Imaginary traumas are just as scary as real traumas
* Courtesy of Scientific American Israel - from the February 2005 issue
In the early morning hours of August 8, 1983, along the empty main road, I approached the town of Higler in Nebraska. A large spacecraft shining bright lights caught up with me and forced me to the side of the road. Strange creatures came out of it and kidnapped me for 90 minutes after which I found myself on the road again unable to remember what happened to me inside the ship. I can prove to you that this is what happened because shortly afterwards I reported it to a film crew.
When people tell me the story of their abduction by extraterrestrials, I do not doubt the truth of their experience. But thanks to new research by psychologists Richard J. McNally and Susan A. Clancy of Harvard University, we know today that there are hallucinations that are indistinguishable from reality, and they can be just as traumatic. In an article from 2004 in the journal "Psychological Science" entitled "Psychophysiological response when listening to scenarios in people who reported being abducted by extraterrestrials" McNally, Clancy and their colleagues present the results of their study that examined alleged abductees. The researchers followed the study participants as they relived their experiences by listening to specially written scenarios. While listening, the squeakers measured the pulse of the participants, the electrical conductivity of their skin and the response to nerve stimulation (electromyography - EMG) of the muscle that raises the left eyebrow - called the left lateral (external) forehead muscle. "Compared to the control group participants," the researchers conclude, "the abductees demonstrated higher psychophysiological activity in response to kidnapping or stress scenarios compared to positive or neutral scenarios. In fact, the abductees reacted similarly to those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when they listened to the scenario describing their real traumatic experience.
The group of abductees was initially intended to serve as a control group in a larger study that dealt with memories of sexual exploitation. In his book "Remembering Trauma" (Harvard University Press, 2003) McNally follows the history of the therapeutic stream of memory recovery from the 90s. Attempts to recover lost memories of childhood sexual abuse (usually through hypnosis and guided imagery) have caused some subjects to invent false memories of sexual abuse that never happened. "The fact that people who believe they have been abducted by aliens react like those with PTSD when they listen to recorded scenarios describing their alleged abduction," explains McNally, "underscores the power of belief to cause a physiological response consistent with a real traumatic experience." The freshness of the traumatic memory cannot be used as evidence of its truth.
The most logical explanations for alien abductions are phenomena known as sleep paralysis and waking hallucinations. In many descriptions of experiences, explained in the context of UFOs and aliens, a temporary paralysis accompanied by visual and auditory hallucinations and sexual fantasies often appeared. McNally found that in laboratory tests the abductees "were much more prone to false memories and false identification than the control group subjects," and scored significantly higher on questionnaires that tested "absorbing capacity," a trait associated with a tendency to imagine, and also indicative of false memories.
My abduction experience was caused by lack of sleep and physical exhaustion. I then rode my bike for 83 consecutive hours along the first 2,026 kilometers of the "Cross-America Race" - 5,000 kilometers without a break across the entire continent. I was staggering tiredly from side to side down the road as my support van started driving alongside me flashing its high beams and my teammates begged me to take a sleep break. At that moment, an old memory of the TV series "The Invaders" from the 60s appeared in a daydream. In that series, aliens took over Earth by duplicating real people, but for some unknown reason one of their little fingers remained rigid. All of a sudden my support team members became aliens. I stared piercingly at their fingers and teased them about technical and private issues.
After 90 minutes of sleep deprivation, all that was left of the experience was a memory of a strange hallucination, which I described to the ABC network crew that covered the race. But when it happened, the experience was real, and that's the point. The human capacity for self-delusion is a limitless capacity, and the effects of belief are decisive. Thanks to science we have learned to differentiate between imagination and reality.
* Michael Shermer is the man behind the website www.skeptic.com and the author of the book "The Science of Good and Evil".
