Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian
Speaker 1: seger In. Today we're talking about a topic that most
Speaker 1: science podcast listeners would think, Wait, what why? Alien abductions?
Speaker 1: Really you guys are going to take that seriously? Well,
Speaker 1: I think the tone is the question, right, because a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of science brands will discuss alien abduction,
Speaker 1: but they'll take a very hard, skeptical approach, And certainly
Speaker 1: science is the bedrock of the show, and I feel
Speaker 1: like we we tend to take a skeptical approach with
Speaker 1: most topics. Now that being said, we always try and
Speaker 1: make a point of of acknowledging that with paranormal experience,
Speaker 1: there's still some sort of an experience going on. There
Speaker 1: is off some sort of a memory, there's something something
Speaker 1: that goes on in the human psyche that makes it
Speaker 1: quasi real or real for the individual, and so we
Speaker 1: always make a point of trying to honor that and
Speaker 1: and respect that as much as possible while also keeping
Speaker 1: you know, one foot firmly planted on the earth. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: And alien abduction is similar to some of the other
Speaker 1: topics we've covered before, like say, uh, satanic panic and exorcisms, demons, angels,
Speaker 1: also like the stuff that we did with John d.
Speaker 1: And what's interesting to look at here is that there
Speaker 1: is a quantifiable large amount of academic research into this topic.
Speaker 1: It's it's actually interesting. Um. One of the pieces that
Speaker 1: I looked at for this episode is by someone named J. D. Finkelstein,
Speaker 1: and they basically look at a review of all the
Speaker 1: academic literature in the last like, let's say, thirty five years.
Speaker 1: And the thing that's interesting is they said, there's really
Speaker 1: not that much available by me, like there is too
Speaker 1: much to read for this episode. There was so much
Speaker 1: out there. I mean I just saw in all the
Speaker 1: research databases that we have access to, there's just wall
Speaker 1: to wall uh information and really like what we put
Speaker 1: together for this, it's gonna fill up probably two episodes, yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: because because there are basically two large categories we have
Speaker 1: to discuss. On one hand, there is the the the
Speaker 1: experience side of it. So individuals claiming to have experienced
Speaker 1: an alien abduction and generally in the process have seen
Speaker 1: a UFO as well, uh, and they are so they're
Speaker 1: all the various ways we can try and understand that
Speaker 1: from a skeptical standpoint, you know what sort of hallucinations
Speaker 1: or memory um false memory scenarios are going on to
Speaker 1: make that possible, the power of belief, et cetera. And
Speaker 1: then on top of that, there's this cultural idea too,
Speaker 1: because you can you can certainly we'll get into this
Speaker 1: more as we progress here, but you can go back
Speaker 1: through history. You can find plenty of examples of individuals
Speaker 1: having um wondrous or tariff and some often sexual encounters
Speaker 1: with demons, angels, ferries, what have you. But it's only
Speaker 1: in the twentieth century and a little bit beyond here
Speaker 1: that we have had these experiences with extraterrestrials and UFOs.
Speaker 1: So then he starts saying, well, okay, if this is
Speaker 1: just the coding is this, if this is just the
Speaker 1: sock puppet that we end up putting over this abnormal
Speaker 1: sensory experience, then where does the sock puppet come from?
Speaker 1: What are all the various cultural threads that come together
Speaker 1: to weave that unique form. Yeah, it is. It's fascinating
Speaker 1: when you look at it from that perspective, and it's
Speaker 1: still fascinating. I think even if you, like some researchers,
Speaker 1: think you've totally nailed it down and you've figured out
Speaker 1: exactly how to explain what's happening here right Um. And
Speaker 1: what's interesting is that even though we've got all this
Speaker 1: fiction that really kind of slowed down I'd say a
Speaker 1: little bit before two thousand, um, right around when the
Speaker 1: X file started to fade. Uh, you know, we have
Speaker 1: all this this alien abduction fiction that was really big
Speaker 1: X Files, Close Encounters, etcetera. Um. Fire in the Sky,
Speaker 1: which neither of us have seen you, but I'm planning
Speaker 1: to check out before we do our trailer talk. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what I want to watch before next week. In communion,
Speaker 1: I've never seen either, have you seen that? I have not,
Speaker 1: I'm familiar with I haven't read the book either, but
Speaker 1: I'm I'm familiar with his story. I've read I want
Speaker 1: to say, I read an Atlantic piece about him a
Speaker 1: couple years back. But so there was a lot going
Speaker 1: on between the probably like mid seventies up until the
Speaker 1: end of the nineties that was in our entertainment about this.
Speaker 1: So we all kind of think we know what this
Speaker 1: is all about. We we we understand the alien abduction narrative. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember as a kid watching a lot of Unsolved
Speaker 1: Mysteries and uh, you know a lot of those episodes
Speaker 1: that dealt with just unsolved normal crimes, and occasionally Matthew
Speaker 1: McConaughey showed up right to reenact it. But they would
Speaker 1: get into these supernatural elements and they would get into
Speaker 1: alien abductions, and I remember just being um like terrified
Speaker 1: and amazed by these tales because they presented them in
Speaker 1: that kind of like hard boiled detective narrative way, where's like,
Speaker 1: this is this is really happening. We don't understand it,
Speaker 1: but this is what these people say happened to them.
Speaker 1: And it made me. It made me kind of terrified
Speaker 1: as to sleep at night for a while, because I
Speaker 1: would imagine the aliens coming for me. I would I
Speaker 1: would get a little nervous if I stared up into
Speaker 1: the night sky too much, because it would be like,
Speaker 1: all right, if I glimpse them, they'll know I saw them,
Speaker 1: and then they will come for me. They're like, all right, well,
Speaker 1: you forced our hands. Now we've got to abduct you.
Speaker 1: I don't know what it is, but I've never been
Speaker 1: susceptible to the scary factor of alien abduction. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: when you didn't did you watch and solve mysteries? Because
Speaker 1: I did. But like, I think that there was a
Speaker 1: part of me, even at that age that was kind
Speaker 1: of like, whatever happens, it's going to be pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: It's interesting. Like like, and I guess too that I
Speaker 1: was so immersed in Star Wars and Star Trek and
Speaker 1: other science fiction that my mind wouldn't allow me to
Speaker 1: go to the really horrific areas that alien abduction narratives
Speaker 1: go to, right, Like I see a movie like what
Speaker 1: was it, Dark Skies that came out like two or
Speaker 1: three years ago, I think that was like maybe the
Speaker 1: latest of these kind of horror movies, or that there
Speaker 1: was one recently, the Phoenix Incident. I think it's like
Speaker 1: a found footage one. Yeah, And then there was one
Speaker 1: that came out a few years back, um, the Fifth Kind,
Speaker 1: I want to say, Okay, yeah, And those have never
Speaker 1: really resonated with me in the way. So, for instance,
Speaker 1: the Demon Possession movies do right, And that's because I think,
Speaker 1: like the way that my cultural background was set up,
Speaker 1: that narrative was far scarier to me. Even though that
Speaker 1: narrative could be placed on top of similar psychological experiences,
Speaker 1: right in the way that alien abduction narratives are. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I guess it just really depends on how
Speaker 1: you approach you, like, what your background and the culture is,
Speaker 1: because certainly, growing up in rural Tennessee in the nineties,
Speaker 1: I I've discussed before how there was definitely this this
Speaker 1: this sense within certain circles that the demons were real,
Speaker 1: that that the supernatural realm was real within the confines
Speaker 1: of sort of fundamentalist Christian upbringing. But then at the
Speaker 1: same time you were there were these voices of you know,
Speaker 1: I want to say, you know, more scientifically sound, reasonable
Speaker 1: voices that filter through into into stuff like unsolved mysteries,
Speaker 1: and you watch that and you're saying, Okay, well, you know,
Speaker 1: this seems like it could be true as well. So
Speaker 1: it just I guess it depends on like where you're
Speaker 1: firmly entrenched. Yeah, And so for that reason, I think
Speaker 1: it's important for us to start off here with just
Speaker 1: a bare bones basic description of what we're talking about
Speaker 1: here with alien abductions. So, and alien abductions specifically is
Speaker 1: when a person claims to have been taken by any
Speaker 1: being from outside Earth against their will, and these surged
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties and then waned through the years
Speaker 1: with the expansion of space technology and exploration. But you
Speaker 1: have to be clear here, there's no physical evidence that
Speaker 1: supports claims of alien abduction or even that extraterrestrial intelligence exists. Now,
Speaker 1: skeptics say that these reports are either hallucinations or their lies.
