2. CONCORDANCE OF REPORTED DATA:
The second point of intriguing discrepancy follows from this surprising absence of evidence of a common thread of severe and reality-distorting psychopathology to account for the patient’s bizarre assertions. They claim that they have been abducted, sometimes repeatedly over nearly the whole course of their lives, by aliens who have communicated with them and carried out procedures much like medical examinations. Persons reporting these experiences are seen to be psycho-dynamically varied. They are also demographically varied. Reports of this basic scenario, numbering in the hundreds, have now been recorded. Even though the reporters range from individuals as diverse as a mestizo Brazilian farmer(5),an American corporate lawyer (6), and a Mid- Western minister(7), there is a perplexing and intriguing concordance of features in these reports. Certain details of the scenarios repeat themselves with disturbing regularity no matter what the educational, national, social, experiential or other demographic characteristics of the reporter. In the production of dreams, reveries, poetry, fantasies and psychotic states, while the general themes of concern may be identified easily between individuals, the specific symbolization, concretion, abstraction and representation of those themes is relatively indiosyncratic for each individual.
This of course necessitates careful empathic and attentive listening on the clinician’s part to gather both the general flavor and specific meaning of the elements of the fantasy state. This careful listening often means that a personal symbolic representational system can be unraveled and its contents can be rendered less mysterious to the patient. In the abduction scenarios however, both specific details and themes repeat themselves with surprising regularity: In general, the appearance and modus operandi of the aliens, their effect and procedures, their tools and interests, their crafts and physical features all tally from report to report with a high rate of concordance. (8,9,10)
This intriguing fact seems impervious to the socio-economic, educational, national, or cultural background of the abductee. Similarly, whether the individual has had previous contact with the literature of abduction seems to make little difference in this vein since the reports of individuals who can be shown to have had no exposure to abduction literature also contains these common features. Skilled practitioners and investigators report in these cases that they are convinced that each of these subjects was being wholly truthful in his/her report.
The concordance of both content and event in these reports makes them unlike any other fantasy-generated material with which I am familiar. Indeed, investigators like Hopkins and others claim they have intentionally withheld dissemination of certain important, frequently reported aspects of the abduction scenarios in order to provide a “check” on the material being presented to them by individuals who may have had access to this literature since abductees may have been influenced at either the conscious or the unconscious level by it. In these cases as well, the features which have previously been published as well as those withheld are both produced by the abductee (11). In instances in which the patient has read some of the abductee literature, this previously withheld material may be offered to the investigator with a sense of personal invalidation, apology and embarrassment. He often expresses concern that this information is less likely to be believed than the other material with which he is already familiar. (12)
Jung and others have written widely about the use of archetypes and the collective awareness of themes and images which are asserted to present themselves in a world-wide and multi-personal way. The amount of individual variation and creative latitude demonstrated within the closed system of archetypes and collected creativity is vast. Those who pose such universals detect their presence in the complex and highly idiosyncratic presentations and guises which they are given by the unconscious mind of the patient and the artist. This disguise is idiosyncratic, they hold, precisely because a set of available images is being used to work and rework the personal realities of the individual against the background of the collective.
But the abductee does not seem to be involved in the reworking of personal mythologies against the canvas of the race’s mythology. The details and contents of the scenarios seem, upon extensive investigation, to bear little thematic relevance to the issues inherent in the life of the abductee. Intensive follow up investigation frequently yields no thematic, archetypical, primary process symbolic meaning to the shape or activities of the abductors and the scenario of the abduction itself. Instead, therapeutic work in these cases centers around the issues inherent in the powerlessness and vulnerability of the individual even is this were not a prominent theme in his life before the putative abduction. In other words, the customary richness of association and creativity found in the examination of dreams and other fantasy material is lacking with regard to the scenario and presentation of the aliens who abduct and manipulate the patient in the abduction story.
If the abduction material is indeed archetypal or fantasy generated in nature, this is a new class of archetypes. These archetypes demand rather exact representation and mythic presentation since the activities and behavior of the aliens is rather invariant within a narrow latitude regardless of the other dream and fantasy themes of the patient.
3. ABDUCTION SCENARIOS AND HYPNOSIS.
Members of both the lay and professional communities frequently assume that material referring to UFO abduction scenarios is retrieved under hypnosis. Since it is generally believed that people under hypnosis are open to the implantation of suggestions through the overt or covert influence of the hypnotist it is concluded that this material reproduces the hypnotists’ expectations or interests. It is further concluded that since the hypnotist “put it there” the abduction could not be accounted for as material which emerges solely from the patient’s end of dyad.
Thus, the abduction scenarios are commonly dismissed as merely representing the production of desired material by compliant subjects. The abductees strong sense of personal conviction that this really happened to him during the session itself and upon recall of the session is similarly dismissed as an artifact of the process by which the fantasies were generated.
Several compelling factors mitigate against the facile dismissal of data in this way. Firstly, about 20% of these highly concordant abduction scenarios are available spontaneously at the level of conscious awareness prior to hypnosis. (13,14) These accounts may be enhanced or subjected to further elaboration through the use of hypnosis or other recall enhancement techniques, but in a significant number of people producing abduction scenarios the recall is initially produced without recourse to such techniques. If their stories were substantially different from the concordant abduction scenarios produced under regressive hypnosis, a different phenomenon would be taking place.
However, given the perplexing clinical presentation of similar stories from dissimilar people who are uninformed about one another’s experience, this presents another highly interesting area of discrepancy.
Hopkins has classified patterns of abduction recall into five categories: