasive medical procedures. These included having an eyeball removed (but, happily for the victim, it was reattached before the return to Earth) and the insertion of probes into various bodily orifices. Sexual contact was also reported. The goal of all this, according to Budd Hopkins, a New York artist and one of the leading proponents of the reality of abductions, is to create a new race of human/alien crossbreeds.

The wave of claimed alien abductions got a slow start at the beginning of the 1980s. Hopkins published the first major book on the topic, Missing Time, in 1981. His list of “symptoms” of being abducted includes things that have happened to almost everyone. For example, have you ever looked at the time and noticed that it is either later or earlier than you thought? Guess what—that shows you’ve been abducted. The aliens have altered your sense of the passage of time. In 1985 Ruth Montgomery, who had earlier described that psychic wonder Jeane Dixon (Montgomery 1965), published the little-noticed book Aliens Among Us. She contended, based on numerous personal reports she had received, that the “space brothers” had already arrived and were on Earth disguised as humans. Montgomery’s aliens were of a very different character than the aliens that became the popular image of the abductors as the 1980s wore on. Her aliens were beneficent fellows, here to do good works for humanity. They did not abduct anyone. The stereotypical aliens in Hopkins’s Missing Time are anything but beneficent—they are cruel, subjecting humans to various highly unpleasant medical procedures for their own ends with no concern about the pain inflicted. Montgomery’s aliens promptly vanished from the popular scene, if they were every really there in the first place, to be replaced as part of popular culture by Hopkins’s version.

UFO abduction claims, which had been a fringe element of the UFO movement, quickly became the major focus of that movement and came to the attention of the general public in the late 1980s. This was due to the publication in 1987 of two major books touting abduction claims as real. One was Hopkins’s Intruders and the other Whitley Strieber’s Communion . As these books appeared, claims of alien abduction began to be features on the numerous TV talk shows, always on the look out for ever more bizarre topics to keep rating up. (After all, teenage lesbian handicapped midget twins can only keep ratings up for so long!) And, to be serious for a moment, the average abductee who appeared on a talk show was not an obvious crazed psychotic, but appeared to be a reasonable human being who truly believed that he had been abducted and was genuinely frightened by what had happened to him. And, in good measure, abductees were genuine in these respects. They did believe that they had really been abducted and that they had been cruelly used by the aliens. And they were frightened, sometimes terrified, that it might happen again.

The alien abduction story took a surprising turn in 1994 when John Mack, a psychiatrist at Harvard University, published his book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens , in which he argued that the abduction events were real and represented real happenings that could not be explained by science. What most impressed Mack, as he reiterated later, were the “strange consistencies and unbelievable aspects of the abduction phenomenon” (McLeod, Corbisier, and Mack 1996, p. 166).

In spite of the huge number of the alleged abductions, there has never been a single piece of physical evidence produced by any abductee. No bits of alien technology from the spacecraft. No recovered implants such as the aliens are sometimes said to use. Nothing. Rumors and claims for real alien artifacts have floated around for years in the abduction community, but no artifact has ever been produced for independent study. Of course, should a genuine alien artifact be found, it would immediately be produced as positive proof by those so intent on showing that the abduction experiences are real. Such artifacts are conspicuous by their absence.

This total absence of physical evidence strongly suggests that the abduction experiences are not real. But if they aren’t, how can it be that so many seemingly sane individuals have come to believe that such a horrible event befell them? An event for which, as noted above, they seem to have real memories; memories that cause a great deal of fear and psychological suffering. It is important it make it clear that in the great majority of these cases, the explanation is not that the individuals are just lying to get attention or to take on the status of victim, nor are they suffering from any psychopathology (i.e., schizophrenia). Rather, the explanation lies in the power of multiple persuasive techniques to create powerful false memories in humans. Variations within the normal range in certain personality traits may enhance susceptibility to these techniques, but one of the important insights to emerge from the UFO abduction claims (as well as claims of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse and/or ritual satanic abuse—see chapter 5) is that many more normal people are susceptible to these techniques than was previously realized. Another important factor is that one usually thinks of “techniques of persuasion” being used on those who don’t want to be persuaded of something, as in the case of “brainwashing” for political reasons. Especially in the case of UFO abductees, however, the individual on whom the persuasive techniques are used is an active and willing participant in the process of creating the false memories.