By Budd Hopkins
This is the way the New York Times should have headlined their July 6 science section piece on the poorly understood phenomenon of sleep paralysis. Unfortunately, however, the headline read “Alien Abduction? Science Calls It Sleep Paralysis” [my emphasis], suggesting to the world that the UFO abduction phenomenon has at last been successfully explained away. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Junk Science is the proper designation for the many outlandish, irrelevant and unsupported hypotheses debunkers have employed over the years to dismiss UFO abductions (some of which I will discuss in future articles). Non-junk Science – the real thing, based upon the scientific method – begins by amassing and studying all the accurate, relevant data before any serious hypothesizing takes place. With this in mind, let’s examine what happened here, in the precincts of the New York Times, to justify my use of the term “Junk Science.” What data were amassed and studied to support a headline proclaiming that abductions have now been explained as nothing more than cases of sleep paralysis? A careful look at the existing data is enlightening. During the first two decades of research when the very concept of a UFO abduction was formed, all of the central cases involved people who were outside their homes when they were taken. None were lying paralyzed and half asleep in their bedrooms. Instead they were driving automobiles, fishing, hunting, making their rounds as police officers, even, in one famous case, driving a tractor on a farm. So where do nighttime sleep paralysis experiences come into the data pool of these crucially important first decades of abduction research? Nowhere. There are none.
With that undeniable fact having demolished its thesis, how can the august New York Times then claim that science has satisfactorily “explained” the abduction phenomenon? Easily. By simply abandoning the rigors of science and taking up the baseless deceptions of Junk Science.
The social circumstances which allowed the paper to make such a scientifically worthless judgement bear examination. First, as everyone knows, most conservative mainstream scientists have long refused, in public at least, to accept the idea that non-earthly intelligent beings have ever flown over our planet or interacted with our people. Prominent, media-savvy scientists like the late Carl Sagan have constantly assured both the public and the media that UFOs are nothing more than misidentified natural phenomena, hoaxes, or whatever. “We would have known if such things as UFOs or abductions really existed,” they claim, shamelessly employing ridicule against anyone who disagrees.
Cowed journalists have accepted this “official” blanket denial without a twinge of doubt. In fact, the pressure exerted by vocal mainstream skeptics and debunkers is so great that it is now considered unscientific, even unseemly, for journalists to look into the issue of UFO reality with any degree of objectivity. And God help them if they should indicate they are skeptical of the skeptics. The Times writers therefore had no reason not to give knee-jerk support to the idea that sleep paralysis is the source of the UFO abduction phenomenon.
In order to accept the sleep paralysis explanation, any scientist, journalist or lay person must first suppress any contradictory data. Thus, the Times article suppressed the fact that for the first two decades of abduction research, all of the central cases took place with the abductees fully awake and functioning, and none involved bedroom paralysis. And as if that alone weren’t enough to sink the Times explanation, in many accounts – one thinks of the Betty and Barney Hill case, the Hickson-Parker dual abduction at Pascagoula and the Travis Walton case, among others – there were two or more individuals simultaneously involved in the abduction. And none were home, lying paralyzed, side-by-side, in bed.
Having established the irrelevancy of sleep paralysis as the cause of the UFO abduction phenomenon, let us take up a more realistic issue. In later decades, when bedroom abduction cases began to be reported, might some of these involve sleep paralysis and nothing more? Of course. The possibility always exists that some sleep paralysis experiences might have been misinterpreted by the individuals reporting them as UFO abductions, particularly by susceptible people who have been devouring books on UFOs. To cite a parallel area, has there ever been a situation in which someone thought he had contracted malaria because he took his temperature and found he had a high fever? Of course this possibility exists, particularly if that individual has been reading medical textbooks or popular accounts of the disease. Medical students famously imagine themselves to be suffering from the various diseases they are studying. So how does a nervous patient tell if he has malaria or just a high fever?
Experienced medical professionals are aware of the wide range of malarial symptoms and are trained to discover, on the basis of a collection of facts, whether a patient has misdiagnosed himself or might actually have the disease. Similarly, experienced UFO abduction researchers have long been aware of the sleep paralysis phenomenon and would not take seriously an alleged abduction account which contained nothing more than typical sleep paralysis symptoms. Nighttime abduction cases often involve other witnesses, temporary disappearances of the abductee, specific types of physical marks, scars or bruises – even broken bones – which appeared during the night, and occasional situations in which the abductee awakens wearing a stranger’s nightclothes. In many consciously recalled nocturnal abductions, none of the symptoms of sleep paralysis are recalled. Finally, logic decrees that out of the tens of thousands of such reports, if a single case of either malaria or UFO abduction – or even twenty such cases – should be misdiagnosed, neither the UFO abduction phenomenon nor the existence of malaria is in jeopardy. Only Junk Scientists make inferences so absurd and sweeping. We would do well to remember the opening headline, which might, in fact, make an interesting bumper sticker:
ALIEN ABDUCTIONS? JUNK SCIENCE CALLS IT SLEEP PARALYSIS
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