Clearly then, a researcher’s or clinician’s intuitive sense about a child’s testimony (let alone the intuitive sense of the child’s parents) says nothing about the validity of that testimony. And the testimony’s detail, coherence, or consistency with adult testimony, is of significance only in regard to the child’s opportunity for misattribution. As difficult as it may be to document such influence, a child’s exposure to books, movies, television, the media, and the casual conversations of parents, peers, teachers, and the occasional stranger, provide more than ample opportunity for misattribution to occur. Parental assurance that their child had no opportunity for exposure to such influences is naive, or at best unfalsifiable. In addition, a perhaps counterintuitive finding from recent research (Brainerd, Reyna, & Brandse, 1995) suggests that false memories acquired by children may even be more persistent (retained over time) than true memories. In any case, the argument that children’s abduction testimony is somehow less assailable than that of adults does not seem to be defensible on scientific grounds.
Multiple-witness cases indicate a real event. Numerous reports exist in the literature where an abduction experience has been shared by two or more individuals. Some of these cases are celebrated as abduction “classics,” such as the Betty and Barney Hill case (Fuller, 1966). Others, while not having achieved such status, are extremely well documented (e.g., the Buff Ledge incident investigated by Webb, 1994; the Allagash incident investigated by Fowler, 1993). Carpenter (1991) and Haines (1994) have provided content analyses of other multiple abduction reports.
In some cases (e.g., Betty and Barney Hill), the individuals involved were family members or very close friends. Such relationships could allow for Shared Psychotic Disorder, a psychiatric condition described in the DSM IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) as the adoption of the delusional (psychotic) beliefs of one individual by another individual with whom a close relationship exists. Typically, such relationships are characterized as long-standing and involving individuals who have lived together for a long time-perhaps in social isolation-and where the individual with the initial psychosis is the dominant partner in the relationship.
Although this may seem to be a plausible explanation for shared abduction experiences, the disorder is quite rare and must involve not just one, but two or more individuals who have acquired a psychotic disorder. Given the normality of the experiencer population in general, the likelihood of mental disorder accounting for the abduction experience should decrease as the number of individuals sharing the experience increases. Furthermore, in most shared abduction experience cases, the relationship of the individuals involved simply does not fit the profile associated with the disorder.
For example, in the Buff Ledge case (Webb, 1994) the two primary experiencers (as well as a number of subsidiary witnesses) were acquaintances at a summer camp, shared little detail regarding their conscious experiences with each other or anyone else, became aware of their own participation in an apparent abduction only many years later during hypnosis, were unaware of the specific events described by their counterparts, had not been in contact with each other for years or even decades, and have remained anonymous making no attempt whatever to capitalize on their reported experiences.
Such experiences cannot readily be attributed to hoax, susceptibility to suggestion, or psychopathology. These cases may provide the greatest challenge to prosaic explanations of the abduction experience.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
1. Hoaxes. Because independent evidence of an abduction is usually unavailable, the establishment of a hoax often depends on evaluation of the credibility of the claimant. Given the large number of abduction experiences that have been reported, it would be unreasonable to expect that in no case was a hoax perpetrated. On the other hand, in very few cases does the behavior of the reporter suggest motivation for such an act. Deliberate hoaxing is not a likely source for the vast majority of abduction accounts.
2. Hypnosis. Experiments demonstrate convincingly that hypnotically retrieved memory is often unreliable. However, the degree to which this research can be generalized to the kind of experience reported for abductions is not completely known, and some experimental evidence may actually be consistent with enhanced memory retrieval for this kind of experience. By no means does this imply that investigators or mental health professionals can be cavalier about the use of hypnosis, or that hypnosis can be exonerated as a causal factor in abduction experiences. But it is premature to claim that research already requires the dismissal of hypnotically retrieved abduction accounts.
3. Fantasy Proneness. Several studies have failed to provide experimental support for the fantasy-prone hypothesis. The data do not rule out the possibility that fantasy proneness may account for a small number of abduction experiences, but they do indicate that fantasy proneness cannot serve as a general explanation.
4. The false-memory syndrome. Clearly, no responsible therapist should ignore the implications of the false-memory syndrome. But what is its scientific status in regard to the abduction experience? Nash (1994) has cautioned therapists to be aware of both false positives (incorrectly accepting) and false negatives (incorrectly rejecting) when dealing with recovered memories of abuse. Although the abuse literature provides some evidence for both, in most cases accusations of abuse can neither be proved nor disproved, and the prevalence of false positives and false negatives remains largely unestablished. Certainly this is the case in regard to the abduction experience. In the absence of independent documentation, and given the limitations of clinical impression as a standard by which to test the validity of abduction accounts, the extent of clinically induced false memory for abductions will remain unknown.
5. Personality. Numerous personality measures have demonstrated that as a group the experiencer population is clinically normal, but atypical in a variety of ways. Some of these characteristics may be consistent with personality traits associated with suspect syndromes such as fantasy proneness or boundary deficit. However, specific tests for these conditions have been disconfirmatory, equivocal, or undone.
6. Sleep anomalies. The relationship between abduction experiences and sleep anomalies (e.g., narcolepsy, sleep paralysis, hypnagogic hallucinations) has, by various theorists, been claimed, assumed, or (conversely) dismissed. However, the relationship has not been adequately tested.
7. Psychopathology. Perhaps more than any other variable, the presence of psychopathology in the experiencer population has been systematically studied. The results indicate that formally recognized psychopathology does not exist to any greater degree in the experiencer population than it does in the general population.
8. Psychodynamic theories. Abduction experiences have been explained as the unconscious’ response to childhood abuse, birth memory, abortion anxiety, environmental crises, unique characteristics of altered states, and the unconscious’ own evolutionary development. Although abduction experiences do contain elements that are consistent with psychodynamic symbolism, the ability of psychodynamic theory to account for a given mental experience in such a wide variety of ways requires that it be evaluated in terms of empirical tests, not appeals to analogy. The suggested applications of psychodynamic mechanisms to the abduction experience are as yet untested, or ultimately untestable.
9. Environmental theories. Experiments which directly establish a relationship between environmental conditions (e.g., electromagnetic allergens, tectonic stress) and abduction experiences have not been carried out. And although debated by their advocates, most researchers concur that the plausibility of the assumptions underlying these hypotheses is yet to be demonstrated.
10. ET hypothesis. Arguments for dismissing the veridicality of abduction reports on a priori grounds are logically flawed. On the other hand, ET advocates’ strongest challenges to alternative theory are not crucial tests of veridicality.