Alien Abduction & Contact

An Overview

Reports of such experiences range from ambivalence to extremes of euphoria or terror

Before we can enter more dense conceptual terrain, we need to be clear on exactly what phenomena are under discussion. I accept the basic division between contact and abduction that dominates most writing on the subject, and I propose a further, analytically useful subdivision in each category.

Typology

"Saucerian" Contact

I distinguish between what I will call "saucerian" and "channeled" types of contact, though elements of the two are not mutually exclusive. The former type usually begins when a lone person in some isolated place - the desert, frequently - comes across a space craft and its crew and is invited aboard. The contactee has a series of encounters in the craft, viewing the civilizations of several planets and discussing weighty matters with the alien leader. Of special concern to the aliens is the disruption in the galactic community caused by humanity's recent harnessing of nuclear energy and its use in weapons. After several saucer trips, the contactee writes of his (most contactees of this type have been male) encounters and, in many cases, founds a new religious movement to get the extraterrestrial message to others.

"Channeled" Contact

Telepathic contact with an "Ascended Master" or some other extraterrestrial being, though it also produces books and religious organizations, is much more along the lines of classic communication with spirits than the "saucerian" contact reports. (J. Gordon Melton [1995] points out the interconnections between contactees and Theosophy, and others link contactees to spirit mediums and "channels.") Some lone person, either by chance or deliberate effort, enters into communication with an alien intelligence. Again, the disruption of the galactic community of intelligences caused by humans and their nuclear weapons is the major theme of the communication. The contactee is urged to tell others of the arrival of "Space Brothers" and the Golden Age with them. Aetherius, Unarius and the group profiled in When Prophecy Fails all got started in this manner.

"Classic" Abduction

Abduction differs from contact on a few critical points:

abductees are taken against their will, whereas contactees enter into their relationship with aliens voluntarily;
abduction is generally unpleasant, if not terrifying, while contact uplifts the intellect and the ego (and occasionally the libido);
and abductees tend to shun publicity for their experiences, an attitude generally diametrically opposed to that of the contactees.

In what I will term a "classic" abduction, a lone person comes into contact with aliens and/or a UFO. The person is rendered immobile, sometimes unconscious, and is taken to a room where s/he undergoes a seemingly "medical" examination at the hands of nonhuman aliens. The aliens use a combination of instruments and visual-psychic scanning, often extracting sex cells, sometimes implanting tiny objects the abductees interpret as tracking devices. Many abductees report a separate segment to the episode in which an alien leader gives them important, sometimes highly symbolic messages. They may see a representation of the end of the world, or they may meet an alien-human hybrid child they are led to believe is theirs. Abductees are then returned to normal life at some remove in space and time from where they were taken. Reports of lifelong series of abductions beginning in childhood are becoming more and more common. Together with the circumstances of the abduction and the seeming alien preoccupation with human reproduction (especially in American cases), these patterns of abductions lead some prominent investigators and abductees to see a sinister plan behind the phenomenon.

"Spiritual" Abduction

A significant percentage of abduction reports suggest abductee - and alien - concern with spirituality, so I will call this percentage "spiritual" abductions. Contact with the alien Other in general has a profound effect on the psyche and worldview, whether or not the Other intends to produce such an effect. "Spiritual" abductions suggest a deliberate and apparently magnanimous intent to change the abductee's psyche. They have the same basic structure and elements as the more secular "classic" experience but have a different orientation and outcome with respect to the abductee. In taking and manipulating people aliens seem to wish to effect a spiritual evolution of the individual people and, through them, humanity as a whole. As the late Harvard psychiatrist and abduction researcher John Mack (1994) suggests, spiritual growth can be painful and bewildering even if well-intentioned. Though some alien self-interest may persist, "spiritual" abductees report positive reorientations like respect for life, desire to serve others, and a more immediate sense of the divine and miraculous in the everyday.

