I heard some shocking news last week. It turns out that all those folks who think they’ve been abducted from their beds by alien invaders may be mistaken. That, at least, is the message of results presented recently at the Dana Centre in London’s Science Museum.
The research was conducted by Professor Chris French, head of the Anomolistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He and his team investigated the psychological differences between people who believed they had experienced alien abduction and a similar group of people who said they hadn’t.
I fall, definitively, into the second camp. Not once have I been whisked from under the duvet and spirited away for a thorough round of probing and experimentation at the hands of little green aliens. Many others think they have, however; a quarter of people in the US believe extraterrestrials have visited our planet, Wired magazine reported last month.
French’s study compared 19 people who said they had had alien encounters with 19 who hadn’t, looking at their scores on measures of paranormal beliefs, tendency to hallucinate, tendency to become engrossed in experiences, propensity for entering into altered states of consciousness, tendency to fantasise, and experience of sleep paralysis.
On all counts, the 19 who had had such experiences scored significantly higher. “What was interesting was that the ‘experiencers’ scored more highly for paranormal beliefs and other paranormal experiences,” French says. “It’s not just that these people have one-off experiences. They have a range of them.”
The other interesting result was that more of the alien abductees reported having experienced sleep paralysis, a common phenomenon when your mind wakes up but your body is unable to move. This is apparently something that about 40 per cent of the population has experienced, and it is often associated with hallucinations, a feeling that some malevolent person or thing is in the room with you, and a sense of a crushing weight on your chest.
“It all seems very real and it’s very, very frightening,” French explains. “But what is happening is that people are still in a kind of REM sleep - the kind associated with dreams - which is coming through into consciousness.”
Most people who experience sleep paralysis shrug it off, but a small fraction are more concerned and some think that there is something altogether spookier going on. In some cultures sleep paralysis has been thought of as a sign that evil spirits, demons or other nasties have taken over. In our high-tech world, we scoff at the idea of evil spirits; some people prefer to believe they have been abducted by aliens, experimented on and put back into their beds with their memories wiped clean. At this point, some believers will suggest that those who have experienced alien abduction ought to undergo hypnotic regression to “retrieve” these memories. The trouble is, as other researchers have shown, those hypnosis sessions, if misused, can actually generate false memories. Some people are more prone than others to creating false memories, such as those who think they’ve had an alien encounter - as the US researcher Susan Clancy, a Harvard psychologist, shows in her recent book, Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens.
For researchers such as Clancy and French, the alien abduction phenomenon fits into a wider matrix of paranormal experiences, including seeing ghosts, past-life memories and so on. Studies have shown that people who have these experiences tend to score highly on the same range of psychological factors as alien abductees. All this may be totally unsurprising to the sceptics, but what might be less obvious is the fact that all these factors are also known to correlate with a repeated history of childhood trauma, French says. He hypothesises that in some cases childhood trauma, for example sexual abuse, physical abuse or terrible illness, may trigger a person to develop a kind of psychological coping mechanism that allows them to become absorbed in a fantasy life as a way of escaping from an unpleasant reality.
He’s certainly not claiming that everyone who has experienced a paranormal phenomenon is the victim of childhood abuse - nor that every abused person ends up believing in alien abduction - but in some cases, “it might be that what we’re dealing with is something that starts off as a defence mechanism”. He adds: “This is a very complicated phenomenon and there are lots of reasons why people will believe in the paranormal, but all these things fit together for me.”
The scientific case for this theory isn’t completely watertight, but it is pretty compelling - for me more so than the idea that super-intelligent aliens are sneaking down to Earth undetected by anyone and whisking away individuals for experimentation.
“If you ask me, I think it would be surprising if there wasn’t intelligent life out there,” says French. “But whether they’re visiting Earth to abduct us from our beds is another matter.” No shock there.
