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A Study of Fantasy Proneness in the Thirteen Cases of Alleged Encounters il in 1 John Mack’ s ‘Abduction’ [Skeptical Inquirer, May-June 1996] Joe Nickell Since Robert A. Baker’s pioneering article appeared in the Skeptical Inquirer (Baker 1987-1988), a controversy has raged over his suggestion that self-proclaimed “alien abductees” exhibited an array of unusual traits that indicated they had fantasy- prone personalities. Baker cited the “important but much neglected” work of Wilson and Barber (1983), who listed certain identifying characteristics of people who fantasize profoundly. Baker applied Wilson and Barber’s findings to the alien-abduction phenomenon and found a_ strong. correlation. Baker na, such as psychic experiences. Neverthe- less, although the criteria for fantasy proneness have not been exactly codified, they generally include such features as having a rich fantasy life, showing high hypnotic susceptibility, claiming psychic abilities and healing powers, reporting out-of-body experiences and vivid or “waking” dreams, having apparitional experiences and religious visions, and exhibiting automatic writing. In one study, Bartholomew, Basterfield, and Howard (1991) found that, of 152 otherwise normal, functional individuals who reported they had been abducted or had persistent contacts with extraterrestri- als, 132 had one or more major character- istics of fantasy-prone personality. Somewhat equivocal results were obtained by Spanos et al. (1993), although their “findings suggest that intense UFO experiences are more likely to occur in individuals who are predisposed toward esoteric beliefs in general and alien beliefs in particular and who interpret unusual sensory and imagined experiences in terms of the alien hypothesis. Among UFO believers, those with stronger propensities toward fantasy production were particularly likely to generate such experiences” (Spanos et al. 1993, p. 631). A totally dismissive view of these attempts to find conventional psychologi- cal explanations for the abduction experience is found in the introduction to psychiatrist John Mack’s Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994). Mack states unequivocally: “The effort to discover a personality type associated with abductions has also not been successful.” According to Mack, since some alleged abductions have reportedly taken place in infancy or early childhood, strong explained how a cursory examination by a psychologist or psychiatrist might find an “abductee” to be perfectly normal, while more detailed knowledge about the person’s background and habits would reveal to such a trained observer a pattern of fantasy proneness. For example, Baker found Whitley Strieber—author of Communion, which tells the “true story” of Strieber’s own alleged abduction—to be “a_ classic example of the [fantasy-prone personali- ty] genre.” Baker noted that Strieber exhibited such symptoms as being easily hypnotized, having vivid memories, and experiencing hypnopompic hallucinations (i.e. “waking dreams’’), as well as being “a writer of occult and highly imaginative novels” and exhibiting other characteris- tics of fantasy proneness. A subsequent, but apparently independent, study by Bartholomew and Basterfield (1988) drew similar conclusions. Wilson and Barber’s study did not deal with the abduction phenomenon (which at the time consisted of only a handful of reported cases), and some of their criteria seem less applicable to abduction cases than to other types of reported phenome- 71