Brief History of Abduction and Contact

Reports of contact with the crews of alien craft seem to be as old as reports of the craft themselves, and abduction reports are not much more recent. I focus primarily on the US in this history, partially because I know it best, but just as much because the US has been the leading producer of UFO-related reports and investigators, not to mention influential UFO-themed entertainment.

There was a flurry of reports of strange airships over the US in 1896-7. Some reports including communication with the crafts' crew, who were odd in dress or speech, but quite conventionally human. The "contactees" sometimes had conversations with the crew on their craft, the weather, and other less-exalted topics, but none ever got on board or took a trip (Bartholomew and Howard 1998, Jacobs 1976).

The 1950s were the heyday of both flying saucer sci-fi movies and reports of "saucerian" and "channeled" contact. People like George Adamski, Howard Menger, and Truman Bethurum are among the most famous "saucerians," George King and Ernest Norman began Aetherius and Unarius, respectively, and Festinger et al. (1956) released their influential study "When Prophecy Fails." Yet we should remember that the first investigated abduction case occurred in Brazil in 1957. A young farmer named Antonio Villas-Boas was examined by Dr. Olavo Fontes after reporting being taken aboard a spaceship and compelled to mate with an alien female.

The Villas-Boas case did not, however, have an effect on the course of abduction research as a whole until it was compared to the Hill case of 1961, the quintessential abduction report. After experiencing missing time and severe nightmares following their sighting of a UFO on vacation, Betty and Barney Hill of New Hampshire sought the help of psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Simon. Simon used hypnosis on the two separately, producing two different but very compelling stories of abduction and experimentation at the hands of aliens that journalist John G. Fuller chronicled in his bestseller "The Interrupted Journey."

It was not until the mid-1970s that any other comparable abduction cases came along. Three major cases appeared in ufological literature and the news media in the US - Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker in Mississippi, Travis Walton in Arizona, and Betty Andreasson-Luca in Massachusetts - and with others coming to light elsewhere. The 1970s were also a time when contactee cults, pared down over the course of the 1960s to a few major groups, experienced the public scrutiny and opprobrium that alternative religions generally did in the West at that time. Though channeling had overtaken "saucerian" contact by this time, one prominent but small "saucerian" contact cult began in 1975--Human Individual Metamorphosis, later Heaven's Gate.

Abduction research began to dominate American ufology in the 1980s. At around the same time, elements of right-wing conspiracist thinking began to mix with the dominant extraterrestrial hypothesis and its latent conspiracist aspects (that is, the claims of a government cover-up of definitive UFO information). By the 1980s, alien contact and its religious overtones had been fermenting for nearly three decades thanks to the success of UFO-themed entertainment and non-fiction, and had begun to reach a point of saturation.

Through the course of the 1990s, alien contact in its several varieties was - as I argued above - very nearly taken for granted by many people, thanks in large part to popular cultural saturation by such phenomena as "The X-Files." In a similar manner, the connection of UFOs to cults, and (unfortunately) of cults to violence, approached taken-for-granted status. This latter series of connections was made possible by the mass suicide of the remaining Heaven's Gate members in 1998, which resonated with the earlier and much larger mass death of People's Temple members in Guyana. People continued to channel extraterrestrial beings, and the established contactee cults awaited the coming of the Space Brothers, though "saucerian" contact was much less frequent. Perhaps this is because of the spiritual turn of abduction reports and research, which is very much a '90s phenomenon (though well-known cases like that of Betty Andreasson-Luca were manifestly religious in content and effects).

Issues in Social-Scientific Research on Contact/Abduction

The following observations and recommendations do not all originate with me, but I think it will be beneficial to collect and re-state them here. They underscore reasons I have elsewhere given why anthropology is of great utility in studying UFO-related phenomena: detailed ethnographic case studies; historical and cultural contextualization; and cross-cultural comparison and contrast.