Speaker 1: On the other side of it, some scientists have attributed
Speaker 1: these experiences to sleep paralysis or repressed trauma. And this
Speaker 1: is probably a good point where we should say that
Speaker 1: our sibling podcast Stuff They Don't Want You to Know,
Speaker 1: has covered this extensively over the years. So if there's
Speaker 1: other stuff you want to look for, podcasts also videos,
Speaker 1: they've done a lot of videos. Yeah, it's kind of
Speaker 1: bread and butter right exactly now. Before those of you
Speaker 1: out there, and I felt the same way when I
Speaker 1: was going to the research. Get too judgmental about our
Speaker 1: friends and neighbors out there who have experienced this. I
Speaker 1: want to throw a couple of stats at you that
Speaker 1: you might find surprising. A twenty National Geographic poll found
Speaker 1: that seventy seven percent of Americans believe that aliens have
Speaker 1: visited Earth, so that's huge, and eighty percent believe that
Speaker 1: alien life exists on other planets. A twenty fifteen IPSOS
Speaker 1: poll found that fifty six percent of Americans believe in UFOs.
Speaker 1: So either way you cut that, it's the majority of people.
Speaker 1: Now for me, I guess like I fall on that,
Speaker 1: Like I don't know if aliens have visited Earth or not,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I mean we do the science podcast. We
Speaker 1: talk about the possibilities of alien life all the time.
Speaker 1: If I had to like vote one way or the other,
Speaker 1: I would probably say yes, Yeah, I tend to fall
Speaker 1: the same way. I think, well, yes, that's given what
Speaker 1: we know of of life and based on the research
Speaker 1: that we've we've done and the sources we've looked at, uh,
Speaker 1: it seems entirely possible that there's life out there in
Speaker 1: the universe somewhere. Now it gets a little more complicated
Speaker 1: from there on out, because then you say, well, okay,
Speaker 1: if there's life, then is it intelligent life? And then uh,
Speaker 1: and you can say, all right, well, based on our model, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can tweak the Drake equation in different ways. Look
Speaker 1: at could could this intelligent life form actually evolve? And
Speaker 1: then is it still around Okay, so maybe there's it's
Speaker 1: not just a slime mold on another planet. Maybe there's
Speaker 1: something out there that's capable of looking up into the
Speaker 1: night sky and forming its own um anxiety ridden dreams
Speaker 1: of visitations from other worlds. But then that visitation becomes
Speaker 1: the next realm. Right, is it possible that this, this creature,
Speaker 1: this alien life is capable of visiting our world? And
Speaker 1: in this we get into an area we discussed a
Speaker 1: little bit in our Interplanetary War episode, because even if
Speaker 1: space faring aliens do exist, could they reach us? And
Speaker 1: part of the problem here is distance staggering in the
Speaker 1: interstellar distance and the lack of any concrete, proven technological
Speaker 1: means to traverse those distances at a reasonable pace. Even
Speaker 1: the more conservative estimates, and like the closer you know,
Speaker 1: planetary homeworlds or out bases for for some sort of
Speaker 1: civilization like this, it would still result in a trip
Speaker 1: of years. Right, And if they did have spacecraft capable
Speaker 1: of performing the sort of highs, the high speed maneuvers
Speaker 1: that are described in UFO sightings, then physicist Michio Kaku
Speaker 1: insists that technology for such a craft and the ability
Speaker 1: for a living passenger to survive, it's g forces. Well,
Speaker 1: those are well beyond humanities modern technology as well. So
Speaker 1: do you think that they've visited Earth? Then like that's
Speaker 1: a that's sort of are they capable of visiting Earth? No? Right, yeah,
Speaker 1: and then would they want to or have that? Yeah? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean if I mean, if you get to the
Speaker 1: point where you say, yes, they exist, yes they're intelligent,
Speaker 1: Yes they have spacecraft capable of visiting us, then we
Speaker 1: again we come back to basing. We have to base
Speaker 1: an alien life form more or less on how we
Speaker 1: think and behave, and we know that we would want
Speaker 1: to check them out, so they would probably want to
Speaker 1: check us out. So yeah, I can, I can buy
Speaker 1: into that, but it's coming over that that technological step,
Speaker 1: that technological leap that is required, it's hard hard to
Speaker 1: get past. Yeah, that's kind of where you get to that. Uh.
Speaker 1: I guess I'm thinking along the lines of independence day
Speaker 1: rather than communion, Right, So, like we jump to the
Speaker 1: point of like where we've imagined a society that has
Speaker 1: the technology, but all we can picture is ourselves. So
Speaker 1: then subsequently we we apply our own reasoning this connect
Speaker 1: BacT as fall Bard, this fall Bard episode, we do
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks ago. Why would we go there
Speaker 1: to exploit its resources? Right? Uh? So, I mean, but
Speaker 1: we would love to think otherwise, right, like that they
Speaker 1: they just want to communicate or do experiments on us.
Speaker 1: But but the thing is, we come back around to
Speaker 1: the proof. Right, if they've if they've visited the planet
Speaker 1: in the past or are visiting it now, where is
Speaker 1: the hardcore proof? And uh And likewise, if they've abducted
Speaker 1: people for experiments, where's the proof? Because from a scientific standpoint,
Speaker 1: there's just insufficient evidence to make a case for alien visitation.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying there aren't people out there that are
Speaker 1: attempting to provide evidence, but most UFO sidings depend on
Speaker 1: infallible human accounts, imperfect footage, and just rampant conspiracy theory.
Speaker 1: All of it tends to crumble under the scrutiny of
Speaker 1: the scientific method. And and that's our best way of
Speaker 1: determining what's reality and what is ultimately fantasy. And uh.
Speaker 1: And also it's it's worth reminding everyone that you know,
Speaker 1: scientific inquiry hinges on something called the null hypothesis, which
Speaker 1: means the burden of proof is on anyone making a
Speaker 1: positive claim. So if you say a dog gate your homework, great,
Speaker 1: where's the testable evidence you saw an alien spacecraft? Excellent,
Speaker 1: let's test and validate your story. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: it's up to individuals who have seen the UFO. It's
Speaker 1: up to individuals who have experienced the abductions or buy
Speaker 1: into these stories. It's up to them to provide the proof,
Speaker 1: and we just don't have it, you know, along the
Speaker 1: same lines as an hypothesis, the scientific world doesn't go
Speaker 1: on the defense every time someone sees a ghost, even
Speaker 1: at the presence of testable evidence. Perfectly. Terrestrial claims demand
Speaker 1: rigorous testing and a high degree of certainty and the results.
Speaker 1: So I guess to put a cap in our position
Speaker 1: going into this episode looking at the research. You know,
Speaker 1: as I've said in the past, when we've talked about
Speaker 1: sort of paranormal phenomenon and then try to shed a
Speaker 1: scientific light on them. I may not believe in this,
Speaker 1: but I believe that the people who believe are being honest.
Speaker 1: I believe they believe. And uh, It's important to note
Speaker 1: that most of the research has focused on attempts that
Speaker 1: are either trying to prove or disprove the existence of aliens.
Speaker 1: Rather than what's actually going on. What what makes us
Speaker 1: want to focus on this is that it's an opportunity
Speaker 1: to learn about our own psychology, right, That's what's really
Speaker 1: interesting about the alien abduction narrative. And I wanna put
Speaker 1: in a quote here that's from that J. D. Finkelstein
Speaker 1: piece that I read for this. They said, in the end,
Speaker 1: while the events abductees report are unlikely to have occurred,
Speaker 1: the earnestness with which they endorse these memories is a
Speaker 1: strong indicator that memory is a malleable and complicated phenomenon
Speaker 1: with implications for a wide range of psychological topics. That
Speaker 1: alone seems like it begs for stuff to blow your
Speaker 1: mind to examine it. Yeah, every time I engage with
Speaker 1: this topic or topics like this, I'm always left with
Speaker 1: with the realization that approaching this kind of thing from
Speaker 1: a skeptical, scientific, but open minded point of view, you
Speaker 1: end up leaving the topic not feeling like you're you
Speaker 1: have a safe distance from it, you know, like you
Speaker 1: have a safe distance from an alien abduction experience touching
Speaker 1: your life. You end up realizing, oh, well, it's actually
Speaker 1: not that far away anyway. When you take into account
Speaker 1: all of the all of the various psychological events that
Speaker 1: can play into it, like the the basic, the basic reality,
Speaker 1: that perception of reality is its own form of hallucination.
Speaker 1: When you start counting all of that in and just
Speaker 1: how how easily memory can be manipulated by yourself or others,
Speaker 1: then you realize, oh, well, I'm not safe from this
Speaker 1: kind of experience. It could it could easily, It could
Speaker 1: easily happen under the right scenarios. Yeah. Absolutely, Actually, in
Speaker 1: preparation for this episode, I revisited one of my favorite
Speaker 1: X Files episodes, uh, jose Chung's from Outer Space, which
Speaker 1: if if nobody out there is seeing it, I highly recommend.
Speaker 1: Even if you've never seen any X Files, you don't
Speaker 1: need to. It's in season three, uh right, smack in
Speaker 1: the middle. I think it doesn't connect to any other episodes.
