Not sure if a thread exists for this already or whether or not it could have gone into New Science...
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Why do people believe they have been abducted by aliens?
That is the question arch sceptic and professor of psychology Chris French set out to answer in a research project that began five years ago.
Now, in a unique UK-based study to be published this month, French has come up with an intriguing explanation. Alien abductees, or "experiencers" as he describes them, have a different psychological profile to people who do not claim to have had these experiences, the research shows.
Experiencers have higher levels of paranormal belief, paranormal experience, self-reported psychic ability and fantasy proneness, more vivid imaginations, a greater tendency to hallucinate and more self-reported incidences of sleep paralysis.
Search for explanations
Sleep paralysis is a scientifically accepted condition. It usually happens between sleeping and waking, when the sufferer experiences a terrifying feeling of being paralysed, unable to move or speak, while an unidentifiable horror lurks in the dark. Several of the experiencers in the study had suffered sleep paralysis and in searching for an explanation concluded they had had a close encounter, French says. "If you have had a really vivid experience like that and you can't make any sense of it, and you come across an article or a book or a documentary that says you may well have been abducted by aliens, it gives you an explanation, and it also means you're not crazy.
"So we can see why some people may go for that and may then, as a consequence, end up going for hypnotic regression, already with the idea in their head that they have been abducted by aliens - and, surprise, surprise, what kind of memory then appears to surface? It's being taken on board a spaceship."
Six of the experiencers had undergone hypnotic regression, which French believes can implant false memories. The research also found the abductees showed higher levels of dissociativity (a tendency to switch off or have altered states of consciousness, such as out of body experiences and missing time episodes) and absorption (an ability to lose themselves in some activity such as watching a movie or reading a novel).
French, who is head of the anomalistic psychology research unit at Goldsmiths College, University of London, led a team of researchers who studied 19 experiencers and a control group, matched for gender and age. In each group, there were eight men and 11 women, aged between their early 20s and early 70s.
The experiencer category included anyone who claimed to have had extraterrestrial contact. These included UFO sightings; direct contact with a variety of alien life forms as well as telepathic communication with aliens; six reported believing that the aliens had implanted some device in their bodies; one believed that his terrestrial parents were not his real parents (his real parents being extraterrestrials); two reported finding marks on their bodies caused by the aliens; and three reported that aliens had removed foetuses from them or caused them to have miscarriages.
The participants completed seven questionnaires and were interviewed by researchers.
The article, called Psychological Aspects of the Alien Abduction Experience, is published in the neuroscience journal Cortex. Its publication is a vindication of French's field of research, anomalistic psychology, which he defines as "the psychology of weird experiences that people have and the beliefs that are associated with them", and which he has pursued for more than 20 years. He also edits a semi-satirical publication, the Skeptic Magazine.
"I'm very used to defending my interest in this because, even now, I get the impression from certain colleagues that it's not quite a respectable thing to be interested in, even though you may have the word sceptic tattooed across your forehead.
"The truth is, looking at the opinion polls [see below], most people do believe in the paranormal and a sizeable minority claim to have direct personal experience. This can mean one of two things, either that paranormal forces really exist, and if that is the case, scientists should accept that and get on and study it in the same way we study and try to understand anything else. Or it's telling us something really interesting about human psychology. Either way, I think it's worth taking these kinds of beliefs seriously.
"One possibility is that people really are being abducted by aliens and taken on board space ships and being probed in interesting ways. I'm not convinced that the ET [extraterrestrial] hypothesis is true. So the challenge for the psychologist is to try to explain what is going on. I think the most plausible explanation is these are false memories."
A-level option
The profile of French's field of research is about to be raised still further following a decision by one of the biggest examination boards in the UK, the AQA, to introduce the study of anomalistic psychology as an option in the curriculum for its psychology A-level from September next year.
French, who is writing a chapter on the subject for one of the board's psychology textbooks, is delighted his rather niche specialism will reach a wider audience in schools. "I'm very excited about it," he says. "The reason I like teaching this topic is the material is a great hook to get people interested.
"Whether they are believers or sceptics, most people find these claims of aliens and ghosts and strange powers interesting. Once you've got the interest, it raises all kinds of issues about the nature of evidence and what should we accept as convincing evidence, and about using it as a tool for critical thinking more generally".
Is French going to be turning out a generation of disbelieving sceptics? "To be properly sceptical you have to be open to the possibility you might be wrong, and willing to be persuaded by evidence. Scepticism is not about dismissing claims before you look at the evidence. It's about saying, show me the evidence."
Close encounters
In a recent lecture, French cited figures from an opinion poll of a representative sample of 1,000 British adults. The figures in square brackets indicate those reporting direct personal experience of the phenomenon in question:
• 64% believe that some people have powers that cannot be explained by science [16%]
• 63% believe in God [14%]
• 52% believe in life after death [11%]
• 49% believe in ghosts [13%]
• 49% believe in precognitive dreams [19%]
• 49% believe in heaven (only 28% believe in hell) [2%, 2%]
• 47% believe in thought reading [14%]
• 41% believe in communication with the dead [9%]
• 34% believe in psychokinesis [4%]
• 26% believe in angels [ 3%]
• 25% believe in reincarnation [-]
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