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Abducted by aliens?
18/11/2005 19:02 - (SA)
Cambridge - Susan Clancy is sick of space aliens.
The Harvard psychologist figures she has read every book and seen every movie ever made about extra-terrestrials (ET). She has interviewed about 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," said Clancy.
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.
According to Clancy, those who believe aliens are among us have not taken kindly to her theory that abductees have created "false memories" out of a "blend of fantasy-proneness, memory distortion, culturally available scripts, sleep hallucinations, and scientific illiteracy".
Studies began with sexual abuse victims
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," said Clancy. "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 paedophiles everywhere".
Around the same time, Harvard Medical School began investigating the research methods of Pulitzer Prize-winning psychologist, John Mack, who used hypnosis to retrieve the memories of people who claimed to be alien abductees.
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?
Many common threads
She and her adviser, Harvard psychologist Richard McNally, placed a newspaper as asking, "Have you been abducted by aliens?"
As Clancy and McNally interviewed the abductees, they began finding common threads. Many of them, for example, described the terrifying experience of waking up and being unable to move.
The Harvard psychologists view this as episodes of sleep paralysis - a state of limbo between sleep and being awake, sometimes punctuated by hallucinations.
Clancy said a wealth of research shows hypnosis makes it easier for people to create false memories. However, she has learnt it is impossible to categorically disprove alien abductions.
"All you can do is argue that they're improbable and the evidence adduced by the believer is insufficient to justify the belief," said Clancy. "Ultimately, the existence of ETs is a matter of opinion."
- AP
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