Speaker 1: It's written by Darren Morgan, who, in my opinion, is
Speaker 1: one of the best writers of the show ever, and
Speaker 1: it is a fantastic but also relatively amusing examination of
Speaker 1: a lot of what we're going to talk about here today.
Speaker 1: And they look at it from that perspective that, like
Speaker 1: human psychology and how we perceive the world is so
Speaker 1: inherently skewed that there's a lot of different ways to
Speaker 1: take a look at this, and in the in the
Speaker 1: episode itself, there's sort of like three or four different
Speaker 1: viewpoints of the alien abduction narrative, right, and like how
Speaker 1: it could play out. I don't want to say too
Speaker 1: much more than that, other than that it's I love it.
Speaker 1: It's a fantastic episode, and it has a Jessie the
Speaker 1: Body venture and it too. Why I was hoping you'd
Speaker 1: get a chance to check out because he's sort of
Speaker 1: a surprise figure that pops up as he shows up
Speaker 1: as a man in black. All right, well, maybe I'll
Speaker 1: get to watch it for next week. Yeah, that'd be cool.
Speaker 1: I think it's time for a visitation of our own
Speaker 1: here though. We should probably take a quick commercial break,
Speaker 1: and when we come back, we will dive into the topic.
Speaker 1: We'll start talking about some of the recurring elements of
Speaker 1: the sort of standardized alien abduction UH experience, and then
Speaker 1: go from there. Sounds good than all right, we're back,
Speaker 1: so let's get into the recurring elements. And now this
Speaker 1: is one of the fascinating things for somebody like myself,
Speaker 1: who's you know, I've seen a lot of X files.
Speaker 1: I thought I kind of knew everything, you know, that
Speaker 1: there was to know, but like, really looking at the
Speaker 1: homework here, there are parts of the recurring elements that
Speaker 1: I wasn't quite aware of. Well, one of the interesting
Speaker 1: things here is that you kind of have two levels
Speaker 1: and they're not they're not isolated from each other. So
Speaker 1: you have what people began reporting about alien abduction scenarios
Speaker 1: across the decades, and then you have what was portrayed
Speaker 1: in the media and in science fiction. And then the
Speaker 1: media portrayals begin to influence the experience, so it becomes
Speaker 1: a little messy there. But it's like a weird or
Speaker 1: a borrows that's like eating itself. Yeah, yeah, it's true. Well,
Speaker 1: all right, let's go down. Here's some bullet points just
Speaker 1: about like what are recurring elements that we're going to
Speaker 1: unpack so that we can get a sense of what's
Speaker 1: actually happening here. Now, alien abduction stories usually involve the
Speaker 1: alien abductor conducting experiments or other procedures on the abductive Okay,
Speaker 1: that's one that we all pretty much know, right. They
Speaker 1: usually occur in an isolated area, with very few cases
Speaker 1: involving more than one person being reported. Now that's interesting because,
Speaker 1: as we'll talk about later, the very first big case
Speaker 1: of this involved two people, but usually they involve people
Speaker 1: on their own. They usually begin with the sighting of
Speaker 1: a UFO or some kind of lights in the sky,
Speaker 1: and then most report it's involved an individual being placed
Speaker 1: in a trance like state while they're being experimented on. Now,
Speaker 1: some people report that the the exams and stuff like
Speaker 1: that that happens in their homes rather than on a
Speaker 1: ship or something like that. Here's one of the things
Speaker 1: I always had a problem with with with these explanations.
Speaker 1: The assumption is that you're taken into outer space when
Speaker 1: this happens, right, But I always thought, well, what that
Speaker 1: seems like a lot of work for the aliens. Wouldn't
Speaker 1: they just stay in orbit or stay like stay within
Speaker 1: the atmosphere somewhere, you know what I mean? Like like
Speaker 1: it seems like why do they have to fly all
Speaker 1: the way down and all the way back up again?
Speaker 1: Well two answers. If I'm gonna go with just the
Speaker 1: straight up sort of skeptical technological uh profile here, I
Speaker 1: would say, well, their ships are apparently crazy powerful anyway,
Speaker 1: able to grip around it unbelievable speeds, So going back
Speaker 1: into orbit for them is no big deal. Maybe if Yeah,
Speaker 1: the other side of this would be that you look
Speaker 1: back at these past paranormal experiences and what one has
Speaker 1: taken to the fairy realm. One is one sends into
Speaker 1: heaven and therefore this this matches up more with their
Speaker 1: mythological expectations for visitation. Right, absolutely, So that's why I
Speaker 1: think it's maybe more surprising when it occurs in the home,
Speaker 1: right that that's like less along the lines of what
Speaker 1: we're expecting. But then again, when the angel visited Mary
Speaker 1: in the Bible, it was just in the home. She
Speaker 1: didn't get to go visit orbit or heaven. Hey man,
Speaker 1: that was a one of a kind thing. Uh. Look though,
Speaker 1: other common factors that show up in these narratives are
Speaker 1: beams of light, and the beams of light can both
Speaker 1: paralyze and make you float, as well as abductors, implanting devices,
Speaker 1: collecting tissue samples, and as we know, probing orifices using
Speaker 1: strange machines. Now, some people also report psychological experiments related
Speaker 1: to memory or pain. Now, this is that was one
Speaker 1: thing that I had never heard of before. So that's interesting,
Speaker 1: and then once the procedures are done, the abductees are
Speaker 1: usually returned home. Now, the aliens are usually described as
Speaker 1: small figures with smooth, shiny skin, large heads, and bulging eyes.
Speaker 1: This is the similar gray aliens that were depicted in
Speaker 1: early science fiction films. And there's a hierarchy that's sometimes
Speaker 1: described between the aliens, where the small ones perform menial
Speaker 1: work while the large ones are the leaders. They are
Speaker 1: usually said to communicate telepathically. Now, of course, Robert and I,
Speaker 1: one of the first things that we started talking about
Speaker 1: when we were prepping this episode was, gosh, I guess
Speaker 1: it's two years old now, maybe that Saturday Night Live
Speaker 1: uh skit with Kate McKinnon and Ryan Gosling. Uh. They're
Speaker 1: they're playing alien abductees who are explaining their experience to
Speaker 1: like the Pentagon or something like that, and they have
Speaker 1: vastly different experiences, right, Yeah, Like most of them have
Speaker 1: this pleasant, hippie dippy kind of experience and then one
Speaker 1: of them has this more traumatic experience with the aliens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's it's sort of explained in the narrative of
Speaker 1: the skit that it's because there's different hierarchies of aliens, right,
Speaker 1: Like there's the larger leader aliens and then there's the
Speaker 1: smaller aliens. And I believe the way that Kate McKinnon
Speaker 1: refers to it was that she wasn't dealing with the
Speaker 1: top brass, which is always amusing to me when I
Speaker 1: watched that. It's a great skip because Ryan Gosling is
Speaker 1: having extreme difficulty holding it together the entire So back
Speaker 1: to this, though, the victims, they don't seem to immediately
Speaker 1: recall their experiences. This is an important part, right, So
Speaker 1: my assumption was was always like, well, you just kind
Speaker 1: of like wake up in bed and you're like, WHOA,
Speaker 1: I was abducted by aliens, right, But it's not actually
Speaker 1: along those lines. It's usually you don't recall what happens.
Speaker 1: You notice that you've lost a chunk of time from
Speaker 1: your memories, and then you start experiencing panic attacks, stomach pains,
Speaker 1: or psychological distress afterward, and then it's because of those
Speaker 1: symptoms that you start kind of looking inward and why
Speaker 1: am I feeling like this? So sometimes people don't realize
Speaker 1: they've been well, they don't come to the realization of
Speaker 1: their abduction until after treatment. And and this is usually
Speaker 1: in the form of hypnosis us Now, abductees often experience
Speaker 1: a range of maladies, both physical and psychological, and this
Speaker 1: leads them to go consult a mental health professional, and
Speaker 1: that can include anything from anxieties to phobia's, nightmares, aches
Speaker 1: and pains, and as we mentioned earlier, the missing time thing.
Speaker 1: Sometimes victims don't know what happened to them. So it's
Speaker 1: not like they visit this person and they say, I
Speaker 1: know that this is an alien thing. I just need
Speaker 1: you to confirm it, right. Usually they're they're terrified because
Speaker 1: they're like, am I having some kind of brain event?
