Are there people out there who have been abducted by aliens? Well, quite a few people certainly think that they have - indeed, they are absolutely convinced that it happens, that it happened to them, and even that they are somehow "special" because they were singled out for abduction. But why? They aren't psychotic or mentally ill according to any standard tests. Some take them seriously, or at least have acted like they do.

Perhaps one of the most famous is John Mack, an M.D. who worked for Harvard University. Before he died, Mack had long accepted that the alien abduction tales are true, although near the end he had begun to waffle and instead argue that “these experiences cannot be understood in a western rationalist tradition of science.” Not that this stopped him from trying to write rational explanations himself.

Psychology Today argued in an article written before his death:

He increasingly distances himself from the question of whether or not aliens exist in the physical world, focusing more on a “consensus reality” that precludes us from even entertaining such a possibility. “We void the cosmos of other intelligence unless it can be proven.”

A fine piece of double-talk you’ll never find. More serious research, however, has revealed more scientific explanations:

Sleep paralysis with hypnopompic hallucinations (those that occur upon waking) can be so unexpected and terrifying that people routinely believe they’re stricken with a grave neurological illness or that they’re going insane. When faced with these prospects, aliens no longer seem so nefarious.

But that’s not all — the ability to create false memories also plays a significant role:

False recall is a source-monitoring problem, an inability to remember where and when information is acquired: You think a friend told you a piece of news, for instance, but you actually heard it on the radio.

Of course, the fact that such things happens isn’t nearly as interesting as the possibility that one was singled out by a race of advanced aliens and chosen especially for strange medical experiments. So guess which explanation people tend to go with?

 

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