Hostage Hallucinations: Visual Imagery Experienced by Victims of Torture, Rape... and UFOs.
Mindhacks blog points to a fascinating (though also disturbing and graphic) study conducted in the mid-1980s about hallucinations experienced by the victims of kidnappings, rape, torture -- and people who claim to have been abducted by UFOs.
The reasoning behind including two 'alien abductees' was to compare hallucinations in verified versus unverified hostage situations. Cases of people who were hostages but did not hallucinate are also included.Link to Mindhacks post, which includes links to the studies, and an excerpt of one torture victim's hallucination testimony, in which he compares the visual imagery experienced to a PCP trip. As the Mindhacks writer, Vaughn, says, "Worth reading the paper in full if you can, or at least from the beginning of the case studies, as it's a rarely discussed but remarkably striking aspect of human experience." (via Maggie KB)The study found that one in four hostages had intense hallucinations, and these were invariably people who were in life-threatening situations. Isolation, visual deprivation, physical restraint, violence and death threats also seemed to contribute to the chance of having a hallucinatory experience.
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where do you think Dante got all that imagery from? Imagination?
Interesting post! Thanks Xeni. Brings to mind Philip Glass' 1000 Airplanes on the Roof.
I was really hoping they'd have an analysis of the 'UFO Abductees' experiences vs the 'real' ones.
My immediate thoughts are of the imaginary worlds of children.
Me and some buddies used to go out near an old copper mine and lay low until some aliens came along. We'd grab a straggler and drag it into an old shed nearby. Gagged and strapped to a table, we'd try stuff on him... tickling, prodding, and eventually probing (Not me! Those guys!) Anyway, we'd let him go before the others got back, hauling stolen copper. They always treated him like he was a liar, making stuff up to get out of work. Ha!
I was wondering the same thing as #3. So does the similarity in hallucination add validity to UFO Abductees claims?
I don't want to explore this any further, but if the UFO abductees had the SAME hallucinations as the authenticated victims...
Lousy slow-paying gang.
@#7 Buddy66: I don't want to explore this any further, but if the UFO abductees had the SAME hallucinations as the authenticated victims...
... then it's quite likely that many who report a hallucinatory UFO abduction experience are actually the victims of a very traumatic (although terrestrial) rape, assault, or abduction. "I was abducted by a UFO" is the traumatized mind's desperate attempt to stitch over an even more unsettling, hard-to-deal-with reality (eg: "I was raped by my own parent").
As I understand it, this is a rather common theory to explain "UFO abduction".
Torture:
Isolation and life threatening death situations may cause hallucinations. Do not drive or operate heavy machinery while being tortured. Take as directed. See your MD if conditions persist.
I think #9 may well be right. Maybe people who think they are UFO abductees are really victims of something else that's too horrible for them to deal with, like sexual abuse by their parents or something, and it's easier for them to blame it on aliens than to admit (even to themselves) the truth.
@#6 -- This isn't the only study to show that the physiological effects that we believe indicate a real traumatic event also exist in people who report ufo abductions.
R. McNally at Harvard Medical School compared war veterans to ufo "experiencers" and found the same physiological responses were present in both (and nearly the same level of PTSD).
Since he could not accept the possibility that the ufo abductions could possibly have been as described, instead of noting that the correlation indicates that real trauma took place -- in terms of the standards of psychology -- he declared that he'd discovered that imaginary trauma must cause real trauma too.
Notably, he did not think that they'd been raped and invented something more exotic. I believe he settled on the idea that they'd had a bad dream, or become confused when they couldn't shake off that sleep paralysis that sometimes hits you when you are waking up. So be careful sleeping, folks. You might wake up with the PTSD!
His "discovery" that has since been used to suggest that adults who report that priests raped them as children imagined that, too.
Basically, it is a slippery slope. You start denying one set of events based on it being unlikely, and pretty soon you're able to deny anything you'd like to imagine is unlikely. You just have to keep reinterpreting what you find in your results, to match what you believe about the world.
#11 - This doesn't explain multiple witnesses, physical marks upon and objects within the body of the "experiencer".
I would suggest you look deeper into the subject.
I meant to conclude, in response to your question "does the similarity in hallucination add validity to UFO Abductees claims?":
No, it does not provide validity. No results will provide validity. Results can be interpreted in ways that will meet the required belief, rather than suggest a new belief may be required.
I thought I should point out that the english word for describing these kinds of experiences is 'traumatic' for those who know german would know this is from the word for dream 'traum'.
I personally suffered trauma during my childhood and had at least one incident of sleep paralysis, and an OOBE during a period of intensive torture from my father.
1/4 of people suffering trauma dissociate immediately, but nearly 100% of people dissociate and hallucinate when trying to recall it, which I suspect is what causes the sleep paralysis and disembodiment.
Arthur Janov was involved in studying the effects of trauma and was probably one of the first to suggest that the way to heal the damage was to actually fully re-experience... Recent research has found a drug that suppresses tachycardia thus allowing the release of traumatic emotional recoiling, and there has been work done using virtual reality to create an experience of recollection dissociated from reality that has shown some promise.
I would be willing to bet that the greater majority of UFO contact experiences are had by people who have suffered an acute period of torture at the hands of someone.
People who have these hallucinatory experiences directly during the experience are probably not receiving the psychological damage that those present during the experience are having. Perhaps this is actually a survival mechanism, because the pain of trauma can cause physical death via the mechanisms of extended CNS arousal such things as shock, stroke and cardiac arrest. It makes sense that a significant amount of the population would have this reaction to torture because this is precisely (possibly) what may have allowed their distant ancestors to make it through a time of genocide or persecution.
I wonder how many holocaust survivors experienced dissociation and hallucination while awake during traumatic experiences.
I also wonder if there is any indicators that can be linked to determine which people are likely have this happen to them, or more importantly those who aren't likely, because I suspect that those who don't are likely to suffer PTSD. Or maybe the other way around? Perhaps this is an indicator. I know I have a tendency towards dissociation, and show a lot of signs of PTSD.
I am very interested in the neurological mechanisms surrounding trauma, I believe that PTSD is just the tip of the iceberg of the ways in which torture distorts people's behaviour. I am also very interested to know if there is any way to 'immunise' people against it... or if having previously experienced it reduces ones chance of being damaged by it further down the track, just as a broken bone knits harder than an unbroken one, and so on. hm well i could go on but I'll just leave it at that.
The book Mysterious Skin (on which the movie of the same name is based) explores that "abductees are really abuse victims" hypothesis very well.
when i was a kid i thought i had been visited by aliens on one particularly vivid evening. years later in therapy for anger i discovered i had been raped by my father on that evening and the "aliens" were my young mind's way of coping with the assault.
Could this hallucinatory state/disassociation be a part of why it's so difficult for people to accept that they have been abused. The combination of blocking it out and being told that it isn't abuse...
This should (but probably won't) bring more attention to the Dr. Rick Strassman's hypothesis that UFO encounters, mystical experiences, and hallucinatory mental disorders are caused by a high level of endogenous DMT (hilariously enough a schedule 1 substance in the US...the DEA can raid you for your brain), which, in another hypothesis of his, is released during high-stress/high-pain/traumatic events such as childbirth. If the latter hypothesis can be proven, then this study would be great evidence for the former.
These hypotheses are more testable but somewhat less interesting than the other speculations about DMT, though.