Speaker 1: You know? But you know, you can imagine a certain
Speaker 1: amount of self diagnosis going on here as well, where
Speaker 1: you're you have some sort of symptom. That's if it's
Speaker 1: not completely unexplainable, then at least it's it's bothersome, it's
Speaker 1: causing some anxiety, and then you start casting around for
Speaker 1: some sort of of an explanation. Now, maybe, you know,
Speaker 1: for the modern listener, you go to web m D
Speaker 1: or something and you start looking at symptoms and driving
Speaker 1: yourself crazy that way. But you could also very easily
Speaker 1: go to an alien abduction reddit, bore do or a
Speaker 1: message board of some kind, or watch an episode of
Speaker 1: Unsolved Mysteries back in their anything to start thinking, oh
Speaker 1: my goodness, what maybe this is what happened to me,
Speaker 1: or another like paranormal narrative like ghosts or angels visited.
Speaker 1: What you know, It really depends on kind of what
Speaker 1: fits your cultural world view. Yeah, if the if the
Speaker 1: soil is fertile for that idea to really grow. Okay, so,
Speaker 1: and another thing that I didn't realize, and this seems
Speaker 1: really important, is that most abductees report the experience as
Speaker 1: being positive. They see it as a life changing thing.
Speaker 1: In fact, Susan Clancy, who's somebody we're going to cite
Speaker 1: a lot in this episode. She wrote a book in
Speaker 1: two thousand and seven about the phenomenon, and she found
Speaker 1: that it's often related to humans need to believe in something.
Speaker 1: She says, quote people go through life trying on belief
Speaker 1: systems for size. Some of these belief systems speak to
Speaker 1: powerful emotional needs that have little to do with science.
Speaker 1: The need to feel less alone in the world, the
Speaker 1: desire to have special powers or a bill of these,
Speaker 1: the longing to know that there's something out there, something
Speaker 1: more important than you, that's watching over you. For many people,
Speaker 1: belief in alien abduction gratifies spiritual hungers. It reassures them
Speaker 1: about their place in the universe and their own significance. Now,
Speaker 1: one abductee actually said to her in the interviews, said
Speaker 1: he at the experience made him realize he wasn't alone
Speaker 1: in the universe, and that there were beings out there
Speaker 1: who cared about him, and that getting to that point
Speaker 1: was a really arduous journey. It was like a hero's
Speaker 1: journey for for this person, because there were a lot
Speaker 1: of people along the way who wanted to deny his experience. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think these are very important points because on on
Speaker 1: one hand, yeah, everyone wants to be a part of
Speaker 1: a just a human community. And and what brings a
Speaker 1: community more together more than than shared beliefs. So if
Speaker 1: you can you can find people that that also say, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think this is really happening. This happened to me.
Speaker 1: It brings you together. And then on the other hand,
Speaker 1: people want to believe in something, you know, bigger than themselves.
Speaker 1: They want to they want some sort of a spiritual model.
Speaker 1: But there's often this, uh, the problem of proof. How
Speaker 1: do you how do you really cement that belief. And
Speaker 1: you know, there's a whole argument that the witchcraft persecutions
Speaker 1: of the past a lot of that. But I've talked
Speaker 1: about this in the show before. The author Walter Stevens
Speaker 1: goes into it in his book of titled Demon Levers,
Speaker 1: where he talks about witchcraft persecution being largely away for
Speaker 1: individuals within the church with a conflict of faith to
Speaker 1: be able to say, look, here's physical proof of the supernatural,
Speaker 1: because this witch had sex with a demon, and the
Speaker 1: demons are real and so are angels. So if you
Speaker 1: have been saying if if you've been experimented upon by
Speaker 1: an alien, that's your your experience. And certainly if you
Speaker 1: have you know, you can point your arm and say
Speaker 1: like this, I think there's a chip under here, then
Speaker 1: you can this is physical proof. This is your physical
Speaker 1: proof of something greater than yourself, of this essentially a
Speaker 1: ritual world you have connection to. And ultimately, what's the difference,
Speaker 1: what's the difference between the stigmata and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the scar of the microchip and plant that you believe in. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a really good point, right, and I think it
Speaker 1: speaks to a larger thing that we're gonna get into
Speaker 1: further down the road here, but just that we are
Speaker 1: at a point in time where religion and government and
Speaker 1: family and they're not necessarily as communally universal as they
Speaker 1: used to be, right, And so subsequently we find ourselves
Speaker 1: turning to other avenues for that human desire for belief,
Speaker 1: whether it's you know, uh stigmata, whether it's video games,
Speaker 1: whether it's a fandom, right, Like, there's all manner of
Speaker 1: things to find your version of community in, right, and
Speaker 1: I think this can fall into that. But how does
Speaker 1: that compare to other paranormal events then, well, you know,
Speaker 1: we we've brought up the episode that we did a
Speaker 1: while back on Satanic panic in the satanic ritual abuse situation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I agree with you. I think there's a there's a
Speaker 1: lot of there are a lot of connecting threads there,
Speaker 1: and really, alien abduction is so much better something you
Speaker 1: can instally Such are more positive uh fiction to layer
Speaker 1: over your your your mind because you're not victimizing anybody,
Speaker 1: like you're not pointing at another human and saying other
Speaker 1: than yourself. Right, Yeah, And I can see where in
Speaker 1: certain models that could take on a harmful um a
Speaker 1: harmful form, but yeah, you're not you're not making legal
Speaker 1: charges of of abuse against somebody. You're, if anything, you're
Speaker 1: you're accusing aliens of physical abuse. Yeah, this immediately made
Speaker 1: me recall no pun intended the book Michelle remembers from
Speaker 1: the seventies, which we talked about in their Satanic Panic episode,
Speaker 1: that this was like, this was a thing going into
Speaker 1: the eighties, like recalling memories that had been repressed. Right,
Speaker 1: and as we learned then and we're gonna learn through here,
Speaker 1: sometimes those called memories weren't necessarily real. Now along those lines,
Speaker 1: there is a historical trajectory of the alien abduction experience.
Speaker 1: The reports really seemed to be marked by the nineteen
Speaker 1: forties and nineteen fifties golden age of science fiction is
Speaker 1: right in the US, and it was very popular due
Speaker 1: to the dawn of the space age. I'm speaking of
Speaker 1: the science fiction stuff, not of the alien abductions. Also,
Speaker 1: we have to remember the Roswell incident, which we now
Speaker 1: sort of think of it as being this fantastical thing
Speaker 1: that's connected to TV shows. It was a real thing
Speaker 1: that happened in New Mexico in nineteen seven, So that
Speaker 1: panicked people as well. Uh, this grew into the nineteen
Speaker 1: sixties and then afterwards, hundreds of thousands of people have
Speaker 1: reported being abducted. That's important, Like when I think of this,
Speaker 1: I think like there's probably like a hundred people out there.
Speaker 1: It's way more than that. Like, this is a way
Speaker 1: more common experience than you would think. Now. Of course,
Speaker 1: with then that, we're talking about the self reports of
Speaker 1: paranormal varience. So within that community, like you have to ask, well, okay,
Speaker 1: how many people are just straight up making it up.
Speaker 1: How many people are in that weird area where they're
Speaker 1: they're kind of lying but there they've gotten to the
Speaker 1: point where they believe it. How many people are like
Speaker 1: just legitimate behind what they're saying. I mean, there's a
Speaker 1: there's a wide spectrum there, I think for for individuals
Speaker 1: buying into the beliefs that they are uh aspounding. I
Speaker 1: mean we see that in religion all the time. You know,
Speaker 1: how many people are just die in the wool believers
Speaker 1: who can say that they had a a personal you know,
Speaker 1: supernatural experience. And how many people are you know, elsewhere
Speaker 1: on the scale. Yeah, And it's interesting too because the
Speaker 1: like I said earlier, the researchers tend to focus a
Speaker 1: little bit more on that, like are you lying or
Speaker 1: are you not, rather than what's happening here? And the
Speaker 1: research that we looked at for today is is more
Speaker 1: about what's happening here. Um, we have to mention this
Speaker 1: one case because I briefly talked about it earlier. But
Speaker 1: the most famous early cases Barney and Betty Hill, and
Speaker 1: this was in nineteen sixty one. They were driving near
Speaker 1: Indian Head, New Hampshire, when they saw a bright object
Speaker 1: in the sky. It followed their car and they stopped
Speaker 1: and they saw a disc shaped craft that had windows,
Speaker 1: and the windows were filled with watching figures. They drove
Speaker 1: away from this, but then they felt a tingling sensation
Speaker 1: in their bodies. When they got home, they realized it
Speaker 1: had actually taken them two hours to get there. Betty
Speaker 1: afterwards kept having recurring nightmares. Both of them underwent hypnosis
Speaker 1: therapy with a psychiatrist and this brought out their story
Speaker 1: of an alleged abduction and examination and the experience that
Speaker 1: this is interesting and maybe if we do trailer talk
Speaker 1: we can try to find something on this. But there
Speaker 1: was a nineteen seventy five made for TV movie called
Speaker 1: the UFO Incident where James Earl Jones played Barney. I
Speaker 1: was totally unaware of that. I mean, it's such an
Speaker 1: interesting case because again it's it's the the early nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: and it's say it's a biracial couple. Uh. And and
Speaker 1: just the fact that it's a male and a female, because,
Speaker 1: as as we'll discuss later, for a long time, you
Speaker 1: saw a far more female uh individuals claiming they had
Speaker 1: an abduction experience. Meanwhile, you saw more male representations in
Speaker 1: media because that's the kind of fiction that was predominant.
