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Sleep Disorder May Explain Alien Abduction Stories [San Francisco Chronicle, Friday, July 9, 1999] About once a week, Jean-Christophe Terrillon wakes up and_ senses the presence of a threatening, evil being beside his bed. Terror ripples through him, and he tries to move or call out, but he is paralyzed—unable to raise an arm or make a sound. His ears ring, a weight presses down on his chest, and he has to struggle for breath. “I feel an intense pressure in my head, as if it’s going to explode,” said Terrillon, a Canadian physicist doing research in Japan. Sometimes he finds himself have the experience, and if they have heard of alien abductions, then they may think, ‘Aha, it’s alien abduction!’ ” Sleep paralysis was once thought to be very rare. But recent studies in Canada, Taw nee OI 8 A Tete a Oe Leek Japan, China and the United States have suggested that it may strike at least 40 percent or 50 percent of all people at least once, and a study in Newfoundland, Canada, found that more than 60 percent had experienced it. There, as in Japan, people have a name for the condition, and some scholars believe that people are therefore more likely to identify it when it happens to them. In Newfoundland, it is called “old hag” because it is associated with visions of an old witch sitting on the chest of a paralyzed sleeper, sometimes throttling the sleeper’s neck with her hands. “People will draw on the most plausible account in their repertoire to explain their experience,” said Al Cheyne, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo in Canada. “Trolls or witches no longer constitute plausible interpretations of these halluci- nations. “The notion of aliens from outer space is more contemporary and somewhat more plausible to the modern mind,” he said. “So a flight on a broomstick is replaced by a teleportation to a waiting spaceship.” Cheyne said that in a survey he worked on involving more than 2,000 people identified as experiencing sleep paralysis, hundreds described experiences similar to alien abduction. “A sensed presence, vague gibberish spoken in one’s ear, shadowy creatures moving about the room, a_ strange immobility, a crushing pressure and painful sensations in various parts of the body—these are compatible not just with Japan. Sometimes he finds himself transported upward and looking down on his body, or else sent hurtling through a long tunnel, and these episodes are terrifying even for a scientist like him who does not believe that evil spirits go around haunting people. Called sleep paralysis, this diso rder—the result of a disconnect between brain and body as a person is on the fringe of sleep—is turning out to be increasingly common, affecting nearly half of all people at least once. Moreover, a growing number of scholars believe that sleep paralysis may help explain many ancient reports of attacks by witches and modern claims of abduction by space aliens. “I think it can explain claims of witchcraft and alien abduction,” said Kazuhiko Fukuda, a_ psychologist at Fukushima University in Japan and a leading expert on_ sleep paralysis. Research in Japan has had a head start because sleep paralysis is well-known to most Japanese, who call it kanashibari, while it is little- known and less studied in the West. diso most of said “We have a framework for it, but in North America there’s no concept for people to understand what has happened to them,” Fukuda said. ‘“‘So if Americans 76 Nicholas D. Kristof