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Abducted, Why people come to believe they were kidnapped by Aliens
By Susan A. Clancy

ISBN 0-674-018796

This book has caused all kinds of commotion in the UFO business. Not for any good reason mind you. It's not a book about UFOs, or even aliens.There are no breathless revelations of alien life or culture. No maddeningly vapid descriptions of what the aliens want from humanity

“Ooo you bad bad humans! Stop fighting wars! Your weapons are causing problems for our mighty star voyaging-million year old civilization! Stop it stop it!”

None of that crap.

No, Clancy doesn’t write about what contactees might have seen or what they might have experienced. She’s not interested in the sinister grays from Zeta Reticuli. She’s not interested in wild-impossible star drive systems or hokey-sounding alien medical procedures, she’s not even interested in weird nose implants. Becuse she's not interested in these things Clancy has become one of the most hated women in the UFO biz, which is OK with her because she’s not in the UFO biz anyway!

Clancy is a Psychologist hailing from Harvard University. Back in the 1990s she found herself in a controversy regarding memory or more specifically, repressed memory. Repressed memory from traumatic events. Whether or not people who may have had traumatic events in their lives.

Clancy worked with women who had been sexually abused. Using various techniques she attempted to find if such people could create false memories in the lab. To her surprise she discovered that most victims did not create false memories at all. She found the data to be fairly constant.

But, there was a certain amount of controversy to this line of research too. People believed that she was trying to prove that these women hadn’t been abused. so, Clancy decided on another tack. There was a groups of people who claimed traumatic events that Clancy was fairly certain didn’t occur.

Alien abductees.

The book is interesting on several levels. It’s a good treatise on contemporary psychological culture. Kind of a snapshot of the Harvard post-grad system and what people have to do get recognition. The book has a kind of Alice in Wonderland quality in it, a young psychology student is immersed in a world where science is misunderstood. Where proof is just a feeling or a conviction. Where an unexpected bruise can turn into a journey across the galaxy. Where extraordinary events need little or no evidence at all.

She interviewed about fifty people. Of that fifty she says only three were strange enough to make her uncomfortable. (One announced that Clancy herself must have been abducted and had an alien hybrid child.) Most she found were perfectly normal, they had families and good jobs. The rest she called kind and generous for spending time talking about themselves and their experiences.

They came from all walks of life. School teachers, construction workers, teens and the elderly. She found that they all scored high in schizortypy (not to be confused with schizophrenia.)

“People who show signs of schizotypy are by no means schizophrenic, but they are generally a bit odd. They tend to look and think eccentrically and are prone to “magical” thinking and odd beliefs (for instance, that ceartan numbers have special powers or that you can influence the future by thinking about it). They are often loners, and they typically believe in paranormal phenomena such as telepathy and clairvoyance. “

But this is just a tendency and not a rule. She also noted that abductees tended to be more fantasy prone. In fact there seemed to be a correlation between these and those who scored high in schizotypy. Most people who believed they were abducted scored highly in both.

But not everyone who shares these traits will believe they were abducted. Clancy thinks that they also must have an in place belief system. And that this belief system is ready made and waiting. You only need to go into your local book store to see it. They are on the covers of our books, in our popular media. From movies to television shows. The aliens live in our imagination. They exist in our dreams and inhabit our nightmares. According to Clancy, this is the catalyst which starts an abduction prone person into believing that they have indeed been abducted.

Starting from a strange dream, an event of sleep paralysis or perhaps even sleep walking. A person will awaken convinced that something strange has happened. Half remembered dreams of strange figures clustered around their bed will coalesce and intensify amid the constant stream of like images in popular fiction or docudramas designed to enhance the mystery of supposed alien abduction.

And so the cycle continues. With each believer, many fence sitters become believers themselves. The meme of alien abduction spreads.