Speaker 1: But yeah, you go back to sort of K zero
Speaker 1: and it's this uh, you know, this, this weird, this
Speaker 1: this kind of strangely diverse sampling. It plays against the
Speaker 1: stereotype that has been established for sure. Do you want
Speaker 1: to talk about Fatima because this is actually close to
Speaker 1: an episode that I've been proposing that we do for
Speaker 1: a while now, but we have to find a place
Speaker 1: to land on it. I've I've always wanted us to
Speaker 1: talk about the Marian apparitions, and this is Fatima was
Speaker 1: where one of those happened. Oh yeah, so this is
Speaker 1: essentially a UFO encounter in terms of you know, unidentified
Speaker 1: flying object, but in nineteen seventeen, before any of the
Speaker 1: alien abduction stuff took off in what is what has
Speaker 1: subsequently been explained as everything from stratospheric dust to mass hallucination.
Speaker 1: You have thousands of people claiming to witness, um uh,
Speaker 1: this paranormal experience in a predominantly Catholic town. They claim
Speaker 1: to see Virgin Mary will arrive in quote an airplane
Speaker 1: of light. So before the advent of Christianity, the same
Speaker 1: sort of event would have likely been viewed through the
Speaker 1: lens of you know, a pagan belief system. Um, But
Speaker 1: how do you how do you think such an event
Speaker 1: would be interpreted today? In a world flavored more you know,
Speaker 1: by scientific dominance, uh, the decline of religion and mainstream
Speaker 1: science fiction, you would think that it's some sort of
Speaker 1: an alien being visiting our world. Like if I looked
Speaker 1: up and saw that, I would That's really where my
Speaker 1: mind would probably go first. Yeah, right, And also I'm
Speaker 1: not as familiar with the fatimas areas I'd like to be.
Speaker 1: But why would we automatically assume it's Mary unless even
Speaker 1: if it appears as a female human being, death doesn't
Speaker 1: necessarily strike the narrative chord. That's common with the two
Speaker 1: of us at least. Yeah. Yeah, I mean you look
Speaker 1: at the people in the place and the time and
Speaker 1: you and you realize this was their predominant narrative for
Speaker 1: supernatural occurrences, and though that is what they went to,
Speaker 1: that's what their minds went to when they when they
Speaker 1: observe this or experience this. Alright, on that note, we're
Speaker 1: going to take a quick break, and when we come back,
Speaker 1: we're going to discuss, well, what's what's actually happening. We've
Speaker 1: we've mentioned the idea that there are you know, their
Speaker 1: hallucination and memory issues, sleep paralysis, etcetera. We're going to
Speaker 1: get into those. We're going to discuss those explanations when
Speaker 1: we get back. Than alright, we're back, So all right,
Speaker 1: what's actually happening? We've pretty pretty much outlined, like the
Speaker 1: cultural narrative of alien abductions, what's common for the cases. Obviously,
Speaker 1: what we what we were speaking of there is in generalization.
Speaker 1: You know, if there are specific cases, they could play
Speaker 1: out in any variety of ways. But what do we
Speaker 1: think is actually going on here? Like what what has
Speaker 1: come about from our scientists sitting down and interviewing and
Speaker 1: studying abductees. Yeah, this is where it gets. It gets
Speaker 1: pretty fascinating because it's the the abductees that you can
Speaker 1: you can study, because when it comes to just seeing
Speaker 1: a UFO, there's not a lot you can do, Like
Speaker 1: there's there's no physical signs of that. And we've already
Speaker 1: discussed some of the problems that come into play when
Speaker 1: you're talking about footage. Uh. In fact, that's that's one
Speaker 1: of the arguments that that has been made that we
Speaker 1: that that people are believing less in alien abduction and
Speaker 1: UFOs because everyone has a camera phone now and you're
Speaker 1: not seeing like the that the wealth of UFO sidings
Speaker 1: that that you might expect if they were actually occurring. Well,
Speaker 1: and also c g I is becoming something that people
Speaker 1: can do in their home, you know, Like I think
Speaker 1: about the episode that you and Joe did on on
Speaker 1: Kenny Valley and the idea that like, we're about to
Speaker 1: hit a point technologically where we and replicate a real
Speaker 1: human being but put them in a scenario where they
Speaker 1: act out and say things that they didn't actually do
Speaker 1: in real life, and then you apply that to something
Speaker 1: like this. Who knows what you can believe in. It's
Speaker 1: just the footage, but with the individual, you know, there
Speaker 1: there we have that physical or that alleged physical proof
Speaker 1: that can be evaluated to varying degrees, be it physical
Speaker 1: or psychologically. Yeah, so there's all kinds of possibilities, from
Speaker 1: hallucinations to lucid dreams which we've talked about extensively on
Speaker 1: the show before, or just plain fantasies, right, and the
Speaker 1: explanations range from sleep apnea to sleep paralysis, to hysteria
Speaker 1: to psychosis. Now, sleep paralysis seems to be a really
Speaker 1: interesting landing point for a lot of more empirically minded
Speaker 1: researchers on alien abduction, and in fact, Robert has done
Speaker 1: a fantastic sleep paralysis video that you can find on
Speaker 1: stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That was a
Speaker 1: fun one. Yeah, and I believe we've talked about about
Speaker 1: it on the show, but for two probably more in
Speaker 1: terms of like incubi and succubi and whatnot. But but yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean the basic idea is in your dream, you
Speaker 1: could have a dream about being a kung fu fighter,
Speaker 1: for instance, but your body is on lockdown, and that's
Speaker 1: to keep you from kung fu fighting anyone who's in
Speaker 1: bed with you or you know, falling out, destroying lamps.
Speaker 1: That's sort of thing. That's the basic idea, But there
Speaker 1: are very various um conditions that can interfere with that,
Speaker 1: and one of those is sleep rouses. And in this scenario,
Speaker 1: you wake up, but your body is still on lockdown.
Speaker 1: And on top of that, it's also not just a
Speaker 1: who I'm awake now, my body won't move, which is
Speaker 1: frightening enough, but you're also going to be in that
Speaker 1: that another space between dream dreaming and being awake. You're
Speaker 1: gonna be in that hypnopomic state where you're susceptible to
Speaker 1: these hallucinations. I think a lot of us have probably
Speaker 1: experienced this to some degree. You know where you're There
Speaker 1: are two versions of this. One is descending into sleep
Speaker 1: and one is a rising um. I've experienced the former,
Speaker 1: where I'm like reading, if you're forcing yourself to read
Speaker 1: a book and you you really should go to sleep,
Speaker 1: you're trying to keep going, and then you start reading
Speaker 1: things that aren't there though. That's one example of this
Speaker 1: another space we're talking about. The other is if you've
Speaker 1: ever woken up and been enough in the dream state
Speaker 1: that you still sort of perceive the dreams in reality. Like,
Speaker 1: the best example I have of this is I remember
Speaker 1: being a kid and having a dream about having this
Speaker 1: like robot toy that was just amazing and uh and
Speaker 1: and then I woke up and at least for like
Speaker 1: a split second, it was it was there in bed
Speaker 1: with me, and then it wasn't. Now, there are a
Speaker 1: few things as an adult that an individual, you know,
Speaker 1: wants as much I think as a child wants a toy.
Speaker 1: But so maybe that's one reason I've never experienced anything
Speaker 1: like that since. But but you know, it's an example
Speaker 1: where I was, I was somewhere in between dream and wakefulness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: my wife actually used to get night terrors, and we
Speaker 1: if we had anything hanging up in the bedroom that
Speaker 1: had like an odd pattern on it, she would wake
Speaker 1: up in the middle of the night and not realize
Speaker 1: that she was still sort of in a dream state,
Speaker 1: and she would think like spiders or something was moving
Speaker 1: around on whatever it was, whether it's a poster or
Speaker 1: a tapestry or whatever. Um So we've we've kind of
Speaker 1: you know, gotten used to that now and try not
Speaker 1: to hang up things like that that would invoke that state.
