Page Content (OCR)
In Abduction, John Mack counts as evidence the emotional power of the encounters and the intensity with which contactees report the events. Sagan and others dismiss this as no more reliable than the power and intensity of nightmares and hallucinations. Another common objection to abduction accounts is a phe"omenon called "hysterical contagion." This tern" refers to the fact that once a description of an unusual event (UFO, alien “bduction, apparitions of the Virgin Mary, etc,) become widely publicized, there is an "hysterical" tendency for people to misinterpret a natural phenomenon as such an event. According to skeptics, such "contamination" of the populace by the popular press incites the "psychologically frail" falsely to connect a distant memory of a traumatic event or nightmare to an ““counter with aliens. However, proponents of the reality of alien abduction point out that even before reports of such abductions appeared in °ooks, movies, conferences, and talk show exposes, a significant number of abduction cases had already been reported “hich fit the prevailing pattern. Jacques Vallee remarked on the state of abduction research in the early 1970s: "There were already a dozen abduction cases in our files by 1970. Some veteran researchers, like Coral and Jim Lorenzen, had accumulated many more. It was clear that abductions had been a part of the mystery since the earliest period. It seemed that the problem we were trying to tackle was a much more formidable one than the arrival on Earth of space visitors, impressive as that possibility might be. The phenomenon challenged not only our definitions of physical objects but our concepts of consciousness and reality. At the same time it brought into question the entire history of human belief, the very genesis of religion, the age-old myth of interaction between humans and self-styled superior beings who claimed they came from the sky, and the boundaries we place on research, science and religion. The abduction experience, in my opinion, is real, traumatic and very complex."!7” What about the remaining third of alleged abductees who recall their encounters without the aid of hypnotic regression? Skeptics attribute this spontaneous recall to deliberate fabrication, hallucinations, repression of childhood abuse, dream states, sleep paralysis, fantasy-prone personality, psychosis, multiple personality disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy, and any number of psychological abnormalities. In an effort to assess their psychological stability or lack thereof, researchers in the Department of Psychology at Carlton University examined a group of 49 individuals who reported varying degrees of contact with UFOs or their occupants. '”* In the 1993 study led by Nicholas P. Spanos, researchers compared the psychological and intellectual profiles of UFO reporters with a comparison group comprised of 53 adults from the local community and a group of 74 introductory psychology students from the university. The results, to the dismay and surprise of many, failed to show any increased incidence of psychological abnormality in the UFO experiencers. In fact, the article states that UFO experiencers "attained higher psychological health scores than either one or both of the comparison groups on five of the psychological health variables." In addition, they found no increased tendency toward temporal lobe instability (a common explanation offered to 69