Methodology

For starters, I suggest that the distinction between abduction and contact is analytically useful and that a further subdivision of the categories of the kind offered previously may be just as useful. This distinction derives its power from its concurrence with the "emic" categories of self-described experiencers and investigators of alien contact. We should not, however, leave the distinction unquestioned and lose sight of the important parallels in structure, content, and effect that alien contact narratives share with stories of encounters with spiritual beings, fairies, and other nonhuman supernatural beings (see Vallée 1993[1968] and Thompson 1989).

In fact, in light of those parallels, I suggest that any social-scientific investigation should accord abductions or contacts the same status accorded to reported religious experiences. By this I mean we should not devote any more energy to debating the existence of aliens than we would to debating the existence of any of the myriad beings (including a Supreme Being) reported in religious experiences before we even begin researching reports of such experiences.

Another issue here is one raised by UFOs in general--cross-cultural and subcultural variations in the structure and content of reported experiences. Aside from scattered references to an overall pattern in reports with intriguing, possibly culturally based differences between reports, there has been no systematic investigation of either the (inferred) pattern or the (incompletely analyzed) variations. For instance, Stephanie Platz's dissertation (1996) on ufologists and contactees in the chaos of post-Soviet Armenia reveals a nationalist interpretation of alien contact very different from the universalist spin US abduction researchers put on it. Ethnographic case studies can be helpful here, not least for focusing tightly on particular phenomena and putting the particulars in their cultural and historical context.

Causality

A number of well-researched histories of UFO reports have been done, mostly for the US. They point to the necessity for tracing both continuities and changes over time in reports of alien contact, in the study of those reports, and in the cultural milieu within which (and with which) the two phenomena interact. However, this leads to the terribly thorny issue of causality. It forces us to try to disentangle the thicket of interrelationships between abduction and contact reports, science fiction film and literature, SETI research and hypotheses, and folkloric traditions.

What should we think when we learn from folklorist Bertrand Mheust that a sci-fi story from the 1930s contains an abduction episode eerily similar in structure and content to professedly non-fiction reports? Or when ufological commentator Martin Kottmeyer points out that an episode of "The Outer Limits" from the same general time-frame as the Hill case contains elements that appeared in Barney Hill's hypnotically elicited abduction report? And how are we to draw any useful causal conclusions from abduction and contact reports that take place within a popular cultural context saturated with images of aliens which were to an extent inspired by those reports?

These are just the sort of questions for which an anthropological approach to the subject could provide provocative answers. Anthropologists have a track record of taking a new look at the familiar by treating it as exotic, and vice versa. Since we are saturated with alien reports and images, it can be useful to show how the idea of extraterrestrials is historically and culturally circumscribed, yet allied to a wealth of other ideas in other times and societies. One example would be comparing and contrasting abductees in the US with people involved in possession cults, like the zar cult among the Somali of East Africa (see Lewis 1986).

Etiology

Dealing with causality leads inevitably to a discussion of the etiologies proposed for alien contact reports--that they derive ultimately from extraterrestrials, angels/demons, shamanic initiation, or mental illness. In keeping with my suggestion to question the taken-for-granted, we could profitably consider these explanations as ethnotheories on the same level as the Azande invocation of witchcraft to explain misfortune (Evans-Pritchard 1937) or the shamans' search for disjointed social relationships in diagnosing and treating diseased individuals (Lévi-Strauss 1963).

In capsule form, then, here are the various ethnotheories concerning the ultimate cause for UFO reports:

