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Alien Implants: The New “Hard Evidence” [Skeptical Inquirer, Sept-Oct 1998, p18] Joe Nickell Science fiction author Whitley Strieber continues to promote the notion of extraterrestrial visitations. His Communion: A True Story (1987) told of his own close encounter—actually what psychologist Robert A. Baker has diagnosed as “a classic, textbook description of a hypno- pompic hallucination” (or “waking dream’) (Baker and Nickell 1992). Now, several money-making books _ later, Strieber offers Confirmation: The Hard Evidence of Aliens Among Us. The evidence is threefold: UFO sightings (yawn), close encounters (been there, done that), and—the hard evidence, quite lite rally—alien implants! Implants are the latest rage in UFO circles, and Strieber marshals the diagnos- tic, radiographic, surgical, photographic, and analytic evidence that supposedly indicates—but admittedly does _ not prove—extraterrestrials are implanting devices in human beings. To put Strieber’s claims into perspective, we should first look at the development of the implant + of the Body Snatchers (1956). A 1967 Star Trek TV episode, “Errand of Mercy,” featured a “mind-sifter,” a device used by the alien Klingons to probe prisoners’ thoughts during interrogations (Okuda and Okuda 1997). Meanwhile, Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 “flying saucer” report touched off the modern era of UFOs and with it an evolving mythology. By the 1950s “contactees” were claiming to receive messages from the Space People. Then in 1961 came the first widely publicized abduction case, that of Betty and Barney Hill. (Their psychiatrist concluded the couple had shared their dreams rather than having had an actual experience [Klass 1974]). With the publicizing of the Hill case—notably by John G. Fuller’s The Interrupted Journey in 1966 and NBC television’s prime-time movie “The UFO Incident’? in 1975—claims of alien encounters quite of Hill abductions and “medical” examinations began to proliferate. So did another phenomenon, the abduction guru: a self- styled alien researcher and often amateur hypnotist who elicits fantasy abduction tales from suitably imaginative individu- als (Baker and Nickell 1992, p. 203). Reports of alien implants may have begun with the alleged abduction of a Massachusetts woman, Betty Andreasson, which supposedly took place in early 1967. However, the case was not publi- cized widely until 1979 when Raymond E. Fowler published his book The Andreasson Affair. Andreasson, who seems to have had a predisposition to fantasize under hypnosis, claimed the aliens had removed an apparently implanted device, in the form of a spiked ball, by inserting a needle up her nose. Fowler speculated that the BB-size implant could have been “a monitoring device” (Fowler 1979, p. concept. The notion of induced mind/body control is pervasive, with paranormal entities typically having some means of monitoring mortals as a prelude to control. Examples range from mythologi- cal beings—like Cupid, whose magical arrows infected men’s hearts with love, and Morpheus, who formed sleepers’ dreams—to superstitious belief in angelic guidance, demonic possession, Voodoo hexes, and zombie slaves. Folklore told of abductions to fairyland from which people returned with addled wits or sapped vitality. Popular literature brought such examples as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1891) and the mesmerizing Svengali in George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894). Science fiction helped develop the alien-takeover concept, with such movies as The Invasion to 50