Stories about personal contact with alien visitors began to emerge in popular media shortly after 1947 and the first notable UFO sighting from Kenneth Arnold. A forestry worker pilot, he was investigating a downed transport plane when he saw nine objects moving “like a saucer skipping over water” near Mount Rainier, Washington. Misquoted via an Associated Press dispatch these became “flying saucers”.
Although there are historical accounts of people claiming to have met with beings from other worlds such as the spiritual journeys described by Swedish polymath Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) those claiming to have met with extraterrestrial occupants of flying saucers in the physical realm were a new breed who became known as contactees.
The first and most famous of them was George Adamski, a maintenance worker who claimed to have met with nordic-looking benevolent “Space Brothers” from Venus in 1952 in the California desert. Truck driver Truman Bethurum met a beautiful space woman named Aura Rhanes also in the desert, she was from a counter-earth hiding from us in its orbit behind the sun. Technician Daniel Fry claimed to have taken a trip in an alien drone ship from New Mexico to New York and back in 32 minutes. Aircraft mechanic George Van Tassel claimed to be the receiver of warnings about our use of nuclear weapons, from an “unseen intelligence”.
After their moment of popularity in the media contactee stories were quickly overtaken by darker tales of interaction with alien beings from those who would become known as “abductees” or “experiencers”.
In 1957 Antonio Vilas-Boas, a Brazilian farmer, claimed to have been taken aboard a craft and forced to have sexual intercourse with a strangely coloured female humanoid. In 1964 postal worker Barney Hill and his wife Betty, a social worker, while under hypnosis therapy recalled their shared experience of being temporarily kidnapped during a nighttime drive in New Hampshire, three years earlier in 1961. They claimed odd looking beings with large dark eyes performed experiments on them before releasing them hours later.
In the years following these encounters there was a lull in similar reports until the mid-70s, when abduction stories started getting inches in the national press. Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker reported that while fishing on the Pascagoula river in Mississippi, they were abducted by strange humanoid creatures. In 1975 a film adaptation of the Hills’ story, The UFO incident, was broadcast on TV. The same year, logger Travis Walton claimed he was taken by a UFO from a forest in Arizona and kept for five days.
Folklorist Thomas E. Bullard performed an exhaustive comparative study of almost three hundred documented abduction accounts up to 1985 and described the sudden emergence of this new phenomenon; “No one reported an abduction before 1957” but by 1975 “25 cases emerged in that year alone” . The abduction accounts appeared to share enough common features and narrative structure that researchers began to wonder if there was something objective common to all the stories, while skeptics noted their lack of evidence and saw them as just that, stories.
Alien abduction reports would increase to the point of epidemic by the late 1980s. Publication of several bestselling books on the topic, such as those by professional artist turned abduction researcher Budd Hopkins, and horror writer, and claimed abductee, Whitley Strieber, ensured this growth in interest would continue into the 1990s, where it received a credulous reception from professional academics, notably, Pulitzer prize-winning Harvard child psychology professor John E. Mack and Temple University professor of History David M. Jacobs.
While contactees broadly described the appearance of extraterrestrials as gorgeous superhumans, tall, handsome, beautiful, and kindly, this all changed by the mid 1980s as encounters became more dramatic, less a meeting of the minds between intelligent species, more involuntary disruption of drivers’ journeys on quiet roads or nightmarish invasions of people safely (or so they thought) sleeping in their beds.
While the contactees recalled their encounters fluidly, speaking on late-night radio or at conferences filled with astounded audiences, the later more traumatic abduction stories increasingly relied upon intense personalised counselling in a private setting to tease out details from encounters they thought they had been commanded by aliens to forget. From the most miniscule seed – a hazy childhood recollection of unaccounted for time, an unexplained scar, an unexpected fear of a certain location, a vague sense of being at odds with the world, or just feeling that something had happened to them – would be nurtured into a full-blown abduction event or even series of events. In the eyes of the abduction researcher tiny clues indicated a real, yet hidden, experience with aliens, to be uncovered and fleshed-out, and increasingly by the use of hypnosis.
Hypnosis Therapy
The use of hypnosis, or hypnotic regression therapy to treat the trauma of abduction by aliens was heavily criticised, not just by skeptics who found accounts of contact with people from other worlds extremely unlikely, but also in the Journal of the American Medical Association that warned of its unreliability as a means of accessing accurate memories of a traumatic event (or of any event for that matter). Professor of psychiatry Martin Orne wrote that patients too easily produced confabulations and fantasies and that even researchers working with them were not able to distinguish fact from fiction in their accounts. Leading questions asked by investigators who lacked proper training in the use of the method combined with the emergence of alien abduction support groups, where contamination could occur as people swapped details of their experiences outside of the privacy of a clinical setting, meant efforts to get to the heart of what appeared to have been very real traumatic experiences became complicated.
By the early 1990s a consensus opinion formed about the appearance of aliens. Superhuman perfection gave way to diminutive hairless grey-skinned creatures with large heads and big black eyes. These are the unmistakable beings that are endlessly presented in our media and that we are all familiar with today.
Summary
- The first reports of Alien abduction emerged in the same period of time that the Keanes were becoming a successful artists
- Abduction accounts began as benign encounters in the 1950s, becoming traumatic ones by the 1980s
- The idea that memories could be hidden or repressed and later recovered by hypnosis became a widely accepted among abduction researchers
- Critics claimed hypnosis therapy used to unlock memories produced distortions