organic mental defect - usually proposed by psychiatrists and debunkers. People supposedly report paranormal experiences because they are psychologically disturbed. This is difficult to support given the results of psychological tests on reporters (several in the bibliography of this section) that register either inconclusively or negatively on the matter of mental illness.
psychosomatic effects of environmental stressors - proposed by some experimental psychologists, chief among them neuropsychologist Michael Persinger. The idea is that seismic events generate strong electromagnetic fields, which influence activity in the temporal lobe of the brain. Thus people have a very real natural experience on which they overlay cultural content (e.g. UFOs) to make sense of it. Some support is claimed from the experimental elicitation of psychological states similar to those attributed to abductees, but these results have not been reproduced within the natural environment where they are supposed to occur.
fantasy-proneness - another psychiatric idea, used by some debunkers. Reporters of alien contact are said to be prone to flights of fancy with little stimulation. Certainly, this hypothesis accounts for some percentage of contact and abduction reports, but not all of them. If applied broadly or exclusively, this can be just a bit condescending, not to mention misleading.
sociopathy (i.e., willful hoaxing) - characteristic of debunkers. In this way of thinking, those reporting abductions are deliberately lying for some sort of gain or fulfillment. Again, this works for a minority of reports. But it fails to account for the majority of situations, in which the report of such an experience defeats potential rewards; if anything, reports bring stigma, and most experiencers say they are loath to make them for that reason.
contact with angelic or demonic beings - a theological explanation common among New Agers and Evangelical Christians. Reporters supposedly encounter or are influenced by spiritual beings masquerading as aliens. This merely substitutes one empirically elusive class of beings with another, which may fulfill criteria of religious credibility but not those of the sciences.
contact with advanced nonhuman extraterrestrials - the standard ufological and pop cultural idea, at least in the US. Reporters are said to interact with physically real beings from another part or dimension of the universe. This, too, is difficult to prove empirically and has strong opponents among professional scientists and scientifc organizations. It is also not as convincing to UFO researchers in other cultural and epistemological contexts--Western Europe, for instance.

In examining these various etiologies or ethnotheories we must keep an open mind as to what provokes reports - whether nonhuman intelligences, seismoelectrically stimulated temporal lobes, or social stressors - because the experiences provoking such reports are liable (I would argue) to be multicausal and in any event inaccessible ex post facto to outsiders.

For instance, we should look hard at the interpersonal interactions that go into the formation of a contact or abduction report. Of special significance is the relationship between abductees and their investigator-therapists--roles often combined, to the consternation of psychiatrists and ufologists alike, in single individuals (cf. Randle et al. 2000). Abduction reports are joint productions of those with the experiences and those with the technical and theoretical apparatus, as well as the seeming authority, to handle such cases. This is not to say that the experiences are fabricated, but rather that most reports are elaborated within an ostensibly therapeutic dialogue. (Psychiatrist and abduction researcher John Mack [1994] terms the process "co-creative;" Adrienne Lehrer [1982] describes the therapeutic process of arriving at a common vocabulary and viewpoint for experience as "critical communication.") They do not become available until they are converted from personal experience to a more or less consistent public narrative. Nor do contactees themselves produce their reports in a social vacuum, even if they do not collaborate to the extent that abductees do. Contactees, occultists, saucer clubs, and others meet and exchange ideas in what has aptly been called a "cultic milieu" (Campbell 1972) composed of many marginalized ideas, people, and organizations.

Use-Value (with apologies to Marx)

We should also inquire about the different projects into which contact and abduction reports (and reporters) are enrolled. A major project for which cooperatively produced abduction reports are used in the US is the development and support of conspiracy theorizing. Tales of alien-government collusion seem to date back to the 1980s, perhaps as far back as 1950s allegations of ufologists like Donald Keyhoe (1955) that government agencies investigating UFOs were withholding information. How alien abduction research/therapy interacts with (originally) far-right conspiracy theories is still under-examined but fascinating; political scientist Michael Barkun (2004) makes a valuable foray into the field.

Works Cited

Michael Barkun. 2004. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California.
Colin Campbell. 1972. The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization. in Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain. Michael Hill, ed. London: SCM. Pp. 119-136.
E.E. Evans-Pritchard. 1937. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande. Oxford: Oxford University.
Donald Keyhoe. 1955. The UFO Conspiracy. New York: Holt.
Adrienne Lehrer. 1982. Critical Communication: Wine and Therapy. in Exceptional Language and Linguistics. L.K. Obler and L Menn, eds. New York: Academic Press. pp.67-79.
Claude Lévi-Strauss. 1963. The Sorceror's Magic. in Structural Anthropology, vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago. Pp. 167-185.
John E. Mack. 1994. Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. New York: Scribners.
Stephanie Platz. 1996. Pasts and Futures: Space and Armenian National Identity. 2 vols. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago.
Kevin Randle, Russ Estes, and William Cone. 2000. The Abduction Enigma. New York: Forge.

