[Paleopsych] NYT: Explaining Those Vivid Memories of Martian Kidnappers
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Explaining Those Vivid Memories of Martian Kidnappers
New York Times, 5.8.9
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/health/09alien.html?pagewanted=print
By [3]BENEDICT CAREY
"Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens,"
by Susan Clancy. Harvard University Press, $22.95.
People who have memories of being abducted by aliens become hardened
skeptics, of a kind. They dismiss the procession of scientists who
explain away the memories as illusions or fantasy. They scoff at talk
about hypnosis or the unconscious processing of Hollywood scripts. And
they hold their ground amid snickers from a public that thinks that
they are daft or psychotic.
They are neither, it turns out, and their experiences should be taken
as seriously as any strongly held exotic beliefs, according to Susan
Clancy, a Harvard psychologist who interviewed dozens of
self-described abductees as part of a series of memory studies over
the last several years.
In her book "Abducted," due in October, Dr. Clancy, a psychologist at
Harvard, manages to refute and defend these believers, and along the
way provide a discussion of current research into memory, emotion and
culture that renders abduction stories understandable, if not
believable. Although it focuses on abduction memories, the book hints
at a larger ambition, to explain the psychology of transformative
experiences, whether supposed abductions, conversions or divine
visitations.
"Understanding why people believe weird things is important for anyone
who wishes to know more about people - that is, humans in general,"
she writes.
Dr. Clancy's accounting for abduction memories starts with an odd but
not uncommon experience called sleep paralysis. While in light
dream-rich REM sleep, people will in rare cases wake up for a few
moments and find themselves unable to move. Psychologists estimate
that about a fifth of people will have that experience at least once,
during which some 5 percent will be bathed in terrifying sensations
like buzzing, full-body electrical quivers, a feeling of levitation,
at times accompanied by hallucinations of intruders.
Some of them must have an explanation as exotic as the surreal nature
of the experience itself. Although no one has studied this group
systematically, Dr. Clancy suggests based on her interviews, that they
tend to be people who already have some interest in the paranormal,
mystical arts and the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors. Often
enough, their search for meaning lands them in the care of a therapist
who uses hypnotism to elicit more details of their dreamlike
experiences.
Hypnotism is a state of deep relaxation, when people become highly
prone to suggestion, psychologists find. When encouraged under
hypnosis to imagine a vivid but entirely concocted incident - like
being awakened by loud noises - people are more likely later to claim
the scene as a real experience, studies find.
Where, exactly, do the green figures with the wraparound eyes come
from? From the deep well of pop culture, Dr. Clancy argues, based on a
review of the history of U.F.O. sightings, popular movies and
television programs on aliens. The first "abduction" in the United
States was dramatized in 1953, in the movie "Invaders From Mars," she
writes, and a rash of abduction reports followed this and other works
on aliens, including the television series "The Outer Limits."
One such report, by a couple from New Hampshire, Betty and Barney
Hill, followed by days a particularly evocative episode of the show in
1961. Mr. Hill's description of the aliens - with big heads and shiny
wraparound eyes - was featured in a best-selling book about the
experience, and inspired the alien forms in Steven Spielberg's "Close
Encounters of the Third Kind" in 1977, according to Dr. Clancy.
Thus does life imitate art, and vice versa, in a narrative hall of
mirrors in which scenes and even dialogues are recycled. Although they
are distinct in details, abduction narratives are extremely similar in
broad outline and often include experimentation with a sexual or
procreative subtext. "Oh! And he's opening my shirt, and - he's going
to put that thing in my navel," says one 1970's narrative, referring
to a needle.
"I can feel them moving that thing around in my stomach, in my body,"
the narrative, excerpted in the book, continues. The passage echoes
other abduction accounts, past and future.
In a laboratory study in 2002, Dr. Clancy and another Harvard
psychologist, Richard McNally, gave self-described abductees a
standardized word-association test intended to measure proneness to
false-memory creation. The participants studied lists of words that
were related to one another - "sugar," "candy," "sour," "bitter" - and
to another word that was not on the list, in this case, "sweet."
When asked to recall the word lists, those with abduction memories
were more likely than a group of peers who had no such memories to
falsely recall the unlisted word. The findings suggest a
susceptibility to what are called source errors, misattributing
sources of remembered information by, say, confusing a scene from a
barely remembered movie with a dream.
In another experiment, the researchers found that recalling abduction
memories prompted physiological changes in blood pressure and
sweat-gland activity that were higher than those seen in
post-traumatic stress syndrome. The memories produced intense
emotional trauma, and each time that occurs it deepens the certainty
that something profound really did happen.
Although no one of those elements - sleep paralysis, interest in the
paranormal, hypnotherapy, memory tricks or emotional investment - is
necessary or sufficient to create abduction memories, they tend to
cluster together in self-described abductees, Dr. Clancy finds. "In
the past, researchers have tended to concentrate on one or another"
factor, she said in an interview. "I'm saying they all play a role."
Yet abduction narratives often have another, less explicit, dimension
that Dr. Clancy suspects may be central to their power. Consider this
comment, from a study participant whom Dr. Clancy calls Jan, a
middle-age divorcée engaged in a quest for personal understanding:
"You know, they do walk among us on earth. They have to transform
first into a physical body, which is very painful for them. But they
do it out of love. They are here to tell us that we're all
interconnected in some way. Everything is."
At a basic level, Dr. Clancy concludes, alien abduction stories give
people meaning, a way to comprehend the many odd and dispiriting
things that buffet any life, as well as a deep sense that they are not
alone in the universe. In this sense, abduction memories are like
transcendent religious visions, scary and yet somehow comforting and,
at some personal psychological level, true.
Dr. Clancy said she regretted not having asked the abductees she
interviewed about religious beliefs, which were not a part of her
original research. The reader may regret that, too.
The warmth, awe and emotion of abduction stories and of those who tell
them betray strong spiritual currents that will be familiar to
millions of people whose internal lives are animated by religious
imagery.
When it comes to sounding the depths of alien stories, a scientific
inquiry like this one may have to end with an inquiry into religion.
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