Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens
By Susan A. Clancy, Harvard University Press, 2005

Harvard psychology grad student Susan Clancy got into alien abduction research through the back door. She originally became part of a study that hoped to show that “recovered memories” - previously unrecalled incidents that surface when a subject undergoes hypnosis - were often, if not always, false memories. The study focused on alleged victims of sexual abuse who had no memory of the abuse before therapy allowed them to recover memories. The results of the study were inconclusive, but the public reaction to it was not; abuse victims were outraged that the study assumed that their recovered memories were false and that the researchers had set out to discredit them with a predetermined bias in hand at the outset of the study.

Clancy herself, she claims in Abducted, was traumatized by the study. She found it very painful to listen to the stories of the subjects as they recounted their experiences, so she was relieved when she was given the opportunity to work on another study with the same goal. This study would use a different set of subjects - alleged alien abductees - whose recovered memories are undeniably false. Very few people beyond the alleged abductees themselves believe that the subjects “remember” anything that actually happened; thus the potential for controversy was relatively small. Also, Clancy had no problem listening to the stories of abductees, because she didn’t believe them.

Clancy began the study with a hypothesis. She believed that the subjects had experienced sleep paralysis, a disturbing state between sleeping and waking that makes dream imagery seem very real, and that they were to some extent traumatized by the event. They then sought to explain what had happened, and the media-supported theory of alien abduction seemed to them a likely explanation. Then, in many cases, hypnosis reinforced their beliefs so well that their theoretical explanation for the paralysis incident began to seem like an actual memory. The fact that these people refused to think critically and scientifically allowed them to firmly believe that they had been abducted.

In Abducted, Clancy presents her experience with the study in a way that is supposed to make the scientific research accessible to a popular audience. Unfortunately, that means she presents very little objective evidence and instead relies on anecdotes, the very shortcoming of which she accuses her subjects. She tries to hide her bias by asserting again and again that the abductees were not crazy but merely normal people who could not think scientifically, but her anecdotes are peppered with enough stories about obvious schizophrenics that the popular notion of abductees as loonies is not at all threatened.

Clancy’s skepticism and initial prejudice open her science to reasonable questions from those who don’t want to believe her. First of all, she bases her outright rejection of abduction claims on a lack of credible evidence; she glosses over the fact that a lack of evidence doesn’t prove a claim to be false but rather makes it impossible to prove the claim to be true. If there’s no evidence, we can only say that we don’t know if the claim is true; we cannot say that we know it’s false. But Clancy must know that alien abduction stories are false, or her research will be unable to reach any conclusion.

Clancy falls into more traps as she tries to point out how extremely unlikely it is that intelligent extraterrestrial life exists. Since she can’t prove that aliens don’t exist, she has to settle for unlikelihood. Her assertion that there are potentially very few planets hospitable to life in the universe is based on 20-year-old science. In the past two decades, planetary astronomy has been radically updated by new discoveries, and now planets are known to be much more common than was previously thought (and the very possibility of such a drastic revision points out just how fallible the astronomical “knowledge” of the 1980s was). Further, Clancy states unequivocally that “a billion species of animals have come into existence [on Earth], yet only one possesses conscious intelligence,” a claim that has no firm scientific basis at all. And it goes on and on, as Clancy lays the necessary foundation for her research: memories of alien abduction are necessarily false memories because aliens aren’t real.

I’m not saying I believe all the people who say they were abducted by aliens. In the end, Clancy is probably right. But I can also understand the frustration of people who believe “weird” things and who have to listen to skeptics as they explain how insane the very idea is. Clancy’s book makes clear how even staunchly objective scientists are tricked by their prejudices into putting faith into unprovable ideas, the precise miscue of which they accuse the irrational believers. Clancy knows that there are no such things as aliens, and she uses that knowledge to build her tower of objective study. But her foundation is unstable. Yes, it’s very unlikely that little alien guys are creeping into bedrooms and taking people on cruises around the universe, but unlikely doesn’t equal untrue, and someone as dependent on statistical analysis as Clancy would do well to remember that.

Copyright 2005 Ad Media Inc.