1988 by Martin Kottmeyer
As claims about the reality of alien abductions multiply, the assertion is increasingly heard that psychology offers little or no insight into how such experiences could occur if they are unreal. Abductees are normal people. Tests prove it. How, then, could normal people make such impossible claims as those found in abduction narratives and not be right? If this assertion is true, the theatre version of the UFO phenomenon is in jeopardy. To the extent that the UFO phenomenon is a genre of theatre and an expression of the human imagination, it must be amenable to psychological study. Clearly this is a paradox that needs to be addressed.
Drama is quintessentially involved with conflict, the exercise of power. Aliens and their magical technology represent an elementary extreme in the spectrum of power relationships seen in a theatre. The vitality of the UFO mythos lies precisely in its ability to provoke fear and desire over the power symbolized in the role of the alien. Studies of UFO belief repeatedly implicate the frustration of the will to power. (1)
The clearest evidence for this fact is Stephen P. Resta’s study which found the strength of UFO belief is well correlated with externality, a generalized attitude that one has little control over one’s life. (2)
The significant correlation between UFO belief and belief in witches, necromancy, and ghosts doubtless derives from this general sense of powerlessness. (3) Witchcraft in some form is found in all societies and practiced most avidly by those lacking, but desiring, power. A subtle sociological datum worth noting is Donald Warren’s Gallup poll analysis which found elevated levels of UFO belief among individuals who failed to achieve the economic level of status that their education would lead society to expect. (4)
UFO reports themselves give ample testimony to the predominance of powerlessness as a shaping factor of UFO experiences. The dominant emotion in reports is fear. If UFOs represent a symbol of wholeness, as Jungians claim, this is assuredly a counter-intuitive finding. We should see serenity and fulfillment. UFOs, in the great majority of cases, behave like agents of chaos. Vehicles lose power. Witnesses are paralyzed. Life is disrupted. Entropy reigns. Abduction is so natural an extension of the core of UFO belief, the mystery is not that it appeared, but why it took so long as it did to be accepted.
Even a person totally naive in psychological analysis should be able to satisfy himself that the overarching theme of abduction narratives is powerlessness. This is manifest not in the mere sense of capture and involuntary scrutiny, but in the extra-ordinary variety of dramatic intrusions imposed on the abductee. Among the accounts in the literature one will find pain inflicted in many different parts of the body including the head, the neck, the chest, the stomach, the back, and the navel. Needles, absurdly big at times, are used to penetrate a variety of points including the nose, the arm, the navel, an eye socket with the eye removed, and wires have been inserted into one man’s penis and anus. Organs have been removed and replaced. Sometimes the body is completely ripped apart and put back together. One abductee had her eye scraped with a knife. Some people have their limbs pulled sharply, their hair pulled, even their head pulled and squeezed by aliens. Abductees are subjected to rape, castration, impregnation, abortion, choking, drowning, freezing, bleeding profusely, temporary blinding, hand cramps, being stripped, having their brains scrambled, and being confronted with their personal phobia.
Abductees have also reported sensations of weakness, of hurtling or tumbling through space, of spinning, of being stuck, of being buried alive, and, once, of crashing to the ground with a saucer. Though there is no reason to be discerned in such a pattern, there is clearly a rhyme with the theme being unfolded.
It should be no surprise that intense expressions of powerlessness are not unique to ET settings. Fictive past-life regressions are commonly quite dramatic. (5) In some individuals daytime stream-of-consciousness fantasies can take on embarrassingly vivid facets that provoke fear. (6)
Alvin Lawson precedes me in noting the striking correspondence between bad LSD trips and abduction experiences in terms not only of emotive engagement, but of bizarre somatic threats such as umbilical pain being a common narrative sub-plot. Far and away the most useful observation, however, is that nightmares provide the ideal model to map abduction experiences. Nightmares overwhelmingly involve powerlessness. They commonly reflect certain basic fears of childhood: fear of completely dissolving or being destroyed; fear of mutilation, castration, loss of body parts; fear of isolation and abandonment; fear of loss of sustenance and love; and an inability to control the body. They are intensely rendered dramas which utilize numerous motifs familiar among abduction stories: chase, capture, torture, imminent catastrophe, wild kinetic sensations, and eerie back-ground scenes. Regarding the last, it is especially damning how fog frequently finds its way into abduction tales, this being a form of artistic license utilized in dozens of SF movies and programes and possessing a lineage stretching back to Lovecraft and probably beyond.
The phenomenon of an introductory eerie silence just prior to encountering aliens, a commonplace noted by Raymond Fowler, similarly has a lineage that dates back at least to H.G. Wells and “The War of the Worlds”. As Colin Greenland might say, everyone subconsciously recognizes such things as an Indication of Monsters. (7) It follows that the abductionologists’ appreciation of the “emotional authenticity” and validity of abductee writings should not lead us to leap to the conclusion that such accounts are materially authentic and valid. The unconscious can and does invest fictions with expressions of passion.
It seems logical at this point to ask if the psychology of nightmares can throw any light on what is happening in alien abduction experiences. While not all the puzzles of nightmares have been solved, psychology has recently made significant strides in understanding why some people develop them and others do not. In building a profile of nightmare sufferers Ernest Hartmann developed a conceptual model termed boundary theory which expands on a set of propositions about boundaries in the mind formulated by a handful of earlier psychoanalytic theorists. It is from Hartmann’s study “The Nightmare” that we will develop the blueprint of our argument. (8)