Bibliography

If you are interested in reading up on contact and abduction, you will certainly not starve for information. Enormous quantities of literature have been produced by contactees, abductees, ufologists, and abduction therapists, varying wildly in quality but following several discrete orientations (among them personal memoir, parascientific research, journalism, and religious tract). Below I provide a short list on each topic, citing the first or most influential work by particular authors. For an excellent bibliography of contactee literature, the reader is referred to J. Gordon Melton and George Eberhardt's article "The Flying Saucer Contactee Movement 1950-1994: A Bibliography" in The Gods Have Landed (see citation below).

Contactee Literature

"Saucerian" Type

George Adamski and Desmond Leslie. 1953. Flying Saucers Have Landed. London: Werner Laurie.
Orfeo Angelucci. 1955. Secret of the Saucers. Amherst WI: Amherst Press.
Truman Bethurum (ghostwritten by Mary Kay Tennison). 1954. Aboard a Flying Saucer. Los Angeles: DeVorss.
Howard Menger. 1959. From Outer Space to You. Clarksburg WV: Saucerian Press.

"Channel" Type

Aetherius (George King). 1962. Flying Saucers: A Report on the Flying Saucers, Their Crews, and Their Mission to Earth. Los Angeles: Aetherius Society.
Heaven's Gate/Human Individual Metamorphosis. 1998. How and When Heaven's Gate (the Door to the Physical Kingdom Level Above Human) May Be Entered. Mill Spring NC: Wild Flower
Mark-Age Meta Center. 1963. Christ Consciousness. Miami: Mark-Age Meta Center.
Raël (Claude Vorilhon). 1986. Let's Welcome Our Fathers from Outer Space: They Created Humanity in their Laboratories. Tokyo: AOM Corp.
Unarius (Ernest and Ruth Norman). 1960. Cosmic Continuum. Santa Barbara CA: Unarius-Science of Life.

Abduction Literature

Abductee, Abductionist, and Debunking

Ann Druffel and D. Scott Rogo. 1980. The Tujunga Canyon Contacts. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Raymond Fowler. 1979. The Andreasson Affair. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall.
John G. Fuller. 1966. The Interrupted Journey. New York: Dial.
Budd Hopkins. 1981. Missing Time: A Documented Study of UFO Abductions. New York: Marek.
David Jacobs. 1992. Secret Life: Firsthand Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions. New York: Fireside/Simon & Schuster.
Philip Klass. 1988. UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game. New York: Prometheus.
John Mack. 1994. Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. New York: Scribners.
Scott Mandelker. 1996. From Elsewhere: Being ET in America. New York: Birch Lane.
Andrea Pritchard, et al., eds. 1994. Alien Discussions: Proceedings of the Abduction Study Conference Held at MIT. Cambridge MA: North Cambridge Press.
Kenneth Ring. 1992. The Omega Project. New York: Wm. Morrow.
Whitley Strieber. 1987. Communion: A True Story. New York: Wm. Morrow.
Travis Walton. 1978. The Walton Experience. New York: Berkeley.

Social-Scientific and Psychological

C.D.B. Bryan. 1996. Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: Alien Abduction, UFOs, and the Conference at MIT. New York: Penguin.
Jodi Dean. 1998. Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace. Ithaca: Cornell University.
C.G. Jung. 1991. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. Princeton: Bollingen.
James R. Lewis, ed. 1995. The Gods Have Landed: New Religions from Other Worlds. Albany: State University of New York.
Terry Matheson. 1998. Alien Abductions: Creating a Modern Phenomenon. New York: Prometheus.
Kevin Randle, Russ Estes, and William Cone. 2000. The Abduction Enigma. New York: Forge.