Boing Boing: Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens

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Tuesday, August 9, 2005

Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens

Today's New York Times reviews "Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens." Written by Harvard psychologist Susan Clancy, the book delves into such interesting topics as sleep paralysis (see previous post), pop culture alien imagery, and "source errors, misattributing sources of remembered information by, say, confusing a scene from a barely remembered movie with a dream." From Benedict Carey's NYT review:

Although no one of those elements - sleep paralysis, interest in the paranormal, hypnotherapy, memory tricks or emotional investment - is necessary or sufficient to create abduction memories, they tend to cluster together in self-described abductees, Dr. Clancy finds. "In the past, researchers have tended to concentrate on one or another" factor, she said in an interview. "I'm saying they all play a role."

Yet abduction narratives often have another, less explicit, dimension that Dr. Clancy suspects may be central to their power. Consider this comment, from a study participant whom Dr. Clancy calls Jan, a middle-age divorcée engaged in a quest for personal understanding: "You know, they do walk among us on earth. They have to transform first into a physical body, which is very painful for them. But they do it out of love. They are here to tell us that we're all interconnected in some way. Everything is."

At a basic level, Dr. Clancy concludes, alien abduction stories give people meaning, a way to comprehend the many odd and dispiriting things that buffet any life, as well as a deep sense that they are not alone in the universe. In this sense, abduction memories are like transcendent religious visions, scary and yet somehow comforting and, at some personal psychological level, true.

Link to buy the book, Link to NYT article

posted by David Pescovitz at 11:51:25 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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