Speaker 1: But yeah, whereas like I've never had an experience like
Speaker 1: that other than uh in this uh satanic panic episode
Speaker 1: and in the Exorcism episode. I've mentioned my experience when
Speaker 1: I was younger and I had snowblindness and I thought
Speaker 1: there was a demon in the room with me, but
Speaker 1: but nothing, nothing like that, whether you know, I didn't
Speaker 1: know if I was dreaming or awake. Now, sleep Paralysis,
Speaker 1: we're gonna we're gonna break it down here, but I
Speaker 1: got to recommend this movie The Nightmare if people really
Speaker 1: want to spend like a good hour and a half
Speaker 1: with the concert up to sleep Paralysis. I believe it's
Speaker 1: on Netflix right now, Yeah, I think so. And it's
Speaker 1: done by the same people who did that great documentary
Speaker 1: on The Shining Room two thirty seven. Uh So, definitely
Speaker 1: check that out. It taps into the alien abduction narrative
Speaker 1: stuff too, But this one is more This is at
Speaker 1: more of a legitimate documentary, right because the thing about
Speaker 1: the Shining documentary is that it's a documentary about a
Speaker 1: fake conspiracy, like it basically a conspiracy theory that was
Speaker 1: made up and multi conspiracy theory that that just ended
Speaker 1: up like having a sort of truthiness to it, like
Speaker 1: you could see, like, oh I could I could see
Speaker 1: Stanley Kubrick faking a moon landing because he was guilty
Speaker 1: about blah blah blah blah. Yeah, exactly, whereas the nightmare
Speaker 1: is more like they're actually interviewing people who have had
Speaker 1: sleep paralysis experience. They re enact some of the experience
Speaker 1: they do. Yeah, so you're you wake up in the
Speaker 1: state of sleep paralysis. Okay, and uh, and things are
Speaker 1: not waking reality onto and and things could be you
Speaker 1: could be essentially be experiencing a sexual hallucination that's colored
Speaker 1: by your subconscient just and the exact nature of that
Speaker 1: hallucination could depend, like your dreams, on just the nature
Speaker 1: of your relief system, your cultural literacy, what you watched
Speaker 1: on television the night before. Um, you know, what you're
Speaker 1: really into or what you're doing. I mean, just think
Speaker 1: to your dreams, you know, and you can see the
Speaker 1: the diversity that is in play. I can give you
Speaker 1: a perfect example of this based on last night, right. Okay,
Speaker 1: so the day we're recording this is the you know,
Speaker 1: the television show at midnight. This is today's the last day.
Speaker 1: It's it's canceled, and this is gonna be the last episode.
Speaker 1: And I read about that right before I went to
Speaker 1: bed last night, and then I had a dream that
Speaker 1: I was stuck with Chris Hardwick in a dorm room
Speaker 1: and that we were packing up his dorm room because
Speaker 1: he had to move out of there, and it just
Speaker 1: kept going and going and going, and it was it
Speaker 1: was one of those dreams, like we talked about this
Speaker 1: in our Lucid Dream episode, where you can't quite get
Speaker 1: out of it, like even if you wake up, go
Speaker 1: to the bathroom and come back and fall back asleep again,
Speaker 1: Like it kept going, and I was convinced that I
Speaker 1: was stuck. I had to help him pack up all
Speaker 1: this stuff and there was just like an infinity of
Speaker 1: things in his room that no matter how long we packed,
Speaker 1: it would never finish. Well's This is interesting because the
Speaker 1: the dorm room narrative, the dorm room situation, I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna guess and say, this is probably not one that
Speaker 1: you draw from a lot. This is probably not something
Speaker 1: you're using in your in your in your fiction or
Speaker 1: your comics. You're you're not reading like college dorm literature.
Speaker 1: But but the brain just latches onto it and it's like,
Speaker 1: all right, this is what we're going with well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I know exactly where this came from. My
Speaker 1: wife and I are planning to move in the next
Speaker 1: couple of months, so I've already, like, for instance, I've
Speaker 1: started going through things and packing them up and putting
Speaker 1: him in boxes and thinking about like what do I
Speaker 1: need to get rid of to make moving out easier? Right,
Speaker 1: And then I just read that small piece of information
Speaker 1: and it somehow got lodged into the back of my
Speaker 1: subconscious and then manifested as Chris Hardwick in my dream.
Speaker 1: All right, well, I'll come back to this frend just
Speaker 1: a second, but I believe you have a little more
Speaker 1: to say about sleep routs. Yeah, I just want to
Speaker 1: give our audience a little more information here. It's often
Speaker 1: attributed as a catalyst event that leads to the formation
Speaker 1: of false memories, and what we're talking about here is
Speaker 1: the basics. It's a non pathological phenomenon that occurs because
Speaker 1: of a temporary discordance in rapid eye movement sleep, and
Speaker 1: it causes sensory input to be blocked and motor output
Speaker 1: to be inhibited. So subsequently, a sufferer of this is
Speaker 1: experiencing both internal dream stimuli and external sensory stimuli. Again,
Speaker 1: you say like, I've never heard of this, This sounds ridiculous, right, Well, actually,
Speaker 1: thirty percent of the population has had at least one
Speaker 1: instance of this in their life. Five percent of the
Speaker 1: population experience vivid, visual, auditory, and tactile hallucinations, and it
Speaker 1: should be made clear too that these are without drugs
Speaker 1: or alcohol. In relation to this, the Japanese actually have
Speaker 1: a term for this. It's so common called kanishi bari
Speaker 1: and it is represented as a devil stepping on a
Speaker 1: sleeper's chest, while the Chinese call it gui yah or
Speaker 1: ghost pressure. I want to see a movie called ghost pressure. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then I got to come back to Susan Clancy.
Speaker 1: As I mentioned, a lot of her research related to
Speaker 1: alien abduction really kept popping up all over the place
Speaker 1: for this episode. She's one of the main researchers on
Speaker 1: sleep paralysis as an explanation for alien abductions, and she
Speaker 1: categorizes it into three different groups based on qualities. The
Speaker 1: first one is called intruder sleep paralysis, and this is
Speaker 1: when you have hallucinations that include the sense of a
Speaker 1: threatening presence in the room as well as strange noises, footsteps,
Speaker 1: voices in the physical sensation of somebody touching you. Then
Speaker 1: there's the incubus sleep paralysis, which leads back to you
Speaker 1: mentioned we've we've talked about it before. This includes hallucinations
Speaker 1: of breathing difficulty as well as a sensation of impending
Speaker 1: death or bodily harm. So that's your ghost pressure are
Speaker 1: essentially right, something's pushing down on you and then down
Speaker 1: on you. And then the last one is vestibular motor
Speaker 1: sleep paralysis, and this manifests as sensations of movements such
Speaker 1: as falling or accelerating upward out of bed. I think
Speaker 1: a lot of us have experienced that, right, or at
Speaker 1: least in my case, it's the one where you're like
Speaker 1: walking down uh stairs in a dream and then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden the stairs give out from underneath you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or slipping. I've slipped and fallen in dream states and
Speaker 1: woken up now. Now, the first two of these, intruder
Speaker 1: and incubus are heavily implicated in alien abduction phenomena. But
Speaker 1: in a twenty oh five study McNally, who's like a
Speaker 1: partner of Clancys and Clancy, they interviewed ten abductees and
Speaker 1: they describe their experiences of alien abduction. In terms of
Speaker 1: sleep paralysis, it all lined up. All the elements reported
Speaker 1: were consistent with these kind of hallucinations, but they were
Speaker 1: only recovered by the individual following hypnotherapy. And of course,
Speaker 1: in all this is just important to remember that when
Speaker 1: you're talking about memory, you're talking about something that is notable.
Speaker 1: Every time you recall a memory, it's susceptible to change.
Speaker 1: That's super important to remember. So and then, and that
Speaker 1: also means I think I've actually pointed this out. This
Speaker 1: was on the there's a line on the television series
Speaker 1: The Expanse where they've mentioned that the memories that are
Speaker 1: the most important to you're the ones that you can
Speaker 1: trust the least because you've drawn them out so much
Speaker 1: and you've you've manipulated them. So you can imagine the
Speaker 1: situation with a life changing uh event, like an alien
Speaker 1: abduction scenario, like this is a memory that is even
Speaker 1: more untrustworthy because you keep touching it, you keep it's
Speaker 1: like a lump of clay. If you've taken it out,
Speaker 1: reforming it and then putting it away exactly dries up
Speaker 1: a little. If you're going to and you might be
Speaker 1: letting other people touch it as well and influence it.
Speaker 1: So you've got to take that into case. Now, one interesting, uh,
Speaker 1: I think example of the two of the skeptical approach
Speaker 1: to all of this is um the experience of Michael Schermer. Now,
Speaker 1: if you're not familiar with Michael Schermer, you should seek
Speaker 1: him out on social media. He has He's very active there. Uh.
Speaker 1: He is always sharing his opinions on a number of
Speaker 1: different scientific and and uh and of course you know,
Speaker 1: criticizing pseudo scientific endeavors. He's the the editor of the
Speaker 1: of Skeptic magazine. UH. So he's he's been active for
Speaker 1: a number of years in the skeptic community. But he
Speaker 1: himself experienced an alien abduction, or rather what happened is
Speaker 1: he collapsed from sleep deprivation and exhaustion following an eighty
Speaker 1: three hour bike ride uh in a transcontinental race, and
Speaker 1: as Shermer's support team rushed over to him to tend
Speaker 1: to him, uh, Shermer saw them through the filter of
Speaker 1: awaking dream and he perceived them as aliens from a
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties television series. Yeah, this is very much in
Speaker 1: the line of that Jose's Chunk from Outer Space episode. Uh.
