a comprehensive look at alien abductions

Imagine for a moment that an alien species about 39 light years away is making regular trips to Earth to study thousands and thousands of humans over the decades. Not only that, but knowing that they’re being watched and people are running to hypnotists to recover detailed abduction experiences, they’re still kidnapping us for all kinds of bizarre experiments. But let’s back up for a moment. Can we trust the way abduction accounts are being collected? Do the actual abductions make sense from logistical and scientific standpoints? And what does it take for an alien civilization to plan and execute a massive research program to be conducted trillions of miles away from their home world? We’re going to take a look at all that and more in this extensive post.

One of the first problems with abduction experiences is the fact that all of them were recovered by hypnosis, a very good means to muddle and confuse memories rather than retrieve them. People in a hypnotic state are very suggestible and their imagination is heightened. It’s like daydreaming but much more intense and given some clues, those susceptible to hypnosis can go off into a fantasy world based on whatever they’ve read or seen about a subject that fascinates them. When you hypnotize someone who thinks he or she was taken by aliens for sinister experiments, chances are good that you’ll hear a very typical abduction story. But it won’t be some sort of recovered memory since that’s not how memory works. When you forget something, your brain can’t recover the information and under extreme stress, recall is usually very fuzzy and fragmented since there are gaps in what was actually committed to your long term memory.

And that brings us to the memory block. It’s actually possible to make a person forget something with certain compounds that inhibit the transfer of information from short term memory to long term memory. But once an amnesia-inducing drug is administered, the memory is gone for good. It’s never recorded unless you have a high resistance to these compounds and can manage to retain a few blurry images or muted voices. If aliens able to travel the 234 trillion miles between stars can erase human memories, chances are that we wouldn’t be able to recover them. It’s a pretty scary proposition that people who may have actually been abducted won’t know it and would have no way to recall their genuine experience. Being able to hit a magic rewind button and bring back nonexistent memories is a lot more soothing for ufologists and believers. At least they can learn of the abductions rather than stay in the dark while nefarious alien forces do as they please in the shadows.

Of course at this point, we need to ask why aliens would need to abduct humans. In the accounts, they seem to be able to communicate with us and understand our language. So why not just hack into our computers or send one of their experts to make copies of our detailed medical information? We’ve accumulated a whole lot of very detailed knowledge about our bodies, enough for an alien species to study it and make some in-depth conclusions. Hold on, you might object. Their technology might be much more advanced than ours so when a real human is being scanned by their equipment, they could pick up on something we missed. That’s a valid point, but is raises the question of why their studies are so basic. In the vast majority of accounts, aliens are just scanning the body with the equivalent of a CT or an MRI and inserting invasive probes into cavities. Not to mention their bizarre obsession with our sexual organs…

If we back up even further, we have to ask how the aliens even found us in the first place and why they used a whole lot of energy and resources to get here. The laws of physics require that species which want to travel to another solar system have to go through extraordinary means to get there. There also have to be incentives to make the trip. They had to know where to find us and decide what to do with us. But how? Earth may be just a stone’s throw away on an interstellar scale so hypothetically, the aliens could’ve detected a few of the signals we’ve been beaming out into space. However, that would only tell them the star from where the transmission came. They would have to track down the planet and decide that a signal which probably deteriorated beyond all recognition even to us, is compelling enough to warrant an interstellar expedition. And to abduct Betty and Barney Hill in 1961, even with the ability to travel nearly instantaneously across time and space, they would’ve had to detect our presence in 1922, decades before we were able to create signals powerful enough to make it light years across space. With the sheer amount of stellar real estate to explore in a 100 light year radius, it seems highly improbable that we’d be randomly chosen without a whole lot of effort on the aliens’ part.

Things just aren’t adding up here. We can’t trust the abduction reports. If there are any real abductees walking around, they almost certainly don’t know what hit them and have no plausible means to recall their experience due to the way human memory works. The alien research itself makes little practical and medical sense. And finally, the aliens would’ve needed to be aware of our existence before we could’ve given them a signal of any sort and be willing to commit themselves to an immense study program based on nothing more than a noise or a pixel or two in one of their telescopes. So if the story seems so implausible and full of problems, why are so many people reporting abduction experiences? Well, that’s a question with a lot of potential answers which would be unique for every case.

Many alleged abductees could’ve convinced themselves into believe they were abducted like a hypochondriac can think himself into feeling sick. They then go to a hypnotist who unwittingly encourages their ideas during a session and get pseudoscientific reinforcement for their ideas. Others might be interpreting some traumatic experience they can barely remember in pop culture terms. And others still might be experiencing full fledged night terrors which are also being interpreted as vague recollections of being a guinea pig for enigmatic alien creatures. Until we can confirm that a person was genuinely taken aboard an alien spacecraft, I think it’s safe to assume that the truth about alien abductions has a lot more to do with our pop culture than with some alien research program conducted for puzzling reasons.