Parapsychology - What Is The Phenomenon Of UFO Abduction?

During the 1980s, ufologists began to devote more time to investigating accounts of people who claimed to have not only seen various types of spacecraft, but also to have been dragged aboard and forced to undergo various medical-like procedures, the most common of which were various types of body probes.

People having direct touch with entities in charge of spaceships were reported to the UFO community.

These were usually accounts of amicable encounters with extraterrestrials who delivered a warning about society's present direction, which should be opposed by a renewed understanding of the Earth's place in the wider realm of spiritual truths.

Contactees were described by ufologists as persons who claimed to have had these types of encounters with extraterrestrials.

In the 1960s, the first reports that matched what would become the general pattern of abduction accounts surfaced.

Betty Hill, a New Hampshire housewife, reported a UFO experience to NICAP in 1961.

(the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena).

Uncertain aspects of the narrative came to light during follow-up interviews with NICAP investigators.

One of them had a two-hour gap.

Betty and her husband were coming home when they saw the sighting.

They came two hours after they were supposed to.

The pair eventually sought psychotherapy and detailed their encounter with a group of entities described as around five feet tall, with a huge hairless head, greyish skin, wide slanted eyes, a slit mouth, small nose and ears, and long fingers, while under hypnosis.

They were examined and brought onboard a spaceship.

Betty's stomach was pierced with a needle.

They were advised to forget about the event before they departed, and as the space ship left the earth, their memories of what had just happened disappeared.

If writer John Fuller hadn't found the Hills and written a book chronicling the events disclosed in the series of hypnotic sessions, the Hill's story may have been buried within the massive databases of UFO accounts.

Fuller's book Interrupted Journey, released in 1966, as well as a simplified version of the narrative published in Look magazine, put abductions on the radar of the UFO community.

Other reports of forced contact with extraterrestrials have been reported to various UFO groups, to be sure.

One of them, the narrative of Antonio Villas Boas, a young Brazilian guy who claimed to have been kidnapped in 1957, was published in 1965 in Flying Saucer Review, a respected British UFO magazine.

Following the publishing of the Hill case, it was given a full examination.

He was purportedly brought onboard the saucer and made to have intercourse with a human-like lady, following which samples of his sperm were collected and kept.

Despite the fact that two well-documented incidents were already under investigation, new reports were sluggish to emerge.

It wasn't until the 1970s that a series of abduction incidents rekindled interest in the phenomenon.

Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, two shipyard employees, were kidnapped while fishing in Pasacagoula, Mississippi, in 1973.

Several others occurred in the same year.

Then, in 1975, six guys in Arizona claimed that one of their coworkers had vanished as he approached a hovering UFO.

Five days later, Travis Walton emerged and proceeded to tell his narrative of a forced meeting with the entity onboard the vessel.

Other lesser-known abduction incidents were reported again that year, but more importantly, a made-for-TV movie on the Hill case aired on NBC on October 20.

Through the conclusion of the decade, a rising number of cases were documented each year.

The interactions themselves were usually years, if not decades, previous to any investigator hearing of the abduction incidents, since the abduction accounts generally contained an element of memory loss.

Betty Andreasson's situation was typical.

Despite the fact that her alleged kidnapping happened in 1967, Raymond Fowler's inquiry did not begin until 1976, and his book detailing the event did not emerge until 1979.

However, his The Andreas Son Affair (1979) and Ann Druffel and D. Scott Rogo's The Tujunga Canyon Contacts (1980) primed the UFO community for a new look at the abduction accounts during the following decade.

In the 1980s, kidnapping tales would take center stage.

Budd Hopkins, a relative newbie to the subject, was in the forefront of the demand that ufologists pay attention to abduction cases.

His 1981 book, Missing Time, documented a number of abduction cases he had unearthed.

He also noticed parallels in the cases, such as the gray humanoids that carried out the abductions, the physical examination that included blood or skin samples, and special attention to the reproductive organs.

Hopkins' investigation brought to light the fact that there were a huge number of instances with a lot of quantifiable commonalities.

In 1987, when prominent horror fiction writer Whitley Streiber was sued for his book Communion, in which he described the account of his own abduction, interest in the work reached a new peak.

The book became a best-seller, bringing the UFO community a level of attention it hadn't seen since the Condon Report (1969).

