My older sister was recently downsizing a bit (good for her) and came across a bundle of letters from the
s. One was from my father, about a trip to the Amish country that the rest of the family (he, my
mother, my younger sister Alisa, and I) had just taken. All of us except Alisa,
he wrote saw a shiny
disk-shaped UFO which suddenly disappeared.
I have no memory of that incident.
But if you’re a certain kind of person, with a certain kind of belief system, the discovery of this letter could suggest an answer to some questions. How did Leonard S. Newman, as mainstream an experimental social psychologist as one could find, end up studying and writing about UFOs? And of all things, why the alien abduction phenomenon? Clearly, something significant happened to him that day in Pennsylvania—something he can’t remember, something he probably doesn’t want to remember. Spotting the shiny disk was just the beginning, a prelude to a more intimate encounter with whoever or whatever was inside the spacecraft. Is he actually an abductee? Could writing about the phenomenon be his way of dealing with repressed memories of his own capture and subsequent painful and humiliating medical examination?
I don’t think so.
The real story is more mundane. At some point in the early s, my mother passed on to me a copy of The Skeptical Inquirer, an issue that happened to contain multiple articles about the alien abduction phenomenon—specifically, about the growing number of people who had concluded that they had been taken against their will, roughly treated, and stripped of their dignity by extraterrestrial beings. It would be reasonable to ask why she had an issue of the magazine in the first place. But my mother is a voracious, even obsessive reader. If there was nothing else at hand but copies of Cigar Aficionado or Golf Digest, she would undoubtedly spend a couple of hours making her way through them despite never in her life having smoked a cigar or picked up a golf club. So why The Skeptical Inquirer—who knows? And why did she pass it on to me? Because she was always doing that. She pretty much had to. If she held on to all of her reading material, she and my father would have needed to rent a warehouse to store it all.
I had just begun a post-doctoral fellowship at Case Western Reserve University with Roy Baumeister, who at the time was writing extensively about what he called escaping the self.
Specifically, Roy argued that the self and its demands—to be liked, to be respected, to be competent, to be
successful—can be burdensome. Too bad, though, because as you’ve undoubtedly heard, you can’t run away from
yourself—except maybe you actually can. Roy made the case that a number of otherwise paradoxical human
behaviors could be understood as ways for people to avoid having to focus on, regulate, and judge who they are and how
they are seen by others. In other words, they could be understood as ways to escape the self. One of those odd
practices was masochism. As I read those articles about the abduction phenomenon, I became intrigued with what I
perceived to be parallels between the abductees’ narratives of their experiences and central aspects of masochistic
fantasy. More on that later.
If you’re that certain kind of person, with that particular belief system, you must be saying “Of course that’s the story he prefers—he’s a skeptic!” And indeed that’s how I would describe myself, as would many of the contributors to this volume. And we all know about skeptics. They refuse to believe that anything outside the ordinary could ever happen to anyone; in fact, they don’t want to discover anything that would challenge their narrow view of reality. Skeptics go out of their way to avoid the possibility of having any sort of experience that one might call paranormal. They can’t understand why “believers” would spend so much of their time and energy exploring subjects like UFOs, and find interest in such topics to be absurd, even contemptible. And they wouldn’t know an alien if (as the old saying goes) one bit them in the ass.
Well, I’m guessing that I would know an alien if one bit me in the ass—but none seems to be interested in taking a
bite. More to the point, that caricature of skeptics and their fellow travelers includes at least two misconceptions
that really should be addressed. Please read Craig R. Myers’s (this
volume) account of encountering a spectacle that he simply could not grasp.
He was stunned by the sight of
strange shape-shifting blobs of light as they moved back and forth, round and round, across the night sky
seemingly in or behind the clouds,
doing a dazzling dance.
Does he come across to you as someone
not open to an awe-inspiring, life-transforming experience? Or does he instead sound like someone excited
about the possibility of finally witnessing something that would upend all of his previous assumptions? Of course, in
this case, the source of the show
was a car dealership using giant rotating spotlights to draw attention to
a sale.
The point remains that skeptics are certainly open to awe and wonder and would be just as excited as
anyone else to come face to face with the incredible. Can anyone doubt that Alexander Keul (this volume )
would pay any price to be able to regularly witness ball lightning? Nonetheless, we
cannot simply believe the stories that anyone tells us, especially those of an extraordinary nature that would
force us to reevaluate established knowledge
(Ballester-Olmos
, this volume ).
And we remain perplexed by those who do not even search for reasonable explanations for UFO reports and accuse
those doing it of being debunkers
(Borraz
, this volume ).
As for the idea that skeptics scoff at those who would express interest in UFOs and in the people who claim to
encounter them, let me state the crushingly obvious. The contributors to this book include some very smart people.
There are all sorts of issues to which they could be devoting their intellectual energy, and all sorts of scholarly
and research contributions they could make. They don’t have to write thoughtful and rigorous chapters for a book
called The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony, but that is what they have done. The fact is that most people
do not actually care all that much about UFO sightings and
alleged alien encounters, and don’t make it a priority to learn more about them. The UFO phenomenon is something that
enters their awareness primarily when they happen to come across a television show devoted to the topic while they’re flipping
through channels looking for something else to watch. Not so the contributors to this book. With whom else could you
have an informed and intelligent conversation about the discrepancies in the description of the Pascagoula abduction (Nickell
, this volume ) or the video evidence for the Phoenix Lights (Tim Callahan, this volume )?
