Don Donderi, Ph.D
Summary: The purpose of this essay is to explain how to clarify the evidence for or against the reality of UFO abductions. Many workers in this field have modified the conventional meaning of both the word “reality” and the word “abduction.” I do not accept these modifications. A UFO abduction, if it occurs, is a physical event.
Don Donderi is an Associate Professor of Psychology at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. His basic research interests include human perception and memory, and his applied work is in the field of human factors and ergonomics. He is a principal of Human Factors North, Inc., a Toronto-based ergonomics consulting firm.
Essay originally appeared in:
International UFO Reporter, Spring 1996, Volume 21, Number 1
Copyright 1996 by the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, 2457 West Peterson Ave., Chicago, IL 60659
published bimonthly with a subscription rate of $25/yr.
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The purpose of this essay is to explain how to clarify the evidence for or against the reality of UFO abductions. Many workers in this field have modified the conventional meaning of both the word “reality” and the word “abduction.” I do not accept these modifications. A UFO abduction, if it occurs, is a physical event. A person is taken aboard an extraterrestrial spacecraft and interacts with its crew. If this event is imagined, then it is not a physical event, it is an imaginary one. If the event happened before and it is being relived in the present, then it is a re-experiencing, not an abduction. There is nothing wrong with either imagining or memory as a description of human experience. A re-experiencing is clearly evidence for an earlier abduction if it can be separated from an imagining, which is based on the incorporation of other people’s experiences (through conversation, books, or films) into one’s own experience. But in no case is imagining evidence of an abduction. By misusing the descriptive categories of language, and calling imaginings and re-experiencing “abduction reports,” confusion is produced which can only bring the substantial evidence for the physical reality of UFO abductions into doubt.