and you zog, are not the father

In the late 1990s, a hot theme behind alien abduction stories were supposed cross-breeding experiments Grays from Zeta Riticuli were performing on unsuspecting humans. Some conspiracy theorists said it was to save their dying populations. A few others said it was to subjugate mankind through hybrids living among us. I thought the meme of alien/human hybridization was dead and gone but after watching some of the more recent documentaries on UFOs, it seems that it’s still very much alive.

All right, let’s think about this. An alien creature with the power to travel between stars (which is not an easy feat by any means) comes to Earth to interbreed with humans. In order for that to be plausible, their DNA has to be a more than 99% match. Even if they combine the genes in a test tube, more than the tiniest difference means that there will be no zygote. The odds of two sentient life forms on planets dozens of light years away having such a close genetic match is somewhere in the realm of being hit by lightning ten times in the head while getting stabbed by four serial killers using the same brand of hunting knife as you were on your way on a date with your favorite movie star. I don’t think there’s a number big enough to portray just how unlikely this is. In fact, I divert to Carl Sagan:

There’s a better chance of a man mating with a petunia because at least they evolved on the same planet.

And share some genetic data. Alien invaders on the other hand come from a distant planet and start an elaborate program to make human/Grey hybrids for some nefarious goal. Why expend all this energy, all this effort on something so scientifically unsound and logically far-fetched?

Well, this has to do with the whole origin and source of abduction phenomena. Psychologists who work with alleged abductees believe that the human mind has a film reel of memory and that the aliens just block a certain art of the film from being played back. They hypnotize their patients and voila! The block is lifted and the memories are replayed like a vacation tape from Hell. Unfortunately for them and their patients, that view of human memory is like the 10% of brainpower myth. It’s simply not true.

Human memory is remarkable but it can only summon short episodes of experiences and it’s broken into three types only one of which stores data we interpret as visual. Under hypnosis, what really happens is a recall of a great multitude of memories which are warped under the hypnotist’s suggestions and probing questions. They’re looking for the standard model of abduction and as they ask questions, following this standard model, no wonder the abduction stories are so similar. They’re suggesting a formula even though they might be certain that they don’t by establishing that they will be uncovering an alien abduction. The patient thinks he or she was abducted by alien monsters and the psychologist has what he wants, a wild, juicy abduction story to add to a file and eventually a book which will influence potential patients’ stories. This is why the alien/human hybrid child supposedly shown to abductees during their experience is attributed to Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs, two ufologists who hypnotize their patients in search of their alien experiences rather than abductees themselves. (the attribution was made by folklorist Thomas Bullard who studied hundreds of abduction reports)

If someone were really abducted and had some sort of memory editing treatment, it’s unlikely that the experience would be recalled. The neuron connections storing the memory are now distrputed and all recall of the actual event is made either impossible or impractically difficult and would seem like a brief, fuzzy, two second dream. Of course this means that you would never know if you really were abducted and whatever a hypnotist tries to “extract” will either be his or her retelling of what an alien abduction is supposed to be like or the alleged abductee drawing on TV and literary depictions of abduction events. That means that even if you were really abducted by aliens and could have a real image of what an intelligent alien and its craft look like in your mind, a Budd Hopkins or a David Jacobs would take your genuine few seconds of recall and warp them into a standard abduction model.

Of course, why would perfectly sane people want to believe something as radically far fetched and disturbing as being surrogates to alien fertility programs? They probably don’t want to. I would even go so far as to discard the general idea that believing in even a malevolent alien being is a substitute for believing in a supernatural higher power. I would lay the blame on the hypnotists who want and need abduction stories from their patients for misleading them and giving them the shocks of their lives, feeding the phenomena for profit and treating potential abductees not as extraordinary cases but as everyday occurrences. Honestly, I don’t know how abduction recall hypnosis isn’t considered a form of malpractice.