THE ABDUCTION REPORT
What is the UFO abduction phenomenon? To abduct means to “carry off or lead away (a person) illegally and in secret or by force, esp. to kidnap.”(1) Anyone who reports that he or she has been carried away by force is reporting an abduction. Since we are obviously only concerned with abductions by nonhuman extraterrestrials, the carrying-away must be reported as done by nonhuman extraterrestrials. Evidence for the non-humanness of the abductors comes from the appearance of the abductors, the tools they use, including the methods of enforcing the abduction, the things they do, and the locations to which the abductee is taken. If none of these are nonhuman, then we are talking about an abduction experience, but one which can be explained as caused by humans. “Abduction phenomenon” in this essay means the abduction of humans by nonhuman extraterrestrials as described here.
False, imagined, and real experiences. The second problem in discussing the abduction phenomenon is to evaluate the source of the reports. I am perfectly capable of reporting an abduction experience on the basis of my accumulated knowledge. I know enough background material to report an experience that would match very closely other reports made by reliable witnesses. Why wouldn’t my report be valid? Because, of course, it was fabricated out of my indirect experience, as communicated to me by conversations, books, films, and television, and not my direct experience; that is, through my own senses without the intermediary of other humans’ spoken, written, or visually portrayed experience. Anyone can report an abduction experience. Our problem is to learn whether these reports are reports of direct personal experience or whether the reports are mediated by the experience of others. If they are mediated by the experience of others, they are worthless as evidence of the existence of UFO abductions. They are simply repetitions of other people’s stories, however convincing either to the listener or (as is often the case) to the teller.
There is no a priori reason why the reporter of an abduction experience which is entirely mediated by other people’s experiences may not also report that he or she believes that the experience was direct and un-mediated. It is very well established that people reporting experiences do not always accurately attribute the source of those experiences. (2) Spoken or written language, as well as the visual media, are efficient ways of conveying information that may be incorporated indiscriminately into what the reporter thinks is his or her own direct sensory experience. The human mind is efficient at generating and storing images or representations of experience, and inefficient at retaining and classifying the sources of those same images or representations. Suggestible human beings often mistake the sources of their information, and they are demonstrably capable of reporting as personal experience events and experiences which have been suggested to them by others.
The properly skeptical public. In ordinary conversation, in the give-and-take on a sunny afternoon by the lake, or of a dinner party with good wine flowing, we do not always – or even often – critically examine the sources of our ideas, or of our conversational bons mots. Why should we expect something more critical, more detached, from the investigators and reporters of abductions? Simply because so much more is at stake. Our real audience is not the lake-side or dinner-table conversationalists. If the purveyors of ideas about UFO abductions want to be treated as entertaining lake-side conversationalists, or as slightly outre dinner-table companions, then we can all go on as before. Some of what we say will be based on what we know are the reports of reliable witnesses, corroborated by circumstances: missing time, physical traces, concurrent UFO sightings. Other reports, whether in the National Enquirer or in our own publications, will be ambiguous and lend themselves to alternative interpretations.
The greater public will get some of both kinds of reports and will be, as always, puzzled about what to believe. The scientific public will say to itself: “X has written two books full of interesting information about abductions and UFOs. X writes with obvious integrity, and the phenomenon sounds plausible. But Y includes as abductions reports from people who sit in a trance and stare at the ceiling and then describe the same kind of things X is describing. Isn’t the obvious explanation to assume that both X and Y’s reports have the same epistemological status – the same grounding in reality – and that Y’s are the more representative because they require the least deviation from present knowledge? Witness Z is obviously imagining things, and abduction investigator Y reports Z’s imaginings as abductions. Therefore, abduction investigators are reporting what people imagine, not what actually happens to them.”
The leaps of reason in my imaginary quote above are not logically convincing, but they are psychologically very convincing. Just because one abduction report (A) is imaginary (i) does not mean that all A’s are (i). But if you are predisposed to reject more complicated explanations, and are predisposed not to change your world-view on the basis of what the UFO research community is claiming, than your reasoning process is: Some A’s are certainly i. I cannot look into all of the A cases, and if I have found one i case among them, I can say that because I have shown that at least one A is i, most-or all-of them might he. And with this very big “might be,” I escape the need to change my world-view, because I can subsume my simpler world-view under the “might be” of the imaginary abduction report. Therefore I will defer judgment, or, more conservatively, not change my world-view in the absence of a more convincing reason to do so.
I think it helps to make this problem specific because it explains what the UFO and abduction community is up against when it seeks to persuade the rest of the world – our lake-side and dinner-party neighbors and companions, as well as the even more skeptical scientific public – that what we have to say should be taken seriously. We have to decide what we are trying to convince people of. We know, and they know, that people report abduction experiences. If in the interest of accommodating every abduction reporter we decide to treat all reports equally, whether or not there is corroborative evidence that there was a physical abduction by extraterrestrials, then our public will nod politely and discount virtually everything we have to say. They will, quite reasonably, consider all abduction reports as evidence of, at most, an interesting psychological aberration or phenomenon.
What are we to think of an abduction case in which the alleged abductee is observed to be present during the entire time she experiences an abduction? The evidence in this case is unambiguous. The investigators who reported the case were present during the time the woman had the experience, and she didn’t budge. There was no missing time, and there were no abduction corollaries – UFO sightings or physical aftereffects. The answer least in need of supplementary explanation is that the woman wasn’t abducted. There is no reason to think that she may not have been reexperiencing a past abduction – the most generous of hypotheses – but by any objective criterion she was not experiencing a physical abduction and the report of her experience made by the investigators was the report of a psychological experience, not a physical one. In my already-expressed opinion, this case should not have been presented as an abduction report.(3)
Abduction researchers should screen abduction reports into those which are probably based on direct sensory experience, and those which are probably based on experience mediated by human language or media. It is clear from the proceedings of the 1992 Abduction Conference at M.I.T. that not all abduction researchers want to do that. And it’s a free world: there is nothing to stop them from using whatever inclusive categories they choose to use in defining abductions. My point is simply that this inclusiveness mitigates against anyone with common sense and no access to the original data from taking the abduction phenomenon seriously. Those of us who are better informed can sort the bad cases out for ourselves; but our friends and colleagues in the general and scientific public can’t. We should be doing it for them. If we don’t, we suffer the inevitable diminishing of our credibility.