Speaker 1: Their their interview young an abductee, and in multiple different
Speaker 1: scenarios during the interviews she sees them. She either sees
Speaker 1: them as aliens, or she sees them as men in black,
Speaker 1: or she sees them as soldiers in the army. Right,
Speaker 1: So there's different lenses that the perception is coming through. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But in Sherman's case, I think one of the cool
Speaker 1: things is like he's I've never seen him indicate like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I was super into that ninety sixties TV show, Like
Speaker 1: it's just it's It's as if the brain just casts
Speaker 1: about for some one of these lenses something that will
Speaker 1: make sense of what's happening, and suddenly there it is.
Speaker 1: And then a lot of it falls to what you
Speaker 1: do with it afterwards. Like Shermer approach it from a
Speaker 1: skeptical point of view, had was in the position to
Speaker 1: then say, oh, well, this is what was happening. Obviously
Speaker 1: I wasn't in, you know, visited by aliens. He also,
Speaker 1: of course had the experience of being able to talk
Speaker 1: to the team who came in and uh and attended
Speaker 1: to him like you know, he knew straight up this
Speaker 1: was not an alien abduction, and he was able to
Speaker 1: work from that point on in his life. But with
Speaker 1: someone else might not have the same tools, the same
Speaker 1: opportun tunities, and they're left to pursue a different route
Speaker 1: in understanding what happened, right, Yeah, And that's the important part.
Speaker 1: Two is that, like, we need to be able to
Speaker 1: distinguish memories, and then what's the difference between false memories
Speaker 1: or recovered memories? Because these terms get thrown around a lot, right,
Speaker 1: And for him, it's very easy for him to say, oh,
Speaker 1: that was a false memory because there were other people
Speaker 1: there with me, right, and they helped to clarify. But
Speaker 1: then the question is, can can a false memory and
Speaker 1: a recovered memory be the same thing? And it seems
Speaker 1: like the answer should be no. Specifically, researchers are interested
Speaker 1: in whether recovered memories are authentic, right, and if they're not,
Speaker 1: is that because the people who are relating them are lying,
Speaker 1: or is it because this is a manifestation of an
Speaker 1: involuntary mechanism that we don't have any control over. You know,
Speaker 1: the latter seems to be more probable based on evidence.
Speaker 1: So the discussion tends to focus on the idea of
Speaker 1: what we're calling false memories here. Yeah, false memories is
Speaker 1: a fascinating area unto itself and one I think one
Speaker 1: of the important things to remember about false memories versus
Speaker 1: authentic memories is to first of all, get into the
Speaker 1: area we realize memories are not a video recording and
Speaker 1: and ar again, every time we draw them out, we
Speaker 1: manipulate them a little bit. So memory this is why
Speaker 1: you have such a problem with eyewitness testimony and in
Speaker 1: in so many criminal trials. So when you when you
Speaker 1: say and also you have to break down their different
Speaker 1: there we remember things in different ways. Memory work is
Speaker 1: more complex than just this sort of videotape kind of
Speaker 1: metaphor that we often draw upon. There's an excellent book
Speaker 1: on this topic titled The Seven Sins of Memory, How
Speaker 1: the Mind Forgets and Remembers by Daniel Shackter, highly recommended.
Speaker 1: But he breaks it down into a few different categories,
Speaker 1: you know, those seven sins. There's transience, which is the
Speaker 1: weakening or loss of memory over time. So you know
Speaker 1: this is just the idea of someone's older and they
Speaker 1: have their memory's have faded. There's absent mindedness. So this
Speaker 1: just see us down to attention in memory. You weren't
Speaker 1: actually that attentive to a series of events, and then
Speaker 1: afterwards your brain is kind of filling in the the details.
Speaker 1: Like one of the examples of this is September eleven,
Speaker 1: people who remember what they had for for breakfast and
Speaker 1: what they were wearing, etcetera. And actual investigations of this
Speaker 1: have turned out that that's often not the case. You
Speaker 1: don't actually remember all that stuff, but your brain is
Speaker 1: kind of working in a way where it's like, hey,
Speaker 1: you just focus on surviving and we'll just make up
Speaker 1: all the details for what you ate for lunch. Um,
Speaker 1: there's blocking, So these are failed attempts to recall tidbits
Speaker 1: of memory of face and name. There's misattribution. This is
Speaker 1: when we recall an authentic memory, but aspects of it
Speaker 1: are misattributed. And this could include a potential scenario, say
Speaker 1: where one is dealing with a an actual traumatic experience,
Speaker 1: maybe an actual case of abuse or even sexual abuse,
Speaker 1: but then you end up your recalling it wrapped up
Speaker 1: in some sort of fantastic form or there is I
Speaker 1: believe there's one account that the chapter himself referred to
Speaker 1: where an individual was an assaulted in a room and
Speaker 1: there was somebody on the television screen and she identified
Speaker 1: her attacker as the individual on the television screen. Uh,
Speaker 1: just because that's how the brain stitched it together, That's
Speaker 1: how the memory is formed. There's of course suggestibility power
Speaker 1: suggestion that of course is a huge factor in our
Speaker 1: satanic panic episode, where if you have someone who is
Speaker 1: going to make heavy suggestions that some sort of scenario
Speaker 1: took place, then that can influence your memory of what happened.
Speaker 1: And then there's bias as well, just the power of
Speaker 1: bias or racial bias coming into play, and then persistence.
Speaker 1: So this is a the failure of the memory system
Speaker 1: involves the unwanted recall of information that is disturbing. So
Speaker 1: this just I think I just present all this to
Speaker 1: to to to drive home that memory is this, uh,
Speaker 1: is this complex system with multiple moving parts, and all
Speaker 1: of those parts can contribute to the creation of false memories.
Speaker 1: And then there's this whole additional area of of of
Speaker 1: describing what's happening in the brain when one is having
Speaker 1: a paranormal experience. UH. Neuroscientist Michael Persenger points the finger
Speaker 1: to the brains temporal lobe. Here seizures can produce feelings
Speaker 1: of deja vu. Persenger believes that the temporal lobe anomalies
Speaker 1: when combined with certain cultural experiences such as belief in
Speaker 1: angels or aliens, can mislabel imagined experiences as actual events.
Speaker 1: So uh so, yeah, we're getting also getting into not
Speaker 1: only like sort of the misfiring of memory systems, with
Speaker 1: the misfiring of other parts of the brains as well,
Speaker 1: but even while without the aid of neurological misfiring. Again,
Speaker 1: human memory is complex, it's fallible. Every day we encounter
Speaker 1: new experiences and then craft that experience into an imperfect narrative.
Speaker 1: We convince ourselves that we can, you know, ultimately convince
Speaker 1: ourselves nearly anything, especially when it fulfills a need, such
Speaker 1: as explaining what happened. Yeah, and even with explanations like
Speaker 1: our realizations that memory is imperfect or the thought that oh,
Speaker 1: something's going on here in the actual organ of the brain,
Speaker 1: some people just assume, well, anybody with an alien abduction story,
Speaker 1: they must be crazy, right, that's got to be what's
Speaker 1: going on. In fact, that the the gag in Jose
Speaker 1: Chung's is that every single person they talked to about
Speaker 1: it starts off by saying, well, this is gonna sound crazy,
Speaker 1: but dot dot dot Now, the study by Clancy and
Speaker 1: McNally that I mentioned earlier, it actually showed that the
Speaker 1: mental health of abductees doesn't differ dramatically from the general population.
Speaker 1: They tested ten abductees. Four of them didn't qualify for
Speaker 1: a single diagnosis in the d s M four. The
Speaker 1: others had phobias that are pretty common. They were scared
Speaker 1: of insects, They had anxiety disorders, alcoholism, bipolar disorder, maybe
Speaker 1: one of them had PTSD, and then panic disorder. Okay,
Speaker 1: but these are, you know, fairly common things. I think
Speaker 1: if you'd sample like a room full of your coworkers,
Speaker 1: those would be common. But none of them qualified for schizophrenia.
Speaker 1: In fact, their mean depression and anxiety scores were well
Speaker 1: with the normal limits, and the only place where they
Speaker 1: differed from the general population was primarily in three areas
Speaker 1: that they scored higher in. And these are really interesting.
Speaker 1: First is dissociative experiences, so they measured this with a scale.
