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Every now and then, someone claims to have been abducted by aliens.
You know about this. You’re on the Internet.
Considering we don’t have any substantial evidence of life beyond Earth, almost everyone
tends to dismiss these claims, but… hear me out… maybe we shouldn’t.
Because, once you start looking at these stories and where they come from, you begin to realize
that there might be something really interesting happening here psychologically.
Ultimately, researchers don’t believe these claims can tell us anything about life in
space. But they can tell us how our brains try to explain the unexplainable.
First, to be clear, experts have found that, on average, people who claim to have been
abducted by aliens aren’t any more likely to have a mental illness that changes their
perception of reality.
Instead, supposed “encounters” might be a result of a common psychological phenomenon:
false memories.
Essentially, someone has a weird experience, and then they misremember it — sometime
that misremembering is dramatic.
That experience can vary, but these days, researchers tend to focus on one: sleep paralysis.
This is kind of what it sounds like: You wake up in the middle of the night, but your body
won’t move. And not only that, but you’re also prone to some pretty specific types of
hallucinations.
Often, people feel there’s a threatening intruder in their room, but they might also
feel bodily sensations — like pressure on their chests, difficulty breathing, or like
they’re floating around. Some people have even reported sensations of bliss.
This all probably happens when normal parts of sleep, like paralysis and dreaming, don’t
wear off once you wake up, so it’s usually not anything to worry about.
But if someone has never heard of sleep paralysis, this could be a really scary experience, and
it’s easy to see why they’d need an explanation for it.
And, at least in the West, there’s a pretty obvious one. Like, if you wake up with a being
looming over you, and you’re terrified and spinning around like gravity doesn’t matter…
well, that sounds like our stories about aliens.
Still, there’s a pretty big jump between “I woke up feeling weird” and “I woke
up on a spaceship, which I can describe in detail.”
Researchers believe this jump happens when people lean into those cultural narratives
about ET — maybe because they want to believe, or maybe because someone asks them targeted
questions.
In any case, they can end up convincing themselves they were abducted by aliens, and can construct
detailed, false memories of their experience.
There’s even some evidence to back this up — like a 2002 study from the Journal
of Abnormal Psychology.
In it, researchers compared false recall and false recognition among three groups.
One group never claimed to have been abducted by aliens. The second claimed they had been,
but they couldn’t remember it.
And the third also claimed they were abducted, but they had supposedly recovered their memories
after something like therapy.
In the experiment, each group was played a list of words, then were given a short distraction
task to stop them rehearsing what they heard.
After thirty seconds, they were asked to jot down all the words they could remember.
Next, everyone was presented with another list of words — some they had just heard,
some that had similar meanings, and some that were brand-new. Their challenge was to look
at this list and recall and recognize the words they’d been played at the beginning
of the experiment.
The results showed that the group who claimed to remember their abductions was significantly
worse at this. They were more likely to misremember the original words they’d been played, often
confusing them with similar words from the new list.
What happened here was likely misattribution, or what the researchers called a source monitoring
error.
These participants had probably heard those words at some point, but they couldn’t remember
when — so they assumed they’d been played during the beginning of the experiment.
This study was small, but the authors suggest this kind of misattribution has a big role
to play in the creation of false memories.
For example, if someone is thinking back on their sleep paralysis experience and is wondering
if it might have been aliens, they could remember things that weren’t there — like the flash
of a creature they once saw in a movie.
Other studies about eyewitness testimony have reached similar conclusions, too. They’ve
highlighted just how easily events that didn’t happen can be incorporated into memories,
either from other sources, or by leading questions.
Like with other things in the field, more studies would help confirm this idea.
But ultimately, this points to the fact that, when we’re trying to explain why weird things
happen to us, our brains can propose explanations that aren’t entirely true. And along the
way, we can end up believing them.
So while these stories can’t teach us much about ET, they can teach us about another
kind of life: the human kind, here on Earth.
If all this talk of aliens has gotten you wanting to learn about weird kinds of life
— you do not need to look any further than Earth’s past. Because millions of years
ago, some strange stuff was walking around here.
And if you want to see some it for yourself, you can check out the first season of Ancient
Earth on CuriosityStream.
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