Folklorist Thomas E. Bullard stated the presence of more than 300 incidents in a collection of cases published by the Fund for UFO Research the same year.

The increased attention devoted to abductions in 1987 resulted in a significant increase in the number of reports.

These hundreds of cases, which have arisen from people who are dependent on others or who are aware of abduction stories in general, tell a very similar story, despite the fact that the details vary greatly.

Strange beings interrupt the abductee's life, and their will to resist is weakened.

They are transported onboard a space ship, sometimes with the assistance of levitation, and subjected to an intrusive physical examination.

In most cases, the victim is made to forget the occurrence, and it is only years later, when troubled emotions develop in nightmarish dreams, that the victim seeks psychotherapy or hypnosis, during which the recollection of the abduction resurface.

The element of memory loss, combined with the intrusive invasion of the body during the examination, has led to comparisons of abduction stories with a very similar story of Satanic ritual abuse, in which stories emerge of people being forced to participate in a Satanic ritual where they were raped while undergoing psychotherapy and/or hypnosis.

They eventually forgot about the incident (s).

The abduction and satanism stories have combined to form a new term for the lost memory condition.

As fundamental research on abductions progressed, experts were split on how to interpret the findings.

Many ufologists, like historian David Jacobs, agreed with Hopkins that the instances were fundamentally true and that they were the greatest proof of an alien presence on Earth.

More crazy elements woven more insane stories of government conspiracies and extraterrestrial alliances.

Most abductees, on the other hand, have merely wanted to know what had happened to them, and have been relieved to hear that others had had similar experiences.

They've been looking for a bigger significance in this occurrence for a long time.

The majority of studies have determined that the abductee has no psychopathology and has no motivation to give such a terrible account.

The huge number of reported interactions is a source of criticism to the story's literal acceptance as evidence of alien contacts.

Given the current level of interstellar travel, the amount of spacecraft that could or would come to Earth to account for all of the connections is quite unlikely.

The many exams of reproductive organs also raises concerns about the aim of bodily probing.

What is there to gain? Furthermore, although the tales are supported by their consistency, they lack independent supporting evidence.

Evidence may have been lost in many situations involving reports of long-ago occurrences.

However, there has been little cooperation overall.

Some hoped to find proof in things implanted in contactees' bodies, however such foreign objects detected in abductees' bodies have shown out to be completely commonplace in nature.

The claims' closeness to abduction and Satanic abuse accounts was highlighted once again by the absence of supporting proof.

Others, both sympathetic and antagonistic to the abductees, have come up with their own explanations.

The abduction claims have been criticized by certain UFO debunkers, headed by tradition critic Philip Klass, as either frauds or delusions.

A purely psychological view has been endorsed by several psychologists.

The most appealing argument stems from the concept of the forgotten ten memory condition, which also accounts for the extremely similar Satanic abuse claims.

This hypothesis proposes that the abductee has been through a true trauma, generally sexual molestation as a kid, but that during efforts to retrieve the memories, a tale is created that validates the trauma while simultaneously disguising it in a Satanic cult or a spacecraft.

The abduction tales started to blend with the contactee stories in the 1990s, adding another crucial aspect to the abduction accounts.

In the sequel to Communion, Transformation: The Breakthrough, Whitley Strieber focused attention to this feature of abduction accounts (1988).

Strieber recounted a series of encounters with the "Visitors" that started when he was a boy, and his developing feeling that their interference into human existence was fundamentally good.

Leo J. Sprinkle, who had been organizing yearly contactee gatherings at the University of Wyoming each summer, finally joined him in this assessment.

As other abductees attended the meetings, he saw the lines between their accounts dissolving over time.

In a similar vein, psychiatrist John Mack discovered that when the accounts of the abductees he counseled were placed in a wider framework of personal growth and changes in consciousness, they could be explained.

They came to believe that the experience was best viewed as a difficult but necessary lesson that led to spiritual growth and change.

In the New Age community, both Strieber and Mack found a large following.

Though ufologists lost part of their attention on the reports in the 1990s, probably owing to a lack of fresh material, there is no such thing as a consensus when it comes to abductions.

The investigation looked to have come to a halt.

They haven't yielded hard physical evidence of extraterrestrials, such as a spaceship, alien materials, or an alien, like other areas of UFO research.