Science still does the knee-jerk reaction to alien abduction, and this article from Big Think, which popped up in my timeline today, illustrates the point. Apparently, people believe they have been abducted by aliens if they see or experience something unusual (see a UFO, suffer a bout of sleep paralysis etc), then via hypnotic regression they create complex false memories based on the available UFO/abduction literature available. Simple!

Sadly, this misses some really important points. The main point being, there is a huge wealth of documented experiences where someone is abducted from the environment. The classic encounter of someone driving at night, they witness a UFO, the car stops and the abduction takes place. How does the Big Think theory account for this? It doesn’t. What about those abductees who have memories of experiences without the use of hypnosis? Oh right, Big Think can’t account for those instances either.

It reminded me of Susan Clancy’s attempt at a unified theory on alien abduction which she wrote about in her book “Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens“. A simplified theory about something as complex as alien abduction always falls apart when you pick at it.

The article does highlight a potentially wider issue around hypnosis, but I’ll dig into that in a future blog post, but it certainly doesn’t invalidate the experiences of a large number of abductees. In my forthcoming book, I highlight the issue around hypnosis, but typically the issue is around the therapist rather than the use of hypnosis itself.

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