Speaker 1: They This basically looks at the mind's ability to tap
Speaker 1: into alterations of consciousness, so for instance, h zoning out
Speaker 1: when you're driving, or not being able to recognize your
Speaker 1: own reflection when you're looking in a in a mirror. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The second one of these was the absorption scale, and
Speaker 1: that looked at an individual's proneness to being absorbed in
Speaker 1: imagery experiences. Imaginary experiences for instance, reading a novel or
Speaker 1: watching a movie right like the the the level that
Speaker 1: you let yourself be enthralled by the narrative. And then
Speaker 1: the magical ideation scale that assesses the individual's beliefs in
Speaker 1: paranormal phenomena such as ghosts, aliens, psychic powers, in the
Speaker 1: existence of magic. Now I read about these three scales
Speaker 1: and my first thought was, you, Joe and I need
Speaker 1: to take these tests. We need to get them to
Speaker 1: send those tests here and then we should take them.
Speaker 1: That seems like it would be a great Facebook live event. Likewise,
Speaker 1: researchers Hugh and Rogers did another study in two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight and they compared twenty six alien abductees with
Speaker 1: twenty six non abductees, and they use scales to measure
Speaker 1: their fantasy prone nous and their emotional intelligence, and they
Speaker 1: found there was no significant difference between the abductees and
Speaker 1: the non abductees in their self reporting. Now, again, this
Speaker 1: led to the conclusion that abductees and the general population
Speaker 1: really aren't all that different. Psychologically, the differences seem to
Speaker 1: be more on like kind of an individual level than
Speaker 1: a cheological level. The abductees tend to be more interested
Speaker 1: in UFOs or aliens before they actually have this experience. Likewise,
Speaker 1: they tend to seek a therapist who is also interested
Speaker 1: in that subject matter. And there does seem to be
Speaker 1: a relationship between abductees and dissociation, absorption, and magical ideation.
Speaker 1: You know that this lines up a lot with what
Speaker 1: with actually what Carl Young said, because he was actually
Speaker 1: asked about UFOs and whatnot an interview, and he said, quote,
Speaker 1: in our world, miracles do not happen anymore, and we
Speaker 1: feel that something simply must happen which will provide an
Speaker 1: answer or show the way out. So now these UFOs
Speaker 1: are appearing in the sky. And in the late nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: psychologists Roy F. Bombastmeister and Leonard S. Newman they further
Speaker 1: this viewpoint by arguing that abduction encounters are essentially subconscious
Speaker 1: attempts to rid one's self of self awareness through massochistic fantasy,
Speaker 1: and in lieu of mystic conviction, our minds staff these
Speaker 1: fantasies with little gray men. Now, of course, our cultural
Speaker 1: frame of reference continually changes. Some observers have have even
Speaker 1: equated the recent declining UFO sidings with the rise of
Speaker 1: the Internet. Uh. You know. For instance, a cultural critic
Speaker 1: ZOD and sod are suggested, instead of projecting our hopes
Speaker 1: and peers into space, we're projecting them into cyberspace. I
Speaker 1: have to say, this makes me wonder. So if you
Speaker 1: go with this argument that people are experiencing alien abductions
Speaker 1: less and they're reporting them less, which again is arguable,
Speaker 1: why are we not seeing more people explaining or or
Speaker 1: draping their paranormal experiences in within the idea that we're
Speaker 1: potentially living within a computer simulation. That that theory, Like,
Speaker 1: maybe that theory just hasn't it hasn't exploded in in
Speaker 1: the mainstream. Yeah, like I can. I could easily imagine
Speaker 1: a scenario where that becomes the new near heard if
Speaker 1: if it picks up anough steam, someone's like, hey, I
Speaker 1: had this experience, Uh, and I clicked out of our
Speaker 1: reality and I was in the real reality for a
Speaker 1: little bit. Yeah, essentially the matrix scenerio so related. I
Speaker 1: have a couple of notes here about that Newman and
Speaker 1: Boo Meister study. Uh, they basically created a model for
Speaker 1: explaining this, and they called it cognitive motivational hypothesis, and
Speaker 1: this maintained that people who claim alien abduction experiences are
Speaker 1: looking for a narrative that will provide us an escape
Speaker 1: from ourselves, and that it represents a massochistic wish to
Speaker 1: experience pain, powerlessness, and humiliation on a grand cosmic level.
Speaker 1: Baumeister himself actually said, the abductees are masochists who unconsciously
Speaker 1: want to relinquish control of their lives. And I immediately
Speaker 1: thought that this is like, uh, cosmic horror as some
Speaker 1: kind of existentialism, right, Like it's like I want there
Speaker 1: to be something so big and beyond my understanding that
Speaker 1: that can make my existence makes sense. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: we'll probably we're gonna do a part two for this episode,
Speaker 1: and we'll probably we're gonna get into more of the
Speaker 1: cultural stuff there. But you know, one one thing that
Speaker 1: we're going to discuss, and that is some of the demographics,
Speaker 1: like the idea that that for the long despite the
Speaker 1: original demographics of the sort of the the case zero
Speaker 1: of alien abduction, you saw mostly white American kind of
Speaker 1: middle class males experiencing these things, and there's this this
Speaker 1: idea like these these might have been some of the
Speaker 1: key individuals who were we're pining for this release that
Speaker 1: they're kind of in this situation where like, here you go,
Speaker 1: it's the it's the nineteen eighties, it's the American dream.
Speaker 1: Go nothing stopping you just go out there, work hard
Speaker 1: and build your life. And so there's this there's this
Speaker 1: kind of this uh, this this pressure then on that
Speaker 1: individual to to you know, to fulfill this American dream.
Speaker 1: And then here's this, there's this out you know, this
Speaker 1: is idea that like I can't achieve it because this
Speaker 1: happened to me. It's kind of like if like the
Speaker 1: fifth or sixth season of Madmen was Don Draper got
Speaker 1: abducted by aliens, that would have been a great sequence
Speaker 1: or maybe I would have gotten for that. Maybe they'll
Speaker 1: do an extra episode where that that takes place. Um,
Speaker 1: it is important, though, Like you're right, there's this argument
Speaker 1: going around that UFO sightings have gone away, right, and
Speaker 1: that there's another argument that says, no, they haven't gone away,
Speaker 1: but that online forums have simply allowed people just an
Speaker 1: accessible inside group where they can share their stories yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, imagine if you had an experience like this,
Speaker 1: or you felt you had an experience like this, where
Speaker 1: would you go to? Now? Whereas someone ten and twenty
Speaker 1: years ago might have run to the nightly news or
Speaker 1: caught up the newspaper sting. Now a our media is changing.
Speaker 1: You tweet it, or you go to Reddit and you
Speaker 1: look up the alien abduction board. I visited that board
Speaker 1: just just yesterday out of research for this episode, and
Speaker 1: there people talking about alien abduction, uh and and talking
Speaker 1: about their experiences. Those are the places you're gonna go to.
Speaker 1: And then when you go to these places, these online
Speaker 1: communities to discuss it, you're kind of gonna gonna be
Speaker 1: in the same sort of echo chambers that everyone is
Speaker 1: in these days. Uh, you know, cut away in their
Speaker 1: own little social or socio political realm, their own cultural realm,
Speaker 1: and then you know, talking occasionally talking about all the
Speaker 1: crazy stuff that other individuals are doing outside of your bubble. Alright,
Speaker 1: So really in all this we come back again too,
Speaker 1: the sock puppet. You know, we we've we've talked in
Speaker 1: broad strokes about all the various um psychological, neuroscientific events
Speaker 1: that could be occurring. And then you know how we're
Speaker 1: manipulating memory. But but then how we end up having
Speaker 1: to stitch that sock puppet together, that that explanation, that
Speaker 1: sort of flavoring, that narrative that describes and fills in
Speaker 1: the details of this paranormal experience. Where do we get
Speaker 1: that from? And what does it say about the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: We're gonna get into that the next episode. So this
Speaker 1: episode published on a Tuesday, the next episode publishes on Thursday.
Speaker 1: I'll make sure there's a there's a link to the
Speaker 1: next episode on the landing page for this episode once
Speaker 1: it publishes. Yeah, and if you're wondering, sometimes people hear
Speaker 1: us say that the landing page and they don't quite
Speaker 1: know what we mean. We're talking about stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com. That's where all this stuff lives.
Speaker 1: You might be subscribing to the show through iTunes or
Speaker 1: Google Player, Spotify or whatever, but if you go to
Speaker 1: stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, it's got the
Speaker 1: MP three downloads for all the episodes right there, but
Speaker 1: also our notes about things, and and then obviously ways
Speaker 1: that you can get in touch with us through social media.
Speaker 1: Right so, we're on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on Tumbler,
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Speaker 1: This is what we're calling the Discussion Module, and it
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Speaker 1: of stump across the page. So we've made this discussion
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Speaker 1: and new episodes, and lots of people are posting in there,
Speaker 1: either introducing themselves or showing us articles that we haven't
Speaker 1: seen yet about cool things that we can talk about
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