- CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Susan
Clancy is sick of space aliens.
-
- The Harvard psychologist figures she has read every book
and seen every movie ever made about extraterrestrials, and she has interviewed
roughly 50 people who claim to have been abducted by aliens.
-
- And it's all in the name of scientific truth, not science
fiction.
-
- "I have become a reluctant scholar of alienography,"
Clancy said.
-
- Clancy is bracing for a fresh round of hate mail with
her new book, "Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped
by Aliens," published by Harvard University Press.
-
- Those who believe aliens are among us haven't taken kindly
to her theory that abductees have created "false memories" out
of, she writes, a "blend of fantasy-proneness, memory distortion,
culturally available scripts, sleep hallucinations, and scientific illiteracy."
-
- That doesn't mean Clancy thinks her subjects are crazy.
In fact, she was surprised how many of them seemed quite normal, intelligent
and articulate.
-
- "Arguing weird beliefs is a very normal thing,"
she said in an interview from Nicaragua, where she is a visiting professor
at INCAE, the Central American Institute for Business Administration. "It's
very human for us to believe in things for which there is no scientific
evidence."
-
- When she arrived at Harvard in 1996, Clancy didn't set
out to debunk the stories of little green men kidnapping people from their
bedrooms and using them for painful experiments. Instead, she started her
research on false memories by studying victims of sexual abuse.
-
- She quickly found herself the target of angry "outsiders"
who accused her of trying to discredit victims. One irate letter-writer
called her a "friend of pedophiles everywhere."
-
- Around the same time, Harvard Medical School started
investigating the research methods employed by Pulitzer Prize-winning psychologist
John Mack, who used hypnosis to retrieve memories from people who claimed
to be alien abductees. (The school decided not to censure Mack, who was
struck and killed by a drunk driver in London last year.)
-
- Mack's work gave Clancy an idea: Wouldn't it be easier
to test her theories if she could be certain that her subjects' memories
were not real? She and her adviser, Harvard psychologist Richard McNally,
placed a newspaper ad that asked, "Have you been abducted by aliens?"
It took less than a day for callers to fill her voice mail.
-
- As Clancy and McNally interviewed the abductees, they
started to find some common threads. Many of them, for example, described
the terrifying experience of waking up and being unable to move, certain
that an intruder was lurking in their room.
-
- To the Harvard psychologists, it was obvious that their
subjects had suffered an episode of sleep paralysis - a state of limbo
between sleep and being awake, sometimes punctuated by hallucinations.
-
- "It's a little bit like a hiccup in the brain. It's
harmless," said McNally, adding that 20 percent of the population
will experience sleep paralysis at least once.
-
- Many of the abductees also could be described as "spiritual
people" who have abandoned conventional religious beliefs, McNally
added. "The people convinced of this are getting genuine spiritual
payoff," he said. "To encounter a naturalistic account of it
is deeply offensive."
-
- In her book, Clancy describes her subjects' stories of
abduction in detail, changing only their names.
-
- One man, "an articulate, handsome" chiropractor
with a "strikingly attractive wife" and twin sons, claimed to
have fathered hybrid babies with an alien, a "streamlined, sylphlike
creature."
-
- Another subject, a 34-year-old artist with a college
education, couldn't identify "disturbing sleep-related experiences"
until he was hypnotized by an abduction researcher he found on the Internet.
During his second hypnosis session, the artist said he recovered memories
of being abducted by aliens who strapped him down on a black marble table
and subjected him to a painful sexual experiment.
-
- Clancy said a wealth of research shows that hypnosis
makes it easier for people to create false memories.
-
- "This is in large part because it both stimulates
the imagination and relaxes reality constraints," she writes in her
book.
-
- However, Clancy learned it was impossible to categorically
disprove alien abductions.
-
- "All you can do is argue that they're improbable
and that the evidence adduced by the believer is insufficient to justify
the belief," she wrote. "Ultimately, then, the existence of ETs
is a matter of opinion, and the believers have their own opinions, based
on firsthand experience."
-
- One of those "believers" is Will Bueche, a
36-year-old who was working for Mack when Clancy and McNally interviewed
him several years ago.
-
- Bueche said he has had more than a dozen "encounters"
with aliens since he was a young child. These encounters with the "pale,
thin beings," he said, usually happen at night, in his room, and he
feels alert but "a little bit drugged" while they communicate
with him telepathically.
-
- "It's not like they're speaking English in my mind,"
he said. "It's a mixture of music, pictures, feelings and impressions."
-
- Bueche said Clancy's theories about alien abductions,
including sleep paralysis, cannot fully explain what he's experienced.
-
- "I think her book comes close to the truth in many
ways, but it isn't able to see the potential out there for another breakthrough
in how we see reality," he said.
-
- Clancy's conclusions aren't shared by David Jacobs, an
associate professor of history at Temple University. Jacobs, who teaches
a class called "UFOs and American Society," said Clancy's "Abducted"
is a "typical debunking book."
-
- "This is junk social science, and there is a certain
condescending quality to it," he said.
-
- Jacobs, who said he has used "hypnotic regression"
to recover memories from more than 900 alien abductees, said sleep paralysis,
faulty hypnosis and false memories "simply do not account for the
convincing details" in abductees' stories.
-
- "All debunkers make one or more of the following
mistakes: They ignore the data, they distort the data or they don't know
the data," he said, describing himself as a "serious UFO researcher
who believes the evidence is compelling that these events are happening
more or less as (abductees) say."
-
- Clancy and McNally aren't the only psychologists who
have studied alien abductees.
-
- Leonard Newman, a psychology professor at the University
of Illinois at Chicago, is the co-author of a paper that argued alien abductees
are "masochists" who enjoy the painful experiences they describe.
-
- Unlike Clancy and McNally, Newman did not interview any
abductees firsthand, relying instead on other published accounts of abduction
reports.
-
- Clancy said the volume and nasty tone of the hate mail
she gets these days is far worse than what her research on sexual-abuse
victims generated.
-
- "I'm done with aliens," she said.
-
- http://www.naplesnews.com/npdn/neapolitan/article/
0,2071,NPDN_14939_4252822,00.html
|