Skeptics are knowledge-seekers. Admittedly, our knowledge often leads us to conclusions that are uncongenial to
believers, like the hard truth that eyewitnesses are capable of extreme
errors at odds with the real events and other observers,
and that there is abundant evidence that hypnotist and subject can
confabulate elaborate stories of events that never happened
(Bullard, this volume ;
see also Christopher C. French ,
Jochen Ickinger, this volume ).
But skeptics have put in the time and effort that has allowed them to reach those conclusions because they believe
that UFO-related phenomena are important to study—and so important that they can’t be left to the imagination of
creative minds. They deserve the assembled intellect and wisdom of all of the contributors to this volume along with
everyone else who honestly wants to know the truth.
(Haines,
this volume ).
A note to believers, then: you may see skeptics as being your worst enemies, but at least try to consider the
possibility that they might be your best friends. For example, I do not know of any data that could confirm
this, but I suspect that if a survey were taken of the general public, and respondents were asked to pick what seemed
to them to be the most probable explanation for the alien abduction phenomenon, the most popular answer would be
something along the lines of “those abductees are ‘crazy.’” Skeptics have provided many accounts of why people might
come to believe that they were abducted by aliens, and how and why they might construct elaborate memories of the
experience. One thing the large majority of them have in common, though, is that even if they do not necessarily
assume that abductees are representative of the general population
(Mavrakis, this volume )n1[Editor's note] The sentence quoted reads, in Daniel Mavrakis’s chapter,
representative of the general New York population
., they also do not assume that abductees are people
with severe (or any) mental illnesses (but see Giulio Perrotta, this
volume, for a different perspective). In that sense, then, witnesses, abductees, and other experiencers can expect
more respectful treatment from skeptics than from the average person.
And now, a little more about one of those accounts. Much has been written about how people might, for all sorts of reasons, wonder if some mental, emotional, or behavioral problem they are struggling with could have its roots in a strange and disturbing (but unremembered) past experience; why they might come to entertain the hypothesis that that strange and disturbing experience involved extraterrestrials; and how a variety of “memory recovery” procedures could lead to pseudo-confirmation of that hypothesis. But what would account for the readiness of so many people to embrace and elaborate on the classic abduction narrative? That narrative involves being restrained or otherwise unable to move; undergoing treatment that most would consider to be humiliating, including being disrobed, displayed on a table, and having one’s orifices probed and penetrated; and physical discomfort and/or pain. Most people who have considered the matter are content with nothing more than the following: if that’s the kind of story floating around the culture, and if the person facilitating the memory recovery procedure is also familiar with it, then that’s the kind of story people will tell when they try to recall their abduction experiences. But there’s a long history in psychology of taking seriously the idea that the stories people tell about themselves, especially in response to ambiguous stimuli (including memory fragments), can reveal something about their needs, fears, concerns, and desires. From that perspective, what can we make of these demeaning, degrading, and debasing abduction stories?
As Roy Baumeister and I noted, a number of commentators have taken the nature of the abduction narrative as being indirect evidence of the stories’ validity. Because after all, who would want to believe something like that happened to them? What would motivate someone to construct a memory like that? What purpose could it possibly serve? Who would wish to have an experience of that kind? But as we explained, there are lots of people who fantasize about very similar experiences, and even pay lots of money to have them: masochists. Masochism involves bondage and restraint, humiliation, and of course, pain and discomfort. In our papers on the topic, we elaborated on what seemed to us to be the remarkable number of parallels between the classic alien abduction narrative and masochistic fantasy/activity. At the very least, we demonstrated that the physical and psychological experiences described by abductees are not in fact unprecedented in human imagination and fantasy. Furthermore, we suggested, it would be reasonable to assume that whatever needs and desires motivate masochism (which Roy had argued involve a desire to escape the self) also play a role in motivating people to construct memories of alien abductions.
It would be nice to say that this idea was met with universal acclaim (“They finally cracked the code!”). Well, not exactly. But in that respect it has much in common with most other theoretical perspectives on the alien abduction phenomenon. It’s never been clear to us why our analysis has met with so much resistance, but Richard Noll’s comments (this volume) are surely relevant:
So much of what passes for scientific “explanation” in specific abduction cases involves arguments by analogy. Abduction stories “resemble” the phenomena of sleep paralysis, Lewy body dementia, false memories, fantasy-proneness as a personality trait, psychosis-like experiences or whatever—that sort of claim. We can endlessly pull analogies to scientific or medical phenomena out of our magical hat (or out of our lower bodily orifice) to soothe our epistemic anxiety, but the proof has to be in the pudding and it isn’t there.
And so, the work continues, as attested to by the papers in this volume. I’m not sure if there exists any collection of papers on any topic that can claim to comprehensively summarize everything that is currently known about it. But this one comes pretty close.
Dr. Leonard S. Newman
Professor of Psychology
Syracuse University, New York